| 543 years later... the city of Bangkok is full of Robot-Buildings, Louis-XIV-Towers and Skeletons of unfinished constructions. They seem to be the dominant typologies, vertical characters, the ones to survive the battle of urban growth and mutation. In-between: The city is floating again, rivers, flows everywhere, brutally-carefully carving out and filling in what is left between the buildings. Concrete subsitutes of what was previously streams of water now lifted above the ground. A fluidum of vehicles-boats are cars are moving point are continuous lines. Gravity is finally overcome: Elevated highways. Skytrains. Express and walkway. Pipes and tubes. Never sure who domainates, the vertical or the horizontal, the concrete snake, biting off the corner of a tower, or the robot that forces the snake to twist in curves and curis at his appearence. Endless competition.
Shapes-formal puritanism ultimately abandoned: Stepping and sliding, shifting and twisting, the rectangle and cube left only as component of complexifying geometries. In the middle: Skylobbies, promise of a better life, free of fume and dust. On top: If not the dome then the temple, re-occurance in the shape of ears, eyes and horms overlooking the city. Historical reminiscence or technological personification. Unidentified Fyling Objects just landed. Sourcers and dishes of urban comfort hovering above the ground. Ready for take-off: City in the future... Inmidst the [coherent] chaos, a series of spaces develops systems of confrontation and conformation... COMMERCE CLIMATES The final condition of the interior: climatization, air-conditioning. Size increases through control of temperature. Constructions grow beyond their possible recognition, no longer buildings, maybe rather atmospheres. Merging with the absolute destination of urban transaction: shopping. Buy, or at least, be: just hanging out...cinema... As water disappeared in the [naturally] horizontal condition, its revival was transferred to the vertical direction: Water curtains, now for decoration only. Maybe the last reminder of the tropicality and rain outside [where?]... MOTEL MARKET Definitive model of short-term occupation of space, finall abundance of fixed properties. The market as last gard of the folkloristic-touristic åreal¼ experience vanished: Free for All, first come first served-anywhere and anyone and anything... ZONES OF CONGESTION Without any obvious reason for their existence, the sudden appearance of Zones of Congestion seems somewhat artificial, almost purposeful. Like an overcrowded bookshelve, or as if the guy that controls the traffic lights just went for lunch... VIDEO VOIDS Spaces emptiness. Content: information. Or stories. Sequences. Rays of light as only physical matter. Absorption of the image inside the void of sheer endless rooms...Illumination-apart from flashing projections [and loud shining monuments outside], light at night is sparse: Only punctual appearances of colored fluorescent light brake the dark in vertical rhythms... NICHES OF PRIVACY Withstanding the Commerce Climates absorbing 'public life' inside their vacuum, Niches of Privacy still blur the distinction between outside and inside. Almost unnoticeable they keep on building their connections as micro social structures undermining the gigantic force of climactic implosion. The inside [or outside?] constructed with meticulous precision, the calibration of personal properties and thei immediate [maybe even deliberate] superposition with one another: space as a tool of social negotiation... INNER CITIES Mobile strategies: It is no longer walls that are moving, or floors, it is buildings, structures, concepts, it is a whole city. The collection and accumulation of architectural and urbanistic projects from a worldwide context and their free dislocation and re-organization into a new hybrid organism triggers the idea of ultimate availability: a catalogue of global choices, a kit of generic conditions. We think a city... MEDIA-POSITIONS Spatial and non-spatial: The image in a fixed location within the urban context. And the appearance within a specific moment in time [as sheer availability]. The permanent and the temporal. The billboard and the newspaper. The poster. And television. The colour of the future is pink. Apart from pink, all that is left in terms of colour is black: Black copies [a good deal] o all imaginable material: computer, clothing, artwork. Even entire buildings are available as a duplicate... Media are no longer looked at in search for information, but as realities in themselves, a relationships, as structures, containers of potentialities. Simultaneity of juxta and super-Positions. A hybrid of absolute existence [vertuality] and specific inscription [real space]... Where one medium is no longer sufficient as container, the shifting into [un] related territories promises immediate help and relief: If necessary also architecture comes back as a fashion and a dress. Wearable today... FILMCITY Film production. Film projection. Film perception. Film-Positions. FilmCity. Video city. Movie city. Cinema city. Experimental city. Filmed cities: Made in Asia, made in Japan, made in Hong Kong, made in Bangkok... PROCESS SPACES History written? Collected? Distorted. Instant history: written and re-written simultaneously. Ongoing transformations. No pre-clusion necessary, no conclusion desired. It might be the constant flux of time that transforms history into successions of realities. The gap between production and consumption. Delay. Shift. Personified perceptions, of different scale and origin. Mixing and merging in muliple-Positions... CONSTRUCTION CONTINUUM Congestion is created within the belief of endless advancement. The intended optimization of flows creates its opposite. Never-ending conversion, and ultimate extension into sky, ground, adjacent patches of land. Densification. Fences, construction walls, protection barriers. Connections become disruptions. We built a city... HYPER POTENTIALITY Assuming that the buddhist calender in the year 2542 could merge with its western equivalent of 1999, the way to perceive this Bangkok might need to be re-considered drastically: looked at as a model of the future rather than an accumulation of problems [traffic, pollution, etc], the city reveals a multi-layered structure of complexity and hyper potentiality. PERMANENT PROVISIONAL CONDITION Scaffoldings, skeletons. Half still structures, half already buildings, size-relationships render impossible the determination of status and use. Coming and going. Creating and Decaying. Before the construction is finished, its conversion has already started. Is completely abandoned. Awaiting the next decision, assignment, function. Ready to go. As if it was already known before... SIMULTANEITY Co-existence of ultimate extremes. Seeming contradiction resolved within no-time. Building and re-building, connections and disruptions, distortion and merging, collaboration and competition, tension and suspension. Sense and no sense, colliding in simultaneous operation. The new and the old, progress and tradition, the street and the mall, the dust and the highway, the river and the skyscraper. Speed turns points into lines... MOTION HYBRIDS The notion blurs between the movement of the spectator, and the movement of its surroundings, slowly it becomes inseparable, unidentifiable, if the body rushes through the city or if the buildings started moving themselves. The city has legs... September 1999 Ole Scheeren art4d had a conversation with Ole 
|
2542 | city on the move | city on the move 6
how to join
list of web sites' participants
Cities On The Move-London Version
related info web sites