— a project in progress —¬

Friendly Architecture is a research and experiment art-design project. It examines the impact of colossal modernist architecture on our sense of being and the way we relate to each other while facing, passing by, or entering these cubical spaces.

What does the rhythm and repetition of squares in a certain format do with our moods and behaviour? What impression do these daily scapes imprint on the sheets of our registered memory. How is it in any way connected to the original intention of the architect and the city planner behind these architectural locations.

It focuses on architecture which has been initiated as propagating or educating certain societal values, mostly social and often socialist architecture. A process of work in which an archive of sources is gathered. A planned stretch along a historical line begins with the settlements inspired by the proto-socialists in England and France and ends at phenomena of unintentional collapse and intentional domicide taking place these days.

While mentioning and documenting these architectural locations, the project also follows the transition occurring over time. The change taking place in what has been erected as a manifestation, a grand gesture, a solution or a commercial idea and has seemingly become a forgotten, a taken for granted object. The goal here is not only the telling and depicting of a story of failure, but also the tracing of anecdotes and facts behind that certain dullness and faded visibility.

In the meantime SpOp & Bruinsma present an audiovisual parallel project.. Cymph (click)

soc_fRaR_24

Snapshots from a day tour in and round Rotterdam, with architect-writer Andrea Prins ; Next stop would be London, meeting expert John Boughton ; Then Berlin, tracing the history/story of the Karl-Marx Allee, Groppiusstadt and more.

I have written this guidelining poem:

If a building is a day
and a day is a name
then a name is say
a building again.

The I as a sentient
being, in time and
material-location, it’s not
its skin and bones

but a memory of A
future plan B
or C or whateva
utopia it might be.