Aarchitecture34

AArchitecture 34 Collision is the encounter between multiple subjects that distort under the impact of each other, resulting in an exchange of energy. If one looks at the city as a set of connections between living organisms and artificial constructs that evolve through time and space, then collision is the essential event that questions and stimulates our built environments. A continuously prolific movement depends on the possibility of the city to experience collision. Since its physical constitution is what drives itself, collision could be termed as a natural (generative) event. It is activated by a pulse or action and inevitably followed by a condition of uncertainty or precariousness. Unpredictable occurrences, accidents, ruptures and discontinuities arise from the undisclosed. Once affected by an impact, the landscape and the subject will both have an immediate necessity of relocating themselves in relation to each other, of reshuffling roles, positions and responsibilities. Indeterminacy will become the norm for a moment; a stage of ‘crisis’ characterised by its transitory innate condition and followed by a promise of stability, when everything falls into place, each time in a completely unpredictable way.

Collision

In this issue, we invited our community to explore and reimagine the nature of impact and to construct its random and momentary agencies. At present, we find ourselves placed in a time where uncertainty has become structural, where our role as architects is dealing with a scale and range of highly complex implications that we cannot easily measure under our traditional practices; collisions become inevitable. In order to understand the scope of an ever-changing environment, there is an urgency to reconsider a promise of stability and to productively start designing forces that can take the blow, reinvent and reboot.

We believe that collisions occur during the intersection of paradoxical characters; for instance, when the contemporary meets the preserved, as in the case of Zaynab Dena Ziari’s essay on Gio Ponti’s Villa Namazee or in the work of Doug John Miller, whose drawing series ‘Mapped’ explores the division between the ‘map and the world it depicts’, with reference to Jorge Luis Borges and the Exactitude in Science.

Maria Fedorchenko invites us to exploit the moment of impact when a catalytic generator forms various modes of discontinuity within the urban landscape. Similarly, Gregorios Kythreotis debates the lens of the video game and the human experience while exploring Shibuya in Tokyo by comparing the consistencies and disparities in between the real and digital city as a means of rendering multiple versions of the same place.

Then eventually, we reach a level of calm between Vectorworld: A Protocol by Rory Sherlock, who deciphers two and three-dimensional vector space, and Towards the Horizon, by Nicolas Feldmeyer and Nina Wöhlk where a form of encounter, that actually acts much quieter than what ‘collision’ might suggest, occurs between a line on the horizon and a meeting between the sea and sky and the sea and land.

Comparatively, these writings convey a type of relationship between things, or a type of relational tension, that might be understood as this ‘collision’. What is interesting is that for a collision to occur there must always be at least two parameters, paradigms and/or protagonists and these actors remain reliant on the other – suggesting a sense of equivalence and the idea that there is as much serenity in a collision as there might be violence.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

Student Editorial Team: Sensy Mania, Intermediate 5 Emily Priest, Diploma 14 Eva Ibáñez Fuertes, Diploma 4

AArchitecture 34 Term 3, 2017 – 18 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Editorial Board: Alex Lorente, Membership Samantha Hardingham, Interim AA School Director

© 2018 All rights reserved

Design: AA Print Studio, Boris Meister Illustration: Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, Diploma 12 Printed by Blackmore, England

Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

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Müll a Leão e Souz ls d ia ic oo Patr Holy F

Charlie Hardie

Charlie Hardie researches the potency of designers as epistemological thinkers both in practice and theory. He is based in London and holds an MA from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Impossible Cosmopolitanism: Holding Europe to a Rustic’s Ransom

Constant, New Babylon – Paris, 1963

AArchitecture 34 2

In March 2013 philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti recited ‘almost’ a love poem to the European Union,→ 1 reminding the audience in session why the EU was created: to realise what once seemed the reasonable project of a borderless de-striated region of the world that would allow for the smoothing out of collisions – social, political, economic – both within its territories, and equally, encounters with those populations and entities without. Braidotti’s concern is that this simple dream has become a utopia, a lost future now subject to nostalgia.

But she also reminds the audience of the context of the EU’s conception in the aftermath of the Second World War, at heart moved by one single motive: to create a cosmopolitan community that could prevent the type of wars that ravaged Europe in the twentieth century.

The contemporary collisions of the migrant ‘crisis’ around the Mediterranean has tested the efficacy of this

ambition in the most basic respect and has revealed the European cultural inheritance of the Enlightenment to be unassailable. In recent years Europe has been asked to absorb the collisions with populations displaced by events with which the west is complicit, to be hospitable to a stranger, only to reveal the European Right’s reluctance to relinquish the integrity of regional territories, let alone National or intra-National ones. If European ideas of social and political community erroneously rely on Immanuel Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace (which has served as a model for the League of Nations created after the First World War, and the UN after the second), then it is today no surprise that contemporary scholarship considers Kant to have been ironic, as one of ‘the philosophers who dream that sweet dream of peace’.

HOSPITALITY

In the wake of the First and Second World Wars, politicians, philosophers, artists and designers dreamt of sweet utopian peace and opportunities for a new European hospitality. In the 1950s, inspired by the plight of categories of the European nomad, Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys created the architectural solution for a cosmopolitan world-citizen-as- nomad: a ‘“New Babylon” where under one roof, with the aid of moveable elements, a shared residence is built; a temporary constantly remodelled living area; a camp for nomads on a planetary scale’. Constant acknowledged that the ‘cosmopolitan hospitality’ such as that proposed by Kant could only exist as a right between equals through a symmetry of property or civic status, and that it was impossible as an inalienable right for the nomad or migrant in question. A host has to be able to empathise – to easily imagine himself in the place of his guest in order to ‘alienate’ the mastery of his territory to the guest. This is dependent on an equivalence that is undermined by cultural asymmetry and even more broadly, economic inequality.

Figured in the light of a postwar Europe as palimpsest where reconfigured borders and the mass movement of people and the emergence of a mongrel European as an opening to re-inscribe over an erased past, Constant’s fully speculative vision was of a future for ‘Homo Ludic’, a man freed from the constraints of territorial striations, civic life and work through the primacy of technology, free to range over the ‘common property of the surface of the earth’.

Projects like this concur with Kant, who proposes at the outset of Perpetual Peace an impossible project for the living, both for the philosopher-as-dreamer and for ‘the sagacious statesman who knows the world’. As a

thinker situated in between a philosophical utopia and the real world he apologises for complacency: ‘a mere pendant who may always be permitted to knock down his eleven skittles at once without worldly wise statesman needing to disturb himself ’. If not entirely satirising the philosopher, then Kant hints that this treatise addresses an impossible problem, or one that at best can only hopes to ‘gradually work out its own solution’. → 2 For Kant the need for a legislative peace is produced by the common possession of the surface of the earth.

The need to be able to tolerate each other’s presence in a finite space creates a natural antagonism that forces the creation of political institutions and law to contain it.

In the Definite Articles of Toward Perpetual Peace Kant argues that ‘the natural state of man is not peaceful coexistence but war – not always open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war’. He warns that ‘all men that can affect each other must stand under some civil constitution’ ,otherwise ‘a man in the state of nature deprives me of this security; and if he is my vicinity he harms me – even if he doesn’t do anything to me – by the mere fact that he isn’t subject to any law ... so if I can compel him either to enter with me into a state of civil law or to get right out of my neighbourhood.’ → 3 This idea of a civil law, the Third Article, proposes that ‘the law of world citizenship is to be united to conditions of universal hospitality’. This incorporates rights that work to accommodate the antagonism of ‘unsocial sociability’; ‘the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy’; ‘the right to visit’, and not be treated as a guest; and the right to present as a possible member of society. → 4

Collision 3

STR ANGERS

Kant directs individuals as members of ‘a civil constitution itself ’ – the state – away from antagonism towards mutual recognition and co-operation in ‘conditions of universal hospitality’. But what of the individual or group that has no relation with a civil constitution? What of those who are cynical of the state and self-identify as ‘citizens of the world’? → 5 The Third Article declares ‘the right to visit, and not be treated as a guest’, but importantly this is not a right of residence. What use has the stranger of a hospitality between members of states based on sovereignty? Unable to reciprocate, this person is figured as the stranger, the eternal visitor, alienated and unequal. Among many overtly racist speculations (‘If the Turks would travel ... this is done by no other people but European, which proves the provinciality in spirit of all others’) in Anthropology from a Practical Point of View→ 6 Kant excludes the non-European from this international citizenship when he conceives of a social hierarchy in respect to the state: the nation as united into a civil whole; a rabble, as those segregated from law; and the mob as a union of the segregated as the character of non-western races.

As now permanent visitors the contemporary

experience of the sub-Mediterranean migrant in Europe is a case in point. As now ‘nomadic’ the migrant is forced to live on temporary sites that are at odds with enclosure systems and private property. This has the effect of situating migrant culture as an implied criticism of the nation-state. This locates asylum seekers or migrants cultural status as quasi-permanent visitors in contemporary Europe and deprives them of the possibilities of the reciprocal hospitality available to sedentary citizens of nation states. Since the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the European Community instituted the freedom of movement of persons, capital, goods and services→ 7 partially in response to the fragmentation of national and ethnic locations in the aftermath of the Second World War. The introduction of The Schengen Agreement of 1985 → 8 sought to create porous national borders in law, but in fact served to restrict legal free movement to national citizens of states within the European Union only, a contemporary ‘Fortress Europe’.

The migrant status as strangers or as people who are culturally figured as not ‘at home’ is institutionalised in this legal framework.

HOSTIPITALITY

An impossible cosmopolitanism is aporetic like the impossibility of hospitality for Jacques Derrida: ‘hospitality is owed to the other as stranger. But if one determines the other as stranger, one is already introducing the circles of conditionality that are family, nation, state and citizenship’ → 9 and operating under laws that exclude the possibility of a universal hospitality.

Derrida’s text reveals the ethical determination of hospitality by identifying its western heritage and etymological descent, revealing the interior contradiction of the concept, and how this is commensurate with the aporetic character of western culture at large: this, in fact, is the deconstruction project. As a French Algerian Jew, Derrida’s culture has suffered its own inhospitality and enforced nomadism within Europe and, in his case, Algeria, enables him to construct a view from outside of the heritage he is examining (the inherited locus of power occupied by Kant and Enlightenment thought) and to continually rethink the conditional as the unconditional.

In the article ‘Hostipitality’, written in 2000 for the journal Angelaki, → 10 he argues that the internal contradiction of hospitality is that in order to be hospitable a territory has to be created, and that is through exclusion, or a pre-existing hostility, like Kant’s ‘asocial sociability’.

So Derrida doesn’t see where hospitality is actually situated – how the third definitive article of Perpetual Peace, ‘cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality’ cannot be anything other than defined by the parasitic presence of a hostility as trace or supplement presented by ‘the seed of discord’ → 11 inherent to the creation of European nation states and borders: cosmopolitics has a history and ‘therefore we do not yet know what hospitality beyond this European, universally European, right is.’ → 12 Kant’s invitation to join a league of nations for perpetual peace involves checks, customs and collision, which for Derrida become thresholds where ‘hospitality always in some way does the opposite of what it pretends to do and immobilises itself on the threshold of itself ’. → 13 For Derrida, Kant’s idea that the ‘right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone else’s territory’ → 14 misaligns the power structure of visitation ‘as a reaffirmation of mastery ... hospitality limits itself at its very beginning’. → 15 The roots of the aporia of hospitality is revealed in the etymology of the word: ‘The troubling analogy in their common origin between hostis as host and hostis as enemy.’ → 16 Derrida creates the neologism hostipitality that reflects the etymological

AArchitecture 34 4

contradictions: at once it’s the aporia in hospitality where it is conditional on hostility – in order to be hospitable to another, one has to already have created a territory of conditionality in as much as the naming of another is a condition of subjecthood. So any invitation to the stranger is predicated on a pre-existing hostility or violence which has to be inverted: ‘... the reversal in which the master of this house, the master of his own home, the host can only accomplish this task as host, that is hospitality, in becoming invited by the other into his own home, in being welcomed by him in receiving the hospitality he gives.’ → 17 And it may be this reversal of fortune, the demand that in order to be hospitable the host has to give up their mastery of their home to the visitor in order to host – the host is subject to the hospitality and generosity of the visitor to say ‘you are master of your home’ – that creates the enmity to the stranger. The host/hostage

aporia of hospitality is where ‘the one inviting becomes almost the hostage of the one invited, of the guest (hote) the hostage of the one he receives, the one who keeps him at home’ → 18 . The caesura created when a host cannot extend hospitality to a stranger is not just an external difference – the failure to accommodate results in the internal alienation of the subject from themselves. The host cannot know themselves without the hospitality of the stranger and so is dependent on the society of fellow humans. And this gives rise to an aporia in sociability – the tension between the supplementary antagonism of asocial sociability and the need of a visitation to know oneself, and the demand therefore for an agonistic hospitality. So if Kant can ‘compel (the stranger) either to enter with me into a state of civil law or to get right out of my neighbourhood.’ it is only by virtue of a hostipitable ‘folding the foreign other into the internal law of the host’ → 19 as an act of generosity on behalf of the visitor to create the territory of the host.

A PLACE IN THE NORTHERN SUN

So if ‘hospitality can only take place beyond hospitality’ where there are cosmopolitanisms that can think outside the box of European intellectual history, what form can hospitality take? In 1996 Derrida addressed the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg on the subject of cosmopolitan rights for migrants and asylum seekers, which in the light of France’s imposition of the law on immigrants and those without rights of residence created a new category of internal stranger in the ‘sans papiers’ or undocumented, was an occasion when Derrida forewent a theoretical deconstruction to suggest a concrete ethical intervention.

Published as ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ → 20 Derrida acknowledges the inadequacies of the contemporary state to accommodate the refugee or the immigrant as they are ‘limited by treaties between sovereign states’ → 21 and struggle with the legal and ontological status of the person without nation or home. He doubts whether an international declaration of human rights as a third ‘host’ – working as ‘home’ for those without a civil home – could ‘transcend the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and for the time being a sphere that is above the nations does not exist. Furthermore this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a world government’ → 22 even disregarding both his suspicion of the possibilities for a despotic world– state. What Derrida wants is something more concrete.

In response to the International Parliament’s call for the conceptualisation of places for refuge for immigrants,

Derrida identifies the city as a possible refuge in a geopolitical landscape where national and international law has erased the originary right of residence: where ‘no one individual had more right ... to live in any particular spot’ based on the ‘common possession of the surface of the earth’. → 23 Kant’s cosmopolitanism proposed perpetual peace by extending a universal law without limit by way of the determination of the common possession as a natural law, and therefore inalienable. Derrida traces a tradition for a Babylonian city of refuge to the Hebraic where that God instructs Moses to institute ‘those cities which would welcome and protect those innocents who sought refuge from what the texts of time call “bloody vengeance”.’ → 24 The city-states of medieval Europe, enjoying semiautonomy from nation states, could operate ‘the Great Law of Hospitality ... which ordered that the borders be open to each and every one, to every other, to all who might come, without question or without even having to identify who they are or whence they came’. → 25 These medieval cities operated a kind of informal reciprocation of auctoritas or status as host that was is in constant danger of being politicised, and churches offered sanctuaries which were always in danger of becoming enclaves.

The Enlightenment form of cosmopolitanism, via Kant’s, emerged to liberate the city from this burden and universalise hospitality through an Augustinian Christianity where the members of the community of God (nevertheless an exclusive club, entry to be earned) were ‘no longer foreigners nor metic in a foreign land, but fellow-citizens with God’s people, members of God’s household’. → 26

Collision 5

However for Derrida it is the limitation on the rights of residence in Perpetual Peace as dependent upon treaties between states that makes for the debate of the rights of refuge, and conditions the aporia of Kant’s cosmopolitanism. The right for every person to have their own place in the sun is in direct conflict with ‘the common possession of the surface of the earth’. Derrida locates the solution as taking place somewhere between the two, the idea of a universal law of unconditional hospitality and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality.

And the possibility that ‘the unconditional law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment’ → 27 is absent in ‘Hostipitality’. Categorical difference is instrumental for Derrida: ‘only fame will eventually answer ... nobody here knows who I am ... just as a dog with a name has a better chance to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general’. → 28 Thus an advantage for the migrant in the naming of a group.

Still from ‘The Spaceman and King Arthur’ 1979 (Dir. Russ Mayberry)

Squatters in Chandigarh, Punjab, North India (designed by Le Corbusier)

GLOBALISATION/A RUSTIC’S R ANSOM

New Babylon was a disruptive and hostile proposal, set to undermine territorial integrities. Spatially it relied on concepts of ‘unitary urbanism’ developed by situationist Guy Debord – a ‘construction of atmosphere’ → 29 that used air as a building material to work against the systems of exclusions and hierarchies sustained by seemingly benign conventional buildings as represented by ‘the repulsive Le Corbusier (who) was the designated enemy’. → 30 (Le Corbusier published the Athens Charter → 31 ‘A Place to Stay’ in 1933, a manifesto for a Fordist City, an architecture of functionality that was widely taken up in the reconstruction of postwar Europe in 1958). Debord was interested in the nature of the spaces in between the state or civic territories, realising space no one possesses – the sea, deserts, wasteland, spaces of pure communication, manifesting in The Naked City (1957) → 32 a psychogeographic map for Paris that made connections and inscribed a territory over the top of that created by the city administration. By erasing the masters or hosts of a city in this way psychogeography makes another kind of

citizenship imaginable: both as re-inscribing the general as a particular ‘City of Refuge’ within, and if conceptually extended to the global beyond nation states, as a cosmopolitan world citizenship. New Babylon’s strategy is to extend the public matter of Kant’s Republic so only the foreign remains, there is no inside from which to exclude the stranger.

Intended to span the globe, Constant designed New Babylon for a ludic dérive through a ‘wide world web’ → 33 an architectural planetary continuity brought about by a ‘construction of atmosphere’ that anticipated the technological development of ubiquitous air conditioning: A technology that accelerated the flexibility of thermodynamic space to invigorate the spatial functionality of place that Debord and Constant set out to disrupt. In an essay published in October in 2002 Rem Koolhaas → 34 reflects on a different kind of continuity brought about through the ‘construction of atmosphere’ through air conditioning: junkspace. → 35 Continuity is the essence of junkspace. It exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure

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of seamlessness. Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble...air-conditioning has launched the endless building. → 36 If those physical and cultural spaces for cosmopolitan opportunity – of pure communication, collision-free movement or translation between nation states – as Constant’s realisation of New Babylon as ‘technical conquest’, material and virtual, have become the immutable networks of the architecture of authority themselves has the situationist ambition of the erasure of territory become the fluid space of late capitalism, and is this the aporia in the loosening of the territorial bonds of the European project? For Koolhaas ‘conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space’. → 37 From the political left, like Braidotti, the view is of a technocratic network of air conditioned structures that has ‘dictated mutant regimes of organisation and coexistence’. Contrary to the exteriority of New Babylon → 38 that feminist philosopher Chantal Mouffe envisioned as an unbound cosmo-political space enabling ‘a multitude of interactions that take place inside a space whose outlines are not clearly defined’ → 39 junkspace is ‘sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble’ → 40 and captures the hierarchies and its inhabitants elaborated in Kant’s ‘Practical Anthropology’: rather than uniting a ‘civil whole’ on a planetary scale as a New Babylon, junkspace threatens to elaborate the segregations of civil states into one global junkstate– the only outcome for those unable to reciprocate any hospitality is an interior segregation.

Junkspace ‘is fanatically maintained, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift ... another population,

this one heartlessly casual and appreciably darker, is mopping, hovering, sweeping.’ → 41 and appreciably ‘another population’ of visitors who must remain hidden in another parallel strata to avoid collision.

So Constant’s endeavour to create a global utopian space for a nomadic race can be transfigured by the authority of the network into a global junkstate. The checks and customs of Kant’s ironic league of nations for perpetual peace prevail, and as for Derrida these become a door or threshold where ‘hospitality always in some way does the opposite of what it pretends to do and immobilises itself on the threshold of itself ’.

If there is a ‘hospitality (that) can only take place beyond hospitality’ through the accommodation of difference, it maybe for ‘another who is still more foreign than the one whose foreignness cannot be restricted to foreignness in relation to language, family, or citizenship’ to mediate cosmopolitanisms that can think outside the box of European intellectual history to accentuate our own particularity among the people of the world with whom we have to compromise. In that case maybe as well as legitimising sovereignty by ‘folding the foreign other into the internal flow of the host’ a gesture from Koolhaas’ ‘single citizen of another culture – a refugee, a mother – can destabilise an entire junkspace, hold it to a rustic’s ransom’ → 42 as the trace of an impossibility that is always present within and beyond the possible. So, for Derrida, ‘the one inviting becomes the hostage of the one invited’ and therein lies the sacrifice that is the obligation of the European host.

1 www.youtu.be/YTNFD1v7zxU

Germany, the Treaty of Rome defined the

19 Ibid.

journalist encouraged him to become an

2 Kant (1996).

European Economic Union.

20 Ibid.

architect. His influence can be seen as a

3 Ibid.

8 The Schengen Agreement started

21 Ibid.

key idea in OMA’s development of the

4 Ibid.

the abolition of internal border controls

22 Ibid.

‘enclosed city’, an interior urban landscape

5 Laertius (1972): A status legitimised,

for citizens of member states of the

23 Ibid.

that minimises private space and

philosophically, by classical Greek thinking

European Union.

24 Ibid.

maximizes the public, aspiring to all matter

and one that historically problematises the

9 Derrida (2000).

25 Ibid.

of unstructured and unregulated

relationship between the State and the

10 Ibid.

26 Ephesians II 19-20.

encounters

citizen: first to use the word ‘cosmopolitan’,

11 Kant (1996).

27 Derrida (2000).

35 Koolhaas (2002).

cynic philosopher Diogenes identified as a

12 Derrida (2000).

28 Derrida (2000).

36 Ibid.

‘citizen of the world’ challenging an ipseity

13 Ibid.

29 Hailey (2008).

37 Ibid.

created through the citizenship of the

14 Kant (1996).

30 Ibid.

38 Fig. 4, Appendix

classical Greek city-state.

15 Derrida (2000).

31 Le Corbusier (1973) .

39 Tempel (2016).

6 Kant (2006).

16 Ibid.

32 Fig 3, Appendix

40 Koolhaas (2002).

7 Signed by Belgium, France, Italy,

17 Ibid.

33 Wigley (2016).

41 Ibid.

Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West

18 Ibid.

34 Koolhaas’ encounter with Constant as a

42 Ibid.

Collision 7

Nina Wöhlk

Since 2012 Nina Wöhlk has been engaging as independent curator and writer in discussions and knowledge production within an expanded field of contemporary art.

Her main research interests lies in the inseparability of the art work and its context.

At the moment she is researching performative practices in contemporary art and its relation to emerging discursive thinking, with a focus on the indigenous cultures of the nordic regions.

She holds a candidate in Art History and Modern Culture & Cultural Communication.

Recent curatorial projects include Per Kirkeby at Læsø Kunsthal and The Crowd by Jørgen Haugen Sørensen in Pietrasanta, Italy. Upcoming projects include Vinduestårnet, a commission by Per Kirkeby for Østerby Havn and Arp / Agop, Armen Agop at Fundation Arp, Paris. She is currently recipient of the Despina Residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. www.ninawoehlk.dk

Nicolas Feldmeyer:

AArchitecture 34 8

Nicolas K Feldmeyer’s works open a contemplative perspective onto the world. Inspired by archaic monuments, the Sublime landscape and abstraction, his practice is primarily concerned with space and light, explored in a range of different media, from large installations to videos, from drawings to digital renderings.

After completing an MSc in architecture at ETH in Zurich Feldmeyer studied Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute on a Fulbright Grant. Feldmeyer received an MFA with distinction from the Slade. His work was awarded the Saatchi New Sensation Prize, was exhibited internationally, including at the Photographer’s Gallery in London and reviewed in the Times and Art Monthly. Feldmeyer has been guest lecturer at the Cass, the AA and Cambridge University. He is Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College, UAL. www.feldmeyer.co.uk

Towards the Horizon

Collision 9

Towards the Horizon was a temporary site-specific installation on the west coast of the island of Fanø at the Wadden Sea in Denmark. The concept of collision is not only appropriate for describing some of the forces at play in this landscape, but also becomes the generating element of the very landscape itself, with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean constantly shaping and reshaping the outline of these western Danish islands. Historically, what is now part of a natural UNESCO World Heritage site stretching from Holland to Denmark used to be the site of the German Atlantic Wall, a system of coastal defence and fortifications, as the dozens of scattered bunkers still attest today.

The artwork itself however, even though it broke the coastline perpendicularly – stretching westwards into the ocean with the waves crashing on it – evoked something much quieter than what a collision might suggest. Perhaps it was a form of encounter, between a line in the mind and a line on the horizon, where sea and sky and sea and land meet.

The installation was present on site throughout the month of September 2016. It was placed on a vast and flat stretch of sandy coastline, which enlarges slowly but constantly as the sea adds sand to the coast. From the entry to the beach, visitors walked 3.5km north along the shore before reaching the installation.

The installation consisted of 70 wooden poles, each 4.2m tall with 1.4m into the sand leaving 2.8m visible.

The poles where placed in two parallel lines that ran perpendicular to the shore. At high tide the entire installation was touched by the sea, and at low tide it withdrew and left it entirely dry. The unevenness of the seabed was mirrored in the poles. A straight horizon line was painted white across all poles and covered the top part of the installation.

In the local cinema, screenings of Mary Lance’s documentary Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World were held together with walks to the installation.

The documentary touched on topics inherent in the otherwise quiet installation. In the coastal landscape the weather had a significant impact on the appearance and experience of the artwork. Heatwaves from the sand

Nicolas Feldmeyer, site-specific installation, Fanø Island, Denmark Timber, white paint, 51 × 1 × 2.8m 1–30 September 2016 Curated by Nina Wöhlk, as part of the Vadehavsfestival 2016

enlarged the installation and made it visible from up to 4km away on clear and warm days. The white paint and the colours of the sky had an enormous effect on the visibility, as the white reflected the rays of the sun.

Walking towards the installation with the sun on your back on a day with blue sky, the white of the poles would be strikingly clear, whereas if the sky was light grey and the sun dim, the installation faded into the background.

Altogether the installation seemed to enhance the surrounding colours and scenery either by contrasting or underlining its characteristics, making it both a part of the landscape and at the same time appear significant in relation to it – an effort not easily achieved in a large and seemingly empty space. It was affected by the tide and served as a means to measure it during the ebb and flow of the day, stretching time by linking the movement in the landscape to an understanding of its larger changes throughout time. The landscape is constantly shifting in appearance and the installation emphasises this, by remaining constant in time and place.

The project touched upon questions related to both presence and time. Perceiving the changes within the landscape through time is assisting in enlarging one’s general perspective of time and one’s role within it, where art becomes the medium of that perception. The walk is a part of the artwork in the sense that the 45 minutes it takes to reach the installation is part of placing you in a calm state of mind – almost meditatively. Whether you walk with others or alone, the location of Towards the Horizon makes it a different experience than seeing an artwork in a gallery – where you might walk straight in from a busy city life without the calm environment to assist you.

Søren Jessens Sand is a loved area for long walks by people living on Fanø. During the installation of the artwork, concerns for the area were clearly stated, but what followed was an embrace of it. During the final weeks, people talked about how it had become their favourite spot to walk to, and how they arranged walks with family and friends with the excuse of going to see how the installation would look on that particular day.

AArchitecture 34 10

Collision 11

Valentin Bontjes van Beek

Valentin Bontjes van Beek runs vbvb studio in London, has taught at the AA since 2001 and is a professor at the Munich University of Applied Science (MUAS). He trained in Germany as a carpenter and worked as an architect in New York with Bernard Tschumi and Raimund Abraham before returning to London to practise and teach.

Collision, as it stands on your introduction page looks like the name of a new unisex perfume. I know this is a rather poor analogy only showing my age. What it really makes me think of is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva of which a photographer used to hang in the bar or the Titanic hitting the iceberg. Moments too small and too large really to envisage. In both cases though the things that collide do cease to exist. Collision here does not seem like a splendid idea. While looking at it from a rhetorical or even didactic point of view it can be quite exciting.

The sperm meeting an egg, the AA choosing a new director from outside of its realms or simply a white London Christmas. Tying things together that seemingly do not belong together but ignite each other, can be very appealing. Some people might even say that this is the true formula of architecture and good design – maybe.

On closer inspection though, to make it a happy encounter, what needs to prevail is that the entities that meet can keep on existing. On our recent trip to Tokyo we could find many examples that would exemplify this kind of (co) existence. One of them is illustrated in the road-marking captured in the photographs shown on these pages. The beauty here is not just the skill of evasion, but rather the celebration of a departure, a shift, in respect to the obstacle. This is not unlike the pre-empted excusing of people saying I am sorry before or during bumping into

one another in the Underground or similar public places, regardless of whose fault it might be. Here, the moment of impact is not that which is to be avoided but rather the understanding that giving way – the acknowledgement and enabling of something or someone – constitutes a higher form of existence.

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di d

Spl en

isolation

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Florence Peake

Interviewed by AArchitecture Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995.

We encountered her work in Terra, an exhibition on contemporary ceramic art by Hotel Contemporary. Her performance practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relation to the moving body. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which create temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. In believing that objects and materials have their own autonomy and subjectivity, Peake draws on the expansive vocabulary of materials to enhance and contextualise her work. Her work has been presented internationally and across the UK.

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A ARCHITECTURE

In your work do you consider the relationship between performance and sculpture an addition or a sequence?

FLORENCE PEAKE

More as a sequence of perhaps transformations. The material moves from one form into another, from the live body transferring its physicality into a clay body, the clay body becoming a new autonomous object separate from the original live gesture. I am reluctant to think of either medium as being a remnant or an effect of the other or a way of giving evidence of the ephemeral act of performance. I hope that each part, whether it be a physical live act or the static object, to be operating in relation to each other rather than a result.

I am keen that they are autonomous parts co-existing perhaps inter-dependently.

There are traces that mark each other – finger prints in the clay and how the ceramic can become a visceral and kinaesthetic score for the body to respond to.

A ARCHITECTURE

How do traditional conceptions of performance and sculpture collide in your work and influence each other?

FLORENCE PEAKE

tI am not sure if I think about tradition in sculpture while making, but I do in choreography and dance. I know that my work does not sit well within the proscenium arch black box situation, so I have departed from that context.

In terms of convention and formality in performance and sculpture I am excited by the tension between a formal relationship to making dance/ choreography and sculpture to more expressive, shambolic, loose connections to making. I am currently interested in high-pitched expressivity and testing how far that can go. I love method and developing systems and form. Shape in choreography is something I find deeply satisfying and necessary but I always feel rebellious in my own practice towards the different approaches and get suffocated if I get too immersed in a particular trajectory or agenda.

I am currently thinking about how transitions work in my performance-making and how transitions unfold different sections, which take quite a lot of rigour at times to find those connections. But I want to challenge myself to find how you can snap into a different mode like the jump between one medium into another and how it can be quite shocking – it’s good to startle myself.

RITE: On this pliant body we slip our WOW! performance.

Photo: Anne Tetzlaff. Dancer: Susanna Recchia Us: Pychic Knead. Andromedan Sad girl, Wysing Art centre.

Photo: Wilf Speller Us 2017. RITE, Studio_Leigh

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A ARCHITECTURE

Which part of the performance do the pieces represent? Is it the movement of the performers, the space they shape, the emotions they suggest?

Are the pieces representations at all?

FLORENCE PEAKE

The assembled parts of YOU: Psychic Knead comes from the performance Voicings where I do a series of preparations before channelling responses to audiences questions. One of the preparations is with the clay where I mould audience member portraits and work with feeling and sensing them using the clay as a medium to press and knead the audience member/ person into.

I like to think of these parts as extensions of that process, kind of fleshy psychic extensions – ceramic ectoplasm rather than representations of the performance or that gesture.

A ARCHITECTURE

Is the performance choreographed? Which level of control do you set for the performers’ interactions and movements?

FLORENCE PEAKE

When working with dancers or performers, or with myself as a performer I develop the work as structured improvisation – so structured that there is not much room for improvisation at times, and then I play with varying degrees of stretching this. I work with highly intelligent dancers who I respect. We often explore breaking all the structured rules. I do occasionally work with setting the movements and material but that is less interesting to me as I feel it leaves less room to embody layers of thinking, qualities, ideas. I am interested in the presence of the performer and how they embody ideas, how a dancer feels and thinks through the body into performance. Through quite rigorous processes and tasks of layering ideas and relationships to materials, space and intention I hope a complex way of inhabiting the performance can be made.

Voicings 2016 performance, Serpentine Galleries, Mysterical Day Photo: Pierrick Mouton

A ARCHITECTURE

How would you describe the experience of immediacy between the performance and the piece?

FLORENCE PEAKE

Clay objects are made quickly and I like to think of it as instinctive and a kind of one hit. There is immediacy in the work, and I don't really fuss with them after the action has happened. They then need a long drying process and in a way it doesn’t matter too much if they explode in the kiln. The glazing has a bit more care and time to it and then how the work is assembled has a different kind of process. With my paintings there are different layers of pace and time too.

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Dena Ziari

Zaynab Dena Ziari completed her postgraduate studies in History and Theory of Architecture at the AA. She writes for architects about architecture and has a research interest in the intersection of urbanism, the digital, and its psychological outputs.

A Precarious Balance: Gio Ponti’s Villa Namazee After 1979

From an elegant family house, to a disfigured body, whose fate sits on the very bedrock of confusion and instability at its best, and an implied corruption that favours individual and commercial interests at its worst.

Italian modernist architect and Domus-founder Gio Ponti designed only three villas in his lifetime. Two are in Venezuela – Villa Planchart and Villa Arreaza – and the third, the Villa Namazee, is in Tehran. All three were built to a standard termed by Ponti as joie de vivre, due to the architect's concern for the happiness of the inhabitants of his buildings.

With the exception of the Iraqi Development Board Hedquarters in Baghdad, completed in 1958, the Villa Namazee, is the only other building Ponti designed in the Middle East. Built in the early 1960s in collaboration with the artist Fausto Melotti, in the wealthy district of Tehran called Niavaran. It shares its name with the affluent Namazee family who commissioned the building after an architect by the name of Mohsen Forooghi (a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des BeauxArts and Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the prestigious Tehran University) recommended Ponti for the job. The Namazees were successful businessmen with patriarchal ties to the government as members of the National Assembly and Senate during the reign of the Shah, the last monarch of Iran. Following the Islamic

Revolution in 1979, which transformed a largely secular Iran into an Islamic theocratic regime within less than a year, the house and property on which it stood were seized by the government – a practice that was entirely common in the period immediately following the fall of the 2,500-year-old monarchy.

And while Ponti's Iraqi Development Board Headquarters is currently being restored by UNESCO after having been badly damaged by the war in 2003, in present-day Tehran the Villa Namazee has fallen into contention. What was once an elegant family house is now a disfigured body whose fate sits, at best, on the very bedrock of confusion and instability and, at worst, on an implied but not necessarily explicit corruption that favours individual and commercial interests.

Not much is known about the life of the property when it was owned by the Namazees, but it is said to have been frequented by modernist poet Forough Farrokhzad, who is known for her beautiful depictions of female desire in patriarchal society. We do know that immediately after the revolution, when the property was seized, it was used by the government as a registry office until it was

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eventually sold to a man by the name of Haj Ahmad Abrishami, a representative for Nokia, then experiencing its boom years as a mobile phone company. Though the date of sale is unknown, according to official documentation from the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts, and Tourism Association of Tehran, Abrishami successfully applied to obtain heritage status for the house in 2007 (although some sources suggest it may have been as early as 2003) during the presidential period of Ahmadinejad, the favourite among radicals. It is also equally unclear under what circumstances he sold the property, and in 2012 the ownership was transferred to someone by the name of Nasser Saffari. Little, if anything, is known about Saffari, and open sources only make reference to a chemistry professor at Shahid Beheshti University, but one cannot be sure if this is indeed the same person. With the information that is available, however, it can only be assumed that he is a ‘developer’, given that the property has remained empty since the change of ownership – a swift way to promote degradation in any building and clever because leaving a building of this era to ruin does not disrupt any laws. In 2013, one year after the sale, Saffari applied for planning permission to construct a 20-storey five-star hotel, which also included within its terms the demolition and construction of the site.→ 1 A planning and construction permit was immediately granted by the former head of the Tehran regional arm of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Association (CHHTA) – the same organisation that granted the villa's heritage status six years prior.

The proposal for the hotel was designed by an architect named Farzad Daliri, who seems to specialise in shopping malls and hotels of the kind of stylistic property that one might only call uninspired, a hybrid of neoliberal and postmodern styles. Fashionable 3D visualisations seem to aspire towards a Dubai-style Tehran than the city that it is, with a vast history behind it of having always been some sort of settlement first. The proposal comes in the wake of renewed efforts to expand tourism to the country, aided by the Obama-era sanctions relief granted by adhering to the Nuclear Agreement.

The same year the planning application was granted Saffari applied to have the heritage status of the building revoked. This request was not immediately granted, and Saffari took the CHHTA to court citing the Antiquity Law of 1309 and eventually receiving a ruling in his favour, on the basis that this outdated law stipulates that anything built before 1794 cannot have its heritage status removed.

So on this basis, the status of the villa was removed by a judge who then paved the way for the absolute legal destruction of the building. While the villa falls within the remit of the Antiquity Law of 1309 the ruling seemingly disregards the reasons and merits that allowed the

building to be awarded heritage status in the first place.

The identity of the judge is also an unknown. The former Mayor of Tehran (from 2005–17), Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who was a former general during the Iran–Iraq War, with a chequered past in suppressing the student uprisings of 1999, was officially called upon to halt the legalities, or to even go so far as to re-purchase the building from Saffari in order to restore its ownership to the state, in the period immediately following the verdict. There is no locatable response on the matter, and one can only assume there was no response to locate.

Despite the efforts to halt or reverse the ruling, on 27 July 2016 the heritage status of the Villa Namazee was officially removed. And although there was an uproar from the architecture community within the country (an anonymous group of activists, by the name of ‘Tehran Historical Houses’, formed to express opposition to the demolition of the villa and were responsible for successfully getting the word out of Iran), their efforts came to no legally binding fruition. The villa has received international attention since then, with a petition that has been circulating for over a year, but the continuation of the petition, and the general silence on the topic from the Iranian press, suggests that the status remains in limbo to this day.

The ease with which twentieth-century architectural history can be destroyed seems implausible to most of us, but in Iran where deregulation is often practically the norm and not the exception. In a 2007 Domus article on the villa, written by Shahab Katouzian and Ponti's daughter Lisa Lucitra Ponti, the authors express their concerns over the villa's future on the basis of the careless alterations that had been made up. But Katouzian is also concerned with the fact that deregulation has been going on for years and ‘wildcat speculations have targeted entire residential districts’ – ‘any building may be demolished at any time.’ → 2 During Qalibaf 's tenure as Mayor of Tehran, from 2005–17, 80 per cent of the city revenue came from the sale of construction permits. And yet the city still has £12.8 billion in unpaid debts.→ 3 While it is not known if such a permit was sold to Saffari, such a condition in the city makes demolition a lucrative business for individuals serving commercial interests and leads one to question whether it is indeed also possible to consider the odds that this happened with the Villa Namazee because of the ease with which the permit to construct, demolish and renovate the site was awarded without any consideration for its heritage status.

The status of the villa also seems to have been actively abused by the dated law called Antiquity Law 1309 (1930), as anything after that period becomes fair game. This has resulted in what only allows for the arbitrary denial or acceptance by the regime of two centuries of architectural history – from the nineteenth-century Qajar and the

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twentieth-century Pahlavi dynasties. The law seems outmoded almost a century on from its creation. It seems puzzling that there can be such careless treatment towards the fate of the building when one considers that the other of Ponti’s two buildings in the Middle East, in Baghdad, is being protected and restored by UNESCO. This suggests that there is a formal recognition outside of the architecture community, on the level of the UN, of the importance of this Italian modernist architect that even the layperson could comprehend. Meanwhile the other is may purposefully and legally be destroyed in the wake of a lack of competency to protect anything from these two centuries of history.

In recent years Iran has wilfully disrespected, neglected or destroyed many examples of nineteenth and twentieth century architecture: the modernist house of Queen Touran – a reference Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and featured in the poetic film by Albert Lamorisse titled The Lovers Wind, from 1978 – is one such example. Queen Touran was the third wife of Reza Shah, and her home was demolished in the middle of the night in late 2016 much to the shock and dismay of the architectural community.

Rahnama House, a Qajar-era building, belonging to an important historical figure by the name of Zeyn-al Abeddin Rahnama who in 1944 was made Envoy to Paris, as well as being in the hands of a poet and filmmaker from the 1960s called Fereydoun Rahnama, currently sits in a state of worsening dilapidation. The house is on the site of a protected garden in Niavaran, which is also shared with the Villa Namazee. However, a tower was recently constructed on the site, casting a heavy shadow, as it belittles this ageing, neglected, historically significant house, and compromising the integrity of the garden's geometry and ‘protection.’ → 4 This is in spite of the heritage listing of the building and the site, neither of which seem to have been respected very much. One can only really deduce that while a heritage listing means a building cannot legally be demolished, deregulation makes the building industry a free-for-all, where a lot of money is to be made by individuals. It does not seem to ensure an active cause for conservation of the building and

its structural integrity as it sits in disrepair in one of Tehran’s wealthiest districts. But it is not the only historical building, or building of architectural significance, that has suffered such a fate or is in such a condition. Frank Lloyd Wright’s only building in Iran – Kakhe Morvarid (which translates to The Pearl Palace) – was commissioned by Princess Shams Pahlavi, the sister of the late Mohammad Reza Shah, and after the revolution was home to the Basij Militia (consisting of voluntary loyalists to the Islamic Republic). It has been empty and in disrepair for years, quietly and slowly crumbling, despite also being registered by the CHHTA. But this is only a small handful, and there are countless other examples of similar treatment.

There has been no evidence of a formal discussion, or expression of the reasons for the change to the status of the Villa Namazee, and also no recognition of the opposition to it being demolished or having its heritage status changed.

Any requests to remove the construction permit were refused on the basis of the Antiquity Law of 1309. There may, however, be one saving grace for the Villa Namazee. It is called Article 79, which seems to be the legal way to reverse and revoke the decision for destruction. Though filed last year it still remains on the table of the new vice-president of the CHHTA, Ali Asghar Mounesan, as they get on with dealing with the status of other buildings first, even those that lost their status after and their fate was similarly in limbo. The eponymously named Alizadehs House, constructed in 1978 (one year before the revolution) by the engineer for his family, is one such example. On the 11 February 2018 on the official Twitter page of Mounesan (the use of which is illegal for ordinary Iranian citizens), the newly appointed vice-president of the association announced that the restoration of the heritage status of Alizadehs House was a gift to the Iranian people.→ 5 Its heritage listing was removed a few years after that of the Villa Namazee, and reinstated after complaints by neighbours, but later revoked again.→ 6 Yet officials claim that they deal with each case in order, and they somewhat understandably cannot make

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executive decisions on cases in order to treat one with more importance than another. It seems reasonable enough, but when dealing with architectural heritage it is not as simple as taking each case in chronological order, but treating each one individually and evaluating them objectively. Mounesan himself seems without any necessary qualification to head a department that deals with the question of Iranian heritage, architectural or otherwise, except for the work in tourism he had undertaken on Kish (Irans free-trade Island). That each vice-president of the association is appointed by the President seems to suggest that the treatment of heritage sits directly within the ever-changing political context, and that the association itself is a direct arm of the political system, therefore set to change direction along with the direction of the government. There is, therefore, a reason to believe that when a condition can change so frequently there is no general consensus around what heritage means for Iran in an official capacity. In conducting my research I have found that more than six different people have held the post of vice-president of the association, compared to one in the last 10 years in the UK, this can only lead one to assume that there is a sense of instability within this government department – not only politically speaking, as each one is appointed by the President, but also in terms of the successes one might have in carrying out protection work to successful completion on a limited budget.

A budget of approximately £5.5 million→ 7 was allocated in 2014, which was meant to broadly encompass all three areas of cultural heritage, handicrafts and tourism for the entirety of Iran. Compared to the £80 million that English Heritage receives for the same work just in heritage protection, it seems a very tiny fraction, while they also have a separate association with its own budget for tourism. English Heritage is part of the government, but it does not formulate a part of the political construct of the government. This tells us that there is a general consensus as to what heritage is considered to be in the UK, and it is not something that is deemed acceptable to enter the political arena and be batted between differing political views – in fact, it is entirely removed from the political arena, and therefore not scarred by or held in the balance of politics.

Trawling through the endless articles around the Villa Namazee, one quickly discovers that government data is obscure and difficult to decipher, with only fragments of information on the ever changing decisions and views of whoever the current vice-president may be.

But the continued question around the fate of the Villa Namazee is how democracy and egalitarianism operate in the city, and whether the government works in the national interest, or individual and commercial ones.

It is the question of how they deal with the interaction between the desires and intentions of a government or select individuals on the one hand, and the moment those meet with the desires and identities of the people and the nation on the other. It is this moment that these two forces meet and what is done with it that matters in the progression of any healthy democracy, and a wellfunctioning egalitarian society.

The fate of the villa rests on a political condition that when one makes an attempt to disentangle the swathes of disjointed information it seems to exhibit more favour for individual and commercial interests over national ones.→ 8 Heritage status does not seem to ensure that a building will ever be conserved through planned intervention, and the best we can hope for is that a building of any importance might at least be protected from demolition – though in some instances it does not seem to have successfully ensured the safeguarding of this either. Arbitrary decisions are made that have no bearing on the establishment and acceptance of a consensus on architectural history and what that means for the visual identity and identities of the city, let alone the country, and how those views are expressed through its architecture, whether for Iran or otherwise. With the continuous overuse and abuse of an outdated law we can only expect to see more of this, as in its very application it fails to take into consideration nor protect two entire centuries and more of architectural and, therefore, also national heritage – not just that of the Iranian nation, and what that means, but also part of that history that is shared with the rest of the world too.

Sign the petition here: www.change.org/p/to-prevent-demolition-ofnemazee-villa-designed-by-italian-architect-gio-ponti Sincerest thanks to Aily Irani and Damon Golriz – obtaining the official information on the current status of the villa would have been with great difficulty, if not an impossibility, without you both.

1 According to Tehran Cultural Heritage,

people/72772/tehran-mayor-sets-out-to-

Handicrafts and Tourism Association –

right-past-wrongs.

one of the regional arms of the CHHTA –

4

granted by the Director General issued the

Tehran Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and

following license: 23421/126/912 dated

Tourism Association.

17/11/2013 agreeing to the conditions of

5

the construction of the 5* Hotel on the site

11 February 2018: twitter.com/

of the Villa Namazee.

mounesan_ir/

2 Domus, ‘Gio Ponti, Teheran, Villa

status/962751445136179200

Namazee,’ (March 2007) p64-67.

6 bit.ly/2HecwGr.

3

From information gathered from the

I refer to this tweet from Mounesan on

7 283 billion Tomans www.irna.ir/fa/.

financialtribune.com/articles/

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Doug Miller

Doug John Miller is currently a Masters student and illustrator working in London.

He graduated in 2015 from the Bartlett School of Architecture. His drawings explore small narratives and experiment with colourful and highly detailed compositions of surreal and fantastical architecture. His main inspiration comes from the comic books of FrancoBelgian sci-fi alongside the visceral grit and atmosphere of vintage sci-fi concept art. www.dougjohnmiller.co.uk, @dougjohnmiller

Mapped

Mapped explores the divide between the map and the world it depicts. In Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges illustrates a fantastical world, in which maps are so near perfection that only an exact 1:1, two-dimensional replica of the world can surpass existing achievement. The result is a short passage that outlines the absurd results on a social and geographic level. In a similar respect, and through the process of drawing, this project explores the manipulations and absurdities that are thrown up by comparing the bleeding-edge technology of mapping and navigation with its two-dimensional predecessor.

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Rory Sherlock

Rory is an independent designer and writer living in London. He graduated from the AA with Honours in 2017 and received a commendation in the RIBA President’s Medals for his thesis, ‘Multimedia Oblivion – Palmyra: Violence, erasure and the corporeal architectural body’.

Vectorworld:

A Protocol Key: A basic perspectival cipher for decoding two and threedimensional vector space

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01.0

Window

01.01 Vector space can be accommodated on all processing units and entered using the visual interface (the window) restricted only by the limits of memory capacity and program coding extent.

01.01.1 Vector space is extant: a defined and absolute representational space (see 02.0, 03.0, 04.0).

01.02 Access to and movement within vector space is exclusively and continuously moderated by the user window.

01.02.1 The view of vector space, as moderated by the window, is therefore limited to the two-dimensional screen of the interface. Through the continuous interaction with the scale function (see 03.0), the user can seamlessly interact with all elements in vector space (regardless of dimension of location (see 05.0) without

interruption or delay.

01.02.2 User requirement input and parameter definition is required to ensure unhindered and, if necessary, functional operation within vector space.

01.02.3 A single vector space can be accessed by an unlimited number of users across intersecting connected networks, the extents of representational matter contained restricted only by the collectively accessible processing and storage units on which the space is hosted.

Two-dimensional grid: A 50 Ă— 50 unit, illustrative twodimensional grid of irrelevant scale. The bounding box is an interface window only; the grid stretches infinitely in all directions beyond.

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02.0

Grid

02.01 Both two-dimensional and three-dimensional vector space is defined by a grid structure of undefined scale (see 03.0) and adjustable precision (see 04.0) according to user requirement.

02.01.1 This space is potentially infinite in all directions, its navigation mediated only by the window (see 01.0).

02.02 The grid is permissible – it may be enabled by a user and set to a chosen tolerance of precision for the purpose of ensuring true dimensions within a given model, or disabled, reverting to a vector matrix restricted only by processor unit parameters.

02.02.1 The removal of a structured reference grid within a given model reduces the appearance of vector space in the window to an ostensibly two-dimensional plane (this appearance, however, belies a three-

dimensional and total vector space which remains – in effect, the appearance of a dot may be a line of indeterminate length in the perpendicular axis).

02.03 All grids operate around a numerical value location system (see 05.0), with a locus or loci defined by the parameters of the model requirements at hand.

02.04 Three-dimensional vector space does not facilitate operational or generative computation. It is therefore limited to a view in stasis – the representation of things as they are, or were, or could-be.

Two-dimensional grid – warped perspective/contained field: Viewed through a warped perspective, the continuous field of the two-dimensional grid as contained by the interface is made clear.

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03.0

Scale

03.01 Vector space is unbounded by the limitations of a set scale – defined by the restrictions of the window and desired output, all drawn matter can be scaled according to user requirements.

03.02 All scales and degrees of precision can be accommodated within the same vector space, limited only by unit processing capability and memory storage.

03.03 Scale can be set within the window according to user requirements in any given circumstance.

03.03.1 Movement across scales of representational matter within vector space can be accommodated through an un-defined user scroll function, facilitating a visual ‘zoom in’ or ‘zoom out’.

03.03.2 For example: In a shared vector space accommodating a celestial entity, a user may generate an

accurate representation of a planet from its geological to its sub-atomic construction, producing via the window a scaled output of both its overall view and the appearance of a given infinitesimal structure.

Three-dimensional grid – linear perspective/contained field: Making use of a primitive, linear perspective, the extension of infinite and inhabitable, three-dimensional vector space (as defined even by the contained field of the interface window) is evident.

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04.0

Precision

def: refinement in a measurement, calculation, or specification, as represented by the decimal value given

NB: As distinct from accuracy – def: the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation or specification conforms to the correct value as drawn 04.01 The limits of dimensional precision in vector space are restricted and defined only by unit processing capability.

04.02 The scope of dimensional precision in vector space is total, encompassing universal and atomic measurement and beyond in a single model.

04.02.1 For example: The limits of precision and processing memory in vector space may, in such an instance, permit the construction of a total three-

dimensional, drawn representation of an external physical universe (including the window and all of its components – see 01.0) at a level of detail as accurate as can be physically measured for everything known.

Two-dimensional grid – warped perspective/endless field: In considering the infinite expanse of three-dimensional vector space to be explored, bounded only by the capacity of memory and processing, an idea of a void in vector space can be of fleeting – albeit entirely deceptive – comfort.

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05.0 Location 05.01 All representational matter created within vector space is located according to the parameters of measurement on the physical planet of a given user’s dwelling.

05.01.1 Such parameters facilitate the accurate representation and location of objects as they are in the extant world.

05.01.2 This programming definition furthermore allows for the location of universal entities as they are according to current systems of reading the cosmos. This is based on all known users’ reading of the sky from the perspective of the extant world.

05.02 Limitations of unit processing power can incur unexplained aberrations and anomalous phenomena as the user moves further and further from the nexus of object location calculations.

Three-dimensional grid – linear perspective/endless field: The threedimensional vector grid extends infinitely in all directions beyond the interface window. In this instance, the window is in the process of ‘panning’ a process that temporarily halts an immediate shift in perspective.

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Álvaro F Pulpeiro

Álvaro F Pulpeiro (Galcia, 1990) is a filmmaker and architect based in Bogotá. He has studied at the Architectural Association and has worked on projects including Sol mihi semper Lucet (2015, 16'), a short documentary-poem intimately exploring the colosal landscapes of West Texas during the magic hours. From 2015, he travelled frequently to the Port of Montevideo to research and develop his first feature-length film, Nocturno: Ghosts of the Sea in Port (72', 2017). He is now developing a project set in and around the Inuit communities of the Canadian Artic region of Baffin Island.

Synopsis

PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND – A cinematic space for those who roam without an origin to return to. No embrace or memory, no land or country, no unshakable identity. This is the synopsis of a film. A sensory ethnographic and ghost story meant to being researched and developed in the Nunavut Province of Canada.

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Set in the depths of the treacherous Davis Strait seas, a SAR helicopter lands on an unnamed community sitting on the shores of the Baffin Island. Inside is the corpse of an unknown deep sea fisherman, a foreigner robbed of a past, a history: a landless body. The inhospitable landscapes isolate this Inuit community, once living as nomadic hunters, today, they are punished by regrouping politics and suffering serious mental health episodes, which ultimately are the result of a shipwrecked society, robbed of a genesis, a myth of an origin, sedentary and stagnant, where the harshness of nature and the ennui towards contemporary banality make them wander aimlessly, as ghosts, over and around a land once home to their ancestors. We, in symbiosis with the only character existing within this fiction, always look and feel through this landless body, which after being taken into an improvised medical room, the obliged autopsy is undertaken and witnessed by an embassy official and notary sent from Iqaluit. The cause of death is determined.

The lonely unclaimed corpse rests on a metallic table, dehumanised, naked and finally abandoned by an oblivious origin that rejects him, or that he rejected long ago.

The stranger stays stranded inside a frostbitten limbo, just like the inhabitants of this coastal town, under an eternal mourning by the too many suicides of youths and elders who see neither future nor a clear past. We are cremated. A pile of ash is all that is left of us. And with the transfiguration of the body, of this singular and burdening gaze to which we were anchored, starts what has no cogent and total description. We will be ashes seeking dynamic currents, procuring to inhabit a collective intelligence, unable to coherently access human affairs.

All fragments, those gestures from the subjects living here fade behind or below the many natural and intangible articulations of the non-human. Isolated actions and activities befall, intercalated by multiple delusive digital images portraying live, through the hyper-saturated abyss of the artic internet, the sluggish and seemingly still changes of this world without the world. Such images lacking purpose illustrate, like a leaking hourglass, the nonexistence or irrelevance of a civil temporality. They are a sensibility far removed from human or even natural emotions, machines gazing within, knowing they will be the only thing with a lasting pulse here. Auyuittuq National Park echoes, dwarfing the plights of the people we inhabit and by which we are inhabited. Uselessly, we try to touch them in order to find an instant of our lost self, to see who we were and shall be, who we might be.

Without a body, mutant, caressing the colossal and the minute, stalking what lays close and what calls from the distance, the flesh of the human and the mechanic.

And finally, after inhabiting an infinitude of organic and inorganic lifeforms, we find a venturesome pilgrim host, an exhaust drifter bound in what will be its last voyage.

Lost in time. Multiple. An anonymous suicidal local that could be many in one, with no context, who will open the longed gates of the open seas, hidden behind risky ravines, intimidating mountain rages and kilometric fjords.

With this diffuse death bound subject we disperse into a timeless totality, which instead of transporting us to a pretended and melancholic home, it unites us, just like black sand, with the raging maritime currents of the Davis Strait sea, and from there to earth as a whole: The palm at the end of the mind.

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Gregorios Kythreotis

Gregorios Kythreotis is the cofounder of Shedworks, an independent game studio based in London. Following his studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Greg has developed keen interest in the intersection of architecture and video games.

A Foreigner at Home

Due to unforeseen circumstances, in February 2017, I ended up alone in an Airbnb in Shibuya for a little over a week, an unintentional flaneur isolated in a city far from home. I began to develop a routine, seeing the same people and places at different times of day. I had my local coffee shop, the places I’d like to eat dinner after a day of exploration. Part of me began to feel like I actually lived in this little part of the world.

This, of course, is not the same as living as a local, with a nuanced understanding of the culture and the general day-to-day. Even with a decent grasp of the Japanese language I would still find myself an outsider.

There was an inevitable sense of disconnect.

Within a month of arriving back in the UK, I was able to return to a different Tokyo – that of Persona 5.

A Tokyo created by people working and living there for years and decades instead of weeks. This time around I am also a stranger to the city, someone from outside Tokyo who has found themselves living in an attic in the fictional district of Yongenjaya. Could spending a virtual year living in this version of Tokyo give me a glimpse of life as a denizen of the real Tokyo?

Shibuya intersection is a postcard image of Tokyo.

It is constantly moving, alive and buzzing. Sounds erupt from every shop front and billboards animate skyscrapers while anonymous masses churn like quicksand. Every space is a choice to make, an opportunity to get lost.

A collision of different parts that don’t fit together neatly.

The first time Persona 5 lets you loose in Shibuya, it tells you to ‘find the Ginza line’. You are running late for school, commuting from your new home in Yongenjaya and are forced to change subway lines at Shibuya Station.

As a transfer student from out of town trying to settle into your new home, you’ll be looping back on yourself and losing all sense of direction. You try to follow some signs, feeling you’ve found a solution to this conundrum.

Suddenly you spot grey clouds and smell the crisp morning air as you find yourself outside in the main square of Shibuya with no more signs in sight, only flashing billboards and perspective-bending skyscrapers.

In this iteration of Shibuya, you can peek around corners as cars pass through the intersection, glimpse into parallel streets through alleyways and are given tantalising hints at a full city that exists around you, however you are

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restricted to what amounts to a corridor of movement with pockets of shops and activities to partake in. This is a microcosm of how the game renders Tokyo as a whole, with city districts chosen to represent a multitude of the city’s many many faces.

Among these districts is Yongenjaya, a location based on the real world Sangenjaya that represents the smallness of Tokyo – the scale in which Tokyo exists when you stop and look at building fronts on the ground level. Residential houses line up next to amenities such as baseball practise cages, supermarkets, or my personal favourite, a strange bath house and launderette combo hidden near an outhouse made of corrugated plastic and metal. It feels so oddly put together and real, it feels like the Tokyo I got to experience away from the lights of Shibuya, Shinjuku or Harajuku.

The entrance to Yongenjaya is just off a road that sits below a concrete highway, it feels tucked away and hidden, literally overshadowed by other busier parts of the city.

There are a few people milling around but nothing compared to Shibuya. People seem to idle and linger for longer, moving at a more leisurely pace with less purpose and the kind of conversations you hear shift.

An elderly man sells second-hand goods from an extremely small storefront and sunlight is filtered through intersecting, tangled and intertwined electrical cables, phone lines and foliage. Services are exposed through Japan’s archetypal aircon units, exposed ventilation systems, gas pipes and roof-topping water towers.

Yongenjaya is firmly based on the Tokyo behind the theatrical curtain of Shibuya’s front facing glitz, it represents a space of Japan which Hidenobu Jinnai, in small Tokyo, claims ‘important activities stay hidden, confined to interior spaces.’ Jinnai contrasts this with spaces like Shibuya crossing, by saying, ‘Big urban spaces do not have a real significance here, nor do they develop that charming character of Italian piazzas. People prefer to withdraw to izakaya, or the narrow lanes.’

The architectural elements that each in-game district chooses to focus on highlight what kind of spaces they wish to be portrayed as. The air conditioning units and electrical services presented in Yongenjaya versus the neon and flashing lights of advertisements in Shibuya, for example, convey the functions and sensations of experiencing these spaces. Shinjuku is represented as a seedy red-light district and Akihabara as the maid cafe and tech-lined alleyway it is known for across the world.

These are postcard images of the places – we know that living in a place like this reveals the true depth below the surface – however, part of revealing this is first becoming desensitised to the architectural protagonists of each area before being able to revel in and explore the minute details that separate each.

Growing up and living in London, I assigned and understood the city in relation to each tube station.

My understanding of the city directly correlated to the visible space around each station and the routes I could witness between whatever shop or landmark I was travelling to. My understanding of space was so distorted I once travelled from Leicester Square to Trafalgar Square using the tube system, turning what could have been a pleasant one-minute walk into a miserable 10-minute journey underground.

It through an understanding of transportation in Tokyo that Shibuya and Yongenjaya are presented to us.

The protagonist of the game navigates the city exclusively by subway. A moody transitional scene shows the shapes and shadows of people holding onto rails and hanging rings in train compartments as each space is loaded.

The first space of any area you see is the subway platform.

A metallic voice rings out ‘YONGENJAYA. THIS IS YONGENJAYA’, and you are unceremoniously dropped off by a subway cart, released as part of a crowd of anonymous city dwellers.

This is also a tidy reflection of the way in which the real Tokyo itself developed. Tokyo has always been multi-nodal. There has never really been a centre, unlike European cities. It is constructed more like an archipelago of places, metabolising organically from each node. It is within this framework in the game that we get to experience the city. This is how Persona manages to express that there is an incredible amount of architectural diversity in Tokyo.

The language of the city changes drastically and stylistically from one subway stop to another.

As Kengo Kuma says, in small Tokyo ‘a foreigner gradually, step by step, gets involved with Tokyo.

He begins to understand the difference between those many “Tokyo’s” that constitute this city. In the beginning, the foreigner would know only certain landmarks, most likely the big railway stations, eventually getting to those small spaces in between.’

That is to say, while you may not be able to spatially comprehend the full expanse of the city as a foreigner, this comprehension also applies to locals. Kevin Lynch says in The Image of the City, when asking interviewees about their experiences navigating the cities they live in ‘it became apparent that none of the respondents had anything like a comprehensive view of the city in which they had lived for many years. The maps were often fragmented, with large blank areas, concentrating most often on small home territories.’

This comes back to the ways in which we all understand our home cities, how we memorise and familiarise localise territories and how this is not unfamiliar to the experience of a foreigner visiting a place and settling into a particular part of that city over

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a longer period of time. The experience of a visitor may be one that is extremely compressed but it is not entirely disconnected to that of someone living as a local. What is significantly different are the types of spaces which people end up inhabiting and familiarising ourselves with.

If you are visiting Tokyo on holiday, why would you choose to visit a high school in Aoyama-Itchome every week day?

Why would you choose to work at a 7/11 in the evenings?

Being a foreigner in virtual spaces manifests itself in a number of ways. From the aforementioned ‘Find the Ginza line’ section, making navigating oneself around Shibuya station an urgent and non-trivial task to the ways in which sections of the city are unveiled to you. You have no real comprehension of the spaces that will become accessible as the game develops. Areas such as Akihabara, Shinjuku and Harajuku are unlocked through characters suggesting you visit or reading pamphlets and books about the city. You begin to discover and unfurl the city in a way that is reminiscent to that of a visitor or a foreigner.

These are not pieces of inherent knowledge that your character is expected to posses.

But after you have been in the city for 100+ hours, spaces become intimately familiar. You begin to navigate side streets and short cuts like a local and your understanding of the space as a player begins to change.

This is further expressed in the game by faster travel between visited zones, reinforcing an image of a native city dweller who autopilots their way around their city from node to node.

In small Tokyo, Darko Radovic says that ‘comprehension of cities is about balancing rooted knowledge and impressions. Locals have their invaluable lived experience. Lived experience is not only knowledge, it is something that is possible to learn and understand.

It is about osmosis, about all of our senses, about slowness, time, touching and feeling. Lived experience of a foreigner is very different from that of a native, but it exists and can be very deep.’

Persona compounds this osmosis through its daily routine structure, creating an opportunity for repetition that familiarises you with its space. Though they do not do it often in this game, designers can use the illusion of familiarity to play with how you feel about areas in this city by moving shop locations, blocking off paths or

opening up new pathways. Even something as simple as meeting a character in a space where you wouldn’t expect them to be can have a devastating impact on how you feel about a space or how you perceive said character.

Disruption of the routine the game settles you into is as important as establishing it. It helps to crystalise what values you assign to a space.

As the game makes you, as a player, more comfortable with its representation of Shibuya, is there a possibility that when you visit the city in real life you will feel more comfortable than you would normally? Not quite a complete foreigner, but a pseudo-informed foreigner with a virtual nostalgia for a city that does not really exist.

After all, this is something that literature and film has given us for years. What British person doesn’t feel like they have some understanding of New York from watching Friends, Sex and the City or Seinfeld?

Persona 5 elicits feelings of warm nostalgia, comfort and often makes you feel like you understand a place that you may have never been. It is adjusting to, settling into, and feeling familiar with a space, that videogames can elicit with even greater potency than a TV show, film or book because you inhabit and navigate the space directly. Persona is certainly not the first videogame to have elicited these feelings, I felt a sense of recognition looking at spaces in Venice after having played Assassin’s Creed 2 and Nicholas Rush talks about the same feeling people had when visiting Chernobyl after playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare in his Videobrains talk, Exploring the Zone. → 1 The pronoun used when describing how you experience the narrative is also significant. You can view Shibuya from different points in space, on different days and the feeling that you are choosing a routine for yourself. Having even a small amount of agency over what you wish to do in this fictionalised version of a real city is overwhelmingly powerful at evoking feelings of familiarity.

This highly curated portrayal of a city is a touristic vision, but in the case of Persona it is curated by locals, through the lens of their lived experience and knowledge of the city. Are feelings of recognition and nostalgia completely imagined, our comprehension based on falsehood or can video games like Persona allow us an insight beyond a touristic gaze?

This piece originally appeared in Heterotopias www.heterotopiaszine.com

1 www.youtu.be/kXfxVXXMmzw

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Maria Fedorchenko

Maria Fedorchenko has been a Unit Master at the AA since 2010, where she has taught in the History & Theory Studies, Housing & Urbanism and the Visiting School programmes.

She has also held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, UCLA and California College of the Art. Primarily an educator and theorist, focusing on diagram and infrastructure, she is also a co-founder of Plakat (a platform for provocations), an urban consultant and co-director of Fedorchenko Studio.

From Collisions to Dis-continuities

For as long as the city has been defined by collisions – between objects, systems, and agendas – architects have learned to diagnose and account for them in their propositions. Still, a call to conceive and develop an urban project by actively putting such forces in motion might be deemed opportunistic and irresponsible. And yet, what if we could approach the power of ‘collision’ from a slightly different angle: as part of the evolved disciplinary project on the city, and crucial for maintaining its visionary aspects? Wouldn’t that mark yet another pendulum swing and a feared return to a historical obsession?

It wasn’t that long ago that postmodern architects were building upon oppositions, clashes and co-existences of all kinds, which have been seemingly exhausted in the series of illustrious works – from divided-and-dialectic cities, to complex-and-contradictory forms, from momentary explosions to provisional assemblages of meanings, spaces and events. True, but let us also recall some further reasons we tend to distance ourselves from this particular segment of history. Generally, we see such work as either too abstract, conceptual and driven by interdisciplinary insecurities, or overly ambiguous and unstable as a result of the protracted process that yields all these deconstructions, mis-readings and re-combinations.

However, if we discount these lofty theoretical indulgences or endless design games of ‘paper architects’, we may overlook the future potential of collision as both a vital concept and a key tool that is most relevant to our own contemporary condition. Let’s admit it – whether we have been pragmatically tuning the project to external contingencies or to speculative diagramming of evolving and ‘smooth’ forms in our recent past, various inconsistencies and misfits are still here with us.

So rather than adding yet another fad to the contemporary bag of tricks, or artificially extending the self-contained chapter of our history, I suggest we rethink what, how and why we might choose to collide in our projects as uniquely suited to our current challenges.

We could take a closer look at dissimilar levels and degrees of complexity involved, and consider the moment of impact as part of the longer process of transformation leading towards investigation of various modes of dis-continuity.

Let’s begin at the simpler and more obvious level of architectural object and form. I would dare say that we could demystify or tone down the more obscure intellectual justifications and let a bit loose. (Some may find this preview of disobedient architectural shapes

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just running about, attacking and penetrating each other not too sophisticated, but we would be getting straight to it, and having some fun.) For all the seemingly superficial clashes and trysts, we would break up and rearrange not only the material prototypes, but also our core ideas with regards to design models, typologies and morphologies.

A few words of warning though, so that we are not swept away with the architectural drama and confuse it with the literal devastation of buildings and spaces, or other dark acts of political and cultural terrorism: it is equally important that we are not simply seduced by the fantastic spectacle (not an easy task with all these fragments flying around, grounds warping and erupting, cities swept away in torrents and clouds of flotsam…) or try to capture the surreal beauty in enigmatic map-drawings or transcripts. We must push beyond these initial intuitive stages of stirring and agitation, towards steady multiplication and accumulation, and then onto conscious incorporation and negotiation – thus, avoiding premature variations on collages and assemblages in our representations, and conditioning further morphs, monsters and other by-products of transitional states.

However, to advance towards a further design resolution, we would need to look beyond discrete architectural objects towards much wider contexts.

So a more difficult challenge would be to exploit catalytic collisions between systems of form, flow and organisation.

Lorenzo Luzzi - Distortion and Metamorphosis (Diploma 8, 2016-2017)

As these could also be seen as fragile and unstable yet marked by persistence and plasticity, why not explore their inherent capacities to adapt and evolve in light of added limitations, disturbances and malfunctions? So let’s map, array and juxtapose; rupture, tinker and rewire; enfold and melt dissimilar systems and elements, and imagine them inhabiting expansive meta-structures. Here, too, we should steer clear of familiar formulae such piling up diagrams of systems that never quite cohere within the layered framework, or expecting a neutral medium of hard (ground, surface) or soft (soup, swamp, sea) landscape to ensure the peaceful coexistence of yet another turbulent collage or archipelago-city. We should seek multidimensional constructs that build upon the tectonic shifts of different conceptual plates – taking in all of our points and surfaces, faults and bridges, mountains and oceans, as they challenge each other and thus condition the unfolding of additional real and imaginary worlds.

But am I not already speaking of yet another degree of abstraction and another level of the game? Inviting the most adventuresome on a more personal journey, I suggest we look at all these oppositions, gaps and schisms that have already fuelled the conceptual expansion of past projects. What if we bring together divergent design approaches and sensibilities, upon yet another battleground? And what if this time, we set it up not for other disciplinary figures, camps or ideologies, but conflicting parts of our own creative selves (while taking care to avoid self-critical obfuscations or deliberate self-sabotage of the architect-author, of course). Then, we could engage with various phases of separation and splitting, debate and dialogue, and ultimately, a collaboration of various identities and archetypes.

And in the long run, we would not only get more attuned towards our predilections - towards real and surreal, rational and intuitive, controlled and accidental, etc. – but also get much closer to true creative individuation.

And so I hope we do continue to explore the potentials of collisions (from concrete to abstract) as it could open up new paths for experiment, discovery and definition. That way we remain consistently open to questioning – the way we think and work; what gives conceptual and spatial coherence to the project; and how to keep its contents and formal products from settling down too soon. We would account for opposition and mediation, division and integration, reduction and multiplication, engaging with longer life cycles of architecture and the city played against the increasing conflicted worlds of our projects. The work that ensues might just boast intellectual and artistic impact worthy of our predecessors, but more importantly, it will support a new disciplinary project on dis-continuous forms and infrastructures, cities and minds.

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Ella Lord

Isobel (Ella) Lord is a writer and designer interested in considering modes and experiences of contemporary life. She studied architecture at the University of Sydney and since graduation has been working professionally as well as collaboratively with Sophie Lanigan as AGENDA Lord and Lanigan, questioning form, the agency of practice and the function of the studio.

8 Envy-Inducing Kitchens and Bathrooms.

1:41 PM – 21 Apr 2018

Prologue to a Twitter Bot

MY HEART BREAKS. 2:41 AM – 19 Mar 2018

13 artists and charity carve giant SOS out of palm recognition for password hints.

3:41 AM – 3 Apr 2018

AArchitecture 34 42

How to Design with Circles.

9:41 AM – 2 Apr 2018

We pulled insights from hundreds of miles and centuries of time, air and motion…

12:41 AM - 21 Apr 2018

Lately I have been planning on making a Twitter bot and proposing it for this exact issue. It would have been a cross between an essay and a fictional text. But also/actually would have been documentation of a Twitter bot written as a list of lines with dates.

The theme of this issue is collision and the idea would have been that there is a collision between reality and fiction.

The reality is that instead of making the Twitter bot I have been sitting in my room alternating between scrolling through my phone and making tea. I am ponly writing this now because my phone is streaked with ominous multi-coloured bars obscuring the gentle drumming of the Internet which provides an entry point into various videos. Later I will go out, away from my desktop computer and my laptop and my chargers and cameras. The phone I will take with me despite its clouded retina.

And so I have not made the Twitter bot tI promised. This text serves instead as a prologue to the Twitter bot. The account, @bldgsupposition, exists and I intend to set it up by April. I imagine it will post statements that mix up architectural descriptions found on the Internet.

In the sphere of the Internet, reality is complicated to a point where the liar Twitter bot divulges the future in its simultaneous creation of relevance. The individual is neutralised as an indifferent and irrelevant character. And I’m not sure how to proceed with that.

I am overjoyed to hear of the vernacular home.

With a New Level.

6:41 PM – 28 Mar 2018

3:41 PM – 1 Apr 2018

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Moad Musbahi, Freefall

Freefall is a new lecture series at the AA, dealing with law and architecture. It seeks to show the complicit overlap between the two disciplines that are both concerned with space, actions and people.

Fingertips

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To operate derives from an act ‘done by labour’. The operation of technical objects involves impacts, between a human operator and the control panel / dashboard presented to them – the pressing of a button, pushing of a pedal, the twisting of a dial or the soft depression of a screen. Force is applied, a collision between mesh and solid matter.

‘I reach out to answer a telephone, and my leg subsequently extends to balance myself accidentally pressing the record pedal.’

In an infamous example of an operation, the Mary Rose Woods’ office was reconstructed for court witnesses of the Watergate scandal as she re-enacted what was then dubbed by the press as the ‘Mary Rose Woods Stretch’.

The court case involved President Nixon’s involvement in the scandal and the absent 12 minutes of the White House tapes recording. The aforementioned secretary, Mary Rose, claimed to have been transcribing the tapes in question, when the phone rang and she reached to answer it.

She performs the stretch; the court photographer captures the act on lm negative.

Intentionality of one’s impacts and collisions against machinery is one of the chief dimensions of the law.

The ordering of bodies in space, specifically the regulation

of those bodies’ actions within that space is the subject of legal narratives dealing with their alleged transgressions.

In another case involving the pressing of a pedal the case of the Scott vs Harris case that was showing during the first Freefall event by Professor Richard Sherwin.

He showed 12 seconds of a portion of a video of a police car chase, from the perspective of the police officer’s car-mounted camera.

This video was made available to the online public through the website of the Supreme Court of the United States. The pedal impact in question here is that of the policeman’s foot and the police car’s operation. Upon greater impact between shoe and pedal, the car responded by accelerating, colliding and pushing the fleeing perpetrator’s car off the road, to collide with an immovable tree. From this collision, the perpetrator was rendered paraplegic.

During the many accounts of the trail and appeals of this case, the US Supreme Court’s verdict was that the video speaks for itself – ie, the intentionality of the actors is made visible, viewable, to all who can make out the pixels depicting the dark and dimly lit scene. Its operation is immediately obvious.

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David Greene and Eddie Farrell facilitate AALAWuN including the 2018 platform – Channel pavilion lawun.blogspot.co.uk

ONTHELAWuN A cowardly lion, a lost girl with her small dog, Toto, a brainless scarecrow and a tin man without a heart, enter 36 Bedford Square. Will any of them eventually discover that they were the wizard behind the curtain all along?

A fine friend and solid supporter of AALAWuN recently said that they thought that our sessions should be compulsory for all AA students to attend… Before we had time to retort in horror at such a thought, it was like they were trying to catch their words and push them back into their mouth before they were heard.

Of course you can't make AALAWuN sessions compulsory for the simple fact that it would it run counter to everything that LAWuN is.

How can you make anyone see something from a different perspective if it doesn't occur to them to do so?

If we consider for a moment Christo's seminal work – the 'wrapped cliff ' – we might see it in one of two ways: as a wrapped cliff or; preferably, as the point at which all other cliffs are unwrapped.

A Channel Pavilion project attempts to achieve this same altered reading of the familiar (in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller's question, 'How much does your building weigh?'). It provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle

and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing a planet in a condition of imminent environmental crisis… revise (the public realm is a constantly flickering electronic surface due to three fundamental flaws in the economic system) On a more literal level the ‘u’of the acronym (Locally Available World unseen Networks) is a bit of a give away so it may take some time and be in a quite unexpected way that anything happens. There's equally a chance that things stay out of sight, and why not? That's something that AALAWuN channel pavilion is willing to work hard for.

As 2018 slides along one increasingly imagines AALAWuN as some kind of Optional Check Point; it's completely unmanned and completely invisible, a witness to students traipsing by each day - they pay with only a passing glance.

It's interesting to see the steady, mixed and varied numbers of those who step on the carpet with some question or something to examine that could arguably remain unanswered or unexamined for the rest of their lives.

Step up to a check point of infinite proportions free of everyday junk, clutter and obligations. *You may need to define your obligations while others join you in there : Think picnic for OnTheRug , the carpet a kind of room without walls ?

An inferred architecture ?

Channel Pavilion a school without walls. Like a picnic a time based territory sometimes an oasis for a conversation interrupting the re exit next to become a silent roll against the skirting . Itinerent , portable , adaptable , provisional , Design a building to have as many collisions as possible! not worried about an intended outcome or best and worst practice or common and uncommon purpose Toto runs in and and sets his tiny little needle teeth into the corner of the covering cloth. He tugs with a snarling yap and reveals the real.

Note* Toto: a small dog that seems to go unnoticed A fine friend and solid supporter of AALAWuN recently said that they thought that it might provide new responses to the conventions of education in a faster smaller culture , that might even then suggest they be consigned to the dustbin of history >?

Now Channel Pavillion offers a site to challenge the naivety of these claims yet is it the reality you dare not confront ?????? cross school conversations on work in progress continue through channel pavilion's ONTHECARPET series.

AA unwrapped about to become wrapped with a new wizard ? By the time you read this a new wizard will be behind the curtain at the AA .

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Forthcoming from AA Publications The Architectural Association publishes titles that explore developments in architecture, engineering, landscape, urbanism, as well as the fields that touch on them – philosophy, history, art and photography. This summer sees the release of three publications: AA Book 2018 – the annual anthology of student work, a student-edited issue of AA Files 76, and An Anatomy of Influence, which a richly illustrated book on the lives of postwar Japanese architects. AA Publications are available to purchase through the AA Bookshop: aabookshop.net.

A A Files 76 Co-edited by Diploma students Bodo Neuss, Jane Wong, Mads Bjørn Christensen and Emily Priest ‘Even the most casual visitor to the AA’s club-liked premises at Bedford Square where the school, the London and International networks make contact in a series of elegant eighteenth-century public rooms, cannot but be caught up in the momentum of the daily events which have made the AA a centre for the public discussion and display of architecture on a unique and unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, until the advent AA Files,’ writes AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky in 1981 in the opening pages of the first issue of the long-running journal, ‘few glimpses have been available and certainly no documents exist recording aspects of this all-important phenomenon.’ In this student-edited issue AA Files 76 looks back on 37 years of not only glimpsing architecture as it happened at the AA, but also of writing about architecture and, through the idiosyncrasies, interests and generosity of its authors and editors, extending those conversations far beyond Bedford Square. Presented in facsimile, AA Files 76 revisits the voices, ideas, drawings and designs that have filled its pages for nearly four decades.

AA Publications, June 2018 230pp, col & b/w ills

978-1-907896-95-8

An Anatomy of Influence

By Thomas Daniell with a foreword by Thomas Weaver and an afterword by Peter Cook An Anatomy of Influence presents a combination of interviews, essays, new translations and previously unpublished archival and family images to give a panoramic overview of postwar Japanese architecture, tracing the evolution of spatial, aesthetic and behaviour concepts over the postwar period. Written by the foremost critic on postwar Japanese architecture, Thomas Daniell, the book focuses on texts as much as buildings, and lives as much as works, to elucidate the theory and practice of 12 significant architects, situating them within a wider cultural context of art, technology, literature and politics. Architects include Kazuo Shinohara, Arata Isozaki, Hiroshi Hara, Toyo Ito, Itsuko Hasegawa, Hiromi Fujii, Terunobu Fujimori, Osamu Ishiyama, Shin Takamatsu, Kengo Kuma, Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama and Kazuyo Sejima.

‘After a decade-long field survey of villages during the 1970s, I arrived at the concept of ‘world scenery’. This may seem like a rather grandiose concept, but perhaps I may be forgiven because, judging from the distances I drove during this research, it is the result of a fairly long journey. The world in ‘world scenery’ comprises the meaning of ‘everything I know’ and differs from nature, which is the womb of the ‘world’ that may be corroborated objectively. It is nature that each of us subjectively apprehends and interprets.

The villages and myself are parts of nature, but people probably have different understandings and explanations for what kind of architectural complex a certain village is, or for what kind of person I am.’ – Hiroshi Hara (pictured, right), On Reflection, excerpted from An Anatomy of Influence AA Publications, July 2018 292 pp, col & b/w ills

978-1-907-896-96-5 Hardback

AArchitecture 34 48

Next Issue

Compromise A vow, a gesture, a burden, a risk.

A promise of cohabitation and mutual understanding.

An agreement that escapes individual satisfaction to serve the implications of chance.

A cause.

Does compromise itself include a consciousness of what ought to be engaged?

How can we embrace compromise as a constructive force as well as a destructive one?

Should we safeguard a certain quality of compromise – or prolong a preconceived idea of what it should require?

Do we have an inherent need to compromise to build an ethos?

Please submit your interpretation, essay, drawing, image by Sunday 1 July 2018 to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

Table of contents An invitation to collision is made by Charlie Hardie’s Impossible Cosmopolitanism: Holding Europe to a Rustic’s Ransom Page 2 and seventy wooden poles, each 4.2m tall with 1.4m into the sand leaving 2.8m visible that Nicholas Feldmeyer uses to mark the fringe condition Towards the Horizon Page 8 while Valentin Bontjes van Beek discovers in magical Tokyo the Splendid Isolation Page 12 of a vertical line from a horizontal one in a gentle move followed by the choreographies of Florence Peak, Page 14 a mix of performance and sculpture while Dena Ziari writes about a secret of collision in A Precarious Balance: Gio Ponti’s Villa Namazee After 1979 Page 17 and Doug Miller’s Mapped Page 21 a bleeding edge while Rory Sherlock’s Vectorworld Page 27 collides window, grid, scale, precision and location to precede the unfolding cinematic space of Álvaro F Pulpeiro in Synopsis. Page 34 In A Foreigner at Home Page 37 Gregorios Kythreotis blends architecture with video games and Maria Fedorchenko articulates the creative potential of collision in From Collisions to Dis-continuities Page 40 to build up suspense in a fiction mixed with an essay Prologue to a Twitter Bot Page 42 by Ella Lord, followed by a press of a button in Fingertips Page 44 by Moad Musbahi that makes Alice appear, a lion and a wizard in ONTHELAWuN Page 46 by David Greene and Eddie Farrell, all moments among which the creatures of Patricia de Souza Leão Müller start to appear.

Edited by students at the Architectural Association