Here we see Constant and Debord in Munich at the Hofbräuhaus. They had met in the beginning of the 50ies. Before Constant was a founding member of the painting group Cobra which was also internationalist and anticapitalist. Other artists from Cobra, like Asger Jorn, joined with the Lettrist International and built together the Situationist International.
Around 1955 Constant quit painting and moved more and more to the field of architecture. This is one of these early works. From 1956 on he started to work on "New Babylon". The project was first called Deriville (after the psychogeographic technique of the derive - the browsing around in the city), then Debord came up with the name of New Babylon, which was a clear statement against the church and institutions in general.
Here we have an image of New Babylon. It's a huge structure
as we can see. It's not on the ground but it's built on pillars, above
existing structures, on top of existing cities; it's another layer somehow.
It's a very chaotic system, and it's very modular: inside all these areas
are constantly reconstructed and changed; this goes along with the situationist
program against stereotyped and mass manufactured living conditions. The
main activity of the people living in New Babylon is browsing around and
playing. They wouldn't work for a living anymore, life would be a permanent
play. Constant wrote a lot about the so-called homo ludens, the playing
human being. The New Babylonian would be a homo ludens, opposed to the
homo faber, which is the producing human being – the old capitalist
subject.
These divisions inside here show the modular structure pretty good: space
inside there can be everything, from artificial landscapes, massage rooms
to areas for special activities and all kind of cognitive experiments.
The structure of N.B. is made up of different sectors, for instance the
yellow sector, or, here this would be the red sector, which is especially
designed for leisure and recreation.
In N.B. there would be no individual homes, but only transit hotels, because
people are mobile all the time.