Fairy Tales: an Overture

Once, a dirty and messy situation was made into a clean and orderly promise.

Precarious living conditions were rationally repackaged into solidified blocks for living, working and playing, respectively. Through expert global maneuvering, economic stagnation became universal prosperity. Wildness was neatly quarantined and inoculated against any possible illness or harm to the inhabitants. The island was an airtight masterpiece that couldn’t be argued against.

It was so airtight, in fact, that no one had any space to breathe. With scant tolerance for the alternative, a new illness was diagnosed: boring pepole. Really, no one was to blame: there wasn’t a real lack of anything. For animals, they had a zoo. To eat, there were demarcated areas and for fun, there was a smaller themed island.

What was wrong? Every act of architectural planning was met with indifference, proving its innocence (or impotence?). All its people wanted was more “more”. But came a point when more and more, more just isn’t more anymore. Economists call it the Law of Diminishing Returns. Self-similar propriatery architectural islands, a flock of sheep in wolf’s clothing, provocatively harmless to the status quo.

//Genesis, or Involuntary Freedom in the Absence of ArchitectureAre We There Yet; Fourty Five Years of Tabula Rasa... now what?

by Lennard Ong1st October 2010

Prologue: High Level v3.0, Low Level v1.0

What does it mean to be modern? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, politics and science, good and bad. In short, a purifying categorical world view: the fracturing of a whole into parts to be manipulated with optimism. (see: CIAM doctrine).

This thesis assumes the planned modernist city as its zero condition. In essence, a city without contradictions, a well-oiled machine to live die in.

It takes the position of deviance and aberrance through a catalogue of tools deployed at various scales: the person, the group, the crowd and the unknowable.

These scales are excuted from a variety of mediums (yet to be determined, but provisionally, cloud computing vis a vis retail and information, infrastructural residue, nomadic housing and festival.)

//Operative WordsMelt, Play, Residue, Wildness

//ScenarioLife as Usual

//SitePlushing Square, Blingapore

//ProgramFestival with Infrastructural Residue

Conceptual References:

_Requim: For the City at the End of the Millenium, Sanford Kwintor. Actar 2010_Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, David Gissen. Princeton Architectural Press 2009_Energies: New Material Boundaries, AD 2009_The Whale, Lennard Ong. StudioSouth 2010_Raumlabor: Acting in Public, Jovis 2008_Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Spaces, Gestalten, 2010

Scenaric Sources:

“The Case Against Home Ownership”Times, September 6 2010

“L.A. project aims to make parking easier”L.A. Times, August 22 2010

“The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies”Fast Company, March 2010

“Super Tiny Power Plants”Fast Company, June 2010

“Heat Map”Wired, August 2010

#001_SuperScape_[d]

Themes[d]ata[a]djacencies[c]irculation[n]arrative[e]cology[p]rogram[i]ndeterminancy

#002_StaticFlexibility_[d][n][a][c][p][i]

#003_HorizontallyVertical_[c][p][n][i]

#004_KnottedSmoothness_[c][p]

#005_PredictingIndeterminancy_[a][i][e]

#006_AlwaysLegal_[i][d]

#007_BedtimeStories_[n][d]

#008_ContextualizingDifference_[d]

#009_KnottedDifference_[a][c][p]

#010_BeyondNatural&Synthetic_[e][i][a]

Excavation of Recurring Themes from Previous Work