Michel Gondry and Bjork's Paint Piano

the Anarchitecture Group

The group Anarchitecture came together in 1973, formed by Gordon Matta-Clark and fellow artists. Cynically, one could say that the term was derived because it sounded good, and elevated the group’s pretensions to work under such a name. Yet the first exhibition of the Anarchitecture group occurred in the same year as the work Splitting (1974), and this association of Matta-Clark’s pieces within the realm of architecture was to foresee the direction his work was to take for the next five years, until his death in August 1978.

So what exactly was this ‘cultural reality’ that Matta-Clark and his fellow artists wished to confront, to ‘push against’? In the words of Matta-Clark:

The group’s architectural aim was more elusive than doing pieces that would demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings.

Gordon Matta-Clark in an interview with Liza Bear, Avalanche, December 1974, p.34

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

These buildings were empty, and for Matta-Clark, they were free for him to use. The neglect of these physical structures allowed Matta- Clark a philosophical approach that sought to reveal societal problems through art.

Matta-Clark’s cuttings were simultaneously an addition to existing structures, since they afforded new passageways and views, and a subtraction, by being a void. In this way, the cuttings stand as metaphors for the layers of past references in the individual building, as well as for the disjunctures in the functioning of the individual within society. The breaking down of walls symbolized a breaking down, a rupturing, of interpersonal and class barriers. The building types were archetypal, each inferring a certain status about the inhabitants. The ghetto tenement blocks he used marked the imprisonment of the poor. The common suburban houses of Splitting and Bingo marked the self-containment of the higher socioeconomic classes. The breakdown of these building types sought an open, more liberal society.

Matta-Clark’s most notorious work, and his most powerful statement, was Window Blow Out (1976). This sought to undermine the foundations of the architectural establishment by which he had gained his architectural education. Borrowing a gun from artist Dennis Oppenheim, Matta-Clark:

… came in at 3 am while we were setting up the show [“Idea As Model” at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York] and he was incredibly wrecked. He said that he was going to knock out only those windows that were already cracked; at that point I said okay, only those. But in fact he shot them all out. When the Institute Fellows came in (Peter Eisenman was the director at the time), they were furious.

interview with Andrew MacNair, in Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1985, p.96

The second part of the piece was to place in each bay of the broken windows, mounted photographs taken of buildings in the South Bronx area of New York, themselves with smashed windows. The work was subsequently eliminated, the windows being replaced, with very few people seeing it. But what his actions had offered Matta-Clark was the opportunity to criticize what he felt to be a lack of attention paid by architects to the problem of decaying buildings. He knew that Meier, Gwathmey and Graves were to be exhibiting at the show, and at the time commented:

These are the guys I studied with at Cornell, these were my teachers. I hate what they stand for.

ibid.

Matta-Clark was disturbed by the attitude he felt existed on the part of many architects who saw decaying buildings only as structures to be removed in the interest of renewal and urban planning, and who constructed replacements that themselves soon became objects of decay. He felt that modern architecture was not meeting the needs of people, but rather was creating dehumanized situations.

http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_conical.html

Using Flickr Geotags to Map the World's Cities

Amsterdam

  Barcelona

Berlin

NY

source:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624209158632/detail/

Paris

We've seen maps of photographic activity around the world, and maps of traffic activity in a city, which reveal how heavily roads are used. And now, photographer Eric Fischer has combined both ideas, creating maps of 50 different cities around the world, using only the geotags of photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa. What emerges are basically maps of human interest--that is, all the places fascinating enough that someone decided to take a picture. Above, the map for New York, with Manhattan in the center. You'll also notice a bit of color coding on the maps. Apparently, Fischer was able to guess that the picture taker's mode of transportation--presumably using the time stamps and distance traveled between a user's pictures. He then created a color code: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit. 

Cool as these maps are, you've gotta wonder at all the possible ways they could be expanded. What if the pictures were color-coded by time of day? Or simply dropped into an animation? Then you could see waves of local interest, as the daytime tourist hordes give way to drunk people snapping party pictures.
To see the entire series, check out Fischer's Flickr. The cities are ordered according to how densely clustered the photographs are (and hence, how detailed the maps are).
 
UPDATE
Using a bit of ingenious reasoning, Fischer has managed to create maps showing which pictures were taken by tourists, and which were taken by locals.
Fischer's thought process: If a user took pictures in a specific city for only less than a month, she's probably a tourist. If she took pictures over a period longer than a month, she's probably a local. 

http://bartlettyear1architecture.blogspot.gr/2010/10/infographic-of-day-using-flickr-geotags.html  




Blue pictures are by locals. Red pictures are by tourists. Yellow pictures might be by either. Base map © OpenStreetMap, CC-BY-SA

Athens by Sound

http://www.athensbysound.gr/ABS_catalogue.pdf

Contingent space - Badel Block . Zagreb

Uncertain environments in which architecture acts require contingent responses. Contingency determines the potential of architecture. It loads architecture with dormant ways-of-being whose appearance cannot be determined a priori. Contingency forces us to approach the project with the desire of uncovering the systems (structures and dynamics) that give us the possibility of being-different. Contingency is the framework for chance. Architecture should be able to deploy contingent structures capable of hosting chance and even encourage it. We propose a place as an open field which forces users acting and deciding as it deploys as an unstable system capable of promoting that chance; a system capable of promoting conditioned changes in its structure (gravitational, programmatic or expressive). Objects are inserted in place to keep it in a permanent state of excitement, they become react we in the presence of other agents in the context. This is the task we assume: creating links and letting new realities emerge through the establishment of these connections. We must allow the blanks to be filled by links between objects instead of filling them with the objects themselves. The OCA (Office for Contingent Architecture) is responsible for the construction of ductile and temporary communities that keep their environment in a constant state of imbalance. Every precise order that is generated through the OCA is a final order; and it is an order only referred to itself.
Selected morphology. 'World is neither predictable nor causal anymore as religions or philosophy or science tried to convey through history. World is onty probable, it is getting more and more statistically Quantifiable."

http://afasiaarq.blogspot.com/2012/06/del-val-sanz-gelabert-del-castillo.html

croud-sourced data

Generic City - Rem Koolhaas S, M, L, XL

Interview: Rem Koolhaas on OMA's preoccupations from Dezeen on Vimeo.

1.2  To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance, from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow cannot imagine that anything contemporary - made by us - contributes to it. But the fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too "small" to be inhabited and shared b those alive. We ourselves exhaust it. To the extend that history finds its deposit in architecture, present human quantities will inevitably burst and deplete previous substance. Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there - in a stable model of continuous population expansion - proportionally less to share, but history also has invidious half-life - as it is more abused, it becomes less significant - to the point where its diminishing hand-outs become insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for "character", grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust.

1.4 Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its tragedy is given in simple geometric terms. As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the broken point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value - a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention - is only a disguised insistence on the priority of dependency on the center: without center, no periphery; the interest of the first persumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned, the condition of the periphery is made worse by the fact that its mother is still alive, stealing the show, emphasizing its offspring's inadequacies. The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only the center is by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy. (Manhattan denigrates as "bridge-and-tunnel people" those who need infrastructural support to enter the city, and makes them pay for it.) The persistence of the present concentric obsession makes us all bridge-and-tunnel people, second-class citizens in our own civilization, disenfranchised by the dumb coincidence of our collective exile from the center.

1.6 The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting - or unexciting - everywhere. It is "superficial" - like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning. 

3.1 The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace. It is a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions, discreet and mysterious like a large space lit by a bed lamp. Compared to the classical city, the Generic City is sedated, usually perceived from a sedentary position. Instead of concentration - simultaneous presence - in the Generic City individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color variations in the fluorescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not - they may simply be ignored. (There's a choice.) This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal.  

3.3 The Generic City is fractal, an endless repetition of the same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct it from its smallest entity, a desktop computer, maybe even a diskette.

4.1 Once manifestations of ultimate neutrality, airports now are among the most singular, characteristic elements of the Generic City, its strongest vehicle of differentiation. They have to be, being all the average person tends to experience of a particular city. Like a drastic perfume demonstration, photomurals, vegetation, local costumes give a first concentrated blast of local identity (sometimes it is also the last). Far away, comfortable, exotic, polar, regional, Eastern, rustic, new, even "undiscovered": those are the emotional registers invoked. Thus conceptually charged, airports become emblematic signs imprinted on the global collective unconscious in savage manipulations of their non-aviatic attractors-tax-free shopping, spectacular spatial qualities, the frequency and reliability of their connections to other airports. In terms of iconography/performance, the airport is a concentrate of both the hyper-local and the hyper-global in the sense you can get goods there that are not available even in the city, hyper-local in the sense you can get things there that you get nowhere else.

Guy Debord, Guide Pychogéographique de Paris

“The unities of ambiance appeared on the map as fragments of commercial street maps carefully cut out to indicate each unity’s defenses and exits.  The psychogeographic slopes were symbolized by red arrows indicating the forces the city exerted on drifters freed from other motivations for moving: drifters would be pulled in the direction of the arrows from one unity of ambiance to another.  The weight, shape, and patterning of the arrows indicated the lengths and strengths of the psychogeographic slopes.”
“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places–all this seems to be neglected.” Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

video mapping activism

Piece Of Paper from Daniel Schwarz on Vimeo.

evental site

"I will term evental site an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation. The site, itself, is presented, but 'beneath' it nothing from which is composed is presented. As such the site is not a part of the situation. I will also say of such a multiple that is on the edge of the void, or foundational."

Alain Badiou, Being and Event 1988,
"Evental Sites and Historical Situations", p.173