READY-MADE - BIENNALE
INSTALLATION 2021
MAÎTRE D’OUVRAGE: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021
SURFACE: 12,5 m²
COÛT: 3 500 € HT
PROGRAMME: Réflexion sur l’utilisation et l’adaptabilité en projet urbain des formes «ready-made»
LIEU: Dongdaemun Design Plaza à Séoul - Corée du Sud
ARCHITECTE: uapS
GRAPHISTE: Jean Marc Ballée et Jean-François Peschot
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An approach to city making
First introduced by the surrealist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, the ready-made practice implies the dissociation of an object from its context with the aim of assigning it new meaning. The act of modifying the object’s contextual dialogue implies a rethinking of the ready-made’s formal qualities, of the contextual interaction and the ways of inhabiting the ready-made.
For the past 22 years, uapS has applied this concept to elucidate a practice of appropriating urban typologies, generally considered to be successful, by trying and testing them in different contexts. The transposition of these typologies into new contexts generates potential for new urban configurations and uses. This approach is accomplished by means of model making and sits at the heart of the project process: new urban forms are generated through successive phases of transposition, adaptation and transformation to ultimately generate an urban project.
Over the years, uapS has accrued a vast collection of ready-mades, all of which are continuously confronted with new contexts – a bottom-up method of exploring built form, its occupation and appropriation and its relation to context. The ready-made practice is not only concerned with form, but also with the interaction between urban form, context and use. This library of urban typologies combined with a broad understanding of how daily life structures our environment, constitute the foundation of our approach to city making, like a portrait of the urban fabric and urban life of our cities today. This approach makes reference to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the city as a work of art: “The city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product…”
This approach raises relevant questions that resonate with the theme of the Seoul Biennale: “Crossroads” aims to focus on cities and metropolises, understood as spaces of superposition and interaction between inhabitants, buildings, infrastructures, flows and regulations in order to examine new perspectives for a sustainable planet.
These are common themes and questions encountered in cities all over the world. To explore their essence, there is little use in studying the specificities of each urban environment. Instead, we believe that the answer lies in the approach and the attitude towards city making. Through transposition and transformation, the ready-made process evacuates the generic aspects and commonalities of urban form from the equation and thereby spontaneously leads to fresh perspectives and novel ideas.
Ready-Made: a tool for addressing the next urban question?
We are globally facing new socio-economic, cultural and ecological challenges. Our responses to these challenges will affect and change territories worldwide. Secchi (2010). In the context of these unprecedented ecological, social and economic transitions we face, we need to revisit and question our established models (the ready-mades) in order to imagine the city of tomorrow. The ready-made concept allows us to take a radical step away from traditional city making and step into a space of “city imagining.” The insertion of a ready-made in a new context usually provokes one of three immediate situations: the urban form either integrates harmoniously within the new context, transforms or recreates its new context, or provokes a clash. Depending on this first observation, the ready-made is often adjusted marginally to better fit its new environment. Thus, this process of transposing, testing, and adapting an existing project to a new site brings to the forefront the inherent potential of our existing models and through provocation allows us to consider the specific urban situation differently. The adaptability of the ready-made built forms to different realities also underlines the resilience of our urban environments.
Heritage/Modern: Open form, Open city, Open attitude
When considering the biennale’s theme of Heritage/Modern, the ready-made bears within itself, apart from a spatial dialogue, a dialogue of temporalities. While the notion of “heritage” refers to historicity and authenticity anchored within an environment, “modernity” on the other hand, has to do with an intervention in an existing context with the aim of imagining a different future. The use of ready-mades introduces a third temporality: the unpredictable and the uncertain and therefore unveils the tension between the old and the new, the historic and the modern, projecting an absolute form, absolute but open, open to interpretation and appropriation. Urban typologies cannot be considered without taking into account the potential uses it might offer or enable.
Over time, various architectural theorists have taken interest in the relation between urban form and urban life. Aldo Rossi drew attention on the autonomy of architecture within the urban realm. He explored the historical city’s receptivity for change, appropriation and reinterpretation and illustrated that historical urban forms have proved their capacity to accommodate changing urban practices and functions. Venturi and Scott Brown were rather interested in the short term of new logics and urban programs of popular environments, while Bernard Tschumi understood the urban environment as a constant dialogue between the built, event and social value.
Therefore, parallel to questioning urban forms, it is important to understand the environment in which designers work. Context not only concerns the surrounding built or unbuilt space, but more so to the relation between man and space. Our social environment is structured by the daily rhythms and uses and is therefore always dynamic and specific.
Through observation (bottom-up analysis), it becomes clear to what extent the everyday, the spontaneous, the non-drawn can structure a planned environment. People inhabit and appropriate public and private space in different ways. A space is rarely inhabited exactly the way the designer or planner imagined it. The art of living often takes precedence over architectural or urban design. The spontaneous appropriations of urban space by its users, is what makes the city interesting and non-generic, and in fact very specific.
Furthermore, the constant and increasing societal changes reverse the dimensions of our temporal and spatial experiences. Modernity, paired with a general acceleration of production and consumption and great urban population growth, has had an enormous effect on the way we conceive our urban environments. The classic concept of urban form has been transformed into a direct expression of urban life, as opposed to yesteryear where cities and neighbourhoods were constructed over longer periods of time, and the urban life, over time, shaped the urban form. Today, no causal relationship exists between static urban form and the hyperdynamic character of urban life. Urban forms manage to manipulate urban life, but urban life conquers urban form.
These diverse relations between form and urban life suggest new ways of imagining built forms, typologies, open spaces, and programs. It places the focus on specific relations instead of reproducing established models for city-making. The ready-made practice brings awareness to the “elasticity” and spontaneous appropriation of space and brings a new perspective on the relationship between space, landscape and use.
By exploring the dialogue between urban form and context, the ready-made practice initiates a certain openness, an invitation to appropriation. The dominance of urban life over urban form questions the role of the designer. Through this intervention, the designer is all but absent, but rather provokes dialogue and invites interaction between the inhabitants, the built form and its context. The designer has the opportunity of transforming the ready-made into a “silent form” – a neutral space that is not designed to fit a specific function. The built form is thus open to appropriation through which it acquires new meaning and becomes an extension of daily urban life.
From the radicality of the ready-made method, that uproots the urban form from its context, emerges a generous approach: a manifesto of transmission, the transcending of all spatial and temporal barriers in pursuit of a diversity of qualities for the cities of tomorrow.
READYMADE - SEOUL BIENNIAL
INSTALLATION 2021
CLIENT: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021
SURFACE AREA: 12,5 m²
COST: 3 500 EUR excl. tax
PROGRAM: Reflection on the use and adaptability of ready-made forms in urban projects
LOCATION: Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Séoul - South Korea
ARCHITECT: uapS
GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Jean Marc Ballée and Jean-François Peschot
------------------------------------
An approach to city making
First introduced by the surrealist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, the ready-made practice implies the dissociation of an object from its context with the aim of assigning it new meaning. The act of modifying the object’s contextual dialogue implies a rethinking of the ready-made’s formal qualities, of the contextual interaction and the ways of inhabiting the ready-made.
For the past 22 years, uapS has applied this concept to elucidate a practice of appropriating urban typologies, generally considered to be successful, by trying and testing them in different contexts. The transposition of these typologies into new contexts generates potential for new urban configurations and uses. This approach is accomplished by means of model making and sits at the heart of the project process: new urban forms are generated through successive phases of transposition, adaptation and transformation to ultimately generate an urban project.
Over the years, uapS has accrued a vast collection of ready-mades, all of which are continuously confronted with new contexts – a bottom-up method of exploring built form, its occupation and appropriation and its relation to context. The ready-made practice is not only concerned with form, but also with the interaction between urban form, context and use. This library of urban typologies combined with a broad understanding of how daily life structures our environment, constitute the foundation of our approach to city making, like a portrait of the urban fabric and urban life of our cities today. This approach makes reference to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the city as a work of art: “The city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product…”
This approach raises relevant questions that resonate with the theme of the Seoul Biennale: “Crossroads” aims to focus on cities and metropolises, understood as spaces of superposition and interaction between inhabitants, buildings, infrastructures, flows and regulations in order to examine new perspectives for a sustainable planet.
These are common themes and questions encountered in cities all over the world. To explore their essence, there is little use in studying the specificities of each urban environment. Instead, we believe that the answer lies in the approach and the attitude towards city making. Through transposition and transformation, the ready-made process evacuates the generic aspects and commonalities of urban form from the equation and thereby spontaneously leads to fresh perspectives and novel ideas.
Ready-Made: a tool for addressing the next urban question?
We are globally facing new socio-economic, cultural and ecological challenges. Our responses to these challenges will affect and change territories worldwide. Secchi (2010). In the context of these unprecedented ecological, social and economic transitions we face, we need to revisit and question our established models (the ready-mades) in order to imagine the city of tomorrow. The ready-made concept allows us to take a radical step away from traditional city making and step into a space of “city imagining.” The insertion of a ready-made in a new context usually provokes one of three immediate situations: the urban form either integrates harmoniously within the new context, transforms or recreates its new context, or provokes a clash. Depending on this first observation, the ready-made is often adjusted marginally to better fit its new environment. Thus, this process of transposing, testing, and adapting an existing project to a new site brings to the forefront the inherent potential of our existing models and through provocation allows us to consider the specific urban situation differently. The adaptability of the ready-made built forms to different realities also underlines the resilience of our urban environments.
Heritage/Modern: Open form, Open city, Open attitude
When considering the biennale’s theme of Heritage/Modern, the ready-made bears within itself, apart from a spatial dialogue, a dialogue of temporalities. While the notion of “heritage” refers to historicity and authenticity anchored within an environment, “modernity” on the other hand, has to do with an intervention in an existing context with the aim of imagining a different future. The use of ready-mades introduces a third temporality: the unpredictable and the uncertain and therefore unveils the tension between the old and the new, the historic and the modern, projecting an absolute form, absolute but open, open to interpretation and appropriation. Urban typologies cannot be considered without taking into account the potential uses it might offer or enable.
Over time, various architectural theorists have taken interest in the relation between urban form and urban life. Aldo Rossi drew attention on the autonomy of architecture within the urban realm. He explored the historical city’s receptivity for change, appropriation and reinterpretation and illustrated that historical urban forms have proved their capacity to accommodate changing urban practices and functions. Venturi and Scott Brown were rather interested in the short term of new logics and urban programs of popular environments, while Bernard Tschumi understood the urban environment as a constant dialogue between the built, event and social value.
Therefore, parallel to questioning urban forms, it is important to understand the environment in which designers work. Context not only concerns the surrounding built or unbuilt space, but more so to the relation between man and space. Our social environment is structured by the daily rhythms and uses and is therefore always dynamic and specific.
Through observation (bottom-up analysis), it becomes clear to what extent the everyday, the spontaneous, the non-drawn can structure a planned environment. People inhabit and appropriate public and private space in different ways. A space is rarely inhabited exactly the way the designer or planner imagined it. The art of living often takes precedence over architectural or urban design. The spontaneous appropriations of urban space by its users, is what makes the city interesting and non-generic, and in fact very specific.
Furthermore, the constant and increasing societal changes reverse the dimensions of our temporal and spatial experiences. Modernity, paired with a general acceleration of production and consumption and great urban population growth, has had an enormous effect on the way we conceive our urban environments. The classic concept of urban form has been transformed into a direct expression of urban life, as opposed to yesteryear where cities and neighbourhoods were constructed over longer periods of time, and the urban life, over time, shaped the urban form. Today, no causal relationship exists between static urban form and the hyperdynamic character of urban life. Urban forms manage to manipulate urban life, but urban life conquers urban form.
These diverse relations between form and urban life suggest new ways of imagining built forms, typologies, open spaces, and programs. It places the focus on specific relations instead of reproducing established models for city-making. The ready-made practice brings awareness to the “elasticity” and spontaneous appropriation of space and brings a new perspective on the relationship between space, landscape and use.
By exploring the dialogue between urban form and context, the ready-made practice initiates a certain openness, an invitation to appropriation. The dominance of urban life over urban form questions the role of the designer. Through this intervention, the designer is all but absent, but rather provokes dialogue and invites interaction between the inhabitants, the built form and its context. The designer has the opportunity of transforming the ready-made into a “silent form” – a neutral space that is not designed to fit a specific function. The built form is thus open to appropriation through which it acquires new meaning and becomes an extension of daily urban life.
From the radicality of the ready-made method, that uproots the urban form from its context, emerges a generous approach: a manifesto of transmission, the transcending of all spatial and temporal barriers in pursuit of a diversity of qualities for the cities of tomorrow.
