Mihail Pandrea

A theory of fragments

Garnacho Marx defined the expression “duck soup”, when explaining Marx’s Brothers 1923 movie with this slang phrase as a title:  

"Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life!”

On the basis of this judgement, one could design a modern building using merely any modern fragments, in the same manner in which a dancer could dance on a waltz by Bedrych Smetana using merely any waltz steps or no waltz steps at all. Extrapolating to Loos, Pilsen and the existing project, one could design a “Loos Soup” using merely and Loos fragments.

In 2013, while working on the St. Sauveur new masterplan, in Lille, Gehl came up with a Matrioshka-doll like classification criteria for the layering of urban fragments, using clothing size conventional annotation to index existing and proposed elements, by size and complexity, from S (the apartment) to XL (the quarter). Extrapolating from this theory, one could expand the matrix on both ends, assigning XS to the fragments forming the interior of the apartment and XXL to the city itself.

In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo depicts the hidden city of Olinda to Kublai Khan, using the wood properties on one of the chessboard squares:

“Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum’s nest, not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree being chosen for chopping down...” (p. 131)

One could use a magnifying glass to analyse, document and index the micro-fragments of an object, for example, the furniture elements that form the interiors of Loos in Plzen, or zoom out and focus on understanding the macro-fragments that form its environment and host it, such as the industrial area of the former Skoda Works.