Non-place and the acceptance of the scantiness of reality

Abstract

The schizophrenia of peripheral urban conditions might be seen as related to the formation of a new ontological notion of space that we still perceive and express in a partial and incoherent way, or that we might not be totally aware of. The growth of chaos and disorder , considered as an entropical phenomenon, no longer is to be seen as a destruction of order. It is a potential source of a new kind of contemporary attitude and construction, of an activity that transforms the multitude of the components of a scanty system in a novel scanty totality containing its own richness, coherency , and identity. The price for the existence of a collective evolution is a production of permanent entropy: the creation of a new "order", which is distant from "equilibrium", is to be found through a generative exploration of disorder. The present work aims to transform this latent energy into an urban form. -- [ strategy]: There are several ways of constructing a work. One is by making a system to make decisions, another is by making decisions at each step. This experiment unifies them in a thinking/ design process evolving from a system of abstractions derived from existent conditions to a further exploration of their spatial potentials. The ideas informing the system become the content of the work. The area of Paris-Nanterre west of La Defense is the place for those ideas to be tested and spatially formalized . -- [construction]: A simple vocabulary of lines and shapes devises a system free from associations with previous methodologies and design processes. It generates a series of object- sys t ems that belie traditional representations and understandings of physical space, informing an alternative strategy at urban scale through a broad exploitation of its geometrical possibilities in the way they can be seen, interpreted, combined, shaped, and re- shaped. The strategy is then open to three- dimensional interpretation. -- [ideas]: The ideas informing the strategy are a mean of getting away from an inclusive formalization of the architectural result, from the idea of form as an end, and rather to use form as a means: they are to simultaneously explain the ontological and the processual interpretation of non-place space; they aim to create an interdependence of language and image, and create a narrative mirroring the scantiness of reality i n interdependence with the different stages of the visual progression in the making of two and three-dimensional space. -- [result]: The physical outcome becomes a three-dimensional expression of an idea and of its generative process.