Liverpool: Balcony with Wind Turbine
Balcony with Wind Turbine was installed on the fourteenth floor of the Bispham House tower block. Originally part of the movement for social housing, tower blocks are today increasingly being pulled down. Of the seventy-two social-housing high-rises once in Liverpool, only twelve remain. With the dissolution of the social state, these remaining tower blocks are being privatized. While underscoring private space and wind-generated energy, the project improves living conditions for two families.

The 3rd Liverpool Biennial had several curators. I was invited to participate by Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna. My Liverpool project developed at the same time as the Istanbul project; the difference was that I first made a research visit to Liverpool before making the proposal. The biennial crew showed me around. Then unexpectedly, while talking with Paul Domela, I learned something that reminded me of the work I had done with the Caracas Case Project: Liverpool is a shrinking city. Both the Caracas Case Project and the Shrinking Cities Project examined the informal city, and although I knew that such towns as Detroit, Michigan, and cities in the former East Germany had declining populations, I was not aware that Liverpool and Manchester did, too. Caracas is a special case, since it comprises two forms, once considered anomalies: a growing informal city and a shrinking formal city. But from my firsthand experience I could see that Liverpool and Caracas had many things in common, though in differing intensities, such as the privatization of space, an almost absurd amount of personal security measures, the irrational treatment of space, and the collapse of large-scale systems (whether large industry or the public utilities)-the usual list of calamities that one cannot really talk about comfortably with socially hypersensitive people. Of course, Liverpool appeared to be a more balanced city than Caracas, but it was not necessarily less wild, in my view: next to London, Liverpool has the greatest number of security cameras per inhabitant in the world.

But what I remember most from my Liverpool visit is this. Although widely considered to be mismanaged, Liverpool's misguided investments and radical formal attempts to solve its problems (including the continual resettlement of residents from lowrises to high-rises and back to low-rises and, my favorite, the transformation of a slum- the city's most densely populated area-into a park) have left the city with its eyes open and its body flexible to change. Social politics is another issue. I find it strange for people to be resettled three times simply for the sake of new approaches to housing issues and yet not to really have a say about it.

As late as the 1960s, Liverpool had a slum that could have been straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. There was even open sewage there. The slum was eventually razed and the area transformed into a park. The population was resettled into tower blocks in socially subsidized housing. I was told that residents used to throw garbage out of the windows-this was something I had seen firsthand in Caracas, too, in the social housing complex of Ventitres de Enero. Of Liverpool's seventy-two tower blocks, sixty were recently torn down, with the population being resettled in bungalows. Not that residents really appreciated the change. They had formed tightly knit communities in the tower blocks and felt uneasy about the security problems they faced in the new environment

For my project, I focused on the Bispham House tower block and its residents. My original proposal was to attach a bay window to an apartment in the high-rise and upgrade the architectural addition with a windmill, which would provide energy for the apartment. I made my decisions based on the facts on the ground. In Liverpool, modernist architecture is generally disliked and has been abandoned without regret. I thought that an addition to the flat surface of the towerblock would not be an eyesore. As for the extension of the private space, I felt it was appropriate in a city that was preparing to transform a public park into a residential gated community with big gardens. One of most important points I wanted to make was that tenants do not have to be resettled in order to improve their living conditions. The project hinted at what a small customized addition could do. The windmill was loaned by Windsave, the Glasgow-based company that developed the domestic wind unit. I imagined it would be inspiring for tenants to be independent of the municipal power grid, to be able to generate their own energy.

In the process of implementing the project, which lasted a year and a half, the bay window was transformed into a balcony. The change mirrored a new trend: balconies have suddenly become a desirable feature on residential buildings in Liverpool. As for bay windows, with which Liverpool abounds, I was reminded of the transformations they went through in contemporary Caracas. In that once-proud modernist city, bay windows used to display the interior of a home; now, they hide it. They serve to survey the outside territory from inside the house, just as in Liverpool and Manchester.

I heard from Paul Domela that the tenants where we installed the Balcony with Wind Turbine are happy with the enlargement of their private space, as well as with the wind-generated energy, and want to keep the balcony, which offers a fantastic view of Liverpool. Alan, the caretaker, has been volunteering to show people around who visit the tower block.

To be published in Informal Architectures, Anthony Kiendl, ed. (Banff International Curatorial Institute, forthcoming 2005).