(Science) Fiction,Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism,Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner

François Roche of R&Sie(n) ruminates on the contradictory nature of the present: a time that is ‘vibrating’ while ultimately ‘lacking momentum’. Reclaiming ‘the scenarios and substances that condition architecture’, he rejects the large-scale flights of fancy of international signature architects and argues for the reactivation of ‘a throbbing, complex and unfinished “localism”’. In so doing, he advocates a machinism that enables fictionalisation and speculation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indeterminacy & Contingency: The Seroussi Pavilion and Bloom by Alisa Andrasek

The lightly programmed spaces of flexible, temporary structures enable open-ended interactions. Here, architect and curator Alisa Andrasek , who is Reader in Architecture and Computation at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), describes how she has embraced adaptability and social engagement by adopting a strategy of ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘contingency’ in her two installations: the Seroussi Pavilion (2007) and Bloom (2012).     

It's in Your Nature: I'm Lost in Paris

R&Sie(n)'s installation I'm Lost in Paris (2008), a disturbing take on the ecological house, epitomises the preoccupation of the French architect François Roche with the contradictions of modern nature. Javier Arbona tracks how Roche's notion of nature as ‘a partly human artifice’ which is both alien and personalised play out in his various projects, capitulating between attempts at overcoming alienation and heightening it. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.