Converging perspectives on money and architecture: CCA c/o Buenos Aires
Apartments are apartments, but they are also safety deposit boxes. The other day, I heard a story about some apartments that were designed to the value of what a safety deposit can contain… It is like a hyperbole of the ridiculousness of using a house as an asset refuge, it completely distorts it. That is why there are houses without people, and people without houses.
This metaphor articulated by the economist and journalist Alejandro Bercovich leans on the absurd, but we immediately recognize it as the truth. In a moment in which we are perhaps more acutely aware of economic disparities and domestic inequalities than ever, architecture’s ties to money seem at the crux of the questions we need answered in order to build a just society to live in. In March of last year, Argentinian architect and curator Martin Huberman invited Bercovich and political scientist Pablo Touzón to sit down with him in Buenos Aires and parse through these power relations that have now shaped the work of architects for decades.
Their conversation marked the launch of the latest iteration of our CCA c/o program, curated by Huberman with a curiosity for the deregulatory policies that have shaped the social and built fabrics of Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the 2001 Argentinian financial crisis. Huberman investigates the initially invisible traits of architectural practice in Buenos Aires—deregulation, arbitration of urban and social relations, and the imagined production of security—that are often excluded from traditional narratives; debunking these narratives writ large through conversations with local architects, activists, and writers.
You met me at a very strange time in my life invites readers and collaborators alike to join Huberman in considering topics that we all innately have an opinion on, and a stake in. These topics go on tangents from text conversations with Buenos Aires-based architecture offices; a fictional short story about architecture, cash caves, and modern land development by architect and writer Dino Buzzi in which the architect embarks in the sordid adventure of sheltering money into three bedroom units with garage and balcony terrace; a photo essay by architects Juan Campanini and Josefina Sposito on the aesthetic history of the banking institutions of Buenos Aires (until 2001, an aesthetic history of trust); and a series of illustrations by architect Manuel Ignacio Nesta that embody these inquiries and offer a secondary thread with which to explore the relationships between architecture and money.
This spring, these conversations will continue, as we share another perspective that has emerged from the research with Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden of adamo-faiden architects, with a historical review of resourcefulness as a design tradition for “porteño” architects. If these questions of unregulated growth and financialization of architecture are urgent concerns in Buenos Aires, should we not be listening closely from anywhere?
Buenos Aires is now the third city to anchor our CCA c/o program: a series of temporary initiatives to engage new contexts and reveal thematic convergence across perspectives. Through the dispersed network of the CCA, we have questioned our own points of view by asking to hear those of others; from Lisbon (curated by Artéria), Tokyo (curated by Kayoko Ota), and now Buenos Aires, and a new relevance has been imprinted on the program as location has begun to matter at once more and less than when the program launched in 2016. For more, and to keep in touch, subscribe here.
