THE EXTENDED LIVING ROOM AND THE WEATHER SALON

by Tereza Vesela

Just as Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts were a reaction to specific activities in a particular city, the London Transcripts are a reaction to contemporary London. The project addresses the loss of individual privacy in a time with little sense of a collective and is concerned with how architecture, people and even nature can be controlled. Interventions are inserted into places of privilege with the student community as parasites to counter the superficiality of the world at present. Shifting this balance, according to Boris Groys in Ilya Kabakov (2006) to create a desired utopia ‘will be a long time coming, for the construction of the ultimate utopia is a slow historical process that requires the collective effort of generation upon generation. But not everyone can live with that.’ Hence this duration might even witness the camouflage and disappearance of a few guerrilla students into the proposed architecture.