PARACITY

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

- Samuel Beckett

Paracity is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-build actions generating spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built human environment and this organic constructivist dialog leading into self-organized community structures, development and knowledge building.

The growing organism the Paracity is based on a three dimensional wooden primary structure, organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6 metres constructed out of CLT cross-laminated timber sticks. This simple structure can be modified and grown by the community members working as teams or by an assigned Paracity constructor.

Axonometric section of the Paracity.  

Primary wooden CLT -structure. 

The primary structure can grow even on neglected urban areas, such as river flood plains, hillsides, abandoned industrial areas, storm water channels or slums. Paracity suites perfectly to flooding and tsunami risk areas and the CLT primary structure has a high standard of earthquake performance.

People will attach their individual self-made architectural solutions, gardens and farms on the primary structure, which offers a three dimensional building grid for the DIY architecture. Primary structure offers the main arteries of water and human circulation, but the finer local knowledge nervous networks are grown by the inhabitants. Large parts of the Paracity is occupied by wild and cultivated nature.

Paracity growing on the Danshui River island in Taipei.

Paracity’s self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid environmental technology solutions providing methods for water purification, energy production, organic waste treatment, waste water purification and sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be adjusted according to the growth of the Paracity and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leaching waste from its host city becoming a positive urban parasite following the similar kind of symbiosis as in-between slums and the surrounding city. In a sense Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction.

Paracity is a third generation city, an organic machine, urban compost, which is helping the industrial city to transform into being part of nature.

Scale model 1:50 of a fragment of the Paracity exhibited in the China Central Academy of Fine Arts CAFAM Biennale 2014 in Beijing. The model is approx. 6% of the planned Paracity in Taipei. 

PARACITY / TAIPEI

The pilot project of the Paracity is growing on an urban farming island of Danshui River, Taipei City. The island is located between the Zhongxing and Zhonxiao bridges and is around 1000 meters long and 300 meters wide. Paracity Taipei is celebrating the original first generation Taipei urbanism with high level of illegal architecture, self-organized communities, urban farms, community gardens, urban nomads and constructive anarchy.

Master plan of the Paracity in Taipei located on a flooding island. 

Paracity Taipei will be powered mostly by bioenergy that is using the organic waste, including sludge, taken from the surrounding industrial city and by farming fast growing biomass on the flood banks of the Taipei river system.

Environmental technology components are mounted on barges that are plugged into the Paracity maintenance docks. Barges can be modified according to the needs of the growing biourbanism.

Paracity Island with the primary structure grid in-between the Zhongxing and Zhonxiao bridges

Paracity is based on free flooding. There are no flood walls. The first 6 m level above the ground is not built, but the whole city is standing on stilts and thus providing the whole ground floor for community actions, nature and space requiring recycling yards.

Primary structure into which people will attach their own homes, businesses and gardens. 

Paracity Taipei will construct itself through impacts of a collective conscious as a nest of post-industrial insects. Paracity is estimated to have 15.000 – 25.000 inhabitants.

E L E M E N T S

Open form

In its growth Paracity is following the organic design methodology of Open Form (Oscar Hansen, Svein Hatloy), in which community level design is viewed as an open dialog with design actions generating spontaneous design reactions within the surroundings. Open Form is close to the original Taiwanese ways of developing the self organized and often “illegal” communities. These microurban settlements are containing a high volume of Local Knowledge, which we also believe will start composting in Paracity, when opening up the community development to the citizens. Centralized architectural control is opened up in order to let nature including human nature to step in. The life providing volume of Paracity is 11, existence maximum, highest possible life in the given conditions, and more.

Cross laminated timber primary structure.

CLT Skeleton

Paracity provides the skeleton, but citizens bring in the flesh. Design should not replace reality, Flesh is

More. The skeleton, the primary structure of Paracity is constructed out of 6 meters long (50x50 cm profile) cross laminated timber CLT sticks which are used to form 6x6x6 m cubes, that are piled up to 16 stories high (8 cubes). The CLT primary structure has a fine earthquake performance and it is fire resistant. The structural elements / sticks with wood joints are prefabricated and transported to the Paracity Island

on barges. The construction work – the growing of the Paracity primary organism can be manually done by residents in teams of by professional parasite constructors. The CLT structure is just a landscape on which citizens will attach their own houses and gardens.

1:1 scale Paracity module at HABITARE 2014, Finland. 

Enviromental technology

The biourban growth of the Paracity is supported by high environmental technology which is mounted on barges. These modular bio-vessels are attached to the Paracity service harbor and can be adjusted according to the needs of the evolving urban organism. The post-industrial fleet of bio-vessels can travel along the Taipei river system and is ready to start the biourban restoration process also from other hot-spots of the river city. The environmental technology barges provide solutions for:

• Waste water treatment of Paracity and of the surrounding Taipei

• Water purification. The infrastructural water circulation is originated from the polluted Danshui River.

• Sludge treatment for fertilizer and bio-energy.

• Closed circuit aquaculture.

• Recycling of construction waste.

• Recycling of organic waste for fertilizer and bio-energy.

The barges have no problem with the flooding river.

Paracity maintenance harbor. Environmental technology will be mounted on barges.

Bio-energy

The main energy source for the Paracity is bio-energy, which is using both treated organic waste and sludge from Paracity and surrounding Taipei and especially biomass that is harvested around Paracity and on the flood banks of the Taipei rivers. The fertile flood banks, flood plains and storm water channels provide ideal cultivation areas for fast growing biomass plantations. The vegetation will be harvested by boats and then shipped to Paracity Bio-Energy Facility. The growing of the biomass on the river banks will also benefit on the natural river restoration through root cleansing of sediment pollution and the biomass will have a positive impact on the Taipei micro climate and urban ecology.

Paracity crossing the 12 m high flood wall into the city.

Parasite Urbanism

Paracity is living off the material streams from the surrounding Taipei. Even the polluted river is a resource for this biourban intestine. Paracity is Medieval medicine: using leaches to cure the circulation. Paracity is letting off the bad blood of Taipei and it uses it a resource. In fact it makes money out of the process. Officially 37% of the Taipei City waste water goes untreated to the river. Paracity wants it all. And it wants all the other materials which the industrial city is regarding as “waste”. Paracity and modern Taipei live in a similar kind of a symbiosis as a slum and the city: the urban nomads will clean the static city from its “waste”; only in Paracity the cleaning and recycling process is boosted up by high environmental technology. In a sense the Paracity is a high-tech slum.

Existence Maximum

Paracity is a seed of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city (2G). The modular biourban organism is designed to grow following the rule of nature: existence maximum. The primary structure can be grown by people and after Paracity has reached the critical mass, the life providing system of the CLT structure will start escalating. It will cross the river and start rooting on the flood plains. Then it will cross the 12 meters high Taipei flood wall and grow gradually into the city. Seeds of the Paracity will start rooting in the urban acupuncture points of Taipei: illegal community gardens, urban farms, abandoned cemeteries and waste-lands. From these acupuncture points the Paracity will start growing following the covered irrigation systems, such as the Liukong Channel and eventually the biourban organism and the static city will find a balance, the Third Generation Taipei.

Paracity @ CAFAM Biennale in Beijing.

Mediator

After rooting on the riverside and gaining a critical mass the Paracity will climb over the 12 meters high reinforced concrete flood wall which is separating modern Taipei from the rivers and nature. The flood wall will remain in the guts of the Paracity, but the new structure enables Taipei citizens to fluently reach the river. Paracity will reunite the river reality and the urban fiction. Paracity is a mediator between the modern city and nature.

Bioclimatic Architecture

Paracity has a lot of holes, gaps and nature in-between houses. The system is ventilating itself like a large scale beehive of post-industrial insects. The different temperatures of the roofs, gardens, water bodies and shaded platforms will generate small winds between them and the hot roofs will start sucking in breeze from the cooler river. Also the individual houses should follow the traditional principles of bioclimatic architecture and not rely on mechanical air-conditioning.

Paracity during high water.

Free Flooding

Paracity is based on free flooding. The whole city is standing on stilts allowing the river to pulsate freely with the frequent typhoons and storm waters. The environmental technology of the Paracity is mounted on barges, which have no problem with the flooding either. Actually the Paracity is an organic architectural flood itself, ready to cross the flood wall of Taipei and spread into the mechanical city.

After reaching the critical mass Paracity Taipei will cross the Danshui River and root on the flood bank before crossing the 12 meters high reinforced concrete flood wall in order to grow into the industrial city. 

Biourban Restoration

Paracity is a positive organic tumour in the mechanical tissue of Taipei. While it is leaching and processing the industrial and organic waste of the city, it is gaining momentum in its growth and becomes more and more important to the static industrial urbanism. Paracity is an alternative reality within the industrial development and will start treating the city the same ways as the urban acupuncture points of illegal community gardens and urban farms of Taipei do today. Paracity has the ability to become a network of biourban acupuncture tuning the whole industrial city towards the organic, ruining the industrialism on its way to become part of nature, the Third Generation City.

Organic Layers

The biourbanism of the Paracity is as much landscape as it is architecture. The totalitarian landscape-architecture of Paracity includes organic layers for natural water purification and treatment, community gardening, farming and biomass production as an energy source. Infrastructure and irrigation water originates from the polluted Danshui river and will be both chemically and biologically purified before being used in the farms, gardens and houses of the community. The chemically purified water gets pumped to the roof parks on the top level of the Paracity, from where the gravity will circulate the water into the three dimensional irrigation systems.

Paracity will use purified water from the polluted Danshui River. After chemical bacteria based primary treatment the water is pumped to the roof gardens for oxygenation and taken by gravity to the farms and gardens. 

Adaptability

The pilot-project of the Paracity is designed in Taipei, but the solution is developed to work in different locations around the world. Paracity offers an alternative for the Chinese strategic urban planning to start ecologically harmonizing the growing river cities of China. And Paracity can be used as urban acupuncture for the emerging cities of China and elsewhere. Paracity can grow along the Oshiwara chain of slums in Mumbai providing better living conditions, cleaning up the Oshiwara River and more effectively treating the urban waste that is flooding in from the surrounding city. Paracity can parachute into Nairobi and start growing from the fertile top-soil of the slums. Paracity should grow into the favelas of Brazil and start celebrating the local knowledge of these organic communities. Paracity is organic, adaptable and welcomes local knowledge. The city is built by hands of a high diversity of different people.

Treasure Hill in Taipei, the original local knowledge inspiration for the Paracity biourbanism. 

Local Knowledge

Paracity is inspired by the Local Knowledge of Taipei, the original Taiwanese urban elements that include a high level of self-made “illegal” architecture, self-organized communities, extensive networks of self-organized community gardens and urban farms, fluid nomadic ways of using the city, communicative collective subconscious in community and urban scale, feeling of dominating the no-man’s land by human nature and other forms of constructive anarchy. The Paracity basically only provides the primary structure, the three dimensional landscape for the Local Knowledge to be attached and grow. The primary structure and the environmental technology solutions will remain pretty much the same no matter in which culture the Paracity starts to grow, but the real human layer of DIY architecture and gardens will follow the Local Knowledge of the respective culture and site. Paracity is always site-specific and it is always local.

Casagrande Laboratory Centre of Urban Research / PARACITY:

Marco Casagrande, Menno Cramer, Katie Donaghy, Niilo Tenkanen, Nikita Wu, Joni Virkki, Ycy Charlie, Sauli Ylinen, Dave Kan-ju Chen

CLICK: PARACITY the newspaper

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P A R A C I T Y
- Review by Eric Hunting / International Society of Biourbanism

Paracity. Image: Matteo Serafini / Casagrande Laboratory

Paracity is a new project of Marco Casagrande which promises to be one of the first full scale demonstrations of a practical peer-to-peer urbanism. Taking advantage of a unique situation on the Danshui River Island in Taipei, Paracity explores a notion of positive urban parasitism, using a novel, freely adaptive, modular, volumetric structural skeleton serving as an urban ‘backplane’ that can subsume otherwise neglected/devalued urban environments, in this particular case an area prone to frequent flooding. Based on a fairly large span cubic structural grid made of cross-laminated timber, this backplane accommodates adaptation and habitation by retrofit, allowing for several possible tiers of social participation in the habitat from the high-level peer-managed deployment of the backplane structure and its key infrastructure elements to the more spontaneous and personalized retrofit deployment of individual dwellings, industry, and commerce. Here we see a totally evolvable urban habitat able to almost spontaneously accommodate any potential change in situation, environmental conditions, urban and domestic technology, and baseline standard of living without the strife associated with an anachronistic presumption of architectural permanence leading to ready obsolescence. This is ‘city’ as a verb. A freely evolvable urban organism with a declared evolutionary imperative of transitioning older urban habitats toward sustainable integration with the natural environment. A Post-Industrial habitat growing on the compost of Industrial Age urbanism.

I find this project concept quite exciting because it incorporates many concepts I have been proposing and exploring for a long time. This is an urban development concept based on truly 21st century sensibilities, questioning the dominant presumptions about property, space, the role of architecture, and the role of inhabitants as creators and managers of their own habitat that characterize the inherent dysfunctions of contemporary cities. I have always wondered why cities are not designed with the practical sensibility of the network/data center–with a recognition of the simple reality that they persist as an application–an activity–in a constantly changing medium of hardware and technology. We are no longer limited by primitive construction technology with no means to adapt. Why then are cities commonly, physically, designed to dogmatically resist the constant evolution that is their very life-blood? It is this very resistance that is the root of their dysfunctions. The modern city is not a collection of architecture. It is not a physical thing. It is an epiphenomenon. An attractor to an emergent form, like consciousness is to the brain and like an operating system is to a cluster of computers.

Paracity Settlement. Image: Matteo Serafini / Casagrande Laboratory.

Paracity’s architecture is most interesting in how it lays bare this paradigm. One might accuse it of being, superficially, a throw-back to the ‘plug in’ architecture of the ’60s, and perhaps this is one of the reasons for a choice of a more organic primary structural material rather than the steel frame and concrete systems of the past. But it is more like one of those transparent ‘visible body’ models that turns our perspective inside-out by bringing its urban backplane out into the open as an overt, visible, architectural feature to be embraced for its bounty of adaptive use possibilities. This habitat revels in its nakedness and its perpetually unfinished state.

The personal computer ran into an evolutionary rut at the time when it had the most diversity of systems architectures, their very deliberate and often pointless incompatibilities wielded like clubs by corporate interests vying for monopolistic control of market share. It was the old Industrial Age mindset abusing a Post-Industrial technology with its quaint notions of value and fuddy-duddy ideas about how money is supposed to be made. The industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that market share was, in fact, keyed to interoperability rather than propriety. That the personal computer existed in a non-zero-sum ecology and made more profit the more you shared and cooperated. Today we have but a few, mostly open, mainstream personal computer architectures and more physical diversity in design, a more rapid pace of advance, and greater potential for personalization and customization than was ever imagined possible in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Relegated to an upper tier of peer organization largely independent of the individual human-scale retrofit use, the modular backplane of Paracity is not so much an overarching architectural scheme as it is a genome in which an unlimited number of urban situations can be ‘sequenced’, expressed, and evolved. It imposes order and standardization to facilitate its ease of use and change, but doesn’t impose any individual designer’s ego over the aesthetic of the habitat. It is not megalomaniaclemegabuild. It’s Lego.

If realized, I think Paracity has the potential to be a breakthrough on many fronts. The community planned for Taipei promises to be a great opportunity for exploring peer-to-peer urbanism and the cultivation of a Post-Industrial culture rooted in the new technologies of alternative energy, sustainable resource use, urban farming, and independent production and economy. Being right in the midst of one of the world’s most important and cosmopolitan cities, the catalytic potential is great. It could be an opportunity for people from around the world to converge on the experimentation and demonstration of a very new urban lifestyle without the hassles and hardships of retreating to the remote edge-of-wilderness locations so many intentional communities are relegated to. And it offers the prospect of creating a package of systems–a vernacular–that, like an urban version of OSE’s Global Village Construction Set, can be freely disseminated through the medium of the internet and applied most anywhere. By virtue of the kind of technology used–the standardization and ready reproducibility and repurposing of this urban backplane–one could contribute to this project in many ways from anywhere in the world. This is most definitely a project to keep an eye on.

Eric Hunting, erichunting@gmail.com

ANARCHIST GRANDMOTHERS

Dialog with Emma Tucker, Editor / Meri Media

What was the original inspiration for Ruin Academy?

I have been following the ruining processes in Taiwan for a longer period – how nature is reading architecture and how nature and architecture can coexist together in a symbiosis. I am interested in a condition, where nature and human nature share the same house – or the same city. I started to develop the architectural design methodology to reach the constructive and creative ruin condition while teaching in the Tamkang University. From architectural scale the thinking evolved into urban scale and  through the methodology of Urban Acupuncture into the theory of the Third Generation City. Ruin Academy was set up to further develop these lines of thinking from a multidisciplinary point of view.

Next to the actual building of the Ruin Academy in Taipei is a tree growing on a wall of an apartment house. The roots of the trees are penetrating into the sewage system as a source of energy and the tree uses the house as a physical support for its growth. The tree needs to regulate his growth though, otherwise it will break the house. In needs the house and it needs people using sewage. This tree, this urban bonsai, is a great inspiration.

What are the differences approaching building a project out of an existing building, and creating an entirely new structure?

Site specific qualities are always different. These are the qualities where architecture is rooting to. Man-made environment can be very fruitful. So can be forest. Everything is interesting.

It seems that these kinds of projects that take over abandoned or derelict buildings are becoming more common. Do you think there's a move in this direction, for architects to focus instead on renovating existing buildings, rather than creating anew?

Dealing with existing buildings and communities is harder than creating new anonymous objects. Architecture is not design, but dealing with reality. There is only one reality: nature. Nature can be found in abandoned buildings, which sometimes have transformed to be part of nature themselves. This is a high quality in architecture and architects should focus on this. I want to see the organic ruin of the industrial city and I want to see people ruining the industrial fiction. The trend is to feel nature, also in architecture. Without this sensitivity architecture and urbanism is developing against nature turning the modern man into a mechanical joke. Cities are full of therapy.

The inhabitants of the building are called 'constructor/gardeners' - can you explain this term a little bit more, and what the role entails?

If an architect is a gardener, he is a constructor. If he is not, he is a destructor. Many spontaneous and often illegal communities are gardening houses, growing architecture that is much more complex and fruitful that official development and official architecture, that is blindly directed by economy and centralized politics. These organic settlements – favelas, slums, ghettos, camps, urban villages etc. are bringing in hope into the urban development. I want the students to garden architecture, to grow structures that will mingle with other structures and natural element resulting into an organic human mangrove. This is not romantic. Nature is murder. A constant impact of energy is needed to keep the structures weak and flexible. Hardness is an expression of death. Anarchist grandmothers are cultivating illegal community gardens and urban farms everywhere around Taipei. These farms are producing needles of urban acupuncture tuning the mechanical city towards the organic. Anarchist grandmothers are an expression of local knowledge, a seed of the Third Generation City.

Can you explain a little bit more about how you hope the organic/manmade will merge in Ruin Academy?

By accident. Nature will grow in and find its balance with the architecture. We find our balance with architecture and nature.

What do you hope will emerge out of Ruin Academy?

I hope the Ruin Academy to be a continuous series of international workshops, research and studies taking place not only in Taipei, but in other locations too. In  Norway we are on a process to open up NOMAD as a window in Hemnes community in straight connection with stunning nature and nomads. This nomadic window will bring in something new to Taipei and to architecture. In Artena, Italy we are opening up Ruin Academy together with the International Society of Biourbanism, together with whom we will publish a book this summer focusing on the possibilities of Biourban Acupuncture. Ruin Academy is a compost, that needs to be turned over every now and then and new organic material needs to get into the pile.

What other projects or people working today do you find most inspiring or innovative?

Normal people are inspiring and innovative. Architects are getting too closed to the discipline like all the other academic disciplines and just taking care of their own “rights” and posing to each other. Most of us are just prostitutes for developers and that is not totally satisfying. Architecture has a big social responsibility in developing built human environement that can perform as a mediator between the modern man and nature – not closing in the mechanical-human joke into a box separated from the rest of nature.

Normal people are good. Illegal architecture is interesting. Spontaneous urban acupuncture is fine … in anarchist grandmothers we trust!

Thanks!

Kiitos

Totalitarian Organism

The points to enter to Local Knowledge are necessarily weak and soft spots on the hard surface of the mechanical city. The hard surface is actually keeping the local knowledge down, like a lid and fermenting it. This causes pressure that will erupt and surface through the cracks and broken areas of the city. This volcanic socialism causes an emotional energy magnetism that effects people on the level of collective mind as a form of communication between the local knowledge and the modern man on the surface.

Hard surfaces are for stress, entertainment and therapy. The organic side is different and in the end of the day uncontrollable. Nature is anarchy, but aiming to far more than to a self organized sustainable community. Its constant rule is existence maximum, maximal life production – balance through a totalitarian organism. 

it’s anarchical it’s acupunctural, well it’s both / marco casagrande

it’s anarchical   it’s acupunctural,   well it’s both / marco casagrande

- Anna Yudina / MONITOR #68

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Pictured on this spread: the construction of the RUIN ACADEMY in Taipei (Taiwan, 2010) and the SANDWORM in Wenduine (Belgium, 2012)_PHOTO: NIKITA WU

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Working with illegal architecture in Taipei to save TREASURE HILL community as a source of local knowledge, and therefore a key to environmentally sound solutions for the city. Originally founded by construction workers together with the KMT veterans from Mainland China, the community used to farm the entire flood plain from their homes to the Xindian River. Every family used to have a boat. At the time when the river has not yet been polluted, it was the bases of everyday life – a source of domestic water, fish and seafood.

Below: Marco Casagrande at the construction of the BUG DOME (Shenzhen, 2009), a temporary venue for underground cultural events and a social club for builders (more on pp 056-057).

Four weeks to erect a willow-woven pavilion for the Beaufort Triennial of Contemporary Art (Belgium, February). Ten days of Survival Architecture workshop to populate a frozen mountainous lake with nomad shelters (Norway, March). A trip to Estonia: Aalto University’s Department of Environmental Art builds connections with the neighbouring country, its universities, artists, architects, urban planners and “even some guys squatting in an abandoned factory” (May). It’s a Saturday afternoon; Marco Casagrande – architect, anarchist, artist, akupunk and partisan of real reality / is back to his home country, Finland, and ready to share his ideas with MONITOR.

Architect & team build a temporary bamboo shelter on a patch of land encircled by high-rises and highways. It can serve as a social club for illegal workers from an adjacent construction site; a concert venue for underground bands and poets; a gathering space for the neighbourhood folks; a lounge for university workshops…You do not even need to remove the whole thing when it’s over: in a few months it will be overtaken by vegetation, then disintegrate on its own. “This architecture is like an insect that undergoes a process of transformation from egg to larva; then it cocoons and becomes a butterfly. When I design, it’s an egg; the construction process is the larva phase; when completed, it’s a cocoon. But I may not be able to answer what the butterfly is. Possibly, it’s the way people feel about this building.” Casagrande is not happy with the superficial attitude of today’s media, which banalizes architecture to a series of elegant photos carrying no trace of the process that has shaped it and made it real. “The construction process is like a gift. You work so hard designing and negotiating to get it built. We have an aspiration that brings together ten people from different countries for one month,” – Marco refers to the recently completed Sandworm in Wenduine. “We develop our own routine, and take care of each other, and prepare food together, and it becomes real. Then at some point architecture overpowers us as designers or builders; we are just working for what becomes our boss. It feels like being constantly on drugs; we sacrifice everything for it to happen. And when it’s ready, we don’t even realize it. It’s a shock.”

To read about architects as shamans go to page 052

To read about business hara-kiri as an eventual door opener go to page 55

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Working hard to ignite the process, balancing on the borderline between control and accident, the architect, in Marco’s view, functions as “the most sensitive antenna that receives what an object wants to say of to be.” Like a shaman whose senses reach beyond the visible and palpable reality, the architect negotiates with the collective consciousness and externalizes this invisible presence into built environments, thus making it accessible to everyone else. “But don’t forget that shamans are not heroic figures: to protect their extreme sensitivity, they can be disgusting and bizarre. I play many roles simultaneously. As an architect, sometimes I have to be very business-oriented, or very aware of how to talk to people, but inside myself I know I do it just to smuggle into the real thing.”

Casagrande’s Treasure Hill adventure in Taiwan is a beautiful case study in negotiating with a whole bunch of realities. A total foreigner, he managed to turn around a complicated issue with an illegal settlement in Taipei. “Who Cares, Wins” is a captivating slogan, but exactly, what do you do in order to win?

In 2000, at the Venice Architecture Biennial, architects Casagrande and Rintala presented an old barge with 22 oaks; the trees were planted on 60 minutes’ worth of human waste produced by the city. A flyer picked up from the Venetian ground led to an exchange with one of the Taiwanese curators, and, later on, to Marco’s participation in a conference in Taipei. He remembers being overwhelmed by the picture of pollution in “thi park of a city where you had to clean up any bench before sitting down.” How come these inherently savvy, intelligently anarchic people had completely destroyed the river that used to be the source of the city’s life?

“Back to Finland, I wrote a letter to Taipei authorities, with a list of reasons why the city was going to die. Two years later, they invited me to Taipei for three weeks to make some alternative proposals for the future of the city. They provided me with all kinds of data, but there was no correlation to the things that interested me: the people and how they used to city, and nothing about nature. It was like reading a manual for some machine; I couldn’t do anything with it! My first proposal was to organize a Hercules airplane parachuting me above Taipei: I wanted to spread vegetable seeds, and it was no metaphor. This was not possible, but then one professor showed me the Treasure Hill. By the time, the city had already bulldozed three layers of this terraced hillside settlement. When I first came to see the place, people were hiding inside their homes because they thought I worked for the government (which I actually did). I was not able to talk to anybody, but I could feel it smelled like slow death: people already knew that the city would take down their illegal settlement. I started studying how they lived. They were very poor; they stole water and a little bit of electricity from the city. Their wastewater was filtered through the terraces of the jungle, so that towards the bottom of the hill it was relatively clean again and could be used for farming. Organic waste was transformed into compost. At the same time, these people harvested the city: they collected garbage, recycled it and sold back. The Treasure Hill was a parasite, and yet it stood for such ideas as urban farming or water circulation, so I suggested legalizing it to see what could be learned from having this organic acupuncture needle inside the industrial city.”

The authorities preferred not to gamble their reputation: neither permission nor prohibition, just stepping aside to watch this strange man face the Taipei reality on his own. Would he sink or survive? Casagrande made a tour of local universities and recruited 200 students and a few professionals to work as section commanders. “We had no building materials, but the work force was already there, cleaning the place, and people started stepping out of their homes. They felt that the energy focus had shifted from destruction to construction. I sent some beautiful girl students to a huge construction site nearby, to ask for materials. Since then, every day at 7:30 in the morning, we had to wait by a certain road where the trucks would briefly stop to unload a bit of their cargo for us and move on. “Mrs Chen, then 87, the matriarch of the Treasure Hill community, adopted Marco like a grandmother, feeding her “grandson” with Chinese medicines to maintain his high energy level through the difficult local climate.

Farming at the Treasure Hill; a map of urban farms and community gardens in Taipei; a sketch by Marco Casagrande mapping out the functional organization of the Treasure Hill, as well as his team’s interventions to facilitate the functioning of the community.

And suddenly something has changed. Volunteer were coming to join Marco’s team. The same people that had been destroying the slum a week ago started showing up to recite poems in front of the locals and cameras. The major came from an accidental visit and spoke of the hope the Treasure Hill held for Taipei. The New York Times and Discovery Channel reported from the site. The city finally wanted to legalize the Treasure Hill: with all the support Casagrande and his fellow thinkers-and-doers were getting from every direction, the officials felt that their own faces were no longer at risk. The delicate issue of the DIY homes not meeting any norms of the building code has been resolved by legalizing them as public art commissioned to a foreign artist: “We signed a paper, and the Treasure Hill became an environmental artwork. Architecture could not have done that.” Bingo. Casagrande, in the epicentre of this productive anarchy, has done his work of a trickster, and it was only the beginning of his affair with Taipei…

For nomads and pagans as the founding force behind the post-industrial city - go to page 061

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This power of architecture is best explained through the idea of weakness – in the words of Sou Fujimoto, an order that incorporates disorder and uncertainty. WEAK! is the name of the loosely affiliated team that unites Casagrande and his Taiwanese colleagues Hsieh Ying-Chun and Roan Ching-Yueh – the Treasure Hill was their first joint effort – who share the same live-and-let-live-approach and believe in the intrinsic wisdom of reality. Which gets us very close to Urban Acupuncture and the 3^rd Generation City, the keynotes of Casagrande’s trans-architectural philosophy.

His debut was quite traditional; the mental image of an architect – work routines, looks, earnings, position in the society – quite complete. After half a year of designing what he calls normal commercial projects, Marco started to realize “that the architect was the first to compromise – for money, for politics, for media, for anything.” He felt that his designs were becoming “crippled mutants of the original ideas, so maybe it was better for them to die before even being born.” Horrified by the prospect of themselves degrading into something equally unwholesome, Casagrande and his then partner Sami Rintala  to do a project where they could be their own clients and see what would happen. With the small money earned from designing mutants, they built Land(e)scape (1999), three derelict barns perched atop 10-m-high stilts, as if marching on long thing legs. Escaping towards the cities? Trying to catch up with the farmers that had abandoned them? The performance during which the barns were set of fire on an October night gathered an audience of 6.000. “Our decisive and dramatic business hara-kiri marked the start of something we could not foresee: people asked us to continue this strange line of work…As for the Urban Acupuncture, it’s a king of magic item you find if you are able to enter the zone that is no longer bound to any particular discipline. It’s neither architecture nor environmental art nor natural river restoration nor anthropology.” Initiation disguised as hara-kiri, an a new freedom that comes with it.

Marco’s first attempt at attacking the city: an installation and performancee made with Sami Rintala, LAND(E)SCAPE (Savonlinna, 1999) commented on the desertion of  the Finnish countryside. Three abandoned barns “were driven to the point where they have had to break their primeval union with the soil. Desolate, they have risen on their shanks and are swaying towards the cities of the south.”

Urban Acupuncture is a methodology combining the theory of urban design with that of acupuncture. In UA, an area is regarded as a complex organism in which different “energy layers” overlap, influencing resident’s behaviour and conduct, but also the way an urban area develops. UA is a point-by-point manipulation of urban energy to create a sustainable town of city, which Casagrande has dubbed “3rd Generation Cities.”

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The UA theory celebrates the possibility of a lightweight touch with a total impact. UA is ruining the industrial surface of the built human environment. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. A weed will root into the smallest crack in the asphalt and eventually break the city. UA is the weed and acupuncture point is the crack.

The first generation city was the human settlement in straight connection with nature and dependent on nature. The second generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism claimed the citizens’ independence from nature – a mechanical environment could provide humans with everything they needed. Nature was seen as something un-necessary or hostile – it was walled away from the mechanical reality. The Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city. The 3G City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and allows itself to be part of nature.

UA has no fixed scale. “Acupunks” practice micro interventions like the Human Layer projects in various European cities, but they may also come to Puerto Rico and rethink an entire infrastructure, aiming to render the city liveable for pedestrians, and not the car traffic alone… Casagrande claims to have discovered UA – essentially, a method where humans are seen as part of nature – when he recognized the city as an enemy. “I am addicted to the city, but it’s a place where people get corrupted, where they blindfold themselves and live in constant hypnotization. You can fly your kite, or drive a scooter, but you don’t look inside yourself because this is called paranoia. It’s a climate that creates pollution and prostitution, so of course I was interested: it was like going to a whorehouse. But the city is also the ultimate place where people meet, and the collective conscious is cooking up here. I wanted to deal with this mass of organic collective energy, so the city became by target and UA – my too. It’s the strategy of a bird that shits over a city, and its shit contains a seed, and this fertilized seed goes down, and cracks the asphalt, and this organic thing starts growing. I needed to penetrate through the industrial surface in order to reach that what everyone sees and feels but the official system cannot deal with. At first I believed to be alone, but there were other people thinking along the same lines. The biggest step forward was when I found out that normal, real citizens were breaking the official city all the time.”

Casagrande describes the forces that act in any built environment as different layers of editing. Taipei developers act on a macro scale, while simultaneous micro editing happens as grandmothers cultivate their vegetables an temporarily available wastelands pending the start of construction works. “I can say more or less the same about Buryatia (Russia) where I have seen a plain occupied by five-storey high radio telescopes in dialogue with the universe, and the sheep eating grass under these huge cosmic mirrors…Or a log-house with an Internet Café sign on it, which I spotted driving through Siberia. Inside, there was a bunch of computers, ripped into pieces but with high speed internet…Supermachines in an almost collapsed house in the middle of nowhere.”

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The node where all these layers are explored and comprehended is a corner squat in an urban block awaiting major reconstruction. JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture (part of JUT Land Development Group) has transformed a cluster of vacant buildings into temporary homes for various cultural collectives. The Ruin Academy, an independent cross-over platform for architectural research founded by Casagrande in Taipei, is both a prototype and think tank for a 3^rd Generation City. “All the interior walls and windows are removed in order to grow bamboo and vegetables inside the house. Professors and students sleep and work in mahogany-made ad-hoc dormitories and have a public sauna on the 5^th floor. The entire building is pierced with 6-inch holes to let rain inside.” It is here that they develop city-scale “Treasure Hill” strategies, preparing the changes – to stop the pollution, to reunite the river and the city, etc. – that the authorities would be eager to initiate themselves were they not immobilized by the rigidity of the official structure.

To find out how all this could have been entrusted to an alien - go to page 061

Built on the dunes of the Wenduine coastline, the SANDWORM (Belgium, 2012) is an “organic structure/space/creature” that unites the realms of architecture and environmental art. The installation designed for the Beaufort 04 Triennial of Contemporary Art measures 45 x 10 x 10 m and is constructed entirely out of willow. In four weeks’ time, Casagrande and his team of young architects and local willow weaving experts have built a sample of weak architecture – “a human made structure that wishes to be part of nature through flexibility and organic presence.” The space is intended for “picnics, relaxation and post-industrial meditation.”

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“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 on 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,” says Casagrande in the Anarchist Gardener, a newspaper published by the Academy. “The Ruin Academy is and independent and free platform where the different student groups and other players can meet. The Academy (…) 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.”

No way to approach Marco with a conventional West-meets-East attitude. Both the compass and the humanity can offer more than these two dimensions. For instance, the Non-Urbanized Nordic Barbarian who “arrives to the city, breaks it, and in the end becomes a citizen.” But (not so) deep inside this citizen-barbarian retains his nomad mentality that makes him just the right guy to go acupuncture Taipei, which is a nomad camp, too. Its inhabitants are already beyond the “industrial” view of a city as something fixed and permanent. The nomadic quality of Asian cities makes it much easier for Casagrande to work in Taipei than in Western Europe.

Probably, another link between “Easterners” and “Northerners” is their understanding of relations between architecture, people and nature. They are aware that people cannot dominate nature but only coexist with it. Northern Europe, formerly a rural region characterized by late industrialization, has in a certain way skipped from pre-industrial directly into the post-industrial phase. Take the Finns, who, according to Marco, live in a quantum reality. “Whenever possible, the guys who design Nokia escape from the city to their cottage, where they stay in primitive, almost caveman-style conditions. In a wooden cottage, ideally built by yourself or at least by someone of your ancestors, you can stay naked, go to the sauna, fish, hunt, get drunk; your children are running around, and you feel connected to eternity. And this reality of hyper modernism intermingled with primitivism is true not only for Finland. There are places like Taipei where, instead of a summer cottage or a rowing boat, you have an anarchist grandmother who breaks the structure of the city and steals water from the official water supply. And, because Asian mentality respects the grandmother, everyone feels that what she does is good for them. They escape to her urban farm or collective garden to get back to the primitive, and it’s caveman style, too, even though skyscrapers stand a mere 10-20 m from there. This negotiation between the skyscraper and the anarchist grandmother can create new knowledge. UA is not about providing a solution; it’s more like this quantum existence within parallel realities.”

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Places, too, can toggle between different realities and live several lives during the day. A downtown street on office hours, after dark it turns into an illegal night market. Cars move away, replaced by guys with trolleys selling fried squid, strawberries in caramel, fake-label clothes and everything else. “These urban nomads seem to come from nowhere. They have their own hierarchies and structures, and I guess that the people who buy these strawberries are the very same office guys who live in a completely different reality in the daytime. And then the morning comes, and the street is cleaned up to give way to the official city. Nomad venders take good care of their surroundings, and everyone follows the rules. Police cars that patrol the street give enough time for the nomad alarm system to alert venders. They disappear some 30 m away so that the patrol can drive through the street with their digital camera on – and come back as soon as the policemen are gone. In a city, this pulsating mess acts as compost, an organic material you stir every now and then.”

The RUIN ACADEMY floor plan:

GROUND FLOOR - entrance, event space
1st FLOOR - student dormitory
2nd FLOOR - professor's deck
3rd FLOOR - lounge
4th FLOOR - sauna, actually

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The CHEN HOUSE (Taiwan, 2008) – a farmhouse that Marco Casagrande has constructed together with architect Frank Chen for Chen’s retired parents. The structure in tropical hardwood, with concrete used for the foundation, cost less than the basic interior decorations of an average Taipei apartment. An example of bioclimatic architecture meant to coexist with nature, the building is optimized for the complex of local conditions: recurring typhoons, floods and heat. When a typhoon strikes, winds blow through a short walkway between the main and side rooms, leaving the internal spaces intact. The same walkway, but also the intentional gaps all over the building walls, allow the cool air to ventilate the rooms, maintaining comfort during the hottest periods.

PHOTO: ADDA ZEI

Casagrande esteems favelas and slums as high-potential acupuncture points. “Industrialism and any other kind of human control introduces rigidity – and, like with anything else in nature, rigidity means death. Flexibility, mobility, softness, weakness have a sense of life to them, so the problem itself may contain a better solution than the attempt at total control,” says Marco who reveres Russian writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Their social science fiction deals exclusively with problems that have no satisfactory solution on the material plane. They pose the kind of question where every answer is strictly personal, one-off, and valid only if you find it deep inside yourself. Problem-solving is different from improvising. Casagrande opts for improvisation.