# “synapses speeches” / Paris, 16th february

picture R&Sie(n) / Matthieu Kavyrchine

Following the current exhibition, An architecture "des humeurs" in Le Laboratoire in Paris (see previous post) by R&Sie(n), Francois Roche has gathered a bunch of very interesting people in order to organize a short conference on "Computation, Robotic, Neurobiology, Philosophy... and incidentally architecture".
One would observe the presence of Toni Negri who would talk about his Multitudes (see previous post) that allows a broad panel of ages - and therefore of background - from 76 years old to 25 years old which I think it is admirable.


“synapses speeches”

Organised by / Le Laboratoire / François Roche / www.new-territories.com

with Mark Burry, François Jouve, Rupert Soar, Antonio Negri, Judith Revel, Behrokh Khoshnevis, Jean-Didier Vincent, Jeanette Zwingenberger, Chris Younes, Stephan Henrich, Winston Hampel, Natanel Elfassy, François Roche / Moderator / Giovanni Corbellini

Location /École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais, 14 rue Bonaparte 75006 PARIS / 16th February / 13h-19h / Location /Amphi 2 des loges

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

13:30 / Preambule / Introduction …. F Roche

With

-Natanel Elfassi / “Stuttering protocols”

-Winston Hampel / “Monkey bridges”

14:00 / Animalism-Animism

-Rupert Soar / “How nature integrates processes, its implications for functional structure generation”

-Jeanette Zwingenberger / “le corps acéphal _ acephalous body”

-Jean-Didier Vincent / “biology of emotions”

Moderator Giovanni Corbellini

15:15 / Machinism-Uncertainties

-Behrokh Khoshnevis / “Adaptive automated construction”

-Mark Burry / “Bone from stone“

-Stephan Henrich / “operatives machinism”

Moderator Giovanni Corbellini

16.30 / Multitudes-Narratives protocoles

-Toni Negri et Judith Revel / “Multitudes”

-Chris Younes / “Coryrhmics”

-Francois Jouve / “Mathematics & emergence of the unknown“

-Francois Roche / “Speculatives narrations“

Moderator Giovanni Corbellini

18:00-19:00 Last roundtable with everybody….

# History of Bombay housing typology

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

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

Here is a good video with good music, enjoy !

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

more about Edouard Salier : here

Thanks Olivier !

# Urban roller coasters

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

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

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

Delphic - Doubt from Modular People on Vimeo.

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


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# Alebardo Morell's Camere Obscure

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

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

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

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

# How far can the bullshit go ?

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

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

You can read another critique expressed by Patricio del Real by clicking here. This has been sent to me by Ronald Rael who did design a proposition for the border besides this NYTimes context.

# fORaLLtHEcOWS by CTRLZ architectures

You won't see so often some firms' projects on boiteaoutils, especially those who loudly claim their sustainable dimension as a religious banner. However, this project fORaLLtHEcOWS by CTRLZ architectures (a young and small Parisian office), seem to me as very interesting in the absolute re-questioning it implies about urbanity.

This project simply proposes to create some self-sustaining settlements in rural areas, producing their own energy and food. The scale seems about right in order to imagine this micro-city being dismantle after exploiting the local resources and set-up somewhere else, waiting for the land to rest... Reaching an equilibrium between nomadism and sedentarism (agriculture being the first achievement of it), fORaLLtHEcOWS tackles an important issue of civilization and depicts an universe that strongly reminds me of Christopher Priest's Inverted world and Dan Simmons' Hyperion.

This brings me to the small criticism I would like to propose here, which is to say that this project would have probably been ever more powerful by proposing a vision of such a world rather than a diagrammatic project (despite the fact that I really like their diagrams). This vision would have started ten years after those settlements began to emerge, their structure would have rusted a bit after having moved twice of territories, the white walls would have became all dusty and the whole settlements would have invented some defensive mechanisms after having being sacked by groups of looters.
Anyway, this is my own cannibalization of somebody else' project but the even fact of such triggering of imagination proves the value of this building/city.

# Death or Glory / Vanités at Maillol museum, Paris.

An exhibition about the theme of death and the notion of vanity in art is taking place at the musée Maillol in Paris from the 3rd February to the 28th of June. This show present an incredible selection of art pieces representing skulls and the idea of death by various artist as great as Caravage, Cézanne or Jan Fabre. We all noticed this fashion of skulls everywhere that seems to appear recently, so far, this exhibition remind me an another one that take place exactly ten years ago (January 2000) and took place at the Musée national des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie(wich is today called Musée du Quay Branly), the title was "Dieu n'en saura rien". This last exhibition was composed by relics from Oceania and Europe it was dealing with the reaction of mankind in front of death and the rituals around, the Maillol museum exhibition is presenting art pieces instead of relics, art instead of religion. We have to admit that art as always been pretty much dedicated to small public, so is our way to wear skull T-shirt,skull rings or ear rings, skull socks and many more that is our contemporary reaction in front of death ...
Following you will see few pictures of this early selection of the 2000 exhibition and in a second part few pictures from the maillol museum ones .

Enjoy or die!

at Maillol :



here : the great catolog of la "mort n'en saura rien" by Yves le Fur

# The battle of Algiers by Gille Pontecorvo / Urban guerilla's theory by Auguste Blanqui

The battle of Algiers dramatizes the urban battle (1954-1960) that happened between the FLN (National Front for the Liberation) and the French paratroopers force aiming towards the decolonization of Algeria in 1962.
This movie, directed by Gille Pontecorvo, was released in 1966 and was banned for five years in France. Just like in Pepe le Moko (1937), the main character here is Algiers' Casbah, the old labyrinthine city from where the FLN succeeded to get organized and that the French army has transformed in a ghetto highly controlling its different gates.
This battle lost for six years and was eventually won by the French army but annihilating a network of organized resistance does not necessarily mean to destroy the fight this network was leading, therefore two years later, after very important demonstrations in Algeria' cities, France eventually accept the independence of the country.

French army has a pretty long history of urban suppression. The revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 even inspired Napoleon III and his Baron Haussmann to transformed Paris in a secured controllable territory by the creation of a very important amount of large avenues that could be used in a very efficient way by the cavalry and the artillery in case of riots. Nobody can doubt that such an urbanism had something to do with the massacre of the Communards by the Versaille army in 1871.
However, a whole theory of urban guerilla has been invented by XIXth century French revolutionaries lead by the most charismatic of all, Auguste Blanqui. In fact Blanqui developed a whole agenda in order to "smooth the striated space" as Deleuze and Guattari would point out in their treaty of Nomadology (A thousand plateaus).
I want to quote here some excerpts from "Maintenant il faut des armes", collection of Blanqui's writing, but I don't have any translation so I will do it myself...I hope you will apologize my clumsiness in it.

« L’attaque repoussée, il [l’officier] reprend et presse sans relâche la construction de la barricade en dépit des interruptions. Au besoin, des renforts arrivent.

Cette besogne terminée, on se met en communication avec les deux barricades latérales, en perçant les gros murs qui séparent les maisons situées sur le front de défense. La même opération s’exécute simultanément, dans les maisons des deux cotés de la rue barricadée jusqu'à son extrémité, puis en retour, a droite et a gauche, le long de la rue parallèle au front de défense, en arrière.
Les ouvertures sont pratiquées au premier et au dernier étage, afin d’avoir deux routes ; le travail se poursuit à la fois dans quatre directions.
Tous les ilots ou patés de maisons appartenant aux rues barricadées doivent être perces dans leur pourtour, de manière que les combattants puissent entrer et sortir par la rue parallèle de derrière, hors de la vue et de la portée de l’ennemi. »

« L’intérieur des ilots consiste généralement en cours et jardins. On pourrait ouvrir des communications à travers ces espaces, séparés d’ordinaire par de faibles murs. La chose sera même indispensable sur les ponts que leur importance ou leur situation spéciale exposent aux attaques les plus sérieuses.
Il sera donc utile d’organiser des compagnies d’ouvriers non-combattants, maçons, charpentiers, etc., pour exécuter les travaux conjointement avec l’infanterie.
Lorsque, sur le front de défense, une maison est plus particulièrement menacée, on démolit l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée, et l’on pratique des ouvertures dans les planchers des diverses chambres du premier étage afin de tirer sur les soldats qui envahiraient le rez-de-chaussée pour y attacher des pétards. L’eau bouillante jouerait aussi un rôle utile dans cette circonstance.
Si l’attaque embrasse une grande étendue de front, on coupe les escaliers et on perce les planchers dans toutes les maisons exposées. En règle générale, lorsque le temps et les autres travaux de défense plus urgents le permettent, il faut détruire l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée dans toutes les maisons de l’ilot sauf une, à l’endroit de la rue le moins exposé. »

Auguste Blanqui. Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris. Maintenant il faut des armes. La fabrique 2006

”When the attack has been pushed back, he [the leader] comes back and pushes relentlessly the barricade construction despite interruptions. If needed reinforcement arrives.
This labor done, one put the two lateral barricades in communication by piercing the thick walls that separate houses situated on the defense’s front. The same operation is being executed simultaneously, in the houses on the two sides of the barricaded street until its extremity, then backwards, on the right and on the left, along the parallel street, on the defense’s front and on the back.
Openings have to be practiced on the first [ndt: first floor in Europe is second floor in US] and last floor in order to obtain two ways; work is being achieved in the same way in the four directions.
All the houses’ blocks belonging to the barricaded streets should be pierced in their perimeter, in a way that fighters are able to enter or exit by the backward parallel street, out of sight and out of reach from the enemy.”
”The interior of the blocks generally consists in courtyards and gardens. One could open communications between those spaces, usually separated by weak walls. It should be even compulsory on the bridges whose importance and specific situations expose them to the most serious attacks.
It would be therefore useful to organize companies of non-fighters workers, masons, carpenters, etc. in order to jointly achieve work with the infantry.
When, on the defense’s front, a house is more particularly being threatened, one demolished the ground floor’s staircase and one achieves opening in the various rooms’ floor of the first [second] floor in order to shoot the potential soldiers who would invade the ground floor to apply some bombs. Boiling water can also play an important role in this circumstance.
If the attack embraces an important extent of the front, one cuts the staircases and pierces the floors in all the exposed houses. As a general rule, when the time and the other defense works more urgent allow it, one should destroy the ground floor’ staircase in all the block’s houses except in the one the less exposed. ”

An important amount of readers will draw the parallel with Eyal Weizman's study of Tsahal General Aviv Kokhavi's strategy of making his troop progress in Palestinian towns through the walls. You can read this article in French on this previous post, and in English by following this link. The parallel of this Israeli general and the Commandant Matthieu - they both commands paratroopers - in The battle of Algiers seem also relevant in their very high sense of tactical philosophy and refusal of any ideology - they consider themselves as soldiers and that is all.

Cities are the new - since walled cities disapeared - scene of war -especially asymmetric wars and domestic riots/revolutions. Architecture, in its physicality, owns some ways to weaponize itself in favor of one side or another. What is certain in that matter is that not choosing is already a choice which risks to bring some more flesh to the institutional body.

# Biopolitics / From a society of blood to a society of sex and towards a society of shit

picture: Salo by Pier Paolo Pasolini (adaptation of Le Marquis de Sade's 120 days of Sodom)

Here is a short article I just wrote for Meredith Tenhoor's Pratt seminar Food/Architecture/Urbanism/Biopolitics :

Before the XVIIIth century, French (and by extension European) State' sovereignty was applied on territories and on their subjects' life and death. The Enlightenment and the constitution of Parisian literary groups and bourgeoisie (in opposition to Versailles' nobleness) questioned the status of an omni-powerful monarchy embodied by Louis XIV and inherited by less strategic kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This led to the French Revolution of 1789 and the creation of a Constitutional monarchy then a Republic in 1792. This whole institutional dislocation, followed by a very strong centralized power (again) from Napoleon Bonaparte, brought up and applied some new means of sovereignty that established what Michel Foucault calls bio-politics.

Bio-politics consists in a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Life is not anymore "let" by the sovereign institution but is sustained and organized in an ambiguous mix of philanthropy (at first perhaps) and precise control on the manpower of the country. The result is a subjectivation of bodies which become as many pieces of a machinist system aiming towards what we now know as global capitalism.

The goal of technology - and by extension of architecture - consists in the invention of apparatuses used to regulate and normatize the bodies submitted to them. We are all familiar with the object "panopticon" as such an apparatus. However, architects tends to stubbornly consider it as a literal architecture forgetting that it is before all, a system of power relation providing a scheme for the entire society - and therefore for the city. The panopticon is not just applied to prison. It adapts itself literally (meaning architecturally) or abstractly to other institutions of control such as barracks, schools, factories and hospitals.

Food being part of the "bios" (life), it is interesting to study the way the whole process of production is also submitted to those apparatuses. The Halle au Blé in Paris seem then paradigmatic by the extreme. In fact, building such a centripetal building in the center of Paris in such a centralized country that France is, constitutes an incredible symbol of the institutional control of food supply. La Halle au Blé was prophesying the Napoleon III and Haussmann' tremendous plans for Paris, during the second part of the XIXth century, that applied such policies of control of food, hygiene and security at the scale of the whole city.

Capitalism, in order to exist, has therefore to take advantage of the shift from what Foucault following Sade calls a society of blood (power embodied by war and death) to the society of sex (power applied on bodies' anatomy and biology). The ecological crisis being its next obstacle, capitalism seems to mutate towards the last step of the Sadian journey (and following the article of Dana Simmons) the society of shit that will apply power on raw materials, objects from now on more valuable than human' life and body.