ticket from Open City exhibition at the NAI Rotterdam

In early October some people and I flew to the land of Holland for 4 days of time. Ryan Air didn’t fail us and we made it to Eindhoven though our eyes were truly offended by the interior of the plane coloured the brightest of all yellows. So the phrase ‘Ryan Air Yellow’ was coined for the week.

Eindhoven had a lot to offer, just from the bus ride to the train station it was clear that the Dutch pay a grander attention to design and have a playful approach to new development. We started walking towards the grand university campus and the scale of the buildings wasn’t at all conservative, large open spaces between large faculty buildings.

A visit to the van abbermuseum was not wasted time. The exhibitions were fantastic and they were well hosted by abel cahen’s clean lines. Three parts of the exhibition that stood out to me: The lift that sung a note of which the key responded to how high you were (Bass at basement floor, and soprano at the top storey), I wowed at the extraordinary effort of a library of outrageous taboo books, and the main atrium especially caught my attention with witty cartoons and doodles over the walls and ceiling. And fourthly the fluorescent ‘Echt iets voor u’ (Just your kind of thing) installation wonderfully contrasts the grey and glass angles of the museum. It also provides excellent shelter from a rain storm.

echt iets voor u

Notes on the IABR (international architecture biennale rotterdam) ehibitions.

From the Open City exhibition in the National Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. This exhibition was extremely heavy on the brain, it was similar to if they had compiled a whole book and exploded it onto the walls. I think I must have slightly phased out because my main memories are clearest at the beginning and the end, all I have to fill the gap in between is the memory of wandering into a room with an essay pasted onto all four walls on ‘ryan air yellow’ paper and the weighty pamphlets picked up on route. Of the beginning a video was screening of the Rotterdam’s past and the previous failed attempts of planners and architects to create paradise. It stated that for reform we “can’t wait for government to reform….we need to stop the illusion of the Architect as visionary…and we need a series of ‘facts on the ground’.” I found this small scale approach interesting as a method away from large scale utopian thinking. Could there be something in this. I didn’t find anything to support this later, perhaps I was just overwhelmed.

A corridor that took my interest was focused on gated communities in the USA and exploring cases where they have caused meetings that would not have occurred otherwise. Four cases to demonstrate the gist of this: A wealthy Catholic communityt in which the services were well proportioned with the homeless because of the perceived generosity. A dwindling golfing community where unsold suburban homes unused swimming pools were attracting swarms of mosquitoes found a helping hand from skaters emptying the water to use as ramps and skate areas. A gay community that became a desired place for retirement because it was considered safe.

Other things in Rotterdam were fun, that is all that needs to be known in this blog…

feral dog

Notes on Manuel De Landa’ s talk at the Tate on Nature Space Society found here:

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26608082001

My initial thoughts to the talk was to find the language extremely hard to interpret and make sense of what was being said, and also puzzled as to what happened to the main body of the talk as most of the video was the question and answering session. This suggests to me that the talk was of a similar point, drummed in by repetition.

De Landa spoke using examples from real life which was helpful to bring across his point. From what I can gather the talk was a discussion of where nature and culture meet, a very pertinent question in times when awareness is constantly being raised of consideration of our world and how we treat it.

De Landa’s conclusion seems to be that surely they never part/ can never be separated as they are far too intertwined with each other. Here are 3 examples that are used to demonstrate this.

] for the measles virus to exist, it needs a tight packed group of minimum 5000 people. This only occurs in an urban environment.

] native weeds in the USA have not survived the land being inhabited, but European weeds that have come across in the hair of livestock  has proliferated.

] when dogs are let loose and live away from humans they become feral (see picture above) and act completely different to when under the control of people.

All three examples tell a storey of the fact that our culture has an impact on how nature behaves and they are intertwined and can’t be parted.

0-100%

Text: the first chapter (From the City to Urban Society) of Lefebvre’s book The Urban Revolution (1970).

The main thing I learned from the text is the stages of transformation of the city which Lefebvre places on a scale of 0-100% urbanism which is demonstrated in the image above. This are ordered like this: agrarian, political city, market town, industrialisation, post-industrialisation. Lefebvre introduces the notion that the industrialisation of the city is the last and most major deciding factor towards explosion/implosion, i.e. an urban concentration, expansion of the city limits and a rural exodus.

The last section of the text was particularly clear at describing the complexities that the critical phase towards 100% urbanism brings. Lefebvre uses two examples, the street and the monument, both of which he presents contrasting opinons.

For the street: significance goes beyond a place for movement, urban life would die without it, creates safer cities, revolutionary events occur in the street.

Against the street: alienating (people only ever brush shoulders), organised for consumption.

For the monument: site of collective life, controls but brings together, u-topic, most recognisable places.

Against the monument: uninhabitable, seat of an institution, glorifies power and death, represents repression and colonisation.

After discussions of the critical zone and what happens to the city in post-industrialisation it became clear that the money market and finance industry can be classed as an industry. So although what is originally considered an industry such as production and maufacture has moved to a more viable location the city still survives with this secondary industry.

Unlike what is depicted in the image at the top of the page, the 100% urbanism is meant less as all land being eaten up by the city, but more about the countryside serving the city and all working as one unit, an truely inciteful prediction written in 1970.

It was good to hear a concise but thorough account of what happened to the fiscal system.

Here’s what I found out…

Capitalism is what we have as a system and although it can’t exist without crises there is no real alternative. Capitalism is grounded on growth of which the average since 1970 is about 2.25%. When it falls below this it is considered a crash. this happens regularly but not to the scale seen in the past year. Harvey explained it’s routes in the Lehman bank in America having a knock on global effect on Britain, Spain and Ireland to Argentina and Brazil to South East Asia and China.

In the 1930′s America used updating the infrastructure and surburbanisation to stop the country going into a crash, but this now has an adverse affect on their dependence on oil and meeting global warming targets.

Throughout the video I was waiting expectantly for a proposal of change. However Harvey actually stated at the his reason for this was to give a more accurate account of what happened not biased to an agenda. He did mention the need for a worthy opposition to the system we have now.

David Harvey’s Space as a key wordfrom pages 119-148 of Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006) and Manuel Castells The space of flows from pages 407-459 of The rise of the Network Society (1996)

There was a great deal of unfamiliar material, interesting, but unfamiliar. The depth that Harvey talked about space and its relation to time was new to me. After my first reading I was curious as to how Harvey considered it possible for eveything to have value, but having looked further into the passage I understand that Harvey rates spaces with varying values according to where they are on the matrix of spacialities. I found it agreeable that Harvey considered Lefebvre’s tripartite division (of material space/representations of space/spaces of representation) non-heirarchically because of how intertwined they are in our daily experiences.

My thoughts on Castell’s chapter were perhaps more shallow. I picked up that he believed that information technology was currently and dramatically transforming the city through advanced connectivity. But as I learned on Wednesday because the passage was written in the 1990′s, with hindsight we can say some of his thoughts were incorrect. With regards to what exactly spaces of flows are I shall have to read further…