casa verde [1997]

late in 1997, i undertook my first project involving a demolition company. titled Casa Verde, it proposed bypassing ordinary demolition procedures to present intervention as an operation which overlays two realities – that of architectural space and that of the modified landscape, in which the former is altered to reinforce the symbolic content of the latter.

by removing three walls which longitudinally divided the interior of a house, i intended to displace the visual axis as conducted by streets and avenues – the opening up of space to something beyond a previously constructed image, which already belonged to the landscape and causing it to stand out among so many superimposed images.

in connecting inside and outside, this action sought to emphasize the interdependence of the intervention’s related parts, offering us a process impregnated by the idea of ‘overflow’ – the city as a territory conformed through construction operations and alterations of the landscape, configurations which correspond to our actions upon physical space, images and projections that we cast into the interior of urban space. the action lasted for only a few hours during an afternoon in May, its only witnesses having been people who were at the location.

translated by Steve Berg