EXILED TO THE VIRTUAL WORLD OR THE INCONSISTENCY OF THE REAL (INSTABILITY IS OUR NEW FREEDOM)
The city no longer exists as we knew it...
Electronic revolution seems about to melt everything that is solid - to eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical embodiment.
Each insistence on its primary condition irrevocably leads via nostalgia to irrelevance, like the sensation of pain after having had an amputed limb.
But this city, the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it’s habitable.
This is any space, any time, an “event city� that cannot be captured, an universe of uncertainty and unexpected hybrids.
Everything is melting down
A violent flow of information, ceaseless political fluctuations and the mark of globalisation, have cutoff the stability of contemporary life. One funeral after another the death of the stands of modernity or other immanent principles is declared:
Weight Integrity Composition Proportion Detail But also...
God
Identity
Beauty
Singularity
The city Urbanism Architecture?
In the past three decades... entirely new spatial conditions, demanding new definitions, have emerged. Where space was considered permanent, it now feels transitory- on its way to becoming. The words and ideas of architecture, once the official language of space, no longer seem capable of describing this proliferation of new condition... (But) words that die in the real are reborn in the virtual.
COME ON IN!
Somewhere in a simulated world...
[KNOCK, KNOCK]
Yeah, we’ve been working on this screen-play for some time now. But still some blurred details need to be cleared up after these massive paradigmatic changes...
I guess you have an idea now of the reason why you are here.
Well, to be sincere i find all this values upheaval extremely exciting...
Wait a nanosecond, i have something that might interest you...
Some rumours have been running about these surrealists techniques for meaning detournement. They call it Paranoiac-critical method, there must be something to dig in there for our screen-play!
This is an active and concrete way of interpreting the world through a distorted relationship to it. Smart move i may say!
Koolhaas, you have to be fast, nothing can go faster than contemporaneity, even light!
[TIC TAC TIC TAC TIC TAC]
SHIT!
The speed of changes is unaccountable, this story is almost out of date already.
GROUND FLOOR
I knew the best place to go would be the reversed-skyscrapper, the place where all the paradigms funerals had been taking place.
[GRRRR THUNDERS ]
Welcome to the reversed Babel.
[NIIIII COFFIN OPENING]
I’ll do it . I’ve been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful!
At the rate population increased and speed of changes accelerated, there were so many deaths/disappeareances/dismantlements and not enough room for the bodies. Dead were then buried in a reversed-skyscraper, hundreds of stories deep, below the buildings. Coupled with an elevator, an undefined number n of Typical Plans will turn into a surrealistic machine, abilitated to fabricate some unexpected encounters. Typical plan is “the plan without qualities”. Its only function is to let its inoccupants exist. Create new territories for the smooth unfolding of new processes. At the same time, the reversed-Babel was transformed by its own Bigness, it was no longer a building but a city in itself. It could compete with “the city”.
I wonder who’s the architect that designed this building?
Hi. I’m the receptionist. If you are here to visit the chambers, please take the lift and go all the way straight down. The number of floors is undefined, only direction is unvariable.
Look, Michael Jackson!!
Wow, there’s a whole floor dedicated to Post-Modernism, amazing!
LEVEL -1
I arrived into a panoptic room where moderns still tried to cope with instability...eternally
I still don’t get it...
Allez, once more!
CHECK MATE!
I have 5 strategies to win this game, this is irrefutable: 1. Pilotis 2. Terrace roof 3. Free plan 4. Band window 5. Free facade
You might bee too predictable.You should try some programmatic alchemy, loss of control, contamination, quantity rather than quality! Relax man!
When i looked at his chessboard i realized he only had towers... you cannot do much without a horse, a trojan horse! Bigness has the potential to recontruct the whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective. A dissociation tool from exhausted movements of modernism and formalism...a new economy where no longer “all is architecture�.
CHECK MATE!
Descent in progress, please stay still behind the yellow line.
[TUUUUU - LIFT MACHINE NOISE]
LEVEL -2
When i came out of the lift Dali had already transformed Lautréamont’s definition of beauty. I thought it made sense, since beauty also died within the violent flow of changes.
“To look is to invent”, PCM is about looking at one thing and seeing another.
I’m hybrid, contemporary and i speak English fluently
Only what makes a difference can generate meaning, that is the encounter!
Well, I’d like to see myself dressed up as someone who serves tea for the Queen of England. Cool, it works!
[BRRR - NEON MAKING NOISE]
Follow me, this way!
The new definition would be “ Beautiful as the unexpected encounter of a sewing machine, an umbrella and Dali, fabricating hybrids, on a dissection table”
Architecture is too slow, just a vague memory of a hope, that shape, form, coherence could still preserve it from melting down.
You are continget and cohesive, also extremely contemporary. Everything happened so fast...but i’ll find a way...
I just followed the hare as fast as i could. All of a suddent the floor started folding down, and i had the feeling someone was playing with us, like someone playing to be an architect... A system of folding plans was about to destroy the status of individual floor. I lost the notion of above and below, while having the sensation that the regime of orthogonality that had dominated architecture was close to an end. Combined to a grid and stacked this new architecture could be defined as new inside-out city. The hare disappeared...
LEVEL IN BETWEEN SOMEWHERE Catch me if you can!
Ohh these little plastic men in the models look so cute!
I walked until a strange shadow took me out of my thoughts...
Do you need some help here? What are you exactly trying to achieve through all these daring acrobaties?
This is what i call serendipity!
All this is getting a bit too compromising!
I see, a programmatic intention directly translated into shape!
I’m trying to find a way to avoid the isolation of my members, by turning myself into a human loop, so i’ll never feel alone again!
This could also be a programmatic loop, something that unites and confronts.
Navigating in the “Predicates sphere” is like going shopping. Afterwards you just have make assemblages in order to foster possibilites!
(PROBABLY) LEVEL -4 Hi dear, welcome to the Trangression Club, are you new here?
We love transforming things into something they were not intended for initially.
Eeuuuh...
It’s also about contradiction, making something become it’s opposite, that’s a poetic tension.
So you know Dali also? Yes, we are pretty close.
This is no longer a lift but a moving room that can create a changeable house. So we can be everywhere and nowhere!
You should visit our ‘Montage’ neighbours, some floors down, they are lovely!
Pfff, again, i haven’t slept in a week!
(PROBABLY) LEVEL n-1
Disconnect!!! Let’s define this by the strict separation of its components. What used to be together can be split in order to define its tasks in a performative way!
Wait, i have a better idea, what about introducing specificity in the indeterminate accomodations? It’s like coupling universality with shafts of specificity, every moment would be one of uniqueness!
Sleep!
So as you can see, we are interested in the relationships between fragments and whole, continuity and discontuinity, integration and decomposition...it’s all about collisions. And what about accumulating all the residual and contradictory demands of the program in a mould that has nothing to do with it. Then form, would become extremely contingent and poetic!
Yeah, i like that, to create links between independant parts. Hybridizations, proximities, frictions, overlaps, superpositions.
ANYWHERE
Time is still there...
[TIC TAC TIC TAC TIC TAC]
[TUUUUU - LIFT MACHINE NOISE]
Since gravity works as a sum the theoretical shape of a column is a cone Here we define the rules that allow the existence of all the other levels.
Here apples always fall last. Please mind your relation to the ground, we only think in terms of section
I have the ability to decouple my intellect from my desire, i am also a conceptual zebra.
Section is no longer simply divided by the discrete demarcation of individual floors; it has become a sandwich, a kind of conceptual zebra; free zones for human occupancy alternate with inaccessible bands of concrete, wiring and ducts. But could a floor become also an inhabited truss? Then we could play odds and evens of inhabited structures and completeley free of structure floors.
STILL DESCENDING
Now everything looked different, eternal...like three people had been living here forever. I secretly believe i have shifted from the predicate to the existence sphere.
We invest our hopes in the unbuilt as the last source of sublime. If we deploy in the unbuilt the powers formerly applied to the built, we can afford to treat the built as we formerly did nature, and take it for granted.
Not sure about this dear. I think we create by elimination, by scooping out forms from a solid, like an ice cream. It’s always harder to construct than to take away.
I feel empty inside
I dreant about a horizontal skyscrapper. Each floor was unbuilt, and therefore purely programmatic. All of them offered potentials to ever new iterations of what life can be.
I am not here
Where there’s nothing, everything is possible. Where there’s architecture, nothing (else) is possible.
Oh oh, i think i am going another loop forward, pre-specificity maybe?
If you think you have now understood the story, then you are entirely mistaken. If by chance you manage to wander inside the reversed skyscrapper, you will find everything described here, but also its exact opposite, the only certainty is that there is no certainty. And one cannot even be sure of that...