Nouvelle page 2

Immersed in a vibrating[1] stopped time, we follow time’s arrow – which since the 1960s has not been sure exactly which way it’s going, vacillating between the moral conservatism of the baby boomers and Gucci consumerist futurology.

Leaving behind its Galilean scrutinizing of the future, an exploration of inaccessible worlds that only Science (fiction) from the heights of its certitude could drive, (science) fiction has slipped into the meanders of our digital society. The false footsteps of Bibendum (the Michelin tire man) in the dirty dust of the moon that day in July 1969 marked an end to our entropic flights of fancy. The books of Stephenson, Gibson, Stirling and others, while marketed as speculative fiction, were in fact live broadcasts, and the funhouse mirror that the genre tended to create between the space of the imagination and that of our daily lives expanded throughout a universe of plausabilities and melted into the news, with all its social dimensions.

Astonishingly, (science) fiction has shifted neither forward nor rearward but into the here and now. The unfolding scenarios it follows to manipulate our reality are becoming true transformation tools and paradoxically strategic levers to grasp the wobbling of our postdigital societies, our choked mass media culture.

But the main interest of this sudden in vivo matrix immersion lies in the anxieties it provokes.

Instead of Science (fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist propaganda, it should nourish the seeds of our own monstrosity – our own loss of control amid indeterminism, chaos theory[2] and biogenetics – as a force striking alliances with harpies and earthly creatures, the Faustian Dark Side and the Sturm und Drang, against the rationalist wigs and the works of the Hegelian spirit, and open up to a world where even fears become fable, as lovely as they are carnal.[3] We have to negotiate with the fold of the instant, the invagination of the thought of the future, and live in a present that is like an asymptotic bend in time, between Back to the Future and Tomorrow Now,[4] between dream time and the day after.

Under these paradoxical conditions where the notion and perception of time are crushed on the surface of immediacy, how can we believe that architecture can only be constituted by fossilized avatars, blind cadavers exquis of naïve and progressist values,[5] by quotational opportunism disguised as global entertainment?

To reclaim the scenarios and substances that condition architecture and reveal the contradictions and fantasies that drive our societies, we need, on the contrary, to draw on this vibrating, disquieting and voluptuous temporality.[6] Architecture is not something to be thought or produced for later, like the standard bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens.

This critical and territorialized attitude is in sharp contrast to macrocynical flights of fancy (the market creates the form!) and their remake of international architecture[7] (New York, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore) and instead launches processes that reactivate the concept of a throbbing,[8] complex[9] and unfinished[10] “localism.”

Our tools for the codification and transformation of territories work not through an ideal projection but a local inventory,[11] a mutant and tangible biotope, issued from the generalized bankruptcy of urban thought[12] and its deception. This ambiguity gives rise to our unstable and unique scenarios.

The folded rhizomes of Guattari/Deleuze were a point of fusion and arborescence to attain an nth plateau,[13] a terra incognita, to break out of the grip of those who declared that they had discursive, pedagogic and linear authority. That made it possible for us to escape from Promethean dreams, millenarian apostles and cynical moralists, and walk gaily over the many and multiple dustbins of the last century, unburdened of the confusion of progressist mythologies, in the voluptuousness of a quotidian cataclysm.

(Science) “fictional”[14] architecture is not a cultural remake of the Altered States[15] variety for the elite. It has nothing to do with a nostalgic idealization of the world in a museum soap bubble, nor a New Age utopia with its kindly moral presuppositions.

Recognizing the new principles of reality, it is a space of confrontation, ceaselessly investing itself in new procedures for the reprogramming and rescripting[16] of existence, here and now.

By necessity, it confronts its emergence, its Gestalt, and can only be negotiated in the visible spectrum. That is its political and operational condition. It generates processes of transformation that take the risk of critical positions and mutations,[17] on the razor’s edge.

There can be no pleasure in announcing the “infocalypse”. We can only harvest its often strange fruits. The following projects are a few paradigms.

[1] Stanley Kubrick touched off the Big Bang, setting the clock back to zero in '67 / Clockwork Orange and 2001 like opposite sides of the same mirror / Dream Time and the Day After simultanously / NASA and CIA, autistic hostages, two copulating Siamese twins. Because of or maybe thanks to him, ever since we've been stuck in that double bill, a scratched record stoptime without past or future, enjoying our stay between heaven and hell in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

[2] Over the course of time all systems become progressively disordered as they approach their final state of total equilibrium (the second law of thermodynamics). In order to track our environment, physical sciences born out of the study of turbulence, vibration, disequilibria and probability have taken the place of the linear sciences where things are viewed as following a quantitative and determinist path.

[3] One percent of the three thousand polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Svalbard are hermaphrodites, with a vagina and a penis. The conditions for survival at the North Pole, including Soviet nuclear waste materials carried by the Arctic Stream and the carbon effluence of the Gulf Stream, have allowed us to observe the first natural mutation.

[4] Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now, Random House, New York, 2003.

[5] How can we reconcile the need to save the Amazonian rainforest and at the same time our fascination with the bulldozer (a sort of Caterpillar with beetle pincers) that is cutting it down? This dual attitude protects us from ecologist alibis, “primitivist” dreams of purity and of the Heimat, as well as from becoming enslaved to the mechanisms of the tabula rasa. Architecture consists of revealing these two contradictory dimensions, in their constant tension.

[6] “Yet this landscape of terror is also, as in Bosch, voluptuous and nearly infinite in irony. Reminding us that hell is full of laughter, we could call this cataclysm where everything bad is foretold in dark humour, a black utopia.” Mike Davis, Dead City, The New Press, 2003.

[7] One could suspect that the “Be global and fuck local” attitude is nothing but a passport that allows countries that can afford to hire a Koolhaas or a Nouvel to become integrated into the World Corp. But why not!? The vulgarity lies in their duplicity. They may be in Lagos, at Prada or a certain floating Pavilion, but they want to lecture us about political consciousness.

[8] Dust and pollution in Bangkok, mosquitoes and Nile River Virus in Trinidad, “hairs in the Snake” and “bovine heat” in Evolène, the bush scorched by sun in Soweto… these are the human and territorial raw materials that condition the local scene. Contrary to what Plato says in

his Parmenides, where he doesn’t bother to hide his distaste for what he considers ignoble elements, the lowest layers of being – materials like hair and dirt – are no less constitutive elements of urban economies, even if they issue from bankruptcy of city planning

[9] Complexity comes from the entropic dimension of a system, between chaos and chance. Another aspect comes from its situation between two different and even contradictory states. Complexity is not driven by autonomy but by reactivity, and cannot taking into account to all that surrounds it. It is in this sense that disturbances of identity, stealth and hybridization become modes of operation. This is reflected in our own indecisiveness, our inability to “choose between…” to “make to do with…”.

[10] In this regard, consider how Jules Verne completed Edgar Alan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe’s last, enigmatic phrase leaves the reader perplexed and frustrated: “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” Afraid by this ghost, Jules Verne, in his sequel, Le Sphinx des Glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields), twenty years after, unfold this fiction: “No! These were physical facts, not imaginary phenomena… This massive shape (the shrouded figure) was nothing but a colossal animal… whose power produced effects as natural as they were terrible.” Poe’s novella was published in serial form purporting to be an authentic report from an expedition to the South Pole that never actually took place. The piece is disturbing, a source of endless questions, and prefigured Poe’s own death. The fact that a half-century later Verne brought it back to life to bring the story to an end reveals the oppositeness of the two men’s attitudes: the former scripts and opens the narrative in its non-finitude, while the latter plans and encloses it within the same operational modes as urban planners, full of Fourièrist alibis, Colbertist swindles and the predictions of "knowledgeable" people.

[11] These two models of territorial intervention are diametrically opposed: one employs reasoned and accepted Euclidean forms issued directly from geometric abstraction (deconstructed or not), laid down like a conceptual or mental grid over a particular place. The other is entirely different; it seeks to exacerbate a response by extending the complexity of the site itself. One dominates the territory in order to prove mankind’s domination of the situation, the other folds back on itself, hollow, so as to let itself be absorbed by the pre-existing equilibrium.

The first is a pure projection of the mind, the Hegelian spirit, facilitating the consumption of concepts and images in an extension of modernist ideals; the other – mutant, extracted from the previously existing, more complex to obtain – in contrast suggests that, “In the absence of ideas, we would have to observe.”

Like a chemist who has conducted an experiment in order to reread it and understand it, this empirical and aleatory process is constructed through induction and deduction. Depending on the project, the skin of the photographic or cartographic image mutates and metamorphoses through aspiration and extrusion, folding, heaving, pollution… The pixels, fractal fragmentations of reality, are recomposed in a series of genetic mutations. The context is no longer idealized, conceptualized or historicized; it is the substratum of its own transformation. There is a political difference. This mutant and thus imperfect dimension permits us a glimpse of technology not as the fantasy of one more progressist assertion, but as a tool of contextualization, hybridization and complexity. Beyond the fascination for technological tools and factitious metamorphoses that they engender, what concerns us is its operational function. It is no longer a question of counterposing a project and its context, like two distinct hypotheses, but of linking them through the very process of transformation. The project no longer issues from an abstract projection, but from a distortion.

[12] On the contrary, we have to handle contradictions like that of the island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. Because of its low altitude and changes in the oceanic water level (due to global warming), a plan for its evacuation has formulated as an objective given.

[13] “This is what the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island itself, but the first-hand knowledge that they stood on rock which the founders had crystallized out of the ocean – and which was, forever, dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair. Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and cooperation, had built Stateless… the balance could be disturbed in a thousand ways…. All that elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be understood. …It had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived mythology of nationhood. It was true. Greg Egan, Distress, Harper Prism, New York, 1995, pp. 171-172

[14] Fiction differs from utopia in that it does not seek to be right. Why would we seek to be right when there are so many people who carry the banner of morality – they are legion, as dangerous and common as criminals.

[15] A Ken Russell film where research into chemical hallucinogenics ends in a polychrome and simian apotheosis.

[16] “What’s the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of a difference and the result slips out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning.” Liam Gillick,“ Should the future help the past ?,” Five or Six Previsions, Lukas and Stenberg, Ltd., New York, 2001

[17] See R&Sie’s Aqua Alta 1.0 and 2.0… amid laguna pollution, technological suspicion and hybrid mutation… in both cases, this is a critique of relational mechanisms.

Delicious Decay

Zeynep Mennan

The almost ecstatic energy and interest R&Sie is investing in decay and contextual alienation in any project can be met on the critic’s side with the perverseness of a construct such as freshness. Freshness has a double anchorage in physical and perceptual realms. With respect to organic matter, it is immediately given as a time-dependent construct, uncomfortably dwelling the very close vicinity of degradation, decomposition and decay. The force of R&Sie’s architecture resides in the endorsement of this fragile physicality, revealed and exploited as an indication of vulnerability - of time, of matter, of architecture, and of a situation’s pre-existence. This vulnerability can only be given in the visible, in the changing gestalt of matter-form, in a formal play with empirical content from which no purity is ever allowed to be extracted through abstraction, projection or idealization. R&Sie deliberately abandons the pompous and heroic role of the architect as the creator (demiourgos), transformed into that of a process engineer, a form-perverter. Architecture builds out of all the physiological processes that occur simultaneously on matter and form in regard to their territorialization; form-making turns out into a form-perversion process, into a hilarious and jubilant formal processing of putrescent and rotting material, conveying a high sense of quality and appetite appeal, of delicious decay, impelling for a new aesthetic and perceptual consumption. R&Sie plays with the organic in the manner of a bio-entrepreneur, experimenting with the chemical, physical biological and topological changes followed by changes in the state and form of matter from a previous equilibrium. The way R&Sie expresses, reveals and exploits changes in the sensory qualities of matter, these physical transformations of a geography come then as another indication for comprehending porosity and the vulnerable proximity and sensitivity of freshness to decay.

The tension of this oscillation echoes further the frenetic insistence on the here and now, on the negotiation with the instant, on the refusal of any historicisation in favor of the immediacy of an architectural production. This production, which is not allowed to extend into any futuristic projection, makes a playful refurbishing of the 20^th century junkyard: Freshness starts from the genuine use of decaying historical material, adding to its life-time while keeping up the immediacy of the work. Immediacy appears then as a possible freshness parameter to measure the deviation between a formal historical repertoire, with its in-built gestalt, and its current perturbation by R&Sie in both hilarious and disquieting fictions.

These fictions, which the architects themselves call scenarios, are actually reminiscent of the concept of play developed by Gadamer[i]. The work calls to play, the play-fiction is drawing the players into itself, absorbing and dissolving their subjectivity. From this dissolution of subjectivity, comes forth the notion of a soluble architecture and emerges the tacit consciousness of already being a player. The architect is but one of the players in this play. The play-fiction is non-linear, non-predictive and non-purposive. In a way, it recalls the open scenarios of soap operas in which the scenario unfolds with respect to the wishes and reactions of the spectators, evolving in an indeterminate way that cannot be anticipated by its very authors. The play-fiction produces an interactive design device, an architect-player-citizen interface acting as a mode of operation negotiating with our troubles, fears, fantasies and perversions while revealing and confronting us to this very transaction. R&Sie delineates there an ethical-political stance that looks forth for compelling play-fictions for the design and dwelling of new territories. A genuine poetic expression unfolds through the scenario and comes to update and expose the flaws and totalitarianism of all utopia, of all social engineering, of all determinism. The scenario acts as creative and critical compost in which resources, materials, energies, sources, structures, territories, and species syncretise with a deliberately non-anticipated outcome. In this un-founded and non-hierarchical synergy melt down technological, aesthetic, social and political layers, to which the natural and the artificial open simultaneously. R&Sie invites all species, human as well as non-human, in an architecture constantly including animals or insects as forgotten inhabitants of territories. An architecture of hybridization playing with the real, the fictional and the mythical opens before us a pagan atmosphere with a strange taste.

I had to admit defeat. Something wanted it that way. I, too, was just an instrument. The world was nothing more than an infinite interweave of instruments. The respite had only lasted for as long as the mirage that it was.Les Racines du Mal, Maurice G. Dantec, Série Noire, 1995

And the pixels, fractal fragments of the real, are put back together again in a series of genetic mutations. The context is no longer idealised, conceptualised or historicised, it is rather an underlayer of its own transformation.

Morphing lies at the root of a software which makes it possible to merge image A with image B by means of a topological shift of salient dots. With the "Warp" technique, which is a variant of this process, it is possible to produce this alteration, but without being aware of the resulting B. Image A can thus be easily manipulated, and distorted, when it comes into contact with a programme and a scenario, but it cannot side-step its own matter, it own physicality, by resisting it. And it is this amorphism that is involved here.

Presenting the conditions of a hybridisation and a transformation that are paradoxically static and which, by virtue of the mobility/immobility that they create, reveal at best the various issues of prior identity and geography. It is tantamount to producing a critical state both on the "territorial development" processes but also on the use and misuse of technologies.

Doing nothing is to raise questions and problems, alike. Doing things on the map, by way of these "@morphous Mutations", is like trying to do things from the negative angle, without the preformatted and accepted skills. The model already in place obliges us to switch our skill towards other arenas (social mechanisms, political economics, and territorial challenges). This process thus opens up areas of investigation likely to extricate us from the dictate of modern projection (medium and alibi of 20th century architecture), which has muddled the programme with the declaration of functions.To make the architectural object ambiguous, and to force it out of the real, is to question our own perception ⁹.

Nothing seems more pertinent to me than an architecture that straddles such ambiguities. The binary structures of the predominant thinking about heritage/modernity and servility/domination have, happily, imploded. The transformations of the body and its sexuality, using silicone and collagen, as a diametric opposite of the Metropolis Cyber-Robot, are the lead-in to this. The contemporary prosthesis is made of flesh, and the functional outgrowth made of artificial skin is re-formed.

The body is not denied, but exacerbated and hypertrophied.Technology thus enables us, by way of these "@morphous Mutations", to involve processes and write scripts which reactivate the concept of "localism", not to serve up dishes again that have got cold, and museified models, but a thrilling localism, made up of contradictions ¹⁰ and respect, and reactive membranes, in an elastic topography.Identifying what characterises a place by these new tools is already tantamount to putting forward a new operational method.

1 Brunelleschi’s perspective geometry is responsible for this, in the rationalisation of instruments of production and the domination of architecture on the site. The rule of visual representation is thus substituted for corporeal perceptions.

2 See the notion developed by Felix Guattari in his Schizophrenia Analytic on ecosophy, that architecture has ‘imploded’ and is condemned to being pulled and torn in every direction.

3 In sense attributed to it by M Maffesoli, Du Temps des tribus, 1988, ‘History can promote a morale (a politics), the space will favour an aesthetic and exude an ethics’.

6 "The rhizome is quite different, map and not tracing… If there is a contrast between map and tracing, it is because the map in its entirety is oriented towards an experiment to do with reality. The map does not reproduce a subconscious that is closed in on itself, it constructs it." Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, Collection Critique, 1980.

7 "Making with to do less", R, DSV & Sie. P, L'Ombre du Caméléon, IFA/Karédas, 1994.

8 "These tear the body within and seek a hole to escape through, it throws its hands on to the body and they vibrate under the fingers ; it pushes them towards the joints, towards the cavities of the belly and throat, it crushes them there, its fist digging into the skin, which, bespattered with blood beneath, turns cold." Pierre Guyotat, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats, L'imaginaire, Gallimard, 1967.

9 L'Hiver de l'Amour/The Winter of Love, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paysage/Landscape nº2, R, DSV & Sie. P. An installation on the stairs. The fitted carpet was laid, the height of the steps slightly altered, and the carpet relaid. A study to do with the dissociation of the senses, between what was perceived (the treads) and felt (a moving topography), March 1994.

10 "How to live by following — not without fascination — the bulldozer's passage in the Amazonian forest and campaigning for its protection… while remaining on the razor's edge. It is with this terribly human dimension that we must work. An admittedly schizophrenic attitude, but one which preserves us from the snares of the clear conscience, environmental activism and destructive forms of extremism." Lecture at the Pavilion de l'Arsenal, F. Roche, 1997, Mini-PA.

It is not easy to grasp the architecture of R & Sie... Rarely their projects appear as compact buildings. Often they disappear in their own context, as if they tried to avoid to colonialise it with their objectivity. The borders between figure and ground become fluid, uncertain where the building starts and the context ends. This undifferenciability is no deficiency, but formulates the antithesis to the modernistic ideology of the tabula rasa. Instead of breaking radically with the past, R & Sie... virtually scan the environment for points of contact, in order to propell them through a transformatory movement into a new constellation. Hence their own intervention is less to be understood in terms of an implantation, but rather as a shift and refinement of information already embedded in the context. While the generation of progress in modernity was usually achieved by an annexation of the existing through a new order (which equals a replacement of the real), this strategy of infiltration brings about a blurring of the categories. The dialectics of old and new evaporate in a gradual transformation, which permanently reorganises the environment and thereby creates ‘newness’.

When R & Sie... was founded as a practice in the late 1980’s, the unease with modernity already pictured a fundamental scepticism of architecture towards the project of the avantgarde. The concepts however, which were introduced as alternatives, were nearly always of a retrogressive nature. The critical regionalism of Kenneth Frampton demanded a move away from the norm of the international style, pleading for a re-animation of historic references and local building culture instead. Josef Kleihues, the organiser of the International Bauausstellung in 1986, reduced the project of contemporary architecture alltogether to what he termed a "Critical Reconstruction of the European City". All of a sudden, any connection to the present seemed only possible by returning to traditional urban and architectural models. History became an Über-Ich, which architecture had to subordinate itself to.

By contrast, R & Sie...’s critical reading of modernity calls for a transformative continuity to the existing; a continuity, which gives way to a new notion of territory, whose ‘genius loci’ ceases to be the spiritualised extract of its historic past, but is constituted by the totality of its material states. Yet soon it became clear, that architecture was lacking the necessary techniques to open up this new territory. For if architectural plans define the space within a building very well, the context seems to occur in them merely as an absent projection surface, as a blank spot on a map, which seemingly becomes a place with characteristics only by placing a building on it.

Thus it marked a paradigm shift, when architects like Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache introduced computer aided design-techniques to architecture during the mid-1990s. Animation software packages used in the film industry such as Soft-Image (later Wavefront and Maya) opened up unknown possibilities to the manipulation of space, resulting in an equal treatment of figure and ground as never before. The binary opposition of existing context and a project yet to be developped gave way to the inclusive notion of a territory with concrete characteristics – flexibility, gravity, erosion, energy flow, circulation etc. Once animated to a three dimensional virtual model, the digitised territory could be processed as a dynamic form. As a result, the modification of its material parameters leads to a process-based mutation of matter, which turns out to have little in common with the traditional logic of sculptural space.

In their later work the pioneers of computer-animated architecture, foremost Greg Lynn, paradoxically focused on designing the architectural object only, in order to apply ever new topological geometries onto them. For R & Sie... instead, the primary potential of animation does not lie in the creation of a new formal vocabulary, but in the ability to map the characteristics of a place and directly apply them to its own transformation. If the architecture of Gregg Lynn, due to its formalist fixation on the object, ultimately reinforces the dialectics of the building and its context, R & Sie... are using animation with the goal to precisely abolish this dialectics.

Furthermore, their interest to interweave an intervention with the found situation, is not limited to the mere materiality of space, but includes its semantic and programistic dimension as well. A rather unusual combination, as the concentration on the ‘digital paridigm’ of architecture in the 1990’s was paralleled by a general aversion from working with philosophical, political or historical systems of representation. Instead, an almost exclusive investigation into ‘material organisations’- such as the choreography of vast circulation of humans and goods – takes the place. A preoccupation, which in its last consequence will lead to a semantic emptying of architecture.

In this respect too, R & Sie… take a different position to the mainstream of contemporary experimental architecture. In fact, the semantic dimension of places does play an important part in their projects; however in a way which is diametrically opposed to the contextualism of the 70’s and 80’s: thus a place is no longer a topographical archive filled with embedded traces of the past, wich are only waiting to be excavated as artefacts in the present. To R & Sie…, territory and information fuse to the hybrid entity of a territorially embodied information. Consequently the abstract idea of a place materializes to a multitude of concrete places, in the same way that history as a given universal reality differentiates into numerous stories.

These places are in fact charged stories, stories very much in the cinematographic sense. In order to make these stories effective for an architectural project, R & Sie… introduce another cinematographic instrument: the scenario, which in architecture proves to be just as useful a tool for structuring stories in space and time. Yet, unlike in film, the scenario was never given a methodical place in the design process of architecture. Hence the scenario must be virtually grafted into the design process at some point, if you want to working with it. In the procedure of R & Sie… it is the program that acts as the secondary structure to implement the scenario. This decision explains the enormous importance of the program in the architecture of R & Sie… – which again lets the practice stand out from the mainstream of contemporary architecture, in which the program rarely plays a generative role. After being ideologically hyped during the functionalist era, the program degenerated soon to a minefield for architecture, which was carefully avoided (with only a few exceptions like Bernard Tschumis’ early works such as the Manhattan Transcripts). The architectural pragmatism of the present treats the program merely as an extra-architectural affair, which is essentially put up with and more or less directly extruded in space. To R & Sie… though, the program represents an immanent condition of architecture itself, a virtual ‘building’ prefigured already in extension and program, who’s shadow already embraces the place and thus threatens to vanish the latters own reservoir of stories. Evidently R & Sie… are as sceptical of this virtual tabula rasa as they are to its real pendant. Thus as much as the architectural object is worked continuously into and extruded out of the territory, the program too is negotiated intensely with the local condition of the place.

To R & Sie… working the program is indeed a constituent prerequisite of their architecture. Before unfolding a program in space, they need to organise its relationship to the existing - which in many cases means re-writing the program. In the case of their project "Maido" "Maido" (Ile de la Réunion, 1995-96), the project essentially foresaw an exhibition building for contemporary art to be built on the French colonial island at a height of 1500 meters above sea level. The site was situated at a clearing in the forest, on which the building was to be presented like a jewel. A program thus, which obviously had been imported from far away to this extreme location, without the slightest consideration of its specific characteristics. In order to put the building in relation to the conditions of the tropical island, R & Sie… disintegrated its monolithic volume into smaller pavilions set away from the clearing closer to the edge of a nearby ravine. Nonetheless the exhibition space does not limit itself to the pavilions for that matter, but encloses the whole natural surroundings, which is cannibalised by their architecture. What comes into being is a museum without the signs of a museum. A building, which exists without the rhetoric of a building, as it occurs in the movement between the insides of the pavilions and the outdoors of the surrounding nature in a way, which is most appropriate to the location.

The same logic of a site specific re-organisation of the program was used for the design of the Soweto Memorial Museum (Johannesburg, 1997). The site of the project was a thoroughfaire in Soweto, where the child Hector Peterson was shot dead in 1976 during a protest march against Apartheit and was buried there and then. The program called for a memorial museum with lecturing halls and an exhibition about the history of the townships to be erected at that very location. Yet on a site visit the architects soon realised, that the aura of the place was still full of fear. It was highly unlikely, that the public would be visiting the location in numbers, let alone spending money there. In order to increase the attraction factor of the museum, R & Sie… tied the following condition to the continuation of their work: the archives about the history of Soweto, which until that point were kept at several prestigious universities in Johannesburg, had to be transferred to the location of the project. That way the historians and researchers had to actually go and see the place, where that history had actually happened, consuming things to eat and drink and maybe even spend a night their, thus creating an economy.

In one of the most recent projects of the practice, "Ectoplasma" (Lorient, 2001), the re-programmation of the program pushed to the limits, thereby almost inverting the original vocation of the competition. The brief for the project was to build a herbal museum reminiscent of the import and export trade of the "Compagnie des Indes", which had been located in the britannic seaport in the 19th Century. But instead of losing themselves in the esoterics of scents and herbs, R & Sie… focused on the issue of colonialisation. The communally ordered cultivation of a gone-by colonial culture back home revealed a genuinely absurd dimension, which obviously had remained unaddressed by the original definition of the project, only to be driven to the extreme by the project of R & Sie…

For what their design in fact proposes is to re-program the museum to a genetic laboratory, in which indian tea cultures are genetically modified in order to sustain Brittany’s climate. In a small park surrounding the museum the genetically acclimatised indian tea is cultivated to be consumed and tested by the visitors in a nearby pavilion. The colonial dispositive is applied to its ancient players: while in the 19th century usually seeds of european plants were taken overseas (causing the distinction of local vegetation), now the colonialised world seeks roots in the highly subsidised agricultural landscape of France. Instead of hiding colonialisation inside the sound walls of an ecological museum, R & Sie… create a dispositive by letting the visitor experience the effects of a re-bouncing colonialisation for themselves.

With such interventions into the programmatic definition of their projects, R & Sie… reclaim a dimension for architecture, which society has long taken away from it and passed on to external parties: commercial project developers or institutional ‘programmers’, who often represent rather particular interests. R & Sie… however see themselves as advocates of a public interest and understand architecture as negotiation of all culminating interests that are part of a situation. By ‘exceeding their authority’ in such a way R & Sie… provoke irritation in a society seemingly not prepared for such an active and critical architecture. But it is exactly these irritations, which seem to form an inherent part of the identity of the practice, who’s name is only partly an anagram of its members. Pronounced in French, the erratic abreviation reads as ‘Héresie’. The three dots stand for the rest.

There was Dr. No and Crab Key, Dr. Strangelove’s War Room, followed by Atlantis, Stromberg's undersea headquarters, Blofeld’s lair inside a volcano and Hugo Drax's laboratory. Fictional places designed for fictional characters that became reality through their appearance on the world’s movie screens. Film sets designed by Ken Adam who is hailed as one of the world’s greatest living production designers.

Adams, a German native, emigrated in 1934, when he was 13 years old, from Berlin to the U.K. to continue his education. In the following years he became famous for his film designs from Dr. Strangelove to Moonraker, from The Ipcress File to The Madness of King George and he participated on no fewer than eighty-eight film projects, seventy-five of which have been realised.

Ken Adam worked as Production Designer on seven of the James Bond films, but his overall contribution to the series is as important as that of any Actor, Director, Composer or Technician and his unique and influential style assured the series success in the early 1960's. It was his sketches that placed Blofeld’s lair in You Only Live Twice inside an extinguished volcano, resulting in the largest set ever built in Europe; that created the Liparus supertanker on the world’s largest soundstage for The Spy Who Loved Me, and that transformed existing locations to recreate eighteenth-century England in The Madness of King George.

The exceptional set that he designed for the first James Bond film ever, Dr. No¹, prompted Stanley Kubrick to hire him on year later for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was that epic architecture that Adam created in the 1960s and 1970s for Dr. Strangelove and the Bond films that cemented his reputation. And in both, Dr. Strangelove and the Bond films, Adam’s key design concern was to find an architectural expression for the villain’s lair, imagining how such men, possessed by power and madness, would choose and shape their environments.

Exotic locations became an essential part of the Bond film formula. Pristine beaches, sparkling oceans and islands, scenes of untouched natural environments in the Caribbean’s, Asia and other places people generally consider as paradise. In such idyllic settings, fantasies for most of his original audience being, stuck in small apartments in the outskirts of London, Mexico or Bangkok, Adam situated the villain’s hideout. As if finally the villain could be closer to paradise than ordinary people. International travel was not commonplace in 1962 and for many cinemagoers this was the first time they had been subjected to another culture or seen the locations and designs pioneered by the Bond series. Even the office of the opponents, the British secret service and its representatives, was given small, mundane offices in grimy London, far away from the pleasures of an untouched nature.

Adam often placed his villains’ headquarters underground, underwater and hidden, without leaving traces on the untouched nature. Framed by the 1960s Cold War, this elaborately hidden world became an elegant metaphor for power and the hubristic belief that the privileged could survive the disasters they initiated. From the underground War Room in Dr. Strangelove, President Muffley can despatch nuclear weapons and from Crab Key in the Caribbean, Dr. No can capture American nuclear missiles and hold the world to ransom.

Adam’s design of the villains’ lairs not only dealt with the question of survival but also with that of lifestyle. His villains eschew the conservative style of the late 1950s and early 1960s and instead look to the future and to the more distant past. The impressive architecture was always slightly ahead of contemporary, with futuristic decorations, surrounded with design and art work.

In the first James Bond movie, Dr. No’s underground lair is a curious mixture of the ultra-modern and the traditional, a look that established the pattern for the inner sanctums Adam designed for other 007 adversaries. The high-tech aspect, the elevators, the banks of gleaming equipment, the rockets ready for lift-off, is the necessary prerequisite for advancing their plans of world domination and was to become the blueprint for what was to follow.

Dr. No takes on a sinister visual note when the shifty villain, the Professor Dent, comes to Crab Key, where he is given an audience by the unseen Dr. No in a large, bare room illuminated only by a circular skylight, barred with a huge metal grille which cast an ominous shadow across the set. A cross between a chapel and an abattoir, the room exudes pitiless terror, and the only living thing it contains is a tarantula.

The War Room set of Dr. Strangelove, while preposterous in its extravagance, is also seriously imposing and reflects the awesomeness of the tragic plot; the absurdity of the dialogue are a hysterically funny foil to the sense of doom. The War Room is the American power elite’s equivalent of the hideouts inhabited by Bond villains, and in effect the rumpus room that lies behind the Palladian portico of Auric Goldfinger’s Kentucky farm and where Goldfinger entertains the gangsters is a smaller, wood-panelled version of it.

One of the most intense scenes of the film Goldfinger, was Bond's near death experience strapped to the laser table. The huge set took up one entire stage at Pinewood Studios and features the first on-screen use of a laser, representing the curiosity of the villain in research and technology.

Surrounded by their extraordinary environments, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Blofeld, Stromberg, Drax and Dr. Strangelove are compelling figures in their respective movies. They are exceptional men: intelligent, curious, and creative, often accompanied by fantastic figures. While special agent 007 is only the servant of the conservative force in power, ordered to oppress any changes and easily satisfied with some comforts of life, the villain is restless and longing for knowledge and power. It is the negotiation with the dark side, this questioning that gives their characters depth.

In Dr. No, which was made in 1962 by Terence Young when the horrors of World War II had fresh resonance, the eponymous villain bears the title of Doctor as a sign of knowledge and questioning. And one year later, in 1963, Stanley Kubrick asked Ken Adam to work with him on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where Dr. Strangelove, an Ex-Nazi, now working for the American Government on a secret weapon program, is again bearing the title of a Doctor.

Both characters draw on the long-established figure of the highly intelligent, but fanatic scientist crossing the border to the dark side in his search for knowledge. In ages of scepticism, men disowning religion have been impatient with all barriers of convention, and have sought to satisfy their hunger of knowledge by reaching for occult powers that seemed to lie beyond the ken of pedant authority.

This was an impulse that the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe⁴, always assailed by a sense of unfulfilled longing, felt in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, as his famous character Dr. Faust had in the ferment of the Renaissance.

The title character, Dr. Faust⁵ is a master of philosophy, law, medicine and theology. As a university teacher, he feels imprisoned by the restricted world of the conventional science. In spite of his continuing studies he can’t get the answers to the essential questions of human life and the more he fails the more he is seduced by the possibilities outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Nor can he satisfy his sensual desires. He represents the ceaseless striving of modern man to solve the mysteries of energy, pleasure, and the creation of life.

When Mephistopheles, the devil, approaches Faust, he offers Faust the fulfilment of all his desires during his life in exchange for his soul after death. Faust is easily attracted by the promise of understanding the mysteries of life and accepts the wager with Mephistopheles, according to the previous wager between the devil and the Lord God. The poet’s creation of Mephistopheles is the world’s most convincing portrait of Satan and cynicism, scoffing, negation, is the keystone of his intellectuality. The world he represents, his knowledge and his intelligence is much more appealing than what Faust had ever tasted.

As the human race develops an ever more complex network of scientific, religious, social and moral guidelines, there are still no answers to the essential questions and we are left alone with our existence. The established guidelines of the Cold War era, the borders of the good and the dark sides, of familiar right and wrong have been destroyed in the explosions of the World Trade Center and houses of Baghdad. As people feel overwhelmed by new complexities, the influence of old religions is rising again, while elsewhere capitalism has become a new powerful religion. Both promise the answers to the mysteries of life.

For the men disowning religion technologies and sciences are seen as the best sources of hope for a better future. While continuing their search for knowledge, they are constantly confronted with the common values, and constantly moving on the edge to the dark side. So, in spite of their noble intentions, prepared Marie Curie with her curiosity for radioactivity the path for Hiroshima and Chernobyl and Alfred Nobel’s discovery of the dynamite indirectly let to the death of thousands of people.

The growing knowledge of men about the structure of DNA and the possibilities to modify and change them and interfere in the creation of God will be the major issue of the 21st century. The possibilities of this technology are too promising to be unexploited and in the same time they are raising questions we are not ready to answer. While the national and international organisations are trying to create rules to restraint its developments, their own scientists are already breaking them under their orders in the search of knowledge and power.

Faust wasn’t able to resist the temptation and is finally transforming himself under the influence of Mephistopheles and by deciding to follow the promises of the dark side, he accepts the coming changes. Faust becomes more powerful, but loses human feelings, his ability to love. Today we are fascinated by the possibilities, while afraid of the consequences. The possible changes can open the way to a new generation of humans, maybe more powerful maybe less human. So who will set the moral guidelines of the future? Who will decide which new technologies to pursue and what those decisions might entail? And while we are thinking about the consequences and complaining loud about the dangers, we are slowly accepting the coming changes. The negotiation with the dark side is a daily task.

¹ In the first James Bond thriller, directed by Terence Young, British secret agent 007 – assisted by the beautiful Honeychile Rider – investigates the nefarious activities of the eponymous megalomaniac master criminal who operates from a private island off the coast of Jamaica.

² Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy turns on the decision of an insane US Air Force general to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. Despite the combined efforts of Washington and Moscow, one American bomber gets through and triggers the Soviets’ latest secret creation, a Doomsday machine.

³Directed by Guy Hamilton, the third Bond movie (but only Adam’s second) sets 007 on the trail of the gold-obsessed super-villain Auric Goldfinger, whose ultimate objective is to clean out the American bullion depository at Fort Knox.

⁴ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749 and died in 1832.

⁵Faust – Part One is a tragedy, written by Goethe in the 18th century. He became famous in his twenties through the plays Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther, a tragic romance that established him in the current Sturm und Drang movement. But Faust - Part One is his masterpiece. He started working on it in his early twenties, and finished, except for a few lines, in 1801, when he was fifty-one.

The brief of the architecture of François Roche is to play a part in its environment in a twofold way, involving mimesis and recycling, extraction and transformation.