Accattone #7 (preview)

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A Monument to the Celebration of Life Costantino Nivola’s!garden in Springs, New York

Domesticity and Hospitality a catalogue of references, typologies, devices and ecosytems

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Homes for Luxembourg Studio SNCDA!et al. at the Venice Architecture Biennale 32

Metal Living Alice Paris on De Smet Vermeulen, Osamu Ishiyama and Kenji Kawai 50!

TEN’s Avala House 12

Le Montavoies Wim Cuyvers’s notes on the hospitality of land

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Cuma of Hope moilesautresart 190!

DSCTHK Where Life is Beautiful

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168!

Fireworks Piovenefabi’s dictionary of the architecture of the feast

Views of North America ideological panoramic wallpapers

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Catalogues, Inventories, Myths Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou on Superstudio’s objects of affection

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El Condor Pasa Carlo Goncalves visits Smiljan Radic’s estate in Vilches, Chile

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Konrad Neufert Aglaia Konrad vs.

Ernst Neufert 136

Reversible Destiny The Museum of Mistakes visits two projects of Arakawa & Gins in Japan

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1 Borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, ‘Casting My Perils Before Swains’, in McLuhan: Hot and Cool (New York: Signet, 1967), p. xii.

The original quote reads: ‘And consistency is a meaningless term to apply to an explorer. If he wanted to be consistent, he would stay home. … I don’t explain – I explore.’

2 Georges Bataille, ‘Critical Dictionary’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas, 1995), p. 51, originally published in the journal Documents no. 7 (December 1929), p. 382.

This issue deals with open-air domesticity and the diplomatic hospitality of land. It presents intellectual and architectural projects, both contemporary and historical, for alternative modes of living. These projects are formulated neither as manifestos nor as wishful thinking.

Rather, they emerge from the situated practice of their actors. Their evidence – if they do prove anything at all – is empirical, intrinsic, seldom replicable, smudged. Neither do they explain much: they explore.

Since its inception, the editorial project of Accattone as a creative and critical space has insisted on challenging the main procedures, ways of seeing and aesthetic codes of the built environment.

It has done so through the practices of its contributors, in a minor mode, released from the burden of demonstration. If it wanted to be consistent, it would stay home.1 Some contributions are cut loose, others don’t land where expected. Nonetheless, a core question emerges from these materials, the question of standards: of building regulations, industrial products, domesticity, real-estate logics and landownership. Depending on the contribution, these standards shift their position towards and relations with architecture, turning oppressive or proving surprisingly liberating for the domestic environment in which they intervene. Osamu Ishiyama and De Smet Vermeulen found architectural freedom in standard industrial products in steel for warehouses and road infrastructure, promoting counter-intuitive forms of ‘Metal Living’. Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins opposed all housing standards to raise the tactile, ambulatory and visual thresholds of attention of the people living in their Reversible Destiny projects.

Sara Noel Costa De Araujo’s proposal ‘Homes for Luxembourg’ envisions shortlease contracts to enable mobile and modular living on the country’s many empty building plots, making room for a new demography: modular units to free housing, and living, from landownership. Through legislation on public-access buildings and constant work on ‘everything at the same time: buildings, paths, forest, meadows’, Wim Cuyvers makes the land of his refuge in the Jura mountains hospitable to foreigners and outsiders.

Breaking the codes of standard living – and thus of typical ‘house design’ – is at the core of sculptor Costantino Nivola’s appropriation of the garden of his house near New"York in the 1950s. The garden, where he moved many indoor activities, including his workshop, became the heart of family life – in his words, a ‘monument to the celebration of life’. TEN’s Avala House, completed last year on the hills near Belgrade,

applies a similar strategy, to the point that interior functions overlap in a single space that successively becomes the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living room and terrace.

Smilijan Radic’s series of constructions in Vilches, Chile, are scattered props inhabiting the land of his family estate.

These projects bear resonances with other ‘anti-villas’ published in past issues. Elissa and Alvar Aalto’s Summer House in Muuratsalo (1954) was intended both as a testing site for brick patterns and as a hut to experience the lake and woods outside.

Arno Brandlhuber, Markus Emde and Thomas Burlon’s Anti-Villa in Krampnitz (2015) counters the soothing typology of the villa-by-the-lake by taking possession of an old factory building – with rough interventions and some tactics to sidestep buildings codes and thermal comfort. Éric Lapierre’s house for a collector (2012) accommodates all uses in 16 rooms with the same dimensions, some without a roof.

René Heyvaert’s house for his brother Gilbert’s family, near Ghent (1958), negotiated modernist housing design with a strong economy of means, making the most of the standard, cheap materials now available in all home-renovation shops.

In such projects, Ernst Neufert’s catalogue of standards is bent, perverted or attacked, yet it still hovers over these houses as their deforming mirror. Artist Aglaia Konrad distorts it literally and brutally on the space of the page, overlapping photocopies of the book with photographs from her own archive.

As usual in Accattone, this issue also insists on methods: Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou’s analysis of Superstudio investigates their practice of cataloguing, at once complicit with and resistant to the ‘mechanisms and semantic codes of power’. Can a catalogue be non-prescriptive, liberating? ‘A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks’, wrote Georges Bataille in his ‘Critical Dictionary’.2 This programme for action echoes Piovenefabi’s ABC of the ‘Architecture of the Feast’, which releases the limits of architecture towards a softer but never delicate interaction with people, rituals, ephemera and places. (By contrast, Jérôme André and Thibaut Blondiau’s ongoing catalogue DSCTHK does the opposite, showing Belgian discos in their silent flesh and bones.) Finally, the catalogue on the following pages investigates references, types, devices and ecosystems in relation to ‘Domesticity and Hospitality’ – a research that anticipated the making of this issue and functions as a continuation of this editorial.

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Hospitality, yes, but welcoming what: above all, wanting to welcome wandering: those who ramble.

The bolt allows you to open or shut the door, as people did hundreds of years before you, without locking the door, without letting the door close by itself with an automatic door closer, without paying the slightest attention to the door, to the bolt; the bolt is a sign of attention, care, love.

Le Montavoix, refuge de passage gardé

Le Montavoies — Hospitality WIM CUYVERS

Aux Orgières, the abandoned house

And all of a sudden I ‘cross paths’ with Fernand Deligny, a breath of independence and dissoluteness, someone also devoid of illusion.

This French pedagogue (1913–1996) who refused to work for institutions watches over me, lends me support and encouragement: he lived the final thirty years of his life with autistic people, followed them, was convinced (he, the pedagogue!) that he could teach them nothing and, moreover, that he could learn nothing from them (there is no solace in ‘learning from’). He knew that all he could do was follow them, just trot along with them, that he could plot and trace their rambles in plans without codes, without references. But in retrospect he was able to ascertain that autistic people possess sensitivities that we ‘normal people’ do not, that the spots they returned to time and again indicated underground watercourses, strong magnetic fields or other phenomena that we ‘normal people’ are not even aware of. Deligny points out the importance of the fact that these autistic people did not have language at their disposal, that ‘walking is their only opportunity to describe themselves’.

Wim Cuyvers, ‘From the Dream of the Novel Turned to Stone to the Acknowledgment of Public Space’, OASE no. 70, Architecture & Literature. Reflections/Imaginations (2006), pp. 26–27.

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The cadastral map informed me that the plot of land of almost 27 hectares that I bought in 2007 in the Haut-Jura in France, close to the small town of Saint-Claude, included four parts: Aux Orgières, Aux Couronnes, Le Montavoix and Les Chaumettes du Haut.

LE MONTAVOIES I was immediately charmed by the name ‘Le Montavoix’ and decided, at the start, to use this name for the land as a whole and for the ‘refuge de passage gardé’ – a type of shelter that is only open to the public when the keeper is present – that I wanted to set up in one of the two old farmhouses on the land and which therefore historically bore this name: it would be the mountain, the mont that would speak and no longer me.

Me I could make room, I could remain silent.

Some elderly people from the area later told me that they did not know the name ‘Montavoix’ (although it is already mentioned on the ‘Napoleonic map’, the cadastral map of 1812).

They explained to me that they used the name ‘Montawé’. And later a lady told me that she had always thought it was ‘Mont-a-way’: a mont with ‘a way’, as in English. It stuck in my mind: I had already sketched the winding rocky path leading to the refuge so many times.

I began to use the name Le Montavoie (the mountain with a way, a path) for the land as a whole and I kept the name Le Montavoix for the refuge. Later, I realized that ‘voix’ can be singular, but also plural: a voice or voices – and later still, I realized that the plural was better and truer than the singular and that ‘voie’ and ‘voies’ sound exactly the same and that ‘voies’ (plural) was much more accurate than ‘voie’ (singular). For years already I had been busy making old paths passable again.

There wasn’t only one path to the refuge, there wasn’t only one path on the mountain, there were several. And from the start I began walking on the boundaries of the land, so that paths developed there (as opposed to a fence around a plot). It is not surprising that in several places I found traces of old paths on these ancient cadastral boundaries, these

boundary paths are crossed by all the paths leading to the land or leaving the land.

From the start I wanted to have a refuge there, to keep a shelter open. Visitors were often surprised that I was busy, that we (many people helped) were busy all over the place instead of just, or at least first and foremost, working on the (building of the) shelter. From the start I always worked on everything at the same time: buildings, paths, forest, meadows ... And from the start, the ‘refuge de passage gardé’, I mean the specific legal framework of the building welcoming the public, not accessible to firefighters, and the ideas about how a refuge functions, were indicators of the approach to the site as a whole. Work on the whole site became increasingly important – the whole site being more important and more interesting than the building of the shelter: the building of the refuge, a means; the land, a goal.

A passer-by once told me: ‘It’s incredible how much more receptive the land has become since you started working here.’ I was surprised that someone passing by on their mountain bike, someone who I thought was going up and down as fast as possible, could say that and would have noticed it. So the little old Montavoix farmhouse became a ‘refuge de passage gardé’, fully accepted by the authorities. The Aux Orgières farmhouse is still a building that gives the impression that it has been somewhat neglected, the ground floor always remaining open. No applications were submitted for this building and nothing was authorized.

HOSPITALITY Below are a few objects I try to name and list, a few ways of doing things, a few interventions that have made Le Montavoies more welcoming.

It appears that interventions or ways of doing things I had used in the ‘refuge de passage gardé’ Le Montavoix could be implemented very simply outdoors, in the landscape, or could be translated very simply.

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OBJECTS

Inviting someone to eat or someone to stay is not the type of hospitality I mean

HORIZONTAL PLANES Contrary to what architects often think, a horizontal plane is, ultimately, at least in the mountains, far more important than a vertical element, than verticality.

BENCHES A chair is for someone, a bench is for everyone.

A bench against a wall, against a hedge, against a pile of wood, ‘works’ better than a bench without a ‘back’.

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OBJECTS

Aux Orgières, table

TABLES

Le Montavoix, table (dining room)

Tables are planes for eating or working. Sitting around a table.

No, neither the empty room nor the empty table are cold: they only leave room, they are not taken.

Le Montavoix, tables (dormitory)

Le Montavoix, dormitory

FLAT SURFACES FOR SLEEPING Some visitors tend to utterly destroy hospitality in the space: backpacks and lots of gear on the table, jackets on the floor, spread out on benches: taking up space, privatizing.

Les Orgières, four flat surfaces that can serve as beds

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ground unexpectedly giving way, with effortless resilience, to his passionately delivered attack, thus turning his own strength against him’.4 A tactic which, as Lao Tzu observes, is similar to water: adapting to everything because undergoing everything and giving way without ever retreating.

2 André Loeckx, ‘Architecture with no Style’, in Resumptions, Compressions, Economy, cit., p. 42.

3 De Smet and Vermeulen, cit., p. 133.

(2) House for Martina in Wetteren (1994) coexists critically with the housing estate ‘without qualities’ of which it is a part: ‘Criticism employs the language of the criticized so the latter cannot easily evade it.’ André Loeckx, cit., p. 44. Photo © Carine Demeter

ECONOMY OF IDEAS The economic aspect of De Smet and Vermeulen’s practice seems to demonstrate a certain sensitivity with regard to the world. An attempt to grasp reality without preconceptions.

Commissions are received as situations which, since they cannot be simplified, call for the formulation of singular responses.

In a second phase, the economy is a way of reinforcing what already exists. It is a matter of reporting on the perceived complexity while being careful not to impose too much order on it. This comes from the belief that it is precisely by operating on reality that one can hopefully impact it. This is the case with ‘House for Martina’ (2), which questions the housing estate by means of architecture, for example by doing without a front door.

‘There is one entrance for both people and cars. One cannot survive here without a car.’2 The economy of the intervention is not so much a question of abstinence as of the right dosage, a certain form of restraint. It is ultimately the economy of the blows delivered that matters. ‘Nothing serves only one single purpose.’3 The architects try to meet several demands with a single gesture. The architectural effectiveness of this gesture must transcend what it is responding to. In other words, this is what Richard Buckminster Fuller theorized under the notion of synergy: his favourite illustration was the behaviour of the steelnickel-chromium alloy, whose tensile strength far exceeds the capacity of its components.

The semi-circular corrugated-iron cover of House K. illustrates this principle. Façade, roof and walls all come together in the same structural and architectural gesture. (3) ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ Curiously, the economy that characterizes the practice of De Smet and Vermeulen reminds me of a Trojan strategy, if not of what I know of some formidably efficient martial arts. I am thinking of that ‘system of self-defence whereby one brings one’s opponent to the

(3) House K. in Z. Photo © Carine Demeter

HANGAR HOUSE Among the projects exhibited at deSingel, House K. did not go unnoticed. A year after its completion, it featured in the Architetti della Fiandra exhibition in the Belgian pavilion at the 1991 Venice Biennale. Geert Bekaert called it a remarkable work.5 Besides an unobtrusive chimney, nothing interferes with this archetypal volume, five metres high and twice as wide. It would be less of a surprise to see the black warehouse along a trunk road than in the middle of this suburban housing estate southwest of Ghent. ‘And what would we do if we had to build there?’6 This is the question De Smet and Vermeulen raised about this territory, which is so thinly spread out that it seems impossible to say whether it belongs to the city or the country. Surprisingly, they see the choice of the inhabited hangar as being a logical choice and the result of the commission. ‘The clients wanted a house where they could live both together and apart.

In order to realize the consequent large house within a modest budget we opted for a semiprefab method, whereby the volume would be delivered and assembled in prefabricated sections: a half-cylindrical iron hangar.’7

4 Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (1948; London: Random House, 1989), p. 25.

5 Geert Bekaert, Contemporary Architecture in Belgium (Tielt: Lannoo, 1995), p. 221.

6 De Smet and Vermeulen, cit., p. 117.

7 Ibid., p. 118.

(6) © archief Henk De Smet & Paul Vermeulen.

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(5) The characters on the sheet look at me and incite me to think of a parallel between here and there. A promise of continuity I had made to myself.

Photo © Carine Demeter

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The plot is 25 m wide and 80 m long. The footprint of the house, 16 by 16 m, fully occupies the authorized building line.

Everyone in the Area Thinks Zoki is a Football Star TEN, AVALA HOUSE

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Avala House stands in a hilly rural environment just a few kilometres outside Belgrade, Serbia.

It is an elegant steel and glass structure, rational yet porous, raised above the sloping landscape.

Its design and construction unfolded over several years as a close collaboration between TEN (the architects) and Zoki (the client), who involved his relatives in the project as well as recurring collaborators and several local resources he managed to harness. This made it possible to build the house on the smallest of budgets, inventing custom-made details and site operations. A very personal and rather unusual process influenced by the specific backgrounds of the designers and client, and reflected in an extensive WhatsApp exchange that lasted throughout the project. A lifeline, and a place to share references, weather forecasts, snapshots and news from the construction site, screenshots and pictures sketched on to help design decisions, ultimately building a kind of digital archive of the project.

The river island of Ada Međica in Belgrade partly inspired the project. The ground belongs to the municipality. People could build their house in exchange for garden maintenance, but no foundations are allowed and all constructions need to be reversible. Houses are therefore built on thin structures, lifted from the ground to abide by that rule and also be protected from flooding.

Photo Maxime Delvaux

A PRAGMATIC CONSTRUCTION BUILT

BY A FEW HANDS-ON PEOPLE The design process bears the imprint of Zoki’s initial request to use steel, as he had access to a cheap supply from a local reseller. The steel tube structure is an open grid that creates a new plane, hovering above the sloping plot, held by three concrete pillars: an elongated, hidden one on the access side; a sculptural stair; and an ‘inhabited boulder’ that accommodates a garden storage, technical equipment and a toilet.

Ognjen Krasna

17.11.18

Zoki was closely involved in the construction and fulfilment of his design ambitions. Himself a contractor who carries out interior refurbishments in Belgrade, he had both the knowledge and connections to actively participate in such a project. After dismissing several construction companies that had made excessive price offers, and then trying to work with one that performed very poorly, he decided to take charge of things himself, asking specific workers to come and perform targeted tasks on the building site. He also involved his cousin, an uncle who lives nearby, some former schoolmates and other acquaintances. The house became a kind of personal challenge, going beyond the skills and work he routinely uses in his business. This led to fewer but trusted workers on site, to a longer construction process, and to a lot of care – not the capital Care discussed in recent architectural debates, but the care needed to ensure that aesthetic, functional and economic criteria were shared by all.

The house was built by; Zoran ‘Zoki’ Spasojević, client.

Ujak Buda (‘Uncle Buda’), Zoki’s uncle, who lives nearby, helped on the project and acts as guardian of the house.

Mira, Zoki’s wife.

Jelena Perovic, ally.

Milan Bajić, welding team leader.

Uroš Bogdanović, aluminium window frames.

Dušan Rajnović, Rinol (floors).

Danijela Ostojić and Marko Viidić, Lafarge Holcim (concrete).

Jana Kulić, architect.

Ognjen Krašna, architect.

Miodrag Mimi Grbić, architect.

Nemanja Zimonjić, architect.

Majstor Boban (‘Master Boban’) and Zoki, plumbing.

Electro Vis M and Zoki, electricity.

Dragana Grahovac and Dragutin Zivojinovic, brick stair.

Milos Kapetanovic, Mladen Maslovar, Nevena Alavuk and Dobrivoje Bojić, landscaping.

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Photo Maxime Delvaux.

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20.07.20 NEMANJA divno!

19:48:36 Zoki Legenda Spasojevic Super izgleda sa ovim 19:48:58 NEMANJA Imas dovoljno kamena?

21:06:54 Zoki Legenda Spasojevic Da, sutra zavrsavamo. Super je sada za koriscenje, mnogo prijatnije za hodanje.

21:08:01 NEMANJA ;) 21:08:07 Zoki Legenda Spasojevic 21:08:23 NEMANJA lepo formirajte ivicu prema brezama -ako treba da kupimo neki flah da ucukamo da ne rasipa...

21:08:43 Zoki Legenda Spasojevic Mislim da je ovo dobro i bez toga, al videcemo 21:09:28 NEMANJA ok, super.

21:10:17 25.07.20 NEMANJA

Photo Maxime Delvaux.

As you walk you encounter places, buildings and structures people occupy from time to time. One of these is anchored in another slope in the undulating landscape not far from the pool. It’s large – the faceted façade penetrates the substratum of the dark slender stems growing past it. On the one hand it’s bound to me through its firm grip of the ground.

On the other, it could be regarded as a stone set for imminent flight with its hovering limbs, levitating pathways and suspended volumes. I welcomed it as the decisive outcome of a feather’s indecisive swirl between brown leaves and dried twigs. When they painted it black it exhaled and fell fully into place, settling into the forest like its mirrored silhouette. They named it Casa Para El Poem Del Ángulo Recto. I decipher its melody as the birds chime in on cue and the wind passes through the crowns. The poem looks inaccessible from a distance, but there is something about appearance. The massive exterior is as porous as the sand it is derived from, letting breeze, birds and bugs penetrate the walls and join you inside.

Just as there is beauty in light, there is beauty in darkness. When they came to the Fonola cabin, they didn’t strip it or change it much, they merely made minor adjustments and gave it a new cladding before going outside and building a place to cook and a place to wash. Since then it has been left to its peaceful self, for me to forget and for the rain to gently tap.

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You might know these structures. People tend to recognize them. They are what you might call familiar, no shadows but childhood memories, a familiar smell, a kind voice and the distinctive slam of the front door.

A white house filters the sun through translucent skin, granting its soft presence. A place for clothes to hang and a playground to tickle every toe under the sun. Transparent doors off er a peek inside, but the rest is like a cloud. Beams buff my soil and I consider the water tower as its kin. There is a soothing link between the two – the customary legs of the tower and the palsy skeleton of Casa Transparente.

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Shaded plan of the open-air rooms, circa 1950. Courtesy of the Bernard Rudofsky Estate.

The stories and images collected here draw on the extensive research carried out by Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda and published in Nivola: La sintesi delle arti (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2015), and on a conversation held in September 2020 with Altea, president of the Costantino Nivola Foundation.

Unless otherwise stated, photos are courtesy of the Fondazione Nivola.

View of the solarium, with Pietro Nivola standing on the stairs and a mural by his father, Springs, East Hamptons.

A Monument to the Celebration of Life COSTANTINO NIVOLA’S GARDEN IN SPRINGS, NEW YORK

The pergola.

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At age 28, Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola fled Fascist Italy with his wife Ruth Guggenheim and migrated to the United States in 1939. After living in New York for some years, in 1948 they bought a house in Springs, on Long Island, which he extended into the garden to create an all-encompassing living environment he called a ‘monument to the celebration of life’. Crossing the boundaries between indoors and outdoors, domestic and public, modern and primitive, leisure and work, this site became generative, in multiple direct and indirect ways, of the artist’s oeuvre and influence.

THE OPEN-AIR ROOMS Nivola renovated the house himself, tearing down walls and painting the floors a bright industrial yellow. But more so than the interior, the garden is where Nivola tested his ideas about the continuity between art and life. He collaborated with his friend, Austrian architect Bernard Rudofsky, to develop an inhabited landscape made up of open-air rooms disseminated in the large garden. Combining Rudofsky’s pre-war experimentations on open rooms (with architects such as Luigi Cosenza and Gio Ponti) and Nivola’s ideas on living close to nature, they formulated an outdoor domesticity, usable by the family and their friends throughout the summer as well as in the colder months.

Pierced wall and apple tree.

The tree no longer exists.

Outside the house he built a brick fireplace, with benches and a stone paved floor, for cooking and eating outside. The edges of the ‘room’ were framed by a simple wood structure painted red that could hold bamboo screens for sun protection. Next to that, he added a pergola composed of similar cubic modules and covered in wisteria. A masonry solarium was also erected, consisting of a cell with no roof, accessible through a ladder resting against the outside wall and then a flight of stairs inside – a place to sunbathe, naked, even in winter, surrounded by murals painted by the artist. Another notable open-air structure was the pierced wall letting the branch of an old apple tree pass through: a token of symbiosis with nature, a play in contrasts – white wall and dark bark, geometry and irregularity – and a screen on which the everchanging shadow of the tree was projected.

The garden was a place for living and working which he called a ‘monument to the celebration of life’. It represented a testing ground in which he developed spatial arrangements and formal solutions that would later be borrowed for public-space or monument projects.

One of them was the design of a kind of kitchen monument with several stoves that could be used to prepare special foods on festive occasions involving lots of people.

The open-air fireplace, with (from left to right) Ruth, Claire, Pietro and Costantino Nivola.

Courtesy of the Nivola family archive.

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Documents: Studio SNCDA et al.: Sara Noel Costa De Araujo, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Ester Goris, Arnaud Hendrickx Axonometric drawings: Lisa Brugière Photographs: Valentin Bansac Text: Accattone

Homes for Luxembourg STUDIO SNCDA ET AL.

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1 The LUCA Luxembourg Center for Architecture’s past two participations in the Venice Biennale also addressed landownership and the housing crisis: Tracing Transition (2016), curated by Claude Ballini, Serge Ecker Daniel Grünkranz and Panajota Panotopoulou; and The Architecture of the Common Ground (2018), curated

by Florian Hertweck (Master in Architecture / University of Luxembourg) and Andrea Rumpf (LUCA).

2 Building regulations vary for each municipality. In Luxembourg City, the minimum surface for any housing unit is 52 m2.

On the occasion of the 2021 Venice Biennale, the LUCA Luxembourg Center for Architecture invited architect Sara Noel Costa De Araujo to explore the concept of modular living. Studio SNDCA responded by overlapping the curatorial approach with the actual design of modular, mobile housing units to be set in clusters on the many vacant plots of building land in Luxembourg. This speculative project can thus be read as an engaged attempt to match the international exhibition with domestic concerns about the housing crisis.1 To carry out this project, this ‘Gesamtwerk’" as they call it, Studio SNCDA has entered into a close collaboration with some architects, an artist, a photographer, a curator, a textile designer, a researcher and a structural engineer. They are not the first to develop visions, estimates and models of mobile housing units. What is striking, though, is that they are designing temporary housing, not on account of war, poverty or another disaster, nor even as a result of lifestyle choices, but for financial reasons.

The price of building land in Europe’s richest country is indeed prohibitive. Most landowners don’t even develop their land because it is in itself already the best financial investment one could possibly dream of, steadily rising in value due to very generous yearly rates. And when land is sold to a developer, the housing built there is unaffordable for a growing part of the growing population, the result being a country of (cross-border) commuters with poorer social and urban qualities.

To tackle these issues, SNCDA’s first move is to take the cost of land out of the equation, as these mobile units could simply occupy free of charge or rent the land for a limited period of time, without changing the ownership. With a minimum investment in infrastructure (ducts, sewage, electricity, basic equipment), inhabitants would benefit from a more central position in the city and from access to the semi-public areas of the plot, sharing outside spaces with their neighbours. Conversely, they should be ready to pack up their units and move to another plot once the owner reclaims the land.

Is such nomadic, reversible living desirable?

What would it look like? Where and to what extent could it be implemented? Homes for Luxembourg confronts building regulations, architecture and urban quality, lifestyle and living standards, ecology, real-estate logics and governance. As an exhibition that shifts from theoretical research to a truly hands-on approach, and from the scale of

the territory to that of the body, the project uses architectural design to condense these multiple dimensions and stimulate a response from the population, the authorities and other stakeholders. Herein lies its political drive.

MOBILE LIVING IN THE ‘THIRD LANDSCAPE’ Studio SNCDA’s design for modular housing units walk a tightrope between other typologies: minimal in space requirement yet fully equipped, they refuse the concept of ‘tiny houses’. They should neither look like emergency containers nor be piled up like a dense housing block. Tapping into the local desire for individual houses on a garden plot, they need to look like fragile villas landing gently on the ground – no need for deep foundations – yet comfortably petit bourgeois, to accommodate both the inhabitants and their neighbours. The units are thin and slender: the basic 52 m2 configuration measures 3.9 by 14.4 m,2 with a glazed façade running along three sides and a back wall integrating storage space, the kitchen and smaller openings. The interior is an open space, only partitioned by the bathroom block, which mediates access to the bed, and by two curtains: the first encircles the bed, the second hides the kitchen worktop or, when drawn, divides the living area into two equal parts. With such minimal housing, inhabitants are projected outside. Depending on the size of the plot, several units can be deployed and accommodate different households and domestic programmes: singles alone, singles sharing, small or larger families, students or workers. Sharing a plot of land that none of them owns and living in kit houses assembled from the same modules offers the opportunity to create bonds, possibly even a small community. In any case, it is a social experiment. The delicacy of the settlement in relation to the soil and vegetation calls for increased sympathy. The site becomes a common, redeemed from the financial grounds that have determined the structure of land property. To foster this idea, the architects plan to avoid fences around individual gardens and units, fences that would merely further subdivide the land.

Rather, they intend to take advantage of the beauty of these empty, reversible lots, setting the units in relation to these qualities. As in a nature reserve or on an archaeological site, architecture is lifted from the ground.

Ducts run on the surface, hidden under the steel grating footpaths leading to each unit, sketching a light infrastructure. Some modules could even serve as common spaces.

Chairs, tables and lamps can be used both inside and outside, around a fireplace.

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Translated and slightly abridged transcript of a round-table conversation co-hosted by Accattone and Radio 100.7, held in French at the radio’s studios in Luxembourg on 2 April 2021 and broadcast on 22 May 2021 on the same station. The topics and guests were chosen by journalist Michèle Sinner and Accattone. The conversation is the first phase in a longer discussion process on Luxembourg’s contribution to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. The process is conceived by architect and mediator Mathieu Wellner in collaboration with LUCA Luxembourg Center for Architecture (see his diagram below).

Nomads and Landowners ROUND-TABLE CONVERSATION

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1 Editor’s note: in Luxembourg, ‘perimeter’ is the common term used to describe the boundary of buildable land allowed by each municipality’s General Development Plan (PAG).

2 Welcome to Paradise, curated by Christian Bauer, Tatiana Fabeck, Shaaf Milani-Nia, Stefano Moreno, Andrea Rumpf, Nico Steinmetz, Lisi Teisen as Luxembourg’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006.

MICHÈLE SINNER

(Radio 100.7)

We are here today for a round-table discussion at the crossroads of culture, architecture and politics in the context of Luxembourg’s participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled Homes for Luxembourg, the proposal can be read as a reaction to the housing crisis.

To discuss this proposal, we are here with Mike Mathias, first government advisor at the Ministry of Housing; Sonja Gengler, architect-director of Luxembourg City; Guy Entringer, director of the National Affordable Housing Company (SNHBM: Société Nationale des Habitations à Bon Marché); Jacques Brauch, general manager of the private construction and property development company Soludec; and the architect behind the proposal, Sara Noel Costa De Araujo.

CARLO MENON

(Accattone)

Let me recall the context of this housing crisis in a few figures. On the one hand, there has been an increase in property prices of more than 10 per cent per year, which is enormous compared to neighbouring countries. On the other hand, private developments of 25 units or more need to provide, by law, only 10 per cent for affordable housing; less than 10 per cent of the current housing stock is affordable rental housing owned by public actors; and lastly, less than 10 per cent of the available building land belongs to public entities such as the state, the municipalities, the Housing Fund and the SNHBM. This means that public authorities have no leverage to counterbalance a real-estate market that is soaring, creating more and more social exclusion, even among the middle classes.

MICHÈLE SINNER

Analysts consider that the structure of the land property is crucial to this crisis. There are around 2800 empty hectares available in the building land ‘perimeter’,1 a figure that has remained stable for decades – in any case, since records began. This is in part because we develop as much land as we add to the perimeter. However, there are also indicators that much of this land has been buildable for a long time, but nothing is being built. We asked Antoine Paccoud, a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute for Social Economic Research (LISER) and the coordinator of the Housing Observatory, why this is the case.

ANTOINE PACCOUD

[recording plays in the studio] That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. We know that there is a great deal of hesitation in selling,

as records show very few transactions on building land compared to property market transactions. Most of the land is owned by individuals, so we are talking about families, not companies. In my more historical work, I have shown that Luxembourg’s current landownership structure is the legacy of a rather distant past: the transition from a feudal regime to a regime where the property rights that we know today came into force.

Property rights were granted to the owners or occupants of these lands so that, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a small number of people have held large areas, originally intended for agriculture, and now also included in building land perimeters.

This configuration has remained stable because there are still no inheritance taxes in direct line, so these lands are passed on from generation to generation. Also, the tax on land is almost insignificant, because it is based on a calculation from 1941. So there is absolutely no financial motive to subdivide or sell these lands.

It is a solidified structure that changes very slowly, as and when these families sell to other types of actors, whether private or public, who could actually develop them.

MICHÈLE SINNER

Let’s open the discussion. Jacques Brauch and Guy Entringer, as a private and public developer respectively, do you experience this rigidity in your daily work? If you share Paccoud’s analysis, how has this problem evolved in recent years?

JACQUES BRAUCH

I think he put it very well. Today, land is practically inaccessible, at least for private companies like ours. We can’t buy land.

We would like to, but no one is selling.

And why don’t people sell?

Because for people, today, land is a safe investment.

At the Venice Biennale, some editions ago, I think, there were gold bars representing Luxembourg. Welcome to Paradise, it was called.2 Well, that’s the land. Because what would people gain from selling it? They would get money and they wouldn’t know what to do with it. The majority of landowners have enough, and eventually they would have to get rid of that money, but banks and classic investments are no longer an alternative. They would have to pay taxes.

So it is in their best interest to hold on over generations to a piece of land that doesn’t

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These photographs show three copies of the panoramic wallpaper ‘Views of North America’ installed in France: one located in a villa in Normandy, one in the Wallpaper Museum in Rixheim, and one in a reception room of Rixheim’s town hall (reproduced here courtesy of Zuber & Cie., the manufacturer). They are overlapped with images of the set put up in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, featuring some of its successive occupants and visitors.

Navigating from one iteration of this wallpaper to the next and telling a short history of this model reveals how this ornamental surface meant to be installed in domestic environments ultimately encountered a political fate. A fate illustrating how the seemingly benign notion of ‘interior decoration’ is also always capable of becoming ideological.

Views of North America

1 Catherine Bindman, ‘“Phantasmagorias of the Interior”: A French Panoramic Wallpaper in the Home of a New England Lawyer’, Art in Print vol. 6 no. 4 (2016), pp. 3–7.

The panoramic wallpaper ‘Les Vues de l’Amérique du Nord’ (‘Views of North America’) was first produced in 1834 by Zuber et Cie., one of the leading French wallpaper manufacturers of the time and the last still active today. It depicts five scenes of Jacksonian America: the New York skyline seen from New Jersey; the bustling Boston harbour; a parade of the cadets of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York; a Native American tribe dancing in front of the Natural Bridge, Virginia; and Niagara Falls.

Ever since they were invented at the turn of the nineteenth century, panoramic wallpapers have primarily served as a promotional tool for the companies manufacturing them.

Using their customary production techniques but with unmatched technical and aesthetic virtuosity, they developed a reputation for excellence that supported the sale of less costly, repetitive wallpapers or printed imitations of silk draperies. This was a costly business strategy, however, as each panoramic scene had to be carefully conceived and designed, and this represented a considerable investment.1 The models thus had to be both successful and marketable, which implied the creation of images that people wanted. This endeavour proved successful, with panoramic wallpapers selling very well in Europe, but also in America, where they adorned the houses of the East Coast bourgeoisie and of wealthy plantation owners as well as presidential residences.

Today, those costly wallpapers, now part of the collections of numerous museums and still regularly put up worldwide in the living rooms of oligarchs, are described on Zuber’s website as ‘a good investment’, fit for auctioning in a hypothetical future.

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The following pages are a collection of words. A lexicon gathering reflections, ideas, projects, friends, teaching work, desires and inspirations around the image of an architecture of the feast. They refer both to our production and the cultural context in which we operate. They are for us an opportunity to create an accidental manifesto beyond any scale, regardless of whether we talk about dresses, furniture, pavilions, buildings or landscapes.

Fireworks

Ananas: The Dunmore Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Airth, Stirlingshire, Scotland. Antipasto: Ambra Fabi, Johnny Leya, Giaime Meloni, Giovanni Piovene, Jean-Benoît Vetillard, Anti-pasto, workshop ‘Ville et territoire’, École d’architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris-Est, Marne-la-Vallée, 2019. Photo: Giaime Meloni. Banquet: Grand buffet de la cuisine moderne, in Marie Antoine Carême, Le maître d’hôtel français, Paris, 1822.

Catafalque: Giovanni Antonio Canal (il Canaletto), The Feast Day of St. Roch, 1735. Circular: Cavart (Pier Paola Bortolami, Piero Brombin, Michele De Lucchi, Boris Pastrovicchio, Valerio Tridenti), Per una architettura culturalmente impossibile, seminario, Cava Montericco, Monselice, 1975. Circus: Piovenefabi, Half Circus, Bozar, Brussels, 2017.

Colours: Piovenefabi, 7 Pavilions for 7 Parks, Brussels, 2017. Photo: Martina Bjorn.

Ananas: Its form is the combination of a pine (symbol of abundance and fertility) and acanthus leaves (the prototypical ornament).

Together, the fruit and its extravagant hat are the crystallization of an explosion, a firework.

We all know that ananases were imported from South America after 1492. Nevertheless, an old mosaic proves that a sole ananas made it across the ocean much earlier and ended up on a Roman table. Nobody knows how.

Banquet: Spatial archetype, model architecture made of simple means (tables, chairs, drapes, plates, food). The banquet pictures the geometry of a moment together.

Once upon a time, architects were very busy with the design and organization of banquets. Antonin Carême, in his book Le Pâtissier pittoresque (1815), writes: ‘Les Beaux-Arts sont au nombre de cinq, à savoir: la peinture, la sculpture, la poésie, la musique et l’architecture, laquelle a pour branche principale la pâtisserie.’

Catafalque: Wooden support for a funeral or party, temporary architecture built for a special occasion, supporting a communication apparatus made of symbols and allegories. A moving ornament made of sticks and papier mâché, able to temporarily transform the urban space. In our opinion, as serious as stone architecture.

Antipasto: As the word says, it comes before the meal, introducing an expectation, generating time before the formality of a proper course.

An antipasto is a moment of exchange and experimentation.

While announcing something greater to come, it often becomes the protagonist.

An antipasto can last forever.

‘Antipasto’ was the title of a student workshop we organized in 2019. As a final exercise, students prepared a big table that was at once a convivial setting, a stage, a model and a territory.

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Circular: Form = community.

Circus: Fun and melancholy at the same time, the circus is made of nothing: textile, colours, smell, people and (once upon a time) animals. Separated from the outer world by a thin dress, it cuts an island of pure fantasy from the most generic context possible.

We once designed a half-circus in front of Bozar, in Brussels. There was no space to build a complete one.

Colours: Are everywhere. When the means to make a project are so reduced that there is no space to design, there are always colours.

Even colourless materials have colours, in a sense, and can be juxtaposed. Or different materials can be coloured just with one colour to form a coherent entity. As we did for the interior of the kiosk of the Brussels pavilions, where the use of one colour was the only possible tool to make architecture.

the Architecture of the Feast PIOVENEFABI

Confetti: Matilde Cassani, Tutto, Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018.

Photo: DSL Studio. OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, After the Party, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2008.

Photo: Bas Princen.

Confetti: Very small pieces of coloured paper. As far as we know, used for the first time in architecture by OFFICE. Their form is either round or irregular (i.e. the negative form resulting from random round cuts, next to each other). If you examine them closely, you’ll see that they are normally pieces of recycled paper on which you can still read fragments of texts. Once you have been the subject of a confetti attack, you’ll find them around your house for months, in the most unlikely places. It’s hardly possible that anybody will ever use confetti better than Matilde did in Palermo.

Diving: Elegantly falling, while drawing instant invisible lines in the air. A diving platform once became the centre and symbol of our Durana Master Plan (Tirana 2014). In the space of our collage, the kids of Kashar could enjoy a new punctual infrastructure, placed at the centre of a former water reservoir created during the Albanian communist regime to irrigate agricultural fields.

Diving: Piovenefabi, Yellowoffice, Stefano Graziani, Kashar Park, competition, Durana, 2014. Dress: Reproduction of Archizoom’s Studio per la decorazione dei tessuti, 2019.

Photo: Simon Boudvin. Habit d’artifice, in Werner Oechslin, Anja Buschow eds., Architecture de fête : L’architecte comme metteur en scène, Mardaga, 1987. Firework: Feux d’artifice, in Werner Oechslin, Anja Buschow eds., Architecture de fête : L’architecte comme metteur en scène, Mardaga, 1987.

Dress: The thinnest possible architecture, a first shelter. For somebody, the only necessary house. Changing dress according to the occasion means choosing the most appropriate architecture for a specific context. Dresses are forcefully transitory and linked to their time and place. With their colour and patterns, they help to define urban space. For the What is Ornament? exhibition, 2A+P/A reproduced the dresses designed by Archizoom for ‘Dressing Design’ (1971). We wore them during the exhibition opening.

Everybody: Put your hands up!

Firework: Immaterial ornament, lasting the time of an explosion.

Maximum yield with minimum effort. Coloured drawing on a black background, it unravels when it reaches its maximum splendour (like the agave flower). If caught in the instant, it shows its geometric perfection, the equitable distribution of the explosion.

There is then the minimum degree of firework: the pleasure of the bang as an end in itself – taking one’s breath away. To do: visit Naples on New Year’s Eve.

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Superstudio (Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo Di Francia, Roberto Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Alessandro Poli), Laminato plastico serigrafato, Abet Print, 1969, Migrazione o Il volo.

Black felt-tip pen on photographic print, light blue cardboard. © Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCI

6 Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), trans. A.L. Alger (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), p. 270.

7 The collaboration between Superstudio and Abet Print continued until 1973 around several series of motifs, including the Decoor series. It gave rise to a joint publication by the various designers consulted in 1972: Archizoom, Clino Trini Castelli, Ettore Sottsass, George Swoden and Superstudio, ‘L’invenzione della Superficie neutra, Presentazione generale’, Elementi: quaderni di studi – notizie ricerche / Cahiers d’étude, nouvelles recherches no. 2 (1972). The eponymous exhibition was never held.

8 The photograph is printed in closeup and the figures of birds were retouched with black felt-tip pen.

9 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, cit., p. 269–270.

10 Taking his lead from Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, philosopher Massimo Cacciari, who participated in the founding of the journals Classe operaia and Contropiano, describes the Metropolis as the completed form of an abstract and intellectual existence, inseparable from the monetary economy. See Massimo Cacciari, Metropolis, Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel (Rome: Officina, 1973).

11 Superstudio, ‘Educazione, Un film a 35mm colore, sonoro, 12 minuti, progettato e diretto dal Superstudio’, Casabella no. 372 (1972), p. 27.

12 In 1971 Superstudio and Archizoom guest-edited an issue of the journal IN on the subject of the destruction of the object: IN. Argomenti e immagini di design no. 2–3 (1971).

Superstudio was responsible for the article ‘Distruzione, metamorfosi e ricostruzione degli oggetti’, pp.

14–25.

L’alluvione di Firenze, piazza del Duomo, 1966, unknown photographer. © Archivio Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

MIGRAZIONI Had a flood come, the mountain would have disappeared beneath the waves long before the birds ceased to fly above it; and should but a single ark float on the surface of the cataclysm, they would rest upon it, survive with it, watch with it the going down of the waters; and the new world which rose from that chaos would, on awakening, behold hovering aloft, winged and living, the thought of the world which had been swallowed up.6 Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

In 1969 Superstudio was contacted by the company Abet Print to produce a screenprinting motif for its plastic laminate coating for wooden furniture.7 The group designed a series of geometric studies consisting of dots, corners, stars, zigzags and, as history has recorded, a grid. One study stood out, Migrazione (Migration). Based on a photograph, it represents a flock of birds.

The picture was treated in such a way as to abstract the represented scene to leave only a simple irregular punctuation of the sky.8 The ‘migration’ and the grid can be read as two sides of a single architectural, political and intellectual project. Grasping this project requires abstracting Superstudio’s grid so as to understand it not as a principle for laying out or organizing a particular site, but rather as the conceptual expression of a new state of human thought to which the group’s architecture would have to conform.

Without forcing what would be an anachronistic comparison, we could see, in this flight of birds, a metaphor for that transformation of the shape of human thought – and hence of its expression – that Victor Hugo had already articulated: ‘Architecture was dethroned’, wrote the French author, analysing the substitution of the book of paper for that of stone as a consequence of the irrepressible rise of the printing press.

‘Under the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, intangible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the day of architecture it became a mountain and took armed possession of a century and a place. Now it becomes a flock of birds, is scattered to the four winds, and occupies at once all points of the horizon and all space.’9 Nourished by a certain understanding of the metropolitan condition as a form of intellectualized life10 and by the symbioses promised by the nascent computation – then in the process of replacing Hugo’s art of printing – Superstudio pursued the project of an architecture suited to this world of ubiquitous thought whose surface it described as a ‘cerebral bark’ on which life would consist of a ‘continuous global education’.11 Throughout the years, the group would develop and resort to ‘mental strategies’ as non-violent forms of criticism and effective means to ‘destroy the object’12 – that is, to destroy the fetishization of things by inflating their exchange value. To Superstudio, mental activity, and with it the means by which it is communicated, was to become the last valid form of architecture.

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DSCTHK — WHERE LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

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JERÔME ANDRE & THIBAUT BLONDIAU

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Accattone explores minor practices in art and architecture through the specific means of the printed magazine. As an exhibition on paper, each issue is a montage of contributions whose shared positions towards reality, history and representation resonate with one another.

In the current landscape of non-commercial publications, Accattone’s originality lies in the strong visual orientation and in the close association of methods, editorial devices and featured contents. Through these experiments, the magazine addresses critically a fundamental aspect of architectural thinking and practice: the working document and the changing status of the image.

This issue deals with open-air domesticity and the diplomatic hospitality of land. It presents intellectual and architectural projects, both contemporary and historical, for alternative modes of living.

Special thanks: Giuliana Altea, Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Jochen Eisenbrand, Elettra Fiumi, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Tania Isabel Garduño Israde, Lorena Luccioni, Gabriele Mastrigli, Arabella Natalini, Claire Nivola, City of Rixheim, Rixheim Wallpaper Museum, Michèle Sinner, Katherine Stahl, Fabrizio Terranova, Christine Van Daele

Printed in Belgium by Graphius

Costantino Nivola was a sculptor, famous for his sandcasts which he embedded in many post-war modernist buildings in America. His own garden became a testing ground for open-air living and working.

Magazine on architecture Issue 7, May 2021

Editors: Sophie Dars, Carlo Menon Galaad Van Daele

Zuber’s panoramic wallpapers bring the outdoor indoors, idealizing nature, society and history for the upper classes.

Sara Noel Costa De Araujo was invited by Andrea Rumpf, director of LUCA Luxembourg Center for Architecture, to conceive an exhibition on housing in Luxembourg for the 2021 Venice Biennale. Her practice is named Studio SNCDA et al., where ‘et al.’ are, for this project, Valentin Bansac, Lisa Brugière, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Ester Goris, Arnaud Hendrickx.

Alice Paris investigated three metal houses by De Smet Vermeulen architecten, Osamu Ishiyama and Kenji Kawai.

TEN is an architecture studio shuttling physically and intellectually between Belgrade and Zürich.

Design: Orfée Grandhomme Ismaël Bennani

Aglaia Konrad has a keen interest in architecture, cities, and every possible experience of the local.

Her practice of photography disrupts the established codes of representation in architecture – in this case Ernst Neufert’s encyclopaedic work on standard dimensions.

The Museum of Mistakes is the frame in which artist Pierre Leguillon explores and processes the art world. This time he brought back from Japan pictures and thoughts on two architectural projects by artist Shusaku Arakawa and poet Madeline Gins.

Copy editing and translations: Patrick Lennon

Wim Cuyvers is an architect, a speleologist, a first-aid worker, a thinker and a forestiero.

He created Le Montavoies, a refuge in the Jura mountains in France.

Carlo Goncalves is an architect with a drive for mountaineering. He visited Smiljan Radic’s estate in Vilches, Chile. He wrote the text in collaboration with Annee Grøtte Viken.

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© Accattone, the editors and the featured authors.

All rights reserved.

Lila Ludmila Rétif, Beth Gordon and Cathie Bagoris work collectively under the name moilesautresart.

Jérôme André and Thibaut Blondiau have been carrying the project DSCTHK surveying Belgian discos in daylight since 2000.

Piovenefabi is the architecture practice of Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene. After their exhibition What is Ornament? at the 2019 Lisbon Triennale, something was still to be developed from the content of its last room, Fireworks.

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Accattone magazine is a project by Ismaël Bennani, Sophie Dars, Orfée Grandhomme, Carlo Menon. It is financed, published and distributed by Accattone asbl/vzw, a non-profit organisation registered in Belgium (BE 0550.585.163).

Rue du Conseil 28/6 B-1050 Brussels info@accattone.be www.accattone.be

The editors have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the materials appearing in this issue. If you claim ownership of any of these and have not been properly credited, please contact us and we will be happy to print a formal acknowledgement in the next issue.

Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou is the curator of the recent exhibition Superstudio Migrazioni at CIVA, Brussels, and the editor of the eponymous book, which deals with the circulation of knowledge in architecture before, during and after the Superstudio.