The inform

The East Zone presents a high degree of architectural disorganization and urban fabric disrupture, product of the collapse of the old structures and the impact of monumental projects of reconstruction. It is basically inform.

A resultant pattern of the deindustrialization process, with the decay and the abandonment of the built, the creation of new productive and services centers, the implantation of diverse overlapped systems of transportation, disorganizing the urban fabric and engendering empty lands, with improvised uses. Impurity, degeneration and collapse are the engines of the process.

Entropy is a force that absorbs all the intervals between the points of the space, abolishing the distances, on which are based the differences necessary to the production of sense. It places the question of the limit, of the contours. A continuous erosion of the distinction between interior and exterior, located and dislocated, that established the space condition required by perception. It engenders a soft, indistinct and limitless terrain.

The images of these spaces not dominated by architecture reflect our insecurity on wandering trough those indistinct and limitless territories. But emptiness, the absence of limits, also contains the expectation of mobility, the possibility of the other. The terrain-vague is also the space of the possible. All the history of the reaction to the terrain-vague, since the perception of the photographers until the urban planning interventions, has been an effort to underline the anxiety face its indefinition and to eradicate its negativity. It reflects the difficulty to deal with the city in terms of force and fluxes, instead of forms.

References

R. Krauss/ Y-A Bois, Formless, MIT, Cambridge, 1997

I. Solá-Morales, Terrain Vague, in Anyplace, MIT, Cambridge, 1995.