LANDSCAPE METROPOLIS, GENEVA 2008–09 URBAN SEA, BARENTS SEA 2011–12 INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, ICELAND 2014-15

PARK CITY, LONDON 2007–08 URBAN UNDERGROUND, SWITZERLAND 2013-14CITY RECYCLING, ATHENS 2010–11

URBAN DESERT, BAHREIN 2009–10 LAND DENSIFICATION, SWITZERLAND 2012–13 INDUSTRIAL NOSTALGIA, VENICE 2015-16

laboratoire bâle

Laboratoire Bâle (laba) is an architecture and urban design studio of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), based in Basel. laba is devoted to the investigation of spatial design at the interface between urban processes and architectural objects. It is laba’s conviction that design is both an intellectual and artistic product that takes place on all scales of the urban, and therefore, laba’s projects span from territorial planning to architectural detailing.

Harry Gugger, ProfessorTél. +41 61 225 10 20harry.gugger@epfl.ch

Juliette Fong, AdministrationTél. +41 61 225 10 21juliette.fong@epfl.ch

Bárbara Costa, Head of ResearchTél. +41 61 225 10 21 barbara.costa@epfl.ch

Charlotte Truwant, Research AssistantTél. +41 61 225 10 24 charlotte.truwant@epfl.ch

Stefan Hörner, Head of TeachingTél. +41 61 225 10 24 stefan.horner@epfl.ch

Salomé Gutscher, Teaching Assistant Tél. +41 61 225 10 26salome.gutscher@epfl.ch

BING MAPS AERIAL VIEW OF BASEL, CH

CHRIS HADFIELD, BRUSSELS, 2013

the pervasive nature of the urbanThe word urbanization was introduced by . . . Ildefons Cerdà . . . in his 1867 book Teoria general de la urbanización. . . . Cerdà legitimized his invention of urbanization as elucidating the emerging “conceptual features” of a paradigm. This paradigm was the condition of limitlessness and the complete integration of movement and communication brought about by capitalism, which Cerdà saw as the unprecedented “vast swirling oceans of persons, of things, of interests of every sort, of a thousand diverse elements” that work in permanent reciprocity and thus form a totality that cannot be contained by any previous finite territorial formations such as the city.1

Cittá diffusa, metapolis, postmetropolis, global city, space of flows, generic city2 – these are some of the recently invented concepts that try to name and define the new kind of urban phenomena that have come to asymmetrically blanket the globe. While each has its own particular standpoint, they all address (directly or by implication) the demise of the humanist city3 and that of its analogous dichotomy, city/countryside. Engulfed by “junkspace”,4 city-as-object and rural-as-background no longer exist. What is left now is an ambiguous and hybrid condition that has no genetic code and is impossible to describe in typological terms.

Ultimately, all architecture colonizes space for human appropriation, defining a boundary of domination set against a background of wilderness and chaos – in other words, nature (the excluded leftover of the architectural inside). The classical city, one could argue, did the same thing on a communal scale: it contained the agglomeration of civilized inner public spaces segregated from the outer (extramural) countryside. The city wall drew the limit between the two worlds, with the cultural object in the foreground, contained and framed against the backdrop of wide-open land. The industrial (modern) city blurred and irreparably damaged this once-stable opposition. Social polis merged with bucolic arcadia in infinite, site-specific combinations and bred a succession of “transgenic landscapes”5 that we now generally refer to as “the urban”. The territory lost friction and changed in more or less awkward ways to the point at which “the urban” itself became a kind of all-pervading (mostly chaotic) cultural background – one might say, a kind of nature.

BING MAPS AERIAL VIEW OF FRESNO, CA, USA

the artificial production of the naturalAir, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce . . . a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Landscape has become Junkspace, foliage as spoilage: Trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts . . . , sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables.6

Nature is a mystified anthropocentric ideal, one evoked well by Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting of a man poised on the edge of the abyss, contemplating its vastness and projecting onto it an extension of his own inner grandiosity. Man, the conscious cultural being, sets himself against the world of natural things: civilized artificiality versus original wilderness. This idea of “artificiality” has its root in the Latin word artificium, which means “art, craft or skill” and eventually also acquired the meaning of “inauthenticity”, thereby coming to encompass the common associations of “truth” with nature and “deceit” with culture. However, nature in the sense of something non-artificial, unaltered by human activity, hardly exists any more. Even those places we call nature reserves (maintained in order to preserve fragile ecosystems and biodiversity) are paradoxically unnatural, since the act of conservation itself can only ever result in something man-made. Human design (biotech agriculture, plastic surgery, beach resorts, rural tourism, greenhouse tomatoes, hypoallergenic cats) makes so-called nature take on an artificial authenticity. Preserved/protected nature is always a sanitized, tamed and overall more human-friendly version of the real thing – a domesticated, hyper-natural version that is little other than culture in disguise. Ironically, the more we learn to control nature, the less nature we have, and the more we change nature, the more complex, strange and unknowable it appears.

In the light of such ambiguity, one might propose replacing the culture/nature binary with that of the controllable versus the autonomous, whereby culture would be that which we can control and nature all that we cannot.7 According to this new classification, greenhouse tomatoes and nature reserves would belong to the cultural category, while computer viruses, traffic jams and “the urban” (in all its all-pervasive autonomous anarchy) would be considered natural.

NASA APOLLO 8, EARTHRISE, 1968

the ecology of artificial earthA Styrofoam cup will take about 500 years to degrade. Radioactive waste deposited beneath mountains has an average harmful life-expectancy of about 100,000 years (for it can endure between 10,000 and one million years), three times longer than the time spanning back to the Chauvet Cave paintings executed by Palaeolithic humans. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the world’s population was one billion, but it is now seven times that, and by 2050 it is predicted to surpass nine billion. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has more than doubled since 1950 and is causing global warming. Human debris dumped into the oceans has been accumulating in patches known as the Pacific trash vortex. Polymer plastics (found, for instance, in the common plastic shopping bag) does not biodegrade as much as degrade, breaking down into increasingly smaller pieces (microplastics) until it eventually enters the food chain:

For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility. . . . There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there.8

We live in an age of ecological panic masked by the cynicism of ideological denial. In the scheme of the five stages of grief,9 after denial follow anger, bargaining and depression, until we eventually reach the point of acceptance. What we are grieving is the death of the idea of nature and the loss of our anthropocentric world view.10 This is an uncanny era in which human history has collided with geological time, giving rise to strange and vast phenomena that are impossible to categorize in terms of the opposition of the human versus the natural (global warming, mass extinction, pollution). Geologists have come to call this era the Anthropocene, meaning literally the “human era”. Earth in the age of the Anthropocene is an artefact – Spaceship Earth, an artificial object travelling through time and space and steered by Earthiens.11

abstract environmentsThe end of the world [nature] has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. . . . It was in April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced . . . the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.12

Modernism has been the history of Western culture’s progressive path toward abstraction – from Courbet to Cézanne to Picasso; from Kandinsky to Rothko to Frank Stella; from Brancusi to Sol LeWitt to Robert Smithson – and this pattern in the visual arts was a response to, as well as a reflection of, the growing abstraction of social relations in modern industrial society. “To abstract” comes from the Latin abstrahere, literally “to draw away from”, which means to uproot something essential out of its totality in order to define generic frameworks rather than specific (concrete) solutions. Abstraction was, in fact, the grand project of modernity – to detach thinking from tradition and myth and to seek a universal rationale that is both generic and all-inclusive: “Abstract art does not appeal to the emotions but to the mind.”13 It shies away from the representation of ideology and/or the subjective pathos of the author, becoming what Umberto Eco has called an “Open Work”, that is, a piece of art whose meaning is somewhat indeterminate and incomplete, and thus admits a myriad of contingent interpretations (carried out by the performer or the viewer) without fear of adulteration.14 Abstraction produces forms with flexible, indeterminate content. Correspondingly, modern industrial society has also been the process through which the formal city has disintegrated into the abstract process of urbanization, the generic habitat of absolute individualism based on the ideology of incommensurability and infinite growth propelled by constant movement and production:

[Urbanization] has blurred for good some of the dualities upon which previous subjects built their world, first and foremost the distinction between public and private, and, subsequently, the triad labour–work–vita activa. . . . Oppositions between work and otium, private and public, inside and outside cease to have any meaning, as the spaces we live in become increasingly hard to label as belonging to one definite sphere: work mingles with living, private with public, production with reproduction.15

Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1924 project for the Hochhausstadt (High-rise City) reveals this ethos by endlessly repeating the same generic building type across an abstract grid. The result is a hybrid of blocks

LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER, HIGH-RISE CITY, 1926

and slabs in which all civic activities, such as production, living and commerce, are superimposed rather than being isolated into specifically appointed zones. Hochhausstadt is a city of “anywheres” whose motors are movement, change and flexibility, and in which architecture has been reduced to pure abstraction: the lack of formal hierarchy stands for the lack of social representation,16 so the city is reduced to its reproductive conditions and form is detached from content. Hilberseimer realized and drew upon the fact that industrial Earth is “a world that no longer depends on the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ time or space”.17 Things like electric lighting, air conditioning, the division of labour and communication technologies have contributed to making “abstraction the hallmark of our experience of space and architecture, or lack thereof”.18 Networks, landscapes, globalization, junkspace, cittá diffusa, metapolis, postmetropolis, global city, space of flows, generic city – all of these concepts evoke a certain aesthetic of industrialization in their implicit praise of an ideology of infinity achieved through endless repetition and non-compositional seriality.

Abstraction is a result of the loss of referentials after the disappearance of the city/countryside dichotomy, the artificial-versus-natural world order. Abstraction is a by-product of the end of nature and the total pervasiveness of the urban. It is a symptom of artificiality. From a pessimistic viewpoint, it encourages a removal of the sense of place and its specific meaning, memory or message. But viewed positively, its indeterminacy can suggest a sense of openness and flexibility that allows other non-human points of view to be acknowledged. When perceived as an “open work”, abstraction can be the device that turns architecture into the background, causing it to switch places with “nature” and thereby reveal the non-human world. In other words, abstraction can be the aesthetic that causes domesticated design objects to abdicate their role as significant anthropocentric landmarks or symbols of human colonization in order to become minimalist background sculptures that enhance and interact with the geological designs of mountains, glaciers, fjords, lava fields and other such earthly things. Abstraction does not tell us about our special place in the world; it does not foster a sense of familiarity. On the contrary, it is ambiguous, it eludes, it raises questions. There is something uncanny about this aesthetic, but precisely for this reason it counters the objectification of nature, because it involves and implicates us in it as actors who can no longer be mere observers. Abstraction creates dark environments just as a film noir does with the detective who thinks he is investigating an external situation from a supposedly neutral point of view but then finds himself dramatically implicated in the story’s narrative.19

EDWARD BURTYNSKY, TANGGU PORT, TIANjIN, 2005

industrial earthArtificiality is now a precondition of life on industrial Earth: a “world” of domesticated nature and wild urbanization well illustrated by j.M.W. Turner’s Impressionistic painting Rain, Steam and Speed, which portrays an eerie landscape of urban infrastructures dipped in sunset light and industrial mist. If the Neolithic Revolution gave birth to “the city”, then the Industrial Revolution gave birth to “the urban”, and if the first altered the natural environment, then the second abolished the concept of nature altogether. We live in an urban-industrialized civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, in that “Nature” with a capital N. The trouble with this belief is that nature quietly expresses and reproduces the precise values that it pretends to reject: it acts like an oasis in the junkspace, which due to its exceptionality ends up perpetuating and endorsing the banality and dullness of that very junkspace. In other words, the aesthetics of Nature – rolling hills and unspoiled greenery – is what hides the fact that Earth in the age of the Anthropocene has become globally dominated by industrial exploitation.

In response to this ideological paradox, this book aims to contribute to the development of a formal architectural language that goes beyond the aesthetics of nature and to an industrial aesthetics that goes beyond its classic opposition to nature – as Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, “We want the creative faculty to imagine what we know.”20 We want to imagine an “ecology without nature”,21 where clean energy and environmental management embrace human and non-human needs in ways that go beyond an economy of preservation in terms of “visual impact”. We want to imagine post-anthropocentric landscapes in which human impact might be seen as a responsible act of cultivation rather than an embarrassing mutilation of the supposedly pristine wilderness. We want to imagine industrial buildings that interact with climate and its changes, collaborating, as Robert Smithson put it, with geology’s entropy and the massive scale of the landscape.22 We want to design non-polluting industries whose production loops recycle natural resources and abolish the concept of waste by creating buildings that do more that just exploit the environment by actually helping to cultivate it – “Waste equals food.”23 In forwarding this approach, we hope to re-establish an integral non-aggressive relationship to living cycles of production and consumption whereby land “development could tend toward a sensuous culture . . . [and] labour would be diverted to the construction of an aesthetic rather than a repressive environment”.24

j.M.W. TURNER, RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED, 1844

URBAN NATURE / INDUSTRIAL EARTH, LABA 2014/18

laba method Territorial forms synthesize the way in which societies perceive, conceive and react to the world: they materialize ideologies (worldviews) into spatial forms and design concepts (aesthetics). This correlation between worldview and aesthetic (ideology and form) is central to laba’s approach to architectural thought. Buildings, cities and the urban at large are usually understood as producers of a “man-made environment” which is often opposed to an idea of “nature”. Urban-nature questions this dichotomy and argues that nature is actually a cultural fiction, no less human-made than architecture itself, and that this paradigmatic shift should have consequences in the way architecture colonizes the supposedly natural environment.

In this spirit, laba is currently working on a research series entitled “Industrial Earth,” which aims to pinpoint the fundamental aesthetic characteristics of environments shaped by Western industrial capitalism, the driving force behind the advent of the Great Acceleration, the Athropocene, and the total artificialization of planet Earth. The current studio—Industrial Nostalgia—is a part of this research and it takes the city of Venice as a pretext to look at how the industrialization of culture has expanded the typology of the museum beyond its institutional boundaries, into urban forms (through heritage preservation) and people’s way of life, through mass entertainment and tourism. The studio will focus on the Venetian Lagoon and its immediate hinterland with the aim of reevaluating the city’s relationship to cultural heritage, its inner local livelihood, and its perimeter hinterland. The goal of this studio will be to question the paradoxical role of preservation and our society’s relationship to monuments, museumification, and the commodification of culture. We will reflect on the historical debate on Venetian style, experiment with ways of responding to the condition/aesthetic of artificiality and simulation, and investigate how the insertion of specific programs into the city might bring “reality” back to the islands.

laba’s teaching method is structured in two major segments—the territorial scale in the first semester and the architectural scale in the second— and its approach is simultaneously specific and universal: it is both contextual, as it departs from the analysis of site-specific forms of a particular place, and generalist, as it promotes the critical assessment of a set of dialectical contradictions which address the studio’s research on industrial aesthetics, such as abstraction/representation, place/event, landscape/object, system/form.

1) analysisBy expanding the field of architectural design into territorial studies, laba aims to claim the urban system as part of the architectural object, the territory (or the landscape) into the site, both in a physical and ideological way. Architecture has the obligation to engage with the “big picture”, the “large scale”, of both abstract thinking and spatial construction. In this spirit, the fall semester is structured around 5 assignments: My Urban Region, Archive Compilation, Selective Reading, Integrated Form, and Feasibility Study I. Apart from the first and last assignments, all are carried out in teams, with each student being assigned a role in two different types of groups: the specialist group, which concentrates on collecting, compiling and interpreting information (Archives Compilation and Selective Reading) and, afterwards, the design group which builds up an integrated urban project (Integrated Form. The Feasibility Study closes the semester with the students proposing a site and program for an architectural project. As such, it may be carried out individually or in pairs. It should be noted that this semester will be backed up by the parallel unité d’enseignement Cartography (U.E. –U), which will provide extra support on graphical techniques and urban/landscape literacy in terms of how to read and identify large scale spatial structures. As a sythesis of the first semester, a Territorial Constitution is developed and carried out by the laba staff, during the inter-semester period, in collaboration with appointed student assistants.

MY URBAN REGION

Students are asked to interpret and represent their initial reading towards the selected urban region in an intuitive and highly personal way, through the presentation of a conceptual sketch. What this sketch actually is, and which medium is used to execute it, is each student’s choice, and the sole requisite is that it be self-explanatory—the message, it’s significant content, must speak for itself, for the author will not be allowed to present it through language.

ARCHIVE COMPILATION

This exercise consists in collecting, compiling and comparing data, facts and figures about the studio’s appointed case-study. The class is divided into 5 specialist teams and each is assigned its own relevant (and site-specific) research topic. In the current academic year, for instance, under Industrial Nostalgia, the themes will be: Terraferma, Marshland, Imago, Industry and Infrastructure. The goal

ARCHIVE COMPILATION

is that each team understands the historical and cultural context of its theme and gains a sense of what role it plays withing the territory and, for that, it is demanded that this research be framed along the following preestablished topics: history, governance, economy, and landscape. The submittal medium of this assignment is a reference wall—a conscious juxtaposition of gathered material—put together in the format of a PreziTM presentation.

SELECTIVE READING

The goal of this exercise is to obtain a geographical understanding of the 5 significant themes, in correlation with the physical morphology of the appointed region. Each group will be asked to understand and explain where and why each of these themes is located, describing their surrounding landscape and territorial requirements and, therefore, this exercise will have a strong emphasis on cartography. One needs to understand the present context in order to then speculate about its future developments.

The selective reading is an academic exercise that is not passive nor neutral—a reading is already an interpretation and therefore, it is a personal construction that implies choice. Because this reading is monofunctional (specialized on one of the research topics), it does not pretend to be a realistic approach to an actual urban project. Nevertheless, it is valuable precisely because of its categorical radicalism, which allows for a certain freedom, where concepts can be tested to their fullest before later being modified and adapted in coexistence with the matrix of the 4 remaining topics. Each group is asked to submit a map of their reading and a conceptual image/collage.

INTEGRATED FORM

At this point students shift from the “specialist” frame to multidisciplinary design teams that includes one specialist from each of the previous 5 themes. Each team is now asked to develop an urban project—a territorial form—that addresses the short, medium and long term issues and needs of the region, in an integrated way that mediates between the 5 specialist themes previously researched. The emphasis on group work in this first semester is understood to be an important component of laba’s academic structure because it teaches students to negotiate and be productive members of a larger entity. Deliverables consist of a map of the territorial form and its explanation in the form of a presentation and a text.

SELLECTIVE READING

2) field tripFIELD TRIP + FEASIBILITY STUDY I

The Feasibility Study is crucially articulated with the Field Trip and is, in fact, produced in situ, during the course of a workshop and symposium which takes place in collaboration with a local partner institution. During the course of the field trip students will be asked to confront the research developed so far with possible locations for a specific site of intervention where they will propose an architectural design project during the second semester. This is the final assignment of the first semester and so the field trip will end with a final reviews day, where students present their future project proposals.

TERRITORIAL CONSTITUTION

The constitution is carried out between semesters as collaboration between the laba staff and appointed student assistants. Its result should be a collective synthesis of the 5 maps produced in the previous assignment of the Integrated Form, and it also include the projects proposed in the Feasibility Study, articulated together in a hypothetical masterplan.

GOALS OF SEMESTER 1

- Critically assess one’s own cultural background and its influence on the perception and understanding of a new site;- Gather, compile and select information, transforming it into active knowledge;- Identify landscape systems and represent them through maps;- Filter relevant information and use comparative references;- Identify territorial forms that reflect cultural issues of history, governance, economy and landscape;- Understand the long-term phasing and timing of urban planning;- Learn about team-work and become familiarized with public presentations;- Learn how to articulate urbanism, landscape and architecture.

FIELD TRIP

3) projectIn the Spring semester laba students must develop an architecture project based on the masterplan carried out in the first semester. Each student is asked to revise a repopose the feasibility study, and then the project design unfolds in a sequence similar to the official phases: Feasibility Study II, Schematic Design, Design Development, and Presentation Documentats. Lectures on the subjects of structure, façade, building services, and fit-out provide inputs to each phase accordingly. Students may work individually or in pairs. They learn to elaborate a project on their own—from the raising of a fundamental question and the definition of a program, to the development a corresponding architectural form—and therefore this semester can be considered a ‘rehearsal’ for the upcoming EPFL SAR master thesis project.

FEASIBILITY STUDY II

This short assignment works as a consolidation of the previous workshop presentation. It consists of a preliminary study that outlines the physical, infrastructural and legal conditions of a site proposed by the student, while assessing its compatibility with a hypothetical program. A rough massing should be set forth. Deliverables include a slide presentation, diagrams, a conceptual model, and a program brief.

SCHEMATIC DESIGN

The initial descriptions of the feasibility study should now be transformed into a functional, logical, thematic and aesthetic architectural standpoint, a design concept. Within this phase, contextual issues of the site are addressed and solutions for basic issues such as circulation, structure, materials, overall aesthetics and volumetric relationships should be discussed. The essential character of the project is formulated. Deliverable consist of a full set of drawings printed on A1 (site plan at 1:500 or 1:1000, plans and sections down to 1:200), a structural model, and a project description text.

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

This phase serves to strengthen the concept by designing appropriate and specific details that guide the decision process, regarding techniques and technologies to be employed for construction. Set of

PROjECT

deliverable remains equal to the previous pin-up, with the addition of a materiality model. A member of the laba replaces the student in presenting the project to the guest critics.

PRESENTATION DOCUMENTS

The final assignment of the year consists of a critical assemblage and presentation of documents that represent the entire project, From Feasibility study to detailing. Deliverables include a presentation of a condensed Feasibility Study narrative, presentation panels with full set of drawings printed on A0, all models and presentation models explaining all aspects of the project, and text description.

GOALS OF SEMESTER 2

- Conduct research of a site;- Formulate a narrative that addresses a specific urban problematic reflected into a site and program of the student’s own choosing;- Initiate, develop and detail a project consistently;- Communicate and represent ideas and designs through drawings, models, texts and presentations.

4) publicationlaba is commitmed to publishing and promoting the research and design results of each academic year. The synthesis is compiled in a book, which publishes the student work as well as interviews or discussions with experts and complimentary essays. The three-part structure of the book reflects laba’s methodology: part one presents a detailed, inter-disciplinary analysis of the region under the appointed 5 research themes, and resulting in a territorial constitution; part two documents the field trip; and part three presents the architectural projects as a formal expression of the knowledge and experience gained. laba’s publications are made in collaboration with Park Books and Ludovic Balland. The 2011/12 edition, Barents Lessons, was awarded two prizes: The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2012, awarded by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (BAK), and The Most Beautiful German Books 2013, by The Book Art Foundation (Stiftung Buchkunst).

PUBLICATION

BARENTS LESSONS 2011–12

SWISS LESSONS 2012–13

ICELAND LESSONS 2014–15

recommended readingADORNO, Theodor W. and HORKHEIMER, Max, 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.ADORNO, Theodor, 1991. The Culture Industry. London/New York: Routledge.AURELI, Pier Vittorio, et. al., 2010, Rome: the Centre(s) Elsewhere. Rotterdam: NAi. AURELI, Pier Vittorio, 2011. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.BAUDILLARD, jean, 1995. Simulacra and Simulation. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.BENjAMIN, Walter, 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: PenguinBERGER, john, 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.BRAUNGART, Michael and McDONOUGH, William, 2009. Cradle to cradle. London: Vintage.ECO, Umberto, 1998. Faith in Fakes. London: Vintage.GUATTARI, Félix, 1989. Les Trois Écologies. Paris: Galilée.HARVEY, David, 2012. Rebel Cities. London and Brooklyn NY: Verso.KOOLHAAS, Rem, 2004. junkspace in Content. TashenLEFEBVRE, Henri, 1992. The Production of Space. London: Wiley-Blackwell.MARCUSE, Herbert, 1964. The One Dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon.MORTON, Timothy, 2007. Ecology Without Nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics. London/Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.MORTON, Timothy, 2010. The Ecological Thought. London/Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.MORTON, Timothy, 2012. Dark Ecology: art and thinking after the end of the world. [podcast] 26 Octob er 2012. Available at: Ecology Without Nature <http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.pt/> [visited 30 October 2013]SOLÁ-MORALES, Ignasi de, 1997. Differences: topographies of contemporary architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

text notes1. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).2. These terms were coined and defined, respectively, by Bernardo Secchi, François Ascher, Edward W. Soja, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells and Rem Koolhaas.3. Alberti said that “the city is like a large house and the house in turn is like a small city”; quoted in Peter Eisenman, “Introduction”, in Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 1982), p. 9.4. The term was coined by Rem Koolhaas; see Koolhaas, “junkspace”, in OMA and Rem Koolhaas, Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004).5. The term was coined by Álvaro Domingues; see Domingues, Vida no Campo (Porto: Dafne Editora, 2011), p. 39.6. Koolhaas, “junkspace”, p. 170.7. Koert van Mensvoort, “Real Nature Is Not Green”, Next Nature (6 November 2006), consulted online at http://www.nextnature.net/2006/11/real-nature-isnt-green/ (accessed 15 july 2015).8. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kindle e-book.9. According to the Kübler-Ross model, there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.10. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).11. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Baden: Lars Müller, 1969).12. Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology. Note that the “end of the world” here means the “traumatic loss of coordinates” that happens when humans are removed from the centre of the universe.13. Robert Smithson, “The Pathetic Fallacy in Esthetics”, in idem, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 337–38.14. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 4.15. Pier Vittorio Aureli et al., Rome: The Centre(s) Elsewhere (Rotterdam: NAi, 2010), p. 56.16. Aureli, Possibility of an Absolute Architecture.17. Peter Halley, “Abstraction and Culture”, in Tema Celeste (Autumn 1991), pp. 56–60.

18. Aureli, Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, p. 56.19. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Kindle e-book.20. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”, in idem, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, By Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1821).21. Morton, Ecology without Nature.22. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, in idem, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996).23. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle (London: Vintage, 2009).24. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 90.

labalaba - Laboratoire Bâle

AckermannshofSt johanns-Vorstadt 19-21

CH-4056 BaselTel: +41 (0) 61 225 10 20Fax: +41 (0) 61 225 55 85

Email: laba@epfl.chwww.laba.epfl.ch