ISSUE #2: NO MAN'S LAND

FREE ASS. MAG.

Free Association Magazine Spring, Issue #2 // NO MAN’S LAND

[inside cover] Dan Harvey

SPRING // ISSUE #2

FREE ASS. MAG. Free Association (Maga)Zine freeassmag.com SPRING, ISSUE #2: NO MAN’S LAND This anti-architecture/architecture (maga)zine is an agitated response to the closed nature of the architecture field. It was born out of the idea that our environment, built or unbuilt, influences much of who we are and the things we make as manifestations of our existence.

Collected and fabricated in Chicago, USA, but extending across the globe.

Contributors Amanda Wills Chloe Snower Chris Kuberski Dan Harvey David Reithoffer David Work Diego Frausto Douglas Wills Elliott Riggen Felix Zdrojkowski Filip Hodas Francisco Alvarez Rincon Francisco Miranda Fritz Park Giulia Formica Haden Miller Jordan Widjaja June Lee Karl Ochmanek Keefer Dunn Kirsten Landmark Masih Krishna Okhandiar Lyra Jakabhazy Madison May Maela Ohana Marklyan Varhola Melanija Grozdanoska Michal Ben Jakob Mohammad Alkhabbaz Noritaka Minami Oscar Alejandro Rios Sudeshna Sen Surambika Pradhan Ted Black uxo collective Vukan Zarkovic 4

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NO MAN’S LAND : The Space (In)Between With the second issue of this anti-establishment zine, we venture to question the extra bits of space often overlooked. ISSUE #1: UTOPIA wondered at the great absurdities of things, but with this second topic, we hope to bring up a question of constant debate, the question of where we may belong as inhabitants of a space.

There are spaces left over, kept blank, perhaps from the absence of consciousness, or a willingness to forget. Much of what we have constructed as our environment has been contrived to manipulate our actions or desires. Simultaneously there are spaces created with unintended consequences. These places can be hidden or in plain site. We may have constructed them ourselves by way of protection or neglect, but all that remains is the place considered “no man’s land”, the “uncontested” area.

Amanda Wills Editor/Founder

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DE_OUTSIDE Inaccessible areas within various maps in the video game Counter Strike: Source

Marklyan Varhola : Chicago, USA

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Felix Zdrojkowski : Chicago, USA

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GAY NO MAN’S LAND I always knew I was gay. Of course I didn’t know what it meant as a little boy, but as I hit puberty, it all started to make sense. I was terrified. No one else was like me, or so I felt. I was in another zone. This was the early 1960’s -- no role models, no internet to exchange stories, just despair at being different and alone.

My first memory of feeling the horrible thud was at a family picnic on a beach. My Dad and I went into the locker room to change. Guys, some of them my cousins, were naked or nearly naked, talking, joking, the usual stuff. I couldn’t take my eyes off their bodies. I was attracted to them in a way that I intuitively knew no one else was.

What the hell? Why? Why me? Why not them? What is this? Lots of questions; no answers.

The only thing I took away from that experience was that I had to hide my feelings and pretend they didn’t exist, at least in public.

What would those guys say if they knew?

What would my Dad say?

What would the world say? There was no hope of a favorable outcome.

Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover were ruining gay people’s lives via blackmail, with local police forces following in suit. I didn’t want to be a criminal. I just wanted to be me.

It never occurred to me to try to change and not be gay because I could tell, even as a little kid, that this feeling was built-in, part of the hard wiring. I had to live in two dimensions – the real me, and the public me. A healthy emotional life this does not create, but I didn’t see any other choices. I didn’t feel like I was Liberace or the ultra-effeminate hairdresser.

I was just a typical kid but one who got excited when he looked at guys rather than girls.

The darkest depths of this no man’s land came when an otherwise very eligible young woman proposed marriage to me when I was in my early 20’s. Panic. What do I do? Where am I? Who am I? Do I take the marriage route, live comfortably off her family’s substantial wealth, give her the children she wants, and – and what? Live a lie? Seek secret sex encounters in dark places?

Certainly that’s how it’s done by some people, but by me?

As I struggled with this decision, I had a classic textbook Freudian dream which enlightened me. I dreamed that she and I were married and we were asleep in a small double bed against a wall. I had the side against the wall, and I was lying on my side facing the wall. Her body was pushed against mine, thus pushing my face against the wall. I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocated in my dream. I awoke gasping for breath. I got the message. I told her the next day that I couldn’t marry her, but I didn’t have the guts to say why not.

How unfortunate for both of us. I guess one could say I dragged her into this no man’s land where I was flailing to seek identity and truth.

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Fortunately however time was on my side. Out of the 1960’s “revolutions” came at least some open discussion about homosexuality. While I was struggling in high school, never meeting another gay person to my knowledge, news reports were beginning to crop up that indicated I wasn’t alone and there might even be some friends for me out there.

The year after I started college, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Whew, at least I was no longer considered a mental case.

In college, slowly but surely I started to meet gay people. It was wonderful, but everyone was deeply closeted. At family functions I would try to be clever, lying when necessary, about my activities and interests.

I felt so different and alone. Would I be exiled to this no man’s land for the rest of my life?

Again, time was on my side. News reports of people coming out of the closet started appearing. Also, tragically, AIDS news reports thrust homosexuality front and center in the media, for better or for worse.

My loving parents were no fools, and they recognized similarities between my behavior and what they were seeing on TV. They had the courage to put the big question to me. I gave them an honest answer, and we moved forward, probably better for me than for them. As I gained confidence in who I was and started living an open life, the no man’s land that I had occupied for the first several decades of my life started to fade away.

One humorous aspect of all this is that as a young gay man I found myself hanging around gay guys of all ages, including guys with good connections.

I benefited occasionally from these connections, be it getting access to back stage at a big theatrical production or getting a tour of a famous corporate headquarters or whatever. When straight people would ask in awe how I had achieved these things, I would just smile and say something to the effect of, “It’s all in who you know,” knowing that this was one of the perks from that gay no man’s land in which I had been swirling for so long.

David Reithoffer : Chicago, USA

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June Lee : Seoul, South Korea

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The space in between... letters. For graphic designers, especially typographers those tiny slivers of space make all the difference. In type-geek speak we call it kerning and tracking, for the rest of you ignoramus’ it’s called hot sh*t. But I digress. The white minutiae of spaces between the letters often define the overall design of a page, as well as the experience of reading itself. If the letters are too far apart they start to blend into a long string of letters mixing with the word spacing. If they’re too close together they begin to jumble up into a mish-mash of sometimes indecipherable words or else mistaken for other words. Of course, we need to talk about leading, but due to space...

The example on the left is a good example of the goldilocks syndrome designers face when it comes to good kerning. The top example is clearly too much real estate while the bottom one is so close they’re mixing into other words. The real turmoil for designers is the middle two.

Which is better? In terms of letterspacing? Since it’s in all caps (a-la MF DOOM) the letters should each be clearly seen, hence the top one is better. No economically it’s better to have tight kerning, yet retain legibility. Ok, ok it all makes sense but why the FLICK is that? Can’t they both be right? Or in this case, since we’re using probably the most ugliest font* in existence, both be wrong?

* No dummy, it’s not Comic Sans. Sheesh get out of your redundant kneejerk reaction cubby hole! It’s Bauhaus. And the second ugliest font is used for this text (op~ stop it! Wrong again) is Souvenir.

Fritz Park : Seoul, South Korea

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DECORATION FOR EMPTY SPACE To commemorate and to decorate are perhaps not such foreign practices.

Both, in their way, call attention.

Though, commemoration calls forth from the past-present, while decoration moves in the present-future.

It is in this sense that the proposal occupies its tiny corner of the United States. In limbo between its neighbors the federal gravity of nearby buildings and the expanse of Taft Park - the site, as empty space, slips away. However, once decorated by dyed-pink concrete, crushed granite, and thin marble, the site locates both itself and the city.

uxo collective : Blacksburg, USA

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Jordan Widjaja : Chicago, USA

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Elliott Riggen : Chicago, USA

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Kirsten Landmark Masih : Minneapolis, USA

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THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS As I thought through all of the ways we might typically use the phrase “no man’s land” they all seemed somehow pejorative: always referring to a space that is forgotten, inaccessible, or contested. Even when the term is intended positively it seems to be colored by the core preception of negativity. It is the act of transgression into the negative space of a no man’s land that might color it with some sort of ironic romance. This implicit negativity is fascinating - why must a no man’s land be a bad thing?

That answer might lay in the fact that language, like architecture or anything else, is a social construction. The meanings aren’t fixed but created and reinterpreted through a continuous process we are collectively engaged in at the level of society. In this way, our values as a society seep into our language and in turn color our vision. In this way, our lexicons are limited by culture, and as a result so are the ways in which we can understand, interpret, and describe the world.

So what social value has produced our current negative understanding of the phrase? I believe that the answer to such questions can be found in a historical study of political-economy. In this case I believe the negativity of the phrase is directly associated with capitalism’s most core value, the ownership of private property. It makes sense that in a system predicated on private possession, a land no single person owned would be seen something profoundly negative.

In fact right-wing economists have long described the perceived problems of land literally owned by no man as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is telling that this critique is often elevated to an assault on any form of cooperative ownership. As the name suggests, the commons is land held in common - belonging to no single individual - which allowed anyone to use the land and its fruits. Typically this meant pasturing livestock, collecting firewood, and even farming for food or hay. The tragedy is the supposed fact that a resource held in common will quickly be depleted due to the self interest of individuals trumping the interests of the whole. As the story goes, a farmer who could freely access land would always take as much from it as he could regardless of what effect it had on the long term sustainability of the land itself or the well-being of his neighbors.

Historians like Susan Jane Buck Cox have critiqued the idea on the basis that it ignores the historical forces that led to the eradication of the commons, the implication being that the “tragedy” is built on a false interpretation of history. As Cox notes, the commons were in fact governed through the cooperation of neighbors and the understanding that their interests in managing the land depended on a mutual and collective cooperation.

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Not only does this challenge the false presupposition that human beings are inherently self-interested, it also shows us that a “no man’s land” could exist apart from the negative connotation that capitalist ideology has endowed it with. Things have been different, and if we have a little faith that they could be again, we might imagine a world where “no man’s land” is a positive phrase that reflects a desire for a common good benefiting no man in particular, but all of humankind.

Keefer Dunn : Atlanta, USA

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Film stills of various spaces vacated by the bodies of the narrative....

In order: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994 The Intruder, 2004 Millennium Mambo, 2001 Like Someone in Love, 2012 In Vanda’s Room, 2000 What Time Is It There?, 2001

Krishna Okhandiar : Chicago, USA

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BOTTOMS

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Abuse, though loud in anger and suffering, is something that is incredibly quiet and isolating. The insurmountable load is carried by oneself and it is desolate and it always remains no matter what healing you try to ignite. The objects that I make speak for those who cannot yet speak for themselves.

HANGING BY THREAD

Madison May : Grand Rapids, USA

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When I think of ‘no man’s land’ I picture the hazy battlefields of the First World War, punctuated with barbed wire that suggests that you can cross, but you’d best be careful.

Far less dramatic, though still striking, are the six-foot high fences surrounding half a square block of land on the corner of 28th and Halsted in Bridgeport. They are worn and rusted, a few still swathed in the remaining shreds of green plastic sheeting that originally draped the entire perimeter. It is strewn with glass bottles, candy wrappers and a sign encouraging fathers to bring their children in Chicago Public Schools to the first day of class (in 2013).

One spring or summer morning six or seven years ago a large sign appeared heralding the construction of an apartment block. This one was going to make the neighborhood more family friendly. Bridgeport already encompasses thousands of apartments and houses, and this one took advantage of the low housing prices.

Around that time the neighborhood was enjoying some upswing. At the end of 2008 Mayor Daley cut the ribbon for the 9th District Police Station, the presence of which helped the region glow bright green for safety on the crime map. A few months later Stearns Quarry, which had been used as a dumping ground for almost 30 years, had been transformed into Palmisano Park (aka Mount Bridgeport). It is 27 acres of green space in a packed urban area that allows residents to walk, run and bike amidst a dozen types of flora. Folks can even fish in a limestone retention pond. Everything felt fresh, clean and right.

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Naturally, some enterprising developers were going to take advantage of the boom. Vehicles appeared. A huge foundation was dug. Piles of dirt grew and patches of graffiti appeared on the sunken walls soon after. The fence went up. Everything was on track, and then it just stopped. Because economies at every level began to sour, work on the lot halted, too. The summer passed and one day the giant hole was filled in and leveled. This was the last effort anybody put into the lot for the better part of a decade.

In the passing years as everything has slowed down, this patch has remained in limbo. Neither paid workers nor bad alley drivers nor drunken passersby have knocked down any of the fence. Nobody has gone inside, to the benefit of the land. Over the better half of the past decade this land has experienced every kind of weather this city gets. It has been scorched by summer heat, pounded with two historic winter storms, nourished by intense rains and cooled in the spring and autumn breeze. Plants grow tall, especially thanks to the recent warm winter, and birds and squirrels roam free. It is tranquil and it just smells good.

Pedestrians can easily use the openings at the northeast and southwest corners as a shortcut, yet, for some reason we don’t. The plants remain untrammeled and there’s not a single footprint in the snow.

Amidst this growth is a new sign. Richland Global is attempting to make Bridgeport more residential. In Parkview Terrace $208,000 will get you 2 bedrooms. I know this spring and summer are going to be noisy and dusty, and we’ll get lots of new neighbors. Soon it will all be gone as new families bound into their own lives.

Right now, though, there are no men, women or children there. The fence remains less a sentinel than a guardian. Even more so than the tended fields of Palmisano Park, in this settled city stands pure wilderness.

Chris Kuberski : Chicago, USA

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Maela Ohana : Montreal, Cannada

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Michal Ben Jakob : Jerusalem, Israel

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BACKPACKING THROUGH “NO­ MAN’S­ LAND” — SYRIA After touring through Egypt and Jordan, crossing into Syria was a much hairier experience. Though we had our documents in order, it took over four hours to pass the first border checkpoint.

Once we got through the first check­ point, we were then obliged to drive to a second check­ point just a few more miles down the road. There, we were promptly sent back to the first check­ point because one of our group members had gotten the wrong date stamp from the careless officer at the first check­ point.

Photo by Lyra Jakabhazy

Finally, we made it through and were on to Palmyra. Piercing out of the sand near an oasis, Palmyra was ancient Roman city now frozen in the sands of the Syrian desert. It must have been a beautiful city in its day. As we walked down its streets we could almost imagine whispers of Roman citizens as the wind blew through the classical Roman archways and ornate Corinthian columns that still stood.

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Photo by Douglas Wills

Though Palmyra was deserted, a steady stream of tourism supported a nearby community of Syrians who sold, literally, tons of dates to sweet toothed tourists who couldn’t resist the desert delights! Dates are definitely comfort in a land of harshness and violence. Anything this sweet and soft is a welcomed respite.

After Palmyra, we trekked on to Damascus. Damascus was ancient, but very much alive in contrast to the ruins Palmyra.

A thriving metropolis, Damascus was built on layers of history and culture: Roman, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Etc. All layered on top one another like paint in an old apartment that changes owners every few years.

Photo by Lyra Jakabhazy

Douglas Wills : Chicago, USA

Damascus was a beautifully dangerous patchwork of people, culture and religions all competing for the scarce resources that Damascus could still provide. Everyone seemed on edge...

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Photo by Douglas Wills

Images of President Assad were everywhere, like the decal on the back of a passing pick-up truck. Reminding us that eyes were upon us.

Photo by Lyra Jakabhazy

Aleppo did not disappoint either.

Like Damascus, Aleppo hid a beautiful life behind the walls of it this ancient city. Within many homes lied a spectacularly beauty that was never betrayed by the dingy streets that snaked through the city scape.

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Photo by Douglas Wills

The “hammer scene” with a local blacksmith created such a huge traffic jam that the street literally came to a screeching halt. Men from all directions slammed on their brakes and pulled out their cell phones to capture the suggestive event. Apparently, in such a closed society, a metaphor goes a long way.

Photo by Douglas Wills

Often we turned to food as the tension of Syria became too much. Syrian cuisine which is definitely the world’s best comfort food.

Follow a great meal with a few shots of Arak and everything will be just fine...until the next day in “no-man’s-land”.

Douglas Wills : Chicago, USA

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Giulia Formica : Forli, Italy

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Krak des Chavaliers, Syria

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Citadel of Salah Ed-Din, Syria

Mohammad Alkhabbaz : Ann Arbor, USA

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Chloe Snower : New York City, USA

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The Space Between...

An uncomfortable truth + A comforting lie ___ A child’s spirit + A parent’s judgment ___ A protestor + A pundit ___ A cleansing breathe + Choked tears ___ Your hands + Your heart ___ An unspoken connection + Self-censorship ___ Dancing in the nude + Dreams of dancing in the nude ___ The journey + The destination ___ A poem + A blank page

Lyra Jakabhazy : Chicago, USA

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SKYBREAK (2012 – 2016) The former Dome Restaurant in Woods Hole, Massachusetts was designed by the renowned inventor, engineer, and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller in 1953. It holds the distinction of being one of Fuller’s early experimentations in building a geodesic dome and the first example that was specifically designed for commercial use.

Despite the establishment’s initial popularity with the Woods Hole community, the distinct design of the dome created difficulties in operating a normal restaurant. Water leaks and soundproofing were constant problems posed by the shape of the ceiling.

In an effort to create a more conventional commercial space in the year 2000, a dropped ceiling was installed to effectively conceal the upper half of the dome. Today, the original roof has been revealed once again, only because a malfunction with the sprinkler system led to extensive water damage with the dropped ceiling tiles.

The fact that the geodesic dome and the dropped ceiling grid are now visible simultaneously allows one to gaze up at two divergent trajectories of architecture and ideas of what constitutes the ideal ceiling of a space.

Noritaka Minami : Chicago, USA

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“BOI” illustrates a highly intimate observation of the topics of consummation and consumerism in relation to growing-up, reflecting the exploration of early sexual awakenings, and social conditioning.

Likewise, concepts of disease, death, and religion are posed into realm of child play. An “innocent” tempting yet distorted world is created that seduces the viewer with its flamboyant and glittering nature.

Clinical imagery appears throughout, exposing the authors obsession with sickness and the infrastructure of the body. Enjoyment in selfviolation, deprivation and the obsession to control the physical state is glamorized, and romanticized.

Always playing around with themes of juvenility, and adulthood the work arouses a rather nostalgic zest.

The work is more of a question, than it is a statement.

Vukan Zarkovic : Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Melanija Grozdanoska : Chicaago, USA

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PINKY’S DREAM #1 Pinky’s Dream #1 was placed deep within a large boatshed. The work was entered through a small passage that opened to a room left bare except for two 1970s hair-drying chairs and a digital projection across the length of the 4 metre room. The projection spanned the width of the wall, yet was cropped enough to allow the faded presence of the decaying yellow and green painted walls to bleed with the images of the pink hair salon. The projected video features an empty, quiet and lonely salon, captured in an almost still moment besides the reflections of cars passing on the street side window.

Pinky’s Dream #1 included two 1970s hair-drying chairs with large pastel yellow domes fitted with speakers playing a whispered audio track simulating a haircut (the voice of a hairdresser). A video was projected from the perspective of the chairs, showing an empty hair salon. The viewer was positioned looking into the mirror with no one around, just the subtle movement of cars passing. The salon itself existed in actuality as a bleak, quiet and lonely place. The décor was located in the 1970s and as a customer, it felt like nothing had changed since.

The experience of Pinky’s Dream #1 is one that passes through time and place, virtual and real. The visual component depicts a place with a décor similar to the 1970s with only a few clues to bring it into the contemporary. Beyond the soft pink wallpaper and 1970s hair dryers mirrored in the video, the viewer is given clues as to the technical makeup of the work. The video itself is shot on a contemporary video format, yet the image contains little to reference a contemporary era. To experience the work the viewer is placed sitting in the hairdrying chair. The chair itself is not comfortable, slightly stiff, awkward and foreign due to the placement of its aged technology within a gallery context.

Pinky’s Dream #1 is a work that blends realities and time-periods.

The work does not intend to trick or fool the viewer by the technology but in its simplicity attempts to create a sense of displacement.

The title, Pinky’s Dream #1, is borrowed from a David Lynch song title that aptly combines the formal attributes of the salon with the history of modern surrealist filmmaking that Lynch is known for. The work pays tribute to the adjective “Lynchian” while simultaneously existing as a fan video playing to the cult following of Lynchian themes. This obsessive trait I deem ironic due the iconic nature of Lynch’s surrealist and meta-themes present in his work, notably Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), where film sets exist within the film, creating a layered narrative. Pinky’s Dream #1 uses a set for the suspense of something to happen that never does.

Pinky’s Dream #1 uses old media to form a melancholic representation of something from a time that’s been and gone. Technically the work exists in a lo-fi manner with all technology comprehensible. Pinky’s Dream #1 simulates an experience from a retro setting, positioning it very much in the contemporary through media and online communities.

Ted Black : Dunedin, New Zealand

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Rodrigo Rivas : Santiago, Chile

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“Oh you silly little men!

With your countries and borders, Your property’ lines, and zoning codes.

I was born before your age.

Before your structures, And your so called architecture.

With fire and the power Of a thousand storms, I’ve built mighty mountains.

Tears from endless rivers And eternal glaciers Carved their faces.

Oh you silly little men!

With your budgets and margins, Your schedules, and naive projections.

I was born before time.

Before your days, And your idea of millennia.

My existence is Touch, feel and perceive While yours is based on a screen.

Rain, wind and fragrances, Tell me I exist.

While you wait for a like, To allow yourself to be.

Oh you silly little men!

You think you can conquer everything.

But you’re nothing more, Than a brief afterthought.

I’m la Pachamama*, Earth and Nature.

I’m no man’s land.”

* Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. She is also known as the earth/time mother.

Francisco Miranda : Chicago, USA

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Sudeshna Sen : Chicago, USA

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MOMENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SINGLE STAIRWELL

There are corners and spaces which are rarely ventured within the places we have constructed for ourselves. These are moments captured in the life of a single stairwell, a no man’s land in it’s own right.

Amanda Wills : Chicago, USA

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MARGINALIA The coinage “no man’s land” has persisted against the wearing off of its specific denotation of “contested territories” between the trenches of World War I, and today it means simply “a place where none can abide.” Curiously, an alternate meaning that predates the WWI phrase is “a dumping ground between fiefdoms,” which is metaphorically closer to the territory I wish to explore: the No Man’s Land (NML) of our built environments.

There are other phrases, some more specific, some less, which might categorically delineate a mental map of these manifold physical territories. A good place to start, using the laborious method of definition by example, is with the “landscape buffers” that surround and intrude into, say, a large parking lot or office campus in any well-regulated municipality. Built and maintained with equal meticulousness to meet legal requirements, these little patches of lawn and forest vignette, which may incorporate some engineered function for mitigating runoff flows, are remarkable by their utter uselessness for interaction with even a phony pastiche of Nature.

I once looked out the window to behold a lush, tree-strewn lawn spanning acres around my employer’s Chicagoland office and thought, “My God, no children will ever play there.” So the idea of waste is a key.

But to call NML “waste space” is too bluntly precise (hitting near the middle of the map …) yet still somehow inaccurate (… with wrong boundaries). My NML isn’t unused land or an explicit dumping ground like a landfill, but rather the interstitial spaces generated by what economists call “externalities” – and this aspect of NML as something “external” to programmatic intentions and purposeful structures is both literally and symbolically on the nose, and we’ll circle back to it shortly.

Nor is my NML necessarily “wasteland” in the sense of desert or blight, calling up associations of an area that is abandoned due to catastrophic pollution or unpopulated to begin with; not a rural zone or mine tailing dump. On the contrary, one of its defining features is its persistent tendency to pop up in the city or town, where one would expect land use to be imperatively dense and efficient. In fact, as with the “buffer” example, its existence is typically not only tolerated but mandated by building or land-use codes.

The inverse of NML, its shadow twin, is probably the phenomenon described by Rem Koolhaas’ elliptical 2002 essay on “Junkspace.” This notoriously rambling, shaggy dog of a jeremiad is so rife with quotable quips, associative leaps, and novel metaphors (example: “Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends.”) that I could fill every page in this ‘zine alternately lauding, unpacking, and criticizing it. Its reputation and influence are so pervasive that, given this issue’s theme, one would be remiss not to allude to it somehow.

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Suffice to say that if the “junkspace” Koolhaas describes is interior, “no man’s land” is its exterior counterpart. NML is the cruft of uninhabited space that accumulates wherever architects and planners are forced to treat a locale as a conduit rather than a place in its own right. Like layers of insulation around a copper wire or asbestos around a steam pipe, the buffers needed to protect the prioritized function – e.g. flow – fatten an over-wide street into a stroad, deform the potential neighborhood into a subdivision, and make structures designed for human use inhumane and inaccessible.

David Work : Chicago, USA

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EXCERPTS FROM “SHE CRIES” “She cries!” yelled a girl at the back of the room.

It was the shortest story yet, composed of only a noun and a verb. Convinced the class had resolved my professor’s challenge to create a setting-less story, I was surprised when he said: “The tears the girl cries have spatial qualities.” His silver tongue had uttered an unexpected but delicious argument.

“Have you ever felt as if you were inside of a tear?” he asked. That’s when it hit me. A creative epiphany took over me leading me to immortalize the quote on my next tale without a place. The film isn’t just about where the girl cries, but why she’s crying -Hollis Frampton’s Carrots and Peas.

This too is a film without an apparent setting. Unless, of course, you consider the spatial qualities of vegetables; have you ever felt as if you were inside of a carrot?

view video here: https://vimeo.com/164011086

Francisco Alvarez Rincon : Chicago, USA

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Haden Miller : Chicago, USA

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Diego Frausto : Chicago, USA

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Surambika Pradhan : Chicago, USA

The drawing, done in ink, is a tribute to the artist Hasegawa Tohaku, who worked under great daimyos to bring peace after a century of warfare. A homage in 60,000 dots.

Since World War I, ‘no man’s land’ has been more defined and deemed dangerous. Today, however, the rest of the world has become a place where people no longer feel safe. The biggest example of such mindless violence we exhibit in the name of politics, were the air-raids on Japan where the casualty count ranges between 240,000 to 900,000, making things such as architecture, art and culture seem trivial. However, it is these arts that can combat the monstrosity with their beauty.

TOKYO: 1942-1945

NO MAN’S LAND

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NO MAN’S LAND

Oscar Alejandro Rios : New York City, USA

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NO MAN’S LAND

THE SHAPE OF HOME Home is the space that forms our character, a remembered landscape imbued with the memories of living in a certain place. The spaces surrounding our houses are the true boundaries of Home.

Early last June I was returning from a few months of travel to my Home. While the inside of my house remained much the same, my Home had changed. I could not quite place how, but the sun was different, it hit the house in the wrong way. And biking my familiar routes felt too wide, too alien. What had happened to my Home?

Anyone who has ever had a return to a Home feels this, my father does when we pass through his childhood suburb near Detroit. He can recall shops since closed, old arcades, and formerly prosperous Catholic churches; he can recall all the icons of a phantom landscape, gradually turned into something else.

On a lazy summer morning the root of the change dawned on me, the trees! The street trees had changed. During my travels the city had enacted a campaign to aggressively trim or remove a great number of street trees, all at once. The end result of which left me feeling wounded, the shape of Home had irreparably changed.

Perhaps it is their ponderous growth that makes trees feel eternal, but the deletion was a real lesson in fragility, in temporariness. Perhaps worse than the physical removal is that I can’t seem to even remember the exact shape of what is missing, just its absence, the void space where something once was. I wish I spent more time memorizing the twists and turns of those trees, more time paying attention to my Home.

Karl Ochmanek : Chicago, USA

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NO MAN’S LAND

Filip Hodas : Prague, Czech Republic

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[inside cover] Dan Harvey

Free Association Magazine Chicago, USA freeassmag.com