# Floating Islands on the lake Titicaca

A very interesting construction takes place on the lake Titicaca (between Peru and Bolivia). In fact, the Uros people regularly build up islands with rushes and mud. The islands are then floating and probably drift a little bit with the current.
These islands can also recall the British Project Habakkuk during the Second World War which was proposing to build aircraft carrier islands made out of wood and ice !

# A Walk Through H by Peter Greenaway

A Walk Through H is a 40 minutes long movie created by Peter Greenaway in 1978. This film is a magnificent journey described only by the vocal narration (and a powerful music) and a series of 92 maps/painting hang on a wall of an art gallery. It is an ode to the map as a mean of representation of space, far away from the objectivity current maps are pretending to reach.
The movie also depicts the narrator's fetishism for those maps that he finds or steals in order to end his journey. The maps themselves when approaching the end of the series acquire more and more subjectivity and therefore more and more uncertainty about the path they are actually showing.

The whole vocal narration can be read by following this link.

WATCH THE MOVIE

# Akha Love Huts in Laos

Whoever travels in Laos can visit at some point Akha villages hosting surprising elevated little houses as you can see on the pictures. Those houses called "love huts", are built by the village's male teenagers in order for them to invite girls for a celebration of their young libidos.
I ignore why those huts need to be elevated but their particularity is pretty compelling.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// The Wall in East Jerusalem (written on July17th)

I am in Palestine for two weeks (based in Ramallah) and I am thinking to update boiteaoutils on a daily basis about what I am observing from there.I spent my first day in East Jerusalem which was annexed by the Israeli Army in 1967. The separation wall is then built far away from what should be the legal border between Israel and the West Bank. This wall thus splits completely an arab district into two parts. At some point of the wall, not so far away from a group of arab houses, Israeli militaries (I discovered that too late not to be spotted !) are surveying the neighborhood from what seems to be a normal house...

The principle of this wall is as much to filter, control and prevent the movement of the Palestinian population as to claim a tremendous amount of land which attempts to include in the "Israeli territory" as many illegal settlements as possible.

nb: those pictures are taken from the "Israeli side" (even though as I wrote before it is not supposed to be an Israeli area).

# 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 poetry of Chicago's emergency staircases

I've been visiting the beautiful city of Chicago recently and I've been particularly impressed by the beauty of those tall buildings' emergency staircases. No one seems to have been really thought trough or designed and that's maybe why their delicateness and their infinite ascension triggers the imagination...

# Sociable Weavers' nests

Sociable Weavers are birds living in the Botswana desert (which is the site of Catherine Ingraham current seminar at Pratt) and they have the ability to build up amazing sophisticated nests on a given support. Not only those nests propose an interesting system of temperature regulation but they even host other species of birds that thus live in symbiosis with the weavers.

thanks Aurana !

# 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.

# Wagah Border between India and Pakistan

The border between Amritsar (India) and Lahore (Pakistan) is special by the "spectacle" it hosts every evening for the lowering of the flags. In fact, soldiers from the two sides daily starts at the same time a kind of ceremonial of intimidation dramatizing in an almost grotesque way, the conflict between the two countries. Stands have been built for the audience of both nation who compete as well to know who cheers the best his country.
This ceremony emphasizes considerably the symbolic and representative aspect of the border and constitutes a daily battle that nobody win, thus perpetuating the war to the infinite.

# David Harvey's class on Marx's Capital

davidharvey.org is Harvey's official website and provides the totality of his class (in video) dissecting Marx's Capital in City University of New York. David Harvey who was lecturing last Saturday for the last session of the Oppositional Architecture, claims that the current economic crisis has weakened capitalism enough for us to have the opportunity to interfere. He is calling for an "eco-communism" (as he was saying people freak out when he says he is a communist but much less when he add "eco" to it...) which tackles an interesting issue about whether or not the word "communism" should be still used as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt think or is this word already too much connoted by the Stalin and Mao experience (which would deserve to be called totalitarian collectivism rather than communism).
Anyway David Harvey's lectures and classes are more than ever worth listening and his website is providing information in a rare generosity which is really appreciable.

# Resisting the Capitalist Production of Space

Resisting the Capitalist Production of Space is a ten days conference organized in Brooklyn by Oppositionnal Architecture proposing discussions between sociologists, architects, geographers, historians, economists about resisting the systematic embodiment of capitalism in urban spaces.
Here is the program:

Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture
Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces

Location: Gair Building No 6, 81 Front Street , Brook l yn NY 11201 / York stop on the F Train

Wednesday, November 11 // 6 pm
Opening Reception

Thursday, November 12 // 7 pm
The Decommodification of Housing
Discussion with James deFilippis, geographer, Rutgers University, New Brunswick · Esther Wang and Helena Wong of CAAAV, Organizing Asian Communities, New York

Friday, November 13 // 7 pm
Bar + programming by Lize Mogel and Alexis Baghat, An Atlas of Radical Cartography*

Saturday, November 14 // 7 pm
The Real Estate Crisis, Private Property and the Prospects of Planning
Discussion with David Kotz, economist, University of Massachusetts Amherst · Teddy Cruz, architect, San Diego

Sunday, November 15 // 7 pm
Bar + programming by tba*

Monday, November 16 // 7 pm
On the Commons: Taking versus Granting Rights
Discussion with Peter Linebaugh, historian, University of Toledo · Brett Bloom of Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, Urbana · Rob Robinson of Picture the Homeless, New York

Tuesday, November 17 // 7 pm
Bar + programming by common room*

Wednesday, November 18 // 7 pm
Territory as a Means of Struggle
Discussion with Veronica Dorsey of United Workers, Baltimore · Neil Smith, geographer, City University New York

Thursday, November 19 // 7 pm
Bar + programming by Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi of SLO architecture

BELOW HIGH-WATER MARK
An evening of film footage and munical improvisation exploring hidden connections along the water ways of New York City

Musical Improvisation by Joe Warner

Friday, November 20 // 7 pm
Reclaiming Capitalist Spaces
Discussion with Janelle Cornwell and Julie Graham, geographers, University of Massachusetts Amherst · Max Rameau of Take Back the Land, Miami

Saturday, November 21 // 12 pm
Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces
Lecture by David Harvey, geographer, City University New York, 12 pm
Workshops with special guests*, 2 - 6 pm
Final presentation and discussion, 7 pm
Party, 10 pm

# Centralia, the continuous burning town

If Hell is a place where fire never stops to burn, Centralia (Pennsylvania) might be this place...

In fact this little town is burning since 1962 when a fire began inside the mine and spread all over the place by tunnels and fault. Since then, the town has to live with smoke, toxic gas and its road being distorted by the heat...

# Jerusalem's Eruv analyzed by Eyal Weizman

In this extract of a text called The Subversion of Jerusalem's Sacred Vernaculars (which is part of Michael Sorkin's book The Next Jerusalem), Eyal Weizman describes what I interpret as the flexibility of Israeli Jewish's districts' boundaries which demarcate their territory with a wire calls the Eruv.

Besides its complex political edges, Jerusalem is surrounded by a boundary that defines not its municipal border, but the geographical limits of one of its religions. The Eruv - a metal wire stretched over high poles - encapsulates the Jewish parts of the city, and prescribes a different religious use mode within it.
[...]
The Eruv is a mobile frontier that is always rerouted to encapsulate every newly built Jewish neighborhood in the city. The path of the Eruv marks therefore the momentary state of the city's Jewish neighborhoods. The Eruv of Jerusalem is about 100km long, but its metal wire, the only necessary element of its construction, weighs no more than 80kg.
Along its path the Eruv boundary manifest itself in different ways. Beyond its presence as a series of poles strung with wire, the Eruv, like a giant-scale act of urban bricolage, incorporates and uses the existing boundaries and urban scars of Jerusalem: fences, walls, concrete decks, metal handrails, rock faces, houses facades, a water reservoir, a railway line, a deep valley to mark its boundary, saving the use of poles and string. These elements could be considered parts of an Eruv boundary, according to lwas described in the Talmud, on the single condition that hey be higher or deeper than one meter. Seeing the city as an object, the Eruv reinterpres and reuses its props and imbues them with another meaning.

Eyal Weizman for The Next Jerusalem by Michael Sorkin, The Monacelli Press 2002

see previous articles (1&2)

# Growing bridges

Here is are some pictures from amazing growing root bridges in India. A beautiful application of Gille Deleuze's mouvement en train de se faire describing Leibniz's philosophy.

Here is the little text on Living Root Bridges:

The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree. This tree produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.
Cherrapunji is credited with being the wettest place on earth, and The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed this tree and saw in its powerful roots an opportunity to easily cross the area's many rivers. Now, whenever and wherever the need arises, they simply grow their bridges.
n order to make a rubber tree's roots grow in the right direction - say, over a river - the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems.
The thin, tender roots of the rubber tree, prevented from fanning out by the betel nut trunks, grow straight out. When they reach the other side of the river, they're allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.
The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they're extraordinarily strong - strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time.
Because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time - and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunji may be well over five hundred years old.


Thanks Eduardo !

# INDIA /// Durga Puja's pandals

At the end of september will be celebrated as every year, Durga Puja all over India. This festival celebrating the goddess Durga is particularly important in West Bengal and more specifically in Kolkata (Calcutta). During six days, some temporary structures called Pandals are being built with mostly bamboos and fabric to host all the celebrations. It means that for one week, the city is getting transformed and might be out of control for a short while of urban creation freedom.