deconcrete

‘The illusion that illegal construction brought a dispersion of power in the production of space dissolved, and it became obvious that the power just shifted into the hands of developers who merely used the illegal as their legitimate field.’ [DS]

Glotzt nicht so romantisch! (after B. Brecht’s statement Don’t stare so Romantically!) is Dubravka Sekulić’s brilliant research on Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Acadmie, 2012). A deep look into former Yugoslavia’s housing policies shaping the countless roof extensions that can be seen all over today. These built-in additions are a literal remnant of both socialist and neoliberal acts of informal negotiations for the addition of new floor area beyond the legal height limits. She takes the case of the so-called Russian Pavilions (post WWII) to take us into a trip through residential markets. Coming from 1960s strategy of co-ownership – to motivate people to invest personal funds in housing construction,- the practice of ‘wild building’ led to the invention of land and housing property as a veritable source of income. This even reached a point where even some people quickly built mock-ups of construction they were planning to build later, just to have them registered on the satellite image for future legalization.

If real estate and the right to housing in 1990s socialist Yugoslavia started a process of individual appropriation of collective commodities, the corruption of the 2000s evolved into a more elaborate turn of the exception into the norm. The analysis of the built form of a roof unveils the struggle of citizens in shifting a political mind-set from one extreme to the other. As Sekulić states, the attitude towards space changed from societal, though it was not entirely clear what this meant, over to more private, so from ‘ours’ to just ‘mine’. This reflects the schizophrenia of how real estate property as such was born out of informal economies to later raise the entire economic system of a nation in the making.

The triad developers-municipality-inhabitants composed a complex set of clever negotiations that detected any loopholes in legal frameworks and allowed them to manoeuvre in the blurry landscape of temporary permits and building legalization. They all fought everyday austerity with a pure sense of entrepreneurial greed to keep up with the Jones’. If a neighboring block could grow a few floors, so could mine. Extralegal Space in Belgrade teaches us a devastating lesson on market syndicalism through Belgrade’s architectural parasites.

In a context lacking clients, commissions and opportunities to grow, Unsolicited Architecture (according to Ole Bouman’s concept) can and should profit from them to generate a more prosperous one. The architectural act needs to be re-understood in a more ample sense, by detecting oneself problems, improvements and better futures for existing reality. Since nobody commissions, this new approach relies on a very active – almost politically activist – phase of marketing an idea. As published in Volume#14 within the portfolio of the Office of Unsolicited Architecture, their vision for the Golden Gate site can illustrate this new way of doing. The method includes four steps.

First, MAKE controversial challenges and public hot debates PATENT: stopping suicides at Golden Gate Bridge, the top suicide magnet in the world. Artist Natalie Jeremijenko already produced SUICIDE BOX (1996) to visualize this practice, a motion detection video system designed to capture vertical activity. [...] In standard operation any vertical motion in frame will trigger the camera to record to disk. Bureau installed the Suicide Box for trial application in range of the Golden Gate Bridge California 1996; an initial deployment period [100 days] metered 17 bridge events.

However, constructing a suicide barrier is a very polemic issue that divides population into for and against sides.

Second, DETECT fields of action. On the one hand, there is a general lack of cemeteries, since they were outlawed within the urban limits of San Francisco since 1902. This has generated a growing need for more plots. On the other hand, there is an increasing budget deficit with the whole structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, which fails to be solved by increasing exponentially the bridge tolls for vehicles.

Third, PROPOSE and SPECULATE within a logical discourse. What if new cemetery is built and at the same time pays for these tolls? Additionally, the Bridge would need a suicide barrier. In order not to alter the aesthetics of the landmark, a camouflaged and light pathway could be cantilevered from the structure, preventing potential victims to jump into the water. A columbarium with niches for cremated remains could be introduced inside the iron beams, turning the Golden Gate into the ultimate snobbish cemetery/memorial. The rental of every niche could support the maintenance costs of the Bridge by far, without increasing vehicle tolls.

Fourth, PROVE the speculative hypothesis by means of studies: urn studies and estimation of the amount of niches needed compared to the tolls. In short, the goal is to achieve realistic, but at the same time utopian, feasibility of the unsolicited architectural act. Afterwards, the marketing phase must deal with the process of opening debate for such a solution. Even if it eventually fails to be realised, its side effect is reconsidering a better social future.

“(O)pportunities which challenge the traditional relationship architects have to the law are often overlooked. Therefore, instead of seeing rules and regulations as hindrances they can also be viewed as opportunities. Even more, they could be turned into urgencies by applying them to taboo social topics.”

Unsolicited Architecture must reinterpret obsolete laws in a perverted reading. Rather than being fix limitations, they can even foster and support delirious. Transgression can open many forgotten doors with high potential. However, the main condition is that taboos are not understood as self-imposed barriers anymore, but as thresholds for action.

[1>Office of Unsolicited Architecture, Reported Suicides at Golden Gate related to light posts after chronicle graphic by Todd Trumbull][2>Natalie Jermijenko, Suicide Box, still from video, 1996][3> OUA, Golden Gate Columbarium proposal]

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]

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]

“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]

After asking for some tobacco at the entrance of some tiny old lane in Shanghai, an old couple sitting at the front door in the street lead us to a secret paradise. the lane is hardly 1 metre wide, and overfilled with storaged goods from the neighbours. after some zigzag twists, we arrive to a pretty dark house at the very end.

“Ringed by thickly forested mountains, illicit cigarette factories dot the countryside, carved deeply into caves, high into the hills, and even buried beneath the earth. By one tally, some 200 operations are hidden in Yunxiao, a southwestern Fujian county about twice the area of New York City. Once famed for its bright yellow loquat fruit, Yunxiao is the trade’s heartland, the source of half of China’s counterfeit production.” [Source> Slate Magazine]

Passed the threshold, an old local family is sitting at their dining table, peacefully slurping some noodles inside a heavy smoke cloud. But our goal is the following room, where another old man is sitting at a corner of a black-walled hole. One could never guess, whether the plain black colour comes from the smoke itself or from the heavy layer of dust wrapping traditional subsidized dwellings, dating back from Mao’s China. He is smiling at us, offering his whole stock displayed all over the room, ranging from Cuban cigars to rolling tobacco, of any brand.

“Most of the foreign cigarettes sold in China are thought to be counterfeit or to have been smuggled in. Tobacco smuggling into China is a multi-billion dollar business controlled largely by gangsters from Hong Kong triads. Smuggling and counterfeiting cigarettes are so lucrative businesses that some criminal gangs have stitched their focus from heroin to cigarettes. Rough cut tobacco usually discarded by cigarette makers is used to make the cigarettes. Often it contains floor sweepings, sawdust and a variety of chemicals. Many of the counterfeit cigarette factories are in the rural areas of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Some have been built underground to avoid detection.

A third of the cigarettes smoked in Britain are counterfeit with 80 percent of them made in China.” [Source> Jeffrey Hays 2010]

[Image above> cheaper tobacco in shanghai] [Image below> Chinese officials destroying counterfeit cigarettes via cnreviews]