Collage Lab - Competition

POINTS OF VIEW >> Part 2 / Chapter 3: thefunambulist.net

Joanne — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:14:44 +0000

CollageLab: In one of your latest posts, Official Report on the Question of the so-called New York Commune, you draw delicately the fictional landscape – in terms of time and space – of a past and forgotten New York Commune. In this text, the line you are talking about, the one you are dangerously walking on, separating the ambition and the principles of it, appears really clearly… But what is it really about? About the necessity of a commune? About a necessary revolution? Or about its inextricable failure? At collage, we are looking at the notions of Commune – interested by the initiative of San Francisco diggers and their – too hippie – Free City – or the so called neo-provicialism as a growing and globalized phenomenon (even though completely anecdotic) significant at least of a renewed and affirmed need for community scale and belonging. But what is – for you – the Problem of the Commune?

The funambulist: This story of the New York Commune has been, and will continue to be, an on-going project that I work on. It is mostly born from my own feeling of integration in New York without feeling attached to the United States and the interpretation of the city as a universal one in which all nationalities and about two hundred languages exist together. In a more historical reading of it, I was interested to superimpose some events from the 1871 Paris Commune on a contemporary situation. My story is certainly a political one, but not necessarily a literal activist one. What I mean by that, is that I am not just imagining a situation where New York would declare its independence through a collective empowerment of its people; I am also trying to see how life in a city could be when comfort has disappeared and that potential suppressive forces are surrounding it. In this regard, more recently, I drew a map of what I called, the Manhattan strip, as a form of comparison of the situation in Gaza with the relentless attacks and control apparatuses it has to suffer from. This story is not therefore a sort of manifesto for New York to declare its independence, but rather a mean to open imaginaries. The latter have been captured by capitalism and “the end of history” which uses a rhetoric that Margaret Thatcher summed up very well with her “there is no alternative”. Fiction is thus a useful tool to fight against this narrow vision of societal models. In this particular story, and probably in its cinematographic version on which I am trying to work now, I am also trying to blur the limits between reality and fiction, to inject some doubt on what is being said or showed, to assume all the subjectivity of the narrative(s) in order to make it easier to dive in.

I think that what you call “the Problem of the Commune” is a way to reflect on an ‘archipelagization’ of governance (sorry for the neologism). Thinking about it is a way to territorialize the way we take decisions for our local society. One might say that it is a sort of feudalism, which is understandable, but exchanges between territories are so important nowadays that we can legitimately think about this archipelagized governance as one where its ‘islands’ would not necessarily behave as antagonists to each other. It is a way for me to exit imperialism but, of course and as always, such a societal model needs to be thought through by all. Reading the poetic philosophy of Edouard Glissant is probably a good way to start…

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www.thefunambulist.net

POINTS OF VIEW >> Part 2 / Chapter 2: thefunambulist.net

Joanne — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:59:39 +0000

Collage: Architecture as a political weapon? It implies that architecture has something to fight against? The re-new-ed “trend” – which may disappear or not – of engaged architecture in a political level seems to be a strategical solution for survival consequently to the economical crisis. Or maybe a reaction to international events that focuses on protest. As architecture is a tool to divide or to unite, architecture has to be engaged. But can architecture – as a built result – be engaged or isn’t the process of making architecture – which had a tendency to disappear from the focus due to the constant repetition of shiny images of the final built product – able to be engaged. Maybe what is changing is the definition beyond architecture. What is yours?

The funambulist: Architecture as such has nothing to fight against, just like a sword or a gun have nothing to fight against. My argument is that architecture is intrinsically a weapon as its physicality has a strong influence, if not violence, on the bodies it hosts. The modification or the creation of the built environment in any given society cannot escape from being instrumentalized within mechanisms of power. Architecture is therefore a political instrument whether we, architects, design it as such or not.

About the trend you are evoking, I have to say that I am having trouble knowing what to think about it. On the one hand, a political agenda, when dissolved until only the general consensus is left, seems to be worse than no political agenda at all. But, on the other hand, we might want to think of what is happening right now as a work in progress that is slowly incorporating the political aspect and consequences of architecture as a given that simply cannot be ignored.

The ‘shiny images’ phenomena is frustrating, it is true; however, I think that all eras have known some forms of mainstream until a radical movement ambitiously challenged them, only to reproduce the same process when followed by an opportunist, yet numerous arriere garde. I think that we always need to be engaged within processes of resistance against those non-imaginative opportunist forces. That also means that we have to be even more careful if we become more influential ourselves. We do not need to necessarily refuse ambition, but we have to draw a clear line between it and the principles that fuel it. Many movement tried to change the definition of architecture through their manifesto, sometimes through their slogans (less is more, less is a bore etc.). There is a thin line between a narrow definition that attempts to reduce architecture to only one of its aspects and a holistic definition which rather, while focusing on one dimension that gives sense to architecture, does not evacuate the other ones in order to give it some flesh. I never taught, but I were to teach a thesis studio in an architecture school, I would expect the students to be able to fill the gap of the sentence ‘Architecture is…’ It would not mean that they could possibly give up working on any dimensions that the discipline implies, but rather than all these dimensions would be thought and designed through the notion that they believe should fill the gap of their manifesto sentence.

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www.thefunambulist.net

The countryside in the city – Joseph Redwood Martinez’s report on the 2#WORK competition jury

Joanne — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 16:00:12 +0000

The premise was simple enough: propose a vision for post-capitalist work. But since there was such a range of responses–most of which took a generous detour from the prompt as written–the foundational questions of this cycle of the Collage Lab competition bear repeating:

Does our urban future lie in each becoming self-entrepreneurs, or to all share collective knowledge in forms of Open Source projects? Can we find new ways of producing and working? How will the global enterprise be able to produce sustainable levels of work through motivated workers, when nowadays humans are seen as resources and not workforces? How will the work of the future be measured, when the production of perceived, speculated value has no theoretical limits? Can work finally be released through technology? And finally: What are the possibilities for our cities? Apart from “job-sharing” and co-working spaces, what could be transformed spatially to change towards a sustainable working culture?

Remarkably enough, what become most clear while reviewing the submitted proposals were the limitations of our capacity to imagine what a post-capitalist work might entail, and most especially, how a scenario for post-capitalist work could be in any way adjacent to a significant spatial transformation. This was evident both from the proposals but also from the deliberations of the jury. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. And by no means do I want to suggest that the ideas generated within this context were at all insignificant. It is actually quite interesting to trace this out–the incapacities, the limitations–between the numerous proposals submitted to this round of the competition. Ultimately, it was the two proposals that most directly engaged with this dilemma–that of imagining a post-capitalist scenario with the tools of the capitalist imaginary–which came out as the strongest.

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Embedded within this entire CollageLab project seems to be a conviction that urban life–perhaps not as we know it, but urban life in an expanded capacity–is something desirable, something that can, and should, be sustained. That is, if we are able to locate the means by which to sustain urban life in a positively post-capitalist way.

If we were to go back to the initial set of questions for this competition on post-capitalist work, for instance, and mark out all of the references to distinctly urban life or high tech solutions, we end up with a constellation of concerns that allow us to think about post-capitalism in general–and this opens up a possibility for us to consider distinctly rural or provincial ways of life as the antidote. But that is not the drive here. The whole premise here is to attempt thinking about post-capitalism within and completely subjected to the urban logic. And there’s the rub.

Almost paradoxically, what this largely produced in this setting is something I would characterize as a certain neo-provincialism. In order to arrive at a semblance of a post-capitalist scenario, a majority of the proposals maneuvered in such a way so as to ameliorate the supposed problems of urban life by way of implementing something of a pre-industrial provincialism within the urban pysche and/or urban fabric.

On an individual level, we might be able to use this term “neo-provincialism” to characterize the exhibition of the urban-dweller’s particular (often, though not necessarily, naive or nostalgic) sensibility for pre-neoliberal or even pre/post capitalist ways of living in “community” and in relation to nature. Whatever the case is–whether it is urban landscape design, an international biennial, or a set of municipal regulations in accordance with the Transition Town movement–neo-provinicialism has become increasingly apparent as a means of coping, a means of perforating the logic of rural occupation into the logic of urban life with the hope of exiting from both scenarios and into something more resilient, sustainable, and viable.

A friend recently shared with me her reactions to this observed tendency:

Neo-provincialism is a concept that deserves a space in our lexicon. To an extent, it is the elephant in the room because it is a reaction to power structures and the status-quo. Neo-provincialism intrigues me in relation to how we define survival and our needs.

We tend to identify ourselves, especially in an urban context, in terms of a stark distinction between the activities that consume humans in contrast to animals. Cities are romanticized because physical survival is easy for those who can afford it. In a rural setting, when we are truly self-reliant, life is not easy, and social/gender inequity is inevitable. The necessary labor is distributed and the marginalized are burdened with providing the resources necessary for survival. Yet, worldwide, the dominant activity associated with cities is monotonous factory/sweatshop labor, which makes one feel like an animal, because one’s time is completely devoted to a cycle of economic survival where one does not have freedom: life is sleep, work, repeat. And the mind decays without stimulation.

So, my question is, how does art and intellectual enlightenment (which can only prosper after basic physical survival needs are met) fit into neo-provincialism?

Reflecting on recent biennials, exhibitions, grant cycles, institutional adjustments, and curricular “innovations,” it seems we have arrived at a point where “art and intellectual enlightenment”–processed through the more aptly named engine of “cultural production”–have become major proponents of neo-provincialism. Having possibly exhausted those tactics that celebrated distinctly urban ways of life, there has emerged a tendency to constitute oneself within and through this dilemma of mapping the provincial onto the urban.

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Referring specifically to the proposals under question, we saw recommendations to enter into modes of development where economies were based entirely off of “locally-sourced materials”; gift, slow-growth, and no-growth economies; barter networks and community “inter-price” systems of assigning “real value” to goods and services; and so on. The derogatory aspects of the assignation “provincial” were reworked into a situation where the participants were decidedly restricting (or playing at the restriction of) their interests, outlooks, and ways of being in order to positively address the negative aspects of urban life.

We can find the genesis of many of these proposals very much alive and functioning maturely in rural or provincial settings across the world. Well-known are projects like LETS, or local exchange trading systems; BerkShares, the local currency of the Berkshire region of Massachusetts; as well as numerous eco-village, permaculture projects, and volunteer communities that practice ethics such as non-violence, nondiscrimination, and low-impact living. But in the process of reviewing these proposals, we regularly came across attempts at reconfiguring select components–and this fragmentary characteristic is important–of these preexisting and well-functioning systems into the urban scenario. But still, this tension over reconfiguring these two distinct logics into one another was never addressed directly.

Simply, there was a tendency to encourage the idea that urban dwellers might solve their problems if they pretended as though they lived in the countryside in the city. That is, the countryside without all of the problems of the countryside. This is not an expanded provincialism, or one that desires the physical encounter with the logic of rural occupation within the city center. Rather, it is a provincialism advanced and accompanied by a distinctly urban sensibility and refinement. A post-production scenario whereby provincial life is rendered through a distinctly urban semantic and aesthetic vocabulary and then enacted as a means of actualizing new forms of urban life. “Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor” has been replaced by “we don’t actually produce the food people eat, but we give them an experience of what it means to produce food,” or “gardening is an attitude that we can transfer to the question of city planning,” or “the countryside itself becomes an instrument to produce new forms of urban life.”

So, we end up in a situation where the ripe ideas for urban life seem to be coming from the rural space and what it makes possible (and not the other way around). But at the same time, the impulse to abandon the city is never on the table. By way of contrast, the impulse is to confiscate these ways of being–especially the ideas of being in relation to one another, in relation to nature, and so on–into the urban space with the deliriously optimistic attitude that they will remain unscathed and still properly functioning.

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In this particular context–that of a cycle of competitions asking for a vision, in the form of a proposal, of post-capitalist work–the proposals that were characterized by a certain neo-provincialism were equally characterized by a lack of significant engagement with the complexities of this dilemma. There was an impulse to appropriate distinctly rural attitudes and implement them into city life by way of reduction and fragmentation. I do not want to suggest that any of this is lacking in significance in and of itself. On the contrary, this is something that merits much more attention.

The proposals selected for first and second place in this cycle of the post capitalist city competition were, however, indicative another tendency: the conviction that under no circumstance would a positively post-capitalist vision of work be brought to bear through anything produced by an architect. Rather, the function of the post-capitalist architect would be one of dismantling buildings and developments.
Fossilized Supra-Capitalism, by Marshall W Ford, suggested a distopian vision whereby “supra-capitalism” biomorphically fossilizes itself so that we can bear witness to the office spaces of high rise buildings deteriorating as the employees inhabiting them do as well. Instead of making a proposal for new ways of working, Ford appears to indicate our incapacity to imagine any alternative or post-anything scenario unless we allow the present to run its course–and to ultimately fossilize itself.

Selected for the first prize in the competition, Dace Amele and Dace Gurecka’s proposal From Corporate to Cooperate might share a similar degree of unfeasibility, but it does suggest a function for architects, spatial planners, and the unemployed as well as a creative reworking of the horizon or what we have come to expect from “adaptive reuse.” This proposal suggests that a post-capitalist notion of work could develop in dismantling man-made structures that are detrimental in terms of negative environmental impact and negligible social gains, recycling the materials gathered, and then “employing” thousands of people to adaptively reuse the raw material in order to build ecologically-sensitive housing. While limited in scope, the strength of the proposal laid in its identification of the way in which symbols of progress have more recently turned into symbols of unbridled global destruction–but it is quite possible that from these very spaces might emerge a vision of post-capitalist work and the (de)construction of the post-capitalist city.

Images and text, courtesy of Joseph Redwood Martinez
For more information on neo-provincialism: http://neoprovincialism.tumblr.com

Sharing points of views >> Part 2 / Chapter 1: thefunambulist.net

Joanne — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:00:35 +0000

We are really honored to launch a second series of shared points of views. This time, we talk with Leopold Lambert, the man – extremely productive – behind the – highly recommended – funambulist.
www.thefunambulist.net
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CollageLab:
There is a beautiful image behind the Funambulist: the image of this passionate guy in love with challenge, control and fear, putting himself in danger to either just reach the other side or because of its addiction to tension and adrenaline.
But for you, who and what is The Funambulist? What is the process behind it? And how did it started?

The funambulist:
The choice of the Funambulist is based on a series of observations that I have been making about the notion of line. Lines are the tool used by the architect to plan a materialization of boundaries. A line is a simple geometric entity but, through the practice of architecture, it becomes a wall that splits one milieu from another. The Funambulist (i.e. tight rope walker) is the character who subverts this separation by walking on the line. I often use the example of November 9th 1989 to describe this expressive act of freedom: when the Berliners realized that the wall’s effect was obsolete, they did not necessarily went from one side to another, instead, they climbed on the top of the wall, and stayed there for a while, on a 20 cm wide world freed from the coercive power of the wall.

In a more straight forward way, through this name, I also wanted to invoke the figures of Philippe Petit, walking back and forth between New York twin towers in 1974, and the Nietzschean character introduced in Zarathustra who can dies peacefully after falling from his line as he dedicated his life to the danger he dies from.

The blog itself is in perpetual redefinition as the desires I am putting in it are also changing all the time. At first, it was mostly an attempt to approach architecture by indirect means, through other disciplines like cinema, literature or philosophy. This approach is probably still happening but I am trying, for better or for worse, to focus my writings through a political and legal filter, the thesis articulated behind those articles being that architecture is inherently a political weapon.

To be continued…
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www.thefunambulist.net

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work, action, labor, seva by Joseph Redwood-Martinez

Joanne — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:56:51 +0000

As an introduction to the work and interests of Joseph Redwood Martinez, member of the jury for the second opus of the competition, we are happy to let you discover one of his text, published by Salt in the -very good- reader “One day, everything will be free” . Enjoy!

Dear Professor Davison,

I’m back in Istanbul again, working a project called “One day, everything will be free…” As part of an ex situ residency self- organized in relation to this project, I had spent the past few months at Sadhana Forest, a volunteer community in Southern India.

But this word “volunteer” is tricky in this context, and I wanted to write to you about a moment where people in the community came together to reflect on the constitutive meanings of what we were doing at the community in relation to this term. It might be helpful, however, to first provide some background information:
Sadhana Forest was established eight years ago as an ecological restoration project aimed at reestablishing the indigenous Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest that was clear cut 150 years ago throughout that entire region. Under French colonial policies, builders were encouraged to source the timber needed to build the city of Pondicherry from the surrounding areas–but there was no regulation on how they sourced this material or how much they were allowed to take. This resulted in complete deforestation that effectively destroyed the way of life for the rural populations–in many cases, as their crops failed and the top soil completely eroded into the nearby ocean, the villagers were forced to move into the nearby peripheral city slums. It’s a familiar narrative. Needless to say, by the early 2000s, the land in this area was considered to be absolutely useless.

But eight years ago, a small family was given a section of this land–about 200 acres–on the condition that they would act as the stewards of the property. They would not own the land– they were not interested in owning land, they were interested in making this their home, establishing a small community, and restoring the indigenous tropical dry evergreen forest. The thing is, they didn’t really know anything about forestry, ecological restoration, conservation biology, or even the back to the land movement for that matter. And this is precisely what they attribute to their success–the fact that they knew and were honest about their not knowing anything.

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And this approach turned out to hold a certain appeal. People began expressing interest in helping the family and they soon established a community, by the name of Sadhana Forest, along the lines of four basic principles:

1. Since deforestation is happening mainly because of animal husbandry (for example, the Amazon is being cut to grow soy– and 85% of that soy goes directly toward feeding animals for human consumption), they have decided to be completely vegan. Their decision is not dogmatic, but affirms their commitment to there being integrity and consistency in every aspect of their project such that all of their actions point in the same direction.

2. Looking beyond exchange economies, they have decided to run the whole project off of what they consider to be a gift economy. They are not really interested in philosophies of money, theories of the gift, or indebtedness in relation to free economies. The belief here is simply that when people have an inner feeling of abundance, they enjoy giving; when people don’t feel abundance inside, they keep. There is no money used at Sadhana–no real money, fake money, alternative currency, or time notes. But there is also no barter or exchange system in place either. All work is unpaid, the meals are free of charge and open to anyone, and any events, screenings, or workshops are always available for free to the public. You do not need to show a card or fill out a form to participate in anything at Sadhana. As long as you are there, they will commit to taking care of your needs. This approach is not motivated so much by a critique of the capitalist system as it primarily has to do with finding a way to be consistent with the third point.

3. Everyone who wants to be at Sadhana can be at Sadhana. It is not a community formed through exclusion and discrimination. Anyone can stay there, and all events, meals, workshops, and meetings are completely open. As in nature: monocultures are weak, biodiversity creates resilience. Maintain diversity, and you will maintain resilience.

4. The community actively pursues practical, technical sustainable living. This includes growing organic food, using composting toilets, running entirely off the grid, and buying only local materials and supplies when needed.
Guided by these ethics, the community began intensive rainwater harvesting and tree planting in 2003. The main issue faced by this group eight years ago was the challenge of how to keep the water on the land–how to keep it from washing away during the monsoon season and carrying with it anything that could have developed into top soil. Through a combination of gabions, check dams, swales, edges, bunds, and contours, they were able to keep enough water on the land to plant a pioneer species of Acacia trees. Their first few attempts completely failed, but after a few years, their planting methods for tropical dry evergreen trees improved from a 40% to a 90% survival rate. But in order to do this, Sadhana Forest has grown from three people to a community of 20 permanent residents and about 1,000 short-term residents each year. Some people come for just a few weeks, others plan to stay for a month but finally get around to leaving after a few years have gone by. It’s easy to get sucked in; life is simple there. Five days a week ,you get up at sunrise with the rest of the community. At 6:15 am, everyone meets in front of the main hut for “morning circle.” Here, people decide what they will be during what is called “first work.” Some people water the swales or the vegetable gardens, others prepare for breakfast, but most of the community heads out into “the forest” to continue the work of planting trees. This lasts until 8:30am, when everybody meets up again at the main hut for breakfast. At 9:25, everyone gathers again for second work, typically, but not necessarily, doing something different from what they volunteered to do during first work–it’s their decision. Lunch is at noon, and from then on, the day is yours to decide. Usually, there are workshops or projects throughout the afternoon. Nothing is mandatory, everything is open. Dinner is at 6pm.

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Not long after I got to the community, a discussion started on whether what we were doing Monday through Friday during first and second work should actually be considered and referred to as work. Several people, myself included, started expressing concern over our use of the words “work” and “volunteer” to describe what was going on at Sadhana Forest.
We were watering the vegetable gardens and preparing breakfast, maintaining compost toilets and planting trees, but we recognized that in this context, the constitutive meanings behind these gestures had nothing to do with the word “work” as we knew it.

In The Human Condition, from 1958, Hannah Arendt draws a distinction between the three human activities of labor, work, and action. Labor, which is distinguished by its never-ending character and creates nothing that endures, was the slave’s occupation. Work corresponds to the fabrication of artificial things and was for the craftsman. Action, however, was for the free citizen: “Action [is] the only activity that goes on directly between men… [and] corresponds to the human condition of plurality…. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life.” And by extension, this corresponds with her definition of power as the human capacity to act in concert.

Nevertheless, when we came together to discuss alternatives to the word “work,” using the word “action” in light of this characterization just didn’t seem appropriate. For some, Paulo Virno’s critique of Arnedt’s distinctions made it impossible to borrow these terms, for others, it just seemed unlikely that these ideas had any real purchase on the circumstances at Sadhana, in southern India. In any case, it was obvious that what was needed was for the introduction of another term that would allow us to break out of this tripartite characterization of labor–work– action.
Someone suggested that we use the word “seva.” In Sanskrit, “seva” corresponds with the concept of selfless service done without any expectation of a result of award for the person performing it. In most Indian religions, seva is seen as an essential devotional practice. But with the explication of this associative meaning, some people felt uncomfortable drawing a connection between religious terminology and the characterization of the actions performed at Sadhana. Furthermore, many people felt uncomfortable using a word from a language most of us did not understand in order to semantically recharacterize an activity that presumably did not require translation to understand. Unable to find our way out of this dilemma, we eventually concluded to replace “work” with “seva.” Importantly, this came down to an interest in the way in which the word seva replaced not only the word “work” but also the entire respective sentence structure and conceptual framework: you “work for” or “work with” or “work less” but seva is never said with a preposition. You would never say that you seva for someone or that tomorrow there will be less seva.

By now, we’ve lost interest in the idea of work entirely. All of those discussions about working more, working too much, finding ways to work less–they didn’t get us anywhere. What is needed now is something that will allow us to move beyond these known distinctions and characterize, instead, engagement in activities with a sense of collective reverence and individual meaning.

After we decided to use “seva,” someone in the group walked up to the chalkboard with the daily schedule, erased the word “work” in “1st work” and “2nd work,” and replaced it twice with the word “seva.” The following day, we performed the same activities of the day prior–watering the vegetable gardens and preparing breakfast, maintaining compost toilets and planting trees–but this was no longer characterized as work and no longer carried this associative meaning. Same action, entirely different meaning. The vague yet precise, collectively held constitutive meaning of this activity found its articulation, instead, in the word “seva.”

I’m coming to New York in May–let me know if you will be holding office hours any time after the 1st. And let me know if there is anything in Istanbul that I can pick up for you.

My best, Joseph
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January 2012

Tempelhof and “The World is not Fair” – a subjective review

ioana — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 19:56:08 +0000

Entering a city is being swallowed by it. Every new-born, tourist, business-man, beggar, parent, dog, fox or whatever living creature ventures on this artificial territory is, willingly or not, drawn into its man-made rhythms. Rhythms are to a city what the vital signs are to a living organism: the condition of life. Any major perturbation can bring irreparable damage; moreover, they are performed subconsciously. No one questions the speed of an escalator, the train-stops´ frequency , the flow of a crowd, the silence of a Sunday-morning, the smells of a covered passage or the sound of fireworks at New Year´s Eve. Even insanity has to compel: the fools wandering through trains and buses, babbling and gesticulating violently, acting as if they would jump through the window at any moment, wait for the stopping signal, push the right button when it lights, then disappear in the crowd. At night, after the most boring week-day, after retiring in the privacy of a home in the most ordinary of streets, speeding cars following the slow pace of traffic lights still send a faint signal, like a snore that reminds you that this giant that you help generate with every breathing moment is still alive.

The logic of a city´s everyday life becomes the reality of each creature who´s emerged in it. For visitors and residents alike, the labyrinth of streets walked by strangers minding their own business as if under a spell, with a parallel world emerging at every corner, seems to go on forever. Everything functions unperturbed up to the edge of the void. But once you get there, it takes only one step to annul every rule that created the universe on the other side.

Berlin Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, Germany, - opened: 1923; - closed: 2008; - current state: open to the public during daytime; events

The colors of the Tempelhoferfeld and its enormous sky seem frozen in a nostalgic picture of a past golden-age. There are no shadows. You can feel the wind and, in some places, see it bending the over-grown grass. People seem to float. Spread through this field conceived for the scheduled take-off and landing of airplanes, every human movement loses its rhythm with the distance and fades into a slow, continuous slide. There are asphalt runways which, at first, you might feel inclined to follow. But after a few steps, you suddenly realize that there´s no point in walking a straight line through this even surface, you can follow any direction, or, better yet, no direction at all. As you advance through the field, the sounds, smells and colors of the city fade away.

Events are sometimes organized in Tempelhof. This summer, the exhibition “ The World is not Fair – Die große Weltausstellung 2012” (The big World Exhibition 2012) spread a few city particles across this void. Searching for the location of a performance, I faintly heard some music dissipated by the wind. It took me a moment to find the source: a small, wooden pavilion. With nothing else around except grass and asphalt, I could walk directly to it. Inside, the music screamed and, strangely, people looked like people again, not like the ghosts on the outside. I could grasp their dance movements, hear their conversations and follow their gaze. Everything that happened INSIDE the shack made sense: the music had rhythm, the performance had a structure, there was a beginning and an end to everything and a purpose in people attending this. The INSIDE belonged to the city. On the OUTSIDE however, everybody leaving the enclosure and dissipating in all directions became ghosts again, they started sliding instead of walking, while the music faded and the sky became gigantic again until, together with the grass, it was the only thing left. Nothing duller and nothing more beautiful. When the sound of passing cars became distinguishable again, it seemed more obvious than in the middle of a boulevard. The void had made it clear that this constant background of city life is not part of the ´real´ but only an occurrence.

Tempelhof is the ultimate void. Detached from both city and nature, its laws are undetermined. Managed as it is right now, serving no particular purpose and being constantly maintained in order to keep nature from taking it over, it looks just like a trace of sulfuric acid, dropped by a malicious God on the city in order to dissolve it and suspend its laws. This huge temporarily purposeless field is full of questions and possibilities. Behaviors are easy to observe here, but hard to control and even harder to put to use. As long as it stays that way, eluding clear definitions, Tempelhof will remain “the void”, an entity contesting “the city”. This is a more powerful reason than the financial one to try to control (through fencing, guarding or closing after dark) maintain (through cleaning, mowing, repairing the asphalt) and to define this place.

The simple act of opening it to the public, with slogans like “Spass an die Leere” (Fun with the Void) or “Tempelhofer Freiheit” (Tempelhof freedom) (http://www.tempelhoferfreiheit.de), along with a “manual” of proposed activities, is a first try of “taming” the void. The people and uses that animate this abandoned airport are a projection of its future. The field could easily remain construction-free, but the goal of the numerous projects that were suggested for this site strive to define functional areas, schedules, constructable and non-constructable areas, people and activities flows, etc.
Besides chaos, the void is the only entity that has the power to temporarily suspend city rhythms. It appears in different spatial forms, from a large, abandoned field like Templehof to an inaccessible rooftop, an unused part of a property, the space under a railway bridge, left-over, unorganized space between high-rise buildings, unused public space, etc. The void can take different forms and occur at different scales, it can be accessible or not, it can last for centuries or minutes, but its most important feature is its regenerative potential triggered by its undetermined use. Chaos, on the other hand, is time-related, and potentially destructive to space. It can occur at different scales, through natural hazards or man-made events like sieges, bombings, fires, up-risings, or, at a smaller scale, transgressions of use, non-organized crime, car accidents, blackouts, etc.

The Void and the Chaos defy the city as an organized spatial and temporal system of human activity. They represent therefore a threat, and one always present because generated by the city and its environment. Consequently, the natural reflex of organized live is to quarantine void and chaos by isolating and supervising them, with the long-term objective of elimination. Yet, contamination doesn´t necessarily mean destruction, it can also constitute a source of renewal for the city-rhythm. What if void and chaos, even at the smallest scale, were to be perfectly contained? What if the city-rhythm were to be perfectly and knowledgeably managed? Wouldn´t this lead to sterility and oppressiveness? Wouldn´t such a city be unable to keep up with time, create novelty and host life? An instant of denial can be a spark of renewal. When chaos meets the void, entirely new systems can be created.

What if, instead of putting so much effort in defining the future of Tempelhof, and in managing its huge surface as a coherent whole, chaos would be let in, simply by giving the land away to free use and construction? What kind of repressed forces of the city surrounding it would take over and what new worlds would they create? The subversive potential of such an experiment is big enough to make the question too scary for all parties involved in the discussion: the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, the city´s administration and the potential investors. This makes it hard for the empty field of Tempelhof to fully exercise its transforming influence on the city.

However, since a one-sided top-down solution is hard to achieve for a surface of 386 ha, time will probably allow for a more diverse involvement in the definition of its uses. The more original the uses and the more diverse the actors, the bigger the success of the void. In the meantime the number of abandoned airports around the world is on the rise, only in Berlin, a second airport, Tegel, is set for closure next year. Exactly what changes will this huge land resource bring to the city is hard to predict.

Stapleton International Airport, Denver, USA - opened: 1929; - closed: 1998 - current state: masterplanned community

Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong, PRC - opened: 1925; - closed: 1998 - current state: abandoned after several masterplanning attempts

Nicosia International Airport, Nicosia, Cyprus - opened 1939; - closed 1974 - current state: abandoned in the UN buffer zone

Berlin Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport, Berlin, Germany - opened (as a military airport at first): 1906; - to be closed in 2013 - current state: in use

Venice report #2: I never thought Foster could make me cry.

Joanne — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:57:07 +0000

©Joanne Pouzenc

By entering the Arsenale, one faces the COMMON GROUND, right there, in big blue letters on a white wall. Apart from the beautiful pictures of a depraved Eastern Germany Landscape by Thomas Struth , few models and a statement, the real surprise comes just after… behind the wall. A flexible plastic door protects my first architectural surprise of the Biennale, the room curated by Lord Norman Foster. Displaying the works of Carlos Carcas and Charles Sandison, the visitor is instantly in another dark universe. The visitor enters a temple of sounds, lights and moving images which projects him directly into an emotional state. Everyone knows what moving images provokes on human mind… A certain sort of fascination. And the images are big and surround the room. 8 different big format projections change continuously whereas on the ground a mix of moving names according to an unknown pattern keep the kids to look up at the videos. But what is it about?

When I entered, it was about architecture. All the projections displayed some fancy pictures we all saw in the magazine, of either iconic buildings or shiny interiors, with the specific scenography used by the photographers of architecture: empty environments, blurry characters on the foreground. And with this “alleluia to architecture”, a soft and nice music, relaxing. The pictures are moving slowly, the kids are still happy looking at the moving ground, trying to catch up some names… physically, or dancing with the lights. Good! They are not seeing what’s coming!

©Joanne Pouzenc

The music is changing. The rhythm is changing. The images are changing. Fast. The sound ambient becomes loud, stressful and oppressive. The content changes. It’s not about architecture anymore, it’s about all the rest. Or maybe it is still about architecture, and that’s the best thing about it. The images are full of people, full of architectural mistakes, full of every other culture, faces, labour, strikes, wars, protests… giving an overview of a global on-going situation of violence we can see only by removing the filter “architecture” – not common in an architecture Biennale. There is something about “being human” in this room. The common ground is definitely Humanity. The statement seems clear. And is deeply effective. One wants the visitor to be emotionally stung for entering the Biennale open-minded.

Common Ground is not just only about architecture. Obvious. And it is not because we love making architecture that we are not aware of what’s going on when there is no architecture. This installation is just a reminder using the power of the media used to its maximum potentiality.

I was looking at the kids. And looking around… and after a while, I figured out that my eyes were wet and my heart was beating too fast. I needed to escape to a less violent environment.
Thank you Mr Foster. I never thought you could make me cry! And this is such a good surprise!

Venice report #1: the Venezuelan case

Joanne — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 17:51:00 +0000

The Venezuelan room, curated by the highly recommended team of Urban Think Tank with Justin Mc Guirk received the Golden Lion for the best project in the current Venice Biennale. It has been said that their “project” is the one fitting the most to the curatorial common topic: COMMON GROUND. In fact, by presenting the Venezuelan pavilion, the team of architects chose to shift smoothly from this “common ground” to the “common RIGHT to the ground”, reminding the theories of Yona Friedman or Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”.

Urban Think Tank and Justin Mc Guirk feature a special case of public appropriation via the symbolic and well known example of the Torre de David, a 45 floors unfinished building in the center of Caracas. This skyscraper, initially made to be the headquarters for a bank, stayed incomplete after the brutal death of its sponsor followed by a financial crisis in 1994. The Torre de David entered then the cemetery of the White Elephants.

white elephant: slang for property or a business that is so costly to maintain or operate that it is impossible to make a profit.

In fact, this phenomenon of vertical ground abandoned at the construction stage is not unique: the Asian crisis of 1997 left behind it more than 300 anticipated giant ruins in the center of Bangkok, or the famous Ruygyong Hotel in Seoul abandoned in 1992 and left empty for 20 years in search of a new investor (it finally found!).

But something special happened in Venezuela. In march 2011, a report from the NY times shows how people invested spontaneously the building and organized themselves into a community to restore a minimal comfort by achieving, at least, water and electricity supply in the giant Ghostscraper. This report came 2 month after the declaration of the president Hugo Chavez allowing the state to take over the abandoned structures or some empty private plots to give it back to the citizens by building differentiated residential areas. Despite this law, insuring more residential facilities for the law, the lack of attention towards the situation in the Torre de David and the non-involvement of the state in helping the community to built a decent environment alerts the international community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05CBTPBxwEA

DECRETO CON RANGO, VALOR Y FUERZA DE LEY ORGÁNICA DE EMERGENCIA PARA TERRENOS Y VIVIENDA

http://www.minamb.gob.ve/files/leyes-2011/No6018decreto_No8005.pdf

“Dictar decretos de creación de Áreas Vitales de Viviendas y de Residencias (AVIVIR), en las cuales el Estado procederá a reordenar integralmente la distribución y uso del espacio, sea éste urbano o rural, para destinarlo en prioridad y con urgencia, a la construcción de viviendas unifamiliares o multifamiliares de micro comunidades, pequeños barrios, grandes barrios o nuevas ciudades.

En las áreas decretadas Áreas Vitales de Viviendas y de Residencias (AVIVIR), el Estado no permitirá la existencia de inmueble no residenciales o terrenos abandonados, ociosos, subutilizados o de uso inadecuado que presenten condiciones y potencial para cumplir con el objeto de esta Ley.

La competencia para establecer las categorías antes señaladas, será exclusiva del organismo debidamente calificado y con carácter nacional, que el Ejecutivo Nacional cree mediante Decreto.”

By passing this law, the president Chavez invited officially people to reclaim the right to the ground by themselves, according to the strong and engaged politics he is leading since 1999. But the consequences of such an act left behind dozens of others buildings under construction, emerging from the private markets, afraid of a future expropriation by the state.

The design set-up in the Venice Biennale shows this phenomenon by dividing the space of the exhibition into an inside and an outside: inside the brick walls featuring the building on its outer surface one can discover by walking around, emerges a meeting point in which one can order venezuelan food and venezuelan beers and have a nice and short rest – in a nice venezuelan atmosphere – after having seen tons of architectural information along the building of the Arsenale. Brilliant! (and easy!).

Today’s report of the Funambulist points on a correlative question: Is Housing a human right? Featuring once again the work of the Take Back the Land movement and having a closer look at their manifesto, the Funambulist points on the question of human rights and democracy: on the one hand, the organization of the communities reclaiming the city’s ground takes place opens violent dialogues “beyond simple civil disobedience” with the authorities and the political powers, on the other hand, it shows a strong involvement of the masses into the democratic process, trying to redefine what is public and what is needed. What is human?

©Take Back the Land

The Torre de David has to be considered as a symptom. Who’s taking care of the cause?

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Sharing points of views >> Part 1 / Chapter 3: deconcrete.org

Joanne — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:45:12 +0000

Opus n°3 of our on-going conversations with Daniel Fernandez Pascual, author of the wonderful deconcrete.org.
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CollageLab:
Actually, when you mention the case of Haussmann’s Paris, David Harvey is going further: in a lecture he gave at the Dickinson College on the 1st of February of 2007, he explains that urbanism is one of the solutions (mainly with war) to avoid capitalist crisis, understanding crisis as the moment and the space when/where there is nothing to invest on. It not only profits investors: after the crisis of 1848, Napoleon the 3rd affirmed: “we have to put the country to work, and the capital to work”, conscious that transforming the city has the double impact on investment and unemployment. Avoiding crisis, it is avoiding to reshape the system: by avoiding crisis (the symptom), you don’t need to kill the system (the causes).

I do share your concerns about “what moves planning authorities to generate (liveable) public space” but, by the way… what is a “liveable” public space? And why do cities need to be attractive?

Concerning the Occupy movements: I was also fascinated by their movements, following day after day the evolution, the beginning of the creation of a community. Then I came to London, and I had the chance to share some time with the Occupyers, being completely amazed by how fast they reproduced a mini-city in which they could experiment the development of a Polis and the development of the society adapted to the rules they tried to shape. But with the wind, the rain and the cold coming, I had to ask myself: What is their future? In a broader way… not simply asking where will they pass winter but more: what do they really want for after, how do they imagine their perfect and equal place? I was astonished by how much the discourses were related to their past conditions (the system we know) and to their present situation (the possible eviction). The future was just “a change”. In your opinion, what is the future of the Occupyers (and of the Occupyed places)? What happens to revolutionaries after revolution – whether it succeeded or not?

Actually, I know a space perfectly used for social awakening… Internet? A shame that I can’t sit on it under the sun!

Deconcrete:
Last Friday we were talking a lot about these issues during the Performing Politics event in Berlin. The members of TXP also raised the question about liveable public space being a matter of either consensus or conflict. To this respect, I must say that it definitely needs to be initially a place for conflict, since it is only through conflict that we can arrive to a meaningful consensus. But providing that the different agents involved participate of it in equal terms. The more openness towards such negotiation processes coming from city council authorities, the more attractive neighbourhoods will turn for residents. It doesn’t consist of simply having an institutional department for citizen participation; what really matters is the fact of having spaces of uncertainty available for people, where the socially unpredictable may occur.
As for life after-occupy, I have to say the effects are already feasible. What it’s being demanded is transparency; transparency of information, decision-making, economics… And politicians are taking more and more care about data-leaks. So it is not so much about the physical presence of an occupied street anymore, but of an on-going fight for making real politics transparent to the general public, as a system of democratic self-regulation. The Internet is therefore the mechanism that plays a decisive role, as you mention, in this social awakening.

Daniel Fernandez Pascual at Performing Politics
Displaced Soils: a Geopolitical Paella
Cook+Talk by deconcrete as part of PERFORMING POLITICS, Tempelhof Airport Berlin 07-08 June 2012.
Curated by Eric Ellingsen and Álvaro Urbano.
More about “Displaced Soils: a Geopolitical Paella”

CollageLab:
Spaces for conflicts and uncertainty… this sounds like a very good idea. I was reading recently Erik Swyngedouw’s “Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis” in which he dedicates a chapter to “Designing Dissensus”. For him: “(…) Elements of such transgressive metonymic redesigns include:
- Thinking the creativity of opposition/dissenssus and reworking the “creative” city as agonistic urban space rather than limiting creativity to musings of the urban “creative class”
- Thinking through the city as a space for accommodating difference and disorder. This hinges critically on creating egalibertarian public spaces
- Visionary thinking and urban practices: imagining concrete spatio-temporal utopias as immediately necessary and realizable
- Rethinking and repracticing the “Right to the City” as the “Right to the production of urbanization”. Henri Lefebvre’s clarion call about the “Right to the city” is indeed really one that urges us to think of the city as a process of collective code sign and coproduction. (…)

Does it mean that we have to invent a new practice for architects and urban planners? How “one” can think or design a dissensual space which supposes to take on consideration contradictions “one” could not even think about? What if the notion of “time” would be emphasized in the way we think about a space: have you heard something about “architectural improvisations”? How could we operate a project – as architects – in a constant change?

Deconcrete:
We don’t have to invent any new practice for architects and urban planners. It is each person who needs to re-invent himself and start hybridizing disciplines. If we look at what is happening right now in Madrid, for example, there is a very interesting sociological transformation that is going on after the crisis. Several colleagues of mine, tired of the decadent architectural market, have initiated an on-going cooperation with neighbourhoods in order to implement new micro-urbanism modes. Since they were complaining of not meeting people’s needs in a city through conventional architecture practices, they have decided to start up new models themselves, acting as mediators between urban planning authorities and neighbours, activating spaces of social encounter in the city towards the making of egalibertarian hotspots, as you brilliantly refer to them. A stunning result of which is El Campo de Cebada. In that sense, their dissidence has become their carefully planned improvisation. But this has happened together with a hard process of trying to re-educate the city council obsolete mind-sets into how actually produce contemporary forms of participatory public spaces. So architectural dissent is working together with a pedagogical experience at all levels. Unfortunately, we still see in Spain how the worst enemy of the city is the city.

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www.deconcrete.org

The real outcome of the Venice Biennale 2012

Joanne — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 09:34:30 +0000

It’s a real opportunity to attend the preview of the Venice Biennale. This is what I have to say. Because it is… or… Is it?
Whereas you all read for some days some fancy articles on as fancy websites describing the ones after the others every single pavilion, conforming to the description of each curatorial statement present in the press books, all exempt of any critic but really useful to have a giant overview, I prefer to offer you something different… before I exercise myself along the next weeks to the single critics as well (but it’ll take some time!).

While crossing every single room and running between every pavilion, I asked myself two questions: who is this Biennale dedicated to and what is the outcome of such an event? I mean the “real” outcome. But in trying to answer those questions, I first have to step back from the omnipresent impression of fashion show.

Report n°1: Architecture became fashionable.
Felix Burrichter, co-founder of Architizer and editor in chief of PIN-UP magazine declared to Architectural Record, talking about his own creation and after the legen-wait for it-dary party at the Mauer Hotel: “I think we’ve created a monster”. But which monster is he talking about? The massive mediatization made possible by the opportunity of corporatists networks such as Architizer, Archello, Archilovers (and I am – of course – myself, a part of it) produced maybe as “right” than “wrong”. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone recognizes everyone. Everyone is flirting with everyone, congratulating everyone… but in a really relaxed and architectural atmosphere. Architectural Paradise of Architectural Hell? When architecture was only on paper, perhaps we did still talk more about architecture than architects. I use to think that Le Corbusier started this growing phenomenon of personal mediatization, with a simple pair of glasses and repetitive sentences.
But it used to be content instead of form. And if form follows function, content doesn’t necessarily follows form (Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber are not known for their content, why wouldn’t it be the same in architecture?)

With as many journalists as big “names” of contemporary architecture (and the number of pictures of the different events can testify it), I found myself easily a small incognito way in between the crowd and 2 proseccos to try to gather as many informations, sensations and inspirations, as my mind was able to manage. because of course, the Biennale is also about content. About a lot of content. About too much content. The national participations bring an overview of the local situations according to the global one and the topic of the year, curated by David Chipperfield “Common Ground” has been understood in so many different ways. Whereas US features a conscious statement on tactical urbanism, Venezuela bring up to the front the popular initiatives related to Yona Friedman statements and the “right to the ground”, and China presents a space wise poetical but completely a-contextual patchwork of lightened things.

The way we understand “common ground” is already not based on a “common understanding”.

And whereas this topic could lead to an architecturo-political act, it leads in fact to my second report.

Report n°2: Who is the Biennale dedicated to?
As I saw it and inside the time-lapse of the preview, it was for architects. And journalists. And architects-journalists.
“Common ground” is an ambitious theme inducing the necessity of crossing the borders of our own and grown corporatism: the local governments and ministries are involved in the funding of the pavilions but were not present in the crowd (a politician doesn’t look like an architect and as the global dress code seemed to be no-suits and short-dresses, I would have noticed them.). And their absence is deplorable (but maybe they were not invited??) while a main part of our job is actually to deal with them daily and to build together common spaces for the common good. The Biennale is proving once more than architects not only draw, they think and they have infinite things to say: the problem is that architects know that already… not the rest of the world.
Politicians make architecture possible and it becomes really urgent to involve them in the architectural process and in what we can offer at best, whether it is a Biennale or not. But if we/architects talk about politics and democracy while practicing architecture without addressing to the ones who are really able to impulse any kind of project (phenomenon which fortunately was massively illustrated across the pavilions), we should not be surprised when politicians will start to make architecture diminishing as much as possible the role of the architects (and I suppose that this is actually already the case).

Report n°3: What is the outcome of such an event?
for the world? for the architects community? for myself?

I may not be able to answer yet but I will be attentive to the future critics (hopefully there will be!) which will appear along the next weeks after the rush of the medias. What the Biennale shows is a global geo-political tendency on a time-t from the point of view of national identities: the global economical crisis was underlined several times placing the popular actions, the notion of territory, the damages of mass-tourism and the need for thinking and acting into the heart of the debate.
I personally come back with lots of inspiration and a lot of work to do, to go through the 8 kilos of information and 800 pictures I came back with.
I would encourage you that by waiting for some more information concerning the actual content of the Biennale, to have a look at the report from our friend from deconcrete.org who features some of my favorite installations you won’t see appearing so much in other medias while they didn’t got any golden prize.
And of course, go to Venice and check the Biennale by yourself!