Texts

Martin Hendrijks show called Enough Room for Space about

“Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence”. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Alternative Space”

“And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me”. Achim Felz, “IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition”

photo book to buy

Lefebvre says his “Critique of Everyday Life was written to create an architecture that would itself instigate the creation of new situations.”

K.R.: Did the Situationist theory of constructing situations have a direct relationship with your theory of “moments”?

H.L.: Yes, that was the basis of our understanding. They more or less said to me during discussions — discussions that lasted whole nights — “What you call ‘moments,’ we call ’situations,’ but we’re taking it farther than you. You accept as ‘moments’ everything that has occurred in the course of history (love, poetry, thought). We want to create new moments.”

K.R.: How did they propose to make the transition from a “moment” to a conscious construction?

H.L.: The idea of a new moment, of a new situation, was already there in Constant’s text from 1953. Because the architecture of situation is a Utopian architecture that supposes a new society, Constant’s idea was that society must be transformed not in order to continue a boring, uneventful life, but in order to create something absolutely new: situations.

Design Like you Give a Damn: pgs. 10-55
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Design Like you give001.pdf

Porous Pavement: Preface, Forward, Chapts. 1, 3, 8
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Porous Pavement002.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Pigeons ch 1-4001.pdfhttp://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Fast Boat to China001.pdf