Münich-based Marcus Buck made these amazing portraits of party walls. In each photo, we’re presented with a pretty common urban condition: the residual traces of a demolished building on it’s surviving context. 

Aside from the purely aesthetic genius of these unconscious works of art, the colors and forms on these walls are also a visceral reminder of the real contact that was once made to connect the structures. Not only have the interiors been protected from the elements, but they have gained the character and specific alterations of individual rooms and structural elements. 

When a data on a digital hard drive is deleted, it is not completely gone… There is a remnant of data left a a result of the erasure, holding bits of information about the contents of those files. In these walls I see that same evidence of life and function. Here it’s just so startling because so rarely do we actually see a physical section of a building in one-to-one scale.

And while totally possible in rural areas, its really a unique condition to the city. Whenever I come across these, I get a really bittersweet feeling… like an exciting signal of new growth along with a quietly exposed vigil of the building’s life and death. The secrets of section that are finally made public.

If the drama of posthumous architectural voyeurism doesn’t do it for you, maybe you can think of the visible remains of a building as a drawing. How often can can the architect visibly recognize his 2-dimensional work on the site? As the process of construction is inherently solid and perspectival, it can’t be read as easily a pure translation from the paper. With the combination of dense urban fabric and the indiscriminate act of demolition, you suddenly have an unveiling of the marks made years ago by contractors. So in fact the alteration of the party wall itself and years of interior customization literally create a physical poché, realizing an actual cut along the surface of the wall.

Thanks to Marcus Buck for the photos and Pruned for the link.

Related: Gordon Matta Clark

This is so great:

MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City’s harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

I am now incredibly inspired. Kudos to MoMA and PS1, for realizing the opportunity for such a collaborative and highly relevant challenge. They are so right: it’s times like these, when offices are struggling to find immediate work, when big-picture plans are often neglected. Instead, what they’ve done is in the same vein as the projects themselves: turned a worst-case scenario into a prospect for change — an endless recession into an extended design charrette, and keeping the gears turning and pushing ideas forward until the funding comes around again. Rising Currents is defined by its ethos of “Optimistic Innovation” and I think the same should be true of all of us looking for things to do in this industry right now. 

Check out all the info and updates on the Rising Currents Blog, and if you are in New York between now and October 11, definitely check out the exhibition at MoMA

Matt Siber cleverly removes traditional written language from his photographs, allowing a purely graphic city to speak for itself.

From the artist’s statement:

“The Untitled Project” is rooted in an underlying interest in the nature of power. With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language. The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.

The reintroduction of the text takes written language out of the context of its intended viewing environment. The composition of the layouts remain true to the composition of their corresponding photographs in order to draw attention to relative size, location and orientation. The isolation of the text from its original graphic design and accompanying logos, photographs and icons helps to further explore the nature of communication in the urban landscape as a combination of visual and literal signifiers.

In his project “A Spring in New York”, French photographer Frédéric Lebain imposes urban landscape upon itself in a contemporary nod to the surrealist concepts of altered perspective and irrational collage.

My question is, how long did he wait between exposures? Some of the prints look much more or much less weathered, more or less aged than their counterparts in the second photo, or in varying times of year. But it’s tough to tell whether that is a result of the artists delayed method, or the constantly changing environment of the city. In some places in New York, a scene could remain unchanged for years at a time, while others are in flux on an hourly basis…

Either way, cool project.

I would love to see these photos of photos printed, and back in the scenes again for a third exposure — and a fourth, and a fifth, etc… — gradually zooming out in scope, eventually to reveal the entire city from these specific lines of sight with successive incremental frames of view through time.

Maybe something similar actually happens with our real memory of someplace: older images and perceptions may be subconsciously overlaid onto the real place, somehow inset and attached to the scene. Yet that reality itself becomes yet another memory on the next visit, and repeated to the point where that place exists at so many scales in our mind that it forms a pastiche which comprises all that we know about the place.

My friend Jason from Cal Poly first introduced me to the Situationists. His architectural investigations are deeply cinematic and bring a complex dimensional montage to the constructed environment. Like his building design, his collages and prints are compositions injected with suspended, fragmented events, all superimposed as surreal escapes from convention.

So as I came across a blog post by Lebbeus Woods on the work of Situationist founder Constant Nieuwenhuys, I knew exactly why I remembered the architectural language.

Woods article outlines the roots of the Situationist International, tracing the motives of Constant and his peers. With ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde, Constant (along with Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and others) advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, pursuing a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of primitive human desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations.

Constant Nieuwenhuys abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of “construction”. It was to be a lifelong project based on a vision of a future society freed by a labyrinth of architectural and social spontaneity. New Babylon, as the project would be called, is “a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.”

Lebbeus Woods brilliantly elaborates on the story of the Situationists and Constant’s work in his article, but I especially like this passage:

New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. …

Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale.

Heavy and sprawling as the vision may be, the work is beautiful. For me it definitely achieves the aspirations of layered and interconnected spectacle, and the creation of radical, mobile, and changeable architectural intervention in its surreal landscape.

What does New Babylon have to offer to contemporary architecture and landscape theory? A lot, I think…

Among the ideas generated by Constant, Debord, and others in the SI, the ones that resonate most with me are the concepts of psychogeography and the act of dérive (“drift”).

Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In other words, a playful and inventive strategy for exploring cities, as a direct consequence of the arrangement of urban stimulus. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. (a recent psychogeographic meet in New York City saw the practice of generative psychogeography, where participants followed algorithmic walking directions — “first right, second left, first left, repeat.” the results were neither goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising.)

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to articulate this theoretical paradox, and produced “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which basically acts as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive.

“Drifting” through the built landscape, as a series of scenographic events, I think young architects today have a lot to learn from Constant and Debord, especially since we are so accustomed to the type of fluid sensory pace offered by the internet. Spontaneous interaction with the city is often the most rewarding experience I have on the street, between the vestiges of older architectural icons and institutions of “style”.

And though the internet has the tendency to degrade real sensory experience, it’s that same instantaneous interaction that can be applied to the city, through strategic — or random — arrangement of architectural events. Instead of the disconnected drift you see with the computer and it’s blogs, the urban condition offers a drift more associated with the lifestyle of the flâneur. It’s a more immersive stroll of sentience and progressive cinematic experience.

Maybe it’s a bit rediculous to imagine the earth blanketed with these deep urban webs, suspended on pillars above freeways and seas… but the ideas generated by Constant are really valuable I think, in terms of reimagining the typologies of an interconnected city. It’s not that far-fetched to consider different scales of architectural engagement… using larger, more malleable architectural frameworks to provide enriched social games at an individual level.

These images of New Bablyon are from Lebbeus Woods.