bg

rights, not privileges

2012-01-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

from Made in Dagenham.

what covers a cover?

2012-01-06T03:05:00.000-08:00

Covers/Luis Urculo from Luis Urculo on Vimeo.

http://www.luisurculo.com/blog/

on oedipus, responsibility and power

2012-01-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

"...the hand which stabbed out my eyes was mine alone. In my wretched life, why should I have eyes when nothing I could see would bring me joy? What is there for me to see, my friends? What can I love? Whose greeting can I hear and feel delight? Hurry now, my friends, lead me away - take me somewhere, a man completely lost, utterly accursed, the mortal man the gods despise the most."

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

"But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?"

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

House L2

2011-12-05T09:39:00.001-08:00

Chernobyl

2011-12-03T05:33:00.001-08:00

TOURISTIC PAVILION

2011-11-11T01:02:00.001-08:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecturehttp://issuu.com/bogdanionescu/docs/prezentare_final?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222

Perphery (as the third space)

2011-08-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

"No matter how hard you'll try to ignore the obvious fact that our consciousness has a periphery (and for us, the Romanians, the periphery is very large, and there, I think, lies most of our famous humor) you won't succed refraining from noticing it."

M. Preda, The Most Beloved of the Earthlings

From the start there is an ambiguity: the periphery appears to be in the same time a mental space and a cultural space. We've met this situation in Heidegger's mythological/ explanatory construct of the culture concept 1: the way the man inhabits the earth/ the world is explained through the way the culture/ cultural space is built/ functions; to the human quality of cultivator corresponds a certain type of space - the cultivated space.It functions through a de-limitation from nature (which remains ex-terior/ out-side 2). This boundry is con-structed/ errichten/ erected; in order to en-dure (as a limit of an ex-closure/ an in-terior), this structure must be kept orderly/ maintained/ cultivated. "This foundation act is the copy of the primordial creation act, and the new fortress becomes implicitly an imago mundi. The enclosure separates what is from what is not yet, or is only in an approximate way, or is hostile" 3 beacause "a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." 1

A tension is created; the limit functions through this tension and this tension is what must be maintained/ cultivated.

This (not-seen) tension acts by tying/ binding together the different elements of the con-struction; the cons-struction performs (there are rules for it use) and exists by receiving/ having a purpose/ a meaning/ a sense. 4 (Again here appears to be a concrete sense and a speculative-abstract one.) The meaning of the romanian word "rost" embraces both realities: "rost- ul " is the gap between the bricks (filled with mortar - the one who binds) and, on the other hand, "rost" means sense/ meaning/ purpose. 5 So, "construction is the art of making meaningful whole out of many parts." Beacause, "buildings are artificial constructions. They consists of single-parts wich must be joined togheter. To a large degree, the quality of the finished object is determined by the quality of the joins.[...] Every touch, every joint is there in order to reinforce the idea of the quiet presence of the work." 6

"Our investigation is ... a grammatical one;" 7 the structure of a proposition is analoguos to the structure of a building. (Heidegger see this structure as the primordial factor that gives the norm.8) This under-standing through grammar (or rather through the rules of the grammar) as the way functions a con-struct is different from a comprehension/ verstehen/ perception of the form/ surface of the object. Under this surface lies the space/ the interval/ the (repressed) tension that links the elements: "What this mutual encroaching indicates is that Inside and Outside never cover the entire space: there is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into Outside and Inside. In human dwellings, there is an inter-mediate space which is disavowed: we all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence – it remains ignored and (mostly) unsayable/ ne-rostit. The main content of this invisible space is excrement (canalization), but also the complex network of electricity, digital links, etc. – all this is contained in narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know well how excrements leave the house, but our immediate phenomenological relation to it is a more radical one: it is as if shit disappears into some netherworld, out of our sight and out of our world. (This is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe the shit coming back from the hole in the toilet bowl – it is something like the return of the living dead…) What I am talking about here is similar to how we relate to another person’s body: we know very well that he or she sweats, defecates and urinates, etc., but we abstract from it in our daily relations – these features are not part of the image of our fellow-man. We rely on this space, but ignore it – no wonder that, in science-fiction, horror films and techno-thrillers, this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk (from spying machines to monsters or contagious animals like cockroaches and rats). Recall also, in science-fiction architecture, the mysterious topic of an additional floor or room which is not in the building’s plan (and where, of course, terrifying things dwell…)." 9

This third space/ whith-in-closure, that stands at the basis of the founding act/ defining/ building/ begründen/ rost-ire of any identity/ con-struct, hides something that remains un-spoken/ ne-rostit, ingnored, (kept) secret/ geheim/ that cannot be seen 10 : the abject. "It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. […] The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine.[…] The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I.[…] What is abject is radically ex-cluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. It lies out-side and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game." 11

What is this "otherness"/ strangeness/ weirdness that cannot be entirely assimilated or excluded, that lies there,"quite close", at (as) the foundation/begründen of the con-struct? The main content, the ex-crement, that which is thrown out-side, is the very reason that permits the in-side to exist: "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you-it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint." 11

This fall/ cadere of the corpse/ cadaver permits the structure to be erected and to endure, to be stable/ begründen. This stability is directly related to the concept of quality, the way the structure functions/ performs; the meaning/ the purpose/ rost-ul of one object is linked to its reliability.8

Of course, there is "the famous movement of translation towards “substitution”. [...] The real substitute begins though with animal sacrifices". 3 But what is interesting is what remains hidden/ secret/ heimlich 10 even with or without this substitution: it is not "I" who is falling/ sacrificed, but the other, and this is the true substitution. It is a murder/ a violent death - it remains as an un-spoken/ ne-rostit/ truth, scary/ uncanny/ unheimlich 10. This murder, lawless and meaningless, is the very fouding that orders and gives meaning/ begründen.Without this sacrifice, the walls fall or remain fallen - the founding/ begründen/ rost-uirea/ rost-irea is the sacrifice. And this thing cannot be spoken/ rost-it or seen, and here lies the horror Zizek is speaking of - "this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk."9

The murder of the other can be read as also as an ex-clusion: the one who is not allowed to belong, to be part of the con-struct, becomes the structure itself but only in death. In The Legend Of Master Manole, it is Ana the one who is sacrifficed - Ana is the other - but as the wife of Manole ("quite close") she is his soul, the soul demanded by the “architectonic” body: "En-livening” a building by sacrificing a human being presupposes, though, the transfer of that being’s soul from their flesh body to the stone body of the building. In other words, being a sacrifice, by the ritual death, the body changes. That being doesn’t come to live in the building, but is “incarnated” in it. That’s why it was sacrificed through a “violent death,” in order to continue its life – and for much longer that it would have done in its flesh body – in a new, architectonic body." 3

Being "incarnated" into the structure, Ana gives meaning/ rost and becomes rost/ the join, the one who binds/ sustains the elements of the con-struction (and also managing this third space and its main content - the excrement 12 ); before the sacrifice, the con-struction of the wall could not endure - it returned to the initial state - it remained a “deserted and unfinished wall."

Easily we can see Ana as a metaphor for nature, the life that remains "quite close", but that cannot be entirely ex-cluded, or assimilated. 2 The natural "is often associeted with feminity."13

Ana is the wife/ the mother - who is sacrificed in order for the dream to be fulfilled.

This element - the dream is one of the key elements of the story. "For some, the dream is part of an ideology that snares and deludes.The dream is often portrayed as jingoistic. Self-determination, success, wealth/ rost, and acquisition are words often used to describe it. For some, the dream denotes a set of social and moral ideals." 14 The dream is the u-topia that through sacrifice, finds/ takes the land (in the name of an ideal/ meaning/ purpose/ rost). In the well-known legend of the Babel Tower, the dream can be built/ can become real, as long as the humanity is united in one language/ rost (meaning/ goal). ("I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you." 11) Modernity itself can be seen as a quest for the fulfilment of the dreams. 15 Unlike the premodern situations, the modern dream exists in only one version - the correct one, the other ones having no meaning, being simply abjects. With this dramatic re-writing, paradoxically, the borders are enforced - whitin these borders there is a "third world": the slums, the banlieues - the periphery. The conflict (the fight of modernity/ of the modernized center, seen as normality/ the correct narration/ rost against the ab-normal periphery, functions as the very basis/ purpose/ begründen/ rost of modernity) is not at all unimportant. 16

The periphery is par excellence de-layed, de-structured; the (common) narration/ rost-irea is missing - a post (or a non) Babel state. It is the "place where meaning collapses." 11 In mythical terms, the builders are incapable of building; without a sacrifice, the walls remains “deserted and unfinished." Without clear purposes/ goals/ rosturi, this place exists "only in an approximate way" 3 - it is a place of appearances: the builders are not builders, they only act as builders (they have no vocation 17), etc.

But the periphery parasites the center and needs a center in ordeer to exists - there is a permanent import of structure/ narration/ rost-ire from the center. The question is how this relation functions in-verse/ in the other direction? The way out, the possibility of exit is what the periphery offers. For the center, this possibility is very important - it makes the difference between an open system and a closed one (a prison): "In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates" 18 ( and what remains is the humour).

There are many famous exits; the true question is, "who dares to face the consequences of this conviction? The man with a metaphysical vocation is more rare than a monster. [...] For a Hindu prince was enough to see a cripple, an old man and a dead one to understand everything" 19 and to leave/ exit.

The border is the "place where meaning collapses." 11 , but it is also a place for regeneration - the frontier; the exit is the act of revolt, maybe the only one left. ("Permanent revolution is this putting into question of the self, of everything and nothingness." 20)

Bibiography:

1. Martin Heidegger, Bulding, Dwelling, Thinking (1951)

2. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt shows that although the nature/ life becames exterior, we cannot be entirely separete from it : "The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside the artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific efforts have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature."

3. Mircea Eliade, Comments On The Legend Of Master Manole (1943)

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his philosophy lectures says: "All the rules togheter give the meaning, and these are not fixed by ostensive definition. The rules of grammar are entirely independent of one another. Two words have the same meaning if they have the same rules for their use.[...] The rules constitute the meaning, and are not responsible to it. The meaning changes when one of its rules changes." Wittgenstein Lectures 1932-35. Edited by Alice Ambrose (1979)

5. The Romanian word "rost/ rost-ire/ rost-uire" has a the following meanings:

- mouth, peak, as it is a cognate from the latin word "rostrum", having the same meaning;

- to speak, as the function of the mouth, the ability to talk, but also the ability to pronounce, to make sounds, utter;

- language, as the result of speach, but also speach;

- saw, as a mouth with teeth, related to the ability of the mouth to cut something (into pieces);

- opening, space, interval (in constructions) that separates and links the elements;

- order, and to order, as the way the elements are organized;

- sense, meaning, purpose, justification;

- to provide something;

- social status.

From Constantin Noica, The Romanian philosophical utterance. (1970)

6. Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (1998)

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1958)

8. Martin Heidegger, ”The Origin of the Work of Art (1965)

9. Slavoj Zizek, Architectural Parallax. Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle (2009)

10. "Thus, while the meaning of heimlich begins with "belonging to the house", or familiar, or friendly, as it is eaborated it turns into something concealed or kept from sight, "finally becoming the negative compound unheimlich: gruesome fear... ghostly...a hounted house... thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich." David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000).

11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (1982)

12. David Morley, quoting Cara Mertes (There's No Place Like home: Women and Domestic Labour) sees the femin role (inside a house) as the manager of the dirt: "Feminity has been, at least in part, defined by how women manage dirt. The solution for the middle-class housewife, at an earlier stage, was to hire servants to do this work for her, and thus "dirty" themselves rather than her ( these servants being replaced, in the post-World War II period, by mechanical appliances) so that she was simbolically removed from the contact with dirt and thus clean for her husband. A woman who had servants to deal with dirt was perceived as "more feminine, more ladylike" while the "negative, unfeminine connotations of dirt had to be absorbed by the body of the servant" and "the good woman could be responsible for the disappearance of dirt in the home, but never had to touch it herself." in David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000).

13. "The local is often associeted with feminity and seen as natural basis of home and community, into which an implicity masculine global realm intrudes" - Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, power, place: explorations in critical anthropology (1997), quote from David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000). David Morley continues this idea with a quote (from Luce Irigaray): "Heidegger builds his philosophical "house" at the expense of the feminine."

14. John Roth, The American Dream (1997)

15. "The first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these "truths" are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be "not perhaps as meaningless as a 'triangular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion' " (Erwin Schrodinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the help- less slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is." Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition (1958)

16. “What they could not risk was a life-and-death struggle, with no prospect of a compromise at the end; for, in this struggle, the less sophisticated combatant would survive.”

A.P.J. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy (1941)

17. "The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice/ rost." [...] Vocation, or the feeling of it, is not, however, the prerogative of great personalities: it is also appropriate to the small ones all the way down to the "midget" personalities, but as the size decreases the voice/ rost-ul becomes more and more muffled and unconscious. It is as if the voice of the daemon within were moving furthur and further off, and spoke more rarely and more indistictly. The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice/rost there is the voice/ rost of the group with its conventions, and vocation is replaced by collective necessities. But even in this unconscious social condition there are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable predjudices. "You are no different from anybody else," or, "there is no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid" and "most unseemly." For it is a "monstrous presumption to suppose anything of that sort could be of the slightest significance" - it is "purely psychological"."

C.G.Jung, The Development of Personality (1967)

18. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (1967)

19. Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949)

20. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (1997)

Within these peeling walls

2011-07-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

"Yes, life is full, there is life even underground," he began again. "You wouldn't believe, Alexey, how I want to live now, what a thirst for existence and consciousness has sprung up in me within these peeling walls. Rakitin doesn't understand that; all he cares about is building a house and letting flats."

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

ciacova 2006

2011-06-20T02:19:00.000-07:00

http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciacova
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciacova
http://www.banaterra.eu/romana/toponimii/c/ciacova/index.htm

strei curch/ biserica strei

2011-05-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

RE-IMAGINING JERUSALEM/ AL-QUDS. 1(+2=3) SOLUTION

2011-05-16T00:06:00.000-07:00

(an entry for a competition - THINK SPACE/ GEOPOLITICAL BORDER)

BEFORE/ PRESENT STRUCTURES

"The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action, nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty) , but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political."

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Often seen from a global scale, THE ISRAELIAN-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT must be read and understood at a regional and at an urban scale. If in its socio-economical form, this conflict presents patterns that are easily recognized in many similar cases trough out the world, the particular is made by the way the national identity is built here - in Palestine/ Israel, the national identity is linked with a religious identity (and also with a social identity) - they often fuse and construct each other.

SO WHAT IS THE TRUE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT? The conflict is based on the two narratives, each claiming there is only one true connection with the land (It’s not really a problem of territory, but rather how they invest this territory). Each of the two narratives exclude (and is based on the EXCLSION of) the other. This kind of CON-FRONTATION is characterized on the fact that no one is really FACING the other. No side is truly RECOGNIZING the other side (of course there are exceptions). Instead there is a very complex apparatus dealing with this problem - so an INTER-FACE (ideological or even physical) is created. THE SEPARATION WALL is (only) a visible part of this interface. It function as a LIMIT, a DELIMITATION, as an apparatus for CONTROL, but it is also an act of LEGITIMIZATION of the Israelian state. The others can’t ignore it and, even more, they are forced to be a part of it, in the complex rituals of the passage through the checking points.

An explanation for the current situation is the fact that the two nations are still found in the first faze - the establishment. This lack of RECOGNITION and LEGITIMACY for the other national construct is in fact the lack of recognition and legitimacy for their own national construct (as it is now). A major problem is constituted by the cities caught up in this conflict - the case of Jerusalem being maybe the most well-known and the most dramatic.

Jerusalem/ Al-Quds is a holy-city; because of this it functioned as an world-city and its prestige was international. Jerusalem/ Al-Quds has a hibryd population, a situation not recognized by the national narrative(s), but a situation that must be deal with. The conflict between the two nations has become a conflict between the nation(s) and the city (and its citizens) - Jerusalem/Al-Quds is not recognized a city as such, it is recognized only as a capital for (one of ) the nation(s). Today, Jerusalem/Al-Quds is separated from West Bank by the Separation Wall. The wall affirm the appartenance of Jerusalem as a part of Israel, but seen from the other side, Jerusalem has become only a part of the wall. Quietly, the new Jerusalem is built, as the capital of Israel. But two things happen: first it must be destroied the very complex city it is now to be preserved only as a museum-city, to celebrate complexity, simply, only in its mummified form. (A well-known example is the Museum of Tolerance which is going to be built by the Simon Wiesenthal Center - a museum that will celebrate tolerance but which, will be built on an desecrated muslim cemetery.) And second, Jerusalem/Al-Quds as such seize to exist for the rest of the Palestinian territories. This is a very important issue, because, the Palestinians imagine Jerusalem/Al-Quds as their future capital and, even more important, this city functioned as a very important economical and infrastructural center for West Bank.

AFTER/ PROPOSED STRUCTURES

“What they could not risk was a life-and-death struggle, with no prospect of a compromise at the end; for, in this struggle, the less sophisticated combatant would survive.”

A.P.J. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy

In this context, the question is how to preserve and update Jerusalem’s unique complexity? Or IS IT POSSIBLE TO PRESERVE THIS COMPLEXITY? And CAN JERUSALEM/ AL-QUDS FUNCTION AS A CAPITAL FOR ISRAEL AND FOR THE FUTURE PALESTINIAN STATE?

The answer is EXAPTATION - a concept used in anatomy and behavioral sciences, it describes a shifting of a function of a trait during evolution. Exaptation is a tool which can be used in RE-STRUCTURING present situations, imagining different scenarios, but using the present elements.

As a solutions/ answer to those problems, it can be imagined AN EXTENDED JERUSALEM, governed only by a civil administration in wich both nations could be represented. It won’t function as a state, but as a city. It is a CON - STRUCTION - a structure capable of attracting, adapting and including people. In order to exist, it will use and transform the actual limits - THE SEPARATION WALL will become the wall of the new city; the frontier with Israel may become a wall if necessary, assuring a certain reciprocity but also a desired degree of security for both sides. THE WALL will function as a LEGITIMACY for the city. An inverse process in wich the CONTROL of city (and of THE WALL) is taken from the military and given to a civil administration of Jerusalem/Al-Quds. A Paradigm of contemporary development could be implemented generating a new urban condition in which hibridity is allowed and encouraged; a generic contemporary city, where history is not blotted out, but updated.

It’s unlikely that the social/ethnic/religious divisions could be abolished (in this way). If old borders will be transformed, new borders will appear (inside city walls) and new forms of segregation. But at least, Jerusalem/Al-Quds will have a normal, a functional appearance.

Jury Comments:

I appreciated the variety of geographies, scales and procedures that accompanied the submissions. But at the same time I was surprised at the quantity of entries that were proposing the same approach: The production of neutral, 'free' autonomous zones in-between the conflict. In general, I have grown skeptical of these autonomous zones that only tend to either ghettoize the problem or through their exception remain islands within the archipelago of atomized environments that do little to subvert the existing hegemony of institutional political and economic power. My predilection has been for practices of encroachment that infiltrate themselves into the rigidity of institutions in order to re-configure existing protocols -and in so doing, suggest new spatial and infrastructural organizations.

Because of the brevity of the competition's time period, I wanted to simply focus on seeking compelling 'before-after' diagrams that could suggest such institutional transformations and their visual and physical consequences. Nevertheless, I welcomed many attempts to transcend the 'diagram' and investigate its unfolding within the specificity of architectural schemes.

Also, while I sought compelling images that could trigger ways to re-imagine border regions, I was also seeking their operational dimension, the degree by which they would suggest alternative socio-political and economic procedures. The most dramatic images were backed by intelligent processes and therefore my criteria for evaluation included: the uniqueness of the diagram's intelligence (before-after), the depth of the research and the graphic quality of the investigation.

Two projects came forward: 'Border Archipelagos of Narrow Spaces' and 'Common Visions: The Case of Prespa Region.' Both produced intelligent diagrams that enabled a different conceptual view of the territories they both engaged: whether the amplification of the Mediterranean islands that have become the critical immigration thresholds between two continents, consolidating them into one conceptual system, a new archipelago with alternative political consequences; or the visualization of natural vacant spaces across nations as armatures to imagine more elastic ecological and socio-economic relationships and exchanges. Also I was interested in the way both of these projects moved from broad conceptual and territorial scales to the specificity of local ecologies and city spaces. This simultaneous engagement of the large and the small, the top down and the bottom up, the abstract and the specific is essential to transcend the ideological divide across the institutions of architecture and urbanism.

In addition to these two projects, I selected three mentions: The first one "Metropolitcal Void" was backed up by a very rigorous research and was one of the most visually compelling documents. It took the discussion of geo-political borders to the very scale and contestation of the metropolitan. The most important image from this research, the recuperation of the forest as a mediating space that frames the growth of the city by producing a differential 'in-between' resonated with many other entries that sought a 'free-zone' of exchange and political autonomy. But in my mind the green zone needed to have more complex gradations of green, maybe even tinted with a bit of red: The democratization of space needs to mean more than a top down gestures that emblematize the re-installment of a new politics of the state, through absolutist architectures. The democratization of space and of borders themselves, and hopefully of a new conception of the political, is an inclusive, contested and agonistic process , where consensus and dissent, the planned and the unplanned are in perpetual tension.

The final two mentions, were actual excerpts from two entries: Mediterranean Big Bang and Mediterranean Union. As if their separate titles composed a unified manifesto, these images were extracted from their processes as singularities because of their provocative message. One shows a dramatic view of a mediterranean water-less landscape, fusing North Africa with Europe. The second image is, in a way, one that has been in our collective imagination for a while: the mediterranean as continent, field, elongated -and permeable- circumambulatory boundary where the vectors of force that have shaped it are not inland but on its edges producing a regional consortium of interconnected points. These images suggest an idea that is pressing in our time: that a point of departure to re-imagine geo-political borders today begins by acknowledging the socio-economic and ecological co-dependance and co-existance of these divided territories and regions.

Teddy Cruz

links:

http://www.think-space.org/

http://www.spatialagency.net/database/estudio.teddy.cruz

http://www.politicalequator.org/

upside down banatian houses

2011-03-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

Appearances (Aparente)

2011-02-20T22:55:00.000-08:00

"It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.
Phædrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.
It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?
His notes, in response to this question, state the following:
The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.
But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"Si mai vreau sa fac referire la convorbirea dintre Sf. Antonie cel Mare si diavol, odata, dupa ce, constatand ca nu-l poate spaimanta si birui pe vajnicul schimnic, a stat la taifas cu el. Sfantul il intreaba pe Scaraotchi daca-s multi calugari in iad. Calugari?! - face interlocutorul sfantului; nu sunt! Cum asa, se mira Antonie, doar au fost si sunt monahi nevrednici. - Nu-i nici un calugar, afirma din nou celalalt. - Poate ca nu-i stii tu, staruie Antonie. - Pe toti ii stiu, nu poate fi vreunul despre care sa nu fiu informat! Iar Sfantul se tot minuneaza. - Aha! striga deodata vrajmasul, stiu la ce te gandesti: la oamenii aceia imbracati in negru de sus pana jos, purtand un soi de tichie pe cap si un val deasupra-i. Da, din aia, da, avem o multime, de oameni in negru nu ducem lipsa, dar calugari, sa stii, calugari nu avem macar unul."
N.Steinhardt, Reflectii Calugaresti
din Daruind vei dobandi

The New Zidonians

2011-01-18T04:06:00.000-08:00

"You can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it's difficult to imagine being a border."

The New Zidonians - the project by Christos Papastergiou, Christiana Ioannou (Architects, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) won an honorable mention at the 'Just Jerusalem' competition of MIT.

The modern story of Jerusalem is a story of borders. In this submission, borders are investigated not as a division, but as a spatial structure of negotiation. This project proposes borders that would not divide space into two distinct and sovereign states, but rather would have to connect, to bring together two different communities in a single homeland. As Michael Sorkin describes:
‘Such a condominium would form a ‘third state’ defined as the territory of cooperation between Israel and Palestine‘
This ‘Third State,’ which lays at the heart of the narrative offered in this entry, is what we need to project in architectural projects and visions. But few have tried to formulate its basic dimensions.. What would the spatial characteristics of a `Third State be? What forms would its public spaces take? How it would realize a status of a coexistence of singularities in space? This entry answers these questions.The ‘New Zidonians’ is a narrative and a project of a Jerusalem’s imagined future. This future forms neither a vision nor a nightmare. It rather tries to imagine a future of a Jerusalem that has accepted its differential character and permit a space were the differences would coexist in an immanent relationship.

new zidonians posts at papemachines blog
the story

the 8th curb

2011-01-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

Season 8 Tease - Larry Scare

THE NARRATIVE METHOD

2011-01-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

The Pavilion possess a function-sign: the metal surface is developed as collage made of different landscape elements from the Banat Region. The surface of the object is a story, a narration representative for the regional identity.
The central iconic image is the baroque churche of Banat. This type of provincial Baroque, with a single tower, is typical for 18-19 century landscape of Banat, and accompanied systematization - (re)construction area by the Habsburg authorities. Also is the most common type of church, in both the Catholic environment, as well as in the Orthodox one. (If in the Catholic environment, the adoption of this model is not surprising, for the Orthodox - being either Serbians or Romanians, the adopted Viennese model is a distinctiv and a characteristic feature.)

The rest of the "narration" is constituted starting from a traditional village from the Banat plain, picturing a street in the village of Niţchidorf (in German: Nitzkydorf, in Hungarian: Niczkyfalva), the native village of Herta Muller.

The church, as well as the rest of the narrative elements are representeted through the technique of cutting and perforating the surface of the metal panels; they picture things that are easily recognized and identified. These signs define an identity and have a representative value. (What is provincial and peripheral is exhibited in the center.)

The text and its reading are ambiguous. The object is open to its north side and is perceived as an object, as a box. Physical properties of the object and its semantical properties are overlapping and mutually excluding eachother, depending on angle, the light and the scale of the perception. By changing the angle of perception, the object is closing and in the meantime is opening, revealing the church (as an icon-image). And changing the angle from the southwest to the nord sidereverses the opperation.

The Unbearable SHIFT+Delete

2011-01-07T03:28:00.000-08:00

"EXPUNGE-ELIMINATE-DELETE-EXPEL-EXCOMMUNICATE-BAN-INTERDICT-KEEP OT-SHUT OUT FROM-PROHIBIT FROM-BANISH-ERASE-EXCLUDE..."

A Philip Kaufman movie (1988) / an adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel (1984).

A Bosniak movie (2009).

And The Ministry of Pain, a great book by Dubravka Ugrešić.

calan's attic and living

2010-12-22T05:48:00.000-08:00

The Story of Eames Furniture

2010-11-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

The Story of Eames Furniture: Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart - Interview from Gestalten on Vimeo.

The nationalist God

2010-11-23T00:59:00.000-08:00

The nationalist God has attacked Christianity on a broad front. In Russia, he is called technology and science, in Italy, Duce, and in Germany, "German Faith," "German Christianity," or the State. The "German Christians" are a contradiction in terms and would do better to join Hauer's "German Faith Movement." These are decent and well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart, who was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the awkward question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always "God." But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of Indo-European culture to the "Nordic" in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more "German" this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more painfully evident it is that the "German" god is the god of the Germans.

from Wotan, by C.G. Jung

So Little Understanding

2010-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

"The box ‘motorcycle’ contains the boxes ‘components’ and ‘functions.’ The box ‘components’ contains the boxes ‘power assembly’ and ‘running assembly,’ and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as ‘causes’ which produce long chain structures of the form, ‘A causes B which causes C which causes D,’ and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operators ‘exists,’ ‘equals,’ and ‘implies’ produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as ‘the system’ is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guys’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. "

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

A Wide Range of Challenges

2010-09-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

The legal requirement that an architect participate in virtually all building development has generated immensurably more work for the profession. It is reasonable to assume that much if not all of that work would have gone, in the old days, to the master and lesser builders for whom building designers worked or, more commonly, who themselves designed what they built.
Although the transition to mandatory architect involvment has been a boon to the profession, it has carried a price, as most boons do: Today's architects are foreced to deal with clients far more varied - in class, taste, character, sophistication, aspiration, and willingness to involve an architect in the first place - than the remarcably patronlike clients we envision when we think of great and famous architects of the past. The difference is that few of yesterday's clients ever hired or even met a Bernini, a Wren, or a Latrobe. Today the range of clients seeking architectural consultation has grown to include not only the patrons who commisioned those master designer/buiders but also - and here's the crux - the vast middle sector of commercial and residential user-owners who, in centuries past, were entirely satisfied with the crudely sketched plans of masons and carpenters. Wich means - beacause the middle is always where the numbers get big - that todays's architects primarly serve clients whose similarity engaged ancestors wouldn't have hired an architect at all.
With the vastly broadened spectrum of clients come two concerns. One is the strong likelihood that a young architect who expects to work much as Bernini, Wren, and Latrobe did - in the contemporary vernacular, of course - is going to be dissapointed with most of the clients he or she meets. The other is that, even for an architect aware of the nature of the modern client population, today's clients present a wide range of challenges in project, practice, and client management.
These challenges include those posed by clients who don't share an architect's interest in or commitment to design or who are concerned with cost above all else. Special challenges also come from clients who opt, when they can, to procure design from a competitor engaged in design-build or construction management or some other emerging discipline, rather than from an architect engaged in traditional architectural practice - meanning architecture as it has been practiced since about 1900.

Kevin W.C. Green, The Nature of the Client, from
The American Institute of Architects, The Architect's Handbook of Profesional Practice

Architecture (in America)

2010-07-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

"Americans don't care much about architecture. They perceive it merely as a product, a form of shelter, or an indication of status, rather than as art or an expression of culture."
Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, Architectural Record, January 1999

house in calan - 13

2010-07-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

Freedom in America

2010-07-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

"Freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That's why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it. "
more here

small (psychotherapy) office

2010-07-11T12:42:00.000-07:00

why are words important

2010-06-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

"-Where are your ancestors buried?
-In Scotland, your majesty.
-But then, where's your skirt? In your country, men wear short skirts, do they not?
-No, your majesty, Scotsmen do not wear skirts, they wear kilts.
-Kilts?
-Kilts. A matter of words, perhaps, but words are important.
-Why are words important?
-If you cannot say what you mean, your majesty, you will never mean what you say. And a gentelman should allways mean what he says.
-Ah yes, a gentleman. Are you a gentleman?
-I would like to be a gentleman, your majesty. I try to be.
-I am not a gentleman. I'm not allowed to say what I mean. They are allways telling me what to say."

Quote from The Last Emperor (1987).

On Design

2010-05-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

Designers Ron Arad and Tom Dixon are joined by Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum (London, England) to talk about the point of contemporary design.

short study (collective housing)

2010-05-24T02:42:00.000-07:00

Timisoara's hydroelectric plant - 2

2010-05-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

Timisoara's hydroelectric plant - 1

2010-05-17T02:42:00.000-07:00

house in calan - 12

2010-05-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

C House (and offices) - 6

2010-05-09T05:14:00.000-07:00

refurbished armchair

2010-04-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

An old armchair that we've just refurbished.

the need for design and more...(3)

2010-04-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

"Man is only concerned with true. Nature is not concerned with true, and of course I mean the physical nature as compared to human Nature."
"Nature is unconscious, but the psyche is conscious, demands life. Nature makes the intruments which make life possible, it will not make the instrument unless the desire for life is there."
"Nature is the giver of all presence, we need Nature but Nature does not need us."
"Form encompasses a harmony of systems, a sense of order, and that wich characterizes one existance from another.
Form has no shape or dimensions.
Form=what
Design=how
Form, as the realization of nature, is made up of inseparable elements. Form has no presence. Its existance is in the mind. Form, when realized, does not belongs to its realizer. Only its Interpretation belongs to the artist. Form is like order."
"I have no method of work, I only have principle around wich I work, there is no method, there is no system."
Louis Kahn

the need or design and more...(2)

2010-04-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

"...e mai putin firesc sa fii om decat sa fii pur si simplu. Simtim asta instinctiv; de unde si voluptatea ce ne cuprinde de fiecare data cand ne intoarcem fata de la noi insine pentru a ne cufunda in somnul preafericit al obiectelor."
Cioran, Caderea in timp

the need for design and more...(1)

2010-04-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

"Jean:
I tell you it’s not as bad as all that. After all, rhinoceroses are living creatures the same as us; they’ve got as much right to life as we have!
Berenger:
As long as they don’t destroy ours in the process. You must admit the difference in mentality.
Jean:
Are you under the impression that our way of life is superior?
Berenger:
Well at any rate, we have our own moral standards which I consider incompatible with the standards of these animals.
Jean:
Moral standards! I’m sick of moral standards! We need to go beyond moral standards!
Berenger:
What would you put in their place?
Jean:
Nature!
Berenger:
Nature?
Jean:
Nature has its own laws. Morality’s against Nature.
Berenger:
Are you suggesting we replace our moral laws by the law of the jungle?
Jean:
It would suit me, suit me fine.
Berenger:
You say that. But deep down, no one . . .
Jean:
We’ve got to build our life on new foundations. We must get back to primeval integrity."

from Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

L'originalite de l'echec

2010-03-28T03:45:00.000-07:00

Le destin de la Roumanie est presque intolerable quand on l'analyse de pres. C'est l'originalite de l'echec. Tous les gens me demandent ici: "Mais, que'est-ce que c'est que votre pays?" Je leur dis: "Vous savez, c'est simple: c'est l'echec permanent, c'est l'originalite de l'echec..."
E.Cioran, Le Neant roumain. Un entretien

l'entretien 1
l'entretien 2

Milano, Feltrinelli Foundation

2010-03-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

Feltrinelli Foundation / Herzog & de Meuron from ArchDaily on Vimeo.

what we've bought sunday

2010-03-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

Postcard from Fiala Josef (Brno, Moravia, Austria–Hungary) to Fiala Alois (Bessarabia, Russian Empire) sent probably in 1917. I bought it sunday in Aurora Market, Timisoara, togheter with a book in Hungarian about models of letters.

H - study

2010-03-08T04:57:00.000-08:00

quotation

2010-03-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

"They're destroying the city and a lot of people don't worry about the design of what's mineral not vegetable. Beacause of false idea of the heritage, if you touch a church there's a scandal, but an ugly building, badly designed, passses without comment."
Eduardo Souto de Moura
quotation from this book.

balkan impressions (summer 2009)

2010-02-23T05:29:00.001-08:00

man in Belgrade/ the (balkan) culture of sitting

mosque column and entrance in Sarajevo

mosque in Sarajevo
Svrzo's House

C House (and offices) - window (again)

2010-02-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

house in calan - 11

2010-02-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

calan's attic - 10

2010-02-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

pp table

2010-02-01T09:46:00.001-08:00

C House (and offices) - a entrance and a window

2010-01-26T05:32:00.000-08:00

Proposal for a hrinostatic room - 2

2010-01-23T01:15:00.000-08:00

A CHURCH

2010-01-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

1
A church is a vehicle to relate to God.

1.1
The Hatlehol church is a chamber filled of void.

1.1.1
Void detaches gestures from their obvious context. Gestures float into the void in search of new possible relations. The unquestioned development of everyday life is suspended and there is space for the appearance of God.

1.2
The Hatlehol church produces quiet.
Agite otium et agnoscetis quia ego sum Dominus. [Ps. 45, 11]

1.3
The Hatlehol church operates as a machine to collect experiences.
Space takes care of gestures, without predicting, without excluding. (This being, finally, the only reason for form: to collect human experiences and to provide dignity to actions regardless to their immediate goal)

1.3.1
The main hall of the Hatlehol church gives form to this inclusive gesture. As a reverse bowl, the dome collects and protects all the small fragments of experience of the community (according to Ingeborg Bachmann’s request for form: Wenn alle Krüge zerspringen/ was bleibt von den Tränen im Krug?).

1.3.2
The large dome of the Hatlehol church creates and protects void.
The dome defines a frame and provides a background. It opens up and contains, it discovers and shelters.

1.4
The Hatlehol church is simple and clear, both inside and outside. The church collects experiences inside of a unique figure.

1.4.1
The church appears in the woods as a recognizable -yet enigmatic- object, both humble and monumental.

1.4.1.1
The Hatlehol church appears -and re-appears in memory- as a single object.

1.4.1.1.1
The church follows a simple and rigorous proportional rule. The overall shape is contained in a 39×39m square. The upper part of the church is a hemisphere, the lower part is a reverse truncated cone. The porch in front of the church is contained in a 13×13m square.

1.4.2
The Hatlehol church is clearly recognizable as a holy building. It is simple, silent and monumental.

1.4.2.1
The large, white, wooden dome and the delicate classical porch immediately identify the new building as a church. Yet the building is not completely familiar: the dome is somehow too big; the porch seems to be too delicate. The church is calm and gentle, yet it is not easy.

1.4.2.2
The Hatlehol church is a fragile monument.
The church needs to be populated by the community. Only the gestures of the parish prevent the monumentality of the church to become empty. Only the silent approval made of the gestures inhabiting the church prevent the weakness of the church to become unbearable.

1.4.3
The simple, large figure of the church establishes a relation with the surrounding geographical elements.
The dome floats in the woods, abstract and respectful, silent as a K. D. Friedrich character staring at the monumental landscape of the Hjørundfjord, Vartdalsfjord and Storfjord.

2
The geometry of the dome and the details of the porch refer to a defined architectural tradition. Gestures inside of the Hatlehol church establish a relation with ancient gestures happening into ancient buildings.

2.1
The outspoken neo-classicism of the Hatlehol church coincides with its naive futurism. The Hatlehol church is both ancestral and utopian; it is Pantheon and U.F.O., igloo and mushroom.

2.2
The Hatlehol church avoids establishing a direct link with the content of the religious experience.
The church just makes reference to an architectural tradition.

2.2.1
The Hatlehol church is no representation of faith; it is a place for faith to happen.

2.3
The Hatlehol church does not lack a bit of sense of humour. It appears as an oversized mushroom, somehow blossoming in the woods around the Storfjorden.

3.
The community reach the main entrance through a path moving in the wood. From the parking, the visitors enter the wood, then turn around the church moving through the rocks and the trees, and reaching the main entrance of the church.

3.1
Small hills inside the park produce open-air protected areas, where the community can meet. Wooden benches allow individual meditation.

4
All of the functions of the church are collected in a single building. The lower level contains all everyday activities; the upper one contains the ceremonial part.

4.1
The collection of all functions in a single building allows better connections among different functions and reduces costs.

4.1.1
All architectural effort is concentrated in the main room.
It is a large circular room, 39 m wide, covered with a dome.

4.1.1.1
The main room clearly appears outside, in the shape of a dome emerging from the fir-trees.
The dome defines a centre for the community.

4.1.1.1.1
The Hatlehol church has no bell tower.
The dome (instead of the bell tower) appears in the landscape and act as a recognizable sign for the community.
Bells are attached to a pole, and are part of the design of the surrounding landscape.

4.1.1.1.1.2
It is not possible to add a bell tower to a rotunda. The failure of Bernini (!) with the bell towers of the Pantheon testifies that it is not possible.

4.2
The main hall receives light from the windows at the gallery level and from the secondary rooms around it.
All minor spaces and the gallery are open to the woods. 550 windows give 360° view over the landscape.

4.2.1
The atmosphere is mild and soft. Shadows inside the room are not too sharp.

4.3
The main room allows perfect visual communication among the pastor and the parish.

4.4
The baptism-sacristy, the kloster space, the sacristy and the storages necessary for the main room are located in the ring encircling the main room.

4.4.1
The main entrance to the upper level is on the northwestern side of the room. A stairway leads to a platform in front of delicate classical pronaos.
The stairs and pronaos define a ritual sequence for the parish entering the church.

4.4.2
Couples stand on the platform when exiting the church after marriages. The classical façade of the church behind them in the wedding photos.

4.2.1
The entrance to the lower level is immediately accessible from the parking.

4.3
The lower level is divided in two by a large central entrance/church market, connecting all other functions.

4.3.1
The chapel, the children chapel, the community room and the meeting/dining are all directly connected to the entrance/church market and compose a complex series of public spaces offering different light conditions. Two entrances are located at the opposite ends of the entrance/church market.

4.3.1.1
Storages and services are located at the centre of the building, leaving offices and classrooms in the external ring, in direct contact with the landscape.

4.5
The choir, the organ and the pulpit are at the gallery level. The gallery can host lights and audio-visual applications.

4.5.1
The three levels are connected by a large stair and a comfortable elevator immediately left of the main entrance.
 4.5.1.1
A minor stair connects the sacristy room and the sacristy and the sacristy and the pulpit.

5.
The church is entirely made of wood. A reticular structure composed of radial beams made of glued lamellate wood beams defines the outside and inside domes. The domes are covered with birch shingles (outside) and plastered (inside).
Pavements and furniture are in birch wood as well.

5.1
The reticular structure in lamellate wood supports the load-bearing internal dome and the relative exterior dome.

5.1.1
The structure works both as arch and as reticular beam, so reducing the weight and the cost of the system.

6.
The Hatlehol church reduces construction costs by concentrating all functions inside of a single building. This choice reduces maintenance costs as well.
The heating of the lower part of the building helps heating the large main room in the celebration days. Pavement heating installations fit to this particular task.
Installations are included in the walls.

7.
The furniture of the church is humble. According to the sober evangelic tradition, no unnecessary ostentation.

7.1
The church collects furniture and objects coming from the local craftsman’s tradition. The building acts as a small museum of the local religious community. Chairs, altars, cups, chandeliers are simple, solid, everyday objects, coming from the Alesund region.

7.1.1
The white background gives importance to these simple objects.

7.1.1.1
There is no fixed furniture.

8.
On the internal dome there is a large graphite drawing.
The drawing represents clouds.
8.1
The drawing is first made on paper, then digitalized and reproduced on the inside of the dome.

by BAUKUH

Emese's proposal for a hrinostatic room (with the second and approved one)

2009-12-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

old (unbuilt) project

2009-11-23T03:32:00.000-08:00

house in calan - 9

2009-11-18T23:55:00.000-08:00

Pictures made by ing. Udrea.

ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT ARCHITECTS

2009-11-17T02:47:00.000-08:00

I believe that as architects, most of us, have a specific, determined and sometimes narrow perspective over what we call architecture. This perception is nowadays influenced by issues like business, trends, prestige or estethics. Further more, we are promoting and sometimes imposing our vision on society, with a strog and authorized voice, forgetting or without knowing that we are involved in designing only 10% (some critics believe that the percent is much smaller) of the dwellings that are built around the globe. A problem of quantity but what are the 90% of the built dwelling? Who built them and how?

Around those questions was organized in 1964, an exhibition in MOMA, New York: Architecture Without Architects: a short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture by Bernard Rudofsky.
It was him who focused on the anonymous builders and on what we call vernacular architecture.
The term vernacular was brought into the English language from the latin vernaculus, meaning domestic, local. Rudofsky who put it in relation with architecture, defining vernacular architecture.
The term is used to caractherize the local architecture, the architecture wich uses local resurces and traditions and wich addresses to local needs. Vernacular architecture is not used to define the traditional architecture wich may or may not include polite architecture.
The main goal of the travels Rudofsky has made during his whole life is the understanding of the vernacular architecture, the architecture that “is not just a matter of technology and aesthetics but the frame for a way of life”. “Bernard Rudofsky was neither an architect nor a theorist in the ususal sense. His architectural output was generally considered to be too limited to be featured in any compendium encompassing the history of 20th century architecture, and his books were not considered scholarly enough for the academic establishment.” (1) Despite this, Rudofsky’s studies are still actual; his holistic approach is still valid , beacause even today, there is not a clear way of how to study the vernacular, as Paul Oliver points out: “There is no clearly defined and specialized dicipline for the study of the dwellings or the larger compass of vernacular architecture” and one of the major problems is “the lack of a common graphic language or even a technical one (all professions being inclined to develop their own specialized jargon).”(2)

Born in Moravia in 1905, Rudofsky lived in Vienna from 1906 until 1932, where he moved in southern Italy. “My native land, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was a pastiche of a dozen nations, each with its separate language, and the native architecture was just as diversified.” (3) From the viennese years he will preserved, like Adolf Loos, Oskar Srtand or Josef Frank, “ the specifically Austrian skepticism toward the dogmas of the modernist and a mistrust of all forms of change introduced under the guise of the progress.” (4)
He began to question the contemporan conventions that have a direct influence over the environment of the man, and most important, over the human bodies: “to him, people in Western society followed conventions in clothing, shoewear, or food only beacause they have accepted the advertising messages created by companies that sold the commodities.” (6) The life of the modern man is built around the images of an ideal life: “He does not know what to look for in a house except improvements wich, like a Will-o'-the-wisp are forewer receding.” To this modern narcissistic society, in love with images, and allways in a state of change, Rudofsky opposes the comfortable life, a "healthy and happy life" as an "alternative to the modern life".
The comfort is one of Rudofsky's key concepts; he discovered (and experienced) it during his years he spent in the Mediterranean area. It was here where he (re-)discovered the ancient rituals of the house (bathing, eating, dressing), still preserved in this area. He experienced them and promote them in his theoretical work : “The so called comfort in the Italian house does not only lie in the way everything meets the demands, needs and comforts our domestic life, but also the organization of the services. The typical comfort lies in something higher - namely, that we accord our thoughts the right dimensions in the architecture, promoting our healthy lifestyle with it’s simple elegance...And there lies the entire sense of the beautiful Italian word CONFORTO.” (6)
I't interesting to see Rudofsky's search for the ideal home; basicaly, most of his houses (built or unbuilt) are based around his concepts and spatialy developed around a courtyard: “ like the ancient Greeks or Romans, Rudofsky certainly saw the patio (or atrium) as a true outdoor living room. Only in a hortus conclusus it is possible to enjoy contact with natural elements such as sun, light, air, and perhaps water while remaining in a private space.” (7) Of course the courtyard is very practical (can be a natural cooler in the dense built areas) or it can be seen as a part of the Mediterranean typology and Rudofsky is known for his interest in ecollogy, urbanism or local traditions. I think his courtyard houses are mainly spatial built shelters with a protected functional core - the courtyard, the main room. From this point of view I understant his concept of comfort, comfortable:
The origin is a Latin word , made from two words: com ("together, together with") + fortis ("strong"). It’s interesting if we analyses the cognates of the dhur/dhwer, another Indo-European word, that includes door (eng.), tür (door - germ.) or dvaar (door -sanskrit), dur (hard, resistant -rom.), duro (hard, resistant -it.), but also dvora (old slavic) wich means court, courtyard.
The ideea of a place that provides you strength is analyzed by C.G. Jung when he reffers to the derivations of the indo-european root velu, vel with the meaning of encircling, surrounding, turning. In direct relation with this is verstehen (germ. - to sorround a thing, to understand); comprehendre (to understand, but also to contain) is a word wich has similar characteristics.(8) This ancient way of understanding the (built and unbuilt) world and identifying with it - somehow similar with Rudofsky’s holistic approach - through successive layers is still found in traditional cultures ( for example in the Dogon culture: basket-house-village-world).
Rudofsky’s focus upon the rituals of the religions of the Mother brings into conflict with the axial religions. For him “disorientation and dispersion could be combated by restoring a meaning almost a certain sacredness, to everyday gestures”, but “ it’s important to shed the Judeo-Christian guilt that can accompany any attentiveness to one’s needs; there is no reason to be afraid of conferring a sensual value upon material life, nur of taking advantage of rituals related to the household and the body as connvivial social occasions.”(9) For Rudofsky the moral was synonymous with discomfort - “even the very first people had their pleasure in the body ruined by commandments.”
Incidentally or not many of his searchs took place in the Mediterranean Basin, an area that still preserves traces of the pre-Indo-European Europe, the source of the" stil unspoiled way of dwelling and living”; “the Mediterranean taught Rudofsky, Rudofsky taught me” said Gio Ponti.

Rudofsky’s work do not focus on systemic-social issues; but even they are exterior to his shelter, their importance can not be ignored. From this point of view, I see Rudofsky’s rejection of the normative, an attitude that make him a marginal and a profet of the counterculture. His rejection can also be understood as a opposition to the system established by the relations of power, system that is ultimately based on the human body - an this is why his work can be seen as a resistance of the body “in face of the normative”. (10)
I think here is the key to understand the actuality of Bernard Rudofsky. Not so much in fashion, in architecture or in anthropology. He doesn’t give direct answers to specific problems; for example his bathig rituals have nothing in common with the population of the slum dwellings and their lack of water.(11) His search is not a specialized search, his search is a search for understanding - understanding of the human nature.

1. Monika Platzer, Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky - Introduction, edited by Architekturzentrum Wien and Getty Research Institute Los Angeles
2. Paul Oliver, Dwellings, Phaidon 2003
3. Bernard Rudofsky - lecture, Copenhagen, 17 February 1975
4. Monika Platzer (see note 2, above)
5. Wim de Witt, Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky - Rudofsky’s Discomfort: A Passion for Travel, edited by Architekturzentrum Wien and Getty Research Institute Los Angeles
6. Gio Ponti, La Casa all’italiana, Domus 1, January 1928
7. Andrea Bocco Guarneri, Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky - The Art of Dwelling, edited by Architekturzentrum Wien and Getty Research Institute Los Angeles
8. C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, second edition, 1951
9. Andrea Bocco Guarneri (see note 6, above)
10. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Gallimard, 1975.
On the Foucault-Habermas dispute over the normative see Laura Hengelhol, From the Body Problematic: Political Imagination In Kant and Foucault
11. See “How to flush a toilet without water?” in Guy Battle, Sustainable Cities from The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, Phaidon 2007

On Certainty

2009-11-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

“ We just do not see how very specialized the use of I know is.” L. Wittgestein, On Certainty

LOVE

2009-11-05T05:04:00.000-08:00

private club

2009-11-01T09:12:00.001-08:00

Delta

2009-11-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

IMDB

C House (and offices) - lonely basement and above

2009-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

ivanescu's intervention

2009-10-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

Dupa-amiaza unui tortionar

2009-10-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

Wonderful scene depicting the traditional (or/and nowadays) relation between the Romanians and the Romanian state.

IMDB

sauna

2009-10-07T10:28:00.001-07:00

antichrist

2009-09-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Superb movie.

retezat/ bucura

2009-09-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

house in calan -8

2009-09-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Courtyards and Courtesies (just words)

2009-09-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

news from calan - 7

2009-09-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Pictures made by ing. Udrea.

C House (and offices) - ideas

2009-09-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

the exchange

2009-09-07T11:12:00.001-07:00

L'échange - The exchange from Baptiste Sola on Vimeo.

pao (1)day

2009-09-02T01:47:00.001-07:00

socolari-potoc trip

2009-09-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

a mirror mirroring a mirror

2009-08-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

This is something we've been working on.

Gomorra

2009-08-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

Gomorra - a 2008 italian film on mafia. Looks real.
I became more curious about the male/ female aggressivity and the relation with the social and built environment - specially in the mediteran area.

house in deta - 1

2009-08-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

old ideas

2009-08-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

Ideas for a (bed)room and a kitchen. 2007 or 2008. Or both.

Benedictin Monastery's church

2009-08-18T01:08:00.000-07:00

3 movies on the same church... incredible modern work from Chile by Martin Correa and Gabriel Guarda. Flickr photos here and there. Then, plans and more...

Interview

2009-08-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

Interview with Andrei Plesu (in romanian).

Svrzina Kuca (Svrzo's House)

2009-08-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

Gazi Husrev Bey Complex

2009-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Gazi Husrev Mosque from Sarajevo was built in 1531 by Ajem Esir Ali, a persian architect, who was the chief architect of Istambul at that time. The complex included beside the mosque, a madrasa, Quranic school, khanqah, soup kitchen, hospice, library, khan, bazaar, public baths and two tombs.
The portic is fabulous. Not public - is inside the mosque's walls- in the open space infront of the mosque you can feel how functions a traditional balkanic city.
The mosque was damaged in the Bosnian inter-ethnic war of 1992-1995 and renovation followed. Professor Michael A. Sells has accused the renovators (whose money came in large part from Saudi Arabia) of Wahhabizing the mosque. It is currently being restored to its original state by a local team of conservation specialists guided by Nihad Cengic.
links:

Islamists Gain Ground in Sarajevo
Wahhabism, Buddhism, Balkan Mosques
Interview with Professor Kemal Zukic

Notes on Lessons

2009-08-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

Bernard Rudofsky :

"We shouldn't live practically, we should live pleasurably; we should feel a bound with the things in the home. The dwelling must suit the character of its occupants and that's the architect sole task."
"The house has to become again what was in the past: an instrument for living, instead a machine for living. This would make all the difference in our conduct of life - like the difference between playing a violin and playing a jukebox."
" I believe that in arts and in architecture the sensual pleasures should come before the intelectual ones."
"What we need is not a new technology but a new way of living."

" How can one take profesional aestheticians or art and architectural critics seriously when one sees what they wear on their feet?"

"Modern man doesn't bathe anymore; he washes himself."
"Even the very first people had their pleasure in the body ruined by commandments."
"I come from a country notorius for its frivolity and therefore I do not share the cheerless outlook of Puritans and Protestants."
"When the Prussians speak of a situation as "serious but not desperate", the Viennese say the situation is "desperate but nor serious"."

related:
life
way of living/ way of dwelling/lebensweise/ lebensreform (germ.)
knowledge
moral
comfort/ conforto(it.)
discomfort/ uncomfortable
nomad
explore
tradition
new
modern

house in calan - 6

2009-07-31T01:27:00.001-07:00

"We're not experts, neither you and neither am I" - worker

some thoughts on freedom and crisis

2009-07-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

Milton Friedman:

"The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country."

"Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery."

"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."

"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, "How do you hold down government spending?" Government spending now amounts to close to 40% of national income not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes."

"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income."

"Governments never learn. Only people learn."

Freidorf Market

2009-07-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

The role of the wall

2009-07-15T06:59:00.000-07:00

"The role of the wall is now only to ward off rain, cold and heat. " (Gropius)

Sou Fujimoto's Campus

2009-07-13T00:10:00.000-07:00

Sou Fujimoto Architects / Date Psychiatric Campus from 0300TV on Vimeo.

High Line

2009-07-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

High Line Design HD from sha on Vimeo.

Interview

2009-07-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

Interview with Neagu Djuvara - in romanian (Interviu cu Neagu Djuvara).
Hard, harsh (and maybe untrue) opinion over Turkey's accesion in the EU.

house in calan - 5

2009-07-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

View from the street.

Il Divo

2009-06-25T04:26:00.000-07:00

"I recognize my limits but when I look around I realise I am not living exactly in a world of giants."(Giulio Andreotti )
"I should be making plans more for the next world than for this one."(Giulio Andreotti )
"You sin in thinking bad about people - but, often, you guess right." (Giulio Andreotti )
"l potere logora." ( Giancarlo Pajetta) or"Il potere logora chi non ce l'ha." (Giulio Andreotti )

house in calan - 4

2009-06-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

Punta della Dogana

2009-06-10T04:42:00.000-07:00

The Querini Stampalia Garden

2009-05-20T01:18:00.000-07:00

Querini Stampalia' s Garden in Venice, by Carlo Scarpa.

cube;s opening

2009-05-18T08:04:00.001-07:00

photos by burghos.

cube - last day before the opening

2009-05-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

cube, burghos and kaynemaile

2009-05-17T08:44:00.000-07:00