Was Super Studio being subversive?
Super Studio's crystalline project had fractured the
notion of utopia among the avant garde.
The project inspired a generation
of architects, including architect Rem Koolhaas.
It was the group that would become the architecture office over
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He conceived Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture.
They proposed to raise essential section of London, to establish a zone
of hyper dense metropolitan light, offering
a maximum of contrast with the surroundings.
People would be voluntarily admitted to this
desirable strip, and as they mass defected,
instead of an outright revolution, Exodus would
slowly crumble the power structures from within.
But notice
this dystopian nature of Exodus exterior perimeter, which sarcastically
includes an image of the barbed wire Berlin Wall.
The wall that divided Berlin during the Cold War.
It highlights the ambivalence of Exodus as
both seducer and oppressor, liberator and terrorizer.
Beneath its good intentions lies a violent colonizing tendency.
The design of Exodus would contribute to alternative social formation.
In this reception area,
people would be brainwashed.
Surprisingly, there are also a few amateur prisoners.
The secret bourgeois clients of Exodus will
attempt to make it more hedonistic and luxurious.
Exodus is an ambiguous project that robbed
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visionary cities of the 1960's of their innocence.
It highlights the normative function of design in social formation.
Overseen by clients with agendas.
During the me decade of the 1980s, and
later in the 1990s, revolutionary visions were sparser.
But American architect, Lebbeus Woods, stands as a big exception.
He was one of the few architects to design for
the reconstruction of war torn cities after the Bosnian War.
His vision for Sarajevo was radical.
He formed buildings out of exploding sharps of
steel, taken from the debris of the war zone.
It was a broader critique of the way
in which cities are typical reconstructed after war.
By wiping out the traces of the conflict, and covering it up with new buildings.
By deliberately making visible the scars of
history, people will be forced to change.
The materials salvaged from the war would plant the seed
for a new alternative, that would no longer accommodate old
practices, which led to the conflict in the first place.
If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent yourself.
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Although Lebbeus Woods drawings inspired a new
generation of architects, other than Alien 3 movie
sets and a small pavilion in Chengdu, China, none of his work has been built.
Revolutionary cities in built form are hard to come by.
Perhaps the only city that comes closest is Black Rock City, a temporary city for
up to 50,000 people that exists for two
weeks only in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
It hosts a festival called Burning Man.
Described by organizers as an experiment in community and radical self-expression.
No cash transactions are allowed in the city.
People can only give without demanding a return.
It's also a city of de-commodification,
untarnished by commercial sponsorship's or advertising.
Landscape architect Rod Garad designed the city in
a series of semi-concentric circles for tents and
recreational vehicles around the center dedicated
to art structures and dance parties.
Is Black Rock City a new Babylon, and all you can play alternative to capitalism.
The entry fee of $350, the expense of trucks
tucked in from capitalist California, and the fact that
most people are looking not for a revolution but
simply for a good party, seem to suggest otherwise.
After all, Burning
Man is made possible by the surplus of capitalist society, of a few
who make more than average and spend it on a lavish desert party.
Although the festival, Burning Man is less suitable in countering capitalism, the
physical structure of Black Rock City
is certainly effective in normalizing exuberant behavior.