deconcrete

The emblematic Central Madrid has turned into a vibrating site of proactive politics again.

2 August 2011, a few minutes before sunrise. It was the second day in the national holiday period for the masses and the city was almost empty. Everyone wants to scape the scorching summer temperatures, but some 15M “indignant” protesters remained still camped. They had marched from all over the country to bring their voice to the capital city. After 2,5 months of pacifist protests since the movement began, riot policemen decided to take action. They evicted the grass-roots information booth and the few tents from the protest camp with premeditation and nocturnality.

This Governmental shift has boosted the general outrage of a movement that was getting ready to hibernate for the summer; it has resurged now instead of September. For the past three days, policemen were told to block Plaza del Sol, emblematic public space for the demonstrators, and where the 15 May movement for real democracy was born. If the whole public square was turned into a massive protest camp since May, now it is an over-controlled empty void, a sort of Bastille-fortress. The same policemen that used to prevent anyone from camping outside the square are now preventing anyone from entering. No civil person has been allowed in the square: the absurdity of controlling a political symbol. The subway nodal station has even already been closed down for a total of 24 hours; trains do not stop at Sol.

Counterproductive as it has proved, blocking public space from people to express their ideas has only strengthened them. Even the policemen trade union (SUP) have publicly considered today Sol’s blockade as a political mistake. Madrid Central has turned from a consumption and commerce hub into a space for debate and consensus. Several surrounding squares (not sieged by police forces yet) like Jacinto Benavente, Mayor, Callao, Cibeles, Pontejos, Atocha have been spontaneously taken over to celebrate bottom-up meetings. Critical issues are being discussed, proposed and questioned: financial crisis, citizen participation, politicians’ corruption and abuse of power… The politics of public space are more active than ever and back to the very origins of Greek agoras: open places of assembly. In Valencia, Tenerife or Madrid, squares that have housed these protests are now commonly referred to as the 15M Square. Even main streets like Madrid’s Gran Vía have been turned into people’s parliaments after stopping car traffic at night. There is an urgent need for real debate; power structures need to listen.

Only 10 days left for the Pope’s bombastic visit to Madrid and the global Catholic Youth Encounter (JMJ). They are to be largely funded by the Government of our secular country in one of the worst moments for national economy. Madrid authorities start to take action in order to show global pilgrims that there is no trouble among its citizens, but tension is heavily felt everywhere. During the Papal visit, the same streets that now function as sites for political expression and debate will house hundreds of temporary confession booths, where Catholic pilgrims will be able to confess their sins in every language.

Meanwhile, 15M “indignados” claim that this square is not the Pope’s (“esta plaza, no es del Papa”). Yesterday, riot policemen started to brutally attack for the first time, beating pacific protesters: 20 injured. Today there will be gatherings and demonstrations claiming again for Real Democracy NOW in most Spanish cities around 7 pm.

[images> August protests in Madrid by Carlos Rosillo (Mayor, Preciados, Alcalá & Cibeles), Alberto Martín (Gran Vía), Samuel Sánchez (Preciados, injured & Jacinto Benavente), Kiko Huesca (Parliament), Dani Pozo (Preciados), Emilio Naranjo (Sol), Uly Martín (Sol)]

Spain has 52 provinces and 48 airports. Several capital towns got one during the golden 2000’s. 37 are loss-making infrastructures.

My hometown is no exception. Its flying terminal, which looks as big as the long-distance bus station, has five similar airports in less than 125 km distance (one hour drive): Logroño, Bilbao, Vitoria, Santander and Valladolid. Mobility efficiency is left aside when every politician from the National Government wants his own hometown to get an airport. It is like a monument to glorify his political ego amongst their fellow countrymen.

The second main aim of building a local airport is obviously real estate value increase on the surrounding terrain: industrial, logistic and hotel complexes are to blossom out of agricultural land like manna from Heaven. However, Spanish airports may also serve as a wise tool to track back many speculation processes occurring during the last decade. Two-year-old Huesca airport will not have any more commercial flights; just the cafeteria will remain open for pricy daily menus. Lleida’s almost inexistent air traffic makes it possible to have local sheep in charge of the maintenance of the lawn surrounding the landing track.

Villanubla Airport is in Valladolid and dates back from the 1970s. Villanubla literally means Fog Valley, an ideal site for a delirious airport. The local name of the area was proudly kept for the new infrastructure, so that everybody could admire the harsh climatic conditions that they bravely need to deal with every day. But at least, this flying node is still working. In Ciudad Real, after being opened in 2008, the terminal is going to close down in October and become the ultimate ghost airport, only three years after completion. Ciudad Real, in English both Royal City and Real City, is only 2,5 hours drive from Madrid Barajas International Airport. However, it was built with great ambitions: the longest landing track in Europe (4 km). The bigger the construction, the more progress it will bring along with; its name “Don Quixote Airport” matches this foolish disproportion very well.

Another mega-infrastructure near there, the high-speed AVE railway connection between Toledo and Cuenca has been recently withdrawn. The reason: 18,000-euro daily maintenance cost for an average of 9 passengers. How can high-speed trains in such a small country be so developed that American and Chinese engineers even came to learn from Spanish infrastructures?

Spain, obsessed with its inferiority complex, used most of the virtual benefits of the construction boom for pharaonic mobility works; in order to show the world how to build monumental railway, airports and toll roads. Madrid alone has built five new radial private speedways to access the city. Today, the loan has not even been payed off and only 14,000 daily drivers (60,000 expected) are using them.

Every town wanted her own Guggenheim, her own International Convention Centre and her own global University. This has resulted into empty museums, eerie architectural landmarks and mediocre faculties spread all over the country. Financial crisis seems to be the only brake to Spain’s quixotic urban development.

[for further information on infrastructural remnants after the Spanish Crisis, watch ¿Era necesario construirlo?]

[1> Ciudad Real ghost airport via abc]

Parangolés and Penetráveis. The former consist of a series of complicate capes that only reveal their intricate nature to the viewer when the person who wears one moves and dances. The latter are labyrinth-like constructions waiting for the viewer to penetrate their boundaries and get lost in a series of tropical colourful panels. Hélio Oiticica’s works from 1960s Brazilian avant-garde contributed enormously to the world of interactivity. A Parangolé is both an object and the representation of its own movements; as long as the fabric waves in the air, it turns dancers’ changing trajectories automatically visible. They are able to visualize unstable spaces. As Simone Osthoff beautifully describes them:

<[Oiticica] created interrelations around the sensual body and the many spatial forms it interacts with. His participatory creations were based on two key concepts that he named “Crelazer” and the “Supra-Sensorial.” Crelazer, one of Oiticica’s neologisms meaning “to believe in leisure,” was for him a condition for the existence of creativity and is based on joy, pleasure and phenomenological knowledge. The second concept, the Supra-Sensorial, promotes the expansion of the individual’s normal sensory capacities in order to discover his/her internal creative center. The Supra-Sensorial could be represented by hallucinogenic states (induced with or without the use of drugs), religious trance and other alternate states of consciousness such as the ecstasy and delirium facilitated by the samba dance. For Oiticica, the Supra-Sensorial created a complete de-aesthetization of art underscoring transformative processes.

[…]

Oiticica’s work fused formal investigation with leisure activities, inviting viewer participation in the creation of “unconditioned behaviour”. In the cultural context of “the country where all free wills seem to be repressed or castrated”, the concepts of Crelazer and the Supra-Sensorial directly defied a pleasure-denying productivist work ethic, subverting it through activities that embraced pleasure, humor, leisure and carnivalesque strategies. Reverie and revolt were never far apart in Oiticica’s work, as Brett has pointed out. Leisure for him was first and foremost a revolutionary anti-colonialist strategy.

[…]

Oiticica described his relation to the popular samba, making reference to the intense experience provoked by dance: “The rehearsals themselves are the whole activity, and the participation in it is not really what Westerners would call participation because the people bring inside themselves the “samba fever” as I call it, for I became ill of it too, impregnated completely, and I am sure that from that disease no one recovers, because it is the revelation of mythical activity…Samba sessions all through the night revealed to me that myth is indispensable in life, something more important than intellectual activity or rational thought when these become exaggerated and distorted.”>

 Thanks, Santiago!

[sources> solarflareark, the art section, the boulevardier]

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 15^th 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]

A statue of the Virgin was turned into a personification of Justice, simply by removing the Christ Child and replacing him with scales.

Network artist Oliver Laric reinterprets Susan Sontag’s statement that just about everything had been photographed (1977), and proclaims that just about everything has been photoshopped. His video essay and statement on visual culture Versions (2010) also features the Iranian incident from 2008, where the Revolutionary Guards released an image with a digitally added missile. This resulted in an explosion of versions and speculations about the real amount of missiles that had actually been fired, at both official and informal level. Dozens of anonymous graphic jokes also explored fantastic and absurd re-combinations of missiles.

Versions coexist. […] Authenticity is decided by the viewer. […] In the telling and the retelling (of different interpretations), the people reveal not the action but themselves. […] We have an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. Laric collects text fragments and squeezes them with collages out of images found in the Internet. In Versions, he shows resemblances between animation movies (Winnie the Pooh, the Jungle Book or ET); different ways of reproducing Zidane’s kick incident; bootleg recordings of films; celebrities’ faces replacing porn actors’; as well as simultaneous visits to a modernist architecture icon in LA. Laric (also co-author of vvork platform) uses available Internet material for his remixes dealing with iconoclasm and iconography.

PN: How do you use stealing?

OL: Stealing creates a feeling of liberty because everything belongs to you while simultaneously causing stress as you have to constantly make restrictions what not to use.  (Oliver Laric interviewed by Peter Nowogrodzki for Incite!)

There are more books about books than any other subject.

[see also Oliver Laric's Versions 2009]

Yesterday, and for the 8^th time, around 50 activists managed to stop another eviction for loan non-payment since 15-May Spanish protests began. Only in Madrid, 2,532 families were evicted during the first quarter 2011. The victims of the mortgage crisis assume some of the responsibility for having signed a loan over their possibilities, in a context of national encouragement towards home-property as the only way of housing. However, bank institutions largely overvalued real estate, which has led to a paradox. Not only does a household pay off their debt by loosing their home, but due to the current legislation they also owe additional money; real estate is valued now at a much lower price by the same banking institution. Furthermore, over 700,000 new apartments in Spain remain empty after completion, trapped in after-crisis legal limbos.

The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform) proposes to change this amongst their solutions compiled in form of a manifest. Debt must be settled with foreclosed homes and without any additional fee, like it happens in the US and in other countries of the EU. If a household is unable to make mortgage loan payments, the bank must only repossess the home. This grass-roots association aims to stop evictions, but also urges the Government to take over mortgaged dwellings and turn them into low-rent social housing. This initiative has already proofed successful in the Basque Country. The PAH also proposes the loan market to be audited, as well as limiting loan installments to a maximum 30% of the monthly income. As they state in their manifest, the call to stop evictions comes from the current violation of the UDHR Article 25, the Spanish Constitution Article 47, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 11.

Today, more than 50 riot policemen prevented a 9^th flash mob from achieving their goal. Moreover, the method to notify evictions has become stricter, according to the current state of affairs. Instead of notifying a certain date and time, from now on they will rather mention a time interval spanning several days or weeks. This measure tries to avoid demonstrators chaining themselves to the entrance door. Activists have reacted by staying overnight at to-be-foreclosed homes at critical nights, and have recently called to squat every evicted dwelling.

Suffocating situation  in Madrid’s turmoil summer, and still two hot events to come: the national protest march for True Democracy is arriving 23rd July to the capital, demonstrators coming from all over the country; and the Pope’s mega-visit in August with a disproportionate cost of 50 million euros. Suffocating.

[image> Stop Evictions Flash Mob, Madrid 19/07/2011 via elpais]

Pfand is a magic and highly used German word for deposit; it functions as a sort of informal contract between two parties or even a contemporary form of barter. Usually involving small valuables, it is largely used for returnable bottles. In Germany there are three official prices for empties:

*Standard beer bottles: 0,08 € / unit

*Other glass bottles and special ones: 0,15 € / unit

*Aluminium cans and most hard plastic bottles: 0,25 € / unit

Supermarket machines scan returned empties and one gets the value of the goods back.

Pfandgeben.de is a non-profit platform to bring people together. It puts empties’ holders (Pfandbesitzern) and collectors (Pfandsammlern) simply in contact. By means of a website, it is possible to search a list of available collectors in one’s neighbourhood, call or text to their cell phone numbers, so that they pick up the empties for free. Depending on the amount of bottles that one needs to get rid of, different names appear to be willing to pick them up: under 20 bottles, around 20, around 30, around 40 or more than 40. Jonas Kakoschke, assisted by Corinna Northe and Mareike Geiling, started the initiative within his communication design studies at HTW in Berlin. However, the list of service providers is growing out of town; the network is expanding already to other German cities like Augsburg, Essen or Cologne. The website provides also the possibility to enter new phone numbers from potential collectors, as well as accept donations of old cell phones and SIM cards for collectors even lacking this basic infrastructure.

The returnable bottles system has basically an ecological and energetic aspiration to reduce pollution and human waste. But the bottom-up network launched by Kakoschke implements it with a social plus: a mutual benefit for both holder and collector in form of a Win-Win typical situation. The empties’ holder does not need to take them back to the supermarket and the nomad collector becomes extra earnings for the job, without wandering around the streets for so long.

Trash collection is regarded as something natural and logic in developing countries, making informal networks recycle as many materials as formal systems provided by Governments. But it makes even more sense that this phenomenon takes place in the developed consumption world. Communication development and Internet politics build a parallel virtual city of negotiations, which can facilitate the exchange of super specific products and services.

It is only a few kilometres wide and more than 900 km long. It has many more inhabitants than the capital city of its country and still looks like the countryside. It has a population density similar to the most congested global megacities, and it is nothing but a linear strip of rururban development. The field along the River Nile is an endless corridor of agricultural land turned into housing blocks, but lacking the necessary infrastructure for such an agglomeration: the ultimate metropolitan village. The Nile City is a research project led by Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Oliver Thill at the Berlage Institute in 2009/2010. The 900-kilometres city has recently been featured in the highly recommendable second issue of San Rocco Magazine, around the topic of the Even Covering of the Field. Additionally, the project shows stunning photos by Bas Princen of the housing developments of the area, consisting of completely walled buildings; they literally reflect the optimal shift from agriculture to real estate as well as harsh climate conditions. Concrete structures filled with brickwork are scattered all over as vertical extrusions of plots, but always leaving a piece of valuable arable land available. This new housing typology – almost like a cuboid version of the Pyramids – has no windows; it is too hot outside to let any breeze of air or sunlight inside. The dull homogeneity of the landscape is enhanced through these monolithic dwellings repeated ad infinitum. As Thill puts it: The quality of the individual building is also that of the whole megalopolis, and so there is no difference between architecture and urbanism. [...] the buildings are so neutral that the landscape becomes the dominant element [...]. According to the principle of isotropic field, their research concludes with a proposal using updated hieroglyphs to map this contemporary vibrating landscape: land-reclamation, exclusive clubs, garbage dumps, unused plots…

<But these agglomerations are cities only according to statistics. Nothing about them is metropolitan except their density. To understand these systems as cities is a mistake. They are merely denser rural areas crowded with restless masses of (underemployed) farmers. Finally, after the modern infatuation with cities, we are going to have to consider villages once again.> [San Rocco#2, Editorial]

[1> Informal Settlement by Bas Princen, 2009 at San Rocco Magazine#2] [2> The 900-km Nile City, fragment]

The Funambulist has rescued this week an impressive piece of architecture without architects from last year. The monsoon flood of July 2010 left 2,000 casualties in Sindh region, Pakistan, and forced more than 20 million people out from their homes. One-fifth of the country’s total area was under water (the equivalent to the whole size of England). Spiders could not find any other way to survive, but to climb up on trees. The extreme concentration of arachnids at these points turned those trees into completely cocooned structures, with endlessly overlapping spider webs. The fact of being surrounded by a vast area of stagnant waters provided them with more than enough succulent mosquitoes, and thereby reducing the risk of a malaria epidemic; locals reported fewer mosquitoes than it would have been expected after such a disaster. Photographer Russell Watkins captured in these swamped areas webs which were sometimes even stretching from tree to tree. As he witnessed: <It was an extraordinary sight, really quite spooky and surreal. Seemingly endless lakes of mill-pond-calm water, with cotton-candy trees reflected like mirrors. It was both beautiful and disturbing. As we talked to local people, dozens of tiny spiders were dropping out of the trees, onto our heads, over the camera. I think they were white crab spiders, just a few millimeters long, and not harmful – almost imperceptible.>

A lack of sunlight killed most trees, since multiple webs acted as an opaque veil over them. When the waters began to recede, displaced villagers tried to resettle their communities. The scarce amount of remaining trees led nonetheless to a lack of natural sun shelters against scorching temperatures.

Despite the shiver that they might provoke on the viewer at first sight, these images only show an  spatial consequence of the much larger extent of an still on-going tragedy.

all images by Russell Watkins: [1-4>via The Funambulist][5>via National Geographic]

Not only has the global financial crisis paralysed the never-ending construction in Dubai, but the city also had to face the uprisings of irregular migrants. In 2007, construction workers’ riots and strikes managed to bring the city to a standstill, protesting against precarious wages. As published in The Economist (Nov 1st 2007), the main solution did not aim better working environment, but it rather went through replacing the unsatisfied workforce by more docile individuals. If Indian workers found Dubai’s labour conditions unattractive, the city could always hire people from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Nepal. Even if the Government tried to guarantee that employers pay workers at least on time, it “also wants to keep the potentially restless immigrant workforce under control. It recently backed an initiative by Bahrain to limit the time that unskilled foreign labourers can work in any of the six member states of the Gulf Co-operation Council to six years, to prevent them from becoming too comfortable.“

In Reclaim Luxury Refuges, I already introduced the Charter of Dubai, an urban research project by SMAQ [2009], consisting of a series of actions  and visions towards spatial appropriation of interrupted housing projects. Some of the urban developments that tried to gain terrain to the desert are still frozen in time and subject to reuse. Thomas Kalak’s recent photography series [Dubai, 2011] from a helicopter provides a bird-view of the country’s current state of affairs: contemporary ruins generated by the hangover of Middle Eastern comfort.

[images via polar inertia and Ethel Baraona_dpr-barcelona]

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]

African-Caribbean community in South London was a step behind on living standards and crime rate compared to the rest of the city some thirty years ago. Police over-controlling the area led to a general uprising in April 1981 known as the Brixton Riots or Bloody Saturday. In architecture-fiction Robots of Brixton (2011), Factory Fifteen re-enacts and updates those riots. The African-Caribbean community is replaced in the movie by robots “built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline. The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the Police invade the one space, which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981.” In the futuristic version, even if we can also watch human citizens around, both oppressors and protesters all belong to the robot race.

Another of their brilliant productions speculates with urban spatial scenarios subordinate to the pace of political power. In Megalomania (2011) Factory Fifteen radicalizes the grandiose structures resulting from capitalist ferocity that future societies will need to deal with. There are no citizens to be seen in these streets, and yet, building and demolitions keep on going just for the sake of it. “Megalomania perceives the city in total construction. The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken.” The city that is shown to us could be a decaying or a booming one. Are scaffolding and cranes maybe the actual building? What is the final architectural translation of human progress?

“We regard science fiction as an extremely powerful tool to voice and explore many subjects from design, environments and socio-political topics. Our projects are used to explore speculative situations and designs that echo real world scenarios.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week diverse media have been announcing ultimate aircraft prototypes for the future; from fully see-through fuselage, making contemplation of sunset, clouds and storms feasible, to hypersonic speeds covering Paris-Tokyo in 2,5 hours. This made me wonder how the Air Force One, the flying White House, looks like. How to modify a standard aircraft into one of the main centres of itinerant global power? The Boeing 747, used since 1990, has three decks; the upper level reserved for pilots, crew and communication centre; the main deck for the mobile headquarters, Presidential quarters, security and press; the lowest for equipment cargo. However, the most striking feature concerning the interior spatial organisation is that it could literally be a mansion in solid ground. Conventional codes of comfort are directly transposed into the air: cushions, handcrafted furniture by master carpenters, thick carpets, office blinds, living-room lamps, leather sofas, oak tables… Almost 1:1 scale reproductions of items that could perfectly be on earth. The flying Oval Office is nonetheless prepared to stay up in the air indefinitely. Its in-flight refuelling system, allows the aeroplane avoid touching ground in case of emergency.

Although every Air Force One flight is classified as a military operation and handled as such, it does not differ from a social meeting at the earthly White House. The furbishing is closely linked to every mandate, making the President always feel at home. When Ronald Reagan’s body was flown inside the Air Force One to Washington, the front of the aircraft was changed exactly the way it was when he was President. Original crew jackets, chairs, books and even candies replaced the present ones to make widow Nancy Reagan feel at home during the flight.

Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers and important leaders unveil their way of understanding politics and representing the country through their personal aircraft. In the graphic below Poor Country, Wealthy Aircraft (2008), some of the most prominent jets are related to the GDP per capita of the country. Citizens’ taxes support their leader’s plane.

Being detached satellites from the mother ship, embassies dining halls are also carefully conceived to present and represent a country to its guests; presidential aircrafts go a step further in the same line by being both temporary homes and ephemeral offices.

[1> Air Force One Floor Plan 2009 via How Stuff Works][2-4> Interiors of Obama's Air Force One by Pete Souza][5>Poor Country, Wealthy Aircraft by Rafa Salas/La Vanguardia, 2008] [6> Russian Air Force One interiors via home-designing]