INVASION
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| Solarium of Charles de Beistegui’s Penthouse, Le Courbusier, Paris, 1931 (source) |
The Continuous Monument, Superstudio, 1969 (source) |
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Le Corbusier was not happy about this. When he finished the penthouse on the Champs-Élysées for Charles de Beistegui in 1931, it was a modern apartment with clean and simple spaces. When the multi-millionaire moved in, he redecorated the space with his favorite Baroque furniture. Against the white walls of the solarium on the roof garden, Le Corbusier allowed a non-working fireplace almost as a joke. But then de Beistegui added a lavishly decorated clock and a pair of ornate candle holders. A mirror with an elaborate oval frame was hung halfway above the wall.
Le Corbusier should have seen this coming – de Beistegui was famous for his extravagant parties and love of the Empire style. Any modern design would be an imposition on his flamboyant client. He still took on the project because he felt it was an opportunity to test his ideas for the roofs of Paris and to realize a piece of his Plan Voisin. The solarium illustrated his agenda for the city. Enclosed by high walls on all sides, one can only see the grass, the four walls, and the clouds in the sky. This “open room” was completely cut off from the Parisian panorama. Le Corbusier announced the modern invasion of Paris by blocking out the nearby Arc de Triomphe – interestingly, a monument built by Napoleon to celebrate the victory of his invasions.
It is reasonable to accuse de Beistegui of raiding of an ideal design. But it would be equally fair to defend his rebellion against Le Corbusier’s assault on Paris and his client’s lifestyle. A building can be a statement, but it’s never an abstract piece of art. It has context and it contains the layers of life and activity. After all, clients, the city and its history are not architects’ enemies. |
As a gridded, material-less superstructure of modernist grandeur, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument represents an angst of over-saturation. Their series of photomontages represent a dystopic potential outcome of international banality – an earth engulfed in a surrealist monolith. While beautiful and breathtaking, the visionary imagery was in fact a criticism of modernism’s global invasion of the built environment. The renderings were never intended as realistic proposals, they simply warned the public that without opposition, criticism and/or an alternative, our urban and natural fabric may disappear.
Think of your most beloved work of architecture. Now imagine an urban condition as an infinite array of that singular work. It may be blobby, it may be sleek and simple, but it would be your only option for residence, entertainment, leisure, and any other activity. As a work you cherish, this may sound optimal or even utopic. Yet other inhabitants, now also obligated to occupy your ideal aesthetic, may not find it as surreal. Soon you too would realize how diluted your experiences had become. In the context of today’s design spectrum we face a similar invasion of uninflected design proposals. Urban design projects continue to be rendered in singularity as offices propose their ideal aesthetic over all aspects and scales of urban renewal. Projects continue to propose re-build before re-use, even in an era of sustainability. Sure, deep down every designer thinks his or her proposal can change the world. But there is no one “perfect” option. Is it not that very diversity which makes our great cities so great? Superstudio’s expression is only one premonition of the imprisonment caused by… more |
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Human Wu
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Jonathan Hanahan
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UTOPIA
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| Bubble Shooter for iPhone |
Adrift in an Internet Suburbia, Present (source) |
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Italo Calvino was obsessed with stories.
He was interested in stories that are told for generations. Over and over. And again and again.
These are stories that are probably as old as us human beings. We told them years ago sitting around a bonfire in a cave and we tell them today, through various new formats, such as video games. They are completely familiar because, whether they are a story from the future or the past, they are timeless.
When writing about Voltaire’s Candide, Italo Calvino uniquely points out that Voltaire’s novel is, above all, about speed. As a reader, we are intrigued by its accelerated rhythms, of traveling around Europe and the globe at such an incredible pace. The story unfolds in one, two, even three countries a day. People die, lie, kill, love and deceive each other with such quickness that it is easy to lose track.
Despite its eventfulness, it is still believable.
Candide is therefore, as Calvino points out, a novel that depicts a place that does not exist. Candide depicts utopia.
Calvino’s definition of utopia is simple: it is a non-place. Not a place of wishes or longings of how things could be. Just a non-place.
But this is not entirely true.
Calvino shows us how Voltaire depicts… more |
I once believed that utopia was the Internet. That was back when the Internet was distinguishable as being someplace different from the here and now, but that is a utopia we have already arrived at, so it is no longer a non-place. It is time to look for other utopias.
Sometimes I will be driving by a neighborhood that I do not know well, in a city like Los Angeles or Athens or the edges of New York. I will see a neglected lot, maybe there is a lone tree and some scrap material scattered around. This lot could be on the edge of suburbia or squeezed between downtown developments. That undeveloped and perhaps abandoned land is a utopia, because it is an unformed place where thoughts can grow undisturbed.
And more than a place, it is also a perfect moment in time. It is someplace that though you know little about, it allows you to imagine the most.
Rather than its Greek origin as the non-place, I tend to think of utopia as a more personal matter, a subjective vision for a potential goal, a Fata Morgana, a place that perhaps does not exist right now, but one which you will definitely want to reach eventually. That place need not be geographical, it could be a personal achievement or a professional goal, a way to re-organize the reality you are working on. It is the reality that you want to be realizing, whether it is a building, an exhibition or a book, its rules and its organization are that of utopia, of a new garden of thoughts where you can only plant seeds and sit, imagining the glorious and ideal life that will grow out of them and surround you. |
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Jan Åman
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Andreas Angelidakis
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CORNER
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| Caulk Structure |
Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, Japanese Grand Prix, 1990 (source) |
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The corporation DAP unmercifully executed the inside corner around the end of World War II, and the butt joint suffered a slower death shortly thereafter. Sure, resins, putty and other schmear were used before that time–but all of a sudden this goo that could fix all problems was mass-produced and easily dispensed in tubes. Architects eventually started to make drawings indicating every linear inch where this frosting should be used. They called them wireframe diagrams, but their real function was to specify the locations of caulk at the intersection of any two planes. It did not matter how big the gap – just caulk to fill. Towards the end of World War II, Dow Corning jumped into the silicone market and made an array of goo so powerful that mechanical fasteners, welding, frames and other conventional tectonics were no longer necessary. In 1978, in order to test their new silicone caulk, Carlo Scarpa was sealed into his casket with a perfect quarter-inch bead of clear indoor/outdoor. So DAP killed the corner, Dow killed the connection. In the late 90s, the Institute for the Promotion of Blobs formed due to the communal hatred of the corner and called for a careful mimicry of this high-tech goo. Eventually they will accomplish their goal of creating a cast caulk structure so we will never have to worry about weathering, shrinking, cracking, expansion, peeling, or leaking. At least for fifteen years. |
In his recent documentary Senna (2010), director Asif Kapadia brings to our attention the importance one corner can have on the course of a single Formula 1 race, a season, and a career. Framing the rivalry between cold, rational Frenchman Alain Prost and passionate, tempestuous Brazilian Ayrton Senna, Kapadia identifies its crescendo at the start of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix, where Senna unflinchingly attempted to overtake Prost at its first corner. Responding to Senna’s aggression, Prost followed an infamously “dirty” line, entering the corner early enough that Senna’s McLaren Honda impacted the rear of his Fiat Ferrari, resulting in the disablement of both vehicles and, ironically, sealing a World Championship for Senna.
Prost’s paradoxical action was a critique, a means of calling attention to behavior he saw as unbecoming a driver in Senna’s position. It also calls attention to the difference between the static corner and the art (and science) of cornering, the means by which a vehicle fluidly traverses a track. Within a single manifold of possibilities, each driver constructs his or her own racing line, and the differences between said lines determine the winner.
Racing lines are concerned with quickness, not the shortest distance between two points… more |
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Kyle May
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Michael Abrahamson
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NEIGHBOR
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| Carlton Street Nolli Plan, 2011 (Image by Author) |
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, c. 1975 (source) |
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In Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 plan of Rome, the outlines of buildings are hatched in order to highlight the planar density of the city. While these hatched boundaries represent spatial adjacencies, they are also a record of social proximity. While the erection of one building next to another necessarily results in a spatial conversation, it also results in the social contract that is being a neighbor. And just as there are good and bad spatial compositions, there are also good and bad neighbors.
By international standards, and as evidenced by its Nolli plan, the inner city Toronto neighborhood of Cabbagetown, where I grew up, is relatively sparse. Existing at an urban edge, next to a winding river valley and interspersed with parks, the houses while in close proximity often maintain spatial independence. This spatial estrangement is reconciled in part by a harsh winter climate, and the legal requirement for homeowners to remove snow and leaves from the sidewalks adjacent to their homes, which in ideal circumstances results in cooperation across boundaries.
This, sadly, is not always the norm. After any large snowfall, our family would don our heaviest winter gear, arm ourselves with shovels, and plow a path connecting the sidewalks in front of our house with those of our neighbors, expecting that the favor would some day be returned. Our neighbor, returning home one evening after a particularly brutal blizzard while we were still in the process of clearing her sidewalk, squeezed past us and paused at the top of her front stoop only long enough to mutter “I owe you an apple pie”, before slamming the door in our faces. Needless to say, we never received the apple pie, nor did she ever express any further words of gratitude, but to this day we continue to clear her walk, making sure to maintain at least our end of the social contract. |
“Here comes the story of a Hurricane…” -Bob Dylan, “Hurricane” I have had a lot of neighbors in my time. When I was born, my family lived next door to a kind-hearted, sometimes drag queen, who would visit our place regularly (dressed as a “man”) bringing me gifts. My mother, a sheltered newcomer to the West, would peer into his apartment through the glass panes of the front door, amazed to see sequined dresses strewn across the floor. Subsequently, we lived next to a very friendly, tall lady who scared me one Sunday when after a nice brunch together, she slipped away from the table, re-emerging in the garden dressed like the Easter Bunny. I was forced to to endure a terrifying ride in the backseat of my parent’s car, with said out-scaled rabbit, which delivered us to an egg hunt at my pre-school. With another change of residence, came a lovely elderly couple who, most significantly, debunked a popular South Asian myth which dictates that one must eat rice for dinner. They also quashed the notion that married people slept in the same bed, opting instead for two twin beds separated by a side table à la Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Following an international move, came a long string of suburban neighbors that I would classify as mostly unremarkable. Upon moving to the city, for a time, I lived next door to a well-known concert pianist whom I recognized from his regular appearances on television. His home had a sophisticated modernist-inspired interior that could not contain his music, which was forever spilling out onto the street. The most famous, however, and not to mention the most uniquely stylish, of all my neighbors was Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. His clothes, his car, the objects in his world, were all so well chosen. His house, a beautiful old dwelling… more |
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E. Sean Bailey
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Erandi de Silva
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WALL
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| Abandoned Wall Street, 2011 (source) |
Still from Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, 1987 |
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2011 has been a year of global unrest; Civil war in Libya, revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, riots in the UK and protests on Wall Street. While the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt played out in the major civic squares of Sana’a and Cairo, in America and the UK there has been no logical point of focus for protests, as the source of outrage has been difficult to pin down (while the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan initiated the London riots, the madness that ensued reflected a more systemic social malaise). This lack of appropriate symbolic geographies has left protesters in these cities to wander. Rioters in London descended on local high streets, cannibalistically looting their own communities. In New York, “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have spun a web around the city, tracing the infrastructure of streets and subways to symbolically disparate points, including corporate skyscrapers in Jersey City, the civic plaza of City Hall, the federal courthouses of Foley Square, the consumer hub that is Union Square and the academic front lawn of Washington Square Park. They have even attempted to cross the Brooklyn Bridge into the ideologically neutral outer boroughs.
The one place the protestors cannot seem to be found is Wall Street (Zuccotti Park is located a couple of blocks to the North). On a recent lunchtime visit, the street was abandoned except for rows of temporary metal barriers lining each side and a handful of police officers… more |
Wall Street, as part of the urban grid, has divisive origins. Its name, derived from the Dutch “Waalstraat”, is believed to be a reference to an earthen wall bounding the northern edge of the original New Amsterdam settlement. It is presumed to have been erected in order to limit access to the English colonizers and Native Americans. Nowadays, the site has expanded beyond being simply a street into an embodiment of the idea of American finance, extending into numerous realms, including that of lifestyle.
In Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, the materialistic influence of this site manifests itself in an apartment on the Upper East Side as the impressionable stock broker Buddy Fox (played by a young Charlie Sheen) steps closer towards emulating the gaudy postmodern style of his mentor Gordan Gekko (Michael Douglas). Guided by his aspirational designer girlfriend (Daryl Hannah) faux marble walls, trompe l’oeil scenery, fake brickwork and an excessive use of gold and silver leaf line his million dollar apartment. As a misguided indicator of “success” that separates Fox from his blue collar roots, his ostentatious private dwelling is a critical accoutrement, necessary for establishing his identity as an up-and-comer in the business. While Wall Street once sought to keep out invaders, its influence has begun to infiltrate the spaces around it, like the urban grid which seemingly expands in every direction, for better or for worse, Wall Street’s reach is limitless. |
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E. Sean Bailey
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Erandi de Silva
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OPPOSITION
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| Rob Ford’s Mugshot, 1999 (source) |
Composition 1960 #10, Performed by Nam June Paik (source) |
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Warmed water molecules are propelled into the sky, latching onto particles of dust to form clouds; cumulus, stratus, cirrus and cumulonimbus. Previously blue skies turn to gray. As the air cools, droplets crystallize in the frigid temperatures, falling instead of rising. What begins as a dusting of white powder gradually thickens into a suffocating blanket. Branches snap and roofs buckle. Opposition sets in.
On October 25, 2010, the citizens of Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford to “stop the gravy train” (wasteful spending) at city hall. But when it was discovered that there was no legitimate “gravy” to be found, and that alternate strategies would need to be employed to reduce the city’s operating deficit, including the closure of libraries, cuts to daycare programs and increases in taxes, a once supportive electorate began to sour. This unrest turned to outrage when the mayor hijacked a democratic, pragmatic, decades long waterfront planning process which proposed parks and human scaled neighborhoods on the lakefront. The mayor proposed to instead sell the land to an Australian developer with plans to build a mall, giant Ferris Wheel and monorail. Confronted with such sad prospects, opposition descended on city hall like a blizzard with planners, designers, academics and the populace at large voicing their unrest, thus decimating the mayor’s approval rating and effectively robbing him of his political sway.
In light of the opposition, the mayor’s alternate waterfront vision was voted down 45-0 (including the mayor’s own vote against his motion) on September 21, 2011. |
Oppositions – I am against them. Well, of course I am not. It is however important to understand that the effect of an opposition, and therefore its value, is to frame a space between two limits. The opposition itself becomes a thing that sets up a tension between two terms but can also work to negate everything outside of the binary. Mao’s assertion, later quoted by the doomed urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction, that “We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy” initially leaves unclear whether the line is vertical—a separating barrier—or horizontal, a tether that connects the opposed terms as they spin in the void.
Discourses on architecture are, of course, often framed in terms of oppositions as well. A foundational opposition that was originally used to open a space of radical potential in the figuration of modernism was that of form to function. Separating these two terms made possible the thinking of architectural objects in terms of the production of actions, situations and, if not lifeforms, then at least what Agamben terms “forms of life”. This opposition, however, has the potential to go stale, lose its negative, dialectical power and harden into positivist dogmatism. In modernism this staleness allowed the emergence of a reactionary, post/anti-modernist “formalism” which did little more than invert an unproductive dichotomy. Lines are drawn in abstract space or become disciplinary boundaries marked out by referees like lines on a football field.
The art piece Composition 1960 #10 in 1961 by La Monte Young, a musician turned performance artist… more |
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E. Sean Bailey
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Alan Smart
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FLOOD
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| Mississippi River Flooding, 2011 (source) |
Titanic, Stanley Tigerman, 1978 (source) |
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“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
-Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel Floods alter reality and create unimaginable situations, structures, and images. Floods can turn roofs into porches, streets into rivers, cities into swamps and yards into swimming pools. Often it takes a crisis, such as a flood, to bring out the best in people. Not strictly in the form of heroism or generosity, but also through adrenaline-fueled ingenuity. While conventional flood mitigation involves sand bags and metal flood barriers, home made levees were employed to keep the water out of yards and homes when the rivers began to rise near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Using nature against itself, the homeowners appropriated land art as preservationist functionalism. Born out of crisis, the levees alter our understanding of the water’s relationship to the land. Floating like small barges, these temporary islands appear scaleless against the vast flood, the rescued homes standing fortress-like inside the earthen mounds. While some of the makeshift dams gave way during the flood, vanishing into the murky waters, the surviving mounds will also, in time, disappear into the landscape. Much like the earthworks projects of 1970s land artists, their existence will persist only in photographs; amazing remnants of a terrible disaster. |
My interest in Stanley Tigerman’s 1978 collage of the sinking of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall has nothing to do with Mies’ architectural reign over Chicago, the complexities of an academic rivalry between IIT and UIC, or postmodernism as an attack on modernism. It has everything to do with the shadowy foreground of the scene, and its mysterious man in a boat. Who was this man and what were his intentions?
At first glance, the man in the boat appears to be the lone survivor of a tragic accident. An accident which risked endangering, or perhaps even pushing to the verge of extinction, “glass box” architecture. The man’s survival is significant, as it means that the traditions of the glass box might be triumphantly carried on to future generations. This type of happily-ever-after scenario would best be played out on the big screen, to some sort of heroic Hollywood soundtrack; credits rolling, sobs of joy from the audience. The man in the boat was a hero.
Alternatively, is it possible the man in the boat intentionally sank Crown Hall? It would not be that hard, after all. A broken window or two would do the trick. While the first scenario portrays architecture as an innocent victim, the latter labels it as a threat. Glass boxes are not for everyone. I can picture the man’s face now: slowly, confidently paddling away from his kill, never looking back. The man in the boat was not a hero; he was a villain.
But, alas… more |
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Matt Shaw
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John Stoughton
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COMMUNITY
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| Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1890 (source) |
Piccadilly Community Center, Christoph Büchel, 2011 (source) |
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The Piccadilly Community Center does not represent an instance of documentation. Its uncanny juxtaposition of both impoverishment and overabundance is both anachronistic and revealing of the center’s studied construction. The inverse of the canon of social documentary photography, those images that record and sometimes romanticize the poverty, the community center creates a dense and specific world, rather than record one already existing. It is a kind of social realism built, not captured.
And though it takes as its subject interaction between people, and studies those spaces that facilitate and house these interactions, neither does the Piccadilly Community Center, as constructed in Hauser and Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery space, represent an instance of relational aesthetics. Rather than represent a continuation of that phenomenon defined by Bourriaud as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space,” the center perpetuates, instead, a more traditional dream of mimesis and its power.
When Pygmalion created Galatea in the likeness of a woman, he hoped the divine gift of a human soul might enliven her sculpted flesh. The Piccadilly Community Center, an artificially constructed vision of a local community center built in a gallery space in posh central London, is, in its mimetic foundation, an expression of renewed faith in recreating reality and the power of these recreations. The Piccadilly project suggests that by building something that looks like a community center, the spirit of such a place, of community, might somehow descend into its shell, rendering it less a mockery of the lower classes than a functioning supplement to their social lives. |
As a type of reproduced space, the artist Christoph Büchel’s interpretation of a community center in Piccadilly has a dialectical agenda which is self-consciously positioned between reality and artifice. For this exhibition, Hauser and Wirth’s upscale gallery fittings are removed and replaced with scavenged furnishings and accessories that simulate a detailed but thrifty recreation facility, indicating a place that has been there for some time and is permanent rather than temporary.
This project relies on misrepresentation to define itself. While the space’s identity may originate in “Art”, it shies away from this label. An obvious gesture indicating an attempted divorce from the discipline’s conventions is the omission of Büchel’s name from any promotional material, implying that the community space has come into being as any other: a product of anonymous authors, possibly bureaucrats.
The uncanniness of the space results from its proclivity for mimicry but also from its programmatic tension: art fans intently gaze at carefully placed Post-it notes and disheveled file folders, as if they were trying to understand a Dutch still-life, while elderly locals bake Algerian bread. Some users of the space are there to observe, while those under surveillance may not know that they are being watched. Thus, there is a gradient of awareness amongst users as to what is really taking place in the space.
Büchel has essentially constructed a stage for ordinary people to go about their daily activities and upon which an audience can wander. Here the roles of audience and actor are fluid and can be exchanged at any given moment. This juxtaposition of program produces… more |
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Rachel Engler
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Erandi de Silva
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GRIEF
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| X37-B Orbital Test Vehicle, 2010 (source) |
Portrait of the Author, Frankurt am Main International Airport, 1990 |
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“Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.”
-Laurie Anderson, “From the Air” The Space Shuttle is gone. The program ended after thirty years when the orbiter Atlantis landed this past July 21st. The Space Shuttle was designed to act as, and resemble, something between a pickup truck and a commercial airliner. Humanist and anthropomorphic, the shuttles climbed to orbit on two leg-like rocket boosters to advance NASA’s stated mission: “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” Before the shuttle, the first few generations of human built spacecraft were highly legible artifacts. Antenna, solar panels, docking ports, attitude thrusters and portholes clearly indicated that they were only components in larger contextual systems, processing nodes dependent on complex streams of input and output. The ship pictured above is the X37-B, first launched by the Air Force in 2010, mission unknown. Blunt and blind, with no windows or doors, no visible human or network affordances at all, this object has nothing to indicate that its autonomy would be threatened or influenced by any other controller inside or outside its smooth heat shielded skin. Who could suspect that this baby robot spaceplane, cute and sinister like a vinyl Dunny toy, designed by the Department of Defense, would be capable of deploying orbital weapons? In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe describes the anger and frustration of the early American astronauts, all originally fighter test pilots, when they discovered that the vehicle they were expected to fly were really only subject to little more than the faceless math of… more |
There is a framed picture on my dresser from when I was eighteen. In it, I am sitting on the floor of the Frankfurt airport. M., my first love, a lanky German boy, sits next to me and quietly studies my face. The other friend in the picture holds my hand, his eyes closed, crying. In slow motion, M. and I are being torn from each other: an hour after the click of the shutter, I will pass through the gate and go back to Minnesota after spending a year in Germany.
Twenty years later in a different city, I took a set of pictures the last time I stayed at J.’s apartment: the knives on the magnetic strip in the kitchen, my reflection in the mirrored closet doors, the vertical blinds and the West Coast light casting diagonal beams on the bed, the view of the bookshelf from the orange couch, each of us on an end, watching old movies and West Wing episodes under a thin turquoise throw. Here was Christmas, here was the most important letter anyone gave me. Here were the meanest things anyone ever said to me.
Neither love nor depression have the words “finish” or “end” or “done” in their vocabulary. Love is belief in expansiveness, of more and again and adventure, of a year that keeps unfolding, of Death Valley in summer and northern Sweden in winter and even just Venice Beach on a gloomy day in June. Depression, too, is expansive, but in a different way, a swirling vortex of shit, a downward funnel that just spins deeper.
Grief, however, is bounded. It twists and gnarls and it stifles the breath. It forgoes the linear in favor of spikes and spots and synchronicity. When you think you’ve managed to escape grief, it hoods you again, capturing you in another convolute. A knot under my sternum that sticks on every inhale, a peach pit, the bitter walnut falling out of a cracked shell. And then: the knot tires itself, giving way to all the muscles that gripped it; the walnut spit out, the peach pit tucked into a napkin, then folded in quarters. |
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Fred Scharmen
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M. W. Steenson
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FREE
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| Free Horse Screensaver (source) |
London Burning, 2011 (source) |
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“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” There is an implicit conflict in the word “free”. While it is commonly used to describe items without any attached value, such as the newspapers that litter the world’s subway systems, or the samples offered in grocery aisles to tempt more formidable purchases, to be free is generally regarded as the most valuable of human rights. Documents such as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the American Constitution, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights have resulted in the expectation of freedom the world over. Operating at such wildly contrasting scales, from the disposable, to the absolute, to everything in between, the implications of “free” are staggering, both abstractly and concretely. While given the opportunity architects might very well banish the word “free” outright, the bitter taste of countless hours invested in unpaid competitions and client proposals, the built world cannot exist outside of its jurisdiction. At the local scale, building codes, labor unions, monetary transactions, transport of materials are all implicit in freedom. At a more global scale, the relationship between space and freedom becomes increasingly complicated. THE BI BLOG is currently seeking proposals for a forthcoming print publication on the topic “FREE”. If you are interested in joining the discussion, please send a short biography, publication list and a 500 word proposal to submissions@thebiblog.net by September 15, 2011. E. Sean Bailey and Erandi de Silva |
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