Archipelago Of Protocols Aristide Antonas

The concept of Urban Protocol names a strategy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city. The Urban Protocols are meant to introduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a municipal authority; the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to establish cluster-like micro-legislative constructions with communal functions. Urban Protocols are formed as systems of rules. Using a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are “play-tested” in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be transformed and re-established easily. The Urban Protocol challenges the relation between the city and the Internet; the concept of user would function better for its performance than the one of citizen. Nevertheless its most sophisticated part would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen. Its most challenging legislative part is ruled by the relationship between the Internet and the state; the Internet is understood as the quick functional basis for the formation, installation and function of an Urban Protocol. With texts by Athena Athanasiou, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Keller Easterling, César Reyes Nájera, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Pelin Tan.

Both a learning platform and a pedagogical experiment, Urban School Ruhr is built upon the foundational belief that experts and amateurs can, together, build a space of critical exchange and knowledge transfer. USR prioritises exchange and dialogue that is not necessarily attached to specific outcomes, results or interventions in built reality, instead understanding conversation as the first step to co-producing cities. Explorations in Urban Practice, the first edition in the Urban School Ruhr Series, draws from and reflects upon USR’s experiences to date whilst also looking to the future of urban practice in contemporary cities. The book presents the reader with key current questions in the field: how can we learn city making? How should we understand the political concept of commoning for this purpose? And how can we discuss intervention as a strategy for enacting urban change?

AA Files 76 is structured as a glossary of terms relevant to contemporary debate in architecture. Each entry has been contributed by a different author, and represents a personal position as much as an attempt to frame the topic in a broader context; the issue therefore maps both a landscape of current concerns, interests, and ambitions, and also an overview of diverse positions and forms of practice. The authors of this glossary are practitioners, academics, students, lawyers, politicians, activists, and their contributions do not only seek to explore the potential of the themes put forward, but also to question the ways in which we can discuss space - as designers, as scholars, as citizens.

This book provides an original research perspective to the field of contemporary urban conflicts. Even though violent conflicts have transformed cities during the XX century, it is nowadays possible to identify the phenomenon of “Tensions” as a specific contemporary both social and spatial urban changes catalyst. Through a collection of essays from various disciplines focusing on international case studies—from India to Europe to Latin America— the publication explores the multifaceted concept of “spatial tensions” as a lens for better understanding contemporary urban transformations. While tensions often depend on spatial dispositives and superstructures, they also offer a powerful key for design practices and strategies.

Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come. The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.

The Century of the Bed addresses the use of the bed as an office and workspace. How can we define and reexamine the bed as an architectural space? This publication offers insight into the diverse artistic research on this topic.

Into the Great Wide Open is a book about a search for a form of practice in architecture. Practice here is understood both as a critical reflection of a status quo and its history, as well as forms of (active) intervention through designing and planning. The book is a fragmentary snapshot of an on going, constantly developing and altering process to find a place in the production and reflection of our built environment, and implicitly disputes the question: “What is to be done?”

Research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle. The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.