Here are the slides from yesterday’s meeting (especially for our remote participants and other curious people). We will put up the slides soon from Bastiaan’s talk.
I was just thinking that it would be nice if we collect a bunch of readings/links that might be relevant/inspirational to our subject and discussions. Please feel free to add to this growing list.
Due to our start in April we missed an international interdisciplinary PhD seminar on a similar subject – “Public space”, held at Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft in March 2009. This seminar aimed to set up discussions towards the current transformation of public spaces. Regarding the themes and problems it touched we can learn a lot for our project on the transformation of communal space in Russian mass-housing environment. Papers online!
In thinking about what “the Collective” means, we will first examine our own neighbourhood situations. Please take either your current or home situation. What makes your neighbourhood a neighbourhood or not? What are the qualities it exhibits that make it a neighbourhood? Are these qualities good/bad/neutral? What are other qualities (tangible/intangible) that create neighbourhoods?
Some questions to think about:
- is a neighborhood necessary?
- how are neighborhoods different in urban and rural settings?
- what is the ideal neighborhood (please bring some pictures of ideal neighborhoods)?
Also, please read the Communist Manifesto in preparation for our discussion.
From Irony of Fate, 1975. This is a beloved Russian classic, based on the idea that everything everywhere is the same in Russia…from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Overture Cartoon
First minutes (FRENCH)
Please see here for the English version (watch 5:25 – 7:26 minute mark)
“A group of old friends have a tradition of going to a public bathing house on New Years eve. Occasionally too much vodka and beer makes two of them unconscious. The problem is that one of them (Sasha) has to go to Leningrad but another one (Zhenya) goes. Zhenya wakes up at Leningrad airport. Believing that he is still in Moscow he takes a taxi and goes home. The street name, building and even apartment number, the way an apartment complex looks the same and the key coincide completely – just typical Soviet-type ‘economy’ architecture. Imagine the surprise of Nadya when she enters her apartment and finds a man without trousers in her bed. What’s more – Nadya’s fiancé also finds him there…”
