# Diving in Strépy-Thieu boat lift

Here is a impressive video of Alain Kohl and Orlando Duque diving from the top level of Strépy-Thieu boat lift into a pool 25m lower (being a lift it can be adjusted). The appropriation of a background which has nothing to do with the activity proposed here makes the whole beauty of the scene.

# Pike Loop (Gramazio Kohler) update

Pike Loop, Gramazio & Kohler 's installation/performance for the Storefront is now effective and R-O-B has started to build the wall which is going to be erected until October 27th. The robot is developing a pretty beautiful dance and the great thing about this performance being the fact that everybody can see it (it is located in Chinatown New York), people easily get intrigued and stop by to see what is going on. My personal critic of the whole thing would be that the wall scheme has already been designed and no uncertainty (slight robotic self-determination , interaction with the environment...) has been input into the robot action algorithm which could have been amazing...

former posts (Venice biennale & Pike loop)

# MANIFESTO /// Viktor Timofeev

Victor Timofeev

My vision of a near future metropolis is tied to my experience of growing up skateboarding the streets of New York. To a skateboarder, urban objects lose their immediate practical functions and are forced to behave as objects of pleasure, transforming a simple street into a funzone. In this way, a skateboarder's vision of the metropolis sees the dreams of the 60's era collectives such as Archigram and the Situationists come true. This logic led me to explore forms found from the street on paper, joining the lineage of fantastical, hypothetical and quasi-utopian architectural situations. With time, street objects were expanded to include all aspects of design that a normal inhabitant of a metropolis is confronted with on a daily basis, recycled and juggled in a non-sensical, humorous way.

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# Victoria Reynolds' paintings + Deleuze's logic of sensation

Here is Victoria Reynolds' work who paint some incredible canvas of meat composing some very evocative carne-landscapes. Her work is very likely to be linked with Francis Bacon's paintings (see former post) as Gilles Deleuze describes it in his Logic of sensation:

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon’s pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, “Pity the beasts,” but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a “fact”, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher’s shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim. Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher’s shops.

Gilles Deleuze. The logic of sensation. Continuum 2003

Thanks once more to Eduardo !

# MANIFESTO /// Nic Clear

Nic Clear (picture extracted from Unit 15's work by Ben Marzy)

1. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be what you think it is going to be; it certainly wont be the big bright shiny world depicted in the pages of the architectural press and fostered by the architectural profession. The architecture of ‘bigness’ offers nothing but a vacuous future of shopping malls, cappuccino’s and antidepressants.

2. The Architecture Of The Near Future is not the architecture of the architectural establishment, which has proved itself to be intellectually and philosophically bankrupt, the corporate architectural complex does not produce a vision of the future only images of the future.

3. The Architecture Of The Near Future needs to re-capture the speculative and the imaginative aspirations of earlier utopian movements without becoming mired in the internecine squabbling and neurotic formalism that plagued such tendencies.

4. The Architecture Of The Near Future, if it is to survive as a discourse and not just as a job, must embrace new ideas, new modes of practice and new forms of communication.

5. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be open and inclusive, the top down approach to architecture is already on the decline, architects must become enablers rather than iconoclasts, the heroic concept of the architect is a romantic fiction and largely a hangover from a late C18th conception of the ‘gentleman’ architect.

6. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be fun, play should be at the heart of the creative processes that inspire all architecture, we have reached a point where we understand the typological and programmatic issues that underpin the banalities of production, however we have lost a sense of purpose and joy that should be at the heart of every project.

7. The Architecture Of The Near Future needs to engage with a new set of values and develop new goals, the architecture of late capitalism predicated on consumerism and the false ideology of growth has to be abandoned; greed and conspicuous consumption are the false idols of a redundant epistemology.

8. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not see technology as an end in itself but will embrace technology in surprising and original ways, the very foundations of how we think about technology need to be reconceptualised.

9. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be predicated on the technology of the visible, but rather technology as an extension of the visceral. The idea of technology as ‘other’ has ceased to be viable; we are intimately connected with it and by it, we are technology.

10. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be a social discourse and as such it has to adopt social forms of communication; architecture is trapped by the conventions of its representations, which are insular and hermetic, we need to question the efficacy of our current forms of representation and adopt tactics derived from other disciplines.

11. The Architecture of the Near Future will utilise design skills developed by the current generation of young architects that allow migration across a range of different disciplines, young designers are no longer defined by the names of their courses or their jobs but by the software they inhabit.

12. The Architecture Of The Near Future will utilise open source methods and protocols, ideas and techniques will be collectively developed and disseminated, mutual co-operation is becoming the norm in the development of software and in on-line communities, if we can operate in this way in virtual environments we must be able to apply these ideas into our actual worlds.

13. The Architecture Of The Near Future will embrace the abstract and the speculative; it will not be constrained by client, cost or patronage but only by the limits of the imagination.

14. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be a thing it will be many wondrous and complex things, it will be inclusive and non-hierarchical, it will be about creating narratives that celebrate diversity and differance.

15. The Architecture Of The Near Future will be a hybrid, it will use ideas of collage, montage and bricollage, it will be an architecture of copy and paste, the architecture of purism and the mono-culture is already dead.

16. The Architecture Of The Near Future will embrace DIY and the role of the amateur, professionalism masks a discourse of vested self-interest and the perpetuation of a set of false values.

17. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be an exercise in shape making, whether we are talking about blobs or cubes we need to move on from reductive formalist concepts, shapism is the art of the banal and we need to look beyond the banal and toward the extraordinary.

18. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be simply about buildings, architecture has always been about more than buildings anyway, the first question an architect must always ask ‘is a building even necessary?’

19. The Architecture Of The Near Future will redefine aesthetics and good taste; the hegemony of morality, hygiene and functionality will be re-imagined as a playful intersection of the impossible, the improbable and the dirty.

20. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be about the plan, the section and the elevation, the new architectures will be generated, developed, represented and experienced through time based means.

21. The Architecture Of The Near Future is already with us, though many people do not yet realise this. The ground has already shifted, the certainties that were once taken for granted have, to use Marx’s phrase, melted into air, we have entered a state of global flux, however it will take some time for the world we think we are living in, to be the same as the world we are actually living in.


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# Parabolic facades by Manuel Alvarez Diestro

Transit-City published today a short post about Manuel Alvarez Diestro's photographic work in Alger about those housing buildings covered by parabolic antennas. It remains me of a very old post now...
Those pictures are being published in Polar Inertia Magazine.

# MANIFESTO /// Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz (for Iconeye)

In the context of a post 9-11 political equator that divides the world and the city between enclaves of mega wealth and sectors of poverty, urbanities of labour and surveillance, the formal and informal, our institutions of architecture have lost their socio-political relevance. Instead, the architecture avant-garde has become fully complicit with an international, neo-liberal project of privatisation and homogenisation, by camouflaging gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project.

New experimental practices of intervention in the collective territory will emerge only from zones of conflict. The radicalisation of the local in order to generate new readings of the global is transforming the neighborhood – not the city – into the urban laboratory of the 21st century.

The micro heterotopias emerging within small communities across the world, provoked by social emergency, are producing non-conforming spatial and economic contingencies that will incrementally pixelate the large with the small. These economic and political informalities generate a different idea of density and land use, a counter form of urban and economic development that thrives on social organisation, collaboration and exchange.

Contemporary art and architecture’s task is not only to reveal ignored socio-political territorial histories and inequalities within this polarised world, but also to generate new forms of sociability and activism.

# How far is the body punishment going ?

See this man ? His name is Frédéric Lefebvre. He is deputy in French National Assembly (for one of the most conservative region of France) and he is not supposed to have any relationship with the government whatsoever (since Montesquieu and the fact that executive and legislative power should not interfere in each other's domain) but he is part of Nicolas Sarkozy's closest friends and since France looks more and more like a 17th century monarchy, he is thus very powerful. The last idea of this very agreeable gentleman (one week after saying that in a trial the culpable is always amongst the suspects...) is to establish chemical castration in France. I don't even want to know where this chastisement is being applied in the world, I don't care either to know that some people are actually voluntaries for it, I am just wondering what the f... is going on in this country. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault illustrates how punishment tries to suppress actively the human body and this example seems to be one step further in the extremity of chastisement as a symptom of a paranoid pro-security society.
And the saddest (if not Sadist) thing is that this tendency is not confined only in conservative camp, but today even people from the left wing like Segolene Royal who are supposed to embody a resistance to the system is supporting this kind of decision...
I don't really understand how all this happened...

# MANIFESTO /// Geoff Manaugh

Geoff Manaugh (for Iconeye)

If architects, critics, historians, bloggers, professors, journalists, construction magnates, city planners, etc really want to talk about architecture, in a way that has any meaning at all for anyone who actually lives in this world (and who doesn't teach at Columbia), then they need to talk about architecture in its every variation: whether a structure is real or not, built or not, famous or not, or even standing on the surface of the earth.

Everything is relevant to architecture - from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel. There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure - but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and WG Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames - as well as in the toy sets of children. The suburbs are architecture; bonded warehouses are architecture; slums are architecture; NASA's lunar base plans are architecture - as are the space stations in orbit about us.

Stop limiting the conversation.


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# MANIFESTO /// Guy Rottier

Guy Rottier

MANIFESTO

Architecture is being invented just like one invents a car or a plane. It has no boundaries and can be exported like any other creation. Sites never compelled a predetermined architecture.

Architecture has no public interest but private, except for some public buildings or monuments.

It is the synthesis of all arts including every discipline and in that regard it should be free and should only obey to technical constraints, security, hygiene and land planning.

But Human beings have a different judgment. Deep frozen in the past and crazy about tradition, they added such useless constraints that any evolution seems to be impossible. Housing is yet the basis cell of any society is currently the only field where progress, especially in France, is almost impossible, in the global indifference of users and most of architects.

French (original) version:

MANIFESTE

Toute réalisation créée par l’homme, sur terre, sous la mer ou dans l’espace est architecture.

L’architecture s’invente comme on invente une voiture ou un avion. Elle n’a pas de frontières et peut s’exporter comme n’importe quelle création. Les sites n’ont jamais exigé une architecture prédéterminée.

L’architecture n’est pas d’intérêt public mais privé, sauf pour certains bâtiments publics ou monuments.

Elle est la synthèse de tous les arts incluant toutes les disciplines et à ce titre elle doit être libre, ne devant obéir qu’aux contraintes techniques, de sécurité, d’hygiène et d’aménagement des sols.

Mais l’homme a un jugement différent. Congelé dans le passé et malade de la tradition, il y a ajouté de telles contraintes inutiles que toute évolution semble vouée à l’échec. L’habitation, pourtant cellule de base de toute société est actuellement le seul domaine où le progrès, surtout en France, est quasiment impossible, dans l’indifférence générale des utilisateurs et de la plupart des architectes.

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# Victor Timofeev

There are some meeting with emotion you don't expect, wandering in the internet street looking for some of El Lissitzky's work, I happened to meet Victor Timofeev's which is as productive as stunning. References are pretty obvious but the way Timofeev is expressing his vision of architecture has a undeniable strong graphic power.
His website introduces his work since 2001 and his very severe skateboard accident which pushed him into the need of drawing.

# MANIFESTO /// Introduction

MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO

October thematic will be tackling the way we (architects and others) are able to express a vision thanks to words via a manifesto. We thus proposed a certain amount of people we admire the work to write a small text expressing the involvement of their work. We don't have much answer yet but it will be probably coming during the month...
We hope that hopefully it could create a very interesting corpus...