# AT&T Long Lines Building by John Carl Warnecke

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

# Circus, spectacle edge by Guillermo Bernal

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

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

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

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

Here is the text related to the project:

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

# CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# Exit Through the Gift Shop by Banksy

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

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

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

# French Architecture's elite has a new stupid idea

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

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

# Israeli military customized Caterpillar D9

This is the most efficient weapon of the Israeli Army against the Palestinians: The Caterpillar D9, customized IDF way in order to be able to operate alone in the West Bank or in Gaza and not fearing the stones threw at it.
This customization is such a "success" that the American army bought a bunch of them back (Caterpillar is a Californian company) from the Israeli Army.
Whether it destroys Palestinian infrastructures or homes (which it does best), pierces Gaza's tunnels anti-blockade that join Egypt, or simply prepare the foundation of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, the D9 is the weapon that fit the best the way the Israeli State oppress the Palestinian People on a daily basis.

If you are interested in studying it more in details or including it in a narrative, you can download a detailed digital 3d file of the bulldozer (see the renderings below).

# The Rolling House by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos

The Rolling House is a project created and "prototyped" by Madrid based office Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. This piece of vertical urban fabric happens to be an assemblage of collective housing where people live for a certain amount of time with a bunch of roommates, thus creating micro-open-communities living together in a apartment.
The following pictures are disturbing for the reason that they immediately make one recalls the sum of voyeur/exhibitionist reality shows displayed on every Western TV channels. However the difference is that there is no outside here. Nobody observes, each of the inhabitant is part of the "community".
It reminds me what Patrick Bouchain and Exyzt had organized for the 2006 Venice Biennale in the French Pavilion: METAVILLA, a cheap and well designed place of life for a creative and reflective community within the architecture Biennale.

Here is the text wrote by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos:

More than 80 million people live sharing houses only within the European Union. Erasmus apartments, fancy houses shared by posh professionals, transnational immigrants slams. Sharing dwelling is a massive and diverse phenomenon, an invisible urbanism, never attracting, so far, architects’ attention, that challenges the way homes have been thought of in the last decades.

The firm Andrés Jaque Architects, has presented the built prototype of a shared house based on more than 100 interviews to people sharing its living space.. The ROLLING HOUSE. A design based on the knowledge contained by a community living, without awareness, like visionary architects thought in the sixties life would come to be like. Home is no longer the sweet, sweet un-political space for peace, but the very centre of public arena. Interior is no longer the place in which things are familiar to us, but the very place in which we face otherness. And home is no longer the place in which desire is been relieve, but the very scene in which we inhabit the space in-between what present is and what we desire it to be.
Andrés Jaque Arquitectos, presented on April 2009, the first prototype of a sharing home: The Rolling House. It’s a design in which converges the accumulated knowledge of a community that, until now, had been forced to use conventional houses for conventional families.

The Rolling House includes four strategic ideas:
1.- Assign to each room mate a intimacy space, which contains:
-A bed, by which the deployment of a screen-stock, it becomes a social space, a lounge in which to receive any visitor.
- A closet for clothes and accessories, designed as a chest that could easily be transported to the new sharing house.
-A sanctuary, like the cork in which we post the pictures that we do not want to forget.
- A greenhouse to take care of something. Because in many cases having something to watch, is the real reason why we have a house.
2. Agroup all the equipments in a junk beach. Where, without any division, in a unique and diaphanous, includes:
-A bath - shower placed over legs. In consequence, after taking a shower, we can use part of this water, after an elemenatal filtration and fat separation process, as irrigation water, a garden pot.
-A repetitive kitchen. Some fridge, some basic kitchens sets, for a house where, at the same time, some cook and others frizz.
-An Intermittent bathroom. With easy open fabric persins, a bath, a sink, a wc, that works as a unit, in a close space, just when its going to be use.
-Here and there furniture. Claiming the obsolescence of modernity. And also the incoherence of the radical today. Every furniture has a history. Those one who doesn’t required specialization would be the easiest to purchase can be reused. The ones that require specialized treatments would have the necessary technological rank. The ones that save and construct memories, would have, during all their life time the company of the Rolling House in the Rolling House. A furniture and technology parliament that looks forward to answer in a symmetric way, today’s complexity.
3.- Sharing Wall: There is no Rolling House lost in the universe. Each one has small gifts that are placed to been offer for the rest of them. If every house shares, at the same time something with the others, then all of them would have everything. In parallel to the Rolling House access hall, a wardrobe wall, contains the equipments the Rolling House shares with its neighbors. A small gym, a library, a stock of board games, a hair dryer and a Finland sauna. Each sharing house is connected with a neighborhood of houses that are united by the desire of having more through sharing.


More Andrés Jaque Arquitectos' projects on their website including the very beautiful and ingenious Casa en Never Never Land.

# Prairie House by Herb Greene

This beautiful Prairie House was created by a Bruce Goff's (see previous post) protege, Herb Greene in 1960. Built in a Oklahoma prairie, this architecture appears as a manifest for the American "provincial" architecture like Goff designed or more currently Bart Prince in New Mexico: a vernacular construction that seems to have been created by its own biotope.

# The Evil Architects Do by Eyal Weizman

"When an architect’s design premeditatedly aims to cause material damage - as part of a largescale policy of organized aggression - a war crime may have been committed."

This article written by Eyal Weizman for Rem Koolhaas' Content is not so new anymore (2003) but unfortunately nothing has changed since then...
In this short essay entitled The Evil Architects Do, Weizman establishes that "architecture and planning intersects with the strategies of contemporary conflicts in ways that the semantics of international law are still ill-equiped to describe."
In fact, architecture has a fundamental role to play in the current warfare -which does not consist anymore in two symmetrical armies fighting in the middle of a field- and the international laws, that once again (see the previous articles) have been made supposedly to be respected by every nations, seem to be not precised enough to really describe the current ways it is now used -as construction or destruction- as a military weapon, especially in Gaza and the West Bank.
The law must therefore be re-written in a much more precised way and architects should face their responsibility in case of being the accomplices of what is being described as a war crime or a crime against humanity.

The following excerpts are what the International Laws stipulates about architecture:

The Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court
Articles referred to above in relation to the transformation of the built environment.
(See the complete statue on: http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/romefra.htm)

Crimes Against Humanity

Article 7.2.d
“Deportation or forcible transfer of population” means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present…

War Crimes

Article 8.2.a.iv
Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;

Article 8.3.b.viii
The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory;

Article 8.3.b.ix
Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives;

# 2012 / Appetite for destruction

I just watched the movie 2012 and I have to say that this film left me puzzled. I don't really want to write to much about the fact that it is one of the rare movie in which the world actually ends (it is more frequent that it is saved at the very last second !) and that the moral of it is absolutely outrageous (rich Westerners celebrating their belonging to the saved elite triggering a genocide by omission...).
What makes me perplexed is the visual fascination that we can have for destruction. In 2001 we were drugged of images of the World Trade Center collapsing without being ever sated watching over and over the same videos of the planes crashing into the towers. What is this appetite for destruction that 2012 develops excessively? Is that a simple fascination for an unusual spectacle or is it more subtle and deeper than that? Wouldn't that be a self-destruction pulse, some self-censored revolutionary pyromaniac envies that pops-out more or less conscientiously?
In order to bring propositions to this question, we might want to allies Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Paul Virilio...maybe Slavoj Zizek did explored this problem...

to be continued.

# The former Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi

Recently Core.form.ula published a small article about the famous former Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi (Georgia). Designed in the 70's this building is a good example of the sequel of Soviet Administration Constructivism.

# Numen's Tape Installations

Numen is a Vienna based office that created four different installations exclusively with tape. They appropriate a site, find some attachment nodes and create a penetrable cocoon for their visitors. Those Tape Installations have been produced for two different sites in Vienna, one in Belgrade, and recently one for Berlin's former airport Tempelhof.