Who’s got the authority to raze the ZOO ?
The erasing will start this August, behind the fence, hidden from the public, by the private client and construction company “Bouygues,” without any survey, any control, and any rights…
The procedure comes from the concession that French administration transfers through a PPP(partenariat public-privé) protocol to “privatize” public area, to minimize the cost and negate any intelligence of production. The Bouygues Company is in charge with a concessionary contract to manage both the renovation and managing operation…all uses, economic and strategic, of the site.
The first action of this company will be to erase everything (except the main mountain), to transform the ZOO with drastically low budget through a cheap and chips concept with an hypothetical phantasm of rationalization and expertise, led on by citizens’ “taste” and willingness for a ‘clean vision of nature’…what a fucked up nightmare of normalcy!
Imagine the same with “le parc des Buttes Chaumont” from the XIXth or “les fabriques” and Grotto from “Hameau de la Reine” or “Desert de Retz” in XVIIIth century.
The Zoo of Vincennes is a combination of Eiffel Engineering, Hennebicques Concrete Innovation, and XIX century Naturalist Illusion as one of the first Land Theme Park, where nature is both artificialized and renaturalized.
Do you think that Los Angeles would be able to erase the first “Walt Disney’s Theme Park”, built in 1955? It’s perhaps the only tangible fiction of LA. But in France, Bouygues is both the force of political lobbying and the Architect (capital A), as a direct incestuous alienation and corruption of our republic monarchy… strangling and stifling any resistance, without any risk of compromising their little “arrangements”.
At the same time, the exhibition “Dreamland” at Pompidou Center was one year ago rearticulating the ideological XXth century utopia of Land-Mark-Fun-Fourierism-Broadacre-City-Epcot-Palace-Park, and in the same time the stupidity and arrogance of our system of production is erasing or worse “sterilizing” the first witness of “Doctor Moreau Island”, or “Stalker wishes Chamber”…
This blog is a protest against the voluntary manipulation and intellectual corruption being used in this condition. It includes memories, current views, maps, history, and the concrete innovation and evolution from XIXth Craft Man Know How, from a Walter Benjamin and John Ruskin uniqueness and rarity claims and Baudelaire “Spleen” to… NOW… through Digital & Computation Craft, introducing bio-concrete without frame work as a potential of singularities and multitudes of singularities…re-discovering the non standart prototyping productions.
The Zoo appears as an historical lift, a trans-door from XIXth to XXIth, jumping over the period of “repetition without anomaly”…
As the Sagrada Familia pursuit headed by Mark Burry, the zoo needs a team involved in technological innovation… from hand-craft to digital-craft concrete expertise: CAD Prototyping, Computation FAB shaping, Digital Concrete Countour Crafting, Stoichiometry, Machinism, etc…
What a tragic irony that Bouygues, the major global concrete company, is now more driven by the Media, Telecom and Management businesses than its lost legacy of research and development.
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In France, since the absolute monarchy of Louis the XIV and Colbert advisor, we endure an Official Ministry of Culture…. what we could hope is that Dolores Umbridge (the antagonist force of the Ministry of Magic for “the Defense against the Dark Arts”) is not infiltrating the soul of our fragile and lost Master of Ceremonies, who decides from his supreme authority about death and life of his subjects, of his beasts, and incidentally the zone of their meeting point : the ZOO…
Bernard Tschumi, the appointed architect of the zoo project, the architect of thriving “Parc de la Villette”, and the genius dean of Columbia University in the 90s, cannot be declared responsible for this weird affair; but as usual, he has been trapped as many other architects in France (as Bernini, years ago) to play blind, mute, deaf and finally becomes the mask of an acephalous client driven by an anachronistic top-down system)
/ Precisions from B.Tschumi Studio : The decision to renovate and transform the Zoo was taken by the Museum of Natural History, as landscape conditions for the animals were considered cruel and incompatible with today’s standards and the World Wildlife Fund’s recommendations. A new “biozone” concept was developed by the Museum. The general layout and overall landscape project was designed by Jacqueline Osty Paysagistes. The architects in this project have no role regarding the “artificial nature.”
