Uncooked Concrete?
Estragon: What do we do now?
Vladimir: I don’t know.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
So, what happens next?
(awkward silence …)
What is the trajectory of this project now that Nicolas’ residency has finished? Is this the end?
What becomes of this plexus of ideas, this new net-work that has been crafted with such care (with such awkwardness)?
Will it remain gathering cyberdust until cyberdeath? Will it become a kind of romantic ruin, chanced upon in the overgrown gardens of cyberspace by the intrepid browser?
A suspended site … a forgotten landmark?
It’s scary to think that I began this response over three weeks ago … where has the time gone? Simple, work commitments have meant that I’ve had to prioritise otherwise.
But I have been very conscious of an awkward void; Amanda’s last comments demanded a response …
There are some tremendous ideas on this site, and, equally important, a very delicate but very lovely fabric of social connection that still lies half woven on the loom.
There is a warp but only half of a weft, so to speak.
Amanda has asked how we might embrace this period of uncertainty.
Perhaps this project offers a beginning, the starting point of a new trajectory (or a whole new series of trajectories) … the opportunity to act creatively, in a small way, towards rebuilding a sense of community; the ruins of which I stare at every day.
We need to re-inhabit that sense of community before it become an eyesore, I think … even in spite of the terrible damage that has been done to it by market forces.
So, what do we do now?
(next awkward silence)
Paul Evans
www.origin09.org
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Some thoughts on 'methodology'...
I wanted to speak a little about the way in which we - with Nicolas Moulin - came together as a group of people (artists, architects, researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Sheffield, practitioners, students, city councillors...) and - in the context of 6 workshops and a symposium - began to think about contemporary art, the changing city (the 'credit crunch city') and the ways in which we imagine, represent and participate in the spaces we inhabit.
While this will be quite a fragmentary introduction to a necessarily fragmented process, I think our aim was quite wide-ranging and ambitious. By involving people from a range of disciplines (architecture, town and regional planning, French, fine art...) and practices, what we wanted to do was create not only horizontal relations across disciplines and subject areas, but also vertical relations between research, practice, civic authorities, business, industry and community, thereby enabling the products of research and creative dialogue to be embedded in decision-making and policy contexts, as well as in the contexts of our everyday lives in the city. The diversity of the participants was, we hoped, a good way to encourage us to think in unaccustomed ways; to cooperate and be open, therefore, to other forms of thinking and the transformational effects such a process might engender.
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City: ‘And just as we learn about our lives from others, so, too, do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live’ (p. 8)
It's important to explain that we began in a very unscripted way and, even now, I can describe no ending - only our many provisional endings and also, I hope, another beginning... Each workshop began with a presentation by a researcher or practitioner, which opened up discussions in which multiple points of view were exchanged and - somewhere amidst these hybrid knowledges - points of consensus and dissensus - threads, if you like - began to emerge. And yet still, no sense of where we were going; no idea of what or whom we might encounter on the way...
Collaboration: ‘a good way of confounding intentions’ (Tim Etchells)
Collaboration: a way of keeping the future open; of unlocking the potential for and the possibility of change.
When we began our workshops, there were many awkward silences, particularly at the beginning when really, we didn't know each other at all. There was a sense that in our discussions, we were rummaging for the right words, working out - awkwardly - how we might talk to each other. Navigating a complex process of translation that at often served to underline, rather than erase, our different disciplines and experiential/professional backgrounds... Saying too much and at other times too little, we stammered and stuttered, making excuses for ourselves and our perspectives, worried about crossing a tangled web of lines which for the most part, we couldn't even define. Fearing to step on each other’s toes… hoping we were saying nothing too stupid… wondering whether our blue sky thinking was actually just impractical and naïve…
Awkward: feeling out of kilter; uncomfortable; out of our depth and also unbounded... Our edges suddenly porous and vulnerable...
Collaboration: ‘neither a union nor a juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line which always sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight' (Gilles Deleuze)
Encounter: ‘no correct ideas, just ideas. Just ideas: this is the encounter, the becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze)
Awkard: a conversation which transforms rather than affirms; challenges, rather than reproduces…
Because our encounters were unscripted, there was no sense that we were making testing, refining and clarifying an idea which we had posited at the outset. A multiplicity of variables, actors, absences and presences produced something (a cloud of ideas, some possibilities for future action and collaboration, some friendships and a plan for a research network) which will have a life beyond this residency, beyond this series of workshops and discussions. Awkward: ‘this inability to arrive' (Mary Cappello)
And yet this awkwardness, this sense of being off message,at a tangent, off the mark or wildly adrift… inching our way forward, with no clear sense of direction, no understanding of where we wanted to be… came to be – for me, at least – a kind of methodology.
Awkward: 1340, "in the wrong direction," from awk "back-handed" (obsolete since 1600s), from O.N. afugr "turned backwards" (from P.Gmc. *afug-, from PIE *apu-ko-, from base *apo- "off, away;" see apo-) + adverbial suffix -weard. Meaning "clumsy" first recorded 1530. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
Awkward: a stumbling block
Awkwardness: resistance to linear narratives of progress and regeneration
‘Sometimes you have to go backward in order to go forward, it is said, but why the primacy on forward, and how did forward come to mean pushy, stubborn, immovable after all? If our faces and eyes let forward motion win the day, then maybe awkwardness depends on a revaluation of the sense. Imagine being able to say, encouragingly: “place your best foot awkward”, rather than forward… or, with adamancy, “you need to move awkward”…' (Mary Cappello)
Awkward: 'untoward'
‘to be untoward is to be hard to manage, to be unseemly, and again, like a belch in the middle of the sermon, perverse, where “toward” means docile, compliant, tractable, educable…’ (Mary Cappello)
The awkwardness of the holes which punctuate our cities...
Holes in the city, holes in the road, holes in the architectural fabric... Holes past and holes present, which trip us up, make us stumble and fall, necessitating detours and causing us to glance, where once we might have ignored... Holes: they force us to think about that which we usually pass over and pass through, without giving it a second thought. They draw our attention to spaces which we rarely, in fact, (take the time to) see... Holes: we have to walk around them, step over them... Holes cause us to deviate from our normal paths.
Could we think about holes as negative space? Negative space – as all arts students learn – gives us a different perspective on what is there… A void which becomes substantial and reconfigures the space around it, disrupts the unthinking ways in which we practise that space…
Awkwardness: the art of looking sideways?
The awkward present: elided as we focus, stubbornly, on our pasts and futures...
The present financial crisis as a kind of limbo: a hole in time, when our usual methods and solutions no longer hold good. A time, then, to reflect and in which to think differently.
Holes: a timely space in which to disorder our thoughts and form disorganisations.
To walk the trajectories in between, to visit absent landmarks and inhabit suspended sites…
To think about how we might reuse and recuperate what is there already… to make do, in a creative and ethical way…
Nicolas spoke of the confrontation between order and entropic forces (an echo of which we find, perhaps, in the relationship between culture and art). He said, in our last workshop: a society that cannot live with disorder is an unliveable society.
In what ways, then, can this period of uncertainty be embraced as a disordering of our planning and perceptions?
In what ways might we embrace it, precisely with the aim of making our cities more liveable?
While this will be quite a fragmentary introduction to a necessarily fragmented process, I think our aim was quite wide-ranging and ambitious. By involving people from a range of disciplines (architecture, town and regional planning, French, fine art...) and practices, what we wanted to do was create not only horizontal relations across disciplines and subject areas, but also vertical relations between research, practice, civic authorities, business, industry and community, thereby enabling the products of research and creative dialogue to be embedded in decision-making and policy contexts, as well as in the contexts of our everyday lives in the city. The diversity of the participants was, we hoped, a good way to encourage us to think in unaccustomed ways; to cooperate and be open, therefore, to other forms of thinking and the transformational effects such a process might engender.
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City: ‘And just as we learn about our lives from others, so, too, do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live’ (p. 8)
It's important to explain that we began in a very unscripted way and, even now, I can describe no ending - only our many provisional endings and also, I hope, another beginning... Each workshop began with a presentation by a researcher or practitioner, which opened up discussions in which multiple points of view were exchanged and - somewhere amidst these hybrid knowledges - points of consensus and dissensus - threads, if you like - began to emerge. And yet still, no sense of where we were going; no idea of what or whom we might encounter on the way...
Collaboration: ‘a good way of confounding intentions’ (Tim Etchells)
Collaboration: a way of keeping the future open; of unlocking the potential for and the possibility of change.
When we began our workshops, there were many awkward silences, particularly at the beginning when really, we didn't know each other at all. There was a sense that in our discussions, we were rummaging for the right words, working out - awkwardly - how we might talk to each other. Navigating a complex process of translation that at often served to underline, rather than erase, our different disciplines and experiential/professional backgrounds... Saying too much and at other times too little, we stammered and stuttered, making excuses for ourselves and our perspectives, worried about crossing a tangled web of lines which for the most part, we couldn't even define. Fearing to step on each other’s toes… hoping we were saying nothing too stupid… wondering whether our blue sky thinking was actually just impractical and naïve…
Awkward: feeling out of kilter; uncomfortable; out of our depth and also unbounded... Our edges suddenly porous and vulnerable...
Collaboration: ‘neither a union nor a juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line which always sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight' (Gilles Deleuze)
Encounter: ‘no correct ideas, just ideas. Just ideas: this is the encounter, the becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze)
Awkard: a conversation which transforms rather than affirms; challenges, rather than reproduces…
Because our encounters were unscripted, there was no sense that we were making testing, refining and clarifying an idea which we had posited at the outset. A multiplicity of variables, actors, absences and presences produced something (a cloud of ideas, some possibilities for future action and collaboration, some friendships and a plan for a research network) which will have a life beyond this residency, beyond this series of workshops and discussions. Awkward: ‘this inability to arrive' (Mary Cappello)
And yet this awkwardness, this sense of being off message,at a tangent, off the mark or wildly adrift… inching our way forward, with no clear sense of direction, no understanding of where we wanted to be… came to be – for me, at least – a kind of methodology.
Awkward: 1340, "in the wrong direction," from awk "back-handed" (obsolete since 1600s), from O.N. afugr "turned backwards" (from P.Gmc. *afug-, from PIE *apu-ko-, from base *apo- "off, away;" see apo-) + adverbial suffix -weard. Meaning "clumsy" first recorded 1530. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
Awkward: a stumbling block
Awkwardness: resistance to linear narratives of progress and regeneration
‘Sometimes you have to go backward in order to go forward, it is said, but why the primacy on forward, and how did forward come to mean pushy, stubborn, immovable after all? If our faces and eyes let forward motion win the day, then maybe awkwardness depends on a revaluation of the sense. Imagine being able to say, encouragingly: “place your best foot awkward”, rather than forward… or, with adamancy, “you need to move awkward”…' (Mary Cappello)
Awkward: 'untoward'
‘to be untoward is to be hard to manage, to be unseemly, and again, like a belch in the middle of the sermon, perverse, where “toward” means docile, compliant, tractable, educable…’ (Mary Cappello)
The awkwardness of the holes which punctuate our cities...
Holes in the city, holes in the road, holes in the architectural fabric... Holes past and holes present, which trip us up, make us stumble and fall, necessitating detours and causing us to glance, where once we might have ignored... Holes: they force us to think about that which we usually pass over and pass through, without giving it a second thought. They draw our attention to spaces which we rarely, in fact, (take the time to) see... Holes: we have to walk around them, step over them... Holes cause us to deviate from our normal paths.
Could we think about holes as negative space? Negative space – as all arts students learn – gives us a different perspective on what is there… A void which becomes substantial and reconfigures the space around it, disrupts the unthinking ways in which we practise that space…
Awkwardness: the art of looking sideways?
The awkward present: elided as we focus, stubbornly, on our pasts and futures...
The present financial crisis as a kind of limbo: a hole in time, when our usual methods and solutions no longer hold good. A time, then, to reflect and in which to think differently.
Holes: a timely space in which to disorder our thoughts and form disorganisations.
To walk the trajectories in between, to visit absent landmarks and inhabit suspended sites…
To think about how we might reuse and recuperate what is there already… to make do, in a creative and ethical way…
Nicolas spoke of the confrontation between order and entropic forces (an echo of which we find, perhaps, in the relationship between culture and art). He said, in our last workshop: a society that cannot live with disorder is an unliveable society.
In what ways, then, can this period of uncertainty be embraced as a disordering of our planning and perceptions?
In what ways might we embrace it, precisely with the aim of making our cities more liveable?
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Responses to the exhibition (1)
After the opening of Blanklumdermilq last night we caught a transitory vision of the ‘greening’ of Park Hill. Wan evening twilight pierced the harshness of the grid and an uneven brush-stroke of vivid trees wavered across the escarpment at its base.
Nicolas Moulin has enthused that the building should remain as it is: a spectacular ruin, a monument to Britain’s unique brutalist heritage.
Seeing it afresh, as such, after the intense contrasts of light and dark, the visceral, emotional intensity of Blanklumdermilq, my mind was in a radical place and I was tempted to agree. It would certainly be a radical solution.
On reflection this morning, with my senses in a less attenuated state, the idea brought to mind Robert Macfarlane’s equally romantic description of a particular shift of time scheme. He describes ‘wildness’ as ‘a quality that flares into futurity as well as reverberating into the past.’ This is the wildness that is now taking a tentative grasp of Park Hill, lending the ruin its aura:
‘The wild prefaces us, but it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas.’
Macfarlane goes on to quote from the poet and forester Gary Snyder:
“A ghost wilderness hovers around our entire planet. Millions of tiny seeds of vegetation … hiding … in the wind … each ready to float, freeze or be swallowed, always preserving the germ.”
Looking at Moulin’s monumental photomontages one can’t help but imagine ghosts.
‘…Wildness will return to these abandoned places. Vegetable and faunal life will reclaim them … Just such a reclamation has occurred in the so-called ‘zone of alienation’: the region of north Ukraine that was placed off limits after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. In Pripiat, the town in which the Chernobyl workers were accommodated, silver birch now throng the empty streets and courtyards.’
I am profoundly impressed by the way that Blanklumdermilq harnesses a number of primal responses: first by subverting our instinctive attraction to a source of light and then by creating an extraordinary sensation of disorientation in pitch blackness. He rudely removes the comfort blanket of spatial awareness and then leads one by the hand into a patterned, dreamlike space of rhythmical, euphoria inducing shadows.
The experience of the exhibition is, admittedly, highly urban and a product of a special response to ‘landscape’: minimalism plays off echoes of architectural modernism etc. But the contrast between the concrete-hard rawness of vision and the ‘softness’ of our humanity is where the real beauty lies for me. This reminder of flesh, frailty, vulnerability is sublime and, like a ‘nature morte’, something that we would do well to meditate on in these chastened times.
Finally, the exhibition has, for me, had the effect of all great visual art; it has powerfully reconfigured my ocular perception of the familiar. I will never look at the grid that shapes the city in the same way again.
Blanklumdermilq demands a radical reconsideration of our spatial and temporal awareness: of our place in the world.
Paul Evans
www.origin09.org
Nicolas Moulin has enthused that the building should remain as it is: a spectacular ruin, a monument to Britain’s unique brutalist heritage.
Seeing it afresh, as such, after the intense contrasts of light and dark, the visceral, emotional intensity of Blanklumdermilq, my mind was in a radical place and I was tempted to agree. It would certainly be a radical solution.
On reflection this morning, with my senses in a less attenuated state, the idea brought to mind Robert Macfarlane’s equally romantic description of a particular shift of time scheme. He describes ‘wildness’ as ‘a quality that flares into futurity as well as reverberating into the past.’ This is the wildness that is now taking a tentative grasp of Park Hill, lending the ruin its aura:
‘The wild prefaces us, but it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas.’
Macfarlane goes on to quote from the poet and forester Gary Snyder:
“A ghost wilderness hovers around our entire planet. Millions of tiny seeds of vegetation … hiding … in the wind … each ready to float, freeze or be swallowed, always preserving the germ.”
Looking at Moulin’s monumental photomontages one can’t help but imagine ghosts.
‘…Wildness will return to these abandoned places. Vegetable and faunal life will reclaim them … Just such a reclamation has occurred in the so-called ‘zone of alienation’: the region of north Ukraine that was placed off limits after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. In Pripiat, the town in which the Chernobyl workers were accommodated, silver birch now throng the empty streets and courtyards.’
I am profoundly impressed by the way that Blanklumdermilq harnesses a number of primal responses: first by subverting our instinctive attraction to a source of light and then by creating an extraordinary sensation of disorientation in pitch blackness. He rudely removes the comfort blanket of spatial awareness and then leads one by the hand into a patterned, dreamlike space of rhythmical, euphoria inducing shadows.
The experience of the exhibition is, admittedly, highly urban and a product of a special response to ‘landscape’: minimalism plays off echoes of architectural modernism etc. But the contrast between the concrete-hard rawness of vision and the ‘softness’ of our humanity is where the real beauty lies for me. This reminder of flesh, frailty, vulnerability is sublime and, like a ‘nature morte’, something that we would do well to meditate on in these chastened times.
Finally, the exhibition has, for me, had the effect of all great visual art; it has powerfully reconfigured my ocular perception of the familiar. I will never look at the grid that shapes the city in the same way again.
Blanklumdermilq demands a radical reconsideration of our spatial and temporal awareness: of our place in the world.
Paul Evans
www.origin09.org
Friday, 5 June 2009
Some thoughts on workshop 6
Terry O'Connor's workshop - entitled 'Grass will grow in the cracks' - engaged with the city as 'a shifting, relational site for subjecthood', looking in particular at how performance can be a means of inhabiting - and making an intervention in - the city. We live cities through their 'representational aliases', playing games to capture the experience of a city that is relational and transactional. Looking at Forced Entertainment's 'Ground Plans for Paradise' - an abandoned metropolis of 1000 balsa wood model towers, the streets and buildings named after cities both real and fantastic, with wall-based photographs of sleeping bodies by Hugo Glendinning - we thought about this installation as a disruptive, ambiguous reflection on the 'iconic utopia of the model'...
[An aside...
The idea of the model - something which Steven Gartside also discussed in workshop 3 - is something which returns periodically to our discussions and which we'll discuss further in the symposium. The classical Greek architects called their models 'paradeigma', and I find in this etymological rapprochement between the architectural model and paradigm a useful opening in which to begin to make some observations about ‘architecturality’ – in the sense that Andrew Benjamin understands this as an intervention in the repetition of a paradigm. Models such as those we find in the work of Maud Haya Baviera countermand, displace and disrupt the model as Kuhnian paradigm. They intervene in the repetition without difference of the architectural object or urban field (‘Sheffield’, perhaps) which is at the heart also of the heritage paradigm of representation. They can stage the becoming particular of the architectural object and the urban field, which Benjamin understands as the very event that distinguishes architecture as a critical, creative and differential practice from building.
To be continued...]
WE HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT WITHOUT YOU GETTING FREAKED OUT ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURE...
We talked about false guides and scripted journeys, the facts we overlook in favour of other truths... An unreliable guide's bus tour of Sheffield (or was it Paris, Berlin, Venice...?) Misreading the city and projecting Paris on Sheffield... Walking the trajectories between absent landmarks, playing in abandoned, suspended sites...
The confrontation between order and entropic forces is the same as the relationship between culture and art. A society that can't live with disorder is an unlivable society... And often, orders get too big. So what is to introduce disorder into order? What kind of disorder might be introduced in the university? In the city?
Disorders and disorganisations
... the rupturing of boundaries
... the importance of the invisible (order is this saturation of visibility)
... claiming (the right to) disorder?
... being in the wrong place at the right time
... the right to take risk, the right to fail
... extreme collaboration (what might this be?)
PUBLIC SPACE DOESN'T REALLY EXIST ANYMORE
Both proud and horrified of this unsafeness (against this cultural pull towards safety...)
[An aside...
The idea of the model - something which Steven Gartside also discussed in workshop 3 - is something which returns periodically to our discussions and which we'll discuss further in the symposium. The classical Greek architects called their models 'paradeigma', and I find in this etymological rapprochement between the architectural model and paradigm a useful opening in which to begin to make some observations about ‘architecturality’ – in the sense that Andrew Benjamin understands this as an intervention in the repetition of a paradigm. Models such as those we find in the work of Maud Haya Baviera countermand, displace and disrupt the model as Kuhnian paradigm. They intervene in the repetition without difference of the architectural object or urban field (‘Sheffield’, perhaps) which is at the heart also of the heritage paradigm of representation. They can stage the becoming particular of the architectural object and the urban field, which Benjamin understands as the very event that distinguishes architecture as a critical, creative and differential practice from building.
To be continued...]
WE HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT WITHOUT YOU GETTING FREAKED OUT ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURE...
We talked about false guides and scripted journeys, the facts we overlook in favour of other truths... An unreliable guide's bus tour of Sheffield (or was it Paris, Berlin, Venice...?) Misreading the city and projecting Paris on Sheffield... Walking the trajectories between absent landmarks, playing in abandoned, suspended sites...
The confrontation between order and entropic forces is the same as the relationship between culture and art. A society that can't live with disorder is an unlivable society... And often, orders get too big. So what is to introduce disorder into order? What kind of disorder might be introduced in the university? In the city?
Disorders and disorganisations
... the rupturing of boundaries
... the importance of the invisible (order is this saturation of visibility)
... claiming (the right to) disorder?
... being in the wrong place at the right time
... the right to take risk, the right to fail
... extreme collaboration (what might this be?)
PUBLIC SPACE DOESN'T REALLY EXIST ANYMORE
Both proud and horrified of this unsafeness (against this cultural pull towards safety...)
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Some thoughts from workshop 5
The presentation by Jaspar Joseph-Lester ('Revisiting the Bonaventura Hotel') engaged with the ways in which fictional narratives (and fictional spatial markers) can activate urban space and realise spaces of illusion. Citing from Pine and Gilmore's The Experience Economy (1999), Jaspar thought through the implications of a society in which 'what we once sought for free, we now pay for'... The ways in which cities and urban spaces are staged, fabricated and constructed - spectacularized, even - in order to bring in users willing to pay for the experience produced for them. Planners have come to realise that there's a 'profit margin' in the city as stage/film set... We seem to have a desire to enter scripted spaces, to walk into the story and connect with the narratives we seek and find there. But what is the effect of these projections on the materiality of the urban and architectural fabric? And how does that materiality affect the narratives which are projected on it?
What then also are we to think about places which seem to condense and distil these ideas, like The Venetian in Las Vegas? (And its sister resort, The Venetian Macau in China?) What is the relationship between the model (Venice, Italy) and the copy?
Some questions which I began to think about in the course of the discussion and inspired by the presentation:
What should we make of Bruce Begout's assertion in 'Zeropolis' that only when ephemeral buildings (such as motels) fall into decrepitude and dereliction, do they then become 'real'? Where is the 'authenticity' of the scripted city?
'Des chantiers en ruines et des ruines en chantier' [building sites in ruins and ruins in construction]... How might we engage not only with the ruins of empty shops and abandoned housing blocks, but also with the potentiality of (the ruins of) unfinished buildings, of the kind we see all over Sheffield at the moment? In a text about his 1993 work, Chantier Permanent (Permanent Building Site), Huyghe writes:
‘The political, economic and geographic conditions of [the Mediterranean] region are unstable, which results in a reversal of the traditional Western model of dwelling, conceived as a finished object and an “everything included in the price” purchase. For the Mediterranean dwellings, there is no fixed moment of completion; you live in a work in progress, life unfolds in a transitory state, permanently under construction. There are no expectations, but a suspended time. At every moment the necessary must be negotiated with the contingent. Choices are made as a function of what is to come, in supple adaptation to exterior constraints and in reaction to changing situations. The permanent state of incompleteness becomes the rule that allows one to respond to the unpredictable, to the vacant spaces in social structures. People have to make do [...]. It is a form of accompaniment and economy that recycles the flaws. The concrete structure of these dwellings allows for additions; it provides a modernist basis that seems to have undergone modifications. Mistakes and accidents are inscribed in the many layers [...] What makes these dwellings singular is the interval between what they are and what they could potentially be, the gap between what exists and its potential.’
(Pierre Huyghe, in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Pierre Huyghe [Skira, 2004]).
What is the role of heritage in the production of the scripted (post)industrial city? Is it not true that the past (time) of the industrial/modernist city is as simulacral as the space of the heritage theme parks that punctuate (but never disturb) the fabric of our contemporary cities?
In what ways are cities and their planners engaging with the question of image management when it comes to authorising or censoring the scripts and scenarios which so powerfully modify and mediate our experience of the urban space? What is and isn't allowed? What kinds of narratives might be embedded (through performance, story telling, small-scale domestic interventions...) in the abandoned spaces of the 'credit crunch' city and how might they impact on future development, practice and planning? What is the relationship between these narratives and fictions and the agency of the city user?
What then also are we to think about places which seem to condense and distil these ideas, like The Venetian in Las Vegas? (And its sister resort, The Venetian Macau in China?) What is the relationship between the model (Venice, Italy) and the copy?
Some questions which I began to think about in the course of the discussion and inspired by the presentation:
What should we make of Bruce Begout's assertion in 'Zeropolis' that only when ephemeral buildings (such as motels) fall into decrepitude and dereliction, do they then become 'real'? Where is the 'authenticity' of the scripted city?
'Des chantiers en ruines et des ruines en chantier' [building sites in ruins and ruins in construction]... How might we engage not only with the ruins of empty shops and abandoned housing blocks, but also with the potentiality of (the ruins of) unfinished buildings, of the kind we see all over Sheffield at the moment? In a text about his 1993 work, Chantier Permanent (Permanent Building Site), Huyghe writes:
‘The political, economic and geographic conditions of [the Mediterranean] region are unstable, which results in a reversal of the traditional Western model of dwelling, conceived as a finished object and an “everything included in the price” purchase. For the Mediterranean dwellings, there is no fixed moment of completion; you live in a work in progress, life unfolds in a transitory state, permanently under construction. There are no expectations, but a suspended time. At every moment the necessary must be negotiated with the contingent. Choices are made as a function of what is to come, in supple adaptation to exterior constraints and in reaction to changing situations. The permanent state of incompleteness becomes the rule that allows one to respond to the unpredictable, to the vacant spaces in social structures. People have to make do [...]. It is a form of accompaniment and economy that recycles the flaws. The concrete structure of these dwellings allows for additions; it provides a modernist basis that seems to have undergone modifications. Mistakes and accidents are inscribed in the many layers [...] What makes these dwellings singular is the interval between what they are and what they could potentially be, the gap between what exists and its potential.’
(Pierre Huyghe, in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Pierre Huyghe [Skira, 2004]).
What is the role of heritage in the production of the scripted (post)industrial city? Is it not true that the past (time) of the industrial/modernist city is as simulacral as the space of the heritage theme parks that punctuate (but never disturb) the fabric of our contemporary cities?
In what ways are cities and their planners engaging with the question of image management when it comes to authorising or censoring the scripts and scenarios which so powerfully modify and mediate our experience of the urban space? What is and isn't allowed? What kinds of narratives might be embedded (through performance, story telling, small-scale domestic interventions...) in the abandoned spaces of the 'credit crunch' city and how might they impact on future development, practice and planning? What is the relationship between these narratives and fictions and the agency of the city user?
Saturday, 23 May 2009
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