Fox diner

Fox diner © Niusia Winczewska

Niusia Winczewska's photographs of Fox diners bring an instant feel of familiarity. Her deserted London streets filled with cheap food cafes recall typical neighboroughs of the East-end without the rubbish scattered around. 
On the pavement, a wooden box mimics the stores in the background : inside are two bowls in which passers-by can share their food scraps with foxes. 



Dark Mountain issue 1

In her statement, Winczewska is keen that the focus of sustainability is the preservation of Life, all Life.
Not that it is her intention but it brings to mind what Dark mountain exposes in the manifesto Uncivilisation about the impact of the Anthropocene on the planet (now is not a time to mourn the extinction of the human civilisation but a time to focus on wildlife protection; on saving the last species of the plant and animal world which can be saved).
At the contrary somehow, Winczewska's design bridges the gap between human and animal, domesticated and wild. 
Inciting gestures of kindness from one specie to another, the box becomes a catalyst of urban wilderness; the fox, which status moves from pest to cleaner, becomes more visible. 
Let's just wish that wild species will not feed on junk-food left-overs or need to help humanity to be more regarded.

Howl - The Altered Landscape © Amy Stein

For now Winczewska's concept goes beyond the radical views : by not investing in prophetic outcomes, focussing on steps for the sustainability of all species, it provokes narratives of hope and further encounters in the night.

Thanks to Niusia Winczewska

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]

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   

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

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

Urban now

Haus der Vorstellung, P2 residence, 2008 © raumlaborberlin



For the P2 residency, Raumlabor mapped the Haus der Vorstellung, a typical mass produced flat in Berlin and overlapped it with a "government-controlled" type of living space (Plattenbau, P2). While the first type of flat was delimited using white masking tape, the second was constructed in 3D using a collection of discarded doors re-cycled into furniture.

© raumlaborberlin

The political transcending of an alienating environment meets a poetic mise-en-abime : playing with conventional architecture by accumulating spaces that mirror each other, making the subversive contrast. Creating space for poetry challenges common urban practices and rethink the concept of housing estates.
The floor mapping strangely echoes archeological plans in its highlighting of superposed rites - when mapping superposition retraces different eras and practices.
The project investigates the Present political context in the way the Situationists used to - the "derive" and escapist wish put in practice here recalls Guy Debord's psychogeographical relief.






White spots, Munich
2006 © Raumlaborberlin

White spots also disrupted the normality of a residential area of Munich. During that playful performance, a group of thirty three cars drew unforeseen white lines along the sides of deserted streets. The awareness created by the transformation of a daily perception, the boring repetitiveness of urban ghettos, provoked conflicts between the artists and the locals.

Thanks to Heike Pauketat

The way out of the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. To transform the perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the same thing. (...) They therefore tried to construct situations which disrupt the ordinary and normal in order to jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting.
Demanding the impossible, A history of Anarchism, Peter Marshall, 1992, Fontana Press [p.551-53].

Radical Nature

Wheatfield, a confrontation - 1982 © Agnes Denes

Radical Nature at the Barbican Centre explores Art and Architecture in a changing planet, maybe suggesting that our relationship to the natural environment is one determined by a form of activist engagement. 
Outside the gallery, Agnes Denes's pioneer guerrilla gardening, a Wheatfield which was once staged on a disused site in Manhattan, is this time erected on a disused site in Hackney.

© Exyzt collective flickr

The architectural collective Exyzt is given the task to build a Mill to go with the field which turns out to be the highlight of the show as the collective builds up audience and local interaction. 

© Exyzt collective flickr

Inside the gallery, the focus is on eco-design, survivalism, experimental architecture, utopianism, physical science amongst others, showing artists of different eras and preoccupations together.

Survival Series #6 - 1973/2009 © Harrison Studio © Lyndon Douglas 

In the first room, Survival series, a line of raised beds by Harrison studio, explores farming awareness or how biodiversity opposes to monoculture-farming. 
This is where we expected to hear about permaculture farming, such as the work of Fukuoka and his Straw revolution but there is no mention of radical gardening, in fact the show doesn't even engage with activist/artistic practices that overlooks nature in urban contexts today.


© Larry Korn and Masanobu Fukuoka

Further away, when showing the work of Joseph Beuys, there is no mention of his connection to food, land and gastrosophy.
While Beuys's multi-layered mythology is installed in a complexified manner, there is no focus on his environmental engagement.

Joseph Beuys. The art of cooking

In other parts of the show, the interest comes from projects inspired by biomimicry : foam bubbles are re-used by Buckminster Fuller for his geodesic structures and by Thomas Saraceno for his Airt-Port-City, mineral accretion mirrors coral reefs in Wolf Hilbertz' ecological city, Ant Farm, with its visionary Dolphin Embassy, aspires towards inter-species communication.

Dolphin Embassy - 1974-78 © Ant farm [taken from Spatial agency web page]

Finally, one image from the Center for Land Use Interpretation does hint at what Art and Architecture in a changing planet meant to expose : the picture which scale fully emerges the viewer, shows a bird's eye view of an Alaskan pipeline cutting across miles of wilderness, forcing awareness on the way the planet is being dramatically re-shaped by human hand.

Alaskan pipeline © CLUI