Post by Lars Kordetzky | This post is the fourth entry on No Place to Hide: an online map of potential places

VIEW PROJECTS ON THE MAP HERE

Title: Splitter
Place: Vienna 48° 12′ 29.99″ N, 16° 22′ 23.03″ E
Type: Project
Author: Lars Kordetzky
Date: 1996

http://maps.google.com

Description: “The three pairs of towers form a triangle around the downtown core of the city [...] and [.] represent the last defensive wall of the 20th century in the city of Vienna. However, the wall is perforated, reduced to points, invisible, and has an entirely different orientation from the preceding ones.

The space to be defended is no longer a surface, the ground, but rather airspace. The towers establish, circumscribe a virtual, invisible spherical space consisting of several spherical segments. On one hand, the towers form a circle around the center, the downtown area, and on the other hand, they are each, individually, a center.

The perforated, point-shaped virtual defensive wall of the 20th century therefore embodies the first step towards a decentralization of a monocentric urban structure. The towers are elements of appropriation and simultaneously elements of disconformance. The razing or transgression of fortifications as a means of expanding the city is ongoing, does not happen once but again and again.

The towers are blown up. The ring structure is multiplied. The existing borders of the hierarchical, monocentric urban structure are perforated by means of the same principle of design and order (one that has evolved historically), a numberless ring structure emerges, starting with the already decentralized impact of the towers. Expansion, the incorporation of surrounding villages, the manifestation of the center turns into a countermovement.”

Lars Kordetzky, Transient Sedimentation, 2006

All images: Lars Kordetzky, Transient Sedimentation, 2006

Bibliography: Lars Kordetzky, Transient Sedimentation, Lebbeus Woods (ed.), RIEAeuropa Concept Series, Springer Wien New York, 2006.