open form : now open

We were playing the Warsaw Game, a strategic ‘Open Form’ game based on the improvisation and adaptation to changing conditions, led by Professor Svein Hatløy (1940–2015), the founder of the Bergen School of Architecture, and Chi Ti-Nan, the author of the Micro-Urbanism concept* and the initiator of the Urban Flashes workshops. At the Urban Flashes in London (2002), Svein made us collect recycled building materials into a shopping cart and use them in a way that they would ‘dominate’ and ‘communicate’. Chi was very impressed by the deep philosophy behind this – it was the first time that his Taoist mind encountered Open Form. After London, Chi begun to teach in Bergen, and Svein – to spend time in China.

Third Generation City, M. Casagrande 

Originally formulated in 1959 by visionary architect, theorist and artist Oskar Hansen and developed further by Svein Hatløy, the concept of Open Form is based on unauthored individual and collective actions that have a potential to generate further reactions. Within this approach, the role of the architect shifts towards directing constructive communication. Open Form is a monument to no one, and the processes it goes by are rather biological. 

Svein got me a teaching appointment at the Bergen School of Architecture, where I sought for a deeper understanding of Open Form. Step by step, this led me towards the concept of Urban Acupuncture, which owes as much to Svein as to Chi’s Micro-Urbanism. Today, looking back to the architectural installations we made in different cities with Sami Rintala, I can see that Urban Acupuncture was already present there. Those installations acted as the acupuncture needles that tapped into the collective conscience of the local communities and tried to communicate with the site-specific knowledge. Our architectural expression was Open Form in the sense that it did not rely on any specific discipline – not even architecture – but glided freely between various fields of art and science. 

“First one has to have something to say, and then find the ways how to say it,” said Mauno Koivisto, the President of Finland in 1982–94. “To be present is key to all art,” said Reijo Kela, the legendary dancer and choreographer who had burned our Land(e)scape back in 1999. “Real Reality is something that is total; something that cannot be speculated,” said Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, the Professor of the Arabic Language and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Edinburg and Helsinki. He continued: “The valueless void of today’s society will be filled with ethics; the corners are windy.” We craved to feel this wind and to break in more corners. Usually design represents a closed form; it relies on the control methodologies that stifle the Local Knowledge. Design should not replace reality. Reality is normal. We chose to believe in the supernormal, and in the works that laughed at their ‘designers’. 

I ended up in Taiwan by accident, although Svein declared: “We sent Marco to Asia.” What really happened were two seemingly independent events at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000: Chi visiting our ‘60 Minute Man’ boat and me picking up from the ground his flyer that advertised the Taiwanese pavilion. Then we got in touch with each other, and Chi invited me to my first Urban Flashes in Taipei. Prior to Taipei, Sami and I had worked on a few projects in Japan, but in Taiwan the Open Form really got me. The final hit was my work in, with and for the Treasure Hill, where everything Svein had been teaching became a reality, because the Treasure Hill was the Open Form fighting against the official city. Without Open Form, I would have never been able to deal with it. Without Open Form, there would have been no Urban Acupuncture for me, and no teaching at the Tamkang University, where the students started playing the Warsaw Game soon after I became their ‘professor of accident’. In a sense, Svein was right: he did send me to Taiwan.

Urban Acupuncture, Hiroki Oya / Casagrande Laboratory

In Tamkang, I was given full support in taking further the Urban Acupuncture thinking to study the essense of ruins and eventually arrive at the Third Generation City. Later on, the Sustainable Global Technologies research centre (SGT) in the Aalto University gave me a free hand in practicing multi-disciplinary design, which, again, was close to Open Form. More disciplines were stepping in: river engineering, futures studies, cultural studies, landscape architecture, civil engineering, sociology, horticulture, and anthropology. In 2010, we were able to set up our own independent research center, the Ruin Academy in Taipei. Totally multi-disciplinary and based on Open Form, this platform for academic squatting involved the Aalto SGT, the Tamkang University, and the National Taiwan University, especially its sociology department. In the meantime, in Artena, Italy, a cross-disciplinary network of university professors founded the International Society of Biourbanism that has also established a strong connection with the Ruin Academy. Through this link, Open Form started to gain some more scientific roots. The biourbanists are as much mathematicians as they are biologists. 

Open Form knows no designer. The architect is not an author, but rather a communicator, or a human intelligence officer. Most of the existing architecture is ‘closed form’, a structural manifestation of human control and authority, while nature is Open Form, and therefore the task of architecture should be mediating between the human nature and the big voice of Nature. Urban Acupuncture strives to penetrate through thin industrial layers of asphalt and concrete in order to connect with the original soil. The resulting cracks in the city fabric provide the breeding ground for the Local Knowledge and Open Form (which are essentially one and the same thing). The Third Generation City is the city of cracks.

Phimenes Sp., M.Casagrande & F. Chen / Casagrande Laboratory

Architecture is an environmental art. It belongs not to architects, but to nature; it belongs to our senses, and not to our control. What is not sensitive, is not alive – it’s death’s companion. 

When I was a student at the Helsinki University of Technology (now the Aalto University), Professor Juhani Pallasmaa, Head of the Architecture Department in 1992–97, made us watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. Stalker – directed by Tarkovsky and based on the ‘Roadside Picnic’ novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – is about the Open Form as it is about life: you either survive your way through the Zone, or you don’t. It’s always the same forest, but the way is never the same. The way is the domain of the accident, yet Open Form is not a mystery. It is about constructing and deconstructing the elements that can maximise the opportunities for life to thrive. These life-providing elements – be it a house, a place, a community, or a city – are parts of nature, and, as such, they follow biological principles.

Existense Maximum, M. Casagrande

Existense Maximum is the given rule of nature. To enable maximum life in site- specific conditions, human control should be loosened up in order for nature to step in. Nature, life and human are one and the same, but human control is something different; it is the source of pollution and prostitution. Architects are not obliged to be design prostitutes, and architecture should not necessarily be a manifestation of human control. And if not, then the house must be ruined. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That’s how the light gets in. 

- Leonard Cohen, Anthem 

A ruin is when the man-made becomes part of nature. Open Form seeks to produce ruins – houses, communities and cities that are broken open by human error to turn into platforms of cracks. These cracks are not slums; they are not the smelly parts of the city – they are the apertures through which light comes in. The modern man is an anti-life form in the universe of cracks. A house is not a box, and the man should not stay inside. The architecture provides necessary shelter, an Open Form for the man to have a rest and contemplate. It gives us comfort. But this is not all there is. The house is where the light comes in. The city is the biology itself. It is a biourban galaxy of lights, a star system of cracks. 

* In his Micro-Urbanism theory, Taiwanese architect Chi Ti-Nan proposes an alternative to conventional ‘macro-urban’ design and planning practices with their “efforts to invent or resurrect dominant forms, to demonstrate heroic rectifications, to reinforce the regulations, [or] to freeze the historical areas.” Instead, he encourages the architects to investigate the way things interact and coordinate in the city’s everyday life; to explore the seemingly insignificant sides of contemporary cities; the unique microcosms that develop in response to “both natural environment and existing urban conditions,” and to take cues from the “immediate solutions and consequential behaviours mobilised by people in order to manage limited resources and adapt to the man-made environment.” Referring to the principles of Eastern medicine like ayurveda or acupuncture, Chi speaks about “a meridian system of interrelated energy zones within the preconceived macro-structure of the city” and emphasises the importance of identifying and working with the city’s organic, innate processes that are being “blocked, concealed or simply ignored.”

Chapter of book: Marco Casagrande: Who Cares, Wins the Third Generation City. Edit. Anna Yudina. ISBN 978-986-85001-9-8. JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture, Taiwan

Marco Casagrande - Oriana Persico on Urban Acupuncture

Dialog with Oriana Persico, published in the book "DIGITAL URBAN ACUPUNCTURE" by O.Persico & S.Iaconesi, Springer International Publishing 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-43403-2

1. Ruins constitute syncretic maps of urban environments, as they show the citizens’ usage patterns, imagination of lack of it, traversals, and behaviors. In short, they constitute the map of the city as seen from the composition of the myriads of micro-histories of its dwellers, and in its perpetual evolution and transformation.

How important are these maps?

What is their meaning and how can they be used.


MC

These ruin maps are a pattern of urban acupuncture. They are small composts where the city is slowly fermenting. The surrounding city, at least the official city, may consider these composts as the smelly parts of the city and cannot really cope with them. The only solution which the official city seems to have is to erase them, turn the ruins into lawn or park, which was supposed to happen to Treasure Hill for example. The official city is in-sensitive for the energy and potential which these areas are suggesting. Normal people though are highly sensitive for urban energies and would be fully capable to operate the map of ruins. The ruins are insulting the official control, but on the other hand they have the capacity of offering the most fertile top-soil for organic urban development, which of course seeks to get rid of the centralized power structure. 

These ruins are voids in the mechanical tissue of the centrally governed city. They are openings to different times, values, dreams and possibilities – like the attic of a house. It is very likely that the essence of the surrounding city would intensify within these voids and get mixed or at least in connection with other organic layers of the city, like in a black hole. Layers which are invisible for the official control. Ruins have the possibility of partly tuning the city towards the organic, towards the third generation city. 

These ruins can be used in interpreting what the collective mind is transmitting. They can be sensitive platforms for local knowledge to emerge and evolve; as receivers. They can be hot-spots for new biourban knowledge building. One must be very careful with the relationship with the official city though. Once the political elements of the city will realize that something constructive, collectively touching and possibly media-sexy is cooking up in the formally smelly ruins, they will try to squeeze in and buy off the energy. In case the constructive energy of the ruins is sold, the construction will turn into destruction. The official city can only banalize the local knowledge. 

2. What you say that the Third Generation City is the ruin of the industrial city, you point into a really interesting direction, indicating how the emergent, spontaneous, energetic dynamics of the city and of its inhabitants are useful in gaining better understandings about the city, and about the ways in which it is interesting to create interventions in its fabric. Maybe even more useful than the information which is obtained through administrative, bureaucratic and commercial processes.

This also places citizens in a new light, suggesting ways in which their active participation becomes of fundamental importance to understand the city, and to act in it.

How do you imagine citizenship?

How do you imagine institutions?


MC

Every citizen is part of the big brain of the city. This collective conscious is complex, multi-layered and organic, but it is still a sensitive nervous system. The official city wants to flatten these layers into a simple two-dimensional map of the city, which is the official reality. Citizens however move much more flexibly, freely and multi-dimensionally in the city that what the official map would allow. The official city is just a background for the real citizen activities. Un-official information is powerful. Whole cities could be designed by rumors. Urban power structures want to flatten the multi-dimensional, resourceful and somehow mystical real citizen. He is too much in connection with nature, and the industrial city wants to claim independence from nature. Nature is seen as something hostile, something that wants to break the machine and the untamed natural citizen is an unpredictable agent of nature, an urban native that needs to get civilized, needs to be saved from himself. 

Institutions should be the inner organs of the city to keep life pumping through it. They could also be partly the nervous nods, which are dealing with the information and other energy flows of the city, thinking of the collective mind. City is one brain. Also nature is only one brain. City should be part of the natural one brain and the institutions should take care of that. Now the institutions are human-focused in a controlling sense and separating the city form nature. The solution which the developed institutional city is offering to the citizens is mechanical and standardized life. City should be a biological man-made organism and part of nature, otherwise it is against nature, a mental disorder – a human error as one might say. Institutions should be organic and most likely modular. They should treat the urban organism through punctual interventions, which would then be connected with the nervous network of the urban brain. This cannot be based on control and hardness – those are death’s companions. City is not an institution, it is a living organism. Accident is greater than human control. 

3. Relation, conversation and flows. Your vision of the city is very focused on these themes. Even in unexpected ways, for example using the term of “urban rumors”. This is very interesting, as it does not imply a concept of beauty and value which is not centered on form, but, rather, on the presence of energy, dynamics, fluidness and emergence, and also on the harmonies and dissonances, the conflicts and consensus which are typical of living ecosystems.

How can an urban planner, a public administrator, an architect, a designer or a citizen learn to recognize this new aesthetic and this value, and use them for collaboration, participation, action and performance in the city, with other people, institutions and organizations?

How does this fit in with your connection of Urban Acupuncture?


MC

A rather good example of this was the co-operation between the Ruin Academy, JUT Developers and the Taipei City Government. First of all the Ruin Academy was set up as an open platform for different universities, disciplines and professionals to participate in multi-disciplinary research & design workshops, courses and actions. The topics for these assignments would be developed together with the City Government and in the end we would also report to the City Government. Still again, this was all un-official. The City Government would not officially commission us and we would not be tied to any official nor academic bureaucracy. We would have access to the official data and intelligence, but we could operate much lighter and direct; more like the Special Forces. Our operations were financed and backed up by the JUT Developers and the participating universities, who would also benefit of our findings and developments. 

All the participating universities, the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, National Taiwan University departments of Sociology and Anthropology and Aalto University SGT Sustainable Global Technologies research center, found it very fruitful to have an open academic operational platform, which did not belong to any university, but was more based on academic squatting. Our interface to the surrounding city was also more real than with the locked academic disciplines and the interaction with local knowledge proved to be vital to the new knowledge building of the Third Generation City. 

City governments are full of departments and disciplines and every corner has a king. These kings don’t talk to each other, but still again they are the first ones to admit, that the highly regulated and protected administrative hierarchies are not optimal for mostly cross-disciplinary and multi-layered challenges and possibilities of the urban reality. They used the Ruin Academy to say things that they cannot say and to study things that they cannot study. We could have meetings in the evenings with the city officials, who could pass us the questions, interests or notions on which they wanted the Ruin Academy to react – almost as if they would be operating with a clandestine organization. We would be their interface to the un-official and to the underground, to the normal.

In some cases, like with Treasure Hill, the City Government was using me as kind of a joker, wild card. In Treasure Hill the Park Department of the City Government was already destroying the un-official settlement, when the Cultural Department of the same City Government was commissioning me to save Treasure Hill. In the end they were all evaluating, how did I succeed and decided to come smiling with the results. “This is exactly what we were commissioning you to do.” If I had failed, they would have just blamed the stupid foreigner and bulldozed down the place. 

What I am trying to say is that we need to develop more un-conventional ways to deal with the urban problematics. We already have the city governments, administrations, organization, NGOs and universities, which are taking care of the official routines, but we need more flexible, straight-forward and light operators to work avant-garde and behind the lines, also underground. Operators who can make hearts-and-minds connections with the local knowledge and mobilize people to develop their city. Operators who can communicate with the shared mind, the collective urban conscious.

Urban Acupuncture is both a strategy for urban development through punctual interventions and straight-forward tactics. There are many holes and cracks in a city and these cracks can be used for cooking up the operations. In the end, the city of cracks is much more interesting and humane than the two-dimensional, flat, industrial-modern city. Urban Acupuncture is breaking the industrial control, but it is for good – it is constructive anarchy. 

4. What transformation comes into this scenario when many people in cities have integrated digital means in expressing their micro histories, relations, emotions, behaviors, in conscious of unconscious ways?

MC

Commercial intelligence has been using the methodology of Urban Acupuncture for a long time. A good example is the network of 7-Eleven convenient stores in Taipei. They are located in carefully studied commercial acupuncture points around the city, building up the densest network of 7-Elevens anywhere in the world. Our actions, behaviors, wishes, desires and individual histories are constantly monitored, traced and processed based on our digital activities. Our digital networks have the power of launching rumors and revolutions, but they are also very easily manipulated. An interesting question is, what is the interface and dialog between this digital mind and nature? Can it support the organic knowledge as a portal for the collective mind to communicate? Are we now just looking at the simplified and flat prints of the digitally moving information the same way as the official city is flattening the informational space of the city into a two dimensional map? Would it be needed to penetrate through the thin layer of visual information surface to the actual digital space, where the countless informational layers are generating new streams of knowledge and how can we communicate with this digital subconscious? I think that this subconscious wants to surface on the city. It wants to take both form and be sensed through our physical presence and our natural mind. 

5. In your conception, the Third Generation City is itself a form of knowledge. This is yet another parallel with the concepts expressed in Digital Urban Acupuncture, where the Relational Ecosystem of the city, captured through data, information and knowledge exchanges, becomes a commons, available and accessible for everyone to use.

How, in your opinion, should this knowledge be accessible and usable?

And, on top of that: how is it possible to suggest and create the basis for the emergence of the imagination, sensibility and desire to use this knowledge?

MC

This knowledge is already now a source of intelligence for political and economic power speculations. It is also a form of new culture. Physically, millions of people are now migrating based on this data – migrants, refugees and people moving to cities. Big digitally formed and manipulated tribes and armies are in physical war and one of the main frontlines is digital. 

The digital realm is one surface of individual and mass communication, but is it yet a form of new knowledge? The digital underground movements and paths seem somewhat hopeful, but the big data is just entertainment and commercially controlled – not very different from the official city. One should not be blindfolded by the online access to information and entertainment. Flesh is More. 

6. How important (or not) is education in your vision of the city?

How can the literacy and sensibility which are needed to conceive the possibility of accessing the knowledge in the Third Generation City emerge in citizens?

Through a school? An educational process? Peer-to-peer processes?

The availability and accessibility of tools and methods?

How?

MC

The un-official community gardens and urban farms of Taipei are run by anarchist grandmothers. Also the urban farming communities are often matriarchal – like Treasure Hill. The ex-Soviet collective farms are by now run by babushkas. Modern city is a patriarchal structure as a form of industrialism. In Taipei the kids go to help on the collective farms – carry water, dig soil etc. Sometimes they come to the farms after school to do their home-work. They learn how to farm and the local knowledge becomes real for them. One step away is the official city. Modern man should take the liberty to travel a thousand years back in order to realize, that the things are the same. What is real cannot be speculated. What is real is valuable. There is no other reality than nature. 

Maybe the digital realm is also nature. Possibly it is like the resonating behind the singing of the birds. We can either listen to the birds’ singing or we can feel and contemplate with the resonating behind it. Maybe we are resonating with the digital flows as well. We can feel the mind, but cannot really interpret it. Nature is a life providing system. My friend is a digital monk and he is very much tuned with nature as well. 

Third generation citizens don’t need to be educated. They already exist. They are the ones connected with local knowledge and sensitive enough to feel the different pulses and messages of the city. They are the connection between the city and nature. We all have that quality, but we are educated to forget it. The third generation condition requires us to forget the forgetting. 

Instead of education we need to learn, how to pay attention to the seeds of the Third Generation City. We need to document them, learn from them and let them grow. Most of all we have to stop ignoring them. These seeds are often cooking at the un-official layers of the city. City is a big compost, which needs to be turned around every now and then in order to keep it alive. The seeds of the 3G City are in connection with the local knowledge and they form a pattern of organic urban acupuncture to the static city trying to tune the urban development into biourbanism. The challenge is, that these seeds don’t necessarily support the economic speculations and can be quite contra dictionary to the established power hierarchies, which try to suffocate them. Hence the existence in underground. The digital realm may be a possibility for the local knowledge, for the seeds of the Third Generation City to communicate and connect with the larger mind of individual citizens. 

How? Forget the forgetting. Industrialism is young and simple. Let the organic growth make a new layer on top of the industrial city. This coexistence will develop into the next step of urban industrialism, the city can learn to become an organic machine. In a sense we must ruin the mechanical city and open up the industrial control, so that nature can step in. Nature including human nature. 

Marco Casagrande: Architecture must be pliant and weak like a willow

Published in the MAJA Estonian architectural review 3-2015

Finnish architect and environmental artist Marco Casagrande participated in Tallinn Architecture Biennale with his experimental project "Paracity". A few months before the biennale he had a conversation with the chairman of Estonian Centre of Architecture Raul Järg.

At first I would like to ask you about the beginning of your career. You said that the architect inside you committed hara-kiri. How did you become an environmental artist?

During my studies I had built so much belief in architecture that I somehow could not separate the idea of architecture and the architect. I saw them as one thing. When we set up the office and started working with clients, I thought that everybody would have the same idea about architecture – how great architecture is and how much it has to offer. I thought that the client would be totally aware of this and that they would come to have an architect help them with the processes so that these ideas could become true. But it was not like that at all. The clients were used to thinking that the architect is a tool, the guy who gets the permission, who makes the city allow them to do what they want to do. But that has nothing to do with architecture. They call it development, but usually it’s a kind of building pollution. Architects work together with money and so this bad development happens. And we were part of that. I started feeling sick of betraying my own dreams and beliefs so fast that in half a year I had become everything I always hated and then I wanted to kill this person.

How did you do it?

Now looking back it seems that I never lost my belief in architecture but only in the architect. Together with my friend Sami Rintala, with whom I was working at that time, we decided that we will do it in a very graceful way, honoring the big idea of architecture. In Japan this kind of suicide is called hara-kiri. So we tried to commit architectural hara-kiri. We put the little money that we owned into one project and decided that in this case there will be nobody else telling us what to do. We had to be the client to ourselves, make the design, get the permission and build it. Step by step we completed our first big architectural scale landscape installation in Savonlinna. It is amazing how much people believed in us. The construction workers were our friends; they volunteered to come in for weeks. The city gave permission immediately. There was no business, no speculations – people just helped us. It touched them and that was a big surprise for us. Then we did this big work and actually burnt it at the end – which was the hara-kiri. I guess some sort of honesty was so much around that this started our career.

Land(e)scape by Casagrande & Rintala, Savonlinna, Finland 1999

You started to get invitations from different places.

Yes, and from places we were not even aware of. And that there were other layers in the architectural world, like biennales, magazines, some organizations that were actually working with the core of architecture. And it is pretty much the same idea we had in university.

You have done very different kinds of projects and art projects. What would you like to bring out yourself?

I have done maybe about 70 projects since 1999. Many of them are just opportunities that arose somewhere. Most of the cases are not financed. Those aren’t commissions in a sense that you are invited, how many square meters are needed, what is the budget and time-frame. They are more like opportunities where something good can be done. Sometimes I see an opportunity and have to find a client for myself – make someone else see this opportunity. Sometimes it’s like a Trojan horse – I’m doing something for the client, who is maybe even paying for it and getting what he wants, but besides that I’m doing something else too and that’s the real work. Sometimes the strategy works two ways. If the city doesn’t want to risk too much and commission me to do the real work, they ask me to do something else. And they know that I’m doing the "real" work too. If it becomes politically too risky for them, they will talk about only the work that they commissioned. But when the "real" work becomes good, they focus on it. Like in Treasure Hill.

Can you tell me some more about this project?

With Treasure Hill, I realized how windy the power structures are. Reality is total and it cannot be speculated. But when you deal with fictional power, it is always based on speculations. The city government had started destroying Treasure Hill, but when we started the counteraction and gained so much publicity that it started to gain political momentum, the same politicians changed completely. They saw that they can use it for their own good. If at the beginning they were 100% against Treasure Hill and wanted to destroy it, then after 3 weeks they forgot this completely. Before I used to think that destruction and construction are on opposite sides of an axis, but it’s more like a circle that is made up of both destruction and construction.

Treasure Hill in Taipei

Was the name of the place also Treasure Hill before?

Yes, it was Treasure Hill. It used to be an anti-aircraft position for the Japanese army. After WW II, when Kuomintang was retreating from mainland China to Taiwan, they took over the Japanese army positions and Treasure Hill was one of those. When Kuomintang’s soldiers came to Treasure Hill there had already been civil war in China for 25 years. It’s a very long time. Then they came there, put up their anti-aircraft guns and were waiting for the Maoist planes from mainland China that never came. So it was boring. Then they started to find wives in Taiwan, got married and had children. The wives started complaining that living in the bunkers was ridiculous. So they started to decorate the bunkers and build houses on top of the bunkers. They became homes and when at some point Kuomintang said that Treasure Hill had lost its strategic value and they must move somewhere else, the soldiers refused. Treasure Hill became a slum, an unofficial settlement of soldiers and their families.

Fast constructed steps in Treasure Hill, Marco Casagrande - Hsieh Ying-Chun, 2003.

At one point the officials wanted to demolish the site.

Yes, in 2002 they started the demolition and in 2003 I was in Taiwan and started to stop it.

At the end of the day it became like a tourist attraction.

Yes, that’s a shame. I had a very idealistic view of it. The Treasure Hill community was old – 80 year-old war veterans. On one hand, it was a wonderful 3-dimensional settlement without any cars. But actually it needed quite a lot of physical effort to use it – carrying the water to the hill and the garbage down. There were many empty houses because people moved away or died. So I thought that for the continuity of Treasure Hill and this very nice community way of living they need a new plan. The empty houses can be used by students or artists and they don’t have to pay rent but instead serve the old people. That was the idea. When they started moving in, it turned out different. They got so much attention, because great artists were there. The focus shifted from Treasure Hill’s original community to the new community. It gave a totally new vibe to the place and in the eyes of the official city it was so sexy so they changed step-by-step the whole of Treasure Hill into a place for artists. And then the original community died.

But maybe it gave new life to it anyway?

Yeah, the officials probably think of it that way. And it is true that the old community was so old that they died naturally. But the continuity became something different, now it’s fully artistic.

It’s not only this place where artists have taken over.

Yeah, it’s kind of a normal thing to happen, I guess.

Community garden in Treasure Hill.

Let’s talk about your recent idea – Paracity. Tell me the story behind it.

Paracity was born because of Treasure Hill. After Treasure Hill I got a professorship in Taiwan for 5 years, and then I was researching all kinds of settlements and local knowledge and getting deeper into that. The city government and the JUT developers at some point asked me to think about the potential for building floodplains on the Taipei river systems. When typhoons are coming the rivers rise a lot. There is a lot of land that is not developed. And on the other hand, the city is totally disconnected from the river environment. They wanted me to think about structures that could both develop these river bank areas and floodplains in an ecological way but also reconnect the city with the river. It was kind of no man’s land we were operating with: an island – 1 km long and 300 metres wide – that always disappears when the river is flooded so there are no houses. The city wanted us to make an urban structure there for 15,000 to 25,000 people. From the beginning I wanted to do a modular platform for people to actually build their own homes. In Taiwan there is a really high number of illegal buildings and illegal building extensions. People take it for granted that if they get an apartment house and it’s 5 floors, for sure they can build 2 floors more just by themselves. The facades become humorous. So it’s always been. It’s the same thing with the unofficial communities, they are fantastic – totally self-built and self-organized. So I thought that I wouldn’t even try to do a city that is ready or totally controlled. Like in Treasure Hill, people will come and start building their homes, and communities will start coming organically.

Paracity at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2015. 

The idea was very simple – we need to develop the primary structure of the city, kind of a scaffolding, where people can attach their communities. At the beginning I was thinking of steel because I admire the high-rise buildings in Taiwan when they are under construction: steel frames look really good and full of potential, but when the building is ready, it gets boring. Later I found out about this material CLT – cross laminated timber, and I got really interested in that because it would be ever more ecological if we could take this kind of wood from the Northern forest. In 2014 they opened the first CLT factory in Finland, so now we can get the material there. Now Paracity is a wooden structure. The dimensions of each module is 6x6x6 m and then put cubes on top of each other to make a village or a city. The wood element is 50 cm thick, which means it burns slowly. The charcoal surfaces take such a long time for the wood to burn so that it’s more or less fireproof and it has also excellent earthquake performance.

Ruin Academy in Taipei

In what phase are you with this project?

I hope it’s going to be built. Taipei is the first case study and we start building earliest in 2016. Another interesting pile of projects has come from North Fukushima in Japan. I’m going there to see three different sites they are considering a Paracity to be built in the tsunami area. Then there are other calls from Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro and interestingly from Pakistan. But nothing is built yet. One to one scale we have already built one module in Finland to test how fast it is going to come together and that the wooden joints are working and so on. In Tallinn we are doing 15 modules. It will be the first in the biennale to serve the Paracity idea, but it will certainly have an afterlife, become a permanent structure for something.

So it’s a kind of platform for people to construct their own houses on.

My ideal is for it to become a slum but in a way that it’s both ecologically okay and healthy. To make that happen we have to put some environmental technology inside. Paracity becomes "positive cancer" in the city – receives the leftovers from the city, treat them and turn them into resources. Just what slums are actually doing right now. But we make it more efficient and for that the environmental technology is needed. We are just copying how the unofficial settlements are already living or how slums live in symbiosis with the city.

I studied for quite a long time a chain of slums with 700,000 people in Mumbai, settled along the river. There the waste that can be treated, turned into resources, but all the rest gets dumped into the river. Then they wait for the monsoon and it becomes like flushing the toilet of the city. But in Paracity we don’t have to flush the toilet.

Nikita sleeping at Ruin Academy. 

Those concepts are more for cities in the East, or can they also be used for Northern or Western cities?

These concepts can also apply to Western cities. When you think of the method of Paracity, it is like urban acupuncture. Even in the West cities are a source of pollution. Small-scale interventions could also start affecting the cumulative development in Western cities. The biggest environmental questions are still in regard to emerging cities. In the West, the urbanization has already happened, but if you look at other places this is on a scale that it has never existed before. So Paracity could live together with the emerging city and act as the buffer zone.

Vegetable garden, Ruin Academy

This concept is connected with your idea of third generation cities.

I have made it very simple in my thinking. A first generation city is totally based on nature. A second generation city is an industrial city. A third generation city would be kind of a ruin of the industrial city. Identifying how an industrial city can become an organic machine. Ruin for me is when something manmade has become part of nature. In architecture it happens actually quite easily if you lose enough human control. On an urban scale the question is even more interesting. Paracity is kind of a method for ruining the industrial city. I would like it to grow into an industrial city from these acupuncture points and then start ruining the industrial city. And when this nowadays industrial core and these new organic layers find a certain balance, that is the third generation city.

Is that why you named one of your projects Ruin academy?

In Tamkang University I was studying the phenomenon of ruins and doing research on how nature is reading architecture. Then it just opened up more and more. Taiwan is easy because nature is so fast. There are trees that are growing on steps. Nature uses the man-made structures. I felt that I would like to move into a ruin and live there for a longer time, in order to have time to adjust my needs. So I informed the Tamkang University professor Chen who is the dean of the architectural department. We went to meet Mister Lee, who owns a small place half an hour from the university. There’s a river valley and rice farming. They had clean water coming from the mountains so they could make tea, a tea factory. But at one point it had burned so there was no roof, just the ruins. Also the rice factory was ruined.

Ground floor, Ruin Academy

I chose the rice factory, the tea factory I left for the students. So I didn’t go to the school any more but the students came there. First I had to decide where I can put my bed, but since there was no roof, I had to make it. And when I was building the roof I saw that below me there was a plant and it was growing there because there was no roof. So I fixed not all the roof, but kept a hole for the plant. Soon I took my wife Nikita there and then we stayed there for a couple of nights and finally she moved in too. Then I had to make ways to clean ourselves – there is a small river, so I can have cold water, but how to make hot water? How to make food? Like a civilization. It was of course very primitive but we stayed there. It was functional. I made the students live in the tea factory, not always, but they had to make shelters for themselves.

Penetrations, Ruin Academy

How long did you stay in the ruins?

One year, maybe a bit more.

In many cases rumors are powerful. The whole valley knew what I was doing. The rumors spread along the river so that one farmer from upstream came to me and said that we know why you are here and what you’re doing, so can you design us the house – we want to live in the ruin too. And I designed them the Chen house. It’s a designed ruin. After the Chen house one developer asked if I know some ruins in Taipei city and step by step it became a Ruin Academy.

I remember you once described the house as a boat.

Yes, the Chen House was also like that. It is like you have a site and it’s not just putting the building there but you somehow have to sail the building. You have to know where the big winds are coming from and how it’s changing. Also you find some natural shelters. So you consider these natural conditions and you sail this ship to the harbor.

Chen House at the Datun Mountains of Taiwan

In the beginning you talked about how you wanted to kill the architect, but the architect inside you is now reborn, you are getting commissions and real projects. So did you make the space around you, so the issues that bothered you before, are actual now?

No, they are not addressed so much any more. I’m getting a little bit freer. More and more people are starting to make apartment buildings out of wood. If I were making them out of concrete it would be a different story. Now everything out of the forest comes into the city.

You are working on "real" projects again.

Yes, we are doing quite large-scale CLT wooden apartment buildings in Finland.

Bathroom, Chen House

There are not many environmental artists in Finland.

No, but I think that architecture is an environmental art.

Let's finish the talk with another project. Did the Sandworm work come after the Ruin Academy? How did this idea come to your mind?

In 2009 I was working in Shenzhen with a project called Bug Dome. There I built a similar kind of structure out of bamboo. The migrating workers came from Guanxi province and I was asking them about their local knowledge. They said that they can do anything out of bamboo. You need just bamboo, water and fire. Then I improvised this building called Bug Dome. It’s very similar to the later one. Then I got an invitation from Belgium and I went to the site and I found that they are using willow a lot. Willow structures for canals are their local knowledge. Then I turned it upside down – used it above the ground.

It was a nice story, how people started to use it in different ways.

Yes, that is also something that quite often happens. You say form follows function. But I didn’t want to follow any function. The dunes are always the same shape because of the wind, so there already existed an architecture. This was actually just copying one dune.

But people afterwards find the function.

Yes, they called it the 'willow cathedral'. Some people got married there, kids were playing, there were a lot of picnics – like they would use the beach anyhow. It was not an interior or exterior space, but just a space. It was still a beach.

Sandworm at the Wenduine dunes, Belgium.

It was there only for one summer. Are most of your artistic projects temporary?

Quite often yes. Some stay, but many of them are not even meant to stay.

Temporary is an interesting quality. It seems to allow architecture much more freedom and psyche than a totally controlled, a totally fixed building. Tarkovsky’s Stalker says that strength is death’s companion – whatever comes stiff and strong will die. In this sense architecture must be pliant and weak, like a willow. It doesn’t help much if you are meant to “last forever”, but you are dead from the beginning.

For example cities are alive, they are collective human organism and also expressions of collective mind. But we treat them as something designed, regulated and controlled – expressions of mechanical human control, industrial laziness. This is a fundamental mistake and the source of stress and pollution.  As architects, we don´t know how to negotiate with the collective mind, and we definitely don’t try – we are cheap. We have shifted away from nature, including human nature. We have become pollution, death’s companions…

Title: Taitung Ruin Academy
Year: 2014
Artist：Marco Casagrande
Medium: wood, tatami, solar panels etc. 

Artist’s Interpretation:

The Ruin Academy in Taitung, Taiwan is situated in an old sugar factory out of duty. The Ruin Academy is an organic machine. It has grown into the abandoned industrial machinery like an architectural creeper and is now producing humane sugar: creativity. 

The Ruin Academy is continuing its bio-urban research on the multidisciplinary design methodology of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city, urban scale organic machine. The research is tied with local knowledge and is operating freely in-between different disciplines of art and science within the general framework of bio-urban built human environment.

Ruin Academy is an avant-garde fragment of the International Society of Biourbanism, a laboratory which is focused on the biological restoration of the industrial city through punctual interventions as a form of bio-urban acupuncture. 

Ruin Academy is hosting a series of workshops for Taiwanese and international universities and citizen groups. It is producing multidisciplinary research and design for real-life cases in Taitung and Taiwan at large. As a creeper the Ruin Academy can slowly grow to occupy and activate new corners of the Sugar Factory machine. We are industrial insects and the Sugar Factory is our hive for insect architecture.

In the Sugar Factory the Ruin Academy operators are working and living in a machine. The industrial control is opened up in order to let nature to step in. The machine is now growing bamboo, vegetables and fruits. Openings on the roof are letting rainwater to irrigate the different organic layers growing on the machinery. The concrete slab on the floor is penetrated with big holes so that bigger trees can root in the original ground. There is a traditional Finnish sauna in one of the big processing tanks. 

Together with Taitung County Cultural Affairs Department

臺東廢墟學院工作坊志工招募
【機構名稱】臺東縣文化處、臺東糖廠
【職務名稱】臺東廢墟學院工作坊志工
【職缺類別】志工
【招募人數】20名

【工作內容】
本計劃擬招募20名，對台東廢墟學院有濃厚興趣之學生或社會人士為志工，參與整個計畫空間改造工程的建構。參與者可近距離觀察並協助知名建築師兼藝術家馬可 • 卡薩格蘭（Marco Casagrande）如何將台東糖廠之局部改造發展成台東廢墟學院的整個過程，並對其以「第三代城市」、「生物城市」等概念為核心的未來城市想像有所認識。

【工作坊時間】
2014年7月15日－2014年7月30日，每日9:00~18:00
午休時間：12：00－13：00；周末全日休息
【工作坊地點】
台東糖廠，臺東市中興路二段191號
【志工招募條件】
1.年滿18歲以上
2.對建築藝術文化有高度興趣
3.需全程參與本活動(2014/7/15~7/30)
4.需協助建築施工，故具服務熱忱、耐心與良好體力者為佳
5.需自行處理/支付往返台東交通、住宿
6.無學歷需求或限制，具日常英語會話能力者尤佳
7.男女不拘
【志工福利】
1.擔任志工期間享有保險
2.工作日中午便當(周末不供應)
3.實習證書索取（開放自行申請）
【薪資待遇】
無薪資。
【報名程序】
1.填寫下頁「志工報名表」(電子檔)
2.於2014年6月30日前，回傳電子郵件與志工報名表，主旨請以「臺東廢墟學院工作坊志工招募+個人姓名」，寄至phebea@gmail.com，沈小姐收
3.信件寄出24小時以內，專人回信確認信件收覆，若未接獲回覆，煩請再次郵寄報名表
4.2014年7月10日前，專人通知您錄取本活動志工，無錄取者不另行通知

志工報名表所需資料
若需電子檔，請來信至phebea@gmail.com索取

三個月內近照
姓名
出生日期
手機
e-mail
市內電話：
學校 / 服務單位
系級 / 職稱
語言能力 中文 英文(請簡述聽、說能力)
緊急聯絡人：關係 姓名 手機
保險受益人
用餐 □ 葷 素

Il Prof. Marco Casagrande (Finlandia) nominato vicepresidente della International Society of Biourbanism

Lo European Prize per l'architettura del 2013, fondatore della Ruin Academy e del C-LAB, Marco Casagrande è un architetto rivoluzionario oltre che un teorico sociale che mira a riportare autenticità umana all'urbanistica, all'architettura e all'arte. La sua agopuntura biourbana è diventata un innovativo approccio all'urbanistica con azioni concrete co-generate nel più profondo tessuto sociale di una città. Ha operato, esposto ed insegnato in diversi Paesi: Finlandia (Università di Helsinky), Italia (Biennale di Venezia, scuola di ISB in neuroergonomia), Austria (MAK, Vienna), Taiwan (Tamkang University), USA (Alaska Design Forum), ecc. Il suo ultimo libro è Biourban acupuncture. Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena, ISB 2013. 

Fondata nel 2010, la Società Internazionale di Biourbanistica è un'innovativa rete interdisciplinare di studiosi impegnati a redigere un nuovo paradigma nella pratica costruttiva e negli studi urbani. Essa si concentra sul ruolo svolto dalle leggi naturali sulle forme, sulle leggi della forma e sul contributo che la complessità e la teoria dei sistemi possono offrire alla pianificazione della città. E' intenta a plasmare un design basato su un criterio umano-centrico attraverso lo studio della biofilia e della neuroergonomia. Esplora nuove pratiche costruttive e metodologie progettuali come l'agopuntura biourbana e il p2p urbanism.

Marco Casagrande collabora con l'ISB fin dalla sua fondazione con pubblicazioni e dibattiti. Nel 2013 ha insegnato alla ISB Summer School in Neuroergonomia e Urban Placemaking, ha pubblicato il suo libro "Biourban agopuncture. Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena" con l'ISB e fonda sempre con la ISB la sede italiana della Ruin Academy ad Artena, Roma.

Il direttivo ISB ha proposto Marco Casagrande come vicepresidente durante la campagna di rinnovo dei ruoli nel gennaio 2014. I membri internazionali lo hanno eletto all'unanimità.

Leggi e compra "Biourban Acupuncture. Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena" su Google Books 

Marco Casagrande appointed Vice-President of the ISB

[PRESS RELEASE]

European Prize for Architecture 2013, founder of the Ruin Academy and of the C-LAB, Marco Casagrande is an innovative architect and social thinker who aims at bringing human authenticity back to urbanism, architecture, and art. His biourban acupuncture has become a revolutionary bottom-up and p2p approach to urban planning. He has worked, exhibited, and taught in several countries: Finland (Helsinki University), Italy (Biennale di Venezia, ISB School in Neuroergonomics), Austria (MAK, Vienna), Taiwan (Tamkang University), USA (Alaska Design Forum), etc. His latest book is Biourban Acupuncture. From Treasure Hill to Artena, ISB 2013.

Established in 2010, the International Society of Biourbanism is a worldwide innovative network of interdisciplinary scholars involved in establishing a new paradigm in urban studies and practice. It focuses on the role played by natural laws on forms, on the laws of form, and on the contribution that complexity and systems theory may offer to city planning. It works on the basis of a human-centred design process, tapping into biophilia and neuroergonomics. It explores new building and planning methodologies, such as biourban acupuncture and p2p urbanism.

Marco Casagrande has been collaborating with the ISB since its foundation with publications and discussions. In 2013, he taught at the ISB Summer School on Neuroergonomics and Urban Placemaking, published his book Biourban Acupuncture. From Treasure Hill to Artena with the ISB, and founded the Italian branch of the Ruin Academy in Artena, Italy, together with the ISB.

The ISB board proposed Marco Casagrande as Vice-President during the society’s selection campaign in January 2014. He was elected after an unanimous vote by members from several countries.