“A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components”.
-Gordon Matta-Clark

The work of Gordon Matta-Clark has been deeply documented in several museums and architecture centres, the way his work changed the meaning and scope of sculpture through architectural interventions has been an undeniable influence in architects and students. He worked mostly with ephemeral interventions on buildings through cuts and extractions on floors, walls and other structures, somehow showing the possibilities of descontructing reality by transforming our consciousness and the way we perceive our world.

When thinking about the power of representation as means of architectural thinking, the way that Matta-Clark transformed real buildings into scale models 1:1 by cutting its abandoned structures is at least, provocative, because he was reverting the process of our lineal way of thinking. As Louise Désy and Gwendolyn Owens points, he was clearly interested in the built environment with all its complexity and contradictions, not just in the buildings that he could artfully cut apart. This contradictions can also be understood as a kind of architectural dissidence, when practising what he called “Anarchitecture”.

Conical Intersect 6. From “Conical Intersect” París, France [1975]

Jean Baudrillard wrote on Symbolic Exchange and Death:

“The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetichism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of the degeneration and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.”

The strength of Baudrillard quote lies in the human capacity of transform reality into hyperrealism. In the same way that Lebbeus Woods wonders “To what extent is destruction necessary for creation?”, when looking at Matta-Clark “building cuts” we can recognize a similar question, a need to demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings. Darío Corbeira sumarizes this attitude at his book ¿Construir… o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon Matta-Clark

Matta-Clark’s architectural gestures had the potential to be statements against certain social conditions. While many architects felt that they could make a contribution to society through the structures they built, Matta-Clark felt that he himself could not alter the environment or make any significant change. His idea of Anarchitecture called for an anarchistic approach to architecture, marked physically by a process of destructuring, rather than by the creation of structure. It was thus his choice to focus on existing structures in neglected areas, to use the city’s abandoned buildings within which to execute his work.

Using his building cuts as his leitmotif, Matta-Clark tried to open a breach in the American capitalist system of the decade of the 1970s by inviting people to think about concepts such as private property, speculation, privacy, poverty, abandonment or isolation.

Circus 2. From “Circus-Caribbean Orange”, Chicago [1978]

At this point it’s also interesting to talk about entropy and this concept makes us think also on the work of Robert Smithson. While working with ruins, both of them contemplated new models of utopian design focusing in their state of deterioration, an state that can be irreversible as Smithson tried to demonstrate with his Map of Broken Clear Glass, because there’s no way you can really piece it back together again. On the exhibition Modernism as a Ruin. An Archaeology of the Present their work has been described with this words:

Smithson and Matta-Clark became deeply involved in the entropic ruinous state as proof of fleetingness. Nonetheless, Smithson also described the state of postindustrial architecture with the concept of reversed ruins, buildings which “rise into ruin before they are built”.

Matta-Clark’s work focused on a process which deals with the increase of entropy. “His cuttings stopped just short of realizing the potential entropy contained within a building; the cuts explored and displayed the structure, but did not allow the structure to pass beyond the point of irreversibility”, as Andreas Papadakis described it, a situation where the structure is shaken, but does not collapse. It is just pushed to the point where it becomes unsettling.

Map of Broken Clear Glass. Robert Smithson

Office Baroque, 5th Floor looking down. Anvers, Belgium [1977]

If the work of Matta-Clark is an object to be destroyed, as has been said, maybe we can talk here about some kind of violence implicit on his works. The 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality has driven artist and architects to ironize about time and space, and this cuts try to be a representation to expand the limits of what scares us most, a vision that can be found in the ruins and voids of this Anarchitecture. A sort of feeling captured at this part of Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Limits”:

“If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?”

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Recommended reading:

[1] The Interruptive Spaces of Gordon Matta-Clark by Eleni Axioti
[2] Gordon Matta-Clark at the Museum of Modern Art
[3] The Gordon Matta-Clark Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture by Louise Désy and Gwendolyn Owens

*All images courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona. MACBA

dpr-barcelona (http://www.dprbcn.wordpress.com) will go dark today on January 18, 2012 between 8AM and 8PM EST along with the official strike in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA] and PROTECT IP Act [PIPA]. The U.S. Congress is about to censor the Internet. We need to kill these bills to protect our rights to free speech, privacy and prosperity.

Read SOPA on OpenCongress · Read PIPA on OpenCongress

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H. Wijdeveld designed his project 15 Miles into the earth in 1944, a design for an international geological research centre in a shaft in the earth at a depth of 15 miles as part of his series of large-scale, utopian projects in which he was seeking for a new relationship between mankind, nature and culture, as the Netherlands Architecture Institute described his work. But it seems that this large-scale underground utopian projects are back, as we can see in some recent projects that are a manifestation of how cyclical our history is, no matter if we talk about economy, politics or in this case, architecture.

For his project Subterranea, architect Rick Gooding created more than 30 meticulous pencil drawings, each depicting an imaginary underground realm. Winding tunnels and labyrinthine passageways are rendered by hand, resolving into dense, intricate patterns. We can read at the Wedge Gallery:

In an era of digital representation, Gooding celebrates the precise and beautiful craft of manual drafting. He works without rulers or measuring devices and carefully constructs his drawings using the most basic architectural drafting tools: a straight edge, a 314 pencil, and an eraser and erasing shield. Gooding works exclusively in black and white. The simple palette occasionally produces Escher-esque qualities. Subversive flips of figure/ground and slips in optical logic confuse the readings of these rigorously constructed drawings.

Reading this, maybe we can think that Gooding’s eerie illustrations are a kind of manifesto not only on the validity of Utopias, but also on the way they are represented and communicated.

Subterranea by Rick Gooding. Courtesy of Woodbury University School of Architecture

Subterranea by Rick Gooding. Courtesy of Woodbury University School of Architecture

This kind of architectural proposals can also inspire comparisons to Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin work on the decade of 1980 for the group known as The Paper Architects. There has been a interest in the past years, between all the renderization of architecture on the fact of how the drawn work affects the course of architectural thinking. So maybe this relationship between drawing and utopias is not a coincidence, we can see through this subterranean examples, how drawing is used to express a philosophical gesture, a forward-thinking approach. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier wrote on the book Architectural representation and the perspective hinge:

Projective drawing need not to be a reductive device, a tool of prosaic substitution. Projection evokes temporality and boundaries. Defining the space between light and darkness, between the Beginning and the Beyond, it illuminates the space of culture, of our individual and collective existence.

From Raymund Abraham to Aldo Rossi, we have seen how utopias were expressed through the art of drawing. This is the same inspiration we found on the project Preserving the Erased: Didactic Architecture by Brandon Mosley, that we first found at BLDGBLOG. As Robert Smithson once proposed the land reclamation of the Bingham Copper Mining Pit now Mosley, motivated by “the inevitable nature that mining imposes upon the landscape, which left mountainous piles of toxic waste, vast underground voids and the imminent threat of subsidence”, proposes to use architecture as a didactic tool, a tool that can help to communicate that the memories of a place can be a reminder that the extraction of the earth’s resources carries with it repercussions that can be detrimental. The idea of an underground building to inhabitat abandoned mines or pits has been discussed here before, and we found Mosley’s project more than provocative on these speculations.

Preserving the Erased: Didactic Architecture by Brandon Mosley

Preserving the Erased: Didactic Architecture by Brandon Mosley

“Was I to believe him in earnest in his intention to penetrate to the centre of this massive globe? Had I been listening to the mad speculations of a lunatic, or to the scientific conclusions of a lofty genius? Where did truth stop? Where did error begin?”
- Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

The human fascination of going underground can be understood by reading Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the same fascination can be seen in some architectural projects such as the 65-storey building which plunges 300 metres below ground or the project Rhizome Tower, where architects intend to start the same travel that Verne proposed in 1864. The poetry behind this idea reminds us the Oxygen House by Douglas Darden, where the main objective was that the owner requested to be entombed in the house. To fulfill this requirement, Darden designed an underground house divide in two operations system:

During Life:
Operation I Visitor is screened by nurse.
Operation II Nurse releases facade, visitor ascend stairs.
Operation III Abraham [owner] receives visitor.
Operation IV Visitor descends by lift.

After Death:
Operation I Oxygen tent is dismantled. Abraham is wrapped in tent membrane.
Operation II Abraham’s body is removed and buried in base of lift.
Operation III Willow is up-rooted; replanted in drum base.
Operation IV Drum-torso is dismantled; relocated over well-spring.

Oxygen House by Douglas Darden

At his Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky wrote about our deepest toughts : “We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We’re acquiring a taste for it. Soon we’ll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write any more “from Underground”…”

Is it hand drawing the best way to express utopias? Maybe, when expressing our most profound desires and dreams, let’s call them utopias [or to be born from an idea, as Dostoyevsky wrote it], we don’t need to turn on the computer to render it. It’s enough to take a pencil and start digging… to scratch them out of our mind and the depths of our souls.

—–
Related info:

[1] The exhibition Subterranea: Drawings by Rick Gooding will be on exhition from January 10 to 28, 2012 at Woodbury School of Architecture’s WEDGE Gallery.
[2] Rick Gooding’s drawings also reminded us the work of Mathew Borrett
[3] Other project by Douglas Darden, The Clinic for Sleep Disorders

“The only perfection which modern civilisation achieves is mechanical; machines are magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is served by them isn’t magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more comely.”
- Karel Čapek, Letters from England [1925]

Are machines able to transmit emotions? This is the first thing that came to our mind while visiting The Circus of Suffering [El Circo de las Penas], an art-work by Antigua i Barbuda that they define as “a drama enacted by machines that show how the soul express itself by way of machines assembled from objects with a memory of other world”. Every machine we use —even the smallest one, leave some traces in our life; the continuous interaction between form and content has an emotional component. Sometimes, machines are a reference of our past and some other times, we build machines in an effort of save that past. In this context, Antigua i Barbuda created a fictional story based on the life of their main character João Siqueiros, who built a machine for cutting leather when he was a child.

As we can imagine, there’s not much information about the life of João Siqueiros. So, to research on his life and history, Antigua i Barbuda have used different sources of information, such as references to Siqueiros name in biographical studies, like Monturiol‘s memoirs or Karel Capek’s ‘Letters from England‘. And some other references has been taken from Siqueiros own philosophical reflections which includes machine’s designs and plans drawn by Siqueiros on the last twelve years of his life.

Some of the machines designed by Siqueiros and now constructed by Antigua i Barbuda are:

[1] The Machine that Measures Love

The Machine that Measures Love. Photo: dpr-barcelona

HEART

The heart beat lasts a second

Sixty beats the marathon runner

Eighty of the cuckolded accounting on Santiago Dantas Street

Hundred the opium smoker from Al Juripis

One hundred twenty Mario Andrade’s daughter who is virgin and loved

One hundred forty the son of Sa Carneiro when looking at the daughter of Mario Andrade

How much love fills a heartbeat?

How much love a systole looses?

What do we give when we give love?

What do we get when we are loved?

How can you transform love into numbers and quantity? Siqueiros proposed that by using an artificial heart it is possible to measure the amount of warmth that you inspire to others. Unable to support this thesis, the measuring system of this machine was defective and drove him into several depressions until he burned and destroyed the plans and abandoned the machine, until a collector discovered the signature of its creator.

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[2] The Memory Machine

The Memory Machine. Photo by Oscar de Paz. Source: Arts Santa Mònica

This machine was intended to provoke a response of the senses, understanding that memory was the sum of all our senses and works by producing subjective reconstructions of reality. When he built this machine, Siqueiros was trying to demonstrate that human memory is unreliable, pursuing a path of study that led him to the discovery of the Objective Emotion outlined in his manifesto Against Emotion.

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[3] The Crying Machine

The Crying Machine. Photo by Oscar de Paz. Source: Arts Santa Mònica

GUIDELINES FOR CRYING.

First guideline: look for a sad memory
If you don’t have one, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Second guideline: read a sad poem.
If you don’t feel a lump in the throat, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Third guideline: imagine the day of your dead.
If you feel immortal, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Fourth guideline (only when the other three has failed)
Cry because you have abandoned all hope of crying.

Siqueiros believes that the learning mechanisms are also mechanical. According to Antigua y Barbuda, Siqueiro designed this machine when he was fourty years old while traveling in South America. When he came back to Europe he sold the machine to the Munich’s Municipal Mortuory to be used at funerals. It was confiscated by the Nazis who considered it a degenerated machine.

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[4] The Essence of Music Machine

The Essence of Music Machine. Photo: dpr-barcelona

The Essence of Music Machine. Photo: dpr-barcelona

What is “the essence of music”? In words of John Cage, “the music’s essence was independent of its physical environment.” And following the same idea, for Siqueiros the relationship between music and the senses was the main task when he built a machine which converted musical notes into smells. Inspired by children with hearing problems, Siqueiros invented the machine to enable these children to discover and be moved by music in a new way.

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[5] The Soul of a Machine

The Soul of a Machine. Photo by Oscar de Paz. Source: Arts Santa Mònica

Even if it sounds as a contradiction, according to Antigua i Barbuda, Siqueiros was strongly opposed to the utilitarian conception of the machine, as nothing but an instrument of work. In their own words:

Rather than seeing the engineer as a Creator, a latter-day god able to breathe life into his constructions, he believed that matter already has a life of its own. Hegel, the rationalist philosopher, came to the conclusion that machines have no soul because they have no consciousness, and argued that consciousness of being and origin —in other words, the consciousness of a diving creator, or God— is the exclusive possession of civilized man.

Siqueiros built this machine to demonstrate that Hegel was wrong.

…………………………………………………………………………

This work of Antigua i Barbuda is an immersive travel on our early machine memories. As luthiers they have created a possible inventor with impossible machines to communicate our most intrinsic human feelings. While enjoying their work we could find similarities to  the work of musicians Cabo San Roque, a band dedicated to build new and unthinkable instruments using discarded washing machines and even a complete porduction line of an ancient cookie factory.

Música a Màquina. Cabo San Roque. The steel sleeve of the CD under oxidation process.

After visiting this mechanic circus of feelings it’s easier to remember that your trash is going to survive you. Being plastic or steely, our detritus will remain on the biosphere even after we are only a blurry memory. What if accepting such fact and start designing our stuff under this entropic approach. And like the luthier does while building its instrument, knowing that it will transcend the existence of the musician. The pieces from our trash will rearrange with nature in unknown patterns for us. They may pulse, move, scratch… and sometimes even feel things we are all too human to know.

“I love the landfill as you love cemeteries.

I am nothing more than a machine.

I also want to be scrapped

My blood along with lubricants and coolants,

let the flesh rot next to plastic and rubber.

My bones will turn into rods and camshafts

the heart will stop beating along with power supplies

and my brain will forget everything I was, everything I did”

Joao Siqueira (1850 -)

—–
Related links and info:

[1] The Circus of Suffering photo-set at Arts Santa Monica FB Page.
[2] The Circus of Suffering photo-set at dpr-barcelona Flickr
[3] Antigua i Barbuda web-site
[4] Poems originally in Catalan. Free translation by dpr-barcelona

“So no, I don’t accept that the future is over-sold : it’s productised an as a result it’s over constrained by our current ways of thinking and immediate practices …”
- Rachel Armstrong, letter to ARUP

The Venice Lagoon is the most important survivor of a system of estuarine lagoons that in Roman times extended from Ravenna north to Trieste. Later, it provided naturally protected conditions for the growth of the Venetian Republic and its maritime empire. In a context where the present aspect of the Lagoon is the result of human intervention, the need to provide Venice and other built-up areas in the lagoon with an effective sea defense system, has driven some experimental projects as MOSE Project or Paisajes Emergentes’ project “The Hours“.

Within all this references, the project Ecological Research & Macro Algae Monitoring Facility [North Arsenale, Venice] by Christopher Christophi reacts to recent pressures facing the Venetian Lagoon, specifically focusing on the increasing threat of invasive algae growth and the rising issues regarding the welfare of the lagoon, due to the nearing completion of the Lagoons MOSE flood gates.

Flood gates by Progetto Mose

Monitoring structures from the Macro Algae Monitoring Facility

Monitoring structures from the Macro Algae Monitoring Facility

Situated in the derelict naval warehouses at the North of Arsenale which face out onto the Lagoon, the project proposes a group of laboratories and structures that will monitor, analyse and understand algae growth and the welfare of the lagoon, whilst collecting and harvesting the existing crop for Bio-fuel to give back to the city. Christophi pointed:

These structures will stand alive, living symbiotically within their environment, by using the lagoons invasive species to drive the sustainability of the project whilst also creating a site specific architecture. The local living materials will create an interactive building which will evolve throughout the year reflecting the changing state of the lagoon and the Venetian climate.

Mimicking coral reefs

Grouped in colonies, corals secrete a stony cup of limestone around themselves as an exoskeleton thus formatting underwater structures called coral reefs. This layer is nothing more than Calcium Carbonate which is a common substance found in the rocks, but also in the snail shells and eggshells. Resembling this phenomena we should remark this interesting proposal for the Venice lagoon by Dr. Rachel Armstrong presented as a “remedial environmental intervention”. She has wrote about Venice environment in terms of an incredibly complex and precarious relationship, suffering with incredibly damage, desiccation, flooding through the aqua alta, chemical digestion and through the deposition of minerals unto the brickwork. And her response to this challenge is to create a kind of architecture that could be an interface between the artificial and synthetic technology, which can be able to provide a framework for new forms of interaction between nature and man structures.

Rachel Armstrong project for Venice

Armstrong’s project Architecture that Repairs Itself works with the idea that it is possible to grow an artificial reef by engineering photosensitive protocells with light aversive mechanism. As Dr. Armstrong explains, this process works because protocells respond very quickly to light with the right chemical ingredients in, moving away from the light filled canal and the lagoon and find a way into the darkened foundations underneath the city where then they create an artificial shell-like structure. This is not an exact science, it’s more like cooking, or like an agricultural practice, where the deposition needs to be farmed and engaged within a human context, not just left and walked away from and then expecting some kind of results in a number of decades. This approach mimicking nature shows glimpses of what future architectural practice would be. A task aware of living conditions around, in Armstrong case formed over time with the movements of the tides and currents. Architecture in symbiosis rather than isolated from it’s context.

Three interacting protocells. Via The Grayanat

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We like to see these new kind of proposals dealing with floods in cities like Venice, as manifestations of mental evolution regarding our position into Earth. Maybe the very deep reason of proposals such as Christophi and Armstrong, is nothing more than preparing our mental frame to envision a future of plenty connection with nature. Despite our anthropocentric cultural perceptions, we are nothing more that another agent into the complete biosphere system and the final destiny of our human achievements is to be absorbed and nurture the nature to come.

Jason de Caires Taylor. Vicissitudes. Grenada

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RECOMMENDED LINKS:
- On Evolution and Coral Reefs
- Videos on the behavior of protocells
- Dr. Rachel Armstrong on Facebook and Twitter
- On the artwork of Jason de Caires Taylor

From Dreamtigers [1964] by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland.

“History tells us how in that past time
When all things happened, real,
Imaginary, and dubious, a man
Conceived the unconscionable plan

Of making an abridgment of the universe
In a single book and with infinite zest
He towered his screed up, lofty and
Strenuous, polished it, spoke the final verse.

About to offer his thanks to fortune,
He lifted up his eyes and saw a burnished
Disc in the air and realized, stunned,
That somehow he had forgotten the moon.

The story I have told, although a tale,
Can represent the witching spell
So many of us use when at our craft
Of transmuting our life into words.

The essence is always lost. This is the one
Lay of every word about inspiration.
Nor will this summary of mine avoid it
About my long traffic with the moon.

Where I saw it first I could not tell,
If in an earlier heaven than the teaching
Of the Greek, or some evening when it was reaching
Over the patio fig tree and the well.

As we know, this life being mutable
Can be, among many things, so beautiful
Because it brings some afternoon, with her,
The chance to gaze at you, oh varying moon.

But more than moons of the night I can
Remember those in verse: like that enchanted
Dragon moon so horrible in the ballad,
And then Quevedo with his moon of blood.

Of another moon of blood and scarlet
John spoke in his book about the ferocious
Monsters and their revelries;
And other clear moons with a silver sheen.

Pythagoras (so tradition tells)
Wrote words of blood on a looking glass
That men could read with the naked eye
Reflected in that mirror in the sky.

And there’s the forest of iron where lurks
The enormous wolf whose destiny
Is to shatter the moon and do it to death
When the last dawn reddens the sea.

(Of this the prophetic North is aware
And how on that day the opened seas
Through all the world will be scoured by a ship
Fashioned of dead men’s nails.)

When in Geneva or Zurich fortune willed
That I should be a poet too,
I secretly assumed, as poets do,
The duty on me to define a moon.

Of faraway ivory, smoke, and the cold
Of snows were the moons that lit
My verses, which certainly were not fit
For the difficult honor of reaching print.

I thought of the poet as being that man
Who, like red Adam in Paradise,
Lays down for everything its precise
And exact and not-known name.

Ariosto taught me that in the shifting
Moon are the dreams, the ungraspable,
Time that is lost, the possible
Or the impossible, which are the same.

Apollodorus let me descry
The magical shade of triform Diana;
And Hugo gave me a golden sickle,
An Irishman, his tragic obscure moon.

And, while I sounded the depths of that mine
Of mythology’s moons, just here
At the turn of a corner I could see
The celestial moon of every day.

Among all words I knew there is one
With the power to record and re-present.
The secret, I see, is with humble intent
To use it simply. Moon.

Now I shall never dare to stain
Its pure appearing with a futile image;
I see it indecipherable and daily
And out of reach of my literature.

I know that the moon or the word moon
Is a letter that was created to share
In the complex scripture of that rare
Thing that we are, both manifold and one.

It is one of those symbols given to man
By fate or chance, which one day he
May use to write his own true name,
Uplifted in glory or in agony.”

—–

Thanks to Carl Douglas for the reference to Borges’ poem on his blog Diffusive Architectures

While our life on Earth seems to be more complicated every day, within financial, social and political conflicts all around, the magical connection of the Moon with our planet has been inspiration for musicians, scientist, and artists to design a micronation called Republic of the Moon. The idea of registering and reinterpreting an “object” which is 238,856 miles away has been almost immanent and now the Moon is conquering our imagination again. As we can read on Getting There, Being There:

Where is architecture in this extreme adventure? What are the implications for the design practice of “going there”, for the idea of what is indeed human, or what is essential to sustain life? And on the nearside, how does this affect our daily lives right here?

Our first attempts to understand Earth’s satellite were based on mapping it. The first serious attempts at naming the features of the Earth’s moon as seen through a telescope were made by Michel Florent van Langren in 1645, but it was with the work of Giovanni Riccioli when the moon craters were divided into a series of octants and grouped names by type regionally. The Moon mapping history passed through astronomer and scientists until the 1950s, when the soviets sent up Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and then, on October 7, 1959 when Luna 3 returned the first images of the hidden side of the Moon. In 1968 the Americans launched the lunar lander Surveyor 7, with a total of 21,091 pictures transmitted to Earth.

Maps of the Moon by Surveyor 7. Source: NASA

But what comes after that, once the Moon is mapped and known? The “Republic of the Moon” is one of the projects that uses all this information as a source of inspiration. The project moonmeme by Liliane Lijn reveals her concept to write on the Moon from the Earth using a laser beam. The word ‘SHE” is projected onto the surface of the moon, the meaning of this word being gradually transformed as the Moon moves through its phases.

Moondust. “I wish I could send you some,” says Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. Just a thimbleful scooped fresh off the lunar surface. “It’s amazing stuff.”
- Feel it—it’s soft like snow, yet strangely abrasive.
- Taste it—”not half bad,” according to Apollo 16 astronaut John Young.
- Sniff it—”it smells like spent gunpowder,” says Cernan.
How do you sniff moondust?
Every Apollo astronaut did it. They couldn’t touch their noses to the lunar surface. But, after every moonwalk, they would tramp the stuff back inside the lander. Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot of dust) made its way inside.*

WE COLONISED THE MOON is a project by Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser defined by the motto “Different planets. Same concept.” In their project Moon, Scratch & Sniff they used the Moondust experience quoted above as the main point to develop an image imprinted with the smell of the moon [as described by Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke] and designed as a scent by flavourist Steven Pearce at Omega Ingredients.

“It is really a strong smell. It has that taste – to me, gunpowder – and the smell of gunpowder, too.”
Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut, 1972

According to the book ‪The Moon: resources, future development, and settlement‬ by David G. Schrunk, there are two important reasons to explore the Moon. The first reason is to know more about the Moon itself. The second reason is to apply that knowledge to a useful purpose —the future colonization of the Moon. In our post Terra Luna Incognita we wonder if the idea of Moon colonization is an idea progress or simply the human ideal of power. In this context we want to bring the poetry behind Leonid Tishkov’s “Private Moon“, a visual poem telling the story of a man who met the Moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life. Tishkov’s metaphor refers to loneliness, an emotional state which means means that we exist, we are here, we are at the center of the universe and we are comparable to the Moon, to the other celestial bodies.

Among all the existing proposals for Moon settlements, from domed lunar cities to viral architecture, the most interesting fact of this Republic of the Moon is that combining lunar narratives, fantasies and futures, this proposed micronation reclaims the Moon for artists, idealists, and dreamers without any intention of colonization, they challenge utilitarian plans for lunar mines and military bases with artists’ imaginings and interventions. Nothing it’s impossible for imagination: want to spray your message or logo on the moon and capture video while flying past? You can do it. Want to buy Moon properties with 20% discount? You can do it. Want to send microorganisms to explore space life? You can do it.

DEEP DATA Prototype 1 by Andy Gracie

Moon Capital by M. Zhang

At this point, we want to mention the Moon Life project, which speculates on the possibility that humans will live in space in the future, pointing:

With the interdisciplinary character of the project [science, technology, art and design] in a futuristic context, Moon Life aims to initiate a new development in design culture. Is it possible to create a future-oriented, innovative impulse for instance in the same way that Constant’s New Babylon did in his time?

Now, what can we learn from all of this? Can we say we’re designing utopias for the future or are we getting closer to a reality checkpoint called Moon? The Lunar Journal, which presents news from the Moon and beyond everyday is an example that makes us think that we are closer to finally reach the ideal of occupying the Moon. In 2010, for the MOON CAPITAL Competition, SHIFTboston received several entries from different countries, proposing parks, stadiums, settlements and even energy collectors. In 1979 somebody proposed to have the 2020 Olympic Games on the Moon. On the book Return to the Moon, we can read:

One possible view of the future of humankind consists of a positive, expansive continuum —the ‘Star Treck’ vision. That view assumes a continuation of hundreds of thousands of years of human migration into new habitats and the perpetuation of our search for new opportunities, personal fulfillment and freedom.

Let’s think about it… is it worth to fund a Republic of the Moon? Maybe it’s enough to leave our political and economical reasons to conquer the Moon and, as The Arts Catalyst pointed, keep on dreaming with the stories created by writers, film-makers, and artists. And also try to find an answer to their question: “Can artists’ quixotic visions reconcile our romantic notions of the Moon with its colonized future, and help us to reimagine our relationship with our natural satellite in the new space age?”

—–
* From The Mysterious Smell of Moondust. NASA Science News

RECOMMENDED LINKS:
- Soundtrack. Lunar Tunes, a playlist by Mojo.
- Volume 25. Getting There Being There.
- Lost Astronaut on Facebook and Twitter
- Terra Luna Incognita. More reflections and thoughts on the Moon colonization.

“We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility”
- Malcolm Gladwell

In The Earth Has a Future, Steven Ian Dutch pointed:

A less conventional way to visualize geologic time is to peer into the future. Even short geologic time scales outrun our ability to project human history, whereas many geologic processes will have barely begun to produce visible changes.

In the context of such geologic processes and its relationship with man-made artificial natures, we find that the Norwegian power landscape is a formed by a prolific infrastructure of water tunnels, surface water collection systems, maintenance tunnels, and turbine halls, all acting as parts in hidden machine. And all this hidden hydrologic machines converts a natural resource to currency in an instant, as pointed by Paisajes Emergentes on their last workshop Plugged in Landscapes. We have published before some posts about the interest of Paisajes Emergentes on atmospheric conditions and geology, and this time we’re focusing on how human impacts already equal or surpass many natural processes and how we can react to this situation.

To understand all this facts, we’re going to review some of the students projects produced during the workshop.

[1] Stressure by Fredrik Blom

Frederik Blom started his project wondering if is our western epidemical stress a result of a greater agency, harvesting mankind of unknown goods. His research on clouds in mountainscape was based on the impact of the clouds in the Norwegian county of Telemark, which according to him is massive. In one condition the mountainous landscape appears as a tremendously giant hall in which people easily diminish into silence. The sky is lifted up by cloud pillars and mountain rock and the dynamic shape of clouds derives and varies by the movement of air by pressure and the topography of the land. One can even see how cloud shape by a mere group of spruce. He wrote:

When the pressure is high in one region, often due to the sun heating a earth surface, the air rises and moisture collects and appears visually as clouds at altitudes of colder air temperature. The clouds then flows to regions of lower pressure and fall closer to ground as their weight grows heavier than the air below. So the densest atmospherical experience occurs by low pressure.

Related with this atmospheric low pressure phenomena, hydroelectric power also derives from altering pressure. That’s why Blom decided to work with these two main issues and create a stressure observatory. If the pressure of the water in the hydroelectric power plant is somehow untouchable and easily turns too abstract to grasp, by using our human experience of dense weather, the mystic fact of the water pressure turning the turbine wheel can be communicate in an observatory.

Tunnel interior.

Isometric drawing: stressure observatory.

The results inside the stressure observatory is that when attendants pass through the observatory, a densification of the atmosphere continues until reaching a peak at the center section, from where it fades back to normal conditions. The invoking atmosphere is silent and stressure becomes a conception of our mental condition influenced by loads and limits.

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[2] Powergarden by Annabel Danson

The inspiration for Danson’s projects comes from her research on the western part of Telemark, which is known for it’s myserious, wet landscapes, resulting in ancient mythological folktales. This part of the Norwegian landscape was transformed in the early 1960s when the hydroelectric plants and dams were installed. On her project, these dams are composed of local materials, with consideration of the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. The powerplants have been neatly hidden and tucked away inside the mountain, creating a system of dark, underground tunnels that live their own lives without the common (wo)mans knowledge. As Dutch pointed, “Any attempt to predict technology far in advance is bound to be almost pure speculation…” And is even more interesting to speculate not only with technology, but with its relationship with nature and how we are working on the “architectural reconstruction of nature.”

The Power Garden

With this project Annabel Danson proposes a luminescent fungi, where lichen and moss will cover the walls and surface of the dark tunnel, gradually building up a layer of earth that provides a foundation for other plants.

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[3] Imaginary Landscape by Patrycja Perkiewicz

Did you noticed that you are surrounded by lines? Pipes, roads, taken everyday paths, flow, books, shelves.. Imagine the place with screams with geometrical shapes where you can become a part of the grid and feel the connection?

This is the first part of Perkiewicz’s statement for her project “Imaginary Landscapes”. In a context of 108 km of transfer tunnels and 32 dams, where more than 140 km of access roads where built to extend the service of hydroelectric power plants in Tokke area; she proposes to create a new landscape inspired by the rock joints, the energy transmitters and neurons connections.

We are not used to seeing massive constructions like dams and power plants, although they are part of our “natural” landscape, as power is an integral part of our existence: A symbiosis between man, machine and the natural world. When analyzing the technological presence of industrial landscapes in our lives, Perkiewicz wonders if maybe these modifications never took place —as all images are the products of how our
brain and its interpretation of electrical pulses?

If hydroelectric power is to become one of the major energy solutions, the interest and importance in those structures will rise, therefore places like Songa dam will become a part of a public experience in the future. So, the “Imaginary Landscapes” proposal is based in a new way of perceiving the dam’s scenery by using electrical output as a final product and main reason for water regulation in the area. Let’s say, energy that stimulates our senses and allows us to feel and better understand the existing conditions, in this case Songa dam and the tunnel connecting it with Trolldals dam. As a result, Patrycja Perkiewicz ads, “a journey that starts at Trollsdals dike and continues inside the tunnel will be different and very versatile personal experience for each and every visitor.” This is how she creates an imaginary landscape.

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We started quoting Steven Ian Dutch and now we can quote him again to start our final reflection:

Observers a million years hence will be able to look at our era in its geologic context. Will they see another great mass extinction as Leakey and Lewin [1996] warn? It is certainly within our power to create one. If we remain within the limits of environmental sustainability, what will future observers see?

All this questions are deeply related with the idea that humankind and its manifestations are part of nature, where natural and technological systems should coexist. Maybe the students of this workshop are just designing the post-natural future described by David Gissen on his article The Architectural Reconstruction of Nature, where he describes buildings with the forms of mountains and caverns; and structures that appear as rivers and clouds.

If Gissen wonders “What could be more modern than demonstrating the manipulation of time and nature in one project?”, here we can see that the differences between natural and technological landscapes are nothing more than cultural imagery. We want to end remembering what Lebbeus Woods wrote:

Space is essentially a mental construct.
We imagine space to be there, even if we experience it as a void,
an absence we cannot perceive.
If space is mental and non-material,
what does this say about our relationships to the world?

This kind of projects are a good reminder that now it’s time to re-think the relationship between us and the world, between nature and technology and all the question within our association with nature.

—–
Plugged in Landscapes | Workshop with Paisajes Emergentes.
September 2011

The course spent a weekend in and around Tokke and Vinje hydroelectric facilities mapping and evaluating the hidden infrastructure of these particular power landscapes. The workshop seeked to investigate the possibility of opening up the power landscape to the public in a way that both raises awareness of the hidden power infrastructure and its operations and of the dams as installed landscape.

Instructors: Luis Callejas, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Lukas Pauer.

Gilles Deleuze started his book Desert Islands with this quote:

Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor is it the only case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mythology makes science more vivid. Continental islands are accidental, derived islands [...] Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands.

We have seen a renewed interest on the concept of “island” during the past months. San Rocco Magazine dedicated its winter issue to this topic and Cabinet Magazine published Islands as its summer 2010 issue.

Maybe it’s due to urban sprawl that we feel there’s no more space on Earth and drives us to the idea of creating permanent dwellings at sea? It is the need for expand our livable areas? Jonathan Swift dreamed in 1726 with Laputa, a floating island with an adamantine base, which its inhabitants can maneuver in any direction. It has inspired different fictional works based on the idea of floating or flying islands, like L’Île à hélice by Jules Verne or in recent years, Star Wars’ Cloud City and Stargate Atlantis.

But what about architecture, cities, territories and islands?

“What is a more vibrant, energising icon for nature than the movement and constant renewal of water? It moves through, around, under, over and binds us together.”

The Pregnant Island by Naja & deOstos investigates the impact of large dams on minority communities in Brazil. As they point, the project is inspired by heartbreaking statistics about gender inequality, mass migration and loss of culture and a desire to explore the subject outside the problem-solving straitjacket, the project absorbs the factual and mixes it with mythical native tales.

We can read on the report TucuruÌ Hydropower Complex Brazil [page xiii]:

A number of displaced people, estimated to be around 3,700, colonised the myriad of islands that were formed by the hilltops when the reservoir was formed. There was no infrastructure on these islands and the lack of tenure was a disincentive for further improvements. In the summer the only water source available was the reservoir, even for drinking. The lack of sanitary infrastructure, clean drinking water and the use of smudge pots to ward off mosquitoes rendered them vulnerable to diseases such as malaria, diarrhoea, verminoses and respiratory problems. In addition these island dwellers were harassed by the former owners of these lands and by loggers.

With a critical approach and without avoiding political implications, the project rearticulates the island’s landscape created by the initial flooding of the Tucurui Dam reservoir. Within this context, the Pregnant Island merges existing ingredients within spatial narrative, a space that changes with time and is a multidimensional experiment depicting cultural and social ambiguities within the context of native communities.

Iceberg Autonomus. Source eVolo

There are other kind of speculative projects which proposes new ways of conquering the sea. The Iceberg Autonomy project is basically an enclave, a seascraper of suspended oil collectors and separators, described as “a new water-world in constant navigation”. The legal position of islands has been discussed frequently, just as Sina Najafi pointed, these outre-mer acquisitions tended to be spatially and legally marginal, regardless of their economic importance.

According to that, it’s easy to understand Akram Fahmi when he says about his projects that it is a drifting political territory of temporary autonomy occupied by a maritime mining and refining community that is searching and hunting for suspended oil plumes in the pelagic depths of our oceans —lost oil, forgotten and unclaimed through leakages, industrial run off, and devastating spillages.

Mostly all of the time, islands are related with geopolitical issues and some times described as enclaves, as they are places that are both “a part of, and apart from” national boundaries. In this context is also interesting to think which kind of inspiration drives us to build artificial islands? There are many kinds of abandoned islands, natural ones such as Hashima in Nagasaki or man made oil rigs [undoubtely a kind of island, according to its definition as a land mass surrounded by water] and ice islands. And instead of inhabiting them again, many artificial islands have been built in the last sixty years.

Northstar Island, an artificial island for oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea

Umihotaru. An artificial island

Godfrey Baldacchino pointed on his book Island Enclaves: Offshoring Strategies, Creative Governance, and Subnational Island Jurisdictions:

[Islands] represent quite fascinating examples of “the resourcefulness of jurisdiction”, illustrating the flexibility and tenacity of global capital, of federal politics, of smaller autonomous territories, as well as of sovereignity and the geography of power generally —and not necessarily in that order.

The direct relationship between politics and economical power has made that the creation of artificial islands and island-growing techniques became a new bussines model. Dirk de Meyer wrote about this on his essay Growing an Island: Okinotori and we can read at the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty [UNCLOS], that “artificial islands are not considered islands for purposes of having their own territorial waters or exclusive economic zones, and only the coastal state may authorize their construction [Article 60]; however, on the high seas beyond national jurisdiction, any “state” may construct artificial islands [Article 87]“. Is this “freedom” and ambiguity, when talking about high seas with no political jurisdiction, which is creating this phenomena of ocean colonization.

Alexander Bolonki points that an old idea is building a big ship, but maybe the best solution to this problem, however, is the provision of floating cities, islands, and states. As Roger Miralles just reminded us, this immanent human desire of colonialism and geopolitical independence and power, has been related with islands not only in political treaties, but as an old human need, as we can see also in literature and arts.

Nowhere Island. Source

Are we witnessing new forms of governance and geopolitical territoties? The rise of Micronations all around and projects as Nowhereisland, led by artist Alex Hartley and recently declared a “new nation” with 2.532 registered citizens [and growing], make us think that we are. The recent economical crash and worldwide uprisings against political decadence are some of the source of inspiration for this kind of projects. Nowhere Island’s statements includes:

Nowhereisland is a new nation declared on behalf of its citizens.

Nowhereisland’s territory originated from an island newly revealed by a retreating glacier in the High Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Nowhereisland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation.

Nowhereisland seeks to redefine what a nation can be.

The future of this ocean colonization is full of questions. Micronations looking for a better quality of life for its inhabitants are only part of this landscapes of contradiction. There are many other projects based only on economical issues or geopolitical control, as Israel plans to build artificial islands off Gaza Strip coast.

Maybe the answer is that contradiction itself, as pointed by Deleuze, “we can assume that these elements are in constant strife, displaying a repulsion for one another. In this we find nothing to reassure us. Also, that an island is deserted must appear philosophically normal to us.”

Fredrik Hellberg, author of Manhattan Oneirocritica, an speculative project that we published here before, has been highlighted with his project The Second Community as one of the best student projects 2011 by Blueprint Magazine. The project wonders about the issue of “identity tourism” in California City. He wrote about it:

In the desert northeast of Los Angeles in an abandoned city called California City the 739,600m2 Second Community floats above the desert floor like a mountain avatar. In its crater the 1,500 heliostatic mirrors reflect the light onto the artificial sky covering the desert of the trans-identity port. With a capacity of 40,000 people the port gathers in its featureless white space individuals open to role-play.

A provocative fact is that the project is focused on an alternative identity tourism, that goes beyond the virtual space of online role-playing games, the open desert of the Burning Man festival and the convention halls of Cosplayers, while the Burning Man is happening just now [from August 29 to September 5] and this year the participation of architect Jurgen Mayer has made it almost a “trending topic” in the architectural scene during the last months. In this context, we have enough points of comparison to analyze and assess Hellberg’s proposal and have a deeper overview.

The idea of megastructure comes to mind since the first moment of looking at the project, so do Yona Friedman’s La Ville spatiale, described with this words:

The traditional structure of the city is not equipped for the new society. I suggest mobile, temporary and lightweight structures instead of the rigid, inflexible and expensive means of traditional architecture.”

Hellberg’s The Second Community spans half a kilometer within the artificial desert of the port and isolates the person in a void of imagination where the persona of an individual becomes a fugitive and creative semiotic gadget which collectively generate a public space of radical self exploration an experimentation. The idea behing the Diploma 5: Third Natures is to redefine our links with technological objects, with the social realm and nature; and the project, floating on the desert, responds to the challenge. As one approaches the Second Community and its mountain avatar through the desert, the light from 1,500 mirrors reflected on the artificial sky of the port, giving the desert a new kind of life.

But the most evident reference that comes to our mind are Konrad Wachsmann‘s hangars for the American Air Force. We have seen in previous works by Hellberg that historical architecture is present and reinvented by him, proposing new uses, locations and giving a complete reinterpretation of them.

So, we wonder if it is possible to revisit the 1960s megastructures and place them in our current world? Will they respond as planned to environment and socio-political context?

The mountain floating over the desert. The Second Community

Konrad Wachsmann. Hangar for the American Air Force

Hellberg recently wrote for The Funambulist:

“Within an hour of your passing,
L.E. will transfer your body to a
vessel where you will be sealed
and frozen at 196 degrees below
zero. Power outages, earthquakes,
nothing will effect your
suspension-hibernation.”

Even if the context is different, it’s interesting to think that Wachsmann’s hangars were frozen, just waiting for somebody as Hellberg to bring them to life again, with new light.

As Manfredo Tafuri wrote on The Sphere and the Labyrinth, “The critical act will consist of a recomposition of the fragments once they are historicized: in their “remontage.”

The Burning Man festival started as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice, and takes place at the temporary city created by Burning Man participants, the Black Rock City. The event is supossed to follow a “leave no trace” policy, but the amount of residual trash at the site has increased over the years.

As a counterpoint to all of this, in the Second Community the porous mountain avatar surrounding and supporting the sky of the port, collects its energy from the concentrated solar power plant in the center of the crater, harvesting the power of the sun and delivers it to the caves around the centered port where the identity tourists prepare for the events in the port. Hellberg’s approach to techology remind us Tafuri’s essay Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology, when he wrote:

Beyond its vast potential and the limitless worlds it opens up, technology also displays a flexibility indispensable in a period of transition: it allows the conscious artist to act not upon the formal effects of communication, as before, but upon its very terms: the human imagination.

The possibilities for architecture, open up in the perspective of human imagination are numerous and diverse.

The artificial desert floor as seen from the top of the port

“But Today We Collect Ads” the essay by Alison and Peter Smithson, marked architecture’s entry into an overt relationship with pop culture, as Denise Scott Brown wrote in Learning from Pop. The “Second Community” project emphasizes the relationship between pop culture and architecture, while opossing to popular culture manifestations as the Burning Man festival, but at the same time, creating a new space for socio-cultural use.

When Henri Lefebvre wonders about the moment of emergence of an awareness of space and its production [when and where, why and how, did a neglected knowledge and a misconstrued reality begin to be recognized?], and talked about social space, he was referring to a biological, social and political act. The aim of Unit 5 projects is to reconnect the production of space with one forgotten material in architecture –people; and this can be also a political act.

Inside one of the caves of the mountain

Role-playing gathering in the port

We can end quoting Lefebvre again:

A new consciousness of space emerged whereby space [an object in its surroundings] was explored, sometimes by deliberately reducing it to its outline or plan and to the flat surface of the canvas, and sometimes, by contrast, by breaking up and rotating planes, so as to reconstitute depth of space in the picture plane. This gave rise to a very specific dialectic.

Hellberg‘s project, revisiting an old hangar structure and designing new utopias, could be the kind of architectural thinking that goes beyond the limits of the practice, creating by contrast new kind of spaces. Or at least, it is a good exercise to rethink the potential that lies in old structures, abandoned places and archi-ruins.