R&Sie(n): François Roche, Stéphane Lavaux, Jean Navarro; Benoit Durandin
(spanish)
Foreword
The contemporary city’s developmental tools manifest the tyranny of tightly scripted determinist procedures, planning mechanisms based on predictability. The city’s growth, densification and entropy are driven by pre-set and invariable geometrical projections. Urban morphological transformations are supposed to follow closed scenarios that cannot deviate from the pre-programmed representations on which they are based. Thus the cartography of the city’s becoming is fettered by a mode of production that takes the future as already written. Everything yet to come is spelled out in advance and tightly locked up by that forecast.
The contemporary (European) city is formatted under Windows, unable to access the programming source codes (Linux).
There no reason to believe that the “everything under control” operating modes that condition the production of urban structures are capable of reflecting the complexities (the intertwining of issues and relational modes) of a mass media society where the multitude of citizens is gradually taking over from the republic’s centralized authorities.
The city’s making suffers from a democracy deficit and the abuse of tools that date back to a time when the reason of the few presided over the destiny of the many. The city’s very constitution is impermeable to the social shifts brought about by the dilution and fragmentation of the informational and productive mechanisms. The free-market space was constructed in terms of social control, and the contemporary city retains and reveals the stigmata of that construction.
Can we envision something totally different, urban structures driven by human contingencies? Can we work out adaptive scenarios that accept unpredictability and uncertainty as operating modes? Can we write the city based on growth scripts and open algorithms porous to a number of real-time inputs (human, relational, conflictual and other data) rather than trying to design an urban future formatted by rigid planning procedures?
The Paris Municipal Modern Art Museum (MAM) invited François Roche to mount a solo show bringing into play his two organizations, one, R&Sie(n), a firm engaged in architectural practice and the other, New Territories , a research and publication project.
The exhibition entitled I’ve heard about describes an emerging urban structure that integrates uncertainty into its own heartbeat. It brings together film, generative and computational procedures, scripts and algorithms, prototypes, models, a social and relational Charta, etc., at the Couvent des Cordeliers July 7 – October 9, 2005 (the MAM venue while the museum is undergoing renovation). Benoît Durandin is a partner in this undertaking.
R&Sie (n)
This architectural practice is currently working on a contemporary art museum in Bangkok , an art centre in Korea ’s DMZ, a hotel in Belo Horizonte ( Brazil ), a bridge in Cieszyn ( Poland ), a public housing project in Valencia ( Spain ), a private residence in Nimes ( France ) and an experimental home for Vitra in Germany . François Roche has lectured at many universities, including Harvard, Columbia and UCLA. He was a visiting professor at the Bartlett School in London , the TU in Vienna , and ESARQ in Barcelona . Next year he will teach at Penn University in Philadelphia . The R&Sie(n) agency has been invited to the Venice Architecture Biennale (international and French pavilions) on five occasions, but declined the invitation to show in the French pavilion during the last edition for political reasons. These reasons and the rigour of their engagement are precisely the factors behind R&Sie(n)’s exclusion from architectural competitions in France , “where public commissions are in thrall to Amélie Poulain systems of representation,” Roche says.
Benoit Durandin
He collaborates regularly with the agency R&Sie(n) since 1999, taking part as well in his formal research and critical attitude. Its last work concerns the modeling of unstable environments and on spaces with decreased reality which deteriorates there and fixes themselves at it. Member of the editorial board of the review “Multitudes”.
Social contract/territorial contract
- I’ve heard about is a fractal structure made quite literally of contingent secretions. Its architecture is based on the principles of random growth and permanent incompletion. It develops by successive scenarios, without planning and without the authority of a pre-established plan. Its physical composition renders the community’s political structure visible.
The proliferating, coral-like network is constituted of both imported raw materials and local materials that have been recycled, synthesized and polymerised, resources arising from the animal and vegetable species that inhabit it. Operating anthroposophically, it generates modes of exchanges, flows and blood vessels.
I’ve heard about recognizes and builds on the idea of an ever-emerging, shifting and above all fragile sociality. Growth is based on negotiations between neighbours and other residents, and at the same time subjected to collective constraints (accessibility and structural contradictions). Section by section, the raw materials of the habitats undergo necrosis every ten years in order to avoid an overly permanent occupation and an attendant sense of individual ownership (the early cycles will be more aleatory).
A territorial protocol has been drawn up by R&Sie(n), Benoît Durandin, Alexandra Midal, Laurent Genefort, Gilles Schaeffer, Berdaguer & Péjus and François Roustang, with preliminary advice from Bruce Sterling.
I’ve heard about does not eradicate the pre-existing city but rather forms a sedimentary deposit over it, like Constant’s New Babylon. It can be described as aplug-in inserted into the urban fabric, or perhaps a three-dimensional tablecloth over attaching itself it.
The VIAB machine
I’ve heard about calls for the development of a machine in partnership with the USC/Los Angeles robotics lab. It takes its name from the terms viability and variability. The machine’s purpose is to build the structure in real time through the secretion of the structural material that serves as the project’s envelope. The VIAB is a kind of parasite, or like the polyps that live inside and are supported by the coral reef they generate.
The basic idea is to design an architectural structure that is always under construction, combining incompletion and self-determination as its constituent parameters of which the VIAB is the vector.
Growth, or rather the variability of growth, is to be determined by a succession of constraints arising from:
- structural resistance
- accessibility and measures entrained by use modes
- the stress felt by the residents
- swarm intelligence (collective behaviour).
The main algorithm derives from structural considerations and controls the viability of the development. Individual and collective stress are taken into account as viruses inflecting the basic construction data. As a result, the VIAB is empathetic, receptive to the subjectivity of the residents. The process of construction reveals the state of social behaviours in a constant state of negotiation. It is always a work in progress, with no attempt to predict or plan the morphological results. It is the nerve ending of the species that inhabit I’ve heard about.
The VIAB is designed as a kind of phasmid, a stealth insect that looks like a stick attached to the structures it generates itself
Quotation
“What the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island itself, but the first-hand knowledge that they stood on rock which the founders had crystallized out of the ocean – and which was, forever, dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair. Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and cooperation, had built Stateless… the balance could be disturbed in a thousand ways…. All that elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be understood. … It had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived mythology of nationhood. It was true.”
Greg Egan, Distress, HarperPrism, New York, 1995, pp. 171-172
Scenario of the exhibition
Rumours …
I’ve heard about something that builds up only through multiple, heterogeneous and contradictory scenarios, something that rejects even the idea of a possible prediction about its form of growth or future typology.
Something shapeless grafted onto existing tissue, something that needs no vanishing point to justify itself but instead welcomes a quivering existence immersed in a real-time vibratory state, here and now.
Tangled, intertwined, it seems to be a city, or rather a fragment of a city.
Its inhabitants are immunized because they are both vectors and protectors of this complexity.
The multiplicity of its interwoven experiences and forms is matched by the apparent simplicity of its mechanisms.
The urban form no longer depends on the arbitrary decisions or control over its emergence exercised by a few, but rather the ensemble of its individual contingencies. It simultaneously subsumes premises, consequences and the ensemble of induced perturbations, in a ceaseless interaction. Its laws are consubstantial with the place itself, with no work of memory.
Many different stimuli have contributed to the emergence of I’ve heard about , and they are continually reloaded. Its existence is inextricably linked to the end of the grand narratives, the objective recognition of climatic changes, a suspicion of all morality (even ecological), the vibration of social phenomena and the urgent need to renew the democratic mechanisms. Fiction is its reality principle: What you have before your eyes conforms to the truth of the urban condition of I’ve heard about..
What moral law or social contract could extract us from this reality, prevent us from living there or protect us from it? No, the neighbourhood protocol of I’ve heard about cannot cancel the risk of being in this world. The inhabitants draw sustenance from the present, with no time lag. The form of the territorial structure draws its sustenance directly from the present time.
I’ve heard about also arises from anguishes and anxieties. It’s not a shelter against threats or an insulated, isolated place, but remains open to all transactions. It is a zone of emancipation, produced so that we can keep the origins of its founding act eternally alive, so that we can always live with and re-experience that beginning.
Made of invaginations and knotted geometries, life forms are embedded within it. Its growth is artificial and synthetic, owing nothing to chaos and the formlessness of nature. It is based on very real processes that generate the raw materials and operating modes of its evolution.
The public sphere is everywhere, like a pulsating organism driven by postulates that are mutually contradictory and nonetheless true. The rumours and scenarios that carry the seeds of its future mutations negotiate with the vibratory time of new territories.
It is impossible to name all the elements I’ve heard about comprises or perceive it in its totality, because it belongs to the many, the multitude. Only fragments can be extracted from it.
The world is terrifying when it’s intelligible, when it clings to some semblance of predictability, when it seeks to preserve a false coherence. In I’ve heard about , it is what is not there that defines it, that guarantees its readability, its social and territorial fragility and its indetermination.
Credits I’ve heard about…
R&Sie(n) / François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux, Jean Navarro & Benoît Durandin
With the production and authorship of:
1- Behrokh Khoshnevis
(Contour Crafting Process, USC, LA)
2 - François Roustang (Hypnosis specialist, Paris)
3 - Chris Delaporte (Film director, 3D effects, Paris)
4 - Christophe Berdaguer & Marie Pejus (Artists, Marseille)
5 - Mathieu Lehanneur (Designer, Paris), with Florent Lefèvre
6 - Laurent Genefort (Science fiction writer, Paris)
7 - M/M (Graphic Designer, Paris)
8 - Gilles Schaeffer (mathematician, algorithmician, Paris )
9 - Michel Boulcourt (Landscape architect, Paris)
10- Alexandra Midal (Author, Paris)
11- Vier5 (Graphic Designer, Paris)
12 - Matthieu Kavyrchine (Video artist, Paris)
13 - Sebastien Szczyrk (Sound designer, Paris)
14 - Alexandre Merlet (Video producer, Paris)
15 - Stephan Henrich (Architect, Germany)
16 - Providence (Singer)
17 - Leo Stephen Torgoff (Translator)
Prototype / installation / publishing
1 - Ufacto, David Toppani (prototype scale 1)
2 - One Star Press (neighbourhood protocol publishing)
3 - Christian Hubert Delisle (prototype)
4 - Thibaut Boyer (installation and prototype scale 1)
5 - Jean-Michel Castagné (electronic driver)
Production
Paris-musées (F)
Curators
Laurence Bossé, Angeline Scherf, Hans Ulrich Obrist
