Maurizio Bortolotti: Our reason
for meeting here in Paris at Yona
Friedman's apartment is to discuss
a collaboration between Yona and
Tomás Saraceno for a new project
and show they are doing together for
the Cabaret Voltaire, under my curatorship
and Adrian Notz's.
Let's start the discussion by talking
about climate change, one of the
most important issues deeply affecting
our lives today and also a fundamental
background to the collaboration
between you.
Yona Friedman: I've already published
some works about climate change. The
most recent one is very funny because
it's written in the form of a joke, a
pseudo-interview with my dog and
cat. They say things like: "You humans
are making everything as stupid as possible
because you want to adapt the
world to you, whereas we are adapting
ourselves to the world."
We managed to live with a changing
climate for thousands of years. Why
not now? The easiest thing is to let it go.
It only has to be understood politically,
because technically why shouldn't we
follow the climate? For example, by
mass migration, if necessary. I don't
think it is very ambitious. The way we
are feeding ourselves and our lifestyle
is the real reason behind climate
change. Let the world redevelop in its
own way and change your lives.
Tomás Saraceno: I like to think about
climate change in relation to survival
strategies in the natural world: hibernation,
reproduction, mutation, etc.
I think that we humans should be
understood as part of the natural
world, and today, between us, we
could help to change the predominant
climate of being in a pessimistic
hibernation attitude.
Just turning off the bulb and going
to sleep won't do much. I think the
bulb of the imagination should be
on more than ever. Hopefully, we
could change the climate to a more
imaginative one, towards alternative
futures with a positive happiness
and joy. Your idea behind the Ville
Spatiale is to liberate the Earth's
surface so that food can then be produced
inside the city.
YF: In the Ville Spatiale food-growing
was a city occupation. In shantytowns,
for example, people grow
their own food.
TS: Someone recently developed a
project called Vertical Farming in
which agriculture is practised on
each level of the buildings. And I am
also thinking of flying gardens and
farming.
YF: This is an important point.
Architecture has never been interested
in this aspect, so I'm very glad
Tomás shares my interested in this
issue.
MB: Tomás has done a lot of work
about ecological questions.
YF: For me ecology is not about politics,
and I know that Ville Spatiale has
to do with ecology.
TS: In one of his books, Félix Guattari
talks of "Three Ecology": social, mental
and environmental.
YF: I think everything depends on our
lifestyle. Lifestyle is an idea, a state of
mind. We have to adapt our lifestyle
regarding heating, air conditioning,
whatever, and it is a slow process. What
you call your "inhabited perimeter" is
only a very small part of the space you
use, and it is always characterised by a
piece of equipment – a table, a chair,
a bathroom, a kitchen – and all of
these elements can be put into boxes
of four metres squared. These big furnishings,
equipment or spatial conditions
mean the volume that needs to
be heated can be reduced to just five
per cent of the total.
We treat an apartment's equipment
like a model and make it life-sized.
People can thus modify the space as
they want. You should only heat the
spaces you effectively use. Using less
energy is not simply economic; it also
increases independence.
TS: I was really inspired by your
books, and by Bernard Rudofsky's
Architecture Without Architects. In these
terms I like to think of a house or a
space that is so light it is able to fly and
travel as solar energy increases the
interior temperature. The temperature
is defined by the relationship
with the environment, and its users
define the altitude and possibility of
displacement.
MB: These are the conditions of the
biological landscape.
YF: Another point is that we have
sophisticated technology but we
don't know how to handle it. That's
why I prefer simple materials, in the
same way that you could use presophisticated
technology before.
After all, you may be able to handle
a computer, but do you know how to
repair it?
You can't really write a software program
by yourself. The computer is
already assembled, so you can't use it
differently. In the old technology you
would get a piece of paper on which
you could write in any language. With
new technology people insist that
you write in English and you can't
write Swahili. It's a limitation of the
computer.
TS: Something is changing now with
this idea of "cloud computing". The
program is constantly updating and
changing according to the user.
There are always open source codes
where people can have access to the
software and change it.
TS: I really like the big idea you have
about this Megastructure situation
that can also propose a new way of
how we could live. But also the capability
of customising the user interaction
which allows us to change.
I'm now thinking of how we are
able to move towards a digital work
that makes a link to a more physical
work. Not only social meetings like
Facebook, Twitter, email and all of
that, but also how technology can
help us to change the way we live
and build architecture in a more
concrete way. One day we'll have
inhabitable cumulus clouds – which
are spread out – inspiring a very
organic architecture that changes
according to the inhabitants' wishes
and climate change. This project is
very much inspired by your Graffiti
Museum.
MB: The Ville Spatiale – as architecture
by Yona – and the Cloud City
– as an aerial architectural model for
a different way of living, travelling
and communicating by Tomás – are
in some way connected. Both of you
agree about the necessity to bring
the computer's abstract dimension
closer to the real world.
TS: Another project I'm working on
with a collective of different people
is a flying museum. It flies with just
solar energy and is built with the
participation of people (see www.
Museoaerosolar.org).
For the museum, people could reuse
plastic bags they have at home
and tape them all together to construct
an enormous foil, eventually
creating a big solar balloon in constant
expansion. With the Museo
Aerosolar we set up a collaboration
between people that is always different
in each place. This museum as a
symbol for future "architecture" will
help to reshape our lifestyle, a direct
relation between the weight of your
goods and the ability to lift them up
into the sky. A close relation to the
environment might be needed, a
deeper knowledge of the environment
around you, forcing a new synergy
between socio-political geography
and environmental states.
YF: People don't often realise that
shop windows represent the biggest
museum in the world. In that sense,
the idea of the museum as a building,
or an institution, is completely
false. It's exactly the reverse of architecture.
A museum is a "path" (un parcours)
and it is better if it is general, so
you can choose your particular path.
TS: The Museum Aerosolar is a collaborative
process, usually being
invited by institutions, local associations
and neighbourhoods to travel
to different countries. It is an engaging
process that triggers the imagination
as a process, and it is therefore
about constructing an experience.
The shop name written on a bag from
one country is a new, unknown name
in another country, or at a distance
just a pixel of colour as it sails the
wind up in the air.
YF: My museum doesn't fly, but you
walk past it, which is a technology
that has existed far longer than even
archaeology can go back. You propose
an object and it speaks in pictures.
So I did the Museum of Simple
Technology in Madras and the Street
Museum in Como, where you have
just boxes and you don't need to make
a building. My idea of the museum is
pedestrian. People today are so technologically
minded that they forget
the pedestrian. I am trying to disconnect
myself completely from technology,
because the risk is that you don't
think but just look at the screen.
TS: I'd like to elaborate on the idea
for a project in the sky. Let me show
you some images of the Salt Lake
in Bolivia. It's an incredible place.
During the rainy season the sky
reflects on the lake's surface in a way
that totally blurs the sky and lake. It
seems a kind of seamless environment.
I thought about it and took
inspiration from the clouds for a
future architecture and how it can
be classified.
For me the important question is
about how the clouds could be a
house, a city or a continent, and
how they can aggregate from one to
another. How could these modules
join and be connected together?
YF: I am interested in improvisation.
I believe that improvisation largely
underlies everything that has brought
about our civilisation. The bad thing
that I see in sophisticated technology
is that you cannot really improvise.
I'd like if you put that forward. You
shouldn't have modules but irregulars
forms, without rules.
TS: Like the clouds, there is no real
geometry in this shape, but it is
organic. It can change and adapt as
it grows. In that sense it can be much
freer. Indeed, the cloud generates
many different shapes, and this is
how the flying city is achieved.
When the clouds reach the city, they
change shape according to the temperature
of the city. There's an interaction
and, in some way, clouds are
very site specific. There are clouds
you never see in Paris.
YF: The question of undecided
geometry is particularly interesting.
In a "space-chain" structure, a ring
substitutes the triangle on one side
and a square on the other, but it could
also be a hexagon. If you move from
one grid pattern to another, it doesn't
determine its neighbour.
TS: What do you think about trying
to imagine the structure you did as
floating in the air?
YF: Sure. I like this idea.
TS: Super! When I look at your kind
of configuration I have the idea that
it should be floating in the air more
freely.
YF: I think there is an aesthetic quality.
Aesthetics, as a species characteristic,
is very human. I don't know
what aesthetics is and you cannot
have any rules for it. I think rules
are emotions as well. In mathematics,
too, there are so many emotional
elements. For that reason I'm much
more interested in the process than
the result.
TS: I said the same thing regarding
the Museo Aerosolar. The importance
doesn't lie so much in the
object itself as in art's capability to
imagine something about how we
may be able to live.
YF: I think I'm lucky because I can
do experiments. For example, in
The Hague people agreed on the
area that the city wants to redesign.
They did research with a simple
plexiglas model.
We did use aerial photographs, but
people from the area came there.
One day they were working by themselves
simply following my indications.
I don't know exactly how
long this would go on, but they did
it for two months, every week. They
recorded the process.
TS: I really love this attitude of collaboration.
We were doing an exhibition
where people could build
their own clouds. As we mentioned
before about vertical gardening,
I wonder why we can't do a flying
garden, or a flying farm or a flying
museum.
YF: Yes, it was similar to what I was
doing with Daniel Birnbaum's students
at the Venice Biennale.
TS: I'd like to develop a collaboration
with you, a platform on the
Internet which could move the digital
community towards the idea that
they could not only build blogs and
chats, but also inspire people with the
notion that we could start to build a
new aerial land, a flying architecture
that forms a new layer to existing cities.
We could also join forces to build
something physically, that we can put
flying in the sky.
YF: What you can touch is reality and
for people the reality is to push a chair
– that's a reality. To make a drawing
on paper is abstract. That's why I was
telling people to bring objects they
want to expose.
TS: Each reality is a product of the
imagination; there is no reality. As
Freud said, the real world is a symbolic
interpretation.
MB: I think you should start from an
alternative platform of a collective
idea and try to realise it concretely.
TS: I would like people to take over
this idea and start to build. Making
things fly is very easy if we take simple
plastic bags. If we talk about a permanent
structure I think in terms of
modules. People could later think
about the interior and design it.
My contribution is to use inflatable
modules rather than rigid structures.
You would still be able to have semirigid
structures or very flexible ones
by simply changing the pressure you
place into the structure. When the
air and its pressure and temperature
are the real material, then each
module has it own elastic web that
allows any module of any size to be
joined together, making partof this
elastic web-cloud flying city where
people could live inside each of
these flying modules. I'd like to do
that using some of your structures
and make it fly.
YF: Sure. I'll send you some more
material.
TS: Some ideas are perhaps coming
together between irregular structures
and my idea of putting a city
in the clouds. We could merge them
together and renew people's imagination.
We could activate processes
over the Internet. It is something
in the air, and these things can be
connected, sprinkling new ideas
around.
YF: Okay, we can start on it, but please
don't over-plan. Leave it to the people
themselves.
TS: I'll start thinking, imagining and
fine-tuning the right tools. Then later
the things will take over the idea.
We have to decide how much we want
to say without revealing everything.
We have to tune the right tools so
that later the things can be left to
move alone... imagination, passion,
curiosity…
YF: Indeed, that was our conversation.
But, as always happens with
audio recordings, a large part of
the content gets lost. When talking,
I used to show drawings or objects.
I also have my mimics and gestures
and my personal way of diction. None
of that is visible in a printed text.
A cloud spatiale city
Yona Friedman and Tomás Saraceno lay the first "building blocks" in their joint project for the cabaret Voltaire, curated by Maurizio Bortolotti.
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- 06 June 2010
- Zurich