Resiliency: It Goes Beyond the Hair

In the January article of The Guardian News ‘How Hurricane Maria forced Puerto Ricans to change their hair’, author Norbert Figueroa reflects on the devastating effects of the category four storm in the US territory. Besides the aftermath caused by floodwaters, massive electric shortage, and structural damages, Figueroa revealed how Hurricane Maria forced adaptations to everyday life, including the way Puerto Ricans styled their hair. Extreme conditions of heat and humidity, exacerbated by the lack of electric power, lead to the acceptance of natural hairdos, to the creation of sidewalk barber shops, and to the formalization of an underground economy where haircuts in the form of currency, were exchanged for power generators. Figueroa’s simple but complex observation is critical in the revelation of creative self-organizing assemblages at the face of concealed realities. If the simple act of hair restructuring convokes taxonomical categorizations, ingenious adaptabilities, spatial re-conceptualizations, and the creation of new underground economies, why isn’t architecture transcending its heteronomous condition to achieve ‘resilient’ solutions? If resilience is defined as ‘the ability of objects to spring back into shape’ after being deformed,’ does it exclude the notion of ‘predictability’? This paper does not bring to the fore the discursivity that the resilient discourse entails, but it is an attempt to question its interpretations and trivial meanings within a ‘utopian’ model that fails to come to terms with the constitution of the physical realm.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.11

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0