The contemporary fascination with representations of decay is frequently denigrated as ruin porn, a moniker meant to render explicit a character of exploitation and scenographic abstraction. In the collective optic, oscillating between fetishism and lament, ubiquity and monumentality, engagement and distanciation, a state of being and coming undone, the ruin has resurfaced as a site of symbolic appropriation, chimerical exploration, material contestation, and fabricated desire.

WELCOME TO FEDERAL SCREW WORKS.

Federal Screw is an installation that proposes an alternative way to read ruin porn. Can the self-reflexive cultivation of enthusiasm for the ruin help build support for its transformation; can the pluralistic reimaging of ruin help concerned constituents speculate about alternative futures for a derelict site? In consideration of these questions, Federal Screw stages an event and collective exploration.

ABOUT FEDERAL SCREW

The Chelsea Screw Works was founded in 1913, and merged into Federal Screw Works in 1928. The 80,000 square foot Chelsea plant once employed more than 250 people. At the time of its closing in 2005, only 37 employees remained. In 2007, Magellan Properties purchased the site for redevelopment.

META FRICHE TEAM

Virginia Black, Melissa Bonfil, Peyton Coles, Joseph Filippelli, Brittany Gacsy, Jeeeun Ham, Kyung Jin Hong, Jordan Johnson, Jennifer Komorowski, Brian Muscat, Christopher Reznich, Michael Sanderson, Ash Thomas, Catie Truong

SPECIAL FORCE

Bruce Findling, Nate Doud, James Chesnut, Joe Gacsy, Kelsey Jensen

GENERAL MANIFOLD

Pavilion designed by Jean Louis Farges, Steven Christensen, Anya Sirota

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1214 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1203&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=la-gaite-lyrique http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1203#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:34:41 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1203

The Théâtre de la Gaîté was built on the rue Papin when the company relocated in 1862. In the late 1980s a good portion of the building was demolished to make way for a quickly doomed amusement center. The facade, entryway and foyer were all that remained.  In November 2010 the City of Paris completed a digital arts and modern music centre on the site, La Gaîté Lyrique, which restored and incorporated the surviving historic front section of the old building.

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1203 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1196&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=base-camp-belleville http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1196#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:34:27 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1196

Clinging to a vertiginous cliff face in the 20th arrondissement’s Parc de Belleville is a curious playground. Here, all vestiges of absorbent wood chips, spongy rubber mats, and safety cords have been banished. In place of the friendly, litigation avoidant materials one would expect of a proper childhood concourse, BASE (build a super environment) deploys bare concrete, timber pylons, and shards of steel.  Seeing it for the first time makes even well-conditioned urbanites want to immediately don a helmet and knee pads. In the absence of monkey bars and swings, one encounters something that is an abstracted combination of fortress and ship, punctured by hidden tunnels, sound scoops, obstacles, and sudden drops. A network of ropes encourages children to scale an impossibly angled wooden wall.  A concealed slide spits them out at top speeds questionably close to a vertical circulation path.

The result is a space which allows the imagination to wander. No gesture is prescribed. No signage. No warnings. Every surface flexibly conceived for a myriad of possible appropriations. Some slopes are highjacked by parents sunbathing. Others are transformed into imaginary universes for risk-inclined toddlers and tweens. Since its inauguration in 2008, this €1.1 million public project has been flocked. And not a single accident, not even a nosebleed, reported.

At the top of the climb there is payoff: a playhouse and an exceptional view of the city. If you squint hard you can imagine a view beyond the banlieue.

- Jordan johnson

In the five short years since creating Fichtre! Frédéric Péchereau, Thomas Cantin and Wilfrid Lelou have substantiated a practice that revels in the ascendency of the micro, the direct, the unfussy, the urban, the collective, and the humbly transformative. For this collaborative, craft defies nostalgia for artisanal fabrication and enters the realm of exploration and immediacy. Here any given intervention unfolds from prototype to final assembly as a continuous design process. The result is a collection of constructions and insertions, both permanent and ephemeral, which no matter how small, invariably explore the very nature of public space and how it asserts itself in the city.

Fichtre! builds mobile furnishings, rolling shops, objects and installations. Frédéric, Thomas and Wilfred stage events and art happenings. They play musical instruments. They use circular saws and electric drills. Their interventions cannot be confused with site specific art works of the lean years. Nor is their project an ironic distillation of spatial experience. If we dare to conjure up the notion of liberty, then perhaps their playful work seeks to impart the same non-authoritarian pleasures that form the very logic behind their own collaborative practice.

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1260 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1212&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=le-zine-vol-ii http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1212#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:16:48 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1212 JOURNAL OF EMERGENT URBANITY

Guide map held in my hand is not really necessary. Just wandering to wherever my foot-steps take me, to places where people gather. Within a short walk, one can find another artists’ studio.

After two months in Paris I finally started to notice: mysterious doors to apartment units squeezed between shops on narrow alleyways. Strangers like me could easily miss them, these doors leading to a Parisian’s life. Even though the streets are filled with apartments like these, it is hard to imagine the life hidden behind the doors.

Most visitors hardly have an opportunity to take a look at how these average Parisians live in their own space. However, they open their doors to the public just a few days a year, when I – along with the other outsiders – have the opportunity to enter into these spaces and see their lives.

On these special days, white flags of Ateliers d’Artists de Belleville – the organization of artists living in Belleville – are fluttering on the alleys. These are the signs that welcome anyone with wondering eyes into their studios.

After walking into the door and passing the shad¬ed corridor, I come upon a surprise: a sun-drenched courtyard. I cannot help but pause for a moment there and enjoy this chance to appreciate the tranquility of the small courtyard that one could not expect from the outside. I follow the arrows toward an artist’s studio, skip the elevator; head for the stairs. Second floor, third floor, fourth floor. . .

Belleville, where this event is held, is the area that lies in the 10th, 11th, 19th and 20th arrondissement of Paris, and over time it has become the home to many immigrant families. Likewise, artists have moved here from all over France and the world to form an artistic community. And once a year, for a few days, they open their studios to the public, hosting the untold number in their homes. Such highly personal spaces – what an opportunity to be invited inside! While the art is often interesting, the chance to peep into the private residences and studios of the artists is what makes this journey through Belleville irresistible.

The excitement of this event is the transformation of the highly personal work space into a public festival place. Like a giant open art museum, the entire city is invited to freely explore the intimate spaces of Belleville. And when you encounter work that captures your interest, you can chat one-on-one with the artist. The free spirit of Belleville, that allows for many private residential/work spaces to be assembled into a single giant art festival, is what makes this one of the most dynamic neighborhoods of Paris

- Jeeeun Ham

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1183 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1170&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=1170 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1170#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:56:15 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1170

 Close to a century after the building’s construction, this Banque de France outpost, rendered obsolete by the introduction of the Euro, is transformed into an arts center.

It is plainly titled Lab-Labanque, a testament to its concern with projective experimentation and its own idiosyncratic context. Dedicated to the production and diffusion of visual culture as it relates to the contemporary city, it is equal parts laboratory, exhibition space, and labyrinth. The program’s scope in media is broad – including temporary installation, photography, video, sculpture, painting, and industrial design – but refined in premise.The center explores the relationship between art and architecture as an urban catalyst within a self-reflexively charged material field. The space is anything but a white box. Layered, complex, awkward, the installation and workshops are unapologetic in their material and symbolic allusion to the refuge and transfer of capital. Projects are constructed, performed, and displayed in decadently surfaced lobbies, director’s offices, in vaults, archives, offering the possibility of critical engagement with the physical realm of cultural and capital production.

- Anya Sirota

For centuries the collective imaginary has enthusiastically engaged with the visual and architectural tropes of vestigial structures, with objects of venerable decay.  Coping mechanisms for the traumas of war, natural disaster, economic shrinkage; ruminations on mortality; speculative propositions on the curative value of natural ecologies, often contradictory and politically provocative, images of ruination have emerged as persistent allegorical stand-ins for cultural and architectural crisis.

In the past decade, ruination has been magnified, augmented, and abstracted. The media, visual arts, popular culture and markets have all eagerly sponsored this phenomenon to the oscillating pleasure of an alternatingly lamenting and fetishistic audience. But what about architecture? How has architecture responded to the representational frustration of its formal prominence, continuity, monumentality? What has architecture learned from its material breakdown, from its climactic obsolescence, from its perceived insolvencies?  And finally, how has architecture gained legitimacy from a projective feedback loop based on the visual negation of its formal authority?

For a small cadre of architects and landscape architects working with architectural remnants and fragmented vestiges, the aestheticization and scenographic abstraction of ruins have provided unprecedented opportunity for a transformative reconceptualization of civic architecture and space. Through a mimetic process of symbolic appropriation a new architectural typology has emerged, one which relishes in the self-reflexive inscription of the architectural object’s intrinsic flaws.

To understand how this evolving strategy is defined and deployed, we’ll examine a series of contemporary projects, defined by disciplinary similarities, each situated in France.  Some are cobbled together from architectural remnants; some are constructed on virgin sites. What binds them is the treatment of decay not as a material deserving of restoration or tidying up, but as a symbolic, programmatic, and operational paradigm. In the context of these projects, the ruin as imaginative fragment and performative site provides a scenario in which human occupation, emergent program, and tactical appropriation supplant the standardized logics of overtly officialized civic architecture.

Why France? With a perceived plethora of industrial, economically pummeled detritus available in the United States, or more widely in any western democratic country, why mitigate the exploration by narrowing the research to fit within a particular national boundary?  The logic is both quantifiable and speculative. Most simply, no country devotes more national funds to cultural programming and infrastructure than France. As a direct consequence, in the past decade, France has invested significant resources into radical and projective planning methods to engageneglected sites on a national scale.

The result has led to a range of experimental projects extracted from the operational terms of ruination – flexible, temporal, and partial in organization – that move beyond the institutional and residential reuse of derelict architecture that we have grown familiar with domestically.

The second reason to investigate the instrumental aesthetization of ruin within the bounds of French cultural infrastructure is trickier, more intangible. It requires the consideration of a French idiom that escapes direct English translation, but points to a nuanced and generative understanding of decay. The term is Friche. Wasteland is its most direct and reductive English counterpart.  Or, neglected terrain.

In the absence of a French word for wilderness, in the absence of the very concept of wilderness as an opposition to the disciplining character of the built environment, friche speaks not only of ruin, but ruin qualified by an anticipated social and botanical resurgence.

Friche infers that architecture or landscape without unremitting maintenance will invariably and voraciously be reclaimed by the natural elements as well as by opportune users, which is to suggest that both the natural and the constructed realms are in a state of continuous management, transformation, and becoming. Friche therefore, is an idea as much as an ideology, that since the mid-80’s has been embraced by French architects, landscapes architects, artists and thinkers as a method for coopting the productive and adaptable semantic charges of ruin in service of architectural reinvention.

Like a Gilles Clement landscape, an architecture of friche speculates that the built environment can be set into motion, cultivating emergent behaviors over an indeterminate span of time. It points to the architectural, social and urban opportunities that are latent in neglected, abandoned, marginalized sites, if they are engaged with imagination, vision and the pursuit of common social good. It is with this appreciation of the opportunistic qualities of friche as an idiom – transcending a mere description of melancholy or nostalgia – that a set of experimental French practices work with material ruin and deploy the visual and organizational codes of decay as an urban and architectural strategy.

In order to qualify the emergent genre, we might call these projects civic friche, as they paradoxically couple the institutional with the abandoned. But to give them a name at all it to create a category that defines a set of disciplinary commonalities that outs an operating method, well outside the normative procedures of restoration or repurposing.

The lessons of civic friche, or the treatment of ruination as substance, as strategy, as texture, as projection, and as a scenographic abstraction are multiple. If conceived as the negation of the form and limits which history and society set out for an architectural object, if as Bernanrd Tchumi contended that the most architectural thing about a building is the state of decay that it is in, then engagement with ruin allows for the consideration of spatial techniques outside contemporary preoccupations with style, completion, polish, and productivity. In place of architecture’s characteristic aspirations, engagement with ruin concedes to the partial, fragmented, unfinished, and transformative.

In the opening of Construire Autrement, Michel Onfray suggests contemporary architecture suffers from an unsatisfying case of prêt-a-porter, where the voguish quickly reaches the status of démodé.  In contrast, the architecture of incidentally aestheticized stylessness extends the spatial lifespan of buildings by working with the layering of the defunct and, and the awkward. For Onfray , ruin, amputated from contemporary formal procedures, liberated from the anxieties of technical élan, is ripe territory for socio-spatial exploration and invention.

But ruin as architectural material is not an innocent find. Ruin requires work. Staging. Engineering. In Patrick Bouchain’s transformation of the former LU biscuit factory into the Lieu Unique, a multi-programmed cultural center in Nantes, terrific efforts are exerted to suspend the building in a state of perpetual ruination.

A protective roofing system is installed to treat the architectural requirements of a water-tight envelope, allowing the interior surfaces to appear ossified in a visual rendition of choreographed decline. Here surfaces are performed, operated on, allied with the chimerical authenticity of neglected urban space. But to suggest that this intervention plainly sides with the logic of conservation is to neglect the project’s free play with the vestiges of the existing structures. New insertions are made – unambiguously, ruthlessless . The mediations are superimposed, and exposed, obstinately rendering the original structure less precious, less auratic.

The concept of aestheticized stylessness, or perhaps more emphatically, ‘aestheticized efficiency’, is evidenced more dogmatically in the scheme for the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum and cultural center situated in Paris’s 16^th arrondissement.  Operating on the semi-demolished Musée National d’Art Modern in Paris, the architects, Lacaton & Vassal, under the pretext of budgetary restriction, opted for a restrained, economical scheme. The established project narrative depicts an intervention limited to the stabilization of the demolished building in order to ensure visitor safety, bringing the scene of codified disorder back up to code.  The resultant texture, symbolically transgressive, undone, evocative of a realm of production, accentuates the provisional quality of the museum as an unfinished site, as work-in-progress.

At first glance the Palais de Tokyo and the Lieu Unique appear to espouse similar visual technique. But with a bit closer scrutiny, they are radically divergent. While the Palais de Tokyo treats ruin as a material palette or surface signifier of heterotopic frisson, the Lieu Unique adapts ruination as a self-reflexive organizational tactic. The Palais de Tokyo still functions categorically in synchronicity with established institutional logics. There is a gallery space. Visitors purchase tickets, are monitored by a security service. Entry is through a single monumental access point.  The restaurant keeps a waiting list. The bookstore is smart. And so on.

In contrast, the Lieu Unique moves beyond ruin as representation of institutional slumming, to adaptation of ruin as a simulated, organizational, spatial logic. Multiple entries are cut into the surface of the building in order to undermine the regulatory centralized entry of institutional buildings. These entries are never shut. And even when commercial or institutional programs are closed, public access to the building remains open. Economic materials divorced from any relationship to the original site, in this case oil barrels from West Africa, are used to stage an augmented reading of decomposition, rendering explicit the staged quality of the ruin. Commercial, administrative, and temporary programming is inserted into the building with little regard for hierarchical specifics or separations. The circulatory core traverses both the commercial and administrative programming with little regard for codes of proper behavior.

So beyond the rhetorical and surficial staging of architecture as process in perpetual liaison with imminent or stayed ruination, civic friche projects, enact or imitate tactics directly derived from the spatial logics of ruination. That is to say, the category is not concerned with the application of representational ruin to an institutional surface, but with the adaptation of distinct organizational potentials that ruin affords in the restructuring of institutional logics.

One such opportunity is the deployment of partial and phased intervention in answer to the particular scalar anatomy of neglected sites. Rather than envisioning architecture as fully occupied by dedicated program, friche projects pirating from existing sites of ruination absorb the notion of gradual, fluctuating transformation through the measured fragmentation of site. LIN Architect’s conversion of a former Nazi submarine base in Saint Nazaire, for example, epitomizes the idea of partial reactivation. Working with a monolith close to a quarter mile long, 400 feet wide, virtually indestructible underneath a 23-foot thick hulking shell of concrete, the architects were charged with designing a nexus for experimental music and culture.

The methods deployed read as strategically humble: the building is structurally stabilized, a street-like linear circulation route is inserted to connect the bays, cuts are made in the exterior shell to allow for urban porosity, one floating dock is transforming into flexible performance space, and additional public programming is inserted into the structure of a single bay. Finally, a sphere, in a gesture of sardonic goodwill, is recuperated from a German airport tower and designated the ‘think tank’.  Placed on the roof, it functions as marker for the intervention within.  More than three quarters of the site is left untouched: inhabitable, accessible, flexible, and unprogrammed. No placards erase or underscore the building’s former uses, and no indication is given as to how the building should be occupied. There is no operating guide. In time, program might be added, adjusted as needed, the strategy is intended to shrink or grows.

A similar plan is implemented in Saint Etienne’s Cite du Design, an industrial design school and exhibition center structured on the remnants of former arms manufacturing complex.  A quarter of the site is arranged to hold classrooms and studio space, a new building is inserted to interphase with the public, but a majority of the site is left undone, in a found state of decay.The unaffected zone of ruination accepts spill over from the programmed area, where students are encouraged to treat the space as free – open to experimentation, events, large scale installation.

What ruin intimates, in opposition to polished architectural space, and in defiance of conventional order, is the luxurious possibility of programmatic ambiguity, of temporary occupation and spatial appropriation. Friche sites like the Belle de Mai, an office park and performing arts center in Marseille, invite tenants and visitors, to procure unprogrammed space, to secure then vacate portions of the site at will. Reenacting arbitrated renditions of squatting and spatial high jacking, the strategy makes generous allowances for transformation and unpredicted used. In the case of the Frigos, an office building in the center of a business district in the 13^th arrondissement, the appropriation of all shared surfaces signals an ever-changing reconfiguration of collective signage.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, civic friche projects actively engage emergent programs on the sites of ruination. That is, rather than imposing new programs that are unapologetically extraneous to a given condition, friche projects rely heavily on civic initiative, interim uses, and public participation.

For the heartiness, stamina, and sustainability of a site, existing or ‘found’ programs are intermingled with new uses. In the case of Le Channel in Calais, a former slaughterhouse turned performing arts center and pyrotechnics institute, the architect Patrick Bouchain worked in close collaboration with artists and residents involved with the site, prior to bringing in new institutional program. At the Lieu Unique, uses inherited from its industrial squat interlude – a day care center, hammam, artists’ residence – are fully integrated with new institutional programming: theater, restaurant, bookstore, gallery, gift shop, etc.

Not all contemporary French projects working with architectural salvage and civic programming defy the formal and symbolic logics of restorative practice. Many recent architectural interventions analyzed over the course of my research defer to the mandates and standards of constructed history, whitewashing the remnants of decay to the point of amnesia, reinstating the authoritative manifestations of the architectural object. As a self-conscious recreation of architectural decay, civic friche is at the periphery,  a methodological anomaly to the structure of contemporary practice. Working at the margin, civic friche participated in a contemporary collective desire to resuscitate, appropriate and reinvent, conservation, and reimagine and the treatment of contested spaces. As discourse, adaptive reuse critiques Modernism’s grand-scale mega-visions along with their progressive, rational and monumental ideals.  Finding individual, fragmented or partial solutions for sites that were envisioned as mono-functional, offers a wry alternative in a field weary of overarching ideological gestures.  Finally, the appropriation of these sites supports architecture’s free play with the vestiges of existing structures, rendering the originals less precious, less auratic. And while engagement with architectural detritus requires a level of humility, the payoff is the potential for plurality, fragmentation, and cheeky subversion.

- Anya Sirota

notes from the Association of American Geographers Conference, New York City, 2012

Ruinations: Violence, Snafus, Porn, panel chaired by Angela Last

Once you’ve been to the Villa Noailles, you begin to nurture a fantasy of complicity and collusion. You hope to return.  You strive to drop the Noailles, and call the place simply the Villa. The Villa, is in the know; you want it in your network. The Villa is a purveyor of discriminating taste and emergent talent. It is a platform that promises an encounter with salient contemporaneity in the realm of architecture, fashion, photography and design. The Villa seeks out new accomplices for future impact and stages events around their imminent rise.  It is a curious and seductive place. Rarely does a cultural venue so deliberately ensconced in the sensibilities of the Now manifest such careful sympathies in establishing a bond with the Then.

The backstory goes something like this. In 1924 Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles, voracious collectors and pioneering art patrons, commissioned the architect.

Robert Mallet-Stevens to build the Villa Noailles in Hyères on the French Riviera. They had mused over design proposals from Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but chose Mallet Stevens for his crisp geometry, concrete construction, terraces and hanging gardens. It would be the architect’s first realized project, completed in three years. The Armenian artist Gabriel Guévréjian designed an adjacent cubist garden.

For the next two decades the Villa served as the material fulcrum of European Avant Garde, and the trove of illustrious visitors and friends amassed by Charles and Marie Laure is astounding. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miro, Paul Vera, Jean Prouve, Marcel Breuer, and Eileen Gray all spent time living or working at the Villa. The Noailles supported film projects by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Château de Dé features the Villa prominently. And they commissioned works by Balthus, Giacometti, Brâncuşi, and Dora Maar.

Then the denouement. In 1940 the villa, occupied by the Italian Army, is turned into a hospital. From 1947 until 1970, the villa was the summer residence of Marie-Laure. She died in 1970, and the house was purchased by the city of Hyères in 1973. Charles de Noailles died in 1981.

Today’s revived Villa, under the direction of Jean-Pierre Blanc, is the logical extension of the original summer retreat, where encounters with the cultural vanguard are intensified. In its current form, the Villa provides space for creation, momentum and play. Home to the annual Design Parade, the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie, leading architecture and photography exhibits, workshops, conferences, the Villa is gaining significant force as an internationally resource for cultural substance, providing multiple occasions for a worthy sojourn to the South of France.

There is also a residency program. In a wing of the Villa called diminutively “the petit villa”, curated guests stay in four rooms independently appointed by François Azambourg, Florence Doléac, David Dubois and Bless.

At the Villa programs are updated, events staged, the site expands and contracts, breaths.  Here the contemporary is juxtaposed against the historical narrative, a permanent collection of artifacts and works that represents the treasure troves of distinguished lifetime. However briefly, the visitor joins the alliance with the distinctive past as well as the imminent future.

 - Christopher Reznich

Edouard Francois. His work, a collection of heightened idiosyncrasies couple autonomy with interdisciplinarity, self-reflection with provocation, landscape with surface, context with graphics, libertarianism with ecology, to name but a few seemingly contradictory alignment. His projects require a playful new vocabulary, though the content is quite serious, perhaps unabashedly earnest. One look at the models that abound in the office and any criticism of choreographed duplicity is evaporated. The delirium he advocates is unaffected. The buildings are the models in direct translation. No snake oil. The project here, ultimately, boils down to a phenomenological appreciation of liberty in all its material guises.

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1149 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1057&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=petit-bain http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1057#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:10:09 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1057 Petit Bain is a curious little barge commissioned by the non-profit group Guingette Pirare. It recently docked on the quai of the Seine in front of the France’s distinguished Bibliothèque National François Mitterrand.

Petit Bain, a piece of floating cultural infrastructure designed on a skinny budget by Nicolas Delon and Julien Choppin of Encore Heureux, is equipped with a concert hall, multimedia studio, restaurant, bar, office, terrace, and vegetable garden. The program is dual. Yes, there is leisure. Here you can dance, or learn to dance, eat, draw, garden, and fix your bicycle. You can listen to slam and music. You can watch swimmers work on their breast stroke in the floating pool next door. But, then, there is enterprise. The Petit Bain provides training and assistance to a labor force in transition, easing reinsertion into an unapologetically competitive economic landscape. In the past, Guingette Pirare had used refurbished barges for the hybrid cultural and economic programming. But as their project took on a more permanent logic, they secured funding for a new home. The floating cultural venue is an upgrade and a meta-appropriation in an ode to the agency’s former mode of organization. Plus, the yellow is perfect.

- Melissa Bonfil

In the sleepy French suburb of Tourcoing, 20 kilometers north of Lille, a  mysterious form hovers tenuously above the rooftops like an alien space craft. This techno-fetishist canopy joins and transforms a defunct complex of century-old buildings  into a cutting-edge home for Le Fresnoy, one of Europe’s most elite trans-disciplinary cultural academies.

Originally a 1920s leisure complex, this cluster of buildings offered such pleasures as swimming, skating, cinema, ballroom dancing, and horseback riding.

Reskinned and reassembled by Bernard Tschumi, the complex is now home to 8,000 square meters of school, library, sound and videoproduction studios, exhibition space, offices, a bar/restaurant, and apartments. Impressive as this programmatic feat may be, Tschumi’s  primary invention at Le Fresnoy is his unconventional approach to the reappropriation of this challenging site.

The relatively out-of-the-way site is actually well-suited to Le Fresnoy’s cosmopolitan aspirations: a mere two hours from Amsterdam and London, one hour from Paris, the city of Tourcoing acts as an unlikely but strategic hub. The fragile state of the site’s existing buildings presented a significant architectural dilemma. A painstaking restoration of the existing buildings would have far exceeded the budget of this fledgling institution, but to demolish  and start from scratch would decimate the unique character of this unusual site. Tschumi’s innovative proposition was to construct a new, high-tech “umbrella” over the site, protecting the existing structures while housing new mechanical and electrical systems and  producing a unique sequence of partially enclosed spaces for performance and inhabitation.

Tshumi’s grand gesture produces what is essentially a succession of boxes inside a box. Acting as the outer crust, the modern canopy stands independently from the original buildings and provides continuity across the site’s disparate parts. It wraps downward over the northern elevation while leaving the sides open to allow views to the existing context. On the southern elevation, a new façade produces a sense of transparency at the building’s entrance. Beneath the monumentally scaled canopy, the site’s original buildings are minimally restored as hollow containers for program to be inserted within. Newly constructed and autonomous boxes housing the more technically demanding programs are then placed strategically throughout these containers, allowing occupants to move freely between them. The scheme allows a relatively low degree of programmatic density in the original buildings, preserving the sense of scale and openness that they originally possessed.

The “common denominator” in this equation is the interstitial space created under the new roof. It is the space where the institution’s diverse programs are physically and symbolically united. The emphasis Tschumi puts on the space is explicit: Like a giant tongue, the red-carpeted grand exterior staircase is by far the most dominant characteristic of the front elevation, even trumping the glassy main entrance. Ascending the stairs, you reach a space flooded with light from every direction. Large cloud-like perforations in the new roof cast pools of light on to historic roofs below, adding contrast to the rigid high-tech structural aesthetic.  A maze of catwalks, stairs, and platforms allow circulation amongst the aged roof tiles of the existing buildings, while producing spaces for casual interactions, spontaneous performances, or collaborative installations.

Tschumi describes Le Fresnoy as “architecture event” rather than an “architecture object”, and the techniques he deploys here render his theoretical approach architecturally explicit. The project is a phenomenal study of interstitial space, and  the ways in which architecture can foster chance encounters and spontaneous performance. Simultaneously, Le Fresnoy offers a dramatic and unique case study in the reappropriation of historic sites, demonstrating that an innovative approach to reuse can produce an outcome  that is economical, ecological, and magical.

- Joe(y) Fillippelli

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1240 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1231&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lappartement-une-metaphore-du-monde http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1231#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:52:39 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1231 Art institutions have enthusiastically morphed into art factories, symbolically blurring modes of consumption and production, leisure and work, while plugging into a collective fascination with performative processes.

But what about more contemporary or more unapologetically banal detritus? What about buildings with dubious historic appeal, those lacking riveted trusses, monumental scale, and the chimerically melancholic atmosphere that makes the post-industrial so uncomfortably tantalizing? Can prosaic sites still cavort mischievously with more urbane and promiscuous cultural appropriations?

For Patrick Beaucé, co-founder of Objectile and associate professor at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes, the answer is an indefatigable Yes.

For the past year, Beaucé has headed The Apartment, a research initiative and installation project in Bethune’s Lab-Labanque. A former branch of the Bank of France, which drained of its original program following the substitution of the French franc by the Euro, has been transformed in a center for the production and dissemination of visual arts. The early 19th century building is tidy and unassuming within urban context. Inside, the bank’s spatial and structural logics have been left untouched: the office, the vault, the archives, and the bank manager’s domestic space playfully preserved in the condition in which they were found 5 years ago.

It is here that Patrick Beaucé’s work, developed in conjunction with art and design students at the ESBAV, reflects on key issues related to contemporary living through analysis and experimentation. The speculative prototypes on display at The Apartment tackle the social, cultural, economic, spatial and environmental parameters embedded in questions of domestic space, and envision alternate as well as future modes of segmentation, distribution and opportunistic alliance.

AS: Your research deals with individuation, mass customization and the potential for functional realignments in domestic operations. How did you first start working on the Apartment Project at Lab Labanque?

PB: The idea for the apartment project grew out of collaborative desire of both students and instructors in the 5th year Design School of Art and Design in Valenciennes to work on concrete projects and to actually realize them.

 Our first step was to establish relationships and build partnerships with local manufacturers, to merge interests in industrial manufacturing, artisanal production and design. What we are hoping to do is to reimagine the entire manufacturing process, and ultimately, to make new technologies and manufacturing techniques available to everyone.

AS: Tell us a little about the current installation.

PB: The project was launched at Lab-Labanque Bethune where the first collection of objects and design concepts was presented as part of an ever-evolving exhibition titled, “The apartment, a metaphor for the world.” The current Bethune 2011 collection features objects relating to domestic space, and reflects on the attitudes and actions adopted by individuals inhabiting space. The speculative objects that are of particular interest are those that engage issues of performance and industrial remnants as an organizational paradigm, as well as the aesthetic sensibility of the work. What the projects also have in common is that the manufacturing costs are kept to a minimum. So the challenge is to conceive of projective, opportunistic design, using inventive, but humble means.

AS: By what process do the students experiment with new modes of design and inhabitation? Is this a site specific project? Does it relate to the artisanal and manufacturing resources in the immediate region?

PB: Here we are experimenting with several modes of fabrication. But again the parallel between projects tends to be a concern with the intelligent deployment of simple, affordable materials, in other words, we try to limit the quantity of materials used. For most of these objects, the assembly is intuitive, using interlocking fasteners and other simple techniques.

 But more importantly, there are two reasons why my teaching and design research interrogate these modes of production, the nature and conditions of that we find ourselves in when we consider the fabrication of the objects that surround and engage us.

 The first is that there is a pressing moral responsibility to consider the full range of acts and consequences behind every design. The second is that work has become rarified in our society.

 We can observe this phenomenon in technical developments and mechanization. More and more streamlined modes of production continue to make smaller amounts of human labor needed to produce goods. And, of course, we continue to witness the relocation of manufacturing goods to countries with low labor costs. Faced with this worrying condition, anxious politicians advocate re-industrialization.

 So we can see labor issues crossing into the territories of heterogeneous realities: aesthetics, invention, technology, economics, society, politics, history, geography. Our goal, therefore, in fostering these  speculative design proposals you see at the Apartment of Lab Labanque is to attempted to address these different dimensions in production, labor and design and to  begin to understand certain correlations between them.  In the current project students were invited to experiment with five educational proposals in which the nature of work, conditions for its exercise were specific and meaningful. Our aim to have students engage contemporary practice first hand.

 AS: There is something thoroughly peculiar the bank as a cultural instititutions. Video installations in the vault. Dance parties in the archives. The material palette left behind – rugs, ornamental tiles, counters – seems to essentially ask the visitor to occupy the space of capital. Does this change the way the public interacts with the site and installation work? And for the students working on the design projects in the apartment space, does the site influence their interrogations?

PB: It is certainly a very unusual approproriation project – Lab Labanque – with a very distinct logic. I am particularly struck by the quality of the apartment. It belonged to the bank manager, so he lived just above the bank with his family. The scale of the domestic space is phenomenal. And working in this apartment forefronts shifts in socio-economic conditions over time. We ask students to investigate the space in contemporary scales, with a very real set of economic constraints. And I find the dissonance between the former use and the current proposals exceptionally productive. To imagine an alternate domestic realm within an outmoded one is a compelling design problem.

- Anya Sirota

In 2010, the Paris-based firm Frankin Azzi Architecture won a competition to transform the Alstom Halles building on Ile de Nantes into a new college of fine arts, the Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole. The winning proposal aims to provide generous pragmatic, productive and residual space for liberal appropriation at multiple scales. A transparent envelope framed in steel forms the unconditioned container for three levels of new program. Insertions, or what Franklin Azzi calls a ‘series of organs’, function in both scripted and undetermined ways, providing plenty of slack for overflow and adaptation. At street level, the building is envisioned as porous, unbound, its circulation following the logic of an urban network reconnecting the manufacturing district to the new developments and the old city beyond. A hybrid Fun-Palace-super-sized-greenhouse-umbrella, the project has propelled the young practice onto France’s national stage. I had the opportunity to talk with Franklin Azzi about his firm, flexibility, modularity and slack.

BG: Your office opened in 2006 as a one man shop. Fast forward to 2011. You’ve won a competition to build a 27,000 m2 art school in the heart of Nantes. You have grown practically overnight from a firm with two employees to a firm with twenty?   Has this been a difficult transition?

FA: I have worked on projects of this scale before; I am able to handle this type of work.  Having worked in large firm prior to starting my own practice [Jean Nouvel], I am familiar with projects of exceptional scale. To be honest, architecture is not simply a matter of scale.  A 200 square meters and a 20,000 square meters project takes the same amount of intelligence and energy.  It is just as complex to work out the idiosyncrasies and requirement of the program for a large scale project as BG: Now that your firm is gaining visibility and recognition, do you imagine growing even larger in the near future?

FA: A large firm of 200 persons is an American form of practice. I like the size we are now, not too big, but not too small. At most, I can imagine adding ten more people, but that’s it. Any more is way too many.  I would rather have a firm of ten strong people than 200 average employees. I feel very confident in the team I have now. I feel we are the right size. This size is the best way to do architecture. Firms of 200 persons are too large to do good architecture. I never want to be this way.  At least, this is what I am telling you now. In ten years, we’ll see.

BG: Your project in Nantes, ESBA, belongs to a typological logic – the box within the box, or the conditioned space within the larger unconditioned container. How does your proposal build on or deviate from its precedents?

FA: This project is a matter of economics. The building scale of the existing structure was too large for the art school. We needed to think about this project ecologically, environmentally, materially and, of course, economically.  We wanted to keep the entire structure intact and only demolish what was absolutely necessary.  We removed the external concrete façade to allow more light to penetrate the building. We also implemented the “umbrella logic” which disassociated the rain envelope from the thermal envelope. The rain envelope consists of transparent polycarbonate and the thermal envelope consisted of two white modern buildings. Of course, the problem with modern or flat-roofed buildings is that they leak. In this instance, we can have modern buildings, and we can inhabit their roofscapes and residual spaces because we don’t have to worry about the rain. The preexisting structure is not connected to the new programmatic insertions. Here the existing structure acts like an umbrella to protect the overarching logic of the whole.

BG: Your Art school project is in very close proximity to Lacaton & Vassal’s Nantes Architecture school, recently completed in 2009. How do the two projects compare?

FA: Very different. In the case of the architecture school, the architects built more program than was needed. They designed extra space. Working with industrial remnants, we had much more space than was programmatically necessary. An overabundance of meters squared. As a consequence, the space we have designed is divided into smaller space and becomes increasingly more private as one penetrates the building. We have brought the existing building down to a more interactive, human scale.

BG: The ESBA looks exciting. How does it announce itself to the city? Is there a marker?

FA: A marker? The building itself is a marker. The project’s transparency allows people to animate and traverse the building as an urban site. It is the potential for mobility and encounter that draws attention to the project.

- Brittany Gacsy

Team Meta-Friche infiltrates a VJ Festival and trade show in Menilmontant to see how the best and brightest in the mapping sphere are using video projection to transform our perception of space. Alongside interactive displays of the newest 5-figure live editing equipment, a group of young hackers build their own equipment on-the-scene for the cost of a Value Meal at McDo. Virginia Black and Chris Reznich show us how it’s done.

- Virginia Black and Chris Reznich

Michael Sanderson (Meta Friche) visits Rosalie Paquez and Lyl Lunik in their atelier on rue Denoyez.

Tell us a little bit about rue Denoyez. Is it a squat? An autonomous street? What are we looking at?

This isn’t quite a street, this is a situationIt started as a completely organic process. None of this was planned. None of this was legal. This street was a mix of squatted and commercial spaces. Concerned citizens. The squats were continuously shifting, changing location. And now it has evolved into the urban situation you see.

Are you a long time resident?

I’ve lived on this street for four and half years. This is our gallery here and our apartment. The street has continuously evolved since we moved here. New residents, new collectives, coalitions, projects have kept developing here over an extended period of time.

How is this street organized? It certainly does not resemble many others in the capital. Do you have an agreement with the city?

Yes, the residents and businesses owners you see here have signed an agreement with the city hall. The entire street belongs to the city, and it’s been this way for years. Like in other neighborhoods, the city purchases the properties one by one over time in order to ultimately renovate, regenerate, create new urban spaces. So this street is slated for eventual “rehabilitation”, which is another way of saying demolition. And we are here living and working in the interim. We are using the street for our own projects, residences, for our livelihood with the understanding that eventually, all of this will be removed. In the meantime, however, we are interested in integrated art, poetry, collective visions into daily urban life. And this is an ideal place for this sort of collective experimentation.

Who determines what the street looks like? Whose aesthetic sensibility is this?

We have designed the aesthetic logic of this street collectively. Every organization on the street built a planter, for example. This was part of a small greening the street project. You can see the mosaic planters everywhere, and each one is original, each one is made by a different neighbor. Here is our place. I share it with Marie, who is a painter, and another Marie, a portrait artist. I make costumes for theater pieces. So it is a collective, shared atelier. And sometimes we host events.

Would you say that the street is a collective canvas?

Maybe. What we are looking for a way to give value to everyone’s gestures. And we are keen on keeping art in the realm of the approachable, the popular.  We do not want to make art too sacred, to unattainable. And, yes, we want to share our creative practice.

Is this scenario special to Belleville? Is Belleville’s ornery history and marginal attitude an enabler for this kind of activity?

This situation is not indigenous to Belleville. Something like this could take place anywhere. If you have the human energy, the interest, the engagement, the neighbors, the autonomous attitude, this can take place anywhere you like.

Is graffiti legal on this street?

Yes! For example, this wall is a wall for free expression. It is legal to tag it. Graffiti is completely authorized here. We have the privilege and the authority to tag all the surfaces. Only on Rue de Noyer is this activity legal. You cannot tag anywhere else. You cannot walk across the street and tag over there. Perhaps you could. You could try.

By authorizing graffiti on rue Denoyez and not elsewhere – is this a form of strategic containment of an otherwise unsavory urban activity?

I don’t think so. There are a number of streets like this, where tagging is legal. Do these sites serve as a sponge? Perhaps. But it is bound to spill outside the limits of the street. The engaging part is that this wall is in constant motion. Every day people tag this wall. Sometime the wall changes twice a day.

Do all of the neighbors agree with the aesthetic sensibilities of the collective?

No. There are lots of people that do not like this grassroots form of urbanism.

Is Rue de Noyer is an economic generator?

Sure. The city knows that this is an attractor, but the street is still not a legitimate urban form. The city is still not thrilled, not even comfortable with this form of organization. So even though this is an important urban attractor, it will nonetheless end eventually.  This isn’t forever.  But it is important to recognize that there is something very powerful when urban situations emerge. What we are witnessing is emergent program – and this program is capable of testing the temperature of the water, understand the parameters and the qualities of the urban site. This way things can change and evolve slowing. This is not fashion. This urbanism is rooted. Slow growing and intense.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris regarded itself as the world capital for technology and innovation. Industrialization was moving ahead at full speed, and the city experienced a massive influx of workers to fill the new factories. The 14th arrondissement, near the city’s southern periphery, felt the impact of this new immigration quite acutely, and soon planning began for a new church to accommodate these new workers and their families.

Construction on the new church began in 1896, and Father Soulange-Bodin was appointed the parish priest. As a nod to the working-class parishioners, the church was dedicated to Our Lady of Labor.

The architect of this new church, Jules Astruc, was given an unusual design challenge. It was determined that this church should endeavor to make these new factory workers “feel at home.” Workers during this phase of industrialization saw little of their real homes; excruciating work schedules ensured that they spent the majority of their waking hours in the factory. Accordingly, the church was constructed using the tectonic language of industrial architecture.

In plan and section, the church continued to adhere tightly to Catholic convention, with a nave flanked by two aisles  and capped with a Romanesque facade. It’s structure and surfaces, however, were rendered in the delicate engineered filigree of turn-of-the-century ironwork.

This was an era in which Paris was frequently flexing its colonial muscles through its numerous Expositions Universelles, and the city was producing temporary architecture at a scale and speed never before seen. These exposition palaces elevated the architectural language of the factory to the cultural sphere. Remarkably, Notre-Dame-du-Travail was not only constructed using the industrial language of these exposition palaces, it reuses the actual material of these temporary event structures. Shoehorned into the relatively petite volume of this traditional Catholic parish church, this productive misuse of the industrial kit-of-parts sparks a poignant dialog between the iconography of dogmatic convention and the iconography of modernity.

- Ash Thomas

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=1040 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1027&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=coloco http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1027#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:42:56 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=1027 Everything has value; nothing is worth destroying.

Meet the mushrooms of Bagnolet. In this neighborhood just beyond the Parisian “ peripherique”, we find an urban Mushroom farm embedded within an overgrown, under-coiffed park. Toward the northwest edge, a derelict little enclave of greenhouses, complete with a mini-cellar. The mayor of Montreuil, initially conflating a scrub-down with demolition, had thought to level it.

COLOCO with their theory that everything has value; nothing is worth destroying. With minimal investment and resources, COLOCO implements the framework to re-activate the site. COLOCO’s role begins with the securing and preparing the infrastructure – here the greenhouse and grotto-esque bunker. Next COLOCO establishes the social network. Interest is gathered and one hundred residents each invest 20 euros in exchange for a share in output. Shareholders maintain the site, care for the mushrooms, and reap their crop every two weeks. Although the project is primarily self-sustaining, COLOCO remains an active, enthusiastic participant on-site, working alongside the members of the community. A neglected landscape has become an activated site of production and social intersection.

- Jennifer Komorowoski

Correction: January 13th, 2012

An earlier version of this post misstated the location of the project. The mushroom farm is situated in Bagnolet, not Montreuil.

In the 19^th Arrondissment, Edouard Francois has recently completed Eden Bio, an exciting new hybrid of social housing and artists’ lofts integrated within a living façade. The architect, deploying plants that require little maintenance and no fertilizer or pesticide, calls the project a “real urban wilderness”.  In this complex the building material is tactically humble: exposed concrete, corrugated siding, commercial security shutters and wood structure. But the soil trucked in is deep and luxurious, an investment in the site’s projected transformation over time.

Eden Bio, in the spirit of the contemporary vegetal zeitgeist, is gated community.  Edouard Francois’s profile is playfully carved into the site’s multiple entries.

Meta Friche is the logical extension of Civic Friche, the research project launched in the Spring of 2010 that examined France’s tactical appropriation of marginal sites for public function. Where Civic Friche analyzed a new approach to urbanism through civic initiative, temporary and interim uses, and public participation, Meta-Friche studies recent exemplary projects where a cadre of French architects have abstracted and applied these lessons of reappropriation to architecture and urban design projects on virgin sites.

On September 10^th 2010, the Civic Friche exhibition opened at the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning gallery.

Part inhabitable diagram, part scenographic installation, the exhibit functioned as a physical manifestation of the research amassed over the course of the spring semester in France and Belgium. The ambition of the assembly was to define Civic Friche as an architectural and urban typology. Concentrating on seven critical examples of the phenomenon, it proposed a comparative analysis that might function as a kit of parts for speculative interventions.

The scenographic insertion, a simple luan U, served to block the existing glass partition adjacent to the building’s circulation. A tactical reorientation, the new surface served to expand the spatial potential of the gallery interior. On the exterior, rough plywood in the spirit of construction site barrier with peep holes, performed as interactive signage.

To organize the research material – photography, models, maps, diagrams and texts – the installation deployed a system of color coded bands running from the collaged photography wall to context maps routed into the floor surface, folded onto the vertical planes of the model stands, to the scaled models of each site. The mapped color bands continued back to the floor and up the facing wall. Removable books that included the research work were mounted to the wall. Photographic material was projected onto the far end of the gallery.

The seven sites:

Cité du Design, Saint Étienne, LIN Architects

Aureole 14, St Nazaire, LIN Architects

Le Chanel, Calais, Patrick Bouchain + Loïc Julienne

Lieu Unique, Nantes, Patrick Bouchain + Loïc Julienne

Belle de Mai, Marseille, Patrick Bouchain

Le Pass, Frameries, Belgium, Laurent Niget

Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Lacaton & Vassal

The Civic Friche Zine, is a compilation of impressions and perspectives produced in parallel to the course research in France and Belgium. Drifting from the realm of academic analysis, the photographs and narratives serve to transmit the intuitions and sensations amassed during the journey.

More Civic Friche on Issuu

In Marseille, France’s largest port city, you’ll find one of Patrick Bouchain’s latest and arguably most ambitious projects. It’s title cuts straight to the point: la Friche.

Here, a former tobacco factory has been transformed into an idiosyncratic space with theaters, offices, artist studios, a restaurant, and a skate park. At night the site becomes a venue for concerts, dance performances, eating, gatherings, salsa, and a myriad of other activities.

At first glance, the location for La Friche may seem anything but ideal. Situated away from the popular Old Port and abutting the TVG rail lines, it is removed from local transportation networks and animated pedestrian routes. It is, in fact, a cultural and economic oasis located in the middle one of the poorest arrondisements of Marseille.

We are not interested in the finished product since it is never finished. we are interested in the process. Belle De Mai is pure collective process.

- LOÏC JULIENNE

How is it that this isolated venue draws 300 workers on a daily basis? And what makes this cultural attractor so undeniably attractive? La Friche is a complex network of thinkers, participants, performers, entrepreneurs and interested people spearheaded by the French architect Patrick Bouchain. Part networker, part coordinator, part politician, Bouchain is a visionary who’s taken the role of the architect far beyond the confines of design.

La Friche is a project that began with a group of cultural actors who were permitted access to this abandoned tobacco factory in order to create their projects. This community group later became known as the SCIC which has now voted Bouchain into the post of “President”. The group has secured a 45 year lease from the city. The strategy works something like this: a building is handed over to a group of cultural actors who are then permitted to transform and market the space how they see fit and in response to a complex matrix of community requirements. In this networking role, Bouchain helps make connections and negotiations between the SCIC and government agencies, harnessing the energy of emergent programs into viable solutions for this formerly marginal site.

Instead of imposing a monolithic design on this complex site, Bouchain mobilized different artists and thinkers to contribute their idiosyncratic ideas to the master plan of the site.

The result is heterogeneous fusion of programs and interventions. Take the entry sequence, for example. BMI, the skateboarding association, was invited in to design a skate park in the central courtyard. Borrowing fragments of favorite urban skateboarding landscapes across the globe, they designed a composite skate park which visitors are invited to traverse on their way to the public venue above. A local artist created a graffiti wall, which frames the skate park and holds back the TGV rail lines. Once you reach the second-story terrace level, prefabricated containers serve as offices for the associations based on the site. Installation artists inhabit the roofscape of an adjacent building, testing new ideas for landscapes and video projection. The very people using and programming the site become responsible for its design, and the architect in this case oversees the strategy for the ensemble as a composite piece.

To manage the financial plan for the development of the site, Bouchain hired a fiscal spitfire and an employee of the Bank of France, Karen Bouvet. Her role is to secure government funding for the continued development of the site. Bouvet is currently in the process of negotiating with the city to create a new bus route that would connect the La Friche at Belle de Mai to the center of the Marseille, making the site more accessible to the public.

Patrick Bouchain’s political role at the La Friche is critical. Bouchain was responsible for helping integrate La Friche into the Euroméditeranée Project and the European Capitol of Culture project. Participating in these large scale developement projects ensured that La Friche received significant funding as well as media coverage, reinforcing the credibility of the project at regional, national, and international scales. Patrick Bouchain is an architect, who by taking on a number of roles (developer, political advisor, site manager, fundraiser, performer), designs urban conditions as much as he designs buildings. His projects are infinitely dependent on a network of people: collaborators, government officials, residents, associations, artists. With the network in place, La Friche at Belle de Mai becomes a fully activated urban node where any number of activities can take place and a framework that can shift and adapt to changing community needs. Not to mention the site doubles as one of the best salsa joints in the city.

- Brittany Roy

Christophe Ponceau is the co-founder of Rue du Repos, a landscape architecture and scenography practice based in Paris. Trained as an architect, he gradually re-calibrated his focus from the built to the vegetal through a series of ongoing collaborations with Gilles Clement. Ponceau’s lecture touched on the sensibilities and techniques of his practise.

He walked us through four projects: a private residence, a canal lock landscape in Bourgogne, Greentrap (an installation in Lausanne), and the French pavillion at Saragosse. Of critical importance is the notion that material boundaries can be blurred, and the dichotomy between hardscape and softscape can be tactically undermined. The result is a landscape that is divided softly, a landscape in perpetual movement with boundaries that shift, overlap and disappear over time.

There is one space in the Nouvel Opera where disorientation was not the goal- the dance studio on the top floor. When we entered the space, many of us could not help but dance. It essentially has everything a dancer could want: a good floor, nice light, mirrors, and plenty of space; the latter being the most important. When given a large space to dance in, you feel as though there are no limits to your movement. The space becomes as big and expressive as the body and vice versa.

- Kayla Lim

Patrick Bouchain is a French architect whose designs cannot simply be categorized as built spaces. He constructs choreographed experiences, situations, alliances and networks. With Loic Julienne, he co-founded Construire, a practice whose very title succinctly reveals an architectural assertion. Here the collective process (the making) trumps product (the output). In this model, architecture is in a constant state of becoming, where meaning is arrived at through occupation rather than the built form.

Deeply rooted on the principle that the environment has sustained sufficient impact from architecture’s material assertions, Construire works with the notion of economy, (mis)appropriation, layering and nostalgia-free salvage. It is an atypical practice that positions the architect in a myriad of roles: public persona, political negotiator, developer, fundraiser, project manager, community organizer – anything but a purveyor of overarching formal mega-visions.

Construire’s projects trade technical complexity for frugality, make the best of regulations and constraints, question programming, and in an inclusive, and daringly forward-thinking way, address the issue of public space in a fragmented, multiplicitous and populist manner.

- Anya Sirota

Mieux faire circuler les gens pour mieux faire circuler les idées.

-DAVID TROTTIN

Edouard Albert’s 1960 regular grid plan for the Jussieu Campus is a spectacular example of a Modernist mega-vision – progressive, rational and monumental. Designed to serve 45,000 students and researchers this over-scaled urban insertion in the center of the sixth arrondissement has been criticized by every critic and Parisian for its redundancy, illegibility, windy underbelly, and unbridled use of asbestos.

In 2002, in parallel with the renovation of the Jussieu Campus, Peripheriques Architectes won a competition to extend and complete the grid plan. Their proposal, known as the 16M building or the Jussieu Atrium, is complicit with the scale and logic of the existing system, but playfully distorts functionalist ambitions. Beyond the obvious – a perforated metal façade sweater, a jovial and diagrammatic paint job and the happy-pill-shaped wall openings, the architects do the unthinkable. They “gut” the new construction – as though space is abundant and economical in metropolitan Paris. The result is a frenzy of circulation and a dearth of program.

The project was completed in 2006.

In 2004, the city of Paris launched a competition to design a new cultural building at the site of a 1907 industrial warehouse facility for the Port of Paris. The existing structure, the first reinforced concrete building in Paris, could be demolished or incorporated into the new proposal according to the competition requirements.

Jakob+MacFarlane‘s winning entry retains the existing structure, cladding it with a dynamic steel and glass skin, and capping it with a new top floor and rooftop public space. Referred to interchangeably as the “Docks de Paris” or the “Docks en Seine,” the building’s main tenant is a fashion academy, L’institut Français de la Mode.

A special temporary installation of industrial and fashion design work gave us the opportunity to see the building ahead of its completion date this fall. As the first people to arrive on the morning of the opening, we had the entire building to ourselves to explore. During the course of the trip, we saw further examples of the work of Jakob+MacFarlane, including their Restaurant Georges in the Centre Pompidou, and their Docks de Lyon at the rapidly redeveloping Lyon waterfront.

- Steven Christensen

La chaleur, tant dans la terre que dans l’air ne peut régulièrement venir que des rayons du soleil. J’ose dire pourtant que j’ai été assez heureux pour l’imiter en petit à l’égard de quelques petits fruits : j’en ai fait mûrir cinq et six semaines devant le temps, par exemple des fraises à la fin mars, des précoces, et des pois en avril, des figues en juin, des asperges et des laitues pommées en décembre, janvier…

- LOUIS XIV

The Potager du Roi (or the King’s Kitchen Garden), located near the Palace of Versailles, yielded the fresh produce consumed by Louis XIV and his court. The king ate locally and organically, being a real forward-thinker. Today the garden is run by the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage, one of the top landscape architecture schools in France.  And it looks very much like the original garden designed by Jean-Baptiste de la Quintine in the late 17th century.  It covers 25 acres of land and is punctuated by a fountain at its center. The Grand Carré , or large square, contains 16 vegetable patches and is bracketed by a raised path from which the king could watch his gardeners toil. Beyond the wall of the raised path, Quintine built 29 enclosed gardens, or vegetal chambers. These spaces allowed for a variety of microclimates to be perfected, making it possible to grow some fruits and vegetable out of season.  To Quintine’s joy and relief, figs took well to this type of protected environment. Figs were apparently one of the king’s favorites.

Along the walking paths we encountered vines and trees beaten into a state or horticultural submission only possible through years of tactical coercion. There were chickens, and bathtubs, and radiators – and other unidentifiable scatterings of landscape architecture experiments.The kiosk at the entry sold fresh herbs, kale, unimaginably delicious juice, the now canonical works of Gilles Clement and a calendar with the school’s gardens nude and frolicking shamelessly with garden hoses.

- Anya Sirota

Nous vivons dans une économie mixte, dans un système ouvert, pas dans une économie étatique. Le rôle de la puissance publique, c’est d’accompagner les mutations, pas de se substituer aux acteurs. Nous créons de la régulation, de l’harmonie. Le public intervient très fortement sur l’espace public, et de manière plus relative, mais précise, sur l’espace privé. Nous ne sommes pas pour autant dans un système de compromis, de marchandage, mais dans une logique de proposition. C’est tout l’esprit du plan guide.

- ALEXANDRE CHEMETOFF

Alexandre Chemetoff, architect, urban planner and landscaper, has constructed an interdisciplinary practice that advocates for a plural, layered, and non-hierarchical approach to the design of public space. He believes that cities are not bound by a single narrative; instead, they function as an assemblage of stories, traces of lived experience and sites of interactive experimentation.  Consequently, they ought not be designed dogmatically, rather enabled and revealed.

We first encountered the work of Alexandre Chemetoff in the bamboo garden – an ethereal and introverted landscape inserted into the Parc de la Villette.  Theoretically and experientially rich, the garden plays with notions of territory, infrastructure, sound, materiality and observation. Progressive for its time, it continues to resonate and engage.

Chemetoff’s Bureau du Paysage, an “office complex” in miniature located just outside of Paris in Gentilly, borrows from the logic of the bamboo garden. A network of exterior spaces on a narrow sloped terrain connects the main building and a series of free standing greenhouse structures. On the day of our visit Chemetoff set up tables on the principle terrace that hinging the two wings of the main building. He talked about his practice, how the rupture between disciplines is a relatively new and unjustifiable development, and about how the idea of the plan-guide can replace the outmoded notion of a master plan.

In 2000 Chemetoff received the prestigious French Grand Prix de l’urbanisme. Consecutively, he launched one of the most ambitious and progressive urban planning projects in France. Termed the Plan-guide de l’Île de Nantes, its task was to restore 160 ha of territory on the city’s central island.

Chemetoff elected to turn his back on all conventions of city planning, opting instead for a speculative and iterative mapping of existing and projected conditions. His office produced an updated map every three months for the duration of ten years. The map, a layered inventory of all structures, materials, vegetation and projected interventions, served as a suggestion or guide for other architectural interventions, rather than a prescriptive, color-coded rule set.

Alexandre Chemetoff shared copies of the maps that his office produced and explained how the projected system worked.

- Anya Sirota

- WALTER BENJAMIN

For Walter Benjamin writing in 1929, Marseille was so incongruous and intoxicating that the best way to describe it was through a series of disparate moments or collected observations: noises, churches, lights, oyster stalls, walls and characters. His experiential collage amounted to a portrait of a complex, vibrant metropolis in constant contradictory movement. In another essay, Hashish in Marseille, still attempting to make sense of the city’s dissonant parts, Benjamin found comfort in self-dissolution and leisure – arriving at a reading of Marseille through the obligatory veil of sedation.

What Benjamin captured was the essential difficultly of grasping a city with so many contradictory social and spatial networks. At once cosmopolitan and provincial, urban and ‘villaged’, nationalist and tolerant, vanguard and archaic, Marseille’s paradoxical character has persistently served as the subject of cultural and historic investigation. However, despite all of the Marseille profound complexities, it is useful to simplify France’s second-largest city to a bare bones diagram composed of a few principle elements: the Vieux Port, the Canebière, the Quartiers Nord, the Quartiers Sud and the Port Autonome, all held in place by an arresting topography.

It is often said that Marseille forms a figurative amphitheater facing the Mediterranean Seaxiv. Center stage: the Vieux Port, or Marseille’s main harbor and marina. Embedded in the fabric of the old city, it marks the origin of Greek settlement at the cove of Lacydon at about 600 BCxv. Moving from the Vieux Port to the church of Les Réformés, the Canebière, Marseille’s central high street, physically and symbolically cuts the city in half. To the north, tucked behind the shipping port, post-industrial neighborhoods are defined by squandered landscapes, modernist mega-structures, staggering levels of unemployment, immigrant settlement and generalized poverty. To the south, Marseille is expressly more affluent with individuated housing, leisurely parks and access to popular beaches.

Marseille, France’s second largest city, is spread over a vast terrain of 24,062 ha (2.5 times the size of metropolitan Paris), with a population of over 800,000 (urban Paris is populated with close to 2.2 million). While hardly as densely populated as the French capital, Marseille is bracketed by mountain ranges to the north, east and south, curbing the potential for unrestrained sprawl. Thus, it is a rare example of a French city without the requisite banlieu, or suburbanized periphery that has been the focal point of so much social tension and political upheaval over the past decades. This absence of banlieu often serves as the speculative explanation for the conspicuous lack of violence reported in Marseille during France’s recent riots. That is, because Marseille’s residents view themselves as belonging to an enclosed, yet integrated metropolis, there appears to be less perceived conflict between an empowered urban population and a relinquished periphery. The city is officially divided into 16 arrondissements, which are roughly regrouped into 4 general areas: the old center (1-6), the south (7-9), the east (10-12) and the north (13-16). Each area has distinct, qualitative characteristics. The urban landscape is further subdivided in 111 quartiers, which correspond to a network of previously autonomous villages. Thus urban identity builds consecutively in scale, but inversely in magnitude: first, residents identify with a specific quartier, then an arrondissement, followed by an area of the city, finally with the city itself. In the end, much greater emphasis is placed on metropolitan rather than on national identity; meaning, residents of Marseille are first and foremost Marseillais, and French only by consequence. This cultural idiosyncrasy epitomizes Marseille’s overall posture within the national landscape. It is a city that culturally and geographically turns its back on the remainder of the continent, taking pride in its self-prescribed autonomy, imaginary invincibility and good-humored petulance.

- Anya Sirota

- LOÏC JULIENNE

Patrick Bouchain’s projects typically evolve through a collaborative network of artists, government officials, residents and interested people. With the network in place, a site may initially be activated with the installation of a small public space – a multi-functional pavilion that facilitates assembly and is organized around some combination of food, exchange and exhibition. The temporary construction is the material point of social impact and site of speculative convergence where architects, participants, locals, builders and curious passersby mix, share intellectual resources and form alliances. It is also an investigation that adjusts a site’s projected function to the specific requirements of its social, economic, political and geographic context.

The cabane de chantier assembled on the site of a former slaughter house in Calais is a prototypical example of a catalyzing insertion. Completed in 2004, it served as the first step in the transformation of a marginal site into what is currently known as le Channel, la scène nationale de Calais . In this tangible nexus, daily exchange between construction workers, architects, artists and the public took place. And, perhaps, most importantly, the cabane set the site into motion prior to the completion of the construction project. Meaning, the process of building The Channel was transformed into a public program. To imagine construction as a porous, interactive, or performative practice is to reconsider the very nature of production, which has come to define the end of the Modern industrial cycle.

Patrick Bouchain’s project at  le Channel  is a collaborative triumph. The project works in active dialogue with elements designed by  François Delarozière, artistic director of La Machine and responds to the creative vision of Francis Peduzzi, the director of the la scène nationale de Calais. The site’s qualities draw heavily on the enthusiasm of Bouchain’s accomplices: Loïc Julienne’s attentiveness and unfaltering presence during construction, Liliana Motta’s vegetal aspirations. The list goes on…

- Anya Sirota

During our visit, we had the pleasure to meet Lena Pasqualini, the secrétaire générale, who far from recounting the logic of the site, performed it.

- Anya Sirota

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=388 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=588&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=marie-combes http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=588#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:33:01 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=588 Combes shoots her architectural subjects in what she terms “a non-hierarchical rampage”…

In her series, Interieurs, Marie combes photographs architecture as the archaic and the ruined, alluding to both Palladian drawings and 17th century painting in mock romantic concern for the eviscerated form. In so doing, Combes simultaneously strips architecture of its typical decorum and liberates photography from its documentarian pretexts. The result is a composite fiction, a series of formal coincidences that frame and construct new dynamic, non-existent spaces.

Combes shoots her architectural subjects in what she terms “a non-hierarchical rampage”, moving through space and concentrating on the experiential fragment. Later she scours through her contract sheets selecting evocative adjacencies which she consequently prints in a diptych format. In other words, she pairs only those images which appear back to back on the contact sheet. Her process is thus one of imposed discovery, productive fluidity and authorial abdication. Interieurs pairs two perspectival fragments in order to produce a third, wholly autonomous representation of space. The new perspective is a spatial provocation: discordant floor plates, compound light sources, the suggestion of folded planes, a multiplicity of thresholds, and schizophrenic subjectivity. It is a spatial assemblage whose meaning is solicited by the realm of the non-image, by the in between, by the axis as fissure. In other words, the connective tissue of the image is essential to the geometric (re)ordering and choreography of the resulting space.

While globalization evens the figurative economic playing field, cities are compelled to compete on an international stage for attention and presence. City agendas, related to investment, job growth and tourism, depend on individuation and place marketing. In the past years, significant resources and energy have been allocating to creating new urban attractors. However for the most part, regenerative urban schemes have become synonymous with highly designed architectural structures and their symbolic relationship to cultural production.

In the case of Saint Etienne’s Cité du Design, Finn Geipel and Giuli Andi of LIN Architects, worked on an attractor scheme that differed in many ways from typically-deployed “wow-factor” iconography. Sited in a former arms manufacturing complex known as “La Manufacture”, the Cité du Design suggests that thematic inspiration, rather than pure visual vanguard, might serve as the driver for manufacturing attractors. When converting the old factory facility – its courtyards, inner streets and green spaces – queues were taken from the Museum of Art and Industry, founded in Saint Etienne by Marius Vachon in 1889. Thus recalling what was arguably a long tradition of design and production, the complex is positioned as an international institute for industrial design, research and exhibition. In this context, LIN Architects contend that strategic use of urban memory can salvage post-industrial space from oblivion by restoring a lost sense of identity.

To put La Manufacture, and consequently Saint Etienne, back on the economic map, Geipel and Andi follow a series of innovative steps. First, they create a symbolic visual presence by assembling a large scale observation tower. It functions both as signage and look out point. Next, they recuperate a number of the historical buildings — each with very different architectural qualities — to house new programming, including: studio spaces, accommodations for scholars, workshops, image editing facilities and exhibition spaces. Finally, they construct an innovative shell structure to serve as a “switchboard” for the site. It is called the Platine and contains the bulk of the public programming: the Agora, the exhibition and seminary platform, the auditorium, the Mediadisque, the greenhouse and restaurant. While the complex combines a wide array of spatial typologies, it ingeniously programs a small portion of the available site. By transforming only a fragment of the available space, Geipel and Andi predict that the organization of the Cité du Design will emerge organically over time.

At Cité du Design, memory serves as a catalyst for establishing the unique potential of the vacated site. But memory alone does not suffice to reprogram the entire troubled complex. Here LIN Architects display restrained confidence in memory’s potential, electing to leave spaces vacant for future emergent uses.

- Anya Sirota

At La Cité International de la Dentille et de la Mode de Calais, architects Moatti and Rivière operate on an existing building like a well tailored garment, amplifying its structural characteristics, sculpting a desirable figure that is fresh but not entirely unrecognizable.

Their tactics tell a narrative of the building’s former use as a lace factory. Transformed into a museum for textiles and fashion, the building recalls the meticulous detailing of a lace making. Exterior glazing wraps around the front building, bulging in and out like fabric hugging the curves of a woman’s figure.

The facade is embellished with a rhythmic pattern inspired by the traditional lace making template. Entering the lobby of the museum, visitors are lured by a shingled application of metallic tags that line the hallway walls. Atop the metal, fluorescent tubes are mounted vertically as wall sconces, adding an intimate yet industrious glow to the interior.

Traditionally, lace factories were designed to allow natural light to enter the building through repeated window frames coated with a protective blue tinting that prevented the sun from damaging the fabric.  Giving a contemporary twist to the utility of tinted windows, Moatti and Rivière layered an array of neon film along the top two rows of glazing facing the courtyard. Both bold and frivolous, the neon panes cascade a rainbow of light into the upper hallways of the gallery space, adding a dose of flair to the lingerie, gowns, and woven furniture showcased inside.

The Lace Museum in Calais was revamped like a well balanced ensemble, juxtaposing historical remnants of the factory with vibrant allure to give the building a deliciously fresh identity. The result is a building that reminds us why the intersection of fashion and architecture is so exciting. Both architecture and fashion, when done well, provide protection and structure, both play with privacy and exhibitionism, both project a constructed identity, and dare I say, produce affect. Scaled to the body or the city, the theatrics and intelligence of a well-constructed piece are irresistible.

- Devon Stonebrook

I was struck by how Le Pass, a former coal mine in the Belgian town of Frameries, is a project  mired in contradiction. It is a site which simultaneously aims to ease its affiliation with its mono-industrial history while preserving its unremitting connection to its thorny past. The project is optimistic (a science center designed to spawn enthusiasm for research and education) and wistful (leaving a traces of the industrial past practically untouched)  confirming that the coal mining industry is an uncomfortable recollection from which the town of Frameries cannot escape.

The entire province of Hainaut, Belgium relied on this one industry for over seven hundred and fifty years. When the mines closed in the sixties, the region was left with nothing to break its fall. Today, the province’s unemployment rate is at a staggering, official thirty percent. It is not uncommon for children in the vicinity of Le Pass to have never seen their parents or grandparents employed. Not surprisingly, these children have often never had the opportunity to visit a science museum.

Le Pass was first conceived of by the Belgian government with help from cultural engineer, Jean Marc Providence, as an educational catalyst. In 1997 the abandoned coal mine, Crachet Piquery, was chosen- because of its scale and geographic location, but above all because the town of Frameries was in dire need of economic stimulation. With funding from the European Commission, Le Pass officially opened in 2001 as a scientific adventure park. From the get go a palatable tension was present between the new program and the site’s weighty historical past. This was apparent during our site visit as well as in conversation with Laurent Niget, the project’s main architect.

Laurence Muller, the director of Le Pass explained that the project was designed to be a way for the local community to move beyond its historical burden and Laurent Niget took on this challenge, while remaining sensitive to the inevitability of memorial associations. Judging from the treatment of the collection of building preserved and reused on the site, Niget, was less interested in thinking of the original purposes of these buildings, but instead tested new, fantastic ideas of how they could act in a contemporary public landscape. He transformed the Neighborhood Silo into a visual marker, opting out of using the existing coal head as signage. He conceived of the coal mines tremmies as ethereal lighting fixtures, utility-free but invaluable for atmospherics during parties. He stabilized and sealed the conveyor belts morphing them into a series of linear exhibition spaces.

But the history of Crachet Piquery looms unremittingly, with the monster- sized slagheap at the edge of the site as the most tangible reminder of the scale and intensity of the former use.

A slagheap is a hill made from the waste material of a coalmine. Slagheaps like the one at Le Pass pop up throughout Belgium’s landscape and have transformed the otherwise flat terrain into an a manufactured artifice. When we climbed the coal slagheap early one morning, we were astonished to discover that the earth was warm. Even some smoke was visible .

The waste that make up the heaps is still burning, which allows for plants from the Mediterranean and other non-native, southern species to thrive on these hills.

Tension between moving forward and remembering the past is very strong at Le Pass. Perhaps certain memories of a place, and even an industry, are so strong that they become unavoidable. Industry (be it coal in Belgium or automobiles in Detroit) becomes so ingrained in the collective consciousness that even as a community attempts to move forward, the remnants can never be erased.

- Kayla Lim

Charles Kaisin is a Belgian designer who works with objects, interiors, installations and scenographies. His designs explore materiality, recycling and process-based form making. Kaisin teaches design at Saint-Luc, Architecture School in Brussels.

At the Grand Hornu, a former coal mining complex in Belgium, Kaisin was commissioned to build a new auditorium and meeting space. His insertion, three free standing inclined cubes, play with the dichotomy between interior and exterior using dichroic surfaces and choreographed reflections. The kaleidoscopic qualities of the installation create an ethereal space that works in sophisticated dialogue with the nineteenth century site it inhabits.

In Kaisin’s installation reflections move beyond the surficial and reiterate the contextual qualities of the historical monument, exaggerating the structural qualities of the original without reverting to imitation. Without wistfulness or anxiety, Kaisin engages in contemporary experimentation.

Patrick Renaud is a photographer and installation artist. His work transforms the marginal and the overlooked into suggestively eerie scenarios that undermine the very nature of the constructed, the pictoresque and the normative. Most recently in collaboration with Marie Combes, Patrick has begun to investigate what they have termed “unstill images”. Projections produced through photo montage, these works play with ephemerality, living matter and site. Currently, Patrick is working on a new video installation project.

The working title, Manoeuvre, alluding to the intersection between creative and laborous production, unfolds on the site of a neglected factory over a thirty year period. He has documented this rural friche from its initial state of abandon to its final state of vegetal takeover. What follows is Patrick’s statement, a work in progress, an ordering, a virtual scenario that considers the nature of architectural erasure in the landscape.

- Anya Sirota

Scénario Manoeuvre

L’usine abandonnée comme une dépouille retourne au silence des champs. Elle a accueilli sur ses murs des peintures maladroites, enfantines qui racontaient d’autres pays, d’autres animaux, d’autres arbres. Parfois elle dissimule aux regards des amours rapides. Certains viennent, cassent les vitres, ce qu’ils peuvent démolir.
Ça commence souvent ainsi des lieux abandonnés, livrés à une lapidation, à la rage contre l’édifice. L’usine reçoit des coups, elle vibre, resonne de cette haine. Elle garde dans son silence meurtri cette violence qui veut la voir tomber. Qu’elle soit au sol, en tas, effondrée sur elle-même, ce qu’ils veulent c’est l’écrouler, la démolir, chercher ses points faibles pour faire tomber un mur, n’importe quoi, tout est bon pour précipiter sa chute. Pourtant elle n’a jamais été arrogante, juste dressée comme ça au milieu des champs pour le travail. Puis, ils ne sont plus venus, ou rarement, une longue agonie a commencé entre ses ouvertures béantes. La pluie, le vent, le froid qui éclatent les pierres continuent le travail de démolition.

Plus tard, timidement quelques plantes se sont installées parmi ses décombres. Ce fut une colonisation lente, âpre pour ces espèces qui commencent. Mais entre les briques, les tuiles un petit espace suffit à la graine pour pousser. L’usine a accueilli des petits rongeurs, des lézards trouvaient là des cachettes. Des orties, des buddleias ont commencé à pousser. Les oiseaux sont venus. Un début de vie fragile s’est installé. Difficilement bien sûr, certains ont réussi à s’implanter et beaucoup sont morts. Ils ont grandi, se sont développés lentement, très lentement, mais le temps végétal n’est pas celui des hommes. Ils ont fait un manteau de feuillage pour protéger l’usine des fortes chaleurs, en hiver ils se déshabillent et le soleil réchauffe ses vieilles pierres. Parfois des machines viennent jusque-là pour vider leurs citernes. L’usine souffre dans ses fondations de brûlures insupportables, elle sent ces liquides qui s’infiltrent dans le sol, empoisonnent et tuent. Elle sait que tout retournera à la forêt, les arbres finiront par gagner. Ils pousseront dans son squelette, l’envahiront, même là où était son coeur, déjà ses membres épars se couvrent de jeunes pousses.

- Patrick Renaud

Grand Hornu is an old industrial mining complex in Hornu in the municipality of Boussu, Belgium. Built by Henri De Gorge between 1810 and 1830, it is an example of an industrial facility projected to the scale of rationalist town planning, replete with housing, burial ground, town center, civic landscape, monuments, and streetscapes.

Today, owned by the province of Hainaut, the site has been transformed into a cultural center with temporary exhibitions, workshops, offices, café and restaurant, bookshop, historical reconstruction of a worker’s estate and the administrator’s residence, known as “De Gorg Castle”. In 2002 MAC, or the Contemporary Arts Museum of the French Community, was added to the site. The architect Pierre Hebbelinck careful insertion grapples with the demarcation between the new and the existing neo-classical sensibilities of the site.

The site functions as a memorial, one that is occupied judiciously. The renovation is meticulous. Sensitive. Uncontestable. It is by all means complete. It further appropriation – unimaginable.

In 2006 the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes moved to a refurbished facility on the outskirts of the city. What was once an office building, Usinor-Sacilor Bureaux, has been transformed by the French architect, Louis Paillard, into a site for creative production with workshops, studios, and exhibition areas.  Spaces for individual practice are conventionally conceptualized and economically inserted into the officescape plates, then painted compulsory white. Greater design ambitions are deployed in what might be termed ‘shared space’: the entry lobby, the grand stair, the amphitheatre, the library and the cafeteria – all glossy, cheeky insertions which unambiguously project their presence through the maintained façade. In a few instances windows join to highlight the effect. Colors, bright and diagrammatic, assert the circulatory logic, which, like a double-loaded corridor, is crystal clear from the get go. The predicament for the intervention is the site itself. Wedged between two rail lines and a highway, it is urbanistically insular, challenged to propel a public posture beyond the physical confines of the institutional façade.  It is thus in the instances that the school transcends its physical boundary that its creative project becomes most compelling. Students in a studio lead by Pascal Payeur prepare scenographic installations for the Cite de l’Immigration in Paris. Others under the direction of Patrick Beaucé test concepts related to digital fabrication as they produce inhabitable installations destined for local landscapes.

La Miroiterie offers us the chance to see a civic friche site in its nascent stage, and helps us imagine the interim life of many of our sites prior to their government-sponsored renewal.

A tiny sliver of space between two unassuming buildings in the Menilmontant neighborhood opens on to a collection of small rooms and a courtyard in the back. A diverse group of artists have reappropriated this abandoned site for their use, producing an odd juxtaposition of performance spaces.

On the night of our visit, a small room near the entry offered folk music and dance. A parachute draped over the courtyard modulated the midsummer light just enough to make visible the work of a projection artist, shown on the wall of the adjacent building. The main event, a line-up of electronic “noise” artists, took place in the primary performance space – a small, colorful space with its walls covered by graffiti and vintage electronic music equipment.

- Steven Christensen

This squat, hidden behind a tall gate in an alleyway on a busy street, provided an eclectic style of music that was appealing only to those with a unique music taste. To the rest of us, it is more easy to describe this music as a unique “noise”. I liked how after proceeding down the thin, long alleyway and past an outdoor lounge area I was able to access the music hall through a stickers-graffitied door. Once inside I stood and listened to the band on the stage that was illuminated by a single bright white light. The atmosphere was so chill and welcoming that even though I was not a normal attender of the place, I could not help but to nod my head along to the music with the rest of the crowd. After the “noise” was over everyone congregated in the outdoor lounge to watch some projections on the neighboring wall before filing through the tall gate that welcomed you back to the hustle and bustle of the streets of Paris.

- Brittany Roy

Les Frigos, a former ice manufacturing plant, reads like a squat, but operates like a thriving commercial complex.  Situated steps from Dominique Perrault’s gloomy Bibliothèque Nationale and the new Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir that connects Paris’s Left Bank to the Parc de Bercy, les Frigos is planted in a transforming urban context, and stands in stark opposition to the anonymous glass and steel office buildings that have mushroomed throughout the quarter.

Since the 17^th century the area (now a part of the 13^th arrondissement) was a predominantly industrial zone. With prevailing winds blowing east, smoke stacks and other industrial nuisances tended to drift toward this urban edge, preserving the air quality for the center and helping desirable real-estate burgeon on the western periphery.

In its industrial heyday the building was known as the La gare Frigorifique de Paris-Ivry, and it plugged directly in to the Paris-Orléans rail line. Trains would pull in at ground level.  The factory produced ice, and perishable were warehoused in the commercial refrigerators before making their way to the city’s central market (or stomache) – Les Halle de Paris. By the late sixties, however, building was out of commission. Les Halles de Paris had shut down, and city’s warehouses moved to Rungis.

Consequently, the refrigeration facility, then owned by the French transportation department the SNCF, was abandoned. It remained unused for close to fifteen years. Not until the 1980’s did artists begin to rent spaces for work and exhibition. Occupants of the building like to stress that contrary to appearances Les Frigos is anything but a squat. It is a highly organized association invests in the projected development of its real estate.

Les Frigos is full to capacity. In a city where space is an unequivocal luxury, les Frigos is now an unattainable find.  Each studio, a former refrigerator compartment, comes fully insulated (the sound separation is enviable) and secured with a bolted refrigerator door. The circulation is open to experimentation – and every surface is covered in tags and graphic appliqué.

Les Frigos hosts a number of open door events, when the public is invited to see work displayed creative work displayed on the site of its production. Crowds filter through the building during these events.

industry de-memorialized

On occasion, powerful memories are best preserved when space is de-memorialized and a site’s former uses become apparent by means of minimal intervention.

In Saint Nazaire, France, Lin Architects have converted a former German submarine base that was in service throughout World War II into a venue for experimental music and culture. Known as the Saint-Nazaire Alvéole 14, the site is designed to serve as the nexus for the new Ville-Porte plan, in other words, to symbolically connect the urban center and the troubled industrial port.

A large part of the monolithic building is renewed with minimal intervention (the building structurally stabilized, circulation in the form of street-like linear routes established, entrance and exits demarcated). One floating dock is transformed into the LIFE room for emergent art forms (a large, flexible open space). The center also contains a VIP room, which is a generously scaled open space for concerts and exhibitions. Three levels high, it connects to the cafeteria and recording studios. A sphere, recuperated from a German airport tower and is called “think tank”. It is installed on the roof to serve as urban signage, as well as a space for artistic experiment.

LIN’s intervention reads as strategically humble, relishing the idea of minimum intervention. Allowing the building’s remarkable structure to retain its original presence, the architects make very few structural additions or breaks in the cement shell. Most successfully, there are no overt references made to the building’s prior use. While the base was built during the glum years of Nazi occupation, the fact is neither erased nor underscored. This de-memorializing approach renders the memorial quality of the space all the more evocative.

- Anya Sirota

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=272 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=263&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=estuaire http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=263#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 09:15:36 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=263 By boat, automobile, bicycle or even on foot.

L’Estuaire is an art biennale spread over 60 kilometers of post-industrial landscape and divided into three installments. The first two events occurred in 2007 and 2009, featured installations by Daniel Burens, Patrick Bouchain, Gilles Clement, Ant Farm, Julius Popp, Dre Wapenaar, Antoin Sorel, Concept Plastique, Minerva Cuevas, to name but a few. Some of the work is conceived of as perennial and functions as an activating feature in the landscape during times when the biennale is not in full swing. The next and final chapter of l’Estuaire is slated to take place in the summer of 2012. It is overseen by Jean Blaise, the creative director of the Lieu Unique in Nantes.  The trajectory can be experience at a number of speeds – by boat, automobile, bicycle or even on foot – and transforms a potentially neglected landscape into an urbane destination.

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=263 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=236&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lieu-unique http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=236#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 10:47:05 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=236 With no monumental entry – people slip in and out of the building seamlessly.

Le Lieu Unique (LU) – a play on words between a popular biscuit and “a unique place” – is possibly one of architect Patrick Bouchain’s best achievements.

Lieu Unique performs as a cultural stage for the city of Nantes in France, providing a space for artists and locals to mix. LU is a stage and a laboratory for performance, music, dance, theater, even philosophy. It is an installation space, a street, a child care center, urban learning center. And it is a place to eat. To eat cheap. To eat well. To meet in an atmosphere that is unusually multiplicitous, democratic, porous, and without pretense.

At night the Le Lieu Unique is were the cool kids hang. Le Lieu Unique winks knowingly at its former program – the old Lefevre-Utile biscuit factory, while at the same time creating an atmosphere that is anything but fussy or nostalgic. It is Nantes’s quintessential living room. Open to all.

LU’s tower acts as a beacon for the building and arguably the city as a whole. The tower draws attention to the building, and its colorful design during the day and illumination at night mark this building as an active place. A replica of the original tower, its restoration is the first measure taken to revive the site.

Patrick Bouchain preserved most of the building in its original form. Any changes are rendered explicit. New materials stand in stark contrast to the old – illustrating that while memory is crucial to the architectural fabric, it should never stunt transformation, new program, invention, progress. Materials are layered and juxtaposed with insolence and humor.

In the main lobby space, all of the new programmatic insertions are clearly demarcated and transparent, the partition walls made of commercial wire fencing. The main performance hall’s acoustic paneling is cobbled out of recycled oil barrels and West African rugs.

The building is situated with its main facade facing a canal, creating an active gathering space on the waterfront. The restaurant and bar both break the threshold of the building and stretch to the water, creating a curving streetscape – a stage of sorts where all social classes can merge . All doors to the building stay open during hours of operation. With no monumental entry – people slip in and out of the building seamlessly.

- Jordan Buckner

A sport without compromise, where the ultimate goal is to humiliate the opponent with the shot of a pencil! The principle is simple: 6-8 designers, whose identities are concealed by the daring costumes of wrestlers and huge mustaches, engage in duels without mercy on graphic themes imposed by the public. This same audience votes at the end of each round to elect the best design. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?” No, the wrestle of drawing is: “two eyes for an eye, and the jaw for a tooth!”

combat de catch à moustache

Un sport sans concession, où le but ultime est d’humilier l’adversaire à coups de crayon ! Le principe est simple : 6 à 8 dessinateurs, dont l’identité est dissimulée sous d’audacieux costumes de catcheurs et d’imposantes moustaches, se livrent à des duels graphiques sans aucune pitié sur des

thèmes imposés par le public. Ce même public vote à la fin de chaque round pour élire le meilleur dessin. «Oeil pour oeil, dent pour dent » ? Non, le catch de dessin c’est : “les deux yeux pour un oeil, et toute la mâchoire pour une dent” !!

From two blocks away, passing the construction site of a trendy new condo highrise, you hear the roar of a great beast. From a block away, next to the shuttered warehouse building, constant whining and rumbling noises become apparent to you. Then, suddenly, in the middle of this industrial cityscape, a figure emerges that ignites your imagination and awakens your curiosity and wonder: a giant elephant. Indeed, a pachyderm of prehistoric proportions. Here, in the middle of a French industrial city of over 275,000 people, is an animal that is living, breathing, and clearly not supposed to be here. Or is it?

Upon inspection, this beast is not actually living and breathing. It is a carefully assembled collection of wood and steel (and other miscellaneous materials), wires and pistons, motors and wheels. It is a large-scale creation born of the dedication of a team of designers and craftsmen. It is run by a staff of operators and maintenance technicians. It is, in fact, a machine. And as such has as much right as any to claim this area as its home.

Upon a closer inspection, however, it turns out it is living and breathing. Not in the strict biological sense, of course. But it does have breath, given to it by a combination of air compressors, pneumatic pistons and a highdecibel speaker system. And it does have life, given to it by a combination of well crafted and articulated appendages, adroit operation and a crowd of willing, believing onlookers. It is the audience that finally breathes life into this mish-mash of mechanics, willing to look past the clearly segmented limbs, the visible structural supports, the giant tires that allow its movement and the engine that ultimately gives it forward momentum. We see what we believe, and we believe what we see.

Then again, maybe it isn’t being able to look past the obvious mechanics that allows us to believe. Perhaps it is the direct, unaccountable presence of them that allows us to convince ourselves that what we see in front of us is real. We are not given a clear elephant. We are given clues, impressions of elephantiness, juxtaposed against elements that are very un-elephanty. These deliberate holes and intentional incongruities confound our notions of what we see and what we know, and force our imaginations to rev up and reconcile the situation. The wonder of La Machine, the creators of this and many other wildly fantastic contraptions, is that they stimulate the imagination by egging it on and allowing it freedom.

Their creations are not attempts to visually replicate living things. They are attempts to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein and bring inanimate objects to life through action. Only instead of lightning, they infuse their monsters with the energy from our imaginations.

- Nathan Doud

]]> http://www.civicfriche.com/?feed=rss2&p=216 0 http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=229&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ensa http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=229#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 09:34:52 +0000 Team http://www.civicfriche.com/?p=229 I think luxury is not related to materiality, it’s just some incredible situations. And as architects, you have to produce incredible situations.

- LACATON & VASSAL

Lacaton & Vassal have made a practice of non-object archtecture at a time when objects reached cult status. They avoid making models to avoid  making sculpture. they habitually explain that their buildings work from the inside out, that their form is a utilitarian after-thought.

Nonetheless, their architecture can hardly be called minimalist. They plainly strive to intelligently deliver the maximum punch using constrained means.  And, perhaps most importantly, they project how their buildings might be appropriated in the future, an act of radical functionalism and creative humility. On the day that we visited the architecture school in nantes, Anne Lacaton was teaching a housing seminar. Her students, just in from Madrid, were squatting a large double-height open area on the third floor. Some of the sliding facade panels were pulled open allowing in breezes and views of the Loire River to create the sensation that this impromptu studio was neither in nor out.

Gaelle Breton, an associate professor at the Ecole d’Architecture in Nantes since 2008, walked us through the building. A registered architect in France, but also trained as a carpenter, she unravelled the logic of the building in a rivetting way. The architects, she explained, were asked to construct 10,000 square meters of program (classrooms, studios, library, computer center, workshops, cafeteria, etc.) on a 5,000 square foot lot. Instead of a typical building, Lacaton & Vassal proposed a parking garage on steroids clad in a greenhouse sweater. In other words, a superstructure with three dilated decks, inserted program and a sliding plastic panel skin. The conditioned program is introduced using a lighter steel structure and placed in the space between the concrete slabs. The two level mezzanines are treated as buildings in miniature with the “left over” or unconditioned interstitial space transformed into a virtual urban plaza. Public. Visible. Shared. Infinitely transformable. Ready to be appropriated as need arises. The result is a plethora of flexible, unprogrammed space. Enviable. Luxurious. Having taught architecture and design studios in Lille, Marne-la-Vallée, Cornell University, the University of Montreal, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, and Paris-Malaquais, Gaelle Breton is deeply familiar with the spatial requirements of a design school, and this building, she was happy to report, provided her with just enough space. “It encourages instructors to have more public reviews, and students to create more audacious, larger scale installations, to dare and take up the volume that has been alloted. It is tempting, and challenging all at once.”

- Anya Sirota

The Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration is a thorny project. Initiated by President Jacques Chirac and completed under his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, it is a testament to the enduring and unsettling relationship France has to its colonial past and subsequent immigration policies. The museum’s official mission as articulated by Chirac at the conceptual inception was to “contribute to the recognition of the integration of immigrants into French society”. It would occupy the Palais de la Porte Dorée, formerly the home of the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes.

Ironically, the original building was constructed in 1931 for the international exhibition with the express intention of representing the French Empire’s colonial scope and prowess. With its plan inspired by Moroccan palaces, the central hall an ecstatic surplus of ionic pillars, tapestried façade cataloging all of the products provided to France in geographic order, and interior frescos illuminating visitors of all the remunerations France generously offered its subjects, in its historical context, the Palais de la Porte Dorée hit all the right notes and was one of the only building to survive demolition after the exhibition was over.

The challenge, naturally, in designing the new Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration on the bones of the Palais de la Porte Dorée was to rework the uncomfortable historical qualities of the site with sufficient innovation, sensitivity and sardonic wit. Consequently, Patrick Bouchain and Loïc Julienne were commissioned to engage the project.

At the completed Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration we see their strategy of minimal intervention played out to its fullest. Rather that memorialize the difficult implications of the original structure, they leave it virtually untouched — electing to intervene strategically as they augment transparency, rework lighting and circulation, and bring the building up to standard code. The cheeky illusion of utility, allows the architects to undermine the affected, authoritarian qualities of the original building as they inserted public spaces for gathering, dialogue and exhibition.

In addition to the political intricacy of the projected program, the building’s classification as a national monument added to the difficulty of deconstructing its supercilious urban posture. Given the pressures to preserve the building’s proper face, perhaps Bouchain and Julienne’s intervention was only partially realized, with the temple mound entry left untouched. Once inside, however, occupation feels unrestricted.

- Anya Sirota

Père Lachaise Cemetery, the most expansive green space in Paris, was founded by Napolean I in 1804, shortly after a decree banished cemeteries to the capital’s margins. In the interest of health regulations the cemetery, officially named Cimetière de l’Est, was situated well outside the city limits, so far out, in fact, that Parisians hesitated to bury their dead on the new grounds.  City historians love to recount how Père Lachaise was salvaged through celebrity marketing when the cemetery’s administrators tactically moved the remains of Molière and La Fontaine to the site. The hoopla paid off, and other celebrity remains were transferred there until the cemetery’s eminence was judged uncontestable (today 300,000 bodies are buried there and countless remains are preserved in the columbarium). To say that we visited the cemetery to pay homage to Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde or Yves Montand is a bit of an overstatement, though celebrity sitings are secretly rousing in any form. Instead, we treated the cemetery –  its topography, streets, alleys, vegetation and crypts – as a city in miniature. Père Lachaise, its size and construct, allows for  the transcription of light and form with a minimum of perspectival distortion.   Staying small allows the eye to test a series of formal relationships quickly, to search for legible relationships between the interior and the exterior, light and shadow, to work on composition.