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Master's Degree Project
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LLiminal Landscapes
Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Richard Cotter
Master’s Degree Project
Completed in Partial Fulfilment of the Master of Architecture Degree in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary
Supervisor: Joshua M. Taron [Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Design]
External Advisor: Thomas Debicki [Principal, Debicki Speta Design]
For Cattive, MoMo, and Luna. We can always meet again in dreams.
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[Acknowledgements]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUM
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Thank you Josh and Thomas for your guidance and support over the last twelve months and throughout this degree.
Thank you Mom, Dad, and Aylish for loving me unconditionally.
Thank you Adam, Alison, Anna, Chris, Kyle, Mike, Shalisha, and Tyler for joining me on the journey of a lifetime.
Thank you to all of my ‘civilian’ friends and family for your understanding. Sorry for disappearing for the past four years.
Thank you Craig and Chris for all of your help and sage advice.
Thank you (again) Adam for putting up with me on all of our joint projects over the years.
Sincerely,
Richard Cotter B.A., M.Arch.
ii
Abstract
SCENE: 00.000DATE: 1999.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Scene from Fight Club]iii
[Abstract][M
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Abstract
‘Only Connect…’1
In the context of an increasingly autocratic society of control, architecture’s apocryphal
claims to the emancipation of life through the mechanism of public space must be challenged
if the discipline is to survive as a critically and politically relevant cultural apparatus.
Through a series of digitally-enabled investigations into the synaesthetically affective
capacity of horrific form (and its imaging), this Master’s Degree Project argues for a radical
reordering of architectural thought and practice, a reordering that would emancipate
architecture from the artificial strictures of reason and deliver it to a liminal space where
it might work to redistribute power through populations in order to resist the suppression
and subjugation of life itself.
In order to achieve such a shift, the project seeks to weaken the fallacious notion that the
individual human subject constitutes the most effective unit for navigating and intervening
in an incomprehensibly complex world.
The work is organized into a prologue, five ‘acts’, an epilogue, and a series of appendices that
‘flesh out’ the project proper. The limitations of documenting the project demand a somewhat
linear approach, but the work in this document consistently chases the temporal fluidity of
cinema as a means of cultivating ambiguity and ambivalence. Like a Francis Bacon portrait, it
is a narrative that tells no story.
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[Abs
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Bare Life, Biopolitics, Heterotopia, Identity, Post-Humanism, Liminality, Speculative Realism, Subjectivity, Sovereign Power, Vital Weakness
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[Abstract][M
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Endnotes
1 ‘Only Connect…’ is the epigraph of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End.
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[Contents][M
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
001...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Prologue
009.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 01: Contextual Introduction
023....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 02: Situating Heterotopia
031.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 03: Precedents
041............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 04: Technique
067..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 05: Case Study
087............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Epilogue
093......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix A: Orthographic Drawings
105......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix B: Site Evolution Diagrams
111......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix C: Construction Techniques
117............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix D: ARP Critique
121....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix E: Outtakes
151..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix F: Physical Modeling
153..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show Gallery Exhibition
155....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Bibliography
159...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Image Citations
ix
Prologue
001
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DATE: 1979.01.01
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[Scene from Alien]
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
‘…It is this last cause of the grotesque which we have to finally consider; namely, the error
and wildness of mental impressions, caused by fear operating upon strong powers of
imagination, or by the failure of human faculties in the endeavor to grasp the highest truths…
The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the most intelligible example
of this kind, but also the most ignoble; the imagination, in this instance, being deprived of
all aid from reason, and incapable of self-government. I believe, however, that the noblest
forms of imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable, and have in them something
of the character of dreams; so that the vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not
submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a prophet, having no
power over his words and thoughts. Only, if the whole man can be trained perfectly, and his
mind calm, consistent, and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen in a perfect mirror,
serenely, and in consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be imperfect and ill
trained, the vision is seen as a broken mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all
the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains
unbroken.’
– John Ruskin1
Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien is often cited as one of the most innovative, genre-defying
movies of its time.2 Alien synthesizes elements of both science fiction and horror, producing
a terrifying hybrid that engages implicitly and explicitly with many of the same aspects of the
grotesque touched upon by Ruskin.
In the film, the crew of a deep space mining vessel touches down on an unidentified planet to
investigate a mysterious distress signal. During the investigation, an alien life form attaches
itself to the face of one of the crew members, only to fall off of its own accord once the team
returns to the landing craft. Later, the crew member convulses violently during a meal with
his colleagues and a small creature erupts violently from his chest and then disappears into
the labyrinthine bowels of the ship. The rest of the film is a terrifying game of cat and mouse
wherein all but one of the crew is annihilated by the alien.
The film is successful because it cultivates suspense and a sense of dread by rarely showing
the titular alien in full view (a time honoured tactic in the horror genre). When the creature
does make appearances, it is rendered almost illegible by the dark lighting and ornately
biomechanical claustrophobic passageways and chambers of the mining vessel. The film’s
affective quality is heightened by the fact that the crew is removed by both time and distance
from any conceivable source of assistance. The story unfolds deep in space, where, according
to the film’s byline, ‘no one can hear you scream’.3
Alien pits conventional notions of humanity against the limit condition of human knowledge.
In the film, the crew’s science officer (himself a ‘synthetic human’) expresses admiration for
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the ‘purity’ of the alien, whose complete lack of empathy makes any sort of relation between it
and the crew all but impossible.4 The alien’s impetus for destroying the crew is quite literally
beyond reason, and therefore, horrific.
Yet Alien does not merely confront the limits of what constitutes humanity; it purposefully
violates them. It is this violation of the distinction between the human and the non-human
that speaks to Ruskin’s understanding of the power of the grotesque. In transgressing
the boundaries of the human body through the ‘face hugger’, the ‘chest burster’, and the
gruesome dismemberment of the bodies themselves, Alien calls into question the notion
of an essentialized humanity (see 00.002). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the alien in the
film is a bipedal creature that bears some resemblance to a human body, yet simultaneously
functions as the grossly disfigured inversion of that body (see 00.003) that one might find in
the reflection of Ruskin’s ‘broken mirror’.
While Alien ultimately sides with ‘the human’ (the film’s protagonist blasts the creature out
of the ship’s escape shuttle and into the vacuum of space), it leaves lingering doubts about
the validity of ‘the human’ as a category at all.
Alien does not make any explicit reference to contemporary forms of power or governance,
but it does pose some pertinent questions about the position of life in relation to Ruskin’s
concept of the ‘ungovernable’. In the context of increasingly autocratic societies of
control, nostalgic visions of democracy are being eroded by insidious and diverse forms of
sovereignty5, namely those wherein power is redistributed from central sovereign bodies
and into broader populations. This diffusion of power through populations and into bodies
is simultaneously the mechanism by which those bodies are subjugated, and, paradoxically,
the potential means of their emancipation.
If resistance to asymmetric power structures has historically sided with an aspiration
centered on a desire to achieve a ‘perfect reflection’ of the individual subject in Ruskin’s
‘perfect mirror’, then perhaps the future of resistance lies in embracing Ruskin’s ‘broken
mirror’ and abandoning all claims to self governance. To return to the Alien vignette, perhaps
it is less about ‘the human’ conquering ‘the other’ and more about embracing the horrific
possibility that there is no essence of humanity, and that life itself is the basic category of
existence, or, more appropriately, of becoming.6 As paradoxical as it might seem, it is, perhaps,
only through the dissolution of our own identities through immersion in the unknown and
the horrific that we can ever make ourselves ungovernable.
But how does one embrace the grotesque reflection in the ‘broken mirror’ and remove
oneself from the political order altogether, so as to hasten its collapse?
This Master’s Degree Project (MDP) will examine the myriad of ways in which life7 itself
functions as the primary object of power, and by extension, of architecture. It is this struggle
over the control of life that underpins the governance of our entire species and it is only in
the tumult of this struggle that we have any hope of finding alternatives to hegemonic forms
of power.
In what follows, we will investigate the fundamental (paradoxical) problematic of attempting
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to subtract oneself from positions of oppression through ‘soft’ engagement with the
instruments of oppression themselves. Following the axiom that ‘problems cannot be solved
using the logics that created them’, this project seeks to reposition the logics that imprison
life in the name of power (and through architecture) in order to open the planet (and all life)
up to potential futures beyond those that are inscribed in the current global political order.
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[Bodily violation in Alien]
[Prologue][M
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Endnotes
1 Ruskin 1860, 165
2 Alien is ranked no. 7 on the American Film Institute’s ’Top 10 Sci-Fi Films’ and no. 33 on Empire Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Movies of All Time’.
3 Scott 1979
4 Ibid.
5 In Political Theology Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the ability to decide on the exception. This form of power is no longer necessarily vested in a single body, but rather distributed
through populations.
6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write extensively about ‘becoming’ in relation to ‘being’ in their work Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They argue for an understanding
of life that is rooted not in the illusion of stability, but rather in the embrace of its volatile, transitory character.
7 In this project, the term ‘life’ should be understood in terms of the concept of ‘whatever life’ articulated by Eugene Thacker in ‘Biological Sovereignty’.
‘Whatever life’ suggests that reductionist, biological ‘life itself’ or ‘specific life’ is, paradoxically, the mechanism that conditions and proliferates socially
constructed ‘general life’. Thacker suggests that the biological is more than biological because it is reductively biological.
008
Act 01Contextual Introduction + Theoretical Framework
009
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DATE: 2005.03.14
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[Guantanamo Bay Detention Center]
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Preamble
‘... social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive
and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their
very center lies the same bare life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of
the twentieth century’
-Giorgio Agamben1
At the ‘crepuscular dawn’2 of the twenty-first century architecture is faced with a decisive
ultimatum: evolve or die. The ‘twin fantasies of order and omnipotence’3 upon which
architectural practice has been predicated for at least the last five hundred years are no
longer (and never really were) viable models for engaging a world so deeply inscribed in
a fundamentally undemocratic regime of control. Architecture continues to shape the
communal spaces of our cities in the name of ‘the public’, but are its actions ever really in
the best interests of that public, or of those publics? Moreover, can we, as humans, continue
to assume hegemony over a planet whose complexity is so far beyond our own capacity for
understanding?
Facing the aforementioned ultimatum, this MDP proposes a revitalization of the speculative
project as a legitimate technique for shaping the discourse around the ‘actual’ built
environment. In projecting a future that does not yet exist (and might never exist), the
project seeks an end to causal reasoning as the basis for architectural intervention and
speculation. Working from a theoretical framework rooted in Speculative Realism, the project
understands that ‘the present is never pregnant with the future’.4
To some extent, this approach is not new. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Constant
Nieuwenhuys, and a host of other radical practitioners in the 1960’s and 1970’s offered
fantastical and highly critical perspectives on the role of architecture in a tumultuous
world. While their influence remains, the tradition of radical speculative projects has all but
evaporated in the contemporary context. True, speculative theoretical approaches remain,
but they are marginalized at the architectural periphery by an increasingly homogenous and
reactionary profession terrified by anything outside of its arbitrary institutional boundaries.
Throughout this project I challenge some of the fundamental assumptions that we, as
designers and as citizens, make on a daily basis about architecture and about its role in
shaping our cities and our lives, and even of shaping life itself. I do not level these challenges
because I hate architecture: far from it, in fact. At their core, the critiques and proposals
offered in this document stem from a deeply seated belief in architecture’s ability to allow
life some measure of sanctuary from the forces that would contain and stifle it. I do not
intend the contents of this document to be interpreted as my own personal vision of what
the future should look like. In fact, it is precisely that sort of myopic, subject-centric, and
arrogant approach that this project attempts to subtract from the design process. Instead,
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[Constant Nieuwenhuys New Babylon]
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I hope that you will read this project as an experiment in the weakening of subjectivity and
the production of immanence.
Liminality
The world is a complex place. It is, in fact, unthinkably complex.5 While this complexity is
in itself nothing new, global scale meta-emergencies ranging from climate change to the
collapse of financial markets have, arguably for the first time, begun to reveal cracks in the
façade of the notion that the world exists for us as human beings, and that we can will the
astounding complexity that constitutes the planet into submission for our own ends.
Since the Enlightenment, architecture has been deeply embedded in a humanist worldview
(underwritten by a biopolitical paradigm) that has allowed our species to operate under the
erroneous assumption that we are in control, both of ourselves as individual subjects, and of
the planet as a collective whole. In so doing, architecture has assumed responsibilities that
it never really had any right to assume and for which it has never really had any means of
ever actually realizing.
In that it permeates our daily lives, architecture is one of the chief mechanisms through
which populations are governed and conditioned to accept the fallacy of hegemony over the
planet. This process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the insidious erosion of the
nostalgic notion of public space as a forum for democratic participation. It is the aim of
this project to pry architecture from its position of imagined control in order to save the
discipline from the oblivion of irrelevance.
The term ‘liminality’ refers to the state that exists ‘in-between’ (and just beyond) the
limit conditions of (apparently) stable or static phenomena. It is a state of becoming that
possesses qualities of both its initial state and its terminal condition, but is itself neither of
these things. Instead, it is characterized by instability and indeterminacy; in fact, liminality
itself challenges the notion that the limit conditions it straddles are themselves concrete or
fixed.
Liminality appears in various forms in the writings of many prominent post-stucturalist
philosophers, notably in Gilles Deleuze’s ruminations on ‘becoming’, but it is perhaps
Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the ‘in-between’ that resonates most deeply with the notion
of liminality explored in this MDP. The in-between ‘lacks a fundamental identity, lacks a form,
a givenness, a nature’.6 It is, by virtue of its ability to facilitate becoming, that which ‘makes
identity both possible and impossible’.7
To confront the notion of an uncontrollable and unknowable future is to confront the limit
conditions of human knowledge. It is something of a paradox to attempt to reconcile the
unknowable through the very means of knowing that the unknowable itself sits outside of.
We encounter the in-between at the point at which it ‘takes on, receives itself, its form, from
the outside, which is not its outside… but whose form is outside of the identity’.8
As a precedent for dealing with this condition, we turn to horror as a lens through which to
frame the problem of the asymptotic limit of human knowledge. The horror genre, both in
literature and film, has long dealt explicitly with this very problem through a very deliberate
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engagement with the enigmatic, the otherworldly, and the unknown.9 Horror rarely seeks
to define or account for any of these things; instead opting to use them as mechanisms
for inducing unease and even terror. Throughout this MDP, horror, in conjunction with the
overarching metanarrative of projecting a science fictive future, functions as a conceptual
framework and as an operative technique for dealing with formal and programmatic
recombinance in pursuit of liminal conditions.
Identity
Identity, in the conventional sense of the term, is understood as a set of traits inherent to a
given body that are indicative of essentialized qualities of that body. For the most part, we
believe ourselves to be human, members of a particular gender, ethnicity, socio-economic
class, etc. Deleuze is, unsurprisingly, highly critical of this facile understanding of identity
and the mechanisms that produce it and perpetuate it. For Deleuze, identity as described
above obfuscates the pure differences that underpin life (all life, not just human life) as a
potentially productive force.10 Deleuze is especially critical of the conflation of the perception
and representation of identity with the inherently unidentifiable forces that are always at
work beneath the superficial veil of conventional performances of identity.11
Judith Butler’s writings on feminism and gender politics offer an instructive complement
to Deleuze’s approach to the topic of identity. In Gender Trouble, she writes that ‘identity
is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its ‘results,’’ To
paraphrase, we are, effectively, what we do. But why do we do what we do? Deleuze points
to a ‘self-destructive dependence’ on identity as a sort of crutch for coping with the
aforementioned un-communicable processes of production that constitute ‘reality’.12
Biopower, Biopolitics + Control Societies
If we peer deeper into the mechanisms that produce and enable identity, however, an even
more insidious set of processes emerges. Michel Foucault argues that the juridical forms of
power on which contemporary ‘democratic’ states are founded actively produce the subjects
that they subsequently represent and control.13 Foucault cites an ‘explosion of numerous
and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
populations’, specifically through the formal institutional structures of the state: the school,
the prison, and the clinic.14 Later, these implements of disciplinary societies are sublimated
into the diffuse and constantly operating mechanisms of surveillance and management that
characterize ‘societies of control’.15 This historical trajectory forms the basis of Foucault’s
understanding of ‘biopower’: literally the power over bodies for a particular productive end,
namely, control over life itself.16
Giorgio Agamben’s body of work expands on Foucault’s discourse on biopower and biopolitics
(biopower’s corresponding political manifestation). For Agamben, sovereign power (a model
of power wherein a single sovereign is vested with the power to decide to whom and when the
law applies) and biopower meet and (paradoxically) fuse in the model of the camp (exemplified
in its most extreme state by the Nazi concentration camps during World War II).17 According
to Agamben, the camp exemplifies the state of exception, an event wherein bare life (life
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exposed to death through a process of abandonment from the protective measures of the
law) is separated from politically meaningful life.18 Agamben goes on to suggest that the
state of exception exemplified by the camp is in fact no longer the exception at all, but rather
an indication of the ‘hidden matrix’ of modern politics. In fact ‘... social sciences, sociology,
urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space
of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare
life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.’19 This
alarming ignorance is the territory that this MDP seeks to remediate.
Viewed from this perspective, the performance of identity becomes even more intrinsically
linked to the hegemony of state and economic power. If we are always already bound by the
strictures of identity and subjectivity, and subjugated by the mechanisms of the state and
capitalism, by what means can we ever really be free of them?
Post-Humanism
Before attempting to answer such a loaded question, we must first more firmly establish the
design contexts in which this project operates. If architecture is ignorant of the foundational
basis of political modernity, then it is equally unaware of the degree to which ‘the human’ is
no longer a relevant basis for the creation or evaluation of politically meaningful space. If
we return briefly to Agamben’s thesis that ‘Western politics is a biopolitics from the very
beginning’, then ‘every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is in
vain’. The stable, coherent subject (or at least the illusion of that entity) is, in the context of
a biopolitical landscape, subsumed by the population at large as the relevant unit of political
engagement and design intervention. The design problem then, is one of moving past the
‘vestigial remains’ of humanism in pursuit of ‘the deterritorialization of the human animal,
and the specific diagram of the Human as a format that has been shuttled forward from the
Enlightenment’.20
‘The innovation of the diagram is much more interesting than the innovation of humans,
and much more so than any particular individual, but not as interesting in turn than the
innovation of forces which form the diagram. In fact, let me be blunt, the focus of post-
humanism on the innovation of a particular individual is a sad diversion. You are not the
100th monkey, they are a dying mammal with a narcissistic personality disorder.’21
In place of ‘the human’, as most relevant constituent of societies of control, this project turns
to the concept of ‘the multitude’, which, as with liminality, presents itself (with slight variations)
in the work of many contemporary theorists. Hardt and Negri articulate the multitude as a
‘set of singularities’ (which we might liken to Deleuze’s ‘dividuals’)22 that together form a
plurality that ‘stand[s] in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people’.23
Ethics + Aesthetics
Challenges to normative assumptions about the validity of subject categories and moral
absolutes bring into focus a debate about the tension between ethics and aesthetics in
relation to the governance of social behaviour. While we may operate under a belief in the
possibility of sacrosanct ethical frameworks, our ‘lives are lived aesthetically before anything
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else… whatever we do, we do for aesthetic reasons’.24 Put another way:
‘Aesthetic common sense does not represent an objective accord of the faculties, but a pure
subjective harmony where imagination and understanding are exercised spontaneously,
each on its own account. Consequently aesthetic common sense does not complete the two
others (reason and imagination); it provides them with a basis and makes them possible...
But is it sufficient to assume this free accord, to suppose it a priori? Must it not be, on the
contrary, produced in us?... The sublime thus confronts us with a direct subjective relation-
ship between imagination and reason...’25
If we adopt such a radically different understanding of the role of aesthetics in design,
what are the implications for design itself? This project posits that aesthetic engagement,
mediated through form, has the capacity to subvert the political and ethical strictures that
produce and reproduce normative identities and in so doing to produce new bodies and new
species of space.
Accordingly, this project understands the process of imaging not as an issue of
representation, but of production. Writing about the distinction between art and architecture,
Walter Benjamin observes that in the case of architectural images, ‘one cannot say that they
re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place...’26 Buildings are not pieces of
architecture. They are the residue of an architectural process, but buildings themselves
do not constitute architecture. It is the performative architectural image that, following
Benjamin’s observation, must be considered as the central component of the architectural
project. Accordingly, this project embraces the speculative potential of the architectural
image without (wholly) subordinating it to the demands of physical built form.
Lines of Flight
The philosophical positions explored above problematize conventional approaches to design
and raise a number of critically important questions about the implications of these positions
on the practice of architecture in a post-human world. Perhaps chief among these questions
is how do we, as human artifacts,27 remove ourselves from the design decision making
processes where we have no claim to the authority to decide? Similarly, what things must be
fixed in order to deliver architecture to a space of liminality? How might the weakening of
identity and the hegemony of the individual subject alter the socio-political landscapes of the
planet? How might such things come about?
This MDP rejects the notion that architecture projects as they are currently conceived of
and executed have the capacity to achieve the kinds of change that they claim to effect.
This project makes no claims to offering a coherent ‘solution’ (or even a singular designed
entity) as a panacea for the biopolitical prison that is the contemporary city. Instead, the
work takes the form of a series of investigations that attempt to manifest an alternative
theoretical framework for answering the aforementioned questions (and others) through
the development of techniques of disfigurement and effacement of multiple ‘bodies’ at
multiple scales.
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This investigation is guided, in large part, by an approach rooted in the emerging
philosophical tradition of Speculative Realism. Speculative Realism holds that reason and
rationality must be abandoned (as they currently exist) as part of a larger ontological problem
centering on the inability of the Principle of Sufficient Reason28 to explain or even mediate
the way in which we inhabit the planet. Instead, Speculative Realism argues for a new sort of
rationality, one that understands that an entirely rational world would be ‘entirely chaotic’.29
Accordingly, the project assumes an ethical stance that refuses to accept that the world as it
is determines the world as it might be in the future and pursues design accordingly.
Endnotes
1 Agamben 1998, 181
2 Virilio 2002. Paul Virilio’s invocation of a paradoxical ‘crepuscular dawn’
resonates with the many apparently contradictory philosophical conceits explored
in this project
3 Koolhaas 1998, 969
4 Meillessoux 2011, 232
5 Thacker 2011, 8
6 Grosz, 2001, 91
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Thacker 2011, 8
10 Williams 2005, 124
11 Ibid. at 125
12 Ibid.
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14 Ibid. at 140
15 Deleuze 1990, 7
16 Ibid.
17 Agamben 1998, 171
18 Ibid. at 88
19 Ibid. at 181
20 Bratton 2011
21 Ibid.
22 Deleuze 1990, 6
23 Hardt and Negri 2004, 99
24 Spuybroek 2008, 168
25 Deleuze 1984, 92
26 Benjamin 1988, 89
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27 Bratton 2011
28 Meillessoux 2011, 226. The Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that everything that happens does so for a particular reason.
29 Ibid.
022
Act 02Situating Heterotopia: Towards a New Communal Realm
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Heterotopia
Architecture’s assumed ability to foster democratic participation though the mechanism of
‘open’ public space is always already undone by the foundations of biopolitical modernity
and the social superstructures that characterize contemporary control societies.
This incapacity for action is expressed quite dramatically in the spectacle of the ‘Occupy’
movement currently sweeping the cities of the global north. ‘Occupy’ assumes the veracity of
the nostalgic (and apocryphal) notion that public space is indeed that: ‘free’ territory where
the expression of opposition to the hegemonic order of Empire1 has some force in terms of
effecting change. In fact, the opposite is true; public spaces are programmed to foster very
specific uses, uses that tend to condition and discipline populations towards docility.
In the context of an increasingly securitized public realm, the public plaza has all but lost
its intended utopian performativity and has instead been subsumed by the operative
techniques of martial security program. Public plazas are now little more than sites for the
performance and social reproduction of normative (i.e. predictable and controllable) values.
The fact that ‘Occupy’ camps can be disbanded by a simple court order, or that police can
legally pepper spray peaceful protestors on a university campus (see 02.002), reaffirms that
public space is intended for use only by very specific members of a very specific ‘public’ and
that outright resistance to the forms and means of power that order public space is always
already a lost cause. Still, even as it secures populations, stratified public space cannot help
but pit these same populations against themselves, simultaneously advancing life as ‘threat,
threatened, and response’, though the response is always the same.2 This asymmetrical
balance of power speaks to the looming presence of a different kind of ‘camp’ than the ones
created by ‘Occupy’ protestors.
Giorgio Agamben identifies the Nazi concentration camp as the paradoxical point at which
two opposite forms of governance (sovereign power and biopower) meet and fuse.3 He
suggests that the camp (and the state of exception it embodies) is no longer an exception
at all, but rather the paradigmatic model of all modern politics.4 In such a model, ‘public’
spaces become territories where the threat of potential exceptional violence is omnipresent.
In a sense, the polis itself is the spatial manifestation of this state of exception; a menacing
biopolitical prison wherein we are all virtually homines sacri.5
If architectural program is ill equipped to produce ‘open’ conditions because of its deep
structural ties to the mechanisms and instruments of biopolitical power, what are the
possibilities of pursuing architecture not with a utopian impulse, but with a heterotopian
one?
Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘Heterotopia’ to the architectural lexicon in his 1967
lecture, ‘Of Other Spaces’. ‘Heterotopia’, which literally means ‘other places’, comprises those
elements that must be evacuated or cleared away to make utopia possible.6 Heterotopia is
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the space of otherness, a territory in which the distinction between public and private is
suspended. Heterotopian space exists in the contemporary city in the form of shopping
malls, parking lots, leisure centers, and the myriad of terrains vagues that populate the
urban realm.7
If the failed utopianism of contemporary public space is best characterized by the camp, then
heterotopian space is best described by the model of the sanctuary. The sanctuary is the
camp’s opposite: a site of refuge for Agamben’s homines sacri from the unmediated violence
of sovereign power.
Despite their polar conceptual differences, the camp and the sanctuary are not so easily
disentangled in the context of the contemporary city. Generally, though, it is the influence
of the camp that permeates and pollutes the conceptual model of the sanctuary and not
vice versa. Indeed, the shopping arcade, famously advanced by Walter Benjamin as a liminal
space between the public and private spheres8 is simultaneously one of the most visible
instances of the influences of the camp as paradigm of the modern.
The intent of this project is not to propagate heterotopian spaces as discrete sanctuaries that
function as binary opposites to the myriad of camp spaces that comprise the contemporary
public realm. Rather, the impulse driving the project is to merge and recombine the camp
and the sanctuary in pursuit of a new species of space, one that defies programmatic
concretization (paradoxically) through the introduction of programmatic elements that foster
liminality through their own mutability and in so doing provide alternatives to the perpetual
insidious infiltration of the camp into all spaces. Heterotopia can thus be understood as the
‘sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human
thought’9 wherein bare life and political life collapse into one another to the extent that it
becomes impossible to separate the two, effectively negating the possibility of the state of
exception upon which the current biopolitical system of control is founded.
This approach acknowledges the historical integration of violence and architectural design
and discourse, but seeks to shift the focus of this violence away from repression and order
and towards emancipation and multiplicity. After all, ‘there is no architecture without
violence’.10
If architecture is to have any relevance or productive force in the contemporary world (and
particularly the contemporary polis), it must reposition itself relative to the unknowable
and the horrific; it must embrace the heterotopian project and discard its utopian impulses.
It is only through heterotopian program that architecture can ever ‘aspire to revel in the
sheer thrill of the unknown’ and in so doing reposition itself in relative to prevailing power
relations and structures of governance.11
On the surface, this position might seem itself to be just another utopian vision, but for one
crucial distinction: utopian projects tend to assume an idealized end state that stretches
on ad infinitum. Moreover, utopian visionaries tend to assume that they themselves are
qualified to prognosticate about the value sets required to achieve such an end. That is not
the case here. Instead, we might reconsider the aspirations that drive the utopian impulse
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and redirect them to more ambivalent ends, recognizing our own inability to reconcile the
complexity of the planet and embracing this fact not as a limitation, but as an ability to
facilitate not one specific future, but rather induce a set of possible futures to which no
value can be assigned a priori.
In the following act we will consider a few precedents that have guided the development of
the project, both conceptually and formally, before delving more explicitly into the means
and methods by which the project seeks to develop novel forms of (immanent) (bio)political
governance in later acts.
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Endnotes
1 Hardt and Negri 2000, xii. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under
a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’
2 Thacker 2006, 20
3 Agamben 1998 171.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid. Agamben uses the figure of Homo Sacer (a figure in Roman Law who could be killed but not sacrificed) to elucidate his concept of bare life, or life exposed to death through a
process of abandonment by the law.
6 Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008, 3
7 Ibid.
8 Benjamin 2002, 4
9 Agamben 2000, 117
10 Tschumi, 1996, 44
11 Grosz, 2001, 105
030
Act 03Precedent Survey
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Preamble
Precedent studies are a time-honored component of architectural projects. Recently,
however, the use of precedent has shifted fundamentally away from direct engagement
with architecture’s own history and has begun to engage more avant garde fare. While
architecture must continue to reach outside of itself in order to ensure its own relevance in
an increasingly complex world, it must also resist the temptation to fall into the trap of using
gimmicks to justify its own existence. The use of ever more absurd ‘precedents’ in projects
both academic and professional is lamentable.
This project is interested in the use of precedents from within art and architectural historical
canons. It is not, however, as interested in quotation of historical form as it is in using history
operatively, that is to say reactivating historical trajectories of thought and practice in order
to effect change now and in the future.
To that end, the aim here is an integrative synthesis of various approaches to (dis)figuration
and subjectivity as they relate to the body and the city. The project engages three chief
precedents: Art Nouveau, the portraiture of Francis Bacon, and Horror. In what follows we
will examine each of these precedents in greater detail before moving on to an explanation
of how they influenced the development of a particular set of techniques in the following act.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau (also known as Jugendstil in Germany, The Viennese Secession in Austria, and
Modernismo in Spain) was active as a critical architectural practice for only a short time
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, before being subsumed by
Art Deco and receding into obscurity as a mere style. Still, Art Nouveau’s impact on art and
architectural-historical discourses is significant. For Walter Benjamin it marked a decisive
break: a caesura between the ‘new and the always the same’.1 In fact, Benjamin claimed that
the entire idea of Modernity should be understood as commencing with Jugendstil.2
Benjamin’s claim can be traced to Art Nouveau’s attempt to rid art and architecture of the
baggage of the historical quotation that characterized much of the late 19th Century. Art
Nouveau embodied an attempt to pursue a new sort of rationality and logical form enabled
and emboldened by emerging technologies and material systems that forever altered
construction methods and practices. The introduction of glass and iron in particular enabled
new means of spatial separation and codification.
It was precisely this formal and material quality of Art Nouveau/Jugendstil that prompted
Benjamin to label the movement ‘dangerous’.3 For Benjamin, the introduction of the cold,
hard, transparency of glass and iron constituted a subversive threat to the plush, closed
interior of the bourgeois Victorian domestic sphere. Whereas the Victorian interior had
hitherto been characterized by its ‘cocoon-like’ opacity, Jugendstil sought to work through
the surfaces that concealed the dwelling in order to open it up to connections with the
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(exterior) public realm. Plush, velvet-draped walls gave way to the undulating ‘whiplash’
lines of wrought iron screens. The materials employed by Art Nouveau practitioners such as
Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, and Henry Van De Velde permitted no trace of occupation to
accrue in the dwelling. Art Nouveau, then, posited the possibility of an untraceable future, a
future not bound to the logics or conditions of the present.
Art Nouveau is also noteworthy for its embrace of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or the
‘total work of art’, which ‘rendered the work of art superfluous’ through the integration of
art, architecture, and life down to the smallest detail.4 This obsessive tendency to design
literally everything from structural members to jewelry collapsed the distinction between
art and life threatened the boundary between the anesthetic built environment and the
exuberance of life itself.
In rendering indistinct the division between interior and exterior, Jugendstil also threatened
the division between observed and observer, casting the Bourgeoisie out from his privileged
position of voyeuristic surveillance over the street and effectively folding the public realm
into the sanctity of the domestic sphere.
Art Nouveau differs fundamentally from Modernism proper (and all subsequent architectural
‘isms’, with the possible exception of emerging trends in digitally-enabled design) because
its constitutive basis is not the grid, but the curvilinear figure. Unlike the grid, where ‘lines
are subordinated to higher order of the surface, where lines repeatedly find each other in
the same manner, solely by crossing’, curvilinear figures deploy a multitude of connective
agencies: they can slide along each other, or bounce, or even lock into each other’.5 Horta’s
merging ‘S’ curves intertwine to form railings in one instance and columns in the next.
Similarly, Guimard’s versions bundle and bounce to articulate entranceways, windows, and
even light fixtures.
What relevance does a one hundred years dead architectural movement have in the context of
the contemporary polis? Surprisingly, a great deal. The political conditions that precipitated
Art Nouveau are not so different from those of today. Haussmann’s Paris, whose monotonous,
militarized urban fabric Hector Guimard’s serpentine stonework subtly subverts, is not all
that different than the securitized and closed circuit television-surveyed public realm of
virtually any contemporary city today. As a corollary to the question of relevance, we must
also ask why Art Nouveau failed and simultaneously imagine what might have happened if
it had not evaporated. It is into this alternate reality that we must place ourselves if we are
to properly excise useful operative techniques for the reactivation of Nouveau’s zeitgeist in
the name of reclaiming the public sphere from the paradigmatic model of Agamben’s camp.
Francis Bacon
The work of Irish painter Francis Bacon constitutes this project’s second chief precedent.
Bacon’s portraiture and figural paintings confound conventional notions of subjectivity and
identity and in so doing stake out a claim for the affective capacity of imagery to induce
violent change in the self awareness of the observer; a central theme in this project. Through
the lens of post-structural perspectives on schizophrenia as a ‘decentered existence’ or a
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‘split subject’, we can begin to read Bacon’s paintings as hyper-reflexive mechanisms for the
dissolution of human subjectivity in favour of more nomadic notions of identity in keeping
with Judith Butler’s understanding of the term (which we previously addressed in the first
act) as a mutable, unstable, and always socially constructed veil of coherence that masks
the teeming complexity and contradiction that characterizes human social interaction.6
Bacon’s figures are never in control of ‘their’ own perceptions, which are always mediated by
external means. Thus, instead of perception leading representation, representation leads
perception, reducing the role of the subject to a scene of action, ‘rendering senseless the
modernist conflation of the subject with the eye’.7 The ‘mind’s eye’ is replaced by ‘the body’s
spasm’.8 One does not so much look at a Bacon painting as devour it. His work is visceral and
synaesthetically arresting.
This emphasis on Bacon’s work as a more than visual experience is well documented. Gilles
Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation examines the quality of Bacon’s figures that
allows them to bypass figuration and yet remain as figures. Deleuze identifies this quality as
‘sensation’, which must be understood as the opposite of both figuration and abstraction.9
For Deleuze, the figure is ‘not simply the isolated body, but the deformed body that escapes
from itself.’10 Bacon’s paintings work through a process of disfiguration, of undermining
accepted norms of representation in order to open them up to new and explicitly unsettling
ways of becoming. While Bacon’s works include qualities of narrative, they tell no story and
allude to no transcendent higher order.
Bacon’s figure’s ‘faces’ droop, sag, twist, and melt. They are horrific, not so much in the sense
that they induce fear or terror (though also that), but in the sense that they confront the
limit condition of the perception of reality and blur the figure’s position relative to life and
death. In so doing, they induce doubt as to whether the subject and his or her body are really
indivisible and moreover, whether that subject’s identity is really all that well tied to anything
inherent to that body.
In that it falls outside of architectural history, Bacon’s portraiture raises even more
questions than Art Nouveau as to its applicability as a mechanism of architectural subversion.
How does art transgress its own disciplinary boundaries in order to corrupt (or augment)
architecture? Is there that much of a difference between one of Bacon’s paintings and an
architectural rendering? How does one disfigure architecture, and how much of the original
figure must remain for disfiguration to achieve its full, nightmarish potential?
Horror
The third and final conceptual precedent that we will consider for the purposes of this
MDP is horror. Horror is, admittedly, an extremely broad term and one that carries with it a
significant amount of preordained meaning. Before proceeding with an explication of horror
as it relates to this project, some disambiguation is in order. Horror, for the purposes of this
project, is best understood as product of confrontation with the unknown.11
In In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker provides a framework for using horror as
a conceptual tool for navigating the paradoxical problematic of attempting to think non-
anthropocentrically12. Thacker’s approach centers on an attempt to engage the unknown
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not from a position of philosophical strength, but from one of what we might call ‘vital
weakness’.13 Rather than attempting to find reasoned connections between things, horror
exploits the sheer inexplicability of certain phenomena as a tactic for dealing with the fact
that some things are simply beyond the realm of human comprehension and attempting to
assign meaning to them usually does more harm than good.
In a way, horror provides a means of emancipating action and decision-making from the
Principle of Sufficient Reason, thus aligning it (as an operative mechanism) with the ethos
of Speculative Realism.
The mechanisms by which horror operates (in film especially) advance some questions
about how they might integrate with architecture in order to facilitate or induce unsettling
negotiations with the unknown. What, for instance, are the implications for architectural
imaging with respect to the cultivation of suspense (a technique common to virtually every
horror film)? If architectural images typically strive for legibility and accuracy, how might
horror pollute these tendencies and allow architectural imaging to become subtler and more
suggestive?
The project strives for the integration of the horrific as a means of liberating architecture
from the biopolitical foundations of modernity through the weakening of liberal subjectivity.
If Art Nouveau can be understood as ‘dreaming that one is awake’, then the folding in
of horror makes the dream a sort of nightmare in which the world is always just beyond
comprehension, and therefore beyond the stifling oppression of the camp.14
Conclusion
The precedents presented here constitute the core bases of an aesthetic model centered
on the notion of synaesthetic activation. All three case studies employ form and imagery
in a manner that challenges conventional distinctions between different mechanisms of
sensory perception, on the one hand, and sensation itself versus intellectual cognition on
the other. All three precedents exploit the liminal space produced through the erosion of
these normative boundaries in order to produce new sensational hybrids. At the same time,
these precedents open up various lines of inquiry that problematize their integration with
the architectural project. This MDP seeks to instrumentalize the approaches embedded
in these precedents in the name of architecture in order to explore the questions raised
by the precedents themselves. In the following act we will examine the means by which
these approaches are sublimated into architectural techniques, before addressing their
deployment as a case study in the final act.
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1 De Cauter 1996, 13
2 Ibid.
3 Spuybroek 2009, 37
4 De Cauter 1996, 22
5 Spuybroek 2009, 36
6 van Alphen 1992, 77
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. at 81
9 Deleuze 2004, 27
10 Ibid. at 19
11 Thacker 2011, 8
12 Ibid.
13 Vattimo 1988, 85
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14 De Cauter 1996, 24
040
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SCENE: 04.001DATE: 2084.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 02[Aerial Rendering]
Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Preamble
Technique and methodology are closely related in that they are both means of achieving
particular ends, but they are not synonymous. Whereas ‘methodology’ tends to imply the
application of external logics to a given problem, ‘technique’ implies a more complex
relationship. Logics and means developed as modes of investigation are (at least in the case
of this project) closely tied to the thematic content of the project itself. In keeping with the
project’s valuing of immanence over transcendence, the techniques developed here are
indivisible from the work itself.
Such an approach may appear as academic heresy to those who believe that architectural
research (or any research) ought to be ‘objective’ and dispassionate. Still, it is this project’s
position that objectivity and the disembodied gaze it implies are absurd and, indeed,
undesirable aspirations of any research project. The techniques explained and explored in
this act are wildly paradoxical, yet they are ultimately no less valid and no less provable than
any other mechanism of inquiry.
Designing [in] a Dissociative State
How does one weaken one’s own (perception of) authorship over the design process? One
of the chief themes of this project is the extraction (or at least the dilution) of individual
subjectivity in the formulation and execution of decisions concerning the production of
‘public’ space in the contemporary city. Currently, the avant garde trajectory in architectural
discourse centers on the role of dissolving authorship through techniques rooted in
generative algorithm-driven software and other digitally ‘autonomous’ approaches. It is by
no means the intention of this MDP to discredit or even criticize this line of exploration.
Nevertheless, this project, while in many respects enabled by digital techniques, has
not employed explicitly parametric methods of realizing itself. Instead, it has flirted with
autonomy through an approach (paradoxically) integrated with what in some respects might
be considered highly conventional means of architectural production.
With the exception of a few lines in the first prologue, ‘I’, has not appeared as a pronoun
anywhere in this document. The reason being, of course, that the ‘author’ of the project does
not really consider himself to be its creator in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, he
prefers to think of himself as one of the facilitators of the project; it’s ‘mere supporter’.1
The projections about the future presented on these pages are not his per se, but rather
the amalgamation of a lifetime worth of cultural consumption (of both the high and low
variety) regurgitated and reassembled in the images you find on these pages. Childhood
obsessions with science fictive ‘creature’ films are folded into the myriad of other aesthetic
cues gleaned from literature, music, film, television, and other means of relating to the world
and then worked through a filter of digital polygon modeling. The resultant formal moves
are thus less the result of precalculated intent executed with rigorous precision and more
042[Act 04][M
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the manifestation of a million idiosyncratic tweaks performed compulsively over too many
late nights. The human male whose name is on the front of this document is thus no more of
a tool in the development of this project than Maya, Photoshop, Rhino, InDesign, Illustrator,
ZPrint, or TrotecJobControl. His body (or is it really his?) is just part or a material network
whose integration made the work you see here possible.
This perspective and approach owes greatly to the concept of positionality and situated
knowledge found in canonical works of feminist theory.2 Still, such approaches do not go far
enough in destabilizing the core of our ‘self destructive dependence on identity’, nor do they
challenge the fundamental assumption that even in recognizing our own positionality or the
situated nature of our knowledge, we remain ill equipped to ever really understand the full
implications of such realizations.3
Many of the design techniques explored in this MDP are rigorously unrigorous. Their
success is judged not on some external performance metric, but on their own agreement
within the topology of the technique itself. Things that have no meaning or identity of their
own gradually begin to accrue both of these things, before eventually divesting themselves
of all meaning through their mindless (but not thoughtless) multiplication and combination.
This MDP can thus be read (in part) as an experiment in using the same faculties that
supposedly afford dominion over the realm of inanimate material self reflexively and,
ultimately, self destructively in the pursuit of a method of making that is divorced from all
ends4; a technique that approaches the limit conditions of ‘pure mediality’5, by conceding
from the outset that pure means do not really exist.
Landscape
We have thus far addressed notions of liminality, heterotopia, and post-humanism as they
relate to the project. We have not, however, discussed the concept of landscape. As a design
motif, landscape has lengthy history in the annals of art and architectural history. In a sense,
much of the Romantic movement in art and literature concerned itself with landscape, often
in reference to the concept of the picturesque, an aesthetic model founded on the integration
of nature and culture through the rendering of idealized depictions of the former using the
technical capacities of the latter.6 The resultant relationship helps to discredit the notion
that nature and culture are somehow discrete categories. If we pursue this line of reasoning
further, we find Slavoj Zizek’s claim that ‘nature is not a balanced totality which then we
humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.’7
As a tactic, a landscape-oriented approach seeks out opportunities for integration across,
between, and through existing boundaries. It exploits existing distinctions in order to
cultivate new entities through cross breeding and recombination.
Curvilinearity
If we take the grid as the paradigmatic organizing schema of the contemporary city, then the
curved line serves as its antithesis. Whereas lines in the grid invariably meet in the same
way – by crossing – the curved line presents a wealth of different options for conjunction.
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It is in this capacity for variety that the curved line proves most useful in challenging the
predictable performance of orthogonal space.
In many respects, Art Nouveau was an architecture of the curved line. Guimard, Horta, Van
de Velde and others exploited the capacity of the curve to combine in a multitude of different
ways and for a myriad of different ends. Guimard’s twisted metal serpentine lines stretch to
become light fixtures, or interweave to become screens, all within the same topological family
of curves.
Despite the decades that have elapsed since Art Nouveau first threatened the predictability
of orthogonal space, not much has fundamentally changed in the way that buildings are
conceived of or executed. Therefore, the extraction and redeployment of logics of connection
from works of Art Nouveau art and architecture remain relevant to contemporary conditions.
Whereas Nouveau appropriated new means of fabrication to realize its otherworldly forms,
this project capitalizes on digital modeling and animation software to produce varieties of
involute connections that defy predictably uniform patterns of arrangement.
Subdivision Modeling
Following from the connective logics enabled through the curve, the project engages
explicitly with the use of subdivision modeling techniques as a means of spatializing the
curvilinear connective logics that define the project.
In many respects subdivision modeling is the digital equivalent of Guimard’s analog, intensely
sculptural treatment of iron and stone. The polygon models employed in this project allow for
virtually limitless possibilities of extrusion, elongation, reconnection, and division.
This method of modeling resonates with the self-effacing intentions of the project
outlined in the introduction to this act. The modeling process does not necessarily rely on
a predetermined volumetric manifold as a guide for developing formal territories. Instead,
the process is driven more by a series of small moves, which are more concerned with their
relationships with their immediate predecessors and successors than with any sort of overall
compositional quality. Faces are pulled, scaled, rotated, pinched, extruded, offset, puckered,
and otherwise deformed in a process that is more visceral than intellectual, fueled by that
same accrued database of science fictive imagery imprinted on the ‘designer’s’ subconscious
described earlier. The resultant forms are simultaneously recognizable and foreign. They
cohere from certain vantages points, but become intelligible from others. This flickering
from figure to oblivion reifies the project’s desire to defy reduction into a single, coherent
reading.
Subtraction
While the project operates in one sense in a proliferative manner, exploring new formal
languages and their capacity for fostering new terms of social relation, it simultaneously
(and complementarily) works through subtractive means, removing those things that
perpetuate the camp as the paradigm of public space in the contemporary city.
Such an approach embraces Gianni Vattimo’s approach to a ‘weak ontology’ concerned with
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blurring the boundaries between discrete entities in order to open those entities up to
radically new mean of connection, and thus performance.8
In the context of this project, these ‘entities’ tend to be synonymous with ‘programs’ (and
their attendant formal manifestations). These programmatic entities vary from the diffuse
and general (circulation, for instance) to the specific and localized (performing arts center,
civic building, hotel, etc.).
Subtraction and erasure have long been taboo subjects in architectural discourse. A return
to the tabula rasa of Modernism, which, perhaps naively, assumed that architecture could
‘make things better’ if only it could scrape away the messy complexity of the city, is not the aim
of this MDP. Instead, the aim of subtraction in this case is precisely to avoid the kind of sterile
monotony fetishized by (for instance) Le Corbusier in his Plan Voisin and Ville Radiuese.
At the same time, the intention is not to take the opposite approach and get caught up in
the cult of collective memory which mindlessly dictates that every old building be treated as
though it were hallowed ground.
Instead, the project works from the middle outwards, weakening and subtracting from
programs not to replace them with equally definite ones, but to induce them to perpetually
unstable relationships with each other and with themselves. In such a system (as we will see
in the case study act), sidewalks mix with hotel floorplates and walls invert themselves into
apertures and everywhere the old boundaries between things are replaced by new, diffuse
‘divisions’ (if they can even be called that) which, through their heightened interdependence,
are continually co-evolving into new programmatic hybrids, ones which are difficult to name,
let alone control.
Conclusion
Taken together, these techniques manage the formation and dissolution of bodily and
subjective identity that is so central to the overarching ambitions of the project. They provide
the means by which, in the spirit of Meillassoux’s call to arms, the Principle of Sufficient
Reason may be abandoned without abandoning rational thought itself.
The remainder of this act is devoted to a direct explanation of the formal manifestations of the
techniques explored here.. In the final act, we will consider the exploration of the techniques
introduced here in a case study focused on a site in Calgary whose particular characteristics
are particularly symptomatic of the urban camp condition described previously.
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1 Koolhaas 1998, 971
2 Haraway 1988
3 Williams 2005, 125
4 Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 24
5 Agamben 2000, 117
6 Spuybroek 2009, 35
7 Zizek 2008
8 Vattimo 1988, 85
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Act 05Case Study: Imaging a New Agora for Calgary
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Preamble
By now we have firmly established the theoretical bases of the project as well as its ambitions
and aspirations. The intent of this act, then, is to address and hopefully reify some of these
desires in a concise manner. This case study is by no means meant to be taken as the projection
of an idealized end state or terminal condition for the city. Indeed, such a suggestion would
run contrary to everything that we have advocated for thus far in this project. Instead, one
might consider this case study as a crystallization of a relatively brief series of moments: a
transitional (perhaps even liminal) phase between an existing paradigm of thought about
the city and a new one where the very idea of a single, coherent ‘paradigm’ no longer applies.
Site Overview
Because this project is highly speculative, and because it seeks to distance itself from
normative approaches to architectural thought and practice, it should come as no surprise
that the process of site selection and site analysis for this project has been an unorthodox
one. Whereas site selection is traditionally approached with deep reverence to existing
conditions, the chief conceit behind this project is that the spatial and programmatic logic
of the contemporary polis is (apparently unbeknownst to architects and urbanists) always
already defined by the paradigm of the camp. Accordingly, the project has little regard for
respecting things that tend to be considered ‘valuable’ attributes of the public sphere. Why
then, give the project a site at all?
The decision to site the project in a ‘real’ location, rather than to keep it abstractly siteless,
stems from a desire to engage its audience in a sensational way; sensational here meaning
tangible and visceral. By relying on bodily – and embodied – reactions to its own content, the
project sidesteps the potential for intellectual paralysis that accompanies purely abstract
speculation. This approach brings with it a host of complications, particularly with respect
to what might be perceived as arrogant historical erasure. Certainly, the project makes some
severe moves in terms of subtracting elements of the city’s fabric, but it does so only to excise
those spurious conventions that anchor the future to the past.
While the general character of the contemporary urban public realm is homogenous, not
all sites are equally thus. The site for this case study encompasses the four blocks between
First and Fifth Streets SE and Seventh and Ninth Avenues SE in Calgary. The criteria for
site selection focused mainly on the character of existing programmatic relationships in
and around public plaza conditions. The selection of this particular site was based on its
identification as a potentially fecund locus of intervention because it presented the most
pronounced gap between its claims to programmatic ‘openness’ and the reality of its failure
to function as a violently productive piece of architectural infrastructure.
The site is currently home to Olympic Plaza, the city’s de facto public square, much derided for
its inhospitable ‘public’ spaces, as well as Calgary’s City Hall/Municipal Building, the Epcor
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Center for the Performing Arts, and the King Edward Hotel. In the broader urban context,
the site marks the dividing line between an affluent consumer culture embodied by Stephen
Avenue’s upscale outdoor shopping mall and the markedly less affluent community of the
East Village. In fact, the East Village is highly symptomatic of the progressive abandonment
of the population from the protection of the state. It is, in effect, a camp quarantined from
the rest of the city. The Municipal Building quite literally turns its back to the East Village: a
telling gesture that underscores the degree to which architecture functions at the mercy of
insidious mechanisms of Empire.
The East Village Area Redevelopment Plan as Nostalgic Regression
The site also provides an interesting opportunity for speculation because of its implication
with the East Village Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) and the Calgary Municipal Land
Corporation (CMLC) (See Appendix D). The ARP/CLMC scheme, like many master planning
projects of its kind, sets out a highly nostalgic vision of the future. The conceptual renderings
produced as part of the document project a future saturated with faux historical buildings
fronting onto quaint, pedestrian filled sidewalks. The ARP speaks vaguely of ‘great streets’,
yet offers little in the way of explicit explanation of what constitutes a ‘great street’ or how
one might go about making such a thing.1 Ultimately, of course, this project suggests that
such an aspiration amounts to an impossible folly in an increasingly ethically ambivalent
world where distinctions between ‘good and bad’, ‘right and wrong’, and so on are becoming
ever more difficult to discern, let alone control.
Why then, does the ARP (and documents like it) propose such anachronistic futures?
Returning again to Deleuze’s observation of a ‘self destructive dependence’ on identity (an
identity formed through habit) we can begin to unveil some of the mechanisms that enable
the perpetuation of sameness in the built environment.2
In architectural terms, these mechanisms tend to present themselves as a synthetic
combination of program and form. Architectural programs become those scripts by which
Empire is able to construct a veil of order and omnipotence over the contemporary city and
the bodies that constitute it. Fixed, rigid programs condition behaviour in extremely specific
ways and for very particular ends (namely the control of life itself). Public space has not
been a space for ‘free’ use by members of the public for some time. Use of ‘public’ space is
everywhere conditioned by a myriad of devices, laws, and spatial logics that limit its range. We
are reminded to keep off the grass, that we are not welcome in Olympic Plaza after 10pm, and
that we are not allowed to sleep (or do any number of other things) in ‘public’ space.
These programmatic cues are both enabled and enforced by their formal manifestations.
Circulation networks are fixed by material boundaries and surveyed via closed circuit
television cameras. Spaces for seating are made distinct from spaces for working and those
for sleeping or eating. We accept this reality because its repetition has made it seem perfectly
natural, and yet nature itself is something of an abstract and arbitrary category developed
specifically to delimit and differentiate human control from the horrific complexity of the
world ‘out there’. 056
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A Modest Proposal
Instead of prescribing a ‘cure’ full of discrete and orderly programmatic entities working
happily towards a ‘sustainable’ future for the East Village, this project proposes a
progressive weakening of existing programmatic relationships in order to produce a terrain
of flexible opportunity where expectations about programmatic and formal relationships are
continually confounded by a violently involute landscape.
Currently, the site is comprised of a civic building (the Calgary Municipal Building), a
performing arts venue (The Epcor Center for the Performing Arts), a ‘public’ square (Olympic
Plaza), an LRT switching yard, and a few (allegedly) historically significant former hotels (the
King Edward and the St. Louis). The site also sits adjacent to the Calgary Public Library,
which is slated for demolition and is to be replaced by a new building on the lot behind the
Municipal building.3
With the exception of some residential units, the project does not change much in terms
of the programmatic composition of the site. Instead, it works to warp and twist existing
programmatic entities until they are all but unrecognizable as their former selves. The ‘all
but’ qualification of this process is important because the intent here is not to completely
eradicate the identity of the site or the programs on it, but rather to push them far enough
from their original, stable incarnations in order to open them up to new means of occupation
and engagement.
In such a landscape, behaviour is no longer so tightly governed by the familiar programmatic
and formal cues on which we rely on a daily basis to navigate our lives. The consequences
of engaging such an alien vision of the city are at once disorienting and liberating. The
project invokes Bernard Tschumi’s notion of ‘programmatic violence’ or ‘those uses, actions,
events, and programs that, by accident or by design, are specifically evil and destructive’ in
articulating its programmatic intentions.4 Programmatic violence, in the context of a post-
human (and perhaps post-ethical) world, can no longer necessarily be labeled as ‘evil’, but
can perhaps be reconsidered as violently productive. Tschumi himself points to violence as
‘the possibility of change, of renewal’.5
The imaging and modeling of the project depart from the conventional approach to such
techniques as typified by the East Village ARP and the CMLC masterplan. The images are
not necessarily immediately recognizable as architecture and they do not project the same
cheerful outlook as conventional architectural renderings. They are dark, dirty, dangerous
and perhaps even offensive. Yet it is precisely this ability to violate conventional sensibilities
that allows the project to engage audiences and (perhaps) alter those sensibilities in such
a way that opens them up to new possibilities of sensation. To return to Walter Benjamin’s
suggestion that, ‘as regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they reproduce
architecture. They produce it in the first place.’6
Heterotopia and the New Agora
In the Greek city-state, the agora (public market) constituted the locus of bios politikos, or
politically meaningful life (i.e. that form of life that is defined by its ability to exert dominance
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over the sphere of the oikos, or the private home).7 It is the foundational model for modern
democracy and thus also the basis of the paradigmatic state of exception cited by Agamben
as the cornerstone of political modernity.
The aim of this case study is not a revitalization of some romanticized, nostalgic vision of
public life, but rather a critical evisceration of that fundamental division between public and
private that makes the agora and the political order it supports possible.
Just as Art Nouveau renders the work of art superfluous and sensationalizes everyday
objects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon projects a future - a ‘utopian infrastructure’
- where citizens ‘no longer make art, but create everyday life’.8 Truly democratic space cannot
exist in a capitalist society. At the same time, capitalism, and the mechanisms of Empire
that constitute it, cannot be stopped but through the same media that presently enable
it. We are once again faced with Vattimo’s embrace of nihilism and vital weakness as the
only way forward. Only through devaluing those things (identity, subjectivity, individuality)
that underwrite the current biopolitical model of power upon which capitalism is founded
can we ever hope to truly autonomous (ironically, of course, by relinquishing all claims to
individuality and autonomy).
This prospect of an authentically democratic public realm; one beyond the ‘perpetual
training’ of Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’ rests firmly in our ability to think outside of our
own habits, customs, and reactionary tendencies.9 These habits can only be subverted by
perpetual engagement with the new. The digital means of imaging and, to an extent, physically
realizing this project offer such subversive abilities, but they will not always be sufficient.
The future will demand more and new means of challenging convention and destabilizing
static conditions.
The vignettes and projections of alternative futures presented in the rest of this act cannot
and should not be interpreted as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, what is important is that they are
different. It is only through this continual engagement with the horrific and the unknown
(yet vaguely familiar) that we can ever hope to give life a fighting chance against those forces
that would stifle it.
The new agora takes the form of the camp whose violence is turned in on itself; a heterotopian
sanctuary from the control instruments of biopolitical modernity achieved, paradoxically,
through those instruments themselves. The new agora is not an open public space flanked
by private program, but rather a field of varying programmatic intensity, where the usual
markers of programmatic division are replaced by a synthetic formal language of topological
continuity. Conventional divisions between public and private spaces are rendered indistinct
through weakened boundaries. Spaces flow into on another and programs coexist in an
awkward and uncomfortable union that resists the separation of life into discrete categories.
Conclusion
In the pages that follow we will examine a few vignettes that investigate, at various scales, the
possibilities of conceiving of and imaging form and program in this way. At the urban scale, we
look broadly at the site and register the impact of reconstituting its programmatic elements
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in alien (yet simultaneously endogenous) formal articulations. At the architectural scale
we examine the effects of programmatic weakening through a redefinition of architectural
terms such as partition, aperture, and circulation. Finally, at the scale of the body itself, we
scrutinize the potential(s) of integrating furniture, utensils, and various other objects into
broader aesthetic systems. In short, the goal of this aspect of the project is the resurrection
of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk through digital means of imaging and fabrication.
Endnotes
1 City of Calgary Land Use Policy and Planning, Development and Assessment
Department 2005
2 Williams 2005, 125
3 Calgary Public Library Board 2012
4 Tschumi 1996, 134
5 Ibid. at 132
6 Benjamin 1988, 89
7 Habermas 1991, 3
8 Wark 2008, 21
9 Deleuze 1990, 7
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Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
‘Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today/If I don’t get some
shelter/Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away’
-Mick Jagger + Keith Richards1
On Inhabiting a Post-Human Planet [Gimme Shelter]
The world is once again at war, only this time, according to Hardt and Negri, the terms of
engagement are quite different.2 No longer are the primary combatants sovereign nations.
Instead, the battles being waged today are between life and life itself.3 Life is simultaneously
‘the threat, the threatened, and the response’.4
It is in this tumult that architecture finds itself caught at present. In the voided shell of
‘the human diagram’5 architecture is left with the opportunity to design the future, but
what might that future look like? And what side of the war between life and itself should
architecture take if it is to seize this opportunity?
This project has argued that for architecture to continue on its present course as a blunt
instrument of Empire and biopolitics is suicide for the discipline and quite literally death (or
at least bare life) for those same subjects architecture claims to champion. Yet the alternative
paths are difficult to navigate and offer no certainty of salvation. Ultimately, of course, it is
not possible to forecast the future through the lens of humanity or humanism. In fact, it is
precisely this nostalgic addiction to the apocryphal notion that the world exists for us as
human beings that stands in the way of change. The question, then, is not ‘what do we have to
do to make things better?’ but rather, ‘how to we overcome our own obsession with ourselves
long enough to allow things to change, and to change us?’
This project has proposed that architecture ought to engage aggressively with the new and
the unknown as one way to allow life itself to flourish. Though horror is typically viewed in
a negative light, this MDP sees it as a fecund catalyst for the evolution of the discipline.
The project has also advocated for the weakening of disciplinary boundaries through the
collapsing of nature into culture and culture into nature and the collapsing of all of it into
architecture.
Exposure to the unknown, though, is not enough. Architecture, and architects, must once
again be incautiously ambitious in speculating about the future. These speculations must
overreach the limits of mere projection and achieve full immersion in new sensations, new
effects, and new affects. These new sensations, and specifically more intensely productive
sensations, are possible explicitly through the use of new technologies and new means of
imaging futures we cannot yet fathom. These technologies will, of course, change in the
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still for too long. To borrow one last time from Deleuze, ‘Make rhizomes, not roots, never
plant! Don’t sow, grow off shoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never
plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still!’6
In this restless liminality, architecture must take up Thacker’s problematic and simultaneously
advance ‘life as the threat, the threatened, and the response’.7 In so doing architecture must
rediscover its foundational relationship with violence and exploit this relationship as a
means of resistance and subterfuge.
And yet, while the future has no reason to resemble the past, there is no reason that
history cannot be treated operatively and its logics and techniques imported and translated
into new means of designing the future. Even as architecture reaches outside of itself to
establish new relationships in order to preserve its own autonomy, it moves inwards, forming
new bonds within itself and within its own trajectories of growth. In both cases, though, the
impetus is the same: ‘Only Connect…’8
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Endnotes
1 Jagger and Richards, 1969
2 Hardt and Negri 2004, 3
3 Thacker 2006, 20. Eugene Thacker’s ‘Biological Sovereignty’ augments Agamben’s thesis on the nature of bare life in the contemporary biopolitical context
through a characterization of the supposed ‘zone of indistinction’ as anything but indistinct. He suggests that the new frontier of biopolitics is life in
perpetual conflict with itself and posits that it is this new problematic that sovereignty must confront and reconcile.
4 Ibid.
5 Bratton 2011
6 Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 24
7 Thacker 2008, 20
8 Forster 2000
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UP
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AA.001 Site Plan Level 01/-01
N0m 50m25mArcade
King Edward Hotel
Civic Building
Theater
Performance Stage
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Hotel Tower
Residential Tower
Park
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Program Key
AA.003/094] AA.003/094]
AA.002/094AA.002/094
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MACLEOD TRAIL SE
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STEPHEN AVENUE
5th STREET SE
9TH AVENUE SE
0608 07
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AA.002 Site Section AA
0m 50m25m
AA.003 Site Section BB
0m 50m25m
+0.0m
-25.0m
+25.0m
+50.0m
+75.0m
+0.0m
-25.0m
+25.0m
+50.0m
+75.0m
Arcade
King Edward Hotel
Civic Building
Theater
Performance Stage
04
05
06
07
08
Hotel Tower
Residential Tower
Park
01
02
03
Program Key
01
02
0308
06
02
060706
07 06
094
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095
N
AA.004 Tower Floor Plan (Typical)
0m 6.25m3.125mBedroom
Bathroom
Stair/Elevator Core
Kitchen/Living Area
01
02
03
04
Program Key
01
0101
01
0101
0101
02
0202
0202
02
02
02
03
0404
0404
04
04
04
04
B D1
2
3
4
B D4
3
2
1
A
A
D
E
C
C
[Appendix A: Orthographics][M
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0960m 5m2.5m
AA.004 King Edward Hotel Section CC
+4.4m
+0m
+8.8m
+13.1m
+17.5m
+21.9m
+26.3m
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
01
02
02
03
04
A B C D E F G H
A B C D E F G H
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0m 5m2.5m
AA.005 King Edward Hotel Section DD
AC.005
115
AC.006
116
+4.4m
+0m
+8.8m
+13.1m
+17.5m
+21.9m
+26.3m
01
02
03
04
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
5 4
5 4
6
6
3
3
2
2
1
1
097
[Appendix A: Orthographics][M
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098
0m 5m2.5m
AA.006 King Edward Hotel Section EE
+4.4m
+0m
+8.8m
+13.1m
+17.5m
+21.9m
+26.3m
04 03
01
02
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
5 4
5 4
6
6
3
3
2
2
1
1
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099
N0m 5m2.5m
AA.007 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 01
0204
01
03
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
A B C D E F G H
6
1
23
4
5
6
1
23
4
5
A B C D E F G H
EE [AA.006/098]EE [AA.006/098]
CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096]
DD [AA.005/097]DD [AA.005/097]
[Appendix A: Orthographics][M
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100N0m 5m2.5m
AA.008 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 02
03
01
040402
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
A B C D E F G H
6
1
23
4
5
6
1
23
4
5
A B C D E F G HEE [AA.006/098]
EE [AA.006/098]
CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096]DD [AA.005/097]
DD [AA.005/097]
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101
N0m 5m2.5m
AA.009 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 03
04
04
04
01
02
03
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
6
1
23
4
5
6
1
23
4
5
A B C D E F G H
A B C D E F G H
EE [AA.006/098]EE [AA.006/098]
CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096]
DD [AA.005/097]DD [AA.005/097]
[Appendix A: Orthographics][M
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102N0m 5m2.5m
AA.010 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 04
N0m 5m2.5m
AA.011 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 05
04
04 0404
02 02
Terrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program KeyTerrace
Office
Bar
Aperture
01
02
03
04
Program Key
CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096]
A B C
6
1
23
4
5
6
1
23
4
5
A B C
A B C
A B C
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0m 5m2.5m
AA.012 King Edward Hotel South Elevation
+4.4m
+0m
+8.8m
+13.1m
+17.5m
+21.9m
+26.3m
103
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0m 5m2.5m
AA.013 King Edward East Elevation
+4.4m
+0m
+8.8m
+13.1m
+17.5m
+21.9m
+26.3m
104
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07
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06
01
05
105
SCENE: AB.001DATE: 2075.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Site Evolution]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution][M
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Performance Venue
Theater
Hotel Tower
Residential Tower
Arcade
Civic Building
106
SCENE: AB.002DATE: 2080.02.10CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
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Circulation Civic Building Park Auditorium Stage Arcade Tower Awning
Archetype 02: Landscape/GatheringArchetype 01: Exoskeleton Archetype 03: Cell [A] Archetype 04: Bridge Archetype 05: Cell [B]
107
SCENE: AB.003DATE: 2080.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Formal Archetypes]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution][M
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Hotel Suites
Residences
Council Chamber
Theater
Arcade
Park/Arts Venue
Cell Type [A]/Exoskeleton
Cell Type [B]/Exoskeleton
Landscape/Exoskeleton/Bridge
Circulation Landscape/Bridge
108
SCENE: AB.004DATE: 2080.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Programmatic Hybridity]
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SCENE: AB.005DATE: 2080.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Tower Elements]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution][M
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110
SCENE: AB.006DATE: 2080.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[King Edward Hotel Alteration]
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SCENE: AC.001DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Construction Techniques]
[Appendix C: Construction][M
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The project imagines a future wherein emerging fused deposition modeling techniques have
been deployed at the scale of the urban and architectural interventions explored in this
document.
Recent advancements in 3D printing technologies allow large scale forms to be printed using
a mixture of epoxy resin, sand, and an inorganic ink binding agent. This process is up to four
times faster than conventional construction techniques (using elaborate concrete formwork,
etc.) and is considerably more efficient in terms of both energy usage and CO2 emissions.
Where the project interfaces with the existing urban fabric, these new fabrication methods
are combined with conventional construction techniques in order to provide a bridge between
‘the new’ and ‘the always the-same’.
112
SCENE: AC.002DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Construction Techniques]
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Medium Extrusion Cable
Medium Mixing Manifold
Medium Deposition Nozzle
Deposition Mechanism Gantry
Deposition Mechanism Track
113
SCENE: AC.003DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Construction Techniques]
[Appendix C: Construction][M
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06_48 Wall Section Detail [Typical]
Weatherproof Nylon Shell
HSS Tubing
Printed ‘Honeycomb’ Core
Utilities Chase06_47 Fabrication Detail
Brick Veneer
Steel Bracket
Steel Column
Steel Beam
Rigid Insulation
Sprayed Concrete
0m 1.0m0.5m
114
SCENE: AC.004DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Construction Techniques]
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Wide Flange Steel Beam
HSS Core
Sprayed Concrete
Anchor
Rigid Insulation
Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb
0m 0.5m0.25m
115
SCENE: AC.005DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Wall Section Detail]
[Appendix C: Construction][M
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Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb
Rebar Reinforcement
HSS Core
Weatherproof Coating
0m 0.5m0.25m
116
SCENE: AC.006DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Wall Section Detail]
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117
SCENE: AD.001DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Critiquing Regressive Nostalgia]
[Appendix D: ARP Critique][M
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The ARP is symptomatic of the endemic ignorance of the biopolitical foundations of political
and urban modernity in that it betrays a self-destructive addiction to the Principle of
Sufficient Reason as the basis for design decisions. In so doing it removes the possibility of
imagining a truly different future, subjugating its own (well intentioned) desires to make a
better world to the dictates of destructive and unproductive design habits.
The ARP rests on the assumption that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to project and
realize a vision of the city based firmly on the observation of past and current conditions.
This case study rejects that approach. The remainder of this document is devoted to imaging
a perspective of the future that embraces the impossibility of knowing or controlling said
future. The case study challenges normative means of imaging architecture in order to
dissolve the bonds that tie us to the perpetuation of an inherently undemocratic regime of
control (Empire).
118
SCENE: AD.002DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Critiquing Regressive Nostalgia]
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119
SCENE: AD.003DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[ARP: Apocryphal Prognostication]
[Appendix D: ARP Critique][M
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Perimeter Block
Ground Floor Commercial/Residential AboveUrban Public Open SpaceGround Floor Commercial/Residential/Institutional AboveCommercial/Residential/Institutional
Ground Floor Commercial/Residential/Institutional/Commercial Above
Residential/Commercial at Grade
Linear Blocks Townhouses Courtyard Block Live/Work Units Linear Block
120
SCENE: AD.004DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[ARP: Apocryphal Prognostication]
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[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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122
SCENE: AE.001DATE: 2011.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Iteration 01]
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[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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124
SCENE: AE.002DATE: 2011.04.28CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 02[Iteration 02]
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125
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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126
SCENE: AE.003DATE: 2011.05.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 03[Iteration 03]
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127
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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128
SCENE: AE.004DATE: 2011.07.25CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 04[Iteration 04]
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129
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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130
SCENE: AE.005DATE: 2011.08.10CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 05[Iteration 05]
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[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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132
SCENE: AE.006DATE: 2011.08.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Iteration 06]
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[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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134
SCENE: AE.007DATE: 2011.09.03CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 07[Iteration 07]
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135
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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136
SCENE: AE.008DATE: 2011.09.28CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 08[Iteration 08]
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137
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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138
SCENE: AE.009DATE: 2011.10.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 09[Iteration 09]
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139
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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140
SCENE: AE.010DATE: 2011.11.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 010[Iteration 10]
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141
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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142
SCENE: AE.011DATE: 2011.11.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 11[Iteration 11]
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143
SCENE: AE.012DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Formal Evolution]
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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What is the form of resistance? Should form respond to the instruments of power, or should
it provoke them? At first glance this project would seem to offer up an ‘other’ to the rigidly
orthogonal geometry of the contemporary society of control. While this is in part true, the
project is actually interested in the indeterminate, liminal zone between the two aesthetic
models it examines. Just as life is controlled at the moment of its abandonment1, so too is
power grasped when its formal instruments are evacuated.
The formal evolution of the project has not followed any linear path (or even a logical one)
outside of its adherence to its endogenous aesthetic sensibilities. Over the course of twelve
iterations, the project has evolved into its own self referential formal language via the
integration of techniques of curvilinear means of conjunction through subtractive design
mechanisms enabled by subdivision modeling.
144
SCENE: AE.012DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Formal Evolution]
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145
SCENE: AE.013DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Programmatic Integration]
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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The manner in which the geometry of the project integrates with its context has evolved
over the course of the investigation. Whereas the initial approach centers on a desire to
establish a clear distinction between new and existing conditions, later iterations focus
on the indistinct zone of interaction between the material systems. As geometries cross
contaminate they begin to weaken one another, and, by extension, begin to weaken their
programmatic respective responsibilities. It is this formal/programmatic ‘grey area’ that the
project seeks to exploit in its latter stages.
146
SCENE: AE.013DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Programmatic Integration]
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147
SCENE: AE.014DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Imaging]
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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In this project, imaging is much more than a mere means of representation. The perspectival
image in particular is exploited for its affective potential for the actualization of space. The
techniques explored in the project pursue images beyond the optical. The strategy aspires to
the synaesthetically arresting affect achieved by Francis Bacon’s portraiture.
148
SCENE: AE.014DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Imaging]
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149
SCENE: AE.015DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Scalar Integration]
[Appendix E: Outtakes][M
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In pursuit of a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work’ of art, the project has
explored the integration of form making and imaging techniques at multiple scales. This
approach weakens the disciplinary distinctions between art and architecture and allows
for direct engagement with the body at the most intimate of scales. In challenging the
conventional notion that different scales ought to be legibly different, the project opens up
an uncomfortable territory of scalar uncertainty that works to decenter the human subject
from his or her position of (imagined) stability.
150
SCENE: AE.015DATE: 2012.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Scalar Integration]
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151
SCENE: AF.001DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Physical Modeling Specimens]
[Appendix F: Physical Modeling]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUM
ENT]
The issue of physical modeling is of critical importance to the viability of the project as
a whole. The negotiation between advanced digital modeling techniques and available
fabrication technologies exerted pressures on both the former and the latter. The project
produced geometries that stretched the capacity of the fabrication technology to its limit,
and this limit in turn helped to (literally) shape the project itself.
Physical modeling is more than mere representation in this project; in many respects it is
a proof of concept, albeit on a very small scale. The language and materiality of the models
suggests that they are fossilized artifacts from a future that never was. A fictive future that
might condition our own very real future(s).
152
SCENE: AF.002DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01[Physical Modeling Strategies]
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153
[Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUM
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154
SCENE: AG.001
DATE: 2012.04.20
CAMERA: 01
FPS: 29.97
TAKE: 01
[2012 MDP Show Exhibition at Art Central]
Bibliography
155
SCENE: B.001DATE: 1968.05.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97TAKE: 01[Paris, May 1968]
Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Signature of All Things. New York: Zone Books, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Rigorous Study of Art’ in October, Vol. 47 (Winter, 1988), pp. 84-90.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: The Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bratton, Benjamin. ‘Rubbing the Clinamen Raw’. (Lecture, Humanity + Conference: Transhumanism and Design, New York, NY, May 15, 2011).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Calgary Public Library Board. ‘Calgary’s New Central Library: Taking us from Great to Global’. Calgary Public Library Website, accessed February 10, 2012 from
<http://calgarylandmarklibrary.com/funding.html>.
City of Calgary Land Use Policy and Planning, Development and Assessment Department. East Village Area Redevelopment Plan. Calgary: Municipal Press, 2005.
De Cauter, Lieven. ‘The Birth of Plenairism from the Spirit of the Interior: Walter Benjamin on Art Nouveau’ in Horta: Art Nouveau to Modernism Francoise Aubry
and Jos Vandenbreeden, eds. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1996.
Dehaene, Michiel and Lieven De Cauter. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post Civil Society. New York: Routledge, 2008
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[Bib
liogr
aphy
][M
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ENT] Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. London: Athlone Press, 1984.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ in October, Vol. 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3-7.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
Forster, Edward Morgan. Howards End. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
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SCENE: I.001DATE: 1992.05.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97TAKE: 01[Scene from Aliens]
Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
All uncredited images by the author.
00.000 Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg
00.001 Still from Alien. http://popscorn.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/alien-prequel-space-jockey2.jpg
00.002 Still from Alien. http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/10/109340/2154563-chestburster.jpg
00.003 Still from Alien. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Archive/Search/2011/9/30/1317378647295/Alien-1979-007.jpg
00.004 Still from Alien. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Archive/Search/2011/9/30/1317378647295/Alien-1979-007.jpg
01.001 Guantanomo Bay Detention Center. http://www.tunisia-live.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Guantanamo-Camp.jpg
01.002. New Babylon. http://fromztoa.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/newbabylon-1.jpg
01.003. The Continuous Monument. http://www.spaceinvading.com/bookmarklet/Images/2701091233096716superstudio_monument_1_kl.jpg
01.004. The Walking City. http://mikkoselin.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/01.jpg
01.005. Walls of Change. http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/walls-of-change/
01.006. Walls. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyc6zltIMO1qk9swjo1_1280.jpg
160
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02.004. Anti-Coalition Protest. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Calgary_anti-coaltion_protest_2.JPG
03.003. Pope Innocent X. http://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/06_francis-bacon_head-vi_1949.jpg
03.004. Still from The Thing. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews41/the%20thing%20blu-ray/large%20the%20thing%20blu-ray5.jpg
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ns%2Feast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1
06.001. Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg
B.001. Sous Les Paves, La Plage. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RBOY6FSVz0w/S9wiSzbqhNI/AAAAAAAAARw/ZsNzf3Gg9wA/s1600/France-01.jpg
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I.001. Still from Aliens. http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/a/l/i/aliens-le-retour-1986-10-g.jpg
162