Check-in Architecture

CHECK-IN ARCHITECTURE THE EXHIBITION

2008-10-02T10:11:00.009+02:00

Arsenale Novissimo
Tese di San Cristoforo
Sept 12th - Nov 23rd
Mon - Sun / 10:00 - 18:00
Free entrance

Check-in Architecture is a participative research project. We invited students of art, architecture, design and sociology from more than 20 universities in Europe, to tell stories about our cities in the form of 3 minute long documentaries.

Featuring works by:
Claudio Sinatti / Invernomuto
Ecosistema Urbano / Metrogramma / Ma0 / NLArchitects / Cherubino Gambardella.

click here for the map

The spaces of representation on the web are changing their shape. As the shapeshift, many questions arise: how are they transforming the way we look? How much of these representations change how we perceive urban spaces? In their own audiovisual research, Claudio Sinatti and Invernomuto have always paid a special attention, almost an obsession, to urban and suburban space. Their obsession led us to invite them to dig into the overflowing audiovisual archive we collected in a span of four months, and to fill with their aesthetic practice a sizable exhibition. They've created a visionary space, where movements, postures, behaviors and the perception of space itself could be questioned and interrogated. Mission Church – a visual wall made of all the videos posted on YouTube – and Perspectives on Archive – an erratic and restless cinematic ballad – were born with this in mind. The former focuses on visual language, and the latter on the subjects and the places shot. Both challenge low-resolution stereotypes in order to exalt them. At the same time, conceiving the exhibition as a contemporary media space, we asked several European architecture studios - Ecosistema Urbano, Cherubino Gambardella, Ma0, Metrogramma and NL Architects - to shape, only using words and sounds, original remarks committed to key words, which attempt to read the modern city in its continuous metamorphosis.
The artists and architects answered our questions with a clear statement. Their responses encapsulated the notion that research about the imaginary forces doubtful pauses and mysterious reflections to arise. But it can also give rise to challenges, invent new standards and re-invent media. And, above all else, stimulate the process of designing new and more adventurous projects.

checkinarchitecture.com
youtube.com/checkinarchitecture
picasaweb.com/checkinarchitecture

Check-in Architecture - The Exhibition

2008-09-09T09:59:00.007+02:00

See you in Venice at Arsenale Novissimo on Friday 12th, for Check-in Architecture final exhibition.

Here, what remains of the post.
REMOVE SPAN TAG IF YOU DON'T USE THIS FEATURE! :-)

We (really) love magazines

2008-08-01T10:59:00.001+02:00

Magazines are not only the best way to keep yourself informed in these postmodern times - actually, the Internet is probably better - but they're also both a physical and a cultural fetish, providing a sensual experience along with a brain tickle. The feel of the leafing paper - or plastic, or tissue, or whatever material you can reach with your hand - is something mag-aficionados can hardly do without. Back in May we spoke with the zine-obsessed author of We Love Magazines, Andrew Losowsky, when he came to our very home for another round of Metaflow's Signjam. We've already shown you some here, but we've got more in store for you magazine-lovers out there. This two-part videoblog features Losowsky as he goes on and on about his mag collection, talking about every piece as a newborn child softly rocked in his arms. How moving, huh?

Groping Nature

2008-07-29T16:14:00.004+02:00

We've already explored a less-known side of Ibiza in this mission here, but some of the guys appearing in that video deserved some more of our video-blessing. Talk about loving nature: this two absolute chiefs here represent the two sides of the alternative Ibiza. One is an old time hippie living life as it comes, happy to be given each day and to live it in harmony with the universe, the other is a tourist's best friend, providing the eccentric and informal kind of human material people expect to find on the island and the loving material women long for when leaving the city for vacation. You girls can't but quiver in excitement, you guys can't but learn how to live.

Fuorisalone's baraonda - Interview with Gilda Bojardi

2008-07-29T15:46:00.007+02:00

We've been covering the Fuorisalone in Milan a lot when it was time back in April, but we still have something more to show you guys, even in the sweaty hot days of late-July. Our own Fabio Falzone interviewed the Interni magazine director Gilda Bojardi, one of the key figures who made Zona Tortona what it is today, putting it on the Design Week map. She visited our headquarters in Via Oslavia and, after we showed her how CIA works, she told us some of her precious share of Salone history. Enjoy.

Pearls Before Swine - CIA goes jury

2008-07-29T13:20:00.009+02:00

Perle ai Porci - italian for Pearls to Swine - is a music festival where you pay no entrance fee and, apart from the bands playing anything from ska to rock, you can enjoy a 4-day pork meat fair. Groupies should know it's no place for rockstars, but a few days of fun and a music contest make up for it.
CIA has been there, documenting some of the guys playing and the atmosphere at the sport center in Casale Corte Cerro, where the festival was. And, more importantly, we were also proudly represented by our very own Andrea Lissoni, Luca Martinazzoli and Luca Legnani Jr., all in the contest jury.
Check out this video for a taste of what they've seen.

"The Most Photographed Barn In America" from Delillo's White Noise

2008-07-25T13:30:00.004+02:00

Though we're concentrating on Europe here at Check-in ARchitecture, we couldn't pass up this excerpt from Don Delillo's White Noise. We'll give a good European example of this peculiar phenomenon tomorrow.

Excerpt from Don Delillio's White Noise:

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"

Octopification of urban spaces

2008-07-11T11:42:00.011+02:00

Forget the banlieues, precarious working and laissez-faire globalization: one of the plagues of our times is the octopification of European cities. As you can clearly see in this amateur snap, France has been conquered by shiny-green octopuses who don't really care whether that couch is yours or not, they'll slide their squishy, slimy bodies upon it and whip their tentacles out of your kitchen's window. Sarkozy already asked the NATO for help, but the guys there keep scratching their heads and so far they've only come up with a chowderizing ray project, but God knows when it's going to be ready.

We survived Bin Laden, but this time we're doomed. No kidding.

Well, I was actually kidding. Responsible for this ludicrous piece of public art are DeviantArt's FilthyLuker and his pal Pedro Estrellas, who apparently "octo-pied" a building somewhere in France with inflatable tentacles, turning an average urban landscape in some sci-fi movie set.
Looking at the tentacles' color one can't help but wonder if the picture is real or just a great photoshop hoax. Our secret hope is someone is really dealing with a giant octopus lying on his sofa, but just an inflatable one would be cool too.

The Transmitting Architecture Report

2008-07-10T14:48:00.001+02:00

We're through with editing, delaying and working on the video material we collected back in Turin last week, and we're finally releasing a considerable amount of brand new stuff for you guys to enjoy.

This video blog load features:

- Aaron Betsky having a talk with us about language in architecture;

- Cino Zucchi and Mirko Zardini discussing about communication practices (they laugh when we ask them about communication in the congress);

- P.K. Das speaking out about social changes, equality and architecture;

- François Roche heavily critiquing the congress and preferring Guattari-style ecosophy to eco-sustainability;
- Mario Cucinella sharing some of his thoughts on human-scale architecture and the architecture star system.

- Adam Greenfield telling us about buildings with moving walls, open source and the internet;

It's a lot of stuff, so take your time to check it all out and come back here often for more CIA videos.

Antarctic Soundscape

2008-07-09T12:41:00.010+02:00

Antarctica was born as a negative, starting from its very name. Antarktikos merely means "opposite to the Arctic" in Greek, and today the continent is still opposing the 21st century frenzy possessing the rest of the world by featuring the only stripe of land nobody on Earth is claiming. If we are yin, Antarctica is yang. If we're full, Antarctica is empty.

For being just a mass of ever-transforming ice and condensation, the South Pole has always been rather interesting to explorers and artists, who always went there to map its landscapes, both geographical and emotional.

Though maps are symbolic representations, and say what they need to say by cutting things out, thus huge gaps and ambiguities that artists can slip and play with as only artists can. Lately Antarctica's negativeness has been picked up by sound artists. Back in 1949, British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams created Sinfonia Antarctica, a metaphorical portrait of the continent, and today eclectic Dj Spooky - that subliminal kid - has come up with a crazy sound-oriented multimedia project titled Terra Nova, The Antarctica Suite.

The Antarctica Suite is a 70-minute long performance, a sound map strictly featuring only Antarctica sounds, recorded by Dj Spooky himself on site. To back up the audio, the artist does also screen images from the places he visited. Although his piece has a much more technological approach to the continent's atmosphere than Vaughn Williams', the two works pair in terms of striking an important nerve: Antarctica's negativeness.
Sound is negative too, it's a dense void, an integration to our experience, an invisible depth shaking beings with their own strength. A soundscape traces the perfect depiction of a still life's most distinctively platonic potential. The crackling noises of ever-rearranging ice, the quiet whistle of blowing wind, the squeak of a penguin - all along with burning-white images of snowy landscapes - are probably not enough to make you experience Antarctica, but they're maybe closer to make you feel it.

The Transmitting Architecture Report (teaser)

2008-07-04T11:01:00.006+02:00

After these four days of Transmitting Architecture, it's time for a little budget.
Although we managed to get some really good video interviews, the congress itself was pretty disappointing, and the many critiques and complaints we collected from the very architects we interviewed during our stay is a further proof to this. Ok, transmitting architecture is not easy, but it gets trickier if you lock yourself into a conference stronghold and only express yourself through slides, that most of the time don't show when they're supposed to. As a medium, the congress is not a very conductive one.
However, all of this doesn't mean our congress experience was fruitless. If you guys are patient enough to wait a couple of days, there's a lot of stuff coming up on our video blog, and some of it is pretty entertaining: our old acquaintance Cino Zucchi and CCA director Mirko Zardini - both with a wrestling mask on, at some point - discussing about media; François Roche and Mario Cucinella showing some contrasting views about sustainability and matching ones on the architecture star system; a super interesting interview with Aaron Betsky about architecture and building. We were also able to get a hold on P.K. Das and Adam Greenfield.
As we were collecting material for you guys, another crew was shooting a documentary about the congress, directed by Vittorio Badini Confalonieri. He's also a Mini DV master and saved our asses recovering a cassette that had fallen on the ground and that we thought was lost forever, with some magic expertise only a film pro could have. The documentary will feature lots of interviews and images from the city and the congress venues, but we'll give you more info about it as soon as we have them. For now, be sure to check the blog every day for new videos.

Mapping Lost Imaginaries: Telex From Cuba

2008-07-03T23:33:00.001+02:00

We've written here before how underwhelmed we can by sparky new technologies in the service of literature, more often than not they hide in their pyrotechnics a lack of content. The explosions masks a story as thoughtful as George W. Bush and as emotional as the clip on tie of a salesman selling Florida time shares.

Technology hasn't often worked in the service of literature, weak attempts at hypertext bore us and Google has become the place people look for answers not Shakespeare. So it goes. We're no luddites, perhaps this blog is a testament to that.

Two recent websites have sparked interest outside the author and their publicist, the first was indie darling Miranda July's simple site devoted to her book No One Belongs Here More than You, which had July writing out her messages in dry-erase marker with the same kind of self-conscious, awkward cuteness that characterizes her book. Self-conscious awkward cuteness sounds pejorative (and maybe it is a little), but really, sometimes and in some ways, it's our bag; We always make passes at girls (or boys) who wear glasses and dig the naive simplicity of the Beat Happening as much as the next gang of cardigan-sporting, twee-loving twenty-somethings.

This a long way to get getting to the second site, built for Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba, released this month. None of the awkward cuteness of July is found here, in fact it's better than most web-art projects we've seen trying to pull off the same thing. The book, we've only read the reviews and the first chapter accessible at the NY Times, but the site built for the book opens up to a map of Cuba with a simple haunting piano music like the last song at the last bar at the end of the road, where Borscht Belt comedians and Cuban strippers come to die.

The site displays a map of Cuba with different locations lined up. Each site, when accessed, gives a brief slide show, like some Gerhard Richter paintings or even some Sebald stories the text/image (and here music) is a little haunting. Snaps of French Nazi Christian de la Maziere mix in with weighted family snaps and glamor shots of some Castro's black bereted female revolutionaries. And the ghostly presence of the images, with Kushner's robust and sometimes sexy prose, brings bout an epiphany. One that maybe attracted Kushner to this space as well. There's a lost world in Cuba.

There was place called Cuba, filled with gambling halls packed with government spies and leftist prostitutes, a Cuba of shitty tenements and fields owned by the United Fruit Co., and lorded over by bully Fulgencio Batista (our man in Havana, another painful CIA blunder), with the rebels in the mountains who can never win, or says the American expatriate sipping rum punch at the country club, knowing little that his waiter works for Castro. It's like all these strange in between places that are now gone forever that play on the American imagination, Casablance when the neon lights of Ric's cafe americain blinked into the desert, or the weathered maps and moving red lines Spielberg plays on in the Indiana Jones films. Some exotic place, filled with excess and troubles, where no one is in the right, but the glamor and the danger mingle together in an intoxicating cocktail. Though this kind of lost imaginary is always tinged with romanticism, we expect Kushner's novel punctures it as much as it explores it.

The first chapter of Kushner's novel (mentioned earlier on the NY Times website)
relates the memories of a man who spent his boyhood as the princely scion of a United Fruit executive, who years later, his exile complete, relates the tales of his lost world. For all its inequity and inequalities that put Castro on the right side of history, is still gone, and the ritual, glamor, and elusive imaginary went with it.

A curious piece of the internets in the service of literature, or more likely something separate from the book, a project born from the same imaginary, producing a strange result of its own.

The Singing, Ringing Tree and Panopticons - Not Just for Terrorizing Prisoners Anymore

2008-07-03T21:53:00.005+02:00

We found this video of a rather peculiar public landmark project emerging from the Lancashire midlands, not far from Manchester. Abandoned and depressed since the industrial revolution revolved to Asia, with all the mines and factories shuttering into oblivion, the region has had to start getting creative about how to reinvigorate the local economy.

One of their methods of getting creative is by building a series of unusual monuments, readymade landmarks to drive any kind of tourism up into the English hinterlands, dubbed "Panopticons" with a peculiar interpretation of the word. The "panopticon" we know is the one developed by Jeremy Bentham to provide total isolation and awareness of prisoners, later picked up by Foucault and others to describe the terrorizing surveillance that governments inflict on their citizens. Which is to say, the word coined by Bentham, leaves a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.

One of the most peculiar of these "Panopticon" landmarks is the unfortunately named "Singing, Ringing Tree." Built near a site known for its history of witchcraft, the tree is made of twisted pipes that pick up the wind and thus sing, emitting a truly spooky sound, one that could be easily, and cheaply, used by a horror film for the sound of lost souls. The fanfare and the rhetoric surrounding the project are a bit weird, but the structure itself is so strange and unintentionally beautiful that it doesn't matter. I say unintentionally (given its name and the city press release) because seems an odd way to reinvigorate a dying region by giving voice to its lost souls.

But it works. We think it's truly worth a road trip to Lancashire.

CIA Transmitting Architecture through partying

2008-07-01T18:05:00.007+02:00

Transmitting Architecture can be pretty boring at times. But we manage to party the congress away. Yesterday night, after an intense day of working and interviewing, the whole CIA crew gathered with lots of other congress visitors and random Turinese bohemians in Piazza Vittorio. As we were sipping on some fresh drinks, different performers livened up the porticos with music. When it got a little late - for the neighbors - we danced to the noiseless beats pumped through wireless headphones directly into our heads, making the Piazza our own silent disco.

As the night pushed on, a smaller group of partying nighthawks rallied to a rather bizarre Villa in the outskirts of Turin, a very old building turned into a party that the late Stanley Kubrick would have dug. The tipsy crowd danced to the Invernomuto and Shackleton dj sets until rosy-fingered dawn, occasionally climbing the rocky stairs to the bar, where a darker version of Benicio Del Toro - who eventually wanted to beat up our chief editor Fabio - served us a few cocktails.

Making a Country Into a Theme Park

2008-07-01T13:33:00.003+02:00

Baudrillard once wrote that the purpose of Disneyland was to hide the fact that all of Southern California was a simulacra, or in other words, a replica for which there exists no original, a fake made real because it's not quite faking anything. In researching this project, we've come across all kinds of curious folds in Europe that make us feel that tourism, not the jetsetting lowcosters using a living Europe, but the hordes going to refurbished pallazzos and the childhood homes of semi-obscure medieval celebrities, that coupled with a declining population, threatens to turn Europe into a museum or likely worse, a theme park.

In Italy, Mussolini (the seeming father of modern Italy for better or worse), interested in uniting Italy under the brand of nationalism, strongly promoted internal tourism to create a better national cohesion. He encouraged towns to cash in on their history, politically useful for him as the celebration of the past hinted at its continuity with the future, in his mind the interminable Fascist Empire. Tourism both internally, and more profitably, externally has made Italy a curious case study and parts of it in particular are especially susceptible to becoming mere theme parks. What happens when your country becomes a tourist trap?

Italy, is not a fake, not a simulacrum, but is still beginning to suffer a fate stranger than even the sunshine noir surreality of Los Angeles. Italy might be becoming a theme park of history and collapsed empires, with the museums and historical centers, like Disneyland, hiding this fact all along. Venice, of which we've done a few missions on, seems a city perpetually in decline, whether it's plague, or conquest, or acqua alta, or the worst yet, tourism eroding the dignity of the city, destroying it in the process of appreciating it. We're loving it to death, and once it's dead, we'll stuff it, mount it, and then love it's well-preserved corpse.

Like Disneyland, maybe Italy should start charging an admission fee to enter the country, matinee prices in the winter, full price during the high season. Or it should manage its economy to try and become less dependent on tourism as the primary form of industry. Venice is becoming a very fragile place, other fragile places have limited tourism, Bhutan as an example, certain national parks and land art. This is a problem perhaps bigger than I've a solution for, even a joking one. But Venice especially and Italy at large, needs to find an answer, or Italians risk becoming only theme actors, security guards, and guides to their own dead history.

CIA Transmitting Architecture with Invernomuto

2008-06-30T19:08:00.010+02:00

Day one in Turin and significant representatives of the CIA crew have now gathered with us for Transmitting Architecture. As we stroll through the pavilions, interviewing interesting people as we go, we've got a few interesting things going on ourselves in the CIA outpost in the Oval.

Our friends Simone and Simone, better known as Invernomuto, performed the first of a series of audio/video sessions, mixing live music and images from the remainders out of the Check-in Architecture footage. An intense experience for those lucky enough (as we feel) to be in attendance. The same formula - not the same performance, since it's going to be different every time - is going to take place twice a day. Don't miss the next one.

Architecture is not building

2008-06-30T17:13:00.016+02:00

Aaron Betsky makes it pretty clear: it's not the buildings that make architecture, it's the architects, and they don't even really need to build. In fact, architecture is more about unbuilding than building, or so says Betsky.

Betsky talks about architecture like someone who is not only passionate about the building-lingo, but about life in general. It's no surprise he wrote a lot about architecture and sex, also becoming one of the main contributors to a spatial interpretation of queer theory.
During his conference at Transmitting Architecture in Turin, he explained how architecture is the whole process around building, not necessary including it. Thinking, talking, experimenting with an environment's geography, landscape, history, people, relationships, culture, beauty.
The exhibition he's curating, taking place at the Venice Biennale and titled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, deals with interventions in space and landscapes aiming to make our world feel like home, without covering it with the "architecture graves." That is, the buildings. Betsky's vision is rather minimal: he looks for beauty in simple and subtle things rather than in grand celebrations of wealthy clients that only house bureaucrats.
Making the people feel at home in their world is the mission of the architect, but by people Betsky means the widest range possible. When we interviewed him and asked him about low-cost traveling, he believes that what we call "low-cost" is not properly "low" for the environment, and it's available only to high-end customers and not to the much bigger crowds of the poor of the world, who can't afford to satisfy their most basic needs. We're not so sure.

But enough with the babble, the video interview we made speaks for itself. Check it out.

The research is on!

2008-06-27T16:18:00.007+02:00

Unluckily, we're not always partying. We at Check-in Architecture have a mission too: Transmitting Architecture.
Next week we're going to be in Turin, in the lounge area at the Oval. There are three spaces you should check-out:
- the interactive area, where you can access the internet to check out our website,
- the video exhibitions, where you can watch the Carlos Casas and Invernomuto videos and a selection of missions,
- the upstairs balcony where we'll be working hard as usual - and taking some video interviews - in case you want to pay a visit.
Transmitting Architecture is one of the most important moments in our Check-in Architecture research, so make sure you pass by.

NYC Waterfalls

2008-06-27T11:34:00.005+02:00

Summer in the City can be pretty damn hot, so a couple of waterfalls might just do. Although it looks a little like shaman material by someone from the rain forest or Niagara, it actually took a Dane to provide the Big Apple with this spectacular - and refreshing - kick to its already iconical Brooklyn Bridge. New York's last public art piece, commissioned by the Public Art Fund to artist Olafur Eliasson, consists in this one waterfall in the picture and three more, falling from free-standing scaffolding towers on the East river. The artist is known for its past success at London's Tate Modern, the Weather Project, worth the museum 2 million visits, and has had the kind of meteori rise softened by green credentials that makes him almost smug seeming to other artists.

Being as tall as the Statue of Liberty, his new public installations will be temporary landmarks and, since the only thing more powerful than water in shifting our perception of a place is moving water, they're granted to shape the nearby area and its relationship with the passers-by. Rivers are the coolest thing ever, and there's no doubt vertical ones have a special appeal of their own.

Genre, art and architecture

2008-06-25T16:03:00.006+02:00

In order to accomplish this mission we went to Venice for Multiversity and had the chance to interview a bunch of interesting people. Here's some of the talk we had with curator Giovanna Zapperi about the relationship between gender and its representation in art.

CIA back in Turin!

2008-06-24T11:11:00.006+02:00

Turin loves us and we love Turin. Once again the Check-in Architecture crew will move to the Piedmontese capital for a gaggle of good reasons: the UIA World Congress, the Transmitting Architecture exhibition and yet another party - details about it in the flyer above.
It's a good chance to witness the Check-in Architecture spirit both in video and in the flesh, we're three dimensional and rocking good dancers.

Great Man and Poet

2008-06-17T16:28:00.012+02:00

You know a party was a success when the police shows up, and the goodbye party for our editor and friend Andrew Berardini was definitely one. The second of the images above shows how project manager and party animal Luca Legnani Jr. explained the cops what was going on.
A rough translation from Italian would be:

"The party was in honor of Andrew Berardini,
great man and poet.
And the music was of excellent quality."

We already miss Andrew's editorial statements and mid-afternoon blitz-naps and wish him a nice trip back home in LA (he's probably there right now). As for you guys, stay tuned for more Check-in Architecture adventures and videos.

The Architecture of Alfred Hitchock

2008-06-12T15:03:00.006+02:00

One cannot watch the films of Alfred Hitchcock without some sense of space. When we first heard about this book, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (published by 010), we thought back to all the films we'd seen and in quite a few, the space, the structures, the architecture plays a primary role in the construction of the tales. In Rear Window, L.B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) confined to a wheelchair due to a broken leg, peeks from the back window of his apartment house, the structure of the building, and where the tenants live defining the story. Or in North by Northwest the famous scene, where villains go toppling off the largest strangest monument in America, Mount Rushmore, or even in The Birds, houses are the only flimsy protections against the fatal attacks by nature.

In all of these movies, and quite a few more, Hitchcock, who worked as a set designer in the 20s, paid very close attention to the structures his stories played out in, often making them not merely plot devices, but strange and haunting characters, the Bates Motel looming at the top of the hill in Psycho; its crazed occupant leering down onto the rooms with a murderous gaze.

But if we can be momentarily expansive about the role of architecture, at the recent Festarch conference, artist Vito Acconci at a conference on the relationship between writing and architecture, simply stated that the two disparate disciplines both have a structure, both as sentences and in totality. We even use this phrase in discussing grammar: a "sentence structure." Cinema as well has a structure, one that Hitchcock was masterfully aware of, watching the below interview with Hitchcock, his sense of direction, and careful consideration of each shot, with who and where, plays directly on the psychology of the characters and the viewers, but also on a poetics of space, perhaps less emotive and nostalgic than Bachelard, but a sense of the poetic potential of not only the physical space of a story, but also the cinematic space from whence is the camera pointed and from there, where will it go, how is it showing the interior spaces filled with, a favorite Hitchcock word, suspense. Below is a clip from a very good interview, where Hitchcock, with the illustrative aid of clips, explains how he built some of the most potent scenes in Psycho.

Before that though, in case you missed it earlier, here's is the publisher's site for the book that sparked our musing. And click on the movie links, they all lead to the best Hitchcock trailers, where he personally tries to pitch the movie to the audience.

The Festarch Report

2008-06-11T11:00:00.011+02:00

Festarch has been a pretty fertile ground for us Check-in Architecture guys and we came back to our headquarters in the Lambrate district in Milan with plenty of new material for your viewing pleasure. For starters, we're giving you a taste in this small trailer, just to give you a hint of all the mission videos yet to come. Rick Moody and Oliviero Toscani interviewed, the mysteries of the Buggerru surfers unveiled, our friends José and Nico's Festarch experience displayed. All of this will soon await you on a video blog near yours. Make sure to pass by.

"For Sale: The Arctic?" or Shifting Maps

2008-06-09T01:17:00.000+02:00

With global warming jumping off everyone's tongues these days, you better be sure that the administrations that fervently deny it are gearing up to capitalize on its benefits. The world map we felt, had largely been decided, a few pockets here and there with shifting boundaries: Kashmir, Palestine, the Balkans, the occasional Pacific island, mere pockets in the sweeping map of the world. But with the Arctic ice caps melted: a whole new, massively difficult territorial conflict is cooking in the waters that are melting the glaciers and permafrost. The northern countries with claims near the Arctic circle: Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway and Denmark (through Greenland) are doing the kind of aggressive maneuvers and territorial disputes not seen in this part of the world since the Vikings and with these countries with each other in a long time. Substantial hydrocarbon reserves beneath the ice as well as shipping rights through the strait, that a few short years ago seemed forever out of reach are now up for serious discussion and substantial posturing. Who owns the land under the Arctic, currently not claimed under any international treaties?

So far the Northwest Passage above Canada (once a myth of adventures, now quickly becoming a reality) is not yet fully operational, but it's damn close and who lays claim to the minerals and oil lay is going to lead for sure to diplomatic spats and perhaps to a bit of saber rattling, to which the Russians have already started planting a Russian flag on the bottom of the sea in what Canada sees as it's territory.

In 2007, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister had this to say:

This is posturing. This is the true north strong and free, and they're fooling themselves if they think dropping a flag on the ocean floor is going to change anything. There is no question over Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. We've made that very clear. We've established - a long time ago - that these are Canadian waters and this is Canadian property. You can't go around the world these days dropping a flag somewhere. This isn't the 14th or 15th century.	”
—Peter MacKay, former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Or is it?

Read more on wikipedia about the bureaucratic mess and potential problems the Arctic will pose as global warming speeds up...

Territorial claims in the Arctic

"I Don't Believe in Art": Loris Gréaud Talks with CIA

2008-06-06T17:04:00.002+02:00

Giulio Frigo, a CIA research affiliate, went on a mission for Check-in Architecture, and had a very interesting talk with Loris Gréaud where the young French artist makes the declaration amongst other things, "I don't believe in art." Check out the mission we wrote about his last exhibition here. This video unlike many other interviews captures the heart of Gréaud's philosophy, and will likely be a resource for artists, students, and scholars trying to wrap their heads around Gréaud's distinctive imaginary.

The Sporting Life: Eurocup 2008

2008-06-06T15:38:00.010+02:00

Nothing alters the landscape of a city like obsession. And peasant farmers and wealthy yachtsman all over the face of Europe will be drunk as lords, glued to their television sets, screaming in anguish and in glory from bars, couches, and the streets. No Europe is not in another nationalistic war of aggression, it's just this edition of the Eurocup. When they set down their rifles, it's almost as if they start becoming truly obsessive about football, though I don't have statistics in front of me to back up one iota of this, I'm sure such sentiment makes governments dump a little more money into their national sides.

Nevertheless...
Basel, Zurich, Geneva, Bern, Innsbruck, Vienna, Salzburg, and Klenfurt will have both fanatical supporters descend on the these cities, but in the participating countries who made the cut, the obsession with sports will send people into the streets, waving banners, sometimes rioting, always letting the pressures of daily life focus into one white hot point called football. Flags waving, cars honking, fists flying, the winners are just as slap happy as the winners.

Nothing beats the energy of a well aimed kick from your hometown hero.

Let the games begin.

Festarch - epilogue

2008-06-01T19:01:00.005+02:00

We were still a bit sleepy from last night - which ended up in a street party at the harbor, with the Minis' speakers booming and some street guys joining the dances with the CIA crew - when José and Nico left their four-star hotel to head back to their hometown Cologne. As they went back home, our own Gianmario and Elena got ready to fly to Venice, to join a party in Jesolo with Soulwax. These adventure and more are coming to a theater near you.

Last day of Festarch, we're not ready to head back home yet. Before packing all our stuff up tomorrow, we're gonna make sure to have the last shot at architectonic parties. Architects don't have much of a reputation for naked moonlight swims, but tonight in Cagliari, we're going to be working our hardest to change this.

Festarch - episode 2

2008-05-31T17:40:00.006+02:00

While some of us had the time to enjoy some sunbathing and the windy beaches near Cagliari, José and Nico - the students from Cologne - had an intense schedule today. They've been attending speeches, wandering around the Festarch spaces and, of course, pursuing the noble goal of shooting us this mission. Their most glorious deed so far is an interview with Oliviero Toscani, soon to come on our video-blog. You can admire our heroes in a snapshot up here, as Toscani was sharing some thoughts with them and discouraging the two Cologne guys from attending his speech. He proved quite funny, so they went there anyway.
Stay tuned for the video, and of course for José and Nico's mission.

Checking-In at Festarch

2008-05-30T17:43:00.006+02:00

We got to Cagliari just in time to go pick up our friends from Cologne, José and Nico, and take them to their luxurious accommodation. They're here to shoot us this mission, while we take care of our check-in point at Festarch.
Come check us out, we're right inside of the ex Manifatture Tabacchi, longing about in the clear sunlight of Sardinia, trying not to work too hard, but failing as we tirelessly toil for the greatness of the cause.

Seasteading!

2008-05-27T10:28:00.003+02:00

We've been earing the rumblings of wealthy libertarians sick of being unable to change the system for a awhile now, and now they've seemed to have shifted their attentions (slightly) away from invisible hand free market domination and towards a simpler means to achieving their economic and political goals: starting their own countries

Apparently it's easier than it sounds. Sealand has long claimed independent status, and though they've been unable to win anything in court acknowledging it as so for their man-made island in international waters off the coast of Britain, no one's really done anything to them either.

Rarely can we actually build declarative, political architecture, a phrase that Geoff Managh at BLDGBLG calls "post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain."

Here's the original Wired article here and some nice commentary at BLDGBLG.

Festarch

2008-05-22T22:11:00.001+02:00

Check-in Architecture is not afraid of moving, and we're more than happy when escape to the seaside. If you missed us in Milan and Turin - or if you live there, or if you're there for some reason - you should join us at Festarch in Cagliari. It's the right place to hear some interesting stuff about architecture, literature and global tourism, and sundry other issues and themes, and to have a dip in the Mediterranean. And get back massages and drink saccharine sweet daiquiris while staring absentmindedly at the waves lapping a the shore. We, as Check-in Architecture, have a check-in point you should pass by, and even somebody shooting a mission for us. Come look us up!

"We Love Magazines!"

2008-05-22T17:10:00.001+02:00

Signjammin' Signjammin'
Gonna keep this party cracking
CIA has got your attention
and we’re rocking on the Signjammin’ rhythm
They say people can’t relate to our band
Misfit children making missions by hand
We’re not tapping out the beat on our laptops
Save your secretary jive for nerdstock
We’re thumping and strumming and a-banging
At the club or in the basements
It’s always a party when the mission gets started
and the screaming hasn’t stopped in Milan
Signjammin' Signjammin'
Just a abumpin' and ahumpin' and aslappin'
Signjammin' like this...
(Grossly adapted from Dub Narcotic Sound Systems "Handclappin'")

Signjam: the final frontier of commercial street culture, we wrote a mission about it already just a short while ago. And yes, the topic is so full, rich, bursting with possibilities, we are shooting another documentary on them. Or rather, Signjam is another project made by the same agency that makes Check-In Architecture, Metaflow. So we felt a healthy helping of shameless self-promotion was in order.

Soon, right at our new headquarters in Via Oslavia, 27, another round of workshops about cashing in on street culture will go down, this time regarding diffusion and communication, along with networking and the satisfying sensuality of printed paper.

The first day's topic is guerrilla advertising, with the international Cunning agency involving the attendants in a viral campaign brainstorming session. On the second day, lecool magazine editor Andrew Losowsky and shift! magazine creator Anja Lutz will discuss tendencies and new grounds in the world of commericial street mags, from nightlife mapping to street art and, let's hear that dirty word again, networking.

So if you're egualrly buying things you see advertised in graffiti magazines, this might just be your scene.

Artists Using Youtube(?)

2008-05-21T17:47:00.006+02:00

There is no doubt that YouTube is the brave new world. It accepts and brings together all manner of production into an unrestrained archive of virtual culture. Video production and films, experiments and documentaries, random acts and everyday performances, catalogues of stories, tastes and personal obsessions are all cinched together under the single broad banner of YouTube. By certainly changed the way we access, consult and broadcast, YouTube has fast become the inventory of sources and information.
[…]
What happens when artistic events are reappropriated by a generation that has witnessed the overturning (and has contributed to overturning) equipment, media, times, distances and representations?

Andrea Lissoni, excerpted from “In Search of the Imaginary,” Check-Architecture Magazine #1

We’re going to take a few minutes to do some navel-gazing on YouTube. A big part of our project is making user generated content, meaning you, making research-driven video documentaries, and not for us necessarily but for the free open market of YouTube where we post all the videos. Our project at heart is creating a channel and tools to promote investigations into living and travelling low-cost in today's cities, and through your travels using new media platforms to revolutionize where we get our information and entertainment. But Youtube as a marginal space is ripe for all kinds of pretty awesome creative innovation, which mosts artists, in the mainsteam art world, it would appear simply aren't using.

So right now in New York, the curator Rachel Greene has put together an exhibition called “Artists Using YouTube” at The Kitchen. The different artists were invited to cull from YouTube whatever they liked, approaching it in whatever poetic and unpoetic manner they saw fit. The participants, Sue De Beer, Matthew Higgs, and Matthew Ronay.

Based on the excellent descriptions in Virginia Heffernan’s mixed review of the exhibition in the New York Times, I can’t help but feel that the way the artists ended up using YouTube kind of missed the point a little bit about how an artist could use YouTube. Matthew Higgs was the guiltiest by simply playing hipster music videos from the ashcan of 80s nostalgia to make his point. Sue De Beer did better but still merely wrote an essay using smart videos from cult and pop culture icons in a way that really reaches to make it’s point (Fassbender and Columbine, you connect the dots). Matthew Ronay seems to be the only one who really used the archive that is Youtube aesthetically by bombarding the viewer with a set of frenetic images relating to practical uses of the supernatural from voodoo to hypnotizing an alligator.

In the end of course, artists, like everything else relating to the mercurial breed, will do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of some critic’s dictums, but our critique relates more to the limitations of their use rather than the fact that they’re using it. A playlist of your favourite songs seems a rather weak way to utilize Youtube when Youtube’s greatest strengths aren’t that it simply reposts mainstream media since discarded, but that it’s an untamed wilderness of images, posted by whomever feels like it, whenever they feel like it. Rather than the set paths and roads that traditional media set out for us (like the moribund and largely irrelevant MTV), with commercial breaks at regular intervals, Youtube has expanded through the multitudes in a manner nearly completely liberated (copyright issues like a bad traffic cop still hangs over our roadless travellers, handing out tickets to violators). Ronay gets the closest, but these artists aren’t using Youtube as artists but as users. A hip teenage girl could’ve come up with a better playlist than Higgs, and besides why aren’t artists posting their content on Youtube,. From here, it appears that most artists seem to be missing the boat on this one.

A quick search on Youtube yielded zero hits for any of the artists participating. I think it’s a bit of an indictment that none of the artists in this exhibition have any thing they’ve done posted on the site that the exhibition claims they’re using.

The question that “Artists Using YouTube” should be answering is not “How are artists using Youtube?” but rather “When are they going to start using it?”

Nevertheless at the top is one of Sue de Beer’s choices (So Much Tenderness - Guenther Kaufmann from Fassebender's "The American Soldier)," and below a few others from the exhibition, recreated here for your enjoyment.

CHANEL: Coco Chanel parle de la mode, chosen by de Beer

New Order: Confusion, chosen by Higgs

Guy hypnotize alligator, chosen (we think) by Ronay

Typed out - Olivetti and Ivrea in Turin

2008-05-20T16:30:00.005+02:00

Our Check-in Point was just a few steps away, so we couldn't miss the exhibition celebrating a hundred years from the founding of the Olivetti company, and its relationship with the city of Ivrea. In case you don't know, we also wrote a mission about it. Check out the video we made, there are a couple interviews that might inspire you to apply for it. In the end, there's something strange and moving about the rise and fall of the Olivetti dream, maybe it was always doomed to failure, but one couldn't help but wish it might have worked.

Collapsing Buildings

2008-05-20T15:02:00.009+02:00

We all have some fascination with collapsing buildings. The World Trade Center tumbling down had the kind of national weight not to be sneezed at for a simple conversation of aesthetics and urbanism, but aesthetics it was, no more striking repeating image drove home both the failure of American foreign policy and the realization that America, for all its broad-smiled vim and vigor, was not universally loved.

I brisk jaunt through YouTube finds collapsing buildings to have fairly high view counts, often in the hundreds of thousands for each building (not even counting the twin towers which oddly have a faction of the views to a video called XXX PORN XXX, with 54,605,695 views and counting).

The urban fabric is composed of these brick and mortar structures, as nothing says city like the towering apartment block or glass and steel modernist spire pocking a hole through the smog.
But these demolitions are as much a destruction of history as march forward of progress (a word you don't heart too much anymore as Western projects has hit a few moral, economic, environmental snags to pure growth). We at Check-in Architecture are neither preservationists or laissez-faire capitalists. We like cities, we like the way they grow and change as humans use them and misuse them over time.

Merely observers, though not detached.

And we hate to psychologize too deeply about the sex appeal of collapsing buildings but we all love to see the seemingly permanent fall, we all find a strange thrill in watching the bricks come down, and the city shift and change forever, the taste of apocalypse, the awesome explosions. An element of human tragedy can always be found here as psychic spaces and human experiences in space are dissipated and destroyed by the wrecking ball or the stick of dynamite.

Below is one of my favorites, the two towers look like crumpling flowers, a stark contrast to the seeming permanence and broken promises of the atomic age.

Justice - Stress

2008-05-19T12:52:00.010+02:00

There's been some talk about this video being censored in many countries. Maybe it's because it's fucking hardcore? You can't really tell whether the people in it were aware of the taping or not, maybe it's just state-of-the-art prank, but it really does look scary. It's like the guys from La Haine got shitfaced with the Man Bites Dog crew and decided to raid the streets of Paris. As for banlieu-savvy directing the closest thing that comes to mind is this video, but Romain Gavras adds a much thicker atmosphere to it, along with tons of movie references.
Just like La Haine and The Warriors were intense cityscape crossings dealing with urban space and subcultural codes, you can't really watch these images without feeling the subterranean grain of street life. Be it Paris or New York, sometimes a moving picture can help a city keep up to its status of myth.

Abandonments

2008-05-16T15:02:00.010+02:00

Dotted across the globe sit, ramshackle, dusty, sometimes dangerous, sometimes beautiful, often unloved abandoned buildings. Wrecked and rotting, our forgotten buildings take on narratives heavier than if they were occupied. Sometimes these are cottages in the countryside, abandoned when the farmhands got pushed out by tractors or ghost towns of all sorts where broken dolls and empty beer cans mix with the dust and broken glass, to bigger buildings iron smelters and insane asylums, fortresses and coal mines, these buildings, sometimes built at great expense and sometimes simply beautiful as buildings have served their use, but exist in a part of the world where movement for whatever reason is slower, sometimes abandoned buildings sit in limbo because their caught in protracted court battles (see Dickens' Bleak House) or because it's more expensive to tear them down than to let 'em rot until the land is useful again. Anyway you cut it, the landscape is populated by ghosts of humananity's past endeavors, since failed.

In Europe you leave a nice building without people and chances are people will find it, and the stories if any will change dramatically with graffiti and punk bands, teenage squatters and middle aged shooting galleries. The buildings in the countryside in many ways take on the most ghostly presence, as the chances of their rehabitation, even by squatters, are minimal

The Opacity blog documents dozens of building in Europe and North America in states of beautiful decay, collapsing in on themselves, former mental hospitals and prisons, these grand edifices made of brick and steel for a permanence of the ages along with the giant industrial factories are the most breathtaking. One feels like a civilization, not so far away or different from our own, has collapsed. Creeping through these crumbling structures makes one feel as if some lesson about human frailty is to be learned, though often the approach is not unlike Romantic poets about empty abbeys in the 19th century. Sometimes this poetic becomes research, like the case with Industrial Archeology, but we at CIA feel there's nothing wrong with being a little poetical.

Though Opacity has many beautiful photos, the blog also links here to dozens other sites devoted to abandoned buildings.

Cannes Film Festival

2008-05-15T14:44:00.004+02:00

Most people are attracted to glamor like flies on shit. Not us though, we are sturdy academics, researchers, we would never fall under the spell of cheap champagne or the flickering flash bulbs of the paparazzi, of the phonies and cheats of the film industry, we have no screen plays in our drawers nor aspirations to bag Paris Hilton on video.

Except of course, when we do.

Which isn't to say CIA has a hotline to the Hiltons but rather that we're sending a couple of wide-eyed students to suck in a little sun and cinema at the Cannes Film Festival in southern France.

The mission is serious, the environment dangerous, the films dubious, and the video is coming next week to a channel near you.

Mission #64: Cannes Film Festival
Q: How does the cinematic transform the space of a city?
To City: Cannes Country: France

Description

Nothing about Cannes is easy. A vanity fair for movie moguls, porn stars, and art-house auteurs to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, for the past 61 years, the Cannes Film Festival has emerged as a showcase for some of the most important films ever made by some of the most influential filmmakers: Walt Disney, Buñuel, Antonioni, Tarantino, Coppola, Spielberg, Hitchcock, the list could go on. Foundeda s a anwer to Fascist tampering at the Venice Film Festival, the Festival de Cannes has long stood arbiter of international filmmaking, especially by striking a balance between quality and commerce. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Cannes became a resort town with the construction of modern hotels along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Since 1939, the city has grown and changed alongside its most famous festival, from infrastructure to attitude. In the end, the festival is so famous it’s surely difficult to say anything new about it, but one still can approach it in a new way. The Festival promotes a very particular imaginary for the city that affects the locals as well as the visitors. Your role is to discover the shape and influence of this imaginary on the city and its temporary cinematic circus, to show what is not normally shown by journalists covering the festival.

Script

- Go to Cannes and explore the city. Find out how it’s changed to accommodate the festival.
- Discover how the rhythm of the city changes. How do locals and then visitors feel about the space of the city and how it changes?
- Ask people to tell their stories about the Festival, both newbies and long-time festival goers, older locals and kids in the street.
- Find out the shape and expression of the imaginary of Cannes.
- Most importantly, explore the fringes of the festival, attempt to capture moments not normally covered by mainstream media.

Travel bag

Barney Wilen, Cannes Film Festival 1958
Tarkovsky and Bresson in Cannes (1983)
Cannes: A Festival Virgin's Guide
Festival de Cannes: 60th Anniversary

CIA in Turin: Check-In Point, Check Out the Party

2008-05-15T10:34:00.010+02:00

From the pulsing creative factory of Via Ventura in Milan, where our headquarters sit, we're all heading to Turin tonight for a cool party at The Beach, on the city's riverside. If you've heard about Murazzi you know it's Turin's best nightlife scene.

The party starts at 11 pm, but you should also come over earlier to take a look at our Check-In Point, beautifully placed at the Politecnico, in the Castello del Valentino. Take a look, apply for a mission if you like and then, later, come join us for the Matthias Tanzmann dj set at The Beach.

The Naked City

2008-05-14T23:31:00.003+02:00

There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.

Shitfaced at Gallery Weekend Berlin

2008-05-13T00:07:00.003+02:00

Here's the latest video blog from the gang at CIA. We were lucky enough to witness some real performance art at Gallery Weekend Berlin, art that challenged the boundaries of art, that toyed with government and government and good taste. Well, the performance was shit, both literally and figuratively; the real performance was the art dealers calling the local police. We think the performance was awful, but the gallerist cgetting the cops to arrest made us feel that these alleged hip patrons of the arts are nothing but tawdry merchants.

Let's not too harsh, the performers had a nice bottle trick and the dealers, I'm sure the dealers can do interesting things with bottles too.

In the height of Berlin Gallery Weekend, a man in his thirties, short hair, button shirt, blue jeans, screamed at the top of his lungs while a stylish lesbian played tambourine alongside, screeching in a regular rhythm. Clothes came off at one point as they moved from one high-end art gallery to another in the building. The woman’s shirt became unbuttoned, the man’s pants descended round his ankles, his green American Apparel undies shifted down around his thighs, he shat into his hand (not pausing in his screams) and smeared it onto his forehead. The German gallerists said nothing. But of course, called the police.

As for the shitsmearing American Apparel model, exceptions exist as with anything, but transgressive performance art more often than not is bad, boring, and shudder inducing. But not the shudder of shock and horror that the artist may be shooting for, but a shudder of pity and embarrassment.

Somehow this scene acts as a metaphor for what Berlin as a center of cultural production is going through, the old style radical and transgressive actions still weakly cling on, but are quickly squashed by the local art marketeers. The gentrifying of a city changes the space for radical action, making a world (the art world) that no matter how bad the art should have acted less reactionary (and let’s call it, fascistic) to artists.

Invisible Cities

2008-05-12T20:17:00.004+02:00

This is how it began:

We're fascinated at Check-in Architectuer with Italo Calvino's landmark book about the imaginary potential of cities, Invisible Cities. While doing research for this blog post, we realized that the Wikipedia page for Invisible Cities was pretty weak. So given this project is about webmedia in its own way, we decided to almost entirely rewrite the Wikipedia entry. We kept some of the original content, and thus we credit the other anonymous researcher, but we added to it greatly. So here is the new Wikipedia entry for Invisible Cities for your enjoyment, courtesy of the researchers at CIA.

Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.

The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by the narrator, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of Polo's descriptions (1-3 pages each) of 55 cities. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. Not only is the book structured around an interlocking pattern of numbered sections, but the length of each section's title graphically outlines a continuously oscillating sine wave, or perhaps a city skyline. The interludes between Khan and Polo, are no less poetically constructed than the cities, but form a framing device, a story with a story, that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Other postmodern writer's such as John Barth, who also uses multiple framing devices, cites in interviews precedents such as Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights.

The book is probably based on The Travels of Marco Polo, his travelogue of the Mongol Empire written in the 13th century, which shares with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities he visits, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.

One of Calvino's masterpieces, the novel does not fall under the aegis' of either magical realism, science fiction, or speculative fiction, and in fact is closer to poetry than classic novel writing. In the end, the book creates its own universe, neither that of a futuristic world or one based on classic fantasy fiction (pagan myths, Christian folklore, etc.) nor does it obey E.M. Forster's classic model for the story, but creates a new form, a new model, and for this it can be easily considered not only unique but revolutionary.

The book, because of it's approach to the imaginative potentialities of cities has oft been used by architects and artists to visualize how cities can be, their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory. It offers a beautiful alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they're formed and how they function.

The book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1975.

A Handy Dandy Guide to Architecture Festivals in Europe

2008-05-09T14:57:00.001+02:00

Over at anArchitecture, Christoph Wassman has set up a handy dandy guide to architecture festivals in Europe this summer, of which there are gobs. These festivals mark an interesting trend in architecture, as it become a little sexier, a stitch more glamourous, and maybe, just maybe, even cool. That we at CIA have Architecture in our title (and we're cool, right?), might be another emblem of this trend.

But anArchitecture asks the most important question concerning this robus amount of attention to architecture: Where are the clients?

The same reason that Rosalind Krauss said architects would never be artists, is really the reason architecture is what it is (alongside the limitations of physics, materials, and usage), clients. Architecture is shaped by reality, and reality costs money, for engineers and construction workers, materials and autoCAD software) and who's got the money, well, clients, the name for customers and patrons of the architect class. People (and sometimes companies) with very deep pockets to build a unique building rather than just having an engineer throw together some plans (which is how most buildings are built).

Enough navel-gazing, here's anArchitecture's handy-dandy guide for arch festivals this summer, and don't worry, CIA will doubtlessly be at most of them.

Architekturtage, architektur erleben, Austria,
May 16th to 17th
"Experiencing Architecture is the motto under which all the provinces of Austria will present a wide-ranging programme, providing you an exciting overview of the most varied aspects of architecture."
http://www.architekturtage.at/English
factor: have fun, a lot of office parties, www.feld72.at, www.000y0.at and more.

London Festival of Architecture 2008,
June 20th to Juy 20th
"The London Festival of Architecture 2008 is a celebration and exploration of the city's buildings, streets and spaces, aimed at Londoners and visitors alike."
factor: have fun
http://www.lfa2008.org/

XXIII UIA World Congress of Architecture, Transmitting Architecture, Torino 2008,
June 28th to July 3rd, 2008
"Architecture that is a part of an overall process that wants to face problems that go beyond the tight environments and languages of the profession to face the mankind's true and far-reaching problems."
http://www.uia2008torino.org/U8T/Engine/RAServePG.php
factor: be smart

La Biennale di Venezia, 11th International Architecture Exhibition
from September 14th to November 23rd, 2008
According to Aaron Betsky, the 11th Architecture Biennale "points out what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them".
http://www.labiennale.org/en/
factor: be a dandy, architecture and Venice – simply great

World Architecture Festival, Barcelona,
October 22nd to 24th, 2008
"The World Architecture Festival is the annual event for architects worldwide. The Festival will celebrate the work, concerns and aspirations of the international architectural community, during a three-day event taking place 22-24 October 2008 in Barcelona."
http://www.worldarchitecturefestival.com/
factor: be competitive, each competition entry costs 950 €

CIA on Tour

2008-05-09T13:21:00.013+02:00

In a way, Check-In Architecture is always on tour, traveling around in cars, airplanes, boats, and on foot, from city to city across Europe. But we, CIA staffers rarely get a chance to get unshackled from our desks, so now we get to trot around the continent ourselves to present the project to different universities. So if you study near or in to one of the following schools, run don't walk, to one of our presentations, meet a few of us. We'll talk to you about how great this thing is and the possibility of traveling around Europe for free and making documentaries. Come meet us, we don't bite or anything.

If you come, you can sign up for one of our missions!

Date - City, University, "Mission" Sign Up

13 May - Delft (Rotterdam), TU, "Festivalism" Barcellona
13 May - London, Metropolitan, "Portrait of the Pilgrims", Santiago De Compostela
13 May - London, East London, "Portrait of the Pilgrims", Santiago De Compostela
14 May - Leeds, School of Design, "Gypsy Caravan", Prague
14 May - Köln, KISD, "Festarch", Cagliari
15 May - Paris, ESAM, "Commodity Exchange", Leeds
15 May - Paris, E. N. S. d'Architecture Belleville, "Commodity Exchange", Leeds
15 May - Barcellona, ETSAV, "Corporate Living", Belfast
16 May - Berlin, TU Architecture, "Acqua Alta", Venice

Here's the link to all the schools participating in the project so far.

Ba-da Boom, Ba-Da Bing

2008-05-08T17:26:00.003+02:00

In this week's edition of Mission of the Week, we take you strip-clubbing.

Place: Italy, Milan
Location: Piero Bottoni multi-functional building, Corso Buenos Aires, 36
Title: Ba-da Boom, Ba-Da Bing
Date: every week-end from 15:30 to 18:00 and from 1:00 to 4:00

Q: How to redevelop the strip clubs?

After the war, modernist architect and Italian Rationalist Piero Bottoni, designed a multifunctional building in Milan’s major commercial district, Corso Buenos Aires. During the reconstruction of the country, this innovative building not only changed the street, but transformed the district. Finished in the 1950s, the building, now after more than half century, has become sexy, seedy, and downright decadent.

The basement hosts strip clubs where the cinema used to be. One is an historic Milanese joint once based in downtown called “Il Teatrino” where porno superstars of the 80s (like Cicciolina and Moana Pozzi) shook their moneymakers. The second “Lily la Tigresse,” though masquerading as a nightclub, is a little more of an indefinable space. Explore the possibility of a compromise between the seedier elements and the locals’ hopes for gentrification.

Life: A User's Manual

2008-05-07T14:32:00.007+02:00

Though the central metaphor of George Perec’s encyclopedic novel, Life: A User’s Manual is the puzzle, a single Parisian apartment house on the imaginary Rue Simon-Crubellier forms the frame for this playful, profound, and masterful work of fiction. Check-In Architecture is interested in how spaces and buildings affect people’s lives, and no book to our mind captures better how people’s lives unfold in buildings than in this novel. As Perec himself wrote,

"I imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed [...] so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible."

The book travels through all of the different apartments and all the different lives of its inhabitants, sometimes the history of the apartment and its myriad tenants and the histories of each of their lives, troubles, fevered imaginings, and documents, become interwoven into the text. As everything crystallizes and culminates in a single moment and written under an array of specific constraints, the book unwinds and unfolds its seemingly endless interlocking puzzles taking us, the reader, on a trip through the potent imaginative qualities of everyday spaces and everyday things.

The book is available widely in English and its native French, as well as in Italian.

The Riesumazione of San Padre Pio

2008-05-06T16:27:00.005+02:00

Certain devout Catholics fiercely believe that the Padre Pio's stigmata - the wounds of Jesus on the cross sometimes divinely remade on his most devoted followers - are evidence of his sanctity, others, more skeptical, assert that he acquired carbolic acid from a local pharmacist to create his wounds.

What is interesting for us is that 15,000 worshippers gathered the 24th of April at the shrine of the Roman Catholic saint and mystic Padre Pio, and a few days ago hundreds of videos uploaded by onlookers - and not - swarmed into Youtube. You can start the tour at the video above tracked from here.

His exhumed body went on display for the first time since his death almost 40 years ago.

We haven't been able to take a student in front of the glass coffin at San Giovanni Rotondo, in the Apulia Region in southern Italy. More than a million people are expected to line in front of the transparent casket between now and September 2009. Catholic practice allows for
the remains of saints to be exhumed, checked for their state of deterioration and exhibited as relics for veneration. No Check-in Architecture researchers has been there yet to investigate, but beside we are working on another pilgrimage mission, for a real missionary.

Destination: Santiago de Compostela.
Vehicle: just your feet and your
travel bag.

Trapped in an Elevator for 41 Hours

2008-05-06T16:09:00.004+02:00

Nick Paumgarten uses as the dramatic pull for a story on the less than dramatic topic of elevators, the story of Nicholas White, a production manager at Business Week magazine who in 1999 was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours.

The video above is the security camera, fast forwarded to cover 41 hours in three minutes and thirty seconds.

Elevators make modern cities possible, without them, who'd live or work in a building over five stories. And the towering blocks of financial centers like New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing, or the insta-metropolises of Dubai, etc would simply not be possible without them. As an experience of space, social, architectural, technological, elevators are the part of the building we usually most try to ignore. Occassionally strapped to the side of the building and constructed of glass, most people want to merely teleport and not to be annoyed byt he presence of others while doing it, watching the digital numbers tick up, as if it made the machine go faster.

All these ideas and more can be found in Paumgarten's story, "Up and then Down: the lives of elevators" from the New Yorker magazine.

CIA on Domusweb

2008-05-05T14:42:00.006+02:00

In the initial post we promised, in addition to regular musing, shameless self-promotion. Don't worry, such a policy continues truly. The positive press has started to roll in and we want you burnish our credentials with a few independent (positive) reviews. Okay, tongue firmly in cheek. But unlike any underpaid creatives working from a lonely cafe somewhere in Berlin (or factory district in Milan as the case may be) we like the sweet taste of recognition, before we return to our keyboards and third cup of coffee, trying to not to stare at the girl crossing her legs on the other side of the cafe.

Which is to say Domusweb has interviewed some of our fearless leaders, Luca Martinazzoli, Mario Flavio Benini, and Luca Legnani Jr., to chat about our projects, a few cups of coffee probably played a role in that conversation as well.

Check it out here on Domusweb.

John Bock's Language Cream

2008-04-30T17:50:00.004+02:00

The Messy Adventures of the Check-In Architecture Gang:
This Week's Exciting Episode!

Artist John Bock's performance-lectures are the things of legend. Weird, funny, and seriously nonsensical to anyone but perhaps Bock, they fall somewhere in-between the Mad Hatter, a physics professor, Joseph Beuys, and Paul McCarthy. He hasn't "lectured" publicly in two years, but one is planned during the opening of his newest exhibition in Milan. Our editor Nicola Bozzi heads to Galleria Gio Marconi in Milan to see if Bock lives up to the hype or if his madness is a put on. Given his playful obsession with Hannibal Lecter, white curly wigs, and language cream, we're pretty sure that whatever you can say about John Bock, he's very, very serious.

What is The Italian Job?

2008-04-29T16:48:00.004+02:00

When we're researching the Travel Bags for the various missions we come across amazing videos on YouTube. The trailer for the movie, The Italian Job particularly titillated us. We're actually doing a mission recreating (as legally as possible) the chase scene. Here's a snippet from the mission script below, but really just watch this clip.

In the Peter Collinson's 1969 film The Italian Job starring Michael Caine, a gang of British crooks steal a bundle of gold bullion from Turin using three Mini Coopers. They sabotage the city's traffic control system, creating total chaos, and then escape the city in one of the best car chases in the movie history, tearing through Turin’s landmarks at breakneck speed.

As an experience, driving explores a way of encountering, conceiving and remaking urban space. It does so by investigating how different kinds of driving, at different speeds and on different roads, produce distinct encounters with cities and architecture and, hence, also produce similarly distinct political and cultural experiences.

More Mapishness

2008-04-28T12:59:00.014+02:00

Lately, we've been obsessed with maps. Not just as visual representations, though we find these quite sexy as well, worthy of hours of lusty contemplation about all the places we've been and all the places we would like to go. But maps, besides being fetish objects for a very, very slim minority of the population, they are also ways of viewing and interacting with the world, space, politics, landscape, well, everything really. Traditionally the map concentrates on a limited data set in order to filter out excess data that's not useful for a particular task. Though I've always been titillated by Baudrillard's Borges reference in Simulations (I've never been able to find the original story):

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the
cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the
territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally
ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined
abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the
substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing),
this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm
of second-order simulacra.

Everyday new maps are invented for new purposes previously unforseen, when Amerigo Vespucci was tricking his way into naming a continent, there's no way the world's cartographers could have even begun to foresee a map of the world's country code web domains...

or this map of the Lunar walk of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

or (another subset of our obsession) speculative and imaginary maps like this one of the lands of temperance and alcohol (we know where we live)...

Each new generation of maps from the earliest ones scratched into an earth with a stick or the latest nifty, digital topographies, literally is a map of how human beings interact with, well, everything.

Many of these maps were taken from fellow map obsessive blog Strange Maps.

McGOURMET

2008-04-25T15:57:00.000+02:00

To our American editor, Andrew Berardini, McDonald's is a heart attack dipped in lard and fried. But McDonald's is trying to renew their reputation by going designer, and what better place to launch it than Milan during the Salone del Mobile (lest we forget this translates to "Furniture Showroom"). A designer hamburger sounds to Check-In Architecture like a pig in a bikini, but we'll let Mickey D's, in the form of Paolo Mereghetti and the designer of the new food, Italian chef Claudio Sadler speak for themselves.

East is East

2008-04-24T16:43:00.001+02:00

The Far East can seem very far, but movies can sometimes bring it a little bit closer. Udine is a city in the far north-east of Italy that for the last ten years has hosted the Far East Film Festival, an international film festival that as become a major showcase for Asian contemporary popular cinema in Europe and point of cultural exchange between the two continents. Once a year, the city is invaded by art films, blockbusters, celebrities, and auteurs, and by a great number of fans that come to watch the movies by day, and party by night.

If the above trailer for the festival is to be believed, Udine is the "sweet spot" of Italy and this festival, mixing culture, architecture, international exchange, and parties is a particular sweet spot for Check-in Architecture.

Australia's Ahead of the Game: Cashing in On Cultural Capital

2008-04-24T16:39:00.000+02:00

In a recent issue of the Australian, Rosemary Sorensen digs into the new plans for Australia to develop creative industries, specifically "the arts" so that it can provide a basket of things that people need in one form or another, including (ahem) money.

"It has been seen only as an economic benefit, but there is the idea now that benefit is a quadruple bottom line, not just economic. It must also capture social equity, social justice and sustainability."

Underlying all this is of course it being rather strategic move overall for the benefit of the country, sense of the quality of life, coupled with cultural tourism and attracting interesting businesses by having interesting cities.

The plan laid out in the article by Brad Haseman, professor in the creative industries faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, and called Creative Nation, outlines why the country needs to develop a coherent cultural policy. Bravo for them, but the article is a little thin on how there going to do this, except for the government pledging 17 million Australian of four years for an Creative Economies innovation Centre, perhaps an excellent start, if research becomes action.

Christiania, You Have My Heart!

2008-04-23T12:57:00.011+02:00

Freetown Christiana started as a "social experiment," with Danish idealists trying to take the liberation talk that was circulating around the counterculture in Copenhagen and make it real. An abandoned Navy barracks five minutes from the center of the city was initially broken into by locals upset with the lack of playgrounds in their neighborhood. They were quickly followed by hippies looking to carve out a section of the city for themselves.

This video dating from 1991 is the primary documentary document of Freetown Christiania, and as beautiful as it is, a lot has changed in the intervening 17 years, including the closure by the government of the open hash trade.

We're planning a mission on it, but for now watch Christiania, You Have My Heart!, to see how one group of hippies created a permanent space for social change with all of the problems, negotiations, victories, and defeats that came out of this one effervescent moment.

Here's a link to a rather thorough wikipedia entry on Freetown Christiania.

You are Here!

2008-04-23T11:53:00.003+02:00

Amy McGuiness gets paid thousands of dollars to take tourists to the North Pole. What do they do when they get there? Take pictures. The only problem, the North Pole looks exactly like the hundreds of miles of white ice around it. The cost: around $30,000 for 30 minutes.

After deciding to visit a friend in the Peace Corps in Mali, John Bowe decided to hitchhike across the Sahara desert, which is probably the most difficult route imaginable. He carried only a bag filled mostly of books and a single change of clothes. One man's adventure to go off the map, off the grid, away from white people, away from technoculture, to the metaphorical heart of the middle of nowhere, almost deliberately

What's the pleasure of being lost, when you know your safe?

How do you map your own life?

Maps of all kinds in these radio stories to which CIA feels a great affinity which can be found here on This American Life. Don't let the title of the show fool you.. Though many of the stories involve Americans, very little of it actually happens in America. And when you're lost in the middle of the Sahara, like so many other travelers, the last thing you're thinking about is your nationality.

We're going off the map and into the airwaves.

Urban Screen

2008-04-22T14:53:00.012+02:00

We only mentioned it last post, but we'd like to tell you about the Urban Screen. This massive media facade shoots down content at the passing tourists in Piazza Duomo, doubtlessly featuring in background of hundreds of thousands of tourists snapshots.

And this time, the content will be ours.

We at CIA have never really liked the word 'content,' as it makes art and advertorials one and the same, but let's say instead of content, Urban Screen will be showing the Check-in Architecture documentaries, roughly between 3-4 and 8-9 everyday.

The screen's frightening size renews our faith in the mission. Each of us, your faithful guides and editors, stood in awe of the awesome mediated force of the screen, especially as flickered with our (and perhaps your) vision.

Don't trust us, look for yourself.

The Medium is the Massage.

Isola under the rain: a watered garden

2008-04-22T11:01:00.021+02:00

We paid a lot of attention to the Salone last week, especially to the five quarters drawing the most public attention. Zona Tortona, Via Ventura, Rho Fiera (of course), Bovisa and Milan's little own special village, Isola.

As for the last one, we sent Serena Porrati (we already starred her as a photographer on our free press) and Corrado Tagliabue to shoot one of our videos, soon to be displayed on the Urban Screen in Piazza Duomo. Here's how Serena describes the quarter:

"There is a multitude of handicraft activities, small and 'trendy' independent eco-design stores mixed up with old commercial family-run businesses putting up a resistance. Slick yet cheap restaurants stand next door to Moroccan take-aways and a tabacchi bar run by South Americans. There are also a designer florist's shop and a book store gallery run by a young curator keeping an eye on new trends and sensibilities in international photography."

Check-in Architecture is interested in urban spaces turning green through community collaboration and critical gardening, so we sent Serena and Corrado to investigate and interview some of the people most aware of eco-interventions in Isola, Milan's central emerging counterculture district. Claudia Zanfi introduced them to the Green Island project she's curating and showed them creative interpretations of the local green. Stefano Massimello, one of the Stecca degli Artigiani guys, explained to them their urbanist projects, construction shenanigans and the pain-in-the-ass problems of neighborhood bureaucracy.

Low-cost geography?

2008-04-21T21:38:00.003+02:00

by Luca Martinazzoli

Let’s talk about low-cost flights. And not just about tourism or that more people are going to airports. The possibility of taking a plane on the cheap has revolutionized the cultural geography of Europe. And it has changed those of us who happen to take the flights. Check-in

Architecture pauses to reflect on the fact that in ten years we have become faced with a new hierarchy of places. Places where, at a cost of a few cents, airplanes land and take off, jetting you to cities both large and small, and sometimes on the edge. They are nodes that draw a completely different map of areas, institutions, people and businesses.

Of course, today we’ve had the Internet and web 2.0. Pervasive networks keep us glued to devices of various types. But this is not enough. It is not enough because at bottom, places are still the nodes of the system. The debate is dated, but it is worth commenting that the net is not eroding the importance of urban spaces. Just skimming a few boring statistics reveals that cities today are more at the heart of economic production than ever before and that an urban renaissance is underway, to the extent that over 50% of the world population lives in one.

There are various reasons for this, differing across macro-regions of the world. But if we focus on Europe, we are probably unable to ignore the increasingly prominent role of cognitive-cultural industries. They are based on the ability to produce symbolic innovation, the ability to turn symbolic capital into products that accumulate in cities. In this way, cities are changing more or less rapidly, renewing through these industries the central role it seemed to have lost just a few years ago.

In this context, if we look at the division of labor in the field of cultural production, we notice that these professions are clustering around low-cost airline hubs that are able to function as magnets. But today, more than ever, we perceive the reverberation of places that are unable
to sustain a consistent job market. They do, however, produce, incubate, and export images. They are bases for professionals and students that commute around Europe. They are the nodes of a dense network of new exchanges and new visions.

You can find architects working for partnerships in Rotterdam living in Milan. Lecturers at universities in London who spend their days off between Barcelona and Berlin. Music producers that split their time between southern Italy and London. These people imply a new generational attitude, that of the low-cost lifestyle. It is not only the possibility and the necessity of moving frequently that marks them out, but also their ability to adapt to new living circumstances and a flexible, international job market.

They find images, chew them up and produce them. Characters that can afford the luxury of low-cost. Understanding how these people inhabit the city, how they see it and what spaces they create, is one of Check-in Architecture’s objectives.

If low-cost geographies are radically remaking and redefining the nodes of cultural production in Europe, then we desire to identify its hierarchies and relationships. We desire to understand its rhythm.

An Anthem for Check-In Architecture

2008-04-18T16:58:00.006+02:00

Oh, the passenger
How, how he rides
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the signs and hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine
Singing la la la la.. lala la la
la la la la.. lala la la
la la la la.. lala la la

Mapbreakers

2008-04-18T11:15:00.007+02:00

Hours of countless research (aka procrastination) by the Check-In Architecture think tank have turned up another internet jewel that we think is very interesting. So Google Earth, for those not in the know, is a program you can download from the Google mothership that allows you to navigate geography in a very interesting way, from photos blended into the map to Wikipedia entries so on so forth.

But intrepid programmers, innovators, drifter, and researchers (aka procrastinators) have both scoured Google Earth and manipulated it to create new interactions with time and space. From couples caught in flagrante delicto (always a favorite for the sex crazed 13-year-old lurking inside all of us) to much more complex monkey wrenches being thrown into human consciousness.

On Google Earth Hacks, you can search through a series of add ons, meant to enhance your Google Earth experience. For example, Google Earth is now largely flat, but many are using tools to render the earth in a searchably three-dimensional world. And though mapping satellites, international flights and football clubs are all good and fun, it's when they really fuck with it when things get interesting, like what the Earth would look like if a meteor smashed into in, or Google Planets, searchable maps for Mars, or global warming sped up just a little bit.

Though we've not heard any serious research on the topic, but we think that mapping technologies as they progress are completely shifting/warping/transforming our consciousness about space. Making everything somehow more immediate, easier, bigger, less foreign and somehow more strange. Mapmakers and cartographers are becoming kind of hip for the first time since Columbus, but what do you call someone who messes with map, changes it shape, plays with it to create new experiences, new worlds. Mapbreakers? Deconstructive Cartography?

Why do I feel theirs a sci-fi novel/new program at MIT somewhere in here.

The First!

2008-04-17T13:18:00.006+02:00

Though we maintain a high level of overexcited earnestness for all of our projects, we sometimes are extra-excitedly earnest for certain missions. Think of a child chasing after an ice cream truck, or a chihuahua humping your leg. We are really this excited! Thus the prodigious use of exclamation points!!!

So once a week, we'll post the abstract for a mission we find especially sexy. Now our version of sexy is probably different than yours. For example, we think Yona Friedman is sexy. You may have a different opinion, but if you're lucky enough to go on this particular mission, your opinion will undoubtedly come to resemble ours. Check-in Architecture: Molding minds to our will, one student at a time!

Here's the abstract. Enjoy!

To: Frankfurt, Germany
Location/Event: Portikus
Title: Smoke on the Water
Date: Coming Soon

Q: Can water help architecture to build utopias in the city?

Frankfurt is an efficient (and often boring landscape-wise) financial center to Germany and it has little of the utopian cityscape of Yona Friedman's visions. If there is any, that has to be the Portikus space for contemporary art, which is the right place to host utopist architect and theorist Friedman's exhibition, which consists of various installations built for the gallery with help from students and alumnus of the Städelschule, drawing from some of his – now less utopian – ideas.

Choose a Place

2008-04-09T13:15:00.006+02:00

From Speer’s delirious dreams for Hitler to the failure of harmonious communities to create collective monuments, the last hundred years brought the monument, in concept and form, to its extreme conclusion. And that century came to an end with the destruction of two highly symbolic monuments: the Twin Towers in New York and the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan.

This new millennium begins with an interesting juxtaposition from the ancient desire to build monuments to a new wave of antimonumental impulse. On one hand the traditional, millennia-old attitude towards the logic of monuments, with the new Olympic stadium in Beijing, the skyscrapers challenging the skies of Dubai, Shanghai and Taiwan, or the new walls on the U.S. Mexican-border or between Israel and Palestine; and alongside these, a few more evolved, democratic, and contemporary metropolises that are producing, through spontaneous activities and commissions to young architects, a “new generation” of monuments that are trying to become horizontal. Open centers, creating an atmosphere of freedom and acceptance, change the demands represented by the many worlds that intersect in contemporary cities.

I believe that these urban creations almost involuntarily give rise to the formation of new communities that attempt to satisfy our deepest human need to meet others, to exchange with them and know them. In these micro-spaces, I see the potential to mediate in urban conflicts and also see a way toward a weaker, more diffuse center, a civil form of a secular and open urbanity.

It would be subject to the same flow of social, symbolic and economic transformations that modern cities constantly experience.

These urban fragments are the offspring of a "noble" twentieth century tradition that cross Ciam’s reflections on the ‘heart of the city’ with the restless urban experiments of Team X, Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds in Amsterdam and the Urbino shared with us by Giancarlo De Carlo, the street humanity of the Smithsons and the humanist radicalism of Archizoom. These urban and social experiments aim to rethink the scale of the metropolitan minute. They question the shadows at the heart of futuristic hyper-cities by offering a warm, welcoming refuge. They work like enzymes necessary for the detailed, silent transformation of the body politic by building new, recognizable centers. They contain the future and the hope that our cities and architecture are still capable of producing political answers.

That is why we felt that the virtuous mechanism of Check-In Architecture could be an extraordinary investigative tool into this important, unseen part of the European metropolis. Moving through these places, understanding how they are woven into the urban fabric and how people live in them and transform them. Stopping for a few hours within these walls, these public squares open to the world, means attempting to understand if the direction we’re heading in is the right one. Relaxing in the shade of an eco-boulevard in Madrid, playing basketball on the roof of the university cafeteria in Utrecht, walking alongside the new Forum in Palermo, or entering Basel stadium, but also investigating how the fragile monuments for the Olympic Games in Athens or the Forum in Barcelona have been, successfully or unsuccessfully, assimilated into the city. These are all fundamental ways, I believe, not only to understand, but also to generate new actions for the future.

Luca Molinari

Reimagining Architecture: One Wall at a Time

2008-04-06T16:41:00.002+02:00

Squat party at Squallyoaks, London.

Literature for Technophiles

2008-04-03T16:38:00.002+02:00

Mega-publisher Penguin books has launched a rather nice six week online project called "We Tell Stories," pairing writers from its stables with new technologies. For Charles Cumming's story, The 21 Steps, the narrative wanders through the landscape London as seen through Google Maps, each turn of the story is a new location on the map.

Hardly Crime and Punishment for the twenty-first century, but it's a far sight better the early wave of hypertext literature where a shiny new toy made of a lot of bad writers temporarily famous for the literary equivalent of being the first kid in class with a calculator. Though we're still working out the kinks on a seamless transition between literature and new technology, both the reader and the technophile in us has taken a shine to this project.

So far Cumming and Toby Litt have stories for you to wander through, and a new one will be posted every week, of which CIA will surely keep you abreast.

Check-in Architecture Blog

2008-03-31T16:34:00.003+02:00

We at Check-In Architecture, after working 12 hours a day in the CIA dungeon (cosy digs in Milano), indulge ourselves in the only form of resistance left in the twenty-first century, surfing the internet, though we would much rather be surfing couches alongside you on missions (lucky bastards).

Though our bodies are chained to our desks, our spirits run free. Watch this space for musings, topical, digressive, contemporary, historic, poetic, and delightfully distracting on everything from architecture, urbanism, public space, private space, fevered imaginings of spaces that don't yet exist, dreamy rememberings of buildings since demolished, cultural production, economies, critique, and of course how all these things are radically effected by new-fangled media (like this here blog).

And lest I forget, shameless self promotion.

Stay tuned.