Living the City
by Lukas Feireiss, Tatjana Schneider, TheGreenEyl
Spector Books, September 2020
Paperback | 8 x 11 inches | 340 pages | English | ISBN: 9783959054171 | 24.00€
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Cities are full of stories—running in parallel, contradictory, overlapping and inseparably linked. Such stories are told in Living the City by referencing various projects from architecture, art, and urban planning. The book aims to show processes and possibilities for action in cities based on more than fifty projects from all over Europe. The publication first looks at urbanites before expanding into emotionally and poetically charged stories that consider very basic activities such as loving, living, moving, working, learning, playing, dreaming, and participating in the city. The book is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the former airport in Tempelhof, Berlin, which runs from September to November 2020.
With works by Assemble, ateliermob, Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, Civic Architects, Crimson Historians and Urbanists, Eutropian, Larissa Fassler, Jeppe Hein, Thomas Hirschhorn,Lacaton & Vassal, No Shade, Olalekan Jeyifous, Ahmet Öğüt, Planbude, raumlaborberlin, Rotor DC, The Black Archives, White Arkitekter, Zones Urbaines Sensibles, and many more.
Lukas Feireiss works as a curator, writer, and art director in the international mediation of contemporary cultural reflexivity beyond disciplinary boundaries. Tatjana Schneider is professor for history and theory of architecture and the city at the Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Braunschweig. Studio TheGreenEyl is a design and research practice based in Berlin and New York. They create exhibitions, installations, objects, images, interactions, and algorithms.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
For the last few months of 2020, the Living the City exhibition took over the main hall of the former Berlin-Tempelhof Airport, presenting more than fifty "stories from architecture, art, and city planning." The former airport was supposedly "transformed into a venue for city life" by taking the form of "a walk-through urban collage." The companion book to the exhibition attempts a similar approach, presenting the 50-plus projects across eight chapters, each one prefaced by puzzle-like collages akin to the cover; these images illustrate the overlapping and contesting nature of doing projects in European cities. And although the projects follow one after the other, the density of words and images reads like a rapid-fire presentation of ideas focused on, as the title alludes, living in cities.
The eight chapters (first spread, below) into which the various projects are inserted are, like many architecture books, suggestions; they are just one way of organizing projects that are not so easily compartmentalized. Most of them basically follow functional considerations (e.g., "Living" equals residential, "Moving" equals transit, etc.), but two chapters stand out from the rest: "Participating" and "Dreaming." The first is given 40 pages, considerably more than most chapters. It includes what I find the most intriguing project in the book, Lichtsingel, a multi-pronged pedestrian bridge in Rotterdam that is given the title "A Co-financed Bridge Generates New Impulses" in the book. The co-financing is clearly one aspect of its participatory nature, as is the fact it was devised by ZUS, which moved into the area twenty years ago and recognized its disconnect from other parts of the city; eventually the city got on board and helped pay for it and make it happen. Other projects in the chapter similarly explore how the public can be part of the processes that affect change in their neighborhoods.
Before getting to Dreaming, another project in the book that stood out to me is the Kalkbreite Cooperative in Zurich, called "The Cooperative Housing Project Above a Tram Depot" in the book's "Living" chapter. It's the only project in the book I've seen in person, having actually stayed in the hostel portion of the large full-block building about five years ago when I was in the city for a World-Architects work retreat. It's a remarkable project, but not just for the fact it is built above a functioning tram depot. It is a truly mixed-use building, with retail, a cinema, and dining at grade, and residential floors above that have shared commons spaces. The apartments can be reached by a large public stair that leads to a raised courtyard, an open space that is public, but by being at a remove from the street is a safe space for the residents' children. Little did I know before seeing it in this book, but a stipulation to live at Kalkbreite is not owning a car, something that could only happen in a European city like Zurich.
Unlike the eight projects in the Participating chapter, Dreaming, at the end of the book, features just one project: "An Afrofuturist Vision" by artist Olalekan Jeyifous. It features a couple of collages that recall the ones he created for Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America on display at MoMA earlier this year. While his contribution to that show depicted an alternative future for parts of Brooklyn, where he lives, the collages in Living the City suitably depict Paris overlaid with other European cities but also elements pulled from settlements in North and East Africa; the latter "critically reflects upon the European city from a post-colonial perspective." Critical, yes, especially when Jeyifous contends architecture "must burn" if it is only used to perpetuate the power structures of colonial ideologies, but optimistic in its cultural layering and "green" imagery. It's a future that some of the ideas earlier in the book would be happy to contribute to.
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