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  • CATPC members (from left) Olele Mulela Mabamba, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Jeremie Mabiala, Jean Kawata, Irene Kanga, Ced’art Tamasla and Matthieu Kasiama (still from White Cube, Renzo Martens)
  • Matthieu Kasiama with White Cube (still from White Cube, Renzo Martens)
  • Urbanização KM 44-Luanda, Angola
  • It’s probably as plausible as a nuclear scientist giving a lecture about wind mills as it is for me to give a lecture about the countryside. But that is what I am going to do tonight. It’s the first time and I hope you will understand by the end of the presentation why I think it is an urgent subject.
  • It’s by now an enormous cliché that half of mankind lives in the city. And the other half doesn’t.
  • If you take magazines as an expression of popular interest; this is a typical newsagent’s wall in Amsterdam...
  • One of the biggest paradoxes was that the village was emptying, its original inhabitants were disappearing...
  • Obeying all these rules the buildings can also look like this.
  • When at the same time I looked at the Swiss meadow I discovered, I saw a Sri Lankan driving the tractor...
  • It’s totally unwise to announce future books. Hereby my announcement that my next book will be on Countryside.
  • I think that our exclusive and accelerating focus on the city creates paradoxically a situation comparable to the beginning of the 19th century. To discover the new world, mostly coastal areas were mapped and we had to describe other parts as terra incognita.
  • ...but this diagram shows that percentage together with the amount of people who actually work in the countryside. We see in Europe that this is a percentage somewhere between two and eight so almost negligible and you see that in most of the so called ‘backward’ areas of the world – in Africa, India and China – where there is still a lot of agriculture, the figure that doesn’t go below 50%.
  • To actually test and see whether this hypothesis was true, we did a test last week, very nearby in Noord-Holland in a municipality called De Rijp.
  • And here again if we look at this rectangle we discover that only the red was connected to the countryside and white was actually a very contemporary expression, where for example even a famous children’s book author lives who just received the Nobel prize for children’s books in New York or you would find a breast feeding center. And every one of these blue patches is a heritage site...
  • Animal husbandry is increasingly automated. You probably know this, but you probably don’t know how it is done.
  • And of course he is irritatingly dependent on services.
  • You could even say that landscape...
  • And every single action from planting to weeding is specified for the smallest pixel to create the largest possible yields.
  • And the farmer works with spreadsheets, again like most of us.
  • ...that can even be more effective in his absence and that can now be applied to either agriculture, the inspection of farms, and for surveillance and security. So the countryside will be and is partly already a vast and unending digital field.
  • An inspiring sequence of inevitable steps that actually left little space to maneuver.
  • And off course the farmer meets the knowledge worker...
  • ...where the wooden construction is a very welcome signal of the past or of continuity.
  • It’s even to the extent – and this was for us a surprising discovery – of how rural Germany works...
  • The digital and the West of course still have enormous power, but not necessarily economic power or military power, but the power of rules. This is a book I made in a different context about all the rules of the European Union, its 7000 pages.
  • Here you see how software is so fool proof that even illiterates can use it.
  • ...of course taught by the white man to such an extent that a piece of jungle is now a carefully inventoried environment...
  • And also Slavoj Žižek confirms this feeling.
  • I talked about the deep engagement with the digital, but there is also architectural evidence.
  • It’s not only agriculture or life stock, but it’s also server farms...
  • Basically I have an instinct that the countryside will be increasingly a hyper-Cartesian rational order that enables massive whimsicality in the city.
  • Another terra incognita is of course that we have a tabula rasa situation with little information. There are too few people to verify information or narratives on the countryside or the non-urban.
  • It becomes the total subject of speculation as well as the territory of an extreme food crisis...
  • And of course these tragedies are increasingly brought to us to the courtesy of NGO’s that are increasing the need to identifying these problems – so therefore we have land grabs, land change, food spikes and support for small scale farming, seemingly telling us what has gone wrong on the countryside but each of these is obviously not more than a mediated diversion and a PR version.
  • So what we hear from the countryside...
  • ...is on the one hand a simultaneous escalation of an upward trend of many different situations, everywhere and not only in Europe.
  • So the countryside is perhaps so far the most contested and emotive field and we are basically trained at this point to be indignant of workers’ conditions in cities like Dubai, but so far working conditions in the countryside escape us.
  • One further similarity or upward trend in the countryside, and these are series of upward trends which are all closely interrelated, is the market and the market economy, the increase in international tourism and an exact parallelism with heritage sites.
  • ...and re-inhabit the authentic environment of the former farmer and his wife.
  • But there are also a number of downward trends. The number of world languages is declining quickly, as well as the biodiversity, animal diversity, traditional architecture and the arable land per capita. So these downward trends are more gloomy.
  • Therefore the countryside is inhabited by an entirely new population that we have to begin to understand and really deserves to be taken seriously.
  • But you see the same phenomena in Dubai. We looked at these completed buildings and we were unable to detect real signs of life. So we then looked at the second best thing, which are signs of irregularity and these were the signs we could find. For me this is also a sign that, whatever we think of the city, it is true that the density decreases because families simply become smaller and more people live alone. So that is already a phenomenon of thinning, but I would not be surprised that in 10 or 20 years we discover that thinning is actually taking place on both sides. In that sense the city and countryside remain communicating vessels signifying that our current preoccupation with the city is highly irresponsible because I think you can’t understand the city without understanding the countryside. Thank you.
  • I did not assume that anyone in the academic world would ask a practicing architect in the 21st century, given the architecture that we collectively produce, to participate in a conference on ecological urbanism. So, I'm very grateful that you challenge me, but I am also deeply aware that my presentation is defined by this doubt and this condition.
  • Vitruvius, for instance, was completely aware that the sun would cast shadows at different inclinations depending on the orientation of the site, and that his architecture should address these conditions.
  • During the Renaissance, this knowledge was cultivated and further amplified.
  • Also inscribed in Enlightenment were people like Goethe, who effortlessly combined art and science
  • Perhaps the very final outcome of this highly reasonable streak of our civilization is the nuclear power plant.
  • That narrative, however we look at it – religiously or otherwise – is a fundamentally anti-modern one, which insists on apocalyptic expectations.
  • Others were Paul Ehrlich in 1968
  • What we have are two completely opposite strains, both with very eloquent and impressive practitioners. Both ideologies read the same phenomena in completely contradictory terms: one as a line of reasonableness and the other as a line of disastrous manipulation and wrongness. The confusion at the current moment is generated by the tension between these two lines. We are not able to disentangle them or understand when one of the traditions speaks and when the other speaks. This polarity is still operating and has been for a long time.
  • They looked at these areas in great depth and were able to analyze to what extent this climate required specific architectures and planning.
  • What I find touching in retrospect is not only the earnestness of this discourse, but also the conviction that they had relevant knowledge worth teaching. The equivalent of this kind of knowledge today is rather tenuous in our academies.
  • They developed a repertoire of measures, avoiding air conditioning and the trappings of typical Western architecture, and created strange prisons of avoidance.
  • They also created an aesthetic that was able to renew modern architecture, which at the same time was running into issues of Puritanism and unpopularity.
  • I am impressed by the perhaps condescending, but still highly efficient didactic intensity of this kind of effort. Even the simplest words were explained in plausible language.
  • I have since become increasingly involved in researching Africa and the tropics, and have found examples of engineering for Lagos by an East German firm. They seemed to ruthlessly turn Lagos into a modern metropolis, making everything local disappear.
  • Though it appeared completely chaotic, things actually worked extremely well in a process of mutual interdependence. There is a subtlety to this kind of engineering that is not visible at first sight. But if you look over time as the infrastructure decays, you see that it has a certain depth.
  • This joint entity, design and science, was stimulated and sponsored not only by designers and scientists, but also by free-form intellectuals like Marshal MacLuhan and Ian McHarg, a sociologist who, in Design with Nature, wrote one of the most subtle manifestos on how culture and nature could coexist.
  • Fuller was able to show, in diagrams produced for a mainstream publication, how the problems of the world could be resolved by switching military resources into other domains. This kind of clarity doesn't exist at this moment at all. It is the absence of this kind of clarity that makes us so desperate for a degree of coherence.
  • But if you put the events into different zones or categories, a pattern emerges. There are of course many crises, but an explosion of green consciousness as a response to those crises.
  • the spread of computers
  • the first international conference about international environmental issues
  • You see a perverse amplification and intensification of the arguments: seemingly rational, but actually on the apocalyptic side.
  • Scientists like Freeman Dyson relativize the disaster of CO2 levels, saying that actually they could also, in certain areas, have a positive effect. He is, of course, completely vilified for these statements. But this kind of thinking leads perhaps to a school of thought that engineering can finally offer a number of strategies that could help us.
  • We have an energetic crew of people working on the problem, but we doubt their seriousness and whether they have the necessary information at their disposal.
  • "Western consumption is no longer necessary".
  • For those who didn't recognize it, this is a collection of masterpieces by architects in the last ten years. It's a skyline of icons showing, mercilessly, that an icon may be individually plausible, but that collectively they form an ultimately counterproductive and self-canceling kind of landscape. So that is out.
  • The boutique of Ann Demeulemeester in Seoul, for example, covered entirely in green.
  • A question that doesn't seem to be asked is: is it all so necessary? And, do we need more aquariums? We have a kind of Parthenon with a planetarium, a piazza, and a rainforest. I would politely submit that it is not a Parthenon.
  • A single ring of integrated wind turbines would not only generate energy, but would also have additional benefits like the reuse of some of the redundant oil-extraction apparatus, and potentially even generate its own tourism. A single ring could generate more energy than the Middle East currently produces each year.