Sebastien Marot 'Palimpsestuous Ithaca: A Relative Manifesto for Sub-Urbanism'

( Abstract )

Sub-urbanism and Super-urbanism may be considered the most significant subversions to which the concept and practices of urbanism are currently subjected, one being initiated from the realm of landscape architecture, and the other by one of the most creative vanguard of contemporary architecture. While sub-urbanism could be described as a design experiment which holds the site as the matrix in which the program is to be deciphered, super-urbanism, quite to the contrary, stands for an attempt at literally inventing the site through the manipulation and building of the program.

The contemporary hero of super-urbanism is Rem Koolhaas and Delirious New York its undisputed manifesto. For several reasons, which are interesting to reflect upon, sub-urbanism has not yet found such a hero, and has certainly not produced a tale that would have the power of challenging Koolhaas’ “Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”. Our ambition, however delirious or playful it may seem, is to correct that by moving the stage set from Manhattan to Ithaca (the seat of Cornell University) where it happens that Koolhaas actually started to work out his theoretical and poetic plot.

Our intention, drawing, like Koolhaas, on the critical paranoid method, is to gather the ingredients of a relative manifesto for sub-urbanism able to suggest both that sub-urbanism can only be advocated relatively (not absolutely), and that super-urbanism is but a moment of sub-urbanism. A tale cannot be challenged, except with another tale.

The lecture will link several narratives, moments and people that were critical in shaping the “topolitics” of Ithaca and Cornell: geographers, scientists, agronomists, engineers, architects, artists and writers. In so doing it will seek to illustrate the idea that every landscape is made of a dense fabric of tales, representations and constructions, and that every building or project is a poem composed and written in that three (or four) dimensional page already saturated with real and virtual constructs.

“Cornell is in Ithaca, NY, Where Greek meets Indian” (EB White)

Sébastien Marot, born in 1961, is a philosopher by training, and a critic in architecture and landscape design. Program director at the Société Française des Architectes in Paris between 1986 and 2003, he was the founder and chief editor of the journal Le Visiteur. His work is focused on the issue of sub-urbanism and the way design may address the temporal texture of sites and situations. He has taught in several schools of architecture and landscape architecture in Europe (Geneva, Marne-la-Vallée, Architectural Association, École) and North America (Harvard GSD, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University). In 2004 he was the recipient of the Médaille de la Critique Architecturale awarded by the Académie d’Architecture in Paris and, in 2005, he was a research fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal. He is the author of Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory (AA Publications, 2003, trad. Suburbanismo y el arte de la memoria, Gustavo Gili, 2006), and is currently working on a “relative manifesto” for sub-urbanism.