page: [1] 

Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty

Dan Graham, Tony Oursler & Laurent P. Berger

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna

Partners : Japanther + Chicks On Speed

November 16th, 2010 to April 16th, 2011

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Ça va, a prefabricated movie theater

Berger&Berger

Arsenale, Venice, Italy

2010

95 m2

Prefabricated movie theater for 80 people

"People meet in architecture," 12th International Architecture Exhibition,
La Biennale di Venezia
Curator: Kazuyo Sejima

Technical managers: François Gaultier-Lafaye, Clément Arnoux

With the support of: Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea – Venezia,
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, ThyssenKrupp Elevator,
CULTURESFRANCE, Ministère de la culture et de la communication,
Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France à Rome,
Alain Resnais et Ciné Mag Bodard, Lux, DCTP Info & Archiv, Garvan acoustic.

The prefabricated theater resembles a selected array of pieces, showing films
and videos created by invited artists and questioning the notion of space,
of fictional narrative, of architecture and temporality.

The film program is curated by Berger&Berger.

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10:15 Man with No Name – Wang Bing (2009)
11:50 Brutalitat in Stein – Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni (1961)
12:05 Rodakis – Olaf Nicolai (2007)
12:20 La Vallée Von Uexkull – Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni (2009)
12:55 Design for a Fair The United States at Expo'67 – Peter Chermayeff (1968)
13:05 Nummer acht – Guido Van Der Werve (2007)
13:20 Gehry's vertigo – Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine (2010)
13:25 Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl) – Mario García Torres (2005)
13:35 Barely midnight – Robert Cantarella (2009)
13:45 Hotel Palindrome – Bernd Behr (2006)
13:55 Interiors – Ursula Mayer (2006)
14:00 Marquise – Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (2007)
14:10 Single Wide – Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler (2002)
14:45 Je t'aime, je t'aime – Alain Resnais (1968)
16:15 Syndromes and a Century – Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2007)

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Le déclin du jour

Berger&Berger

Marché Couvert, Metz, France

2010

City of Metz, France

Structural Engineer : Bollinger + Grohmann (France)

The advent of artificial light, which grew strongly during XXst century,
has gradually freed the man from the natural rhythms of the day and night
and allowed him to redefine the world around him. Evolution lighting technologies
- from the oil lamp to the fluorescent tube, passing through the incandescent
light bulb - has gradually lengthened our standby time, so that we can say
without exaggeration that our society "never sleeps". If the modern project was
to extend the day and its activities during the night, overnight, without interruption,
we want with this project, promptly reverse this phenomenon.
We do not postulate for the return of the pre-modern night, but rather the night
of the beginning of modernity. If the "perversion" of the natural night by artificial
light is inevitable, we want to preserve the qualities of its disparate atmospheres,
those that contemporary homogeneous over-lighting impoverishes.
This is altering the modern night by reintroducing quality that lighting systematic
cities wiped out : heterogeneity.

A "lamp" consisting of sixty four fluorescent sources, replaces the multitude
of sources that currently illuminates uniformly the square.
This public space is redefined according to the illuminance of 1500 lux under
the "lamp" to 5 lux at the end of the square.

Initially envisaged in 1762, as the Episcopal Palace, the building designed
by architect Jacques Francois Blondel became a market in 1831.
Designed to enhance the great classical portal of the cathedral of Metz,
the market, classical building, seems not be expected for a particular function.
Almost abstract architecture, religious palace - civil market, multiple successive
uses have been affected.

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The light source, placed asymmetrically in the length, width and height
of the square, enlighten unevenly in every way. Associated with the specific
production of "parasols", this source will increase the disparity of public space
defined by dark areas and bright areas. The "parasols" which will alternately
house a variety of diurnal uses and nocturnal uses.
Our project seeks to introduce new unexpected uses in public space.

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Miss Julie

by August Strindberg

Set, costume, light design : Laurent P. Berger

Shizuoka, Japan

2010

SPAC, Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, Japan

Director : Frédéric Fisbach

A blank space for 3 actors and 15 residents of Shizuoka that can literally eat,
drink, sleep in an uninterrupted modern architecture.

With Miki Takii, Asuka Fuse, Kazunori Abe

Chorus members : Yasuyuki Miyashita, Miyuki Yahata, Hitomi Kushida, Namiko
Sugiura, Benoit Résillot, Sota Narita, Tsubasa Kamiyama, Nobuto Nakamura,
Yoshie Akiyama, Shinji Takojima, Yuki Sato,Yoichi Wakamiya, Koji Murakami,
Miwa Aoshima, Takahisa Yonekawa, Yoneji Ouchi

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Hidden Land

Laurent P. Berger

Metz, France

2010

Nuit Blanche Metz

Hidden Land, is an illuminated sign, the reading of which is postponed is made
of 76 fluorescent white tubes suspended in the exhibition space. Each fluorescent
flickers in a random manner for nearly 4 minutes, until the light stabilizes
for 30 seconds. It is then possible to read the words, "Hidden Land"
in the arrangement of the fluorescent tubes. The rapid flickering then restarts,
beginning a new cycle.
The spectator is first and foremost offered a direct, physical experience
in the presence of a suspended present tense, which is made apparent
for 30 seconds, as the landscape in which the object and the visitor are located,
is given a name. Hidden Land names a space and an exacerbated present,
that is literally deployed, produced in the reality of the demonstration space.
The spectator wanders, waits, slips into the duration of the flickering lights,
submitting him or herself to the unknown spectral cycles.

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Insulary Furnitures

Cyrille Berger

Partner : Team Ghost

Fort du Luxembourg, Metz, France

2010

Nuit Blanche Metz

Insulary Furnitures is a performance done by a "dispersed" group of musicians.
The "set" lasts 50 minutes, a standard "set" which is standard in every respect
but one that usually played in concert.
The project is to divide geographically the stage by each member of the group
that does not hear and will not see their partners.
The public has no access to the garden where the musicians play. The audience
must go around the garden to see each of them and hear the amplified sound
of each instrument isolated respectively depending on the position
of the musicians.
During the second half of the XXth century, the development of techniques
of sound recordings have increasingly isolated during the recording sessions,
musicians from each other, thereby subverting the "natural" qualities of the group
or ensemble of musicians.
If a current trend sees musicians reconnect with a miking system more "natural"
where they are together again in the same space, the Insulary Furnitures
performance is a perversion of the "traditional" concert which is played,
usually in groups and soundtrack in "chorus".
By spatially separating both transmission and reception of each sound emitted
by the instruments, the quality of the music itself is affected.
The space that separates the musicians affects both the nature of the issue
than the reception of music.

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City Visions Europe : Superterritorialised soil

Berger&Berger

Kosice, Slovakia ; Bordeaux, France

2009-2010

Architectural and Urban Design Research

The Berlage Institute – Centre for Architectural Research & Development
(Rotterdam, Netherlands), with the Centre for Central European Architecture
(Prague, Czech Republic), the Flemish Architecture Institute (Antwerp, Belgium),
MMMechelen (Mechelen, Belgium), Arc en rêve - Centre d'architecture
(Bordeaux, France).

Reconsidering the notion of territory and architecture from the viewpoint of climate
we acknowledge that the intranquility and incertitude of climate have replaced
urban convictions, thereby reconfiguring our relationship to the physical world,
nature and territory. In fifty years, taking into account current global warming
trends in Europe, a geographical movement from south to north will occur.
This phenomenon will appear as a rise in temperature of several degrees
and a change in relative humidity levels, slowly transforming the climate type.
According to the CNRM ARPEGE Climate model and the Hadley Centre model,
Kosice could have a climate analogous to that of Tirana or even Istanbul.
Other scenarios suggest instead the possible cooling of a part of Europe, known
as the "golf stream shut down scenario". The IPCC believe it is very likely that
the Gulf Stream will slow down during the XXIst Century: since the cold polar wind
is stopped by the Gulf stream, this deceleration will have a cooling effect on
the European region.
Consequently Bordeaux could have the same climate as Montreal.
As an architect, it is less about designing for one or other of these scenarios but
rather to use this incertitude to create urban, rural and architectural environments
that are sufficiently undetermined that they are able to adapt to unforeseeable
changes.
We speculate that geography, or more precisely the environment, is the root
cause of the different architectural inventions.

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This model considers the influence of culture, technology or religion as fixed
variables. The only real changeable variable is and remains geography :
the creation and invention of urban, rural and architectural forms emerge from
ecological, climatic and geographic needs and constraints.
Geopolitical and economic decisions do not predetermine the apparition of these
forms, but are instead contained in this question of landscape.
The politics of territorial organization (transport, energy provision and waste
disposal) no longer fit within local geopolitical networks and the concept
of the physical division of territories into autonomous entities is again called into
question.
Today the question of territory as an incarnated area can be no longer seen in
only a cultural and historical dimension. The climatic dimension takes its position
and begins to participate in the definition of the heterogeneous context.
Thus appear the above-ground determinants of territory, such as the quality of air,
light or water, and those of the soil, physical, chemical or fluid mechanical.
Our urban proposals are integrated in the site using and inflecting the specificities
of climate and energy. The proposal is not a static object created by history,
but a dynamic and evolving, macroscopic and microscopic, created by both
climate and physiological elements.
It is a strategy that operates simultaneously on territory, city and interior space.
These ecological processes are both a goal and a means of reinventing
an architectural language, its form, its uses and its functions.
This allows the architecture to determine landscapes while liberating it
of representation and symbol. This methodology will permit new situations
to emerge, new social practices and new political interpretations.
The social, cultural, political and aesthetic potentials relating to the concept
of the "plan libre" created by Le Corbusier were contingent with the development
of reinforced concrete. Would Le Corbusier have imagined the concept
of "plan libre" without invention of this new technique ?
We postulate that from prosaic sustainable techniques there might emerge new
landscapes and new forms as well as unforeseen uses.
The urban strategy we set up here for both cities, Bordeaux and Kosice,
is an example of this principle. The urban form and the uses it renders possible
are the unexpected consequences of physiological needs and geographical
realities : that of heating and climatising infrastructures using soil energy
(geothermal sources) and above-ground energy (wind and sun).

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City Visions Kosice : Superterritorialised soil

Berger&Berger

Kosice, Slovakia

2009-2010

Architectural and Urban Design Research

The Berlage Institute – Centre for Architectural Research & Development
(Rotterdam, Netherlands), with the Centre for Central European Architecture
(Prague, Czech Republic), the Flemish Architecture Institute (Antwerp, Belgium),
MMMechelen (Mechelen, Belgium), Arc en rêve - Centre d'architecture
(Bordeaux, France).

Our project for the city of Kosice proposes an above-ground network that would
provide sufficient electricity, heating and water to support the new housing
in addition to the existing city. The Kosice region has important geothermic
sources that can support the energy requirements of both the city
and its extension.
Revolutionary structural changes will be needed as worldwide energy
consumption mounts as a result of an increase in population and living standards.
In response to the greater impact on the environment (especially the threat
of climate change caused by the greenhouse effect) and decreasing reserves
of fossil fuels, other sources will be required. For Slovakia, which is extremely
poor in fossil fuels, the prospect of such an evolution should provide strong
motivation for more intensive utilization of sustainable energy sources, especially
solar and geothermal energy. The simple, direct use of geothermal heat
in the District Heating Network (DHN) is not a feasible way of replacing
the existing CHP plant within current economic circumstances, due to its low
efficiency. However geothermal energy could be utilized within a system
that combines heat and power production, rather than only direct utilization
in the DHN. The combined heat and power production would not be limited to,
but significantly supported by, geothermal heat. The use of hybrid CHP plants
with the simultaneous use of fossil and geothermal sources can be done using
existing machinery, but a special design for the planned gas-steam cycle seems
to be desirable.

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Optimized integration of the secondary geothermal heat carrier into the system
of combined heat and power production in a gas-steam cycle based cogeneration
unit and into the DHN could lead to very intensive utilization of its enthalpy,
and also to a reduction in the consumption of primary energy. At the same time,
huge heat losses or an accumulation of them in the earth's crust will be utilized
and the working life of the geothermal wells will be extended to public uses such
as baths. These would be dispersed randomnly across the site from north to south
and range between 42 and 15°C.
Kosice, as with all of Slovakia has substantial ground water. For many years
people used to take care of the mineral springs so that every passer-by could
have a drink, but many such springs have been seized for the development
of curing spas. In some of them it is the mud of the groundwater that cures,
in others its temperature or the minerals it draws from the earth's depths.
An example are the dropstone caves in which modern diseases such as asthma
and allergies have been releived. Our project seeks to reintroduce outdoor baths
in a contemporary way, as public squares in a sensual relationship with the local
milieus.
The eastern part of the site along the river Hornàd is composed of individual
houses running from north to south.
Our project follows the principle of the palladian 9-square grid as a sustainable
contemporary system that can be adapted to varying climate changes.
Each of the houses is composed of 9 squares, articulated differently depending on
their position within the block. This proposal looks to maximise the use of passive
above-ground energy. Taking advantage of solar gain in winter a trombe wall
constitutes the south facade of the wind tower, heating the air within. This warm
air moves by means of the natural depressions created by the strategic
positioning of patios and is circulated according to the requirements of one
or more volumes of the houses.
During the summer the wind approaches primarily from the north, cooled by
the vegetal expanse that forms the forests to the north of the city.
By means of the wind tower the wind cools the grid and is expired by the patios.
The palladian division of space allows for autonomous spaces and a variation
of climatic quality during a single season.
An aim and environmentally-friendly means of defunctionalizing the traditional
planning of housing, it ultimately allows for a free interpretation of usage, driven
by the fluctuating climate within the grid.
Indeed the systematic partitioning of space into regular squares of the same size
permits the housing to be composed primarily of a series of micro-climates.

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Existing industrial equipments and infrasructures are kept as programmatic
potentials.
Given the amount of speculation and the demand for land, our project attempts
to put in place a strategy that maintains one part of the city undeveloped.
We propose a collective urban park that contrasts with the individual and intimate
private spaces within the housing area. Creating direct relationships between
the public and the private, the collective and the individual, the common
and the intimate, creates both tension and closeness within each. We firstly
assigned a technical role to the park in order to better defunctionalize the use
of the park itself : a strategy that exemplifies a new spatial organisation without
hierarchy.
Traditionally urban industrial equipment that pollutes the environment is set up
downstream from the dominant winds, creating an organisation and zoning
strategy that precipitates a social hierarchy, social and geographical,
within the city. The new "clean" industrial equipment allows for a more free urban
organisation to emerge, de-functionalized and without hierarchy, allowing for
varying amenities within a single urban fabric. The de-functionalization of the urban space is the interruption of the usual order,
business, transport, work, and specialization.
Paradoxically, this project consists of the conservation of the brown field :
by means of giving it an ecological function it can be left almost untouched by any
design. Rather than being predetermined by planning, anything that happens
will be the outcome of chance. In this way, nature may be formed by whatever
spontaneous use is made of the sites, by the fly-over geothermal network, bath,
wind, sunshine, shadow and vegetation. It is a biotope slightly perverted by
the micro-climate that the geothermal pipes would create as a collateral effect
of the sustainable development of the city.
It is an urban park as a brown field that has not been designed.
Anything is possible and nothing is to be expected.

Team : Jean-Sébastien Lebreton, Sarah Baldous, Jean Philippe Sanfourche.

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City Visions Bordeaux : Superterritorialised soil

Berger&Berger

Bordeaux, France

2009-2010

Architectural and Urban Design Research

The Berlage Institute – Centre for Architectural Research & Development
(Rotterdam, Netherlands), with the Centre for Central European Architecture
(Prague, Czech Republic), the Flemish Architecture Institute (Antwerp, Belgium),
MMMechelen (Mechelen, Belgium), Arc en rêve - Centre d'architecture
(Bordeaux, France).

When considering the reduction of energy consumption by replacing fossil fuels
with ecological alternatives, the paradox is that the more sustainable a building,
the more it is isolated from its environmental context.
The Modernist preoccupation with a spatial continuity between inside and outside
throughout the XXth century, eventually resulted in overcoming these
categorisations, binding and confusing them. Today the Earth itself,
its atmosphere and surface strata, has been transformed into artifice by human
activity, as exemplified by the phenomena of pollution and global warming.
During the course of the XXth century the generalization of heating during
the winter and cooling during summer in addition to uninterrupted and systematic
artificial lighting in cities and countryside, has liberated the environment from
an alternating and random cycle of cold and heat, night and day. Today, the goal
of modernism has basically been reached, that of an atmospheric homogenisation
of climate and time, but it can be perverted by using the very tools
and technologies that have enabled its standardization.
If the external environment is now artificial, we speculate on the supernatural
rather than the natural, that no longer exists.
This project produces interior landscapes, where vegetation, geological,
and climatic circumstances are established by a new nature of architecture.

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Our project for Bordeaux follows this artificialization of environment and territory,
not in the sense of creating a uniform atmospheric continuum, but rather
by creating heterogeneity, ruptures in the monotony of modern landscapes
of peri-urban Bordeaux.
Given the rapidly changing climate and increasing soil pollution, we assume
a necessary repackaging of the land that constitutes the Bordeaux vineyards.
We propose to set up soiless wine-growing cultures on several sites with varying
identities:
9 atmospheres modify the nature of the climate at each site articulated along
the "rocade".
9 atmospheres, like the different conjugations of the qualities that define
the Bordeaux vineyards : the mineralogical nature of soil, sunlight, humidity
and temperature. Many qualities are artificially propagated and become alocal
"natural" or at a minimum a less corrupt variation than the current external
environment in which the vineyards are cultivated.
Compared to traditional soil cultivation, this provides a far more satisfactory
ecological balance, reducing water eutrophication, acidification, soil toxicity
and human toxicity and allows for a reduction of atmospheric ozone.
New building technologies, linked to durable development, allow for new
architectural natures to emerge and among them greenhouses.
Our project seeks to exploit the physical qualities of a greenhouse,
and the phenomenon with which it shares it name, the greenhouse effect.
This new generation of greenhouse both captures and utilizes thermal energy.
Indeed the amount of thermal energy captured in the course of a year is double
of that required for heating in winter. The principle is that during winter
the greenhouse is warmed by the hot water heated the previous summer
and stocked in a warm water stock. During the summer, the greenhouse is cooled
by the cold water collected during the preceding winter and stocked in a cool
water stock. During the summer, one feels comfortable crossing this internal
landscape, cooled by the by-products of the past winter, a season six months
passed.
During the winter, one is inversely warmed by the heat of the summer before.
This architecture exacerbates the modern seasonal shift phenomena :
the greenhouse acts as jet-lag architecture.
As a final attempt to naturalize a recontextualized territory, the proportion of land
farmed on different soils within a "natural" environment is respected.
The area is a vacant open space for uses indefinite and uncertain.

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We are not attempting with this project to conserve a threatened environment,
as with the ultimate avatar of Fuller's megastructuralist dome, we aim rather
to produce a new environment that is no longer an application of function
but rather a continuum of new sensations and practices in an environment where
artificial and natural merge. Post-modernity has produced public places frozen
in the image of architectural forms which in their time subscribed to an urban
logic, tied to its functions and uses. The functions at the origin of these forms
have disappeared and the reproduction of such spaces are unable to give rise
to customs: thus these tedious public spaces have been abandoned
by the inhabitants. We propose the invention of new forms of collective and public
spaces, places of undefined function capable of establishing a more sensual
and less frustrated relationship with territory.
These emerge as a consequence rather than a prerequisite of making a place
where function meets ecological, geographical and physiological needs.

Team : Jean-Sébastien Lebreton, Sarah Baldous, Jean Philippe Sanfourche,
Lucy Winterstyles and Mustapha Majid.

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Centre Pompidou Mobile

Berger&Berger

Partner : Thomas Raynaud

2009 Restricted competition

1800 m²

Mobile art museum

CNAC GEORGES-POMPIDOU, France

Structural Engineer : Bollinger + Grohmann (France)
Mechanical Engineer : Alto Ingénierie (France)

The grid as a source of variability.
In using the grid the idea was not simply to optimize the schematic composition
in an economy of space, but rather to affirm its validity and continuity regardless
of program and function.
The grid here is not necessarily constructive, but a formal expression of spatial
extension. The Centre Pompidou Mobile project is a shifting structure, without
center, hierarchy, or periphery. Its boundaries are those defined by the program.
Our project is an abstract space, neutral and free of iconographic connotation.
It is a geometric space that does not attempt to create an anecdotal or figurative
relation to the landscape.
Instead it is a space that seeks to build on the physical, seasonal and climatic
qualities of the different locations where it will be installed.
An abstract architecture where space is defined as an availability of uses.
The rationalization and economy of space assigns the architectural project
to a minimum form. If the grid is more significant than ever in Superstudio's
projects, it now becomes the tool of a widespread displacement.
An "indifferent architecture", it guarantees changing environments of varying
quality.
The grid not only accepts but is enriched by any logic of exhibits and stage sets.
Ironically it rejects any notion of uniform space and deviates from the temptation
of the figurative or symbolic.

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This produces a new museum landscape. An "a-figurative" structure that becomes
a locus for the production of a variety of scenarios generated by an infinity
of moods.
It is an "a-representative" architecture that does not seek to be a sign but which
could ultimately become one. It is a space that can dissolve the natural, artificial,
form and function into an ever-changing environment. This will permit multiple
uses and varying scenic interpretations to emerge. The project develops an
architecture beyond any formalism or subjective expression.
It is an architectural style which allows for the articulation of spaces that are
identical in surface (6x6m) but qualitatively unique (light, volume, temperature ...).
If for the architect Peter Eisenman the grid was a way to enhance the spatial
configurations in the most effective way with regards to a given program,
here the grid does not serve only to optimize functional spaces. It also creates
breaks, voids, a-functional spaces, pathways and unexpected scenes :
unpredictable uses for the mobile museum.
This project provides for an infinite number of spatial qualities, without prejudicing
their programmatic value. It is the setting in abyss of the museum :
there are as many museums as cubes. The mobile museum is no longer a simple
museum but a collection of museums. The loss of any reference to the external
or vanishing point paradoxically leads to an indeterminacy of museum program
and territory, supported by a stretch that is open to the fluctuating local climate.
What matters here is the search for variability and not the quest to the modularity.
This is an architecture designed as the architecture of relationships, free of any
distance or authority of representation.
The grid becomes achieves a new status : it is the tool of a qualitative expansion,
tool of decomposition and reconstruction.

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Ghost Town

Berger&Berger

2009

Libelle, Alexandra Baudelot, ROSASCAPE

A2-sided printed on synthetic paper Polyart.

Ghost Towns is a map of the world in the negative. Geographically and through
various tales, the project reveals the lost cities reminiscent of our civilization's
ancient and recent history. It is a map with neither function nor use :
the non-exhaustive accumulation of over a thousand cities documented
by individuals or groups. To this day, no government organization
has documented a global survey on the subject.
A fall in economic activity, loss of natural resources, isolation, withdrawal
of communication lines, natural, military or industrial catastrophe, government
expropriation, war, massacre, are some of the numerous scenarios leading
to abandoned homes and the arrival of ghost towns.
Ghost Towns identify which cultures give rise to the myth of the ghost town.
Certain continents contain numerous abandoned towns, while others appear
to be exempt from them, though one can easily suppose that every continent
is touched by the phenomenon. In particular, lost city mythology can be found
more strongly anchored in Occidental and Anglo-Saxon cultures.
Ghost Towns was created in the context of the Libelle project, in the form
of 30 numbered and signed copies printed in A2 format, and 1300 copies
were made widely available, and included an enriching text written by Marc Augé.
The signed copies as well as the freely available works were printed on synthetic
Polyart paper and published by Rosascape.
For the Suspended Space exhibiton in Amiens, 1500 supplementary copies
were printed in the French language, in addition to an unprecedented, large
format edition.

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La maison des grands lacs

Berger&Berger

Partner : Thomas Raynaud

Lac des Settons, France

2009

700 m²

Refurbishment of a house

Structural & Mechanical Engineer : GMGB (France)

"La maison du garde", constructed in the XXth century, initially housed those
responsible for the construction site of the Settons Lake dam.
This building, which will shelter a new program, need not be modified structurally,
but in its relationship to the environment.
It is a matter of treating "La maison du garde" and its annexes with the same
environmental demand. The idea is to envision, without hierarchy, the ensemble
of existing constructions as an architectural heritage which needs to be reinforced
climatically (thermal, watertightness). Thus, to consider, without folklore
or nostalgia, the buildings as architectural structures capable of containing
all the programs extended to the scale of the landscape, with which they engage
in a climate exchange.
The gallery, we propose, envelopes the annexed ruins. This "between two"
constitutes a preheated space, a thermal "plug".
This ambiguous space is an interior landscape to which few natural qualities
of climate are removed : the wind (windows) and rain (the roof). It is a natural,
"domestic" environment preserved by its central heating system and freed
with artificial lighting. The accidental topography of the surface is conserved.
This location constitutes an intermediary territory between a humid forest
and vernacular, artificially air-conditioned architectural structures.
The paradox of contemporary eco-friendly constructions resides in the fact
that more they are "cut off" from their environment, without "chemical" and natural
climate exchanges with their territory, more they are competitive.

page:  [2] 

Our project responds both to the economic necessity of the consumption
of fossil fuels, and the need to produce spaces open to the landscape
and the environment in a relationship that goes beyond that of simple visual
perception.
The idea is to experience the landscape through its temperature, by accepting
the thermal fluctuations of the seasons and the natural cycle of light
– that of the rise and fall of the sun.
Our project aims to produce a multitude of environments and qualities of climate,
by accepting the new environmental rules of contemporary construction.
It generates alternative, "non standard" spaces in less controlled environments.
Our desire is to produce a singular, spatial quality for the lack of a "modern"
standardized comfort.
A space of unstable climate and topography. Alternatives to the homogenous
climate within modern spaces are possible, and capable of renewing
a more sensual and less "frustrated" relationship with territory.
This project is not the symbolic representation of a landscape or a region,
but the physical presentation of both, through the sensuality of its environment.
A program whose uses are seasonal, can thus accept the absence of an interior,
permanent atmosphere temperature.
"La maison du garde", is not the creation of a multi-purpose space, but that
of a location through which users will migrate according to the seasons
and meteorological fluctuations.
Our intervention offers to "make do with" everything, while producing spaces,
"beyond" the physical limits of the existing buildings.

page: [1] 

The Prophecy

Berger&Berger

2008

CENTQUATRE, Etablissement artistique de la ville de Paris, France

Partners : Yves Tenret, Emilien Tessier, Chloé

The Prophecy is the creation of an ephemeral community, which gathers
for the duration of a narrated story. One such project, Une île paradisiaque est
un spectacle artificiel, has been underway at CentQuatre (Paris). The different
architectural structures produced for this Parisian institution are presented here
in the form of short stories. The idea is not to represent, but to present – not
through fact, but through fiction. A novel for every architectural piece made
of floating practices and unknown destinies. This series of stories assigned to
the writer, Yves Tenret, appears in this "reading salon" under the form of "reading
performances". The architectural structure which hosts visitors is a small theater
constituting a single seat for roughly thirty spectators.
A form of insular architecture at rest - deaf and of questionable use.

December Thursday 18th La fonction utopique 40 ans après
19:00 Heart Break Hotel novel
20:00 Roundtable : Jean Louis Violeau (sociologist), Berdaguer & Pejus (artists)

December Friday 19th Archéologies du futur
19:00 Big Sleep Room novel
20:00 Roundtable : Yves Tenret (author), Stéphane Magnin (artist)

December Saturday 20th Art et institution, peut-on rêver de nouveaux lieux ?
15:00 Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse novel
16:00 Heart Break Hotel novel
17:00 Roundtable : Robert Cantarella (director, CentQuatre ), Laurent Le Bon
(director, Centre Pompidou-Metz) and Nina Möntmann (curator).
19:00 Big Sleep Room novel

21:00 Live show : Chloé

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Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse

Berger&Berger

2008

20 m2

CENTQUATRE, Etablissement artistique de la ville de Paris, France
Defined by luminous intensity, this architecture takes on two different identities,
depending on whether it is night or day. In the day, there is total visibility ; at night
the dazzling light makes those who enter invisible to the outside viewer.
If private spaces are defined by a barrier which must be surmounted,
and the anonymity removed, Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse proposes a public space which
preserves the anonymity of those who penetrate it.
Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse is a proposal for an unlisted space, which claims its territory
in the public sphere. It is a double mechanism : by day it is a transparent space,
lacking density, and without relief, and at night it follows into a black space
in which the user's position is unknown to others. It aims to propose the night
as a space for anonymity, whereas the temptation of the big city would be
to saturate the entire extent of a space with light and visibility.

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Neocitta

Cyrille Berger

Partners : Thomas Raynaud + V+

Seraing, Belgium

2008

3500 m²

Multifunctional building (Housing, Offices, Commercial)

Economist and Execution phase architect : Bureau Bouwtechniek (Belgium)
Mechanical Engineer : Daidalos Peutz (Belgium)
Structural Engineer : Bureau d'étude Greisch (Belgium)

Within the next years there will be an increased demand for urban housing.
Looking at current demographics, there will be two waves that will change
the western population.
One wave of elderly and one wave of foreigners. These demographic changes
have blown up the structure of society. The middle class disappears and with her
the classical nuclear family of the XXth century. Society split up in many of new
and big-subgroups, singles, dinkies (double income no kids), one-parent-families
and elderly people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. All of these groups
have their own expectations regarding their home.
Building in the future must be flexible, on the one hand, flexible during the design
process. The fast changing global economy and the relatively long time to develop
a collective housing project, one always faces a new economic situation during
the process and the design should be able to react to it.
On the other hand, flexible over the years of use.
The possibility to change partition walls, toilets and bathroom units and to change
the program (from housing to office) will become an important design item
for every collective housing project. A big neutral space can perfectly cover almost
all the spatial wishes. The access zone in the form of a corridor or a gallery could
stimulate flexibility.

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Housing = Office
This change towards flexibility and neutrality makes new construction methods
necessary. Load bearing outside walls offer total freedom inside.
Skeleton systems offer flexibility in two directions and are more usefull
than systems based on constructive partition walls. To create more flexibility
the floor system becomes a very important item. Sandwich floors allow
the integration of all ductwork and can therefore offer flexibility for toilets
and bathrooms.
The consequence is that housing and office typology become more or less
the same. The effect is that houses can be offices, wich has a lot to do
with realities of work in the future.
The new wave of the elderly has enormous consequences for the society.
All collective housing projects in the future will get the "old people label" because
it is the smallest common denominator : lift, living just on one floor,
and no thresholds. The logical consequence is to design a solid structure
with a flexible façade and a large empty space that is independent
from the exterior.

The apartment
The new typology of the XXIst century seems to be the loft.
The loft is more an enclosed outside space than a classical room. It is a platonic
internal landscape, a piece of emptiness in the city. It is a reaction to the decay
of urban communities and public space. In the loft you can create your own
"paradise" and cut all relations with the public sphere to a minimum.
The loft is a mix of public and private ; it can be home, office or both.

Insulation
Because of the wish to reduce heat loss apartment, buildings become more
and more compact and the depth of the houses becomes bigger.
Because of the noise problems on almost all urban locations apartment buildings
have to be heavily protected against noise pollution. This can be done by double
skin facades.
This phenomena have an enormous potential. They give the possibility to build
houses that are made out of different layers. By doing so the house can be
divided into an insulating and a climate layer (pullover and rain jacket).
A climate buffer can be created that can be used over the seasons and adds
spatial dimensions to the house.

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This phenomenon can also be a possibility for collective housings projects
to create more individuality and freedom.
By separating a housing project in structure and infill, an enormous amount
of typologies can be offered from one basic structure.
People can build their house in a house.

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Notus Loci

Berger&Berger

Partner : Thomas Raynaud

Ile de Vassivière, France

2008-2011 Restricted competition - Ongoing

650 m²

Artists' residence and extension of the international art and landscape center

Région Limousin, France

Structural & Mechanical Engineer : Saunier & associés (France)

The Vassivière Château is the product of superimposed various functions
and volumes added over the years, in response to the needs of residents.
Today, a certain number of those functions remain unchanged: the kitchen,
the restaurant, and lodgings. Only the artist's studio essentially reflects a new
program that integrates the outer casing of the building, as it structurally adapts
to modifications.
Our intervention is limited to the boundaries of the building envisioned
as an interior landscape: a kind of topography to reprogram.
In the first spaces, we operate by suppression: décor and all superfluous
ornaments are eliminated to conserve the essential of the edifice. The isolation
of the building is handled in a strategic manner: the volume of heated space
is reduced by removing certain elements of the central heating network.
Our project consists of developing varied interior climates according to the nature
of specific uses and programs. We propose different atmospheres by alternating
the technical use of rudimentary, specific heating (fireplace, brazier) with modern,
more homogeneous techniques (geothermal heat pump).
And we compose with the materiality of the building, or within the thermal inertia
of the granite.

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Notus Loci is an autonomous, abstract location that roams across existing building
by freeing itself from its structure, without analogical comparisons to the edifice's
identity. The painter's studio is lit from the north.
Is it the painter searching for a northern light, or the luminous quality
of that space, which initiated the practice of painting ?
Rather than attributing the studio with functions pertaining to identified practices
(video, sculpture, etc.), we develop different forms of ambiance, and explore how
to live in a work and exhibit space as if inside a landscape.
It is a space that is de-functionalized and sensualized according to fluctuating
uses. The studio acts as a current of air : a public space open to the park
and in atmospheric continuum with the island. A modern, white space altered
by the viscosity of the local climate. These qualities can initiate diverse,
new practices and situations.
We permit a wavering interpretation of the location. Here, the mode of operating
is inverted: the white space of the gallery is where production takes place,
and the neo-medieval "brownfield" is left for daily life.
Our project does not consist of reproducing an "Ivory Tower" - the artist's last
refuge. Rather, it proposes a space for individual or collective isolation, favorable
to the development of an artistic project that is open to the public.

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Une île paradisiaque est un spectacle artificiel

Berger&Berger

2008-2009

CENTQUATRE, Etablissement artistique de la ville de Paris, France

Une île paradisiaque est un spectacle artificiel is a project for a serie
of architectural structures forming the elements of a new syntax for habitat.
A serie of architectural structures to be placed along the CentQuatre passage
hallway. Each visitor is free to cross or enter these spaces of unspecified uses.
This series of micro-dwellings questions about living spaces – a private sphere
in the public arena.
Structures that modify the geography of the CentQuatre : Dr Jekyll & Mr Mouse
is the first in the series, the Big Sleep Room is a sleep platform where one can
sleep at any time of the day or night ; the Heart Break Hotel, a room for love ...
Simultaneously, The Prophecy, a reading room has been organized where, during
our residency, there will be regular readings from a collection of fictional works
freely inspired by each of the architectural projects, and commissioned
to the writer Yves Tenret.

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Drip Feed

Cyrille Berger

Partner : Thomas Raynaud

First Prize competition

Venice, Italy

2007

31 hectares

International Idea competition

Venice urban park

2G, Spain

There isn't a single scientific model that has predicted a drop in temperatures.
The last IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report made public
on February 19th 2001, foresees an average increase in global temperatures
ranging between 1.4°C and 5.8°C, as well as a rise in ocean levels from 9
to 88 cm for the XXIth Century. A system of mobile dikes known for their acronym,
Mose, was conceived in order to deal with a 60 cm increase in sea levels.
The apparatus, which must function with timely precision in order to ward off
the successive acqua alta, risks becoming a permanent featured, thus interrupting
the tidewaters that regulate the natural hydraulic exchange from fresh to salt
water, and in turn, the biological function and ecosystem of the wetlands.
The Venice lagoon shelters an immense biological heritage of flora and fauna,
as well as several threatened species of rare, or nearly extinct plants and animals.
This unique ecosystem made of fresh and brackish water, is in the process
of inexorably transforming itself into an arm of the sea in its central region,
and into a swamp around its periphery.
The elimination of a number of organic material has led to the eutrophication
of the environment : only the Ulva rigida seaweed proliferates. Eutrophication is
a biochemical transformation of bodies of water into which an excess amount

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of nutritional industrial waste is poured. As a result, the water's biological
equilibrium is disturbed by a lack of dissolved oxygen. The lack of sunlight makes
the lagoon uninhabitable for numerous plants and animals. The depletion of plant
life, whose roots once served to prevent erosion, has further aggravated
the phenomenon.
The Ulva rigida seaweed is the only species that has proliferated. The Ulva feed
for the most part on phosphorus and nitrogen. The sea beds in the bays for which
the algae has a predilection, such as the lagoon, are a constant source
of phosphorus, lightly flavored by agricultural and urban waste.
For the last few years, biofuels have progressed forward, but their production
alone, through oleaginous plants, cannot meet with our energy needs. In order
to match the 49.35 million tons of petroleum consumed by Italian transportation,
one would have to cultivate 118% of the total surface of the country with
sunflowers !
Studies conducted on micro-seaweeds have shed light on the basic concepts
behind a prolific source of biofuel. Today various enterprises and research
laboratories are pursuing this field, and looking for ways to optimize
bio-production and extraction of the micro-algae using pumping techniques.

Our project for the urban park of Sacca San Mattia consists of reinvesting
the island in a Venitian, multi-functional approach to urban planning, in the context
of an enlarged metropolitan, touristic center.
The Drip Feed project on the Island of Sacca San Mattia puts into place an above
ground Ulva rigida cultivation device that is in keeping with the Greenfuel system.
A Saprophyte structure that ingests polluted waste from local industry,
and conceptually redefines the lagoon's future water level, without harming
the natural state of the island. In its day, No Stop City, by Archizoom defined
the factory and the supermarket as the key points to the city of the future.
In other words, the places where the system turned its own ideological
programming into full-scale reality : money's form of logic brought to its extremes
- a high level of integration between production and consumption.
In a sense, this integration between production and consumption is carried out
in the project Drip Feed : the planned construction of an industrial farm, where
nothing can be removed, yet everything is for consumption on the site.
This includes: biofuel for the lagoon's transportation needs, seaweed to feed
the tourists, oxygen for the water, and the CO2 emitted from the local industries,
which is necessary for the farm's operation.

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Our project fuses together every scale of society : the local scale - the activity
of fishing ; the regional scale - the merchant society that adapted and remodeled
the lagoon to meet the new functions of and use the new technology necessary
for the port's development ; the national scale – with industrial activity for which
water signifies accessibility and a necessary material for production, and finally on
the global scale - with tourism, a vessel for the city's lagoon-image, which is
seeped in romantic literature, and still distributed by the majority of tour
catalogues.
Venice and its lagoon, a world of languid sentiments, of decadent love,
the city of lovers, the place to take refuge far from the continental metropolises,
while admiring the artistic beauty of this insular city. The consumerist mentality
of the industrial (or post-industrial) society are internalized by the tourists who go
there: they wish to divert themselves, thus Venice is codified as a city-diversion.
The Drip Feed project strengthens Venice, like Disneyland's competitor,
it modifies the environment and helps slow the physical destruction of the lagoon
and the city.
At the same time it is leads to the creation of urban environments that are adapted
to catering to tourism. Drip Feed is a project for a high quality form of tourism
that is more durable, sustainable, and which guaranties the continuation
of productive activity, off-set from the central flux.

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Blinder Berg, a temporary Opera House

Berger&Berger

Munich, Germany

2007-2008 invited competition

650 m2

Temporary Opera House for the Münchner Opernfestspiele for 350 people

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, Germany

Structural Engineer : Bollinger + Grohmann (France)

Blinder Berg is the creation of an undulating topography in the center
of Marstallplatz. An opaque bulge, and artificial landscape, that reconfigure
urban space.
With divine space inaccessible, mountains and their ascension were the genesis
for myth and religion. This project is not the mystical allegory of a divinity,
but the secular, physical presentation of abyssal spaces. Blinder Berg doesn't ask
to be surveyed, but to be penetrated. A shelter whose form results from acoustical
studies based on the program's musical and vocal requirements.
Performances are preserved from exterior view and light, as they unfold within
its walls by day and night. The interior floor of the mountain is unstable
and generates a multitude of scenographic partitions, which rearrange
the auditorium's "sacred" authority imposed by traditional opera.
A topographic and non-functional partition that will initiate a multitude of free
appropriations of its surface. Blinder Berg is activated by a series of events,
which unfold during the summer, transforming one's perception of the object.
A café, an auditorium, a nightclub, will successively modify the uses of this public
space. Activities that succeed each other throughout the day and night,
from the exterior toward the interior, from the light of day to that of the artificially
electric. An opera house as a primitive space - elementary, archaic.

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Atelier 0

Berger&Berger

2007

100 m2

Nomadic art gallery

CENTQUATRE, Etablissement artistique de la ville de Paris, France

Structural Engineer : Spectat (France)

Atelier 0 is the first project for a production and exhibition space by CentQuatre.
A gallery, the Paris institution will put at the disposal of artists, and it will be hosted
in different capitals. Our project is about architecture in transit. It draws from
the "white cube", which is reconditioned with every new installation
and the accompanying, continuously differing viewpoints.
The neutral gallery space, smooth and generic, frame the viewpoint around
a renewed, exterior perspective. The question here is one of stretching
the studio space - of spreading out the program and the activities on the same
scale as the context in which the atelier is set up.
The question is of creating tensions, frictions - as many connections as possible,
which reconfigure the site as they simultaneously recondition the studio space,
and in particular, the most porous parts, or the "pontoons" which are exposed
to the wind, the rain, the sun…
The black color of the casing, opposite of those traditionally used in vernacular air
conditioning systems, works here like an inversed air conditioning system :
the radiance emitted from its surface warms the gallery spaces.
The aim is to produce a multitude of situations and original environments
which will invite users and artists to invent their own relationship to this object.
Atelier 0 is an insular architectural structure in the midst of an infinite, territorial
space continuum.

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Feuillets d'Hypnos, Unité d'Habitation 3 Jours

Conception : Laurent P. Berger, artistic collaboration : Cyrille Berger

Avignon, France

2007

400 m2

Multifonctional collective housing for the performance Feuillets d'Hypnos,
237 actions pour la scène

Festival d'Avignon

Director : Frédéric Fisbach

Speakers : Etienne Balibar, François Cusset, Marie-Josée Monzain

Construction Team : Atelier du Festival d'Avignon (France)

Feuillets d'Hypnos, 237 actions pour la scène was performed at the Cour
d'Honneur in the Palais des papes for the 60th anniversary of the Festival
d'Avignon.
The set layout is not a performance project, but the proposal of a housing unit
located on site, which redefines traditional codes of set and habitat design.
This unit of residence serves a literal purpose : the troop of artists lives on stage
in the Cour d'Honneur with their families, for 24 hours a day during the whole
of the three-day performance. A circumstantial community thus brought itself
into being, and took the stage to speak and recite the poetry of René Char every
evening.
The performance space is substituted with functional programming : a kitchen,
a bathroom, a badminton court, a small amphitheater, a public gathering space,
and an ensemble of cabin bedrooms. The latter of which provide a softer surface
for multiple and indeterminate purposes, functioning simultaneously as a work,
reading or sleeping space ...
This residential unit evokes the standard form of functionalized architecture
invented in the XXth Century.

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A concept therefore corrupted by virtue of the unit's specific location within
the Cour d'honneur. The seemingly standard form of this architectural structure
"3 Days" (3 days of set-up, 3 days of performance, 3 days of dismantling)
was drawn up in tandem with the project's registration on the site
for the performance dates of the 15th, 16th and 17th of July 2007.
It is presented as a series of climatic modifications that respond to the different
micro-climates within the Cour d'Honneur.
The stage is re-territorialized in function with the potential forms of habitat made
possible by the climate of the site : from cooler to warmer, from the most artificial
to the most natural, from east to west.
The set is composed of five climate sections, which allow for as many possibilities
of eco-habitation. A long hallway crosses the whole of the building, enabling
the public to successively cross each one of the differing climatic environments
throughout the day.

Ambient temperature section : To the east, the cabins are open to the sky,
for sleeping under the stars. The air from the coolest zone of the Cour d'Honneur
enters through this section of the building.

Wind section : The Mistral wind crosses the Cour d'Honneur with greatest
intensity in this section, and is reproduced in keeping with its orientation within
the surrounding walls of the bedrooms and the hallway.

Mist section : A refreshing mist is diffused in the bedrooms and the bathroom,
creating a screen from exterior view.

Rain section : Artificial rain falls from the roof and constitutes a facade of fresh
water for the rooms and the kitchen.

Air-conditioned section : In the western edge of the residential unit, the cabins
are artificially air-conditioned from 16°C to 18°C. The temperature outdoors goes
above 30°C during the day.

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Ça va, a prefabricated movie theater

Conception : Laurent P. Berger, artistic collaboration : Cyrille Berger

Dijon, France

2006

95 m2

Prefabricated movie theater for 80 people

Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, centre dramatique national, France

Director : Robert Cantarella

Construction Team : Pyrrhus conception (France)

Originally proposed in the framework of a play, Ça va, by Philippe Minyana,
and directed by Robert Cantarella at the Dijon's Theater, this public alcove
is an envelope placed within another.
A temporary movie theater then resulted from a protocol which determine
an audience's behavior, can lead to a viewer experience that goes beyond
the basic, core uses of a constructed object. Our project focuses on the dissolving
of an architectural object into a fictional system.
An unprecedented environment is formed by selecting the minimum necessary
volume for an 80-person audience. The morphology of this inhabitable set obeys
the rules and physical deformations of acoustic compositions.
The pre-established rule for the design arrangement, is to avoid putting
two partitions parallel to each other.
Fabricated from Alucobond sheets (sandwich of aluminium trapping a polymer
core, here manipulated with careful craftsmanship), the plates are grooved
for folding, then bolted together. With characteristics similar to a primitive cave,
this movie theater has frontal tiers with a small stage that has a projection screen.
To complete the exclusive relationship between this room and the film being
screened, the "set" in every one of the film's scenes is presented here
in photographic form.

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By putting into action this conceptual apparatus, our display attempts
to simultaneously question architectural models of representation : the movie
and theater auditorium, and the museum gallery.
With this project we assert the autonomy of the object's own architecture,
as being more than just a link, or an interface between the spectator
and the projected works. Rather, imposes itself as a pure presence :
that of a visual and acoustic environment. An installation that asserts the vivid
resonance of the "container" or the theater just as much as the "contents"
or the visual and sound elements..

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Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place

Laurent P. Berger

Watermill Center, New York

2006

Fog machine, sound installation. Variable dimensions

Grand Opening exhibition, Watermill Center, New York

Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place is the formation
of an artificial storm cloud, contained in a confined indoor space.

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Happy Thermostat

Laurent P. Berger

Watermill Center, New York.

2006

Wood, white fluorescent tubes, electronic programmer. 220 x 360 x 35 cm.

Grand Opening exhibition, Watermill Center, New York.

Happy Thermostat is an illuminated sign that produces a placebo effect
on the audience of the opening. Through a real time temperature calculation,
the lit sign displays an adjusted temperature that is more preferable than the real
surrounding temperature. If the climate is too warm, the signal indicates a lower
temperature, and visa versa.

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Happy Thermostat

Laurent P. Berger

Watermill Center, New York.

2006

Wood, white fluorescent tubes, electronic programmer. 220 x 360 x 35 cm.

Grand Opening exhibition, Watermill Center, New York.

Happy Thermostat is an illuminated sign that produces a placebo effect
on the audience of the opening. Through a real time temperature calculation,
the lit sign displays an adjusted temperature that is more preferable than the real
surrounding temperature. If the climate is too warm, the signal indicates a lower
temperature, and visa versa.

page: [1] 

Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty

Dan Graham with Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger,
Huber Marionnettes, Japanther

Artistic Direction : Sandra Antelo-Suarez

Art Basel - Miami Beach, 2004, Miami - Weiner Festwochen, 2005, Vienna -
Deutsche Staatsoper, Unter den Linden, 2005, Berlin - Walker Art Center, 2006,
Minneapolis

Production : TRANS>

Co-production: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Foundation
2021, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Voom/LAB, New York.

Envisioned as a genuine satiric history of the hippy generation and the end of the
psychedelic era, the opera's tragi-comic narrative is the "reductio ad absurdum"
of the hippies "generational politics" contained in the 1960s youth slogan :
"Don't trust anyone over thirty". Seen from hindsight thirty-five years later through
the eyes of the 1960's youngsters now grown old, the effect is one of bitter
reflection over time, whereby we witness a hip generation's indictment of their
own shallow seduction by the cult of youth and the fascistic tendencies that can
overwhelm even the most idealistic movement left unchecked. Even more
pertinent today, Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty mirrors the disillusionment
of a generation who must today grapple with their failure to stop the growth
of an extreme political and economic conservatism that today wages onslaught
against the liberal ideals for which they so ardently fought from the 1960s on.
DTAOT is staged in a 50-minutes show, presented in a small theater built
for the occasion, which involves both a puppet show, a punk concert and video
projections.
DTAOT is striking in its refusal to typify a single, defining medium or structure.
In addition, the production changes and evolves according to the presentation
and situation. DTAOT defies all attempts to categorize its characteristic identity.
In the end, it is in this revolutionary spirit of rock, punk, and psychedelia,
that the audience becomes the project's final collaborator.