Atelier Van Lieshout Atelier Van Lieshout Jennifer Allen Aaron Betsky Rudi Laermans Wouter Vanstiphout NAi Publishers, Rotterdam AVL for Dummies Jennifer Allen 005 Ten Simple Steps # 1 Make It Fit Welcome to the world of Atelier Van AVL works fit into a set of circum- frame of determinant factors – firmly Lieshout (AVL). Founded in 1995 by stances. Of course, every design into the foreground: Alfa Alfa is visibly Joep van Lieshout, the Rotterdam is contingent upon certain factors. a sports car and a chicken coop while collective has produced a veritable Consider the architect who must Clip-On’s windows bear the traces of cornucopia of works which straddle take account of the client, budget their automobile origin. To give rise to art, design and architecture. Beyond and site, even natural light. However these new forms and functions, the car facile categorizations, AVL’s oeuvre can decisive, these factors often operate was not recycled – reduced to scrap be daunting for both the absolute be- as an invisible frame around the final metal, melted down and then re- ginner and the hardcore aesthete. But product: an autonomous ‘object’. shaped into window frames or chicken whatever your background, expertise While AVL values its own autonomy as wire – but rather maintains traces of and tastes, ‘AVL for Dummies’ lets you an organization, many of its designs its past, as skin holds wrinkles and get a grip on the atelier, which makes are manifestly adaptive and ad hoc. scars. Parasite or host, an AVL work its own designs and fabricates them to In contrast to architecture’s realm can preserve in a legible way the parts boot at its base on the Rotterdam har- of autonomous objects, AVL’s works of other stories, from the personal bour. This easy-to-use essay is organ- function as parasites that latch onto memory of a car crash to the collective ized in ten simple steps, which offer larger architectural hosts, often in history of a car’s design. Paradoxically, an effective guide for understanding an aggressive way that cannot be by making objects that fit into a given AVL’s vast output of over 1000 works, compared to the building extension. set of circumstances, AVL manages to from the discreet Personal I Faecal Take Toilet Unit Museum Boijmans make space for more history. (2004) to the giant BarRectum (2005). Van Beuningen (1998) created for the Far from a variation on ‘form follows To save time, readers can start with Rotterdam museum’s pavilion: shaped function’, AVL’s approach liberates any step and read them in any order like a penis, the unit penetrates a design from a master plan: urban, to understand how the AVL process glass passage leading from the main architectural or even divine. By exten- is manifest in a multitude of gestures: building to the museum’s pavilion. The sion, this approach frees the temporal- starting a farm, setting up a Free State, camouflage print covering the exterior ity of design from duration, which sculpting a Michelangelo, recycling suggests that the toilets are part of a imprisons one form and one function for energy, sexual pleasure or organ military invasion, if not an occupation. together forever. In AVL’s world, form transplants. Another significant ease- Clip-On (1997) a reading and relaxation and function follow fate. A car could of-use feature: each step functions unit installed on an exterior wall of end up as a roof or as a nest without independently while referring to many Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, provides losing its original appearance; there is AVL works so readers decide what another example of a parasitic cohabi- a visible process of adaptation, as an they can read and then leave out what tation: the cube floated down from a object follows its fate and discovers they don’t need to do. Whether you’re crane and latched onto the third floor new uses that were never anticipated an established artist, an aspiring of the museum, like a tick floating in the original design. Again: the architect, a frustrated critic or some- from a tree and firmly lodging itself car must not be reduced to raw and body who’s curious about composting, into a human head. reusable materials to serve different this essay lets you get a handle on the Beyond its parasitism, Clip-On shows ends or to fulfil an unpredicted destiny. AVL basics and use them for yourself how circumstances – including chance – Other AVL works resist any manifesta- with confidence and control. Free from can determine the design and the ap- tion of planning, whether in space or jargon and footnotes, the ten steps pearance of an AVL creation. Clip-On’s in time. Consider AVL’s Favela House are packed with handy insights that skylights take their curious shapes (2001), a free-standing façade inspired readers can put to use right away from automobile floor mats: the by the organic housing structures in real-life situations: adding history remains of Joep’s crashed car, which that have evolved in the São Paulo and mobility to a design; packaging happened to be sitting around the AVL slums. While AVL provides the basic without waste; adapting ready-mades studio when the unit was being built. fibreglass structure, each Favela House such as the female reproductive By deciding to use the floor mats to will be built in an unforeseeable way, system for architecture; playing shape the skylights, AVL made the depending upon the found ‘waste’ with critical truisms about form and fragment of a wreck into the crowning materials that each dweller can collect function, modularity and ecology. element of a new structure; part of a around the building site. Favela House Travelling from classics like La Bais-ô- moving floor into part of a stable roof; never reaches completion but rather Drôme (1995) to the latest SlaveCity protective coverage into translucent expands indefinitely, according to (2005), ‘AVL for Dummies’ maps out illumination. As this chance addition the site’s conditions, the dweller’s a leisurely route through AVL’s world suggests, AVL parasites can become needs and the available materials. By while pointing out the bumps that can hosts for other parasites. While Clip- breaking the firmly-sealed fate of an always show up along the road: city On housed spare auto parts, Alfa Alfa autonomous object – whether a car or planners, inspectors and police. with Chicken Run (1999) fit a chicken a dwelling – AVL takes the inherently coop into the shell of Joep’s old Alfa social dimension of architecture and Romeo; its trunk doubled as a secure design one step further. Both parasites portal for the chickens to lay eggs and and hosts, AVL works need not only for the farmer to collect them with people but also other buildings and ease. AVL places the circumstances objects to survive. Fitting into circum- ‘behind’ every work – the invisible stances, AVL explores the possibilities # 2 Make It Move of cohabitation for designs, whatever AVL aims for mobility in its designs, climbing a one-storey set of stairs, not require a liquor license to serve only an artwork – can break the law and violence. Compostoilet defies their origin. far beyond the demands of packaging since the toilet bowl sits over a 3 m alcohol. A-Portable, an abortion clinic while remaining legal. In the AVL many standard sanitation regulations, Of course, AVL may choose to stick and transportation. This quality is tall collecting container. Even the that was commissioned by the Dutch arsenal, Workshop for Weapons and such as the stipulation that toilets be to a more predictable set of outcomes most evident in the wide range of plants in Pioneer Set will never take activist Dr. Rebecca Gomperts for Bombs is legal only as an artwork, flushable; yet AVL’s compost toilets, by fitting its designs into the spaces AVL works on wheels. While the Alfa root in the ground because they Women on Waves (WOW), exploited which circulates without producing despite their flagrant illegality, pose provided and predefined by others. Romeo behind Alfa Alfa lost its tires in grow in a shallow bed of earth on a the sea as both a legal limit and a legal weapons and bombs, although a sustainable alternative to the fresh There are the many bathroom-and- its radical metamorphosis, Mercedes plastic sheet; the trees of the AVL Tree haven. According to international law, the possibility remains open. The drinking water wasted by the flush kitchen-in-one fibreglass units made with 57mm Canon (1998) kept the tires Planters all flourish in moveable pots. a nation-state’s laws and jurisdiction Compostoilets, which are designed to toilet. Boijmans Toilet Unit – with for private homes, and the fibreglass and gained a canon for luxury-class While avoiding anything subterrane- end 12 nautical miles (just over 22 km) be used at each exhibition stop-over, their doors ajar – take advantage of façade that replaced the garage warfare. These works reinvent the role ous, AVL favours building materials, from shore; for vessels travelling in the pose a more direct challenge to most the museum to disobey building regu- door at the Fons Welters Gallery in of the automobile, but AVL’s vans add such as scaffolding, that can be easily open seas beyond this point, the laws sanitation laws. While enforcing lations that call for toilets to be hidden Amsterdam. While placed in small con- even more creative options: consider assembled and quickly taken apart. from the vessel’s country of origin are various laws, the state protects the from public view by a double set of fined spaces, these units tend to stick Modular House Mobile (1995/1996), The first floors of Compostoilet and in effect on board.