terrain vague: Urban Wilds/ Transgression and Recreation

The Circus as the Urban Subconscious

Let us stop for a minute and imagine the city as

a crystallization of a collective consciousness, a vision of

order once residing in our minds that has slowly

materialized in a concrete form. We can then think

of a stratified psycho-analyzed urban environment,

where voids are not only visible gaps in a saturated

urban tissue, but also perceptible “uncivilized”

urges that penetrate our very minds and corrupt

our production of desires. Pockets of emptiness

inhabiting the corpus and psyche of the city.

Originated in the ancient world, the Circus has

a history of a ritualistic performance -mostly of a

nomadic nature. It served as a proto-theatre,

examining and experimenting with the interaction

between human and animal nature. Since it

originally featured an event staged within nature, it

didn’t really necessitate architecture; no stronghold,

no threshold needed whatsoever. Later on, newly

conceived dualities gave rise to apparent

architectures, and consequently to built divisions

between nature and civilization, man and animal.

Walls, hedges, embankments and prisons carefully

started to crystallize an interiority: that what stays in

and that what is left out. The rest remained in the

fringe of non-materiality. A specter hovering above

and across, refusing to take a form -hidden in the

woods. A place where mythic assemblages of

human and animal have proliferated. And while

these combinations once constituted a way to praise

nature, in the middle ages they represented an

incarnation of the demonic. Thus, the Circus and

its intricate ontologies were ostracized outside the

city walls. This factory of oddities topped by a

tensed fabric has been located in the fridge of

architectural typology ever since, taking the

form of a mechanized caravan on wheels, traveling

from town to town in search of urban voids, feeding

the curiosity of an agitated public with its obscure

and absurd forms. The Circus intoxicated the

nineteenth century american public as a theatrical -

and even an anthropological- laboratory for the

exotic, the whimsical and the monstrous.

The word circus that originally denoted a

traveling company of performers, later on came to

signify a frenetic pandemonium; particularly, the

absence of order. This metonymy qualifies as

the main thesis of this paper. (...)The Circus can be

ontologically defined as an intense field of

anthropomorphic and zoomorphic entities; the elephant

stands on two legs and humans walk on four. This

cross-mimicry blurs the distinctions between the

species and handles them as a unified corporeal

expressivity -a “dance of an ecosystem”. With this

circus ontology at hand, the becoming-animals of

the performance constitute a transgression in the

normality of urban society. There are indeed spaces

of the city or the mind detached from the plane of

civility -the one of comfort, security and

infrastructure- and infested with the forces of the

chaotic and spontaneous nature. (...)The

Circus is a marginal space par excellence:

abandoned from any form of rationalism and not

included in our institutionalized urban spectacles.

We should therefore study the Circus as an

internalization of a wilderness, both natural and

psychological. A terrain not only haunting the

urban environment but also acting as a vague surface

for the projections of a collective subconscious. And

it is in this unique vagueness that we should look for

the subjectivities, the spectacles and the monsters of

an imminent future, towards a redefinition of how

man relates to nature.-

The city as a construction left at the mercy of the animal.

A terrified Bruce Willis, wrapped in cellophane, leaving

the underground haven to collect species from a

quarantined city. from Terry Gilliam!s movie: “Twelve

Monkeys”(1995)

by Michael Vlasopoulos, architect and artist

Michael Vlasopoulos was born in Loutraki, Greece in 1984. He earned his

diploma in Architecture-Engineering in 2009, from the National Technical

University of Athens (NTUA) Greece. In his undergraduate years he had the

opportunity to participate in various exhibitions, publications and competitions

in graphic design, graphic novels, architecture and urbanism. He is the GRAND

prize winner of the 26th international Space Prize competition, juried by Ryue

Nishizawa; his team in Do.co.mo.mo workshop NL 2008 was placed 2nd , and he

received an honorable mention for his project The Concrete Circus in the ‘Live’

Architectural Competition in Calgary, Canada 2007, with Lebbeus Woods as a

jury member. He currently works as a member and editor in the

ARCHITEKTONES Journal of the Association of Greek Architects. He’s

enrolled in Harvard University, Master in Design Studies program 2010. His

research interests revolve around the concept of the domestic space in relation to

future developments in philosophy and technology.

http://spacecollective.org/mikaBoo

http://issuu.com/mikaboo

7 NYMFAIOU, ILISIA 11528 ATHENS

GREECE +30 6974635735

m.vlasopoulos@gmail.com