# Contemplating the void / 50th anniversary of the NY Guggenheim

A lot has been already written about the current Guggenheim's exhibition, Contemplating the void, that gathers two hundred artists and architects who have been commissioned to create a work related to the famous and fascinating void of New York's Guggenheim. The interesting thing is that those artists and architects comes from very different backgrounds (generational, influential, geographical etc.), therefore the result is extremely various. A lot of propositions are nevertheless similar probably due to a lack of time and ideas, but thus prove the intellectual poverty of this period.
However, some works are worth looking at and you have here a very little selection of those:

- Doris Salcedo (Bogota): Tribute to Hans Haacke and Edward Fry
- Powerhouse Company (Rotterdam): Tryptich
- Luzinterruptus (Spain): A museum inhabited --> see previous post
- Arne Quinze (Brussels): Untitled --> see previous post
- Mass Studies (Seoul): Art Trap --> see previous post
- TheVeryMany (Brooklyn): Along the void --> see previous post
- N55 (Denmark): Untitled

# (UN)WALL /// A volleyball game over the border

One of the videos Ronald Rael (see previous post) shows during his lecture(s) about the US/Mexican border is the one he found of two Americans and two Mexicans playing volleyball over the border (on the Western extremity of it). This game is a evanescent act of subversion of the wall and its apparent harmless aspect creates an ambiguity that the law did not incorporate. It therefore seems to me that it is an important symbolic act of resistance towards the wall in its absurdity.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The King is Alive by Kristian Levring

The King is Alive is one more movie in the desert (see previous post) and was directed by Kristian Levring. It takes place in the ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia which was originally built by a German (diamond) Mine Company in 1908 and was abandoned in 1956. Since then, the desert re-colonized the land and despite the pretty good state of the houses, they are invaded by the sand.

# (UN)WALL /// Envisioning the border by Edwin Agudelo

A month ago, I wrote this article about the incredibly stupid project that Eric Owen Moss designed for this ridiculous competition organized by the NYTimes called A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs. I won't repeat how I feel about this crap (apparently I just did though), but the interesting thing is that Ronald Rael, architect and professor at Berkeley, contacted me and showed me the work he did in order to transform the US/Mexican border into an infrastructure that would at least provide jobs and energy out of this shameful wall.

However I have a fundamental issue with such projects and we had this interesting discussion with Ronald which is extremely important for architects. I do believe that softening the border wall -especially by establishing important infrastructures instead- is the best way to ratify the wall and therefore to make it fully permanent. Ronald on the contrary believe that we have to deal with a factual reality and that we have to do our best to make it the less worst as possible.
This debate is a real interesting problem which can definitely concerns some more domestic programs than this extreme one.

Anyway, Ronald happens to have chosen the US/Mexican border as his studio topic in fall 2008 at Berkeley and you can see his students' work on his blog by clicking here. One project particularly catch my attention and I then discovered that I was not the only one since it has been already published by Bryan Finoki on Subtopia.

This project was designed by Edwin Agudelo who graduated since then and is now working in Washington D.C. Envisioning the border is an attempt to explore the bypass of the border by subterranean ways. Tunnels represents in imaginaries the example by excellence of resisting to the wall since it romanticized the breakout. When you are surrounded by static materiality, you need to try to go through it without completely destroying its global configuration. Edwin thus proves that the wall can both conserve its expressive violence and be bypassed by other "architectural" apparatuses.
This project obviously recalls the incredible network of tunnels that links Gaza strip with Egypt and that Tzahal tries desperately to pierce from the surface. (to read more about tunnels read Bryan Finoki's article about Edwin's project)

Here is what Edwin writes about his project:

On June 28, 2007, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a search warrant at 24 North Escalada Drive in Nogales, Arizona, at a home used to conceal the U.S. entrance to a recently constructed tunnel that stretched nearly 100 yards underground to a residence across the border in Mexico.
According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, on January 16, 2008 authorities discovered three short tunnels in Nogales connecting approximately 250 ft. of storm drain to create one continuous passage. Then on December 11, 2008 another clandestine tunnel was found near the Mexico border in Nogales. The tunnel's exit was located about one foot away from the International Boundary fence and was estimated to be about 12 by 19 inches wide.
For the US Border Patrol, it was the sixth tunnel found in the Tucson Sector during fiscal year 2009, which started on Oct. 1. Since the start of fiscal year 2003, 40 tunnels have been found.
The US-Mexico border is not usually thought of in its below grade condition, but the continual illicit digging of tunnels, for the smuggling of drugs and individuals, by increasingly well-organized and sophisticated groups, has been cause for the deployment of combative strategies ranging from “tunnel teams” (Border Patrol Tunnel Unit) to concrete plugs. While monitoring technologies such as motion sensors are effective in the case of sewage infrastructure, clandestine tunnels are most effectively filled with concrete.
Up until now, these plugs have been used to close off the tunnels where they cross the border and at main entrance and exit points, while the areas in between remain largely intact. Part of the reason they have not been filled completely has to do with access to areas where they cross into private property, while on the Mexico side, a lack of resources sometimes keeps any work from being done, thereby keeping portions of tunnels available for reuse through new diggings. Without proper coordination and resources, this will continue to pose a binational security breach whose exact magnitude and range remains unknown.
My interest was in locating, excavating and envisioning three underground border systems: infrastructure (sewage tunnels), natural systems (caves, and illicitly dug tunnels, which through a system of aggregation, might suggest a specific spatial dynamic capable of being programmed for public access. Much of the potential for me exists within what I feel is the futility of the border fence as a definitive and defensible measure. Part of this dynamic is already visible at the border fence in the form of breaches that occur on a daily basis, requiring US Border Patrol to continually reseal and repatch what is often done with simple and highly accessible tools. During our visit to the border in El Paso we were told by US Border Patrol of days where, along just a stretch of a few miles, one to two hundred individuals would penetrate or jump the fence in an attempt to sprint across the barren Texas desert to then slip into the nearby neighborhoods. If this sort of circus can exist above ground, what sort of worlds might we find if we could have a totalizing view of the underground?

Ronald's own words after reading this article are:
My position is that the aestheticization of the border wall is a horrible idea, and i believe you would agree. to a certain degree, the poeticization of the wall presents potentials, as many of the poetic acts of resistance we find on the actual border wall currently or Edwins project, for example.

My argument does not promote the wall's aestheticization or poeticization, but rather attempts to play the legislative hand that has been dealt at the border by attempting to increase security, while putting the 40,000 acres of fallow territory to work, creating solar energy, hot water, saving lives, etc

Envisionning the border by Edwin Agudelo
Ronald Rael's studio: Borderwall as architecture
UC Berkeley 2008

# Abandonned New York / photographs by Jake Dobkin

Photographer Jake Dobkin a.k.a. Bluejake works mostly in New York and among other things, constituted an interesting data bank of abandoned buildings in the five boroughs.

Pictures:
- Port Morris. Bronx. 2009
- Batcave in Gowanus. Brooklyn. 2010
- Ballroom in Harlem. Manhattan. 2009
- Admiral's Row. Brooklyn. 2009
- Farm Colony. Staten Island. 2009

# Wes Jones / Four projects and an interview

Yaohua Wang, our hyperactive (!) friend from Sci-Arc (see his Carbon project) recently sent me the interview he just released with Lennard Ong of Wes Jones. It seemed thus appropriate to recall some projects of what might be the most interesting architect of the US West Coast...
I am not uninterested by the current projects developed by his office but I think that more radical ideas have been expressed during the 80's on the paper and in the 90's as a built work. Jones, with an accepted naivety, followed Le Corbusier to the word when he said that architecture is a machine for living.
The comic created in 1988 for the California Lifeguard Tower is pretty illustrative of Jones' architectural interpretation of Heidegger and Derrida's conceptualization of the machine -he even evokes Hitchcock's McGuffin which I think is pretty funny. The interview itself seems to me as pretty irregular as far as interest is concerned but is definitely worth it to listen (the part about regulation is pretty interesting for example).

Housing for the Homeless 1985
Robotics Reasearch and Development Facility 1982
California Lifeguard Tower 1988
Rob Brill Residence 1999

Archinterview_WesJones from Foral on Vimeo.

# Kowloon Walled City documentary

Here is a 40 min long German (Austrian ?) documentary filmed in 1989 within the Kowloon Walled City (see all the previous posts about it 1/2/3). The density of this Hong Kong district - the highest in the world before it got destroyed in 1993- creates the feeling of an underground autarkic world, the quintessence of an heterotopia, with its protocols of entrance/exit, its superimposition of several worlds layers (see link 3) and its imaginary of freedom/danger within it.

# Jim Kazanjian

Young American artist Jim Kazanjian is using photomontage as a medium in order to compose surrealist post-apocalyptic landscapes. I particularly like the first image depicting a raft of survival suburban houses...

# (UN)WALL /// Complement to the last article The Edge

In the last article, I was evoking this intuition I have about the best transgression of the wall being the fact of standing on it. Pretty stupidly, I did not recall immediately all those East and West Berliner on November 09th 1989 who exactly did that. The gesture there was not so much of crossing the wall but rather standing freely on it, on the very narrow part of Berlin that belong to both East and West.

# (UN)WALL /// The Edge - Lebbeus Woods / Philippe Petit

Lebbeus Woods recently wrote a text called The Edge about the necessity of architects to work as tight rope walkers instead of working "within the boundaries of what they comfortably know and what others know, too". As a metaphor, he used the magnificent transgression we already talked about (here and here) of Philippe Petit joining illegally the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

Philippe Petit’s walk on a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, in August of 1974, tells us a lot about architecture and the edge. He and his team, who illegally penetrated the buildings’ security systems and rigged the wire, conceived the two towers as anchor points, stable and sure. Architecture, we believe, endures. Our lives continually moving within and around it are fleeting, ephemeral. It is a very great, but also instructive, irony that, in this case, the architecture did not endure. The towers were brought down by illegal ‘interventions’ different from Petit’s only in their intent to do harm, and to prove the instability of architecture. Both proved the vulnerability of presumably secure systems—especially the social ones symbolized by architecture—and shifted the focus of public perception and debate to what might be called ‘the endurance of ephemerality’ in contemporary worlds driven so often to the edge.

Lebbeus Woods. excerpt from The Edge. 2010

This article does not seem relevant at first glance as far as our (UN)WALL subject is concerned. However, it made me think that if we still consider the wall as a line, a good way to transgress it would probably be to walk on this line. The wall is an infra-world that exist between two larger milieus. Imagine the fantastic gesture that would consist in walking on the edge of the West Bank wall...

# (UN)WALL /// Tunnel house by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck

This incredible tunnel house has been posted everywhere two years ago when it has been achieved by artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck in Houston. This installation evokes a black hole that absorbs the house's material from inside. People have then the opportunity to experience this vortex.

# (UN)WALL /// Rachel Whiteread

In several of her works, Rachel Whiteread is "unwalling" architecture by casting the negative of the wall i.e. the space framed by the walls.
For House (1993), she casted an entire Victorian house in London printing all the details of the original walls in the concrete. She then destroyed them letting the concrete negative as a final result.
For the Holocaust Monument (2000) in Vienna she metaphorically reproduced this process by casting an imaginary library. The books are thus appearing as the surface of the monument and the detail precision is such that the pages are actually visible.

two last pictures: Joe Perez-Green