A Book Unfolded

 I was asked by artist and friend Vassiliea Stylianidou to contribute something to the project revolving, or unfolding out of her recent book "The Plotless Room _ I Lie to History". 

That something could be an inhabitable structure she said, a house.

 as I am browsing through the book, I realize slowly that it's neither a catalogue or exactly an artists' book, but almost an inhabitable structure itself. There are pages of text that refer to emotions and thoughts, like a house. Texts by guests  inhabit some of the pages,

there are many references to the stages of construction of a house, and many pages of people meeting and eating inside unfinished structures. 

As I am flipping through the book in an erratic way, I feel like I am walking around an incomplete house, a house under construction, and I am looking for a place of my own, a spot to claim.

 some pages rotate sideways, maybe now I am lying on a makeshift bed, in a corner of this concrete frame house.

looking close, I notice structures made of hardware, towers topped by chewing gum,  

and I wonder if I am still in the same house or I have I left?

then a view out of a corporate window of succes and a business man with chewing gum covering his face.

is this house in Greece or in Vasillieas' adopted Germany?

 I realize that this is the simulation

 a landscape wrapped around soft forms

a concrete frame curiously inhabiting a room of it's own

 "the text has acquired an intimate relation to the viewer"

"A section of this post has been printed an re-photographed by Vassiliea in Berlin"

suddenly the unfinished frame of a house that inhabited a room inside a museum, 

 which we saw inside a book, 

 and then on a blog, 

was printed A4 sheets of paper

 photographed inside a room in Berlin.

 only to end up

 back on the internet

 this is the simulation

Vasby Labs / Workshops

How does one approach “development” and city growth in a landscape of countries going bankrupt? If it seems like the populations of the eurozone are hostage to a continuous exchange between banks and governments, where does that leave the citizen, and how should the architect or designer accept commisions?

Thats when urban sociologist and consultant Mia Lundstrom and writer, curator and urban thinker Jan Aman approached me with the idea of proposing development methods for a community just outside of Stockholm, Vasby.

Vasby is a typical Stockholm suburb, or rather, it is so typical as to be definitive of the type. Built during the Million program, it is the perfect mix of state funded apartment blocks and semi-detached homes.

[moving services around sometimes allows for better circulation]

The idea was to developing Vasby not only in financial or investment terms, but to develop it socially, to use the construction development as a tool for social restructuring, and to do this with the support and approval of the current citizens.

[cars and traffic are not always bad]

The project would be structured around a series of workshops, and I was initially asked to design a pavilion where the workshops would take place, and which could act as a “headquarters” for the project.

[urban planning exhibitions can happen in shopping malls too]
It would be a quick and fun project, but somehow I felt that a new structure was not what the project was calling for. Jan and Mia had made it clear that we would be working with the existing buildings, reconfiguring and re-programming, as much as proposing brand new development possibilities.

[sometimes you just need to position yourself where the citizen likes to be]
So instead of accepting the commission for a pavilion, I proposed to place the workshops in the local shopping mall, where civic activity was already taking place. Like this we would not need to officially invite the locals to participate, but rather we would position ourselves casually in their midst.

[a shopping mall corridor can make a great conference room, everybody is there]
Once in the mall, we saw that there were empty shops available, but decided to push the envelope a step further, and located some of the workshops right in the middle of the shopping mall corridor.

[modular boxes as workshop equipment]
(When in a shopping mall, I cannot help but think of Margaret Crawfords' excellent “The World in a Shopping Mall”, which perfectly captures the space of the contemporary consumer. 

[a shopping mall is a miniature city]
How a person entering a shopping mall usually slows down because they don't know exactly what they are looking for, but rather they are in browser mode, open to suggestions.

[in Vasby the mall exists right in the center of everything. or everything just grew around it]
Of course when Crawford wrote that text, she was talking about malls, now the internet is our mall and we are live in continuous browser mode, citizens of browserville.

So, the idea was that the Vasbians would stroll over to the workshop desks, where the participating architects and the bosses of development companies would be obliged to explain what they were planning for their community. 

[workshop modules can grow up to become exhibitions, rooms, desks, bookshelves, community centers]
And perhaps the Vasbians would have suggestions to make and even preferences to voice. 

[the mayor of Vasby presenting, while Vasbians shop for soap and stuff]
The citizens of Vasby would be participating in the process of designing their community, spontaneously, while doing their shopping or just hanging out. 

[plinths and boxes instad of pavilions]
And personally, I was fascinated by an "architectural proposal" that does not propose a structure but rather a social situation with potentially such far reaching consequences.

[part two: proposals, coming soon]

Anatomy of Melancholy

Selections from the Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

in-between photos from Drummer magazine

as put together by William E Jones.

Robert Burton was an Oxford scholar (1577-1640), who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy as a manual for getting over chronic depression.

(published under the pseudonym Democritus Junior in 1621)

Drummer Magazine was "America's mag for the Macho male" published from 1975 until the late 1990s

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who put the two together

Poverty and Want, causes of melancholy

 I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.
Melancholy in Disposition,
improperly so called,
Equivocations

[a heavy heart, hatchling in my head]

 Like all men, he was given bad times in which to live

 "Gay magazines originated in the early nineteen fifties from the physique magazines that already ... Well known Drummer Magazine first appeared in 1975."

 [152]———Arcades ambo

Et Cantare pares, et respondere parati.

Both young Arcadians, both alike inspir'd

To sing and answer as the song requir'd.

if I remember correctly, I got this at OMMU

Thoughts on an exhibition (Domesticated Mountain)

Recently I've been thinking about what it means for an architect to show in a gallery. Or what it means for a artist to present work that is perceived as architecture.

It became clear that the project and the exhibition should overlap. Of course the project was what was being exhibited, but the exhibition should be a project too, perhaps a project that informs the project itself. Almost inevitably, exhibitions are projects.

The main narrative of domesticated mountain takes place inside the video, the vehicle that carries the project, and it is also the object that occupies a spot between art and architecture, if only because it borrows it's form from film.

(but when an art installation is inhabitable, 

and actually a functional room in the space of the gallery, is it still art?)

All the other objects are more or less straightforward art or architecture: a large scale installation and short video fragments seem to be part of the art, and plans, section and model seem to be part of the architecture presented.

if, according to the video, we don't need buildings anymore, are the architectural plans and sections drawings of an un-proposed home? And could we say that they have crossed over to art, since they are not proposals?

Personally I was never interested in the what is what question, because the edges of the field have always been blurry, and writing a blogpost can be as architecture or as art as anything.

Plus, I do sometimes think about whether we indeed need buildings, and whether the only role for architects is to produce more objects, and if that is still a valid role. 

Couldn't it just be wrong to make any more buildings? Aren't we just serving the empire with products that in the end we despise? Doesn't every newly "developed" area just remind us of how scary is our postneoliberal reality? And could buildings play a role other than suspicious development tools for a post-capitalist landscape of perpetual crisis?

Domesticated Mountain

curated by Maria Cristina Didero

Gloria Maria Gallery, Milan