Art visual np2

Here is a (very) short film made by a young interesting office FREAKS freearchitects (Paris, FR), this movie as been made during august 2007 maybe we can qualified it as a "pre-crisis" work. so far even if the message of the video is pretty tough, the pictures are kind of enthusiastic!! Enjoy!

Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture is the final AA 1972 thesis of Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis . It elaborates a narrative of a walled city within London similarly to the Berlin situation at the time. This city, like West Berlin, is considered as a shelter that people access and thus become voluntary prisoners of architecture. The condition of the "liberty" here is paradoxically the imprisonment. Here is the text supplied by the MOMA which owns the original drawings: These drawings come from a series of eighteen drawings, watercolors, and collages called Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The dense pictographic storyboard reflects Koolhaas's earlier stints as journalist and screenwriter and is intended to be read simultaneously as a factual and a fictional scenario for the contemporary metropolis. The title of the project alludes to Cold War West Berlin, a restricted enclave encircled by a forb...

Our good friend Alexandre Pachiaudi is currently releasing on his blog Archiact , an excellent series of post about French artist Etienne Boulanger 's work. Several of his projects could be appropriate for this (UN)WALL theme but the "performance" Plug-in Berlin drew my attention even more than the others. Between 2001 and 2003, he reproduced what Georges Orwell did in 1929 and described in his Down and Out in Paris and London , which is a voluntary choice for a temporary precarious life. During those two years, Etienne Boulanger built several shelters "into" walls providing thus a perfect camouflage of his presence: " The time of occupation of each space is undetermined and varies depending on unpredictable external events (degradation, police, neighborhood). After having been inhabited, each shelter is abandoned as such on site. In two years, I used 17 interstices as shelters and 21 disused spaces as logistic support. This fragmentation of my environme...

La Periferia Domestica who is still following our theme of (UN)WALL just posted this amazing work of Dante Ferreri for Venice's Biennale 2007.

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...

La Periferia Domestica keeps helping boiteaoutils to gather architectural projects or art pieces that apply a process of unwalling and just posted this wonderful video (see below) called Moment. This work has been achieved by Japanese Berliner artist Yukihiro Taguchi ; it fragments the elements of the floor in order to create an important quantity of various spaces more or less sculptural, more or less functional.

One of the videos Ronald Rael (see previous post ) shows during his lecture(s) about the US/Mexican border is the one he found of two Americans and two Mexicans playing volleyball over the border (on the Western extremity of it). This game is a evanescent act of subversion of the wall and its apparent harmless aspect creates an ambiguity that the law did not incorporate. It therefore seems to me that it is an important symbolic act of resistance towards the wall in its absurdity.

A month ago, I wrote this article about the incredibly stupid project that Eric Owen Moss designed for this ridiculous competition organized by the NYTimes called A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs . I won't repeat how I feel about this crap (apparently I just did though), but the interesting thing is that Ronald Rael , architect and professor at Berkeley, contacted me and showed me the work he did in order to transform the US/Mexican border into an infrastructure that would at least provide jobs and energy out of this shameful wall. However I have a fundamental issue with such projects and we had this interesting discussion with Ronald which is extremely important for architects. I do believe that softening the border wall -especially by establishing important infrastructures instead- is the best way to ratify the wall and therefore to make it fully permanent. Ronald on the contrary believe that we have to deal with a factual reality and that we have to do our best to make i...

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.

Lebbeus Woods recently wrote a text called The Edge about the necessity of architects to work as tight rope walkers instead of working " within the boundaries of what they comfortably know and what others know, too ". As a metaphor, he used the magnificent transgression we already talked about ( here and here ) of Philippe Petit joining illegally the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Philippe Petit’s walk on a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, in August of 1974, tells us a lot about architecture and the edge. He and his team, who illegally penetrated the buildings’ security systems and rigged the wire, conceived the two towers as anchor points, stable and sure. Architecture, we believe, endures. Our lives continually moving within and around it are fleeting, ephemeral. It is a very great, but also instructive, irony that, in this case, the architecture did not endure. The towers were brought down by illegal ‘interventions’ differ...

This incredible tunnel house has been posted everywhere two years ago when it has been achieved by artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck in Houston. This installation evokes a black hole that absorbs the house's material from inside. People have then the opportunity to experience this vortex.

In several of her works, Rachel Whiteread is "unwalling" architecture by casting the negative of the wall i.e. the space framed by the walls. For House (1993), she casted an entire Victorian house in London printing all the details of the original walls in the concrete. She then destroyed them letting the concrete negative as a final result. For the Holocaust Monument (2000) in Vienna she metaphorically reproduced this process by casting an imaginary library. The books are thus appearing as the surface of the monument and the detail precision is such that the pages are actually visible. two last pictures: Joe Perez-Green