Architectural Design V-IX: The Law of Withdrawal (A. Antonakakis)

Abstract

The studio explores the core of nowadays’ social sphere proposed as an idiosyncratic withdrawal. Withdrawal is meant to be an antisocial attitude but increasingly it is only through withdrawal that we can grasp the spirit of this phase of “urbanism”. The core of the “urban” becomes withdrawal. We may claim that the specific withdrawal we deal with is a deep stay in the sphere of infrastructure

Objective

The aim of this workshop is to articulate a position concerning the new condition in which contemporary humanity finds itself after the major changes that characterize the planet. After the consciousness of global warming, the new urban condition is asking for a new consciousness of the infrastructure. The question of the anthropocene calls for a global human ethics against the transformations of the earth. The second aspect of the studio concerns the new urban conditions that operate while life in the infrastructure and its extensions to physical space become increasingly normalized; the construction of a live archive such as the Internet that augments and transforms common realities. Distribution of goods, return to the shelter, relation to the community are all architectural characteristics of a new yet not identified urban condition; it threatens the human communities and also at the same time it over-determines them. The urban side experienced during the pandemics is also part of this new isolating reality which is meant to be examined thoughtfully. The scope of this exercise is to calculate this double future of the planet and the infrastructure, proposing alternative architectures that will establish a new phase of the self and the community without farewelling them both. A total urban character guaranteeing all automatic mechanisms of reaction to its users or to its contestants could lead to a dictatorship of the infrastructure. Against this concept architecture is called to answer by its own means in order to save the civic character of the infrastructure and organize a new vision of some possible communal life for the humans.

Content

The law of withdrawal Against nature Syllabus: The studio explores the core of nowadays’ social sphere proposed as an idiosyncratic withdrawal. Withdrawal is meant to be an antisocial attitude but increasingly it is only through withdrawal that we can grasp the spirit of this phase of “urbanism”. The core of the “urban” becomes withdrawal. We may claim that the specific withdrawal we deal with is a deep stay in the sphere of infrastructure. Previewing the world, asking for material objects to reach us and also instauring a dialogue with others all happen with the mediation of the infrastructure. In this sense the research hypothesis of the studio leads to a research related to the core of the late exaggerated concept of this place for withdrawal and its rationale as an island-like concept. Against nature is the English translation of the title À rebours, a novel written in french by Karl Juris Huismans in 1884. Des Esseintes, the hero of the novel, decides to isolate himself in a villa where he can enjoy only artificial pleasures and where he would avoid any connection with the things themselves. This negation of “reality” is the driving force of the whole narrative. And it is in this frame that the studio will test an exaggeration of an urban condition lived today, with a residence in a secluded desert. The maximum relation to an image of declined paradise is finally experienced as an idiosyncratic prison. This isolated system, the island of Prison-paradise (proposing an ever growing ideal of a dismembered community) will be thought of, balanced, and designed as a dream project and in the same time as a counter-project belonging to the sphere of infrastructure; questioning the city transformations the studio investigates about different structures of “desert”. Infrastructure proposes a new status quo for the urban element and for its user while new concepts of desert arise. In this sense infrastructure becomes able to strangely prolong a new phase of a different urban culture where the life of every user will adjust to this principle of withdrawal forgetting the community. In this account the studio will investigate the unknown future of the desert islands of the Aegean Sea while posing the problems of the city. Observation: The growing difficulty to make an account concerning facts describing the nowadays world makes us look at the urban present as something obsolete, belonging already to the past; already surrounded by new languages and new perceptions of reality we could be triggered to envisage the end of the modern city, the deep decline of the Western world and its instruments of interpretation, which still structure the image of decay for the world around us. Αccepting this change does, however, not mean that humans cannot influence positively the new conditions of this different world. The question we pose with this intellectual and design exercise is related to the possibilities of architecture to plan a different future for the infrastructure. The new communities that are formed in this frame, and the possibilities of them to be self-regulated via the Internet show a possible way to emancipate parts of the infrastructure. The reference to deserted islands gives an interesting chance to deal with erased writing, an experience of implementing a structure in a natural setting. The text of Gilles Deleuze “L'Île déserte” is a starting point focusing on the openness of a promise for a restart but the studio will also delve into the reality of the desert islands. Communities can be differently thought through the protocols they accept for their constitution. The example of an alternative university community or a desert island university could form the basis of this studio.

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