2006
Meta(sta)city
Professors:
Theory:
Nigel Whiteley
Antonino Saggio
Workshop:
Penezić & Rogina architects
Guest critics:
David Mikhail
Jim Njoo
Žarko Paić
Time:
5-13 August 2006
The theme deals with the possibility of implanting a dwelling into a dense and defined present-day environment through a self-generating implants created more according to the rules of Internet rather than classical urbanistic principles. Urbane acupuncture integrated elements replace the mainly segregated architectural tectonic-constructive, technological-installation and information-decorative aspects. The architectural interface of that META(STA)CITY is at the same time both integrative and disintegrative.
It is not primarily a shelter, although it definitely is one, rather it is an interface of urban nomads and of their immediate environment where a new type of voyeurism meets a new type of exhibitionism. They are the billboards of everyday that instantly display the happenings inside where one “surfs” from one sequence to the other not being clear whether the events are real or virtual, are they house activities or scenarios; whether the objects are appliances are they artefacts, since there is no intimate act that is not accessible through the Internet.
As the digital annihilates the analogous, the electronic graffiti are replacing our accustomed way of perception, creating a frightening non-apocalyptic infrastructure of pixels that tends to transform visual gluttons into “bats”. Because of hyperinvestment our ego is being separated from its identity through the same process of desubstantiation, fragmentation of oneself, since, according to Gilles Lipovetsky, the paradigmatic TV viewer is “attracted by everything and nothing, excited and indifferent all at the same time”.
The symposium is fundamentally practical.
Workshops hosted by P&R are supplemented by discussions led by Nigel Whiteley and Antonino Saggio.
Grožnjan Summer School of Architecture
JMI CENTRE GROŽNJAN
Umberta Gorjana 2, 52429 Grožnjan, Croatia
groznjanschoolofarchitecture@gmail.com
