*Fans of atemporality and Favela Chic will understand why this Domus article is pressing all kinds of buttons.
http://www.domusweb.it/en/art/the-brutality-of-utopias/
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"Utopia demands a denial of time. A realised utopia is definitive and concluded. It cannot evolve, for that would imply an error or instability in the originally conceived utopia." (((Couldn't agree with you more.)))
"This is what seems to underlie the brutality that Michel Houellebecq ascribes to Le Corbusier's vision in his latest novel: utopia's inherent lack of evolutionary scope (for nature, man and architecture itself), and the exclusion of continuity from its language. The same flaw is also shared by 3D projects for the most recent signature buildings, thus disclosing their utopian aspiration: whiter than white, rendered surfaces; empty and immaculate horizons all around, never to be populated; proportionate, identical trees set in rows; scattered knots of people inside them gazing into each other's eyes or holding hands, with children destined never to grow, who have no shadow. This non-utopia represents the epicentre of Dionisio González's work."
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"And it takes a particular insistence on details to reveal it: his photos portray only slums. To be precise, these are modified slums. Upon closer inspection, all González's compositions reveal computer processing and interpolations. In between a metal wall and a container, a shack or a rotting wood partition, González inserts architectural modules of a recognisably contemporary style, in glass and metal, geometrical and essential.
"Once noticed, their incongruity is evident, for reasons of structural feasibility and, more simply, economic plausibility. Yet initially they seem to blend perfectly with the shanty towns in which they stand. They even look like spontaneous outgrowths, natural elements or organs.
"In another cycle, González applies the same imaginative strategy to a floating village in Halong Bay, by integrating it with futuristic architectures that simultaneously take up the traditional forms of dwelling and the island profiles that delimit the harbour. Here, too, at first sight, his alterations are invisible. Even when you notice them, it is hard to tell exactly what is false or wrong about them...."
