Everything Is Turning To Gold by Tor Lindstrand

Everything Is Turning To Gold With and By: Sir Ken Adam, Mark Andrus, Amanda Apetrea, Matteo Arnone, Ulrika Ax, Reyner Banham, Dave Barista, Peter Behrbohm, Cecilia Bengolea, Sofia Bolinder, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Mark Campbell, Ingrid Cogne, Tim Conaglen, Celine Condorelli, Peter Cook, Tom Dyckhoff, Alvin Ekmekciu, Jesper Engström, Charles Esche, Jesus Franch Jimenez, Rasmus Fleischer, Sir Christopher Frayling Bea Galilee, Evelyn Gavrilou, Paul Gazzola, Jonathan Glancey, Ron Gluckman, Johnny Grey, Nina Gunne, Dustin Hoffman, M Huggies, Anna Hult, Jane Jacobs, Jonas Jernberg, Anders Johansson, Hanna Johansson, Louis Kahn, Casey Kazan, Emma Kim-Hagdahl, Tsang Kin-Wah, Kira Kirsch, Anna Kisselgoff, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, James Langdon, Claes Larsson, Sidney Léoni, Tor Lindstrand, Darri Lorenzen, Geoff Manaugh, Paloma Madrid, Oliver Marchart, Dennis McNabb, Katarina McNabb, Edward Merkus, Martin Miljand, Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno, Halla Olafsdottir, Claes Oldenburg, Leo Park, Brad Pitt, Goran Sergej Pristas, Björn Quiring, Steve Rose, Helen Runting, Nico Sandri, Florian Schneider, Charles Siegel, Rutger Sjögrim, Mårten Spångberg, Joachim Stein, Måns Swanberg, Renae Tapley, Johan Thelander, Christopher Thomas, Zoltan Thurman, Polly Verity, Gavin Wade, HRH The Prince of Wales, Markus Wagner, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith, Anna Weber, Charlotte West, Walt Whitman, Janica Wiklander, Josefine Wikström, Qingyang Yu, Malin Zimm, Pernilla Öfvergård and many others.

In collaboration with: unrealstockholm.org 1

Everything Is Turning To Gold, Introduction

Charlotte West What happens when you unleash the creativity of some 20 architects, seven choreographers and one design writer? What happens if feed them 1,500 cakes and ask them to assess the state of architecture in the world? And what do James Bond and the Rolling Stones have to do with architecture? This magnum opus, Everything is Turning to Gold, is not in and of itself a seminal work of architectural theory, but neither is it the hodge podge of randomness that it might first appear. It is rather a snapshot of what its editorial team found interesting, relevant, revolutionary or just plain amusing about architecture on one chilly Friday in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. This 800+ page manuscript – produced on site at the Day of Architecture (Arkitekturdagen) on November 14, 2008 – is the result of collaboration between International Festival and the Swedish Association of Architects (Sveriges Arkitekter). Architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer Mårten Spångberg created International Festival, a project exploring the intersections of architecture and performance, in 2004. The initiative examines the role of an individual spectator in relation to the collectivity. A theatre audience, as well as museum visitors, are conventionally addressed as single population. International Festival challenges this notion by engaging the audience in the production of the work itself. Like many things, sometimes the process is as important as the product. This book would not have been made without the collective efforts of its editorial team, or the interest and participation of the Swedish architectural community. Just as architects are often working against the clock, we were also constrained by time – but not by ambition! The team assembled on Friday morning, setting up their laptops, trying to unearth an outlet in a web of electrical cords and cables. Others preferred the analog method, putting pen to paper. The creative energy was palpable, and drew the attention of the 500 architects who were attending lectures in the auditorium across the hall. By the end of the day, some tables looked like the aftermath of school children’s art and crafts projects, with bits of shredded paper strewn about. The supply of cake was dwindling, but the pyramid of cake boxes was growing. The editorial team continued to aggregate information, bringing together seemingly unrelated texts from the far reaches of Internet with their own musings about architecture.

The result is surprising. This volume contains everything from a contemporary history of pyramids, including ruminations on the “Great Pyramid of Cream Balls” – “strongly linked with energy and low calorie sweetness” – to a discussion of architecture on ice in Jukkasjärvi, a village in Northern Sweden. A non-scientific survey also revealed Mia Hägg as the Swedish architect most preferred as a companion on a deserted island (although one woman named Emma did ask us to have Gert Wingårdh give her a call). Another essay by Steve Rose explains why James Bond is the enemy of architecture (just imagine all of those Venetian palazzos being blown to smithereens). Everything is Turning to Gold, like all of the recent International Festival events, is named after a Rolling Stones song. Lindstrand and Spångberg (coincidentally, both born in 1968) are inspired by the strange preservation of authenticity in rock ‘n roll at a time when show business – and in many respects, art – has become so obsessed with product and success. As Lindstrand says, “what we are trying to do is rather to emphasize process and rehearsal. [We want to create] spaces where we have opportunities to take risks and where failure is, if not celebrated, at least allowed. We want to involve and empower people through engagement and production.”

Kira Kirch

this situation takes place in the garden of a kettler-haus-siedlung in saarland, germany. the houses in the picture were built with the help of a priest called peter theis, who had developed (after wwII) a strategy based on goods on own account. in 58 communities in saarland these colonies were founded. from 1949 till 1952 1311 houses were constructed. all the family houses have a garden. more infos in german: In nimmermüdem Einsatz hat er nach Beendigung des Zweiten Weltkrieges im ganzen Saarland Kettelervereine gegründet. In 58 Gemeinden des Saarlandes gab es Kettelersiedlungen, die vom Frühjahr 1949 bis Ende 1952 allein 1311 Häuser durch Selbsthilfe errichtet haben. Die von Theis geführte und inspirierte Dachorganisation »Kettelervereine und angeschlossene Siedlungsgemeinschaften« sah folgende Strategien vor: ausschließlich Eigenheime (keine Mietswohnungen) als geräumige Einzel- und Doppelhäuser (keine Reihenhäuser) mit ausreichenden Gärten. Durch hohe Eigenleistungen von 4000 bis 6000 Stunden und gemeinsamen Einkauf wurde die finanzielle Belastung der Familien auf die Hälfte gesenkt. Die fertigen Häuser wurden nach einem Punktesystem verteilt; maßgebend »waren die geleisteten Arbeitsstunden, der finanzielle Beitrag und die soziale Lage des Siedlers, gemessen an Familiengröße und akuter Wohnungsnot. Auf diese Weise konnten auch Kriegerwitwen zu Eigenheimen gelangen.

Limericks

Bea Galilee There was once a magazine based in Essex Whose interest was architecture and all its effects We love international festival They are my favourite and the best of all I hit the dancefloor when they hit the decks

There were once two men named Marten and Tor Their aim is to create a choreographed score From texts images and rhymes Sent from different spaces and times And will become a performance with brilliance and dancers galore!

I Am For an Architecture (After Claes Oldenburg)

In this beautiful text we can experience the postive notion of architecture. Freely after Claes Oldenburgs text I Am For an Art. This text has over the years developed into a signature text for International Festival. I am for an architecture that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass. I am for an architecture that grows up not knowing it is architecture at all, an architecture given the chance of having a staring point of zero. I am for an architecture that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top. I am for an architecture that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an architecture that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. I am for an architecture that vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways. I am for architecture that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky. I am for architecture that spills out of an old man’s purse when he is bounced off a passing fender. I am for the architecture out of a doggy’s mouth, falling five stories from the roof. I am for the architecture that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an architecture that joggles like everyone’s knees, when the bus traverses an excavation. I am for architecture that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for architecture that flaps like a flag or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for architecture that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit. I am for architecture covered with bandages. I am for architecture that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for architecture comes in a can or washes up on the shore. I am for architecture that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for architecture that sheds hair. I am for architecture you can sit on. I am for architecture you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on. I am for architecture from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist. I am for architecture under the skirts, and the architecture of pinching cockroaches. I am for the architecture of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal stick. I am for the architecture that grows in a pot that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for architecture that is flipped on and off with a switch. I am for architecture that unfolds like a map that you can squeeze, like your sweetys arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth? I am for architecture that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with. I am for an architecture that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an architecture that helps old ladies across the street. I am for the architecture of the washing machine. I am for the architecture of a government check. I am for the architecture of last wars raincoat. I am for the architecture that comes up in fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the architecture that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worm’s architecture inside the apple. I am for the architecture of sweat that develops between crossed legs.

I am for the architecture of neck-hair and caked tea-cups, for the architecture between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odour of boiling dishwater. I am for the architecture of sailing on Sunday, and the architecture of red and white gasoline pumps. I am for the architecture of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs. I am for the architecture of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the architecture of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the architecture of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the architecture of slag and black coal. I am for the architecture of dead birds. I am for the architecture of scratchings in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the architecture of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down. I am for the architecture of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the architecture of kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; smells. I am for the architecture of mama-babble. I am for the architecture of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beer drinking, egg-salting, in-sulting. I am for the architecture of falling off a barstool. I am for the architecture of underwear and the architecture of taxicabs. I am for the architecture of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic architecture of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals. I am for the blinking architectures, lighting up the night. I am for architecture falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off. I am for the architecture of fat truck-tires and black eyes. I am for Koolarchitecture, 7-UP architecture, Pepsi-architecture, Sunshine architecture, 39 cents architecture, 15 cents architecture, Vatronol Architecture, Dro-bomb architecture, Vam architecture, Menthol architecture, L & M architecture, Ex-lax architecture, Venida architecture, Heaven Hill architecture, Pamryl architecture, San-o-med architecture, Rx architecture, 9.99 architecture, Now architecture, New architecture, How architecture, Fire sale architecture, Last Chance architecture, Only architecture, Diamond architecture, Tomorrow architecture, Franks architecture, Ducks architecture, Meat-o-rama architecture. I am for the architecture of bread wet by rain. I am for the ratsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; dance between floors. I am for the architecture of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light. I am for the architecture of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the architecture of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go. I am for the brown sad architecture of rotting apples. I am for the architecture of meows and clatter of cats and for the architecture of their dumb electric eyes. I am for the white architecture of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closing. I am for the architecture of rust and mold. I am for the architecture of heart, funeral heart or sweetheart heart, full of nougat. I am for the architecture of worn meat-hooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat. I am for the architecture of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the architecture of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the architecture of crayons and weak grey pencillead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the architecture of windshield wipers and the architecture of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub. I am for the architecture of teddy-bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones, and boxes with men sleeping in them. I am for the architecture of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums & tambourines, and plastic phonographs. I am for the architecture of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs. I am for architecture of water tanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades. I am for Italian Government Inspected Architecture, Grade A architecture, Regular Price architecture, Yellow Ripe architecture, Extra Fancy architecture, Ready-to-eat architecture, Best-for-less architecture, Ready-to-cook architecture, Fully cleaned architecture, Spend Less architecture, Eat Better architecture, Ham architecture, pork architecture, chicken architecture, tomato architecture, banana architecture, apple architecture, turkey architecture, cake architecture, cookie architecture.

Arkitekt

Nedan följer definitionen av arkitektens verksamhet och arbete enligt Arbetsförmedlingens hemsida. Arbete Den traditionella arbetsuppgiften för arkitekter är att rita byggnader av olika slag, allt från villor till industrifastigheter. I arbetet ingår både att kunna utforma förslag på konstruktion och att vara spindel i nätet under själva byggtiden. Vid skissandet används både penna och dator. Man utformar ett förslag i form av ritningar, texter och modeller. Förslaget innehåller till exempel planlösningar, hur rummen ska vara utformade, var fönstren ska vara placerade och hur elledningarna ska dras. Arkitekten kan även ge förslag på färger och material. CAD, datorstödd konstruktion, är ett vanligt arbetsinstrumenet i arkitektens arbete. Arkitektens uppdragsgivare kan se väldigt olika ut. Det kan till exempel vara en privatperson eller ett företag som anlitar arkitekten. Staten, kommunerna, landstingen, länsstyrelserna och Svenska kyrkan är andra exempel på uppdragsgivare. Under arbetets gång diskuteras uppdraget med beställare, kollegor och de konsulter som anlitats för att ta hand om bland annat el, vatten, avlopp och ventilation. Arkitekten sitter ofta som spindeln i nätet och knyter ihop de olika delarna i projektet till en fungerande helhet. Man måste vara bra på att lyssna men också på att informera. När man utformat ritningen efter beställarens önskemål lämnar man in ansökan om byggnadslov till kommunen. Ett uppdrag behöver inte bara gälla nybyggnad utan kan även gälla om- eller tillbyggnad eller modernisering av äldre hus. En del arkitekter specialiserar sig på utformning av en viss typ av byggnader eller på särskilda uppgifter, som till exempel färgsättning. Som projektledare har man det övergripande ansvaret. Anställningsformerna varierar för arkitekter. Det kan bland annat kan ha fast anställning, vara egen företagare eller ha en projektanställning. De flesta arkitekter arbetar i privatföretag men kommunen är också en viktig arbetsgivare. Stadsplanering och bygglovgranskning utförs av arkitekter. Som fysisk planerare eller planarkitekt gör du upp planer och anvisningar för hur ett område ska vara

utformat. En översiktsplan visar exempelvis hur en ny stadsdel ska utformas och en på detaljplan finns hus och vägar utritade. Bygglovsgranskning innebär att se till att det som byggs uppfyller gällande regler om byggande. Det kan också gälla bevarande och upprustning av gamla stadsdelar. I arbetsuppgifterna för en fysisk planerare ingår att samråda med många olika yrkeskategorier, till exempel med tjänstemän på andra kommunala förvaltningar och med byggföretag. Att informera kommunens politiker, allmänhet och fastighetsägare är en annan viktig del av arbetet. En stor del av arbetstiden tillbringas utanför kontoret. Länsstyrelser, statliga verk och högskolor är statliga arbetsgivare. Där arbetar arkitekten med kulturminnesvård, utredningar, undervisning och forskning. Det är vanligt att arkitekter arbetar som konsulter. Arkitekter kan även efterfrågas utomlands. För att arbeta som byggnadsarkitekt inom EU krävs att du gått en utbildning som uppfyller EU:s arkitektdirektiv. För fysiska planerare finns inget liknade direktiv. Dock är det ofta så att arkitektarbeten som innebär myndighetsutövning ofta inte är tillgängliga för dem som inte är utbildade i landet. Arkitektyrket håller på att breddas.Yrkesrollen förändras mot att vårda och utveckla befintliga byggnader och miljöer, inte bara arbete med nyproduktion. Andra arbetsuppgifter är fastighetsförvaltning och planering av samhällsbyggande och infrastruktur. Utbildning Arkitekter utbildas vid de tekniska högskolorna i Stockholm, Göteborg och Lund. Utbildningstiden är 4,5 år vid normal studietakt, med möjlighet att förlänga till 5 år. Det är vanligt att ta ett halvårs eller ett års uppehåll för att praktisera på arkitektkontor eller liknande. Förutom grundläggande behörighet krävs särskild behörighet i matematik, samhällskunskap samt i fysik och kemi alternativt naturkunskap enligt de enhetliga behörighetsreglerna. Fysisk planerare/planarkitekt utbildas vid Blekinge tekniska högskola i Karlskrona. Utbildningen omfattar 5 års studier. Även arkitekt- och landskapsarkitektutbildningarna kan inrikta sig mot arbete som planarkitekt. Till arkitektutbildningen kan du också antas genom att göra Akitektprovet - som är gemensamt för de tre arkitekturskolorna. Alla som söker till arkitektutbildningen via Verket för högskoleservice och som uppfyller behörighetskraven får i första hand göra provet. Provet kan ses som en extra chans för den som har för låga gymnasiebetyg eller inte tillräcklig hög poäng från högskoleprovet. Mycket av undervisningen bedrivs i projektform. Det innebär att studierna mer består av övningar och eget arbete och mindre av föreläsningar. Du läser bland annat arkitekturhistoria och byggnadsteknik. För att kunna arbeta självständigt som arkitekt krävs oftast flera års erfarenhet av praktiskt arbete. Med tiden ökar svårighetsgraden på uppdragen och du får ökat ansvar.

Framtid Arkitekternas arbetsmarknad, som är känslig för konjunktursvängningar, har de senaste åren gynnats av den starka tillväxten inom byggnadsverksamheten. Arbetslösheten har sjunkit mycket kraftigt och ligger nu på en relativt låg nivå. Byggaktiviteten mattas av under 2008 och än mer under 2009, vilket medför färre jobb för arkitekter och ökad arbetslöshet. Behovet av att rekrytera arkitekter ökar något de närmaste tio åren. En av anledningarna är att byggandet av bostäder och andra lokaler bedöms ligga kvar på en hög nivå. Dessutom väntas pensionsavgångarna inom yrket bli större än normalt. Tillgången på utbildade arkitekter blir inte tillräcklig för att möta arbetsgivarnas rekryteringsbehov. Arbetsförmedlingens bedömning är att utbildade arkitekter har goda möjligheter till arbete på fem års sikt och medelgoda på tio års sikt. Arbetsmarknaden påverkas enskilda år av hur konjunkturen förändras. För fysiska planerare/planeringsarkitekter, som än så länge är en liten yrkesgrupp, är arbetsmarknaden stabil. Planeringsarkitekterna efterfrågas i kommunerna där de ersätter eller kompletterar arkitekter vid planeringsjobb. Eftersom behovet av samhällsplanering ökar samtidigt som många planerare går i pension de närmaste åren kan det bli brist på planeringsarkitekter. Att tänka på Du måste vara en god lyssnare och ha lätt för att samarbeta med människor. Du måste ha inlevelseförmåga. Du bör vara intresserad av form. Yrket kräver att du har fantasi och förmåga att överblicka många saker samtidigt.

Allt Fler Vill Inhägna Sin Villa - Men Får Nej

Hanna Johansson Dagens Nyheter 14 November 2008 Allt fler villaägare ansöker om att få bygga plank eller murar runt sin tomt. Men kommunerna är restriktiva med att ge tillstånd och anser att planken förfular stadsmiljön. DN HAR GJORT en rundringning bland ett tiotal av landets större kommuner och svaret är entydigt: det har blivit populärt att bygga in sin trädgård med plank eller mur. I Malmö fick stadsbyggnadskontoret in 90 bygglovsansökningar för murar och plank för tio år sedan. Sedan dess har ansökningarna ökat med mer än det dubbla. Förra året landade antalet på 253 och fram till oktober i år har 204 ansökningar kommit in. - När det gäller plank mellan grannar är det okej så länge alla berörda parter är med på det, men i övrigt är vi väldigt restriktiva med att ge tillstånd, säger programarkitekt Christer Liljemark. TRÅNGA VILLAOMRÅDEN med flera plank i rad ger en oerhört torftig och nästan fängelseliknande miljö, där du går miste om det visuella, du kan inte se grönskan, säger han. Christer Liljemark menar att planken sällan fungerar så som villaägarna vill att de ska göra. - Det är en missbedömning att planken skulle ge ökad säkerhet, man blir bara invaggad i falsk trygghet. Tjuvarna tar sig lätt in bakom inhägnaden. Väl där kan de arbeta ostört utan insyn. TROTS DETTA UPPGER en tredjedel av alla svenskar att de av säkerhetsskäl skulle vilja bo i inhägnat område med kortkod eller lås. Detta enligt rapporten Botrender 08 som nyligen presenterades av konsultbolaget Tyréns Temaplan. Christer Liljemark menar att murar och plank i sig riskerar att skapa större otrygghet. - De offentliga ytorna blir osäkrare. Om du som förbipasserande har insyn i villorna omkring dig känner du dig inte lika osäker - skulle någon stå och lura bakom buskarna är det större chans att folk kan ingripa om de inifrån husen ser vad som pågår. I grannkommunen Helsingborg upplever man att framför allt önskemål om murar har ökat. - Jag kan känna en ändring i synsättet hos sökande, man önskar högre murar och plank än tidigare. Det uppförs dessutom en hel del som saknar tillstånd, säger bygglovschef Ann-Charlotte Wedelsbäck.

I BÅSTAD HAR byggnadsnämnden tagit ett policybeslut för murar och plank runt bostadshus i kommunen. Beslutet innebär att den här typen av plank endast får uppföras om särskilda skäl föreligger. Insyn och buller räknas inte hit och plank över 1,8 meter tillåts aldrig. - En del vill gärna upp i 2,20 meter. Men vi försöker stävja det här.Vi har fått in väldigt många ansökningar de senaste åren. Det finns även rena svartbyggen där folk har byggt utan att ansöka om tillstånd. Just nu sitter jag faktiskt och jobbar med en broschyr med riktlinjer för att folk ska veta vad som gäller, säger Lena Derfner, assistent på kommunens bygglovsavdelning. Även i Örebro har varningsklockorna börjat ringa. - I slutet av sommaren gjorde vi en sammanställning eftersom vi noterat ett ökat intresse och kom fram till att det gjorts 70 bygglovsansökningar under 2007-2008. Vi har ett allmänintresse att bevaka här, folk ska slippa uppleva känslan av att vara inmurade. Samtidigt vill vi också bevara stadens byggnadsstruktur. Vi vet inte var det här landar ännu, men det lutar åt något slags policybeslut, säger Bo Davidsson, stadsingenjör.

City of Transformation

Paul Virilio in Obama’s America

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The Information Bomb, War and Cinema, Speed and Politics -- less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio’s thought always invokes the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance. Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the technological death- instinct moving at the speed of light. And remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, facination,terror, and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described “atheist of technology,” his motto is “obey and resist.” But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio’s reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process, principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In Virilio’s writing what Hannah Arendt once described as “modern world alienation” rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the technological accident that has become us. But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio. Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent -- the slow ubiquity -- of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of biogovernance.You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world’s first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres’ the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies -- implanting unknown levels

of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community. Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that “It is beyond panic.” Wall Street types say it is “panic with a capital P.” Harvard economists, standing on the sidelines like a chorus of lament, wisely add that we are now between “capitulation and panic” and “debt is good.” That in a world of over-extended economies, sudden loss of financial credibility, and a seizing up of credit mechanisms everywhere, the only thing to do, financially speaking, is wait for the capitulation point -- that fatal moment when despair is so deep, pessimism so locked down tight in the investor’s heart, that everything just stops for an instant. No investments, no hope, no circulation. And for the always hopeful financial analysts, this is precisely the point to begin anew, to reinvest, to seize financial redemption from despair. Definitely then, not a speed economy, but a politics and economy of complex recursive loops, trapped in cycles of feedback which no one seems to understand, but with very real, very slow consequences: like vanishing jobs, abandoned health care and trashed communities. In The City of Panic, Virilio writes about the “tyranny of real time,” “this accident in time belonging to an event that is the fruit of a technological progress out of political control.” For Virilio, we’re now interpellated by a complex, three dimensional space-time involved in the acceleration of technological progress “that reduces the extent, the fullness of the world to nothing.” Or something else? Not really a fatal oscillation between fast technology and slow society, but hypertechnologies of global financial manipulation that can move so quickly because, just as Jean Baudrillard long ago warned, the hyperreal, simulational world of derivatives, credit swaps, and mortgage backed securities long ago blasted off from material reality, reaching escape velocity, and then orbiting the world as star-like high finance satellites -- purely virtual satellites which have no real meaning for the rest of us as long as they stay in space as part of the alienated, recursive loops of advanced capitalism. But when the meltdown suddenly happens, when that immense weight of over-indebtedness and toxic mortgages and credit derivates plunge back into the gravitational weight of real politics and real economy, we finally know what it is to live within trajectories of the catastrophic. Economists are quoted as saying the financial crisis effects “everyone on earth.” Is this Virilio’s “global accident?” Quite certainly it is panic finance: that moment when the credit mechanisms necessary for capitalist liquidity slam shut, a time made to measure for Virilio’s brilliant theory of bunker archeology, with each bank its own toxic bunker of junk assets, each banker a born again socialist. For example, always vigilant automatic circuit breakers working in the darkness of night recently prevented a global plunge of the futures market. Allan Greenspan throws up his hands, exclaiming “I’m in shocked disbelief.” By one measure, the global economic meltdown is Virilio’s accident, a searing demonstration of the truth of Virilio’s proposition that every technology is born with a necessary accident in mind. This time it is not a trainwreck, a robotrader or even 9/11, but a massive financial accident. Here, the brilliant software innovations and computerized trading programs that run so much of the world’s economy move so quickly but respond so slowly to the complex information feedbacks of recursive loops of bank failures and toxic debt and storms of warring political opinions that they do the only logical thing possible. They quickly, globally, and simultaneously abandon their own hyperreal world of virtuality, and go to ground in a panic search for authentic value. The machine to machine communication that makes the posthuman economy possible wants, in effect, the gold standard of real, measurable value. It demands the bottom line, the unleveraged mortgage, the real asset that its digital operations have worked so zealously to accident. And just when you think you have finally got the financial capitalists -- those unfettered deregulators -- they instantly reverse course saying “Now that the capital is gone ‘something different’ is needed -- an emergency provider of equity.” That emergency provider, of course, is us.

But maybe it’s not an accident at all. Perhaps Naomi Klein’s theory of always predatory capitalism as a “shock doctrine” is correct. Or perhaps Robert Reich’s statement that, “It’s socialism for Wall Street and capitalism for the rest of us.” Perhaps we’re experiencing a carefully planned accident, a trajectory of the catastrophic, that was allowed to run freely to its fatal destiny. A culture under the sign of the “tyranny of the code, where we find ourselves biologically driven to unlock a code, where computer code literally reinscribes our genetic code and reconfigures our brains. Virilio suspects this. He most of all is an artist of the art of war, a theorist who understands that dromology has no real meaning outside of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation. When modern world alienation, Hannah Arendt’s “negative spirit,” found its quintessential historical expression in the past eight dark years of Republicanism, it not only set out to accident the world, but it has succeeded, probably beyond its dreams, in doing so. Thinking the Middle East in terms of the Book of Revelation literally required world catastrophe for Armageddon, for a fatal clash of civilizations and ancient religions, which would usher in the seven years of the Anti-Christ, and thereupon the Revelation.Thinking American political economy first, and then world economy, in terms of a permanent paralysis of the progressive movement has meant just what Thomas Frank’s recent book described as the “wrecking crew.” The party is finally over, the hosts are packing up to flee the premises, and everything is wreckage. Out of the coming crisis of massive state over-indebtedness and hyper-inflation can come only Democrats as night watchman of the Tower: the imposition of a new austerity state for non-fungible labor -- blue-collar workers, the weak and the dispossessed; the intensification of the disciplinary state to control the inevitable social unrest; and for the always unrepentant capitalist class, a massive reliquidifying of all the capitalist marketplaces of the world, with the state willingly held hostage, just as Virilio predicted, by demonologists wrapped in the masquerade of bankers and financiers and investment dealers. At this time, at this place, at this trajectory of the catastrophic, Kevin Phillips’ admonition “bad money always follows bad money,” gets it just about right. Or is it the reverse? In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 -- exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 -- is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air. It’s the electricity of the technological noosphere. It’s the primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts. It’s why beyond all the rules of normal politics that the popular American Will -- the world Will-- now unifies into a common current of information flows, of house-to-house organization, of state to state campaigning, of immense financial support by a microphysics of small donations -- over 3 million at last count--, without illusions, without false hopes, that is on the verge of creating in American politics a truly transformational movement. Marshall McLuhan once noted correctly that the United States is the world environment. Ironically then, just as the United States triggered Virilio’s global accident, it just might be on the verge of accidenting the accident, revealing that the City of Panic can also be an American City of Transformation.

A Home Is Not A House

Reyner Banham When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up. When the cost of all this tackle is half of the total outlay (or more, as it often is) what is the house doing except concealing your mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the sidewalk? Once or twice recently there have been buildings where the public was genuinely confused about what was mechanical services, what was structure-many visitors to Philadelphia take quite a time to work out that the floors of Louis Kahn’s laboratory towers are not supported by the flanking brick duct boxes, and when they have worked it out, they are inclined to wonder if it was worth all the trouble of giving them an independent supporting structure. No doubt about it, a great deal of the attention captured by those labs derives from Kahn’s attempt to put the drama of mechanical services on show - and if, in the end, it fails to do that convincingly, the psychological importance of the gesture remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow architects. Services are a topic on which architectural practice has alternated capriciously between the brazen and the coy - there was the grand old Let-it-dangle period, when every ceiling was a mess of gaily painted entrails, as in the council chambers of the UN building, and there have been fits of pudicity when even the most innocent anatomical details have been hurriedly veiled with a suspended ceiling. Basically, there are two reasons for all this blowing hot and cold (if you will excuse the air-conditioning industry’s oldest working pun). The first is that mechanical services are too new to have been absorbed into the proverbial wisdom of the profession : none of the great slogans - Form Follows Function, accusez la structure, Firmness Commodity and Delight, Truth to Materials, Werzig ist Mehr - is much use in coping with the mechanical invasion. The nearest thing, in a significantly negative way, is Le Corbusier’s “Pour Ledoux, c’était facile - pas de tubes,” which seems to be gaining proverbial type currency as the expression of a profound nostalgia for the golden age before piping set in. The second reason is that the mechanical invasion is a fact, and architects-especially American architects - sense that it is a cultural threat to their position in the world. American architects are certainly right to feel this, because their professional speciality, the art of creating monumental spaces, has never been securely established on this continent. It remains a transplant from an older culture and architects in America are constantly harking back to that culture.The generation of Stanford White and Louis Sullivan were prone to behave like émigrés from France, Frank Lloyd Wright was apt to take cover behind sentimental Teutonicisms like Lieber Meister, the big boys of the Thirties and Forties came from Aachen and Berlin anyhow, the pacemakers of the Fifties and Sixties are men of international culture like Charles Eames and Philip Johnson, and so too, in many ways, are the coming men of today, like Myron Goldsmith. Left to their own devices, Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture. From the Cape Cod cottage, through the balloon frame to the perfection of permanently pleated aluminum siding with em-

bossed wood-graining, they have tended to build a brick chimney and lean a collection of shacks against it. When Groff Conklin wrote (in “The Weather-Conditioned House”) that “A house is nothing but a hollow shell ... a shell is all a.house or any structure in which human beings live and work, really is. And most shells in nature are extraordinarily inefficient barriers to cold and heat ...” he was expressing an extremely American view, backed by a long-established grassroots tradition. And since that tradition agrees with him that the American hollow shell is such an inefficient heat barrier, Americans have always been prepared to pump more heat, light and power into their shelters than have other peoples. America’s monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors - the porch, the terrace, Whitman’s rail - traced plains, Kerouac’s infinite road, and now, the Great Up There. Even within the house, Americans rapidly learned to dispense with the partitions that Europeans need to beep space architectural and within bounds, and long before Wright began blundering through the walls that subdivided polite architecture into living room, games room, card room, gun room etc., humbler Americans had been slipping into a way of life adapted to informally planned interiors that were, effectively, large single spaces. Now, large single volumes wrapped in flimsy shells have to be lighted and heated in a manner quite different and more generous than the cubicular interiors of the European tradition around which the concept of domestic architecture first crystallized. Right from the start, from the Franklin stove and the kerosene lamp, the american interior has had to be better serviced if it was to support a civilized culture, and this is one of the reasons that the U.S. has been the forcing ground of mechanical services in buildings so if services are to be felt anywhere as a threat to architecture, it should be in America. “The plumber is the quartermaster of American culture,” wrote Adolf Loos, father of all European platitudes about the superiority of U.S. plumbing. He knew what he was talking about; his brief visit to the States in the Nineties convinced him that the outstanding virtues of the American way of life were its informality (no need to wear a top hat to call on local officials) and its cleanliness - which was bound to be noticed by a Viennese with as highly developed a set of Freudian compulsions as he had. That obsession with clean (which can become one of the higher absurdities of America’s lysol-breathing Kleenexculture) was another psychological motive that drove the nation toward mechanical services. The early justifications of air-conditioning were not just that people had to breathe: Konrad Meier (“Reflections on Heating and Ventilating,” 1904) wrote fastidiously of “... excessive amounts of water vapor, sickly odors from respiratory organs, unclean teeth, perspiration, untidy clothing, the presence of microbes due to various conditions, stuffy air from dusty carpets and draperies ... cause greater discomfort and greater ill health.” (Have a wash, and come back for the next paragraph.) Most pioneer air-conditioning men seem to have been nose-obsessed in this way: best friends could just about force themselves to tell America of her national B.O. - and then, compulsive salesmen to a man, promptly prescribed their own patent improved panacea for ventilating the hell out of her. Somewhere among these clustering concepts-cleanliness, the lightweight shell, the mechanical serviees, the informality and indifference to monumental architectural values, the passion for the outdoors-there always seemed to me to lurk some elusive master concept that would never quite come into focus. It finally came clear and legible to me in June 1964, in the most highly appropriate and symptomatic circumstances. I was standing up to my chest-hair in water, making home movies (I get that NASA kick from taking expensive hardware into hostile environments) at the campus beach at Southern Illinois. This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner - scenically it is the ole swimmin’ hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames chairs on poles in the water) and it’s chlorinated too. From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above

the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller’s experimental domes. And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether. Bucky Fuller, of course, is very big on this proposition: his famous non-rhetorical question, “Madam, do you know what your house weighs?” articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental.This suspicion is inarticulately shared by the untold thousands of americans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes which, though they may never actually be moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ground-anchored structures costing at least three times as much and weighing ten times more. If someone could devise a package that would effectively disconnect the mobile home from the dangling wires of the town electricity supply, the bottled gas containers insecurely perched on a packing case and the semi-unspeakable sanitary arrangements that stem from not being connected to the main sewer - then we should really see some changes. It may not be so far away either; defense cutbacks may send aerospace spin-off spinning in some new directions quite soon, and that kind of miniaturizationtalent applied to a genuinely self-contained and regenerative standard-of-living package that could be towed behind a trailer home or clipped to it, could produce a sort of U-haul unit that might be picked up or dropped off at depots across the face of the nation. Avis might still become the first in U-Tility, even if they have to go on being a trying second in car hire. Out of this might come a domestic revolution beside which modern architecture would look like Kiddibrix, because you might be able to dispense with the trailer home as well. A standard-of-living package (the phrase and the concept are both Bucky Fuller’s) that really worked might, like so many sophisticated inventions, return Man nearer to a natural state in spite of his complex culture (much as the supersession of the Morse telegraph by the Bell Telephone restored his power of speech nationwide). Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire, which, in a more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion. Unlike the living space trapped with our forebears under a rock or roof, the space around a campfire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability. The direction and strength of the wind will decide the main shape and dimensions of that space, stretching the area of tolerable warmth into a long oval, but the output of light will not be affected by the wind, and the area of tolerable illumination will be a circle overlapping the oval of warmth. There will thus be a variety of environmental choices balancing light agrainst warrnth according to need and interest. If you want to do close work, like shrinking a human head, you sit in one place, but if you want to sleep you curl up somewhere different; the floating knuckle-bones game would come to rest somewhere quite different to the environment that suited the meeting of the initiationrites steering committee... and all this would be jim dandy if campfires were not so perishing inefficient, unreliable, smoky and the rest of it. But a properly set-up standard-of-living package, breathing out, warm air along the ground (instead of sucking in cold along the ground like a campfire), radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heartwarming stereo, with well-aged protein turning in an infrared glow in the rotisserie, and the ice-maker discreetly coughing cubes into glasses on the swingr-out bar-this could do something for a woodland glade or creek-side rock that Playboy could never do for its penthouse. But how are you going to manhandle this hunk of technology down to the creek? It doesn’t have to be that massive; aerospace needs, for instance, have done wild things to solid-state technology, producing even tiny refrigerating transistors. They don’t as yet mop up any great quantity of heat, but what are you going to do in this glade anyhow; put a whole steer in deep-freeze ? Nor do you have to manhandle it-it could ride on a cushion of air (its own air-conditioning output, for instance) like a hovercraft or domestic vacuum cleaner.

All this will eat up quite a lot of power, transistors notwithstanding. But one should remember that few Americans are ever far from a source of between 100 and 400 horsepower - the automobile. Beefedup car batteries and a self-reeling cable drum could probably get this package breathing warm bourbon fumes o’er Eden long before microwave power transmission or miniaturized atormic power plants come in. The car is already one of the strongest arms in America’s environmental weaponry, and an essential component in one non-architectural anti-building that is already familiar to most of the nation-the drive-in movie house. Only, the word house is a manifest misnomer - just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels.You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car.You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill and god-wot else they don’t provide at Radio City. The car, in short, is already doing quite a lot of the standard-ofliving package’s job-the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor by courtesy of the Highway Dept. of course) and all this is paradisal till it starts to rain. Even then, you’re not licked - it takes very little air pressure to inflate a transparent Mylar airdome, the conditioned-air output of your mobile package might be able to do it, with or without a little boosting, and the dome itself, folded into a parachute pack, might be part of the package. From within your thirtyfoot hemisphere of warm dry lebensraum you could have spectacular ringside views of the wind felling trees, snow swirling through the glade, the forest fire coming over the hill or Constance Chatterley running swiftly to you know whom through the downpour. But ... surely this is not a home, you can’t bring up a family in a polythene bag? This can never replace the time-honored ranch-style tri-level standing proudly in a landscape of five defeated shrubs, flanked on one side by a ranch-style tri-level with six shrubs and on the other by a ranch-style tri-level with four small boys and a private dust bowl. If the countless Americans who are successfully raising nice children in trailers will excuse me for a moment, I have a few suggestions to make to the even more countless Americans who are so insecure that they have to hide inside fake monuments of Permastone and instant roofing. There are, admittedly, very sound day-to-day advantages to having warm broadloom on a firm floor underfoot, rather than pine needles and poison ivy. America’s pioneer house builders recognized this by commonly building their brick chimneys on a brick floor slab. A transparent airdome could be anchored to such a slab just as easily as could a balloon frame, and the standard-of-living-package could hover busily in a sort of glorified barbecue pit in the middle of the slab. But an airdome is not the sort of thing that the kids, or a distracted Pumpkin-eater could run in and out of when the fit took them-believe me, fighting your way out of an airdome can be worse than trying to get out of a collapsed rain-soaked tent if you make the wrong first move. But the relationship of the serviees-kit to the floor slab could be re-arranged to get over this difficulty; all the standard-o£-living tackle (or most of it) could be re-deployed on the upper side of a sheltering membrane floating above the floor, radiating heat, light and what-not downwards and leaving the whole perimeter wide-open for random egress-and equally casual ingress, too, I guess. That crazy modernmovement dream of the interpenetration of indoors and outdoors could become real at last by abolishing the doors.Technically, of course, it would be just about possible to make the power membrane literally float, hovercraft style. Anyone who has had to stand in the ground-effect of a helicopter will know that this solution has little to recommend it apart from the instant disposal of waste paper. The noise, power consumption and physical discomfort would be really something wild. But if the power-membrane could be carried on a column or two, here and there, or even on a brick-built bathroom unit, then we are almost in sight of what might be technically possible before the Great Society is much older. The basic proposition is simply that the power-membrane should blow down a curtain of warmed/ cooled/conditioned air around the perimeter of the windward side of the un-house, and leave the surrounding weather to waft it through the living space, whose relation ship in plan to the membrane above

need not be a one-to-one relationship. The membrane would probably have to go beyond the limits of the floor slab, anyhow, in order to prevent rain blow-in, though the air-curtain will be active on precisely the side on which the rain is blowing and, being conditioned, will tend to mop up the moisture it falls. The distribution of the air-curtain will be governed by various electronic light and weather sensors, and by that radical new invention, the weathervane. For really foul weather automatic storm shutters would be required, but in all but the most wildly in climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning kit to with most of the weather most of the time, without the power consumption becoming ridiculously greater than for an ordinary inefficient monumental type house. Obviously, it would still be appreciably greater, but this argument hinges on the observation that it is the American Way to spend money on services and upkeep rather than on structure as do the peasant cultures of the Old World. In any we don’t know where we shall be with things like solar power in next decade, and to anyone who wants to entertain an almost-possible vision of air-conditioning for absolutely free, let me recommand Shortstack (another smart trick with a polythene tube) in the december 1964 issue o£ Analog. In fact, quite a number of the obvious common sense objections to the un-house may pove to be self evaporating: for instance, noise may be no problem because there would be no surrounding wall to reflect it back into the living space and, in any case, the constant whisper of the aircurtain would provide a fair threshold of loudness that sounds would have to beat before they began to be comprehensible and therefore disturbingr. Bugs? Wild life? In summer they should be no worse than with the doors and windows of an ordinary house open; in winter all right-thinking creatures either migrate or hibernate; but, in any case, why encourage the normal processes of Darwinian competition to tidy up the situation for you? All that is needed is to trigger the process by means of a general purpose lure; this would radiate mating calls and sexy scents and thus attract all sorts of mutually incompatible predators and prey into a compact pool of unspeakable carnage. A closed-circuit television camera could relay the state of play to a screen inside the dwelling and provide a twenty-four-hour program that would make the ratings for Bonanza look like chicken feed. And privacy ? This seems to be such a nominal concept in American life as factually lived that it is difficult to believe that anyone is seriously worried. The answer, under the suburban conditions that this whole argument implies, is the same as for the glass houses architects were designing so busily a decade ago more sophisticated landscaping.This, after all, is the homeland of the bulldozer and the transplantation of grown trees - why let the Parks Commissioner have all the fun ? As was said above, this argument implies suburbia which, for better or worse, is where America wants to live. It has nothing to say about the city, which, like architecture, is an insecure foreign growth on the continent. What is under discussion here is an extension of the Jeffersonian dream beyond the agrarian sentimentality of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian/Broadacre version -the dream of the good life in the clean countryside, power-point homesteading in a paradise garden of appliances. This dream of the un-house may sound very antiarchitectural but it is so only in degree, and architecture deprived of its European roots but trying to strike new ones in an alien soil has come close to the anti-house once or twice already. Wright was not joking when he talked of the “destruction of the box,” even though the spatial promise of the phrase is rarely realized to the full in the all-too-solid fact. Grass-roots architects of the plains like Bruce Goff and Herb Greene have produced houses whose supposed monumental form is clearly of little consequence to the functional business of living in and around them. But it is in one building that seems at first sight nothing but monumental form that the threat or promise of the un-house has been most clearly demonstrated-the Johnson House at New Canaan. So much has been misleadingly said (by Philip Johnson himself, as well as others) to prove this a work of architecture in the European tradition, that its many intensely American aspects are usually missed. Yet when you have dug through all the erudition about Ledoux and Malevitsch and Palladio and stuff that has been published, one very suggestive source or prototype remains less easily explained away-the admitted persistence in Johnson’s mind of the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial

shells of the houses consumed by the fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing, chimneys. The New Canaan glass-house consists essentially of just these two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit which is a chimney/fireplace on one side and a bathroom on the other. Around this has been draped precisely the kind of insubstantial shell that Conklin was discussing, only even less substantial than that. The roof, certainly, is solid, but psychologically it is dominated by the absence of visual enclosure all around. As many pilgrims to this site have noticed, the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter, physically and operationally so in summer when the four doors are open. The “house” is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There. In summer, indeed, the glass would be a bit of a nonsense if the trees did not shade it, and in the recent scorching fall, the sun reaching in through the bare trees created such a greenhouse effect that parts of the interior were acutely uncomfortable - the house would have been better off without its glass walls. When Philip Johnson says that the place is not a controlled environment, however, it is not these aspects of undisciplined glazing he has in mind, but that “when it gets cold I have to move toward the fire, and when it gets too hot I just move away.” In fact, he is simply exploiting the campfire phenomenon (he is also pretending that the floor-heating does not make the whole area habitable, which it does) and in any case, what does he mean by a controlled environment? It is not the same thing as a uniform environment, it is simply an environment suited to what you are going to do next, and whether you build a stone monument, move away from the fire or turn on the airconditioning, it the same basic human gesture you are making. Only, the monument is such a ponderous solution that it astounds me that Americans are still prepared to employ it, except out of some profound sense of insecurity, a persistent inability to rid themselves of those habits of mind they left Europe to escape. In the open-fronted society, with its social and personal mobility, its interchangeability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost universal expendability, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough. ANATOMY OF A DWELLING With very little exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic gadgetery epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious living – in other words, this is the junk that keeps the pad swinging.. The house itself has been omitted from the drawing, but if mechanical services continue to accumulate at this rate it may be possible to omit the house in fact. SUPER-COUPE DE LONG-WEEK-END, 1927 Dallegret’s 20-20 hindsight and foresight produced this historical capriccio from. the First Machine Age well before the present article was first mooted. In the mode of its time, services are in a separate outhouse instead of beeing a mechanical clip-on. TRAILMASTER GTO TRANSCONTINENTAL Trailmaster GTO + 2 with beefed rear axle and drive-train Transcontinental “Instant Split-Level” trailer home U-Tility Life-Support pack The present mobile home is a mess, visually, mechanically, and in its relationship to the permanent infrastructure of civilization. But if it could be rendered more compact and mobile, and be uprooted from

its dependency on static utilities, the trailer could fulfill its promise to put a nation on wheels. The kind of mobile utility pack suggested here does not exist yet, but it may be no farther over the hill than its coming-attraction. style would suggest. The Environment-Bubble Transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output In the present state of the environmental art, no mechanical device can make the rain go back to Spain; the standard-of-living package is apt to need some sort of an umbrella for emergencies, and it could well be a plastic dome inflated by conditioned air blown out by the package itself. TRANSPORTABLE STANDARD-OF-LIVING PACKAGE To the man. who has everything else, a standard-of-living package such as this could offer the ultimate goody - the power to impose his will on any environment to which the package could be delivered; to enjoy the spatial freedom of the nomadic campfire without the smell, smoke, ashes and mess; and the luxuries of appliance-land without those encumbrances of a permanent dwelling. POWER-MEMBRANE HOUSE The goal of present trends in domestic mechanization. appears to be ever-more-flimsy structure that is made habitable by ever-more-massive machinery, and the Power-membrane house then pushes this idea to its logical/illogical conclusion - the open plan to end open plans, a walless, garden house sheltering under the spreading arms of the ultimate appliance. Architecture-world faint hearts who fear this total conditioner as the leviathan that will trample down their ancient should observe how near Dallegret has come to making a monument of the Power-Membrane; like true-blue breeding, architecture will out, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Art in America Number Two, April, 1965

Pyramids

A pyramid is a building where the upper surfaces are triangular and converge on one point. The base of pyramids are usually quadrilateral or trilateral (but generally may be of any polygon shape), meaning that a pyramid usually has four or five faces. A pyramidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design, with the majority of the weight closer to the ground, means that less material higher up on the pyramid will be pushing down from above. This allowed early civilizations to create stable monumental structures. For thousands of years, the largest structures on Earth were pyramids: first the Red Pyramid in the Dashur Necropolis and then the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the only remaining Wonder of the World. The largest pyramid ever built, by volume, is the Great Pyramid of Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla.This pyramid is considered the largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world, and is still being excavated.The greatest pyramids (or most well known ones) are in Egypt but there have been many other pyramids all over the world but none quite so big. Strangely though they all seem to be linked in with death and burial. But there is one exception; The Great Pyramid of Cream Balls. It is strongly linked with energy and low calory sweetness.

Images 1. Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas 2. The great pyramid, a monument for all of us, Germany 3. Le Louvre 4. Slovak radio building 5. The great pyramid of cream balls

Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology

Christopher Thomas Late last year, while prowling in a Catholic bookstore, my eye was caught by a book title--E. Michael Jones’s Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology. The book seemed to have a promising thesis: that the dream of a new architecture promulgated by modernist architects in Europe after World War I was founded on a complete and rather stupid disrespect for tradition, particularly that of the integrity of the family. Now here, I thought, were a daring author and publisher and a provocative argument: that architectural Modernism has been not just an aesthetic failure--how boring it often looks--but an ethical one. I confess to being tired of art history that is unfailingly even-handed and detached, and here I caught the scent of blood. However, as I guess I should have expected, the book turns out to be really rather wonky--too bad because the argument, if it were made in a subtle, knowing way, could, I think, be thought-provoking and important. The story of what critic Nikolaus Pevsner christened the “Modern Movement” goes back to just before World War I. Between about 1912 and 1927 a new look in leading-edge design appeared which has reshaped the way our century lives and our material environment looks. “[T]here exists today a modern style as original, as consistent, as logical, and as widely distributed as any in the past,” wrote Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, heralding the landmark 1932 exhibition called The International Style. The principal book under review here is a new edition of the one that was written to accompany that show. The authors were a pair of young, overprivileged, and rather preachy and aesthetic friends of Barr’s who went on to distinguished careers, Hitchcock as a scholar and Johnson as an architect (he is still alive and making a mark).The book was designed to expose “backward” Americans to the radically stripped, futuristic architecture built in Europe and some corners of America in the preceding decade.The authors’ heroes were J.J.P. Oud of Holland; Walter Gropius, creator of the Bauhaus in Germany; Mies van der Rohe; and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better-known as Le Corbusier--all of whom, except for Oud and with the addition of Frank Lloyd Wright, are still considered the modern masters. In other words, to a great degree Hitchcock and Johnson wrote the history we still tell about modern architecture. With a puritanical, missionary zeal, the authors argued that the pale, cubistic, minimalist architecture of new housing-settlements and recreation clubs, which looked so strange beside the Beaux-Arts Classical courthouses and Colonial Revival residences Americans were accustomed to, heralded the advent of a universal style for the twentieth century, the equal of Graeco-Roman classicism, Romanesque, and Gothic. Barr and the authors christened the austere new look the “International Style,” a label that has stuck. Claiming only to describe the style, they were (as they themselves later admitted) actually prescribing it, an aim in which they were largely successful until the 1950s. The book’s reissue marks more than a jubilee or nostalgia: it is a sign of the return to favor, after being held in disdain for about twenty years by “Postmodernists,” of sharply antitraditional modes of design harking back to those of the 1920s and ‘30s. So the subtext is about design today, not outlandish-looking

villas and housing colonies then. Charles Jencks, the taxonomist of late twentieth-century architecture, calls the new look “Neomodernism,” and signs of it are everywhere--suggesting that “Postmodernism,” like “Postcommunism,” may be too hopeful a term. Neomodernism is seen in the current penchant for exposed steel I-beams, glass-and-steel canopies at street-and roofline, and modernistic, slightly punky decor, with lots of exposed wire and metal, glass bricks, unmolded cherry-hued hardwood, lean tracklighting with tiny bulbs, and attenuated leather-and-metal furniture. Prominent in fashionable coffee-bars, the look is both retrospective and coolly, elegantly “now,” like a Chanel suit or handbag. For my part I am tempted to call it “Millennial Modernism”--architecture for the age of CD-ROM, the Internet, and cellular telephones. The new designers and theorists, whose utopia looks like the sets of Batman Forever, will find much to admire and emulate in Hitchcock’s and Johnson’s text and dated black-and-white photos, with their intimations of a precision-engineered future. Perhaps we who scoffed at the book only twelve or fifteen years ago, when all the talk in architecture was of comfort and tradition, were blind to its considerable virtues. The text, written by Hitchcock, is pellucid. Based on car tours of Europe, the text and photos documented examples of the radical architecture that had sprung up since 1922. These include such now-familiar icons of modern design as the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany; Mies’s Tugendhat House at Brno, Czechoslovakia; his glass-and-marble pavilion at the Barcelona exposition of 1929; and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie at Poissy, France, of 1930. But the authors also presented principles, arguing that the new architecture was more than a flash in the pan; rather it was the harbinger of an organic style for the times. (Only five years later, with architectural modernism turned back by European dictators and American millionaires, they might not have been so hopeful.) The principles of the new architecture, noted Hitchcock, “are few and broad....There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass.” This was to reflect the modern reality of the building as a cagework of steel or concrete with walls that were mere screens or membranes--”curtainwalls.” Second, to assert the primacy of plan and function over a priori notions of style and avoid the determined symmetry of the previous generation of Beaux-Arts design, “regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design.” His third principle “proscrib[ed] arbitrary, applied decoration,” substituting for it skilled handling of proportions and frank but expressive architectural detail dictated by need. Yet, to rescue a place in the new age for the architect as artist and man of taste, Hitchcock insisted that the good designer did not employ these principles mechanically, but with tact and sensitivity; and herein, I think, lies the subtlety of his argument. He, Barr, and Johnson--in keeping with the new MOMA’s mission--were seeking a via media between the bald functionalism of sociologists and engineers, for whom aesthetics meant nothing beside the urgent need for decent housing, and, at the opposite extreme, the formalism of traditionalist architects who believed that meaning and legibility in design demanded reference to the Western humanist past. Anyone who has been awake at all in the past decade will sense the resonance of their quite balanced, and in retrospect admirable, argument for our present situation. The International Style and the example of the new European architecture caused the new style to sweep America by about 1939-41. The process was hastened by the arrival here of several of the modern masters, forced out of Europe by Hitler. Both Gropius and Mies came in 1937 and directed influential American architectural schools until the 1950s. Accordingly, their attitudes were dominant when the war ended. Only Wright really demurred, and by the mid-thirties even his architecture--for instance, Fallingwater, the Kaufmann house in western Pennsylvania, of 1935--was nodding to the International Style. As with so many phenomena, though, the style’s ascendancy contained the seeds of its demise. By the late forties the austere, “honest” architecture Hitchcock and Johnson had celebrated fifteen years before had come to look, frankly, boring, especially in showy, materialist America. Was it for this world of white stucco housing settlements, with nary a trace of ornament and small shopping and community centers, that Allied soldiers and millions of others had died? Even during the war, progressive architects had started calling for a “New Monumentality” in design, which the small, unselfconscious, often left-wing

work of the Modernists in the 1920s and ‘30s could never deliver. Instead, some architects began to look to the powerful and expressive, even primitive, work that Le Corbusier had explored in wartime seclusion in southern France and with which he burst back on the scene when the war ended, especially his Unite d’Habitation at Marseilles, of 1946-52. By the fifties, architects and their clients, especially in the United States, were seeking modes more expansive and expressive than the prosaic International Style of the interwar period. So began what has been called Late Modernism, a phase that Hitchcock himself coined in his essay of 1951 on “The International Style Twenty Years After,” which appears as an appendix here. Embarrassed at the narrowness of his earlier views and willing to tolerate greater stylistic latitude, he predicted that architecture would continue to flow in the stream channeled by the “high” modernism of the 1920s and ‘30s but said, “I suspect we are entering the `late’ phase.” For a time architecture seemed to bear him out. The swooping roofs and decorative patterned grilles employed in the late fifties by architects like Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durrell Stone, and, yes, Philip Johnson himself--who, in the new preface, calls himself a “jumper-arounder”--looked like baroque variations on the old purist themes. By the 1960s, however, younger architects were in full revolt against what they considered the rigidity and heaviness into which orthodox Modernism had fallen. A rupture occurred. The key event, says art historian Vincent Scully, was the appearance in 1966 of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which, aping the smug, aphoristic style of the High Modernists but turning their aphorisms on their heads,Venturi proclaimed “Less is a bore” and “form evokes function.” His ironic play on received architectural pieties, which parallels the parody of the “organization man” and “militaryindustrial complex” in the Vietnam years, ushered in “Postmodernism.” Architects like Venturi and fellow Yalies, Charles Moore and Robert Stern, without denying their place as heirs to the powerful tradition of Modernism, sought to create a complex, multilayered, often witty architecture in which traditional, especially classical, elements appeared, transformed and out of scale. At their worst such designs were what Moshe Safdie called “private jokes in public places,” but at its best the movement fostered renewed appreciation for the Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, and Neoclassical architectural traditions. The late seventies saw a kind of High Postmodernism in which--for a pertinent example--Johnson’s AT&T Building in Manhattan, of 1978, alluded to several kinds of tradition, with its grand, thirties-ish elevator lobby, its subtly articulated shaft of office stories, and its memorable crest after that of a Chippendale highboy. It is this mood of retrospection or continuity with the past against which the Neomodernism of the late eighties and the nineties has reacted. Neomodernism also evokes a past--that of the visionary High Modernism of the early twentieth century--making it in effect a Postmodern Modernism. The reaction was evident by 1988, when the MOMA, not to be left behind, staged the show Deconstructivism, which Johnson himself organized to celebrate (his own work and) the quite extreme direction being taken toward themes of collision, contradiction, and random chaos by architects like Peter Eisenmann. Architecture since 1990 seems generally tamer than this, replaced by more earnest, sober-sides, and thus buildable “Neo-Modernism,” but without doubt the neotraditionalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s has waned among the avant-garde. While admiring the sleek beauty of the current work, I am not in total sympathy with this resurgence of Neomod, which I find, at its worst, bone-chilling, like green hair and blue lipstick or suicide committed in style. Like E. Michael Jones, I feel it harbors deep nihilism--hardly the mood for the millennium. I want to protest, “Haven’t we seen and done all this before? Must we fetishize the New and go in search of it again and again?” It seems we must, and the new edition of Hitchcock’s and Johnson’s book, good as it is, just when we thought it was dead and buried, is a sign of that.

What are your dreams for the future?

Architect 1:

I’d like to write something. Mabye a book about architectur-theory. That would be fun. And mabye do some volonteer work aswell. Save the world, you know.

Architect 2:

Earn so much money so that I wouldn’t have to worry all the time. Mabye merge my business with someone elses for stability. And fun of course.

Architecture student 1:

My dream woud be to start my own business with some friends. 4 or 5 would be good. Mabye be a part of the world leading office that consists of only women.

Architecture student 2:

I don’t know. At first just get a job. Do competitions would be fun. And mabye combine it with som art work. But first a job.

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Architecture As a Translation Of Music

Crowded House: World Where You

Here’s someone now whose got the muscle His steady hand could move a mountain Expert in bed but come on now There must be something missing That golden one leads a double life You’ll find out

Tell me I don’t know where you go Do you climb into space To the world where you live The world where you live

So here we lie against each other These four walls could never hold us We’re looking for wide open spaces High above the kitchen And we’re strangers here On our way to some other place

Tell me I don’t know where you go Do you climb into space To the world where you live The world where you live The world where you live

Friends come round You might remember and be sad Behind their eyes is unfamiliar

Do you climb into space To the world where you live The world where you live To the world where you live To the world where you live To the world where you live To the world where you live To the world where you live

Deus: The Architect What is the architect doing? He is by the riverside What is he thinking out there? He is committing egocide Now isn’t that a strange thing? Well to him it feels just Well we guess a person’s gotta do, What a person feels he must He said: I won’t throw myself from the pier I’m gonna go home and shut up for a year And when the year is over I’ll reappear And have a solution I’ve reason to believe that what I find Is gonna change the face of human kind And all these years before well I was blind That’s my conclusion Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect Now the man has understood That outer space is overrated and too About all the problems on this earth we should Worry now to solve them later And so he’s brooding and alluding on a perfect design He thinks that working on behalf of himself is a crime He flushes out by the water, a view so divine He’s the architect of his own fate, a man in his prime

He said: I won’t throw myself from the pier I’m gonna go home and shut up for a year And when that year is over I’ll reappear And have a solution I’ve reason to believe that what I find Is gonna change the face of human kind And all these years before well I was blind That’s my conclusion Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect And so he drew himself a pentagon Thinking it through a geodesic dome From the coast of Tahiti, to the hills of Rome Step aside cause the man will take the Nobel prize home He said: I won’t throw myself from the pier I’m gonna go home and shut up for a year And when that year is over I’ll reappear And have a solution Now if these aspirations bother you Well you are just you, you don’t have a clue I’m sticking to the plan I will see it through Let there be no confusion Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect Cause I’m the architect

On Becoming An Architect

Charlotte West Architecture comes in all shapes and sizes, as do the architects who create it. Some take their inspiration from the natural environment; others implicitly see the form and funtion emerge from the material itself. Recent correspondence with my good friend Johnny Grey – a kitchen designer and interior architect based in Hampshire, England – made me wonder about why people are drawn to their particular professions. Is there a particular moment when your calling becomes clear? Johnny set up his own design studio and furniture workshop after graduating from the London Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1977. But the seeds of architecture had been planted long before. His aunt, the British food writer Elizabeth David, was a major source of inspiration for the current concepts Johnny now uses in much of his architectural work: unfitted kitchen ergonomics, soft geometry, sociability in the kitchen, the blurring of indoor and outdoor environments and hard-wired elements of comfort. He sees the kitchen as much more than just a place to cook; it represents the social heart of the modern home. On the subject of becoming an architect, Johnny writes: My aunt was British cookery writer Elizabeth David. Between the ages of 15 and 30 I ate regularly with her, perhaps every eight weeks. We met up mostly for lunch. It was a lengthy affair, lasting up to five hours – there was no rush because she began her writing at 5 am and had finished by 10 am (few writers it seems can do more than this). The time with her was pleasurable, daunting and always full of surprises. I always looked forward to the conversation and mood of these lunchtime excursions into the world of eating... If you were lucky, she was in the middle of one of her research programmes, although the word conveys the wrong impression. She nurtured ‘enthusiasms’ that became scholarly and gustatory quests. I dined with her during her English spices phase where we tried Christmas meats and terrines, her bread book research that involved eating everything from pizzas to Selkirk Bannocks, her ice cream experiments for her posthumously published Ice Book (that luckily went on for years and was as delicious an end piece as you can imagine)... There was one major drawback to eating with her. As she lived on her own and lived in relatively modest circumstances, she had no one to do the washing up. The guest (at least me) was expected to do the bulk of it. Fairly early on, when I was 17, what one could describe as a sink cabinet finally fell apart. When leaks began appearng in the drainers, and the cupboard doors started falling off, she suggested that I should build her a new sink cabinet. I duly obliged, constructing it in the street to the bemusement of local Chelsea residents. I was paid in meals – mostly lunches and £300 to embark on student travel. Looking back, it was no accident that I became a kitchen designer. So why did you become an architect?

KOPIMI

Rasmus Fleischer The decade between 1995 and 2005 roughly marks out the breakthrough of first www (world wide web) the p2p (peer-to-peer filesharing).Those were the times when it was still possible to imagine a shift from an old and material to a new and virtual world, most distinctive in the Californian ideology of John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence for the Cyberspace (1996). It still made some sense to use bandwidth as a symbol for community and freedom, proclaiming that “Welfare starts at 100 mbit”, as we did with Piratbyrån on May Day 2005, just before releasing the anthology Copy Me – which in retrospect reads as a time document over a brief but interesting era, published exactly at that end point. Since then, we have moved ahead. After reaching the point when one realizes that the files have been downloaded, the question is no longer one of access but of action. What to do with all these files? My hypothesis is that, on a kind of collective level, this point was somehow reached in 2005, at the time when file-sharing also stabilized around the Bittorrent protocol. Of course the exchange of files will continue to increase quantitatively, but what really counts is not how fast connection one has to the network, but how this abundance of data is actually used in space and time. Some ideas which had a liberating potential in the last decade (1995-2005) – especially the idea of the digital as a “second life”, detached from the old powers – may even have become reactionary or paralyzing in the decade in which we now live (2005-2015). On the one hand, copyright law continues to expand in the direction of neo-corporativism and of a permanented state of exception, which is something one has to deal with regardless of one’s involvement in actual copyright infringements. On the other hand, we must deal with ethical and aesthetical questions which demands that we ignore copyright, or at least regards it as a thing of the past. Now we can also realize that the exclusive attention that was given to bandwidth must be supplemented with other aspects of the digital, like storage. The simple fact is that storage capacity is increasing exponentially and much faster than internet bandwidth. Some simple quantitative extrapolation of this fact may helt us to formulate new, qualitative questions for the time we live in. I will do this from the perspective of music, as it is the most ambivalent of art forms, in-between product and process, poiesis and praxis. We are approaching a point, predicted to occur within 10-15 years, when any cheap, pocket-size media player will have have space to store practically all recorded music that has ever been released. This gargantuan pocket archive will be created, and it will be copied from friend to friend. There will be absolutely no way for a rights holder to prevent that from happening. Such a scenario is not good or bad in itself. But it opens the question: Will all music ever recorded have any value at all for us? How could the simple addition of one more song on top of such an archive produce any feeling whatsoever in us? When you sit there with all music ever recorded – what do you

do? The idea of just pressing “shuffle”, to let musical history be played randomly, seems to open up an almost existential horror. The opposite idea of playing it all in alphabetic order is just plain stupid and would exceed human lifetimes. It actually doubtful whether any of these two choices would produce something that could seriously be called “music”. Because music, as any improvising musician knows, can only be something in-between total predictability and total randomness. Imagining this archive of “all music ever” is not just speculation in some hypothetic future, because we already have access to much more media than we can incorporate in our lives. Through these common small white earphones, we are already – more or less – able to listen to any piece of recorded music, whenever, wherever, while doing whatever. That means that any piece recorded music – considered in isolation – is deprived of all its remaining emotional value. Both 19th century western classical music and 20th century pop music were cultures resting on the belief that the sound of music could in itself reveal meaning to the listening individual. Still today, that logic is used conventionally to explain the difference between good and bad music. It is preserved first of all, of course, by the record industry and by the mass media, but also very present in various online music communities, including file-sharing sites. We must now discard that convention, and stop pretending that there can be any inherent value in a digital file. First the complete denial of this value allows us to explore and affirm new values. This process is well underway, but we may not yet have all the concepts needed to complete it. When we can listen to any piece of music, whenever, wherever, while doing whatever – then we begin desiring musical experiences which can not be accessed anywhere and at any time. We begin seeking out contexts which are specific for a time or a place, an occasion or a friendship. Some of these contexts by convention known as “live” music. Others are personal, like the association of a certain playlist to busrides through foggy November mornings. In between the big and the small is a space for multiplication of informal habits. One way to find directions for exploration is to simply negate everything that the iPod stands for. Using a strictly materialist approach, that negation drives us downwards, towards the sub-bass spectrum. Bass-centered music can not be experienced anywhere, because of the very physical need for very large speakers to produce really deep frequencies. It can indeed be recorded, digitalized and transportet in the pocket, but not be listened to in headphones during the transport. All you can listen to is a simulation. Such simulations are vital for creating a cultural continuity – but their musical value is never inherent in the hearing of any track, but is derived from the bodily memories of bass and the anticipations of being physically present at future occassions. In fact, sub-bass is almost never an individual experience. Low frequencies have less respect for physical architecture (ask your neighbours), if played at the volumes that bass-centered music demands. They have, however, more respect for human ears than the higher-frequency sounds of a traditional rock concert. I am talking about dubstep, which is a phenomenon rather than a musical genre. What keeps it together? First, a few clubs with extremely large bass woofers, primarily in southern London, and in many cases using squatted space. Second, a certain combination of internet protocols: internet radio (shoutcast protocol) with DJ:s playing in their own bedrooms while being in real-time interaction with the community in chat rooms (irc), with sessions being afterwards freely available in MP3 format on the web (http).Third, there are indeed record labels, usually integrated with the clubs, releasing most tunes only on vinyl. In short, the material constellation of dubstep is one possible way to create meaning out of abundance, while simultaneously maintaining an informal economy which does not really depend on copyright law,

by systematically integrating the very digital with the very analog. It is not a coincidence that dubstep, as an extremely bass-centered musical phenomenon, emerged exactly in 2005. That was the year when the files had been downloaded, when the digital abundance had to again become anchored in time and space. Dubstep is music for the current transitory decade of 2005-2015. But of course, gigantic bass woofers are not the solution for everything. The morning after, we are back in front of the screen, with access to all music ever recorded, thinking about where to start. We will not just press “shuffle”, and not just play the tracks alphabetically. And as anyone knows who has been in a similar situation, it is not simply to reconsider “what one likes”. For the contemporary music fan in the climate of abundance, there is not even such a thing as a unitary individual taste, independent of a particular context in time and space. Rather than individuals, we are dividuals. That is also why all these automatic recommendation systems are still very primitive, defining “taste” just in terms of personalized listening statistics. Amazing developments on this field will come, for sure, as soon as we accept being geographically tracked, allowing certain parts of the city to be associated with certain musical tracks (which in its turn will performativize individual listening, knowing that it contributes to the databases containing these associations). Automatic recommendation systems are a necessary help, and will continue to change our relations to music in many ways, but they can not solve the basic problem of having too much choice.You can always switch to an alternative software algorithm, just as the forward button on your iPod is keeping you aware that you that you can always shuffle on to the next song (which is a far more important difference between iPods and cassette tapes than any “sound quality”). Pure freedom could never be musical, just as the absence of any freedom couldn’t. Musical experience happens in-between, when you have a choice within certain limits, to work against something – and this goes for all musical acitivities, “passive listening” as well as “active playing”. A melody or a rhythm is a limit, just like a musical instrument, the acoustics of a room, or the human body when one sings or dances. Most importantly, the very presence of other people with other expectations is in itself a limit. In order to find out what we want to enjoy, to create meaning out of abundance, we surely need some software, but most of all we need community. Only reference to collective contexts can save us from the terror of the shuffle button, and from the forced performativity of automated recommendation systems. The digital poses questions whose answers can not remain within the digital, but demands the formation of provisional communities, where people can engage in a common selection, indexing, combination and actualization, connecting the digital to time and space. Size does matter a lot. Some recent experiments have been demonstrating how groups of 17 [17] or 23 [23] or [47] participants (for some weird reason this tends towards prime numbers) can further certain dynamics which are not possible neither in the biggest stadium-size or the smallest kitchen-size event. Many times, these communities seem to thrive best in the greyzone in between what is usually regarded as the public sphere and the private sphere, often also in-between the purely commercial and the purely non-commercial. And here we get back to copyright! Because greyzones are generally not recognized by copyright law, copyright licenses or copyright collecting societies. Copyright is dichotomizing. It always recognizes some kind of private sphere. Within the family you may copy without restrictions. You may even invite friends to your home to watch a movie, or to hear you sing a song, without asking for special permission or paying extra to any rights holder.

Copyright law does not step in to the picture until the copying or the performing becomes “public”, at which point a completely different set of rules starts to apply. Where to draw this line between private and public is, however, a matter of uncertainty and modulation. Think about a group of people getting together every week to watch and discuss a selected movie and maybe also listen to some music. Week after week the group slowly grows, and it has to move to larger spaces. Sooner or later this group – or any informal activity emerging in the spectrum in-between between private and public – will be pressured by copyright law to choose on of two paths: Either it has to keep small-scale and hidden from the public. Or it has to turn fully commercial, to put up advertisement or start selling expensive cocktails, so that licenses to the industry can be paid. Copyright is not just a repressive power, but a productive. It shapes the contexts in which people can get together to create meaning out of abundance, by attempting to erase exactly the grey zones which we need most. Copyright materializes in the city, as well as in the architecture of computer networks. In the latter, however, the definite walls seem to be lacking and must be simulated by software. Because computers operate by copying information all the time, and doesn’t seem to care about physical distance, copyright law has quite serious problems with drawing a credible line between private use and public distribution through computer networks. Distinctions which where formerly within physical infrastructure, like the one between record distribution and radio broadcasting, actually collapses when on the internet the only difference between “downloading” and “streaming” is how the receiver’s own software is configurated. This is the main reason why today’s conflicts over to copyright law are essentially about access to tools (indexing services like The Pirate Bay, stream ripping software, or codes for circumventing dvd encryption). The conflicts are not anymore, like in the 20th century about access to copyrighted works. We must stop asking how artworks are best distributed within networks. Copyright conflicts rather concern the very meaning of terms like “artworks” and “networks”. In the rhetoric about so-called Creative Industries, especially at an European policy level, “creativity” is defined as the production of ever more “content”, irrespective of its context. Pure information, infinitely reproducible even if tightly controlled. This discourse subscribes to an idea of the digital as a substitute for place-specific activities – an idea which somehow resembles the utopian net discourse of the previous decade. Now we start realizing that one of the most fascinating properties of digital communications is that they can awaken a strong desire for exactly those things which they cannot communicate. The digital is not a separate world, as the dominant ideology of 1995-2005 used to preach. It is always a complement to something else. But for what we never know in advance. We must invent it and that is an adventure that must take some time. All we know is that there can not be one single solution for everything. The anxious search for “the solution” might be necessary to trigger the process of moving on. But in every such process comes a certain point when the anxiety must be unconditionally left behind. Now our main task can’t any more be to give more answers, to create more “content”, or to invent fresh business models. Much more relevant than drawing up blueprints for how stuff should work in the future, is to here and now try out new ways to put all existing content into context.The general problem is abundance, not scarcity. What counts in the end is action, not access. With Piratbyrån, we are co-developing a method known as kopimi. Kopimi is about affirming the will to copy and to be copied, without reservation, and to acknowledge the active and selective moment in all copying. It is, at the same time, about exploring that which can not be copied, that which slips away – and to enjoy it as it slips away. It is about valuing the very process of copying, while recognizing that

no copy will be identical. Mutations always happens when as a copy is connected to another place and another time. Kopimi is an imperative – copy me! – not a theory. Thus it has no real origin, but is said to have emerged from a dance. When it is defined, it is always by means of selecting and copying definitions of other phenomena, letting these definitions mutate. That kind of processes is probably the only “alternative” to copyright that kopimi can propose – an alternative not for individual “artists”, but for artistic practice at large. Of course, answers will be formulated, “content” will be created, and business models will be invented. Don’t worry. From the perspective of kopimi, however, this comes merely as a side-effect to something much more crucial: The quest for ways to integrate the infinite abundance of information into our finite lives.

--[17] Bill Drummond’s choral project The 17 (www.the17.org), recently documented in a book with the same title, and the related performance No Music Day (www.nomusicday.com), generally resonates a lot with some standpoints expressed in this article. [23] In 2008, Piratbyrån acquired an old city bus, named it S23M and drove it in the summer with 23 passengers and 100 mixtapes, from Stockholm to the Manifesta biennale in Südtirol, as an experiment in enacting a “digital” community to a very “analog” context. This experiment has greatly influenced this whole article, and led to innumerable follow-up actions, including the autumnal journey S23X taking the bus eastwards to Ljubljana and Belgrade. [47] When I am writing this sentence, I am listening to the dubstep net radio SubFM (www.subfm.com), I looking up how many listeners we are at the very moment, getting the number 47. That’s low, because right now they only reprise a session from an earlier night. Listener numbers go up a lot in the evenings when it is possible to interact directly with the radio DJ.

DO THE WHIRLWIND

Architecture in Helsinki She said you’d given up, Your folks told me you should be left alone, On a mountain top knocking the aeroplanes down with stones. Do the whirlwind and carry the hope that stings all night long, Don’t abandom him ‘cause he quivers when he hears your song, Believe me, it’s safe to see. At least be confused about right and wrong, Plan to settle down, Over the moon under the sun. Do the whirlwind and shotgun the seat that beats Hanging on to the one you love To keep keepin’, sleepin’, dreamin’ on. Folks given up under the quivers and lines, You do the whirlwind, Don’t abandon, Get a handle of yourself, son

A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the New Buildings in Old Places Conference

31st January 2008

Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am enormously grateful to all of you for coming today, particularly to the Minister for giving up her precious time for what promises to be a lively and interesting gathering on the subject of New Buildings in Old Places. If I may say so, I am delighted to see so many familiar faces (dotted about in the audience - pepperpotted not in ghettos!) and very pleased indeed that The National Trust and Historic Royal Palaces have joined with my Regeneration Trust and my Foundation for the Built Environment to sponsor this timely event. And I must use this opportunity to apologise to poor Ros Kerslake and Hank Dittmar for constantly putting them under so much pressure to deal with so many issues that this conference seeks to review. At present, our country looks to be in the midst of one of its periodic building booms, and in an ancient land such as our own, we cannot help but build the new amongst the old. I can only think of two times in our history where it was proposed to build homes, workplaces and shops on such a massive scale, and both times it changed the face of Britain. I am thinking of the Victorian era, when our predecessors built the face of the cities of industrial England, and of the post-war period through to the end of the 1960s when there was a rush to rebuild, knocking down much that was old in the process. In the first case, although there were the inevitable mistakes made, much that was built was of enduring value and at least acknowledged the historical patterns and identity of past generations. In the second, every time-tested principle and all reference to an accumulated inheritance in the “grammar”, if you like, of architecture and building were simply thrown out of the window and we have been living with the consequences of this enormously risky experiment ever since. And the gigantic experiment still goes on, with the same mistakes being repeated and with yet further consequences for people’s lives and for the long term future of this planet. In the haste to build after the Second World War, many untested new design theories were put into practice, with the best of intentions but disastrous results. I am thinking particularly of the brave new world of housing estates – the system-built, deck access variety, and the tower block – which quickly became sink estates all across the country, unloved and relentlessly, depressingly ugly, with endless wasted acres of “public open space” and a dearth of private space. I know because I spent a lot of time in the 1980s trying to see what I could do to improve the inner cities. Many of these have been torn down after only 20 to 30 years of use. The builders of that era also ripped apart many town and city centres for enclosed shopping malls and parking structures, many of which have also been taken down. Ladies and Gentlemen, the point about all this is that we simply cannot afford to repeat these mistakes, but this time in a twenty-first century guise. In fact, I would go so far as to say we must not repeat such mistakes. We owe it to the people of this country to do infinitely better and that is the purpose of today’s conference: to try to learn from the past, and take the best ideas forward as we build what will become tomorrow’s heritage today.

Now our current plans call for building three million new homes by 2020, which you all know better than I, which amounts to 240,000 new houses each year, at a time when the house builders currently only put up 185,000 houses per annum. And if that doesn’t seem like a challenge, The National Housing Planning and Advice Unit has said that 270,000 houses need to be built each year, arguing for a total by 2016 of 3.25 million! Such ambitious housing targets will impact both the countryside and our cities, towns and suburbs, and groups ranging from The National Trust to the Campaign to Protect Rural England have, most understandably, expressed deep concern about the potential consequences. A 2007 Housing Audit by the Government’s design watchdog, the Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment, found that “the housing produced in the first few years of this new century is simply not up to the standard which the Government is demanding and which customers have a right to expect.” Requirements to build on brownfield land and an appropriate concern about building at densities that support public transport and mixed-use means that much of the new housing is being built within existing built-up areas, and provided in the form of flats in residential towers of nine to twenty stories. These towers are generally opposed by local residents, but loved by “buy to let” investors and planners to add a bit of the “wow” factor to their suburb or town. I therefore hope very much that this conference will address the issue of building housing at greater densities in a way that is harmonious with town and city scapes, with the existing heritage and with the needs and desires of local residents. We have endured for too long the prevailing lack of courtesy within the public realm and the time has come to reinvent “good manners” in the way we build. We should surely be asking whether it is a natural pre-requisite of “being modern” to display bad manners? Is it “being modern”, for instance, to vandalize the few remaining relatively unspoilt, beautiful areas of our cities, any more than it would be “modern” to mug defenceless elderly people? Can it not be modern “to do to others as you would have them do to you?” That’s the question. Ever since I so rashly decided to get involved with these issues by writing “A Vision of Britain,” I have been working on a series of principles for building better places. Together with my Trust, my Foundation and the Duchy of Cornwall, I have been trying to put these principles into practice at Poundbury and other smaller sites – although not without a bit of difficulty here and there! So now, taking advantage of the fact that I am nearly sixty, I would like to share a few thoughts with you about the ways that we can build new buildings in old places, distilled from nearly twenty years of all this experience. Now, it seems to me that the following ideas might conceivably be worth following up:• Firstly, recognition that sustainability actually means building for the long-term – one hundred years, rather than twenty years; • Secondly, because of this, it is worth building in an adaptable and flexible manner, reassessing and reusing existing buildings wherever possible; • Thirdly, it is worth building in a manner that fits the place, in terms of materials used, proportion and layouts and climate, ecology and building practices; • Fourthly, it is worth building beautifully, in a manner that builds upon tradition, evolving it in response to present challenges and utilising present day resources and techniques;

• And, finally, it is worth understanding the purpose of a building, or group of buildings, within the hierarchy of the buildings around it and responding with an appropriate building type and design. Doing this often implies the composition of a harmonious whole, rather than the erection of singular objects of architectural or corporate will which merely panders to ego-centric imperatives. Such principles, in my experience, tend to create added social and environmental value, as well as commercial value. They apply whether building anew or adapting existing buildings. We all need to consider the meaning of heritage and recognize that sustainability is achieved by creating buildings that people will both want to use, and be able to use efficiently, a hundred years hence. Local distinctiveness should flourish and traditional craft skills should be re-discovered and incorporated in new buildings as well as old; so that true and timeless methods of building are exploited for not only the beauty they create, but also the environmental benefits they offer.You may possibly, ladies and gentlemen, have heard of the Slow Food Movement which has emerged as a direct reaction to the overall destructiveness of fast food (and incidentally, as probably you may have read, we waste a third of all food in this country too)… What we need is a “Slow Architecture Movement” as well. This is not mere romanticism, for after 32 years of The Prince’s Trust I have come to see just how many young lives are wasted; how much potential talent and technical craft skill is lost because people are not able to follow their true calling and thus become psychologically frustrated and alienated. I have seen an awful lot of such young people. We never seem to think about this aspect of the whole built environment equation – the fact that we are actively discouraging young people from putting their souls, yes their souls, into buildings through the skills they acquire… So in those places where more ambitious urban development is appropriate, there are principles of planning which, again, can make sure new development is adding value to communities in this country. Such principles include well-designed public spaces, a mix of shops and services within walking distance, values of hierarchy, legibility and proportion, integration of high-quality private, social and affordable housing – and by incorporating these qualities we are applying the lessons tradition teaches us about how better neighbourhood design improves the lives of those who live in new developments. And while we are talking about principles, let’s just consider for a moment, if we may, the issue of taller buildings in our historic towns and cities, and especially in and around the United Kingdom’s twentyseven World Heritage sites. In this area I very much fear we are repeating the mistakes of the 1960s, but doing so with even greater hubris and efficiency! Corporate and residential towers are being proposed across London, and overshadowing World Heritage sites from Edinburgh to Bath – this audience will not need reminding of the fact that the World Heritage status of sites such as Edinburgh’s old city, the Tower of London and Westminster have all been challenged by U.N.E.S.C.O. due to new construction in recent years. And so they should be, as there is no point at all in having a World Heritage site unless it retains its unique integrity. There are, after all, other areas where such tall buildings could be accommodated within their own context.The French have managed it quite well up to now in La Défense, in Paris (but I hear there are even current threats to the integrity of the historic quarters of Paris from ever taller, deconstructed glass monoliths). For some unaccountable reason we seem to be determined to vandalize these few remaining sites which retain the kind of human scale and timeless character that so attract people to them and which increase in value as time goes by. What is it, Ladies and Gentlemen, about our outlook which perpetuates desire deliberately to desecrate such places? You would think, wouldn’t you, that we might have outgrown this kind of attitude by now…? Thus, in chasing the corporate tenant or the buy-to-let investor, we may not only be destroying our heritage, but killing the goose that lays the golden egg for we will destroy what makes our cities and

towns so attractive to tourists in the process. Interestingly, London currently holds almost a two per cent share of world tourism and London tourists spent £7.5 billion here in 2006, according to Visit London, with visitor surveys attesting to the fact that the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral are Britain’s top paid attractions. Nevertheless, speculative towers are currently proposed in the environs of both the Tower and St. Paul’s… Many people believe, erroneously, that the only way to achieve environmental efficiencies in development is by building very tall buildings. Indeed, improving the average density of building in England is critical to achieving “location efficiency,” which reduces automobile use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as minimizing land-take. But these efficiencies only begin to occur at 17 units to the hectare, when public transport becomes feasible, and begin to tail off at densities above 70 units to the hectare, according to a definitive research study from the United States which has recently been applied by my Foundation in a London project.This is because achieving environmental gains is a function of density, access to public transport and walkable, connected streets. Pedestrian street access becomes more difficult at higher density. Indeed, there is also a question about whether London’s overstressed public transport network can actually handle greater density at the centre. Creating visual pollution is not the answer to achieving greater efficiency. It is crucial to stress before it is all too late, and before people are persuaded otherwise by clever marketing, that these location efficiencies can be achieved easily by traditional English building types, including the four to five storey terrace and the six to ten storey mansion block. It is worth remembering this. In fact, Kensington and Chelsea, which so far lacks tower blocks, is the densest London borough. It is worth noting that the Urban Renaissance report showed how densities of 75 units to the hectare can be achieved by mansion blocks and terraces, both of which can provide family housing, and can include gardens, unlike the typical one to two bedroom tower blocks being built all over London today. And, if we look at London’s skyline, and compare it, say, to Paris where, up to now, building heights are regulated far more precisely, we are immediately struck by how much less is protected here than abroad. The current debates about tall buildings here in London would have been unnecessary and superfluous in Paris – where tall buildings have been concentrated, as I have mentioned earlier, in the urban quarter of La Défense – outside the historic area which, of course, continues to attract tourists and their spending power. And, in Berlin, too, where an immense programme of reconstruction and regeneration has gone on – larger than in any other European city – the city leaders have insisted upon rigorous limitations to the height of new buildings. These kinds of approaches can help to achieve a far more coherent sense of harmony and civic self-confidence than the alternative “free-for-all” that will leave London and our other cities with a pockmarked skyline. Not just one carbuncle, ladies and gentlemen, on the face of a much-loved old friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners. To seek to protect historic views and vantage points, and oppose the planning of random new towers – for perhaps they would be better described as “vertical Cul-de-Sacs” or “Network Congestors”! – is not, I believe, synonymous with supporting what some have rather disparagingly called a “museum city.” It is certainly legitimate to ask, I would have thought, how it can be considered sensible, or indeed rational, to implant such “congestors” into a network of streets which were designed to function with two to three storey buildings… You might think, too, mightn’t you, that in today’s world there would be a whole series of health and safety issues that needed to be considered! The argument has been made that London must build tall buildings in order to protect its place as a

global financial centre. While this argument doesn’t in any way apply to the dozens of undistinguished blocks of one and two bedroom flats being built all over the city, surely business seeks glamorous buildings? If this is so, then Canary Wharf already provides, like La Défense, a place for those statements of corporate aspiration to be made. Why can they not be concentrated there, rather than overshadowing Wren’s and Hawksmoor’s churches? My concern is that London will become just like everywhere else with the same homogenized buildings that express nothing but outdated unsustainability. It may be very surprising to some that the preferred location for many hedge funds and the new private equity firms is neither the City or Canary Wharf, but Mayfair, St. James’s and Belgravia, thus demonstrating the enduring appeal of the mixed-use, mid-rise, human scale city quarter. So, the key point I want to make is that I am not opposed to all tall buildings. My concern is that they should be considered in their context; in other words, they should be put where they fit properly. If new vertical cul-de-sacs are to be built, then it seems self-evident to me that they should stand together to establish a new skyline, and not compete with or confuse what is currently there – as has already happened to a depressing and disastrous extent. If clustered, then the virtue of height becomes something that can, in the hands of creative architects, be truly celebrated. This solution, so clearly the case in Manhattan or La Défense in Paris, requires locations where intrusion into historically protected views, either at height or at street level, can be avoided, and is, therefore, difficult to justify in places such as the City of London where the pressure to build at height is often greatest. There is a very real and urgent risk looming over us that in the drive to make historic cities like London and Edinburgh “world cities” in the commercial sense, we simply make them more like every other city in the world and in so doing dishonour and discredit their status, character and local distinctiveness. In “A Vision of Britain,” I suggested that the impact of new buildings could be softened by an acceptance of the existing street rhythms and plot sizes and that the buildings in a city such as London, Edinburgh or even Bath or Ealing are the individual brushstrokes of a grand composition, which works because all the participants understood the basic rules and “grammar,” with harmony being the pleasing result. This lesson is, I believe, still as relevant today as it was in the Enlightenment, when builders sought to remake their cities to compete on a new stage. For the past sixty years or so we have been conducting an experiment in social and environmental engineering that has gone disastrously wrong. Is it not time to say, ladies and gentlemen, in the words of William Cowper – that “Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head, and learning wiser grow without his books?”

“Any house,” wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in 1931, “is a far too complicated clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body... The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects.... The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion.”

Divine Architecture

The Score, The Beginning In the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth. Now the earth is formless and empty, darkness is over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. And God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. God see that the light is good, and He separates the light from the darkness. God calls the light “day,” and the darkness he calls “night.” And there is evening, and there is morning—the first day. And God says, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God makes the expanse and separates the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it is so. God calls the expanse “sky.” And there is evening, and there is morning—the second day. And God says, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it is so. God calls the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he calls “seas.” And God see that it is good. Then God says, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it is so. The land produces vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God see that it is good. And there is evening, and there is morning—the third day. And God says, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it is so. God makes two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also makes the stars. God sets them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God see that it is good. And there is evening, and there is morning—the fourth day. And God says, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” So God creates the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God see that it is good. God blesses them and says, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there is evening, and there is morning— the fifth day.

And God says, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it is so. God makes the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God see that it is good. Then God says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God creates man in his own image, in the image of God he creates him; male and female he creates them. God blesses them and say to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God says, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it is so. God see all that he has made, and it is very good. And there is evening, and there is morning—the sixth day.

Message - Future In Architecture? Posted by MJE on June 10, 2003 at 20:42:34: I am a student of architecture in my 2nd year. I enjoy visiting this site occasionally just to read about the different things people have to say. But it seems like every time I come here I end up reading somebodys rant about how horrible being an architect really is. Low pay, lots of ass-kissing, no life outside of the office, the list goes on and on. Up until now I have remained optimistic about my future career and disregarded these comments as coming from people who are bitter and spiteful because of their own shortcomings in their professional lives. However I am now seeing these comments far too often to ignore any longer. The thing is, I really do have a love of architecture and design but I want to be able to raise a family and enjoy my life as well as my career. At this point in time I am not thinking at all of changing career paths but I am getting a little worried about what the future might hold. Can anyone out there tell me more about a career in architecture without going off the deep end of negativity? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m pretty sure that there has got to architects out there who love what they do and make a good living at it.

I Sing the Body Electric Walt Whitman 1 I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

2 The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and from the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horse-man in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child, the farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curvâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d neck and the counting; Such-like I love--I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

3 I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

This man was a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love, He drank water only, the blood showâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like scarlet through the

clear-brown skin of his face, He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sailâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him, When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

4 I have perceivâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

5 This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious nice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d day.

This the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman, This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d, she is both passive and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

6 The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place, He too is all qualities, he is action and power, The flush of the known universe is in him, Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well, The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him, The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul, Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself, Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here, (Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

The manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body is sacred and the womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body is sacred,

No matter who it is, it is sacred--is it the meanest one in the laborersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession.

(All is a procession, The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant? Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight? Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts, For you only, and not for him and her?

7 A manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily rollâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d.

In this head the all-baffling brain, In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve, They shall be stript that you may see them. Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood, The same old blood! the same red-running blood! There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations, (Do you think they are not there because they are not expressâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? (Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace

back through the centuries?)

8 A womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body at auction, She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face. Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body? For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9 O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and

that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,

Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

Alicante in Orleans

Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno The University of Alicante, the Architecture School to be precise, headed abroad for the first time. The destination was Orleans where, thanks to the FRAC CENTER, our ships berthed and our crew infiltrated the city. For a clearer description of the voyage and a more expressive location of our position, we will draw a series of maps for you. They are a succession of more or less concentric surroundings. Starting at our specific location, the spot where we stand, we will gradually mover further away until we have an overview of the territory that includes you readers. MAP 1: THE EXHIBITION 11 écoles d’architecture AT THE frac center This not very large venue fitted in a sample of 11 schools of architecture from around the world compactly, almost tightly packed. We were in a central position, slightly nearer the end opposite the window. We were surrounded by distinguished neighbours: the University of Tongji, all the way from Shanghai, the Lille School, the Strasbourg School, the Versailles School, the Special Architecture School of Paris (all French), the Architectural Association from London, the Nagaoka Design Institute from Japan, the Berlage Institute from Rotterdam, Oporto’s Escola Superior Artistica and the University of Geneva’s Institute of Architecture. The show was well attended, all the visitors were from Orleans’ 4th International Architecture Conference (ARCHILAB). There are few occasions when lands such as this hove into sight.Teaching-linked architectural exhibitions usually take place in academic surroundings. The first peculiarity of this panorama was to consider that architectural design teaching is relevant in a professional forum. We found ourselves at a different kind of architectural conference, perhaps more scientific because of this genetic view, more involved in the difficulty of defining what is contemporary or in a longer time scale. By laying snares to catch what is prior to the objective it was also laying them for what is to come. This first framework consciously although fuzzily sketched the portrait of a coming generation. This generation finds itself obliged to construct its trade. It has been left without a legacy and has no rôles to fulfil.The Eleven Schools, together for a fortnight, proclaimed the death of a single understanding of the profession. Depending on where you are looking, and depending on the sharpness of your eyes and how long you look, you can see not only different architectures but also different ways of understanding architects as agents, their ability to act, their aims and areas of interest. Some presented a big architecture, enormous, almost massive, with an exaggeratedly generalist view of large-scale architecture and the construction of the city. We were also brought architects, authors, who are preceded by single ideas, proposals without versions, clear credits. Other schools brought architects that are institutions, every act backed up by the weight of a collective process. Some had come with phenomenological architects who, rather than building, encounter architecture in the accidents that lie to hand. There were also analysts, trackers, publicists, strategists and a variety of other fauna. That is enough to give an idea of

this sort of political map. Starting from scratch on professional qualification generated new phenomena of neighbourhood.There were involuntary coincidences between distant schools, not too much overlapping and abundant differences. A contact based on specifics was made, transcending generalist concepts such as regionalism, generation or style. One might speak of the appearance of a network of concretion that revealed resemblances where the observed or generated samples of reality coincided and produced specific but overlappable reactions. One could say that each student and each school answered the first question, What kind of architect are you making?, with a selection of data.These formed a diffuse network of connections that seem to be the most relevant elements for reflection and criticism. MAP 2: THE ECONOMY OF THE EARTH This third map should cover all of you, those who are reading this article and those who are publishing it. It is the map that outlines the relevance of Archilab in a wider panorama, as wide as you like. Nowadays it would be difficult to defend architectural values that are practised by all the architectures in existence. If we are talking of space we have our doubts about books (they are full of architecture without it), if we are talking about form all our excuses based on flows that seem to lead to an informal or aformal state come to mind. It is impossible to believe in the universality of architectural values. Archilab was more astute in choosing its overall theme for the conference. Instead of focussing on the hard volume, the essential eye, the clichéd internal questions, it adopts a peripheral, inclusive view. It views matters from various positions, both inside and outside the profession and, like the conclusion of an undeniable syllogism, announces that architecture is an eminently economic activity.To reach this point, the intention of paying attention to the exterior, of doing guard duty on the frontier, had first to be constructed. This time, from the start, we will talk of architecture under a heading that would also serve for talking about trade, communications, finance or politics but, paradoxically, is one of the few that seems to include all of us (architects). In 1989, Felix Guattari argued for the need to reorganise individual and social practices under three headings: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology, all under the guidance of a certain ecosophy that he considered to be of an ethical-aesthetic nature. At that time, it seemed that an attempt was being made, from a partial section of reality, to reflect on the widest set of things we could. Nowadays we attempt to give an authoritative opinion on what is happening to us, in the specific enclosure of our discipline, and understand that the lack of conclusions obliges us to sally forth. In both types of movement (deductive – from the general to the concrete – and inductive – the opposite) it would seem that a reflection on how we administer or manage nature has this capacity for integration. However, at that time, ecology had probably not become an economic activity. It only started to become one a short time ago. On its way to reaching the status of a cliché, the environment is torn between generalism, cheap ethics, fashion, cultural and political transgression, between threats and control and guarantee systems. In any event, it is moving on the unstable ground where everyone seems to know what it is about, even when it is, obviously, a polysemous phenomenon. Archilab is doubly clever and confronts us with an expression that we have not yet filed. It repeats its inclusive strategy and the economy of the earth enables us to talk about the environment, although not as a single central discourse but as one option among others (franchise, multinational, global, local, monopoly, etc.) I would have liked to find a quote with something about the relationship between intelligence and necessity, but have not been able to (though I went up and down and round and round the magic mountain), so the reader will have to be the one to fill in this last map by inserting two final lines in absolute praise of the colossal work that an activity such as this is doing for redefining architecture and current thinking.

The Death Of Influential Architects. For Real

Jessyka Watson Galbraith Louis Khan died of a heart attack in a men’s restroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York City. He was not identified for three days, as he had crossed out the home address on his passport. He had just returned from a work trip to India, and despite his long career, he was deeply in debt when he died. Against his doctor’s orders, on August 27, 1965, Le Corbusier went for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. His body was found by bathers and he was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death on April 9, 1959. His third wife’s Olgivanna dying wish had been that Wright, she and her daughter by a first marriage all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. By then, Wright’s body had lain for nearly 30 years in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery. Olgivanna’s plan called for a memorial garden, already in the works, to be finished and prepared for their remains. Although the garden had yet to be finished, his remains were prepared and sent to Scottsdale where they waited in storage for an unidentified amount of time before being interred in the memorial area. Today, the small cemetery south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and a long stone’s throw from Taliesin, contains a gravestone marked with Wright’s name but its grave is empty. On 7 June 1926 Gaudí was run over by a tram. Because of his ragged attire and empty pockets, many cab drivers refused to pick him up for fear that he would be unable to pay the fare. He was eventually taken to a pauper’s hospital in Barcelona. Nobody recognized the injured artist until his friends found him the next day. When they tried to move him into a nicer hospital, Gaudí refused, reportedly saying “I belong here among the poor.” He died three days later on 10 June 1926(aged 74), half of Barcelona mourning his death. He was buried in the midst of La Sagrada Família.

Dance - space - architecture - spatiality

From pulse, summer 2006 Introtext: Years ago, the late Balasaraswati explained how she saw that the structure of the bharatanatyam repertoire order captured the architecture and spirit of the (Tamil/Hindu) temple. Architects now speak of their designs and buildings in movement and dance terms, as would the ancient builders were they here today. Scholars have drawn parallels between dance and architecture as equally, complementary, cultural forms. Dance and architecture lay claim to a shared vocabulary and ethos likely because they also share something immediately apparent – space. Before examining it all, Alessandra Lopez y Royo starts by asking: ‘What is space?” Choreographers and architects often say that dance and architecture share the same concern, and the shared concern is space; dancing bodies and the architectural built environment manipulate space. But what is space? Is it static and always there, or is it ‘produced’ by movement and by construction? Is it three-dimensional as we commonly understand it, or is Time also part of the equation, as Einstein and the physicists after him have proposed – giving us notions of ‘spacetime’? Is it measurable, or is space itself a measure? Is it a conceptual framework, or does it have its own ontology – its own nature of being and existence? Is space a perception? Can it be owned or, what do we really own when a ‘space’ is ours? These are not my questions; they have been, for centuries, part of the philosophical and scientific discourse about space. They make it clear at once that space and spatiality – or spatial property – are complex and multi-layered; the space which dance and architecture claim to share is not only physical, for there is more to space than we see in its physicality. The dance and the temple To discuss south asian dance and its relationship to space historically, we need to go back to pre-colonial times and to the prescriptions recorded in Sanskrit texts about the wooden ‘play-houses’ built for the performance of natya or drama, of which dance was a component. These play-houses were erected on temple as well as royal precincts. They showed the connection between ritual space and spaces that we would today, in a typically modernist sense, understand as secular, hence totally split from any religious activity. In a sense, this absence of a clear-cut division between the secular, the ritual and the religious had some bearing on the conceptualisation of the ‘temple-stage’, which transformed the urban 20th century proscenium stage in India into consecrated grounds, what scholar Avanthi Meduri has identified as the construction of the ‘temple-stage’ – for the performance of bharatanatyam and all the other south asian classical forms. The rituals performed for laying the temple’s foundations were also performed for building the playhouse, such as the drawing of ritual diagrams and the giving of offerings to the guardians of the eight car-

dinal directions following the layout of vastupurushamandala, a ritually potent square which established the essence of all existence, through invoking and symbolically reproducing the mythical sacrifice of a primeval giant, the purusha. The vastu rituals were also enacted at the beginning of the natya performance, with offerings to the eight deities and the bringing onstage of the jarjara or flagstaff, this being equivalent to the stambha pillar which stands at the entrance of almost every temple, marking the axis mundi. The bowing to the guardians of the directions is not found only in the practices of the subcontinent: the rangapuja still performed in Bali at the beginning of a dramatic performance seems to follow this same pattern, possibly as a result of eastward travel and relocation of religio-cultural ideas from India. The play-house stage was built following a specific grid, with areas roughly corresponding to the frontand back-stage of the modern proscenium, and with squares, replicating the vastu squares, each marked by four pillars at a specific distance from each other. Each pillar was symbolic of the four castes, the pillars of traditional Hindu social life. The pillars of the play-house were a shared architectural feature with the natamandapa (lit. dance-hall) of the temple, the designated space for dance – one can think here of Orissan temple architecture, where the natamandapa was the stage for the ritual dance of its devadasi-s. The choreography of the dance of the pre-colonial period must have undoubtedly negotiated the presence of the pillars in the architectural spaces in which it dwelled: depending on the size of the playhouse the number of pillars was in multiples of four, with a likely impact on the dance space and consequently on the dance. But architecture dances… British architect Adam Hardy, who currently lectures at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, has researched the temples of India, working on the idea of a structural homology or complete correspondence between the architecture of the temples and the structure of other artistic forms, such as dance. Any ‘dynamic’ architecture (the European Baroque being the best known example), says Hardy, must offer scope for such an exploration but the architectural expression of movement, in Hardy’s view, is perhaps nowhere more explicit and consistent than in the temples of India. As he sees it, a temple is an expression of movement, which seems to be progressing downwards from a point just above the finial, and outwards from the vertical axis, all the way down its length, and predominantly towards the cardinal points. A temple structure is made up of small self-contained temple structures, known as ‘aedicules’.The pattern of growths of the aedicular components of the temple structure is conveyed through clearly identifiable and mutually reinforcing architectural means: projection, staggering (or multiple projection), splitting, bursting of boundaries, progressive multiplication and expanding repetition – interestingly, these are terms we encounter in speaking of dance composition! The dynamism of the temple structure is, of course, conceptual, illusionistic, almost cinematic (Hardy 1995). New York-based architect, Devdutt Shastri, currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the Welsh School of Architecture under Hardy’s supervision, expands on this idea of architecture as movement by envisioning a dance architecture which he is attempting to convey through the moving image: We now have at our disposal moving image technology which includes video capture, animations and computer generated graphics. As this technology continues to put more tools at our disposal, we as architects can begin to conceive of new design processes that take advantage of what is on offer. The association of Indian classical dance and temple architecture can be more thoroughly explored using motion capture technology to analyse the spatial qualities of dance. At the same time, the ‘dance’ of the architecture itself can be better understood through animation technology combined with video footage.

Thus in pre-colonial times the architecture of the sacred buildings of India was itself an expression of movement, while dance inhabited play-houses, temple mandapas and court halls. These architectural spaces would have had an impact on the choreography, its layout and the way it would be perceived. Point/s of view A number of post-structuralist theorists have pointed out convincingly that space is socially constructed. How we are made to see a work is critical to how we do, in fact, experience it. Let’s consider ‘perspective’, the Renaissance notion, which we can know well from Renaissance paintings; it is based on classical Greek geometry, and is relevant to performance as it applies to the modern proscenium stage and, hence, the spectator-performer relationship. The ‘classical perspective’ is understood as a single point from which vision issues, and to which light is directed. So, it dictates where you should stand to see the work, usually central-frontal, like at the apex or point of a triangle. This perspectival vision or ‘right place’ cannot be assumed to be universal, for it was/is not true of other cultures. For example, in the paintings of pre-colonial India it was a rotational perspective which was predominant: the viewer was not in one static position with only one source of lighting, but could avail herself of different vantage points to ‘enter’ the narrative. The same rotational perspective was seen at work in natya (and consequently in dance) as the texts would suggest, and in the rotational perspective enabled by the play-house, as exemplified by the kuttambalam of the Kerala temples, where viewers gathered on all sides in typically open or pillared spaces mentioned earlier. It is therefore important to be aware of which perspective we are talking about if we are to understand the spatial relationships between bodies. French theorist Lefebvre points out that the single point perspective and visualisation are ideological constructs which define the perception of space and of bodies within it; and it is through these spatial relationships that subjectivities, or notions about individual actions and discourses and the individual’s understanding of his/her own experience, are constructed or socially agreed/imposed upon. Dance and architecture can organise space following a logic of perspectival visualisation but they can also disrupt this logic by creating ‘in–between’ spaces, a concept developed by Homi Bhabha to rethink identity (Bhaba 1994,2). It is this kind of ‘in-between’, hybrid space which was explored, for example, by Shobana Jeyasingh in her 1993 work Duets with Automobiles, as Valerie Briginshaw, from University College Chichester, has pointed out in her analysis of its choreography. Duets is a dance for the camera, a collaboration between Shobana Jeyasingh and Terry Braun – thus never performed live – about bharatanatyam and London buildings, seen as metaphors for a specific socio-political condition. But it is also a piece imbued with a fascination about dance and architecture as forms, hinting at a convergence of their different but parallel, geometrical and mathematical structures, in a thoroughly ‘classical’ way – in bharatanatyam terms. This is visible, for example, in a section of the choreography in which one of the dancers performs jathis framed by the square and circular patterns of the marble floor upon which she is dancing. The concern with the way dance relates to architectural structure was also present in Jeyasingh’s earlier work, from the time when she performed in a ‘traditional’ mode, as for example in the piece The Square and the Circle (1984); in a sense Duets is continuous with this earlier preoccupation. It is a way of choreographing that Jeyasingh subsequently rejected as being unsatisfactory: When I go to the theatre I realize I have to engage with the hierarchy of western theatre space, with its own conventions and rhetoric of upstage, downstage, green space, centre stage.There is a very particular power relationship. When you put a body in such as space, you are already telling a story. I find that I am not interested in centre stage any more. Before I choreograph a single movement, just by choosing

where I put a dance, I have already made a political choice. The wing spaces, especially that psychologically nebulous place just before entering, is where my interest lies (Jeyasingh in Goldhill 2004,81). In Duets three bharatanatyam dancers are juxtaposed with three London office buildings, and the dancers are filmed inside and outside the buildings: Perhaps one of the most memorable moments in Duets with Automobiles in terms of the ways in which the choreography reinvests the city spaces with a new kind of power is when a dancer travels forwards towards the camera by the walls and ceiling of a long corridor, emphasising a new sense of perspective as it recedes into the far distance…The forward approach of the dancers seems relentless; it leaves an impression of female potency and strength that transforms this previously male-dominated centre of capital (Briginshaw 2001,107-108). Un-siting it, specifically The staging of dance – south asian dance included – in open spaces is what has come to be identified as ‘site-specific performance’. The spate of site-specific work we have seen in the past two decades has been indicative of the desire to trouble conventional notions of the dance/space and spectator/performer relationship, some attempts being undoubtedly infinitely more radical than others. Most site-specific choreography takes the architecture of the building for which it is created as its starting point and makes the dance/architecture relationship central to the choreographic endeavour. Again, Jeyasingh’s work can be cited here as an example. In her recent Foliage Chorus (2005), made for the opening of Artsdepot, a new art space in London, Jeyasingh uses dance and digital projection to animate a public space – the foyer and the balconies of the art centre – working with the notion of inside/outside and its inversion, with the idea of transparency resonating with the glass walls of the balconies, and with that of organic growth; hence, the name of the piece. Yet there are interesting discrepancies. For John Thornberry, the architect of Artsdepot, performance is effectively that of people entering and moving around the building and using it as a space for public and/or private consumption; for Jeyasingh, the performance is that of her group of dancers moving for an unsuspecting audience, half caught by surprise, half expecting the dance to begin as part of the event (the opening of the centre) and rushing to secure a good viewing location. This disruption of the classical, single viewpoint perspective, encoded in the practice of the proscenium can also take place on the conventional stage: it is the way the architectural space is manipulated by the choreographer, which allows the inversion. Scenographers and lighting designers, collaborating with choreographers, can indeed create a polycentric space with several focal points – for example, think spotlights that can create many ‘centres’ on a stage – no longer predicated on orthogonality or perpendicularity or other geometric relationships, which made up the ordering principle of the classical Renaissance perspective. The challenge to visibly geometric arrangements is as old as modernism: the radicalism of site-specificity is not in the change in perspective that it engenders, but in the new significance that it lends to the idea of interactivity and interactive space, with a shift of emphasis from the purely visual to the performative. The iconic Meredith Monk, whose site-specific work of the late sixties and early seventies involved audience participation, famously said: I was always trying to break down habitual ways of thinking about the act of going to a performance. I made pieces to be performed at different times of day or pieces that took place over a period of time in different locations, incorporating memory as part of the experience (Monk in Kaye,2000, 205).

Ah, all that’s space! A space with which we are all increasingly familiar with is the hypertext environment of the World Wide Web, more commonly known as cyberspace or virtual reality. Interestingly, we see the web as having spatiality even though it does not possess the volume duality – positive and negative – of physical space. It is a space which is architecturally manipulated, designed, to create cyber-places, increasingly capable of affording social interaction and of expressing cultural values – and yes, the programming construct is spoken of as ‘architecture’. Fittingly, it is a space which is also being manipulated by dancers for dance, at every level: from performing in cyberspace to creating databases, blogs, internet journals, image banks, all for the purpose of relaying information and engaging in critical debate, globally; think here of Narthaki, now in its sixth year, founded by Anita Ratnam in Chennai, an interactive tool with web links, discussion forum, information centre, articles, interviews etc. and the e-group bharatanatyamdancers@ yahoogroups.com where dancers exchange notes on lyrics and interpretation, and health and marriage counselling! Dance, space, architecture: it is clearly not a relationship based only on shapes and lines. Japanese Noh theatre separates, in a ritualised manner, the world of death and the world of life, through spaces filled with white sand linked by a diagonal bridge, upon which the Noh dancers – themselves a bridge between the world of the dead and the world of the living – have to walk in order to reach the actual performance area. Says Japanese architect Kengo Kuma: “This space of separation is extremely important in Japanese architecture…In dance this void can be used to signify both space and time.” (Kuma in Goldhill, 2004, 82) The more one thinks about it then, the idea of ‘space’ is neither neutral nor universal: space is a concept underpinned, simultaneously, by historical, geographical, social, political and cultural significations. There is not one space but many spaces, simultaneously intersecting each other, just as there is not one dance and one architecture but a plurality of differently conceived dancerly and architectural endeavours. Works cited Valerie Briginshaw (2001) Dance, space and subjectivity, London: Palgrave. Homi Bhabha (1994) The location of culture, London: Routledge. Simon Goldhill (2004) “Terpsichore and the architects” The Architectural Review, vol 216, issue 1290, pp. 81-83. Adam Hardy (1995) Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, Foreword by Kapila Vatsyayan, New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Nick Kaye (2000) Site specific art London.

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Reframing the Open Archive: A Live Show Bjรถrn Quiring

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Written for the occasion of: OPEN Darri Lorenzen Ingólfur Arnarsson Finnbogi Pétursson BJNilsen Björn Quiring A collaborative exhibition titled OPEN will be on view at the Living Art Museum from 11.10.08 - 22.11.08. The exhibition will open at the opening ceremony of Sequences Real Time Art Festival. The artists working on this exhibition are Darri Lorenzen (initiator of the collaboration), Ingólfur Arnarsson, Finnbogi Pétursson, BJNilsen and Björn Quiring. OPEN is the first event in the extensive program of Sequences festival. In the evening of the opening day, at 9.30-11.30pm, the artists will collectively perform a remake of an LP record from the collection of the Living Art Museum: BÍLFERÐ NR.1 / AUTOFAHRT NR.1 by Dieter and Björn Roth from 1979. The original piece is a sound recording of a road trip made by Dieter Roth and his son Björn. In the remake the artists will attempt to do the same i.e .make and record another road trip that will be played on this occasion. On Sunday 12th of October at 4pm, Björn Quiring will give a lecture titled: “Reframing the Open Archive: A Live Show” and BJNilsen will perform a sound piece.

The Living Art Museum Laugavegi 26 101 Reykjavík ICELAND www.nylo.is 2008

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Reframing the Open Archive: A Live Show 1. Archive The word archive derives from the Greek word arkhē which means both „origin“ and „command“. It designates the location where things begin and their origin in space and time remains located, but also the source of power where orders are given and enforced. From the arkhē derives the word archon which denotes the superior magistrates of the Greek city state and the commanders who represent the law. From the word archon in turn derives the term arkheion which is the place where the archons convened and, more importantly, where all their official documents and administrative files were kept, the memory of the rulers and the knowledge thought concomitant to their power. The access was, of course, traditionally restricted to the privileged and closed to the public. The arkheion was a concealed, sheltered space: the entrails of power, so to speak. The Roman empire took over the term; they labeled as archivum a place where they gathered together what belonged to the state. Along with the temples, it also became a store house of trophies where the republic stashed loot from the conquered nations. On feast days, some of it was taken outside, to be paraded around in processions. From that, one might glean a certain ambivalence of the archive: While it is basically an instrument of power, it might also allow the conquered to reconstruct their past, once they get access to it. The archive is both revolutionary (in its potential) and conservative (in its self-perpetuation). So in order to function, it has to establish fixed rules that regulate access and utilization. The archive always has terms of use and a filing system, normally establishing hierarchies of relevance. Its contents will tend to mirror the structure of the outside world, but it’s also bound to impose its own order on it. The archive always must keep its outside at bay and dominate it to a certain degree. A certain closure is its condition; a totally open archive would soon cease to exist. When the outside forces its way in and destroys or alters the records any which way, it will mean the end of the archival regime or at least a significant memory loss. Smart conquistadors have always known that a people will tend to lose its coherence and cease to be a homogenous unit once all its archives are burned. The only way to preserve the information under these circumstances is its further interorization by way of memorization and oral traditions. One might label folk memory as just another, more interior form of the archive. In both forms, however, the archive turns out to be incomplete; it can’t record or control everything that’s going on, but beholds life outside the archive only within a certain frame. There can only be one archive without a frame, or rather there can be two: The first would consist of all voluntary and involuntary memory traces of all 2

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living things, what one might label the neuro-biological archive. The second would be the archive that just coincides with its object. For example, a text by Lewis Carroll narrates of some scientists who developed ever more detailed maps of a country until they arrived at a „a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile“ which couldn’t be spread out because the farmers complained that it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight. So the scientists decided to use the country itself as its own map instead which, of course, is not a very practical solution. The problem with those two ideal archives is, again, one of access: one is too deep inside, the other too far outside. Thus in the workable archives, there’s always a remainder, a place that the archive can’t take into account. The perfect archive is never no be accomplished, which makes for the paranoia of power. On the other hand, one can never be sure to be outside the archive either. For can there be life without some form of memory, that is, some form of archivization? At least, one can never be certain to have encountered it: Seeming spontaneity might just revive some forgotten memory traces. So the archive as well as the non-archive end up framed, in the sense of betrayed. 2. Museum The museum turns out to be under a similar strain. The Greek term musaion originally denoted the home of the Muses, usually a temple. Later on, it came to designate collections of artifacts, but also areas of study and scientific enquiry. It was a location of accumulated, privileged knowledge, with restricted access, but with access. The museum displayed inner and outer wealth and established a community around it. Now, the museum has normally always been composed of an archival collection on the one hand and an exhibition space, that is a gallery, on the other. The gallery is the point at which the museum opens to the outside, the reception room where it shows itself. The word „gallery“ apparently derives from galilaea, the front hall of a temple or church: It designated the space both separating and connecting an outside, public area and private or sacred or otherwise restricted quarters. The gallery works as a sort of floodgate, an interzone neither all the way out nor all the way in. Architecturally, it’s often been constructed as arcades or as a platform in front of a building, a place from which to see, but also to be seen. It’s an observation platform supposed to afford a domineering vision. Situated at this treshold, the space of the gallery establishes a community that is both inclusive and exclusive, in several gradations. It seems that the archive became a museum when it is conditionally and partially opened to its outside. Why has this happened? One of the reasons certainly lies in the fact that this is the best of all possible image campaigns. The museum establishes itself as a permanent triumphal procession, the objectified memory of a powerful organisation. Now as then, this organisation is

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often the state: The mother of all modern museums, the Louvre, used to be the seat of the French king and became a museum when France became a republic. It was used to demonstrate the republican victory not only over the monarchy but also over the opponents of France in the Napoleonic wars. The Louvre exhibited captured enemy arms and pillaged treasures from conquered nations. The museum has developed as the place for the victorious to strut their stuff and a place for vanquished cultures to be buried. It draws the line between living culture and dead culture and documents their more or less strained relationship. Accordingly, museums in the nineteenth century were built to resemble temples and official buildings of antiquity, but also tombs. The museum sustains itself by the notion that, in some way, it represents more than itself, that it makes some totality or at least some vital essence thinkable and palpable. It functions as a device for the production of a discursive or manifest sense out of contingency. The museum in this sense is a specifically modern institution which develops in parallel to the hospital, the school and the prison. All four institutions are destined to make the subjects within its walls accept their image of the world, but they’re also places where this image can potentially be put to the test and questioned. Now, how do the two functional parts of the museum interact, how does the the gallery relate to the archive? One might say that out of the material in the archive, a view on life is constituted which will find its expression in the gallery. Thus, the gallery exhibition articulates the archive. In that sense, the museum figures as a device for classification and interpretation. But the museum not only produces knowledge, but is also in the enviable position to provide in its objects the sensual experience to back it up. On the most basic level, it can form a sort of feedback loop of awareness by collecting evidence for its own categorizations. The museum thus functions as a framing device in the sense that it gives to see an image, but also in the sense of being a frame-up. Just like the archive, it is founded on hidden, one might say vampiric selectivity. The museum renders the outside world visible, but also invisible; it’s a place of lucid vision and abject blindness. In this invisibility, the museum also hides itself. The ideal museum might be defined as the repository and source of diverse spaces and times, and for this very reason has to represent itself as a place that is no particular place, ideally to be taken in within a moment of holistic appreciation that is outside of time. The result being that the museum increasingly stages itself as a non-place, erasing all traces of its temporal or spatial specificity. In denying its own contingency and simulating as closely as possible the experience of a pure, homogenous, Cartesian space, the gallery has become more and more inconspicuous, generating the famous „white cube“ of Brian O’Doherty.

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3. Museum Art The French philosopher Jean-Louis Déotte assumes that the very notion of art has been generated through this institution of the museum. According to Déotte, the function of art would be to give to the world an original and originary point from which to watch itself, in a way it likes to watch and be watched. Thus the art museum is conceived as a powerhouse and depository of perspectives on the world. In a somewhat stronger, more utopian version of the same conception, art is described as the area where life recognizes its own potential, or at least glimpses of it are caught. Accordingly, a painting or drawing hanging on the wall has for a long time been conceived as a timeless window on the world. But what actually is a window? What is its function? Generally, it is situated at the border of an inside and an outside, but is not supposed to be a place where inside and outside really interact. For example, if you’re coming into a room through the window, it is generally assumed that you’re up to no good, and if a policeman watches you doing it, he will probably take you to the station and question you. Come to think of it, it’s obvious that most windows are made for looking out, not for looking in. The window thus frames not the inside, but the outside world; it might be regarded as an attempt to reverse the relation of outside and inside. That’s why it’s easy to confuse a window with a mirror or an image, as artworks themselves often indicate. For example, the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez engages in one of the most sophisticated plays with the inside and outside of frames in art history. And, as Foucault has shown, its interest centers very much on the question if a frame in the painting’s background frames a mirror, a window, or a painting in the royal collections. As this example demonstrates, art itself can take account of the structures that determine it and engage with them. Just as a good play both posits and subverts the fleeting border between drama and „real life“, an interesting artwork in some way or another has to deal with the tense relation between representational objects and the „real world“. In this context, art necessarily will relate to the museum apparatus in one way or another. And since this relation imposes certain restrictions on both parties, it has become increasingly conflictual over the course of the last two centuries. Art seems to have slowly stripped itself of all the false autonomy that the museum seemed to offer it as a compensation for its conformity to exhibition standards. Finally, the space in which the conflict was waged, in most cases the gallery, became itself the focus of attention, one might say: the content of the artwork. In a constant struggle, the artwork tries to reframe the gallery that frames it or to blast the gallery’s structure open all the way towards its outside or towards its inside. One inconspicuous way to open the museum up by exposing it is to exhibit not so much the archive as the process of curatorial collecting and archivization, that is, the diverse forms of openness and closure that art has to pass through in order to arrive

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at the gallery. Another possibility is to put a platform into the gallery, one might say a gallery into a gallery, and put the viewer on top of it. When art thus engages with overexposures and blind spots of the archive, it engages in experiments of disarticulation in which necessarily no definite statement can be made. If the artwork tried to propagate another locale and another fixed meaning, it would at best end up as an alternative idol or trophy. So it has to try to remain open toward exteriors and contexts that it cannot anticipate, even though the museum almost always manages to integrate and archive these subversions of the archival apparatus. 4. Sightings of Life in the Museum These edgy conflicts at the openings of the museum reanimate the old question how art and life ought to be related. In this context, it is worthwhile to remember that for a long time, the main business of art was generally considered to be the imitation of life. Such life manifested itself in an assemblage of figures or forms which the artist found in the outside world and mimed by way of the artwork. The artist thus extracted from nature its hidden substance, a vital essence which was to be dealt with almost like a subject. However, in the course of modernity, the artwork increasingly tended to be conceptualized as a result of a primal act of creation instead, an integral yet autonomous part of life without the need to imitate anything. The artwork acquired the right to become self-referential and to convey first and foremost its own status as an artwork. It didn’t imitate but create spatial perceptions which impinged on the space the gallery visitor occupied. Soon it turned out that one didn’t even absolutely need an artwork for that purpose. Kandinsky in 1929 was one of the first to praise the bare, naked wall that normally separates the inside and the outside of a gallery not only as a frame for the artwork, but as a worthy object of aesthetic contemplation, „living in and of itself‘“ and conveying „the intensity of lived experience“. If this venerable idea of intensity seems to sound somewhat nostalgic nowadays, scientific and industrial development might have something to do with it. For technology has invaded life more and more, and now manipulates and even generates the processes of living itself with the help of better and better access to ever smaller spaces within nature. This makes it more difficult to believe in an autonomous inner life of things which art exposes, but which in „real life“ remains hidden. Consequently, a new artistic paradigm seems to be needed in which the artwork would no longer behave mimetically toward life, but wouldn’t just serve as its most free and sublime manifestation either. But if the artwork cannot serve as an exposition of a preexistent world with clear structures and borders, but cannot convincingly trace a vortex of unfathomable events or rampant spontaneity beyond all structures either, what can it possibly do? In order to find out, one will have to set out on a line of flight crossing these fading alternatives on toward a place that is not yet taken within the old dialectic of outside and inside. 4

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Provisionally, let’s call this place „the Open“. 5. The Open Now, something can be open both to the inside and to the outside. Will this mysterious „Open“ be able to connect the two, like an open door? At least one can’t see how just another opening (for example access to secret information) would change the situation of the artwork. Rather, the Open should be regarded as the place where the difference between inside and outside itself is suspended. Since Heidgegger, the discussion of this mysterious area tends to start off with the Eighth Duino Elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. For Rilke, the animal is the paradigm of the Open, because it is completely within the world, not even separating between the world and itself. In contrast to that, humans want to get hold of the world, so they put themselves in opposition to it, outside of the pure space of wholeness. To say it in the words of the poem’s beginning: „With all its eyes the animal world beholds the Open. Only our eyes are as if inverted and set all around it like traps at its portals to freedom. What’s outside we only know from the animal’s countenance; for almost from the first we take a child and twist him round and force him to gaze backwards and take in structure, not the Open.“ Accordingly to Rilke, man has fallen from the grace of the Open and doesn’t inhabit it any longer. Instead, he inhabits a theatre, in which he remains both spectator and actor. Again, in Rilke’s own words (translated by Edward Snow): „We, though: never, not for a single day, do we have that pure space ahead of us into which flowers endlessly open. What we have is World and always World and never Nowhere-Without-Not [...]. Spectators, always, everywhere, looking at, never out of, everything! It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart. We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.“ Martin Heidegger has developed an extensive critique of these lines. According to him, the openness of the animal life is not a real openness. It is, in a way, nothing but a closure, for the animal is absorbed in nature, captivated by it. („Benommen“ is the German word used in that context.) The animal is always outside of itself, its natural

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openness closes it off from its own inwardness. The animal is thus beyond the difference of openness and closure. It beholds neither the one nor the other, for it lacks awareness of the difference which supposes a faculty to differentiate between them. And that faculty, according to Heidegger, supposes human language. Only man has access to the Open, and only by way of language. The Open, in his interpretation, basically turns out to be the confrontation with a significant noise or form which illuminates and rearranges the relationship of human beings with the world by drawing them out of the structures they normally move in. 6. Electronics Just out of spite, let’s take an example that Heidegger would have intensely disliked and return to the the door which can be either closed or open. Come to think of it, the door not necessarily connects or separates between an inside and an outside. One might imagine wall around the equator, and if you put a door in that wall and pass through, are you stepping outside or inside? This reflection is just to serve as a stepping stone to another, more structural approach to the door and the Open. To supplement another example, think of electronic appliances. Rather surprisingly, an open circuit turns out to be exactly the one through which no current can pass. The condition of a current of electrical energy is a closed circuit. Hence you might say: the more closed the system is, the more open it turns out to be. This is not just a bad joke hanging onto a curiosity of language. Think of the archive again: that also can only function if its doors remain closed, at least some of them to some of us. And this arrangement keeps the sense the archive makes of the world in place. It becomes apparent that the door is a device with which to differentiate and signify. You might imagine an archive that consist of nothing but of an enormously complicated assemblage of open and closed doors. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it; you can see it all over the place. A computer is basically exactly that. There’s a good reason why the basic building blocks of all digital devices are called gates; as there’s also a good reason why the most widespread operating system of protected modes under one Bill Gates isn’t called Doors, but Windows. Now, just as it was undecidable if the open door through the imaginary equatorial wall leads to an outside or an inside, it’s undecidable or irrelevant what’s outside and what’s inside in the realm of electronic archives. Perhaps for this very reason, the use of electronic appliances in artworks has led to some controversy. A widespread supposition was that the growth of electronic arts was a fatal development that has rendered art impure and its contemplation impossible. However, their electrification has at least offered good occasions to ring in a new round in the conflict between artwork and museum by reopening the question what art is and what it is supposed to do. Take, for example, a loudspeaker within a gallery playing back sound events occuring in the gallery or outside street noises. Now these are noises that are neither intrinsic 5

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to the objective gallery space nor extraneous to it, and neither altogether natural nor altogether artificial and subjective. They are located in an interzone between these alternatives, and widening it, for example by exposing the connections between the amplification and the transformation of sound events. Thus, sound artists seem to be in a particularly privileged position to rework the relation between imitation of the outside and expressive creation from the inside since they have always produced works which bypass this nagging dichotomy. They make things perceivable by transforming them, that is, they reframe them. Under ideal conditions, this technological intervention neither imposes itself on the outside world nor imitates it. Instead, it renders the relation between space and the gallery visitor more open in the sense of experimental, hinting at new ways of experiencing the acoustic and visual properties of the rooms she or he usually moves in. Neither a subject nor a world finds its authentic expression in the process, but their relations and conditionings can be slightly transformed all the same. The immediate result of such interventions will tend to be a certain disorientation because categories one uses to orient oneself in the world are found to be temporarily suspended. Yet after momentarily getting lost in space, one might perhaps be able to reaccommodate to it in a new way which is richer in possibilities. Thus some new sense would have seeped in from a virtual place that is neither inside nor outside and which one might call the Open without giving in too much to mystification. 7. The Passing of Dieter Roth Of course, you don’t have to use electronic equipment in order to achieve this effect. Another strategy would be to erode the archive by taking it at its own word. This is how the work of Dieter Roth could be described, for example. Roth’s project, if you want to call it that, seems to be one of all-encompassing incorporation which excludes absolutely nothing from the process of art production. A somewhat blatant emblem of this approach is the „Journal for Everything“ Roth edited for a while. For it printed all contributions that were sent to it, regardless of the content. Other examples are his extensive recordings, photographs and other documentations of ordinary, seemingly insignificant events, such as a car drive from his gallery to his home. Generally, Roth has been archiving the formless for decades, particularly all that which seems to fall out of useful categories, such as small everyday waste products and even excrement in the form of little sculptures made of rabbit shit. A peculiar way of striving for the absolute archive seems to open: the archive of absolutely everything which would leave no remainder. The effect, of course, is that the archive itself goes to waste. Roth’s work is marked by an ambivalence. For one the one hand, he gives nothing for lost, on the other, he consciously rots the archive from the inside, hinting at its final, necessary dissolution and even accelerating it. Eventually, it all comes down to a question of time: Everything is passing, but everything will have been at some point. Along

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with everything, one is always passing through the archive, haunted by the phantasm of catching life at its origin, the arkhē of the right moment, just as it comes to be. Then life would really show itself and might live on in the Open, without the need of archives. But somehow the last door always opens on the place where we got in instead. And it turns out that the doorkeeper keeps us from nothing but this door. All we’re left with is the archive as the symbol of the origin that, finally, one can’t get into and can’t get out of, so that we end up permanently taking leave of it. In that context, one can quote for a last time Rilke’s Eighth Elegy: „Always, no matter what we do, we’re in the stance of someone just departing. As he, on the last hill that shows him all the valley one last time, turns and stops and lingers—, we live our lives, forever taking leave.“ Or one might state the same matter in the words of Dieter Roth himself: „Pissing is as good as crapping Coming is as good as going [...]. Good night“

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What is Choreographic Style? – William Forsythe as an Example

TUK Introduction In trying to come to some definition of choreographic style this study will consider both how it imposes identity on a work and the relationship between it and the other constituent aspects of ballet. By addressing these issues the importance of stylistic elements may become more apparent, allowing some exposition to be reached that encompasses the multi-faceted nature of the concept of style. The discussion, though fundamentally philosophical, does require a degree of empirical support. By looking at how a particular choreographer makes use of the diverse stylistic possibilities of the media critical analysis can be used to supplement logical deduction. For the purpose of this study the choreographer whose ballets will be central to the analysis is William Forsythe. Style and Interpretation From the outset it seems evident that any analysis of choreographic style must be concerned with the work in performance and will as a consequence have to consider the intent of more than just one individual. Because intent is important it will be looked at later in this analysis of function. Whatever it may be, style requires a medium through which it can be presented. It is here that far more than the choreographer’s agenda becomes apparent. In any ballet the dancers will have different physiques with different proprioceptive responses. They will come from different social backgrounds and exhibit individual psychological responses. In addition they may have had a wide diversity of dance educations, having trained at various schools and in various genres of dance. These result in stylistic qualities innate to the way each dancer moves that, to a greater or lesser degree, give individual identity to their dancing. Even the choreographer who performs in his or her own work will find that their own body has a distinct style of movement that defines the way it will respond. This can place limits on how far even the choreographer is able to fulfil his or her own intention. Adina Armelagos and Mary Sirridge emphasise the importance of the dancers’ body in dance in their essay “Personal style and Performance Prerogatives” (1984). This outlines the stylistic contribution of the dancer as being twofold. Firstly, what they term “general style”, being principally concerned with the technical aspects of spatial vocabulary, movement and kinaesthetic motivation. Secondly, what they term personal style, which allows for the dancer’s involvement in the creation of the dance work (Armelagos, 1984, 86).

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Clearly the dancer is not inanimate, as is the case with the media used in the plastic arts. As a consequence of being portrayed through an independent interpreter, a dance is bound to have stylistic elements impinged upon it other than those of the choreographer, a common characteristic of all the performing arts.

Here the problem of to what extent interpretation may be destructive of choreographic style arises. In other performing arts the fragility of the stylistic elements tend to be far less pronounced. An actor portraying Hamlet may deliver the famous soliloquy in a variety of ways, but the text will retain much of its Shakespearean style. Similarly, a musical score will generally contain enough information to allow the musicians to reproduce the original intent of the composer with a fair degree of stylistic accuracy. A movement text has a much less secure sense of identity, even if it exists in one of the notated forms. It can be far more fundamentally changed by the qualities of movement displayed by different performers then would a written or musical text. However rather than being a weakness in the art form it creates a level of dynamic tension between the choreographer and the dancer.This can in itself inspire new works and define new styles. As a result it has become increasingly common for the choreographer to take on a group of dancers to act as principal interpreters of their work. Consequently one aspect of style is exercised in the choice of performers. This involves the choreographer in the selection of dancers who can both inspire and fulfil their choreographic intention. In this way the issue of identity, which is a primary function of style, becomes apparent at the corporate level. The choreographer creates an institution that acts as a dedicated instrument for the interpretation of his or her own works.The degree to which they then become identified with the company marks out a level of stylistic commitment on both the part of the choreographer and of his or her dancers. Since he became director of the Ballett Frankfurt, in 1984, Forsythe has fashioned the company into one intimately associated with him and his ballets. He has also been able to use the resources of the institution to develop a style of performance that is characteristically his own. Following on from this it is necessary to look at how style functions at a more individual level to give identity to a choreographers work. Style and Identity Style is not a quality of conformity, rather an aspect that distinguishes one work from another. For this reason it and identity are fundamentally bound together. Stylistic qualities allow for varying levels of categorisation, from broad artistic movement down to the individual choreographer’s characteristic style. One of the problems of the post-modern cultural imperative has been the breaking down of the distinctions between the various categories of art form. Historically speaking movements such as Classicism, Romanticism and Modernism have all exhibited stylistic features that were used to place the artist and his or her work within distinct genres. Post-modernism challenges the coherence of these boundaries. By so doing it allows for the reinterpretation of previously accepted notions, such as the distinctions made between art forms and that between high and low culture. An example of both occurs in one of Forsythe’s early ballets “Love Songs”, created for the Stuttgart Ballett in 1979. Its use of songs from the 1960s and a contemporary bar setting may seem prosaic, but its merging of the idioms of ballet and pop culture is illustrative of the stylistic eclecticism that features

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so strongly in post-modern choreography. There is also an irony in the use of a ballet company, which is frequently regarded as hierarchical in structure, to illustrate a social order in disintegration. In ‘Always something there to remind me’ the male partner grips the ballerina by her shoulders and violently shakes her. In response she throws him to the ground, walking over him on pointe with stabbing like steps.These give the pas de deux the quality of an Apache Dance. Such eclecticism is not without its critics. Part of the problem of style is that it can be viewed as acting as a façade or an insubstantial entity, added to a ballet more for effect then for substantive reasons. (This is an issue that recurs through out this study.) By merging pop culture into ballet, choreographers such as Forsythe are open to the charge that they are merely being reflective, rather than analytical, of fashionable trends. Arlene Croce, writing of the Joffery Ballet production of “Love Songs”, condemns such works as acting merely to “…inform people that the attitudes circulating throughout our culture can also be found at the ballet…” (1981, 148). This critical reaction, that such works are inherently superficial, has to be interpreted within the seeming triviality of the post-modern cultural environment. As Susan Sontag has pointed out in her essay “On Style”, contemporary styles do not retain their qualities for long enough to become identifiable but “… instead succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare” (Sontag, 1965, 35), resulting in them being unintelligible. Though “Love Songs” is not highly regarded critically, Senta Driver having described it as the “least interesting of Forsythe’s works” (Driver, 1991b, 83), it has remained in the repertoire of several ballet companies. As most ballets have something of a short shelf life, normally falling from the performance schedule after a single season, it would be reasonable to conclude that there was something about this work that explained its longevity. The piece in some way transcends the changes that have occurred in the cultural environment. This cannot be because of its reference to 60s fashion because, even allowing for some level of retro-chic, it is caricature of a period piece. However the characters are still manifestly recognisable, involved in a subtext which Forsythe himself has described, in his introduction to the filmed version of the Joffery Ballet’s production, as figures acting in an absurd fashion, whilst being unaware of their own absurdity (Kinberg, 1989). In this sense it has an element of pastiche.The situation and how the characters react are probably intelligible to anyone who has ever drunk too much and made a fool of themselves. What is different is that it is being expressed through the medium of ballet, a form of dance that has accepted aesthetic conventions that the piece seems to break. The challenge therefore is not in understanding what is being said, but in understanding the way it is being said. This concords with a further obsession of post-modernism with the sign system analysis of semiotics. Integrating this into the function of choreographic style what becomes apparent is the way the language of dance works to create a sense of identity. The use of vocabulary and syntax will be discussed later, but it is clear that there is also a manner of articulating dance that distinguishes the individual choreographers’ style. Following on from the symbolic function of style and the post-modern eclecticism it is necessary to analyse how the stylistic elements of Classicism pervade contemporary balletic choreography. The importance of the role of the interpreter has already been examined. As has been pointed out the selection of performers will have far reaching effects on the style a work will have in performance. It is here that, to a certain extent, choice of dance genre is being made. Working with a company that is primarily balletic in its training, has ballet as its core class technique and is generally viewed as being a ballet company necessitates acceptance that both performers and audience will, to a certain extent, view the work through a set of preconceived notions as being balletic. If the choreographer has a background

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that is similarly dominated by the balletic idiom logic would dictate that some aspects of it would be manifest in the style of their choreography. Thus William Forsythe is regarded as a ballet rather than a contemporary (modern dance) choreographer. The acceptance of this requires the acceptance of the stylistic features of Classicism with which ballet is imbued. Amongst these are the appearance of proportion, balance and symmetry. Appearance is in this sense important because the qualities must exist at a perceptual rather than just a mathematical level if something is to be categorised as being classical. The problem that such stylistic features raise is to what extent they define the work of the choreographer and how far he or she is able to reject them. Forsythe’s identification with the work of the French writer and semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is a case in point. Barthes approach to classicism, in his essay “Is There Any Poetic Writing”, is coloured by his rejection of what he describes as the “…attributes of language, which are useless but decorative” (Barthes, 1953, 53). This accords with the notion of style as an unnecessary encumbrance on the work. It also presupposes the possible existence of a work of art that has no style. This seems unlikely, as such a work would possess no sense of identity. As Sontag makes clear “there are no style-less works of art, only works of art belonging to different, more or less complex stylistic traditions and conventions” (Sontag, 1965,22). In describing classical poetry Barthes terms it as “…the fruit of an art” (1953, 53), using the term art as a synonym of technique. On this basis it would appear that Forsythe’s identification with Barthes presupposes his own rejection of Classicism and consequently a rejection of the form of dance most closely associated with it. On a superficial level the appearance of some of his works may suggest that he has created a movement genre that does leave behind the accepted notions of ballet. However, on closer examination, it becomes apparent that there is a more complex dynamic within the style of the dance form. The eclectic nature of post-modern works has allowed an expansion of both the vocabulary and the syntax of ballet through a series of fusions with other techniques, such as contemporary and jazz. As a result other cultural movements, both artistic and ethnic, have augmented those elements of Classicism that are innate to ballet. This has had noticeable effects on the stylistic nature of ballet and on those choreographers working within its idiomatic forms. Thus post-modern choreographic works present an amalgamation of artistic styles that, by their respective prominence, give identity to the choreographers work. A notable example occurs in Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure, which he choreographed for the Frankfurt Ballett in 1989. Here there is a seeming reference to one of the stylistic forms of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivist, movement that emerged in Germany in the 1920’s. In particular to the work of Oscar Schlemmer (1888-1943), a painter and choreographer who worked at the Bauhaus in Weimar during this period. Schlemmer’s conceptual realisation of the relationship between figures in movement and the space they inhabit bares some accord to Forsythe’s dancers moving within “…an environment bathed in technology” (Sulcas, 1998, 12). Both choreographers being responsible for their own designs also costumed their dancers in a way that fundamentally altered their body shape. In other ways the styles diverge considerably. Some contemporaries regarded Schlemmer’s best-known work, the “Triadische Ballett” (1922), as not according with any recognisable dance genre. Conversely Enemy in the Figure is clearly balletic, despite the disturbing imagery that overlays its text. At one point, the dancers who are costumed so abstractly perform a series of very rapid posés tours. The result is

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startling, for the classical step actually serves to enhance the modernist costume and vice versa. This symbiosis of styles gives the work a level of coherence that it might have otherwise lacked, but which is essentially underlined by its classical identity. Any theoretical rejection of classicism would be null and void.To be fair to Forsythe he recognises that the solution is to be found within the classical context (Gardiner 1996). As a ballet choreographer he must find that the de facto classicism of the genre pervades the identity of his work, leaving its acceptance as his only recourse. Style and Understanding An appreciation of the varying ways style makes identification possible allows some understanding of a work to be achieved. The degree to which meaning, both obvious and hidden, can be revealed within a piece is an aspect of its decipherability. Within the non-discursive medium of dance the complexity of this issue requires some examination. Human beings are natural born communicators. At its most basic level this is illustrated by the way an infant uses sound and gesture to convey its needs. However higher levels of communication are far more complex and require degrees of learning before the messenger is able to utilise the requisite signs to generate the intended meaning. These complex constructs are used by the individual both to define their relationship to the world about them and to interpret what they witness. Thus decipherability will have an existential component that is dependent upon the individual’s appreciation of any given signal interpreted through their own levels of experience and learning. The use of any language, discursive or otherwise, presupposes at least a partial mastery of its idiomatic forms, both on the part of the teller and the told. The various genres of art forms can extend the process of communication into levels of abstraction ranging from the immediately accessible to the highly obscure. However the position of any work within the spectrum of decipherability should not be thought of as concording with any value judgement. The merit of a ballet does not depend on it requiring any specific degree of decoding and making pejorative remarks about a piece based on its immediacy takes artistic analysis into the realms of intellectual snobbery. Considering the spectral nature of style and how it allows some understanding of the work to be achieved Forsythe has provided two descriptive analyses for the placement of his works. In speaking of his appreciation of classical ballet he describes his reaction as the “…joy of the evident”, whilst saying that he does “…enjoy watching things emerge that require a quick eye” (Gardiner, 1996). In either case comprehension requires a pre-existing knowledge of the salient form. Style and Intention Intention as an aspect of style is problematic. The logic of intentionallity is that whilst it might not fully circumscribe the choreographic process it does initiate it. Also to view a ballet in the abstract, as it would be from this point of origin, would be senseless for it exists to be performed. Whatever the function of choreographic style it manifests itself in performance. In order to understand how it influences style it is important to view it within the total dynamics of the creation of a ballet. The following shows how process act as a bridge between the initial intention of a work and its final realisation.

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INTENTION Aesthetic Philosophical Socio-political Psychological PROCESS Technique Experimentation Rehearsal Design Discussion REALISATION Production Event Performance These lists, whilst not definitive, serve to illustrate some of the complexities involved in the creation of a dance work and the problem of determining at what point choreographic style can be said to emerge. It is also apparent that the intention may change as a result of both process and realisation. The (original) diagram illustrates this by the presence of dashed arrows, which give it the quality of a feedback loop. As a result of the systems circulatory nature it can become increasingly difficult to see where, after a period of time has elapsed, the genesis of a work lay. At this point the relevance of intent and even its very existence can come into question. It would be more reasonable however to assume that this problem arises because the initial definition was too limited. Intentionality is not just a single thought that sparks off the process, but a process of its own, altering with events and taking on an organic quality. As a consequence of this process it has to be asked to what extent the choreographer can be said to retain authorship of a ballet that has been influenced by external events and the work of other people. Already recognition has been made of the presence of corporate stylistic identity as seen in performance, but here it takes on a deeper level of significance. If the relevance of the choreographer to the final form of the work is lost then so to is the stylistic identification with him or her. Consequently the possibility of coming to some kind of understanding diminishes. As Barthes comments in his essay “The Death of the Author”, “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile” (Barthes, 1968, 35).

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In a way Forsythe has moved towards a denial of his own authorship by giving his dancers collaborative credit for the choreography of works such as Hypothetical Stream 2 (1997) and Quintet (1993). The question arises as to why he should choose to do so? Seán Burke’s analysis of the theory of the death of the author is that it attests “…to a departure of belief in authority, presence, intention, omniscience and creativity” (Burke, 1992, 22). From this point of view Forsythe seems to be rejecting much of his own responsibility, both as a creative artist and as the company’s director. As an example he has described the initial process in the creation of the ballet “Sleepers Guts” (1996) as involving no scheduling nor casting, but with the dancers of the Ballett Frankfurt working singly or in groups on their own movement material. His own contribution to the work he describes as principally editorial (Sulcas, 1997, 35). Taken to its logical conclusion this form of process would result in authorship having a wholly corporate identity. As a consequence choreographic style would only exist within the company that had developed the work and, even more specifically, with those persons involved in its genesis. Any change in its original casting would result in the ballets total loss of identity. Also the lack of some overriding imperative able to make artistic as well as editorial decisions would radically effect the coherence of the piece. It would be a collage of all the stylistic qualities of each of its contributors. The existence of coherent works, able to be presented by different groups of dancers, logically defies the rejection of authorship. According to Burke “A massive disjunction opens up between the theoretical statement of authorial disappearance and the project of reading without the author (Burke, 1992, 154). The ballets of Forsythe possess characteristics that identify him as their choreographer. In crediting his dancers he may be giving them due recognition for their work within the process, but he cannot assign them authorship. Style and Technique Having recognised the importance of choreographic style in giving identity to a work it is now necessary to define its relationship to the other constituent aspects of a ballet. That style is an integral part of content is a prerequisite for any rational that regards it as having a substantive character. If a duality exists between style and content the former would serve a merely decorative function. The content of a dance work encompasses a wide spectrum of possible variables. The way a dancers’ body is used to shape space in both movement and stillness. The individual movements themselves and the way they are sequenced into phrases of varying dynamic qualities. The spatial relationship between the dancers and within the dance space. All of these are relevant to any work, whether or not it has a narrative. Much of this falls within the scope of technique. Janet Adshead describes technique as being manifest in the different genres that exist as a “selection” of all the possible ranges of movement. This equates to a core vocabulary, though not necessarily to syntax. The latter is constructed by the choreographers’ use of “distinctive ranges” within the initial selection, resulting in what Adshead describes as “dance styles”. By the use of these styles the choreographer creates their own choreographic style (Adshead, 1988, 22). This rationale, that technique is a prerequisite of choreographic style is also supported by Graham McFee (McFee, 1992, 201).

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Clearly dance styles are not immutable for, as McFee makes clear, the process of choreography can bring about new techniques (McFee, 1992, 205). This can be seen in the emergence of the post-modern fusion of ballet with other genres. However this should not be regarded simply as a process of assimilation into a uniform technique. There is within modern balletic choreography still a general weighting towards the classical form, which has already been described in the discussion of identity. At the same time it has created a level of redundancy in both the vocabulary and syntax. Many of the steps of elevation, such as terre à terre work and in particular batterie, have fallen out of use. Such subtle movements seem to have become regarded as ornamental. Instead greater prominence has been given to extending the amplitude of certain movement, resulting in a dynamic shift towards a higher level of athleticism in the technique of ballet. This is seen in works such as “In The Middle Somewhat Elevated” which Forsythe choreographed for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1987. In it the technical aspects of ballet, the use of balance, flexibility, agility and coordination are pushed almost to their possible extremes (Sulcas, 1995, 57). Because of this the emphasis is on the technique, as it is that aspect of the ballet that is central to its focus. As a result technique and style become a unity within a dance form that is essentially commenting upon itself. This had been a central focus of Forsythe’s style for some time before he choreographed this work. Speaking in an interview in 1984 he remarked that “the most important thing is how you speak with the language, not what you say” (Kirchner, 1984, 6). As a consequence just by being a dance work the ballet justifies its own existence. For the choreographer the act of making dance is motivation in itself. This raises important questions of how far technique can take the genre. If the limits of what the dancers are physically capable of achieving were to be reached would both the technical and stylistic possibilities be exhausted? At this point would the media lose its expressive potential and become obsolete? Because technique exists in a state of flux this is unlikely to happen. It evolves in a dynamic way across the work of succeeding generations of choreographers. Like any language it not only shapes the user and the way he or she makes use of it but is shaped by them. Where it can no longer give symbolic expression to what is trying to be said it will be changed in order to do so.That is not to say that the new forms that develop will be in any sense better or worse, only that they will be different. Conclusion The role of style in imparting identity to a ballet is not its only function. If the scope of this study were extended it would take in the sense to which style acts to preserve works. By establishing characteristic patterns that help retain the work’s place in the public consciousness it has what Sontag refers as a “mnemonic function” (1965, 34). Specific analysis of this within the context of Forsythe’s work, or that of any choreographer, would have to take into account to what extent he was interested in the survivability of his own work (Baudoin and Gilpin, http://www.frankfurt-ballett..de/ ). What choreographic style does is to communicate the existence of a ballet as a work of artistic endeavour. At the same time as answering the question of where the work has come from, the identity factor, it asks how and why it has been brought into existence and what meaning can be deciphered from it. Style exists as a consequence of the choices a choreographer makes, of movement genre, performers, designers and accompaniment. These both define the work and are defined by it. The one option that is not available to the choreographer is the denial of the existence of style.

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First There Was The River

Zoltan Thurman ”First there was the road, then there was the city.” First though were the water ways, along which the first cities were formed. Water means not only transportation, but also sustenance, growth, hygiene and overall life. It has considerable role for urban functions and in urban development.The rivers are a part of nature’s cycle.Through this continuous recycling, the balance of life on earth is regulated. Every city lies by some sort of water. The urban development as well as the ecological changes depend on the permanence of the connections between the city and the water. The connections are retroacting from source to ocean which means that it is important to attend the problem locally as well as globally. For example we have the environmental catastrophe of the mines at Nagybánya (Baia-mare) where a large quantity of cyanide was emitted, which polluted streams, rivers and eventually also the ocean. Another example is how repeated floodings of the river Maros has affected Marosvasarhely (TirguMures). In the future, the kind of problems that will rise between the city and the river not only depend on climat development, but also on urban planners and water planners, and vice versa. Experts will be able to 3-D model possible changes, and with this knowledge the ecological behaviour of the public and the decision makers can be influenced. Everyone should be directed to choose sustainable structurable solutions in the urban development to make sure that the circulation of water also in the future will play the part of sustenance. Water is life.

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The Architect’s New Clothes

Charles Siegel John Silber exposes the pretensions of celebrity “starchitects.” Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art, by John Silber

The winning entry in a recent architectural competition came with this self-description: “Project Concept: In the contemporary world with its abundance of visual experience... an exposition piece of architecture will only be attractive insofar as it can offer perceptual sensations attainable only through direct, unmediated exposure to out-of-the-ordinary, singular stimuli.” If we translate that into plain English, it summarizes the central idea of today’s so-called starchitects: to attract attention, you have to do something that is different—and weird. John Silber’s Architecture of the Absurd effectively criticizes the obvious flaws of today’s celebrity architecture. Silber takes us on guided tours of buildings that leading starchitects designed, exposing their pretensions and failures. He concludes by likening such works with the naked emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale; his book may help some readers see that the starchitects have about as much credibility as that emperor did in the end. The heart of Silber’s book is a tour of the works of Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry. Silber does an excellent job exposing Libeskind’s “theoryspeak” – his invention of outlandish conceptual justifications for his designs. For example, Libeskind claims that abstract patterns of slashes on the outside of his Jewish Museum in Berlin suggest the locations of Jewish communities in Berlin before the Holocaust. But he also claims that similar slashes in his Royal Ontario Museum represent “the primacy of participatory space and public choreography”—whatever that means. Libeskind is obviously talented at formulating these opaque explanations for buildings that do not work in human terms. Doubtless, the razzle-dazzle often intimidates his clients, so that they’re willing to do whatever this “genius” tells them. Frank Gehry, Silber writes, has styled himself as an abstract sculptor rather than as an architect creating places for public use. Perhaps Gehry has good reason to hide behind such an artifice; Silber exposes his many practical errors, such as the blinding glare of Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and his tendency to ignore his clients’ needs, best shown in MIT’s Stata Center, where Gehry came up with exposed offices for people who need privacy to work. It’s easy to ridicule such absurdity, but more difficult to provide the conceptual tools that show what is

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wrong with starchitecture and how we can do better. Silber says that this architecture is absurd because it cares only about novelty, about being outrageous and attracting attention. As an alternative, he calls for architecture that is “functional” and “harmonious.” Unfortunately, he never makes clear what these terms mean. Silber calls Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building a “stunning masterpiece,” for instance. The building is the archetypal modernist high-rise steel-and-glass box, set back behind a sterile little plaza on New York’s Park Avenue. Silber also praises I.M. Pei’s John Hancock Building in Boston, another glass high rise with an even slicker, shinier skin than the Seagram Building. He calls it a “beautiful tower designed to be a mosaic of its surroundings as they were mirrored in its surface,” as if a wall of reflective glass were a revelation. He notes that, initially, the building’s six-by-twelve-foot glass panes sometimes fell to the ground in high winds—but excuses this problem by explaining that it wasn’t intentional, and was eventually corrected by replacing the originals with smaller window panes. Yet elsewhere, Silber finds modernist buildings aesthetically appalling. He dislikes Pei’s glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre, saying that this modern structure is “inharmonious and intrusive” in the Louvre’s seventeenth-century courtyard. Such an intrusion, he writes, is an example of an architect “consciously practicing the architecture of the absurd.” Josep Lluis Sert, a modernist dean of Harvard’s School of Design who has designed many projects in Boston, is another target. Sert’s Holyoke Shopping Center and Peabody Terrace student housing are inharmonious, Silber tells us, because they “defy the tastes and traditions of a community he longs to reshape.” Silber also points out that Sert’s Harvard Law School, “despite its radically different function, is embarrassingly similar to the residential Peabody Terrace,” suggesting that the architect had discovered a universal design that he could apply to every project. But don’t Silber’s criticisms of Sert apply equally to van der Rohe? Didn’t the Seagram building deliberately defy New York’s traditional urbanism? Park Avenue was defined by its consistent wall of buildings in traditional architectural styles.The Seagram building deliberately broke with these styles and disrupted the street wall with its little plaza. The 1950s and 1960s saw an endless series of modernist high rises with such windswept plazas, until enough people realized that they were destroying the definition of New York’s streets and public spaces. Likewise, Pei’s Hancock Building helped to destroy Boston’s skyline and the traditional scale of Copley Square. Silber considers the two buildings harmonious because he thinks of them in isolation; but when placed in the context of the traditional architecture and urbanism of Park Avenue and Copley Square, they clash with their surroundings just as strongly as Pei’s pyramid clashes with the Louvre courtyard, or as Sert’s shopping center and student housing clash with their surrounding neighborhoods. Silber also tends to make sharp distinctions between like things. Le Corbusier is absurd; Mies is not. The money spent to correct the reflections from Gehry’s Disney Hall show that that building is absurd; the money spent to stop the windows from falling out of the Hancock Building show no such thing. Sert’s Holyoke Shopping Center is absurd because it deliberately defies the architectural traditions of its neighborhood; Mies’s Seagram building is not absurd, though it’s guilty of the same offense. Perhaps Silber is led to make such arbitrary distinctions because he focuses on such a narrow realm of modernist architecture. He doesn’t consider any buildings without the typical flaws of modernism. In his conclusion, Silber offers some alternatives to the architecture of the absurd, such as the Sydney Opera House—it reminds him of a lovely sailing ship, but has put other critics in mind of a pile of copulating turtles—and a building by Moshe Safdie with curving sculptural rooflines. These buildings are just more moderate examples of today’s taste for novelty and for buildings designed as abstract sculptures.

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They do not go to the anti-human extremes of Libeskind and Gehry, true, but they do move in that direction. Silber argues that the architecture of the absurd fails precisely because it tries so hard to be novel, but he praises the Sydney Opera House as “an iconic structure” that is “imaginative and excitingly and enduringly novel.” Haven’t we heard exactly the same terms used about Gehry’s and Libeskind’s buildings? Silber praises Safdie’s building by writing that it’s “every bit as contemporary as those of Gehry, [Steven] Holl, and Libeskind.” But these buildings are less contemporary than they are unfortunate hangovers from mid-century modernism; they represent the final decadence of an approach that was exciting in the 1950s or 1960s, but that now strains for novelty because it no longer has anything meaningful to say. It would have been welcome if Silber had discussed some of the neo-traditional contemporary architects trying to move away from modernism by designing buildings that are good places for people, rather than iconic novelties—architects such as Robert A.M. Stern, Quinlan Terry, Christopher Alexander, and Robert Adam.They offer a real alternative to modernist decadence. Silber helpfully demonstrates what’s wrong with architecture today, but he fails to point us in a better direction. Charles Siegel is the author of An Architecture For Our Time: The New Classicism.

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Emotrappan

Anna Hult and Helen Runting INTRODUCTION The grand modernist spaces of Sergels Torg seem to be perpetually occupied by moving figures – all day, anonymous crowds drift across the vast expanse of the square, toward the vaulted subterranean entry to the subway station. By 3pm, a group of teenagers has gathered upon the elevated terrace above the square, breaking the established movement patterns with their collective stasis. Their eye makeup, clothing and hair unite Japanese pop culture references with American punk aesthetics, clearly proclaiming common subcultural allegiances to the outside world. When we ask to take their pictures they immediately respond by asking us which internet site we will post them on – they are happy to be photographed, and strike deliberate (set) poses for the camera. These kids speak Swedish but they look like they could be from anywhere. They are part of a long history of rebellious youth culture associated with Sergels Torg and with Stockholm in general, yet in a break with the past, their rebellion seems to be waged on aesthetic grounds as much as political ones. In fact, it seems as if they are not so much making a statement as giving a performance. On the internet, the steps and their occupants exert a clear presence. In the virtual world (perhaps condescendingly), the stairs are referred to as “emotrappan”. Stemming from the somewhat notorious (and often derogatory) “emo” subculture, the phrase generates 129 hits on google, on blogs and in chatrooms. The scene at the stairs is therefore something more than just an anomaly or chance occurrence – emotrappan is a phenomenon which exists in a virtual, social and spatial sense. Further complicating matters, the phenomenon is as global as it is local – the gathering of “punk” kids in public spaces, particularly those abutting main metro stations, is an observable phenomenon in cities as diverse as Tokyo and Melbourne. It is strange that in the most talked-about public space in Stockholm, the square located at the very heart of the city, it is a group of punk kids who seem to define one corner of the site as their own through their simple presence there. In contrast to the anonymous and bustling masses, the “emo-kids” (for want of a better term) seem to represent something important, a sense of ease within the public sphere. Utilising the concepts of social establishment and the social production of space, we propose to delve a little deeper into the relationship between this group of people and the site that they inhabit, with the view to expose the power dynamics that support the emergence of this subculture in this site at this time…

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SITE “i den emotrappan brukar jag sitta, och vid glashuset(vid hissen) och bökongen...bredvid hissen XD och emo klippan...kanten vid kulturhuset...” (ungdomar.se/forum.php?thread_id=190317&page=1:21-09-2007) In physical terms, the site of the emotrappan forms the north-eastern corner of the Sergels Torg block and, whilst intimately linked to the square, it has none of the resonant symbolism of the square itself or the surrounding civic buildings. In fact, it reads as “neutral”, as “backdrop”. The site comprises a regular, if not unusually wide, set of stairs, a small paved terrace and a free-standing single-story glass building, its architecture is firmly the type that goes unnoticed, that is generic, replicable, international and perhaps best described as “infrastructure” rather than architecture. The building itself is transparent, devoid of overt stylistic references beyond those of the particular brand of “clean” modernist symmetry beloved of transport planners and politicians alike in the current decade. It presents as a component in a system, designed to channel commuters into the subway below. Unlike many other components in the system, it is worth perhaps noting that the place is not adorned with advertising, and there is little signage or imagery attached to the facades. It is important to note that the glass pavilion building was constructed recently, in 2003, at the commission of the municipality of Stockholm, as a rearrangement of access arrangements to the subway station. The existing arrangement followed a number of unsuccessful proposals for the site, which included an 18-storey high apartment building and total enclosure of the square by a glass and steel structure. The land itself is owned by the municipality but financial stakeholders include Connex (private operators of the underground train system, accessed via the building), commercial operations Seven Eleven and Pressbyrån who also benefit from increased access in the immediate area, and those who have an interest in encouraging access to the lower concourse in the surrounding area (for instance, Åhlens, the owners of NK, Hufvudstad, and the owners/managers of the Galleria mall). Some of these stakeholders exercise power of the space through visible control mechanisms, which are hardwired into the architecture – i.e. security systems. These mechanisms interact with people in space and modify the nature of the interactions that occur and the space that is created. EMOTRAPPAN AS SOCIAL ESTABLISHMENT “Jag bryr mig inte om dig random person 31 som måste ha den där Fila-jackan. Så länge du inte bryry dig om min Musse Pigg jacka. Jag gråter nästan av att se folket på emotrappan på plattan, så annorlunda, så ovanligt, så udda, så häftigt” (strombyar.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html) An exploration of what is to be observed at Sergels Torg, at the site we define as emotrappan, is at its heart an exploration of the relationship between subculture and the built environment. The emotrappan phenomenon is dual in its nature, as it depends equally on both the “emo-kids”, who can be conceived as “actors”, and its setting, the stairs. In the terminology of Goffman, it is this dialectical relationship which is the grounds for the evolution of what he describes as a “social establishment” (Goff-

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man 1956:2). Within the particular social establishment in question, the “emo-kids”, to continue Goffma’s dramaturgical rhetoric, together form a performative team, using the stairs as their stage. The emo-kids are clearly identifiable to the public as a “team”, partly based on their common age, but primarily on the visual attributes they display – the common themes which thread through their aesthetic presentation, their clothing and their hairstyles (i.e. black eyeliner, converse-shoes, dyed hair, black jeans, studs). These visual attributes present a collective representation of a clearly definable subculture, which in turn is closely connected to global mass-media - their collective representation is far more global in its references than Swedish. The fact that we can identify these allegiances is the result of a highly controlled presentation of self. Such control, we could pose, is exercised with the aim of controlling the situation of one’s interactions with others. In some ways, we might extend this thinking to consider their appearance as a way of controlling space, at a very personal level. Power relations therefore occur on a personal level within defined sites and within social space per se. These relations are varied and complex – the presence of these kids at the stairs is not so much a performance for the others at Sergels torg, as for those who are within the team. This is the stage for them where they can interact with each other; through verbal communication and through watching each other. The stairs provide a public stage for their performance which, it seems, the virtual, or the private, world cannot. In virtual space, social interaction may take different forms and be expressed in different ways, but clearly the emergence of emotrappan in the discursive sphere of virtual communities (where references to the site are rife) supports the emergence of the phenomenon in “real life”. At the stairs at Sergels torg the emo-kids are in a sense visually appropriating the site, and in chattrooms and blogforums they reinforce this appropriation discursively, through discussion of the phenomenon and its “naming”. Ultimately, others have also adopted this term, and even when it is used pejoratively, its use reinforces its existence in the real world. Further, the virtual world continues the identity-forming practice of performance - in virtual space they can also construct their identity and belonging to a subculture through social interaction with other parts of the world. The subcultural identity of what we have here termed the “emo-kids” therefore emerges within a defined space, which is appropriated visually and discursively through the concurrent processes of performance and naming. It is the staging of the “emo-kids” social interactions at these stairs that make the social relations and the site clearly “public”; and make the “emo-kids” “public persons”. EMOTRAPPAN AS SOCIAL SPACE “What exactly were the cathedrals? The answer is that they were political acts,” states Lefebvre in a moment of defining clarity (1991:74). We support the view that public spaces, like cathedrals, exist primarily as political acts. Whilst this definition may on the surface seem self-evident (the link between politics and cities is as old as cities themselves and certainly has been cemented in Western philosophy since the Greek polis), the concept of act is worth stressing, as it encompasses the performative dimension of politics, the productive capacity embedded within political relations which Lefebvre argues actively produces space. Accepting that hidden power relations (both social and political) permeate space and that these rela-

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tions in fact create it in some respects holds serious consequences for the way in which we view the built environment within which we live our daily (urban) lives and the way in which understand architecture. If we consider the brief site analysis presented previously, stylistically, the “generic” nature of the architecture itself speaks volumes. Transparency is employed by architects as a well-recognised trope to refer to values of “accountability” and “rationality”. The generic aesthetics of the building which abuts the stairs attests to a deliberate choice not to reference historical characteristics or a more regional architecture but rather reference the global. As demonstrated by many of the subway stations of Stockholm which play with the idea of entering an underground world of stone and surrealism, and as the art nouveau metro entrances of Paris from the turn of last century attest, generic aesthetics are not inherent to civic/ transport architecture, rather they appear to have entered the architectural vocabulary in recent times. The site analysis also briefly touched upon the ownership structures which affected the subject site. It must be noted that land owners and stakeholders in the surrounding built environment also exercise power through more subtle means of control than direct ownership or control mechanisms like security guards. By having control of the functional programmes which operate within their respective buildings, the desired land uses can act as exclusionary regimes (particularly with regard to the commercial uses), defining norms in terms of behaviour and dictating the scope of social relations that may eventuate in space. Beyond aesthetics and control mechanisms, the performative nature of space, like the active component of politics, runs ever deeper. No matter how neutral or generic, if Lefebvre’s conception of space is accepted as a theoretical basis for enquiry, architecture can be seen to be a living body, and an animated entity. The animating principle of such an entity is that it “reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience” (Lefevbre, 137). Whilst public art continues to play with notions of “site” (Kwon, 2002), and whilst architecture as a profession tends to dwell in the realm of visual interpretation or symbolic analogy, if we accept Lefevbre’s proposition, then the true “site” of architecture is in our direct experience of the built environment. It is our view, taking this conception of “site” as our founding principle, that the architecture of Sergels Torg exists through the animating presence of groups of people such as the “emo-kids”.They literally give it life. Their reasons for being there, purely for social interaction, in turn defines the space as a “social” one. In this sense, they create the square’s “publicness” – they define what it is, because they live it as such. We find in this thought a strange sense of optimism, in the face of the supposed “death of public space”. CONCLUSION “efter skolan idag sa ahde jag inte ett skit att göra sa jag ringed natta och vi bestämde att vi skulle gå runt i stan lite men eftersom jag inte vågade åka till hennes skola o sätta mig (fryshuset) sa satte jag mig pa emotrappan instället... i typ 35 minuter”. (screamingatyou.blog.se, 24 May 2007) A group of teenagers loiter on a set of stairs near the main train station in Stockholm, Sweden, on a dark winter’s afternoon. Physical (observed) reality does indeed, on the surface, seem a lot simpler than the contested battles over identity and power described within the preceding analysis. The scene of teenagers congregating near a station is just one of many scenes which we pass by, or around, or through, as we experience the city in daily life. Many stockholmare would not consider the

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sight unusual or even particularly interesting. In this sense, the built environment plays a strangely contradictory role in relation to our daily experience of it – it seems to either pass us by unnoticed (as a neutral “backdrop” or “setting”) or to affect us deeply (for instance the iconic buildings which we visit as tourists or the domestic and intimate architecture of our homes). The built environment is easily neutralised, naturalised and ignored in an experience of the city constituted by daily routine – the more we use space repetitively, the less we seem to be aware of the presence or qualities of “space” at all. We become accustomed to certain urban scenes, certain spaces. Using the public realm primarily for movement, we rush through train stations and squares, down sets of stairs and escalators, on our way from A to B. And, in our haste, we stop paying attention. What would happen if we slowed down – if, in fact, we sat down – if, specifically, we spent 35 minutes sitting on the stairs at Sergels Torg waiting for a friend, watching the “emo-kids”, feeling bored, thinking trivial thoughts, simply “being” there? What if we chose to “be” in public space more often, if we took a space populated by the blur of movement, and we made it ours, simply through our presence, through “being there”? What if public space was the “A“ or the “B”, and not the transitory place in between? What kind of public life might emerge? What kind of city might be made possible? These questions touch on the reasoning behind this project, which has focused on one small urban “scene” - one “play” – in order to expose the possibilities presented by public space as a site of social relations, for the emergence of social establishments such as the emotrappan. Underlying this study has been a sense of suppressed urgency, stemming from an emerging understanding of the fragility the phenomenon. Having initiated our study on the basis of a vague interest in what appeared to be a “cute” or “visually-interesting” phenomenon, we have come to the understand that what we were attracted to at first was representational as much as actual. The emo kids for us have come to represent a symbolic defiance – a rare display of presence within the public realm. In many ways, these kids represent what could very well be the last vestiges of a truly “public” Sergels Torg. If the power of architecture lies in the way that it is reproduced within lived experience (Lefevbre), the power of this space lies in its public use. In the midst of the commuters and the shoppers and the homeless (who do not choose to be in public space but are rather there out of necessity), the presence of the “emo-kids” is an anomaly. They are the only users of this specific space who actively engage in it and with it. They even gave it a name, which resonates throughout the virtual consciousness. It is our fear that in the urgency of their repetitive tasks, the planners and politicians may one day forget to pay attention to what really generates urban life. In terms of power relations, the kids in a way have only one card to play should they feel threatened – they could leave.

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James Bond: The Enemy Of Architecture

Steve Rose From Venetian palazzos to fantastical submersible lairs, the buildings in Bond films dazzle - what a shame they get blown to smithereens Most people will be too carried away by the relentless action in the latest Bond film to notice the background, but design-minded viewers will find it more exciting than most. It’s unlikely to go down as the best Bond ever, but Quantum of Solace wins hands down when it comes to best architecture. Perhaps it’s because he’s Swiss, but director Marc Forster certainly has an eye for a good building, usually a piece of hard-edged European modernism with a conveniently flat roof. A key location, for example, is the Festival House Bregenz, in Austria - a dauntingly sophisticated ensemble of steel cladding and huge glass windows that opens out on to a spectacular open-air amphitheatre facing the lake, with the stage in the middle of the water. Designed by Austrian architect Dietrich Untertrifaller, it’s the perfect venue for a covert mid-opera meeting of arch-villains. It’s also great for crane shots, tuxedo-clad shootouts, and the odd rooftop punch-up. Forster seems to have passed up on another local landmark, mind you: the Kunsthaus Bregenz, designed by his revered compatriot Peter Zumthor. Perhaps it just didn’t have enough places to plug in a Klieg light. Elsewhere we get a precarious chase over the terracotta tiled roofscape of Siena, a brief tour of London’s Barbican, some grand colonial buildings in Panama, even a car chase through Italy’s Carrara marble quarry - birthplace of Rome’s Pantheon, among others. Topping the bill, though, is the ESO Paranal Residencia in Chile, where the traditional climactic rendezvous between Bond and his nemesis takes place. In reality, this stunning building is a hostel for astronomers at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere. Designed by German architects Auer and Weber it’s a fine choice: a long rectangular strip of a building, sunk into the barren landscape that contains a splendid indoor garden and swimming pool lit by a 35-metre glass dome. Being situated in the middle of the Atacama desert, 2,400 metres above sea level, it’s a place very few of us are likely to ever see inside for real, so here’s your chance. Be dazzled by the rhythmic concrete facades! Thrill to the earth-toned interiors! Swoon over the long internal perspectives. Salivate over the minimal detailing! Then watch it all get blown to smithereens! Yes, almost inevitably, the building does not survive its encounter with Bond, and as he saunters away from its smoking ruins, it occurred to me that few buildings ever do. Bond movies invariably end like Quantum: with 007 single-handedly trashing not only the plans of would-be world dominators but also their hideouts, which is a pity because most of them are rather splendid. Think of the stupendous submersible lair of Stromberg in the Spy Who Loved Me with its circular underwater windows and 2001-style furniture, the hollowed-out volcano in You Only Live Twice, the vertiginous control room in Moonraker, the elegant, if structurally unfeasible, ice palace in Die Another Day, and so forth. Some of the low-rent

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Bond baddies settle for oil rigs and such, but whatever the villain’s crib of choice, you can guarantee it’s going to get exploded.Those villains tend to put a great deal of effort into their bachelor pads, recruiting tasteful but evil architects, contractors, interior designers etc - it can’t be easy. Then along comes Bond. The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He’s basically an enemy of architecture. Even beyond the villains’ lairs, Bond is a menace to the built environment. Think back to Casino Royale. For once there was no hideout at the end, so what does Bond do? He demolishes a priceless Venetian palazzo instead, not just smashing it up but actually sinking it into the lagoon. That seemed like an awful lot of damage to inflict in the name of a $150m theft, or whatever it was. How much would it cost to repair that building? Probably more. It’s a similar story when it comes to historic cityscapes in Quantum of Solace. The chase across the rooftops of Siena leaves plenty of tiles in need of replacement, and culminates in Bond and his quarry crashing through a skylight, swinging about on pulleys and knocking over statues inside some antiquated chamber. If Bond has a problem with architecture it can probably be traced back to his creator, Ian Fleming, who was certainly no fan of modernism. He even went as far as to name one of his best baddies after the Erno Goldfinger, architect of London’s Trellick Tower among others. Goldfinger the architect was apparently a neighbour of Fleming’s in Hampstead, and the conservation-minded author was incensed when he demolished two Victorian houses to build his now-classic modern villas on Willow Road. So he returned the insult by lending Goldfinger’s name to his fictional gold-loving megalomaniac. Another, less-controversial version of the story has it that Fleming played golf with Goldfinger’s wife’s cousin, but either way, poor Erno tried and failed to stop Fleming appropriating his name, and had to bear the association for the rest of his life. Fleming’s views on Le Corbusier were equally scathing, according to associates. In fact, on closer inspection, what is the archetypal Bond villain if not a modern architect? He is usually on a mission to “improve” humanity by wiping out the messy status quo and replacing it with some orderly, rational utopia of his own design. In Moonraker it’s Hugo Drax who wants to start civilisation afresh in space. In the Spy Who Loved Me, it’s Stromberg, who tries to wipe out the world’s cities and create his own underwater world of Atlantis. “The only hope for the future of mankind,” he says, echoing Le Corbusier. “We all have our dreams,” responds Bond, resolving to ensure Stromberg’s scorched-earth vision remains just that - a dream. The association between evil and modernism runs through many Bond movies. In Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery is taught a lesson by Bambi and Thumper in John Lautner’s beautiful Elrod House in Palm Springs - all futuristic concrete domes, dynamic diagonals and circular furniture. Villain interiors are often modelled on similar modernists. Osato’s spacious office in You Only Live Twice is rather Corbusier in Japan. Goldfinger’s “rumpus room” is distinctly Frank Lloyd Wright, as is Hugo Drax’s behindthe-waterfall lair in Moonraker, whose Mayan-patterned relief panels resemble those of Wright’s Ennis House. The association continues in Quantum of Solace. When they find a mole within MI6, where do you think he lives? London’s Barbican centre, of course. What kind of house does Bond himself live in, I wonder? Does he even have one? If Bond is the scourge of modern architecture, the movies at least have a champion in the form of Ken Adam, production designer extraordinaire. He was the man behind most of the classic Bond villain headquarters - from Dr No to Moonraker, and he designed and furnished them with great skill and devotion, as a new book from Thames and Hudson details. Adam studied architecture in London before the second world war, and he deserves to be considered one. Inarguably, he created some of the most memorable spaces of the modern era. Usually, we look at buildings in a city and wonder what they look like inside. Adam’s spectacular interiors do the opposite, inviting us to wonder what the buildings look

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like on the outside. In reality of course, most of them were just flimsy sets in Pinewood studios whose ultimate fate was to be dismantled or blown up (like the Venetian palazzo in Casino Royale, and the interior of the Paranal Residencia in Quantum of Solace), but Adam’s designs have been as influential as any “real” pieces of architecture. Bond might deploy his licence to trash with worrying abandon, but his motive should be seen less as a grudge against modern architecture and more an extreme form of criticism. He makes a mockery of buildings’ functions and pricks the pomposity of their designers. Flat rooftops become platforms from which to dangle henchmen by their neckties; tall chimneys are there to drop wheelchair-bound villains down; corridors become racetracks, balconies vantage points, buildings as a whole turned into giant climbing frames, their carefully designed details relegated to mere footholds and escape routes. Perhaps that’s just fanciful thinking on the part of someone who writes about architecture for a living, but as I loosen my bowtie, unholster my revolver and mix a stiff vodka martini, I can’t help but identify with him. The Guardian November 4, 2008

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Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s).

Oliver Marchart Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism and political theory

“Social space is produced and structured by conflicts. With this recognition, a democratic spatial politics begins.” [1]

Rosalyn Deutsche

As we know, “art in the public space” can mean at least two things. For one, art in combination with architecture and artistic urban outfitting; this is the traditional conception - among other things, a conception of space as a physical geographical urban and architectural space.Yet on the other hand, “public art” in the sense of more recent forms of “art in the public interest” (or “social interventionism”, “community art”, etc.) - not least in Austria - has also been developed into a secure niche in the canon of available art practices and forms. Sending Austrian artists, usually subsumed under this header, to the Biennale of Venice is just the keystone of sanctioning social interventionist art practices in art history (and could very well be their gravestone, too). However, what this general artistic enthusiasm for social issues tends to outshine is politics. What artistic social work replaces is political work. And what social interventionist art practices have completely superseded, it would seem, are political interventionist art practices. Politics, wherever it enters the scene at all, is understood exclusively by social work art “in the public interest” to mean policy: administration, engineering and possibly technocratic handling of social problems. Public art becomes a privatist version of public welfare. The astonishing thing about this is not only the appearance of bureaucratic phantasms of administration or administration reform in art, but above all a narrowing of the concept of the public sphere whose banner had once been held high. For the concept of the “public sphere” is relegated to the realm of social affairs - and yet the public sphere really only deserves this name if what it denotes is the political public sphere. For public art, everything would seem to depend on what exactly is implied by the concepts of “public sphere” or “the public” or “public space”. Is it a space in which conflicts are resolved or in which they are managed and administered? Is it a space of open political agonality, a space of the battle for meaning in the sense of a “politics of signification” (Stuart Hall), or is it a space of reasoned rational and informal debate, as Habermas would have it, or is it a space in which so-called concrete shortcomings are to be named and remedied “in situ”? Is the public space one space among many other spaces (private, non-

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public, semi-public, local), is the public space one particular space at all or is it rather a generic term for a multiplicity of public spaces? What exactly makes it a political space (as opposed to social spaces)? And what is public about the public space, and - vice versa - what is spatial about the public sphere? I am not asking these questions at the beginning of this chapter with any rhetorical aim of finding some kind of approach to the issue, rather I would like to try and find a real answer to them in the following. To this end, we will have no choice but to depart from the theoretically rather restricted art discussion in these parts, on the one hand turning to political theory itself from where the concept of the public sphere derives in the first place, and on the other to the recent Anglo-American discussion on public art that has hitched up to the discussions of political theory much more than is the case in the German-speaking world. For quite some time, the Anglo-American art discussion has, for example, been promoting the analysis of Claude Lefort’s concept of a libertarian democracy, or Ernesto Laclaus’ and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of radical and plural democracy [2]. The discussion of art in the public space, it would seem, is becoming increasingly inextricably linked with theories of democracy that are unwilling to be fobbed off with a Habermasian or a social work version of the public sphere. So far the most valid articulation of public art concepts in the public sphere theories of Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe is in my opinion that of Rosalyn Deutsche. The double question that arises, for us and for Deutsche, is, what role does the public sphere play for political art practices and what role can political art practices play for the public sphere? And the initial theory for this chapter and it would seem for Deutsche’s works is that we cannot find an answer merely with the aid of art theory and art criticism, but rather only by including political theory. But at the same time, this also suggests a paradigm shift away from the guiding theoretical discipline of critical art of the seventies - (Marxist) economy and social sciences. [3] However, before discussing Rosalyn Deutsche’s concrete answer to the question of the public sphere in the sense of democracy theory, our first step will be to address the more obvious question as to the concept of public space in the rather urbanistic sense. Where is the space in “public space” (and then we will see where art and politics are)? This seemingly more substantial problem was also in some cases used to analyse political theory, for example, in critical and post-modern “urban studies”. In order to restrict the subject somewhat, I would like to take Ernesto Laclau’s concept of space, also deriving from the field of political theory, as a basic guideline. A concept of space that has been scanned by Doreen Massey, for example, as to its usefulness in terms of critical urbanism and geography. In the following I will thus look into the discussion that evolved around the various concepts of space as developed by urbanism and political theory respectively (Section I), before returning - after a brief excursus into a criticism of Foucault’s, Deleuze’s and Habermas’ theories of space (Section II) - to the implications of public art in terms of politics and democracy theory (Section III).

/: Space vs. time - politics as spatialization As Doreen Massey remarks in her criticism of Ernesto Laclau [4] the following movement evolved in the history of critical geography. In the seventies - during the general rise of social science, particularly Marxist, approaches - the canonical slogan was, space is a social construction. In other words, space was no longer seen as a preceding substance or as unchanging terrain that had always existed, and upon which the building of society had been erected, but rather the respective specific structure of space was theorised as the result of social, economic and political processes. Space theories underwent the same constructivist turn that had impacted on social sciences as a whole. In the eighties, this approach was made more radical by being inverted. Not only was space seen as a social construction, the general understanding was, inversely, that the social sphere is also spatially constructed. And this spatial form of the social sphere certainly does have causal effects, i. e. the way in which society works is influenced by

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its spatial structure. The basic difference between the convictions of the seventies and the eighties (and nineties) lies in the fact that, in the first case, space is still seen as a passive mass, i. e. as the result of social construction processes, while in the second case, space itself assumes the role of a social actor. [5] Massey criticises the notion according to which space is seen as a passive product and generally as being in a state of stasis - a conception, it would seem, that among other things creeps in when the category of space is placed in binary comparison to the category of time, with time usually being the positive term (e. g. as history, change, etc. [6]), and space being the negative coded concept. Although, according to Massey, the dualism of spatiality and temporality is very common among theorists, she above all accuses Jameson and Laclau of drawing on it (despite all the differences she admits these two theorists display; we will concentrate on her criticism of Laclau). Her criticism is motivated by, as Massey sees it, the depoliticizing effect that she feels their concepts of space have. With Laclau, space itself, she maintains, is depoliticized in that he (mis)construes space - in contrast to time - as a realm of stasis and standstill, “Laclau’s view of space is that it is the realm of stasis. There is, in the realm of the spatial, no true temporality and thus no possibility of politics” [7]. In contradistinction to this, she feels that radical geographers and urbanists had made spatiality stronger and more productive as a political category with the aid of concepts such as “’centre’/’periphery’/’margin’” and their analyses of the “politics of location”. Thus, the question concerns whether and how the concept of space can be seen as being political itself. In order to investigate whether what is initially an abstract criticism of Laclau is justified, we will of course not be able to avoid giving a brief description of Laclau’s theory of space. However, before doing so, it should be noted that it is certainly rather odd to accuse an (exclusively) political theorist of depoliticizing his concepts from the viewpoint of geography, i. e. it is strange to accuse a political theory of advocating unpolitical concepts. This would rather suggest that certain discipline-specific misunderstandings may have slipped in during the translation process between “urban geography” or “critical urban studies” and political theory. Could it be that Massey does not take the concepts and theoretical constructions of political theory/philosophy on their own terms? Could it be that the language game of critical or post-modern urbanism - despite all reciprocal inspiration - cannot be translated word-for-word into the language game of political theory, and vice versa? That something like Laclau’s concept of political space cannot be completely transposed to urban, social, geographical space? And that a political theory approach to the category of space cannot be totally absorbed in an approach of social science and urban sociology? Let us begin by looking at what exactly Laclau understands by spatiality and temporality. Laclau bases his assumptions on the consideration that every system of meaning (i. e. every discourse, every structure, every identity, and ultimately every space) can only become stabilised by differentiating itself from a constitutive outside. [8] However, this outside cannot itself be part of the system of meaning (for then it would not be an outside but part of the inside), but must rather be something radically different. Yet for the very reason that it refers to something that it cannot fully bring under control itself, a system of meaning never manages to become fully stable. On the one hand, what it perforce refers to (the constitutive outside) does permit a certain stabilisation, on the other the very same constitutive outside prevents complete totalisation of the system. A system, a discourse, a structure is thus always traversed by a constitutive ambivalence that Laclau calls dislocation. And in the dislocatory effects to which every structure is subject, he sees a temporal phenomenon, whereas he always sees the structure itself as spatial. The easiest way to understand this is perhaps by imagining structure, for example, as a particular topography. The very idea of a structure implies some kind of topography (a certain relational arrangement of elements that become “places” through their reciprocal relational determinations) - otherwise the structure would, quite simply, not be “structured”. A structure or topography is in the extreme - albeit unattainable - case a closed system, with all possible recombinations of its elements and changes of its state being derivable from the interior of the system itself.

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On the other hand, the symbolisation/systematisation (= spatialization) of the structure as compared to the heterogeneous/exterior consists in the almost complete elimination of its temporal character, i. e. the dislocations of the structure. Hence, creating a topography always entails the effort to transfer time into space (what Laclau calls the “hegemonization of time by space”), to minimise the dislocatory, “destructuring” effects, and to define the flow of meaning. In order to be able to symbolise a temporal sequence [9] of events, they must be made synchronously present, they must be spatialized. This is achieved by means of repetition. The mythical figure of the eternal return of the same is - like any myth - spatial in precisely this sense. For example, this figure describes a circle [10]. But myths of memory spatialize the historical event, too, for example myths constructed around national historical events and their representation in the form of monuments. Sedimentary social myths and traditions are quite simply the result of repetitive practices (Laclau, “[a]ny repetition that is governed by a structural law of succession is space” [11]) that have lost their contingent origin in the course of their repetition with the effect that we now perceive them as necessary, naturalised, unchangeable and eternal. This space - engendered by the hegemonization of time by space - may be a space of memory, as is the case with the national monument, in which a certain historical memory has been fixated [12] (only secondarily is it the “physical” space surrounding the monument). Laclau, too, concludes from this that it would be naive to hold on to the notion of space as an unchallengeable objectivity that has always existed. Quite the contrary, space is the result of an artlculatory practice - the practice of defining meaning. The result of this practice necessarily consists in the form of some kind of hierarchised structure in which the relations between elements, levels, places, etc. are more or less clearly defined, i. e. fixated. In this sense, Laclau’s position is a structuralist one because, to him - and this is where he falls in with Saussure - meaning can only evolve within a relational system of differences. On the other hand, however, this fixation can never completely succeed. It would be a totalitarian illusion to believe that one could master the totality of a system of signification, regardless of whether we call this system “discourse”, “society”, “city” or “public space”. Thus, establishing the flow of meaning to form a structured system allows us to forge a topographical relation between the various elements of the system.Yet the relation, the articulation and hierarchisation between the various regions and levels of the structure is only the result of a “contingent and pragmatic construction” and not the expression of an essential connection. This is precisely due to the fact that every identity is flooded by a constitutive outside, i. e. time. In this sense, Laclau’s position is a post-structuralist one - the relational system can never be completely constituted or closed. [13] To summarise, if space is always subverted by time, then there is no possibility to tie down or end this contingent and pragmatic construction of a system of signification once and for all, for this possibility would only exist if the connection between the elements were actually essential and preceded articulation. But, of course, this is not the case, the connection must be articulated continuously, time must be hegemonized constantly through practices of spatialization, and this works by means of repetition (sequence). Thus, articulation is a continuous and continuously failing process that essentially consists in the repetitive connection of elements. It is precisely by means of articulation, by linking different elements, that we open up a space. Articulation, in turn, progresses in a double movement. On the one hand, hegemonial articulation, if it succeeds, can lead to what Laclau and before him Fredric Jameson - both referring to Husserl - called sedimentation or the “sedimentary forms of ‘objectivity’” [14]. This is the field of the ostensibly objective or, as Barthes termed it, the “naturalised” social sphere, as must be distinguished from the political field of rearticulation. Following Husserl, sedimentation is a name for the routinisation and forgetting of origins - a process that tends to occur as soon as a certain articulatory advance has led to a hegemonial success. In Laclau’s terminology, this movement simply describes the fixation of meaning in solid topographies that need to be conceptualised as sedimentations of power and which spatialize the temporal movement of pure dislocation into a precise choreography.Traditions are such routinised practices or, for example, foundation myths and spaces of memory as are constructed, for example, by national or other

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monuments. Yet inasmuch as these spatial, “ossified” sediments can, on the other hand, be reactivated, there also exists a temporalisation of space or an “extension of the field of the possible”. In the words of Laclau, we are confronted with a moment of “reactivation”, with a process of defixation of meaning. In this case, more and more elements, levels and places are perceived as contingent in their relational nature. This puts us in a better position to judge to what extent Doreen Massey’s criticism of Laclau’s concept of space is justified. Laclau makes it quite clear that he is not speaking of space in the figurative sense, but rather physical space - being only discursively accessible in his understanding - is constructed in the same way as discursive space: “If physical space is also space, it is because it participates in this general form of spatiality.” [15] This is the classical constructivist view that Massey would ascribe to the first wave of “radical geography” in the seventies. But Massey overlooks the point of Laclau’s approach, more or less wilfully reducing it to traditional structuralism. For just like the second wave of “radical geography” discerned by Massey, Laclau (in turn favouring political discourse theory) actually bases his assumptions on the inverse theory that space is not only constructed discursively, but also that discourse itself - seen as the partial fixation of a system of signification - is essentially spatial. (Without, however, inferring that space has any causal effects on time.) Consequently, Laclau’s political theory is not only beyond the bounds of Massey’s distinction of the seventies and eighties (that could be seen as a distinction between constructivism and post-constructivism), but may well equally be beyond the bounds of the categories of passive and active. Massey’s criticism, as mentioned at the beginning, is that Laclau continues the old metaphysical notion in which space is labelled as a passive mass, a mere product of a construction achievement, for example. Yet to Laclau the difference between space and time is not a difference between passivity and activity. Time is not the “actor” creating passive spatial sediments, i. e. social deposits, but rather time - as dislocation - is precisely the category that prevents these sediments once and for all from becoming firmly established. As Laclau attempts explicitly to explain, space can hegemonize (i. e. “spatialize”) time, but time itself does not hegemonize anything at all: “But while we can speak of the hegemonization of time by space (through repetition), it must be emphasized that the opposite is not possible: time cannot hegemonize anything, since it is a pure effect of dislocation.” [16] The reason for this is easily apprehended. Although the existence of a constitutive outside of a system of signification (a space) is a precondition that a certain systematicity (e. g. topography) can become stable, at the same time the constitutive outside (as the source of dislocation of the system) is the reason why the system will never be able to close itself to achieve totality. A condition allowing spatialization and, at the same time, a condition thwarting total spatialization, time is beyond the bounds of categories such as activity/passivity. And if time does not simply play the active part, inversely space cannot play the passive part either; thus, the convenient symmetrical dualism that Massey imputes to Laclau does not work in this way. What effect does this have on Massey’s criticism that Laclau depoliticizes the concept of space? In Massey’s reading of Laclau, time plays the active part, while space plays the passive role. At the same time, the active part is conjoined with the category of politics, while the passive role is free of all politics. Inasmuch as Massey imputes this conviction to Laclau, she can accuse him of seeing space as a passive, unpolitical mass in true Western tradition. This would be the case if Laclau’s theory were to fit Massey’s portrayal. But that is not what Laclau writes. Here, Massey is taken in by a categorial mistake that inevitably occurs when categories of political philosophy are read as categories of social science. In actual fact, time is not so much the category of politics as the category of the political. This distinction itself is qualitative and not simply quantitative - and it is thus generally inaccessible to social scientists. Although it is true that Laclau compares politics and space, “politics and space are antinomic terms” [17]. However, he does so because, to his mind, space, i. e. the social sphere or “society”, is precisely the

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- unattainable - final product of hegemonial efforts of spatialization. Precisely these hegemonial efforts are politics, namely practices of spatialization by means of articulation.Thus we must distinguish between spatialization as politics, on the one hand, and space as a category of the social sphere, identity, discourse, society, and systems of meaning in general, on the other. Indeed, politics (= spatialization) can only exist in the first place because space is impossible in the final analysis. The complete constitution of space/ system/identity/society is impossible because these categories refer to a constitutive outside that is at once the condition enabling them and making their complete closure and self-identity impossible. And one of the names for this outside is time. However, it follows from this that time is definitely not identical to politics - as Massey implies. As mentioned above, the category of politics is spatialization. The constitutive outside of space, in contrast, is what is heterogeneous to the system - everything that cannot be explained from the inner logic of the system itself or what has never had any prescribed place in the topography: dislocation, disturbance, interruption, event. Laclau calls this moment of interruption and reactivation of spatial sediments “the political’” [18]. Thus, we must distinguish between politics (spatialization) and the political (the dislocatory collapse of temporality in the emphatic sense). In his rejoinder to Doreen Massey, David Howarth rightly pointed out that in this Laclau follows Heidegger’s criticism of the metaphysical notion of time as presence and representation. For Howarth, too, temporality is the category of the political as pure negativity (antagonism) that prevents society from achieving its identity with itself, while politics is a practice of spatialization, identification. As Howarth says, “The character of temporality is indeterminate and undecidable: it is a condition for politics, not politics itself.The political is antagonism and contestation between forces, whereas politics consists in giving form or embodying the political. In this respect, politics must always have a spatial dimension.” [19] So what Massey fails to recognise is what we might call the onto-ontological difference between space and time, or between the way Laclau uses these terms and the way Massey uses them. Howarth recognises this absolutely correctly in his reply to Massey when he says, “it is my contention that Laclau’s usage of the concepts of space and time operates on the ontological level, rather than at the ontic level of Massey” [20]. When Laclau speaks of temporality or of the pair temporality/spatiality, he is strictly speaking about the conditions of the (im)possibility of spatialization (politics) and space (society). He is speaking, if you like, about temporality as the ontology of social space and of politics. The latter, on the other hand, are located at the ontic level that Massey refers to, for example, when she investigates into a certain “politics of location”. At the ontic level, time does not exist, but rather only times, i. e. spatial symbolic representations of temporal processes, for example history. From the viewpoint of the social sphere, the ontological level of temporality is only manifested in the event, only when these temporal processes are abruptly interrupted and - for example at the moment of revolutions - when a new “chronology” begins, i. e. a new space gains hegemony over an old one. By differentiating between a social science and a political philosophy approach, following Laclau, we can thus obtain three categories, or rather pairs of categories, which although all having something to do with “spatiality”, must not be confused as they are located at different ontological levels. The categories are a) Time and space. Time is the ontological principle of dislocation of a structure that results from the essential dependence of the structure on a constitutive outside. Space, inversely, is the name given to the theoretical extreme case of complete obliteration of temporality and dislocation. This extreme case can, however, never occur as the constitutive outside of the structure will always leave behind traces and dislocatory turbulences inside. If we could eliminate this constitutive outside, we would also eliminate the structuredness of the structure with it. Thus, the disappearance of temporality would also entail the disappearance of spatiality. Space itself - i. e. a closed, non-dislocated totality without a constitutive outside - is consequently never attainable.The term “society” is generally used in this sense of space (“everything

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is social”) - as an undeceivable horizon that knows no outside. But in so far as space and time can only be analytically separated as ontological principles and the principle of space as totality is never attainable without inclusions and dislocations of time, society is impossible - impossible precisely as a closed totality, as space. This is the provocative key theory of Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s book Hegemony & Socialist Strategy [21] - society does not exist. b) Spaces. If space does not exist in the strict, ontological sense, this is the very reason why spaces may exist at the ontic level. When Massey speaks of space, and this is where the misunderstandings arise, she generally means this level of spaces. But Laclau, too, means spaces when he speaks of the unevenness of the social sphere and of sediments.The concept of sediments - not in the slightest indicating passivity - is fully justified in that it only makes sense in the plural. We will come back to this in the next section. c) Spatialization. Spaces, however, are not pre-existent, but must rather be continuously constructed. This process of spatialization or sedimentation is the actual moment of politics. Laclau calls the logic of politics hegemony, thus spatialization is consequently quite simply the hegemonization of time by space. Laclau himself says, “any representation of a dislocation involves its specialization. The way to overcome the temporal, traumatic and unrepresentable nature of dislocation is to construct it as a moment in permanent structural relation with other moments [e. g. as topography, O. M.], in which case the pure temporality of the ‘event’ is eliminated” [22]. This construction - the more or less permanent connection of various moments to form a structured whole - is what Laclau (as in the Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall or Lawrence Grossberg) terms articulation. //: From space to spaces and back: three blind alleys On the basis of the above discussion, in the following I would like to focus on three - as I see it, unsuitable - strategies for reconceptualising public space that I will try to link to the names Foucault, Deleuze and Habermas. [23] Assuming that their theories of space are largely known, I will not describe them in detail. My concern is simply to touch on a possible criticism that would follow from the aforesaid, i.e. from the viewpoint of political theory. Whereas Foucault consciously attempts to promote anti-public spheres via a strategy of multiplication, Deleuzians see the public, urban space as a flood zone of energy and libido flows. Habermas, in turn, hypostatizes a certain conception of public space to the public sphere. According to the theory, these three blind alleys of multiplication of space (Foucault), the substantialisation of space (Deleuze) and the hypostatization of space (Habermas) display a pronounced depoliticizing effect. Against the negative background set out in this section, in the following chapter it will be easier to come closer to a really political theory of public space - and thus public art. Foucault’s lecture entitled “Other Spaces”, held in 1967, brought forth a whole genre of heterotopology studies in the wake of its publication in the eighties. The success of this incidental text can probably only be explained by the obsessive thirst of architects and urbanists for theory imports (and by the inexorable pleasure that architects take in 1:1 translations of post-structuralist theoretical concepts into architectural building forms such as folds or ovoids). In Foucault’s text, “Other Spaces”, i.e. heterotopias, are presented as privileged, forbidden or sacred places within our society, spaces that mark out a space of transition, crisis or deviation. Crisis heterotopias, assigned by Foucault above all to so-called primitive societies, are privileged, sacred or forbidden places.Today, they would be replaced by deviation heterotopias such as holiday homes, psychiatric clinics or prisons. Generally speaking, heterotopias must be seen as folds from the outside into the inside, as Deleuze would say, as “bubbles” in a homotopos that Foucault does not define in any more detail. A typical instance of these bubbles is the last example that Foucault cites in his lecture, the ship, “a pitching piece of space”, a “place without place that lives out of itself, that is closed in itself and at the same time at

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the mercy of the infinite expanse of the ocean”.To Foucault, the ship is “the heterotopia par excellence”. And he draws the somewhat romanticising conclusion that “dreams run dry in civilisations without ships, espionage replaces adventure, and the police replace freebooters” [24]. As spaces of the outside in the inside, heterotopias are real, existing Utopias. And they are above all multiple, i. e. we should really speak of many small outsides in the plural. By employing this pluralisation of the category of outside (and its folding into the inside), Foucault does, however, let himself in for a certain inconsistency of his representation, for the heterological science he evokes is evidently unable to present a criterion for the exact nature of the borderline between the outside and the inside. If the outside is “real and existing” and occurs at many places inside, how can we speak of an outside? Is the other-in-the-same not immediately transformed into precisely this same? Are heterotopias not merely simple variations or certain modes of homotopias? In view of the fact that Foucault does not supply us with a criterion with the aid of which we can define the borderline between the inside and the outside, it remains totally unclear who or what actually determines whether a given place comes under this category or not. The very concept of heterotopias loses all contours. Benjamin Genocchio posed the same question in the following way: “How is it, that heterotopias are ‘outside’ of or are fundamentally different to other spaces, but also are related to and exist ‘within’ the general social space/order that distinguishes their meaning as different?” [25] The only possible answer is that the person differentiating the places is Foucault himself, Genocchio concludes. The categorisation of heterotopias is apparently an arbitrary act of the author. Without a criterion for the borderline between inside and outside, the criteria for the concrete determination of places as heterotopias are also weakened. Thus, when Foucault decides to assign to the category of heterotopias gardens, ships, childbed, brothels, churches, hotel and motel rooms, museums, cemeteries, libraries, prisons, asylums, holiday homes, psychiatric hospitals, military facilities, theatres, cinemas, Roman baths, the Turkish hammam, and the Scandinavian sauna, and if we can add, as Genocchio does, markets, sewers, amusement parks, and shopping malls, what on earth is not heterotopical? Are there any other places than other places? A sympathetic reading could of course see this systematic weakness as the real strength of Foucault’s concept. For example, Bernd Knaller-Vlay and Roland Ritter advance the theory that Foucault’s list of almost Borgessian anti-systematology is not a “weak concretisation of a strong idea”, but rather he “creates a systematic inconsistency with which he protects the list from being completed”. “The list of heterotopias suggests an open-ended series that can be thought out and continued.” [26] Thought out and continued, that is all very well, but according to what criteria? The problem is that if I cannot give any criteria for the other/outside, then, conversely, I cannot subvert the own/inside either. Heterotopias are then not simple components of the inside, nor are they external to it, rather they coincide with the inside - in Foucault and also in Marc Auge. If everything can become a heterotopos, then ultimately nothing will. Foucault’s fuzzy heterotopology consequently proves to be a homotopology. This argument can equally be made along the lines of the logic developed in Section I: the mere multiplication of other spaces or internal outside spaces into an unclosable series inversely makes it impossible to define the borders of the own space or interior space in any way, as mentioned above, the outside must be of a radically different nature than the inside. If the inside, for example, is a system of differences or of differentially determined positions, then the outside cannot be a further difference or position, for then it would be part of the inside. The constitutive outside - that Laclau conceives as distinctly non-spatial (time) - would in this case become merely another difference (or many other differences = heterotopias) of the inside. But then it would cease to be an outside (and the inside would no longer be an inside). And it is no longer constitutive as it has been broken down from an ontological category (time/space) to an ontic category (spaces).

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This thought leads me to the hypothesis that the actual, secret bugbear that the concept of the heterotopia seeks to oppose is not the ontological category of the “same” or the “inside”, but rather the ontic counter-concept of a certain rival topos on the inside - namely of public space. In other words, the only thing that the heterotopias listed by Foucault have in common and that might be added consists in the fact that they seem nof fo belong to one place, namely to the bourgeois public. Foucault drafts a particularist concept of space whose unadmitted but implied opponent is the universalism of the public space. This hypothesis is backed up by the fact that Foucault does not indicate how and whether heterotopias are mediated with each other - a task traditionally assumed by the public space over private spaces. It is not clarified what the reciprocal relationship between heterotopias is or how they relate to each other. Must we, we might ask with childlike naivety, go through the homotopos to get from one heterotopos to the other, or are there doors between heterotopias? And is the public sphere the space that we must traverse if we wish to pass from one heterotopos to another? What seems to be more probable is that the public sphere is not only the homotopos that embraces the heterotopias, but rather that, for the purpose of Foucault’s argument, it assumes the role of the anti-heterotopia (and heterotopias assume the role of anti-homotopias). The universalist bourgeois public sphere is quite simply the antithesis to the particularist heterotopias of crisis and deviation, compared to which the latter - precisely qua deviation - are tacitly defined. Thus, heterotopias are the mere reverse, the inversion of the concept of an undescribed homotopos that is, however, implicitly manifested as the public sphere. A homotopos that must be presupposed as a universal, mythical authority so as to give meaning to the concept of the heterotopia. When Foucault, at the only point in the text where he actually speaks of public space, describes the opposition of private and public space as the result of a silent sacralisation, his text itself is the best example of the “silence” with which this sacralisation is still performed in its apparent subversion. Let us look now at the version of the heterotopia that is being hailed as the “new public sphere” - the Internet. At a symposium held at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, under the heading “Fictions of the Public Sphere”, the Frankfurt-based sociologist Peter Noller goes on to answer his own concluding question after taking stock of the commercialisation of the public sphere “Where is the public, freely accessible space of the 90s?”, suggesting “In the digital cities of the networks” [27].The idea of the Internet as “public space” or simply as “the public sphere” has become so firmly entrenched that it would be perfectly futile to line up assertions similar to Holler’s. Even the criticism of the “myth of the public” would at first glance appear to have been already formulated and dealt with. However, this Internet myth is currently being countered with another myth that leaves no room whatsoever for the public sphere. We are talking about the (post-)Deleuzian myth of the Internet as a rhizomatic space of flows with no centre. Here, the public sphere is overflooded by a spatiality that, as replete positivity or substance, utterly thwarts any rational discussion or normalisation/spatialization. I call this reference to a space that is too overfilled to be circumscribed in clear-cut boundaries, and which at the same time “floods” the space of the public sphere, the space of flows theory. In the issue of the Architectural Design magazine dedicated to “Architects in Cyberspace”, Sadie Plant formulates the space of flows theory of the Internet with unequivocal clarity. Cyberspace, she contends, resists all demands for supervision, regulation and censorship for “such zones have always been out of control”. With this, she draws a parallel to cities, “Cities, like cyberspace, are not object of knowledge to be planned and designed, but cybernetic assemblages, immensely intricate interplays of forces, interests, zones and desires too complex and fluid for even those who inhabit them to understand” [28].The reason for this urban resistance is to be found in the Deleuzian substance assigned to cities: “Weeds and grasses lift the paving stones.”This allusion to May ‘68 and to situationism is not limited to the purportedly subversive potential of cyber-flows, “all spaces, their builders, and inhabitants, functioned as cybernetic systems in multiple layers of cybernetic; space” [29].

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The euphoric myth of the intrinsic force of flows is usually articulated by the diffusely anarchistic evocation of centrelessness. The buzzword “rhizome” has been flogged to death for this purpose. But in a sense, promoting a flowing, rhizomatic centrelessness of the Internet/the city is an extremely vapid affair. All anti-foundationalist theories would today agree that, by definition, no system of signification has a natural centre, and for this reason alone the Internet too cannot have a natural centre. But what exactly does this mean? Again, I would like to link this problem back to the political theory outlined in Section I. Ernesto Laclau makes it clear that the simple ritualistic reference to the decentrised nature of a structure is not the end of the story. What we must understand by a decentrised structure is “not just the absence of a centre but the practice of decentring through antagonism” [30]. In view of the fact that, on the one hand, every system of signification is dislocated, there can be no singular centre. Yet, on the other hand, we must note that “the response to the dislocation of the structure will be its recomposition around particular nodal points [=centres] of articulation by the various antagonistic forces”. Such that we can say that precisely the dislocatory, decentrised nature of a system of signification is both the result of the battle of various forces for the meaning of this system and an appeal to undertake new attempts at centrisation: “Social dislocation is therefore coterminous with the construction of power centres.” [31] So what does this mean in terms of our problem? If the patchwork of heterotopias or the rhizome of the Internet were to possess a “natural” and stable centre, there would be no dislocation and thus no problems of meaning. The process of the articulation of meaning would stand still and we would enter a frozen world in which every sign is bound to a natural referent and in which complete transparency exists. A world of total and eternal wealth of meaning. Yet if, on the other hand, heterotopias, public spheres, etc. did not have any centre at all, if meaning were not articulated by the partial construction of nodes (by means of spatialization) and no signifier could maintain a temporary relation to a certain signified, then what we would see would be a psychotic structure and, again, no meaning, but rather a world of total and eternal meaninglessness. In this sense, Deleuze’s flows model is extremely psychotic. And in Deleuzian space, too, there is no space for the public space of politics. Space is naturalised, vitalised, furnished with natural metaphors, and assumes a positivity or substance that obviates any politics (i.e. all articulatory practices of spatialization). Does the aforesaid lead to a general criticism of plural models of space? Does the criticism of Foucault’s heterotopia model necessarily entail embracing the public sphere as a homotopos? This question leads us to the last model of the public sphere, namely the public sphere as a super-space or meta-space. The idea of the one standardising public sphere has often been ascribed to Jürgen Habermas. This may not be fully justified for Habermas himself speaks of the public sphere in the plural - of regional, cultural, literary, scientific, political, organisational, medial, and subcultural partial public spheres. The problem is not that Habermas does not recognise this plurality of partial public spheres, but rather that this plurality is swallowed by a positive principle of communicative reason. For all partial public spheres, being interpermeable, refer to one all-embracing overall public sphere. According to Habermas - despite all admitted plurality at the level of partial public spheres - there is but one “democratic” or “autonomous” public sphere [32] that does not coincide with the public spheres of mass culture, but rather in which citizens could communicate about the regulation of public affairs. Within the scope of the aforesaid, the idea of a rational super- or meta-public sphere - i. e. the public sphere that we are talking about when we hypostatise the concept of public space into the concept of public sphere - is amiss. Not that there could not be a reasonable and democratically discussing public, of course there can, namely wherever people discuss in a reasonable and democratic fashion. We need not even dispute that reasonable and democratic discussion is possible per se (although practically improbable, nevertheless at least possible as a regulative idea and as an asymptotic ideal). But still it remains a partial public sphere among many, a public sphere that is not by a long shot onto-logically privileged, nor by a long shot an overall - or to put it in my words - a meta- or super-public sphere.

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Our criticism of the meta-public sphere, then, in no way equates to Lyotard’s post-modern criticism of meta-narratives. The point is not that all meta-narratives, to which I would also count Habermas’ public sphere narrative, are to be rejected because they automatically led to a kind of totalitarianism. The real criticism is that such narratives cannot assert a meta-status and are thus at the same ontological level as all other narratives. Which does not in itself refute the meta-narrative itself - it may well make sense to argue in favour of the hegemony of a particular narrative - but rather simply opposes its transcendental status. So I am certainly not coming out against the possibility of communicative reason or against the possibility of a democratic public sphere. Rather, I am opposed to the idea that this public sphere is ontologically privileged over other, pre-rational or pre-, non- or anti-democratic public spaces. To give an extreme example: if we do not wish to smuggle the idea of communicative reason into the concept of the public sphere, then there is not even anything to stop us from speaking of “fascist public spheres”. Why should the public sphere of the one German people as constructed by Hitler’s radio speeches not be a public sphere, why should the public sphere of a Nuremberg Reich party conference not be a public sphere? Why should only the informal rational dialogue generate public spheres in the emphatic sense, is there not equally the public sphere of command, authoritarian invocation, enthusiastically swaying or goose-stepping masses? Or, to cite some less emotive examples, what makes all the various “partial” public spheres such as the everyday public spheres of advertising, backstairs gossip, sports events, youth cultures, etc. any less public, less autonomous or less universal than a public sphere created through rational discussion? And even if we narrow our concept of the public sphere to political and democratic public spheres, their plurality remains irreducible, constituted around a collection of irreducible political language games and divergent demands. This brings us back to a conception of the public sphere that would be compatible with Ernesto Laclau’s notion of public space: “For me, a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces constituted around specific issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instils in its members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces, or, rather, as a consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific identity. Within this community, the liberal institutions - parliament, elections, divisions of power - are maintained, but these are one public space, not the public space.” [33] What Laclau says of the institutional public spheres of democracy (parliament) can also be said of Habermas’ concept of the democratic public sphere. It is not the public sphere. Just as the advocates of the “liberal democratic fundamental order” would like to restrict the democratic public sphere to parliament, Habermas hypostatises a certain public space (of rational discussion) to the one public sphere. [34] But is not precisely the irreducible plurality of the public sphere - i. e. the absence of a rational or other super-public sphere, a meta-space - the real precondition that something like democracy is possible at all? Laclau would maintain just that: “But the condition for a democratic society is that these public spaces have to be plural: a democratic society is, of course, incompatible with the existence of only one public space.” [35] Which by no means implies that democracy consists of a merry patchwork of public spheres. Rather, democracy means that the conflict of the question as to which public spheres are tolerated as politically legitimate and which are not, is not automatically settled in advance - for example by taking recourse to a quasi-transcendent ideal of communicative reason. Democracy means that no particular public sphere, no individual project of spatialization may claim this transcendental status for itself. This, in turn, implies that the place of the public sphere remains void. This is what distinguishes this approach, corresponding

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for example to the theories of Laclau and Lefort (whom we will speak about below), quite clearly from simple pluralisations of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere, as can be found, for example, in Fraser or Benhabib. [36] To recapitulate, we have identified three blind alleys that in a way are designed to illustrate what can go awry with theories of space and the public sphere and how certain decisions can, from the outset of the theory, have depoliticizing effects or implications. 1) The first blind alley was the multiplication of space, or rather the folding in of the constitutive outside into the inside. With the aid of this model of the heterotopos, Foucault aims to draw up a counter-model to the great closed space of society, a counter-model in that this space always displays inclusions of the outside, of the “other space” - heterotopoi. To say that these spaces are multiple and plural in no way implies saying that they constitute an endless unstructured puzzle or that they are all equal. As illustrated above, by virtue of the fact that the only applicable criterion of a heterotopos is its deviation from the homotopos, and that this is ultimately - similar to Habermas’ super-public sphere - a phantasm of the theory that either anarchistically warns us of it, like the Foucaultians, or upholds it, like the Habermasians, everything can become a heterotopos, from the sauna to the shopping mall. In the end even the parliament is a heterotopos. 2) The Deleuzian blind alley is the substantialisation of space. Here, all subtly differentiated public spheres - heterotopias, Utopias and homotopias - are in a way brought together. The literary public sphere no longer differs from the party political, subcultural, or artistic public sphere, for we are not looking at a logic of delimitable spaces, possibly systems, but rather a rhizomatic, centreless mess. This view could be countered by the fact that the space of the public sphere is not a quasi-natural force transforming the city into one big libidinal jungle of its own accord, for that would imply attributing it with its internal laws, an inner driving substance of constant becoming and fading. That would mean remaining in the realm of Deleuzian natural philosophy, if not to say natural mysticism. Consequently, politics becomes a distinctly superfluous activity, for it is the quasi-natural substance of the libido-flows that lifts the paving-stones and not the politically organised and articulatory will of the demonstrators. 3) But a model contrasting with this vitalist hippie and neo-hippie model is the model in which the public sphere is assigned the role of the super-brain [37]. This is the blind alley of the hypostatisation of the public space: a particular public space - the space of rational, informal, normative deliberation - becomes the public sphere. Yet the space of the public space is not the bourgeois meta-space of rational and non-violent discussion, although it need not even be disputed that such a space does or, if not, in the contrafactual, regulative sense - should exist somewhere at the ontic level (although I would tend to doubt both - factual existence and contrafactual desirability - for different reasons). Rather, the public space is plural or multiple and the Habermasian debating society, if it exists, is one public space among many, a space that is not in any way ontologically privileged over the others. None of these three approaches can answer the question of why the public space is, on the one hand, plural but, on the other hand, not indefinitely so, i. e. not unstructured, but rather why certain public spheres dominate other public spheres [38]. So none of these approaches can help us explain how the various public spheres are interrelated - for example how exchange relations are supposed to work between these public spheres if we a) do not assume an overall public sphere that unifies all others, thus taking charge of exchange (the homotopous space as a medium between the heterotopias) and b) do not wish to assume a puzzle of unconnected public spheres, between which no exchange takes place whatsoever. These problems can only be resolved by means of a political theory that takes into account the way in which various projects of spatialization - i. e. hegemonisation of space - are at loggerheads with each other and construct partial, transitory hegemonies over other spaces.

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///. Public sphere (s) and radical democracy What is to date probably the most valid attempt to interconceive art practices and the political category of the public space was proffered by Rosalyn Deutsche. One of the most overriding aims of Deutsche’s seminal “Agoraphobia” essay is, in her own words, to infiltrate new theories of “radical and plural democracy” into the public art discourse. It seems that Deutsche shares the opinion that underlies this chapter. In order to attempt to answer the current question as to what makes art public, we will have to devote our attention to political theory. Of course, this does not imply demanding a new master theory for art. Rather, the questions, problems and impasses that have long concerned political philosophers and democracy theorists in the form of the concept of the public sphere, have always determined the public art discussion - even where they were not dressed in the explicit vocabulary of political theory. For example, Deutsche says: “Although public art discourse has so far paid little direct attention to these theories, the issues they raise are already present at the very heart of controversies over aesthetic politics.” [39] When we speak of impasses, one of these impasses of the left in which a progressive theory of the public sphere - for example a theory of “radical and plural democracy” - should not stray was and, to some extent, still is Marxist economic determinism that declared political concepts such as the public sphere to be a mere superstructure phenomenon of the economic base. With her attempt to re-theoretise public art and public space, Deutsche has to fight on several fronts - against public art as embellishment, against public art as a means of gentrification (as an aesthetic arm of property speculators), against conservatives such as Jesse Helms, who seek to substantialise and restrict the concept of the public sphere, and on the other hand against the communitarist left, that sees politics simply as community work, and even, in terms of criticism and theory, against Deutsche’s own colleagues from October, who continued to argue the ideology that art is produced autonomously and by artist personalities - for example in their defence of Serra’s Wed Arc (which was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza), and who, in some cases, even succumbed to fits of cultural conservatism, etc. I assume that the criticism of public art as a means of gentrification, as an intrinsic means of distinction in art, as an individualist substitute for public welfare, is generally familiar so that there is no need to go over it again at this point. But the decisive front on which Deutsche’s criticism has to liberate the concept of the public space is the front with the neo-Marxist left (Harvey and Jameson) and their economic determinism. On closer scrutiny, the latter proves to be the main opponent when it comes to a progressive articulation of the political public sphere with the aid of art/culture. A criticism of the Marxist/social science paradigm of art and cultural criticism, where it becomes economic-determinist, must go hand in hand with a criticism of the paradigm of the radical, often Marxist political left that brushes aside bourgeois democracy, and thus the bourgeois public sphere, as “purely formal”. In these determinist approaches, politics and culture share the sad fate of being assigned to the (“purely formal”) superstructure that is supposedly determined by the economic base. The typical example of a theorist operating with this Marxist meta-narrative is Fredric Jameson, for whom the cultural phenomena of post-modernism are, as we know, merely the “cultural logic” of late capitalism. This view is shared by David Harvey in his influential book The Condition of Postmodernity - of course, the “condition” of postmodernity in this case is again the economy. Belonging to the cultural superstructure, post-modernism is just a symptom of economic upheavals of the base (such as globalisation, etc.). [40] The same fate of cultural categories is shared by the political categories such as the public sphere or political actors such as the New Social movements. From an economic viewpoint, the political public sphere is part of the bourgeois ideology that obfuscates the true social, i.e. in the final analysis, economic conditions; equally, struggles about issues such as gender, sexual orientation, etc. and about general cultural representations are only scenes of secondary importance: for if, in the final analysis, it is the economy alone that counts, the only true political actor can be defined by the category of class, and

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the only radical political demands are economic demands. Deutsche opposes this idea by pleading the case of Laclau/Mouffe versus Jameson/Harvey. “Mouffe and Laclau reverse Harvey’s proposal: socialism, reduced to human size, is integrated within new social practices. Links between different social struggles must be articulated rather than presupposed to exist, determined by a fundamental social antagonism - class struggle.” [41] Socialist class politics, this would imply, is in no way ontologically privileged over other politics and demands. Rather, economic demands are presented at the same ontological level as, for instance, “cultural” demands. And given that class politics cannot cite any deeper social reality (the economic base), it cannot claim any automatic leadership over other, e. g. minority or identity struggles, but must rather first construct - i. e. articulate - a common chain of equivalence with them in the field of politics (i. e. in the “superstructure”). What this articulation creates is quite simply a common space (a space among many). This space has no substantial base distributing and determining all positions in it a priori (and thus automatically guaranteeing socialist positions pole position), but rather this space is the contingent result of an articulatory practice that links up the positions to form a topography in the first place. This practice is simply politics, to return to the terminology drawn up in Section I, a practice of spatialization. A necessary condition for politics and spatialization is, however, as mentioned above, that space does not exist as a closed totality with no constitutive outside, i. e. time. As soon as we cease to assign society a fundamental, standardising base or substance, social cohesion is always only the result of temporary - and ultimately failing - political articulation. Society as a totality, on the other hand, is impossible. However, the public sphere is possible precisely because society is impossible. This is one of the fundamental propositions of Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy and Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical and plural democracy that Deutsche takes up when she says, “[according to new theories of radical democracy, public space emerges with the abandonment of the belief in an absolute basis of social unity (...)” [42]. Before discussing Lefort’s exact argumentation concerning the constitution of the public sphere, let me cite a decisive passage of Deutsche’s text in detail, for a lot of what she says may appear to be familiar. “Democracy and its corollary, public space, are brought into existence, then, when the idea that the social is founded on a substantial basis, a positivity, is abandoned. The identity of society becomes an enigma and is therefore open to contestation. But, as Laclau and Mouffe argue, this abandonment also means that society is ‘impossible’ - which is to say, that the conception of society as a closed entity is impossible. For without an underlying positivity, the social field is structured by relationships among elements that themselves have no essential identities. Negativity is thus part of any social identity, since identity comes into being only through a relationship with an ‘other’ and, as a consequence, cannot be internally complete (...) Likewise, negativity is part of the identity of society as a whole; no complete element within society unifies it and determines its development. Laclau and Mouffe use the term antagonism to designate the relationship between a social identity and a ‘constitutive outside’ that blocks its completion. Antagonism affirms and simultaneously prevents the closure of society, revealing the partiality and precariousness - the contingency - of every totality. (...) It will be the Lefortian contention of this essay that advocates of public art who want to foster the growth of a democratic culture must also start from this point.” [43] If we follow Deutsche, the paradox of public art is not so very different to the paradox described by political theory. On the one hand, society is impossible, i.e. every space lacks an essential identity or positivity and depends on a constitutive and yet negative outside. On the other hand, a certain socialization is necessary as a completely dislocated society (a space without spatiality, as it were, i. e. pure time) would of course be just as preposterous. Politics or spatialization is, on the one hand, only possible because society has no “basis”, but must on the other, always fail in an attempt to merge spaces and their constitutive outside into the space of society. Deutsche’s reference to Claude Lefort is pioneering in this respect, for it was Lefort who described the historical emergence of this logic - and in it the emergence

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of the public space. Everything begins with what Lefort (following Tocqueville) calls the “democratic revolution”. The historically decisive event for the emergence of modern democracy - an event that should, however, only be seen as a symbolic condensation of a development that commenced far earlier - was, according to Lefort, not the storming of the Bastille, nor the summoning of the general estates, but rather quite simply the beheading of Louis XVI. From this point on, not only had the king been “disembodied”, but the place of power in society had been disembodied, too. The instance of power - and with it the instances of law and knowledge - were henceforth no longer localised in the “two bodies of the king” (Kantorowicz), the earthly and the transcendental. The exercise of power - i. e. the temporary appropriation of the empty space of power - is instead subject to political rivalry and can no longer cite any transcendental principle. Without such a founding principle, society is faced with the permanent task of refounding itself again and again. As a result of the evacuation of the place of power, the democratic dispositive thus releases a potential of autonomy. For if the place of sacral legitimation is vacant, society is referred back to itself in its search for legitimation. Through the evacuation of the place of power, a new place is thus separated from the state - the civil society becomes a place of autonomous self-institution of society. And finally there evolves in the civil society a public sphere, seen as a space of the political (of conflictual debate) within the non-political (i.e., the “private” or economic parts of the civil society that are, however, always potentially “publicisable”, i.e. which can be made the subject of public debate). [44] The secession of an empty place from the state, the separation of the spheres of power of law and knowledge, the emergence of an autonomous sphere of the civil society, and finally of the public sphere in which the legitimatory foundations of society, having lost their transcendental status, must be renegotiated again and again - all this presupposes the instance of a fundamental division of democratic society, a fundamental conflictual composedness that is located at the ontological and not at the ontic level. Democracy is the institutionalisation of conflict - i. e. of the debate about the foundations of society - or it is none. Institutionalisation means i. a. the attested legitimacy of public debate about what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. The public sphere is not so much a pre-existent space in which this debate occurs or to which it is assigned. On the contrary, the public sphere must be created again and again precisely by means of conflictual debate about the foundations of society and the scope of rights (albeit on the absolute foundation of the right to have rights), and the extension of rights to new groups of the population. [45] Following Lefort and Laclau/Mouffe, Rosalyn Deutsche refers precisely to this necessary construction of the public sphere when she writes, for example, “the political sphere is not only a site of discourse; it is also a discursively constructed site. From the standpoint of a radical democracy, politics cannot be reduced to something that happens inside the limits of a public space or political community that is simply accepted as ‘real’. Politics, as Chantal Mouffe writes, is about the constitution of the political community. It is about the spatializing operations that produce a space of politics.” [46] In other words, it is political intervention itself that actually creates the space for politics (the public sphere) - and not the other way around. The logical consequence is that “conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere: they are the conditions of its existence.” [47] This form of political spatialization - the opening up of a space of conflict and debate - originates, in turn - it must be added - in a constitutive division or a constitutive antagonism (between society and its outside, between the empty space of power and the state, etc.). The founding antagonism is institutionalised in society to become public political debate that must not, in turn, be halted. If it were to be halted, the empty space of power would be occupied, the separation between power and the state, and the division between the spheres of power, law, and knowledge would be annulled - the name of this condition of the democratic dispositive, according to Lefort, is totalitarianism [48]. In totalitarianism, the

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founding antagonism is denied, the debate is halted and, as a consequence, the public space implodes. So it is of crucial importance that the conflictual composedness of society, politics and, ultimately, the public space, is not suppressed or obfuscated, as it is in models of consensus. For Deutsche, the model of consensus par excellence is, of course, “Habermas’s ideal of a singular, unified public sphere that transcends concrete particularities and reaches a rational - noncoercive - consensus” [49]. The Habermasian model must be anathema to an attempt to apply theories of radical and plural democracy to problems of public art - Habermas sees the public sphere, as we have seen, as a singular meta-space, society as a positive object whose conflictual dimension (and thus its self-difference or non-identity with itself) is to be annulled by means of a rationalist meta-discourse, “Construed as an entity with a positivity of its own, this object - ‘society’ - serves as the basis of rational discussions and as a guarantee that social conflicts can be resolved objectively. The failure to acknowledge the spatializations that generate ‘social space’ attests to a desire both to control conflict and to secure a stable position for the self.” [50] In the final analysis, the unification of the public space qua rationalisation of conflict comes down to a suppression of fundamental social antagonism, to the denial of all distinction between society and its constitutive outside - i. e. ultimately between space and time, for the (temporal) dislocation of space is seen in Habermas’ model as something that may be rationally remedied. In Laclau’s/Mouffe’s model, on the other hand, it is precisely what constitutes spatiality. To Laclau, Mouffe, Lefort and Deutsche, something like public space does not emerge where consensus has been found, but rather where consensus breaks down (= is dislocated) and where temporary alliances need to be rearticulated again and again. On the basis of the terminological distinction between space as totality and spatialization as political practice, as set out in Section I, Habermas’ model would be unambiguously identifiable as space - as a space of consensus in the singular this version of the public sphere ultimately has no place for divergent spatializations that do not wish to stand on the basis of “rational” procedural agreement. But as soon as - rationally unconveyable - conflictuality is denied, society is set as positive identity. As Deutsche rightly criticises, community art practices commit a similar mistake when they seek to create “society” by means of social consensus work and thus establish it as positive identity in the first place. Thus, the public sphere is not a space of consensus, but rather a space of dissent. The urban public space - we may summarise - is generated by conflict and not by a consensus having recourse to rational and procedural meta-rules. In connection with the urban space, Deutsche speaks of three incommensurable meanings of conflict: “Urban space is the product of conflict. This is so in several, incommensurable senses. In the first place, the lack of absolute social foundation - the ‘disappearance of the markers of certainty’ - makes conflict an ineradicable feature of all social space. Second, the unitary image of urban space constructed in conservative discourse is itself produced through division, constituted through the creation of an exterior. The perception of a coherent space cannot be separated from a sense of what threatens the space, of what it would like to exclude. Finally, urban space is produced by specific socioeconomic conflicts that should not simply be accepted, either wholeheartedly or regretfully, as evidence of the inevitability of conflict but, rather, politicized - opened to contestation as social and therefore mutable relations of oppression.” [51] What, then, is exactly the incommensurability of these three meanings of conflict? In view of the aforesaid, the following interpretation would seem appropriate. What Deutsche draws our attention to, intentionally or unintentionally, is the difference between 1. the conditions of the (im)possibility of society, and 2. and 3. the various attempts nevertheless to construct society partially (either as conservative and unifying or as progressive and reactivating). The incommensurability about which Deutsche writes

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thus correlates to the onto-ontological difference mentioned in Section I. At the ontological level, the category time stands for the fundamental lack characterising every space; the antic level, in contrast, is distinguished by rivalling hegemonial efforts of spatialization - and, as a result, by a multitude of (possibly conflicting) spaces. The final determination of the urban space in terms of identity - as of any other social space - is thus, in the final analysis, impossible due to the ineradicable ontological conditions (the necessary reference to a constitutive outside and consequently the existence of a fundamental lack and antagonism). Inversely, precisely this failure of the closure of spaces to form space permits and requires constant efforts of spatialization - i.e. political practices of articulation. But does the public space, as we have defined it following Lefort, not have a special relationship - a relationship that may not be completely reduced to the ontic level of other spaces - to the ontological level of space/time? Does the so-called public, political space - without becoming a meta-space - not refer to a far greater extent to the outside of society and to the instance of dislocation than other social spaces? Not because it emerged historically as a result of the division of society in the first place (the secession and evacuation of the place of power, etc.), but because it continues to perform this division qua conflictual debate again and again, and is itself constructed again and again by means of debate in the first place. Furthermore, it would follow from this that the public sphere evolves wherever “debate” occurs (and thus that it cannot be restricted to certain places such as parliament), i.e. that the public space itself is not a space at all (nor a space among spaces), but rather a principle - the principle of reactivation, i.e. of political dislocation of social sedimentations as a result of the onset of temporality. As a principle of reactivation (of space by time), the public sphere rather belongs to the ontological level than the ontic level of social sediments. In fact, both concepts of the public sphere, Lefort’s and Habermas’, are ontological concepts (or rather they are both quasi-transcendental). Above all this unifies them against approaches of social science that always remain on the ontic level. And yet there is an indelible difference between Lefort et al. and Habermas et al.To clarify matters, let us recall how we defined space and time at the beginning.Time was seen as the ontological principle of dislocation of a structure that results from the essential dependence of the structure on a constitutive outside, whereas space, inversely, designates the theoretical extreme case of complete eradication of temporality and dislocation. This should make it adequately clear as to what the real difference is between radical democratic quasi-transcendentalists such as Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe, Deutsche and others on the one hand, and universal pragmatic quasi-transcendentalists such as Habermas on the other. It is Habermas’ model of consensus that sees dislocation only as disturbance or noisome interference in the process of communication and that aims to eradicate dislocation and completely spatialize the public sphere. Ultimately, then, it is a concept of space. As opposed to Habermas, according to whose theory the public sphere occupies the category of space (as unified totality), Lefort’s public sphere is precisely not a space, but rather, in the final analysis, belongs to the order of temporality, namely to the order of conflict. Lefort’s public sphere is thus ultimately not an ontic location but rather an ontological principle - dislocation. The model of radical and plural democracy is not concerned with the substantial consensual standardisation of space, i.e. finding consensus, but rather with its conflictual opening. It is about avoiding precisely the occupation of the empty space of power, the permanent creation of closed space. From the standpoint of democracy theory, the public sphere is at once a product and condition of possibility of democracy as it is the public sphere that stands for the constitutive division of society and creates this division qua conflictual, antagonistic debate again and again. Democracy means that (at the ontic level) no particular public sphere, not even the public sphere of rational noncoercive discussion, may halt this debate or delegitimise deviating political language games. Lefort’s public sphere is thus not a meta-space, either, as is Habermas’ public sphere, because time cannot form space (time cannot, as Laclau says, hegemonise anything). It is nothing but the principle of the temporalising opening of space, the guarantor that the place of the public sphere remains empty.

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Public art will be measured by whether it ultimately decides in favour of space - the social - or for time: the political.

[from: Andreas Lechner / Petra Maier (Ed.), stadtmotiv*, Wien: selene 1999]

[1] Rosalyn Deutsche: Evictions. Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, Mass-London: MIT Press 1996, p. xxiv. [2] Occasionally there have been translations of and interviews with Laclau and Mouffe in Germanlanguage art journals such as Texte zur Kunst, springerin or die Nummer. [3] The fact that economic determinism has often been connected with these guiding disciplines is the real problem. After accepting the basic assumptions of anti-economic political theory (Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe), Deutsche must thus fight on this front against the heirs of economic determinism in critical urbanism such as Harvey or Jameson. [4] Doreen Massey: “Politics and Space/Time”, in New Left Review No. 196 (Nov./Dec. 1992). [5] Massey counts the following among this second wave: Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London 1989, and the anthology Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London 1985, edited by Derek Gregory and John Urry, and her own Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London 1984. As can be seen from the programmatic titles of these works, it is characteristic that in these cases they seek to link up with social sciences rather than with political theory. [6] “With Time, Massey writes, “are aligned History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics and Reason, portentous things with gravitas and capital letters. With space on the other hand are aligned the other poles of these concepts: stasis, (‘simple’) reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the body.” op. cit., p. 73. [7] op. cit., p. 67. [8] Specifically, the line of argumentation developed by Laclau is as follows. Laclau begins with Saussure’s assumption that meaning can only evolve within a system of differences. The possibility of the existence of a system of difference, however, is dependent on the existence of its boundaries - and these boundaries cannot belong to the side of the system as, in this case, the boundary itself would be just another difference and consequently not a boundary of differences. Only if we see the outside of the system as a radical outside - and the boundary thus as an excluding boundary - can we speak of systematicity or meaning in the first place. As a consequence, the boundaries themselves cannot be signified, but can only be manifested as an interruption or breakdown of the process of signification.The radicality of the radical outside (non-meaning) is not only the condition of possibility for establishing a structure (meaning), it is at the same time the condition of impossibility of establishing a structure as closed totality (full meaning). In other words, the function of .the excluding boundary thus consists in introducing an essential ambivalence into the system of difference constituted by these boundaries. [9] Strictly speaking, the concept sequence - if it implies putting diachronous elements into synchronous order - is in itself a spatial concept.

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[10] It follows from this that, strictly speaking, there is no diachronicity. In order to become representable, the diachronous must be synchronised. [11] Ernesto Laclau: New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London-New York: Verso 1990, p. 41. [12] We know from memory theory, for example from rhetoric, that our memory is best extended with the aid of spatial constructions, memory architectures. [13] Massey’s criticism of Laclau works precisely by constantly reducing Laclau to a structuralist. [14] Laclau, op. cit., p. 35. [15] op. cit., p. 41-42. [16] op. cit., p. 42. [17] op. cit., p. 68. [18] Here, Laclau follows a distinction between politics and the political that can be found in French since Ricoeur and as recently as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and in the Anglo-American literature, for example, in the works of Sheldon Wolin. [19] Another interesting thing about this quotation is that Howarth, too, emphasises a point in his interpretation of Laclau that corresponds to the second wave of the eighties diagnosed by Massey, albeit in this case in terms of the narrower field of political theory: not only space has a political dimension, but also, as Howarth says, every politics always has a spatial dimension, too. David Howarth: “Reflections on the Politics of Space and Time”, in Angelaki 1/1 (1993), p. 47. Cf. also Michael Reid’s response to Howarth: “The Aims of Radicalism”, in Angelaki 1/3 (1994). On the discussion between Massey and Laclau cf. also Malcolm Miles: Art Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures. London: Routledge 1997. [20] op. cit., p. 47. [21] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London-New York 1985. [22] Laclau: New Reflections, p. 72. [23] The following portrayals do not intend to give a detailed, in-depth appraisal of these theories but rather a clarification - ex negativo - of our own suggestion of a political theory of space. [24] Michel Foucault: “Other Spaces”, in Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay (Ed.): Other Spaces. The Affair of the Heterotopia. HDA-Dokumente der Architektur 10, Haus der Architektur, Graz 1998, p. 37. [25] Benjamin Genocchio: “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces”, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Ed.): Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford-Cambridge, Mass. 1995, p. 36. [26] Bernd Knaller-Vlay and Roland Ritter: “Editorial”, op. cit., p. 10. [27] Cf. Marko Schacher’s report in Texte zur Kunst, March 1997, p. 170.

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[28] Sadie Plant: “No Plans”, in Architectural Design, vol. 65, 11/12 (November/December 1995), p. 36. [29] op. cit., p. 37. [30] Laclau: New Reflections, p. 40. [31] ibid. One of the side-effects of blind insistence on the fluid nature of the network, not taking into account equally existing fixation endeavours, is that we fail to recognise the production of new centres such as World Cities. A phenomenon that Saskia Sassen, for example, insists be taken into consideration: the electronic “free-flowing” financial capital requires infrastructural fixation (Manhattan, London, Tokyo, Bombay). Sassen goes even one step further, contending that cyberspace is a new - transterritorial form of centrality: the network has no centre, the network is the centre (or rather, I would add, one of the centres currently most articulated). [32] Be it also in the form of a network of autonomous public spheres. [33] Ernesto Laclau: Emancipation(s). London-New York: Verso 1996, p. 121. [34] It is often said that Habermas makes the communication model of the university seminar room into a model of politics. The fact that the agonal moment of politics is disregarded goes without saying. Cf., for example, Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political. London-New York: Verso 1993. Cf. also the works of William E. Connolly, e. g. Politics and Ambiguity. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press 1987; or Identity/Difference. Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press 1991. [35] op. cit., p. 120. [36] Nancy Fraser: “Rethinking the Public Sphere”, in Craig Calhoun (Ed.): Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1992; Seyla Benhabib: “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas”, op. cit. Despite the superficial multiplication of the public sphere, its decisive feature of normative deliberation is still preserved for all public spheres.The pluralising updating thus alters nothing about the fact itself. [37] Habermas is sceptical about the consciousness philosophical legacy of a theory of the public space as a super-brain, although he does not always manage to avoid this tradition himself. [38] Note, in both cases in the plural. Not why the public sphere dominates other public spheres, but rather why certain public spheres dominate other public spheres. [39] op. cit., p. xxii. [40] Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism. Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso 1991; David Harvey:The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell 1989. Deutsche renders a convincing criticism of Jameson’s and Harvey’s economism. [41] op. cit., p. 228-9. [42] op. cit., p. 268. [43] op. cit., p. 274.

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[44] On Lefort’s concept of the public sphere, cf. i. a. his essay “Les droits de I’homme et I’Etat-providence”, in Claude Lefort: Essais sur le politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil 1986. [45] To Lefort, the expansion of human rights - from formerly white, male land-owners, to the inclusion of women, to the inclusion of African-Americans brought about by the civil-rights movement, and beyond - (contra the ideology-critical suspicion of human rights being “purely formal”) means a generative principle of democracy; it cannot be completed: what comes under the category of “humans” possessing the right to have rights needs to be defined wider and wider. [46] op. cit., p. 289. [47] ibid. [48] A perhaps more apt name for this condition - considering the extent to which the concept totalitarianism has been ideologised by the rhetoric of the Cold War - was proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy: immanentism.This concept would have the advantage that it immediately makes it clear that in “totalitarian” conjunctures the constitutive outside of society is eradicated - or rather: denied - and the immanence of the latter is asserted. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy: Die undarstellbare Gemeinschaft. Stuttgart: Patricia Scharz 1988; Engl.: The Inoperative Community. [49] op. cit., p. 287. [50] op. cit., p. 310. [51] op. cit., p. 278.

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Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture.

Sir Ken Adam in conversation with Sir Christopher Frayling, V&A I saw Sir Ken Adam, production designer of numerous Bonds, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and Dr. Strangelove amongst other movies, interviewed by Christopher Frayling at the V&A last Friday, as part of their current Cold War Modern exhibit. As a result, Frayling concentrated the conversation on those iconic Cold War images of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, and the numerous lairs for Bond Villains he had designed. Frayling described these lairs with a lovely turn of phrase, paraphrasing Corbusier’s “houses are machines for living in” - that they were “Machines for being a meglomaniac in”. Adam responded that his intention was to make the Bond Villain a contemporary creature. They should embedded in the material culture of the times - albeit with the resources of a meglomaniac millionaire or billionaire - and also able to reach a little bit beyond into a near-future as those resources allow. Although rather than maintaining a purely high-modernist aesthetic, Adam’s villains were ostentatious, status-seeking magpies, with their old masters from a daring heist, siberian tiger rugs and priceless antiques on display next to their Eames recliners and Open-plan freestanding fireplaces. “Gantries and Baroque” might be the best name for the look though, as this finery was, of course, all inside the ’sanctum-sanctorum’ of their lair - generally they would have maintained such a well-appointed apartment somewhere within a more massive and industrial death-dealing facility staffed by uniformed private armies. Frayling pointed out this repeating formula in the 60s and 70s Bond movies to the audience. A hidden fortress, that had to be discovered, infiltrated and destroyed with a girl/goddess as guide - but not to be destroyed before we could take in some of the fine lifestyle touches that supervillainy gave as rewards. But then in an almost throw-away aside to Adam, he reflected that the modern Bond villain (and he might have added, villains in pop culture in general) is placeless, ubiquitous, mobile. His hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile

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phone. Where’s the fun in that for a production designer? Maybe it’s in the objects. It’s not the pictures that got small, but the places our villains draw they powers from. Perhaps the architypical transformation from gigantic static lair to mobile, compact “UbiLair” is in the film Spartan, where Val Kilmer’s anti-heroic ronin carries everything he needs in his “go-bag” - including a padded shooting mat that unfolds from it to turn any place into a place where he holds the advantage. Move beyond film and I immediately think of my favourite supervillain of the year, Ezekiel ‘Zeke’ Stane from Matt Fraction’s masterful run on the comicbook Invincible Iron Man. As Fraction puts it: Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist, he has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn’t want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete. Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop. He’s the open source to Stark’s closed source oppressiveness. He has no headquarters, no base, and no bank account. He’s a true ghost in the machine; completely off the grid, flexible, and mobile. That absolutely flies in the face of Tony’s received business wisdom and in the way business is done. There are banks and lawyers and you have facilities and testing. Stane is a much more different animal. He’s a much smarter, more mobile and much quicker to respond and evolve futurist. Zeke has no need for specialised infrastructure beyond commodity gear than he can improvise and customise. He doesn’t need HeliCarriers or giant military-industrial infrastructure like Tony Stark. He just needs his brain and his hate. As Fraction says in an interview: I was trying to figure out what a new Iron Man would look like, and I figured, well, there wouldn’t be a suit anymore.The user would be the suit. I just started to riff on that, on cybernetics and riffing on weaponized bodymod culture stuff. Tony’s old money, old world, old school and old model manufacture. So where would Stane, a guy that had no manufacturing base and no assembly facilities, get his tech? Everything would need power sources, so how would that work? Where would the surgeries be performed? How would he pay for it? What’s his ideology? I started reading up on 4G war and warfare. And on and on until I understood Stane’s reality, and how Stane would wage war on Stark Industries and Tony both. So - for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling. But - what about materialising, visualising these invisible networks in order to do so? Dan Hill just published a spectacular study of his - into the ‘architecture’ of wifi in a public space. They make visible the invisible flows of the network around tangible architecture, and the effect that has on how people inhabit that tangible space. Interesting, deeply-interesting stuff. Me, I just think that’s what’s fluxing and flexing around the 4th Gen Bond Villain.

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That’s what could telegraph to us, the audience their bad intentions. That’s what communicates their preference, and their potency. Could it do it as effectively, immediately, seductively as Sir Ken could with Cor-Ten and Cashmere? Probably not. Yet. The visualisations he’s made Dan freely admits make more than a nod to Cedric Price’s Aviary at London Zoo. Price himself being no stranger to creating intangible, mobile, flexible architectures - I bet he would have been bursting with ideas for 4th Gen Bond Villain UbiLairs… In the mean-time, in the real world of all-controlling superpowers, we seem to be coming full circle, architecture professor Jeffrey Huang has been investigating the all-too-tangible architecture of what we rather-wishfully call the cloud: server farms. These hydropowered, energy-guzzelling megastructures seem to have all the ‘Gantry’ but not a lot of ‘Baroque’ panache to qualify as good old-fashioned Bond Villain SuperLairs. But, perhaps Larry and Sergei are working on it… This summer, Google put a patent on floating data centers cooled and powered by the ocean. Sir Ken was always ahead of his time.

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Paradicmatic Pedagogics: An interview with Peter Cook

Design Boom: What is the best moment of the day? Peter Cook: About 6:45 in the morning because I wake up very early, and I think my best thoughts, my mind is very clear, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m an early morning person. DB: What kind of music do you listen to at the moment? PC: A lot of 20th century brazilian music. DB: Do you listen to the radio? PC: A little bit. DB: What books do you have on your bedside table? PC: Either a biography or mostly architecture or catalogues or text books, information books. DB: Do you read design magazines? PC: Not very much, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find them very stimulating. DB: Where do you get news from? PC: Gossip. DB: Do you notice how women are dressing? Do you have any preferences? PC: Yes. I like women who have originality of style and who have a view of themselves. DB: What kind of clothes do you avoid wearing? PC: Brown. DB: Do you have any pets? PC: No, but I have a 12 year old son. DB: When you were a child, what did you want to be? PC: Architect, since the age 8.

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DB:Where do you work on your designs and projects? PC: Partly at home and partly in university, sometimes in austria where we have a house. DB: Who would you like to design something for? PC: I would love to plan a seaside town, because I come from the seaside. DB: Do you discuss your work with architects and designers? PC: Yes, very much. I’m surrounded by architects -- wife, friends. DB: Describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it. PC: Lyrical technical mechanical, even slightly gothic. DB: Does form follow function in your environment? PC: Not always (laughs). DB: The spirit of archigram is optimism, you said. is there anything else? PC: It also has to do with the application of being inspired or having ideas, you can always have an idea about anything, but it could be something even more, it could be even better, there’s still room for improvement and manipulation and the application of ideas in almost every situation. DB: How do you see your work? PC: Is it about the theory or about the actual creation? I’ve always been an optimist and I’ve always been interested in progress. If civilization has existed for thousands of years, it must and can only go forwards. that’s why I can’t stand people who are boring. What we’re involved in is applying imagination. maybe some people don’t have imagination and borrow other peoples. Other people have imagination but can’t apply it. the new is not only the product of the past. And another thing I find fascinating is that certain things are in the air at a certain time, and I find this amazing and I’ve never gotten to the bottom of this. ideas are rolling in the air. Archigram has been out of style for a long time, but about 8 years ago, archigram started to get more attention again. I think ideas go in and out of fashion. But what amazes people is that we’re still alive and we can come around and talk about it. And this sort of breaks the rules, because it’s as if you’re supposed to be out of the scene. I guess we’re due to go out of fashion again any minute. I am extremely cynical about all of this, and I don’t think it has anything to say with the actual content of the work. We should have been given the medal years back, but the guys in between wouldn’t have been caught dead even giving us a cup of tea. I myself can remember when I wouldn’t have been caught dead using a metal structure. But it is nice to get the medal, and for us it symbolizes that there is a sort of thread of people that are optimistic and creative and imaginative, although they do not all have to do the same kind of thing. for us the medal stands for that. DB: Which of your work has given you the most satisfaction? PC: I suppose seeing what happens to former students, but so few of them go onto actually doing anything.

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DB: Is there any architect from the past, you appreciate a lot? PC: Gaudi. DB: And those still active, are there any particular ones you appreciate? PC: I actually appreciate Frank Gehry. DB: Any advice for the young? PC: Not to be put off, intimidated by those who just happen to be older. DB: What are you afraid of regarding the future ? PC: Death, narrow-mindedness and the pious.

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ABSTRACTCONTEXTCOMPLEXELEMENTSCOMPONENTSSTRUCTUREDATABASESPROPORTIONRULESOBJECTTRUTHSUNIVERSALSUPERFICIALLYRECOGNISABLESIGNIFICANCEFUNCTIONALITYCONSTRUCTIONMATERIA LSWORK”YOUEMPLOYSTONE,WOODAND CONCRETE,ANDWITHTHESEMATERIALSYO UBUILDHOUSESANDPALACES:THISISCONST RUCTION.INGINUITYISATWORK.BUTSUDDE LYYOUTOUCHMYHEART,YOUDOMEGOOD. IAMHAPPYANDISAY:THISISBEAUTIFUL.THATISARCHITECTURE”(LECORBUSIER,TOWARDSAN EWARCHITECTURE,DOVERPUBLICATIONS198 5)CONCEPTSPRECEPTFUNCTIONASPECTSVALUESSTIMULATIONPERCEPTIONPERFECTIONORIGINALITYINSTRUMETALITYIMPACTPOWERDEMANDSSECURITYCULTURESKNOWLEGDESTRADITIONSPRACTICESCRAFTPROCESSTRIALERRORINPROVISATIONREPLICATIONEXPERIENCEPRODUCTIONAREASCAESSUPERNATURALURBANISMEDESIGNCOMPLEXITYARTISTTECHNICALSAESTHETICSHUMANISTASPECTSCLIENTSPROTOTYPESSTYLESPRODUCTIONPATTERNREACTIONLINESQUALITYSYNTHESISMEETINGFORMSSURFACESDETAILS190

RIGHTMEANSABUILDINGINWHICHTHEWHOLEFORMANDITSFNCTIONARETIEDTOGETHERIDEAAPPROACHTODAYINDIVIDUALISTSSTUDIESMULTIDISCIPLINARYDESIGNPROJECTADDITIONSEPARATIONACCELERATIONPRINCIPLESTRANSPORTATIONINDUSTRYIMMEDIATEACTIONCOMSUPTIONREDUCTIONDEMONSTRATIONOPERATIONPROPOSALSENERGYDEMANDSUFFICIENCYINNOVATIONCOMPETITIONSALTERNATIVESTEAMPUBLICEXPERIENCEARTSCIENCESENSECALCULATIONSHARMONYPRINCIPLETHEORYRYTHMBODIESDIMENSIONSSYMMETRYORDERINFLUENCESCALEDISTANCESCHARACTERMEANINGEXPERTISEPATTERNSNETWORKPROBLEMWAYROOMTOWNSENTRYSITUATIONWORDSLANGUAGESENSETOPICWHOLESYSTEMCONDITIONSCONFLICTSTHINKINGPROJECTDESIRESEFFICIENCYTASKHAPPINESSOBJECTCODEREUSEIMPACTSCOLLECTIONSYMBOLSPICTUREDESCRIPTIONKEYWORDSLABELSVOCABULARYPLACETIMELESSQUALITYPATTERN……………....................................…… INGRID Cogne 09.09 14/11/08 191

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Laptop Glare Shield (Template for Apple MacBook Pro 15”) Joachim Stein

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allows using your Laptop in sunlight

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protects your privacy

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covers manufacturerʼs logo

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open source: use and modify as you like

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environment friendly

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works best in combination with baseball hat

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avoid using sunglasses

>> enlarge this page to A1 in order to achieve a 1:1 template that you can cut out

http://joaoﬂux.net

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Beijing 2050

Project Name: Beijing 2050, Beijing, August, 2006 Location:Beijing Design Period: August, 2006 Architect: Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun Project Team: Zheng Tao, Fu Changrui The coming 2008 Olympic Games have symbolized the dream and ambition of Beijing for many years. However,as the 2008 Olympic Games draws near,it is necessary for us now to envision Beijing's future beyond 2008 and to think about what Beijing's long term goal and imagine new possibilities for the city's design. Beijing and politics are inseparable. Almost all the landmark architectures in Beijing, including "the 10th anniversary of PRC, 10 great architectures," architecture built for Asian Games and Olympic Games were built within a short period at several stages of modern society development.Will these architectural creations reshape the city? The city we mean is not just its images, but the lives of the people living in it. Olympics We hope it will lead to people's thinking about their future and building greater confidence in their dreams in Beijing. It is not only a picture, be it beautiful or not, it is perhaps a mirror from which we can get a good look at history as well as the world today. It is no rebellious or radical point of view, for we should be familiar with history and reality, and we believe all this will come into being in 2050. The Future Of The Hutongs History is an invaluable asset of Beijing. The city can't be understood with a grasp of Beijing's rich history. While Hutongs are a haven to the visitor, it is a difficult environment for local Beijingers who live in the hutongs which have no private bathroom or shower. The hutong dwellers are being moved by the government to outskirts of the city, their homes being

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occupied by the wealthy and developers who recreate the spaces where they once existed. We hope that generations live happy life in this land. Some new houses will replace old ones.That's natural law of life and space. The new ones will reflect future life style. The old and the new, they complement each other in the space respectively. 2050's Hutong values people's life, not just the traditional form. Floating island over the Central Business District The CBD in Beijing was built according to the western vision of modernization created in the last century, which is regarded as an expression of wealth and status. However, unlike Western countries, Beijing's CBD isn't characterized by Western countries' ambition to push the limits of technology and the present, nor does it attempt to set future new standards for itself. What will the densely populated future city in China look like? We think we need a literal connection rather than segregation or simply chasing the building height. Digital studios, multi-media business centers, theaters, restaurants, libraries, sightseeing, exhibitions, gyms, and even a man made lake are elevated above the CBD, and connect with each other horizontally. This proposal and the new city organization principle articulate our queries of "machine aesthetics" and "vertical city", characterized by modernism. Tiananmen: People's Park The Tiananmen Square we see today does not have a long history. All the changes it witness in the past few decades reflect the evolution of the nation's spirit. By 2050, a mature and democratic China will emerge, and spaces for massive political gathering and troop procession like Red Square may no longer be necessary. The transportation could no longer rely on the ground traffic system, it may utilize an above-ground or underground system due to changes in transportation. What will Tiananmen Square be like when it is deprived of its political and transportation functions? The ground might turn into a garden or park, and cultural facilities could be placed underground to connect to a transportation network. A national theatre is hidden inside a "landscape mountain", diffusing its forms in what is now Zhongnanhai, the nearby Communist Party compound. In 2050, Tiananmen Square is an urban space filled with life and the biggest green area in the center of Beijing.

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www.treehugger.com

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Green Cities What all greening cities -- and we use the word “greening” as no city, not even Portland, is yet truly green with a capital “G” -- have in common is vision and policy plan for smart growth. After that, the other important factors seem to be:

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Good streets for bike and pedestrian traffic

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Robust transit

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Lots of green canopy

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Expanding and connecting of open spaces

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Natural storm water management techniques

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Renewable energy for metropolitan power generation

But which cities out there are the up-and-comers, those starting to embrace these criteria, with the aesthetics and spirited citizenry that make cities great -- and green?

1. Malmö, Sweden. Malmö is in line to be a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) “One Planet Living” representative city. It was Sweden’s first Fair Trade city, and you can tell in local cafés and restaurants, which feature lots of Fair Trade and organic choices. Malmö’s latest sustainable city plan takes climate change into account and sets goals for a 30% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. Malmö is seriously building green, too –- the Hyllie section of town will run on 100% renewable energy and include lots of green roofs and urban gardens. Friendly competition from Copenhagen as well as nearby Växjö, which has won several awards for greening in Sweden, continues to keep Malmö on its toes. Malmö is definitely a role model for mid-sized green cities.

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2. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Generally when people think “green city” and “Canada” it is Vancouver that comes to mind, and for lots of great reasons, including 90 percent of its energy generated by renewable sources. But Toronto garnered top marks in Ethisphere’s recent evaluation of cities that would be able to call themselves “Global Sustainability Centers” by 2020. Toronto can’t perhaps generate as much excitement as Vancouver, but it scores well on the basics, has a good plan in place and some impressive stats –- the city has reduced greenhouse gas emissions 40% since 1990. Great ideas in Toronto include the adoption of a green roof policy, the green makeoverat the Brickworks, and zerofootprint toronto, which has the potential to inspire CO2 footprint makeovers and change the city’s green self-image! 3. Singapore. According to Ethisphere, the greenest cities of 2020 will likely be located in India and Asia -- and not the developed world. If Masdar City’s ambitious plans become the norm, this sounds about right. In any case, Singapore has a head-start in Asia -- the city claims nearly 50 percent of its land is in green space. With nearly five million inhabitants, it’s a very clean and relatively conservative city (chewing gum and cigarette butts are legally banned!), with the pace, the tropical weather, and a fabulous food culture to keep things interesting. Singapore has embraced high tech along with its clean ethos and its focus on urban greenspaces. What may be a challenge is to add two million more citizens to what is already a dense urban space. Cool projects include the new downtown eco-complex city block design by Foster + Partners. 4. Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador. Disaster became opportunity in Bahía de Caráquez, which suffered damage from natural disasters including an earthquake in the 1990’s, but bounced back with a plan for greening and was declared an “ecological city” in 1999 after putting sustainable ideals into law. Since then, the city has become home to the first certified-organic shrimp farm, replanted thousands of native trees, and established an urban “wild corridor” (Ecuador has granted nature rights in its constitution). The city also takes its zero waste goals seriously, improved its human-scale transport, and has generally evolved into a small urban sustainability oasis, though volunteers for the Planet Drum sustainability efforts in Bahía warn that efforts have declined in recent years. Clean water for all city residents is still a huge problem, and Planet Drum believes that to continue its great momentum, Bahía needs more eco-education of citizens. 5. Cape Town, South Africa. For beauty in a natural setting, Cape Town can’t be beat. This city of 2.5 million people adopted a sustainability plan in 2004 that includes a goal for 10% of energy consumption

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coming from sustainable sources and 10% percent of homes equipped with solar power by 2020. Cape Town still has excessive poverty, and not even its continued growth as a destination tourism spot has done much to alleviate the problem. Drought and a long coast line makes it vulnerable to rising seas from global warming, so the city is putting lots of effort into these issues. Last but not least, Cape Town definitely has nearby Johannesburg nipping at its heels as far as greening is concerned. But Ethisphere says Cape Town has the foresight in place to be a global sustainability center by 2020.

6. Brighton, United Kingdom. As with New York in the U.S., London leads the way in the U.K. in exciting sustainability efforts. Former mayor Ken Livingstone did much to catapult green city efforts into the limelight in London. In comparison, little Brighton, with a fraction of Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population, garnered Forum for the Futureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (FFTF) number one spot as most sustainable city in the U.K. Most of Brightonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s designation can be attributed to its quality of life, its citizens and, FFTF says, its future plans -- city officials are already working on a One Planet Living plan, due to wrap up this December. Construction is also finishing up on the One Planet-endorsed One Brighton development. 7. Seattle, Washington. Seattle has some secret weapons, mainly its mayor, Greg Nickles, who has not only led the charge to keep Seattle on a sustainable path, but has also done much to promote healthy competition between green cities worldwide. The city has a huge wealth of energy-efficient green buildings and is retrofitting older ones for efficiency, as well as making investments in district heating, and light-rail. Ninety percent of energy already comes from renewable sources. Metro traffic congestion is still a big problem, and the cost of living remains high. Being in the shadow in terms of sustainability may continue to be good for Seattle, however, as it tries to balance its natural beauty and access to recreation with future growth.

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On The Language Of Archicture

Charlotte West Interview with architect Jennifer Magnolfi (Herman Miller) How do you put architecture and design into words? The history and criticism of architecture as a discipline alone is fairly young. It started in 1968 with the advent of publications and magazines as we know it. Prior to that, it was relegated to the academy and to the work of few scholars accompanying the thinking and discovery process udergoing their practice. This can clarify the disconnect that sometimes is seen and the commodification of the thinking behind architecture, vis a vis architectural production proper. It did not start as putting design into words, but it started as a way to communicate the specific design intent of the artist/designer to the constituency of stakeholders involved in a building. To what extent can words truly capture the physicality of architecture and design? To the extent and skill of the communicator. Is a picture really worth a 1000 words? When it comes to architecture, the experience of the space should be worth a million. Interview with artist Erik Krikortz How do you put architecture and design into words?To what extent can words truly capture the physicality of architecture and design? Words can help us to better understand, but as the question implies, never perfectly capture all visual, emotional, or structural aspects of architecture, art or design. Not even all theoretical aspects of architecture, art or design can be described wordly. But they would not exist without words. Is a picture really worth a 1000 words? A picture can be worth much more than a thousand words. But a (short) text can be worth more than thousands of pictures. I believe that pictures and words often go hand in hand. We need to talk about pictures and words alone are often not enough. More specifically for you, is there an increasing convergence of art and architecture? I see very few artists working with architecture, or vice versa. The art world is interested in architecture though, and architecture is often presented and discussed within art institutions. I have not seen the same interest from the opposite side. Architecture is a

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professional field, more pragmatic than art. Art is built on the concept of sacrifice and amateurism. Architecture does not involve a critical discourse the same way that art does â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and art does not involve the professional possibilities that architecture provides.They would both profit from meeting and converging more, but I cannot see that happening to any greater extent. How does architecture play a role in your work as an artist? By involving architecture in art, an artist can use the texture of the city. The art gets more integrated in everyday life and reaches a wider audience.

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MYCHOREOGRAPHY.ORG SING ALONG!

En ce jour de célébration de la réunification, Mychoreography.org est extrêmement honoré d´ajouter á son palmares d´évèvenementiels sociopolitico-culturo-sportif-super chic, une rencontre de haut niveau sonore autour de tubes qui nous unirons une fois de plus. Chantez, chantez, et chantez fort!

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Donna Summer - Hot Stuff

Sittin' here, eatin' my heart out waitin' waitin' for some lover to call dialed about a thousand numbers lately almost rang the phone off the wall Lookin' for some hot stuff baby this evenin' I need some hot stuff baby tonight I want some hot stuff baby this evenin' gotta have some hot stuff gotta have some lovin' tonight I need hot stuff I want some hot stuff I need hot stuff Lookin' for a lover who needs another don't want another night on my own wanna share my love with a warm blooded lover wanna bring a wild man back home Gotta have some hot love baby this evenin' I need some hot stuff baby tonight I want some hot stuff baby this evenin' gotta have some lovin' got to have a love tonight I need hot stuff hot love lookin' for hot love Hot, hot, hot, hot stuff hot, hot, hot hot, hot, hot, hot stuff hot, hot, hot

How's that hot stuff baby this evenin' I need some hot stuff baby tonight gimme little hot stuff baby this evenin' hot stuff baby got to I need your love tonight I need hot stuff lookin' for hot stuff gotta have some hot stuff Sittin' here eatin' my heart out no reason won't spend another night on my own I dialed about hundred numbers baby I'm bound to find somebody home Gotta have some hot stuff baby this evenin' I need some hot stuff baby tonight lookin' for some hot stuff baby this evenin' I need your love baby don't need your love tonight Hot stuff baby this evening I need hot stuff baby tonight yes, yes, I want some hot stuff baby this evenin' I want some hot stuff baby tonight yes, yes, yes now hot stuff baby I need your hot stuff baby tonight I want some hot stuff baby this evenin' hot stuff baby got to I need your love tonight

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Scorpion- Wind of change

I follow the Moskva Down to Gorky Park Listening to the wind of change An August summer night Soldiers passing by Listening to the wind of change The world closing in Did you ever think That we could be so close,like brothers The future's in the air I can feel it everywhere Blowing with the wind of change Chorus: Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night Where the children of tomorrow dream away In the wind of change Walking down the street Distant memories Are buried in the past forever I fallow the Moskva Down to Gorky Park Listening to the wind of change Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night

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Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams With you and me Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night Where the children of tomorrow dream away In the wind of change The wind of change blows straight Into the face of time Like a stormwind that will ring The freedom bell for peace of mind Let your balalaika sing What my guitar wants to say Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams With you and me Take me to the magic of the moment On a glory night Where the children of tomorrow dream away In the wind of change

Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go (Love Theme From "Titanic")

Every night in my dreams I see you. I feel you. That is how I know you go on. Far across the distance And spaces between us You have come to show you go on. Near, far, wherever you are I believe that the heart does go on Once more you open the door And you're here in my heart And my heart will go on and on Love can touch us one time And last for a lifetime And never go till we're one Love was when I loved you One true time I hold to In my life we'll always go on Near, far, wherever you are I believe that the heart does go on Once more you open the door And you're here in my heart And my heart will go on and on There is some love that will not go away You're here, there's nothing I fear, And I know that my heart will go on We'll stay forever this way You are safe in my heart And my heart will go on and on

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Gloria Gaynor - I will survive First I was afraid I was petrified Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side But I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong I grew strong I learned how to carry on and so you're back from outer space I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face I should have changed my stupid lock I should have made you leave your key If I had known for just one second you'd be back to bother me Go on now go walk out the door just turn around now 'cause you're not welcome anymore weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye you think I'd crumble you think I'd lay down and die Oh no, not I I will survive as long as i know how to love I know I will stay alive I've got all my life to live I've got all my love to give and I'll survive I will survive It took all the strength I had not to fall apart kept trying hard to mend the pieces of my broken heart and I spent oh so many nights just feeling sorry for myself I used to cry Now I hold my head up high and you see me somebody new I'm not that chained up little person still in love with you and so you felt like dropping in and just expect me to be free now I'm saving all my loving for someone who's loving me

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Ricky Martin Ale Ale Ale Do you really want it (yeah) Do you really want it Do you really want it Do you really want it Go, go, go (go, go, go) Ale, ale, ale (ale, ale, ale) Go (go), go (go) Go (go), go (go) Here we go (yeah) The cup of life, this is the one Now is the time, don't ever stop Push it along, gotta be strong Push it along, right to the top The feeling in your soul is gonna take control Nothing can hold you back if you really want it I see it in your eyes, you want the cup of life Now that the day is here, gotta go and get it Do you really want it (yeah) Do you really want it (yeah) Here we go, ale, ale, ale Go, go, go, ale, ale, ale Tonight's the night we're gonna celebrate The cup of life, ale, ale, ale The cup of life, it's do or die It's here it's now, turn up the lights Push it along, then let it roll Push it along, go, go, go And when you feel the heat, the world is at your feet No one can hold you down if you really want it Just steal your destiny right from the hands of fate Reach for the cup of life 'cause your name is on it Do you really want it (yeah)

Here we go, ale, ale, ale Go, go, go, ale, ale, ale Tonight's the night we're gonna celebrate The cup of life, ale, ale, ale We're gonna get it Do you really want it We're gonna get it Do you really want it Yeah The cup of life, this is the one Now is the time, don't ever stop Push it along, gotta be strong Push it along, right to the top The feeling in your soul is gonna take control Nothing can hold you back if you really want it I see it in your eyes, you want the cup of life Now that the day is here, gotta go and get it (yeah) Do you really want it (yeah) Do you really want it (yeah) Do you really want it (yeah) Here we go, ale, ale, ale Go, go, go, ale, ale, ale Tonight's the night we're gonna celebrate The cup of life, ale, ale, ale Un, Dos, Tres, ole, ole, ole Un, Deux, Trois, ale, ale, ale Tonight's the night we're gonna celebrate The cup of life, ale, ale, ale Ale, ale (ale, ale) Ale, ale (ale, ale) Ale, ale (ale, ale) Ale, ale (ale, ale)

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Open Source Architecture: Studio Wikitecture

“Examples of collaborative practices can be found in art and in software engineering. They offer an alternative model in which innovation is achieved through the active participation of all parties. Ideas and products are no longer developed in a closed production process organized around the autonomy of the artist or the company, but evolve out of the pragmatism of usage. That is the motor of innovation.” “The movement has its origins in use. David Garcia: ‘The digital revolution thoroughly upset prevailing Western ideas about intellectual property.Thanks to the Internet there is an extensive network in which ideas are not so much protected by copyright as developed collectively. Ownership is not what counts, but use.” “In short, open source requires a shake-up of established ways of thinking and a different interpretation, both socially and economically, of the concept of innovation. The existing (cathedral) model with the autonomous genius of the chief designer at the top of a strict hierarchy is ‘closed’ and based on competition. That competition has proved to be an important generator of innovation, but also leads to enormous fragmentation. The bazaar model, on the other hand, is based on cooperation. It conforms to the network logic of an effective distribution of ideas, as a result of which these ideas can be tested in different situations and improved. It makes use of the ‘swarm intelligence’ of a large group of users and/ or developers.” “The fact is that the open-source process can also be an important stimulus for greater participation by residents in the spatial planning process. The only condition that needs to be met in order to produce an actively involved community is a reasonable promise: ‘It can be crude, buggy, incomplete and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.” “Thus, open source provides an organization model for the collective development of solutions for spatial issues involving housing, mobility, greenspace, urban renewal and so on. These are all complex issues that presuppose an interdisciplinary approach; in fact they can only be solved with cooperation. Open source presupposes that these ideas are disclosed and made available to others, who in turn can improve on them. In this way, design changes from a one-off action into a kind of evolutionary process.” “Open source would seem to be an attractive model for an architectural practice wishing to revive its pro-active role in spatial issues. Cooperation and the exchange of ideas give rise to a learning organization that is able to evolve by reacting alertly to change. This sounds easier than it is. As suggested earlier,

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the idea of a collaborative practice presupposes a complete reversal of the existing organizational model of a discipline that is very keen on its autonomy and the concept of copyright. The first step towards an open-source practice in architecture is to develop a broad-based awareness that cooperation and the opening up of architectural practice to input from outside are important requirements if an effective contribution is to be made to the ever-more complex spatial processes.â&#x20AC;?

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Naughty, Not Nice

Tom Dyckhoff

A group of radicals suggested tha architecture was dead. How right they were, says our correspondent

Like many revolutionaries, Adolfo Natalini has mellowed with age. These days he has a pleasant, even bourgeois, life as a soft-spoken professor of architecture. A few glints of the old firebrand still shine through: he still calls himself a Marxist. “Oh, yes,” he nods with pride; naturally, he gets a bit heated about Silvio Berlusconi — “our national disgrace”; and every day, he says, he sighs a little deeper at the apathy of his students. Not like in the mid-1960s, when Natalini was the rebellious young Turk, leading a band of merry Italian subversives called Superstudio, on show now for the first time in decades at the Design Museum in London. Superstudio wore their hair long, sported Che moustaches and outraged the architectural establishment with naughty antics. Modelling themselves in part on art-house movements such as the Situationists and Fluxus, they took part in happenings, filmed satirical Pythonesque films and suggested provocative stunts such as flooding Florence to keep out the tourists. But they weren’t just silly hippies. Superstudio had a deeply serious point: the death of architecture. Or rather the death of that particular brand of utopian architecture which had lorded it over Western society since the Renaissance. For centuries, the task of the architect had been to build the ideal city, whether the city state of 15th-century Italy, or, in Natalini’s day, a Modernist backdrop for car-driving, welfare-state citizens. Naturally, they all failed. Superstudio had the audacity to say that after 400 years of failure we should give it a rest. Utopia? It ain’t coming. They weren’t the first: years before them, a new generation of architects and designers had crawled out of the Second World War and rattled their pencils at old-guard Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, in whose image Western governments were furiously rebuilding their cities. At first these young guns thought they could simply tinker with Modernism to make it more humane. By the mid-Sixties, though, disillusionment had set in. Guinea pigs had had all the experience they needed of living in concrete utopias. Much of the social and political unrest that swept across Europe and America in the late Sixties was focused on disappointment with the modern city, expressed in benign local neighbourhood protests against comprehensive redevelopment, and in more violent outbursts.

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A huge column of the May 1968 rioters in Paris comprised architecture and planning students, protesting at the inhumanity of the new alienating banlieue, into which the French state had been dumping Algerian immigrants. Modernists had drifted far from their egalitarian roots, building “planned wastelands”, said one. Superstudio were the most flamboyant of these provocateurs, and the latest in a long tradition of utopian architectural fantasists. Before them were Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Superstudio’s own inspiration, Constant Nieuwenhuis, who also features in a current exhibition about the Cobra movement at the Baltic, Gateshead. Nieuwenhuis, of that more optimistic generation just before Natalini’s, fantasised about a socialist New Babylon built on dreams and fulfilment. Superstudio were more bitterly dystopian, contradicting governments which said that things could only get better. Well, no, in fact, things were getting worse. They savaged the absurdities of technology, capitalism and international Modernism in a series of prophetic projects in Barbarella space-age meets colour supplement style. The Continuous Monument is a vision of a world gobbled up by developers, a totalitarian grid of mirrored glass engulfing river, forest, desert, everywhere from the Taj Mahal to Coketown — even outgridding the grid of Manhattan: every high street and downtown looks creepily the same. Remind you of anywhere? In the Twelve Ideal Cities, Superstudio even foresaw the lonely misery of Connex commuters on the 8.12 from Sevenoaks. The ninth ideal city was an endless conveyor belt for inhabitants: “They know that if they get off the obligatory routes established by the machine they will be crushed by the machinery.” Instead, Superstudio asked naively, why couldn’t where we live be glamorous, exciting, poetic and romantic, instead of grey and humdrum. They asked why architects, instead of designing the latest fashionable dining chair or detailing drainpipes, couldn’t get off their backsides and do something about the world they were designing. They provoked, certainly, but they failed to come up with an alternative that wasn’t just hippy-dippy. Perhaps their grim message was that there was no alternative. Worse: they became “fashionable”, says Natalini with a sneer, their evocative images selling fashion mags and, to their horror, consumer goods. They designed furniture for a joke, making it as ugly and cumbersome as they could to make it hard to sell. But it was a bestseller. Wily capitalism got the better of them. So in the 1970s, Superstudio saw a future of garish post-Modernism, environmental catastrophe and aesthetic blandness. “We ran to the hills,” says Natalini. But come back, all is forgiven. We need a dose of Superstudio’s stupid, youthful idealism again. Three decades after the Italians exited stage left, architecture, and especially British architecture, has fulfilled all their prophesies. It’s cursed with niceness. It’s dull. Unquestioning.Terminally polite. Britain’s lottery design renaissance that we hear so much about has delivered few buildings of real oomph. Beacon projects, such as the London Eye or the city centre renaissance of Manchester, championed as if they were saviours, are just nice-enough loft-style neo-Modernism, with all of Modernism’s attitude sucked out for the tourists. Everywhere looks the same. I swear that if I see one more brushed steel banister, one more wood floor, any more walls of glass, any more curvy blobs with cheeky nicknames, I’ll scream. Has nobody got any other ideas? And this is the 1 per cent of buildings that can comfortably call themselves architecture. Don’t even get me going on the rest. What better monument to the years of John Major and Tony Blair than design by focus group?

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You can’t blame architects entirely. They’ve been through the mill, blamed in the 1970s for every social ill from inner city decay to the Bay City Rollers, walloped by Prince Charles in the 1980s, and, when finally allowed to build things again in the 1990s, told to design nice lofts, perhaps the odd art gallery, and not to complain. No wonder universities these days are turning out meek apolitical souls like Natalini’s students. No wonder architects don’t dream any more. Most have forgotten how. Get down to the Design Museum sharpish! Grow your hair long. Read some poetry. Do something. It’s only when bold form is backed by bold thought that architecture packs a punch — say, the Pompidou Centre, the Eden Project, or Will Alsop’s library in Peckham, southeast London, all buildings cast from Superstudio’s dream world, more relevant today than ever. This is architecture with a purpose, and purpose is what most architects lack these days.

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I Hate Architects

Hebrone First, God created the world and the heavens, and then he created Architects. Yes my fellow reader, this is how the world started according to the Architects. In there spoiled dysfunctional mind, they are god’s gift to the world and humanity! Sadly they got the government fooled and they believed them. I guess politicians and the general public loves the idea of the artist creating a building, of the free spirited human drawing the future bla bla blaaaa. Ok people, let me tell you what an architects is… the architect is the kid who got kicked out of engineering school because he is too dumb to do math and the art school won’t take him because he is too materialistic to be a true artist. YES I have said it people.. this is what an architect is, the reject of the engineering and art. What pisses me off is that all what an architect dose is he draws the freaking concept of the building, and every building (especially if it was publicly funded) is a temple to the architect’s ego. They put these missed up shapes that are just too expensive to build and in the same time with no freaking purpose within the building other than to symbolize the angle of the dangle of their sick and twisted mind. After that, they carry these drawings and give it to US engineers, weather civil engineers, structural or geotechnical and tell us, design this! Never the word PLEASE comes out… so we the math geeks embark on a journey of pain, agony and frustration to build and design a realistic and functional and SAFE structure. We argue day and night that HEY … You can’t do this .. but ooh no the mighty architect wants his arch to intercept the main beam that is holding the ceiling and then want the beam to look wavy while it’s carrying the darn thing!!!!!!! And unfortunately we engineers yield to there demands and figure out a way some how… we yield because the fucking architects have the whole world fooled to the point where they are the leading professional on any building… not the structural engineer… but the architect. And since they have the money … we have to make them happy. I sat on meetings in which major structural matters where in question…. And instead of debating the problems and how to solve it.. we wasted 80% of the time listening to the architect bitch at the contractor that the color of the brick was not what he wanted… he wanted Maroon with a touch of Fire Brick colors… while what he is seeing on site is more Dark Red and Sienna colors with a touch of Maroon.!!!!!!!!!!

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SERIOUSLY???? Are you fucking kidding me… here we are 3 engineers (geotechnical, civil and structural) bitching about.. a foundation problem that might cause the freaking building to fall and your royal highness is busy thinking about how the colors of the brick “will reflect on the shadows around the building???” YES I am quoting his words!! Of course when we were leaving, we passed by piles of the brick that will be used on the stupid building, the structural engineer asks me shyly: “aaaah they all look brown to me Mo…. Which one is the dark red and Sienna with a touch of maroon?” My answer was… a look of despair and sadness….and raised middle finger…. They draw and get the credit… and we slave on quietly like a silent warrior, and no one acknowledges our achievements and sacrifices. I hate Architects.

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Where Psychology Meets Architecture

Dave Barista Imagine how much more effective the design process would be if you knew what your clients were really thinking. What colors inspire them? How do they interact with their physical environments? How does sunlight make them feel? Answers to such questions are rarely gathered during typical pre-design planning sessions. For one thing, design teams rarely delve that deeply into the human psyche of end users. And most people have difficulty verbalizing this kind of subjective information, says Christine Del Sole. “Research shows that only 5% of what the average person thinks can be expressed verbally,” says Del Sole. The other 95% is hidden deep within the subconscious. Del Sole’s Pittsburgh-based consulting firm, fathom, applies a staid research technique to probe the conscious and subconscious thoughts of user groups and then translates these thoughts into design approaches. Think of it as a shrink session for building occupants. Developed by Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, the technique has been used for years by Coca-Cola, DuPont, and other Fortune 500 companies as a market research tool for product and brand development. Now, fathom is bringing it to the architectural community to help designers create better environments. “We ask questions a typical designer would not ask, and in ways that uncover the deepest thoughts,” says Del Sole. Key to the process is the use of art therapy during initial one-on-one interviews with end users. “We ask them to bring six to eight images that explain their thoughts and feelings about their most recent experience at the facility,” says Del Sole. “It’s a snapshot of what’s going on inside their head.” Fathom consultants then analyze the resulting graphical collages to look for common metaphorsideas like “transformation,” “energy,” “control”among the group of end users. “With the metaphors, we’re able conduct brainstorming sessions where we come up with design and human objectives that tie back to those metaphors,” she says.

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These objectives are then matched with the client’s programmatic needs to come up with a prioritized design guide. Del Sole points to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, currently under construction, as an example. One-on-one interviews with 29 patients, nurses, and doctors resulted in metaphors like “control,” “energy,” and “connection.” “The children wanted the new hospital to feel home-like and comfortable, but not too much like home because they felt that they wanted to be able to leave [the hospital],” says Del Sole. As a result, the architects reworked the design scheme, introducing bright, vibrant colors, softer materials, and patient-friendly features: a healing garden, private rooms, and individual temperature controls for patient rooms. “We also found that the kids were very intimated by the height of the beds,” says Del Sole. “We’re working with a manufacturer to design a bed that is much lower to the ground, but can be raised when nurses and doctors come in.” Since launching in June 2004, fathom has completed research programs for eight projects, including a public library, a high-rise condo tower, and a public park. Healthcare and residential have been its strongest markets, says Del Sole, and she is looking to expand into the K-12 market. “Figuring out what the kids need and want in a learning environment would be fascinating,” she says.

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Space and Archetypes In The Home

Edward Merkus The design and selection of a home is a very complex thing. Many aspects come into play in the selection process. The location is generally important, the size of the home, the layout, environmental influences, aesthetic appeal, individual or family’s belongings (contents) will fit into the house and the relation to the archetypal background of the individual or family. These would include the configuration of the internal space and their relationship to each other, the potential for personal growth of the individual or family and the extent of enclosure of the spaces. A. Two Extremes Of Space If we look at the concept of space we see that its extension is boundless, that is, it becomes, outer space. It is this extension and the inability to perceive boundaries that forms one extreme of a pair of opposites. The other opposite to boundless space is naturally space that has definite boundaries. It is this realm and its relationship to the boundless extension of space that architecture concerns itself with. Humans are certainly not alone in the construction and enclosing of space. We can schematically categorise the creatures that live on the earth into three groups. The first are those creatures that graze on the landscape or swim in the ocean. They make no shelter and roam from place to place in search of food. Animals such as sheep, cows, lions, tigers, fish, whales, dolphins etc. These creatures do not have closed boundaries like walls or shells. The boundaries are generally distant and take the form of fences, rivers, oceans, mountains and the like. The second category includes creatures that burrow into the earth. Their space is generally quite enclosed and dark. It offers protection against predators, heat and cold, light, fire etc.   The third and most interesting category is the creatures that create their own space. This category is surprising in the fact that it does not limit itself to any particular species. Bees create the most elaborate structure for their colonies. So to, members of the ant family, particularly termites. Beavers create the loveliest of structures called dens.They are usually built on top of a dam that the beavers created to capture a ready source of food. The Den has two entrances, one at the bottom of the structure with direct access to the water; the other is high and dry in the structure. Other examples include crustaceans that create shells.   A sub category to the creatures that create their own spaces are those that grow there home as either part of their own physical structure or as an outer shell for protection.This would include turtles, crabs, crustaceans, insects etc. A hybrid and less obvious example would be those creatures that have developed a hard and tough exterior shell such as the skin of a crocodile.   If we turn our attention to humans, it is obvious that we do not fit easily into any of the above categories. As we have seen with the Dogon people of Africa, their homes are totally enclosed and contained, a representation of the maternal womb and a space that is introverted. In our western culture we have

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moved away from the purity of this principal and designed homes that have a stronger relationship to the external environment.     B. Space and Architecture The extremes of space have been studied and discussed for many years by architects. The names given to these extremes are also many and varied. Names such as space/anti-space; refuge/prospect; cave/pasture; romantic/modern are to name only a few. From the very beginning to our modern era, architecture has mainly concerned itself with enclosed space. This is mainly due to the structural and technological limitations of load bearing masonry. There are however, examples of temples in ancient Egypt that demonstrate an urge to create space that is not contained. Generally speaking though, architecture and in particular homes, up until recently, were structures of enclosure with windows cut out in the walls to let in light and air. It wasn’t until our culture embraced the new technologies of steel that we were able to explore the notion of space not completely contained. This we call modern architectural space.     The purest example of this breakthrough was Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House of 1945.     With its unique structural system for the time, Farnsworth house liberated the spatial and enclosed quality of traditional houses, and gave the world a house without visible enclosure. It is interesting to note that the twentieth century was instrumental in the awareness of our place and ourselves as individuals in the cosmos. The advent of Freud and the awareness of our instinctive foundations, Jung and the spiritual aspect of these foundations, were all signs of a new consciousness emerging in the world. Our idea of what a home should be, also changed at this time. It is as if we emerged from the enclosure of our original condition with a new awareness of ourselves, which was reflected, in our cultural viewpoint.     C. Archetypes in the Home I refer the reader to the text called “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”[8] for a detailed description on the archetypes, as they appear to us in our personal and complex patterns of behaviour.  To see where the archetypes affect us in our homes lets turn back to the original container and its characteristics. They are introverted (enclosed), warm, liquid, dark and safe. We could say that the whole house is our enclosure and makes us feel safe. The whole house can be warm, particularly with a good heating system. The whole home can be dark, particularly at night if the lights are turned off. There are only a few places in the home where a liquid environment exist however. The most obvious space is the bathroom.     The bathroom is a wet environment and is designed as such with impervious materials and drainage in the floor. The places we actually get wet ourselves are the shower and more importantly, the bath. It is indeed the bath that has all the symbolism attached to it through years of ritualistic use. It is the place where we cleanse ourselves, where we languish in warm water, we rest, we rejuvenate and we emerge renewed. The bath also reminds one of cooking or incubating as a foetus does in the womb. In alchemy the bath plays a highly significant role in transformation, cleansing and renewal. There are numerous images of Mercurius being cooked in the bath until the spirit or white dove ascends, the brother and sister pair in the “bath of life”, the conjunction of soul and body in the marriage bath and the king and queen in the bath of the philosophers.     The bathroom as a space is generally somewhat enclosed. There is obviously the practical reason of privacy for the enclosure, but this is a condition of civilisation and self-consciousness. Windows are generally small and may have obscure glass in them. The bathroom is also the favourite place for a skylight, thus

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providing natural light yet retaining enclosure. It is light from above in its literal form.     The kitchen is another example of the symbolic structure of our lives.The kitchen is where food is transformed from its natural and raw state to a state it can be digested.The kitchen thus satisfies our nutritive instinct and in a traditional family is the realm of the mother. The mother gives us life and nurtures us. Naturally the kitchen can also be a man’s domain particularly if the man has integrated some of his own anima material. The shed or garage is a favourite dwelling place for a man. It is where he can think and be himself. He can make things, break things and experiment.     We quite often find that one or other family member dominates particular rooms. As mentioned earlier, the person who cooks in the household organises the kitchen to suite him or herself. It is quite possible that our complexes are reflected in our attitudes towards certain spaces. For example a daughter with a negative attitude towards their mother may have an impatience and intolerance with cooking. Therefore the kitchen would be a less favourite place for that person.This shows how we can learn about ourselves through our attitude towards certain spaces.     D. The House Plan as Mandala Pattern The house plan is diagrammatic representation of the ground plane of a building. Technically it is view of a building or proposed building cut through the walls parallel to the ground plane one metre above the floor and viewed from above. The plan is by nature an abstraction of the spaces to be constructed in three dimensions.     There are many influences on spaces and their relationship to each other in a house. These include environmental, site configuration, relationship to other spaces, local authority guidelines, and psychological preferences. On rare occasions, there are buildings constructed from an idealised and mandala patterned plan. This villa called Villa Rotunda by Andrea Palladio is an excellent example of the environmental and other influences given secondary importance to psychological considerations, that is, the purity of the ideal. We can thus say that the plan of a house has the above-mentioned influences working on the design in varying degrees. It is unlikely that the psychological influence can be ruled out entirely in the design process. As a consequence there will be some traces of the personal disposition of the designer in the plan and overall design of the house. This would explain why a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is quite different from a house designed by Mies Van der Rohe. If we view the plan of a house with a psychological eye we can see some interesting similarities. For example the centre of a Wright house is with very few exceptions, occupied by a fireplace. Other designers locate the kitchen in the centre believing that the preparation of food and the social aspect of this nurturing be the central activity in the home. The architectural plan can indeed shed much light on the psychological aspects of the designer.

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The Sound and The Flurry Of William Forsythe

Anna Kisselgoff The rule of thumb is that a choreographer works best with his own company, the dancers with whom he is most familiar. There is no reason to doubt that the rule holds true as well for William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet, the West German company headed by the American choreographer since 1984. Nonetheless, one doesn’t regret having seen the works produced by Mr. Forsythe in his freelance days during the early 1980’s, most notably ‘’Time Cycle,’ ’ ‘’Love Songs’’ and ‘’Say Bye-bye.’ ’ These pieces were always well danced, and their eye-riveting emphasis was on Expressionist or pop imagery to treat a theme of alienation. ‘’Say Bye-bye,’ ’ for instance, spectacularly used Elvis Presley recordings and other elements of 1950’s popular culture to offer a critique of that very culture. But if one looked behind the aggressively theatrical surface, it was obvious that a choreographer with a complex sense of formal substructure was at work here. ‘’Say Bye-bye,’ ’ created in 1980, looks very different from ‘’Artifact,’ ’ the two-hour Forsythe work with which the Frankfurt Ballet made its United States debut at the Pepsico Summerfare Festival in Purchase, N.Y., this month. Yet, even ‘’Say Bye-bye’’ contained a clue to the ideas behind ‘’Artifact.’ ’ Both deal in disparate ways with how we perceive things around us, be it a social environment or the nature of language. More interestingly, both focus on a limited number of movements that serve as themes for a large number of choreographic variations.The audience may not be aware of this; Forsythe dancers are as apt to do the same step lying down as standing up or in interacting units that keep the eye busy. Beginning with the 1982 ‘’Gange,’ ’ which was compressed into a shorter variant called ‘’Square Deal’’ for the Joffrey Ballet in 1983, Mr. Forsythe’s ballets began to look more stripped down, openly formalist. Yet, the shrewd theatricality of the early pieces was still present, relying on complex, computerized lighting designs - by Mr. Forsythe himself. The lighting changes were used as formal elements spliced into the structure of these works. The result, as in ‘’Artifact,’ ’ is a fragmented look but with the kind of cinematic continuity that cuts from one image to another. The difficulty with ‘’Artifact,’ ’ as in ‘’Square Deal,’ ’ is the proportion of spoken text in relation to the danced passages. Mr. Forsythe is at his best when he simply choreographs. The proof lies in more recent works or in excerpts that have grown out of ideas contained in ‘’Artifact’’ and similar ballets (one thinks of his superb ‘’New Sleep’’ in January for the San Francisco Ballet). Trustworthy accounts rate ‘’In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,’ ’ created in May for the Paris Opera Ballet, as exceptional Nobody talks in these latest works. But they do in ‘’Artifact,’’ where Mr. Forsythe is obviously exploring his earlier interest in the writings of French post-Structuralist literary theorists. One says ‘’obviously’’ because in later pieces he uses the concepts involved without having them articulated aloud, as in ‘’Artifact’’ where two actors, a man with a bullhorn and a woman in an Elizabethan gown, wander through most of the production.

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The male-female violence that permeated ‘’Love Songs’’ has now been sublimated into screamings on philosophical themes. The heart of ‘’Artifact’’ is the passage that has the least interruptions: the stunning second section, with a corps in yellow spread out as a three-sided frame for two couples who dance to the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. During this same section, the asbestos fire curtain drops down with a heavy thud. When it rises, the dancers have regrouped (this occurs several times). The music continues, and the viewer has filled in the lacuna with an afterimage that Mr. Forsythe demolishes when the curtain goes up again within the minute. The dancers have regrouped and the stage picture has changed. And so, the hard-to-catch logic of the text spoken by the actors begins to make sense. The talk is of ‘’stepping inside’’ or ‘’outside,’ ’ of remembering and forgetting, of seeing what you think you see and so on. One doubts one’s ability to perceive; the theme of the work is epitomized in the fragmentation of its four sections. In its aggressiveness toward the audience, the ballet makes the point it discusses. Reportedly, the piano pieces played by Eva Crossman-Hecht are variations on the Chaconne (perception is really put to the test here), and in the third section, a series of freestanding panels with drawings fall. Each time, a woman is revealed behind, and we begin to doubt whether we are seeing the same woman or three. How does the vocabulary of dance function? That is the question Mr. Forsythe asks, but he does not necessarily do so through dance itself. His choreographic theme is stated by a barefooted woman, whose arm gestures are repeated occasionally by others but whose legs - the women are on toe - seem to act in counterpoint.The simultaneous duets in the second section and one in the third are virtuosic partnering feats. We can admire these isolated passages, but we are asked by the choreographer to question our own perception of what is before us. In a conversation last January, Mr. Forsythe said he had been reading Michel Foucault’s ‘’Archeology of Knowledge’’ while working on ‘’Artifact.’ ’ He was interested, he said, in how architecture conceals (much of the dancing here is in an obscure light, with the performers barely visible). ‘’The nature of history is to conceal as well as to preserve,’ ’ the choreographer said. ‘’Artifact’’ may well derive from such concepts transposed to a ballet stage, and the post-Structuralist critics’ use of words like ‘’outside’’ to signify nonverbal references that affect language may be concealed from the audience. The choreographer can say that the audience need not bother about his theoretical inspiration and should look just at the dancing. But when a woman keeps screaming the jargon at you, she is hard to ignore. Moral: Less screaming, more dancing.

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Is There a Poetry in Architecture?

Jonathan Glancey Is there a connection between poetry and architecture? I remember talking on this subject some while back at an Arts Council-sponsored evening at Somerset House. In preparation, I’d spent the best part of a fortnight walking through parts of London I’m particularly fond of and photographing buildings and places that seemed, to me at least, somehow poetic. I learned, by heart, a number of poems that seemed relevant to what I wanted to say.To me there was, and is, something in the structure, rhythm, balance, and the very language of architecture corresponding in certain ways with those of sonnets, odes and epics. I didn’t have an academically approved theory to back up my sentiments, yet I felt that what I had to say was in the spirit of architects, of all eras, with poetry in their souls and with the spirits, too, of poets like Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, among many others, who have truly seen poetry in architecture. Yet, when I had said my piece, I was torn apart by the poet Denise Riley and the author Iain Sinclair. This unyielding twosome demolished not just the decorative superstructure, but the very foundations of my argument. Piffle! Nonsense! Poppycock! This was the most stupid, most utterly inane talk they had ever heard in their lives. There has never, ever been a connection between the two, they thundered. I crept out of Somerset House like a church mouse that had been spat out by cats. My pet theory was far more ruinous than Tintern Abbey. In foolhardy fashion, but without making a speech, I raised the point afresh last night at an event held by the literary charity, Poet in the City, in the concert hall of King’s Place, the Guardian’s soon-to-be home in King’s Cross close to where the young Thomas Hardy once worked as an architect, for Arthur Blomfield, before turning full-time to poetry and novels. Close, too, of course to St Pancras station and the Midland Grand hotel, an intrinsically linked pair of haunting Victorian buildings saved thanks to John Betjeman, a much loved popular poet and architectural writer greatly influenced by Hardy. The poets who spoke last night weren’t necessarily ready to agree that there is a connection between their art and architecture. Simon Barraclough, who had written poems inspired by King’s Place for the occasion (the one below is a particular celebration of the concert hall we spoke in), made it clear there isn’t a connection, yet did say that there is an affinity between the two. Jacob Sam-La Rose agreed, making the point with a poem he read about a building in Lewisham he and his childhood friends took to be haunted; the building was nothing to write home about from a strictly architectural point of view, but it became the stuff of poetry when infused with the fantasies of young Londoners. Paul Farley who was brought up in a brutalist council estate in Liverpool, yet steadfastly refuses to blame Le Corbusier (who wrote A Poem to the Right Angle, as only a truly Modern architect could) for any

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influence he might unwittingly have had on such terrifying forms of post-war English housing, has been inspired by architecture, but again made the point that the two arts might inform one another while being different beasts. I’m left, slightly unsatisfied, sensing that there has been and can be a more than associative connection between the two arts, but I’d need to make a proper study of this. I’d welcome your views. There is, though, no doubt that architecture, and a keen sense of place, has been good to poetry. Think of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Wordsworth’s Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge, whole poems by Larkin, snatches of TS Eliot, lots from Hardy, masses by Betjeman. Equally, there have been several architects or architectural enthusiasts who have been fine poets, from Michelangelo to Hardy. And, there have been, too, architects whose work surely deserves the name poetry – in stone – whether Hawksmoor, Borromini, Palladio and, yes, Le Corbusier. The subject is potentially as long as something by Tennyson, as complex as the Four Quartets (which feature quite a bit of architecture; Eliot was good on the subject), and as rich as The Divine Comedy. Neither Sinclair or Riley will forgive me for raising the subject again, yet I can’t help wondering if there’s something new we could be learning here; a way, at the very least least, of imbuing contemporary architecture with a poetic vision. Bounded in a Nutshell by Simon Barraclough Five centuries ago, a German acorn sweetened on the branchuntil it reached its crucial massand blew the bolts to give itself to gravity.Then all it had to do was dodge the jay’s keen beak,the hedgehog’s truffling snout, shrug off the weevil’s drill.This lucky nut was squirreled away,a hedge fund for a hungrier day that never came and, planted in the soil, the work began:the cylinder of shell unscrewed, a taproot dropped,a pale shoot periscoped towards the light,extended leaves and rippled out its rings,trunk thickening as history hurtled by.Six thousand moons the shadow of the branches flewaround its base through midnight, noon, until the daythat brought the saw that bit into the barkand turned the tree into an acre of veneerto line this room, this snug nutshell, replanted in the earthin which we sit and feel the taproot of the bass notes shift,hear sonic tendrils lift.

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About The Architecture Of The Face

A woman I have known for many years did something to her face not all that long ago, and for a few weeks afterward, I was not able to put my finger on it. Did she get her eyes done? Restylane injections? Botox? Then I thought, Oh dear God, she got a face-lift. No one whom I consider a friend and a contemporary had yet gone that far. But there was no denying she had done something major, and frankly I was worried. Had she ruined her pretty face? As the curtain of hair slowly parted a little each week, I could see that her lips were bigger. Nowhere near overcooked-hot-dog-turning-inside-out bigger like Meg Ryan’s, and not even duck-bill bigger like Courteney Cox’s—but big enough to make me feel uncomfortable looking at her mouth when she talked. Don’t look at her lips! Then one day, about a month later, I ran into her at a party and she looked stunning. The puffiness had settled, the fire under the skin had gone out. Even her lips looked like they belonged on her face. They were shaped just like her old lips, but … juicier. Her whole face looked as if it had been pushed out and plumped up—not unlike a slightly tired but still very stylish down-filled sofa that looks almost new if you keep those cushions fluffed. I cannot say that she looked exactly like her old self—but so close! A fantastic approximation! An uncanny resemblance! She looks like a very impressive artist’s rendering of her. But there was also a faint likeness to someone else. She looked a little like … Madonna? Strange, I know, since Madonna and my friend have little in common, at least physically. But when I saw the Big Ciccone on the cover of Vanity Fair a couple of months later, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities: the Mount Rushmore cheekbones, the angular jawline, the smoothed forehead, the plumped skin, the heartlike shape of the face. Their faces didn’t seem pulled tight in that typical face-lift way; they seemed pushed out. Looking at Madonna, I kept thinking of the British expression for reconditioning a saddle: having it “restuffed.” Perhaps that’s where she got the idea to have some work done. After the hunt, Madge dismounted her trusty steed and thought, My saddle needs restuffing. And, by George, so does my face! Women have been availing themselves of new faces since the dawn of plastic surgery, but suddenly it seemed that there was a better new face to be had.There is a New New Face, very different from the old one, and both my friend and Madonna now have it. Once I starting thinking of it in these terms—the face as the new handbag, say—I started seeing New New Faces everywhere: Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Liz Hurley, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour. They all have it! Even the Olsen twins seem to have a starter version of the New New Face, with their big crazy doll eyes and plush lips. Just to be clear, I don’t presume to know exactly what any of these women have done to their faces, if anything at all. It’s possible (though in some cases before-and-after pictures would seem to suggest otherwise) that this face is occurring entirely naturally—after all, these are women who are famous for being beautiful. The point is that there is a noticeable aesthetic shift happening in the face, and that it’s dovetailing with quantum leaps in plastic surgery and dermatology.

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Through some unholy marriage of extreme fitness and calorie restriction (and maybe a little lipo), women have figured out how to tame their aging bodies for longer than ever. You see them everywhere in New York City: forty- and fifty somethings who look better than a 25-year-old in a fitted little dress or a tight pair of jeans. But this level of fitness has created a new problem to which the New New Face is the solution—gauntness. Past a certain age, to paraphrase Catherine Deneuve, it’s either your fanny or your face. In other words, if your body is fierce (from yoga, Pilates, and the treadmill), your face will have no fat on it either and it will be … unfierce. It was only a matter of time before a certain segment of the female population would figure out how to have it both ways, even if it means working out two hours a day and then paying someone to volumize their faces, as they say in the dermatology business. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, there is now a whole new class of women walking around with wiry little bodies and “big ol’ baby faces.” And they look, well, if not exactly young, then attractive in a different way. A yoga body plus the New New Face may not be a fountain of youth, but it’s a fountain of indeterminate age.

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Is Britney Spears related to Albert Speer?

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architecture is...A CUP OF COFFE? architecture is...EUROPEAN? architecture is...MONEY? architecture is...MUSIC? architecture is...BLACK? architecture is...WHEN YOU PARENTS THINK YOU ARE ONLY CHILD? architecture is...UNISEX BAG? architecture is...FAT? architecture is...BIG OFFICE? architecture is...FUKSAS? architecture is...DEAD? architecture is...SILENCE? architecture is...A CIRCUS TENT? architecture is...FUN? architecture is...FUNNY? Architecture is...that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is really architecture?? Frank lloyd Wright architecture is...REALLY architecture is...UTOPIA? architecture is...OLD? architecture is...NATURE? architecture is...ORNAMENT? architecture is...TANGO! architecture is...4 REAL? architecture is...MAGIC? architecture is...ATMOPHERE? architecture is...AN IDEA? architecture is...A MOVIE? architecture is...SWIDISH GIRL? architecture is...WHAT YOU THINK IS ARCHITECTURE? architecture is...CHAIR? architecture is...PLANT? architecture is...TRIPPEN SHOES? architecture is...ART? architecture is...STRAIGHT? architecture is...FUTURE LIVING? architecture is...A LINE? architecture is...A PARTY? architecture is...A MUSIC BAND? architecture is...A PICTURE? architecture is...BUILDED? architecture is...A LUNCH WITH ARCHITECTS? architecture is...SPEAKING WITHOUT SENSE? architecture is...DEFINITLY TANGO!

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What Does an Architect Do? Architects design all kinds of buildings. They design schools and skyscrapers. They design hospitals and hotels. They also design churches, train stations and plain old regular houses. Any building that is used by people was probably designed by some architect. Okay then, but what does the word “design” mean? A design is simply a plan. Before constructing a building, an architect needs to draw a plan of the building. Sometimes architects will make a cardboard or plastic model of the building. The building is then built by a construction company which follows the directions of the plans for the building. The architect will closely supervise the construction company to make sure that the building is built according to the plans. Okay then, but but what does an architect do when he or she draws up a plan? Architects have to thnk of many things before they draw up the plans for a building. First they have to think about what the building will be used for. How many people are going to use the building at the same time? What types of activities will these people do in the building? An ofﬁce building will need lots of small rooms for ofﬁces. A school will need many medium-sized rooms for classrooms. And a train station will need one larger room for hundreds of 264

people to pass thru at the same time. All of these building must be built so that they can be used efﬁciently by everyone who walks through their doors. When architects discuss what the building will be used for, they talk abut the “function” of the building. But the function of a building is just one of many things an architect has to think about when designing a building. Good architects also spend a lot of time making sure a building is safely designed, and making sure the building will last for many years. A building that is not safely designed could catch on ﬁre or fall down on itself. Architects have to design building so that people can escape from the building in an emergency. Of course, some emergencies, such as earthquakes or tornadoes, destroy even the safest buildings. A few years ago an architect had a real surprise when one of the buildings he designed collapsed under the weight of a foot of wet snow. The building was a sports arena with a large, curved roof. The heavy snow put so much pressure on the roof that the roof collapsed. Luckily nobody was in the sports arena at the time. Besides thinking about the function and safety of a building, architecs also spend time creatively thinking about how they want the building to look. Just as a painter decides which paints to put where in a painting, an architect decides where to put the rooms, walls, and open spaces in a building. Just as different painters have different styles of painting, different architects have different styles of designing. One 265

architect might like to use a lot of circles and curves in his or her buildings. Another architect might like to design buildings that look sleek and ďŹ&#x201A;at. So architects have to be good artists and good scientists when they design a building. The building must be pleasant to look at, pleasant to work in and strong enough to be safe from most natural disasters. Trying to do all these things at the same time is part of the challenge and excitement of being an architect.

What Does an Architect Do? It depends!

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Architects behind the starchitects Big designers get credit, but lower-profile firms often do bulk of the work Top billing may go to Richard Meier, Renzo Piano or Jean Nouvel, but neither the starchitects, nor their firms, are likely tasked with the majority of the architectural work on most of the buildings they design. With a growing number of New York developers seeking out brand-name architects from abroad, some local firms with strong design traditions are taking on more behind-thescenes roles as so-called architects of record — or executive architects, as they are sometimes called. As such, the local firms may be responsible for corresponding with city agencies about code compliance, coordinating pre-construction site cleanup, communicating a project’s progress and delays to developers and financial backers, and creating up to 90 percent of the construction documents. In other words, they handle the less sexy elements of the job. For the vast majority of new buildings in America, a single architecture firm performs both the creative and project management functions. But when it comes to the highestprofile, megamillion-dollar projects — and New York has more than its share of them — two architects are often commissioned. One generates and makes adjustments to the 267

design concept; another executes that concept. “Some firms do it grudgingly,” Peter Samton, a partner at the full-service architecture firm Gruzen Samton, said of accepting work in an executive, rather than design, capacity. “But this is a big city. There are many projects and we can’t be too greedy.” Gruzen Samton, a New York- and Virginia-based firm now in its eighth decade, is serving as the architect of record on the German-American architect Helmut Jahn’s 65-story, 580,000-square-foot residential and hotel tower at 50 West Street; and doing the same for the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis on the nine-story, 175,000-square-foot academic building at Cooper Union. The Downtown tower broke ground in June and is slated for completion next year. The division of labor between design and executive architects is not new, but the boundaries of the roles are no longer as clear-cut as they once were, Samton said. During the past 20 or so years, and particularly in the last few years as the stock of high-profile architects has risen in New York City, what were once two very separate jobs have become increasingly collaborative. That is thanks in part to electronic communication and computer-aided design, enabling more back-and-forth between the architects. “There are times you have to bite your lip, but usually I feel very comfortable speaking my mind to the design architect,” Samton said. This arrangement works best when the two commissioned architects — with their unique skill sets and directives — make every effort to integrate their ideas to present a united front to the client. 268

“If the design architect is so ego-driven that he gets put off by ideas coming from other people, then it could be a problem,” Samton said, noting that this has not been the case at 50 West Street or at Cooper Union. “If you don’t engage in the silly little child’s play of ‘Whose toy is it?’ that’s when you get the best results.” Architect Steven Kratchman said he has developed a synergistic working relationship with design starchitect Annabelle Selldorf, with whom he collaborated, as the executive architect on a six-story, 65,000-square-foot addition to a mixeduse building built in 2002 at 415 West 13th Street. The two architects are again working together — Selldorf as design architect, and Kratchman as architect of record — on a 19-story, 57,000-square-foot luxury condo. Informally known as the “Sky Garage,” the building, slated for occupancy in 2009, features parking on every floor. “We have great respect for Annabelle’s design ability,” Kratchman said, explaining that his role as executive architect is to interpret the designs so that they are “buildable, approvable and, ultimately, concrete.” Kratchman said working as an architect of record does not require him to stymie the creative impulses he employs as a design architect. “I find it very satisfying, creatively,” he said. “It isn’t dreaming things up in the same way; it’s problem-solving.” Other prominent examples of New York firms doing much of the heavy lifting for starchitects include Davis Brody Bond Aedas for Renzo Piano on Columbia University’s forthcoming Manhattanville expansion project, and FXFowle for Piano on the New York Times Building last year. SLCE Architects 269

served as the architect of record for both Robert A.M. Stern on 15 Central Park West and for Jean Nouvel on the 40 Mercer Residences. The firms may be hired on simultaneously. But frequently, the client works with the executive architect on a master plan and preliminary construction documents for months, or even years, before a design architect is chosen “to put his or her particular stamp” on a project, said Cliff Moser, who serves as an advisor to the American Institute of Architects in the area of practice management. In some cases, the client issues a contract to each firm; in others, the two firms are covered under a single contract — often administered by the architect of record, according to Moser.

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Venice architecture biennale is like nerds talking about sex This yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Venice architecture biennale has been hijacked by awkward ambassadors of the parametric maďŹ a and the elite of the avant-garde.

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Kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; toys pick up prize at Venice Architecture Biennale Furniture made from squashed childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s toys has helped its creator win one of the top prizes at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

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Venice cancels opening ceremony for hated Santiago Calatrava bridge The Mayor of Venice defended a controversial new bridge over the Grand Canal as Italy’s “most important contemporary architectural achievement of recent decades” yesterday despite complaints that it was unnecessary, unsuitable and four times over budget. Plans for a grand inauguration of the new steel and glass bridge — dubbed the “carpet of light” by its admirers — built by Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, have been scrapped because of the row. The 94-metre (310ft) single arching span links Venice’s railway station with Piazzale Roma, the car, bus and ferry terminal on the other side of the Grand Canal. The bridge, Venice’s ﬁrst for 70 years and only the fourth to be built over the Grand Canal, was to have been opened on September 18 by President Napolitano. Right-wing members of the city council said that it was “a monument to bad administration and a waste of Venice’s money”. Critics also noted that it lacked access for the disabled. Massimo Cacciari, the centre-left mayor, said that it was “typical of this city to do itself down”. The absence of facili273

ties for the physically handicapped could be traced to the beginning of the project, when planners had assumed the disabled would use the existing ferryboat across the canal. A lift for the disabled would be installed but this would take “several months”. Critics claim that the cost of the bridge has risen from an original estimate of ¤5 million (£4 million) to ¤20 million, partly because of delays and legal disputes with the construction company. The council insists that the ﬁnal cost will be about ¤10 million. Maria Rumiz, head of public works, said that the row meant that the bridge would be opened without fanfare “on or near September 18”. The bridge, which was ﬁrst planned 12 years ago and was scheduled for completion in 2005, was installed last summer after a two-year delay caused by fears that the bridge supports in the canal banks would prove unstable. Other late adjustments included a decision to add glass steps. Vittorio Sgarbi, the art critic and former deputy Culture Minister, said that the bridge looked like a lobster and hid the Venice skyline from Piazzale Roma. Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, Venice’s famous watering hole near St Mark’s Square, said that he did not like the bridge at all, asking: “Can you imagine what it will look like with chewing gum visibly stuck to the glass?”

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I COMBAT AND DESPISE: 1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American; 2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing; 3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces; 4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility; 5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials. AND PROCLAIM: 1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile ďŹ ber, and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness; 2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. synthesis and expression; 3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no 275

integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these; 4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials; 5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration; 6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished; 7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit; From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by words-in-freedom, plastic dynamism, music without quadrature and the art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice.

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

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Do Buildings Have Gender?

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Frank Lloyd Wright is the only American architect, anyone should know about.

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L.K. was really poor?

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Is this Atmospheric Silent Architecture?

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Less is more, or a bore? Who said it?! I just believe in Sex

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Architecture is a discipline that gives an order to the space in our life... Botta’s work seeks to improve the quality and appreciation of life Botta’s religious building designs address fundamental questions of man’s relationship with the divine. It gives shape to history Oh God!? 283

why we became bees?

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The incoming MOMA in WASAW

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A Downtown Architect Explains That Silly Manifesto A year ago, Ali Tayar was just another downtown architect. Working in a renascent modernist idiom that owes as much to the James Bond movie Dr. No as Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport, he did interiors for Waterloo, a restaurant on Charles Street, and Gansevoort Gallery on Gansevoort Street. Some of his aluminum furniture had been acquired for the design collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Montreal’s Museum of Decorative Art. Since Pop, his latest restaurant design, opened on Fourth Avenue near 12th Street in April, he’s become a sort of downtown celebrity of the moment–the guy who wrote the over-the-top design manifesto that was included with the restaurant’s menu. The interior of Pop has been praised for its blond plywood banquettes, simple, clean lines, and a soaring cherry-red metal ceiling that shows off Mr. Tayar’s knowledge of structural engineering. But the architect has been ridiculed in both The New York Times and the New York Post for his use of the type of jargon-ﬁlled writing that passes for English among starry-eyed graduate students. The design of the restaurant, Mr. Tayar writes with the wide-eyed idealism of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead , is “based on postwar social idealism and trust in technological innovation, mass production and prefabrication. While it resonates with the midcentury American dream, Pop has been realized with end-of-the century means.” He goes on to say in the lengthy diatribe: “The project is conceived as a kit-of-parts system consisting of modular ceiling and seating elements. These 286

have been assembled within the space with minimal permanent impact on the original structure.” Perhaps the manifesto is a bit too much to digest along with the geoduck clam tartare featured on the menu. “This is not just a place to eat, drink and be seen–it’s a design statement,” Jared Paul Stern noted in the New York Post . “Who the hell wrote this?” Mr. Stern said that his companion asked. Mr. Tayar has an explanation. “First of all, I think it is a little pretentious to call it a manifesto. It is a press release. The manifesto wasn’t supposed to be included with the menu but I couldn’t stop Roy from putting it there,” Mr. Tayar told The Observer , referring to Roy Liebenthal, the owner of Pop. Mr. Liebenthal was the owner of Cafe Tabac and is the current owner of the Lemon restaurant on Park Avenue South. For his part, Mr. Liebenthal says that he included the manifesto as “a goof. It was to be a futuristic menu. I thought the language was funny. Something you would laugh at.” Mr. Liebenthal believes that it has been “taken out of context,” by The Times and the Post . “The name Pop came ﬁrst,” added Mr. Tayar, a fairly serious, trained architect who is slightly befuddled by all of the attention he has gotten for an insert in a menu. “Roy had this idea that he wanted to do something that would be called Pop and I tried to phrase it in some way that would, for one, interest me and somehow relate to the name. I am trained as an architect. There is no Pop architecture. There is nothing you would study that would be called Pop architecture. It corresponds to midcentury high modernism. So I thought I would phrase it in such a way that it relates to the midcentury architecture and perhaps pop art and the movies. I thought of Dr. No and Contempt and Blow Up .” 287

There is nothing about Mr. Tayar’s background that would suggest he would become a hip downtown architect. Born in Istanbul in 1959, he was educated at the University of Stuttgart in Germany in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In 1986, he received a master’s of science degree in architecture studies from M.I.T. His thesis was on “structural optimization.” Unlike other students trained as architects at that time, Mr. Tayar rejected the then-popular postmodernism as “too decadent.” His preference was for pure modernism from the middle of the century. He points out that it would have been impossible for him to gain such an education at Harvard or Yale at that time, because pure modernism had come to be seen as dated as the Hula-Hoop. “When I came out of school, I never thought modernism was going to become fashionable again, said Mr. Tayar, whose ﬁrst job after graduate school was designing airplane hangers for Lev Zetlin Associates in New York. From 1988 to 1991, he worked for FTL Associates on the Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion, the portable performance facility the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic use for outdoor performances. Still, Mr. Tayar did not have much of a place in the Michael Graves and Philip Johnson world of postmodernism that dominated architecture in New York. In 1991, he struck out on his own and formed Parallel Design Partnership with Ellen Levy. Living on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he designed furniture. In 1995, his design for a system of shelving and a molded particle-board table was included in Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design , a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. His clean, modern interior designs were featured in design magazine articles with titles like, “Let’s Twist Again,” but he was still more apt to wax on about the “ﬂow of forces in 288

structures” than speak out in hip, deconstructionist jargon. The turning point in his career came this year. Mr. Tayar’s designs for a chair and screen were purchased by International Contract Furniture, or I.C.F., the New York-based manufacturer that has produced the designs of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and Josef Hoffmann, the father of the Wiener Werkstätte movement. In May, he won an award at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Convention Center for Rasamny , an indoor-outdoor chair made out of teak and aluminum. Even with all of his success, Mr. Tayar still has the wideeyed quality of the star science student who explains his projects in such technical detail that it leaves everyone stupeﬁed. Standing next to his chair at a reception at the manufacturer’s headquarters on Broadway in May, he attempted to show how the chair was put together and the theory behind the chair. Daniel Fogelson, the vice president of marketing for I.C.F., said that he and James Kasschau, president of I.C.F., had decided to take on Mr. Tayar as one of their designers as soon as they saw his work because “Everything he does is clear and clean. There is no hidden story behind it.” Mr. Fogelson added that for I.C.F. the key to working with Mr. Tayar is: “His ego is under control.” That is, as long as he stays away from those manifestos. Harlem Renaissance On May 27, American Vision Gallery 145 opened on 145th Street and Edgecombe Avenue in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem. “A lot of the artists are excited and want to come back to Harlem and show their work,” said Donald Clayton, one of the owners of the gallery, which will show African-American and Latin American artists. “During the Harlem Renaissance there were galleries in this part of Harlem. This is the ﬁrst public gallery to open in Harlem in a 289

long time. We feel that this area is going to be one of the major forces in the arts. There are a lot of upper-middle-class people with million-dollar brownstones up here.â&#x20AC;? The show includes The Last of the Blue Devils , a Romare Bearden painting never exhibited before, as well as works by Ed Clark, Herbert Gentry, Faith Ringgold, emerging West African artist Ephrem Koukou and Norman Lewis, considered the father of abstract art among African-Americans. The gallery, open from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, has been receiving a lot of foot trafďŹ c from European tourists on guided tours of Harlem, according to Mr. Clayton.

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Why I... believe architecture is a craft as well as an art In the 1948 film The Fountainhead , Gary Cooper’s character, Howard Roark, defined the image of the modern architect. He was heroic, individualist, uncompromising, a social and aesthetic visionary and politically just to the right of Ivan the Terrible. This caricature has left its mark on architects on the left of the political spectrum, as well as on the right. One of its less attractive aspects is the distance it places between the Olympian professional designer and the humble “builders”, who realise the architect’s vision. The separation of thinking and doing, of idea over execution, has long been associated with the condition of modern art. When applied to an art as fundamentally practical as architecture, it may translate into walk-through sculpture. But the caricature is a myth that the Crafts Council’s exhibition, Making Buildings , attempts to redress by showing how architects work with crafts people from a variety of fields to produce buildings that provide their users with a kind of added value derived as much from the finesse with which buildings are put together as from spatial sophistication or formal originality. The exhibition spans the spectrum of building technology, from thatch and timber to the latest plastics and electronics, showing how contemporary architects and crafts people are 291

employing ancient materials in new and challenging aesthetic directions to solve contemporary problems. For her North London studio-house, Sarah Wigglesworth exploits the thermal and acoustic potential of straw bales, quilted canvas and sandbags to protect the interior spaces from cold and the roar and rumble of nearby high-speed trains. In contrast to this complexity, John Pawson relies on the traditional expertise of stone masons to create the seamless, minimalist interior surfaces of his home. Inspired by nature, Japanese architect Tono Mirai uses mud and straw to form the urban nests he makes in collaboration with school children or architecture students. Simon Conder employs the materials of the do-it-yourself superstore: pre-cut timber, translucent acrylic sheet and silicone sealant, manipulated by small teams of craftspeople to achieve highly sophisticated buildings that are cost effective and unique. Similarly, Sixteen*(makers) from the Bartlett School of Architecture, a research unit that looks at new directions for architecture, uses modern materials and methods, laser-cut steel and electronic control mechanisms to achieve interactive structures that respond through movement and light to human activity according to a variety of programmed instructions. The group shares with Mark Prizeman of the Architectural Association and many others a belief that students need direct contact with materials and fabrication methods as a fundamental part of their design education. Alongside the architecture profession, the exhibition presents the achievements of self-builders taught through the Walter Segal System how to construct their own homes in small communities for very low cost. It therefore shows construction as an activity that anyone can pursue and demon292

strates how craft adds character and meaning to buildings and can humanise our environment. But embracing craft does not mean a return to a cosy cottage vernacular. According to Wigglesworth: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The future of architecture is soft and hairy.â&#x20AC;? I agree. But it is also hard and smooth, traditional and futuristic, conventional and innovative. Some of it will roll off assembly lines like new Fords, but a percentage will be crafted by hand and, where that is done in conjunction with thoughtful design, the results will be enriching for makers, users and maker-users.

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ART/ARCHITECTURE; Put on the Headphones but Don’t Trust Your Ears JANET CARDIFF is inside you. It’s your own fault, really. You let her in. And now you belong to her. Her voice breathes into your ear, slow and ﬂat at ﬁrst, but quietly urgent. ‘’I wander through the house, looking in room after room. All there is is emptiness.’’ She’s on your left, it seems, then right, then somewhere deep in the lakeside mansion that houses the Oakville Gallery, echoing back. ‘’Hello?’’ she calls. Nothing. ‘’Hello?’’ Footsteps echo around you, but there’s no one here, no motion at all. Then she’s back inside you, restrained but insistent, moving you onward. ‘’I have to try it again. Turn around. Let’s go outside.’’ And you do, helplessly in her thrall, a compelling voice from another time seeping into your mind, guiding your thoughts, actions, even perceptions through a garden, along a creek and then to the water’s edge and back again. Through a set of headphones, you’re held captive by that voice, the real world around you altered by a suggestion, a memory, a feeling conveyed through a breathy insistence that seems to come not from your ears but from the center of your brain. 295

Here at the Oakville Gallery in a lakeside suburb of Toronto is ‘’A Large Slow River,’’ Ms. Cardiff’s signature: the audio walk, a form of art installation that has won her increasing international acclaim. She created one in East London, ‘’The Missing Voice,’’ in 1999 for the Whitechapel Gallery, through Jack the Ripper’s old territory; one in Los Angeles, at the Chateau Marmont, in 1996 (‘I’ve Been Waiting for You’); and others in Rome, at the Villa Medici; in Münster, Germany; in Pittsburgh, at the Carnegie International; and in New York and San Francisco at their respective Museums of Modern Art. And there’s no shortage of opportunity to create more. ‘’The problem is, I’m just so overbooked,’’ said Ms. Cardiff, speaking from her summer retreat, a riverside cottage north of Toronto. ‘’I get a lot of offers for the audio walks, but I sort of try to ignore everything.’’ Included on the to-do list, though, is a new walk for P.S. 1, in Queens, part of the ﬁrst major survey of Ms. Cardiff’s career, to run from today through January. The timing could hardly be better: Ms. Cardiff and her husband and frequent collaborator, George Bures Miller, are still energized by having won one of three special jury awards at the Venice Biennale in June. (Some but not all of the works scheduled for P.S. 1 are by both Ms. Cardiff and Mr. Miller, hence the ungainly title: ‘’Janet Cardiff, Including Collaborations With George Bures Miller.’’ ‘’George thought it was ridiculous, but I think it’s important,’’ Ms. Cardiff said.) It was a collaboration that won the prize in Venice, a videoand-sound piece called ‘’The Paradise Institute.’’ The work -- a ‘’mystery-spy movie,’’ Ms. Cardiff said -- consisted of a theater with 17 seats, each outﬁtted with headphones, and revealed many of their priorities.

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Put the headphones on. Someone in the audience makes a joke. Someone else coughs, laughs. Didn’t they? It’s almost impossible to tell. Using a technology called binaural audio, Ms. Cardiff and Mr. Miller create intricate soundscapes that play with your very perceptions of what is real and what is not. The sound seems to come not from the headphones but from somewhere outside you -- or somewhere within. It’s that disorientation, a questioning of your own senses, that drives much of the work. In Oakville, Ms. Cardiff leads you through a garden. A plane flies overhead. You’d swear it did. But the sky is an expanse of empty blue. Nearby, you can hear children playing. They’re real. Aren’t they? Meanwhile, the voice tells you of overturned flower beds where a row of daffodils is in full bloom, and of a gray sky where a fierce sun is beating down. You realize you’re walking with a ghost, a specter from another time that is stage-managing your reality as she draws you back into an urgent episode long past. ‘’It really makes you think about time, and the past and how we just ignore it, normally,’’ Ms. Cardiff said. ‘’One thing that really interests me is, Where is the listener? They’re walking with me, and walking in my footsteps, so they become part of me in a way, but it’s kind of like you’re in memory; you’re listening to my memories, but they become the present for you. It’s a really complex interweaving of time.’’ And then there’s the voice -- certainly not passive, not quite stern, but undeniably in control. ‘’I find it’s kind of like a trance voice,’’ Ms. Cardiff said. ‘’I try to make it as neutral as possible, not active, hopefully. It’s this stream of consciousness -- it echoes the way we think when we walk.’’ Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of Ms. Cardiff’s P.S. 297

1 show, described the voice as a ‘’point of surrender’’ bordering on an almost embarrassing level of intimacy between viewer and artist. ‘’She finds it very sexy, in fact, the negotiation: ‘If you want to be with me, you have to give up your power over what’s going to happen,’ ‘’ Ms. Christov-Bakargiev said. ‘’You have to let go. By looking at how you can construct a one-to-one relationship with each individual viewer, she’s moving away from that older vision of art and toward something that’s extremely exciting.’’ For Ms. Cardiff and Mr. Miller, that individual relationship creates a visceral connection with a viewer, a way to conjure those specters through memory, with the ear as a direct path to the mind. In ‘’The Dark Pool,’’ a 1996 collaboration between the two that will be on display at P.S. 1, an elaborate, disheveled science lab sits abandoned and dusty. Books and papers are strewn everywhere, as though its occupants left suddenly and never returned. As you move through the room, your motions set off sounds, random memories escaping its past. These are clues: what happened here? You’re confused but manage to piece it together: a scientific couple (Ms. Cardiff and Mr. Miller) were on the trail of a bleak discovery, ‘’The Dark Pool,’’ a black well of water on which nothing would float, that consumed everything placed on its surface. And now they’re gone -- they’ve disappeared. Were they victims? Did they run? It’s impossible to say. But as fragments of memory and narrative flicker about the room, the disorientation it evokes seems to suggest one thing: memory is fallible. Don’t trust your own ears. It’s the key to all of Ms. Cardiff’s work, both with Mr. Miller 298

and alone. Witness other P.S. 1 pieces, like ‘’Playhouse’’ (1997), in which the viewer enters a small theater wearing headphones and watches a video projection of an opera singer while a woman whispers in his ear about the singer, a gun, a crime about to be committed. Or ‘’The Muriel Lake Incident’’ (1999), which appeared recently at the Tate Modern in London. A direct forebear of ‘’The Paradise Institute,’’ ‘’Incident’’ has viewers peer into a tiny, dollhouse-size theater while their ears tell them that they are in a grand-scale cinema, complete with a coughing, popcorn-munching crowd. But there’s more to the work than the play between perception and reality. ‘’When I started working in sound, I was really attuned to the sculptural aspect of it, and how it can envelop your body and really affect you directly and emotionally,’’ Ms. Cardiff said. In ‘’To Touch’’ (1993), a roughened wooden table is surrounded by speakers. Pass your hand over the table. Run your ﬁngers along its cracked surface. ‘’Touch me. I want to hear the memories,’’ a woman’s voice says, eerily -- the table’s past set free. But perhaps nowhere is the connection between sound and emotion clearer than in ‘’40-Part Motet,’’ Ms. Cardiff’s manipulation of ‘’Spem in Alium,’’ a complex choral work by the 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis. Tallis put it together in 1575; last year, Ms. Cardiff took it apart, recording each of the 40 choral parts individually and then broadcasting them, a speaker apiece, in the Rideau Chapel of the National Gallery in Ottawa. The effect ‘’has enormous emotional power,’’ said Pierre Théberge, the gallery’s director. ‘’It’s a combination of the way she uses space, the way she uses sound vibration, the fact that you can move from one loudspeaker to the another and listen to the individual, real 299

human voices speaking to you,’’ Mr. Théberge said, ‘’and yet the whole thing makes an extraordinary, harmonious whole in your head.’’ Its power comes not only from the arresting beauty of the song itself but also from its broken-down form -- the dissonance drawn from a circle of black speakers, standing sentinel-like, each of them containing the remnants of a human act long past. ‘’It’s quite amazing,’’ Ms. Cardiff said. ‘’There is this presence of past people. You really do get that.’’ AMAZING and captivating and a little weird -- and that’s exactly the point. ‘’There are so few situations where we just forget about ourselves,’’ Ms. Cardiff said. ‘’When we go to a movie, we can forget about ourselves and just become engrossed and get lost in it; or when we’re reading a book, we can get lost in it. But so often, in conversation, or when we’re walking somewhere, we’re so aware of our place. ‘’I think for the P.S.1 show, with all the pieces together, you’ll get a strong sense that what I’m doing is very much about transformation -- about making people forget about themselves.’’

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Space Colonization -Our Future or Fantasy?

Casey Kazan Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Some even believe that colonizing new planets is man’s best hope for the future. The popular idea is that we’ll eventually need some fresh, unexploited new worlds to inhabit. In a recent Galaxy Post we wrote that Stephen Hawking, world-celebrated expert on the cosmological theories of gravity and black holes who holds Issac Newton’s Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University, believes that traveling into space is the only way humans will be able to survive in the long-term. “Life on Earth,” Hawking has said, “is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers ... I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.” Another of his famous quotes reiterates his position that we need to get off the planet relatively soon. “I don’t think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years unless we spread into space.” The problems with Hawking’s solution is that while it may save a “seed” of human life- a few lucky specimens- it won’t save Earth’s inhabitants. The majority of Earthlings would surely be left behind on a planet increasingly unfit for life. In a futuristic mode similar to Hawking, both Steven Dick, chief NASA historian and Carnegie-Mellon robotics pundit, Hans Moravec, believe that human biological evolution is but a passing phase: the future of mankind will be as vastly evolved sentient machines capable of self-replicating and exploring the farthest reaches of the Universe programmed with instructions on how to recreate earth life and humans to target stars. Dick believes that if there is a flaw in the logic of the Fermi Paradox, and extraterrestrials are a natural outcome of cosmic evolution, then cultural evolution may have resulted in a post-biological universe in which machines are the predominant intelligence. Renowned science-fiction writer, Charlie Stross, argued last week in his High Frontier Redux blog that space colonization is not in our future, not because it’s impossible, but because to do so effectively you need either outrageous amounts of cheap energy, highly efficient robot probes, or “a magic wand.” “I’m going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn’t unfamiliar,” Stross opens his post, “domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O’Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where — as we are now discovering — there are profusions of planets to explore.”

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“The obstacles facing us are immense distance and time -the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.” Stross adds that “Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system.” Stross sums up by saying that while “I won’t rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic that, interstellar travel for human beings even in the comfort of our own Solar System is near-as-dammit a non-starter.” Stross’s blog received over 450 comments as of this writing. The most prescient follows: “First, Stross’s analysis fails to take into account future civilization types; I get the sense that he takes a normative view of today’s technological and economic realities and projects them into the future. This is surprising, not only because he’s an outstanding science fiction visionary, but also because he’s a transhumanist who has a very good grasp on what awaits humanity in the future. Specifically, he should be taking into account the possibility of post-Singularity, Drexlerian, Kardashev Type II civilizations. Essentially, we’re talking about post-scarcity civilizations with access to molecular assembling nanotechnology, radically advanced materials, artificial superintelligence, and access to most of the energy available in the solar system. “Stross also too easily dismisses how machine intelligences, uploaded entities and AGI will impact on how space could be colonized. He speculates about biological humans being sent from solar system to solar system, and complains of the psychological and social hardships that could be inflicted on an individual or crew. He even speculates about the presence of extraterrestrial pathogens that undoubtedly awaits our daring explorers.This is a highly unlikely scenario. Biological humans will have no role to play in space. Instead, this work will be done by robots and quite possibly cyborgs (which is how the term ‘cyborg’ came to exist in the first place).” http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/10/space-colonizat.html#more

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Dingleton Boiler House

A derelict concrete building in the Scottish Borders town of Melrose has just been listed by Historic Scotland. Simultaneously, practice Studio DuB has lodged a planning application to turn this extraordinary boiler house built in 1977 into five residential units. Although its original architect, Peter Womersley, won RIBA awards in his lifetime, his groundbreaking work of the 1950s-1970s is only recently coming back into focus.

Gordon Duffy, principal at Studio DuB, has also won listed building consent in 2005 for modifications to Womersley’s Klein Studio also in the Scottish Borders, which was at the time Scotland’s most modern A listed building. Duffy says of the current boiler house scheme, “a previous owner was considering lopping the chimney off to tone it down, but we think it can be used as a flue for multi-fuel stoves in the proposed residential units. After all, it was a working boiler house until the hospital closed in 2001 and now there is a chance it can live again.” The three concrete hoppers originally used for storing coal will be expressed on the interior of the living spaces as vast chandeliers.

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Rebecca Wober, architectural writer, says “The quality of the shuttered concrete is rather beautiful and it is an extraordinary building for its time and its area. Like Womersley’s stadium for Gala Fairydean it makes use of dramatically sloping concrete planes but unlike his public buildings it is thoroughly off the beaten track, nestling on the edge of a cosy Borders town. Although it was originally a boiler house for a psychiatric unit it looks more like a purpose built art gallery in contemporary Tokyo”. The Galashiels stadium has also recently been listed as covered in AJ 20.07.07. An Englishman who spent his career in a rural village in Scotland, Womersley was reclusive and there is little information yet published on his life and work. He is more well known for his studio pavillion for flamboyant textile designer Bernat Klein which won an RIBA award in 1973.

The boiler house is on the Risky Buildings list as published by the 20th Century society. Now with Studio DuB’s planning application lodged, there is a chance that it can be saved from further dereliction. http://www.e-architect.co.uk/scotland/dingleton_boiler_house.htm

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Icarus Today: The Ephemeral Eye

Christine Buci-Glucksmann Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium (1985), which is in many ways prophetic, conceives of lightness with respect to the new values of the second millennium. Between Perseus, Lucretius, Dante, and the Thousand and One Nights, lightness may look like optical images, influxes and networks, and all those messages that Cavalcanti called spiriti, spirits.1 For the last ten years spiriti — optical images, numeric images, synthetic images and other networks — have been generalized to such an extent that new cartographies of the world now pass above territories, across the information highways of cyberspace, in a becoming common to globalization and virtualization. Have we not all become Icarian in the enchanted world of virtual map-worlds from which we cannot fall? In fact, this encounter between the Icarian and the cartographic has already had an artistic antecedent in the search for a virtual aesthetic which would liberate the work from its terrestrial coordinates in the interest of that “vertical littoral”or “vertical shore” about which Paul Virilio writes in his book L’Insécurité du territoire. Calder’s mobiles, Takis’ telemagnetic sculptures, Flavin’s neon icons, or the light architecture of Turrell — all made the world levitate through a subtraction of weight which passed for immateriality. But, in fact, it was more a matter of that “lightness of Being” which refers to the aerial being of an entirely aesthetic virtuality. Lightness: suspense; that which floats; that which everywhere reaches visible imperceptibility and carries you to other sensibilities more invisible, more tactile, more musical. Lightness is a permanent aesthetic and cosmological paradigm of the philosophies of immanence, from Lucretius to Nietzsche. Atoms float and fluctuate in the void, between trouble, turbulence and whirlwinds. They drift, wane, like a chaos of clouds. There is but flux, envelopes, black holes and the simulacra that are freed from bodies in order to give birth to a sentient, whirling and undulating sameness. In brief, it collapses, it re-orders itself, and the trementia flutant is the law of all the infinite worlds. Everywhere the “genius of touch” triumphs over vision.2 Void, suspense, infinite worlds: that Lucretian “trinity” has not ceased to traverse the artistic works of the twentieth century. Also, one might distinguish two modalities of the aerial and the light: a transcendence and elevation that directs its celestial activity to the heights as a “surreal ethereality; and an Icarian aeriality that re-examines and accepts a world without height or base, a world cosmically liberated from weight to become the object of artistic experimentation and conceptualization. For it is indeed a matter of “bursting the optic centre” as El Lissitzky sought, and of leaving the horizon for an infinite space, potentially of four, or “n” dimensions. From Malevitch to Takis,Yves Klein or Fontana, an entire aesthetic of immanence is constructed, at the price of the most esoteric speculations and most nihilistic criticisms of the values of art, in the exploration of that “aerial materialism” of which Bachelard spoke. In his 1919 text, Suprematism, Malevitch, proclaiming that “man’s path lies across space,” wrote: “I have ripped through the blue lampshade of the constraints of colour. I have come out into the white. Follow me, comrade aviators! Swim into the abyss. I have set up the semaphores of suprematism.”3 The point of view of the aviator, common to Malevitch and Duchamp, defines a perspective that will destroy the “circle of

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the horizon” to approach a null point, a “zero of forms.” This is the condition for which is realized the energy that discovers (or uncovers) form, that of material. From the “Declaration on the Uncoloured” to the “White Manifesto,” Malevitch continually refused the “blue doubling of the sky” for “its pocket” and a “sailing in a blank and free abyss.” If whiteness is emblematic, as it is for Rauschenberg and Ryman, it is because it “represents the infinite,” a cosmic immateriality which lets the eye plunge its gaze into the limitless. The “White Manifesto” is very explicit about this. The disappearance of the world of things proper to “non-objectivity” is accompanied by a texture through which “the course, pure and light, will repose in an infinity of phenomena endowed with new realities.”4 The invention of abstraction and of an art of spatial configurations which slide from painting to architecture and which is impassioned by aerial photographs, institutes an aesthetic of immanence which exorcises aesthetics in its traditional sense. For it concerns a navigator-philosopher, a ferrier who, like Spinoza, penetrates the infinite and assigns to its energy a heuristic role of discovering forms and their plasticity. The black square is at once the “sign of economy” and the “fifth dimension” of art, just as white symbolizes the “pure action of the infinite.” For, in science as in art, the idea of the infinite negates all frontiers “because the object of knowledge is infinite and beyond number, and the infinite and the innumerable are equal to zero.”5 This symbol of “zero,” as it appears since 1915, opens on to the limitlessness of a new cosmology and to the “nakedness of deserts” (1916 letter to Alexander Benois), and to the “zero of forms.” The white is “that opacity proper to pure transparency,” of which Goethe speaks, and the white-on-white of the paintings of 1918 calls forth an opacity that reveals the transparency of forms and makes them float. In this the white is a projective space which permits the forms to bring themselves, suspended, to the fore. So Malevitch always opposes the substantial luminosity proper to the “white” to another luminosity derived from Plato. In a fundamental philosophical text, Light and Colour, Malevitch carries out a veritable reversal of Platonism and its solar emblems. This was already sketched out in the decorations for the 1915 opera The Victory Over the Sun. To the entire tradition conceiving the aerial as a transcendent flight to a height which privileges light and the sun as the paradigm of Being or as the revelation of all things in a Fiat Lux, Malevitch opposes the suprematist revolution and a pictorial thinking “in which the rays of light have lost their power to illuminate.”6 The Malevitchian primacy of colour, long reputed to be charming and sophisticated, even feminine, translates itself in the apparition of a “pure surface,” a material construction whose black can be alive, whose white can be sombre and opaque. If there is any epiphany, it is in the Greek sense of epiphania, of surface. The forms constitutive of the world, the “suprema,” are not ideas, but forces, “signs of the work of energy,” immanent to the surfaces or the four dimensions in an open space where planets and architectonics fly. From projects with “houses that fly or are about to fly,” to the realization of architectural maquettes which mark the abandonment of the plane for an asymmetrical equilibrium of volume, taken up in the double rupture of modernity and the Revolution, Malevitch dreams “of a wall all the way around a cubed space” and elaborates “future planets for the inhabitants of earth” (1924). In this sense the “white” is none other than the uncoloured world of infinite spatial expansion. And if the painting is an “icon” — as an entire interpretative tradition would have it, playing the icon against the image — it must be added that this remains an icon of the infinite world and not of the divine. For “every form is a world” and reciprocally, every world is a form. A world torn from that chaos which confronted Malevitch at the moment of his renunciation of objects and the invention of the black square: the impossibility of eating and sleeping; seven nights of insomnia; long crossings to an empty, vertiginous point where nothing is liberated. Cezanne before the motif: “there is nothing but that dawn of our selves above the nothingness,” “an iridescent chaos.” And Klee, facing the grey point as the original chaos, annihilating being [néant étant], the critical point between death and becoming. And always and everywhere the same obsession, the flight and the taking flight of forms. Nevertheless, one can capture the sun.The Victory Over the Sun would be the victory of Icarus over his rival, thanks to the black that eclipses everything and precipitates an airplane on the stage of L’Opera.

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In 1946, about thirty years after Malevitch, Lucio Fontana published in Buenos Aires his Manifesto blanco, quickly followed by the Manifeste spatialiste of Milan (1948).7 A very Malevitchian impulse makes a return, inventing an aerial art: “We will open up the skies: artificial forms; rainbows of wonder; luminous sky-writing.”8 With the spatial concepts of the buchi and tagli in 1952, where crevices and clefts lacerate and scar the canvasses, that cosmic and aerial art will undergo the exorcism of matter in the interest of a surface-support that extends space to infinity by rarefying it.The searching out of the space of the inside moves by way of the outside, and even through an inside/outside which is dynamic and transitory for the overarching gaze: “We have pierced our envelope, our physical crust, and we contemplated ourselves from above, photographing the earth from the flying missiles.”9 Whether it be the luminous forms in space in the Structures in Neon (10th Milan Trienniale, 1951) or the ovals and the circles of the lacerated “heavens,” all suggest a universe as it is so well described by Savero Sarduy: “If Fontana’s canvasses full of spiralling holes and his perforated metal evoke for me the designs of galaxies, it is because the first support of these objects offered up to tension and destruction is the image of the universe.”10 Here is the mythic image of a cosmos in which laceration and destruction recover the energy that produces movement in an Indian raga, integrating space and time in a way that is baroque and/or minimal. In the spatial nudity of silence, the wounds inflicted on the canvasses by the blade of a razor allow one to reach a topological space of interiority-exteriority, of surface-support, of matrix-gaze. In order to attain the infinite and unlimited of a painting or an installation of light, it is perhaps necessary to approach the emptiness of space and not its image or figure.That emptiness is immanent to the plane, fissuring the surface with lacerations and holes, and the void envelopes, from the earliest sculptures like Victory of the Air (1934), to the great arabesques of neon and multiple “spatial milieu” treated as plastic material. One could relate these two uses of the void: the void “in” and the void “which surrounds,” forms of the void proper to Chinese aesthetics, where the void is dynamic, metaphysical, and aesthetic, “the functional place where all transformations occur,” as François Cheng writes.11 On the one hand, there is the void around, the void of origin and root, that of the Tao, the “ultimate root of the world,” an infinity of what is “without form” and “without trace.” But this primordial ontological void gives birth to a cosmos and to an active “median void,” similar to the valley between two mountains or the space between two trees. It is thanks to this median void that the “internal line of things” (the li), which is at work in the materiality of the holes and lacerations, is able to construct itself. That which separates violently rejoins and engenders a breath, creates a mute rhythm, and brings forth “a nodal point woven of the virtual and the becoming.”12 Painting thus evokes “the body of the great void,” but it is a void that is cosmic and is not deathlike, a void that thinks and contemplates, where art is taken up into all the resonance of the world. A cartography of the universe in gestures and signs: this would be one of the possible roots of an aesthetic of immanence, where the virtual is not form but force, even spiritual force. A heterogenous and plural energy that invents this impulse to suspension is found equally in Takis or Yves Klein in their common “here is space” [ci-gît l’espace]. Thus, Takis’ fascination with the earth’s elementary forces and forces of attraction paradoxically leads to work with suspended planetary sculptures, “signals,” “electric flowers,” “telesculptures” of light and vibration and other “idols of the air” defying gravity. He whom Duchamp called “the gay labourer of magnetic fields and indicator of gentle railways” takes up again the Icarian impossibility of a planetary cartography of forces. As in the title of the demonstration in 1960 at Iris Clert, “L’impossible un homme dans l’espace” where Sinclair Bells levitates in the emptiness and recites one of his poems called “I am a sculpture.” That the impossible becomes possible, breaths a material and spiritual cosmic energy into all forms to the point that the deliberate a-aesthetic of the work returns to a planetary aesthetic. Objects float in front of the magnetic walls; the symbols and miniature blossoms are animated by a perpetual movement. Vibrating Tableau (1963), Vibrating Telesculpture (1972), Spiral Galaxies, are all suspended in a multi-sensory aesthetic in which it is necessary to “hear with the eyes” in order to attain a spiritual levitation inhabited by a machinic humour.

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Icarian art opposes the vision dependant on heaviness and its constraints — horizons, orientations between the above and below, falling — with a “being in trajectory.” The Icarian fall to the bottom gives way to a fall into the heights in a liberated material fluidity where one would re-inhabit the earth on the basis of the infinity of the world. For, the Spiral Galaxies of Takis resemble the spiral form of the Andromeda galaxy, just as the different Cosmogonies of Klein aspire to a “landscape of the universe.” There again, from the celebrated 1958 exposition on the Void at Iris Clert, to the “Cosmogonies” with canvasses exposed to the elements, we find by way of cosmic monochromes the same cartographic process of exploring the void and zones of invisible sensibilities. Indeed, the double space of the void (in and around) actualizes that plural and multi-sensible topological space that Merleau-Ponty opposed to the Euclid ean and representational space. One passes, then, from contours to environments, from geometrical forms to constellations and articulations proper to a world “outlined in a total luminosity that surrounds us.”13 Different from classical representation, which opposed subject and object in a reflexive relation, the architectonic of the configurations has as its principle “the fold or hollow of Being” and its outside.14 All of the terms of that “intra-ontology” — crack, fold, lacuna, dehiscence or separation — are forever only the thought of a non-Hegelian and non-reflective negation. This is an active and dynamic negative, where the visible is folded with the invisible, encompassing the encompassed, conforming to that “vertical Being” in the immanence that leads to the aesthetic world in that which is perceived. “It is the negative that makes possible the vertical world, the union of the incompossibles, the being in transcendence, and topological space and the time in joints and members, in dis-junction and dismembering — and the possible as claimant a claimant of existence.”15 The very Leibnizian vocabulary does not, however, return to a theological transcendence, but to “verticality in immanence” proper to a sensible being which always opens to the possible and the virtual because the world — this world here — surrounds us with a “halo of possibilities.” From here that suspension of things: “To say that things are structures, frameworks, the stars of our life: not before us, laid out as perspective spectacles, but gravitating about us.”16 But such a topological space still situates itself at the interior of a phenomenological and ontological project where the intersensoriality of the “flesh” lays the ground for the art, even if Merleau-Ponty introduces an important disconnection in relation to the “existentiaux” of the perceptive system and the laws of weight. Further, the notion of a gap, a separation or divergence that forms that space is conceived as “perceptual sense” and signification: “signification is always the divergence,” horizons of sense-sensible interiors in “brute Being,” called “savage” [sauvage]. But in the de-ontologized world that is ours one can henceforth see the gap as an operation of transfer and of metamorphosis, following Duchamp, as opposed to the ontological gap of Merleau-Ponty, the latter much closer to modernism. Duchamp’s gap leads to a completely different topology — that of a ‘seeing across,’ of flux, over the super-fine [infra-mince] and ‘language games’ — which anticipates the new lightness of the virtual. There are correlates that often pass unnoticed in the technological drunkenness of the simulacra: the new gravities, where the technological eye of the world occults, in its all seeing transparency, a completely other, more ‘geo-political’ gaze. Killing from a distance, ethnic purification and genocide, those such as in Angelopoulos’ quest for the ephemera of a film that is lost and recovered in devastated Sarajevo in The Gaze of Ulysses. Indeed a tragic separation does not cease to appear between ‘the great optic’ (Virilio) of cyberspace at the speed of light and the ‘geo-politics’ of the gaze where there is a crystallization of forces into presences and territorial conflicts and wars. As Yves Lacoste has shown in his numerous works, it is without doubt appropriate to distinguish different standards of spatial analysis and to juxtapose them to the global geo-politics. Does the cartographic eye of the earth already reveal to us a truth that the Icarian eye of a technologically programmed world would conceal from us?

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The revolution of virtual technology has brought about the appearance of new cartographies where one can henceforth fly across the earth and the sky, deserts and cities, planets and galaxies. Thus, aerial photos from satellites of tele-detection submitted to an informational analysis permit us to reconstruct maps in three dimensions and to tour the planet without ever moving. From now on one can simulate most natural phenomena — the dynamics of clouds, the waves of the sea splashing upon a beach, the collision of galaxies — and treat the most infintesimal as the most significant or grand without suspicion of their scale. This permanent passage from the microscopic to the macroscopic defines the modality of the image of synthesis with its millions of ‘dots’ and its character as a mosaic or as wallpaper. Thanks to the simulations of point of view and of object, one can return to the strata of images, one can sculpt them, just as one would drill and explore in the recent exhibit Le Tunnel sous l’Atlantic [The Tunnel Under the Atlantic] at the Pompidou Centre. Standing before the labyrinthian exploration of images, one is in dialogue with that very distant unknown Other in Montreal. Within Maurice Benayoun’s “event of tele-virtuality” there is an entire “empire of maps” common to France and Canada — parchments, fortifications, ships, portraits, and landscapes — which unravels and weaves that “immense numerical Bayeaux Tapestry” of which Jean-Paul Fargier speaks. One traverses the temporal and iconographic layers that are much like geological and geographic strata — vestiges of time freed from all matter. It is an immense anamorphic and symbolic territory where suddenly I come to rest before a portrait of Napoleon, some ship of discovery, some urban scene, and then set off again in a programmed and aleatory journey. The map is the virtual territory; and it is no less paradoxical to note that the historical modalities of the cartographic eye — paintings, plans, views of a town — are found once again in the conceptual and programmed eye of the virtual. But is it not again a matter of the voyage of the gaze, or of a simple spatial and “matrical” vision, an “eye in the image” which brings about a culture of the surface without an unconscious? As Florence de Meredieu writes, the new transparency engenders “a culture of a partial, lacunary unconscious, on the surface of the waves,”17 a culture of a machinic pre-conscious, not a Freudian unconscious.” Thus, the possibilities of a multiplied vision, of an exploration of infinite details proper to a surface mentality which leaves little place for shadows, only lead to a new “blindness of the gaze” proper to periods of technological revolution and the crisis of the aura. Is not, as Jean Baudrillard has suggested, the territory of the virtual merely our own world turned pure simulacrum, without real referent and without the unconscious, where projection is from now on made without metaphor? The terrestial habitat is thus “hypostatized in space” and is only the “microprocession of time.”18 If so, the miniaturization of the Icarian eye is only translated by “effects that are miniaturized, concentrated and immediately available,” a topology of the obscene, of general transparency where one loses the dimensions of the gaze, of distance. Consequently, the fractalized subject disperses and diffracts him/ herself into “a multitude of miniature egos.”19 The minutest detail of Icarus’ leg in Bruegel’s painting becomes a mode of vision whereby the exorbitance of the artificial and serialised detail transforms us, little by little, into a witnessed ready-made, offered up to the fascination and seduction of superficial abysses. In brief, we then have the screen as the microscope of the everyday, and are facing a geography of the world that is more and more of a desert. However, what if the crime is not perfect and this world of simulated-simulacra surrounding us is itself full of faults and hollows, and of quite another obscenity, namely reality? And what if it could still give birth to a virtual aesthetic which is not immediately identifiable with a single, all invasive virtual technologic, even if it involves exploring their potential bonds and their virtual and linguistic relations? The pure and simple identification of the virtual with the simulacrum as the post-modern regime where the aesthetic disappears in a “transaesthetic” of the spectacle has the effect of suppressing a certain number of necessary distinctions. The virtual is not always a simple substitute for the real, but indeed is a “form of perception of the real.”20 And if the numerical art is an “art of abstraction” which eliminates the real object in its construction, it nevertheless recovers it through the “dialogic” of a body that interacts with the computer, and thus recovers indirectly the entire history of the “happening” at the heart of the networks.21 In this, the virtual is opposed less to the real than to the actual. It is indeed “a place of action,” even a “fractal dimension of reality,” as Paul Virilio develops in his discussion with Catherine Ikam.22 To the dominant virtual image/simulacrum one can oppose a

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virtual force and a calculated intelligibility that may engender a heterogenesis of forms and their manifestation in art. Perhaps it calls for an even more active gaze, more fractal, a “meta-gaze” which bears the modalities of the exercise of its execution and exhibits its syntax. This is possible not only because the virtual and the real can coexist, as in the case of numerical maps where the simulated countryside is really flown over by a plane, but, above all, because the possible mixing of the “real” and the virtual in art through hybridization, transfer, simulation, incrustation and modelization, introduces us to the new paradigm of visibility which traverses contemporary practices and leads to a de-specification of the arts. Further, this approach of the virtual could be conceived in relation to two transformations imposed by the cartographic paradigm:the plan(e)-transfer [plan-transfert] as heterogenesis,and the deterritorialization as a generalized trajectory, as the loss of the being-there particular to the geographical here and now. We now know that an image does not have to be chemically registered in order to exist, and the super-imposition of images, their running together, as in cinematography, engenders zones of perception by contact, strata and interferences that call forth mechanisms other than the “strictly optical” of modernism.The suspense, the fact of “floating,” suggests a new point of encounter, which is temporal and often musical, between the most ephemeral and the momentarily durable, the most machinic and the most aerial, the most visible and the most interior — thought itself. Thus in Weeps for You (Lyon Biennale, 1995-1996), Bill Viola explores that art of passages between the microscopic and the macroscopic, the cartographic and the Icarian with the aid of a dynamic interactive device and with procedures of aggrandizement that permit any spectator to see themselves on the screen in a drop of water that falls.The anamorphic and erratic image of the self in that which is most fragile, most minuscule — a drop of water — simultaneously resounds with a dull rhythmic sound of splashes. So, the drop of water functions as both an eye-image that returns to anamorphic deformations, and a “microscope of time” that analyses the ephemera of an almost imperceptible event. There, as in other projections by Bill Viola, the screen is none other than the place of thought, the “darkroom” of its echoes and metamorphoses. That “image extended as sound,” which Raymond Bellour has analysed in “La Chambre,” brings together the dark chamber and the mental chamber, such that the “video image” opens the virtuality of a sonic space which is borne by vibration.23 Such a virtuality rises from a vibratile point of suspension, which one also finds in other works: the videos of Thierry Kuntzel, the suspended chairs of Bruce Nauman, or the inverted piano of Rebecca Horn — not to speak of the haziness, the informal fluidity and ephemeral quality of Gerhard Richter or the woven work of Polke. Indeed this virtual “aesthetic” inhabits many different forms of art and not only those images and apparati are engendered by the new technologies. For, if the machinic can be heavy or aerial, to the point of being invested with the invisible fluxes of the topological infra-fine, is that not because a new lightness constructs itself, a grave, sometimes tragic lightness? In accordance with the Japanese expression Mono no aware: simultaneously an insisting presence, an effect of withdrawal, and a dissymmetrical beauty which seizes the impermanence of things. We might translate this as the poignancy of things, with all the valences of Old French: to break through, to be born, to actively seize.24 That movement of a just equilibrium between two disequilibria, that apparition of Walter Benjamin’s “thought-image,” floating and trembling in its temporary precision, perhaps even that fugitive moment where life affirms only life, already taken up in the mirror of a “no longer” [ne plus] or a “not” [ne pas]. Nothing but that abstract shock that “scalps your soul and renders it naked” evoked by Emily Dickinson in a poem.The virtual as the scalpel of the soul, or perhaps as the soul ... Mono no aware: neither the pure plenitude of the surface of the infinite, nor the pure emptiness of a mortified and complicit melancholy but that movement of the virtual that is immanent to the multiple and hybrid gaze, from now on able to travel among images, heterogenous spaces, categories and media. For, the oppositions structuring the ‘world of art’ of modernism — aesthetic/anti-aesthetic, banal/ noble, sign/sense, subject/object — are shirked off and the retreat to the past only nourishes itself with sad and disenchanted conformisms in a return to order that is more or less cynical. Between the scepticism of the marketplace for some and the return of the sacred of others, the mono no aware

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outlines one alternate approach to aesthetic complexities analogical but not identical to complexities of contemporary science, which has witnessed the emergence of time, of points of bifurcation, of the fractal and of chaos. An entire physical, chemical and, indeed, biological world is rendered subject to a structural instability.These new instabilities operate through a non-hierarchical mixture of the simple and the complex, which Isabelle Strengers and Ilya Prigogine analyze by beginning with the notion of the “attractor” in their book Between Time and Eternity.25 The notion of the attractor, which has long been a symbol of homogeneity (all systems submitted to a similar attractor resemble one another), nonetheless symbolizes “the qualitative diversity of dissipative systems.” In these systems that are submitted to time and to an “erratic behaviour,” the attractors are called “strange” or “fractal.” In a given region, the points of the same systems subjected to these attractors “belong to divergent trajectories in the course of time.” From this comes the definition of chaotic behaviour and the routes to chaos: “a behaviour is chaotic if trajectories issuing from points of whatever degree of proximity in the space of phases distance themselves from one another over time in an exponential way.”26 They are therefore submitted to a “temporal horizon,” and it is beginning with this horizon that a difference establishes itself between what we can “see” from here, where we are, and a beyond — the evolution that we no longer describe in terms of the behaviour of particular beings, but only in terms of the erratic behaviour common to all systems characterized by a chaotic attractor,”27 such that in the case of chemical systems, the irreversibility of time is inscribed in matter itself. And one can always aesthetically dream over a scientifically definite example: some flake of real snow constituting a crystal, conserving in its structure the “memory of the path taken since its formation.” The “arrow of time” from the beginning penetrates the macroscopic as the microscopic, disequilibrium as equilibrium and leads to new phenomenon of order where time has a positive and constructing role. The world of the aleatory, of holes and confusions, giving birth to a new geometry where the image of the universe is crooked and irregular. As James Gleick writes, “it is a geometry of hailstorms, of twists, of entanglements, of interlacings”28 — which is not without a relation to Smithson’s entropic procedure. Indeed, in the fractal coasts engendered by the computer, the details are aleatory but the dimensions are constant. In contrast to Euclidean forms of measure that proceed with length, size and depth, here the notions of dimension, with their cartographic referents — longitude, latitude and altitude — become fundamental operative concepts. For, dimension is always related to a point of view, and every form possesses a variable scale. Thus, apprehended from a certain point of view, a side can have an infinite length. In this sense, there is indeed an analogy of questioning and even of structure between the Icaro-cartographic and the fractal as a way of seeing the infinite. Could there be these strange attractors in art? Are there are not aesthetic or existential guides of instability, chaoticization implemented through humour or derision, have they not a sliding of the homogeneous towards the heterogenous and the qualitatively diverse? A kind of heterogeneity, re-affirming more than ever the necessity of “points of passage,” of critical thresholds, and of existential and social engagements in and within the irreversibility of time. A topic doubled by a cartography of sign-fluxes and machinic-fluxes, which would eschew technological utopias and reinterpret Duchamp in contemporary terms. Bernard Moninot’s 1985 studio-work stands as an example. By means of a grid [mise au carreau], he sets onto his ceiling the stars from a part of a map of the heavens entitled “la baie sombre” [the sombre bay]. These transferred stellar points supply orientation in a space, and points of suspension for various refuse objects — a circle, rim or wheel — which reflect themselves in shadows projected on the walls. These spaces of fragile shadows that Duchamp loved take advantage of the “light” passage between two projections; that of a cosmic points-stars and that of suspended shadows [ombres-suspense] in a work that makes shadows, clear or panoptic, its stake [enjeu]. Consequently, point and shadow are from now on the trace of a cartography that is more virtual than real, bringing together suspension and suspense in a kind of weightlessness of luminosity. One could take as an aesthetic paradigm the “Vision Machines” of Steina and Woody Vasulka who use the “media for the media” in a language that also exhibits the visual and machinic syntax. Transfers and projections of planes, multiplicities of points of view proper to an all-seeing vision, a ludic and fractal universe of fragile images capturing the pure present,

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aim to create an abstract electronic space encompassing the spectator and the place. Thus, in All Vision (Lyon Biennale, 1995-1996) an apparatus of monitors and cameras filming the reflections of a “sphereworld” animated by a rotating movement, engenders a veritable Icaro-cartographic space liberated from the oppositions between the interior and exterior, high and low, top and bottom. One sees oneself in the sphere as in crystal balls and other vanities of the past. But the reflecting sphere is from now on the world-eye of the phantasm of Icarus — an enlarged eye, scaled down by the cameras that submit it to all the possible variations in order to better analyze the vertical space in real time and to make the spectator the subject of vision in the architecture of the ephemeral. It is precisely in the case of architecture, where weight is an inescapable constraint, that the new “lightnesses” of the unstable are expanding. In an article in the review Any devoted to “Lightness,” John Rajchman distinguishes between two forms of lightness .29 A modernist lightness proper to a glass architecture prioritizes the optical and the geometrical always free of context (i.e., the international style). The other lightness, proper to the micro-electronic age, aims for the “degree zero of gravity,” privileges regional context, proximity, and a space more haptic than optic. Marked by “nodes of resonance” (Bernard Cache), this latter form of lightness returns to the cartographic cities of networks and rhizomes where volumes float. Exemplary in this regard is Yoyo Ito’s architecture in Japan, which is precisely modelled on the microprocessor in order to give birth to “a space that floats and whirls.” For the role of architecture is precisely to “envelop phenomenon that cannot be seized.”30 Certainly, the floating gaze and the taste for the “smallest existent” [shô sei] comes from an entire Japanese tradition. In the era of the Nô, Zeami advised his actors to move “in seven-tenths” in order to favour the unachieved of movement; and the Ukiyo-e of the seventeenth century presents figures in a floating world. The detached view [regard détaché], the lacunae of images hollowed out by the abyss, the silent density and the stratification of shadows make up part of the Japanese aesthetic that Tanizaki Junichiro analyzed so well in his Éloge de l’ombre. Lights diffuse and vacillate, icy and altered bursts of surfaces, phantom beauty, palpitating mists or golden tatami mats, aim to do nothing more than make felt the wear of time and its immateriality. The gaze is never the correlate of a controllable object, but that of an opening and a receptivity. The world is revealed there in its here and now, its fragility and its suspension. In the architecture of Toyo Ito — without rigid facade, in the angled interiors, with the permanent fluidity between the inside and the outside, and the vaults similar to tents floating in a breeze — one recovers the values of the Rilkian opening between suspension and floating. “The envelope” and “nomadism” are at the same time constitutive metaphors claimed as architectural paradigms which resemble the rest of Tokyo (cf. the “Nomad Restaurant”).Tokyo, “the amoebic city” according to Yoshinobu Ashihara, only manifests a “hidden order” when opposed to Paris, the Benjaminian city of form, of stone, of mirrors, of serial perspectives and of structures radiating from the squares. Viewed from on high, Tokyo is only a chaos full of irregularity and asymmetry, with contours and multiple spaces that are always ambiguous. But it is above all an “artificial city” [ville factice], ephemeral city, “a city in a state of weightlessness” (Toyo Ito) where a quarter of the buildings date from less than five years ago and where no one stays at home. It is a “sequential city where things take place to the extent that time passes” and where “its people live as nomads.”31 For the rest, the space is never but the “space left free between the buildings,” something temporary. The Toyo Ito’s search for a “post-ephemeral architecture” could thus take the form of Pao (a primitive hut of the Mongolians) or of a garden paradise suspended twelve metres above the ground. But, above all, it opposes to the modernist transparency of glass facades a completely different transparency: that of facades glazed with crystal liquids, veritable screens and envelopes that are always changing. The Tower of Winds in Yokohama (1966) is covered with reflecting panels of acrylic and a protecting scabbard of perforated aluminum. At night a veritable kaleidoscope of light surges forth and indicates the “arrow of time,” in as much as the projectors vary in relation to sounds and to the direction and speed of the wind. Thanks to these infinitesimal dots of light glistening at a great height, the form cannot be seized. It floats erratically,

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a pure luminosity of signs and flux. In a 1993 interview “The Visual Image of the Micro-Electronic Age,” Toyo Ito speaks of an “architecture that would be a garden of micro-processors.” The city transforms itself into “a space of ephemeral effects born of an electronic and invisible flow.” Just as sounds float in space, forms derive gardens of light, and the architecture unlimits itself by reinterpreting the invisibility of flows and minuteness of microchips. The virtual transforms itself into a heuristic and aesthetic paradigm where the most advanced technology is aligned to traditional multi-sensorial referents like huts, clothes, envelopes or suspended gardens. The ephemeral, indeed the “post-ephemeral,” therefore drives an architecture that employs new models of abstraction responding to systems of flows and micro-electronic information. One finds again a development analogous to that of Toyo Ito in Bernard Tschumi’s Glass Video Gallery (Gronigen, 1990). Constructed on an oblique inclined plane in a careful equilibrium, the gallery itself is as transparent as a house of glass. But the vertical and the horizontal supports of modernism have disappeared in the interest of glass structures, such that, there again, everything floats in an immersion of immateriality and landscape. Using C. Rowa’s distinction, one can oppose the literal transparency related to the quality of the material (the glass) with a phenomenal transparency which plays on the illusion and unlimitedness of the apparition in order to create the effects of floating. It is precisely that second transparency, that of multi-sensorial and “extra fast” virtuality, which defines the new contemporary lightness. Also, it sets one dreaming in a very Nietzschean way of a post-nihilist lightness which takes us to a utopia of a non-Heideggerian “earth of light” [terre de lumière], as John Rajchman promises. In any case one indeed takes part in the exploration of an Icarian lightness in a “Pascalian” space dominated by the metaphor of the envelope and of decentring, where the cartographic and nomadic aesthetic ends up inscribing itself in highly advanced technologies. This assumes the paradox of light: it permits vision but fixes it blindly. In the ephemera of time, light floats. The ephemeral would be neither pure immobilized instant, nor purely recovered time, nor the a-present of a heterogenous time; rather, it would be the moiré or waves of time, a sort of flow of imprecision which gives and takes in a Kairos of desire and death. If there is some affinity with photography as analyzed by Barthes — a time of encounter and contingency and of traces — it is closer to the punctum: a flash that floats, a time so singular and tenuous that it passes in the insistence of passing. The vibration of time in its fragility. “Ephemeros” is related to the day (emera), to that which only lasts a day, a brief instant, like the insects that only last a few days or sudden fevers that disappear without one knowing why. The ephemeral is that which is carefully suspended between the apparition and its disappearance, a non-time of time, a between-time which inscribes itself somewhere and nowhere. We gave the name ephemerides (ephemeris) to books that record the events accomplished on a day across different epochs, or a calender that one removes a page from each day, or astrological tables that determine, day by day, the place of each planet in the Zodiac. The ephemeral is the cartography of time, of each period, each day, each event. Ephemerides were also those books of Antiquity which recounted, day by day, the events in the life of a character. Contemporary art is haunted by the “each” — each day, each instant, each particle of time — by the acute consciousness of only one “this” and “here” of the event — because it defines our being in the world, more and more subject to the double regime of the ephemeral. On one side is “the empire of the ephemeral” — a permanent zapping of images, of a museal visual, of artistic modes, a dictation of the “look,” of encroachments by a world of images where the speed destroys all the physical and social referents. But that “ephemeral” of the global empire of information and images in real time, with its immediate pleasure and its loss of experience, doubles itself with another precariousness: that engendered by violence, exclusion, and programmed death. How to live until one’s death, and how to survive, if around one is all sadness and destruction? Elias Canetti’s poignant question in Crowds and Power concerning the moment of surviving and the being of survival, henceforth returns in an everyday that is increasingly marked by all the sabbaths of warlike humiliation and the mortifying devaluations which

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will have to give rise to the “summersaults of rage” à la Bataille. Therefore, one could be tempted to define our ephemerides, all those extra-fast envelopes, screens and interfaces of the present, used or transposed in art, from the moment when the spatial cartographies of the world become temporal. If the palimpsest works on the side of a past ephemera that reappears, the Freudian magic pad would perhaps offer a paradigm appropriate for thinking the present ephemera. For, it explores the play of contact between presence and absence, a play of floating traces, like psychoanalytic listening. One knows that Freud, in his 1925 text, presents “that little machine” because of his analogies for the unconscious. It has in effect two sheets: one receptive surface always available (a tablet of wax and resin) and another fixed from the top, but free at the bottom, which covers over the first. But that sheet is itself composed of two layers, one of celluloid where one can inscribe, without ink or lead, the traces of incisions, and another, fine and transparent, that one can pull back, thereby returning the wax to its original state. This apparatus, that Jacques Derrida has analyzed as the “scene of writing,” makes its subject appear and disappear, machining a virtuality through contact and transposition which registers an event in its ephemeral character. A model of the unconscious, the magic pad is a machine that registers the passage on several levels, with the result that the plane remains open to different planes of the image, beyond that available to the retinal and the purely optical.The Self or Ego [Moi] is thus an embodied Self [Moi-corps]; and one understands, just as Didier Anzieu noticed in that topological schema and psychic apparatus, the form of a skin ego [Moi-peau].32 The skin ego is not a pure surface but the projection of a surface on two sheets: one of celluloid which protects, the other of wax on which is inscribed the traces and passings. It is the interface of the world, an originary parchment of intersensoriality which evokes the Aristotelian conception of space as an envelope.Thus any passage can leave a trace, or it can fall into oblivion if some “writing pad” of art does not map it. Smithson created “non-sites,” Richard Long and Hamish Fulton imprinted places or photographed their steps. On Kawara sent maps of towns or post cards marked with a seal giving the time and signature: I went [in English in French text - trans.], July 3, 1968, 16 July, 30 July. ... Yves Klein glazed his models with paint, Penone recorded his breath, Tapies reinscribed footprints and directions in materials of the desert: there has everywhere only been imprints, traces, the ephemeral collected in order to better conserve a gesture, the soul of a voyage, the passage or existential trajectory of an Ego. That vibrato of time henceforth takes on the relays of allegories and cartographic vanities of the past; and it is not limited to the cartographic art that we have examined. Just as there is a “post-ephemeral” architecture, one can also speak of a “post-ephemeral image,” a “post image” across which a new order of abstraction reinvents itself, an order which knows nothing of the historical dualism of the abstract and the figurative. For, if one can from now on project the image on to any object or medium, it is the support that maintains the image, and images liberated from this ontological origin can pertain to different spaces and spatialities in a permanent play of transformation and metamorphosis between the visible, the informing, and the calculated.They form themselves, un-form themselves, are superimposed, traverse one another and project themselves in an infinite complexity in which the mobile image is treated as immobile and the inverse. Also, the cartographic can no longer be reduced exclusively to the work on the motif or on the model of maps in their instances of descriptive, allegorical or topological vision. One could speak of an expanded cartographic logic, just as Beuys spoke of an “enlarged (or greater) art.” The light is not light by nature but through this lightening, this subtraction of weight, in which every experience reaches its frontiers in the necessary nudity of a suspense, reuniting the aesthetic and the ethical, in order to pose again the very problematic question of a “politics” of the gaze. The site is now only a point of escape [fuite], “the site of the stranger” to take up the expression of Pierre Fedida. Maps are always by nature abstract, ever approximative whatever their degree of scientific or electronic precision. For, these abstractions produce impure analogical images that work by coupling the visible and the readable in a diagrammatic being which composes and decomposes the world, rather as geography uses specific procedures of abstrac-

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tion, grids, surfaces, plots. Thus, to use a map, to manipulate it, is always to construct a narrative scenario however brief or unlasting. Maps always tell stories that double the projected voyage of an intra-psychic, mental and temporal voyage. The projective space of maps, as site of all the transfers of art, gives rise to geological, tectonic and archaeological powers of the image, its “sites” and “non-sites,” its mental traces and landscapes. Indeed maps incite a stratigraphic gaze split between the aerial logic of the Icarian on one hand and terrestrial energies of the world at their virtual meeting point on the other. Further, today they allow the re-traversing of the absolete abstract-figurative dualism, avoiding both the modernist nostalgia of the purely optical-abstract and the mimetic and mortifying complacencies of the bodies treated in their first degree. For, abstraction is not the proper of abstract art.There is nothing more abstract than the gothic line, that of skeletal art, even the formalized and distanciated treatment of certain images.Thus the banalization, the serialization, the repetition, the blowing up of or the miniaturization of the images can result in an abstraction “of/at the surface” [en surface] where all the procedures of “pre-visualization” of codes that Rosalind Krauss analyzed in relation to the photographic are re-invested in numerous artistic practices. It is necessary to analyze the cartographies of art in which the historical distinction between the abstract and the figurative is scrambled and “deconstructed” in favour of a non-mimetic image or a new type of abstraction integrating cartographic elements such as the architectural projects, plans, diagrams, tags, transposed spaces of the virtual. A “flatbed” abstraction of a rhizomatic or fractal kind, such as one finds in recent American painting (Peter Halles, Jonathan Lasker, David Reed and Lydia Dona) in which spaces disconnect in a heterogenesis of abstract motifs, networks, spirals and fluxes. For, a map is “like an image” (Origen) in the sense that an image is not an object in the modernist sense but rather a process fuelled by a “dissipative energy” to take up an expression of Gilles Deleuze.33 Such a dissipative energy breaks with all ontological substrata and causalities of the world, as recognized by Benjamin. The famous “aura” which interrupts the blindness of the view and obliges one to raise one’s eyes is nothing but an energy that dissipates the near in the interest of the distant in a sort of vertigo. It is indeed this distant of the visual that the techniques of reproducibility, always on the side of the same and the close, have already radically modified. In this sense, Warhol’s work is only a huge variation on a Bejaminian theme. Yes, there is but the close and “same” of the surface, and the serial and sequential reproducibility is the post-auratic work of an artist-machine. A huge “ready-made” of screens [toilesécrans] where the banalization of art dear to Danto is “transfigured” by a neutralized style that flatly redoubles the metaphoricity of its object and brings forth a way of seeing the world. A very panoptic gaze, an all-seeing one anyway, as is evident in Warhol’s taste for collections of ephemeral materials and for “time capsules.” However, in the informational and virtual epoch, the energy of the image can assume different forms related to those new parameters of the light and to a re-multiplied circulation of energies in suspense. Thus Tom Shannon, in Painted Planet and Parallel Planet explicitly takes up the motif of the terrestrial globe. But he makes it float in the air at a distance from the horizontal by making use of the invisible forces of magnetic fields. Thanks to the magnets the works are indeed in levitation, in suspense, but the cosmological approach of the visible and the invisible, of what is out side of us and what is inside us, functions as a great mirror of the universe. In the piece Decentre, Acentre (1992), shown at the Château de Voiron, a huge suspended aluminum disk, four meters in diameter, cuts across a sphere leaving the upper half floating. Centre and absence of centre, “decentre” define an ambiguous cartography of the universe. As Tom Shannon said to Jerome Sans, “it is a matter of using an image to show that the sun and the earth are one and the same entity.”34 Indeed Ray (1986) was already sculpting the invisible “energetic ray” that links sky and earth, Icarian and cartographic, out of materials that aim to create a world in which art can explore the scientific understanding of the real without losing sight of the effects of its aesthetic construction, of the virtual as poetic and cosmic “levitation” of forces and elements.

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These dissipative energies are also found in Rebecca Horn’s light machines [machines légères], in which the circulation of positive and negative energies, their variations of state and their passages, map out the intersections of life and death, feminine and masculine, order and chance. Feathers, pollen, musical instruments, painting machines, inverted weightless pianos, beds in descending spirals, projections of machine made paintings — not to speak of alchemical materials like mercury, or the use of sound as the invisible eye, witness to a disappearance — explore in one movement the new machinic lightness — and the new dangers that inhabit the world at their points of bifurcation and suspense. For this suspense in weightlessness rejoins the “negative spaces” that Bruce Nauman explored in order to situate thought “above and behind” things. To transform the functional chair into a symbolic chair, hanging or suspended such that one will see the chair’s underside and that which takes place between its rungs. Or yet, to suspend a wax head confronted with its shadow and its video image as in Spinning Head (1990). The negative spaces reveal the motivation behind his art, and perhaps of art itself: a violence, something insupportable, a “frustration before the human condition.” Indeed the dissipative energies of the image instill a fragility at the heart of time, while temporalizing the visual through a more or less chance encounter which creates the ephemeral as an affect of art. Thus it produces a split [écart], that varies according to the projection spaces used. Also this type of image performs neither as pure simulacra nor as pure mimesis. It is closer to the latin imago and the plassô of the sophistic than the platonic couple copy/simulacre which always belongs to a truth system. For even if the copy is a good likeness and the simulacre a bad copy, even if the simulacre emancipates itself from any Idea and any referential mimesis, it remains profoundly equivocal in its origin and in its exercise. For, wars simulated and programmed using electronic maps murder nonetheless. Thus, “seeing” is to displace one’s angle of vision and adopt a “geo-political” perspective of the world. If from a certain mediatized and virtualized perspective “the gulf war did not take place,” from a ground view it certainly did — 250,000 dead... If the image in art always presupposes a minimal suspension of the world, one that can make it slide from the visible towards a virtual-thought, that suspension might be immanent to the world, doubling the suspense. For the imago, that which Ulysses finds in his descent into Hades, is a quasi-spectral oblique image which can be neither reduced to a reflection nor to a simulacra. Rather, it is a body of a fictional shadow, which does not invoke a strong ontological causality. For it hollows out a gap between words and things, and like Barbara Cassin’s sophistic Helen, it is fundamentally double — both mirage and phantom. It is musical and contrapuntal, like a burst or “flash of a chance encounter.” Also it involves a convergence of divergent series — the machinic and the light, the Icarian and the earthly, the chaotic and the order, the feminine and the masculine, life and death — in a subitum which suddenly touches the substance of the inexistent. Here the real burns the image and the event is seized in its aleatory, in its dead time, its imperceptible variations and its zones of corporeal indiscernibility. This oblique image gives rise to “two chambers of reflection” as Lezanne Lima identified so well in Les Vases Orphiques. In fact it is dissipative because it is projective. The virtual is nothing other than that imperceptible sliding between the two, the construction of a place of passage, crossing, transfer and metamorphosis. To emigrate everywhere in the image as Paul Celan would have it in language. For it does not concern seeing the image but seeing across the image into its spaces of virtual projection and its multi-sensorial envelopments/developments. Also, this sliding of a pure optic towards a haptic-optic or a sonic-optic proper to the “post-ephemeral image” of which Toyo Ito has spoken, brings into question the “ocularcentrism” of the occidental tradition in which the visual and its machines have dominated since the seventeenth century.35 The de-hierarchization and de-specification of the senses proper to the cartographic multiplicities and the inevitable proliferation of media and envelopes (skin, clothes, tissues, homes and technological interfaces) makes of the thought-image as of the oblique-image, new technologies of the made-image [faire-image] which often oscillates in an impure zone between figuration and abstraction, representation and image, in order

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to create a fractalizing “dimension.” As if the ephemeral of the cartographic vanities and allegories of the past gave way to that which motivated them: an ephemeral eye apt at virtualizing the world in order to better find it again. “Painting of Idea” as Duchamp would have said. “Mono no aware” — the ephemeral and suspended, the pregnancy and poignancy of things, their dissipative energy — such would be the cartographic voyage of an art that does not renounce the affect of art and which has found, in the cartographies of the world, the truth of that vertical eye of which Bruegel’s Icarus dreamt in his fall. Perhaps a wounded beauty which takes the side of disorder and chaos, and abandons melancholy for the humour of a world sometimes too big, sometimes too small — that of a cartographic eye in art. Translated by Lang Baker, with Ger Zelinski and Susan Lord This essay appears as Chapter 6, “Icare aujourd’hui: l’oeil éphémère,” in Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s L’oeil cartographique de l’art (Paris: Éditions Gallilée, 1996), 145-171. The editors wish to thank Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Éditions Gallilée for their permission to translate and publish this text. [A note on the translation. We have provided in parentheses in the text the original French for those terms which English cannot accurately approximate. Buci-Glucksmann’s poetic style has been retained as much as possible. Whenever possible, citations are provided from previously published translations. In the note, these references are given first. All other citations are translated for this publication.— Trans.]

Notes 1. Italo Calvino, Leçons américaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 33. [Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Harvard University Press, 1988).] 2. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 53. 3. Malevich, “Suprematism,” Catalogue of the 10th state exhibition, Moscow, 1919; Reprinted in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevitch: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 283; tranlated from the Russian by Alexander Lieven. [ Malevitch, Écrits (Paris: G. Leovici, 1986), 227.] 4. Malevitch, Écrits (Paris: G. Leovici, 1986), 218. 5. ibid., 245. 6. Malevitch, La Lumière et la couleur (Lausanne: l’Age d’homme), 1981. 7. Guido Ballo. Lucio Fontana. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 185. [Lucio Fontana (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1987), 283.] 8. ibid., “First Spatial Art Manifesto,” 198. [ibid., 283.] 9. ibid., 198. [ibid., “spatialistes II”, 283.] 10. Severo Sarduy, “Six lacérations de la couleur,” Lucio Fontana (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1987), 14. 11. François Cheng, Vide et Plein (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994), 33. 12. ibid. See also my article “Le vide en peinture” in A. Tàpies (Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume), 1994. 13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible; trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) [Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964)]. [Lingis notes the difficulty in translating Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word écart and provides a number of possible translations,

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including divergence, spread, diviation, separation (see p. 216). In translating Buci-Glucksmann’s use of écart, we rely to some degree on these variants, as well as “gap,” “split” and “hollow.”—Trans.] 14. ibid., 227. [281.] 15. ibid., 228 [281.] 16. ibid., 220 [273.] 17. Florence de Mèredieu, “Le crustacé et la prothèse,” Paysages virtuels (Paris: Dis Voir, 1988), 15. 18. Jean Baudrillard, L’Autre par lui-même (Paris, Gallilée, 1987),15, 29 and 39. [The Ecstasy of Communication (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1988).] On the idea of the image where there is nothing to see, see La Transparence du Mal (Paris, Galilée, 1990), 25. [The Transparency of Evil (New York: Verso, 1993.)] 19. Jean Baudrillard, L’Autre par lui-même, 36. 20. Jean-Louis Weissberg, “Le compact réel/virtuel”, 16, 17. 21. Edmond Couchot, “Le même et l’autre,” Les Techimages in Revue d’aesthétique 25 (Paris, 1994), 46. 22. Paul Virilio and Catherine Ikam, “Le virtual est un lieu d’action,” Art Press (1993), 185. 23. Raymond Bellour, “La Chambre,” Traffic, 9 (Paris: Hiver, 1994). 24. I developed this analysis in A. Tàpies. 25. Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, Entre le temps et l’éternité, 73-77. 26. ibid., 77. 27. ibid., 77. 28. James Gleick, La Théorie du Chaos (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 127-28, and the entire chapter entitled “Une géométrie de la nature.” 29. John Rajchman, “Lightness, A Concept in Architecture,” Any 5 (1994): 6 passim. 30. Sophie Roulet and Sophie Soulié, “Toyo Ito, L’Architecture de l’éphémère,” (Paris: Le Monitor, 1991), 9. 31. Toyo Ito, “Vers un architecture post-ephémère,” interview with Sophie Roulet et Sophie Soulie, 92. I take from this article the terms of the description of Tokyo. 32. Didier Anzieau, Le Moi-Peau, 85. [The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).] 33. Gilles Deleuze, “L’épuisé dans Samuel Beckett,” Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 77. 34. Thomas Shannon, “Une Vision Global,” interview with Jérôme Sans, Art Press (June 1993). See also the catalogue of the exhibition in Sète, Feux Terrestres and the preface by Anne Tronche. 35. On the analysis of this “ocularcentrism” see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). I take the term from this book which reconstructs the history of vision in French thought.

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15 filmer med arkitekter Arkitektens mage (Peter Greenaway, Storbritannien/Italien, 1987) Bröllopsfesten (Ang Lee, Taiwan/USA, 1993) En underbar dag (Michael Hoffman, USA, 1996) Ett oanständigt förslag (Adrian Lyne, USA, 1993) Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais, Frankrike/Japan, 1959) Jungle Fever (Spike Lee, USA, 1991) Livsverket (Irwin Winkler/Vincent Lascoumes, USA, 2001) Män och kvinnor (Peter Chelsom, USA, 2001) Pionjären (King Vidor, USA, 1949) Skyskrapan brinner (John Guillermin/Irwin Allen, USA, 1974) Sleepwalker (Johannes Runeborg, Sverige, 2000) Snyltgästen (Frank Oz, USA, 1992) Three to Tango (Damon Santostefano, USA, 1999) Tre män och en baby (Leonard Nimoy, USA, 1987) Vid första ögonkastet (Irwin Winkler, USA, 1999)

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worth of artificial caves in a warren of entrances and exits throughout the city. Eliot Spitzer did this, the gruff, benchpress-ready men quietly say. We’ve got to stop him. But I’ve made my point. What I’d like to see, at some point before I die, is a series of show caves, free and open to the public, that have been excavated and paid for by the film and music revenues of global superstars. All the tunnels have been supervised by celebrities, who are addicted to digging. Shia LaBoeuf has a tunnel. Shakira has several. Even Bob Dole has one - but he’s forgotten how to use it. You book a flight to Hollywood, then, and you buy a Star Map - but within three hours you find yourself one hundred and sixty seven feet below ground in the most spectacular cave you’ve ever seen. Its stalactites have been precision-cut by CNC-milling machines, the walls shaped by computerprogrammable routers. There is a vague smell of sawdust in the air, and you notice several wood boards holding up some parts of the walls. There are vaults visible in the distance, and a slight groaning sound. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the New York Times, was there last week - and he hated the place. Rumor has it, though, that a vast, echoless complex exists beneath Atlanta, dug by Ludacris. Its dimensions are too shocking to believe. He hangs out down there with Umberto Eco, discussing the Hollow Earth Theory and practicing rhymes. Whenever another royalty check comes through, he digs deeper.

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What is architecture to you? Buildings, artistic experience, travel, other cultures, science, fascination, history. Communicate with each other, to make transport easier, meeting points where communication happens, safety...to feel good...home....somewhere you feel safe, somewhere you can get away from reality, we create a structure of how we want our society/ or way of living should look, playgrounds. Architecture is the human being, it controls how we move in space....then there is always a way to use architecture differently than the way it was thought from the beginning....interesting to see when people follow the rules of the architecture. Architecture says a lot about what we put value in in our society...which buildings are chosen to look extravagant depending on the activity happening inside them. It sends out signals of what we value as important. Johan Thysell, 42 Counsellor

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What is architecture to you? I want to study architecture, but when I did my internship at a architecture office it was very boring, I simply only got to do all the boring paper work. It is not something that I think of very often. I think we use architecture to characterize a house...it performs what they (the architects) want to happen inside it. You want to put a characteristics on the building depending on what happens inside it. There was a museum that I heard of, a kind of glass house you walked up a stairway on the outside of the house....that sounded cool. For me it is probably something in Chile, I like the buildings in Chile...they look beautiful but still you see that the quality of life is totally different than from here in Sweden. You can see that the walls are not maintained and the difference of how the people there relate to their houses in the sense of that they accept that it is not maintained, whereas in Sweden you would never accept to live in that kind of environment. The houses in Sweden represent the identify of the people that live in them. The president palace in Chile is very beautiful! How important is it how your home looks like? I think it is important to feel comfortable in your home...You sense directly if it is the right place for you. The houses that look like small boxes and it feels like people decorate it for someone else, I prefer when you see that a building or a house has a history and a character. San Torini I love, the white and the yellow and with the blue sky, when the nature and the people seem to coincide with each other. It is nice in those countries where you can sense that people appreciate life in a different way than we do here....it is not all about the consumer society. Alma Diaz RĂ¤mĂś, 15 Student Katarina Heiskanen,15 Student

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What is architecture to you? Is there a building that you like to go to? We hate our school, old and dirty few benches to sit on, too small spaces to communicate in and they are always full. How would your dream school look like? Bigger cafĂŠs and bigger corridors. You have to feel good where you are which means you have to take care of the place where you are in. Have to have furniture which is comfortable. It does not work to have a cafeteria where the benches are too small and too little space. Maria Sohrabi, 14 Student Garmian Sohrabi, 16 Student Roman Saide, 16 Student

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What is architecture to you? Since I work with stucco I think that architecture is all about decoration, but architecture of course also deals with what is inside the buildings, how it is planned, how you move in it. Where are the stairways, the walls I think we can think of architecture as a way of directing flows of movement, maybe? But most of all, to me, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about how the building looks. I like older architecture, from the turn of the last century. I feel that contemporary architecture has lost a lot of quality and in some ways the language of form. Another thing is that earlier we had one big space in the house to basically do everything and today we make a new room for every thing we do. What I like about earlier architecture is that they took time to come up with smart solutions and I believe that the knowledge of the handicraft was greater than today. Today we loose the idea of individuality in a building. Actually I have realized that the most important thing for me in a building is the energy of the place. Like I can sort of feel when I get inside that this is a good place or not, but how I know this I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell you. Mita JĂśnsson, 44 Stucco worker

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What is architecture to you? Building structure, how they are designed. How do we use architecture? You consume it when you are situated in it. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of it so much of using architecture, I enter a room and I notice where the windows are placed and doors are placed. Do you have a favorite building? Something that you recognize...like your family home....somewhere you are comfortable...it depends on the atmosphere, is it cosy, a safe feeling....it is more about the people that are connected to the building than the building itself. When you are somewhere where you can not find your way it makes you feel insecure. There is definitely some psychological studies that can have an immense affect of how people move within a building...people also look for that that they are familiar with. Kristina Erikson, 30 Self employed

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What is architecture to you? To design buildings, before I was interested in becoming an architect. Do you have a favorite place? The turning torso. Buildings that are distinct from other normal buildings, something that is different and special, I would design a building that would not look like a building so it had the function of a house but you would not necessary recognize it as one. Josefin Isaksson, 16 Student

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What is architecture to you? It is fun with architecture, when you play with the idea of how it is designed, what function it serves and what function it could serve. So many cool different things. Architecture is definitely an art form, Globen, the turning torso, houses built of glass...you can really play with peoples minds and thoughts. I think of the different ways you use light in architecture, and how it affects people. It has a lot to do with colors and how they changes how people communicate. It becomes more and more glass, you can use the natural light, modern houses have often high ceilings. Brick buildings are boring. It is very important with lights If you were to build a house how would it look? Free big spaces, not only with corners but rounded also, play with the light...use the nature, where the architecture melts in with nature. Tryggve Lindqvist, 15 Student Henrik Bjรถrkman, 15 Student Lukas Sernlind, 15 Student Robin Sahlstrรถm, 15 Student

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What is architecture to you? It is cool, my uncle is an architect, somebody that designs. The football stadium is designed, the fence is there because of a reason. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important when designing to consider that people must feel good in what you design and also to consider how people move within the place. First there is a need from the community and then you build something. Places you like? Our youth recreation centre, a place where you have activities for different needs, football, Ping-Pong, tv-games, computer room etc. If you would build a party place how would it look? Big dance floor, small room with couches where you could relax, a stage and a place for DJ Quality. Hamudi Karrani, 15 Music, dance, football person mâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;bame Karlsson, 15 Football professional

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs Jacobs’ book is an attack on “orthodox” modern city planning and city architectural design. Looking into how cities actually work, rather than how they should work according to urban designers and planners, Jacobs effectively describes the real factors affecting cities, and recommends strategies to enhance actual city performance. Part 1 Jacobs briefly explains influential ideas in orthodox planning, starting from Howard’s Garden city, indeed a set of self-sufficient small towns, ideal for all but those with a plan for their own lives. Concurrently, City Beautiful was developed to sort out the monuments from the rest of the city, and assemble them in a unit. Later Le Corbusier devised the Radiant City, composed of skyscrapers within a park. Jacobs argues that all these are irrelevant to how cities work, and therefore moves on to explain workings of cities in the first part of the book. She explores the three primary uses of sidewalks: safety, contact, and assimilating children. Street safety is promoted by pavements clearly marking a public/private separation, and by spontaneous protection with the eyes of both pedestrians and those watching the continual flow of pedestrians from buildings. To make this eye protection effective at enhancing safety, there should be “an unconscious assumption of general street support” when necessary, or an element of “trust”. As the main contact venue, pavements contribute to building trust among neighbors over time. Moreover, self-appointed public characters such as storekeepers enhance the social structure of sidewalk life by learning the news at retail and spreading it. Jacobs argues that such trust cannot be built in artificial public places such as a game room in a housing project. Sidewalk contact and safety, together, thwart segregation and racial discrimination. A final function of sidewalks is to provide a non-matriarchy environment for children to play. This is not achieved in the presumably “safe” city parks - an assumption that Jacobs seriously challenges due to the lack of surveillance mechanisms in parks. Successful, functional parks are those under intense use by a diverse set of companies and residents. Such parks usually possess four common characteristics: intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure. Intricacy is the variety of reasons people use parks, among them centering or the fact that parks have a place known as their centers. Sun, shaded in the summer, should be present in parks, as well as building to enclose parks. Jacobs then explores a city neighborhood, tricky to define for while it is an organ of self-governance, it is not self-contained. Three levels of city neighborhoods; city, districts, and streets, can be identified. Streets should be able to effectively ask for help when enormous problems arise. Effective districts should therefore exist to represent streets to the city. City is the source of most public money – from federal or state coffers.

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Part 2 Given the importance of all kinds of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support, part two of the book explains the conditions for city diversity or the economic workings that produce lively cities. First, districts must serve more than one primary function to ensure presence of people using the same common facilities at different times. Second, blocks should be short, to increase path options between points of departure and destinations, and therefore enhance social and as a result economic development. Third, buildings should be at varying ages, accommodating different people and businesses which can afford different levels of rents. Fourth, there should be a dense concentration of people, including residents, to promote visible city life. It is important that all of these four conditions are necessary to generate diversity, and absence of each one would result in homogeny and ultimately dullness. Jacobs refutes the myths about disadvantages of diversity presented in orthodox planning. First she argues that diversity does not innately diminish visual order. Conversely, homogeny or superficially diverselooking homogeneous areas lack beauty. Moreover, diversity is not the root cause of traffic congestions, which is caused by vehicles and not people in themselves. Lively, diverse areas encourage walking. Diversity is not permissive to ruinous uses- if defined correctly- either. A category of uses contributing nothing to a districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s general convenience, such as junk yards, grow in unsuccessful spots. In fact, to make these areas successful and thereby dispose of such ruinous uses, diversity should be enhanced. A second category of conceived ruinous uses such as bars and theaters are a threat in grey areas, but not harmful in diverse city districts. The final category includes parking lots, large or heavy truck depots, gas stations, gigantic outdoor advertising and enterprises harmful due to their wrong scale in certain streets. Jacobs suggests that exerting controls on the scale of street frontage permitted to a use would alleviate such a use. Part 3 Part three of the book is designated to analyzing four forces of decline and regeneration in city cycles: successful diversity as a self-destructive factor, deadening influence of massive single elements in cities, population instability as an obstacle to diversity growth, and effects of public and private money. Self destruction of outstanding successful districts occurs by ousting less affluent dwellers and businesses, to replace them with more affluent or profitable ones, probably as the multiplication of those already existing in that district. This not only erodes the variety of dwellers and businesses as the base for diversity in that specific district, but also has a cross-effect on the diversity of other localities by depriving them from such profitable businesses and affluent residents needed for mutual support. Massive single facilities such as railroad tracks, enormous parks, and college campuses create vacuums in areas immediately next to their borders because such areas (adjoining borders) are a terminus of generalized use. Jacobs suggests to figure out border-line cases, such as special park uses (chess or checker pavilions), in order to blend the border and the immediate neighboring area together and yet keep the city as city and the massive element (such as the park) as itself. Population instability is the third factor in the life cycle of cities. For instance, the reason that slums remain slums is the unstable population of residents there, ready to get out when they have the choice. Therefore, Jacobs suggests that the real slumming process, as opposed to slum shifting through renewal projects or slum immuring practices of orthodox planning, is to make slum dwellers desire to stay and develop neighborhoods. This could possibly be done by gradual incremental monies which make continual improvements in the quality of lives of individual residents of slums. The last factor is public and private money. Jacobs argues that money has its limitations, incapable of buying inherent success for cities lacking the success factors. She classifies money into 3 forms: credit extended by traditional, non-governmental lending institutions, money provided by government through

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tax receipts or borrowing power, and money from the underworld of cash and credit. Jacobs argues that despite the differences, these three kinds of money behave similarly in one regard: They shape cataclysmic, rather than gradual, changes in cities. She matches the cycles in city districts with these types of money: “First the withdrawal of all conventional money, then ruination financed by shadow-world money; then selection of the area by the Planning Commission as a candidate for cataclysmic use of government money to finance renewal clearance”. These cataclysmic monies, in the absence of gradual money, waste city districts which are indeed fit for city life and possess a potential for rapid improvements. Part 4 Part four of the book is dedicated to effective tactics to actually improve city performance.These include: subsidized dwellings, attrition of automobiles as opposed to erosion of cities by cars, improvement of visual order without sacrificing diversity, salvaging projects, and redesigning governing and planning districts. Jacobs suggests subsidized dwellings be offered to those who cannot afford normal housing. Unlike the current practice in which the government acts as the landlord, these people can and should be housed by private enterprises in regular buildings, not projects. The government guarantees a rent to the landlords. Tenants pay subsidized rents, calculated based on their income level, and the government pays the difference. This way, under circumstances that tenants’ incomes increase, they are not forced to leave, for their rents would be adjusted. Therefore, diversity would be enhanced by keeping those wishing to remain at their choice. Tenants might be encouraged to stay by letting them own the house gradually, after years of paying rents. Jacobs admits that there are potentials for corruption, but argues that corruption grows as the target of corruption remains unchanged.Thus, she suggests that methods of subsidized dwelling be revised and varied every eight or ten years. Cities offer multiple choices. However, one cannot take advantage of this fact without being able to get around easily. Thus, accommodating city transportation is important, and this should not destroy the related intricate and concentrated land use. She proposes tactics of giving room to other desired city uses which compete with automobile traffic needs such as widening sidewalks for street displays which would narrow the vehicular roadbed and thereby automatically reduce car use, and traffic congestion. Jacobs argues that visual cohesiveness should not be regarded as a goal. She stresses the importance of the visual announcement that a high number of streets would make by picturing an intense life. On the down side, if such streets go on and on to the distance, the intricacy and intensity of the “foreground” appears to be repeated infinitely.Therefore the endless repetition and continuation should be hampered, by introducing visual irregularities and interruptions into the city scene, such as irregular street patterns with bends, special buildings, etc. Finally Jacobs argues that cities are a problem of organized complexity. Unlike simple two-variable or disorganized-complexity problems of statistical randomness, problems of organized complexities are composed of numerous interrelated factors.Therefore, horizontal structures in city planning would work better than vertical structures, which aim at oversimplifying problems of such complexity.

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The future is commonly understood to contain all events that have yet to occur. It is the opposite of the past, and is the time after the present.

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Inscribing structures of dance into architecture1

Evelyn Gavrilou National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Abstract Alternative models of dance as spatio-temporal form are used as a basis for discussing the interaction between the bodies of buildings and subjects in architectural environments. The aim is to enrich the ways in which we describe and design the spatial structure of built space in relation to the spatial structure of embodied experience. Can choreology contribute to spatial theory in architecture? This paper looks at dance, and the theory of dance in order to retrieve principles of movement, co-ordination and spatio-temporal form and that can potentially illuminate and enrich the manner in which we understand buildings as generators of spatial experience. Specifically, looking at dance offers a good starting point for asking questions about the relationship between movement and visual understanding, generators of form that might have tactile or kinetic foundations and their visual consequences. This endeavour involves a reconsideration of our awareness of the human body: recent theoretical discussions (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) have brought into focus the importance of embodied experience as a foundation for the development of abstract frames of understanding. However, the body involved in embodied experience should not necessarily be treated only as a biological given. It becomes itself a construct and is amenable to redefinition based on perceptual and cognitive schemes. Dance offers a good way to understand how this may occur precisely because the body is the instrument for the production of form while at the same time the experience and the communication of the experience of the body is expressed as an aim of movement. Thus, dealing with dance in the context of architecture is aimed at bringing a richer understanding of the body to bear upon our descriptions of spatial experience and upon our treatment of such experience as an end of design formulation.

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32 Keywords Dance, spatial experience, spatial structure, design d i a g r a m s , Balanchine, Cunningham evelynga@ortenet.gr

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In earlier work, Hillier (1996) and Peponis (1997) have pointed out the complementary relationship between architecture and dance in so far as movement and form are concerned. While dance realises some of the patterns of movement that are potentially implied by empty space, architecture restricts potential movement through the imposition of boundaries and the creation of spatial structure. Thus, a heuristic comparison between dance and built space has been used to suggest that our understanding of space involves an exploration of how generative forces interact with constraints, how patterns of movement reveal underlying patterns of order within everyday spatial experience. At the same time, consideration of embodied spatial experience is embedded in commonly used analytic techniques for spatial analysis. For example, consistent with other theoretical approaches (Gibson, 1986), the architectural analysis of the visual field, as articulated through a multiplicity of computational tools, requires that we consider not only the individual visual frame, but

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much more fundamentally, the manner in which the visual field is constructed as a function of potential movement and layout structure. However, while movement and its relationship to physical setting is central to the body of theory and the analytic techniques associated with “space syntax”, no attempt has yet been presented in previous syntactic symposia to learn from the way in which space is constructed in and through dance. Thus, this paper is an exploratory attempt to ask whether the study of dance can make a specific contribution to our description, conceptualisation and formulation of spatial patterns and spatial meaning in architecture. Dance can be defined as patterned, rhythmic movement in space and time (Copeland and Cohen, 1983). This is a broad definition that links dance to common everyday patterns of movement, perhaps as a conscious elaboration of relationships and potentialities that are also manifest in such everyday patterns. The theory of dance, choreology, addresses the principles that generate dance movements as they interact with the body. These can involve a vocabulary of individual moves, a syntax governing the sequence of such moves in time, and a syntax of co-ordination between different moves occurring simultaneously or in parallel. Most importantly, the principles that generate dance include a reflective awareness of the interplay between a locally applied rule, or force, that becomes visible as a movement, and an overall form that unfolds over time as the collective effect of such rules or forces. Dancers and viewers alike consider the individual moment as part of an overall flow, and the individual movement as part of a complex co-ordination of other movements, the difference being that the dancers are immersed in the very flow they are creating, while viewers are presented with it. However, the overall form of dance cannot easily be described. First and foremost, the whole form is only present in the imagination, it implies an “imaginative space of dance” (Sheets-Johnstone, 1980). The imaginative form of dance is not constituted as a series of images but as a Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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unified and continuous image, an almost paradoxical synchronic capture of a diachronic phenomenon. As Foster (1986: 58) has put it, “only the viewer who retains visual, aural and kinesthetic impressions of the dance as it unfolds in time can compare succeeding moments of the dance, noticing similarities, variations, and contrasts and comprehending larger patterns – phrases of movement and sections of the dance – and finally the dance as a whole”. Below, it will be suggested that the imaginative form of dance itself is spatially structured in different ways, each with different implications regarding the definition of the dancing subject, the viewing subject and the manner in which dance is generated over time. The subsequent attempt to relate dance to architecture will primarily address aspects of underlying structure. Contrasting paradigms of dance: Balanchine and Cunningham Following arguments by Foster (1986) we can treat works by choreographers George Balanchine (1904-1983) and Merce Cunningham (1919-) which can be used to illustrate two contrasting paradigms of dance. Many of Balanchine’s choreographies are composed from one elegant picture or pose to the next. In other words, certain positions and certain moments in time are given particular emphasis, through momentary pauses. Movement can be perceived to occur so as to bridge between such privileged moments and in turn, the privileged pauses can be perceived as culminations of motions. This implies that dance is treated as primarily visual not only in perception but also in conception, specifically that it brings to the fore specific visual frames. Also, the idea of a vocabulary of key discrete positions is clearly present, not only as a compositional device, but also as a clearly perceivable aspect of the language of dance. Movement is exploited for its capacity to highlight the tensions and forces that are involved in the composition of such frames. It also serves to suggest that the idealised or privileged moments are transformable into one another. Accordingly, the syntax of the dance can be considered in terms of sequences of transitions, or transmutations, from one pose to the next. In this context, however, the body is exploited for its ability to realise ideal forms, in a seemingly effortless manner. The direct experience of the body, or its mechanics are not as important as the pictorial compositions that bodies fit in. The emphasis is on overall harmony, including a good fit between pictorial image and music. Stravinsky (1966:24), for example, has said that “to see Balanchine’s choreography of the Movements is to hear music with one’s eyes; and this visual hearing has been a greater revelation to me, I think, than to anyone else. The choreography emphasises relations of which I had hardly been aware – in the same way – and the performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result”. Proceedings . 4th International Space Syntax Symposium London 2003

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This choreographic emphasis can perhaps be traced back to earlier traditions, including the ideas explored by French court dance in the 18th century. In 1760, for example, Noverre encouraged choreographers to consult paintings in order to identify harmonious visual compositions and then to think of the sequencing of the elements of dance in terms of their theatrical effect (Copeland and Cohen, 1983: 12-13). However, for Balanchine, the visual composition of the dance and the unfolding of movements is more important than the potential narrative contents, even if it is not independent of them (Balanchine, 1945). The choreographies by Cunningham are built upon a continuous inquiry as to the potentialities of the human body, what arms and legs, torso and head can do in relation to gravity, time and space. The movements of different parts of the body are often elaborated independently of each other, through a process of combination.

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Thus, the evolving lexicon of moves is open-ended, dense and provisional. The syntaxes of arrangement are often unpredictable regarding their overall structure. Choreographies do not provide a sense of flow from one predetermined privileged composition to another and in many cases do not even suggest such privileged positions, or moments of definitive conclusion of movement. In some cases the impression is of parallel flows occurring simultaneously but distinguished not only as spatial forms but also as patterns of accentuation of time. In other cases, contrasts between local spatial forms and rhythms are evident. In the terminology used by Hillier and Hanson (1984) to describe morphic languages, Cunninghamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choreographies suggest a tension between local and global dimensions of spatial order, evolve from multiple local generators to global effects, and imply a tension between generative rules and randomness. Thus, the dances invite an active engagement to retrieve descriptions of pattern, to search for alternative focal points of attention, to recognise emergence. The admission of differentiation, heterogeneity, contrast, and circumstance extends into the manner in which Cunningham relates dance to music. The dance is not treated as an interpretation or visualisation of the music, nor is the music treated as a rhythmic, narrative or descriptive scaffolding for evolving the dance. Cunningham allows sound to be present as yet another layer of a composite and multi-sensory morphology, intersecting the morphology of movement. The relationship of music to dance is often not known until the moment of the performance. Equally, colour, lighting, and stage design do not act as inert backgrounds that contribute to the imagistic interpretation of narrative; nor do they assist in visually accenting and highlighting specific patterns or focal points of attention. They too are treated as spatial morphologies that intersect with the

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morphology of movement. Viewers are invited to seek the meaning of the dance in the form itself, rather than in relationships of representation or reference, internal or external to the elements of the dance. Contrasting choreographic principles can be treated as indexes of broader paradigmatic shifts. Foster (1986) has sought to identify paradigms which encompass the manner in which subjectivity, perception and the awareness of the body as well as more directly evident principles of movement. For example, she contrasts Balanchine’s emphasis upon technique as the attainment of control and prescribed skills with Cunningham’s emphasis upon technique as the articulation of bodily movement into partly distinct independent motions; she also contrasts Balanchine’s treatment of the body itself as a medium to attain ideal forms with Cunningham’s exploration of the potential of bones, muscles, nerves and ligaments to produce and articulate complex and novel structures of movement. Regarding expressive aims, she contrasts Balanchines’s emphasis upon resonance and harmony with Cunningham’s emphasis upon enunciation. Similarly, viewers’ responses are seen to oscillate between the contrasting poles of exhilaration and attentiveness, as dancers’ sense of subjectivity is seen to oscillate between an empathetic dedication to the ideals of an art and an instrumental immersion on the exigencies of an activity or a complex motion. Such contrasts form part of a more complex argument that makes sense of the evolution of choreography in the United States in terms of four major paradigms. The significance of Foster’s search for fundamental paradigmatic shifts is to underscore that the body, and by implication the generation, perception and understanding of immediate spatial experience can be treated not only as a biological given but also as a cultural construct. If different principles of choreography imply different assumptions, or normative positions, regarding the body and its movement, it might be possible to ask if they also imply different ways of reading a spatial setting from the point of view of spatial experience. At what level of detail and according to what dimensions of formal variability and structure might such differences implicate the architectural object and the manner in which it can be described and designed? The next section discusses some preliminary ideas for the retrieval of descriptions of settings through the lens of the paradigms of dance described above. The final section extends the argument through tentative design exercises.

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Reading a setting to design a boundary A single space used as an office is to be subdivided. At present, the furniture is arranged into the following major behavioural micro-settings. First, a number of tables are clustered to create a large work-surface, or meeting area, in the front of the room. Second, a bookcase is arranged along one of the lateral walls, with a system of deeper drawers at the bottom, creating a platform for arranging objects, including architectural models, at its base. Third, a work desk is placed against the same lateral wall, at the back of the room. An adjoining smaller table holds the peripherals for a computer that sits on the desk. Fourth, a sofa is placed against the back wall, facing forward. It is often used for rest and occasionally extended into a bed. Fifth, a smaller shelf holds the telephone next to a paper sculpture placed on a wall, at one of the back corners of the room. There are four connections, all arranged by the lateral wall across from the bookcase: these include two front doors (one

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leading directly to a narrow street, the other leading to the lobby of a block of apartments and, through that, to a busier street), an auxiliary bathroom by the first front door and a kitchen, also connected to another bathroom. A boundary needs to be designed to divide the space into a front and a back part so that the former can be classified as a primary use space and the later as an auxiliary space, for the purposes of satisfying building codes. The elementary design question to be treated here is the manner in which a description of the live-in experience of space can inform the design of the boundary and the intentional manipulation of the morphology of space use and spatial experience that will unavoidably issue from its construction. It will be argued that the description can be informed by models of the body, of movement and of spatial experience drawn from the study of dance. Figure 1 shows the space and the main behavioural settings which are currently fully co-visible and directly connected. The addition of a partition will result in the interruption of some relations of visibility and connection, transforming a very dense graph into a graph with two distinct clusters. The design question is how to interpret, render and qualify this unavoidable structural change in terms of a spatial experience. Two possible readings of this underlying structure will be formulated, leading towards alternative designs. The two choreographic paradigms outlined above will be used as filters towards establishing the readings and developing them into designs. The procedure will be fundamentally diagrammatic. Diagrams are â&#x20AC;&#x153;intuitions, insights, feelings or concepts expressed as shapes and spatial relationships; more precisely, diagrams engender the configurational structure implicit in various forms of understandingâ&#x20AC;? (Peponis et al., 2002). Here, they are used to mediate the transition from an understanding of choreographic paradigms, to an understanding of spatial experience, a reading of spatial setting and finally a projection of new potential experience through the design of an otherwise simple partition. Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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Figure 1: The plan of a setting, with behavioral micro-settings marked. The implications of adding a partition represented as transformations of an underlying connectivity graph

Inscribing still sections of movements As stated earlier, Balanchine’s choreographies can be perceived as flows of movement linking privileged poses and moments in space. Figure 2a visualises this using screen captures from the “Nutcracker” (Balanchine, 1997) as an example. Figures 2b-d propose the principles of a reading of setting: A setting is viewed from a position often occupied in normal space-use; particular frames within the field of vision are identified, corresponding to familiar behaviours and micro-settings regularly occupied and inscribed in the lived-in image of space (Figure 2b). These frames are isolated from their configurational context, their boundaries are blurred and they are allowed to overlap; they get “stitched” together by a line that represents typical sequences of movement and connections between them (Figure 2c). It is as if diachronically dispersed snapshots of everyday life are placed in a composition that functions as the equivalent of a synchronic snapshot, a composite mental image anchored onto discrete visual impressions. This image has spatial articulation, precisely because the focal themes of the different snapshots are linked according to habitual patterns of movement and connection. To express this diagrammatically, the composition of frames is drawn as a folded surface that can be looked at in two ways: first, as a synthesis of typical perspectives (the micro-settings seen or remembered from typical viewpoints); second as a pattern of overlap whereby the sensed properties of objects in each frame are allowed to affect and distort the sensed properties of objects in others (as the sensations and feelings associated with one activity linger and affect the sensations and feelings associated with another) (Figure 2d). What kinds of design intentions might emerge from such a diagram of ways of thinking and seeing? Figure 3 suggests that the partition can be conceptualised as an interruption of current patterns of movement or viewing from relevant micro-settings, resulting in the creation of new frames inscribed onto the partition.

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Figure 2: Balanchineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choreographies can be read as sequences of momentarily crystallized visual frames linked by flows of movement. Settings can similarly be imagined as spatial syntheses of visual frames into patterns that correspond to habitual spatial behaviors

Figure 3: Diagrammatic representation of the inscription of movement and visibility patterns upon a partition plane Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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The inscription of new frames onto the partition may occur in at least two ways. First, new frames can be treated as literal openings that define the visual relationships between pairs of individual micro-settings. This is equivalent to treating the new partition and its openings as a structure that affects the visual polygons (Benedikt, 1979) extending from vantage points corresponding to significant positions in space. Second, the partition itself can be treated as an object with its own spatial structure that invites movement towards it, tactile exploration, and viewing from particular close-up positions. In addition to inscribing frames, however, the relationship between such frames and mediating movements must itself be inscribed. One way to do this is to think of the partition in terms of surfaces that become distorted and folded as forces of impact are applied to them. In addition, movement can be inscribed by allowing the two sides of the partition to become associated with different materials each of which becomes visible, in a controlled way, from the other side; this can register the idea that the partition is regularly viewed from both sides as the behaviours that occur in the partitioned setting continue to be closely interlinked. These ideas are represented in Figures 4a and 4b which are diagrams of an architectural intention, corresponding to an elevation and a plan respectively.

Figure 4: Diagrammatic elevation and plan of a possible partition inscribing frames of visibility and movement

These diagrams are amenable to development into architectural drawings. From the point of view of the present argument, the significant feature of the diagrams is that they orient design intentionality to various forms of relevant elaboration. For example, from a visual point of view, the folds can be approached as perspectival distortions that may work together in a manner that marks positions in space as significant viewing points. Or, from a functional point of view, the thicker areas of the object can be interpreted as small scale enclosures, say shelves, that would engender contact with the body, and therefore behavioural positioning associated with additional viewing points. Thus, the effect upon visibility polygons, Proceedings . 4th International Space Syntax Symposium London 2003

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characteristic of either typical positions or typical paths (Figure 5), is only one of the ways in which the partition can be developed to both register frames and to project significant viewing points in space, both at a distance and at close range. Indeed, the engagement of scale, the creation of overlapping frames of reference corresponding to ranges of distance from the partition is a most interesting direction in which design intentionality can be further developed.

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Figure 5: Interaction between partition and visibility polygons from key vantage points

Inscribing articulated movements Cunninghamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choreographies emphasise the articulation of independent movements. Figure 6a expresses this diagrammatically by superimposing folded surfaces representing movements over a screen capture (Cunningham, 2001). Figures 6b-e propose principles for reading a setting derived from the idea of expressing the articulation of movements. A setting is viewed from a position often occupied in normal space use; particular behavioural micro-settings are identified that can be treated as destinations and nodes of movement trajectories (Figure 6b). A particular path of movement is represented by two sets of superimposed horizontal ribbons associated with the lower and the upper body respectively; both vary in width, while the upper one also varies in inclination relative to the floor; thus additional movements Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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of the body are represented including outward stretch (Figure 6c). The movement pattern is subsequently represented as a solid surface extending between the two ribbons; the inclination of the surface relative to the vertical plane represents body inclinations; the surface is incident upon frames representing the objects to which movement is directed (Figure 6d). The momentary engagement of the body with these objects is inscribed by absorbing deformations onto the surface; the objects/ frames themselves are no longer independently shown (Figure 6e). It is as if habitual patterns of movement are represented by a plastic form anchored onto the setting at significant positions. Alternatively, the representation can be perceived as a pattern of 3-D extrusions and elaborations of lines that would otherwise merely mark the trace of movement on the floor.

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Figure 6: Cunninghamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choreographies can be read as patterns of independent movements coming together into localized and provisional interactions. Settings can similarly be imagined according to movement surfaces inscribing interaction between bodies and objects in the setting

What kinds of design intentions might emerge from such a diagram of articulated movement anchored in a spatial setting? Figure 7 suggests that the partition can be conceptualised as a plane intersected by primary (lower body) and secondary (upper body) lines of movement as well as by views upon the pattern of movement from selected vantage points. Thus, Figure 7a emphasises the main traces of movement on the floor, as they are interrupted and reflected when they intersect the boundary; Figure 7b emphasises the movements of the upper body that alternatively get tangent to the plane or distant from it; Figure 7c interprets movements on both sides Proceedings . 4th International Space Syntax Symposium London 2003

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of the plane as ribbons intersecting it, in order to suggest that openings or passages are created; Figure 7d inserts the same pattern within the traces of views and transverse movements, some of which are themselves represented as surfaces intersecting the plane. The underlying intuition is that the boundary must directly affect the body and respond to it in such a way that body and boundary become momentarily merged into a single pattern of movement. The body is not to be merely set-up and framed, as previously; nor is the boundary to act primarily as a framing device. Rather, body and partition are to be treated as potentially interacting mechanisms able to generate partly co-ordinated patterns.

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Figure 7: Diagrammatic representation of the interaction between the partition plane and movement and visibility patterns affected by it

Two alternative diagrams of architectural intentions are developed from these premises. The first (Figures 8 and 10a-c) breaks the partition into four sections. The two end sections are formed as strips of wire mesh and are, therefore, partly transparent. The middle sections are made of wood strips differentially angled around pivoting axes about which they rotate. The strips can be locked together to rotate as a single element, functioning as a door; or, they can be locked into separate sets, so that the upper set rotates as a window; or, finally, they can be unlocked and rotated independently. In this manner, each of the two middle sections can function in multiple ways. When both sections are rotated, various configurations are possible. These include a bi-permeable enclosure in the middle, with one door on either side; or a uni-permeable enclosure facing inward, also with one door on either side. The shorter and longer angled strips are made of different material, so that the colour difference can be used to differentiate the two sides of the partition. At various positions, the simultaneous exposure to both colours would imply a virtual synchronisation of the two boundary faces. Figure 10a shows the partition inserted in the plan of the setting.

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Figure 8: Diagrammatic representation of partition

The second diagrammatic alternative, (Figures 9 and 10d-f) treats the partition as an integral articulated mechanism. There are two ways in which the partition functions to control connections between the front and back rooms. These can be better explained with reference to figure 10. The first way is to enter the narrow passage which is formed near the bookcase wall, pointed towards the front room and leading towards a closed door (Figure 10d). A subject proceeding down this passage can push the door so as to enter the back room (Figure 10e). The action results in closing the passage behind, as if to squeeze the subject through. This action simultaneously starts to open a second passage at the other end of the partition, near the entrance wall. This second passage, which is much more direct, provides an alternative way for returning back towards the front room (Figure 10f). The co-ordination of the mechanism is achieved by means of a wheel with arms, situated above head height, but clearly visible within the volume of the overall space. Proceedings . 4th International Space Syntax Symposium London 2003

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Figure 9: Diagrammatic representation of partition

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Figure 10: Alternative partitions inserted in the plan of the setting

Discussion The diagrams discussed above represent experimental devices that structure the micro- scale of spatial experience. They render, or qualify in particular ways, elementary relationships of division, transition, and visibility. By doing so they question what we mean by a boundary, and, by implication, what the relationship is between the body of built form and the spatial structures and experiences generated by built form. Several lines of theoretical discussion issue from the experimentation. First, how to enrich the ways in which spatial structure is represented in order to be analysed. Within the context of â&#x20AC;&#x153;space syntaxâ&#x20AC;?, attention is placed on the manner in Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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which the perceivable geometry of built space is read prior to the representation of intelligible connections in terms of graphs. But more is at stake than simple degree of detail, or resolution, adopted for the analysis. For instance, the linkages between visual structure treated in terms of visibility polygons and visual structure treated in terms of perspective or other representational frameworks need to be examined systematically. Also, the manner in which different frames of reference overlap or are nested into each other needs to be further conceptualised and represented (how can we deal with the simultaneous presence of different scales of spatial structure within the perceptual field, for example). A second family of questions concerns the representation of spatial experience as a morphology with objective dimensions. All space-occupancy oscillates between the two poles of movement and rest, and the idea of representing space as a relational structure from these two points of view is fundamental to representations of spatial structure such as the lines map, the various convex partitions and the visibility polygons. The exercises reported here suggest potentially fruitful developments that would take us from the representation of the structural scaffolding of behavior to a representation of aspects of spatial experience. The idea of turning lines representing paths into 3-D surfaces whose shape (variations of width, slope, inclination) can register more about the movements that occur on the paths than their mere trace may be fruitful in other studies. The combination of local visual information, including particular points of view, into constructions that summarise aspects of global spatial structure as imaginatively remembered may also have potential for more analytic development. The aim would not be to abstract connecting movements out of our representations of global structure, but rather to complement our analysis of global structure as a pattern of connections that are explored through movement, by an analysis of global structure as a virtual synchrony of locally elaborated conditions. Such questions can be approached from different points of view, some of which are taken up by other papers presented at this symposium. Studies of dance provide a particularly interesting point of departure for discussing them, precisely because they call us to look at spatial structure in terms of patterns of potential coordination that arise between otherwise discrete and independent entities, rather than merely as patterns fixed into the shape of material things. This paper has emphasised the potential patterns of provisional co-ordination between the perceiving and thinking human body, and the body of the building. In the context of this paper, the much more interesting, but also more difficult step, of looking at space as a field of provisional co-ordination of collections of individuals has not yet been approached from the point of view of dance. This is the topic of current work extending the studies reported here. Proceedings . 4th International Space Syntax Symposium London 2003

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Notes 1

This paper is based upon studies in the spatial construction of meaning that formed part of the post-

graduate course in architecture offered by John Peponis, Ken Knoespel and Andreas Kourkoulas at the National Technical University of Athens and at the Georgia Institute of Technology. An associated MSc thesis, on spatial paradigms in dance was supervised by John Peponis References Balanchine, G., 1945, “Notes on Choreography”, Dance Index, February-March, pp. 20-31 Balanchine, G., 1977, The Nutcracker, Warner Video Benedikt, M. L., 1979, “To take hold of space: isovists and isovist fields”, Environment and Planning B, 6, pp. 47-65 Copeland, R., and Cohen, M. (eds.), 1983, What is Dance, Oxford, Oxford University Press Cunningham, M., 2001, A lifetime in dance, Winstar TV and Video Foster, S. L., 1986, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, Berkeley, University of California Press Gibson, J. J., 1986, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hillsadle, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

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Hiller, B., 1996, Space is the Machine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Johnson, M., 1987, The Body in the Mind, Chicago, University of Chicago Press Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh, New York, Basic Books Peponis, J., 1997, Chorographies: the architectural construction of meaning, Athens, Alexandria Press Peponis, J., Knoespel, K., Abrioux, Y., Kanekar, A., Lycourioti, I., Touloumis, A., Michalopoulou, K., Spanou, I., and Gavrilou, E., 2002, “La Construction Spatial du Sens en Architecture: Un Projet Transdisciplinaire”, Theorie Literature Enseigment, 20, pp. 139-156 Sheets-Johnstone, M., 1980, The Phenomenology of Dance, New York, Books for Libraries, A Division of Arno Press Stravinsky, I., and Craft, R., 1966, Themes and Episodes, New York, Knopf

Inscribing structures of dance into architecture

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Skriver: Hej

Martin Miljand [10:26:23] Martin Miljand skriver: är på arkitekturdagen och jobbar m tor [10:26:29] Martin Miljand skriver: vi ska göra en bok på en dag [10:26:33] Martin Miljand skriver: typ 800 sidor [10:26:46] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Kul, låter som ett hästjobb. [10:26:50] Martin Miljand skriver: kan jag göra en intrvju med dig [10:26:54] Martin Miljand skriver: jepp helt sjukt [10:27:25] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Tja, det kan du väl, om det går hyfsat fort, måste dra till jobbet snart. [10:27:31] Martin Miljand skriver: ha ha [10:27:36] Martin Miljand skriver: kan ju göra den under dan [10:27:42] Martin Miljand skriver: jag vet inte vad jag ska fråga [10:27:46] Martin Miljand skriver: :D [10:28:35] Martin Miljand skriver: Kanske ngt om erat husletande [10:28:52] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Ok, fundera på det, är här ett tag till, men sen tänkte jag ta en långsam promenad in till jobbet. Börjar kl 12, och slutar 9.30, så det blir inte så jättemycket tid kvar. [10:29:11] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Varför ska den va just 800 sidor? [10:29:16] Martin Miljand skriver: shit... [10:29:18] Martin Miljand skriver: ha ha [10:29:20] Martin Miljand skriver: varför inte

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[10:29:52] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Ja det förstås, men det låter ju som ett rätt högt uppsatt mål, om man säger så. [10:30:03] Martin Miljand skriver: det är lite av poängen [10:31:20] Martin Miljand skriver: Tänker ni annorlunda när no köper hus i London än om ni hade köpt i Sverige? [10:31:30] Martin Miljand skriver: när ni [10:31:41] Martin Miljand skriver: köper hus ska det va [10:31:46] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Ok, men bara att göra en bok på en dag är jju ett rätt högt uppsatt mål. Antar att det inte är en särskilt snäv bok. [10:31:54] Martin Miljand skriver: nope [10:32:21] Martin Miljand skriver: Skulle ni köpt hus om ni bestämde er för att flytta tillbaka till Stockholm [10:34:57] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Tja, har ju aldrig köpt något hus eller lägenhet i sverige, men lite annorlunda är det ju, speciellt budgivningsningsprocessen. Här har man ju lite mer tid på sig då man inte budar mot andra samtidigt, inte lika stressigt. [10:35:14] Martin Miljand skriver: just det [10:36:45] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: I stockholm skulle vi nog köpt en lägenhet, här siktar vi på hus. I london kan man ju faktiskt bo centralt och ändå ha eget hus med liten trädgård. Det är nog ganska unikt för en storstad. [10:38:32] Martin Miljand skriver: Ja eller hur, det känns ju ovanligt att hitta hus i centrala Stockholm [10:38:49] Martin Miljand skriver: känns också som att det är större skillnad mellan lägenhet och hus i Sverige? [10:38:52] Martin Miljand skriver: eller? [10:39:09] Martin Miljand skriver: Kanske just det där med radhusen som finns i London [10:39:26] Martin Miljand skriver: Finns ju ingen motsvarighet i Stockholm [10:40:38] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Ja defenitivt, att gå från lägenhet till hus i stockholm innebär ju ofta ett byte av livsstil, här betyder det mest att man får mera yta att bo på. [10:41:33] Martin Miljand skriver: Precis [10:41:37] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Nej det finns ju ingen riktig motsvarighet i sverige till en engelska terrace. [10:41:47] Martin Miljand skriver: kan du skicka över ngn bild på det huset ni lagt bud på

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[10:41:49] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: engelsk [10:41:50] Martin Miljand skriver: från gatan [10:42:00] Martin Miljand skriver: det här går ju toppen! [10:42:08] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Kan ge dig länken till hemsidan. [10:42:15] Martin Miljand skriver: perfekt [10:44:25] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: http://www.vebra.com/home/search/vdetails.as p?src=agent&fd=716&bd=1&db=1&cl=2326&pid=15104658 [10:45:48] Martin Miljand skriver: sen om du har tid, din text om ditt telefon-projekt, när vi pratade om att komma ihåg saker, och du pratade om din pappa som skrev skrivmaskin, och ljudet av det mekaniska... jag hittade en grej jag skrev i London, om minnet... hur jag kom ihåg mitt sommarhus vi hade när jag var barn [10:46:24] Martin Miljand skriver: tänker att dom två grejjerna skulle kunna vara kul att lägga bredvid varandra [10:46:32] Martin Miljand skriver: om du nu skrev ngt om det till slut! [10:46:49] Martin Miljand skriver: men jag kommer ihåg att det var rätt kul att skyp-snacka om det [10:50:20] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Nej, jag har nog inte något om det, annat än våra diskutioner fram och tillbaka so ev kan finnas i skypehistory. Tror att jag snackade lite förvirrat om det på presentationen men har nog inte kvar några anteckningar tyvärr. Vill helst glömma hela den där soppan. :) [10:51:37] Martin Miljand skriver: Ha ha, ska kolla i skype history om jag hittar ngt [10:53:20] Martin Miljand skriver: verkar inte gå så långt tillbaka [10:58:00] Paulina Öhman Och Fabian Nyblom skriver: Jag måste gå och duscha nu, men är kvar ett tag till. Om du har nån mer fråga så skicka på bara. :) [10:58:24] Martin Miljand skriver: Coolt [11:16:34] Martin Miljand skriver: Känner mig ganska nöjd [11:16:40] Martin Miljand skriver: Tack så mkt

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Tape Project

Martin Miljand, Måns Swanberg, Janica Wiklander ”Hej Hoppas allt är bra med er och att projektet går som det ska.!!! Det har sett härligt ut, det man sett på myspace och i mailen! Snart kommer vi... känns riktigt fint. Hade lite fika-möte med test-bed idag och vi ska prata lite mer framöver. Tänkte bara berätta lite kort vad vi har för idéer så här långt, och hur vi tänkt.Vi kommer nog ner till den 21, fredag eventuellt torsdag, och stannar till måndag/tisdag. Har mkt att göra på kontoret så vi kan tyvärr inte vara iväg mer än en långhelg. Jag och janica har en ide om en sorts möbel-performance, som involverar möblerna (bord och stolar?!) som finns i lobbyn/foajen. Vi har ju jobbat som tusan med rumsfunktionsstudier till hagfors, där ju möbleringen spelat en stor roll... hur man möblerar ett rum, avstånd mellan bord, konfiguration, riktning etc. Det intressenta är att beroende på hur man möblerar ett rum, så ger det ju olika associationer om användning/hur man uppträder(förväntas uppträda). -alltså att möbleringen i allra högsta grad är med och programerar ett rum/plats, och att man som besökare får en uppfattning/förväntning om vad som kommer att ske, redan när man kommer in/ dit, innan det faktiskt skett... (tex klassrum, föreläsningssal... man förstår vad som ska ske och hur man kan/ förväntas interagera och känna, samt umgås med andra) Så vi tänkte kanske göra några enkla expriment med olika möbleringar i baren/foajen (och utomhus på torget) som kanske skruvar dessa associationer/ inprogramerade förväntningar lite, en möblering som lovar sånt som aldrig sker, sätter fokus på funktioner som kanske är lite oväntade etc... hur som helst, inga konstigheter, det ska ju absolut inte bli jobbigt, typ fungera dåligt som bar/foaje... eller att folk tycker det blir trist, ja du fattar. Kommer mer info senare, lite mer genomtänkt! Du kan ju maila en rad om vad du tycker, känns det som ngt som skulle vara roligt att vi gör? Bifogar bilden som satte igång idén; rumsfunktionsstudier av hagfors, fast med alla vägg, tak, glasparti -lager släckta... bara bord och stolar som syns. Det ser ju det första alldeles underbart fint ut..., och för det andra så är det intressent att se hur vissa programmeringar fortfarande är glasklara, medan vissa andra blir mer tvetydiga och suddiga, och ger utrymme för andra förväntningar och tolkningar om vad som kan hända. Vi fattar att det inte kan vara för komplicerat, se bilden mer som en konceptgrej... Ok, nog pratat, vi hörs snart. Stor KRAM - Martin och Janica Ps. om ni har koll på vilka flygbolag som är bäst när det gäller att flyga till Graz/Vien så maila gärna ngt sånt. Ha det underbart!!!”

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Remembering A House

Martin Miljand The house I spent almost every summer in that house, until I was about fifteen years old and convinced my parents to let me stay in the city on my own. After that summer in the city, I hardly ever followed my parents to the house. I never thought about it. Recently I have found myself thinking about it. To my surprise, as I am trying to remember the details of the house, I suddenly recall so many memories of things that happened there. The house was big, really big for a summer house, although the last time I did see it, just before we sold it to a neighbour in the same village, I remember thinking that it used to feel so much bigger when I was a kid. It had a simple rectangular plan, two storeys high, kitchen and living room on the ground floor and the bedrooms upstairs. The pitched roof was covered with tiles, the colour of a sunset. The house had no basement. You entered through a white door. It used to have a wooden porch, painted dark brown, but we tore it down. The passages below are a record of some of my memories about that house.They are written in present tense, as if I had travelled back in time and was able to experience the same place again, as it was when I was young. There is a reason for this. I believe it is the closest I can come to accurately describing how I remember the house now, some fifteen years later. When I recall things about the house my thoughts and feelings end up in a twilight zone, as if time was suspended. I remember things about the house that I thought I had forgotten a long time ago. They are particular details, smells and emotions that must have been stored for several years in my memory. Like a time capsule, untouched for all these years. Thinking about the memories gives me a sense of being back there, eleven years old, playing in the high grass on the backside of the house. But at the same time, as soon as these memories come back to me, surface in my conscience, I interpret them, I add up the details and draw conclusions. I find names for things that I was unable to name at the time of the actual experience of the house. This is a confusing state of mind. Halfway back to your childhood, but with the mental capacity of a grown up, instantly making comparisons and judgements about something that once was a very direct sensuous experience, sometimes even subconscious. The subconscious, or the unnoticed experience is interesting. Things that I could not understand fifteen years ago, or didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take much notice of, consciously, still got stuck in my mind. These memories suddenly provide me with information about my childhood. Informa-

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tion that I never thought I would get hold of again.

Pink room “It is on the second floor, I come up the stairs and it is the first room to the left. It has two windows with white mullions and there are always dead flies in the little gap between the two windowpanes. I don’t understand why they are in there, they look dry and fragile. If they manage to get into the gap between the panes, why don’t they escape before they die. It doesn‘t make sense. I stand by the window and I can see our earth cellar on the left, shaped like a small round hill, with flowers growing on it, pink and violet. We are only allowed to pick the flowers at midsummer. Next to the round hill is the barn, with a red painted wood panel and a roof in different shades of metallic grey. To the right of the barn is a birch standing on a small meadow where we used to grow potatoes. Beyond that, bigger meadows, now yellow, sloping down towards a small stream, but that is quite far away so you don‘t really see it. Me and my brother sometimes play down there, in the stream, constructing dams and small waterfalls. The room is called the pink room. It is because of the wallpaper. Thin white stripes in groups of four, four stripes close together, then a gap and then another group of four, running from floor to ceiling, against a background of pale pink. My parents and my little sister sleep in the blue room. Me and my brother sleep in the pink room. I love to lie on my bed, listening to Nirvana in my walkman, looking into the pink wall, sometimes falling asleep.” Of course, when I was younger and lived in the house I never really thought about the wallpaper, it was just there. It was pink and nothing like I had seen anywhere else, but it seemed completely normal to me at the time. In the context of our summer house it was the way it was supposed to be. At our flat in the city none of the rooms had names that referred to the way the room looked. When I was trying to remember the view outside the window in the pink room, the first thing that came to my mind was the dead flies between the windowpanes. I guess the continuous wonder about why they were there is a memory that is inseparable from the view itself. There were probably dead flies between the panes of all the other windows. Maybe all memories of looking out of a window in that house is more or less connected to a memory of dead flies. The important question is then if this in some way affected my experience of looking out at the barn or the meadows or whatever I was looking at through the window. It certainly made me a bit more careful around the window, I wouldn’t lean against the window and I think I rarely touched the windowpane or even the windowsill.

Façade “The house is clad with rectangular panels, overlapping each other and nailed to the wall. The panels are white, but like an eggshell rather than milk, and the surface is coarse and not very pleasant to touch. I run my finger across a panel and feel tiny bumps and holes. I am not supposed to touch the panels, my mother has told me that dust from the panels is very dangerous, it can get stuck in my lungs and cause all kinds of trouble. In certain areas of the façade, especially on the north side, close to the rock foundation, some sort of fungus has turned the panels pink, and if I inspect the wall up close I see that the fungus is sprinkled across the panels, tiny red dots that from a distance makes them look a little pink. When it is raining, the fungus sometimes dissolve in the water running down the wall, leaving long stripes of darker pink.”

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Again, I never really thought about the façade of the house as a façade. When I was a kid I didn’t have a real concept of what a façade was. But I clearly remember the panels, the way they shifted, the overlapping, the slightly chamfered bottom corners of each panel. Since we were always playing around the house, on the lawn or in the higher grass on the backside, the façade of the house was always the backdrop to everything we did, and of course the details is embedded in my memory. When I was writing about the panels of the façade a memory of a specific event suddenly came back to me.

Bird We were changing the cladding of the house to a wooden panel, painted with a traditional red colour, very common in the northern parts of Sweden. It was a lot of work and the whole family was involved, I remember painting the wooden panels on the ground, and later nailing them to the wooden joists of the bare wall. After the whole wall was finished the panels had to be painted a second time and you had to stand on a ladder, reaching as far as you could with the brush. I was too young to help my father take down all the white panels, because of the dangerous dust. He had built a wooden scaffolding around the house and he used a crowbar to take the panels down. My parents had bought me a soft air gun that summer and I used to practice shooting at aluminium cans that I would place on a stone wall in front of an old storage building we used as a workshop. It was painted in the same red colour as the barn and later the main house. “I am coming down to the back of the house to see how my fathers work is coming along, he sees me coming and is putting down the crowbar and then turns around and looks down at me, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, smiling at me standing there at the bottom of the scaffolding with my rifle. He comes down the ladder, which is completely covered in rust, takes his gloves off and tells me he wants to show me something. He tells me that while taking down some panels just below the roof he accidentally destroyed a small birds nest which fell to the ground. My father looks at the ground next to the wall of the house and he spots the crumbled nest not far away, a little round basket made of small sticks and fluffy dry grass. We approach it slowly and when we turn it around, a lonesome little bird starts screaming with a weak voice. High pitched, short sounds comes from the small beak, the body looks somehow blue, partially covered in grey feathers. We have too kill him, my father says, it is a shame, but he will never survive now, and the parents will not return to him, now that the nest is destroyed. Do you want me to do it, my father says, reaching for my rifle. No, I can do it, I say, taking a step back, loading the rifle with a tiny lead bullet. I am surprised by how easy it is to point the gun at the bird, how little I feel. Still, imagining the bullet hitting the small bird makes me look away as I pull the trigger, the barrel of my rifle only a few centimetres away from the little bird lying on its back, the broken nest beside him. I don’t remember what happens after I pull the trigger, I guess my father takes care of the dead bird, maybe he buries it.” The funny thing about this memory is that it ends very suddenly. After I shot the bird I don’t remember what happened. I suppose it was both traumatic and exciting at the same time and as soon as the action was carried out my mind went blank. Up until the shot I have very detailed memories of everything. The way the scaffolding looked, how my father carried out his work, how I felt at the time, I even know how the rifle felt in my hand. The weight of it, the smoothness of the wooden parts, the feeling of my finger on the trigger.

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Hall “I don’t like the hall.The walls are painted with a thick turquoise, which sometimes appears almost green, depending on what time of the day it is. The colour is quite intense to look at. For some reason the hall is always colder than the other rooms on the ground floor. I have just closed the front door behind me and I am looking straight ahead at an inner hall, smaller than the one I am standing in, with double doors leading into the living room. From the inner hall I can also turn left and go up the stairs to the second floor. If I turn right there is a small storage space, where we keep logs of birch, pine and fir in a big chest, to use in the fireplace. Above the opening to the inner hall two swords are hanging, steel blades with hilts of matt brass. They are resting on small hooks and held in place by plastic strings, also turquoise. Sometimes my father takes down the swords and let us play with them. They are quite heavy. I try to imagine what it would be like to go into battle with one of the swords, the one I like best.” There are three things about the hall that made a big impression on me. First it is the colour. The thick turquoise paint seemed perfectly normal at the time, or at least self evident. However the memory of that colour is associated with a feeling of uneasiness. I never stayed longer than was needed in the hall. I even have memories of hurrying through the hall, from the kitchen to the living room, just because I didn’t liked to be there. The second thing I remember is the temperature. I believe that the hall was poorly insulated. There was always a chilly breeze chasing you, which made the atmosphere of the space quite harsh, especially in the winter. The third thing is the memory of the swords. The swords were the only thing that ever made me want to go into the hall I it wasn’t necessary. I sometimes stood looking up at them when I was putting on my clothes. I didn’t know to whom they belonged. They had been there when my grandparents bought the house.

Living room “Possibly my favourite room in the whole house. It has four big windows, three on one wall, facing an expanse of meadows. I look out over the fields, the sun feels warm on my face. I look around the room, the walls have patterned wallpaper. When we had to replace the old fireplace in the corner of the living room we had to take some of the wallpaper down and beneath it several layers of paint and older wallpaper revealed itself. At one point we discovered that the walls had initially been covered with pages from newspapers. Some articles could still be read. We were all fascinated by these old news, trying to carefully remove the layers covering the newspaper in an attempt at discovering small glimpses of the past. If we spend the Christmas holidays at the house, we always put the Christmas tree in the living room. The winters are cold and the house and the surrounding yards is always covered in deep snow, but the living room is always warm.” I have so may memories of the living room. Most family activities either took place in the kitchen or in the living room. The reason for choosing the incident about the wallpaper is because it was a somewhat odd experience, unlike most of the other memories I have of that room. I have many happy memories of doing things in the living room, playing on the floor, listening to the Beatles on the stereo, eating sandwiches in front of the television with the rest of the family. Everyday things. The wallpaper incident was a very strange thing, reading these articles from many years ago, on

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the wall of our living room. It made me very aware of the fact that people had lived there before us, people I didn’t know, didn’t know anything about. The only thing I knew about them was that they read that newspaper, and at some point decided to cover the walls with it. Of course they put up wallpaper afterwards, but I remember trying to imagine how it would look if the whole living room was covered in these newspaper articles. It made me slightly uneasy.

The barn “Two large black doors. Rusty hinges squealing as I open one of the doors. Inside the light is dim. From a window at the opposite end of the long room, light is coming in, illuminating millions of small dust particles. It smells of dry hay, motor oil and gasoline. Everything in here smells old. I walk carefully on the massive wooden floor planks. The main entrance to the barn is on the short end of the building, one storey up. One third of the ground floor is below ground. Along the left wall of the room a number of old farming machines are resting, not used for many years, some of them covered by tarpaulins. A mower, which could be attached to a tractor. A machine for collecting the cut crass from the ground, another for ploughing. At the end of the barn an old sleigh is positioned, covered in dirt and sawdust, its runners rusty and bent.” The barn could be a dangerous place for kids. My parents told me to be careful in there, at certain places the floor was open to the storey below. But it was an exciting place. All these old things. We used to store our boat in there and later my father bought a small tractor that we sometimes parked inside, next to the farming machines.The size of the room was quite grand to a child, giant wooden beams supporting the ceiling and all those big machines that was never used. I always kept close to the doors, but sometimes the wind would shut the doors behind me with a bang and the whole barn would be dark. It could be quite scary if you wasn’t prepared for it.

Memories I imagine the memory as a tape recorder, sometimes recording the things we experience, sometimes not. The details of a place, the facts, the information our senses gives us, often seem to be recorded by the memory if they are connected to an emotional experience of some kind. I often record a very detailed mental picture of everything that surrounds me in such a moment. Every detail is recorded as if it was a significant part of a movie set. The particular shot being the event that caused the emotional experience in the first place. At the same time as I am trying to remember the details of the house where spent my summers as a child, I recall the emotional memories that are attached to that place.They are both there, I can‘t remember one thing without remembering the other.

Questions What is then the essence of an experience that is being recorded by our memory? Are you always the protagonist in all your memories of places, events, people? What is the relevance of all these things we have stored inside us, do they affect me subconsciously? Is it a good thing to bring them back, although

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they make me feel nostalgic, sad, like a child again. Do I know the person who experienced all these things in that house. Was he happy? Does it matter? I wonder how my family remembers these things? There seems to be a lot of memories about my dad. What about my mum, and my sister and my brother?

Truth There is also a point to be made about the degree of truth in all of this. Memories always seem trustworthy to me. My first thought is never to question if I remember something accurately. When I was working on the passages for this essay I just wrote down whatever came to my mind, details about the house just appeared in my head. So did the memories of the events happening there, the emotions they stirred up. It all seemed reliable, perhaps because I had not been in touch with all this information up until now. When speaking to my family about this, a memory I have of something we experienced together, I sometimes get the feeling that we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really have the same recollection of it at all. We can agree on almost everything but just a few differences makes me wonder about what really happened. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I remember what I want to remember? Maybe we sometimes remember only what we want to remember and leave out the things we wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like to remember, and the truth is somewhere in between. Sometimes when we remember unpleasant things, were the experience was emotional in some way, the mind filters the event. Some memories end up as scars for the rest of our lives, some are suppressed, some completely disappears.

Tape Recorder The analogy of the tape recorder is only believable as far as the collecting of memories. As soon as we remember something it is not at all like listening to music on your tape recorder. It is more like playing music yourself, playing the same song you hear on the tape, but you can change it if you want to. Change the rhythm, the order of the verses, maybe even some of the lyrics. Sometimes you try to play it as accurately as you can, but it still doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sound like what is on the tape. I am not sure if it really matters though.The importance of an accurate memory is perhaps questionable. Or is it? History is always written by someone. The whole of mankind are never able to witness its own collective progress, only share the testimony of others. Remembering something always means that you consciously recreate it in your mind, at that given moment. It is no longer a part of the past, it becomes part of the present.

11th of may - 2006 The Forgetting of Air Teacher: Helen Mallinson

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La Mezquita-Catedral de Cordoba

Martin Miljand Den stora moskén i centrala Cordoba är utan tvekan en av världens mest fantastiska byggnader. Ursprungligen uppfördes den av Abd al-Rahman i slutet av 700-talet. Under århundradena som följde gjorde den umayyadiska dynastin ett flertal tillägg till moskén, och byggnadens nuvarande dimensioner (178x125 meter) gör den till världens tredje största moské, och den största i Europa. 1236 återerövrades Cordoba av Ferdinand III och efter relativt små förändringar började moskén användes som en kristen kyrka. I början av 1500-talet föreslogs det att en ny katedral skulle byggas på platsen, men befolkningen i Cordoba motsatte sig planerna på att riva moskén, vilket ledde till det ovanliga beslutet att uppföra en katedral inuti den befintliga moskén. Det magnifika resultatet kan beskådas än idag. Det oändligt horisontella, ickehierarkiska moskérummets möte med den fokuserat vertikala kristna katedralen. Två kontrasterande rumsliga idéer som smälter samman i en och samma byggnad. Katedralens gotiska valv bärs upp av dubbla valvbågar med muslimska dekorationer, som tillsammans bildar ett harmoniskt collage av olika tidsepoker och arkitektoniska stilar. I sin nuvarande form innesluts moskérummet, katedralen och den intilliggande apelsinträdgården av en yttre “stadsmur” som separerar komplexet från den omgivande staden. På senare år har röster höjts för att byggnaden åter ska bli tillgänglig för bedjande muslimer, vilket skulle göra moské-katedralen till en säregen mötesplats för två världsreligioner. I dagens världspolitiska läge är det en fantastisk tanke. En byggnad där två olika religioner praktiseras, sida vid sida. Byggnadens 23000 kvadratmeter rymmer utan tvekan de båda programmen, och moské-katedralen skulle bli ett publikt rum, i ordets rätta bemärkelse. Moské-katedralens repetitiva skog av pelare utgör byggnadens grundläggande struktur. Denna struktur är fortfarande intakt, trots århundraden av tillbyggnader och förändringar. Det som är anmärkningsvärt är hur dessa små och stora förändringar har påverkat upplevelsen av byggnaden. Det stora moskérummet har i någon mening genomgått en uppdelning, en nedbrytning i mindre delar. De tidigare ytterväggarna, som efter hand inkorporerats i moskén, har gett upphov till små förändringar i pelarskogens densitet. Dessa förändringar, har i sin tur skapat ett antal arkitektoniska trösklar inom byggnadens repetitiva struktur, som delar upp moskéns enorma interiör i både subtila och dynamiska rumsligheter. Byggnaden förkroppsligar en sorts dualism. Samtidigt som den, i någon mening är ett stort sammanhållet rum, är den också ett konglomerat av flera mindre rum, som adderats över en lång tidsperiod. Den rumsliga upplevelsen av moské-katedralen är beroende av var man befinner sig i byggnaden.

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I plan är gränsen, mellan det horisontella och det vertikala rummet, tämligen diffus. Katedralens korsform avtecknar sig svagt. Kyrkbänkarnas placering i övergången mot moskén, representerar ett sorts svävande möte mellan de två rumsligheterna. I sektion är förändringen skarpare, vilket förstärks av kontrasten mellan katedralens bländande ljus och moskéns dunkel. Det vore fel att beskriva moské-katedralens arkitektur som ett möte mellan två system, snarare rör det sig om två olika principer för skapandet av rumsligheter. Dels de horisontella arkadernas repetitiva princip och dels de kristna tilläggen, som karaktäriseras av riktning och vertikalitet, “uthuggna” ur pelarskogen. Katedralens plan existerar som en glänta i moskérummets skog av pelare. Byggnadens förening av olika rumsligheter fascinerar. En tillåtande arkitektur, en arkitektur som tål interventioner. En byggnad, vars flexibilitet inte står i motsats till den arkitektoniska identitetens dynamik. Rörelsen genom byggnaden präglas av en narrativ sekvens av rumsligheter. Korsandet av tröskeln mot staden, genom komplexets “stadsmur”, in till apelsinträdgården och vidare in i moskén. Byggnadskomplexet bildar en stad i staden. Att röra sig runt i arkaderna och uppleva spåren av utbyggnader och tillbyggnader, är att hela tiden korsa subtila trösklar. Att sedan träda in i katedralen som öppnar sig uppåt och tränger igenom moskéns tak, den sista tröskeln, mot himlen, ger denna sekvens av övergångar ett både dramatiskt och symboliskt avslut. Byggnaden är en heterogen skapelse, vars rumsliga rikedom är en konsekvens av dess historia.

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Favorite Architect Survey, November 2008

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CLAUDE CORMIER

MARIO BOTTA

ROBERT VENTURI

ALDO ROSSI

ADOLF LOOS

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Interview With Architect Unn Malm at Arkitekturdagen in Älvsjö Mässan

Alvin Ekmekciu My name is Unn MamI, I am an architect. Currently I am working at Gyllenpalm Orving Sohlman (GOS) Arkitekter in Stockholm. We are a small architecture company of eight people. What kind of projects have you done ? We do any kind of project that comes up, actually. Have you taken part in any competition? Our company did take part in a competition about Mörby Centrum, subway station and the center, which was won by Erik Giudice, who actually did a presentation today in Arkitekturdagen. We had of corse another proposition. But I was not part of that because it happened before I started to work for this company. I’ve only worked there for about three months. My colleges who worked on this project received an “honorary mention” . They are very proud of this. I don’t think we will take part in some other competitions for a while, we have a lots to do and the company’s budget is tight right now. Did this competition had to do with the new subway line between Mörby Centrum and Täby ? No, it had to do with the need that Mörby Centrum has to expand and get fresh; of course subway is implicated in this. What project that you have done, you like the most? I would mention the project that I have done working together with our common friends Magnus Helgesson and Daniel Koch, the college for the craftsman in Stockholm. It was outside any other of my way of working because this was working at the site. But now it am very used with this kind of job, working on the site. Also special with this project, was that my voice had the same importance as the others. Because when you are an employed architect there is always a boss or the employer who has the last word and there not so much space about discussion. You could always appoint your opinion but it does not count that much. This kind of project was a collaboration and everything had to be done very quickly and in the cheapest way. Here it is of course the costumer who has the last say because it has the money. Is there any hierarchy at your office? It is very much so. I would say that in Sweden architects work in hierarchies and they are extremely strict.

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It’s very old fashioned actually. Are there only architects in your firm or are there engineers as well? We just have one engineer but there is not much work for him so we have to let him go. Do you collaborate with any building company ? Yes, there are some of them, friends of the owners of the company who come to us for help with architecture issues. That is something that I like. Can you mention some other projects that you were engaged in? Before I started in this company I was working in other one which worked with changing attics to apartments and my employers were not architects. But I was one of three architects who were working there. We were very free and the work was rewarding. But the business didn’t go very well since people didn’t want to pay the actually producing costs. How long have you worked as an architect? …Since seven years. But I graduated only for about 4 years ago. It is something usual here in Sweden. Is Stockholm a very competitive place for architects? I would say so. Everybody is hunting for the projects. I think the we architects in Stockholm… in Sweden, would do just anything for money and this reflexes in architecture. I think we are very pragmatic in the extreme way. What changes do you see in today’s architecture? I think we have become less Swedish, less nationally. We try to copy international architecture. Do you think politics interferes in architecture? Well, this is not easy to answer. .. Yes, it does very much. But this is not on a national level but more on a local level, I mean cities and communes. I think that the government should get more interested in Architecture. ..Maybe we also need something that comes from people. Maybe this would make people more interested in architecture. You were speaking about architecture in Sweden being influenced by international architecture. Did you have something specific in mind? The project I had in mind, I think is called “Kungsbrohuset”, it’s under construction now… it’s on the Kingsbrigde in the central Stockholm. When I was working on it, I was struck by the similarity it had with any other building that could have been build somewhere else like in Berlin, or a copy of them. Have you worked with projects outside Sweden? It is not a practice. I have worked on a villa, and on refurbishing of a house in Las Palmas. This is not enough, to say that I have international experience. We are a very modest company. Is it because you have not been interested to work outside the country? No, I would love to do that. It is because I am the kind of person who sits and waits for the chance to come instead of creating it by myself. How do you reach the customers? They contact us, through our network. Has your firm won a reputation? The firm has a reputation, I have a reputation too. I am bringing in jobs that have to do with attics and refurbishments, and other small stuff. The owners have a lot of contacts because they have been in this branch since a long time. I think, this is the most common way for architects to get projects. Are you satisfied with the work that you have done ? Definitively not. I think that most of what I have done never got worked through properly because nobody has paid for to be so. They are not interested in the putting much intellectual work behind the planning of their buildings. Did you have hard times ? Not in this firm, but I have been working here for only three months. It could happen.

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I think we are more save because we also take on small jobs and we work on a wider range. But it happened in the firm that I worked on for three years ago that I was laid off for a couple of month but then it was sorted out and I came back to work. It has happened even a couple of times before. How did you find this job ? Through contacts, a college of mine talked to the owners of this company, they needed somebody, and I had told my college that I wanted to find another job

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Architecture At A Juncture

Ron Gluckman China gave the world the Great Wall, pagoda roofs, screens, joints and other innovations of garden architecture. Yet that was centuries ago. Since then, China has been renowned for its concrete blocks.As the country turns to world-class talent to remake the Middle Kingdom as a modern showpiece, can China really replace crass with class? PAUL ANDREU PONDERSwhat has become of his dream of giving Beijing a National Theater that would be the envy of the world. “The Big Hole - yes, that would be a very apt name,” the French architect says as he scans the partly excavated site alongside Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital. Andreu’s vision - a $300-million structure that is not so much a building as it is a futuristic bubble set in an artificial lake - has been repeatedly stalled by objections of Beijingers who derisively refer to it as the “alien egg.” Others have not been so kind calling it a “Giant Turd.” A series of project reviews have hampered development and no official date is set for completion. Andreu is undeterred. “This will be my most successful work,” he predicts. “Look at Sydney’s Opera House. It’s now considered an icon for the whole world. But during the process, it was much the same as this. So much controversy.” Nobody would know that better than Andreu, who has been dogged not only by bad press, but regular halts to the project whenever the public controversy grows too heated. One round of recent scrutiny by a panel of Chinese architects and designers not only delayed the project by as much as a year, but resulted in one of four theaters being trimmed from the egg over spiraling cost concerns. Still, Andreu realizes “this is my life’s work. Although renowned for his design of airports around the globe, China has given him a chance to stretch out; he’s also done a sports stadium in southern China. But nothing ever on the scale of this grand theater. And few other countries would entertain such an outlandish project beyond the sketch-and-vague-proposal stage. Following on the heels of a 1990s building boom, mainland cities are once again in a state of architectural ferment. Government officials and developers are tearing down plodding Stalinist bunkers and rethinking the cookie-cutter chrome and glass towers that heralded the country’s embrace of capitalism. Frenetic construction is the next leg of a rebirthing process that can be traced at least as far back as the

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1950s, when Communist leaders began tearing down Beijing’s landmark city walls and swept away feudal traditions - along with the country’s elegant aesthetics. Then, China was bent on creating a more modern socialist state. Now the country is racing again to be modern, clearing land for utopian, cutting-edge designs like the National Theater - edifices meant to outdazzle anything in the West. Just as the country is lurching toward some blurry ideal of a quasi-capitalistic economy, so too is it groping for a sense of national identity in its architecture. Experimentation and grand dreams are encouraged. “China is like a fresh source of vitality,” says 66-year-old Meinhard von Gerkan, a German whose concepts for planned communities are under consideration by the officials of several Chinese cities. “Europe is all finished,” he says. “Here you have the freedom to build.” For some of the world’s top architects, the country offers incomparable opportunity.Topping the roll call of the architectural stars who are drumming up Middle Kingdom business include the fabled Pei family, which just completed Bank of China’s new Beijing headquarters and has, among other projects, drafted a master plan to redevelop Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, second in size only to Tiananmen. Michael Graves, perhaps the only architect ever named GQ Man of the Year (1997) has ambitious plans for the modern refurbishing of an old brownstone along Shanghai’s Bund(the waterfront area that was China’s Wall Street). Then there are the huge firms. Skidmore Owens & Merrill, which practically invented the skyscraper, branding skylines around the world with its distinctive towers for several decades, has done the same for Pudong, near Shanghai, with China’s tallest building, the $540-million, 88-story Jin Mao Building (at left), which houses the world’s highest hotel. Kohn Pederson Fox, creators of New York’s World Bank Headquarters and Rockefeller Plaza West, has several projects under discussion, including a 182-hectare site on the outskirts of Beijing. Commissioned by Chinese pharmaceutical giant San Jiu, this mega-town would mix research and agricultural areas with housing and services for up to 10,000 people. Foreign architects aren’t necessarily making a lot of money. Corruption, construction snafus, and bureaucratic meddling make property development a dicey game in China. Many say they are there despite the difficulties because they are being offered a chance to create signature masterworks. The country has been laid out for them like a blank canvas, a muse for their most ambitious architectural visions. Plans on drawing boards include space age cyber-cities, cloud-topping sky-rises, and suburbs based on Venice, Amsterdam and ancient Athens. Dutch firm Kuiper Compagnons recently won a competition for a community set on canals outside Shanghai. Kohn Pederson Fox designed the $600-million World Financial Center, scheduled to be the world’s tallest building when it opens near Shanghai in 2003 or 2004. The 95-story tower will be so high that a huge circular section will be cut through the top to relieve wind pressure. Many of the projects are too ambitious for a poor country. They will never be built. But the anythinggoes atmosphere is “amazing,” says von Gerkan as he unveils drawings of a science city filled with observatories, museums and a pyramid-shaped civic plaza.

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Officials for the new town of Lang Fang, located 70 km from Beijing, approached von Gerkan for a basic outline of a new community. He produced sketches for a lakeside metropolis that on paper look like an updated Aztec capital. “They gave us absolutely no instructions,” says von Gerkan. “They just told us, ‘Give us ideas for a place like nowhere else in the world.’ ” Von Gerkan recently signed a contract for a $320-million exhibition center in Shenzhen to be completed in 2003. He’s due to finish a daring $58-million convention complex in Nanning the same year. “There are things you can do here that in America, people would throw up their hands and say, ‘No way!’ “ says Skidmore Owens & Merrill architect Brian Lee, who designed the Beijing headquarters for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (at left), the country’s largest bank. “It’s an exciting place to work.” Freedom is a reflection of broader socio-economic trends. With entry into the World Trade Organization and Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics ahead, mainlanders are eager to demonstrate they are on par with industrialized nations, says Jeffrey Cody, associate professor of architecture at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Not just on par with - ahead of. “The people’s tastes are no longer satisfied with the commercial and retail architecture that was common in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” Cody says. “At the time, it was common to see offices with a great deal of blue glass and cheap chrome, buildings that looked like children’s toys.” Indeed, Shanghai’s high-tech district of Pudong, described in Wired magazine as “the site of the wildest and most ambitious construction boom of the 1990s,” is to some a proto-city parody - its most visible landmark is the Oriental Pearl Tower, a 300-meter-high spire that resembles a giant sci-fi movie prop. Pudong “is ghastly,” says Graves, the American architect and designer of themed Disney hotels. Graves has a personal reason to lament the soaring gaffes of Pudong. He is restoring an old brownstone along Shanghai’s Bund, a row of graceful colonialist-era stone buildings often cited as the zenith of Western architecture in China. Graves’ beloved Bund arcs along the Huangpu River, almost directly opposite the Oriental Pearl Tower. “There’s this thrust in China’s mind to be modern,” Graves says. “But the influences are the worst of the West.” This physical face-off between old and new Shanghai is just one of many conflicts between traditional and contemporary arising from mainland redevelopment. I.M. Pei, designer of the Louvre pyramid in Paris, mourns the disappearance of some of Beijing’s greatest architectural treasures: the hutongs ancient alleys filled with courtyard houses. Several blocks of these neglected but historically rich structures are being demolished every day, their occupants normally banished to soulless suburban high-rises. “It’s really too late,” says Pei. “It’s going this way and it’s too late to change.” If there is no going back, then China needs to find a way forward that retains the country’s unique architectural heritage. That, at least, is the hope of some like Pei as well as Boston architect Benjamin Woods, widely praised for his sensitive redevelopment of a neighborhood of traditional row houses in Shanghai.

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Dubbed Xin Tian Di, the district of pubs, restaurants and art galleries reminiscent of Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, has been mobbed since its opening in mid-2001,and the reception speaks reams about the difference between government-conceived “fun districts” and the real thing. “People said it wouldn’t work, that the Chinese want modern, not old shopping centers,” concedes the Burly American architect. “But I saw that they like to be outdoors and sit under trees.” Still, Pei and Woods, with their low-key approaches and reverence for tradition, are the exception. For every classy historical renovation, there are scores more neighborhoods being razed to build flashy glass towers. “China does have a certain infatuation with flash architecture,” says Lee. Ironically, the job of designing 21st century China has largely been turned over to non-Chinese. There’s little room for local architects in the master plan. In the same way that a foreign suit is more prestigious than a local one, city planners want Western signatures on their blueprints. China’s emerging group of domestic architects “just haven’t had the experience, the exposure,” says Barry Ball, 50, chief architect with H.K.I. Development, which has the first rights to development in Beijing’s Central Business District. While mainlanders share a unique architectural heritage, few people - including architects - have had an opportunity to absorb it.The best buildings of the past, such as the Forbidden City, served royalty, not the masses. “Students tend to copy things without knowing how they work,” Ball says. “It’s understandable, because the majority have only seen the buildings in magazines.” In practice, the wholesale use of foreign experts affords plenty of opportunity for cultural friction to develop. Andreu’s National Theater, the largest and most visionary construction project in central Beijing for a quarter of a century, is a case in point. The size of several football fields, the site will house three auditoriums inside a 56-meter-high translucent glass and titanium dome that appears to float on water. Visitors will descend via escalators through the water into an underground lobby. “I consider this the big chance of my life,” says Andreu, 51, one of the world’s foremost designers of airports. “To be right here, in the center of this city, the capital of China, is a very big responsibility. People will come from all over the country to see this building.” And they will be distracted by it. The alien egg is dogged by controversy because it will hatch within the sight-lines of The Great Hall of the People,Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, the country’s most lasting monuments. Party cadres are divided over the wisdom of allowing a foreigner to dig around in the communist heartland. As that debate rages behind the scenes, local architects and others criticize the design as too expensive ($550 million, according to some estimates; $300 million, says Andreu) and not Chinese enough. “Opponents use every argument, whether true or not,” the architect complains. But “while many people see it as a high-quality design, it seems in many ways to have very little to do with the context [of Beijing],” says Cody, the Chinese University of Hong Kong professor, who is researching the mainland’s architectural history. “Andreu feels that he is being very wronged, but most people feel he has missed the balance between being up-to-date and creating something that resonates with the people.”

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The outcry has delayed the project’s completion indefinitely. Construction delays, the bane of developers everywhere, are not the only traps awaiting China’s refurbishers. Architectural fees are typically 20% to 30% of those in the West - and there is no guarantee of being paid. “I tell newcomers to get half up-front,” says an experienced hand who asked not to be identified. “Developers often go bankrupt, so there is nothing left to go around at the end.” Foreign firms are not permitted by law to do the complete design of a building, so some of the work is allocated to a local. But when money is tight - which is often - the bulk of the project shifts to the less experienced, less expensive Chinese architect. “That cheapens the quality,” says Ball. “The danger is you have an incredibly good design, but the detail disappears.” Other perils: There is risk that plans, once unveiled, will be stolen and resold without the architect’s authorization. Too, regulations often work against world-class standards.The principal problem is that the contractor - a state agency - controls every project. “That’s wrong,” says Tao Ho, Hong Kong’s best-known architect. “The architect should be on top. Otherwise, you have no quality.” Ho, 65, speaks from sour experience. In the 1980s, his firm of Great Earth Architects & Engineers International produced master plans for three Chinese cities: Xiamen, Qingdao and Hangzhou. With execution out of Tao’s hands, he found his suggestions on development strategies, traffic grids and other urban ideals were largely ignored. “You don’t see much there,” he admits. Nor, he acknowledges ruefully, do people see much of his vision for the exterior of the China Construction Bank in Beijing.The developer wrapped the building in Darth Vader-type dark glass, instead of the translucent green glass Tao proposed. “The difference is night and day,” he sighs. “But in China there is little an architect can say.” Adds von Gerkan, the German architect: “Sometimes you feel like a dancing bear. They need your name for publicity purposes, and then they get the design and go elsewhere. They don’t realize how it changes things. It’s like the difference between a Mercedes and the image of a Mercedes.You don’t know it when you see it, but you know it when you drive it.” Still, there is progress being made. “There is no market premium for great architecture in China, not yet,” says Rob Walker, 33, Beijing managing director of commercial property leasing agency Jones Lang LaSalle. Case in point, the procession of gaudy modern structures along Beijing’s showcase boulevard. It’s called Chang An, but many joke that it might be dubbed the Architectural Hall of Shame. Some interesting concepts are attempted, but too many buildings try to do too much, cutouts and curves, pagoda roofs that clash with modern glass. It’s row after row of kitschy flash (two exampled here) with little sense of subtlety or substance. Is that likely to change soon? Perhaps as the next phase of development puts a premium on class. “What is just starting to hit the market is polish,” Walker says, “buildings with the right corporate image.” Moreover, a generation of local architects who have been educated abroad is coming of age. “The foreign moon is not always better than the moon in China,” says Ma Guoxin, 59, chief architect with the Beijing Architectural Design Institute. Respect for traditional Chinese disciplines - such as the relationship between man and nature - can turn

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Western concepts into something uniquely Chinese, says Ma, who in the early 1980s was visiting scholar at architect Kenzo Tange’s office in Japan. He doesn’t worry that Chinese aesthetics will be crowded out in the rush to modernize. The foreign invasion will help locals learn new techniques, he believes, leading to cross-fertilization and, ultimately, the emergence of a modern Chinese architectural style. “Our traditional culture is so strong, it can never be overpowered,” he says. Even I.M. Pei, a critic of China’s architectural legacy, believes the frenzied building will cease and some kind of balance will prevail. That’s probably years away. With any luck, Paul Andreu will have finished his National Theater by then.

Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who has been living since 1990 in Asia, roaming around the region a number of publications, such as Asiaweek, which ran his package on architecture in China in August 2001. Extra reporting by Asiaweek included.. See also related story on famous Chinese-born architect I.M. Pei. For an updated view of architecture in the Chinese capital, see Beijing: Bold? Brazen? Renditions of National Theatre and Lang Fang city project by offices of the architects. All other pictures by Ron Gluckman

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Water Cube Brings Chinese Architect Olympic Glory

The National Aquatics Center, also known as the "Water Cube," illuminated with colour in Beijing on August 7. Chinese architect Zhao Xiaojun may not have won a gold medal but the Shanghai architect who helped create the iconic bubble-clad Water Cube is reaping the rewards of Olympic glory [Photo: AFP/File/Greg Wood] SHANGHAI (AFP) - Zhao Xiaojun may not have won a gold medal, but the Shanghai architect who helped create the iconic bubble-clad Water Cube is already reaping the rewards of Olympic glory. The record-breaking exploits of US swimmer Michael Phelps turned a global spotlight on Beijing's National Aquatics Center, which was built with an exterior that looks as delicate as soap bubbles. And for Zhao, the Olympic Games have brought very welcome attention. "People tell me it is a magic swimming pool because swimmers broke so many world records in these past few days," the 41-year-old architect told AFP. Zhao's firm China Construction Design International teamed up with Australia's PTW Architects and London-based engineers Arup to build the award-winning building. Initially, the Australian architects suggested the building should have a wavy design, conveying the sense of water in motion, but after weeks of discussion Zhao said his team won the case for a very Chinese reading of water: calm, serene and untroubled. "It may not appear stunning at first sight, but if you take a second look, you will feel peace and a profound sense of beauty," he said. In his four-story concrete office surrounded by a green bamboo grove, Zhao, dressed in a black Mandarin collar suit, performed a tea ritual as he explained how the Water Cube has led to an unexpected bonanza. A combination of sports fever and regional governments eager to show their economic achievements has led provincial cities to court Zhao's services for stadium projects in the hope he can repeat the Water Cube's success.

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They include Jinan Olympic park in east China's Shandong province, the venue for China's national games next year, Taiyuan sports centre in Shanxi province and Hohhot sports centre in Inner Mongolia, both in north China. His firm has grown dramatically from 200 people five years ago to more than 1,800 today with revenues rising about 80 percent annually, and turnover expected to top 800 million yuan (120 million dollars) this year. Zhao said the firm put so much work into the Water Cube -- which reportedly cost 1.35 billion yuan and was mostly paid for by donations from overseas Chinese -- that it actually incurred a loss on the project. But that work has more than paid off in other ways. The Water Cube's prestige has helped attract top talent and the experience of working on such a massive project has been invaluable, Zhao said. "It's the best card you could play in business," Zhao said. "Even your competitors understand how much hardship you have to endure to finish a mega-project like that." The approval process for the Water Cube was not easy, Zhao said. The venue's key component is the translucent polymer ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE, that forms the 3,065 pockets that cover the steel structure. The material is said to be 100 times lighter than glass, while allowing in more light and insulating better. Before the Water Cube, it was most famously used in the Eden Project in Cornwall, England. But to convince the jury that the plastic facade could withstand Beijing's tough weather, Zhao's company spent heavily on trials to test the materials. The environment inside was designed with swimmers and speed in mind, from the air temperature to tiny bubble in the pool to break surface tension and depth and gutters designed to reduce waves. After the Games end, the building will begin it's new life as the 17,000 seats will be cut to 6,000 and the extra space will be converted into a community recreation centre, Zhao said. There have also been some surprising spin-offs building on the Water Cube's brand. Zhao said he heard a Canadian company had won a contract to sell glacier water with the Water Cube's distinctive bubbles moulded into the bottle. Wang Ming, one of Zhao's former designer partners, had already started her own workshop to develop accessories and furniture lines echoing the Water Cube's distinctive bubbles.

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Time For Chinese Architects To Come Off The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Eggshellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

China Daily Updated: 2004-06-29 08:38 With Paul Andreu's "Eggshell" - the National Grand Theatre, still under construction in downtown Beijing, the National Stadium, dubbed the "Bird's Nest," designed by top Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, broke ground some 15 kilometres north of the "Eggshell" site. To the east in the Central Business District, Ram Koolhass, a Dutch architect, won the bid for CCTV's new building, "Z-crisscross." On the southeast outskirts of the capital, Zaha Hadid, a Baghdad born British woman architect, has joined hands with Pan Shiyi, one of the most successful real estate tycoons in China, to develop a logistics hub. The project is expected to be a huge complex of conference facilities, shopping malls, hotels, office buildings, theme parks and top-quality residential areas. All big names in architecture circles, they are noted for their novel designs, use of new materials and high tech and their sky-scraping costs. Apart from these top architects, with their landmark projects in Beijing, many other architects from abroad have also been lured by the huge Chinese market. They are involved in either public buildings or residential developments, many of their jobs won through public bidding. No matter whether famous or not, these foreign architects have also received their share of both praise and criticism. They have brought not only new designs to this country, but also heated debate: Does China really need foreign architects to design Chinese buildings? A big cake "China is now the largest construction site in the world. That makes us, as architects, excited," said Neil Leach, a professor of architectural theory at the University of Bath, UK, who attended a recent seminar on avant garde architecture at Tsinghua University. At the seminar, initiated by the organizing committee of the first Architectural Biennial 2004 Beijing, 12 architects from both home and abroad presented their designs and shared views on avant garde architecture. Starting from the early 1990s, foreign architects began to swarm into China to take part in the development of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai. Celebrated architecture firms such as AS&P, Atkins, OBERMEYER, RRP and SOM Planning submitted winning bids for some of the big projects in the new area. According to Beijing-based International Herald Leader, foreign architects took 30 per cent of the

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projects in Shanghai in the late 1990s. Following the 2008 Olympic fever, many of them moved to Beijing and won almost all the big public projects in the city. According to the Beijing-based Architecture Journal there are now more than 120 foreign and joint architecture firms in China. Over 140 of the 200 top world engineering companies and design consortiums have set up branches in the country. Design contracts for a great number of landmark buildings in major cities have gone to foreign firms. Like them or not, these buildings are being erected. Controversial reaction Much criticism centres on the one problem most new designs have: their failure to achieve a harmony with Chinese culture. Consider, for example, the "Eggshell" next to Tian'anmen Square. Those who like it say it is unique and avant garde, and those against it call it a "dirty dropping" or "a tomb." Paul Andreu has been accused of damaging the harmony of the area, which includes the Great Hall of the People and the Tian'anmen Rostrum. Forty-nine academicians of the Chinese Academy of Science appealed to the central government reconsider the design, but their request fell on deaf ears. The heavy cost is another major point of dispute. According to a report from the International Herald Leader, the "Eggshell" costs are running way over original budget.The cost has reportedly increased from 2 billion yuan (US$241 million) to 5 billion yuan (US$603 million). The whole construction area, including the theatre and a pool, now covers 260,000 square metres, 143,000 square metres more than in the original design. The "Bird's Nest" has also exceeded its original budget of 3 billion yuan (US$362 million), escalating to 3.5 billion yuan (US$422 million). For the new CCTV "Z-crisscross," the cost is now expected to far surpass its original 5 billion yuan (US$603 million) estimate. "I'm not against novel ideas, or unconventional or unorthodox designs, as that is what the art needs," said Wu Liangyong, one of the great contemporary Chinese architects. "But we cannot put aside engineering and structure, we cannot overlook our culture, or the cost. China is not rich enough not to care about 5 billion yuan," Wu said. "Some cities in China have become 'experimental sites' for both noted foreign architects and some second and third level ones," he said. However, some disagree. Wang Mingxian, an architecture critic, says: "We'd better first have a welcoming attitude towards these new things. City planning and historical protection must allow for a combination of old and new. "We really wish that our Chinese architects were able to win the bidding for these landmark buildings. Unfortunately, they were not able to do so," Wang said. "Why should we reject these great architects whose previous experiments have been recognized in international architecture circles," he said, adding that their experiments in China offer more benefits than harm to the evolution of Chinese

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architecture. Among those architects who have come to Beijing, Koolhaas was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2000, the foremost authoritative prize in the field of architecture; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the prize in 2001; and Zaha Hadid was the winner in 2004. Fei Qing, a New-York based Chinese architect, said: "From the point of view of Chan (the Chan Sect of Buddhism, known in the West by the Japanese name Zen, which emphasizes simplicity, spontaneity and self-expression), putting unrelated things together might produce something new." "When the East meets the West; traditional concepts give in to modern ones, and vice versa. The two might compromise. This can happen in every art form, including architecture." But Luo Li, secretary general of the first Architectural Biennial Beijing 2004, pointed out that to improve the ability to judge beauty, or in other words, to judge art and culture as a whole, is crucial for decisionmakers, architects, developers and ordinary people alike. "For quite a long time, we have lagged behind in art education," Luo said, adding that in designing a new building city planners must keep in mind the unique local cultural fabric of their city. "What is most important is not to let new buildings break the cultural line," she said. "We must encourage foreign architects to deepen their understanding of Chinese culture before they work on projects in China." Chinese architects The failure of local architects' bids for some major projects has not only revealed the inferiority of architectural education in China, but also the dilemma Chinese architects face. Architectural education in the modern sense started late in China, in the early 20th century, and failed to keep abreast of changes because of the country's closure of its doors to the outside world from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the world of architecture was experiencing dramatic development in ideas, design and technology. Zhang Yonghe, a noted Chinese architects, once said that Chinese architects have been trained in classicism and are more concerned with form and style in design. "I have to admit that Chinese architects cannot compete with their foreign counterparts when it comes to imagination and design," said Dou Yide, deputy chairman of the China Architecture Society, who has worked as a jury member for many international bidding competitions during the past years. "Most of them know very little about new materials and new technology, which has badly limited their creativity and imagination," he said. However, Chinese architects complain that many developers have blind faith in foreign designs. Cui Kai, one of the top young architects in China, in his late 40s, complains about the imbalance in design charges. "Many developers know nothing about domestic architects," said Cui, who has won many awards in design including his "See and Seen" villa for the Commune by the Great Wall.Together with 11 other architects, Cui won a special prize at La Biennale di Venezia in 2002. Cui said that in a joint project, the developers usually pay two-thirds of the bill to the foreign firms,

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leaving only one-third, or even less, for the domestic designers who have usually done much more of the work than their foreign counterparts. Some top Chinese architects have to work for some foreign firms that don't have enough designers to handle all the projects they are involved in. All the foreign designers do is signing their names on the final sketches. The experience of Cui Hongbing, a Shanghai architect, is a good example. Once when he was on a jury assessing international bids for the renovation of a downtown area in Shanghai, he was confused by four plans. Though coming from four different countries, the proposed plans shared the same space and planning concepts used at Tongji University in Shanghai. After hearing the presentations of the leading designers, Cui got the answer - all four of them were graduates from Tongji University and one had even been his classmate. Guan Zhaoye, a noted Chinese architect, also a professor from Tsinghua University, urged giving more opportunities to Chinese architects. Only when they are given more chances, he says, can they demonstrate their abilities. "Chinese architects should improve their own abilities instead of complaining," said Wu Huanjia, a professor from Tsinghua.

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Cubicle 1, Mens Toilet, Arkitekturdagen 2008. 10:18am

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Cubicle 1, Mens Toilet, Arkitekturdagen 2008. 15.54pm

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Architecture and Marriage

(From butterpaper blog) Arkatekcha This local blog seems to have disappeared off the net, anyone know where it has gone? Will be sadly missed, but for those who missed it it is still cached at Google. by Peter 05.11.08

she got married! by ross on 6 November 08

Oh. But you can be married and blog at the same time, can’t you? by peter on 6 November 08

I would have thought so…maybe an extended honeymoon by ross on 6 November 08

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(Architect, Westfield – London, UK)

M Huggies

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Fri Nov 14 10:07:36 2008 Subject: Architecture today... Ok lads - not as bad as might seem - doing a wee project here today in the soon to be frozen north at Arkitekturdagen (National Conference of Architecture) looking into what the state of architecture today is - All replies/views gratefully received (today) understand the time difference might prevent this but hey... here for another 7hrs... (Nb - I’m that curious to hear that have even sent this to our interior design dept in Londres - feel free to forward at will...) Wotcha!

- Show quoted text This is composed while sitting in shepherds bush McD’s nursing a large hangover: Damn you Bentley for taking me to McD’s in Banff. Having witnessed the opening of what amounts to not much more than a box with a fancy roof in the past couple of weeks and the general public’s stares and gasps of amazement, I’m initially going to agree with Jean Nouveau - the public are ignorant. The question is how do we treat them to architecture? Do be indulge them? Do we trick them? Do we fool them? Do we make architecture for architects? Is it a secret club and do we design in jokes? Went to the Gehry Pavilion in Hyde Park a little while back. He is just taking the piss as far as architectural process is concerned. Makes models and then gives them to a team to plug into a computer and

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build. I thought that the space created and the structure was less suited to an English summer and more interesting for an English winter (maybe this was the intention). Had enough of typing these ramblings on a blackberry and drinking shit coffee. Off to the bank and then to get a real coffee. I must be hung over. I just gave a homeless guy my change... Lines of communication are open throughout the day... Huggies ********************************************************************** This E-mail is from Westfield Shoppingtowns Limited. Westfield Shoppingtowns Limited is a private limited company registered in England, Company No. 03912122 whose registered office is at Level 6, MidCity Place, 71 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EA. VAT registration number is 815 0326 63. Westfield Shoppingtowns Limited is a subsidiary of the Westfield Group and further details about the Westfield Group can be found at www.westfield.com. This E-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. Any unauthorised dissemination or copying of this E-mail or its attachments, and any use or disclosure of any information contained in them, is strictly prohibited and may be illegal. If you have received this E-mail in error please notify the sender or telephone +44 (0)20 7061 1400 and delete it from your system.

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Question proffered to International Festival an uncountable number of times during the lunch break at Arkitekturdagen 2008:

How many pages have you done so far?

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Green Carpet Ceilings: The Textile Art of Elvis Presley

Mark Campbell ‘Human life is aesthetic for Freud in so far as it is all about intense bodily sensations and baroque imaginings, inherently significatory and symbolic, inseparable from figure and fantasy. The aesthetic is what we live by; but for Freud this is at least as much catastrophe as triumph.’ [‘The Name of the Father: Sigmund Freud,’ in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, (London: Blackwell, 1990), p. 262.] ‘I love the fake, as long as it looks real I’ll go for it.’ [Liberace, as quoted in Karal Ann Marling, Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 197.] Evidently, Joni Mabe, a regionally celebrated sculptor from Athens, Georgia, owns one of Elvis Presley’s toenail clippings. This revered artefact was discovered by Mabe during a tour of Graceland – Presley’s Southern–Antebellum style mansion in Memphis, Tennessee – buried amongst the long synthetic fibres of the shag–pile carpet engulfing the mansion’s private den – better known as the ‘Jungle Room.’ This clipping, now displayed amongst the Elvis whisky decanters, collectors’ plates, costumes, lamps, clocks, watches, bedspreads, pillows, ashtrays, bedroom slippers, towels, knives, cologne, worn shoestrings, and generous vials of the King’s sweat, forms the mythic centrepiece of Mabe’s tribute installation sculpture. Variously known as The Elvis Room, or Joni Mabe’s Travelling Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis, this mobile ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ veering precariously between a self–described ‘high–brow level of Art’ and an indescribable level of trailer–home collectivism, began when the artist stumbled across this objet d’art and started to make an informal collection of her own ‘Elvis–objects’ in celebration of it. As Mabe has written of this fortuitous discovery: ‘This was the first time that I had gone through the house and I wanted to touch where Elvis had touched. I was touchin’ the walls. I was in the Jungle Room and the rest of the tour went on outside. I just bent down and wanted to touch where he had walked and not where everybody else had walked. I just felt something in one of the fibres of the green shag carpet and picked it out and it was this toenail clipping.’ (1.) Mabe’s initial sense of astonishment had been tempered by doubts concerning the clippings authenticity and – accordingly – it is now labelled in the Travelling Panoramic Encyclopedia as the ‘Maybe–Elvis Toenail.’ It is evident, however, that nothing of Mabe’s archaeology – whether it is authentic or not – could be described as serendip–itous; in actuality the notion that a disembodied Elvis still resides in Graceland, amidst the fiberous depths of the Jungle Room’s luxuriant shag–pile, is endemic to the architecture of the mansion. Essential to the construction of this notion – and of architecture itself – is the figure of the Carpet. Instead of acting as a simple material that covers architecture, the archetypal function of carpet – as the German architect and critic Gottfried Semper theorised in 1851 – is to define architectural space itself. Asserting the primalcy of a suspended carpet as the origin of walled architecture (as enclosure), he stated virulently: ‘wickerwork is the essence of the wall.’ Such a working of the woven carpet divides

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space; literally creating architecture, this construction was coincidental with – and entirely dependent upon – the advent of textiles.The inter–weaving of carpet surfaces to enclose space is viewed by Semper as a ‘patterning’ of the world, the creation an ‘interior world.’ As such, the covering of the carpet actively constructs the domestic, and such a comforting interior is the source of a ‘lasting–pleasure’; a comfort brought about through the establishment of order, pattern, and unity in the space of the domestic. This ‘striving towards a lasting pleasure,’ becomes for Semper, ‘as old as the pleasure’ itself.(2.) A statement that is ambiguously suggestive of the direct correlation between the ‘comfort’ of the carpeted surface and erotic pleasure, a convergence which is less than subtly implied in the ‘bachelor–van’ aestheticism of the shag–piled floor – and ceiling – of Graceland’s Jungle Room. However, the notion of ‘comfort,’ as Siegfried Giedion has written of the continued evolution of the modern interior, has been divorced from its original meaning: ‘the word ‘comfort’ in its Latin origin meant to ‘strengthen,’ however ‘the West,’ following the eighteenth century, ‘identified comfort with ‘convenience.’ Man shall order and control his intimate surroundings so that they may yield him the utmost ease.’ For Giedion it is this deliberate designing for ‘ease’ that ‘would have us fashion our furniture, choose our carpets, contrive our lighting.’ (3.) Through a concentration on ‘interior comfort,’ as a construction of the domestic (and by implication architecture), architecture is inverted – turned inside out – and form itself is displaced. Within such a contrivance, the interior is perverted through this displacement of form and privileging of a sense of comfort. Lost, it would seem, amidst the confused profusion of interior furnishings and decoration, was ‘man’s instinct for quiet surroundings and for the dignity of space.’ (4.) What is more, this undignified loss of architectural coherency began with the archetypical element of the carpet. For Nickolaus Pevsner, writing in Pioneers of Modern Design, an exemplar of these transformations was a patent–velvet tapestry – a suspended wall of carpet – that was exhibited in the 1851 World Exposition in London and on whose surface ‘the artificial flowers on the machine–made carpet shine more gaudily than they ever could in nature.’ (5.) The greater the extent to which the ‘natural sense of the material’ – which the object imitates – is obscured by the object’s artificiality, the greater the illusion of that object’s relation to nature has to be reinforced. The 5” shag–pile of the Jungle Room is unnatural. Furnishing the Jungle Room with a lavish and undeniable opulence, it is a covering – between the architecture of the house and the body of inhabitant – that is utterly useless, obsolete, absurd, and fatally anaesthetised. The luxuriant shag–pile is sublimely artificial – even more so than the faux–Hawaiian furnishings of the room – and is splendidly formless (rather than form–giving). In actuality, the essential element of the carpet of the Jungle Room – rather than defining space – is that it is de–forming rather than forming. The sensuality of the shag–pile, its tangible fuzziness, collapses the room’s inhabitant into the comfort of the interior, eliding the distinction between the two. To clarify that the carpet is used here – not as a functional material, nor as a symbolic definition of space – but precisely because of it’s obsolescence and elision of the distinction between the house and it’s inhabitant, Elvis covered not only the floor of the jungle room with shag, but the ceiling as well (figure one). In one early instance, illustrated in a fashion spread taken for a local Memphis newspaper in 1965, the distinction between the very–public image of Elvis Presley, and the closely guarded private interiority of Graceland, melded into one another; beginning a ‘technicoloured’ dissolution that would reach it’s apotheosis in the Jungle Room. For this shoot Elvis was photographed wearing clothes that were costumes from Viva Las Vegas, made with Ann–Margret two years earlier, in Graceland’s recently refurnished living room. These ‘sharp new clothes,’ and the maturing attitude they mirror, audibly reflect these renovations. However, it is not only the clothes, or his co–star, which have transformed from the fictive world of celluloid into the real world of Elvis: ‘It comes as no surprise, somehow, that an early version of the chandelier in Elvis’s dining room may be glimpsed dangling from the ceiling of the casino in Viva Las Vegas.’ The disjuncture between the fictive and the real was always preciously expressed in Graceland’s architecture,

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with either one collapsing back onto the other; aware that a celebrated private interior – however– unseen – was a necessary complement to the public persona of celebrity, Elvis paid scrupulous attention to the interiority of his mansion, collapsing the exposure of the exterior perilously into the world of the interior. The necessity of continued renovation – of incessantly altering the interior in an effort to reinvent the exterior – was manifest in Graceland. Stasis was – literally – death. Accordingly, Elvis was ‘forever fiddling with his house,’ as Alan Fortas (a member of his entourage known as the ‘Memphis Mafia’) has said, ‘Changing things. Elvis liked red and the bright technicolour of the films.’ This reinvention was obsessive and Elvis’s ‘attitude towards [other’s] efforts to modify his house were always edgy … Graceland [itself] was sacrosanct.’ Priscilla Presley, who lived at Graceland for six years before she married Elvis, recognised that he was the one who made the decisions on colour and style, admitting, ‘All I did was to change the drapes from season to season.’ For Elvis this activity was a form of Home–making, a mode of establishing the (fictive) security of social order (figure two). Elvis had always intended that the house would be a home for his unified family, but with the death of his mother, Gladys Presley (in 1958), what had been highly implausible, became physically impossible. The strong identification that Elvis had with Graceland stemmed from this unhealthy association with his mother. ‘Gladys,’ as Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Elvis’s only wife wrote candidly in her autobiography, ‘was the love of his life. She had died on August 14, 1958, at the age of forty–two, of heart failure … He had expressed how deeply he loved and missed her and how in many ways he dreaded returning to Graceland without her there. It has been his gift to her, a private estate that he’d purchased a year before she died.’ This dread of returning to Graceland, mourning the loss of it’s inhabitant fictions, continues to haunt it’s interiors.These rooms retain a sense of emptiness; inspite of their aesthetic loudness, they are quietened by a funereal absence. This radical emptiness, repressed by the exterior, was initially covered over by the exuberant expansion of these facades. Elvis frequently altered the environment surrounding Graceland, not merely because constant change alleviated his terminal boredom, but because such an activity convinced him that Graceland was an environment – which if not ever–changing – was able to satiate his desires without leaving the property (and eventually the house itself). In order to accommodate these disparate activities (over the two decades he owned Graceland), Elvis undertook the initial planning for a variety of enclosed structures, all of which – with the exception of the Trophy Room and the Raquetball Court – were scrupulously planned, only to be abandoned for the next project. These alterations variously included; an underground shooting range to replace the old wooden shed where target practice was held (following a neighbour’s complaints of stray high–calibre munitions); a circular movie theatre; an octagonal twin–level recording studio and music centre; a snaking asphalted go–cart track; and a fully–operational helicopter pad and hanger. The only permanent structure built was the Raquetball court; the prototype for a network of courts Elvis developed in a speculative and financially–disastrous venture with his doctor George Nichopoulis. Needless to say, a series of 70’s era Elvis Presley Raquetball and Health Clubs didn’t eventuate, and the court wasn’t used for many activities independent of its extensive mini–bar and medical cabinet. Clearly none of these schemes were undertaken with studied consideration and one notable incident illustrates the architectural impatience of a bored Elvis (a shown in figures three – six). Deciding ‘that he didn’t like the looks of an old house located on the grounds in back of the mansion,’ as Priscillia Presley wrote, ‘Elvis took a long look at it, called his father and told him to get a bulldozer over there right away and get rid of it. When the bulldozer arrived, Elvis insisted that he was going to do the local honours, convincing his father – and the local fire and demolition departments – that he could handle the job himself. Wearing his football helmet and his big furry Eskimo coat, Elvis proceeded, his entourage cheering him on, to bring it down and set it on fire.’

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Even at the controls of a bulldozer, Elvis needed to maintain an appearance of control. For the few activities that Graceland couldn’t accommodate, he would drive into Memphis and hire the full–sized equivalent – like the Fairground Amusement park or the Rainbow Skating–Rink, or any of the local movie theatres (insisting the concession stand remain open). However one hobby did briefly outgrow the confines of Graceland. In 1967 Elvis brought a 163 hectare ranch in Mississippi, renaming it the ‘Circle–G’ (inventively after his house), in order to provide space for his interest in horseback riding after ‘the hobby had outgrown the pasture at Graceland.’ However, suffering from the increasing financial strains of sustaining this hobby – and feeling homesick for his mansion (which was twenty minutes drive away) – Elvis sold this property. Moving the horses back to Graceland, Elvis contented himself with riding the exhaust– fogged ranges – alongside the six–lane Elvis Presley Boulevard (figure seven) – of the front lawn. The provision of an interior content (to the exterior legend) found expression initially during the sixties renovations of the Trophy Room. In the ‘Hall of Gold,’ amongst the film costumes and hundreds of Gold albums – representing the more than 800 million albums he had sold – Elvis was able to closet himself away as another object among the emblems of his immortal career. The effect of the trophy room, as Albert Goldman has noted with due–incredulity, ‘is less that of a trophy case than the display case of a trophy manufacturer.’ Originally the shed had been constructed to allow Elvis and his entourage to race expensive toy slot–cars around a giant track. An indulgence, which like several others, had grown from a Xmas gift into something grander and – like the majority of Elvis’s hobbies – was a distraction from tedium which soon became fatuous itself. The empty shed offered him a large space to house the records, clothes and momentos compiled throughout his career. ‘Elvis never allowed anything to be cast out of Graceland,’ as Albert Goldman acerbicly noted, ‘except for human beings. Once an object, no matter how trivial, came into his possession, it remained with him for the rest of his life.’ It is no coincidence that after their spontaneous wedding and reception in the banquet room of the Las Vegas Hilton, Priscilla and Elvis returned for a second ceremony, including extended family and hangers–on, staged in the Trophy Room. In the midst of his career trophies Elvis proudly presented his new bride, an irony which wasn’t lost on the furious bride herself. An ordered domestic interior was regime and as Priscillia, who eventually resisted the petrification of being turned into an object in Graceland, observed: ‘Elvis Presley created his own world; only in his own environment did he feel secure, comfortable and protected. A genuine camaraderie was created at Graceland.’ However such an environment, despite it’s apparent comfort, is nothing other than the temporary redecoration of an illusion. What requires such a degree of interest in the preservation of this fiction, as Susan Buck–Morss has written, is the individual’s naive belief that they can be created – and perpetually re–created – out of the inventive material of their own imagination. Such a delusion of ‘auto– genesis’ maintains a ‘narcissistic illusion of total control.’ (6.) Graceland was sacrosanct for Elvis Presley and the external maintenance of an illusion of total control over it’s exterior and interior contents – as illustrated in Priscilla’s lacquered makeup and fantastically unstable Sixties Beehive – was essential (figure eight). However if Graceland is a fiction, one maintained for the waning interest of its Regent, then it was an external and hallucinatory one. As Priscilla recalled nostalgically of her first arrival at the white mansion, as she was chauffeured melodramatically up the driveway in an open–top Cadillac: ‘Graceland was everything that Elvis had said it would be.The front lawn was adorned with a nativity scene and the white columns of the mansion were ablaze with holiday lights. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever laid eyes on.’ If the beauty of its exterior was virtually unimaginable, then the possibilities of interiors were for the still–virginal Priscilla, intoxicating (figure nine). Graceland was a seductive interior which was not only bereft of the moral instruction of fairytales, but of any tangible content whatsoever. As Siegfried Giedion has written, although not admittedly of Graceland, the agency of the interior deco-

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rator is the production of artifice: the work of one who through the ‘embellishment of furniture and artistic hangings, sets up a fairyland to enchant the drabness.’ (7.) This charming of the mundane is the attempt to cover–over the inevitable return of a domesticated boredom, and it was with the historic emergence of the decorated private room, painstakingly arranged with lavish coverings and plush furnishings, that the ‘devaluation of space’ began. As the room’s decor subsumed the architecture housing it, an un–easy tension was created between the contents of the room and their container. While the opulent coverings of the carpet attempted to cover over this dis–ease, the furniture becomes merely a means to fill the room. Apparently, the furnishings of the Jungle Room – which seems to express an incoherent faux–Hawaii beach party theme – resulted from an impatient 25 minute redecorating spree at McDonald’s Furniture store in Memphis in 1974, during which Elvis brought the entire shop display and relocated it to the old sun porch in Graceland. There it complemented an existing fake brick waterfall (vaguely reminiscent of the haute–decor living room of Elvis’s wealthy parents in Blue Hawaii), illuminated by an idiosyncratic series of fairy–lights, along with the luxuriant lurid green shag–pile carpet which already covered the floor – and ceiling – of the room. However this room, despite it’s opulence, is emptied out – of not only any tangible content, but of space itself. ‘Space itself doesn’t enter the interior, it is only a boundary.’ (8.) The contents of the interior are a ‘mere decoration’ and as one commentator has written, they are ‘alienated from the purposes they represent … engendered solely by the isolated apartment that is created in the first place by their juxtaposition.’ (9.) The realm of the interior is created through the juxtaposition of these objects, however it remains – paradoxically – empty; literally without space. Conceived in such a manner the interior is a mirror, reflecting the inhabitant who dwells – nestled – within it. This self–reflection of the inhabitant appears to be echoed by not only the underlying desire, but the very materiality of Graceland’s architecture; juxtaposing the formlessness of the shag–pile carpet are the sharpened reflections of the mirrors which are spread throughout Graceland. This use of mirrors had an interesting history, originating in 1960, when Elvis relocated to Hollywood to resume his film career, following the conclusion of his military service, where he had already brought a house at 565 Perugia Way in Bel Air. Constructed in a faux–Oriental style with an elaborate garden and waterfall, this circular mansion was perfect for the self–indulgences of stardom and had required only minimal redecoration, mainly consisting of the installation of white shag–piling, pool tables and a jukebox. However, one very significant alteration was made: a two–way mirror would also be installed, to accommodate Elvis’s growing attraction to voyeurism. This mirror was installed in a hand–dug crawl–space, running alongside the pool–house, overlooking changing guests. However the physical discomfort of using it impelled Elvis to relocate it to the interior of the house, renovating the internal layout to construct a wall between one of the bedrooms and a small concealed room with this viewing glass. From the privacy of this closet, Elvis would watch the sexual antics he encouraged between members of his entourage and unsuspecting female guests. However, Elvis became frustrated by the technical crudity of the perennially steaming mirror–wall, and his inability to orchestrate the performance from behind it, and soon began deploying a primitive video camera. The technological detachment of this device allowed Elvis to tape his favourite scenarios, then endlessly replay them. When Elvis eventually moved out of Perugia Way his nostalgic attachment to this mirror–wall compelled him to freight it to Graceland, where it was too large to ever be installed, remaining stored in the attic amongst other unknown treasures. In the extensive renovations to Graceland in 1974, several other mirrors or highly reflective surfaces were installed throughout a number of the mansion’s interiors. A continued attention to detail meant materials were installed in strange locations; small swatches of red shag were used as cabinetry infill panels on the first floor and mirrors were installed on the ceilings of stairs and a basement room, in

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which Elvis ‘could lie back in splendid repose and upon a bank of velvet cushions and, from underneath one heavy, half–closed eyelid, watch himself.’ (10.) The preponderance of reflective surfaces is never more apparent than in the interiors of this basement room: the television room (figure ten). Designed and executed in 1974 by the Memphis decorator Bill Eubanks, the blue–and–white television room – with its mirrored fireplace surrounds, podiums, tables, plant–pots and ceiling – is possibly the most breathtaking of all the mansion’s rooms open to public view. The deco–inspired op–art super–graphic motif, from which the room takes its cue, spews out a potentially–nauseating profusion of forms and colours, surfaces and reflections. And nestled into the plush blue velvet and yellow formica rear wall, between the stereophonic hi–fi system and the primitive video, are the rooms three small television sets. The idea of watching several televisions originated in a visit to the Whitehouse of President Lyndon Johnson, who had installed 3 sets to simultaneously watch the network news broadcasts. Elvis, in turn, watched a ‘limited variety of shows ranging from sporting events to sitcoms.’ Strangely the main orientation of the room turns toward the formal fireplace, away from the television sets, and despite the padding of the custom designed and upholstered sofa and ottomans, the surfaces of the television room remain uncomfortably hard. As Karal Ann Marling has written of the formality of this room – coupled with adjoining games room (also designed by Eubanks) – ‘form a unity based on the range of possibilities in high end decor of the 1970’s … the studied disposition of parts suggests public or quasi–public spaces, like cocktail lounges and hotel rooms these spaces remain impersonal and lifeless.’ The unyielding hardness of these furnishings and coverings is reflected – literally – in the uncomfortable profusion of images flickering across the television room. Elvis rarely relaxed into watching television here, consigning to use it as a more formal entertainment room (due to the exceedingly generous size of its built–in bar). In contrast, as Lynn Spigel has written, ‘the ideal home theater was precisely ‘the room’ which one need never leave, a perfectly controlled environment of wall–to–wall mechanised pleasures.’ (11.) The ‘ideal home theater’ of Graceland was a room – resplendent with mechanical pleasures – in which the inhabitant was more often likelier to be the protagonist than the spectator. What is more, it is within the inescapable comfort of the Jungle Room that the most–domesticated incidents of his pathological behaviour took place: the infamous execution of television sets during of the 1970’s. While Elvis had undoubtably shot–out a number of other television sets in a similar manner, most probably in the penthouse suite of the Las Vegas Hilton, where he regularly stayed while performing and habitually shot at the imitation crystal chandeliers, the Jungle Room remains the site of the definitive – undeniable – incident. As the story goes – late one afternoon in 1974, Elvis Presley was sitting in his faux–Hawaiian driftwood throne breakfasting while watching television. Finding a Robert Goulet entertainment special particularly objectionable, and pausing only briefly to put down a forkful of crispy bacon, Elvis – barefoot on his dangerously lurid 5” green shag–pile carpet – reached for his even more dangerously loaded and ever– present silver plated pearl–handled .357 Magnum to register his ratings disapproval, reputedly whilst muttering under his breath and through a mouth of half–chewed bacon, ‘get that shit out of my house.’ Considering that he had withdrawn so deliberately from a world exterior to the walls of Graceland, it is pertinent that Elvis not only treated his furniture with such contempt but choose to sever so violently the only connection he had with the outside world.That he would splutter ‘get that shit out of my house,’ is telling and rather ironic considering Elvis Presley died attempting to do precisely that, (sufferering a massive heart–attack‘whilst straining at stool’ to quote the Memphis Coroner’s report). Of course his father Vernon, or one of the boys, just wheeled in another television between mouthfuls and, assumedly, got additional ammunition if required.

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This metaphoric self–blinding is further exaggerated given that Elvis was physically losing his sight. In March 1971, he had complained of acute pain and inflammation in his left eye during a difficult recording session in Nashville and had been rushed to a local hospital. There he was diagnosed with glaucoma in both eyes, a diagnosis which was subsequently confirmed by his private physician, Dr Nichopoulos. This disease had originated in years of chronic drug–abuse and continued to bother him for the remaining years of his life, ironically the anti–glaucoma medication contributing to his narcotic addiction. Therefore it may be suggested that another reason for the constantly draped windows and extravagant dark glasses of the Seventies, aside from the obvious allure of their costumed eccentricity, was a growing sensitivity to light. A sensitivity – however conducive to his nocturnal lifestyle – that forced Elvis to diligently avoid bright, even natural, light. Only an insanely heightened sense of vanity prevented him from wearing sunglasses on–stage, believing that the audience made eye contact during the performance, oblivious to the fact that these eyes were regularly obscured by a reddened veil of drug abuse. Given that Elvis was physically blinded, and metaphorically short–sighted (through the severance of his televisual ‘window’), it is significant that he preferred the tactile environment of the Jungle Room over the infinite self–reflections of the Television or Trophy rooms. Instead of the mansion’s interiors acting as a mirror to reflect it’s inhabitant, there is no visible reflection on these polished surfaces whatsovever – it is in the merging between the 5” shag–pile carpeting of the Jungle Room and an equally blurred Elvis that is the point at which ‘he was Graceland, Graceland was Elvis.’ Elvis didn’t need – nor did he want – to see himself in Graceland, as some commentators have suggested, rather he wanted to feel himself inside of Graceland. And it is evident that it was only within the privacy of his den that he felt such a tangible sense of comfort. Yet ‘there is no indication that Elvis meant the Jungle Room to be preserved intact for posterity,’ as Marling has written. However with Elvis’ death in the en suite bathroom on the 16th August 1977, that is exactly what happened to the most personally encoded of the mansion’s rooms. At this moment Graceland shifted from being a private house to a museum – or perhaps more appropriately – to a mausoleum. In her chapter on the furnishing of the Den, ‘Elvis Exoticism: the Jungle Room, from her wonderful book Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, Karel Ann Marling defines the Jungle Room as kitsch, writing; ‘lets face it … the Jungle Room is stunningly, staggeringly, tacky.’ This is a strange disjuncture given that Marling had been empathetic in not reducing Elvis to a caricature via the aesthetic sensibilities of ‘bad taste.’ And given that even a sympathetic critic such as Marling should flounder – undisguisably nauseated – in the interior of the jungle room is significant. As the ‘tasteful’ architect,Vittorio Gregotti has written of such a floundering, ‘Nothing is more ludicrous than the retreat … from the concept of design to one of ‘furnishing’ … [or] … the concept of the ‘anti–house’ which is conceived from the inside and demonstrates at best a lack of cohesion between the interior and the exterior or at worst a deplorable falsity of architectural conception.’ (12.) An elision between the exterior and the interior of architecture which is for Gregotti the virtually unimaginable conception of the ‘anti–house.’ Such a discomfort with the decor of the Jungle Room – a ‘deplorable falsity of architectural conception’ – is not atypical; indeed is it the source of its nomenclature: ‘The Den became the Jungle Room when the house tours began because the decor embarrassed the staff. Giving it a name made the excruciating lava–lamp, semi–hipness of the place seem meaningful.’ (13.) At the point that the private interior of the house became openly public, it’s interior – and all it’s vestiges – were subsumed by the ‘exterior’ myth that surrounded it’s inhabitant. As Marling herself notes: ‘The Graceland tour is careful to avoid anecdotes that might lend support to the unbeliever’s mental image of a bulging besotted King who was fatally out of control or dying in his very excessiveness.’ In contrast to the fatal excessiveness of the Jungle Room, Marling places the deliberate architectural campiness of Elvis’s friend, Liberace, whose ‘tastes’ are seen as a form of ‘connoisseurship,’ an ironic in-

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dulgence in the aesthetic sensibilities of bad taste and obsolescence. ‘I love the fake,’ as Liberace told an interviewer, ‘As long as it looks real, I’ll go for it.’ Marling’s opposing of the Jungle Room with Liberace’s various Las Vegas mansions agrees with a conventional definition of camp as precisely a ‘cultivated bad taste – as a form of superior refinement.’ Or, as Susan Sontag puts it simply, ‘it is beautiful because it is ugly.’ The Jungle Room, rather than being an interesting – or defining – moment in the architecture of Graceland, is reduced to being read as mere aesthetic inadequacy, just plain bad taste: ‘There is no similar irony in Elvis’s Krakatoa-style den. Only a rush of pleasure enhanced by the awareness that there were more jokes to come, more wacky stuff from Donald’s to buy some day, more Saturday matinee fantasies to be lived out in the privacy of Graceland.’ For Marling the decoration of the Den is an ‘act of serial novelty,’ an impermanent and ever changing joke to be renewed as soon as its architectural punchline became worn-out.The interior of the Jungle Room was never meant to be permanent and ‘Elvis had the great misfortune to die before his den.’ While the relationship between the ‘serial novelty’ of the joke and a notion of the aesthetic may not at first appear to be an obvious one, it elicits a tensing out here in order to provide an alternative to reducing the Jungle Room’s interior to a dismissive reading as merely the ‘bad taste’ of an uncultivated aesthetic sensibility. Aesthetics was originally conceived of as a discourse of the body. And in this original form it refers, not to the artistic, but (as Terry Eagleton has written) to the ‘whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought.The distinction which the term ‘aesthetic’ initially enforces in the mid-eighteenth century is not one between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ but between the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas.’ (14.) Thought of in this manner the aesthetic distinguishes between the material and the immaterial (form and content). Writing on the restorative psychical action of humour, in a paper appropriately titled ‘Humour,’ Sigmund Freud regarded humour as ‘a kind of triumph of narcissism, whereby the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality in a victorious assertion of its invulnerability. Humour transmutes a threatening world into an occasion for pleasure.’ As such, the agency of humour transfers the reality into something less serious and assimilable into the experience of the subject as pleasurable – this is the classic articulation of the ‘pleasure-principle,’ which actively transfers the unpleasureable into the pleasurable. To the extent that humour operates, through this narcissistic transference, in the provision of a technicoloured version of reality – within which the subject is inviolate – humour is sublime: ‘It resembles nothing as much as the classical sublime, which similarly permits us to reap gratification from our senses of imperviousness to the terrors around us.’ The humorous can be tangibly aesthetic then – as the aesthetic is the mediation between the material and the immaterial, the sensation and the idea, the real and the fictive. Moreover, this liminal oscillation between these states is not only a condition of aesthetic existence – but is in itself traumatic. ‘Human life is aesthetic for Freud in so far as it is all about intense bodily sensations and baroque imaginings, inherently significatory and symbolic, inseparable from figure and fantasy,’ as Eagleton writes, but as he adds cautiously, ‘for Freud this is at least as much catastrophe as triumph.’ An aestheticised insulation from trauma, as Freud famously stated, is more fundamental than the positive reception of experience: ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than the reception of stimuli.’ Such a form of protection, literally a Self-protection, mediating between pleasure and displeasure, comfort and discomfort, takes place on the site of the body. The pleasure principle constructs itself as a shield at the extremities of the body in its attempt to shield the subject from the potentially fatal excess of reception.The subject, ‘suspended in the middle of an external world charged with ‘the most powerful energies,’ would be mortally injured if it wasn’t protected form these forces by a protective layer.’

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Elvis’s need to protect himself from a physical exteriority had increased dramatically during the drugfuelled paranoia of the Seventies, as is graphically illustrated in the Jumpsuits worn to perform in during the final years of his life (not to mention his insistence on ‘packing heat’). The evolution of these costumes, as at least one commentator has pointed out, had exceeded the practical demands of performance – transforming into a kind of rampant symbolism. From the arguably pragmatic leathers of the 68’ Singer-Special, they evolved into the classic jumpsuits of the early Seventies, clothes which not only had names, but personas: like the Mad Tiger, the Pre-Historic Bird, the Mexican Sundial, and the most famous of all – worn only during the 73’ Satellite Special – the American Eagle. Resplendent – with cape unfolded to ascend to the heavens – the jewelled, studded, fringed, and laced ‘jumpsuit Elvis is a different creature, the Vegas Elvis, a legend armoured in a caraplace of sheer, radiant glory.’ These were more than clothes, they were a liturgy, ‘Elvis the icon was cosmic, mysterious, all-American, untouchable.’ (15.) This ornamented invulnerability was an attempt to shield the self from the strains of being itself. As Elvis had entered his final decade, his personal fiction had became public property; ‘now the entire world was urging him to live his fantasy. He could now celebrate a career that included an evolution from a teen idol to movie star to worldwide cultural phenomena.’ (16.) As his personal life imploded around him, Elvis Presley recorded a concert performance at the Honolulu International Center Arena on January 16, 1973: an event, which as his official Graceland biography succinctly puts it, was ‘the pinnacle of his superstardom.’ Broadcast in over forty countries, the ‘Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii – Via Satellite’ television special (made to raise funds for the USS Arizona War Memorial), is the most viewed event in human history. Surpassing the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and was eventually seen by almost one and a half billion people (at the time over half of the world’s population). As a result of the enormous publicity this engendered, by the time of his death – only four years later – Elvis Presley had become the most photographed human figure in history. An image bearing his likeness had become the most recognisable representation around the globe. This phenomenal success, as he himself was acutely aware, lay in this reduction to an image; a serial reproduction. As Elvis himself stated, ‘the image is one thing and the human being is another – it’s very hard to live up to being an image.’ Following such over-exposure there was no need for him ever to perform again, or – because he was available in so many different representations – even to exist at all. Furthermore, as so many contemporaries have noted, when he toured subsequently it was purely for financial reasons and Elvis had degenerated – or merely completed the natural evolution – into self-parody. Describing a narcotically-hazed, slurred and generally incoherent performance in Houston’s Astrodome during August 1976, during which the performer forgot the lyrics to even his seventeen year-old standards, one reviewer wrote, ‘attending an Elvis Presley concert these days is like making a disappointing visit to a national shrine.’ This monumentalisation underscored the futility of continued renovations; within the proliferation of impersonators, each with a given time and era, Elvis had been petrified. This confrontation between imitations which were unable to recognise themselves (as figure eleven graphically illustrates) elides the distinction between the original and it’s serial imitations, drawing a pained attention to the redundancy of the original. This overwhelming of the individual by the serial – a loss of the interior to an exterior – is an incomprehensible shock to the system. If the body is the site of the ego (as Freud postulated) – then the protective function of this body, the ‘synaesthetic system,’ breaks down with this overcoming. The attempts to neutralise this shock are numbing. ‘The cognitive system of synaesthetics has become one of anaesthetics,’ as Susan Buck-Morss has written, and ‘drug addiction is characteristic of modernity. It is the correlate and counterpart of shock.’ It isn’t necessary to over-state the well known extent of Elvis Presley’s drug abuse, suffice to say he ‘had become a connoisseur of recreational drugs and of the fine nuances of their euphoric affect’ and consumed narcotics with the physiological appettite of a small elephant. Such an appreciation of sensory-deprivation does illustrate the escalating extent to which Elvis felt (tangibly) af-

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fected by his image as the King and his inability to numb the sensations of boredom and exhaustion. The correlate between the domestic site of drug-addiction and an unsatiated addiction for the domestic is found in the renovations of hotel rooms during the final concert years, renovations which were meant to imitate Graceland. This dependency on a ‘home away from home,’ coupled with the desire of Elvis’s Manager – Colonel Tom Parker – for unmitigated concealment, nearly had fatal consequences. In one virtually incomprehensible incident Elvis’s first overdose (of many) took place ‘behind the closed and guarded doors of the Las Vegas Hilton Suite 361’ on February 19, 1973. Fearing the disastrous implications of a public scandal, a comatose King was left to recuperate amidst the luxury of the penthouse suite with a temporary hospital constructed around the bed. ‘If it had been anyone but Elvis Presley,’ as Peter Harry Brown dramatically described the scene, ‘an ambulance team would already have been en route to the Hilton. But Newman and Esposito [two prominent members of the entourage] were charged by Colonel Tom Parker with preventing just such a scandal. So they did the next best thing: they transported medical and oxygen equipment into the suite and built an intensive care unit around the silk-sheeted bed.’ On tour these hotel rooms were arranged with exacting instructions to duplicate the master suite at Graceland. All the furnishings were laid out in the same configuration and the windows – which were already concealed behind newly hung heavy-velvet drape – were sealed with insulation foil and duct-tape. In such an environment it was impossible to ever ascertain what time of day it was, or even whether it was day or night, and in such an artificial environment it was easy to imagine that the surroundings were Graceland. Elvis faded further and further into Graceland, eventually venturing outside infrequently. With an escalating drug consumption and the loss of any reality external to the fictive world of Graceland, it can be argued that – aside from the ever-briefer moments he was on stage performing – an anaesthetised Elvis Presley never ventured outside Graceland. The quiet resignation of this final return to the mansion’s emptied rooms is apparent in the decor of the Jungle Room and the formless artificiality of it’s shag-pile. The synaesthetic system of the body has broken down, dissolved into the comfort of the surfaces that surround it; no longer mediating between the pleasurable and the un-pleasurable, or perhaps no longer wishing to distinguish between the fictive and the real. The architecture of this room marks the final – vacated – moment of it’s inhabitation: a last attempt to give it a content which had become lost, like a stray toenail clipping, amidst the long synthetic fibers of the shag-pile. The final moments of Elvis’s recording career took place in the Jungle Room. From its inauspicious beginnings in the bleak hardness of the acoustically tiled walls and stained linoleum floors of Suns Studio’s cramped recording room, the recording career of the King – who had sold enough records to stretch around the globe twice – dissolved into the formlessness of the den’s carpet: a dissolute formlessness apparent in the album recorded there. In February, 1976, his final studio album was recorded at Graceland, as a result of his refusal to leave the house. As one commentator has described this bizarre scene: ‘The musician’s equipment had to be lowered in through the windows of the Jungle Room den. But after everyone had assembled, Elvis refused to come downstairs. He said he was sick. Over the week that followed, Presley eventually recorded a dozen songs. As Elvis put it, that night, to producer Felton Jarvis, ‘I’m so tired.’ ‘You need a rest,’ replied Jarvis. ‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Elvis wearily. ‘I mean, I’m just so tired of being Elvis Presley.’ (17.) This sense of fatigue was indefeasible and as the Chicago Sun-Times eulogised so succinctly in their obituary of August 18th 1977: ‘Decades of being ‘The King’ had affected him. The body failed the test of the reign. Apparently the spirit flagged too. Then the energy – and thus so much of the talent.’ And,

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as they concluded rather ungraciously, ‘At least the legend still lives.’ As the obituarist obviously thought; not only was the legend exhaustedly limping along without a body to bear it – but it was itself emptied out, interior-less. On the 18th of August, 1977, an inert Elvis Aaron Presley lay in a nine hundred pound casket, identical to the one he had buried his beloved mother Gladys, in state barely inside Graceland’s front door. The solid-copper casket lay underneath an elaborately cut crystal chandelier (resembling a film prop), beside the stairs leading mysteriously to the upstairs bathroom where Elvis – straining under the pressure of being the King – had drawn his final breath.That afternoon, the body of Elvis Presley was carried through the entry of Graceland for the final time by members of the Memphis Mafia and driven to the local cemetery to be laid to rest beside his mother. Barely a month later,Vernon Presley – fearing further attempts of grave-robbing after two local men had been arrested at the graveside carrying shovels – exhumed both bodies and brought them to their final resting place, in the Garden of Contemplation beside the swimming pool, in full view of Graceland – literally in the back yard. Graceland had exhumed the body of the King, drawing Elvis back into the uneasily domesticated realm of the interior, assuring they remain indivisible. It is difficult to think of one without the other and – in thinking of one without the other – either one is disembodied. If the impatient furnishing of the Jungle Room is a joke – from a however deluded and unquestionably naive sense of humour – then it is also the moment at which the body of the King, exhausted from representing itself, and the architecture of Graceland dissolve into one another. If it is a punchline which has indeed worn thin, as one commentator has suggested, then its tragedy – which doesn’t preclude it from being hilarious – is this tangible sense of exhaustion: there are no more pranks, no more practical jokes, no more reassuringly narcissistic assertions, to follow. Instead of containing the lurid artificiality of the Jungle Room’s shag-pile carpeting, and its contents, within the conveniences of ‘aesthetic inadequacy’ – of being just ‘bad taste’ – perhaps we are left laughing, however awkwardly, at the hollowness of the joke itself. Notes: (top) 1. Joni Mabe, ‘Everything Elvis,’ in John Chadwick ed., In Search of Elvis: Music, Race, Art, Religion (Boulder: Westview, 1997), p. 155. 2. Gottfried Semper, ‘Style in the Technical Arts or Practical Aesthetics,’ in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrove and Wolfgang Herman (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 235 (emphasis added). >3. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 260. 4. Ibid, p. 345. 5. Nickolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 41, as cited in, Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (London: California UP, 1993), p. 125 (refer note 14, p. 232). 6. Susan Buck–Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,’ in, October 62, (Cambridge: MIT Press, Fall 1992), p. 8. 7. Giedion, op cit, p. 365. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot–Keller, (Minne-

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apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 43. 9. Ibid, p. 43. 10. Karal Ann Marling, Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 219. 11. Lynn Spigel, ‘The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighbourhood Ideal in Postwar America,’ in Beatriz Colomina ed., Sexuality and Space, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), p. 198. 12. Vittorio Gregotti, ‘Kitsch and Architecture,’ in Gillo Dorfles ed., Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, (New York: Universe, 1969), p. 276. 13. Marling, op cit, p. 192. 14. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, (London: Blackwell, 1990), p. 13. 15. Marling, op cit, p. 82–82. 16. Whitmer, op cit, p. 274. 17. Brown and Broeske, op cit, p. 400.

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Support Structure

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Eastside Projects Manual Draft #1

Feb 22––– 226 days work: 477 sq. metres Design by function Materials: Wood, Scaffolding, Stirling Board, Shuttering Plywood, Mild Steel, Pyrok, Corrugated PVC, Polycarbonate, Valchromat, MDF, Plasterboard, Mineral Fiber Insula tion, Glass, Concrete, Plaster, Nails, Scr ews, Varnish, Paint.

* We have joined together to execute

functional constructions and to alt er or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy .

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Contents

4 Display Device

Main Gallery

1 Entrance 2

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6 References 3 Functional Constructions ng rdi o c Re tudio S

U VR

2 Pleasure Island

dio

Stu

Cinema / Small Gallery

5 Graphic Alphabet

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Support Structure: CĂŠline Condorelli & Gavin Wade Functional Configuration, 2008 Gallery Entrance: Front Door, Lights & Mobile Front Desk, 3.2m2 (172cm x 185cm)

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Front desk: Douglas Fir plywood body on castors, with powder-coated mild steel display and table piece. Execution by Tom Bloor.

1 Entrance Eastside Projects is an artist-run space as public gallery and incubator of ideas for the City of Birmingham and beyond. Eastside Projects is being developed as a new model for a gallery, one where space and programme are intertwined: a complex evolving programme of commissioned works and events, starting from radical historical positions will also form the spatial identity of the gallery and provide vital distinctive features to the area. Eastside Projects was conceived by artist-curator Gavin Wade and is organised by a founding collective also comprising Simon & Tom Bloor, CĂŠline Condorelli, Ruth Claxton, and James Langdon. Eastside Projects is a not-for-profit organisation, working in partnership with Birmingham City University and STATE Enterprises, revenue funded by Arts Council England West Midlands; it aims to commission and present experimental contemporary art practices and exhibitions and fully participate and support the cultural activity of the city both inside and out. Eastside projects promotes the idea of art and other spatial practices as important forms of alternative knowledge production. The space and programme offer tools for the creation and comprehension of contemporary visual culture as well as the immediate context of the forthcoming development of Eastside, and engage with the role and function of art within the urban environment.

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2 Pleasure Island Eastside projects will provide a unique example of an art space where design, organisation and architecture is an integral part of the programme. Architect CĂŠline Condorelli and graphic designer James Langdon have been working with artist-curator Gavin Wade to propose and maintain a graphic and spatial development over time. The building and its graphic identity will be allowed to evolve, change and grow according to changing needs. This is dependent on a flexible and disposable exhibition set-up, and a strong integration both in its immediate and larger context. Each artist working with Eastside Projects will be able to consider the conditions of the space, which will include previous artworks, elements of which may remain and accumulate with their own work.

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The Eastside Projects office is the artwork ‘Pleasure Island’ by Heather & Ivan Morison. The structure is built from harvested red wood trees from a wood in Wales belonging to the artists. Originally commissioned for the Wales Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, the building has been adapted for Eastside Projects as a long term commitment to exploring the nature of artworks within the space. New features within the structure include a kitchen, desks, shelving and a larger entrance. The artists will present a series of puppet shows within ‘Pleasure Island’ over the next few years with the first performance at the launch of Eastside Projects on 26 September 2008.

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3 Functional Constructions Eastside Projects is set within an industrial building, originally a cabinet makers, mid-way along Heath Mill Lane in the centre of Eastside and in close proximity to both Ikon Eastside, the Custard Factory and Vivid. The building has been renovated using Arts Council England West Midlands funds and includes a large main gallery space, 225m2, a second smaller gallery, 70m2, (equipped with video projection equipment) and an artists’ residency studio, the Visualisation Research Unit (VRU) offices and studios for image and sound editing. The building renovations are led by Support Structure, Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade.

Support Structure: Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade Functional Constructions, 2008 VRU Recording Studio Internal area 19m2 Ceiling height 230cm Offset double stud wall construction, exterior cladding anthracite coloured MDF, interior plasterboard. Contains a separate recording booth. Single soundproof door to VRU office.

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VRU Office 20m2 (700cm x 300cm) Ceiling height 270cm Stud wall construction, exterior cladding Pyrok, interior plasterboard. Single door to kitchen, and access to recording studio.

Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Residency Studio 25m2 (740cm x 330cm) Ceiling height 275 (475cm skylight) Stud wall construction, exterior dove grey and clear corrugated PVC sheets, interior plasterboard. Double doors to common area.

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4 Eastside Projects is a Display Device The development of the design process will revolve around the following questions: How can architecture and design support exhibition making alongside the curation process? Can architecture and design be understood as a form of curation? Can we imagine a context for exhibitions and exhibition making that produces rather than embodies or represents the exhibition itself? The way the environment is constructed and organised provides a framing for what is going on inside it: exhibitions and exhibition-making, talks and events amongst other activities. The gallery becomes a project-making machine, the art space a space of production; the production of sensibility, of exhibitions, and of a specific understanding of objects and experience. The art space itself enters a discourse of performativity, with a constructed context that engages in its subject rather than merely offering it for consumption. Eastside Projects is a display device designed specifically to support different directions in a programme. We can think of gallery space design as a form of curating, with the building and graphics supporting the curation process. Such an art space is imagined and run in order to produce questions on the production of art, its perception and consumption through the filtered display of the art space.

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Liam Gillick ‘The Doors of the Administration Building are Open’ 2008 Photograph by Stuart Whipps

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5 Graphic Alphabet The Eastside Projects environment is active, being constructed through and with the exhibition programme, occupying the existing building with a very thin and fragile layer – a lining – with a temporary, ad-hoc aesthetic. This is clearly added on to the building, like a scaffold is, and as such allows further possibilities for change. In order to accumulate experience and put the building through a learning process, some traces should remain from what has happened previously. The evolution of the space will be recorded in an ongoing work by artist Stuart Whipps. From a pre-determined set of positions within the gallery, Whipps will make photographs at regular intervals for the duration of Eastside Projects’ existence. This work will be published in stages in the series of publications that the gallery will produce and distribute. The graphic identity of Eastside Projects is comprised of an evolving group of component ‘shapes’. These are to be collected from various areas of the gallery’s activity, such as: artists’ contributions (incidental or commissioned), research, references, use and development of the gallery space, and so forth. In lieu of a fixed logo, these shapes will become a kind of alphabet that can be recombined variously over time to represent the development and record the history of the gallery. The concept of what a shape can be is open and does not preclude contributions in any form: graphic, image, text, format, sound, process etc. The growth of the collection will be recorded in each of the gallery publications.

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6 References Three exhibition precedents provide references and an underlying ethos for the first exhibition and continuing evolution of the gallery as an ongoing artwork. El Lissitzkyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Abstract Cabinet, 1926/1930, at the International Kunstausstellung Dresden & Hannover Museum takes the role of the first reference as a clear and radical emergence of the artist-curator generating a constructed environment for artworks by Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo and Lissitsky. It functioned as an artwork in itself, intertwined with the selection and integration of other artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; works.

El Lissitzky Design for the Abstract Cabinet, 1927

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The second reference is to the 1978–79 Peter Nadin Gallery, New York, by Peter Nadin, Christopher d’Arcangelo and Nick Lawson, which had a continuous exhibition titled ‘The work shown in this space is a response to the existing conditions and/or work previously shown within the space’. Artists included Daniel Buren, Peter Fend, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Sean Scully and Lawrence Weiner and the artists directly responded to each others’ work, developing a cumulative environment. Two of the artists (Peter Fend and Lawrence Weiner) are participating with semi-permanent pieces in the first exhibition at Eastside Projects. The title of the first Eastside Projects show This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things is adapted from the third reference exhibition This is the Show and the Show is Many Things, 1994, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, curated by Bart de Baere. It included Honore d’O, Fabrice Hybert, Louise Borgeois, Suchan Kinoshita, Jason Rhoades and Luc Tuymans, who all planned the exhibition through workshops as a joint enterprise, defining relationships between each other and redefining functions of the Museum space. Nadin’s 1978 project began with the text “We have joined together to execute functional constructions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy.” The text forms the starting point for Eastside Projects’ gallery policy and strategy. Just as Nadin’s exhibition started with the ‘empty’ gallery space and newly constructed wall elements followed by the series of ‘solo’ projects, This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things follows suit in an unravelling of function, design and execution by the practitioners forming the gallery and the invited artists.

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Eastside Projects is a new artist-run space as public gallery for the city of Birmingham. Eastside Projects 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth Birmingham B9 4AR www.eastsideprojects.org Thursday to Saturday 12 to 5pm Eastside Projects is a not for profit company in partnership with Birmingham City University and revenue funded by Arts Council England.

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List of every individual who has worked with Eastside Projects since it was founded Herbert Bayer, Marc Bijl, Simon Bloor, Tom Bloor, Harry Blacklett, CĂŠline Condorelli, Spartacus Chetwynd , Rachel Clarke, Ruth Claxton, Bill Drummond, Gene George Earl, Marte Eknaes, Jimmy Fantastik, Sarah Farmer, Peter Fend, Beth Fisher, Rita Fletcher, Iain Forsyth, Liam Gillick, Walid Glaied, Helen Grundy, Joseph Hallam, Matthew Harrison, Barbara Holub, ISAN, Faye Khan, Ben Kinmont, James Langdon, Kelly Large, Rain Li, Nicki Lupton, Lisa Dawn Metherill, David Miller, Heather Morison, Ivan Morison, Apexa Patel, Jane Pollard, Magnus Quaife, Antonio Roberts, Elizabeth Rowe, Mithu Sen, Chen Shaoxiong, Tim Stock, Support Structure, Mark Titchner, Laureana Toledo, Gavin Wade, Lawrence Weiner, Joe Welden

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Interview with Goran Sergej Pristas

Olivia Newton-John: Hey Sergej. We are doing a project here at the Day of Architecture. A project where we publish an 800 page thick book on the current state of architecture. We are an editorial team of some 20 choreographers and architects and there are a conference running parallel with some 600 Swedish architects. So. Do you have anything you could contribute with? Text images or maybe even we could do a short interview? Goran Sergej Pristas: We are setting the show now in Lincoln. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be back tomorrow and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll think about it. Olivia Newton-John: You are a masterpiece. Good Luck with the show

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