Monthly Archives: May 2011

# LECTURES AND SYMPOSIUMS /// Designing Geopolitics. June 2nd & 3rd at UC-San Diego

Posted on May 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Upcoming this week (June 2nd and3rd), is a probably very interesting symposium organized by the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California – San Diego. The symposium is entitled Designing Geopolitics and include various speakers such as Ed Keller, Manuel de Landa, Benjamin Bratton, Geoff Manaugh, Teddy Cruz and Hernan Diaz Alonso (both of them being in the same panel, believe me or not !).

Here is the schedule of those two days followed by the brief of the symposium. (Don’t forget to register on their page before going there !):

THURSDAY, JUNE 2
9:30     Designing the Century: Futurity’s Past
Benjamin H. Bratton, Norman Klein, Geoff Manaugh
11:00     Network Polis: Promise/Peril
James Fowler, Adam Bly, Metahaven (video from Netherlands)
Break
1:30     “Force is a Diagram of Forms”: Architecture, Emergence, Emergency
Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Teddy Cruz, Jordan Crandall
3:00     Data as World, World-Image, World-Making
Lev Manovich, Kelly Gates, Molly Wright Steenson
FRIDAY, JUNE 3
9:30     Planetary Data, Planetary Governance
Larry Smarr, Charlie Kennel, Naomi Oreskes
11:00     Design and Post-Humanism
Ed Keller, Vernor Vinge, Rene Daalder
Break    
    Tricia Wang (video from China)
1:30     The Agency of Code: Form, Tool, Policy
Casey Reas, Ricardo Dominguez, Elizabeth Losh
3:30     Geophilosophy, Geoaesthetics, Geopolitics
Manuel De Landa (video from Spain), Peter Krapp, McKenzie Wark

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Posted in Lectures and Symposiums

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body

Posted on May 29, 2011 | 13 Comments

Modernist Architecture is characterized by a thaumaturgic (talent of miraculously curing) ambition which would heal the “diseases” of individuals and society. Although this ambition appears as obsolete and slightly ridiculous nowadays, after several decades of post-modernism that constituted in denying any other power of architecture than a merely aesthetic one. However, my thesis, that I have been developing though a reasonable amount of articles on this blog, is that architecture does certainly own a power, but rather than the power of healing, it might rather be the power of hurting.  (see weaponized architecture)

In this regard, what appear to be the quintessential example of a set of norms and a residue of the modern ideology are the overwhelming diagrams proposed by the fascinating Architectural Graphic Standards (cf introduction cover page). Indeed, following the modern dream of an optimized built environment, those architectural documents consider a normative body –one could think of Le Corbusier’s Modulor- and advocate for an architecture that is perfectly adapted to this same body. This normative body is not an ideal body in the classical meaning of it (mostly based on aesthetic values) but can be considered as such, as it does not represent anybody’s body but rather constitutes an unreachable state of normality.
As we saw with the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins (see my essay Architectures of Joy) , architecture can be considered within the time frame of human evolution and, this way, be designed in order to influence such evolution. The normative body of those diagrams constitute the exact opposite of Arakawa/Gins’ work that attempts to activate bodies in order to resist death. In fact, the normative ideology by choosing an oxymoronic normal ideal body as a model, refuse the very idea of the human evolution. This denial organizes a violence effectuated on the body as it makes it interact with an environment that forces it to remain the same. Such a normative environment also implies a normative behavior that implies a set of pre-defined activities relatively to each space and furniture.
One can dream (I do !) of a re-interpretation of those diagrams subverted by various activities and bodies that were not thought about by those normative documents (the coitus seems to be a good way to start them for example !).

The following documents and the first image are all extracted from the Architectural Graphic Standards. Hoboken: Wiley, 2000.

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Posted in Arakawa/Gins, Architectural Theories, Weaponized Architecture

# (un)WALL /// Playing at Border crossing in a Mexican Indigenous Community…Seriously by Tamara Underiner

Posted on May 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

picture by Anthony Suau

TDR journal published by the MIT Press just released its summer issue in which one can read an interesting article written by Tamara Underiner (professor at Arizona State) about a Caminata Nocturna (Night Walk in Spanish), strange event taking place every week in the Mexican countryside. Her article Playing at Border crossing in a Mexican Indigenous Community…Seriously in fact describes a Mexican indigenous community which weekly reconstitutes the conditions of the crossing of the Mexican/US border as a mix between the game and the ceremonial.

The article starts with a narrative that puts you in those conditions and blurs the difference between a real border crossing and its reconstitution:

If it’s Saturday night in the Mexican town of El Alberto, it’s time to cross the border. If you’re lucky, the moon will be out and you will be able to pick your way through the rugged terrain. You will be able to see glimmers of the streams you will have to cross, and the river you will want to avoid. If the moon is out, there might be some light at the end of the sewer tunnel you will crawl through, enough at least to let you fairly calculate how much flesh will be left on your palms and your knees by the end of its rough passage, and how many creepy-crawly things have already landed in your hair as you’ve crept along, parting curtains of cobwebs with your face. You will be able to gauge the incline of the next hillside you will have to scale, and the width of the next plank you will have to walk, across a patch of stinking swamp. You might be able to distinguish the difference between a cactus arm and a tree branch, so that when you lose your balance, you won’t grab hold of the wrong one.
 If it’s a moonless night, you will have to rely on the expertise of your guides, the polleros or coyotes1 you have hired to help you navigate these challenges. You will try using your flashlight, or your lighter, or your cell phone — anything to show you where to put your foot next. You will be told in no uncertain terms to turn it off or put it out. In the dark and the quiet, you will see the flashing lights of the US Border Patrol, which pursues you nearly constantly, on foot and in pickup trucks; you will hear the orders they yell to turn yourself in, and the gunshots they will use to convince you. You may manage to elude capture, but some of your fellow travelers will not — especially the ones who are obviously drunk. You may find yourself chuckling at the sight of them being hauled away, even as you wonder just when and where you’ll see them again.

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Posted in (un)Wall, Politics, Resistive Operations

# FUNAMBULISTS /// A Funambulist Moment with Brodsky & Utkin

Posted on May 26, 2011 | 2 Comments

I did not have much time to write long articles lately…I apologize for that and leave you with one of the most beautiful illustration of a funambulist I know. This beautiful illustration has been created by Russian artists/architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin (see previous article) extracted from the just as much beautiful monography: Brodsky & Utkin: complete works. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.

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Posted in Funambulists

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Ecological Borders. Think Space’s new Competition as proposed by Francois Roche

Posted on May 24, 2011 | 2 Comments

It now became an habit on the Funambulist to follow one of the (too) rare fair and interesting idea competition organized by the Zagreb Society of Architects and curated by Eva Franch: Think Space.
The first competition was entitled Urban Border with a topic proposed by Shohei Shigematsu and I got to publish the winners’ project Demotown designed beautifully by Jesse Honsa & Gregory Mahoney.
The second competition, Geopolitical Borders (see previous article) was proposed by Teddy Cruz and the winners are now visible by following this link.

Here comes the third of those competitions and the high level of interest remains as the new juror happens to be Francois Roche (R&Sie(n)).
The borders here are Ecological. YUmen[eco]tec-pharming is in fact a competition about rethinking ecology (or ecosophy following a concept formulated by Felix Guattari) not anymore as a new form of transcendental moral but rather as a participation to the various processes of material deterioration and re-composition in stake in our environment.
As enunciated in the competition’s brief, those processes involve “screwed, chewed, shat, sweated, swallowed, vomited, pined, secreted, woven, knitted, extruded, staggered, scattered, coagulated, aggregated, welded, pinched, braided, spidernetted, bonsaied, crystallised, calcified, excreted, expanded, branched, pulped, smeared, coagulated, excavated, assembled and disassembled, bended, blended” materials that needs to be considered as the production of humans and another living species.
This competition balances this broad field of exploration by imposing a precise frame of action that can be read below:

ECOLOGICAL BORDERS:
PARTIAL-TOTAL ECOLOGY: “YUmen[eco]tec-pharming”

I remember…
– That the idea of a necessary mediation, a kind of social contract, was essentially
based on a juridical conception of the world, as elaborated by Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. For Spinoza, on the contrary, forces were inseparable from a spontaneity and a productivity that made their development possible without mediation, i.e., their composition. They were elements of socialization in and of themselves. Spinoza thought directly in terms of “the multitude” and not individuals, in a conception… of physical and dynamic composition in opposition to the juridical contract. – Bodies were conceptualized as forces. As such, they were defined not only by their random encounters and collisions (state of crisis); they were defined by relationships between an infinite number of parts making up each body, which already characterized that body as “a multitude”. Gilles Deleuze, introduction to Anomalie Sauvage, Toni Negri, PUF, 1983

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Posted in Heterotopic Architectures, Interviews

# INSTANT ARCHITECTURES /// My Home my House my Stilthouse & my Safe Garden by Arne Quinze

Posted on May 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

Arne Quinze continues his obsessive beautiful work on the tracks of Tadashi Kawamata and Yona Friedman. This new installation will be soon visible at the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (Denmark) from June 1st to October 2nd.
My Home my House my Stilthouse & my safe Garden is an investigation of the notion of domesticity and neighborhood. Each “building” is, as always, architecturally recounting its own fragility and self-construction.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Architectures Without Architects, Exhibitions, Instant Architectures

# CINEMA /// The Paradigm of Modern Cinema: The Cinematographic Introspection (Godard, Fellini, Truffaut, Assayas & Hansen-Love)

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 5 Comments

One of the element that created modernism is the introspection accomplished by artistic disciplines for what they really are, followed by the expression of such look on itself.
This introspection has been set in motion much before the XXth century, notably in painting (and very likely in literature too). My weak knowledge would place Rembrandt and Velasquez as precursors, respectively with the Artist in his Studio (1628) and Las Meninas (1656) which both include a canvas and the painter within the painting. However I would claim -and I may be wrong- that such examples were more introspection by the artists on their own person rather than a real questioning of their discipline and the act of representing in general. Marcel Duchamp is probably one of the face of this modern revolution in art but since this article tends to consider very straight forward example, I would name Rene Magritte and his “Ceci n’est pas une Pipe” (This is not a Pipe) as a pure formulation of the problem of representation. In fact, the pipe on the painting is not a pipe but the representation of a pipe.

Here I would like to tackle the same issue by a very short analysis of five (six) films that are all (almost) entirely based around the idea of making films. The five of them have very different visions/manifestos of cinema to the point that Jean-Luc Godard will finish to break up his friendship with Francois Truffaut after the latter released La Nuit Américaine (Day For Night).

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Posted in Cinema, Essays

# HISTORY /// Prison Information Group by Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Posted on May 19, 2011 | 2 Comments

“Are intolerable: High courts, cops, hospitals, asylums, school, military service, press, TV, the State and primarily prisons.“

Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons

In my last article about Antonin Artaud and Vincent Van Gogh, I was evoking the issue of psychiatry being society’s mean of “suiciding” some of its undesired components. Today, I want to evoke an issue that is similar to some extents. I recently read that France has currently 65 000 of its citizen who live in prison which represents almost exactly 0.1% of the population. Of course it does not reach USA’s sad record of 2.5 millions detainees (0.8% of the population), but this amount is definitely frightening.

Prisons are zones of exclusions included within the space of society. They are micro-totalitarian societies that can difficultly be thought without architectural apparatuses. The cell fully expresses the supremacy of the wall on the body and the prison subtly negotiates between hyper-seclusion and hyper-visibility. Spaces of punishment, in their essence, have been created in a peculiar revanchist way of thinking. Indeed, they have been programmed to suspend the application of the law for people who have been suspending the law for themselves. It is then important for the society that hosts those territories of punishment that the exceptions they represent do not appear in any way as enviable. Their design is therefore intentionally and considerably aggressive to the human body.

In 1971, in France, Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet decided to make the hermetic border between the societal space and the zones of exclusions that prisons embodies, more porous. They thus created a collective entitled Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prison Information Group). In fact, this group was trying to extract information from within those zones to put society in front of its responsibilities, but it also attempted to bring information the other way around, from the milieu depending on law to the milieu in which law is suspended. Members of the collective would therefore make pressure (and actually succeed) to bring the radio and newspaper within prisons, or stand outside and scream information in megaphones.

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Posted in Foucault, History, Law, Politics

# LITERATURE /// Van Gogh The Man Suicided by Society by Antonin Artaud

Posted on May 18, 2011 | 3 Comments

In 1947, one year after having spent nine years in psychiatric hospitals, Antonin Artaud published a beautiful book as an apologia of Vincent Van Gogh, “suicided by society” like every other visionaries that has been categorized as mad. Artaud, fifteen years before Michel Foucault, affirms that madness has been created by psychiatric medicine and not the other way around. He accuses doctors and Van Gogh’s brother Theo, to have, not only ignored, but actively suppress the expression of the painter’s art.
The invention of the adjective suicided illustrates exactly the process of psychiatry. By having elaborated this medicine method, society did not want simply to kill those that it could not assimilate (like it would do for prisoners for example), but it wanted them to recognize themselves their vision as a pathology and therefore to make them commit a social suicide.

Just like Heliogabalus or the Crowned Anarchist (we’ll see it in another article sometimes), Antonin Artaud’s literary style is magnificent and untranslatable. One of the most illustrative example of that is Artaud’s obsession for Van Gogh’s “coup de pinceau”, which literally means paint brush’s strike and therefore express the painter’s power but the same expression is the correct expression to talk more simply of any painter’s action on the canvas…
Nevertheless, I attempted to translate by myself several excerpts and I already apologize for providing such badly transcripts in English (the original version in French is below):

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Posted in Books, Fine Arts, History, Literature

# HISTORY /// Rituals of War by Zainab Bahrani (Zone Books) & At War by Antonio Monegal, Francesco Torres, Jose Maria Ridao (Actar)

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 3 Comments

After writing a (too) short article about war and the city, now is one about too books that, each in its way, question the relationship of Art and War.

The first one is entitled Rituals of War. The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia and is published by Zainab Bahrani for the great Zone Books (distributed by the MIT Press) in 2008.
The book starts by this powerful sentence, War is organized violence and thus begins an introduction that proposes a brilliant archeology of violence. Brilliant, in fact, as Z.Bahrani manages to mix the topic of her book, the representation of war by ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the ME (the Assyrian word for “the arts of civilization”) and a more contemporaneous approach of war as thought by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille. Z.Bahrani quotes the latter in her introduction saying that according to Georges Bataille, war exists because the taboo on violence in daily life relegates violence to areas of existence confined in space and time and that follow their own rules.  This confinement has indeed a name, war, and is almost paradoxically regulated by conventions and laws, thus legitimizing violence and introducing the ambiguous notion of Just War.
The book then lead us through the various representation of war in Mesopotamia, analyzing steles and monument describing the power of the king’s body and the degradation of the one of the enemies. It also show us the relationship with war and the divine through human sacrifices, omens, and oracles in bodies.
After a very interesting series of chapter specific to Mesopotamia, the conclusion goes back to the mix between general considerations and their application to the Mesopotamian case that the introduction started. Within it, we can find an interesting analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of war machine: War is appropriated as a Repressive State Apparatus but remains outside state power proper and outside the law. To kill in war is appropriate and sanctioned. It is not a punishable act. It is a transgression that forms an exception to the normal order of things and to the law. The war machine falls between the juridical and the theological; it intersects with and connects them. But it exists only in its own metamorphoses, in industrial and technological inventions, in religious and militaristic rituals.

The second book, At War, is the book associated to the exhibition of the same name organized by the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona in 2004. The book itself is edited by Antonio Monegal, Francesco Torres, Jose Maria Ridao and published by Actar.

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Posted in Books, Fine Arts, History, Politics

# POLITICS /// Slavoj Zizek’s First as a Tragedy then as a Farce by RSA Animate

Posted on May 10, 2011 | 3 Comments

After the video of David Harvey (see previous article) here is the RSA Animate video for Slavoj Zizek‘s speech at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Zizek’s lecture, First as a Tragedy then as a Farce is associated with his book of the same name (2009) and is now well known by the public but the brilliant illustration of the RSA Animate makes it very didactic, concise and clear.

Thanks Hannibal

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Posted in Lectures and Symposiums, Philosophy, Politics

# CINEMA /// Dream as True Horror / Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali

Posted on May 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

It seems to me that there are two kinds of true horror. There is the absolute relentlessness of the real that is felt through the built-up realms of rationality. However, there is another type of true horror, the one that escape from this rationality and belong to the domain of dream. No need here to dissociate dreams and nightmares as this terminology is only specified retrospectively when the dream is over and that rationality is reactivated.
Dream and its generator, the unconscious were both the raw material and the object of the Surrealist work. In 1929 the young Luis Bunuel with Salvador Dali created a beautiful 15 min film, Un Chien Andalou, that was exploring this notion of dream as the irrational sequence of irrational -and therefore terrifying- events created by the unconscious of one person. This uniqueness of the person who dreams is actually interested to observe here as this film has two authors. As Gilles Deleuze points out in his lecture at the FEMIS in May 1987 (cf previous article), if you fall into the dream of another person, you are screwed-up. Here, Deleuze speaks more about the dream as an enunciated desire, than the dream as an experience in which the unconscious has all power. However, we can argue that both of these definitions of the dreams are in fact creating a unique one that celebrates the victory of the unconscious over the real. Deleuze therefore advices against the imposition of the surreal on the real as the dream needs to use the whole power of the real in order to implement itself in it.

Dreams are true horror as it does not incorporate any exit. They are the ultimate labyrinth that I believe is being described in Kafka’s work as I wrote in my hypothesis that The Trial has not been well reconstituted by Max Brod and is actually a post-mortem dream. In this hypothesis, I argued that death’s time is out of the real and therefore is “lived” as an infinite dream in which only the unconscious remains. Dream, in this regard, is a moment of death and Un Chien Andalou, a vision of death.

Watch the movie after the break:

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Posted in Cinema

# PHILOSOPHY /// Cyclonopedia Symposium’s lectures are archived and visible online

Posted on May 8, 2011 | 4 Comments

“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.”

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

The New School’s symposium organized last March 11st around Reza Negarestani’s fictio-philosophical masterpiece Cyclonopedia is now archived and visible online.
To be honest, several of those lectures are very difficult to understand -at least for me- as they involve a vocabulary and a system of thoughts that are specific to what we could call “dark materialism”. However, I decided to incorporate three of them here that are accessible to a broader audience.

The first lecture is given by Eugene Thacker, co-organizer of this symposium with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. The title of his lecture is “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans” and focuses on the materialist vision offered by Black Gondolier, a short story written by Fritz Leiber.


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Posted in Lectures and Symposiums, Philosophy

# HISTORY /// Paris’ 1871 Commune recounted by RaspouTeam

Posted on May 6, 2011 | 5 Comments

Almost exactly 140 years ago, in March 1871, Paris was declaring its independence from defeated Napoleon III’s France and creating, for three months, what Karl Marx called the only real socialist society of history.
I already evoked this historical event through the writings of Blanqui (see the essay Processes of smoothing and striation of space in urban warfare) and the book written by Kristin Kross about Rimbaud and La Commune and soon enough I hope to be able to do it again thanks to Peter Watkins‘ movie. However, here I want to evoke the operation organized by RaspouTeam to celebrate this anniversary of Paris’ Commune. This group of French  street artist activists mixes low and high tech in order to link spaces of Paris to their historicity related to La Commune. They chose forty five chapters of those three months of insurrection and for each space concerned by this event, stick up historical photographs like windows of time connecting nowadays Paris with its glorious socialist past. To each of this spaces, they add a QR-Code allowing owners of smart-phone to learn about the events that occurred 140 years earlier at the very place (s)he is standing on.

This historical reminder is certainly not defined for a strict educational purpose. By promoting the memory of a true democratic society, RaspouTeam wants to compare it to the current French (European) situation that mixes a xenophobic ideology with a political-economical system that oppress humans in their daily lives using fear and securitarian effects as a mortar to keep the building standing. In that matter, RaspouTeam already released a similar operation than the one dedicated to La Commune. Entitled Désordres Publics (Public Disorders/Trouble), it establishes a map of Paris where a series of trouble events that occurred in Paris since the end of the 19th century.

La Commune’s website is unfortunately only in French, which denies a little bit the International aspiration of La Commune but it counts a lot of etchings, photographs and maps that would allow a non French speaker to familiarize with those three months, eventually repressed in a massacre ordered by Adolphe Thiers. I invite all to follow their website in the coming month as each chapter is released exactly 140 years later
In order to facilitate this exploration, I attempted to translate the name of each article that has been already published so far:
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Posted in History, Politics, Resistive Operations, Weaponized Architecture

# PALESTINE /// Consigned to History? Memoirs of a Closed Rafah Crossing by Sami Kishawi

Posted on May 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

I already evoked in a previous article the very good website Arena of Speculation edited by Ahmad Barclay, Nina Kolowratnik, Tashy Endres. This website gathers and edit articles focusing on the territoriality of the Palestinian struggle. In this regard, the last one, released on May 1st is a text written by Gaza activist, Sami Kishawi who mix personal memories, history of the Rafah crossing (the access point on the border between Gaza and Egypt) and speculations for the future as the new Egyptian government consider to reopen the border permanently.
Since 2005, Gaza is in fact the largest prison in the world encircled by the Israeli Army and until March 2011 the complacency of Mubarrak’s policies in Egypt for Israel and the United States. The re-opening of the border will probably not change the regular tragedy of Israeli raids and siege over Gaza (see Eyal Weizman’s lecture Forensic Architecture) that appear more to a human hunt than whatever the Israeli/American Press wants us to believe it is.

You can read Sami Kishawi’s text by following this link toward Area of Speculation.

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Posted in (un)Wall, Palestine, Politics

# STUDENTS /// DMZ Game by 원석 최 (Won Sok Choi)

Posted on May 4, 2011 | 1 Comment

The DMZ Game is a project I should have published last year, but for some practical reasons, that is only now, one year after it has been first presented that I am able to introduce it.
This Undergraduate Thesis project has been designed by Won Sok Choi for a studio at Pratt tutored by Yael Erel and Christoph Kumpusch, studio that had already produced the beautiful Circus designed by Guillermo Bernal (see last year’s article).  The DMZ Game is an architecture that seems to be eminently influenced both by Constant’s New Babylon and Lebbeus Woods’ projects like the Labyrinth Wall around Bosnia and his own project for the DMZ. In fact, Won chose the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea as a site for his game. Game, here, has to be understood in a similar meaning than the one proposed by Constant and the Situationists, an erratic behavior provoking a series of events in relation with other people and psychogeographies.
But Won’s project, even in its non-materiality, already reaches its goal as he does not provide much explanations (see below) about what determines his architecture. The viewer’s imagination is therefore obliged to play and loose itself in this dialogue between a labyrinthine (probably mobile) architecture, the river, the land and the earth. In this hypothesis, the depiction of a player represented like Rodin’s thinker with a cyberpunk helmet seems to be a symbol of the invitation to imagine the rules (or the non rules) of the game.

The following text is Won’s introduction to his project:

Demilitarized Zone, Korean Peninsula
2009-2010

In DMZ game, the main strategy on the site (DMZ) was to employ playful competition instead of compromised harmony. There are hardly any stable moments of interaction in reality but people are conceptually more comfortable with the notion of stable culture, society, and physical environments. The modern nation states successfully convinced their people into the idea of scientifically proved pragmatic functional spaces with some collectively subjective aesthetic condiments. The notion of self-development of society with various tools (such as science and technology) and ¡°engineering¡± perfect society and culture has become nothing but a modern mirage: tragedy. Because of this restrained social coherency, we, as a modern society has fallen into diluted (and compromised) sense of cultural and physical spaces. I wish to ¡°transform the chaotic energies of economic and social change into new forms of meaning and beauty, of freedom and solidarity.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Militarized Architectures, Pratt Institute, Students, Weaponized Architecture

# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// Sadian Architecture / An architectural narrative by Eduardo McIntosh

Posted on May 1, 2011 | 6 Comments

This project is probably the most problematic that I got to publish so far. In one of the most current articles, about the book Camouflage written by Neil Leach, I evoked the chapter entitled Sacrifice in which he recounts the tale of Master Manole who imprisoned his wife within the wall that he was building.
This architectural narrative (which was presented as a book and made it to the finals of 2010 Riea Book Competition) by Eduardo McIntosh seems to follow a similar path in an even more disturbing representation. He, in fact, describes an obscure massacre that occurred in 2001 in Afghanistan when the Taliban soldiers fought against the Northern Alliance (led by Massoud)  to gain the control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif (fourth biggest city in Afghanistan). Eduardo uses this context in order to create something that, to be honest, I did not know architecture was able to do. He fictitiously describes the construction of a mass grave in which the 3000 dead bodies are directly used as bricks. He then even go further in the horror with the introduction of a chemical reaction between the bodies and the rich soil of Afghanistan that produces the birth of a “poppy Anthropophagus” which produce a high production of opiate. This opiate, producing opium or morphine can then be introduced in the economical loop that is always more or less involved in the contemporary warfare. In this narrative, the horror of war is therefore fully part of the globalized system of production.

I am extremely disturbed by his images which remind me of the Sadian film Salo by Pier Paolo Pasolini. In fact, there is something eminently Sadian in this narrative as the bodies, even dead, remain objects of empathy from the spectator who is both fascinated and repulsed at the same time by the absolute power expressed by a body (the soldier/mason) on another (the corpse).
Once again, even if I pursue the claim that architecture carries inherently a violence on the body, I could not imagine that an architecture per say (even if it is represented as a narrative) could reach this level of horror. The neutral tone used by Eduardo for his text and his images helps even more to reach this degree of violence as it emphasize its banality (as I was already evoking in my article Violence on the Body).

With this narrative, Eduardo thus increase our imaginary of human violence and include us, architects, as potential actors of the dark side of History. In a similar way than Hannah Arendt’s work, he force us to look at pure evil without allowing us to comfortably exclude ourselves from it.
He also remind us the expressive power of representation that is usually considered by architects as a simple mean to please the eyes and therefore to comfort the mind.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Cruel Design, Militarized Architectures, Politics, Weaponized Architecture