A&R

(Architecture & Resistance)

Resist whatever seems inevitable.

Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the idea that architecture is a building.

Resist the idea that architecture can save the world.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the influence of the appealing.

Resist the desire to make a design based on a piece of music.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

Resist the idea that you need a client to make architecture.

Resist the temptation to talk fast.

Resist anyone who asks you to design only the visible part.

Resist the idea that drawing by hand is passé.

Resist any assertion that the work of Frederick Kiesler is passé.

Resist buying an automobile of any kind.

Resist the impulse to open an office.

Resist believing that there is an answer to every question.

Resist believing that the result is the most important thing.

Resist the demand that you prove your ideas by building them.

Resist people who are satisfied.

Resist the idea that architects are master builders.

Resist accepting honors from those you do not respect.

Resist the panicky feeling that you are alone.

Resist hoping that next year will be better.

Resist the assertion that architecture is a service profession.

Resist the foregone conclusion that They have already won.

Resist the impulse to go back to square one.

Resist believing that there can be architecture without architects.

Resist accepting your fate.

Resist people who tell you to resist.

Resist the suggestion that you can do what you really want later.

Resist any idea that contains the word interface.

Resist the idea that architecture is an investment.

Resist the feeling that you should explain.

Resist the claim that history is concerned with the past.

Resist the innuendo that you must be cautious.

Resist the illusion that it is complete.

Resist the opinion that it was an accident.

Resist the judgement that it is only valid if you can do it again.

Resist believing that architecture is about designing things.

Resist the implications of security.

Resist writing what They wish you would write.

Resist assuming that the locus of power is elsewhere.

Resist believing that anyone knows what will actually happen.

Resist the accusation that you have missed the point.

Resist all claims on your autonomy.

Resist the indifference of adversaries.

Resist the ready acceptance of friends.

Resist the thought that life is simple, after all.

Resist the belated feeling that you should seek forgiveness.

Resist the desire to move to a different city.

Resist the notion that you should never compromise.

Resist any thought that contains the word should.

Resist the lessons of architecture that has already succeeded.

Resist the idea that architecture expresses something.

Resist the temptation to do it just one more time.

Resist the belief that architecture influences behavior.

Resist any idea that equates architecture and ownership.

Resist the tendency to repeat yourself.

Resist that feeling of utter exhaustion.

Lebbeus Wood

PS : Il était bien trop difficile de choisir UNE image pour ce post, je vous conseille dès lors de jeter un oeil sur le blog de Wood, et notamment les carnets de croquis NOTEBOOK

TL

(Texture Logement)

Ou comment résoudre, avec un pragmatisme typiquement chinois, les problèmes de densités.
N'hésitez pas à cliquer pour agrandir.

©Photos Flavien Menu

C/C

(Copie/Coller)

Colmar est une charmante ville d'Alsace ou l'on peut se délecter, dans le froid glacial d'un hiver continental, d'une consistante choucroute ou de quelques verres de vin chaud. Malheureusement il y a un hic: l'Alsace ne se trouve nulle part d'autre qu'en France. A cela, les Malaisiens ont trouvé un remède simple: ils ont reconstruit Colmar chez eux.
Berjaya Hills Resort situé dans le village de Bukit Tinggi, province du Pahang tente de copier pâlement les charmes du village alsacien rasant par la même 320 000m2 de forêt tropicale.

IS

(Ito San)

"Although editorial selection may play a part, houses of this flavor are certainly conspicuous. Of course, many of these characteristics apply to my own architecture, and I am aware that due to my advocacy of lightness, ephemerality, and transparency, I must bear some of the responsibility for this syndrome among my colleagues born only twenty years after me. Nevertheless, I have sympathize with Hasegawa’s loss of taste and speech. I suppose this is because it seems to me that many of these houses by young architects share a feeble introversion. Of course there are some to which this does not apply, but so many have a light and transparent aesthetic sophistication throughout. However beautiful and delicate, they do not engage the exterior and are somehow negatively closed to reality. Put another way, while persisting with the critique of modernism. I think an overwhelming number of these houses fail to clearly demonstrate any criticality of their own. I think that very few attempt to positive engagement with reality."

Toyo Ito , Shedding the Modern Body Image: Is a house without Criticism possible?
in : After the crash: Architecture in post bubble japan, Thomas Daniell

SR

(Sensorial Revolution)

"For the rationalist culture of the modern movement, « understanding » reality was more important than « perceiving » it, analyzing it through its elementary components, discovering its dynamic mechanisms, and never stopping at the surface. Those who did not know how to lead these in the right direction were “fooled by the senses”; they were inferior, untrustworthy, and substantially obscure perceptive instruments. They provided accessory, intuitive, superficial, and therefore substantially misleading information.

At the end of sixties an immense haste for information and stimuli to determine that which we call the Sensorial Revolution developed, and consisted in an unchecked growth of sensorial information and consequent development of all the perceptive sensitivities of man. This great informational, musical, and behavioral sensitivity is based on a new perceptive hierarchy: the senses are no longer a simple instrument that transmits inert information to reason, which only reason can then transform into organized conscience. The senses have become redefined, vibrating, cognitive instrument of reality and an element of the individual’s political formation.

The reality produced by music, fashion and social behaviors, but also by electronics and new materials, is a reality of surfaces, which imposes a knowledge of surfaces. If modern mans’ sensitivity was analytical and mechanical, that of contemporary man is synthetic, electronic and resonant.

The Sensorial Revolution displaces some of the old codes in order to introduce new Vanguard. It is rather a matter of a series of filters, additional lenses, and sonorous amplifiers that tend to revisit existence, displacing knowledge towards a world of absolute immediacy.
This is not a spontaneous, simple world; quite the contrary, it is an extremely sophisticated universe, where, however, there no longer exists a critical and ideological distance between man and the phenomena that surround him.

The perceptive ability capable of instinctively choosing useful elements of the complex stratification of informational fabric that reaches the individual through space is growing.

This new “auditory ability” that the metropolitan inhabitant is developing consists in the integrated use of all the perceptive abilities of the body: we could paradoxically say that he sees through touch, listens with the eyes, and smells with the ears. In the sense that all messages, real or virtual, that he receives imply a whole, sensorial deciphering.(…)

The eye was the illuminist symbol in the mechanical age, when a glance allowed a deep inquiry into the logic of reality’s movement, similar to that of a large clock.

The hand was Le Corbusier’s symbol that, through “Le Modulor”, gave the modern world a chance to recover a human dimension in the act of making.

The symbol of man in the pos-industrial world now is the ear, that strange, enigmatic organ, perennially open to the outside, and within which simultaneously millions of complex information bits are input, allowing us to perceive within the great soundtrack of the metropolis the light hum of the computer, a bird’s song, or the sound of the jungle.

The ear represent quit well the sensorial revolution, where “understanding” the internal mechanisms of phenomena no longer counts, rather “perceiving” the effects of these mechanisms, choosing the sounds and information, transforming into culture the gray mass of sounds present in space. (…) One single view of the world is no longer enough if there is not any sound information to act as its key: do those images come from a film, or they are real scenes from the Gulf War? Is the chase of those traffickers fiction or a scene from Bolivia?

We listen, and will understand. "

Andrea Branzi, Weak and diffuse Modernity.

MW

(Mark Wigley)
Dean of the Columbia Architecture School in NY

"Architecture is a set of endlessly absorbing questions for our society rather than a set of clearly defined objects with particular effects. Architects are public intellectuals, crafting forms that allow others to see the world differently and perhaps to live differently. The real gift of the best architects is to produce a kind of hesitation in the routines of contemporary life, an opening in which new potentials are offered, new patterns, rhythms, moods, sensations, pleasures, connections, and perceptions. The architect's buildings are placed in the city like the books of a thoughtful novelist might be placed in a newsstand in a railway station, embedding the possibility of a rewarding detour amongst all the routines, a seemingly minor detour that might ultimately change the meaning of everything else. The architect crafts an invitation to think and act differently. "

in the Future of the Architect, Dean statement at Columbia University

Patrick Blanc, paysagiste

FM

(French Memory)

Hangzhou, à l'est de la Chine...

WC

(Web Communication)

Un post rapide pour parler de com' sur un projet, le batiment de logement à Copenhague de BIG et JDS (anciennement PLOT).
Ils ont conçus un site pour les clients. Il permet entre autre de voir tous les plans et de savoir si les apparts sont libres.



A noter pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, la conférence de Julien de Smet (ici) au pavillon de l'arsenal.
Et pour ceux qui connaissent, et qui ont toujours envie d'en savoir plus, voici le blog inauguré il y à peu.