Architecture as hard work

Gabriele Oropallo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:40:29 +0000

Visiting the David Chipperfield exhbition at the Design Museum (”Form Matters”, 21 October – 31 January 2010) and navigating with the camera the many maquettes made and used to research the urban areas on which he was commissioned interventions. The second picture refers to a museum under construction in Naga, Sudan. His forms are solid, euclidean, yet they seem to give way or to adjust to the surroundings, instead of making space around them and offer glossy shooting opportunities for photographers. Others prefer to concentrate on fantastically fascinating roof structures, while Chipperfield is actually concerned with creating space. After all, it’s architecture, but it’s easy to forget what it’s all about.

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Spatial design as territorial control

Gabriele Oropallo — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:05:58 +0000

Originally published by Verso in 2007, Eyal Weizman’s book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation is a history of the process of transformation by which Palestinian space (underground, at ground level and in the air above the ground) is constantly redesigned in order to be kept under control. Or, rather than a history, one could call it a medical record, since the patient under analysis is still suffering the symptoms and effects of its condition. Hollow Land is now translated for the first time in a foreign language, and published by Italy’s Bruno Mondadori Editore with the title Architettura dell’occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele. The book was translated by yours truly last winter, during the development of the recent Gaza crisis, at the end of which around 15% of the buildings in the Stripe were left destroyed – an acceleration of the very processes described in the book, which provided a continuous memento of the urgency of the project. After taking stock of the latest events, in the new preface the author writes that in Palestine the spatial conflict ‘goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent “governable” colonial form’. On the contrary, it is through this ‘constant transformation of space that this process of colonization has played out’. The transformation of space, rather than being a goal, is the very instrument through which control is articulated, and violence, far from being casual and being triggered by a confrontational configuration of space, is the very tool to design it.

The cover of the Italian edition features a new image, that refers to the practice of ‘walking through walls’, used by the Israeli army to reinterpret urban space when fighting in refugee camps.

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

Eyal Weizman, Architettura dell’occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele, tr. Gabriele Oropallo (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2009).

The book will be also presented at this year’s Mantova book festival.

Bartlett Think-Tank » space

Architecture as hard work

Spatial design as territorial control