The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. See all published pamphlets HERE.
Volume 06_Cruel Designs includes: Introduction: What Is Cruel Design? — Violence on the Body: A Manual for the French Police Escorting Illegal Immigrants — The Handcuffs of the Future — The Straightjacket & the Guillotine — The Thanatopolitics of Death Penalty — The Precise Design of Torture in Kafka’s Penal Colony — What Constitutes “the Act of Killing” — The Absolute Power of a Body over Another in Sade — The Corset: “A Body Press,” Paradigm of the Violence of Design on the Body — Carceral Treadmill — To Design a Prison, or Not to Design a Prison: What About a Hippocratic Oath for Architects? — From Student Design to Conservative Policies: Dutch Politician Fleur Agema’s Scheme (by Jonas Staal) — The Open Warehouse as the New Carceral Paradigm — The Eastern State Penitentiary Panopticon: The Materialization of the Diagram and Its Fallibility — The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank — Cruel Bench — Innocent Stairs? The Killing Steps of the Mayans — Sadian Architecture / An Architectural Narrative (by Eduardo McIntosh)
The Funambulist Pamphlets is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.
About the Editor
Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who successively lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai and currently resides in New York. His approach to architecture consists in a delicate articulation between theoretical research and a frank enthusiasm for design. Such an articulation has been explicated in his book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), which attempts to examine the characteristics that make architecture an inherent political weapon through global research as well as an architectural project specific to the Israeli civil and military occupation of the West Bank. He is also the author of the graphic novel, Lost in the Line. He finds his architectural inspiration from films, novels, and political philosophy books, rather than in architectural theory texts. He is currently collaborating with Madeline Gins for her Reversible Destiny Foundation (created with the late Arakawa) whose philosophical and architectural work is highly influential upon the role of architecture in relation to the human body.
The blog The Funambulist: Architectural Narratives , a daily architectural platform written and edited by Léopold Lambert, finds its name in the consideration for architecture’s representative medium, the line, and its philosophical and political power when it materializes and subjectivizes bodies. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert for example — and one comes to trace a line on it, (s)he will virtually split this same milieu into two distinct impermeable parts through its embodiment, the wall. The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line.