Reading with Nicole Kleine and Axel Tangerding
Based on critical texts by Rem Koolhaas, Paul Scheerbart, Bruno Taut, Peter Sloterdijk, Italo Calvino, among others, about architecture, urban life, utopias and the dream of Arcadia.
"Utopia is the dirty secret of architecture. At its core, all architecture claims to improve the world. But like everyone who has ever come into contact with Utopia, architects have been severely punished for it. In the face of Utopia, the architect is in an impossible situation: without reference to it, his work is worthless. But with this reference, he becomes an accomplice to serious crimes."
Rem Kohlhaas
"Nowhere can you look past things so blindly as in your own home. You buy things that you think are beautiful... you put them in your home and that is the best method of making these things completely invisible. You don't see them for the next twenty years. From an anthropological perspective, you could even ask whether it shouldn't actually be like that, namely that the home is actually a place in which we spatialize our unconscious. The unconscious is actually most personal there, even if it is full of all kinds of traumas and memories."
Peter Sloterdijk
The text of the reading can be downloaded here.