3Chief EditorsNathalie FrankowskiCruz Garcia

Co-EditorRonald Frankowski

Graphic and Content DesignNathalie FrankowskiCruz Garcia

What About It? is intellectual property of Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz GarciaWAI Architecture Think Tank

First Published 2014 by WAI Architecture Think Tank Publishers

ISBN978-2-9544145-0-8

www.waithinktank.com

contact@wai-architecture.com

Printed in China

Limited Edition Copy

/

Underground3

What remained particularly memorable of that fierce scuffle were the three blows, in the form of three vociferous statements from out manifesto.

1. Destroy the all-canons freezer which turns inspiration to ice.

2. Destroy the old language, powerless to keep up with life’s leaps and bounds.

3. Throw the old masters overboard from the ship of modernity.

As you see, there isn’t a single building here, not a single comfortably designed corner, only destruction, anarchy. This made philistines laugh, as if it were the extravagant idea of some insane individu-als, but it fact it turned out to be ‘a devilish intuition’ which is realized in the stormy today.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Drop of Tar, 1915

CONTENTS

Essays and ManifestoesManifesto of the Third Waizine 4

A Map to Utopia 5

Narrative Architecture: 34A Manifesto

Glossary

Underground 1

Collapse 9

Vision 17

Narrative 33

Ideal 37

Suprematist 49

Alternative 59

Painting 67

Universal 99

Projects andNarrative Architectures

Palace of Failed Optimism 10

Blindness 18

New NCCA, Moscow 38

Suprematist Landscapes: 50Totems without Qualities

Housetelier, Beijing 60

Interviews

Painting a Philosophyof Emptiness 68Interview with Meng Zhigang

The Architecture of 76Curating Interview with Elias Redstone

The Possibility of 80Sitelessness Interview with Francois Blanciak

Engineering Pure Form 84Interview with Charles Pope

Manifesto of the Third WAIzine

Six Years have passed since WAI was created.Many manifestoes have been written and projects elaborated.Many theories have been tested, and many questions have been asked.

“What About It” is not just a question, it’s an attitude.It is a philosophy that starts by questioning.The Idea of WAI is to question the world around us.To challenge the status quo.

The WAIzine manifests in the material world and in the virtual domain. It presents the materialization of an ethos, a practicing philosophy, an executing theory. The WAIzine doesn’t have deadlines, or release dates. It exists, like pamphlets and journals of artists have existed for more than a century.

The WAIzine is both text and action.It represents architecture in theory and practice.It presents architecture as theory and practice.

The WAIzine offers a platform to manifest the inextinguishable fire of curiosity. It exists independent to external forces, the economy and the market. The WAIzine is a purely speculative project against socio-economic speculation.

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Utopia is a state not an artist’s colony. 1

Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Soci-ety. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.2

Utopia is thus by definition an amateur activity in which personal opinions take the place of mechanical contraptions and the mind takes its satisfaction in the sheer operations of put-ting together new models of this or that per-fect society.3

Yet with Baudelaire, in the ‘death-loving idyll’ of the city, there is decidedly a social, and mod-ern, sub-stratum. The modern is a main stress in his poetry. As spleen he shatters the ideal (Splee et Ideal). But it is precisely the mod-ern which always conjures up prehistory. That happens here through the ambiguity which is peculiar to the social relations and events of this epoch. Ambiguity is the figurative appear-ance of the dialectic, the law of the dialectic at a standstill. This standstill is Utopia, and the dialectical image therefore a dream-image. The commodity clearly provides such an image: as fetish. The arcades, which are both house and stars, provide such an image. And such an im-age is provided by the whore, who is seller and commodity in one. 4

So far as a society producing under capitalist

conditions is concerned, the commodity has not become any cheaper, the new machine signifies no improvement. The capitalist is therefore not interested in the introduction of this new machine. And since its introduction would make his present and not yet worn-out machinery simply worthless, would make old iron of it, would mean a positive loss for him, he takes good care not to commit such a uto-pian mistake.5

What can undoubtedly be said is that the mod-el of society proposed by William Morris cer-tainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris. 6

He called it “Utopia,” a Greek word which means “there is no such place.”7

Utopia leaps beyond time..., using means whose existence was determined from the beginning within a given reality, it desires to achieve a perfect society: paradise, a fantasy dependent on its time.8

Utopia was not built for those who exist. It was built for those who come later. In order to cre-ate the new man it was necessary to destroy the old. 9

Utopia has two fields of possible realization. 1. Existing power, whatever it is, assimilates the means, the criticisms, and the project of uto-pia, therefore, in a certain measure, its goals, by rejecting them. But, if there had not been a fundamental modification of the existing

A Map toUtopia

1Rem KoolhaasUtopia Station

2Michel FoucaultOf Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

3Frederic Jameson Archaeologies of the Future: The De-sire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

4Walter Benjamin Paris: Nineteenth Century Capital

5Karl MarxCapital: A Critique of Political Economy

6Michel Houellebecq The Map and The Territory

7Quevedo

8Max Horkheimer

9Emilia Kabakov

order, a share of utopia nevertheless passed into reactionary praxis. 2. The revolution that destroyed the topos theoretically permitted a total realization of utopia, which becomes a (revolutionary) topos. In advance, one cannot determine what will constitute the revolution-ary praxis of this topos and what will remain theoretical and reintegrated in theory. The real-ized utopia is a new topos, which will provoke a new critique, then a new utopia. The installation of utopia passes through a (total) urbanism.

And that is the complete process.

Topos(conservative) —critique/utopia/revo-lution— urbanism / topos (revolutionary and conservative)/new utopia…etc. We call that Dialectical Utopia. Utopia is the phase of theo-retical construction, but it is absolutely indisso-ciable from the other planes and can only exist as part of dialectical utopia. It is only through dialectical utopia that we can elaborate, out-side and within the present system, an urban thought.10

Above and beyond this one could perhaps say in general that the fulfillment of utopia con-sists largely only in a repetition of the continu-ally same “today.”11

But I believe that we live not very far from the topos of utopia, as far the contents are con-cerned, and less far from utopia. At the very beginning Thomas More designated utopia as a place, an island in the distant South Seas. This designation underwent changes later so that it left space and entered time. Indeed, the utopi-ans, especially those of the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, transposed the wishland more into the future. In other words, there is a trans-formation of the topos from space into time. 12

In fact, when I think of the fair and sensible ar-rangements in Utopia, where things are run so efficiently with so few laws, and recognition for individual merit is combined with equal pros-perity for all—when I compare Utopia with a great many capitalist countries which are al-ways making new regulations, but could never be called well-regulated, where dozens of laws are passed every day, and yet there are still not enough to ensure that one can either earn, or keep, or safely identify one’s so-called private property—or why such an endless succession of never-ending lawsuits?—when I consider all this, I feel much more sympathy with Plato, and much less surprise at his refusal to legislate for a city that rejected egalitarian principles.13

Republics are very easy to found, and very dif-ficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the reverse. If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this: the only solution of

the problem would be a despotism of the wise and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method of generation—that is, by the marriage of the noblest men with the cleverest and most intel-lectual women. This is my Utopia, my Republic of Plato. 14

The entire life of a nation—beyond the formal sum of individuals standing for themselves, that is to say, living and struggling for their land, their place, their Da-sein—carries within itself (concealed, revealed, or at least occasion-ally caught sight of) men who, before all loans, have debts, owe something to the neighbour, are responsible—chosen and unique—and in this responsibility want peace, justice, reason. Utopia!15

A map of the world that does not include Uto-pia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is al-ways landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.16

One of the “proofs” of my practice of fetish-ist disavowal is the alleged “perverse paradox” of me rejecting utopias and then nonetheless claiming that today “it is more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open” - as if I did not repeatedly elaborate different meanings of utopia: utopia as simple imaginary impossibility (the utopia of a perfected harmonious social order with-out antagonisms, the consumerist utopia of today’s capitalism), and utopia in the more rad-ical sense of enacting what, within the frame-work of the existing social relations, appears as “impossible” - this second utopia is “a-topic” only with regard to these relations. Utopia as simple imaginary impossibility (the utopia of a perfected harmonious social order without antagonisms, the consumerist utopia of today’s capitalism), is not utopia in the more radical sense of enacting what, within the framework of the existing social relations, appears as “im-possible” - this second utopia is “a-topic” only with regard to these relations.17

We must therefore admit that the refusal to legit-imize murder forces us to reconsider our notion of utopia. In that regard, it seems possible to say the following: utopia is that which is in con-tradiction with reality. From this point of view, it would be completely utopian to want people to stop killing people. This would be absolute utopia. It is a much lesser degree of utopia, however, to ask that murder no longer be legiti-mized. What is more, the Marxist and capitalist ideologies, both of which are based on the idea of progress and both of which are convinced that application of their principles must inevi-

10Jean Baudrillard Dialectical Utopia

11Theodor W. Adorno

12Ernst Bloch

13Thomas More, Utopia

14Arthur Schopenhauer

15Emmanuel LevinasThe Other, Utopia, and Justice

16Oscar WildeThe Soul of Man under Socialism

17Slavoj ZizekThe Liberal Utopia: The Market Mechanisms for the Race of Devils

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tably lead to social equilibrium, are utopias of a much greater degree. Beyond that, they are even now exacting a heavy price from us. 18

“Now,” he said to me, “you are going to see something you have never seen before.” He carefully handed me a copy of More’s Uto-pia, the volume printed in Basel in 1518; some pages and illustrations were missing. It was not without some smugness that I re-plied: “It is a printed book. I have more than two thousand at home, though they are not as old or as valuable.”

I read the title aloud.

The man laughed.

“No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I’ve not read more than half a dozen. And in any case, it is not the reading that matters, but the re-reading. Printing, which is now forbidden, was one of the worst evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying de-gree.”19

The language of the Image-repertoire would be precisely the utopia of language: an entirely original, paradisiac language, the language of Adam -- “natural, free of distortion or illusion, limpid mirror of our sense, a sensual language (die sensualische Sprache)”: “In the sensual language, all minds converse together, they need no other language, for this is the language of nature.20

The poverty of a civilization which, avowedly destroying every kind of constrained to the most practical the basest necessities, those of the mechanical and industrial type! The pov-erty of a period that replaces divine luxury of architecture, the highest crystallization of the material liberty of intelligence, by “engineer-ing”, the most degrading product of necessity! The poverty of a period which has replaced the unique liberty of faith by the tyranny of mon-etary utopias!... 21

All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures. Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn’t mean ‘a good place’, it means merely a ‘non-existent place’) have been common in literature of the past three or four hundred years but the ‘favourable’ ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as well. (...)

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.22

“That’s it, Fukada was supposedly looking for a

utopia in the Takashima system,” the professor said with a frown. “But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in the world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is making mindless robots. 23

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxi-ety and struggle.24

All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous’. Everything has been set in or-der and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place.25

Life in More’s Utopia, as well as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social Systems, actual as well as imaginary. 26

If Communism is Utopia it is indescribable because Utopia, being no-place, cannot have any definite form. Every attempt to describe Communism necessarily functions as a projec-tion of the personal prejudices, phobias and obsessions of the writer or artist who tries to undertake such description.27

I would like to say (perhaps as a final thought), what conclusion can be drawn from this ex-hibition or even from this conversation. You could say this. While mankind still lives, each of us produces a utopia. Creating projects is as natural to man as the discharge of secretions. People always fantasise. We make plans, pro-grammes, compose something or other. But when the plans are implemented in reality, es-pecially by those in power, who have climbed quite high up the ladder of power, all these projects end in catastrophe, blood, destruc-tion or chaos. This produces a terrifying arc: projects are inevitably devised, but inevitably end in failure and death. The question arises: what to do with these projective and produc-tive components? The answer is: divert them, channel them into special ‘utopia-receivers’. Maybe build a ‘Museum of utopias’, or many such museums.28

18Albert CamusNeither Victims nor Executioners

19Jose Luis BorgesA Weary Man’s Utopia

20Roland BarthesA Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

21Salvador DaliThe Sectret Life of Salvador Dali

22George OrwellWhy Socialists Don’t Believe In Fun

23Haruki Murakami1Q84

24Christopher HitchensLove, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

25Georges Perec Species of spaces and other pieces

26Bertrand Russell

27Boris GroysInstalling Communism

28Ilya Kabakov

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PALA

CE

OF

FAIL

ED O

PTIM

ISM

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CollapseThey wanted to build one vast barn or hang-ar, new and shiny, a festive hangar. While we were already under the ruins, the remains of this barn, which had collapsed so spectacu-larly. We belonged to the end of the epic story. They started the epic and we ended it. We saw the results, whereas they saw only the project. They were at the start, peculiar overture of the symphony, denouement fell to our share.

—Ilya Kabakov

[ 10 ]

Palace of Failed Optimism

Every optimistic project deserves an afterlife. Instead of using the world as a canvas to draw the utopian picture, a special place could be designated where no dream can ever be dan-gerous enough. Fueled by eschatological fears and an addiction for new beginnings, the new palace was the concretization of a contem-porary tragedy; always contemporary, forever tragic. It forecast humankind’s eternal predica-ment: ideology as prognosis, orthodoxy as resistance. Faustian perversity in architectural form, the building was a structural Pandora’s Box,a cynical museum of philistinism; archi-tecture as ultimate conformism.

1 Ilya Kabakov, Dimitri Ozerkov, Interview with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, from Utopia and Real-ity: El Lissitzky, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Exhibition Catalog, (Moscow: The State Hermitage Museum, 2013), 61.

Every ideal project implies the destruction of other ideal projects. Since unfeasibility is its main feature, the ideal project must be impos-sible to achieve. The more absurd the propor-tion of the ideal project, the more powerful its strength. Because the history of the ideal project is written with blood and gun powder, someone finally decided to build a place for it. A build-ing where ideal projects could not only coexist, but where they could harmlessly flourish. The building implied the victory of humankind by defeating the ideal project. It was conceived af-ter realizing that failed optimism due to stagnat-ing idealism, led to the vanishing of ambition and therefore the salvation of the world as ‘we know it’; architecture as ultimate preservation.

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Every lost cause deserves a space to be studied, critically scrutinized. For every uncompromis-ing enterprise, there should be a space for col-lecting the ungraspable need to rule lives under a cosmic order of divine canon, in the form of black squares and electronic poems, of pyra-mids, and hexahedrons, of beautifully idealistic master plans and horrifically dreadful concen-tration camps. There should be a palace for the Lissitskys and the Kabakovs, for the Malevichs and the Tatlins, for the Moses and the Wrights, for the Le Corbusiers and the Hilberseimers, for the Haussmans and the Cerdas , for the Khidekels and the Chernikovs, for the Chiricos and the Palermos, for the Mendelsohns and the Konwiarz, but also for the Speers and the Iofans, for all the dream-makers and the night-mare enforcers, for the geodesic domes and the walled cities, for those who dream of an-thropological transformations and radical new beginnings . In order to protect humankind from itself a –very big—pavilion was built for the coexistence of opposition and divergence, where form is free of friction and ambition can be manifest as drawings and installations, as pictures hanging from the walls and models on pedestals. A temple for the glorification of disillusionment. A palace for the ultimate am-bition; architecture as ultimate absolutism.

PalaceGuided by the inexhaustible curiosity of des-peration, the palace for ambitious projects was said to be discovered by those willing to look for it. Like a Tarkovskian Stalker, instinct could drive the optimistic—or those curious enough— to this archival cemetery where leg-ends are truth, where the walls hold the gospels of dreamware. Walking away from a world with no more hope in hope, contours are drawn and paths crossed in the search for hope as failure, failure as hope. In the path to find this mystical totem that a series of pictures emanate. They are all so beautifully personal; so freshly sub-lime. Like postcards from an idealistic coun-tryside they display a journey of despair. An unfathomable open book; a tour guide to the utopia of utopias.

JourneyThe journey to that special place of places can be recalled as the consecration of an epiph-any where despair meets hope. It starts with the incursion of the intoxicating wilderness beyond any regional boundary. Past all the bucolic openness and virgin landscapes, far from the city, deep into the woods, the sharp edges of the pyramid rise awkwardly above the dense contour of the trees. The jagged figure breaks the homogeneous calm of the surroundings, as if announcing the mysteri-ous figure that waits. Beyond the stained bun-ker, an unusual silhouette can be spotted.

Mythical stories described it as a palace of projects; less optimistic ones as a cemetery of utopia. Its construction was fueled by fear of uncertainty. It started as a single block, cast in the slowness of weathered concrete, anchored monolithically to the ground. It was built like a hangar to store works which ambitions threatened to destabilize, as in the comforting predictability of daily life, the quotidian rhythm of the status quo. Work af-ter work, the first section was quickly filled. Projects were hung on the walls, displayed on pedestals. The walls were awash in a rain of light that poured through the slits in the ceiling. A second part was annexed, and as projects piled up, a third and a fourth section quickly followed. Every new hall rose above the previous one. Some sections sloping in ramps. Others cantilevered their flat slabs defiantly above the ground. The structure coiled always upwards. Cores with circula-tion systems scarcely supported the gravity defying structure. The concrete hovered with crushing weight, as if suggesting the severe density of its contents.

The building, if we can call it a building, grew bigger and bigger, rising like a promethean phoenix from the ashes of perennial con-formism. Spiraling under hermetic control, its every movement predetermined, calcu-lated, it reached seventy meters high. And today it keeps growing, filled with failure and extinguished ambition. A Museum of Lost Projects. A palace of failed optimism…

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VisionA white amaurosis, apart from being etimol-logically a contradiction, would also be a neurological impossibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the im-ages, forms and colours of reality, would like-wise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continous white white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colours, forms and images that reality it-self might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.

—Jose Saramago1

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1 Jose Saramago, Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Lon-don: Vintage Books, 2005) p.22.

Blindnessstraction reminiscent of the wall that left them confused or to the clearly defined urban ico-nography that can be recognized in the distance. Once drawn by the hypnotizing sharpness of symbolism, the protagonists are sequestered inside Atlas, an urban maze of unremarkable buildings overlooked by four pyramidal mono-liths, one of them containing what will make the wanderers discover—against their will—the last part of their journey.

Like Wall Stalker, Blindness is a graphic radi-ography of the fictional subconscious of archi-tecture. This time using pieces from Jan Gar-barek, Eberhard Weber, Agnes Buen Garnås, Rainer Brüninghaus, and Naná Vasconcelos as acoustic landscape the architectural narrative is built once again around twelve chapers / pho-tomontages that depict a journey to find mean-ing in architecture. The images evolve around fictional landscapes that evoke a new kind of blindness of symbolism and meaning.

Wall Stalker narrated the journey of three char-acters in search of the essence of architecture. After an exhausting odyssey from a city of icons to a mysterious wall, the wanderers were confronted with a blinding whiteness that not only blurred their hope to find what they were looking for, but put in question their true inten-tions.

Continuing where Wall Stalker left off, the plot of Blindness is resumed after the characters (now on a first person point of view) are envel-oped in the whiteness of the wall they initially came to see in their search for answers. Once stricken by a white form of agnosia resulting from the purging experience of the mystical wall, the characters are unable to tell if what they think they see is a memory of times past or unknown possibilities of new paths to be taken. Going through desolated landscapes, the characters face a dichotomy as to which path to take: the one that points to the uncertain ab-

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Agnosia It struck them by surprise… They found themselves trapped in a thick white mist where noth-ing they knew could be recog-nized anymore…

All their memories and certi-tudes had turned into uncertain-ties...

What was it they had come look-ing for… what was it that had driven them here…

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As they were lost in their con-fusion, they didn’t notice the shapes rising in front of their recovering eyes…Shapes so pure… Nothing like what they had ever seen be-fore… So close and yet so un-graspable… Then they felt it again… But this time out of the dazzling mist a clearer world… a better under-standing… They were left with a decision to make… Which path to follow? … What way to choose? …

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NOSTALGIASlowly regaining their full per-ception, they were stricken by visions of an uncertain past…

Where memories of fading dreams haunted their horizon…

There was no easy decision to make… Once the path has been unveiled it has to be taken…

Every struggle is a process of choice… And the inescapable loss of other possibilities…

As they advance deeper into the secrecy of their journey, they be-gin to make out a distant silhou-ette, looking almost as if await-ing their coming…

Have they been here before? Was it where they had come from?What they sensed seemed fa-miliar… but what they saw was unknown…

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ATLASOnce they entered the gates, they felt captive…

held in by the walls of the city…

There was no turning back…

They had attracted the attention to themselves in a place where nothing could belong…

Four shapes soared into the sky… Perfectly identical…

Bulk to their eyes…

Ideal geometries stripped of any intention other than their form…

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THE ICON Unconscious of the power that lies within them…

Guiding them against their awareness…

They were led to the source…

They were not prepared for what woul d come next…

As darkness became their only surrounding…

They couldn’t but wonder…Was this another purgatory…

… or a place with no exit?

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NarrativeEvery episode in a careful narrative is a premonition.

—Jose Luis Borges

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ManifestoThere is a form of architecture that aims at not getting built. An architecture on paper that should not be confused with paper architecture. An architecture based on pure statements in which real brick, mortar, and poured concrete are substituted by cut-and-pasted paper and narrative prose. An architecture about the failed and accomplished ambitions of buildings and master plans. An architecture that although fo-cused on the critique of this ambition, is not concerned with just any form of critique. An architecture not preoccupied with the expert’s view in newspapers, nor the common man’s comments on populist design blogs, nor the propaganda centrefolds of glossy magazines. An architecture that talks directly to architec-ture about architecture. An architecture of dis-ciplinary struggle.

This form of architecture focuses on the cri-tique of ideology, after recognizing that ideol-ogy – in its multiple incarnations – has infil-trated all spheres of architectural production, including the sphere of criticism itself. An architecture that through narrative texts and a vast repertoire of images (collages, photomon-tages, drawings, storyboards, comic strips, ani-mations) – creates allegorical stories that aim to expose the impasse and misfires of architecture in theory and practice. This form of architec-ture is simultaneously both theory and practice. It is theory as practice; critique as architectural project. This form of architecture is called Nar-rative Architecture and this is its manifesto.

CoupIn order to be an effective tool against the se-riousness of architectural discourse, Narrative Architecture relies on the subversive power of humor. It paints portraits that parody through irony and sarcasm the shortcomings of ideolo-gy. Narrative Architecture turns disillusion into mockery, disappointment into subversive cri-tique, pessimism into kynical reason.1 It drills the sharpness of critique into the ossified shell of hegemonic architectural discourse. Narra-tive Architecture is made out of blown-up im-postures. Its components are exaggerated char-acteristics innate to architecture. Architectural ambition freed from the pragmatic distortions of selective inhibition.

Although heroic, Narrative Architecture is not utopian. Its colossal monuments, impossible landscapes, and allegoric texts are real depic-tions mirroring the absurd scenarios imagined by architectural discourse. Narrative Architec-ture implies the sublime autonomy of theory. Narrative Architecture is pure theory under a magnifying glass. It is architecture as ‘endless supermarket’,’ continuous monument’ and ‘vol-untary imprisonment’. Narrative Architecture is the product of failed struggles and lost wars. It recognizes its inability to ‘win’ the fight. It feeds from past, present, and future failures. Because it learned that Team 10, Yona Friedman, and even artist-turned-urbanist Constant failed to break from the modernist discourse and the tools of its ideology, Narrative Architecture turns the tools of ideology against themselves.

Narrative ArchitectureA Manifesto

1 The concept of ideology critique applied here is borrowed from Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cyn-ical Reason (1983). According to Sloterdijk Kynicism, as opposed to modern cynicism (enlightened false consciousness), could be used as a strategy to destabilize the hegemomic powers of the establishment. Kynicism con-sists often of humor (through satire or irony) that attempts to highlight the impasse of absurd intellectual postures in order to carry out an ideology critique. For more see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minne-apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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If Modernism used every medium available – publications, architecture, urban plans, even CIAM as a platform to project its ideology – to shoot down the opposition, Narrative Architecture points the ideological guns back at Modernism. When an architectural posi-tion tries to consolidate itself as a hegemonic discourse and avoids “coming voluntarily to the table of negotiation” with its opponents, Narrative Architecture provokes “the polemi-cal continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means”.2 Narrative Architecture summons the dialectic properties of narrative in order to reestablish the conversation and expose the lies. If architecture promises a city made of glittering white concrete, Narrative Architecture casts the whole world in cement. If architecture renders buildings behind cur-tains of dense green foliages, Narrative Archi-tecture depicts a universe contained in a forest of skyscraping trees. If architecture decides to surf the waves of economic and social indiffer-ence, Narrative Architecture projects a world washed away by a neoliberal tsunami.

Narrative Architecture tackles every form of ‘enlightened false consciousness’ and reveals what lies behind the disguising masks of social impromptu and urban reconstruction; of the intoxicating greenery of certified sustainabil-ity and neoliberalist social philanthropy, of the aesthetic fantasies-turned urban oversimplifica-tions of parametricism and other momentary aesthetic trends; of the perverse reduction-ism of cartoonish diagrams and immaculate

renders.3 Narrative Architecture doesn’t shoot down the banners and slogans of architectural discourse, it reads them aloud against the ideo-logical wind so as to reveal their absurdity.

Post MortemBecause ideology presents concepts as their opposite – lies as truth, opportunism as re-sponsibility, self-consciousness as social con-sciousness – it has condemned Narrative Ar-chitecture to the sterile indifference of the museum wall, to the anesthetizing beauty of the art book. However, Narrative Architecture belongs on the drawing board, on the comput-er screen, in the architectural discussion. Nar-rative Architecture belongs to the present, to the schools, to the practices. Narrative Archi-tecture reveals the condition of the zeitgeist, now. If Ideology is doublethink, Narrative Ar-chitecture screams “down with Big Brother”. While ideology is watching you, Narrative Ar-chitecture watches it back. In a world driven by nonsensical statements, the most absurd of positions then becomes the clearest path. When everything seems to stagnate, Narrative Architecture keeps moving.

2“Enlightenment is reminded how easily speaking openly can lead to camps and prisoners. Hegemonic powers cannot be addressed so easily; they do not come voluntarily to the negotiat-ing table with their opponents, whom they would prefer to have behind bars.” (…) “Ideol-ogy critique means the polemical continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means. It declares a war on conscious-ness, even when it pretends to be so serious and ‘nonpolemi-cal’”. Ibid

3 Thus, we come to our first defi-nition: “Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness.” Ibid.

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IdealArt and People must form a unity.

Art Shall no longer be the enjoyment of the few but the life and happi-ness of the masses.

The aim is alliance of the arts under the wing of a great architecture.

—Arbeitstrat für Kunst, 1919

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ManifestoThe NCCA is the new epicenter for the crea-tion, study and support of Contemporary Art in Russia.

Enhanced by the dialectic between the city and architecture, between art and the public, be-tween landscape and building, the new NCCA marks a paradigm shift of international museol-ogy. By creating a building that invites and em-braces the public through its open spaces the new NCCA blurs the lines between building and context, between art and life.

The NCCA is not a building in the city; it is an extension of it. The autonomy and flexibility of its spaces, either enclosed, semi-outdoor, or completely outdoors, makes it the first archetype of Museum as City. The NCCA is not just a center for the arts; it is a building as Manifesto.

Form and Space Instead of emulating the typical boundary that usually separates museums from their surround-ings, the NCCA is an Open Museum. The form of the building is a direct response to both, the programmatic complexity of the center of arts, and the urban context that surrounds it.

The spatial strategy of the NCCA consists of a series of free standing volumes scattered through the ground level that structurally sup-port three hovering megaliths that interconnect in mid-air. The free standing volumes contain all the non-exhibition spaces. The interconnect-ing megaliths contain all the exhibition galleries.

Ground Level-Public SpaceThe openness resulting from the layout of the volumes on the ground level enhances a sym-biotic relationship between the NCCA and its surroundings as it draws the public coming

New NCCA

ГЦСИeither from the metro station, from the sculp-ture park, from the avia park, or from any sur-rounding building into a free circulation of open spaces that connect to public programs like halls, libraries, cafes and shops as well as semi-outdoor and open air terraces with space for public exhibitions, workshops and outdoor activities.

The NCCA brings art to the public by directly addressing its relationship with its urban con-text and surrounding landscape. An Open Museum, the building creates a promenade in which people interact with commissioned and acquired exhibition pieces featured on the pub-lic space and on the multiple terraces featured through the varying levels of the building, en-riching the experience of not only those who come to the museum but of the common pe-destrian that passes by.

The Volumes on the ground level also contain direct access for the creative residences, of-fice space, the collection depository and all the loading and logistic programs.

Exhibition GalleriesDirectly above the promenade, three intercon-necting volumes contain the permanent col-lection, space for temporary exhibitions, the children’s gallery and the art-club café. The exhibition galleries are accessible through three main lobbies on the ground level that are simul-taneously connected to the outdoor major pub-lic space or promenade.

Of varying heights and widths the hovering volumes provide spaces with the ultimate flexi-bility for exhibitions of multiple mediums, sizes and durations. The possibility of accessing the galleries through different points allows for the possibility of running several shows simultane-ously without any type of conflict.

NCCANational Centre for Contemporary ArtsMoscowArtist Residence, Office Space, Media Zone, Library, Children’s Zone, Collection Repository, Music Hall, Theater, Cinema, Lecture Hall, Multi Hall, Exhibi-tion Space (Permanent Collec-tion and Temporary Collection Space), Outdoor Exhibition Space, Cafe, VIP Cafe.International CompetitionFinalist2013

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SuprematistThe Suprematist element, whether in painting or in architecture, is free of every tendency which is social or otherwise materialistic.

—Kazimir Malevich

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RefugeI took refuge first in the Black Square. The ap-parently rational Euclidean form was my shelter from the real and common world. Everything was irrelevant for me from that moment. Eve-rything, that is, except the Black Square.

I was accused of aestheticism by those who called it abstraction, and failed to understand its scatological dimensions and potential for new creation. I was a formalist, claimed others to undermine the mission of my project. Some said I intended the Black Square to be the re-duction of the world ‘as we knew it’. But the world ‘as we knew it’ didn’t mean anything to me. The truth was that the Black Square was a door opening onto another world. The Black Square provided a different perspective when everything seemed so coherent, so crystal clear.Against all odds, I kept painting doors and win-dows that looked beyond our territorial bound-aries and beyond our geopolitical limits. Not in

Suprematist LandscapesTotems without Qualities

the literal sense off course. They were mostly black shapes with paint on canvases, wood pan-els, or any surface, which could be painted on. The others were not very enthusiastic about my pictures. They tried to conceal them, they tried to obstruct access to my doors and windows, blocking and distorting the view to the other side. Resistance came in from every direction and took every form. First it appeared in the shape of Boycotts; nobody came to my shows, editors were declining to publish my work. Then the adherents of ‘utility’ argued for art as the apotheosis of a copy of a copy of a copy of utilitarian life; figurative art became abundant, political paraphernalia and vernacular traditions saturated the shows.

Each year, their grip on my doors and windows would get tighter and tighter. They accused me of being an ideologue, an iconoclast. I was heretic, a menace to their system. They knew what my doors and windows implied, they were

iiKasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, trans. Howard Dearstyne, (Paul Theobald and Company, 1959).

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afraid of the new perspectives that could be opened. The vision I revealed didn’t fit their predetermined view of the world. For them everything has to have a purpose, history had to make sense, all had to provide an all-structuring logic.

For me objectivity—life as objects, life as ob-jective—in itself, is meaningless. Objects and their ideology are empty creations made up to draw speculative value and consolidate systems of control. Materialism with its infrastructures and superstructures, with its mechanical and metaphysical dialectics, with its natural and su-pernatural theological myths meant nothing, absolutely nothing to me. All the struggles, the wars, the piracy and corruption, the terror and bloodshed are vain attempts to restructure ob-solescence with outdated systems.

Absolute concepts, all encompassing world-views and grandeur narratives based on tradi-tional conditions and customs of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling, as I call it, is the determining factor. Everybody teach you, in-doctrinates you to think in a predetermined way. Feeling is replaced with preconceptions and prejudices. The world around us, chaotic and unstructured is forced within the inflexible boundaries of reason. The ungraspable be-comes measured and quantified. The absolute is depicted as figurative simulations. Pictures are drawn to imitate life. Life is turned into a com-modity, into an object of pure consumption.

The so called “materialization” of feeling in the conscious mind means the materialization of the reflection of the feeling through some realistic imitation of it in a plastic medium. In contradiction to this over-simplistic imitation I created totems, structures that were not meant to be the materialization of the feeling of the conscious mind, but moreover thought as sub-lime icons that were to outlast the ultimate im-passe we were living in. Transcendental bea-cons, these totems could potentially survive the environment in which they are called forth.

Lighthouses for a cataclysmic shipwreck, the totems are non-objective objects, architecture without program, the ultimate work of art. Not only they exclude any possible reference to ‘real objects’, objects of the ‘real world’, but they also have no objective. These totems exist in a world abolished of goals, a world freed from itself; they are the gate to the new world.

TotemsMy aim when I started to build these totems was to conceive something to cling on to when we finally reached the long awaited desert in which nothing can be perceived but pure feeling. These totems, or Architectons as I call them,

are beacons that guide us through the blinding newness of the new world. The Architecton is always subjective in nature; as it appears unin-telligible and disharmonious due to its non-ob-jective abnormality. If the Black Square was a window that looked into a landscape of empti-ness; the Architecton stands alone in desolation looking back at us through that window. The Architecton is anchored on the moist soil of a world of reasonlessness and pure feeling.

It took me years to outline the first Architecton. I painted it, drew it, and made schemes of it. It was the product of multiple attempts at finding formless form, shapeless shape. Since ‘Febru-ary’, I strived to deliberately abandon the objec-tive representation of my surroundings, either physical or immaterial, to reach the summit of the true ‘unmasked art’ and therefore, unleash life’s true potential. All the naturalism, figura-tion, analysis of my contemporaries were noth-ing more than dialectic methods that made no sense in determining the true value and the po-tential of the artwork, and therefore of the life that lie within it. Existence for them relied on the materialistic values applied by the subjective forces of the market, of politics and of society.The Architecton is transcendental, totally in-different to all the forces of the natural world, indifferent to reason and logic, to history and culture. The foundations of the Architecton were set on the ground of total negation. The structure was the concretization of the possi-bility of existential exceptionality, as supposing the radical negation of all the cultural, social, economical, political, traditions, conventions and restraints. The Architecton, like the Black Square, stood up while—and exactly at the same time— the world, the real world came crumbling down. The Black Square is ultimate nothingness, the Architecton is the ultimate icon that occupies this void. The Architecton is the formalization of emptiness within the full-ness of the world, an emptiness that devours, destroys, consumes, annihilates, evaporates all things, turns everything into nothing, and nothing into the ultimate everything. While the Black Square is the beginning of the ultimate purge, the Architecton is all that is left when the solid melts into air.

Society attributes to every work of art, to every piece of architecture the aim of making a social contribution, a political critique or at the very least an environmental observation. Its role is to improve society, to move things forward, although always using as a reference and as a starting point, reality, the status quo.

On the other hand, the Architecton’s unique role in the world is to be ‘unproductive’, to aim at not solving anything; this totem has the power to abolish the puzzle of the material-

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ist dialectic. The Architecton can only exist as in complete indifference of politics, context, and history. In fact, it can only exist in a world without politics, context or history. The Archi-tecton’s ultimate plan is tantamount to pure negation of the rules of our materialist lives. It breathes the existential air of eschatological nihilism. The Architecton is all that is left when there is nothing left.

In the world of the Architecton the real is not of any concern. There are no struggles or bat-tles to fight. The ultimate victory has been achieved by mean of the ultimate defeat. The world of the Architecton means the end of tragedy, no more two equally forces struggling to succeed. Pseudo reality will prevail, the real would be neglected. The new World will be a completely new world. There would be no past to be overwritten. A radical new beginning is all that is left. LandscapesAllow me to summarize how I got to these landscapes and what do I see through them.Although product of laborious years of explo-rations following the search for absolute ‘noth-ingness’, these landscapes are also the sponta-neous translation of values that were revealed to me first through the ancient medium of paint-ing. Just like the cosmic shapes of Suprematism were recorded with oils of the darkest hue, the Architectons –Suprematism experiments in space—were casted in the lightest of concretes. These landscapes implemented Suprematism’s paradoxical condition; a non-objective world consummated as objects.

Looming over grasslands and wetlands, or over mountainous topographies and smog washed nightscapes, the Architecton is there to re-mind us that this is a new world; a world freed from all the goals, principles and ideals of the previous world. Fulfilling Suprematist values, the Architecton reorients our gaze from the ‘nothingness’ of the Black Square back into the world in which this ‘nothingness ‘ emerged. If the Black Square directed our sight to a world beyond, the Architecton expands our field of vision to include the world it inhabits. While the Black Square opened our world through the ul-timate reduction, the Architecton multiplies and conquers the territories neglected, transformed by the Black Square.

In these landscapes no human figures can be spotted, and the few artificial constructions – except these totems- could just be abandoned remnants from a previous world. The sublime desolation of these scenarios announces that the Black Square was after all not just a mere aesthetic episode, but the representation of the first chapter of an ongoing epic.

Weathered concrete display the idiosyncratic decay of these totems. It becomes more and more difficult to tell how long have these bea-cons been there for. The grass grows uninter-ruptedly, the water flows without obstacles, and the skies shift from gradients of blue to the colorless blackness of the night revealing the orthogonal contours of the Architectons. A halo alters the otherwise homogeneous tran-quility of the night reflecting the light of the stars on the faces of these totems.

Like the Black Square, the landscapes are primi-tive marks of the new. They make us look be-yond the decorative nature of ornament and accept the central role of rhythm as the pure nakedness of absolute supreme feeling. These images carry on the fundamental concept previ-ously deformed under the inexorable forces of prejudiced rules and conditions, morals, ethics, ways of living, traditions, protocols, processes and mediums, technologies and theories. In a world without the quantifiable statistics and imposed values that determine our existence, we are left with Suprematist scenarios, with Landscapes of pure feeling, with Black squares as windows and doors, with Architectons as to-tems without qualities.

This essay contains excerpts of Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959), Boris Groys, “Installing Commu-nism” in Utopia and Reality: El Lissitzky, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Catalog of the Exhibition (St. Petersburg: The State Her-mitage Museum, 2013), and Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale, 2012).

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AlternativeOur generation has set itself the aim of work-ing precisely in accordance with commis-sion. But practice has shown that the work of true artistic worth can be created only when the artist sets out his own objective (the internal social commission). It would be a great pleasure to work on Mayakovsky, but where to find our palette, the modern, well-equipped printing house? Who will provide us with it?

—El Lissitzky

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CatalystCan architecture be an urban catalyst? How to regenerate an urban zone with interventions of specific forms of architecture?

By designing a space based on the three points of work, exhibit and live, the Housetelier cre-ates the ideal conditions to attract creative en-terprises that could enhance the urban context in the Dashila District both by contributing to its micro economy and by fomenting cultural and intellectual exchange through activities and events.

ProgramConceived as an architectural prototype for ur-ban re-development, the Housetelier integrates office space, gallery space, and living space in a seamless architectural strategy. By creating spac-es that are visually related to a central courtyard, but that could also be accessed independently,

Housetelier

the Housetelier could be used by up to three different tenants simultaneously.

The first level of the building situates at each of the four sides of the courtyard a lobby, service space (kitchen, storage, and restrooms), office space, and gallery space in a sequence of spaces that relate visually and spatially.

The Second Level of the building includes a residential apartment whose main spaces are ar-ranged around the central courtyard.

LanternTreated with a translucent polycarbonate main façade, the Housetelier looks radically neutral during the day, while it turns into a kaleidoscop-ic lantern during the night, inviting those who wander around to discover the contents of the building.

HousetelierDashilar District, BeijingResidential, Atelier, Exhibition SpaceInvited Study2012

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PaintingArchitecture represents people’s living con-dition. When I paint a building, I relate it to humanistic environment. Similarly, when I paint a Chinese building, I speak about Chi-na. It’s the same everywhere. Buildings sym-bolize and represent the culture of a country. They have significant meaning.

—Meng Zhigang

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WAI – The first part of your education was majored in design? Meng Zhigang – Yes. When I first tried to get into College to study oil painting, there were only a few places available. It was in 1994 and I was rejected twice by college, although my aca-demic result was good enough to get in. It was really hard to be accepted at that time for sev-eral reasons. So then I took the Environmental Art Design major, which is the closest to art among all the design majors. Moreover, it’s re-lated to architecture as well. Even if I couldn’t major in art, my goal was still to be an artist. During the time in college, I never stopped painting and learned from an oil painting professor in Guangxi Normal University.

Painting a Philosophyof Emptiness

How about the painting technique you use? Oil painting is a contemporary tool compared to the more traditional paint-ing medium here in China. Does this come from your educational background or per-sonal choice? Technique doesn’t matter that much. Art cares most about spirit. I will probably do images or installations someday. But my educational back-ground indeed affected my choice of oil paint-ing to some extent. I learnt traditional Chinese painting from childhood. However, in order to get in to college, I had to take an examination on western painting. This is quite ironic. Coming from an architectural background, we are interested in the connotation of buildings. What do the buildings in your

Interview with Meng Zhigang

Emptiness can be deceiving. Often used as an aesthetic strategy, many architectural pho-tographs and renderings depict spaces devoid of human presence. Magazines, books and design blogs have flooded us with so much minimalistic aesthetic paraphernalia that emptiness has been deprived from its dialectic potential. But, what happens when, as a counter strategy to this contemporary phenomenon, spatial emptiness is not pursued as an aesthetic end but a meditative process?

Meng Zhigang (b. 1975, Guilin) paints architecture to depict a state of mind. After work-ing with floating objects, and large scale religious and governmental buildings summon-ing a critique of ideology, his new works immerse the viewer into naked architectural interiors in a search for self-criticism. Stripped of furniture, decoration and ornament, his paintings show encounters between walls and corridors that lead us to philosophical introspection. Architecture as questions to be asked, Meng Zhigang paints self portraits as the empty spaces we (could) inhabit.

WAI discussed with Meng Zhigang the meaning of emptiness and the philosophy of the architecture of his paintings.

Meng Zhigang is an artist Born in Guilin in 1975. After gradu-ating from the environmental Design Department in Guilin University of Technology Meng Zhigang relocated to Beijing where he currently resides and creates his work. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions in 798 Daku Museum and To-day Art Museum in Beijing and in group exhibitions in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi, Hong Kong, Xian, Milan, Lon-don and New York.

Deeply rooted in philosophical foundations, the paintings of Meng Zhigang create psycholog-ical dissections of the space that surrounds us, from the fictional landscapes of his early works, to the ethereal architectural interi-ors and Institutional Buildings scraped of context and depicted in his recent paintings. Mixing percussion and martial arts to his endeavour, the work of Meng Zhigang is representational of a young generation of artists that promise to contribute to the al-ready rich Chinese art scene.

www.mengzhigang.com

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paintings represent?

Architecture represents people’s living condi-tions. When I paint a building, I relate it to hu-manistic environments. Similarly, when I paint a Chinese building, I speak about China. It’s the same everywhere. Buildings symbolize and represent the culture of a country. They have significant meaning. You are very interested in painting architec-ture as we can tell by your works. Is this in-terest more related to painting or buildings?

It can be seen as different stages of my artistic creation. I’m currently more interested in paint-ing. But in the future I want to create my own architectural space if I’m capable of doing so.

So painting is just a tool to represent what you are interested in? By means of painting and artistic behavior, my ultimate goal in life is to fulfill spiritual explo-ration and pursuit. Although my current occu-pation is a painter, I should be freer to work as a comprehensive artist. The purpose of art is about spiritual cultivation. Hence, for me, painting is a significant way of practicing, but definitely not an end. In terms of artistic ideology, eastern and west-ern cultures have different appeals. For exam-ple, apart from the buildings, these two paint-ings below both leave large blank areas. This is due to the Taoist thought of ‘act through non-action’, which is an inclusive concept frequently stated in eastern art and philosophy. The empty space in my paintings is a metaphor for time and history. Very often, architecture is a witness to history. As time passes, people are no longer the same. However, architecture remains as a historical trace. Therefore, through painting architectural space, I explore my own worldview. That is also the most important way of being responsible for my life.

Is the concept of ‘emptiness (Kong)’ then, very important in your works? If so, how do you represent ‘emptiness’ through painting architecture?

The concept of ‘emptiness’, which is important in both Taoism and Buddhism, has a strong link with the spirit of Chinese culture. In ancient times, the generation of almost all the civiliza-tions was related to religion. Yet the ideology of religion is often based on architecture. Eventu-ally architecture becomes the most significant symbol which carries ideology. History can be distortedly written. However, due to the exis-

tence of a genuine ideology and philosophy carried by architecture, the truth could never be covered up. I think this idea is rather fascinat-ing. Therefore, through painting architecture, I’m willing to reveal true history and represent the essence of cultural ideology. When using architecture as a metaphor for ‘emptiness’, I need to get rid of all the unneces-sary artificial decorations. If you put Hitler’s of-fice supplies in one room, it becomes an office with Nazi authoritarian style. Whereas if you put a tea table in the same room and decorate it with eastern items, it becomes a space with Zen style. When we apply the theory of Phenom-enological reduction and remove all the deco-rations, what does architecture originally look like? This is similar to the approach of inner pursuit in Chinese Buddhism. The meaning of space itself is the substantial expression of ar-chitecture. Yet, the emotion of architecture can be shaped by decoration. When painting the space, removing decorations is a requirement that comes from deep in my heart. Painting the exterior of a building represents my complex criticism towards history, while painting empty landscapes in the interior of buildings implies my inner demand. I need my heart to be pure. The real me is without decorations. That’s how I use architectural space to convey this concept. So the concept of ‘emptiness’ plays a dif-ferent role in painting the interior and the exterior of a building? Yes, it has some differences. The exterior of a building landscape is an objective entity, which stands for history and the reality we can see. The empty space in the interior landscape is like the cultivation (Xiu Lian) suggested by eastern religion. Like I said, the previous one is my perspective on history. And the latter is my requirement for my own personality, as well as being an intellectual. Apart from criticizing and questioning, I need to reflect on the solution. Therefore, as far as I know, learning to empty my consciousness is what I need to do first. Following the way of eastern philosophy, the wisdom behind subconsciousness would come naturally when you put yourself in the state of ‘emptiness’. I hope to gain this kind of wisdom to solve puzzles in my life. Is there any other particular idea that you want to represent in your works? Certainly. My works are not limited to history and personal cultivation. Some of them are my pure yearning and affection towards aesthetic sensibility. For example my painting “Azure Dream” is a retrospect of the color of sky in Ancient China. Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty was a man who loved art. One day, the

Spread p.66-67Meng ZhigangNo Theme Room87 x 133cmOil on Canvas2012Personal Collection

p.69Meng ZhigangNo Difference Space:Spectulative 87 x 133cmOil on Canvas2013Personal Collection

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weather was remarkably clear after raining. He was deeply captivated by the blue sky above the imperial palace. This is how he was inspired to paint the famous “Auspicious Cranes”. Later he even decided to use the color of the sky in firing porcelain. Since then, another tint called ‘azure (Tian Qing Se)’ appeared in China. Unfortu-nately, the beautiful sky of the old times does not exist anymore. Hence this painting reflects my nostalgia for the sky in the Song Dynasty.

In terms of creative diversity, I also really want-ed to cooperate with architects and accomplish some special ideas. This was another original issue at the beginning of my artistic creation. Some of my early abstract works are imaginary architecture schemes, including “Hovering Ar-chitecture”, “The Blueprint on Aluminum” and so on. The latter one is painted on an alumin-ium-plastic panel. Although these architecture plans are impossible to be realized, merely the design drawings and texts are already beautiful. So I have been thinking of collecting many of the architectural blueprints which could not be implemented. Moreover, they may also be transformed into painting in some way. From my point of view, those architectural concep-tions on paper well represent human imagina-tion. Blueprints themselves are so beautiful that, as artworks cannot be neglected.

So those two are basically utopian projects. What about this painting entitled “Furry Home”? What is the specific idea behind this? Anything to do with architecture?

This painting is like a fairy tale world, same as some of my following works. I think many buildings will eventually escape the earth grav-ity. So my ‘Dust’ series is about hovering ar-chitecture. I hope buildings will be suspended in the future. In the air, there is another micro world which is full of life. In this world, every-thing is floating like dust, including architecture and many other things. It’s worth mentioning that the word ‘dust’ also contains implicit mean-ing in Buddhism, which is very interesting.

Previously we have got a rough understand-ing of your works through some casual questions. Now let’s be more specific. So in general, what is the order of your painting process? This book is a collection of my paintings pub-lished on the occasion of my solo exhibition ‘I Am Not in the City’ in 2013. It looks back on my painting process in a flashback. Overall, my works have three main series. The earliest ‘Dust’ series is about hovering architec-ture and the future. The second ‘Mystical Fly-ing Objects’ series is my attitude towards reli-

gion and science. The last ‘Architectural Space’ series, including the exterior and the interior, shows the criticism of ideology and history in the contemporary context and the reflection on inner cultivation. I have had a free heart since childhood. In grow-ing older, I started to become curious about sci-ence, religion and the origin of life. Now that I’m an adult, I’m really interested in Chinese traditional culture. Then I start to reflect on the disappointing situation of current China. Looking through the history, I got to know that Chinese history and culture experienced a severe interruption after 1949. Politics largely affected the culture in a negative way. My pas-sion for art and culture has led to this concern for history. Later I figured out that choosing the wrong culture would greatly influence the course of history. So the reflection on culture should come first instead of history. However, only criticizing wouldn’t change anything. I ad-mire the scholar Hu Shi more than the literary Lu Xun, because the former has put forward his methodology after criticizing. In order to create a methodology, I need to make my mind empty and try to get the ultimate wisdom. So, to summarize, my early works are fantasies with el-ements of science fiction and religious features. And the subsequent paintings have a more re-alistic meaning in the context of contemporary art. Every professional artist must experience this process in terms of creative thinking. What’s more, my second ‘Mystical Flying Ob-jects’ series, which focuses on the relationship between religion and science, is the most im-portant stage in my painting. Chinese ideology is used to advocate a form of contrarian dual-ism or crude scientism argument, which tends to be oversimplified. Before, Chinese culture was diverse. Later it became singular and tends to argue the contradiction between religion and science. As far as I know, religion and science actually pursue the same destination for univer-sal truth. It’s not necessary to make them con-tradict each other. Religion and science have been guiding human being’s progress in differ-ent fields. Those hovering objects like airships with Chinese characteristics in my paintings combine the mystery of religion and the space in reality. This kind of spacious interpretation matters a lot to today’s Chinese people, since our minds have been imprisoned for too long. This work called “Flying Altar” is very special to me. It marks that I have achieved the transfor-mation from the second series to the third one. The Temple of Heaven is a piece of Chinese architecture specifically built for worshipping god. It has a remarkably strong relationship with both theology and eastern philosophy. I painted it into the shape of a flying saucer so

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as to integrate the divinity of architecture with a futuristic Sci-Fi sense. At this point, I have emotionally connected architecture, religion and science. Can you talk more about your psychological transformation in the process of painting? My psychological transformation is also the process of gaining a deeper understanding of art. I can put aside my social identity as an artist and go back to mental growth. I have been a fan of science and Sci-Fi liter-ary works since childhood. At the same time, I also like Neo-Taoism such as “The Book of Changes”, Constellations, etc. I actually never thought they are contradictory. Later I started to question the origin of humans in the per-spective of metaphysics. Once I knew that phi-losophy couldn’t solve all the puzzles, I moved to explore religion. In this process, I found that our early attitudes towards religion and science were quite ambiguous, which is different from the subjective and superstitious propaganda we find now. Both religion and science explore the same ultimate question of the universe. In an-cient China, our culture was rich and diverse. But in modern times it has become material-istic and monistic, which is rather distressing. There was a time when I felt the pursuit of art and ideals was totally absurd. I was desperate about this. Later I figured out that there might be aliens. The world as told by god and Buddha might exist. Humans may have soul. Since then, I have gained a diverse view about the world. Life is meaningful again. The choice of culture determines the direction of history. Art is too significant. It decides the future of everything. So art is an important tool in my life. It helps me develop a method for self-cultivation and improve my quality of life. All the connections and changes in my works are a must for my process of growth. So the process of painting every work helps you to reach your inner pursuit? Right. I have been trying to elevate the realm of my inner world through painting. People take different roads to seek the truth. For me it is art. It helps my heart become purer and simpler. Meanwhile the transformation of my works proceeds slowly as well. The process of artistic creation is a kind of inner cultivation. Do you feel that you are reaching this state of inner harmony?

Yes, I’m on the way.

What prompted you to paint this work

named “Monument” ? “Monument” was painted in 2008. I was fasci-nated by massive concrete architecture at that time. It feels like the existence of massive ar-chitecture implies people’s yearning for divin-ity and a mysterious world. Through painting along with reading on religion and history I finally have chosen eastern philosophy, which is easier for me to comprehend and get close to, to guide my artistic creations including depict-ing the solemnity and divinity of architecture. The recent ‘Nondistinctive Space’ paintings are much closer to real life. It’s also a result of my exploration by applying an eastern artistic con-ception. Are those interior paintings imaginary or painted from existing buildings? They are basically real architectural spaces. “A Corner at UCCA” shows a corner at Ullens Center For Contemporary Art in Beijing 798 Art Zone. I took a picture first before paint-ing. Sometimes I will look for picture materi-als of space and subjectively remove furniture and decorations to get the empty space I need. “Tranquil Life” is an exception. The landscape is in my friend’s home. I kept the furniture be-cause the beauty of minimalism deeply touched me. I don’t really need to remove anything in it. Sometimes empty architectural space looks like an abstract painting. However, in Chinese aes-thetic education, people pay too little attention to abstract aesthetics. Chinese people get used to appreciate narrative and story-telling paint-ings. But I prefer to view the combination of space and structure as an abstract image.

So the interior paintings have a form of ab-stract thinking behind them? Most Chinese people don’t really understand abstract painting. Even critics avoid explaining abstract art. Most of the time I tell people my works are just about simple and elegant spaces. I express the oriental Zen mood by the ‘emp-tiness’ of the minimalist environment: plain color tone and frozen time. So I could just hide my passion for abstract aesthetics in a specific space.

This painting “Untitled | Winter” shows the exterior of a contemporary house. Do you have abstract thinking in this as well? And does it indicate a new possibility in the ‘Architectural Space’ series? “Untitled | Winter” mostly represents the con-temporary Zen style Landscape. I appreciate its cement texture. It’s a modern building full of the beauty of modernity. The whole land-scape’s sense of ‘emptiness’ is full of oriental

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taste and the sequestered ancient Chinese land-scape painting. It meets the traditional Chinese Taoist aesthetics. This kind of elegant simplic-ity echoes the style of western minimalism. This is the last painting painted before my solo exhibition at Today Art Museum in 2013. One of my projects for next year is to continue and improve this series of works.

You mentioned that you may want to go back to paint more imaginary works after the ‘Architectural Space’ series. What are your current works like? What’s the main guiding concept? Yes, I’m planning to paint some abstract works. But currently I’m still working on a sub series of the interior paintings called ‘Nondis-tinctive Space’. Taoist thoughts have a profound influence on my artistic creation. The aesthetic notion of “Tao” exists throughout the Chinese cultural history. However, nowadays lots of ordinary scholars misunderstand the core values of Chi-nese culture, especially traditional culture and art. They usually think that the ancient Chinese intellectual (Shi Da FU), along with the artists, is a group of people who tend to escape society. In fact, they have been using their own ways to create a perfect world on the basis of Tao-ist concepts in the field of art. This is the core spirit and content of the values of Chinese art.

I have been exploring this idea. In the light of Chinese Taoist and Buddhist point of view, only when people put their mind in a state of ‘empti-ness’, can the ultimate wisdom emerge from the depth of their soul rather than logical thinking. So I hope my artistic experience follows the same rule. It’s worth mentioning that, in Chi-nese traditional culture the word ‘wisdom (Zhi Hui)’ has two characters, respectively “Zhi” and “Hui”, which have different explanations. ‘Zhi’ is on behalf of the knowledge which could be acquired by learning and logical thinking, while ‘Hui’ means the sophistication of the soul, that is, the most fundamental insight in subcon-sciousness. If interpreted in a modern way, the first primary wisdom is based on brain thinking. And the second more advanced wisdom is deep inside and beyond thinking. This advanced wis-dom is like ‘love’. But love is not the most ap-propriate explanation. Being an artist as well as an intellectual, you have got a deep understanding of Chinese culture and philosophy. Which philosophi-cal thought or theory has influenced you the most? Can you explain more about how Taoist values are reflected in your works?

The Taoist concept of ‘emptiness’has influ-

enced me the most. However, this concept is only the beginning of one’s personal cultiva-tion. Regardless of Buddhism or Taoism or Confucianism, there is an ultimate goal of hu-man cultivation that will meet the final moral standard. After that your soul will be set free and the essence of the world will come out. Those exceptional functions mentioned in my-thology are only small episodes on the way to reach the moral standard, but not the ultimate goal. Yet, the premise of meeting this standard is to empty the secular mind.

The most advanced moral concept in east-ern culture is getting closer and closer to the ultimate law of the sky, the earth and nature. To achieve this goal, one needs to block the secular values in sociology and forget the con-ditioned reflex of the physical senses. This is like the reduction method found in Husserl’s ‘phenomenology’, as I mentioned earlier. Give up the outer label in order to explore the actual essence. Sometimes eastern wisdom and west-ern wisdom could arrive at the same destination through different ways. Hence, I believe the purpose of art is about spiritual cultivation. The quintessence of ‘Tao’ explores the essence of nature. The aesthetics of eastern art is to reveal the modest and unadorned beauty of nature, so as to guide the meaning of life.

When painting, I like to apply the sense of form in architecture and space to take away col-or and structure. And the virtual gray space cor-responds to my inner experience of emptiness. The process of painting allows me to achieve absolute quietness. And through artistic behav-ior, I will keep seeking the plain beauty of the great ‘Tao’.

We can tell that you are looking to thorough-ly understand what architecture, buildings and space mean and all the different philo-sophical questions related. From the ideol-ogy of “Monument” to the pure essence of the ‘Architectural Space’ series, all your works have deep explorations. Have you ever been strongly affected by any figure, architect or artist?

I haven’t been strongly affected by any specific figure. Yet I’m mostly inspired by my reading experience on different cultures. Reading helps me change the misreading of western culture and start to study Chinese traditional culture by myself. Then I could establish the standard of judging the culture. And based on this standard, I can understand architecture, painting and other cultural phenomenon better in order to guide my artistic creation. This is a long journey to rediscover Chinese traditional aesthetics. It’s a bit sad that China’s education system is quite strange. From childhood, we start to learn the

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so-called modern value system from the west, which is far away from Chinese traditional val-ues and also westerners’ understanding of their own culture. Then in adolescence we contin-ue to read western philosophy and humanist knowledge. However, we have to experience mostly Chinese social occasions in real life and follow norms and habits of traditional family ethics. The majority of people will eventually develop kinds of weird life values which are neither eastern nor western. And they will find that all the mixed knowledge will not be able to solve many of the problems in real life after they step into society. Then, what on earth are to be the similarities and differences between eastern and western culture? So I need to sort out many ultimate values to guide my life and artistic creation. Otherwise I probably would be lost in the complicated and pluralistic mod-ern life like many others.

Sometimes, looking into our own culture from an outsider’s viewpoint can be a good approach. I really appreciate a Japanese phi-losopher named Kakuzo Okakura. Through many years’ research, he has summarized the Chinese culture into three main aspects by us-ing the simplest words. Confucianism deals with the social relationship in real life. Taoism guides for artistic creation. Buddhism explains life and death. The theory of ‘Tao’ is mainly put forward by two ancient scholars Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Taoism emphasizes that hu-man beings should follow the natural law of ‘non-action’ and worship the most unadorned beauty of nature between heaven and earth. Taoism’s biggest secret is the unity of human and universe. Human and nature cannot be separated. ‘Tao’ is almost god itself. It is the most fundamental operation mode of universe along with scientific law itself. Taoist theory has always been the core content to guide Chinese art. You can’t understand Chinese art without it. This understanding is also a great help for me to work in the art field. Le Corbusier is one of my favorite architects and artists. He first aroused my interest in mod-ern art and architecture and also broadened my cognition on artistic identity. In recent years, the books of some sinologists, such as Jonathan D. Spence and James Cahill, have deepened my di-verse interpretation on Chinese culture. Is there any direct reference from an archi-tect in your works?

One of my paintings called “Youth Commu-nity” was inspired by Le Corbusier. After the Second World War, he invented this kind of concrete slab structure with the purpose of building many low cost buildings in a short time to meet post-war young people’s living re-

quirements. His subjective intention was to use this new architectural style to eliminate class di-visions in any residence. Since the 1950s, this kind of building structure has been widely used in China, but only for senior cadres. It’s quite ironic that a kind of building designed accord-ing to civic consciousness by an excellent archi-tect can be turned round to become a privilege under another national ideology. So this paint-ing shows my attitude of criticizing political re-ality and history.

We can notice your unusual sensitivity to-wards architecture, which is not very com-mon even among architects, especially after we have seen all those money driven prac-tices nowadays. What’s your opinion on this phenomenon?

I opened an environmental art design company once with another two friends. So I’m lucky to have experienced two professional identities re-spectively in design and art. I can understand better how painting. Architecture or business can have an effect on art through different an-gles. Social phenomena changes all the time. A good social environment needs to be led by a positive cultural form. The operation of mod-ern society fairly depends on the involvement of commercial activities. When used properly, commerce does not affect the creation and communication of art. Commercial civiliza-tion is the main feature of modern society. The wealth itself doesn’t have good or evil proper-ties. For instance many Hollywood blockbust-ers will also tell stories about love and courage in order to touch people. Hiding universal val-ues in popular culture is very smart, which is also a good place to learn from the west.

Apart from the ancient philosophy that in-fluences your life and works, how can you explain the contemporary feature of your paintings? The contemporary feature in my works is mani-fest in my renewed study and understanding of Chinese traditional culture. I use art to criticize and reflect on our history and reality. This is the obligation of intelligentsia and artist, as well as the meaning of existing.

It’s important to know that 1994 was a key turning point for Chinese culture. The new re-gime has chosen a completely different cultural strategy. In the 1960s, during the Cultural Revo-lution, many Chinese intellectuals were perse-cuted to death. Being well-educated became a crime. Due to political unrest and the death of older intellectuals, the contemporary artists born in the 1950s and 60s have missed the op-portunity to learn and inherit Chinese culture. Their ability and social values are embodied

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in winning our part of the social discourse in the 1980s, and they can put forward some new ideas and study certain modern western culture. But the problem is that they are not as well-educated as the older generation of intellectuals during the period of Republican China whose worldview is relatively complete. They have re-ceived education on Chinese traditional culture as a child and later studied abroad to see the western society. After the culture rupture caused by the Cultural Revolution, a lot of young intel-lectuals and artists now start to take an interest in Chinese traditional culture again. Because of the rich information in contemporary society, it’s relatively easy to learn about Chinese culture and understand western universal values in a more comprehensive and modern way. Con-temporary young artists have a broader horizon than the previous generation.

In the future, China’s young artists and intel-lectuals will become more important in the course of history. They will have to cross the cultural rupture caused by modern Chinese his-tory and repair our incomplete cultural context. Each generation has their own mission in their own time. This is a mega trend. My individual pursuit is close to this direction as well. In the process of cultural and historical evolution, as part of an intelligentsia, I would be alert to the change of current affairs and also try my best to create in art.

How do you consider the social function of your paintings?

The origin of the ancient painting itself has a direct causality with social moralization. When developed into art, art records human history. Then humans also develop their cognitive abil-ity of thinking through art. I hope to keep im-proving myself in real life and ultimately influ-ence society in a positive way.

When I was little, I deemed that science would be more useful than art, because science has been changing people’s way of life in terms of material and technology. Yet art is only a kind of social activity for self-cultivation. Later I get to know the importance of art after learning history. Actually the progress on culture and art promotes all the progress on science and tech-nology. China is different from other countries because we have chosen different politics and culture. The present social situation is deter-mined by the selected culture. Criticism of his-tory always starts from the cultural and artistic field. A healthy culture can create an enlight-ened political life. While an ignorant culture can put back the clock of history. Although, on the face of it, the intelligentsia’s power has been weak, the evolution of the course of history is invariably promoted by them.

“The Theory of the Origin of Human Inequal-ity” by Rousseau directly caused the French Revolution. Hitler’s misunderstanding of Ni-etzsche led to the destructive Nazi regime. Art influences the society in a concealed but power-ful way. I hope to touch the essential wisdom of oriental philosophy and balance people’s lives in this frenetic world by painting in a simple and plain way. As an old Chinese saying goes, ev-erything depends on human effort. I can only try my best to be responsible for my own life. However, if I could make the world a better place to live in, why not? Can you foresee the developing path of your artistic creation? Are there any new di-rections you want to take? I hope my future works would try more new materials and have a richer means of expres-sion. It takes time though. There is also a pos-sibility to combine painting with installation art. Maybe there will be more space creations. I have written down some relevant plans in my working journal. Hope they can be put into ef-fect soon along with new exhibitions.

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WAI– We would like to start with your back-ground as a curator. There is certain trade-mark in your work, like in the Archizines touring exhibition, where you look at young upcoming creatives, not necessarily archi-tects or urbanists. You also have been doing research and co-curating projects, about architecture in latin-america, you have your pieces of the London underground for the New-York Times. Do you have a special in-terest in emerging talent?

The Architecture of Curating

Elias Redstone- I guess I’m interested in new ideas, new talent, and what is coming next. For me when things get too established it becomes something else. Obviously it’s not saying that only new things are good, but I see myself as a curator to bring people’s attention to things that may have been overlooked or not yet ap-preciated.

About your education, you studied in the London School of Economics, City Design and Social Science, which is something that

Interview with Elias Redstone

Archizines is perhaps one of the exhibitions of contemporary architecture that has trav-elled the most around the world. Exhibited in cities that range from London, to New York, to Buenos Aires, to Melbourne, Tokyo and Shanghai its level of influence on gen-erations of emerging architects and students around the world it’s still up to be measured in years to come.

What started as a personal interest in printed media with a focus on architectural and urban space, developed in a full documented exhibition with more than a hundred inde-pendent and alternative publications from more than five continents.

The exhibition was conceived by Elias Redstone, a London and Paris-based curator, edi-tor, and author, whose project Archizines lines up in a constellation of other projects that includes curating the installation Hairywood and the photography exhibition I Shot Norman Foster at the Architecture Foundation’s temporary Yard Gallery, and authoring Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography, to be published by Phaidon in 2014.

WAI discussed with Elias Redstone the curiosity and instinct that drives the architecture of his curating.

Elias Redstone is an independ-ent curator, writer and editor based in London and Paris. He is the curator of the AR-CHIZINES archive and touring exhibition, the editor-in-chief of the London Architecture Diary, an exhibitor in the British Pa-vilion at the 2012 Venice Archi-tecture Biennale and the author of Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography, to be published by Phaidon in 2014.

Previously, Elias was the curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, hub curator of the 2008 London Festival of Architecture and sen-ior curator at the Architecture Foundation, where he worked from 2003 to 2010. During this period he initiated a programme of exhibitions, installations, events, film screenings and inter-national exchanges with emerg-ing and established architects, artists, designers, photographers and filmmakers. He curated the Architecture Foundation’s tem-porary Yard Gallery – including the award-winning installation Hairywood and photography exhibition I Shot Norman Fos-ter – and the Closet Gallery, con-ceived by artist Simon Fujiwara.

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Elias has delivered projects in partnership with the Architec-tural Association, Barbican, Brit-ish Council, Center for Archi-tecture NYC, Design Museum, MoMA, Southbank Centre, Tate Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum. He has edited pub-lications for Sternberg Press and Bedford Press, acted as a contributing editor for Arena Homme Plus and GQ Style, and written for a number of interna-tional magazines including New York Times T Magazine, Wall-paper, PIN–UP and Monument.

Elias holds an MSc in City De-sign & Social Science from the London School of Econom-ics and was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2008 to research contemporary architec-ture in Latin America.

www.eliasredstone.com

is somehow related to our urban environ-ment. Do you think that this reflects in the way you curate or in the topics you are more sensible about?

Yes, a lot of my studies were about the urban experience and not necessarily about designing architecture, but considering the impact of ar-chitecture on people. Since I didn’t study archi-tecture, I guess I will have that perpetual kind of outsider gaze on the world of architecture. It’s something I’m passionate about and can be curious about without necessarily having the burden of being an architect myself.

When you create all these curatorial experi-ences, do you try to relate them to one and another, behind a possible narrative? Or do you have different agenda for each one of the projects? Each project is totally separated. I consider and treat each project individually. At the same time, I made a website for my work a few years ago and it was the first time that I stopped to look at them and starting to see themes emerging that I didn’t even noticed at the time. You mentioned working with younger people, architects, de-signers or artists. I think they are themes emerg-ing but I think that with any kind of creative practise it’s only natural and you are drown to certain things.

That’s not to sound like I have career plans or that I am manoeuvring projects to get to some place, it’s quite nice not necessarily knowing what’s coming in the future but just being in a position where I can research and develop proj-ects that I’m really passionate about.

In that same context, do you feel that one curatorial project influences another cura-torial project that is not necessarily related?

Yes, for example photography is a big interest for me. I’m very passionate about photogra-phy, and it is very important for me specially as looking at cities and architecture. For example, two projects I am currently working on at the moment: I’m publishing a book that is a survey of 50 contemporary photographers who were looking at architecture. I’m also curating an ex-hibition in London at the Barbican that is look-ing at key figures from the 1930’s until today which have developed this relationship between photography and architecture. It is two very dis-tinct separated projects that are looking at the same sort of discipline, from different angles and from different time periods.

Do you feel that you are growing closer to architecture with every project? Because being interested in the urban phenomenon

not necessarily guaranties a direct relation-ship with architecture. Some people see the city completely as a system of infrastruc-tures and empty spaces. But we feel that, from our outsider’s perspective, that you have some affinity with architecture also.

I do love it, that’s why I do what I do. But at the same time, I can’t tell you that I will be al-ways working with architecture. There are other things that interest me and I still have many years ahead so it may branch off away of archi-tecture at some point. In that moment it’s the focus of everything I’m working on, because I still have a lot to look at to resolve myself, things I am interested in and curious about and want to understand. But I want my work to in-spire me so as long as it does that and as long as architecture has something to offer then I will keep on looking at it, but maybe one day I will move to something else.

When you realize these curatorial projects, do you have a theory or a hypothesis you want to prove with the project? Or is it mostly about interest? We can see how the ideas can change throughout, for example this exhibition has been travelling so much that we are sure a lot of ideas must have changed in the process. But other projects that you have developed, are they about the-ories, ideas or more curiosity?

Curiosity and instinct. I am a strong believer in sort of eager feelings for something, so when I teach curatorial students I try to encourage them to be instinctive. What feels important to address now and then look at everything around it. If you are not instinctive around something, you are not going to have the passion for it. Some people will start with a load of research and then narrow something down, refine it. I will start being instinctive about something, being curious about it, and exploring it further to see if there’s something interesting there. I guess that’s just the way I work.

Does you curatorial methods change a lot from project to project?

Yes they have to. I think that’s something very interesting especially when you are curat-ing something. When you are curating around architecture every project is so totally different. You are thrown at deep end every single time. Working on something like Archizines is totally different than working on putting a photogra-phy exhibition together. They have different compositions, different relationship that have to be built, different subjects matters that you are looking at.

Sometimes you have to make it up as you go,

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but that keeps it exiting, especially when you are running a space, like when I used to work at the Architecture Foundation. There was no one sort of model for doing a show. Sometimes you just invite an architect to do something and respond to a space, and you hand in over a lot of creative control to that person. Other time it would be a group exhibition and you are re-ally working through the ideas and drive them at every step of the way.

Do you find a difference in the type of challenges you are confronted with dif-ferent types of exhibitions? Is it more challenging to deal with the architecture exhibitions or with contemporary art or photography?

Every show has its own challenges I can tell you! In the end no, it shouldn’t matter. It’s a process, curating. I start with an idea but then I have to work through it, it doesn’t necessar-ily matter what the subject is. It’s about having an interest in presenting an idea to the public and thinking about how you do that and how do you work through that process. I am more interested in not defining that from the start but working at it organically.

You talked about Archizines sort of evolv-ing, that was fantastic. The first thing I did was make a website for it and I changed it a lot and I play around with it. I learned about how you can sort of talk about all this material. It was really nice working this way, which was so much more fluid than developing an entire show, press and print, put it on the wall and that’s that! It was a much more organic process.

At the moment the exhibition I’m curating at the Barbican, I’m actually curating in collabo-ration with one of the curators of the Barbi-can Centre; it’s the first time I’ve co-curated a show and I have to admit I love it. It’s brilliant; it’s a totally different way of working. It got me excited about curating again. It’s nice. Be-ing a solo curator on a project you have the freedom to make every decision, so it becomes a very personal work, but there’s something very beautiful about going through this pro-cess with somebody else. Sharing the ideas, make a joint show and what you end up with is less predictable form the start. It’s two minds coming together. I’m really looking forward to walking through a show, which will appear as very sort of clear project to the world. I can walk though with my co-curator and we could talk and break down the decisions. It will just be nice to see a show we will have brought to the world together.

Once the shows are in, is it very impor-tant for the next show, for example, the

feedback of the people that go to watch the projects, the exhibitions?

Feedback is very important. I always suggest to student curators that if they are putting on an exhibition they should spend some time in the gallery. So not necessary feedback from the form, but sort of like seeing how the people experience it and how they respond to it.

I wouldn’t say that the feedback of one show will directly inform the other. You will take on board and learn from it generally. Each project is often very particular so you just have of sort learn from your mistakes generally but I don’t think that it necessarily directs the sort of the content or ideas of another project.

The Archizines exhibition is quite unique because it started with your website. That also means that beyond having the exhibi-tion, you will always have a more perma-nent statement. Do you also use this kind of media for different shows you are do-ing? Like a virtual platform? What about the catalogues for your shows? How do you see this relationship with time, between an exhibitions and leaving a more permanent trace of these projects?

Catalogues are very important; I only learned that from experience. Exhibitions are so tem-porary and they respond and reflect to a specific and special moment in time. That’s wonderful, every one exhibition is of a time and of a place. If you did this exhibition 10 years later it would be a different show with a different meaning to it. That’s so beautiful about it.

So a catalogue or a document is an additional media and content if people want to dive deeper into the show. Off course this permanent side of it is important. But often when you are put-ting up a show you are so busy with the physi-cal content that sometimes a catalogue is left behind, especially if there’s not funding for it.

At the same time I think that the Internet is also very interesting as a sort of alternative space to work with. I don’t think it replaces an exhibi-tion per say but for example in 2006 I did an online project for the Venice Biennale. It was collaboration with myself at the Architecture Foundation with Paola Antonelli at the MoMa in New-York, to collaborate. It was this two in-stitutions coming together to document all the activity and energy that was taking place in the Biennale and broadcast it out.

Unless you are there, it’s very hard to experience just from the kind of reviews in magazines. That project was totally online and we were in-vited. It was called the Venice Super Blog and

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it was a super blog. We invited many voices, ar-chitects, critics, and academics who could con-tribute and just sort of capture everything that was going on around. It was phenomenally suc-cessful. Everyone that was involved, it felt like quite a landmark project. At that time, people were not using the Internet this way. People used to blog in but there was no twitter, there was no immediacy, no group voice happening, so it pre-dated all that. It was live in the media and it was instinctive, and it wasn’t necessarily planned ahead to how it was going to turn out or what we were doing. I think that sense of energy, perhaps naivety really came through and I think people really enjoyed that. At the same time, I’m not even sure that the website even exists anymore, because you know if you don’t maintain it, it disappears.

So even those different forms of exhibitions and works can be as transient, the same with catalogues if you don’t keep a copy.

Going in the same direction, talking more about how you see and you overview the relationship with this alternative mediums, that can complement or even challenge an exhibition. Do you see a different approach taken to reach people, or should there be new way? For example, the Archizines ex-hibition is very pedagogical; it’s almost like an educative tool for the public, for the ar-chitects, for everybody. Are they other ways to broaden even more the audience?

I’m sure. Every project or every exhibition needs to be considered and thought through for what must be the most appropriate tool to achieve the aims. With exhibitions, it is perhaps not always appropriate to have a catalogue or a

website. You need to consider that case by case on project bases. One problem when you are looking at architecture projects, there’s so many exhibitions that should just really be a book, they don’t need to be on a wall in a gallery, it doesn’t add anything, or bring anything else that something that should be read.

But for most of the exhibitions is about having the good resources and how you can at the best utilise them. What’s the most you can get from an exhibition? I try and use exhibitions as a space to generate ideas and content as opposed at just being a presentation that already exists. Through many of my projects, it provides op-portunities for new art to be developed, for ar-chitects and artists to develop their practice in new and different ways.

So in that sense a curatorial project is a cre-ative project in itself. Because sometimes people misread curating as being an insti-tutionalized process or responsibility to dis-play creative projects.

I don’t think there is one way of being a cura-tor. There is a traditional important role of the curator to be caring for materials and present it, and look after collections and things like that. There’s always a certain amount of creativity in-volved. But the extent to which the curator will drive a project will depend on the show and on that curator.

So in your case, you see it more like a cre-ative project.

I definitely believe that curating is a creative process. If it was purely administrative role I wouldn’t be interested in doing it.

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WAI: Siteless was published in a critical year. 2008 not only marked a rupture with the current financial system and sent com-plete countries into an economic debacle that had direct effects on architecture, but served as a symbolic closure of an extended decade that saw an explosion of architec-tural imagery. Mass media either as printed press or virtual bytes stimulated a prolifera-tion of building icons (real or virtual) that seemed to appear everywhere in the world. Was the publication of Siteless motivated by a specific event or phenomenon in archi-tecture? Or, was it more of a personal re-flection on the possibilities and limitations of the discipline? Could you tell us more about how Siteless came into being?

François Blanciak: It would be somewhat mis-leading to state that this book was specifically written, or rather produced, as an anticipation of the events of 2008, or even that it was meant to trigger such a debacle. But it is true that the

The Possibility ofSitelessness

further we get from that publication date, the more I realize the symbolic value of this book, its implications, and the relevance of its con-tent with regards to the trajectory of archi-tecture, both as a practice and as a discipline, since then. To a point that makes me think that Siteless might have been an agent in the shift-ing of architectural paradigms which we are now witnessing. That so little has happened in this field since the publication of this book is both preoccupying and exciting. This being said, it took about five years to develop the book into a thorough publication proposal, and the manuscript had typically to be sent a year before its publication date. So one might talk about a coincidence, but the intentions which underpinned the book, and its effects — the flooding of the market of form that a thousand previously unpublished building shapes consti-tute — might also be at stake in the subsequent demise of architecture. A friend of mine in New York once told me: “With this book, you killed architecture.” I think what he meant was

Interview with François Blanciak

Architecture reached a critical point in 2008. While the crash of Lehman Brothers Hold-ings Inc. and Wall Street could have marked a precipitated end to a decade of vertiginous architectural production, that year also brought the opportunity to contemplate and re-flect upon the state of architecture in the 21st century.

Also in 2008 François Blanciak published a book titled SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms. While its one thousand and one hand drawn buildings with singular shapes seem to sug-gest a theory of multiple design directions, a closer look at the publication reveals an architecture that achieves coherence through its sublime pursuit of formal exploration.

Either a symptomatic diagnosis of a truncated decade, an epiphany of pure creative in-spiration or a gospel of architecture for years to come, Siteless belongs to those works of architectural intelligence that are valuable either as isolated sparks of visceral inventive-ness or as perverse narratives of sharp disciplinary criticism. Like Pure Hardcore Icons, Siteless focuses on the relationship between pure form and architecture. WAI discussed with François Blanciak the underlying potential, the limitations and the possibility of Siteless architecture.

François Blanciak is a French ar-chitect and Lecturer in the Fac-ulty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Prior to completing both his Master’s and PhD at the Uni-versity of Tokyo, he has worked for architectural firms in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and New York, with ar-chitects including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman. His work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Venice Architecture Biennale. François has served as an invited design critic at Rice University, and has lectured at Tunghai Uni-versity, the University of Michi-gan, and Tsinghua University. He is the author of SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms (MIT Press, 2008).

www.blanciak.com

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that this series of forms had the potential to impede architects, rather than to enable them, by appropriating a large number of formal concepts all at once, thus short-circuiting the endless search for formal complexity that you refer to. So there was also this desire to some-how exhaust the potentialities of architectural form, in order to transcend this very issue, not only for architecture, but also for me, in order to be able to focus on other points of inter-est within this field. Authors often feel that they publish what they publish to simply evacuate their mind, to paradoxically get rid of what they set out to exert control over. I can sympathize with this condition. However, I shall stress that this book is not merely aimed at being destruc-tive, or obstructive. It is in fact essentially meant to be more of a tool to trigger the imagination of the reader, a way to store one’s creative im-pulses, rather than a means to display an array of morphological ideas to be copied, as some architects might have misinterpreted.

In the introduction of Siteless you stated regarding your buildings that “although a number of these figures constitute mere criticisms of recurrent paradigms in the discipline, most aspire to innovate a more diverse future; to the point that many re-quire construction techniques not yet avail-able to date, if not different gravitational values.” Our intention is to understand the current state of the discipline and its al-most fetishistic relationship with form. Al-though we see the subversive potential of a publication like Siteless in which, like you stated, words become substituted almost completely by drawings of forms, we are left wondering if the original intention of the publication was to provoke the disci-pline or to explore the potential of accept-ing architecture’s infatuation with form?

The original intention was to do both. And I think that one couldn’t be done without the other, in the sense that the exhaustion and ex-acerbation of architectural form could not be achieved without a certain acceptance of form as a primary component of architecture, and a certain abiding to the rules of morphologi-cal research within the discipline. What might seem unsettling is that the book does not up-hold a specific method to produce architecture. If anything, this book presents the result of an intense practice of architectural hesitation. Siteless is a complex book, in the sense that it endeavors to have both artistic and academic values. It is compulsive in the way it derives a myriad of architectural forms with no site, scale, or program, but it also embodies a ratio-nal impetus to redefine architectural research as a prospective field, which conveys the book a specific meaning, at a time when universities are

struggling to understand what this research ter-ritory consists of. This is why the parallel with the graphic nature of language was so impor-tant in the layout of the book.

Carl Jung called “Archetypes of the Collec-tive Unconscious” the set of images em-bedded in people everywhere. When this idea is translated into architecture we can see how, for example, pyramids, spheres, and cubes keep appearing throughout his-tory independently from any religious, cul-tural, social or economic circumstances. These forms seem to have a life of their own and their meaning seems to change according to the circumstances that sur-round them. As examples we can look at the Pyramids of Giza, Foster’s Palace in As-tana, and Piranesi’s depictions, or the ideal buildings of Boullée and Ledoux. Like you seem to suggest in Siteless, contemporary architecture seems to be expanding the repertoire of pure forms. Can an open ac-knowledgement in which form is no longer a Taboo change the discipline up to the point in which even architectural education is changed?

That’s an interesting point that relates directly to a graduate studio that I have taught last se-mester at the University of Sydney. The brief that I devised demanded students to focus on one pure form as a basis for morphological investigation and design across the whole se-mester. In this case the form was a tetrahedron with fixed dimensions, which reached over 100 meters high. Following an intense analysis of a given site and its surroundings, the students were asked to determine their own building program. The studio brief thus constituted an experiment in itself, as a geometrical straight-jacket which left at first glance little room for formal experimentation, but which nevertheless provided them with a high degree of flexibility in terms of interpretation of this morphologi-cal theme. In accordance with the intentional framework of each project, this initial pure form could be distorted, fragmented, liquefied, displaced, granulated, or otherwise affected by any other transformative operations deemed meaningful. Such a project methodology is intended to break with the usual “program-plus-site-equals-form” project pattern that is so common in architectural education, where site and program are fixed by the brief, and where form is meant to be the logical result of a lin-ear design operation that involves the addition of these two initial given values. This is where the intention of the studio connects with the modus operandi of Siteless, as this traditional sequence is inverted in the brief: we start with form, then site, and the program is to be deter-mined through the project. Hence, the project

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becomes a tool for analysis. Though it was ini-tially looked upon as rather disciplinarian and radical by certain colleagues, the results of the studio were surprisingly creative.

Is Siteless a product of its time, or could it have been written 20 years ago, or 20 years in the future? On that same line, do you see Siteless as a publication that could tran-scend the recent years of architectural im-passe and be a publication that more than explaining a specific period of architecture could offer valuable information about the depths of the discipline?

I often say that I wanted to produce a book whose content would look so obsolete, at least in terms of graphic appearance, that the book could no longer become obsolete in the future. It is in fact timeless in the way it reminds that drawing is a form of writing, and that writing is a form of drawing. More precisely, its character was inspired by a number of treatises from the Renaissance, such as those of Scamozzi, Ser-lio, Vignola, and others, who relentlessly drew and redrew the same set of columns — the Five Orders — in complete siteless conditions, in the sense that these architectural elements were pre-designed prior to their insertion into particular contexts, whether programmatic or geographic. Yet, like anything else, it is a book that also is a product of its time, but it clearly constitutes a reaction to trends that aimed to maximize page count in architecture books. Rather, Siteless has gone further than most in performing a reduction of the means of rep-resentation of architecture to its very basics, a reduction of the size of the publication itself, and a reduction of the scope of architecture to its essentials, which is the conception of buildings. In an age obsessed with the issue of sustainability, it radically opts for a practice of architecture that, in an effort to reduce the con-sumption of resources, restricts the representa-tion of experimental architecture to a minimal set of printed signs.

Around a hundred years ago Kazimir Ma-levich submitted art to a radical transfor-mation, reducing it to the most basic pos-sibility of existence: pure form. Black Square (1915) and Black Circle (1923) presented a new beginning for painting. From that mo-ment on, art didn’t need to reproduce real-ity, not even to make references to it. Art was in a way liberated from the responsi-bility of simulation. Some people claim that it was photography that freed art. We would argue that up to a point it was Ma-levich who did it. Nevertheless, architec-ture is not painting. While it can be argued that a great part of the role of the archi-tect consists of graphic representations of

buildings, there is, at least in general terms, a constraint since those images (drawings, collages, renderings) are up to a point a simulation of reality, or of something that at any given moment could, or should be-come real. After all, even all those treatises of the renaissance were depictions of col-umns. Scamozzi, Serlio and Vignola were making representations of ‘real’ and build-able columns. As the opposite of painting, pure form as a higher ideal in architecture can encounter a series of obstacles since buildings have programs and, in the best of cases, users. The act of extreme abstraction achieved by artists like Malevich or Blinky Palermo can easily become an act of wish-ful thinking when applied to architecture. With publications like Siteless, and through teaching studios like the one you have men-tioned in which form becomes the main object of attention, is form approached as a liberating tool in which the architect is freed from thinking about anything else but building (cultivating a form of inten-tional naiveté about other issues), or is this strategy part of a cynical hoax about the limitations of architectural representation and building design? Do you see this ‘com-ing out’ of deliberate formalism as some-thing that enhances architecture, or, as your friend mentioned, something that has the potential to “kill” it? It’s a complex set of questions and comments. I’m not sure if I agree with the statement that Malevich’s Black Square constituted a new be-ginning for art, as it’s more likely to represent the desire to put an end to a trend that pre-dated Suprematism, through Impressionism and Cubism, which aimed at maximizing affect through the sublimation and minimization of graphic means. To a large extent, the years that surrounded the end of the nineteenth century in art have been clearly dominated by the desire to produce the last painting, to reach the very bottom, from which one can only come back to the surface. And Black Square can be seen as a culmination of that aspiration. In fact, if one considers Malevich’s oeuvre as a whole, one can observe that abstraction is a mere digression in an otherwise figurative career. My position is somewhat ambivalent regarding this issue, be-cause I do believe in the potential of figuration in architecture, and I think that it is likely under-exploited. Art today has drastically returned to figuration. Architecture is yet to follow. What I am trying to say is that it’s easier to design the world away than to pay close attention to what already exists. Now, referring to your last questions, with a publication like Siteless, there is certainly an intention to operate a dichotomy between the language of architecture and the imperative to build, which does not necessar-

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ily oppose itself to the desire of highlighting the limitations of architectural representation and design. Using freehand drawing as a medi-um was a deliberate choice that aimed to show the weaknesses of digital tools in the produc-tion of diversity, as what has called itself the avant-garde has now basically been recycling the same forms for over twenty years. Software in architectural design tends to generate forms that are not site-specific, nor program-specific, but forms that are properly software-specific, to the extent that it can become an obstacle to the production of diversity, since computers only offer a predetermined array of forms and trans-formative operations.

Following this line of thought, and assum-ing that form is a transcendental concept that can resist changes in society, politics, and even ideology, should form then occu-py a privileged position as an object of dis-cussion in the academia? Or should other topics like site, program, and social issues remain as the top priority? Can these top-ics (often conflictive) coexist as the raison d’être of architecture?

Form certainly is a notion that has started in recent years to be more thoroughly addressed and embraced in academic circles, rather than blindly rejected, as it was previously the case. The studio I taught that revolves around the use of a single form for all projects across the entire semester precisely aimed to depressur-ize the issue of form-finding in architectural education, in order to focus on probably more important issues, such as those you mentioned: site, program, structure, social issues… In fact this type of design exercise is aimed to counter the perverse aspects of pedagogies that pretend to focus solely on those particular aspects but within which form often becomes the predomi-nant criterion that governs the assessment of

creative output. In the brief I defined, the given pure form is in a way presented as carrion that program can scavenge, so as to trigger a form of heteronomous architecture that is merely governed by external forces.

Do you see pure form as a medium or a goal? Well, in this particular instance, it’s a medium. If we understand pure form as a set of forms that originates in Euclidian geometry, such as spheres, pyramids and cubes, the inherent ca-pacity of these forms to contain, rather than to divide, makes them particularly appropriate as receptacles for site-specific programs. If we un-derstand the design of an architectural project as a process of adaptation of form to external dynamic forces, these can be catalyzed by the use of pure form as an outer shell for the proj-ect. On another hand, pure form is merely of interest for its capacity to be eroded, to be af-fected by those forces. In a dialectic process of definition, this fixed outer shell helps determine the program, and reversely, the program reveals and distinguishes morphology. So the reversion to pure forms comes from an intention to oper-ate a sort of tabula rasa on architectural expres-sion. It’s almost the negation of form itself. Is a siteless architecture not only possible, but desirable? Judging by the book sales of Siteless, it seems to be. The vast majority of the architects I ad-mired as a student were architects who never built anything, or who built next to nothing, such as Leonidov, Hejduk, Kiesler, or Krier. My way of thinking was that if these architects had managed to become that relevant within this field without building, they must have done something right.

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WAI- I would like to start by asking you to give us a short overview of your education and how you came to end up in Arup, start-ing from your studies and eventually what made you come to such a practice.

Chas Pope- I guess it was probably a good place to start, as a university education, by studying at Cambridge University. I had already kind of picked to do engineering as a university course because I guess it was the subjects I was good at and which led me in that direction. Prob-ably starting from a numerical background, I

Engineering Pure Form

was more interested in the practical aspect of what you can actually do with that, and, while I was there I heard about Arup and all the things they had done, so I wanted to try and get a job with them. Arup came across being one of the best or ‘the best’ engineering firm. Because I started by looking regionally at different bridges and other projects I had discovered first, it was only later I saw that they had done all the amaz-ing buildings in the world: the Sydney’s Opera House, Richard Rogers’s buildings in London and in Paris. WhenI got a job with them, and al-most immediately I was working on a Norman

Interview with Chas Pope

Pure Geometric form, a perennial obsession in the kingdom of buildings has always been associated with the role of the architect as visionary, as utopian and idealist. How-ever, without engineering, Hardcorism, that is, the theory of buildings as pure geomet-ric shapes, would exist only as sketches, drawings or 3d simulacra.

Behind every building that pushes the boundaries of architectural form, there are engi-neers assuming the risk. Arup has been pushing the limits of extreme architectural form ever since the Sydney Opera. Responsible for the CCTV and the TVCC, as well as an ongoing list of challenging buildings across the globe, this engineering company has been demonstrating that there’s no form that cannot be done.

WAI discussed with Arup Beijing’s Associate director Chas Pope about the challenges, risks and opportunities of pushing the boundaries of engineering pure form.

Chas Pope is an Associate Di-rector in Arup’s Beijing office. He moved to the city in 2003 to work with OMA on the design of the new CCTV Headquarters building, and stayed on to contin-ue his career in Asia. He is now a member of the leadership team for the 150-strong office. Subse-quent projects include Shenzhen Stock Exchange and Taipei Per-forming Arts Center, also with OMA. He currently manages large-scale commercial projects in China, working with interna-tional architects and clients.

www.arup.com

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Foster project, it was a very full month of May to start with. It was a project which had been moved aside in central London, which is an apartment building at the back of the Thames. When I came in, they had already worked out the scheme; it was a very logarithmic curvy spi-ralling building. And so by the time I came in, we had already gone through the process of turning that into a reality, dealing with things like lights, structure, all the sorts of things that are wonderful concepts but which you have to turn into reality. So from the off, I was try-ing to help turn these forms into practical real buildings. In London we do a lot of details right through the construction drawings. Much more so than in China, so you are really seeing the full implications of a complex form.

So you were interested already in buildings, even given that engineering has so many branches?

The Cambridge courses are very theoretical but they are also very good because they teach you a very wide range of engineering, so you just don’t do code, or you just don’t do struc-tural engineering. You learn about the ventila-tion systems, the lighting and the architectural design. It is that that got me interested in build-ings and also bridges, because it is about how a building responds to its occupants, how it is al-most learning all the time and adapting. There seems to be much more depth to designing a building than you realize. That your interest might be structure is only part of the all, which is of course when Arup comes in because that’s the holy force of Arup, compared to a technical architecture where you might not al-ways do the best structural solution if it means compromising

So it was design oriented?

Yes.

And you started with the Foster Building in London. But when did you move to China?

I moved to China in late 2003. Arup had won the commission to design the CCTV tower, here in Beijing, without me. The competition was in 2002, so again I joined the team just af-ter the competition was won. So we won it and then we needed to bring the engineers in and develop this thing, At that time, we thought we had a very challenging schedule to design it, and off course having come to China, I know that everything is like that.

We did the main design in London, because it was a London team — Cecil Balmond, Chris Carroll, Rory McGowan — that had really good contact with Rem Koolhaas and his team in

Rotterdam, so we were spending 9 months or so, flying to Rotterdam every couple of days to sort of work out a design with them.

That was at the beginning?

Yes and then a few of us moved to Beijing to then hand over to the local engineers who would finish off the work and oversee some of that from here. That’s when my Beijing career started.

I joined at a Scheme Design Stage, so we al-ready had worked out to see if the design was feasible. We would need a basic structural sys-tem to hold it up. But for the first 2 months we were solving what seemed to be an impossible problem every day, just to make this form and these ideas into a practical reality.

So that was a very challenging project to start with here.

Absolutely.

And have you found or encountered any more challenging projects that that one?

Not yet.

Do you think from what you have seen, that there are more challenging projects which have been built? Recent buildings?

Yes definitely. CCTV caught everyone’s imagi-nation on the design team, so Arup was able to pull out a very good team to work on it. So we had very good people and we all knew we had to pull some expression out of the bag to deliver this thing. So it meant we needed to all work together very well as a team.

I’ve worked on other projects since then, which shouldn’t have been more complex, but for this reason they became more complicated.

What was the complexity, the difficulties about the CCTV? Was it a schedule issue? Or was it the structure?

It was the structure. As the team who was mak-ing the design to make it stand up, we were pushing the boundaries quite a lot, and quite a way outside the rules of the Chinese code. So we had to design everything, from first princi-ples to be able to justify it in front of panels of experts in China. So we had to do much more analysis that we ever had done to prove that this could work. But then, some of the implica-tions of that, which were coming through to me was that, we had to make sure that a televi-sion station could fit into there, so we couldn’t just put structure where we wanted. So we had

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to coordinate this with the architects to make the building actually function. That was another complete challenge, and that’s what I was doing on the building. Were the spatial complications a product of specific requirements or because of ar-chitectural decisions?

Because the building was for the studios, it’s not just an office tower, we couldn’t just put col-umns where we wanted to. There were some big open spaces in there, so our concept was that all the structure goes into the skin, so you see it. All those dark lines on the façade are structure. We got the majority of them but there were still trusses, there were still cantilevers, all those sort of things inside to try to make it all stick to-gether. And so in many cases where we wanted to put things, we couldn’t because it was a studio or a mechanical floor, a lift shaft or whatever.

Do you think that this type of strategy or bold architecture would be possible in other places?

CCTV was very much a function of China in 2002 for the Olympic Games. It was a function of that design brief for a company which had the vision to do something special, but with the need to have such a big varied design brief, be-cause you wouldn’t expect a country or a com-pany trying to make a statement doing that. So it was a real combination of circumstances. So you might not see that again, but there might be a South American company, who knows.

Trying to encapsulate what CCTV brings, do you think that the most difficult thing about the building is the form?

Certainly, because when you are trying to do a structure in a shape … Just to make it stand up is a challenge in other words. We had to have much more structure. If you’re doing some-thing unusual you have to think of every pos-sible consequence, because you introduce new data to the design that you don’t need to consid-er in normal buildings. So you need to explore all these avenues of thought to make sure that there are no risks.

Were there ever doubts that the building would never be able to be done or the form was already suggesting a structural princi-ple that couldn’t be solved?

We did a lot of work. There was the initial sub-mission for the competition where you want to have a general idea without having to work ev-erything out. But we actually did a fair amount of work for that stage. But then between that

point and actually starting the scheme design we did a whole round of feasibility studies to do exactly this. WAI- Is that part of the process of all the proj-ects?

CP- This was a headline grabbing international project so it involves doing much more than if it was a small little project somewhere else.

You worked also with similar projects around Asia. You mentioned the Taipei Op-era House you are working on?

Yes that was another one of my projects after-wards. There were actually quite a lot of the same team since that was also working with OMA. That was a similar idea to the interna-tional competition we entered, except that in this one, I was involved in the competition stage. What was interesting looking back now is, that it was also a very form based project. Al-though there’s a good rational functionality as well, it means that you need typically three dif-ferent auditoriums for a Preforming Art Centre. Actually 3 different buildings within one shell. For example, the Sidney Opera House is ike that. For the Egg in Beijing the sphere is actu-ally completely separated from the three build-ings housing the auditoriums. In Taipei, the concept was what would happen if you could combine these back stage aspects into one big back stage area and the three Auditoriums. So that’s what led to the idea of having three Au-ditoriums around a central core. And then they got lifted up from the ground and became very form based ideas.

On TPAC, we fixed so much very quickly from the structural concept. On all the different is-sues we had very strong conceptual ideas, which guided us through later on.

Sometimes you might see an example of a form based building going up and it’s taking a long time for all the different components to go up. For example, if the structure is going up, what would be the ventilation strategy. If the form is driving the design so much in a building, sometimes it is like trying to fit a structure to it without a very strong structural idea or very strong ventilation strategy, so then you are on the back foot, you are just trying to fit the tech-nical part to the form. It might overall suffer because once you eventually get the structure and the MEP to work, you might have to com-promise the form. Again if you don’t have the solutions for those things at the same time as the architectural concept you are risking dilut-ing the design so much later.

That’s why for TPAC we tried to have all these ideas at the beginning; it meant that it was also

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part of the concept.

So the process of that one compared to the CCTV is quite different? Because what is striking about CCTV is that the form is so strong and that’s so unusual. The Taipei Opera is very formalist with all the volumes, so it’s less difficult to imagine built. You can see there is the result of something but the CCTV building is almost like a utopian form. We remember reading some descrip-tion you made about it comparing it to an Esher composition. It’s a sculptural object so it becomes really about the form.

True, it’s a very sculptural object. The beauty of CCTV is that the functional description brief allowed that to work as a sculptural form. There was actually a list of different sizes of rooms’, areas which had to be fitted into this building; it was like assembling a 3D jigsaw. OMA found a way to assemble all these little boxes to work together but also that suited that form. One image you probably have seen of CCTV is the one where they have the exploded view of all of the studios, walkways, offices, etc. and how they all fit in. For other office buildings, usually they just wish for a core and a nice big area you can rent out, which leads you to a very simple shape of building. You could never do that with CCTV except with this unique program brief. They were ready to accept that there would be areas that couldn’t be used that well because it didn’t matter, it wasn’t that big of a penalty; they got there functional program and they got their visual statement.

Putting it in context, along with the TVCC that building is also structurally unusual or, is it more about the façade?

CCTV was geometrically quite simple but tech-nically quite complex because once you get your head around the shape it was very regular, whereas TVCC was technically quite simple but geometrically it was far more complex because it was a very irregular shape constantly chang-ing. At the bottom of TVCC, hidden inside that shape, there are the recording studios. All the programs have all kinds of different shapes. It’s technically kind of complex how the programs fit together.

In your experience in this project and in other projects that you may be working on in Asia and in Europe, is there a type of form which tends to give more problems? Making our book about Pure Hardcore Icons where we look into sev-eral different possibilities of the classification of buildings according to their shape, we saw even buildings shaped like alphabet letters, etc. But for example every time that somebody does

a building in a sphere shape, it looks very un-feasable . Are there, in your experience, certain types of building ideally very easy to portray visually but physically very difficult to achieve, structurally speaking. Even when we look at the cover, all those spherical buildings. Of course some have been built, but they usually have legs popping out everywhere. Do you think almost anything can be done nowadays?

Of course everything can be done nowadays if you have enough money. In Beijing and in oth-er places where we have earthquake regulation to worry about, the further it is from a simple square or sort of rectangular shape the more the problems, and the stronger it needs to be to resist an earthquake basically. So a sphere, espe-cially if it’s sitting on a small stick that’s going to wave around quite a lot if there’s an earth-quake. you will need to reinforce it a lot. So for the more unstable looking forms, you definitely have a structure penalty on those.

But all shapes are possible?

Yes they are. If you find a client willing to pay for it! Once you get away from regular shapes, and that you are into double curvatures or el-lipsoidal, things that aren’t simple repetitive shapes. That really add costs on façade, etc. There’s a building on hold for example in Lon-don, because of façade issues. It’s not such a complicated façade but it’s made of different panels and it’s basically burning the budget for the whole thing. So if you have to have a lot of different facade panels you rapidly add to the cost.

But in terms of structure it’s not a problem?

It usually all comes down to money. That’s where often we try to rationalize the design. So it’s still having the drama factor of the architec-ture but it becomes simpler in a way that you, for example, are using 10 different panel sizes instead of 10 000. We had a project where that is exactly what happened; in the Middle East. We helped to get down from about 10 000 dif-ferent panel types to 10. This was for a 100 me-ter tall tower, so not that big but big enough that you are into some pretty serious money.

So you also have projects in the Middle East? Is the freedom of experimenting with forms or different types of architecture big-ger than here? Of course we know that Europe is not the place to experiment too much, is it somehow similar?

I think Dubai has calmed down to some extent but the Emirates and Qatar still seem to have a fair amount, looking at the buildings which are going up.

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But they are mostly about being really high?

The one I am actually thinking about is the Al-dar Headquarters. The one that looks like a disk on its side. Not that high but actually very eye catching. It’s a circle, and it’s actually wider than it looks.

How about the structural concept for this one? Is it also challenging?

There are less earthquakes over there and lower levels of regulations, so that makes it easier. The only challenge there is that the client wanted to build it very very fast, so the core was finished in 12 months after starting the design.

How do you see the future, where the chal-lenges might come from? If not form, fa-cades, etc.? We know the history of Arup with the Sydney Opera House where no-body else knew how to solve it. So basically as a practice you live on the edge of absur-dity , and of course, you need to have the money and the desire to create things that look absurd. Like the CCTV looks com-pletely out of the image of what a normal building would be, Sydney Opera House also. But talking more about economical climates, can you see how experimentation can keep on in the future or will we reach a point where by experience, our building become more constrained?

I don’t think so. If you cast your mind back to the 70’s when they were building the Sydney Opera House, you wouldn’t have been able to predict where we are going now. I think so many ideas in China are as advanced as you would see in the gulf, whether all of them get built or not. Increasingly, you also see developers who are looking at eye-catching statements often for commercial properties as well. Where China is building so many offices for example, you have to differentiate; you want a reason why people would come to your building and not someone else’s and often than means form.

Up to what point in the process do you be-come involved in the decision of form? For example, talking again about CCTV and the Taipei project, is there a moment where the engineer says we have to change the strategy because this is really not working?

Often yes. Which is why it’s so good when you are doing those very advanced designs, to make sure that the engineers are there from the beginning. So when you have this great form idea, you can very quickly get it more realistic. There are plenty of times where we might get involved in a project where the architect show’s

his form to the client, and the client sees the photo-realistic renderings which convinces him that it will stand up, but no engineer has looked at it. Then you become the bad guy that is com-promising the form to make it work. But if you work together from start, your concept will fly and the client is happy because he will be able to be confident that this form can be delivered.

Again going to your experience, do you have any kind of projects which gave you, structurally speaking, a lot of challenges in the way the building was designed, or built?

CCTV is definitely up there. TPAC; that re-quired a lot of thought. What we did there was a technique called base isolation, so we actually put all the building on bearings. So when there’s an earthquake the building just moves. So that means that a lot less forces are transmitted into the building. It gave us much more freedom to be able to do a complex form.

If it’s a complicated shape it increases the dam-age caused in a possible earthquake. So if you are reducing the effective size of the earthquake you are reducing the risks.

It’s a common technique in the US, and in Ja-pan, and fairly common now in Taiwan. It’s starting now in China. It’s still an expensive technology even if it’s getting cheaper. Which means you are going to do this for a building you don’t want to fail at all in an earthquake, like a hospital for example. I think there is a hospital in China like that and as it will become cheaper you will see more and more buildings with this technology.

It will probably help in the future to have more freedom in form.

When does this have to be implemented in the process of a building?

It has to come early because if you are going to isolate a building because it has to be able to move, you can end up with pretty wide joints around the building. You can’t suggest it later in the process because it will affect too much.

If you are in a place which has frequent earth-quakes, you don’t want to be in a case where the plaster on the ceiling cracks or the furniture is damaged every time there’s an earthquake, because that costs money to repair. So, if you have a building which is completely unharmed the upturn will be much more happy.

Are all the most challenging projects for ARUP from OMA?

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OMA and Zaha Hadid as well. We did one of the Soho projects with them, the Wanjing, but just the MEP. We also did the Aquatic Centre in London for the 2012 Olympics.

What is important there, is the 3D modelling of the building; to make sure that you can model every last detail before you get on sight. You save a lot of time. For the London Aquat-ic Centre they did a model up to the diving boards because they were also very complicated shapes, so they modelled every single piece of reinforcement steel. That’s another technique that we now use to help us when we are doing complicated forms so you can get that much further in the design process.

From where we are we try to write theory and understand the built environment. But what you are telling us about Rem Koolhaas, or Zaha Hadid is that they are the ones that build on theory but also do more challenging buildings. This may be pushing the discipline of architecture, not only in thinking but also in building build-ings. What about other practices you might know, not as famous architects, but also very challenging structurally or how build-ings are being developed?

We do collaborate often with smaller practices. If there’s a really good idea we will try to push to deliver it. Information Base Architects, they are a Dutch couple, are the one’s behind the Canton Television Tower in Ghanzhou. They came up with this very beautiful idea but as it was only the two of them, they couldn’t deliver it. So we came in at the competition stage and looked at how we could make this thing stand up but also what would need to be done to go from the concept to actually delivering this 600 meters tall tower.

We have also worked on a couple of projects with Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies from Ko-rea. We have worked with him for the Kore-an Pavilion in the Shanghai expo. He also has some very interesting sorts of form ideas. He did a number of commercial buildings in Seoul which are much simpler… but when you get a commission where you can really go mad with a beautiful curved concrete shell, he has done that as well.

Still related to the same architects, because maybe they have the projects that allow them to look-up Arup, in terms of the en-gineering world, do you see other practices that are also willing to go to this level of engineering craziness and willingness to deliver buildings that are highly unusual?

Buro Happold who formed out of an Arup group have a very similar philosophy, so they

have produced a lot of great work. Also the engi-neers working a lot with Coop-Himmelblau, Bol-linger und Grohmann gmbh.

There’s a lot of good engineers around the world but not every one is willing to take the risk to build complicated buildings.

Yes, it is more about being able to take the re-sponsibility with your name on what you are building even if you may know how to solve it structurally…

To make one point on what you just said as well, which is quite important. In this world with the computer it is extremely easy just to buy software and analyze something. So you can have an amaz-ing architecture shape, you can analyze it and you can prove it works and that’s great, but it’s prob-ably not the best way to get the best building. There’s also a risk that you can’t really understand the behavior of the structure. If you just analyze a structure to make it work, you may not really understand how it is behaving and how it is re-sponding.

Here, in China, we saw a lot of shake table testing. Is it very unusual today?

My view is that you get better answers with com-puters than with a scale model. But this test has a benefit, especially here, where everything is mov-ing so quick. So to the client it can give a very good representation.

When we did the CCTV one, it was just outside Beijing, and the lab actually had a hook on top because they were worried it would fall over… we often joke about this…

It was a pretty big model?

Yes, 6 or 7 meters… And it just fitted on the shake table…. Now the tallest tower in China is 660meters tall and the tallest Arup one is 600 me-ters tall, in Tianjin. It is called “Goldin Finance 117” and it’s under construction, it’s probably about 30-40 storey’s up…

What is more challenging, the height or the form of a building?

It’s two separate things really, because the higher it goes the more restrictive you are in terms of… Once you get to 600 meter high there are very few cost effective structural systems you can use to get that high. Often now your standard tower around the world is a square tower, a core and high big columns inside. Usually these big towers are commercial offices, so you want as little struc-ture as possible, so you kind of group it in these sort of mega columns. In China it’s the same but with more bracing to face the earthquakes.

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The other thing you could do is brace it up so you have diagonals in the façade. The Guang-zhou IFC tower is like that. It’s a slightly round-ed tower with diagonals around the outside.

These are basically the two systems that are brave enough to support a very tall tower, but the structure size just gets more enormous for something that big.

Is there a limit of height?

Again it’s economic…

So you can go 1 km?

They are already doing that in Saudi Arabia… There have been plans for 1 mile also in the Middle East…

So there are actually no limits….

Again it comes down to money because the structure size becomes enormous, the core be-comes enormous, you need so many lifts and so many shafts to service the building, so the actual revenue of the space becomes tiny.

So a pyramid can be built 2 miles high, in theory?

I’m sure, yes.

Do you think that structure has reached a point where everything can be solved if there’s money basically? If the building touches the ground at least? And, is the progress of engineering more technology driven?

If you are an architect and your model doesn’t stand up… I have looked at buildings like that and you know there will be a few issues there!

Certainly technology has evolved a lot, for ex-ample CCTV wouldn’t have been done 1 or 2 years before because it took us a month or two to prepare for a severe earthquake study that now replaces the shaking table test, and in those days it took over one month to do the analysis on computer processes. Now we can do those analyses in just a few hours. So know-ing the speed of the changes, a few years ago we wouldn’t have been able to do those analyses in time.

CCTV was also just made before the world turned on to 3D documentation, so CCTV was mainly designed in 2D.Today it would be easier, so technology is defi-nitely making it easier more so than material ad-vances or other things like that.

We are architects. We are quite visual and somehow superficial because we are always looking at surfaces and at images, it may be a good thing or a bad thing as it keeps you away from those problems. But new materi-als also help architecture make a big leap if we think of the industrial revolution, and the use of steel, and glass, etc. Is there not a meaningful advancement in new materials, materials that can be used in mass?

In the last 20 years, there’s not been that much change in materials. It’s still main-ly steel and concrete. Steel got a little big stronger but not in any sizeable magnitude, concrete a little lighter…

So that’s what we should be looking at in the future to really make a difference… But would it be technology in terms of calculat-ing and then going back to form? We have for example compared Zaha Hadid and Schumacher with all the theory that they developed with these ideas, which flow per-fectly in the computer but when faced with reality becomes something else.

There are also other factors that might change things as well… For example, China is develop-ing big rules on sustainability, which will affect the materials you can use. For example, planes. Planes are being built in carbon fiber to face the cost of fuel going so high.

The point is that this will push the development of carbon fiber, although carbon fiber is not present in the building world yet.

Sometimes, in some projects the materials that are going to be used depend on the costs, which can change very quickly. For example for a proj-ect of a tower we did in Hong Kong, we had out ringers that connects the core to stiffen it. Three of them were made out of steel which is what you normally use, but one of them was made out of concrete because when the tower reached that level there was a massive spike in steel price and it was cost effective to change the design.

There might be some exterior shocks like that which might bring about the development of different materials and potentially give oppor-tunity to new forms.

Broad Group in China, started as an AC manu-facturer but came up with a pre-fabricated con-struction idea and now they’ve proposed to build a tower of 838 meters tall in Changsha, Sky City one, in only 6 months. It’s actually on hold, but the basic idea of pre-fabrication, al-lowing people to build more quickly, can be a

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big game changer for the industry… but with the risk of moving away from nice forms to more blocky ideas.

Thinking about the future, to project our-selves, maybe in 20 years or 30 years, we will be able to say that the most meaningful change in the capacity of people to deliver these forms is through calculating technol-ogy? Software? Computer technology?

That’s where it has been basically… The one thing that is interesting and that can really change the game is the 3D printing. It seems that now you can do that with metals or differ-ent materials, so there are more organic forms being printed. I think that maybe printed reality is a little way off but in terms of simpler form ideas it can be a game changer.

But in terms of structure, are we doomed forever because of physics?

It’s not just physics it’s the constructability. You might be able to prove that an interesting form stands up but if someone has to build it and finds it too difficult to build it or cast it then you are stuck. But if 3D printing allows you to do that on a massive scale…

So, ideally, in the future it could be 3D printing and casting full buildings…

Eventually yes. I think in the short term we still have to have technology to assist design and bring bigger changes…

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PURE

HA

RDC

ORE

ICO

NS

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HardcorismFor as the universe is in the form of a sphere, all the extremities, being equidis-tant from the centre, are equally extremi-ties, and the centre, which is equidistant from them, is equally to be regarded as the opposite of them all. (...)

To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form ; for earth is the most immoveable of the four and thwe most plastic of all bod-ies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature.(...)

Let it be agreed, then, both according to strict reason and according to probability, that the pyramid is the solid which is the original element and seed of fire ; and let us assign the element which was next in the order of generation to air, and the third to water.

–Plato

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UnderstandingIcons have become the ultimate generic form of architec-ture. Never before has the combination of technology and mass media enhanced such a prolific production and diffusion of monuments to “signature” architecture. Design school desks, computer screens, and magazine pages around the globe have been flooded with torrents of buildings in pure shapes. Redundant forms —either as poured concrete or as virtual bytes— pop-up with the speed it takes to wire-cut Styrofoam or master 3d modeling software. Paradoxically, this abrupt surge of iconographic architectural parapher-nalia has overshadowed the demise of the manifesto, one of architecture’s most powerful and straightforward tools to declare its intentions. Ever since Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) was hailed as the last great architectur-al narrative, architectural theory has been unsuccessfully trying to rationalize the often similar icons either as the by-products of the unpredictability of the contemporary city or as the result of suspiciously momentary (and op-portunistic) trends that oscillate from the so-called green design to the supposed technology-aided revolution of parametricism.

1

But, are vague explanations of conditions external to architecture enough to elucidate the formal similarities between so many iconic buildings? Are the CCTV tower and the Max Reinhardt Haus similar just by coincidence? Or, is there an underlying relationship between Foster and Partners’ Palace of Peace and Reconciliation , Buck-

Pure Hardcore IconsA Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture

minster Fuller’s Tetrahedron City and Giza’s Pyramids? How to explain the disappearance of any attempt to give theoretical coherence to these buildings, at the moment when formal consistence seems to suggest the possibility of a new architectural ontology? What about understand-ing architecture’s concealed plot about form? ManifestoNot all architecture is infatuated by form, but for the one that is, this is its manifesto. Resisting the temptation to claim that form and architec-ture have a new symbiosis or that all contemporary archi-tecture is obsessed with pyramids or looping skyscrapers, this vademecum targets a specific series of buildings that have given form undeniable protagonism. It recognizes that, just as Modernism had five canonical points, and Post-Modernism aspired to emulate complexity and con-tradiction in architecture, there is an architecture that has made form the pillar of its visual edifice. This is a manifesto about architecture and form, a mani-festo about Pure Hardcore Icons. ArchetypeCarl Jung defined as an archetype, the patterning forces contained in the Collective Unconscious, the deeper layer of images that is inborn in the human psyche in people in-different to time and place.

2,3 Pure Hardcore Icons surges

when those images become architectural.

Based on the principle of Hardcorism—architecture as Hardcore, pure geometric form, Pure Hardcore Icons

1Robert Venturi, Complexity and Con-tradication in Architecture, (New York: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture, 1966).

Complexity and Contradiction in Archi-tecture was hailed as the Last Great Ar-chitectural Narrative, is the world ready for a new reading of architecture?

2“A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious in undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a person-al acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term ‘collective’ because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal…” From C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Col-lective Unconscious: The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

3“Jung’s conclusion to be developed in his later writings, was that, inherent in the human psyche, there is a patterning force, which may, at various times, and in places of touch with each other, spon-taneously put forth similar constellations of fantasy.” From the introduction in Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Jung, (New York: Penguin Books 1976).

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4Hardcorist Munari?

Bruno Munari’s Il Cerchio (1964), Il Quadrato (1960), and Il Triangolo (1976) provided in book form graphic evidence of Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Pure Hardcore Icons aspires to do the same with architecture.

5François Blanciak, SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

PURE HARDCORE ICONSA Manifesto on Pure Form in ArchitectureArtifice Books on ArchitectureLondonISBN 978 1 908967 39 880 Pages15 x 15cmAugust 2013

looks into the ‘collective unconscious’ of architecture in a similar way as Kazimir Malevich stared into the depths of modern art. Just like Malevich’s The Non-Objective World (1927) became the first manifesto of pure form in art, de-spite the fact that geometric shapes have been part of the visual repertoire of fairytales, myths, religions, and visual arts ever since the beginning of humankind, Pure Hardcore Icons gives a theoretical framework to the timeless tradi-tion of designing buildings as pure form.

Pure Hardcore Icons is both retroactive, in that its theory applies to architecture since the beginning of history, and projective, since it foresees the future dialectic of archi-tecture and pure form. Pure Hardcore Icons is a Munarian discovery of the Cube and the Sphere, of the Pyramid and the Skyscraper Loop, of the Horizontal Condenser and the Stacked Boxes.

4

Without implying that the creation of autonomous objects is the only way to produce architecture, Pure Hardcore Icons brings architectural form —a relentless taboo in the architectural discourse— to the forefront of the theoretical discussion. Pure Hardcore Icons excavates the thick layers of historical memory to reveal the depths of architecture’s Collective Unconscious. TriptyqueWritten and designed by Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (directors of WAI Architecture Think Tank), Pure Hardcore Icons includes supporting contributions by Luca Silenzi (Prologue: Form Substance), Guido Tesio (Epi-logue: Conjectures on Conventional Composition) and an interview with François Blanciak, author of SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms (2008).

5 A conceptual triptyque, Pure

Hardcore Icons is composed of three semi-autonomous parts, each one the product of a combination of critical text and manufactured landscapes that aim to dissect the relationship between form and architecture.

PureIn the first part, Pure Hardcorism presents pure geometric form as an architectural ideal. The first manifesto of pure geometric shapes renders the role of pyramids, cubes, and spheres throughout the history of architecture. HardcoreThe second part presents The Shapes of Contemporary Hardcore Architecture, an ontology of some of the most prevalent formal categories in the recent years of architec-tural production. In this part a series of landscapes display as “evidence” contemporary architecture’s consistent forms. IconsThe third essay, Post(card) Ideological Icons showcases three post(cards) that put in contrast iconic projects of an avant-garde charged with philosophical symbolism, with contemporary re-interpretations to reveal the dialectic between the iconographic power of form and the lasting relevance of ideology in architecture. DogmaPure Hardcore Icons is not a dogmatic publication or a history book. Instead of offering absolute answers, the manifesto uses humorous conviction as a tool to raise awareness about pure form in architecture hoping that the potential and limitations of these architectures could be fully grasped either in practice, in the academia or as a purely intellectual exercise. This book asks; what about Understanding Pure Hardcore Icons?

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What About It? exists and subsists with the pull of external forces that help WAI gravitate in an unpredictable universe of challenges and risks. This issue and the projects presented in it wouldn’t be possible without the embrace, belief and support of friends, colleagues and con-tributors from all around the world that include. What About It? is possible because of… the unconditional support of Ronald Frankowski…the support of Zhang Ke, Zhang Hong, Claudia Taborda… the kindness of Michelle Garnaut… the support of Wang Xingyou and PIFO New Art Gallery… the invaluable contributions of Hao Chen, Zhang Yanping (Diego), Edgar Gar-cia, Joao Dias Pereira, Annie Yuxie Wang, Felix Cruz Marcos, Sophie Salamon, Guido Tesio, Yu Yihua, Anna Popova, Ilyas Sadybekov, Alejandra Garcia Hooghuis, Evgenia Novgorodova … the belief of Duncan McCorquodale and Artifice Books on Architecture in London and Paula V. Alvarez and Vibok Works in Sevilla…the eagerness and support of Vicente Diaz Faixat…the interest of Horizonte Journal for Contemporary Architectural Discourse, Studio Magazine, Arch+, Monu Magazine on Urbanism, Concrete Flux, Desierto Magazine, Archdaily, Revista Plot, Ethel Baraona Pohl, 0300TV…the embracing atmosphere of KB Strelka in Moscow…the curatorial initiatives of Pedro Gadanho of the MoMA New York, Bea Leanza of Beijing Design Week and the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, Daan Roggenveen of the Shanghai Study Centre of the University of Hong Kong, Elias Redstone of Archizines…the words of Meng Zhigang, Francois Blanciak, Charles Pope, Elias Redstone, and Carmen Graciela Diaz of El Nuevo Dia… the unconditional support of Dominique Decloitre, Lourdes Santiago, Manuel Garcia, and Cruz Manuel Garcia for making the world a welcoming place…

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UniversalThe newest trend and the art scene are un-necessary distractions for a serious artist. He will be much more rewarded respond-ing to art of all times and places. Not for art history but considering each piece and its value to him.

—Agnes Martin

www.waithinktank.com

Projects

Manifestoes

Essays

Interviews