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

[mccoy@earthlink.net (Jennifer & Kevin McCoy)]

Hans Ulrich Obrist wrote:
>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. "

This is the "lost legacy" of the situationists, one that Debord and
Bernstein found little time for. It is interesting that these attempts
at "applied situations" came from the northern wing of the
situationists. After the split of '62, when Debord solidified the
theoretical direction of the SI around the Paris group, the German and
Scandinavian groups gained the freedom to  pursue their programs:  SPUR
in Germany, Asger Jorn's Scandinavian Institute for Comparative
Vandalism in Denmark, and the Bauhaus Situationists in Sweden. It was
this third group, led by Asger Jorn's brother Jorgen Nash, that pursued
ideas that bear a close connection to CONSTANT's New Babylon. For them,
the focus of effort was Drakabygget, an experimental living and working
environment that attempted to enact a kind of self-building,
self-governing habitat, related to CONSTANT's "permenently shifting
architectural situations", but locating it in a rural context. I find
this emphasis on a rural situationist organization to be very
interesting, especially within the context of a contemporary, on-line
networked world.


Kevin McCoy
nyc



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