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new associations. However, how would a borderland which is inclusive more than exclusive be defined?
As a response to this difficult question, the active borderland works in a very particular way: It is able to bring
what is happening on one side of the border to its other side without breaking the idea of boundary. To
produce such an effect it has to be ambiguous yet highly specific. In fact, the active borderland holds the
necessary ambivalence which allows plural integration and the tracing of new associations, while remains
extremely situated, holding very particular physical and socio-cultural qualities which could only be
prescribed to a particular ambit. In the end, what the active borderland embodies is the estrangement of the
border condition: it allows a certain freedom of action while keeping the common recognition of the limit as a
displaced situation.
Following this investigation on the concept of active borderland, our office has developed in combination with
the practice a line of theoretical research on different activation tactics. The first of these tactics, explored in
The Medical Center in Almonaster, was to shape a new rur-urban artefact taking as its material base different
realities that surrounded it. As a result, the building is the indivisible composition of road, tree and sportsground, being impossible to define, i.e., where the road ends and the building begin. In the Four Squares in
Seville Competition, the borderland condition is produced by direct estrangement of the border, which
displaces the site from time and place alluding to a particular situation during the annual event of the
Semana Santa. Finally the tactic deployed in the Patio House without Patio design reifies the private-public
boundary as a contestation to the recent abusive suburban development in Spain. These projects were our
attempt to address a contemporary urban condition, which cannot avoid its growing state of fragmentation.
Nevertheless, by accepting this fragmentation, these projects take advantage of the border conditions to
bring a political role back to the urban artefacts that configure the city as integrators of new collective
experiences.
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Three contemporary theories depict this new social situation well: Peter Sloterdijks concept of Foam in Spheres III, Bruno Latours idea
of Reassembling the Social and Toni Negris definition of Multitudo. The three authors attempt, in a different yet similarly didactic way, a
redefinition of the social as an alternative route from the individual to the collective. Latour, Bruno: Reassembling the Social, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005; Sloterdijk, Peter: Esferas III. Esferologa plural. Espumas, Madrid: Siruela, 2006 (translated by Isidro
Regera from the original: Sphren III. Plurale Sphrologie. Globen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004); Negri, Antonio y Hardt, Michael:
Multitude: war and democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
Paris banlieus, certain areas in East London or La Mina in Barcelona, are good examples of socio-culturally segregated fragments in the
city where conflict and social unrest arouse continuously.
Bataille wrote: "It seems to me that the object of the prohibition was first marked out for coveting by the prohibition itselfBataille,
George: The Accursed Share, Volume 2, New York, 1991, p. 48. This is especially clear not only in the relationship between new
technologies of communication and everyday life, but also in the very punctual and fragmented transactions that individuals maintain
with the metropolises today.
Serres, Michel: The Natural Contract, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp.105 and ff.
The history of architecture has left us different urban artifacts that have already functioned as successful active borderlands. The
emergence of the Department Store in post-Haussman Paris, for instance, proved how a particular urban device was able to bring the
domestic realm into the city streets without breaking the inside-outside boundary of the building. The particular position and specific
qualities of transparency, smoothness or porosity made the department store a perfect social integrator in an increasingly regulated and
conflictive metropolis. The variety of urban artifacts working as active borderlands is enormous. Some are large scale elements such as
Central Park, some are just as small as Duchamps office door in 11 Rue Larrey, Paris. However, all of them share this kind of inbetween situation, where the nature of the boundary is contaminated, while the integrity of the urban artifact is kept.
The renovation of the squares that was proposed is based on an extensive pouring of red resin over the original granite brick floor. This
resin pouring preserves the original pavement while consolidating it. Patterns defined from the experience of this pouring would be used
in adjacent streets and squares lacking the original granite brick floor. The pouring of red resin is an amplification of the effect caused by
the red wax poured from the candles during the Semana Santa processions. They annually leave their traces in these squares even
several weeks after the events.
With its 7 meters high blind wall, the project explicitly negates any relation between public and private as a reverse of Dan Grahams
Alteration to a suburban house (1978). The vertical convexity of the wall is the gentle gesture which manifests a conscious and joyful
assumption of this negation.