Wednesday 30 January 2013

What of opacity today ?


Groupe Architecture Principe, 
Eglise Ste. Bernadette-du-Banlay,Nevers,1963-66


Going back in the history of architecture, following a brief stay in the trees and in the caves: there is the wall. 
The wall and its manifold turns upon itself gave birth to the enclosure, the first protection against aggressions of all kinds. And the first expression of land ownership. 



We may consider, then, that the wall and its openings constitute the first among the initial principles of architecture, and the only one surviving today
The miracle is that, despite sociological and technological upheavals, it is omnipresent and dominant in the minds of those specializing in human settlement on the planet. It is therefore legitimate to raise the essential issue, that of opacity as the fundamental principle of architecture.
Indeed, in our times, aspirations to dominance are coming from two quarters. 

Transparency, through glass and its substitutes. Stretched membranes, which act as translucent surfaces or as sieves.
SANAA + Imrey Culbert, Louvre-Lens museum, Lens,2012
In arbitrating this confrontation, one criterion should be decisive: how to let solar light into inhabited places.
Architects thus automatically find themselves in charge of this arbitration, this choice. Through the artifices they invent, they determine how light is conducted.
Accordingly, they are free to determine the new fundamental of current architecture. The object of this debate between fundamentals is to formulate one’s preference, to state which manipulation should be used to arbitrate between opacity and transparency.
Claude Parent [ on Spéciale’Z , May 2012 ]


Wednesday 16 January 2013


                                                                             Gabriele De Vecchi: URMNT _1961                         


"According to the [T] group, the socialization could occur through the kinetic, replacing the static work with the process  referring to the union of space and time."
G. De Vecchi 

Saturday 12 January 2013

Gilles Clement: jardinier et écrivain



[The principles of biological evolution and those of economic evolution are not-overlapping.

 - Growth, developpement, represent the dynamic of an economic system, inasmuch accumulation. 
 - Growth, developpement, represent the dynamic of a biological system, inasmuch tranformation. 

The Third Landscape, a territory of diversity, therefore of evolution, produces invention, opposes accumulation. 
From a cultural point of view, the Third Landscape is referring to an organized territory and in opposition to it.]

The ruling power, undermined from inside, attempts to regain its wavering balance menaced by its own drift. A multitude of counter-powers exercises pressure from the outside and weakens, to an even greater extent the monolithic edifice based on the belief in a unique economic and social system.
In spite of efforts to consolidate the architecture of a system built on the sole mechanics of material exchange and consumption, it crumbles.

[ - Consider the un-organization of the spaces of Third Landscape as a vital principle, thanks to which, each organized system lets itself be passed through by flashes of light. 
 - Consider the growth of spaces of Third Landscape originating from an organization of the territory as necessary counterpoint to it. 
 - Consider planetary mixture - a mechanism inherent to Third Landscape - as an  engine of evolution.
 - Promote biological growth and developpement, in opposition to economical growth and developpement.]

In crumbling, it joins the autonomous structures that contributed to its fall. It amalgamates and undergoes a transformation at contact, helpless to impose its rule and model, henceforth obsolete. This dispersed entity corresponds to an atomized society obliged to invent new models of exchange, sharing and distribution for material and immaterial goods.

During its life cycle, the tree returns to the environment the energy it removes. Symbiotic man , by adopting this model of operation, answers the question posed by the Planetary Garden: « How to exploit diversity without destroying it? »
While the image of a tree represents a strong model, stable and lasting, that of grass is closer to the fragile model, unstable and short-lived. In reality, the two figures function in the same manner with regard to the environment: by constant recycling of energy with no accumulation of waste other than decomposable organic matter. (Vegetation, autotrophic, produces its nourishment from solar energy and minerals resulting from the deterioration of organic matter, rocks, etc.)

[Declare the territory of Third Landscape as a privileged place of the biological intelligence: an inclination to constantly reinvent oneself.]

The totality of these autonomous systems forms a « Milky Way », insuring its autonomy by guaranteeing, for each entity:
-a short circuit of production and distribution of goods of greatest necessity
-one or several local production centers for energy permitting  the systems to operate independently of any other such system.
-Systematic recycling, direct or indirect, of by-products resulting from the function of human society.
Furthermore, each system exchanges with its neighbors, near or far, all immaterial (or highly necessary) goods impossible or difficult to find locally, necessary for the cultural enrichment of this atomized society. Such a series of distant exchanges, with regard to immaterial goods, and, to a lesser extent material goods impossible to find locally, appears in grey on the drawing, tying the remote systems together.
These two models of exchange - near and far - correspond to a new economy functioning on the model of trees and grass where all taken in nature is restored with no qualitative deterioration, no matter what the form and level of transformation of this restitution. This new economy is characteristic of symbiotic Man.

A dead leaf on the ground is not waste , it is food.

 




G. Clement; Le Manifeste du Tiers-Paysage (2003)

G. Clement; L'homme symbiotique , commentaire de six dessins  (2009)