Art visual np2

benandsebastian We work out of a need to explore, probe and question the world around us – through architectural constructions. For us, architecture is not only the buildings we inhabit, but also a way of thinking that can be explored through the spaces of mythical stories, utopian models, economic systems and power relations. We create highly-crafted spatial constructions as a way of questioning our own assumptions about how we inhabit the world around us, inviting others in to question theirs too. Working through a process of serious play, we tackle our interests head-on and are not afraid to explore the dysfunctional and unfashionable. Our recent work has taken inspiration from mediaeval rituals, romantic ruins, office politics and a Manhattan urban legend. We develop our work through a process of continual ‘story-telling’. Each project is built on stories whose endings have not yet been written. Our works are not ‘one-liners’, but inspire curiosity exactly because they beg for mult...

Usman Haque In the last year or so I've become once again very interested in non-monetary economies (1) and, more specifically, in twisting prisoner's dilemma (2) for useful and practical outcomes. This means I've been looking at cooperative systems and altruism (in an economic sense (3)) and how offering the option to be non-altruistic has, anecdotally, often seemed to be more successful in encouraging altruistic behaviour than systems in which the only other option is to *opt out*. Our consumption (and creation) of energy is of course particularly poignant in these kinds of system. More specifically, with respect to conversations and 'debate' around climate change and the environmental crisis, I've become particularly interested in how members of the public can themselves contribute to the evidence gathering process; how people can convince themselves of what's going on, so that they don't have to rely on merely selecting which authority figure (scien...

Bob Sheil ( Director of Technology and Computing at Bartlett) PROTOARCHITECTURE In the post digital age, how we design has become of equal importance as to what we design. Never before have there been so many, or so varied, techniques and methods at our disposal each with the capacity to leap frontiers previously only imagined. Designing has become a liquid discipline pouring into domains for centuries the prime possession of others such as mathematicians, neurologists, geneticists, artists and manufacturers. Post digital designers more often design by manipulation than by singularity, and what is designed has become more curious, intuitive, speculative and experimental. Each of these new techniques vies for dominance amongst the cut throat trenches of advanced tooling. They battle to outdo one another, predict the unpredictable, promise the unattainable, materialize the immaterial, solve all our problems, and so dazzle the beholder that all previous paths to architectural wonderment ...

(sorry no English translation this time...) Romaric Vinet-Kammerer WUNDERKAMMER « Imaginez les relevés spatiaux futurs, ceux qu’établiront les générations à venir pour tenter de comprendre où se concentrait l’habitat de leurs ancêtres, comment ils dessinaient les plans de leurs cités, pourquoi ils choisissaient ce delta, ce plateau ou cette baie pour se regrouper, bâtir des villes et les nommer… » Les visiteurs défilent. Certains ne font qu’approcher des hauts rideaux qui séparent le pavillon du parc, d’autres pénétrent dans l’obscurité, y trouvent une place et s’y installent. « … et lorsque les climats auront changé, à partir de quoi redessineront-elles les paysages dans lesquels nous vivions, la végétation qui peuplait nos villes et les environnait ? Quand nos intérieurs auront disparu, qu’il restera très peu d’informations sur notre quotidien et moins encore sur nos vies intimes, certains tenteront d’écrire l’histoire des mutations de nos grandes métropoles et c...

Norbert Palz SUPER ROMANCE To write about a future vision of Architecture asks for a systematic concept on how we can blend competing interests and possibilities, be they of technological, economical or social nature, into a building practice. I don´t have this systematic idea that is applicable for all cases at hand. I mostly work on "Wicked Problems" as Donald Schoen would call them. These are problems that mutate while you work on them. Maybe I am the wrong one to ask to write a manifest. I am not Marinetti. But I know what I strive for. I will try to explain why I am doing what I am doing through an example. A couple of years ago I was visiting the site of the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona with a group of students. I separated myself from the rest to experience the building alone. The site was under full production with stonemasons working and groups of tourists running through the aisles. I was going down to the basement, passing screens that showed some CATIA ...

Pedro Gadanho LINKING BEYOND ARCHITECTURE - AN HYPERACTIVE MANIFESTO A personal manifesto must start with a personal statement. Mine is this: I’ve become addicted to hypertext . And this is the magnifying lens through which I look at architecture’s augmented reality . With architecture being a cultural toolkit for permanently re-dressing the builtscape that surround us , today’s architecture can only go beyond itself. Architecture is like the man whose head expanded . Architecture is not only dependent , nor otherwise oriented . As it asks for its own expanded field , architecture rejects the idea of its own autonomy . I claimed for the interdisciplinary before it became mainstream ; I advocated diversity when it wasn’t yet such a daily fix ; I’ve investigated architecture as urban practice , as open-source , and as performance ... With ideology gone I reflected upon resistance and the ultimate incarnation of Marxism . But after all that jazz how can one devise a non- retroactive...

Eduardo McIntosh (picture Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi) THE ARCHITECTURE OF DECEIT Setting the scene The Law of (-1) There is sometimes a minuscule flame burning inside people who do Architecture. The feeling in the back of their brain that something is terribly wrong with the world. A “splinter in their minds”. For many this feeling of wrong-ness, dissatisfaction and helplessness can never be explained, for its nature is concealed by The Law of (-1). We need to understand that life is WAR, that we all are driven by the will to power, and that the lofty ideals of the “magnanimous human spirit”: equality, justice, freedom, etc are in practical terms absent from us, for we are not human spirits, we are flesh and bone. Quoting from Nietzsche's Beyond good and Evil: "Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant—not from any morality or...

Emmanuel Dupont & Colin Priest (picture The rise of Neptune Colin Priest/Greg Andrews -Nuit sans Opéra) The Event MANIFESTO In a world accented by youth and speed, edges rather than content are the physical reality. Within those, human relationships make and un-make. Collaborating is the issue. Knowing and arguing your position is another. Hard and soft matters as well as nothingness may hook, plant and position a place but the challenge of contemporary architecture is to get up close and personal to people not conceptually or physically but in a way to sustain opportunity across generations. Why care about form that will suit no-body? Slow down, be selective. Forget the single function if everything else is multi-platform. Reconsider a sensitive adventure beyond efficient manufacture and towards an agile assembly evolution. What if we cared more about time? Working the instant, the long term, the short term and the structure that makes any event magical (or any other basic terms ...

Vito Acconci (for Iconeye ) A tale of two or more architectures (An architecture of fairy tales) It is the best of architectural times, it is the worst of architectural times. It’s the age of lightness, of fluid architecture; it’s the age of architecture that’s only constructed into forms of fluidity and lightness that themselves remain solid and heavy. It’s the epoch of architecture that emerges and grows as a living creature; it’s the epoch of architecture that only looks as if it emerges and grows, that only looks like a living creature. It’s the era of sensual architecture; it’s the era of an architecture of visual affects. It’s the season of virtual architecture, science-fiction architecture; it’s the season of architecture that, when built, comes tumbling back down to earth. It’s the spring of code-writing and computational architecture; it’s the winter of generic architecture generated by and justified by numbers. We architects and designers practice operations now that will mak...

Marcos Cruz NEOPLASMATIC DESIGN The rapid development of innovative technological approaches in the realms of biology, microbiology, bio-technology, medicine and surgery are becoming of immense significance to architecture, demanding our attention due to their inevitable cultural, aesthetic and technical implications. Marcos Cruz investigates with students of Unit 20 at the Bartlett School of Architecture the impact of these emerging and progressive biological advances upon architectural and design practice. The unit has been looking at the current groundswell of experiments and creations that utilise digital design as a method to explore and manipulate actual biological material. A notion of design is emerging in which interdisciplinary work methodologies, traded between physicians, biologists and engineers, as well as artists and designers are increasingly occurring, giving rise to hybrid technologies, new materiality and hitherto unimaginable potentially living forms. The results of...

Victor Timofeev My vision of a near future metropolis is tied to my experience of growing up skateboarding the streets of New York. To a skateboarder, urban objects lose their immediate practical functions and are forced to behave as objects of pleasure, transforming a simple street into a funzone. In this way, a skateboarder's vision of the metropolis sees the dreams of the 60's era collectives such as Archigram and the Situationists come true. This logic led me to explore forms found from the street on paper, joining the lineage of fantastical, hypothetical and quasi-utopian architectural situations. With time, street objects were expanded to include all aspects of design that a normal inhabitant of a metropolis is confronted with on a daily basis, recycled and juggled in a non-sensical, humorous way. former post

Nic Clear (picture extracted from Unit 15's work by Ben Marzy) 1. The Architecture Of The Near Future will not be what you think it is going to be; it certainly wont be the big bright shiny world depicted in the pages of the architectural press and fostered by the architectural profession. The architecture of ‘bigness’ offers nothing but a vacuous future of shopping malls, cappuccino’s and antidepressants. 2. The Architecture Of The Near Future is not the architecture of the architectural establishment, which has proved itself to be intellectually and philosophically bankrupt, the corporate architectural complex does not produce a vision of the future only images of the future. 3. The Architecture Of The Near Future needs to re-capture the speculative and the imaginative aspirations of earlier utopian movements without becoming mired in the internecine squabbling and neurotic formalism that plagued such tendencies. 4. The Architecture Of The Near Future, if it is to su...

Teddy Cruz (for Iconeye ) In the context of a post 9-11 political equator that divides the world and the city between enclaves of mega wealth and sectors of poverty, urbanities of labour and surveillance, the formal and informal, our institutions of architecture have lost their socio-political relevance. Instead, the architecture avant-garde has become fully complicit with an international, neo-liberal project of privatisation and homogenisation, by camouflaging gentrification with a massive hyper aesthetic and formalist project. New experimental practices of intervention in the collective territory will emerge only from zones of conflict. The radicalisation of the local in order to generate new readings of the global is transforming the neighborhood – not the city – into the urban laboratory of the 21st century. The micro heterotopias emerging within small communities across the world, provoked by social emergency, are producing non-conforming spatial and ec...

Geoff Manaugh (for Iconeye ) If architects, critics, historians, bloggers, professors, journalists, construction magnates, city planners, etc really want to talk about architecture, in a way that has any meaning at all for anyone who actually lives in this world (and who doesn't teach at Columbia), then they need to talk about architecture in its every variation: whether a structure is real or not, built or not, famous or not, or even standing on the surface of the earth. Everything is relevant to architecture - from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel. There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure - but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and WG Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames - as well as in...

Guy Rottier MANIFESTO Architecture is being invented just like one invents a car or a plane. It has no boundaries and can be exported like any other creation. Sites never compelled a predetermined architecture. Architecture has no public interest but private, except for some public buildings or monuments. It is the synthesis of all arts including every discipline and in that regard it should be free and should only obey to technical constraints, security, hygiene and land planning. But Human beings have a different judgment. Deep frozen in the past and crazy about tradition, they added such useless constraints that any evolution seems to be impossible. Housing is yet the basis cell of any society is currently the only field where progress, especially in France, is almost impossible, in the global indifference of users and most of architects. French (original) version: MANIFESTE Toute réalisation créée par l’homme, sur terre, sous la mer ou dans l’espace est architecture. L’...

MANIFESTO MANIFESTO MANIFESTO MANIFESTO MANIFESTO October thematic will be tackling the way we (architects and others) are able to express a vision thanks to words via a manifesto. We thus proposed a certain amount of people we admire the work to write a small text expressing the involvement of their work. We don't have much answer yet but it will be probably coming during the month... We hope that hopefully it could create a very interesting corpus...