Anne Kockelkorn
Anne Kockelkorn is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of the City and the Architecture of Urban Housing. Her research in urban and architectural history is focused on the intersections between design, territorial politics and processes of subjectivation since the 19th century. Her forthcoming monograph "The Social Condenser II" investigates the representation and production of large-scale housing complexes in France before and after the neoliberal reforms of 1977, for which she won the ETH Silver Medal for outstanding doctoral theses in 2018. Together with Susanne Schindler, she is currently preparing the edited volume Cooperative Conditions: A Primer on Architecture, Finance and Regulation in Zurich (Zurich: gta Verlag). This research project explains the regulatory framework and agency of cooperative housing in Zurich since the 1920s and was on display as a research station at the 17th Architectural Biennale in Venice until November 2021.
Anne has studied at the École d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville, graduated as an architect in 2003 from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and obtained her PHD in 2018 from ETH Zurich. In 2018 she was Guest Professor at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus; from 2019–2020 she co-directed the Master of Advanced Studies program for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
Since 2006, Anne worked as architecture critic, in particular for the German Architectural Magazines ARCH+ and Bauwelt, and was an editor of the peer-reviewed Journal Candide – Journal for Architectural Knowledge from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on German and French housing histories in the 20th century and was co-editor of Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies, (Berlin: Spector Books, 2015) and Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019, with Nina Zschocke).
Anne has studied at the École d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville, graduated as an architect in 2003 from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and obtained her PHD in 2018 from ETH Zurich. In 2018 she was Guest Professor at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus; from 2019–2020 she co-directed the Master of Advanced Studies program for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
Since 2006, Anne worked as architecture critic, in particular for the German Architectural Magazines ARCH+ and Bauwelt, and was an editor of the peer-reviewed Journal Candide – Journal for Architectural Knowledge from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on German and French housing histories in the 20th century and was co-editor of Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies, (Berlin: Spector Books, 2015) and Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019, with Nina Zschocke).
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Books by Anne Kockelkorn
Contributors Ursula Biemann, Gaia Caramellino, Filippo De Pieri, Johan F. Hartle, Samia Henni, Christa Kamleithner, Anne Kockelkorn, Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, Emily E. Scott, Laila Seewang, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Ariane Varela Braga, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Alla Vronskaya, Andrew Stefan Weiner, Nina Zschocke
Why don’t architects like to bother with acoustics? Why do they turn a deaf ear as it were, when instead they could master the tools to control the atmosphere and character of a space, thus enhancing our sense of well-being? We will try to understand this apparent lack of motivation by way of four “disconnections” in architects’ relationship with sound. These disconnections occur on the levels of urban design, architecture, electroacoustics, and media.
Housing Question by Anne Kockelkorn
The case study of my investigation is the colossally inflated project Les Espaces d’Abraxas, in the Parisian new town of Marne-la-Vallée, planned and realized by the Catalan architecture firm Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectu- ra between 1978 and 1983 (plate 1). The three-part complex consists of some six hundred apartments, and its eighteen-story silhouette, with its eclectic pillared façade of precast concrete panels, towers like a symbolic city gate above its suburban surroundings. Because of its expressive formal language, Abraxas is considered a canonical example of postmodern architecture, which many philosophers, geographers, and cultural practitioners at the time de- clared to be a paradigm of reactionary social change. Since Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued after the neoliberal reforms of 1977, it can indeed serve as a paradigm of post-Fordist conditions of production, particularly regarding the disjunction between its aesthetics, its material production, and financing. On the other hand, both the materialization and the media representation of Abraxas include intentions and procedures that emerge from a logic of Fordist production, centralized interventionism, and a welfare state policy of social redistribution—intellec- tual, political, and economic. The sociopolitical background to the spectac- ular downfall of this project unveils the complex imbrication of neoliberal restructuring processes and the demise of the welfare state.
In what follows, I frame this history—as the first main aspect of this chapter—through the lens of personal narratives, based on interviews with Abraxas residents conducted during my six-month stay in the building in 2012. In a first step, I investigate the constellation of Abraxas in the early 1980s; in a second step, I reconstruct the political and conceptual background of France’s neoliberal housing re- forms of 1977 through a close reading of the eighth lecture of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics. Finally, I show the consequences and effects of these reforms on the French urban landscape in general and on Abraxas in particular. Here, I develop the second main aspect of this chapter, which consists in conceptualizing “architecture” as a constellation of disparate instances and which I illustrate by referencing the speed of the downfall of this housing monument and the radical disjunctions of its representations.
Architectural & Urban Histories by Anne Kockelkorn
postmodernen Zerfall des Gesellschaftsprojekts der Nachkriegsmoderne in die disziplinären Sparten von Architektur, Städtebau und Kunst. Darüber hinaus widmet sich dieser Essay dem Paradox, dass The Pre-sence of the Past zwar als eine der anschaulichsten kulturellen Manifestationen der Postmoderne galt, ihr Diskurs jedoch den wichtigsten Topos der Postmoderne ignorierte, nämlich die Krise der Universalismen der Aufklärung sowie die Krise ihrer Repräsentationen des Subjekts und der Geschichte.
During that same period, the general public, students, administration and the press, heavily criticised the building, mostly because of constructional defects, but also due to a number of deferrals between the architectonic concept and the realized building structure. The campus building was planned around the terms appropriation, program and an idea of flexibility. It epitomizes a turning point of the postwar debate between modern architecture and the city, and between the architect, the institution and an abstract idea of the user. Since the building is considered as a prototype of structuralist architecture, a closer reading might help to see whether this denomination is useful and how it relates to the design approach of Shadrach Woods.
Transversal Writing by Anne Kockelkorn
of Nicosia district, the Trodoos mountains in the south, the Pentadaktylos mountains in the north, and 650 kilometres of coastline. Its political history is a micro-version of the conflicted histories of the Middle East. After the end of the British rule in 1960, the young independent state was torn by conflicts; and since the Greek coup d’état in 1974, which was followed by the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island, Cyprus is divided into a Turkish-speaking North and Greek-speaking South Side.1 The most important consequence of what is known as the ‘Cyprus dispute’ however, is not only the longest UN-mandate in the world, but also the de facto expropriation of a third of the island’s population in 1974, meaning 162,000 Greek Cypriots and 48,000 Turkish Cypriots.2 The unresolved postcolonial conflict is a conflict about property, as about a third of the land seems to have two legal owners, one from a bygone past and one from the present.3 The conflicted imaginaries of North and South, Muslim and Christian pre- vail not least because the wealth of the island is grounded in the real estate sector and its mobilization as capital under the guise of ‘development’.
First, the development as a global tourist destination in the 1960s, then the development as a global tax paradise in the 1990s, and finally as a shop- ping destination for EU citizens since 2014.
We had planned our stay in Cyprus in the spring of 2018 years in advance. Once I had finished my PhD, I would take the invitation as a guest professor from the department of architecture, while Kaye would take a three-month sabbatical from his work as an editor of the German architectural magazine Bauwelt. The theme we sought to investigate was the recent processes of financialised urbanism in Cyprus’s coastal cities. After the banking crisis in 2013, the government of the Republic of Cyprus launched a combined sale of EU citizenship in tandem with luxury real estate to boost the economy.
An investment of 2 million euros in a luxury apartment by the sea ensures a European passport along with discrete opportunities of tax evasion, the imaginary of sunshine, a sea view, and relative political stability.4
If an architectural design studio and the processes of financialization con- stituted the official framework and leitmotif of our stay, the oral histories of colleagues and friends, everyday routines and touristic visits drew a
different picture. They uncovered the relations within which climate change, the commodification of the coastline, global real estate transactions and Cyprus’s violent postcolonial conflict are inseparably imbricated into one another. Instead of investigating the sale of EU passports, I attempted to approach those relations between territories, environments and imaginaries through the chance collection of a diary. Following up on Guattari’s ecos- ophy between processes of subjectivation, the relation to others and the environment, I left the clear-cut history of the political economy of territorial development behind and followed the detours.
Apart from being a postmodern icon, Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued in France after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. Its accelerated decline in less than a decade resulted from the mortgage credits with which it was marketed: their flexible interest rates led to the bankruptcy of Abraxas’s housing company in 1985. On the other hand, the building complex conveys intentions of welfare state policies of social redis- tribution and was built by procedures that emerged out of the logic of Fordist production. Its eclectic pillared façade made out of prefabricated concrete panels originates in the mass housing pro- duction of the postwar boom years; and its seemingly excessive monumentality can be traced back to the ambition of the Parisian new town planners of the 1960s to structure the Paris region with modern, thriving centralities that were to fulfill not only a right to housing, but also a the “right to the city.
This play confronts the memories of Abraxas’s first generation of inhabitants—which I collected in narrative biographic interviews during a six-month stay in the building in 2012—with the cultural discourse that constructed it and which permeates its social spaces. Taking the lived experience of the inhabitants as a starting point and situating the discussion inside the building changes the viewpoint from which the narrative of the demise of the social housing high- rise is usually told. The resulting polylogue of testimony and stories as well as excerpts from publications explores the emancipatory potential of discourse, which occurs at the moment when this dis- course opens up towards what, for the sake of its functioning, has to be kept outside. Torn out of context, oral statements and fragments of sentences can lose their original meaning, but their reassembly creates new relations between otherwise often incommensurable registers of speech. I have left temporal incongruencies intention- ally unresolved: discursive utterings, which extend over a time span of fifty years, remain in the present tense whereas the memories of inhabitants recalling in 2012 their experience of the 1980s and 1990s are narrated in the past tense. Finally, my own voice as an author is transmitted in the stage directions that transform Abraxas and the new town center of Mont d’Est into a stage set and thereby into a central agent of this piece. “Architecture,” then, becomes an instance that occurs in specific settings and exists only within the simultaneous entanglement of practice and representation within which it makes sense.
Contributors Ursula Biemann, Gaia Caramellino, Filippo De Pieri, Johan F. Hartle, Samia Henni, Christa Kamleithner, Anne Kockelkorn, Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, Emily E. Scott, Laila Seewang, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Ariane Varela Braga, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Alla Vronskaya, Andrew Stefan Weiner, Nina Zschocke
Why don’t architects like to bother with acoustics? Why do they turn a deaf ear as it were, when instead they could master the tools to control the atmosphere and character of a space, thus enhancing our sense of well-being? We will try to understand this apparent lack of motivation by way of four “disconnections” in architects’ relationship with sound. These disconnections occur on the levels of urban design, architecture, electroacoustics, and media.
The case study of my investigation is the colossally inflated project Les Espaces d’Abraxas, in the Parisian new town of Marne-la-Vallée, planned and realized by the Catalan architecture firm Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectu- ra between 1978 and 1983 (plate 1). The three-part complex consists of some six hundred apartments, and its eighteen-story silhouette, with its eclectic pillared façade of precast concrete panels, towers like a symbolic city gate above its suburban surroundings. Because of its expressive formal language, Abraxas is considered a canonical example of postmodern architecture, which many philosophers, geographers, and cultural practitioners at the time de- clared to be a paradigm of reactionary social change. Since Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued after the neoliberal reforms of 1977, it can indeed serve as a paradigm of post-Fordist conditions of production, particularly regarding the disjunction between its aesthetics, its material production, and financing. On the other hand, both the materialization and the media representation of Abraxas include intentions and procedures that emerge from a logic of Fordist production, centralized interventionism, and a welfare state policy of social redistribution—intellec- tual, political, and economic. The sociopolitical background to the spectac- ular downfall of this project unveils the complex imbrication of neoliberal restructuring processes and the demise of the welfare state.
In what follows, I frame this history—as the first main aspect of this chapter—through the lens of personal narratives, based on interviews with Abraxas residents conducted during my six-month stay in the building in 2012. In a first step, I investigate the constellation of Abraxas in the early 1980s; in a second step, I reconstruct the political and conceptual background of France’s neoliberal housing re- forms of 1977 through a close reading of the eighth lecture of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics. Finally, I show the consequences and effects of these reforms on the French urban landscape in general and on Abraxas in particular. Here, I develop the second main aspect of this chapter, which consists in conceptualizing “architecture” as a constellation of disparate instances and which I illustrate by referencing the speed of the downfall of this housing monument and the radical disjunctions of its representations.
postmodernen Zerfall des Gesellschaftsprojekts der Nachkriegsmoderne in die disziplinären Sparten von Architektur, Städtebau und Kunst. Darüber hinaus widmet sich dieser Essay dem Paradox, dass The Pre-sence of the Past zwar als eine der anschaulichsten kulturellen Manifestationen der Postmoderne galt, ihr Diskurs jedoch den wichtigsten Topos der Postmoderne ignorierte, nämlich die Krise der Universalismen der Aufklärung sowie die Krise ihrer Repräsentationen des Subjekts und der Geschichte.
During that same period, the general public, students, administration and the press, heavily criticised the building, mostly because of constructional defects, but also due to a number of deferrals between the architectonic concept and the realized building structure. The campus building was planned around the terms appropriation, program and an idea of flexibility. It epitomizes a turning point of the postwar debate between modern architecture and the city, and between the architect, the institution and an abstract idea of the user. Since the building is considered as a prototype of structuralist architecture, a closer reading might help to see whether this denomination is useful and how it relates to the design approach of Shadrach Woods.
of Nicosia district, the Trodoos mountains in the south, the Pentadaktylos mountains in the north, and 650 kilometres of coastline. Its political history is a micro-version of the conflicted histories of the Middle East. After the end of the British rule in 1960, the young independent state was torn by conflicts; and since the Greek coup d’état in 1974, which was followed by the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island, Cyprus is divided into a Turkish-speaking North and Greek-speaking South Side.1 The most important consequence of what is known as the ‘Cyprus dispute’ however, is not only the longest UN-mandate in the world, but also the de facto expropriation of a third of the island’s population in 1974, meaning 162,000 Greek Cypriots and 48,000 Turkish Cypriots.2 The unresolved postcolonial conflict is a conflict about property, as about a third of the land seems to have two legal owners, one from a bygone past and one from the present.3 The conflicted imaginaries of North and South, Muslim and Christian pre- vail not least because the wealth of the island is grounded in the real estate sector and its mobilization as capital under the guise of ‘development’.
First, the development as a global tourist destination in the 1960s, then the development as a global tax paradise in the 1990s, and finally as a shop- ping destination for EU citizens since 2014.
We had planned our stay in Cyprus in the spring of 2018 years in advance. Once I had finished my PhD, I would take the invitation as a guest professor from the department of architecture, while Kaye would take a three-month sabbatical from his work as an editor of the German architectural magazine Bauwelt. The theme we sought to investigate was the recent processes of financialised urbanism in Cyprus’s coastal cities. After the banking crisis in 2013, the government of the Republic of Cyprus launched a combined sale of EU citizenship in tandem with luxury real estate to boost the economy.
An investment of 2 million euros in a luxury apartment by the sea ensures a European passport along with discrete opportunities of tax evasion, the imaginary of sunshine, a sea view, and relative political stability.4
If an architectural design studio and the processes of financialization con- stituted the official framework and leitmotif of our stay, the oral histories of colleagues and friends, everyday routines and touristic visits drew a
different picture. They uncovered the relations within which climate change, the commodification of the coastline, global real estate transactions and Cyprus’s violent postcolonial conflict are inseparably imbricated into one another. Instead of investigating the sale of EU passports, I attempted to approach those relations between territories, environments and imaginaries through the chance collection of a diary. Following up on Guattari’s ecos- ophy between processes of subjectivation, the relation to others and the environment, I left the clear-cut history of the political economy of territorial development behind and followed the detours.
Apart from being a postmodern icon, Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued in France after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. Its accelerated decline in less than a decade resulted from the mortgage credits with which it was marketed: their flexible interest rates led to the bankruptcy of Abraxas’s housing company in 1985. On the other hand, the building complex conveys intentions of welfare state policies of social redis- tribution and was built by procedures that emerged out of the logic of Fordist production. Its eclectic pillared façade made out of prefabricated concrete panels originates in the mass housing pro- duction of the postwar boom years; and its seemingly excessive monumentality can be traced back to the ambition of the Parisian new town planners of the 1960s to structure the Paris region with modern, thriving centralities that were to fulfill not only a right to housing, but also a the “right to the city.
This play confronts the memories of Abraxas’s first generation of inhabitants—which I collected in narrative biographic interviews during a six-month stay in the building in 2012—with the cultural discourse that constructed it and which permeates its social spaces. Taking the lived experience of the inhabitants as a starting point and situating the discussion inside the building changes the viewpoint from which the narrative of the demise of the social housing high- rise is usually told. The resulting polylogue of testimony and stories as well as excerpts from publications explores the emancipatory potential of discourse, which occurs at the moment when this dis- course opens up towards what, for the sake of its functioning, has to be kept outside. Torn out of context, oral statements and fragments of sentences can lose their original meaning, but their reassembly creates new relations between otherwise often incommensurable registers of speech. I have left temporal incongruencies intention- ally unresolved: discursive utterings, which extend over a time span of fifty years, remain in the present tense whereas the memories of inhabitants recalling in 2012 their experience of the 1980s and 1990s are narrated in the past tense. Finally, my own voice as an author is transmitted in the stage directions that transform Abraxas and the new town center of Mont d’Est into a stage set and thereby into a central agent of this piece. “Architecture,” then, becomes an instance that occurs in specific settings and exists only within the simultaneous entanglement of practice and representation within which it makes sense.