Rubic's Cube story

The text that follows is an abstract from the article that Saurabh Vaidya ,my close friend and fellow worker wrote for the introduction of our common offspring...

"... Our intention is to design an archive of these multiple possible variables that hang on a string that stretches between dreams and reality within one of the alley ways of our city and make a city making machine.Like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, it shall embody within it numerous elemets in the form of Sites,Histories, Desires, Resistances etc. that form different imaginations of cities through these imaginations that we attept to make the observer conscious of the disjunction between the vast possibilities that are possible and existing sterile urban landscapes being churned under the capitalist mode of production.
Thus critiquing the existing systems of production of the urban space being the main objectives the tools of change, surprise and intrigue demonstrated by the Surealists like the exquisite corpse becomes an important entry point.But Guy Debord of the Situationist International critiqued the surrealists that mere chance cannot be a powerful enough tool to resist the strongly structured mechanisms of industrial society and its ability to control and engineer the urban environments.And so it became important for us to find a tool that shall allow a play of exquisite corpse but at the same time embody within it multiple fragments of structured arguments. The ability of games (like chess, card games, monopoly, backgammon, etc) to bring together multiple players with dialectical positions and create their own space trough the rules became an important aspect that had to be integrated within the object/tool that we desired to create.if one were to analyse different games in terms of their structure one realises that besides the physical differences and the logic or rules there is an important difference that determines the elaboration of the physical aspects.
For example, games that are strongly structures around rules assumed to be well accepted and understood by the players are more simpler in their physical make up like chess, cards etc but on the other hand games where the physical form of the games is an integrated part within the logic of the game has more subtle rules, with the manifested form hinting towards the objective of the game.Thus at this point of the time it was realised that tool/object should not be game with symbols but more of a device that generates numerous permutations and combinations of argumentt, rhetoric and dialectics with its physical form hinting towards the nature of engagement required on the part of the observer.

The Rubik's cube was a form that satisfied the above conditions and at the same time allowed us to design each fragment of the cube in the image of the argument [with each surface of the cube being an individual projection of the future in 2080 juxtaposed on the city of London].

Metaphorically the form of the Rubic's cube also allowed imagination of an object that rew parallels with multiple attempts through art history to present space.

Locus for physical exercise 1

Course: Architectural design studio 7

7th Semester 2003

Kostas Dimitrantzos, Maria Katzagiannaki

This project took place at the central area of Athens, the object of the assignment was the formation of a large scale area as a place for physical and spiritual activity.More precisely, there should be settlements for cultural, sports, leisure activities, combined with the educational functions (schools) and the natural landscape of the site.

The total aea of about 2000sq. meters included: reception space, cultural and sports hall, amphitheater caffe, restaurant, auziliary spaces, parking places...The landscape foramtion played a critical role during the entire procedure.

Student Housing for the University of Geoponics

Cource: Architectual design studio 9

9th semsster 2003-04

Kostas Dimitrantzos, Maria Katzagiannaki

The University of Geoponics is situated at the Elaionas Area in Athens, where many heavy industries were beung installed during the last 20 years.The campus covers a big area of land and includes fields for agricaltural workshops.

The Building schedule required a 30% of the area to be designed as park. The rest should include acommodation facilities for students, professors and visitors, a restaurant a multi-uses Hall, a gym, commercial stores, common-used auxiliary spaces.

In the second part of our project we decided to construct a model of the platform in a scale of 1/200.This superstructure, has been chosen as the main synthetic component, which integrate the selected functions, such as the restaurant, the swimming pool, the underground parkingareawith the main body of the student apartments.

The Urban Revolution

It has been said many times, in keeping with Marx, that the essence of “man” cannot be found in the isolated individual but consists of a set of relationships or concrete social relationships. Generic Man(in general) is only an abstraction.

Henri Lefebvre

In analyzing the urban phenomenon is not difficult to imagine that the above dictum is useful as a evaluating system of social formations. Different city-scapes need to be opposed or combined with other equally opac and complicate urban systems so as to be defined. The hypothesis advocates that without this process the urban landscape doesn’t make sense, its unable to unveil the complexity and the importance. With the construction of the cube we claim that the opposition should be base not only on the level of grammatical or syntax elements but among already signifying units .

As in the Saussurian linguistics in the cube the complexity of its face makes possible an analysis that is based on differences within the object, which can intelligibly subdivide and reconstruct.

Towards a possible(?) opposition that will establish urban paradigms and syntagms.

As H.Lefebvre admits the urban phenomenon taken as a whole, cannot be grasped by any specialized science. Thus the cube doesn’t aim to demonstrate a final scientific result,nor can give complete and perfect methodology. The object is worthwhile only if we use it and using it consists in measuring the differences between models and between each model and reality. Besides no synthesis can be accomplished in advance.There is no original and final totality compared with wich any relative situation or act or rotation would be alienated-alienating .

The movements of the cube and the structure of the transformations of it try to underline the fact that urban can be grasped not as a prefabricated goal or a meaning of a single history or narrative.

On the other hand the narratives of the cube work in a way contrary with the spatial formations of the metropolis where the classification and the domination of needs have a contigent character and are paradoxically institutions. Institutions are created on top of such needs, controlling and classifying while constructing them. Conversely the cube explores the urban fabric as a formation of abstract human desires challenging(?) the established social and economic hierarchies arguing for a new humanism that is developed as a succession of images and fragments. Denying the totality of a finished object and balancing among the contemporary economic context (Richard Sennett New Capitalism),

a) superficial, short-term relations at work, superficial and disengaged relations in the city

b) The second expression of the new capitalism is the standardisation of the environment. A few years ago, on a tour of New York’s Chanin Building, an art-deco palace with elaborate offices and splendid public spaces, the head of a large, new-economy corporation remarked: "It would never suit us. People might become too attached to their offices. They might think they belong here."

c) adults withdraw from civic participation in the struggle to solidify and organise family life; the civic becomes yet another demand on time and energies in short supply at home.) and emerging previously mentioned institutionalisation of needs the project try to conceive the urban as a presence-absence. That the urban is a language(or better a metalanguage) and a sign system, a virtuality.

Leviathan 8801

...So as to exist some form of domination, there is a need for a real and specific-fundumental-will.Which says that we want to live even if our lives depend on the will of someone else...This will is connected with fear...domination is not derived from above but its origin comes from the will of the social base from the will of whom are in fear...

Michel Foucault

Accordind to Hobbes the State could be regarded as a great artificial man or a monster composed of men.The state power is not something negotiable for Hobbes it is almost a necessity, a necessity that begins with the first social formations.But Leviathan could be read not only as the literary methaphor for the illustration of the right of the state to exercise its power but also, as the nature of the spatial formation of the society-city of the ultimate hierarchical model.

The misleading chaos of pipes and cables is reflected on the tranquil polluted water of the lagoon. The tear-drop of the vast infrastructure networks (above the Harbour) blurred the reflected face of the curious traveller with the same melancholic monotony that the propeller of the cargo ship agitated the muddy bed of the dock.

He ,as soon as he landed ,stepping out from the bulk of the hovercraft, couldn’t stop steering at the biblical scale pillars; 150m height, these concrete columns were erecting from the depths of those murky waters, challenging the limits of the constantly fogy sky, constructing a network of radiant megastructures. With his head constantly turned up trying to grasp the scale of these elements our voyager discovered that there was no obvious passage to the next elevation...no staircase, no elevators, nor gates with guiding maps or signs. Only rusty iron corridors with 6 digit numbers flying over the water connecting vertical clusters of pipes, avoiding countless small docks and warehouses floating and jiggling in time with the waves of the morning tide. “There is a physiological mission of this vastness of pipes and columns and the breathtaking point of view from the bottom of the harbour facilities 300 feet below the habitable level of this city. As some kind of spatial fetishism that connects subject’s perspective with the inquisitive boy peering at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up [Freud, Complete Works, 21:155]”

Finally, he reached the cigarettes from the pocket of his raincoat, the thick smoke from the cigarette started climbing into the air merging with the humid atmosphere...he couldn’t stop thinking of the ambivalence of voyeurism _the desire to see accompanied by a sence of prohibition. Disappointed from his own defective thoughts and gazing the fragments of horizon behind the artificial forest he remembered lines from Shelley’s Medusa.

Below the lands are seen tremblingly,

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips a shadow, from which shine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death

[...]Wandering around for several hours he noticed that in Leviathan citizens are wearing the same cloths, a uniform made by rubber like a diving suit, as they are living in constant fear of the liquid thing, at which the whole city is founded on, their society and culture.

From the steady view of people wearing their potential lifesaver suit he gradually felt sick, with his pace accelerated he tried to find an escape. In front of him in 20ft distance one gate among the grimy pipes of the harbour sector was half opened. When he came close he found that one small message was winking on a pale green screen.

‘Should I enter a password to open the gate’, he wondered. On one hand, the gap was wide enough for him to sneak in; on the other hand, he was always fascinated from solving small riddles. But what could be the word, maybe this watery concrete city is not that boring after all.

The non-end Architecture

“...The issue of scale is a fluid concept and probably is a matter of addiction¹...”

The problem of representation of social hierarchy in the contemporary context is more or less the problem of representation of the structure of social classification but at the same time outlines the non charted spatial or non-spatial relationships of a vast ambivalent world that bears the weight of the virtual and the physical.

The environment of Leviathan is the constellation of urban slots. Where the state is formed as a binding net of columns of infrastructure and amenities and the human activities are weaving the fabric with the freedom of transient small clusters of communities. These networks built as monumental pillars of overconcentration of optic fibre and structural pipes reflect the necessity of a global spider network of a multi-core but, one uniform cityscape simulating the global networks of data, the manifestation of non-end non-scale architecture.Back to the dialectic of space and power, the initial reading of modern urban societies is that the city is not anymore an environment connected with the economic necessities of industrialization. According to Lefebvre the transition from the industrial city to the so called critical zone is composed of a 3^rd urban revolution where the economic and social growth extends from the simple market barter to the global exchanges. So Leviathan is pretty much an offspring of this transformation where the uniform carpet of urban musts is the medium (the essential mediating factor^{2, page 12 Revolution HL}) and the reason between them and nature, between their home and the world, the new urban reality which establishes the complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban.

The screen’s role seemed not to be the one that he suspected initially. There wasn’t a question that should be answered as a key-access to the interior that was partly hidden behind the gate. It wasn’t even a question to be answered, only one phrase, perhaps an anecdote that not only refuses to clarify the role of this detail, but it rather misguides with the allegorical picture that it described.

...Your things are apple trees whose blossoms touch the sky

According to the myths and rumours about leviathan there was in the base of these structures one recorder device that the visitors where obliged to respond and type some kind of information. It was a game of poetry and images some kind of representation of the sarcastic humour of the inhabitants. Our voyager recognised the quote; it was the first line of the poem “Portrait of a Lady”.One smile of approbation light his face as he was recalling the next 2 lines of Carlos Williams poem,

Which Sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper...

[...The acceleration of the elevator shook his head and woke him from the nirvana of thoughts and illusions. In front of him all these million nodes, optic fibre micro-servers and nano-machines attached to the muscular opaque structure were travelling to the opposite direction with the same velocity of his capsule –elevator. He was inside the core of one of these pillars, travelling through the structural elements of the meta-state. All the abstract bureaucratic apparatus of the state transformed to a multitasking column where the subjects travelling everyday inside the flesh of this machine to the upper levels of the city, being reminded with this commuting the importance of this megastructure...]

600ft above the sea level, on the fly-deck of the column Z0-R8188 above the fertile synthetic fields and plantations our traveller lit a cigarette. The vast floating flora underneath his foot was transformed to a gigantic filter of light and further down among the shadows only a trained eye could see the reflections on the brown water far down into the abysses. The upper level of the city formed a landscape extended beyond the horizon; only few towers were emerging in strategic places either as centres of distribution and surveillance, or as privileged resorts. As he stubbed out his cigarette he understood the meaning of the journey and the sequence of the views. The apple tree was nothing more than a metaphor of the image of the city, as a female organism that attracts the male voyeurs by the visual pleasure that she delivers (from a masculine perspective always) aplenty. The female otherness though was untouchable; the city was treated as a pornographic material, where the visuality and the imagination parts of a masturbatory fantasy were provided as any beauty that tempts the male serve their pleasure without the need of first obtaining her consent ⁴.

One albatross, as if it knew what he was thinking, dived into the urban abyss from the outskirts of the tower. Our hero tracked the orbit of the bird down to the limit of his visual field; the city wasn’t anymore only the image. The elegant dive of the albatross reminded him that he was aware of the female otherness of this city. Somehow the path inside the flesh, the entrails of the city was a path of catharsis. So as to view the fertility of the gardens, you should have felt the violence of the erotic fantasy on the harbour dock, the fetish of gazing the ankles, the knees of the city from below then penetrating the skin of the organism and finally view the blossoms of the trees that touch the sky.

Benvud 3.0/ Nece(c)ity

Kostas Dimitrantzos, Saurabh Vaidya, Barbara Casini Cortesi

“ ...The effect, the impression or emotion, in no way implies a knowledge of the system’s laws (harmony, composition).Couldn’ t the urban be conceived along these lines? Couldn’t it be considered a virtuality, a presence-absence?...”
The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre

Our city is a spatial interpretation of a possible future community in the region of Poplar. The existence of this social formation is based on an intellectual game of time transitions, progressive and regressive movements between the present and the projected future.
From the contemporary context to the frozen image of a possible future in 2088 a leap in time bridges the two moments and also produces a blind field in between. During these 80 years the community is transformed into a new spatial agglomeration. The forces that are forming this definite future of Poplar are complex and opaque. Historicity and structuralism are unable to predict the vast possibilities of urban transformations. Therefore our tools of interpretation consist in a series of narratives. 5 different subjects unfold their personal stories so as to deconstruct and subdivide the mechanisms and the spatial configuration. The tracing of these individual paths reveals fragments of the social structure and enables us to understand points of departure of this small urban project. The ambiguity and the complexity of the urban life in 2088 are reconstructed continually through the concept of surrealistic views , urban legends and illusions.

Faliron Bay,redefining(?) the relationship between Sea and City

Diploma thesis, September 2005

Konstantinos Dimitrantzos

Maria Katzagiannaki

The project area is part of the Athenean coastline in Faleron bay. The embouchure of Kifissos on the Southwest and the embouchure of Ilissos on the Southeast form the geographic boundaries of the site plan which on the North side adjoins the elevated Poseidonos highway. The average width of the “polder” is 350m and the total coastline is 720m.
Collecting the characteristical elements of the area constist the beginning of our design procedure. The reconstruction of the image of the area is realised through an analysis of the urban and local scale. The priorities in the procedure of planning are the following.

- The creation of the conditions which allow the crossing of the highway through a number of interventions in the contiguous areas and primarily in the transitional zone in between them.
- A complete landscape redesign of the area.
- The positioning of specific functions thus aiming at the enrichment of spatial mobility and action.