# Asylum by Christopher Payne (MIT Press)

The excellent MIT Press is currently publishing a book by photographer Christopher Payne about American state mental hospitals (for information, the one above is the Buffalo (NY) asylum). This post can probably be related to the one I wrote about One flew over the cuckoo's nest in the chapter Heterotopias in Cinema.
Payne's official website hosts a long series of photographs from the book.

# New Malacovia by Pascal Bronner

In a recent post, I was evoking the presence of Pascal Bronner's work in the exhibition London Eight curated by Peter Cook for Sci-Arc. New Malacovia is his thesis project at Bartlett for CJ Lim's Unit10.

This very beautiful narrative project depicts an hidden micro city under the Danube's surface that happen to produce its energy thanks to potatoes' power.

Here is Pascal's summary text for New Malacovia:

The design thesis, the portable city of New Malacovia, is the blueprint for a perpetually sustainable culture and an environmentally responsible city. Inspired by the narrative text of the lost Malacovian city from “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places”, the research followed the emigration of the city’s leader, a Nogai prince (and inventor) and his people during the Crimean War to a new settlement in the Danube River delta. The project extrapolates the inventions and urban ideas of the old city into programmatic, tectonic and environmental concerns for New Malacovia.
Born in Crimea, an island of rich pastures, the prince spent his youth in St. Petersburg. As a consequence, New Malacovia is a hybrid of rural and urban landscapes, acquiring distinct characteristics from both places. The city of New Malacovia is a vast prairie of windows, which mimic a flattened version of the main boulevard in St. Petersburg. The New Nevsky Avenue stretches to infinity in the river valley.
An intelligent recycling process selects appropriate urban and spatial ideas; environmental technologies and construction methodologies collectively evolve into the tectonic character of the city over time. Familiar everyday materials are used to perform unfamiliar architectural and urban tasks. The windows are the custodians of the city’s power, while the humble potatoes are used to harvest renewable energies. Pixel blankets of iron foil suspended on fine vertical sewing pins camouflage the New Malacovia. The city bed, a matrix of bottle corks, buoyantly synchronises with the Danube River, which in turn takes the weight of the entire city. The Malacovian community occupies the void created between the fake pixel-river and the real river.
The translation of old Malacovia into a new micro scale city explores the delights and efficiency of sustainable architecture and urban design. The new city aims to preserve the very essence of an extinct civilization and questions the portability of one’s ethnicity in today’s society. New Malacovia is the metaphor and inspiration for our future sustainable cities.

# ESA Shedule 2010

The Ecole Speciale d'Architecture carries on its interesting program of lectures and exhibitions this year. Hernan Diaz-Alonzo, Marcos Cruz (eventually for the semester workshop !), Wolf Prix, Antoine Picon, Ricardo de Ostos etc.

Peter Cook will even organize a conference in May about "Transmitting a passion".

Let's just hope that the ESA is not only becoming a new important Cultural Centre but truly a place where students are able AND want to reach a very interesting level of research...

# ENOUGH !

map coming from bbc.co.uk

At the time I am writing this article the West Bank is still sealed by the Israeli army as a "prevention measure". Many defenders of the Israeli Government action claim it as legitimate defense which is already a farce when you observe the total asymmetry between the two opponents; however here, such an oppressive measure is being justified by the notion of prevention. This shift from suppression to prevention is a perfect example of a police/military absolute state. It is based on a fear narrative and maintains this potentiality of danger as a legitimacy of oppression.

The reason of such a fear here is based on the announcement -while Joe Biden was visiting Israel in order to support potential negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians- of 1600 new housing built in a illegal settlement in East-Jerusalem (on Palestinian land). This continuous illegal colonization (read Eyal Weizman's Civilian Occupation) which brings the most extreme Jewish communities on the Palestinian land, will provide to the Israeli state a total advantage for eventual land negotiation. Indeed for each settlement withdrawn (and there are dozen of them), Palestinian will have to concede something as well -which is completely absurd since all those settlements have been built in a complete transgression of International Laws.

It seems to me important to recall that Israel is one of the five religious republics in the world (with Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mauritania) and that the fact of religion and politics being mixed up together cannot bring anything else than the fear and despise of the otherness.

As a conclusion I would like to address the fact that so few medias have been writing about the seal of the West Bank (very small article in NYTimes, a bit more in LeMonde). That is the way of banalizing injustice.

Read the BBC article about the new settlement in East-Jerusalem and the NYTimes' blog article.

# (UN)WALL /// Moment by Yukihiro Taguchi

La Periferia Domestica keeps helping boiteaoutils to gather architectural projects or art pieces that apply a process of unwalling and just posted this wonderful video (see below) called Moment. This work has been achieved by Japanese Berliner artist Yukihiro Taguchi; it fragments the elements of the floor in order to create an important quantity of various spaces more or less sculptural, more or less functional.

# Peter Cook's lecture at Pratt today / London Eight exhibition at Sci-Arc

I am very pleased to see my dear undergrad teacher, Sir Peter Cook coming tonight (6:00PM) at Pratt in order to give a lecture.
It seems also appropriate here to evoke the exhibition London Eight he is currently curating at Sci-Arc about Bartlett's teachers, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz, CJ Lim & Pascal Bronner and Smout Allen & Johan Hybschmann.

# 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