This sketch was done by an (unknown) student of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. It is a design for a suicide building:
Jumping is done from the top platform. From the underlying floors, as well as from the audience seating opposite the building, spectators can watch the suicides happen live.
Photograph by Levan Asabashvili.
Photograph by Krzysztof Weglel.
Some examples of informal structures called “kamikaze loggias”, the vernacular extensions of modernist buildings characteristic of Tbilisi. These extensions have been created since the 1990s as an organic response to the new, “lawless” times after the fall of the Soviet Union. They increase the living space and are usually used as terraces, extra rooms, open refrigerators, etc.
It is said that a Russian journalist named them “kamikaze”, drawing a parallel between the romantic and suicidal character of such an endeavour and the typical ending of most Georgian family names “-adze”. This architecture also refers back to the local palimpsestic building technique, which since the Middle Ages has allowed new houses to be built on top of existing ones on the steep slopes of the Caucasus Mountains thus not monumentalising the past but expanding on it for the future.
Read more about the Georgian Pavillion at the 2013 Venice Architecture Biennale here.
Francis Alÿs, stills from ‘Tornado’ (2000-10)
Since 2000, Alÿs has visited an area in the Mexican countryside where tornadoes occur, and has filmed his attempts to run into the eye of the storms.
