800 VIEWS OF AIRPORTS 
Peter Fischli & David Weiss

Quelques îlots d’humanité 

Et l’avion circule dans la nuit

(Je n’avais rien à reprocher

A l’ameublement de l’hôtel ) 

J’étais seul à la plage ; un peu après Cassis. 

Dans mon maillot Madras extrêmement à la mode, 

Je voyais des Allemandes qui enlevaient leur robe; 

Je buvais un pastis.

Supermarché des corps où l’esprit est à vendre, 

Et des psychologies se tordent et se dénouent

Sous le soleil. Bronzé, rien ne sert de prétendre

Que vous ayez une âme.

Il n’y a pas de chemin au-delà des peaux moites

Qui suent le pur désir d’un destin prévisible ; 

il n’y à pas d'espérance quand lentement s'emboîtent

Les structures du plaisir mené de leur fusible

Qui est la peur. De l’autre. Et de son innocence.

Le soupçon au-delà de son absence, 

De quelque chose enfin qui ressemble à un sens

Au-delà de nos peaux. Fantôme de transcendance.

La grâce immobile, 

Sensiblement écrasante, 

Qui découle du passage des civilisations

N’a pas la mort pour corollaire.

Les sapins sont pour les serpents

Et les autoroutes pour l’homme.

Les monde est plat, interminable ; 

Vient un envol de cormorans.

Un aligator a dévoré trois touristes autrichiennes 

Quelque part en Floride

Je jour de l’indépendance ; 

Le gouverneur a donné des consignes de prudence ; 

Dans les motels, on écarte prudemment les persiennes

Le tourisme a horreur du vide

Texte : La configuration du dernier rivage, Michel Houellebecq


Voir aussi Concorde de Wolfgang Tillmans ici

HALL
Antoine Espinasseau

Dans les espaces de transition de la ville, le hall tient une place particulière. Urbain par nature - il n’existe que peu de halls à la campagne - il assure le passage d’une importance vers une autre, d’un état à un autre, très souvent entre le public de la rue et le privé du chez soi. Mot emprunté à l’anglais, il est admis en 1930 une prononciation française par le dictionnaire Barbeau Roche, son usage révélant une lacune linguistique et très peu d’équivalents français. L’antichambre évoque une proximité plus rapprochée, la salle d’attente s’exprime dans une temporalité plus longue. Le vestibule serait le terme le plus approprié mais s’apparente à un usage moins contemporain, référant à un type d’espace plus classique et à une connotation plus bourgeoise. 

Le hall connaîtra son âge d’or dans les années 1970, à une époque où la rationalisation des chaines de montages en béton préfabriqué permet de construire beaucoup d’immeubles à moindre coût. Il s’en est reproduit des centaines de milliers, dans les villes petites, moyennes, grandes, les stations de ski, et les périphéries plus hagardes. 

Face à l’uniformisation de cette typologie aux façades répétitives, très souvent posée dans un contexte qu’elle dénie, il a fallu imaginer un rapport au sol nouveau, qui permette de singulariser le bâtiment. Dans ces paysages gris est née une nature propre à ces rez-de-chaussée. Ils ont commencé à faire exister leur personnalité architecturale face au regard du piéton, et ont trouvé dans cette grande vague d’uniformisation, un moyen d’appropriation pour les usagers.De cette abstraction du contexte, ce sont développés des univers artificiels. Le vide des halls s’est peuplé d’ objets extrêmement singuliers, souvent construits dans des matériaux bruts de gros-oeuvre. La brique, le béton, le pavé, le verre, le parement de façade utilisés articulent la transition entre la massivité du volume extérieur vers les pièces intérieures. Dans ces atmosphères tempérées par le chauffage collectif, une nouvelle nature s’est aussi imposée : plantes vertes, palmiers, rocailles. La transition s’est transformée en voyage, toujours plus imaginatif, toujours plus exotique. Elle est devenue une invitation à l’exil, une coupure entre le monde de la rue et l’univers privé par un passage dans une sorte d’irréalité. 

Depuis l’entrée en vigueur du décret n°76-276 du 29 mars 1976 sur l’instauration d’un rapport entre surface hors d’oeuvre nette SHON et la surface hors d’oeuvre brute SHOB,  le hall s’est doucement réduit à un minima, désormais tenu à son strict nécessaire par les promoteurs. Avec des objectifs de coûts de construction les plus faibles, ces mètres carrés non utilisables sont devenus inutiles. Le hall a alors subi deux mouvements antagonistes : une réduction drastique ou un élargissement spectaculaire qui l’a fait muter au stade de lobby, très vaste espace d’apparat représentant le prestige du bâtiment. 

Le hall est donc devenu rare. Pourtant, dans ce moment métropolitain qui ne dure qu’un instant, ce sont créés des mondes, des univers silencieux dans le grondement de la métropole. Prendre le temps de s’arrêter sur ces petits espaces, c’est porter une attention sur une époque, des pratiques et des temps particuliers. Regarder les halls d’immeubles aujourd’ hui, avec tout le caractère désuet que cela peut revêtir, c’est aussi regarder tous ces espaces de la métropole qui semblent oubliés, ces décalages qui se produisent dans le mouvement général, ceux qui ne semblent jamais nous affecter, mais qui revêtissent une certaine forme d’importance car c’est là que s’inventent les libertés et les pratiques exotiques de la ville. Cachés mais visibles aux yeux de tous, réservés à un petit nombre, ce sont ces micro-univers qui génèrent la narration du quotidien.

Texte d'introduction de Flavien Menu 

pour la première exposition personnelle d'Antoine Espinasseau à la Galerie Florence Leoni, du jeudi 31 janvier à 18 heures au 14 mars 2012

KODACHROME

Luigi Ghirri

In 1969 the photo taken from the space shuttle on its way to the moon is published in all newspapers ; this was the first photographs of the world. The picture pursued for centuries by man presented to our eyes, containing contemporarily all the preceding images, incomplete, all books written, all signs deciphered and not. It was not only the picture of the world, but the picture which contained all the pictures of the world : graffiti, frescoes, prints, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. Simultaneously the representation of the world in one time only. 

On the other hand this total view, this redescription of everything, destroyed one more the possibility of translating the hieroglyphic whole. The power of containing everything vanished in front of the impossibility of seeing evetything at the same time. The event and its representation, to see and to be contained, reappeared to man as not sufficient to solve eternal questions. This possibility of total duplication, however, let us glimpse the possibility of deciphering the hieroglyph; we had the two poles of doubt and of the secular mystery, the picture of the atom and the picture of the world, finally in front of the other. The space between the infinitely small and the infinitely big was filled by the infinitely complex problem : man and his life, nature. The need for information or consciousness thus arises between two extreme points, oscillating from the microscope to the telescope in order to be able to translate and interpret reality or the hieroglyph.

My work rises from the necessity and the desire to interpret and translate the sign and meaning of this sum of hieroglyphs. So, not only a reality which is easily identifiable or highly loaded with symbols, but also thought, imagination, the fantastic and strange meanings.The photograph is extremely important for the aim I have set myself because of certain characteristic features of its language, which I shall try to explain.The cancellation of the space surrounding the framed part is for me as important as the represented part; it is because of this cancellation that the picture assumes a meaning and gets measurable.At the same time the picture continues in the visible part of the cancellation, and it invites is to see the rest of the not represented reality.This double aspect of representation and cancellation not only tries to evoke the absence of limits, excluding any idea of completness or finished thing, but it indicates something which cannot be delimitated, and that is the real.

On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and penetrating universe of reality passes through all the cultural representations and models known, and which have been given to us as definite and decisive, and our relationship with reality  and the life is the same relationship as the one of the picture from the satellite with the earth itself. So the photograph with its indeterminateness becomes a privileged subject in order to be able to get outside the symbolism of definite representations to which a certain value of truth has been given.The possibility of analysis in time, in the space of signs which form the reality whose completeness has always slipped our minds, thus permits the photograph, because of its fragmentary character to be closer to things which cannot be delimitated, and that is physical existence.

That is why I am not interested in the pictures and the decisive moments, the study or the analysis of their language as an end in itself, aesthetics, the concept or totalizing ideas, the emotions of the poet, the well-bred quotation, the search for a new aesthetics creed, the use of a style. I am occuped with seeing clearly, that is why I am interested in all possible functions, without separating anyone from the whole, but to assume then in a total way in order to be able to see and render recognizable from one time to another, the hieroglyphs I met. The daily encounter with reality, with the fictions and surrogates, the ambiguoous aspects, poetical or alienating, seems to deny any way out of the labyrinth, whose walls are always more illusive even to the point of confusing ourselves with them. The meaning that I try to give to my work is that of the verification of how it is possible to wish to face the way of knowledge, to make it possible at last to tell the real identity of man, of things, of life from the image of man, of things, of life. 

And more about Luigi Ghirri : here Note sur l'architecture 
                                                 and there  Atlante

NEW CITY, PRINCIPLES OF PLANNING

Ludwig Hilberseimer

« Reason is the first principle of all human work ». Consciously or unconciously L.Hilberseimer follows this principle and makes it the basis of this work in the complicated field of city planning. He examines the city with unwavering objectivity, investigates each part of it and determines for each part its rightful place in the whole. Thus he brings all the elements of the city into clear, logical order. He avoids imposing upon them arbitrary ideas of any character whatsoever.

He knows the cities must serve life, that their validity is to be measured in terms of life, and that they must be planned for living. He understands that the forms of cities are the expression of existing modes of living, that they are inextricably bound up with these, and that they, with these, are subject to change. He realizes that the material and spiritual conditions of the problem are given, that he can exercise no infleunce on these factors in themselves, that they are rooted in the past and will be determined by objectives tendencies for the future.

He also knows that the existence of many and diverse factors presupposes the existence of some order which gives meaning to these and which acts as a medium in which they can grow and unfold. City planning means for the author, therefore, the ordering of things in themselves and in their relationships with each other. One should not confuse the principles with their application. City planning is, in essence, a work of order; and order means - according to St Augustine - «the disposition of equal and unequal things, attributing to each its place»

and if you are more interested on The Principles of Planning , you can see the entire book here, ( it takes a bit of time to appear ) which is more explicit than the sample of texts and images above, and allow to understand Hilberseimer's reflexion as a whole

OVERPAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS
Gerhard Richter

Richter began to produce these small-scale works by smearing, mostly at the end of a working day; some of the paint left on one of his squeegees - the large-scale spatulas with which he drags great volume of paint accross the canvas to achieve his signature blur - onto the surface of photographs he keeps in this studio. This connects the photographic images, mostly snapshots taken by the artists himself, in a very immediate and physical way with his paintings. The majority of photographs adhere to a standard size of approximately 10x15 cm, the same size Richter also employed in War Cut. The subjects cover a similar range to that Richter ‘s painting based on photographs: mountain ans seascapes, cities and landscapes, self and family portaits and images of friends as well as anonymous crowds of people. On the whole, they have an everyday, if not idyllic, quality to them , circling the same cosmos of holiday mementoes, treasured private moments and records of a personal life that many of us use photography both to construct and to freeze frame. Noticeably, these are few excpetional subjects and no images that would carry a particular message or that would appear burdened by the gravitas of what they depict; no sites imprinted with the traces of German History, no images of particular celebrities or of dramaturgical scenarios - just an ordinary personal universe. 

Miesology 
Piet & Win Eckert (E2A)

Perhaps nothing epitomizes modern architecture’s transformation from an avant-garde utopian project into built reality more clearly than the carrer of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. The German architect’s output in the first decades of the twentieth century remained, for the most part, limited to a few relatively humble houses as well as to a number of bold visions on paper that would haunt the profession’s imagination for decades to come - and apparently continue to do so. His emigration to the United States at the end of 1930’s marked the beginning of Modern Architecture’s fast embrace by the capitalist establishment. Far from its iconoclastic and radical beginnings, by the 1960’s Modern Architecture, and in particular its manifestation in the works by figures such as Walter Gropius or Mies Van Der Rohe, had become the architectural lingue franca in the western hemisphere, and the normative model of architectural production. Meanwhile in Cold War politics, features such as abstract reductionism or transparency were hailed as the architectural insignia of democratic and egalitarian societies. Although its predominance was soon challenged by a younger generation of architects who whould become the protagonists of postmodernism. Mies’s proposal a seemingly timeless architectural grammar consisting of a limited number of formal elements has remained a reference - and a challenge - for practitionners to the present day. 

The ongoing fascination with Mies’s architectural language is not surprising, for it seems reduced to the point of indeterminacy, leaving ample space for projection and speculation, while simultaneously manifesting a superior understanding of tectonics and the inherent qualities of materials. What renders his model compelling from a contemporary perspective is the reduction of architecture to a limited number of discrete modules or elements that can be reassembled and reproduced seemingly at will. In this regard, Mies’s conception represents not only a pertinent architectural answer for the « age of technical reproductibility», but arguably, also a historical precusrsos to the digital age. Seen in this way, as E2A has suggested in their theoretical Miesology project, the architectural and spatial configurations developend by Mies in the mid-twentieth century may be seen as a formal source from which in an almost digital manner an infinite number of architectural variations can be assembled based on a finite numbers of elements. Miesology is a series of a dozen or so photomontages created by E2A with the help of their photocopier and based on reassembly of fragments of Mies’s projects into new configurations.

POST-CITY
Andrea Branzi, Eva Le Roi (part of Venice Biennale's Luxembourg Pavilion)

«Post-city», the theme proposed by the Luxembourg Pavilion for the XIII Biennale of Architecture in Venice requires a long process of reflection and research. Part of the «Common Ground» topic initiated by David Chipperfield, it must not be merely a striking slogan for the benefit of architects who have never reflected on this subject and whose sole concern is to «construct» as many parts of the town as possible...

Already at the XIth biennale a similar topic was proposed to leading architects: «Architecture beyond building». This was interpreted as a kind of improvised vacation, an excursion into the unknown territory of Art by professionals whose main ( and legitimate ) interest was in constructing square kilometers of «buildings»

My purpose in making these introductory remarks is to stress that this topic highlights one of the central aspects of the crisis of architecture in the XXIst century. The Post-City is neither a utopia nor science fiction, but the most realistic mirror of what already exists.

To put it plainly: The Post-City is not hypothetical possibility for the future, it is the city of the present. A city in which architecture has lost its role as a «central scenario of history» and has instead become «non figurative « that is to say an accessory, cataconic, inexpressive presence. Its role is limited to that of creating «exalted and isolated icons» that do not bear witness or anyhting or produce shared emotion. Realities that are rapidly submerged in social indifference, are already old when they are born and convey messages that are increasingly self-referential.

The city is no longer «an ensemble of architectural boxes» but an invasive and sprawling plancton of information, relations, services, consumer goods and persons. These realities produce an enormous expressive energy that is seductive  and uncontrollable and derives architecture of space and of its role. 

The Post-city is the most obvious sign of the great transformation that has characterised design in the XXIst century, the transition of Western society from architectural civilisation to consumer civilisation. It is an extreme effect of the Industrial Revolution. In the last century it was erroneously interpreted as the central role of the machine, the factory and the rationality of artificial technoologies.

The «consumer civilisation» is the result of the huge productive effort of the entire industrial apparatus, which has created a devastating, anarchic and unpredictable environmental effect. The markets for this civilisation today extend from China to South America, and the phenomenon goes by the name of globalisation. 

The Post-City mut be understood as part of this new historical framework, existing within this molecular and dynamic reality consisting of commodities. The exportable nature of the  commoditites fluidifies the world’s territory, in which national borders are becoming blurred, becoming an opaque tissue, traversable, non-specialised, operating in «post-Fordian» fashion. It is the product of a «creative» society, which, in order to compete internationally, must daily produce innovation through entrepeneurial activity for mass consumption. 

A city in which everything is contaminated and hybridised, as in the Oriental megalopolises in which the living live together with the dead, technology together with sacred animals, fiction together with theology.

A society that is not developing in a single direction but is looking for provisional, reversible  and incomplete solutions in order to positevely manage the state of permanent crisis in which capitalism is developing. The Post-City is the city of capitalism, where the only laws are those of the market and the market is entirely identified with society; where the apparent liberty of the individual coincides with the apparent liberty of everyone...

The historical reality that I am trying to describe is not an apocalyptic reality. It is not the end of history; on the contrary is it the beginning of a new story in which design ( lacking direction ) must reflect its deep foundations ( which are not the professional ones ) on the basis of its own existence, in the face of a society of 7 billion people who want «everything and the opposite of everything», who are attracted by novelty but also hostile to it..

Globalisation is not producing a uniform mentality or universal peace. On the contrary, it is leading to violent ethical or religious conflicts based on support for or opposition to cultural hybridation, support for or oposition to the contamination of traditions created by the invasive power of the economy ( and of arms ).

This society is standardised in appearance only. In reality it is a society that constantly has to experiment on and with itslef, its own imperfections and inadequacies, probing its own anthropological foundations but also trying to ensure that they do not become insurmountable walls. 

It is a society that must overcome modern rigidity and false oppositions between town and country, agriculture and architecture, tolerance and intolerance.

The Post-City consists of a territory lacking an external reference point but teeming with connections, conflicts and contradictions, in which everything is provisional, where billions of images and of messages converge and interact but even in their totality still do not succeed in building a «new cathedral»

These works are extract from the Venice Biennale's Luxembourg Pavilion 

POST-CITY Considering The Luxembourg Case

consisting of an exercice of models, drawings and texts

exhibitors / Yi-Der Chou, Radim Louda, Phillippe Nathan

you can see more here

RUSSIAN CYCLE
Pre-Soviet Period, Suprematism & other mysterious CCCP movements

I was deriving, a few days ago, on Tverskaya's Moscow main avenue and I found in the basement of a mainstream bookshop some architectural publications about the pre-soviet period, suprematism and brochures from different CCCP time. Everything is unfortunately written in russian but it adds something really mysterious -  don't know what is it, student work perhaps - but something really powerfull cames from all that people's faces who seems totally engaged in their tasks, to produce with high belief all these abstract architectural models and drawings. 

In a way, it also reveals what you can feel when you're in Russia from a quiet short time, you cannot really understand what's happened here - language people reactions - even if everything looks the same everything is different ;  something which can be contain in this Dostoievsky's quote " Russians are not whites, blacks or yellows, they are greens". It will follow a posts' series about that feeling and stuffs I found here and there.