Stalker 1979

Manifesto
"This is a hole. It always has been and still is. But now it is a hole into the future. We’re going to
dump so much through this lousy hole into your world that everything will change in it. Life will
be different. It’ll be fair. Everyone will have everything he needs. Some hole, huh? Knowledge
comes through this hole. And when we have the knowledge, we’ll make everyone rich, and we’ll
fly to the stars, and go anywhere we want. That’s the kind of hole we have here."
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

Today we are proclaiming the Era Of Changing Status - intriguing game of blurry interrelation of
digital and physical parameters.

Architecture is an arena for the constant processes through the history and civilizations,
proclamations and manifestations, flows and flaws,achievements and disenchantment.
Transformations never ends: piece by piece we replace old things by new ones, life style,
values, sense of time, pace, space, constant improvement and constant destroy.
Political regimes, economical situations, geographical maps and human values experience
deformations and shifts more often and with more serious consequences. Luxury high-
scrapers in a middle of desert, resorts on the artificial islands, space turism and record prices
at art auctions, growing slums and squatters movement, global economic crisis and financial
disappointments, natural disasters and scarcities, fear of terrorist attacks, ethnic conflicts and
globalization processes - another important issues to consider for architects.

Spiro Kostof once said that "Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human
activity.” To that should be added some thoughts of the Russian architectural critic and historian
Grigory Revzin. In his article Light Avatar , inspired by what he saw at the last Venice bienale
he talks about the crisis in Western architecture: “The decade 1990-2000 we spent waiting for
a new architecture that will forsake straight line language to replace it by the endless curve
lines. New theories have been invented and manifested. First of all, a human being is not a
body any more, but a DNA, a double curvy spiral... Digital space of is also curvy - it is flexible
and boundless. One can incurvate it as much as possible. People fall for it. They have started
practicing yoga to be adjustable to the new curvy spaces. This is it. The future is here. The
curves finished. We are experiencing troubles forming a new architectural paradigma. You will
get old in the future, then die. Isn’t it exciting story?”
So, about the new fresh curvy spaces that we created in order to express the new DNA-driven
humanism.
What if the computer will completely intrude in our lives in decades? In the Age of Information
not only the conventional way of work, life style will be repressed. Information will affect every
single aspect of our lives. The natural human feelings will be suppressed under the global
control of the digital net. The industry will be developed in a highest level, so that the pace of
changes will be extremely quick. Time and information will be the only essential values. They
will displace forever all natural feelings and emotions. People will forget many simple but yet
beautiful senses the previous generations used to experience and appreciate. Emotions will be
considered as something useless, irrelevant, and moreover, in some cases dangerous. The
information will be the only power. It will control everything. Mass media, culture, art, music will
have new expressions designed to establish new moral principles. Step by step, day by day, the
new rules and new fashion will conquer our minds.
The artificially enriched food instead of natural products. The test-tube babies to save women
time and “even” males and females. The robots instead of pets. The knowledge instead of
emotions. The computer games instead of real interaction. The plastic surgery. The vitamins.
The pills.

In 2001 First Prize, Premio Milano, of the Museo del Presente in Milan, Italy, went to Alexander
Brodsky. The architect and artist presented a piace with the name Coma. The installation
was made by clay and meant to fall gradually. The only that remains after destroying process
is a mass of gray material and unpleasant smell. The falling buildings provoke controversial
thoughts and strange feeling. The image of ruins, lethargy, and simply death...
It lies on an operating table, lighted and warmed up above the huge hospital lights, suffering in a
coma that waits for assistance - sickness to death that open the door to eternal life.
That death turns life into an artifact.
The ruins, bridges going under water, mummies, objects and people...
Romantic, elegiac and sublime...

American engineer, designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller in his profound book “Nine Chains
to the Moon“ expressed the idea that “traditional architecture had to give way to a “world wide
dwelling
services network” modeled on the telephone network”. The work on technological history was
written in 1938. 28 years later Japanese architect Kenzo Tange continue this notion saying
that “Creating an architecture and a city may be called a process of making the communication
network visible in a space”. Today The "blended urban reality" phenomenon provoked long
and controversial discussions between educators and practitioners on the challenges that
global community will deal with in MySPace and Facebook Era. There is an interesting post
Is Mobile Technology Bringing Us Together Or Tearing Us Apart? where the author Jeremy
Adam Smith reviews two different points about virtue and sin of the new technologies. Memoirist
Richard Rodriquez believes that "the cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from
body, from presence, from city." Brooklyn based Andrew Blum in British Wired magazine
states that there is "thrilling development of social networking that enhance urban places".
A new layer of cyberspace is added on a top to our physical substances - mobile phones,
facebook profiles, internet maps, google search system and online libraries - pretty packed and
invisible layer.
This idea eloquently expressed through an artist Gabriel Orozco work: he reimagined NY
phone book as a Japanese scroll. “When you get close you can see a kind of grid or a kind of
landscape. At some point, I call it Phone River because you unroll this thing and you see a
torrent of numbers. It represents everybody in the city, they just don’t have a name.” Is society a
list of cell phone numbers, email addresses, avatars?
There are some exciting things related to new digital opportunities. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt
in one of his interviews shared about all delightful moments the world will be experiencing owing
to the total Internet expansion: “In our lifetime we are going from not everyone being able to
communicate to almost everyone being able to, from not everyone having access to a library to
almost everyone having access to the world’s knowledge”
Here some major points about the “enormous achievement for humanity”:
- personal view experience – fundamental thing that Internet/Google can do
- search for new ideas – learn by the searching
- the Internet replaces the textbooks: use for teaching. New task style: search info as much as
possible. Mr Schmidt believes it develops creativity.
- community based – when the specialists can all get together online to talk – profound change
of the education system
What is this to be human – how does Internet/google helps us understand that?
- the technology has made us be closer together
- it is much less likely to be terribly misunderstood – you need to know where is Off-buton
- to be able to cope with the access to the huge amount of information
- children – fact of the overwhelming of repeated information is affecting the cognition, the
deeper thinking
To the question if technology makes us read less the answer was “Yes! But the search
technique, computer games develop abstract thinking “which is important as the world is getting
more complicated”
“Computer is taking care about everything” E. Schmidt

Where is the role of architects, what is their impact, how does their voice sound in the Age of
Information?
“The choreography of digitally enabled chance allows us to create architecture of blossoming
possibility, where events are fleeting, exceptional and particular.” Neil Spiller
Architecture as any other realm has been experiencing dramatic changes and transformations.
New technological achievements and discoveries make us to review architectural tools and
languages, sense of space and geography, methods and algorithms, materials and processes.
Our vocabulary have been enriched with the cyber's , eco's, digital's words...
"... in a level of the designer does much the same job as his system, but he operates at a higher
level in the organization hierarchy". Gordon Pask.
Application of conventional philosophy and methods to the voids that are created by digital
tools.
Reconsideration of the spacial programs and design processes. Intimate and dependent
cooperation with different sciences.Cyber geography, cosmos space, deep ocean, nature,
anatomy - new resources and material for architects.
In this challenging time architects have attempts to oversee the bigger picture: the scale of
the changes that have been coming inevitably with digital revolution. How deep the digital
devices permeate into our lives?How far will we go in creating software that will speed up the
working processes and lighten our life? How will it influence architectural space? Does anything
depends on architects? Are we still controlling the design?
“We cannot remember without architecture” states Ruskin in the sixth chapter of the Seven
Lamps of Architecture. Yet Victor Hugo in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris noticed that the
printing process ruined architecture which played a role of the people memo verbalized through
the stone before the print machine had been invented. In reality the sin of the printing press
was not in the fact that it took away the literary value of the architecture. The true guilt was that
the literature had determined the value of the architecture. Starting from the Renaissance Age
the most important modern difference between literacy and illiteracy had been extended to the
construction: a master mason who would perfectly knew his stone, workers, tools and traditions
of his craft had to give a way to an architect, who knew his Palladio, Vignola and Vitruvius.
From the art that expresses a spiritual admiration on the surface of the building, the architecture
became a craft of the perfect precision and accurate articulation. The architects of the 17th
century rebeled against this condition would create a baroque style However, the only place
they found placebo would be entertaining parks and palaces...
Lewis Mumford, a philosopher of technology and science, and important literary critic, during
his early life was inspired by Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes, known also for his innovative
thinking in the fields of urban planning and education. Mumford believed that any sphere/
specialization is pointless and infructuose if it obscures the wider links and connections between
different realms. He suggested that owing to a book architecture of the 18th century from Saint-
Petersburg to Philadelphia appeared as a masterpiece of one’s mind.
To that should be brought the words of a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar Marshal
McLuhan: “The medium is the message” (Understanding Media: The Extension of Man 1964)

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not
the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?” from the Sunless by Chris
Marker (1983)

Architecture like literature or landscape is shaping our civilization's memory as well as books
that consist of the printed words and hold people thoughts and plans. Books are containers of
our history. Yet they are principal vehicle humans have used to move ideas around time
and space. Libraries as an institution is a cultural celebration and history collector.

The French historian Roger Chartier, who writes on history of book, publishing and reading,
sees the effect of the presentation of the text on the reading practice and comprehension
process. The design of the page, placement of words, choice of format and fonts, marginal
notes, have the potential of influential impact on understanding of the content.
According to DF McKenzie "forms effect meanings". A library, as the space of knowledge,
through juxtaposition and correlations might be revelatory or limiting.
“If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from
place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how
much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and
make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the
other?” Fransic Bacon.
Elizabeth Einstein, an American historian, well-known for her work on the history of early
printing, in her book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, states that invention of the
printing press is the "Unacknowledged Revolution". Her work also influenced later thinking
about the subsequent development of digital media. The transition from manuscript to print
influenced thought about new transitions of print text to digital formats, including multimedia and
new ideas about the definition of text.
The information technologies nowdays increasingly represent physical reality. There are many
changes that predict the future of libraries as mobile and integral to the space we inhabit,
dispersed into infinite bytes. Nevertheless, we are still gregarious creatures who need to
belong to a lager community. Thus, our libraries, as well as other institutions/apparatuses,
remain its position and physical existence.
However, the shift towards nebulous ether of cyberspace is inevitable. Architect's mission is to
adapt successfully the space organization to the new physical and virtual reality.

There have been several attempts to re-evaluate the role of library.

Transformation Lab - Prototyping the Future

The project’s goal was to question whether the space is still a library or it is a different space.
Within new conditions and opportunities the existing libraries has began adaptation from the
traditionally organized and functioned institutions to the transformation labs as it happened
with a local library during the 17gh "Halmstad" conference in Aarhus 2007 'Elevations - The
Networking Library'.

Five new departments tested in the existing library: Literature lab, where fiction books were
placed next to the robotic interaction devices. News lab with the screens that show news from
all over the world. Music lab with zones of audio and visual science, inspiration cafe, and
production zone
where musical instruments and computer equipment were provided to the visitors. Exhibition
lab where kids and adults could explore information on the previous exhibitions done by other
users; and "the square" where spontaneous as well as planned meetings between visitors and
librarians
where hold, with quotation walls that would exhibit opinions anyone expressed.
This new library arrangement was done through the close cooperation of IT-specialists,
researchers and architects. Mobile and flexible furniture, augment space, and many other digital
technologies played an important part in re-inventing a physical library. With this approach the
users were forced to dismiss a book as an idea of the library. At the end they accepted it and
were co-creators of the new library space.

As the digital strategy director at the Columbus (Ohio) Metropolitan Library says "the library
building isn't a warehouse for books. It's a community gathering center".

Architect, educator and lecturer Paul Lukez in the book Library Builders reviews the library
problem through four major aspects:
- librarians as editors and publishers;
- hard and soft libraries issue;
- on-line library and books of tomorrow.
He refers to John Browning article at Wired magazine, who suggests that "librarians will not
disappear.
They will serve as editors and quasi-publishers. They will catalogue the enormous flow of
information generated every day. The new technologies will make the process more economical
for libraries to produce, distribute and share or sell new publications". Online libraries are
becoming the primary resource of information and, therefore, knowledge. Although Internet
service is expanding day by day, it still requires an initial investment fee that cannot be
affordable for many segments of our global society.
SONY, IBM and other companies start making low-cost computers with a primary purpose to
provide Internet access.

As information technologies continue the mutation process it might influence the very definition
of a book as Bill Gates states in The Road Ahead.
The traditional book will be replaced by affordable and sufficient source such as E-book.
The digital format of the book will change the linear and hierarchical way of reading the text.
Thus, the role of the reader, author and publisher will transform to the new structure of
relationship.
Multimedia form will let the readers to influence the narration of the book adding, developing,
changing information and, as a result, there will be unique and endless combination of work.
“To most people the word ”library” evokes a mental picture of a particular type of building. The
mental picture of the “libraryness”is in this sense a sign - a particular type of shape and volume
which signals a particular function. Society reads the built sign and receives meaning codes.
The difficulty for architects today is how to communicate the presence of the library when IT
has eroded the principal element upon which the library as a building type is based - namely
the book. By changing the nature of its elements, computing has undermined the fundamentals
upon which allow the mental picture of a library to be constructed - have vastly different
qualities depending upon the type of material in the library. An electronic library has neutral
space, the book-based library informed the space.”
Changing characteristics of library design:
1850-1950:
large, often circular, readling room
separate subject rooms,
seating normaly in centre
non-electronic sequrity
high ceilings
larg, tall windows
steel amd timber construction with
load-bearing walls
card index or ledger type cetalogue
1950-1990
deep plan
uniform, low suspended ceilings
horizontal bands of windows
concrete construction with columns
square reading room
open plan
electronic sequrity
seating at perimetre
air-conditioning
microfiche catalogue
1990-present
shallow plan
relatively high celings
perimetre windows and central atriums
open fluid plan
natural light and ventilation in most areas
mechanical ventilation in “hot spots’(photocopying)
perimetre cabling for IT
task lighting
book stacks used as thermal store
streets of areas of computers as anti-rooms to main body
computer catalogue

There are few successful and refreshing attempts of architects to re-evaluate and develop the
potential of tomorrow’s [cyber]-library.
Toyo Ito: Library As a Fluid Space:
- competition was help in 1995 for a library, art gallery and visual-audio collection
- sets of components: tubes, platforms and building skins
- the notions of mobility and fluidity into space and structure.
- to integrate real and virtual worlds that according to Ito “the primitive body of natural flow and
the virtual body of electronic flow”
Tschumi's Karlsruhe ZKM: Library as Message:
- Centre for Art and Media
- electronically animated skin between two parallel movement system, public spine "line of
exchange"
- several bridges that cross the spine as Tschumi explains, help to activate the space, along
with "giant
video screens, suspended passerelles stairs, a tensile glass elevator and two rooms floating in
mid-air"

OMA's National Library of France Proposal: Library As a VOid Carved From Information
Blocks:
- developed together with systems analysts and electronic inventors
- "magic tablets" that provide access to the books, media collections
- "a solid block of information" and five public spaces

Gordon Bunshaft
Beinecke library

Thesis: Gutenberg Space

“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness...”
T.S. Eliot [Burnt Norton]

The project is a result of meditation on the fate of printed books and a space that stores the
civilization’s memory.
Specialists admit the intellectual discourse has been experiencing shifts from printed pages
to networked screens. That explains the fact of disappearing of the publishing business. The
printed books will become a precious relic.
In this sense, the concept of a library as an institution and a cultural celebration, will be
reconsidered. It will be no longer a space where visitors have access to the books. It will be a
cemetery of the books, a shrine that houses the valuable disappearing artifacts. Llibrary as a
place where the memories of feelings will be stored carefully. The last collection of the books.
The precious heritage of irrational, naive, and strange dreamers, who wrote about beauty,
happiness, grief, misery, hope, delusion, solitude, delight, joy, faith… The last library of printed
books.

Memory:
in 1998 a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and traveler Chris Marker created a multi-layered,
multimedia memoir. The reader investigates "zones" of travel, war, cinema, and poetry,
navigating through photographs, film clips, music, and text, as if physically exploring Marker’s
memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an
exploration of the state of memory in our digital era. With it, Marker has both invented a literary
form and perfected it. This is how he describe his work: “In our moments of megalomaniacal
daydreaming, we tend to view our memory as a kind of History Book: we have won and lost
battles, found and lost whole empires. At the very least we are characters from a classic
novel. A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach would be to consider the fragments
of memory in terms of geography. In every life, we would find continents, islands, deserts,
swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. From this memory we can draw the
map, extract images with more ease (and truth) than do stories and legends”.

“History is essentially longitudinal, memory essentially vertical. History essentially consists of

passing along the event. Being inside the event, memory essentially and above all consists of
not leaving it, staying in it and going back through it from within.”
– Gilles Deleuze

Infinity:
Yayoi Kusama, Japanese sculptor, painter, writer, installation artist and performance artist, in
1965 created an outstanding installation Infinity Mirror Room–Phalli’s Field. Kusama used her
signature polka dots to decorate the stuffed phalli, which were placed in a mirrored room to
give the illusion of an endless surreal field of objects, reflecting a preoccupation with mortality,
as well as with enlightenment, solitude, nothingness, and the mysteries of the physical and
metaphysical universe. And, among all these spirited emanations, the sublime Infinity Net
paintings.

“Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book,
perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am
preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead,
there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless
air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which
is infinite. I say that the Library is unending.” Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel.
Phylosophical hypothesises, metaphores, symbols of the faith, and wisdom of the generations
that come from ancient times, progresses in a cyberspace of the Library. According to Borges,
the history of culture should be perseived and considered as tangibly and truly as the world
with objects and people. The Universe, or the Palace and the Garden, is a metaphor of the
Book, or the Library and the Word). “ Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies
our conception of the past, as it will modify the future”. Redecorating again and again during
numerous journeys to the different “possible worlds” of individual and collective perseptions, a
fate of any story, text or phylosophical work can create unpredictable and unobvious context
and assotiations. Their repetition is impossible because a reader is always locked inside of
a “garden of forking paths” and labyrinth of constantly multiplying spaces and times.

Labyrinth
“… that the history is sealed within the movement of language.” Eduardo Cadava [on Benjamin
in Words Of Light]

Phenomenology - when it comes to the books shaping the surface

classify - Geroges Perec

gutenberg space - the title reflects

Of Mimesis, Auerbach wrote that his "purpose is always to write history."

Nestedness

book shelves - mosaic - Mimesis

giedion sigfried caves -

opt art

a reader/ visitor/pilgrim is a third component of the program.

Program
Building
Boxes
Ramp
Entrance

Site

Aral sea - disappearing culture at the disappearing sea

Aral sea - land of the oral culture

etc...