City of Signs

Standing on the Beach with a Gun in my Hand book presentation in Geneva

2012-01-21T18:18:00.001Z

Three Scottish waterfront regeneration programmes

2011-12-23T20:16:00.001Z

The Limits of Openness? Reassessing the Contribution of Communicative Action Theory to Urban Planning

2011-11-17T14:48:00.001Z

Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

Habermas’s collaborative action theory takes communication as its main object of analysis following the author’s sustained interest in the public sphere as a dimension where democracy can happen through participation. The public sphere is fundamentally a linguistic construction, created and maintained by language. The study of communication is therefore crucial to the theory in order to recognise the obstacles and the constraints that prevent individuals from participating and contributing their ideas to the debate. The theory is based on two elementary concepts. The lifeworld is the ever-changing network of connections established between individuals, which can have a communicative or normative nature. The lifeworld is continuously colonised by abstract systems. These can be described as pre-emptive networks, structures that are constructed with the purpose of staying fix, of providing some frame to the human interaction, like the economic order with the market place or the political or administrative order with the bureaucracy. They are based on instrumental rationality, and are superimposed to the lifeworld to constrain its ever-changing nature.

The core of Habermas’s theory contribution to the debate on good practice in planning is in the distinction between lifeworld and system, between planning imposed because of functional rationality and planning that emerges from and through communicative rationality. To instrumental rationality, Habermas opposes communicative rationality. From this point of view, among the many sources from which the German social theorist borrowed, Sigmund Freud is an important one. Rather than in his formulations and terminology, Habermas is simply, selectively interested in psychoanalysis as a method based on language. Conversation is used in psychoanalysis both as a method to reveal and heal disorders. Psychoanalysis, if successful, provides the patient simultaneously with emancipation and rational understanding of their issues. Similarly, Habermas with his theory wanted to provide an intriguing tool to both explain the relation between language and repression and solve it. Unbalances of power affect social structures, which in turn affect individuals. For Habermas, language is both a way to reveal and to heal them, i.e. to change the understanding of the world and to augment control of the subjects on their reality.

Reality is formed through interaction between actors and actants, a collective process that combines objective and subjective knowledge: as Judith Innes put it, ‘Information that influences is information that is socially constructed in the community where it is used.’ Another important element of the theory from this point of view is the idea that ‘social illness’ emerges from the fragmentation of symbolic contents. Again, language allows for the re-symbolisation of isolated symbolic contents, by conveying them into the public sphere. Communicative action brings people together, because it allows to rescue isolated pieces of content (a spatial distortion) through acquisition into the public domain. Issues emerge and are understood by verbalisation: this is the hermeneutic value of communication. This part of the theory was particularly important in the formulation of the practice of placemaking in urban planning and design, i.e. the process of finding a rationale to new elements of the built environment by associating them to former desires, symbols and narratives of an existing or imagined community.

Also the built environment has a twofold nature and is both a text and a medium of communication. Its basic blocks are units of information and its structure is a syntax that connects them. Communication is constantly required because of the collective dimension of the human effort to colonise and inhabit the environment. Cities and neighbourhoods come into being at the point where all forces involved reach a balance, and the planner’s aspiration is to transcribe and inscribe these processes into the built environment.

Since the nineteen-sixties, planners and urban designers have created innovative, participative approaches and methodologies to encourage stakeholders to take part to the planning process and let communities emerge through consensus-building. The Team 10 left the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as early as in 1953 in disagreement with the then hegemonic model of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The architect and planner Giancarlo De Carlo founded the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) in 1976 to make extensive use of methods as public consultation and open debates in most of his projects. Today the charrette methodology is particularly popular in land use and urban planning. It consists in short, intense periods of consultation and design, to which all stakeholders are invited. Communicative rationality is a crucial element to these approaches and Habermas is often quoted by planners and scholars who report and comment on similar projects. However, what Habermas’s theory should suggest to planners who adopt these approaches is not only to set aside emotion and ownership of ideas, and most importantly to avoid consensus thinking.

‘Open form’ is a term sometimes used for flexible or polyvalent forms of creative expression, where the arrangement of the parts or sections is indeterminate or left up to interpretation. Some open artworks can appear structurally incomplete, either because meant to be representing an unfinished activity or because hinting at spaces and concepts outside their own limits. Similarly, planners who want to act as facilitators and allow for the participation of all stakeholders must include in their work aleatory, extemporary elements. It is this very openness that creates opportunity and means of critical reflection through language and premises truly collective action on the basis of the validity of propositions and lines of argument rather than established power relations.

Of course, as long as planners are involved in the process, truly open planning remains an imagined ideal, because the very opportunity and means for stakeholder participation must be designed or designated and is subsequently implicitly limited and possibly susceptible to external influences. Nevertheless, at least from a conceptual point of view, stakeholder participation allows planners to soften the boundary between the output of the planning process and its context, subsequently creating a linguistically more homogeneous system.

The charrette methodology has been in recent years very often used by proponents of ‘New Urbanism’, an alternative to traditional low-density urban sprawl. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett in 2007 wrote a detailed examination of a charrette process in a small town in New Zealand and noted how the use to a single type of participatory tool can represent a constraint in itself. Another limit to participation is the fact that professional designers and planners openly and inevitably pursue a New Urbanism agenda, despite the fact that they present themselves as facilitators. Charrettes and similar processes are hardly truly neutral and inclusive and in the worst case scenario they can easily be ‘hijacked’ used by authorities or interest groups simply to provide an aura of legitimation for their agenda. Moreover, local administration or private sector actors can dilute the power of participatory planning by creating ‘artificial’ or ‘redundant’ stakeholders in the form of partnerships or local groups. Tore Sager, on the other hand, in 2005 pointed out that the role of dialogue in communicative planning does not necessary ensure the best outcome, because ‘results are generated not only by amalgamation of preferences but also by the amalgamation of argument’. When different externalities or incomparable preferences are involved, dialogue does not easily result in a balance of all interests through communicative rationality and in accordance with democratic criteria: ‘Usually, only some of the pro-and-con arguments about a plan refer to impacts measured on comparable scales, like a monetary scale’.

The model of the planning process based on the communicative action theory, with its emphasis on components of discourse and deliberation within a group, does not take into account how individual actions are affected by rules, community and the physical environment. From this point of view, planners interested in creating theoretical models to explain and present findings, should integrate elements of theories that deal with the social construction of knowledge and the Actor-Network Theory, which largely focuses on the interaction between human and non-human actors. However, a major contribution of communicative action theory has certainly been to stimulate debate about the nature of the planning profession, giving practitioners the opportunity to think of themselves as facilitators. Alternatively, planners can reclaim their role in researching and interpreting what solution grants the most positive externalities, by identifying with the user and defining what would be desirable, usable and useful. Also this approach adjusts the top-down strategy introduced by modernist planning and brings the user to the negotiation table from which the built environment emerges. As a task it includes addressing a range of desires, physical and emotional issues that go beyond the simple functional needs summarised by the notion of instrumental rationality. Such an approach requires a great effort of identification with the user/citizen, an effort perfectly symbolised by the image of the planner exploring the territory in person rather than analysing it through maps and models.

"After the dust has settled over the war, architecture turns into evidence." In conversation with Eyal Weizman

2011-09-21T07:26:00.000+01:00

Forensic science and the production of truth. The only subject that does not lie is the object.

EYAL WEIZMAN is head of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and author of books like Hollow Land and The Least of All Possible Evils, in which the same meticulous critical methods are used to scrutinise built environments and cultural constructs. He is also the co-founder of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR), a Palestine-based collective that acts through its interventions on the architectural space and on the space described by international law. This is the transcription of a conversation between Gabriele Oropallo and Eyal Weizman about his current project on forensics. The conversation took place on June 18th, 2011 in the rural setting of the DAAR Architecture Rehab Camp organised by DAAR and Iaspis in the Stockholm Archipelago.

Gabriele Oropallo Eyal, I first encountered your work through Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, which was published by Verso in the UK in 2007 and has since been translated into several languages. Hollow Land was a history of the process of transformation by which Palestinian space is constantly redesigned in order to be kept under control – underground, at ground level and in the air above the ground. I translated your book into Italian during the 2008-2009 Gaza crisis, the unilateral attack at the end of which about 15% of the buildings in the strip were left destroyed. This was in many respects an acceleration of the very processes described in the book, which provided me with a continuous memento of the urgency of the project. After taking stock of those events, in the new preface you wrote that in Palestine the spatial conflict “goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent ‛governable’ colonial form”. On the contrary, it is through this very “constant transformation of space that this process of colonisation has played out”. In the Territories, the transformation of space, therefore, rather than being a goal, is the very instrument through which control is articulated, and violence, far from being casual and being the result of a confrontational configuration of space, is actually the tool used to design it. I am now taking part with you in the Architectural Rehab Camp organised in the Stockholm Archipelago by Decolonizing Architecture, the collective you co-founded with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and Iaspis, part of the Swedish Visual Art Fund. Today with Thomas Keenan of Bard College New York you have presented the new book project on which you are working together. The process of negotiation you talked about today does not refer to the construction of factual reality in the Territories, but to the construction of judicial truth. The space on which you are working now is not the contested space in which settlers, natives, international organisations and Israeli military along with a variety of other actors carve their ephemeral niches – it is a twofold space made of court rooms and legal texts. This shift of perspective initially threw me off balance; can you tell me more about the way your books are connected, and how your background as an architect relates to the new project?

Eyal Weizman The work on forensics started with problems that I encountered in the same field of study of Hollow Land. It started with problems posed by international law as it is interpreted by those opposing the Israeli occupation. And it also addresses the question of what it means to oppose the occupation with the language and with the terminology of international law.
I started to be interested in the law, investigating its origin and the way in which it constructs its claims. Then, after the Gaza attacks of winter 2008-2009, I was looking at the Goldstone report, from what I thought was a logical point of view. You know the story of the Goldstone report that has been written by many authors and has been extremely often featured in the news. But then, as I was reading it time and time again, it occurred to me that there was something worth investigating in the methodological section of the report. You know that every human rights report has a methodology section, just like a PhD. One could feel a certain shift occurring when the commission was constructing its report on the basis of testimony and witnesses in order to find evidence. In that section emerged a sort of understanding on the side of the commission that the testimony provided by Palestinian survivors of the attack in Gaza would not be easily, so to say, legally accepted. The international community suspects Palestinians of having a confused, a skewed political subjectivity in favour of Hamas.
So there you can see a shift from relying on living witnesses to relying on dead bodies through autopsy reports. Autopsy reports enter this human rights document and finally claim that Israel has committed crimes against humanity. These autopsies are used to corroborate suspicions of alleged crimes against humanity. But it is not only corpses, the epistemological resource for this report actually also include architecture.
Think about it. Between 15 and 20 % of the buildings in the Gaza strip were destroyed during this attack. About 20,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed. Most of the people died inside of the buildings because most of the people died inside of their homes. So architecture in this report is not only a reference to the incidental destruction that the attack brought about. Architecture is the means of killing. People are killed by bits of walls flying around, falling or crushing them. People are crushed in their own homes. And then, after the dust settled over the war, architecture turns into evidence. The task of reading the rubble in relation to the given frame of analysis – that of international law – was given to some people that in lack of a better name should be called forensic architects. I was interested in one person in particular, called Marc Garlasco. He used to be an expert for Human Rights Watch in battle damage assessment. He was in fact a world expert in looking at ruins and reconstructing from the way the ruins fell a narrative or the reason for the ruins being that particular way. A strange story occurred that saw this person as a protagonist. The Goldstone report was published on 15 September 2009. On this very same day, Human Rights Watch announced the suspension of Marc Garlasco from the organisation. Why? The reason was that he was discovered to be a collector of World War Two memorabilia. He was accused of being a Nazi fetishist, and the Israeli were saying that a Nazi fetishist cannot speak on behalf of the rubble. Then I started to think about these issues very seriously. Regardless of whether Garlasco is actually a fetishist or not, is fetishism really an inhibition to speak on behalf of the object? Or is the fetishist in fact the best person to interpret the object and see some excess qualities to it? Therefore, I decided to take his side – and this was a very unlikely coalition. I travelled to New York to speak to him and we discussed the issue of this investigation.
And again, in answer to your question, my interest starts with the legal problem of narrating, with the epistemic problem of uncovering violence as it is registered on architecture.
There are other works that I have done on architecture as evidence in court. Think about this relation: the more violence enters the city, the more architecture will get affected by this violence, and eventually the more architecture will function as evidence. Yet, the whole question of how to interpret architecture in these cases has not yet been written about.

Gabriele Oropallo Have you ever been yourself summoned by a court to act as a forensic expert?

Eyal Weizman Yes, in fact, that was for me one the main entries to this issue and as an experience it also has some other implications. A you know from Hollow Land, the maps that I have produced have been used as forensic evidence in The Hague process against the wall and also in the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem. Working as an expert often involves becoming complicit in the process a judicial or even a historical truth is constructed.

During a trial, the court may be looking at the same pile of rubble after a strike has taken place and be confronted by different accounts for what happened, constructed by different observers. Resorting to scientific methods to establish the judicial truth may involve the development of models to ascertain what happened with a precise degree of probability. This kind of controversies and the questions asked of the forensic experts reveal the role played by data in the way a truth is constructed. When a court examines scientific data, 84% is not good enough to establish a point, the threshold of truth starts with 85%. Was the building destroyed by an international coalition or by local forces, was it an unavoidable military operation or a war crime? All the answers to these questions may reside in a 1% difference. Also, in the end, the problem how to read the rubble and how to deal with it sometimes has more to do with how history is constructed than with legal matters. When a site finds itself at the border between different narratives, there are sometimes different monuments or memorials that coexist and mutually challenge themselves. In this way, they represent an aesthetic embodiment of a fluid tension between competing narratives.

Gabriele Oropallo Today Thomas Keenan and you showed how “scientific” evidence has increasingly become crucial in determining the judicial truth, even before the use of DNA samples was introduced as an everyday investigative tool. This material turn, based on the assumption that objects are more trustworthy than humans, and that the evidence they can convey is more reliable than human contributions (such as informed deduction and testimony) has placed a great deal of influence in the hands of scientists and specialists – including architects who draw maps and interpret GIS data. However, you also said that scientific truth is more about probability than yes/no answers. It seems to me that empirical science is paradoxically reliable exactly because anyone in principle can criticise, review and change its truth by using experimental methods and is therefore subject to continuous rephrasing. Nevertheless, trials have to end with a definitive answer, this is what human justice is about. Even if the defendant is innocent, this is a clear answer. So, what are the forces that work within that fifteen or twenty per cent of probability left open by forensic experts and that eventually establish the judicial truth? It seems to me that in a way scientific or technical expertise is simply being exploited to bestow a new aura of correctness to truths that are established in other ways – culturally, socially or politically – and that improbability is functional to other hegemonic forces that are subsequently keen to emphasise it.

Eyal Weizman On the contrary – you will see that in fact it is science that insists on probability here. In fact, all other forms of historical processing, commemorations and actions actually tend to flatten that possibility and are oriented towards certainty of response. If you really look at what empirical science says, you will notice this aspect in great clarity. Every empirical scientific article, from astrophysics to biology typically ends with a kind of balance of probability, in which the reported experiments are processed to reach an order of probability, plus or minus 3%, plus or minus 0.003%, and so on.
The question is: how do we account, in practice, in politics, for probabilistic models? I believe this is a fascinating cultural problem. Our past is not absolutely transparent, it resists staying still and being dependant on us. We cannot just simply put stones on top of it and seal it in some way. How should we aesthetically deal with it in the face of the complicated interaction between deniers of all sorts, revisionists, negationists, deniers of global warming, deniers of Holocaust, deniers of Serb massacres and genocides in Srebrenica and so on? And all the while we should also be keeping the idea of the truth open as a construct.
So, this is why it is interesting to look at different kinds of rupture techniques in international law, such as those we discussed yesterday when we studied the case of Jacques Vergès. [Vergès is a lawyer who dedicated himself to the Algerian anti-colonialist struggle at the very beginning of his career, and who later went on to defend both leftwing and rightwing militants and terrorists, post-colonial dictators and war criminals – including Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy and SS officer Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon. Vergès was famous for his counter-accusing rupture strategy, which saw him use the trials to show that prosecutors were guilty of the same offences as the defendants.] Vergès was treading a very thin line. On the one hand, he was opening up historical records of massacres, gross violations, murders that were done in colonial times to bring these histories into European history, insisting that all that this kind of denied past enter into the court. On the other hand, you know, he was also quite close to rather gross characters, not only counter-terrorists but also Holocaust deniers and Nazis, like François Genoud, the principal benefactor of the post-war Nazi Diaspora. There is a danger in treading that line, in navigating these kinds of issues while moving between probability and political action, between insisting on the “constructedness” of truth and avoiding political negation.

Gabriele Oropallo In Hollow Land there is a chapter that as a historian I found particularly useful as a case study because it is based on consistent research on a great variety of sources: political briefs, legal documents, architecture, even land surveys and construction materials. It is the chapter in which you look at the Jerusalem stone and at the genealogy of its compulsory use as covering material for all buildings erected within the areas that throughout history were at some point or another officially identified as Jerusalem. I found that chapter particularly compelling because it shows how a fairly recent development in law – the stone decree that was originally enforced during the British Mandate on Palestine and then confirmed by all other powers that ruled the city – was used to visually stretch the concept of what Jerusalem is, and along with its concept, its territorial extension. We know that often spatial and material realities are created by language, maybe because language is the only tool we have to interpret a chaotic environment. In fact, the raw material of lawmaking is language, and maybe the only way to escape the frozen hermeneutic space created by law is by establishing the philology of the written word of the law itself. What is the operative purpose of genealogy as a method today? Do you think there are ways to use the knowledge generated by a study such as yours on the Jerusalem stone to have an impact on policy or law making, and if yes, what are they?

Eyal Weizman In the context of our conversation, I think it is useful to look at the treatment I did of the Jerusalem stone as a way to analyse the relation between an architectural detail, some small types of repetitive generic objects and a larger geopolitical transformation.
There is something similar between my study of reality as in the Jerusalem stone chapter and the work of a forensic expert. There is some sort of larger meaning that becomes fossilised, that collapses into all sorts of architectural facts like red roofs, or antennas, or the Jerusalem stone, or holes in walls, or underground smuggling tunnels. This really is the forensic moment. Forensics reads those things as elements of a large scale process in which they are a part, it kind of collapses scales, because the normal kind of urban analysis would take the details, the building, the neighbourhood for what they are. Here you have a direct connection between a type of architectural element and new politics, new legal structures and a new cultural aesthetic perception that are wrapped around it. You can see here that an object is both a source of legal, aesthetic and political debate and a reification of these processes. All is captured and emerges from that material, in that type of stone. The question I always ask myself is how can you actually tease out of those things the politics and history that are saturated in them. Reading it by ferociously investigating the materiality itself is not always sufficient. You have to look at the networks of relations and power relations in which objects are circulating and existing.
You ask a very interesting question, that is: “If this is your mode of analysis, what is your politics? If this is your mode of analysis, do we need now to discuss of geopolitics on a geopolitical scale?” I will reply with another question: “Can we intervene exactly on the level of material things in order to affect politics in a different way? Can we actually intervene on the level of technology, on the level of architecture?” And I think, in fact, that a lot of the work that we do in Decolonizing Architecture is exactly about this. Our projects use micro-scale interventions that work through cracks and fissures in the system and kind of short-circuit the relation between the different scales of action.

Gabriele Oropallo When you introduced the title of your current project, you usefully reminded us of the etymology of the word “forensic”. In the ancient Roman city, the forum was the part of the city used for secular activities. Neutral in Latin often referred to categories rather than objects and the word ‘forum’ indeed literally meant “anything that is outdoors”, because it was a space that belonged neither to the private homes nor to the consecrated spaces of the temple. Markets would take place there, candidates wishing to be elected would rally for voter support there. The fora were also the places were public debates and trials would take place, like the Greek agoras. In this, one can see a polarity in those cities between the forum and the temple, the former being the place where truth was constructed or negotiated and the latter the place where truth was received. In other words, there were institutions – and buildings – associated to each kind of truth, and each had its competencies. The word forum eventually became associated with justice and in some languages today it still means court room. Hence, our adjective forensic. The images and the quotations of the forensic anthropologists all intent on reading the truth in human bones you showed us were exhilarating. I especially remember a quotation by Clyde Snow, the forensic anthropologist who talked about human bones as always telling the truth, and of his work as simply giving voice to them. This ideal ventriloquism immediately made me think of the priests who would read sacrificial remains – often human remains – and interpret them only to make divine will apparent. Also, divine will, as scientific truth, was almost unquestionable. Do you think this “objectual turn” in forensics is somehow an attempt to use the same strategy? Do you think we can actually still see these two forms of truth represented or staged by different institutions today – if yes, which ones?

Eyal Weizman You put it very right. In fact, there are all sorts of truth used in the production and structuring of the polity and the polis. These truths constantly govern our understanding of how to conduct ourselves day by day – and also into the future. In rhetoric, for instance, there is also the deliberative mode – a kind of forensic mode – which is the modality through which decisions regarding the future are developed and notified, made public. It seems to me that the production of truth as it happens in the forum, that form of negotiation of truth, is in fact a negotiation of the future. I think that what needs to be shed light upon is the deliberative element in the forensic mode. We need to look at how that sort of discourse is conducted, in which objects are allowed to speak and participate in all forms of political arrangements.
Then you ask, where is truth received and not deliberated upon today? To answer that I would say that the forums of today are much more diffuse. They do not exist as buildings in acoustic resonating chambers but as network media, assemblages of cultural institutions, where the two modes of truth production are constantly in conflict. This negotiated truth equals science, at least from a certain empiricist perspective. The natural, given, objective truth, on the other hand, is typically separated from anything that has to do with humans: it is subjective, constructive, interest-bound – ultimately political. Bruno Latour makes a point of bringing those two modes together. But I think that, in any given moment and in any given institution today, you simultaneously have the temple and the forum. In the way in which science is discussed, you have the temple and the forum. And sometimes, the temple aspect of a discourse, that kind of received, given, incontestable, transcendent truth seems to come to trump the constructedness of truth. There may be people who insist on scientific truth and say that something is beyond negotiation, that science itself is beyond deliberation. Latour, on the contrary, brings science itself into the field of deliberation. But these two modes of truth are always in tension with each other, not divided into institutions.

The text of this dialogue is going to be featured in an upcoming publication that takes stock of the 2010 edition of the Eternal Tour art festival, curated by Donatella Bernardi and Noémie Etienne. Additional transcription and proofreading of the text by Fanny Benichou and Patrick Morency.

The palimsepst is revealing

2011-08-23T17:02:00.016+01:00

Jaffa Flat photograph © Amit Geron from dezeen.com

When Dezeen featured images and the usual scant captions on a flat renovation in Jaffa, the first enthusiastic (and omnivorous) comments on the elegance of the minimalist furniture and the attractiveness of the girls modelling in the photography left at some point the stage to a more complex, if fragmented and delayed conversation that touched upon issues as the ethics of design and architecture, the appropriateness for architects to talk about social and political justice, and finally which platforms are more suited to these discussions.

The flat in itself, remarked some of the commenters, is conceptually quite simple. A contemporary flat is carved out of the existing space in an ancient building. The designers provide it with all mods cons and use tasteful, minimalistic furniture throughout the rooms. Plaster is stripped from walls and ceilings to expose the underlying layers and highlight the geometry of the arches. Lots of light (we are on the shores of the Mediterranean) and a sensual effect provided by the roughness of the bricks and sandy, crumbling concrete.

However, revealing the structural palimsepst behind the plaster of an old flat is a risqué cultural intervention in Jaffa, now a suburb of Tel Aviv. A bit like in those horror b-movies of the nineteen-eighties, where the dark side of the American past reemerged in the form of a stream of poltergeists coming from an Indian cemetery below a haunted house or a funky high school. My first reaction was to ponder whether living in this flat ever makes the current tenants wonder where the original owners are now and exactly how they lost possession of their home. Then I realised how powerful a metaphor is provided by this flat. It seems that the only way the new inhabitants of this side of the Fertile Crescent can adapt to the newly conquered territory is by slowly turning into Palestinians and progressively absorbing little elements of native culture into their daily lives, as you see in this flat happening with the elements of the vernacular architecture.

Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 and evolved from a few tents in the sand to take off as a modernist city when Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in the nineteen-thirties as refugees. Today the city prides herself on having the highest concentration of Bauhaus buildings in the world (though with little Bauhaus planning). Yet, their grandchildren today crave to live under Moresque ceilings and go to the length of stripping the plaster from the walls to visually project their act of dwelling into a possible past. Whose past is it?

Human, all too human

2011-07-24T08:01:00.000+01:00

“Parametricism,” in the words of one of his main theorists, “is the great new style after modernism.” A design style in which “buildings are developed using problem-solving as the driving force rather than by grouping together architectural objects.” We have seen this in recent years in the voluptuous shapes of Zaha Hadid studio’s computer-generated designs, in the sculptural iconicity of buildings as Rome's Maxxi.

Wait a moment. “Problem-solving is the driving force.” This sounds quite similar to the old modernist tenet according to which “form follows function.” What is the difference?

According to Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, author of the above quotation, the difference is in the direction of the design intervention. So far we have juxtaposed Eucledian structures in order to create space or harness portions of it into environments. The rationale of the design is in the concept that links these solids. The reader may be familiar with the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed in Vienna in 1927 for his sister, today seat of the Bulgarian cultural institute. There is maybe this concept expressed at its best, mind you, by a non professional architect. Volumes in Wittgenstein House develop from each other in an orderly albeit ambitious manner, as in a logical deduction. Rather than created, space is acknowledged, as it happens when shedding light in the dark.

A later variation on this deductive way to building was dubbed “deconstructionism,” and consisted in disassembling these configuration of solids before they were even erected. Its purpose was to show the relations between the basic components in a more honest (and post-modern) fashion. The elements put on display were not only structural and material, but also ideological and symbolic. This approach was aimed at favouring inclusion: anyone was entitled to read and experience the building their own way.

Parametric design, on the contrary, is nothing about deduction. It is an attempt to let structures grow systematically, according to their relation with the environment, as a living organism would do in order to survive. Everything is interconnected, and to take into account everything, sophisticated softwares are necessary and do much of the work. Instead of “spaces,” Schumacher actually speaks of “fields,” which fluidly articulate themselves to accomodate the complexity of contemporary life.

Parametric design therefore bears a striking resemblance to organic forms. Curiously, it is visually very close also to surrealist decoration patterns. Both styles share an oblique, decadent appeal. This is because both styles took a great deal of inspiration from nature. Organic structures are economical: organisms – as also computers if they are so programmed – always try to find the shortest way between A and B. This is why living forms are usually curvilinear and not square, Cartesian or Euclidean. A parametric city would resemble a circulatory system, rather than a modernist grid. Every element would be interconnected and the complexity of functions would lead the growth of the system.

Transition and fluidity are greatly praised by Schumacher. This makes one remember of the “natura non facit saltus” (nature does not make sudden jumps) motto by Lucretius. Also Gaudì’s architectures were supposed to imitate nature – praising god's magnificent design skills in the process. The Sagrada Familia, if designed today, would look a lot like a building by Zaha Hadid. Intriguingly enough, that decadent architecture was constructed according to principles that are very similar to the construction of organic matter. One ray of light descends from the sky and divides itself at each hub in four lines, which progressively multiply, one to four, until the structure touches the ground. Even if fluid, its architecture is stable and solid because based on four "legs," as chairs, tables and horses. Also organic matter is physically built on the atom of carbon which combines with other atoms of carbon four by four, forming very stable, never-ending chains (a process known as catenation). We thought the dispute on whether art should or not imitate nature was finished two centuries ago, but it is clearly an ever-present motif in human psyche.

I like the idea of an architecture whose form develops according to fractal geometry (the geometry of leaves, plants, clouds and all natural structures) instead of being constrained by platonic solids. And yet, all this organic matter makes me feel like a virus, a parasite in a host body, as though I should not be walking along these circulatory systems. Or, in the best case scenario, I feel like a part of the system, inextricably linked to it and forced to give away some individuality.

I have taken some time to reflect upon this, and now I think the underlying reason for this awkward feeling is that this ideal biomimicry in architecture eventually eschews one crucial aspect of design I am otherwise used to. This is the confrontation between built space and human being, which is made necessary exactly of the artificiality of the constructed space. Parametric architecture is often soft, and gives way, thus making it difficult to recognise the boundaries between my individual perception of space and the built space that I find around me.

This is a structural confrontation in which one usually develops a critical, informed understanding of things. It may just be premature to say, but parametric architecture to me feels like being sucked back in an ideal utero, in which the spatial sense that characterizes human beings as a species is dimmed and left unripe. No wonder it is actually becoming the favourite style of iconic public buildings, airports and other non-spaces. Ultimately, parametricism can be very useful and exciting as a design method, but the designer should always somehow work against the methodology rather than let it take total control.

The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Fractal geometry describes forms that are regular in their development, as crystals, clouds, organic structures and all other natural shapes, but are too irregular to be described by Euclidean geometry. In fractal geometry the shape of a leaf can be described by equations, like triangles, squares and other man-made forms can in classical geometry.

In the folds of a striated space: Shu'fat refugee camp

2011-07-01T14:00:00.000+01:00

W.J. Mitchell opened his famous 1990 book, The Logic of Architecture, stating that "architecture is an art of distinctions within the continuum of space". Similarly, also A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be read as recounting a story about how the definition of space is the result of an extended confrontation between two arrangements of its raw material – the smooth and the striated. This couplet of concepts deserves some attention in that their interpretation is quite open and lends itself to many, contrasting possibilities.

Let us begin by taking that striated is not a space in which movement is hindered by boundaries and obstacles. Also, smooth, on the other hand, in my reading of Deleuze-Guattari does not stand for homogeneous. Rather, smooth means amorphous, formless. Striation is generally speaking the result of the intervention of man, who while colonising a territory drew lines on it as on a wax tablet. This intervention progressively created homogeneity and still facilitates movement through the territory. Think of a grid that allows to measure discrete distances, or of a network of roads that allows navigation through the land.

One of the oldest continuously anthropised territories on the planet, the Fertile Crescent, has undergone a radical process of redefinition of boundaries since the end of the First World War and the dismissal of the Ottoman empire. On the Mediterranean end of the crescent colonisation and redefinition have been extensive, but pockets of old fragments of the mutilated previous space, already crossed and defined in a slow process over the centuries, still remain.

The Shu'fat camp was established in 1965, after the Muscar camp in the Old City of Jerusalem was closed because of its insalubrious living conditions. It is the only refugee camp that lies within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and its refugees are entitled to the Jerusalem identity card. Since card holders are not affected by the closures imposed in the Territories, many refugees who had optimistically left the camp following the beginning of the Oslo process have subsequently returned in recent years. The official number of refugees currently registered by the UNRWA as residents of the camp are 11,000, but it is estimated that the real number is around 18,000, on a surface of around 0.2 square kilometers, which was originally leased from the Jordanian government before the 1967 war. In an attempt to provide accommodation for their families, refugees are constantly building taller structures on foundations originally designed to hold one or two-storey shelters, layer on layer.

Hamad wuz here

2011-06-22T09:58:00.004+01:00

Somewhere between the Keynesian concept of governments stimulating demand in times of unemployment by spending on public works – and a mischievous child scribbling his name on the wall. Sheik Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan spent 22 million dollars to have his name carved as water canals on the sand of Al Futaysi island, and make it visible from outer space. But he got the north and the south wrong and the puzzled astronauts are wondering what on earth the word pɐɯɐɥ means.

When design is really good

2011-06-01T14:33:00.006+01:00

Photo by Carl Malamud [Creative Commons]

DESIGNERS should never aim at producing good design. When design is really good, then design is lethal. Look for example at the case of the AK-47 sub machine gun, developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov between 1941-1947 with the help of his friend Zhenya Kravchenko, a machinist. What an example of successfully good design. Simple, effective, lasting. It needed less updates in sixty-six years than the iPod in ten years. It has no logo, but needs less promotion and advertising than the Coca-Cola. It is even capable of educating its users by itself on how to operate it; in fact, someone said the AK-47 is able to transform even monkeys into soldiers. Oh, and obviously even if the AK-47 is one of the greatest bestselling designed objects of all times, its designer never received any royalties for his work. All the profits go to producers and distributors.

Wittgenstein Haus: the logic of building

2011-05-25T01:12:00.004+01:00

In 1927, Wittgenstein returned to Vienna to design a house for his sister. At that moment of his life, after having studied engineering in Manchester, logic in Cambridge, writing his Tractatus while an Italian prisoner of war, living two years in isolation in a hut in Norway and working as a school teacher for in an Austrian village, he had eventually renounced openly intellectual activities and was working as a gardener in the now former imperial capital. His sister thought collaborating on the design of the house with a contracted architect could be a stimulating work for him. She was right, because her brother immediately got caught full time in the project and could hardly stop rephrasing the house over and over again after two years of work.

This building is what should have been the ideal link between logische Aufbau and Bauhaus. Logical positivism was a methodology developed by the intellectuals of the so-called Vienna circle (e.g. Schlick, Neurat, Carnap) to contrast interpretations of things made on the basis of assumptions that existed beyond the sphere of the immediate and direct experience of the observer – metaphysical reason. They made philosophy into a method, whose rationale was to separate meaningful statements from the quicksand of metaphysics, where the object of analysis are sublime facts, transcendental realities beyond the ordinary. Their philosophy was therefore constructed as a critique of language and not any more a critique of reason, as it was with Kant.

The volumes of Wittgenstein Haus develop or better derive as propositions one from another. Relations between the elements have an objective, visible nature. They are shown, rather than told. The house, long forgotten, was eventually bought by the Bulgarian government in 1972, and today is used as Bulgarian cultural institute. In 1929, he left Vienna and went back to Cambridge to work on the problems that led him to develop the idea of the language games, which he wrote about in his second book, the Investigations. Every situation is a "game" with its own special language. Misunderstanding happens when the words used to play one game are used to play another. To establish and maintain communication one constantly has to shift the meaning one associates with a certain word or expression.

The core of the house is the central hall. The rooms are collocated around the hall and each one has double doors. Each door is made of vertical panels, of alternatively wood and glass. You can see through the doors, but only as long as you keep moving, because when you face the door the see-through panels correspond to thick ones. Only by directing your gaze sideways you find a thin clear line and establish a visual contact with the space behind the two doors. Walking inside the house equals to reading his Investigations.

Spatial relation of red plastic cones

2011-05-20T16:21:00.001+01:00

The Holga aesthetics is starting to tire me. Also when it's flatly reproduced by iPhone apps to make do for the limitations of its tiny camera. Don't get me wrong. Vignetting, low-fi aura and saturation are surely pretty to look at, but the way images always look intriguing no matter what you put in the frame is suspicious. The real author of the image is the camera and not the person who shoots. One should work against the hardware and software of one's equipment, not let them take total control.

Not the object, but the concept of it

2011-05-01T17:33:00.003+01:00

A nineteen-fifties ultra-light prototype in rosewood by the Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros (Unilabor period) casts its shadow on a rough concrete wall in an unusually sunny Geneva mid afternoon. A hommage to those who have been sitting there over the decades.

Throughout his career as industrial designer, interestingly, the basic component of Geraldo's design philosophy is the chair. This is particularly fascinating, especially if we consider that at the time modular systems were really popular amongst the most considerate industrial designers, as most of the ones who graduated at the Ulm Institute. While armchairs inspire intimacy and solitude, chairs, as sofas, have a great social aspect to them. The proportions of Geraldo’s chairs multiply into larger furniture items, and the environments arranged for publicity photographs are often constructed around the presence of the chair.

De Barros’s designs are presences in space that function as a continuous reminder of the centrality of man. The chair as a basic unit of design embodies an ideal, intimate relationship with the human being. It accommodates the human body allowing the straight angles that connect its segments to fold and reduce the degree of their inclination. In the organic contour of his later chairs this aspect is emphasised and revealed. Their sculptural shape is somehow activated by contact with the human being, in the process solving the mystery of their appearance. Its function is clearly to sustain the human body and its form is openly anthropomorphic, always inviting the user to come closer.

Entropy and the built environment

2011-04-22T01:10:00.000+01:00

The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.

The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an ice-cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever increasing. Low entropy means highly organised but also highly dishomogeneous. An ice-cube at room temperature will inevitably melt and the state of matter and the temperature eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continually applying work, which in the case of the ice-cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the wall spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.

The university campus was barely saved when in 2003 the wall was threatening to cut right through it. The barrier in this picture hardly seems capable to withhold the urban buildup above it. The houses populate the slopes of the hills, and as they thrive and proliferate they seem on the point of overwhelming the concrete fence underneath like a wave.

As long as it is embroidered

2011-04-15T00:19:00.001+01:00

These fancy curtains in a glass and steel high rise between Cutty Sark and Deptford seem to make the space feel a bit more Victorian to their inhabitants.

The stuffing of dreams: material science as gastronomy

2011-04-11T11:51:00.000+01:00

Laurence Humier in a photo by Michele Silvestro.

ONE of Laurence Humier's on-going projects is based on the simple but extremely fascinating acknowledgment that when we cook our food we actually modify its chemical nature or its physical state. Everyday we convert stored energy into heat to break down or build chains of molecules. We apply very low temperatures to increase durability. We modify physical dimensions and composition to allow or hinder homogeneous diffusion of heat. Even the lazy ones who feed themselves on ready-made meals rely a sophisticated instrument that uses micro-waves to excite particles and make them vibrate at high speeds. What if we used the same approach to materials to understand how they work and use everyday equipment to adapt them in artisanal fashion?

Kitchens are basically chemistry labs that work with a variety of temperatures between minus 25º and plus 200º centigrade to obtain an extreme variety of effects, sometimes quite radical. Can we use the same tools to obtain changes in other materials? "Is it possible to obtain the same visual results of a kitchen recipe, using sawdust instead of flour?" asks Humier. Can we beat "beeswax into a Chantilly cream", or blow "sawdust into a soufflé?" Or, what about "caramelising crystals of glass like sugar? Dry-freezing cotton fibres like spaghetti?" Moreover, she adds, mentioning an intriguing example, "small changes in a recipe, such as the liquefaction of San Gennaroʼs blood in Naples, sometimes give birth to weird reactions."

Cooking material as a project becomes even more remarkable when you think about the fact that its implicit effect is to shortcut the long journey between industrial facilities and users and generate hands-on understanding of the way materials can be treated to obtain different qualities and respond to different function.

Maybe functions can actually be discovered after the accidental discovery of the material quality? The project is currently supported by the Z33 gallery, DoDesign and the Digital Fabrication Lab of the Columbia University and the designer is looking for other partners. Foundations, schools, private or public organisations and companies that want to contribute or learn more can contact her or the gallery Z33.

Comic Sans, but not so amusing

2011-04-01T18:41:00.015+01:00

Today's Google's Helvetica "joke" was most probably a viral for Monotype's new Comic Sans Pro. I fell victim too and spent some time trying out if Futura, Gill Sans, Optima or Adrian Frutiger's opera omnia had the same effect. This has not made Comic Sans less pointless to my eyes. A typeface so firmly anchored to its context than in every other situation hinders communication and jeopardises the real message. To what effect can you use the Coca-Cola or the Marlboro typeface for anything else that their packaging? I would rather eat a comic book for breakfast than use it. Besides, how can Comic Sans ever become Pro: all graphic designers dread that moment one client amateurishly asks them to use it to "cheer things up" – rightly, as you can see from this little overview below (more in this flickr group):

Nothing says "expert" like Comic Sans by Allan Ferguson (Creative Commons)

Tragedy or comedy, by Andy Clarke (Creative Commons)

Comic Sans is apparently also one of Berlusconi's favourite typefaces. Cartolina by Filippo Giunchedi (Creative Commons)

Comic sans gravestone, by Cory Doctorow (Creative Commons)

Libya as it was and as it will be

2011-03-20T11:53:00.032Z

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D'Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: "faith, fatherland and family". The image is taken from a publication called "The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan": I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

ART HISTORIAN Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator – hoping the new military campaign just started after the UN resolution 1973 will not further jeopardise the architectural heritage. I once had the chance of watching the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial newtowns (like Al Bayyadah/D'Annunzio), which in their structure were surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived "simply because there was no will to destroy it". She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means "renovating, re-interpreting, rehabilitating" and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day no atlas to this and other colonial architectures has still been compiled.

Alessandro Petti of DAAR proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari's article is "reinterpretation". In fact, we also should reckon with the fact that no building can be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this will be a form of reinterpretation. Not always are monuments that crumble down "lost", sometimes they are "regained".

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya's oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator's antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that be able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

The rise and fall of cities in fictional, historical and visual spaces

2011-03-07T16:04:00.005Z

"For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things." An archivist-scavenger opens Paul Auster's latest novel Sunset Park, taking pictures of abandoned personal possessions while working in a firm that specialises in preparing homes repossessed by banks for re-sale. The dystopian urban landscapes he depicted in In the Country of Last Things and Man in the Dark are dauntingly real and contemporary in his cities of today.

Detroit in Ruins is a series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre showing a decaying Detroit, depicted in the guise of a modern Pompeii. The images seem to imply that financial crises are as unpredictable and irresistible as environmental ones – as a tornado, a flood or an earthquake. Also, one has to notice that the decadence of Detroit started well before the 2007 financial crisis. Effectively, in a world economy were money accumulates by magnetically attracting money and corporations can survive without having to relying on the people who run them, there is really little control human beings can actually exert on financial matters.

The pictures of the grand buildings that crumble down and the abandoned neighbourhoods of Detroit are dramatically iconic – but they also make one think of Petra and the other cities of the past that progressively or swiftly became devoid of human life when trade routes or the economic conditions of their contexts changed. In Europe, North America and Japan we are going to see cities and districts change more or less radically in the next decades. In many instances, this will be presented and interpreted as decadence, thereby revealing how accustomed we are to an idea of history as a constant improvement and a steady increase – also when it comes to cities, which are actually our social shell and are subject to change and adaptation as much as any other thing human.

A gap between the pavement and the wall of a rusty corrugated iron home on the island of Naoshima, Japan reveals the warm and intimate comfort of a flowery curtain or a sofa.

The abandoned town of Ruesta in Aragon, Spain was restored to life by a community of anarcho-syndicalists, but it is still green and fuzzy on the edges.

The ethics of graphic design? A UCL public seminar with Ken Garland, Richard Hollis, Silvia Sfligiotti, Annelies Vaneycken, Annelys de Vet

2011-03-01T07:00:00.025Z

16 March 2011 5.30pm
Old Refectory, Wilkins Building
University College London
Gower Street
London, WC1E 6BT

The process of translating messages into images or facilitating visual communication is an activity that involves responsibility towards the public on the side of the author. Even when occupied with commercials, corporate identity, or other so-called non-political goals, designers are actually making decisions towards the preservation and reinforcement of social and cultural assumptions. Since the days of the Modern Movement there has been a great deal of debate on questions as to who the actual clients are and who should take part to the negotiation process from which design emerges. A few years ago when the Helvetica typeface, one of the icons of the modernist search for the standard, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, these questions were revived, this time without attempts to agree on a set of rules. This seminar draws on these questions, which developed alongside the whole history of the graphic design profession, and explores notions as design ethics, social commitment and public role of the designer.

The seminar will feature a presentation by Silvia Sfligiotti of Alizarina Milan on the role of the user in the design process – do designers work with, for or against the users? Annelys de Vet of the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam and Annelies Vaneycken of Trans-ID Brussels will also present on their recent works, in which visual communication is used as a tool to chart and highlight tensions and cleavages in culture and society. The seminar is chaired by Gabriele Oropallo and will end with an open round table discussion with the participation of Ken Garland and Richard Hollis.

The event is free and open to all.

This seminar has been organised with the support of UCL Grand Challenges
www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges

The main campus of the University College London can be reached from a number of London Underground stations (the closest are Euston, Euston Square, Warren Street, Goodge Street and Russell Square) and buses. View Larger Map

Wilkins Building (aka Main Building), Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT [Creative Commons]

Timeless modernism

2011-02-14T13:06:00.009Z

Modernism originally emerged in the early twentieth century as a markedly generational movement, supported by a narrative of opposition between young, revolutionary artists and a long established system of art production and consumption. Their aim was to overturn an established system of traditional art schools and mediocre industrial production, with an honest, rational design based on an understanding of materials, functions and machinery. After the disintegration of the modernist utopia, this style has survived as a favourite in provincial cemeteries in Italy, as shown in this picture, shot in the small Southern town of Airola. The modern style was perceived as instant classicism, a non-historical style because it was in fact supposed to be a non-style. But, however rational the foundations of the modernist aesthetics were, non-historical time is in reality the time of myth-making: it is not the time of prose and archives but of poetry and epic, which are inherently time-less languages.

On simplicity

2011-01-12T07:59:00.006Z

An image from the current John Pawson exhibition at the London Design Museum (Plain Space, until 31 January 2011). The show features an interesting section with large photographs and samples of the materials used for some architectural projects, a film showing Pawson's stage design for a ballet, models and objects. The core of the exhibition is a plain space, a bare room separated by the rest of the gallery by a semitransparent screen, through which people can still comfortably see each other, without giving away too much of their identity.

TERMS like simple or essential are often used in much of contemporary design discourse. A common way to praise minimalist design is to call its forms elegant and natural. This is based on the assumption that simple and unclogged design is immediately understandable by the user and does not need to be processed. As it often happens, what is simple acquires an aura of truth. Simplicity, however, is not necessarily a regression to nature, but can be a very complex, semantically loaded strategy. It is clearly the purpose of many designers to create shapes that seem to have always existed, whose raison d’être is self-explanatory. In this sense, simplicity is a design approach that aims to conceal the very design intervention on the environment. The regular and the simple do not represent the default in the grammar of human perception. The default is the multiform, the multilingual. Senses are trained to expect the complex. In fact, a ‘simple’ shape requires a great deal of labour to be designed and manufactured. Symmetry, proportion, essentiality are almost otherworldly qualities that need a great effort to be brought into being and to be made to look ‘natural’, ‘essential.’ In a way, this labour anticipates and thus dispenses the beholder with the labour otherwise required to disentangle the complex.

A fertile crescent

2010-12-12T23:21:00.002Z

Eternal Tour is a nomadic art festival curated by Donatella Bernardi and Noémie Etienne. The caravan this year hit Jerusalem for five days, 5-10 December. I took part collaborating with Fabiana De Barros on the installation of her Fiteiro Cultural on the campus of the Al-Quds University, where I also gave a workshop in public history and the built environment. A number of amazing fine art students worked with us and took part to the workshop, the result of which was a short film called This Place.

This place

2010-12-08T23:59:00.006Z

Public history, private narrations. Filmed at al-Quds University during Fabiana de Barros's Fiteiro Cultural installation, with the participation of eleven students. Photography and camerawork by Dominique Fleury, sound and editing by Ashira Ramadan. Concept by Fabiana de Barros and Gabriele Oropallo. Directed by Gabriele Oropallo.

South Bank

2010-11-11T23:58:00.008Z

A layered composition of music by Arovane, A Secret and imagery from the current Pawson show at the Design Museum and taken at the London Bridge City Pier. The movements of the dancers have been processed to a degree one can satisfactorily describe them as unnatural. The video is therefore not meant to be a documentation of the original performance in any respect, nor is it a commentary on its role within the show. Rather, it is a reflection on the notion of authorship.

Last things last

2010-09-26T09:38:00.000+01:00

An ephemeral landscape of water and sound. Music by Rachel's, Last things last from the Systems/Layers album (2003).

The risks of critical design

2010-08-13T19:50:00.014+01:00

This is Safe Cuddling, by RCA graduate Helge Fischer, a children playsuit that fires an alarm if the child is touched inappropriately. Image from Deezen. Full post here. Video of the product here.

The inherent risks of critical design are that on the one hand its messages may arrive to individuals who are already informed and educated enough to develop that criticism in their own right, and, on the other, that the same messages can be paradoxically legitimize the very object of criticism.

In this case, for instance, one can read a reference to the paranoia with which parents surround their children today, a paranoia which dramatically limits the children's ability to interact with the environment and the others. This was the designer's stated intention. However, to be able to read this, you have to be able to think this by yourself, and from this point of view, it is like "preaching to the saved," or can even be described as a form of social ventriloquism, whereby the opinion that to recognise erogenous areas in infants is plainly ridiculous is presented as shared by most members of the design-educated community. In fact, most of the commentators are outraged by such an overdose of puritanism or are adamant they would never use this for their children. On the other end of the spectrum, there are users (probably paranoid parents) who take the product to be a certification of their fears. "This is really cute and practical!" exclaims one observer, amongst several newly parents, in the comments to the original Dezeen post. However, it "loses some of its practicality due to the fact that it will get dirty very quickly," realistically argues another.

Critical design is always interesting and invaluable as a conversation starter. It really becomes a formidable tool in the hands of the committed designer when its aim is to locate, chart and highlight lines of tension within society and culture. This is a work on the structure of design, rather than the visual language of design.

Baked for glory

2010-08-01T12:38:00.005+01:00

The Battersea Power Station (1934-1953) as seen from a train pulling into Victoria Station. This was the day I gave up my struggle to maintain my travel plans unaltered and left Gatwick airport. I had been squatting there for two days, since the ash cloud had cast its invisible shadow on northern Europe. This power station was initially tipped in the early nineteen-nineties to house the new Tate Modern gallery, but the plan was then dropped. Apparently, the smaller Bankside power station, across the river from St Paul's and also shut in 1983, was eventually chosen because of budget constraints. Both power stations are examples of that beautiful brick-cathedral style that no doubt influenced also the design of the British Library. It is a style of symbolically civil grandeur, of dirt harvested from the soil on which we tread and glorified through slow oven-cooking. Bricks are powerful in telling us that the labour of hands can raise you to the sky from the humblest soil. Last year, the floor of the turbine hall in the former bankside power station was cracked along its length for an installation in the Unilever series. Shibboleth, this beautiful work of art, despite being very voluble and evocative in its own right, was accompanied by an official printed interpretation that loaded it with all sort of meanings – post-colonialist, post-feminist, post-industrial. I still remember how I struggled and did my best not to faint under the effect of that powerful dose of verbalism. The Battersea power station, endangered as it is by the indecision what to do with it, has become a familiar sight to welcome me every time I return home in London. As a symbol, it can indeed have all sort of meanings. What is the word? On that day it told me "don't worry about these volcanic troubles. Just keep moving and everything is going to be all right. This is a small island. And while I'm at it: mind you, Shibboleth was a farce."

Tunnel vision

2010-07-09T14:14:00.005+01:00

San Francisco, Robert C. Levy Tunnel. A lengthy highway tunnel that runs along a section of Broadway. San Francisco, as many Northern American cities, has a freeway that runs right through its core. This contributed to make it unnecessary to have a proper public transport system, as the ones Europeans are used to. Spending so much time inside cars seems to have taken away that mystic these objects are still surrounded by in Europe. While on this side of the Atlantic cars resemble wild animals and the approach to driving is aggressively Darwinian, in the US cars look and feel more like sofa-and-telly hybrids. While in European cities at crossroads drivers trade angry looks and insults, over there they smile and tip their cowboy hats in courtesy.

East London Reloaded: The Ropeworks, Barking

2010-06-12T13:38:00.002+01:00

"What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others."
[Marc Augé, From places to non-places]

Red and black of Britain

2010-05-14T14:15:00.004+01:00

When the volcano erupted weeks ago, I remained airlocked in Gatwick airport for two days, before rephrasing my travel plans and deciding on a casual exploration of the country where I live. You see, here it is easy to be overwhelmed by the frosty grayness of the sky, as the saying goes. But to me this is an island of red and black building materials, like the soot and blood of the industrial revolution. This picture was taken changing trains somewhere in Devon on my way to Bath on a rainy day.

"Who rejects design, accepts to be designed"

2010-04-27T18:10:00.002+01:00

Critical minds: critical spaces
Cruciform Building, Lecture Theatre Two
University College London
8 May 2010,  15.00-19.00 hrs

Art historian Giulio Carlo Argan formulated his famous sentence in the nineteen-seventies, when then the modernist grand narrative of “good design” had already long disintegrated, leaving a semantic vacuum in the object. This empty space had been promptly occupied by a micro-narrative of immediate satisfaction by indiscriminate consumption. Looking at the ease with which designed objects can be used to carry extremely different meanings and values forces us to reflect on the communicative power of design and its information value. Forms generated by design represent a presence in space that doesn’t end in the fulfillment of its function, but continues in force of their mere existence, in their relationship with the rest of the environment.

“Critical minds: critical spaces” is a one-day symposium organized by a few UCL researchers, all the efforts being coordinated by yours truly with the precious help of Wesley Albrecht. The event is conceived of as an occasion to look at the work of architects, planners and designers and its social and cultural relevance in stimulating awareness and criticism of the contemporary. Very often, at the heart of cultural production, there is a practice shaped by a rational or existential response to material, technical or cultural constraints. This practice generates products that are designed as tools to enable the rest of the community to critically understand and question messages, objects and environments, rather than taking them for granted. The colloquium will feature some presentations on current research in design theory and history and on recent design projects. A final panel discussion will follow, introduced by Justin McGuirk, editor of the Icon magazine. The event also marks the closing of CitiesMethodologies, an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities at the Slade Research Centre (Woburn Square, 5-7 May 2010). Speakers include Mark Cousins (Architectural Association), Annelys de Vet (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam), James Auger (Royal College of Art), Teresa Stoppani (University of Greenwich), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths College), Jonathan Hill (Bartlett School of Architecture).

The colloquium will be followed by a wine reception in the Wilkins Building Haldane Room. Participation is free and open to all, but booking is recommended (email: g.oropallo@ucl.ac.uk, wesleyaelbrecht@gmail.com). Critical minds: critical spaces is supported by the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, the Graduate School Research Project Fund and the Department of Italian Studies.

The Korea War in two minutes and sixteen seconds

2010-03-12T17:41:00.010Z

I found the original film bulletins of Korea War (1950-1953) searching through archive.org and edited the some of the footage together. Music and lyrics are by the Cake. "I bombed Korea" was also covered by Zeev Tene in Hebrew and readapted as "Beirut" for "Waltz with Bashir" (ואלס עם באשיר), the 2008 animated documentary film by Ari Folman about his experiences as soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war.

Elite living

2010-03-10T15:52:00.006Z

Nazareth-Illit. Towers of dwellings for new immigrants from Russia loom from above on the otherwise exceptionally well preserved old town. In the Galilee, Palestinian population is still majority and many of the new immigrants to Israel from post-Soviet Russia were directed there on their arrival in an effort to strike a demographic balance. However, after around a decade, many of them learnt Hebrew and decided to move to more attractive parts of the country (especially the Tel Aviv area), so many of these flats are now being bought by young Palestinians, whose original towns cannot expand because of planning restrictions.

Metropolitan colonial

2010-02-04T14:44:00.007Z

Italy's takeover of Lybia from the Ottomans in a 1912 print (Rossotti Litho & Printing Co.) The image, with its imperialist iconography, speaks for itself (Creative Commons).

LOCAL crafts had a particular role in Italian colonialism, especially in a moment when the regime ruling Italy was projecting itself as a truly modernising force, adopting rationalist design as its main advertising genre. Italian colonialism was characterised by a complex, contradictory use of categories as modern and traditional, that reflects its ambitious plans of political incorporation, besides the economic exploitation. The annexation of Libya envisaged by the Fascist regime, for instance, was supported by a narrative of a common past, rearticulated as a “return” to a former senatorial province of the Roman empire, with the North African locals in the role of temporary guardian guests. The latter’s traditions and vernacular crafts attracted attention because the colonized was thought to have inevitably been influenced by a powerful Roman past. (The Venetian Republic hegemony was a favourite source of readapted cultural genealogy in the Levant, while the peoples of the Horn of Africa were presented as worth being associated to the empire because proud and industrious.) Local artisanship subsequently acquired a crucial role in the propaganda machine. A colonial museum with didactic purposes was opened in Rome in 1923 and “colonial villages” were mounted at main trade shows. Local crafts were the centrepiece of the orientalist experience as manufactured for the use of the tourists in Africa. While transcribing and translating local material cultural traditions for use at home, however, the colonial administration was really keen on presenting itself in the very colonies as modern and technologically advanced and embarked on a systematic “modernization”, a rewriting of local material culture. The aim was pursued using sample settlements, designed according to the latest trends in architecture and urban planning, as well as with international exhibitions, as the Tripoli annual international trade fair, an event that took place from 1927 to 1939 as a showcase for modern industry.

She Harbour

2010-01-15T08:09:00.003Z

Her steps were rhythmically moving as to the sound of a music. I raised my eyes to study the lines of that body, so freely floating in the world. Invisible hands were propping her up – she was past having to keep her balance. Then the lights of the coming train suddenly lit up her figure, neatly bringing out her silhouette against the black backdrop, as in a baroque painting. She was a dancer on the brim of an abyss, while the train eased off its run out of the dark womb of the city. The passengers arranged themselves on an arch around the sliding doors, as following an accurately studied choreography. All around, the city extended itself, overground and underneath. Some millions of people went round its focal point, following concentric routes, as on a carousel. Last night that music saved my life.

Visual retaliation

2010-01-03T11:51:00.002Z

This photograph was conceived and produced to represent my research on architectural writing and criticism at a recent conference. Given the ubiquity and popularity of design writing, objects and buildings are often interpreted and received more secondhandedly, through writings and photography, rather than through direct experience. Here I tried to reverse-engineer the process: the basic material was a famous piece of architectural and design writing, photographed at a certain angle and focal distance in an attempt to visually construct a built environment out of the written environment.

Wood and weather (2)

2009-12-02T08:24:00.002Z

Seattle, the pier 62, along the waterfront. This wood hadn't been treated by fire as the Japanese one of my previous post, but by the relentless action of the ocean wind and the briny exhalations of the water below. I took some time to research its texture and the topography of its veins.

Of weak forces that elastically connect time and space

2009-12-01T12:34:00.001Z

I took this picture on the small island of Naoshima, on the Eastern shore of Japanese Kansai. The island had almost been abandoned by its fisherman population in the early nineteen-nineties, when a series of redevelopments transformed it into a pilgrimage site for contemporary art lovers. Architectures designed by Tadao Ando and installations by other artists and architects, sometimes located in former fisherman homes, dot the space today, providing a treasure hunt for educated visitors. I was surveying the green, clean space of the lawn before me with the eye of my camera, unconsciously dividing the frame into three parts to compose the picture and offer a logical stage to the moving figures of the other visitors. Our visually well-trained eyes interpret moving and still images according to subtle, agreed-on conventions. To suggest movement, there should be some empty space before the character, so as to literally, physically allow movement in a certain direction. In this picture, this child is on the left-hand side of the frame and there's almost no space for her to play and run. Yet, when editing my images of that session, I preferred this one to the others: it visually describes that sort of distraction you experience when your senses are less vigil and you become aware of movements in the field of sight only an instant later. It captured my experience of being on an almost deserted island like Naoshima, a space artificially tuned to suspend critical awareness of the material, in order to let the visitors rely merely on the grammar of artistic invention and thus allow them to build their own imagined worlds.

Text and image published in the issue no. 7 (Autumn 2009) of the Opticon1826 journal.

Wood and weather (1)

2009-11-28T11:12:00.004Z

This wood of a traditional house on the island of Naoshima, off the Eastern Kansai coast, has been slightly darkened by applying a flame to it for a short time. There are a number of variations of this traditional technique around the world; its purpose is to increase the resistance of the material to the weather, making it more durable without using any chemical varnish or paint. It also reveals the intricate beauty of the wood’s natural patterns.

Architecture as a profession: David Chipperfield at the Design Museum

2009-11-23T09:01:00.008Z

Visiting the David Chipperfield exhbition at the Design Museum (Form Matters, 21 October – 31 January 2010) and navigating with the camera the many detailed models that he used to research the urban areas on which he was commissioned interventions. The second picture refers to a museum under construction in Naga, Sudan, formed of juxtaposed square-section tubes. The museum will eventually look like a sand-coloured natural formation emerging from the environment. His forms are solid, euclidean, yet they seem to give way or to adjust to the surroundings, instead of simple making space around them and offer glossy shooting opportunities for photographers. Others prefer to concentrate on fantastically fascinating and sensual roof structures, which forget they are roofs and descend along the whole building like a dress. Meanwhile, Chipperfield is actually concerned with creating space. After all, it is architecture, but it seems easy to forget that architecture is about making space into place.

Long evening of short films in Naples

2009-11-15T10:11:00.001Z

Betting on Shorts Naples is over, this year's overall winner is an abstract dance short film by Marianna Mørkøre and Rannvá Káradóttir, filmed on the Faroe Islands, with music by Jens L. Thomsen. Here is a visual story of the evening.

"Click here to buy the exhibition catalogue"

2009-10-27T11:50:00.001Z

Kapoor's works – now on display at the Royal Academy of Arts – are instinctively pleasant to the eye and in this they show that handicraft has still a lot to say about human nature. The main issue with them, however, is that they try to eschew presence all the time and from all angles, while at the same time making a bold attempt to capture and fascinate through their visual appeal. The gaze is forced into unknown territories, but once we got there, we look around and we find nothing. In this respect, their role as decoration pieces for the homes of the rich is rightful and all praise of his art has been deserved.

Construction and device

2009-10-13T16:32:00.003+01:00

The week I spent in Vienna last September was warm and brilliant. One day I was having lunch outdoors at the Kunsthalle on Karlsplatz, a coffeeshop and exhibition space carved in a piece of no planner's land in the very centre of Vienna, where once the medieval walls stood and I was attracted by the soft-spoken colour texture of the tent cloth as this was hit by the bright sun. It reminded me of the return of figurative painting in the nineteen-twenties, after the war; painters were then trying to provide some depth to their shapes without relying on perspective, the representation technique they had managed to escape from the decade before. They would superimpose layer upon layer of paint, with a beautiful waxy effect of translucence.
Photographic composition – much like the construction of the city – is still largely based on perspective and reflects the positivist decades in which photographic technique was refined, formalized and eventually embedded in the very devices, with cameras programmed to obtain a certain type or style of image – and thus being the real authors of the photograph. Content is still paramount and prevails over form, and this opens exciting perspectives for the future.

Let's make peace in Jaffa

2009-09-14T10:53:00.006+01:00

The idea of the Peace House was originally launched by the late Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. Named after the latter, it’s part of the seafront redevelopment of the mixed city of Jaffa and was designed by Massimiliano Fuksas as a dramatic spacial progression of pale green concrete slabs interspersed by glass panes, which offer an unconstrained view on the open sea – in the words of the Italian architect “a symbol of the state of emergency.”

A site-specific intervention by a local resident

"3 Km Europe," reads a writing on the front of a house between the Peres Peace Center and the newly gentrified Jaffa seafront

The work started in 2005 and is now almost finished and ready to be photographed and published on design blogs worldwide

The multiple lives of an image

2009-09-07T11:11:00.007+01:00

I took many photos in Cuba, while filming the Lo haría de nuevo documentary with the EICTV last year, in part to research that reality and in part to record my impressions of the island, in the vane attempt to give myself a structure opinion to report once back in Europe. One of those pictures – policeman and dog in front of a bar in Old Havana – is now published on the first page of the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald, to illustrate an article by Juan O. Tamayo about Cuban police using dogs to pursue political dissidents, in an East German fashion. (You may remember the story of the glass jars used to store "personal smells" of suspected people, the Stasi had a whole bank of samples that could be used to find dissidents on the run). Thus, my story behind the picture now becomes just one of the many possible stories associated to the same image, like the many referents and meanings of a single word. And this ultimately tells a lot about the notion of authorship.

Checkpoint four: from Oush Graib to History

2009-08-13T22:30:00.006+01:00

A man scrambles up the wall of a derelict watchtower in the middle of a military camp wearing a wading waistcoat and carrying a tripod. The man is an ornithologist, and the backdrop is an abandoned Israeli military base of Oush Grab near Beit Sahour. The keen scientist uses the lonesome structures as bases to study the birds that annually migrate from Turkey to Egypt through Palestine. Since the military left the base, the birds have started using it as a stopover point, temporarily inhabiting the structures left behind season after season. The military camp was established by the British during their Mandate in Palestine, after the First World War, and has since been used first by the Jordanians and then by the Israelis. This space has congealed for decades into the shape of a walled-up instrument of control, with a crucial influence on the lives of people who lived next to it, however off-limits it was for them. Today, the site is a theatre for a chess game between several players: the settlers who want to claim the land and found a new town, the army that supports them, international NGOs and seasonal activists that enact situationist protests and finally the Beit Sahour municipality that is trying to make it into a public park, in order to restore it for public use.
The founders of Decolonizing Architecture, a Beit Sahour-based studio, were inspired by the work of the ornithologist and the spontaneous practice of the birds. Decolonizing Architecture was created a few years ago with the aim of investigating security/control devices and engaging with the spatial realities of the Israeli-Palestinian situation in a propositional manner. When Gaza was evacuated by the IDF, suddenly the many red-roofed homes of the settlers became available, but there were no ideas what to do with them. Eventually, they were demolished because the settlers could not bring themselves to imagine the pretty European-looking dwellings inhabited or vandalised by their ‘enemies’. It is useful to realistically reflect on possible scenarios or future evacuations or returns, to painstakingly deal with their details. After all, the absurdity of the separation fence has become reality exactly by dealing with the smallest details and turns of its path.
Decolonizing Architecture conceived a proposal that does not want to re-phrase, translate or just reiterate the function of the site, as it typically happens in our cities when warehouses and industrial sites are converted into city lofts or cheerful suburbs. Their plan is to profane it. The goal of their proposal is to release the energies that were harnessed when Oush Graib, this site of control, was established and maintained. The means to achieve this? Naturally, they will be powerful, obvious and inexpensive. They want to pierce the entire surface of the walls and create myriad inlets for the birds, in order to encourage them in their seasonal return and let nature operate the slow process of dismantling these man-made structures. The buildings will happily crumble down and the space will not be ‘lost’, but ‘regained’.

Photos by Nina Kolowratnik and Alessandro Petti. Additional proofreading of the text by Patrick Morency.

Checkpoint three: from Ramat Rahel to Nazareth

2009-08-08T15:15:00.007+01:00

Galilee. Site of former village of Saffuriyya, destroyed in the wake of the 1948 war. The area once occupied by the village (as shown in a old photo on the right) is now entirely covered by trees, with only one old stately home still standing.

A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari recounted how the definition of space is historically the result of an extended confrontation between two arrangements of its raw material – the smooth and the striated. Smooth does not stand for homogeneous. Rather, it means amorphous, formless. Striation is the result of the intervention of man who, while colonising a territory, drew lines on it like on a wax tablet. This intervention progressively created homogeneity and facilitated movement through the territory. Think of a grid that allows one to measure discrete distances, or of a network of roads that allows navigation through the land. One of the oldest continuously anthropised territories on the planet, the Fertile Crescent has undergone a radical process of redefinition of boundaries since the end of the First World War and the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire. On the Mediterranean end of the crescent, colonisation and redefinition have been extensive, but pockets of old fragments of the mutilated previous space, already crossed and defined in a slow process over the centuries, still remain.
It is easy to tell that this is one of the places on earth that has been continuously inhabited for the longest time, and subsequently one of the hardest struggled for. Every bit of soil is a symbol before being something real, it extends itself into several dimensions, in depth above and below, towards the past and the future. Nazareth is the largest Palestinian city in Israel. In the West Bank people are confronted by different problems, they want independence or annexation; they wish for themselves whatever could take them out of a limbo without basic services, an archipelago of enclaves intermittently connected by a fleet of checkpoints. In Nazareth people have Israeli passports, are often bilingual, and seek civil rights – integration in the civil community, not discrimination.
Over the old town looms Nazareth-Illit, a new suburb whose name may well be a retro-transliteration of the word ‘elite’. It is mostly made of dwellings for new immigrants from Russia. In Galilee, the Palestinian population is the majority and many of the new immigrants to Israel from post-Soviet Russia were directed there on their arrival to strike a balance. However, after about a decade, many of them learnt some Hebrew and decided to move to parts of the country that are more appealing to them, especially the Tel Aviv area. Many of these flats are now being bought by young Palestinians, whose original towns cannot expand because of planning restrictions.
Older and younger Nazarenes tell stories about the time when their world changed overnight. They point at hills that once were thriving towns and today are covered in deep green, the roots of the trees undoing ancient homes in the secrets of the earth. I mistake their stories for a chronicle of events that happened yesterday but in fact their voices are the last relic of one or two generations washed away by a history that ran as fast and abrasive as desert sand here.

The text of this post was proofread by Patrick Morency

Checkpoint two: from Bethlehem to West Jerusalem

2009-08-03T12:21:00.009+01:00

I had not been flying, but the sight made me feel jet-lagged all the same. Glancing across the Gilo checkpoint from the balcony of a luxury resort, I could sample a view that encompassed a landscape going from the third world to the very first in only a few kilometres. I was in West Jerusalem and had just started my exploration into the world of biblical archaeology. Anthropologists call this ‘participant observation’.
The dig on which I worked as volunteer was really intriguing, with several layers of stratification documenting over twenty-five centuries of local histories. The many strata that constitute the underground of the whole country are enough to demonstrate that this disputed land between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan is best described as an omnibus where the passengers – hopping on and off over the centuries – are nations, empires, religions and systems of belief. I have once been told that ‘biblical archaeology in this land is about colonising the past, while soldiers, farmers and fanatic settlers colonise the future’. This simple aphorism is based on Israel’s first president David Ben-Gurion’s opinion that the citizens of this young state had to keep their hands firmly in the soil, referring to the adjacent practices of agriculture and archaeology. When he died in 1952 the job of president of Israel was offered to Albert Einstein, no less, who kindly refused noting that he lacked the right ‘people skills’.
After a week of participant observation, it turns out that some of the dig supervisors, local archaeologists, are very scientific in their approach and even critical of the political use of archaeology that has been done over the years. They actually fear politics encroaching on science, to the point that the Israelis have to argue with the international volunteers who came here to temporarily rediscover their Jewish roots, and who read the Bible as though it were the Holy Land’s telephone book. The name with which this place is referred to today is modern: Ramat Rahel. This site was not mentioned in the Bible and the reason for this is still under debate amongst archaeologists. Maybe it was a foreign outpost – its position would support this view. On a hill higher than Jerusalem, halfway between the capital and Bethlehem and overlooking the major trade route of Hebron Road, it made a perfect control device for the Assyrians who subjected the Kingdom of Judah in the fifth century BC. The site was developed during several phases and includes synagogues, churches, temples and mosques.
One fascinating section of the dig was the initially dull-looking B3: a stone quarry-turned-burial ground in Byzantine times – and finally also the site of a trench during the 1948 and 1967 wars, on the Israeli-Jordanian front. The supervisors of the dig were wary of ordinary people, non-archaeologists, who wandered around the site, which is located within a kibbutz converted into a luxury resort. For the religious authorities, it is forbidden to unearth graves. The tombs are given improbable coded names and swiftly covered with plastic canvases when strangers are around. And yet, as I sweat, pick-axe and remove dirt, I discover that a few graves were already profaned a few decades ago by the tractors that were digging up the earth deep down to the bedrock to build the military trench, in which I also found a flagpole holder. The front of the battles to take over Jerusalem in the 1948 and 1967 wars run through the ancient settlement. Surgically cutting through the grave and exposing the remains inside them, those tractors were actors of a fascinating and revealing game of perspectives on the ends and means of militarised religion.

The text of this post was proofread by Patrick Morency

Animal rights

2009-07-30T19:18:00.006+01:00

A couple of days before coming to Jerusalem I witnessed a non-violent demonstration in Al-Masara where the locals were trying to regain access to their land. There were children, many (also known from this side of the divide as the "demographic bomb") and mothers, protesting to regain access to their lands and harvest. In the Western media there is little attention to this dignified, non-violent resistance against the perpetual occupation and colonization of the West Bank. It unites Palestinians and Israelis who cannot overlook the obscene violations of human dignity that take place here. As I crossed the checkpoint, the First World suddenly re-unfolded before my eyes, with its visual and social discourse. Israel could apply for European Union membership. I am told, in this country there is a lot of attention to animal rights. It's a comforting thought; maybe one day people will realize that also Palestinians are animals.

Checkpoint One: From Tel Aviv to Hebron

2009-07-25T15:40:00.005+01:00

Tel Aviv seemed like a mirage as I approached the land from the aeroplane, emerging with its angular boxes from a wide sea and a golden desert. I surveyed the clean Bauhaus lines of the buildings that make up a big part of the city, which grew out of nothing in a handful of decades. Originally meant to be a suburb of Jaffa, it eventually engulfed the ancient harbour city. During the nineteen-thirties many European Jews migrated to British-administered Palestine and wanted to recreate a European-looking urban setting in a blatantly Middle Eastern country. These buildings were paradoxically much more suitable for the Mediterranean than for the Northern European climate, where the new Modernist architectural paradigm had initially been conceived. A quick examination of the vernacular architecture reveals a series of traits that Modernist architecture drew inspiration from: squared, geometrical structures with slits for windows, blanched and roofless. On this end of the Fertile Crescent there is no rain to drip along the walls and no snow to dangerously sit on the roof. The whiteness of the dwellings reflects the sunlight, and the sun-breakers have a practical purpose – they do not just serve to reveal and emphasise the structure of the building by reiterating and visually reinforcing the frame of the construction.
After a week into the West Bank, the sights are already overwhelming and the stories weigh like stones in the notebooks. Following the separation barrier with your eyes as it snakes its way through a semi-desert landscape already leaves a deep impression. ‘Architecture, ou révolution’, wrote the maestro of the Modern Movement, in defence of the role of architectural design and planning in improving living conditions for all. However, here, the more appropriate wording should be ‘architecture, sinon répression’. The Wall is flexible: a number of forces confront themselves on both sides and when they reach a balance, the barrier rests, although its prefabricated elements with their holes on top are always ready to be lifted and moved around by the cranes. Palestinian civil society takes part in the confrontation: villagers and farmers try to rescue what can be rescued, however small the achievement may be. However, this civil participation from all sides effectively confirms and acknowledges the very concept of the security barrier. The Wall absorbs the issues raised by the communities it separates, it congeals them into its concrete. The question of whether the Wall should exist or not is postponed in the agenda by immediate debates on whether it should include that settlement or not, and whether it should flatten this or that orchard. The details of the path are infinitely discussed, but the sheer absurdity of the Wall itself is deferred and vanishes.
In Hebron (al-Khalil) the locals have to protect themselves with metal nets from flying debris – bricks, bottles, cans and everything else you are able to imagine – that are thrown at them by the settlers who have colonised the roofs of the buildings. The upper layer of the urban fabric is separated from the body on which it sits, with different circulation systems, entries and water storage. Nested on top of the old constructions, you can see military posts and small cottages that pretend to ignore what is immediately beneath. Barriers suddenly appear in the most unlikely places, in the middle of a lively market or right at the entrance to a temple. Being confronted with these sights leaves you stranded, because one can see the brutality of power stripped of all its fig leaves.
The Wall, seen in its context, is a textbook example of a low-entropy structure. Like an ice cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever-increasing. Having a low entropy means it is highly organised, but also inconsistent with the environment that surrounds it. An ice cube at room temperature will inevitably melt, and the state of matter and the temperature will eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continuous effort, which in the case of the ice cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the Wall, spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.
A local girl told me her impressions about the separation barrier. Its greyness overwhelms her. She imagines blindness to be grey rather than black or colourless. When I reviewed the pictures I took of the barrier I was awkwardly surprised and upset to find myself lingering with my eyes on its stark symbolism, as though I was merely admiring an aesthetic object, a sculpture by Richard Serra. The Wall just seems to draw its legitimacy from its very existence – and this clearly explains the sense of what has been called ‘the politics of the facts on the ground’, the swiftness with which the occupying power has seized land and developed land to build settlements and military compounds. This land is a huge laboratory for techniques and technologies of state-building and mentality-forming that can then be applied around the world, from occupied countries to the suburbs of Western cities. Will the riots that shake the neighbourhoods of the capitals of the industrialised world be dealt with as in Palestine? Are we going to see the rise of separated circulation systems presented as necessary security measures? What you see here is history at its fullest: it undoes cities like card houses and blows people away, scattering them like rustling leaves.

The text of this post was proofread by Patrick Morency

Concrete poems

2009-07-14T14:32:00.004+01:00

One of the pictures I took in the Basque country last summer now features in a journal on Sustainable Cities, published by University College London. I re-read the text I wrote for it a few months ago,

I took this picture in Vitoria’s Plaza de Los Fueros, designed by Basque artist Eduardo Chillida during the 1980s. The essentiality of its design hints at a timeless past, where the birth of an idealised community is usually imagined. Enigmatic geometry, pure surfaces, unshakable stone brick walls: these features suggest a solid, enduring construction, which is destined to last beyond the lifespan of a single individual. The square is appropriately also used to play the national game, la pelota vasca.

and realize that these words are ambiguous, neutral to say the least. At that time I was thinking of them as a deconstruction, an exposé of the design language behind many monuments to the nation and other imagined communities. Now I see that the same sentences can be interpreted as an appraisal of the same design strategies. Things are in fact more complicated, because in the meantime, my own opinion about this has become more nuanced, and I enjoy there being a variety of languages in all kinds of communication. Something like the 'language games' Wittgenstein wrote about in his last notebooks. Every situation, every 'game' has its own language. Misunderstanding happens when the words used to play one game are used to play another. So, what one really needs is some insight and an awareness of the rules of the game.

I took a mental picture of her face

2009-07-11T22:14:00.000+01:00

It was the stark sunlight that woke me up. I opened my hands before opening my eyes and shielded my eyes with the palm of my hand. Then I sensed the towel beside me, it was as coarse as hell, in the sunlight it had dried up and little grains of sand had filtered through, they shone like spiky blossoms. Already full day, I muttered to myself. I stood up and went to the shore. As the sunlight flickered across the surface of the water, it broke into tiny pieces, sharp shards of broken glass. I entered the water and the reflections painted a spiderweb pattern on my own skin, it resembled those expensive Italian marbles you can see in posh toilets.

So I had my bath, I felt crisp and salty, I used the coarse towel to speed up the drying and proceeded to stuffing everything lying on the sand in a stupid bag. I didn’t have much, I have to say, and that was better. In this climate you don’t need much covering for your body.

The sand slowly lost ground to earth. Walking with my head down I could see little isolated patches of grass signalling the end of the beach. They were really sad, playing the martyrs on the border between two worlds, so poor and miserable. As I approached the house, the bitch was standing in the porch. She had collected the best pose she could. And yet – I felt something. Her body was leaning against the wall and she had a very light dress on, which freely moved along with the light breeze, a cloud of textile wrapped around a core of flesh and skin. Her body was easy to imagine through it, languid and fragrant. You know how it works, I did feel something. I stopped and instead of talking any of the bullshit I was supposed to, I removed with rapid strokes of my hands imaginary sand from my clothes, also patting on my stupid bag, smiling. Tempo.

In a moment, the clouds went thick and black and a shower of emotional, electric rain fell between us. Her lips initially just trembled in the light, and no sound came from her mouth. Then her smile turned into a sour expression of pity and disdain. And finally, her sentence – my sentence: you’re only stupid, you, you don’t understand a single thing. You. Me. This took me some time to take in. In a way it's true, I’ve never really been that smart – but I really can't help it, how could I go against my nature. My eyes were wondering. Her eyes were weary. I looked at her. I studied her features. I took a mental picture of her face. That rain was sour on the lips. Maybe I’ll never see her again. You know, one needs to move on, that's for sure.

"Never."
Never what?
"Don't say never."
What are you talking about?
"You're just a creature of blood and earth."

53rd Venice Biennale preview: Worlds in the making

2009-06-07T19:00:00.006+01:00

The Venice Biennial is today a large, intermittent institution that organizes and manages film, art, architecture and dance exhibitions. The same pre-industrial spaces are used for different the events in different times, sometimes allowing for curious, interdisciplinary cross-references. The 53rd edition of the Art Biennial, directed by Daniel Birnbaum and visited by more than 375,000 people, was the latest edition of a series originally started in 1895. It curiously engaged in a postponed dialogue with the latest architecture Biennial, by virtue of the fact that the latter had taken place in the same spaces of the Venice Arsenale a few months before. Whilst the architecture show was dominated by a logic of temporariness and elasticity, the art exhibition boasted an attention to the scenarios we’re living in, looking at current political and environmental issues. Its main concern was to create space under the theme of “Making Worlds”. Some called this mission an escapist fantasy. Apparently, as architecture increasingly turns to an esoteric cult of the logarithm and to spectacular, photography-ready roof structures, artists are left freer to explore the actual material world and voice ideas and opinions through the manipulation of space.

This Biennial also continued a recent trend in providing representations of differences and of previously underrepresented parts of the world. Wales and Catalonia had their own pavilions on the island of Giudecca, while Scotland was represented by Martin Boyce, who created a set of seventeen installations under the title of “No Reflection” at Palazzo Pisani, near the Ponte di Rialto. Boyce had originally considered other spaces for his project, but eventually settled on this fifteenth-century construction because of its eerie atmosphere of decay, a mixture of past grandeur and an irregular, apparently irrational layout of spaces. Boyce used these spaces to create a collection of variations on the theme of man’s fear of not surviving himself. Brown leaves rustle along the rooms to unify the experience of visitors as they explore the spaces. But the leaves are blatantly artificial, made of paraffin-coated crepe paper and cut in angular, unnatural shapes. The rooms feature a number of metal works, which are shaped after familiar objects, but look abandoned or unusable. for instance, there is a metal bed with a metal pillow, in which only a metal person could sleep. All in all, one could imagine the installations as a vision of man-made environments after men have disappeared, as if after an environmental Armageddon.

The Palestinian pavilion was also located on the island of Giudecca, and it required, as the Welsh and Catalonian pavilions, a short vaporetto pilgrimage through the Venetian lagoon. It presented a mix of engagement and formalism, and artists successfully eschewed the easy aestheticisms and domestications of the West Bank Separation Wall seen often over the last few years. Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the founders of the Decolonizing Architecture collective, based in Beit Sahour, Palestinian territories, presented their “Ramallah Syndrome”: an enclosed, darkened space, where one could listen to recorded oral testimonies from Palestine and physically perceive the oppression. Other artists included Emily Jacir, Khalil Rabah, Jawad Al Mahli, Shadi AbibHallah, and Taysir Batniji, who used used video and photography combined with installation to research concepts like construction/destruction, cultural erasure and marginalization. On the other hand, the debut of the African pavilion, supervised by curator Robert Storr, was very colourful, lively yet easily forgotten: the audience was given what they expected from “Africa”: myths of good savages, true colours, crude oil, human warmth, thongs, globalisation, animism, optimism, and so forth.

The national pavilions are located in the gardens of the Biennale. These spaces are also featured in their off-season blankness in a video by artist Steve McQueen (Giardini), who represented England at the event. Visiting the national pavilion, where each and every country tried to project an idealized image of itself, one was able to perceive the continuous, consistent retreat of many artists from the notion of art as the most appropriate medium to convey notions difficult or impossible to express otherwise, the sublime. This was especially true for the European artists. Figurativism and pseudorealism were the main codes used by artists who created work so involved with the contemporary world and its values, that this work is deemed to fade away with it. The transnational Danish-Nordic Pavilion was an interesting example. People diligently queued hours to enter and admire a flashy space designed as a catharsis for a culturally ambitious middle-class audience. The multi-installation, called “The Collectors”, featured works by artists of several background, including Italy’s Maurizio Cattelan.and imitated a posh house, destabilized by cute interventions such as an automaton-like chambermaid, a melted armchair, a dining table split in two and other neo-surrealist artefacts characterized by a wit that can well charm the occasional viewer, but that also, ultimately, disempowers art by presenting it as something unusual, flamboyant, or simply weird – as if leaving most space blank on a page could make any piece of prose into a poem.

Some works by Brazilian artists in the Arsenale building demonstrated a radically different approach. The language adopted by artists such as Sara Ramo or Renata Lucas was universal in its formalism and conceptualism, and successful in creating alternative times and spaces. Often, the terms used to describe their work include reduction and essence. However, cutting a board out of the wooden floor to expose the raw concrete underneath – as Renata Lucas did – is nothing essential or minimal: all the way round, it dramatically created a new space, polydimensional in its depth and bidimensional in the game of references to the very floor people set their feet on. These interventions in space and time were powerful dismissals of a geo/egocentrism still dwelling in our minds centuries after Copernicus. This was real world-making, this was baroque: a brutal reshuffling of planes that left the audience unsettled because they could feel stranded, castaway like a drifting planet brutally removed from its fixed spot at the centre of the universe. This baroque was even more convincing because it utilized the very tool that should eradicate it – the Cartesian grid – to its own advantage.

On the day of the opening a still sprightly Michelangelo Pistoletto hinted at some kind of beyond by methodically smashing several tall mirrors in his installation at the entrance of the Arsenale complex. However accustomed to similar acts, the audience's enthusiasm was stirred by the desperate gesture. Someone noticed that the mirrors were placed in heavily decorated, golden-leaf wooden frames. This certainly was a hint at the intimidating taste of the petty bourgeoisie, which usually favours cumbersome testimonies of past grandeur. The broken mirrors, however, then stayed in the lovely frames for five months until the closing of the Biennial, providing a tragic metaphor of fate and place of much “controversial” art in society today.

Discreet machines

2009-04-27T11:54:00.011+01:00

Laurence Humier's meeting chairs represented an exception amongst the many new designs on display at the design week in Milan. Most new products they were characterized by bold and verbose styling, whilst her work is about almost silent – discreet – structural innovations. The meeting chairs are based on a pantograph, a mechanical linkage originally used to copy drawing in different scales (its Greek etymology means "writer of everything"). Laurence was trained as an engineer in Belgium and her starting point when working on a project is to think of a mechanism that can accommodate a function. These mechanisms always have a theatrical aspect: they surprise, reveal and ultimately let the user think about the object and the function. The resulting designed object and the designated function are representation of that idea here and now, a dress that covers it for the time being, as words cover and substantiate a concept – a very linguistic take on design.

Two images of the Meeting Chairs at the Fuorisalone in Zona Tortona. While closed, their function is still not apparent, but a simple, intuitive gesture is enough to reveal it. As in a pantograph, the gesture of the hand is amplified and a whole row of chairs – ready for meeting – takes shape in one movement.

Three images of Laurence Humier's Meeting Chair (photo: Michele Silvestro from www.missdesign.it)

Spatial design as territorial control

2009-04-15T09:01:00.007+01:00

Originally published by Verso in 2007, Eyal Weizman's book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation is a history of the process of transformation by which Palestinian space (underground, at ground level and in the air above the ground) is constantly redesigned in order to be kept under control. Or, rather than a history, one could call it a medical record, since the patient under analysis is still suffering the symptoms and effects of its condition. Hollow Land is now translated for the first time in a foreign language, and published by Italy's Bruno Mondadori Editore with the title Architettura dell'occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele. The book was translated by yours truly last winter, during the development of the recent Gaza crisis, at the end of which around 15% of the buildings in the Stripe were left destroyed – an acceleration of the very processes described in the book, which provided a continuous memento of the urgency of the project. After taking stock of the latest events, in the new preface the author writes that in Palestine the spatial conflict "goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent 'governable' colonial form". On the contrary, it is through this "constant transformation of space that this process of colonization has played out". The transformation of space, rather than being a goal, is the very instrument through which control is articulated, and violence, far from being casual and being triggered by a confrontational configuration of space, is the very tool to design it.

The cover of the Italian edition features a new image, that refers to the practice of 'walking through walls', used by the Israeli army to reinterpret urban space when fighting in refugee camps.

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

Eyal Weizman, Architettura dell'occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele, tr. Gabriele Oropallo (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2009).

The book will be also presented at this year's Mantova book festival.

Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican, London

2009-03-26T19:54:00.000Z

Visiting the show at the Barbican and reading about the many projects by the Swiss architect that were not actually built, one gets the impression that Le Corbusier is a bit like Marx. He didn't really create much, but had many followers, who applied his ideas in several ways. Sometimes they were just alienating white boxes, easy targets for legitimate criticism. The actual take on modernism wasn't as good as the imagined one.

Streams of London

2009-02-12T22:55:00.002Z

A type of cell within the body capable of engulfing and absorbing bacteria and other small cells and particles.

Families grow their roots in this soil like trees

2009-01-21T21:04:00.006Z

It was one of the outstanding summers of the century, when my father passed away. Germany would invade Poland in a few weeks, but of course there was no connection between the two events. They heard a shot from the garden, the innermost part of the house, enclosed by walls from every side. He was wearing his workman’s outfit and some sweat collected in pearls at the sides of his forehead. Blood came in a little stream out of his chest. His hands were stiff but empty. The grass was dry and fine summer dust was floating in the air. The only other man in the house at that moment was his own father.

People started pulling in through the large entrance from the surrounding houses and the street. My aunt didn’t bother to push them away. Someone said the police was coming and urged my grandfather to run away. He didn’t ask why. He was a man of seventy, old but still very active. The police however didn’t take long to find him and carry him away. In jail he was questioned but always rejected all charges. How could he kill his own son, he kept saying. It’s true, there had been a lot of violent rows between them. His son was not really willing to work and help him out. He was lazy, he just dreamed his days away, but he was his son and had his own family with a wife and kids.

Out of protest or depression, my grandfather refused to eat anything and died within three weeks of inprisonment. The family didn’t even have the time to hire a good lawyer and start defending him properly. In the meantime, the only assured thing was that no weapon had been retrieved. The police even drained the well but didn’t manage to find anything. The wound was described as provoked by a revolver. But where this had been concealed, nobody knew.

The investigations ended when my grandfather died. He was the only one to know the reason for the killing and the whereabouts of the weapon. But he could speak no more and the case was closed. A family row gone horribly wrong. As for myself, I’ve always blamed it on that pathological insistence on manly values that has been passed on from father to son in my family, by means of contemptuous silences, derisive remarks and sheer violence. An ethics made of work, impassibility and righteousness that has rested on a lack of communication broken only by mocking.

But it now turns out the truth was of a different kind. My aunt had been the first one to rush in to the garden after the gun had fired. He had been alone all day, musing on his own. She had recognized in her brother's hands her policeman husband’s gun and had immediately got hold of it. Probably she had hidden it in her fucking underwear, the whore. At that time a policeman was held responsible for everything that happened with his gun – he wasn't supposed to leave it lying around the house like he had done. He could wind up in prison and, even worse, losing his precious job. Those were tight times. And so the daughter didn’t blink an eye when her old father was carried away and accused of a hideous crime. Call it survival instinct. My uncle is now in his bed dying and has chosen to disclose the truth to me. He was propped up on pillows while the others were making their way to the door to leave us alone. On the bedside table, an unopened bottle of water and a wristwatch. He awkwardly took hold of my hand, while keeping his eye in mine. Families grow their roots in this soil like trees, their branches carving their way through the dirt and feeding on all organic matter they find, be it compost or shit. I’ve known nothing of my kin. I've just spent my life nurturing stupid fantasies. I’m fucking alone.

Cuba: the state of memory

2008-08-08T22:48:00.012+01:00

Cuba is a state built on memory. Cubans are always eager to tell you the history and the stories of their land and their leaders, who never fail to celebrate anniversaries and memorable days, train the population in the art of memory. The Revolution has become the focus of a secular mythology, whilst personal histories are shaped and reshaped in an attempt to find their place in a larger history.

I went to Cuba to shoot a documentary on the generation that lived the early days of the Cuban Revolution. They are the only age group on the island that witnessed two economic-social systems and that – according to some commentators – will probably live to see a third. These pictures stood at the heart of the project, as they allowed intermingling mnemonic images of the past and glimpses of the present. As when you match two images in a rangefinder, often overlapping the two versions revealed a distance in time. The certainty of progress in which many interviewees believed, sometimes short-circuited as the two versions failed to show the improved living conditions the official discourse is adamant about.

The images of aging – of people, places, objects and ideas – build a monochrome landscape, a world in which the will to fight for one's dreams and ideals fades away as one approaches and touches the edge of existence.

As Azmi Bishara said:

2008-07-23T23:30:00.022+01:00

"The fighter plane is the quintessence of modern civilization [...] It soars above good and evil, a celestial goddess with an insatiable thirst for sacrificial tribute."

The smoke from the resulting fires

2008-06-29T02:58:00.006+01:00

Someone is collecting images of all the logos of the small businesses in New York in which the stylized shape of the WTC was used, before the small businesses disappear, or before they change their identities and the two towers disappear from this ideal graphic world as well.

The former WTC site in May 2008

A love song from the material to the human

2008-05-01T17:22:00.004+01:00

I was at the MoMA in New York, browsing the catalogue of the ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ exhibition, on the encounter of design, science and technology. I was stricken by the abundance of ergonomic details in the exhibits. In the end, a crucial element of what they call interaction design is ergonomics, the study and design of interfaces between man and manmade structures. This includes tools as well as complex organisational charts.

Still, it can be argued that ergonomicity in design has replaced traditional ornament. This is particularly apparent when elements are transferred from technical equipment to mainstream everyday objects. Throwaway water bottles show the detailed imprint of an ideal hand, and cheap plastic chairs feature a sculpted relief of the fine line between two buttocks. But how many drinkers will buy their 500 ml water bottles from the convenience store and then go climbing a mountain? And, how long am I going to sit still on that chair, keeping myself aligned with that idealised backside? One can even compare ergonomicity to Reinassance perspective drawing. In perspective drawing, the vanishing point hypostatizes the onlooker by accommodating their gaze; it flatters the beholder by attributing them a god-like perspective on the fictitious world of the painting and creates an effect of identification that ultimately suspends critical thinking. The beholder is the zero, the cipher beyond the countable (beyond the frame of the picture) from which yet all numbers originate (all responses, all interpretations). Likewise, ergonomicity addresses the user, reifies their presence. Ergonomic details in a designed object convey a message of specificity aimed at the user. The object pleads to be used. Any reference to the body of the user embedded in an object is ultimately a love song from the material to the human.

And yet, ergonomically designed objects are based on the illusory assumption that the human body can be measured and that average, ideal proportions can be used in the design process. This fits pretty well into most twentieth-century design theory, that generally took for granted that there is always an ideal, univocal solution to every problem. Eventually, this strictness has offered itself for many an attack. It assumes that dialectical history can end when the best solution to deal with a problem is finally found. It features an interpretation of the world based on a hierarchical system of aptitude, eligibility, fitness. In a world that now functionally praises multiplicity and subsequently choice (‘I like my whatever with a slice of blah blah blah,’ ‘because I'm worthy,’etc), universal solutions are perceived as uncomfortable. These two interpretations, however conflictual, are clearly both borne of contingent necessities whose end is to redirect resources: in one case pumping state money into industry and public building; in another stimulating purchase.

Still, after some thinking in the walled-up garden of the museum, torturing and troubling my mind with questions of fairness, social justice and possible solutions – sabotage on a small scale, chronic scepticism, self-destruction – I had arrived to no conclusion. I finally opened my eyes and reached for a novel by Paul Auster in my brown leather bag, to numb my mind with his labyrinthine story-telling. The water in the pond stood still. Some kids were running across the bridge, again and again. The sunlight and the shadows fell sharp, following the precise lines of the skyscrapers. People seemed happy and content. A day out, a nice meal break. Jackets on the shoulders, flip-flops, sunglasses, drinks being glugged down. That was when I resigned. Understanding of things should be for its own sake. Reaching for solutions is to immerse oneself in a continuous stream of functionality. Entering the sphere of action means to accept its rules and somehow being acted, rather than act.

Everlasting masterpieces

2008-04-24T23:42:00.001+01:00

I recently remembered the words of George Orwell, who was in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and, as he used to say, never forgave the anarchists for not blowing up Gaudí's Sagrada Familia when they had the chance. George made me think of my visit to Kaufmann House (aka Fallingwater) in Pennsylvania.

On my first trip to the US, I went to see this architectural marvel featured in all books of architectural history. The house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and 'erected' between 1935 and 1936. The commissioners were the Kaufmanns, an affluent family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wright was hired upon suggestion of the youngest member of the family, Edgar Jr., who also worked at MoMA as curator and clearly took the modernist mission of spreading good design seriously. Wright’s aim was to put the inhabitants of the house as close as possible to the surrounding nature. During the Depression, the house came at a price. The house is really humid and the noise of the waterfalls constant; it is hard to argue the extent to which the architect succeeded in bringing the wild environment into the built. The tour guide said the construction of the house “put bread on the table of many people” during a sad time for American economy. When Wright realized there was a dripping in a corridor, he smartly decided to keep it and dig a little canal that collected the water and convey it into the river underneath. Wright used a mix of concrete and crude stone to build a house that stands cantilevered on the river and offers a dramatic view on the falls. Expensive as it was to build, intense restoration over the years was required and even costlier. Several thousand workers took part to the construction. They were sometimes afraid to get hurt by the very structures they were building, the tour guide said with a benign smile, as they could not begin to fathom the audacity of Wright's ambitious designs. In 1994, when the house was slowly falling down and the stone going back to its original location downstream, a final intervention was necessary that ultimately altered the original balance of cantilevers Wright had optimistically designed. Actually, even during the construction of the house the contractor secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. The house was featured on the cover of the Time magazine the year it was completed and assured a new avalanche of commissions for the aging Wright, who was at that time surrendering to the idea of retirement. Good advertising for one of the fathers of modern architecture, for the architectural profession, for modernity and for the enlightened contemporary wealthy elites.

I left the place with mixed feelings. I found the taste of the furniture kitschy and ostentatious. People around me were buzzing about an artistic or architectural masterpiece. They didn't seem to see any difference between art and architecture. My sister once told me that, according to some economists, pointless labour is necessary in depressed times, as it injects new currency in the economic stream. As a kid, I liked the idea and kept vandalizing phone booths or releasing garbage on pavements and trains, sure to make a favour to my working-class fellows. I stood there, suspended over a stream of water that continuously fell with a loud crashhhhh. The construction screamed alien to the surroundings, as though it had just landed from another planet. All I could see was the blood of the manual workers, the handy people who had constructed it without ever even imagining of stepping into the finished work one day. Their blood was dripping along the walls, just as along the oblique surface of the Egyptian pyramids that wow the crowds since millennia, but there was no architectural trick to convey that blood anywhere.

No building should be allowed to last forever. Monuments that crumble down are not 'lost', but 'regained'. The energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again. Walking in the eerie air of a mausoleum is like treading on a minefield.