Art visual np2

French speakers (listeners) would be happy to know that the radiophonic program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance (on France Culture) just released five hours of discussions about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt mostly about Totalitarianism and the "banalization of evil". Eichman cannot be excused by his role in the Nazi bureaucracy nor can he be expelled from the man kind (which would be too easy for humans) but rather has to be put in front of his responsibilities, as a human who committed true horror.

This project has been posted by Lebbeus Woods on his blog a year and half ago and it certainly catch my interest for walls, borders and labyrinth. As a matter of fact, this project gathers those three typologies in one as a poetical response to the Bosnian war of 1992-93. Lebbeus Woods imagines this monumental wall all around Bosnia which does not forbid its entry but rather make it more difficult by the experience of this labyrinth. He narrates how this giant edifice would ultimately becomes a whole city (probably started by people who never found the exit). His text can be read on his blog but another explanatory paragraph deserve attention when Woods answers to a criticism of a comment posted on it: "You are certainly correct in saying that the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not as simple as my project seems to suggest. However, there were trench lines around Sarajevo, manned by the Bosnian army and Sarajevo citizens, and these prevented the Bosnian Serb military forces ...

picture: Gaza after the 2008 Israeli Siege. Getty Images Here is a small text I recently wrote about the notion of urbicide. It includes a digest of Eyal Weizman's lecture about Forrensic Architecture I had the chance to attend both in New York and in Bethlehem. Despite of the fact that this strategy has been always occurring in history, the notion of urbicide has been invented by the former Mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic after the wars of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1996. One could define it as the act of destroying buildings and cities that do not constitute any military targets. Urbicide is rather an act that is supposed to affect the very life of the population in such a way that war cannot be ignored by anybody. This technique is being used in symmetrical wars like the Second World War and the Blitz in England on the one hand and the systematic bombing of German cities by the allies on the other hand. However, urbicide is also fully present in asymmetrical wars with ...

Architecture of Aggression: Military architecture of two world wars is a very interesting book written by Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar in 1973 which proposes an inventory of military architecture during WWI and WWII according to their typology and location. The two example I chose here are camouflaged bunkers in the United Kingdom and a mobile sea fort also in the UK (the Maunsell Towers are obviously in this book as well --> see former article ).

After Barcelona, here I am, one day in Roma which apparently has some new surprises every time I visit it. La Fontana di Trevi by Nicola Salvi , despite a noisy popularity for the tourists, presents very interesting baroque details that directly talk to architecture. The fountain is made to appear as a building -since it is its basis- back to the natural state. The stone used for the building transforms itself in a performative way into the original rock it was (romantically) extracted from. The craft of this transformation is very well made and the transition between one another is thus extremely fluid. One can use this beautiful example in order to illustrate narration in architecture...

As short as great article on Deconcrete entitled Suspended Bivouac Shelters ... Also see BLDG BLOG 's last article about this strange Michigan triangle ... More articles very soon

Respectively in 5 Codes , War Against the Center and City of Quartz , Noam Chomsky , Peter Galison and Mike Davis bring other explanations about the creation of Suburbia than the most known one concerning the idea of an American visceral desire for land ownership. - In the following excerpt, Noam Chomsky evokes the 1940's General Motors, Firestone Rubber and Standart Oil California's conspiracy to buy and destroy the urban collective transportation system in order to make cars and oil as indispensable as they are today. This conspiracy was then followed and institutionally implemented by the Eisenhower Administration's National Interstate and Defense Highway Act in 1956 which was the first real step of what we nowadays call "urban spreading". Noam Chomsky: It [suburbia] was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate ...

The next Transit-City 's workshop will occur this Friday June 4th in the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris. The issue's topic Francois Bellanger proposes is: What if it was between 1910 and 1930 in Chicago that the XXIst century compact, fluid and complex city had been invented ? The guest will be Jean Castex who wrote a book entitled Chicago 1910-1930: Le chantier d'une ville moderne. More information on Transit-City's website .

I very recently wrote a short essay about the three notions of space conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Treatise of Nomadology (in A Thousand Plateaus) : the Striated, the Smooth and the Holey. The following text is only a part of this essay. It tries to articulate three historical examples already approached on boiteaoutils: Blanqui and his manual of urban modifications for the XIXth century French revolutions, the Casbah's guerrilla for the Algerian Independence in the 50's and the capture of the War Machine by the Israeli State. The act of striating space is fundamentally inherent to the birth of agriculture and therefore to property. Indeed, agriculture is the first act that brings value to the land and by this very fact is asking for a parcelization of it. Agriculture is also what brings a population to become sedentary and therefore to aggregate knowledge in the research of new tools. This process of innovation is called progress and is the bas...

picture: Illinois State Penitentiary Stateville 1916 Forms of Constraints: A History of Prison Architecture is a book written by Norman Johnston which investigates the physicality of prisons from middle age to the XXth century. It is very interesting, not only as an understanding of the retaliation institutions prison embodies but also because prisons represents the quintessence of authoritarian societies, one can very easily compare their plans with those of "normal" architecture and find a lot of similarities. Architecture is systematically used as an apparatus of control and the plan almost always expresses this dimension very clearly. Johnston Norman. FORMS OF CONSTRAINT. A history of prison architecture . Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003 Pentonville Prison London 1844 Moabit Prison Berlin 1844 Prision Modelo Madrid 1877 National Penitentiary Mexico City 1885 Maison de Force Ghent 1839 First Western Penitentiary Pittsburgh 1820 Eastern State Penitentiary P...

Marc-Antoine Mathieu is in my opinion the most interesting French graphic novels author. He succeeds in all of his work to re-create an absolute bureaucratic Kafkaian society with humor and intelligence. The graphic novel Dead Memory (yes it has been translated in English !)depicts a city that is subjected to the anonymous creation of huge walls blocking off its streets and composing a totally new labyrinthine space outside and inside the buildings. One could recall Terry Gilliam's Brazil (or in a less trivial way, Tzahal's siege of Nablus in 2002 ), when seing the comission of wall breaker who create some new streets within people's appartments. I think it is appropriate here to re-insert the text I translated from Auguste Blanqui who describe a guerrilla plan for French XIXth century revolutions: « L’attaque repoussée, il [l’officier] reprend et presse sans relâche la construction de la barricade en dépit des interruptions. Au besoin, des renforts arrivent. Cette besog...

I happened to see some pictures (via Archdaily ) from various pavilions' construction yesterday for Shanghai Expo 2010 and it made me recall when World Expos were actually synonym with architectural experiments and innovation. In 1958, Le Corbusier and Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion for Brussels' Expo In 1967, Montreal's Expo hosts various innovative buildings designed by Frei Otto (German Pavilion), Moshe Safdie (Habitat67) and Buckminster Fuller (Biosphere). In 1970, Kisho Kurokawa designed three buildings for Osaka's Expo as metabolist manifestos. Today, the French pavilion for Shanghai 2010 is pretty representative of the global quality of architecture (as far as the Expo is concerned but maybe also in general): it is drab, conventional and thinks it talks about sustainability because some plants grow (have been plugged) on it... I talk about the French one, but the others are not so interesting either... Heatherwick's British pavilion might be the...

Here is a 40 min long German (Austrian ?) documentary filmed in 1989 within the Kowloon Walled City (see all the previous posts about it 1 / 2 / 3 ). The density of this Hong Kong district - the highest in the world before it got destroyed in 1993- creates the feeling of an underground autarkic world, the quintessence of an heterotopia, with its protocols of entrance/exit, its superimposition of several worlds layers (see link 3) and its imaginary of freedom/danger within it.

In the last article, I was evoking this intuition I have about the best transgression of the wall being the fact of standing on it. Pretty stupidly, I did not recall immediately all those East and West Berliner on November 09th 1989 who exactly did that. The gesture there was not so much of crossing the wall but rather standing freely on it, on the very narrow part of Berlin that belong to both East and West.

In his Bunker Archeology (1975), Paul Virilio establishes an inventory of bunker typologies and tries to determine what the essence of those militaries architecture might be. The plans and sections inserted in the book illustrate spaces which are not anymore framed by walls as usual but rather spaces within the walls. The interior space is thus felt like tunnels and cavities inside a concrete mass, the wall itself. However those walls have an important characteristics which is that they are not anchored in the ground, allowing themselves to slightly move whenever a bombshell explode nearby. You can also read the two articles ( here and here ) we already released on boiteaoutils and t he one written by Geoff Manaugh for BLDGBLOG.