Weaponized Architecture

LOST IN THE LINE
[ by Lopold Lambert ]
i ord ION J t n T #Sa L EDI A .23 CI SPE 2012.04 Lopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect currently living in New York City. His work combines the occupation of designer with the one of writer and editor for the blog The Funambulist which daily attempts to question architecture via other disciplines such as cinema, literature, philosophy or politics. His book, Weaponized Architecture. The Impossibility of Innocence is a materialization of such a process which combines a theoretical interest with a fundamental enthusiasm for design itself.
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INTRODUCTION
/// The labyrinthine dark matter of the lines thickness
Excerpt from the graphic novel Lost in the Line by Lopold Lambert
Architecture is the discipline that attributes physicality to the lines traced on paper. In this regard, the architect wields the power to separate milieus by the mean of those lines, thereby applying a tremendous violence upon the bodies that become prisoners within. One immediately thinks of the famous geopolitical walls of our world; around Gaza and the West Bank, along the Mexican border, in the middle of Cyprus or Korea, etc. However, those walls are only the
extreme illustrations of a more general and subtle system of architectural apparatuses that manifests a transcendental control on the bodies. This characteristic of architecture can not only be explained by intrinsic qualities, but also for the close relationship it has maintained through history with military strategy. The latter, in its need for diagrammatization, rationalization and optimization, mutated the architect into the engineer who designs exclusively via those processes. The
more literal the translation from a diagram to an architecture, the more powerful the transcendental control becomes. The labyrinth, in its classical representation, is the quintessence of the architects absolute control. The line is traced from above, its author has a total vision of the space, and he is amused to see bodies below subjected to his architecture. When he writes The Trial1 and The Castle2 in the 1920s, Franz Kafka reinvents this notion of labyrinth by creating a maze that escapes the control of its developer, the giant administrative system. This maze will find a space in 1941 through Jorge Luis Borges and his Ficciones3 in which space is composed both by the notion of infinite and the random. Eventually, during the 1950s, Constant Nieuwenhuis brought an architecture to this labyrinth by the creation of New Babylon, the territory of the Homo Ludens continuous drift. Those three labyrinths, whether they are administrative, spatial, or architectural, all own the characteristic of not
1 Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. 2 Kafka, Franz. The Castle. New York, Knopf, 1954 3 Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2007.
being controlled by their creators. The labyrinth proposed in the following story attempts to be of this kind, as well. Just like the wall, this labyrinth is defined by a single line; however it considerably increases its thickness in order to allow a roving in the line. In fact, one transgression towards the line consists in walking on it, in the way of a funambulist (tightrope walker) experiencing spatially this one inch thick world. This labyrinth is an uncontrollable growing entity comprised of a forest whose use depends exclusively on its appropriation by people. The creation of a new environment that needs to be colonized in order to acquire a function implies the invention of a new architecture that adapts to its new conditions. Its violent architectural vocabulary is not innocent nor is the potential danger its experience implies. In fact, Italo Calvinos dream of remaining for a lifetime in the three dimensionality of the forest4 entails a refusal of comfort, convenience and safety.
4 Calvino Italo, The Baron in the Trees. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977
Credits:
Characters: main: Laura Vincent extra: Danielle Pecora and Xinyang Chen human-book 1: Martin Byrne human-book 2: Ekin Barlas human-book 3: unknown human-book 4: Sarah Le Clerc The human-books scene is inspired by Ray Bradburys Farenheit 451 [New York. New American Library, 1968] Excerpts from: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment [New York. New American Library, 1968] Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince [New York. Hardcourt Brace, 1943] Franz Kafla. The Trial [New York. Vintage Books, 1969] Albert Camus. The Stranger [New York, A.A. Knopf, 1946]
Lost in the Line is a visual essay included in the forthcoming book WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE. The Impossibility of Innocence
Lopold Lambert
First edition: 2012 dpr-barcelona Author: Lopold Lambert Graphic design: Lopold Lambert Publishers: dpr-barcelona
dpr-barcelona Viladomat 59, 4 4 08015 Barcelona Spain
Weaponized Architecture is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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LOST IN THE LINE

dpr-barcelona Viladomat 59, 4 4 08015 Barcelona Spain

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