INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Georgia Jules Vlassi_Quotes

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q: Quotations for Week 8

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q:

Even though the above adjectives could translate to countless urban conditions and distinct cases, it is somewhat obvious that they all express a state when something vital has been lost from this place. Next to the notion of ‘loss’ there is also the presence of ‘void’ and bleak sentiments.

Although emptiness and void are sometimes equivalent terms, a differentiation takes place in the urban notion of ‘empty’ as ‘urban emptiness’ and

‘urban void’ tend to translate into deviant conceptions of urbanities.

Q: ‘RK : The Berlin Wall as architecture was for me the 1

first spectacular revelation in architecture of how absence can be stronger than presence. For me, it is not necessarily connected to loss in a metaphysical sense, but more connected to an issue of efficiency, where I think that the great thing about Berlin is that it showed for me how (and this is my own campaign against architecture) entirely missing urban presences or entirely erased architectural entities nevertheless generate what can be called an urban condition. It's no coincidence for example that the center of Shenzen is not a built substance but a conglomeration of golf courses and theme parks basically 1

Excerpt from an interview of Rem Koolhas to Hans Ulrich Obrist, for

‘artnode’ http://www.artnode.se/artorbit/issue4/i_koolhaas/i_koolhaas.html

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

unbuilt or empty conditions. And that was the beauty of Berlin even ten years ago, that it was the most contemporary and the most avant-garde European city because it had these major vast areas of nothingness.

HUO: Landing in Berlin was very beautiful, with all these gaps and holes in the urban tissue.

RK: Not only was it beautiful, but it also had a programmatic potential, and the potential to inhabit a city differently represented a rare and unique power. The irony of course is not only that the architecture being built is not the right architecture, but that it is built at all.

It's a city that could have lived with its emptiness and have been the first European city to systematically cultivate the emptiness. Like Rotterdam where there is a lot of emptiness inside. For Libeskind, emptiness is a loss that can be filled or replaced by architecture. For me, the important thing is not to replace it, but to cultivate it. This is a kind of post-architectural city, and now it's becoming an architectural city. For me that's a drama, not some kind of stylistic error.’

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q:

As Rotenberg and McDonogh mention in their texts : 2

‘Given the lifeways and values that associate with cities-the very type-specimen civilization—emptiness disturbs.

For some, it may be unnerving or “dangerous” to deal with such spots. For others, the emptiness of ‘no one goes there’ represents such a cultural imposition that it eclipses patterns of use therefore marked as deviant and therefore nonexistent. It may simply seem wasteful, uneconomic, or threatening, but empty space begs explanation… I will argue that emptiness as a complex social space is defined by conflict among groups with distinct visions of the city and presences in its society.’

Q:

Since ‘urban emptiness’-or else put an empty/unused part of the city- it is neither governmentally, entrepreneurially and financially prescribed nor design-prescribed, it could be seen as a kind of wilderness inside the urban plane.

Wilderness may not be productive in financial context, since no one controls it, but it serves as an irreplaceable free field for human action, whether that is appealing to most or not. New things can spring from wilderness since it serves as a cheap ‘plateau’, especially in the cultural field, a necessary element for new and interesting, non-mainstream, 2

,Robert Rotenberg, Gary W. McDonogh, ‘The Geography of

Emptiness’, The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space, P. 7. Praeger, 1993.

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

unofficial cultural phenomenon to arise. It is a reserve for character and freedom in the city and a usual shelter to non-conformists, a ‘no-man’s land’.

Q:

Given that and considering that we exist in a

context of semiotic capitalism, one would argue that ‘urban emptiness’-like all other things- changes its character and value dramatically when you name it one thing or the other. It can move from a promising and desirable urban area to scary and avoidable. Cultivation of ‘emptiness’ is in a way a matter also of giving it a name which someone does not see in terror (e.g. ghetto).

Q: ‘…governance of the infinite property owners.’

3

?

3

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q: ”The State has its root in time, and will ripe and rot in time. Greater things than it will fall — religion, for example. Neither moral conceptions nor artforms have an eternity before them. How much are we really in duty bound to pin our faith to? Who will guarantee me that on Jupiter two and two do not make five ?”4

4 From Wikiquotes, Letter to Georg Brandes (17 February 1871), as translated in Henrik Ibsen : Björnstjerne Björnson. Critical Studies(1899) by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q: “The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.”5 “It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.”6 “Evil brings men together.”7 “When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.”8 “Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.”

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”

5

Aristotle

6

Aristotle, 'Nicomachean Ethics,' 325 B.C

7

Aristotle

8

Aristotle, Politics, book 1, chapter 2

,

Rhetoric.

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q:

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of

terror/ which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,/ because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

Every angel is terrible.” 9

Q: “Let everything happen to you/ Beauty and terror/ Just keep going/ No feeling is final” 10

9

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

10

Rainer Maria Rilke

.

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014

Q: Cosmopolitan democracy is a political theory, which explores the application of norms and values of democracy at different levels, from global to local. It is about what global governance of the people, by the people, for the people can mean.

The academic advocates of cosmopolitan democracy include David Held, Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, and Mary Kaldor. In the Cosmopolitan Democracy model, decisions are made by those citizens that are affected by them, avoiding a single hierarchical form of authority.

According to the nature of the issues at stake, democratic practice should be reinvented to take into account the will of stakeholders. This can be done either through direct participation or through elected representatives. The model advocated by cosmopolitan democrats is decentralized - global governance without world government, unlike those models of global governance supported by classic World Federalism thinkers, such as Albert Einstein.11

11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitan_democracy

INSTEAD_Generative Thinking_Week 8_Quotations Book_ Georgia Jules Vlassi_2014