Note:
We are sorry to be unable to deliver the slides Mrs. Veikos and Mr. Mossessian used during their lecture. If some of you are very interested, then just mail us; in this case we will try to do something about it.

(Slide)

We are here together representing the Atelier 4 Architecture which has been operating since 1992 as a kind of virtual practice that basically telecommunications allows us to have. Even though architects are traditionally very capable of working in different cities or different places with different people, project or demanding must ? at a time other expertise than just architecture. We took the opportunity of a little recession in 1991/92 to step away a little from our inital professional practice that was essentially dealing with office buildings, and realizing with the society that office buildings did saturate the market in the 80s time was there available for reflection on the type of space and the type of needs that may occur in the 90s and what set of definition telecommunication could have or could bring to space. I am talking here about physical space. I like this slide that you have in front of you basically for the various impressions that you may have when you get on the internet or the net or anywhere dealing with a black screen that you may guess and strawl and walk around and all of a sudden something pops out to you, and your synapsis, part of your brain gets really exited, some kind of emersion comes and the contact is established. Firework acts have always a fascination. The mind and in a way the synapsis work very well with the body. There is a presentation happening and a current is going through. Like today: I think this conference is wonderful in a sense that it puts forth a condition of subsistence to these days, the one of being wired or the one of being connected, in order to keep a need for information and also for contacts and emotions to keep moving.

We could cover so much here, but we decided to limit ourselves to one project that we recently realized in Europe, in Mallorca on an island. Later on we are going to review the content and the principles that we developed here.

Before that two snapshots about a project we are conducting right now in the United States for the City of Detroit. It is a multi-media museum that deals with musicians that have the capacity to still make people dance and they decided that they should be remembered through a museum, a piece of architecture. Our challenge here is, that for architects there is still some type of fascination with the image, dealing with the imagination and how we can capture those musicians of the bodies that could make you dance as components of architecture. And here you see some renderings bringing an interactive process at the scale of the street, of screens and actually glass buildings, it is 48 feet wide, about less than 20 meters high, and could be programmed at a distance or activated as you walk through the museum, some silhouettes into the space that do actually control the visual impact of what is happening.

We have also been talking about virtual museums, but here our purpose as architects is to better define a living environment, a physical environment, in which we can interact with, considering that the power of the mind and the power of the network and the power of telecommunication has not to be proven at this point.

(Slide)

This project is about to happen. You may recognise the artist there, it is Diana Ross. I wouldn't say more than that, it is still in cooking process, where the architect is not supposed to announce what is really happening here. We will announce that to the world soon, but it is a little preview of the whole building.

(Slide)

We called the lecture "Waves and Harbours - a Network for Living, Working and Walking". Waves are the condition given by telecommunication as a vast ocean of activities, and harbors are the points in the world where we can anchor ourselves to a physical environment.

I am very pleased to have been invited to put together a proposal for the island of Mallorca.

The slide that you see is this beautiful part of Mallorca rural environment that used to be a farm and I think the challenge that is presented by telecommunities is to address this double condition - the kind of etherial waves and fields and zones and the real physical environment that we have before us, that is often very beautiful almost to the point of not wanting to touch it. This kind of double condition or double essence is really the nature of this project. We are trying to address this double nature in all our work, in other words we are trying to use the local richness and the local marks and tradition not in an aesthetic sense, but in a very essential sense, and also to address this layer that floats above, which represents the telecommunication capacity, that links this local area to the global network.

(Slide)

The context of the page that was given here was already inscribed written over the several centuries of peasants, that did wonderful use of the land given to them. It was not a question for us to bring in a new dimension or a new reality, it was not a question to bring in technology reality to Mallorca. It was not a question to bring in technology as a presence to invade and give a new way of being in Mallorca. Our page was already written, was already inscribed almost saturated with informations that had to be read and understood or guessed or misread, but had to be taken into consideration for our own intervention.

(Slide)

Here are some landscapes that many of us would love to design and to be able to produce, but this is the work of time, this is the work of nature and this was the work of the peasants that put all the knowledge for good use. The concept here was also to put and to introduce a new function of 10.000 inhabitants, dealing with telecommunication, dealing with new technologies, a new population imported of nomades passing by living there to be defined for another economy which cannot be agriculture anymore and could be different from what Mallorca is living of today, which is tourism. The problem that came through and with is that tourism brings tremendous profit for this part of the world, but is exhausting the natural resources of that same part of the world. So if we keep doing what they are doing to that part of the world, it will be a desert island within fifty years from now.

So this is really another phantasy for Mallorca, it is a real new project we had to come up with. It is trying to change the function and the vocation of the nature of the economy and for us an opportunity to say, this could be a place to work or this could be the place I choose to be because there is the sun, because it is beautiful and because we are going to keep the natural environment as it has been left by the peasants or the culture of Mallorca.

When we began the project we actually used the internet to send out a message, a question about what kind of community would a teleworker or any kind of worker like to be in. What you have before you are some of the responses we received about the nature of this telecommunity. Many People have presented conceptual projects about the telecommunity and talk about sites of the internet and I think the role of the architect is to try to give a spatial and physical component to this space: what is the nature of this site? How is it different from the café we have downstairs? How is that different from your home? I think a new typology needs to be addressed in the age of telecommunication.

(Slide)

We came up in a most provocative, but most low-tech way of addressing the question vis-a-vis the given material that we received from the government of Mallorca. We came up with a series of questions, but also that close to an action in a way of perceiving the nature of the problem here. We defined the position between different systems. The first layer was the one that limits territories and boundaries, which basically has been the way of defining space throughout our cultures and mostly European cultures and pretty much systematically through the work of the peasants. Also the military and politics and architects did formalize the nature of the land.

Next to that we superposed the concept that technology and telecommunication are not quite invisible. They are more likely to be transparent. I think first of all it is a very important distinction to ??? a technology so there can be none present as a physical entity, but doesn't have to be invisible because it does create a fear into your mind of having som power that you don't see. We prefer to say that this is a second layer that is transparent, but lets the existing condition to be.

(Slide)

These are really our three principles, the first one of which technology is transparent, the second one of which is nature, is culture and reading of the site through its lines and through the traces that were left by others on the site.

(Slide)

Next to the notion of waves, zones and fields was the second layer of transparency which basically is a capacity to be connected, activated and moved by further distances as long as there is something to go through. I am talking about this new world, this new configuration which we are going to evolve with no frontiers, no political ties or no barriers to communicate and interact and basically make a new economy within and throughout existing cultures. These define the point of crossing and will be and will have to be represented within existing conditions of what we call here the harbors of the world, but we are going to stay in Mallorca for the time being.

(Slide)

To be brief here, the definition of our work was very important to be understood to the local authorities and to the experts that came to this event, they were about fifty different experts in the jury that came to give their opinion on the project and to come out as one of the approaches to be selected by this jury was a great honor because there was really a lot of brains in this room where they presented these projects.

Those were the design principles. They did want to link or to lock our design to a specific site, but give more a set of directions, no rules, no formal definitions, a static system of formulation, but more a set of conditions that could be encountered in many other places. The ambition of the government is not only to treat one site, but to link Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and then, once that is configurated, obviously working with a network throughout the world. So other sites could happen, and our purpose was also to address the mediterranian culture and the conditions around the mediterranian basin. So what you see there: we are talking about the emergence of fields, which was basically going back to one of the first concepts which was the reading of the lines that were inscribed in the site. Obviously this knowledge of looking at existing conditions takes a lot of sensibility and time to detects the system of information we may receive from the fields, the lines, the walls, the existing structures. These approaches have also been developed in another project in an urban condition. Thinking of the traces or what is left is a component of what we can do with and translate is a different approach than for example not far away in the 60s when we were thinking, let's put down this stuff and start from the scratch. That started already with the wars when everything was down anyway. But what we are trying here today is to do with what we have, considering that we first of all don't need much more space to deal with.

(Slide)

This is a transcription of the site once we processed it. It is like a map for us to anchor out additions with the community. This is basically the master plan in a camouflaged way.

(Slide)

This is the final master plan. You see that there are different concentrations and different phases that all are organised with the intention of, well, we had to preserve the water, we had to preserve the ??? cars and we had to leave the nature, the impression of the topography and the fields predominant on the architecture, nevertheless we had to bring in 10.000 people there coming along with 30.000 cars. Once of the principle, each of the phases would be built with full accomodation to be able to drive to the site, because it is a bit islolated five minutes from the airport and five minutes from Palma, but to get to the sites, you see those fields and these became parking lots that actually are also water collectors under wines and plants and local vegetation along with a community of office buildings and a node that organize each of these phases which have this concept of cube.

(Slide)

I think the concept that is proposed by working at a distance is not only that you can work from your home or that you would choose to do so, but that you can choose to work from anywhere in the world that you like. The proposal of Mallorca was to sell their finest asset which is their environment, and the fact that you can work and be in nature. The concept and organization of our project was to maintain the essence of the nature of the site.

These are the three themes that interconnect and superimpose each other, but in a supplementary way rather than in a dichotomy. Technolgy and nature can exist and supplement each other and not be in opposition.

(Slide)

This is actually one of the phases that we will be starting with other then the central farm on the sites that will be first restored to be a telecommunication- or a telecenter, but the second action will be to bring the first community of workers providing what you see as a draft there, a series of office fields, at the state of the art what you need to work in an office environment along with a parking lot. This parking lot is not an old style environment, but a place where you leave the car, then you can start to walk through the site. That happens to be also a water collector, but you see the water system that we designed here later, and the node that is cut off from the top of the slide which has this concept of cube. The cube was initially designed for urban environments, which was a small node within the city for small entrepreneurs or self-employed people on the payroll. That reorganises the way you work but not necessarily by telework, but simply by being able to have a facility next to where you live where you can perform business transaction, meet people, simply do a xerox or start a fax or access the internet through a work station at the same time of being a pleasant place to meet. We are also in the process of putting the package in a more attractive way. It is basically a project for sale, but deals with the interactive café as well. So we are very pleased that there is one here, it is an electronic café, there is many of them being on the experimentation stage today, but there is definitely a need and the beauty of it. Being Parisian, I know that initially cafes have been a place of cultural exchange and communication. I know the Viennese have the same culture, they probably initiated that culture, and in Paris we probably took it from Vienna. We see that in America, there is a café for everything these days, there is a Hollywood café, there is a Rock'n Roll café, there is a Hard Rock café, everything is café. Obviously TV and phone and teleconferencing is not enough, people need to have a substitute or pretext to declare a physical need for each other. These nodes of cube here in Mallorca or in the city are definitely small entities, that are a service centre as well as being a café where you can gather information, but also knowledge of the local resources of where you are, for example if you need on office space you may rent it for an hour or for a week somewhere else, but it is a point where you always find the resources you may need, material or intellectual.

(Slide)

That shows a bit of the master plan that is dealing with the water. Mallorca has a problem with their water.

Bringing 10.000 people into a community entails lots of problems one of which is very grave for Mallorca is the issue of water. We were concerned that people coming to Mallorca wouldn't draw from the existing and rapidly depleting water table in Mallorca. What we introduced in the centre of our project is an ecological system for recycling water. The whole site would be treated as a water collector. The water that comes down from the mountains from the north-west across the site would be collected. All the buildings were also water collectors so that each building was self-sustaining. The Hyacinth as flowing plant has the capacity to draw toxins from the water. What you see in purple as a field are seven pools of flowing Hyacinth plants, that take the toxic water produced by the community and recycle it into the water table. This is a system that is already working in San Diego and we actually worked with consultants for the city of San Diego who put a similar system into place there.

(Slide)

This shows a little bit how that system works and what its capacities are.

You see the flowery there in a little square, this is actually a beautiful flower that blooms several times a year. In California they are doing it to toxic waste as well and they go to 90% drinkable purified water. For the last 10% it is a very expensive process. For drinking it is cheaper to buy the water, but 90% of the water recycled is plenty for all you need in the house and irrigation and all the water to sustain a community within itself, but here we are not talking about toxic water, we are talking about just grey waters. We are starting with a capital of water for ten thousand and try to keep it within and slowly the proposal here was to extend it to the whole Mallorca island, because they have this big concern since the water bed is under sea level at the peak season of tourism in August and salt water comes out of faucet, so it is really critical.

We were asked by these mega contractors to deal with this problem, because they had a big experience of water treatments in Spain. We explained to them the concept we were trying to work out, they said, it cannot be, that is impossible, you cannot do that. We explained, yes, it is possible, and I was bringing all the documentation from our consultants in California, and they said, well, maybe it is possible, but we cannot do it here. The problem was, that our engineering schools in Europe are training people to think engineering in a sense of using pipes, of using technology, machines - all these types of things that are very good for the economy. So they didn't like even the idea that this Hyacinth field is an ecological system that just needs about three years to tune up with nature. Yet you treat a lot of problems, mosquitos, plants. There are a lot of things to tune up with the environment and that takes a lot of patience and a lot of knowledge and some thinking how to resolve the problem.

So it was very interesting to talk with the contractors who didn't want to deal with that kind of system. I think there are definitely questions raised here with our perception of the economy. This is a very good example of how you could cheaply resolve problems we have, but somehow we are driven to go into business as usual. Let's use the big solutions that make great jobs somewhere else.

(Slide)

That system was also a good opportunity to make water gardens, which is a very high tradition in mediterranean basins. Below a shadow you see how the parking would be treated. We worked with a landscape architect from France as well, he has done parking lots with plants and water collection previously.

(Slide)

That is an image of the different fields we are dealing with. We were talking about the material way, with the computer screen below and then the natural perception of things.

(Slide)

In our presentation today we wish that you may have the scent of an orange coming out of these images. Basically what we wanted to preserve in Mallorca is to go to work there, putting out an orange of your garden before getting in the internet. The scent of an orange was like a motivation to try to convince that it is possible to create a working environment over there.

(Slide)

Thank you !