deconcrete

^ Black Mirror series 2 episode 2: White Bear (UK, 2013). Director: Carl Tibbetts. Writer: Charlie Brooker.

An absolutely brilliant trip to hyper-mediatized space:

“Victoria wakes with a head-ache and bandaged wrists,pills spilled on the floor. A strange sign is flickering on the television but she can remember nothing. Outside she meets Jem, a young woman who explains that the signal on the television set comes from the White Bear transmitter. It has turned most of the population into voyeurs who do nothing but watch and sometimes film as a deadly elite known as the hunters kill those unaffected by the signal,such as Jem and Victoria. Escaping from a hunter they reach the White Bear transmitter,which they intend to destroy. However the White Bear set-up is not what it first appears and nor is Victoria.” [text> imdb]

watch White Bear

thanks, nerea!

Due to a growing decrease in parishioners, the Evangelical Church closed 340 temples in Germany between 1990 and 2010. It is estimated that 700 additional churches will be shut down in the following 10 years. [source> el pais].

In order to financially cope with their heritage, they have recently launched an internet website to promote and deal with post-religious real-estate [www.kirchengrundstuecke.de]. However, controversies concerning the metamorphosis of these empty buildings have arrived to the public opinion.

For me, the conflict is not about WHAT to do inside unused churches, but WHO has the authority to determine that. Who should decide on them being turned into luxury retail, hotels, restaurants and Muslim mosques (i.e. Kapernaum, Hamburg): the archbishop, local parishioners or the State? Is it the owner, the user/non-user or the government?

^ Gerhard-Uhlhorn Church for sale in Hannover. 1,276 m2. 410,000 €

^ Parchim Church for sale near Schwerin. 829 m2. 298,500 €

^ Church and parochial house in Stöcken, Hannover. 4,618 m2. 990,000 €

^ Church in Frankfurt am Main. 3,068 m2. Price upon request.

^ Church in Hannover. 4,161 m2. 640,000 €

The final results for the 3rd edition of the POST+CAPITALIST CITY Competition cycle, LIVE, organized by Collage Lab and for which I have been one of the members of the jury, have been just announced!!

—
[be, inhabit, subsist, experience]
 
«Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.» ~ Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking 1951
 
According to the last report of the United Nations Population Fund, we have reached 7 billion people with 7 billion possibilities. Nonetheless, those 7 billion possibilities don’t correspond to 7 billion of equal possibilities. There are as many ways of living as people on the planet. The increasing demographic changes – due to the combination of medical and technological progress leading to the growth of aging population and the decrease of birth mortality – tend to generate fast informal expansion of urban territories: whereas demographics in Europe announces a limited growth for the future, the prognostic numbers concerning Asia and Africa are alarming. Studies prove that education level, birth rate and average income are intrinsically linked and that by facilitating education in the countries in situation of high poverty, we could reach a necessary state of balance.
 
But the question induced behind those numbers is the question of “how”.
 
The worries seem to focus on space: we can observe the horizontal development of slums and shanty towns – which Robert Neuwirth proposes to stop considering as informal or a-normal but instead, to recognize as an acknowledged architectural typology as it is one of the most common – if not the most – around the world while, at the same time, ex-industrial towns see their population shrinking. Also the mortgage crisis of 2008 in U.S. lead to the non-desired abandonment of thousands of houses nowadays, that organizations likeTake Back the Land” are trying to get back to use by claiming the “right to housing”. If it is not a question of space available, what is it about?
 
But the right to housing is not only a question of global scale or global balance. The access to private space – for rent as for sale – and the evolution and diversification of the ways of living took an unlikely direction over the last years: the personal guarantees one has to insure in order to have a roof, and the non-proportional raise of the prices of the real estate market against average salaries drove to trivialize shared living spaces, irrespectively of the personal situation, age or family status. Even more, the criteria of admission for getting an apartment do not stop reinforcing whereas the working policies tend contrarily to liberalize: the seeker is submitted to high competition where the perfect concurrent has something which is about to disappear: the perfect job for life and the good reputation in some countries directly ranked through your bank account data.
 
Could we think about an alternative society in which we could perceive space as part of a four-dimensional system in which the inhabitants, the use and the occupation can alter in time? If consuming were not the main motto anymore, if production and distribution would be reduced to the satisfaction of our global basic needs, wouldn’t we have more free time to live? Where would personal creativity and action find its place? How could a post+capitalist society affect our daily lives and the way we envision housing?
 
Would we still own and if yes, what would we own? Compulsory, the heritage to our kids would be a different one. Assuming that our cities can provide “everything we need”, how could an after crisis scenario look like? What would happen to real estate if there were no speculation on living? What would be the scale of inhabiting: will there be controlled islands or open spaces for free evolving community structures? Will we live close or enclosed from nature? Will we occupy even more space or will we switch to minimal standards of living? How would it change the structure of the megacities and their infinite expansion?

The jury was held in London on the 2nd of February, 2013.

Jury Members: Petra Havelska, Ioana Mihailescu, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Joanne Pouzenc, Philine Schneider.

Since it was hard to decide whether the POST+CAPITALIST CITY has to be approached through dystopian scenarios; poetic forms of dwelling; or real-estate feasibility, we eventually awarded THREE FIRST PRIZES among the finalists. Congrats to all!!!

PARIS CIRCLE, by Philip Clemens – Australia:
On 3 June 2010, the French National Assembly and the Senate adopted Law 2010-597 which formalised the goal to build 70,000 new homes within the Paris metropolitan region each year. This project takes Law 2010-597 as a starting point in an alternate future where Paris is reconfigured at a massive scale by a single line inscribing its boundary, clarifying its interior. This line takes the form of a circle 15.9km in radius, exactly 100km long. This circle has a width of 6.7m and has ten stories. Separated from the towers of La Defense, it looms above its neighbours. There are four typologies of apartments with variations based on the location of communal spaces that puncture both façades. On average, there is a new apartment every 14.2m with provisions for circulation, maintenance and communal spaces. In total, there are 70,000 apartments within the circle. Scale distorts. The line is a circle is a building. The building is wall is home. The abstraction forces its exceptional status within the city. Yet it remains necessarily habitable, an ambivalent figure, looking out in both directions. Knife thin, the Paris Circle defines and exists within both metropolis and hinterland. Thus bound, the metropolis turns inwards, upon itself.

PETRZALKA, by Natalia Petkova, Paula Petkova, Bernardo Robles Hidalgo – Slovakia / Spain:

Architecture is a potent expression of ideology. But nowhere is this made more evident as when it outlives the ideology that conceived it. In such cases, the built environment is compelled to reconcile with new societal aspirations, or face its untimely demise, be it physical or spiritual. Petrzalka, a prefabricated mass-housing estate, which flowered under the communist regime in 1970s Bratislava, is the densest of its peers in all of Central Europe, housing one third of the city’s population. The demolition of the estate after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was therefore inconceivable. Instead, standing among the ashes of the regime that constructed it, the 150,000-strong community suffered substantial neglect and deprivation under the ‘turbo’ neo-liberalism that swept through Slovakia. Our tale of life on the estate – a bricolage of reality and fiction – seeks to illustrate the uniquely human capacity to re-imagine and re-appropriate spaces, mobilizing their latent potential, and paving the way for regeneration. Against a background of concerns regarding urban sprawl, and the reality of the shrinking welfare state, we attempt to give sense to – and take advantage of – the existing ‘architecture of congestion’.

MACRO-LOT, by Camiel Van Noten – Belgium:

Macro-Lots examines strategic mutations of existing lot divisions in order to create a new housing condition, based on collective ownership. It proposes both a physical concept of combining multiple lots to enable new housing conditions, and a socio-economic strategy, which strives for affordable homeownership as a collective interest. This strategy focuses on the border condition in North American cities. These neighborhoods are located at the edge of the city and are inhabited by a socially disadvantaged class. These types of urban fabric symbolize the social inequality as a result from the uneven development inherent to neoliberal urbanisation. The most recent foreclosure crisis has proven that the current parcelization structure is not viable anymore. The system of private ownership of land led to high personal independency of European immigrants one hundred years ago, but now has become a major source of social and economic inequality. Therefore, the concept of a macro-lot derives from the idea that a new parcelization structure, consisting of larger ëamalgamatedí lots, enables a new housing condition based on collective instead of private ownership. A macro-lot arises by combining multiple portions of or complete lots together. Local homeowners, who encounter financial difficulties, can decide to join the macro-lot. Furthermore a macro-lot will provide new housing units. The new context, obtained by omitting the parcel boundaries, enables different typologies as a alternative on the existing housing stock. As an answer to the current housing issues, the main goal of a macro-lot is the provision of affordable homeownership. The division of land- and homeownership, based on community land trust ideas, is the fundamental principle of the financial structure of a macro-lot. However, more than an architectural design, the concept of a macro-lot primarily represents a socio-economic reorganization. A macro-lot arises from a group of people who believe they are stronger together than alone. By definition, a macro-lot cannot be imposed on people, since it is set up, maintained and expanded by its residents. Therefore a macro-lot cannot be imagined by one person in front of a laptop. The involvement and the informing of the inhabitants is the most important ingredient for the success of a macro-lot.

^ Black vultures waiting for coming benefits via abc

Sadly, we read today on the news that Eurovegas, the doppelgänger of Las Vegas in Europe, is going to settle in Madrid periphery by the end of this year. Not underestimating the potential of more Venturis and Scott Browns that this tragic event might generate in the future, I am more worried about a Spanish political class that seems to have learnt no lesson from the recent financial and real estate burst.

How can Madrid regional government allow millionaire Sheldon Adelson to turn now 750 hectares of rural land into a mega-city with four resorts housing 3,000 rooms each, shopping malls, convention centres, and casinos…? Again? Didn’t we have enough? Madrid region has accepted to reduce the gambling tax from 40% to 10%, special offer for Mr Adelson. High-rise buildings without any height limit, special offer for Mr Adelson. And smoking allowed in his buildings, contrary to the law that is effective in the rest of the country. It is also very remarkable to see which landowners will profit from the sale of the site to build it (map below).

^ Landowners who would profit from selling the rural land necessary to build Eurovegas via burbuja.info

^ Casinos in the making, supervised by Mr Adelson via eurovegasmadrid

How do politicians dare to justify Eurovegas as the final solution to the crisis and austerity measures, just at the same time when the President of the country and several ministers are suspicious of having constantly received slush money from real estate investors during the past decade? [source> The Economist]

What if Spain had been living in an undeclared state of exception since 1997, date when the speculative Land Law that led to the current situation was passed? Urban planning legislation, meant to protect the urbanization of a territory, has not been officially suspended, but constantly shaped to certain interests of those in power.

As G. Agamben argues, the State of Exception rather than being a provisional measure became a working paradigm of government in the course of the 20^th century. ‘The state of exception separates the norm from its application in order to make its application possible.’ He brilliantly begins his book with the Latin quote: ‘Why are you jurists silent about that which concerns you?’.

Could Madrid government be smart enough to oblige Mr Adelson to include high-tech research labs as a requirement to build his casinos instead of providing millionaire tax exemptions?

Nice evening to watch Berlanga’s Welcome, Mr Marshall! Franco died, yes, but we are still stuck in 1953.

BBC, 2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

Cornwall, south westernmost region in England, has assisted to flourishing tin-mining activities since the Middle Ages, where tin-mines and soil-politics were brought together into a particular legal system: the Stannary Courts and Parliaments. The privileges in tax-exemption and civil jurisdiction that were conferred upon the tinners reflect the importance of the economic activity at the time. Cornish and Devon Stannaries are one of the most ancient regulations concerning the reclamation of the commons. The extraction of mineral resources basically operated through the demarcation of tin bounds in the territory.

The same region developed a large china clay industry a few centuries ago. Today, many disused pits and dump wastelands, some listed under UNESCO world heritage protection, are scattered all over post-mining Cornwall. The beautiful landscape of grey kaolin terraces surrounded by green prairies still reminds us of how the subtracted material actually creates a topographic silhouette that prevents the soil from sliding downhill. The clay pit as a void emphasizes the idea of ‘hole’. Contrary to natural valleys, disused clay pits are rushed to be filled up again with something malleable. A valley would never become a ‘hole’, since valleys have always been ‘empty’ and do not need any material ‘stuffing’.

^ Clay Pit near St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Clay Pit near St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Clay Pit near St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Flooded clay pit, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

One of the most celebrated reconversions of a former quarry is the Eden Project (2001). The gigantic and impressive domes covering the empty pit do not aim to regenerate original landscape, since it would not attract investment for the region. Quite the opposite, the goal was to install exotic follies (‘Tropical and Mediterranean Biomes’) as a way to transform disused mining pits and raise nature-consciousness – it is actually labelled as a ‘top eco visitor attraction’. Apart from exuberant plants, this includes an Italian live singer with his guitar amongst fig trees or a mobile bar selling baobab juice smoothies; fair trade chocolate or hand-made crafts; an incredible waste of thermal energy to force tropical plants grow in the UK in order to become environmentally-aware. Local visitors are so not used to the high humidity and heat inside the greenhouse, that there are even air-conditioned ‘cool rooms’ along the indoor path to have a break. Eden Project is the paradigm of commodification of the environment, where nature needs to be marketed to further preserve nature.

Paradoxes apart, the domes and the clay landscapes are definitely worth a visit.

^ Aerial view. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Mediterranean Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Dome openings. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ ETFE dome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Mediterranean Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Suspended staircases in the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Air conducts in the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Suspended staircase in the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

^ Interior of the Tropical Biome. Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. photo>deconcrete2012

My top six harmonious interventions at 13th Venice Biennale deal with noise, somewhere between the random and the unwanted, what we don’t want to hear and what we don’t want to see: the noise of those under power, the noise of those in power, the noise of the powerless; the noise of a building, the noise of the inhabitants of a building, the noise of the politically incorrect.

^ With Unmediated Democracy Demands Unmediated Space, Croatian National Participation [Igor Bezinović, Hrvoslava Brkušić, Boris Cvjetanović, Siniša Labrović and Pulska grupa] proposes a post-capitalist manifesto to really hear each other and create new ways of operating resources. By looking at civil struggles, student protests going on since 2009, the so-called “Forum for Space” and their concept of KOMUNAL, they proclaim:

We imagine city as a collective space which belongs to all those who live in it an who have the right to find there conditions for their political, social, economic and ecological fulfilment at the same time assuming duties and solidarity. This concept of the city is blocked by capitalist dialectic based on public and private ownership. From these two poles, State and Market emerge as the only two subjects. We want to escape this dialectic, not to focus on the “third subject”, but on a group of collective subjectivities and the common they produce. We understand common as non-material value produced through differences, communication and social interaction. Only if these common values manage to escape being captured by the capitalist public-private dialectic they keep their non-material value open and they have the potential to become productive, to become means of production.

We understand KOMUNAL as the land where common value, once it is transformed from non-material to use value cannot be exploited and turned into exchange value. Therefore, this common territory exists outside current forms of city exploitation based on property and land speculation. It bases its general values in the field of access, use, activity or care.

Word KOMUNAL was traditionally used for natural resources, which were managed by self-organized users. This kind of space managing is more and more frequent in the abandoned spaces in the city where different autonomous zones are emerging. Although these zones exist today on the social margins we consider them potential places for appearance of new utopias and collective imagination. Let us try then to imagine a different way of operating spatial resources, distributing surplus value and creating our own institutions.

^ Image of a City in late Capitalism. Red Plan Pula by Pulska grupa. Croatian Pavilion.

^ The Kingdom of Bahrain’s participation, as brilliant as in 2010, presents how the image of the country is broadcasted internationally for political and economic purposes, thus creating an imaginary vision of a territory. With In Your Living Room – On TV Landscapes And The Urban Imaginary, Bahrain’s contemporary history is revisited through relevant events for the international community, such as exposing the new Mina Salman Port to the world through the arrival of Queen Elizabeth in 1979 by ship. We are reminded how the spontaneous appearance of un-iconic landscapes in international media offer an intentionally biased portrait for economic powers.

^ Awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the Common Ground Exhibition, Torre David / Gran Horizonte, is Urban-Think Tank’s proposal to present the informal community in an abandoned and unfinished office tower in Caracas, Venezuela. As they refer to it, this ruin-turned-home they encourage contemporary architects and planners to look at these examples for further collaboration with informal actors. For the Biennale, Torre David is presented as a [highly recommendable!] Venezuelan arepa restaurant surrounded by raw brick walls hanging photographs by Iwan Baan, creating a genuinely social space rather than a didactic exhibition space. This installation has become controversial in the Venezuelan architectural community. Many are dismayed that the nation’s architectural accomplishments are “represented” by a never-completed and “ruined” work; others argue that the exhibit condones the Venezuelan government’s tacit and explicit support of illegal seizure and occupation of property. It’s nonetheless remarkable how Western countries acknowledge and award the social potential of squatting in developing societies, while Occupy London-New York-Madrid were not even mentioned in the same Architecture show.

^ Making The Walls Quake As If They Were Dilating With The Secret Knowledge Of Great Powers. Katarzyna Krakowiak’s piece in the Polish Pavilion, curated by Michał Libera and awarded a Special Mention by the Jury, uses this beautiful title to state how Architecture is built of sound: It is what makes the diffusion of sound possible – absorbing, filtering, and transferring it, amplifying some of its components at the expense of others. Enclosed spaces are room tones, while niches are specific echoes. The ventilation and heating systems are a quiet yet constant noise, whereas windows and walls are the filtered sounds of street bustle, the buzzing of cicadas, or neighbor’s living rooms.

The pavilion is used as a resonator to amplify a sort of soundtrack of the cracks. The exhibition is grounded with an exquisite publication assembling texts on Sounds in/through/of Architecture: reverberation – eavesdropping – vibration.

^ In 100, a table fills the centre of the scene; we cannot but walk around it. But the main stage is not in the middle of the room. It is on the narrow aisle left between this gigantic table and the walls. Visitors to the Serbian Pavilion decisions to smash, bang, tap or clap against the table surface with certain force put each actor right on the spot. Speakers amplify these onomatopoeic gestures and turn them extremely audible for everyone in the room, catching attention from the rest. As Igor Marić describes it: Are we alone against everyone or alone with everyone? […] The interior becomes an exterior, we are not surrounded by empty walls but by architecture with either in between, emptiness and fullness, the definitiveness of the placed object becomes a diversity of perception. Movements make the space pulsate, sound fill the silence, we touch the surface, we look at each other and hear each other. Does it separate or join us?

^ Finally, the controversial Pigeon Safari project, orchestrated by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck, consists of around 60 Venetian grey pigeons coloured with food dye in red, blue, purple and green tones and released again in the city. Colour is harmless and wears off after 6 weeks. The initiative has increased current discussions on the issue of pigeons damaging architectural heritage with their acidic droppings, especially in Venice, as well as the methods through which city councils are getting rid of hundreds of them.

[all images> deconcrete2012]

^ Finale Emilia after the earthquake. Photo courtesy Collect_Finale

Finale Emilia is an Italian village of 15,962 inhabitants in Modena district, 15 meter above sea level, actually now only 12 m meter above sea level, after the earthquake on 20 May 2012.

Collect_Finale is a recent initiative launched by architects Alfredo Borghi and Francesca Bergamini three weeks after the earthquake to manage the disaster. According to them, nobody knows how to deal with chaos, neither the people nor the authorities; improvisation wastes many resources. The lack of coordination prevents citizens to join forces. So the platform started to connect different stakeholders (public institutions, citizens, artisans, sellers, farmers…) willing to cooperate in the spatial aftermath: gathering and monitoring data (which shops are open, which streets are accessible, who has surplus of food supplies…), managing the emergency, coordinating available resources to reconstruct damaged areas through efficient and participatory modes. Taking advantage of existing digital tools to improve bureaucratic burdens, Collect_Finale deals with transparency in the rebuilding process to regain control of the situation after the shock, determining priorities and hierarchies for intervention.

Collect_Finale is an open-source and ever-changing platform to attract requests and knowledge from agents involved in a state of emergency and to increase communication between institutions and citizens. The platform has been inspired by other similar 2.0 actions, such as: Ushahidi, Birmingham Civic Dashboard, Fix my Street, Dear London, Idea Map or Tools for Actions 

^ Finale Emilia after the earthquake. Photos courtesy Collect_Finale

^ Disaster Relief Project. Partition system, SBA. via m.e.t.r.o.n.o.m.

Excerpt from interview to Shigeru Ban by Francesca Picchi on the Disaster Relief Project#1 via domusweb:

[…]

SB: We are accustomed to intervening in emergency situations but March 11 was the worst disaster I’ve ever seen because the earthquake was compounded by the devastation caused by the tsunamis and by the nuclear crisis. The devastated area is immense: it reached over 500 km inland from the coast. More than 12,000 people were killed and 18,000 are still missing. The tsunami wiped away everything in its path making it even more difficult to bring aid to the people and organize assistance. Everything is extremely complex, particularly the removal of the debris and the unearthing of the bodies of loved ones. There is great reluctance, for example, to use the bulldozers.

People wanted to stay until they found their loved ones. Nobody wants to abandon their city or their village. The situation is very difficult: there is no water or electricity, but everyone wants to stay, preferring to live under these conditions until they can understand the destinies of their loved ones.

Evacuation centers were set up in the area to accommodate refugees in school gyms or in any other structure available to provide shelter to those who had lost everything. It really is the worst I’ve ever seen, even compared to disasters in which the number of people affected were much greater but in which the devastation was mainly caused by the earthquake. In Japan, the situation is much more complex …

FP: To assist, the first thing you put in place wasn’t a conventional emergency shelter, but a system that strengthens the sense of intimacy of those who have already been wounded by the losses caused by the earthquake and tsunami. This is a partition system that you call PPS4. Can you tell us about it?

SB: In 1995, I was working in Kobe. At the time, I worked to build temporary homes for Vietnamese refugees. I even built a small public building for them, a church.

At that time I realized that the main problem in the first phase of an emergency evacuation situation is the great density of refugees. Evacuation centers are usually large rooms under a single roof where families find themselves sharing space with strangers. Privacy is a key issue for people who are not accustomed to nurturing close relationships with neighbors in their daily lives, and who have suffered a shock that makes them even more vulnerable.

So I posed the problem of creating a partition system that was inexpensive and simple to build. The first project was in 2004 in Niigata where, after the earthquake, many families had taken refuge in the gyms. To alleviate the lack of privacy, we designed a small house made of square cardboard tubes. We only built a few because at that time the real needs were still not so clear to me. Despite the original idea, in fact, the Paper House was used as a temporary clinic for the elderly and has been adopted mostly by children.

With experience, however, it’s become more clear to me about what is really needed in an emergency situation.

In Fukuoka, in 2005, I created a very simple and low cost partition system for the first time. Fukuoka was hit ten years after the Kobe earthquake, and for the first time in a long time, an earthquake hit Japan with an intensity greater than magnitude 6.0 on the Richter scale. We created simple cardboard partition systems that would help define the “territory “between families but which also serve as isolation systems: at night they were used to help people gain some privacy.

The system was very simple and cheap, but it was not enough to provide privacy for families.

The version that we are currently using (No. 4) is an improvement on previous ones. It is very simple and suitable for every situation. It’s a system made up of three cardboard tubes of different diameters. The largest tube (10 cm in diameter) acts as a column which connects to a smaller tube that works as a beam. The smallest of all, then, serves to make the joint solid. It is very simple and inexpensive; it is enough to drill holes in the tubes that serve as columns, use a little tape to secure everything, and hang a curtain to ensure privacy when needed. Just cut, drill and connect the components to obtain any dimension.

[...]

^ image via urbanphoto

^ image via LP_AEC

^ image via domusweb

^ Jesús Gil y Gil in his jacuzzi 1994. Corruption star of the housing bubble in 1990s-2000s Spain. EFE

Trade under inflated values generates economic bubbles. Prices constantly fluctuate and thus become impossible to predict. Like soap bubbles, it is just a matter of time until they burst. A bubble contains the maximum volume within the minimal surface, and the tension of the surface is directly proportional to an ideal stability.

Spanish real estate bubble generated a trend of what could be named as Building without Content. This idea brings Deleuze’s cancerous Body without Organs – associated with true freedom, unstable virtual potentials of the self, endless reproduction of the same pattern -, together with Agamben’s Man without Content or self-annihilation. Analogously, Building without Content (BwC) can be understood either as an object that has had enough from its own content; or as the action of building objects without any content. They are mega- or infra-structures designed to be functional only until the day of the opening, but not rationally planned to last in time. BwC are born dead before birth. Their content consists of speculating with restrictions, rather than aiming to efficiency, functionality, utility or needs. The paradigm of government towards development legitimizes BwC within mediocre economies: create new jobs, reach European standards, become a global reference… As Aguilera Klink defines it, it is the contraposition between the instrumental (aiming a specific use) with the ceremonial (the paraphernalia).

A new web has been launched revealing corruption scandals of architect Santiago Calatrava, and accused, as The Guardian titled it yesterday, for ‘bleeding Valencia dry’. The name of the site created by left party Esquerra Unida is a beautifully dirty pun: calatrava-te-la-clava. In it, we can find a list of disastrous Buildings Without Content, as well as irregularities with his contracts and bills towards public administration budgets.

Here are some other relevant resources on Spanish space of corruption. In Germany, when a politician has plagiarized bits of his PhD, he is obliged to resign. In Spain, when politicians are charged for embezzlement of public funds, they are reelected and can govern again. [Check the updated list of politicians charged with corruption included in the lists of candidates for past election]

Indignados: 12May occupy the streets! #12m15m

^ corruptódromo

^ País Corrupto

^ ladrillo a ladrillo

^ calatravatelaclava

^ PPleaks

^ Museo de los Horrores Urbanísticos

^ Corruption complex surrounding King’s son-in-law Urdangarín. El País/Corrupción Urbanística

Speculation in Spain_Ecologistas en Acción

‘Europas neue DDR’ (the new GDR in Europe) was the name that German Stern magazine used to refer in 2011 to the wave of privatisations and asset sales going on in Greece, comparing it to post-1989 panorama. Among the ones that the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF) is managing, we can find land development, real estate operations, infrastructure and corporations: lotteries, Postbank, Thessaloniki water company, Hellenic Motorways, Public Gas, Hellenic Telecommunications OTE, Piraeus and Thessaloniki ports…

As part of these desperate economic initiatives to raise 50 billion euros by 2015, the Ellinikon Airport site in the periphery of Athens, shut and abandoned in 2001, is currently undergoing a brutal top-down process of redevelopment. Eero Saarinen accomplished the terminal building in 1969. It still survives in a mixture of agonizing temporary use for commercial fairs and utter emptiness with wild flora reclaiming the landing tracks. The recent plans for a highend new city larger in size than Monaco, with marina, helipads and golf course, is regarded once again as the only alternative for ‘sustainability’. Rumours speculate that investment may come from Qatar or Chinese stakeholders. Is a new Las Vegas potentially being born?

I only doubt that circulation of capital within the same hands manages to exit the enclosed circuit of corruption, be it publicly or privately owned.

[all images> Ellinikon ghost airport by Saarinen 1969_Athens_Photos by deconcrete2012]

Turbo Sculpture, 2010 by Aleksandra Domanovic.

Video Essay 18:29 min

via We Find Wildness

Architecture and Urban Planning in Former Yugoslavia and its Successor States 

<Unfinished Modernisations is a collaborative, long-term research platform on architecture and urban planning.  […] The project is aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research on the production of built environment in its social, political and cultural contexts. It encompasses the countries that succeeded former Yugoslavia, spanning the period from the inception of the socialist state until today.  The topic of the 14 researches is the way in which divergent concepts of modernization conditioned architecture, territorial transformations, and urban phenomena.  The project seeks to detect effective, resilient, and socially responsible models of architecture and urban planning in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. Special attention is going to be paid to critical re-reading of modernization processes and contextualization of local architectural and urban planning concepts within the framework of international evolution of architectural discourse. While largely unexplored and lacking appropriate interpretation, many of the models created in the region were original and experimental and may be used as inspiration for a progressive current practice both inside and beyond the regional borders. The project also seeks to reconstruct an important segment of the shared history of Central and South-Eastern Europe and to strengthen cross-cultural respect and understanding through trans-national collaboration and mobility.

[…]

Unfinished Modernisations – Between Utopia and Pragmatism will analyse and compare the production of built environment in two opposed economic and political systems: those of socialist Yugoslavia and the market-based democracies that emerged out of its collapse. The region is especially conducive to such comparative analysis because its successor states share the same heritage of a common socialist project of modernisation, but are at the same time highly divergent in terms of their social and economic development. The project will identify and interpret how the spatial politics of the two systems conditioned architectural and urban solutions and their social, ecological, and cultural impact.  It will simultaneously pay attention to unique concepts and products and to general processes and phenomena. We seek to identify the sustainable models of urban development and the possibilities of encouraging progressive architectural practises.> 

[text source: Unfinished Modernisations. Photo by Wolfgang Thaler]

^ Waste Not (wu jin qu yong), by Song Dong. Installation at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London, until 12 June 2012. All images by deconcrete2012.

<Comprising over 10,000 items collected by Song Dong’s mother over five decades – ranging from a section of the house to metal pots and plastic bowls to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes and toys – the installation is a tribute to his mother, as well as a meditation on family life during the Cultural Revolution. The activity of saving and reusing objects of all kinds is in keeping with the Communist adage wu jin qu yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil.

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During the early post-War Communist years in China, being frugal was the only way for a family to survive. Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, saved everything, including items we might view as rubbish or junk – for instance, old pieces of used soap and empty toothpaste tubes – for possible future use. Even when things improved a fear of shortage was ever present, leading to a life of thrift. Following Song Dong’s father’s death in 2002, she sank into deep depression. As Song Dong says, I understand her need to fill the space with those daily life objects more as a need to fill the emptiness after my father’s death. The artist wanted to make her happy and for her to find renewed purpose in life, to bring her out of the depths of grief, so he proposed that she work with him to make her possessions a work of art.  In exhibiting her life, her things, and her philosophy: It gave my mother a space to put her memories and history in order. Song Dong’s mother died suddenly in 2009, but did install the first showing of Waste Not in 2005 in Beijing.>