Talks

Lars Lerup
“After the city: Enhancing the urbanisation process using assemblage thinking”

“Forever transforming, the mirrored human trace is, in its built materiality, blind to its surroundings and open to endless interpretation by its occupants. Just as the frame “knows nothing” of the door it facilitates, the city, driven by millions of assemblages, all operating as scenes in some kind of unison, acts — perplexingly in part and in whole — autonomously. Each component in the urban assemblage is a “selfish gene” on its own errant, yet somehow it is not quite independent: gas explodes when ignited; sun, soil, and climate both help and hinder tress in their work as solar pumps; the frame, the door, and the wall separate and join spaces. A bewildering mix of design, evolution, and circumstance. All these “objects” roam across our landscape, both constituting and occupying the city.  The continuous city undermines any notion of grand design; we contemplate a jerry-built and brittle world, reluctantly held together by abstruse affinities. 

The apparent interdependency of the city’s assemblages leads us to think  in other than binary terms. Binaries, such as nature/artifice, ignore and quash any region of affinity between stated “opposites”. A more productive way to think of opposites is to envision a force field differentiating and connecting apparent polarities. This opens the heterotopic potential — the differing placements or capacities — of an otherwise supposedly inert condition. When seen as a field of vectorial intensities, our urban condition swells with newly apparent hybrid assemblages. (…) The city becomes a hybrid ecology, its physical contiguity and diversity both source and potential for a better future. But here lies a final obstacle: the examination of any assemblage in need of energy follows a trail that currently leads back to petroleum. As we mine our future, we must live with our past. The continuous city is our geology, biology, archaeology, and destiny.”

 *Excerpts from ‘The Continuous City’ by Lars Lerup published by Park Books, Zurich, 2017

— Lars Lerup is the Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Professor of Architecture and the Dean Emeritus at Rice School of Architecture, Houston Texas and Professor Emeritus of University of California at Berkeley. He was awarded Doctor honoris causa in technology by Lund University, Sweden in 2001. He was the Harold W Brunner Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2009-2010. Lerup holds a teaching and research appointment at Humboldt University’s Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques in Berlin. Lerup has written several book: Villa Prima Facie 1976, Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action 1977 (also published in German by Vieweg), Planned Assaults 1987 (also published in Chinese), After the City 2000 (also published in Italian 2016 by LIST Lab), One Million Acres and No Zoning in 2010 and The Continuous City in 2017. Currently Lerup has an exhibit of objects called Parque Movil at Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain.

Luis Callejas
“Islands and other derivative territories”

“How can the smallest possible entities (…) become the most powerful tools for reclaiming sovereignty over an oceanic archipelago? How could a series of tactical interventions to the lighthouses and navigation beacons become the key elements to protecting the ecologies of the Archipelago, and finally trigger an understanding of it as an oceanic territory of a country? How can small-scale interventions to the structures change the cultural perception of the seemingly unoccupied landscape that so many fishermen depend on?

The projects contained in Islands & Atolls are a collection of works that share these questions. In all projects there is an interest in how architecture might critically repurpose its traditionally limited disciplinary tools to have an impact at a territorial scale and ultimately instigate how the territorial effects might be categorised by appropriating the term landscape.”

 *Excerpts from Pamphlet Architecture n.33 ‘Island & Atolls’ by Luis Callejas LCLA Office published by Princeton Architecture Press, New York, 2013

— Luis Callejas is director of LCLA OFFICE and associate professor at the Oslo School of Architecture. After completing large public projects in Medellin and Bogota Luis Callejas was awarded with the Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects in 2013 and selected as one of the world’s ten best young practices by the Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation in 2010. Callejas was nominated again in 2012 and 2014. In 2016 Callejas was one of the three finalists for the Rolex mentor and protege arts initiative. In ten years of practice Luis Callejas has received diverse recognitions in twenty design competitions and his works exhibited in North America, Europe, Australia and Latin America. Callejas is the author of Pamphlet Architecture 33 (Princeton Architectural Press, NY). The competition for PA33 asked previous authors in the series to nominate the architects and theorists whose work represents the most exciting design and research in the field today. Previous appointments as visiting faculty include Harvard University GSD (2011-2016), Escola da Cidade, RMIT Melbourne, the University of Toronto and the 2016 Patrick Geddes fellow at the University of Edinburgh.