At the Kunst-Werke Cafe
Two weeks ago, on a rainy afternoon, I was sitting in the Kunst-Werke Cafe in Berlin with Kyong Park. We were talking about cities in the Balkans. Should we make a research trip there? The autumn rain was pouring against a glass wall and transforming the pavilion where we sat into a kind of island, a Berlin island. I thought, what is it that draws me away from islands-to walk through cities no one else seems to care about and some might be afraid to visit? I still remember the e-mails I received, back in the spring of 2003, cautioning me not to go to Caracas. At the time, I wondered whether I would be able to tell the stories of a city in crisis-I mean the stories embedded in its architecture. Would people back home understand narratives that did, at first glance, not appear to concern them? Now, looking back at my Caracas experience, I feel that the opportunity to study the city was an extraordinary gift, one that has helped me better understand the cities I love

A number of my recent projects had their start in Caracas. I am most proud of the Istanbul and Liverpool projects, which were realized recently. I consider the Dry Toilet, constructed on site in a Caracas barrio, and the Urgent Architecture exhibition, which I dreamed up with Michael Rush, then director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida, to be the best work I have ever done. The PBICA exhibition gave body to recent trends in contemporary architecture, such as the emphasis on private space and personal security-remember, it is individuals who make a city and it is their concerns that matter. For me, the most important thing about this exhibition was the attempt to construct an understandable language out of the apparent madness of cities in crisis. After all, the architecture of such cities tells vivid stories, since reality seems somehow enhanced there. Caracas has served as a case study for my cities. Look at Berlin, of all places; here I sit and all is well-today.

The City of Caracas
The city's underground passages were full of people pressing onward, and always too close to my body. Above ground, the city weighed heavy. It was noisy and loud, and never slept. It was smelly and dirty. The tropical rains, which unleashed a pure natural energy, seemed to be the only thing able to calm the city down and give me a chance to catch my breath. Caracas is a pagan city. I felt its raw energy smelling of survival in the midst of individuals who stake their claims to happiness in an apparently collapsing city. Never walk through the narrow alleys of La Vega barrio alone. In the formal city, always take a taxi after dark. Push down on the gas pedal when the light turns red. Never stop at a traffic light at night, especially when you are driving alone. You must always be present in both mind and body, but above all listen to your instincts. Never plan anything. Events impose themselves on you easily in Caracas, whether crimes, floods or celebrations. I found that, once I had arrived, this dangerous and divided city would not let me go.

I came to Caracas in order to research the informal city,1 which is one way of referring to the barrios of Venezuela. In Caracas, this informal city, climbing up the hills, encircles and presses in on the formal city, which occupies the valley below. The communities that inhabit the two cities are alien to each other, with different value systems that breed a mutual mistrust. They coexist in close proximity, however, and must constantly accommodate each another. The divisions in Caracas are unmistakable. I had no problem accepting this fact, the permanence of this division. When you think about it, the finality of the division is, more or less, the only thing that is really permanent in Caracas. Everything else exists in a flux of decay and expansion in the midst of permanent crisis.

The formal city, once a proud modernist town, was now in decline and fast becoming a modern ruin. It seemed to me that it was losing its body as well as its mind, wildly and without regret. Oversized billboards, sometimes bigger than the houses they were built on, were left empty. The Parque Central building complex, once the pride of Caracas modernism, was deteriorating and being overtaken by nature. Built-on additions and vegetation sprouted from its monumental faзades. The ground floor shopping mall was deserted, with barred windows barricading the shops. The elevators were not working. Parque Central seemed consumed by its own malaise and had apparently abandoned modernism's quest to display the values of functionalism and consumer society. Parque Central's demise felt almost biblical. Or did it? A block away, the Urban Agriculture Cooperative occupied a former public park. Red peppers and lettuce were growing in green fields and were being sold to passersby. Those who lived in the vicinity viewed the urban farm as an invasion of the rural into their urban landscape; the barrios, too, were considered a form of rural architecture, an alien growth in the modernist city. Though the barrios were not as nearby as the urban farm in the park, they were constantly present. From virtually anywhere in the formal city, you could see the outlying hills populated by barrio communities. Who were those people and why did they persist in invading the modern city with their urban farms and informal marketplaces? They had arrived in Caracas from the rural hinterland and had stayed, becoming the construction workers who built the formal city by day and their own city by night. The barrios are not planned settlements; they were created by individuals who built their homes on public land without obtaining any permit or title. These homes are selfinitiated structures that have been upgraded and expanded as need arose. In Caracas, the barrios are growing, not decaying, and they exude a confidence in their own body. This is a rural architecture made of tightly interwoven buildings and alleys. The people who live in the barrios had prevailed against all odds, growing their houses as their families grew, shamelessly showing off this growth with construction wires that sprouted from every rooftop. This ephemeral city was clearly here to stay.