deconcrete

In his post about narrow urbanisms in New Orleans, Candy Chang refers to the phenomenon of FORM FOLLOWING TAX LAWS. Government taxing according to property frontage led to extraordinary inventions, both in housing (the “shotgun” typology) and also in the skinny land lots along the Mississippi River.

The government taxed two-story houses more; so people added second floors to the rear, where it didn’t count. The government taxed houses based on the number of rooms; so people didn’t make closets or hallways, which counted as rooms. [...] Doors are arranged so that in some homes you could potentially shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard, hence the name.

In the same way that houses minimised their access to the front street, farmers reduced the size of their plantations to the minimum frontage along the Mississippi, just enough to allow ships transport their goods along the main river.

[image1> shotgun house in New Orleans from candychang via strangemaps] [image2> Southern Mississippi map showing narrow lot tenure structure, 1858 from candychang via strangemaps]

Instead of a sign, this bike-shop in German Altlandsberg has decided to hang 120 bicycles from its façade. In the most refined Venturi’s Vegas style, I cannot wait to see also their washing-machine store building, their Bakery or even the Town Hall with 15 town councillors exhibited on the front wall!

[image> bike shop in Altlandsberg via spaceinvading]

When estate-subsidized housing, urban sprawl and formal public space fail to provide an adequate civic life, can citizens develop their own models? Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010 deepens in historical Kibbutz settlements from mid 20th century, a model to be updated.

The Kibbutz mode of settlement, which entails a way of life voluntarily rooted in equality, mutual support, and sharing, presents an inherently unique architectural challenge, encompassing economic egalitarism, collective ownership, and all-inclusive education and health services. [...] Reformist and utopian plans promoting such social ideals had remained mostly on paper. The vision of the Kibbutz, however, was translated and realized through spatial organization, incorporating contemporary experiences and processes of change. [...] Egalitarianism and equality thus materialize in planning through a sharing of space and a communalization of functions of production and consumption, agriculture, industry, culture, education, health, etc. In effect, the Kibbutz is one space, undivided by differential tenure, free of private parcels and fences, host to all of life’s multiple dimensions, and owned cooperatively by Kibbutz members. Open public common space is the main arena of kibbutz life (a large central lawn with the public facitlities, the dining hall, and the culture house situated around it like a forum or agora).

The last 3 years have seen a marded return of population to the Kibbutz, a rethinking of its architectural values, and a reenvisioning of models of solidarity, mutual assistance, and assurance.

This wonderful exhibition proclaims: “Architecture as an active partner in the shaping of a society and in contributing to the quality of human relationships within it.”

However, this utopian humanism and good intentions terribly contrast with the current Mare Magnum that Léopold Lambert describes in the isolation still existing in his Palestinian Archipielago model. I wish the Kibbutz spirit could spread out a little bit in the area.

[image1>dining hall floor-washing machine - unidentified kibbutz 1960s] [image2>general diagrammatic plan for a kibbutz for 250 families by samuel bickels 1940s] [image3> dinning hall at kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek 1953] [images1-3> from the Israel Pavilion brochure] [image4> Palestinian Archipielago by Julien Bousac via boiteaoutils]

In order to reveal the hidden potential of vacant property in the Netherlands, Rietveld Landscape were comissioned to depict the new “21st century form of entrepreneurship” for the Holland Pavilion at the current Venice Biennale. VACANT NL first detect all the empty buildings from t7th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, to propose and encourage afterwards its Zwischenutzung or Intermediary Use by means of Urban Pioneers.

In Curator Ole Bouman’s words: Is there so much unused architecture in the Netherlands?[...] It might come as a surprise [...] to know that a large part of the Netherlands is indeed vacant and is growing more vacant by the day.

Vacant NL – where architecture meets ideas, shows that temporary use can give a positive impulse, inspire, and create the conditions for innovation within the creative knowledge economy [...] and wants to inspire designers, property developers, and policy-makers to come up with architecture that is not just funcional and aesthetically poleasing, but which also sets a positive change in motion.

Apart from a physical model of Dutch emptiness, the exhibition refers to diverse bottom-up initiatives for urban development in the Netherlands:

Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam

NDSM, Amsterdam

Op Trek: Hotel Transvaal, The Hague

Worm@VOC, Rotterdam

Summerhouse hotel, Amsterdam (GECEKONDU)

Duintjer CS, Amsterdam

NU HIER, Rotterdam

Caballerofabriek, The Hague

De Verdieping, TrouwAmsterdam

Schieblock, Rotterdam

Lab Tussentijd, Arnhem

Ebbingekwartier, Groningen

[image1> Vacant NL by Rietveld Landscape] [images2&3> Vacant NL model at the Venice Biennale Dutch Pavilion by deconcrete2010] [image4> map of Vacant NL from the exhibition brochure]

The Kingdom of Bahrain, an island nation neighbouring Dubai and facing the Arabian Peninsula, was once completely dependent on the sea through its fishing and pearling activities, but today it has nearly turned its back on it. RECLAIM is an investigation on informal coastal settlements, consisting of fishermen’s huts laying on plots, which were once used as gathering places of pearl divers hosting the first organized syndicates. Today, scattered here and there, at the edge of the reclaimed and soon to be claimed sea, the huts host five o’clock tea sessions and backgammon games; a small attempt to reclaim a zest of leisurely coastal space.

Reclaim rethinks the openness of Bahrain’s waterfront at its Venice Biennale Pavilion, trying to recover a lost relationship, by showing and displaying some of its still existing pile-dwellings. These huts together with the endless land reclamation to the sea, makes the island extend and extend…and also be awarded the Golden Lion to the best National Participation:

“Given the range of vast urban developments that Kingdom of Bahrain could have been tempted to include in this Exhibition, the jury was impressed by the choice, instead, of a lucid and forceful self-analysis of the nation’s relationship with its rapidly changing coastline. Here transient forms of architecture are presented as devices for reclaiming the sea as a form of public space: an exceptionally humble yet compelling response to People meet in architecture, the theme proposed by Exhibition Director Kazuyo Sejima.”

[source and images> Bahrain Urban Research Team & A Coastal Promenade by Camille Zakharia]

Usus/Usures explores the wearing down of architecture from a material point of view. An exhibition at the Belgium Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2010 by ROTOR, which shows users’ traces in a generic city.

They collect scratched benches, a prostitute’s waiting corner, eroded granite tiles surrounding an elevator’s button, a worn down door handle, or a hard-to-clean rubber flooring from the subway…

Construction materials go through several phases over the course of their lives [...] Consider one of these in particular: the time when the material is subjected to use. When a material is used in the exposed surface of a building, it is gradually transformed by deposits, imprints, scratches and other traces of wear. [...] It can no longer be a convenient abstraction [...] and must from now on confront the uses and the users who mark and shape its very substance.

The more muddled, the richer.

Worn out urban objects collected by Rotor for the Venice Biennale 2010 [image1> by eric mairiaux] [images2,3,4> by deconcrete2010]

A 700 metres deep mine in Northern Chile. Only one entry and no emergency exit. 33 miners trapped in the lowest underground shelter. 35 ºC and 98% humidity.

After 20 days of survival, rescue teams have found them by means of an 8 cm wide drill. Food, messages and medicines are to be interchanged from now on.

Final rescue is predicted to last another 3 months, since the drill machine can excavate only 15 m per day of the salvation tunnel, 66 cm wide, enough for average male shoulders to pass through.

Meanwhile, their relatives camp at the entrance of the mine, to provide psychological support to the miners, trapped until Christmas.

The owner of the mine has not appeared in public yet. Apart from a ridiculous salary and non-existent safety controls, miners were reported to have been given only water and 2 biscuits inside the tunnels per working day.

[source and image> vertical section of Chile Mine disaster by El Pais paper version 24/08/2010]

Two rivers meet each other in Manaus, the capital of Brazilian Amazonas State: Rio Negro (Black River) and Amazon River. But Rio Negro had such dark waters, that 19th century eccentric rubber barons preferred to send their clothes back to Europe for laundry service.

Extravagance was as unendless as the economical profits that conquistadores made out of the rubber trees. Manaus city boosted as an Opera Capriccio of one of them, who decided to bring Enrico Caruso’s works to the middle of the jungle. This scene is depicted in Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo, where one baron succeeds in making a ship cross from one river to another by climbing up and down a 40º hill, by previous deforestation of the area.That’s how the baron’s slaves open a new trade route to revalue unproductive sectors.

Today, Manaus hosts a world-wide referent Opera Festival. But unfortunately, former capitalist follies, which once made the city grow, only perform fantastic journeys on stage.

thanks laura!

[image1> Werner Herzog's ship through the jungle via coffeewithanarchitect] [image2> Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo via moviecritic] [image3> Rio Negro meets Amazon River via wikipedia]

Deserts have no reference points for orientation, and dwelling in them during a music festival can be a whole adventure. How to plan a temporary settlement for 50,000 inexperienced people on a vast sunny flat landscape?

Burning Man Festival organises the camp in a solar-based scheme. Alleys dividing blocks are distributed in concentric circles. Clock-time and degree-based coordinates orient participants and locate theme camps. Main axes occur at each half-hour spoke.

One disoriented festival-goer can look at his watch. It is 2 pm. His projected shadow on the sandy floor extends in one direction. But his tent is located in the 5:30 Alley. Now he knows where to address himself to have a rest from the soaring temperatures….

[image1> aerial view Burning Man Festival camp in Nevada's Desert via activitylounge] [images2&3> Burning Man 2005 camp map by Lisa Hoffman from HAILEY,C.: Camps - a guide to 21st century space]

Troy, Paris and Montreal have a lot in common, but everyone cannot experience it. Cities below street level may either conceal or profit from their fantastic realities.

In Secret Tunneling [dpr-barcelona], Paris Catacombs and their 155 miles of linking passages are one version of underground leisure for adventurous urban explorers. Paris lies over the result of a peculiar topography, excavated both by natural caves and artificial quarries. After centuries of usage, either as a mineral source or as a public ossuary, the city forbids any functional use of them.

Troy, as many antique cities, enjoyed reusing its street layout. This settlement’s organic process of expansion throughout the centuries made buildings disappear and reappear when reusing their stones, bricks, walls or partial structures. But this overlapping urban growth, like in Paris, is not readable for city-users any more.

Montreal’s tough winters made the city expand in the vertical dimension, but towards the centre of the Earth. A 30 km network of underground leisure passages, protected from freezing winds, created a new layer of retail pedestrianism underneath conventional skyscrapers. However, the underground city, much more than the surface, is a controlled space, just like any other enclosed public space. Thus, the subterranean still resists the appropriations that people are able to make of city spaces outdoors. [Emily Raine]

Invisible Troy, Paris and Montreal originated their underground complexity in teleported walls, recycled ossuaries and harsh winters. But today controlled environments simplify them to the maximum.

[image1>overlapping Troy maps by the TroyProject] [image2> Underground Catacombs of Paris, 1855 via dpr-barcelona] [image3>Montreal underground passages map via readingo]

…personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity…

[images 1,2&3> chinese street cleaner with spinning brooms; army shovels used as cooking pots; self-made truck cabin; all from KK via uonodesign] [image4> self-built truck cabin in India by sephi bergerson]

Philippines, like most tropical islands, uses flip-flops as its most common footwear. As a paradox, Metropolitan Manila houses today the “shoe capital of Asia” Marikina City, where 200,000 people are said to work on the shoe manufacturing industry along its Sandal Street or Slipper Street.

But this suburb is also the site where flip-flops pay tribute to a woman who had not enough time in her life to wear all the shoes she owned. After a popular revolt in 1986, former Dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos had to leave her collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes in the Presidential Palace, before fleeing the country. Imelda stock-piled 5,400 luxury brand shoes in the same way as other kings gathered over 3,000 women in their harems. Palaces, contrary to common dwellings, have this virtue of housing any possible paradox whim inside their walls. 18th century French merchant Beaujean was too fat to walk along his amazing gardens and suffered from insomnia inside a palace full of splendid bedrooms…

At least Imelda can show off her collection; some years ago she turned her precious treasure into a populist Shoe Museum, maybe as a tool to win Manila’s Major Elections. She was wearing a pair of locally made silver high-heels the day of the extravagant opening.

[image1> Malakañang Palace in Manila with Imelda Marcos' shoe collection via indecorous taste] [image2> shoe manufacturers distribution in Marikina City, Manila by Allen J. Scott]

Spanish cities had been revaluing real estate properties, and the city itself, by inventing general headquarters of anything in the suburbs.

This has been the end of branches spread all around the city, in order to be joint in one site together. Downtown is not the representative quarter par excellence anymore. Then, different so-called monofunctional “cities” have started to blossom in inner peripheries: Telefonica City (one of the main telecommunications firm), Santander Group City (one of the main banking corporations), Real Madrid City (grouping all their football training facilities) or the recent Barcelona and Madrid Cities of Justice.

Santander Group envisioned before the crisis, that they should rather sell all their offices in Spain, and then rent them again; they managed therefore to earn largest profits before the real estate bubble went off. But Madrid City of Justice was not so lucky. After a bombastic project to revalue farmlands in the outskirts, the whole mega-project needed to be stopped a couple of months ago (1,4 million euro had already been spent only on advertising).

Controversy started, when officials decided that each cylindrical court should be built with a budget of social housing rectangular blocks. But after the 90% completion of the first court, the whole project has been frozen. The rest 14 courts, each one signed by a different architect, hadn’t even been started. And yet, 6-12 million euro are to be used in contract cancellations. Meanwhile, desert streets remain in the middle of an organic sandy landscape…

[image1> aerial view of Madrid City of Justice from googlemaps] [image2> empty sites in Madrid City of Justice via madridiario]

Among intense incense scents and pilgrims, Tibet can also surprise with enlightened non-pedigreed artifacts. Mobile collapsible mirrors can bring enough power to cook in isolated areas for free; by means of two parabolic reflecting surfaces on wheels, a pot can be easily heated under the extremely bright sun of its 4,000-5,000 m highlands.

Another discovery is its traditional compact earth flooring techniques known as Arka, used in monasteries rooftops. Based on an average of 8 member working teams, Arka’s procedure consists of workers compacting the soil with their feet and a special tool; helped by the strong rhythm of their sung melody, they harmonically step on the humid surface everyday during 1 to 2 months, until it becomes a completely even waterproof flat roof covering. The  Tibetan singing terrazo in situ.

[all images> tibetan solar kitchen and compact earth flooring Arka by luis galan]

What if buses could fly? Science fiction seems to be more real in last proposal for sustainable urban mobility in Chinese cities. The “straddling bus” looks like a light-rail train bestriding the road, reducing the cost of commuting systems to a third, when compared to subway construction. Its construction will begin at the end of this year in Beijing.

It is 4/4.5 m high with 2 levels> passengers board on the upper level while other vehicles lower than 2 m can go through under. powered by electricity and solar energy, the bus can speed up to 60 km/h carrying 1,200-1,400 passengers at a time without blocking other vehicles’ way. {…} it can reduce traffic jams by 20-30 %.

[source and image> straddling bus via chinahush]

Equipped with a motorbike and a long-distance laser, telescopes pop up in Xian at night. Chinese pedestrians can then enjoy moon, planets, eclipses and stars by means of such kind of informal hybrids for only 1 euro. 

[images> mobile bike/telescope at night in Xian, China by deconcrete2010]

Today Catalunya has fortunately approved to end bullfighting shows in its territory from 2012 on. Canary Islands already did it in 1991, but the topic is still provoking a huge controversy amongst Spanish most rooted sectors.

Most arenas have been used for pop concerts, acrobatic performances or commercial activities during the winter season as well; Barcelona already turned its main arena into a commercial shopping mall. Cartagena awaits for a contemporary art museum recovering the Roman Theatre above which the bullfighting arena had been built and abandoned.

The possibility that the whole country ends up closing these macabre spots of barbarian traditions opens a wide range of possibilities to come up with new uses for them…

[images1&2> abandoned Plaza de Toros in Cartagena, Murcia via skyscrapercity and ayuntamiento de cartagena] [image3>reconversion barcelona arena by josep toledo]

my grandfather enjoyed growing champignons in a dark sandy cave. maybe he could have been growing a small house too…

“Mycotecture, or the creation of architectural forms with fungus, is being pioneered by Philip Ross at Far West Fungi in California. He doesn’t use the caps of the mushroom; he’s interested in the mycelium, the white root-like fibers that form a network in the soil below. Grown in a mold, and then dried, it is an amazing material. It is nontoxic, fireproof, mold-resistant and extremely tough. [...] Mushrooms are grown by packing sawdust into airtight bags, then steam cooking the packed bags for several hours. After these pasteurized wood chips have cooled down small pieces of mushroom tissue are introduced into the bag, which eagerly devours the neutralized wood. As the fungus digests and transforms the contents of the bag it solidifies into a mass of interlocking cells, slowly becoming denser and taking form. [...] After the mushroom tissue has colonized all of the sawdust the tops of the bags are cut off and moved into a growing room with high humidity. The bricks are then unwrapped and moved to a drying room for about a month.” [Source> technovelgy]

thanks laura & tanner!

[all images> mycotecture installation out of fungus bricks by philip ross via technovelgy]

Broken Embraces is last Almodóvar’s movie from 2009. But far from several disappointing forced dialogues, there are some scenes shot in a magical landscape consisting also of broken embraces.

La Geria is a human invention of extracting any possible vitality from the volcanic island of Lanzarote, in the Spanish Canary Islands Archipelago. After last eruptions in the 18th century, local villagers discovered that they could still grow wine-plants underneath the 1-2 metre deep layer of sands and ashes. The witty system involved digging circular inverted cones until touching fertile soil, where planting would be optimal; the black lapilli sands function as humidity stabilisers, helped by a characteristic broken circle of stonework wall, which embraces the wines and protects them from dominant winds.

A non-pedigreed landscape for Bernard Rudofsky…

[all images> La Geria wineplants in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain via postersguide, wikimediacommons, economia urbana, googlemaps]

Berlin finds its tricks to enhance entertainment. Edgy party clubs have been traditionally using the legal formula of the e.V. (association) to avoid paying taxes as a registered business, since they are, conceptually and physically, rather informal gatherings of people simply eager to enjoy.

Mauerpark is one of the hundreds of examples in the city, where the informal among the informal pops up. If 10 years ago a group of neighbours decided to found the Mauerpark e.V. in order to activate this former piece of Berlin NoMan’s Land, today it is one of the most vivid Sunday corners of the city. Just providing spaces for  meeting, this bottom-up urban governance team have left citizens free space for their spontaneous activities, such as weekly hero Joe Hatchiban and his open-air mobile bike-karaoke. A mix of freak-show and dream of fame, where a bike, a sun-protector and two speakers add an excuse for flanierenden Sundays.

[all images> open-air karaoke and hairdresser's at mauerpark berlin. stills from reportage by der spiegel]

19 meters is the dangerous remaining gap until the water level of the Three Gorges Dam in China reaches its maximum limit. Since its opening in 2008, nobody could think that the reservoir could be filled up so soon.

Being the world largest water engineering facility, with its 185 metres high concrete wall, it might be currently waiting for a Solomon Judgement. Due to increasing rains and generally damaged soils, which can retain less superficial water, Yangtse River is menacing to flood either the high lands or the low lands. A decision needs to be taken, unless weather helps.

Providing that a radical situation arrives, should only one side of the dam become fully flooded? or rather both a little bit? which settlements would deserve being erased of the map?

[Source&images> Three Gorges Dam in Central China via der Spiegel]

“The Project Matrioska Home (MH) raises the building of living spaces in order for the homeless to spend the night at the streets in better conditions. This temporal solution is presented as a support to this collective. However, we do not try that these people live in carton boxes. Our objective is to give meaning and to provide visibility to the fact that is viable to improve significantly the conditions in which the homeless are nowadays. That is, it is necessary to re-stablish his/her fundamental right, as any other citizen, to have a worthy house. The solution in this case is a simple anecdote which is used as excuse, as attention calling to the society and to the public administrations to face these problems. MH escapes therefore of the stands close to the purely welfare or charitable ones. MH is nominated as a visibility and tool for the demand of the homeless rights.”

[Source&image> Matrioska Home by Todo Por la Praxis]

Benidorm is the Manhattan of Spain. Having experienced its flash development à la Chinese since the 1960s tourist boom, it is one of the largest and most compact accumulation of high-rise in the Mediterranean coasts. Spain’s boom relying on real estate speculation during last decades has led to its current crisis. millions of empty apartments await now for tourists who cannot afford going on summer-holidays any more, dreaming that North European snowbirds, tired of such massive careless tourism, would dare to come back again.

Coastline destruction is a fact in Spain, nurtured by corrupted local governors and investors hungry for business. but i always wonder, whether extremely dense Benidorm is in fact more sustainable in terms of land consuming, than neighbouring towns with spreading disperse middle-rise towers… anyway, Greenpeace reports that more care should be taken in flash urbanisms so that a piece of natural coast might at least be still recognisable in the future, and keep on demolishing former developments which, from their very beginning, were breaching the Spanish Coastal Law.

[images 1-5> Benidorm - Marbella - Gibraltar - Mallorca - Oropesa. Before and After tourist boom, all by Greenpeace via el pais] [image 6>La Manga via lugares naturistas]

Bivouac shelters date back to Napoleon Wars, referring to a guard on night watch duty, inside any kind of improvised shelter.

Charlie Hailey in Camps, his guide to 21st-century space, refers to two examples of vertical camping working as single shelters: suspended tents used in long-last mountaineering and children tree hammocks for summer camps. These hybrids of hammocks and tents make “tree camping and cliff camping reorient the grounding of camp’s spaces, to harness, poetically and technically, the tensile nature of tent camping.” [HAILEY, C.: Camps. The MIT Press 2009]

[image1> Wall camp at the Arctic Circle via victoria.blogware] [image2> children tree camp in barres, France from Charlie Hailey's Camps]

O Campo is a photography series by Joachim Schmid, concerning irregular Brazilian football fields. These organic invented fields are resulting products of vacant/waste lands together with a rising demand for playgrounds. A pure example of contextual urbanism, where the built existing context is the one who fixes the rules.

As the photographer states: the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws.

[source> la periferia domestica]

[all images> joachim schmid photographing brazilian football fields via multicipios brasil]

The thin thin building [楼薄薄] in Chinese Hainan island, a triangular pet-architecture housing 6 people, has been demolished. convicted of being “illegal”.

Requiem for 19 m2 of invented land!

[all images> thin thin building via chinahush]

finally, the graphic result of the seoul series exploration is released. a map describing the way in which the city was explored during 5 days of my situationist dérive, following 50 different spontaneous agents/strategies. the graphics are a mixture of ancient Korean 2D/3D mapping techniques, and spatial scale is replaced by timing.

[click to enlarge]

[image by deconcrete2010]

Extremely complex political context in Berlin inspired visions and ideas towards utopia. DasUngebauteBerlin are 100 forgotten projects for a city, which wants to make them visible in an exhibition opening on the 16th July at legendary Café Moscow. The venue itself was part of a built Stalin-like utopia for a city demanding a representative avenue in the 1950s.

“Although the idealized and often radical concepts do not always respond satisfactorily to the specific context and reflect an exaggerated attitude, they are still part of the history of ideas. They reveal the aspirations of a society. [...] Forgotten and repressed projects are brought to light and presented in plans and models, showing a different Berlin, as we know it, an invisible city.”

[image1> unbuilt berlin exhibition via das ungebaute berlin]

Kyrgyzstan’s Bishkek and Uzbekistan’s Tashkent have experienced the planning of Soviet apartment blocks during last decades. The fact that a great part of their population was still rooted in a nomad life, made bizarre transformations of concrete high-rise appear, when people  moved from the meadows to the industrial city. Nomads of central Asia and Mongolia have traditionally inhabit Yurts or Gers, a circular collapsible structure out of foldable timber lattice and felt; taking only one hour to erect them, without a single nail. However, when moved to a standard apartment, families have been reported to wall their windows and tear down all inner partitions, in order to erect their windowless nomad tent inside the whole apartment in the 5th floor.

The nomads divide the interior (of the circular floorplan) into two basic parts. The left part belongs to the man, where he stores his weapon, saddles and horse-whips. On the right side, the woman keeps the household goods such as dishes, cups and cutlery as well as her belongings like dresses and jewelry. A wall made of reed separates the cooking area from the living room…There are some ancient Chinese documents about wars with Kyrgyz Nomads. It is written that when they wanted to attack the Kyrgyz in the morning, they could not do it, because during the night the whole village just silently disappeared. [Source>mykyrgyzstan]

If Russian planning made nomad Yurts struggle, so is doing the Made in China economy. Kyrgyz people recognize that recently imported Chinese-manufactured tents are easier to assemble (20 minutes instead of 1 hour) and cheaper. However, a Chinese unit would last up to 3 seasons, while the traditional Kyrgyz one, can last several generations. Not only being used by nomads nowadays, urbanites in Bishkek or Tashkent also prefer them for family funerals, weddings or official acts, interacting with standard built environments.

[image1> yurt inside a concrete building in Ulan Baator via trueslant] [image2>yurt by Ondřej Žváček] [image3>chinese prefab yurt by david trilling via tol] [image4>erecting a mongolian ger via canada mongolia connection]

Cities sometimes need to provide space, which is more intimate than an office and more public than one’s home. Santiago de Chile has its peculiar magic formula in Cafés with legs (literally cafés con piernas). Resulting from an hegemonic masculinity in society, these widely accepted cafés still struggle with male and female roles, reaffirming traditional modes of being “man” and being “woman”.

Basically they consist of a café, where refined coffee is served at a higher price than average, by waitresses with naked legs or light clothes/underwear. Clients (mostly men) sit along its bar on stools during their midday break from office work. From the street, a smoked glass turns the prohibited into invisible, while once inside, mirror glasses make the permitted fully visible.

But eroticism aside, the incredible success of such meeting places relies on the waitresses giving psychological support to their customers, a kind of female advisor on personal lives. The fact that waitresses are more naked than dressed, provides an atmosphere of intimacy to talk about one’s deepest feelings.

In a time where women have achieved enough self-sufficiency in Chile, it seems that there is still a necessity for outdated roles of women’s servility, that is not to be found at home. As Devanir da Concha Silva pointed out [magazine for experimental anthropology 5,2005], these places are anchored to former “natural” spaces for men and women, reflecting how [hetero] sexual human beings enjoy everyday urbanity. But does urbanity really need the illusion of being a “real man” to feel more masculine?

Meanwhile, Cafés with Legs will remain between a modernised past and an obsolete modernity…

thanks paulo!

[images1,2> café with legs Caribe via serious eats] [image3>café with legs interior by marcelo montecino] [image4>café with legs Haiti via davidlansing]

Poetically, Lord Byron suggested that the bridge where prisoners should take their last glance at the outside world before execution could be renamed as the Bridge of Sighs. However, its dense stone-lattices in its two windows almost prevented them from seeing anything, just exactly as the huge billboards that Venice resigned herself to install last year in every restorating façade.

The marketing-city par excellence has already closed 10 out of her 100 churches, since public budget does not meet the vast amount of renovation needs. As a result, hordes of visitors are also resigned to experience the decaying monuments as former victims from Inquisition walking through the Bridge of Sighs used to; through the most rancid way of attracting investment.

No matter if the city sinks or not. We won’t notice. Floating billboards can remain over the water surface.

[image1> view from the Bridge of Sighs by phileusfogg] [images 2-4> Venice advertising via unbound edition] [image5> Venice billboard by sarasculli]

In a former post I was delighted with the informal appropriations of IKEA’s showroom by Shanghainese people, who used it as a public park. A similar situation occurs in Beijing main bookstore, where every kind of citizen enjoys a Sunday soaring summer day reading books along the air-conditioned aisles. The fact that this 5-story mega-mall lies next to Tian’anmen Square also makes one think of the scarce chances of finding controversial books on its shelves, or even any significant non-commercial architecture book in its dull “Construction Science” section. Anyway, it is gratifying to find a private business that ends up functioning as a public library, and even being able to have a sort of refreshing picnic while sitting behind the yellow lines.

[all images> Beijing Books Building by deconcrete2010]

No clue to be found about this diagonal partition in a village house of middle Spain. However, i wonder which reasons hide behind this beautiful Wonder. The house lies between the old and the new. But given that we consider it is not simply an architect’s capricho, could it be a result of perverting nonsense regulations allowing transforming only 50% of the surface of historic fassades? or is it rather the result of two brothers inheriting their parents’ house and refusing to split it into two vertical narrow pieces? or is it the house for an astronomer with an integrated telescope to watch stars? or the trace of a former ladder linking balconies together to ease night-lovers access? maybe all urban policies should be ambigous enough, or even much more restrictive, to provoke such playful inventions…

thanks, tito!

[image> diagonal partition in Arroyo del Rio, Caceres, Spain by Yeiart]

One can always dream of a city, but what if we all would dream on, over, above, underneath, in or along the city?

Bernd Hagemann has been documenting the magnificent way in which Chinese citizens physically experience the texture of their everyday built environment for many years. With his open-end open-source archive of sleeping people in the most strange corners and positions, SleepingChinese is a website, where a city can be described according to a hard, soft or group condition, leading to hardsleepers, softsleepers and groupsleepers.

This makes me think of unsuitable relationships, such as working-places far away from sleeping-places, working hours overcoming leisure hours… or simply pavements lacking soft beds.

[image1> sleeping Chinese by deconcrete2010] [images 2-5> hard, soft and groupsleepers via sleeping chinese]

Maps can tell us as much about politics and ideology as they do about space. As with any representation, you can’t put it all in; you only include what’s important to you [...] Nations and empires trace borders. The navigation needs of European merchants and explorers determined the shape of Mercator’s familiar world map, which also dramatically minimized the size of Africa and the Tropics. But today, the argument goes, social and economic forces are shrinking the globe and physical location is losing its importance. So if we’re beyond space, what will our new maps look like? [Alex Aylett]

In Antonia Hirsch’s World map series [2006], the shape of each of the world’s countries is scaled to occupy the same relative area, which is then transformed into a transparent layer. All layers are overlaid, making the centre of the image, which is shared by many countries, highly saturated in colour. Individual shapes are difficult to discern, yet this map’s uncertain borders and ambiguous shape can be understood to describe the territory of the average country.

The same conceptual process is used to conceive her universal Untitled World Flag in 2009, where 200 countries melt with each other through their flags, morphing into one.

[images 1&2> world map, Antonia Hirsch 2006] [image3> untitled universal flag, Antonia Hirsch 2009]

…the sun shines, and one is automatically taken to the clouds…

Tomás Saraceno’s art explores possible visions of a better world, generating poetic, playful propositions for a human life in balance with the planet. His works occupy the border regions between science, art and architecture. They can include anything from spheres and cloud creations to flying gardens, space elevators and futuristic dwellings. The dream of a weightless state and the possibility of a human being moving freely above the clouds, free of the confines of gravity, and free from national borders, recur in several works. [Source> artfacts.net]

[image> saraceno's solar-powered balloon by entrelaspiedras]

Finally, my Urban Design research thesis and proposal on HYPER-REAL ESTATES: Shanghai, the partycipatory megacity just released!

In Post-1978 Shanghai, there are two major forms of urban dwellings resulting from previous Chinese Maoist society: formal high-rise compounds and informally restructured ancient urban housing. Under the incessant trend of flash growth in last decades, both types, the Real Estates and the Un-Real Estates, reveal decisive for city making. Traditionally, standard high-rise have led to a monotonous and impersonal city; and over-crowded ancient housing (Lilong) have led to interactive modes of appropriation of public space. The Un-Real Estates manifest themselves as participatory environments, where dwellers build up social networks and achieve personal fulfilment.

On one hand, a discourse throughout currents of thinking on Participation is followed, ranging from classic Lefebvre, Heidegger, Constant, Situationism, Everyday and Tactic Urbanisms, Turner and Habraken, to more recent thesis on the Open City and Temporary Use. On the other, diverse research thesis concerning the redevelopment of Shanghai’s Lilongs and new Estates are compared.

Regarding the role of dwellers in contemporary and future Chinese developments, this research investigates whether real estate compounds are becoming the new kind of participatory architecture in Shanghai. To achieve this purpose, Do-It-Yourself strategies have been field-studied and a survey on the amount of services that real estate developers offer in their new housing compounds has been conducted.

Combining current trends and niche market strategies with desired improvements, a tactic approach to the housing process, instead of a strategic one, can lead to a new urban housing typology. By learning from both Real and Un-Real Estates in Shanghai, this paper proposes a more socially sustainable mode of Hyper-Real Estates. Once the desirability and likeliness of dwellers’ participation in the housing process in today’s Shanghai is proved, it concludes by introducing the party-cipatory city model, where the triad investors-government-people can all better meet their needs.

Keywords: Participatory Architecture / Leisure Space / Spatial Appropriation / Real, Un-Real, Hyper-Real Estates / Everyday Urbanism / Tactic Approach / Zwischennutzung / Temporary Use

read daniel fernandez pascual – HYPER-REAL ESTATES

[Everyday Life Invents Itself] ELII has presented this week their last hybrid Urban Tree species in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, Spain): the Capio Solem et Mutuo Spinning. It consists of an artifact that first, attracts people to meet together in an open space; second, supports practising spinning all together; third, uses the energy generated to pump and atomize water for the shading plants above; and fourth, captures solar energy to complementary light the whole space at night.

As they state, any tree is far more than a mere image and every tree is artificial. If trees depend on a network of care-takers, why not inventing a tree working as a club as well? Nonsense gymnastics acquire a new meaning; Human calories and physical exercise are then visualized as life energy making plants grow. Almost everyday personal donations to nature…

[all images> installation and drawings of the Urban Tree by elii]

Love stories have two things in common with utopias: desire and destruction.

Sexually attracted by an object, Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer literally married the Berlin Wall in 1979, acquiring then her new husband’s surname as her own. East Berliners trapped in a desperate survival, would find such schizophrenia from West-siders, not an object of praise at all. If Ms. Berliner-Mauer saw the Fall of the Wall in 1989 as a terrible disaster, meaning her husband’s death, Koolhaas once read the void of the Wall as a true piece of convulsive architecture, to be also introduced in London periphery and Joseph Beuys ironically proposed that the Wall should be made taller by 5 cm for aesthetic purposes. [Robert Sumrell & Kazys Varnelis in Blue Monday: stories of absurd realities and natural philosophies]

On the other hand, it is also understandable to be appealed to the amount of dreams and tensions that introducing an alien mega-structure in a city generates. Just one block away from the former No-man’s land in Berlin, an urban renewal plan from the 1950s failed to destroy part of today’s most vivid area of Kreuzberg (including Görlitzer Park and Oranienstr.) and replace it with a huge freeway. My last home would have disappeared in this plan, but still, I would not discard a possible wedding with a meandering highway…

[image1> Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer with the Berlin Wall via berlinermauer.se] [image2> 1950s plan to build a highway through 19th century Kreuzberg in Berlin via wrangelkiez]

female: born 1972, 1.68 m, owns her apartment…

male: politician, college degree, 1.73 m, earning 3,000 RMB/month or more…

female: born 1980, working as an accountant assistant, originally from shanghai (no migrant peasants here)…

The amount of ads hanging from trees, strings, suitcases or sidewalkers’ shopping bags seems endless in Shanghai People’s Square. Just behind the Central Government building, people gather every Sunday afternoon to advertise their children in this informal open marriage mart, filling the park with an authentic flea-market atmosphere. In Ancient China, families usually would privately choose an spouse for their kid, as most Western societies did; this practise was forbidden during Maoist times, shifting the capacity and authority of matching couples to the Danwei Working Unit committee.

But in current times, youngsters are officially free to choose on their own, providing that they had enough free time to meet candidates. Parents are eager to descendants, and start  seeking in public parks of main Chinese cities on their own, as in Beijing’s Zhongshan Park. Elderly sit together in benches of certain areas, where they show the files of their children, chatting with other interested parents.

The open public park becomes then a dating-agency where hot topics sound again and again: height, age, job position, education, salary, and own house (apart from some rumours of offering money for the marriage). Then, after first contact, pictures will be interchanged, and the task of convincing children to meet the newly-found candidate will start. Some Shanghainese agree with their parents looking for an appropriate spouse for them, others don’t.

But far beyond the drama of buying wives in rural/urban areas, depicted in Li Yang’s terrific Blind Mountain movie, parks can also work as interactive marriage marts, under a strange mix of tradition and modernity in this Internet era; let’s believe, without any forced monetary transactions.

[images 1&2> marriage mart in People's Square, Shanghai by deconcrete2010] [image3> googlemaps shanghai]

After seeing Doug McCune’s visualizations of San Franscisco according to 8 different crime rates, one understands the city as a mountainous landscape, where valleys are supposed to be the safest areas and peaks the least boring ones.

Also understanding urban dynamics, this reminds me of the Real Time Rome project and its raster images. If San Francisco maps aim an artistic impression of a reality, the Rome ones deal with scientific time accuracy. Their software, developed in 2006 by MIT SENSEable City Lab, represented cell phone activity in Rome under mass events; for example, they showed the vital energy of the city by relating it to the assistants to Madonna concert in Stadio Olimpico or the World Cup Final at Circo Massimo.

Citizens’ fluxes, together with public transport intensity movements, mobility in definitive, could also be adjusted to changing demand in real time, by understanding how neighborhoods are used in the course of a day, how the distribution of buses and taxis correlates with densities of people, how goods and services are distributed in the city, or how different social groups, such as tourists and residents, inhabit the city. [senseable - MIT]

[images 1&2> San Francisco Crime topography via strange maps] [images 3&4> Real Time Project]

Who has stolen our bodies? are 27 soap bars in different states of diminishment, miniature sculptures made from human flesh and skin. Chinese artist Chu Yun conceived this piece in 2002, capturing our everyday routines in a specific instant, before some of the bars simply disappeared…

Human present absence also occurs in worn-away staircases; or timber flooring scratches under a loosen door. But it could also be hygienic, that city neighbourhoods would shrink in size, the more people use them (contrary to today’s Detroit); forcing to be replaced by a new one and reinvented again and again…

He also visualized in his beautiful piece Constellation (2006) the amount of everyday objects in state of error that surround us, by illuminating a room only with their chaotic alert LEDs: a printer out of paper, a cell phone with an unread SMS or a laptop out of battery. Once inside the dark space filled with inoffensive objects, one gets the frightening feeling of being in front of a robotic machine controlling Life.

[Source and images> Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews, 2009]

An Oasis makes water accessible in an extremely dry desert area. Oases also have historically been decisive tools for political, economic and military control of an area, which trading routes should depend on. But an oasis can also be created to go beyond military barriers.

The US/Mexican border has experienced over 1,000 deaths of migrants between 2000-2007 venturing themselves into the desert in a life-or-death flight to a dreamt future. [map below] In a season where Spain suffers from a similar drama of Subsaharians dying in sea waters while fleeing into Spain, ElPaís brings the example of Humane Borders volunteering association to its pages. They take care of 100 drinking water stations in Arizona to help migrants survive, once they have crossed the border.

While some extreme right radicals Minutemen have been recently reported to being patrolling the same area but with fire weapons, some other ranches agree on having free water tanks on their plots, and the organization will check the water quality and filling on weekly or even daily basis. By providing information of walking distances in the desert, as well as signaling where these water points are located, they aim to reduce the everyday tragedy of nomadic migration and imposed boundaries.

As Teddy Cruz stated in his SanDiego/Tijuana Borderwall: Urbanism of Transgression:

“The border’s transformation from light to solid is exactly opposite the trend in recent architecture, which has moved from solid to light.

Contemporary architecture is searching once more for nomadic strategies of lightness and freedom, less interested in objects of imposition and more interested in territorial strategies. It is engaging the boundaries that simultaneously delimit and blur the diverse socio-cultural geographies of contemporary life.

Maybe this suggests, once more, that the dreams of architecture are at odds with the actual socio-political and economic realities in which they exist.”

[images 1-4> volunteering and water stations via Humane Borders] [image5> Urbanism of Transgression by Teddy Cruz]

It is astonishing the numerous amount of elderly couples I have been seeing in the subway, wearing a complete neon-colour camouflage trekking equipment. Since Seoul is surrounded (rather gobbled up) by hills, its subway system easily reaches any forest at the end of its lines to enjoy nature just half an hour ride from schizophrenic urbanity. So my last wandering in Seoul is going to be natural; I need some greenery. While looking for other Korean architecture blogs, I came up with the project of regeneration of a forest by ludens-ifying it with hidden art installations amongst trees. It’s my place.

Before coming out at a random periphery subway station, I get lost in an interchange, where I suddenly find in the basement 3 a compass rose printed on the floor, north-oriented; a paradox of unguideness in this messy maze of underground staircases. Once outside, I am guided by a beautifully clear drawing that the newspaper-kiosk seller has made in my notebook. And while walking, I start finding aliens in the forest, where people are cheerfully picnicking in, around, above or around…

In this forest I found by sheer chance one of my favourite fetish hybrids: the ramp-stairs: a mix between a diagonal surface and conventional steps, to be used in many forms. Parent and Virilio already exposed the possibilities of freely squatting an oblique surface some decades ago (memories of my architecture master thesis, exactly two Junes ago now!). So before leaving the city, I grant myself with the only two architectural sins in this trip of spontaneous everyday detours; two pieces of open voids where people inhabit and appropriate themselves of a diagonal circulation.

First, another ramp-stairs system by OMA inside a Museum (more elegant than the Chicagoan ones) and staircase outside it, and second, the hole excavated as a plaza/corridor by Perrault at a University campus. While the former is a C-shape covering of an existing uphill circulation between a bus stop and the campus, the latter is a U-shape turning an open-air oblique corridor into a meeting area. I am glad that both cases seem almost more successful in their void condition than the own function of the building beside them.

Exhausted I sit down for a break in a sudden tiny café back somewhere in town, 3.5 m2 big, at twilight, and find a Surrealist illustrated story by Edward Gorey, The Object Lesson, lying also on a tiny shelf; an exquisite dark tale about absences, missed connections, dreams and surreptitious absurdities. Originally printed in 1958, it appeared the same year as other surrealist inventors dreamt of re-reading the city.

Here, the Seoul Series end.

[images 1-4> Seoul Art Park] [image5>compass rose on the floor of the basement 3 of a subway station] [image6> OMA's Museum of Art, Seoul Nationalal University] [image7> Perrault's Ewha Women's University Campus, Seoul] [all images by deconcrete2010]

Soaring temperatures make a sea of white shirts appear in the CBD of Seoul at noon. It is Monday lunchtime and this isolated area of the city (literally an island) dedicated to finance becomes invaded. Although clothing stores at the groundfloors of corporate buildings advertise only Westerners wearing suits, I hardly see any of them in the real world.

This recently planned area starts being invaded by alien skyscrapers blossoming all around, and despite not existing any sense of a lively city, the fact of finding several 24h kimchi-sushi restaurants, makes me remind that Koreans are amongst the ones with most working hours in the world.

It is impossible to follow anyone randomly. Any try makes me follow workers to an eating place or back to the office. Bored of these non-productive routines and being stuck at the main crossing, I almost feel obliged, first to go also for lunch, and second, to move on to another neighbourhood.

Eager to visit the Rainbow Cathedral, an art installation somewhere in Seoul that I read via newsletter some time ago, I take the subway to that station. After appearing in an anodyne huge crossing, I realize I mistook the line; so asking everybody for a rainbow in the street is a fruitless desperate operation. This makes me go into a PC room (or an Internet Cafe in a stinky basement full with video-games freaks) and check the map for the first time in Seoul and explore these anodyne highways while walking to the exhibition.

I discover then a network of anonymously big crossings, where 5&5 lane highways intersect each other. the city in-between is as dull as the crossings themselves, making these crossroads the most exciting points. There is a gap of 300 to 400 metres between each other and surprisingly all of them have quite a big slope separating these valleys, reminding me of San Francisco, and making me walk up and down, up and down, up and down, again and again… It takes me 5 crossroads to realize that Mondays do not like art exhibitions and another 3 to find the nearest subway station.

While detouring the city in the most explorer-related sense, leaving all outdated Situationist politics aside, it is very useful to use the subway map  in order to make the city even more abstract. Like transnational geographies, moving from one point to another and forgetting what lies in-between, either if is a street block or a whole country, turns the city into a virtual cloud of scattered situations.

After seeing my seventh golf course flying over a carparking and the third soldier carrying a cosmetics bag, I cannot find any office worker going for dinner in his white shirt. but it is time for me to do so.

The whole lighting neighbourhood is turned off. It’s Sunday morning in Seoul and this whole industrial district providing any kind of electric component is closed. The beautiful Seun Arcade, an immensely long concrete building threats demolition, for the sake of a green park; the city thinks that turning derelict structures from the 1960s into open parks is a magic formula for political success.

Today my psychogeographical strategy has more to do with psychopath than with psychological geographies (or psycho-paths). Instead of following random people to be guided through new parts of the city, I choose and chase my prey imagining his story beforehand. I also used to do this when making crosswords; imagining simple stories of why the author would have chosen that word that day.

The first individual results to be a baseball player leading me to a hidden field; the second is a Japanese/Korean student memorising words all her way and the third notices that I am following his bag with the printed word Tokyo, and starts a kind of zig-zag play by changing direction at every corner. After a while, he is getting nervous, so I decide to quit: I have arrived to a very interesting area.

My psycho-instinct takes me to the National Cemetery subway station after seeing a huge sign. It is Sunday morning, and it is full of elderly people. But instead of having a depressive ambiance, families gather joyfully for a picnic at his ancestors’. This place is a mix between a National memorial to war victims, and a meeting point to celebrate life. Corpses are mere numbers in a vast extension of rationally ordered graves. And I suddenly remember this Situationist game of interchanging graves, putting the Peter’s one at Mary’s, and Mary’s at Steven’s…

After this carparking-like park, I discovered a new area, by following the Japanese student. It is a wasteland under an elevated highway among railway tracks. Dozens of disabled veterans (having been or not involved with war) wander around this creepy post-apocalyptic place. The fact that there is a charity open air canteen, gathers people all together. It is shocking to change from this panorama to the lavish Ferraris lane I find some stations away, guided by the guy carrying the Tokyo bag. I am not interested in street names, so I rename them myself, depending on what I live or find there: only luxury vehicles!

This makes me think of the linear map I am producing of Seoul. It needs to be connected to place and psychological perception (phenomenology), but also Time is basic.

The map of my city and the city will both end as soon as I give up moving and the drawing line ends. The rest of the existing city, probably 90% of the surface, which i have not detoured, do not need to be represented. It does not exist for me. And I learn that whenever a city does not show up with any new attractive corner, anything new to discover, it is not worth living there any longer. Provocation is then dead.

Second day of derive: the fact that Saturday is traditionally the leisure day, has also made the people I was following in Seoul, to take me to shopping districts, or accidentally monumental spots; these were anyway lying one next to each other: trendy consumption together with culture origins.  

Walking along lanes filled up with multitude of clothing stores, in between I meet Korean folk dances all along, or an spontaneous taekwondo show, or a procession of Royal guards in traditional costumes, or a replica of a traditional village, or a woman handing brochures for a religious sect asking me whether I need spiritual comfort f0r my depression. (do I look so depressed?!) The answer is a sign I find later wondering whether I am bored!

I discover a network of back alleys, which were originally built for common people in order not to walk along the main street, since they would be obliged to kneel down whenever a Lord walk by. So these alleys turned into lively spots for the everyday avoiding imposed protocols.

Suddenly Berlin appears in front of me! Five years ago, the city gave a piece of the Wall to Seoul, trying to achieve a peaceful reunification of the two Koreas. Just in front, I found the Canal. If yesterday some alleys remind me of Tokyo, now I have landed back in Kreuzberg, but with cleaner waters. The city has destroyed the 1950s highway, in order to recover the historical river which used to cross the city, and give it back to citizens. A project which pushed the Major of the City become the Prime Minister of the country. Should Shanghai recover its dried up network of channels as well?

For a moment, I decide to make the pre-fab Chinese City prototype guide me, and leave my derivators aside. Ancient Seoul copied their philosophy in order to plan their own urban grid. So as soon as I see the Gate to the Imperial Palace, with the river at my back a mountain in front, I prove that I am in the North-South fengshui axis. I didn’t want to use cardinal points, but I needed to prove whether an Empire transported the same urban concept to all its conquers.

To finish the day, I let one business card from an amazingly crazy shop guide me to their other branch somewhere in the city. After one hour of lost paths, I end up in an over-pretentiously designed area, where it seems to be a Tokyo-like competition going on about who has the weirdest haircut. a whole street with cafes and cafes and cafes and cafes…

enough for today.

Arrived in Seoul. An endless railway bridge crosses from the airport island to mainland peninsula. the left side of my ride is an esplanade of mud, whereas sea water covers the right side landscape.  there is time to imagine flooding and emptying cities with water.

The first journey of the series starts with Shanghai’s map.  i draw every movement on my spontaneous itinerary into it. but after a whole day of virtual abstractions, it does not make sense any more for me. sorry, Debord, but this situationist strategy n.1 forces me to an unpleasant derive. so i decide to give it up, and shift to strategy n.2> being guided by other derivators or citizens that I just intituively  follow.

I choose my prey, follow it,  I can even smell it in short distance, and afterwards discard it until either I find something interesting or I loose it in a crowd. some go into buildings, others meet people, others seem too lost…

This strategy is going to produce a graphic linear map of the city, out of the situations I experience, directly related to a specific time. north, south, east and west do not count any more; but references are only visual instead of linking portions of the city. a sort of conceptually moving city, as ancient Mayas did along the Mexican jungle, discarding what has been left behind.

found situations:

* a golf course covering a parking. the oblique net allows balls return back to players and works as shadowing for cars. 

* Women’s University: a whole neighbourhood oriented to female cultural, commercial and services consumption. 

* non-democratic subway system: instead of a flat-rate, the price of the ticket depends on the amount of stations, making me decide the end of the journey before entering the train. (in case i am legal!)

* French antiques neighbourhood: it seems to be a fever consumption of 19th century bombastic furniture.

* hyper-abundance of Christian churches. I start to wonder, whether the amazingly status of development in this rich Korean society is leading to an increasing soul emptiness; the built form of pure loneliness.

fear of the day> where to sleep. i haven’t seen an economic hotel in the whole day. a girl i ask in a nice cafe offers me to sleep at her place in an extra room. i go with her, we derive together, and after 15 minutes of impossible conversation Lee wants to charge me 80 euros. Just similar to another couple of sex-motels I have tried, so after 3 hours of failed attempts it is time to assume it and go into an Internet basement to find a place before midnight.

once settled, i meet another derivator, who virtually takes me to his favourite club in Seoul. he tells me of a night spent at this top exclusive place, which charge 500 US$ only for the cover. but as he explains, the good part is that you can even go with only one friend (probably one can go there alone) and feel like in a private party. the club has dozens of rooms, where they provide girls you choose, to dance there; neither prostitutes nor gogo dancers; just normal people having a drink in your lonely private party.

so decided, every day I am trying different situationist strategies in my drawing of a graphic linear map of Seoul, out of time moments.

Guy Debord wrote in 1955 about a friend of his having just traveled through the Harz region in Germany, by means of a map of the city of London, whose directions he had blindly followed. [tom mcdonough editing the situationists and the city]

so tomorrow, i’ve decided to flyxperiment to southkorean Seoul and start a 5 day-series of dérive explorations, (un)guided by a map of Shanghai (fully in Chinese). i have no referent of its form, but that both cities have a sort of a main river meeting a smaller one. someone told me that shanghai lacks of a huge mountain in downtown. maybe shanghai turns mountaineous, maybe seoul finds its dreamt urban grid. no idea where to go, to sleep or to eat. but i have a small bag as luggage and loads of excitement with me.

has the day already arrived when some cities are built for dérive, as Debord predicted? next 5 posts, hopefully, from somewhere in seoul.

psychogeographies to be continued…

[image> Vinland map, 1434 AC. speculated version of America's discovery occurring before Columbus's expedition in 1492 AC via bnl]

Salvador Dalí met Le Corbusier in 1928 to tell him that his functional architecture did everything but actually function.  And he predicted that the future for architecture was however to become soft and hairy. Hairy are some renamed pavilions in shanghai world expo, but in order to see these zoological attractions, one needs to queue all around the security cage that protects them, from hypothetically dangerous invasions of onlookers.

These gated countries reflect very well current obsessions to impose borders to the city. So escaping from over-admired hairy Crown Jewels, my daily hero is the Happy Street/Dutch diorama. Conceived as an open walking-scape in form of a picnic lawn and an 8-shaped ramp for spatial appropriations, it is an explosion of irony and cynicism at the same time.

Denmark failed to make her lent bikes be driven all along the expo, but John Körmeling did succeed in not gating his pavilion with a fence; so the whole concept of representing a country also goes physically transparent. Expos do not need any more museum-like walled artifacts, but simply attractive meeting areas under the excuse of experiencing a local beer sitting on a mobile Dutch sheep. And people will just do the rest.

[all images> Dutch and Danish pavilion at shanghai Expo by deconcrete2010]