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Abstract:

The archipelago of plugged in and secured capsular spaces increasingly produces a smooth sort of hyper-architecture: themed, spectacular and illusionist. Hyper-architecture is the product of the architect as the experience engineer within the experience economy. Architecture as social engineering (modernism) has been replaced by architecture as experience engineering or 'imagineering'. In our world, architecture tends to be either pure logistics or purely décor. Its counterpart, formed by the enclaves of containment, comes in the form of infra-architecture: slums, ghetto's and camps. Infra-architecture, architecture reduced to its most minimal function of logistics - architecture as survival kit -, corresponds to the 'infra-reality' of extreme poverty, chaos and war, as opposed to the hyper-architecture of glossy magazines, which corresponds to and expresses our hyper-reality. If most hotspots in the archipelago could be called 'heterotopia', the black holes in the ubiquitous periphery we can call 'camp'. Indeed, the archipelago of secured and connected capsules has its dark counterpart, the archipelago of camps: the archipelago of order, wealth and security as opposed to the Gulag archipelago of detention centres, prisons, labour camps, refugee camps, military camps, secret prisons and outright concentration camps such as Guantánamo. The archipelago of camps is administered by the archipelago of order. The camp is the bio-political device which makes it possible to operate within the treacherous terrain outside of the network of well-connected premium worlds. Besides the proliferation of heterotopias that provide for normality in the (atopic) network space - 'places to be' in the 'space of flow' - we see a proliferation of camp-like situations. Besides hyper- and infra-architecture there might be an excluded third: let's call it para-architecture. Para-architecture is architecture that plays in a parallel world. In an age dominated by the extremes of hyper-architecture and infra-architecture, para-architecture might be a way to make architecture again. We believe that para-architecture is a way to give architecture back its visionary power. Para-architecture in contrast is only the small door through which the Messiah could enter (but mostly doesn't). Even if this sounds like messianic double Dutch, it cannot be denied that within para-architecture (both the classical and the more recent forms) there is a deep rooted strategy of deactivation, non-participation. Well, interruption, suspension, revocation, discontinuity, standstill, reversal, are all the attributes of the messianic. In other words: para-architecture is a long shot. But in the face of infra-architecture and hyper-architecture, what do we have to loose?