"To be able to choose what you want to be and how you want to live, without worrying about social censure, is obviously more important to Angelenos than the fact that they do not have a Piazza San Marco."

-Jan Rowan in Progressive Architecture, February 1968.




Photo by Stephanie Chow.

1900's industrial building in downtown Los Angeles.
Used to be Catalina Swimwear's factory.
Converted in one of the first city approved artist-in-residence loft properties.
Located in the heart of Skid Row, a one square mile area designated to serve the homeless.
Home to a diverse group of creative people including noted painters, Pulitzer winning photographers, and Emmy winning producers.
Unit 607 is one of the units in the building.












Photos by Stephanie Chow.

"In the beginning, we used to call these spaces 'public spaces', but we now know that the notion of public space has been replaced by that of a space for the consumer. We've been lead to believe that we're either going to work, or going to consume ... Skateboarders bring an alternative to this, not consciously, because all he really wants is to have fun. In his practice of leisure, he introduces some free will, because he chooses his own operating status for the city ... he redefines the use of everything .... the skater offers a way to practice the city not simply as a mere user, and not simply as a mere consumer, but as a creator."

-Raphael Zarka in the short film Which is to be the master? by Sylvain Robineau.










Stills from the short film Which is to be the master?


The film was written and filmed by Sylvain Robineau (aka Coucou Sylvain) with the collaboration of Guillaume Noyelle. It combines Raphael Zarka's essay 'The forbidden concurrence, notes on skateboarding'; a story featuring young Parisians; and raw street skating. Put together, they form a docu-fiction skate video that is both educational and entertaining, even for the non-skater. For today's skaters, who are saturated with all the performance-based skate videos out there with someone doing one more flip than the other, this is a very refreshing and enlightening piece of skate media. More of Sylvain Robineau can be found here.


In the hopes of spreading Zarka's theories and Robineau's vision, the entire film can be watched below...



Which is to be the master?, 2010
by Sylvain Robineau.
src: quiseralemaitre.com

"In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings."

-William J. Mitchell




Spacebook, 2010
by Ken Mishima and Teo Biocina.
img src: kenmishima.com

"There is an undeniable aggression in Tuazon's work, as well as a distrust of architectural orthodoxy. He often speaks of his lifelong interest in alternative or 'outsider' architectural movements, ranging from the ad hoc constructions of hippie communes to the portable and do-it-yourself shelters of hard-core survivalists."

-Julian Rose, ARTFORUM October 2010.











Untitled, 2010
by Oscar Tuazon.

Instalation at Kunsthalle Bern.
Photos by Dominique Uldry.

"But we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right?"

-Lebbeus Woods.



    

    

    

    

    

DMZ Demilitarized Zone, 1988
by Lebbeus Woods
imgs src: lebbeuswoods.net





Berlin Free-Zone 3-2, 1990
by Lebbeus Woods
img src: nytimes.com





Havana Projects, 1994-1995
by Lebbeus Woods
img src: nytimes.com

"This film reanimates one account of the utopian impulse–Le Corbusier’s Plan for a City of Three Million (Ville Contemporaine), a project that has become iconic of both the visions and failures of the modernist moment. That this work has come to epitomize a modernist directive for city planning, one both eerily familiar and outlandishly distant, serves as the basis of our inquiry into the uncanny space of a dislocated subject. By collapsing a digital animation of the City of Three Million onto the recognizably antiquated medium of 16mm stock, this project attempts to complicate the path between a memory of existing urban forms and the possibilities of future urban arrangements."

-Szu-Han Ho and Jesse Vogler.





Such Is Our Pleasure, 2008
by thenorthroom
16 mm film loop

According to the New York Times, one of the most striking developments in recent world cinema is the emergence of films that blend fiction and nonfiction to form a new kind of semi-documentary hybrid film. Alamar by Mexican filmmaker Pedro González-Rubio is an example. It is real, yet idealistic. It is poetic, yet plain. Watching Alamar is like daydreaming about a utopian life in the middle of the ocean away from civilization.

Watch the trailer here.





Still from the film Alamar.

"Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity . . . I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical . . . It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony. There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder . . . And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it, I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."

-Werner Herzog in the documentary film Burden of Dreams by Les Blank.





Screenshot from Burden of Dreams.

"Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done."

-From the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.





Screenshot from Sans Soleil.

"I do not think of myself as an anarchist with any critical political meaning. I see myself as a completely independent person, independent from any belief, country, or religious background. I want to stand as a free individual, who is open to the world."

-Kim Sooja





A Needle Woman, 2005
by Kim Sooja

"The practice of skateboarding seems to radically invert the logic and experience of urban capitalism and its abstract and contradictory space. Where contradictory space rationally zones the city into discrete spaces of work and commerce, the skateboarder 'drifts' through the urban, in the fashion of the Situationist 'psychogeographer', seeking out adventure, opportunity and pleasure. Where the city builds functional paths, ramps and stairways, the skateboarder submits these to a ludic reinvention as elements in an ad hoc adventure playground. Today's skateboarder would seem to embody, even if not 'consciously', the theories and practice developed by Lefebvre and the Situationist, in order to challenge the bureaucratic rationalism of urban planning, and refuse its attendant boredom and impoverishment of everyday life."

-Douglas Cunningham Spencer on Iain Borden's Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body.





Photo by Guillaume Périmony.
img src: flickr

"We're bombarded from childhood with so many images putting 'us'—the individual person—at the center of the universe that we cannot help thinking that this is where we belong. We live in a Times Square world and thus we become the ultimate Descartesians: media think only of us, therefore we think only of ourselves. The result of this self-centeredness is that we become increasingly numbed by the bombardment of images and, in a variation on the "if a tree falls in the woods" query, we can no longer imagine our premediated lives."

-Thomas de Zengotita.





TV Buddha, 1974
by Nam June Paik.
img src: pomoetry

“…if design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities…until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture…”

"In the beginning we designed rather fantastic objects for production in wood, steel, glass, brick or plastic. That was at the beginning, in 1966. Then we turned to the production of usable objects like chairs, tables and cabinets, but these were designed in a deliberately neutral way, a criticism of consumer culture and the continuous drive for novelty. Finally, in 1969, we started designing negative utopias like Il Monumento Continuo, images warning of the horrors architecture had in store with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide. Of course, we were also having fun."

-Adolfo Natalini, co-founder of Superstudio.


























imgs src: butdoesitfloat

"Especially between 1890 and 1940 a new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as a laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist."

"The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires."

-From the book Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas


















imgs src: butdoesitfloat

"The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture."

-Owen Jones.
















imgs src: wisc

"The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires."

-Guy Debord.