Category Archives: Heterotopic Architectures

# CINEMA /// …Would Have Been My Last Complaint

Posted on March 20, 2013 | 1 Comment

WHBMLC_poster_sm1

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to have access to the short film “…Would Have Been My Last Complaint” created by Camille Lacadée (see her guest writer essay as an inventory for this project) and François Roche for their [eIf/bʌt/c] (Institute for Contingent Scenarios) with the collaboration of Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Heinrich and a small team of people from all over the world (see the credits at the end)

The film is now visible online (see also at the end of this article) which will allow many viewers to consider a work in which neither architecture nor cinema is “enslaved” to the other, but rather they collaborate at their best. The architecture itself has been thought and built by the film’s team, but could not really unfold its essence without the narrative and expressive means developed by the film.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema, Heterotopic Architectures, India

# GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS 32 /// Would Have Been…an inventory by Camille Lacadée

Posted on July 24, 2012 | 1 Comment


Would Have Been My Last Complaint (2012). See full credits at end of the text

This week’s guest writer is a long time friend of mine, Camille Lacadée, with who I share the taste for living in places far from “home”! Camille is the recent author of a text for LOG 25 entitled (rama)kanabolism: Bangkok’s furious, sensuous hankering which marks its difference with the other essays as it uses words as a graphic, rhythmic and sonorous material rather than as semiotic container of knowledge. Similarly, her guest writer’s text is written as an inventory in a similar form than the one written by French poet Jacques Prevert in 1946. This one describes the recent construction of an architecture in South India by [eIf/bʌt/c] (Institute for Contingent Scenarios that she co-founded with François Roche in 2011) with Ezio Blasetti and Stephan Henrich as well as an international group of students and friends. Would Have Been… declines itself as an architecture, but also as a forthcoming film, some evocative photos like the ones above, and thus as an inventory that hides, beyond its apparent dryness, a multitude of narrative combinations (aka contingent scenarios)

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Essays, Guest Writers Essays, Heterotopic Architectures, Literature

# ARCHITECTURES WITHOUT ARCHITECTS /// Details of a Proletarian Fortress

Posted on July 14, 2012 | 3 Comments

It is not the first time -nor it will be the last probably- that I evoke the Kowloon Walled City (see this past article for example) as a Proletarian Fortress which is very interesting to look at as it provides us a historical example of a district which immanently constructed its own form of urbanity. In few decades, this housing block like it exists many of them in Hong Kong, got transformed by its inhabitants into a compact piece of city in which all object and person finds its place and function despite the density. The section drew by Japanese architects for the book 大図解九龍城, is very illustrative of what life has been like in the Walled City as it includes a multitude of micro-scenarios animating the district from the darkness of the ground to the aerated rooftops. The Walled City, by its relative self-sufficiency was the object of many myths from the outside population and authorities who was seeing it as a criminal neighborhood, argument that was used to destroy it in 1993. The density of the district as well as the addition of many alternative bridges and pathways was making it indeed very difficult to control and the police is said to have simply gave up on it. From what several authors who worked on it tell us, although the walled city was a shelter for drug addicts, criminals were not living in it.

Graphic narratives seem the right way to describe such district as it allows the restitution of the richness of micro-events and sociality that were occurring in it. The global section (see below) is therefore full of small annotations describing those micro-events. Rio Akasaka had the good idea to translate them into English and to put them online. I also extracted a dozen of significant details from the section that can be seen below.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Architectures Without Architects, Heterotopic Architectures, History, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# HETEROTOPIC/CHRONIC ARCHITECTURES /// Lebbeus Woods: Early Drawings Exhibition

Posted on April 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

Lebbeus Woods: Early Drawings at the Friedman Benda Gallery (2012)

There is an on-going exhibition at the Friedman Benda Gallery (New York) presenting some of Lebbeus Woods’ early drawings. This show is still on for few more days (until April 14th) but I figured that I would release a dozen of these drawings that are not necessarily well known in his work.

Many of us have seen numerous of Lebbeus Woods’ drawings and could maybe feel, somehow blasé to the idea of looking at some more; however, it seems difficult not to feel a strong enthusiasm and inspiration from this new (old) series. What seems so appealing to me in his work is his constant ability to design architectures that seems to narrate the absence of architect. As much as a building drawn by him is immediately recognizable as such, the elements that composes this architecture clearly tell us a story in which its construction involved a spontaneous collective effort with no particular presupposed plan. Metal sheets, wood posts, loose pipes, visible truss beams, all the pieces stands together in a very interesting balance of immanent approximation and skilled control. Those drawings seems to come from an uchronia (a steam punk one !), mix between medieval age, industrial revolution and post-apocalyptic future, when architects and builders were (will be) the same person.

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

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 3)

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Document from the ‘Plan Local d’Urbanisme‘ of Paris  illustrating the fragmentation of the complex in many property lots

This article constitutes the third and last part of a series about this Hausmannian social housing complex in Paris :
- Read Part 1
- Read Part2

As I wrote in the first part of this series, this 19th century Proletarian Citadel has lost its identity as a whole and became fragmented into many real estate lots disconnected from each other. The most visible materialization of such fragmentation can be seen in the courtyards which have been, not only separated from each other for most of them, but also split up to six times sometimes for the same courtyard (see plan above and photo below).  Just as much architecture, by its physicality, was providing this inter-connexion between the courtyards as public spaces offered to a proletarian community, it now materializes the limits created by the market to maximize the profits done on this housing complex. Those limits are embodied by various elements from low concrete walls to high fences which claim their pieces of property. Rather than sharing -and therefore negotiating- a large common public space, landlords and inhabitants -who are not so much proletarian anymore- prefer a smaller piece of land that they can call theirs.

To go even further, when looking at the incredible richness of Paris’ interior courtyards, one may regret that those are not open -at least during day time- to the public who would find in them zones liberated from the compulsory movement of the street as well as a labyrinthine network of paths similarly to the one developed in Lyon with the Traboules. The Situationist’ derive would probably find in this project, an interesting improvement…

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures

HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 2)

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 2 Comments

This article is a sequel of a first one written on January 7th 2012.

I would like today to follow yesterday’s assimilation of what I called a Proletarian Citadel within Paris to a solid mass incised by two streets and punched by a multitude of more or less narrow courtyards. While walking on the roof of this mass, one could imagine being actually on the top of a fantastic subterranean complex looking down to the dark depths of the multitude of the various sizes of holes that populate this ground. The Woman in the Dunes by Abe/Teshigahara (see previous article) comes to mind…
Once again, an effort of imagination needs to be made to envision this citadel at the end of the 19th century thus dramatizing a very probable appropriation of those spaces by their inhabitants. Laundry drying, well buckets bringing up goods coming from the depths, people conversing from one window to another, maybe even bridges who knows? We can even go further in this fictitious historic description by imagining artisans who audaciously added more or less reflecting pieces of bad metal on the courtyard walls to bring down more light, or others who organized networks of ropes used for a horizontal and vertical circulation of objects and bodies. Such stories are created by the successful balance between the uniformity of the block (it is an Hausmannian building after all !) and the multitude of local moments that trigger both a sense of community and a potential individual appropriation of those small localities. The courtyards, as narrow and dark as they are, constitute the key to such balance.

A third and last part will be published tomorrow or Friday.

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

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 1)

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 5 Comments

Photograph by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

I recently rediscovered a collection of documents that Martin Le Bourgeois and myself had collected and produced, almost four years ago, about a very interesting group of housing buildings in Paris’ 18th arrondissement (district).  Situated at the intersection of the rue Eugene Sue and the rue Simart these blocks had been built in the second part of the 19th century during Haussmann’s transformations of Paris in order to host 10,000 workers. I described them above as a group of housing buildings but what really struck us back then was the fact that this group appeared actually as a unique built mass, incised by two streets and punched by a multitude of more or less narrow courtyards. What also appeared to us is that this mass’ area was almost exactly the same of a more well-known compact mass of buildings that the low social class transformed into a proletarian citadel: the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong (see previous article and the fantastic section). Although the Parisian citadel is probably one of the densest blocks of the city, the Walled City used to be five time denser until it was destroyed in 1993.

Just like the Walled City has been associated for a long time with its own myth in which the police did not want to enter it and was hosting all kind of crooks, clandestine and other pirates – in reality it seems that this reputation was usurped – one could imagine a fictitious re-reading of Paris’ history in which this block could have functioned as an autonomous entity with its 10,000 inhabitants -during the bloodshed of the attack of the Commune by the Versailles troops in 1871 for example – and resists to the various forces of suppression by the use of this architecture’s defensiveness and labyrinthine organization of space. Unfortunately, the reality is somehow more prosaic and nothing like that happened. The Citadel is now subjected to Paris’ real estate (although the neighborhood is very far from being one of the most expensive in Paris), the density decreased and the blocks have been divided in individual lots, thus suppressing any form of potential community within it.

This concludes the first part of this article, a second one explores the depth of the multitude of courtyards which populate the citadel.

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

# STUDENTS /// Sadic(t)ropisms or The Intransigent Pursuit of the Sublime by Farzin Lotfi-Jam & Juan Francisco Saldarriaga

Posted on December 22, 2011 | 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, I was  lucky enough again to be part of a very interesting jury at Columbia University for the final review of the studio tutored by Francois Roche assisted by Ezio Blasetti and Miranda Romer. Like the last three year (2008, 2009, 2010), one project/scenario particularly triggered my imagination and critical sense.

This year’s story,  Sadic(t)ropisms or The Intransigent Pursuit of the Sublime is being recounted by Farzin Lotfi-Jam & Juan Francisco Saldarriaga. As their evocative text above implicitly mentions, Farzin and Juan found inspiration in the beautiful novella by James Graham Ballard, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (see previous article) in order to investigate the potentiality for architecture to carry some sadistic characteristics towards the body who occupies it. The built environment that hosts their narrative is, in fact, composed by a sort of vertical forest made out of shape-memory alloy which can be easily distorted but re-acquire its original form when in contact with an intense heat. People involved in this scenario are nomads, who after colonizing the matter during the night have to flee during the day as the Sun’s heat threatens to make their bodies prisoners of their direct environment thus continuously attempting to “remember” its origins. The body would then experience a last ecstasy while being strangled, allowing its subject to reach for a while, the sublime indicated in the name of the story.

One could then imagine a sequel to this narrative, in which a part of the population -named the builders or architects- would have managed to settle down in this environment as they succeeded to master the shape of the matter. They would then suspend the process of remembrance of the alloy, freezing it into sedentary habitat until this event they call “Catastrophe” which sees architecture suddenly remembering its origins in a spasm lethal to the bodies living in it.

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Posted in Columbia, Heterotopic Architectures, Students

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Ca s’est passé ici: A Call for scenario/fabrication/exhibition proposals curated by Francois Roche

Posted on November 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

Francois Roche has been recently commissioned to curate a competition for less than 30 years old artists/architects which will see the winning project being built in a wild site near Bordeaux. In this regard, he dedicated a website to this “call for scenario/fabrication/exhibition” that he called Ca s’est passé ici which includes the beautiful introductory text that follows:

“Grass produces neither flower nor sermon on the mountain, nor airplane carrier, but in the end it’s always grass that has the last word.  It fills emptiness, grows between, and amongst other things.  The flower is beautiful, the cabbage useful, the poppy makes us mad, but grass is overflow.” / Henry Miller

We are at the crossroads, where, faced with the autistic, blind, deaf and mute violence of our mechanisms of technological, industrial, mercantile and human domination, nature reacts…with violence and without warning, in a faltering of the original chaos…in mutiny against the organization of men… Gaïa seems to take revenge (Katrina, El Niño, Cyclone Jeanne, Tomas et Nargis, the Xynthia storm, Ewiniar typhoon, Indonesian and Japanese earthquakes, collateral Tsunamis all the way to Fukujima…chain of devastating incertitude, unpredictable in spite of our seismographic sciences).  The elements rage and the gods, so quick to pardon our folly, seem powerless to appease the rebellion, armed with infernal force…

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Posted in Heterotopic Architectures

# STUDENTS /// The Second Community: Identity Tourism California City by Fredrik Hellberg

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

It became a sort of tradition on The Funambulist to publish regularly the work of specific people whose interesting projects, add one by one over the years compose a coherent ensemble. Fredrik Hellberg is one of those people. After his Manhattan Oneirocritica, his Japanese Embassy in London and his essay about Meta-Virtual Solipsism, his work is back on the blog with his thesis project at the Architectural Association that is now competing for the RIBA’s 2011 Silver Medal.
The project, already published on dpr-barcelona for its homage to Konrad Wachsmann is named The Second Community. It starts with an exhaustive research about three community based on the notion of game: Online-role playing gamers, the Burning Man Festival and the Cosplay Conventions and the architecture that result from such gathering. Considering the abandoned city of California City in the desert, Fredrik designed a gigantic structure -indeed influenced by Wachsmann and Buckminster Fuller- that can host a new form of event that gathers the three concerned game gatherings.

His project, in addition of introducing this poetical structure, impresses for the numerous technical means it uses to describes itself. The important amount of documents that follows the text constitutes only half of the whole set Fredrik managed to compose in order to give to his project a strong consistency. The notion of tourism as a form of territorialization and deterriorialization being important to him, he fabricated his boards as maps that literally unfold the project in front of the viewer (see the following film).

The following text is his introduction to the project (for more renderings and another approach to the project read the article on dpr-barcelona):

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Posted in AA, Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures, Students

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Response of Aristide Antonas about his Zizek Residence

Posted on July 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

About three weeks ago, The Funambulist and Dpr-Barcelona both released reflections about Aristide Antonas‘ last project, the Zizek Residence, giving their interpretation of this house of seclusion for one to step back from the world in order to work and think. While Ethel Baraona Polh and Cesar Reyes were writing about the notions of heterotopia, networks and envelopes, I was myself questioning the architectural model of the Ivory Tower and evoking the potentiality of a Zarathustrian return to the world after such seclusion. After those interpretation, A. Antonas seems to have secluded indeed himself in order to respond to us in a long answer that provide a new way to envision his house.

This “dialogue à trois” was therefore very prolific and would be very interesting to continue on a regular basis. As Aristide pointed out, he is himself in Athens, Ethel and Cesar are in Barcelona, and I am myself in New York. The four of us are very far from our native land (in the wrong order, Salvador, Cyprus, France and Guatemala) and we all communicate in a foreign language. All those conditions can be also understood as forms of seclusion and the fact that we communicate with each other is not only by chance. As Aristide Antonas puts it: “Stepping back is not exactly the condition that negates the networks. It is the function that the network needs in order to be created.”

Zizek Residence by Aristide Antonas:
- article on Dpr-Barcelona
- article on The Funambulist
- response by Aristide Antonas

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Zizek Residence by Aristide Antonas (in dialogue with dpr-barcelona)

Posted on July 1, 2011 | 6 Comments

Dpr-barcelona and The Funambulist associate themselves in a dialogue around the last project designed by the very talented Aristide Antonas (see also his very rich blog): The Zizek Residence. Both Ethel Baraona Pohl & César Reyes (from dpr) and myself were in charge of writing a short interpretation of this project associated to a direct question to A.Antonas and post them on our respective blogs.
Here is the link toward the article written by Ethel and César on dpr-barcelona (in which you’ll be also able to see more documents about the project).

The axiom of this project is directly inspired by the book Violence (see my previous post about it) written by Slavoj Zizek in 2008. In its introduction, the Slovenian Philosopher uses the example given by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Existentialism and Humanism about a young French man’s dilemma during the Second World War as he is torn between entering the Resistance or helping his ill mother. In fact, in front of this choice without any a priori answer, Zizek proposes, once again, a third pill (see his chapter about the Matrix in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema). This third proposition is to withdraw to a secluded place in order to work and analyze the situation from outside of it.

The Zizek Residence is therefore a secluded house in which one can withdraw in order to work. A.Antonas even considered as Zizek himself as the inhabitant of such a house as you can see on his drawings. His argument, that you can read below the series of images, implies this house to be contemporaneous and connected to the internet, but in the interpretation I am about to develop, I would like to ignore that fact and questions the notion of ivory tower in general. Although the very name of the ivory tower has originally nothing to do with seclusion -it is first used in the Song of Solomon in the Bible- it is probably not by chance that the figure used for a wise withdrawing owns some obvious architectural implications.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures, Philosophy, Politics

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Paris’ Zoo to be Destroyed

Posted on June 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Francois Roche is currently leading a collective resisting to the developing project to rebuild Paris’ Zoo in Vincennes. In fact, this zoo, famous for its numerous artificial mountains is the object of a quasi-total reconstruction in an ambiguous semi-private contract lead by the omnipresent building company Bouygues (who also owns the main private TV channel in France and whose president Martin Bouygues is well known to be Nicolas Sarkozy’s buddy !).
Francois Roche is therefore proposing an information blog that gathers many precious and interesting documents about the zoo and its history and also invite people to sign a petition by sending name, title and nationality at freethezooparis@gmail.com
This invitation also insist on the fact that Bernard Tschumi, the architect of the project cannot be personally considered as responsible of such a problematic project.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Heterotopic Architectures, Politics

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Totem War by Martial Marquet, Louisa Gouesnard, Nicolas Polaert & Pierre Bregeon

Posted on June 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

While numerous blogs are competing to be the first ones to release the winning projects of every year’s Evolo skyscraper competition -when it’s been a while  now that the most interesting projects are not winning anymore- it seems interesting to observe the “refused” to the prize list…

Totem War is one of them and it has been designed, or should I say narrated, by my good friends Martial Marquet (you can visit his new website), Nicolas Polaert and Louisa Gouesnard helped by Pierre Bregeon. This project introduces a narrative in a small town lost in Siberia’s Taiga, Sliznevo. This narrative involves a local tradition that can be compared to one that was developed in San Gimignano (Tuscany) during the Renaissance, the erection by each family of a tower competing with the others. The totems drawn by the French team are made out of wood and use all the same system of joinery (see the diagram below) but are all built according to a different scheme that allow such a competition.

Here is the text written by this project’s authors for more details:

Sliznevo is a small Russian village located in the middle of the giant Siberian Taiga forest. In this village The family who built the highest totem would be recognized as the
most prestigious and powerful family of Sliznevo. Thanks to their past and cultural heritage, what they build adopts a very genuine typology and because each clan is different, each totem represents it through it’s own architecture.
This village is a micro-utopia, a modern San Gimignano, which represents at a small scale what is happening since more than a hundred years in our cities : the quest of the highest tower. This is one of our society syndromes, and there is no need of a Babel ending to understand the vanity of this phenomenom. Whatever it is today, everyone wants to be part of it, with a full commitment. It has become a fashionable religion.

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# 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

# 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.

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

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// OneFiveFour by Lebbeus Woods

Posted on March 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

For its thirtieth birthday, the Princeton Architectural Press is re-editing some of its past book including the beautiful OneFiveFour by Lebbeus Woods which was first published in 1989.
This book is actually a collection of eleven projects drawn by L.Woods from 1984 to 1989. However, I feel that it is more interesting to consider the ensemble of drawings and models as one single project which constitutes his vision of a city somehow lost in time, driven by an ambiguous technology that recalls the steampunk of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (The Difference Engine).

The following text is an amazing excerpt from Woods’ introduction about his project Underground Berlin (see previous article) that creates a metaphorical and romanticized city out of the situation of Berlin in the 80′s:

What is happening in this city is much more than political unification. What is happening is acclimation of people to new conditions of life. Beneath the surface, within the planetary mass of the earth, a new climate of forces exists geomechanical forces that issue from deep within the earth -gravitational electromagnetic, and seismic forces that come to shape the forms and relationships comprising life in the underground city itself.
From the subtly vibrating planetary mass of earth come seismic forces that move the inverted towers and bridges in equally subtle vibrations. The inhabitants of the city feel them, perhaps in a way we would call subliminal because the structures they build are of metal sheets -steel and aluminum and bronze and copper. These living and working places vibrate and resonate in the great civic spaces of the city. Like musical instruments, they vibrate and shift in diverse frequencies, in resonance with the earth and also with one another.
A way of living is in this way formed. The builders of the city have sought political independence by going beneath the earth, under the Wall, subverting the designs of occupying political rivals, and have found something unexpected: a new world, a world of seismic wind and electromagnetic flux, a world of constant and not unpleasant temperatures, but also of continuous change. Their structures, built to connect inversely with the world above, are instruments of this change, measuring both the life of the inanimate planet and the corresponding changes of those living within.

Lebbeus Woods. OneFiveFour. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.
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Posted in Books, Heterotopic Architectures

# LITERATURE /// Untitled Narrative #002 (Feral Garage) by Martin Byrne

Posted on March 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

I recently published the post-professional thesis project of my good friend Martin Byrne, Feral Garage. This beautiful Ballardian architectural project is actually associated with a short story written by Martin as a parallel medium to describe the narrative of a building which, by a dysfunction of its technological system develops a feral condition that the narrator of this story experiences.

As I wrote in this previous post, the project that applies the conclusions of his research starts from the observation of IBM recent advertising for “a smarter planet”, full of sensors and interactivity. One understands easily how IBM can be economically interested to propose such a vision of the world and also how the various institutions can see in this program a new way to control a bit more society. Martin’s building is thus a garage and a server tower in Mid-Town Manhattan (in front of the Apple store from all places !), that dialogues with each other. Both have been designed for IBM and the server tower remains a pristine universe but the over-magnetic charge of the sensors in the garage building made the latter go back to a feral state, in which unexpected forms of life starts to develop. Humans are then invited to negotiate with their own fear to enter this building that developed its own form of uncontrol.
(He does not have a publisher so if somebody want to talk to him about that, I’d be happy to transmit the message !)

UNTITLED NARRATIVE # 002
by Martin Byrne

# 001

April is the cruelest month.

Sitting rigidly at the far end of the thick clear plastic conference table – enameled and embossed with desaturated flickering figures, charts, and graphs – nervous little Eli Warring was sweating under the weight of the expectations recently laid upon him.  Only six weeks a freshman at the firm, he had yet to witness such a large and encompassing responsibility delegated to someone as unsullied as himself, regardless of the sufficiency of the intellect within.  Wiping the moisture from his palms onto his Bergdorf-patterned knees, he tried not to look at the flexing, intelligent walls streaming with data like rivulets of pixilated water – wary that they may register some sense of the fear he was attempting so desperately to hide. Continue reading →

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Posted in Heterotopic Architectures, Literature, Pratt Institute, Science Fiction, Students

# GREAT SPECULATIONS /// Demotown by Jesse Honsa & Gregory Mahoney

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 5 Comments

Demotown is the winner project of the Urban Borders competition by Think Space (Zagreb Society of Architects)(check out also my friends Kyriakos Kyriakou and Sofia Krimizi’s project that reached the third place) . This very beautiful vision of a feral Detroit that recalls another friend’s project by Martin Byrne, has been created by Jesse Honsa & Gregory Mahoney. Demotown introduces an hybridization of the city of Detroit by nature and human occupation in which each program is organized in strata.

Here is their text related to the project:

Utopian megaprojects of the 20th century, from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse to Paulo Soleri’s Linear City, are too often negated by their megalomaniacal, individualistic plan for the future. With the tabula rasa as their method for organization, such projects lack the contradictory, contextual, democratic, “organic” process of city building. Contextual, yet admittedly still megalomaniacal, this project uses the city of Detroit as a found object (rather than a blank canvas), forming the basis for a retroactive arcology that redefines urban density and circulation.
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Posted in Architectural Projects, Great Speculations, Heterotopic Architectures