In preparation of the exhibition A Cidade do Homem Nu (The City of the Naked Man) that I curated at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in 2010, I conducted a research into Flávio de Carvalho’s Experiencias. From the great amount of material that I gathered for that research, there is an historical document of great interest for me which I wish to further catalyze towards an analysis of certain art practices that deal with urbanism in relation to subjectivity and the psyche of the individual. The document I’m referring to is a 1929 questionnaire interview made by Flávio de Carvalho to Le Corbusier upon his visit to Rio de Janeiro. The questionnaire that structured this interview included the following questions coined by de Carvalho along with Geraldo Ferraz (editor of the Antropofagia Magazine):

- Do you think architecture is a philosophical problem?
- Should architecture be logical? What logic?
- Should architecture have colour? Which is the predominant factr: colour, form or the functional idea?
- What qualifies as pleasant in colour and form? Is that pleasantness subjective or objective?
- How to introduce the psychic factor in architecture?
- Should the idea of the structure be sacrificed because of the psychic factor or not?
- Should the desire to progress grasp humanity or should mankind grasp the desire to progress?

As a proposal for research, I wish to appropriate this set of interrogations, as to think how certain artists mingle the relationships between ‘the body’, ‘the architectural space’ and ‘the psyche’. Within this process, there are two bibliographical references that I see as the main discursive structure of my interests: Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Beatriz Colomina.

I take Colomina’s words in order to compare the difference of gaze and corporal experience between the architecture of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Flavio de Carvalho; In Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1998), Colomina compares the experience of gaze between the architecture of Loos and Le Corbusier: where the first keeps the inhabitant’s eyes within the house, experiencing its interiors so that when you walk through a space in a Loos house you always turn back to see it again. In contrast, Le Corbusier’s houses, because of their ‘horizontal window’ principle, produce a cinematographic perspective from the inside towards the panoramic outdoors. Bearing in mind this duality of gaze between these paradigmatic figures of modern architecture, I propose that perhaps Flávio de Carvalho, through his interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which he reads and quotes throughout his lifetime (and his premature inquiry on the relationship of the psyche with architecture that one can entail from the 1929 questionnaire above) brings yet another approach to the gaze in modern architecture: the psychological interiority of the individual. It is this introspective experience of the body in the architectural space (related to the biopolitical, which Sven Olow Wallerstein connects to urbanism in his essay Foucault and the geology of Modern Architecture) what I would like to further research by other figures in modernism such as the 1950s Emotional Architecture of Mexicans Mathias Goeritz and Luis Barragan, or contemporary artists like Ana Maria Tavares (as examples that will grow through out the research).

When I addressed Experiencia no. 3 / the New Look in the exhibition at Sao Paulo, I did it through the lens of my interpretation of de Carvalho’s urban thesis The City of the Naked Man; the outcome of this was a show that, in general, touched upon transgressions from fixed cultural constructs of gender and sexuality.

Now for Performance in Residence, I would say that the focus departs from the premise that the New Look is an architectural modern project; a modernist design of a symbiosis between, form, function and body, and if so, from where could we understand de Carvalho’s peculiar form of understanding architecture?

My suggestion is that it lays in the questionnaire to Le Corbusier, the paradigm of modern architecture, who de Carvalho confronts by instigating ideas that color, structure and form in architecture do render the individual’s psyche, subjectivity and desire. In my research, these questions comprising de Carvalho’s questionnaire, are my questions when looking at the New Look. How I will answer them is by cross referencing the New Look-Experiencia no. 3 to other related subjects. I will let the research itself sophisticate my associations, including those that can arise from ‘simply’ addressing the meanings of the words that de Carvalho used both in his questionnaire and also in the written descriptions found around the drawing of the New look, a parallelism which I plan to do in the beginning of this process. For example ‘Better Hygiene’ is literally written by him on the upper right of the drawing of the New Look:

The gaze of theory of Beatriz Colomina is the theoretical backbone to understand how de Carvalho understood the individual’s body within architectural space, if you may, the performativity implied within the orchestrated experience of inhabiting a modern space. At an early stage of the research, reading-wise, I would like to revise Colomina’s text and the source of her footnotes; especially those of psychoanalytical reference.

Inti Guerrero, January 2011