# Last Year in Marienbad by Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 film written by the Nouveau Roman author Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. This movie is elaborated as a narrative labyrinth activated by a very dramatic and repetitive way of filming the disturbing baroque setting that close itself on the spectator.

# Within Big Bambu at the Metropolitan Museum

Lots of things have been already posted online about the Metropolitan Museum's current terrace exhibition, Big Bambú by Starn Studio; nevertheless I decided to publish some of the photographs I took yesterday while visiting the exhibition. But, rather than attempting to explain the form of this installation (that you can probably find somewhere else), I preferred to insist on the complexity of the lines in order to lost the viewer.

One has to admit that Big Bambú is not as extreme than in its former version (see previous post) since the MET requested a horizontal platform for people to walk on (at least, those who survived from the pretty bad organization of the museum) which forced the installation to re-adopt a more traditional structure made of vertical and horizontal lines than the previous one.

Despite this fact, one can still imagine a giant bamboo forest populated by hundreds of Barons in the Trees moving from branch to branch without ever touching the ground again...

# 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."

# COMPUTATIONAL LABYRINTH or Towards a Borgesian Architecture

picture: Etching by Eric Desmazieres for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Boston : David R. Godine, 2000

As I wrote a week ago, I was lucky enough to write for the last issue of Pratt's grad students' journal TARP which was proposing to investigate new ways of considering Computational Architecture. Here is the article:

COMPUTATIONAL LABYRINTH or Towards a Borgesian Architecture

Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before its death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

Jorge Luis Borges

It has been several years now since computation has grown within a group of international architecture schools in the Western world. However, something that I regret too often, computational architecture stands as a self-contained discipline. Increasing the limits of the field of possibilities is definitely a laudable idea; however this achievement seems relatively meaningless if it is not achieved with serious consideration for the human dimension in architecture. Based on this statement, I will elaborate with a short study of how computation allows one to design what I would call a ‘Borgesian’ architecture. Jorge Luis Borges’ work indeed involves very evocative spatial dimensions and I will try to focus here on what may be his two most famous short stories: The Lottery in Babylon and The Library of Babel.

The Lottery in Babylon dramatizes a city whose integral human behaviors and functions are systematically subordinate to chance. It is very important to understand that the notion of lottery in this short story is not characterized by an arbitrary distribution of more or less valuable prizes, but rather by a random determination of every citizens’ acts and fates whether those are desirable or dreadful. The whole frenzy – not to say idolatry – of this lottery actually comes from this existence of danger and loss of control.
The notion of loss of control is primordial because it is that which brings us to the creation and origins of architecture and the ability we now have to design with computational methods. In the same way that the Borgesian Babylon ceases to depend on the causal judgment of a transcendental morality, architecture can now tend towards an emancipation from the omnipotence of the architect by partially delegating a power of decision to chance. Actually, the Babylonians and computational architecture still depends on a transcendence; however, the latter no longer arises from a direct subjectivity but rather from an illegible disorder triggered by this subjectivity. On the contrary I would suggest that randomness is able to bring an important dose of irrationality and illegibility which I am personally interested to study. If the hyper-rationalization of an architecture tends to make it more controllable by an institutional power, breaking with this process, could thus be considered as a form of resistance towards such a power. As a homage to Borges, I would propose to call labyrinth any “out of control” architecture inserting in its core a decent amount of resistance to rationality.

The other short story that seems appropriate to evoke in this short study is The Library of Babel. This story is a conscientious description of the library as “a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible,” that host the totality of books composed with all letter combinations possible. The Library is thus questioning the notion of the infinite and its paradoxical spatial application. I intentionally write “paradoxical” because the infinite seems to me as illustrating a conflict between mathematics and physics. The latter can only suggest the infinite without actually describing it whereas, mathematics is a language based on the idea of the infinite. Returning to our field of study, architecture originally belongs to the universe of physics; computation tends to insert mathematics into it and therefore the notion of the infinite.
The only limit to an architecture generated by mathematics is the finite characteristics of its generator: the computer. However, simply the idea of relating architecture to one or several equations is to allow itself to acquire an infinite dimension. Such an idea obviously tackles the issue of its physicality and therefore allows architecture to exist through other means than within the finite amount of the physical world’s particles.
In the same way Borges succeeded to create an infinite world thanks to words and to the reader’s imagination, computation allows the creation of an infinite architecture thanks to its relation to mathematics.

In 1949, Jorge Luis Borges published Ficcionnes, a collection of labyrinthine short stories including the two studied here, and thus proved once again that some of the richest architectures were not necessarily designed by traditional means. Sixty years later, computation, another untraditional means, allows such scenarii to be visualized. It seems appropriate here to evoke very briefly the creation of the hyperlink, which elaborates protocols for the infinite narrative arborescence of another short story from Ficcionnes, The Garden of Forking Paths.
Computation now allows architecture to reach a new dimension be it poetic, political, mathematical or even metaphysical, and thus seems to justify the use of these new tools. The architect now needs to adopt a perfect balance between, on one hand, the amount of control he gives up in order to improve his design, and on the other hand, the amount of control he actually needs to tame the tool so as to not fall into idolatry.

APPENDIX

However unlikely it might seem, no one had tried out before then a general theory of chance. Babylonians are not very speculative. They revere the judgments of fate, they deliver to them their lives, their hopes, their panic, but it does not occur to them to investigate fate labyrinthine laws nor the gyratory spheres which reveal it. Nevertheless, the unofficial declaration that I have mentioned inspired many discussions of judicial-mathematical character. From some one of them the following conjecture was born: If the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodical infusion of chaos in the cosmos, would it not be right for chance to intervene in all stages of the drawing and not in one alone?

The Lottery in Babylon. Jorge Luis Borges. Ficcionnes (1949). Rayo 2008

The universe (which other calls the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal book case. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.

The Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges. Ficcionnes (1949). Rayo 2008

# 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.

# Relationship between engineering and architecture / interview by Francesco Cingolani

Francesco Cingolani is one of the associate of CTRLZ architectures we already published here; he also works for Hugh Dutton Associes in Paris and take part of the blog Complexitys related to this office. He recently asked me to answer to a short interview concerning the relationship between engineering and architecture. The original version in French follows the translated one.
(nb there are four other interviews on Complexitys with people coming from very various backgrounds)

Francesco Cingolani: In your vision, what is the relationship between architecture and engineering?

Léopold Lambert: In order to answer to this question, it is important to define what we understand by engineering. If I define here engineering as the discipline that tend to rationalize, diagrammatize, optimize space so then, in my vision, architecture has to try to evolve to the opposite side of this discipline.
Of course, architects would always have to do concessions to technocracy, however to resist to it -and probably resist it with its own language, its own symbols- seems to me as a important attitude.
Last week, one of my teachers, Catherine Ingraham, was evoking the hypothesis that English architects might have an important part of their education dedicated to engineering for reasons that were relative to colonization. In fact, she had the intuition that such an association of architecture and engineering had for goal to materialize and organize in an optimal way the English presence in colonized land. To associate this way Norman Foster and the colonial Bombay's organization is certainly a bold thing to do, nevertheless, even if this hypothesis would be proved to be wrong, I remain convinced that when architecture and engineering are too closely associated, it leads to a space of control. Obviously, I speak here of disciplines in their definitions; by no means I would like to praise architects and speak out against engineers. Actually the important word here is the notion of control. I like this word because it is not connoted and can thus develop an interesting ambiguity. It is not about completely refuse control and engineering, at least for some obvious physical issues; what, in my opinion, should be done is to resist a transcendental absolute control whether the latter comes from the architect or the encompassing institutional system.

FC: We are in an era of great changes: how do you imagine the architect of the future?

LL: I am a bit cautious about this attitude that consist in considering the present era as special. I think we have to work to gather all the circumstances that would make it become this way, but I don't feel it is really the case right now. What I see hidden behind this question is the question of the "green" architecture, but once again, I am cautious about his unique thought that acts like a new religious moral that capitalism did not have too much problem to appropriate.

FC: Nowadays, digital technologies multiply our possibilities and our conception tools: in your job what is your relationship with this complexity that seems to characterize the contemporary world?

LL: I just wrote a short paper for Pratt's journal that illustrate how parametric design allows us to physically access to the spatial complexity depicted in Jorge Luis Borges' short stories.
Previously, the labyrinth was described in two dimensions and was thus controlled in a transcendental way by its author. Borges, by introducing chance and infinite as generative elements of a space, invented uncontrollable architecture in which everybody can get lost.
Those literary spaces, we can now generates them with the help of computation. Using scientific terminology, architecture mostly belongs to the world of physics. Computer allows it to enter in the world of mathematics, and thus, as far as Borges is concerned, to investigate notions of randomness and infinite.
To make an architecture dependent on an equation is yet a vertiginous thing and that is why too many architects and students let themselves go towards a tool idolatry, what we could call an ergaleiophilie (ergaleio in greek means the tool). One should thus use this tool for goals that are external of itself.

original version:
Francesco Cingolani: Quel est, dans ta vision, le rapport entre l’architecture et l’ingénierie?

Léopold Lambert: Afin de répondre a cette question, il convient de définir ce que l’on entend par ingénierie. Si je définis ici l’ingénierie comme la discipline qui tente à rationaliser, diagrammatiser, optimiser l’espace alors, dans ma vision, l’architecture se doit de tenter d’évoluer a l’opposé de cette discipline.

Bien sûr, les architectes auront sans doute toujours à faire des concessions a la technocratie, néanmoins, lui résister –et sans doute lui résister avec son propre langage, ses propres symboles- me semble être une attitude libératrice.Une de mes professeurs, Catherine Ingraham, la semaine dernière, évoquait l’hypothèse selon laquelle les architectes anglais avaient une formation approfondie en ingénierie dont les raisons dataient de la colonisation. En effet, elle avait l’intuition qu’une telle association de l’architecture et de l’ingénierie avait pour but de matérialiser et organiser de manière optimale la présence anglaise en terres colonisée. Associer de la sorte Norman Foster et l’aménagement du Bombay colonial est certes une chose audacieuse mais quand bien même cette hypothèse se révélerait fausse pour une raison ou pour une autre, je reste persuadé que l’architecture et l’ingénierie lorsqu’associées de trop près mènent inexorablement a un espace de contrôle. Bien évidemment, je parle ici de disciplines dans leurs définitions, il ne s’agit en aucun cas de faire l’apologie des architectes et de conspuer les ingénieurs. D’ailleurs, le mot important ici, est la notion de contrôle. J’aime ce mot car il n’est pas connoté et peut donc ainsi développer une ambigüité intéressante. Il ne s’agit pas de refuser le contrôle et l’ingénierie, ne serait-ce que pour des problèmes évidents de physique ; ce qui selon moi convient de faire, est de résister a un contrôle transcendantal absolu que celui-ci provienne de l’architecte ou du système institutionnel environnant.

FC: Nous sommes dans un moment de grands changements: comment imagines-tu la figure de l’architecte dans le futur?

LL: Je me méfie un peu de cette attitude qui consiste à considérer la période présente comme spéciale. Je pense qu’il faut œuvrer à réunir toutes les circonstances pour qu’elle le devienne mais je n’ai pas le sentiment que cela soit le cas en ce moment. Ce que je vois caché derrière cette question est la question de l’architecture « verte » mais là encore, je me méfie de cette pensée unique qui agit comme une nouvelle morale a tendance franchement religieuse que le capitalisme n’a pas eu trop de mal a s’approprier.

FC: Aujourd’hui, les technologies numériques multiplient nos possibilités ainsi que les outils de conception: dans ta profession, quel est ton rapport à cette complexité qui semble caractériser le monde contemporain?

LL: Je viens d’écrire un court papier pour le journal de Pratt qui raconte comment le design paramétrique nous permet d’accéder physiquement à la complexité spatiale décrite dans les nouvelles de Jorge Luis Borges.
Auparavant, le labyrinthe était décrit en deux dimensions et était ainsi contrôlé de manière transcendantale par son auteur. Borges, en introduisant le hasard et l’infini comme éléments générateurs d’un espace a inventé des architectures incontrôlables au sein desquelles, chacun peut se perdre.
Ces espaces littéraires nous pouvons désormais les générer à l’aide de la computation. En termes scientifiques, l’architecture appartient plutôt au monde la physique. L’ordinateur lui permet d’entrer dans le monde des mathématiques, et ainsi, en ce qui concerne Borges, d’envisager les notions d’aléatoire et d’infini.
Faire dépendre une architecture d’une équation est cependant quelque chose de vertigineux et c’est aussi pourquoi trop d’architectes ou d’étudiants en architecture se laisse aller à une idolâtrie de l’outil, ce que l’on pourrait appeler une ergaleiophilie (ergaleio en grec désigne l’instrument) aigue ! Il s’agit donc de se servir de cet outil à des fins qui lui sont extérieures.

# Constant's New Babylon / Drawings

"The labyrinth as a dynamic conception of space, as opposed to static perspective. But also, an above all, the labyrinth as a structure for mental organization and creative method, wanderings and errors, passes and impasses, luminous breakaways and tragic seclusion, in the generalized mobility of the times (more apparent than real), the grand dialectic of open and closed, of solitude and communion".

Jean-Clarence Lambert. Situationists. Art, politics, urbanism. Actar 1996

I am surprised how much the same images are being dwelled on when one writes about Constant's New Babylon. However, it exists a lot of drawings and models (next post) that are rarely shown and I thought it would be interesting to bring them on.
This issue is actually symptomatic of the fact that most amazing projects are being seen in a very narrow vision forgetting their very essence.

New Babylon is a labyrinthine city that host the nomadic behavior of what Constant calls "the homo ludens" (latin name for the playful human). It is the architectural materialization of Gilles Ivain's Formulary for a new Urbanism, Henri Lefebvre's theory of moments and situations' construction and the Situationist' Unitary Urbanism Bureau that was promoting the "derive continue" (continuous drift) as an experience of the city.

The following drawings are extracted from two (great) books:

- Libero Andreotti & Xavier Costa. Situationists. Art, politics, urbanism. Actar 1996
- Mark Wigley & Catherine deZegher. The activist drawings. The MIT Press 2001

# (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. ”

# Nimis by Lars Vilks for the micronation Ladonia

Ladonia is a micronation within Sweden territory, proclaimed in 1996 by the artist Lars Vilks after he built a monumental labyrinthine sculpture on it in 1980. This splendid structure called Nimis is at the center of an extremely long trial that ended in the decision of demolition but thanks to an issue of ownership it actually never happened (however another sculpture has been removed by a crane boat in 2001).

If you want to read more about Ladonia or even ask for the citizenship you can visit the national website.

# Tadashi Kawamata in Roosevelt Island

In 1992, Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata (see previous posts here and here) was commissioned to create an installation around the abandoned Small Pox Hospital on Roosevelt Island (NYC). Faithful to his craft language - he was using it for more than ten years already - Kawamata and his team produced a wooden labyrinthine structure whose rough aspect was strongly contrasting with Manhattan skyscrapers.
What is interesting here is not as much the final product than the three months that this group of people led by Kawamata needed to achieve the construction lightly embracing the heavy stones of the severe hospital.

# Big Bambú by Starn Studio upcoming to the MET

From April 27th to October 31st, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Arts will host a giant work in progress on its roof. The installation called Big Bambú is designed by twin brothers artist Mike and Doug Starn and is composed by 3200 bamboo poles constituting a huge three dimensions scaffolding maze. One very interesting aspect of it is that the installation will be build up little by little during the exhibition time reconfiguring continuously the space that will be open for one part to the public to climb it up.

To know a little more about it, you can read the New York Time's article about it.