2013 WATERWORLD // AA Summer School
INVERSE LONDON
_______________ Arantza Ozaeta & Álvaro Martín
ESCENARIO And then, we have a very strong urge to make a new beginning.1 Nowadays, London turns its back on the Thames River, the river runs through it and divides the city, and citizens are not aware of 2 the fact that water can cover parts of their city in a close future . This Unit inverts these 3 facts and proposes a new scenario where: the city will face a waterland, the river will be a link, and citizens will be aware of flood capacity of their world. A new working frame is needed, a parallel scenario where testing ideas and experiments that helps us to define possible relationships between London and water. What would happen if the map of the city is inverted: land will be water and water will be land? London would be a waterland, composed by a minimum tongue of land and a vast extension of water. This is a process of inversion and erasure: texture is taken off the map, and a new territory emerges. This potential territory is characterized as a waterworld: where inhabitants live with “the active struggle between earth and water”3. This is a world where the land is scarce and valuable, and where new colonization forms of the water appear.
New Cartography of ‘Inverse London’: a Waterworld (Arantza Ozaeta & Alvaro Martín, 2013)
BRIEF The Unit will develop large scale re-imaginings of the city’s present at a new context that address water as a parameter to define an speculative scenario where students will explore certain conditions which define the present world, such as instability, temporality and new forms of social space. By the abstraction of the city form from the traditional point of view, we pretend to encourage the detection of subtle and new dynamics in the urban life which shape a changeable and adaptive city, understood as a landscape of events. Chosen parameters will trigger the design of a parallel London from the most infrastructural (as we can see in some examples of Metabolist plans by Tange or Maki) to the most subtle proposals (take Ishigami’s Project “Island Garden” as an example). The Unit explorations will address 3 key questions: 1. How to colonize a piece of land that follows the trace of Thames River? In a world with scarce squared meters of land, they become valuable. We will deal with topics such as density, porosity, economy and connectivity. Will we use the land to plant forests or to build towers? Will we build the rest of the city from this piece of land or far away? Will this lineal element connect the islands or will it separate them? 2. How can we colonize the vast extension of water? How will these new Islands look like? In a context dominated by an unstable and volatile element which depends on parameters, such as the humidity, temperature, wind, topography, etc., how will the new city be redefined? Which parameters will define its infrastructures, its public space, its energetic equipments, its social space? 3. How can this speculative work about a parallel scenario inform the present? A new and unexpected context encourages risky and creative attitudes. New situations and parameters incorporates other visions to the debate, students are encouraged to adopt vocabularies, graphics and techniques from disciplines related to the new world (geography, cartography, ecology, climatology, economy, etc.).
METODOLOGY & SCHEDULE Since current society requires immediate and responsible solutions, this Unit encourages training and creativity of students by production and self-evaluation. This is an intensive course, and doing something quickly requires fast movements, immediate answers and constant self-criticism. We don’t waste time in making up huge theories or in developing intricate ramblings. A first action -immediate, vigorous and even thoughtless- of the students shouldn’t be inhibited by complexity. Every week new precise instructions are provided and we follow them; we must just ‘jump in’ without knowing the result. We will discover it.
1
KOOLHAAS, Rem; MAU, Bruce. S,M,L,XL. Monacelli Press, 1995. Overall theme AA Summer School. 2013. 3 DELEUZE, Gilles. Deserted islands and other texts. 1953‐1974. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. 2
2013 WATERWORLD // AA Summer School
1st week: A FEAST AROUND THE CITY
At this first step, we will work all around the same table, as in a Feast. A FEAST is a kind of project in which each guest at table -agent- seems to act individually, but everyone is perfectly coordinated with the whole group to perform the act of having lunch. Our table will be the city of London at July 2013, our case study. All students take their places around this common working table where they interact and they are in close contact with each other work all the time. This physical coexistence generates a constant debate: arguments and agreements, rejection and needs, problems and solutions, questions and answers. The Unit will organize a day-visit along the Thames River and other aquatic sites, in order to detect ways of living in a metropolitan ‘waterworld’ (such as the house-boat village at Bermondsey), infrastructures, border conditions, etc. It consists of a movement from the laboratory to the real world, the ‘outside’, where a phenomenon will be caught and brought to the laboratory. This new material, free of its outer inputs, will reveal its own nature.
Kenzo Tange, Plan for Tokyo 1960
XDGA, Monaco extension 2002
Ron Herron, Seaside Bubbles 1966
Document 1: CARTOGRAPHY LONDON 2013 Every student will add its own layer of information, the superposition of all of them will produce an informed common document, a Cartography. Cartographies are “geographical maps of a place”, but we would like to redefine them as “geological maps of a place”, what means “a representation technique that shows measurable and descriptive relations of a place dealing with its composition, internal structure and generative process”. We use diagrams to describe reality and we apply them in the construction of models and new cartographies that represent the Latent Environment of a place, these are cartographies of what is possible, what is real and what is needed. +Our Unit will be visited by Theo Lorenz, AA Interprofessional Studio [AAIS] Director. Together with him we will explore alternative forms of collaboration between multiple creative professions, he will expose hidden ‘worknet’ between multiple professions and their products. nd
2
week: AN INVENTORY OF COLONIZATION PROTOTYPES
This Unit works as if in a LABORATORY where creativity is a result of experimentation. We could take risks without fear of mistakes: launch and discard hypotheses. The whole group will debate about forms of colonization of this new waterworld. We introduce the notion of “Island”. An island is a part or terrain surrounded by water completely. It can’t be conceived without the water, its inhabitants are aware of this condition between land and water, between the stable and the unstable. It’s an entity, it’s complete. Its perimeter, boundary, is dynamic, its position related to the sea constant changes.
Jackup floating structure 2010
Floating Casino Boat Blue Chip 2
Oil platform
Document 2: INVENTORY OF COLONIZATION PROTOTYPES Students will work in teams of 2/3p. They will look for references of “colonization prototypes and islands” such as oil rigs and jackups (productive islands), floating resorts (moving islands), icebergs (temporary islands), Sealand (micronations), etc. All of them will be compiled in a common document: an Atlas or Inventory. From their compilation and analysis, we will extract the qualities which will define our models to colonize the water. Here students will produce 4/5 PROTOTYPES of the new islands which reconstitute the city of London in a new waterworld. While models are representations of final results, the main advantage of the prototype is that it constitutes a testing document. It can (and has to) be forced to suffer modifications as a part of the working process. Project is considered as an experiment. +Our Unit will be visited by Francisco Triviño, an architect and founding member and director of Hipo-Tesis. He will join the teachers group with the aim of encouraging students how to embrace other disciplines and fields of knowledge in the definition of models of colonization. rd 3 week: A PROJECT AS A PRODUCT & AN IMAGE
Since we have defined and built our prototypes of models with which colonize the waterland of our alternative London, we will extend their definitions by the production of an image. Here students will adopt the role of a traveler who visits the islands and take a picture of a special place, which will represent the environment of the island. The Artist Joan Fontcuberta works in this direction,
2013 WATERWORLD // AA Summer School
by creating evidences of nonexistent places, but real in the mind of the artist. By the technique of the montage (cinema) replacing the photo-montage, the students will explode their fantasy. They will produce images showing a deeper definition of their islands: social space, inhabitants, materials, fashion, technology, etc.
Doc.1_ Cartography: Diller Scofidio
Doc.2_ Atlas: Didi-Huberman
Doc.3_ Postcards: On Kawara
Document 3: POSTCARDS A postcard consists of a photo and a text. A photo is an evidence of a done trip. A souvenir of a place as a prefabricated instant. The text is a short and brief description of the perception of this place which adds information that is invisible in the photo. This document addresses the idea of the ephemeral. +Our Unit will be visited by LOTOCOHO, two designers specialized on jewelry. On one hand, they will teach students about the relevance and construction of an image -references, messages, technique-. On the other hand, they will show students how to deal with a project as a product.
To finish, the Unit will go on a ‘trip’! The prototypes of colonization and islands will be worked as jewelry pieces which will be exhibited in the final jury together with an image and a short text (postcards). All the prototypes together will constitute a single common model of the new city of London: The Inverse London. Students, Visiting Teachers and Unit Staff will pack our bags, and we will travel all together through the new Inverse London, visiting its neighborhoods produced by the students. We will be travelers, conquerors, seekers, adventurers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Atlas, ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas? MNCARS, 2010. KOOLHAAS, Rem; MAU, Bruce. S,M,L,XL (especially, XL chapter). Monacelli Press, 1995. KOOLHAAS, Rem; OBRIST, Hans Ulrich. Project Japan. Metabolism Talks... Taschen, 2011. LATOUR, Bruno. Paris: Ville invisible. Web version: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/CAST/index.html OUMAN, Ole; et al. Archis 198: Islands. Archis / Artimo, 2003. SCHALANSKY, Judith. Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. Penguin Books, 2010. SMITH, Dan. 100 Places you will never visit: The world’s most secret locations. Quercus Publishing Plc, 2012. SORIANO, Federico; URZÁIZ, Pedro. Pop Up. Architectures that appear and disappear. Fisuras, 2013.
CV &Bio Unit Staff: Arantza Ozaeta and Alvaro Martín head the architectural office TallerDE2 since 2007 [ www.tallerde2.com ], which makes an ongoing commitment to research and knowledge, both in training and innovative practice. Their work has international scope, been recognized, published and awarded on several occasions. Arantza Ozaeta and Alvaro Martín’s work is mainly developed between Spain and Germany, where they are teaching, researching and building recent winning competitions. They studied architecture at the Madrid Polytechnic ETSAM and at the TU Delft of The Netherlands. In Rotterdam they collaborated in MVRDV. They completed the coursework for the PhD at the Madrid Polytechnic ETSAM in the Department of Advanced Projects in 2010 where they are PhD candidates. They have been teaching at the Architectural Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain), Hochschule Coburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Ural State Technical University of Ekaterimburg (Russia). In addition, they have actively participated in debates and lectures. Arantza Ozaeta and Alvaro Martín won the European competition Europan-9 in Selb (Germany) in 2008, where they are developing an entire master-plan through the Urban Acupuncture Principle. Recently, they have received the German Bauwelt Prize 2013 “First Works” for their first completed project.
Visiting Teachers: Theo Lorenz, AA Interprofessional Studio AAIS Director [ www.interprofessionals.net ]. He is an architect, painter and media artist. Trespassing between art and architecture his interest lies within the relation of digital and physical space and the associations between subjects and objects. He is a member of n-o-m-a-d.org, spatialwork.net and director of T2 spatialwork ltd [ t-2.org ] together with Dr. Tanja Siems.
Francisco Triviño, founding member and director of Hipo-Tesis [ www.hipo-tesis.eu ], a thought-platform in an embryonic stage based on transversal scientific knowledge emerging from the collection and publication of independent texts. Launched by a team of architects, it embraces other disciplines and fields of knowledge open to contribute. Anna Tomich, a british designer and partner of LOTOCOHO [ www.lotocoho.com ], together with Jorge López, a spanish photographer and artist. LOTOCOHO work makes visible the geometric constructions and physical/material that imply decisions and delimit cultures. They generate spaces of exchange where the physical rule of geology, the connections and its expressions are assimilated by its users. Their work has been published in a number of specialized publications in Architecture, Photography and Design.