... is a new side-project of mine. It basically consists in the articulation between two sources of insights about the urban environment:

Some pictures I've taken over the years in various territories. The photograph are converted into Black and White using a threshold filter to highlight certain characteristics of the environment: shapes, forms, grids, silhouette, outlines or directions. Given my interest to show stereotypical shapes, the focus of the pictures is certainly connected to my interests, obsessions and gut feeling when undertaking urban safaris. As much as I can, I'll indicated where the pictures have been taken (which is not that difficult if you have an eye for peculiar scenes and buildings).
Quotes from books written in the second part of the 20th Century about cybernetics, architecture, urbanism and design theories. I've bought these books recently at the flea market and in an architecture/design book shop and they seem to come all from the collection of a recently deceased professor from the University of Geneva. The quote I've chosen echoes with my interests and perception about what "matters" in these disciplines. It's definitely a subjective choice and I enjoy the accumulation of such excerpts (as attested by the presence of commented quotes on this blog).

My aim was to select quotes and pictures so that a peculiar kind of relationship emerges out of the juxtaposition. To some extent, this articulation between the two elements could be seen as some vague correlation: sometime there is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship (the quote exemplifies a certain trend that has influenced the architecture of the building represented on the picture), sometimes there isn't. The idea is to show that some notions, paradigms and system thinking either shaped urbanism or provided a certain framework/cultural Zeitgeist which led to the shapes and representations depicted on the B&W pics.

This is a work-in-progress thing. I guess some assemblage are better than others of course. Let's see how things unfold, I'll try to keep this going and select the best juxtapositions in a booklet once I have a certain quantity of material. My perception of this is simply that some patterns and categories will emerge at some point and perhaps a narrative could be constructed at some point.

As usual here, comments are welcome.