2014 AA Summer School Unit 4 - LIVELOAD

Live Load : Euphoric Space and Pleasure Zones

Summer School 2014

“One should not confuse sexual saturation with mad love, the institution of the failed encounter with the institution of encounters, the gospel of the carnival with the gospel of the lightening bolt.”

1 René Lourau, “The Man in the Street” "What matters most to modern man is no longer pleasure or displeasure, but excitement."

Friedrich Nietzsche 2 Unbuilt! Within the many spheres of architecture this implies all that is contained within, addressing, assaulted by the conventional notion of building – events and happenings in other words – the live load of civic activity. London, like all cities, has monopolized, controlled, and been controlled by, such actions. From the vast unbuilt project of Christopher Wren following the great fire of 1666 to the Superstudio swath across London by Rem Koolhaas and associates, The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture of 1972,3 and including the vast Modernist housing projects of the Smithsons and their peers; these megalomaniacal proposals, too large to build, articulated civic activity primarily. Such projects were visionary in the sense that all strong urban design is, given that it violates and proposes alternatives to the urban standard and accommodates the population as a figure to its ground. In their scale, they depended on collaboration with the multitude, to borrow Chantal Mouffe’s politically charged term.

Public executions, royal pageants, workers’ riots, but also, and particularly relevant, the continuous quotidian turmoil of the streets; more recently the Nottinghill Festival, Gay Pride, violent protests on the periphery, the nightly swarm, raves and the concerts and detritus of popular entertainment. All, even the most “perverse”, are sites of pleasure, danger or excitement, lifting the urban animal out of the everyday, making the event transcendent.

1. Lourau, René, “The Man in the Street,” in “Outlines of Urbanism as a Critical System of Thought,” February 13, 1967, in Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967 - 1978, eds. Craig Buckley & Jean-louis Voileau, trans. Jean-Marie Clarke, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011) p. 39 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich, as quoted without further attribution, and requoted promiscuously, in Virilio, Paul, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: U MInn, 1985) p. 99 3. Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis

The workshop will transform into action those theories studied in the laboratory, fully immersing students in the subject matter through personal interpretation. It will also recognize that architectural design itself is event, process and extrapolation much more than production or image. To approach these conditions, short excursions - tours and experiments - will concentrate interests. A set of exercises will thus develop, some of them executed collectively.

The lines defined in the workshop (happenings, events and parties or instance) become a structural guide for these investigations to follow.

For workshops to maximize the special opportunity that a concentrated single-focus series of exercises offers, its schedule must accommodate and adjust as options present themselves and as skills and needs emerge. Call and response must be part of the method within a basic structure. Almost inevitably the schedule will change, both in the length of particular episodes and in their content. Given this caveat we present a format: Our studio will begin with a quick 72-hour event/exercise in live-load dynamics, immersion and production, envisioning the pregnant void. This will be followed by a research phase. Like detectives unravelling a case, assessment of data, particularly the dynamic images presented by film, will demand interpretation and urge transformation. Mistakes are not possible but lack of rigor is. The group will be renamed The Vice Squad and the work will be seen as “evidence,” in a search for clues, licit and illicit. The Squad will gather information - demographics, topographies, circulations, etc., but also the ineffable atmospheres that waft through London, marking ludic, haptic and euphoric spaces.

They will consciously engage a system implementing the BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS’ (Guy DeBord and Gil Wolman’s) “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” of 1956. The Squad will thus produce a case file, with “perps’” and “crime scenes”, drawing especially from detective drama, in particular Film Noir! Jules Dassin’s, Night and the City, from 1950 and set in London’s underworld, is a particular example.

This will be followed by proposals that will assemble as a group work. The site(s) reflect the three states of matter – solid, liquid, gas – within the earth, on the water, in the sky! All these realms have been, and continue to be, exploited in London, with often unbuilt results and particular impact. Thus the studio work - ineffable, floating, interred, imagined – becomes, the last event – again unbuilt. As part of the final show, students will have to again build a case (literal and figural) - a reflection on the production process and resulting forms, as a catalogue of visual and linguistic elements and motifs that have interested the Vice Squad during the research period.

They will collect documentation, production notes, pictures, photographs and objects. This exercise defines multiple impositions of an object and its construction, in a gesture that follows in the footsteps of the ready-made and interest in reproducibility as framed by Duchamp, Cornell and the event/shapes of Fluxus. These various guided exercises highlight the architectural as thought process. Event challenges construction, of key relevance to the current global economic situation. The DJ shapes a model. Her session is deliberately enigmatic and random. Likewise the group will assemble a kit to unbuild the city, not by destroying but by recomposing. A set of tracks from The Vice Squad can generate a shuffle version of the city of London.

Unbuilders! This will be followed by proposals that will assemble as a group work. The site(s) reflect the three states of matter – solid, liquid, gas – within the earth, on the water, in the sky! All these realms have been, and continue to be, exploited in London, with often unbuilt results. Thus the studio work ineffable, floating, interred, imagined – becomes the latest installment, the last event – again unbuilt.

Lectures: (will approach the discipline from various divergent angles) Partizan Publik (http://www.partizanpublik.nl/) and/or Monnik (http://www.monnik.org/), social agitators and futurist historians, from Amsterdam.

Casper Henderson, writer addressing energy, science, environment and human rights: former senior editor at OpenDemocracy, a project for open global politics, contributing editor and member of the editorial advisory board at chinadialogue, and a member of the advisory group for Artists' Project Earth; author of Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary

As part of the show, students will have to build its case (literal and figural). It will be a reflection on the production process and the resulting architecture meanings, as a catalog of visual and linguistic elements and motifs that might interest The Vice Squad during the research period.

The classic distinction separating teachers and pupils cannot, and should not, survive the described process. Studio collaborators will seek, among other things, the reinvention of methods and standard practices, proposing to transcend the academic and dilute the boundary between the built and the unbuilt to re-etch architectural practice. This workshop intends to modestly revamp architectural intelligence and identify new issues. It is expected that some of the results will acquire life after the workshop, in the shape of innovative practices or forming part of research chains - objects of contemporary and rigorous study - redefining and reaffirming architecture from outside its “built” norms.

“This is in fact the clearest aspect of the modern voyage. It happens in any-space-whatever – marshaling yard, disused warehouse, the undifferentiated fabric of the city – in opposition to action which often unfolded in the qualified space-time of the old realism. As Cassavetes says, it is a question of undoing space, as well as the story, the plot or the action. They are sites that appear to have been torn from the seeming continuum of progress and that reveal particularly propitious chasms and wounds.”

Gilles Deleuze, “Crisis of the Action-image” 4

4. Deleuze, Gilles, “Crisis of the Action-image,” in Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) p. 208 referring to Cinématographe on John Cassavetes, no. 38, May 1978

Tutors: Lectures: (unbuilders will approach the discipline from various divergent angles) These will include: Partizan Publik (http://www.partizanpublik.nl/) and/or Monnik (http://www.monnik.org/); social agitators and futurist historians, from Amsterdam.

Casper Henderson; writer addressing energy, science, environment and human rights: former senior editor at OpenDemocracy, a project for open global politics, contributing editor and member of the editorial advisory board at chinadialogue, and a member of the advisory group for Artists' Project Earth; author of Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary Juan Herreros; professor Columbia University and ETSAM, copiously awarded architect but also prolific author, emphasizing theory, method and urbanism.

Bibliography: Keller Easterling, Enduring innocence: global architecture and its political masquerades Simon Gunn, “Public Spaces in the Victorian City,” in The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class; Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London Lars Lerup, After the City, in particular “Stim and Dross” Judith R. Walkowitz, “The Shady Nightclub,” in Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London Peter Bailey, “Sexuality and the Pub,” in Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image Lynda Nead, “The Meaning of the Prostitute,” in Myths of Sexuality Alan Moore, From Hell George McKay, DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties' Britain Films: Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., Blowup Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, dir., 28 Weeks After Guy Ritchie, dir., RocknRolla Allen Hughes, Albert Hughes, dirs., From Hell (loosely based on the book by Alan Moore)

Michael Stanton Michael Stanton was educated at Antioch College and Harvard. His March is from Princeton. He organized and directed 12 2-to-4-week architectural workshops in Beirut, Barcelona and Venice and has conducted study-abroad programs for The Universities of Miami and Minnesota, and for Tulane in New Orleans where he taught throughout the ‘90s. Subsequently he was Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut where he lived for a decade and has taught at diverse art and architecture schools including The University of Texas, the Royal Danish Academy and, most recently, the University of Maryland, the Maryland Institute College of Art and ETSAM (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid) where he and Salcedo were colleagues. His architectural and urban design work has won awards from Progressive Architecture and the ACSA, as well as winning several design competitions one of which awarded him Fellowship in the American Academy of Rome in 1990 – ‘91. He has lectured internationally including at the Tate Modern and is the author of more than 50 articles and referred papers and two book chapters. He has recently completed a two-volume book entitled An Urban Memoir: The American City Beyond Good and Evil. He has been a visiting critic at 54 architecture schools plus the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede. In the last few years he has repeatedly visited Columbia, Princeton, Cooper Union, Catholic University, Morgan State University and the University of Miami in this capacity.

In 2012 Stanton’s installation “Witness/Vanitas,“ was selected in the referred exhibition “House Show” at the Urbanite@Case[werks] Gallery, Baltimore and at the Faculty Exhibition at MICA. In 2012, Stanton was also co-curator of the Baltimore Modernism Project: 01 - Selections from Archives of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation, DCenter, Baltimore and author of the connected essay “Charm and Character”. Also in the same year “Reconstructing a ‘Nation Divided into Fragments’” reviewing the book, Lessons in Postwar Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War, appeared in the first issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. In 2010 an article “Yamasaki and the Fatal Monument,” was published in Abitare: Interior Design Architecture Art. Two essays “Terrain Vague” and “Modernisms” composed part of the book, BEYROUTES, a critical urban text disguised as an “alternative” guide. This evolved from a design workshop Stanton co-directed in Lebanon during the summer of 2007.

During Fall 2013 he was a speaker at “Beirut Now, a Panel on Urban Landscape’s Conflicting Desires” sponsored by the AIA New York Center for Architecture and at “Trans-Atlantic Panel Improving the Howard St. Corridor - Transit: Creative Placemaking,” supported by The Mayor’s Office of Baltimore and the Goethe Institute. This was followed by participation in an international symposium on Creative Placemaking at MICA in late May. A lecture “Jefferson's Revenge” was presented at The Society for Utopian Studies 38th Annual Meeting, “Utopia and Freedom,” in Charleston, SC where he is also moderating a paper session. Two lectures “Parametric Rococo: A Short, and the Long, History of Landscape Urbanism” and "Conciliatory Figures: Giuseppe Vaccaro and the Naples Central Post Office" were presented at the International Conference "Architectural Education and the Reality of the Ideal," in Naples. In addition the paper on Landscape Urbanism and another on Low-Tech Sustainability were published in the conference proceedings. In March he presented the paper “Ludic Utopia: the pursuit of happiness” at the conference “Ecstasy and Aesthetics” the Sixth Annual Geo-Aesthetics Conference in Baltimore. Stanton is currently completing an article on the new Spanish mannerism for the journal LOG. He just collaborated with a Spanish performance artist and Danish filmmaker on Fakeless, a project exploring emotion and the city and is preparing drawings and material for an exhibition of work from his Beirut office for display in several venues in fall 2014.

Esteban Salcedo Architect (2010 ) from the University of Granada , have been awarded scholarship in various universities ( ENSA Marseille 2005 , Central University of Chile 2007 , ETSA Madrid 2011 ) by different institutions, most notably the Bancaja , scholarships Scholarship competition practices Arquia foreign reports and La Caixa scholarships for postgraduate studies .

He has worked in several studios which include , Architectures Torres Nadal in Murcia, Elisa Valero Architects in Granada and Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris . Since 2011 he co-founded nkarquitectura that has earned some prizes in national and international competitions .

His academic production is shared between research and teaching. He has participated in publications as San Rocco Magazine or Desierto and presents a number of chapters in books among which highlight the recent monograph on Caño Roto published by the Ministry of Public Works. Regular participant in conferences , has presented at the International Campus of Ultzama, Ceramics Congress and has been lecturer or visiting professor at an assorted group of universities as ETSA Coruna , IED Madrid or The EAIE Cartagena and institutions such as The College of architects of the Region of Murcia and the Casa encendida MAdrid .

Currently developing PhD studies in the ETSA Madrid and is Assistant Professor of Projects 8, 9 and PFC in the same school and member of the Emerging Practices in architecture research group, leaded by Juan Herreros.