boiteaoutils

# boiteaoutils becomes THE FUNAMBULIST

2011-01-03T01:15:00.002+01:00

boiteaoutils has now more than a thousand articles which were not so well archived. Moreover, Marksor recently made the choice not to write on it anymore in order to dedicate his time on other projects.
THEREFORE, I decide to create a new site for hosting the daily narratives that you've been able to read on boiteaoutils so far.

boiteaoutils thus becomes THE FUNAMBULIST.net

# boiteaoutils becomes THE FUNAMBULIST

2011-01-03T01:14:00.000+01:00

# boiteaoutils becomes THE FUNAMBULIST

2011-01-03T00:41:00.004+01:00

# Cellular Clay Multifamily Habitation by Saken Narynov

2010-12-31T22:42:00.002+01:00

Kazakh architect and artist Saken Narynov created a superstructure able to host what we could call an adobe vertical city. In fact, the structure is used as a matrix that can be more or less densely filled with multifamily habitation units.
The traditional earth based material thus hybrids with the steel structure in a very unusual and interesting way and the space resulting between the habitation units and the structure is beautifully occupied by mazes of staircases and elevated pathways.

# Bildbauten by Philipp Schaerer

2010-12-31T03:58:00.002+01:00

The series of images created by Philipp Schaerer entitled Bildbauten (built picture in German) includes twenty five rendering of monolithic buildings that seem to have been produced by their environment in some sort of camouflaged bunkers.

Here is the description thanks to which the Swiss artist describes his work:

The series of images with the title „Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality.

Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.

originally found on butdoesitfloats

# Sadic Apiaries by Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia

2010-12-29T17:40:00.006+01:00

The fifth studio Francois Roche has been tutoring at Columbia University since 2006 recently presented its last projects. One of them drove an interesting conversation between the jury and its authors, Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia. For this year's studio, Francois Roche was assisted by Ezio Blasetti and Dave Pigram

For the second year, this studio was experimenting processes of life and death of an architecture; in this regard, Sadic Apiaries is a system composed by two robots and thousand of bees. The first robot is used as a mobile matrix for the bees to build the hives architecture, while the second robot exercises a sadistic role on the bees via smoke throw in order to orient the construction.
With time, the wax loose of its consistency (and color) and eventually disintegrates, thus triggering the death of this architecture.

As I wrote earlier, an interesting discussion occurred during the final presentation involving a Darwinist vision of the project that was involving a mutation of the bees making them more resistant to the machine and therefore able to "revolt" against this sadistic apparatus. This revolt drives us to the second vision that was expressed, a Marxist vision of capitalism in which a transcendental will was organizing an energy production into a material product leading to a use of this product by the same transcendental entity.

The following text is Brian and Loukia's interpretation of their project:

Can we orient production of the nature to produce architecture?

Can we use the animal organization to generate the (un)natural artifice?

Can we employ sadistic instruments to torture the animal to construct a domesticity of wax?

Can we use the paradox that the immateriality of smoke creates space?
Through an employment of sadistic instruments within an artificial hive apparatus, a multiplicity of bee colonies constructs a domesticity of wax over a period of time.

The protocol for construction is the utilization of a natural agent animal — the honey bee — its expended energy, and its consequential construct. The bee is the assembler and its derivatives are the spatial artifact.

The process begins in the containment device — a cavernous, mobile, artificial housing — that reveals its interior construct of layered wax honeycomb with time. The containment device actively engages and amends the agents’ behaviors by negotiating the solid void relationship inherent in the agents’ constructive nature. Over time the exposure to external biotope defines a battle between the natural conditions and the semi - artificial structure.

The machine creates a symbiotic relationship with the bee; it enters into a machinic assemblage with it. It therefore extends beyond any earlier distinction between the mechanical and the organic and includes both domains. It is composed of organic and inorganic parts which act together to constitute its life and to produce its power and speed.

A sequence of internal sadistic devices intent upon aggravating and torturing the bees further calculates the consequence of the agents’ energy. The instruments employ smoke to ensure a continuous void space for habitation through the hive construction and create surface deformation of the structure.

There is an interaction between the human body and the structure, the living space, fresh as flesh, supple and formable. In this sense the human body shapes the adaptable wax structure. The space is formed according to the humans’ postures and needs. At the same time the structure either compels the human body to crawl, to contract, or permits it to be released, to stand, defining different spatial qualities.

The hypothesis is focused on controlling the energy of the bee so as to produce architecture full of natural odor, taste, sounds, and touch that moves, wet and slippery in some areas, sticky and hairy in others; a structure that will at last be cannibalized by its natural context justifying the internal process of Birth and Thanatos.

# Sofia Krimizi's first year studio at Pratt /// Khilna Shah & Inti Rojanasopondist

2010-12-27T20:24:00.005+01:00

Since September, my friend Sofia Krimizi has been teaching a studio in the first year of the Pratt Institute's undergraduate program. The assignment consisted in a series of three projects related to each other which was exploring both the notion of mass/void and the notion of joint. Several projects can be said to have been successful but the two following ones reached a level of intelligence that is rare in this early stage of the studies.

The first one has been designed by Khilna Shah. She managed to create a model working only in tension and which allow enough elasticity in order to carry a variable amount of weights that would modify the structure's morphology.

The second project, created by Inti Rojanasopondist is divided into two clear different phases. The first one is a sort of clothe assembled by wooden pieces in friction that give to the model a acupuntural masochism dimension. The second phase is a monumental labyrinth which paths are visible from everywhere but only accessible by certain points.

# Bunker 599 + 603 by Rietveld Landscape

2010-12-26T03:25:00.002+01:00

After Interaction Between the Elements, here is another project by Rietveld Landscape I wanted to publish. Bunker 599 + 603 is the story of a Matta Clarkian cut in the middle of a bunker on the Dutch coast. The most massive and close architecture thus becomes permeable and proposes to the viewer, a three dimensional section of this mass of concrete.

Here is the official text related to the project:

Bunker 599 + 603

This project lays bare two secrets of the New Dutch Waterline (NDW), a military line of defence in use from 1815 until 1940 protecting the cities of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem by means of intentional flooding.

A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. The design thereby opens up the minuscule interior of one of NDW’s 700 bunkers, the insides of which are normally cut off from view completely. In addition, a long wooden boardwalk cuts through the extremely heavy construction. It leads visitors to a flooded area and to the footpaths of the adjacent natural reserve. The pier and the piles supporting it remind them that the water surrounding them is not caused by e.g. the removal of sand but rather is a shallow water plain characteristic of the inundations in times of war.

The sliced up bunker forms a publicly accessible attraction for visitors of the NDW. It is moreover visible from the A2 highway and can thus also be seen by tens of thousand of passers-by each day. The project is part of the overall strategy of Rietveld Landscape | Atelier de Lyon to make this unique part of Dutch history accessible and tangible for a wide variety of visitors.

# The Last Land by Hans Schabus

2010-12-24T05:43:00.003+01:00

Here is the project that Hans Schabus achieved for the Venice Art Biennale 2005: a monumental piece of rock in the middle of the Giardini. The inside part is as impressive as the outside with numerous wooden beams and posts maintaining the building's structural integrity.

# New Works by Yojiro Imasaka

2010-12-22T23:34:00.003+01:00

Yojiro Imasaka is currently achieving his Master in Fine Arts in Pratt Institute and his N ew Works has been exhibited this year at the Steuben Gallery in New York. Those photographs explore the interstitial voids between high buildings, thus creating some ambiguous corridors driven by a gradient light.

# Mechanical Living by Nelson Larroque

2010-12-21T18:12:00.003+01:00

Mechanical Living is a project designed by Nelson Larroque within Peter Cook's studio at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris (studio that I was lucky enough to be part four years ago). This project is a very literal vision of dwellings created in former industrial sites which facilities manage to supply energy.

# Maslennikov Kitchen Factory

2010-12-19T20:11:00.004+01:00

The Maslennikov Kitchen Factory is situated in Samara in the center of Russia and presents the curious characteristics of adopting the shape of the Sovietic Hammer and Sickle.
This building is currently in the middle of a preservationist battle confronted to its potential destruction. In the case of its destruction, it would be interesting to look at the footprint the building would have leave, in the way of a monumental ideological stamp.

# ARCHITECTURES OF JOY. A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture

2010-12-18T04:30:00.002+01:00

Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park by Arakawa & Madeline Gins

ARCHITECTURES OF JOY.
A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture
By Léopold Lambert (December 2010)

In the middle of the XVIIth century, Baruch Spinoza revolutionized theology by proposing a tremendous change in the definition of God. From the classic transcendental vision of a God creator, he introduced an immanent vision of God creature. Some architects might stop their reading of Spinoza’s Ethics here and consider the whole theory as an external element from their practice. However, this immanent theology envisions the world in such a way that architecture can creates itself based on this vision and celebrates it in composing what we will call, an architecture of joy. The first part of this short essay will attempt to concisely envision Spinoza’s Ethics, the second will present the difference between joyful affects and sad affects, and the third and last one will try to elaborate relationships between this philosophy and the architectural projects designed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the 1960’s on the one hand, and those built by Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the last ten years on the other hand.

Spinoza envisions God as the infinite substance composing the universe. This substance is an infinite amount of infinitely small parts which develop external relations with each other and thus compose bodies. The ability of those bodies to maintain the effort of persisting in their own beings is called conatus and composes the essence of things. Those bodies have then the ability to encounter and affect each other and thus increasing or decreasing their power of action. That being stated, we can observe that Spinoza is not only a rebel against religion but also against the paradigmatic philosophy of his century; the Cartesian philosophy. In fact, in the second book of his Ethics, he demonstrates the following proposition: The Human mind does not perceive any external body as existing, except through the ideas of the modifications of its own body. In other words, a mind knows itself only via the encounter with other things which is in complete contradiction with Descartes’ I think, therefore I am , in which a mind knows itself by thinking. Spinoza, on the contrary could have states something like “I encounter, therefore I am.”

From there, Spinoza distinguishes four modes of perception in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding . In order to focus on the proposed topic here, we won’t even evoke the first one, “arising from hearsay” that is negligible. In fact, in his class for the University of Vincennes about Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze – who appears between the lines in this essay- does not even talk about this first mode of perception that he personally calls kinds of knowledge. Those three remaining modes of perception are establishes as following:

- The first one is empirical. It implies only the experience of shock between the extensive parts of respective bodies and thus provides what Spinoza calls inadequate ideas. Deleuze, in order to illustrate this mode, uses the example of the wave. In the first mode of perception/knowledge, one can only experience the shock of the wave against his body. In other words, it provokes a knowledge of effects without a knowledge of causes.
- The second one is both empirical and rational. It involves the composition of relations between the bodies. In the illustration of the wave, one can position his body in such a way that the relations of the wave compose in a harmonious way with the relation of one’s body.
- The third one is strictly rational. It implies a perception of the essence of a thing or, following what we wrote earlier about the essence, the understanding of the mechanisms of perpetuation of a body in its being. It is indeed an understanding of causes and this way can be defined as adequate ideas.

From there, the purpose of this essay becomes probably clearer and one can distinguish the role that the second mode of perception can play in architecture. However, it is still too early in this text to evoke this question as the Ethics itself has not been yet deployed.

The first part has in fact established Spinoza’s theology/cosmology and the different modes of perception of it; nevertheless, the second part needs to develop veritably what makes Spinoza calls his book Ethics. In fact, one more reason for his Cherem from the Jewish Community is that he establishes a fundamental distinction between a religious moral and an individual ethics. The good versus evil both determined transcendentally are replaced by the good versus the bad which are, on the other hand, determined by the accordance or the discordance of relations between parts composing bodies.

As Deleuze explains in his class, when I have an encounter such that the relation of the body which modifies me, which acts on me is combined with my own relation, […] my power of acting is increased . This encounter that increases the power of acting is defined by Spinoza as being good and he calls it Joy. As a corollary, any encounter that tends to destroy the relations of one’s body is considered as bad for this same body and thus is called sadness. In the same way Spinoza decided to keep the same terminology (God) than religion in order to show the revolutionary content of his philosophy, he uses the creationist religious example of the Original Sin in his demonstration, in order to deactivate what used to be the paradigm of the religious moral. He affirms that Adam did not do an evil act when he ate the apple, but rather he did a bad act as the relations of the apple were not composing well with his own relations. What is described in the Bible as a divine interdiction to eat the apple is nothing else than Adam’s instinct that the apple may be poisonous for his body.

Since joy results from the harmony of relations between two bodies, joy can be said to be the motor of the persistence of the parts in their being. We have already seen that this persistence is called essence by Spinoza but it also matches with the notion of desire also called appetite. This notion is central here, as it implies the action that is required for the concerned architecture to be activated and to be legitimately considered as Architectures of Joy.

Those principles of Spinoza’s Ethics being expressed, we can now begin to evoke the two architectures we proposed to investigate in this essay.
The first one is the work of the association between the two French architects, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio between 1963 and 1969 under the name of Architecture Principe. In 1964, they established an architectural manifesto that can be summarized by an action of tilting the ground that replaces the paradigmatic assemblage of horizontal plans with vertical ones. They call it, The Oblique Function.

Explanatory diagram by Claude Parent in Architecture principe : 1966 und 1996 . [Besançon] : Les Ed. de l'Imprimeur, 2000.

The previous diagram illustrates the effect of the tilted surface on the body. If we apply a Spinozist reading on it, we can observe that the first mode of perception is necessarily occurring as gravity forces the bodies’ parts to interact with the architectural surface’s parts. However, in the difference of architectures which proceed only with flat floors, in the Oblique Function, gravity imposes an additional effect on the bodies, a directionality. In fact, any movement of the body in any direction will exercise on it, a degree of acceleration. This acceleration will be negative if the body attempts to climb up the surface and it will be positive if the same body attempts to go down the slope.

If we accept to consider as negligible -for the sake of this argument- the effects of a flat surface on the body, we can obviously not do the same for the Oblique Function’s effects. In fact, a negative acceleration imposed on the body creates a fatigue on the body whereas a positive one triggers an exhilaration. One could thus hastily argue that only half of the potential movements on this surface provide a Spinozist joy when the other half provokes sadness. However, this affirmation would be inaccurate as the body in action while conquering –we use the word conquest here in the same way that Deleuze talks about the conquest of colors by Gauguin and Van Gogh - the slope is expressing its power of existence. This last argument is the one that lead us to think that comfort and joy are not synonyms if not veritably antonyms.

In that sense, the Oblique Function, in its experience, requires the exercise of the second mode of perception. On this tilted surface, a body can only persist in its being if it manages to compose harmoniously its relations with the relations of this surface. That is how we can affirm that Claude Parent and Paul Virilio manage to create an Architecture of Joy in the Spinozist meaning of joy. The Oblique Function, being only a manifesto, it is interesting to observe the work –mostly by Parent- that has been built based on those principles:

- The Villa Drusch in Versailles (1963)_
- Sainte Bernadette Church in Nevers (1966)
- The French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970)
- Claude Parent’s apartment in Neuilly sur Seine (1973)

French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970) designed by Claude Parent

The second architecture on which we propose to apply a Spinozist reading is the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. In fact, despite the fact that their work has been comfortably categorized by critics as having more to do with art than with architecture in the same way than many radical architects, their production is probably the best achievement of a Spinozist architecture.

In order to illustrate this point, we have to start by evoking the notion of the Architectural Body developed by Arakawa and Gins. In fact, in their research of an interaction between the human body and the architectural environment, they establish this notion as a symbiosis of those two entities. The Architectural Body is thus an entity in which the second mode of perception is continuous. Placed in a state of disequilibrium as in Arakawa and Gins’ architecture, the human body keeps re-harmonizing its parts in relation with the architectural parts and thus develops a conscience of its direct environment. Via this process of harmonization, the body learns and becomes both stronger and more skillful.

Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Photograph by Masatako Nakano.

That leads us to the main purpose of such an architecture for Arakawa and Madeline Gins which consists in a adamant refusal to death. In accordance with the XVIIIth century French physiologist Xavier Bichat who stated that life is the ensemble of functions that resist death , they undertake to architecturally train the body against the continuous degradation of human tissues.

One could not be more wrong to associate this enterprise with the Modernist belief for potential healing characteristics own by architecture. Indeed, what Arakawa and Gins calls Reversible Destiny is an absolute refusal towards the modernist comfort that triggers a process of weakening for the body and decreases its power. On the contrary their architecture challenges the body, put it in danger and leaves it without any other alternative than to react to this delicate situation. In this regard, this architecture is profoundly anti-paternalist and own some clear emancipative characteristics. It releases the exact same Spinozist freedom, when he writes A thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone .

Spinoza describes death as the change of belonging of a body’s parts to another body. The parts do not persist in their being anymore and they start to populate one or several other bodies. The goal of Arakawa and Gins is therefore to maintain this persistence as long as possible via a continuous conquest of joy as we have been defining it earlier in this essay. Describing the condition offers by the Bioscleave House (Life Span Extending Villa), Madeline Gins has this evocative sentence: Everyday, you are practicing how not to die.

Bioscleave House by Arakawa and Madeline Gins

In the Proposition II of the Book III in his Ethics, Spinoza writes no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension . This way, he asks a fundamental question which can be formulated this way: What can a body do? The question that the Oblique Function and the Reversible Destiny ask is not different in any way. Acknowledging their common ignorance with Spinoza, those radical architects attempt to create an environment dedicated to the Spinozist Joy, only condition for the beginning of an answer to this question.

# Moving Things by Brandon Morse

2010-12-17T19:01:00.005+01:00

Here is a poetical monument to engineering. Brandon Morse creates videos of structures submitted to a series of forces which deforms them and make them collapse for some of them. It makes me think of the softwares that the Pentagon uses in order to simulates destruction of buildings as Eyal Weizman pointed out in his last work: Forrensic Architecture. (in this lecture, the targeted buildings were the one in Iraq which were hosting important personalities to assassinate for the US Army.)

see Morse's work Moving Things

found on PYTR75

# The obsession for decay in A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway

2010-12-16T06:24:00.005+01:00

I just rewatched A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway (1985) and I am still amazed by the depiction of the two main (twins) characters for decay.
In fact, in this film, they set up a series of biological observation devices that photograph very three seconds an organic body in decomposition in order to compose a accelerated cinematographic piece of its complete putrefaction.
Greenaway actually introduces very quickly in the narrative this obsession as the first sentence pronounced in the film by those characters after the death of their two wives is: "How fast does a woman decomposes ?".

# Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

2010-12-14T06:15:00.002+01:00

The following text is the transcript of an audio recording found on dytopolitik. In it, Giorgio Agamben interprets Michel Foucault's chapter in Discipline and Punish about the shift from an exclusive urban scheme based on the leprosis management to a disciplinary urban scheme based on the plague management. In fact, according to Foucault, the sovereignty on life itself has been replaced in the XVIIIth century by a biopolitical sovereignty that consider life in its anatomical and biological dimensions in order to both ensure its power and maintain them in a state of continuous work production.

Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: 'Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist'. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however 'pure', general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won't enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.

I would like to start from a banal consideration on the etymology of the word metropolis. As you know, in Greek, metropolis means Mother City and refers to the relationship between cities and colonies. The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis(1). As you know this meaning of the word is still current and is today used to express the relationship of the metropolitan territory of the home to the colonies. The first instructive observation suggested by the etymology is that the word metropolis has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dishomogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. And this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as an urban, continuous and relatively homogeneous tissue (2). This is the first consideraton: the isonomy that defines the Greek polis as a model of political city is excluded from the relation between metropolis and colony, and therefore the term metropolis, when transposed to describe an urban fabric, carries this fundamental dishomogeneity with it. So I propose that we keep the term metropolis for something substantially other from the city, in the traditional conception of the polis, i.e. something politically and spatially isonomic. I suggest to use this term, metropolis, to designate the new urban fabric that emerges in parallel with the processes of transformation that Michel Foucault defined as the shift from the territorial power of the ancient regime, of sovereignty, to modern biopower, that is in its essence governmental.

This means that to understand what a metropolis is one needs to understand the process whereby power progressively takes on the character of government of things and the living, or if you like of an economy. Economy means nothing but government, in the 18th century, the government of the living and things. The city of the feudal system of the ancient regime was always in a situation of exception in relation to the large territorial powers, it was the citta franca, relatively autonomous from the great territorial powers (3). So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things.

We cannot go into the complexity of the transformation of power into government. Government is not dominion and violence, it is a more complex configuration that traverses the very nature of the governed thus implying their freedom, it is a power that is not transcendental but immanent, its essential character is that it is always, in its specific manifestation, a collateral effect, something that originates in a general economy and falls onto the particular (4). When the US strategists speak of collateral damage they have to be taken literally: government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on subjects.

Going back to the metropolis, my idea is that we are not facing a process of development and growth of the old city, but the institution of a new paradigm whose character needs to be analysed. Undoubtedly one of its main traits is that there is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicization, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public.

Michel Foucault tried to define some of the essential characters of this urban space in relation to 'governmentality.' According to him, there is a convergence of two paradigms that were hitherto distinct: leprosy and the plague. The paradigm of leprosy was clearly based on exclusion, it required that the lepers were 'placed outside' the city. In this model, the pure city keeps the stranger outside, the "Great Confinement": enclose and exclude (5). The model of the plague is completely different and gives rise to another paradigm. When the city is plagued it is impossible to move the plague victims outside. On the contrary, it is a case of creating a model of surveillance, control, and articulation of urban spaces. These are divided into sections, within each section each road is made autonomous and placed under the surveillance of an intendant; nobody can go out of the house but every day the houses are checked, each inhabitant controlled, how many are there, are they dead etc. It is the imposition of a grid upon urban territory surveilled by intendants, doctors and soldiers. So whilst the leper was rejected by an apparatus of exclusion, the plague victim is encased, surveilled, controlled and cured through a complex web of dispositifs that divide and individualize, and in so doing also articulate the efficiency of control and of power.

Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of social exclusion, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm. According to Foucault, the political space of modernity is the result of these two paradigms: at some point the leper starts being treated like a plague victim, and vice versa. In other words, there emerges a projection onto the framework of exclusion and separation of leprosy, of the arrangement of surveillance, control, individualization and the articulation of disciplinary power, so that it becomes a case of individualizing, subjectivating and correcting the leper by treating him like a plague victim. So there is a double capture: on the one hand the simple binary opposition of diseased/healthy, mad/normal etc. and on the other hand there is a whole complicated series of differentiating dispositions of technologies and dispositifs that subjectify, individuate and control subjects. This is a first useful framework for a general definition of metropolitan space today and it also explains the very interesting things you were talking about here: the impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialization, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.

I remember Genoa 2001: I thought it was an experiment to treat the historical center of an old city, still characterized by an ancient architectural structure, to see how in this center one could suddenly create walls, gates that not only had the function of excluding and separating but were also there to articulate different spaces and individualize spaces and subjects. This analysis that Foucault summarily sketches out can be further developed and deepened. But now I want to end on a different note and concentrate on a different point.

I said that the city is a dispositif, or a group of dispositifs. The theory that you referred to earlier was the summary idea that one could divide reality into, on the one hand, humans and living beings, and, on the other, the dispositifs that continuously capture and take hold of them. However, the third fundamental element that defines a dispositif, for Foucault too I think, is the series of processes of subjectivation that result from the relation, the corpo a corpo, between individuals and dispositifs (6). There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation; to speak of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects.

What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated. Obviously this is also complicated by the fact that modern dispositifs not only entail the creation of a subjectivity but also and equally processes of de-subjectivation. This might have always been the case, think about confession, which shaped Western subjectivity (the formal confession of sins), or juridical confession, which we still experience today. Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance, in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of subjectivation that they create. But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes attached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque.

I think that a confrontation with metropolitan dispositifs will only be possible when we penetrate the processes of subjectivation that the metropolis entails in a more articulated way, deeper. Because I think that the outcome of conflicts depends on this: on the power to act and intervene on processes of subjectivation, in order to reach that stage that I would call a point of ungovernability. The ungovernable where power can shipwreck in its figure of government, the ungovernable that I think is always the beginning and the line of flight of all politics.

Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files.

Translator's notes:
(1) allontanarsi is the verb used in the original;
(2) tessuto: material, cloth, woven fabric;
(3) citta franca is so called because it is exempt from feudal tax (franca = free, nice idiom: farla franca, 'getting away with it');
(4) ricade sul particolare: falls onto but also hangs and incumbs on;
(5) These reflections can be found in Michel Foucault's Lectures on Les Anormaux, given at the College de France in 1975, specifically this issue is treated on 15th January, Lecture II. The 1975 lectures are published in English by Verso as The Abnormals (London: 2003), in French by Gallimard (Paris: 1999) and in Italian by Feltrinelli (Milan: 2000). Excellent stuff;
(6) Funny how in English there is head to head and face to face, but no body to body. The Leviathan;
(7) assoggettamento;
(8) the usual conundrum: capacitá in Italian.

# Sådan Set Er Byen by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

2010-12-13T01:05:00.004+01:00

Sådan Set Er Byen is a new work by benandsebastian (see their manifesto for boiteaoutils) and Anne Haaning. It is a short and beautiful film inspired by the poem Det (It) written in 1969 by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.

Sådan Set Er Byen

a film by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

assistants: Christine Bjerke, Marie Erstad, Rasmus Myrup Mortensen

soundtrack: ‘Junkspace’ by Isambard Khroustaliov

Narrator: Jan la Cour

‘sådan set er byen’ is inspired by and constructed around the poem:
‘Det’ by Inger Christensen
copyright © 1996 Inger Christensen, v. forlaget Gyldendal
translation copyright © 2005, 2006 by Susanna Nied

# Basento Viaduct by Sergio Musmeci

2010-12-11T23:57:00.002+01:00

The Basento Viaduct is a bridge built in 1969 in Potenza (Italy) whose structure is assured by a continuous surface that minimize its area while maximizing its structural function.
Its engineer, Sergio Musmeci thus managed to create a magnificent concrete surface whose aesthetics directly derived from its optimization. The beauty of this bridge also emerges from the experience for people to walk on this surface as a second functional layer.

found on La Periferia Domestica (see also on core-form-ula)

# Burden of Dreams by Les Blank

2010-12-09T20:12:00.004+01:00

I recently wrote an article about Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the great constructive achievement it constitutes and the probable difficulties the film crew probably encountered in order to achieve this construction process. Burden of Dreams is a 1982 documentary by Les Blank that illustrate those difficulties and the continuous struggle for Herzog to achieve his movie in one of the most remote place of the Amazon forest. The movie actually show Herzog, extremely bitter, talking in a very intense way, about the absolute counter-harmony of the jungle and the obscenity of constant fight and survival struggle of its elements.

# Arena of Speculation

2010-12-07T16:39:00.004+01:00

Arena of Speculation (Critical conjecture on the spatial futures of Israel-Palestine) is a remarkable platform about the Palestinian territorial struggle which include several articles on the topic but also various interviews including two acquaintances, Alessandro Petti (from Decolonizing Architecture) and Yazid Anani (from Birzeit University near Ramallah).
This website is also focusing on the Palestinian Right to Return and strategies on its application.

Its authors are :
- Ahmad Barclay
- Nina Kolowratnik
- Tashy Endres

# Stadium Tower in Detroit by Kendra James

2010-12-04T16:09:00.004+01:00

Last May, I published two of the three projects (Another Dance Macabre and Underground City) from Thomas Leeser's studio in Pratt Institute that I wanted to show; here is the third one.
Stadium Tower in Detroit is a project narrated by Kendra James who proposes a monument to Detroit's status of "ruin-city" by erecting a frenzied building hosting a bunch of various sizes stadium and a car-park race track.
This project is the expression of the non-thaumaturge power of architecture and thus an invitation to sublimate problems rather than trying to solve them.

# Radio documentary programs about Hannah Arendt on France Culture

2010-12-04T01:06:00.003+01:00

French speakers (listeners) would be happy to know that the radiophonic program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance (on France Culture) just released five hours of discussions about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt mostly about Totalitarianism and the "banalization of evil".
Eichman cannot be excused by his role in the Nazi bureaucracy nor can he be expelled from the man kind (which would be too easy for humans) but rather has to be put in front of his responsibilities, as a human who committed true horror.

# Great Construction Processes in Cinema: Andrei Rublev & Fitzcarraldo

2010-12-02T15:15:00.007+01:00

Two movies, so far (there are probably a lot of other potential ones), have deeply moved me for their extensive dramatization of a process of construction within their plots. Those two films are Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966) and Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog (1982).

The first one depicts a fragment of life of XVth century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev. Nevertheless, Tarkovsky dramatizes this life by lingering on surrounding events for which Rublev is only an influenced spectator. The most significant of them is the construction from A to Z of a bell for the local cathedral and is filmed extensively by the Russian director.

The second film is one of the most famous of German director Werner Herzog's and introduces a passionate character of Fitzcarraldo who undertake a tremendous challenge involving a steamship and the native population of the Amazon Forest in Peru. I won't reveal what this challenge is about in order to save this amazing surprise for people who would not have watched it yet, but here as well, the process of construction is extensively visible.

Those two cinematographic episodes recount the deep fascination one (and especially a designer) can have in the contemplation of a work in progress which transforms mater into a designed assemblage. The beauty, here, is not in the finalized object but rather in its process of construction that also had to be achieved, to some extents, by the two films' teams.

# A Marxist reading of Capitalism's crisis by David Harvey at the RSA

2010-12-01T06:42:00.005+01:00

In April 2010, David Harvey gave a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London) about his Marxist reading of Capitalism's contradiction that inevitably led to the current economical crisis. In the following video, his speech is being illustrated by a great series of drawings by RSA Animate. The result is a vivid and concise discourse that needs to be absolutely watched !

Thanks Nora.

See the video of the lecture at the RSA

See the videos of David Harvey's class at the City University of New York, offering around 30h of close look to Karl Marx's Capital.

# Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson

2010-11-30T23:42:00.004+01:00

Data Fossils is the last project of the series about the RIBA President's medals projects. It is a project designed by Tobias Jewson for Liam Young (from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) and Kate Davies' studio at the AA.
This very interesting project dramatizes a near future where digital data would be biocomputerly archived (fossilized) within organic tissues and mineral substance. In this latest case, Tobias introduces the geological constitution of monumental earth archives in Iceland, offered to far future archeologists.

Here is his text:
In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?
The project employs design speculation as a critical tool to explore the potential ways in which architecture and landscape may respond to our ever evolving digital fascination. ‘Data Fossils’ has evolved as a series of fictional scenarios grounded in technically rigorous physical and computational investigations. Real techniques have been developed for encoding digital information in the physical world at both individual and collective scales.
Advances in biocomputing are allowing the possibility of storing data in living, physical forms. As the division between our bodies and the digital becomes increasingly blurred, the bone’s ability to remodel itself, in response to stress, can be hacked to provide data storage. Polyps of calcified binary code become written onto our skeleton, recounting our digital identities- a poet’s finest sonnet is read like Braille through his skin; an Internet glutton’s hoarded browser bookmarks cripple his every movement, our remains become an archaeology of memories.
Our collective history can be deposited in columns and strata of earth – where once archivists trawled the library stacks, data geologists now roam the Icelandic landscape. Hoards of machines traverse the lava deserts, scraping loose sand from the surface, and under immense heat transforming it into elaborate glass like geometries, within which our recent internet activities are encased. Topsoil blown by the harsh arctic winds soon gathers in the lee side of these immense structures, the grounded geological layer sprouting grass and moss.
Over time, habitats will grow in the glimmering hollows as fields of data slowly reverse Icelandic soil erosion. Local Islanders read the growth of this landscape from afar, whilst archaeologists look close ,using advanced MRI scanners, searching for insights into our past. And while tourists might flock to see history in the making archaeologists will read the dull fragments of frozen silica as records of our digital pasts.

# Ai Wei Wei is under House Arrest

2010-11-29T22:57:00.005+01:00

I am a bit late with these news but I learned yesterday that Ai Wei Wei has been placed under house arrest by the Chinese Authorities at the beginning of this month. In fact, one could recently read about his studio in Shanghai, first authorized then built, and eventually retroactively judged illegal and subject to destruction; following what, the Chinese artist decided to organize himself a destructive celebration of his studio. This seems to have been as an excuse for the Chinese Authorities to arrest him -they were probably planning that a long time ago, since Ai Wei Wei never failed to criticize the Chinese governmental system- as "they cannot let anything happen if they don't understand it" says the artist in a interview for the BBC visible here.

I definitely do not register myself in a world vision dividing the "free democratic world" and the "evil totalitarianism axis"; however, one has to observe that the freedom of press and opinion in China is still severely limited since those liberties constitutes an obstacle to the bureaucratic capitalist system currently in operation. The difficulty of dealing with those issues seems to be related to the fact that governmentability is more operative via a system than via peoples themselves, as illustrated by Wen Jiabao's (the Chinese Prime Minister) own interview for CNN being censored in China. In fact, in this interview Jiabao was stating that "freedom of speech is indispensable, for any country, a country in the course of development and a country that has become strong".
Read the whole interview.

# St. Stephen's Cathedral, Bio-Structural Architecture by Liu Chien Sheng

2010-11-28T16:13:00.007+01:00

In my last article about Alistair William's Monastery of Irrigation, I was referring among others, to Hernan Diaz Alonso 's students' cathedral project in Angewandte (Vienna) so I thought that it would be interesting to publish one of them.
St. Stephen's Cathedral is a project designed by Liu Chien Sheng and demonstrates of a very rich work. Beyond the usual architectural vocabulary used by Diaz Alonso's studios, lies the real richness of space created by this student.
My regular readers might be surprised that I value this "suckerpunchy" project since I believe that a new architecture should be achieved by more than the simple revolution of its vocabulary. However, this project demonstrating a tremendous amount of work and rigorousness, I cannot help to veritably respect it, just like I respect and appreciate Mr. Diaz Alonso's sharpness and precision of discourse that he brings whenever he is invited to talk about architecture (for instance, recently invited at Pratt Institute's symposium Architecture and Beauty organized around Yael Reisner's new book)

St. Stepnen's Cathedral, Bio-Structural Architecture from Liu Chien Sheng on Vimeo.

# Monastery of Irrigation by Alistair Williams

2010-11-27T04:43:00.012+01:00

UK schools' projects, as we know, are as amazing for the strength and ingeniousity of their narratives than for their concern for interesting and evocative means of representations. In this regard, the Monastery of Irrigation by Alistair Williams (also selected by the President's Medals and also for the University of Westminster) is striking for its use of an hybrid of hand drawing and computer generated images, thus creating a unique poetic vocabulary serving the program. The latter is a building that organizes its monastic life around water rhythm and power.
Everything in this architecture recounts the calm and the insular aspect of the monastery which is to be contrasted with the talkative vocabulary used by urban cathedral recently designed by Hernan Diaz Alonzo's studios or Tobias Klein and Jordan Hodgson respectively at the Bartlett and the Royal College of Arts (see previous article).
In the same spirit, one would like to (re)read the article about Chen Xinyang's Space Monastery/Prison project at Pratt Institute.

text by Alistair Williams:
Is there no larger and more encompassing creative element in this world than nature and its perpetual interplay between ourselves and the lives we build? What is a more vibrant, energising icon for nature than the movement and constant renewal of water? It moves through, around, under, over and binds us together. It connects all living beings through a central need, a chemical desire that allows us to grow, to build and strengthen.
The Monastery of Irrigation is imbued with water. It flows around and through, powers and feeds it. It offers aesthetical and spiritual planes. It surrounds and embraces the cold and stark concrete, offering on those blank surfaces, a plane on which light can reflect and play with the water’s shimmering surfaces. Every surface is alive, perpetually moving and giving the building the perception of continual growth and energy.
The realignment of the traditional cloisters, cells and chapel propels the building forward, out of tradition and the esoteric, out of history and into the future, where belief stems from a practical relationship with the world.
It is a building of contrasts, underneath the tones of cascading water lies the mechanical percussive heart of the building. Water transforms from the musical or visual, into something vastly powerful and energising. Again it has the potential to change; the vast water powered pipe organ system, illustrates how water, away from its own natural lyricism, can power and project sound around the entire building. Water’s influence can never be disguised or hidden, it flows inextricably with the building itself.
Due to the adaptable design the monastery can project itself outside its own construction to mark and impact any environment. When the concept is multiplied it increases the inherent power of water.
Water reminds us of our place within something greater, something far beyond our comprehension, something beautiful and powerful. We live and build because of it.

To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things.

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.

As the sun doth daily rise, Brightening all the morning skies, So to Thee with one accord Lift we up our hearts, O Lord.

Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.

Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.

The highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.

Pass the sugar please?

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context, a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment,

A message prepared in the mind reaches a mind; a message prepared in a life reaches a life.

Moonlit Sailing

High Water

Low Water

Burial at Sea

# Metropolis II by Chris Burden on Transit-City

2010-11-25T22:20:00.002+01:00

Francois Bellanger very recently released a post about Chris Burden's new installation which could easily be considered as the artistic manifesto of Transit-City.
In fact, this installation, Metropolis II, is a monumental metropolitan race track on which 1200 hot wheels cars are driving at high speed. It can sound a bit too straight forward to represent Los Angeles' circulation as the artist asserts; however, watching the video above is a good way to realize that the speed frenzy occurring within this tentacular race track becomes very interesting if not hypnotic...

# Port of London Authority (The rise and fall of the icon) by James Wignall

2010-11-25T05:36:00.005+01:00

We continue our exploratory series of UK schools' best projects for 2009-10 with a project entitled Port of London Authority (The rise and fall of the icon) and designed by James Wignall in the Royal College of Arts.
In this project, he introduces a near future City of London flooded by the effects of Global Warming, and thus the appropriation of this new surface embodied by water. In this regard, this project questions the modernist paradigm of the skyscraper (see the gorgeous photomontage of the Seagram Building falling down below) by re-exploring the notion of horizontality in architecture. What used to be the tallest buildings (especially in most vision of the future) become inhabited bridges above the river (sea) Thames.

Text:
“When the earth was last four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole.”
Mark Lynas, Six Degrees
Both the intergovernmental panel of climate change and the Met Office Hadley Centre predict a possible temperature rise of four degrees in the next millennium. A four degree world will result in the
re-organisation of the planet.
Humanity must begin to ask how such environmental change, rather than being seen as a threat, is in fact a generator to reconfigure our cities and create new altered urban models.
Inverted-infrastructure
The Romans chose their position along the edge of the Thames where it was narrow enough to cross, but vitally deep enough for the largest sea going ships of the time; London thrived and became the centre of trade for the entire Roman Empire.
Since then the Thames has changed and Victoria’s Embankment was able to control and alter nature’s course. As man put pressure on nature, nature began to fight back and eventually overpowered Victoria’s imposition.
The depth of the River Thames is now similar to that of the Panama Canal allowing the largest ships on the planet back into the centre of London. Through the rising water the state infrastructures are washed out of London’s urban fabric and float above the old city. Centres that people have always traditionally travelled to now have this remarkable ability to move themselves. Wherever infrastructure is needed it can now go.
The Fallen Icon. Inverted-Skyline
Man’s obsession with the grandest, tallest, most indulgent creations have led to icons of absurdity, energy doomed products of a wasteful era. These icons shall fall within a future, energy conscious society; a metaphor for a new type of architecture, a new type of city.
The fallen icons, former vertical typologies have become linear. London’s skyline is now read from Google Earth. The fallen skyline is able to bridge the water and connect the moving infrastructures to London’s dry urban fabric. The starchitects’ skyscrapers have become habitable bridges which, not only allow London to survive in the flooded world, but in fact thrive under the new conditions.

tutors: Fernando Rihl, Charlotte Skene Cataling & Marc Frohn

# Platforms by Romain Pellas

2010-11-24T06:40:00.003+01:00

French artist Romain Pellas created several platforms installations that uses a very cheap and rough looking architectural vocabulary. With Ceiling (Paris 2006) (photograph above + last one & video), this vocabulary implements a strong contrast with a bourgeois apartment, thus creating an architectural dialogue as violent as interesting.
Platform is only one category of work for which Pellas uses this "bricolage" language. Much more interesting installations can be seen on his website.

# Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the AA

2010-11-23T19:27:00.003+01:00

Liam Young (from Tomorrow Thoughts Today) and Geoff Manaugh (from BLDGBLOG) are organizing the second episode of the Thrilling Wonder Stories, a symposium gathering "mad scientists, literary astronauts, digital poets, speculative gamers, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries to spin stories of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales"

The symposium will occur at the AA on November 26th (this Friday) and will be released live online on the AA's website

Participants are:

# MANIFESTO /// benandsebastian

2010-11-22T20:19:00.007+01:00

benandsebastian

We work out of a need to explore, probe and question the world around us – through architectural constructions. For us, architecture is not only the buildings we inhabit, but also a way of thinking that can be explored through the spaces of mythical stories, utopian models, economic systems and power relations.

We create highly-crafted spatial constructions as a way of questioning our own assumptions about how we inhabit the world around us, inviting others in to question theirs too. Working through a process of serious play, we tackle our interests head-on and are not afraid to explore the dysfunctional and unfashionable. Our recent work has taken inspiration from mediaeval rituals, romantic ruins, office politics and a Manhattan urban legend.

We develop our work through a process of continual ‘story-telling’. Each project is built on stories whose endings have not yet been written. Our works are not ‘one-liners’, but inspire curiosity exactly because they beg for multiple readings.

photograph above: 'Made in Ruins' by benandsebastian (photograph by Niclas Jessen)
see the City of the (Re)Orientated published earlier on boiteaoutils

# The Bladders: A legacy project by Jonathan Walker

2010-11-21T17:45:00.006+01:00

Another project from the 2010 President's Medals would be The Bladders by Jonathan Walker for the University of Westminster (one more !). This project introduces an half organic, half industrial architecture supplying the City of London with a new series of water cistern that adapt their sizes to the amount of water contained inside of them.

Here is the text written by Jonathan:

The project is a model for the extension of London’s ailing water treatment cistern, and thus is a response to the classification of London as a city of ‘serious water stress’. The proposal looks towards the date 2031 when London’s reservoir cistern is expected to be unable to meet demand and when projected shifts in our climate will bring hotter, drier summers.
Inspired by natural membranes and tensile structures, the project envisages a municipal water treatment system located on the London Olympic Park. HOK/Peter Cook’s Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects are given a purposeful and sustainable legacy. The stadium's outer structure and seats are reused in the proposal and the remaining basin cradles a pair of giant bladders storing water of a similar quantity to the regular reservoirs further up the Lea Valley. The Aquatic Centre shelters an anaerobic digester stomach and other components of the water screening process.
The Bladders return a segment of the Lea Valley back to its role before the ‘Olympic invasion’, as a ‘backyard’ for Londoners. The valley acts as a void, dividing East London from the main body of the city, and has always been a place where the city's utilities can be hidden away and one can escape the confines of the city streets. The spectacle of the Olympic Games is substituted for a performative utilitarian architecture to enhance the capital’s ‘life-support system’.
The Bladders lie bloated and endlessly reshaping depending on how much water is in them. The large membrane structures sag, fold, swell and flatulate. They are sustained by a set of instruments performing specific operations across the site. The instruments' residual spaces and the watery bodies upon which they operate present a bizarre architecture where, alongside utilitarian function, performance and recreation can be sought.

tutors: Susanne Isa, Sasha Leong & Markus Seifermann

Front page news in the local London newspaper - A legacy project for the Olympic Park

General Arrangement Plan

Instrument No.4 - Retractors - used to spread open and grip onto skin for repair

Flacid Skins - aesthetical transformation of membranes through lack of water

General Arrangement Section

Instrument No.1 - Flank Buttresses - stabilizes the Bladders and controls the inflation and deflation of the inner chambers

Plan and Section of a Flank Buttress showing conoid and reclaimed Olympic stadium seats
Instrument No.2 - Thirsty Walls - performative water collection

Instrument No.3 - Clamps: Draw-off Towers - controlled draw-off of water reserves. Clamps avoid over-topping and maintain structural stability of the Bladders

Instrument No.5 - Dilators - allow access to narrow passages

Section through principal Bladders showing deflated inner chamber

Narrow rift passage
Instrument No.8 - Digester Stomach - separated waste products are digested anaerobically

Illuminated at night - view from Instrument No.10 - Methane Capture Membrane

# Mapping holey spaces on Pruned and BldgBlog

2010-11-20T15:01:00.003+01:00

I am pretty sure that only few of my readers do not read BLDGBLOG , but I nevertheless wanted to draw attention on a very recent article Geoff Manaugh has been published. This article is a sort of sequel of one Alexander Trevi wrote on Pruned in last February. Both introduce a project that succeeded to 3d-scan a subterranean architecture.
The first one on Pruned is the digital reconstruction (in little dots) of the 2km long tunnel underneath the Mexican city of Guanajato by the artists The North Room. (the project is entitled La Subterranea)
The second one on BLDGBLOG is a similar scan (this time with surfaces and textures application) of the tunnels and caves network of the city of Nottingham. This incredibly rich survey has been organized and effectuated by the local instances of government associated with the University of Nottingham. See the official website of the Nottingham Caves Survey
Geoff published one video on his blog but there are many others and I would like to propose three here which explore three caves of breweries and public houses.

courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey

# Spatiology by Vittorio Giorgini

2010-11-19T15:18:00.006+01:00

Spatiology is a book written (and drawn) by Vittorio Giorgini, former teacher at the Pratt Institute who exposes among other fields, his interest for the geometrical and physical construction of topological thin shell structures.
The book is rich of various drawings illustrating the geometrical processes applied to simple surfaces in order to achieve topological characteristics. This research matches with Giorgini's obsession for the minimal impact of a building on the ground. We can observe this obsession through the Casa Saldarini (Italy 1962) and the Liberty Center (done with Pratt's students in New York 1976) but also in other projects designed by the Italian architect which are using a more "industrial" architectural vocabulary.

A video is available on youtube showing Giorgini in the garden of the Casa Saldarini talking (in Italian) about his small scales shells but also about the house itself (starting after the 5th minute)

Casa Saldarini

Liberty Center

# Two projects by Jonathan Schofield (University of Westminster)

2010-11-17T19:28:00.008+01:00

Creative Evolution is a project designed by Jonathan Schofield at the University of Westminster which is nominated for the RIBA Presidents Medals. Since the boards of this work can be looked at on the Presidents Medals' website, I chose to publish the film of the project and another film that Jonathan created for a former project entitled Thames Salmon Rehab.

Both films illustrate a clear interest for a mechanical architecture (paradigmatic in the main UK schools) and the beautiful poetry that those mechanical devices create.

Creative Evolution - Silvertown Ship Breaking Yard / Reconstructed Hybrid Community from Jonathan Schofield on Vimeo.

Thames Salmon Rehab from Jonathan Schofield on Vimeo.

# Capitalism's Architecture

2010-11-16T20:55:00.002+01:00

Here is another text I originally wrote for my post-professional thesis...

So far, I have been focusing exclusively on the militaro-political aspect of the problem I propose to study in this essay. However, it would be deceiving not to evoke the economical system this first aspect attempts to protect: in the Western world, namely Capitalism. In fact, Capitalism as well necessities a space, and architecture, more or less consciously is ready to provide it.
This chapter will be divided into three parts which will attempt to explore the process of gentrification and the two paradigmatic examples of capitalist architecture that are the privately owned public spaces and the shopping malls.

Gentrification is a process extremely illustrative of how Capitalism operates. In fact, only a part of the capitalist system is based on the more or less objective value of manpower and raw materials. A very important other part is provided only by values that are based exclusively on the virtual. That is how a low social class’ neighborhood that despite a not so comfortable aspect, provides a relatively cheap place to live in the center of a city, can be transformed into the new area where the wealthy youth has to spend their nights.
This process usually starts without any transcendental will, with a little amount of middle class young people who decide to move to this kind of districts in order to benefit of the low rents and the authenticity of the neighborhood. Politics, speculators and developers do not need a lot of time before becoming aware of the potential of such area in the center of the city. For the first ones, it constitutes a good opportunity to get rid of a population that is considered as risky and marginal; for the second and third ones, it is a very good way to develop a good financial investment. When politics are taking measure to transform this “dangerous neighborhood where nobody want to come out at night” into a “better and safer place” –understand a place that the authorities can fully control-, speculators buy the current buildings, increase considerably the rent from years to years until the tenants cannot pay anymore and eventually replace them with a population can pay or even destroy the concerned buildings. The developers can then intervene and build new complexes of commercial activities and condominiums.
Gentrification sometimes necessities a dozen of years to become actually effective; however it often implement itself in a much faster way, such as in Williamsburg in Brooklyn where it only took six years to transform a low social class black area into one of the main hipster place of New York City.

Capitalism does not stand not to be in full control of every space of the city. It does not bear either that its best architectural invention, the skyscraper that virtually reproduces infinitely a parcel of land for only once its price, could be limited by urban codes. That is how, in 1961, the City of New York made a deal with private entities in order to reform those codes. In exchange of a significant area of public space on their parcel, corporations and private owners would be authorized to build their towers higher. However, this little zone of public space was not meant to be given to the city so those private actors remained the owners and controllers of this area. They therefore keep the right to authorize or forbid activities to occur and persons to pass on those spaces. Under an appearance of openness, privately owned public spaces are in fact extremely selective of their public. Employees working in the towers are of course welcome; those open spaces are part of a post-modern biopolitical capitalism that appears as taking good care of its subjects. People who spend money on those sites in order to buy coffee, hot dogs, or newspapers are also targeted for this type of public spaces. Others are regarded as unwelcomed and even suspect and can even be asked to leave in case of a “subversive” activity such as playing with a ball, taking pictures or picnicking.
Both corporations and governments are satisfied with those public spaces. Corporations are able to build higher their skyscrapers, provide open space for their employees, developing commercial activities while governments see their public space being maintained by private actors and any potential space of gathering being controlled and supervised.

Shopping malls are another typology of private spaces open to the public under determined circumstances. Once again, two birds are being killed with one stone: the paradigm of the Greek Agora as public space is replaced by a hyper-controlled space owned by private corporations AND this space is able to be highly productive in consumption.
First shopping malls in their contemporary version are said to have been invented by the Austrian-American Victor Gruen in the mid 50’s. In fact, he is probably the one to have thought of those pure capitalist architectures as pieces of urbanism. In an America that was tremendously starting to move its middle class –to whom shopping mall are addressed- in large spread out suburbia, shopping malls were going to become the equivalent of Europeans old cities’ centers, a pedestrian place of gathering and activity. However, probably observing that those European public spaces had been the same spaces that hosted the various national revolutions and insurrections, the United States placed this new kind of public space within the frame of a private supervision, control and police. As Mike Davis describes it for Los Angeles: “The ‘public spaces’ of the new megastructures and supermalls have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional comportments under the gaze of private police forces.” By designing this space as an interior area accessible by definite entrances and supervised by dozen of video cameras and sensors, corporations were assured to limit to the minimum the population that was not welcomed on “their public space”.
The design is also oriented in order to compose a whole interior fantastic world of itself that is supposed to be perceived as better than the reality. This world is safe, clean, warm, entertaining and attractive and it is always a disappointment to leave it for the consumer who forgot reality thanks to it.

The main characteristic of capitalist design is to leave nothing to chance. Indeed chance provokes uncertainty and uncertainty provides an illegibility that can be unproductive for Capitalism. Supermarkets’ products are placed on their shelves according to various consumers surveys and marketing studies; malls are designed in such a way that in order to reach the place their consumers intended to visit, they would have see the integrality of the shops in presence; hyper-visibility discourage homeless people, kids and political activists to take place on private piazzas etc. Legibility is the ability of Capitalism to transform space into an object, both marketable and controllable.

# Small Worlds by Frank Kunert

2010-11-16T04:32:00.003+01:00

A small dose of humor today to give some courage to every students who just realized that their semester will end up in 3-4 weeks or so (!). Frank Kunert's Small Worlds (in reality dioramas he photographs) are enchanting for their soft absurdity involving domestic architectures.

# EVENT /// William S. Burroughs. A Man Within by Yony Leyser

2010-11-14T17:20:00.004+01:00

William S. Burroughs. A Man Within is a documentary directed and written by Yony Leyser which is about to be released in several American cities. The New York's opening is on this Wednesday 17th November at IFC and Yony will be there to answer post-projection questions on November 17th, 18th and 19th.

The movie includes interviews of renowned people such as Gus van Sant, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth, David Cronenberg and a bunch of others.

See the different dates for different cities on Oscilloscope Laboratories' website.

Thanks Camille

# Meat and 2 Veg by Ali Qureshi & Muhammad Zulfiker Enayet

2010-11-13T01:19:00.006+01:00

Meat and 2 Veg is a pretty peculiar project designed by Ali Qureshi & Muhammad Zulfiker Enayet in the University of Greenwich in London. In fact, this project proposes a very poetic re-interpretation of the Cyprus conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Bullets trajectories are replaced by food trajectories and space ends up serving a big banquet for both sides.
The project itself is a sort of slaughterhouse (which is not without recalling Martin Byrne's to some extent). whose main characters are the reconverted US Army "big dogs".

Here is the text Ali and Muhammad wrote in order to explain their approach:

Our ‘theatrical landscape’ is situated in the Buffer Zone, in Nicosia, Cyprus. The site (and the city) is currently divided between Greek Cyprus to the south and the Turkish Occupied Territory to the North.
The theatre of war has delineated that which is Turkish from that which is Greek in the Green Line, a ceasefire line within the city limits. But the line is actually a space with operation posts on either side of it, in a state of ceasefire for 35 years. We imagine how the exiled Cypriots will be rehoused in the Buffer Zone.
Gunslots around the contested space frame a series of miniature theatres. The appearance of any occupants could result in deadly gunfire.
We have replaced the guns with the accoutrements of a feast, a shared dining space, a public kitchen, and a vanishing banquet, stored in the operation posts atop the batteries of the venetian fortifications.
Once the united nations post has been vacated, vegetables will be sent in from the gunslots on the Greek side to tables suspended over the space, where the banquet will take place. The trajectories of gunfire will be replaced with slow moving tomatoes, courgettes and sumptuous olives. Market stalls with abundant produce will set up below, grapevines and lemon groves will infiltrate the buffer zone.
Ali the Greengrocer will reprogramme the ‘big dog’ US robots to farm the inaccessible spaces. Once the mines have been cleared, he will send robotic farmers in to grow vegetables for the feast. Crops will be watered using rotating irrigation arms emerging periodically from the operation posts. Remote harvesting techniques will be employed. Remote controlled triggers will signal the need for more provisions, the use of fertilizers, the dusting and spraying of crops, and harvesting.
Sheep grazing on the ancient battlements will be farmed by Mohammed the butcher, and sent across the ceasefire line for the annual feast. The Butchers cleaver comes down on the sheep on the borderline. This is the realm of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, a butchers’ market stall in the buffer zone. Over time, the wall of blood in the housing / butchery will be drained and in its place will grow the richest of red flowers.
Our theatrical landscape will tamper with nature to create a spectacle and a shared space for people, plants, animals. A place where people from both sides can merge in the moonlight.

tutors: James Curtis, Reenie (Karin) Elliott & Francois Girardin

The Theatre of War: Mapping the positions of gunslots and their trajectories, a reeanactment of a battle.
Re-programming the spaces and accoutrements of warfare for a more benign purpose

Gunslots around the contested space frame a series of miniature theatres.

Exploring modernist technologies: Electro-magnetism in the air 'wirelessly' powers up lamps, tampering with nature to create a spectacle.

Pop up landscapes subvert militaristic functions to achieve an aesthetic purpose, sometimes comical and always eerily prescient

The Big Dog: US robots reprogrammed to farm the inaccessible spaces of the buffer zone

Robots dock off to be repaired/recharged

Sheeps graze on the ancient battlements. The Butchers cleaver comes down on the borderline.

In the aftermath of military operations; why not reconfigure a permanent housing project on the temporary barricades of the buffer zone?

Dehumanisation of the others

Big Dog remote controlled robotic farmers, a robot dock, a housing project, a butchery, a market and a last supper

Vegetable crops grown in the buffer zone, irrigated by rotating arms positioned in the operation posts.

Blood is gathered in sacks of ETFE. Over time, this wall of blood in the housing / butchery will be drained and in its place will grow the richest of red flowers.

The realm of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde: Meat and veg market stalls are positioned in the strategic trajectories of gunfire, dining tables are spectacles viewed from gunslots.

After the market is packed away and the last remains of the last supper have been cleared, the robots begin the next days harvest.

# The Cult of the Infinite by Isaac Barraclough

2010-11-12T04:05:00.009+01:00

Until December 1st and the President's medals annual ceremony, I'll be publishing a decent amount of student projects coming from the United Kingdom, or said in other words, a plethora of magnificent architectural narratives illustrating the British education savoir faire .

Today I start with an incredible project, The Cult of the Infinite designed by Isaac Barraclough in Gerard Bareham and Adrian Evans' studio in the University of Huddersfield Huddersfield.
This project dramatizes an "infinite" monastic architecture dedicated to the cult of the amazing Jorge-Luis Borges' Book of Sands within a ravine. (don't hesitate to click on the images in order to appreciate the representative details)

Here is the text related to the project:

The work centres on a personal narrative inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book of Sands and the revelation of an infinite book to the protagonist. The story has been expanded on in the form of an epilogue, whereupon the book has passed hands to a group of individuals who proceed to form a sacred cult around the book and its limitless contents.
The thesis aims to explore the idea of infinity in an architecture and also the idea of the common and understood when revealed to us in an unknown and intimidating fashion. This is primarily revealed in the guise of ‘The Book’ and the house it resides in; all of this in turn, supposedly lies within a ravine in the Pyrenees – but ultimately, everything may not be as it first apparently seems.
The story and the work is introduced as part of a collection of documents supposedly found within a suitcase unearthed in the French Pyrenees.
The book is the focal point of a community of unknown size and provides the basis of daily ritual there. The day-to-day activities of the people who reside within the community provide for its sustenance and operate much as a monastery would. The key difference is that their scripture is a very real book: which to the extent of their knowledge holds literally all of what has been, what will be and what is. It will also hold everything that has never been, never will be and never is.
This is The Cult of The Infinite.
A place where an infinite lives meet an infinite book and their endless attempts to extract and catalogue its contents into an infinite library…

The Book of Sands is a mythical book infinite in length. Those who are exposed to it are enslaved by the potential it holds - the answer to everything. In 2006 a suitcase is found buried in the South of France in the Pyrenees.

The contents of the suitcase seem to portray a community that held this very Book at its centre.

Within the suitcase among the drawings, a diary was discovered. On its pages was scrawled an account of the original discovery of The Book.

Early investigation into the form of the construct revealed the emergence of a ravine like topographical feature in which buildings were built, suspended or seemingly hovered.

The diary mentions the House that the cult leaders resided in prior to their exposure to The Book. The House itself seems to have been replicated and fragmented throughout the drawings - Theory holds that these were fabrications manifested by The Book.

Sections such as this were concluded to be nothing more than conceptual images, produced early in the Author's attempts to contemplate their new surroundings.

An aerial plan of the Ravine at its crucial point: The Gourd. The Gourd is the crux of The Ravine itself, the impossible axis on an impossible infinite line - The housing of The Book as it warps the very fabric of space around itself.

The House fragments and contorts into the residential complex of The Cult - an infinite lives meet the infinite pages of an infinite book...

The Gourd - housing The Book and its infinite pages...

The infinite Library - the systematic cataloguing of The Book into a never ending construction of shipping containers...

Section through the fragmented House - the daily lives of the cult members is shrouded in doubt over their place in a boundless universe and where it was they originally came from...

Section through the Gourd and the container of The Book. Beyond lies the limitless contents of the Library...

Section through the rows upon rows of shipping containers holding the catalogued contents of The Book. People spend years pacing its infinite walkways...

The environmental systems at work in the Ravine consist of the huge waterwheels used to power dynamos and the continual ritual of the burning of heresy...

A Scribe House - the relentless task of reading and cataloguing the contents of The Book ready for inclusion in the Library all happens in small scholarly rooms such as this...

That which is deemed as heresy is mercilessly eradicated in the fires of the furnaces deep in the bowels of the Ravine... The faith must remain pure...

# Notre Dame de Royan by Guillaume Gillet & Marc Hebrard

2010-11-10T23:30:00.002+01:00

Notre Dame de Royan is a 1958 church in Royan (West part of France) which was designed by architects Guillaume Gillet & Marc Hebrard in association with engineers Bernard Lafaille, Rene Sarger & Ou Tseng after the destruction of the first church during WWII.

The two first photographs are from Guillaume Amat (see previous post)

# Two Connected Houses by Mark Manders

2010-11-08T23:24:00.002+01:00

Two Connected Houses is Mark Manders' proposition for the Guggenheim's exhibition Contemplating the Void (see previous article). In fact, this artist proposes to link a little house in the the void of the Guggenheim, with another house on the other side of the street by a tunnel excavated from New York's ground. "It will take four days to construct the tunnel", he writes.

The whole narrative is to be seen on Roma Publication's website

# Abhominal by Jason Hopkins

2010-11-07T05:38:00.005+01:00

Jason Hopkins develops a compelling digital art work entitled Abhominal that illustrates a beautiful hybridization of geometrical normative structures with a tumorous organic flesh. His "bodies" are as much striking to me that it obviously evokes the hyperactive use of uncontrolled topological surfaces in current architecture. Jason Hopkins proposes a much more interesting vision of not only a surface, but also its content, the flesh, which is not without recalling Marcos Cruz's interest (see his manifesto for boiteaoutils).

However, what I just wrote is only my interpretation as an architect and I wanted to have Jason's "version" of his own work which is the very short text that follows:

"I am fascinated by mankind’s pursuit of ‘perfection’. Through the instruments of science we strive to categorize, understand, rearrange and ultimately tame the natural world around us. My sketches are explorations of possible genetic futures where mankind has achieved this perfection, where science has ironed out the inadequacies of being human."

Biostructure 2

Human Reconfiguration VI

Human Reconfiguration IV

Human Reconfiguration X

Human Reconfiguration XIX

Olympian I

Human Reconfiguration XI

Human Reconfiguration XII
Human Figure Study III

# An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other by Will Laslett

2010-11-06T02:17:00.005+01:00

An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other is a beautiful project by Will Laslett for Jeanne Sillett's University of Westminster's studio. As told in the text below the project dramatizes a network of architectural canyons linking Naples' multiple caves.
In this regard, it might be interesting to look at it in a dialogue with a project already published on boiteaoutils: Chen Xinyang's Underground City.

Here is the text written by Will Laslett:

An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other

This project is an exploration into the caverns of Naples. This vast network of caverns, which has formed through human inhabitation of the land over at least the last five millennia and which has come to extend beyond the perimeter of the city, is unique in its extent and diversity. The network of voids now underlies vast sections of the city, sometimes out scaling the built forms above and yet is largely abandoned, neglected or even forgotten. These are spaces of disorientation, wonder and curiosity, where time is frozen and the nature of positive and negative space is questioned. Through the anthropological creation of a punctured ground plane, upon which Naples is situated, ambiguities are created in notions of the natural and the artificial, the built and the found, as well as the very authenticity of the ground plane itself.

Here I aim to incorporate this hidden alternative network of spaces into the wider network of the inhabited city. Through the creation of a symbolic opening and point of convergence between these two planes, the project aims to allow these worlds to collide, and where in this collision, the city is drawn in, a point of orientation between these realms is created and an altered perception on the nature of the built fabric is allowed. This point of intersection thus aims, fundamentally, to serve as a means of re-comprehending the city, both for those who visit and those who inhabit.

# Nébuleuse by Guillaume Amat

2010-11-04T22:07:00.004+01:00

Nébuleuse is a photographic work by Guillaume Amat investigating the strange territory of the French Atlantic coasts and its military ruins from World War II, bunkers. The atmosphere of the photographs helps to compose a foggy heterotopia where those bunkers appears as monolithic artifacts within an infinite sand landscape.

This work integrates perfectly the series of article written about bunkers on boiteaoutils and that can be read by following this link.

Here is the text related to the series (nb: the complete series has to be seen of Guillaume Amat's own website):

Nébuleuse
In April 2007, in a muffled silence, the sea disappeared, as if vanished, leaving behind only ghosts of stone.
These Blockhaus, remains of World War II, slowly digested by the tides turned out to be threatening places of refuge in the middle of an unexplored desert.
A haunting wind is sweeping along the coast and wrapping distant figures.
In the open sea, one could hear the muffled sound of a foghorn very much like the whispering rumbling of life.
People seem to get lost in a scenery both quiet and threatening where one gets stifled by the immensity of the landscape.

The project called "Nebuleuse" (Nebula) is part of a reflection on the question of World War II heritage, the French coast and its conversation.

In the form of a photographic proposition, I tried to show how the hand of man and the hand of Nature can mix or be in conflict.

# Todor & Petru by CRCR (Wizz Design)

2010-11-03T18:23:00.004+01:00

Todor & Petru is a very short film created by CRCR, five students from the GOBELINS, l'école de l'image (applied art & digital media school in Paris) within the frame of an internship at Wizz Design in Paris. The results evoke a lot of things that have already been done, yet demonstrates an excellent articulation of technique and aesthetics.

The five students are Remi BASTIE, Nicolas DEHGHANI, Jonathan DJOB NKONDO, NIcolas PEGON et Jérémy PIRES

# Biblioteca Nacional de la Republica Argentina by Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich & Alicia Cazzaniga

2010-11-02T23:31:00.005+01:00

photograph by Baobee

I was recently writing about Jorge Luis Borges as director of the National Library of the Argentine Republic (see previous post); here is the current building that hosts the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires.
It was designed in 1961 by Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich & Alicia Cazzaniga, yet only started to built in 1971 and eventually opened in...1992.

photograph by Fiddy James

photograph by Nikko1974

photograph by Calovi

photograph by Castronovot

# Subnature by David Gissen

2010-11-01T14:53:00.005+01:00

Subnature is a pretty interesting book written by David Gissen that attempts to gather a body of architectural works that take their essence in the consideration of the non-romantic (at least not in the classical meaning of it) elements of nature whether the latter are atmospheric, material or living entities.
The best way to illustrate the content of this book is probably to insert its contents' page:

PART ONE (Atmospheres):
- Dankness
- Smoke
- Gas
- Exhaust

PART TWO (Matter):
- Dust
- Puddles
- Mud
- Debris

PART THREE (Life):
- Weeds
- Insects
- Pigeons
- Crowds

All those elements can be the motor of a narrative that ends up into an architectural project such as developed by R&Sie(n), Eyal Weizman, Philippe Rahm or Jorge Otero-Pailos. The interesting thing here, is that nature is considered, not anymore as the docile entity that capitalo-ecology want to "save", but rather as the component of all things, continuously evolving and liberated from any subjectivation.

In a very similar way, David Gissen recently published his edition of AD (the famous English periodic that offer the edition to a different person every two months) that he entitled Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment.

# Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict by Andrew Herscher

2010-10-30T16:33:00.003+02:00

Almost as a sequel of the article I wrote about the notion of Urbicide, here is a invitation to read Andrew Herscher's essay, Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict which attempts to illustrate the role of architecture destruction in the second conflict of the Balkans in the 90's (the first one being the Bosnia war).
In fact, destructing buildings in an asymmetrical conflict is not anymore a strategy of diminution of the enemy's forces but rather a symbolic negation of the otherness' culture and to a broader scale, the otherness' existence.
Herscher thus recounts the three phases of the Kosovo conflict which all dramatized this perspective on architecture assassination. The first one (1st and 2nd images) is the 1998 series of attacks, massacres and profanation from (Christians) Serbians towards (Muslims) Albanians in Kosovo. The second one was the surgical bombing of Belgrade by NATO (3rd image) targeting not only political objectives but also civilian infrastructures like bridges or the TV Tower. Eventually the third one occurred after the partial retreat of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian troops from Kosovo and the non official Kosovo Liberation Army's retaliation of destruction (4th image) on Christian churches...
Herscher finishes his essay with the description of a billboard (5th image) encouraging the new independent country of Kosovo (still not recognized by Serbia) to preserve the common architectural patrimony of the country as being fully part of the National narrative.

# The Truffle by Ensamble Studio

2010-10-29T04:44:00.003+02:00

The Truffle is a self sustaining small shelter designed and built by the Spanish office Ensamble Studio (see previous article about their incredible Hemeroscopium House). The most remarkable aspect of this building to me is its construction process. In fact, in a way which recalls Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev's Bell construction, the team has first created an empty hillock, then assembled the negative of the architecture with hay bundles within this emptiness, cast concrete in between and eventually after the concrete dried, destroyed the earth hillock. The remaining step then consists in the evacuation of the hay from the inside of the building, task which is ensured by Paulina the cow in the following movie:

thanks Xinyang for reminding me of this beautiful project !

# Poema des los dones by Jorge Luis Borges

2010-10-27T23:21:00.005+02:00

Poema des los dones (Poem about Gifts) is a poem written by Jorge Luis Borges after he was nominated Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. That is that time that he strongly lost his sight and this poem expresses the beauty of the irony of his inability to fully appreciate his function. He is in fact condemned to be the blind warden of the Library.

Original Spanish version follows the English one:

POEM ABOUT GIFTS

Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
Of this manifesting the mastery
Of God, who with excelling irony
Gives me at once both books and night.

In this city of books he made these eyes
The sightless rulers who can only read,
In libraries of dreams, the pointless
Paragraphs each new dawn offers

To awakened care. In vain the day
Squanders on them its infinite books,
As difficult as the difficult scripts
That perished in Alexandria.

An old Greek story tells how some king died
Of hunger and thirst, though proffered springs and fruits;
My bearing lost, I trudge from side to side
Of this lofty, long blind library.

The walls present, but uselessly,
Encyclopedia, atlas, Orient
And the West, all centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies.

Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.

Something that surely cannot be called
Mere chance must rule these things;
Some other man has met this doom
On other days of many books and the dark.

As I walk through the slow galleries
I grow to feel with a kind of holy dread
That I am that other, I am the dead,
And the steps I make are also his.

Which of us two is writing now these lines
About a plural I and a single gloom?
What does it matter what word is my name
If the curse is indivisibly the same?

Groussac or Borges, I gaze at this beloved
World that grows more shapeless, and its light
Dies down into a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and the oblivion of night.

Original Spanish version:

POEMA DES LOS DONES

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños
a unos ojos sin luz, que sólo pueden
leer en las bibliotecas de los sueños
los insensatos párrafos que ceden

las albas a su afán. En vano el día
les prodiga sus libros infinitos,
arduos como los arduos manuscritos
que perecieron en Alejandría.

De hambre y de sed (narra una historia griega)
muere un rey entre fuentes y jardines;
yo fatigo sin rumbo los confines
de esta alta y honda biblioteca ciega.

Enciclopedias, atlas, el Oriente
y el Occidente, siglos, dinastías,
símbolos, cosmos y cosmogonías
brindan los muros, pero inútilmente.

Lento en mi sombra, la penumbra hueca
exploro con el báculo indeciso,
yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso
bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Algo, que ciertamente no se nombra
con la palabra azar, rige estas cosas;
otro ya recibió en otras borrosas
tardes los muchos libros y la sombra.

Al errar por las lentas galerías
suelo sentir con vago horror sagrado
que soy el otro, el muerto, que habrá dado
los mismos pasos en los mismos días.

¿Cuál de los dos escribe este poema
de un yo plural y de una sola sombra?
¿Qué importa la palabra que me nombra
si es indiviso y uno el anatema?

Groussac o Borges, miro este querido
mundo que se deforma y que se apaga
en una pálida ceniza vaga
que se parece al sueño y al olvido.

# Conversation between Ed Keller, Carla Leitao, Bruce Sterling & Geoff Manaugh

2010-10-27T06:17:00.002+02:00

I recently evoked the series of lectures organized by Parsons via its assistant Dean Ed Keller (see previous post) entitled Design and Existential Risk. The first event of this series occurred on October 9th with a conversation between the same Ed Keller, Carla Leitao, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling and the figure of the blogosphere, Geoff Manaugh.

The next lecture will occur on Thursday with the interesting author of the book Enduring Innocence, Keller Easterling.

# Refaced facades by Alexandre Farto

2010-10-26T05:21:00.004+02:00

Alexandre Farto is an artist who creates monumental faces by scratching facades' material until it composes beautiful bichromic compositions. He also works with wood, metal, paper and billboards but the wall series seems to be the most architectural one.
As every piece of art which is created by subtraction of material (sculptures coming obviously first in mind), it is beautiful and vertiginous to think that the work is already contained within the material and that the artist content himself to reveal it.

Thanks Martin.

# Brittlebush by Simon de Aguero

2010-10-24T22:35:00.002+02:00

Brittlebush is a desert dwelling designed and built by Simon de Aguero in Arizona. 90% of the construction material have been found on site or nearby which makes this shelter being both high-tech and vernacular at the same time...

More to read on Designboom

Thanks to Nikolas (who sent me this link after finding disturbing similitude with the project I am currently working on !)

# Profaning Colonial Architecture / Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti at Columbia November10th

2010-10-23T16:45:00.006+02:00

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the two founders of Decolonizing Architecture (with Eyal Weizman) will be presenting their work at Columbia University on November 10th (at 6:30pm). Their lecture entitled Profaning Colonial Architecture will introduce their strategy of re-using abandoned Israeli settlements in the West Bank for the future new state of Palestine. Their projects are therefore based on a pretty optimistic scenario (Israel leaving the West Bank (1) without destroying their own settlements as they did in Gaza (2)) but as said in a BBC article that a reader just sent to me, the colonization's impact on land is such that it can now be considered almost as irreversible which make Decolonizing Architecture's projects even more important.

# The biblical battle of Jericho / When the trumpets destroy the walls

2010-10-22T23:51:00.002+02:00

The biblical episode of the battle of Jericho has always fascinated me. The story from the book of Joshua (6:1-27) introduces the first battle the Israelites had to win in order to conquest the land promised by God after the Egyptian slavery period and the forty years spent in the desert. God gave Joshua instructions in order to take the city of Jericho: the Israelites had to march around the city's walls once every day during six days. Then on the seventh day, they had to do the same but in addition to blow in their horns which would make the walls collapse and the city easily defeated.

It always pleases me to imagine a poetico-scientific explanation to this episode by thinking that the horns actually reached the resonance frequency of the walls; this same phenomena that explains why military manuals prevent troops to march on bridges not to risk to make them collapse. I find very compelling the potentiality of destroying whole buildings with only human means (or in that case, music instruments). This could in fact be considered as a metaphor of revolutions which make institutions collapsing...

Here is the text in the Bible.

# Terrorist Motel by Stealth Architects on Archinect

2010-10-22T16:48:00.002+02:00

Archinect just released an article about a very ironic project which proposes to build a "terrorist motel" instead of the controversial Muslim Cultural Center in Down Town New York. Mocking the idea of associating Muslims with terrorists and acknowledging the fact that the West always needs enemies in order to sustain itself, Stealth Architects proposes to provide terrorists directly on the U.S. ground thus authorizing an organize a local hunt rather than expensive abroad wars in Afghanistan.
This project is also a small ode to the act of excavating by creating construction documents that indicate the process of digging in order to achieve this negative labyrinth.

More to read and to see on Archinect's page about the project.

# Wind as a tree sculptor

2010-10-19T16:15:00.001+02:00

photograph by Anita Gould in New Zealand...

# Low Tech intelligence on Deconcrete

2010-10-18T17:07:00.003+02:00

Our friend Daniel Fernandez Pascual from Deconcrete recently published two very interesting articles involving very cheap processes of construction.

The first one introduces La Havana's Barbacoas (unformal mezzanine added illegally to the old colonial buildings of the city) and Andiamos (scaffolding preventing buildings to collapse), the second ones inviting (or suggesting) the first ones to exist in a beautiful ambiguity of decay and urban appropriation.

The second one involves the collective Inteligencias Colectiva which investigatesvernacular smart modes of construction and introduce the example of Justo Gallego’s self-built cathedral constructed with concrete reinforced by cheap metallic spinning bar.

# If Antigone was a Refugee / Zizek, Badiou and Aloni's lecture yesterday for the Jenin Freedom Theater

2010-10-17T14:57:00.003+02:00

Philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Udi Aloni were invited yesterday in New York (peculiarly enough, hosted by St Paul's Church in Manhattan which seems to have an interesting priest) by the famous Jenin Freedom Theater (located in Jenin's refugee camp in the West Bank) in order to expose their thought about the current Palestinian situation.
It would be hard for me to make a coherent summary of those three talks and I am unfortunately lacking of time to do so; however I wanted to report several points which were evoked yesterday:

ALAIN BADIOU:
- The Palestinian weakness is and has to be an affirmation of existence
- Under the name of Palestinian lies something universal
- Palestinians are being presented but not represented

UDI ALONI (who wanted to talk as an "Israeli Jew"):
- It is very important to distinguish which art if the official art and which one is the resistive one. Films like Waltz with Bashir or Lebanon are the official art.
- The difference between Tel Aviv's population and Jerusalem's population is that Tel Aviv's is racist but think it is liberal whereas Jerusalem's know it is racist and acts like it.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK:
- Colonization does not really happen between "what is happening" (in reference of what interests Western medias). Colonization is a slow and invisible process enforced by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy system
- Joke: "In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: 'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair -- the only thing you can't get is red ink."
That is our role to be the red ink.
- Israeli liberals want "decaffeinated Palestinians" (in reference of his observation on nowadays' society who wants coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cream without fat, warfare without casualty, sex without sex etc.)
- Western Countries (especially in Europe currently) are acting for a "reasonable racism", a "barbarism with human face", a racial oppression that does not kill.
- "Antigone is a true bitch". He advices the Jenin Freedom Theater which wants to play Antigone to change the script during the fight between Antigone and Creon by an exasperation of the people of Thebes who proclaim a revolution and kills both of them (!).

I know that it is sometimes risky or irrelevant to extract those quotes from their context (each ot their talks last for thirty minutes), but I thought it was worth it to have a bit of the substance of what have been said.

# The excavated books of Noriko Ambe

2010-10-16T04:02:00.003+02:00

Noriko Ambe is an artist who magnificently excavates books to create troglodytes landscapes within them. The physical landscapes thus dialogue with the imaginary landscapes created by the books' content in an almost inversion of form and substance.

A tremendous multitude of other works are visible on her website.

Thanks Biayna

# 1933 Slaughterhouse in Shanghai

2010-10-15T04:56:00.003+02:00

Shanghai's 1933 Slaughterhouse has now been reconverted into an Art Center. The intermediary area between the peripheral building and the central cupola is composed by a multitude of beautiful massive concrete pathways that were originally paced by the animals.

# Sympathy with the obstacle / Parkour in Gaza

2010-10-13T20:10:00.003+02:00

“Thus, hostile urbanists or militias always conduct the battle towards the inside, or the domain of obstacles, the urban canyon. When it comes to urbanized war, every combatant must think like an obstacle –‘See everything from the perspective of an obstacle’. West then uses Parkour as the exemplary discipline in which the practitioner becomes as one with the obstacle during movement. Every soldier should be a traceur, a swerving projectile which has a deep sympathy with its physical obstacle.”

Negarestani Reza. CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re-Press 2008

We already wrote a bit about Parkour on boiteaoutils (link 1 and 2) and our fascination for this practice of architecture which attempts to consider every surfaces as a potential ground for the body.
In his great Cyclonopedia (already evoked in a previous article), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani evokes urban combat as the new paradigm of war in the Middle East. He establishes a materialist interpretation of the city as a set of obstacles and the militarized choreography of bodies as a set of trajectories that develop a "sympathy" for these same obstacles.
I recently discovered this following video showing three young men practicing Parkour in the Gaza Strip. My romanticism did not need so much to see a poetical resistance by the bodies to the various obstacles the Israeli Army impose to the Palestinian population...

# Tate Modern Unilever Series 2010 by Ai Wei Wei

2010-10-12T19:55:00.006+02:00

The new installation in the Tate Modern's turbine hall in London for the now traditional Unilever Series has been created by the Chinese artist/architect Ai Wei Wei who populated the ground by 100 millions (!) hand made unique porcelains mimicking a sunflower seed.
Visitors are invited to set foot on this particle-landscapes and probably experience the change of the surface imposed by their body.

Tate Modern 12 October 2010 – 2 May 2011 (London)
photographs belong to the Tate Modern

# Vision Haptique by Salem Mostefaoui (OzCollective)

2010-10-11T15:49:00.004+02:00

"Voyez, la vue optique, ce serait la vue éloignée, relativement éloignée, au contraire l’exercice haptique ou la vue haptique, c’est la vue proche qui saisit la forme et le fond sur le même plan également proche."

Extrait du cours de Gilles Deleuze à l'Université Paris 8 du 19.05.81

"See the optic vision, it would be a far vision, relatively far away, on the contrary the haptic vision, it is a close vision that grasp form and content on the same plan close as well."

Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze's seminar at Université Paris 8 (19/05/1981)

Vision Haptique is a series of twenty two photographs created by Salem Mostefaoui who is part of our friends' collective Oz. As the Deleuze's quote indicates, Salem tries to approach this antinomic haptic vision (haptic being what belong to the sense of touch) and to extract from each of those photographed buildings "a built truth that attempts to gather the architectural concept and its physical reality." In his approach of this method, he understands his work as being infinite.

When I contacted him to write this short article Salem referred to some photographers whose work has similarities in the approach of architecture:
- Perry Roberts
- Christobal Palma
- Nicolas Moulin
- Kim Høltermand

The complete series of visible on OzCollective's website

# Fissure Port by Biothing

2010-10-10T16:41:00.003+02:00

Biothing entered the competition for Kaohsiung's (Taiwan) Port Terminal and designed parametric canyons that strongly contrast with the current paradigmatic trend of hadidian (!) floppy structures... In fact, here, Alissa Andrasek and Jose Sanchez decided to start from a virtual pure mass and then carved it with programmatic voids whose sharp edges narrate the cut of the mater.

More (text, pictures, videos) about the Fissure Port project on Biothing's website.

biothing
Alisa Andrasek + Jose Sanchez_ principal designers
design team: Knut Brunier – Gabriel Morales – Denis Lacej

# The situation in Palestine is NOT a war

2010-10-08T22:30:00.007+02:00

I just watched a television debate on the French television (thanks Maxime !) wondering if the current circumstances were allowing to think of a potential peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
This enunciation of the problem mimic the one which has been the topic of the very recent negotiations between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in Washington. Even Abbas himself posed the problem as such: "Israel has to choose between peace or the colonization".

HOWEVER, this enunciation is, in my opinion, symptomatic of the absolute refusal of the World to see what is the real situation in Palestine. Talking about peace implies that there is a war going on which is not the case by any mean. I affirm it; there is no war in Palestine.

Frederic Taddeï, the animator of this debate killed the latter "in utero", when his first question to his six guests the following question: "Who is to be blamed ?" This very question implies a symmetrical conflict characterized by a mutual violence between each camps, in other words, a war. The situation in Palestine is highly different and whoever went there without a preliminary educational brainwashed knows it.

In fact when Mahmoud Abbas proposes to the Israelis to choose between colonization and peace, he knows that he is bluffing at poker with no game whatsoever and his adversary knowing it. Only the Israeli State or the International Community can enforce the application of International Law which would stop the systematic daily oppression of the Palestinian people.
I am sorry to repeat what I already wrote in numerous previous articles but one has to know that there are at least 300 000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank that are violating the article 49 of the Geneva Convention -I am not even talking about the violent acts of some settlers on the local population- and that is one aspect of the illegal status of Israel.
One other is the various humiliations of Palestinian by Israeli soldiers revealing the extreme power established between a population and an army which is composed by a tremendous amount of people who are less than 22 years old. Tzahal is claiming that those cases of humiliation -those which are carried to the public- are marginal and not revealing the professional spirit of the army and I have to recognize that I understand some of those situations of "nervous breakdown" as symptomatic of the pressure put on those kids' shoulders associated with an educational brainwash (that is part of the Israeli military service's package). However and despite the fact that I condemn those acts, I also recognize the same "attenuating circumstances" to the very marginal terrorist acts committed by some disoriented Palestinians.

Nowadays, the only valid argument that can be carried by the Israelis for those violation of Law is religious. In fact, only the argument according to which God's words are the most important and that the antic territory of Israel belongs to the Jewish People. There is nothing I could argue against a Jewish fundamentalist who would affirm that a human life and human law is nothing compared to God. The defenders of Israel's occupation should thus decide if they agree with such a extremist and violent argument or not because once again, that is the only one which functions in a system of rationality that do not contain any contradiction. Nowadays, nobody can both include Human Rights in his system of rationality and defend Israel's colonization and occupation in the West Bank as this territory was defined in 1949 by the Green Line.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I am profoundly revolted against the eternal highjack of intelligence that is effectuated in debates which constantly refuse to look at the reality as it is, and the elaboration of semantic decoys in order to hide the undeniable violations of the International Law.

# Mister Sanchez by Vasco Mourao

2010-10-06T17:01:00.001+02:00

Mister Sanchez by Vasco Mourao (Cargo Collective)

Thank you Jean-Baptiste

# Once upon a Place. Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities

2010-10-06T15:32:00.003+02:00

picture: La Fievre d'Urbicande by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters

From October 12th to October 14th, will be held in Lisbon a very interesting symposium entitled Once upon a Place. Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities.

Guest speakers include:
- Alberto Manguel (Author: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading, among others)
- Colin Fournier (Bartlett School of Architecture, London)
- François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters (graphic novels authors)
- Kazys Varnelis (Columbia Univ., NY)
- Ângela Ferreira (artist)
- Gonçalo M. Tavares (author/writer)

The program is attractive with three full days of literary stimulation !
Thanks Pedro for reminding me about it.

# Interaction Between the Elements by Rietveld Landscape

2010-10-05T16:05:00.005+02:00

Interaction Between the Elements is a beautiful project by dutch office Rietveld Landscape (Grand Prix de Rome 2006) which attempt to save a North Sea island, Terschelling from a massive flooding.
The project proposes to create multiple dunes by introducing hundreds of stakes in the ground which would recover the sand freed from vegetation and carried by the wind.
Here is the introduction text:

Interaction between the elements

Rising sea levels are posing a threat to Terschelling, a North Sea island and UNESCO monument. In 2008, a report addressing this threat appeared, and Rietveld Landscape was asked to advise on the opportunities offered by the report. According to Rietveld Landscape’s vision, the symbiosis between human activity and impressive natural processes accounts for Terschelling’s attraction to inhabitants and outsiders alike – a fact that should guide all attempts at dealing with the rising of the sea level.

Because it is impossible to predict with sufficient certainty when the sea will have what level, flexible strategies for East- and West-Terschelling are needed: interventions that follow the movement of the water and can be adjusted through time. The activity of a huge drifting dune will be stimulated by removing its current vegetation, and the power of the wind will be used to transport its sand. In this way, the growth of the island will outpace the rising of the sea level.

Although the proposed interventions have been designed specifically for Terschelling, the strategy informing it can be exported to other islands in the North Sea that are threatened by the sea in a similar manner. Read more >>>

Client: Atelier Fryslan
Designers: Rietveld Landscape
In collaboration with Deltares
Location: Boschplaat Terschelling
Status: vision 2009

# One Flat Thing Reproduced by William Forsythe

2010-10-04T17:05:00.004+02:00

In the series People using their bodies are never wrong (cf articles about surf, parkour or other tight rope walkers), here is a beautiful choreography by William Forsythe entitled One Flat Thing Reproduced that introduce a group of people dancing in a simplistic familiar environment: a group of rectangular basic tables...

Bodies are flirting with surfaces and using the space in between that would normally be considered as too narrow to move. The margin between bodies and objects are therefore minimal and the risk of injury creates a very beautiful tension between all the living and inanimate elements of this choreography. The video sometimes shows views of the scene from above which reveals the transgression of the object frame by the bodies.

Thanks Hiroko

# Ethel Baraona's world of wonders !

2010-10-03T05:17:00.002+02:00

Our friend Ethel Baraona (from dpr-barcelona) just reached 1000 references on her tumblr which offers a wonderful field of interesting discoveries to explore with enthusiasm !

# The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

2010-09-30T22:52:00.002+02:00

One story by Jorge Luis Borges is interesting to read as it reveals his vision of his own work. This short story, entitled The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths in fact compares two types of labyrinths; the first one, complex, full of tricks and devices and the second whose labyrinthine aspect comes from its extreme simplicity and "desertness". It has been written that those the first labyrinth was assimilated to Borges' vision of James Joyce's litterature, which lost the reader thanks to the complexity of its form, whereas the second labyrinth was Borges' interpretation of his own work which lost the reader thanks to the vertigo of its essence.

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to muck the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God's aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage."

Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to him who does not die.

From Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 263-264.

# William Heath Robinson's mechanical apparatuses

2010-09-30T05:19:00.005+02:00

William Heath Robinson is a cartoonist from the first part of the XXth century who spent most of his time to invent complicated mechanical apparatuses in order to achieve a single action. The absurdity that emerges from those machines is, in my opinion, a pretty good expression of technophilia in its ambiguity, most of the time fascinating but also sometimes sustaining its existence by its own contemplation...
It makes me recall Hernan Diaz Alonzo's lecture's conclusion at the Pompidou Center, one year ago, that was questioning the hyper sophistication of the Coyote's apparatuses in order to catch the road runner. This sophistication is so planed and contemplated that it eventually fails but rather than condemning it, Diaz Alonzo claims that this failure should be thought as part of the work.

William Heath Robinson is regularly quoted by Peter Cook and CJ Lim as a potential reference for their work and their architectural studios in schools.