http://www.archiwik.org/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=TenementofnaughtArchiwik - User contributions [en]2026-05-02T02:28:11ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.43.3http://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=1247Main Page2025-09-13T23:14:30Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
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|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1246Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:36:48Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1245Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:34:11Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf width="500" height="700">File:Hiddenarchitecture.pdf</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1244Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:33:55Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf width="500" height="700">File:Hiddenarchitecture.PDF</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1243Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:33:25Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf width="500" height="800">File:hiddenarchitecture.pdf</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1242Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:25:35Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf>File:Hiddenarchitecture.pdf</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=File:Hiddenarchitecture.pdf&diff=1241File:Hiddenarchitecture.pdf2025-09-13T22:24:49Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
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<div></div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1240Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2025-09-13T22:19:10Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf>File:Superstudio-Hidden-Architecture.pdf</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=The_Recovery_of_Discovery&diff=1239The Recovery of Discovery2025-09-13T21:34:31Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Cyprien-gaillard-board.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''The Recovery of Discovery'', installation views, KW Institute for contemporary Art, Berlin, 2011]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' is a 2011 exhibition at Kunst-Werke Berlin by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Consisting of a single large-scale installation of a pyramid of cases of beer in the sky-lit main gallery space at Kunst-Werke, visitors to the exhibition were invited to climb the stepped array of the stacked boxes, use them for seating, and to freely open and consume the beer contained inside.<br />
<br />
The installation was on view for two months,<ref>March 27 – May 22, 2011. See the Kunst-Werke Berlin exhibition page: "[https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/cyprien-gaillard-the-recovery-of-discovery/ Cyprien Gaillard: The Recovery Of Discovery]", ''kw-berlin.de'', retrieved 31 January, 2022.</ref> during which time the pyramid, initially totaling 72,000 bottles, was gradually torn apart, consumed, and its debris, including shattered glass bottles, left scattered throughout the gallery space.<br />
<br />
==Background==<br />
<br />
Gaillard used imported ''Efes'' beer for the installation, a brand favoured among the large Turkish immigrant community in Berlin.<ref>See Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'' (Köln, London: Walther König, 2012), 7-16.</ref> The brand is named after the modern Turkish name for the ancient city of Ephesus, built by the Greeks in Asia Minor (the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey).<br />
<br />
The artist has spoken about his intention to juxtapose the accelerated ruination of his pyramid over the course of its exhibition run with the ancient architectural ruins it is in part making reference to. The exhibition's press materials specifically cite the [[Pergamon Altar]],<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar Pergamon Altar]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 8 November 2021.</ref> on permanent view close to Kunst-Werke on Berlin's Museum Island, as a reference point for Gaillard's installation. The Altar was constructed in the first half of the 2nd century BC in Pergamon—like Ephesus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Excavated by German engineer Carl Humann in the 1880s, the architectural fragments that make up the Pergamon Altar were removed from their site in present-day Turkey and relocated to Germany, where Italian restorers reconstructed the monument in a purpose-built museum that first opened in 1901. The huge altar structure is famous for its 20 meter-wide stairway, the steps of which have been a popular spot for visitors to the museum to sit, rest, and take photographs.<br />
<br />
Gaillard's installation seeks to promote a corresponding public interaction with his own stepped installation, drawing visitors into a perhaps unwitting relationship with the history of displaced monuments, as he also interweaves that history with that of the contemporary displacement of Turkish guest workers in Germany, and the imported goods of a globalized economy.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery".</ref><br />
<br />
==Violence from above and below==<br />
<br />
In a conversation with the exhibition's curator,<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 33-49.</ref> Susanne Pfeffer, in a publication accompanying the installation, Gaillard has addressed the work's reference to the appropriation of cultural monuments by colonial powers, and the vexed issue of repatriation and restoration. The artist remains equivocal on the issue, acknowledging the value of preservation that often goes along with relocation to museum contexts. Gaillard additionally highlights the futility of the search for an authentic experience of ancient architectural sites—the desire to look at 'the original' is oftentimes fruitless, given the extent to which historical context and overzealous attempts at reconstruction mean we can only be looking at a highly altered object when we view monuments in-situ.<br />
<br />
Pfeffer cites the writing of German art historian [[Martin Warnke]],<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Warnke Martin Warnke]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 2 January 2022.</ref> and his distinction between the idea of vandalism "from below" and "from above" in the context of the destruction and restoration of monuments. If vandalism from below is characterized by a blind destructive mania without a specific purpose, vandalism "from above" can frequently take the form of restoration, conservation and urban planning. For Pfeffer, The ''Recovery of Discovery’s'' self-destructing monument engages with each of these impulses, and even suggests their mutuality.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", 9.</ref><br />
<br />
==Drunkenness, sovereignty, and instability==<br />
<br />
Gaillard has related anecdotes about being hungover on foreign trips, and standing looking at a ruined monument as he, himself, felt 'ruined'. He has discussed the role of alcohol and intoxication in ''The Recovery of Discovery'', specifically relating the effects of alcohol on body and mind to the destruction of the initially-perfect form of the pyramidal stack of beer cases.<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation".</ref><br />
<br />
The artist notes the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are branded with gold-embossed crowns and named after kings, gods—or in the case of the ''Efes'' beer imported for ''The Recovery of Discovery'', after an ancient city manifesting a once golden age. Gaillard identifies the tendency with a kind of 'sovereign subjectivity' of drunkness: feelings of well-being and command over one's place in the world, that can so quickly flip toward aggression or loss of control when over-intoxicated.<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Hal Foster has elaborated on this instability in writing on ''The Recovery of Discovery''. Initially noting the potential antagonism of a publicly-funded arts organization spending 40,000 Euro on 72,000 bottles of beer for an art installation (at a time when German tax payers were balking at the idea of bailing out Greece through the EU), Foster goes on to elaborate:<br />
<br />
"the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd as seen from Gustave Le Bon, through Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, to recent students of hooliganism - an instability that renders the installation insecure as both structure and event."<ref>Hal Foster, "Vandal Aesthetics", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 51-52.</ref><br />
<br />
==Place in Gaillard's broader practice==<br />
<br />
[[File:Jhagehrohk.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008]][[File:Fdhgerguu.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008. Detail.]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' reflects an ongoing exploration by Gaillard of issues around architectural monuments, what constitutes something worth preserving, and how sculptural displacement and changes of context can release new meanings and energies.<br />
<br />
The artist has produced a series of works, beginning in 2008, in which the pulverized remnants of demolished modernist tower blocks are employed to create sculptural and landscaped elements in new architectural contexts. For ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008, the artist created a gravel pathway leading up to the Château d'Orion, a sixteenth century chateau in western France that is a designated national monument. Gaillard's new path was constructed from the rubble of demolished tower blocks that once stood in the Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of south-west Paris. Ground down to small, roughly evenly-sized pieces, visitors to the picturesque gardens of the Château are unaware that the path they are walking on is made up of the remains of a former housing block. The work thus serves to introduce a hidden, destabilizing element in the context of the design of the Château and its surrounding park (which otherwise reflect the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and harmony between man-made design and nature).<ref>"Cyprien Gaillard, La grande allée du Château de Oiron", in: ''Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place : Public Art (Now)'', (London : Art Books Publishing Ltd, in association with Situations, Public Art Agency Sweden, and the European Network of Public Art Producers, 2015), 36-39.</ref><br />
<br />
As curator and writer Claire Doherty has observed, Gaillard's project "contrasts two very different conceptions of reason and necessity. His ''grande allée'' asks us to consider what we choose to preserve and remember, and what is made from the ruins of the things that we do not. What is left is a quietly unsettled landscape, hovering between the various points in time when these structures were built and have been or will be destroyed, and our own footsteps on the uneven concrete gravel."<ref>Ibid., 37</ref><br />
<br />
Gaillard has made video works of the demolition of mid-century tower blocks such as ''Color Like No Other'', 2007, and ''Pruitt-Igoe Falls'', 2009, both depicting the demolition of buildings in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also produced a series of 'Cairns' from piles of modernist building rubble, photographed in the landscape to reference prehistoric monuments. <br />
<br />
Linda Yablonsky has noted ''The Recovery of Discovery's'' themes of intoxication and disorder in relation to architectural monuments reflects some of the artist's video works including ''Cities of Gold and Mirrors'', 2008, which juxtaposes images of American spring breakers partying at a decaying Mayan-themed resort in Cancun, and the three-part ''Desniansky Raion'', 2007, which documents hooligans warring in the parking lot of a Russian housing complex.<ref>Linda Yablonsky, "Beautiful Ruins", ''T Magazine'', April 10, 2013. This and other articles on the work of Cyprien Gaillard are available at the site of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, see: "[https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/cyprien-gaillard/press Cyprien Gaillard]", ''gladstonegallery.com'', retrieved 31 January, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
==Unnatural ruins==<br />
<br />
Tom McDonough has aligned Gaillard's interest in architectural collapse with the writings of German theorist [[Georg Simmel]].<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel Georg Simmel]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 29 November 2021.</ref> For Simmel, the ruin provides us with a compelling image of nature reclaiming culture: "The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical forces of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards."<ref>McDonough quoting Simmel. See Tom McDonough, "Controlled Explosion", Bice Curiger, ed., ''30 years of Parkett : Tauba Auerbach, Urs Fischer, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirana Shahbazi'', (New York; Zurich: Parkett, 2014), 210-217.</ref> The ruin thus provides a compelling prefiguration of death, allowing us to contemplate our own oblivion.<br />
<br />
McDonough, however, questions Gaillard's figuring of modernist housing projects in terms of ruins, noting that their decay or destruction is more likely the result of economic forces that have abandoned them and their inhabitants—often with the express aim of forcing their erasure in order to make way for new privatized developments, as was the case in some of the Glaswegian estates that the artist has featured in his work. Focusing only on the moment of these buildings' destruction runs the risk of treating it as a natural event divorced from the social and political context that is its true cause.<br />
<br />
However, McDonough concludes that the artist, in often highlighting the moment of violence in these destructive events, holds up a mirror to our own nihilistic fascination with architectural destruction, and in highlighting this collective 'death drive', signals its centrality to Neo-liberal economics. "Images of controlled explosions are first and foremost signs of capital's fundamental fluidity, its retreat from fixed form the moment profitability dictates a shift in geographic locale—and even the most durable of concrete structures can be forsaken as the economy dictates their obsolescence."<ref>Ibid., 217</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1236Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2024-03-31T02:42:10Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf width="360" height="460">File:Superstudio-Hidden-Architecture.pdf</pdf><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Superstudio_-_Hidden_Architecture&diff=1235Superstudio - Hidden Architecture2024-03-31T02:38:07Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Photo by Giulio Boem]]"Hidden Architecture" is a 1970 project by Italian architectural collective Superstudio, first published in the US journal ''Design Quarterly''. The project consisted of the design of a new building by Superstudio, the plans for which were concealed inside a metal box, remaining inaccessible and "hidden in hermetically sealed covers for ever."<ref>Superstudio "Hidden Architecture", ''Design Quarterly'' No. 78/79, 1970, 54-58</ref><br />
<br />
== The Published Project ==<br />
<br />
[[File:Hidden-arch9.png|140px|thumb|right|Superstudio, "Hidden Architecture", 1970. Image 9.]]"Hidden Architecture" was presented as a short text and a series of images documenting the action of sealing the designs inside the metal box, published over five pages of a special edition of ''Design Quarterly'' dedicated to conceptual architecture.<ref>The issue was edited by Peter Eisenman whose opening essay “Notes on Conceptual Architecture,” consisted only of footnotes, the 'body' of the text itself erased.</ref><br />
<br />
The first page contains the collective's short statement on the project, including a description of the process of the designs' concealment, with each step numbered according to a set of images on the following pages. <br />
<br />
The thirteen black and white images document the stages of the action: the open zinc box with copies of the architectural drawings arrayed alongside; the burning of the original drawings; the sealing of copies of the plans inside protective coverings and their placement inside the box; its welding shut; and finally, the signing of a letter by the lawyer "Dott. Proc. Andrea Orsi Battaglini", whose besuited figure has been visible witnessing the proceedings throughout. Various members of the Superstudio collective can also be seen in the photographs and the events appear to take place in a workshop space. The sealed box was labeled with the date, July 25, 1970 and titled "HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE + SUPERSTUDIO". Its dimensions are given as 50 x 350 x 75 mm, 1.5 mm thick.<br />
<br />
Following the two pages of images is a full page reproduction of Dr Battaglini's signed letter attesting to his witnessing of the events, while the final page adds short bios of the Superstudio members.<br />
<br />
Of the architectural project contained in the drawings (which, of course, is not revealed in any of the imagery), Superstudio founding member Adolpho Natalini described it in a notebook at the time as‚ "a great project, an important project, a beautiful project‚ a project resolved in all its details and designed with even more care than usual."<ref>Quoted in: Sebastiano Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", ''Pidgin Magazine'', Issue 19, Princeton School of Architecture, Spring 2015, 10.</ref><br />
<br />
== Meaning ==<br />
<br />
In their introductory text to the published project, Superstudio invoke a "semantic redundancy" at the heart of architectural magazines by way of context for "Hidden Architecture". If the publication of "theories, projects and buildings" in the architectural glossies tends toward becoming a goal in itself, divorced from any kind of end product in the built environment, "It is therefore an act of coherence to attempt a logical extrapolation of this process, and to propose a project which coincides with the act of its own transmission."<br />
<br />
Superstudio further state: "We propose a HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE as conceptual architecture: architecture which is only an image of itself and of our instrumentalizable muteness." This somewhat ambiguous phrase could be taken to refer to a muteness or powerlessness of architects bound up in the "great race" of novelty, fashion and design<ref>Adolfo Natalini had used the phrase, writing of Superstudio's white cube modular furniture, in "A House of Calm Serenity", a 1969 text published in ''Vogue'' magazine. Reprinted in Peter Lang, William Menking, eds., ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'' (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 73-77</ref> in which architectural magazines play such a key role. Or it could invoke a tactic by which a conceptually based practice such as Superstudio might retain leverage within such a system: by withholding or deflecting the image of their architectural design in order to 'take back' some of its power and meaning. Writing about the project in 2015, Adolpho Natalini rejigs the phrase to emphasize the latter sense, referring to "Hidden Architecture" as "a project that is only the image of itself and of our non-exploitable muteness."<ref>Adolfo Natalini, "A History of Exhibitions", in: Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi, eds. ''Super Superstudio'' (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2015), 47.</ref><br />
<br />
== Critical perspectives ==<br />
<br />
=== Superstudio's contemporaneous writings ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Superstudio.jpeg|240px|thumb|left|The Superstudio collective in 1970, l to r: Piero Frassinelli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Aldolfo Natalini.]]"Hidden Architecture" can be related to a number of ideas being explored contemporaneously by Superstudio in some of their own published texts.<br />
<br />
In "Invention Design and Evasion Design", published in ''Domus'' in June 1969, they had proposed the term 'evasion design' as a counter to 'invention design', where:<br />
<br />
"Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalism and functionality. Each object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate."<ref>Superstudio, "Invention Design and Evasion Design", ''Domus'' 475, June 1969. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 74-75.</ref><br />
<br />
The project can also be seen as part of an overall shift in the practice's work away from architectural and product design toward conceptual strategies. Whereas Superstudio had continued to produce highly covetable designs for lamps and chairs alongside their first conceptual work,<ref>[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2522 Superstudio, Gherpe Lamp, 1967], Museum of Modern Art, New York. Retrieved June 22, 2018.</ref> the group had announced by the end of 1967 their decision to abandon traditional object design altogether.<ref>See: Peter Lang and William Menking, "Only Architecture Will be Our Lives", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 19. Superstudio's position is evident by implication in the "Evasion Design" essay, and the authors also refer to a 2002 interview with Toraldo di Francia, where he admits that the collective realized around 1967 time that their furniture was only initiating "a new level of consumerism, and consequently another level of poverty."</ref><br />
<br />
The strategy reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the role of architecture and design within the broader luxury goods market, one that tended to reinforce the glaring inequities of a rampant consumer market. A project such as "Hidden Architecture" can be understood as a conscious negation of the consumable object, its 'withholding' of its architectural contents from the design publication, as a "...destruction of the syntactical ties which bind the object to the system...".<ref>Superstudio, "Distruzione, metamorfosi e recostruzione degli oggetti (Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object)", ''IN'' 2-3, March-June 1971, reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 98-99.</ref><br />
<br />
Their position reflected a strong utopian impulse, a desire to reconstruct relations of ownership and use value from the ground up; Superstudio's 1971 text "Destruction, Metamorphosis and Reconstruction of the Object" maintains that what this negation of the designed object creates space for is its return to a system that is non-exploitative, allowing access again its transformative powers: "The metamorphoses which the object has to go through are those during which it is re-loaded with the values of myth, of sacredness, of magic through the reconstruction of relationships between production and use, beyond the abolition of the fictitious ties of production-consumption."<ref>Ibid. In their 1972 article "Supersuperficie", published in ''Casabella'', Superstudio elaborated on this need to break down traditional understandings of the design object in relation to the contexts of the city and work: "The destruction of objects, the elimination of the city and the disappearance of work are events closely connected. By the destruction of objects, we mean the destruction of their attributes of 'status' and the connotations imposed by those in power, so that we live 'with' objects (reduced to the condition of neutral and disposable elements) and not 'for' objects. By the elimination of the city, we mean the elimination of the accumulation of the formal structures of power, the elimination of the city hierarchy and social model. By the end of work, we mean the end of work seen as an alienating activity".</ref><br />
<br />
=== The displacement of design to its mediation ===<br />
<br />
Writing more recently on the the project<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box".</ref>, Sebastiano Fabbrini has emphasized "Hidden Architecture" as not anti-architecture: "Hidden Architecture did not suggest the negation of design, but rather a shift of focus from the design of the architectural project to the design of the processes of creation and communication of the architectural happening." He notes how "the design of the hiding happening itself" was planned and executed with such attention to detail, as was the presentation of the project within its allotted pages in Design Quarterly, that Hidden Architecture could be thought of as an architectural design after all, just one displaced onto the mechanisms of architecture's mediation. Fabbrini locates Superstudio’s approach as part of a broader concern with redefining architecture in light of the decline of the certainties of the Modern Movement: "As the major language of action, synthesis, and spectacle quickly faded, a minor language based on conceptual thinking, analysis, and self-questioning began to emerge."<ref>Ibid., 12</ref><br />
<br />
=== The context of post-war Florence ===<br />
<br />
Fabbrini and others<ref>See: Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires", in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 31-51.</ref> have also noted the role that the post-war redevelopment of Florence played in defining Superstudio's position. The city had been heavily damaged by retreating German troops during the war, and the reconstruction was dominated by free-market building that emphasized a conservative and conventional approach to restoration. The foment within architectural schools across Italy in the 1960s was a response to these conditions<ref>Ibid.</ref>, and radical architects who were largely left out of the reconstruction process were pushed into teaching and the development of theoretical work.<br />
<br />
The restrictions of Florence's approach to architectural preservation was a linked factor. The first ''Superarchitecture'' exhibition, which showed work by future members of both Superstudio and Archizoom, was scheduled to open on November 5th 1966: the same night a catastrophic flood hit the city of Florence when the Arno river burst its banks, damaging many of the city's priceless artworks and buildings. The issue of preservation, of what constituted an architectural monument, was an ongoing debate that found its way into many Superstudio projects, including the ''Continuous Monument'' (1969-), and their collage series ''Rescue of Historic Centres'' (1970), which included proposals to flood the Arno Valley, and enclose the city of Rome in a smog filled glass cube.<ref>Reproduced in Lang and Menking, eds, ''Superstudio - Life Without Objects'', 172-173.</ref><br />
<br />
=== From a 'people's architecture' to an 'architectural people' ===<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the restrictions of working within 1960s Florence provided the platform for Superstudio to think beyond architecture as a discrete discipline. They were seeking to hypothesize no less than an entire reconstruction of the relationship between design, object, use: "...no longer existence under the protection of design objects, but existence as design. The time being over when utensils generated ideas, and when ideas generated utensils, now ideas are utensils."<ref>Superstudio, "Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore e Morte: Cinque Storie del Superstudio", ''Casabella'' 367, July 1972. Reprinted in Angelidakis, Pizzigoni, and Scelsi, eds., ''Super Superstudio'', 118-123.</ref><br />
<br />
Superstudio's contribution was one less of the 'invention of more architecture', and more the creation of a critical framework around the process of design itself. Their projects imagined a society in which architecture as an external discipline was no longer necessary; one where society itself was a perfectly designed unexploitative entity: "Not with a new form of people's architecture, but an architectural people ready to give their world a form."<ref>Lang, "Suicidal Desires", 49.</ref><br />
<br />
"Hidden Architecture" played an important role in the collective's formulation of their position—"...the transcendence of architecture to a realm of absolute representation, one that embraced the critical value of the fantastic and the fictional",<ref>Fabbrini, "Hidden Architecture: Superstudio's Magic Box", 20-21.</ref> was a key strategy in the liberation of architecture from its constraints.<br />
<br />
<br />
<pdf width="360" height="460">File:Superstudio-Hidden-Architecture.pdf</pdf><br />
[[File:Superstudio-Hidden-Architecture.pdf|page=1|600px]]<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=1231Main Page2022-04-18T17:38:13Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
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*''Archiwik.org'' was launched as a contributing project at Galway, Ireland-based visual arts festival, [https://www.tulca.ie/tulca-2016-the-headless-city TULCA 2016: ‘The Headless City’], in November 2016.<br />
<br />
*The site invites contributions on themes of architecture and the built environment, specifically taking as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille. Read more about the conceptual background of the project, and parameters for contribution, on the ''[[Archiwik:About|About Archiwik]]'' page.<br />
<br />
====Contributing content====<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik.org'' is built using [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki], the same open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia. Anyone can add or edit content, just request an account at the "[[Special:RequestAccount|Request account]]" page; you will be sent an account verification email that, once completed, will allow you to log in and contribute to the site.<br />
<br />
*Articles can be added using plain text, with basic formatting tools available in the edit window of each article. You can also paste text from any word processing application. To upload images, use the "[[Special:Upload|Upload File]]" link in the left menu bar.<br />
<br />
*Create a new article by typing its title/subject in the search bar at the top right of any page. You will get a search result page that includes the line "'''Create the page "<span style="color: #F00">Name of your article</span>" on this wiki!'''" Click on the red highlighted text to get started. <br />
<br />
*Editing and formatting are further explained in [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWiki_markup_cheatsheet_EN.pdf Wikipedia's cheat sheet], or for a more in-depth overview, see [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting MediaWiki's formatting guide].<br />
<br />
====Contact====<br />
<br />
*For any issues with account set up, article creation, or general questions or comments, please contact the main administrator of the site [[User:Tenementofnaught |here]].<br />
<br />
<br />
<!--------------------------- Featured Article --------------------------><br />
| style="width:50%; padding:0 1em; background:#f5fffa; border:1px solid #ccc;" id=mf-sow|<br />
{{Featuredarticle}}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<!---------------------- Index auto generated -----------------------><br />
{| style="width:100%; margin-top:1em; background:#fcfcfc; font-size:90%; border:1px solid #ccc;<br />
| style="padding:0 1em;" |<br />
{{Pagesindex}}<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1230Template:LAbar2022-04-18T17:22:11Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Barcelona - Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (5).jpg|x130px|link=Gaudí Beatification]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Gaudí Beatification]]''<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1229Template:LAbar2022-04-18T17:20:04Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Barcelona - Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (8).jpg|x130px|link=Gaudí Beatification]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Gaudí Beatification]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1228Template:LAbar2022-04-18T17:18:58Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Barcelona - Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (8).jpg|x130px|link=Gaudí Beatification]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Gaudí Beatification]]''<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1227Template:LAbar2022-04-18T17:18:06Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Barcelona - Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (5).jpg|x130px|link=Gaudí Beatification]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Gaudí Beatification]]''<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1226Template:LAbar2022-04-18T17:11:49Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Gaudi-montage-03.jpg|x130px|link=Gaudí Beatification]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Gaudí Beatification]]''<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=1206Main Page2022-02-28T19:06:58Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__ __NOEDITSECTION__<br />
<!-------------------------Banner across top of page------------------------------><br />
{| style="width:100%; margin-top:1em; border:1px solid #ccc;"<br />
|<!------------"Welcome to Archiwik"---------------------------><br />
|style="text-align:center; padding-right:2em; color:#000;"|<br />
<div style="margin:0; padding:.1em; border:none; color:#000;"><br />
<span style="font-size:130%">Welcome to<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size:180%">[[Archiwik:About|Archiwik.org]]<br /></span></div><br />
<!------------------- Taxon Navigation on righthand side OUT ----------------------><br />
|}<br />
<!--------------------------- Latest Articles Line --------------------------><br />
===Latest Articles===<br />
<div style="overflow: auto;"><br />
{{LAbar}}<br />
</div><br />
<!--------------------------- How To Contribute --------------------------><br />
{| style="width:100%; background:#fcfcfc; margin-top:2em;"<br />
|- valign="top" <br />
|style="width:50%; padding:0 1em 0 2em; color:#000; border:1px solid #ccc;"|<br />
==How to contribute==<br />
<br />
====About====<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik.org'' was launched as a contributing project at Galway, Ireland-based visual arts festival, [https://www.tulca.ie/tulca-2016-the-headless-city TULCA 2016: ‘The Headless City’], in November 2016.<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik'' takes as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille. Read more about the conceptual background of the project, and parameters for contribution, on the ''[[Archiwik:About|About Archiwik]]'' page.<br />
<br />
====Contributing content====<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik.org'' is built using [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki], the same open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia. Anyone can add or edit content, just request an account at the "[[Special:RequestAccount|Request account]]" page; you will be sent an account verification email that, once completed, will allow you to log in and contribute to the site.<br />
<br />
*Articles can be added using plain text, with basic formatting tools available in the edit window of each article. You can also paste text from any word processing application. To upload images, use the "[[Special:Upload|Upload File]]" link in the left menu bar.<br />
<br />
*Create a new article by typing its title/subject in the search bar at the top right of any page. You will get a search result page that includes the line "'''Create the page "<span style="color: #F00">Name of your article</span>" on this wiki!'''" Click on the red highlighted text to get started. <br />
<br />
*Editing and formatting are further explained in [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWiki_markup_cheatsheet_EN.pdf Wikipedia's cheat sheet], or for a more in-depth overview, see [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting MediaWiki's formatting guide].<br />
<br />
====Contact====<br />
<br />
*For any issues with account set up, article creation, or general questions or comments, please contact the main administrator of the site [[User:Tenementofnaught |here]].<br />
<br />
<br />
<!--------------------------- Featured Article --------------------------><br />
| style="width:50%; padding:0 1em; background:#f5fffa; border:1px solid #ccc;" id=mf-sow|<br />
{{Featuredarticle}}<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<!---------------------- Index auto generated -----------------------><br />
{| style="width:100%; margin-top:1em; background:#fcfcfc; font-size:90%; border:1px solid #ccc;<br />
| style="padding:0 1em;" |<br />
{{Pagesindex}}<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:Featuredarticle&diff=1205Template:Featuredarticle2022-02-28T19:05:02Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Featured Article ==<br />
<br />
===''Holes''===<br />
<br />
[[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|340px|link= Holes|Ulster University's big hole in the ground, 2017.]]<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 90%;"><br />
"[[Holes]]" are the negative space of the city. A hole is necessarily dug before a building can be erected, as permanent structures need foundations sunk underground to lend them stability. A hole dug deep enough into the ground in an urban site sometimes reveals evidence of previous habitation, and information about the development of the city that serve to disrupt or undermine contemporary understandings of history.<br />
<br />
''[[Holes|Continue Reading...]]''<br /><br />
<br /><br />
</div></div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:Featuredarticle&diff=1204Template:Featuredarticle2022-02-28T19:03:43Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Featured Article ==<br />
<br />
===''Holes''===<br />
<br />
[[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|300px|link= Holes|Ulster University's big hole in the ground, 2017.]]<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 90%;"><br />
"[[Holes]]" are the negative space of the city. A hole is necessarily dug before a building can be erected, as permanent structures need foundations sunk underground to lend them stability. A hole dug deep enough into the ground in an urban site sometimes reveals evidence of previous habitation, and information about the development of the city that serve to disrupt or undermine contemporary understandings of history. Looking deep into holes in the ground can help to call to mind the death of previous incarnations of the city, and to remind the viewer of the dirt and waste that is ordinarily made invisible in the city. Looking deep into holes in the ground can also induce a feeling of vertigo, or a desire to escape; or even a desire to be in a hole deep under the ground.<br />
<br />
''[[Holes|Continue Reading...]]''<br /><br />
<br /><br />
</div></div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:Featuredarticle&diff=1203Template:Featuredarticle2022-02-28T19:01:58Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* Featured Article */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Featured Article ==<br />
<br />
===''Holes''===<br />
<br />
[[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|360px|link= Holes|Ulster University's big hole in the ground, 2017.]]<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 90%;"><br />
"[[Holes]]" are the negative space of the city. A hole is necessarily dug before a building can be erected, as permanent structures need foundations sunk underground to lend them stability. A hole dug deep enough into the ground in an urban site sometimes reveals evidence of previous habitation, and information about the development of the city that serve to disrupt or undermine contemporary understandings of history. Looking deep into holes in the ground can help to call to mind the death of previous incarnations of the city, and to remind the viewer of the dirt and waste that is ordinarily made invisible in the city. Looking deep into holes in the ground can also induce a feeling of vertigo, or a desire to escape; or even a desire to be in a hole deep under the ground.<br />
<br />
''[[Holes|Continue Reading...]]''<br /><br />
<br /><br />
</div></div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1202Template:LAbar2022-02-28T18:52:01Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Whitechapel-monster-626.jpg|x130px|link=Monster Fatberg]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Monster Fatberg]]''<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1171Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:13:21Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular construction on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller circle adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites, and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the arrangements were laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring at multiple locations appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1170Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:11:39Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller circle adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites, and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the arrangements were laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring at multiple locations appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1169Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:11:11Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller circle adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the arrangements were laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring at multiple locations appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1168Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:10:33Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller circle adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the constructions was laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring at multiple locations appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1167Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:08:04Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller circle adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the structure was laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring on multiple locations of the structure appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1166Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:07:08Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped, however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller structure adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the structure was laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring on multiple locations of the structure appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Neanderthal_Cave_Structures&diff=1165Neanderthal Cave Structures2022-02-07T14:06:28Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:728.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Image: Michel Soulier/SSAC]]<br />
The Neanderthal cave structures are arrangements of stalagmites discovered in the Bruniquel Cave in south-west France that have been dated to around 175,000 years ago, well before the migration of modern humans into Europe,<ref>Generally considered to have occurred between 75,000 and 45,000 years ago. See: Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559480/ A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History]," ''The American Journal of Human Genetics'', May 30, 2006, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> and among the oldest built structures yet to have been discovered.<br />
<br />
The cave was initially explored by speleologists in the early 1990's who discovered, around 300 meters from the entrance, a low semi-circular structure on the cave floor, as well as other smaller assemblages. Work on the site stopped however, when the lead archaeologist died in 1999, only to be picked up again in 2013 by a team led by Sophie Verheyden, a palaeoclimatologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.<ref>Ewen Callaway, "[http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975 Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why]," ''Nature'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref><br />
<br />
The arrangements are constructed from up to four hundred stalagmites<ref>Nadia Drake, "[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/neanderthals-caves-rings-building-france-archaeology/ Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles]," ''National Geographic'', May 25, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> broken off from other parts of the cave and laid out horizontally in overlapping layers to create low-walled semi-enclosed areas, the larger measuring 6.7 meters (22 feet) across. Vertically positioned stalagmite parts are also in evidence and appear to have been used to strengthen and support the horizontal elements. The smaller structure adjacent is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) across.<ref>Callaway, "Neanderthals built cave structures." </ref><br />
<br />
[[File:02-cave-rings-bruniquel-france.ngsversion.1464195781861.adapt.945.1.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The larger structure is 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, while the smaller one is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ/Archéotransfert/Archéovision -SHS-3D/base photographique Pascal Mora]]Uranium-series dating has established consistent ages of around 175,000 years for the creation of the structures. The dating procedure involved sampling the material of the stalagmites and the calcite layers that have grown over them in the millennia since the structure was laid out.<ref>Ibid.</ref> The site has been remarkably well preserved, the original entrance to the cave having been sealed by rock fall before the end of the Pleistocene period.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the constructions remains mysterious. Evidence of charring on multiple locations of the structure appears to confirm the existence of hearths.<ref>Josh Davis, "[http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/structures-built-neanderthals-discovered-french-cave/ Oldest Known Neanderthal Construction Found In French Cave Is 176,000 Years Old]," ''IFL Science'', May 26, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2016</ref> The site is well beyond the reach of daylight from the cave's original entrance. The discovery is considered of major significance to our understanding of hominid development, demonstrating Neanderthal deep cave use and a degree of social organisation not previously evidenced at sites in use this early in European prehistory.<ref>Drake, "Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles."</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=The_Recovery_of_Discovery&diff=1164The Recovery of Discovery2022-01-31T19:50:41Z<p>Tenementofnaught: refs cleanup</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Cyprien-gaillard-board.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''The Recovery of Discovery'', installation views, KW Institute for contemporary Art, Berlin, 2011]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' is a 2011 exhibition at Kunst-Werke Berlin by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Consisting of a single large-scale installation of a pyramid of cases of beer in the sky-lit main gallery space at Kunst-Werke, visitors to the exhibition were invited to climb the stepped array of the stacked boxes, use them for seating, and to freely open and consume the beer contained inside.<br />
<br />
The installation was on view for two months,<ref>March 27 – May 22, 2011. See the Kunst-Werke Berlin exhibition page: "[https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/cyprien-gaillard-the-recovery-of-discovery/ Cyprien Gaillard: The Recovery Of Discovery]", ''kw-berlin.de'', retrieved 31 January, 2022.</ref> during which time the pyramid, initially totaling 72,000 bottles, was gradually torn apart, consumed, and its debris, including shattered glass bottles, left scattered throughout the gallery space.<br />
<br />
==Background==<br />
<br />
Gaillard used imported ''Efes'' beer for the installation, a brand favored among the large Turkish immigrant community in Berlin.<ref>See Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'' (Köln, London: Walther König, 2012), 7-16.</ref> The brand is named after the modern Turkish name for the ancient city of Ephesus, built by the Greeks in Asia Minor (the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey).<br />
<br />
The artist has spoken about his intention to juxtapose the accelerated ruination of his pyramid over the course of its exhibition run with the ancient architectural ruins it is in part making reference to. The exhibition's press materials specifically cite the [[Pergamon Altar]],<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar Pergamon Altar]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 8 November 2021.</ref> on permanent view close to Kunst-Werke on Berlin's Museum Island, as a reference point for Gaillard's installation. The Altar was constructed in the first half of the 2nd century BC in Pergamon—like Ephesus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Excavated by German engineer Carl Humann in the 1880s, the architectural fragments that make up the Pergamon Altar were removed from their site in present-day Turkey and relocated to Germany, where Italian restorers reconstructed the monument in a purpose-built museum that first opened in 1901. The huge altar structure is famous for its 20 meter-wide stairway, the steps of which have been a popular spot for visitors to the museum to sit, rest, and take photographs.<br />
<br />
Gaillard's installation seeks to promote a corresponding public interaction with his own stepped installation, drawing visitors into a perhaps unwitting relationship with the history of displaced monuments, as he also interweaves that history with that of the contemporary displacement of Turkish guest workers in Germany, and the imported goods of a globalized economy.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery".</ref><br />
<br />
==Violence from above and below==<br />
<br />
In a conversation with the exhibition's curator,<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 33-49.</ref> Susanne Pfeffer, in a publication accompanying the installation, Gaillard has addressed the work's reference to the appropriation of cultural monuments by colonial powers, and the vexed issue of repatriation and restoration. The artist remains equivocal on the issue, acknowledging the value of preservation that often goes along with relocation to museum contexts. Gaillard additionally highlights the futility of the search for an authentic experience of ancient architectural sites—the desire to look at 'the original' is oftentimes fruitless, given the extent to which historical context and overzealous attempts at reconstruction mean we can only be looking at a highly altered object when we view monuments in-situ.<br />
<br />
Pfeffer cites the writing of German art historian [[Martin Warnke]],<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Warnke Martin Warnke]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 2 January 2022.</ref> and his distinction between the idea of vandalism "from below" and "from above" in the context of the destruction and restoration of monuments. If vandalism from below is characterized by a blind destructive mania without a specific purpose, vandalism "from above" can frequently take the form of restoration, conservation and urban planning. For Pfeffer, The ''Recovery of Discovery’s'' self-destructing monument engages with each of these impulses, and even suggests their mutuality.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", 9.</ref><br />
<br />
==Drunkenness, sovereignty, and instability==<br />
<br />
Gaillard has related anecdotes about being hungover on foreign trips, and standing looking at a ruined monument as he, himself, felt 'ruined'. He has discussed the role of alcohol and intoxication in ''The Recovery of Discovery'', specifically relating the effects of alcohol on body and mind to the destruction of the initially-perfect form of the pyramidal stack of beer cases.<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation".</ref><br />
<br />
The artist notes the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are branded with gold-embossed crowns and named after kings, gods—or in the case of the ''Efes'' beer imported for ''The Recovery of Discovery'', after an ancient city manifesting a once golden age. Gaillard identifies the tendency with a kind of 'sovereign subjectivity' of drunkness: feelings of well-being and command over one's place in the world, that can so quickly flip toward aggression or loss of control when over-intoxicated.<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Hal Foster has elaborated on this instability in writing on ''The Recovery of Discovery''. Initially noting the potential antagonism of a publicly-funded arts organization spending 40,000 Euro on 72,000 bottles of beer for an art installation (at a time when German tax payers were balking at the idea of bailing out Greece through the EU), Foster goes on to elaborate:<br />
<br />
"the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd as seen from Gustave Le Bon, through Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, to recent students of hooliganism - an instability that renders the installation insecure as both structure and event."<ref>Hal Foster, "Vandal Aesthetics", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 51-52.</ref><br />
<br />
==Place in Gaillard's broader practice==<br />
<br />
[[File:Jhagehrohk.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008]][[File:Fdhgerguu.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008. Detail.]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' reflects an ongoing exploration by Gaillard of issues around architectural monuments, what constitutes something worth preserving, and how sculptural displacement and changes of context can release new meanings and energies.<br />
<br />
The artist has produced a series of works, beginning in 2008, in which the pulverized remnants of demolished modernist tower blocks are employed to create sculptural and landscaped elements in new architectural contexts. For ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008, the artist created a gravel pathway leading up to the Château d'Orion, a sixteenth century chateau in western France that is a designated national monument. Gaillard's new path was constructed from the rubble of demolished tower blocks that once stood in the Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of south-west Paris. Ground down to small, roughly evenly-sized pieces, visitors to the picturesque gardens of the Château are unaware that the path they are walking on is made up of the remains of a former housing block. The work thus serves to introduce a hidden, destabilizing element in the context of the design of the Château and its surrounding park (which otherwise reflect the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and harmony between man-made design and nature).<ref>"Cyprien Gaillard, La grande allée du Château de Oiron", in: ''Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place : Public Art (Now)'', (London : Art Books Publishing Ltd, in association with Situations, Public Art Agency Sweden, and the European Network of Public Art Producers, 2015), 36-39.</ref><br />
<br />
As curator and writer Claire Doherty has observed, Gaillard's project "contrasts two very different conceptions of reason and necessity. His ''grande allée'' asks us to consider what we choose to preserve and remember, and what is made from the ruins of the things that we do not. What is left is a quietly unsettled landscape, hovering between the various points in time when these structures were built and have been or will be destroyed, and our own footsteps on the uneven concrete gravel."<ref>Ibid., 37</ref><br />
<br />
Gaillard has made video works of the demolition of mid-century tower blocks such as ''Color Like No Other'', 2007, and ''Pruitt-Igoe Falls'', 2009, both depicting the demolition of buildings in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also produced a series of 'Cairns' from piles of modernist building rubble, photographed in the landscape to reference prehistoric monuments. <br />
<br />
Linda Yablonsky has noted ''The Recovery of Discovery's'' themes of intoxication and disorder in relation to architectural monuments reflects some of the artist's video works including ''Cities of Gold and Mirrors'', 2008, which juxtaposes images of American spring breakers partying at a decaying Mayan-themed resort in Cancun, and the three-part ''Desniansky Raion'', 2007, which documents hooligans warring in the parking lot of a Russian housing complex.<ref>Linda Yablonsky, "Beautiful Ruins", ''T Magazine'', April 10, 2013. This and other articles on the work of Cyprien Gaillard are available at the site of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, see: "[https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/cyprien-gaillard/press Cyprien Gaillard]", ''gladstonegallery.com'', retrieved 31 January, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
==Unnatural ruins==<br />
<br />
Tom McDonough has aligned Gaillard's interest in architectural collapse with the writings of German theorist [[Georg Simmel]].<ref>"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel Georg Simmel]", ''Wikipedia'', last modified 29 November 2021.</ref> For Simmel, the ruin provides us with a compelling image of nature reclaiming culture: "The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical forces of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards."<ref>McDonough quoting Simmel. See Tom McDonough, "Controlled Explosion", Bice Curiger, ed., ''30 years of Parkett : Tauba Auerbach, Urs Fischer, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirana Shahbazi'', (New York; Zurich: Parkett, 2014), 210-217.</ref> The ruin thus provides a compelling prefiguration of death, allowing us to contemplate our own oblivion.<br />
<br />
McDonough, however, questions Gaillard's figuring of modernist housing projects in terms of ruins, noting that their decay or destruction is more likely the result of economic forces that have abandoned them and their inhabitants—often with the express aim of forcing their erasure in order to make way for new privatized developments, as was the case in some of the Glaswegian estates that the artist has featured in his work. Focusing only on the moment of these buildings' destruction runs the risk of treating it as a natural event divorced from the social and political context that is its true cause.<br />
<br />
However, McDonough concludes that the artist, in often highlighting the moment of violence in these destructive events, holds up a mirror to our own nihilistic fascination with architectural destruction, and in highlighting this collective 'death drive', signals its centrality to Neo-liberal economics. "Images of controlled explosions are first and foremost signs of capital's fundamental fluidity, its retreat from fixed form the moment profitability dictates a shift in geographic locale—and even the most durable of concrete structures can be forsaken as the economy dictates their obsolescence."<ref>Ibid., 217</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1163Template:LAbar2022-01-31T19:14:30Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Img 4050 press.jpg|x130px|link=Modern Times Forever]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|x130px|link=Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Oppositions-9-summer-1977.jpg|x130px|link=Architecture and Transgression]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|x130px|link=Holes]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Modern Times Forever]]''<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|''[[Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]''<br />
|''[[Architecture and Transgression]]''<br />
|''[[Holes]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Archiwik:About&diff=1153Archiwik:About2022-01-21T13:14:59Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Headless-City-Graphic.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
<br />
''Archiwik.org'' is a public wiki that invites the contribution of articles on themes of architecture and the built environment—specifically taking as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille in his 1929 'Critical Dictionary' entry on the term. <br />
<br />
''Archiwik''<ref>The name, based on the simple compound of ''architecture'' and ''wiki'', is intentionally awkward. ''Wik'' is indebted to the juvenile Northern Irish term ''wick'', for something that is below par, or a bit useless. It also recalls the phrase to 'get on someone's wick', to annoy or irritate them, which is itself derived from the cockney rhyming slang 'Hampton Wick' for 'prick'.</ref> was initiated by artist Mark Orange and launched in November 2016 as a contributing project at the Galway, Ireland-based arts festival TULCA. TULCA curator Daniel Jewesbury proposed the theme for the festival - ''The Headless City'' - as a loose framework for a wide range of projects and events that, "inform and shape our thinking about the city, through their ability to make us aware of certain problems and ongoing unresolved contradictions, by dramatising our unease about the city, or by generating that unease."<ref>Daniel Jewesbury, “The Headless City: Visions of Impossible Existence”, in ''TULCA 2016'', exhibition catalogue.</ref> <br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
First published in the journal ''Documents'' in 1929 as part of series of texts forming a conjectural ''Dictionnaire Critique'' (Critical Dictionary), Bataille's [[Architecture|“Architecture” article]] stresses the capacity of architecture to exert both literal and metaphorical power. Writing primarily of the monumental public buildings of the French church and state, Bataille points out how architectural form itself can act as proxy for these institutions in ordering and prohibiting behavior. Architecture has the ability to manifest social hierarchy and political power, but can also affect and convey that power to those who walk in its shadow. <br />
<br />
This definition of ''the architectural'' - as that which is ordered or ordering - extended, for Bataille, to any system, from the social to the psychological. In painting, it is evinced as classical composition and, in the most advanced painters working in the Paris of his day, Bataille saw a route out of the architectural injunction: by escaping form itself. <br />
<br />
The influence of the article on architects and theoreticians has been far-reaching. Most notably, Denis Hollier's elaboration of Bataille's central thesis, in ''La Prise de la Concorde'' (1974; published in English as ''Against Architecture'' in 1989), has ensured an extended afterlife for the text. Hollier develops Bataille's premise by demonstrating the degree to which architectural terminology and its metaphors reach deeply into the construction of language itself, underpinning narratives of historical progress and much of the edifice of rational philosophy. <br />
<br />
More recently, architect and writer Jill Stoner, in ''Toward A Minor Architecture'', argues for the continued relevance of Bataille's text to the architectural and urban environment. Where, for Bataille (writing in Paris in the 1920's), the source of architectural authority was the church, the military and the judiciary, for Stoner, it is in the speculative redevelopment of our cities, and the corporate facades of the neoliberal economy that we can see the blank face of today's financial and political elites: "... here in full force (though in radically different form) are the architectures of power that Bataille so precisely described seventy years ago. They place the argument for alternate and subversive spatial strategies squarely at our door step".<ref>Jill Stoner, ''Toward A Minor Architecture'' (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012)</ref><br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
[[File:DOCUMENTS-1929-117-article.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Documents 2, 1929, p.117]]''Archiwik.org'' aims to explore and expand on some of these themes, from the central starting point of Bataille's article. <br />
<br />
We invite artists, architects, writers, academics, and all interested parties, to contribute to the project. Articles can take as broad an approach to the central area of focus as contributors feel appropriate, from scholarly articles on the post-urban city, to investigations of the more lurid or bizarre side of architecture and the built environment. Possible categories might include: critical or literary texts central to the theme; minor architectures; architectural appropriations and misuses; haunted structures; architecture and crime; ruins and ancient architectures; the architect's body; gravity and entropy; unauthored structures; architectural excess.<br />
<br />
The choice of a wiki as format underlines the collaborative intentions for the project and proposes, in a playful way, an encyclopedic scope analogous to Bataille's ''Dictionnaire Critique'' series, in which the "Architecture" article first appeared. Bataille flouted the ideals of comprehensiveness and scholarly objectivity associated with the dictionary, cutting across conventional hierarchies and categories with a fragmentary choice of entries ranging from Buster Keaton to spittle, factory chimneys to shellfish. Michael Richardson describes the ''Dictionnaire'' as “an edifice lacking architecture but emerging through the process of construction from the ground up”,<ref>Michael Richardson, "Dictionary", in ''Undercover surrealism : Georges Bataille and Documents'', (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 92</ref> and it is in this spirit that we hope the ''Archiwik'' project will take shape. ''Archiwik'' will foreground wide-ranging and unexpected takes on its ostensible subject of architecture and the built environment, and remain committed to playing architecture, as 'first of the arts', against its opposite: the vertiginous, the contingent, the minor, the infirm - all that acts counter to the edification of grand designs.<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=1152Main Page2022-01-20T13:56:30Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
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==How to contribute==<br />
<br />
====About====<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik.org'' was launched as a contributing project at Galway, Ireland-based visual arts festival, [https://www.tulca.ie/tulca-2016-the-headless-city TULCA 2016: ‘The Headless City’], in November 2016.<br />
<br />
*''Archiwik'' takes as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille. Read more about the conceptual background of the project, and parameters for contribution, on the ''[[Archiwik:About|About Archiwik]]'' page.<br />
<br />
====Contributing content====<br />
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*''Archiwik.org'' is built using [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki], the same open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia. Anyone can add or edit content, just request an account at the "[[Special:RequestAccount|Request account]]" page; you will be emailed an account verification that, once completed, will allow you to log in and contribute to the site.<br />
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*Create a new article by typing its title/subject in the search bar at the top right of any page. You will get a search result page that includes the line "'''Create the page "<span style="color: #F00">Name of your article</span>" on this wiki!'''" Click on the red highlighted text to get started. <br />
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*Editing and formatting are further explained in [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWiki_markup_cheatsheet_EN.pdf Wikipedia's cheat sheet], or for a more in-depth overview, see [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting MediaWiki's formatting guide].<br />
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====Contact====<br />
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*For any issues with account set up, article creation, or general questions or comments, please contact the main administrator of the site [[User:Tenementofnaught |here]].<br />
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|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Archiwik:About&diff=1151Archiwik:About2022-01-20T13:47:57Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Headless-City-Graphic.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
<br />
''Archiwik.org'' is a public wiki that invites contribution of articles on themes of architecture and the built environment—specifically taking as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille in his 1929 'Critical Dictionary' entry on the term. <br />
<br />
''Archiwik''<ref>The name, based on the simple compound of ''architecture'' and ''wiki'', is intentionally awkward. ''Wik'' is indebted to the juvenile Northern Irish term ''wick'', for something that is below par, or a bit useless. It also recalls the phrase to 'get on someone's wick', to annoy or irritate them, which is itself derived from the cockney rhyming slang 'Hampton Wick' for 'prick'.</ref> was initiated by artist Mark Orange and launched in November 2016 as a contributing project at the Galway, Ireland-based arts festival TULCA. TULCA curator Daniel Jewesbury proposed the theme for the festival - ''The Headless City'' - as a loose framework for a wide range of projects and events that, "inform and shape our thinking about the city, through their ability to make us aware of certain problems and ongoing unresolved contradictions, by dramatising our unease about the city, or by generating that unease."<ref>Daniel Jewesbury, “The Headless City: Visions of Impossible Existence”, in ''TULCA 2016'', exhibition catalogue.</ref> <br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
First published in the journal ''Documents'' in 1929 as part of series of texts forming a conjectural ''Dictionnaire Critique'' (Critical Dictionary), Bataille's [[Architecture|“Architecture” article]] stresses the capacity of architecture to exert both literal and metaphorical power. Writing primarily of the monumental public buildings of the French church and state, Bataille points out how architectural form itself can act as proxy for these institutions in ordering and prohibiting behavior. Architecture has the ability to manifest social hierarchy and political power, but can also affect and convey that power to those who walk in its shadow. <br />
<br />
This definition of ''the architectural'' - as that which is ordered or ordering - extended, for Bataille, to any system, from the social to the psychological. In painting, it is evinced as classical composition and, in the most advanced painters working in the Paris of his day, Bataille saw a route out of the architectural injunction: by escaping form itself. <br />
<br />
The influence of the article on architects and theoreticians has been far-reaching. Most notably, Denis Hollier's elaboration of Bataille's central thesis, in ''La Prise de la Concorde'' (1974; published in English as ''Against Architecture'' in 1989), has ensured an extended afterlife for the text. Hollier develops Bataille's premise by demonstrating the degree to which architectural terminology and its metaphors reach deeply into the construction of language itself, underpinning narratives of historical progress and much of the edifice of rational philosophy. <br />
<br />
More recently, architect and writer Jill Stoner, in ''Toward A Minor Architecture'', argues for the continued relevance of Bataille's text to the architectural and urban environment. Where, for Bataille (writing in Paris in the 1920's), the source of architectural authority was the church, the military and the judiciary, for Stoner, it is in the speculative redevelopment of our cities, and the corporate facades of the neoliberal economy that we can see the blank face of today's financial and political elites: "... here in full force (though in radically different form) are the architectures of power that Bataille so precisely described seventy years ago. They place the argument for alternate and subversive spatial strategies squarely at our door step".<ref>Jill Stoner, ''Toward A Minor Architecture'' (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012)</ref><br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
[[File:DOCUMENTS-1929-117-article.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Documents 2, 1929, p.117]]''Archiwik.org'' aims to explore and expand on some of these themes, from the central starting point of Bataille's article. <br />
<br />
We invite artists, architects, writers, academics, and all interested parties, to contribute to the project. Articles can take as broad an approach to the central area of focus as contributors feel appropriate, from scholarly articles on the post-urban city, to investigations of the more lurid or bizarre side of architecture and the built environment. Possible categories might include: critical or literary texts central to the theme; minor architectures; architectural appropriations and misuses; haunted structures; architecture and crime; ruins and ancient architectures; the architect's body; gravity and entropy; unauthored structures; architectural excess.<br />
<br />
The choice of a wiki as format underlines the collaborative intentions for the project and proposes, in a playful way, an encyclopedic scope analogous to Bataille's ''Dictionnaire Critique'' series, in which the "Architecture" article first appeared. Bataille flouted the ideals of comprehensiveness and scholarly objectivity associated with the dictionary, cutting across conventional hierarchies and categories with a fragmentary choice of entries ranging from Buster Keaton to spittle, factory chimneys to shellfish. Michael Richardson describes the ''Dictionnaire'' as “an edifice lacking architecture but emerging through the process of construction from the ground up”,<ref>Michael Richardson, "Dictionary", in ''Undercover surrealism : Georges Bataille and Documents'', (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 92</ref> and it is in this spirit that we hope the ''Archiwik'' project will take shape. ''Archiwik'' will foreground wide-ranging and unexpected takes on its ostensible subject of architecture and the built environment, and remain committed to playing architecture, as 'first of the arts', against its opposite: the vertiginous, the contingent, the minor, the infirm - all that acts counter to the edification of grand designs.<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Archiwik:About&diff=1150Archiwik:About2022-01-20T13:46:58Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Headless-City-Graphic.jpg|400px|thumb|right|]]<br />
<br />
''Archiwik.org'' is a public wiki that gathers together articles on themes of architecture and the built environment—specifically taking as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille in his 1929 'Critical Dictionary' entry on the term. <br />
<br />
''Archiwik''<ref>The name, based on the simple compound of ''architecture'' and ''wiki'', is intentionally awkward. ''Wik'' is indebted to the juvenile Northern Irish term ''wick'', for something that is below par, or a bit useless. It also recalls the phrase to 'get on someone's wick', to annoy or irritate them, which is itself derived from the cockney rhyming slang 'Hampton Wick' for 'prick'.</ref> was initiated by artist Mark Orange and launched in November 2016 as a contributing project at the Galway, Ireland-based arts festival TULCA. TULCA curator Daniel Jewesbury proposed the theme for the festival - ''The Headless City'' - as a loose framework for a wide range of projects and events that, "inform and shape our thinking about the city, through their ability to make us aware of certain problems and ongoing unresolved contradictions, by dramatising our unease about the city, or by generating that unease."<ref>Daniel Jewesbury, “The Headless City: Visions of Impossible Existence”, in ''TULCA 2016'', exhibition catalogue.</ref> <br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
First published in the journal ''Documents'' in 1929 as part of series of texts forming a conjectural ''Dictionnaire Critique'' (Critical Dictionary), Bataille's [[Architecture|“Architecture” article]] stresses the capacity of architecture to exert both literal and metaphorical power. Writing primarily of the monumental public buildings of the French church and state, Bataille points out how architectural form itself can act as proxy for these institutions in ordering and prohibiting behavior. Architecture has the ability to manifest social hierarchy and political power, but can also affect and convey that power to those who walk in its shadow. <br />
<br />
This definition of ''the architectural'' - as that which is ordered or ordering - extended, for Bataille, to any system, from the social to the psychological. In painting, it is evinced as classical composition and, in the most advanced painters working in the Paris of his day, Bataille saw a route out of the architectural injunction: by escaping form itself. <br />
<br />
The influence of the article on architects and theoreticians has been far-reaching. Most notably, Denis Hollier's elaboration of Bataille's central thesis, in ''La Prise de la Concorde'' (1974; published in English as ''Against Architecture'' in 1989), has ensured an extended afterlife for the text. Hollier develops Bataille's premise by demonstrating the degree to which architectural terminology and its metaphors reach deeply into the construction of language itself, underpinning narratives of historical progress and much of the edifice of rational philosophy. <br />
<br />
More recently, architect and writer Jill Stoner, in ''Toward A Minor Architecture'', argues for the continued relevance of Bataille's text to the architectural and urban environment. Where, for Bataille (writing in Paris in the 1920's), the source of architectural authority was the church, the military and the judiciary, for Stoner, it is in the speculative redevelopment of our cities, and the corporate facades of the neoliberal economy that we can see the blank face of today's financial and political elites: "... here in full force (though in radically different form) are the architectures of power that Bataille so precisely described seventy years ago. They place the argument for alternate and subversive spatial strategies squarely at our door step".<ref>Jill Stoner, ''Toward A Minor Architecture'' (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012)</ref><br />
<br />
<nowiki>~~~</nowiki><br />
<br />
[[File:DOCUMENTS-1929-117-article.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Documents 2, 1929, p.117]]''Archiwik.org'' aims to explore and expand on some of these themes, from the central starting point of Bataille's article. <br />
<br />
We invite artists, architects, writers, academics, and all interested parties, to contribute to the project. Articles can take as broad an approach to the central area of focus as contributors feel appropriate, from scholarly articles on the post-urban city, to investigations of the more lurid or bizarre side of architecture and the built environment. Possible categories might include: critical or literary texts central to the theme; minor architectures; architectural appropriations and misuses; haunted structures; architecture and crime; ruins and ancient architectures; the architect's body; gravity and entropy; unauthored structures; architectural excess.<br />
<br />
The choice of a wiki as format underlines the collaborative intentions for the project and proposes, in a playful way, an encyclopedic scope analogous to Bataille's ''Dictionnaire Critique'' series, in which the "Architecture" article first appeared. Bataille flouted the ideals of comprehensiveness and scholarly objectivity associated with the dictionary, cutting across conventional hierarchies and categories with a fragmentary choice of entries ranging from Buster Keaton to spittle, factory chimneys to shellfish. Michael Richardson describes the ''Dictionnaire'' as “an edifice lacking architecture but emerging through the process of construction from the ground up”,<ref>Michael Richardson, "Dictionary", in ''Undercover surrealism : Georges Bataille and Documents'', (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 92</ref> and it is in this spirit that we hope the ''Archiwik'' project will take shape. ''Archiwik'' will foreground wide-ranging and unexpected takes on its ostensible subject of architecture and the built environment, and remain committed to playing architecture, as 'first of the arts', against its opposite: the vertiginous, the contingent, the minor, the infirm - all that acts counter to the edification of grand designs.<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=1149Main Page2022-01-20T13:45:02Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
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*''Archiwik.org'' was launched as a contributing project at Galway, Ireland-based visual arts festival, [https://www.tulca.ie/tulca-2016-the-headless-city TULCA 2016: ‘The Headless City’], in November 2016.<br />
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*''Archiwik'' takes as its starting point the [[Architecture|definition of architecture]] laid out by French writer Georges Bataille. Read more about the conceptual background of the project, and parameters for contribution, on the ''[[Archiwik:About|About Archiwik]]'' page.<br />
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*Create an article by typing its title/subject in the search bar at the top right of any page. You will get a search result page that includes the line "'''Create the page "<span style="color: #F00">Name of your article</span>" on this wiki!'''" Click on the red highlighted text to get started. <br />
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*Editing and formatting are further explained in [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWiki_markup_cheatsheet_EN.pdf Wikipedia's cheat sheet], or for a more in-depth overview, see [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting MediaWiki's formatting guide].<br />
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*For any issues with account set up, article creation, or general questions or comments, please contact the main administrator of the site [[User:Tenementofnaught |here]].<br />
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|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Walkie-Talkie_Death_Ray&diff=1148Walkie-Talkie Death Ray2022-01-20T13:39:28Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:A-man-reacts-to-a-shaft-o-015.jpg|400px|thumb|right|''20 Fenchurch Street'', London, Rafael Viñoly Architects, 2014.]]''20 Fenchurch Street'' is a London high-rise office building designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects in 2004, and completed in 2014.<br />
<br />
Built on a compact site in the City of London financial district, the building is characterized by the gradually increasing size of its floor plan as it ascends from ground level through 37 stories toward the top floor.<ref>[http://vinoly.com/works/20-fenchurch-street "20 Fenchurch Street"] ''Rafael Viñoly Architects'', retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref> The design gives the building a characteristic top-heavy form with concave curving facades on its northern and southern elevations, earning it the nickname ‘The Walkie-Talkie’.<br />
<br />
As the building neared completion in 2013, reports first began to appear of a solar glare issue caused by the building's curved facade. Local business owners on Eastcheap, a block to the south of Fenchurch Street, reported that a focused beam of reflected sunlight from the building blistered paintwork, caused fires, and melted cars and bicycles at street level. The beam of light had been powerful enough to set the doormat of a local barber shop on fire, and a Jaguar XJ parked on Eastcheap suffered warped panels and a melted wing mirror and dashboard from the heat.<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/03/walkie-scorchie-building-developers-erect-scaffold "'Walkie Scorchie' building developers say they will erect temporary scaffold"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref> The phenomenon was dubbed the ‘Walkie-Talkie Death Ray’ in widespread press coverage—a reporter from Sky News demonstrated the intensity of the beam by frying an egg in the heat on live TV.<ref>Sky News, [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2013/sep/03/london-walkie-talkie-skyscraper-video "London's 'Walkie Talkie' skyscraper reflects light hot enough to fry an egg - video"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Chris Shepherd, of the Institute of Physics, London, likened the phenomenon to starting a fire with a parabolic mirror. “If a building creates enough of a curve with a series of flat windows, which act like mirrors, the reflections all converge at one point, focusing and concentrating the light."<ref>[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 "Who, what, why: How does a skyscraper melt a car?"], ''BBC News'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
The building's developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf had parking bays suspended on the street and erected a temporary screen to block the light while they evaluated longer-term solutions. They pointed out that, because the effect depends on a certain elevation of the sun at a particular point of the day, the issue was likely to continue for several hours a day, two to three weeks of the year.<ref>Oliver Wainwright, [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/04/walkie-talkie-screen-death-ray "Walkie Talkie developers build screen to stop 'death ray'"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 4, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Viñoly Architects had a similar problem in 2010 with their Vdara hotel building in Las Vegas, which also has a southern-facing concave glass facade. A beam of concentrated reflected light created a 10 feet by 15 feet hot spot at ground level by the resort's swimming pool that singed hair and melted plastic cups and bags. The architects had anticipated the problem by installing film that disperses sunlight on the glass facade—one possible solution for 20 Fenchurch Street—however, in the case of the Las Vegas building it was clearly not enough to eliminate the issue.<ref>Alan Maimon and Joan Whitely, [https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/vdara-visitor-death-ray-scorched-hair/ "Vdara visitor: ‘Death ray’ scorched hair"], ''Las Vegas Review-Journal'', Sept 24, 2010, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Visiting London in the days following the emergence of the problem at 20 Fenchurch Street, Rafael Viñoly blamed the issue in part on the nature of the development process in the UK:<br />
<br />
"One problem that happens in this town, is the super-abundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer to the point that you just don't know where you are any more." The original design of the building, the architect pointed out, had featured horizontal sun louvres on its south-facing facade, but these are believed to have been removed during cost-cutting as the project developed.<ref>Oliver Wainwright, [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/06/walkie-talkie-architect-predicted-reflection-sun-rays "Walkie Talkie architect 'didn't realise it was going to be so hot'"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 6, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Viñoly, however, also appeared to have underestimated the amount of sun that London experiences in a given year: "When I first came to London years ago, it wasn't like this," he said. "Now you have all these sunny days. So you should blame this thing on global warming too, right?"<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
== Gallery ==<br />
<br />
<gallery><br />
20F-3-714x1000.jpg|<br />
A-woman-shields-her-eyes--012.jpg|<br />
A-young-couple-kiss-as-th-016.jpg| <br />
City-workers-walk-past-bi-017.jpg|<br />
69625278_light.jpg|<br />
69606115_69601806.jpg|<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Walkie-Talkie_Death_Ray&diff=1147Walkie-Talkie Death Ray2022-01-20T13:38:55Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:A-man-reacts-to-a-shaft-o-015.jpg|400px|thumb|right|''20 Fenchurch Street'', London, Rafael Viñoly Architects, 2014.]]''20 Fenchurch Street'' is a London high-rise office building designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects in 2004, and completed in 2014.<br />
<br />
Built on a compact site in the City of London financial district, the building is characterized by the gradually increasing size of its floor plan as it ascends from ground level through 37 stories toward the top floor.<ref>[http://vinoly.com/works/20-fenchurch-street "20 Fenchurch Street"] ''Rafael Viñoly Architects'', retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref> The design gives the building a characteristic top-heavy form with concave curving facades on its northern and southern elevations, earning it the nickname ‘The Walkie-Talkie’.<br />
<br />
As the building neared completion in 2013, reports first began to appear of a solar glare issue caused by the building's curved facade. Local business owners on Eastcheap, a block to the south of Fenchurch Street, reported that a focused beam of reflected sunlight from the building blistered paintwork, caused fires, and melted cars and bicycles at street level. The beam of light had been powerful enough to set the doormat of a local barber shop on fire, and a Jaguar XJ parked on Eastcheap suffered warped panels and a melted wing mirror and dashboard from the heat.<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/03/walkie-scorchie-building-developers-erect-scaffold "'Walkie Scorchie' building developers say they will erect temporary scaffold"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref> The phenomenon was dubbed the ‘Walkie-Talkie Death Ray’ in widespread press coverage—a reporter from Sky News demonstrated the intensity of the beam by frying an egg in the heat on live TV.<ref>Sky News, [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2013/sep/03/london-walkie-talkie-skyscraper-video "London's 'Walkie Talkie' skyscraper reflects light hot enough to fry an egg - video"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Chris Shepherd, of the Institute of Physics, London, likened the phenomenon to starting a fire with a parabolic mirror. “If a building creates enough of a curve with a series of flat windows, which act like mirrors, the reflections all converge at one point, focusing and concentrating the light."<ref>[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 "Who, what, why: How does a skyscraper melt a car?"], ''BBC News'', Sept 3, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
The building's developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf had parking bays suspended on the street and erected a temporary screen to block the light while they evaluated longer-term solutions. They pointed out that, because the effect depends on a certain elevation of the sun at a particular point of the day, the issue was likely to continue for several hours a day, two to three weeks of the year.<ref>Oliver Wainwright, [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/04/walkie-talkie-screen-death-ray "Walkie Talkie developers build screen to stop 'death ray'"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 4, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Viñoly Architects had a similar problem in 2010 with their Vdara hotel building in Las Vegas, which also has a southern-facing concave glass facade. A beam of concentrated reflected light created a 10 feet by 15 feet hot spot at ground level by the resort's swimming pool that singed hair and melted plastic cups and bags. The architects had anticipated the problem by installing film that disperses sunlight on the glass facade—one possible solution for 20 Fenchurch Street—however, in the case of the Las Vegas building it was clearly not enough to eliminate the issue.<ref>Alan Maimon and Joan Whitely, [https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/vdara-visitor-death-ray-scorched-hair/ "Vdara visitor: ‘Death ray’ scorched hair"], ''Las Vegas Review-Journal'', Sept 24, 2010, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Visiting London in the days following the emergence of the problem at 20 Fenchurch Street, Rafael Viñoly blamed the issue in part on the nature of the development process in the UK:<br />
<br />
"One problem that happens in this town, is the super-abundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer to the point that you just don't know where you are any more." The original design of the building, the architect pointed out, had featured horizontal sun louvres on its south-facing facade, but these are believed to have been removed during cost-cutting as the project developed.<ref>Oliver Wainwright, [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/06/walkie-talkie-architect-predicted-reflection-sun-rays "Walkie Talkie architect 'didn't realise it was going to be so hot'"], ''The Guardian'', Sept 6, 2013, retrieved Jan 19, 2022.</ref><br />
<br />
Viñoly, however, also appeared to have underestimated the amount of sun that London experiences in a given year: "When I first came to London years ago, it wasn't like this," he said. "Now you have all these sunny days. So you should blame this thing on global warming too, right?"<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
== Gallery ==<br />
<br />
<gallery><br />
20F-3-714x1000.jpg|<br />
A-woman-shields-her-eyes--012.jpg|<br />
A-young-couple-kiss-as-th-016.jpg| <br />
City-workers-walk-past-bi-017.jpg|<br />
69625278_light.jpg|<br />
69606115_69601806.jpg|<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1146Template:LAbar2022-01-20T13:37:57Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:20F-3-714x1000.jpg|x130px|link=Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|x130px|link=Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Oppositions-9-summer-1977.jpg|x130px|link=Architecture and Transgression]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|x130px|link=Holes]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Walkie-Talkie Death Ray]]''<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|''[[Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]''<br />
|''[[Architecture and Transgression]]''<br />
|''[[Holes]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=The_Recovery_of_Discovery&diff=1120The Recovery of Discovery2022-01-18T02:51:42Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* Violence from above and below */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Cyprien-gaillard-board.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''The Recovery of Discovery'', installation views, KW Institute for contemporary Art, Berlin, 2011]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' is a 2011 exhibition at Kunst-Werke Berlin by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Consisting of a single large-scale installation of a pyramid of cases of beer in the sky-lit main gallery space at Kunst-Werke, visitors to the exhibition were invited to climb the stepped array of the stacked boxes, use them for seating, and to freely open and consume the beer contained inside.<br />
<br />
The installation was on view for two months,<ref>March 27 – May 22, 2011. The Kunst-Werke Berlin exhibition page is available at: https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/cyprien-gaillard-the-recovery-of-discovery/</ref> during which time the pyramid, initially totaling 72,000 bottles, was gradually torn apart, consumed, and its debris, including shattered glass bottles, left scattered throughout the gallery space.<br />
<br />
==Background==<br />
<br />
Gaillard used imported ''Efes'' beer for the installation, a brand favored among the large Turkish immigrant community in Berlin.<ref>See Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'' (Köln, London: Walther König, 2012), 7-16.</ref> The brand is named after the modern Turkish name for the ancient city of Ephesus, built by the Greeks in Asia Minor (the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey).<br />
<br />
The artist has spoken about his intention to juxtapose the accelerated ruination of his pyramid over the course of its exhibition run with the ancient architectural ruins it is in part making reference to. The exhibition's press materials specifically cite the [[Pergamon Altar]],<ref>"Pergamon Altar", Wikipedia, last modified 8 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar </ref> on permanent view close to Kunst-Werke on Berlin's Museum Island, as a reference point for Gaillard's installation. The Altar was constructed in the first half of the 2nd century BC in Pergamon—like Ephesus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Excavated by German engineer Carl Humann in the 1880s, the architectural fragments that make up the Pergamon Altar were removed from their site in present-day Turkey and relocated to Germany, where Italian restorers reconstructed the monument in a purpose-built museum that first opened in 1901. The huge altar structure is famous for its 20 meter-wide stairway, the steps of which have been a popular spot for visitors to the museum to sit, rest, and take photographs.<br />
<br />
Gaillard's installation seeks to promote a corresponding public interaction with his own stepped installation, drawing visitors into a perhaps unwitting relationship with the history of displaced monuments, as he also interweaves that history with that of the contemporary displacement of Turkish guest workers in Germany, and the imported goods of a globalized economy.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery".</ref><br />
<br />
==Violence from above and below==<br />
<br />
In a conversation with the exhibition's curator,<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 33-49.</ref> Susanne Pfeffer, in a publication accompanying the installation, Gaillard has addressed the work's reference to the appropriation of cultural monuments by colonial powers, and the vexed issue of repatriation and restoration. The artist remains equivocal on the issue, acknowledging the value of preservation that often goes along with relocation to museum contexts. Gaillard additionally highlights the futility of the search for an authentic experience of ancient architectural sites—the desire to look at 'the original' is oftentimes fruitless, given the extent to which historical context and overzealous attempts at reconstruction mean we can only be looking at a highly altered object when we view monuments in-situ.<br />
<br />
Pfeffer cites the writing of German art historian [[Martin Warnke]],<ref>"Martin Warnke", Wikipedia, last modified 2 January 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Warnke </ref> and his distinction between the idea of vandalism "from below" and "from above" in the context of the destruction and restoration of monuments. If vandalism from below is characterized by a blind destructive mania without a specific purpose, vandalism "from above" can frequently take the form of restoration, conservation and urban planning. For Pfeffer, The ''Recovery of Discovery’s'' self-destructing monument engages with each of these impulses, and even suggests their mutuality.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", 9.</ref><br />
<br />
==Drunkenness, sovereignty, and instability==<br />
<br />
Gaillard has related anecdotes about being hungover on foreign trips, and standing looking at a ruined monument as he, himself, felt 'ruined'. He has discussed the role of alcohol and intoxication in ''The Recovery of Discovery'', specifically relating the effects of alcohol on body and mind to the destruction of the initially-perfect form of the pyramidal stack of beer cases.<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation".</ref><br />
<br />
The artist notes the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are branded with gold-embossed crowns and named after kings, gods—or in the case of the ''Efes'' beer imported for ''The Recovery of Discovery'', after an ancient city manifesting a once golden age. Gaillard identifies the tendency with a kind of 'sovereign subjectivity' of drunkness: feelings of well-being and command over one's place in the world, that can so quickly flip toward aggression or loss of control when over-intoxicated.<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Hal Foster has elaborated on this instability in writing on ''The Recovery of Discovery''. Initially noting the potential antagonism of a publicly-funded arts organization spending 40,000 Euro on 72,000 bottles of beer for an art installation (at a time when German tax payers were balking at the idea of bailing out Greece through the EU), Foster goes on to elaborate:<br />
<br />
"the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd as seen from Gustave Le Bon, through Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, to recent students of hooliganism - an instability that renders the installation insecure as both structure and event."<ref>Hal Foster, "Vandal Aesthetics", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 51-52.</ref><br />
<br />
==Place in Gaillard's broader practice==<br />
<br />
[[File:Jhagehrohk.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008]][[File:Fdhgerguu.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008. Detail.]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' reflects an ongoing exploration by Gaillard of issues around architectural monuments, what constitutes something worth preserving, and how sculptural displacement and changes of context can release new meanings and energies.<br />
<br />
The artist has produced a series of works, beginning in 2008, in which the pulverized remnants of demolished modernist tower blocks are employed to create sculptural and landscaped elements in new architectural contexts. For ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008, the artist created a gravel pathway leading up to the Château d'Orion, a sixteenth century chateau in western France that is a designated national monument. Gaillard's new path was constructed from the rubble of demolished tower blocks that once stood in the Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of south-west Paris. Ground down to small, roughly evenly-sized pieces, visitors to the picturesque gardens of the Château are unaware that the path they are walking on is made up of the remains of a former housing block. The work thus serves to introduce a hidden, destabilizing element in the context of the design of the Château and its surrounding park (which otherwise reflect the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and harmony between man-made design and nature).<ref>"Cyprien Gaillard, La grande allée du Château de Oiron", in: ''Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place : Public Art (Now)'', (London : Art Books Publishing Ltd, in association with Situations, Public Art Agency Sweden, and the European Network of Public Art Producers, 2015), 36-39.</ref><br />
<br />
As curator and writer Claire Doherty has observed, Gaillard's project "contrasts two very different conceptions of reason and necessity. His ''grande allée'' asks us to consider what we choose to preserve and remember, and what is made from the ruins of the things that we do not. What is left is a quietly unsettled landscape, hovering between the various points in time when these structures were built and have been or will be destroyed, and our own footsteps on the uneven concrete gravel."<ref>Ibid., 37</ref><br />
<br />
Gaillard has made video works of the demolition of mid-century tower blocks such as ''Color Like No Other'', 2007, and ''Pruitt-Igoe Falls'', 2009, both depicting the demolition of buildings in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also produced a series of 'Cairns' from piles of modernist building rubble, photographed in the landscape to reference prehistoric monuments. <br />
<br />
Linda Yablonsky has noted ''The Recovery of Discovery's'' themes of intoxication and disorder in relation to architectural monuments reflects some of the artist's video works including ''Cities of Gold and Mirrors'', 2008, which juxtaposes images of American spring breakers partying at a decaying Mayan-themed resort in Cancun, and the three-part ''Desniansky Raion'', 2007, which documents hooligans warring in the parking lot of a Russian housing complex.<ref>Linda Yablonsky, "Beautiful Ruins", ''T Magazine'', April 10, 2013. This and other articles on the work of Cyprien Gaillard are available at the site of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York: https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/cyprien-gaillard/press </ref><br />
<br />
==Unnatural ruins==<br />
<br />
Tom McDonough has aligned Gaillard's interest in architectural collapse with the writings of German theorist [[Georg Simmel]].<ref>"Georg Simmel", Wikipedia, last modified 29 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel </ref> For Simmel, the ruin provides us with a compelling image of nature reclaiming culture: "The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical forces of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards."<ref>McDonough quoting Simmel. See Tom McDonough, "Controlled Explosion", Bice Curiger, ed., ''30 years of Parkett : Tauba Auerbach, Urs Fischer, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirana Shahbazi'', (New York; Zurich: Parkett, 2014), 210-217.</ref> The ruin thus provides a compelling prefiguration of death, allowing us to contemplate our own oblivion.<br />
<br />
McDonough, however, questions Gaillard's figuring of modernist housing projects in terms of ruins, noting that their decay or destruction is more likely the result of economic forces that have abandoned them and their inhabitants—often with the express aim of forcing their erasure in order to make way for new privatized developments, as was the case in some of the Glaswegian estates that the artist has featured in his work. Focusing only on the moment of these buildings' destruction runs the risk of treating it as a natural event divorced from the social and political context that is its true cause.<br />
<br />
However, McDonough concludes that the artist, in often highlighting the moment of violence in these destructive events, holds up a mirror to our own nihilistic fascination with architectural destruction, and in highlighting this collective 'death drive', signals its centrality to Neo-liberal economics. "Images of controlled explosions are first and foremost signs of capital's fundamental fluidity, its retreat from fixed form the moment profitability dictates a shift in geographic locale—and even the most durable of concrete structures can be forsaken as the economy dictates their obsolescence."<ref>Ibid., 217</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=The_Recovery_of_Discovery&diff=1119The Recovery of Discovery2022-01-10T22:17:57Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* Unnatural Ruins */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Cyprien-gaillard-board.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''The Recovery of Discovery'', installation views, KW Institute for contemporary Art, Berlin, 2011]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' is a 2011 exhibition at Kunst-Werke Berlin by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Consisting of a single large-scale installation of a pyramid of cases of beer in the sky-lit main gallery space at Kunst-Werke, visitors to the exhibition were invited to climb the stepped array of the stacked boxes, use them for seating, and to freely open and consume the beer contained inside.<br />
<br />
The installation was on view for two months,<ref>March 27 – May 22, 2011. The Kunst-Werke Berlin exhibition page is available at: https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/cyprien-gaillard-the-recovery-of-discovery/</ref> during which time the pyramid, initially totaling 72,000 bottles, was gradually torn apart, consumed, and its debris, including shattered glass bottles, left scattered throughout the gallery space.<br />
<br />
==Background==<br />
<br />
Gaillard used imported ''Efes'' beer for the installation, a brand favored among the large Turkish immigrant community in Berlin.<ref>See Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'' (Köln, London: Walther König, 2012), 7-16.</ref> The brand is named after the modern Turkish name for the ancient city of Ephesus, built by the Greeks in Asia Minor (the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey).<br />
<br />
The artist has spoken about his intention to juxtapose the accelerated ruination of his pyramid over the course of its exhibition run with the ancient architectural ruins it is in part making reference to. The exhibition's press materials specifically cite the [[Pergamon Altar]],<ref>"Pergamon Altar", Wikipedia, last modified 8 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar </ref> on permanent view close to Kunst-Werke on Berlin's Museum Island, as a reference point for Gaillard's installation. The Altar was constructed in the first half of the 2nd century BC in Pergamon—like Ephesus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Excavated by German engineer Carl Humann in the 1880s, the architectural fragments that make up the Pergamon Altar were removed from their site in present-day Turkey and relocated to Germany, where Italian restorers reconstructed the monument in a purpose-built museum that first opened in 1901. The huge altar structure is famous for its 20 meter-wide stairway, the steps of which have been a popular spot for visitors to the museum to sit, rest, and take photographs.<br />
<br />
Gaillard's installation seeks to promote a corresponding public interaction with his own stepped installation, drawing visitors into a perhaps unwitting relationship with the history of displaced monuments, as he also interweaves that history with that of the contemporary displacement of Turkish guest workers in Germany, and the imported goods of a globalized economy.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery".</ref><br />
<br />
==Violence from above and below==<br />
<br />
In a conversation with the exhibition's curator,<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 33-49.</ref> Susanne Pfeffer, in a publication accompanying the installation, Gaillard has addressed the work's reference to the appropriation of cultural monuments by colonial powers, and the vexed issue of repatriation and restoration. The artist remains equivocal on the issue, acknowledging the value of preservation that often goes along with relocation to museum contexts. Gaillard additionally highlights the futility of the search for an authentic experience of ancient architectural sites—the desire to look at 'the original' is oftentimes fruitless, given the extent to which historical context and overzealous attempts at reconstruction mean we can only be looking at a highly altered object when we view monuments in-situ.<br />
<br />
Pfeffer cites the writing of German art historian [[Martin Warnke]],<ref>"Martin Warnke", Wikipedia, last modified 2 January 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Warnke </ref> and his distinction between the idea of vandalism "from below" and "from above" in the context of the destruction and restoration of monuments. If vandalism from below is characterized by a blind destructive mania without a specific purpose, vandalism "from above" can frequently take the form of restoration, conservation and urban planning. For Pfeffer, The ''Recovery of Discovery’s'' self-destructing monument draws these two impulses together, and reveals their mutual dependency.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", 9.</ref><br />
<br />
==Drunkenness, sovereignty, and instability==<br />
<br />
Gaillard has related anecdotes about being hungover on foreign trips, and standing looking at a ruined monument as he, himself, felt 'ruined'. He has discussed the role of alcohol and intoxication in ''The Recovery of Discovery'', specifically relating the effects of alcohol on body and mind to the destruction of the initially-perfect form of the pyramidal stack of beer cases.<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation".</ref><br />
<br />
The artist notes the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are branded with gold-embossed crowns and named after kings, gods—or in the case of the ''Efes'' beer imported for ''The Recovery of Discovery'', after an ancient city manifesting a once golden age. Gaillard identifies the tendency with a kind of 'sovereign subjectivity' of drunkness: feelings of well-being and command over one's place in the world, that can so quickly flip toward aggression or loss of control when over-intoxicated.<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Hal Foster has elaborated on this instability in writing on ''The Recovery of Discovery''. Initially noting the potential antagonism of a publicly-funded arts organization spending 40,000 Euro on 72,000 bottles of beer for an art installation (at a time when German tax payers were balking at the idea of bailing out Greece through the EU), Foster goes on to elaborate:<br />
<br />
"the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd as seen from Gustave Le Bon, through Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, to recent students of hooliganism - an instability that renders the installation insecure as both structure and event."<ref>Hal Foster, "Vandal Aesthetics", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 51-52.</ref><br />
<br />
==Place in Gaillard's broader practice==<br />
<br />
[[File:Jhagehrohk.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008]][[File:Fdhgerguu.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008. Detail.]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' reflects an ongoing exploration by Gaillard of issues around architectural monuments, what constitutes something worth preserving, and how sculptural displacement and changes of context can release new meanings and energies.<br />
<br />
The artist has produced a series of works, beginning in 2008, in which the pulverized remnants of demolished modernist tower blocks are employed to create sculptural and landscaped elements in new architectural contexts. For ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008, the artist created a gravel pathway leading up to the Château d'Orion, a sixteenth century chateau in western France that is a designated national monument. Gaillard's new path was constructed from the rubble of demolished tower blocks that once stood in the Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of south-west Paris. Ground down to small, roughly evenly-sized pieces, visitors to the picturesque gardens of the Château are unaware that the path they are walking on is made up of the remains of a former housing block. The work thus serves to introduce a hidden, destabilizing element in the context of the design of the Château and its surrounding park (which otherwise reflect the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and harmony between man-made design and nature).<ref>"Cyprien Gaillard, La grande allée du Château de Oiron", in: ''Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place : Public Art (Now)'', (London : Art Books Publishing Ltd, in association with Situations, Public Art Agency Sweden, and the European Network of Public Art Producers, 2015), 36-39.</ref><br />
<br />
As curator and writer Claire Doherty has observed, Gaillard's project "contrasts two very different conceptions of reason and necessity. His ''grande allée'' asks us to consider what we choose to preserve and remember, and what is made from the ruins of the things that we do not. What is left is a quietly unsettled landscape, hovering between the various points in time when these structures were built and have been or will be destroyed, and our own footsteps on the uneven concrete gravel."<ref>Ibid., 37</ref><br />
<br />
Gaillard has made video works of the demolition of mid-century tower blocks such as ''Color Like No Other'', 2007, and ''Pruitt-Igoe Falls'', 2009, both depicting the demolition of buildings in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also produced a series of 'Cairns' from piles of modernist building rubble, photographed in the landscape to reference prehistoric monuments. <br />
<br />
Linda Yablonsky has noted ''The Recovery of Discovery's'' themes of intoxication and disorder in relation to architectural monuments reflects some of the artist's video works including ''Cities of Gold and Mirrors'', 2008, which juxtaposes images of American spring breakers partying at a decaying Mayan-themed resort in Cancun, and the three-part ''Desniansky Raion'', 2007, which documents hooligans warring in the parking lot of a Russian housing complex.<ref>Linda Yablonsky, "Beautiful Ruins", ''T Magazine'', April 10, 2013. This and other articles on the work of Cyprien Gaillard are available at the site of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York: https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/cyprien-gaillard/press </ref><br />
<br />
==Unnatural ruins==<br />
<br />
Tom McDonough has aligned Gaillard's interest in architectural collapse with the writings of German theorist [[Georg Simmel]].<ref>"Georg Simmel", Wikipedia, last modified 29 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel </ref> For Simmel, the ruin provides us with a compelling image of nature reclaiming culture: "The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical forces of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards."<ref>McDonough quoting Simmel. See Tom McDonough, "Controlled Explosion", Bice Curiger, ed., ''30 years of Parkett : Tauba Auerbach, Urs Fischer, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirana Shahbazi'', (New York; Zurich: Parkett, 2014), 210-217.</ref> The ruin thus provides a compelling prefiguration of death, allowing us to contemplate our own oblivion.<br />
<br />
McDonough, however, questions Gaillard's figuring of modernist housing projects in terms of ruins, noting that their decay or destruction is more likely the result of economic forces that have abandoned them and their inhabitants—often with the express aim of forcing their erasure in order to make way for new privatized developments, as was the case in some of the Glaswegian estates that the artist has featured in his work. Focusing only on the moment of these buildings' destruction runs the risk of treating it as a natural event divorced from the social and political context that is its true cause.<br />
<br />
However, McDonough concludes that the artist, in often highlighting the moment of violence in these destructive events, holds up a mirror to our own nihilistic fascination with architectural destruction, and in highlighting this collective 'death drive', signals its centrality to Neo-liberal economics. "Images of controlled explosions are first and foremost signs of capital's fundamental fluidity, its retreat from fixed form the moment profitability dictates a shift in geographic locale—and even the most durable of concrete structures can be forsaken as the economy dictates their obsolescence."<ref>Ibid., 217</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=The_Recovery_of_Discovery&diff=1118The Recovery of Discovery2022-01-10T22:17:39Z<p>Tenementofnaught: /* Drunkenness, Sovereignty, and Instability */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Cyprien-gaillard-board.jpg|280px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''The Recovery of Discovery'', installation views, KW Institute for contemporary Art, Berlin, 2011]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' is a 2011 exhibition at Kunst-Werke Berlin by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Consisting of a single large-scale installation of a pyramid of cases of beer in the sky-lit main gallery space at Kunst-Werke, visitors to the exhibition were invited to climb the stepped array of the stacked boxes, use them for seating, and to freely open and consume the beer contained inside.<br />
<br />
The installation was on view for two months,<ref>March 27 – May 22, 2011. The Kunst-Werke Berlin exhibition page is available at: https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/cyprien-gaillard-the-recovery-of-discovery/</ref> during which time the pyramid, initially totaling 72,000 bottles, was gradually torn apart, consumed, and its debris, including shattered glass bottles, left scattered throughout the gallery space.<br />
<br />
==Background==<br />
<br />
Gaillard used imported ''Efes'' beer for the installation, a brand favored among the large Turkish immigrant community in Berlin.<ref>See Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'' (Köln, London: Walther König, 2012), 7-16.</ref> The brand is named after the modern Turkish name for the ancient city of Ephesus, built by the Greeks in Asia Minor (the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey).<br />
<br />
The artist has spoken about his intention to juxtapose the accelerated ruination of his pyramid over the course of its exhibition run with the ancient architectural ruins it is in part making reference to. The exhibition's press materials specifically cite the [[Pergamon Altar]],<ref>"Pergamon Altar", Wikipedia, last modified 8 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar </ref> on permanent view close to Kunst-Werke on Berlin's Museum Island, as a reference point for Gaillard's installation. The Altar was constructed in the first half of the 2nd century BC in Pergamon—like Ephesus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. Excavated by German engineer Carl Humann in the 1880s, the architectural fragments that make up the Pergamon Altar were removed from their site in present-day Turkey and relocated to Germany, where Italian restorers reconstructed the monument in a purpose-built museum that first opened in 1901. The huge altar structure is famous for its 20 meter-wide stairway, the steps of which have been a popular spot for visitors to the museum to sit, rest, and take photographs.<br />
<br />
Gaillard's installation seeks to promote a corresponding public interaction with his own stepped installation, drawing visitors into a perhaps unwitting relationship with the history of displaced monuments, as he also interweaves that history with that of the contemporary displacement of Turkish guest workers in Germany, and the imported goods of a globalized economy.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery".</ref><br />
<br />
==Violence from above and below==<br />
<br />
In a conversation with the exhibition's curator,<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 33-49.</ref> Susanne Pfeffer, in a publication accompanying the installation, Gaillard has addressed the work's reference to the appropriation of cultural monuments by colonial powers, and the vexed issue of repatriation and restoration. The artist remains equivocal on the issue, acknowledging the value of preservation that often goes along with relocation to museum contexts. Gaillard additionally highlights the futility of the search for an authentic experience of ancient architectural sites—the desire to look at 'the original' is oftentimes fruitless, given the extent to which historical context and overzealous attempts at reconstruction mean we can only be looking at a highly altered object when we view monuments in-situ.<br />
<br />
Pfeffer cites the writing of German art historian [[Martin Warnke]],<ref>"Martin Warnke", Wikipedia, last modified 2 January 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Warnke </ref> and his distinction between the idea of vandalism "from below" and "from above" in the context of the destruction and restoration of monuments. If vandalism from below is characterized by a blind destructive mania without a specific purpose, vandalism "from above" can frequently take the form of restoration, conservation and urban planning. For Pfeffer, The ''Recovery of Discovery’s'' self-destructing monument draws these two impulses together, and reveals their mutual dependency.<ref>Susanne Pfeffer, "Life in the Museum is Like Making Love in a Cemetery", 9.</ref><br />
<br />
==Drunkenness, sovereignty, and instability==<br />
<br />
Gaillard has related anecdotes about being hungover on foreign trips, and standing looking at a ruined monument as he, himself, felt 'ruined'. He has discussed the role of alcohol and intoxication in ''The Recovery of Discovery'', specifically relating the effects of alcohol on body and mind to the destruction of the initially-perfect form of the pyramidal stack of beer cases.<ref>Cyprien Gaillard and Susanne Pfeffer, "In Conversation".</ref><br />
<br />
The artist notes the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are branded with gold-embossed crowns and named after kings, gods—or in the case of the ''Efes'' beer imported for ''The Recovery of Discovery'', after an ancient city manifesting a once golden age. Gaillard identifies the tendency with a kind of 'sovereign subjectivity' of drunkness: feelings of well-being and command over one's place in the world, that can so quickly flip toward aggression or loss of control when over-intoxicated.<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Hal Foster has elaborated on this instability in writing on ''The Recovery of Discovery''. Initially noting the potential antagonism of a publicly-funded arts organization spending 40,000 Euro on 72,000 bottles of beer for an art installation (at a time when German tax payers were balking at the idea of bailing out Greece through the EU), Foster goes on to elaborate:<br />
<br />
"the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd as seen from Gustave Le Bon, through Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, to recent students of hooliganism - an instability that renders the installation insecure as both structure and event."<ref>Hal Foster, "Vandal Aesthetics", in Susanne Pfeffer, ed., ''Cyprien Gaillard : The Recovery of Discovery'', 51-52.</ref><br />
<br />
==Place in Gaillard's broader practice==<br />
<br />
[[File:Jhagehrohk.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008]][[File:Fdhgerguu.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Cyprien Gaillard, ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008. Detail.]]''The Recovery of Discovery'' reflects an ongoing exploration by Gaillard of issues around architectural monuments, what constitutes something worth preserving, and how sculptural displacement and changes of context can release new meanings and energies.<br />
<br />
The artist has produced a series of works, beginning in 2008, in which the pulverized remnants of demolished modernist tower blocks are employed to create sculptural and landscaped elements in new architectural contexts. For ''La grande allée du Château de Oiron'', 2008, the artist created a gravel pathway leading up to the Château d'Orion, a sixteenth century chateau in western France that is a designated national monument. Gaillard's new path was constructed from the rubble of demolished tower blocks that once stood in the Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of south-west Paris. Ground down to small, roughly evenly-sized pieces, visitors to the picturesque gardens of the Château are unaware that the path they are walking on is made up of the remains of a former housing block. The work thus serves to introduce a hidden, destabilizing element in the context of the design of the Château and its surrounding park (which otherwise reflect the Renaissance ideals of symmetry and harmony between man-made design and nature).<ref>"Cyprien Gaillard, La grande allée du Château de Oiron", in: ''Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place : Public Art (Now)'', (London : Art Books Publishing Ltd, in association with Situations, Public Art Agency Sweden, and the European Network of Public Art Producers, 2015), 36-39.</ref><br />
<br />
As curator and writer Claire Doherty has observed, Gaillard's project "contrasts two very different conceptions of reason and necessity. His ''grande allée'' asks us to consider what we choose to preserve and remember, and what is made from the ruins of the things that we do not. What is left is a quietly unsettled landscape, hovering between the various points in time when these structures were built and have been or will be destroyed, and our own footsteps on the uneven concrete gravel."<ref>Ibid., 37</ref><br />
<br />
Gaillard has made video works of the demolition of mid-century tower blocks such as ''Color Like No Other'', 2007, and ''Pruitt-Igoe Falls'', 2009, both depicting the demolition of buildings in Glasgow, Scotland. He has also produced a series of 'Cairns' from piles of modernist building rubble, photographed in the landscape to reference prehistoric monuments. <br />
<br />
Linda Yablonsky has noted ''The Recovery of Discovery's'' themes of intoxication and disorder in relation to architectural monuments reflects some of the artist's video works including ''Cities of Gold and Mirrors'', 2008, which juxtaposes images of American spring breakers partying at a decaying Mayan-themed resort in Cancun, and the three-part ''Desniansky Raion'', 2007, which documents hooligans warring in the parking lot of a Russian housing complex.<ref>Linda Yablonsky, "Beautiful Ruins", ''T Magazine'', April 10, 2013. This and other articles on the work of Cyprien Gaillard are available at the site of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York: https://gladstonegallery.com/artist/cyprien-gaillard/press </ref><br />
<br />
==Unnatural Ruins==<br />
<br />
Tom McDonough has aligned Gaillard's interest in architectural collapse with the writings of German theorist [[Georg Simmel]].<ref>"Georg Simmel", Wikipedia, last modified 29 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel </ref> For Simmel, the ruin provides us with a compelling image of nature reclaiming culture: "The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical forces of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards."<ref>McDonough quoting Simmel. See Tom McDonough, "Controlled Explosion", Bice Curiger, ed., ''30 years of Parkett : Tauba Auerbach, Urs Fischer, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirana Shahbazi'', (New York; Zurich: Parkett, 2014), 210-217.</ref> The ruin thus provides a compelling prefiguration of death, allowing us to contemplate our own oblivion.<br />
<br />
McDonough, however, questions Gaillard's figuring of modernist housing projects in terms of ruins, noting that their decay or destruction is more likely the result of economic forces that have abandoned them and their inhabitants—often with the express aim of forcing their erasure in order to make way for new privatized developments, as was the case in some of the Glaswegian estates that the artist has featured in his work. Focusing only on the moment of these buildings' destruction runs the risk of treating it as a natural event divorced from the social and political context that is its true cause.<br />
<br />
However, McDonough concludes that the artist, in often highlighting the moment of violence in these destructive events, holds up a mirror to our own nihilistic fascination with architectural destruction, and in highlighting this collective 'death drive', signals its centrality to Neo-liberal economics. "Images of controlled explosions are first and foremost signs of capital's fundamental fluidity, its retreat from fixed form the moment profitability dictates a shift in geographic locale—and even the most durable of concrete structures can be forsaken as the economy dictates their obsolescence."<ref>Ibid., 217</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1117Template:LAbar2022-01-10T21:53:44Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|x130px|link=Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Oppositions-9-summer-1977.jpg|x130px|link=Architecture and Transgression]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|x130px|link=Holes]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[The Recovery of Discovery]]''<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|''[[Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]''<br />
|''[[Architecture and Transgression]]''<br />
|''[[Holes]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Template:LAbar&diff=1116Template:LAbar2022-01-10T21:52:44Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>{| style="width:100%; margin-top:0; vertical-align:top; border-top:5px #ccc solid; border-bottom:5px #ccc solid; text-align:center"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Rauerbdjjks.jpg|x130px|link=The Recovery of Discovery]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Psychobuildings-front-cover.jpg|x130px|link=Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Excavations-at-Craig-Rhos-y-felin.jpg|x130px|link=Stonehenge quarries]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Dundes-walled-up.jpg|x130px|link=Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:57fbc8aff87b4921a0b1a9c11ad109d7.jpg|x130px|link=Villa Savoye abandoned]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:MS10495 127.jpg|x130px|link=Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:CgXcb8zWIAApzv5.jpg|x130px|link=Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:Oppositions-9-summer-1977.jpg|x130px|link=Architecture and Transgression]]<br />
|style="padding-top:1em;"| [[File:UlsterUniBelfastHole.jpg|x130px|link=Holes]]<br />
|- style="font-size:80%;"<br />
|''[[Kippenberger Psychobuildings]]''<br />
|''[[Stonehenge quarries]]''<br />
|''[[Ballad of The Walled-Up Wife|The Walled-Up Wife]]''<br />
|''[[Villa Savoye abandoned]]''<br />
|''[[Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult]]''<br />
|''[[Superstudio - Hidden Architecture]]''<br />
|''[[Architecture and Transgression]]''<br />
|''[[Holes]]''<br />
|}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Waiting_for_Godot_%27Architecte%27_insult&diff=1106Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult2021-09-27T01:13:25Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
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<div>[[File:MS10495_127.jpg|240px|thumb|right|''En attendant Godot pièce en deux acte'' (Les Éditions de Minuet, 1952). Annotated first edition, Trinity College Dublin (TCD MS 10495)]]Samuel Beckett's play ''Waiting for Godot'' received its first public presentation at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris in January 1953. <br />
<br />
Act 2 of the play contains a celebrated passage in which protagonists Vladimir and Estagon engage in an escalating series of back-and-forth insults—followed by silence and their immediate reconciliation. The original published manuscript for ''En attendant Godot'' indicated this exchange with the stage direction "Echange d'injures" ('they trade insults'). Unusually for Beckett, who was to become well known for spelling out precise directions—down to the last pause—this left the actors and director free to work out the exact wording of the insults in rehearsals.<ref>Deirdre Bair notes in her biography of Beckett that Roger Blin, director of the original production, and actors Pierre Latour (Estragon) and Lucien Raimbourg (Vladimir) were already surprised at Beckett's use of such a generalized direction, "since all his other stage directions had been methodical and meticulous." See: Deirdre Bair, ''Samuel Beckett: A Biography'', (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 426</ref><br />
<br />
"We needed strong swear words, and so I wrote them down," director Roger Blin recalled of the process. "We came up with ordure (fertilizer), fumier (shit), curé (priest)—they were all good, but the one which worked best to make Vladimir shut up was ''architecte''. It seemed to us the worst insult that one could ever say."<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
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Jean Martin, who was performing the role of Lucky, had suggested the word, having heard it used as an insult by a Belgian taxi driver. It was apparently a well-known curse in Brussels, where tenements had been torn down more than sixty years previously to make way for the construction of the Palais de Justice, "causing the slum-dwellers to riot and, in their frustration, to blame the architects for the loss of their homes."<ref>Ibid., 427</ref><br />
<br />
Beckett, who was present at rehearsals making changes and additions to the text as they went, confided quietly to Blin that they would try "architecte," and the lines were left in for the duration of the play's first run. His hand-corrected manuscript from the production, in the collection of Trinity College Dublin, notes down the agreed wording.<ref>See: Sam Slote, "Samuel Beckett", on [https://www.tcd.ie/trinitywriters/ Trinity Writers], first published January 2016, retrieved May 31, 2018.</ref><br />
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<div style="float:left; margin: 5px 15px 5px 0px; background-color: #f6f6f6; border: solid 1px #ccc; padding: 10px; width:30%; height:40%><br />
'''Vladimir''': Moron!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Vermin!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Abortion!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Morpion!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Sewer-rat!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Curate!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Cretin!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': ''(with finality)'' Crritic!<ref>Samuel Beckett, ''Waiting for Godot, A Tragicomedy in Two Acts'', translated from the original French text by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 85.</ref><br />
</div>The amended published version of the play, in its original French, continued to include the loose stage direction "Echange d'injures", leaving the exact wording of the exchange open in successive productions. However, Beckett's own 1954 English translation of the play specified the insults to be used: culminating, instead, with the word 'critic', apparently seen by Beckett as an even more heinous insult than ''Architecte''.<br />
<br />
Jeanette den Toonder has argued "Both lists are compiled as much for sonority and shape as for meaning". Elmer Tophoven's German translation, which was made before Beckett's English version, "arrived at the term "Oberforstinspektor" as the final insult— a composite noun of six syllables.<ref>Jeanette den Toonder, "A Trilingual Godot", in ''Beckett & la psychanalyse, Volume 5'', ed. Sjef Houppermans, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 162</ref> Tophoven explained:<br />
<br />
"In my first translation I replaced the word "architecte" in the French with the word "Oberkellner" ("head waiter"). "Ober" is typically German. Then it became “Ober...forstinspektor" ("Head forest inspector"). The purpose was to give a sense of authority of the state."<ref>Elmer Tophoven quoted in den Toonder, "A Trilingual Godot", 162</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=Waiting_for_Godot_%27Architecte%27_insult&diff=1105Waiting for Godot 'Architecte' insult2021-09-27T01:09:06Z<p>Tenementofnaught: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:MS10495_127.jpg|240px|thumb|right|''En attendant Godot pièce en deux acte'' (Les Éditions de Minuet, 1952). Annotated first edition, Trinity College Dublin (TCD MS 10495)]]Samuel Beckett's play ''Waiting for Godot'' received its first public presentation at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris in January 1953. <br />
<br />
Act 2 of the play contains a celebrated passage in which protagonists Vladimir and Estagon engage in an escalating series of back-and-forth insults—followed by silence and their immediate reconciliation. The original published manuscript for ''En attendant Godot'' indicated this exchange with the stage direction "Echange d'injures" ('they trade insults'). Unusually for Beckett, who was to become notorious for spelling out every direction, down to the last pause, this left the actors and director free to work out the exact wording of the insults in rehearsals.<ref>Deirdre Bair notes in her biography of Beckett that Roger Blin, director of the original production, and actors Pierre Latour (Estragon) and Lucien Raimbourg (Vladimir) were already surprised at Beckett's use of such a generalized direction, "since all his other stage directions had been methodical and meticulous." See: Deirdre Bair, ''Samuel Beckett: A Biography'', (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 426</ref><br />
<br />
"We needed strong swear words, and so I wrote them down," director Roger Blin recalled of the process. "We came up with ordure (fertilizer), fumier (shit), curé (priest)—they were all good, but the one which worked best to make Vladimir shut up was ''architecte''. It seemed to us the worst insult that one could ever say."<ref>Ibid.</ref><br />
<br />
Jean Martin, who was performing the role of Lucky, had suggested the word, having heard it used as an insult by a Belgian taxi driver. It was apparently a well-known curse in Brussels, where tenements had been torn down more than sixty years previously to make way for the construction of the Palais de Justice, "causing the slum-dwellers to riot and, in their frustration, to blame the architects for the loss of their homes."<ref>Ibid., 427</ref><br />
<br />
Beckett, who was present at rehearsals making changes and additions to the text as they went, confided quietly to Blin that they would try "architecte," and the lines were left in for the duration of the play's first run. His hand-corrected manuscript from the production, in the collection of Trinity College Dublin, notes down the agreed wording.<ref>See: Sam Slote, "Samuel Beckett", on [https://www.tcd.ie/trinitywriters/ Trinity Writers], first published January 2016, retrieved May 31, 2018.</ref><br />
<br />
<div style="float:left; margin: 5px 15px 5px 0px; background-color: #f6f6f6; border: solid 1px #ccc; padding: 10px; width:30%; height:40%><br />
'''Vladimir''': Moron!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Vermin!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Abortion!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Morpion!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Sewer-rat!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': Curate!<br /><br />
'''Vladimir''': Cretin!<br /><br />
'''Estragon''': ''(with finality)'' Crritic!<ref>Samuel Beckett, ''Waiting for Godot, A Tragicomedy in Two Acts'', translated from the original French text by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 85.</ref><br />
</div>The amended published version of the play, in its original French, continued to include the loose stage direction "Echange d'injures", leaving the exact wording of the exchange open in successive productions. However, Beckett's own 1954 English translation of the play specified the insults to be used: culminating, instead, with the word 'critic', apparently seen by Beckett as an even more heinous insult than ''Architecte''.<br />
<br />
Jeanette den Toonder has argued "Both lists are compiled as much for sonority and shape as for meaning". Elmer Tophoven's German translation, which was made before Beckett's English version, "arrived at the term "Oberforstinspektor" as the final insult— a composite noun of six syllables.<ref>Jeanette den Toonder, "A Trilingual Godot", in ''Beckett & la psychanalyse, Volume 5'', ed. Sjef Houppermans, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 162</ref> Tophoven explained:<br />
<br />
"In my first translation I replaced the word "architecte" in the French with the word "Oberkellner" ("head waiter"). "Ober" is typically German. Then it became “Ober...forstinspektor" ("Head forest inspector"). The purpose was to give a sense of authority of the state."<ref>Elmer Tophoven quoted in den Toonder, "A Trilingual Godot", 162</ref><br />
<br />
==References==<br />
{{Refs2}}</div>Tenementofnaughthttp://www.archiwik.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Createaccount-text&diff=1104MediaWiki:Createaccount-text2020-08-09T22:28:32Z<p>Tenementofnaught: Created page with "An account has been created for you with this email address on {{SITENAME}} ($4) named "$2", with temporary password "$3". You may log in and change your password now. You ca..."</p>
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