Monthly Archives: April 2011

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Cloud Architecture by Carla Leitao in the Huffington Post

Posted on April 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

Yesterday’s Huffington Post published an interesting article entitled Cloud Architecture  written by Carla Leitao, well known professor of architecture in New York and co-principal of the office AUM Studio with Ed Keller.

Within this article, she advocates for an architecture that would be inspired by the cloud or the fog, as much for its blur than for its ability to reconfigure continuously its shape than it can actually be said to be “formless” (concept borrowed to Georges Bataille).
This enunciation of a precise and articulate argument is even more important than it comes from a frenetic context for the use of particles, atmospheres and flux that are almost always the pieces of a retroactive legitimacy for a pre-given aesthetics. Carla’s text is therefore important to replace what is really in stake for architecture innovative practice and education in this field of exploration.
The article is joined by a series of references, some of which are recurrently published on The Funambulist (R&Sie(n), Brian Buckner/Loukia Tsafoulia, Kokkugia, Alissa Andrasek, Magnus Larsson) among other (Diller/Scofidio, David Benjamin, Rachel Armstrong etc.).

Here is the article as published by the Huffington Post:

CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
Carla Leitao

Back in 2006, while participating in the NewBlood exhibition organized by the Portuguese Architects Guild, our office stated that our approach to work was one where we attempt to voluntarily un-focus or blur the image of a building and instead imagine we are designing fogs. We find that this ‘mist’ typology works as a design process because it better enables us to read and enact on the patterns, flows, continuities, cohesions and ruptures which better encompass the fluid nature of the systems that architecture, urban and landscape systems are made of.
Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Architectural Theories, Essays

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Camouflage by Neil Leach with photographs by Francesca Woodman

Posted on April 28, 2011 | 2 Comments

After having evoked a very literal vision of camouflage yesterday (see the article), the book entitled Camouflage written by Neil Leach in 2006 and published by the MIT Press, proposes a more philosophical way to interpret such notion.
In this book, N.Leach interprets camouflage as a phenomenological survival strategy or masquerade that  questions the notion of the “self” and the “other”. It can be said to be a sort of treatise of aesthetics in architecture, a value that after having being demonized currently comes back as a self-sustaining argument. N. Leache stands obviously out of those two “schools” and proposes a series of chapters referencing the depth of the aesthetical discourses by themes (mimesis, mimicry, becoming, death, narcissism, identity, paranoia, belonging, sacrifice, melancholia, ecstasy…). Each of those chapters are accompanied by beautiful photographs by Francesca Woodman of young women phenomenologically amalgamating their bodies with the building.

Neil Leach uses references from philosophy (Benjamin, Adorno, Deleuze, Caillois etc.), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), gender studies (Butler), anthropology (Levi-Strauss), religion (St Teresa),  botany (orchids), zoology (chameleons), literature (Bataille) and myth (Narcissus, Daedalius, Medusa etc.). One who would like to explore all those fields related by the erudite Leach would have to read the book (or listen to the course at USC attached at the very end of this article, but this is only an overview of the book) but here, I would like to copy the two first pages of the chapter “Sacrifice” that I find profoundly interesting (probably because that might be one the most “architectural” moments of this book):

Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Architectural Theories, Books, Philosophy, Photography, Topie Impitoyable

# HISTORY /// WWII Camouflaged City

Posted on April 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

In 1942, after the United States entered the second world war and fearing the Japanese threat on the Pacific coast, an entire aircraft plant and airport -the Lockheed Burbank- has been camouflaged to escape from sight to potential Japanese airplanes. It is interesting to observe that, in order to do so, the US army had to ask for the help of Hollywood studios -WWII is probably the beginning of a long history of exchanges between Hollywood and the US Army- to make this industrial landscape appearing as a piece of suburbia. The very vast aircraft plant was therefore obliged to function under a porous canopy from which was emerging here and there, some chimneys disguised in trees or fountains.

Thanks Martial. (see more on amusingplanet)

Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Architectural Projects, History, Militarized Architectures, Weaponized Architecture

# POLITICS /// Violence on the Body. A Manual for the French Police escorting illegal immigrants

Posted on April 26, 2011 | 7 Comments

The last decade would have seen Europe experiencing a very important wave of xenophobia that are modifying our institutions in their very essence. As two current examples, Hungary is modifying its constitution in order to declare Christians as “normal citizens” and Italy and France are threatening Shenghen space to know who will have to take care of 20 000 Tunisian emigres who just fled their country.

In this context, French alternative press website Mediapart (here is a link toward the English version) just released the Manual created for the French Police to escort clandestine to the border. In this manual, a dozen of pages are describing the procedure of strangulation in order to potentially calm who is being called “the foreigner”. That’s in fact, his only crime, believing that globalization was not just for goods, but also for people and he his categorized as the absolute otherness, the one we are taught to fear and to expel.

Those pages of description of the strangulation are interesting to look at. Their coldness reveals the banality of violence, and yet two things strike me.
The first one is that those photos present this violence as a choreography that appear as even more terrifying as it gives to it the disturbing ambiguity between an embrace and a rape.
The second one is the analytical presentation of it, that reminds me the presentation of an architectural project. Diagrams, elevations (it shows front side and back), perspectives, texts, everything is here to describe an action on the body. This is reading I do, in the spectrum of my thesis, which is that architecture is weaponized, it carries  inherently a tremendous power on the bodies and exercises it by its physicality. This argument might appear as exaggerated, especially in that extreme case, but I include at the end of this article, some photographs by Edmund Clark taken in the current extreme architectural paradigm in that matter, Guantanamo camp. In both cases, violence is expressed in its banalization which is the absolute danger of our so called liberal and democratic societies.

This article was published on Critical Legal Thinking

Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Architectural Theories, Cruel Design, Law, Politics, Topie Impitoyable, Weaponized Architecture

# PHILOSOPHY /// Letter from Jean-Francois Lyotard to Arakawa and Madeline Gins

Posted on April 24, 2011 | 1 Comment

The following letter has been written by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard to Arakawa and Madeline Gins in 1997. Their answer is readable in the fantastic book Reversible Destiny: We have decided not to Die published by the Guggenheim Museum in the same year.

Dear Friends,

Could one perhaps call your antidestiny architecture “antibiography”?
Would the distribution of time between beginning and end be neutralized?
Would the possibilities reserved for childhood remain open in every circumstance? Might they even multiply? Could the body be younger at sixty years of age than at fifteen?
The body would no longer inhabit a dwelling that grew old along with it. It would no longer inhabit a dwelling that grew old along with it. It would no longer be dedicated to adapting itself to constant volumes –a door here, a chair there, an ear here, a pair of knees there. Would it space begin anew each day?
Instantaneous habits would come and go. Affectionately, energetically. Would architecture summon energy and affection to inhabit the body?
Would it be futile to build concepts? Could one write or draw through encounters. Straight from nothingness?
The three children playing hide-and-seek in this house as I ask you these questions reverse the destinies of the beds, the tables, the rooms, ignoring the assigned purposes of each. Laughter, shouts, silence, vehemence, foot-stamping, breathlessness –is this, in fact, similar to the task your architecture expects of us, dear Madeline, dear Arakawa?

Jean-Francois Lyotard
January 1st 1997

Translated from the French, by Stephen Sartarelli.

Arakawa/Gins. Reversible Detiny.New York: Guggenheim Museum Publication 1997.

Other articles/essays about Arakawa/Gins’ work
- Dislocative Architecture by Ed Keller
- Architectures of Joy by myself

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Arakawa/Gins, Architectural Theories, Books, Philosophy

# LECTURES AND SYMPOSIUMS /// Speculative Materialism in Rovinj (Croatia) & The Social Parameter at ESA

Posted on April 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

On August 6-7th, in Rovinj (Croatia) will be held an incredible symposium organized by Alissa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic entitled Speculative Materialism. During two days, amazing speakers (Reza Negarestani, Ed Keller, Usman Haque, Francois Roche, Wolf Prix, Tom Kovac, Alissa Andrasek and so much more…) will expose one by one, how their work are more or less generated by materialism philosophy.

Closer from now, my friend Andri Gerber, professor at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture is organizing a round table questioning the human and social aspect of computer generated architecture. This round table will involve a conversation between Antoine Picon, Sandford Kwinter, Albena Yaneva, Daniel Dendra, Philippe Morel and Odile Decq.

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Lectures and Symposiums

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// The Burdens of Linearity. Donkey Urbanism by Catherine Ingraham

Posted on April 22, 2011 | 4 Comments

picture: The donkey, the dwelling place and the rock by Laura Adams Armer extracted from Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity by Catherine Ingraham. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

In 1992, Catherine Ingraham wrote a short essay entitled The Burdens of Linearity for the Chicago Institute of Architecture and Urbanism. Six years later she published a book with the same name that brought back this essay under the chapter’s name. The Burdens of Linearity. Donkey Urbanism. The Donkey -and the mule- is in fact the recurrent animal in this book, he is the burden beast to who Le Corbusier attributes  the plan of all the pre-modern cities. According to the Swiss-French architect, the donkey by his zigzags’ tracks that “takes the lines of least resistance, drew the lines of the city. Modernity, on the contrary, advocates for the pure and sane orthogonality that celebrates the fact that “Man has made up his mind”. Le Corbusier’s obsessive pathology for sanity, is fully expressed here: Architecture and the City have to constitute thaumaturgic machines in which health is no longer a mean to perpetuate life but rather celebrated as a self-justified end.
To the asserted “ruinous, difficult and dangerous curve of animality” by Le Corbusier, one can think of Deleuze’s Becoming Animal that celebrate the adherence to the counter-standard imposed by Modernity. In this matter, the anti-modern behavior by excellence is the Situationist drift (dérive) and the anti-modern architecture/urbanism is Constant’s immanent labyrinth (see the article about Kafka’s Trial) constituted by the New Babylon, the city of humans who did not make up their minds.

In the following excerpt of this same chapter, Catherine Ingraham recounts Le Corbusier’s “mythopoetical account of the history of the city” and subtly  promotes a “bestial urbanism” that will lead her to write her next book Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition in 2006.

Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Architectural Theories, Books, History, Philosophy

# FINE ARTS /// The art of Mapping as a subjective vision of the city. Stephen Walter & Sohei Nishino

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 3 Comments

pictures: Stephen Walter (above) and Sohei Nishino’s (below) maps of London

Maps, in our imaginary, carry much more objectivity than they actually do in reality. We can probably explain that by the reliability that we put in them in order to locate ourselves in a city or in a country. However, just like the architect plan (another kind of map), maps are actually a form of representation that is characterized by just as much subjectivity than any other forms. They only shows what make sense in their system of logic, they use a more or less complex aesthetic vocabulary and they often emphasize the importance of some of their included elements.
The work of art that expresses the best this subjective beauty in my opinion remains the medium length 1978 movie by Peter Greenaway, A Walk Through H. (see previous article) in which an ornithologist recounts his journey in 92 maps that one by one leads more and more toward abstraction. Very luckily you can watch this movie by following this link.

Stephen Walter and Sohei Nishino are two artists who are exploring the subjectivity of the map. S. Walter has draw two gigantic maps of London and Liverpool in a sort of report of Situationist drifts (derives) experiencing the psychogeographies of those two cities. His maps are mostly constituted by doodles and words that places various neighborhoods and its characteristics but also his autobiographical feeling about those places when he went there. Space’s representation and narratives are then completely colliding in one documents and makes S.Walter’s maps absolutely fascinating.
Sohei Nishino is using photographs to compose his maps which oscillate between aerial views and maps using a technique that became famous by David Hockney which consists in assembling pictures together despite their different vanishing points. S.Nishino chose some very generic photographs from main monuments of each city to make the map more recognizable but one could imagine his work with an approach more similar to Stephen Walter’s that would assemble pieces of life brought together with pictures that would eventually constitutes the city.
Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Fine Arts, Maps, Photography

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Pro Domo by Yona Friedman

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

all images are extracted from the book Pro Domo by Yona Friedman. Barcelona: Actar 2006

The understanding of Yona Friedman‘s work can be said to be disturbed by its popularity. His Ville Spatiale, just like Constant’s New Babylon, suffers from its architectural formalization that is immediately categorized as a 60′s megastructure that simply allows a second level to the existing city. Those prejudices are not helped by the fact that Yona Friedman develops a simplicity of language and of drawing (whether we are talking about his perspectives than his graphic novels) which makes him appear as a gentle naive idealist to the reader who would pass too quickly on his work (and that’s something the blogosphere definitely allows).

For a very long time if you were reading French, you would probably be easily able to go further in his research; from now on, this is also easy in English, as Actar published the book Pro Domo which gathers an important amount of his texts, research and projects. Within the frame of this article, I also translated in English the interview Martin Le Bourgeois and myself had done of Y. Friedman in 2007 for our Undergraduate Thesis.

The Ville Spatiale as a principle can be said to be Yona Friedman’s only work that he spent fifty years to explore and redraw again and again. However, it is fascinating to observe the ensemble of approaches that he took in order to fully understand what was at stake in this project and how to actually make it happen to a small or a big scale. Before enumerating them, it seems important to re-affirm what the Ville Spatiale is about, as it has been too often shaded by its radical representation:

The Ville Spatiale is an architectural mean of the democratization of urban design built up by the citizen themselves. It advocates for an architecture without plans that adapts to people’s desire and implement a negotiation between neighbors. The Architect is only an adviser and in charge of designing the (infra)structure that will provide space and necessary resources for the city to grow.

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Architectural Projects, Architectural Theories, Books, Great Speculations

# LITERATURE & CINEMA /// The Kafkaian Immanent Labyrinth as a Postmortem Dream

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 8 Comments

In the following essay, I would like to expose my interpretation of The Trial as written by Franz Kafka published after his death in 1925 and then adapted in a film by Orson Welles in 1962. The images in this article are extracted from this movie.

The Trial carries all the characteristics of a dream. The fact that Joseph K. is in bed in the first line of the novel –he is even sleeping in the film- is only a clue in that direction. Just like a dream, the whole narrative is centered on his person and nothing seems to exist where he is not here.
The dream is then shared between elements of K.’s fantasies and fears which can categorize this dream as a nightmare. On the one hand, all along the narrative, K. distributes orders and accomplish eloquent speeches that express a fantasy for power that Orson Welles’ character –played by Anthony Perkins- does not seem to inherently own when one observes his non-charismatic presence. This paradox goes even much further with his surprising success with women who all fall for him with such easiness that can only be expressed by fantasy. We will find again such fantasy in The Castle the main character who shares his name with K.
From then, paranoia can be implemented as each man becomes a threat either for him and his judicial case or for “his” women who all end up kidnapped by other men. Orson Welles even illustrates such a “kidnapping” by a scene in which a woman who just got seduced by K. is carried by a magistrate in a very expressive position which recalls Jean Boulogne’s Rape of the Sabine Women.

Continue reading →

→ 8 Comments

Posted in Cinema, Essays, Labyrinthine Architectures, Literature, Philosophy

# STUDENTS /// The Supurban Project by Nick Axel

Posted on April 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

The Supurban Project is a thesis project in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s B.Arch program by Nick Axel (who now lives in Santiago, Chile). Located in Phoenix, Arizona it questions the status of suburbia as a inanimate grid by designing a megastructure inspired from the 70′s that breaks this grid and reactivate neighborhoods by linking them together and implementing new public spaces.

One of the reasons of existence of Suburbia was in fact to kill public space as it was understood with the Mediterranean paradigm [we currently see what it allows with the "Arab Spring"]. Quoting an article I wrote a year ago about the Obscure History of Suburbia, Mike Davis affirms in City of Quartz 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.

I read Nick’s project as a metaphorical manifesto, a megastructure as an extreme and literal expression of a will to invent a new paradigm of public space inspired by the Mediterranean one but incorporating the modern American fascination for cars and highways.

Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Architectural Projects, Great Speculations, Other Schools (USA), Students

# LITERATURE /// Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Posted on April 16, 2011 | 1 Comment

The following excerpt is the first lines of the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami which describes the main character’s “journey” in an elevator so slow that he does not know if it goes up or down to eventually access a long neutral corridor of which the doors’ number do not follow each other. Somewhere between Kafka and Wong Kar Wai…

Thank you Martin for the parallel

ELEVATOR, SILENCE, OVERWEIGHT

THE elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent.There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?

Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building, scarcely one notch up the evolutionary scale from a well bucket. You’d never believe the two pieces of machinery had the same name and the same purpose. The two were pushing the outer limits conceivable as elevators.

First of all, consider the space. This elevator was so spacious it could have served as an office. Put in a desk, add a cabinet and a locker, throw in a kitchenette, and you’d still have room to spare. You might even squeeze in three camels and a mid-range palm tree while you were at it. Second, there was the cleanliness. Antiseptic as a brand-new coffin. The walls and ceiling were absolutely spotless polished stainless steel, the floor immaculately carpeted in a handsome moss-green. Third, it was dead silent. There wasn’t a sound—literally not one sound—from the moment I stepped inside and the doors slid shut. Deep rivers run quiet.
immaculately carpeted in a handsome moss-green. Third, it was dead silent. There wasn’t a sound—literally not one sound—from the moment I stepped inside and the doors slid shut. Deep rivers run quiet.
Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Literature

# STUDENTS /// Drawing a Kimono 新在英国日本国大使館 by Fredrik Hellberg

Posted on April 15, 2011 | 3 Comments

After his very beautiful Manhattan Oneirocritica (see previous article) which was proposing a model of New York City including all the mythical buildings that were never built, Fredrik Hellberg makes me the honor of coming back on The Funambulist with one more brilliant project. His story DRAWING A KIMONO  新在英国日本国大使館 (A new Japan Embassy in London), introduces a narrative in which the guardian of the Embassy wears a Kimono that recounts the story of the building before he allows the Embassy ‘s ceramic facade to unfold itself in order to open the building.
This project has been designed in the frame of the Architectural Association‘s Unit Diploma 13 tutored by Oliver Domeisen. I recommend the reading of Fredrik’s texts that follow my comment as they allow to explore more deeply and precisely this beautiful story.

The representative language Fredrik is using strikes us by their uniqueness.  He actually produce the project’s Kimono after an interesting research on this art that like other Japanese Arts celebrates the precision of the gesture.
Although, I was not necessarily planning on publishing his project right after the text of Exodus, it is very interesting to observe the evolution of the Architectural Association in almost forty years. I don’t really know how much Koolhaas and Zenghelis’ thesis was representative of the AA at that time but the fact that such media has been accepted is already illustrative of what could happen back then.
The straight forward political aspect has pretty much disappeared and has been replaced by an obsessive regard for details and ornamentation but the narrative remains extremely compelling and determinant of the essence of the project. I am convinced that ornamentation in architecture is currently experiencing a come back to the center of the debate because of a retroactive manifesto, computational architecture being confronted to an economical issue that allows it to exist only as an additional aesthetic layer. However, projects like Fredrik’s make me think that ornament can transcend this condition in order to convey an interesting narrative. Of course, many people would probably argue that narrative in architecture is another kind of ornamentation but those people do not realize that narratives allow architecture to access a territory beyond Good and Evil as Nietzsche would put it. This project is a perfect illustration that such a creative process can access to such territory only by fully engaging its essence with strong audacity, ardor and persistence.

Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in AA, Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures, Students

# GREAT SPECULATIONS /// Integral Text of Exodus by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vreisendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis

Posted on April 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

A while ago, I published an important amount of images produced in 1972 by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vreisendorp,  and Zoe Zenghelis for their thesis at the Architectural Association. Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, despite the reunification of West and East Berlin, remains an extremely powerful icon of the current urban design’s ideology. I never got the chance to publish the integral text of the project, owning a very uneditable version of it but Mariabruna Fabrizi et Fosco Lucarelli recently edited it on Socks which now allows me to present it.
It seemed important as this text is just as much important as the other documents for Exodus to make sense.

Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture
Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis (1972)

Once, a city was divided in two parts. One part became the Good Half, the other part the Bad Half.
The inhabitants of the Bad Half began to flock to the good part of the divided city, rapidly swelling into an urban exodus.
If this situation had been allowed to continue forever, the population of the Good Half would have doubled, while the Bad Half would have turned into a ghost town.
After all attempts to interrupt this undesirable migration had failed, the authorities of the bad part made desperate and savage use of architecture: they built a wall around the good part of the city, making it completely inaccessible to their subjects.

The Wall was a masterpiece.
Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in AA, Architectural Projects, Great Speculations, Heterotopic Architectures, Literature, Militarized Architectures, Students, Weaponized Architecture

# STUDENTS /// Royal Cabinets/Re-Formation by Paul Nicholls

Posted on April 12, 2011 | 6 Comments

It became almost an habit on the Funambulist to publish projects created within the frame of the Unit 15 at Bartlett. This unit is lead by Nic Clear (see his manifesto) and the concerned project here has been created by the video virtuoso Paul Nicholls.

His project, Royal Cabinets introduces a building of the British Royal Mail that stands like a wart on a Canary Wharf (London) office building. Two ideas of labor are therefore existing in parallel. The capitalist driven one that we experience everywhere in the West, and the accomplishment of public service in a building that recounts its essence by its architecture.

The Royal Cabinets are associated with a film -as it is required in the Unit 15- entitled Royal Re-Formation. I don’t know if Paul has ever watched Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni in which the explosion of a house in the desert allows the Italian director to film the luxurious products originally contained in this house while they are in the air.
Paul Nicholls, here, accomplishes the opposite by filming the  chaotic Post’s elements of construction and labor in the air that eventually creates the structure of the Cabinets. This process could maybe appear too abstract or even useless but I think that, by allowing us to see the ensemble of pieces composing the Cabinets, he very strongly reinforces the subversiveness of the architecture that seems to be built only by cheap industrial peaces found here or there and assembled as a celebration of emancipated labor.

Here are the two texts written by Paul to introduce his project:

Continue reading →

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Architectural Projects, Bartlett, Students

# HISTORY /// Cities at War (Joe Sacco, Robert Frank and Orlando Von Einsiedel)

Posted on April 12, 2011 | 5 Comments

picture: Joe Sacco. The Fixer. London: Drawn and Quarterly 2003

In 2009, Saskia Sassen was organizing a symposium at Columbia University entitled, Cities and the New Wars (see previous article) that was gathering intellectuals such as Stephen Graham or Eyal Weizman who presented brilliant lectures about how cities are affected by urban combat.
Cities are the new battlefields for two mains reasons. The first one is related to the fact that many of the current wars are established in an asymmetric scheme (Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechenia, narco-wars in Rio’s favelas etc.) The second one is caused by the will of the belligerents to involve the population and perpetuate the urbicide (read the essay I wrote about this topic).

In this article, I would like to introduce three works of different mediums that expresses life in cities at war:
The Fixer by Joe Sacco (see his interview for Al Jazeera) is a graphic novel/documentary by the famous American author who created a very striking series about Palestine several years before. The Fixer recounts his trip to Sarajevo in 1995 at the end of the Bosnian war which is reported to him via Neven, a para-military soldier that explains the situation in Sarajevo during those three years of combat. Three years later, the war in Kosovo occurred and expressed in its most painful degree, this notion of urbicide. (see the article about the book Violence Taking Place. The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict)
Come Again is a very beautiful book by photographer Robert Frank that collects photos of Beirut at the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The city seems to be empty and every buildings is a ruin that managed not to completely collapse. Beirut is indeed one of the city of the world that has been destroyed the most since the European/Japanese cities of the Second World War and 1991 was certainly not the end of it as the Israeli army attacked the city in 2006 in its raid against the Hezbollah. (thank you very much Xinyang for offering me this book)
The last work is a ten minutes movie created by Orlando Von Einsiedel and entitled Skateistan (see at the end of this article). It introduces the story of a small school of skateboarding in Kabul, Afghanistan in which kids can forget the war for a while and learn to use their skateboards. The movie is a little bit too much aestheticizing in my opinion but remains a very moving documentary about the expression of a passion in such a city at war. (thanks Pico for the link)

Continue reading →

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Books, Bosnia, History, Literature, Photography, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# POLITICS /// The Architectural Paradigm of Society of Control: The Immanent Panopticon

Posted on April 8, 2011 | 6 Comments

Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) just won the urban competition for the Master Plan of the Stockholmsporten, a new district in the Swedish capital city. Beyond the recurrent romanticism for the countryside in the city and the mythology of a tamed and benevolent nature that can be observe in almost every competitions now, what is striking in the project is the presence of a gigantic reflective sphere in the middle of this circle based district.
The fact that this sphere stands above the entire district and is reflective allow anybody to visualize the activity of everybody else in the neighborhood in some form of what I call, immanent Panopticon.

In order to go further, I need to recall what architects usually forget when they evoke in a simplistic way, the paradigm that Michel Foucault establishes for the disciplinary society, which is the Panopticon created by Jeremy Bentham. In fact, this circular prison in which the centralized form of power can easily supervise every actions of the prisoners situated in the perimeter, was a paradigm for the society between the end of the 18th century and our era. Foucault’s thesis was that the society’s scheme that we progressively enter into is much more interested about control than discipline. The mode of surveillance is shifting from a transcendental mode -the centralized proctor, symbolizing an entity like a government or an institution- to a complete immanent mode in which each member of the society is supervising the ensemble of the other members while being supervised himself.

BIG’s project is therefore amazing for its absolute literalism of forms and schemes. Both Bentham/Foucault’s transcendental Panopticon and Bjarke Ingels’ immanent Panopticon are spheres. When the transcendental one is exclusively an interiority -there is nothing outside the sphere- the immanent one is exclusively an exteriority – there is nothing inside the sphere. This is a topological transformation as the interior surface “unfolds” itself to become the exterior surface and one has to visualize this transformation to understand this morphological shift . This shift is also a political one, the same that I was evoking above. Power is not anymore effectuated by an imprisonment of the bodies, but rather by their delegated control.

Continue reading →

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Architectural Projects, Essays, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# DELEUZE /// Lecture by Gilles Deleuze about the Act of Creation (May 1987)

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 6 Comments

picture: Pickpocket by Robert Bresson (1959)

On May 17th 1987, Gilles Deleuze gave a lecture at the FEMIS (most famous school of Cinema in France) that will remain famous. Talking to the students, he elaborates about what does “having an idea in cinema” means and what is an Act of Creation.
The integral text in French and the videos of the lecture in French subtitled in English are available at the end of this article.

A significant part of this lecture has been translated in English by Eleanor Kaufman and published in the book, Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1998.)
This translation had for ambition to recreate a coherent piece of discourse from the beginning to the end, however, some very interesting fragments have been forgotten, notably the “chapter” in which Deleuze talks about the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Robert Bresson.

He uses Kurosawa’s example to describe how to discipline can resonate one from another and how an idea in literature can be translated into an idea in cinema even if the means of expression of this idea are extremely different (see the translation about the differentiation of ideas depending on the discipline). He compares Kurosawa’s films with the written work of Shakespeare and even more specifically Dostoevsky.
In Dostoevsky’s work and especially in The Idiot, the characters are taken into an absolute urgency established by the narrative when suddenly, they linger on a question that seems more important to them:

Mais dans les Sept samouraïs, vous comprenez, ils sont pris dans la situation d’urgence, ils ont accepté de défendre le village, et d’un bout à l’autre, ils sont travaillés par une question plus profonde. Il y a une question plus profonde à travers tout ca. Et elle sera dite à la fin par le chef des samouraïs, quand ils s’en vont “ qu’est-ce qu’un samouraï ?“ Qu’est-ce qu’un samouraï, non pas en général, mais qu’est-ce qu’un samouraï à cette époque là. A savoir quelqu’un qui n’est plus bon à rien. Les seigneurs n’en n’ont plus besoin, et les paysans vont bientôt savoir se défendre tout seul. Et pendant tout le film, malgré l’urgence de la situation, les samouraïs sont hantés par cette question.

(translation by myself…) But in the Seven Samurai, you understand, they are taken in a very urgent situation, they accepted to defend the village and from the beginning to the end, they wonder about a more profound question. There is a more profound question through all that. And it will be said, at the end by the Samurai’s chief, when they go away: “What is a Samurai?” What is a Samurai, not in general, but what is a Samurai at that time. Meaning somebody who is not good for anything anymore. Warlords do not need them anymore, and peasants will very soon be able to defend themselves. And during the entire movie, despite the urgency of the situation, the Samurai are haunted by this question.
Continue reading →

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Cinema, Deleuze, Lectures and Symposiums, Philosophy

# POLITICS /// Geopolitical Borders. A Competition by Think Space with Teddy Cruz

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

Zagreb Society of Architects, Think Space, after organizing a brilliant competition entitled Urban Borders (see the winners in a previous article), now launches another competition called Geopolitical Borders.

This is a good opportunity for architects to question the notion of map and to explore the subjectivity of what we usually forget as being a creative way of representing the real.
The jury is composed by the well known Teddy Cruz who is interviewed on Think Space’s website and who wrote the following text:

This competition calls for critical observations of border regions as laboratories from which to imagine new paradigms of urbanization and democratization. These critical thresholds amplify the politics of migration and citizenship, labor and surveillance, the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms, wealth and poverty and the collisions between natural systems and political jurisdiction, exposing conflict as operational tool to re-think artistic practices.

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Maps, Politics

# CINEMA /// Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa

Posted on April 6, 2011 | 1 Comment

I very recently watched for the first time (I know I know) Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa (1950) and was stunned by the introspection of cinema it constitutes. Here, it is probably important to notify purists that I will reveal important details of the movie, so people who would have not seen it yet, and who would keep an absolute innocence about it should not read what follows.

Rashomon is a metaphorical movie about which problems cinema deals with. A character tells the story of three different versions of the same story he heard in a courthouse about a murder. The three versions are the three very different points of views of the three characters involved, the thief/lover, the wife and the killed husband. In each of those story the narrator enhance the behavior of the two other characters and the scene is shot with great dramaturgy by Kurosawa. The narrator always ends up to be the murderer, even in the case of suicide. By doing so, the narrator of each version, put the light on his (her) person even through the mean of a crime, and accentuate the dramatization of his (her) character.
Eventually comes a fourth version from an external observer of the scene that has manifestly no reason to lie. In this version the three characters are pathetic, selfish and clumsy and the crime, the only real dramatic event, is presented almost as an accident that is immediately regretted by its author.
My interpretation of this movie -and I insist that it’s only my  interpretation-  is a praise of fiction as something that exists on its own. It is indeed inspired by reality and maintain a dialogue with it, but brings something more interesting in its symbolic and narrative than the crude pathetic phenomenon of the real. At the same time Rashomon can be said to be the work of a genius only because this same real is being shown in opposition to the fictionalized versions. This confrontation is what cinema  is about says Kurosawa.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Cinema