Monthly Archives: December 2010

# GREAT SPECULATIONS /// Cellular Clay Multifamily Habitation by Saken Narynov

Kazakh architect and artist Saken Narynov created a superstructure able to host what we could call an adobe vertical city. In fact, the structure is used as a matrix that can be more or less densely filled with multifamily habitation units.
The traditional earth based material thus hybrids with the steel structure in a very unusual and interesting way and the space resulting between the habitation units and the structure is beautifully occupied by mazes of staircases and elevated pathways.

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# PHOTOGRAPHY /// Bildbauten by Philipp Schaerer

The series of images created by Philipp Schaerer entitled Bildbauten (built pictures in German) includes twenty five rendering of monolithic buildings that seem to have been produced by their environment in some sort of camouflaged bunkers.

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# STUDENTS /// Sadic Apiaries by Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia

The fifth studio Francois Roche has been tutoring at Columbia University since 2006 recently presented its last projects. One of them drove an interesting conversation between the jury and its authors, Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia. For this year’s studio, Francois Roche was assisted by Ezio Blasetti and Dave Pigram

For the second year, this studio was experimenting processes of life and death of an architecture; in this regard, Sadic Apiaries is a system composed by two robots and thousand of bees. The first robot is used as a mobile matrix for the bees to build the hives architecture, while the second robot exercises a sadistic role on the bees via smoke throw in order to orient the construction.
With time, the wax loose of its consistency (and color) and eventually disintegrates, thus triggering the death of this architecture.

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# STUDENTS /// First year projects by Khilna Shah & Inti Rojanasopondist

Since September, my friend Sofia Krimizi has been teaching a studio in the first year of the Pratt Institute‘s undergraduate program. The assignment consisted in a series of three projects related to each other which was exploring both the notion of mass/void and the notion of joint. Several projects can be said to have been successful but the two following ones reached a level of intelligence that is rare in this early stage of the studies.

The first one has been designed by Khilna Shah. She managed to create a model working only in tension and which allow enough elasticity in order to carry a variable amount of weights that would modify the structure’s morphology.

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# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// Bunker 599 + 603 by Rietveld Landscape

After Interaction Between the Elements, here is another project by Rietveld Landscape I wanted to publish. Bunker 599 + 603 is the story of a Matta Clarkian cut in the middle of a bunker on the Dutch coast. The most massive and close architecture thus becomes permeable and proposes to the viewer, a three dimensional section of this mass of concrete.

Here is the official text related to the project:

Bunker 599 + 603

This project lays bare two secrets of the New Dutch Waterline (NDW), a military line of defence in use from 1815 until 1940 protecting the cities of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem by means of intentional flooding.

A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. The design thereby opens up the minuscule interior of one of NDW’s 700 bunkers, the insides of which are normally cut off from view completely. In addition, a long wooden boardwalk cuts through the extremely heavy construction. It leads visitors to a flooded area and to the footpaths of the adjacent natural reserve. The pier and the piles supporting it remind them that the water surrounding them is not caused by e.g. the removal of sand but rather is a shallow water plain characteristic of the inundations in times of war.

The sliced up bunker forms a publicly accessible attraction for visitors of the NDW. It is moreover visible from the A2 highway and can thus also be seen by tens of thousand of passers-by each day. The project is part of the overall strategy of Rietveld Landscape | Atelier de Lyon to make this unique part of Dutch history accessible and tangible for a wide variety of visitors.

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# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Kowloon Walled City

Kowloon Walled City can obviously not be literally considered as self-constructed. However, this Hong Kong district acquired a kind of autonomy for years and could not stop densifying itself until it was demolished by Authorities in 1993 (See Ryuji Miyamoto’s photographs of the empty Walled City, ready to be tear down).
The Walled City tackles an interesting problem about the connection such autonomous district could have with legality. In fact, there has been a strong phantasm of insecurity about it, probably encouraged by the authority when some neutral reporters like Greg Girard and Ian Lambot (read their “City of Darkness” from where almost all photographs we still have come from) affirmed that the district was the shelter of drug addict but not criminals.
Before it was demolished, the Walled City was the home of 50 000 inhabitants reaching an incredible density of 1 920 000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
As far as self-construction is concerned, let’s quote City of Darkness:

“With lifts in just two of the City’s 350 or so buildings, access to the upper floors of the 10 to 14 storey apartment blocks was nearly always by stairs, necessitating considerable climbs for thos who lived near the top. This was partly alleviated by an extraordinary system of interconnecting stairways and bridges at different levels within the City which took shape -somewhat organically- during the construction boom of the 1960′s and early 1970′s. It was possible for example, to travel across the City from north to south without once coming down to street level.”

Let’s add to this description, the one of this grid placed over the district’s temple (right in the center of the Walled City) on which inhabitants having their windows on the courtyards throw away their garbage, transforming the temple’s environment into a shadowy underworld.

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// The Last Land by Hans Schabus

Here is the project that Hans Schabus achieved for the Venice Art Biennale 2005: a monumental piece of rock in the middle of the Giardini. The inside part is as impressive as the outside with numerous wooden beams and posts maintaining the building’s structural integrity.

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# INTERVIEWS /// Raja Shehadeh

Thanks to Romaric, my friend who works at French publisher Galaade, I had the chance to meet Raja Shehadeh for an interview he kindly accepted.

Raja is a lawyer in Ramallah since the end of the 70′s and has dedicated his carrier to cases of expropriation of Palestinian lands by the Israeli.
He wrote several books, including Occupier’s Law and Palestinian walks.
Ramallah. 21st July 2010

Leopold Lambert: The particularity of your actions is that you are a lawyer. Despite the fact that law is violated every day by the State of Israel, what may be some naivety from me makes me think that it is the one domain that can save Palestinians from oppression. Would your expertise agree with that?

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# INTERVIEWS /// 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.
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# INTERVIEWS /// Teddy Cruz on Archinect

Power and powerlessness is the title of Archinect’s interview of Teddy Cruz I recommend you to read for its description of the Estudio Cruz’ s archi-political work on San Diego/Tijuana’s border zone. Teddy Cruz was participating to November conference of Oppositional Architecture and declared that he believe in a long term work to make institutions evolve rather than a resistance based on the non-respect of established rules.

# INTERVIEWS /// Roland Snooks (Swarm 3/3)

Third and last interview for this SWARM thematic. This one is of Roland Snooks from Kokkugia. Roland speaks about his research about multi-agent strategies in his studio and in the schools he is teaching (Columbia, Pratt, Sci-Arc, UPenn, RMIT…)

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?

Designing through complex systems, in particular through multi-agent design methodologies, does not represent a loss of control in the design process, however the nature of design and authorship changes. It is a shift from invention of form to the orchestration of processes. Within highly volatile algorithmic design processes topology and dimension are not directly controlled, however the formal and organisational characteristics, which are tied to the internal behavior of the algorithm are controlled through an iterative design process.

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# INTERVIEWS /// Francois Roche (Swarm 2/3)

This is the second interview of the Swarm thematic about R&Sie(n)‘s work and research.

Interview Leopold Lambert / september 17th

 

 

Short stories from an acephala body / f. Roche


 

 

 

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?


This notion has to be used carefully, to avoid a direct and reductive analogy between bird, ants and humans. The swarm intelligences work in the nature at the condition to reduce and limit the inputs, but contradictorily, humans are known to de-multiply inputs and outputs, between their perception and the illusion of their perception and the paranoia of the both…

The first who introduce for me the politic hypothesis of Swarm intelligences was Ilya Prigogine in his book ”the end of certainty’, where his thermodynamic analyze showed the opposition between Newtonian and Entropic scientific approach.


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# INTERVIEWS /// Valerie Chatelet (Swarm 1/3)

Valerie Chatelet is the publication director of Interactive Cities, published in 2007 by HYX. You can download her own article from HYX website.

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?

Valerie Chatelet: What is pretty fascinating in emergent processes in human situations without any centralized or voluntary organization, is not really their intelligence, but much more their absurdity. We keep calling intelligence patterns which emerges at a superior level from the one where were taken the decisions, even when those patterns are fatal. We are the heir of a fascination for emergent processes which take their roots in the origins of computer science and simulation possibilities. This fascination is still persisting nowadays, in particular for the architects, by the omnipotence that provides the enormity of flux we potentially succeed to manipulate.
Although if anthill are magic/intelligent in their mechanism despite its composing individuals’ simplicity, what emerges from human society is more about traffic jams, congestion phenomena, pollution, resources waste, stock exchange crisis, public space privatization, urban spreading or scattering.
The point is not to simulate those processes, neither to reproduce them but on the contrary to come out of those emergent absurdity. There are thus two intervention hypothesis: the structure or the awareness. Structures which could be architecture works are imposing themselves in a centralized way and find their legitimacy in the fact that they allow to go beyond the emergent phenomena’s insufficiency. What is new nowadays is the move offered to architecture to design, not anymore structures which organize and solve emergence’s anomalies, but to design devices allowing people to become collectively aware of these phenomena and to modify their behaviors in order to avoid their absurdity.

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# INTERVIEWS /// Stephen Graham by Subtopia

Here is a very interesting interview of Stephen Graham by Brian Finoki (talented webmaster of subtopia) tackling the relationship of architecture and transcendental control in a warfare society as defined by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire.

# INTERVIEWS /// Usman Haque and granularity

I recently met Usman Haque in London and got the chance to talk with him about his work and I’ll be trying here to make an article about it.

Usman Haque is a Bartlett graduated architect who tries to increase human participation in architecture. Too many people confuse technology and interaction he says, himself always trying to create some human engaging interaction more than determinist technology.
The ambiguity consist then in using the same tools than the illusion of so called intelligent environments. Humans are far more adaptable than the technique. That is why he designs environment where sensors, instead of being considered as owners of an inherent logic, tend to propose what seems to be an irrational behaviour which must be learnt indistinctly by humans in order to control it. This is how he tries to achieve to change relationships between people and their environment and also change the way urban designers are conceiving this same environment.
In fact, he develops the concept of granularity as the resolution of different entries to the system:

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# INTERVIEWS /// Peter Cook le 2 novembre 2007 à Londres

Ron Herron pour Archigram / Tuned suburb


Je remarque seulement aujourd’hui que je n’ai jamais diffusé l’interview que Peter Cook m’avait accordé dans le cadre de notre mémoire de diplôme en novembre dernier. Mieux vaut tard que jamais; la voilà ! (il est à noter que grâce à la qualité horrible de mon enregistrement audio, je n’ai plus retranscrire que la seconde partie…)

la traduction française est plus bas…

Léopold Lambert: When we are thinking about design of cities, there are two extreme cases which could be, on the first hand, the paternalist utopian architecture and, on the other hand, an architecture without architect. Where should we stand between these two cases ?

Peter Cook: That is the most difficult question of all ! If you just let anarchy reigns, there would be an authority; it would be the authority of money. There would be a certain point to which it is unliveable.
On the other hand, if everything becomes so “authority written”, it would be what we already call in England, a “nanny state”. Everybody is watching if you do this right, everything is correct, you don’t do this because it is bad for you, you don’t do that because it is bad for others. Don’t do that because it’s not good. Don’t do that because it will upset somebody etc. This is a kind of robot world and I’m against that. If somebody says: “You can only choose one from the other”, I’ll risk for the free state.

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# INTERVIEWS /// Daniel Docu

Building Blog publie une interview de Daniel Docu, ex-graphiste d’Electronic Arts et directeur du département artistique du jeu vidéo online ArenaNet (NCSoft). Cet entretien porte sur la relation du jeu et de l’espace.

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# INTERVIEWS /// François Roche et Stéphanie Lavaux (R&Sie)

Interview réalisée le 6 février à Paris, dans le cadre de notre diplôme Penser la ville démocratique (Pré-jury le 21 mars prochain)


Martin Le Bourgeois : Le pouvoir de l’architecte, plutôt que de le déléguer aux hommes ou aux usagers, vous préférez le déléguer à des machines, ou à la nature (cf : spidernet). Quand vous perdez le contrôle pourquoi ne le remettez vous pas aux usagers plutôt qu’à une altérité autonome et qui n’a pas pour vocation de servir l’homme ?

François Roche : Je sens poindre l’hypothèse qu’il y aurait un déficit d’humanisme. Je sens dans ta question, une critique qui s’insinue malignement comme un préalable, une critique qui flatte celui qui l’émet, drapé et paré d’un supplément d’âme, portant l’humanisme en écharpe, en bandoulière, voir en cartouchière, pour flinguer dans le confort et la complaisance tout ce qui présupposerait ne pas en être.
L’attention aux mécanismes humains, et aux structures qui les conditionnent, l’empathie aux situations, les valeurs climatiques, voir pollutives d’un environnement, la relecture chimique des humeurs, autant de petits dispositifs qui chez R&Sie(n) fonctionnerait plutôt comme sa dénégation et son antidote.
Comment ne pas se prémunir et se méfier d’une notion, resucée anachronique des idéaux de la Renaissance, qui a été le vecteur, le levier opératoire des envolées illusionnistes du XXe siècle. On ne peut en évacuer la duplicité, sous couvert de…, a l’ombre de… ; duplicité maligne auréolée de grandeur d’âme pour simultanément et contingentement s’asservir aux systèmismes de la standardisation fait de tabula rasa, d’autorité panoptique, de mode de production sous-surveillance…pour en éliminer les multitudes, les anomalies, les singularités.
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# INTERVIEWS /// Yona Friedman le 14 novembre 2007 à Paris


INTERVIEW DE YONA FRIEDMAN LE 14 NOVEMBRE 2007

Léopold Lambert & Martin Le Bourgeois: Quelle est l’utilité de la fiction pour penser la ville ?

Yona Friedman: Je ne sais pas. Moi c’est surtout la réalité qui m’intéresse. Beaucoup de mes confrères considéraient mon travail comme fictionnel mais je l’ai réalisé en vrai et si c’est possible une fois, c’est possible plusieurs fois.
Je vais commencer par expliquer le côté social de mon travail. Je pense que les gens ne savent pas exactement ce qu’ils veulent, et, de plus, ils ne savent pas exprimer ce qu’ils veulent. Dès lors, qu’est ce qui est nécessaire que l’architecte puisse corriger ? Quelque chose qui n’est pas définitif. Vous avez l’exemple avec les meubles. Tout le monde trouve normal que je puisse changer ma chaise de position dans la pièce. Maintenant je peux aller plus loin. Je peux imaginer, c’est techniquement possible, que je puisse changer les parois. Je peux également changer la situation de la fenêtre. Donc je peux changer tout. Mon espace privé. Mais la ville, c’est un ensemble de ces espaces privés, une sorte d’accumulation, donc cela a des conséquences sur la ville.
Alors, pour aller un peu plus loin, je peux composer la ville avec l’équipement urbain qui changerait de place. Imaginez que ce boulevard puisse se déplacer cent mètres plus loin. Tout cela est possible si le bâtiment ne touche pas le sol dans son intégralité. La réponse technique est donc très simple. La partie mobile s’insère dans une ossature fixe. Si le mur doit soutenir le plancher supérieur, évidemment, tout cela n’est pas possible.
Si je peux changer mon mobilier, c’est parce que mon plafond est tenu par quelque chose d’autre. L’ossature sert donc de garantie que les choses se trouvant au dessus de vous ne tombent pas sur vos têtes. Ainsi, toute l’enveloppe peut être changeable. Il n’y a, de ce fait, aucune obligation quant à la forme architecturale. C’est le principe.
On m’a souvent dit que l’usager n’est pas capable de changer cet ensemble. A cela, je réponds que j’ai déjà fait l’expérience en réalité, avec de relativement grands groupes, notamment dans des lycées. Ces personnes étaient capables de faire la conception de leurs locaux. En même temps, ceci est passé par l’exigence de l’autorité, en l’occurrence le Ministère de l’Education Nationale, que tout cela soit changeable. Car, évidemment, ce que les gens ont conçu à tel moment ne s’adapte peut être plus dix ans plus tard lorsque les conditions ont changé. C’est pourquoi, j’ai été choisi pour ce travail.
Maintenant, il y a quelque chose d’autre qui m’intéresse. C’est la possibilité pour ces éléments de cette architecture complètement personnalisée, d’être à ce point simplifiés techniquement que ça ne dépend plus de telle ou telle compétence technique.

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# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// Little class of Camouflage in Architecture

I’ve been recently interested in camouflage in architecture and I excerpted the following documents from two books:
- Camouflage by Tim Newark. Thames and Hudson 2007
- Industrial Camouflage Manual. Pratt Institute 1942
When the first one (fourth first pictures) attempts to explore camouflage as much in military than in the animal world and in art, the second one was developed during the Second World War and was interestingly enough, intended to participate to the war effort.
I let you discover those pages that speak for themselves…