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