WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE

# The Book is on Amazon.com.fr.co.uk.co.jp.de.es.it etc.

Léopold Lambert — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:30:56 +0000

I don’t mean to advertize for amazon, if you find the book in local bookstores, that is great news! Simply, if you are looking to purchase the book as several people ask me, that might be an easy way to do so:

http://www.amazon.com/Weaponized-Architecture-The-Impossibility-Innocence/dp/8461537025/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362155317&sr=8-1&keywords=weaponized+architecture

# The Lund Lecture’s video is online

Léopold Lambert — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:15:54 +0000

Léopold Lambert Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

(Clumsy) presentation of the book at the Lund Architecture Symposium on September 14th 2012. The lecture is organized in three parts and an appendix:

- Part 1: Lines, Law and Architecture
- Part 2: Palestine
- Part 3: A Disobedient Architecture
- Appendix: Designing, Writing, Editing

# WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE will be published by DPR-Barcelona

Léopold Lambert — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:49:45 +0000

The book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence that gathers 200 pages of my research and my architectural project will be published in March by DPR-Barcelona.
Ethel Baraona-Pohl and Cesar Reyes were in fact kind enough to take the risk of this publication and we are currently working on it together.

Here is the index of the book:

INTRODUCTION: VIOLENCE ON THE BODY

ARCHITECTURE IS A WEAPON
- Chapter 1: Military Architecture
- Chapter 2: State of Exception
- Chapter 3: Urbicide
- Chapter 4: Architecture of Safety
- Chapter 5: Capitalism’s Architecture
- Chapter 6: Resistive Architectures
- Chapter 7: Smoothing and Striating Space
- Interview: Bryan Finoki

ISRAELI COLONIAL APPARATUSES
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Israeli Separation Barrier
- Chapter 2: I.D.F.’s Road Checkpoints
- Chapter 3: Israeli Civil Settlements
- Chapter 4: Segregated Infrastructures
- Chapter 5: Areas of Control
- Chapter 6: Militarized Destructions
- Chapter 7: Extreme Urban Example: Hebron
- Interview: Raja Shehadeh

AN ARCHITECTURAL DISOBEDIANCE
- Introduction
- Designed Project

CONCLUSION: SYMPATHY WITH THE OBSTACLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

APPENDIX /// LOST IN THE LINE
- Introduction
- Graphic Novel

Claude Parent & Paul Virilio: The Oblique Function (chapter Sympathy with the Obstacle)

Sarajevo after the war in 1995

Paris during the 1848 Revolution

East Jerusalem

Israeli settlement in the West Bank

Hebron (West Bank)

An Architectural Disobediance: Palestinian Qasr and Caravansery in Area C

Lost in the Line, an architectural graphic novel

# FINAL PRESENTATION /// Wednesday 8th December

Léopold Lambert — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:20:01 +0000

Weaponized Architecture is an examination of the inherent instrumentalization of architecture as a political weapon; research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle. The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.The shelter constitutes both an architectural design and a narrative whose uncertainty is integrated as a creative catalyst.

# Thesis digest

Léopold Lambert — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:39:13 +0000

# REFERENCE /// Shotcrete is the way to go

Léopold Lambert — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:49:14 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotcrete

# In Progress /// Where am I going ?

Léopold Lambert — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:53:38 +0000

Having talked for a while by skype today with my best friend, things appears much clearer to me now. The project is going to change radically and I am taking advantage of the blog here to try to write down my thoughts…

Things already changed a bit when I decided to adopt a cave/tunnel vocabulary to the interface between the 200 yards tunnel between Area A and Area C and the project itself. The result is what can be seen above…a sort of cave (linked to the tunnel) hosting the functions of shelter, sheepfold and agricultural storage (plan to come).

A remark done by my friend was that those posts were really harmful to the legibility of the project (and obviously not in the good camouflage meaning of it) so I should go back to set of bigger tents which needs less posts.

But the changes are going to be more radical as the space should really reflect the tool it has been operated with (I guess it relates back to Aristotle/Deleuze’s notion of Hylomorphism, doesn’t it Jason ?), so the project might use a double language of cave and quarries as seen below (photographs by Edward Burtynsky).

There is also something that I want to work on which is a kind of beauty of a bad crafting…What I mean by that is that there is an urgency involved in this project which forbids the ability to make perfect and beautiful finishes, so the ugliness and imprecision of the result should be enhanced and considered as an opportunity rather than a disappointment. In the cave, for example I am going to consider the surface carved by workers as a given and locally set instructions for locally projecting concrete in order to make a trough or a table (for example) possible. The confusion between concrete and earth (but also probably bad reinforcement wood and electrical sheathing) should bring an interesting and poetical aesthetics I believe…

I understand that it remains only something like one week or so to bring some dramatic changes in the design before starting to really engage the production of representative documents but I think that I can make it…

# REFERENCE /// Nébuleuse by Guillaume Amat

Léopold Lambert — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:40:18 +0000

Nébuleuse is a photographic work by Guillaume Amat investigating the strange territory of the French Atlantic coasts and its military ruins from World War II, bunkers. The atmosphere of the photographs helps to compose a foggy heterotopia where those bunkers appears as monolithic artifacts within an infinite sand landscape.

This work integrates perfectly the series of article written about bunkers on boiteaoutils and that can be read by following this link.

Here is the text related to the series (nb: the complete series has to be seen of Guillaume Amat’s own website):

Nébuleuse
In April 2007, in a muffled silence, the sea disappeared, as if vanished, leaving behind only ghosts of stone.
These Blockhaus, remains of World War II, slowly digested by the tides turned out to be threatening places of refuge in the middle of an unexplored desert.
A haunting wind is sweeping along the coast and wrapping distant figures.
In the open sea, one could hear the muffled sound of a foghorn very much like the whispering rumbling of life.
People seem to get lost in a scenery both quiet and threatening where one gets stifled by the immensity of the landscape.

The project called “Nebuleuse” (Nebula) is part of a reflection on the question of World War II heritage, the French coast and its conversation.

In the form of a photographic proposition, I tried to show how the hand of man and the hand of Nature can mix or be in conflict.

# REFERENCE /// Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict by Andrew Herscher

Léopold Lambert — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 15:24:49 +0000

Almost as a sequel of the article I wrote about the notion of Urbicide, here is a invitation to read Andrew Herscher‘s essay, Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict which attempts to illustrate the role of architecture destruction in the second conflict of the Balkans in the 90′s (the first one being the Bosnia war).
In fact, destructing buildings in an asymmetrical conflict is not anymore a strategy of diminution of the enemy’s forces but rather a symbolic negation of the otherness’ culture and to a broader scale, the otherness’ existence.
Herscher thus recounts the three phases of the Kosovo conflict which all dramatized this perspective on architecture assassination. The first one (1st and 2nd images) is the 1998 series of attacks, massacres and profanation from (Christians) Serbians towards (Muslims) Albanians in Kosovo. The second one was the surgical bombing of Belgrade by NATO (3rd image) targeting not only political objectives but also civilian infrastructures like bridges or the TV Tower. Eventually the third one occurred after the partial retreat of Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian troops from Kosovo and the non official Kosovo Liberation Army’s retaliation of destruction (4th image) on Christian churches…
Herscher finishes his essay with the description of a billboard (5th image) encouraging the new independent country of Kosovo (still not recognized by Serbia) to preserve the common architectural patrimony of the country as being fully part of the National narrative.

# Mid-Progress / Thursday 21st October

Léopold Lambert — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:21:00 +0000

The Israeli colonization of the West Bank implements itself by various spatial and architectural means. The civilian settlements and the separation barrier, both violating the International Law are the most expressive examples of such physical occupation. However, one other major mean of oppression over the Palestinian people is bureaucratic and depends essentially on the fact that 60% of the West Bank is contained in the area C in which the Israeli army exercises an absolute control over security (by its presence), movement (by checkpoints and private roads), planning and construction (by the interdiction for Palestinians to build and the systematization of destruction of Palestinian buildings).

This project therefore intends to elaborate a strategy of construction of a building which is both built and used by the two populations which suffers from the Israeli occupation: Palestinians and Bedouins. In fact, this project proposes a negotiation between those two very different peoples who share only their daily suffering caused by the Israeli colonization. While this building can be used by Palestinians as an agricultural platform and temporary dwelling (a Qasr), Bedouins can appropriate it as a caravansary for their animals and themselves as an episode of their continuous movement between the islands of the Palestinian Archipelago (area A where Palestinians own a relative autonomy is in fact fragmented in a multitude of little “islands” of territory).

The architectural vocabulary of this building recounts this negotiation and associates the Bedouins’ textile language with the solid and thick aspects of Palestinian architecture. The tents are the first elements set on site in order to camouflage the excavation of the earth for the dwelling to exist. Meanwhile an undercover trench is also dig in order to link the illegal -illegal here is used in the transcendental definition of the power embodied by the Israeli army- construction site with a decoy one situated two hundred meters away in the area A. The excavation done, a slow construction made out of concrete, dirt and stones is accomplished every night to eventually achieve an “indestructible” architecture that fulfill the intentions expressed above.

The building can only be revealed by the improbable withdrawing of the Israeli army from the West Bank or a more likely attack and evacuation of the IDF on this building. In this second scenario, an attempted destruction of it is effectuated, symptomatic of a more or less conscious will from the Israeli State to absolutely make disappear any Palestinian impact on the land as we observed with the total annihilation of the Arab villages on the Israeli territory after the Naqba in 1948. To exist becomes therefore to resist, and the impossibility of a total destruction of this architecture is, despite its evacuation, represents an expressive resistance to the Israeli colonization. With time, the building becomes more and more an integral part of the land, dust, stones and vegetations thus appropriating the former structure that became a manifesto of existence.