COUNCIL OF URBAN CULTURE - Site Study: Contextualist and Disciplinary Readings of Luxembourg City
DISCIPLINARY ARCHITECTURE PRECEDENTS
Archizoom Associati and Constant Nieuwenhyus
Architectural Theory
In the case of Luxembourg, the project developed contextualist and disciplinary readings of the city, as shown juxtaposed in the image. The tension between this more formal and theoretical approach towards architecture and urbanism would lead to a design strategy for the institutional base of operation combining real and fictional parameters.
Hence the project followed a case study of the two disciplinary projects of Constant Nieuwenhuys' New Babylon (1959-74) and of Archizoom Associati's No-Stop City (1969) in the context of architecture and urbanism:
Cultural Narratives
1. The Situationists
The project adopted New Babylon's cultural imperative to conceive of the disciplinary institute involving artistic and architectural minds.
Constant explored the situationist concept of psychogeography in this city of 'New Babylon' in which he created a permanent encampment for homo ludens (man the player) and prefigured his return to the 'Garden of Eden' or 'Zion' as a finale/denouement/metagame.
The irregular hexagonal lattice acted as a raised meta-platform of interconnected sectors hovering above the existing context below and anchors only on a kind of Corbusean pilotis. In content and in form, Constant saw the dialectic nature of the culture of conflict.
In one possible misreading, once the network of sectors have been inverted, New Babylon's ground condition can be read as an archipelago; a cluster of islands or individual sites which are made continuous by the invisible diagram of a network. The metacity becomes the megacity, hard infrastructure becomes soft infrastructure. Rather than a superstructure, it becomes the craquelure, the rizhome or the cracks in the system.
Cultural Narratives
2. Archizoom Associati
The project also learned from No-Stop City's social polemic to understand and manipulate the impact of natural and built environments on social dynamics in the case of Luxembourg.
As a critique of welfare-state capitalism, Archizoom Associati were inspired by Socialist/Social Realism and Pop Art, which originated by reenacting and articulating the consumer-producer models of a post-fordist (outsourcing) world in Andy Warhol's Factory.
They nested one piece of architecture within another, the box within the mirrored box, effecting a perspective of endless repetition stretching far into the horizon. At this point, the distinctions between the object and the subject are blurred and organisms are completely in tune with the standardizing logic of the market.
The absolute homogeneity suspends the subject/object/other in a heterotopic state. The underlying building regulations and code of conduct inform the limits which in turn dictate people's behaviour or even identity, creating order at the expense of more spontaneous interventions.
Furthermore Archizoom Associati created the 'Homogeneous Living Diagrams colonized: continuous floor plans, micro-climatic, artificial nature with ample room for spontaneous 'figuration''. These diagrams were part of a series of drawings of No-Stop City which remind of a field of homogeneous typewritten code in an isotopic grid.
This project challenges this pure 'format' and 'second nature' by introducing an element of difference; this element of difference attempts to neither operate solely within or outside the homogeneous field; it transposes multiple functions across multiple platforms. It is a constant balancing between the systemic and the asystemic.
As a cultural scenario explored in a side research of this project (see Provocations), the artistic squiggles found in their drawings were understood as a metaphor for spontaneous interventions in the field and can be reread in relation to ''programming after program''. No-Stop City was exaggerated by overpopulating and polluting the grid with foreign elements, the enzym, in order to test various dynamic formations and morphological configurations in quarantine. The project then argued that 'quantity of entities rather than quality of entities generate difference, and effect gravitation, diffusion and catalysis'.
Conclusion
Following the close examination of the precedents taken from architectural theories of the 60s and 70s, the 'Council of Urban Culture' formed its own narrative for the design of the office and the project on the city: the bridge. The narrative allowed a serious project departing from a study of the European Capital of Culture for more playful, fictional and spontaneous interventions.