UNIVERSIT Y OF DUNDEE ARCHITECTURE 2020/21 | YE AR 5
EARTH
GROUND AND S
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STUDIO A: GROUND AND EARTH Andy Stoane
Contents Studio Statement 2 Elaboration of Themes
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Studio Field(s) 12 Structure and Staging
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Reading 16
Important Note: In addition to this, your own brief, you should read the coupled Ground and Earth 4 brief . 1
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“THERE ARE MALIGNANT WINDS BLOWING ON THIS BLUE PLANET. . . . A SEEMINGLY INEXORABLE MARCH TOWARDS OUR ONLY HOME, EARTH, BECOMING UNIHABITABLE.” Manuel Castells
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A || MACRO GROUND AND EARTH: STOANE STUDIO B MICRO: SANDRAANDY COSTA SANTOS The firstHOUSE: man who, having enclosed HOME NOT YEAR 4 a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars
and murders, many horrors and misfortunes might notasanyone have savedindividual mankind, conceptby pulling at The ideal of from home,how while universal, exists simultaneously a deep-rooted up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you“the are once fantasy, memory, and longing- and as a cultural norm. One speaks quite easily of undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. American dream home” or the “traditional” Dogon houses in Mali. Embedded within the spaces, between the objects, of all homes are implicit roles for men and women, for individual and comJean Jacques Rousseau, 1775 munity, for majority and minority groups within any society.
Gwendolyn Wright, 1991
GROUND: YEAR 4
What is home? Home is a political ground. Home is an urgency in the context of urbanisation and climate Ever since Gestalt psychology promoted figure to ground relationships in human perception. architects and urbanists emergency. We can’t address the question of home at the individual level, because understanding home have borrowed from this idea to create a schema within which the city could be understood and theorised. The is understanding society. Home life reflects a society’s valueassystem subject to and social, thinking is almost always predicated on (domesticity) an understanding of figure (foreground) artificialand and isconstructed, ground political and economic pressures; just like the contemporary withdrawal from public life into the home (background) as existent and residual. Yet today the definition of any real “ground” in our cities is becoming increasingly reflects ournineteenth privatisedcentury lifestyles. Therefore, and the ground Studio’sconsolidations, driving question on home (not house) a much moot. From infrastructures to massive twentieth centuryopens inhabited urban larger problem about public life: who are we as society? podiums, since the industrial age it could be argued that our preoccupation has been less about developing a means of inhabiting the surface of the earth, and more about escaping it.
The problem with re-thinking home is that domesticity develops within the spatial arrangements the house Muchand of our urban landscape “artificial”. People liveThe and house work high what instrument was once thefor single of its location within isa wider urban realm. is aabove powerful pre-ground; civic, public and commercial exist elevated artificial landscapes; shopping malls and other determining and enforcingfacilities home. As anininstrument, it hasinterconnected been successful throughout various housing quasi-public spaces connect to transportation hubs, which themselves connect to increasingly spatialised networks of reforms that valorised certain social relations, collectives and morals. While conservatives have focussed on transport systems buried deep into the earth and used by millions of people every day. These often exist on the scale the privatized family haven, progressive championed collective spaceto and shared resources.is of whole districts. In the connectivity of thereformers twenty-firsthave century city, the very idea of figure ground relationships The urban and material qualities of housing are key to its political power: how can housing support new types becoming questionable. of collective life?
Drawing on this phenomenon of the contemporary city, the studio will seek to discover and design new urban
forged MICRO from architecture without ground, or maybe without architecture. Fromand Hong Kong to relationships MACRO aims to use the disciplinary tools ground of architecture to experiment develop an Shanghai toon London Cumbernauld, our research will urban take us(as to Lefebvre’s urban fields social near and far where artificial argument hometo(as Morley’s ideology) and the space). Research by grounds MACRO prevail through design necessity. Weovercrowding will localise theinresearch yield throughas a major workconsequence of design in anof alternate MICRO students lastand term revealed Dundee’s Hilltown the acute the Dundee, stretched along artificial landscape of its waterfront, and imagined under anshould agency explore for architecture city’s housing crisis andthe thealready gentrification of the area. Design proposals within the Unit the in which the design of the city realigned with socio-spatial intimacy of domesticity and isthe social relations of publicideas. life within the context of Dundee.
EARTH: YEAR HOUSING THE 5CITY: YEAR 5 Fredric Jamieson famously said “it is easier to imagine the endright of the world than changes thetherefore eco-capitalist Housing (…) offers a place to be, is the principal that allows private lifeinand socialorder 1 and its inequities.” It is undeniable that this neoliberal age, with its trope of unfettered economic growth and market relations to flourish. Without housing one is not able to function and integrate oneself into social liberalisation, has annexed architecture and the city to “development” – a process which represents little more than life. Therefore, the right to housing should be seen as paramount. the subsummation of power, quite literally planted in our social field as individual buildings – commodity-forms. Author Peter King, 2017that while this practice seems to “liberate each individual work of architecture and its Nathanial Coleman observes architect to the significant pleasures of his or her own apparent creativity, . . . [it] barely veils the complicity of such buildings in thelive fragmentation environment, including widespread for thelone everyday More people and work of in the the urban city, resulting in three growing trends:disregard urbanisation, livinglife andencroached 2 upon and threatened with dissolution.“ freelancing. The immediate consequence is an increasing strain on resources, space and dwellers’ wellbeing.
At the micro scale, housing speaks of intimacy, safety and care. At the macro scale (neighbourhood, Capitalist development and its concomitant urbanisation reached far beyondenergy the city,consumption physically consuming district or city), housing can support new collectives pooling has resources, reducing and hinterlands and commodifying wildernesses, but perhaps most perniciously by pushing its putative urban processes production, water, food production, consumption and waste. However, despite the undeniable relevance of into all-encompassing supraurban networks of political-economic activity. In the field of urban design, this dominant housing, Peter King (2017)about reminds us that the ‘right toinhousing’ is notideas a natural idea spatial but a social urban condition has brought a resurgence of interest the Lefebvrian of unitary theoryconstruct. and Within theoretical context, the MACRO with the role in form; urbanwhere city planetarythis urbanisation, recognising “urban”MICRO as moreexperiments of a theoretical category thanofanhousing empirical transformation and social Year 5 continues the with discussion on Y4 Accordingly, with a focusany onform the housing boundaries are arbitrary andjustice. where the urban is a condition no “outside.” of effective socioinequalities that threatenwhether the sustainable of the andacquire asks students to build a critical environmental resistance, that be in development politics or design, mustcity, surely equal scope and scale to the forces of the market brought it about. the expansion of the the market has already most forms of us argument on that howhave to house the urban Afterall, population. Given that speculative qualityco-opted of architecture allows activism and rendered sustainabilitydiscourse all but impotent. to represent, analyse and visualise large sets of information from various disciplines, this year we will engage in conversation with Dundee City Council to discuss such a complex problem.
In this context, our studio will consider “the urban” as something decentralised - beyond what urban theorist Stephen Cairns describes as “debilitating city-centricity,” In its analysis we will explore new supraurban design ideas MACRO MICRO will work in the spatial, social and political context of Dundee City and in for the built urban environment, seeking [totalising] forms of compact and propinquitous continuity. Our studio partnership the the Citytendency Council.inWe know that the Citytoward has a the relatively high level of deprivation (38% in investigationswith opposed architectural education naturalisation of “the local,” a condition which 2020); butserves housing inequality is a long-standing historic upon problem Dundee. Designorder proposals on and sheltered only ever to support the uneven spatial development whichinthe neo-capitalist depends, where accommodation respond (at we thewill macro micro tothe theunitary, City’s the sustainable These little resistance canshould be forged. Instead, tend and toward the scale) generic, unifying –development. attempting to find new proposals may consider lack ofatsocial facilities goes hand in hand with housing deprivation and forms of common urbanitythe conceived the scale of thethat Earth.
segregation.
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Illustrations, top to bottom: Buckminster Fuller, 4D Timelock, 1927. A world map, characteristically for Fuller, developing whole world solutions for housing. Prefabricated towers were to be dropped by Zeppelin and erected in a single day, providing two billion new homes across a fully urbanised world. Crossrail, London Liverpool Street. 3D model showing structure and space above and below “ground”. Mapping of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong. The book presents mappings of non-ground-based, publicly accessible areas of Hong Kong, which the authors consider as “a template for public space within future cities undergoing intense densification (and subject to changing weather).” Drawings from the book Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress. The authors describe the first as a “drawing by Angelo Bucci entitled The Thin Layer depicting Earth’s boundary as a shallow zone of approximately 3.5 kilometres that constitutes the inhabitable realm of the planet; what appears as a single line is actually comprised of two lines, the inner and outer circles of the thin layer.” The next two drawings are described by the authors as “Diagrams of uneven world development; the first is the socalled “Brandt Line” from the 1980 Brandt Report prepared by an independent commission of the World Bank, proposing a new “poverty line” demarcating what was then called the developed “First World” above and the underdeveloped “Third World” below;” the second shows archipelagos of affluence scattered around the globe, disclosing the imbalance of wealth accumulation worldwide, based on the Brookings Institution report Global MetroMonitor 2014. (Leonard Streich, Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert from Something Fantastic, Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, 2019).
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SPACE CRUMBLES, IS EXCHANGED (SOLD) IN BITS AND PIECES, INVESTIGATED PIECEMEAL BY THE FRAGMENTED SCIENCES, WHEREAS IT IS FORMED AS A WORLDWIDE AND, EVEN, INTERPLANETARY TOTALITY.” Henri Lefebvre
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“The urban” is a global condition. Statistical data such as 55% of the global population living in cities and the prediction of its continued rise to 75% by 2050 is well know and has been discussed for decades, as has the rise of the hypercity. Thise so called “urban age,” with its trope of continued urban growth - where the city is an engine of economic growth reveals deep and concerning implications for our inhabitation of the planet. Manuel Catells opens his book Local & Global with the thought that “ . . . if urbanization is the usual form of spatial settlement for the human species, does it make any sense to continue to speak of cities? If the trend is for everything to be urban, should we not then shift our mental categories and our management policies towards an approach that differentiates between the various forms of relationship between space and society?”1 In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt examined spatial changes in modern “society,” from her referent of classical Greece arguing that the rise of “mass society” had brought about a loss of distinction between the realms of public (political) and private that so defined the Athenian polis. It had folded them together into a single bureaucratic, organisational “social” realm, of which the modern city was the economic engine. For Arendt, the potency of the polis as a political community was in its limit. The law, she tells us, was “quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomoration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.” 2 We are reminded that the Greek city-state, “. . . could only achieve freedom in the polis by restricting its numbers. Large numbers of people, on the other hand, “develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism . . .”3 This idea of limits – of control of a now hegemonic and irreversable urbanisation process – is instantiated in the architectural office Dogma’s projects Stop City and A Simple Heart, both of which delimit space precisely to protect it from the system. In contrast, Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969), exposes the values of the capitalist city by pushing them to extremes. An “assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis,” in which lies “the idea of the disappearance of architecture within the metropolis . . . to qualitative utopias, we answer with the only possible utopia: the one of Quantity”4 Another retranslated Arendtian idea is the consideration of the world as a fabricated human entity. Arendt conceptualises the planet as “the human artifice”: “The work of our hands, as distisnguished from the labor of our bodies . . . fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.”5 This argument is echoed by contemporary theorist Beatriz Colomina in her book Are We Human?, along with much contemporary new materialsist thinking. Colomina asserts that “[the] archeology of design is not simply about the history of the human animal as revealed in all the layers of artefacts. It uncovers the sedemented ways of reinventing the human.”6(10)
“Humans no longer move across a small part of a very thin layer on the skin of the Earth, nomadically foraging for resources as if acting lightly on a vast stage. They now encircle the planet with layer upon layer of technocultural nets . . . ”7(12)
The Politics of Earth Castells’ doctoral teacher, Henri Lefebvre, wrote his seminal The Production of Space in 1974, arguing that space is “produced.” “Social space” is effectively a “representation of the relations of production” - a subsumation of power, quite literally “planted” in our social field as buildings. This realises a contradiction:
“the principal contradiction is found between globally produced space, on a worldwide scale, and the fragmentation and pulverization that result from capitalist relations of production (private ownership of the means of production and the earth, that is, of space itself). Space crumbles, is exchanged (sold) in bits and pieces, investigated piecemeal by the fragmented sciences, whereas it is formed as a worldwide and, even, interplanetary totality.” 8
This idea of a “unitary theory” of space as Lefebvre puts it - has been long forgotten in our age of specialisations and disciplinary compartmentalisation. In Douglas Spencer’s words, as architecture has ”sutured itself more securely to the means and methods of the market,” it has retreated into its own box, on its own piece of ground.9 In his writing on Lefebvre, Nathaniel Coleman describes architecture as “paralysed by its capture.” It can do little more than “reinscribe alienation into the built environment as something of a repetition compulsion. In doing this, architecture largely elaborates on its own cultural irrelevance: characterised by social emptiness, or a general lack of ethical purpose beyond technocratic proficiency, economic reductionism or novel extravagence.”10(5) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Manuel Castells, Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age (London: Earthscan, 1997), 1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 63-64. Ibid., 43. From the original publication of the project in Casabella in 1970. The project was titled “City, assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 136. Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Are We Human?: The Archeology of Design (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2016), 10. Ibid., 12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 148. Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 47-48. Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 5.
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As Cary Siress and Mark Angélil observe in their book Terrestrial Tales, Bruno Latour has raised the urgency of the need for “new stories to make the Earth public, that is to make the state of our planet a matter of concern for all.”12 Siress and Angélil also cite the work of environmental historian Jason W. Moore in talking of “environment-making” as something that “can no longer be framed by the strictly opposing terms of ‘man’ versus ‘nature’.”13 They go on to expand Lefebvre’s thesis on the capitalist “production of space” “. . . environment-making must be reconsidered as the prime channel for capital in leveling everywhere to the bottom line of a cheap resource to be exploited.” As it stands from this perspective, capitalism does not operate outside of and on nature but through nature to steer the development of socio-technical- ecological systems in accordance with vested interests, implying that the production of space encompasses “the production of nature.”14 The eco-capitalist order, as Manuel Castells calls it specialises and instrumentalises broader spatial concerns, especially those which may impede its progress or challenge its interests - the co-option of “placemaking” into renewal and gentrification, for example. “Earth- thinking” now connotes ideas of “environmentalism,” a practice subsumed into ever more sophisticated ways of commodifying, fragmenting and selling the surface of the planet, the air above it and the ground below it. The “Trap of Localism” This century, urbanisation has exploded exponentially with the rapid rise of the global economy. Shenzhen, for example, has grown from a small town of 30,000 to a global city 13,000,000 in only thirty years. The global presence of a new super-scale of city has brought contemporary urban theorists such as Neil Smith, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid to research the sociospatial ramifications of such accelerating globalisation and the now accepted metanarrative of “city as machine for economic growth.” Such research has revealed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that globalisation and its associated cultural imperialism have far from homogenised “the landscapes of everyday life around the world.”15 Brenner states that “[m]ost critical geographers have stridently rejected such claims, arguing that late modern capitalism has in fact been premised upon an intensification of differences among places, regions, and territories, even as the mobility of capital, commodities, and populations is enhanced.”16 These global differences - “uneven spatial developments” as they are often referred to - are supported by the tendency toward “localism” in urban research. Such a focus assumes a certain naturalisation of the local scale, often prompted by local activism which stood in opposition to urbanisation, such as that of Jane Jacobs and her followers. Now co-opted into processes of redevelopment under the hegemony of neoliberal economic growth and now often branded as “placemaking”, many contemporary critics now see the promotion of such a local agenda as a tool of the development process. Localism, while often well intentioned, can often lead to a further relinquishing of criticality, ignoring as it does the importance (and history) of multi-scalar and supraurban processes in not only supporting cities, but in realising their potential for social transformation. This has brought about a resurgence of interest in the Lefebvrian idea of urbanisation as a planetary phenomenon, where boundaries are arbitrary; where the “urban” is more of a theoretical category than an empirical object; and where the urban is a condition with no “outside.” Aims and Key Questions The studio aims to address Lefebvre’s “contradiction,” daring to imagine a different world in which the now commonly maligned idea of utopia is central. We will imagine a world in which the place of architecture is closer to a planetaryscale social condenser than the instrumentalised role that contemporary architecture performs in the world today. We will not consider architecture as the system wants us to - as fully bound “’objects’ on isolated building plots,” which relate to fragmented “ownership.” This, in fact, compounds the contradiction - as Nathanial Coleman puts it in his writings on Lefebvre, while seeming to “liberate each individual work of architecture and its architect to the significant pleasures of his or her own apparent creativity, . . . barely veils the complicity of such buildings in the fragmentation of the urban environment . . . “17 - a fragmentation concomitant with the ongoing, and seemingly unstoppable, atomisation of society. Can the understanding of spatial imagination as non-specialised - as not respecting the boundaries of interior design, architecture design, urban design, and politics as they have been imposed upon us - allow us to consider “the city” as a political entity, and “the urban” as a theoretical register that allows us to discover new social form? If “the urban” is a whole-earth condition, then surely we must consider it as a totality. Through thinking about the urban on a planetary scale can the conceptualisation of non city-centric urban processes offer new scope for the design of an equitable habitat - one without expropriation or enforced displacement? Can urbanisation contribute to a the idea of a “public” planet. Can it unite rather than fragment?
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Marc Angelil, Cary Siress, Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2019), 21. Ibid. Ibid., 35. Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (New York: OUP USA, 2019), 256. Ibid. Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 57.
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“. . . TO TAKE ON EARTH IN MORE RESPONSIVE WAYS IS TO TAKE ON OURSELVES AS STAKEHOLDERS RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING NEW WAYS OF THINKING AND WORKING THROUGH THE ‘INSIDE’ BY PUTTING THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE ON PAR AS EQUALLY POLITICAL AGENDAS.” Cary Siress and Mark Angélil
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Researching ‘Critical’ Projects URBAN SCALE | ‘Critique,’ statement, contestation, affirmation. In the endeavour to find new social space and form - in researching the relationship between architecture, its grounds, and socio-spatial, socio-political, and socio-economic ideas - it will be vital to analyse urban projects whose intention is one of critique, statement, contestation or the disrupted affirmation of established ideas. Some notable examples are listed opposite. In their own way, all these projects oppose, expose or affirm power structures.
THE ABSENCE OF CRITIQUE, OR ITS REDUCTION TO A ‘MARGINAL’ ACADEMIC POSITION, MEANS THE CLOSURE OF OPPORTUNITIES OF STEERING SOCIETY TOWARDS SELF-IMPROVEMENT. Tahl Kaminer
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Yona Friedman’s Spatial City, 1964
Archizoom’s, No-Stop City, 1969
Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, 1964
Ungers’ Green Archipelago, 1977
Koolhaas’ Exodus, 1972
OMA’s Melun Senart, 1987
Dogma’s Stop City, 2007-8
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Locality, Ground and Totality Locality Your year 5 thesis should be seen as a consistent, synthesisied body of work. It will involve your thinking, researching, reading, designing and writing extensively about the contemporary urban condition and its relationship to the planet. As such, there will be no prescription of operational fields, other than that your fields will be considered on a planetary scale - a patchwork of variegated fields making up the surface of our world. The meta-question is about the ability of a unitary theory of space to affect and ameliorate our inhabitation of the planet? Can urbanisation create unity instead of fracture in the world? How can inequities be avoided? Where, how, and if you localise these ideas is open to discussion and is part of your thesis. Ground From our modern perspective, ownership of ground often connotes a form of freedom and liberation – having our own piece of the world. Yet, As Rousseau observed, paradoxically, this freedom is also a form of theft. Rosseau made this observation when the population of the planet was around eight hundred million - when industrial capitalism was embryonic and over a century before the “mass society” Hannah Arendt talks of began to re-shape world according to the logics of production and consumption that we have now normalised. These logics see ground as power - a place to park capital in the form of architecture and space. On a planet of now almost eight billion people, ground (as perhaps its most precious resource) becomes more and more scarce – and consequently more and more expensive - as that population grows. The commoditisation of ground, accordingly, deprives future generations. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, ground is an increasingly valuable part of our asset structure. Escalating levels of investment in it will raise social inequalities and bring a “renewed importance of inherited wealth.” Totality The studio will aim to realign the design of the built environment with its social mission. We will re-address the de-facto (non)relationship between individual architecture and the urban “totality”. However, please be clear, understanding the totality of a particular urban field does not simply mean researching or analysing it in its entirety. We may well find means of exploring the typical conditions of the whole fields, by cutting transects or other by methods, but crucially, we will try to build understanding of an urban totality within which architecture, as a socio-spatial discipline, is deeply interwoven with socio-economic and socio-political ideas and concerns. Totality means understanding, in Hilberseimmer’s words, that the entire “organism” has many interconnected factors - the relationship between the individual piece of architecture and the urban whole will always be considered as the relationship between an individual and the public to which the individual belongs.
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THE FIRST MAN WHO, HAVING ENCLOSED A PIECE OF GROUND, BETHOUGHT HIMSELF OF SAYING ‘THIS IS MINE’, AND FOUND PEOPLE SIMPLE ENOUGH TO BELIEVE HIM, WAS THE REAL FOUNDER OF CIVIL SOCIETY. FROM HOW MANY CRIMES, WARS AND MURDERS, FROM HOW MANY HORRORS AND MISFORTUNES MIGHT NOT ANYONE HAVE SAVED MANKIND, BY PULLING UP THE STAKES, OR FILLING UP THE DITCH, AND CRYING TO HIS FELLOWS, ‘BEWARE OF LISTENING TO THIS IMPOSTER; YOU ARE UNDONE IF YOU ONCE FORGET THAT THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH BELONG TO US ALL, AND THE EARTH ITSELF TO NOBODY. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1775
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“IF THE TREND IS FOR EVERYTHING TO BE URBAN, SHOULD WE NOT THEN SHIFT OUR MENTAL CATEGORIES AND OUR MANAGEMENT POLICIES TOWARDS AN APPROACH THAT DIFFERENTIATES BETWEEN THE VARIOUS FORMS OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPACE AND SOCIETY?” Manuel Castells
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In your thesis, you will be expected to engage in, and contribute to, the extensive body of theoretical work on the subject in question, putting forward a clear argument in the form of a project and associated text. To help with the management of this, the year has been structured into the following key phases. Please note, key submission dates and whole-year events will be detailed in the year 5 Module Guide.
Key Phases: Notes: Texts (both on the reading list and those discovered) are expected to inform and supplement all phases. All data gathered should be organised and put into a collective resource. Phase 1: Researching Urban ‘Grounds’ | ‘Critique,’ statement, contestation, affirmation. We will research the relationship between architecture, its grounds, and socio-spatial, socio-economic and socio-political ideas. We will do this through analysing projects whose intention is one of critique, political statement, contestation or affirmation – “political” projects. Non-exhaustively, some notable examples are listed on page 11. In their own way, all these projects oppose, expose or affirm political ideas. Working alongside year 4 students in their Humanities Thinking Machine, The Pattern Book of Power, we will question how power is represented in morphological ideas? Considering Lefebvre’s notion of space being “produced” by power relations, in an upturning of order, we will ask how new social patterns might yield different powers? Phase 2: Understanding “Totality”. We will research the notion of “total” space – earth as a continual, uninterrupted field of social relations. We will explore questions of totality, fragmentation, continuity, and discontinuity in physical, spatial, and temporal terms, building understanding of architecture as a socio-spatial discipline deeply interwoven with socioeconomic and socio-political ideas and concerns. Phase 3: Hypothesising on a Unitary Spatial Idea. Neil Brenner, in Urban Growth Machines–But at What Scale? observes that: “. . . cities may well remain a central object and terrain of investigation, but they are grasped by being positioned analytically within broader, supraurban political-economic configurations–” What he describes as “putatively urban processes” are “often multiscalar, stretching beyond any single municipality into a tangled jigsaw of metropolises, regions, national or transnational interurban networks, and worldwide spatial divisions of labor.”(234) You will prepare a working hypothesis for a spatial idea that can in some manner unify fragmented supraurban terrain. Your hypothesis will be set up to allow you to test some idea of how “the urban” can be a unifying condition, rather than a condition concommitant with the fragmented power-relations of our current economic system. In building the hypothesis, you may well also want to develop the antithetical argument, so that your eventual synthesised thesis can stand in opposition to it. Phase 4: Testing the Hypothesis / Synthesising the Thesis. The final thesis might be brought together in a number of ways. The hypothesis might be tested through detailed scenarios, devised to illuminate conditions imagined as part of a much bigger complexion; it might develop into an antithetical (or critical) project, devised to stand in opposition to particular existing conditions; it might be a project of the nature of No-Stop City, which pushes a pre-existing idea or trend to its extremity, thus exposing its values or end-game; or it might use a pre-existing hypothetical project to make an opposing or alternate point, as Stop City does with No-Stop City.
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Space & Politics, Urban: Brenner, Neil. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, New York, OUP USA, 2019. Brenner, Neil, Marcuse, Peter, Mayer, Margrit. (eds). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Coleman, Nathaniel, Lefebvre for Architects, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. Castells, Manuel., Borja, Jordi. Local & Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age, London, Earthscan, 1997. Kofman, Eleonore, and Lebas, Elizabeth. (Eds.). Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973. Marcuse , Peter, Connolly, James, Novy, Johannes, and Olivo, Ingrid, Potter, Cuz, and Steil, Justin. (Eds.). Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011. Marcuse, Peter., Madden, David. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, Verso, 2016. Ryan-Collins, Josh, and Macfarlane, Laurie. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, London, Zed, 2017. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Abingdon, Routledge, 1996. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Space & Politics: Misc. Earth, Urban and Architecture: Kaminer, Tahl. The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017. Angelil, Marc, and Siress, Cary. Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth, Berlin, Ruby Press, 2019. Colomina, Beatriz., Wigley, Mark. Are We Human?: The Archeology of Design, Zurich, Lars Muller, 2016. Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance, London, Bloomsbury, 2016. Aureli, Pierre Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005. Ginzburg, Moisei. Dwelling: Five Years’ Work on the Problem of the Habitation, London, Ginzburg Design with Fontanka; 01 Edition (23 Nov. 2017) Leach, Neil. (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Abingdon, Routledge, 1997. (particularly Jameson’s Is Space Political? and Leach’s Architecture or Revolution). Deamer, Peggy (ed). Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York, Routledge, 2014. A+T, Issue 32, Autumn 2008, Hybrids II, Low-rise mixed-use buildings. Koolhaas, Rem., Mau, Bruce. S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995. Essays: “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” “Bigness, or the Problem of the Large”, What Ever Happened to Urbanism?. Project: “Surrender, Ville Melun-Sénart, France, 1987”. Koolhaas, Rem., Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Cologne, Taschen GmbH, 2011. Fuller, Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Zurich, Lars Muller Publishers, 2008. Tafuri, Manfredo. 1976. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Tectonic / Material: Hartoonian, Gevork. Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006. Paredes Maldonado, Miguel. Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures: Phase Spaces and Generative Domains, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019. Cairns, Graham. Reflections on Architecture, Society and Politics: Social and Cultural Tectonics in the 21st Century, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018. Boom, Irma. Rem Koolhaas. Elements of Architecture, Cologne, Taschen, 2018. Economic: Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge / London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Papers Kate Shaw (2015) “The intelligent woman’s guide to the urban question”, City, 19:6, 781-800, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1090182 Michał Murawski & Jane Rendell, “The Social Condenser: A Century of Revolution Through Architecture”, 1917–2017, The Journal of Architecture, 22:3, 369-371, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2017.1326680, 2017. Websites: SOCKS: a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination http://socks-studio.com/ Documentaries: Curtis, Adam. 2011. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Episode 1 (BBC Documentary). Manifestos / Surveys: Hertweck, Florian., Marot, Sébastien. The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Zurich, Lars Müller, 2013. Koolhaas, R., Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhatten, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994. Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., Izenour, S., Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972. Graphical: Bunschoten, Raoul., Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Uitgeverij, 2000. Desimini, J., Waldheim, C., Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima). (2014). Atelier Bow-Wow - Graphic Anatomy 2. Toto. (and/or Graphic Anatomy 1).
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“. . . EVERYTHING (‘PUBLIC FACILITIES’, BLOCKS OF FLATS, ‘ENVIRONMENTS FOR LIVING’) IS SEPARATED, ASSIGNED IN ISOLATED FASHION TO UNCONNECTED ‘SITES’ AND ‘TRACTS’; THE SPACES THEMSELVES ARE SPECIALIZED JUST AS OPERATIONS ARE IN THE SOCIAL AND TECHNICAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.” Henri Lefebvre
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