Edited by Francisco Sanin and Davide Sacconi

INTERIORTALES

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Architecture and the City: Form, Presence, and Politics........................................ 5 - Francisco Sanin

Form follows Fiction: 8 Perspectives on the Power of NarrativeConceived by 2A+P/A

Notes on the Interior Space.......................................................................................... 12 - Gianfranco Bombaci and Matteo Costanzo

Mon Oncle........................................................................................................................ 15

The Great Escape........................................................................................................... 25

Playtime............................................................................................................................. 33

The Holy Mountain....................................................................................................... 41

Tron.................................................................................................................................. 49

The Truman Show.......................................................................................................... 59

The Dark Knight........................................................................................................... 67

Anonymous...................................................................................................................... 75

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The City Inside Out: 4 Visual Essays on the Present Urban Condition

In Search of a Collective Ethos................................................................................... 86 - Davide Sacconi

The Public Interior........................................................................................................ 91 - 2A+P/A - Gianfranco Bombaci and Matteo Costanzo

A Few Living Rooms.................................................................................................... 105 - FALA - Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja

The Field and the Wall................................................................................................. 119 - MICROCITIES - Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli

RE: Housing vs City....................................................................................................... 133 - TSPA - Thomas Stellmach and Benjamin Scheerbarth

Image Sources................................................................................................................ 145

FORM FOLLOWS FICTION

Conceived by2A+P/A

Gianfranco Bombaci & Matteo Costanzo

8 PERSPECTIVES ON THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

MON ONCLEJACQUES TATI

1958

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My name is Gerard Arpel, I am a nine-year-old boy living with my materialistic parents, M. and Mme Arrpel. We live in an ultra-modern, geometric house called Villa Arpel in a new suburb of Paris situated just beyond the crumbling stone buildings of the old neighbourhoods of the city. My father is the boss at a pipe factory and my mother is a housewife. They like to impress their guests using conspicuous displays, such as the fish-shaped fountain at the center of the garden. However, my mother only turns it on for important visitors.

I enjoy watching my parents and guests moving their tables around on the pavement of the garden. Sometimes they are very funny.

All the elements inside our house, such as furniture and fixtures, are very modern and functionally-designed. I like my house but it I don’t think it’s very comfortable.

I am happy every time my uncle, Monsieur Hulot comes to visit. He is a man that is different from my parents. Despite that my father doesn’t like him, I find him very interesting. He comes from an old and run-down city district. I can tell that he doesn’t find our house very comfortable either. I enjoy going out with my uncle to the old neighbourhood of the city. In there I can play with my friends on the hill and buy delicious crepes whereas at home I can only have food from our kitchen which reminds me of a clinic.

My uncle never stops me from doing things I like, instead he plays with me. He is my good friend. Although he has already gone back to his city, I miss him and hope that he will come visit me again in future.

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THE CITYINSIDE-OUT

4 VISUAL ESSAYS ON THE PRESENT URBAN CONDITION

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2A+P/A with Andrea Branzi, Globalized Bauhaus (2015).

The influence and the potential that the Bauhaus still exerts on the contemporary project, not just as historical event but as an interpretative key to the present age of globalization, can’t be reduced to an hagiography of a cultural theory that was proposing a secular Future driven by Reason, by the industrial functionality and the certainty of a social equilibrium. From this point of view the Bauhaus completely failed its mission.

The present world is characterized by an ungovernable complexity, by the irrationality of the market, by an unsolvable social and religious conflict that constitutes a new anthropology for the civilization of machines.

Thus the project intends to go beyond the limits of architectural typology, of specialized functionality and formal composition, to spread the Bauhaus beyond its historical and physical limits, as an autonomous nucleus of energy. Not a prophecy but a part of a globalized reality without one single destiny; a genetic part of a globalized universe.

Museum as Urban Interior

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2A+P/A with Andrea Branzi, Art Forest (2010).

The XXI century introduces some important new issues. Today contemporary art doesn’t seem to proceed in one direction but in many (all?); it doesn’t relate itself with history or with the outside reality and it feeds with its own self, as an objective reality, creator of a tautological knowledge; as Science or Metaphysics.1

Museum as Territorial Device

1. Andrea Branzi, from the project brief.

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FALA, Principe Real Apartment, built (2014).

The marquise is a Portuguese D.I.Y. national sport. These balconies are semi-outdoor spaces that bring only some indirect light into the bedrooms. Here, the marquise archetype was inverted by removing the old windows, moving the bedrooms to another part of the house, and opening in their place a generous living room. The relationship with the outside happens through the compressed space of the old French windows.

Filtered

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FALA, Casa Cor-de-rosa, ongoing (2014).

The living room is made of two spaces, one existing and one newly built, each with very different qualities. The first space occupies the whole ground floor of the existing building and is meant to work as an open plan with a variety of possible uses where each object becomes a sculpture. The new, added space, has a very clear dining area usage. The connection happens through a yellow cladded doorway, emphasizing the linear tension between both.

Composite

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Microcities, Grundrisse:Housing for the Immaterial Worker (2011).

Grundrisse is a dystopian tale investigating the relationship between life-time and work-time in contemporary capitalist society.

Grundrisse is a basin of «immaterial labor», a network of individuals performing on call tasks, adapting their competences for specific projects, assuming their own responsibilities, facing the risks.

Grundrisse is a service company that provides each worker a house to live and work, rented for only one symbolic euro. Each unit is to be equipped with a technological system of control that keeps the worker in touch with his clients. Some services are integrated, like individual coaching, access to up-to-date technologies, meeting facilities, yoga training, leisure spaces etc., in order to avoid alienation, manage stress, and improve the workers’ performance.

Grundrisse’s physical expression is a structure composed by different typologies of cells, all made up by one room, where inhabiting and working are completely merged. The houses are conceived to allow the possibility of working in connection to any other activity and in any possible space.

Dysfunctional Plans #2

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Grundrisse is a means of exploitation as well as of social control. It provides the illusion of preventing precarization, keeping the workers ever busy for different companies. The city of Paris is the location for the pilot project. With its ever growing sqm price, the city forces young knowledge workers to live in ever smaller units (studios), while renting a flat has become harder and harder for precarious individuals or couples, usually unable to provide stable economic guarantees to the landlords.

Providing a house to the flexible workers will be appealing for an ever growing segment of the population. Huge areas of the city, once connected to the main infrastructures (railroads and highways) were populated by industrial structures that today are being relocated outside of what has become part of the city centre.

Dysfunctional Plans #3

Microcities, Grundrisse:Housing for the Immaterial Worker (2011).

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Ouagadougu - Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso (1930).

Which came first, and which is more enduring? From a bird’s eye view, the street is the most stable element of a city. Indeed, houses were built and demolished along its edges many times. Their program - housing, production, administration - has changed with an even higher frequency. Gazing out of a window, however, the street becomes the most fluid element with ever changing constellations of people moving, talking, trading.

To make cities today, planners have tried to leverage both housing and infrastructure as catalysts. While the former has been the more popular method, the latter is recently increasingly recognised as a successful model.

Housing, street, city, chicken, egg

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Juba, South Sudan (2014).

Unplanned settlements citify over time. Slums (arguably the primary mode of contemporary urbanisation), refugee camps, and migrant-housing villages-turned-mid-rise are examples of housing agglomerations that petrify, but also incrementally exhibit urban dynamics. Commercial activities infuse the residential settlements, informal trading emerges from street food to the level of real estate, municipalities upgrade utilities in exchange for votes, housing becomes city by default.

This process should not be romanticised. City amenities such as safety, sanitation and economic opportunity are often lacking. Other elements however, in turn missing in numerous planned developments are often achieved - vibrant entrepreneurialism, affordability, walkability.

City emerges from housing