Notes on Types, Bodies, and Empty Buildings as Zombies: the Miesto Laboratorija

Intro. In 1966, Aldo Rossi published The Architecture of the City, a manifesto against total-planning, zoning, consumerism and modern overrated architects. Rossi described the city as a work of art in the sense of its diversity, uniqueness, and quality, which emerged from a revised theory of architectural ‘types’ that was completed only when paired with their ‘events’. Prelude. Since ancient times, the analogy of the body in relation to buildings has been central both in Western and Eastern architectural and urban design. Urban designers and architects adopted the analogy to ensure a certain continuity between the self, its body and the built environment. In the Roman period, for instance, political ideologies and visually harmonious, symmetrical proportions distilled from the geometries of the human body underpinned architecture and urbanism. Outro. Drawing on the overvalued ideas of Aldo Rossi’s writing on ‘types’ and ‘events’ and an analogy of the body in relation to buildings, this paper enquiries the overlooked permeance and adaptability, causality and intentionality, death and life of buildings-bodies as zombi/es. Even though ‘types’ continue to live because of new ‘events’, buildings-bodies and their forms die again and again. By empirically exploring and thereby describing the Miesto Laboratorija in Antakalnyje - Vilnius, Lithuania, a sustainable and environmentally friendly educational community centre initiated and nurtured by 5 young women with a community cafe, hydroponic and educational gardens, gallery, and outdoor DIY playground for children and give-away shop, more quietly, this paper will render an ecofeminist critical history harboured within an inclusive collaboration between these 5 young women, their families, volunteers and other categories of residents of Antakalnyje, and a carefully careless changing and adapting large parts of an existingempty building – a 1958 Antakalnyje military Hospital warehouse, with its unique awareness of the needs for post-carbon future generations and the ecosystems of which they are a part.