project of resistance for a democratic reconstruction of the crystal palace
antonio di campli
ankara, metu, 28 may, 2014
Problem / Theme Pars Destruens / Pars Construens (the negative part of criticizing views / positive part of stating one’s position and arguments)
> conglomerate / non-linear narrative
To define design strategies able to provide for a better degree of habitability and inclusivity of our cities > to cope with contemporary dwelling practices, cohabitation forms, invention of new commons or sharing spaces.
cultural discourses
interior
1
relations betwen urban design / landscape design / dwelling practices
domesticity community
proximity post-colonial theories
destruction
2
ruin
off-modern
Genealogies of “postmoden� concepts such as identity, memory, palimpsest but also the invention of lateral, minor forms of Modernism.
friction between modernization processes and persistencies of traditional forms of dwelling and spatial production
an image, a process, an attitude
This building-atmosphere describes the main features that different western urban contexts tend to acquire through some prevailing practices of urban design; features of transparent, controlled and culturally reclaimed spaces. The combination of this image with the urban conditions redefined by some recent urban design tendenciens was proposed by Peter Sloterdijk.
an image: the crystal palace
Boris Groys: “cultural smog� Definition of forms of social control and the research of spatial transparency of an implicitly pan-optic type, inasmuch as sought after by means of seemimgly neutral or anti-modern operators, such as cultural discourses (identity, palimpsest, heritage) or by means of landscape enjoyment-induction strategies (Slavoj Zizek): the city as landscape to be consumed.
Bentham Reloaded
The term reconstruction allusively describes the aims of my research: the identification of arguments, strategies and discourses for a critique and a modification of some current dominant forms of urban design that we can syntetically describe as liberal urbanism logics outputs.
a process: reconstruction
Urban design intended as a tool of a contrastive or resistance discourse, rejecting the idea that the project for the city must necessarily be intended as something that goes along with exhisting conditions and ongoing processes. Resistance does not run after the present, it goes against it.
Project of Crisis. The Tafurian “project� conceived historical research not as reconstruction but as design practice, as an action highlighting a breakage off or a crisis of usages.
an attitude: project of resistance
1
2008/2009 The Reconstruction of the Crystal Palace
2
2007-2009 Dwelling in the Contemporary City: Turin
3
2004-2007 The Endless Coast
4
2009-2011 1Km Well-Being
5
2012-2013 Forms of Communities
6
2008
Barranquilla. Creole Spaces
7
2013 -
The Destructive Character
1 2008/2009 The Reconstruction of the Crystal Palace A Critic of Some Nineties and Noughties European Urban Design Practices
Sloterdijk uses this building as a metaphor to describe how the liberal economies and global economic processes, modify western urban spaces as a culturally and climatically controlled greenhouse. The controlled atmosphere produces comfort but also invisible boundaries, as a total work of art that acts as a space of exclusion. The Crystal Palace describes the interior world of capitalism.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, an observer from the European periphery has argued that with its construction the principle of interiority exceeded a critical threshold, going beyond the bourgeois or aristocratic dwelling dimension. Here the interior becomes something capable of containing all the space, putting together nature and culture in a unique indoor concept subtending the idea that life could only take place in a large tamed interior. Fyodor Dostoevsky / Walter Benjamin The passages is something that supports the abolition of the exterior world.
Gottfried Semper: The architectural configuration is freed from tectonic structure, the interior is free from the structure: being inside is not a question of structural rigidity but of atmosphere.
Benjamin. The true inhabitant of the interior is the collector.
Liberal Urban Design An important series of design experiences that began approximatly thirty years ago: recovery of London’s Docklands in 1979 and projects for the Olympic Games in Barcelona. Margaret Thatcher / Reaganomics: a set of economic policies inspired by the neo-liberal ideology of Milton Friedman, the main urban transformations saw the decline of public action and the increasing power of private investors.
90s neo-liberal economies > urban design
Relationships between neo-liberal economies and urban design practices produced: urban transformation projects determined through benchmarking processes the development of services and increased the weight of finance in urban economies promoted dwelling practices where the city is seen as a space of consumption and tourism as a lifestyle.
In this period the main framework images of urban design practices, are at least two:
urban sprawl, which has put the theme of landscape as a public space at the center of urban design action the infrastructure reticular growth for private mobility, the project for the network-city.
The city is a special decantation and materialization place of economic processes.
The city is regarded as one of the main places of wealth production and consumption, at the same time it is conceived as a unity of images production and consumption.
90s / 00s. main urban design tendencies
sprawl design
infrastructural urbanism
landscape urbanism
sustainability as a communication device
To better describe some of the characters of the liberal urban design we can use three main images:
the network-project or the light project the triumph of blurred concepts the myth of the public space
The advent of a multiplicity of actors and powers the urban design project becomes cooperative, strategic, it requires flexibility and the adoption of a basic language, understandable to everyone, able to capture and metabolize misunderstandings, it acquires so the form of the network the network-project as a light project is free from social conflicts but open to cultural differences, able to accept progressive adjustments without impeding movements
The term rhizome was used by Deleuze and Guattari (1977) to describe a particular semantic model diffenent from tree models of though.
network-project or light project
The need to communicate and establish a relationship has led the design practices to the adoption of fluid concepts “suitcase-words� which have the advantage of leaving each network figure the chance to produce their own interpretation and action strategy. Resilience, smart city, re-cyle, are examples of faded or blurred concepts.
the triumph of blurred concepts
Public space as image-space, an aestheticially seductive space When a city is considered as a consuption space, differencies are highlighted but in concrete, they are redefind as a set of situations, theme-places where for people it is possible to make the same choices, the same decisions, and constantly do the same things.
An aestheticized urban space is a particular theatrical space where inhabitants are both observers and actors it, but, affirms Michael Sorkin, it is also a place of production.
The quest for transparency does not mean therefore opening or accessibility, but control, surveillance, separation
the myth of public space
Topotek 1 + BIG Architects + Superflex , Superkilen Location: Nørrebro, Copenhagen, Denmark Client: Copenhagen Municipality Budget: 11 MIO USD Area: 30,000 sqm Year: 2012
an edonistic idea of urban space as well as of social integration
diversity, multiculturalism, coexistence excess, saturation, congestion ipernarrativity of urban space hybridation/fragment/quoting
no stop city
Disappearance of Design The No-Stop City is the output of the application of two constructive types well settled at that time: the Dom-ino system and the B端rolandschaft.
+
Richard Hamilton, Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?
No-Stop City, Residential Parkings, 1971 / Layering
the situationist as an urban interiorist
new babylon
unban interiorist as a professional situationist
layering
net
b端rolandschaft
definition of situations
microclimate
overflight of the existing city
no design
inner articulation
inexpressivity
absence of work
isotropic space
labyrinthine space
they share: the idea of the dweller as a nomadic subject desire of dissolution of bourgeois interior domestic characters
2 2007-2009 Dwelling in the Contemporary City: Turin current urban design project and dwelling practices
137.519.602 euro / 2500 at et mo 26.266 mq otto 3 10.870mq / 65.000mc h = 21,85 (ste d e) otto 4 11.040 mq / 63.000 mc h = 21,85 (camerana - rosenta ) ott 5 10.320 mq / 59.000 mc h = 28,20 (deross )
modular ty
/ susta nab l ty / landscape des gn
Two images around which it is possible to organize questions related to dwelling in the Olympic Village: “parklife” and “landscape as a wrapping, the house as an exterior” Parklife Village’s open spaces are marked by the desire for security and control, and by an ambiguous use of the common spaces. Open spaces are considered by the inhabitants as important elements but their dwelling practices often consider them as residual spaces.
Landscape as a Wrapping, the House as en Exterior The space of the house shows the characteristics of an exterior to be colonized where the space of the bed is the only “ personal territory “.
to recover a prototypical attitude in urban design invention of new devices for social interaction; new kind of public spaces / sharing spaces / commons to reflect on the question of urban interior in a non-domestic or bourgeoise way Beatriz Colomina, “domesticity is always at war�.
New Devices Frank Van Klingeren /Meerpal, Dronten 1965
A Social Condenser. A glass box of 50 for 70 m as a prototype of an urban open space.
Some Urban Design Experiences. Questioning Interior Urbanism
research project. turin, the city, the hill, the river international urban design competition first prize
2013 Urbanisation du pĂŠrimetre Viesseux-Villars-Franchises. Geneva, Switzerland International Urban Desing Competition.
sharing spaces new urban interiors density spatial compactness
Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm. Berlin Free University, 1963: “Mat-building can be said to epitomise the anonymous collective, where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association, and possibilities for growth, diminution and change” Alison Smithson: “How to recognise and read mat-building: mainstream architecture as it has developed towards the matbuilding” Architectural Design 9 (1974)
2013 Requalification of Aldo Moro and Enrico Berlinguuer Squares in Putignano, Italy
conglomerate sharing spaces
“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego” Vladimin Nabokov, Pnin
3 2004/2007 The Endless Coast Landscape and Power
Social effects of identitarian and cultural discourses in landscape and urban design policies. In many forms of urban design and landscape design project proposed by Italian or European instituitions it is possible to find neo-colonial attitudes defined through cultural, patrimonial or identitarian topics.
Coastal Park Scenarios
In the thesis, among other things, I tried to reflect on those who are the main feature of the western Adriatic coastal landscape, a landscape that has the structure of fiction, where the processes of construction of urban spaces are made evoking other places.
contexted / conflictual landscapes
A Minor Landscape
a subtractive process, a detraction of all that constitutes elements of power to pull out the language [landscape] from a system of oppositions, of conflicts. It doesn’t concern addition but subtraction of those elements expression of power, to operate not by addition but by subtraction, amputation.
2006 International Ideas Competition “Requalification of Latina Coastal Landscapes” Honorable Mention
4 2009-2011 1Km Well-Being proximity / urban comfort
“1Km Wellbeing-The Urban Landscape Observatory� urban comfort and urban landscape design
How to identify existing urban landscape qualities to outline new design direction to redefine urban landscape qualities at the neighborhood scale.
design themes dwelling: friction / thresholds / estrangement formation: cuts / archipelago / distancing atmosphere: domesticity / combination of microclimates / interiority
in urban contexts characterized by mature economies we can see the emergence of forms of inhabiting characterized by two extreme dimensions: a wide range of large-scale movements, linked to work and leisure practices (weakening of the intermediate dimension of the medium range scale movements).
the emergence of a demand of comfort for an horizon of proximity corresponding to an area where you try to export some domestic practices. the space around the house has un unfamiliar dimension but different expectations starts to be required for it.
the poverty of our urban environments
2 hypothesis
N. U. functional and metrical model Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit is centered on the metric of the walker > the key points had to be reached on foot. In the 60s a critique of the concept of neighborhood gets relevance because of its segregative and stiffening social relationships character. (According to the sociologist Chombart de Lauwe, there is a natural tendency to get rid of the neighborhood). neighbourhood unit
shortage / waste ground improvement of soft mobility reduction of movements of people and goods “0 km market” models of distribution of goods renewed offering of wholesale trade lack of residential mobility extending commuter culture urban crisis reclaimaing of the “right to proximity”
the return of proximity
geneva
cloudbeing spacing distancing
archipel
friction
memory
carpets domesticity thresholds interiors
variations visual porosity conglomerate
atmosphere
materiality
swarm of questions
«Le but de l art est de communiquer la sensation des choses telle qu elles sont perçues et non pas telle qu elles sont connues Le procédé de l art consiste à rendre des objets étranges de fabriquer des formes difficiles pour augmenter la difficulté et la durée de la perception car la perception est une fin esthétique en elle même et doit être prolongée » Viktor Shklovsky L Art comme technique Théorie de la Prose 1925
RHÔNE
LAC LÉMAN
ARVE
HORIZONS GÉOLOGIQUES
k l h t
bl
b
l
b
b
b
hè
l
a a
a
a
ak
HORIZONS ÉTRANGERS
the picturesque spacing distancing thresholds materiality variations conglomerate visual porosity
A space made of thresholds, with the possibility to choose between different situations and spaces having different performances. An heterogeneous mix of materials, performance, and different atmospheres (each one well identified).
the after-landscape (Ulric Neisser) atmosphere domesticity archipel interiors shelters
landscape is no longer a thing to contemplate, but becomes noise in the eyes and the act of looking becomes a way of listening. a different way of observing spaces capable of producing uncanny landscapes
5 2012-2013 Forms of Communities proximity / cohabitation > community
How to address issues raised by the new desire for community and proximity that is arising in the European city without any reference to elitist communitarianisms? Ibiza, Skopje and Hiroshima: a critical attitude toward rational logic and Modern models of living.
Ibiza is an example of an “individualist community” where what holds together the people is a particular rural landscape.
The case of Skopje shows are in Europe are coming back Ottoman logic of urban functioning where different “communities in motion” interct with each other thanks to the presence of particular devices of spatial interface.
Hiroshima is an example of a “ destructive community “ where what defines the forms of living at the proximity scale is the infrastructure.
A common thread unites these stories. The 3 stories can be described as a contrastive projects, as reactions to , in response to predetermined patterns and models of dwelling, typical of traditional modernism. In the stories of Hiroshima and Skopje there is the presence of a common protagonist, such as the Metabolist star-architect Kenzo Tange. The story of Ibiza, where we can find figures such as Walter Benjamin, Josep LluĂs Sert, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Jack Kerouac, has also ramifications in the Far East, but mainly in the Californian counterculture, knotting Mediterranean events with social movements and cultures that developed along Pacific coastlines.
The rural landscape here becomes a place of resistance, expression of escape and taken away from bourgeois or capitalist lifestyles, a sign of distinction (Pierre Bourdieu).
Drop City or The Hog Farm, that have defined settlement principles communitarian space and forms of interaction much more tight, intended to part themselves out from the surrounding environment. landscapes of resistance
Walter Benjamin. Ibiza as an antimodern and archaic space, landscape in which to hide. The antibourgeois interior of the Ibiza house, the Porxo. Josep LluĂs Sert. Ibiza architecture as an expression of Modern rationality, as a model for Modern architecture. Hippies mix these 2 images
the construction of the rural myth. Walter Benjamin vs Josep LluĂs Sert.
Landscapes of Resistance The Hippie Communitarian Project
Dilated Proximity
Inversion between Interior and Exterior
dilated proximity
dilated proximity
dilated proximity
inversion between interior and exterior
6 2008 Barranquilla. Creole Spaces proximity / cohabitation > community
about 1.500.000 inhabitants
raizal palenquero amerindian black mulatto roma caucasic mestizo ebrew arab / middle eastern
“importation of landscapes� / karl parrish, el prado, 1920
paseo bolivar
Édouard Glissant, affirms that a creole space: is characterized by a particular opaque character, where ‘opacity is what protects the other, “and it is the condition that allows the establishment of the relationship between individuals and social groups”. From this perspective, he criticizes the policies of the recognition of diversities within the multiculturalist discourse
creole spaces
Barranquilla’s urban fabric is composed of different frontiers, intended as interface between grids of spatial selection. These refer to the model of the membrane, a filtering device space mediating between multiple environments , contexts and subjects. The membrane is a threshold, a concept that recalls the ways recalls the “Homi Bhabha “third space”: a place of translation of antagonistic positions. arroyos
ÂŤwe claim for everybody the right to opacityÂť Edouard Glissant
the membrane is an opaque space
7 2013 - The Destructive Character community, ruins, traditions, off-modern
Modernity / New Modernity rationality / transparency / utopia (avantgarde / experimentation / research)
destruction / ruin/ demolition
Charles Baudelaire Walter Benjamin Hannah Arendt Georg Simmel, Theory of Ruins
Joseph Schumpeter. The Creative Destruction
Albert Speer Ruinenwerttheorie, Theory of Ruin Value ruinophilia ruin > Post-Modernism
Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture, where he reflects on the language of the scar, the crust, the aesthetic imagination of the ruin as architectural language.
Sarajevo
1991, Franco Purini. Projects of Destruction as “liberating scenarios� 9 boards working on the fabric of Rome through cuts and ruptures
Robert Smithson in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (Artforum, 1967), affirmed that walking in the outskirts of his home town in New England he saw “ruins in reverse”: “the opposite of romantic ruins because the buildings do not unravel after they have been realized, but rather they grow, become ruined before being constructed.
Incubated cities are destined to self-destruct Ruins are the style of our future cities Future cities are themselves ruins Our contemporary cities, for this reason, are destined to live only a fleeting moment Give up their energy and return to inert material All our proposals and efforts will be buried And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted That will be the future
Arata Isozaki, Blue Sky of Surrender Day: Space of Darkness
Gomera
Godzilla
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
1962, Arata Isozaki, Incubation Process / Joint Core System
In A Clockwork Orange images of destruction constantly interact with images of art, of things created, usually thought to be the diametric opposite of such violence. Creation and destruction become almost indistinguishable.
1968, Arata Isozaki, Re-Ruined Hiroshima, Milan Triennale
12 large curved panels: photos of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined with images of supernatural beings and demons of Japanese tradition representing the vengeful spirits of the nuclear disaster.
The invention of the Metabolist megastructure has tried to define radical strategies to cope with huge urban growth phenomena but it also contains a search for psychological antidotes to cure the poisons produced by the traumatic experiences of the past.
An Estranged Modernity of Darkness, Termination, Ashes City Demolition Industry Inc. ipermodern post-modern off - modern
Destruction / Ruin / Demolition: Zombie Concepts
These ghosts resemble what some sociologists call “zombie concepts”, ie concepts that continue to be used, despite having lost their heuristic potential. Yet the categories zombies are somehow essential to move forward between phenomena only partially recognizable.
We do not get rid easely of “zombie concepts” do not you get rid easily. Some burials haven’t been successful, we are forced to an eternal beginnig. “
1966-1976 Chinese Cultural Revolution The failure of the Great Leap Forward ( 1958-1962 ) weakened the position of Mao in the Communist Party, hence his call for a new proletarian revolution, or the Cultural Revolution.
Everything that has been suspected of being bourgeois had to be destroyed. Rural Myth
postmodernism
manipulation of historical signs joyous rediscovery of the entire repertoire of the past contamination of expressions recovery of the concepts of place, site, history and continuity complexity cult of the roots “end of prohibitionism�
counter-culture cultural revolution postcolonial movements
figures of destruction 1 assembly technique 2 prototypical approach in the urban design
Architecture as a Body: Frankenstein
Destructive attitude results in combinatorial game of fragments. Michelangelo, Ledoux, Giulio Romano, Otto Wagner, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi, Hans Hollein, Peter Cook, Adalberto Libera, Philip Johnsosn, Leon Krier, Lawrence Halprin, Ettore Sottsass. Isozaki: Tsukuba is “a real monster suffering from schizophrenic eclecticism�.
1983, Arata Isozaki, Tsukuba Center Building
Egyptian is the predicate of all the buildings that may be subject to deconstruction, except for the most Egyptian construction, the pyramid, a structure built based on the appearance it would assume after its collapse. According to Isozaki we are condemned to live forever in ancient buildings, in places always haunted by ghosts.
Isozaki the Egyptian
metabolists
redefinition of dwelling characters at the proximity scale > the community as an isolated block infrastrucure as sharing space / collective space prototypical approach in the project tradition redefinition of the role of the architect
Kiyonori Kikutake, Tower-Shaped Community
Kisho Kurokawa, The Agricultural City
Urban Connector infrastructure as a sharing space > Soviet Disurbanists’ Social Condenser “The urban connector referred to a superscale structure which served as the medium between urban scale and human scale, and between the collective and the individual. It would gather individual forces into collective power integrating the environment as a whole”. Noboru Kawazoe, “City of the Future” in Zodiac 9 (1961): 110.
1960, Kisho Kurokawa, Bamboo Type Community
Nobel laureate Camillo Golgi developed techniques for the visualization of nerve cell bodies. The Golgi organism is what in plant and animal cells allows the processes and transport of proteins. This project, alternating dense urban areas with open spaces, is characterized by the presence of overlapping cones that host capsules and sharing spaces. This indoor / outdoor space switches the light, facilitates the “transmission of information� it works as a device space for participation. 1968, Fuhimiko Maki, Golgi’s Structures
The Metabolist megastructure identify precise measurements of living at the scale of proximity. Some solutions recallparticular sharing spaces characterizing old Japanese cities. The machi is a particular neighborhood unit.: a short filament in which the urban road aggregatees particular residential typologies conceived spatially as sequences of spaces arranged in parallel to the road. This device works as as a hybrid, sharing space that can be inhabited in a semi-private way. In the machi the road is a threshold, a membrane.
“The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.� Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character, Frankfurter Zeitung at 20th November 1931
The Reconstruction of the Crystal Palace Dwelling in the Contemporary City: Turin The Endless Coast (Heimat) 1Km Well-Being
cultural discourses
interior
1
relations betwen urban design / landscape design / dwelling practices
domesticity
community
proximity post-colonial theories
destruction
2
ruin
off-modern
Forms of Communities Barranquilla. Creole Spaces The Destructive Character
friction between modernization processes and persistencies of traditional forms of dwelling and spatial production
Attention to dwelling practices Problem-oriented urban design
Infrastructure as sharing space Invention of devices of spatial interfaces The opaque interior space
Redefinition of forms of spatial proximity 1 Km Wellbeing design themes (dwelling, formation, atmosphere) Reconsideration of some Off-Modern experiences
theory/critique
Reconstruction of genealogies, associations between some liberal urban design discourses and radical proposal developed in the context of countercultural movements Explicitation of the “dark side” of some landscapes policies and discourses The minor landscape The critic to a trivialized idea of the public space as well as to the use of certain concepts in urban design practices intended as “suitcase-words”
elements of a contrastive or resistance project
to question the greenhouse-space