Guest of the Season - Stéphane Malka אדריכלות ישראלית Architecture of Israel #133 August 2023 | | 26 guest of the season Stéphane Malka - rethinking architecture Natalie Mann Malka was born and raised in Marseille. Inspired by abandoned urban spaces during the 1980s, he "donated" his graffiti skills to express his opinion on their unused potential. He saw the ruins of the Belleville neighborhood in Paris as a fertile opportunity to experiment with his painted collage techniques while being part of the Ateliers Frigorifiques street artists, who decorated walls of buildings with various graffiti techniques, such as enlarged stencil and fresco. After completing architectural studies in 2003, Malka established his own architecture studio, while continuing his graffiti activity in various places in the city, hiding the fact that he was an architect. Collaborating with well-known artists and architects, like Philip Stark, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nobel enabled him to plan (in only three days) the Top Nest panoramic bar on the Terrace at Galeries Lafayette, a work that became a cornerstone for his first manifesto, 2014 Petit Paris, an Architectural Kamasutra” At the heart of his almost anti-architectural manifesto stands the statement that urban intervention requires no pre-planned design, but rather, based on casual, random events, allows endless recycling of second-hand architectural details. Malka left his marks on neglected, unused spaces, creating "blind walls" under bridges and roofs of existing houses. At the same time he began to formulate architectural projects, among them, recycling a gas station that became the largest contemporary art store in Paris - Black Block, at the Palais de Tokyo Museum. These non-conventional works have bestowed Malka with international acclaim and awards for his works, which have been presented in national galleries and museums around the world. Five of his architectural works presented here express his spontaneous utilization of urban spaces, performing extreme recycling examples of old building details which are deliberately superimposed on their structures, creating interesting facades, most of them having been carried out without any conventional plans to convey the message of the absolute needlessness of architectural knowledge to re-adapt social constraints.
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