Friendly reminder
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury.
Photo: The Taksim Square Book Club, 2013.
“I’m not afraid of getting the future wrong, as I almost invariably will. I’m actually intent on exploring our very mysterious and unknown present moment.” —William Gibson
We’re living in the era of data paranoia —”too much world,” in the words of Hito Steyerl. Twitter bots, alternative facts, blockchains, AI, fake news, DNA hacking, false leaks. What once we recognized as “the real” has been transformed into a set of blurred realities created through digital personas, avatars and social media profiles, generating landscapes of uncertainty where we can say that Lacan’s categories overlap: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real creating a common ground in which architecture has to play it’s role. It is undeniable that this data flows affects how cities evolve, affecting our social context, the political system, the way we move, consume, dream, and live.
In this context, more and more architecture is becoming a mediated discipline unfolding many different forms of production and circulation — from buildings, to research projects, exhibitions, books, and other media — where communication tools and interfaces can be powerful instruments to provoke a meaningful shift in the way theory and practice are intertwined; while at the same time, they can present a confuse vision of the social and political context where we need to act. Immersed into this massive set of layers, it’s easy to lose the critical distance that is often necessary to envision where are we going as a practice. Although “critical distance” doesn't refer to a physical distance; it refers to the needful time and space to reflect, discuss, and confront the status quo to see things from different perspectives, in order to create new understandings of the role of the architect nowadays.
Having a critical distance to our practice can be enormously consequential for the future of architecture, if there is such. Or at least, to explore in many diverse and active ways our “mysterious and unknown present moment”. Ethel Baraona Pohl — dpr-barcelona
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On Critical Distance #3, organized by the Trienal de Lisboa in the framework of Future Architecture, we’ll moderate a discussion with Lucia Tahan, Fakt Office, Bika Rebek and Léopold Lambert.
Come and join, all the info, here.
Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence Ines Weizman Routledge, Feb 3, 2014
Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence maps out and expands upon the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorates the concept of dissent within the architectural field. It expands the notion of dissidence to other similar practices and strategies of resistance, in a variety of historical and geographical contexts.The book also discusses how the gestures and techniques of past struggles, as well as ‘dilemmas’ of working in politically suppressive regimes, can help to inform those of today.
This collection of essays from expert scholars demonstrates the multiple responses to this subject, the potential and dangers of dissidence, and thus constructs a robust lexicon of concepts that will point to possible ways forward for politically and theoretically committed architects and practitioners.
Issue One: Loft Call for Submissions Due April 31, 2017
Westbeth, artists’ housing-cum-retirement community, is an early example of industrial adaptive reuse. The complex that once housed Bell Laboratories was converted in the late 1960s by the modernist architect Richard Meier. Images courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners Architects.
In 1982, sociologist Sharon Zukin asked of New York City lofts, “What social forces benefit from the rise of the loft market?” Zukin’s concerns lie with the evolution of the loft: once serving local manufacturers, later converted cheaply by artists as live/work space, and, in some cases, further remodeled into luxury real estate. What originally began as a solution for affordable housing, has become co-opted by city officials and developers who aim to increase available housing with the renovation of commercial space.
Artists, urban planners and activists have built their own homes from the space and materials available, allowing for a way of life not wholly focused on profit. Lack of official oversight allows the creation of spaces that are communal and fulfilling, but can also prevent artists from having complete autonomy. For instance, building owners can decide to hike up rent or evict these semi-legal dwellers without warning, and city officials can arrest residents or declare spaces unfit to live in. Loft residents often face landlords who refuse to comply with building codes, leaving them no choice but to handle dangerous living conditions themselves. Recently, the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland was a stark reminder of the tragedies that can arise from these conditions.
With this issue of Take Shape, we aim to explore how lofts function for their residents and in the broader context of affordable housing within a city. How are spaces that are classified as lofts treated differently from other forms of illegal dwelling and low-income housing? Who benefits from new legal frameworks, such as loft laws in New York City and the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance in Los Angeles, which aim to elevate resident ownership over spaces they have built and maintained? How can the loft-living model of communal labor and maintenance be incorporated into other forms of affordable housing? How have remodeled lofts become highly marketable, often expensive living options?
Take Shape is a nonfiction publication at the intersection of politics and architecture edited by Julia Goodman and Nolan Boomer. For our first issue “Loft,” we invite pitches for long-form journalism, interviews or creative nonfiction, as well as completed short historical essays, infographics, maps, architectural renderings or documentary projects to be printed and distributed in June 2017. We are looking for well-researched work that emphasizes narrative over theory. Our publication is intended as a resource for loft tenants, a critique of loft co-optation and a smattering of urban history for the curious reader.
We are accepting submissions about lofts anywhere in the built environment until April 31, 2017. All fields of inquiry—law, environmental science, architectural history, politics, literature, et cetera—are encouraged.
Email takeshapemag [at] gmail [dot] com to submit or receive more information.
Map of Houyhnhnms Land, featured in the 1726 edition of Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.
Source: Wikicommons
FUTURISTIC MANHATTAN: R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1961 dome over Manhattan, a glass structure with a 2 mile diameter.
“I sit here on the perfect end of a star,
watching light pour itself toward me.
The light pours itself through a small hole in the sky.
I'm not very happy, but I can see how things are faraway.”
—Richard Brautigan, "Star Hole", in memoriam Rosetta and Philae.
First guideline: look for a sad memory If you don’t have one, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.
Second guideline: read a sad poem. If you don’t feel a lump in the throat, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.
Third guideline: imagine the day of your dead. If you feel immortal, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.
Fourth guideline (only when the other three has failed) Cry because you have abandoned all hope of crying.
—'Guidelines for Crying,' The Circus of Suffering [from the archive at DPR-barcelona BLOG]
Amidst the art of May 68: L'Atelier Populaire de Paris
Sketch by Buckminster Fuller of his 4D Auto-Airplane, Courtesy, The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.
“Music On A Long Thin Wire” is a sound and installation piece conceived by Alvin Lucier in 1977 and repeatedly staged thereafter. A single piano wire (originally three- to four-foot-long, then lenghtened over the course of other performances) is stretched between bridges at either end. Both ends of the wire are connected to an amplifier, driving the wire with a sine wave oscillator. A horseshoe magnet is placed around the wire. When the wire is electrified, its current interacts with the magnetic field and the vibrations are picked up by microphones connected to the bridges. The resulting sound is controlled by a performer who control the sine wave oscillator inducing sonic phenomena as “nodal shifts, echo trains, noisy overdrivings”.
Source: Socks Studio
Une édition de France expédiée en 1976 nous montre la plage et la rangée d'immeubles donnant sa silhouette à l'horizon de la Grande-Motte.
Source: Archipostcards
Cap d’Agde in the 1970s was a concrete brutalist playground that combined modernist architecture with progressive social ideals.
Source: The Guardian
“Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move.”
—Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, in reference to Étienne Jules Marey camera, invented in 1882, the photographic gun.
A rotating Soviet space station launching an interplanetary ship. Ari Shternfeld, c. 1949
Source: @sevensixfive on twitter
Archizoom, No-Stop City (1969)
The plans for Archizoom ’s 1969 No-Stop City were typed out on a typewriter. The plan emerged from limitations of typesetting: leading, tabs, indentation, and spacing. Appropriately enough, the project conceived as architectureless architecture is represented with a planless plan. Operating more like graph paper, the plan was seductively incomplete and awaiting occupation.
No-Stop thinking. An interview with Andrea Branzi (in Italian)
The interview by Antonio Scarponi, made in 2004 was released in 2005: ‘Andrea Branzi: la ville continue [Interview with Andrea Branzi]’ in Moniteur Architecture AMC no.150 March 2005 / p.88-94. It was then published on Abitare’s blog by Stefano Mirti.
After Aleppo
“I learned to read early. But the truth is, sometimes I wish the letters remained funny drawings for longer, before the uninvited tyranny of words, and before other tongues found home in my big mouth.
I don’t mean it literally.
One day, we will go back to Aleppo you said.
You don’t mean it literally.
four years ago we shouted for change, and now we are citizens of border towns. We go from Turkey, to Lebanon, to Egypt, but we don’t find Aleppo. We have food vouchers, and, assistance criteria, and, intermittent empathy.
I don’t write any more poetry.
The boat is sinking, literally, but I don’t want to leave this room. It smells like jasmine and you taste like freedom.”
By Jehan Bseiso Published in madamasr Via Didem Kılıçkıran + Merve Bedir
“Death will come and will wear your eyes – the death that is with us from morning to evening, sleepless, deaf, like an old regret or an absurd vice. Your eyes will be a futile word, a cry kept silent, a silence. Thus you see them every morning when alone you stoop over yourself in the mirror. O dear hope, that day we too will know that you are life and nothingness.Death keeps an eye on each of us.
Death will come and will have your eyes. It will be like giving up a vice, like watching a dead face re-emerge in the mirror, like listening to closed lips. We will go down into the vortex mute."
—Cesare Pavese, 1950.