AArchitecture 43

AArchitecture 43

‘If the photograph, under the influence of the text (or caption), expresses not simply the fact which it shows, but also the social tendency expressed by the fact, then this is already a photomontage.’

The gifts we wish we were given: An estate agency listing.

The Wedding photographer, as the last professional photographer.

A discourse with the descendants of the family.

An essay: Looking Again at Reality Television.

An advertisement for St. Corona’s annual ball.

A provenance of the fur coat and the diamond necklace.

Something from Tamir.

An interview with Simon Withers.

The architecture of the gravestone.

An introduction to the gothic spire of the local church.

Recommendations for places to eat nearby.

(Not including sausages) A skiing guidebook for the wider region.

(Voralpen und Mittelalpen) The route of the road trip.

A plan of the house.

The pattern book of building elements used in the house.

An examination of the first photograph and an enquiry into the hat. (Why is the first image so much older?)

A technical reading of the act of taking each photograph. (Leica M4, we believe; but what lens?)

What does it mean to photograph a photograph?

Mother’s Last Christmas. (A poem perhaps?)

Fill in the blanks.

An interview with the local priest.

Compulsive cataloguing.

What else fits in a shoebox?

The 10 Austrian Villages you must visit!

Were they visiting a concentration camp?

A Forensic Architecture enquiry into where all the images where taken, exactly.

An economic analysis of the cost of a swim in a temporary swimming pool.

An homage to Teching Hsieh, the worker’s time clock and the one year performance.

Crises in the Twentieth Century, Volume II, Handbook of Foreign Policy Crises; Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Michael Brecher, Sheila Moser.

Perhaps only texts, why add images to 500 already existing images anyway?

‘If a more or less random snapshot is like an infinitely fine scale that has been scratched from the surface of reality with the tip of a finger, then in comparison the photoseries or photomontage lets us experience the extended massiveness of reality, its authentic meaning. We build systematically. We must also photograph systematically. Sequence and long-term photographic observation—that is the method.’ 1 We at AArchitecture put forward a bold action plan for all photographs to be preserved, stored and entered into the public domain 100 years after the passing of the photographer.

A form of pre-emptive archeology, the digital mummification of around 640.000 photographs per person—photogrammetry anything. The box of photographs forever entrusted, the archive made anew. The small matter of each individual’s 8TB footprint will have to be considered; data-centres will sprout in Basildon. How heavy is this cloud?

Billions of personal archives combined, each geotagged, will construct different forms of constant re-organisation and cross-reference. 5 1 . 5 1 4 3 2 5 4 4 8 5 3 1 0 7 5, - 0 .1 2 6 9 2 76 24 8 6 67 5 2 8 5 August 18th 2021, 12:00:35 PM, shared with 17 others. Image sets overwrite and overlay the photographers intent; only god knows how many Eiffel towers.

How many photographs a day should now be maintained for ‘good health’? And will we ever delete? Perhaps our daily statistics should no longer alert us to our steps, but also mark our progress, ‘you’re taking less photos than you usually do by now’.

1

Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov

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

AArchitecture 43 Term 4, 2020– 21 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Gabrielle Eglen, Theo Sykes, Paul Vecsei

Editorial Board: Alex Lorente, Membership Ryan Dillon, AA Print Studio Design: AA Communications Studio

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

© 2020 All rights reserved

Der Wasserball Ball Alva Jung

Andreas (sixty four) explains how once the season had changed from summer to winter, from long sunny days to dark rainy nights, when the crops had been harvested and the finals of all the local sport competitions had taken place, every student, parent, farmer and citizen of Steinhagen, Germany began preparing for the annual winter balls.

No matter if you had won or lost this season, agriculturally or competitively speaking, everyone was excited to see what the mayor, and/or trainer had set up for this year. In most cases different associations such as the men’s football, horse riding or Kyffhäuser club, held individual balls.

In Amshausen, Steinhagen (33803), the annual winter water polo ball was known to be the best of the year.

Two to three weeks prior, gentlemen would ask their ladies to join them as dance partners. The wait began and everyone started to prepare; dancers would buy new shoes, girls would buy new dresses and think about the volume of their hair and which brooch would match the decorations of the ballroom. The mayor would plan his speech about the town’s successful year, the disk jockey would select from his vinyl and the dance committee would be busy making arrangements for food, drinks, decorations and ticket sales.

Once you had walked through the warm and welcoming entrance after stopping at the member of the organising faction who sat to sell or check entrance tickets, here a water poloist, the ball officially started.

Outside the entrance, a group of people stood waiting for their friends or partners to arrive whilst exchanging the latest news on recent local affairs and rumours about the planned changes to the existing streets and monuments of Amshausen. The dance floor unravelled with people of all ages celebrating the end of the year and their accomplishments of the last few months

– some were clinking shots of rum triumphantly over the water polo victory, others were quietly whispering about whom they would ask to dance next.

Andreas further explains, that even though every student was in the same class and all of the adults grew up together in the same town, new connections and life long bonds were formed at every ball – a foxtrot or a waltz igniting the spark of high school sweethearts, friendships born from long meaningful conversations in the ladies’ bathroom whilst reapplying eyeliner and fixing smudged lipstick, new brotherhoods formed by two men sipping their ninth pint and sharing complaints about their wives and groups formed in the corner for spreading gossip, stories, rumours and lies about those on the dance floor obliviously prancing the night away. This is but a small selection of events that took place. Despite their similarities, the events of each winter ball differed every time and with it their stories.

Andreas is eager to explain that whilst the water polo ball would eventually come to an end, every guest knew that there would be a chance to resume the festivities a couple of days later at the next ball. In the meantime, the village would reflect upon the experience and newly formed relationships. All eagerly awaited the next warm welcome, the same small room with its beer tables, benches, snacks, drinks, decorations and dance platforms, where one could dance one’s troubles and the night away.

Living in a small village, the ball was one of the yearly events worth remembering.

AArchitecture 43 4

Goethe and the Liberation of Greece Alexander Kluge

The scholar Ernst Robert Curtius (European literature and latin Middle Ages), born 1886, knew an old lady, who as a young girl, had been chased by Goethe out of his garden; reports Jörg Drews. Back then, the children hadn’t come to steal fruit, but to play. The old poet gruffly made them leave his property and led them with a repeated, vehement hand gesture back through the hole in the fence from which they had entered. He then spent time barricading this unsecured part of his property. He had lost this time for writing poetry. A gardener could just as well have removed the children from the garden, Curtius noted. The old woman on the other hand, said Drews according to Curtius, mentioned an impression of impatience, yes, a certain hecticness in the old poet. In retrospect, as an adult, this woman wished for a conversation with the author, whose celebrity she was now aware of. He should have tolerated the noise in his garden, she said. Children are like flowers; that’s something he ought to have written about in his poetry.

Because the child, the one that would speak to Curtius later in life, had broken her foot the same evening and because her father, an educated citizen of Weimar, had taken note of it in his diary, it is possible to precisely determine the day on which Goethe had lost all this time barricading his garden against the children. On this day he wrote a number of fragmentary verses. The philologists argue whether they belong to the neo-hellenic ‘Love Skolies’ or the neo-hellenic-epirotic hero songs, Drews said.

Apparently, his spirit – momentarily distracted by the children or perhaps just by the intrusion into his property – was very focused in the year 1826.

‘Wiese sagte: ‘Geh nach Haus’ / Siehst mir gar zu traurig aus / Möchte selber trauern’

‘Meadow said: ‘Go home’ / Seem to me quite too glum / Wish to grieve myself ’

And after some illegible notes:

‘Die Nachtigall, sie war entfernt / Was Neues hat sie nicht gelernt / Singt alte, liebe Lieder’

‘The nightingale was far away / She has not learned anything new / So sings old, beloved songs’

’64–’69 5

And another note:

‘Sei der Sklave Stadtbewohner / Stadtbezirk ist unsern Braven / Wüster Felsen Klippenspalte’

‘Let the Citizens be slaves / Borough for our braves is / Deserted rock cliff crevice’

In the context of these notes, it becomes clear that ‘our braves’ refers to rebels from the Peloponnese. The revolution against the Turkish occupants originated in the countryside (in as much as it wasn’t carried out by Philhellens, Mercenaries and volunteers from abroad.) Drews commented that the cities remained Turkish-Phanariotic inclined long after, they could not sustain the revolt. Biased, Goethe called their citizens ‘slaves’, which he would have read in the daily newspapers. In summertime, when the Turkish occupants marched into the country from their winter residency in the North, the resistance lived and fought out of the mountains and the coastal cliffs, not unlike partisans or corsairs.

Since the revolution is a city, according to Drews’ take on Goethe, ‘deserted rock cliff crevice' turned into urban terrain. The city is founded first in the head – Drews still in the rhetorics of 1969 – before it reaches the masses. He refers us to another successful line of Goethe in Heldenlieder. (Poems, last edition):

‘Setzet eure Vorhut dahin, / Wo die Wölfe nistend hecken!’

‘Place your vanguard there, / Where the wolves nest!’

According to Drews, on the day that Goethe had chased the children from his garden, he had thought that the Hellenes, having liberated themselves from the Turkish yoke, ought to now focus on Saloniki, Konstantinople and ‘fumigate’ the winter residency of the Turkish army. On other days, says Drews, Goethe was less aggressive, quite understanding of the loose and tolerant system of the Ottoman Empire. He notes:

‘Und mit einer klugen Wendung / Beut das Türkenschiff die Spitze / Jannis aber schwingt hinauf sich / Mit dem Säbel in der Faust / Das Gebälke trieft vom Blute / Und geröthet sind die Wellen.’

‘And with a clever turn / Offers the Turkish ship the tip / Jannis swings up / Sable in fist, / The beams ooze blood, / And red are the waves.’

In recognition of the maritime elegance of the Turkish ship (‘clever turn’), one can tell, according to Drews, that Goethe, like an Echolot, identifies with the Turkish as he did a moment ago with the rebels. The crude bloodbath that the hero Jannis causes is mentioned in the verse, but made difficult to empathise with and ready to cause outrage. This man of balance (Drews studied Goethe for a lifetime, defending him against attacks during the student protests) had always ‘dedicated himself completely’ to one side. In a different mood, he might have just let the children play in his garden. It could have pleased him too.

Excerpt Translated by the Editors: Kluge, Alexander. ‘Das fünfte Buch: Neue Lebensläufe.

402 Geschichten (German Edition)’.

AArchitecture 43 6

The Encounter Patricia Roig Canepa

The photographs are probably still in Vienna.

Looking at a digital image on my computer screen, a coded series of ones and zeros, I experience not the archive itself but an image of it. Through this translation, various shifts occur that might seem invisible at first sight and devoid of subjectivity. Yet, as we take a closer look at the relationship between the printed photograph and its digital reproduction, we can detect multiple decisions that were made along the way. The migration from the physical world to the digital suggests a gap between the two realities. Robin Evans first made explicit how architects rarely deal with the object of their study (the building) but rather work with its representation (the drawing).1 He emphasised an awareness of such a gap, leading me to feel suspicious of the nature of what I encounter. I look at the relation between the photographs and the website, asking myself what constitutes this archive.

I first encountered the collection at home, scrolling endlessly on a screen, unable to remember much of what I had seen, struggling to make sense of it. For some reason, my memory doesn’t work online the same way it does offline. I attribute this to a lack of room for the other senses; there is no sense of touch or size, no perception of weight, no funky edges. The digital reduces us to the visual. The resistance to absent-present digital traces that first prevented me from finding a story to tell became the subject of this essay, where writing can work to explore the nature of this difficulty. I am less concerned with content, more so with the journey of private analogue objects becoming public digital images.

Although archives are always incomplete, either due to their lacunas or own abundance,2 we rely almost entirely on what is being depicted, as opposed to the absent and unknown. In this case, the dates and locations seem like pin drops that try to provide

facticity to the stories portrayed, yet, the atemporal nature of building a house, a walk in the forest with the family dog, or a restaurant dinner, go beyond such contextual specificities.

Before I go further, I would like to establish the distinction I make throughout this essay between photographs and images. I use the term ‘photographs’ to refer to the found objects contained in their box, whereas my use of the word ‘images’ refers to the digital reproductions (executed by an invisible hand) captured with a digital camera and displayed on aarchitecture’s website. Despite presenting a potentially problematic proposal that extends far beyond the borders of this article, it is a risk worth taking to help delineate the distinction between physical and digital worlds.

PUBLIC PRIVACY. How did these photographs end up in a flea market? Did all the members of this family pass away before they were discarded? Were they forgotten about in the attic of the house we see depicted in some of these images? Are they the discarded selection of a more extensive collection of treasured family memories, boxed elsewhere? A few decades ago, family albums were confined to the home. Back then, seeing a photo album involved a spatial dimension and the act of being physically together. It implied proximity in both geography and affection. However, looking at this set of family photos involves neither. It would be a mistake to suggest the moment when these images became available online as the complete crossing of the boundary between private and public. As Roland Barthes suggests, the photographic medium coincided with and was instrumental in the creating of a hybrid ‘new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.’ 3 Following his line of thought, one could argue that the act of making

’64–’69 7

a family photo album already displays a desire to make the private public. However, the levels of exposure and publicness that come with the new sphere of the World Wide Web are a different game. I wonder how our reception of this unknown family album is affected by our present media landscape, where it has become commonplace to see the everyday lives of strangers.

BROWSING. The online browsing of this archive is no different to navigating Google Images or Instagram – confined to an orthogonal grid, images are displayed in sequence and never overlap. It takes some time to scroll all the way through the five hundred items with my thumb flicking fast across the mobile phone screen. It is hard to get an overview, I am only aware of the overall quantity because the image file names follow a numerical order. Some images offer the underside of the same photograph – such photographs are made up of two images represented on one screen. The primarily black and white archive acquires some colour, at first, for the house under construction and then again towards the end of the series in the depiction of a wedding. The default sorting order is chronological. The years covered reach from 1964 until 1969, with two earlier and outlying images from 1940. Behind the perfect sequence of numbers, I dwell on the laborious task of reaching this order in the first place, in the hesitation and the doubt of determining what comes before or after. Some photographs have the date written but there are still many unknowns, and therefore, subjective decisions were made along the way. My suggestion is not a critique but a proposal to think within the construction of the archive. How can the language and logic of sorting make sense of guessing games where absence and the unknown rule?

SORTING. The two other display options organise the images according to themes or a random number generation through an automated button that mixes and remixes. Whether the list of themes included are limited to the words found on the back of the photographs or reasonable assumptions made from observation, I cannot know, but I’m more interested in the images that escaped this categorisation and instead sit in an untitled section at the end, amongst strangers. I can also imagine opening the box full of photographs after the flea market; I can picture the chaotic nature of the prints, neither aligned nor respecting each others edges, unmediated by language and order, stimulated by associations and connections, juxtapositions, misreadings and overlaps – most likely, this would have led me to write a different article.

NAMING. Browsing and naming are fundamentally interlinked. In the digital world, each image file needs a name, although not just any, it needs to be different from the previous one. The digital cannot exist without the names that allow it to be one of many, locatable and identifiable. On the contrary, physical photographs can exist outside of nomenclature. They exist in the world without the need of a name, tied instead to a time and place. A multiplication of the possibilities for viewing have passed beyond the original materiality of the photographs, digitising them in the form of shareable images and virtual imaginaries.

MARKS ON THE TABLE. For some reason, the undersides of the photographs have either been portrayed further away from the lens of the camera or the margins haven’t been cropped as much in post-production. This difference traces processes of dissolution by which the object becomes a two-dimensional image, its objecthood overcome through its uploading. Even though we do not get to see the hand nor the body doing the work, we see the cardboard that serves as a background and we notice the pencil marks that locate the placement of each photograph during its reproduction. Getting a glimpse of this space of transition between the two embodiments of the archive is a good moment to return to Evans and his choice of the word ‘translation’ to address the relation between drawing and building. When he talks of its meaning, he acknowledges that ‘translation’ in the context of language presupposes friction, tension and other inescapable forms of disruption.4 The grey surface, the holes in the board, the marks on the table – all seem to silently give space to contradiction and allow for loss and breakage to take place as part of the process.

If the start of this piece was interested in the gap between two conditions of existence, the material and the digital, the development of this essay as well as the overall edition and production of this issue, which you are holding, in some form, is evidence of their inextricable linkage.

What does the afterlife of the archive look like?

Does the web page vanish after serving its purpose?

Does it need to be conserved? And what happens to the photographs in Vienna? I suppose that if the physical photographs disappear and the url stops working, this issue will become its latest translation.

1 2 3 4

Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 154.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1988), 98.

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 2.

Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, 154.

AArchitecture 43 8

House of Many Dilara Koz

Taking a photograph is preemptive nostalgia, one acts upon a future desire to remember the present moment and attempts to resist the loss that will accompany the passing of time.

In this reduction of memory to image, the abstraction of light is unable to meaningfully describe the moment of capture. The photograph offers a fragment of a moment, an incomplete part of a present whole. One cannot determine what precedes or follows the moment of capture, the process of observation can only suggest a virtual reality of a past.

Until 1972, photography was restrained by rolls of film – each roll shooting up to 36 pictures. Now the preference for the physical is replaced by a seemingly limitless digital medium. 36 no more. Today, my iPhone album of ‘recent’ photographs contains 42, 056 files1 – equivalent to 1, 169 rolls of film. The single photograph burnt onto film has been replaced by multiplicity, speed and accessibility – abundance has trivialised the image.

The digitisation of images has significantly accelerated their circulation. I can now scroll through five

years, ’64-’69, of an Austrian family’s life published online. It would take me less than a month to take the 500 pictures photographed in those five years. What I see are weddings, trips and funerals – moments that were deliberately chosen to be remembered. Each memory is carefully shot, printed, annotated and archived. Each image is personal and anecdotal, bookmarks for the recollection of vital moments – anywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Seen together, they form the hopeful residue of a life spent archiving.

As strangers we make sense of the images by their relation to each other, as opposed to the memories they were meant to capture.

In the set of images shared online, we see a house.

Sequencing distinct moments of its construction creates an event, a foreign memory that we visit anonymously.

The house of an Austrian family becomes our house, as we slowly see it rise, frame by frame.

1

Note by the Editor: between the submission of the text and the publication of the issue, 794 additional images were taken.

’64–’69 9

White Fluffy Dog Bart Price

I download image ‘no. 343’ of aarchitecture’s Austrian family photo archive, dated April 1967. From all of the images of weddings, funerals, houses under construction, skiing holidays, etc., this photo of a puppy immediately stands out to me. I go on Unsplash, the internet’s source of freely-useable images, and start a visual search by uploading ‘no. 343’ into a search engine that quickly collates 273 royalty-free stock images similar to the original image. Fluffiness and white fur are consistent elements that are displayed in an orderly grid, creating a systematic and obsessional visual presentation of canine cuteness. As one goes through the collection of photos from ’64-’69, they might experience a recurrent feeling of déjà vu. As an artist who spends several hours a day scrawling through royalty-free image and video databases, I constantly detect recurrent patterns both in the subject matter and manner in which people select and take photos of the world around them.

Much photography, especially amateur photography, is a form of creative self-expression, yet, in the context of a systematising structure underlying homogeneities in the images are made explicit. To cite a few categories, people have a predilection for photos of families, pets and beautiful landscapes.

In the age of Instagram, an understanding of such archetypal clichés has become recurrent within the process of consumption, as users develop ways of quickly and effectively processing visual data.

Scrawling through the rows of old photos archived on the aarchitecture website, I find myself being just as interested in the digitisation and organisation of these images as I am in the photos taken in and of themselves. The website blends the new and the old, a 1960s family album once dumped into a flea market is now adapted and reconfigured through a Tumblresque lens and aesthetic.

My response to this collection might appear to be an act of appropriative cynicism as I permit the context of the internet age to inform and transform the way in which one might look at these photos, submerging the visual relics of someone else’s personal experience within a digital flow of mass-produced, processed and consumed visual information. Though, I don’t intend to make an implicit critique of the digital and of the de-individualisation of photos, as they are increasingly perceived only within the space of digital systems. Instead, it seems to me that we have here a new way of engaging with images, one that invites a sense of interconnectedness and collectivity.

Every photograph is seen as a node, giving access to and forming part of a greater network of images.

This engagement with systems of images and the ways in which royalty-free stock image databases such as Unsplash provide an accessible visual alphabet, prompts the viewer to not just appreciate this photo of a white fluffy dog but to instead understand that it is part of a greater abstract idea; the network of the white fluffy dog. This opens up a world of meta-art creation where individual artists will not only create images, but start working with images, royalty-free, within the construction of a new world that these images begin to constitute. This seems a natural progression in the digital age as we attempt to use art as a vehicle of cognitive processing and as a means by which we can digest, understand and appreciate the increasingly complex visual systems that make up the world in which we live and the potential that they offer for the creation of new work.

AArchitecture 43 10

’64–’69 11

We want to focus on the tree, not so much the tree itself, but the rite of placing it atop the bare structure of a building, the ‘Richtfest’.

AArchitecture 43 All pictures are owned by their respective authors. They are used for educational puporses only.

12

Richtfest Géraldine Recker and Fabian Tobias Reiner

’64–’69 13

THEATER CINEMA OFFICE GARAGE SWIMMING POOL CUSTOMS SHOPPING MALL HOTEL BANK FACTORY HANGAR BROTHEL CLUB RESTAURANT BAR SCHOOL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

ACT WATCH WORK PARK SWIM CONTROL BUY SLEEP INVEST PRODUCE STORE FUCK DRINK EAT FLIRT LEARN STUDY READ

Sfumato Comte/Meuwly

AArchitecture 43 18

HOUSE ACT WATCH WORK PARK SWIM CONTROL BUY SLEEP INVEST PRODUCE STORE FUCK DRINK EAT FLIRT LEARN STUDY READ

We live in churches and work in hotel rooms: to classify housing as a specific typology – the home – is obsolete.

The home, no longer defined by the specificities of programme, risks becoming reduced to a standardised product – like your iPhone or your Fiat Punto – a generic empty box packed in a thick layer of polystyrene ensuring a constant and monotonous ‘comfort’.

We need structures that can accommodate a multitude of actions, different living expectations and the frenetic evolution of taste. This enhanced freedom of use that we fancy comes with the possibility for freedom in interpretation. To imagine a greater number of uses, structures must enable subjective readings.

Vast spaces, low-tech climate control, optimal placement of circulation and shafts. The efficiency of

a logistical centre combined with an open-plan office is translated into space for living: beds, chairs, screens, tables, cooking appliances and bathtubs freely floating in open fields.

We propose living spaces as defined fields for experimentation: devices to inhabit the changing parameters of the environment, climate, inhabitants, regulations and context in all its vastness. We concentrate design choices and construction details towards the definition of a performative interface able to negotiate with the lunatic yet beautiful variations of external influences and turn them into positive inputs for the inside.

Reacting to the undefined interior, the home is defined by a diffuse and malleable relation to the exterior: living in an experimental sfumato.

’64–’69 19

Fi l t

Pe rm

an

en

tw ee k

er h

en

dh

ous

ou

e

se

House above all

Motel hous

Ho

use

fo

ry ve re

thi

ng

e

crystallisation of the setting they create. Leaving the carpark and entering the exhibition, a main route leads you in a circular path around the entire plot.

Whilst there are branches leading off this main road, most of the houses here can be viewed from it. The void in the centre of this loop is filled by an artificial pond, as though the only possibility of dealing with an empty space in this setting is to fill it with water and make it the object of a picturesque view. The inability of the houses to accommodate any form of public

BLAUE LAGUNE

In Austria, every third house is prefabricated. The Blue Lagoon sits right beside the largest shopping mall in Austria, ten minutes outside the city of Vienna. It is the largest exposition of prefabricated houses in Europe, where houses are no longer built but bought, the entire process can take place here in an afternoon, from the provision of a loan to the selection of the contractors.

‘Buying a house from the counter and hiring an architect are very different experiences. A major difference lies in the former being a ready-made,

pre-designed, finished product, even before its physical existence on the plot, whilst the latter is in a constant process of being designed and becomes a product only after completed construction.’

To understand the architecture of the prefabricated house, the function of the Blue Lagoon can be compared to that of a prototype – not so much in a technical sense, since the houses are identical to those found throughout the country, but because the Blue Lagoon seems to be the place in which the typology originates, the original to be copied. If one can describe the sprawling suburbs largely as a product of these houses, then perhaps the Blue Lagoon is the

space, apart from the infrastructure that links them, is so great that the creation of such a shared view becomes the only way to design around the problem of an empty central space. Paradoxically, here a peculiar cross-programming occurs – this pond is now the home of a small fishing club.

Quasi-familiarity is central to the experience of the Blue Lagoon, it stems from a compromise between attempting to replicate the design of quaint Austrian villages as closely as possible with a greater cost efficiency and practicality. Houses are grouped more densely, one can easily walk the entire plot in one afternoon. Whilst there is reason enough to

AArchitecture 43 22

to the core of the contradiction between the advertised customisability and the economic nature of prefabrication. The paradox lies in the insistence of advertising what prefabrication is less suitable for.

To prefabricate is to copy – identical, not unique.

The same is true of the advertised application of new, innovative technology, advertised throughout the Blue Lagoon. They claim innovation in the construction, whilst in reality bricks, concrete and wood are simply market standards. The same pattern reappears: why

house into their house. The main aesthetic tropes of modern architecture here get turned into one of many possible choices; you can have the same house in a modern style, in a traditional style or somewhere in-between – you choose! Though, the reality of prefabrication means the extent to which one can personalise each model is very limited, many people just swap the roof. Nonetheless, the supposed possibility for customisation of the prefabricated house is central to their marketing.

However, this ploy is ambivalent, the second step of differentiation is only required because the houses are the same to begin with – an ambivalence that cuts

lay claim to groundbreaking and innovative technology, when in reality the advantage of the prefabricated house is that it’s tested time and time again, to succeed is almost guaranteed thus making it cheaper as a consequence.

In viewing the house as a product, the problem of expressing one’s taste becomes central, the attempt to paint prefabrication as ideally suited to customisation is a way to protect the very foundation of the economic model of the Blue Lagoon. More than that, it also conceals the total lack of inspiration in the arrangement of floor plans; which are as static as the elevations are adjustable.

MAYA KLEIMAN

assume that the imitation of very familiar settings in the design of the Blue Lagoon is strategic, the inverse question could also be posed: what type of environment does the house itself actually create?

The notion of the home as the material expression of one’s individuality is assumed as a central marketing strategy. It is a strange irony that this ambition of self expression is achieved through prefabrication. For this reason, in a second step, each model can be customised. Each customer can turn any

’64–’69 23

Building a House Maria Korolkova

AArchitecture 43 24

Buildings, Walter Benjamin writes in 1935, have been man’s companion since primeval times. According to Benjamin, buildings are primal to our social existence and aesthetic perception which makes architecture, in general, the highest of all arts. Yet, the invention of photography has hacked these relationships and put the autonomous aesthetic experience of buildings in decline, removing buildings from their site and as a consequence reappropriating them – ‘the cathedral leaves its place to be received in the studio of the artlover’.1 Buildings are detached from complex haptic connections to people and landscapes, their aura and authenticity disappears as photographed buildings become cult-like objects of pure contemplation, or to use John Berger’s words, ‘ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free’.² I am looking at an example of such processes. In front of me, is a digitised archive of an Austrian family dating back to the years ‘64–‘69. 124 out of 500 photographs depict one building. These 124 photographs show various stages in the construction of what would become a family home; from pictures that display the ‘joy and pride of (land) ownership’ with the family celebrating the purchase, to laying out the foundation of the house, to the ‘topping out’ ceremony, to details of completed handrails and doors. The majority of the shots are without human participants, depicting the unbuilt house itself in several stages of completion – with and without the walls, with the skeleton of the roof, etc. These moments are also represented through different angles and techniques – close-up and from afar, portrait and landscape, in black and white and colour, elevational and panoramic.

The care with which the details have been photographed, the experimentation with camera angles as well as the duplication of certain shots, despite being almost identical, makes this archive challenge the ‘hacking’ relationship between photography and architecture that Benjamin established several decades earlier.

When these images were digitised and uploaded to a website, which a user can scroll up and down again and again, different temporalities merged and emerged and were thus given a new way to be seen – the time of taking these photographs of the construction site in the 1960s, the time of ageing of the original photographs from the 1960s up until now, the time of locating the archive at a Viennese flea market, digitising it and putting it together and finally, the time of looking at the photographs as part of a now digital archive. These now connected, scrollable temporalities along with the inner narrative of the series (from empty land to the house upon it)

provide a new way of seeing – the archive as an amateur slow motion film of the construction of a house in 124 frames, to be filled in with meaning. Why are there so many shots of one rather banal building, why shoot it from so many angles? Is this the point of family pride or construction necessity?

In the context of this archive, the house is set on the move not just from one temporality to another, but also from the affective attachment of the photographer to the affective detachment of the viewer. Through the care of photographing and the multiplicity of photographs of one single building, the aesthetic detachment that photography imposes on architecture becomes haptic, imaginary, material, performative and affectual. The viewer tries to comprehend the process, to understand the reason for camera angles, to live the banality of someone else’s everyday.

Writing about the movement of the rocks in a mountain as a conceptualisation of the temporality of space, Doreen Massey notes, ‘the conceptualization of the rocks as on the move leads even more clearly to an understanding of both place and landscape as events, as happenings, as moments that will be again dispersed’.3 Following Massey, we can suggest that the photographs of the different stages of the construction of one building for a family archive, taken by a family member, are indeed the conceptualisation of that building as an ontologically temporal event, continuously dispersed in the very process of seeing. This archive is the (temporary) product of the meeting up of these different temporalities and affects from which a new aesthetic experience of buildings, simultaneously banal and intensely affecting, private and public, meaningful and mysterious, can be negotiated.

1 2 3

Benjamin, Walter (2006) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, Selected Writings, Vol 3 (Harvard University Press), 101–33.

Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, London, 32–34.

Massey, Doreen (2006) Landscape as a Provocation: Reflections on Moving Mountains. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2).

’64–’69 25

Mr Charles Higley ‘Times’ Report Takako Hasegawa

I found the notebook in a small flea market off a narrow canal path in Oslo in 2005. My eyes were drawn to a clothbound notebook sitting upon a folded sheet of fabric on the ground. It was a travel journal dating back to 1887, its pages filled with dense handwriting in black ink. On the cover, firmly written in pencil, was ‘Charles Higley,“Times” Report’. This, I thought, must mean it had once belonged to an American journalist commissioned by Time magazine to travel from the us to Europe in the 19th century.

On the first page, it read: ‘Straßburg Ger, July 26th 1887 to August 10th – at Amsterdam Holland.

Inclusive’. In elegant script the notebook contained Mr Higley’s day-to-day walks and encounters.

I bought it for around 15 euros. The notebook started its journey in America in 1887, travelled through most of Europe in Mr Higley’s pocket, some 120 years later it had been picked up and brought to a small flea market in Oslo. It had crossed the Atlantic back and forth three times and would now accompany me to London and then perhaps Tokyo, where I grew up.

When I finally read it, I was disappointed. Mr Higley recorded his day-to-day activities in the most brief and non-personal manner, ‘crossed the Square in front of Station to the hotel where I got a room.

Took a turn around the square had a glass of beer and some good music. Returned to Hotel, wrote Jessie and then to bed.’ It had the sound of a schoolboy’s diary, he’d make a note of the time he woke up every day in the morning but not of his impressions or feelings nor his observations or thoughts on anything

he came across. Only occasionally he would remark, ‘The fortifications around the city of Straßburg are the finest or as fine as any in Germany’ or ‘the supper was splendid, nothing like I have ever put in my mouth’.

The notes were simply to transport him back to the time and place of his visits. He was not writing for his readers, but for himself. *** I never found out who Mr Charles Higley actually was.

I did once look him up on the internet to find only his birth and death registration recorded on an American family website. I thought it would be interesting to search further before I started this text on Mr Higley, who had now been sitting on my shelf for the last 16 years – this time it untangled a (twisted) string of historical journeys.

To start with, I noticed that the paper was gridded rather than lined, a curious choice for a journalist.

Gridded paper, called ‘coordinate paper,’ first became commercially available in 1794 in England.1 It wasn’t until a century later that the paper was recommended for high school and university math students in America.2 Mr Higley was on his expedition in 1887, which was just before the gridded paper was introduced in his home country. With this finding, I suspected that he might have acquired his notebook during his travels, most likely when he was in London.

I looked for evidence in his writing as to whether he had visited London and was pleased to find a remark from his time in Wiesbaden in Germany, ‘I heard

AArchitecture 43 26

more church bells here this morning than I have in any other place since leaving London.’

A series of new questions and suspicions arose.

I studied his birth and death registration in greater detail than before.4 His full name was Charles Wellington Higley from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was born on the 18 March, 1866 and died on the 7 April, 1936 in New York. This means he was 21 years old at the time of travelling. Was it possible that Time magazine had invested this young man with such significant responsibility? Perhaps still feasible, however, I was naïve not to have known that Time magazine was launched in 1923 in New York, long after his European excursion. Therefore, my romantic notion of Mr Higley being one of the pioneers of American journalism in Europe was a completely blind belief.

Was he just a young traveller keen to see the world then? When did Americans start to cross the Atlantic for leisure? A quick search landed upon an article in the Journal of Social History.3 ‘In the latter half of the nineteenth century, … tens of thousands of Americans travelled to Europe annually. Their designation in official statistics as “ocean-bound tourists” reflects that general view … the “habit” of European travel became general among wealthy Americans.’ There is a remark that he decided to extend his stay for a further month until 16 September, after which he asked for money from home, ‘Thursday July 28 First thing after my breakfast I telegraphed father for $150.00.

It cost me $3.00 but there was no other way to get it.’ $150 in the year 1887 is equivalent to $4,000 in 2021, roughly £3, 000’. Mr Higley was indeed one such ‘ocean-bound ‘wealthy American’ tourist’.

I now felt desperate to know if other notebooks existed. The family registration record provided enough information to navigate my new search – and what a delight it was to locate two earlier volumes.

They had been donated to a digital archive in a museum in Florida5, all 278 pages were scanned and uploaded in 2016. I was amused to see that the first notebook was lined and the second was the same as the one in my possession, gridded. I am convinced that he acquired these two gridded notebooks in Victorian London.

The museum’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library lists an abstract of the first two volumes of Mr Charles Wellington Higley’s travel journals.

Glasgow and take the train to London for the Queen Victoria Jubilee in June of 1887. Volume [2] describes travels from July 1st through July 26th, from Paris to Straßburg, Germany.

The first volume tells us that he embarked on his European expedition on 20 May, 1887, the second volume ends on 26 July. He starts a new notebook – the one I have – in Straßburg on the same day, ending with a note ‘Continued in Next Book’ on the 10 August in Amsterdam. It was young Mr Higley’s witty pretence that he inscribed ‘“Times” Report’ on the cover. The inverted comma for “Times” was a telling sign. He must be winking at me – ‘I’ve got you!’

1

2

Diary of a trip to Europe by Charles W. Higley, President of the State Bank of Frazee in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He and his traveling companion, Walter, depart Cedar Rapids from New York city via Chicago. From New York they travel to

3

4 5

Michael Friendly, Daniel J Denis. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization. 2001. Accessed: April 15, 2021. http://www.datavis.ca/milestones/.

Alexandre Borovik. Mathematics under the Microscope. 2008. Accessed: April 15, 2021. https://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/graphed-paper/.

Douglas Hart. “Social Class and American Travel to Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century, with Special Attention to Great Britain” Journal of Social History, Volume 51, Issue 2, Winter 2017, Oxford University Press. https://www.geni.com/people/Charles-Higley/6000000002435316171 Diary of Charles W. Higley, Cedar Rapids, Iowa [May-July 1887]. Digital Catalogue, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University. https://digital. wolfsonian.org/WOLF078003/00001/.

’64–’69 27

The Monstrance A Comedy in three Acts and seven Scenes Mike Nelson

AArchitecture 43 32

CHARACTERS

MEHMET (age: 37) Besuited in a two-buttoned tweed suit tucked into mid-calf-length leather boots that would have originally have been issued by the military. Hair of mid-length, grown out short back and sides. He is holding a piece of rough sawn timber, 120 × 80 × 1200 mm.

FRANZ (age: 42) Dressed in a loose-fitting work shirt and canvas work trousers with turn-ups – reminiscent of a previous decade – worn over boots. A Tyrolean fur felt trilby sits atop his dark hair. He is holding a roofer’s axe of steel shaft and leather bound handle.

STEPHANIE (age: 61) Woman with mid-length dark, wavy hair, possibly dyed, parted to the right.

Dressed in a patterned cotton blouse and heavy wool mid-calf A-line skirt. Over the top is a thick cotton apron with pockets to front – these bulge with undisclosed objects or the memory of them. American tan stockings and fur lined ‘butterfly’ slipper boots. She is cleaning something with a tea towel.

’64–’69 33

CHARACTERS

MAX(IMILLIAN) #1 (age unknown) A non-speaking part with face obscured by the length of timber he is supporting.

Loose canvas jacket, canvas hat just visible above timber.

MAX(IMILLIAN) #2 (age unknown) A non-speaking part who appears with his back to us and head obscured by the junction of two lengths of timber – one is the opposite end to the same timber held by max ( imillian ) # 1 on which franz and mehmet balance. Bomber jacket in leather, canvas work trousers and a nail pouch slung to the left hip, a canvas bag supported on a leather strap.

KURT (age: 59) Clean-shaven man dressed in an outfit more befitting a decorator than the builder he appears to be. Mid-thigh-length white dust coat with matching trousers in canvas, white peaked cap to match – somewhat reminiscent of a German military field cap. He is holding a shovel and wearing old shoes – slip-ons with paint splatters and spray from previous jobs, their heel section creased and crumpled from excessive wear and changing.

AArchitecture 43 34

ACT ONE Set within the timber and brick structure of an unnamed building with a backdrop of silver birch and birdsong; the repeated sound of a cuckoo can be heard at intervals of three minutes. It is unclear as to whether these sounds emanate from birds within the woodland or from max and max, imitating the bird call, their faces obscured. The stage is flooded with the yellow hue of a sodium bulb of a street light that all but renders the scene in black and white.

SCENE 1 A conversation between franz and mehmet – whilst balancing on a timber held aloft by max#1 and max#2 – about the building techniques employed for the structure and the relevant tools for such a task. Cultural differences ignite a heated exchange on the suitability and historical pertinence of the axe. franz focuses on prehistory and the Neolithic usage in the area, mehmet jokes about the Crusades.

’64–’69 35

SCENE 2 The conversation escalates around Christianity and Islam and their respective prophets and saints. There is a suggestion that the structure is for a building of worship…

SCENE 3 franz mis-hits a nail with the aforementioned axe, a running joke ensues from the previous conversation around the words ‘stigma’ and ‘stigmata’. The sound of the cuckoo is heard repeatedly, max#2 rattles his pouch of nails, he is asked to desist, a confusion arises around which ‘max’ they are addressing. The shouting escalates.

AArchitecture 43 36

ACT TWO A construction site – unclear as to whether it is the same or different. The sound of the cuckoos continues; this suggests that perhaps this is part of, the reverse, or adjacent to the location of act one. The lower hills of a mountainous area can be seen in the distance over a low stone wall. A man, kurt, is mixing concrete; a woman, stephanie, is cleaning something. Both intermittently gaze upwards at the sky.

SCENE 1 Conversation centres on the discovery of a well whilst excavating for the foundations of the construction. Again, the purpose of the building work is unclear but allusions are made to an apparition in the sky – we are led to believe that this could be explained by science and that the purpose of the work could be astronomical, an observatory of sorts. kurt complains about his suitability for the job.

’64–’69 37

SCENE 2 It becomes clear that stephanie is in fact performing a soliloquy, as when kurt interjects she speaks over him. The audience start to realise that only they can see kurt; it is also apparent that he is unaware of his spectral nature. As the scene moves on, kurt starts to doubt his reality and turns to address the audience. The staircase and things ‘concrete’ are clumsily overused metaphorically in a knowing pastiche of Shakespeare filtered through Stoppard.

AArchitecture 43 38

SCENE 3 stephanie continues to clean an unseen object throughout the scene. Her conversation turns to something found whilst franz and mehmet were digging the foundations for the staircase. We are now more aware of the interplay between the two acts and the structural ambitions of the building work and plot. stephanie reveals the object she has been cleaning, mehmet appears at the darkened window as if, literally, from the other side.

’64–’69 39

ACT THREE The light switches from the muted tones of the sodium lamp to bright tungsten, an effect akin to switching from black and white to colour. A work desk strewn with objects: lamps, a fan, books, bobbins of cotton, cameras and what appears to be a disarray of charred firewood with orange flames affixed sit around an open laptop. On the laptop two images sit side by side, their catalogue numbers clearly visible. The two scenarios of the preceding two acts are clearly recognisable too. A disembodied voice emanates from the machine.

SCENE 1 An invisible narrator confesses their tricks and obsessions, the voice is computer-generated so it is hard to appoint the authorship to any one of the characters.

AArchitecture 43 40

’64–’69 41

Take Care!

SCENE 2

might end. Sometimes I believe, (…) I am not up to my luck.

I know the story of the young lady.

I heard around.

I had to wait for it too long.

Wherever I go, he looks at me.

I imagined all this a bit

Isabelle, I cannot tell you how sorry I am.

Were you to have talked drunk? So do people. If only you had trusted my honest face back then.

Times change. Today, not I dance, but the men around me. Think about it.

take her position as private secretary on the 17th this month. She is expecting her for an introduction and so on and so forth.

SCENE 8

Why did you call me, you’re keeping me in suspense. And if I had also gone to search before? What do you know.

I’m not interested in you as a woman, I’m interested in you as a friend; open your bag.

TAGTRAUMVERSCHWÖRUNG

AArchitecture 43 42

– Loud Scream

Come here, darling!

SCENE 3

Sound of an arriving train

Can I speak to you for a moment?

I tremble because of my news, I fear everyday the world

SCENE 4

more chevaleresque.

Well, if I have to.

What do you think to beg him?

I am sorry to meet under such circumstances.

SCENE 5

Na (…)

– Excellent. I can let you go.

What does the gentleman say?

Listen to me. All of that just has to do with this rascal.

– Somehow, the communists must have gotten wind of this.

SCENE 6

Countess Norin received the message with delight, that Miss Riedl will

SCENE 7

Ha, I am so happy. The last one used to snore!

Well, that you really can’t say of me.

That means I’ll have to look again for somebody to live with me.

Come!

– Churchmusic

SHAN BHATTACHARYA

’64–’69 43

– A brass band starts to play

Remember, this evening is crucial for your future.

SCENE 9

Winchester, is that right? And, didn’t that surprise you? And, do you happen to remember where that was? Yes (…) He came back Yes Of course, I saw him by coincidence when he drove past with our bus.

I thought, I just have to see you again.

Is it possible?

– Bells ringing

Stay there!

I hadn’t felt as strongly, just how much we belong together. That thoughts and wishes sometimes slip out of our reach What is that?

Perhaps I just imagined all this.

AArchitecture 43 44

– A shot

SCENE 10

You have last seen your uncle, to my knowledge – in

SCENE 11

from the newspaper stand. He had a newspaper under his arm and a letter in his hand.

SCENE 12

SCENE 13

– Dog barking

SCENE 14

Go!

SCENE 15

What?

Watch the film

’64–’69 45

NOTHING IS INTERRUPTING YOU FROM EXISTENCE

I’m getting tired if there is constant noise around

Private Space is

Because if there is an emptiness in your head

AArchitecture 43 46

Which I want to call private

DARIYA CHEREMISINA

It means that all the problems have been solved

Nothing is interrupting you from existence

’64–’69 47

Das Dorf Valentin Wölflmaier

AArchitecture 43 48

Following Google Maps one finds the village by turning left from the federal road onto the trench-way after the second gas station in Gschnitz, here one will interrupt the children playing on the side of the road but should continue undisturbed by their warning cries, stubbornly following the trench-way until the children in the rear mirror are only children in the rear mirror who have resumed their harmless play. Having reached the junction of the road, after asphalt has turned to gravel and gravel to earth, one continues on foot, turns left and follows the path for an hour and a half through the forest and then through the so called Goaßschlucht.

But you must know that should you arrive at the village – having turned left at the second gas station, past the children’s warning cry, having witnessed the transformation of asphalt to gravel, gravel to earth, taken the left path by foot, first through the forest and then through the Goaßschlucht – the mayor will greet you personally. Following ancient tradition, he shall arrange for the biggest bull to be caught by its horns, slaughtered and exquisitely prepared, served, whole, with Zirbenschnaps at lantern light in your honour. And you will eat. Nobody but you will eat, you see, the bull is only for you.

Granted they will share some of the schnaps and the lantern light with you and they will tell tales of the village, of romantic poachers and of cheerful farmer’s daughters. They will wish to hear your tales too, they will wait attentively to listen, and the Zirbenschnaps will make you sing, oh how it will make you sing.

The entire village will hang on to each of your drunken words and patiently wait should you pause to take a bite of meat or a glass of schnaps. But, my friend, do not dare to slow, nor stop, that is to stop eating the bull until it is no more than a pile of bare bones. Should you leave but a bit of meat on even one bone – leaning back with a full stomach, excusing yourself with being too full or something of the kind – the entire village, jolly up until now, will angrily fall silent. I know what I am talking about, friend.

Before sending the children inside, one or two of the villagers, the teacher perhaps, out of compassion or religiosity will tell you: ‘you are to eat, quick, finish the bull, you idiot’.

But it will be too late and the teacher, caught in his attempt to save you, will be sent away together with the children. You will be led from the banquet to the meadow, where just a few hours ago, as they will tell you, behind a high fence the proud bull had grazed and yes, friend, take that as an accusation. Then, behind the tree in front of which they had earlier killed the bull, the priest will mark a cross on your forehead, consecrating your death with his final prayer.

And, after the Amen, they will place a noose around your neck and hang you from the tree but that will not be the end of it, your Amen is yet to come, friend! First, the mayor and priest, still in a civil manner, will bite your calf, yes, you heard right – one in the right and the other in the left. Then it will be the turn of the mayor’s wife, once she has tasted you there will be no stopping it. They will rush at you, jumping on each other’s shoulders and tear your meat off the bone, like you had ripped the meat off the bull – or should have. One or two of the villagers, the teacher perhaps, might drop their bite into the bloody grass to feign the ecstasy felt by their peers. But what good does this serve?

They won’t stop gnawing until nothing but your skeleton remains at the tree and they will take the remains and bring them to the miller, to ask he who mills the wheat to mill your bones into a fine flour, one that can be mixed into the fodder of the cows to nourish them in pregnancy, so to give birth to a proud, new bull…

’64–’69 49

Next issue

Distorted fish eye lens view of the Earth from International Space Station.

Nasa© Feb 11th 2016

The Warm War is an intermediary space. It is not the Cold War’s political hostility, espionage and nuclear dread that made up the power struggle between Federalism and Communism. Nor is it a ‘hot’ condition of war—best summarised by Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan—a carving of a boundary through total violence. The warm war is a murky conflict. It is being fought primarily with technocratic instruments, where its operatives traverse planetary infrastructures through covert military operations, insidious new modes of combat, deceptive targeting, and backroom policy transformation.

It is data warfare; never virtual, always material.

Information and misinformation flows through social media and mobile feeds.

For policy makers, military and corporate strategists, these noise machines become a battleground. This shifting axis of warfare continuously thickens and thins boundaries of negotiation.

One message pierces through the noise: findings from the latest IPCC Climate Report 2021 show that we are at a tipping point for action. Multiple and complex changes are already underway in every part of our planet, and we can expect ‘over the next 20 years, global temperature to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming’. The headline is trotted out so often that we forget the rupture that it implies.

Welcome to the Warm War, where willing or not, we all partake in a conflict of spatial re-organisation, amidst an irreducible entanglement, a complex knot of material and knowledge networks. Tethered and untethered, separated and yet enmeshed, we must move past the semiotic noise operations reducing action to a series of signs; fake targets, unthinking clichés, memes, hot air. These are not action. The planet needs action. aarchitecture aims to be a mosaic of the Warm War’s multiple frames, wherein its complexity can start to unravel and frame forms of planetary action.

aarchitecture 43 – Biographies

ALVA JUNG is a Second Year student at the aa, passionate about poetry, nature, sustainability and making people laugh.

ALEXANDER ERNST KLUGE is a German filmmaker, tv producer, writer, playwright, philosopher and lawyer. A multi-faceted intellectual, he became known as one of the most influential representatives of New German Cinema, which he co-founded and developed in theory and praxis.

He also won two golden lions.

PATRICIA ROIG CANEPA graduated from the aa and is now writing about the names of water for her upcoming dissertation at Goldsmiths, University of London.

DILARA KOZ is a visual artist and researcher with a background in architecture. She is interested in the potential of curated spaces and the performance of artistic creation to stimulate thought and an awareness of one’s own presence.

BART PRICE is creative director of Black Country, New Road and makes art engaging with the world of royalty free stock image and video databases. He attended the University of Cambridge, the Ruskin School of Art and is currently studying Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Arts.

GÉRALDINE RECKER and FABIAN TOBIAS REINER are architects based in Zurich.

They studied at the eth Zurich, as well as Harvard Gsd and the aa respectively.

COMTE/MEUWLY Cultivating an ability to be astonished.

Constantly looking for unexpected discoveries. Interpreting them as moments with narrative evocation.

Characters. Scenes. Objects. Roles.

Anchor points stitched together.

Brought in relation by the project.

Launching iterating narrative loops.

MAYA KLEIMAN is a Diploma student at the aa.

MARIA KOROLKOVA is a researcher, educator and curator.

She has recently published the co-edited collection ‘Miscommunications: Errors, Mistakes, Media’.

She is the current Head of Media Portfolio at the School of Design, University of Greenwich, where she also leads MA Media and Creative Cultures.

TAKAKO HASEGAWA acts at the intersection of contemporary dance and architecture. She explores the experience of architecture as a form of choreography.

Currently she is pursuing her PhD at the aa.

MU ZHANG is a diploma student at the aa. Obsessed with the sanctity and site-specificity of (a) space, she is interested in the language, Ritual and ‘liminality’ of Architecture and its (increasingly compromised) cultural and educative potential.

MIKE NELSON is an artist living and working in London and has exhibited widely across the world.

Nelson represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 and 2007.

SHAN BHATTACHARYA is an artist based in Kolkata who works with photography and video. His text-and-image narrative work ‘Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose’ was co-published

by Tulika Books and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation in 2020.

DARIYA CHEREMISINA grew up in the chaotic Moscow megapolis. She played violin and drums, was part of a survival training community, worked in a bilingual educational centre and volunteered at an integrative summer camp. She is a Diploma student at the aa.

VALENTIN WÖLFLMAIER worked as a Holocaust Memorial Servant in Berlin, he studied German literature and philosophy at the Humboldt University and the University of Cambridge and is currently studying Aesthetics at the Goethe University and Creative Writing at Hildesheim University. He is editor of the Panoptic Magazine. He writes poetry, prose, essays and drama.

In this issue Alva Jung heißt uns herzlich willkommen. Alva Jung gives a warm welcome. Page 2 Dear readership, a first; an excerpt from Alexander Kluge’s ‘fifth book’, in English. Page 3 In-between a box and a screen, Patricia Roig Canepa encounters the archive. Page 5 Dilara Koz calls for a halt to photographs. (Reuters) Page 7 Re-search, Bart Price. Page 8 Recker Reiner Richtfest! Page 10 The Adriens (Comte/ Meuwly) enjoy specifics. Page 16 Maya Kleiman, from ‘the island of the blessed’. Page 20 Maria Korolokova tries to comprehend the process. Page 22 Ms. Hasegawa and Mr. Higley. Page 24 Mu Zhang, We thank our official global lead partner. Page 28 Coming to a stage near you; Mike Nelson’s ‘The Monstrance’. Page 30 Heimatfilm.

Shan Bhattacharya. The word has connotations specific to German culture, German society and specifically German Romanticism, German nationalism, German statehood and regionalism so that it has no exact English equivalent.1 Page 40 Dinner at Dariya’s. Page 44 ‘Have you sufficed?’, asks Valentin Wölflmaier. Page 46 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimat

Edited by students at the Architectural Association