Voluntary Common Land
Kibbutzim were created before the first Jewish settlement in the 1950s by Zionists that were mainly Russian-Jewish emigrants. The first funded community was called ‘Degrania’ in Israel, 1909. Kibbutzim became independent-social, economic and cultural units, somewhat like cooperative-socialist islands in capitalist seas.
A community can not be free if does not produce resources to be itself.
On small plots, farmers grow vegetables and fruits for their household and for a common market. Regional cooperation in agriculture saves expenses by common use of farming equipment, warehouses, other facilities, schools, clinics, communal halls, shops etc., located centrally. The aim is to reduce the running costs of diversified farming and increase production of industrial crops such as cotton, sugar beet and ground nuts, which could be processed at the central point; and as a consequence, a reduction in transportation costs results.
Nahalal moshav, Israel. Established by the Women’s International Zionist Organization as a Girls’ Agricultural Training Farm in 1929. The inner-most circle contains the communal buildings and resources, which are surrounded by individually owned farms. Contrary to the collective kibbutzim, farms in a moshav tended to be individually owned but of fixed and equal size. Sourced from Sourced from J. Robertson McIlwain [dot] com.
Kibbutzim originated the first building blocks of modern day Israel. Most, if not all of Israel’s main industries grew out of the Kibbutz environment. Most of the nation’s income is created by agriculture whist still using classic traditions established in productive agriculture (although there is present the use of high-technology to the achieve the level of ‘laboratories for research’; aiming to experiment with growth methods while increasing the production of crops without jeopardising quality). They are desirable places to test experimental agricultural techniques and many of them are adopt environmental approaches (see Green Kibbutz movement). The Algatech and the Geshem projects are large-scale projects designed for on-site production whilst managing natural resources.
Alga Technologies (Algatech), Kibbutz Ketura, mass-produces algae for cosmetics, nutritional supplements and for energy conversion and production. Sourced from Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute.
Kibbutzim also exist in the urban context: they are a means to resolve conflicts and social problems. There are more 75 Kibbutzim nationwide in which over 129,300 Israelis reside and collaborate. The Zionists defined the organization of Kibbutzim not only as a necessity but also the new Jews in Palestine (the founders of the Kibbutz movement), felt that they couldn’t rely on others only themselves - belonging to a Kibbutz was a form of societal identity. 
Kibbutzim are seen as the most effective way of taking control over land in Palestine - a tool for any Zionist. Sourced from Google.
Kibbutzim are miniature communal societies wherein the principle that all wealth is common property presides. The inhabitants usually are allowed some notion of private property, however all inhabitants are provided for, with all necessities such as: food, housing, clothes and social and medical services. The inhabitants cook and dine together - normally adults and children do not form standard families, even if the adults have private quarters. The raising of children, is also a common task of the Kibbutzim.
The Ideal Settlement: the Utopian settlement behavior. Kibbutzim, for the past 80 years, have been concurrently reflecting the changes in ideology that take place in society and consequently reconfiguring their layout and evolving the aesthetics. Sourced from Google.
Notes on Arabic Adoption
Dubai is a double-edged sword. At once there is an encounter with tarnished terrain – a lucid, lagoon of baroness propagated into hard-scaped, impenetrable reality of unprecedented scales. The other, a more global and serious reality, deals with the question of the fixed, temporary and the permanency of architecture now. Dubai garners the wealth to exploit construction at a never-before-seen rate – bypassing values like craftsmanship (the lack of which is a ubiquitous problem), tactility, durability and poignantly, adoption.
The fate of architecture is to become ‘pillar-less’ cages of fragility, non-dependency and un-attachment, suspect to Warhol’s fame but rapidly forced into the shadows of its newer, more ‘world’s biggest’ successor on some other terrain vague in another part of the city with a function that nobody really cares about. The landscape and its migrant labourers that set stone upon it have to admirably and muted, like the deterioration of the value of architecture, handle the changes to their existence, to the point that what really is at stake is survival.
Dubai “Another World”. Sourced from Photobucket.
The constructed conclusion, is a non-linear array of impersonalities, that change their function over time, not by choreography, but through definition by the State, relocation of resources, flip-sides to economic prosperity and the pressures of the success of capitalistic endeavours. What remains is the mechanical, rhythmic motion of the worker, and the memory of the architect aiming to recreate another masterpiece.
Dubai workers in the shadow of a UAE national. Sourced from Asia News.
Until the 1950s and the discovery of oil, Dubai was predominantly empty, home to Bedouins and open sand plains. The construction methods were textbook examples of Frampton’s “critical regionalism”; materials hard-packed from the earth, courtyards so as to keep the heat out, intelligent, breathable buildings and clusters allowing sheltered lane ways. It was a workers town, this was the silent vernacular that existed, world’s away from Simmel’s Metropolis. The acceptance of concrete in the 70s as the preferred material terminated any possibility of Dubai having an honest identity and pastiche development thereafter proceeded.
It is the validity of surface and the strength of program/locale that serves as indicators of the sustainability of an architecture’s adornment. The validity of surface is naturally achieved given the age of building, its defiance against ecological circumstance and wrong treatment in the militaristic sense. Dubai is not an old city (The Al Fahidi Fort, built in 1787 is believed to be the oldest building in Dubai) and does not possess architecture of artefactual significance compared to that of nearby Mashriq.
The Al Fahidi Fort, Dubai, 1787. Sourced from Trekway.
The strength of program dictates that, for example, a building of religious importance is more likely to be widely adorned than that of a hotel or banking institution. The reproduction of the ‘same-old’, a visible by-product of the industrial revolution and pre-fabricated age, may fight against fiscal pressures but greatly reduce the chances of public adoration. Success stories of modern public adoration in architecture can be found in the youthfulness of the Pompidou and the early works of Lacaton and Vassal – they speak wholeheartedly, honestly and beg for adoption. The pity is the infrastructure of Dubai relies on the tourist turnover. Perhaps the issue is not of the pastiche, copy-paste language of Dubai, but simply that the city is a transient one.
Lacaton, Anne, Vassal, Jean-Philippe, 1984, Straw matting hut, Niamey. Sourced from Lacaton and Vassal.
Continue reading in the Texts section (If not, soon).
Semiotic Mythologies and the Green Agenda
The frontier of the post-icon era, brought about by the downward-spiralling economy/ecology, has formed a new breed of architect of less moral stature than the capitalist’s ‘building designer’. Previously embedded as part of the marketing strategy of a brand, the architect today is tailored for a token green agenda. Governed by state dictation, most buildings today require efficiency attributes, some without a trace of carbon-emission; a nominal paradigm shifts exists in this newly created responsibility in which there appears to be two serious issues with the deployment of the ‘green icon’.
Semiotics:
The contemporary icon is conceived by a marriage of a successfully marketed entity and the established architect. The aim of the icon is to manifest a physical representation of the identity of the brand - the most potent example being Bank headquarters. Early 19th Century mercantile architecture resembled important civic institutional buildings; fortresses, allowing little light to permeate. Today they represent more than they are; transparent, readable, attainable, reflective, open and with a green agenda, certainly not the model modern banking stipulates. The misdemeanour of specifying sustainability as corporate identity wreaks of tokenism and fallibility. What best represents a banking institution today? A trough.
The image of banking institutions today. Sourced from Poor William.
The advent of green architectural marketing are second-order signs where buildings have fallen victim to Barthes’ Red Wine analogy. The bourgeois’ full, dark bottle is to signify healthy, robust, relaxing wine. The reality is that this image contains subtle embedded semiotic manipulations with the desire to sell the product and the simple desire to maintain the status quo (Barthes, Mythologies, p. 60). Sustainability is the bottle in this case.
Roland Barthes. Sourced from Islakotero.
Palace, 2009. Banking institutions then and now. Left: Former brank of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh (1847). Right: Cook+Fox Architects. Bank of America Tower, New York (2009).
Mis-education:
Architects are caught in the Green agenda, speculating merely as no-man’s-land designers, in the same way Government tries to regulate emerging technologies or the internet, albeit on a nominalistic scale. The thinking stops at the formulation of infrastructure embedded in the building and green baton is passed to environmental engineer/consultant/designer/specialist. This is merely a problem of specialisation, the age-old ‘jack-of-all-trades’ debate, which is why architects should choose their friends wisely. The issue is in the presentation of the design being flawed, superficial and let alone misconceived, however fulfilling the market appeal of the brand.
The running joke is that apparently today, icons are sensitive too.
The noble orientation of our established architects today is that of an architectural iconoclast.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] (played 31 times)
Interview by Valle Medina and Ben Reynolds with Junya Ishigami
Recorded at the Japan Institute of Architects, Tokyo on 23rd of October 2008 (07:46 mins)
Junya Ishigami. Sourced from In Interest.
Ishigami, Junya. Japanese Pavillion, Venice, 2008. Sourced from flickr.
Ted Nelson: Social Architecure’s Future
On Sun, Apr XX, 20XX at 2:00 PM, XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX@hotmail.com wrote:
Hi Ted,
I am just laying the groundwork for my XXXXX project at XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX. And I came across your work. Like you I am not a tekkie. Nor am I attached to the physical form of architecture. Cities, like cyberspace are full of rubbish and the constructed environment has enough physical construction for me not to produce a building for the project.
I am more interested in the future: the fact that architecture can play a role in the connectivity ofsocialstructures or ideas like transclusion in the built context. One way is that a piece of architecture is just the skeleton, with floor plates - allowing as much freedom as possible (see Le Corbusier’s plan libre).
The other way to see it is that we don’t need building anymore…we are mobile and perhaps it’s just nature, perhaps gridded and divided - with rules of cultivation (see REX). Or perhaps I could design a giant jail the size of Mt. Everestin each major city andincarcerate the city’s inhabitants for crimes to the earth. The building could just use the surrounding, useless fabric.
I’m not a morbid person - perhaps my question to you is that, because you foresaw many of the components that the web has today, what do you now see it becoming, technologically and probably more poignantly, socially and if you have some hints, architecturally?
I hope you have time.
XXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXXX
From: Ted Nelson
Sent: Thursday, April XX, 20XX 9:22 PM
To: XXX XXXXXXXX
Cc: Ted Nelson
Subject: :gbg:arx:artx: Architecture, Art, Web 2.0 (wuz Re: Social Architecure’s Future)
Thanks for your kind words.
I am afraid I don’t have time to answer all the essay questionspeople send me.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what junk or fads will come nexton the Net. ‘Web 2.0’ nonsensically conflates a bunch ofvaguely related stuff under a misleading title.
Architecture? I loved it as a kid but I’m a cynic now.Like “Art,” look at who profits and why. The art establishment(critics, galleries…) mediates between public, collectorsand would-be artists. If those emperors have no clothes,it would all fall down.
Architecture could be cheapo modules. Who prevents?The contractors (working through the Building Codes). Soleri told me that the building codes had killed him.And the big firms that want to build screwy-lookingconcert halls. (Note: I’m hoping to build a good oldQuonset hut on our family farm. Beautiful space inside.)
Quonset hut. Sourced from Texnrails.
(And how come nobody’s selling the Usonian houseas a prefab? Surely the rights have expired by now.THERE’S a money-making suggestion for you.)Wright.jpg)
Palace, 2008, Frank Lloyd (I’m) Right..
Enough! No time.
TN
—
- FIRST ROCK MUSICAL RECALLED— See
http://hyperland.com/A&E.AnnivBlurb-D10.txt
- NEW XANADU SOFTWARE— See xanarama.net
- MY SPECIAL LECTURE on 14 non-computer topics—
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/podcasts/seminars.php
Theodor Holm Nelson
Founder, Project Xanadu
Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
Visiting Professor, University of Southampton
The Garden in the Machine
Topographical contours. The body belongs to the earth as the building belongs to the earth..
Reinsertion of local landscapes into the city:
Looking to different neighbouhoods in any city, mean activities could be mapped and linked to open plazas, skeleton infrastructures and aerial gardens (forests). The idea is to generate new identities inside the city, between the citizens, the traditional natural species and cultivations, and the education that the local knowlegde and the global media can bring. In each neigbourhood, could be implemented new structures with the funtion of becoming a body (building-garden) inside of a body (city-machine).
From left clockwise: 1.The new catalysts are bodies with tubes. 2. With skin wrinkles. 3. They belong to the earth, incrementing the earth surface.
The idea of the multifuntional garden: Ecological Niches (Gills Clement)
Utopia is linked with ecology: If there is one only specie of any plant in your garden, the opportunnity of growing a bean is impossible. Diversity is linked not only in the diversity of species, but too in their behaviours. Mixture. A tree is not an individual, it is a linked community. One tree alone is a gardens that doesn’t need maintenance, without watering. In abandoned places is where diversity is, not in the mono-cultivations. These are the genetic pools where life is generated. “The horse is generating a mint garden, because he doesnt like the mint” (Gilles Clement: From the Garden in Motion to the Third Landscape, AAIR, February 20, 2007). Diversity is surprise.
We should liberate as much space as we consume through the material construction of the project, making compatible the program with the preservation and multiplication of the landscape (social and/or natural landscapes). We should abandon the romantic relationship between looking, nature and space, and realise that the landscape is not what is in front of us, but what is around us.
Nature Restauration: Permaculture (Bill Mollison)
To let the building be a part of the machine, we inject new natural elements that fertilise the soil of some plots in the city, generating valleys. We re-source the energy from above: electricity from the roof and facades (solar energy), and water from rain that is collected through the valley. Never again do we have to re-source our elements from under the cities, but rather from the sky.
Palace, 2008. Funnel collectiors and pot cultivations (non-digging): When the plants have grown to their point-of-sale size, they can be removed in their pots and sold immediately. The larger pots remain in the field to be reused. This system allows growers to offset labour costs associated with planting and re-planting in the field with a significant initial investment..
Palace, 2008. Fertilising valleys: Filtrations of water excess, pots on ground, hanging pots and funnels. Pilars from the sky to the ground.
Another solution for cultivating:
“A growroom: A growroom, or grow room, is a room of any size where plants are grown under controlled conditions. The reasons for utilizing a growroom are countless. Some seek to avoid the criminal repercussions of growing illicit cultivars, others simply have no alternative to indoor growing. They can be grown with the use of artificial light, sunlight, or a combination of the two. A grow room will often become excessively hot (relative to temperature range ideals for plant growth), due to the heat generated by the high power lamps; the use of supplemental ventilation fan is often necessitated.” (Sourced from Wikipedia).
Hydroponics: Hydroponics or agricultural hydroponics is a method used to cultivate plants using mineral solutions instead of agricultural land. Plants can grow with only the mineral solution or in a neutral medium such as sand, gravel or tissues.
