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L’aménagement du territoire
173 Pour la première fois une architecture nouvelle, qui à chaque époque antérieure était réservée à la satisfaction des classes dominantes, se trouve directement destinée aux pauvres. La misère formelle et l’extension gigantesque de cette nouvelle expérience d’habitat proviennent ensemble de son caractère de masse, qui est impliquée à la fois par sa destination et […]
2009-03-06
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July I5th, I972
Charles Jencks dates the symbolic end of modernist architecture and the passage to the post-modem as 3:32 p. m. on July I5th, I972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development (a version of Le Corbusier’s “machine for modem living”) was dynamited as an unlivable environment for the low-income people it housed. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon officially declared […]
2009-02-05
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Ruins
The future of our lives lies in the ruins of your cities.
2008-12-13
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The Rythmanalyst
Lefebvre outlines a suggestive portrait of the future rhythmanalyst, which differs from that of the psychoanalyst. The rhythmanalyst is all ears. He listens not only to words, however, but to everything happening in the world. He hears things that are usually hardly noticed: noise and sound. He pays attention to the babble of voices, but […]
2008-12-10
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Sensibility
I want to suggest a different sensibility from the bureaucratic (or regulatory planning that dominated the twentieth century – a sensibility that is as alert to the emotional economies of the city as it is to the political economies; as alert to city senses (of sound, sight, touch, smell, taste) as to city census; as […]
2008-12-10
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Marseille
Here we want to underline the contrast between the prototype of an universally recognized architectural model, Le Corbusier’s Unitè d’Habitation, which today has become a high standard middle class residence, and the degeneration of such a model as expressed in the French banlieu, representing today the most dystopic, conflicted, defeating product of this ideology. Segregation, […]
2008-12-10
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Detroit
A prototype of the blue collar city, archetype of the Fordist industrial organization of work , Detroit has been strongly affected by the industrial restructuring since the seventies and is an epitome of transformations and contradictions of the late-modern shift towards symbolic economies. The Fordist model of industrial organization has been a reference point for […]
2008-12-10
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Berlin: Periphery at the centre
The particular historical condition of Berlin, divided by walls and borders, wounded by wars and destructions, designed a city without form characterized by fractures and fragmentations, somehow denying the concept of periphery. In a city without form and without centre, periphery and centrality are questionable concepts. Up to the eighties the city has been the […]
2008-12-10
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La Habana/Alamar_INT/EXT
2008-12-10
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Alamar – La Habana
It is the first step, a sort of number zero: “Doble Forza” is a pilot already realised with low budget and technical standard. Alamar, is a new city built in the 1970s in the outskirts of La Habana, mostly with rudimental prefabricated technologies inherited by the soviets; it has been put in place through self-costruction […]
2008-12-09