- Beyond the Camp - a review of the conference 'Archipelago of Exception' covering aspects of sovereignty and extraterritoriality from a spatial perspective, at the Center of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB)
- Courtjester - The institutionalised experiment or: the political aspects of 'Jewish Architecture' in Germany. There is no Eruv in Germany. The Eruv can be seen as the typical architectonic and urbanistic response to the diasporadic condition. In Germany, representing maybe the diasporaic condition “par excellence”, one would have expected the typology of the Eruv to be recurring. On the contrary though, in Germany, the physical presence of Jewry follows an ideology which is remarkably opposed to that of the eruv, and that can be described as anti-eruv, and maybe anti-diasporadic....
- Between City and Desert - The eruv creates a modern urban form and condition out of the opposition that was set in the Talmud between the Temple and the desert, and temporarily defines the territories relating to them.
- Against Negotiation - Today the architects cannot escape the role of the fool. We are the perpetual court jesters. As a comical but tragic figure, we try with wit and cunningness to satisfy the client, the city, the courts and regulations and simultaneously meet our own demands. We smile a fake and forced smile when the client echoes in a patronizing and demanding way the architect’s own anthem that “good architecture doesn’t have to be expensive”. And we shyly bow and nod our heads to the planning departments arrogant assumption and truism that the limitations through rules have never prevented good architecture....
- Towards a New Brutalism - Within the matrix of the concepts “identity” and “architecture” the term “vernacular” holds a central position. Describing a traditional architecture arising from a collective notion and shaped by external factors such as regional materials, climatic and geographical conditions and local rule-systems, it is an architecture not by the master builder, but by the “anonymous” craftsmen. The examples of stacked villages along the Amalfi coastline or Moroccan clay towns show this relationship between identity and architecture through the vernacular. Even though external factors forming this architecture can be of political or legal nature, the vernacular architecture is no political architecture, as no demagogical or ideological interest is involved, and can therefore be described as being apolitical....
- Legal / Illegal - What does this architecture want in Bayenthal. The building is an expression and reacts to the urban condition of that part of Cologne. Having always been the toy of the real-estate investors and speculators, the building introduces a foreign body into the urban fabric, which is very receptible for that. The building moves right up to the limits of the site, or rather, exceeds them, in its ratio of massing, in its measurements, in its complexity and its materiality. It overloads or strains the site, and is in a certain way ruthless to it. Maybe it is one of these architectural interventions which are not in the interest of the suburb. Maybe it has a self-sufficiency. But in all these examinations, it expresses the economic situation, the constellation of laws and rules to form, and the sociocultural condition of the suburb in a built form. As foreign as the building might seem in the context of the area, as more it acts upon the history, the state of the urban fabric, and attempts to formulate an enrichment out of this immediate context....
- Temporary Eruv Shelter - The design of a house for orthodox Jews in north London, formerly the ‘Jews Temporary Shelter’.The ‘Temporary Eruv Shelter’ is the design of a house for orthodox Jews in north London. It is a house where orthodox Jews will come every Friday evening to spend the Sabbath in. It is architecture in time....