Today's archidose #85

architecture arquitectura Ljubljana 2006 ofis, originally uploaded by sinor favela.

650 Apartments in Ljubljana, Slovenia by Ofis.

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Fortress Europe

[Image: A turret on the Maginot Line].

"As I have said many times before," Paul Virilio states in an old interview with CTheory, "I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance."

[Image: The Maginot Line].

"More specifically," Virilio continues, "under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St. Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers."

[Images: The Maginot Line – and, yes, I am aware that these are not the bunkers at St. Nazaire that Virilio just mentioned].

"But what I also discovered was that, during the War, the whole of Europe had become a fortress. And thus I saw to what extent an immense territory, a whole continent, had effectively been reorganised into one city..."
War, in Virilio's formulation, was thus a kind of terrestrial reorganization – a reshaping of the Earth's surface; it was, among other things, landscape architecture pursued by other means.

[Image: The Maginot Line].

(Thanks, Scott! Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Bunker Archaeology).

Sim Staircase

[Image: A detail from Abgang, 2000, by Thomas Demand, a photograph now on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. "Although his large-scale photographs seem to capture specific places," Artkrush explains, referring to Thomas Demand, "they actually document large-scale models constructed in the artist's Berlin warehouse studio." To date, these "large-scale models" have included "the site of Princess Diana's death, Saddam Hussein's 'spider hole,' and a standard staircase." Demand, along with Oliver Boberg, popped up on BLDGBLOG back in 2005].

Ridgemont Typologies

Recalling the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher are the typological arrays of artist Mark Luthringer. Where the Bechers looked at the industrial landscape of their native Germany, Luthringer looks at Ridgemont Typologies, the American suburban landscape of consumption, status, and identity.


From the artist's statement:

The typological array’s inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption...

The typological form acheives an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.

To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though, as if actually seeing it in print allows us to see it, or rather, be confronted by it, in a way never possible when it’s just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately.

Ridgemont is about our desire for a mythic lifestyle, one industry’s attempt to fulfill that desire, and what the results look like to a passerby. The naming of places has traditionally alluded to history, or in the case of topographically derived names, the details and peculiarities of a learned landscape. In the instant communities of Ridgemont, though, the name and thus the history are fabricated as part of an attempt to turn sense of place into product for consumption by homebuyers. The public symbols of places we are being asked to imagine, these signs are the only way that the notion of "Ridgemont" as a place is established for the rest of us.

Luthringer's Ridgemont Typologies will be on display at 3A Architecture in San Francsisco from May 31-June 29, 2007. Click here for more information.

Italian Urbanism Under Fascism

Here's some information on an upcoming conference at Columbia Unversity.

Polis and Politics: Italian Urbanism under Fascism
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University
27-28 April 2007

The event will feature eleven presentations on interwar Italian urbanism, including a talk by Italian Consul General Antonio Bandini and a keynote address by Maristella Casciato of the University of Bologna. The conference is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Department of Art History, and is organized by doctoral students Andrew Manson, Lucy Maulsby and David Rifkind.

In Fascist Italy the urban environment served as a critical cultural reference from which artists, architects, politicians, and planners sought to fashion a new Italy. This conference asks the question of why the city exerted such a powerful influence over contemporary artistic practice and what were the consequences. While scholars have documented many of the major urban interventions in cities such as Rome and considerable attention has been given to the new towns founded by Mussolini, recently historians begun to look at other models and examples that enrich and complicate our understanding of Fascism’s interest in cities and towns.

Precambrian Motorways

[Image: The geological time scale, in spiral form; via the USGS].

Upon seeing the above diagram, it occurred to me that you could – or should – redesign the 10 Mile Spiral so that it communicates geological information.
In other words, you could literally be driving up a diagram of the Earth's deep history.
Vacationing families tootle their way around the spiral, eating ice cream cones – twisting in loops, upward through space – reading signs posted on either side about Precambrian tectonics...

[Image: The 10 Mile Spiral, by Terraswarm].

At the very least, it would make the US highway system a bit more educationally worthwhile...
Every off-ramp of I-95, for instance, would tell you a quick story: the discovery of edicarans, as you pull off to get gas; the rotational history of the North Pacific Gyre, explained to you at a Georgia rest-stop; outside New York City you read in awe, slowing down at a toll-booth, about the ancient reversal of the Amazon River...
Signs like these proliferate, inspiring a whole new generation to take endless car trips: driving up and down the east coast of the United States, reading about geology.
Soon, though, all those curious kids and their millions of cars emit so much carbon dioxide the Atlantic weather system shifts, plunging them all into an ice age... a planetary event that will someday be described on a sign and posted next to a highway in Kentucky.

(Geo-spiral found via Leah Beeferman).

Today's archidose #84

Frøsilos, originally uploaded by Peter Guthrie.

Frøsilos in Copenhagen, Denmark by MVRDV.

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