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- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Critique = Propaganda : The Role of Critics in the Netherlands
- 2005
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- A lot of critics in the field of architecture speak from above and outside lived experiences. They lose sight of their conditional nature, take no risk in speculation, and circulate as members of an administrative inquisition over the world paralyzing all practitioners what should be done tomorrow. When Lucien Goldman spoke his words in Paris during the turbulent days of 1968 he referred to what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels once said in “The German ideology” that when someone speaks, one should always ask oneself “Who is speaking and from where?” Goldman targeted people such as the philosopher Jacques Derrida and others who where stepping in the footsteps of Martin Heidegger, dealing with the world from an ivory-tower; as if life can be determined far from a consciousness determined by life itself. It is remarkable says Terry Eagleton “…that intellectual life for centuries was conducted on the tacit assumption that human beings had no genitals. Intellectuals also behaved as though men and women lacked stomachs.” Heidegger’s rather abstract concept of “Dasein” is indeed – as Emmanuel Levinas once said a “Dasein that does not eat”. In the many mediations of Dutch critics many different influences are delt with: sociology, economy, anthropology, history, philosophy, technology, art, film, music, literature, design, the city, the everyday, photography, fashion, the experience of the thing, and other fields all inform their role as mediator. And it is of no coincidence that several mediators have started as an architect, because – as Antonio Gramsci once noted – architects and other practitioners are “organic intellectuals”, they feel the obligation to organize life, they cannot permit themselves the luxury to observe the world from a quasi-neutral distance as traditional intellectuals prefer to do. Architects cannot avoid to experiment with the contemporary. Through projects they commit themselves to the present. Cannot but make their hands dirty when they transform a given reality to the better (at least that is what many hope to establish). It is these practices of experiment which mediators – from several different angles propagate. But we face a problem as well
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| 2. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Duelling in Skin : Interview with Wiel Arets
- 2009
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Roemer van Toorn The artist and filmmaker Wim T. Schippers once went over the body of a Parisian taxi with a hammer, as an art object, and then spray-painted it. He wanted to undermine the car as a status symbol and still leave it as a car. Wouldn’t your Porsche improve if you dented it all over and then painted it again?Wiel Arets I don’t like that kind of thing. For me everything has to have a reason which emerges from the making or use. I would never use a bent form because I like arched forms. The arched form I use has a reason within the logic of the use or the situation.RvT In your buildings the structure and the arrangement of the space is not only crystal clear but also emphatically present. While in the films of Lars von Trier and Jean-Luc Godard, which you admire so much, one is not made aware of the order and the structure at all. Is less more?WA The big difference between architecture and film is that in film you remain passive while you are psychologically open to all kinds of filmic experiences. When you’re moving through a building you’re like a cameraman. The viewer walks through the building and sees things by manipulating the route. That’s why the route is so important to me. The construction appears simple, but I can only do that because I take certain measures which you don’t immediately realise. The route in the building is, in principle, the route that in a film is the cameraman’s route. Thus you get a complexity which also emerges in the work of the two filmmakers you mentioned. What I find fascinating is that both of these directors often have different scenes interacting with each other in very different ways. That is something you experience constantly in architecture as a viewer. Most films don’t stand out because they tell a story which is unusual, but because they treat the age-old story of Joseph and Mary, as Jean-Luc Godard does in the film Je vous salue Marie. I think this is also true of my work. After the second, third reading it becomes more and more interesting. I don’t seek complexity of form, I seek complexity of content. I seek polyphony of content because it allows a multiple reading.RvT Almost all films take place within the commonplace. The lived experience in an everyday space is central. Is it your intention to address yourself to the commonplace in your architecture, as many artists and architects now do?WA For me architecture is not an commonplace affair. When I go to a bakery, I choose a specific bakery. I don’t think the baker I choose makes a commonplace product. When I go to the bakery where I get my bread, I can smell that the man is a Titan in his field. Just the smell of the bread. I don’t have to have anything on it. I’m not interested in every baker’s, cobbler’s or artist’s work. I make very specific choices. The problem with a word like ‘commonplace’ is that it suggests a kind of dumming down of our culture. We live in a society where you have to be commonplace, you have to do things everybody understands. If you don’t get good ratings you don’t score, you don’t get funding.I do feel we should allow that commonplace to exist. I’m a person who’s very absorbed in life, because I feel we can learn from it. The commonplace has extremes which fascinate me, inspire me. The commonplace is routine, but also has astonishing extremes. I like going to a bar in Maastricht, which has existed for as long as anyone can remember. I also go to events which attract large audiences. Of course I took my children to Disneyland. Though I have to admit I left with a migraine.
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| 3. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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In Search of Political Ecology : Response to Lars Lerup's Megacity lecture 2005, Amsterdam
- 2009
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Annan publikation (refereegranskat)abstract
- When a natural disaster like an earthquake, tsunami, or hurricane18 strikes, our society reveals its true self. Instead of using the public funds donated after a natural disaster to help the local population, “Disaster Capitalism” takes opportunistic advantage of the event to colonise the area with tourist centres, elegant villas and hotels, such as the ones springing up from the earth swept bare by the tsunami. There are very good reasons why Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot19 ask themselves what has happened to our democracy in the 21st century. Although the number of free elections and elected governments in the world is increasing, it does not diminish the fact that the public electoral debate is engineered with precision by a strictly controlled and staged spectacle. The majority of the population plays a passive, quiet, apathetic role, and can only respond based on the signals dished out to them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is actually shaped in private by the interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent the interests of the free market and big business. The real question is where the world of politics stands. Are we sliding down farther toward a post-democratic model as analysed by Lars Lerup in “Toxic ecology”? Is politics disappearing under post-democratic conditions in the air-conditioned business lobbies of the privileged elites in Houston, or is there a chance of a synergy between nature and culture that makes the idea of a democratic city not only possible but feasible?
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| 4. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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NOX Machining Architecture
- 2005
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Annan publikation (refereegranskat)abstract
- It’s easy to be critical when you’re opposed to something. What’s more interesting is to try and understand the qualities that underpin a vision. All the more so when that vision and the accompanying experiment are revealed as openly and honestly and daringly as Lars Spuybroek reveals in his inspiring book Machining Architecture. Wetgrid Clearly, the word 'blob' is far too simple and vague a notion with which to classify the work of NOX. Of all the blob-makers, Greg Lynn, UN Studio, Kas Oosterhuis, Maurice Nio and the many others, Spuybroek to me is the only one who genuinely experiments with the way in which structure and material can orchestrate experience freely and by way of association. How space is created using various routes, sound, the body, the eye, and perception. The blob-makers largely confine themselves to the beauty of the autonomous object. That is definitely not the aim as far as NOX is concerned. After all, the unpredictable result that Finding-Form generates often looks terrible. And a good thing that is, because otherwise the form would already have supplied the answer to the question whether it was beautiful or ugly. Architect Lars Spuybroek isn't interested in regulating functions and comfort. Instead, the technology he deploys as a destabilising force should steer our desire for chance occurrences and a diversity of possibilities and events.But then the starting point. The various criticisms of Deleuze note that the feast of endless differences no longer guarantees liberation. Present-day capitalism has bid farewell to totalising regulation. Digital capitalism has even turned Deleuzian. The carnivalesque character of everyday life now guarantees high profits through the permanent revolution of its own order. The 'radical chic' of NOX is an expression of this. Instead of distinguishing between what is important and what not, we are burdened with a multitude of lifestyles that co-exist in sweet harmony. In embracing pluralism and the endless relations that an intelligent system can generate, more and more designers (NOX among them) are fearful of placing a particular antagonism or alternative above another for fear of choosing a faulty cause as already happened with modernism, communism and Maoism. The danger, however, is that the search for difference or the stimulation of the unpredictable is elevated to an absolute law, and the possibility of difference is fetishised. There is a big danger that the machines built by NOX engineer nothing but an advanced form of entertainment, precisely because in no way do they express support for or opposition to anything, except a desire to be self-organising and interactive. In the future it will, I think, no longer be a matter of machines that just generate difference. The collage has had its day. It will have to be about new forms of representation and action that make visible and productive differences that matter. That's why I'm looking forward to the next NOX experiments, which I hope celebrate more than just the Deleuzian paradigm.This book is not a monograph as such, but a glimpse behind the scenes. It's a manifesto, a thesis, and a cookbook full of recipes for how to make interactive, complex architecture. Internationally renowned writers such as Andrew Benjamin, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Detlef Mertins, and Arjen Mulder discuss the work of Spuybroek's office NOX from the perspectives of architecture, philosophy, history, (media) theory and biology.The inspirational 'godfather' to all these authors is philosopher Gilles Deleuze. A child of the 1960s, Deleuze loathes every form of totalitarianism. Under no circumstances whatsoever may the human mind and body be terrorised by any formal system. Deleuze advocates open systems in a perpetual state of motion. He seeks experiments that proceed of their own accord, unimpeded by predefined standards. Every form of clichéd indoctrination, control, or silencing must be avoided. Moreover, the dialectic logic of progression-through-opposition, which is familiar to us from the Modern Movement and which eliminated history with the notion of tabula rasa, doesn't please Deleuze. Linear processes that hold out the prospect of a definitive and pure truth must be destroyed. After all, they result in totalitarianism. As an alternative, Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari put forward the idea of the rhizome as an alternative to the dialectic of negation. The rhizome – comparable to the (non-hierarchical) rhizome of the fern plant – has no beginning or end. Instead, it has a logic that begins and moves from the centre and through the centre, backwards and forwards, a logic that concentrates on the in-between and the line (curve) rather than the point. Central to Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the rhizome is their optimistic reading of mankind as a positive, pleasure-seeking 'machine' capable of establishing the most positive connections possible in every unique situation. Theirs is a call for active participation, a constant process of becoming without any form of discipline. In the words of the Slovanian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek: '… the aim of Deleuze is to liberate the immanent force of Becoming from its self-enslavement to the order of Being.' Man must be the producer of unpredictable creations, full of differences, intensities and permanent interaction. At the same time, he must embrace the reality of the virtual nature of our existence. The impressive thing about the NOX book is that it shows how this and other abstract concepts are translated into the practice of architecture. The book makes clear how the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari can be further considered in terms of structure, material and spatial activity. In that sense, this book is recommended reading for philosophers in danger of losing sight of everyday reality. Beyond that, the book forms an excellent introduction for architects to the ideas of Deleuze.In the opening article Spuybroek explains that he is not concerned with architecture as an autonomous or static system but with perception, and with how the object can reconfigure itself through actions that take place within the structure. While 'traditional' architecture deals with formations that reflect assumed ideas like static mirrors, NOX tries to escape from every totalising representation by concentrating on the self-organising optical and haptic activities that can occur in a building. Spuybroek avails of inventive concepts such as Deep surface, Wetgrid, Beachness, SoftCity, Softsite to elaborate his designs. The Wetgrid concept is a good illustration of what Spuybroek advocates. For a presentation of 250 paintings, installations and drawings in Nantes, France, he devised a 'vision-machine'. Presentation, not representation, is what it's about. The vision-machine turns a dry, orthogonal grid into a Wetgrid. A geometric line that goes from A to B, says Spuybroek, doesn't have enough structure to compose a higher complexity. If you move point A or B, the line doesn't change very much. What the Wetgrid facilitates is the development of a system of paths that can be read as a curve with a multiplicity of variable openings. Spuybroek: 'on which one can partly return to one's footsteps, change one's mind, hesitate or forget. It is not labyrinthine, causing you to lose your way completely: no: it complicates your way, makes it multiple and negotiable.' What the Wetgrid creates in the exhibition are new and unexpected connections that the visitor can make between paintings that appear above, beside or below during a Situationist stroll through the perception machine. NOX is not concerned with 'Form-finding' but with 'Finding-Form', or as Spuybroek puts it: 'The arabesque order of the end result is in fact as rigid as the first gridded stage, but more intelligent because it optimizes individual necessities in a collective economy.
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