# After the war by Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods just released series of what I believe are new drawings telling the story of a devastated city starting its reconstruction. This follows his continuous interest for such situations and constitutes a very interesting sequel to his book: War and Architecture

Lebbeus Woods. After the war

# Project Carbon by Yaohua Wang

Project Carbon is a project designed by Yaohua Wang for Peter Testa's Sci-Arc studio. Its level of achievement is remarkable since Project Carbon presents a real engineering innovation associated with a very interesting level of poetry (whether it is in its architectonicity or in its representation) and a real interest for the construction means.
A lot of so called innovative vertical urban design are visible nowadays without really bringing any degree of innovation, however Yaohua's project introduces a very smart interpretation to what Peter Testa already achieved with his carbon structures.

Here is the text related (once again, I particularly recommend the animation below for its high level of didacticity):

LIVING INSIDE A CARBON FIBER FOREST

Material is always one of the most important driving forces for the evolution of architecture. Nowadays, architecture are facing greater challenges than ever in the contexts such as climate changing and urbanization, but also are given greater opportunities with the emerging of new materials. Carbon fiber is one of those 'Pioneer materials' with the advantages such as lightweight, good continuity, excellent tensile and the construction process that closely linked with the automated machinery. Meanwhile, as all the other materials, carbon fiber is not a material of perfection---it has weak compressive strength.
Project Carbon makes an attempt at using carbon fiber to create new opportunities for architecture's spacial quality, visuality and micro/macro climatology. Also, the project dives into the practical carbon fiber construction process.
Two diverse material systems work together for Project Carbon: the internal steel cages contain the multiple functions of the building; while the external carbon fiber layer works for the structural and environmental function of the building. Steel cages are arranged in a precarious condition which is usually purposely avoided but here works perfectly for keeping the carbon fiber layer in tension rather than compression. A new possibility of architecture section is created by taking advantage of the interaction between these two systems: the linear load transfer mechanism in the traditional skyscrapers is one of the key restraints in creating new skyscraper section; this type of load transfer mechanism is substituted by using carbon fiber to disperse the load in a 'field condition', which leads to the freedom of the section formed by those steel cages. In the meantime, the three diverse layers of carbon fiber serve different functions. For example, the environmental layer composed by dense carbon fiber strings is not only working for bearing horizontal load but also functions as a blur boundary between interior and exterior, providing new opportunities such as shading and natural ventilation.

CONSTRUCT THE DREAM STEP BY STEP

The traditional construction methods and the sequence that the construction solution comes after the architectural formal design become inapplicable in the Project Carbon. From the very beginning of the project, the architectural form is generated by taking into consideration the construction methods and creating a way to make these two working together. The distinct construction process of carbon fiber makes the involvement of robot important than ever. Two types of robots called construction machine 1/CM1 and construction machine 2/CM2 engage in completely different tests: the former is used for the construction of the 30cm diameter carbon fiber main structure; the latter is responsible for the creation of the 15cm diameter en-winding layer. The detail construction sequence is: firstly, CM1 will finish the braiding of the first linear layer of carbon fiber structure; secondly, the crane let down the prefabricated independent steel cages into the initial carbon fiber layer, meanwhile, CM2 will finish the second looping layer of carbon fiber structure; lastly, CM2 with operator will finish the last step of en-winding layer of carbon fiber structure.

Testa X_Lab final presentation from Foral on Vimeo.

# Tales of ordinary poverty in Cedar Bridge

The New York magazine presents a reportage written as a novel, of Cedar Bridge, a homeless village in a New Jersey forest. Rather than studying the community in a very superficial way, journalist Alex Morris seem to have spend a decent amount of time within it in order to understand the daily difficulties, the relationship with the local authorities, the self-organization but also the elaboration of an micro-institutional power and its debatable aspects.

Thanks Martin !

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Beyond by Koji Morimoto (Animatrix)

The haunted house is a paradigm of the heterotopia. A close environment, few clear accesses of entrance/exit and inside, a whole bunch of new behaviors and rules.
The short film Beyond by Koji Morimoto within the Animatrix set, seems to be particularly appropriate for what we are interested here. The plot introduces a bunch of kids who discover a house in the city which does not exactly respond to the same usual rules or norms. It is raining inside the house (even if the weather is nice), gravity is not as operative as it is usually, one room directly leads to the nil...if you replace that in the Matrix Universe, one can say that this house is a bug, a failing code which provokes the existence of a magic enjoyable world.
However, just like Georges Canguilhem illustrates in his The Normal and the Pathological, the norm is always trying to re-conquer the anomaly and here there is a special squad trained for the solving of this kind of bug.
It brought us back to our article on the so called madness of people and how, since the XVIIth century (according to Foucault, madness in the Middle Age was not symptomised), we live in a system which either exclude the anomaly or tries to re-educate it.

# Slavoj Zizek on French radio

French radio program Les matins de France Culture keeps on broadcasting interesting shows by inviting Slavoj Zizek last Wednesday about his book First as tragedy, then as farce.

Zizek speaking a perfect French, it is useless for non French speakers unfortunately...

# MANIFESTO /// Bob Sheil

Bob Sheil (Director of Technology and Computing at Bartlett)

PROTOARCHITECTURE

In the post digital age, how we design has become of equal importance as to what we design. Never before have there been so many, or so varied, techniques and methods at our disposal each with the capacity to leap frontiers previously only imagined. Designing has become a liquid discipline pouring into domains for centuries the prime possession of others such as mathematicians, neurologists, geneticists, artists and manufacturers. Post digital designers more often design by manipulation than by singularity, and what is designed has become more curious, intuitive, speculative and experimental. Each of these new techniques vies for dominance amongst the cut throat trenches of advanced tooling. They battle to outdo one another, predict the unpredictable, promise the unattainable, materialize the immaterial, solve all our problems, and so dazzle the beholder that all previous paths to architectural wonderment pale into the archives.

Our new tools are more malleable than before, so much so, that no sooner do they graduate from beta mode than a brighter, fitter or shinier sibling has emerged. As recently as twenty years ago, when I began my architectural education, the methodology of designing buildings had largely remained unchanged in 500 years. Drawings were prepared by hand and evolved from the tentative to the fully costed. Things got built, sometimes in strict accordance to what was drawn, but not always, as records later captured. A few well known but rare individuals such as Pierre Charreau managed it all without such dogmatic trappings, designing his magnificent ‘piece de resistance’ (1927-1931) in collaboration with Bernard Bijvoet and the craftsman Louis Dalbet, largely through conversation and modelling. Before them Gaudi, and later through Prouvé, Price, Eames, and others, pioneering efforts to rethink the verbal properties of design moved us forward but the tools to manage it remained largely the same.

Now we are spoilt for choice, and are frantically catching up with the latest definitions on how the design revolution is to unfold. I describe work from this period as Protoarchitecture. Not a recognised word in any dictionary, it is therefore only part real, and that is how I see the material, part real, part ideal. Protoarchitecture recalls propositions that are prompted by vision rather than convenience. It may be plural or singular, evolutionary or revolutionary, temporary or permanent. It is at once a construct of the physical and the virtual. It does not conform; it is by definition, an exception, a transgression between drawing and making.

# Saenz de Oiza's Torres Blancas in The Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch

I recently watched Jim Jarmusch's last movie, The Limits of Control, and I was stunned to see that a whole part of the movie's first part was taking scene in what may one of my very favorite buildings in the world: the Torres Blancas in Madrid designed by Fransisco Saenz de Oiza (1961)
It is interesting to observe that this fantastic building stands very close from the very published Puerta del America Hotel which has tried to gathered all the architecture star system (Hadid, Foster, Nouvel, Chipperfield etc.) and thus proves that mainstream architecture is nothing more than a capitalist luxury product. Choose your camp !

Besides those considerations, The Limits of Control is once again for Jarmusch a very interesting and beautiful movie, a manifesto for emotion, passion and introversion through art against its capitalization. It is still in Theater in Europe and I really recommend it.

# Erik Desmazieres' illustration of Borges' Library of Babel

I just found out a version of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel (see previous post for integral text) illustrated by Erik Desmazieres. This very talented French printmaker created eleven etchings in relation with Borges incredible short story. However and despite the fact that the author is extremely precise in the way he describes the space of the library, Desmazieres chose to interpret the tale his own way, refusing a stubborn literal adaptation of the drawings to the words. The result is a very rich universe full of books and visitors who probably wandered several days in the library before finding the word combination they were looking for (or the one that hold their attention)...

# PHILADELPHIA / Marcel Duchamp room in the Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is worth visiting for one room, the Marcel Duchamp's one. It not really by the quantity but more by the quality of the work proposed that this room seems to be a self-sufficient Duchamp exhibition.
The big glass peace of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor, even is here obviously and also an important amount of preparatory drawings and texts. A bunch of famous ready-mades (including the urinal/fountain) are also present, series of Female Fig Leaf (a molding of a female sex) and beautiful machinistic paintings of the Bride and the Nude Descending a Staircase...
In a nutshell, a Must see !

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor, even

Bride

Nude descending a staircase

Female Fig Leaf

# Doctruck at Studio-X: "Land and Noise, Space and Silence"

Thursday, 1/14, 6:30pm: Doctruck at Studio-X: "Land and Noise, Space and Silence"

A selection of experimental non-narratives that explore cities of silence, suburbs of noise, indoor discomfort and a prison wall. Presented by Doctruck, a "traveling, sporadic, fun, depressing and possibly experimental documentary series" curated by RACHAEL RAKES. Special appearances by filmmakers BENJ GERDES and KATHERIN MCINNIS.

Featuring:
Democratic Looking, Benj Gerdes, 1:30, 2008
Horizon Line, Katherin McInnis, 1:00, 2009
Null X, Jans Groot, 6:00, 2004
The Shutdown, Adam Stafford, 10:00, 2009
In Order Not To Be Here, Deborah Stratman, 33:00, 2002
And recent work by Pawel Wojtasik

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

Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
180 Varick Street, STE 1610, New York City
1 train to Houston Street

[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental design and research run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]

# F. Roche & M. Fornes Columbia Studio / Inoculate weep by Naomi Ocko and Benjamin Riley

This semester at Columbia, Francois Roche and Marc Fornes and their studio were exploring a topic I've been interested in for quite some time now which is to ask, how does an architecture dies ? The studio thus tried to elaborate processes of life and death, continuously re-negotiated in the same kind of way that proposes The woman in the dunes (see former post).

Six projects have been designed, I decided to publish only two of them but the four others might be soon visible on Columbia website or R&Sie's...

Inoculate weep by Naomi Ocko and Benjamin Riley presents a imaginary forest in which is observed the inoculation of a virus. This agent provokes the death of the trees and thus progress from one to another creating some kind of path which composes a poetic landscape of destruction. We are here at the core of architectural narration and in the process of an architecture trying to express what Francois Roche calls a biotopisation.

Here is the text related to the project:

Is there a way to create space while maintaining the illusion that we were never there?
We propose to use a biological system to create a pavilion from an existing condition. We are introducing a micro-organic material to degrade an existing condition, a live forest of trees. The output is thus a mutation of the input itself, which is growing and dying at the same time.
Biologically, we are using white rot fungus as the agent of necrosis. This eats the glue that holds the cellulose strands in wood together, leaving a stranded pulp of wood, atrophies in different states.
We wanted to study how the morphology and geometry changes as something become more delignified and weakened, and the tree start to weep. We visualized the spatial implications and possibilities by simulating perfect delignification in material experimentation without the inconsistencies of nature.
But, understanding that nature is not perfect, we developed a protocol of dynamic testing so that we could study the forces that weaken the systems, such as gravity, attraction, collision, and friction. The outcome is a combination of both our material and computational tests.
Our agent functions as a parasite, inoculating along a path in a live forest. Not killing, but rather tormenting the system while it is still growing.
It takes one day to inoculate a path, and a season to affect it. From generation to generation, there is more growth, and also more degradation. Each generation interacts with the previous generations of inoculation. In other words, there is the possibility, or almost certainty of overlapped trails of infection.
Our scenario becomes insular and internal both within its creation and output. It is endemic and the result is a transformation of the input nature itself. The bacteria spreads from a path of inoculation, dispersed without a master plan. The strategy of infection from the initial inoculation is controlled through distance thresholds. The infected infect the uninfected, leaving a trail as the reading of time.
It is cannibalistic and atrophic, a full or partial wasting away of the initial material. Once weakened, it can be humanly manipulated to form spaces or protection. It is potentially endless and self-propagating, one area cannibalizing and infecting the next. It is in a constant state of beautiful distress.
It is atrophic, but not entropic. The system can be biologically stopped, and the resultant architecture is a remnant or a ruin of this mapping of time, an illusion of its own sublime impermanence.

I really recommend the two short films at the end of this post which fully express the poetry of this death process.

# F. Roche & M. Fornes Columbia Studio / Epidermic Hyperplasia by John Becker & Sofia Krimizi

Epidermic Hyperplasia by John Becker & Sofia Krimizi is a project introducing an architecture generated by a mimicry of the construction of the skin and which is also dependent on a age limit of the cells composing it. David Cronenberg introduced this marriage between biology and technology with eXistenZ (see former post), John and Sofia use it more specifically to architecture.
It is then interesting to observe the confrontation of the two architectonic languages used here; the structural one, a chaotic scaffolding supporting the skin/fabric and how those two elements are eventually amalgamating in order to die together...
This architecture seems a very good illustration of French physiologist Xavier Bichat who defined life as the ensemble of functions that resist death (Physiological Researches on Life and Death. 1800).


Here is the text related to the project:

Epidermic Hyperplasia
You are all contained in you skin.
You are contained in a vessel that is generated by your organism as a defense mechanism.
Your skin is a living mortal vessel.
Our point of departure comes from the semi-living condition of the artificially produced epidermis. The epithelial tissue is located in the middle of the hierarchy between the cell and the organ tending to perform more like the one or the other along the different stages of its growth.
We understand the skin engineering culture as an attempt to create an animate but not alive fraction of a body, coming from the body’s genetic information but reversibly detached from it.
Biologically, the process of the skin engeneering:
a synthetic polymer substratum [ PGA, P4HB] performs as the host for the stem cells that will initiate the skin culture. This PGA scaffold is responsible to provide cell support, cell attachment, supply growth nutrients and drugs, provide structure and form. Cells can and do grow 3dimensionaly, so the geometry of the scaffolding has to create the anatomic site for the cell lines to grow, attach to each other and finally produce a continuous epidermic tissue.
The growth of the skin is interwoven with the degradation of the scaffolding material. The epithelial cells hook on the body of the scaffolding absorbing the nutrients that are delivered through the system concluding to its slow dematerialization. This parasitic relationship between the growing tissue and its host, holds a direct analogy between the proliferation of the skin cells and the disintegradation of the synthetic matter. This dual system reaches its apex the exact same moment that it destroys the viability of the scaffolding that provided the circumstances for this dual system to exist in the first place.
In a scale large enough to include a human body we assign a trajectory, or most likely behavior to a 3D printing device able to construct the PGA web and simultaneously seed the primal cells in the synthetic host. The march of the printing machine materializes the arrow of time, from the birth, to the growth, the adolescence, and the necrosis. The balance of the system lays between the struggle of the living matter to survive intrinsically resulting in the acceleration its death. The live and death instincts, eros and thanatos create but simultaneously disintegrate this spatial narrative.
The printing device doesn’t really produce a design, its performance appears more like a tick- Tourette syndrome repeating the same action over and over. An unintended fidgety limp behavior retraces in its inbuilt amplitude the sequence of a vertically arrayed field of points.
Similar devices, the punitive apparatus in Kafka’s Penal Colony and the Bachelor Machine (later the Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp perform in a dual parallel manner.
In our case this performative machine operates as an extension of the body fluids of its occupant. To walk following the printing device is to experience the biome of being in our selves. To experience an offset of the skin that touches us but from the inside.
The cellular matrix of the occupant.
Constant state of death.
The residuum of the passage of the machine.
Dangerosity of a living organism.
To create dying life.
Injecting genetic information into the scaffolding.
We understand the constructed materiality of our scenario the entropy between what is generated and what is dying.
Extended apparition of the body’s envelope.
The human membrane, the membrane that contains and protects us is being extended beyond the scope of the body.