spaces of passage
mihai stanescu

translated by mihaela militaru

< summary

spaces of passage zero
URBAHN(germ)=ancient road /a path used in mythical times…Urban, <Urbahn>,
Significant resemblance, the creation of discourse accompanying a non-animated entity; ancient road connected with the derogation of the spatial–temporal perception; the opposite of the ROYAL PATH, the intricate, labyrinthine road, orphic in essence (but more in form), the meta–road.

The sons of Israel promised not to divert from their course across the Amoreis’ fields and vineyards and to follow the royal path leading to the Promised Land. Only the lack of truth causes derogation from the path. The road’s germination takes place between shortcuts and loops, through the senses: labyrinths, crossings of minor roads, some of them without issue, cul–de-sacs that are however full of unimagined treasures.

The growing of the Ego into life through the continuous passage towards the Self-older-than-life, the reaching of the gates, the spirals of learning the URBAHN’s metaphor-experience present from beyond time, transgressing and using it as a meaningful cue undetectable to an ordinary perception.

URBAHN =a palimpsest-reality, adapted to any kind of discourse referring to the city, life in a community space; IN-concept, OUT-consensus, a non-paradigm, a circus of acrobats and flame swallowers that have visited our Inside Town.

spaces of passages- one
The City. Each going out from our home sweet home faces us with an avalanche of perceptible/imperceptible messages, received from all peripheries of our contacts with the “foreign “world, with otherness. Add to this the impact of the city environment – an indefinite monster with numerous whispered voices, roars, whistles and onomatopoeias. We protect our interior tranquility as much as we can, although it is also mixed with outside noises, but exactly when laying down our defenses something immediately interacts with us, forcing us to take decisions supposed to be expressions of our whole. And after a while we find ourselves trapped into a mäelstrom of receiving and transmitting, of action and shaded refusal. We re-discover ourselves and we learn new things about us over and over again throughout the Brownian movement or the clearly motivated one. Her only quality, seen, wanted and expected by us is the persistence of future inactivity. As if we had to cross a zebra having the length of the day itself, bearing in mind the thought of reaching the end, the opposite sidewalk.

Our disappearance in the urban: a double acknowledgement. First of all, acknowledging our personal status of social actors, contributors to the enlargement of the entropy, small creators seizing the favorable conditions offered by the Big City. The pleasure of meeting other people, by its ceaseless appeal to certain social norms shared by the whole community, makes us feel safety. The fight inside us every time we meet/depart from someone spotted accidentally in the street, at the coffee shop, in the libraries… The need to awake our senses that have forgotten long time ago our primal undistinguished peace, the peace towards which we run, sometimes at paroxysmal speeds.

Hence the second acknowledgment of a general but not abstract nature: acknowledging the exterior, the urban space built outside us that we interpret/live daily, as a whole, as a structural unity impressing us, generating the idea of MESSAGE. This piece of information finds connections with what intrinsically populates us in a painfully clear manner and in a frightening ambiguity. Paul Valéry, in his book “La Crise de l’Esprit“ perceived this candid and continuous violation of the interior space by the public one as identification:
“…and I tell myself that in our soul there are streets, crossroads and cul-de–sacs. On the one hand there are gloomy corners and areas we should avoid and on the other hand we posses magnificent and sacred areas. Our soul conceals tombs which seem to comprise the monuments of our victories and the high edifices of our conceit. And we know that in our Interior Fortress, where every moment is a step of our life, a ceaseless activity gives birth to good and evil, truth and lie, beauty and grotesque, all being contradictions specific to mankind, creating mankind, assembling themselves and creating such a powerful contrast in a capital“.


 
spaces of passage– two
Narwhals. The statement according to which town planning cannot longer exist, at least not in the way modernism perceives it, has left room for indefinite and unlimited criticism. The city’s definitions cannot longer be restricted to urban discourse. They have become divergent and they generate attitudes varying from “the nitzschean frivolity “stated by R.M.Koolhas, to an equally constructive refusal to acknowledge the crisis as a modulation point in the relations between urban creators or professionals and beneficiaries.

Can the city be still considered, respecting the terms of this debate, as a compact conglomerate endowed with significance? Simplifying, can we still talk about an integral perception of the urban message?

The message covers a variety of psychological realities designated in the current language by such words as: fear, spleen, stress etc. The message is a sequence of units of sense in specific connections. The city as a perceived message has been so far a concomitance of units of sense anchored to the quays attributed to the community norms.

All of a sudden, the city’s inhabitants and constructors became aware of the tearing into significant units, functional and artistic patterns in areas of a maximum rush vs. areas of limit, marginal, even dangerous. If the town was so far centered, the expression of the father–state (through administrative, educational, religious areas, with a pillar like value), the enlargement of the communication possibilities and the immediate globalization generated a decentralization, a reevaluation of its components. This brought to the coagulation of these units of sense, of the groups of buildings in the city.

And thus appeared the narwhals, groups of buildings that, besides their mainly esthetic and functional purpose, promote a series of messages which although considered as auxiliary tend to become essential in their relation with occasional receivers. It is the case with the fluorescent lighting placed in the most important squares, the huge hoarding on the apartment buildings and even the banners stretched above thoroughfares. These parasites tend to unify, aggressively and without any selection, places, and buildings that didn’t have anything in common before.

The fluorescent lighting of company Q, through its rigorous location, will make sure that is noticed by the majority of people and such fluorescent lighting can be seen both inn financial and traffic centers. You can see them even around your own house as to remind the individual a conditional structure defining its supposed needs. This is the narwhal’s tusk, pricking and having as streamers the commercial messages. It establishes a communication between spaces by the simple association of brands.

The same goes for hoardings – physically unifying apartment buildings and institutions in an avalanche of light and color – and banners – bridges without a beginning and without an end, hanging parachutes, narwhal tusks suspended in the void. A similar situation and perhaps the most frustrating one is the boulevard marked by commercials of the same product. It creates the feeling of following the road to that product’s Paradise.

The multitude of daily temptations, directly/indirectly caused by advertising, appears as groups of narwhals in the season of mating …whereas we appear as a fertile ground for the madness of the senses.

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