deconcrete

^ B/W: Photograph series of Armenian bus-stops in The Architecture of Waiting, 1997/2004 by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.

Colour: Bus-stops in Burgos, Spain. Designed by H&deM, 2011. Photos by Ángel Ayala.

This week my hometown’s newspapers revealed that our recently built bus-stops designed by H&deM are indeed a direct replica of soviet ones erected in Armenia in 1970s. Apart from the banality of this interesting fact, together with the local anger caused by the high fees paid to the architects, I would like to make three small remarks to the excellent argumentation of the architects’ concept in their website:

< Instead of designing a Herzog & de Meuron bus shelter, we were inspired by the work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg called “The Architectures of Waiting”. It is a series of photographs that she took in 1997 * of bus-stops in Armenia (the oldest Christian Country**). We have recreated some of these bus-stops in polished concrete and galvanized steel. Instead of being simply functional shelters, the beauty of these small structures is how they relate to the human body, and that they are sculptural and somewhat poetic social gathering places***. >

* There is no recognition to the soviet designer of the bus stops in the 1970s, but to the German photographer who took pictures of them in 1997. The inspiration is linked to the book where they were published. The image has completely erased the original architect: fewer problems with copyright in buildings. But it makes sense: if the ultimate author was the Soviet Union and it doesn’t exist anymore, there is total freedom to reuse the idea.

** It seems that the main reason for justifying their decision is that Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. Both Spain and Armenia appear to share tight religious connections, even if many Spaniards would have difficulties to locate Armenia accurately in a global map. This is a fantastic argument for copying a soviet bus-stop from the Armenian steppe and pasting it in the ‘Catholic’ Spanish steppe.

*** We copy Armenian bus-stops, even if they might look like ‘simply functional shelters’ (=boring). So H&deM upgrade them by declaring that, although they have almost 1:1 similar shape, they are nonetheless ‘poetic and gathering spaces relating to the human body’. Armenians alike, we are also Christians, so we need to believe it.

Berlin Model Basin (Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau) is a building attached to a colossal pipe; the ideal home for ship hydrodynamics, applied hydromechanics and ocean, environmental and navigational engineering tests.

Just the opposite to any conventional building process, where space is first conceived and piping is somehow added.Here, the Pipe is the Space.

A facility providing a cavitation tunnel (to test the formation of gas bubbles of a flowing liquid in a region where the pressure of the liquid falls below its vapor pressure) by means of scaled replicas of actual ships. It also houses the deep and shallow water basins, each 120 metres long, where waves are intentionally provoked at a certain frequency, height and amplitude. Every ocean of the world can be reproduced inside it.

The movement of water is eventually what generated a whole construction, its dimensions and its functions. And inside this 1976 fluid house, it is also where mock-up bionic penguins are tested in their swimming technique, so that engineering can learn again from nature. By injecting colour ink in the wings of the robot, researchers can visualize their undulation parameters.

Ships learn from animals and buildings are taught by the water. But Berlin decided in 2004 that after 100 years, they did not need this infrastructure anymore; still trying to overcome a sudden disappearance, the building is prolonging a chronicle of a death foretold. Let’s see what the future learns from it.

[1-7> Berlin Model Basin VWB complex by deconcrete2011][8> Bionic penguin studies by Ingo Rechenberg via Bionik TU Berlin]

Since 1933, a 21-33 m high Christmas tree pops up every year in Rockefeller Center, NewYork. This time,“the 74 foot tree hails from the town of Mahopac (in Putnam County) which is located approximately 50 miles from Manhattan.  This year’s tree, a 75 year old Norway spruce, is going to be especially meaningful since it comes from the yard of 9/11 first responder and firefighter Peter Acton.”

The whole operation consists first on finding a donor to support the operation, cut the tree, transport it to downtown, and resettle it by means of a crane. Afterwards, 30,000 lights attached to 8 km of wiring are to be installed from a 8-storey scaffolding covering the whole tree. In 2007, after being taken down, the tree was used as symbolic timber for Habitat for Humanity house construction.

Similar to a standard construction process of a building, but inverted: first the building is just transplanted from elsewhere, and only after it is completely erected, the scaffolding does appear to make it look nicer.

(image1> via ajorbahman´s collection) (images2-4> via examiner ) (image5> via lostnewyorkcity)

Winter is approaching in Berlin. Nights become longer, and the sun is progressively being replaced by a monotone grey colour. But only 60 km away there is one (ersatz) Tropical Island to be found.

Reported to be the largest self-supported structure in the world, this hangar was built in 2000 to lodge a new prototype of dirigible. After the company went bankrupt, four years later, a Malaysian investment group converted the vast hall into a leisure-oriented artificial ecosystem: a rainforest.

The sliding walls of the airship hangar closed forever. The south façade needed to be glazed to allow daylight inside. An incredible amount of energy started reproducing a constant climate with 28-32ºC inside, around 60% humidity and 28ºC warm waters. A bombastic billboard depicts a Truman-blue sky.

And a piece of Germany is eventually encapsulated, like Buckminster Fuller capturing NewYork.

After the exotic first hour of the journey, excitement turns into sadness. I wonder whether the kids playing with the sand have previously seen a real beach. If not, which one will they actually prefer?

Back in Berlin city, one can easily find warnings written in German, English, French, Turkish and Spanish. In Tropical Islands, it is significant to read them in German, English, Polish and Czech. No Mediterranean visitors apparently. For whom are fakes more real than reality itself then? I guess that when one is used to experience the true Light everyday, dogmas of this paradise inside a cathedral-like dome are just a matter of believing or not believing.

Or maybe simply sun-therapy.

[all images> Tropical Islands in Berlin by deconcrete2010]

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]

“In 1968 Venturi and Scott-Brown did for Las Vegas what Giambattista Nolli did for Rome in 1748: they revealed the essence of a city by mapping it in a new way.” Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran have made a new reading of the mega-casino in their essay Casino City State for latest issue on Monu Magazine. Analyzing diverse visitors maps of Las Vegas gambling paradises, they suggest that mega-casino’s true ambition is to be rather a city than a big hotel.

Providing blurred boundaries, omissions of clear main entrances, organic building perimeter, countless facilities & services, transport facilities, artificially controlled eco-system and weather…mega-casinos function as city-planners offering all kind of dreams that the conventional city does not provide.

what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas…

[images 1,3&4> Visitor maps of Caesars Palace, MGM & Bellagio casinos in Las Vegas via vegas casino info] [image2> Nolli map of public space Rome 1748 via the blue room] [images 6,7,8&9> interiors of Eiffel, Flamingo, Bellagio and Venetian in Las Vegas by deconcrete2007]

Could a viewing platform be built around a pre-existing suburban housing settlement?

The society of spectacle led to the very pure form of a model-homes showroom, by building fiction the other way around. An abandoned baseball stadium in Osaka was turned in the late 1990s into a Real Estate fair of one-family homes. Next step was to turn this imagined world of commercial housing into a fake green mountain, housing a commercial centre.

Namba Parks was the greenyfied answer to end with the temporally dreamt utopia. An artificial mountain of overlapping bridges, footbridges and terraced consumption. In a way, analog to the underground consumption city to which some metro stations have evolved, such as Shibuya in Tokyo.

If ones grow upwards, the others expand deeper and deeper to the centre of the Earth; the former add soil into the air, the latter add air after extracting soil.

[image1>abandoned osaka stadium via mellowmonk] [image2> namba parks in osaka via halbstark] [image3> diagram of Shibuya Metro Station in Tokyo via tywkiwdbi]

The Simpson’s are a replica of current post-American Dream society.

And a replica of the replica was built 1:1 in the State of Nevada to commemorate the popular series anniversary: their house. Using real architectural codes and language to reproduce cartoon fantasies, it could almost become the suburban pre-fab reference for future suburban developments; what means, real estate copying its own parody, only for USD 120,000.

[interior images via pictovista and Spaceinvading] [floorplans via simpsoncrazy]

Walls precede Walls. The longest conveyor belt in the world, located in BouCraa (Western Sahara), is an elevated structure flying phosphates from the mines in the desert to the Atlantic coast. Under a heavy nationalist conflict, the whole territory has experienced countless landscape subdivisions, by means of industry as well as politics.

In the 1970s, this conveyor belt was the main objective for attacks by guerrillas against imposed Moroccan sovereignty. In order to protect it, a series of walls started to be carved out of the sand dunes in successive front lines. The 1980s sculptured the Sahara in continuously changing Berlin Walls dividing pro-independence from pro-king supporters.

Camps may convey militaristic, political and romantic feelings. But in the Western Sahara, it has been one of the most common kind of settlement in last years. Either for refugees, military or industrial workers, camps resulted in a blurred mix of autonomy, control and necessity. [Charlie Hailey: Camps, a guide to 21st-century space].

Turning a hostile territory into dwelling space, camps need to imagine built environments in the middle of aggressive milieus. The spaces of camps are both open and closed; they register the struggles, emergencies and possibilities of global existence as no other space does.

[image1> BouCraa belt conveyor via conveyorbelt] [images2&3> BouCraa camp settlement via googlemaps] [image4>BouCraa settlement in 1975 by jotapebe] [image5> Western Sahara military Walls in the 1980s via academic dictionaries] [image6> Morocco's Wall of Shame via bythefault] [image7> Western Sahara Wall 1980s via the Independent]

Sometimes economy insists on clinging on to lost enclaves.

Fordlandia (Fordlândia) was the beginning of a failed American Dream by Henry Ford in 1928. In the middle of Brazilian jungle, he thought he could settle a piece of Detroit society, to stop depending on British manufacturers of rubber for his T-model wheels.

Although identical clone suburban houses started blossoming among rubber trees for American engineers, life quality did not come together. Despite having ball-room, cinema, school, hair-salon, bakery, informal alcohol suppliers and even brothel, the American Dream, only for a few, ended up with the uprising of agonizing Brazilian slave-like workers. In 1942, the settlement was definetely abandoned.

Another whim of ersatz society was established in Hashima island, Japan in 1916, with the highest concrete building of the country at the time. The island was 6 times more overcrowded than nowadays Tokyo. Based on an intensive coal-mining activity, Mitsubishi entrepreneur set up another failed utopia there.

Lacking of basic private (intimate) space, dwellers inhabited 10m2 sleeping cells with shared bathrooms. However, entertainment services were also provided, such as swimming pool, kindergarten, clinic, temple, and again as in Fordlândia, a brothel. Since they could not chop rubber trees down to make space for new uses, roofs were the only spheres for expanding personal autonomy.

In 1975, coal was not profitable anymore, and Hashima was abandoned; recently it is experiencing a phase of photography-aficionados tourism.

[Images1&2> googlemaps] [Rest of images> spiegel.de]

After reading in the pop-up city about julien berthier’s balcon additionnel, and his attempt to reproduce a piece of Haussmann’s Paris in your own house, I come up with the work of Francisca Benitez. She has documented the process of adding informal balconies in Brooklyn, known as Jewish Sukkahs. These huts provide wild-like shelter reminding of the ones used by freed Jewish slaves in Ancient Egypt. According to Judaism, believers should sleep, pray, eat and spend time inside at certain times of the year. However, Jerusalem City banned these informal constructions last year, concerning safety matters, since authorities are not giving licenses any more.

[Image above> balcon additionnel by Julien Berthier] [Image below> Still from Brooklyn Sukkahs documentary by Francisca Benitez]

Location over Site? 2 examples of moving constructions in Shanghai, China.

In 2004, the old Concert Hall was moved 66 metres southeast to avoid noise and pollution coming from a nearby highway, towards its present location in the quieter middle of the block.

Currently, the former Qiu Mansion, struggling to survive to surrounding demolitions, will be moved 57 metres south, turning into a commercial hub towards the façade line of a busy street.

Puzzling the city….

[Image above> 57 metres south planned relocation of the Qiu Mansion, Shanghai] [Image middle> 66 metres southeast relocation in 2004 of the Shanghai Concert Hall] [Image below> moving house malaysia] [Sources> telegraph.co.uk; enerpac; malaysian post]

CHINA:

- the 5 largest shopping malls on earth

- 2 of the 3 longest bridges

- 5 of the world’s 10 tallest buildings

- the world’s new largest urban plaza

- the largest dam

- the biggest gated community

- the world’s most extensive national highway network (to be completed)

- the world’s highest rail line

- the world’s longest, largest bus

- the biggest airport terminal

- the largest bowling alley

- the biggest tennis complex

- the most expansive golf course

- the largest skateboard park

- the world’s largest lamp

- the biggest Buddhas on earth

- the world’s largest dragon

- the world’s largest McDonald’s

- more housing built in 25 years than any nation in history

- more migrants to cities in 25 years than the entire population of the US

[Source> J.T. Campanella's The Concrete Dragon] [Guzhen's lamp from bldgblog] [largest bus from timw]

Thomas L. Friedman declares that The World is Flat.

In a current society, where mobility and transnational economies define a Space of Flows, we are almost “required to run faster in order to stay in place”.

This anxiety for knowledge about new things led an investor in Shenzhen, China, to develop the Mecca of the express tourism: Window of the World theme park, where replicas of 118 scenic spots all over the world are gathered together in the same site. Ranging from different scales 1:1, 1:5, 1:15… it is easy to loose even more the sense of reality when walking from the Taj Mahal to the Kremlin. Promenade of a constant Illusion.

The World dreams then, to be like a compact flat, where citizens can look through its windows to visit remote realities; travelling freely may also be replaced by fake substitutes.

Bringing the mountain to Mohammad…

[All images by deconcrete-shenzhen 2009]

One hour away from Beijing, China, a real Loire Valley seems to be born. Château Changyu and its old oak barrels imported from France are one of the latest leisure/snobbery attractions “among a Top-notch, comprehensive and fashionable tourism, with an aristocratic leisurely style serving leaders, statesmen, business tycoons, foreign friends and medium and high-end fashionable white collars that positively enjoy life.”

After a huge investment in researching the optimal conditions for wine producing and the ambiance that surrounds it, this complex offers the true experience of the amusement park of the 21st century in the 6th wine-producer country of the world, where all existing kinds of grapes are already being introduced.

Included in the teleported journey to an ancient vineyard, visitors can borrow a basket and a pair of scissors and pick themselves some grapes home.

[source> Is China the new Chile when it comes to wine?] [elegance and wine in rural beijing]