“Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” ~ Lebbeus Woods

Let us consider the term “utopian architecture” for a moment.  Does it sound like an oxymoron?  Must it?  Le Corbusier said that all architecture is utopian. How might we change the rules of architecture without throwing away its generative aspects?   Like goldfish, we grow to fit our containers.  Can we imagine an architecture that increases liberty, propagates communalism, stokes mutual aid, and embraces interdependence?

What would such an architecture – a desiring architecture – look like, and what might it want from us?

Is it modular?

Is it anarchic?

Nomadic?

Ecohousing?

Collective?

Squat?

Freespace?

Inflatable?

Self-sufficient?

Feminist?

Queer?

Anti-capitalist?

Black?

Commune, or Common?

Picking up on the work of visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, architectures of desire will explore expanded conditions of a built environment beyond those intended by an ideologically-driven definition of urbanism pegged to for-profit development, imposed alienation, isolation, and other tropes of the capitalist regime.  To imagine such an architecture is to expose the ideology inherent in the way we currently build the buildings in which we live our lives.

In doing so, we will construct a reader and reflect on writings by Rosalyn Deutsche, Lebbeus Woods, Jennifer Bloomer, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paolo Soleri, Daniel Campo, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Marc Augé, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, Richard Serra, among others.

About Utopia School:

Utopia School is an open-sourced pedagogical project hosted at Flux Factory and elsewhere with the purpose of studying Utopian thought throughout time.  The school works on a horizontal, non-hierarchical, and open-sourced model. Utopia school asks: What questions are useful for re-imaging the future?

The first iteration of Utopia School was held at Flux Factory, New York City, in 2015, and was co-organized by Dylan Gauthier, Lena Hawkins, Jamie Idea, Scott Rigby, and many others.

See also the Architectures of Desire class page on the US website.

b. An open-source feature-length video composed of 24 5-minute parts, recorded by a single camera.

c. A Mini- DV tape is locked into the camera. The camera is mailed back and forth between hudson and nyc, in a call and response fashion. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to take part by borrowing the camera and recording a 5-minute video on the theme of ‘correspondence,’ this paper-based shot log will travel back and forth with the camera detailing time of day and location of the last shot to guide the start of the next scene.

See 120m for current location of the camera.

During the fair, the shed served as cover for the collective’s bookmaking equipment / bindery as well as a pop-up shop for Red76 books, some extra special goods, and other contributions (publications, ephemera) by friends engaged in the fight for housing, shared control of public space – right to the city fights, occupations and re-imaginings of our experience(s) of the urban fabric.

After the fair the bookshed was moved to the lot of Frank Traynor, who was working as an art handler at the fair and expressed interest in it.  It was eventually incorporated into The Perfect Nothing Catalog, Traynor’s backyard art shanty/gallery located behind Signal Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Inspired by the Lumières Brothers’ 1895 film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon, in which the filmmakers turned their cameras on their own workers as they leave the worksite.  In the process, the worker is effectively recast as the first film actor in their moment between work and leisure time.  Workers Leaving the Museum, turns the regard of the cultural institution back upon itself, and to follow museum workers beyond their work on the “production lines” of the cultural factory, to register their comportment as they are leaving the museum, and to inquire about their role in the creation of culture.

The project was presented this Summer at MASS MoCA as one of three pieces commissioned by James Voorhies of Bureau for Open Culture for the exhibition “I am Searching for Field Character.”

Prior Dawn Schools have investigated: the social and labor relationships in the industrial infrastructure around Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, the closing of a Ford plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, and signs of de-gentrification in the East Village.  In the Summer 2011, Dawn School was held at MASSMoCA at North Adams, MA, at the invitation of Bureau for Open Culture, which included a visit to Specialty Minerals, a quarry and mineral processing facility in neighboring Adams, MA. In 2017 Dawn School will be held as part of the exhibition con•tin•u•ums (time beyond lifetimes) curated by Patrick Jaojoco.

Wake before dawn. Take a walk. Watch the day emerge. Discuss.

Alarm:

Dawn Alarm

—

Dawn School 8: Dawn School to the former Pfizer Building, NY (2017)

Dawn School 7: Dawn School to Newtown Creek, NY (2015)

Dawn School 6: Dawn School to San Pedro, CA (2014)

Dawn School 5: Dawn School to Specialty Minerals, Adams, MA, with MassMoCA/Bureau for Open Culture (2011)

Dawn School 4: Dawn School to the East Village for Psygeoconflux festival (2010)

Dawn School 3: Dawn School to Minneapolis Airport (2010)

Dawn School 2: Dawn School to Prince Edward Island (2010)

Dawn School 1: Dawn School to School of the Future, Brooklyn, NY (2010)

Preamble:

“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.”

~ The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Our work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis.  ML’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics.  Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture, and temporary occupations, our work expands on Lefebvre’s “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways. Mare Liberum is premised on the speculation that water is a commons and the boat as a heterotopia – social platforms that catalyze societal change.

We have presented work at Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA, Neuberger Museum, Maker Faire, the PsyGeoConflux Festival, The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, EFA Project Space, Smack Mellon, Alexandraplatz, and the Antique Boat Museum, and have been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, and Vice Magazine, among others.

The collective was founded by Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen in 2007.

The collective is currently:
Dylan Gauthier, Sunita Prasad, Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Kendra Sullivan, and Stephan von Muehlen.

For more information, visit – http://www.thefreeseas.org.