ARTWORK Jon Wozencroft
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SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple
of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined
a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know
how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The
poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city,
we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards,
the latest state of humor and poetry:
Shower
Bath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Sainte Anne Ambulance
Cafe Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station
on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement
center on the Quai des Orfevres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The
Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Cafe. The Hotel
of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor
of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. To explore Paris.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the
consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao,
without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda
where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with
fables from an old almanac. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda.
It doesn't exist.
The hacienda must be built.
All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps
without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We
move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward
the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow
us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary.
It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings:
castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
These dated images retain a small catalyzing power,
but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating
them by giving them a new meaning. Our imaginations, haunted by the old
archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines.
The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate.
Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture
in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate, storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere
other fragmentary beauties can be found -- while the promised land of syntheses
continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally
still -- alive past and the already dead future.
We will not work to prolong the mechanical civilizations
and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.
We propose to invent new, changeable decors....
Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting,
and the seasons by air conditioning; night and summer are losing their charm
and dawn is disappearing. The man of the cities thinks he has escaped from
cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of his dream life.
The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.
The latest technological developments would make possible
the individual's unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating
its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings.
The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation
to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning
and return to the forest in the evening.
Architecture is the simplest means of articulating
time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter
not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral
beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the
eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying
present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and
a means of action.
The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect
will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants....
Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute
truth and incontrovertable mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion
of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL
aspect of the next civilization (although I'm not satisfied with that word;
say, more supple, more "fun"). On the bases of this mobile civilization,
architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with
a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to a mythic synthesis.
A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization.
Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences sewage system, elevator,
bathroom, washing machine.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against
poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal--the liberation of man from material
cares--and become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Presented
with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of
all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential
to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light
forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out
an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.
We have already pointed out the need of constructing
situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization
will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately
associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space....
Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural
precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences
in time and space. We know that an object that is not consciously noticed
at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits,
provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward
in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More
precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite,
it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance
accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of
no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle
of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)
In Chirico's paintings (during his Arcade period) an
empty space creates a full-filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic
future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses.
Today we can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such
blueprints to its so-called museums.
This new vision of time and space, which will be the
theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain
so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities
specifically established for this purpose, cities assembling--in addition
to the facilities necessary for a minimum of comfort and security-- buildings
charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces,
events past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious
systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural
expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming
impassioned disappear.
Everyone will live in his own personal "cathedral,"
so to speak. There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug,
and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring
to travelers.... This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese
gardens of illusory perspectives [en trompe l'oeil]--with the difference
that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time--or with
the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which
is written (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed): Games are forbidden
in the labyrinth. This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary
assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage
of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase
is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed
which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve
and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum
of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings,
the topographical location, etc.).
The districts of this city could correspond to the
whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday
life.
Bizarre Quarter--Happy Quarter (specially reserved
for habitation) -- Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children)--Historical
Quarter (museums, schools)--Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) --Sinister
Quarter, etc. And an Astrolaire which would group plant species in accordance
with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden
comparable to that which the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer
Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness
of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as
to have somewhere to live in peace, and I think here of Mexico and of a
principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.
The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good
replacement for those hellholes that many peoples once possessed in their
capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter
would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.
It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles,
alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven
mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it is blindinglylit
during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the "Square
of the Appalling Mobile." Saturation of the market with a product causes
the product's market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister
Quarter, the child and the adult would learn not to fear the anguishing
occasions of life, but to be amused by them.
The principal activity of the inhabitants will be the
CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the
next will result in complete disorientation....
Later, as the gestures inevitably grow stale, this
dérive will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that
of representation....
The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that
the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people's
behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated
by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas--and Reno, that caricature
of free love--although they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental
city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde
activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a
few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would
be universally recognized as such.
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