John McMorrough, ‘Undead: Ru(m)inations: the haunts of contemporary architecture’ in M.Guberman, J.Reidel, and F.Rosenberg. Monster: Perspecta 40. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. | #kamworkshops2011
Once a discipline is defined to in relation to preservation rather than a its performative attributes, it is a constrain rather than opportunity. While at one point such preservations were a necessity, they have now outlived their initial use. At this point the disciplinary conception of architecture concretizes the formats of practice as a rite: what was once the saving grace is now the problem it self. The impulse that originated as a mechanism of preservation has now being transposed into meaning -the defense mechanisms of architecture have become its content; the fort became the prison.
Read moreby KERNEL (Pegy Zali, Petros Moris, Theodoros Giannakis)
Bibliography
- Bound By Law?, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, by K. Aoki, J. Boyle, 2006
- Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by L. Hyde, 2010
- Commonwealth, by M. Hardt & A. Negri, 2009
- Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, by L. Lessig, 2005
- Reclaiming the Commons, by Naomi Klein, 2001
- Romans, Roads, and Romantic Creators: Traditions of Public Property in the Information Age, by Carol M. Rose, 2003
- Boyle, J., 2003. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, by J. Boyle, 2003
- The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Market by Michael A. Heller, 1998
- Benkler, Y., 2007. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, by Y. Benkler, 2007
The main idea behind the project “Earthship” designed and implemented by the american architect Michael Reynolds lies in the reuse of garbage as building material. The concepts and the design of Earthship, developed as early as the 1970s, were later elaborated in three books published in 1990s titled: “How to build your Own,” “System and Components”, “Evolution Beyond Economics.” The books were conceived as a combination of manifesto, technical study and construction manual. A critical reading of Reynold’s conceptual and design approach, highlights the connections between this project and the architectural culture developed in the 1970s where Reynold’s Earthship shaped its own (pre) history of sustainable design. This project and its analysis contributes in many ways to the research approach of this year’s kamworkshops with the provovative theme: “the value of garbage” and it will be presented in the next days in this tumblr through an extended post.
Metabolic House on Flickr.
Key to the Metabolic House:
A Recycling Chutte / B Mulch Processor / C Mulsch Collector / D Mulch Pickup / E Mulch / F Paper/fuel processor tank / G Furnace-boiler / H Piped-in biodegradable detergent / I Water recycling and distilling system / J Paperless toilet / K Vertical conveyor / L Horizontal conveyor / M Pollution control filters
by William Stumpf, 1989
Published in Lupton, Ellen, and J. Abbott Miller. 1992. The bathroom, the kitchen and the aesthetics of waste: a process of elimination. Cambridge, Mass: MIT List Visual Arts Center.
#kamworkshops2011 | Hardt & Negri, Empire (2000), p.32
“The most complete figure of this world is presented from the monetary perspective. From here we can see a horizon of values and a machine of distribution, a mechanism of accumulation and a means of circulation, a power and a language. There is nothing, no ‘‘naked life,’’ no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field permeated by money; nothing escapes money. Production and reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing. In fact, on the global stage, every biopolitical figure appears dressed in monetary garb. ‘‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!’”
#kamworkshops2011 | by Ilia Kabakov, 1977:
“An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials and sacks; all forms of packaging which were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it…
It’s hard to say what kind of image this is… maybe an image of some sort of camp when everything is doomed to perish but still struggles to live; maybe its an image of a certain civilization slowly sinking under the pressure of unknown cataclysms, but in which nevertheless some sort of events are taking place. The feeling of vast, cosmic existence ecnompasses a person at these dumps…
…But stiil why does the dump and its image summon my imagination over and over again, why do I always return to it? Because I feel that man, living in our region, is simply suffocating in his own life among the garbage since there is nowhere to take it, nowhere to sweep it out - we have lost the border between garbage and non-garbage space. Everything is covered up, littered with garbage - our homes, streets, cities. We have no place to discard all this - it remains near us.”
#kamworkshops2011 | a photo-question towards @dpr_barcelona: How did sewage and waste management fit into Zenetos vision for Electronic Urbanism?
Caption and image no23 of the publication on Electronic Urbanism (Arhitektonika Themata 7/1973) shows the use of sewage and recycle collection center as an intermediary solution which would be abolished as soon as future technology becomes available in the electronic city. The preparation for a temporary sewage collection center however, raises a series of questions and shapes a ‘critical’ entry point for Zenetos’ work: Why did Zenetos prefer to ground his ‘suspending’ urbanism with a sewage treatment plant? Why did he not experiment and design with the “closed-circuit dwelling units” as an option; and what critical assumptions are drawn from this observation on his project’s consistency and his work in general? What other infrastructural or design solutions did he proposed for treating human waste and garbage; how visionary and elaborate was on this aspect?
This is a topic that ‘the-value-of-garbage’ would like to explore more. For now we are anxiously waiting for dpr-barcelona findings on the work of Takis Zenetos to continue this discussion. Follow the project of dpr-barcelona on Takis Zenetos here.
#kamworkshops2011 | zombie-theories
[…] let us ask a naïve question: why do the dead return? The answer offered by Lacan is the same as found in the popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong with obsequies. The return of the dead is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization, the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt. […] The return of the living dead, then, materializes a certain symbolic debt persisting beyond physical expiration.
It is commonplace to state that symbolization as such equates to symbolic murder: when we speak about a thing, we suspend, place in parentheses, its reality. It is precisely for that reason that the funeral rite exemplifies symbolization at its purest: through it, the dead are inscribed in the text of symbolic tradition, they that, in spite of their death, they will “continue to live” in the memory of the community. The “return of the living dead” is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition. (p. 23)
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991
(Source: books.google.com)
#kamworkshops2011 | Garbage Cities: Italo Calvino’s Leonia from the book Invisible Cities.
(Source: ruanyifeng.com)
#kamworkshops2011
Architecture and medicine are, in their respective ways, attempts to control the symbolic universe, defenses against the uncontrollable overdetermined meaninglessness of death, meaning run riot. The Parthenon – that ruin, that empty signifier, that always dead always resurrecting building – has such a problematic status in architecture because, like the zombie, it stymies this control. It can’t keep anything in or out, not because it is broken, but because its status as an interior has always been in question. The zombie keeps coming and we keep boarding up the holes it makes in our walls with bits of scavenged architecture, floorboards, pieces of door, furniture pushed up against the walls, all in a fashion as ad hoc as the drive itself. The zombie keeps coming as fast as we barricade it out; architectural careers are as endless as they are repetitive, repetition without change. […]
The zombie is an animate body without subjectivity; what remains is a solid shreddable body, no space at all. If not literally a solid object, then an aspatial object – an object not organised spatially – like Giedion’s and Zevi’s understanding of the Parthenon.
Holm, Lorens. 2007. “Vignettes of Death: Architecture and the Death Drive”. Critical Quarterly. 49, no. 3: 31-59
#kamworkshops2011 | by Zygmunt Bauman
Read moreThrowing things out confirms retrospectively the wisdom of excess: it helps to build confidence and reafirrms the link between self-assertion and wastefulness. Things thrown away are therefore promptly replaced by another, yet greater, ‘spare potential’, the ‘just in case’ surplus over and above the conceivable potential of consumption. The act of consumption marks the end of the road, while the trick is to keep forever on the move.
Throwing things out reassures that one can go a long way yet and that one has enough, more than enough resources to negotiate it. Waste shows that the capacity to move is the asset more important than the movement itself.
#kamworkshops2011 | via @phokaides
#kamworkshops2011 | Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, Sage, 1998), p. 43-45
Waste
We know how much the affluence of rich societies is linked to waste, given all the talk of a `throwaway society’ and the fact that some have even envisaged a `garbage-can sociology’: `Tell me what you throw away and I’ll tell you who you are!’ But the statistics of waste and rubbish are not interesting in themselves: they are merely a redundant marker of the volume of goods on offer, and their profusion. We can understand neither waste nor its functions if we see in it only the residual scraps of what is made to be consumed but is not. Once again, we have here a simplistic definition of consumption — a moral definition based on the imperative utility of goods. So, all our moralists rail against the squandering of wealth — from the actions of the private individual who no longer respects that kind of moral law internal to the object which its use-value is taken to be and the object’s time- span (the individual who throws his goods away or changes them to comply with the whims of prestige or fashion, etc.) to waste on the national and international scale — and even on a kind of global scale, where the human race is seen as squandering wealth in its general economy and its exploitation of natural resources. In short, waste is always considered a kind of madness, of insanity, of instinctual dysfunction, which causes man to burn his reserves and compromise his survival conditions by irrational practice […]
(Source: books.google.com)
Read more#kamworkshops2011
Perhaps the key issue here is to be vigilantly aware that as a concept and as a practice sustainability is constantly running the danger of turning into a totalizing doctrine that subsumes critical thinking. […]
Maybe it is good that sustainability does not have a fixed or coherent definition. Maybe it should never had one! Because if the technical questions of energy efficiency or the technocratic questions of efficient recourse use or even the questions of socioeconomic management end up constituting the definition of sustainability in architecture, this will threaten to reduce design to a series of small decisions (on materials, energy or feasibility) that will ultimately have less to do with design and more management or with political correctness. […]
P. Pyla, “Counter-Histories of Sustainability”, Volume 18 (December 2008): 14-17. Publisher: Archis]
Download the article here
See also:
The complex history of sustainability, by Volume
and the Map in Issuu
