Laurits Elkjær / The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Architecture in Copenhagen interviewing Marco Casagrande.I am currently working on a large paper dealing with urban acupuncture. I understand that urban acupuncture is a strategy You have developed and would in this context ask You a few questions. If You have the opportunity to answer these, I will be both happy and grateful.
How do you as an architect define urban acupuncture?
Urban Acupuncture is cross-over architectural manipulation of the collective sensuous intellect within a city. City is viewed as a complex sensitive energy-organism, a living environment. Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature.
How do you use urban acupuncture to create architecture?
First you have to determine the sensitive flows of the built human environment. Based on those you have to determine the acupuncture points. The last is to determine what is the needle: architecture. The key to understand this is to be presents. To be truly present one has to give up, one has to be weak. To be present is the key of all art.
What are the benefits of using urban acupuncture?
Weakness and flexibility. Communicative action with the collective mind. Environmental sensitivity. Every grass growing through the concrete or asphalt pavement of an industrial city is urban acupuncture.
What requirements should an area meet if Urban acupuncture is to be used as a strategy?
Urban Acupuncture can be applied as networks to deal with a whole city or it can be used puctually in close quaters. If a city is undergoing some sort of an active process or transformation, UA is a good strategy to tune the direction. Acupuncture is good for hardness and industrial insensitivity. Hardness and strenght are death's companions. What has become hard will never survive. Urban Accupuncture can suggest the Dictatorship of Sensitivity.
What is your experience with the use of urban acupuncture? In what context? What were/are the expectations and what was the outcome?
A good case is the transformation process of the Treasure Hill settlement from an illegal urban farming community into a model example of ecologically sustainable urban living in Taipei. See: http://www.e-architect.co.uk/taiwan/treasure_hill_taipei.htm
The process locally was Urban Acupuncture tunning the direction of the collective Qi from destruction into construction and afterwards the whole legalized settlement acting as an acupuncture needle for the modern Taipei. I have been referring this process to the turning over of a compost - something that is considered to be the smelly and repulsive corner of the city suddenly becomes the most fertile top-soil and source of life.
How do you as an architect define urban acupuncture?
Urban Acupuncture is cross-over architectural manipulation of the collective sensuous intellect within a city. City is viewed as a complex sensitive energy-organism, a living environment. Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature.
How do you use urban acupuncture to create architecture?
First you have to determine the sensitive flows of the built human environment. Based on those you have to determine the acupuncture points. The last is to determine what is the needle: architecture. The key to understand this is to be presents. To be truly present one has to give up, one has to be weak. To be present is the key of all art.
What are the benefits of using urban acupuncture?
Weakness and flexibility. Communicative action with the collective mind. Environmental sensitivity. Every grass growing through the concrete or asphalt pavement of an industrial city is urban acupuncture.
What requirements should an area meet if Urban acupuncture is to be used as a strategy?
Urban Acupuncture can be applied as networks to deal with a whole city or it can be used puctually in close quaters. If a city is undergoing some sort of an active process or transformation, UA is a good strategy to tune the direction. Acupuncture is good for hardness and industrial insensitivity. Hardness and strenght are death's companions. What has become hard will never survive. Urban Accupuncture can suggest the Dictatorship of Sensitivity.
What is your experience with the use of urban acupuncture? In what context? What were/are the expectations and what was the outcome?
A good case is the transformation process of the Treasure Hill settlement from an illegal urban farming community into a model example of ecologically sustainable urban living in Taipei. See: http://www.e-architect.co.uk/taiwan/treasure_hill_taipei.htm
The process locally was Urban Acupuncture tunning the direction of the collective Qi from destruction into construction and afterwards the whole legalized settlement acting as an acupuncture needle for the modern Taipei. I have been referring this process to the turning over of a compost - something that is considered to be the smelly and repulsive corner of the city suddenly becomes the most fertile top-soil and source of life.
Link: UA
See also; Projet insolite en bambou
And I strongly recommend reading this interview of MC,
teasers to keep you interested; "flesh is more", "in grandmothers we trust"...
FLESH IS MORE
Marco Casagrande has been working with both Sami Riintala and prof. Chi which both is connected to BAS. Sami was our teacher under the shelter course in 2005, and in autumn 2007 I did a course with Chi on micro urbanism (www.microurbanism.net). (see the MICRO URBANISM BOOK" under other works on the left column of this page).
see also if you like;
Chamber of the Post-Urbanist
em Interior por Marco Casagrande
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