As Found Anti-aesthetics, Post-industrial Urban Waste Lands, and the Problems of Creating an Adequate Contextual Reconstruction. ABSTRACT. The south-west coast line of the inlet “Limfjorden”, in Aalborg, is a lucid shore; situated on the embankment are two strange, lost, neglected tourist attractions, the “Marine Museum” and the “Defense and Garrison Museum”. The stretch of shore is a former rubbish dump, filled with old boats and debris. The museum buildings are old hangars and wooden pavilions, and surrounding them are a submarine, a torpedo boat, airplanes, and a large numbers of military vehicles. Next to the buildings, on the shore, there is a small compound with temporary, wooden allotments houses and pavilions; a lucid anarchistic place, inhabited by fishermen and students. It is s a place concealed within a time capsule. Can this place, then, be redeveloped without losing its original spirit? This paper tells the story of the researcher’s and artist’s own reflective and interpretive strategies for authentic, first-person research, and how to use these findings in a context of communication and education. The first part of the paper deals with the problem of reinventing lost tourist attractions without losing the spirit of the “wasteland”; and, can we use a Sub-Phenomenal Approach in search of this spirit? How do we avoid this future of “Non Places” as described by March Augé; and can we use Rob Shield’s “Places on the margin” or Guy Debord “The Society of the Spectacle” to understand other possible solutions? We will look into the virtual and actual world of architects, such as Toyo Ito and Lars Spuyborek of NOX, who create interactive, sensitive, architectural objects for the future. This section will also focus on the building as an interactive object that mirrors the spirit of the place and the user; as catalyst and as a meteorological station. We are looking at four cases: “The Grotto of Venus”, the ”Tower of Winds” in Athens, the ”Tower of Winds” in Tokyo, and the D-tower. The second part of the paper suggests a master plan and a concept based on a situationist methodology for a new “War and Peace Center” and “Artville”. The concept of the center is: to understand the reasons for war and peace, through interactive learning environments, and the importance of peace and why we need to fight fundamentalism and tyranny. “Artville” is a small experimental sustainable city with workshops and galleries for artists and craftsmen, all based on small flexible units. The final part of the paper will look into the intuitive sketch process in a hermeneutic perspective and the “Flow of becoming”, based on the Situationist’s strategy of Derive and Détournement. These findings and experiments will be used as introduction and concept for the “Artville” main project, at 1. semester, in the fall of 2010, at the Department of Architecture and Design Aalborg University, and at the exhibition “Play Your city 2”, at the Utzon Center, February 2011. Keywords: Wastelands, derive, détournement, learning environments, and reinvention.

Skudehavnen at the south west shore of Limfjorden in Aalborg

A Sub-Phenomenal Approach to a Lucid Shore “The Waste Land” THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept... Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. T. S. Elliot (1922. The Waste land III “The Fire Sermon” verse 175 -185) Voice and tone compose the emotional dramatic monologue, and the sense and experience of the text are such that the shore and the flow of the river come to symbolize loss, destiny, and death as the unavoidable human condition, just as winter and summer. This section from “The Fire Sermon” describes London as the “Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter noon”. The Thames becomes the river “Lethe”; the black river of forgetfulness. The river is the metaphoric edge, the marginal periphery between two contrasting/oxymoronic elements; death and life, memory and oblivion, the great limbo of winter. The poem works with binary oppositions as: Fire/Ice, Death/Resurrection, Water/Drowning, Voice/Silence, Decline/Civilization. In the architectural design process we work with diametrical opposite themes as: Light/Shadow, Massive/Transparent, Cubic/Organic, Vertical/Horizontal, just like the case is for writing dichotomies in architecture that creates poetry in form and space. The key to understand Elliot is fragmentation, allusion, and voice, but most of all exploring. The only way to learn about poetry, life, and landscape is by exploring, just like when Eliot describes how we must search for the spirit of the place in the end of his poem “Little Gidding”. We are moving in circles from exploring, drifting, and experimenting to reflecting; this paper is about exploring the waste land and a lucid shore.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot "Little Gidding" (the last of Four Quartets) 1942.

The sociologist Rob Shield is exploring these outer boundaries of the city in his book “Places on the Margin”. As in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, it is not confined to one specific place; rather, it is locations all over Europe, Africa, and Asia. Though, these places are all on the edge of culture, society, and landscape; and they all represent a state of mind. A place on the margin exists on the outer edge of influence, control, and social conventions.Their marginality creates centers of subversion; places that present an opportunity for acting outside the boundary of prevailing norms or romanticized sites of otherness and difference. Shield appreciates these peripheral zones as important, subversive places from which one may gain a critical vantage point of the central values of society. Shield writes on the diversion between high and low in social hierarchies of the city, and he uses the terms centre and marginal. The culture of the marginal places is “Low Culture”; at the edge of civilization. He defined places on the margin as: “Marginality reveals its own states, a history of transformation between being margins, near-sacred liminal zones of Otherness, and carnivalesque leisure spaces of ritual inversion of the dominant authorized cultures” (Shields 1992). To experience and interpret the spirit of a place, “Places on the Margin” and “The Waste Land”, we must turn to art and poetry. To the French philosopher Bachelard, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.” Poets, painters, and artists are born as “phenomenologists” (Bachelard 1994), and through their art they reveal the close and “happy” rooms of reminiscences, in which the house and place become the mirrors reflecting the consciousness and the inner soul. “Sub-Phenomenology” is about nearness and the joy of interpretation and creation. To Bachelard, poetry is based on nearness and dwelling, which ties together the tactile and the metaphysical room taking its starting point in nearness, senses, and dreams. The philosopher David A. Jopling argues in his paper on “Sub-Phenomenology”: “Granting an increased role to phenomenological investigation in cognitive psychology is not tantamount to weakening or denying the role played by causal explanation: it is to reinstate the descriptive element as an essential component in any complete causal explanation. Phenomenological description is not a substitute for causal explanation, but a constraint upon theory-formation” (Jopling 1996). Jopling insist on a new hermeneutic and phenomenological approach to the research of the intuitive design process to help understand and explain the complex and wordless processes in the design process. Places and Non-places, Dérive and Détournement Marc Augé explains in his book “Non –Places an Introduction to Supermodernity” the three figures of excess, which characterize the situation of supermodernity - overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of reference, (the ego).This “spectacle” is to some extent the opposite of Rob Shield´s “Places on the Margin”, in which he explores the edge and boundaries of the city, where things and places are out of control. One of Shields cases is Brighton as the “Ritual pleasures of seaside resort”: Brighton as a clash of cultures and classes. “Places on the Margin” creates new subcultures according to Shield, or as Foucault calls these places: “Heterotopias” or “other spaces”, which are small realized utopias, like a world inside a world.

Non Places is born out of the spectacular acceleration of means of transportation, airports, high speed roads, railways, container harbors, shopping malls; from these emerge the new non-places, spaces of transit and consumption. This is the new global architecture of infrastructure, and it looks the same all over the world; in neither Hong Kong nor Stockholm is there any reference to a local culture or history. The same hotel chains, the same label shops, the same television networks are cinched tightly round the globe. Augé argues that our historical cities are becoming museums, like small Disneyworlds; it is the unavoidable rule of globalization that uniforms our world. “If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space, which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity, will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces, which are not themselves anthropological places, and which, unlike in Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places. Instead, they are listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory” and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position” (Auge 1995). The position of the poet is above the world; neither in the world of labor nor that of religion; he is in both worlds in the city, but outside the crowd in his individual consciousness. Augé sees exactly here modernity as an expression of the existence of parallel realities. “Place and non-place are rather like opposing components: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsest, on which the scrambled game of identity and relations are ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified- with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance-“ (Auge 1995). These Non-places are places of short memory dominated by the text and image, the airports, motorways, supermarkets. The signs, the text, and the image are everywhere creating our present cultural landscape and converting it to a rhetorical space that is an empire of signs. Non-places are places where space has been trapped by time; history spans only forty-eight hours of news; each individual is created on this unending loop of history in the present. Marc Augé calls ithis: “The intersecting participation of publicity and advertising apparatuses”; it is the fundamental mechanism that drives the almighty worldwide consumption space. In the world of supermodernity, people are always and never at home, we are dwelling on the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of reference (the ego). It is truly our common roots to dwell in all these non-spaces of the “Spectacle” of supermodernity. The French theorist, writer, and philosopher Guy Debord wrote in his 1967 manifest, “The society of the Spectacle”, a critique on modernity and capitalism and the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image and information culture. “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world-not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society´s real unreality. In all its specific manifestations – news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment – the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life” (Debord 1967). Debord organized with Asger Jorn and his colleagues The Situationist International, an artistic and political movement that attempted to create a series of strategies for engaging in class struggle by reclaiming individual autonomy from the spectacle.

Two key psychogeographcal concepts of this strategy were Derivé and Détournement, also based on the book Memories, co-authored by Asger Jorn. Derivé, or Drift, becomes the Situationist habit of walking and drifting aimlessly through the city in search of its true spirit. Drifting they drop their usual motives for moving and navigating through the city; they let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the city, the smells, the sounds, the sights. To the Situationists, Derivé is to let go and to improvise through the terrain of the urban landscape and the encounters they come across.

Détournement was the strategy, tool, and method by which to create disruption or diversion. It was used in Debord’s and Jorn’s book Memories to create startling, chaotic, disruptive collages and ink fragments to disorient the text, so that the reader could see the city as it really is, rather than as charted in maps and signposts.

Déturnement as “Fin de Copenhague” (End of Copenhagen) Asger Jorn and Guy Debord satirized the empty heart of the spectacle in their 1957 screen printed book: “End of Copenhagen”; a collaged based on a collection of newspapers and magazines that lampooned the experience of the spectacle of modernity. This was the situationist technique of détournement in action. Détournement can be translated most simply as “diversion”, though with the loss of nuances encoded in the original French- “rerouting” “hijacking”, ”embezzlement”, ”misappropriation”,” corruption”, which are all acts implicit in the situationist use of society’s “preexisting aesthetic elements” (Sadler 1998). This action implies that the situationists expected a new revolutionary “people’s aesthetic” to rise on the ruins of the spectacle. The text in “End of Copenhagen” satirized ironically on the western consumerism: “Whatever you want, it’s coming your way-plus greater leisure for enjoying it all. With electronic, automation, and nuclear energy we are entering a new Industrial revolution, which will supply our every need, easily…quickly…cheaply…abundantly” (Jorn and Debord 1957)

Derivé as a Joyful Way of Getting Lost into the Unknown Before spring, the wet dark mould is distorted by mirror fragments of brown, grey shades of heaven, reflected in soft wet multidirectional footsteps. Above, white seagulls and black crows, they do not sing like other birds, they complain as in pain; they repeat their empty scream in infinite loops as if they were permanently suffering the loss of memory; screaming why, why, why am I here?

Before spring, this borderless horizontal wetland towards the west is a faceless, edgeless river, and the almost monochrome shades of grey brown and grey blue, between meadow and marshland, blur my senses and ability to focus. Restless I wait for something vertical to raise, just a mirage of a little grove, or single white sails of a ship, but it is too early. Beneath me flow lines of light green sea grass, as thin sea serpents in slow motion on the surface of dark, grey water. In the grove, behind small semi transparent doors and windows, shadows of barking dogs move as in an imprisoned trance; screaming who, who, who are you?

Inside the labyrinth of wooden allotment houses and boats: grey smoke and the smell of burnt wood from small rusty chimney pipes, rank rain in orange plastic barrels. Random vertical lines into the labyrinth of monochrome black and white birch stems create the synthesis of houses, cars, and boats in a birch grove; all of which are grown, fragmented, and interwoven as a natural, essential, inseparable whole of the spirit of place. In the center of the grove is a sign with the words “No access for hysterical women”, behind it is the mumbling voices of men and the sound of glass bottles clinging.

Spirit of Place, Place and Technology, Tower of Winds If we say that a structure or a building contain the essence of the spirit of place, it depends on a multiplicity of circumstances: is it a structure placed in a junction of trains and cars, or is it situated in the corner of a marketplace, or in the place of memory of historical and cultural importance. Regardless, the building must express the spirit of the place and/ or the mind of the citizen. If all these elements coincide, we have a fusion of art and architecture.

Debord and Jorn shared the same affection for picturesque and primitive architecture as well as a technological baroque. They empathized with the “exemplary” work of the “Mad” King Ludvig II of Bavaria, whose most famous work is the Neuschwanstein, in the German Alps. That castle is the inspiration to Disneyworld’s famous centerpiece castle. In his castle Linderhof, Ludvig built the “Grotto of Venus” (1876-1877). It was an illustration of the First Act of Wagner's "Tannhäuser". Ludwig liked to be rowed across the lake in his golden swan-boat. The cave is built out of cast iron and cement, and it includes a lake with artificial waves, a waterfall, and an opera stage with electric lighting that can change colour in between the different sets. Debord called it a synthesis; a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, a total work of art. The “Grotto of Venus” is an introvert event structure,

King Ludvig II of Bavaria “Grotto of Venus” at Linderhof. “Tower of Winds” in Athens.

Tower of Winds Tokyo D-Tower Doetinchem, The Netherlands.

where art and architecture follow fiction. The Tower of Winds, in Athens, is an extrovert structure based on architecture, art, and business.

The fusion of architecture, art, and technology is displayed in an exemplary way by the ancient Greeks in form of the Tower of Winds. Or as with the Aerides (Winds), also called horologion (timepiece), which is an octagonal Pentelic marble clock tower, placed close to the Eastern Propylon of the Roman Agora, in Athens (build between 19-11 BC). It is the most well preserved structure of ancient Greece. The structure features a combination of eight sundials, a water clock, and a wind vane. It was supposedly built by Andronicus of Cyrrhus, around 50 BC.

The tower with its Doric interior and its Corinthian exterior featured a 24 hour mechanized clepsydra and indicators for the eight winds, from which the tower received its name. It displayed the seasons of the year as well as the astrological dates and periods. It is a 12-metre-tall structure that has a diameter of about 8 meters and, which, in antiquity, was topped by a weathervane-like Triton indicating wind directions. Triton was the fish tailed sea god, the son and herald of Poseidon, king of the seas. He stilled the waves with the blow of a conch-shell trumpet. Below, is the frieze that depicts the eight wind deities. It was important to be familiarized with the winds, so as to estimate the arrival of ships carrying products from overseas. The considerable height of the tower made it visible from the most of the agora, making it effectively an early example of a clock tower. The figures were originally painted in bright colours, just as the Greek did with the temple figures

and friezes. The tower has survived 2000 years of war and changes. In early Christian times, the building was used as the bell-tower of a Byzantine Church. Under Ottoman rule, it became a tekke (a lodge for dervishes) and used by whirling dancing dervishes, also known as a dergah.

The Tower of Winds has been a model for and a source of inspiration to the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. In 1986, Ito designed his installation, the interactive landmark, the “Tower of winds” in Yokohama. He created a transparent, interactive architecture, which was able to respond to its sounding sound, wind, and light. The tower, appearing solid during the day; the perforated aluminium structures, "dissolve" at night through the use of computer-controlled light systems, which form an interactive display representing measured data, such as noise levels and wind in the surrounding vicinity. The concept of the tower, as a structure that interacts with its surroundings, was further developed in the “D-Tower” (1998-2004), which is partly a homepage reflecting the mood of the city inhabitants displayed by the colour and light of the tower. The tower mirrors the inhabitants’ different moods during the day based on their voting on the tower homepage. “On the whole “happiness” (blue) is 45% of the time in first place, “hate” (green) is a good second with 30%, “love” (red) only 20%”. The D-Tower consists of the collaboration between the architect Lars Spuyborek of NOX, in Rotterdam, and QS Serafijn, a Rotterdam based artist. The “D-Tower” is both an introvert and extrovert structure. What these three towers and one cave have in common is that they are all small scale, from actual to virtual, from low-tech to high-tech, extreme in expressing the spirit, emotion, and function of place, just as the allotment houses in “Skudehavnen”.

Collage based on “Derivé” and “Détournement” with collected fragments from Fjordbyen, first sketch loop.

Methodology and Findings: Exploring the “Free Zone” This is a case study based on a sub-phenomenological approach. Its about being there standing, seeing, smelling, touching, and hearing, experienced what happened on the beach trough the

phenomenological and methodological approach of Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, and their strategy of psychogeography involving Derivé and Détournement. This strategy is the key tool and concept, to create a possible new design concept for Play your City 2 and Artville, combined with Colb´s classic and more “scientific” approach to the design process. In this case study it can also be described, as David Colb ventures in his “Experimental Learning” (Colb 1975), using the hermeneutic circle to unfold the intuitive sketch process and the loops between experimentation and reflection. David Colb’s learning system is based on these four elements:

• concrete experience, • observation of and reflection on that experience, • formation of abstract concepts based upon the reflection, • testing the new concepts, • (repeat).

Psychogeography and experimental learning are two sides of the same quest for a true methodology. In any artistic and design process you must let go and “drift” into the unknown; you must be open and lose yourself to attain a mind and an experience free from prejudices. The Russian cognitive neuro-psychologist Alexander Luria wants to bring phenomenological psychology into a kind of reflective equilibrium; a simultaneous vision of the actual case study. In his “The Making of Mind” he states that: “Scientific observation is not merely pure description of separate facts. Its main goal is to view the event from as many perspectives as possible. The eye of science does not probe "a thing", an event isolated from other things or events. Its real object is to see and understand the way a thing or event relates to other things or events” (Luria 1979). The scientific research process is a complex event. In order to unfold all these aspects, Luria termed his scientific approach “Romantic science”. It is perhaps misleading as his research and cases are deeply serious, as with the case of the soldier (The man with the shattered world), who despite a wound to the head heroically struggle to regain his mental faculties. But Luria wants to avoid mechanical scientific models when you are working with living facts, as it is working with person –level experiences and phenomenological observations. "Romantics in science want neither to split living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the wealth of life's concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves" (Luria 1979). We could argue that this case study, based on its exotic location, is a” Science of nostalgia”. However, a much more fitting term seems to be, as David A. Jopling terms this kind of investigation, “Sub-Phenomenology”. This term pertains to the act of dealing with the researcher’s and artist’s own reflective and interpretive strategies for authentic, first-person research, and how to use these findings in a context of communication and education. In conclusion, we can say that in order to be found and to find, you need to be lost, get lost, get unreal, to drift, to experience the world “As Found”. Bachelard explains: “By the swiftness of its action, imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be added a function of unreality, which is equally positive,….Any weakness in the function of unreality, will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.” (Bachelard 1994).

To invent and create something new you must steal, deconstruct, hijack, copy; and for that purpose “Détournement” and “Derivé” are your perfect tools, and together with David Colb’s learning system based on the four elements: Concrete experience, Observation of and reflection on that experience, Formation of abstract concepts based upon the reflection, and Testing the new concepts with the two Situationist key concepts of the psychogeography: Derivé and Détournement. It becomes a joyful exploration into the unknown, an experience of the design process from both the inside and outside, beneath and above. There is a broad field between art and design, one that we can approach from two diametrically opposite positions: from that of Colb and the situationists, with the intension of finding the spirit of place, as we now have the “tools” for initiating the design process. Furthermore, we can choose to approach the definition of place and non places, from the centre of mainstream spectacle, or we can explore the outer boundaries of the city, as “Artville” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; places on the margin, and use these places as constructive, critical vantage points looking at the central spectacle of society as we do in this case. These findings and experiments will continue for the rest of the year and will be used as introduction and concept for the “Artville” main project, at 1. semester, in the fall of 2010, at the Department of Architecture and Design Aalborg University, and at the exhibition “Play Your city 2”, at the Utzon Center, February 2011. Ole Pihl

NOTES: T.S.Eliot: “The Complete Poems & Play” Faber and Faber. 1969. p. 67-197.

Asger Jorn and Guy Debord: “Fin de Copenhague”. (End of Copenhagen) 1957, Permild and Rosengreen.

Simon Sadler: “The Situationist City” The MIT Press 1998. p.19.

Guy Debord “Report on the construction of Situations” Potlach New Series, No.1. Paris, July 1959. pp. 22-23.

Rob Shields: “Places on the Margin Alternative geographies of modernity”. Routledge. 1992. p.6 Guy Debord: “The Society of the Spectacle” Zone books. 1995. p.13. David A. Jopling: Human Studies 19: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996. p.153-173. Kolb. D. A. and Fry, R. “Toward an applied theory of experiential learning”. in C. Cooper (ed.) Theories of Group Process, London: John Wiley 1975. Marc Auge: “Non Places an introduction to supermodernity” Verso Books 1995. p.63-64. Alexander Luria: “The making of mind”. Trans. L. Solotaroff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (1979) p. 177. Gaston Bachelard: “The Poetic of Space”. Becon Press Boston. 1994. p.6. David A. Jopling: Human Studies 19: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996. p.153-173.