Busto | Pelle (Bust and Pelt) is a research project on the complex relationship in the contemporary urban landscape between Firmitas and Infirmitas, Composition and Superimposition, Structure and Remain, Flesh and Bone in order to define the provocative dialogue between Bust and Pelt. 

Born as an academic thesis, it is aimed to be defined as an in progress research about the architectural value of the Pelt in our cities. 

The history of mankind, like the history of architecture, is fulfilled with ongoing tries of rationalisation and reconfiguration of the world. Every period of history has shown a new surface of things, a new morphology, interpreting and applying the meaning of order. Time and history gave the proof that every interpretation has been absolute: where the human seemed to be imposed with its ordering trace, the residual of its presence always showed up and proliferated against every logic of control and order.

Order and Disorder, Firmitas and infirmitas, Flesh and Bones, Arborescent and Rhizomatic: they all represent significantly the ongoing dialogue between the Bust and the Pelt, the two poles of the designing gesture and the spontaneous one.

The definition of Bust and Pelt (Busto y Pellejo) is an intuition by the Madrid-based architects Maria Langarita and Victor Navarro. Their interpretation of the city according to this contrast is aimed to describe the material evidence of the city: the Bust represent the inorganic family of slow deterioration; the Pelt is all the rest, the organic element, instable and rapidly variable.

Our research starts with this intuition but it has chosen to widen the range of study aside from any type of judgement against the two families of elements. This work strives to show the dialogic behaviour of these two entities: sometimes they hug themselves, sometimes they bump into each other, some others they join themselves. They are human-origin categories whose relationship can illustrate a new way to interprete the city.

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Logic of Bust and Pelt

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The Bust has always been the protagonist and subject of investigation in every history of architecture; The Pelt is a strictly non-architectural matter and for this reason it has always been excluded from historiographies. However, it is likely to believe that the active role it has in the life cycle of each architecture makes it worthy of the same attention given to the Bust.

The establishment of a study methodology assumes the presence of a situation of stability. The Bust has a stable and timeless condition and its birth is regulated by compositional, material, historical and normative premises. Over the centuries, various grammars have been easily formulated in order to interpret it. However, representations of the Bust are often incapable of revealing what it effectively means for its users. The Pelt provides for this lack, representing the innate need that man has to express his individuality within a formal scheme. The Pelt establishes with the Bust a temporary coupling, always ready to break up. Its anthropic nature makes it unstable and susceptible to daily changes.

What methodology can restore dignity to the ephemeral relics of human behavior? It is impossible to develop a theory that defines the Pelt in absolute terms and that frames its fleeting, unpredictable and deregulated behaviors. Moreover, as Michel de Certeau underlines in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), it is better to avoid creating behavioral metonymies that generalize an informal action and transform the inhabitants into a large, homogeneous mass from which a unified response is expected; on the contrary, it is desirable to ascertain once and for all the heterogeneity of the micro operations of manipulation and to study the Pelt as a collection of different objects and wunderkammer of leftovers.

The most appropriate means to study the Pelt is therefore photographic: the Pelt is photographed and categorized according to its value. Nine different values are defined: