READY-MADE ARCHITECTURAL PROCESSES:
RE-SYMBOLIZING REALITY
TIAGO ASCENSÃO
Architecture development without extractivism
Working with the built environment is, in the present, working with the climate crisis received as an inheritance. Facing the urgency for action, the physical world, also inherited, can be understood as a key to the problem, using the currently built space to build the future. A possibility of architecture practice is to solve the requests and needs by maintaining the exact physical reality of the space, with no building.
The processes that build the space using exclusively the already existing physical space can be defined as an architectural practice. The link between an architectonic answer and the physical construction of the space doesn’t need to be mandatory in order for architecture to exists: a process of space re-signification is an architectural practice without new physical construction. It is a reaction towards the sustainable targets’ achievement since it is based on the non-exploration of any material: the reality is in itself the resource.
The architecture development, as a possible alternative to the infinite development model grounded on unsustainable resource exploitation, cannot be based on its exploitation, whether material, energetic, or even human, and cannot be through over-exploitation the territory and the production of unnecessary elements.
Based on a transdisciplinary methodology, the ready-made art movement's principles and operative procedures are transferred and applied to spatial practice conceptions. It can be applied to different project scales, from small to large scale, such as the landscape and the territory organization.
Ready-made – to choose
The ready-made architecture process rethinks the space and attributes it a new meaning, and by doing so, solves the requested new necessities. The project happens in the combination of reality and the look over it, emphasizing the potentiality of reality as a resource in itself.
The concept of ready-made architecture challenges traditional architectural practice and ideologies. Rethinking space and attributing new meanings to solve current necessities. Emphasizing reality as a primary resource, it doesn’t need new resources, separating the discipline from extractive practices, allowing the freedom of the discipline. It allows architecture to focus on the users, so be more political and less dependent on the economy.
The application of ready-made methodologies to architectural processes enables the use of specific vocabulary to define architectural actions. Rather than considering design as the foundational basis of architecture, this methodology introduces alternative architectural acts, like choosing, appropriating, assisting, recontextualising, validating, and legitimising. These architectural acts, which bring a project into practice, empower the existing spaces’ re-symbolization, ensuring their continued use and, more importantly, shifting the focus from the creation of new structures to re-signification of the existing spaces. It gives the necessary importance to care as the main service of architecture.
The ready-made questioned the symbolic system in art, moving the aesthetic judgement from ‘this is beautiful’ to ‘this is art’. This profound symbolic reconfiguration that the ready-made introduced into art, transposed to architecture, allows the evaluation to focus on the architectural process - reinforcing the conceptual role of the project - to the detriment of the built object at the end of the process - the formal role of the built object. Introducing the conceptual process into the evaluation of architecture allows the aesthetic judgement to shift from ‘this is beautiful’ to ‘this is architecture’. The choice of built spaces (implying their re-symbolisation), as an architectural act, challenges the established view of what architecture is, and implies a broadening of the discipline to fit these processes.
“If the word ‘art’ means making, and if making means choosing, then we are left to draw the most general conclusion possible: art means choosing.”
Taking Duchamp’s suggestion that the act of choosing is the main action in art, this concept is transposed to architecture action. Whether choosing to build, not to build, or build a space using the existing physical spaces, the action of choice remains the same. It is possible to incorporate ready-made architecture into architecture tradition based on the same process, with a completely different result: the architectonic gesture is now an ethical and symbolic choice.
Place Léon Aucoc
The project by the architects Lacaton & Vassal to the square Léon Aucoc, in Bordeaux, France, is a case study that can be read based on the application of a ready-made process to an architectonic process.
In 1996, the architects were commissioned to redesign the Léon Aucoc square. The request aimed at embellishing the square, but a detailed analysis by the architects revealed that the space already functioned well as it was. They studied the physical elements, the state of vegetation, and, crucially, the community's use of the space. Observing the locals playing pétanque and interacting with the area, they concluded that the space was not a void and no drastic changes were needed.
“It possesses the beauty of what is obvious, necessary, right. Its meaning emerges directly.”
The preliminary survey created a modest project: instead of altering the square, they proposed minimal maintenance interventions, recognizing the competence of the existing situation. These interventions included replacing gravel, adjusting curbstones, maintaining urban furniture, and establishing a long-term maintenance plan. This plan addressed issues like tree health, cleaning frequency, and other ongoing care needs to ensure the square’s vitality over time. Such an approach ensured that funds originally allocated for a single embellishment could instead support the square’s sustained upkeep. Their approach highlighted the existing beauty of the square and the importance of preserving its current state for future use.
To answer the space's needs, the architects deliberately challenged the initial brief, presenting a design aligned with reality rather than with preconceived notions of change. Convincing the council to approve this anti-brief approach required significant effort, but the architects successfully demonstrated the importance of preserving what already existed. Their intervention was rooted in recognizing the value of the existing space and its users, leading to minimal physical changes. The architectonic project is a process where the briefing is critically reviewed and, at the same time, the architectonic act answers the request.
The project shifted the perception of the space, transforming it by attributing new value without altering its physical dimensions. The project was coincident with reality. This process exemplified an innovative architectural methodology: addressing a request by finding solutions within the existing environment, rather than through new construction. The architects not only chose what to do but also, importantly, what not to do, reinforcing the importance of respecting the existing environment, re-symbolizing it. This careful decision-making highlights their authorship, as they coordinated a process that worked in the present while ensuring the square's potential for the future.
This project illustrates how a change in perspective and value can redefine a public space. The result was a square that remained fundamentally unchanged physically but was transformed into a space celebrated for its enduring functionality and beauty.
Perception
The choice of the square as it is, is positioned as a counter-proposal to its alteration. The insertion of the current form (the existing one) is determined as the idea that best fulfills the thought and decision process. The form is relevant insofar as it corresponds to the idea – allegorical appearance.
“Ideas are not visible; they have neither form nor color”. Ready-made architecture facilitates the reinvention of architecture, allowing the possibility that significance can be detached from the significance of the form in itself. Similar to conceptual art, the significance of a space may not be materialized in the building resulting from the act of construction, but rather resides in an existing space, resulting from the action of its attribution.
“The ready-mades, by contrast are “art” and nothing but “art”. (…) a urinal is a sculpture only when you accept seeing it as art. Otherwise it simply remains a urinal. The generic seems to precede the specific.”
If it is necessary to initially perceive the Fountain as a urinal, before considering it as art, a similar sequence exists in ready-made architecture: one must first accept the physicality of the space as it is prior to the ready-made intervention. Only then can one integrate the resignification as an architectonic action that transformed the space.
By incorporating the possibility of using existing objects as a work of art, the ready-made art that doesn’t produce objects stands in opposition to art that produces objects. In other words, introducing this possibility implies that the canonical option must itself be the outcome of a decision.
A similar situation happens with the possibility of ready-made architecture: in the light of the possibility of non-production, architecture's response to need is now regarded as a form of production, rather than an automatic response.
The process illustrates that maintaining the space as it is presents a paradox between the outcome achieved – namely the permanence of the current situation – and the architectural, bureaucratic, legal and cultural processes involved in preserving it. Thus, to maintain apparent inaction, considerable effort was required, emphasizing the significance of the authorship inherent in these appropriation processes.
Ready-made architecture processes are an intellectual process of spatial construction, combined with critical reflection. It allows a possibility of freedom for the discipline, disconnecting architecture from the obligation of solving a need through built construction, and allows other types of authorship in the projects. Instead of the authorship of an architecture object, in Ready-Made Architecture processes, authorship of the action is evaluated according to the need satisfaction, increasing the responsibility of the architectonic act as a service. The act of design is taken to the back seat in the architectural process, highlighting the importance of the answer as a whole, and inserting the architectonic process in a culture where illegitimate environmental acts are not possible.
Focus on the use as a basic condition in the architecture process implies a reduction of resource exploitation. It allows a comprehension of maintenance and care, which avoids the need for the new. The existing is continually re-signified, keeping its use. The future development of architecture is anchored on the existing and on environmentally responsible answers, keeping its intellectual process as a creative act. It broadens the possibility of architecture, including this act as an architectonic act.
Ready-made architecture processes create a space of reflexivity on the discipline, since it uses the whole built environment as a potential space to be re-symbolized. Ready-made architecture processes focus on the culture of maintaining the present for the future, reducing the symbolic weight of the past: the present state is underlined with ready-made architecture, looking for the timelessness of present spaces.
The ready-made architectural approach, by valorising what exists, seeks to align architecture with a sustainable, future-oriented vision, where the act of choosing carries as much significance as the act of building, where the possibility of choice as design is considered as one solution for sustainability. The integration of the ready-made as an operative architectonic modality into a production system allows a collective awareness of the value of the present space. This approach emphasizes the urgency for a fundamental change of attitude in built culture, in society, and towards the built environment, by legitimizing the possibility of the architectural proposal being only the use (without “re-“ prefixes) of what is here, and now.
Tiago Ascensão is an architect and researcher at Lab2PT – Landscape, Heritage and Territory Laboratory. He is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Art and Design, University of Minho, Portugal. His research explores the intersection of art theory and sustainability principles, focusing on the use of ready-made artistic concepts as a possible approach to architectural design.