# History of Bombay housing typology

Here are three boards from my friend Faiza Khan who did study the history of housing typology in Bombay and made a very vivid synthesis through those boards. It is interesting to establish the relationship between those architectural matters and Indian history in general and how the latter influence the former (actually the other way around may even be more interesting but far more subtle !).

# Explosion / Massive Attack's Splitting the Atom by Edouard Salier

Here is a good video with good music, enjoy !

Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.

more about Edouard Salier : here

Thanks Olivier !

# Urban roller coasters

I just found back some pictures I took while I was in Japan in 2007 and I thought those two urban Roller Coasters respectively in Tokyo and Osaka would deserve some space in boiteaoutils' big mess.
A lot of cities (Hong Kong, Paris, Rouen etc.) have some theme park permanently or temporarily set inside the city but it never reaches the intrication Japanese roller coasters develops, jumping on buildings' roofs, flirting with the streets and even going through a building (see below).
We are still very far away from Constant' dream for the Homo Ludens (Playful Human) with New Babylon since Roller Coasters do not include any kind of behavior flexibility and human choice; however those urban Russian Mountains (that is how we call roller coasters in French !), suggest a zone of game with architecture's seriousness and rigor that could probably bring us somewhere interesting...

#Body extensions / Delphic's new music video by Andrew Huang

Following you'll see "Doubt" the last clip of the English band Delphic, it's directed by the talented Andrew Wang .
This video is pretty much inspired by the great work of the two english artists Lucy Mc Rae and Bart Hess works, that every one must have seen on many other blogs... but the video is a nice mix between real body extensions and digital ones brought into a strange and cold atmosphere.

Delphic - Doubt from Modular People on Vimeo.

Another Andrew Wang's music video : here
A previous post on Boiteaoutils about Bart Hess : here


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# Alebardo Morell's Camere Obscure

Alebardo Morell is a Cuban photographer who creates a camera obscura in several hotel rooms around the world. This way, he succeeds to fold the view outside the original window and unfold it inside the room. The result is stunning and provokes an overlapping of domestic space and outside world, thus creating an ambiguous and disturbing third kind of space.

# XIXth century in Europe / Philanthropy vs Humanism / Fourier+Godin vs Marx+Engels

In 1803, Claude Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon creates a new kind of religion that worships science and propose as main "prophet", Isaac Newton. This "religion" is founded on philanthropic basis, yet it did establish the roots of what we nowadays know as technocracy. Science was supposed to unify human beings; that is how Charles Fourier designed his Phalanstere in the early 1800's thinking that a rational architecture could achieve a utopian communitarism. He was followed by Jean-Baptiste Godin and his Familistere built in 1858.
However, those designs were over-controlled - technology has to be precise - and were revealing the deep condescending aspect of philanthropy established by the high educated social class on the lower working class. Both Phalanstere and Familistere's architecture are built in a very introverted way, supposed to maintain the community's spirit, however the apparatuses of surveillance they therefore imply make them organized pretty much like prisons are.
Moreover, in its various schemes, Saint-Simonianism considers the human as a decontextualized being only influenced by a kind of Rousseau-ist prevailing nature. Such considerations can establish theoretical and probably valuable reflections on society, nevertheless their application can only lead to failure or worst totalitarianism.
Marx and Engels, on the other hand, denied any kind of human nature and were strictly circumstantialists. They believed that each human was the product of the society he lived in and that building new social schemes could not be achieve in a vacuum but rather by creating on the first place a resistance towards the establishment. This way, rather than designing what may be good for people, they were putting the latter in front of their responsibilities preventing them from any transcendental control that was existing in the case of XIXth century philanthropic projects.

In the same spirit and approximately at the same time, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was also encouraging this humanist emancipation by claiming that "labor destroys property" and that "property is thief", prophesying the revolutions of 1871 (France) and 1917 (Russia).

# How far can the bullshit go ?

The article is not so recent (June 2006), but I still think it is worth it to speak about it since this project gathers the biggest bullshit architectural discourse I ever had to listen to...
It starts with a stupid idea competition organized by the New York Times calls A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs that proposes to thirteen architects to design the US/Mexico border instead of leaving it to technocrats.

Only five firms did propose a scheme and the one exhibited by the NYTimes is Eric Owen Moss 'accompanied by a short audio explanation. Moss proposes an incredible aesthetization of the political violence of this fence by making it composed of transparent pipes' rows and argue in a stunning naive way that the interface zone will be a promenade like Paris' Champ Elysees. He then dig a tunnel in which there could be an exchange of culture and other kind of western filthy attitude of accepting everything coming from other countries (economy, skills and culture) except humans.
A wall is a wall and as pretty as you can make it look, it remains an object that violents bodies by preventing their movement. An architect who does not realize that a the geo-political scale may probably not realize it in every building he gets to build...