The hole in the wall
I was in Copenhagen last May 29-30 to get my annual dose of ideas and inspiration overload at the conference aptly called reboot. It’s an annual gathering — a community event to be more precise — that’s been going on for a decade; it has been a crossroads of digital technology and change where practical visionaries meet and reboot.
This year’s theme was ‘Free’: not just the price, but the freedom to flow, create and re-create spaces and interfaces around and within us.
One of the topics that struck me the most was the talk on ‘walking through walls’ by Molly Wright Steenson. It was a military strategy used by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on its attack on the city of Nablus in April 2002. Described as ‘inverse geometry’ as it re-organised the ‘urban syntax’, it used the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city in a non-traditional way; as well as the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, the soldiers moved horizontally through blasted walls, and vertically through blasted ceilings and floors. Because the rebels interpreted the spaces made by doors, windows and alleys in a traditional manner — places where you can walk through or enter, but also places where you can be trapped and confronted — Aviv Kochavi, then commander of the Paratrooper Brigade decided to perceive these spaces not in the same way as every architect did. He considered it forbidden territory and thus looked for other ways of moving through the spatial boundaries they were in.
(Read more...)Keywords: wallls,spaces,democratic,spaces,architecture,cities,urban,flow
