Lecture date: 2006-01-17
Sub-urbanism could be described as a design experiment which holds the site as the matrix in which the programme is to be deciphered. Super-urbanism, by contrast, is an attempt literally to invent the site through the manipulation of programme. The contemporary hero of Super-urbanism is Rem Koolhaas, and Delirious New York its key text. For several reasons, Sub-urbanism has not yet found such a hero or leader and has not produced a text to rival Koolhaas’s ‘retroactive manifesto’.
Sebastien Marot seeks to illustrate the idea that any landscape is made of a dense fabric of tales, representations and constructions, and that every building project is a poem composed in that three- (or four-) dimensional page saturated with real and virtual constructs. Marot is a critic in architecture and design. He is an associate professor at both the Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Valle and the Institute of Architecture in Geneva, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell.
