RAUMPARK

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HITZE TAKES COMMAND 3 HITZE CHALLENGES 4 HITZE TO BE CHALLENGED 5

RAUMPARK TAKES COMMAND RAUMPARK CHALLENGES RAUMPARK TO BE CHALLENGED Hannes Stiefel, Luciano Parodi

1 RAUMPARKS are climatic devices; they are constructions of various sizes, operating on diverse scales, offering multi-dimensional populated parks, gardens and (*wild’) forests in and above our future cities.

2 ‘As perhaps the most fundamental condition of a possibility for architecture, and thus also its most definitive constraint, the notion of ground cuts across time and space to unite all buildings. Digitally-generated architecture has produced radical advances in virtual representations of space in which any grounding in gravity, materiality and tectonics is malleable (but often experiences difficulty in translating the resultant forms back into the material world). This falsification of reality, in a way the fundamental condition of all systems of representation, is a generative process, and in a sense it is the very structures of falsification that we wish to investigate. Doing so may allow architecture to simultaneously increase both its liberation from reality and its impact on the concrete world.

Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi 13

CMT CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY ESC ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE

In order to explore these ideas, we propose the theme of Faux Terrain, or False Ground. The term originally described the three-dimensional artificial landscape designed to mask the transition between the viewing space of the spectator and the representational space of 360° panoramas built in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Ultimately, False Terrains can describe any artificial construct, but it is perhaps better to say that they obliterate the hierarchy between the real and the virtual in favour of a system of exchange between multiplicities of possible realities. Accordingly, we propose the notion of Faux Terrain both as an approach to design and as the description of a possible role for the architectural object.

This approach embraces rather than denies the inherent distance between architect and building, and between building and public as precisely the territory of productive interpretation. Like the faux terrain, the building becomes a mediating body, a material thingforeign in some way to both designer and public, artist and spectator, which both links and separates them. Here we refer to Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’ as one who ‘dismiss[es] the opposition between looking and acting and understand[s] that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking is also an act that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it. As a method of design, the Faux Terrain indicates the wilful insertion of a mediating structure between the designer and the reality that he or she observes. In this sense, the concept of Faux Terrain produces a kind of double-bind inscribed by the distance between its two terms - it asks the designer to examine very closely an existing terrain, while simultaneously using these observations to produce a novel construct, a false site, non-site, or virtual terrain that can both mediate and be reinserted into the real. To the extent that the imagination implied in the false is reinserted into the concreteness of the terrain, any essential difference between these two realms is destabilized. This approach allows designers to imagine radical new possibilities for architecture through intense observation of the world as it is, while acknowledging its fundamental contingency as its greatest opportunity.’

Hannes Stiefel / Brian Tabolt: Faux Terrains (2011). First published in Positions: Unfolding Architectural Endeavors, ed. by Maja Ozvaldi / Bence Pap / Indre Umbrasaite / IoA Institute of Architecture, Edition Angewandte, Birkhäuser, Basel 2020.

Faux Terrain – Investigations on Critical Environments is the title of a research proposal by Luciano Parodi and Hannes Stiefel 2017/18.

3 see IKA, HITZE TAKES COMMAND, Preview Winter 2019, p.8 4 see ibid. 5 see ibid.