discussion

This is the painting on which I had the most moving reaction. I saw it in London and it moved me because the way he painted his parents remindes me of my own parents. The mother is painted as a person that is alway listening and beining there for you and the father sitting and doing his own thing a little bit in the background.  And I love the way he painted it and the use of colors.

A few weeks ago we were talking about De Bijlmer and that it is based on city designs from Le Corbusier.

Last semester during Architectural history class, I had to give a presentation about city planning by Le Corbusier. This is the text I had written about it for the presentation:

In the late 19^th and the early 20^th century, the city was in a process of transformation. Industrialization brought a lot of workers into urban areas. At the same time, the automobile was introduced. It destroyed historic street patterns, causing a gridlock and a dangerous situation for pedestrians. When Le Corbusier went to Paris and the United States, the large complex city’s convinced him of the need for modern housing and a modern city. Partly, this was a response to what he called the chaos around him, the enormous amount of traffic and the squalor of the industrial workers’ housing.  In the United States he admired the luxury apartment houses, but he said: ‘My own thinking is directed towards the crowds in the subway who come home at night to bad housing. The millions of beings sacrificed to a life without hope, without rest, without sky, sun, greenery.  He also believed that the only way to block a worker revolution was to formulate a machine for living, a living area that would bring the worker’s home life in line with the discipline of the factory. To this end, he created the Dom-ino housing concept. It  should be a cheap, efficient way to house workers that would provide a modern ethos. He wanted houses to be mass-produces.

According to Le Corbusier, the historic city, then, was seen as something that had to be cleared away if the modern age was to fulfill its true duty - unlimited production of human needs and wants.  His first attempt at city planning came in the form of the Contemporary City Plan for Three Million People, followed by the Voisin Plan. In these early theories, he attempted to show how his plan would be beneficial to business sector of the city. The Contemporary City was based upon clearance of most of the Parisian landscape (a few historic monuments could be kept), and the birth of twenty four steel and glass skyscrapers that would house the business and artistic elite. The workers were placed at the edges of the city in modern apartment structures, based on the Domino, close to their workplace–the factory. Most of the land, around eighty-five percent, was left to natural landscapes and playgrounds. He assumed that the plan would garner support from capitalists interested in arresting the workers’ movements and instituting a factory-like discipline onto the whole of society. No one took him up on it. With the depressions of the late 1920s.  Artists like Ebenzer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright had believed that once the environment had been designed for the people in a city, the sources of disorder in society would be minimized and individuals could be left to pursue their own initiatives. This believe rested on a faith in a ‘natural economic order’, a faith which Le Corbusier no longer shared. He confronted a world threatened by chaos and collapse. It seemed that only discipline could create the order he sought so ardently. Coordination must become conscious and total. Above all, society needed authority and a plan.In 1930 Le Corbusier had a new appreciation of workers’ rights. He joined the syndicalist movement. Syndicats were groups of workers in a particular trade that elected their “natural” leader to a regional trade council. From the regional council, the most able individual was chosen to represent the regional’s at the national council. The pyramid like conception reached an apex with the “natural” elites making scientific plans on how and what the factories should produce. For Corbusier, this meant that capitalism would have a plan and thus, would be ordered and harmonious. No longer would factories be able to overproduce and create depression.  This hierarchy of administration has replaced the state.  The Radiant City is based on this theory.  Every aspect of productive life is administrated from above according to one plan. This plan replaces the marketplace with total administration. Experts match society’s needs to its productive capacities. The citizen in Le Corbusier’s syndicalist society experiences both organization and freedom as part of his daily life.This plan for Le Corbusier was more than a collection of statistics and instructions; it was a social work of art. It expressed the full range of exchange and cooperation which is necessary to an advanced economy.  He said that the plan was necessary because the Machine Age requires conscious control.The plan had much in common with the Contemporary City, like clearance of the historic cityscape and rebuilding using modern methods of production. In the Radiant City, however, the pre-fabricated apartment houses, which he called Unités  were at the center of “urban” life. Like the Dom-Ino house, the Unité represents the application of mass-production techniques. The Unités  were available to everyone, not just the elite, based upon the size and needs of each particular family. In designing these apartments, Le Corbusier said that he ‘thought neither of rich nor of poor but of man.’ He believed that housing could be made to the ‘human scale’, right in its proportions for everyone. No one would want anything larger nor get anything smaller. Sunlight and recirculating air were provided as part of the design. The building would be placed upon pilotis, five meters off the ground, so that more land could be given over to nature.Inside the Unités were the vertical streets, the elevators, and the pedestrian interior streets that connected one building to another. Corridor streets were destroyed. Automobile traffic was to circulate on pilotis supported roadways above the earth. The entire ground was given as a “gift” to pedestrians. The business center was positioned to the north of the apartment houses and consisted of glass & steel skyscrapers.

Corbusier spends a great deal of the Radiant City theory elaborating on services available to the residents. Each apartment block had a catering section in the basement, which would prepare daily meals for every family and would complete each families’ laundry chores. The time saved would enable the individual to think, write, or utilize the play and sports grounds which covered much of the city’s land. Directly on top of the apartment houses were the roof top gardens and beaches. Children could be dropped off at the apartment houses ’ day care center and raised by scientifically trained professionals. The workday, so as to avoid the crisis of overproduction, was lowered to five hours a day. Transportation systems were also formulated to save the individual time. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently. Corbusier called it the vertical garden city. The most basic services which the Unite provides are those which make possible a new concept of the family. Le Corbusier envisioned a society in which men and women would work full-time as equals. In the Unite, cooking, cleaning, and child raising are services provided by society. In the Radiant City the family no longer has an economic function to perform. It exists as an end itself. The Unite is thus high-rise architecture for a new civilization, and Le Corbusier was careful to emphasize that its design could only be truly realized after society had been revolutionized. He therefore never concerned himself with such problems as muggings or vandalism. In the Radiant City, crime and poverty no longer exist.     Arna

This an article I found about the two designers that are giving a lecture wednesday, february 20. I think it’s good to know something about them and their work before they give a lecture. Their work and ideas are really interesting!

Text by Kirsten Algera

The studio of Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal is a home for ideas. These ideas are about relationships, representation, desire, public space and all the sort of issues that raise controversy these days. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal welcomes these ideas by integrating them, and forging them into other designs. Sometimes, by leaving the door open, it is possible to discard some ideas. Basically, they are not very much alike. And when they do have something in common, then it is that they are surprising and confusing all at once, providing an experience rather than an answer. That they are beautifully made with reference to a society that balances spectacle and mediocrity, mixing up lifestyle with values, and in which material comfort keeps pace with an increase in malaise. However, it is far from sombre in the studio. The magnificence of the world around us is warmly embraced, after all it is an immense space without paradigms, and this is received with generosity and presented with love.

BL/DP’s works are disturbing and fascinating. They raise issues that are topical in this wide, media-controlled world of today, touching upon, as Sloterdijk points out, “[...] the disorder of the western world that has tamed its civilians so as not to have them listen to the fundamental notes of boredom, stress and moral panic.” (1) In this chaotic world the concept of meaning has become lost. It is from here Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal begins, having shaken off the idea that the world can be considered an objective and progressive project. Complacency never brought enlightenment, with or without the capital E.

There is no clear distinction between autonomous work and applied art. Moreover, in BL/DP’s ‘functional’ designs the studio ideas are filtered and translated into other, actualised images. This conceptual approach keeps design far from the retrospective, modernistic form; graphic tools always being ultimately utilised, and not just to clarify the world. BL/DP’s designs do not promise understanding, but they may offer the hope of revealing the relationships that control our lives and undermining them.

In the kiosk I have laid 6 jackets of magazines side by side. All pictures show watches: TAG Heuer, Cartier, Rolex, Breguet, Baume et Mercier. Is it later on Newsweek than on Paris Match? One could be forgiven for thinking that it is a designconcept, each magazine its own time.
‘Would you put them back as before, please?’
‘Do you fancy the jackets any more?’
‘You’re not being serieus, nobody looks at the cover.’
Not clever of these watchmakers. A cover advert can cost as much as $ 600,000. Perhaps there are people who prefer their magazines on a pile lying face-up, showing Brad Pitt on a couch wearing a watch rather than New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Catherina. Since I have seen Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal’s cover sketches I cannot resist turning magazines upside down. Never quick enough though, I am unable to harmonise the front and backsides like the sketches do. And especially the interaction with engagement and trendiness in representation forces me to lose myself in these sketches. Besides, they have been done with a technique that has nothing to do with the fast world of journalism and advertising. BL/DP’s devotion shows how little attention is paid to the originals. The contours of the front and back cover have been outlined with a fine stylus. I see uncertainty, briefly, at the A of BANLIEUE. One can feel how it is made. They compel as well as question the relationship between the French riots and Eau de Toilette, the front and back, news and catastrophe, engagement and consumption, tragedy and desire.

Four flags in a row hang quietly in the empty white room of Casco’s in Utrecht. They are made of transparent, blue silk and almost look like a projection. These images, that are meticulously tacked on, fade away when light reflects from behind. Light is deflected more by the colour blue than by any other colour. It was John Tyndall who discovered this in 1859 as he wondered why the sky was blue. Is it for this reason, perhaps the most anonymous and intangible colour?
The manufacturing process of the flags forms an important part of the design just as in Front and Back covers. The time and effort it took to embroider the motifs on the expensive cloth contrast sharply with the casual imagery of the street. If it is a street at all? Do these misplaced, white sneakers belong to the dozy, anonymous man? An invisible fugitive? Or to the man with the beer in his hand? Is he a labourer? An Australian tourist? Who plays the lead role? Where is this anyway? What is available?
Usually flags have symbolic, recognisable designs on them. And they themselves symbolise a nation, a mutual goal or an identity. Flags are objects that express confidence, calling for people to feel the same. However, the flags I see here do not show any territorial claim or security, at most only the desire for them. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal’s images on the flags are uncharacteristic and ambigious. What they refer to might not be that important after all. They resemble images of other worlds that possibly exist. They can appear and disappear, as projections do.

At the busstop an enchanting poster is placed in a shiny frame. The image reminds me of a magic box with a sparkling starry sky. The poster says EVERYBODY-THING and BODYEVERYTHING. Everybody is a thing. Everything is body. A few letters of the other words on the poster have been cut off: friend has become fr and on a second poster uck is changed into fuc. Jeremy, Tariq, Michael, Babak, Florian, Steve. Do I know them? Are they intimates? Are these posters actually meant for me? Probably, hanging in a busstop. It is impossible not to look at them. Just as it is impossible not to be confronted with, real or imagined, the private life of others in the public domain. The letters on the posters seem to have been drawn by a sign writer with a steady hand. Behind the glass window shimmers some kind of reflection. It is difficult to see if it is me. When my nose is practically pressed against the windowpane the man standing beside me is no longer able to contain his curiosity, and asks: ‘What’s in it?’
‘Just a poster, sir.’

I always had difficulties with ‘nature’. The only nature I had met with in the village I grew up were lost, migratory birds. They mostly got knocked down because they came from Siberia, where they did not know cars. ‘Wring their necks, straight away,’ my friend, a farmer’s son, advised, having seen these helplessly flapping geese on the asphalt: ‘that’ll put them out of their misery.’
In the stamps that Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal designed for the centenary of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Natuur Vereniging1 , I see the awkward, culturally defined relationship between humans and nature looming up again. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal has combined images from the Jac. P. Thijsse’s Verkade-albums, who was one of the founders of the association, with pictures of naturalists and silhouets of flora and fauna. The sheet of stamps looks like a graceful dance of lines, dunes, people, animals and plants. Who is deceiving who?
The Verkade albums of 1906 were considered the first successful marketing campaign in Holland. Thijsse’s pictures of nature in packets of biscuits and Dutch rusks seemed to have doubled the sales for the biscuitmaker. Without Thijsse the Marie biscuit would have long become history. So the consumption of nature literally becomes the subject of the stamps. However, I wonder what it actually is what we see. Does something like nature really exist, or is it already substituted with a picture on the wall, with what we want to see? Or is this imposed on us?

The jacket of the publication Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2003/2004 is made from grey velvet. It is impossible not to touch. On closer inspection it turns out to be an annual report. On the inside the report is as plain as the museum itself : a space for art and art-related information. The text is placed like a bookmarker between the pages, while images fill the white pages. The report gives Jozef Israël’s work a place next to museumworkers dressed in hippie-style at the outdoor festival for culture and entertainment, and a desk chair that is being rehoused is placed in front of a Sheila Hicks installation. The catalogue informs us of one year of the life in the Stedelijk Museum, and it also shows that Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal do not restrict the equal treatment of form and concept to autonomous work. Even the design of an annual report - usually not the most exciting publication - can in an accessible way offer comment on its own being.

Note: (1) Peter Sloterdijk, The Crystal Palace, a philosophy of globalisation, Nijmegen 2006