# NYPD mobile folding miradors

Skywatch is an invention that any New Yorker (at least any Brooklyner) can daily observe in the public space. The New York Police Department has created a new apparatus of panopticon by making itself mobile. Situated at 22 feet high, one police officer helped by a bunch of surveillance cameras can monitor a district without being seen. The mobility of this device has at least two advantages, first to be able to deploy itself in any district which is supposed to be supervised, secondly (and that is the sly aspect) to be integrated more easily by the local population who will accept the surveillance for a temporary time.
I am very surprised this kind of device did not spread out in Europe yet. Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was still the French Minister of Internal Affairs dissolved what we called the "proximity police", I would not be surprised that now that he is the President he would replaced it by those shameful mobile folding miradors...

# Paris' 1910 great flood

Exactly a century ago, the brand new Paris (an incredible amount of so called "hausmanien" buildings have been built from 1900 to 1910) was flooded of 8 meters (around 30 feet) above the normal level of the Seine river. During one week, Parisians had to adapted their way of experiencing the city and even for an important amount of them, moved out and gathered in shelters all over the city.
This kind of flood is supposed to happen once every century, therefore this 100th anniversary is not a simple commemoration, but almost a prophecy of what will probably occur in the coming years.
In that regard, in 2008 the French tv channel France5 released a pseudo-documentary describing Paris' 2011 great flood.
Here is the link towards the four videos:

Those next pictures comes from a small article published by French newspaper Liberation today.

# LOCAL_AREA_NETWORK[s] / Exhibitions by Viktor Timofeev

Our very talented friend, Viktor Timofeev (see previous posts) will be opening his two exhibitions called LOCAL_AREA_NETWORK[s] in London and in Cologne on January 14th and January 15th. During those openings, he will join Bryce Hackford for creating a improvised sound in relation with Viktor's paintings and drawings.
Here is the text related to this improvised creation:

Bryce and Viktor met in 2004 at Hunter College, New York, where they began collaborating on music projects. They have made pop songs and sound pieces in repetitive and environmental styles and create unique bodies of work in correspondence between Brooklyn and Berlin.
Bryce has a band in Brooklyn called Behavior (occasionally featuring Viktor), experimenting with recording mediums and effects in special new style some have called 'hypnagogic pop'.
To celebrate the performance in London by these two artists we have produced a 12" record. It features a piece called 9/32 produced by studio then live versions being layered arbitrarily on top of one another with a continuous sample and complete interruption by sample (during which both play). The flip is a live sample of Viktor's collaboration with Behavior this past summer. Each of the 15 12'' covers is a unique drawing by Viktor produced specially for this exhibition.
Bryce's recordings and performances match sensuality and intuition with a conceptual approach that traces the influence of Brian Eno and many German musicians, dub producers, home recording and dance music pioneers.
This 12" will be released at the same time as two new cassettes Bryce has produced for Robert Goff’s gallery in New York and The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco this January.

# Une architecture des humeurs / Exhibition by R&Sie(n)

It was planned for a long time now, the sequel of the 2005 exhibition I've heard about will be released starting January 22nd (opening is on 21st) at the Laboratoire in Paris. Since the beginning of its existence, this exhibition space produces projects elaborated between a designer and a scientist. That is how R&Sie(n) happened to create a collaboration with mathematician Francois Jouve in order to design an architecture generated by les humeurs (a French word which implies a bit more than just 'mood'). The crew includes other talented people like Stephan Henrich and Marc Fornes but also Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Pejus (see former posts)
Here is the text published by R&Sie(n) regarding the exhibition:

From January 22, 2010, the studio R&Sie(n) will render visible a project exploring new modes of architectural structuring and transaction:

- One aspect is comprised by computational, mathematical and machinist procedures designed to produce an urban structure following certain protocols. These successive indeterminate, improbable and uncertain aggregations will rearticulate the link between the individual and the collective.

- The other aspect is the scanning of the neuro-biological emissions of each visitor so as to analyze their chemical composition. Until now the collection of information involved in the residential unit protocol has been based on visible and reductive data (area, way of life, number of rooms, mode of access, neighbourhood frontiers).

In contrast, this experiment will provide the occasion for an interrogation of the shadowy “emission of desires” through the scanning of certain physiological signals, and the implementation of a chemistry of the moods of future purchasers taken as inputs generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the relationships between them.

A signal collection station will be on hand. It will make it possible to perceive these variations and the way in which changes in emotional state affect the emitted geometries and influence the construction protocol.

Animist, vitalist and machinist, “mood-driven architecture” rearticulates the need to confront the unknown, an uncertain and unpredictable nature, in a contradictory manner by means of computational and mathematical assessments.

“Humor-driven architecture” is also a tool that will give rise to “Multitudes” and their palpitation and heterogeneity, the premises of a relational organization protocol.

This research is being carried out with François Jouve, the mathematician in charge of working out dynamic structural strategies; Marc Fornes with Winston Hampel and Natanael Elfassy in charge of computational development; the architect and robotics designer Stephan Henrich; and Gaetan Robillard and Fréderic Mauclere for the physiological data collection station, following a scenario by Berdaguer and Pejus. A second process of collect via “Microneedles” of Mark Kendall will be included.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Research and exhibition credits:

R&Sie(n) / Le Laboratoire

Scenario, design, production: R&Sie(n)

Math process: François Jouve

Computation: Marc Fornes with Winston Hampel and Natanael Elfassy

Robotics design: Stephan Henrich

Physiological data scanning process and design: Gaetan Robillard, Fréderic Mauclere and Berdaguer & Pejus and Mark Kendall on Microneedles.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pitch / “une architecture des humeurs”, a research project / exhibition in which the R&Sie(n) architectural practice has worked with a group comprised of a mathematician, programmers, architects and a robotics designer to develop a computational approach based on biological and physiological data scanned from visitors who are put through situations inciting repulsion, stress and pleasure to conceive housing units and urban fragments based on relational protocols. From January 22 through the April 26, 2010, at Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75003 Paris

# Learning from Nike town on Kosmograd

The new brand city described by Borries ... is a dynamic city, a setting for organizing 'situations.' In order to reach even the smallest target groups, the media will be deployed in this city far more interactively than they are today. Streets, fallow zones, interstitial spaces and ruins will play essential roles in the brand name city. These spaces will not be overlaid with advertising in classical fashion, but will instead become the objects of discriminating marketing strategies. Here initiatives from below that devise new leisure activities will be instrumentalized, as will critical actions and political demonstrations."

Martin Gittins of Kosmograd released several days ago an interesting article about Nike's strategy in order to transform urban space in a space full of the brand representation and merchandising. This reseach is based on Friedrich Von Borries' book called: 'Who's afraid of Niketown'

# Décio Tozzi's work

Décio Tozzi has always worked in Sao Paulo and still is. His work from the 60's, the 70's and the 80's is striking by the love expressed for the craft work and exposed materials. One can obviously recognize Oscar Niemeyer's influence but along the years, Tozzi's work seems to have developed an own very interesting identity (by the color and the "graphic design" of the projects to name only one example).

pictures:
- Jardim Ipe School (1965)
- Geraldo Abbondanza Neto Residence (1989)
- Carmen Heloisa Ferraz Carvalhal Gonsalves Residence (1977)
- Antonio Teofilo de Andrade Orth Residence (1974)
- Fazenda Veneza Residence (1970)

# Berkeley in the sixties by Mark Kitchell

Berkeley in the sixties is a 1990 documentary by Mark Kitchell exploring a decade of demonstration and activism from the University of California's students. Those demonstration started to obtain a full freedom of speech within the campus and lead to fights for black civil rights, end of the war in Vietnam, requisition of land for communities and women liberation. This movement more or less ended with the violent intervention of military forces (helicopter, nauseous gazes, gun shots) on the campus of the University of California.
It is difficult for me to imagine such a political awareness in nowadays Western world. Some might say that we also reached a state where few things only can be considered shocking, I would argue that the institutional system understood that it needed to be more sly in order to survive but nowadays social violence and continuous manipulation are still in the core of the Western world.

# Archaelogies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia by Frederic Jameson

I read this Fredric Jameson's book six months ago, and I don't know why I forgot to post a small article about it since I have been extremely interested by its content at that time...
First of all I love absolutely the name of this book. Archaelogies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia. This second sentence is pretty much my own definition of Utopia that I am always comparing to the horizon, something to aim to without being ever able to reach it.
This essay explores the notion of utopia through More and Marx, but more essentially through science fiction novels. The chapter about Stanislaw Lem's literature is particularly interesting in its illustration of an attempt to describe the un-imaginable.

The book has also been translated in French.

# Spontaneous Architecture Competition #1

Spontaneous Architecture is a series of small competitions organized by the Columbia Studio X and tries to trigger quick reactions from architects to answer to a problematic.
The first one, launched on January 1st and with final submission on January 15th is about developing a vision of what the future might look like.
The conditions of the competition are a bit unclear and the 5$ fees are frankly debatable but I do think that the results could be interesting enough not to despise it for that.

Here is the brief of this first competition:

New Year's Day 2010. Welcome to the future. Y2K is ten years behind us, and 2012 is at our doorstep.

The promises and terrors of our previously projected futures have both manifest and been forgotten. We are not living in a world of flying cars, intergalactic civilian travel, hovercraft skateboards, or robot assistants. No, but we have real-time video chat, the Hubble telescope, maglev trains, and smart phones. We are not living in the wasteland aftermath of nuclear war, but global warming is melting the arctic.

Images of our present future have historically been either utopian or dystopic. The technologies that were going to save us or destroy us have arguably done both to some degree, creating our greatest problems and our most significant solutions. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before and fewer critical tools to navigate that information with discrimination. We are more connected through our myriad telecommunications and more disconnected due to a growing class divide. The future is more complex than could've been predicted. It is more nuanced and diverse than Huxley, Orwell, Le Corbusier, or Nostradamus knew.

Times of crisis and calamity, like today, always put ideas in high demand: big ideas and big dreams to foster the next wave in invention and innovation on our way toward tomorrow.

We are living in what has historically been the future. Now that we are here, what is next? What is our future? This an open call for visionaries.

Answers to this question can take many forms: renderings of future imagined cities, advertisements, photographs, collages, maps, etcetera. There are no limits on content, only limits on format. All submissions must be formatted as a single letter sized (8.5 inch by 11 inch) landscape image, which contains no more than 100 words of text.

# Designing Interface Architecture student workshop

FABberz and LaN are looking for sponsorship in order to achieve their Rio de Janeiro workshop (Designing Interface Architecture) which would consists in designing an interface allowing slums' inhabitants and architecture students to work together in fabricating specific products needed by the communities there. This is an attempt of a democratization of digital tools but it needs some more funds to happen and there is only seven more days for that.
You can check out the workshop's website if you want to financially participate (it starts with 1$).

# Excursions on Volume. Counterfeit Terrains by Shawn Sims & Erik Martinez

Excursions on Volume. Counterfeit Terrains is the research achieved by Shawn Sims and Erik Martinez for Michael Chen and Jason Lee's Pratt undergrad thesis studio named Crisis Fronts. This research presentation is half way of the thesis project which would be released in May 2010.
Shawn and Erik studied very seriously the apparatus of counterfeit product transportation globally and locally. An important part of the research observes the processes of control and suppression of those products and how those processes are passed through by a certain amount of clandestine goods.
The proposition made here is a scenario worthy of a Geoff Manaugh's story, a narration of urban landscapes directly influenced by this clandestine economy and even counterfeit landscapes constructed thanks to the waste of this economy.

Here is an excerpt of the project's precis:

Certain logistical points along the trajectory of product movement are susceptible to highly intelligent protocological hacks. The global logistical infrastructure of shipping can be seen as a set of highly rigid channels providing passage to a steady flow of matter. The system is most comfortable when it exists in its normalized state of equilibrium. While this perpetuates the rigidity of the system, this is a highly fragile moment. At any instance there may be a point in the system that is experiencing great pressure, while, opposite that, there is a void created by this dynamic. The greatest threat to a system with this nature is flooding. Unlike a hack, which is a systematic attack on specific ingress typologies, flooding does not necessarily attempt to operate with stealth; instead it locates its ingress moment, and through sheer force, attempts to breach the rigid system. The flood is an attempt to disrupt the structure of the network and the equilibrium. This offers the illicit matter an opportunity to blend in with the masses. Both hacking and flooding occur due to specific counter-protocols in operation. The two modes are able to correspond at times and, at others, operate independently. In correspondence the power of the collective hack is able to generate a new, differentiated rigidity spawning internally out of the licit network.

Historically, logistical spaces were positioned within the closest proximity to urban areas. This was in attempt to maintain the singular space of commercial and social programs, often resulting in urban environments producing high degrees of capital flow. Within these spaces, a public forum, often times a plaza or park, begins to emerge as a viable topology for understanding the link between commercial and social infrastructures as they pertain to capacities of slippage.

You can read and see more on the Crisis Fronts' website

To be continued...in May

# Computationnal neo-baroque / Projects by Tobias Klein and Jordan Hodgson

"Ornament is a crime" wrote Adolph Loos in 1908. This sentence was opening one century of disdain for architecture's aesthetic developed by modernism. A hundred years later, a School claims for an embrace of ornament via computation. This approach of architecture is highly debatable since it seems to fully accept the role of the architect as only a embroiderer who would be able to express his creativity in non-essential elements (just like the French law which plans that 1% of every public building's budget should be dedicated to a piece of art).
However, some people succeeds to design ornaments as fully part of the narration expressed by a project. Computation allows them then to populate a structure with an expressive ornamentation that register the resulting architecture in what we could call neo-baroque. Architecture becomes thus a materialized surrounding narration and computer seems essential to have a global and local control of the project (capitalism not allowing the construction to take as much time as it used to do in the 17th century during the baroque era).
Tobias Klein, former student at the Bartlett and now teaching at the Royal College of Arts, the Architectural Association and one of the founders of an experimental design group called horhizon, is one of this rare people. His two projects, Synthetic Syncretism and Contour Embodiment and the project developed by one of his student, Jordan Hodgson at the RCA are examples of fascinating narrations embodied by their neo-baroque architecture.

Synthetic Syncretism by Tobias Klein

The project’s narrative background is based upon the hybrid Cuban religion of Santeria (a mixture between Catholicism and the African Yoruba tribe beliefs). As a result of this unusual syncretism an altered kind of religion evolved which hybridizes Catholic Saints with animals and Sakralraum with sacrifices.
The necropolis Christobal Colon, the main cemetery, does not provide enough burial space hence the proposal for a processional route through the city of Havana for a ceremonial funeral in the sea. Along this processional route the ‘Chapel of Our Lady de Regla’ acts as architectural highlight.
Slotted inside an existing cross shaped courtyard, this inverted chapel contains a series of Santerian relics and utensils condensed from the virtual into the actual. Tweaked to the max, skeleteral and visceral at the same time, these ‘cybrid’ objects, 3D modeled and 3D printed in order to perfectly fit animal bones found on the site in Cuba, and 3D scanned into virtuality and re-moulded into actuality in London, provide, on a smaller scale, the formal expression for the larger architectural intervention.
At face value computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) merely performs within the domain of what is best described by the German term Technik (it expresses technology, technic and technique). Thetruth is that CAAD overcomes the dichotomy between technē (craftsmanship) and poiēsis (art).
Although digitally driven, the project does not succumb to the pervasive allurement of ‘Parametric Digital Modernism’—the unspecified whitewash (actually grey) of =3D surfaces, the universal Sachlichkeit of algorithmic design techniques, and the mechanistic vision of input-output interactivity.
The project provides an example of syncretism of contemporary CAD techniques and CAM
technologies with site specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, and historical architectural references. The project shows the architect as the creator-craftsman that finally has the chance to overcome the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century schism of intellectual from manual labour, as well as the nineteenth-century gulf between automatic mechanisation and poetic creation.

Contour Embodiment by Tobias Klein and Ben Cowd

On a tectonic level, the project amalgamates symbiotically the qualities of contoured geometries (Ben Cowd) and volumetric voluptuous embodiment of MRI generated organs(Tobias Klein). On the conceptual level, the work is much guided by a fascination of catholic Iberian baroque, the scale-less implementation of symbolism of the Sacred Heart by the use of MRI generated body data; aconversation with the particular architecture of St. Paul’s cathedral by Sir Christopher Wren and the adjacent properties as constructive interpretation of the hidden spaces of the double dome /cone lighting qualities within St. Paul.

Workhouse of the Infrastructural [Counter] Reformation by Jordan Hodgson

‘Inequality has reached Victorian levels’
'Britain has the lowest level of social mobility in the developed world.'
(July 2008 - Shadow Minster Chris Grayling)
By 2032 the chaotic urban conditions that once helped define Elephant and Castle have given rise to a cripplingly disenfranchised underclass. In this bleak landscape of proletariat discontent, might the British government revert back to Victorian modes of jurisdiction, whilst simultaneously providing an architectural placebo to soothe a nervous population?
Unprecedented levels of unemployment generated by the crash of 2008, combined with a paralysis of social mobility triggers the reinauguration of the once potent Workhouse typology. A re-branded Victorian-style workhouse, reminiscent of a lost empire, provides a sanctuary for adrift individuals and the crucial workforce required for a British industrial renaissance. The lost industries of the golden age are reawakened from decades of slumber and manifested in a glorified cathedral to the plebeians of Elephant and Castle.
Car manufacturing and living quarters are positioned uncomfortably adjacent to bureaucratic authority, with a constitution of rationality, efficiency and profit permeating throughout. A sprawling workhouse, providing a clear separation between its occupants and the population of Elephant and Castle at large, gradually inhabits the infrastructurally intensified cityscape. A language of sublime ornament and excess exerts a sense of authoritative power over the workers, but a gain in momentum sees the emergence of an architectural encrustation that quite literally embodies the paupers that it controls.