"For the longest time I didn't know what I was writing about. I wrote to figure it out and by the time I did I was done."

Jonathan Safran Foer

inglourious basterds

so the two characters that began the movie, ended it.

and there are traces of cinema paradiso which also parallels the "italians" (coincidence?), a reference to cinderella with a twist, and an overt reference to westerns (once upon a time).

and kudos to chrisopth waltz or something.

what else was there? and what could it mean

Dear lennard-future,

Please remember- mornings to yourself make you happy. Drinking too much when you're angry doesn't help. Overeating when you're down just makes you sadder, but a good well prepared meal helps.

Also, a good nights sleep cures most fluctuations, and so does taking a break from the computer.

p.s. turn the internet off when you're working, it distracts you too much.

love,

lennard-present

"there" is not there.

On Henri Lefebvre

for Lefebvre, space doesnt not exist in itself, but is created by human actions and other spatial practices. Lefebvre also states that, in this everyday, utilized space, power relations become visible. These relationsh are articulated through the ordering of the physical space and how it is represented. For Lefebvre space is thus at the crux of power and power relationships.

Architectural Positions, PRACTICES, page 335

Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (the production of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is the central argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La production de l’espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainly within human geography, as seen in the current work of authors such as David Harvey and Edward Soja. Lefebvre is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory, embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever expanding reach of the urban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities (which is treated in La pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, amongst other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").

In his book The Urban Question (translated into English very early, in contrast with Lefebvre's works), Manuel Castells heavily criticizes Lefebvre's theoretical arguments contained in the books published in the 1960s about the contemporary city from a Marxist standpoint. Castells' criticisms of Lefebvre's subjective approach to Marxism echoed the Structuralist school of Louis Althusser, of which Lefebvre was an early critic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some may argue that the acceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the long and theoretically dense The Production of Space.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that there are different levels of space, from very crude, natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced ('social space').^[10]

Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions. As a Marxist philosopher (but highly critical of the economicist structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. Therefore, the notion ofhegemony as proposed by Antonio Gramsci is used as a reference to show how the social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance.

"(Social) space is a (social) product [...] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power."^[11]

Lefebvre argued that every society - and therefore every mode of production - produces a certain space, its own space. The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space - it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself - Lefebvre argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of its spatiality). Then if every society produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaring itself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar abstraction incapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticized Soviet urban planners, on the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced the modernist model of urban design (interventions on physical space, which were insufficient to grasp social space) and applied it onto that context:

"Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa."^[12]

"... going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that."

the sun also rises

live each day like its your last, but always love it like its your first.

There is a new form of human settlement - from the nomadic, to the agrarian to the urban/suburban dichotomy and the metropolis, we now have the mediapolis.

The difference in this form of urbanity is that unlike previous formations which were rooted in physical spatialities and densities, this new form is ephemeral, defined by virtuality and multimediality which interact to give us connectivity across spatial borders. Exploiting this connectivity gives us interactivity.

What is unique about this is that it doesn't require a tabula rasa of the physical realm to imagine - it can already be grafted onto our existing infrastructures and realities.

pts for further research: sasika sassen, howard rheingold, christine boyer.

remember to avoid blanket rhetoric and confusion of metaphors, as have been employed by william mitchell and marcos novak (the fallacy of the diagram, anyone?) possibly interesting however, is jean baudrillard's idea of simulcra. authentity as the physical stuff of stuff is nowmoot - as walter benjamin writes in The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. Echos of this can be read in Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things.

One concrete example of this new form of "nodal urbanity" is in Global Cities. Cities such as tokyo, london and new york form the most important hubs in the current worldwide information economy. their financial districts thus assume their own strategic positions because they have been detached from their direct environments. What would a map of all these virtually connected centers look like if conceived as one physical aggoloration. This is only meant as a study tho.

Another point of reference could be Superstudio and Archigram.

the uncomplicated brightness of existence, its a beautiful life

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

every revolution is a case of Cain and Abel, the son killing the father. A case of Tabula Rasa and new beginnings. But can we think about this as a hijacking. (to be elaborated)

remember this: augmented reality

It is one of those dark and stormy nights if not for the fact that instead of dark and stormy it was cloudy and windy and it was in the late morning but it felt like a late afternoon.

yay!

http://www.notcot.org/#23993

remember, "it is all as it is"

che in bolivia, perhaps they didnt want that revolution.

"Che" is all in the present tense. He has made an irrevocable decision to overthrow governments, he explains why in his descriptions of injustice, he identifies with peasants and not with his own ruling class, and although he is nominally a Communist, we do not hear discussion of theory and ideology. He seems completely focused on the task immediately before him. His method is to give voice to popular resentment against a dictator, win the support of the people and demoralize opposing armies of unenthusiastic soldiers. He needs few men because he has a powerful idea behind him.

from rotterdam, "The Chilean coup d'état of 1973 is a landmark in the history of Chile and the Soviet-American Cold War. On 11 September 1973, the government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military in a coup d’état.

The coup occurred two months after a first failed attempt, the Tanquetazo — Tank putsch — and a month after the Chamber of Deputies (with an Opposition majority) condemned President Allende’s alleged breaches of the Constitution. President Allende died during the coup; the cause of his death remains disputed.

A military junta took control of the government, with the original plan of power being rotated between the heads of the Air Force, Navy, Carabineros (Chilean police force) and the Army lead by General Augusto Pinochet. However the head of the Chilean Army being the oldest branch of the military, originally founded in 1810 was determined to be the first of the co-rulers, a role that was never surrendered to the other military leaders of the country as it should have been. Thus General Augusto Pinochet assumed power after deposing President Salvador Allende, establishing a military government that ruled until 1990."

likes prouve, s&b, early koolhaas and hertzberger. but architecture which references its own discipline gets boring after a while, don't you think?

If art will eat art up, architecture will exhaust itself soon enough.

fun weekend, cool beans with fun people. "someone to call home", but who says people can't move house aye. grin.

if you could compare urbanism to park/garden landscaping, where the french model of a god's eye-view, perhaps that could be used to describe many planned cities.

berlin on the other hand, a plan that has been mutilated, collaged and stitched back too many times to remember, maybe defies its initial intention (if there was any. but one can always retroactively dig up a pretension).

So it feels more like the english garden, a series of follies not necessarily related in program, theme or style, but only by virtue (and chance) of their geographic proximities. This freedom gives each their own developmental arcs and specific mutations (understood through program, demographic, section, scale, materiality and poche.)

The fact that Berlin was a city designed for 5 million but now inhabited by 3 million gives it this degree of freedom - for areas to expand and contract without contamination.

reinventing storytelling in the digital age

http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15302v1001

// mcluhan