Buildings are the best sensors that we have for long-term environmental change. ... I want to expose the atmosphere as something sedimented over time onto buildings.
There is a powerful critique of preservation to be unpacked within the notion of fetishism, because heritage should help us transition from one stage of culture into another. But when we hang on to an object beyond what should be a transitional period, then we are still stuck, and we become fetishistic toward that object. The notion of destruction is really important, but it doesn’t mean that objects should be destroyed. It means that as we care for objects in a particular way, we are actually destroying them. At a certain point, we can accept the object for what it is and let go.
When we choose an object, we’re actually trying to engage society. That’s what the very radical proposition of experimental preservation is: we deploy objects as a way to raise fundamental questions about what’s important to us.
Preservationists work with a mode of creativity that is not about formgiving, but about form-taking and guiding attention. The kinds of objects that they propose can’t be singular and subjective creations. They are what I would call, borrowing from pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, 'not-me creations,' which are objects created collectively through interactions among specific people or interests.
Experimental preservationists share a common interest in using existing historic objects, buildings, landscapes to think differently about the future. That is quite different from traditional historic preservation, where the object of heritage is understood as stable. Experimental preservationists look carefully at how heritage objects are constructed in the present and then find new purposes for them.
Architecture in the postcritical, post-starchitect, posthumanist, postparametric twenty-first century is changing, or perhaps has already changed, certainly into a scrappier discipline, if not one of actual scraps. In such times our youngest and greatest minds are encouraged to fight, to scrounge, and to root for remains that might be used to cobble together any experimental construct at even the most minuscule of scales—and for free.
Mark Foster Gage, “Rot Munching Architects” from Perspecta 47: Money, 2014
Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, Expo 58 Philips Pavilion, Brussels, Belgium, 1958 (via funambulist)
Jean-Paul Jungmann, Experimental Pneumatic House / Diodon, 1967 (via arqueologiadelfuturo; nytimes)
"A mediados de los 60 tres estudiantes franceses de la Escuela de París, entre los que se encuentra Jean-Paul Jugmann, sorprende con sus proyectos finales de carrera con tres estructuras neumáticas, que atentan contra el racionalismo francés: un podium itinerante para 5000 espectadores de Jean Aubert, un hall itinerante de exposición de Antoine Stinco y Le Diodon de Jean Paul Jugmann, un habitat neumático extensible y transportable de carácter futurista y de gran complejidad formal."