“New Babylon is an experiment in extreme hospitality. It’s not an architecture in which the whole world would be housed, but a piece of architecture in which the whole world would be able to house itself according to the way it wishes to, according to the life it would like to live. Hospitality is not easy. Hospitality is openness to the stranger. It is to embrace the risk of the other. It is to welcome somebody else into your house who you don’t know, and without knowing how they’re going to act.”

Read an excerpt from Mark Wigley’s essay reflecting on the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys and an architectural paradigm of free space and time afforded by automation.

https://strelkamag.com/en/article/mark-wigley-new-babylon

constant line law:

Can you draw a line that welcomes without also excluding?In Constant’s theory,

every line is violent.

Every line has to be undone. Every line has to be provisional, dotted, blurred, contested.. t How, then, do you operate as an architect? That is to say, a person who draws lines, while depowering the lines, by not allowing the line to be violent, to exert its violence? Miesian architecture may inspire hospitality, but it never strays too far away from the idea of authority. The room we are in is in every sense exclusive.

siddiqi border law: every border implies the violence of its maintenance – Ayesha Siddiqi

Real hospitality is a radical act. This invitation and embrace of the unknown guest necessarily undermines the designer and the design itself. In other words, a genuinely hospitable architecture that would welcome the other would welcome its own destruction. It would welcome the dissolution and blurring of the figure of the designer. The real generosity of a host is not to invite someone or something to occupy a space, but to invite a transformation of the space..t

hosting ie: a campfire et al

New Babylon is the most extreme and invaluable example of extreme hospitality. Here, hospitality is extended to the whole species. It is a genuinely popular architecture for a world in which no one would be considered either ordinary or strange. This would be, to put it crudely, an architecture for the people, and nothing less.

Constant really tries to ask the question: how could we live together? What does it mean to be suspended within a networked world beyond labor? ..t

bishop freedom law: how do i have to be in order for you to be free – Orland Bishop

But the question Constant could not answer remains, this brutally important question: how will we live together when it would seem that one of the key characteristics of our species is its murderous relationship to itself?..t..  Our insensitivity and brutality towards others, our ability to anesthetize ourselves to the suffering of others, even to our own pains and pleasures. The repressive default setting reinforced by the new brains and body that we have become through the *technological adjustments to our own organism..t..  forces again a new generation of architects to ask, what is it that we could offer? What could hospitality be?

thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman (@BobThurman)

*ie: supposed to’s.. of school/work