On March 1, 2019, MAM’19 - Maia Architecture Month - Fast Forward will open, curated by Portuguese architect Andreia Garcia. The event aims to envision the territory 100 years from now and will feature eight emerging architecture practices and four architecture critics. As part of a partnership between ArchDaily and MAM'19, we will publish a series of articles by guest critics in the coming days. See below for Andreia Garcia's introduction to the event.
Fast Forward, the theme of MAM’19, brings innovation to this year's edition by expanding its audience. Now bilingual, the event explores the future and inseparable themes such as territory, landscape, environment, architecture, technology, mobility, and society.
On the infinity of the world of its possible discourses.
What anchors one of many narratives speculating about the future is an ongoing perspective that allows us to situate ourselves in the present—on what it might mean to situate ourselves as an escape from the indeterminacy of an increasingly fast-paced time. Looking at the history of the city, it is possible to say that it is within these multiple potential times that the debate must be raised, where the chance of ruin arises, doubt is provoked, and the appeal of the new turns excess into a cliché, presenting itself, more often than not, in fragmented historical shards.
It is through the lens of the future that we question everyday life. It is also within the future that (in)temporality exalts the collective memory of humanity, which mostly manifests its power in monuments, mythologies, or fictions.
While yesterday we spoke of speculative cities shaped by ideologies, politics, and the infrastructure of buildings, public spaces, and roads, today we speak of digital networks, the hyperloop, climate change, top-down planning and bottom-up initiatives, dehumanization, biotechnology, and cloud storage.
To call for a collective reflection on the future is to destabilize assumed ideas, forcing us to rethink.
Starting from Maia—and from city to city—we can walk through the futurological visions that the guest architects were invited to develop. Moving along a 100-year horizon, Fast Forward brings together a diversity of architectural practices and approaches to expand the debate on the city of the future, collectively developing narratives that stem from an imagined urbanism.
Ana Aragão, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic drawings, brings a hand-drawn exploration of the reality and fiction of the landscape, based on a possible image of ruin, the traces of mobility, and time;
Artéria calls for participation in the process of thinking about the city, positioning inclusion as the crux of the future of urban policy;
Branco Del Rio presents a work about time within a romantic vision of futurism, expressed through the rigorous architectural drawings of a utopian city that breathes new uses, rhythms, and histories;
Corpo Atelier traverses a city in two periods, seeking to discover today the historical relevance of tomorrow: the more or less fantastical, more or less real, more or less anticipated monuments of the future;
Fala invokes the future through a meticulous and imagined, yet possible and probable, look at architecture, the city, and the fascination with the elements of both;
Inês Moreira envisions in two acts the (post-)life of an industry, along a path that repeats itself from catastrophe to homage;
Joaquim Moreno presents a lucid, prudent, and sharp stimulus of a future detached from promises and devoid of amnesic strategies;
Os Espacialistas design a tribute to time based on an architectural vestige, along a path stimulated by a collection of bodies and spaces that propose new climates and words, rehabilitate new architectures and cities, and (in)define new policies and urbanities;
Pedro Bandeira fictionalizes a tribute to the memory of the place through a time traveler; through this confrontation with memory, he exposes, analyzes, praises, criticizes, and challenges emergence, awakening a nostalgia for the present;
Skrey creates a fictional narrative to construct the year 2119, which is envisioned as worryingly detached from environmental issues, grounding the imagination in post-truth data;
Summary, navigating between the memory of an unbuilt project and the need to rethink it in the present, leverages emerging virtual reality technology to materialize future mobility;
Susana Ventura proposes a scenario of potential catastrophe, using it to point toward a conscious revolution, necessary in all facets of its future.
This exhibition, which may emerge as a form of intellectual fertilizer for the discipline, might also restore something we have lost: the space to make mistakes and to reclaim the cruel beauty of materializing the architect's critical sense and social responsibility—an endeavor designed to rescue the vital creativity that comes with anticipation.
Thinking about the future not only forces us to act, but also counters the opiate of routine practice as architects. Perhaps, from now on, the future itself can be a project.
Learn more about the event at the link below.
This article was written by Pedro Vada. The translation is powered by AI.
MAM'19 - Mês da Arquitetura da Maia - Fast Forward
MAM'19 - MÊS DA ARQUITETURA DA MAIA - FAST FORWARD1.03.2019 - 31.03.2019 Em 2019 o MAM´19 oferece mais uma vez um programa ambicioso, onde propõe uma antevisão do território a 100 anos com a participação de 8 ateliers de arquitetura emergentes e 4 críticos da arquitetura.
