# Abhominal by Jason Hopkins

Jason Hopkins develops a compelling digital art work entitled Abhominal that illustrates a beautiful hybridization of geometrical normative structures with a tumorous organic flesh. His "bodies" are as much striking to me that it obviously evokes the hyperactive use of uncontrolled topological surfaces in current architecture. Jason Hopkins proposes a much more interesting vision of not only a surface, but also its content, the flesh, which is not without recalling Marcos Cruz's interest (see his manifesto for boiteaoutils).

However, what I just wrote is only my interpretation as an architect and I wanted to have Jason's "version" of his own work which is the very short text that follows:

"I am fascinated by mankind’s pursuit of ‘perfection’. Through the instruments of science we strive to categorize, understand, rearrange and ultimately tame the natural world around us. My sketches are explorations of possible genetic futures where mankind has achieved this perfection, where science has ironed out the inadequacies of being human."

Biostructure 2

Human Reconfiguration VI

Human Reconfiguration IV

Human Reconfiguration X

Human Reconfiguration XIX

Olympian I

Human Reconfiguration XI

Human Reconfiguration XII
Human Figure Study III

# An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other by Will Laslett

An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other is a beautiful project by Will Laslett for Jeanne Sillett's University of Westminster's studio. As told in the text below the project dramatizes a network of architectural canyons linking Naples' multiple caves.
In this regard, it might be interesting to look at it in a dialogue with a project already published on boiteaoutils: Chen Xinyang's Underground City.

Here is the text written by Will Laslett:

An Opening into Voids: (re)connecting Napoli and its Other

This project is an exploration into the caverns of Naples. This vast network of caverns, which has formed through human inhabitation of the land over at least the last five millennia and which has come to extend beyond the perimeter of the city, is unique in its extent and diversity. The network of voids now underlies vast sections of the city, sometimes out scaling the built forms above and yet is largely abandoned, neglected or even forgotten. These are spaces of disorientation, wonder and curiosity, where time is frozen and the nature of positive and negative space is questioned. Through the anthropological creation of a punctured ground plane, upon which Naples is situated, ambiguities are created in notions of the natural and the artificial, the built and the found, as well as the very authenticity of the ground plane itself.

Here I aim to incorporate this hidden alternative network of spaces into the wider network of the inhabited city. Through the creation of a symbolic opening and point of convergence between these two planes, the project aims to allow these worlds to collide, and where in this collision, the city is drawn in, a point of orientation between these realms is created and an altered perception on the nature of the built fabric is allowed. This point of intersection thus aims, fundamentally, to serve as a means of re-comprehending the city, both for those who visit and those who inhabit.

# Nébuleuse by Guillaume Amat

Nébuleuse is a photographic work by Guillaume Amat investigating the strange territory of the French Atlantic coasts and its military ruins from World War II, bunkers. The atmosphere of the photographs helps to compose a foggy heterotopia where those bunkers appears as monolithic artifacts within an infinite sand landscape.

This work integrates perfectly the series of article written about bunkers on boiteaoutils and that can be read by following this link.

Here is the text related to the series (nb: the complete series has to be seen of Guillaume Amat's own website):

Nébuleuse
In April 2007, in a muffled silence, the sea disappeared, as if vanished, leaving behind only ghosts of stone.
These Blockhaus, remains of World War II, slowly digested by the tides turned out to be threatening places of refuge in the middle of an unexplored desert.
A haunting wind is sweeping along the coast and wrapping distant figures.
In the open sea, one could hear the muffled sound of a foghorn very much like the whispering rumbling of life.
People seem to get lost in a scenery both quiet and threatening where one gets stifled by the immensity of the landscape.

The project called "Nebuleuse" (Nebula) is part of a reflection on the question of World War II heritage, the French coast and its conversation.

In the form of a photographic proposition, I tried to show how the hand of man and the hand of Nature can mix or be in conflict.

# Todor & Petru by CRCR (Wizz Design)

Todor & Petru is a very short film created by CRCR, five students from the GOBELINS, l'école de l'image (applied art & digital media school in Paris) within the frame of an internship at Wizz Design in Paris. The results evoke a lot of things that have already been done, yet demonstrates an excellent articulation of technique and aesthetics.

The five students are Remi BASTIE, Nicolas DEHGHANI, Jonathan DJOB NKONDO, NIcolas PEGON et Jérémy PIRES

# Biblioteca Nacional de la Republica Argentina by Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich & Alicia Cazzaniga

photograph by Baobee

I was recently writing about Jorge Luis Borges as director of the National Library of the Argentine Republic (see previous post); here is the current building that hosts the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires.
It was designed in 1961 by Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich & Alicia Cazzaniga, yet only started to built in 1971 and eventually opened in...1992.

photograph by Fiddy James

photograph by Nikko1974

photograph by Calovi

photograph by Castronovot

# Subnature by David Gissen

Subnature is a pretty interesting book written by David Gissen that attempts to gather a body of architectural works that take their essence in the consideration of the non-romantic (at least not in the classical meaning of it) elements of nature whether the latter are atmospheric, material or living entities.
The best way to illustrate the content of this book is probably to insert its contents' page:

PART ONE (Atmospheres):
- Dankness
- Smoke
- Gas
- Exhaust

PART TWO (Matter):
- Dust
- Puddles
- Mud
- Debris

PART THREE (Life):
- Weeds
- Insects
- Pigeons
- Crowds

All those elements can be the motor of a narrative that ends up into an architectural project such as developed by R&Sie(n), Eyal Weizman, Philippe Rahm or Jorge Otero-Pailos. The interesting thing here, is that nature is considered, not anymore as the docile entity that capitalo-ecology want to "save", but rather as the component of all things, continuously evolving and liberated from any subjectivation.

In a very similar way, David Gissen recently published his edition of AD (the famous English periodic that offer the edition to a different person every two months) that he entitled Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment.

# Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict by Andrew Herscher

Almost as a sequel of the article I wrote about the notion of Urbicide, here is a invitation to read Andrew Herscher's essay, Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict which attempts to illustrate the role of architecture destruction in the second conflict of the Balkans in the 90's (the first one being the Bosnia war).
In fact, destructing buildings in an asymmetrical conflict is not anymore a strategy of diminution of the enemy's forces but rather a symbolic negation of the otherness' culture and to a broader scale, the otherness' existence.
Herscher thus recounts the three phases of the Kosovo conflict which all dramatized this perspective on architecture assassination. The first one (1st and 2nd images) is the 1998 series of attacks, massacres and profanation from (Christians) Serbians towards (Muslims) Albanians in Kosovo. The second one was the surgical bombing of Belgrade by NATO (3rd image) targeting not only political objectives but also civilian infrastructures like bridges or the TV Tower. Eventually the third one occurred after the partial retreat of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian troops from Kosovo and the non official Kosovo Liberation Army's retaliation of destruction (4th image) on Christian churches...
Herscher finishes his essay with the description of a billboard (5th image) encouraging the new independent country of Kosovo (still not recognized by Serbia) to preserve the common architectural patrimony of the country as being fully part of the National narrative.

# The Truffle by Ensamble Studio

The Truffle is a self sustaining small shelter designed and built by the Spanish office Ensamble Studio (see previous article about their incredible Hemeroscopium House). The most remarkable aspect of this building to me is its construction process. In fact, in a way which recalls Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev's Bell construction, the team has first created an empty hillock, then assembled the negative of the architecture with hay bundles within this emptiness, cast concrete in between and eventually after the concrete dried, destroyed the earth hillock. The remaining step then consists in the evacuation of the hay from the inside of the building, task which is ensured by Paulina the cow in the following movie:



thanks Xinyang for reminding me of this beautiful project !

# Poema des los dones by Jorge Luis Borges

Poema des los dones (Poem about Gifts) is a poem written by Jorge Luis Borges after he was nominated Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. That is that time that he strongly lost his sight and this poem expresses the beauty of the irony of his inability to fully appreciate his function. He is in fact condemned to be the blind warden of the Library.

Original Spanish version follows the English one:

POEM ABOUT GIFTS

Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
Of this manifesting the mastery
Of God, who with excelling irony
Gives me at once both books and night.

In this city of books he made these eyes
The sightless rulers who can only read,
In libraries of dreams, the pointless
Paragraphs each new dawn offers

To awakened care. In vain the day
Squanders on them its infinite books,
As difficult as the difficult scripts
That perished in Alexandria.

An old Greek story tells how some king died
Of hunger and thirst, though proffered springs and fruits;
My bearing lost, I trudge from side to side
Of this lofty, long blind library.

The walls present, but uselessly,
Encyclopedia, atlas, Orient
And the West, all centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies.

Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.

Something that surely cannot be called
Mere chance must rule these things;
Some other man has met this doom
On other days of many books and the dark.

As I walk through the slow galleries
I grow to feel with a kind of holy dread
That I am that other, I am the dead,
And the steps I make are also his.

Which of us two is writing now these lines
About a plural I and a single gloom?
What does it matter what word is my name
If the curse is indivisibly the same?

Groussac or Borges, I gaze at this beloved
World that grows more shapeless, and its light
Dies down into a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and the oblivion of night.

Original Spanish version:

POEMA DES LOS DONES

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños
a unos ojos sin luz, que sólo pueden
leer en las bibliotecas de los sueños
los insensatos párrafos que ceden

las albas a su afán. En vano el día
les prodiga sus libros infinitos,
arduos como los arduos manuscritos
que perecieron en Alejandría.

De hambre y de sed (narra una historia griega)
muere un rey entre fuentes y jardines;
yo fatigo sin rumbo los confines
de esta alta y honda biblioteca ciega.

Enciclopedias, atlas, el Oriente
y el Occidente, siglos, dinastías,
símbolos, cosmos y cosmogonías
brindan los muros, pero inútilmente.

Lento en mi sombra, la penumbra hueca
exploro con el báculo indeciso,
yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso
bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Algo, que ciertamente no se nombra
con la palabra azar, rige estas cosas;
otro ya recibió en otras borrosas
tardes los muchos libros y la sombra.

Al errar por las lentas galerías
suelo sentir con vago horror sagrado
que soy el otro, el muerto, que habrá dado
los mismos pasos en los mismos días.

¿Cuál de los dos escribe este poema
de un yo plural y de una sola sombra?
¿Qué importa la palabra que me nombra
si es indiviso y uno el anatema?

Groussac o Borges, miro este querido
mundo que se deforma y que se apaga
en una pálida ceniza vaga
que se parece al sueño y al olvido.

# Conversation between Ed Keller, Carla Leitao, Bruce Sterling & Geoff Manaugh

I recently evoked the series of lectures organized by Parsons via its assistant Dean Ed Keller (see previous post) entitled Design and Existential Risk. The first event of this series occurred on October 9th with a conversation between the same Ed Keller, Carla Leitao, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling and the figure of the blogosphere, Geoff Manaugh.

The next lecture will occur on Thursday with the interesting author of the book Enduring Innocence, Keller Easterling.