<eyebeam><blast> Constant & Rem Koolhaas & Itsuko Hasegawa

[Hans Ulrich Obrist <HUO@compuserve.com>]

Carlos Basualdo writes in his very interesting message  "more  than
turning art into everyday life it would be a question of turning
everyday life into an architecture of situations"
I recently interviewed CONSTANT in Amsterdam about his New Babylon which
he developped in the 60s as a city of fluid, permanently shifting
architectural situations. " New Babylon is the world of the homo ludens,
a pattern of society which takes into account that everything is in
permanent flux and  transformation."
New Babylon planned to be a flexible environment, from the groundplan to
all its details. It is an open city without borderlines which can spread
in all directions,  like a super- fluid without barriers, leading
towards a post-identitarian city.
Constant imagined the different entities of the city to be
hyperconnected in order to constitute a horizontal web, every location
is accessible to everyone, the life of the inhabitants of New Babylon is
a CONSTANT travel where they  would stay   in an ongoing and spontaneous
relation to their surroundings. Any intervention of an individual
becomes an interference and interaction with the collective life-
ambience and provokes reactions of the others. Constant told me that he
imagined a kind of participatory chain reaction of creative actions
which finds a climax:
"The point of climax constituted an ambience- moment which can be
understood as a collectice creation. The rhythm of becoming and
disappearing of ambience-moments is the time-space measure of
New-Babylon".

Concerning the museum-discussion I would like to add a fragment from a
panel discussion on Museums of Modern Art in the Twenty-first Century
which took place in 1996.
Rem Koolhaas pointed out that  he sees the musem as an issue of urbanity
and less as  an issue of architecture.
"I think rather than architecture which  always induces enormous anxiety
in its either/or logic -since architecture is, just like MoMA ... about
exclusion-
the urban is the ideal medium, combining the unpredictable with a degree
of organisation. Because a city of course never preempts what is going
to happen;
rather it offers  the latent potential for things to happen .. in a kind
of related way."

I recently made an interview with Japanese architect  Itsuko Hasegawa on
her groundbreaking  "Museum of Fruit" and her participatory and
horizontal architeture in general . I will mail it in a few days when it
is
transcribed.


Hans Ulrich Obrist



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