The City under the Sign of 'Aphrodite Pandemos'

Abstract

The city is the place of humanity. It’s their greatest invention. With that thought in mind, we have measured our evolution and replicated the most effective models around the world with a mastery precision whose consequences are discovered like an autopsy, at the wrong time. This paper is written in the period when a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 has broken the rules of that domain. Firstly, because the words replication and autopsy, terms linked to biology are no longer metaphors. Secondly, because the confinement measures put in place to control the pandemic have been organized in the cities themselves, demonstrating that they have not been thought out or designed against such an enemy. Thirdly, because the proliferation of information during the quarantine has served only to claim the same forms and ways of life that dominated the planet, with remedial, not integral, proposals for adaptation. Viruses and information dispute a privileged place to appropriate each other's bodies. Through a meticulous record of readings made during the period of confinement, barely relaxed in the days when this article is submitted, it is intended to demonstrate that we are not yet aware of the opportunity to redefine the alignments of the Late Modernity, if we trust the formulation of counter-historical readings, metaphors yet, but which disintegrate our most paralyzing convictions. That is where the city to come will emerge, to house what I call life with value. These counter-mythological metaphors refer us to the reformulation of our origins. This argument will be exemplified through a double contrast −between two architects and two paintings: Jean Prouvé and Rem Koolhaas; and Velázquez's Forge of Vulcan and Tiepolo’s Santa Tecla praying for the Plague−. With Prouvé, we will close the process of construction as we know it and the forge will be its counter-mythology. With Koolhaas, we will disclose ourselves to an outside world where the opportunity should be taken to recognise our own mental confinement so that questions freed from a self-imposed logic might then emerge. Tiepolo’s composition allows us to go back to his encounter, thus returning with the impulse of Eros, a figure that represents the revolutionary aspiration to a completely different way of life and society. The conclusion is that the counter-mythological procedure is germane, although the unlikely achievement of a courageous planetary metamorphosis of the magnitude of the pandemic creeping on us, does not foresee great social transformations. If these are not to happen, the mutations in the social, public, and spatial forms embedded in our cities will be tragic in the short term.