Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.
“Geographical segregation exists whenever the proportions of population rates of two or more populations are not homogenous throughout a defined space”. It is the norm in most of our cities: wealthy vicinities, china towns, Italian and Turkish districts are examples of non-uniform spread of populations. Laetitia Gauvin explained at the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon why it happens and presented some interesting variants of the phenomenon. I have edited the authors’ introduction in order to make it more accessible. I think there is much more here than technical jargon, with many social and philosophical implications.
Schelling’s segregation model for an open city: emergence of physical frontiers from a socio-spatial dynamics
Check out my conversation with Kati Blom on the website of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture. It follows a philosophical paper I published last year on the appropriation of space.
“The objective of I S P A is to promote rigorous philosophical engagement with the subject of architecture by providing an informal platform for parties interested in furthering the cause.” Excellent initiative indeed!
I was in Lisbon few months ago to attend the European Conference on Complex Systems. A demo of the study on verticality was displayed at the event, which gave me the opportunity to present my philosophical observations to a scientific crowd. It was extremely valuable to attend the various talks and to learn about the latest studies being made in the field of complex systems theory:
