WEEK 4 | READING

Winters, E. (2007) Politics and the Situationist International

The reading looked at how political and moral considerations infiltrate the concept of architecture. How is the pattern of life mapped onto and into buildings and artifacts even though they aren't something that one can actually see?
Many intellectual developments in humanity has been largely influenced by the French - Structuralism is a french product which was largely exported to the world.
Our essence is exists in our freedom and our freedom to choose: an animal behaves the way it does according to its dna, to an unwritten but understood language that was written in its most basic genetic material. Man however, is born free and he can exercise that freedom in choosing the life he leads. Animal and man both have their genetic material determined by nature, but man's life however, is on a different stature.  It is therefore a problem for man as to HOW he lives, but not for the animal.
Satre's disdain for the bourgeois is based on the assumption that its members haven't committed themselves to live in a certain way, they've just passively accepted to life of numbing servitude.  They collude in supporting a set of artificial values which remove from their own consciousness any obligation to think and act for themselves: basically an army of zombies meeting the 9-5 grind because that's what they've been told is normal and right and socially acceptable.
The Situationist International wanted to transform the everyday life. "Derive":instead of working, walk the streets in search of the unknown.  Engaging and being absorbed into. Social encounters with strangers is encouraged. Encountering the unfamiliar is key to this.
"Detournament":Designed to replace art.
VIRTUAL SELF - largely agrees with this idea, to make daily life exciting and stimulating, it helps people with the same interests or values interact, bringing people closer that may not have had that chance before.  Not only will people want to roam the streets again in search for these social interactions, it'll help create safer communities.

Manaugh, G. (2007) Architectural weaponry: an interview with Mark Wigley

New Babylon encouraged one to step out of the norm to create a new conversation/dialect not only with ideas, or with people but also with the built environment.
A playground is a space of free movement.  But its freedom is really only perceived - you are limited to what activities are done, and you are constantly monitored.
The concept of New Babylon - designed as a BIG playground for everyone, no body works, everyone is free to use this space however they feel.  What the architect designed as a place for exchange of love ala 60's peace love ecstacy paradise, he also envisioned not so many years later it being a place of bloodshed.  The human spirit is just drawn that way, we are dark miserable creatures. Without constraints and struggles, we would all just kill each other. There would be 'freedom' as such, but not freedom in its essence - which reflects alot back to the concept of man from the last reading. We, as man, are singled out from the rest of nature, by our ability to choose.
Mark wigley quoted:
George Bataille: "Architecture, no matter what it is, in any form, is a prison".
Gordon Matta-Clarke: an an example of Liberation with regards to the 'utopian' mobile home..."you're only free to go anywhere you want in so far as you never leace the US highway network"
Enrique Walker: "we as architects build constraints, we don't build freedoms: we build reductions of freedoms".

The aim of our project will be to try to give people the feeling of freedom at the very least. Like the above quotes, once you build something, you are building less freedom and more constraint, no matter what angle you look at it...so we have tried to propose a building that limits the number of constraints and maximises freedom.