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the metamorphosis of Beirut City Centre Building
by Farid Noufaily
The signing of the Ta’if Agreement on 22 October 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the Lebanese Civil War that had raged since 1975. The war ended in March 1991, when the new Lebanese Parliament enacted the General Amnesty Law, which stated that there were to be no victors and no victims in the war (la ghalib le maghlub). Unfortunately, this law allowed the Lebanese people to turn a blind eye to the ugly truths of the war and ushered in an era of uneasy silence in Lebanon, where no word is uttered, no acknowledgement nor responsibility is taken by anyone surrounding the desperate events of the past 33 years. Today, as Lebanon’s political battle for independence and a unified national identity continues, the government still hasn’t supported the public in breaking the silence. I believe that this legislated lack of collective/public self-expression has rendered both the local and the diaspora populations incapable of reconciling with their traumatic past. Though public confessions, art, film and novels have begun to facilitate some discourse, architecture’s role will be to gather, catalyse, and give voice to the countless victims of the war. The rehabilitation of Beirut City Centre Building (CCB) is an architectural proposal to breach the silence.
A failed attempt at modernism...
A sinister sniper point along the infamous Green Line...
An impromptu brothel during the civil war...
A failed retrofit by the Ministry of Finance in 1992...
A venue for illegal raves in the mid 1990s...
Slated for demolition in 2003...
These are but a few of the many different incarnations of the former Beirut CCB which stands just south of Place des Martyrs and is the only remaining ruin in the centre of Solidère’s newly-restored Beirut Central District. Referred to by locals as the bubble, the soap, the blob or, most often, the egg, the ovoid CCB was cursed by the misfortune of being at the exact geographic centre of the civil war, and has been blackened by neglect ever since the war ended. Even in ruins, the 6,000 m2 building remains a remarkable surviving icon from Beirut’s golden age of Modernist architecture.
Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam designed the CCB in 1965. The urban complex was planned as three blocks: Block 1 would contain five underground floors (total 22,500 m2) for car parking and a taxi service station; Block 2 would be three floors with 144 retail shops, a 1000 m2 supermarket, a 900-seat cinema, a restaurant and a snack bar; and Block 3 was to be three mixed-use towers with eight, twelve, and 21 floors respectively — a wide range of commercial services under one roof.
Karam’s vision was never completed; only part of his original proposal had been built when the war broke out in 1975 — two floors of the base in Block 2, the cinema and one tower. The CCB’s adjacency to the Place des Martyrs, as well as its unique shape, made it a prime target for heavy shelling during the war. After 17 years and many failed renovation proposals, today’s CCB sits vacant, guarded and inaccessible.
CCB promised, as did all modernist architecture, a rational future of increasing peace, prosperity and social justice. History betrayed this promise, and the CCB instead became a powerful symbol of the impotence of modernisation when confronted with unresolved social and ethnic conflicts from the past. The New CCB, proposed here, can be a symbol of national unity through the rebuilding and re-appropriation of what was once a potent symbol of a rational future. The surviving elements of the ruin will be incorporated into the new building. The plan makes use of the remains of the original, housing the many program elements required to address new roles for the building: archive space, both digital and material, indoor and outdoor exhibition space as well as artist residences and state-of-the-art meeting and research spaces. All of these surround the most important space of all, the space of the voice, where citizens are invited to share their account, experiences and opinions of the civil war. The New CCB will stand as a beacon – a place for reconciliation of the past and discussions for the future. The new program begins at the datum of the city street (the present), descends through the strata of the city’s layers to the space of dialogue, memory, and recollection (the past) and finally rises to the commanding contemplative view of the city (the future).
the present: the living monument
By implementing a non monumental program that is part of the everyday life of the city, the New CCB will become a living monument that not only commemorates the history of the civil war, but also celebrates the present. Visitors are free to wander onto the premises of the New CCB directly from the redesigned Place des Martyrs. The various pavilions provide access to the restored theatre (the egg), a café, residential and commercial floors above, and a nightclub. A bus and taxi station south of the CCB will again centralise the transportation network that once ran so actively through Place des Martyrs.
the past: the descent to reconciliation
Below the level of the city lies the ruins and origins of Lebanon. Descending into this void brings one closer to not only the original level of the historic city, but to something sacred. The archives containing the collective memories and voices of the citizens, both patriot and expatriate, are located in the lowest levels, where they are protected from the current unstable and uncertain present. This imagery is not unlike our own escape to the chthonic origins of our hearts, depicted in our escape to the safety of the underground in times of war. Here, the archives frame the Space of the Voice. It is in this space, where whispers echo, that the voices of all Lebanese – regardless of nationality and sect – are heard. Here, the three shared languages – Arabic, French, and English – resonate in the space, and blend, as if one dialogue.
the future: truth and reconciliation archive centre (TRAC)
The archive itself, though effective at storing and encouraging dialogue, is only one step in mastering the past and imagining a bright future for the Lebanese people. The ascent from the sacred darkness is equally important. An elevator links the Space of the Voice (at the archive level) with the privileged Research Level. Perched high above the city, researchers, builders and planners of the future city can cast their gaze from the mountains to the horizon, and to the city in between.
The New CCB will not only become the Space of the Voice amidst a landscape of silence, but a hub for conducting research and promoting art. By gathering, in a single place, a wide range of works and research dealing with the civil war in many media, Lebanon can begin to articulate a unified voice. Rebuilding the CCB will be more than simply revitalising part of Lebanon’s dark past. As its ruins reflect the mindset of a people long ago, its new form will allow for the re-imagination of a unified people and a unified Lebanon.
Noufaily, Farid. 'House of Reconciliation' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Farid Noufaily and On Site review
land of shadows
Wayne Guy
Walking through the downtowns of most North-American cities can be characterised by tall buildings coming directly to the sidewalk creating hostile thoroughfares with little reprieve for the pedestrian to loiter, relax or enjoy. Yellowknife is much the same in this regard having adopted the worst aspects of urbanism though on a diminutive scale.
The Wall, a project completed by Guy Architects, seeks to arrest, nurture and invite citizens to loiter, sit down and take it all in. This runs counter to the culture that predominates in the City of Yellowknife in which loitering is seen undesirable, bad for business and practiced only by less fortunate souls in the community. It is indeed the predominant hostility of the urban environment that typically provides only parking lots and back alleys to meet and share, that characterises the predominate failure of the city. As such areas are marginalised, they require additional policing and monitoring as they become prone to vandalism. It is the premise of this project that if you create comfortable places for people to spend some time with good exposure to sun and view, it promotes congregation. With more people from a wider cross section of society, the group is self-policing and in this urban living room individuals get to know both their community and each other a little better.
The new park is a triangular niche on the north-west side of Franklin Avenue, Yellowknife’s main street. It faces directly south with a north wall serving as a wind break and a climbable screen to the adjacent basketball courts.
Benches sit around a one-foot by one-foot concrete tile mosaic chessboard, part of a games area. The wall’s staggered, geometric lattice pattern has an immediate and beneficial effect: the sculpted forms play with light during the course of the day, marking the passage time and conveying images and pattern which have myriad meanings for those in the park. The wall reminds some of crosses, others, a line of Inukshuks. These wide cultural interpretations marks it as an effective piece of urban art, a sculptural piece which provides an animated backdrop for thinking, for participating in community life, for loitering.
Since The Wall and the adjacent plaza have been opened, street people have begun to use the park, as have a growing number from the community at large. In this new milieu pluralism, tolerance and understanding is nurtured as citizens of all ilks can now share a common experience. It is a sanctuary of inclusiveness, a gesture of generosity in a predominantly selfish environment where the private thoroughfares of malls dominate public streets.
At the end of the day, for most days of the year, it is collective public experiences which mark the success of an urban environment. The more of these we have, the greater the city. The Wall has been Yellowknife’s first baby step to claim the street back from the strictly utilitarian movement of vehicles to a place which contributes to the identity and image of a city.
Guy, Wayne. 'Land of Shadows: Jiewa Park, Yellowknife' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Wayne Guy and On Site review
Mason White and Lola Sheppard: Lateral Architecture
The urban street traditionally united three physical roles: that of circulation, that of public space and that of built frontage and address.
— Stephen Marshall1
typological studies of traditional streets have tended to focus on the dimensional and qualitative characteristics of good street-making: the width of vehicular lanes and sidewalks, the presence of trees, benches, lighting and so forth. In such studies, the temporal and programmatic aspect of the street is typically overlooked. With the advent of the modern city, the street was reconceived as infrastructure in service of efficient mobility, effectively liberating road form from city block form and divorcing the street from its role as a programmatically charged, public realm. This phenomenon has reached its greatest impact in the sprawling margins of cities.
Cliffside Slips is a project that attempts to re-integrate mobility and the public realm through a reprogramming of streetscape infrastructure. The project centres on the crosswalk as a space capable of re-appropriation and new occupation. Like the sidewalk, the crosswalk has the potential to serve as an extension of the public realm. Akin to connective tissue, it invites a continuous urbanism across connecting thoroughfares.
Cliffside Slips is a proposal that will reconnect a neighbourhood and stimulate a retail zone bisected by Kingston Road, a six-lane arterial. The proposal uses a range of connections to stitch together a community that is divided physically, socially and economically. The retail and urban conditions of the road are asymmetrical; the buildings on the north side establish a recognizable main street form, while on the south side buildings are set back from the street in a strip mall typology. The six-lane main street presents more than a physical separation, it reinforces a psychological barrier between the north and south neighbourhoods reducing connectivity and discouraging urban vitality.
Urban Marina
The Kingston Road proposal takes cues from the fleeting informal urbanism occurring at the nearby marina beyond the Cliffside Village bluff. Cliffside Slips produces a new infrastructure / urbanism hybrid. The intention is to create a main street that translates the idea of docking, bridging, anchoring, and temporary occupation to incrementally convert the suburban strip in Cliffside into an urban marina of roving activity and vitality. Cliffside Slips uses an inventory of existing urban infrastructure elements that includes pocket parks, crosswalks, medians and temporary parking lot occupations to connect both sides of the street into a dense public space.
Pocket Parks
Pocket parks, places to rest or play, act as attractors along the street. The pocket parks, which could be rented or purchased by the City or the Business Improvement Area, take advantage of open lots or derelict properties in the area, adding value to the adjacent properties and the rest of the street. The program for the parks would relate to the adjacent businesses and arrangements for shared public-private space could promote activities such as outdoor cafes, playgrounds and other activities. Pocket parks are often extensions of the crossing slips and act as an urban attractor.
Crossing Slips & Medians
The crossing slips and medians act as the connective tissue of the village. Slips merge crosswalks and pocket parks, and are inserted along Kingston Road at intermittent locations. The use of slips slows traffic, encourages pedestrian fluidity between the two sides and makes a series of places each with a distinct identity. Depending on local conditions, these slips project differently; some connect to pocket parks while others connect across parking lots to the strip malls on the south side.. The crossing slips act as progenitors for anchoring temporary events within the large parking lots in underused times.
The existing median, currently an inaccessible island in a sea of infrastructure, is expanded to become a resting point and to serve as a linear green buffer, providing a more intimate scale of street, both on the north and south side. The median also accommodates the proposed streetcar along Kingston in the future, incorporating transit shelters and rest points.
Dockings
Dockings are temporary urban infrastructures that bring street life to the parking lots of the strip malls on the south side of the street when they are not being used. These urban insertions allow for larger, temporal programs such as markets, outdoor cinemas and festivals. These would serve as early catalysts for the project, attracting people and extending the retail life of the surrounding shops.
Incremental Urbanism
Cliffside Slips is an incremental project not a master plan. The project recognises that it is economically and logistically more feasible, in the short-term, to transform the public space of the street, particularly through program and temporal interventions, than it is to change the physical configuration of the built fabric. The crossings, slips, parks and occupations can be produced over time as the economy and culture of the neighbourhood changes and develops.
Public space is defined not solely by built form, but equally by program, event and infrastructure. Appropriating existing street infrastructure such as the cross-walk, the median and the parking lot, allows a shift away from the purely pragmatic function of movement control to suggest new ways of occupying the public realm.
1 Stephen Marshall. Streets and Patterns: The Structure of Urban Geometry. Abingdon, New York: Spon, 2005.
Sheppard, Lola and Mason White. 'Cliffside Steps' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Lateral Architecture and On Site review
Cote-des-Neiges, Montreal
Nathalie Heroux, Olivier Boucher and Gabrielle Nadeau
Côte-des-Neiges presents itself as an exemplary axis, representative of Montreal’s harmonious cohabitation of diverse populations. The axis is literally serviced and used by a heterogeneous population, of all ages, all social statuses and of all origins.
Here, the different cultural impressions draw themselves subtly by commercial activities where the local forces express themselves by densely setting up small establishments on the street. The path’s usage does not become less bounded, controlled and regulated, segregating commercial activity from that of the sidewalk and that of street.
Inversely, in many countries, particularly in Asia, the chaotic investment of the street blurs these limits and leaves the way clear for the social forces to saturate all available zones. This standpoint is in complete opposition to the North American attitude concerning the street, which favours the establishment of a controlled environment, and that opposes citizens’ freedom of organisation.
The work sites that are currently dispersed along Côte-des-Neiges road challenge the way that we apprehend the street, transforming the normally banal progression into a true obstacle course, temporarily disturbing the established order. These forbidden zones invade the street in a random and unexpected fashion; they form an ideal alibi for the construction of ludic social installations. Our proposition of using road works as deceptions allows for spontaneous, marginal or foreign practices by using a disruptive code accepted and assimilated by all.
Heroux, Natalie. 'Investments' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Natalie Heroux and On Site review
rebuilding the mat in the contemporary urban landscape
Matthew Neville
Density is a contentious issue in Halifax. A region characterised by a slow growth conservatism, the city appears divided, even paralysed, between heritage preservation and new urban real estate development. Misrepresenting density as purely height, coupled with excessively rigid and paradoxically vague municipal building regulations, Halifax shows a great disconnect between social and spatial perceptions of the liveable city. One process, called mat-building, defines density as both physical and of social characteristics at the ground plane, and is measured by levels of intensity and mixitié; mat-building is density at the scale of habitat. As a strategy to increase density in low-density North American cities, mat-building can enrich the presently hostile [sub]urban pedestrian environment, offering an alternative to the relatively unchallenged New Urbanism model. With a fine-grained historic fabric and many vacant sites ripe for redevelopment, Halifax is an ideal testing ground for mat-building. It would give the city valuable insight into the tribulations and contradictions of its rich history, culture and its unique sense of place.
Introduced by Alison Smithson in 1974, mat-building provides individual freedom of movement through the city by weaving close-knit patterns of association between objects, supported by a dense internal language of circulation. Mat-building emerged from Smithson’s fascination with the traditional Arabic casbah – its rich texture, ‘full of starts and stops and shadow…with a high degree of connectedness to allow for change of mind and the in-roads of time’. As connective tissue in various phases of construction, destruction or decay, mats are never finished: they encapsulate the continuous evolution of urban form.
Mat-building is a process: it structures high density patterns of living. Mat-building requires delicate interplay between variations and repetitions of form; it is governed by connections and thresholds rather than by geometric boundaries. In contrast, a grid is indifferent to and detached from topography; no where is this more evident than in the 1749 British plan for Halifax where a flat military grid was laid upon a steep hillside. The ultimate objective of mat-building is total integration of building, tissue and landscape. From building to city block, mat-building intensifies the relationship of landscape to culture by emphasising process and organisation over objects.
Mats are close-knit, fine-grain fabrics with a dense internal language where choice of movement for the user is maximised; they allow for easy appropriation of space; they welcome organic, incremental growth and various states of construction, destruction and decay. They are produced under the influence of culture, landscape and time.
Remnants of mats are visible in Halifax as one navigates from the top of the glacial drumlin where a 19th century citadel remains, through the historical residue scattered over the slope, down to the harbour and the edge of the ocean. As the grid pattern aligns the short side of the blocks with the water, it increases the east-west porosity –the number of choices– of the fabric. Personal space unfolds; each part of the route is governed by time and a series of sequential, changing thresholds.
Although the Citadel and harbour seem to present a stable bi-polar system while peripheral areas fill a dynamic role to meet changing urban needs, recent history tells us this is not the case. Such monuments act as divisive objects that fragment the tissue as well as the city. At a smaller scale, there are numerous vacant sites scattered throughout the fabric that act in similar ways by creating barriers, dead zones and areas of exclusion that further degrade quality of place.
The site of the former Halifax Infirmary (including two adjacent parking lots) is the most significant vacant site on the peninsula. With no shortage of ideas for its redevelopment as residents, business leaders, politicians and developers express their desires through many recent visioning exercises held by the city, the debate over the future of this site is only just beginning. Many proposed uses are institutional (a library and courthouse) while others focus on more residential and commercial space in the area. The site is a strategic location, next to the Dalhousie’s schools of engineering, architecture and planning, and between Citadel Hill, a national historic, Spring Garden Road, a main shopping area and Barrington Street, a proposed heritage district. Rather than highlighting these differences by engaging in acts of monument building, the city is in desperate need of a strategy to build associations and social and spatial interdependence in this area. As a site where distinct urban areas collide, it has the potential to act as a threshold between the primarily residential south end of the city, commercial areas to the east and north, and the hospital and university areas in the west. Instead of creating an exception in the tissue, the city requires a reciprocity that weaves together old and new physical elements, and social patterns of use and behaviour, creating a dense fabric that remains active throughout the busy summers and often long winters.
Imagining a new centre of stability in the city – anchored by strong existing public institutions – the elements that fill the site must take on an unconventional, anti-monumental shape. Through an organic understanding of the in-between – a sort of interstitial urbanism – these elements can not only form the physical construct of the site, but can create habitat and allow for unexpected patterns of human behaviour. Such a process requires one to step away from buildings and plans viewed from above and to explore the hidden potential on the ground, in the city, on the street and in the landscape.
Aldo Van Eyck predicted an end to architecture’s fascination with form, to be replaced by a ‘culture of determined relations’ where ‘the relation between things and within things are of greater significance than the things themselves’. Mat-building continues this push for a shift in architectural design from static imagery to organisation, temporality and transition. It places architecture closer to the humanities and in a position better able to deal with the dynamics of contemporary cosmopolitan forms of urbanity. Mat-building is place-making in a phenomenological sense – using the experiences of people as the foundation of design. The mat is a discussion of density, city life (in buildings and in the street) and cultural differences in the use and meaning of space. In this sense, the mat may be the most appropriate ’ground cover’ for culturally diverse cities as it embraces the overlapping and complex structuring of social and spatial elements of urban life.
Neville, Matthew. 'Rebuilding the Mat in the Contemporary Urban Landscape' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Matthew Neville and On Site review
a nature scene for parking lots in Los Angeles
Lia Maston
The 20th Century left an enormous asphalt footprint on the earth’s surface. Cities sprawled horizontally. Impermeable, bituminous seas surrounded malls, commercial centres and industrial parks. Rising from the asphalt sea, a cloud of smog produced beautiful pink and gold sunsets. Too soon the hot, mineral city began to asphyxiate itself.
Could the architecture of the 21st Century actively reverse the effects of 100 years of asphalt? What would it take?
Inspired by the mythology of building with nature, Paradise is a hybrid architecture: part living, verdant air filter; part concrete and steel. An undulating, floating network of greenery rests on tall stalks which are implanted in parking lots in Los Angeles (one parking space per stalk), evoking the hanging gardens of Babylon. The plant life support system consists of suspended hydroponic hypertextiles that are breathable and flexible; a construction inspired by the traditional wire mesh garden topiary. Living suites and gardens are nested in the shaded folds of these hydroponic drapes. People and mechanical services travel via the concrete stalks from the parking level to the garden level. The gardens, terraces and social spaces of the dwelling (kitchen, living room and dining room) are located on this level – open to the sky. The intimate spaces of the residences are suspended below, completely immersed in the verdant sheets. As a result, the views from bedroom windows are always across screens of leaves.
Far from the tame nature that holds up Laugier’s hut, the plant life in Paradise is assumed to be an independent force with its own needs, capable of growing, dying and being reborn. It recalls the idea of living in a state of negotiation with nature, as the giant vaults of a gothic cathedral built in the image of the medieval forest, or the beanstalk in the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk, which embodies a fantastic will beyond the control of Jack or the villagers. In Paradise, to reinforce this wild quality of nature, giant topiary rabbits jump freely through the scene.
A playful and figurative representation of nature, Paradise is destined for a popular landscape. The most ordinary, ubiquitous urban situations hide incredible potential. Not only could lost real estate above surface parking lots be recycled, the parking lot itself could benefit from the microclimate introduced by a fantastic new parasol. The ecological movement’s living air filters, green roofs and walls (as much symbolically evocative as effective), could be liberated from their building envelopes. They could take on greater proportions, becoming breathing parks, floating above other surfaces generally intended to prohibit plant growth.
I thought of this project after looking at Ed Ruscha’s paintings and photographs of freeways, advertisements, strip malls and parking lots in Los Angeles. Ruscha captures a streetscape of rapid production and consumption, built to be experienced from a vehicle traveling at a high speed. Absurd, instantly appealing, and charged with a Hollywood romanticism, Los Angeles is urban sprawl at its most enhanced.
Consider such sprawl in all of its mania and fun, and rethink the composition of our cities where asphalt is often the largest land user.
Maston, Lia. 'Paradise: a nature scene for parking lots in Los Angeles' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Lia Maston and On Site review
Monastiraki, Greece
Efrosina Charalambous and Anna Papachristoforou
Describing the street in terms of field, we inevitably move from the one towards the many: from individuals to collectives. The complicated infrastructures that emerge from the interaction of different situations of design, processes of self-organisation and expectations, transform the city into an agglomeration of autonomous structures. The dynamics of a crowd, of subjects wandering in the city motivated by complex desires and interacting in unexpected ways – as one more field of vectors in the streetscape – intensifies different experiences in particular moments of time, sustaining the generic form of the city. A city’s coherence and generic form is produced through the coexistence and interface of different conditions at a local level.
Through a new reading that incorporates the complex behaviours of user-citizens and new dynamic actions, a city could be described as a collection of activities, as a field of forces. ‘City’ is a living organism that continually reorganises and readjusts itself as a complex system, where small local structures cooperate with global flows. Such a consideration requires an approach to the city from the inside, from its interior, tracing the ways the field develops, evolves and transforms and not to observe it from the outside as a distinct object, a material structure that remains the same, changes or disappears. The flow of action and rhythm of the streetscape, which is continuously equipped by arbitrary and ephemeral interventions, converts the space into a field of forces, where all seem to be in play. An excellent example of such a field is the area of Monastiraki in Athens. Monastiraki is an area in-between the noise of the commercial triangle of modern Athens and the tranquillity of the ruins in the ancient Agora. Monastiraki can be described as non-pure, because even though it is a space interwoven with the concept of the market, the real scenario that unfolds in its interior reveals a space composed by the coexistence of various elements. Different functions, some even incompatible with each other, agglomerate in the same place, intermix and thus blur the notion of any clean or pure image. A mixture of scenarios and activities that overlap, diverse activities that many times appear functioning complementarily can compose places whose identities cannot be determined with clarity.
The boundaries of private activities are extended into and disrupt the street while the interior of the building validates an expansion of this same street. The continuous succession of private and public accelerates and lends the space a hybrid character. Thus an intermediate space is articulated, one that unifies diverse elements while respecting the identity of each, allowing their simultaneous presence and expanding the field of action. A space that embraces alternation and is capable of combining and blending, stimulates the progress and the succession of events, amplifying the articulation of relations and relationships in the street. It is of great interest how the urban landscape of Monastiraki receives any new structure. Instead of occupying or totally replacing an existing building, the ‘new’ structure collaborates and adapts, incorporating elements of the existing structure. A ‘game’ between the past and the present, an intermediate situation, characterises the everyday experience in Athens. The augmentative evolvement is supported by mechanisms capable of articulating different movements and events according to internal orders and external requirements. It is not a single geometric structure that is being imposed or that predominates – ‘the overall form is an elaboration of conditions established locally’. The conditions, the mixture and incorporation, detected in the microscale, in the internal, are arranged by parasitic relations between the structural elements and the activities as well.
Monastiraki ceases to be a homogeneous Cartesian place and constitutes the field that allows to desires of the subject to emerge — a field generated by conflicts, clashes and inter-crossing that eventually produce a large diversity of combinations, densities and intensities of experience at specific moments in the extended field of the cityscape. The complex and flexible system that modulates space and articulates relations and events, extends the field of action, inviting the unanticipated, the spontaneous, the intimate, the erotic. Space transformed through such actions enables self-determination through continuous negotiations between individual expectations, desires and fantasies. Such space is an inter-media where each person can be defined and at the same time define his environment according to his desires. The changeable, unstable, precarious streetscape of Monastiraki is in fact a relational space, not only for taking a stroll in, but also for personal and/or shared stimulus.
Here the interest of architecture is no longer in generating form; its value arises from the adoption of relations in space, dynamic actions and spatial situations that introduce a particular environment. The subject of our research is a flexible framework that embraces transformation and where the user himself activates his environment. Through an experimental redefinition, architecture can turn to site. Working with the field, new qualities may emerge with the acceptance of complexity: design activates both visible and latent spatial dynamics leading to an architecture that responds to our desire to interact, to be activated, to interrelate.
With this project of a digital art workshop, we are experimenting at Monastiraki, exploring a space of in-between which disputes the structural context. We do not encounter the ‘building’ as an entity, a self-referential object, but as a process of actions in the urban field; a transmitter of activities that feeds and feeds back the flows of the street. At the in-between space of building and city we are suggesting a broadened ‘street’ that interweaves with the building system. The folding of the ground detects new spaces of relation and action: joint with a vertical ground, a scaffolding, a superposition, a support of action. Between them, intermediate spaces emerge; new, strange spaces, spaces for the formation of new spatialities. This is an architectural project whose identity is almost ephemeral, an unfinished project in continual evolution.
Charalambous, Efrosina. 'Sites of Complexity in the Urban Field: Monastiraki' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Efrosina Charalambous and Anna Papachristoforou and On Site review
and lessons learned
Sumoproject: Ruth Alejandra Mora and Gaston Soucy
Having had direct contact with the uneven distribution of wealth and resources in Latin America has taught us a form of recycling that goes beyond ecology. To us, recycling is also a social act where the constant reinvention of a particular resource is a choice that comes from the social consciousness of necessity and responsibility.
Thesis Bench is the result of re-cycling and re-inventing second hand materials. It is composed of a series of 1x4s and scrap pieces of wood previously used as frames for a thesis presentation. The 1x4 studs are staggered horizontally to create a sitting area while the scrap wood is inserted in between to act as vertical support. These operations produce a ‘random’ and artistic disposition of all the pieces creating a dynamic, playful and yet functional object.
Sumoproject. 'Social acts' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Ruth Alejandra Mora and On Site review
by Farid Noufaily
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