cold turkey

sometimes making something leads to nothing

Belgium born and Mexico City based artist Francis Alys says:

"Sometimes to make something is really to make nothing;
and paradoxically, sometimes to make nothing
is to make something."

unbearable laughter of the ticklish subject

the tourist gaze

Orhan Pamuk writes in Other Colors: “There are two ways of looking at cities. The first is that of the tourist, the newly arrived foreigner who looks at the buildings, monuments, avenues, and skylines from outside. There is also the inside view, the city of rooms in which we have slept, of corridors and cinemas and old classrooms, the city made up of the smells and lights and colors of our most cherished memories (69).”

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is such a tourist. In the Atlantic Magazine he writes about Los Angeles: “what must be true for a city to be legible? […I]t has to have a center. But Los Angeles has no center. It has districts, neighborhoods, even cities within the city, each of which has a center of some sort. But one center, one unique site as a point of reference […] nothing like that exist in Los Angeles […]. Los Angeles is, I fear, a city about which one can predict with some certainty that it will die.” Lévy behaves like a tourist; a tourist looking for the fictional city of movies and literature, the fictional city of nineteenth century Europe. This Eurocentric tourist gaze, though, overlooks that a multi-centered city is still a city.

Orhan Pamuk claims that there are two views on the city: the outside and the inside view. But isn’t a third – a middle – position possible? A position taken up by someone who isn’t really on the outside and not really – or not yet – on the inside. A position taken up by someone who goes back and forth. Beck calls such a person a place polygamist – even if this person is not a frequent traveler, even if this person doesn’t collect air miles. After all, not every person residing outside her or his country of origin – in the sense of birth place – is a tourist. Indeed, a tourist stays on the outside to gaze merely at surfaces, and the same can be said of most expats.

After so many years in Indonesia in Indonesia, I’m obviously – at least in my own eyes – no longer a tourist, and I like to claim an in-between position. For me, the city of Bandung has by now many personal memories for I have traveled its streets countless times. I feel at home here, even if I’m still seen as an outsider. Bandung has nested underneath my skin – the dust, the dirt, the heat, the jams, the noise – the thrills for me, the urban junkie.

language and the city

In the Oxford dictionary city is explained as “a large town” and the urban as “having to do with a town or city.” Of course, a dictionary is not of much help. Ultimately, language is self-referential. Moreover, Wittgenstein writes: “The power language has to make everything look the same […] is most glaringly evident in the dictionary […] (Culture and Value, 22e).” For example, the same Oxford dictionary explains building as “a structure with a roof and walls.” And as Nietzsche remarks in the Will to Power: “words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common (810).” And, “[t]he demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless […] (625).” We have to make use, therefore, of the available tools without forgetting that meaning isn’t within these tools.

designing anonymous facades

It is ironic that the New York City Sky Scrapers website claims to "A look behind the anonymous facades." Is it possible to design a sky scraper without an anonymous facade? After all, how can an architect be proud of a design which offers only an anonymous facade? Perhaps we can read the above statement as an analogy to today's fashion: We style ourselves in the latest fashion to be absorbed by the masses, i.e. fashion as a lifestyle instead of styling oneself as an individual. Fashion as a lifestyle only shows surfaces, deptless surfaces. Zygmunt Bauman writes that " through reducing the self to a surface, to something one can control and arrange at will, it offers the self security against intruders [...]."

See also the highrise project at the University of Edinburgh.

I took the above photo in 2007; the building in the background is one of the five 151 meter Taman Anggrek towers in Jakarta.

reflexivity: city as autobiography

In the Gay Science Nietzsche writes: “We wish to see ourselves translated into stone, and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around […] buildings and gardens (280).” And Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value: “Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (16c)”

posttraditional architecture: dystopia?

The manifesto of futurist architecture can be read here. Can we still imagine beyond our horizons?