# Futurism in Paris, an explosive avant garde in Beaubourg

Another very interesting current (until february 26th) exhibition in Pompidou Centre, is about how Italian futurism and French cubism influenced each other and eventually succeed to hybrid themselves during the beginning of the XXth century.

Is futurist in his life:
1. Whoever loves life, energy, joy, freedom, progress, novelty, functionality, speed.
2. Whoever acts with instantaneous energy and does not hesitate by cowardice.
3. Whoever, between two possible decisions, prefers the most generous one and the most daring one, towards improvement and individual and racial development.
4. Whoever acts joyfully always turn towards tomorrow, without any remorse, without any pedantry, without any fake reserve, without any mysticism and without any melancholy.
5. Whoever knows how to pass with agility from the most serious occupations to the most light distractions.
6. Whoever loves life outdoor, sport, gymnastics, and heal each day the nimble force of his own body.
7. Whoever knows, in useful times, to give a conclusive poke or slap

(translation is mine so it may not be perfect...)
Texts in Futurism are as important as painting or sculptures, therefore the bookshop ends the exhibition.
Almost a century after, it is very important for us to observe the futurist's captivation for innovation and artefacts and how, by what Walter Benjamin did prophesy as an esthetisation of politic, this art movement took part in fascism ideology and great support for war:

War ? Yes, war is our only hope, our reason for living, our only wish! Yes war ! War against you who die too slowly, and against all the dead bodies which block up our roads.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Such intensity and integrity in art, is quite amazing to observe nowadays and I do recommend books which tried to gather all the futurist manifests (there are several !) like Jean-Pierre de Villiers' one which is unfortunately only in French...

# Ron Arad in Beaubourg

Ron Arad's exhibition in Pompidou Centre started a month ago but I only got the chance to visit here yesterday. Scenography was directly designed by Arad's office and the exhbition is then very very rich and dense. "No discipline" is the title of the exhibition and coherency is definetely achieved between several scales which blur the boundaries between industrial design and architecture.
Exhibition will then fly to Amsterdam and eventually in MOMA.

# SELF-CONSTRUCTION /// Introduction

This month's thematic would be about self-construction.
Self-construction always takes place in an interesting debate for the reason it questions the role of the architect. Moreover, it often succeed to achieve an amazing architecture and urbanism in the pureness of a necessary function, to inhabit. Does that mean that the architect could be considered as a luxury supplier, more or less hidden behind a pseudo artistic or intellectual discourse ? It must not be that simple, but beyond the flagellating exercice of the architect of being amazed by architecture without architects, this same architecture ask some real questions about where to stand as an architect.
We will thus try to see a bit clearer during this month.

# Tara is in Paris

Sailboat Tara is in Paris (on the Petit Palais' bank) until january 11st. This boat has been doing a lot of expedition around the world (for example in 2005, French artist Pierre Huyghe and some friends of his went to Antartica doing some research) and now exhibit its last journey in Artica.

Tara was built in 1989 after having beeing designed by Luc Bouvet et Olivier Petit, architects for Jean-Louis Etienne, a client passionnate in Antartica. Principle was to create a solid boat able to slip - with rudders and fins obviouly removed - on icefield in order to stay on it just in the same way that norvegian navigator Fridtjof Nansen did with his boat, Fram in the XIXth century.

This last exhibition last one year and half between 2006 and 2008 and consisted in a drift on the north pole's ice field while scientific research were achieved.

More informations, pictures and videos on Tara's official website

# Yellow Treehouse by Pacific Environment Architects

Here is a new restaurant built in the north of Auckland by a kiwi office called Pacific Environment Architect.

found by Marksor on Contemporist / more pictures on official site.

# SMALL /// Conclusion

That is how ends our thematic about SMALL. We're a bit sorry not to have found a real coherency with it, but what we can extract from this, would probably be that SMALL is definetely a human scale which can possibly be built by a small group of people trying to express their creativity. Size, economy, technicity, involvement are issues which can, most of the time, be proceed by a small amount of persons and therefore can make a lot of projects happenning. SMALL in public space can thus, be a sum of discreet participation of people to the democratic construction.

picture: Oliver Bishop-Young's garbage dumpster

# SMALL /// Luz intima by Luzinterruptus

Luz intima is a guerrilla intervention in la calle del Pez in Madrid where the collective, Luzinterruptus installed twenty six domestic shades on urban lights. This operation lasted for one night. It is a quite discreet appropriation of public space which I hope would give some motivation for other people to act on commun space.

found on dezeen

# SMALL /// Matthieu Lehanneur's Local river

Local river is the last published project of paris based office Matthieu Lehanneur (with Anthony van den Bossche), which proposes a "locavore" (people who only eat food produced in a radius of 100 miles of them) tool of producing local fish food and vegetables with an absolute control of its owner. Beyond the beautiful design, I do suspect it to be full of irony (at least I hope), by giving such a litteral and luxurious proposition.
It was exhibited this year in Artists Space in New York.

# Before the levees break in Wired

Wired.com currently presents an interesting article about Netherlands' plan for saving the country from huge future floods there. More than fighting these floods, this plan tries the best as possible of coping with water by flooding some areas preventing some others (like cities) from them.

# Green Void by LAVA

This installation by LAVA (LAboratory for Visionnary Architecture) (Stuttgart, Abu Dhabi & Sydney) is a lightweight architectural sculpture made of high-tech nylon which has been digitally cut by CNC (Computer Numeric Code) machines thanks to patterns unfold by computer.
I would be glad to know that it could bring some more light into the building, but I won't be so sure about that...
more pictures on Plataforma Arquitectura

# Tomorrow's Thoughts Today

Tomorrow's Thought Today is a quite new information platform about fictious next urbanism and design. It is lead by two English architects, Darryl Chen and Liam Young, who decided to quit the star system's dependency to develop their own vision.
Here is their manifest:

TOMORROW'S THOUGHTS TODAY is a London-based think tank exploring the consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms. This site is organized as an open sketchbook of our current themes and design projects an ever-expanding repository of our collective research.
TTT REACTS against a torrent of professional conservatism in the urban and regeneration industries and seeks to revive dormant ideas as new sources of inspiration from para-disciplinary fields. Often this leads to reappraisals of dysfunctional milieu. We want to know why pop, pulp and vulgar are so engaging and persistent.
TTT CONDEMNS the fashionable cult of 'innovation' that hides a lack of depth of thinking within historical narratives. We are no longer bound by the strictures of linear history. Rather, we are free to revalidate late-modern pasts, current archaisms and retro projections of the future.
TTT BELIEVES that our urban environments are best understood as spatial settings for social and political economies and it is within this frame of reference that the most powerful propositions lie.

# SMALL /// Gilles Ebersolt's work

Ballule

Gilles Ebersolt is a French architect, particulary interested in small often inflatable structures created either for landing on an amazonian canopee, living above an abyss or rolling down a mountain (Ebersolt was in fact asked by Jackie Chan to film his ballule in one of his movie).
More pictures and videos on official website.

Solvin Bretzel

Ikos

Tetrafolt