CloudCuckooLand

Peisetaerus: First, we give the place a name. A good name, one to roll off the tongue.  Euelpides: What shall we call it then? Something impressive…  Peisetaerus: It ought to be something light, airy, billowing like clouds…  Euelpides: Deceptively spacious…  Peisetaerus: Cloudcuckooland?  Euelpides: That’s it! Cloudcuckooland. Cloudcuckooland, where castles in the air are built. 

(Aristophanes, trans McLeish, K. Birds. Methuen Drama 1993 [820])

 

Nephelococcygia [ne-fê-lê-kak-'si-jee-yê ] lit. Cloudcuckooland [1] The act of ‘seeing’ familiar objects in the clouds. [2] A dream land cut off from reality. 

 

Cloudcuckooland is a dreamland, a place where issues of work/play, economy and politics are turned upside down. It is used most frequently in a derogatory sense, suggesting naivety or over-optimism; “you’re living in Cloudcuckooland”. It is living (literally) with your head in the clouds.

 

But perhaps the idea of Cloudcuckooland should be entertained. What if the world of work/play were turned upside down (play/work)? What if clubs became the focus and lifeblood of not only community but economy? What if we had time to race pigeons? 

 

Welcome to Nephelococcygia.

 

 37umbrianemptyroom_full.jpg

 

When this just feels like spinning plates. I’m living in cloud cuckoo land. Spinning Plates, Radiohead 

 

Founding Cloudcuckooland

 


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About

Studio Six, MArch School of Architecture,

University of Sheffield

The work of  Studio Six is linked to the Interdependence Day project, (www.interdependenceday.co.uk)

launched in 2006 to reinvigorate sustainability debates and to question some of the technocratic outcomes of seeing ecological and economic concerns as an accounting or ‘problem solving’ challenge.

What can architecture contribute to this attempt to reconsider global, economic and environmental issues?

Interdependent understanding invites an architecture rooted in creativity and metaphor, which ‘listens’ to the potential of a city rather than imposing mark marketable criteria of enterprise, lifestyle or efficiency. This architecture is based on conversations between the city and its varied inhabitants, and in an awareness of its social, economic and ecological metabolism.

The interdependencies of a place may be understood as a particularly dynamic and complex constellation of social, economic and emotional relations, but the term also has ambitions for a sense of a place that is extroverted and unexpected. Interdependence includes a consciousness of links with the wider world integrating in a positive way the near and far, the local and the global, the human and the ecological.

The studio will instigate alternative modes of architectural collaboration, representation, and communication that are more open and amateur rather than specialised or expert. We will be exploring an architecture of ‘making-do’ and of ‘provisional construction’.

The studio has been exploring the ’steel cities’ of Nowa Huta and Sheffield but we have also been thinking about other cities, about state responsibility, about carnival, about pigeons…     Renata Tyszczuk

 

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