Casa Palestra

In the beginning of the 1980s modern architecture was always presented as lifeless, puritanical, empty and uninhabited. It has always been our intuition however, that modern architecture is in itself a hedonistic movement, that its severity, abstraction and rigor are in fact plots to create the most provocative settings for the experiment that is modern life.
Our presentation was to illustrate this point by bending the Barcelona Pavilion and systematically develop a project of its all human occupancy related to physical culture in the widest possible sense of the word. The house will be both desecrated and inaugurated, and show its perfect appropriateness for even the most suggestive aspects of contemporary culture. Action suggested by projection and light-effects and an abstract soundtrack of the human voice – somewhere in the ambiguous zone between exercise and sexual pleasure – will complete this spectacle, whose aim is to shock people into an awareness of the possible ‘hidden’ dimensions of modern architecture.