Stability, Seattle, 2009 --- Alex Schweder & Ward Shelley
Photo © Scott Lawrimore

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From the archives of Spéciale’Z, Performance Architecture by Alex Schweder appeared in Issue No. 4 of the Journal. Schweder looks back at how his interest in the relationship between architecture and performance developed through his works. To order the complete issue, or to subscribe to the Journal, please contact our subscription managers: Bruil & van de Staaij.

The archives will be a recurring feature of the Spéciale’Z website so check back for other on-line articles from past issues.

From the archives of Spéciale’Z, Sprawl Wars by Andri Gerber. Sprawl Wars appeared in Issue No. 2 of the Journal under the theme Decolonization & Architecture. The essay examines links between military technology and the development of suburban communities in the United States. To order the complete issue, or to subscribe to the Journal, please contact our subscription managers: Bruil & van de Staaij.

The archives will be a recurring feature of the Spéciale’Z website so check back for other on-line articles from past issues.

Ordering and subscription information here

Contents
Diagram

the Spatial Turn

Perform

Conferences

l’église Sainte Bernadette du Banlay à Nevers, Claude Parent et Paul Virilio

Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui de l’opacité ? (par Claude Parent)

Si l’on remonte l’histoire de l’architecture, après un bref séjour dans les arbres et dans les grottes, on découvre le mur.

Le mur et son retournement plusieurs fois sur lui-même pour donner naissance à l’enclos, première protection contre les agressions de toute nature. Première manifestation de la propriété du sol.

On peut donc estimer que le mur et ses percements constituent le seul et le premier des fondamentaux initiaux de l’architecture qui subsiste toujours aujourd’hui. Le miracle est qu’il soit omniprésent et dominant dans le mental de ceux qui s’occupent de l’établissement humain sur la planète malgré les bouleversements sociologiques et technologiques. Il est donc légitime de se poser la question essentielle,  celle de l’opacité en tant que principe fondamental de l’architecture. ….lire plus

What of opacity today ? (by Claude Parent)

Going back in the history of architecture, following a brief stay in the trees and in the caves: there is the wall.

The wall and its manifold turns upon itself gave birth to the enclosure, the first protection against aggressions of all kinds. And the first expression of land ownership.

We may consider, then, that the wall and its openings constitute the first among the initial principles of architecture, and the only one surviving today. The miracle is that, despite sociological and technological upheavals, it is omnipresent and dominant in the minds of those specializing in human settlement on the planet. It is therefore legitimate to raise the essential issue, that of opacity as the fundamental principle of architecture...more.

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Le Journal Spéciale’Z is distributed by Bruil & van de Staaij, one of the world’s leadings distributors of architecture, art and design magazines. For information on subscriptions or to order single issues, please visit the order page.

Available September 2012
Ordering and subscription information here

Contents
Diagram

the Spatial Turn

Perform

Conferences

Le Journal Spéciale’Z can currently be found at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York with  Archizines + Arch-Art! Books, a double exhibition consisting of Archizines curated by Elias Redstone (April 18 – June 9, 2012) and Arch-Art! Books, curated by Adam O’Reilly for Printed Matter, Inc. (May 5 – June 9, 2012) bringing to the table a hypothesis: printed matter matters. Consisting of an eclectic selection of new independent and alternative magazines, fanzines and journals from around the world (that can be read as a contemporary response to the Clip Stamp Fold exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina at Storefront in 2007, which explored the little magazines phenomenon in the 60’s and 70’s), together with a selection of contemporary artist books with architecture at the center, the exhibition will be a temporary library for contemporary approaches to architecture from different disciplinary origins and degrees of expertise. An opening reception will take place on April 17th at 7 PM.

Archizines was recently launched by Elias Redstone as a research project to celebrate and promote the resurgence of independent and alternative publishing (www.archizines.com), and an exhibition was initiated in collaboration with the Architectural Association School of Architecture in November 2011. Following presentations in London, Milan and Barcelona, Archizines makes its American debut at Storefront with a bespoke design by \ / | < | \ | (Giancarlo Valle, Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser) that draws inspiration from the quintessential New York model of publication display – the newstand – and turns it on its side. Instead of a vertical, 2-dimensional billboard, the show will offer a horizontal, 3-dimensional field of objects: 80 architecture publications displayed on delicate metal rods, which sprout from the floor. The exhibition will evacuate all other content from the space, creating an information vacuum that focuses the visitor’s attention on the objects themselves: 80 architecture magazines, fanzines and journals from over 20 countries that provide new platforms for commentary, criticism and research into the spaces we inhabit and the practice of architecture. Arch-Art! Books will present a selection of artists’ books culled from Printed Matter, Inc.’s current catalog and present them as a medium through which architecture might be photographically and representationally explored. Each book is an flâneur’s response to the urban environment, documenting the social patina and environmental decay left on architectural space. The \ / | < | \ | design will present the books on linear displays, which will cut through and displace the field of existing Archizines publications.

Together, the complementary shows will form an exhibition of exchange and dialog; mining the overlap and friction found in the recent resurgence of alternative and independent architecture and art publishing from around the world. The exhibition will also include additional printed material (a graphic façade, newsprint, and catalogue) designed by Benjamin Critton that bring together ideas presented in each exhibition.

ARCHIZINES LIVE: Symposium on Publishing Practices 6 Manifesto Series on: MEDIUM / SPEED / HISTORY / CRISIS / DESIRE

In conjunction with the presentation of Archizines, Storefront will host a 2-day symposium on publishing practices as part of its Manifesto Series. Throughout its exhibition tour, Archizines has provided platforms for architectural research and debate, and demonstrated the residual love of the printed word and paper page – providing an antidote to digital publishing. Made by architects, artists and students, the publications included in the exhibition add an important, and often radical, addition to architectural discourse that will be furthered explored through the Manifesto Series, which will take place on Friday, April 20th and Saturday, April 21st. The Manifesto Series consist on a series of presentations by the editors of the publications on display in the exhibition together with editors of some of the most established publishing magazines. The themes of the Manifesto series will be:

Friday April 20, 7-9 PM: Medium and Speed
7.00-8.00 Medium
8.00-9.00 Speed

Saturday, April 21, History/Crisis and Desire
2–3.30 / HISTORY
4.00-5.30 / CRISIS
6.00-7.30 DESIRE

For more information contact km@storefrontnews.org.
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regardez l’agenda pour voir des conférences à Paris

Françoise Fromonot Michel Bertreux Jean Nouvel Peter Greeaway Paolo David William J.R. Curtis Paul Chemetov Andrea Branzi Vittorio Gregotti Philippe Sers

the calendar of conferences and debates on architecture and urbanism in Paris this month

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Si vous souhaitez que votre événement soit publié sur l’agenda du site, envoyez-nous un email : specialez@esa-paris.fr
If you would like to announce your events on the site, please send us a mail : specialez@esa-paris.fr

‘Landmark’ deals with the passing of time. It shows the differences and similarities in people’s emotions through pairings of portraits taken in front of landmarks in Europe – in 1966 and 2011. It also investigates the Japanese idea of the European tour.

When I first saw the set of old photographs, I felt an immediate affinity with my great grandmother who’d passed away when I was a child, and through her with the eternal landmarks portrayed in her photographs – landmarks which have been there for several hundred years and have not moved.

My great grandmother was dressed in a traditional Kimono and travelled with a large group of women. Fourty-five years later, I began studying in the UK, travelling to the continent sometimes. I travelled to each city she had by myself, then took self-portraits with friends living locally. Unlike 1966, I noticed that people now choose to join in on strangers’ photographs. I first realised it in Paris when two men unexpectedly decided to become part of my group shot.

I laid out simple notes in a Facebook typography as a general way to explain my photographs to friends, just like my great grandmother chose to annotate the back of her photographs.


Yuri, 2012

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Yuri Gomi studied Design, then Visual Design and Communications at Tokyo Universitiy of the Arts. She is currently completing an MFA in Photography at the University for the creative arts, in Surrey.  She was awarded a month-long residency at the National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad. Her work can be viewed at www.gomiyuri.com and at ‘http://cargocollective.com/gomiyuri/LANDMARK’.

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Spéciale Z is an OpenBlog comprised of work submitted by readers. Texts, book and exhibit reviews, drawings and images can be sent to specialez at esa-paris.fr.

Nous faisons appel à vos diverses expériences pour nourrir le blog. Vos commentaires sur des sujets d’actualités, des visites, des artistes, des expositions, des bâtiments et des expériences vécues nous seront très précieux. Vous pouvez nous écrire à : specialez at esa-paris.fr.

Open source is not only for programmers, technicians and nerds. It is a philosophy that will increasingly challenge social and economic conventions.

What if we also start (re-) imagining the city as open source?

After all, the city is not only the sum of private domains and interests but also a social construct and project, comprised of places where one does not need to re-invent the wheel, where one can put existing knowledge, tools, infrastructure and productive power to new use.

We should not limit our understanding of the built environment to libraries, universities, roads and squares but also consider the information and ideas that flow through the city and are generated by city life.

This idea is certainly not new. In many ways, it was a crucial part of the foundations of ancient Athens and of much of democracy thereafter. Indeed, it is telling that the contemporary focus on technology has once again brought credibility to an open source outlook.

“The city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it flows.”
- Antoni Negri in Commonwealth

Since its articulation in Athens, the slow disappearance of this idea and practice was brought to attention at the end of the 1960′s in Garrett Hardin’s essay ‘The tragedy of the commons’ and was thereafter only been slowly taken up by economists.

Only recently – when these insights came back to haunt us as part of the financial crisis – questions surrounding ‘externalities’ and ‘commons’ are receiving the attention they deserve.

In that light, the slight extremism or at least impatience with which Negri emphasizes this concept in Commonwealth is understandable. Indeed, his radical approach doesn’t make the argument any less true.

In short: people living together, sharing ideas and working together create value. One can certainly discuss how this value is shared or distributed, but one goal remains essential: to confirm these fruitful urban sources, to maintain their accessibility and to increase their power of application; thus, keeping them open source.

It is exciting to apply these concepts to the spatial dimension of a city, where they could generate new insights for – and initiatives by – many people, thereby establishing the idea of the city as an open source project.

A previous project from The Cloud Collective serves as a pragmatic example. It involves a neighborhood built mostly in the 1970s, near the centre of The Hague, The Netherlands. The north side of the neighborhood consists of a very large complex containing some 400 dwellings, office spaces and parking garages that are isolated by large scale infrastructure. The other parts of the neighborhood comprise a varied distribution of flats and private houses with the. south side still containing some typical canal houses.

So what to do with these outdated dwellings, empty offices spaces and garages, insecure passages and neglected public spaces? Our multidisciplinary team (consisting of a sociologist, urban designer, industrial designer, real estate developer and an architect) diagnosed the problem as an urban ‘stalemate’: the neighbourhood was taken hostage by a dwelling cooperation that lacked financial means but owned almost all the buildings (including empty parking garages and offices) and a municipality with equally insignificant means, but nevertheless in charge of the huge public spaces.

Our proposal was to begin solving the problem by playing and accepting more players to the game. From the neighborhood’s existing qualities we developed a spatial structure that functioned as a playing board with its own rules of engagement. This framework generated strategic insights needed for people to suggest initiatives and place them in context with others. We then proposed a constellation of modest but effective measures by different parties that could be more than the sum of their parts.

We showed that only by keeping passages – now simply perceived as insecure – open for the public, possible commercial activities on the north would have a chance of developing and/or surviving. We showed that by letting other partners and concepts into the exploitation of the parking garages, one could generate money to restructure the dwelling complex. We showed that attractive offers to inhabitants to buy their apartments could enhance connectivity with surroundings and provoke creative renovations. And we showed that all of this could have a much bigger impact on the area than creating yet another patch of grass.

Not surprisingly during this process, we began looking for tools to comprehend the wide range of strategic dimensions of the location. Were the inhabitants as powerless as presumed by the dwelling cooperation? Was there room for specific commercial activities according to surrounding competitors, demographics and infrastructure? What plans – large scale and small scale – had already been made. What potential did the local real estate market hold? Supporting data for these questions can be found on the internet.

To answer these questions and many others, we developed a simple online GIS (Geographic Information System) system called Cumulus (without the EHV), that could bring together a large amount of data from diverse sources to reveal strategic insights about the situation.

At this point, a pilot version of this system is online for members of our collective and other interested people to play with. It shows demographic neighborhood data and locations of most businesses and public functions in the Netherlands. It offers different kinds of map styles and simple analysis tools like proximity, density and spatial queries.

From this, the motivation for the Cumulus EHV project can easily be understood. To renew the open city project is a continuing ambition.

In the end, the leap of the open source philosophy is to realize that we can not solely profit from scarcity – keeping things for ourselves and selling them, but also by opening and sharing our surpluses. In precisely this lies the joy of open source and city experience alike.

The Projects
Cumulus EHV is an interactive installation shown at the Dutch Design Week 2011 in the Madlab – Emergent Art Centre, located in the former Philips factories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It shows a virtual image of the city based on extensive data from a variety of sources. It invites people to take direct control, exploring urban processes as a video game, simulation and city panorama. A variety of temporal, programmatic, social, infrastructural dimensions are shown in combination with the generation of strategic insights and initiatives.
‘Projections on air’ is an interactive installation, also forming part of the Dutch Design Week 2011 and commissioned by the Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning at the Technical University of Eindhoven. Several lectures, all treating relevant themes for contemporary architecture and urbanism, are projects on a screen filled with a wide range of influences, references and theoretical projects. The visitor is invited to sit underneath and become aware of both the complexity of these themes as well as the possible richness of solutions.

Recently The Cloud Collective launched the free web application ‘Ruimteondernemer.nl’ (spatial entrepreneur) which looks for space according to one or more criteria.

You want to live in the vicinity of a supermarket, elementary school and a train station? Or you are looking for a business location that combines a recreational area with good parking facilities and a lot of high income people nearby?

With the help of a huge amount of topographic, demographic and infrastructural data and the addresses of all kinds of private and public facilities, the ‘Ruimteondernemer.nl’ answers those questions.

Parts of this text were written for a presentation of Cumulus EHV for Hacking the City / Pulse / Madlab during the Dutch Design Week.

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Spéciale Z is an OpenBlog comprised of work submitted by readers. Texts, book and exhibit reviews, drawings and images can be sent to specialez at esa-paris.fr.

Nous faisons appel à vos diverses expériences pour nourrir le blog. Vos commentaires sur des sujets d’actualités, des visites, des artistes, des expositions, des bâtiments et des expériences vécues nous seront très précieux. Vous pouvez nous écrire à : specialez at esa-paris.fr.

Perform

The term ‘performance’ remains elusive even within well-delineated disciplinary contexts. The bursting of performance art in the sixties provided a new framework and an alternative set of rules through which artists could articulate their relationship with society. Durational at its core, performance seems set to become the twenty-first century’s most influential intermedium. As budgets are slashed, attention spans shorten and professional activities become eventalized, the cultural object – no longer preeminent – veers into product, turns into activity, de-materializes into performance. Cultural production as process… more

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Performance

Le terme de « performance » demeure assez insaisissable, y compris dans des contextes disciplinaires clairement délimités. L’explosion de l’art de la performance dans les années soixante a produit un nouveau cadre et un ensemble de règles alternatives par lesquels les artistes pouvaient désormais exprimer leur rapport à la société. Fondamentalement liée à la durée, la performance semble vouée à devenir le moyen d’expression hybride le plus influent du XXIe siècle. Avec les coupes budgétaires, une capacité de concentration de plus en plus courte et l’ événementialisation des activités professionnelles, l’objet culturel, ayant perdu de sa prééminence, évolue vers le produit, se transforme en activité, se dématérialise en performance. La production culturelle devient processus…lire plus.

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Le Journal Spéciale’Z is distributed by Bruil & van de Staaij, one of the world’s leadings distributors of architecture, art and design magazines. For information on subscriptions or to order single issues, please visit the order page.