For the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture 2009 International Festival intend to reconstruct Reynar Banham’s notion of the Four Ecologies of Los Angeles, using it as a kind of impossible map in order to encounter the city from a, so to say, oblique perspective. It is our belief that this strategy can activate our understanding of the city differently and at the same time force us to acknowledge the conditions through which we address the city and region. The purpose is not to re-enact the document – in the sense of look a like – but on the contrary reconstruct it through contemporary discourses dealing with architecture and performance as well as economy, environment, technology, mediation, social issues etc, and more over use it as a resistance to encounter the city and its inhabitants in ways, so to say, unthinkable.

The project thus can be understood as 1. The production of architecture (actions as production of space) 2. As an urban mapping project 3. As a durational performance in the urban landscape 4. As projects in their own right (a document that can be shared).

Abstract

International Festival’s proposal for The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture is an attempt to activate and remix a known protocol in order to produce a shape-shifting assemblage that activate specific local contexts through slightly unconventional architectural/urbanist and performative tools in an in situ production that both maps and produce agency, and simultaneously transpose conventional binaries such as of process and product, labour and manifestation, authorship and inhabitation, within an experimental research practice whose aim is to produce in-cohesion where cohesion rules.

Project

Re-enactment and reconstruction are practices that have become common in both architecture and performance. Reconstruction can be understood as a kind of exile, thus allowing the producer to engage in other layers of meaning production, which in its turn can provoke the production of previously unknown significance. Reconstruction in this sense could be equated with solving somebody else’s problem, which of course is no problem exactly because personal investment is displaced and identity exchanged for efficiency. International Festival makes a difference between the terms and will in this project engage in reconstruction, i.e. to reactivate the construction, the protocol of an existing, historical production/document. It is thus the specificity of the activation that is central and not the precision of the expression. On the contrary the in-determination of the expression will function as agency, and the incompatibility of the protocol due the given context carry the potentiality of radical differentiation.

In the 1968 documentary film “Reynar Banham Loves Los Angeles” the British theoretician travels in a Cadillac through the city assisted by a futuristic machine that could be compared with a contemporary GPS. The film with Banham’s voice-over celebrates the city, its disposition and its layers of population and lifestyles, addressing it as a new episteme; a different coagulation of knowledge, decision making and its distribution. This fairly known document, with its overt didactic tone yet celebrating superficiality and pop, including Banham’s street level perspective (from the Cadillac), issues a new mode of addressing architecture, and even more so the complex flows of the city, and is more than saluting Los Angeles reminding us of how defined our view is on our environment, architecture and city. Or in Banham’s own words in “The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment”: “Architecture as an art is finger-painting compared to architecture as an art of environment.”