RESEARCH IN REALITY

THE CITY TO YOU THINK TANK

The City to You Think Tank seeks to compile creative responses to the COVID-19 imposed self-isolation measures currently affecting the world at large.
It seeks to open- up a multi-disciplinary conversation about the issues related to the residential built environment of our homes, particularly in relation to the building envelope and the notion of bringing the city to the individual.

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FOR A NEW RIGHT TO THE CITY

Whereas we deplete space, control over the land regains importance in the foundation of our contemporary social structure.

Totally divided and individualized, the soil and its use are freezed, lacking any possibility of the radical change needed. This theoretical project acts as a manifesto. It arouses, through the creation of new grounds, the question of the land, its spatial occupancy and its politics in a broader sense.

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STOP CITY

A hypothesis for a non-figurative architectural language for the city.

Against the taboo that form means to abdicate from a political vision of the city, Stop City intends to provide a theory (in the original, non-intellectual, sense of the word vision) of political organisation and of the city through the absolute form of an architectural project.

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Has Photography Been Able to Provoke Language

Takuma Nakahira revolutionized post-war Japanese photography with his dark, expressionistic photographs that captured the uncertainty, exhilaration, and tumult of life in the decades following World War II. As well as a critically acclaimed photographer, Nakahira is a writer, critic, and political activist, whose groundbreaking ideas and essays about visual expression led to the publication of Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought (first published 1968), a radical, short-lived journal that nevertheless had a profound impact on visual culture in Japan.

Nakahira introduced what became known as the are, bure, boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) style of photography, pushing the camera well beyond its previous use as a documentary or propaganda tool. Stark and suggestive, his photographs show fragmented scenes of urban life as he experienced it – imbued with pathos, grit, and potential.

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After Forms

We might look forward, even if it is very far, to a time when it would be possible to create space – livable, habitable space in the full sense of our experience – without the necessity of inferring it from objects and their tightly bounded forms. This is not to say that objects would no longer be important – we, being objects ourselves, have an irrevocable affinity for objects and their forms, their physical tangibility and tactility and the many uses these avail – but rather that we would be free of our present absolute dependence upon them in order to experience space. Form and space, we might say, would coexist in our experience as equals.

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