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"First come, first served" The lecture starts at 7pm, Please be there on time.
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IKA Lecture Series Summer 2023
Ruptured Landscapes
Anne Lacaton
La valeur des lieux - faire avec ce qui est déjà là
Monday, 26 June 2023, 7pm, Lecture and Film screening
Prospekthof, Atelierhaus Lehargasse 8, 1060 Wien
The lecture will be in French with simultaneous translation into German.
IKA lecture series Ruptured Landscapes curated by Aristide Antonas
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© Project Lacaton&Vassal, photo © Philippe Ruault
Welcome by Johan Frederik Hartle, Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Gilles Pécout, the Embassador of France in Austria.
In her lecture, Anne Lacaton offers her point of view, relating the work of Lacaton&Vassal to the emergencies concerning the specific moment of our planet.
After the lecture the evening continues with an open-air film screening with snacks and drinks in the inner courtyard of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz. Constructing escape, a story about air, void and light. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2019) and The Imaginaries of Transformation (2012), both films by Karine Dana.
The value of places making with the already there
The existing environment - its plants, uses, views or constructions - provides the preliminary structure for all of our projects. We see it always as an opportunity a resource that already brings value to the project and as the basis of any project. Use, re-use and transformation are the base of creation and invention in architecture and urban planning.
We invariably seek to extend existing situations as delicately and lightly as possible, avoiding destruction. Adding, joining, expanding, superimposing, spanning the existing structure is always more interesting than always start over and start from a place beforehand cleaned and emptied. They are in themselves sources of savings and efficiency. The existing offers already enough material so that it allows to reduce drastically the need of new materials and the need of always using new territories to build. Based on observation, inventory and understanding of the qualities and values that are already there, the approach involves a permanent adjustment between the characteristics and strengths of what already exists and the need to evolve, adapt and create, considering new challenges and new uses. DOING WITH means taking on board the values and strengths of the existing system, rather than thwarting or denying them, and re-engaging them fully in a new system, making them the driving force of a new project. This does not mean being conservative or subjected to, but on the contrary, inventing from what exists, taking each place with its coherence and intelligence and as a whole. It is an economy of gesture, of material, an economy in short, favourable to the essential, and which does not oppose, on the contrary, the spirit of invention.
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal run the international architecture practice Lacaton&Vassal based in Paris. Their work is based on a principle of honoring the pre-existing, of generosity and economy, serving the life, the uses and the appropriation and consequently changing the standard. Main projects completed by the office comprise the regional contemporary art center FRAC in Dunkerque, the renovation of the contemporary Art museum Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Architecture School in Nantes, the Viennese Café at Museumsquartier, transformations of modern social housing like the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in Paris or the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux, as well as numerous collective and individual housing projects like the house Latapie in Bordeaux, the house in the trees in the bay of Arcachon, the Cité Manifeste in Mulhouse or the social and student housing in Paris. Throughout their careers, the architects have rejected city plans calling for the demolition of social housing, focusing instead on designing from the inside out to prioritize the welfare of a building’s inhabitants and their desires for larger and generous spaces. In 2021 the Pritzker-Price, architecture’s highest honor, was granted to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal.
The evening is a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Institute for Art and Architecture and the Institut français d'Autriche in the frame of the IKA Lecture Series Ruptured Landscapes and the Night of ideas 2023 "More?" - Nuit des idées 2023 "Plus ?" - Nacht der Ideen "Mehr?"
https://www.akbild.ac.at/de/institute/kunst-und-architektur/veranstaltungen/...
Ruptured Landscapes, IKA Lecture Series curated by Aristide Antonas
A provocative tension between post-colonial, feminist discourses and the global warming literature is put in focus in a series of investigations led at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Ecology offers a new grand narrative and the specific investigations challenge the possibilities of practical interventions in its frame. The stabilization of the global warming discourses runs in parallel to a continuous development of the post-colonial literature and a part of feminist writings underlying the importance of a destabilized normality even in the most trivial accepted natural observations. Voices from architecture and arts present their perspectives on the concept of urgency in relation to its impact on theory and praxis.
Lecture Series Summer 2023
Ruptured Landscapes
Voices from architecture and arts present their point of view on the concept of urgency in relation to its impact on theory and praxis: within the discourse on “global warming”, we observe the stabilisation of a grand narrative that is becoming increasingly powerful and accepted as legitimate; it arises from the primacy of a human fault (or even of a human “sin”, to immediately affirm the theological scale of this discourse), and it is understood differently each time, in the context of what we conceive as “nature” and “natural”. The process of stabilization runs in parallel with post-colonial literature and parts of feminist writings underlying the importance of a destabilised normality even in the most trivial, accepted natural observations. While we cannot really enter into its important details in simple dialectical ways, the presence of a scientific discourse breaks with a critical and deconstructive tradition usually running counter to hegemonic discourses. In other words, there is now supposedly a privileged hegemonic discourse that we tend to agree is considered unchallengeable; it presents itself with theological force, for some definitions of “nature”.
Geography, as a complex way of framing different types of countryside and urban fields, is addressed in this exact frame of the omnipresent issue of global warming. Global warming—considered as a new grand narrative—is presented as a metaphysical scheme able to belong to a new religious constellation of science, already described in past epistemology.
The empowerment of this discourse is presented together with the necessity of “acting urgently”; while urgency is often linked to an end of investigations, this lecture series investigates the possibilities of urgent but well-balanced political thought. The new frame of action becomes increasingly threatening and disorienting as regards the type of inquiries held on the topic, and the constitution of any possible critique of their scientific results.
Nevertheless, a non-homogeneous technical power alone seems in a position to organize the horizon of any human response to global warming. In this poisoned setting—that necessarily leads to an unquestioned aristocracy of science driving any actions for “reversing global warming and its discontents”—the role of the university appears boycotted. It seems that there is no room left for critical thinking, while an anonymous technical and scientific power appears to be the only actor able to assume the responsibility to act; but could that ever happen in the name of the people, and for their sake? It is true that a political engagement for action on the urgent issue of global warming seems trapped in this impasse; a problem of democracy seems to be intrinsic to the structure of this type of scientific discourse. It is only on a technical level that we might be able to raise our voices about options to be heard, and maybe discussed and decided. Furthermore, the production of a field of urgency cannot drive a single scientific proposal.
In this difficult frame of urgency, the policies left to debate seem impotent and restricted; any critique that may be voiced in this respect can be excluded in advance because of its incompatibility with the scientific understanding of the processes inscribed in the field of investigation. In a Foucaultian sense, the discourses held in this frame can only refer to a set of knowledge epistemologically excluded from the critical discourses that traditionally took place at universities. Can these displaced critical discourses still form a background, and reposition a political scenography at a distance from increasingly unreachable science?
Lecture Series Summer 2023
James Bridle
20 March 2023
Lucia Pietroiusti
15 May 2023
Anne Lacaton
26 June 2023
All lectures start at 7pm
Schillerplatz 3
1010 Vienna
Lecture Series Winter 2022
Invisible Symposium
24 – 30 October 2022
Momoyo Kaijima
28 November 2022
Territorial Agency
23 January 2023
A...kademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Institut für Kunst und Architektur Institute for Art and Architecture
Telefon +43 1 588 16 5101 / 5102
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien
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