Sporalla Turun Vanhalle Suurtorille

Kirjoittaja haluaisi palauttaa rauhan Tuomiokirkon ympärille, yksi keino vähentää yleistä liikennettä olisi yhdistämää vanhat raitiotielinjat 1 ja 2 kulkemaan Turun satamasta yliopistolle Kauppatorin ja Suurtorin kautta.

Isäni keräsi lapsena taskurahaa laulamalla Turun sporassa. Kuulin vanhemmiltani keltaisista sähköllä liikkuvista vaunuista pikkupoikana 1970-luvun Lapissa ja muodostin oman käsitykseni suuresta eteläisestä Turun kaupungista pitkälti raitiovaunujen ympärille – keltaisten kolisevien vaunujen, joissa pikkupojat saivat rahaa laulamalla.

Pettymyksekseni en saanut nähdä Turun raitiovaunuja, jotka oli poistettu modernisaation tieltä vuonna 1972. Toinen pettymys oli Tuomiokirkko, joka tuntui seisovan likaisen liikenneympyrän keskellä. Äitini kertoi kirkkoa ympäröivästä Vanhasta Suurtorista, jonka totesin parkkipaikaksi.

Aurajoki oli Torniojoen varrella kasvaneelle pienelle lappilaiselle kuvottava ilmestys – julkinen viemäri, joen irvikuva. Myös kraanavesi maistui pahalle.

Kaiken kaikkiaan en saanut Turusta kovinkaan hyvää kuvaa. Ylitornioon verrattuna kaupunki tuntui olevan mielisairas. Ainoa merkillepantava etu kotikylääni verrattuna oli ukkini tarjoamat katkaravut, joita hän haki käsitykseni mukaan Wiklundilta.

Joki, raitiovaunut ja Tuomiokirkko ovat määräävä osa Turun kollektiivista alitajuntaa ja yhteistä muistia. Joki on kunnostettu ja olen itsekin nähnyt siinä hyppivän taimenia ravintolalaivojen kupeessa. Tuomiokirkko seisoo vieläkin liikennejakajan takana ja sporat odottavat kolisemistaan. Ns. Suurtori lienee Suomen karkeimmin kastroitu kaupunkitila, jossa ihmiset odottavat viisikaistaisen Uudenmaankadun molemmin puolin liikennevalojen vaihtumista päästäkseen torin toiselta puolelta toiselle. Näky on hävettävä. Kaupungin sydän on halkaistu ja alistettu 1970-lukulaiselle liikennemekanismille. Pääsiäisenä Jeesus meinasi jäädä auton alle kantaessaan pajupuista ristiään kohti kirkon rappusia kaiketi osana passioharjoituksia.

Soitin Suurtoriasiassa eläkepäiviään viettävälle arkkitehtuurin historian professori Wilhelm Helanderille ja kysyin, eikö jaetun kaupunkitilan puoliskot pitäisi yhdistää ja Uudenmaankatu poistaa? Helander toppuutteli intoani ja sanoi, että julkisen liikenteen pitää jäädä; sitä pitäisi jopa tehostaa. Yksityiset autot saisivat toki kiertää jostain muualta kuin keskeltä keskiaikaista toria.

Kun tori on yhdistetty ja jalankulkijat saaneet vallan, sopii tuleva Pennisiltakin yhdistämään Suurtorin historiallisen kaupunkitilan kirjaston torin kautta kauppatorille. Nykyisellään Tuomiokirkon edusta on kulttuuripääkaupungin negaatio.

Professori Helanderin mainitsema julkisen liikenteen tehostaminen tarkoittaa raitiovaunuja takaisin. Otin asian puheeksi Haroman arkkitehtitoimiston Raul Kallion kanssa, joka havainnoi Turkua tarkemmin kuin ehkä kukaan muu. Kallio ratkaisi liikennetrauman yhdistämällä vanhat raitiotielinjat 1 ja 2 kulkemaan Turun satamasta yliopistolle Kauppatorin ja Suurtorin kautta.

Kun joki, raitiovaunut ja Suurtori ovat restauroitu, voin vanhana ylitorniolaisena todeta kaupungin parantuneen mielisairaudestaan. Kraanavesihän on jo hyvinkin kelvollista.

Marco Casagrande

C-LAB for Spora:
Marco Casagrande
Shreya Nagrath
Arijit Sen

Artikkeli on julkaistu Turun Sanomissa 30.12.2010

Taipei Organic Acupuncture

Paper presented at the Ruin Academy 6.11.2010

Taipei Organic Acupuncture
Marco Casagrande / Ruin Academy

Acupuncture is the procedure of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes.

Urban planning integrates land use planning and transportation planning to improve the built, economic and social environments of communities.

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space.

Environmental art is art dealing with ecological issues and possibly in political, historical or social context.

Sociology is a science of human social activity.

Anarchy is acting without waiting for instructions or official permission. The root of anarchism is the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this.

The community gardens and urban farms of Taipei are astonishing. They pop up like mushrooms on the degenerated, neglected or sleeping areas of the city, which could be referred to as urban composts.

These areas are operating outside the official urban control or the economic standard mechanisms. They are voids in the urban structure that suck in ad-hoc community actions and present a platform for anarchy through gardening.

The punctual community gardens and urban farms of Taipei. C-LAB

For the vitality of Taipei, the networks of the anarchist gardens seem to provide a positive social disorder; positive terrorism. They are tuning the industrial city towards the organic, towards accident and in this sense they are ruining the modern urbanism. They are punctual organic revolutions and the seeds of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city.

Corners are windy

Claude Lévi-Strauss believes in the beauty of the human nature as part of nature. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno lost all the hope for the industrial development and said it has failed the promise of the Enlightment - it had corrupted humanity. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Mosfilm, 1979) is taking sophisticated people into the Zone, where their deepest wishes may come true. The Zone which is the organic ruin mirroring the surrounding mechanical reality. For the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady & Boris) the Zone was a Roadside Picnic.

Missis Lee in the Gongguan community garden.

The community gardens of Taipei are Roadside Picnic. Grandmothers can take us there, like Stalker. The honorable Lévi-Strauss could be happy to start new ethnographical research between the parallel realities of the cultures of the urban compost gardens and the surrounding city – the reversed modernization and focusing in Local Knowledge. Horkheimers & Adorno’s graves should be moved in one of these urban acupuncture spots of Taipei. Here even they would find hope, surrounded by the valueless modernity and hard industrialism. Prof. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila has said: “The valueless void of the society of today will be filled with ethics: the corners are windy.” With the recognition of the urban farms and community gardens Taipei has found its corners.

101 community garden in-between Taipei 101 and World Trade Center. Photo: Isis Kang.

What is the ethics then pushing through these corners into the city? It could be called Local Knowledge, site-specific reactions building a bridge between the modern man and nature. The gardens of Taipei, these acupuncture points, are penetrating through the industrial surface of the city and reaching the original ground. The self organized community gardens are the urban acupuncture needles of Taipei. Local Knowledge is in connection with the first generation city, when the built human environment was dependent on nature and regulated by nature. Now the anarchist gardeners are regulating the industrial city.

Dominate the no-man’s land

The community gardens are taking over abandoned construction sites and ruined housing areas, empty city-blocks waiting for development, flood banks of the rivers and even grave-yards out of fashion. In many cases the gardens are flourishing on spots of land where the land-owner issues are unsettle or complicated. Sometimes the garden will stay in the spot for only a couple of years, as in the cases of soon to be developed areas and sometimes the urban farming has decades long traditions as with the river flood plains or on the island in-between Zhongxiao and Zhongshing bridges. The smaller urban farms are flexible and eager to overtake the empty spots of the city, eager to dominate the no-man’s land.

Treasure Hill in 2003. Photo: Stephen Wilde.

One of the more famous urban farming communities of Taipei was the Treasure Hill settlement, originally an illegal community of KMT veterans. During its legitimating process Treasure Hill became so famous that eventually the original community was kicked away by the city government and the houses were taken over by artists and art related organizations. All the farms were destroyed on the process. Sounds like urban warfare against urban acupuncture. Treasure Hill was powerful and self-sustained when it was illegal. The community built its own houses and its own farms and it made its own rules. The official city wanted to eliminate this unofficial organic rival. NGOs found the issue sexy and stepped in to protect and legitimize the settlement. In the end the NGOs and artists took over the now-famous community and hooked up with the city government. The original urban farmers didn’t fit the picture anymore and had to leave. Now you can listen gansta-rap in a yellow plastic tent where the gardens used to be. Local knowledge died.

Missis Chen, the leader of the Treasure Hill urban farming community.

But Treasure Hill is not alone. Urban farming happens through different social classes and through out the city. The socially disordered citizens are ready to occupy land and start the community farms over and over again. Some acupuncture spots get hot and benefit the surrounding urban tissue while others fade away. The industrial surface of the city keeps constantly being broken up and herbs and vegetables are planted into the cracks. People are ruining the industrial city. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature.

Urban Editors

Compared to Western cities Taipei plays in quite different rules. The aesthetics of the city is dominated by the functionality of a big collective machine and the urban mechanism is constantly being edited and rendered as with changing the micro-chips or other parts of a super-computer into more powerful ones. The urban data is people and this is what the machine needs to process. Mostly it goes smoothly, but also people get viruses – they get together to spontaneous demonstrations, they do tai-chi in improvised city-corners, they launch ad-hoc night markets or under-bridge sales on temporarily occupied streets or city corners. And they do farms – they are squeezing organic material into the machine like a creeper crawling into an air-conditioning box. Why they do this? Why does the nature want to break the machine?

Hyena Man. Photo: Pieter Hugo

Developers are the true urban editors. They are linked with the city authorities and necessary political powers and they make the urban editing. Architects are in a secondary role – something like the hyenas after the lions have made the kill. Money is a good consultant and the generating force of the developer run urban editing process. This is not urban acupuncture though; it is more like a western style medical practice – operations on the body removing, changing or maintaining parts – or even plastic surgery. (Oh, Shanghai has bigger tits than Taipei.) The body is not necessarily seen as one big organism.

In this rough editing process the anarchist gardeners seem to act as micro-editors, parasites benefiting of the slow circles of the big-scale development. They occupy the not so sexy areas of the city and they jump in the more sleepy parts of the development cycle. For example – the developer buys a whole city block with originally many land-owners. The process is slow because he has to negotiate with all of them. While the process is dragging behind the urban farmers step in and start farming the area. The developer doesn’t want to cause any more fuss and let it happen. It takes 3-5 years before the developer has got all the area to his possession and those same years the site acts as the community garden. When the actual construction starts the gardeners have already occupied a next vacant spot in the city.

Third Generation City

First generation city was the human settlement in straight connection with nature and dependent on nature. The fertile and rich Taipei basing provided a fruitful environment for such a settlement. The rivers were full of fish and good for transportation and the mountains protected the farmed plains from the straightest hits of the frequent typhoons.

Taipei Basin - a river valley surrounded by mountains on three sides and opening up to the Pacific Ocean.

The second generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism claimed the citizens independence from nature – a mechanical environment could provide human everything needed. Nature was seen as something un-necessary or as something hostile – it was walled away from the mechanical reality.

Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city. The community gardens of Taipei are fragments of the third generation urbanism when they exist together with the industrial surroundings. Local Knowledge is present in the city and this is where Ruin Academy focuses its research. Among the urban gardeners are the local knowledge professors of Taipei. Third Generation City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and allows itself to be part of nature.

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The paper is based on independent Ruin Academy research (2010) in co-operation with the National Taiwan University Department of Sociology. Special thanks to Professors Yen-Fen Tseng and Chia-Ling Wu, to RA researchers Frank Chen and Yu-Chen Chiu, to Project Manager Nikita Wu and for Roan Ching-Yueh and Hsieh Ying-Chun to keep the talk up.

The Ruin Academy research is kindly supported by the JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture.

Ruin Academy : Reading List 1

Ruin Academy


These books must be read before Sunday:


1. Roadside Picknic / Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, 1972
2. Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad, 1902
3. Tristes Tropiques Claude / Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955
4. Dialectic of Enlightment / Otto Adorno & Max Horkheimer, 1944
5. God and the State / Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
6. Master and Man / Leo Tolstoy, 1895
7. Towards a Poor Theatre / Jerzy Grotowski, 1968
8. Go Rin No Sho / Miyamoto Musashi, 1645
9. The Organic Machine / Richard White, 2005
10. Anti-Oedipus / Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, 1972

Ruin Academy

Ruin Academy (Taipei, Taiwán 2010 -) es una plataforma educativa independiente de arquitectura situada en el núcleo urbano de la zona de Taipei, Taiwán. La Academia se de desarrolla en cooperación entre el Laboratorio finlandes Casagrande y la taiwanesa fundación JUT para el Arte y la Arquitectura.


Ruin Academy se propone repensar la ciudad industrial y el encajonamiento del hombre moderno. Organiza talleres y cursos para diversas universidades taiwanesas e internacionales, incluyendo National Taiwan University Department of Sociology, Tamkang University Department of Architecture, Aalto University Sustainable Global Technologies Centre and Helsinki University of Arts and Design Department of Environmental Art.. Las tareas de investigación y diseño se mueven libremente entre la arquitectura, el diseño urbano, el arte ambiental y otras disciplinas del arte y la ciencia dentro del marco general del medio ambiente humano construido.


La Ruin Academy ocupa un edificio de apartamentos abandonados de 5 pisos en el centro de Taipei. Todas las paredes interiores del edificio y todas las ventanas han sido eliminadas con el fin de crezca el bambú y las hortalizas en el interior de la casa. Los profesores y alumnos duermen y trabajar en dormitorios ad-hoc hechos de caoba cuentan con una sauna pública en la 5 ª planta. Todo el edificio está perforado con agujeros de 6 pulgadas con el fin de permitir "la lluvia en el interior". La Academia es vista como un ejemplo o un fragmento de la Ciudad de tercera generación, la ruina orgánica de la ciudad industrial.


Sin sus ruinas el hombre es un mono común.


Ficha técnica
Arquitecto: Marco Casagrande
Gerente de Proyecto: Nikita Wu y Fundación JUT
Coordinadores: Lea Yi-Chen Lin, Hung Yi-Ling
Fotos AdDa
Contacto: info@ruinacademy.com

Ruin Academy Sketches

Ruin Academy_Drawings

Site Plan

Ruin Academy / Jong-Hua Road "Urban Core" Block (JUT Foundation), Taipei, Taiwan

1st Floor - "Archive"

Blown off basement with olive trees, pile of top-soil with taro, fire-place, 6 inch holes through wall, public walkway, archive.

2nd Floor - "Dormitory"

Sleeping - Working units for 4 students, kitchen, vegetable garden, bamboo, 6 inch holes through ceiling and floor.

3rd Floor - "Professor's Deck"

- Bed on wheels, kitchen, bamboo, 6 inch holes through ceiling and floor

4th Floor - "Lounge"

- Fire-place, stage, bamboo, 6 inch holes through floor.

5th Floor - "Sauna"

- Public sauna, chill-out room, showers with taro+bamboo, white gravel, wild tree, 6 inch hole in the floor.

Section

Cross-section

Drawings Marco Casagrande

Ruin Academy: Cello

About this ruin. WE made the ruin. It did not happen due to some escape, giving up or forgetting. Or did it? Maybe we forgot the forgetting. Maybe we gave up “architectonic control” and let nature in. Maybe we ruined the house in order to escape to the jungle.

Ruin Academy:
- Is it a He or a She?
- What kind of animal?
- What instrument?

A. Not sure about the sex yet, but the ruin is sexy. Sexier than a house.
B. More like some mind than an animal. Or if an animal and a vegetable could make babies, so maybe one of those.
C. Cello


It feels like we are writing new memories to the city - new stories. Ruin Academy is an architectonic sketch-book already impregnated by subconscious sweat of the surrounding Taipei. This is more a void than a volume. An open corner in the city…and the corners are windy.


How to escape academic control? How to get over disciplines? How to find the Local Knowledge Professors? How to high-light the hidden orders of the city…the urban acupuncture? How to determine the energies that the composting processes of Taipei are producing; and how to use these energies? How to make the city and the river meet?


The anarchist grandmothers, the anarchist gardeners who are cultivating the forgotten corners of the city: they are holding some keys. We have a sauna in the Ruin Academy. Soon we are ready to start operating with the granny-power - sauna fresh.


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Ruin Academy: Casagrande Laboratory with JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture
Cello: Emily Chang 張立青
Photos: AdDa

Ruin Academy

The Ruin Academy is an experimental platform for knowledge building on the way towards the Third Generation City – the ruin of the industrial city. The Academy offers a public sphere for cross-disciplinary communication within the general field of built human environment, city. We don’t focus in the different disciplines of art and science. We focus on local knowledge, people and stories.


The Academy is more like a Pub than a University – or like a public sauna in Finland, where everybody is stripped naked from the President to the Police.


We must build a public sauna to the Ruin Academy.


The Ruin Academy sends an open call to think on the urban environment – the city, the people and the nature. We want to understand the ruining processes in Taipei. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. People are ruining the industrial city; this is connected with the local knowledge. Who are the professors of the Local Knowledge in Taipei? They should be the bar-tenders of the Ruin Academy.


The Ruin Academy is an independent and free platform where the different student groups and other players can meet. The Academy is about knowledge building. It is a simultaneous construction site and a ruin. We don’t know what we will find but the first step is to break the box, ruin the city. What comes to the academic control, we will give up in order to let nature step into our ruin. There is no other discipline than nature. There is our Pub.



LINK

CASA CHEN

La casa está construida sobre una vieja plantación de cerezos en Datun - montanas de Taiwán del Norte. Está disenada como una casa que reaccione a las condiciones de vientos insistentes, enuandaciones y calores del sitio.

La casa es un poste que se eleva sobre la tierra para permitir que las aguas de la inundación corran por debajo de ella. Los diferentes espacios están conectados con un movimiento flexible dentro del eje de funciones interiores y exteriores. El bano más pequeno y la cocina actúan como contrapeso estabilizando la estructura de madera durante los frecuentes tifones y terremotos.

La arquitectura bioclimática está disenada para atrapar la brisa fresca del Río Datun durante los días cálidos y para que entren los pequenos vientos que circulan en el predio entre la reserva de agua dulce de la laguna y las tierras de cultivo. Un hogar es utilizado durante el invierno para calefección y para preparar el té. Conectado al bano se encuentra un pequeno sauna.

La casa no es fuerte ni robusta - es débil y flexible. A la vez no deja afuera al entorno sino que está disenada para ofrecerle a los granjeros un refugio necesario.

Una ruina surge cuando la fabricado por el hombre se transforma en parte de la naturaleza. Con esta casa deseábamos disenar una ruina.



En un sueno anoche presencié una gran tormenta. Arrancó los andaminos, tiró al suelo las piezas de hierro. Pero lo que estaba fabricado de madera, se balanceó y permaneció.
- Bertolt Brecht

ARQUITECTOS:
C-LABORATORY

MARCO CASAGRANDE, ARQUITECTO PRINCIPAL
+
FRANK CHEN, ARQUITECTO

COLLABORADORES:
SHI-DING CHEN, NIKITA WU, SHU-GI BAI, MISSIS LEE

CONSTRUCTOR:
C-LAB

FOTOGRAFIAS:
AdDa

UBICACION:
DATUN MONTANAS

AREA DEL TERRENO:
3.890 m2

AREA DEL PROYECTO:
138 m2























Casas Internacional. ISBN 978-957-584-276-2. Kliczkowski. Argentina. 2010