Spaces of Uncertainty Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen
Verlag Mueller + Busmann Wuppertal ISBN 3-928766-54-6 spacesofuncertainty Kenny Cupers www.mueller-busmann.de Spaces of Uncertainty Exhibition

Spaces of Uncertainty is a collaborative of two architects, Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, working at different institutions and locations. They do not form an office, but present a collection of ideas about architecture and spatial practice. Their collaborative work started off in Berlin in 2002, where they worked on a publication Spaces of Uncertainty (Verlag Müller + Busmann, 2002). Moving between urbanism, sociology and the visual arts, this project presented urban research and a photographic essay on the life of leftover spaces in Berlin. By documenting activities such as leisure, temporary living, urban agriculture, informal trade, and social encounters, the research addressed the micro-politics of public space, thereby adding energetic realism to the overwhelming rhetoric of loss that dominates the current discourse. An international exhibition continued this investigation with three case studies in Berlin, Brussels and London. Their recent ongoing work attempts to rethink the position from which to intervene in the spatial practices that make up urban societies today. Leaving the vertical position of the architect to roam the network of urban situations, it aims to develop research strategies geared towards spatial practice. The exploration of urban culture as a process unfolding in a multiplicity of spaces, allows the terrain of action to shift towards the multifaceted dynamics of the contemporary city. With contributions by Margaret Crawford, Hilde Heynen, Paul Davies, Paul Halliday and Juergen Mayer H. Grounds for an Urban Space To think about the identity of a city is to think about the collection of sites and spaces that together signify this city. It is at the opposite end from identifying the city with big stories, architects, historic characters, or any such clearly identifiable influences. The identities of a city lie in its struggle to administer its everyday activities. It is the very moment in which the institutionalised whole is overruled by the everyday, that immediate identities are born. Berlin demands that one thinks about the unconscious opposition between space and place, site and project. The latter is produced by the narrative practices in which architecture plays an important role. Architects like to foresee future identity. They rarely seem to look at the present nature of a site, of the city. Focussing on identity in architectural terms does unquestionably demand talking about systems of representation. The architectural project is the storytelling practice that produces image, and more specifically an image of the site. Architectural production is based on the self-conscious construction of particular sites. By deconstructing the actually existing, it is the architectural vision that transforms grounds into sites and sites into objects. It is only this transformation that describes the becoming site of urban ground, the shift from space into place. Alternatively, with Michel De Certeau, space could be understood as a bundle velocities and intersections of mobile elements, describing the effect produced by the procedures that place it. Like spoken language, it is dependent upon its contextual conversation. Place, in this scheme, is the order of elements, the force that determines the relationship of coexistence. It excludes the possibility of coexisting elements within the same location. It is the structured organisation of elements always situated besides one another. Whereas place equals fixity in location and identity, space is constituted by a vectorial description of dynamic forces. This configuration of opposing entities evokes the question of how urban identity is constituted rather within the immediateness of the city’s ground than by architecture and its apparent imagery. An architectural plan or project is generally a projection of a site. It is a story about a space that thereby turns it into a place. In contrast, immediate identity is about the sense of the spaces that make up the city, not about all of the projections that try to tie its identity down for the sake of a singular story. Immediate identity seems to exist through the temporary use of ill-defined sites. Sites without projects. In this sense, Berlin’s identity is merely a shadow of architecture, despite all attempts to construct its identity through architecture and ideological urbanism. Berlin shows how the identity of a city is not in its architecture, but next to it. Aside architecture, we can hear the whispering voice of societies, the memories and predictions differing from one another without categorisation. They inhabit the vagueness of every future moment that does not exclude questions but allows for a multiplicity of immediate response. Public Space and its Margins In contemporary society, the modern citizen seems to be free by constitution and can - within the very reasonable limits of a First World comfort - theoretically do whatever he or she likes. This naivety – supported by media and mass consumerism in their natural attempt to narrow our perspective - seems to be successful in hiding the foggy presence of control, be it personified by governments, guardians of property, or the media culture in our very living rooms. However, opposed to this naivety, there seems to be an ever-growing atmosphere of pessimism about our supposed transformation into branded consumers: “We have reached utopia – and it sucks.” Do we really need to choose between Disneyland and blacked out pessimism? Public space - with its mechanisms of control - has its other, situated in the fragility and indefiniteness of certain spaces and activities. It is both these atmospheres that influence us in the way we live, the way we communicate, and finally the way we think. How ambiguous are our desires, dreams and projections? Is it only the sterile places with clearly defined use that we can enjoy today? Is it the designer shops, the fancy cafes, or the commercial promenades, that provide our satisfaction? What about the social public spaces in the back of our heads? Do we still consider the possibility of diverse encounters, with the non-consumer, the other? What about the young, the restless, the old, the poor, and the ones having been excluded from contemporary public space and therefore removed from society? Public space and urbanity have always been connected to disorder, functional heterogeneity, and diversity. The most meaningful character of the metropolis lies in this multiplicity beyond physical borders. The urban public sphere can therefore be based on a model of confrontation and instability, as it is characterised by encounters and confrontations between people. Public spaces are – or at least should be – places where the individual and the community can, openly, and insecurely, meet. The functional units, the highly structured, programmed, and controlled spaces in the contemporary city, mean to threaten the city’s crucial characteristics, namely openness and unpredictability. The margin is an essential aspect of public space conserving all these crucial characteristics, as it is the preferred space of uncertainty in the contemporary city. The Transitory Other Architects dream to build; the confident lines on the drawing board signify their plans directed towards a bright and shining future. Traditionally, architects have always been standing on the frontline of modern society’s warfare against the existing. They have been the ones to direct and design the city of tomorrow. The driving force of such encounter is carried by a genuine faith in progress. However, the projections of their desire not only describe sensitivity towards society, but also show a distorted hidden pleasure: the desire to build is supported by the desire for power. In their attempt to sell their subjective dreams for tangible vehicles of progress, architects luxuriate in the power handed over to them by society. Legitimising their social position though means hiding this pleasure. Ethics are in this sense the means of doing so: architects understand their power as a positive tool in making the world into a better place. Patronising, ironic, dogmatic, or cynical, the different modes of communicating the ethical message are all directed to support the architect’s legitimacy. In the architect’s head however, there is a fundamental misconception concerning this desire. As opposed to their expectation - the illusion that their child made from stone will enhance environmental quality - reality offers no guarantee for a better future. This is partly connected to the specificity of architectural production in general: as architecture is bound to focus its energy on a limited location, it always leaves things behind. These leftovers constitute a marginal position, the ultimately transitory attitude that connotes powerlessness, or a refusal to intervene in the world. As opposed to architectural structures and programmes it does not do anything towards a nearby or faraway future. It is simply there. This margin is the place where architecture reaches the border of intentional intervention. It is the very space in which the architect loses his power, where we are being confronted with the impossibility of designing an environment. While the negative aspects of the margin show architecture’s limits, its positive characteristics prove the redundancy of the architect. We do not seem to need architects to create our own markets, meeting places, or parties. Playing grounds are preferably not defined by architects, they are naturally being moulded around the action taking place. This is the humility with which we have tried to approach architecture. It could be categorised as a useless approach for the profession. And indeed, nothing points in this respect to a possible implementation of theory into practice. However, tracing these spaces can help us understand how the built environment functions. The margin strongly demystifies often-used terms such as development and process. Traditionally, architecture is involved with the development of empty sites into well-defined developed places. This is supposed to constitute the continual process of developing a city. And indeed, there will be nobody claiming that there is an end point to this process: there is no final product, no perfect city. The city is a never-ending cycle of growth and decay. But does that equally count for our everyday environment itself, being the action field of architecture? The architectural project is being developed in its design phase, but once built, it is immovable. As a result, the city consists of fixed frozen moments of solidified architecture. It is architecture’s sloth that is bound to freeze the city’s dynamism. The margin - as the immediate stage of architecture’s side effects – offers a second perspective to this specific nature of the architectural production. In opposition to architecture, the space of the margin allows for a more direct idea of process, a continual one. The physical leftover is a ground of ephemeral traces, and offers simultaneity of difference, stratified information that the places of architectural development are lacking in their exclusiveness. In this respect, the margin functions as the delayed catalyst of urban culture. This extra dimension to architecture’s instrumentality enables us to understand the margin as a local recollection of the other, a memorial testimony of tactical space. Occupied by whispering narratives rather than visual representation, this continuity in space and time is the enormous resource that marginal territories present today as the ultimate buffer zone in the contemporary city. The margin evokes an architectural understanding, which lies far beyond its own discipline. The question remains however, how to deal with the ever-present desire of implementation. It is the practice of annihilation that tends to support and satisfy the desire to fill up the in-between, to diminish its possibilities, to replace uncertainty with definition. If we, in the end, are to make up a final balance, this is the ultimate goal that has directed our energy: an increased sensitivity of the professionals involved in our urban environments towards the hidden possibilities that lie within the margin and its practice. And although the step from this marginal urban research into consistent design practice is by far self-evident, the underlying motives between the lines can instigate thinking about a different urban practice: one of a realistic understanding of the existing, towards a more open and potent future:“(...) concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which holds them together (...) it was the attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were.” (ARENDT, H., in: BENJAMIN, W., Illuminations, Pimlico, 1999, p.17) The existence of these spaces of uncertainty is both a relief and a promise. While breathing our eternal desire for a humane homecoming on in-humane territory, it is as undefined as we are. In our attempt to structure the chaos that space initially is, the margins have become the last reminders that can possibly tell us who we are. They are inhabited by the other and inhabit the opposites, which our phoney worlds are put together from. The margins are ugly and beautiful. They laugh and they cry. They are full of energy and still remain calm. They are without sound while they speak. They stabilise, and still, exist through instability. They catch our dreams, and still, they are sleeping themselves. They give birth and they kill at the same time. The margins are we. International Feedback: A-Matter (Alexander Kluy) “ Forty years ago, in 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities', Jane Jacobs wrote that a vacuum was boring because monotony itself was boring. It is not monotony but everyday variety that is captured by Cupers and Miessen in seemingly casual photographs of couples and passers-by, of parks and desolate areas, of gloomy industrial wasteland in absurd constellations. (...) The subversive margins, strips of land that have continued to be ignored, and architectural discomposita are documented by Cupers und Miessen, as archivists of the discontinuous. (...) In contrast to the arranged, enigmatic photos of Jeff Wall, the photographic images of Cupers and Miessen are text-bound. They are a conceptual antidote to the text. They imply something without actually being that something.” The Big Issue (Ann Lee) “ According to Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, 'big stories, architects, historic characters, or any such clearly identifiable influence are irrelevant. The identity of a city lies in its struggle to administer everyday activities'. Ignoring famous cultural landmarks, the exhibition looks at the mundane and everyday.” Centre for Urban Research, Goldsmiths College London (Paul Halliday) “ (This book) has a transporting and transformative quality. Transporting because it sucks my gaze into a space beyond my experiential particularity. Transformative because it will change the way in which I think about my office chair. (...) One of the things I know now is that Robert Capa, like so many anthropologists also, was wrong when he made a necessary link between closeness and epistemological or aesthetic value. Some of the most engaging and challenging images I have seen have been concerned with the alienation and fragmentation of the modernist nightmare. Where the human condition is reduced to little more than the illusion of grandeur and where the vicissitudes of time and physical corruption reduce all of our monuments, be they architectural, historical or political, to stories of absence and insignificance in our own private worlds that we call the collective memory.” Deutsche Bauzeitung “ Da machen zwei einen Spaziergang durchs gegenwärtige Berlin und sie entdecken eine Stadt. Die sie in Bilder, Zitate und Reflektionen über Geschichte, Architektur und Städtebau auflösen, mal spielerisch tastend, dann wieder zupackend auf den diskursiven Punkt gebracht.” TAZ – Die Tageszeitung (Harald Fricke) “ Die Architekten Kenny Cupers und Markus Miessen kümmern sich mit Video-Installationen um schwer definierbare Räume in Berlin, London und Brüssel. Der Mix schmiegt sich zwar oft der Faszination für urbane Kaputtheitsästhetik an, zeigt aber auch, wo der Metropolenkult endet: in der Auflösung urbaner Räume, als Brachfläche der Ökonomie.” TAZ – Die Tageszeitung (Sandra Loehr) “ Der wunderbare Fotoband "Spaces of Uncertainty" lässt die Freiflächen Berlins von den Brüchen und Verwerfungen des 20. Jahrhunderts erzählen und zeigt die Stadt als poröse Landschaft, die Stille ausatmet. Dem Buch gelingt es, als eine Art Reiseführer im Negativ, diese wüsten und vernarbten Orte in der Poesie der Leere zu inszenieren; vom repräsentativen Berlin sieht man nichts. Und so wird man, solange die Stadt ihre Mitte sucht, Berlin vielleicht am ehesten zwischen den Buchdeckeln von Spaces of Uncertainty finden.” Blueprint (Grant Gibson) “ ...in their investigations of Berlin's voids or the undesigned areas in-between architecture the book finds its feet. Spaces of Uncertainty is punctuated throughout by some wonderful images of undiscovered parts of Berlin - areas that have nothing in common with the gleaming brand of Potzdamer Platz and have managed to avoid regeneration. Once you've got through some of the academic speak it becomes clear that these are two incisive minds.” BBC London “ An exact examination of the nature of public urban space.” (Stadt)Bauwelt (Wolfgang Kil) “ Kenny Cupers und Markus Miessen, zwei aus der ganz jungen, transatlantischen Architektengeneration, haben ein Berlin-Buch der Postneunziger geschrieben: 'Ein Gegengift gegen all die Nostalgie und das Gerede von den Verlusten, welche die gegenwärtigen Diskurse der Stadt dominieren', so Hilde Heynen im Anhang. Das Buch stellt die Macht der Architektur infrage, es übt exemplarisch Bescheidenheit. Indem das Buch sich fuer die positive Variante der 'eröffneten Möglichkeiten' ausspricht, hilft es die gängige Wahrnehmung von Stadt zu verändern.” Architect's Journal (Andrew Mead) “ ...and one message of their book, as far as architects are concerned, is - for goodness' sake, tread gently. The authors call for ‘an increased sensitivity of the professionals involved in our urban environments towards the hidden possibilities that lie within the margin’ - and who would argue with that? Berlin may have such spaces of uncertainty in profusion, but every city needs them, and this timely little book helps to demonstrate why.” Hilde Heynen (author of Architecture and Modernity. A Critique, MIT Press) “ A few years ago Liane Lefaivre characterised the work of Rem Koolhaas and kindred architects as ‘dirty realism’. Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen have given a personal twist to this strategy and have developed their own version of dirty realism by looking at the marginal and interstitial spaces that Berlin – like probably no other Western city – possesses in such abundance. By focussing on these seemingly insignificant left-over spaces, they manage to provide an antidote for the nostalgia and the rhetoric of loss that seem to dominate the contemporary discourse on the city. In relying upon photography and textual arguments, the book denounces the power of architecture. It is, finally, an exercise in modesty.” Harvard Graduate School of Design (Prof. Margaret Crawford) “ Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen present themselves in a disarmingly humble way, as young architects who lived in Berlin for a few years and who have some questions about public space. But this publication demonstrates an extremely sophisticated understanding of the theoretical and empirical realities in which current debates about public space exist. The rendering of the possibilities of voids and margins inspires me. This is a wonderful book, both poetic and intellectually convincing. I hope it finds a broad audience.” Open Source Architecture “ With "Spaces of Uncertainty" the architects Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen have analysed the psychology of the in-between spaces of London, Berlin and Brussels, and the ephemeral architecture, which occupies such marginal urban territories. An urban investigation that embraces 'dirty realism' rather than representational architecture.” Deutsche Bauzeitung “ TRANSFORMERS zeigt in dichter Reihenfolge drei Gruppenausstellungen und bildet einen sozialen Raum, ein Labor für den Austausch mit internationalen Teilnehmern und eine Produktionsstätte für Kooperationen. Hier präsentieren und diskutieren Künstler, Architekten, Autoren, Theoretiker und Filmemacher Entwürfe für neue urbane Konzepte und Strategien, die ein neues Licht auf bestehende Bedingungen werfen.”