deconcrete

Astronomical, by Mishka Henner.

Map of the solar system in twelve 500-page volumes.

1,000,000 km = 1 page

Standard Operating Procedure

[by Errol Morris, UK 2008]

A documentary on the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Talk by Trevor Paglen on the Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. 11/02/2009

thanks, blake!

TED Talk by Taryn Simon

<  At night, it’s like Dubai is waking up, exactly when the temperature is going down. During these hours, the future face of Dubai appears. The buildings are set out against the darkness by their construction lights. Each lit-level marks each new floor. Everything shifts at night. In the daytime Dubai is impressive, but not mystical. That’s why I began to feel that I wanted to shoot at night. I had a special interest in construction sites because there you can feel at night what is still hidden during the day. […] It is a surreal atmosphere. When the lights are switched off maybe they’ve gone. In a way, it is all a mirage, on the way to somewhere else. >

[text & images>Burj Dubai during construction: Susanne Schuricht_In the Night_2006 in BASAR, S / CARVER, A / MIESSEN, M (eds.) 2007: With/Without - Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East. Bidoun & Moutamarat.]

Removed from Society: The Prison System and the Geography of Nowhere by Chase Dimock

< As the threat of Hurricane Irene loomed off the eastern coast last week, it was discovered mere hours before its arrival in New York that despite the city’s historic mandatory evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents, there was no plan to evacuate the estimated 14,000 prisoners held on Rikers Island. With the swift and efficient evacuation of the free citizens of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the city government were praised by the media for taking steps to avoid a possible Hurricane Katrina style catastrophe. Yet, by failing to evacuate the prisoners of Rikers Island, they set themselves up to the possibility of replicating one of the most egregious episodes of human rights abuses surrounding Hurricane Katrina: the abandonment of the prisoners of the Orleans Parish Prison. According to the ACLU, prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison were left locked in their cells as the flood reached the prison and were left without food or water for days until they were evacuated.

The incident at the Orleans Parish Prison received little notice from the mainstream press that preferred to chronicle the hardships of more sympathetic victims of the disaster. From the wardens that refused to evacuate them to the media that failed to cover them, it is evident that our society turns a blind eye to the notion that a prisoner has the same human rights and deserves the same consideration as free civilians. Upon becoming a criminal, the person in question cedes some essential element of humanity, as if his or her crime has voided his part in the social contract and his crime has been permanently etched into the offender’s DNA. What most effectively reinforces this view of the criminal in the public’s opinion is the prison space itself. Prisons are spaces that are removed from civic space of society. Once inside this space, the criminal becomes stripped of their humanity and is known only in the abstract for their crime and as a statistic in the ever-expanding, voiceless US prison population.

[...]

We base our modern beliefs in the system of crime and punishment on the idea that one who has committed a crime must be removed from society. Whether one believes in the prison system as deterrence or incapacitation, it is agreed that the function of the prison is to remove the offending individual from the society against which he or she has offended. What I find intriguing in this conventional wisdom is the idea that one can be “removed from society”, as if society is a space that can be located within a specific physical location that one can depart. Implicitly, if a criminal is sent to prison in order to be removed from society, then it holds that the prison itself is not a part of society. This line of reasoning would somehow ignore the ways in which ideologies of power, race, and human rights from society are reproduced and reconfigured within the prison space so as to produce behaviors compliant to recognizing the legitimate power of the state to punish and police incarcerated bodies. For the prison system, this assumption of a removal from society allows for a treatment of the incarcerated body outside of the most important feature of society that prevents the abuse of state power: the vigilance of civil society. While prisoners constitute their own unique form of a community, they are by definition unable to form a civil society as they have no rights to freely organize and have few avenues for the redressing of grievances. Outside of the vigilance of civil society, the incarcerated population falls from the memories and collective consciousness of society as a whole. > [Read full essay at As It Ought To Be]

Barefoot, one enters a white curved room, apparently empty. The most relevant objects seem to be the fire protection systems and mechanical pipes above and the air-conditioning grilles. There are also tiny rope barriers preventing visitors from trespassing a certain area, but it is hard to distinguish on which side of the barrier one should walk along. Am I in front of the Emperor’s New Clothes?! Then, the curved colonnade of white vertical rods becomes more and more visible to the naked eye. The rods are not attached to the walls and they do not hang from the ceiling either. We are told that raindrops measure approximately 1 mm. And cloud droplets 0.01 mm. And those are exactly the diameters of this extreme lightweight structure, transparent as air. Its components are only revealed when a wave of air shakes them or a person in black stands behind them. One feels like a cinematographic burglar lacking his high-tech glasses to move through an invisible laser-beam labyrinth. The curved shape of the room potentiates the atmospheric installation and vice versa. During the visitor’s promenade at an utterly unhurried walking pace, one enjoys wondering whether the colonnade should ever come to an end.

Junya Ishigami wants us to experience this delicately built space with his “cute” exhibition Architecture as Air (at The Curve, Barbican Centre; curated by Catherine Ince), and thus, experience the basic elements composing natural phenomena. For him, architecture should deal with the real scale of raindrops and cloud droplets to achieve and explore the limits of a man-made equilibrium.

< In the same manner as rain falls to the earth, as clouds form in the sky, 54 columns of rain have been erected, beams placed across them, and the resulting structure strung with 2,808 threads of cloud. The result: a highly transparent building that seems to dissolve into the air. I find myself irresistibly drawn to this transparent quality, because architectural space is essentially transparent. […] by doing so, we might be able to create through architecture the kind of transparency found in nature that until now, architecture has been unable to provide. […] Such transparency, we surmised, could extinguish the boundary between ‘space as void’ in which there appears to be nothing, and ‘structure as frame’, in which a clear presence is perceivable. We have endeavoured to think of architecture as something akin to the air that surrounds us, filling space into infinity. > [Junya Ishigami]

The fact that we, pragmatist minds, are always eager to touch in order to believe, unfortunately made the structure collapse once, but it is now open to the public again. As architectural historian Taro Igarashi puts it: one might even call it “architecture as incident”. Permanence is not the be-all and end-all of architecture.

[1> Installation. Photo Lyndon Douglas. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery, London] [2-6> Video stills. Miguel Santa Clara]

There is a tiny black square in the middle of a landscape. Endless topographic curves are only interrupted by a black frame. The landscape is suddenly cut and that is the end of the town. The black square is not a house in the countryside; we are told that we are in front of a whole urban settlement with a single dwelling standing in the middle of it. No roads, no streets, no cars. Only traces of a possible railway line disconnected from the building and a grey surface that could be read as a small lake. We don’t know whether the One-House Town has trees. But automatically, we want to know and imagine more. How does this town function? How do the few inhabitants reach their home? How is their everyday life? Is it a 500-storey skyscraper? If it is a single-family house, do they have a helicopter that leaves the surrounding terrain untouched? Is it a primitive prehistoric city or is it the future of humanity? The simple title of the piece gives scale to the otherwise infinite drawing. The Two-House Town seems more welcoming. At least, inhabitants live very near from each other and are connected to the landscape by means of a dashed line. Is that a cable railway infrastructure carrying them up the hill? Or is it an ephemeral pathway that disappears with every winter’s floods? One doesn’t know if any of the three detached constructions making up the Three-House Town knows of the others’ existence. Are they built in the deepest point of three valleys, with such steep slopes, that no one has ever been able to leave his own gorge? Or are they unreachable fortresses at the very top of three high peaks, isolated by turbulent water streams? Does Janice Kerbel teleport us with her drawings to Mars 2050? Lacking conventional references, it is our fantasy that builds up the rest of the town.

[images> 1-House Town, 2-House Town, 3-House Town from Town Studies series by Janice Kerbel, 2005 via Galerie Karin Guenther]

Summer solstice has arrived again this week; some architecture pieces have celebrated it worldwide. Solar observatories date back from Neolithic and Bronze Age and are still able to trap time for a few minutes every year. They often consist of circular distributions of stones aligned with sunset and sunrises from a certain viewpoint. Although there might have been other kinds of rituals the rest of the time – linked to moon alignments, astronomical maps or diverse cosmic beliefs – such megalithic structures did not acquire full existential meaning but during solstices and/or equinoxes. Rulers and spiritual guides alike could have easily used this enigmatic knowledge to impress and control the ignorant masses. If ancient astronomers chose to reveal the secret, the community could celebrate together. If they kept the phenomenon as a magic matter, then they had a strong political weapon in their hands. The least used constructions were able to provide the most stunning display of power. Kings could govern the elements.

Some rulers could have also used the power of directing sun rays through buildings in order to link their mandate or physical body to cosmic divinities. Inheriting this cult to the sun, religion also profited from astronomy in the Middle Ages. San Juan de Ortega Catholic Monastery was built in the 12^th century in northern Spain. Only for some minutes during both equinoxes, the 5 pm sun lights one capital: the Annunciation relief. The scene represents the Virgin Mary as the light of the Holy Spirit reveals her that she will give birth to Jesus: a literal symbolism of the Christian propaganda of the time. Known as the Light Miracle, this architectural trick still receives the visit of hundreds of curious pilgrims, especially in the spring equinox, nine full months before Christmas.

Sun altars materialize an otherwise invisible relation to the cosmos; they are a direct result of time cycles and spatial coordinates. Furthermore, they generated a whole performing stage and a ludic event for the community to experience, the sun being the absolute rock star.

Archaeoastronomical sites: [1>Goseck Circle_Germany via wikipedia][2>Stonehenge_UK via galacticroundtable][3> Chankillo_Peru via Yale Bulletin][4> Nabta_Egypt via catshaman][5>Mnajdra_Malta via wikipedia][6>Penas da Rodas_Spain via celtiberia][7> Keswick Circle_UK by WD Anderson via jrbooks][8>San Juan de Ortega_Spain_Felix Ordóñez/Reuters via NationalGeographic]

As documented by Mauricio Guillén in his Island Hopping [2005], security huts in upscale Mexican neighbourhoods turn open streets into permanent borders flowing along independent archipelagos of wealth. These “Casetas de Vigilancia” are public space invaders, military extensions of highly isolated private kingdoms. They even replicate or camouflage the architectural features of the mother palace behind the fence. Security huts should be the most often populated structures in these districts, being inhabited 24/7/365, while mansions remain as empty as the surrounding streets. However, these huts are the ones which are often a mere empty set to discourage burglars and at the same time show off a certain status, without the need for a permanent guard inside:

“On the one hand, the casetas de vigilancia operate as a presence of order, of reassurance for the people who live there. On the other hand, they also function as a status symbol: they are often empty, built illegally and beyond the property line, often directly obstructing the otherwise public sidewalk. Fear seems to have the potential to become an accessory at Las Lomas, an area where “good” taste becomes a geographical criteria to map a territory, establishing a constantly shifting boundary which allows its inhabitants to close an eye to whatever lies beyond, while turning everything in its domain into an image of itself.”

[source & images> Mauricio Guillén: Island Hopping_Politics of Visibility in Contemporary Mexico [2005] via 104 & Did Someone Say Participate? (Miessen/Basar, MIT 2006)]

There is a place in the centre of Berlin which used to be an overground bunker, providing shelter up to 4,000 people at a time inside its 1,50 m thick concrete walls. Later, it was a prison, a cooling storage facility for bananas and oranges, a techno club, an experimental theatre, a gay dark-room and finally, the Sammlung Boros: a five storey art collection with a residential penthouse at the top, or also a detached family house with five levels of cellar space underneath; perception depending on the user. Even if renovated a few years ago, it is still possible to recognise the overlapping cutaneous layers of history at some of its walls, which were left untouched, the concrete floor framework perforated though. Small remaining details reveal their former presence, like toilet drainage pipes covered mouths.

From the walls is also hanging Florian Slotawa‘s work, among others. A series of photographs of ghost interactions with rooms of cheap motels. Around 1998-1999 he built shelters in the chambers he stayed overnight, using only existing elements. He rearranged and recontextualized everyday objects in elaborate compositions. A door from Prague could be used as a roof for his small hut; the tacky landscape picture as a wall in Dresden; the table in Kassel could be a perfect support for the suspended bed base… After immortalizing every shelter with his camera, he slept in that newly achieved cavity, and reorganised everything back to its original position the following morning before leaving. Like in movies, hotel rooms can be used for smuggling transactions, illegitimate love affairs or radical changes of identity. No trace evidence after guests vanish. Maybe the cleaning lady is the only one noticing that the table is slightly displaced.

[1-6> Florian Slotawa's series of hotel shelters 1998-1999 via Sammlung Boros][7> Sammlung Boros concrete wall with different layers of uses by deconcrete2011]

Football stadiums are like fortresses. Nothing to be seen from the outside; an hermetic, inaccessible private space for public celebrations; an indicator stating urban power and measuring international recognition. The amount of seats proves a reliable capacity to organise mega-events and the amount of stadiums in a city almost aims to display physical superiority. This contemporary way of colonising a territory has a lot of similarities with medieval castles. How can Real Madrid’s Bernabéu football Mecca, then, be read as a Norman Keep dating back to the 12th century?

When looking onto the constructive elements, the “wall” plays a definitive role, acquiring in both cases a gigantic dimension. The Wall understood as the interface layer with an outer face touching the exterior and an inner one related to the main space. Between these two faces, it is where the highest density of human activity takes place.

A defensive bastion is mostly inhabited in its thickness; a several metres deep structure supporting the whole building, but also lodging the whole variety of tiny and intricate chambers for everyday life: wardrobes, storage, chimneys, fireplaces, staircases, sleeping chambers, sitting facilities, lord office, chapel, ovens… Bernabéu Stadium also has the evacuation routes located in its perimeter, audience stands, changing rooms, VIP lounge area, eateries, shop, trophy showcases, toilets, lockers… In both situations, the main scene is performed in a rectangular central hall with all its pomp, but the Wall is the actual domestic living space; the real Show, the space for all kinds of transactions.

As described in “Growth of the English House” (Gotch, 1909):

Everybody knows that an Englishman’s house is his castle, but it should also be remembered that in early times an Englishman’s castle was his house. Castles were not necessarily military strongholds; many of them were so, but many of them, again, were nothing more than fortified houses, and it is in these fortified houses that we must seek the first germs of our own homes, the earliest evidences of domestic architecture.

When cutting horizontally one of these fortified homes, one discovers the richness and complexity of inhabiting a wall. “The plan is quite simple, consisting of a large room (38 by 31 ft.) on each floor, enclosed by thick walls which are honeycombed with mural chambers and recesses.” A whole series of functions serve the main room. Like in a stadium event, former Keeps even provided viewers with a surrounding gallery (triforium) to look down onto the two-storey high halls.

The abstract and labyrinthine character of the Wall, in both stadiums and bastions, makes it impossible to recognise from the exterior the incredibly intense activity, negotiations and conspiracies, going on beyond the entrance; always occurring before entering the main rectangular stage.

[1> Real Madrid Bernabéu football stadium by deconcrete2011][2,3,4> Medieval English castles - floor plans from GOTCH: Growth of the English House, 1909][5> Carney Castle floor plan via carneycastle]

“There’s something strange, something dreamy going on here, where pedestrians would rather use back lanes than front streets; where our homeless hide en masse on the rooftops of abandoned skyscrapers; and where a strange civic law requires you to admit for a night any former owner or resident of your current home.” [source>ligress]

My Winnipeg (2007) is a magnetic vision about home, memories and nostalgia of a city trapped in the middle of East and West coasts of the Canadian territory. Director Guy Maddin blurs Manitoba region mythology with urban rumours and his own perception of a distant childhood. A series of fascinating urban phenomena about how Winnipeggers experience, transform and pervert their own city.

“It is a documentary, but I just call it a docu-fantasia by way of flagging the fact that I am unapologetically aware of the fact that a third of it is just opinion or wishful thinking, and that a third of it is legend and folklore, and a third of it is cold, hard facts. But they are all emotional facts, or ecstatic facts. And then the episodes that are discussed in there – the historical episodes – are all literally true, as implausible as they seem.” [source>Vertigo Magazine]

There are two taxi companies in Winnipeg: the one which is exclusively allowed to drive citizens along back alleys, and the one which takes them in legitimate streets. But the vast network of unofficial streets does not appear in any map, despite being the site where real Winnipeg takes place. A grid of a secret city lies right on top of the streets…. and beyond them, their inhabitants swim in piled-up underground pools.

During 1926 cold winter, all the horses from the hippodrome fled away after the stables went on fire. Their only scape-way was the river. But they all froze before managing to reach the opposite side. Their sculptural heads with terror still in their eyes served as a leisure park that season. I wonder in which moment the following spring carried them out into the sea, without anyone noticing.

Featuring people stuck in repetitive patterns of behaviour, Maddin also depicts a popular soap opera TV series from the 1950s, Ledge-Man, where a mother tries to convince his son not to jump off the building.  A collection of tales inside the actual tale of a whole city.

But we won’t know which Winnipeg is the real, the ideal or the disappointing one. Bizarre as they all may seem, once scaping Winnipeg, everyone dreams of going back.

[1-4> stills from My Winnipeg. horses frozen in Winnipeg river via kafka-on-the-shore. Ledge-Man; alleyways and taxi companies]

Inside a darkroom. Carefully, the photographers open a small hole in one of the fabrics, which have been used to cover up all windows and gaps. As if by magic, the city suddenly onslaughts to the walls. The inverted image of São Paulo is projected onto rooms located at quintessential buildings of São Paulo.
The photographers sense their work before it becomes their work. They gaze at their picture while it turns into their photograph, minutes of exposure seeming like an eternity.

As in the purest Abelardo Morell’s trajectory, Pablo Saborido and Paula Muniz portray domestic scenes with the dual fascination of the fetishist and the urbanist. The gigantic scale finally meets the insignificant detail. Confronted or in love, the former contaminated by the latter.
Emblematic buildings such as Copan or Itália, private dwellings and hotel rooms, Avenida São João and the Republic Square. The more accurate picture of all of them lies in what they see and what they reveal of themselves, in the spectacle they offer and the spectacle they observe.

If the outside is inside, the interior must be there because of the outside. And if buses drive along the bed and clouds dance with the floor tiles, what prevents the bed from overtaking buses and the photographers from dancing above clouds, before the room returns to darkness again.

[translation from text by Isabel Martínez Abascal]

[all images> Camera Escura. courtesy: Pablo Saborido]

Dreamstones are imaginary landscapes on marble slices, which ancient Chinese nobility enjoyed identifying with similar real ones. A passion for finding hidden/esoteric stories in natural materials.

Several million years have passed since the Miocene and Anna Cornellá discovers that our contemporary buildings still keep trace evidence of that period alive. Sea urchins with spine holes on a street bench surface, crab creeping trajectories on a threshold, and giant corals hanging from a façade. After 10 years of field study and over 5,000 photographs, she has recently edited and condensed an Urban Fossils Guide of Barcelona featuring her best 120 exemplars.

“I see fossils where nobody else does”. Her vocation for paleontology has produced this open-source guide, which documents any trace of fossils on architectural building materials. Marbles and limestones are easy to track down in her everyday activity of fossil hunting. Barcelona, located by the sea, has countless constructions using stones coming from former marine landscapes. Animals which got trapped or died in a sandy or muddy bed have been cut through any arbitrary plane, so that a resulting cross-section of the fossil ends up in a vertical zoo hanging from an urban aristocratic façade.

And suddenly a tiny piece of an extinguished sea may appear on a wall; inert sedimentary materials that make their origin, age and former dwellers visible for us.

thanks borja!

[1-4> via la información] [5-7> via els fossils urbans]

3 litres of water with soap can make dreamers in a park literally float.

Media also did in 2004, when a fiction project for Dubai was largely publicized, between irony, wishes, speculation and critique. The Bubble City of Dubai was supposed to float in the air by means of gigantic helium balloons, powered by solar cells and propelled by an anti-gravitational motor. Museums, parks, theme parks and restaurants should fill it up. A reinforced glass dome should cover the enclosed atmosphere.

But the whole bubble just went off. Both the real frenzied buying obsession and the imaginary outer space ambition.

We will better remain in the park.

[images1&2>large soap bubbles in berlin by deconcrete2010] [image3>Bubble City Dubai via koda]

Margush is one of the oldest cities in the world (2250-2300 BC), a settlement which depended on the nearby Murgab river’s lush oasis. When the river was gone, they did as well.

But the rambling adobe ruins remained, as a trace of one of the most ancient civilisations, developed enough to have a complex sewage system. Set in the middle of Karakum desert, dwellings had thick walls without windows as protection against extreme temperatures outside, but had a gap underneath the roof to let some light in.  Reported to possibly be the birthplace of Zoroastrianism religion, this eastern Turkmenistan’s society used to drink divine Soma. A ritual beverage consisting for ones of a mix based on heroin and cannabis, or urine for others.

For Carsten Höller, Soma had also the Amanita mushroom as an ingredient for its magical psychotropic effects, promising enlightenment and access to the divine sphere. Providing that 12 animals are fed with this hallucinogenic mushrooms, would they then urinate Soma? As an answer, his latest installation in Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof, which invites visitors to experience it by means of his alive reindeers, canaries and mice inside the museum, surrounding one bed on a pedestal available to stay overnight.

[image1> Margush ruins by Asad] [images2&3> Margush sewage system and Soma urns via cais] [image4> ancient Margush via countryturkmenistan] [image5> Carsten Höller's installation SOMA via tagesspiegel]