Beyond the horizon

© Poincheval and Tixador

Poincheval and Tixador bravely standing on inflatable boats, wearing shorts, sailors hats and sunglasses, as they departed on an expedition Further away behind the horizon.


© Poincheval and Tixador

Another snapshot shows them crossing a rocky stretch dragging inflatables boats equipped with protective found vegetation.

© Poincheval and Tixador

In the out-of-bounds territories of the Frioul archipelago, they've hunted seagulls with home-made spear-throwers, feeding on mussels and prickly pears, rediscovering the art of socks embroidery and self-tattooing, walking all day penis sheaths between their legs.




© Poincheval and Tixador

Their exploits include surviving one night in underpants armed with elastique bands in a room invaded by mosquitos, walking between cities in straight line only guided by a compass, digging a 20 metres long tunnel which they filled behind themselves as they progressed or living for three weeks in the basement of an art gallery.


© Poincheval and Tixador

Adding more self inflicted punishments, they walked to the north pole as much unprepared as before, making them the first artists ever reaching it.


© Poincheval and Tixador

Laurent Tixador is building an hidden village as we speak : you can explore here.


© Poincheval and Tixador



Thanks to Laurent Tixador

The freedom zone

The zone of freedom lives at the edges of wilderness, at the periphery of industrial areas and council estates, along train tracks and desolate lands, in factories and buildings that escape central agendas to become spontaneous playgrounds, and sometimes also on sacred lands.

Free Stonehenge encampment, UK

To implement the control, zoning and conpartimenting of these populations, local authorities abolish the right for free gathering (suppression of the Free festivals) : subcultural nomads are expected to redirect themselves towards the spaces of (state) convenience - the Mall, the Funfair.


Enchanted forest, Texas - 2006 © Alec Soth

But they don't.
Once that breathing zone is reduced by squatting laws or controlled by regeneration politics, some leave for the Never never lands.

The last convoy to Stonehenge - Battle of the Beanfield, UK - 1984

The spaces of play and freedom become flexible, resilient, temporary; communities live in transient mode to avoid the encirclement. 

Tales of space and time © Heather and Ian Morison

The free parties get more organised, less easy to track (endless hunts for remote gatherings, truck convoys at the far ends of western and eastern borders). 

Earthship © Michael Reynolds

Investigating new lands, new living patterns provoke the context we aim to flee - Michael Reynolds spends as much time by-passing building laws to keep his earthships legalised than building them - but pioneers open the doors to social change. Ignoring the alienation of the state machine, the 60's give birth to resilient architectural practices. 

© Archigram photo © Tatiana Schneider taken from Spatial agency webpage

Buckminster Fuller informs the building of Drop city, a temporary settlement built from scratch, Archigram influences a socially engaged architecture for a playful city. Freedom activists, artistic and intellectual movements investigate new forms of deterritorialization to preserve autonomous zones in the city. 

Southwark Lido, 2008 © Exyzt / Sarah Muzio 

Architectural collectives like Exyzt devise urban spaces that invest the zones of control : benefiting from a pause in the development frenzy, their events replicate, duplicate, multiply themselves, disappear and re-appear, putting the off-grid back on the map. Their temporary appearances keep political agendas, advertising and consumerism off site while giving space for play and gathering.

At Campo Boario in Roma, Stalker opens a borderless, visa free zone to homeless groups and transitory immigrants. A space that temporarily succeeds to abolish the rules imposed by Shengen (a legal space, 'illegally squatted but legitimised by institutional and media support'). 

In order to escape the societal rules and spatial boundaries of the state, in essence, the zone of freedom remains a fleeting momentum charged with the spirit of now, an urban void filled with shared experiences and memories.

Campo Boario - Roma 1999 © Stalker

The breathing zone

© Bellastock photo © Felicie Botton [taken from Popupcity web page]

Bellastock mixes recycled plastics with wind power and human breath to build a temporary city. The desertic landscape inhabited by one geodesic structure and bubble-like shelters bridges the gap between the utopian appropriation of new territories at Drop city, the pop-up installations of Raumlabor - spacebuster - and the experiments of Buckminster Fuller. 


© Bellastock photo © Guy Vacheret

The project which sounds light and simple also involves the complex logistics of living from scratch (mobile kitchen, sheltered dormitory spaces, waste recycling and agency of hundreds of architects and artists).


© Hans walter Muller

Bellastock cites the pioneer of inflatable architecture Hans walter Muller as influence : his work embraces the idea of nomadic, moving, walking architecture for a transient man; like Gilles Clement's idea of a moving, walking garden in landscape design.


© Bellastock / photo © Guy Vacheret

Bellastock's bubble city has a TAZ quality : a fleeting, poetic redefining of the social contours of space informed by working and breathing; the re-invention of the spatial environment as a place in between, a meeting point between blurred domestic and social dimensions.

H.O.R.T.U.S.

  © H.O.R.T.U.S by ecoLogicStudio 

The members room at the Architecture Association looks cyber-exotic with its vivid green apple carpets and 300 intra-venous bags hanging from the ceiling : mimicking the blood of an urban ecosystem, the bags hold nine shades of green from different kind of algaes.
The concept of H.O.R.T.U.S. (Hydro Organism Responsive to Urban Stimuli) appears technical or confusing (read here) but is simple : while blowing into plastic bags, viewers create enough CO2 to sustain the oxygen needed to produce algae organisms. The bags possess a QR code that visitors scan to find which algae they are producing. By helping it grow, they become part the garden.



© H.O.R.T.U.S by ecoLogicStudio

EcoLogicStudio quotes Gilles Clement as introduction to its eco-garden - 'If we look at the earth as a territory devoted to life it would appear as an enclosed space, delimited by the boundaries of living systems [the biosphere]. In other words it would appear as a garden' - as for Clement, the 'Symbiotic man', is an actor of the 'Planetary Garden' and its task is to find out 'How to exploit diversity without destroying it ?'. Clement conceives the environment as a place of constant 'recycling of energy with no accumulation of waste other than decomposable organic matter'. Somehow, this is what  H.O.R.T.U.S. explores by inviting viewers to give life to the mini ponds of an algae farm.


© H.O.R.T.U.S by ecoLogicStudio

The greenhouse cohabits with a virtual garden that feeds on visitors' scans and tweets about the exhibition but we don't need this association to grasp the idea that the garden is connected to the viewer and the garden to the viewer - thus the initial confusion : the fact that we participate to the biosphere's expansion, is an idea already embedded in the work.

To build a chair ...

These days, architects are versatile in reclaimed wood, pallets and sustainable means of construction - like the crates our parents used as bookshelves when we were kids or the pallets used by permaculture gardeners to build city allotments today - : pioneers of situationist architecture, Exyzt, Collective ect., Raumlabor, Constructlab use collective involvement and flexible, low-tech material.

© Exyzt

In Portugal, in Guimaraes, Exyzt is leading construction workshops for Fine art and Architecture students using traditional ways of building. Students are not sitting behind computers but building a crafted platform, with bespoke chairs, to be used for a Laboratorio de Curadoria. The platform is built in a way that puts the human hand and the human brain at the centre of architecture : the design doesn't rely on machines here.



© Collective etc., La piscine [taken from Collective etc. web page]

© Collective etc., Marseilles - Le Panier's area nomadic workshop [taken from Collective etc. Facebook page]

In Grenoble, Collectif etc. runs collective workshops, at La Piscine, empowering locals to 'self-build' low-cost, DIY furniture, investigating for a better habitat. In Marseilles, they bring the nomadic urban intervention to the residents of Le Panier, using wooden pallets, to share concerns about the regeneration of their neighborough.

Constructlab (Build your own shelter, intervention in Annecy's Art & Design school) or Raumlabor similarly use crate-looking planks as staircases, viewing-sitting platforms, partition-walls, to host temporary community projects. Raumlabor's ingenious design (workstations and chairs) encourages viewers to 'learn by doing', by building collectively. 
The collective also explored the idea of 'sustainability' by pilling up discarded furniture, doors and windows at The big crunch.


© Raumlaborberlin [taken from Raumlabor's web page]

In 2010, Oikos proposed to re-use reclaimed wooden planks and pallets to build The Jellyfish Theatre. 'Focusing, on energy-efficiency, co-operation and human-scale', creating performative and temporary constructions, making space and giving space (back) to the community. 

© Oikos project [taken from Oikos flickr]

Underground Desert cities

© Magnus Larsson, Dune Arenaceous [taken from Magnus Larsson web page]

Magnus Larsson envisions to build a green wall across Africa, a Dune Arenaceous that irrigate the soil and prevent the environment from desertification to sustain an underground city. 


Dune Arenaceous © Magnus Larsson [taken from Magnus Larsson web page]

Larsson uses the biological properties of a marshlands bacteria - the Bacillus Pasteurii - which he flushes onto the dunes to solidify sand into sandstone and build a city of sandstone structures underneath the Sahara, using the desert soil.



© Magnus Larsson

By building without machines or architects, he would leave the  bacteria sculpt the landscape of the city. The biochemistry of sand solidification recalls the sedimentation of rocks like limestone, creating interesting cavernous shapes after years of aggregation.


© Magnus Larsson

Biological scientists will wonder about the long term effects of importing a non-native organism into a vast environment like the Sahara; the bacteria which could potentially solidify the whole desert - recalling the invasive nature of plants like Kudzu in America and Asia - can also save Africa from aridity.


Sietch Nevada © Matsys Design [taken from Matsys design we page]

Larsson's dune habitat echoes Sietch Nevada, an experiment of Matsys Design which re-thinks the way ancients civilizations - like the Nabataeans in Petra - used to control water and create artificial oasis in the desert.
The Sietch Nevada project brings to reality Frank Herbert's Dune novel. Here, underground communities master the art of guiding and storing water via a network of underground canals to answer water shortage in Southwest America and avoid water wars.

Floating cities

What if New York city ... © Studio Lindfors/ Ostap Rudakevych

Ostap Rudakevych's emergency zeppelins that look like hybrids of an airship and an insect can be deployed other the rooftops of rescued communities while a team of workers fix the damage downstairs. 

Cloud skippers © Gretchen Stump/ Studio Lindorfs

While post-disaster cities, like Cloud cities or Archigram's pods prevent chaos, the Cloud skippers already float beyond the skyscrapers territories : their self-sufficient communities live on green platforms suspended by cables.

Cloud skippers © Rael Sanfratello

Rael Sanfratello pushes the idea further by sending out Floating gardens, inflatable dirigables resembling giant jellyfishes, which transport growing gardens and migrate from one city to another following the seasons.

Flooded cities

 
Flooded London © Anthony Lau  

Facing the potential rise of sea levels, Anthony Lau and his idea of living on oil platforms on the London's Estuary concentrates on escapism, relates to space in the same way as Howl's moving castle's transformative home or Archigram's walking city. 

Howl's moving castle © Miyazaki 

© Archigram 

Today in Lea valley, those who live on barges can harvest neetle or comfrey from nearby marshlands, cycle to work along river pathways, grow food on nearby allotments and plant nurseries, avoiding the city pavements. 


Aqualta © Studio Lindfors

Tomorrow in Tokyo or New York, citizens could transport themselves via gondoles and suspended bridges, acclimatise their agro-system to a wet landscape, inhabit their territories alongside the wildlife and feed on the edible landscape. 
Why not adapting to the sea rise rather than fear its consequences ?

Aqualta © Studio Lindfors