"I am thinking of a work that makes the struggle between periphery and centre tangible. Two façades, one from a working-class district and one from the historic centre, decide, as if they were characters from Shakespeare's comedy The comedy of errors, to take each other's place. Two perfectly recreated facades obscure the original, the real facades. The facades are as it were de-duplicated. With a crane, the counterfeit is peeled off its original facade. Then the facades are driven around the city together on trucks in a festive parade. To eventually go their separate ways. The fake historic façade is placed against the workers' façade with a crane and the workers' façade replaces the historic façade.
The city is being rehashed, as it were, as a kind of inversion ritual. Like during carnival where power is allowed to be mocked for once.
If a house is a living body, the facade is its face, with expressive features. The windows are like eyes, like mirrors of the soul. You could say that the façade of a building expresses not only how people live inside the house on a micro level but also how we organise our society on a macro level. In the late Middle Ages and certainly in the Baroque period, in the inner city, all attention went to the outer façade as the perimeter of the public space. Consequently, life largely took place in the streets. Thus, outdoor space became indoor space and the city dweller wandered through the city from room to room. With the rise of industrialisation and Le Corbusier's egalitarianism, living becomes something functional, something individual. The focus shifts from outdoor space to indoor space. It is not the golden plasterwork that matters, but the creation of (interior) space. The functional, austere outer façade expresses this paradigm shift.
Switching the facades shows them isolated from any context, in all their nakedness. Automatically, a value judgment intrudes. Which is worth the most: a historic façade with golden plasterwork or a working-class façade with two satellite dishes? What makes something of value? Its age? Its recognisability? The degree of finish? The amount of gaudy gold or plasterwork? The authenticity (many of those supposedly historic façades are also fakes, copies)? The creativity with which a facade has been has been bricolaged by its occupants over the years?
I think it is good to leave this question of value unanswered. It is like Italo Calvino's story about the city of Maurilia in which he argues that it is pointless to wonder whether the new gods who run the city are better or worse than the old gods, since there is no connection between them. It is precisely the context that gives meaning."