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The House for Doing Nothing

The House for Doing Nothing

Also known as Slavoj Žižek's House or The Responsible House.

The House for Doing Nothing

Based on an observation by Slavoj Žižek the responsible house is a place designed to follow the Slovenian philosopher’s comment about responsibility nowadays. Following Žižek’s remarks, the global condition of nowadays cannot orient towards any concrete political attitude: the most appropriate action in order to undertake a political responsibility would be to do nothing. Doing nothing (far niente) was proposed as one of the most elevated experiences by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his “Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire” when he describes his isolation in a semi abandoned lake island. In Greece there are many deserted islands that could host such populations of responsible houses: they would look like exile places, like banal livable internet stations and in the same time like paradise options: all representing a responsible condition for today, this includes an ironic look to Žižek's approach and the fact that Žižek is describing something existing. A condition of exile, promoted as necessity for balancing a future responsibility and, in the same time, the culmination of a desired condition is linked to an idiosyncratic inaction. The responsible apartment intends to propose a view of a population of such units for doing nothing. Are all those descriptions of inaction present in this design? A body culture is evidently the left over of a condition of the self. The Internet structures invisible communities that could all act in similar ways and form together juxtaposed responsible apartments in semi abandoned areas. Following this rationale the project is supposed to function in a double bind: from the one side it shows a possible condition or a materialization proposed by an exaggeration of Žižek’s remark; from another point of view it could be read as a counter project commenting already Žižek's argument.

The apartment is structured as a unified single space divided by mobile elements and curtains. A swimming pool is supposed to give a rhythm of a body’s temporality. Printers and a good connection form the material part of the common world and the invisible public sphere. All services are performed through the existence of a “courrier” system that distributes products to the units on demand.

 

In collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni, Kristy Garikou and Alexis Georgiadis

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Zizek Residence by Aristide Antonas (in dialogue with dpr-barcelona) | The Funambulist

The ivory tower is not to be confused with other architectures of seclusion like the monastery, the hospital or the prison. The three latter examples are destinations in themselves, they are the heterotopias from which one does not comes back, on the contrary of the ivory tower that constitutes a transitional space. Again, here one must not interpret this “transition” like a station situated in between two localities, but rather as a transitional space that will allow its inhabitant to go back to where he comes from. The paradigmatic example of such a movement of reterritorialization is the one effectuated by Zarathustra in Nietzsche‘s masterpiece. Regularly, he withdraws to his cave before going back to the world in order to expose his philosophy.

This movement is fundamental in this vision as its premises were based, not on an abandon of society but, on the contrary, on a deep will to act within its frame. In this spirit, such a seclusion is only legitimate if it prepares action. This whole figure of seclusion is in fact, a metaphor for theory in general that could not exist without its materialization that then gives it a retroactive justification.

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