Earlier this year, Archinect brought you the Michael Jackson Memorial Competition . Now let's turn our focus towards current events and delve into the strange intersection of religious rights, freedom of expression, and architecture. This is an open call for ideas to help Switzerland navigate its recent difficulties with minarets. We look forward to your proposals.
After December 18th, a representative selection of the proposals will be featured here.
On Sunday, November 29th, 2009, the citizens of Switzerland overwhelmingly passed a referendum banning the construction of new minarets in their country. With this move, the ban will be added to the Swiss Federal Constitution – a new and dubious level of status for an architectural element to reach.
Optimistically, let’s put aside questions of religious persecution and think about this as a design problem: what are the tensions within the built environment that made this ban possible? When the law is a flaw, what does design offer?
This is a tale of equality in confrontation with equanimity. On the one hand, the right to religious freedom should include reasonable material expression: every church with its cross, every mosque with its minaret [1]. On the other hand, the atmosphere and image of Switzerland’s picturesque Cantons are so finely crafted and manicured that formal deviation disturbs the calm.
To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment, we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?
Your task is to design a deployable minaret that can attain full presence, visible from a distance, during each of the five daily calls to prayer.
You may use any technology you like, choose any site in Switzerland, and your minaret may reach any height so long as it’s at least twice as high as the building it sprouts from.
After the lengthy discussion below we're scratching this part out in an effort to broaden the variety of proposals.
Format
Entries must be submitted as a single image that depicts both the deployed and hidden states.
Submission
Entries must be added to the Switzerland, We Have A Problem group pool on Flickr.
1. Get yourself a Flickr account.
2. Upload your image to your own Flickr account
3. Navigate to this page to add your image to the pool .
Deadline
All entries must be submitted no later than December 18 at 11:59PM Pacific Standard Time.
[1] OK, so not every mosque has a minaret (actually there are only four in Switzerland), but every mosque should have the option to have one.
61 Comments
- Okay officer. book me a ticket...
Criticism dont come wrapped in cotton and not everyone can take any it seems. I say what i think. And, judging by your past posts you do so too. So please dont play the copper, as it takes conversations like this totally off topic and context...
Any updates?
I can hear the jeopardy theme song bouncing around editorial inboxes of archinect...
The wrap up is still coming, but I want to underscore that this was not a competition. There's neither a winner or any prizes.
Yes, we're slow. Sorry!
Oh, I know it isn't a competition.
I was just curious to see the cream of the crop.
@Unicorn:
I'm just curious here ...
With milk, the cream rises. Same thing with hot air.
But in an exhibition like this, how would you decide what is the cream and what is the non-fat? And which one is 'better' than the other and why?
The results are in, CLICK HERE TO VIEW.
In the introductory comments, the editors note:
___________
Now let's turn our focus towards current events and delve into the strange intersection of religious rights, freedom of expression, and architecture.
_________
Sorry, but the whole line of discourse here is a load of typical architect-speak. The editors get an 'F.'
In plain English - and I'm not sure that the editors actually care to speak plain English because it undermines their power and authority - it's a load of crap and they know it's a load of crap.
The underlying issues are about control of property, and about money. In the United States, historic architectural preservation prevents property owners from displaying the symbols of their choice for no other reason than to benefit the so-called 'design professions.' The 'design professions' use the architect-speak to address social problems which they can then 'solve' through various visual designs and through the taking control of *other people's property.*
The architects make money by extorting the property owners. They use 'meaning' - meaning which they themselves, define, distort and bend to their own purposes - to seize control of the property owners' bank accounts and milk them dry. All the while, they pretend they are making the world a better place. A lot of attention is generated and lots of folks talk, and a few years down the road, people wonder, "What were they thinking? That is just a load of crap."
Which, of course, everyone has known from the start.
The architects' work product serves no useful purpose other than to make the architects look like they are doing something great. Their real motive is to get a commission or to ingratiate themselves within elitist cultural and social circles where they can do just that. They give not one rat's ass about the views of the people who own the property. If they did, they wouldn't either propose this type of competition or enter it. No matter how you slice it, this contest assumes that architects can impose their views on others, just as the Swiss people have done.
Why does this 'strange intersection exist? Because without it, architects would have an obligation to actually listen to their clients instead of trying to win architectural popularity and beauty contests, which simply perpetuate the cycle.
eje, you're arguement is completely riddled with misconceptions, regarding everything from the nature of the excercise to basic tenets of REALITY, that even the most juvenile and ill-informed reactionary and embittered (yet hostile) student would understand. your combination of bombast and ignorance is actually impressive at this point. can you please, honestly, just leave this message board alone, since you don't appear to have had any proper understanding of its purpose in the first place?
your*. sorry, my ire provoked poor grammar.
@ nothing_engine
Well, please enlighten me? I'd be delighted.
I say this in all humility, but I may understand the architectural issues better than you or anyone else on this board. Certainly your calling me ignorant, ill-informed and full of misconceptions does not make you right. Nor does being angry and bitter make one wrong.
When you've been spit on and shit on and dumped on and screwed by enough people promoting their Almighty Church of Architecture - after playing Mr. Nice Guy - that's one thing.
But when you realize that the Almighty Church of Architecture is run by a pack of lying, corrupt, arrogant crusading priests WHO ARE SCREWING THE PUBLIC, TOO for their own greed - including naive students who trust and look up to them - that is something else. I make absolutely no apologies for having some responsibility toward innocent victims who don't know what hit them, OK?
But arrogant priests don't seem to respond to gentle suggestions or polite discourse. It looks like they have to be hit over the head, called names, insulted and sued. Otherwise, they lie, cheat, and do whatever they can get away with, because their egos and livelihoods are at stake.
Have you ever read Goethe's Faust? At the end of his life, Faust was digging mud in Holland, like a common laborer, after having studied medicine and philosophy and law. Now, would you call Goethe ignorant?
When he first started doing the compositions for which he is now famous, Philip Glass couldn't tell whether his work was genius or crap. Philip Glass, the Great Composer, couldn't tell shit from shinola. He admits that as the starting point his work that followed.
I'm guessing that you're too young to remember the uproar that Robert Venturi created on the early 70's. "Not architecture!" "Bunch of crap!" "Unsophisticated!" He was hated. Venturi's take was that grandma's taste was "almost all right." My take is that grandma's taste is "100% OK."
Musashi never had any formal training and never lost a fight. Whacked a lot of really good teachers at a lot of different schools who dismissed him as an ignorant, unsophisticated lowlife.
Tell me engine, because I would really like to know. Seriously. Give it your best shot. In increasing difficulty:
1) How does one distinguish 'ignorance' from 'beginner's mind'?
2) Tell me what 'wisdom' means.
3) What are the basic tenets of REALITY?
And don't worry about spelling.
Sorry, I gotta go.
Test for latency and phantom auto-responses...
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