Featuring the work of Yasmine Abboud, Olympia Anesti, Nick Axel, Jacob Burns, Jesse Connuck, Rodrigo Delso Gutierrez, Yi-Hui Lin, Frank Mandell, Basima Sisemore, and Alan Yates.

The event of recognition in many ways is an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of a particular legal entity. As a precondition, recognition is also detection, identification. Lastly, the “re-” of recognition points to an act of translation by which things are thought differently.

This exhibition starts from these premises of recognition to unearth some of the conflicting sets of circumstances, decisions, controls and landscapes of the world we live in. The work presented seeks not to examine a common sense of spatial and political destabilization, but rather to initiate an engagement and re-evaluation, a recognition and re-cognition, with contemporary spatial politics.

“Home is a 3-year shelf stable pizza” by Jesse Connuck.

“Grounding Deregulation” by Nick Axel

By recognizing, we:
- Present Beirut’s contested history through the city’s structural rolling blackouts. Explore Thessaloniki’s social and architectural interface with the Roma.
- Expose the legal geography of industrial deregulation in the United States.
- Meditate on the effectivity of violence and the digital mediation of “terrorism.”
- Reflect on the relation between the home and war through military food rations.
- Frame in-vitro fertilization as a Palestinian movement of political resistance.
- Challenge the legitimacy of civil engineering metrics as a perceptive device
- Render the distinction between life and the circus unrecognizable.
- Reveal shifting axes of identity in facial recognition technology and Syrian militia defections.
- Use time variables to turn the infrastructure of urban environments over to its inhabitants.

/// Exhibition details:
re-cognitions
Centre for Research Architecture
MA Research Architecture 2013-2014 Exhibition

19-25 June. 10am-6pm daily

Richard Hoggard Building (RHB) 312
New Cross, London
SE14 6NW

/// Header image: Jacob Burns: “‘Everyone Can See the Fate of Spies”
/// You can follow all the projects and more info on re-cognitions FB event

Alain Pilote wrote on an article published in 1994 that reality —the environment— is sacrificed for the symbol – money. Searching alternatives to the ongoing capitalist system, it’s impossible no to think on how it leads and affects environmental issues. Oil, energy, water, and waste are conducted by economical forces, beyond its geopolitical, social, economic and infrastructural implications. The cycle of extraction, production and recycling has demonstrated to be a failed system and some of the worst environmental disasters in the past years are related with industrial models and the micro-politics of economic power. At this point and with the access to information and digital tools, the response to environmental issues have reached the masses to enable new models, ideas and innovative proposals. Thus, it’s worth to think which can be the architectural response to the emerging conditions presented by climate-changed terrains?

Utopie Dynamit, Gunter Rambow. MoMA Collection

The juror of this competition is Keller Easterling and is called Subtraction. Here you can read her competition brief:

Consider the pleasures of building removal. Whatever the prodigious efforts associated with erecting architecture, the art of causing it to disappear can be equally violent, compelling or satisfying. Methods for demolishing, imploding or otherwise subtracting building material are not among the essential skills imparted to architects in training. Believing building to be the primary constructive activity, the discipline has not institutionalized special studies of subtraction. In fact, for architects, building envelope is almost always the answer to any problem, and subtraction is often understood to be the preparation of a tabula rasa.

In the often indifferent ecologies of building subtraction, marketers, financial experts, planners and politicians man several different kinds of remote controls that can detonate building and landscape creating destruction and political disenfranchisement in ways that are only somewhat slower than warfare. This subtraction generally signals loss while accumulation or accretion generally signals growth. But every act of building is already an act of subtraction. Most buildings today are designed as repeatable spatial products with rapid cycles of obsolescence. Financial industries surround the seemingly static and durable building with a volatile balloon of inflating and deflating value, be it a small house, a massive sports stadium or a 4000-room casino. Populations migrate into and away from cities causing both rapid growth and rapid decline. Buildings subtract other building because they replace a previous structure but they can also, just by their often toxic presence, cause surrounding buildings and landscapes to tumble to the ground.

In the wake of recent crises, catastrophes and population shifts, as buildings turn over and radiate negativity, a significant portion of the heavy machinery used to construct buildings is also now busy taking them apart. Ruin and decay has its own pornography. Demolition has its own TV shows. Disassembly and teardown are now popular art forms. The newest approaches to building removal even appear to retract skyscrapers into the ground. Finally, it is easy to see, with half closed eyes, an accelerated time lapse, like harvest and cultivation, within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously built and unbuilt —an economy where subtraction is the other half of building.

Bringing its own aesthetic pleasures, subtraction tutors an enhanced repertoire of form-making and opens onto a redoubled territory of endeavor. Space making through clearing is one pleasure. Still, subtraction is not simply absence but a moment in a set of exchanges and advances, aggressions and attritions.

Subtraction.

Building subtraction, as a heavy industry and a design protocol, is an emergent lucrative enterprise, a source of employment and a political instrument of extrastate governance. A subtraction protocol might be appropriate in many parts of the world where, for instance, sprawling overdevelopment has attracted distended or failed markets, where development confronts environmental issues, where development would be wise to retreat from exhausted land or flood plains, or where special land preserves are valued for attributes that development disrupts.

A subtraction economy may mark the end of an era within which building is treated primarily as financial instrument. While there are elaborate schemes for manipulating the virtual values of buildings and landscapes —in real estate markets or carbon markets— there are fewer spatial variables of value. Materializing risks and rewards in a physical, spatial constructs, shares and mechanisms in an alternative portfolio of values can be traded in an parallel market. Active forms can be designed as spatial levers, ratchets or offsets in this market. These negotiations can stabilise, compete with or even overwhelm financial markets to grow, contract or erase development.

Financial systems are good at haphazardly deleting building and landscape, but since architects have been trained to make the building machine lurch forward, they may know something about how to put it into reverse.

/// More info about the Think Space Money—Environment Competition ‘Subtraction’, including deadlines and registration requirements, here.
/// Keller Easterling will be presenting the competition today Feb. 28th from 7pm CET live-streaming at www.think-space.org

Francesc Magrinyà wrote on his article “Inhabited Infrastructures: Plaça de les Glòries, an Urban Centrality?” that the Glòries flyover and its evolution is a paradigmatic case in the design of centralities. Andhe added that to this day, it is a space of unconscious experimentation.

Following the recent competition to design the public space at Plaça de les Glòries Catalans and the public presentation of the ten proposals, we want to revisit this interesting article first published on Quaderns #261 “After the Party”

Plaça de les Glòries, una centralitat urbana? by Quaderns

/// More info: Les Gloriès
/// Public presentation of the ten proposals and round table organized by ArquinFAD, COAC and Cambra d’empreses de serveis professionals a la construcció. More info, here.
/// Header image, pic from the cover of Quaderns #261 “After the Party” [fragment]. Photomontage by Adrià Goula.

Barcelona, 6 to 7 July 2013

Childhood and public spaces offers a series of perspectives and experiences on actual childhood space scenarios in the city.

An encounter with urban-design practice, educational experience and artistic methods are key aspects of this hands-on approach. It will be a forum allowing dialogue between international professionals from Germany, France, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Catalonia, and Brazil, taking the form of discussions that articulate the whole range of the topic under study, moderated through round-table talks and workshops. There will also be workshops that take us to actual spaces in Barcelona, surroundings that we can study with an ethnographic and play-oriented perspective, as well as taking part in a symbolic action in one of Barcelona’s public city squares. This action has been organized by the design and space-creation masters students of the UPC-CCCB.

REGISTRATION open at: www.rosasensat.org

ORGANIZERS Urbanitas Berlin-Barcelona, Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat
CONTRIBUTORS Goethe Institut Barcelona, Institut Francés Barcelona, CCCB, UPC School, Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya

/// On facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/538006039571175/
MORE INFO info@urbanitas.eu
LOCATION CosmoCaixa c. Isaac Newton 26, Bcn

PRICE
60 euros (including day expenses on July 6th)
40 euros ESTUDIANTES (including breakfast on July 6th)

Childhood and Public Space by Quaderns

Here is the video of the presentation:

In a back-to-back series of short presentations, [bracket] editorial advisors and contributors Neeraj Bhatia, Fionn Byrne, Michael Chen, Leigha Dennis, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Geoff Manaugh, and Chris Perry discussed some of the collection’s most innovative soft proposals—a diverse set of projects ranging from sonic urbanism to repurposed pay-and-display whose softness lies in the way that they propose “systems, networks, and technologies that are responsive, adaptable, scalable, non-linear, and multivalent.”

“Jujitsu Urbanism is an approach to contending with the potential of the contemporary city: an art of gentle energy redeployment.”

David Kohn, Jujitsu Urbanism

davidkohn.co.uk

Among the dangers of the architecture-fashion industry has been its anesthetizing effects on our collective cultural sensitivity to original thought and genuine architectural innovation. When the shock of the new is felt, it is often in obscure and marginalized contexts, and often resists easy categorization. In spite of this cultural condition, and the difficulty that it poses for the dissemination of deserving work from a range of emerging talents, architecture does emerge in new and stimulating varieties. And architecture persists as a vibrant cultural form through which actual innovation is still possible. No contemporary practice represents this perennial potential for the shock of the new through architectural innovation better than the trio of young Colombian architects practicing under the collective description “Paisajes Emergentes.”

The work of Paisajes Emergentes is embodied through an astonishing array of recent projects exhibiting fluency with a range of scales and subject matter. Their provocative appropriation of the culturally loaded term ‘paisajes’ to describe their practice signals their ambivalence regarding traditional professional role of the architect. It also points toward their literacy with international architectural culture and the recent recovery of landscape as a medium of design. Combined with the adjectival modifier ‘emergentes,’ their appropriation of landscape as a frame for their diverse body of work illustrates an appetite for addressing the ecological imperatives of contemporary design culture as well as the diverse array of international environments in which they find their work projected. As such, Paisajes Emergentes serves as an apt appellation for both the medium and message of the collective’s architectural aspirations that have as much to do with curating atmospheres as with constructing buildings.

Many of the young practice’s projects exhibit specifically horticultural or botanical strategies in the service of complex public realms. These projects typically resist easy identification with the traditional typological categories of landscape, urban design, or architecture. Rather, these projects more often conflate various aspects of these diverse disciplinary practices, in favor of a new hybrid form of work. This confluence of disciplinary commitments often reveals itself through robust representational strategies hacked from various architectural and landscape precedents. More often, it is revealed through the very subject matter and operating assumptions driving the particular design response on a given site. At its best this work simultaneously reveals aspects of a particular site and subject, while conjuring remote and fleeting environments and emotions.

The architectonic language and design sensibility of Paisajes Emergentes reveal a deep literacy with contemporary architectural culture, they are equally informed by the rising importance of environment as a category of architectural thought. In this sense the recent work of Paisajes Emergentes transcends Iberoamerican architectural precedents from late 90’s and early 00’s by pushing the limits of the architectural object to its extreme end conditions, into environments, experiences, or even atmospheres. Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes accomplish this through a close reading of the particular ecological or phenomenal contexts in which they are sited. While these effects can reveal themselves through architectural artifice, they are best described through that dated term landscape. While much of Iberian architectural culture (and its international diaspora) has been actively engaged in resisting the rise of landscape as a professional and cultural practice in recent years, Paisajes Emergentes have firmly declared their commitments to the messy and productive potentials of landscape in relation to architectural production. In so doing, they have not only offered us an example of genuine innovation and a whiff of the new, they have also made a generational and geographic stake in the ongoing cultural struggle to open architecture to its multiform and various ecological and urban associations.

Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes depend upon deep horticultural and botanical knowledge. Yet it would be a misreading of their work to take these projects for traditional landscape architecture with a focus on plant material as a medium of design. Rather these projects often illustrate an ambidextrous quality, equally fluent with landform and ecological process on the one hand as with architectonic language and spatial composition on the other. What these various methodological approaches often share is an interest in the specific media of atmosphere itself, water and air. In a diverse range of projects including the Jardin Botanico and their recently completed Piscinas complex both in Medellin, Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes build complex public realms through an obsession with the material and phenomenal properties of water. In this project the hydraulic logics, and experiential potential of liquid water as well as their ephemeral effects on light and air offer the primary operating systems of a complex refined public realm. Further afield, their recent competition entries for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador and the Venice Lagoon reveal an ongoing commitment to the various potentials of a hydrological urbanism. In Quito their proposal juxtaposes the reflectivity and endlessness of pools stretching to the horizon of an abandoned airfield with the reflective metallic surfaces of the airplanes that once occupied them. In contrast with the bright light, and clear blue of Quito, their Venice Lagoon project plumbs the murky impenetrable depths of a dark, dank, Venice. In both examples, the particular phenomenal and experiential qualities of the site are revealed through the most fundamental of elements, water. Equally these projects explore the associated experiential conditions of fecund humidity of luminous aridity, while constructing complex public venues through the ambient and atmospheric conditions attendant to water in its various states.

An equally significant line of investigation pursued by Paisajes Emergentes might be described by the term atmospherics. In pushing their architecture to the limits of the object, beyond the question of ground, into the realm of climate and humidity, the collaborative has developed an approach to pneumatics and aerial suspension. In a range of projects including their proposals for monumental totemic structures in New York or other North American cities, for Heathrow airport’s guerrilla decommissioning through balloons, and for the commemoration of communities impacted by a Ituango hydroelectric plant in their native Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes have proposed a new age of inflatables.

Through their projects, and the pursuit of an architecture beyond weight and mass, Paisajes Emergentes propose an architecture of atmospherics. In this realm, liquid water, water vapor, and ice emerge as primary representational media for a new form of public life. In this work the fleeting experiential qualities of air and water as seen through light are orchestrated much in the way that the sequential experience of space was orchestrated by traditional typologies and subjectivities of landscape architecture. In pursuing the ends of architecture, the work of Paisajes Emergentes exhibited here simultaneously transcend the limits of the architectural object, while renewing the cultural potential of architecture as a medium of genuine innovation. While this body of work is still emerging, the energy, ambition, and optimism of these projects suggest that an architecture of atmospherics may very well be an important way forward for Paisajes Emergentes and for design culture internationally.

Charles Waldheim
FAAR, John E. Irving Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

This text was originally published as part of the exhibition LIGA 02 Inundaciones/Floodings Paisajes Emergentes held at LIGA Espacio para arquitectura in Mexico City.

We would like to thank Charles Waldheim, Paisajes Emergentes, and LIGA/Productora for their permission to reprint the text.

With: Jordi Adell, Arquitectura-G, La Petita dimensió, David Sebastian + Gerard Puig