# City of the Future by Cedric Price

the addition of continuous mobility to industrial plants previously considered static

City of the Future is a series of drawings Cedric Price accomplished in 1965 as a summary of the vision of architecture he has been developing with earlier projects like the Fun Palace in 1961. This city is both technophiles and hyper-infrastructural as an architectural manifesto for the 60's and Price followers (Archigram, Japanese metabolists, Yona Friedman, Paul Maymont etc.)

the ability to be aware from both above and below, of the mass of support, shelter and concealment that the city offers

An increasing discontinuity of artificial services as the whole becomes more responsive to both the user and natural conditioning
the height- airspace

and the depth- subterranean and submarine, will increase primarily for global and regional energy transfer & communications

Recognition of the familiar - coloured by alteration of scale & relevance

Air and water will become major structural elements - sheltering, supporting & positioning

Increasing visual acuity amongst citizens combine with miniaturization and task acceleration of electronics should establish a new metropolitan awareness of both speed and interval

The environmental and operational advantages of the coast line -both natural and man made- is likely to encourage future urban development in coastal zones.

The potential of phased movement of goods, shelter and equipment by means of mechanical & magnetic suspension

Existing buildings in new roles - the buried social archeological relic...
... and the recognizable shell prepared for new uses.

The traditional legal and physical union between home/house and the land on which it stands will fragment enabling new variants of ownership & siting.

# Rendering Speculations organized by Tobias Klein and Ricardo de Ostos

On May 7th, Tobias Klein (see previous post) and Ricardo de Ostos are organizing a symposium at the AA about digital representation of architecture with architects such as Lebbeus Woods or Marjan Colletti but also graphic artists Andrew Jones and Julian Oliver.

Rendering Speculations

Date: 07.05.2010

A Symposium coordinated by Ricardo de Ostos (AA INTER 3/ NaJa-DeOstos) and Tobias Klein (AA First year Studio/ Horhizon)

Rendering Speculations is a day-long AA event in which seven invited guests, from a variety of different fields including architecture, conceptual art, video gaming and interface design, will discuss the topic of speculative visualisation and virtual design. Highlighting a variety of disciplines and approaches, the event seeks to locate architecture as a magnifying lens through which digital visions and speculations are imagined.

Speakers include:

Nigel Coates – architect, founder of NATO and head of department at the Royal College of Art, whose work pursues a narrative-driven architecture

Marjan Colletti – an architect and teacher at the Bartlett UCL, who explores digital architecture and representation

Andrew Jones – digital painter and ‘techno-mystic visual pioneer of digital art’

Julian Oliver – New Zealand born artist who works with augmented reality and interface design

Lebbeus Woods – American architect and educator whose work envisions experimental constructs and the question of the individual in society

Plus other guests to be confirmed

# Dark lens by Cédric Delsaux

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire has never been so visual thanks to Cédric Delsaux's amazing series called The Dark Lens and depicting our contemporary societies under the yoke of the dark force. As most of you may know, the Star Wars' Empire used the pretext of war (insecurity) to declare a perpetual state of emergency (read the previous article about Giorgio Agamben's state of exception) and establish an army as a quasi-omnipotent police. The comparison with the current state of the world is therefore easy and Cédric Delsaux, by a switch of context, succeeds with great talent to make the Empire troops extremely familiar to us.

much more pictures on Cédric Delsaux's website

originally via Transit-City. Thanks Francois B.

# Pratt Institute Grad School's exhibition

The Pratt Institute GAUD (Graduate Architecture and Urban Design) exhibition will officially open this Thursday at 7PM. It introduces the work accomplished during Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 at Pratt via a scenography supervised by Michael Szivos, assisted by Carrie McKnelly and designed by graduate students, Breanna Crispo, Adam Fisher, Nicole Hill, Jeffrey Johnson, Andri Klausen, Navin Mahantesh, Jorge Mendez, Tyler O'Rielley, Eric Olsen, John Putre and Laura Vincent.

# Pixels by Patrick Jean

Pixels is a hilarious short movie by Patrick Jean who depicts a pixelated Apocalypse coming out from the primitive video games. The resolution of things decreases until the ultimate pixelization, one single cube. When Spinoza meets the computer...

Thank you Florian

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.

# (UN)WALL /// Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture

Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture is the final AA 1972 thesis of Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis. It elaborates a narrative of a walled city within London similarly to the Berlin situation at the time. This city, like West Berlin, is considered as a shelter that people access and thus become voluntary prisoners of architecture. The condition of the "liberty" here is paradoxically the imprisonment.

Here is the text supplied by the MOMA which owns the original drawings:
These drawings come from a series of eighteen drawings, watercolors, and collages called Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The dense pictographic storyboard reflects Koolhaas's earlier stints as journalist and screenwriter and is intended to be read simultaneously as a factual and a fictional scenario for the contemporary metropolis.

The title of the project alludes to Cold War West Berlin, a restricted enclave encircled by a forbidding wall—in effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Exodus proposes a walled city in a long strip, with tall barriers that cut through London's urban fabric—an intervention designed to create a new urban culture invigorated by architectural innovation and political subversion. Here Koolhaas and his collaborators use collage to create vivid scenes of life within these visionary urban confines.

The Museum of Modern Art

# Sublime Flesh Symposium by Marcos Cruz & Lisa-Rain Hunt

picture: Yousef Al-Mehdari

An interesting symposium is happening today in London entitled Sublime Flesh: Architectural experiments for sacred and sublime spaces and which is organized band chaired by Marcos Cruz (read his manifesto for boiteaoutils), the new director of the Bartlett and tutor of the famous Unit 20.
The participants are Marjan Colletti, Yael Reisner, Robert Harbison, Ali Mangera and Sir Peter Cook. The background of the symposium is an exhibition which shows work of Unit 20 produced in the last seven years. It includes works by Tobias Klein (see previous post), Kenny Tsui, Yousef Al-Mehdari, Hannes Mayer (current co-editor of Swiss architecture magazine Achitese), alan Chuang etc.
The exhibition related to this even will be visible until April 11th in the Baroque Christ Church Spitafields in London.

Sublime Flesh brings together, for the first time, new designs for contemporary spiritual spaces developed by students in Unit 20 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. A collection of research projects located in international cities including Istanbul, Rome, Turin, Lisbon, Havana and Miami, each explores a unique sense of sacredness and the Sublime. The complex nature of these themes is articulated in a series of exquisite models that express a new ornamental, spatial and technological approach and also a reconsidered religious and cultural dimension for contemporary architecture design. Sacred Spaces have long been the apotheosis of architectural genius; buildings created by some of the greatest names in architectural history in which stylistic and spatial innovations are revealed and new technologies tested and developed. The theory and theology of Sacred Spaces holds renewed interest in the current historic moment where religious faith is under intense scrutiny.
Sublime Spaces are primarily associated with experience bound up in the powers of nature, but as nature has changed throughout the ages, so has our sense of the Sublime. Expressing grand passions and utopian ideas, Sublime Spaces illuminate the emotional involvement between the creator and the user of architecture spaces.
Housed in the Nave of Christ Church Spitalfields and displaying designs for churches and other spiritual spaces, the exhibition will offer a direct dialogue between historic and contemporary architecture. The exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium in which key architects, historians and critics discuss contemporary architecture in the context of the exhibition. Speakers are Sir Peter Cook, Marjan Colletti, Rev Rod Green, Robert Harbison, Ali Mangera, Yael Reisner, and Marcos Cruz (chair).

Curation: Marcos Cruz with Lisa-Raine Hunt
Exhibition design: marcosandmarjan with Unit 20 (Aleksandrina Rizova, Luca Rizzi Brignoli, Leonhard Clemens, Amanda Bate, Richard Beckett, Linda Hagberg, Wendy Teo)
Collaboration: Johan Voordouw and Wanda Yu-Ying Hu
Manufacturing of Exhibition Tables: Special thanks to Emmanuel Vercruysse - CAD/CAM workshop, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL; and Guan Lee - Grymsdyke Farm + MESA Studio
Manufacturing of models: DMC London, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL
Media: M.A.D. London
Participants: Jay Williams, Sam White, Johan Voordouw, Hannes Mayer, Laurence Dudeney, Kasper Ax, Yousef Al-Mehdari, Yaojen Chuang, Vicky Patsalis, Jason Chan, Kenny Tsui, Tobias Klein, Jenna Al-Ali, Aleksandrina Rizova, Luca Rizzi Brignoli, Leonhard Clemens, Amanda Bate, Richard Beckett, Linda Hagberg, Wendy Teo.
Speakers during symposium: Peter Cook, Ali Mangera, Marjan Colletti, Robert Harbison, Yael Reisner, Rev Rod Greene and Marcos Cruz (chair)

Opening Reception Monday 29 March 19.00-21.00
Exhibition Continues 30 March to 11 April
Opening Hours Mon-Sat 11.00-18.00, Sun 13.00-18.00
(The exhibition is closed on 2 and 3 April for Good Friday and Easter Saturday)
Exhibition Symposium Tuesday 6 April 14.30-18.30
Film Screening Friday 9 April 19.00-20.00

# Temple City by I. Galimov

But clocks tick on, and season come and go,
The names of cities change, events retain
No witnesses, and memories and tears
May not be shared...
Unwanted and unsought,
The shades of loved ones shrink and slip away
And we recoil in horror from the thought
That they might reappear...
...We realize that we no longer know where lies the path
To that lone house, and run as in a dream,
Despairing, mute, to where it stood, and go! -
Discover that the walls, the things, the columns
Are different and strange, and that we too are strangers there...

Anna Akhmatova. Northern Elegies IV

# Space violating bodies by Bernard Tschumi

Part of Bernard Tschumi's Architecture and Disjunction describes the power of architecture on the bodies and the violence it therefore implies. The chapter Space violating bodies establishes the basis of such a postulate. However Tschumi does not elaborate on the political implications of such a control but rather attempts to distinguish a Dionysian dimension of architecture out of it.

Space Violating Bodies

But if bodies violate the purity of architectural spaces, one might rightly wonder about the reverse: the violence inflicted by narrow corridors on large crowds, the symbolic or physical violence of buildings on users. A word of warning: I do not wish to resurrect recent behaviorist architectural approaches. Instead, I wish simply to underline the mere existence of a physical presence and the fact that it begins quite innocently, in an imaginary sort of way.
The place your body inhabits is inscribed in your imagination, your unconscious, as a space of possible bliss. Or menace. What if you are forced to abandon your imaginary spatial markings? A torturer wants you, the victim, to regress, because he wants to demean his prey, to make you lose your identity as a subject. Suddenly you have no choice; running away is impossible. The rooms are too small or too big, the ceilings too low or too high. Violence exercised by and through space is spatial torture.
Take Palladio's Villa Rotonda. You walk through one of its axes, and as you cross the central space and reach its other side you find, instead of the hillside landscape, the steps of another Villa Rotonda, and another, and another, and another. The incessant repetition at first stimulates some strange desire, but soon becomes sadistic, impossible, violent.
Such discomforting spatial devices can take any form: the white anechoic chambers of sensory deprivation, the formless spaces leading to psychological destructuring. Steep and dangerous staircases, those corridors consciously made too narrow for crowds, introduce a radical shift from architecture as an object of contemplation to architecture as a perverse instrument of use. At the same time it must be stressed that the receiving subject -you or I- may wish to be subjected to such spatial aggression, just as you may go to a rock concert and stand close enough to the loudspeakers to sustain painful -but pleasurable- physical or psychic trauma. Places aimed at the cult of excessive sound only suggest places aimed at the cult of excessive space. The love of violence, after all, is an ancient pleasure.
Why has architectural theory regularly refused to acknowlege such pleasures and always claimed (at least officially) that architecture should be pleasing to the eye, as well as comfortable to the body? This presupposition seems curious when the pleasure of violence can be experienced in every other human activity, from the violence of discordant sounds in music to the clash of bodies in sports, from gangster movies to the Marquis de Sade.

Violence Ritualized

Who will mastermind these exquisite spatial delights, these disturbing architectural tortures, the tortuous paths of promenades through delirious landscapes, theatrical events where actor complements decor? Who...? The architect? By the seventeenth century, Bernini had staged whole spectacles followed by Mansart's fetes for Louis XIV and Albert Speer's sinister and beautiful rallies. After all, the original action, the original act of violence -this unspeakable copulation of live body and dead stone- is unique and unrehearsed, though perhaps infinitely repeatable, for you may enter the building again and again. The architect will always dream of purifying this uncontrolled violence, channeling obedient bodies along predictable paths and ocasionally along ramps that provide striking vistas, ritualizing the transgression of bodies in space. Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center, with its ramp that violates the building, is a genuine movement of bodies made into an architectural solid. Or the reverse: it is a solid that forcibly channels the movement of bodies.
The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual. Sixteenth-century pageants and Nathan Altman's reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, for example, are ritualistic imitation of spontaneous violence. Endlessly repeated, these rituals curb all aspects of the original act that have escaped control: the choice of time and place, the selection of the victim...
A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute.

Bernard Tschumi. Architecture and Disjunction. The MIT Press. 1996

# Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention

The Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention (1949) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, describe the state of Israel's support to colonization as a violation of International War Law:

Art. 49. Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
Nevertheless, the Occupying Power may undertake total or partial evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.
The Occupying Power undertaking such transfers or evacuations shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated.
The Protecting Power shall be informed of any transfers and evacuations as soon as they have taken place.
The Occupying Power shall not detain protected persons in an area particularly exposed to the dangers of war unless the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand.
The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

To read the four Geneva Conventions and their three additional protocols (which are not all ratified by every nations of the world. see map here) you can visit The International Committee of the Red Cross' website

# (UN)WALL /// Plug-in Berlin by Etienne Boulanger

Our good friend Alexandre Pachiaudi is currently releasing on his blog Archiact, an excellent series of post about French artist Etienne Boulanger's work. Several of his projects could be appropriate for this (UN)WALL theme but the "performance" Plug-in Berlin drew my attention even more than the others. Between 2001 and 2003, he reproduced what Georges Orwell did in 1929 and described in his Down and Out in Paris and London, which is a voluntary choice for a temporary precarious life. During those two years, Etienne Boulanger built several shelters "into" walls providing thus a perfect camouflage of his presence:

"The time of occupation of each space is undetermined and varies depending on unpredictable external events (degradation, police, neighborhood). After having been inhabited, each shelter is abandoned as such on site. In two years, I used 17 interstices as shelters and 21 disused spaces as logistic support. This fragmentation of my environment generates a continuous moving through the city, close from nomadism. This experience of voluntary precarious life goes beyond the conventional field of art and the simple production of objects. The two years "performance" introduces the work in a political, urbanistic and social context which is necessary to a work that is directly inspired by contemporary society."

original text:
"Le temps d’occupation de chaque espace est indéterminé et varie en fonction d’évènements extérieurs imprévisibles (dégradations, police, voisinage). Après avoir été habitée, chaque construction est abandonnée et laissée sur place en l’état. En deux ans, 17 interstices me servirent d’abris et 21 espaces désaffectés, de support logistique. Cette fragmentation de mon environnement quotidien génère un déplacement constant à travers la ville, proche du nomadisme. Cette expérience de précarisation volontaire de mes conditions de vie dépassele champ conventionnel de l’art et la simple production d’objets. La “performance” de deux ans place l’oeuvre dans un contexte politique, urbanistique et social nécessaire à un travail ancré dans notre société contemporaine."

# Guantanamo / An Architektur about Giorgio Agamben and the Camps

picture extracted from the 2006 film The Road to Guantanamo by Mat Whitecross

It's been one year and half that Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States, and although one of his very first proposition was to close Guantanamo, it seems that nobody is too much in a hurry to find a way to deal with people whose majority has not been proven to be guilty of anything.
Anyway, Guantanamo as a materialization of what Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception is compelling for the importance of architecture to that matter. In the excellent book Territories. Islands, camps and other states of utopia, the German group An Architektur (see previous post) writes a very interesting article about Agamben and the notion of camp:

The number of people detained at Camp Delta now runs to 650. Their status is neither that of prisoners of war nor that of civilians. The US has skirted the Geneva Convention and international law by arbitrarily designating the prisoners as "Unlawful Enemy Combatants," to whom constitutional rights do not apply. The prisoners have no right to legal representation or to due process, and they can be detained indefinitely without concrete charges being filed. Guantanamo Bay's special judicial-spatial status allows the US to redefine and reinterpret laws as it sees fit. Guantanamo is a space whose conventional military significance has declined but which still serves the strategic interests of the US. There, a parallel legal system for suspected terrorists has been created, which was originally site-specific, but which is meanwhile also being applied outside of this unique territory.

Giorgio Agamben: The State of Emergency and the Notion of the Camp

Reflection is needed about the paradoxical status of the detainment camp in its quality as an exceptional space. It is part of a territory which stands outside the normal rule of law but which is not therefore an external space. What is excluded there [...] is actually included by virtue of its own exclusion. The state of emergency is what, above all else, is captured in the order of the camp. The right to declare a state of emergency is the basis of sovereign authority, and a camp is the structure that realizes a state of emergency in its most permanent form.

Giorgio Agamben. Means without End

Guantanamo Bay's shifting significance within a changing political order becomes apparent, when one considers Giorgio Agamben's investigations into the relationship between sovereignty, states of emergency and camps. Agamben offers a precise analysis of the new political space that opens up, when the political system of a nation state is beset by crisis, exploring the evolutions of various functions of power. In times of crisis, the relationship between sovereignty and territory, as well as the connection between law and space, are redefined. The previous structure of the nation-state, which is based on the functional coalescence of three elements (the laws of state, the territory in question and the membership of citizens in a given nation) begins to dissolve. Proceeding from his investigation of this process, Agamben develops a model of poer that unites judicial-institutional (sovereignty and state) with bio-political (corporeal punishment) aspects. The crucial connection is the constitutive conjunction of the estate of emergency as a legal category and the camp as its spatial manifestation.
The basis of the power of state is the capacity to decide whether to declare a state of emergency i.e. to temporarily suspend the rule of law. The decision affects both the binding legal system and its suspension. As part of the sovereign authority's decision-making capacity, the suspension of law, the state of emergency, is an inherent part of the legal order. Not only is lawlessness inherent in the legal system; the former is a precondition of the latter. However, as an abstract legal dimension, a state of emergency also needs a space in which it becomes concrete. For Agamben, this is the function of the camp. In the camp, the state of emergency, which was originally a temporary suspension of the legal system, gets a permanent spatial location. Camps are exceptional areas within a territory which fall outside the jurisdiction of law. Moreover, the camp is the place, where the bio-political dimension of sovereign power denying the detainee -for example in refugee or detention camps- all legal and political status, the state reduces them to complete judicial arbitrariness and absolute state power. By showing how a temporary or spatially limited state of how a new law is created from the lawlessness of the camp. The camp is a kind of catalyst, which transforms the suspension of law into a new, permanent, spatial and legal order.
[...]
Guantanamo is an example of how a political system no longer orders legal norms and practices within a concrete territory, but rather applies ex-territoriality as a constitutive element in the maintenance of its own power. Ex-territoriality as a spatial category refers to places which are located outside of a state's borders and its legal system, but which are nonetheless under the control of its sovereign authority. The suspension of law is transformed there from a provisional measure into a permanent technique of rule. The increase in power of the executive, which exercises sovereign authority, not only leads to the loss of the absence of rights into the constitutive element of the new legal order. The state of emergency, which is manifested in various forms of ex-territoriality, becomes the new regulator of the system. It takes its place along side the state, territory and the nation as the fourth element of the political order.

Oliver Clemens, Jesko Fezer, Kim Forster, Sabine Horlitz (AN ARCHITEKTUR). for Territories. Islands, camps and other states of utopia. KW 2003