Felix Schwimmer is shorlisted for the “Migrating Landscapes”. “Migrating Landscapes” is a project to be exhibited in the Canadian Pavilion of the Architecture Venice Biennale 2012.
Solo exhibition of Felix Schwimmer at 22A22 gallery in Florence. January 2012.
by Juan Oyarbide
The project explores a subversive transformation of a very well-established architectural product – the office – into a new set of spaces that, by means of a narrative, propose an alternative reality. It is an attempt to deal with the “wondering woman” and the material world as defined by the current commodified architectural landscape of the late-capitalist society.
The narrative is the device that addresses the parameters of interpretation, transformation and generation of an office located in Tower 42 of the City of London. The plot is driven by a non-linear structure consisting of a series of scenarios that Nora, a young accountant, re-creates and journeys through in her imagination as an exercise in escapism from the tyranny of late-capitalist office work, while she re-assesses gender policies in the workplace.
The project is an extreme détournement of the tyranny of late-capitalist office work from a gender perspective by means of an illustrated narrative consisting of a set of psycho-geographical spaces based on an exercise in escapism.
The spatial proposal stems from the character’s literal interpretation of a metaphorical invisible woman of tower 42, who inhabits and transforms the office following her desires abstracted into needs.
The spatial production follows a particular logic, whereby a rejection of the discriminatory stereotype of womanhood engenders a rejection of the commodification of the working woman’s material world. This translation provides a de-sanctification of the workspace and a de-commodification of the objects of consumption that create and fill the office, as a new personal construction of herself and the world.
This proposal aspires to provide a hybrid spatial response against objective universal spaces, where a solitary neo-Babylonian from the financial sector of the City of London détourns the liberal myth of a Robinson Crusoe whose island is the office and whose material goods are consumer goods, following the abstraction of a world inhabited by a unique individual who, rather than a free universal man, is a particular woman looking for her freedom.
Watch the film to follow the narrative
[toggle heading="Arcadian Reception"]
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[toggle heading="Tailor's Photocopy Room"]
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[toggle heading="Operation Toilet"]
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[toggle heading="Dining Sanctuary"]
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[toggle heading="Flight Simulator"]
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[toggle heading="Vending Laboratory"]
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[toggle heading="Galilean Bedroom"]
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[toggle heading="Forensic Laundry"]
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[toggle heading="Ludopoly Drawer"]
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[toggle heading="Voyeur's Server Room"]
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Follow the Process Blog
By Simon Winters
by Ju-byung Lee
Today’s geophysical environment is shifting with stunning speed and unpredictability. Dense the production of greenhouse gases emitted as the success of human activity and consumption of Earth resources has contributed to uncomfortable climatic change that may give rise to the loss of the habitable land mass and ecospecies included humankind.
Contemporary building, as realized architecture, are constructed using industrial processes consumed useful natural resources faster than its own cycle to replenish. Although the aesthetics of buildings have diversified according to architectural design isms, the essential limitations of architectural practice, as the products controlled by market equilibria and the contributor to greenhouse gases, hasn’t changed a lot.
The project examines the reconciliation between the industrial society and the natural world that is presented as a fictional documentary of cyanobacteria-protocell’s ‘Synthetic Ecology’, growing as an architectural first aid kit over 80 years in an abandoned and deteriorated industrial district. It is the aim of the architectural first aid kit as the provision of initial care for a damaged city and its isolated citizens submerged form a flooding disaster until definitive treatment can be applied. Settled inside of existing building, synthetic ecological transformations occur with inert building materials into living architecture.
Silvertown, an industrial district in the London borough of Newham, is being transformed into a set of environmentally responsive reproductive organs which create cyanobacteria-protocell ovums using industrial fruit, and develops them into a kit of architectural first aid supplies. Within the four sites Ju-byung has chosen; the Royal Docks, as the uterus, stocks up on the nourishing liquid to develop cyanobacteria-protocells; Spiller’s Millennium Mills, as the ovary, produces the ovums; the Tate & Lyle refinery provides nourishment to the uterus as the small intestine; and the Beckton gas works supplies the main resource of self-generating energy to the ovums as the lung. The gate of the Royal Docks remains closed until rising floods open it and bring cyanobacteria as the sperm, which is the metabolic agent in the architectural first-aid kit.
[toggle heading="An architectural laboratory"]
2009, Photograph of the chemical reaction; a computer scripting for cymatics experiment; the electric device with wet starch and Ferrofluid; and hand drawing with black ink.
Above: Real and virtual wet chemical compound is transformed into dynamic forms by manipulating environment in an architectural laboratory.
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[toggle heading="Cyanobacteria-protocell as architectural first aid kit"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
1. The first property is ‘the architectural living structure-forming system’ as bone-cells that is responsible for resorbing existed building materials (Fig 1) while rebuilding a new structure (Fig 2). This symbiotic system locates in the outer surface of architectural structures as periosteum, and the hollow interior of architectural structures as bone marrow. In the hollow interior, there is the flexible tissue found which is the core of the living structure’s growth. The system can pass throughout inert building structures by the liquid condition of carriers such as seawater. The main matter of living structure is calcium carbonate. Catalytic seeds (Fig 3) substituting the living limestone structure for the inert structure of existing building materials are one of the system’s products.
2. The second property is ‘the unconscious purifier system (Fig4)’ as one part of the physiological systems of Earth, the so-called Gaia. This regulates the surrounding climatic and biogeochemical condition at a comfortable state for human’s life through photosynthesis, converting the mixture of carbon dioxide and water into organic compounds, especially sugars and oxygen, while photosynthesis generates energy. The sugars and self-generating energy are consumed for maintaining the metabolic system, cyanobacteria (Fig 8), and suppling natural fuel to the artificial body, protocell (Fig 9). The oxygen is released to keep the ratio of atmospheric gases which is related to global temperature and human’s breath.
3. The third property is ‘the nutritional supplements system for human life. In dry conditions, the synthetic ecology of cyanobacteria-protocells minimize metabolic activity to conserve energy by temporarily stopping its activity inside their own habitat, which is a flexible tissue structure of calcium carbonate. As a result, they maintain longevity in their life cycle. In wet conditions, the synthetic ecology produces, by instinct, the calcium carbonate compounds with natural glue until the exhaustion of calcium from its own settlement. The synthetic ecology then extends itself over the border of flooded buildings into quiet water that has settled there to find new supplies of free calcium ions. The extended part of synthetic ecology forms the colonies of perfect spire coils (Fig 5), which contains protein, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. These natural nutrient capsules, in an isolated situation by submergence, can use emergency human dietary supplements for the flood victims.
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[toggle heading="the implantation of cyanobacteria-protocell into limestone & London bricks"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: For a mock-up test in a laboratory, Cyanobacteria-protocells are implanted into limestone and London bricks which are mineral resources and the foundation of living structure. This experiment illustrates the mature stage of cyanobacteria-protocell that offers unique architectural characteristics, including the property to remodel chemical molecular structures of the compound of calcium, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and etc. The mature cells are parasitic on the existing building materials and, at the same time, construct the complex synthetic ecology inside the building materials. The life cycle of the kit is maintained by the efficient self-generating energy using chemical molecules of the building materials.
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[toggle heading="the autogeneration of living material in the ruin industrial estate"]
2010, Photography of the inside of the ruin industrial estate.
Above Right: The natural phenomenon on the opposite which is strong reference of inventing an installation as an artificial uterus, which keeps developing architectural ova. The ova are going to be transformed into the autogeneration of living material. In an architectural laboratory, the unknown architect had designed the prototype of an artificial uterus of Gaia before operating the real scale of Gaia’s artificial organs which is located in a industrial district in the London borough of Newham.
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[toggle heading="the inert & activated cyanobacteria-protocell in the prototype of an artificial uterus"]
2010, DMC 3D printing with computer scripting.
Above Right: The two inert London bricks become a unitized living structure by the artificial uterus / Above Light: The three inert London bricks keep transforming into a unitized living structure with its own ecology / Below Right: The elevation view of two bricks / Below Light: The virtual generation of the living London bricks by cyanobacteria-protocell with computer scripting.
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[toggle heading="the imaginary anatomical chart of Gaia"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: The cyanobacteria-protocells are grown within an artificial uterus. The chart displays how each of the organs provide a set of chemical molecules which becomes nutrients and nourishing liquid.
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[toggle heading="the flow of chemical molecules"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: A chemical compound of calcium, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen decomposes into ion condition by artificial organs, which used to be abandoned factories. The operation is maintained until the organs are submerged by floodwater.
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[toggle heading="the artificial liver, the Beckton Gas works"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: The Beckton Gas works provides the regular power and chemical gas which contains nourishing nutrients.
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[toggle heading="the artificial small intestine, the Tate & Lyle refinery"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: A chemical compound of calcium, carbon hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen decomposes into ion condition by artificial intestines, which used to be abandoned factories. The operation is maintained until the organs are submerged by floodwater.
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[toggle heading="the artificial ovary, the abandoned Spiller's Millennium Mills"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: the Millennium Mills disassembles rusted equipments and produces protocell at an instant.
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[toggle heading="Life, Dormancy and Death of architectural first aid kit"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
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[toggle heading="the birth of the Architectural first aid kit"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: The artificial organs of Gaia has got constructions to release the architectural first aid kit, which is the initial cure of the submerged city of London. Between mother’s legs, the personification of the kit looks down sleeping human, who has kept dreaming that they can control every environment perfectly for only themselves.
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[toggle heading="the release of the architectural first aid kit to build safe shelters by Gaia"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: A heavily pregnant Gaia’s uterus is releasing the architectural first aid kit through the gate of Royal Docks. Top-view of Dome as a parturient uterus which has been constructed with abandoned architectural structures and industrial facilities.
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[toggle heading="the inside view of a heavily pregnant Gaia's uterus"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: The artificial uterus of Gaia, being designed with alchemical and architectural tools by an unknown architect, is releasing lots of the architectural first aid kit, which is the initial cure of the submerged city of London. Even though Human’s civilization has driven Earth’s environments into an uninhabitable condition for themselves, Gaia, the self-regulate system of Earth, is trying to give her child to save them from a familiar disaster, namely submergence by flooding, until definitive treatment, which will be founded by human themselves, can be accessed.
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[toggle heading="a heavily pregnant Gaia in 2100 AD"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: The three-dimensional anatomical chart of a heavily pregnant Gaia, which is shown unenlightened people to educate what a symbiotic relationship for sustainable life by herself.
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[toggle heading="in 2100 AD & after 2145 AD"]
2010, Hand drawing using 0.13 nib size of technical pen with black ink.
Above: Fictional Narrative > the drowned city of London, 2145 AD > reconciliation_ Most of the people still living on in the sinking cities, even though they are surrounded by the fantastical environment. According to Ballard’s description (p. 7), ‘…this morning he found himself reluctant to leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite’, people do not like higher temperatures but adapt themselves to new circumstances. They spend a couple of hours over breakfast which is cooked with sea ingredients such as fish, seaweed, and algae. Aquatic people can look back on the past through the surface of the water.
‘Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. Fist a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were…part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon…a blunted rectangle smothered with weeds and algae, across which slithered a few desperate fish. Immediately half a dozen others appeared around it, already roughly delineating a narrow street’ (Ballard 2008, p. 120).
The synthetic ecology, through the repeated operation between the period of dormancy and activity accumulates the fossilized itself with the trapped environment of those days. In the narrative, the section of living architecture as historical documentary of climate change display the degree of symbiotic relationship between human civilization and the natural world. Through these architectural documentary, people understand what is the natural world, where human being belong to, and how they can sustain their own life.
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by Felix Schwimmer
This project considers psychomorphic relations between body and technology as a time based architecture. Freud’s Oedipus complex is used as a basis for reconstructing Debord’s borderless space into a domestic environment. It is a research on how an architectural system may embody psychological theories and mythological narratives and how a physical reality may be constructed out of it.
A device, the dissecting table was designed as a soft form-making instrument, an installation located between the virtual and the real. On the table is lying an Oedipus skin reacting to time, it gives birth to a three-body tool system; apparently erotic objects that converse to each other and react to the viewer. Shapes emerge from the movements of the tools. Time based performance of liquid, points, lines are responses translated by the tools from an Oedipal relationship, the skin.
The model deliberately explores different digital making procedures as an expression of contemporary relationship between body and technology; it is a conceptual architecture where each device takes potential on the fabrication technology and functions according to an established narrative. Intimacy and eroticism are descriptive words of these objects that live between a dream in this world that becomes a comment on architecture.
The ‘anti-oedipal house’, an outcome of the dissecting table, is inspired by Gustave Moreau’s ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’ and Lagrangian mechanics with its stationary solutions of the circular restricted three-body system.
It is composed of three volumes: parent, child and bridge (a central ‘empty’ glass wall acting as a separation and unifying space). The architectural program is an organized environment that responds to emotion and behavior of individuals according to the Freudian theory.
The response comes from “living materials”, they alter the space and create a playful environment. The organic material translates into inventive strategy to construct unpredictable areas mixing isolated rooms, growing chambers, mnemonic gates and table.
[toggle heading="Oedipal Skin"]
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[toggle heading="Anti-Oedipal House"]
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[toggle heading="Psycho-Geopraphic Map"]
- Psychogeographic Map of Anti-Oedipal House
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The 3rd Degree; Secrecy & the Consequences of Promiscuous Technology was a research based design project that stemmed from earlier fascination and research in self-organizing, bottom-up biological systems and how they could possibly influence new parameters within architecture. It started in a micro-biology lab where the growth, documentation and analysis of slime mould encouraged the creation of a speculative, living architectural material technology- a Material Internet, where the cellular rhythm of slime-mould was harnessed as a biological social-networking system, accessed and deployed through the alchemical relationship it has with gold, essentially communicating by atmospheric engagement through the gold surfaces within Freemason’s Hall in London. In its simplest beta-terminology, it could be compared to a living Morse-code system, where masonic ciphering provided dual coding between the biology of the material and information stored and transmitted within it through the building. The program took on a narrative inspired by Masonic ritual, envisioning the situation and consequences of the users engagement with the living technology through plan, section and axonometric of the Hall that overlaid the biological clock of the Material Internet with a new architectural framework based off the ritual and Solomons Temple, and revealed a strangely interesting set of clues about how the users might utilize this prospective technology through the bodies senses, inevitabley suggesting a new architectural model for constructing the Masonic Temple.[toggle heading="Cellular Studies"] .
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The proposed architecture comes from the synthesis between the analysis of a film, ‘Last Year in Marienbad’, and the analysis of an existing site, Brent Cross, in north London. Concepts and tactics from theatre are used: the project communicates the idea of montage in a synthetic environment and makes it apparent; references to the footlights and the backstage appear in order to emphasize this as well as the process of assemblage of components.
The narrative is that of a subject called X, trapped in the suburban area TQ230874, who creates his own reality using the Temple/ shopping centre (place of illusion and desire) as a means of escape from an everyday reality. The Temple is the gateway from one reality to another, which articulates two parts:
- Part I, Collective Urban Reality TQ230874, a re-interpretation of the existing site.
- Part II, X’s synthetic reality, a representation of mental space and time, following the analysis and mapping out of the film.
Film is used to explore the relationship between metaphoric space (the space of the montage) and the creative experience of the viewer through space (the subject). The combination of spatial superpositions of video and computer imaging techniques disrupts the spatial and temporal perspective ‘that is considered normal’.
by Salma Zavari
The main goal of this project is to intensify the perceptions of an observer in the context of everyday life so as to enable him/her to achieve a higher degree of self-reflection in tune with the environment. It’s about the importance of the unimportant. The project aims to explore architecture’s potential, when combined with various sensual techniques, to perform as a Rhythmanalysist in the context of everyday life and as second-order cybernetics of daily-rhythms perception. Selected objects are combined in order to construct an interactive harmonic environment.
The project is located in Tita’s kitchen from the magical realist novel “like water for chocolate” by Laura Esquivel as it provided a place full of sensible fragments and tangible elements and a story of everydayness for these elements and objects. The narrative is about a girl who expresses her feelings and passions via cooking, where the repetition in her everyday life causes an adaptation in her body. The story advances with the recipes that metaphorically represent everyday routine.
The rhythmanalysist is described through a mathematical equation with the rhythms of everyday life as the variables of this equation. The observer, who is also engaged with the system, receives the black box’s output as a sensual pattern; however, he/she has no idea what is going on inside the black box – the rhythmanalisist. Here, like any architectural project, we are dealing with potential variables and participants which in this case is the “rhythms” of the character’s everyday.
This project not only concentrates on human activities, actions and events, but also observes their temporality, meaning the period in which these activities unfold. It aims to explore the alignment of rhythms, in repetitive time periods and its translation to sensible effects. So to design a series of rhythmanalysists, the project has divided into five different time spans: one month, one second, one day, one decade and one week and the related rhythmanalysists along with the story flow have designed. Each piece has its own operation technique, occupies on one chapter of the novel and has its story.
Dressage or training -INformation- is the effect of rhythms perception on the observer and the analytical adaptation which naturally takes place in this correspondence. The translation of the objective world becomes enmeshed with our inner subjective world, we share a world of spaces constantly fluctuating in their rhythms and creating new transactions, new objects and new meanings in a constant dressage of events and meanings.
[toggle heading="WHEN HAND BECAME A RHYTHMANALYSYST"]
…Every day Tita starts cooking with chopping an onion, as she is so sensitive to onions, she starts to cry. She cries so hard, the floor get wet with her tears. But after it gets dried there is enough salt on the ground to cook with so she collect the salt and re-use it…
This is combination of a three stages routine -chopping, crying and collecting salt- as polyrhythmia. This rhythmanalysist is dealing with DRAFTING and TRACING. A container is collecting Tita’s tears; a fish like balloon is floating on her tears; connected to a drawing device which is drafting the volume of her tears on a rolling canvas; each loop of the canvas is one month. The onion juice, which is invisible ink – sensitive to light – is wetting the canvas. There are two lamps; first evaporates the water and so the salt get collected in a jar and the second one has located behind the jar. The shadow of the salt level marks the canvas as it’s wetted by invisible ink.
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[toggle heading="TITA'S KITCHEN GARDEN"]
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[toggle heading="PATTERN CALENDAR"]
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