Architecture in Soviet fiction

Druzhba Sanatorium © Frédéric Chaubin

Frederic Chaubin's photos of soviet architectures bring Utopia and Science Fiction together : the Georgian Highways Ministry 's concrete blocks piled on top of one another are monumentally alienating, the Druzhba's Sanatorium recalls the space shuttle concept, a time when the Soviet Union overtook the United states in the space race.


Highways Ministry © Frédéric Chaubin

The buildings' eerie surroundings, in locations at the peripheries of USSR, are preserved by the photographic use of the wide angle. By mixing hybrid shapes, passage ways, bubble windows, gold plated decor and flying saucers, this amazing architectural vocabulary expresses a new born freedom from the soviet regime.


Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development © Frederic Chaubin

Building the Revolution

Narkomfin Communal house © Richard Pare 

Former soviet architecture is monumental, industrial and cold and that melancholy makes me wonder how life was before the revolution ? 
One photograph by Richard Pare captures almost by accident the loneliness of a communal house in Moscow : with its dinning room and its pilled turquoise walls, the reproduction of Raphael's Sistine madonna above the chimney, the little Pushkin statue and the faded flowery cloth on the table, this apartment is infused with the passage of time, testimonies for a lifetime not spent in leisure but working in factories. 

Pare's photos of Power stations, derelict buildings and abandoned rooms now standing like post-apocalyptic background with their obsolete machines and futuristic enginery brings to mind scenes of surreal work conditions. 


Brazil © Terry Gilliam

How real is tomorrow ?

© Christopher Nolan

What is reality made of, in the future ? 
Science fiction imagery might be an unlikely place to decode the reality of images but Thrilling wonder stories 3 explores reality via the manipulation of visual data and the future of images and technologies.


© Valerie Bennett

This ten hours momentum at the AA in London is directed by Liam Young from Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG. As I lasted only half of the marathon, I missed the taxidermy performance - a good thing in my view -, so I can only comment on the special effects artists and the futurist narratives developed in SF movies.

©2009 by
© Christian Lorenz Scheurer

Christian Lorenz Scheurer is an illustrator of dystopian futures for video games and films such as The Matrix, Fifth Element and Superman Returns. His artistic world is so rich in details that Hollywood needs only one of his drawing to write the scenario of a whole movie : one panoramic city view contains enough data to create futurist civilizations, migrant communities, streets, vehicules, set of rules, characters, smells, sounds, colors ... Scheurer is an amazing artist but the problem is that when fictive realities are loaded with pre-digested and self-referenced information, it leaves no room for one's imagination.


Spov TV has now removed those images so I am showing a similarly controversial concept/images of seed bombs by © Hwang Jin Wook, Jeon You Ho, Han Kuk II and Kim Ji Myung

Spov TV is a group of motion graphics artists which uses information as the basis of storytelling : information is out there, anything can be found, even secret information is available, so to build narratives, they research the news and mix existing formulas from everyday objects or historical events, stories from a contemporary space with an inauthentic past.
Real news inform fictive news, the past informs the future which reveals how visual data can turn the news into fiction, into fictive reality. Using archive footage to create live action footage presupposes that wars can be created out of nowhere, they can be fictions invented by governments via the manipulation of media and visual data. This answers the current trend in visual media of using reality to make images look real - the opposite of what Scheurer does.


© Hwang Jin Wook, Jeon You Ho, Han Kuk II and Kim Ji Myung

Spov TV presents slick images of future weapons from their recent movie Project Earth for Discovery channel. The animation uses high end CG, computer generated imagery and graphic sequences to examplify how engineering weapons can be used in the fight against global warming. The complicated spatial weapons shown on the trailer direct the energy of the sun to send it onto earth or shoot seeds into the atmosphere to develop new ecosystems.
Despite its slick imagery, the movie is highly referenced and in case of the seed bombs, recycles guerilla gardening and permaculture principles - the mimicking of nature's intelligence by re-designing the environment in a world of less energy and resources - to replace it with its opposite; the supremacy of human engineering, the old belief that science will improve ecology, while dismissing the importance of waste impact.


© Duncan Jones

The main set and special effects of Moon (directed by Duncan Jones) was designed and supervised by Gavin Rothery : in the movie is a long corridor, a robotic space house of the future, as Rothery calls it, which shelters one man during a three years solitary retreat on the far side of the moon to mine Helium 3, a non-radioactive source of nuclear energy.



© Duncan Jones

The success of the set lies in its respect of Science fiction rules - if it is not real enough it is fantasy - and its minimalist depiction of reality due to budget limitations - no CG here -, a choice which is crucial to the belief of what we see. Here, the use of modeling technology, fine artists and shooting in real space instead of creating computer design worlds, brings more importance to the sense of touch than to the sense of vision, making the movie more sensual, more plausible. 


© Valerie Bennett

When you don't know how the images are made anymore, says Gavin Rothery, you can't connect with them. The fact that the details are real in the movie, that the characters/actors bring their own stories in the story, gives it strength, makes the movie more real.


© Christopher Nolan

When Andy Lockley joins the panel, the conversation carries on the subject of the authenticity of images and the minimalist use of special effects has having a positive impact. As Special effects director for Inception, he explains that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is "the anti-digital guy" so the film is not scanned and re-worked but shot on location (there is nearly no green screen) : the film doesn't use much special effects so the design of the sets is very important. This is good new for artists and designers who are back on movie sets.
Nolan is very interested in architecture, says Lockley, he hates when people makes things up because he is peculiar about reality. He likes the ugliness of reality because most things in life are disappointing. If he needs to build fictive places it will be from real locations; in locations he gets the true lighting effects and the actors are in a live emotional moment, and this is what sticks in the viewer's mind when watching the movie : there is life and soul, therefore it looks real, therefore it exists.

I'm lost in Paris

I'm lost in Paris © R&Sie(n) 

I'm lost in Paris questions and provokes fantastic scenarios : can a forest grow overnight unnoticed and swallow a city ? 
How long would it take nature to destroy the concrete jungle and force us back into a feral state of being ?
R&Sie(n)'s interventions explore our disconnecting from Nature, question architectural and human behaviour : why do we cement the  land ? Why do we pesticide the soil in order to eat ?

Streamside day © Pierre Huygue

And why do we do romanticise Nature, thinking it needs saving ? 

The natural world is in constant metamorphosis for its own survival and the maintenance of plant and bacteria expansion : Nature doesn't need saving but we do.
The fern used to grow I'm lost in Paris is a good example of plant world resilience : it species existed before the human race, 360 million years ago. 
Its rapid and aggressive nature recalls Kudzu, a plant which survives pollution, fire and lack of nutrients by sprawling over cars, streets, houses or entire landscapes.

















Symbiosis'hood  © R&Sie(n)

The transformative structural nature of Kudzu which inspired R&Sie(n) to build Symbiosis'hood in Korea blurs the boundaries between two properties as the invasive plant is slowly covering the spatial areas that originally delimit where one property starts and another ends - exposing how Nature reclaims land regardless of human contingencies.





I'm lost in Paris © R&Sie(n)

I'm lost in Paris is a façade for a city laboratory, exploring the way ferns protect the environment from heat and control pollution. 
Despite soil and with little water, the hydroponics experiment has managed to grow thousands of them while the glass grapes clean up the air from pollution composing with nature by adapting.   
Nature can't be domesticated : architects need to validate the inter-dependence between the human world and the animal/ plant world.
We may not stop the consequences of the Anthropocene but by composing with the natural world we may find our place in it, and hopefully save ourselves and some species. 


1200 Hydroponics ferns - a method of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions, without soil
300 glassblown "grape-drops" beakersPhytoremediation - the science of using plants to help clean up pollution

AMO v OMA

Maison a Bordeaux © Rem Khoolas / AMO

OMA/ progress at the Barbican Centre is fortunate to be curated by Rotor. 
First, they inject some humour by showing Houselife, a portrait of Rem Koolhas's Maison de Bordeaux : the movie is narrated by Guadalupe Acedo, the cleaning lady, who tries to make sense of the house in her daily struggle as she washes oddly sized concrete panels, re-arranges furniture and gigantic curtains or carries the hover around awkward spaces.


© Beka & Lemoine

The house is known for being made of three rectangles topped above one another with a private room in the middle performing as a lift, changing the function of the room each time it moves : library, wine cellar, bedroom ... 


© Beka & Lemoine

A found footage of OMA's educatorium building in Utrech also investigates sideway stories by showing people using the curved walls of the building for freestyle body windsurfing.

But despite Rotor's humour and recognising the scale of OMA's urban planning research and spatial organization, it is impossible to connect to its vision and give credit to its business strategies and political affiliations : OMA's architecture lacks of humanity because it is not architecture for all. 

CCTV © OMA


Buildings currently under construction by OMA include : Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, China; a new headquarters for Rothschild Bank in London, the biggest welfare in the world history; and the new headquarters for China Central Television which operates under police watch and government regulations therefore boycotted by Chinese intellectuals for being a propaganda aimed at brainwashing the audience.
In the show, a project room that presents one of OMA's vision, an art-city-museum with its own parliament and embassy recalling an administrative mall, forces to observe that OMA is much concerned with manufacturing the city's architecture and with conceiving art as commodity for bankers.


Architecture as air - Cloud © Gallery Koyanagi © Junya Ishigami/ Photo © Yasushi Ichikawa

Happily, down the lower ground of the Barbican Centre, the Curve gallery is also showing work concerned with architecture and this time Architecture as air, an installation by architect Junya Ishimagi fills spatial environments with pure poetic lightness. 

About the workers - see High culture and hard labour

The Big crunch & the House of contamination

© Raumlaborberlin

In Raumlabor's apocalyptic scenarios, capitalism and global litter threaten mankind survival; a temple of discarded doors and chairs is crawling towards the Darmstadt's Theatre to fight/ escape, the imminence of a disaster.





















© Raumlaborberlin


It echoes the Merzbau, when Kurt Schwitters transformed his home into an expansion which was growing vertically and out of control. Here the threat is still global : will humanity use its creative power to rise out of chaos or will the sterile processes of our political and economical world swallow the Earth until space reverses onto itself ?



















© Raumlaborberlin


Built from the left-overs of mass-consumerism The Big crunch investigates new social territories, expands organically from inside out, assembles domestic rubbish to create a physical space for social gathering.

© Raumlaborberlin/ photo © Max Tomasinelli

Same alternative at the House of contamination, an architectural model for Artissima's cultural centre and indoor city. By skillfully piling-up the leftovers of mass-consumption (plastic bottles, packaging, advertising papers, fabrics ...) to create the skeleton of the House, the walls reveal layers of trash like archeological stratas of the present.

































© Raumlaborberlin/ photo © Max Tomasinelli

We are invited in the Palace of our rubbish : there litter holds the potential to shelter us, fridges are book shelves and rejected clothes cover the floor of a garage. A corridor bathed by a breeze gently opens and closes parts of a translucide curtain, where compartimented areas host a program of dance, urbanism, cinema, education, litterature, design.





















© Raumlaborberlin/ Max Tomasinelli



The Skywall which dominates the whole of the architectural intervention acts as a tolerant type of panopticon : anyone can place himself or not in the tower of control, but can't intervene on what is happening in the rooms of the first floor.
Overlooking the city from this observatory platform, we face the reality about its potential future : if we all control the machine, how to make it run now ?

© Raumlaborberlin © Max Tomasinelli

When materials, people and programs collide, interesting moments of ambiguity and tension lead to negotiations over needs, desires and purposes, and hopefully allow new forms of collaboration to develop. We consider this negotiation process an essential part of the production public space. New forms of collaboration spark the hope for a different and better world, for a human overcoming of the endzeit scenarios. Again the future is uncertain. Let’s contaminate radical individualism. Collectively is not a choice, but a necessity. 
Raumlabor

Towers of Babel

© Centre Pompidou

In 1967, a shanty-town in the 13 district of Paris is being demolished and its population of migrant and minority origin, not wanted in the bourgeois centre, is relocated on the outskirts of the capital.  


Nanterre shantytowns © Photothèque EPAD

The architect Emile Aillaud is asked to transform a no man's land flanked between a motorway, a notorious prison and a couple of speed roads into a living place for 13000 people coming from 55 different ethnicities. 





























© Centre Pompidou

To build this boomtown, Aillaud choses the middle landscape and the garden cities as points of reference : he wants 'La Grande Borne' to be a city for the Children. So he builds vertically to free space for everyday life, conceives poetic, rhythmical apertures, fluid perspectives and succession of play areas, and covers the walls of the estate with a decorative mosaic which becomes its trademark.



























© Centre Pompidou

His vision recalls the counter-cultural experiments of the times : the swimming pool's outlook is reminiscent of Drop city's utopian pods.

© Drop city/ La Grande Borne swimming pool

La Grande Borne is a well-intentioned project, driven by utopian aspirations but it lacks of infrastructures for work and cultural life. How to create a sense of place when people live over one kilometre length of cemented land ? how to preserve one's privacy in this jungle of concrete blocks ? how to make sense of one's life ? 
The estate becomes a huge dormitory town with issues common to all the red suburbs (discrimination, youth criminality, unemployment etc...), a context which sadly gets worse with time.



























By chance, one area of individual units called 'Les Patios' will capture some of Aillaud's sense of space.
The smaller settlements are built on marshes as temporary housing for the builders and architects of la Grande Borne.
Following the housing crisis, Les Patios isn't demolished and becomes a council estate. 




























At first, the few trees can't mask the desolation of its location : there is no post office, no high school, no cinema, no local shops, therefore no social life. 
The houses are physical aliens in the landscape : with their radical blinded walls, their unique window on the outside and a flat roof; they become known as the 'garage-houses'. 














 

© Jean-Claude Maugirard

Soon, the pioneer residents reclaim the space by painting the concrete in the streets, by re-designing the lay-out of the units, by bringing tables outside to eat together : they open La Halte, a Self-run Space for social and cultural events. 

Les patios is car-free so there is endless space for children to run, climb, hunt, hide : a whole underground culture develops like in most suburbs (youth centres, street-art, Parkour, graffiti, skateboarding, hip-hop, alternative music ...).

© Unknown / Julia Feracci

Thanks to Aillaud, the houses are built around enclosed gardens; inside, a ceiling window overlooks the stars and on the facades opaque windows increase privacy. 

© Jean-Claude Maugirard/ Julia Feracci

While the space of the houses opens onto a contemplative garden, 
the physical landscape around them is enliven by sculptures that size the sun's course (Pyramid, sundial...) : that living experience deepens children's spatial awareness and sense of play.



















© Unknown / Julia Feracci

The inside-outside dialectic, the play of light and shadow on the architectural volumes, connect the habitat with the landscape. The hidden gardens slowly grow over the concrete jungle preserving sheltered social/play areas : the harmony between man and nature is preserved through time.























Les patios is not inscribed in a context of romantic vision of the red suburbs but a built utopia well anchored in reality - a place where alternative visions and little spatial disturbances endlessly defeat the urban angst.