Leningrad 2012

The capitalist colonization of Utopia


Why Tatlin's tower fascinates Londoners,what is so charming about the unbuilt monument of the Third international?


Gazing at the 1:42 model of the red spiral tower in the courtyard of the Royal academy of Art's didn't help at all, on the contrary a feeling of sickness and disappointment mixed with sadness and melancholia paralysed me. For a few seconds I was standing there looking at it, confused perplexed.A "small" tower in the middle of the courtyard of a Palladian mansion, expressing the ideas of modernism(?). The model was bright red, small enough to flatter the proportions of the open space around it and big as well to celebrate the fusion of sculpture and architecture, at least as an anecdote. At that moment the banality of the whole atmosphere reminded me the  quote of Karl Marx, History repeats itself first as a tragedy second as farce.(which in turn is reproduced with the same triviality over the last years.)


The seemingly intrigued subjects around it were merely the authentication (for me and my present) that it is a model made for an exhibition, the ultimate acceptance of the defeat. Not the  defeat of Tatlin and constructivism (or the soviet revolution and its spatial projections) through oblivion, but ironically through exhibition and transformation of it to a permit table(?) consumption.


The scale, the colour, the detail and the atmosphere all perfect instrumented for the capitalist colonization of Utopia...


However, inside the main building on the ground floor, there is a small space between the toilets and the cafe, where usualy the institution install small events and expositions. In that small transitional space-corridor, there were visualizations of the project(the modelling of Tatlin's tower). 


Hurrah!! From the frozen banks of Neva, behind the white thick smoke(elaborately placed so as to balance the shape of the tower), the 400meter tall monument dominates the skyline of Leningrad. On the canvas of that picture Tatlin's tower is not a enigmatic toy for the bourgeois.In front of my eyes lies  the synechdoche of Leningrad,the revolutionary "version" of 2012 Leningrad, and therefore a possibility of a new tradition. Where Tatlin's tower has a significant role to play. 

            

La mer, la mer toujours recommence(?)

The video should be watched soundless

Tehran, a competition from the past

The objective of our entry is the proposal for the multi-storey building A located in Teheran.

Our concept is based on a configuration of volumes that reacts to

a) The Volumetric constrains

b) The neighbouring buildings, the force of their cubic volumes.

The first issue was more or less the “iceberg barrier” that an architect confronts from the zoning envelope in urban environments. Gradually for us the evolution of a setback building transformed to a key issue of the hole project, mainly because the necessity of the setback regulations reflect this move towards an already acknowledgeable urbanism.

-Straight Up-

In 1915 the Equitable building with 39 stories

is declared as the most valuable office building in the world;

apart from its scale the configuration of a solid base

and the binary system of two towers on top, was rather intriguing.

( at least to us)

Teheran 2009-03-26

The basic formation of our building is “control

led” by the void between the couple formed by our two major elements. With this solution we tried to built a solid boundary with the city, supporting (enhancing) the perspective of both crossing roads and thus reinforcing the “corner” of a city block.

The Monolithic structure with its membrane-skin facilitates the commercial and (the majority) of office spaces. One 70% of the whole building is covered with this “Persian” lattice. (Which is a completely subjective interpretation of a Islamic facade filter) Only that this filter is more a scaling device that helps the building merge into a huma

n environment. However, the domination of this goose flesh volume is being challenged by the secondly (and mostly complementary) “crest” of a variety of “harmonious” relations of regulating elements¹.

¹ Regulating elements are the vital volumes o

r objects that balance “battle of masses in space”.

So this antithesis between the monolithic geometrical figure and the “impulsive reaction” of the collection of volumes bear the basic compositional idea.

The building, the public

One other point of departure that we have to un

derline (briefly) is the investigation of form as a –potential- public space. Therefore the “in between” space is supposed that forms a variety of such public spaces. For example the alternative walk path through the building from the south entrance towards the north exit near the north-west edge of the plot, is a potential public by-pass of the southwest corner, during this walk the subject penetrates freely the boundaries between public and semi-public and entering isn’t anymore a process entering a lobby –elevator-office but rather a new space , with succession of shadows-light and close perspectives of the hole structure forming(?) a semi public square that will try to coexist with the existing urban structures, a transition space.

A critical History of Utopias, through the dialectics of Urban and rural space.

Theme: The subject of this research is the analysis of contemporary boundaries between Rural-Urban and the search for bounds between the post utopian turn of the 70s and the emergence of cybernetics and the virtual.

My initial hypothesis is that current disassociation of the Urban phenomenon from spatial representations (the process of alienation from place through managerial capitalism, cybernetics and virtual-ity) can be grasped only through the dialectical opposition of Urban and Rural space, in other words

a) To define what is natural and what is artificial and

b) Conclude for the necessity or not of centrality. I argue that is crucial to trace similar dialectics from the past, for example in the spatial transformation of rural space in the middle ages during the transition from serfdom to market economy (the métayage system), or in Jeffersonian visions of American cities and the contra dictionary characters of conceived space (Philadelphia) and industrial space (e.g. N. York) or even better in the first decade of soviet planning with the conflict between desurbanists and urbanists. Can we define the dialectic between virtual and urban as a result of the contradictions between the rural and the Urban? If our answer is positive then we have an opportunity to confront at an ideological level a world of constant flux (with infinite trajectories of representations but rather fixed as a socio-economic organism) and a possible future that is pure product of reason and thus again static (but rather radical as a socio-economic organism). Because here lies the first paradox that I try to research, how could one conceive of a better future without projecting an image of it (and hence falling into the dual pitfalls of futurology and deterministic notions)*.The first paradox thus is targeting the end of Utopianism and the lost efficacy of spatial aesthetics. We will name it, the paradox of a static future.

The second paradox though is something that happened simultaneously with the appearance of virtuality and the emergence of the first paradox, because although both paradoxes don’t have any relation of cause and effect or any other explicit link, they are results of the same historical event.

The second paradox could be outlined as the emergence of urbanism as a totality through the destruction of the city. We will name it, the paradox of a non city urban totality. But how someone can conceptualize urbanism as an abstract reality that forms a global homogenized space?

We consider urbanism as a dominant phenomenon that its dimensions and nature reflects a specific setup of space and time, and this was somehow true not only for the industrial cities but also for the long evolution of urban forms throughout the centuries. Even in the 70s when M. Tafuri illustrates the reality of technological integration and the collateral alienation of spatial formations from ideology through diagrams of the intensity of telephone communications going out from Boston and New York, the historical role of architecture[1] seamed to be concrete and consolidated. Awareness of the technological possibilities was limited, poor and above all a belief to a static (spatially) future impossible or comic. But unfortunately (?) this isn’t the case anymore. The Avant-garde point here(and now) is the virtual per se, as the medium that transforms current urban into a totality but also as the space of social interaction and communication . Thus what is concrete reality of urbanism today isn't associated on spatial or geographical parameters, Urban through virtual (and informational technologies) develops itself more as a project of everyday life and less as a representation of space.

However it is also crucial the fact that urban cant be completely disappeared and evaporate (not yet), it still have a spatial representation.[2] The difference is that now it doesn't need to create or form new representations of space so as to support the new social evolution but rather is supported by an existing compatible and "eternal"[3] spatial pattern, the post-industrial city. The question that arises from this conclusion is why current urbanism avoids the radical alteration of the industrial city’s urban matrix?

The main reason that I advocate is the devaluation of the role of utopian vision and architecture[4] in what we can call dialectical process of urbanism. This doesn't happen instantly but it was developed at least in 2 specific chronological periods during 20th century.

a) During the financial crisis of 1930

b) During the restructuring of capitalism in the 70s, the simultaneous emergence of the virtual and the end of the last period of utopianism.

Obviously this isn't the only and sufficient enough reason for shaping the current context. Nonetheless on the process of elaborating our concepts, virtual is clearly the keystone of our theoretical structure. It is the force that occupies the void that was left from the retreat of utopianism. And the spatial representation of this "void" is the boundary between rural and urban. In the current context Virtual can regulate and sustain the organic connection between the two spatial entities far more efficiently then any program of restructuring the urban agglomerations or reorganizing the productive vast areas of agricultural sector of global economy. Taking into account the enormous inertia of metropolitan areas, the informational network help not only the de-territorialisation of capital[5] and furthermore the managerial evolution of financial economy but also the subsequent transition from architecture(-1930) to techno-utopia(1945-1970) to virtual-ity (1970-) as the mediums of spatial evolutions[6].

Summarizing the Problématique .[7]

The main objective of my research is the establishment of one hypothesis.

If Urbanism is experienced as a totality, a similar hypothesis with Lefebvre in his book urban revolutions, then what is the future of the urban rural dialectics? And if Urban rural dialectics (a product but also a producer of political economy) are responsible ( largely) for the evolution of spatial aesthetics then what is the future of them(and thus what is the future of Utopia)?

Last but not least, if virtual is what we can call artificial space and urbanism is an unquestionable part of our “natural” social condition can we assume the urban rural dialectics are transcended by the dialectics of virtual-urban?

The diagram bellow is a possible linear structure of this transcendence, where the black bold line is the continuous dialectical development of cities and countryside and the red is signifying the beginning of the second dipole of virtual and urban under the weight of the socio-techno-economical transformations.

[1] Architecture (at least what we can call avant-garde) as a major tool of spatial interpretation of rationality and politics.

[2] The definition of urban as a centrality in production of space by H.Lefebvre is aiming exactly at this point, urban has had a specific spatial antithesis with the rural and still h

as.

[3] This is mainly the conclusion of conservative American thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, based on the assumption that a liberal democratic community(+free enterprise capitalism) ultimately satisfies humankind's needs for economic stability self-esteem and recognition.(the end of History)

[4] Manfredo Tafuri is very explicit on this specific su

bject, [...the crisis of modern architecture begins in the very moment in which its natural consignee-large industrial capital-goes beyond the fundamental ideology, putting aside the suprastructures.]

[5] Richard Sennett The culture of new capitalism, [...linear development (Fordism) is replaced by a mind-set willing to jump around.] several quotes like the above one outline one model of managerial capitalism and shareholders that its transforming the centrality of urbanism and promot

es an "uncaged" economy.

[6] It is clear-I suppose- that the trinity architecture>techno-utopia>virtuality refers to the aspects of the three of them as instruments of public equilibrium. Architecture keeps throughout my hypothesis the property of being a “science of sensations”

[7] is a French term denoting a concept somewhat similar to the English Research question, but also including elements of definition and contextualization

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.