# Barcelona and Paris, cities of sand

Borrowing Ethel Baraona's quote of today: “There is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone” -Jorge Luis Borges

Being currently in the Middle East, it will be hard for me to get my mind out of it. Here are two pictorial invasions of the desert in European cities, Barcelona and Paris. The first was a campaign of information during Barcelona's drought in 2008 and the second one is the not so new Cedric Klapish's Peut être (1999) that dramatized a near futuristic Paris which has been filled by the sand. Life being on the roof, a whole subterranean way of living is happening inside the former buildings; unfortunately it seems that it was not Klapisch's main interest...

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Postponed...

...I received messages that I should be careful with what I published on boiteaoutils from Palestine in order not to suffer a pretty hard time at the border by the Israeli army. I therefore decided that it would be more cautious to wait to be back in Europe to present my articles about what I am observing here.

Sorry about that, I just have no idea which should be my degree of paranoia...

# Suspended Bivouac Shelters on Deconcrete

As short as great article on Deconcrete entitled Suspended Bivouac Shelters...

Also see BLDG BLOG's last article about this strange Michigan triangle...

More articles very soon

# The obscure history of suburbia by Noam Chomsky, Peter Galison and Mike Davis

Respectively in 5 Codes, War Against the Center and City of Quartz, Noam Chomsky, Peter Galison and Mike Davis bring other explanations about the creation of Suburbia than the most known one concerning the idea of an American visceral desire for land ownership.

- In the following excerpt, Noam Chomsky evokes the 1940's General Motors, Firestone Rubber and Standart Oil California's conspiracy to buy and destroy the urban collective transportation system in order to make cars and oil as indispensable as they are today. This conspiracy was then followed and institutionally implemented by the Eisenhower Administration's National Interstate and Defense Highway Act in 1956 which was the first real step of what we nowadays call "urban spreading".

Noam Chomsky: It [suburbia] was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate public transportation, destroy the inner cities, forces everyone to use cars, trucks. And in the 1940’s there was an authentic conspiracy, a real one, between General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil California to buy up the public transportation, destroy it, and force everyone into buses and cars. The conspiracy went to court and they were convicted and fined –I think $5000 or something. Then the government moved in and took it over, under cover of defense.

Stephan Truby: You mean President Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956?

Noam Chomsky: Yes. The pretext of the National Defense Highway Act was that we have to move missiles around the country. But the point of it was to massively subsidize road transportation –cars, trucks, gasoline and so on- and to undermine public transportation.

Chomsky Noam in conversation with Daniel Mock and Stephan Truby on Homeland, Paranoia and Security in Igmade. 5 CODES. Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror. Basel: Birkhauser 2006

- In War Against the Center, Peter Galison establishes that suburbia was created in the very beginning of the Cold War as a military strategy of dispersion in order to avoid the possibility for a nuclear strike to affect too considerably the United States. Even the planning of the road would then be extremely important: evacuation roads, military reinforcement road (I even heard about highways that was designed to allow planes to land on them), replacement roads in case of the first being destroyed etc.

“It was in this context that in August 1951, the president announced a national policy for industrial dispersion, and the National Security Resources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Plant a Target? that proclaimed, “The risk of an all-out atomic attack on the United States grows greater each day, since we are no longer the sole possessor of the secret of the atomic bomb. This means that no industrial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attack.”20 To guarantee survival, the National Security Resources Board insisted, would require that productive capacity be protected: “The dispersion (or deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supporting industries can make American production less vulnerable to attack.” Space could protect men at the battlefield, the authors continued, and space, by multiplying targets, would diminish “the vulnerability of any one concentration.””

Galison Peter. War Against the Center Grey Room. Cambridge: MIT Press 2001

- One last component of this political interpretation of suburbia's birth is brought by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz (and also in Michael Sorkin's Variations on a Theme Park). In this book about Los Angeles, Davis affirms that public space in the American city has been destroyed for a reason of control and security, free gathering of people being too hazardous and uncertain for a system that bases its self-sustainability in the anticipation of its subjects' behaviors. Suburbia is thus a way to kill the Mediterranean street to replace it by the road or the highway that prevent any social interaction between people.

"The 'public' spaces of the new megastructures and supermall have supplanted tradtionnal streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional compartments under the gaze of private police forces."

Davis Mike. City of Quartz. London: Verso 1990

Another very interesting book about suburbia (more on its urban typology than on its history though) is Alan Berger's Drosscape. Wasting Land in Urban America

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The Element of Crime by Lars Von Trier

The Element of Crime is a 1984 movie by Lars Von Trier that dramatizes a post-apocalyptic (sepia) world where people lives in the ruins of the ancient one. The scenario focuses on a tense detective trying to find back the tracks of a serial killer. The result is an ambiguous mix of film noir and science fiction with a slight dose of influence by William Burroughs.

# Excursions on Volume.by Shawn Sims & Erik Martinez (Part 2)

A bit more than six months ago, I published Shawn Sims & Erik Martinez's Thesis Research for Michael Chen and Jason Lee's undergrad thesis studio [CRISIS FRONTS] at Pratt Institute. This article is about the project that came out of this research.
Excursions on Volume is a study about freight and its participation to counterfeit market. Shawn and Erik thus created their own "counterfeit" freight production by designing a harbor that creates its own terrain thanks to the containers' weight. In fact, the containers are sitting on a mechanism that dredges the ooze in the bottom of the Hudson River and thus transforms a deep muddy material into a physical more or less solid reclaiming land. The heaviest the container is, the most effective the process of solidification which produces an interesting contradiction with capitalism's eternal wish of profitability. In fact, the most effective container is the one that did not succeed to make itself cheap (i.e. light). One can even think of some "counterfeit" containers filled with concrete, extremely expensive to freight but tremendously effective in the production of land...

Here is a small text related to the project:

Historically the process of standardization has spawned from the need for new structures of efficiency. The performance requirements of this process create unbiased arteries that are susceptible to forms of exploitation. This entails that at a global logistical scale, the network is blind with regard to the status of the goods; being licit or illicit. As globalization generates new organizational models for distribution, the intelligence of the counterfeit network is understood to be its ability to uncover and anticipate opportunities embedded within these structures of efficiency.
The modern shipping container is analogous with these standardized practices, both physical and protocological, and in an effort to increase globalization, this mechanism generates an opportunity for the insertion of a hack. Perhaps with an excursion into understanding the ability for weight and volume to be an operable energy, the container field of a port becomes an untapped resource able to generate new land.
Currently the dredged materials form the Hudson River are carried out into the ocean and dumped because of their toxic attributes. However the toxicity levels are dropping and for the first time since an industrialized New York, the sediment collected from dredging operations has the potential to remain in the city and be utilized in this land forming process.
The use of weight as a latent energy, and of dregde as a material are combined to reconsider the arrival of infrastructure to a once industrialized Hudson river. The fluctuating weight of container traffic is utilized to rigidify dregde to create a pixelated landscape which emerges from the existing water level. The commercial materials utilized within this infrastructure provide an emerging architecture with the products necessary to begin a series of retail and market spaces. A porous pixelated landscape rigidified by a membrane is stretched vertically to enclose space and change continuously as the market fluctuates in size.

# Braille Education Ball by Danielle Pecora

My friend Danielle Pecora just won the Design 21's Game Changers Competition (in partnership with UNESCO) which was proposing to elaborate a game or a toy that questions an issue. Danielle who did her undergrad in Parson school of design and grad school in Pratt Institute's school of architecture, designed the Braille Education Ball that proposes to blind and sighted kids to learn braille while playing with a beautiful toy.

Here is another article about it on FastCompany

# AT&T Long Lines Building by John Carl Warnecke

If you get the chance to walk in downtown Manhattan, you may catch a glimpse at a tall and opaque skyscraper. It is the AT&T Long Lines Building designed by John Carl Warnecke in 1974. Its program (housing the telephone switching equipment) and its cold war paranoia requirement (remaining operative even after a nuclear strike) makes it appear as a late constructivist building as an ode to war.

# Circus, spectacle edge by Guillermo Bernal

Circus, spectacle edge; nomadic architecture as a creative aid a performative distribution

This beautiful project has been created by Guillermo Bernal in 2009 and 2010 for his undergrad thesis at Pratt Institute. Guillermo was then part of the brilliant studio tutored by Yael Erel and Christoph Kumpusch which attempts to approach the thesis project by producing a lot of hand drawings and physical models or objects as you can see below.

This project is magnifying the deployment of the circus by developing a beautiful poetry of mechanics that can be read in Guillermo's objects/models. Rather than inventing a swiss knife system of folding/unfolding as we already saw in a lot of projects, he insisted on the performance of the cables, mechanical arms and fabrics and the potential unplanned events of their deployment.

I am not sure it was one of Guillermo's reference but this architectonic circus entertains a very interesting dialogue with Alexander Calder's circus which insisted more on the sculptural aspect of the human and animal performance. (see the video here)

Here is the text related to the project:

Originating in the ancient world, the Circus has a history of a ritualistic performance -mostly of a nomadic nature- and functioned as a proto-theater where the distance between human and animal nature was under examination. Since the performances were held in the open, its architectural typology remained open-ended. The circus is a thing that strongly resists definition. Since the very depths of its etymological roots, it has been a signifier for an abstract animate vitality, later to incorporate “frenetic public activity” under its umbrellic term. The this space, suitable for the interweaving movements of man and animal was the birthmark of its etymological significance.
A creative aid and distribution platform, the nomadic equipment can be positioned as “momentary anchoring ”, Their goal is both to situate themselves on the exterior in order to open new trails, and to weave, or even to repair certain links. to put holes in the public space using the invasive, nomadic presence of the war machine, or any other technique of sudden appearance invades and overcomes everyday life. Located primarily in a decaying city. The Circus on the edge makes do with what it finds, enveloping and adapting found structures, resources and technologies to infiltrate, innovate and construct space for community, as well as community itself, in unusual and provisional ways.
It also intends to confront creation with the public, in all of its diversity and contradictions, as well as its occasional tensions, and to confront it with the public space, as well as its
complexity and richness. The Circus on the Edge is not one complete city, but a constantly moving and fleeting fragment. Acting as an agent for change, it provides an instant dynamic system for the production of new urban and cultural space, seemingly disintegrating and connecting the local and global, and the real and not so real. The reciprocal relationship between Circus and everyday life becomes a state where society can negotiate its own future.

# CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

Cyclonopedia is one of those books that drives you ecstatic for being so different from anything you have ever read so far. In this book, Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani elaborates a beautiful narrative of the Middle East seen as a sentient and alive entity. Following the tracks of Deleuze & Guatarri's Thousand Plateaus, Negarestani go far beyond them by granting an alive autonomy to every entities composing the Middle East (sand, dust, oil, plague, rust, war, bullets, rats, corpes, Zoroastrian divinities etc.) except maybe human being themselves.
The text is very obscure and sometimes even esoteric, but the feeling of being lost in it provides even more jubilation when a paragraph becomes vivid for the reader.

Here are some beautiful excerpts (and there are so much more in the book):

“Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented. When the despotic necrocratic regime of periphery-core, for which everything should be concluded and grounded by the gravity of the core, is deteriorated.” P50

“Rats are exhuming machines. Not only full fledged vectors of epidemic, but also ferociously dynamic lives of ungrounding. […]
A surface-consuming plague is a pack of rats whose tails are the most dangerous seismic equipment; tails are spatial synthesizers (fiber-machines), exposing the terrain which they traverse to sudden and violent folding and unfolding, while seizing patches of ground and composing them as a non human music. Tails are musical instruments, playing metal -tails, lasher tanks in motion. Although tails have a significant locomotive role, they also act as boosters of agility or anchors of infection.” P52

“A self-degenerating entity, a volunteer for its own damnation, dust opens new modes of dispersion and of becoming-contagious, inventing escape routes as yet unrecorded. In his interview, Parsani suggests that the Middle East has simulated the mechanisms of dusting to mesh together an economy which operates through positive degenerating processes, an economy whose carriers must be extremely nomadic, yet must also bear an ambivalent tendency towards the established system or the ground. An economy whose vehicle and systems never cease to degenerate themselves. For in this way, they ensure their permanent molecular dynamism, their contagious distribution and diffusion over their entire economy.” P91

“If, in middle-eastern tradition, gods deliberately allow themselves to be killed left and right by enemies, humans, or themselves without any prudence as to their future and eventual extinction, it is because they find more significance and benefit in their own corpes –as a concrete object of communication and tangibility among humans- than in the abstractness of their divinity. At last, as corpes, they can copulate and contaminate.” P205

Negarestani Reza. CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re-Press 2008

# Exit Through the Gift Shop by Banksy

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a new movie created by Banksy. The film is pretty much divided into two parts that successively introduces a beautiful homage to street art (perhaps in opposition of what used to be created as graffiti) and then presents a kind of real experiment of the volatility and gregarious behavior of Art as an institution and a business.
I don't want to say too much because the agility of this movie is to bring you smoothly from the first part to the second one with interest and humor.

This film is also extremely interesting for seeing some Banksy's works that are less communicated than others because of their difficulty to be sold as images by medias. For example, this risky assignment of introducing a Guantanamo prisoner doll at Disneyland. The work is botched and not as "sexy" as the paintings everybody knows; however the observation of Disneyland's magic stopping to let room to a very severe security paranoia is delectable.

Unfortunately the film seems to be only released in the US so far...

# French Architecture's elite has a new stupid idea

After the construction of the French Pavilion at Shanghai which has strictly nothing to say in architectural matters, here is the new proof of the little French architecture world's stupidity. They (La Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine) found nothing more clever to be noticed than to plan to build a 10m tall tower made exclusively out of food in some kind of XVIIIth century nostalgia when it was pretty tasteful to play with food when most of the country was struggling to eat.
As Jerome Auzolle recalls in his letter to the Minister of Culture, currently in France, 750 000 people are obliged by their situation to survive thanks to the National Food Aid. This tower is thus a symbol of Sarkozy's France: a society where a majority struggle while a minority do not even understand what reality is made of. "If you don't have a rolex when you're fifty years old, you are a looser" said Jacques Seguela, advertiser and good friend of the President...this could be the slogan of the French government and elite...

If you want to sign the petition that attempts to avoid this food tower's construction you can follow this link (it's in French though)