Just in time before Christmas we launched Volume 22, The Guide and Beyroutes at the Athenaeum magazine shop. There were ‘bitterballen’, sparkles, booze and a spectacular last minute arrival of the issue straight from the printer. Enjoy the photo’s together with the warm wishes from the entire Volume crew for a happy christmas, good parties, and a incredible new year.
Signed; Lilet, Arjen, Valerie (who made the pictures) Rory, Timothy, Jonathan, Christian and Edwin
We invite you to join us for the launch of our latest issue, VOLUME #22 The Guide, and the special supplement publication Beyroutes: A guide to Beirut.
Athenaeum News Centre, Spui, Amsterdam, December 22, 5-7pm
Both publications come together in a single packet, and form part of your subscription.
About this issue
Guiding – as it is commonly understood – is not about creating; it’s about helping. The guide has no goal other than to lead someone safely to the destiny of their choice. The guide is skilled; he or she actually can lead the way, but does so without ambition beyond delivering quality service. The guide sells safety where risk is involved.
With The Guide, VOLUME presents a diverse collection of guides and attempts to guide. From strange maps, bike tours and magnetic navigation belts to the conception of Paris’ 13th arrondissement as a series of islands; here, the guide is understood as not simply a service or selling point, but as an exploratory tool, a generator for a proactive engagement with the city.
As a supplement to this issue of VOLUME, we also present the separate publication Beyroutes, a guidebook to Beirut, one of the grand capitals of the Middle East. Beyroutes presents an exploded view of a city which lives so many double lives and figures in so many truths, myths and historical falsifications. Visiting the city with this intimate book as your guide makes you feel disoriented, appreciative, judgmental and perhaps eventually reconciliatory. Beyroutes is the field manual for 21st century urban explorer.
Contributors
The Guide: Arjen Oosterman, Jan van Grunsven, Ole Bouman, Rory Hyde, Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Kubo, Edwin Gardner, Filip Mischelwitsch, Jonathan Hanahan, Louisa Bufardeci, Sunny Bains, Anastassia Smirnova, Thomas Daniell, Kate Rhodes, Naomi Stead, Thomas Kilpper, Lucy Bullivant, Christian Ernsten, Charles Esche + The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency (Andrew Herscher a.o.)
VOLUME Magazine #22 was conceived and edited by Archis. Supported by the Mondriaan Foundation and the University of Michigan.
Beyroutes: With contributions by Maureen Abi Ghanem, Romy Assouad, Hisham Awad, Cleo Campert, Joane Chaker, Tony Chakar, Zinab Chahine, Steve Eid, Christian Ernsten, Christiaan Fruneaux, Edwin Gardner, David Habchy, Mona Harb, Pascale Harès, Jasper Harlaar, Janneke Hulshof, Hanane Kaï, Karen Klink, Niels Lestrade, Mona Merhi, Elias Moubarak, Tarek Moukaddem, Kamal Mouzawak, Joe Mounzer, Alex Nysten, Nienke Nauta, Ahmad Osman, Haig Papazian, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Rani al Rajji, Joost Janmaat, Jan Rothuizen, Ruben Schrameijer, Reem Saouma, Michael Stanton, George Zouein
Beyroutes was initiated by Studio Beirut in collaboration with Partizan Publik, Archis and the Pearl Foundation. Supported by Prince Claus Fund, Fund Working on the Quality of Living and the Netherlands Embassy in Lebanon.
Simón Vélez’s aesthetic and technical innovations in bamboo have enhanced its construction potential and challenged mainstream architectural trends. He invented a new method to build foundations and roofs, which transformed one of the world’s oldest building materials, namely bamboo, into a modern resource that meets the strictest international construction regulations and can even outperform steel.
For this contribution, on the 16th of December Simón Vélez will receive the 2009 Principal Prince Claus Award.
Former Volume-er Simon Pennec gives a round up of his highlights of the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR) that ran from October 29 to November 1 2009.
The 5th edition of the AFFR gathered an eclectic crowd of architects, artists, film-makers, curators and designers for three days of intense programming of shorts, documentaries, long features and arthouse videos. This year, the festival promised to frame the city and its architecture in the midst of the financial crisis; with the selection reflecting on potential urban and architectural futures.
The themes presented explored the highs and lows of architecture: West Coast modernism, Russian Avant-Garde and Architecture of Hope, the legacy of Jane Jacobs and a rich series of city documentaries exploring the ‘Great Planning Disasters’. The vast number of films turned the weekend into a challenge, and the need to strategize and tailor a programme quickly became everyone’s motto. I managed to watch 26 films including 18 shorts, most of them connected to the ‘crisis’ headline of the festival and the collective city.
Starting off with one of the first cinematographic reports on the effects of the mortgage crisis, Fresno is a documentary about how a group of Skateboarders have made new uses for the growing number of empty homes and swimming pools in this city just North of Los Angeles. Mixed with interviews of politicians, real estate brokers and property investors, the result is a rich account of the rapid changes that transformed American suburbia making it a new site for urban exploration. The problem does not stop at the individual home or the residential community; in Malls R Us, the film makers depict a much broader concern for American Suburbia, filming shopping malls closing down and leaving behind huge footprints of closed and gated spaces.
However, the intention here is not only to document the changes, as it is to suggest possible alternatives. In highlighting the growing gap between architecture and construction, the Festival has intended to make bridges between the presentation of the plan and the complexities of its realization. In a special screening, the London-based design practice Squint Opera presented their work turning documents and planning proposals into cinematic experiences. Large-scale projects such as London Olympics and Abu Dhabi 2030 are proposed in the form of hyper-real images so to communicate architecture and urban developments. For the architectural audience, the visual rendering comes as an innovative design, which ‘brings to life’ the complexities of the architectural drawings and models. The use of text placed over the images replaces a spoken narrative, presenting key features of the urban plan. In one or two occasions, the quotes highlight the “authentic and progressive character” of Abu Dhabi, but the simulated environments are imaginary places, representing the city as a series of slick, safe and ordered spaces. These contradictions turn both the urban plan and the film itself into an animated parody. Animation here becomes a crucial element not only in place-making but also in selling the image of a city to prospective clients and developers, though arguably a very generic city. This is cinema as a political tool at its best.
Squint Opera, Abu Dhabi 2030
In presenting Squint Opera’s video montages, the festival programmers question the nature and definition of the architecture film. Indeed, their selections span across all genres of architectural cinema. There are, however a few classics, including the architect tribute-documentary which reads just like a monograph; a page after page, project after project, survey of the architect’s work replacing the subjective photographic eye with pleasing slow camera tracking, as in Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner. Another classic has to be the sci-fi approach, framing the future of the city built either from sets and backdrops or fragments of the existing city such as the modernist residential houses in Woody Allen’s Sleepers.
Amongst the variety of screenings and topics explored, one of the highlights for me was the Shorts program, which showcased films not only connected to the themes of this year’s festival, but also resonated with the ’Collective City’ exhibition at the International Architecture Biennale at the NAi in Rotterdam. The programs ‘Modernist Architecture of Hope’, ‘Pre Architecture’ and the ‘Block’ all open another rear window, looking at some of the larger architectural manifestations of the 20th Century and their contemporary everyday use. Whilst the West Coast Modernist Architecture screenings idealized an image of architecture (as in Infinite Space, or Visual Acoustics, on the photography of Julius Shulman), European and Asian modernist architecture is embedded in ideas of failed utopias, disillusions and decaying urbanism framed in the XL housing blocks.
Chris Chong Chan Fui, still from Block B, 2008
In Block B, we are immediately immersed in a frontal view of a housing block which becomes a living photograph. The enormity of the building is examined closely through quotidian stories, trivial actions, dialogues, and sounds, animating the uniform and rigid structure. The stillness of the camera reflects on the stillness of the building, demanding that we contemplate its complexities and its residents, “being connected but distant”.
Jean-Louis Schuller’s contrasting lens in Chungking Dream walks into another mass housing development, where 10,000 people – immigrants from all over the world – squeeze into 5 blocks of 17 stories high. Chungking Mansions, a cheap accommodation in Hong Kong, houses a paradise of multiculturalism and low-end globalization, turning the residential building into a fully functional city with its labyrinth of informal guesthouses, curry restaurants, African bistros, clothing shops and foreign exchange offices.
Jean-Louis Schuller, Chungking Dream
In Quadro, Lotte Schreiber portrays the monumentality of a 1960’s apartment block built in the Italian coastal city of Trieste. Sitting atop a hill, the building appears to be floating in space, disconnected from the surrounding city. Her other film Borgate, recomposes a declining neighbourhood of Rome with tight and slow-tracking shots surveying the topography of the urban landscape composed of facades, wide streets and small architectural details. The black and white film provides a dramatic contrast between a nostalgic look back to neo-realism, highlighted by references from Fellini to Pasolini, and the violent intrusion of almost subliminal and abstract sequences.
Lotte Schreiber, still from Quadro
In both films, the dramatic intensity created between the cinematography and powerful music, serve as a reminder that housing projects and post-war blocks still bear the dystopic stigmas of our contemporary urban fabric. In reference to the spaces she documents, Schreiber states that “this is where the city ends and no-man’s-land begins.”
Unfortunately, it was quite difficult to see how the other two features fit into the “Block” program, simply because they did not use the housing block as a backdrop. However, in Tallagh, a 25 minute maybe-too-long feature, a group of kids take over the empty streets of one of Dublin residential suburbs and gather urban residue in preparation of a bonfire finale. Although the point of ‘collectivity’ in these uniform housing estates is made through the engagement of the youngest residents, the film’s seemingly endless narrative felt a little out of context. At that point, the audience seemed to resent the next film in the screening, which presented yet another abstract sequence of shots of windows and facades of apartment buildings merged into a backdrop of film clippings. Thankfully, the soothing music of Franz Schubert made the whole experience much more pleasurable.
As filmic experience, the short features have an evocative way of representing the city and its many fragments as the central protagonist of the narrative. Thom Andersen claims that “movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories”. However, the films selected for the weekend – particularly in the Shorts program – essentially trace stories of buildings and neighborhoods, from the context in which they emerged and how they change overtime. They are framed not only as a backdrop on which to project a narrative, but also as a means to position architecture and the urban condition as a protagonist of the filmic experience. And so, architecture film festivals, however loose in their selections, come as much needed reminders of this.
Simon Pennec is a photographer and urban researcher. He contributed to the ‘Collective’ section of the IABR and his survey of collective housing as depicted in film is included in Volume #21: The Block. Simon is currently at OMA/AMO in Rotterdam.
“As a biologist, I see cities as living organisms. Pulsating bodies made up of new and dying cells and kept alive by the people flowing through their arteries. Cities grow, swell, change shape, absorb and eject. This is not about cities with a heart, but about cities as a heart; pumping oxygen and fresh blood into the greater metropolitan areas.”
- Jacqueline Cramer, minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning
Hearing these words at the closing speech of Morgen/Tomorrow – the International Urban Planning Congress held in Amsterdam – one may travel into the memory of “The Heart of the City”, theme of the 8th International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM VIII, 1951, Hoddesdon, England). Today, as then, it was an important moment where urban planners and architects from all around the world gathered to discuss the City as a living liveable centre (core/cuore/coeur). Still today it has a fundamental role in the balance of the expanded new (Open) City.
As an Open City enthusiast, Kees Christiaanse speech alerted to the present status of worldwide metropolises, dealing with the multiple layers of their multicultural heritage: “The enemies of the open city are the open city itself”. Thus, the coexistence of ethnic communities which do not communicate with one another (the favelas of São Paulo and the city of Jakarta were examples given) and rather just inhabit in the same metropolitan structure it is a phenomenon that must be surpassed by city government. Exploring deeper the Netherlands point of view on the Open City, Zef Hemel’s (Substituting the canceled speech of Anastasia Volynskaya’s) presented his “Free State of Amsterdam” speech in a cheerful tone of positive aura upon Planning, as described by his nine “Amsterdam Principles”. The focus on the city of Amsterdam continued in the afternoon workshop “Urban Governance and Liveable cities”, where Maarten van Poelgeest (Alderman of Amsterdam for Town and Country Planning) and Hessel Boerboom (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) could reveal a bit of Amsterdam projects for the future.
City and Revolution
Nevertheless, the motivation for the congress was to pay a tribute to Floor Wibaut, Amsterdam’s alderman on the beginning of the 20th century and an important city enthusiast and city revolutionary. Inevitably, thinking on the city of tomorrow is also to respect and learn with the past and its examples. Is also to think how extraordinary events, like war and revolution, have such a great impact on the city. This link was made through the emotive love-liberty imagery of the streets of Amsterdam led by the Paris 1968 Uprising that were shown as an appetizer before the beginning of the speakers’ presentation. So the question was posed… Throughout the world of today, ”Who are the new Wibauts?”
As an attempt to answer this question at this second day of congress positive cases of city revolutions worldwide were presented, namely Chicago (USA), Pittsburg (USA), Mumbai (India) and Tirana (Albania) (There were presented more city study cases in the afternoon workshops (being held simultaneously): Helsinki (Finland), Malmö (Sweden), Hamburg (Germany) and Freiburg (Germany)).
On a Chicago community study case, La Donna Redmond presented a revolutionary project involving the Food System Movement. Following a personal motivation (On a very tender age, La Donna Redmond’s son was diagnosed with several food allergies), La Donna was involved and it is still fighting for the implementation of a Soul Food System, searching for a perfect agricultural policy (there is an easy access to all kinds of fast-food but the essential vegetables are not available, unlike what we’re used to in European grocery stores) that affects the values of her community: “Revitalizing Soil is revitalizing Community”. Pittsburgh was presented as a former flourishing industrial city that faces an identity crisis that has its roots in the 70’s. To address the uncertainty and loss of value of his community, speaker Michael J. Madison pointed out the importance of finding icons for the future, in order to put citizens in love with their city again (‘Let’s go Steelers!’ is the slogan for the Pittsburgh American football team, in a clear relation with the city’s past heritage).
The Mumbai case-study was presented by P. K. Das, an architect-activist that struggles against the shrinkage of open space, brought a vision of the City from a democratic planning perspective: “Open space is a metaphor for democracy.” His demand for designing collectivity was also part of the main CIAM agenda more than 60 years ago, in order to enhance public spaces and act in comprehensive planning. The positivism of this case relies on reclaiming public spaces performed by P.K. Das, a victory over the the total apathy of city government. Tirana, the last example, gives us a completely different vision upon the citizen’s public space appropriation. Public space was a tangible expression of the communist and previous regime, that late fell in 1990. Ten years later, when Edi Rama became city major, the people of Tirana still had a strong negative feeling towards public space. This was leading to an abusive private appropriation of the City. Starting with a low-budget project, in a period where words were meaningless, Edi Rama used color as an instrument of politics, involving the community into refurbishing the (previously damaged) city façades (for more info visit T.I.C.A). Other projects that emerged where all led by a single leitmotiv: “Beauty intimidates (Albanian) people. (…) So the only answer is to build and invest with quality.”
The purpose of this congress was to review new factors of worldwide global urbanization. These were mentioned at the conference: waste, water, food, mobility and ICT. In the case-studies shown above there is a general conception of “the Revolution(ary)” as key to make cities go through deep change, into development and growth, into the future.
Explore the vast archive of Volume and its predecessor Archis. All the issues since 1993, their covers, full tables of content and a growing amount of articles are online.
