COUNCIL OF URBAN CULTURE - How do we read our cities? A combination of strategies
PROJECT ON THE CITY
'Urban Stoppages'
The project proposes an approach to urban planning and architecture called 'Stoppages'.
First, this concept refers to Marcel Duchamps 'Three Standard Stoppages', chance theories and involves an element of contingency.
Second, it is derived from the collision of the two visionary projects: Constant Nieuwenhuys' expressive projection of New Babylon versus Archizoom's deadpan view of No-Stop City.
Theoretical Context
Archizoom Associati's No-Stop City (1969) serves as a precedent for urbanism, ridiculing rigid modernist planning strategies.
This project exploits the way in which Archizoom reduced the role of planning ad absurdum. Archizoom Associati's drawings show of a field of homogeneous typewritten code in an isotopic grid. They suggest the endless suburban plane or the generic city.
The 'Urban Stoppages' attempt to interupt this infinite isotropic field, the typewritten script, the electricity grid through which No-Stop City represents the total urbanisation of the world !
The Importance of Site
The project is speculating on a disruption of the isotropic field, as exemplified
in the grid, from within (through invisible forces). In the language of No-Stop City, one may say that 'the systemic entities should be made elastic, liquified, mutated into asystemic entities'.
This disruption is effected using two types of formal interventions:
1. site strategy focusing on the importance of 'site' within the city,
2. event structures claiming back the importance of 'building' as a container of life.
The 'urban stoppages' are strategically located event structures, which claim back the role of architecture as a catalyst for change in the city.
At this point the project uses more contextualist parameters to inform
combined site strategies, as explained in the following chapter.
The Importance of Structure
The poject questions whether architecture is doomed to the production
of theatrical consolation objects for a society ''without qualities''.
Ultimately the project acknowledges that the utopia of quality collapses
in favour of a utopia of quantity and the birth of the city without architecture.
But despite theoretical dilemmas, certain cultural platforms for intellectual and material production in the city simply have to be designed for.
The 'Council of Urban Culture' designs structures imagined after cultural narratives, as further explored in chapters II.3 and II.4 (project 1) and III.2 (project 2).
The first proposal told the story a bridge as a metaphor for a place between two states of being, from where the the crisis of cultural production can be overcome.
Finally the 'urban stoppages' can act as architectural catalysts for change in the city through defining the physical boundaries of space in the white collar society.
Conclusion
Luxembourg is a testing ground for different types of 'Stoppages', regarded as both an approach to planning and event structures, which are complementary to each other.
After the European Capital of Culture Festival, the city does not merely publish a report and resume to its old habits or patterns. The cultural field remains active with the new temporary and permanent organisations although the main institute has moved on. In theory the Council of Urban Culture forms neither 'Stop City' nor 'No-Stop City' but the 'City of Stoppages'!