No Made

NO MADE. Building in hard step

Millions and millions of people, at the risk of their lives, will continue, in any case, to flock to the so-called rich countries. It all depends on how rich we are talking about, not how welcoming they are. It is a historical trend, it is a fact, and no amount of anti-migrant rhetoric that is currently flourishing everywhere will be able to stand up to the march of history. They will wither, wither and rot. It is only a matter of time. I wouldn't pretend here to propose THE architectural solution to answer the camps in Calais and elsewhere, but I would like to try to come back to lighter things to perhaps be inspired by them.

There's something adventurous about temporary architecture. You arrive, you make your own thing, you stay there for a while, then you take it down and go somewhere else, to discover another place. A forest becomes the support for possible huts. Whether they are buried in the ground or hung in the branches, they are refuges, the guardians of secrets and limitless imagination.
A wasteland becomes the site of a fairground, of shows, games and joys etc. In all cases, we take, we understand the site as it is, we use it while respecting it, we reveal it in a different way and we disappear as if nothing had happened. A tent that is set up for a few days with its camp set up out of sight and the structure stretched out in the foreground transforms the perception of a space, it transforms it completely.
It would never occur to anyone to raze a forest to build a field of huts or it is called a housing estate.

There is a contextual intelligence and harmony in vernacular architecture that is forgotten when building hard. You'd think that hard building makes you dumb.
One is made to live and exist by considering only the essential, it tells a truth with all the life that goes with it, made of solidarity and violence too.

The other one has no reason to exist except to appear so.
One considers the instant and movement, the other exposes his fear of the passing of time and freezes it in an ostentatious image, tense for eternity.
One is a process, the other speaks of maintenance.
One suggests, the other imposes, it is the difference between eroticism and pornography.
To varying degrees, the contemporary architecture of cities where everything is seen, everything is known, no more streets but islands, open, always open, where there is no more depth of field, no more mystery, than close-ups. The façade says it all and everything becomes a screen. Whether it is the computer or the front wall, it confines its inhabitants to live only in front of or behind their shields. These new districts transform the city from a place of culture and exchange into an inert and vulgar place.
Poodle lawns have replaced the secret gardens. The city, once a land of adventure and what remains of human savagery, is gradually transforming its inhabitants into domestic animals.
The problem of cities is not their historical centre, which has been frozen for a long time, but their margins. Instead of wanting to reinvent Paris, which really doesn't need it, it is crucial to think about the future of these boundaries, the suburbs, the cities where watchmen rule the public space and where beautification work is most often symbolic because it amounts to increasing rents.

Before rethinking these districts in definitive ways from our beautiful bobo agencies, perhaps we should give time to ambitious and assertive urban and architectural experiments to make their effect. Let's stop making the pallet and the container sacred as if it were a good idea, or else it amounts to considering the human being as an improved commodity.
Let's build unique solutions, corresponding to each of the places that we will be asked to study in order to demonstrate their relevance and intelligence. This is undoubtedly a way to give the temporary a chance to take root.
Proposing solutions that are at first ephemeral is perhaps a way to get the city out of its conformist and comfortable gangue so that it can once again become a matrix of living matter and can finally get in tune with its time and its citizens. To make them concerned and part of a process that has been restarted so that they will once again want to defend not their city but the whole city.

Matthieu Poitevin