| property | value |
|---|---|
| created | $=dv.current().file.ctime |
| modified | =this.modified |
With the coining of the term Terrain Vague, Ignasi de Sola-Morales is interested in the form of absence in the contemporary metropolis. this interest focuses on abandoned areas, on obsolete and unproductive spaces and buildings, often undefined and without specific limits, places to which applies the term “terrain vague.” Regarding the generalized tendency to “reincorporate” these places into the productive logic of the city by transforming them into reconstructed spaces. SdM insists on the value of their state of ruin and lack of productivity. Only in this way can these strange urban spaces manifest themselves as spaces of freedom that are an alternative to the lucrative reality prevailing in the late capitalists city. They represent an anonymous reality.
(The way the city is hikikomori? - a “withdrawal” from the productive space. But also the sense is that it isn’t just that, it can be aesthetically pleasing and productive, counter in a way that the isolated hikikomori is not.)
Describing places and forgotten spaces which are left behind as a result of post-industrial urbanization. Interestingly, the term embodies two viewpoints: the first looks at these spaces negatively as representing disorder and disintegration; the second highlights their positive potential as free spaces in an urban environment that is becoming increasingly specialized.
The representation of the metropolis in various media has had its disposal one particularly privileged instrument since its beginnings: photography. Landscape photography, aerial photographs and photographs of buildings and of the people in the big cities constitutes a principle vehicle for information that makes us aware of the built and human reality that is the modern metropolis.
In seeking images of Kowloon Walled City one of the few available videos I was able to find, of the city in motion, was from a film that happened to be filmed there. It exists as the surviving document, now that the city is gone.
It is impossible to capture in a single English word or phrase the meaning of terrain vague. The French term terrain connotes a more urban quality than the English land; thus terrain is an extension of the precisely limited ground fit for construction, for the city. In English terrain has a more agricultural or geographical meaning. The French refers greater and perhaps less precisely defined territories, connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which are external.
Vague has Latin and Germanic Origins. The German Wage refers to a sea swell significantly alluding to movement, oscillation, instability and fluctuation. Two latin roots come together in the French vague. Vague descends from vacuus, giving us vacant and vacuum in English, which is to say “empty, unoccupied” but also “free, available and unengaged.”
(I’ve started with trying to understand shadows, which lead me to holes, and now it seems there’s this return to a sense of vagueness and a lack of definition. Yugen with the dim beauty and enjoyment of imaginative insertion into a space.)
The Romantic imagination, which still survives in our contemporary sensibility, feeds on memories and expectations. Strangers in our own land, strangers in our city, we inhabitants of the metropolis feel the spaces not dominated by architecture as reflections of our own insecurity, of our vague wanderings through limitless spaces that, in our position external to the urban system, to power, to activity, constitute both a physical expression of our fear and insecurity and our expectation of the other, the alternative, the utopian, the future.
Odo Marquand on the Present “the epoch of strangeness in front of the world.”
Changes in reality, in science, in behavior, and in the experience inevitably produce a permanent strangeness. The exposure of the subject and the loss of consistent principles correspond ethically and aesthetically.
Alexanderplatz in 1945, after its sustained bombing by the Allied air forces. It reveals the disfigured city, the dislocated space, the void, imprecision and difference. An urban space becomes a terrain vague through violence of war. The contradiction of war bring to the surface the strange, indescribable and the uninhabitable.