The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.
We must change life,' the poet [Rimbaud] had written, and so the Situationists set out to transform everyday life in the modern world through a comprehensive program that included above all else the construction of 'situations' -- defined in 1958 as ...
We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conception...
We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired... Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing pro...
The alarming lack of ideas that is recognizable in all acts of culture, politics, organization of life, and the rest is explained by this, and the weakness of the modernist constructers of functionalist cities is only a particularly visible example o...
We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)
Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?
Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is a...
So many problems we will get to the bottom of later, but whose spatial aspect we must grasp right away. If the space of the industrial economy dominates the social space in which the Parisian worker or intellectual develops, to what extent could resi...
Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to thei...
Moreover the present abundance3 of private cars is nothing other than the result of the non-stop propaganda through which capitalist production persuades the mob--and in this case is one of its most confounding successes--that the possession of a car...
Couples will no longer spend their nights in their houses dedicated to habitation and reception, the customary social reason for banalization. The chamber of love will be more remote from the center of the city: it will completely naturally re-create...
Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.
We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a ...
The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of...
8. Conditions of Dialogue The functional is what is practical. The only practical thing is the resolution of our fundamental problem: the realization of ourselves (our uncoupling from the system of isolation). This is useful and utilitarian. Nothing ...
...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institu...
All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations....
4. Radicalism of forms. If a new model once created meets with much success on account of its greater efficiency than its predecessor, it lends certain neighbouring forms a formal radicalism, which attempts to borrow from the appearance of the new fo...
