Technology itself is advancing at an ever increasing speed but many people have less and less access to it. This Utopia that we envision in the future with the increase of technology, that will only be for a margin of society. Societies like Chêne Pointu will have a different reality as it declines from the time it was built in the 1960’s till today and will continue to decline.
How does an Architect deal with this situation? Where there is less access to technology and more inequality? The Self-Agenda, conceptualized of a dream that needs to be seen through the rigidity of the current time. Becoming an Activist and catalyzing a change in which the residents take control over their living conditions. Thus It is needed to gather a team, then there is an opportunity created to adapt Chêne Pointu to become a self-sufficient, self-sustainable structure.
I have made a drawing that is needed for a Lighthouse of Change. A movie that is needed to merge the problems and my inception. A proposal that would feed as a strategy towards a new community. I will go back there again, with all that I have researched and do an inception inside the society, try to activate, be a catalyst. Maybe only 10% will agree with me, but the project is to instigate a push for the Self-Agenda, an attack against the Social Inequality.
This kind of Architecture is the result of top down power infrastructure segregating the residents. You can see the aerial view and elevation of Clichy-Sous-Bois and surrounding suburbs divided by an invisible fence and visible difference in architecture.
I wanted to illustrate further using kinect sensor and processing, this isolation, being boxed in. Having no control over the means of your space, just like here where you could try to push the obstacle boxes away but it keeps coming back in a different form, a different problem, and you can not be outside the main white box. Live performance demonstration in December jury .
There are many other ways in which Clichy-Sous-Bois has been isolated;
It is not served by any motorway or Railway, just a bus that takes you in and out of the city and Upto 50% of unemployment.
Chêne Pointu was built in the 1960s by Bernard Zehrfuss, student of Le Corbusier, was the dream of the home ownership of the middle class which quickly deteriorated into a vertical slum. Today 70% of residents live below poverty line stuck with overpriced maintenance costs. A three bedroom house, 65 m2, could have 17 people living in it. A lot of the families feel stuck in this situation. The immobile, the disabled, the elderly, cant keep going up and down the stairs due to faulty lifts. Yet even though they are segregated from the outside, they form a strong helping community within them.
How does social inequality become worse with upcoming technology?
Technological advancements are predicted to exponentially increase reaching the point of the technological singularity at 2045.
Although many positives, this growth will cause for a constantly increasing wider social gap.
This Utopia that we envision in the future with the increase of technology, that will only be for a margin of society. Societies like Chêne Pointu will have a different reality as it declines from the time it was built in the 1960's till today and will continue to decline.
How does an Architect deal with this situation? Where there is less access to technology and more inequality? The Self-Agenda, conceptualized of a dream that needs to be seen through the rigidity of the current time. This drawing is the Dream, the Lighthouse. Becoming an Activist and catalyzing a change in which the residents take control over their living conditions. Thus It is needed to gather a team, then there is an opportunity created to adapt Chêne Pointu to become a self sufficient , self sustainable structure.
Before I went any further into what their future community might be, I had to go there myself. One thing is researching the problems and another is feeling their presence.
What I propose is gathering a team and incept the idea of self-constructing. My project is preparing an attack against the inequality there.
To accomplish this retrofitting that will serve the self-agenda is needs to be done in stages, first a way to transport people & materials using system of pulleys.
In order to run a sustainable living in the adaptation of Chêne Pointu, there needs to be a system of harvesting food and a renewable energy source.
External accommodation for the people whom house is being retrofitted to move into and for the overpopulated load to spread out.
I wanted to create a movie that embraces their living condition and showing the dynamic of the retrofitting, the movie puts their problems and my inception together so they can see that the possibility is not far away.
I also wanted to exaggerate in the movie the atmosphere of Chêne Pointu, in my project its not far up in the sky but right here in the domestic space, in the molds on the wall, on the ceiling leak, the rust, the discomfort.
