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The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.
In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.
It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.
In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.
An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition is a collective portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist composed by friends, collaborators, admirers, and inquisitors. From personal anecdotes to analytic estimations to visual representations, the contributions respond to the questions that frame the book: Who is HUO? What does HUO do? What has HUO done?
The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.
Communists Anonymous understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated—in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.
Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture.
This book examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.
It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background.
Future Imperfect critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa.
With The Proposal Magid attempts to bring together architect Luis Barragán’s professional and personal archives by probing the architect’s official and private selves, and the interests of various individuals and governmental and corporate entities who have become the archives’ guardians. Magid, with permission of the Barragán family, commissioned a small amount of Barragán’s cremated remains to be transformed into a diamond.
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level.
“Miessen’s new book depicts in a challenging and projective manner the problem of politics in times of conceptual indeterminacy, where ‘participation’ of the civil society seems to become the salvation for the political mess we are in, especially in Europe.”
—Ulrike Guérot, political scientist, founder and director, European Democracy Lab, Berlin
10 minutes after features installation views from Josephine Meckseper’s recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor, a gallery of “psychoimages.” Independent curator and writer Piper Marshall considers ideas of détournement, the readymade, and base materialism in Meckseper’s oeuvre, while writer and editor Domenick Ammirati explores the significance of painting and text within Meckseper’s installations.
In the seventh volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the Viennese émigré architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance in a contemporary world saturated with visual information.
Having furnished solutions for Germany and Dubai, Ingo Niermann takes a new look at what nationhood can mean and accomplish today, finding inspiration, of all places, in North Korea. Now that the promise of global prosperity and abundance can technically be fulfilled, the time has come for a minimalist rethink of society.
The phenomenal performative relationship between the state and its cultural institutions was perhaps best exemplified when the declaration of the State of Israel was staged at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1948. This relationship has been at the heart of Public Movement’s research.
One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.
Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications on the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond.
The tenth speculation in the Solution series imagines a possible European present and future: the small island nation of Lavapolis.
Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s. In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.”
Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth.
This book excavates the notion of forensis (Latin for “pertaining to the forum”) to designate the role of material forensics in articulating new notions of public truth. The condition of forensis is one in which aesthetic practices, new technologies, and architectural research methodologies bear upon the legal implications of political struggle, violent conflict, and climate change.
In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.
The collected essays presented here form the compartments of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s curatorial toolbox, along with elucidating his views on stewardship, patronage, and art itself. Influences and interlocutors cited and discussed here include, among others, Alexander Dorner, Édouard Glissant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-François Lyotard, Dominique de Menil, Josef Ortner, Cedric Price, Sir John Soane, and Harald Szeemann.
“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?,” Wittgenstein asked himself in “On Certainty.” Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence of this world: a world as he found it. Hysterically reproduced paper maquettes of choreographed architecture, imprisoned within a clumsy, photographic frame, are abstract shelters for imagined and unspoken texts. Words are characters in performance of a world as a text.
The Human Snapshot draws upon a 2011 conference of the same name. The conference contributions and subsequent essays examine contemporary forms of humanism and universalism as they circulate and are produced in art and photography. The look toward these two terms stems from theorist Ariella Azoulay’s research on the seminal exhibition “The Family of Man,” first installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.
In its ninth volume, the Solution series departs from its previous geopolitical focus on regions and countries. The issue becomes the infinite prospect of connection as well as transformation: this book explores the biopolitical and psychosexual topic of love.
In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making.
In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.
Welcome to Finland, a young land of rapid aging, where newly founded institutions are already outmoded and geographic impediments are a constant crippling agent. As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Finland: The Welfare Game by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments.
The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.
Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.
As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Japan, or The Book of Japans, makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the “far.” The Book of Japans restores a sense of wonder—along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies—by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but also time.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book.
Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution Series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.
Class inevitably raises awkward questions for the protagonists of contemporary art—about their backgrounds, patrons, and ideological partialities. Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates this latent yet easily overlooked issue, which has been historically eclipsed by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality.
Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy is the fifth book in the Solution Series. Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with analytical elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable.
At a time when functional independence seems to be a real possibility for Scotland—and yet no one is quite sure what that means—a delirium of visions, realistic and absurd, is necessary.
In Solution 1-10: Umbauland, Ingo Niermann devises ten provokingly simple ideas which would see Germany work it out after all, including a new grammar, a new political party, assigning allotment gardens to unemployed people and retirees, and the Great Pyramid, the tallest building of the world which would serve as a democratic tomb for millions of people.
“German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.” —The Independent
“East Coast Europe,” which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics.
Europe, as a political space, is as conflictual as its constitution. It needs to be designed and negotiated. It is longing for an architecture of strategic encounters. Based on the curation of a space at the 2007 Lyon Biennial, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen has drawn together a group of people to lead conversations around alternative notions of participation, the clash of democratic heterogeneities, and what it means to live in Europe today.
