3. AA >> Advanced Architecture
An action (an architecture) that is advanced is an
action (an architecture) which is necessarily
projective: propositive and anticipatory/anticipating.
An action (an architecture) with the capacity to
connect with technological change (industry and
technique), with cultural progress (thought and
creation) and with scientific logic (research and
development).
4. Action and activity in public space, Temporary
installations for ludic uses, Abalos & Herreros, Vincente
Guallart, MVRDV, Riegler & Riewe, Barcellona 1998
5. Action
What we are interested in today is an ‘action
architecture’ defined by a desire to act, to (inter)act.
That is to activate, to generate, to produce, to
express, to move, to exchange and to relate.
To promote interaction between things, rather than
interventions on them. Movements, rather than
positions. Actions rather than figurations. Process,
rather than occurrences.
31. “In France an important public
program is being mounted to
deconstruct the high-rise
housing estates from the 1960s
and 70s
(demolition/reconstruction on a
one-to-one basis), thus
expressing a strong will to
transform the image of the city.
At the same time an important
deficit is observed of public
housing, one which would, on
the contrary, call for an increase
and an acceleration in building
terms.
In this context, we consider that
demolition is aberrant and that
transformation would permit
one to respond to needs in a
more economic, more effective
and more qualitative way.”
PLUS -Les grands ensembles
de logements
Ministère de la culture et de la
communication, 2004
32.
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46. Antitypes
A surprising image shows a car coupled to an
aeroplane…
This is not an univocal object… it is not a typological
design, but rather an a-typological mechanism; an
antitype.
66. Form (and no-form)
The interest lies in an architecture that has neither
image nor form. That does not express explicitly the
scale in which it is produced.
Today shape is disposition.
70. Ambiguity
Univocal space now yields to a space decidedly
ambivalent…
In a multifaceted, polyphase, definitively non-
essential reality, architecture can create spaces that
are more plural, by virtue, precisely, of being
indeterminate. Implicitly changing and (in)formal.
Multiple. Multiplied and multiplicative.
A building can be a garden. A garden, a building.
71. Francois & Lewis, Stazione di trattamento dell'acqua, Nantes, Francia 1995
108. Francois Roche, Silverelif, B-mu, Contemporary art Museum, Bangkok,
Thaïlande 2002
<<Collecting the dust of the city ("Breeding the dust" of Duchamp...) by
an aluminium envelop and electrostatics system. >>
122. Devices
Our challenge as architects is to produce new
devices of action… Dispositifs (devices) (open and
evolutionary) rather than design (closed and exact).
130. Diversity
Ours is a time of diversity, calling for constant
simultaneity of individual events in global
structures… evidencing the impact –the emergence-
of the singular upon the collective, not as “part of the
whole”, but rather as specificity “interconnected with
the whole”.
In our time there exists the conditions for assuming
creatively this fragmentation, and thereby attaining
an anthropological universality which also integrates
plurality, difference and discontinuity.
135. Inhabiting
Today, we are witnessing the generalised collapse of
the mythical residential “stereotype”: the “sitting
room-dining room-kitchen-laundry- room-bathroom-
plus three bedrooms, all in ninety square metres”
scheme as the commonly accepted formula.
There is also new awareness of a wandering type of
domestic life, increasingly disseminated throughout
the metropolis: replacement of private space with
service space scattered at the urban level (bar,
restaurants, laundries, sports clubs, leisure centres,
etc) in a city converted into a large dispersed home
for nomadic user.
155. Eden Bio is a 100-unit social housing development in Paris.
The project features terraced houses along pedestrian alleyways.
Staircases to reach upstairs units will be mounted externally and
covered in plants. The lush, green atmosphere of the development
will be enhanced by the organic gardens all along the pedestrian
alleys, as well as the greenery covering the buildings’ facades.
Francois planned a vertical garden ...not forgetting to furnish each
flat with some flowerpots, so that everybody got the chance to grow
his/her own plant on the window board!
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161. Lightness
Lightness is a term, along
with levity, that can amply
claim to be characteristic
of current architecture.
Insulating layers have lost
weight, becoming
habitable spaces, and the
concepts of interior and
exterior have lost their
definition, having become
mixed one another,
thereby suggesting other
interventions.
165. Junia Ishigamil, KAIT Studio for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Kanagawa
Prefecture, Japan, 2008
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172. Precarious(ly)
An approach made up of
reversible relationship, unstable
links, impermanent
constructions, lightweight
structures and fragile
presences.
Certain forms of architecture
can… accept their
inconsistency, their physical and
conceptual precariousness, as
a new value rather than as a
negative quality.
175. Reversible
Reversible is action which is capable of changing the
direction of its own movement. There is something of
an elastic braid about it. It has an unstable presence.
Such strategies could possibly even throw into crisis
the old idea of permanent colonization of and on the
territory… dynamics which would suggest the capacity
to act with the place and with the user with a less
formal, and more informal –unstable and mutable-
attitude.
181. Land-arch
…as an instrument. This
shift has been favoured by
the passage from a
generation obsessed with
the relationship between
architecture and city to
another, the latter more
aware of a new contract
with nature (a nature
evidently epic, mongrel,
manipulated, rather than
domestic and bucolic).
190. New dynamics conform to an incipient vocabulary of a
hybrid contract… Construction that would artificially
integrate movements –or moments- of nature, in some
cases “architecturalising” the landscape (modelling,
cutting, folding…), proposing new topological shapes
(reliefs, waves, folds)…
191. …in others, landscaping (lining, enveloping, covering)
an architecture in ambiguous synergy with the strange
nature that surrounds it.
192. Imaginative formulas capable of favouring this new
natural contract… would reside precisely in its capacity
to incorporate the technical, plastic and perhaps
unheard-of solutions neither paralysed nor diminished
by the presence of the nature, but rather stimulated
precisely by the possibility to incorporating it, of
spurring it, of reformulating it –of enriching it rather
than conserving it.
195. Land(s) in lands
“Operative landscapes” rather than “host landscape”.
As with the city, which has blurred the boundaries separating it
from former extramural territories, today the architectural project
too can blur its profiles –and its edges- in new
geographies of transition. The application of new structural
and technical concepts… now permit the positing of a
deformation of the old Euclidean structures, transforming
them into multilayered spaces… towards almost geological
processes… spaces of folding rather than prismatic
volumes…
Topographies rather than volumes.
“Lands over other lands”.
Constructed geographies rather than architectures.
No longer lovely volumes under the light, but rather
ambiguous landscapes under the sky.
Fields within other fields. Lands in lands.
223. Ecology
nstead of old nostalgic or pseudobucolic ecology
(which freezes landscapes, territories and
environments), we suggest a bold ecology. Based no
onger upon a timid, merely defensive –resistant-
non-intervention, but rather upon a non-impositive,
projecting and qualifying –restimulating- intervention
n synergy with the environment and, also, with
echnology.
An ecology in which sustainability is interaction.
n which nature is also artificial.
n which energy is information and technology is
vehiclisation.
n which to conserve implies always to intervene.