spaces of terror

 

^ War Primer 2, Plate 23. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

 

< War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. The original is  a collection of Brecht’s newspaper clippings, each accompanied by a four-line poem that he called Photo-epigrams. It was the culmination of almost three decades of intermittent activity.  The title deliberately recalls the textbooks used to teach elementary school children how to read; Brecht’s book is a practical manual, demonstrating how to “read” or “translate” press photographs. Brecht was profoundly uneasy about the affirmative role played by the medium within the political economy of capitalism and referred to press photographs as hieroglyphics in need of decoding.

War Primer 2 is the belated sequel. While Brecht’s War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, War Primer 2 is concerned with the images of conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

“Don’t start with the good old things but the bad new ones” Brecht famously said, and in this spirit Broomberg and Chanarin [choppedliver] have gathered their material from the internet - compressed, uploaded, ripped, squeezed, reformatted, re-edited and often anonymous images - rather than sifting through newspapers with a pair of scissors.

Heiner Müller once said that to use Brecht without changing him is an act of betrayal. With War Primer 2 Broomberg and Chanarin have appropriated Brecht’s original, giving us their critique of images of contemporary conflict, which is simultaneously a betrayal and a homage.> [source text> MACK books]

^ War Primer 2, Plate 72. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 6. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 21. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

 

 

^  Saturday Come Slow, 2010. Filmed inside Cambridge University’s anechoic chamber (designed to create total silence) and featuring former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, this short by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a reflection on Ahmed’s experiences whilst in detention (particularly how he was interrogated using high-volume music) and about the use of human sound on the body. 

Published on February 4, 2012 17:29.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, invisible cities

cartographies of an uprising

La Sublevación (The Uprising) is a recently published cartographic visualization of the pro-Franco military coup in Spain 18th July 1936. Its author Víctor Hurtado maps the improvisation and deliberation with which both sides, fascist and republican, combatted. The role of dense narrow streets or wide avenues was decisive on the fate of the uprising that day: placing of the barricades, spacing and timing of shoot-outs. But also the physical and political distances between key institutions like Republican Governments or Military Headquarters and barracks (Gobierno Militar, Cuartel de Artillería…). With Hurtado’s maps, one realizes the complexity of the whole apparatus surrounding the event,of anything that had in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. [G. Agamben’s definition]. The relational network of power structures is automatically revealed, making possible to understand the dynamics of Spanish cities at the time: which buildings had been playing the main role in everyday politics, where power decisions were actually taken, where to seek refuge under state of exception, who to negotiate with in critical moments and who to defeat first to gain control over population.

As Hurtado puts it in this meticulous atlas, the success of the fascist uprising was in many cities just a matter of small details, even a few hours.

V. Hurtado, 2011. La Sublevación. Edicions Dau: Barcelona.

^ V. Hurtado. Barcelona: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Cádiz: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Sevilla: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. San Sebastián: Fascist Uprising 1936

[all images by Victor Hurtado via C. Geli 09/12/2011. 18-J: cartografía de una sublevación. elpais]

Published on December 9, 2011 14:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, invisible cities

Pornotopia: Architecture & Sexuality

 

The same images of naked women that the military had approved and openly distributed among soldiers during WWII – as a way to keep their souls more stable through masturbatory practices – were automatically stigmatised after the end of the war, for being utterly illicit pornography. The nation urgently demanded stable heterosexual couples producing kids for the future. The suburban house with garden, car and electric appliances became the American dream. But Hugh Hefner decided to shake the deep roots of society in 1950s when he founded a Disneyland for adults: the Playboy empire. Philosopher Beatriz Preciado, in her sharp analysis Pornotopia: Architecture and Sexuality in “Playboy” during the Cold War (only Spanish and Italian editions available), makes a necessary reading of the implicit domesticity of this new paradigm of modernity.

< Playboy was not merely a magazine featuring girls with or without bikini, but a vast media-oriented architectural project, which aimed to supersede the heterosexual dwelling as the nucleus of consumption and reproduction by new spaces orientated towards the production of capital and pleasure. […] In the same way that enlightened society thought of the individual prison cell as a means of healing criminal souls, Playboy envisioned the bachelor’s mansion as the way to construct the modern man. […] Inspired by pioneering sexual utopias conceived by Sade and Ledoux, this complex worked as the first multimedia brothel in history; a modern pornotopia erected from mass media and the architecture of the spectacle. It is a laboratory to study the mutations from Cold War to hot Capitalism, through sex, drugs and information as means of production, and where architecture plays the role of a stage on which male identity is performed. >*

As queer theoretician Preciado reveals, woman’s role – of an “imprisoned” housewife dominating the domestic realm – was something that Playboy magazine would try to end up with. It was not in favour of female rights at all, since the role of many suburban housewives as exploited sex workers did not differ much from the bunnies legally hired by Playboy. Quite on the contrary, it was all about the male recovering the sphere of the house that he had lost. The new masculine character should be sovereign of his bachelor urban refuge, where he would enjoy licentiousness while preparing exquisite cocktails. Modern architecture and design was used as a weapon to free 1950s American bachelors from their Victorian moral-led lifestyles. The aim was not to walk towards a more feminized man at home, but towards a more masculinized domesticity as a contemporary way of inhabiting space.

Preciado (interviewed by Ibrahim B.) sustains that even today the models of producing subjectivity invented by Playboy influence our everyday life: our contemporary ways of meeting people and producing pleasure are prosthetic, mediatized and psychotropic. However free we are, we are still trapped in a virtual world of laptops, as well as Hefner was in his round hyper-connected bed. Our sex relationships are determined by pharmacological technologies (the morning-after pill, Viagra…) and surveillance (we fall in love via SMS, we record and document our meetings, we broadcast and share them via Youtube or Facebook…). Hence, she concludes, our way to love directly inherits the pornotopia of Playboy, being absolutely kitsch and telecommunicative.

Preciado, B., 2010. Pornotopía: Arquitectura y sexualidad en “Playboy” durante la Guerra fría. Barcelona: Anagrama.

[*my translation]

Thanks, Bea!

[1>Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion_1960 via Ibrahim B.] [2-4>The Playboy Town House designed by R. Donald Jaye; renderings by Humen Tan_published in May 1962 Playboy issue via HighStreetMarket]

 

 

 

 

Published on November 18, 2011 18:42.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens

NO projection above the pope

…When protests throw a light and escape control…

A project by Santiago Sierra and Julius von Bismarck (+ Fulgurator) as part of the NO, Global Tour during the Pope’s visit to Madrid, August 2011.

thanks, anastasia!

Published on September 22, 2011 09:15.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, protest & critical space

london passwords

< Because words pass, then; because they pass away, metamorphose, become “passers” or vehicles of ideas along unforeseen channels not calculated in advance, the expression “passwords” seems to me to enable us to reapprehend things, both by crystallizing them and by situating them in an open, panoramic perspective. > [Jean Baudrillard, Passwords]

After the spread of cholera in 1854, John Snow decided to map the deaths around London’s Broad Street. The fact of linking the reported cases after the outbreak to the location of the dead’s houses proved that they had a strong link to a public drinking water pump. Those who had used that pump had a higher chance of contracting the disease. This primitive spatial analysis took to pieces the theory that cholera was connected to pestilent air rather than drinking waters infected by sewage. And as a matter of fact, it led to stop the practice of simply draining human wastewaters into the River Thames, which was to be drunk later by citizens.

Charting unnoticed relations reveal a hidden city visible. For Simon Elvins in his map Silent London, black dots represent the most peaceful spaces in the city according to government measurements, whereas noisy areas fade into blank voids, and vanish. He applies the same principle to his other version, similar to Braille codification in its form. Sound levels alter the two dimensional paper and silence is associated with higher dots. Our reading finger can only perceive the quietest areas in the city.

Snow dealt with deaths and Elvins with silence as passwords to access an encrypted city. But street limits can also be replaced by words. Layla Curtis deletes any spatial references in her London Index Drawing. Street names configure space and its density. Words overlap and stretch and it is still easy to identify the structure of the city. Automatically, one can imagine what sort of lane; street, bridge, square or mews one is travelling through with his eyes.

< The map, as a scaled replica of the entire city, presents a choice to its maker: not what to include, but rather, what to exclude. > [Simon Foxell]

3 London mappings compiled in FOXELL, S  2007, Mapping London – Making Sense of the City, Black Dog Publishing, London.

[1> Dr John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 1855_fragment via history of vaccines] [2,3> Simon Elvin_Silent London_fragments via arkinet][4> Layla Curtis_London Index Drawing 2007]

Published on September 16, 2011 12:08.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, dérive, invisible cities

user5160788

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Who are the philosophers and thinkers who gave you ideas? Was Foucault an inspiration for you? Or Deleuze?

Yona Friedman: I have had one very important intellectual guide: my dog. A dog spends its whole life improvising. Improvising in every situation.

With the following statement opens Yona Friedman his latest publication: Architecture with the People, by the People, for the People. [RODRÍGUEZ, MI (ed.) / OBRIST, HU / FRAMPTON, K / ORAZI, M (contributors), AA MUSAC - Actar, 2011]. It is a compilation of his most remarkable projects since the 1950s, such as the megastructural Ville Spatiale, a city with no real façade where Architecture and Urban Design become interior design within the infrastructure; and some of the most recent ones, like the brilliant Museum of the Afghan Civilisation, 2008. The idea of the hybridised Bridge-Town always being present, either if it spans over the English Channel or Shanghai’s Huang Pu River.

< I chose this title as it paraphrases Lincoln’s definition of democracy, a definition that is just but seldom implemented. If I had to qualify my approach to architecture, I see it as “democratic” in the sense of Lincoln’s interpretation. Architecture has to be conceived with the people, materialised as much as possible by the people. The term “for the people” is evident. This does not mean that the architect has no role in the process: he can provide ideas, techniques, new aesthetics – which will get validated only with the people, by the people, for the people. By the way, architects are also people…belong to the people. > Yona Friedman.

One of his feasible utopias (Utopies réalisables) also featured in the book is Métropole Europe. Métropole Europe should become the “biggest non-city in the world”, a network of large cities connected to each other by systems of fast trains, (with moderate prices and high frequency of trains), which would enable a more fluid mobility of citizens, the social fabric would be restructured and new strategies would be considered in the labour market and cultural life. Is London a suburb of Paris? A simple political decision in the European sphere would allow to link the two Europes that operate at different speeds and were brought to light by the economic crisis of 2008: the Northern countries and what British economists began to call the P.I.G.S. (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). For Friedman, every utopia can be feasible if we reach the necessary consensus. But at the same time, participation when taking decisions for the living environment, doesn’t mean for him that somebody handles the whole process: in architecture it’s impossible for the architect to do what the user wants. The only solution is to have a technique in which the user does what he wants and there are no middlemen.

The highlight of the book is without doubt the pictures of Yona’s home, depicting endless amounts of beautiful tiny everyday objects, the beauty of which simply relies on the accumulation of different textures: transparent, shiny, rusty, cheap plastic, glossy…  It is almost impossible to distinguish models, from objects, or inspirational drawings; perhaps all of them simply configure his whole life project. One has the feeling that his house would look totally different only a few weeks after the photos were taken. This approach to furnishing applied to his own on-going housing environment perfectly matches his vision of micro-sociological tactics for cities:

< Architecture would also introduce the “changeability” of the city, the possibility of continually rearranging the urban plan of the quarter without recourse to demolition. The mobility of the urban plan should, as far as possible, be like that of furniture. >

Another relevant topic featured in this publication is the approach to the concept of a museum. Yona Friedman regards the museum of a civilisation of the 21st century as the city, understood as an ideal archive for the future accessible to everyone. In his multiple concepts for contemporary forms of museums, there is always a special call for simplicity, participation and circulation of viewers. The true prototype for a museum, for me, is simply a street, any street. […] We have to re-invent the street as museum; a collection of everyday objects in everyday use.


YONA FRIEDMAN, DEMOCRATIE. from BALKIS PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

[1-3> Yona's house, photographed by Michel Mallard Studio 2011][4> Ville Spatiale_Yona Friedman 1958-1962][5>Gangway bridges with exhibits of the Museum of Afghan Civilisation_Yona Friedman 2008][6>Continent-City Europe_Yona Friedman 1960+1994]

To watch more of his short drawing-movies, visit Yona’s website: http://vimeo.com/user5160788

 

Published on September 6, 2011 09:59.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

juridical masks

Masking is one of the most complex and secretive, yet profoundly important, phenomena in Africa. […] Why, despite the changes that have taken place since the early 20th century, does masking persist in such vibrant form in parts of Africa and its diaspora? What is it that motivates the communities and individuals still so committed to the practice, despite the threats posed by the combined, if antithetical, forces of secularization, fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam? [Chika Okeke-Agulu]

In Maske photo essay (Chris Boot 2010), Phyllis Galembo provides a visual platform to enter everyday African life through the politics behind masquerades. There are many functions of masking nowadays: planting and harvesting (Chi Wara masks, Bamana people); juridical functions (Glewa masks, Dan people); boyhood initiation rites, memorials after their owners’ deaths (Lukwakongo masks, Lega people); fostering gender and social harmony (Yoruba people).

But they also function as a way of protest in contemporary culture. In some cases, masks have been used as a means of complaint against enriched citizens abusing of power, oppressed people sending the most terrifying masks to their homes. As Okeke-Agulu describes it: “masks as agents of law enforcement and coercion”. In patriarchal communities, female masqueraders take the chance to reveal against imposed hierarchies through their costumes.

<Among the Ibibio and Efik people, all-male societies such as Ekpo and Ekpe still preside over social, legal, economic and political disputes, and this practice functions openly alongside the modern legal system.> [P.Galembo]

Built with local materials, performers camouflage with their surrounding constructions and vegetation. Costumes and houses, plants and stones, all mingle with each other: Woven plant fibre materials (sisal, cotton), painted wood, resinous materials (beeswax and tar), twigs, bushes, leaves, lizard excrement (white colour), boiled acacia seed pods (black), iron-rich hematite stone (red), grass, vines, feathers, fur, sugar syrup mixed with coal dust, roots, branches… Materials might be ever lasting or ephemeral. African expats in the US even send actual animal heads preserved by taxidermy back to Sierra Leone, whereas Burkina Faso masks are supposed to fall apart during every ceremony.

Urban space is profoundly altered during masquerades. In Eastern Nigeria Uzo-Iyi, no social event, market or funeral can be held during the festival. In Zambia, there is a spatial dislocation during boyhood initiation rituals; it is by leaving the settlement boundary during some months into the surrounding forest, that a new life calendar is set by the fact of returning to their settlement wearing Makishi masks. Boys leave the city to come back as real men. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, when talking about juridical identity and masks: <Persona originally means mask and it is through the mask that the individual acquires a role and a social identity.>

Masks also serve as a display of current issues. New technologies are applied on the motives of the masks, some including airplanes, helicopters or Hondas. Other masks in Benin, for example, provide moral lessons, ranging from “you can’t buy wisdom at the market” to prevention from AIDS.

African masks are wild and shapeless, and they reveal a whole society behind their powerful aesthetic appeal. In words of Okeke-Agulu, contemporary masking inhabits a space in which faith in new religions combines with residual beliefs in indigenous metaphysics to produce ontological uncertainties; this mixture of foreign and inherited cultural traditions is responsible for the complex, dramatic, rich and extreme social and cultural life in Africa and its diaspora today.

 

 

 

[all images> Maske by Phyllis Galembo, via Stephen Kasher Gallery, Tang Museum, DUST]

 

Published on August 30, 2011 11:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens, mutant

landscape-generated languages


Whistled languages are a direct result of surrounding environment. Complementary to their spoken versions, they help humans communicate in the distance overcoming natural barriers without travelling: steep topography, cliffs or dense forests. Landscape-related professions that deal with constant loneliness, such as shepherds, hunters or fishermen, profit from this system to warn the others from dangers, emergencies, wolf attacks or enemy invasions.

There are whistled communication methods in every main family of languages (listen): French Pyrenees, Turkey, Mexico, Greek islands, Amazon forests, North Vietnam Hmong peoples, or desert zones in West Africa. One of them is the Silbo Gomero in Spanish Canary Islands, reported in historical records since 15th century and inscribed on the list of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Since Pre-Hispanic times, whistling was an efficient and economic response to communicating two distant hills without building a bridge. The way in which the message is sent out does not require any vibration from the vocal cords. Having a narrower bandwidth than human voice, whistled sounds manage to travel further (1-5 km) and become less affected by background noise than shouting. It is possible to whistle every oral language, once the system of reduction of vowels and consonants is established. The phonetic characteristics of the spoken language are simply reproduced by a different method. Instead of A-E-I-O-U, there are only two vowels: a high-pitched (for both E and I) and a grave one (for A, O and U). Some authors have proposed that there are four though. All consonants are reduced to two high-pitched and two grave tones.

In La Gomera Island, locals used to speak and whistle Guanche, but with the arrival of Spanish conquistadores, it evolved into whistled Spanish.  (Hear a sample conversation with subtitles). The Silbo Gomero is not any code, but an articulated structure that can reproduce any given spoken language. The vocabulary is basically reduced to everyday activities, being much more restricted than its spoken equivalent. Nowadays, it is mainly used to announce weddings and funerals, although it has been implanted in secondary school for islanders.

<It is not a language created for the intimate. It is for the public. It must be said out loud and can be heard by all.>

[more info> highly recommendable post-doc research on whistled languages by Julien Meyer]

Published on July 26, 2011 20:04.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

The Maghreb Connection

The Mediterranean Sea is not a sea; it is Southern Europe’s border wall.

The Maghreb is literally any territory west from Egypt; Cairo functioned as the georeference for a Greenwich-like system in the Arab world.

The Sahara Desert was traditionally perceived as a vast sea; the Maghreb was referred to as an island surrounded by Mediterranean, Atlantic and Sahara “waters”.

Tuareg former free territories belong to five different countries today.

Western Sahrawi are deprived from their nomadic life in the desert by a 2,000 km long artificial wall of sand, dug out from their very same desert.

Ancient nomad trans-Sahara trade tracks are the new highways for work migrants.

Tangier-Med is a key mega-port for global mobility of goods. It lies just opposite Bel Younech informal camp, where migrants wait for a chance to cross over to the global consumption dream.

How much I love my family is measured according to how much money I send them.

Migrant boats have to be built clandestinely in the desert and brought to the coast at the moment of launching them into the sea.

A prison in Italy is better than freedom at home.

Chinese migrants struggling to survive in Cairo have taken over the role of traditional door-to-door female vendors, the Dallala.

The poorest and driest region in Almeria, Southern Spain, has been turned into one of the most fertile and wealthiest, thanks to the labour of irregular Maghreb migrants.

Doctors and engineers are bricklayers and fruit pickers.

The Maghreb Connection is a compilation of essays and research projects that assemble everyday reality in this part of Northern Africa. Edited by Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes, The Maghreb Connection charts counter-geography through various contributions, apart from their own: Armin Linke, Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussey among others. As the editors define the term: counter-geography is where the subversive, informal and irregular practices of space take place, the ones that happen despite state forces and supranational regulations.

The desert acts as a sort of waiting room for millions of desperate souls awaiting the chance to be crossed over the border to an idealized world. This post-colonial migration movement relies upon an extensive network of alliances to reach their final goal. Ali Bensaâd outlines also the fact of being unconditionally mobile people. This is the common feature to all this floating population in African coasts, who wants to venture into the other side: The individuals with the most resources in terms of opennesss to the outside are the most susceptible to becoming mobile. They are entrepreneurs in a way, in our era where the “entrepreneur” is promoted as the social ideal-type. Every migrant leaves everything behind: belongings, family and life.

European sealed borders delimit an area of free mobility after Schengen Agreement; but at the same time, they enhance the desire to start a real exodus and be inside them.  Either if it is the Strait of Gibraltar, Canary Islands’ or Lampedusa’s waters, a never-ending flow of irregular boats keep on trying to touch European ground. The Maghreb works as the departure point to bridge the gap between two continents. Florian Schneider points out that (i)n the nineteenth century, people had no problems crossing borders, while goods and products were taxed. Now it is the opposite: goods and money are supposed to flow freely, while people face more and more obstacles.

The Maghreb Connection throws a light into the kind of ambitions that move humans to start such a journey to Europe, as well as the mechanisms and strategies that make it feasible. We usually only hear in the media of the ones who are caught in their attempt and those who perish. However, the successful are already victorious somewhere at the other side of the Maghreb, where another hard journey begins for them.

[1,2,3> Biemann, U. / Holmes, B. (eds.): The Maghreb Connection – Movements of Life Across North Africa. Actar 2006]

[4> Informal Migrant Camp Bel Younech, Morocco_Eduardo del Campo 2009] [5> La Canoa by El Roto]

 

 

 

 

 

Published on July 4, 2011 18:21.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, nomads

air matters

In constrained urban agglomerations buildings experience a tense fight for available volume of occupation. In order to exploit maximum financial floor area ratios, constructions manage to occupy as much air as possible. In the 1920s, Hugh Ferriss already visualized the 1916 Zoning Law for Manhattan by shaping invisible theoretical envelopes into fulfilled architectural volumes. His drawings represented literal translations of urban policies.

Except for counted examples releasing cities from architecture in form of representative privately-owned public spaces, air usually matters. Legislators provide paternalistic frameworks to prevent citizens from an overly built environment. As a result, streets become victims of diagonal views, sunlight and hygienic ventilation.

Every building must be legal, but according to Yasutaka Yoshimura’s research, some can also become Super Legal. This condition is a direct result from frenetic megalopolises, looking how to supersede restrictive regulations. Super Legal Buildings 超合法建築図鑑 (建築文化シナジー). 彰国社 2006 is a compilation of strange mechanisms making architecture forms in Tokyo literally follow law and building codes. Organic setbacks, twists, perforations, distortions and extreme angles appear when air is squeezed to its most. Restrictions act as invitations for new inventions.

[images> courtesy Yasutaka Yoshimura]

Published on June 13, 2011 15:46.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, urban research

the end of the masterplan?

Learning from concocting informal uses of the formal city, legal loopholes, speculative visions and appropriations of public space, Berlin-based Ilka and Andreas Ruby launched Urban Transformation in 2008. Their cookbook for real action aims ideal cooperation and alliances between urban authorities and citizens towards a more socially sustainable future. As they point out: <the term “urban” […] represents a cosmos of extremely varied notions determined by geographical, cultural, and individual preferences. If we want to get a grip on what is “urban” today, we have to capture it in all its disguises, gradations, and transformations occurring simultaneously on a global scale.> The edition was initiated and extended after the Holcim Foundation Forum for sustainable construction held in Shanghai in 2007.

“Transformation” is emphasized here as estate in-between unfinished realities: visualising urban failures and their implementation. In this ever-changing panorama, we are guided through a world of possibilities that deal with the role of consumption in configuring our current cities, and its perversion by means of witty tactics. The spatial and legal transformations compiled in the book are structured in 6 chapters of in-between contexts: Between ecology & economy, global & local, public & private, sanctioned & shadow order, permanent & transitory, standard & appropriation.  These confronted dualities determine a zone imaginaire with an incredibly high potential for spatial practices.

The right to urban mobility is one of the main challenges described. A wide-range series of thinkers, pioneers and visionaries, narrate the adventures and misfortunes of almost every megalopolis in its struggle with overpopulation; however, even if Urban Transformation does not try to cover city by city in a methodical analysis, it unveils an astonishing X-ray of the urban fractures that every society shares. Some of the highlights of  this “urbanism on the move” are RV practitioners in Arizona (Simpson), 21st century Mongolian nomads (Lippe), homeless men’s temporal houses in Seoul (Cho), refugees’ spatial negotiations in their temporary camps (Herz), trans-border flows (Cruz), the impact of gondola lift transportation systems in the slums of Caracas (U-TT) or even cycling initiatives in Quito and Bogotá (Ganchala).

Another relevant issue questioning conventional modes of urban planning is the invented typologies resulting from speculation and politics that are superseding past modes of real-estate housing. This new sort of hyper-real estates, where popular imagination and eager for fast profits make unexpected urban hybrids appear, include: Serbian turbo typologies (Jovanović Weiss), super-dense urban villages in Shenzhen (Du), Caribbean floating cities (Zapata & Supersudaca), model showroom houses with fake windows in Korea (Shin), restricted International Aid walled cities in Kabul for foreigners (Karakat & Hannurkar) or Singapore’s schizophrenic social mix (Zhang & Tan).

Urban Transformation also provides a series of informal spatial appropriations of the public realm such as the fantasy world Underneath a Highway in Guangzhou (Gutierrez & Portefaix). Furthermore, it also compiles projects that have enhanced users’ participation and supported civil disobedience in otherwise over-controlled environments: United Bottle (Hebel & Stollmann) and Elemental (Iacobelli & Aravena) are good examples. As Philippe Cabanne states in his essay, <The democratically constituted state, according to Habermas […], cannot be infallible. Neither can it demand from its citizens an unconditional obedience and remain, at the same time, open to development.>


Urban Transformation. Edited by Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Ruby Press, Berlin 2008 (pp. 400, s.i.p.)

[1> Family Home in UlaanBaatar_Mongolia_Florian Lippe][2> Ciclopaseo in Quito_Cycling Citizenship in the City_Ximena Ganchala][3> How To Buy an Apartment in Korea_Haewon Shin][4> Underneath the Highway_Gutierrez & Portefaix]

Published on May 18, 2011 15:40.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, co-optation/zwischennutzung, participation

14/06/2011::: deconcrete’s Talk at Uni Kassel

Deconcrete at sub.40_School of Architecture, Urban Planning & Landscape Architecture at the University of Kassel

Published on April 25, 2011 19:32.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

Ecological Urbanism

Ecological Urbanism is not only about green roofs and windmills anymore. Instead, Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty propose to approach the city from Ecology’s perspective, in the most ample meaning. Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers 2010) is the compendium of the homonym symposium that took place at Harvard University GSD in 2009. The main motivation of the book is to go beyond the so-called “sustainable architecture” produced by mainstream green marketing. Consequently, this collection of essays, projects, dreams and visions addresses both current conditions and future possibilities in order to broaden stuck minds. As Mostafavi puts it: This type of speculative design is a necessary precondition for making radical policies that are embedded in imaginative and anticipatory forms of spatial practice.

This (not so Little) Red Book on Greenness explores more spontaneous study fields, from which our future cities can and must immensely learn. Several artists are featured, ranging from fantastic Katrin Sigurdardóttir’s inventive models to Zhang Huan’s performance of raising the water level in a fishpond by 40 Chinese migrant workers/bathers. Although such interventions might have a priori no direct application into improving city life, they expand current debate into a less typecast urbanity.

Over hundred pieces are compiled to allow the reader leaf through different worlds, back and forth and back again, glancing into statements for a better future. Sometimes, they acquire the form of data visualization, such as the Trash|Track Project, where different types of trash can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects. Other times, they simply increase awareness of the absurd, like in MQ2’s photo-documentation of the 10,466 streets named Main in the US, mostly turning out to be lost pathways among crops. In words of Mostafavi, if we don’t see the garbage of our culture, both literally and metaphorically, then we are not confronting the reality of what that garbage actually says about us.

Ecological Urbanism evokes new ways of experiencing the city. Sissel Tolaas proposes to train our noses to navigate everyday space in a more tolerant mood, by means of her captured fragrances from different neighbourhoods. And it also evokes new ways of expanding to new territories, be it OMA’s utopia for conquering the North Sea or CityCar’s collapsible automobiles for enlarging public space.

Nonetheless, we can also find realised ideas in the book. Among these brilliant discoveries, it is worth to highlight some energy-harvesting initiatives like geothermic active insulation applied by Sanaa at Essen-Zollverein or KVA matx’s flexible photovoltaic fabrics. These experimental ways of hybridising nature and construction are also literally executed at Shenyang University Campus, where faculty buildings are spread amongst rice fields.

In conclusion, sustainable modes of producing urbanity should learn also from those practices, which have not been traditionally considered as “architectural”, but do support an ecological approach, nature being the true main character. And at the same time, spatial practices that liberate devices for citizens to interact with, from a Laissez-Faire point of view. As Mostafavi states: Ecological urbanism must provide the necessary and emancipatory infrastructures for an alternative form of urbanism, one that brings together the benefits of both bottom-up and top-down approaches to urban planning.


[1> Sissel Tolaas, Without Borders - NOSOEAWE, Berlin Biennale 2004 via duendemad][2>Zhang Huan, To Raise the Waterlevel in a Fishpond, performance Beijing, 1997 via Tate Modern][3>Trash|Track, Senseable, MIT 2009][4>Shenyang Architecture University Campus via chinese-architects][5>KVA matx, Soft City, 2008 via goodcleantech][6>OMA, Zeekracht, Netherlands, the North Sea 2008]


Published on April 11, 2011 17:52.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

A Peripheral Moment

The post-socialist urban condition that experienced Croatia in1990s was mainly characterised by collapse of estate-controlled urban planning and lack of investment on public infrastructures. But at the same time, and as Eve Blau points out, “(i)t is distance from power, rather than unremitting change, that creates opportunities for architecture”. Post-socialist consumption society produced wild urban villa typologies as a direct translation of Croatian free market housing, which ended up in a multiunit dwelling masquerading as a single family house: neither urban, in the sense that provides no collective amenities, nor is it a villa, as it does not provide any sense of individuality. But at the same time, architecture needed to reinvent itself to think of new housing forms between paradox and contradiction.

A Peripheral Moment (Actar 2010) is last Ivan Rupnik’s publication about a decade of architectural experimentation in Croatia. The author uses two approaches to go into the turmoil of spatial practices that were carried out between 1999 and 2010. First, and according to Ljubo Karaman’s theory, this very specific and prolific moment of artistic production can be directly connected to existing conditions of sustained instability. And second, reading the whole period from Tafuri’s perspective, instead of an avant-garde situation (“always affirmative, absolutist, totalitarian”), he approaches it as an Experimentalist phase (“constantly taking apart, putting together, contradicting, and provoking”). Consequently, Rupnik sees the necessity of publishing the whole contextual processes triggered beyond the accomplished built objects:

“While the physical products of this period have become quite common on the glossy pages and web portals of architectural journals, the innovative practices that generated them have not had the same fate.”

In Aaron Betsky’s words, this architectural moment cannot be understood as a finished form, but as a generic container that floats through the grid.

The book is a compilation of urban analysis, architectural findings, contributions by external thinkers and a series of discursive methods. Frampton writes: “the architect must become an urban guerrilla, an inventor of new strategies, or let us say, at the very least, an aesthete amid the ruins or an agent provocateur”. Croatian urban periphery is the terrain vague where all these guerrilla experiments have been taken form. Alien constructions which are “jealous of their isolation and proud of their individuality; […] projects that are […] always committed to the thought of producing a symbolic and functional “plus-value”, that offer the city and community something more than what the individual investors who are financing and producing architecture today across Europe demand”. [Stefano Boeri]

Homeland War memorials constituted the first architectural realizations of the peripheral moment, evidencing a revival of RELIGION and cultural IDENTITY. One of the most remarkable compiled works being the Field of Crosses orchestrated by Nikola Bašić (picture above). Aiming to recover nearly lost masonry construction techniques common to Croatia’s coast, groups of volunteers flocked to the construction site voluntarily, forcing Bašić to use a loudspeaker as his primary design tool.

The book understands a delirious society from its built form and vice versa. Its most relevant contribution to understanding this outskirts condition is the comparative analysis of projects, regarding their effect on urban society. A series of transitional typologies where BIG BOX RETAILERS and FAST FOOD FRANCHISES dominate an urban periphery hybridised with housing, office and public space. Managing to make a McDonald’s drive-in rooftop serve as an unused basketball court, framing speculation, recycling the urban passage, urbanizing pedagogy or conceiving Trojan horses injecting urbanity.

A Peripheral Moment is an explanation behind the invented hybrids derived from a newly born society.

[1> Field of Crosses via grad-vodice][2,3> A Peripheral Moment via Actar]

Published on March 13, 2011 14:02.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, urban research

“everything is linked”

SOMETHING FANTASTIC is about changing the world. But it is also a manifesto by three young architects on worlds, people, cities, and houses (authors: Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz and Leonard Streich, self-printed. Distributed by Ruby Press, Berlin 2010). Somewhere between utopia and activism, they want to approach reality with a perverted unconventional perspective. And somewhere between naivety and pragmatism, it is where they find their sources for their public space actions and dreamt realities: The beauty of our future buildings will be rooted in the poetry of their simplicity.

The book is divided into four sections:

POSITIONS are statements and their wish list for the world to become;

PLANS are actions, dreams and recipes resulting from their manifesto: how to profit from gentrification (see the jet-set houses), how to recycle GDR built relics (see Plattenbau Algorithm), how to enhance green energy public space (see the Dumpling Express)…

CONVERSATIONS is a series of 12 interviews with carefully selected minds, ranging from lightweight construction expert Mike Schlaich to Markus Miessen and his uninvited outsiders theory; Wiel Arets’ virological architecture influencing the environment or firm futurologist Gerd Gerken, among others.

EXCERPTS include those essential quotations that everybody mentions and nobody knows exactly.

They thoroughly deal with ecology, politics, poetics and speculation, but these are to be read between the lines, since these topics melt constantly with each other in the text and in reality alike. The audience of architecture is everyone. And in this same line, they have launched the on-line archive whatwow – an index of re-inventing construction – and an on-going compilation of pedigreed and non-pedigreed collective thinking. It collects unconventional examples of construction techniques, material use, typologies, programs etc. invented today or centuries ago that expand your possibilities beyond the building-as-usual.

The most naïf ideas usually foster the most talented discoveries. This manifesto and its unusual visions inspire both further action and fiction. I do believe that Something Fantastic’s Nighttrain Station with its 6 km long train, moving the equivalent amount of passengers to the whole daily air transit between Berlin and Munich, will someday arrive at the Central Railway Station.

[1 &2> Encyclopedia and The Dumpling Express. Courtesy: Something Fantastic]

Published on February 22, 2011 15:20.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, non-pedigreed, unsolicited, urban research

the independent moment

An architecture competition can last at least for one month: insanely intense teamwork for a never-to-be-built concept. A very good friend of mine understands tattooing as the most optimal opposite: less than one hour dedication for a life-long built existence. After late 2000s crisis, architects seem to be encouragingly returning to construct paradise in independent papers, virtual blogs and dreamt utopias again. A lack of clients is progressively enhancing unsolicited initiatives, otherwise never to be achieved if one had a comfortable and stable job. Ladies and gentlemen, we are assisting to the independent, almost self-reliant moment.

Inheriting the prolific production of architecture counter-cultural publications of the 1960s,70s,90s, curator Elias Redstone has recently launched ARCHI ZINES. It is a showcase of new fanzines, journals and magazines from around the world that provide an alternative discourse to the established architectural press. [...] (T)he project celebrates and promotes publishing as an arena for architectural commentary, criticism and research, and as a creative platform for new photography, illustration and design.

An on-going archive which today compiles 40 different international titles, 80 considering themed and special issues. And growing. All begun after 2000, and most of them are merely 5 years young; a very contemporary and instantaneous archive for the intended. Some of them will last several decades, others will vanish without trace, while maybe others will make their speculations plausible… But like a tattoo, they all mark a corporeal moment in the very present, and a memory souvenir in the uncertain future.

[1> ARCHI ZINES archive snapshot 15/02/2011]

Published on February 15, 2011 12:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, unsolicited

collective (unsolicited) architectures

“I am an unsolicited architect. Despite our skill and experience in manipulating space and material, architects are incapable of addressing the needs of society unless we have first been explicitly asked to do so. The unsolicited architect tackles the big issues that are otherwise overlooked by the market. They create briefs where none are written, discover sites where none are owned, approach clients where none are present, and find financing where none is available…” This is the statement of a bootleg edition of Volume magazine from April 2010 (Abhelakh, Hyde, Moore), which expanded the thesis of unsolicited architecture initiated by Ole Bouman a couple of years before.

When conventional architects run out of clients, they need to reinvent themselves; and that is what Collective Architectures: trucks, containers, collectives tries to prove. That working with nothing can actually bring everything. Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions) is Santiago Cirugeda’s studio practice; and this recently published book, his results of unsolicited architecture since 1996. An initiative in which more than a dozen collectives participate to recycle 42 liveable containers and transform them into a network of self-managing spaces.

Like in the medical tradition, this set of urban prescriptions reveals his masterly formulas and turns them into open-source tools to be used by anyone daring to intervene in the public realm. The book consists of a specially designed packaging with an EZcode for a Scanlife application in its cover. Inside the packaging, we find a 95-pages textbook and 5 folded leaflets (for its first edition); the written work separated from the graphic documentation of real cases. Its remarkable simplicity and dualism explain its nature of open-ended publication; it is a book, which is also a platform for cooperative research and dialogue. A book to be rewritten, recomposed, and prescribed in a different manner. More leaflets documenting future projects are to be added, and the text edited again and again, updated to the infinite. This book is the premiere of VIB[ ]K, and Paula Álvarez, its head-editor: an independent publisher and a cultural project which investigates innovative ways of re-considering the traditional publishing process.

Inheriting countercultural practices from utopian 1960s, Santiago Cirugeda and his team work with a transient nature, optimisation and adjustment, self-management, bottom-up networks, and with a critical dimension of land and housing speculation; a similar version of the Urban Pioneer defined by Klaus Overmeyer. As David G. Torres puts it, it’s a transient practice because it itinerates through legal loopholes. […] The legal loopholes give way to the possibility of recuperating spaces and inhabiting them above and beyond the speculative fever. In definitive, ”using” the system to one’s own benefit.

Trucks, containers, collectives works with the legal, the alegal, with the ambiguous status, with induced legality or with strategies alongside the law. For Cirugeda, “Alegality” does not go against the law; rather it takes it a step further, revealing possibilities that have not yet been considered. His Architecture could almost be defined as Archi-true-cture, where sheer reality generates on-going processes. This can also explain his interest in ingenious ways of profiting from intermediary estates of developments, and consequently focusing on the course rather than the finished product to be published in glossy media.

This first publication of VIB[ ]K features essays by different authors, including an interview with Saskia Sassen on Cirugeda’s work. It is also open for collaborations, contributions, editorial work and study cases for further update of the work, so “…Architects, don’t wait for the phone to ring. Act now. Pose a problem. It’s the best solution. Become the expert. Knowledge is. Write your own brief. You answer to no body. Design the answer. It may not be a building. Run the numbers. Win in the end. Get yourself together. Pool talent. Find the loophole. Assemble your argument. Biased advice is best. Build public support. Demonstrate the urgency. Solicit your future client. “

[1> Trucks, Containers, Collectives via Recetas Urbanas]

Published on February 6, 2011 18:00.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, unsolicited

lifeless is not motionless

“The desert is a huge paradox. Beneath its outward appearance of immensity and silence, are the sounds of various experiments, mysteries, and utopias. The setting of outrageous true histories, entertainment oases founded on consumerism and play, and the secret staging of military power, the desert is far from empty. Instead, it is full of activity: unexpected, uninhibited, and excessive. Not subject to barriers and seemingly free of the formal, ideological or cultural ties of global society, the desert cultivates alternate architectures, urbanisms, and built phenomena.” [source> actar]

American emptiness is the perfect breeding ground for bizarre experiments. As compiled in Desert America – Territory of Paradox (Actar 2006) in different thematic groups, the rough vacant landscape hosts an exceptional amount of urban laboratories. Promised Lands deepens into the US-Mexican border condition and ancient Mormon colonizing strategies; The Elements puts together a series of ways to control sun, wind, water and extract power, including both failures and wise moves; Eden gathers idealistic utopias ranging from firearm-oriented towns to +55-year-old-communities; Hostility describes dozens of obsolete military infrastructures showing a decadent pierced landscape by nuclear tests, or open-air collections of Cold War Rockets and unused airships; Other Worlds brings outer space watching and receiving installations together, adding ersatz natural environments underneath man-made structures; and Expansion describes ways to produce an instant city for modern nomads: the Burning Man camp site and Arizona’s RVs oases.

“The story of the American desert is fundamentally one of technology. What distinguishes it utterly from the other deserts to which it is superficially similar [...] is this chemical reaction between the raw material of a landscape and the modern sciences that have occupied and acted on it, producing a hybrid space that is both the most natural and the most artificial of territories.”

It is astonishing how rural desolation can unleash such a variety of urban interventions. Land Art once extracted the best of these wastelands and Venturi squeezed Las Vegas neon-lights to the maximum, but the human yearn for colonizing a territory never supersedes the eccentric.

[1&2> Desert America - Territory of Paradox. Actar 2006] [3> abandoned Bombay Beach resort by Kim Stringfellow via greenmuseum] [4> Imperial Valley and artificial Salton Sea via earthobservatory] [5> Dead fish at Salton Sea via filmfestivalworld] [6> Sedan Crater nuclear test via radiochemistry]

Published on January 13, 2011 15:58.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, learning from

extrude to the max

A purely economical use of ground has led HongKong towards a variety of singular built inventions. Simply by translating contextual requirements of mountainous topography and high demand for housing, the city develops itself almost as a literal result of urban policies. The recently published HongKong Typology, by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (Profs. Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein), researches into these phenomenal morphological constructions, pure victims of height limitations, street shadowing policies and absolute minimization of elevators.

Although every building has an author, it seems as if they had almost no choice when land market is the main concern. “Their language swings between an anonymous lack of design and a classical modern expression. HongKong’s architecture is thus thoroughly like a traditional anonymous architecture without architects.”

Their research focuses in 36  case study of rare species, with their correspondent photo, floorplan and axonometric diagram, classified in seven characteristic, almost radical, typologies. Among them, Pencil towers, for example, are a direct extrusion of the lot, over 20 storey high. Like in the Fullic Court Building below, each storey consists of a 22 m2 apartment with 39 m2 dedicated to vertical circulation. Even though such a contradictory ratio could sound nonsense in other megacities, it was the simplest formula for developing real estate property without involving owners from different adjoining lots. If the pencil typology deals with micro-property land structure, star shape towers can expand as much as they can; objective: achieve the maximum outer perimeter by folding and folding the façade again. Once every room has its own window, up to 8 big apartments can be fit in every floor, all concentrated around one single elevator nucleus. Inheriting this same principle of land profitability, Industrial blocks dedicate their whole height to light industrial use. Similar floorplans stacked one above the other, with chimneys cladding the façade up to the roof.

As questioned in their publication, what can other cities learn from such economic and aesthetic efficiency in our post-crisis urbanity?

Should/Could their buildings also extrude to the max?

[image1>HongKong Typology case studies] [images 2&3> Fullic Court Tower and MeiKei vertical Industrial Building] all published in HongKong Typology by gta publishers, ETH Zürich

Published on December 7, 2010 21:08.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, urban research

death in venice

Venice is both shrinking and sinking.

While every year her streets are increasingly being flooded by acqua alta, she is loosing more and more population at the same time. On November 2009, a popular mock funeral was held, in memoriam to the city’s future perspectives. Matteo Secchi, organiser of the event declared:

“We promised two years ago when we got less than 60,000 inhabitants we would plan a funeral [for] the city because we think the city [...] is not a city any more, it’s more a village,” he said.

Palazzi are nowadays a mere scenery, whose backstage is empty. The rockstars and millionaires living inside, who should be performing on the city-stage, are gone, and only come back to their homes once a year. How can a 60,000 souls’ city then deal with an average of 50,000 tourists per day?

my deepest sympathy.

source: bbcnews source picture

Published on January 23, 2010 17:09.
Filed under: BOOKS/news