# Radio documentary programs about Hannah Arendt on France Culture

French speakers (listeners) would be happy to know that the radiophonic program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance (on France Culture) just released five hours of discussions about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt mostly about Totalitarianism and the "banalization of evil".
Eichman cannot be excused by his role in the Nazi bureaucracy nor can he be expelled from the man kind (which would be too easy for humans) but rather has to be put in front of his responsibilities, as a human who committed true horror.

# Lebbeus Woods' Labyrinthine Wall for Bosnia

This project has been posted by Lebbeus Woods on his blog a year and half ago and it certainly catch my interest for walls, borders and labyrinth. As a matter of fact, this project gathers those three typologies in one as a poetical response to the Bosnian war of 1992-93.
Lebbeus Woods imagines this monumental wall all around Bosnia which does not forbid its entry but rather make it more difficult by the experience of this labyrinth. He narrates how this giant edifice would ultimately becomes a whole city (probably started by people who never found the exit).
His text can be read on his blog but another explanatory paragraph deserve attention when Woods answers to a criticism of a comment posted on it:

"You are certainly correct in saying that the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not as simple as my project seems to suggest. However, there were trench lines around Sarajevo, manned by the Bosnian army and Sarajevo citizens, and these prevented the Bosnian Serb military forces from overrunning the city. I was in Sarajevo several times at the height of the siege, and knew many architects who would fight in the trenches half the day, then return to their houses and offices and work on their ideas for rebuilding the city.

I also agree that walls are often used to divide people. This work and others are meditations on how walls can unite them. It remains to be seen whether or not they might be useful.

There is no doubt, however, in light of the known facts that Serbia and Croatia directed the destruction of BiH. The Muslim majority bear some responsibility for having declared independence based on their slim numerical majority, without considering the consequences. And the governments of the West bear some responsibility, too, for offering recognition of BiH independence too quickly and also heedless of the feelings of Serbs and Croats. But the ultimate responsibility for the destruction belongs to the destroyers.

Finally, it must be said that Sarajevo was much more diverse in its people before the war than after. Many Serbs and Croats left with the signing of the Dayton Accords. Many Muslim refugees sought refuge from the notorious ‘ethnic-cleansing’ campaigns carried out by Serbian military and paramilitary forces in the smaller towns and villages. Sarajevo is not the cosmopolitan city it once was, but today far more ethnically polarized."

# Urbicide

picture: Gaza after the 2008 Israeli Siege. Getty Images

Here is a small text I recently wrote about the notion of urbicide. It includes a digest of Eyal Weizman's lecture about Forrensic Architecture I had the chance to attend both in New York and in Bethlehem.

Despite of the fact that this strategy has been always occurring in history, the notion of urbicide has been invented by the former Mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic after the wars of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1996. One could define it as the act of destroying buildings and cities that do not constitute any military targets. Urbicide is rather an act that is supposed to affect the very life of the population in such a way that war cannot be ignored by anybody.

This technique is being used in symmetrical wars like the Second World War and the Blitz in England on the one hand and the systematic bombing of German cities by the allies on the other hand. However, urbicide is also fully present in asymmetrical wars with the case of guerilla AND governmental terrorism. The most famous example in the Western World is of course the terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center in 2001 for its sudden and unexpected violence that was both perceived literally and symbolically; however, governmental armies also use this strategy to actively oppress a given population. That was thus the case of the Serbian army over the Bosnian population during the same wars evoked above, and that also constitutes the daily life of the Palestinian population who has to suffer from the Israel Defense Forces’ domination.
One should not forget that buildings and cities are the most tangible element of a civilization since even the written heritage that composes a nation’s archive necessities an architectural container. It thus happened that a civilization fully disappeared from History after having suffered from a combined genocide and urbicide.

In fact, urbicide has been pretty much developed as long as war exists. However, one can probably affirm that its surgical application and its insertion within a global warfare strategy of a highly sophisticated army are merely recent. Its implementation by the Israeli Defense Forces, for example, is very illustrative. We already saw in the last chapter how the Israeli soldiers were sometimes destroying Palestinian homes in order to re-compose the battle field, but there are plenty of other applications of urbicide in this context. The way Arab’s villages in Israel have been fully destroyed after 1949 is highly symptomatic of this refusal from the Israeli authorities to deny the Palestinian existence in the past, in the present and of course in the future. Nevertheless, this last example remains absolutely legal from Israel who is free to develop its own land as it wishes. On the contrary, the systematic destruction of civilian Palestinian buildings and homes in the Gaza strip can be absolutely considered as a war crime according to the International Law of conflicts.
In that matter, Eyal Weizman observes the birth of a new legal discipline which places buildings as the main object of the judicial investigation. Weizman is then interested in the notion of “forensic architecture” that see war and building experts intervening in order to attempt to determine the technical means of destruction of architecture by external agents. In this regard, he focuses his study on the person of Marc Garlasco.
Garlasco was one of the Pentagon experts in “attacks design” and during the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003, he was named “Chief of High Value Targeting”. His task consisted in the organization –Weizman uses the word ‘design’ in order to accentuate the architectural aspect of the job- of various attacks of buildings in order to assassinate several members of the Hussein administration or family. The fact that Garlasco was allowed to include the death of up to twenty nine civilians in each attacks is illustrative of the way Western armies are dealing with both military pragmatism and political communication. Just as much as there are processes and software of positive design of architecture, it also exists some for the accomplishment of a negative architecture; an architecture that has been transformed by the mean of destruction. The study of this transformation is far more objective than the chaotic aspect of such an architecture could let suppose. That is how, from his job in the Pentagon, Garlasco ended up working for the organization Human Rights Watch as an expert of what Weizman now calls forensic architecture. Before being fired by this same organization for the collection he owned of military Nazi objects, Garlasco studied the evidences of the 2008 Gaza siege. His conclusions proving that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by the Israeli Army during this operation, were then confirmed by the United Nations’ representative, Richard Goldstone in his report.

Urbicide had thus become a scientific surgical military operation on architecture that allow to either simply kills a civilian population by the mean of architecture, or practically and symbolically destroys the organizational and cultural aspects of the city in a biopolitical attack on a population.

# Architecture of Aggression by Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar

Architecture of Aggression: Military architecture of two world wars is a very interesting book written by Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar in 1973 which proposes an inventory of military architecture during WWI and WWII according to their typology and location.
The two example I chose here are camouflaged bunkers in the United Kingdom and a mobile sea fort also in the UK (the Maunsell Towers are obviously in this book as well --> see former article).

# When the stones go wild with la Fontana di Trevi

After Barcelona, here I am, one day in Roma which apparently has some new surprises every time I visit it. La Fontana di Trevi by Nicola Salvi, despite a noisy popularity for the tourists, presents very interesting baroque details that directly talk to architecture. The fountain is made to appear as a building -since it is its basis- back to the natural state. The stone used for the building transforms itself in a performative way into the original rock it was (romantically) extracted from. The craft of this transformation is very well made and the transition between one another is thus extremely fluid.
One can use this beautiful example in order to illustrate narration in architecture...

# 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

# Transit-City's workshop about Chicago

The next Transit-City's workshop will occur this Friday June 4th in the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris. The issue's topic Francois Bellanger proposes is: What if it was between 1910 and 1930 in Chicago that the XXIst century compact, fluid and complex city had been invented ?

The guest will be Jean Castex who wrote a book entitled Chicago 1910-1930: Le chantier d'une ville moderne.

More information on Transit-City's website.

# Processes of smoothing and striation of space in urban warfare

I very recently wrote a short essay about the three notions of space conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Treatise of Nomadology (in A Thousand Plateaus): the Striated, the Smooth and the Holey. The following text is only a part of this essay. It tries to articulate three historical examples already approached on boiteaoutils: Blanqui and his manual of urban modifications for the XIXth century French revolutions, the Casbah's guerrilla for the Algerian Independence in the 50's and the capture of the War Machine by the Israeli State.


The act of striating space is fundamentally inherent to the birth of agriculture and therefore to property. Indeed, agriculture is the first act that brings value to the land and by this very fact is asking for a parcelization of it. Agriculture is also what brings a population to become sedentary and therefore to aggregate knowledge in the research of new tools. This process of innovation is called progress and is the base of the construction of a civilization. Architecture embodies the striation and thus defines the limits of the land. Property is thus claimed and history of war can begin. This narrative is perfectly expressed by the myth of the creation of Rome. Romulus established the limits of the city by digging a trench (or building a wall depending on the version) and when his brother Remus leaped across it, Romulus killed him.

Architecture thus creates an inside extracted from an outside and whose property is being claimed by people or institutions. Lines of property are being virtually traced and architecture materializes them into violent devices actively controlling the bodies. The wall is quintessential and paradigmatic in this regard and is operating at every scale, from the domestic wall of an apartment to the United States’ border with Mexico via various scales of gated communities. The original city limit from Romulus however disappeared during the XIXth century to let the city diffuse and spread into a quasi total ambient milieu.

The following paragraph will try to elaborate about how the urban Warfield became a territory submitted to processes of striation and smoothing since the XIXth century. The first one implies Paris’ situation between the first and the end of the second Empire. In fact, this fifty six years period of time of French history would have seen three revolutions occurring starting from the Parisian urban fabric. As both theoretician and practician of urban insurrection, Auguste Blanqui makes the link between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Paris’ Commune in 1871 and urban modification in a conflict situation. In fact, he was fully part of the two revolutions and without being actually present during the Paris Commune –he was imprisoned- he was then considered as an icon of the resistance against the governmental forces. In 1866, he writes a small manual entitled: Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris which establishes an extremely precise protocol of modification of the Warfield in order to optimize it for the weak –yet victorious- camp of asymmetrical urban conflict:

”This labor done, one put the two lateral barricades in communication by piercing the thick walls that separate houses situated on the defense’s front. The same operation is being executed simultaneously, in the houses on the two sides of the barricaded street until its extremity, then backwards, on the right and on the left, along the parallel street, on the defense’s front and on the back. Openings have to be practiced on the first [ndt: first floor in Europe is second floor in US] and last floor in order to obtain two ways; work is being achieved in the same way in the four directions. All the houses’ blocks belonging to the barricaded streets should be pierced in their perimeter, in a way that fighters are able to enter or exit by the backward parallel street, out of sight and out of reach from the enemy.”
”The interior of the blocks generally consists in courtyards and gardens. One could open communications between those spaces, usually separated by weak walls. It should be even compulsory on the bridges whose importance and specific situations expose them to the most serious attacks.
It would be therefore useful to organize companies of non-fighters workers, masons, carpenters, etc. in order to jointly achieve work with the infantry.
When, on the defense’s front, a house is more particularly being threatened, one demolished the ground floor’s staircase and one achieves opening in the various rooms’ floor of the first [second] floor in order to shoot the potential soldiers who would invade the ground floor to apply some bombs. Boiling water can also play an important role in this circumstance. If the attack embraces an important extent of the front, one cuts the staircases and pierces the floors in all the exposed houses. As a general rule, when the time and the other defense works more urgent allow it, one should destroy the ground floor’ staircase in every block’s houses except in the one the less exposed. ”

Those urban modifications that Blanqui advocates for are precisely applying processes of striating and smoothing the space . In fact, the construction of barricades with the paving stones of the street –Blanqui establishes very precise calculations about the necessary amount of them- adds another layer of striation of the city which encounters the normal function of it. On the other hand, the piercing of holes through the walls associated with the destruction of staircases tends to deny the physicality of architecture and thus smooth the urban space. With those processes, the city is assimilated to a giant assemblage of mono-matter mass that can be acted on and reconfigured according to the needs of the insurrection army. On the contrary it is interesting to observe that the additional layer of striation the State’s police applies on the city is not at all part of this scheme since its own barricades are pre-fabricated and owns no vernacular dimension whatsoever. The ability of the insurgents to act on this matter evoked above, and therefore to manipulate the Warfield in favor of their strategies probably has a lot to do with their victories in 1830 and 1848. On the other hand, the Paris Commune’s ultimate defeat against the Versaillais, was very likely influenced by the State’s modifications of this same Warfield for the last two decades by Napoleon III and his Baron Engineer Haussmann. In fact, the “renovation” of Paris between 1852 and 1870 into an urban apparatus both hygienic and militarized, helped Thiers’ cavalry and artillery to move very efficiently within Paris when the ultimate suppression of the Communards was effected.

A second example still concerns French history and the French State strategies of counter-insurrection. It occurs between 1954 and 1960 in Algier’s Casbah from where the first operations of the FLN were being organized. In this regard, Gille Pontecorvo’s 1966 film entitled The Battle of Algiers depicts in a pseudo-documentary way the guerrilla opposing the French paratroopers with the Algerian anti-colonialists within the labyrinthine Casbah. The chronology is important here. The typology of the Warfield is in a first period perfectly used by the Algerians who applies Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of speed as the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point . Whoever accomplishes a mission for the FLN, strikes intensively then immediately disappear in the maze of the Casbah. However, some years later, by following the officer in charge of the counter insurrection Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu’s strategies, the French paratroopers manages little by little to capture the War Machine’s principle by acting directly on the Casbah’s materiality and infiltrating the organization of the FLN. The final result is the absolute suppression of resistive forces in Algiers in 1960. Nevertheless, the resistance would have had last long enough to provoke a national mobilization that leads eventually to the Algerian independence in 1962.

A final example of urban striation and smoothing in a conflict situation would be the one studied by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman who daily attempts to establish a forensic analysis of the hyper militarized use of architecture by the Israeli State to oppress and control the Palestinian lives. In 2006, in an article entitled Lethal Theory , Weizman analyzes the Israeli General Aviv Kokhavi’s strategy during the siege of Nablus in 2002 in the West Bank. In fact, Kokhavi developed a theory of inverted geometry that consists for his division in avoiding to operate in Nablus’ refugee camp’s streets but rather to move through the wall of the dense urban fabric in order to surprise the Palestinian fighters. “Rather than submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries and logic, movement became constitutive of space. The three-dimensional progression through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban balk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax .” From Auguste Blanqui to Aviv Kokhavi via Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a capture of the War Machine has been operating by the State. It is not innocent that the State that succeeded this capture is a state who established war as its main contingency and its population as entirely composed of soldiers. The elaboration of the oppression towards the Palestinian led the Israeli Army to associate a striation of the space both by its walls, colonies and roads and to adopt a nomadic behavior, springing up from its border, infesting Palestinian land and folding itself back in its own territory. This coexistence of State and War Machine is probably achieved by to the status of the Jewish People who was involved in what Deleuze calls a common becoming due to a long persecution through ages and who eventually become a State. Thus was established a normatizing benchmark that internalizes some of its subjects and oppress the others.


notes:
- Blanqui, Auguste. Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris. in MAINTENANT IL FAUT DES ARMES. Paris: La Fabrique, 2006. (unofficial English translation by Leopold Lambert)
- FLN: Front de Libération Nationale. Algerian organization leading the fight for independence
- Weizman, Eyal. HOLLOW LAND: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso, 2007.

# Forms of Constraints by Norman Johnston

picture: Illinois State Penitentiary Stateville 1916

Forms of Constraints: A History of Prison Architecture is a book written by Norman Johnston which investigates the physicality of prisons from middle age to the XXth century. It is very interesting, not only as an understanding of the retaliation institutions prison embodies but also because prisons represents the quintessence of authoritarian societies, one can very easily compare their plans with those of "normal" architecture and find a lot of similarities. Architecture is systematically used as an apparatus of control and the plan almost always expresses this dimension very clearly.

Johnston Norman. FORMS OF CONSTRAINT. A history of prison architecture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003

Pentonville Prison London 1844

Moabit Prison Berlin 1844

Prision Modelo Madrid 1877

National Penitentiary Mexico City 1885

Maison de Force Ghent 1839

First Western Penitentiary Pittsburgh 1820

Eastern State Penitentiary Philadelphia 1821

Central Prison St Petersburg 1884

# (UN)WALL /// Dead Memory by Marc-Antoine Mathieu

Marc-Antoine Mathieu is in my opinion the most interesting French graphic novels author. He succeeds in all of his work to re-create an absolute bureaucratic Kafkaian society with humor and intelligence. The graphic novel Dead Memory (yes it has been translated in English !)depicts a city that is subjected to the anonymous creation of huge walls blocking off its streets and composing a totally new labyrinthine space outside and inside the buildings.

One could recall Terry Gilliam's Brazil (or in a less trivial way, Tzahal's siege of Nablus in 2002), when seing the comission of wall breaker who create some new streets within people's appartments.

I think it is appropriate here to re-insert the text I translated from Auguste Blanqui who describe a guerrilla plan for French XIXth century revolutions:

« L’attaque repoussée, il [l’officier] reprend et presse sans relâche la construction de la barricade en dépit des interruptions. Au besoin, des renforts arrivent.
Cette besogne terminée, on se met en communication avec les deux barricades latérales, en perçant les gros murs qui séparent les maisons situées sur le front de défense. La même opération s’exécute simultanément, dans les maisons des deux cotés de la rue barricadée jusqu'à son extrémité, puis en retour, a droite et a gauche, le long de la rue parallèle au front de défense, en arrière.
Les ouvertures sont pratiquées au premier et au dernier étage, afin d’avoir deux routes ; le travail se poursuit à la fois dans quatre directions.
Tous les ilots ou patés de maisons appartenant aux rues barricadées doivent être perces dans leur pourtour, de manière que les combattants puissent entrer et sortir par la rue parallèle de derrière, hors de la vue et de la portée de l’ennemi. »
« L’intérieur des ilots consiste généralement en cours et jardins. On pourrait ouvrir des communications à travers ces espaces, séparés d’ordinaire par de faibles murs. La chose sera même indispensable sur les ponts que leur importance ou leur situation spéciale exposent aux attaques les plus sérieuses.
Il sera donc utile d’organiser des compagnies d’ouvriers non-combattants, maçons, charpentiers, etc., pour exécuter les travaux conjointement avec l’infanterie.
Lorsque, sur le front de défense, une maison est plus particulièrement menacée, on démolit l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée, et l’on pratique des ouvertures dans les planchers des diverses chambres du premier étage afin de tirer sur les soldats qui envahiraient le rez-de-chaussée pour y attacher des pétards. L’eau bouillante jouerait aussi un rôle utile dans cette circonstance.
Si l’attaque embrasse une grande étendue de front, on coupe les escaliers et on perce les planchers dans toutes les maisons exposées. En règle générale, lorsque le temps et les autres travaux de défense plus urgents le permettent, il faut détruire l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée dans toutes les maisons de l’ilot sauf une, à l’endroit de la rue le moins exposé. »
Auguste Blanqui. Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris. Maintenant il faut des armes. La fabrique 2006

”When the attack has been pushed back, he [the leader] comes back and pushes relentlessly the barricade construction despite interruptions. If needed reinforcement arrives.
This labor done, one put the two lateral barricades in communication by piercing the thick walls that separate houses situated on the defense’s front. The same operation is being executed simultaneously, in the houses on the two sides of the barricaded street until its extremity, then backwards, on the right and on the left, along the parallel street, on the defense’s front and on the back.
Openings have to be practiced on the first [ndt: first floor in Europe is second floor in US] and last floor in order to obtain two ways; work is being achieved in the same way in the four directions.
All the houses’ blocks belonging to the barricaded streets should be pierced in their perimeter, in a way that fighters are able to enter or exit by the backward parallel street, out of sight and out of reach from the enemy.”
”The interior of the blocks generally consists in courtyards and gardens. One could open communications between those spaces, usually separated by weak walls. It should be even compulsory on the bridges whose importance and specific situations expose them to the most serious attacks.
It would be therefore useful to organize companies of non-fighters workers, masons, carpenters, etc. in order to jointly achieve work with the infantry.
When, on the defense’s front, a house is more particularly being threatened, one demolished the ground floor’s staircase and one achieves opening in the various rooms’ floor of the first [second] floor in order to shoot the potential soldiers who would invade the ground floor to apply some bombs. Boiling water can also play an important role in this circumstance.
If the attack embraces an important extent of the front, one cuts the staircases and pierces the floors in all the exposed houses. As a general rule, when the time and the other defense works more urgent allow it, one should destroy the ground floor’ staircase in all the block’s houses except in the one the less exposed. ”

# World Expos from the past

I happened to see some pictures (via Archdaily) from various pavilions' construction yesterday for Shanghai Expo 2010 and it made me recall when World Expos were actually synonym with architectural experiments and innovation.
In 1958, Le Corbusier and Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion for Brussels' Expo
In 1967, Montreal's Expo hosts various innovative buildings designed by Frei Otto (German Pavilion), Moshe Safdie (Habitat67) and Buckminster Fuller (Biosphere).
In 1970, Kisho Kurokawa designed three buildings for Osaka's Expo as metabolist manifestos.

Today, the French pavilion for Shanghai 2010 is pretty representative of the global quality of architecture (as far as the Expo is concerned but maybe also in general): it is drab, conventional and thinks it talks about sustainability because some plants grow (have been plugged) on it... I talk about the French one, but the others are not so interesting either...Heatherwick's British pavilion might be the only one interesting questioning the notion of archive by hosting a giant seed bank.

# Kowloon Walled City documentary

Here is a 40 min long German (Austrian ?) documentary filmed in 1989 within the Kowloon Walled City (see all the previous posts about it 1/2/3). The density of this Hong Kong district - the highest in the world before it got destroyed in 1993- creates the feeling of an underground autarkic world, the quintessence of an heterotopia, with its protocols of entrance/exit, its superimposition of several worlds layers (see link 3) and its imaginary of freedom/danger within it.

# (UN)WALL /// Complement to the last article The Edge

In the last article, I was evoking this intuition I have about the best transgression of the wall being the fact of standing on it. Pretty stupidly, I did not recall immediately all those East and West Berliner on November 09th 1989 who exactly did that. The gesture there was not so much of crossing the wall but rather standing freely on it, on the very narrow part of Berlin that belong to both East and West.

# (UN)WALL /// Bunker Archeology by Paul Virilio

In his Bunker Archeology (1975), Paul Virilio establishes an inventory of bunker typologies and tries to determine what the essence of those militaries architecture might be.
The plans and sections inserted in the book illustrate spaces which are not anymore framed by walls as usual but rather spaces within the walls. The interior space is thus felt like tunnels and cavities inside a concrete mass, the wall itself.
However those walls have an important characteristics which is that they are not anchored in the ground, allowing themselves to slightly move whenever a bombshell explode nearby.
You can also read the two articles (here and here) we already released on boiteaoutils and the one written by Geoff Manaugh for BLDGBLOG.