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Since the last century, Malka Architecture has devoted itself to neglected urban spaces and their reappropriation through alternative implantations. Stéphane Malka has recently completed an experimental work entitled Le Petit Paris which proposes dozens of projects around Paris. In this open call to publishers, Malka Architecture offers an exclusive sneak preview of this chronicle of intervention-grand aspirations clad in micro-architecture ; design unleashed in hand-to-hand combat with the French capital. |
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“Everything that is outside is ours.”
Stephane Malka, Neossmann (proposal), 2012. Credit : Tristan Spella / Laurent Clement
A Vital Retaliation: Malka’s Petit Paris
By Stephane Malka
Since the last century, Malka Architecture has devoted itself to neglected urban spaces and their reappropriation through alternative implantations. Stéphane Malka has recently completed an experimental work entitled Le Petit Paris which proposes dozens of projects around Paris. In this open call to publishers, Malka Architecture offers an exclusive sneak preview of this chronicle of intervention-grand aspirations clad in micro-architecture ; design unleashed in hand-to-hand combat with the French capital.
In the tradition of visionary architects such as Piranesi and his idealistic visions of 18th century Rome, or of the futuristic Sant’elia and his theoretical projects, “Le Petit Paris” is a collection of projects set around the city of Paris.
Representative of a new architectural reading appropriate to the 21st century, these projects do not reflect an ideal city in the tradition of theoretical projects since the renaissance, but instead reflect a society in crisis, with its spaces and people left behind. The place of man, his sentiments, his expectations, his aspirations, and his limits are at the heart of these buildings.
The current economical context leaves no room for doubt about the malaise and discontent of the people. Indeed, the spring of 2011 was struck by civil disobedience, driven by a desire for political and social renewal that has developed in ricochets around the world. Public spaces have been taken over and squatted by an influx without precedent; a genuine popular uprising. We are witnessing a conscious, massive, and symbolic appropriation of public spaces in which architects have the duty to provide support. The emergence and progression of these movements require a fast and modular construction methodology that is able to respond to rapid development.
By opening the field of investigation, the redefinition of public space as the negative of private space broadens the universe of the possible in terms of an urban rereading.
Everything that is outside is ours.
Extend the existing without destroying it; reclaim abandoned areas of the city to transform them, such are the guidelines of this new architecture.
As a graffiti activist since 1987 I have revealed my “spots”—the diligently selected sites where my architecture resides—on roofs, under bridges, on blind walls or in interstitial empty lots. These non-places are the last bastions of contemporary romanticism, banners of the working class soul of Paris, raw, brutal, and persistent.
Le Petit Paris is organized into four strategic territorial approaches:
INSIDE
IN FRONT
ON TOP
UNDER
This is a journal of interventions, micro-architectures of survival in combat.
“Penser la ville, panser l’Architecture:” literally “Thinking the City, Healing Architecture”
The economic crisis has disrupted the foundations of the financial system, leaving the building sector just as dry. The process of architectural production is no longer adapted to real needs; it’s costly in time, therefore in money, and increases the gap between architecture and the needs of citizens.
Moreover, it is unacceptable to speak of “environmentally friendly” architecture when the act of building in itself generates environmental degradation. The construction industry results in enormous pollutions of water, air, and land. This problem, however, is not directly linked to architecture: with the explosions in world overpopulation, capitalism generates artificial needs, enabling the development of markets.
Cities, recipients of different exoduses and receptacles of the accumulation of needs, have to deal with not only rural migration, but also absorbing the influxes related to economic, ecologic, and environment issues, as well as those related to relocation. Cities are heading towards a poverty of means, standardization, and uniformity.
In light of these social, economic, and ecologic urgencies, it is necessary to reconsider the city with the logic of transformation: through superposition, addition, and the extension of our built heritage more than through that of a univocal tabula rasa. This means reclaiming territory in the marginalized areas of our cities, with projects that bear insurrection and civic mobilization.
This methodology seeks to promote public participation as an act of resistance against the laws of the market, against the commodification of construction, and lobbying among local authorities, who infect the milieu of architecture through labels and norms.
It is a colonization of neglected public spaces by the participation of a non-specialized labor collective that elaborates on prefabricated and hijacked construction systems. These interventions are spontaneous expressions, responding to needs without cultural filters; using industrial objects as construction materials, and ready-made architecture as barricades.
The land strategy is one of circumvention; a low ground occupation density allows these structures to be installed in necessarily legal ambiguity. It is imperative to para-cité the city, to lean against it, generating an urban vitality that is reactive and affordable, sustaining its effervescence and creating new potentials for collective use.
Stephane Malka, Ame-lot Student Housing, 2012. Credit:Tristan Spella / Laurent Clement
