'White House Redux' de Pietro Pezzani, Enrico Forestieri y Matteo Pace

Publicamos el proyecto 'White House Redux' de los arquitectos Pietro Pezzani, Enrico Forestieri y Matteo Pace. Memoria:
“It’s clear that each object –each issue- generates a different pattern of emotions and disruptions, of disagreements and agreements. There might be no coherence in our opinions, but there is a hidden continuity and a hidden coherence in what we are attached to. Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else.” B. Latour
“Y es este espacio concretamente, esta institución social que acontece cuando un individuo o grupo de individuos se encuentran en una habitación con un sofá mirando, por mediación de un dispositivo eléctrico, la imagen de una habitación más o menos genérica en la que junto a un sofá aparece un individuo o unos individuos haciendo algo parecido a vivir, uno de los laboratorios en los que indudablemente cada día se deciden textos significativos para el entorno del hombre.”
A. Jaque
We believe that the idea that architecture should or could still have the capacity to represent the “highest political power” through the medium of buildings, is an obsolete and dangerous idea. A definition of this sort of power is not lasting but constantly being negotiated, discussed, re-described and constructed. We do not believe in literally-built metaphors, however we are not fundamentalists either. We are conscious of the need to be correctly represented politically. We therefore choose to make use of a medium that communicates and publicly discusses the mutable identities of a political power and it’s domestic manifestations. Why symbolize political power architecturally when it will no doubt be grasped by society via other mediums of mass communication? Why worry about building a new White House when there are and will continue be as many different White Houses as there are visual representations of it? Television contains architecture and transforms it from its inside. Our proposed architectural intervention on the White House is situated at the level of the televisual medium. t definitively situates the White House inside the television set.
THE OSBOURNES MODEL
In the midst of physical and professional decline, Ozzy Osbourne managed to reboot himself by turning his private life into a Reality tv show. Through the representation of this model of distorted domesticity, we are given the opportunity to judge the devastating power of drugs, the better (or worse) way to educate our spoilt children, the risks connected to unbalanced power relationship in a couple, etc. Why not recreate a similar situation inside the White House?
THE WHITE HOUSE IS THE HOME OF ALL AMERICAN PEOPLE
We propose to inaugurate a new communication channel between the President and his voters, by setting up the President’s private life as a stage of controversies: a mirror for the American people to look at and see the reflection of his own domestic life:
A NEW REALITY SHOW BASED ON THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.
By doing so, we want to: problematize the relationship between power and private life. A theme that is prominent in the fully fledged American identity, as Spiderman’s motto reveals: “With great power comes great responsibility”; to discuss the relation between power and luxury: initiate debates, accumulate consensus over the objects of the house; to celebrate the entry of new institutions and objects -capable of reflecting the mutations of the international political agenda- into the domestic domain (ex: the Greenhouse room); to make use of the potential communicative power of dramatization and narration (“Meanwhile in the White House…”); to take advantage of the communicative potential of ephemeral instruments such as setting, furnishing and iconography (ex: Middle Eastern Atmosphere room). Why not accept the idea that the President himself is at the centre of a fundamentally more interesting representation than the architecture that contains him? Why transform the entire White House into a Moorish architecture when we can put a Moorish bathrobe on the president himself? We mean to give the American people a new container in which discussions about the domestic policies that reign over our every-day-lives are led. We want to give the President a new feedback tool (televote?) over his policies -or at least over his domestic policies. The President would have a new, large field of choice, in which he may identify his preferred means of self-representation, and therefore how he defines himself in terms of power, information and his electorate: from a Chavez style populist rhetoric to a Big Brother style pseudo-transparency. Shouldn’t we consider this new, large field a great opportunity of democracy? Why not be confident of the public’s capacity to repudiate, mock, and, by doing so, modify a poor formulation of political power, together with its poor representation?
TRANSPARENCY CONTROVERSIES
A video surveillance system (CCTV), extended to each room in the building, would permit the President to be visible whenever he may choose -to the point where a possible television program would coincide with the President’s real-time actions in the White House. Pushing the limit further, this format could eventually follow the President outside of the White House’s walls. As an alternative, the President may choose to use professional crews to film him, turning to the vast number of narrative strategies available in the television medium: from open-hearted frontal confession, to a imaginative “blue screen strategy”. It’s up to him to choose. Television parliaments proliferate.
The American public comment on it - comfortably seated on their own sofas at home.
THE FORMAT IS THE HOUSE.