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]
INFO :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Based in London and Berlin, Daniel Fernández Pascual holds a M.Arch [Madrid ETSAM]; M.Sc.Urban Design [TU Berlin]; and M.Arch [Shanghai Tongji]. He has collaborated with studios in Berlin, NewYork, Madrid, London and Shanghai; and his work has been published and awarded in international media. His postgraduate CajaMadrid Fellowship (2009-2011) focused on relational space & informal strategies of city development. Currently, he is a LaCaixa fellow and is conducting a research project on the Spanish Real Estate Crisis at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: wishes, contributions & critiques to: daniel [at] deconcrete [dot] org
