>> Une présentation du jury du concours House Redux face aux projets de la 'future maison blanche'. Malgré les ambitions tant attendues du concours, les propos du jury font preuve de peu d’enthousiasme. On y fait référence aux projets des années 60, aux images ré éditées depuis « plusieurs décennies », où ici l’imaginaire et l’utopie ne porteraient aucune volonté politique. Voit-on alors les limites du discours politique que doit susciter un rendu de projet architectural? Est-ce vraiment par le biais d’un concours que l’on pourrait exprimer synthétiquement l’acte politique de l’architecture ?
"During a year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, designer Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), surveyed the darkening realm of real estate markets: foreclosures, pro-formas, chains of title, block busting, exploding ARMs, and the obscure history of the mortgage, Old French for death vow.
In the resulting installation, the head of Frederick Babcock, pioneer appraiser, gazes over a scattered field of diminished Detroit houses, still showing damage from 1960s real estate scandals. Looming behind Babcock, the flicker of a neon sign – BUY LOW SELL HIGH – reveals the spikes and troughs of a wall cut by the 20th century’s prime rate, the sharp line between lenders and borrowers. Projected videos haunt the gallery with the apparitions of financial engineers, federal regulators, and anti-foreclosure activists.
Today, what has become known as the Subprime Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic crisis. Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments." >> full text [source]
>> The exhibition ' Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosure, Risk Structures: Architecture of Finance from the the Great Depression to the Subprime Meltdown' is an exhibition curated by Damon Rich and the Center for Urban Pedagogy commissioned by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the MIT.The MIT Lawrence project participated actively in the show. [see video below]
