Project Heracles #13

Fears, desires, tics, perversions, ideological tendencies and fetishes are found by the Triestine researcher in the folds of the proposals submitted for the competition.

For all of the guest-curated sets of Project Heracles submissions, please look here. Giovanni Corbellini is the next of our guest curators to select his favorite entries out of the hundreds Domus received.

That architecture is largely amoral is written in its origins and its evolution. Vitruvius was still a military engineer; and when we read of poor Madame Savoye, asked by Corb to place "beautiful wild plants" in the foyer of the uninhabitable Poissy masterpiece, or Miss Farnsworth, seduced, abandoned and even a loser in court battles against Mies, human empathy conflicts with our identification—as architects—with the cruelty of the masters' determination to achieve an architecturally significant result.

The profoundly ethical dimension of Lieven De Cauter's and Dieter Lesage's proposals (along with the 'impossibility' of the topic and the extreme synthesis of the postcard format) work as an effective means of contrast, revealing the fears, desires, tics, perversions, ideological drifts and fetishes of a meaningful sample of colleagues. At the same time, it allows the viewers of the two hundred 'projects' submitted to "Domus" to understand something about themselves, to take a sort of do-it-yourself test, as if, in their varying uncertainty, they were so many architectural Rorschach inkblots….

Postcard #140. [top image] From dream to the evidence of numbers. The graphic display of migration routes, nodes of convergence and the quantities involved show a truly imposing reality. The Strait of Gibraltar is one of the most problematic bottlenecks but the size of the Sahara is even more striking. A topic for a new consultation?

Top: the postcard sent by Tom Fox. Above: a chain of islands for shipwrecked migrants, Marketa Haist, Karlsruhe (Germany).

Postcard #5. [above] Here, too, a certain—and perhaps unintentional—ambiguity emerges. The proposal that scatters floating islands across one of the most widely-used passages addresses the tragedy of shipwrecks that all too often involve substandard migrant boats. These are, however, cartoon islands: deserted hills (sand colored) with a tilting palm tree on one side... It is strange that they are not equipped with bottles for rescue messages instead of flares.

Who's behind bars? Desesseintes Sruobera.

Postcard #20. [above] A gate (obtained, in fact, by erasing part of a vintage print) has us ask, "Who is behind the bars?" Is it an invitation to learn more about Africans? Or to wonder about who the prisoner really is—we Europeans entrenched behind the 'walls' of our borders or those who want to get in?
The more I look at it, the more I wonder if the effectiveness of the image (a simple graphic gesture in contrast to the figurative grace of the original drawing) will be resolved by moving towards indignation regarding the ferocity with which the EU has entrenched itself within its borders or by reassuring our desire to live as privileged inhabitants of a gigantic gated community.

That architecture is largely amoral is written in its origins and its evolution.

Postcard #22. [above] The same precarious boats to which clandestine immigrants entrust their hopes are multiplied and connected, creating practicable continuity. Unlike the previous postcards—Eurocentric, paternalistic, if not downright cynical—this colorful expanse of boats offers a different perspective: not only because of the point of view (which appears to be looking from south to north, following the migrants' routes), but especially because of a self-organized, bottom-up process—without a project—that can combine the economy of recycling with the effectiveness of ready-mades.

Ephemeral, unreal, illusory. Alberto Bottero.

Postcard #118. [above] The hot-air balloons lining up to support a long walkway from one continent to another are also ready-mades. But they create a "cooler" image in terms of its subject and refined production. I don't know if I should see the irony of a pastime of the idle rich used for the benefit of those who are forced to confront their most basic needs, or opt for a poetic dimension, a suggestion of dreamy lightness....When I turned the postcard over, I realized that the author intended the second option while the possible provocation (like, "They don't have bread? Let them eat cake!") was all in my head.

Ieri | oggi. Un limite che unisce, Ottavia Parisi, Francesco Stassi.

Postcard #95. [above] Italo Calvino, quoted in postcard # 22 (where Marco Polo's concreteness contrasts Kublai Khan's attention to the intangible), returns in postcard # 95 along with Dante. The high/low inversion of one of the Invisible Cities is suggested here to describe a submerged Manhattan that supports a straight line used by black men (perhaps they are black only because they are backlit ...). The calm sea accelerates the symbolic-dreamlike dimension of the image in which the combination of half sunken ships, a bull from a ham advertisement (now an icon in Spain), its counterpart on the African shore (the silhouette of an elephant) and above all, the tops of skyscrapers that emerge like islands from the water recall the alienating grammar of a rebus. I don't know if I should give into the surrealist effect (seen through Spielberg's eyes) or search for hidden meanings: Western civilization submerged by events that it caused?

Mangrovia's bridge, Federica Deaglio, Edoardo Riva.

Postcard #122. [above]People who amiably pass their time on the Mangrovia bridge are white. Beyond identifying them with one of the parties (in light of the continents involved), it would have been more coherent to make them blue. Only the giant Na'vi tree/building could have the trees sprout from the thousand foot depths of the Strait ... However, behind the atmosphere of facile environmentalism à la Avatar, the idea of using a biological substrate is more interesting than many muscular manifestations of building construction.

Gene Linkage | Ideas on an Eurafrican Connection, ChenQing, Zhengzhou City (China).

Postcard #145. [above] And then, since the dimensions involved made it impractical to use both technological solutions as well as biological materials, all that was left to do was to combine the potential of both, proposed by the Gene Linkage project. The connection between the two sides is created by the accelerated growth of coral, induced by laboratory-engineered bacteria. The design of nature is an oxymoron that is all the more intriguing if it is based on such politically correct programmatic assumptions. Does the end justify the means? Good intentions and mutations?
Towards a genetically modified architecture...

Project Heracles #13

Fears, desires, tics, perversions, ideological tendencies and fetishes are found by the Triestine researcher in the folds of the proposals submitted for the competition.

Latest on Architecture

Latest on Domus