l me fallait retoucher l’espace partagé par les êtres humains, réchauffer et refroidir la terre, dominer les éléments, devenir le maître de l’air. J’essayai d’obtenir le soutien de l’industrie en filmant dans ma cuisine la démonstration que mon toit d’air fonctionnerait. Elle consistait à empêcher l’eau de tomber sur le carrelage grâce à un jet d’air comprimé.
Yves Klein, cité dans Yves Klein: The Blue Revolution (MK2TV, Centre Pompidou, France 5, 2006)

Each floor is a separate installment of a complex intrigue … the planning of the choreography of mankind through experimental techno-psychic apparatus designed by themselves to celebrate their own design
… Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor.
Koolhaas, “‘Life in the Metropolis’ or ‘The Culture of Congestion’”, Architectural Design 47 (August 1977)

The term ‘performance’ remains elusive even within well-delineated disciplinary contexts. The bursting of performance art in the sixties provided a new framework and an alternative set of rules through which artists could articulate their relationship with society. Durational at its core, performance seems set to become the twenty-first century’s most influential intermedium. As budgets are slashed, attention spans shorten and professional activities become eventalized, the cultural object – no longer preeminent – veers into product, turns into activity, de-materializes into performance. Cultural production as process.

Of course, just as Klein was leaping into the void to affirm that performance is ‘the evolution of art towards the immaterial’, he was also dreaming up and indeed prototyping a similarly dematerialized, performative architecture. This ‘air architecture’ set the stage for the experiments of Superstudio, or indeed for Haus-Rucker-Co’s explorations of the performative potential of architecture through the use of viewing structures and prosthetic devices that activated a critical perception of space.  Emergent and as yet under-investigated, performance architecture is an architecture that is enacted as much as it is built. Notions of building performance, performance as construction, the rendering of the socio-political experience of the individual in space, or the architectural program as an urban script reaching beyond the specification of typologies to prescribe behavioral patterns are all converging to formulate new paradigms of spatial practice.

Performance crystallizes the potential of architecture as a form of critique. Heterotopic in the Foucauldian sense, it renders visible counterarrangements and discontinuities. But could architectural practitioners lift methodologies and ideas from the realm of performance art to reassess how the environment affects our movements, habits and gestures and is in turn affected by them? When does performance become productive of architectural space? Could the traditional architectural object be supplanted by architecture as a process? Could an architecture of gesture – not of objects, nor of discourse – be envisaged, and what forms might such an architecture take? Crucially, could we begin to articulate a proto-history of performance architecture?

http://specialez.fr/" target="_blank">Le Journal Spéciale’Z, a publication of the http://www.esa-paris.fr/?lang=fr" target="_blank">Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, explores architecture’s complex contemporary context. Each issue is structured around four thematic questions critical to current debate on the built environment, bringing together contributions by researchers and practitioners – artists, architects and urbanists. Le Journal mediates the wider cultural experiences that feed into the knowledge-culture of spatiality with open calls for submissions ensuring a dialogue between emerging and established voices.

The Spéciale’Z http://www.bruil.info/magazine-le-journal-specialez" target="_blank">http://specialez.fr/blog/2012/01/06/le-journal-specialez-no-3/" href="http://specialez.fr/blog/2012/01/06/le-journal-specialez-no-3/">third issue is available now! Read up on Resistance, Destination, Revisiting the Vernacular, and Number.

Click http://specialez.fr/journal/current-themes-2/" target="_blank">http://specialez.fr/journal/current-themes-2/">here for  further calls for papers on Co-opting Art, the Diagram and the Spatial Turn.