Volume #42 Preview

Volume 42 Art & Science of Real Estate

In today’s rapidly changing World, the role of real estate has been affected deeply. To such a degree that the Center for Urban Real Estate sees an opportunity to transform the profession from within, stressing its creative potential and introducing an ethical code. CURE’s ambition is to create a continuum between architecture and real estate, as part of the design disciplines. It may be a good moment to dive into the archives and look at some architects’ attempts to provide for an open society. How much help do people need?

Art & Science of Real Estate INSERT INSIDE

Cedric Price INSERT INSIDE

To beyond or not to be

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Archis 2014 #4 Per issue € 19.50 (NL, B, D, E, P) Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + CURE

Struc­ turalism

... AND

Kate Ascher Guus Beumer Piet Blom Eleanor Bron Vishaan Chakrabarti Benedict Clouette Paul Finch Samantha Hardingham Joop Hardy Dirk van den Heuvel Jeffrey Inaba Catherine Ingraham Lada Hršak Jesse M. Keenan David A. King Andrew Laing Steve Mullin Jan Nauta James Sanders Francis Strauven Julia Vitullo-Martin Piet Vollaard 4/12/14 15:30

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Table

of

Contents

In today’s rapidly changing world, the role of real estate has been affected deeply.

To such a degree that The Center for Urban Real Estate sees an opportunity to transform the profession from within, stressing its creative potential and introducing an ethical code. CURE’s ambition is to create a continuum between architecture and real estate, as part of the design disciplines. It may be a good moment to dive into the archives and look at some architects’ attempts to provide for an open society.

2 Editorial

Arjen Oosterman 12

The Art & Science of Real Estate Development Jesse M. Keenan

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20 Property in Common: Co-disciplinary Nexus between Architecture and Real Property

Catherine Ingraham

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48 Want to Save Public Housing? Integrate it into the Neighborhood, Starting with Retail

Julia Vitullo-Martin 54

Building the Digital City James Sanders

68 The Implications of a Networked Urban Landscape for Architectural Programming

Andrew Laing

28 A Value Add Proposition – the History of Real Estate Development in New York City

Kate Ascher

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The Discipline and the Profession Jesse M. Keenan interview

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Structuralism insert

Value Propositions Vishaan Chakrabarti interview

42 Mobility and the City: Dismantling Automobility for a New Development Paradigm

David A. King

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113 Cedric Price insert 146 Colophon, corrections & additions

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Have

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Dream

Arjen Oosterman Once upon a time, not so long ago and also not that far from where we are now there lived an architect. He, because it was a he, had the ambition to build big, real big impressive projects. He had a vision, or actually he had several. But something was preventing him to execute his ideas. He couldn’t find an investor or a developer who would support his plans.

It made him miserable. But he wasn’t the kind of guy that gives up easily. So on a sunny day, it must have been November, he said to his wife and children and to some neighbors that visited his house: “I have a dream, I have a dream that one day I will be able to create what I envision. That one day, I will be able to make this place a better world.” That’s what he said. And everyone in the room applauded and was impressed. Everyone? Not his eleven year old daughter. She walk over to him, pulled his sleeve and asked with her sweetest V42_biwe_def.indd 2

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little voice: “But why don’t you do it yourself, daddy?” The little rascal. She obviously had hit a sweet spot, because he burst out in tears. “Because”, he stuttered between his sobs, “my fellow architects won’t let me”.

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From today’s perspective, this story seems light years removed from where we are now. In most countries it is no longer forbidden for architects to develop by them­ selves. But fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, this would still be a rule in the code of the profession. Though shalt not develop. If architecture is more than just another profession, if architecture is also one of the liberal arts, the vulnerability of that position should be protected. Therefore design quality and financial interest should be kept wide apart, so was the idea.

This conviction ruled most of the twentieth century.

The builder can compete on price, the architect should compete on the quality of his service (alone). In the golden triangle of client – architect – builder; of desire – vision – expertise; of initiative – proposal – execution; the separation of roles was crucial.

In a world where the client is the owner/user of the building, this mechanism functioned fairly well.

But in a world where buildings have become specu­la­ tive objects, investment vehicles, this division of labor becomes less relevant, it doesn’t make much sense.

The changes in practice of development (the story is different for the US and Europe) and in power rela­ tions created a new reality for architects. They were less and less protected from competing on price and were losing more and more control over how things were being built. The wall between developing and designing no longer made sense. Architects should not just be exposed to minimizing their margins and a red­uced role in the actual execution, but also be al­ lowed to participate in the world of risk taking – the architect as entrepreneur.

There are more process innovations that drove the architect from the ivory art tower he or she once inhabited. The turn-key project is one, a more holistic understanding of performance embracing the full lifecycle of the project is another. On a more mundane level, the recent practice to include beyond the initial program and delivery date thirty years of main­tenance and flexibility in use in the assignment, introduced a far closer collaboration between developer, designer and builder, blurring the traditional boundaries between them.

The simplicity is lost that developers are money wolves without remorse (but admittedly with grand visions), that architects are irresponsible dreamers (but great designers of course), and that builders are tricksters constantly pinching the quality of execu­ tion and adding to the bill (but amazing craftsmen for sure). Instead, we’ve entered a time and field of hybrid

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practices where architects can develop and do pro­ duct design and be consultants all the same, where de­ velopers become designers and facilitators, and where builders absorb both design and development. But also a practice that sees new kids on the block: indi­vi­ dual private development, cooperative private devel­op­ ment, crowd-sourced initiatives, experiments with other kinds of ownership. It is at this point in time of al­most total flux and fluidity that Columbia’s young Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) proposes to emancipate real estate development from a prac­tice and profession into a full-blown discipline. I have a dream.

It is a dream worth exploring because a large part of this world is literally shaped by the activities of real estate developers. The developments I just described are taking place in only a fragment of this world. It is the part that invented modernism, but also the part that was heavy hit by the credit crisis, the part that has trouble to return to business as usual. The ambiguous condition that results cannot be taken as announcement of the next economic cycle, as the model for the world at large. How things will play out is highly unpredictable, but at present one can see it at least as an alternative that could be.

To pump up the Volume, the main theme curated by CURE, drafting a real estate development discipline in the making, is flanked by two explorations into the caves of architectural history. With a little help from our friends of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre in Rotterdam and Bureau Europa in Maastricht, two inserts have been created that respectively address (architectural) Structuralism’s quest to foster an open society and Cedric Price’s personal quest to create a democratic architecture. These two probes show that architects cannot resist meddling with society, that some of the experiments currently presented as in­no­ vation have been preceded by probably more radical experiments some twenty to fifty years ago. They also show that the power of initiative and the polit­i­cal role of the project were very much on the table at that time. They are on the table again, to be further explored in four new issues in 2015. Keep posted.

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Property in Common: Co-disciplinary Nexus between Architecture and Real Property Catherine Ingraham Architecture and property live in split screen worlds. The necessary occasion of their confluence compels different systems and logics – which do not readily mesh – to find common ground in order to form a nexus. In almost every discipline, we speak out of one side of our mouth about economic, business, and legal issues and out of the other about cultural, creative, and intellectual work. The dialectics

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of philosophical pairs such as real vs. unreal, fact vs. fiction, form vs. function – so familiar to us – fuel themselves like thermodynamic engines, establishing gradients from one state (for example, hot) to a contrasting state (cold). By employing the concept of nexus, which means, among other things, an adjudicated agreement, I am seeking to slightly calm this dialectical compulsion. What, for example, would constitute com­ mon ground between real property (real estate) and architecture?

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To begin with, both architecture and real property systems are speculative. Architecture is often called a projective practice because design forecasts a structure and a spa­tial organization for that structure before either build­ing or space exists in any literal sense. And the speculative practices of property valuation are

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legendary. Rem Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, writes about the almost ludicrous power of speculative real estate development proposed by the New York Commis­ sioner’s Map of 1811, which gridded the land north of lower Manhattan in ad­vance of its occupation: “…the land it divides, unoc­cu­pied; the population it describes,

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A Value Add Proposition The History of Real Estate Development in New York City Kate Ascher It can be argued that nowhere in the world does real estate matter more than in New York City, as it relates to the history of the physical development of a city and the role of the private sector in defining and executing a vision for that physical development. In this case, ‘real estate’ means not just the land and the buildings but the institution as defined by the people who develop it and the projects they deliver.

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Real estate developers in New York are not seen as merely one component of the economy of an urbanized place; in the constrained vertical city that calls Manhattan its heart, developers stand as close to raw power as any group of professionals, and are arguably more involved in the civic realm than they are elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad.

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New York’s role as a global city turns on its ability to constantly reinvent itself and to grow, whether that is through the reinvention of products or through the trans­ formation of entire districts. That growth depends not only on the manufacturing and service industries that provide jobs, but also on the companies who provide the physical infrastructure for both workers and residents: those who build and maintain apartment buildings, com­ mercial office towers, warehouses, hotels, and increasingly parks and transit facilities. As the real estate industry expands in the face of globalizing pressures to reinvent itself, a new class of developers is united by a shared set of institutional norms and a common history, which is often underappreciated in its relevance to the cyclical nature of urban growth.

The rise of the real estate development industry and its enormous visibility in New York has its roots squarely in a history defined by geography, events, and people.

Together these factors contributed to profes­sionalizing the development of land in the city and to crafting an outsized role for the profession at the heart of govern­ ment policy and planning. Therefore, the education of

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the next generation of real estate developers is grounded in a history whose experiments in the definition of value provide a foundation for the continuity of a profession whose service is as much to the city as it is to an industry.

Geography The physical circumstances of New York have played a central role in the rise of the real estate development industry. Together, the city’s natural harbor and the con­ figuration of the island of Manhattan created sus­tained demand for a finite amount of land at the heart of the city – and with it a robust real estate market.

The island of Manhattan began life as a marshy and rocky outcropping of land, not entirely desirable for settlement or agriculture; indeed, the name ‘Mannahata’ is believed to be derived from a Native American word for ‘many hills.’ But, its location at the mouth of a great river, once thought to continue westward across the continent and at the heart of a natural harbor, served it well as a site for the trading post of New Amsterdam: a safe, easy base from which to trade furs from the Dutch West India’s landholdings to the north. That location

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City of Manhattan or New York, 1861

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Credit: City of Manhattan or New York (1861): New York, NY: Common Council.

Credit: The Ratzer Map of New York City, 1767 (circa 1767). London, UK: Longmans, Green & Co.

The Ratzer Map of New York City, 1767

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would remain important for trade under subsequent English rule, but would be celebrated most after 1825 when the opening of the Erie Canal provided a longsought waterway to the interior and led to the city’s rise as the world’s busiest port.

The city’s role as a commercial capital created tremendous demand for land as close to the docks, and to the money they produced, as possible. That demand was funneled onto a small narrow island: Manhattan consists of only 23 square miles (59 square km) of land today – and much of that total (+/- 10%) has been added over the last two centuries. At its tip, in the area that includes Wall Street, the island today is even less than a mile wide. Not surprisingly, given the volumes of trade occurring there, demand for both commercial and resi­ den­tial real estate underpinned the local economy as far back as the eighteenth century and served as a stable foundation for the growth of the wider region through­out the nineteenth and twentieth.

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Events While the geography of Manhattan and its suitability for trade all but ensured a demand for land, a series of events facilitated the rapid and robust growth of the real estate market. Foremost of these was the adoption of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 – among the most ambitious and far-reaching acts of urban place-making in recorded history. At a time when the city itself extended no further than Greenwich Village and comprised a random net­

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work of winding streets, a plan to regularize the island’s development along a rectilinear, level street grid was adopted and gradually implemented. The impact of this plan cannot be overstated: it made clear the nature and direction of the city’s future development, inserting an unprecedented degree of predictability into land spec­ ulation development; and, it also commoditized land into very simple rectilinear blocks, making the buying and selling of land incredibly simple.

The filling of marshes and laying of streets that followed the grid’s adoption made clear to all that devel­ opment was afoot, and created strong demand for land to the undeveloped north of the evolving city: as an island, there was no other direction in which the city might grow. But demand for land in the older portions of the city would rise in the early 19th century as well.

The Great Fire of 1835, which started in a warehouse on Merchant Street (now Beaver Street) and destroyed much of the city’s financial heart, contributed signif­i­ cantly in this regard. Much like the Great Chicago Fire thirty-six years later, it left in its wake a strong demand for land downtown and the opportunity to rebuild better, bigger and taller.

A third factor that pushed real estate development to the heart of the city’s evolving economy in the 19th century was the great wave of immigration ushered in by the industrial revolution. Hundreds of thousands of European immigrants swelled the city’s ethnic enclaves in search of work and places to live, giving life first

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10th Avenue with Buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel in the Distance, New York, NY

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Credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin (2014)

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Over the past decade, with astonishing speed – and to the surprise of nearly every observer – New York has risen to become what is arguably the second most impor­tant hub of digital activity in the world after Silicon Valley.

By any measure the recent growth of the city’s tech industry has been nothing less than explosive – in the number of funded start-ups; in the success of its fastest-growing companies; in the meteoric rise in New York-based venture capital; in the boom in commercial leasing; and, not least, in the growing gravitational at­trac­

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tion the city is exerting on established tech com­panies from the West Coast and elsewhere.

Indeed, in the final years of the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg – whose administration aggressively supported the sector’s growth through a series of public-private initiatives, including new applied-science campuses on Roosevelt Island (CornellNYC Tech), in downtown Brooklyn (NYU/Poly’s Center for Urban Science and Progress) and in upper Manhattan (Columbia’s Institute for Data Sciences

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Building the Digital City James Sanders James Sanders, a New Yorkbased architect and CURE Fellow, describes the urban implications of the growing tech industry in New York, pointing to the differences in work culture between tech and previous business booms, and their import for architectural design and planning in the city.

If workplace can be any space, what has real estate to offer?

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Credit: James Sanders

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Midtown South, the Center of New York’s Tech Industry

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and Engineering) – the city’s tech industry solidified its position not only as a leading engine of growth in research and develop­ment, but also as a transformative urban force is redefining the very nature of city life and work in the twenty-first century.

In 2013, responding to this important new presence in New York’s real estate landscape, a multi­ disciplinary team at the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) embarked on a multiyear research initiative called Building the Digital City – the first of its kind to explore not only the dramatic growth of the tech industry in New York, but also its increasingly significant impact on the design, planning, and development of every facet of the city, which scales from the work­ space to the workplace to the larger urban fabric and draws an in­creas­ingly hybrid function between the foregoing.

In its first year, the initiative garnered the support of several major corporate partners in the city’s tech, real estate, and planning sectors, including Google, Airbnb, Jamestown Properties, Cisco, and the Control Group,

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as well as a key research and creative partner in a team established within the global engineering firm Arup.

Research Initiative In setting out to explore the transformative impact of digital culture and economy on the physical city, the research team was impressed from the start by the sheer range of urban scales at which that impact is taking place, and, no less importantly, the ways in which changes and innovations at one end of the spectrum – at the scale of a single building, for example, or even a single interior – are tightly intertwined with those at the larger scale of neighborhoods and districts, and indeed with changes to the city as a whole.

At the scale of the individual workplace, for example, this tech culture is pioneering significant inno­ vations through the development of new collaborative models – including ‘co-working,’ ‘shared-service,’ ‘incubator’ and ‘accelerator’ spaces – that are reshaping basic notions about the layout and structure of the urban office and the very process of working. These new

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Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate and ARUP (2013)

Tech Companies in Post-War Buildings

Tech Companies in Landmarked Buildings

Tech Companies in Non-Landmarked Buildings

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Tech Companies in Pre-War Buildings

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Tech Companies in Buildings Under 14 Floors

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a short animated video – inspired by the 1974 edu­ca­ tional film, ‘Powers of Ten’, by the office of Charles and Ray Eames – to bring to life the transformative impact of digital cul­ture on the twenty-first-century urban environment – at a wide variety of scales, from the individual desk, to the interior of a co-working “incubator” space, to the land­scape of a new tech hub district, to the city as a whole.

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Conference Program As a culmination of the first phase of the initiative – and as a means of disseminating and testing the initial research findings – CURE organized a multidisciplinary confer­ence in the fall of 2013. Held in a specially designed and curated multimedia event space in the Chelsea district of Manhattan – the very heart of the tech industry in New York – the conference gathered together key figures from New York’s digital and venture-capital worlds with mem­bers of the city’s real estate, planning and archi­tec­tural communities, as well as government officials, civic leaders and academic experts. The conference venue in­cluded a pop-up co-working space (operated by WeWork), multi­media exhibitions and digital projections, and work­ing demon­ strations of portable manufacturing tech­nol­ogy – notably by MakerBot, Tomorrow Lab, and others.

Discussing the layout and design of tech-oriented workplaces, participants noted the value of collaboration that is intrinsic to these spaces, and emphasized as one of the city’s irreplaceable strengths the fundamental urbanity of its tech districts, in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the design of the workplaces them­selves has been inspired by the nature of urban life – replacing the ‘monoculture’ of the traditional Class A corporate office interior with something more resemb­ling (and ideally as stimulating as) a vital city street – with multiple overlapping activities, a variety of social gather­

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Tech Companies in Buildings with Greater than 30 Floors ing places, and a rich mix of specialized uses, situated within an overall layout based on flow and movement rather than a static, compartmentalized office interior plan. On the other hand, as CURE’s own research has observed, the city itself is becoming a kind of giant work­ place, its cafes, hotel lobbies, public spaces and parks becoming as much a part of the overall business environment as formally designated workspaces within commercial buildings.

The afternoon panelists, looking at the implications of tech for real estate, development, and the large-scale growth of the city, outlined in some detail the significant obstacles to the continued growth of tech workplaces, beyond the existing Class B spaces they have already occupied in Midtown South and a few areas of Brooklyn.

They described the formidable commercial challenge in constructing a new workspace that is financially viable both in terms of affordability for tech start-ups (who, as noted, are highly price-sensitive), and as an alternative to residential condominium development, which remains in such extraordinary demand in the city that it can com­mand far higher prices per square foot than nearly any tech-related commercial space. As one participant noted, “Is there the need for an affordable workspace movement?”

Panelists pointed the way to two possible solutions. On the private side, one approach is to incor­ porate tech space within a larger mixed-use develop­ ment, which spreads the financial burden across a broader portfolio of elements, and indeed may serve to enhance the desirability (and thus value) of adjacent residential units by providing a more ‘urban’ and energized environment for the project as a whole. On the public side, panelists agreed, government needs to acknowledge the larger value of providing affordable tech space for the city a whole, and create innovative policy mechanisms to com­pensate for the financial

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Volume 42

The Discipline and the Profession Jesse M. Keenan interviewed by Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette As the Research Director of CURE, Jesse Keenan leads many of the center’s projects, drawing on his diverse professional and academic background in law, sustainable development, and housing policy to shape a bold intellectual project for CURE’s research.

Keenan talked with Volume’s Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette about the need for an

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ethical foundation in the practice of real estate development, and the role of disciplinary knowledge in informing the decisions of professionals.

Benedict Clouette What is it that interests you about the idea of real estate development as an academic discipline? Why frame it as a discipline autonomous from the practices of development in the profession?

Jesse M Keenan I see real estate as having a dispro­por­

ti­onate influence on the decisions that are made con­ cern­ing the design and construction of the built environ­ ment. And, in my own experience, I have observed the modes of communication through which developers have engaged design and urbanism, and I’ve seen that the decisions made based on this communication have resulted in a higher or lower quality of designs and/or spatial or environmental outcomes – generally lower quality outcomes. To me, this speaks to a very practical need to promote the professionalization of real estate, as the consequences of getting it wrong are significant.

To this end, professionalization is a function of both private and public obligation. What distinguishes a profession from a trade is ethics, which has been his­tor­ ically grounded or rationalized as a public obligation by virtue of social contract theory in exchange for the exclusive right of practice. As a more practical matter, a profession is self-regulated and perpetuated by ethics, and the only way that you can have an ethic is through the elaboration of a theoretical framework that connects the decisions, the language, and a higher order of intelligence to the external phenomena that drive the subjectivities that ultimately shape the built environment.

BC So you’re suggesting that without a discipline,

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there is no profession?

JMK I think you could argue that both the profession

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and the discipline of real estate development are in the process of coming to fruition; but, to create a discipline on which a profession is based, you need not only a theory but also a historical narrative. All disciplines share the commonality of having both a theory and a history.

Without those, you really can’t build an evolving profes­ sional ethic – or, a notion of value, and of course one of the mechanisms of differentiating real estate from other built environment disciplines is the notion of value. If, as a profession, we want to create a sensitivity to value or even to redefine values, history provides many examples.

Kate Ascher’s piece in this issue of Volume looks at Samuel Ruggles [the 19th century developer responsible for New York’s Gramercy Park and Union Square, ed.]

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and John D. Rockefeller, [Jr., the financier who bank­ rolled New York’s Rockefeller Center, ed.], two historical figures that were very sensitive to the public realm, and saw that as a value-driver. Likewise, Catherine Ingraham’s piece advances the richness of theoretical foundations that have yet to be explored. How does one underwrite this expanded notion of value within the conventions of mortgage or financial underwriting, for instance? It’s a bit of a challenge, but it’s not a methodological impos­ sibility. I think that to recalibrate these notions of value, and their hierarchy within the process of development, it requires a rigorous discipline with its own history and theory to inform the profession. Without a discipline, a profession is dependent on other allied disciplines, for example, urban planning or urban design, which are probably the most closely related cousins of real estate development, but have their own ideological and intel­ lectual imports and biases. I think these other disciplines do not provide clarity with regard to the types of deci­ sions, the modes of analysis, and the variability that exists in real estate development, which operates at the inter­section of economy and design. Of course, there’s much to be learned from other disciplines – design, in particular – but I think that the expertise they provide is not quite consistent – particularly at scale – with the challenges that we face in real estate today.

Jeffrey Inaba: Can you talk more about an ethics for real estate? What would that look like?

JMK The origins of real estate development as an academic discipline go back to the early studies of land economy at the turn of the last century. Early in the evolution of the discipline, the diversity of real estate practice – from brokers, to land developers, to planners – led to substantial frictions, speculation, and even fraud in the market caused by indeterminate unregulated practices. It came at a time of tremendous growth in population, and therefore in demand for housing and real estate, and the need for internal regulation by virtue of a codification of ethics became very clear as a function of bringing stability to very unstable markets. There were two sides to the debate within the dominant professional body of the day – the National Association of Real Estate Boards. One faction, later to splinter off and become the Urban Land Institute (ULI), argued for a codification of ethics, as a practical necessity that would unite the real estate practices under a common profession. The

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Het Nieuwe Instituut

An Installation in Four Acts Education, Ideals, Building, the City

curator Dirk van den Heuvel / Jaap Bakema Study Centre

exhibition design Lada Hršak / Bureau LADA

graphic design Patrick Coppens

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programme Landscape and Interior

file Ongoing research on Structuralism

project Structuralism

Structuralism: An Installation in Four Acts is the first presen­ tation on the subject. It is the starting­point of a research project mining the historical dimensions of 1960s structuralism while investigating its potential for today. An Installation in Four Acts con ­ centrates on the event of Dutch Structuralism in archi­ tecture. For 2016 a follow­up project is planned: Total Space, which looks into the interdiscipli­ nary aspects of structuralism as well as its international context.

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object number / inventory number

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objectnummer / inventarisnummer

architect / author

year

J. Habraken

1967

architect / author

year

H. Hertzberger

1967

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object number / inventory number

Guus Beumer

I was a student when doubt had already made itself felt. In the mid-1970s I walked into the Social Academy at Westblaak, Rotterdam – an 18-year old, embarking on my studies. You might say the social academy was one, if not the ideological center of the welfare state. Not only intended to shape the critical contours of everything that ‘social’ could achieve, it also provided the support staff of social workers, community workers and socio-cultural workers for an intricate infrastructure of temporary refuges/shelters, crisis-, community- and youth centers, and the like. It was the time when the social aspect was supposed to function as the dynamic motor for a new society, aided by architecture and urban planning as agents of change. The academy building, more or less across the street from the architecture office of Van den Broek and Bakema in Posthoorn­straat, had the typical aesthetic of its day, with endless gravel-screed floors, flanked in places by pale grey walls of aerated concrete slabs. In addition, the interior was characterized, apart from a huge rope wall-hanging, by pragmatism. Looking back, it was mainly the vast numbers of washing machines (where else could a student do the laundry?) and the white Formica tables littered with plastic beakers that were typical appointments.

From the very first day – and ultimately I spent four years there – every standpoint, every political truth, every personal ambition was analyzed, discussed and in the end rejected, so that everything seemed to be permanently in a state of flux, never to solidify. The first day all the lecturers were on strike, often themselves only four, five years older than myself; they refused to continue as ‘lesson-merchants’, demanding that the student take the responsibility for his or her own learning program. In my final weeks, the plenary meetings – the last vestige of an institutional structure – were dominated by paralyzing criticism of the individual character of the social infrastructure, which from the inside out….

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Why am I writing this, why do precisely these anecdotes surface when I’m asked about the background of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s choice for long-term research into structuralism? For me, the reason lies in the analogy: I was a student when doubt had already made itself felt, doubt about welfare work, doubt about a social infrastructure, doubt about the eternal polarity between bottom-up and top-down, doubt about architecture and, by extension, urban renewal and community work as an instrument for social engineering and, of course, doubt about the idea of an equitable society. Doubt as regards the social aspect that Hans Achterhuis was to formulate brilliantly in De markt voor welzijn en geluk [The Wellbeing and Prosperity Market] (1979).

And those doubts, that were so at odds with the ideas of the post-war reconstruction generation like Van Eyck and Bakema, inevitably formed the gateway to that other ideology, that of the market, of the consumer. I also remember the moment of intellectual release when all those reader-unfriendly publications by companies like Suhrkamp, for instance about false consciousness (1971, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Kritik der Wahrenäs­ thetik [Critique of Commodity Aesthetics]) made way for a more perceptive description of the superficial, which could cover every antithesis, and pop culture, fashion and punk were not automatically disqualified as expressions of civil proto-fascism. Nowadays, we know that that market and its endless flexibility did not provide the promised answer either, and once more a productive moment is being sought and the domain of the ‘social’, including the ideology of top-down versus bottom-up, and the possible role of design are being reassessed. Just when the polarity between market and government, between consumer and citizen, appears to have been abolished and we refer to ‘a culture of convergence’ (Henry Jenkins), to a creative industry and the moment when the contract between the citizen as a consumer and the government as the market, should be revised. In other words, now is the moment when the deployment and arsenal of Structuralism are again experiencing social urgency – to use it as a lens to take a fresh, yet investigative look at the present situation, with the infinite wealth of the institute’s archive providing a helping hand.

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Speak, Memory!

architect / author

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object number / inventory number

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objectnummer / inventarisnummer

architect / author

year

Van den Broek en Bakema

1980

architect / author

year

P. Blom

1978

An Installation in Four Acts Education, Ideals, Building, the City

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object number / inventory number

Francis Strauven

The address, found in the Blom archive, that was delivered at the opening of the ‘Structuur’ exhibition on 18 September 1965 at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, is one of the few texts produced by Blom dating from that time.

Although, on first reading, it seems rather erratic, somewhat rash, when carefully re-read the text proves to reveal much about Blom’s position at the time, and about the infancy of the movement that become known successively as ‘kasbahism’, ‘configurative discipline’ and ‘structuralism’.

In his address, held when he was a 30-year lecturer and had been project-leader for a year, Blom, for all his insouciance, made a self-assured impression. As an undergraduate at the Academy, he had emerged as a gifted, brilliant designer. In September 1959, Aldo van Eyck had presented Blom’s study project The Cities will be Inhabited like Villages in Forum review as the outcome of ‘the story of another idea’. And at the CIAM congress in Otterlo, that project also featured alongside the plan of the Amsterdam orphanage, linked to it by the slogan vers une “casbah” organ­ isée. Blom had continued working in the same vein, and had christened his design approach ‘kasbahism’. In 1962 Van Eyck, who recognized Blom’s study designs as a continuation of his own thinking, had developed a theory to explain and substantiate the new design method in the steps towards a configurative discipline, a pivotal article in which he did not fail to expose Blom’s achievements.

Admittedly, this propitious development was brazenly frustrated by the Smithsons, who, at the Team 10 meeting in Royaumont, had labelled Blom’s Noah’s Ark a form of fascism. Their odious condemnation caused Van Eyck to have misgivings and temporarily spurn configurative design.

However, his students continued the development. In 1962–63 Herman Hertzberger, in his

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capacity of lecturer at the academy, had set up a ‘study of configuration’ – a project in which the configurative approach was elaborated into a step-by-step method.

Blom, who was appointed as a lecturer a year later, had also directed a configurative project, of course in his own way and with his own emphases, which he expounded in his address.

Remarkably, he made no mention of Van Eyck or the configurative principle. It looks as if he wanted to distance himself from Van Eyck and the whole story of configuration, which Team 10 had rejected, and that he, as the acknowledged initiator of Kasbahism, wished to continue developing that movement in his own way.

He advanced the term structure as a ‘canopy’ covering the exhibited plans. He did not go into the geometrical or thematic composition of that structure, but focused mainly on its mediating role between social regulation and the aspirations of contemporary society. The ‘ordering and regulating character of the present day’ forms the base of the building brief and requires an ordered structure of the built environment. But it is the architect’s job to interpret that structure in such a way that it provides maximum freedom for developing life. Just as regulated working hours generate leisure time, the ordered structure must open up space for the great diversity of unordered life. The structure he envisaged was to be the opposite of a sequence of self-contained buildings that kept activities separate. He wanted an open structure enabling various happenings to be experienced at the same time. In his opinion, society was in a state of mutation. Life was enriched with a vast quantity of industrially-produced things: machines, appliances, gadgets and other stuff. They form a kind of second nature and turn the human being into a new kind of animal. The human being is no longer a person with a fixed identity. “The centre of our individuality is at least situated outside ourselves.” Man becomes a decentred animal living in the plural.

Looking back over his development, Blom felt that Kasbahism had been a productive design method, but it no longer corresponded to the new 1965 attitude towards life. He felt the explicitness of the structure particular to the term ‘kasbah’ was especially outdated. He switched his focus

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Piet Blom: from Kasbahism to ‘structure’

architect / author

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Bureau Europa presents the work of architect Cedric Price and the first public appearance of some of his selected projects in the Netherlands.

CEDRIC PRICE: THE DYNAMICS OF TIME

‘TIME and timing’; the one provides the fourth dimension to design, the other reminds one that to be late can be to be lost. (1984)

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Cedric Price (1934–2003) broke the conventional boundaries of architectural practice by continuously employing a broad pallet of potential design variables. Engaging formal, infrastructural, organizational, operational and ethical factors into all of his design propositions. It is this level of complexity that both sets Price apart as an architect and obscures the great potential of his profound design ideas.

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Price’s broad orientation and readiness to collaborate with other disciplines outside of architecture allowed him to challenge existing assumptions and to introduce alternative concepts to the field of architecture, such as impermanence and responsiveness. Today’s climate of increasing uncertainty makes this attitude more relevant than ever.

Does the architect have an exclusive domain? Architecture is never conceived of in isolation; rather it is shaped by the economic, political, social, spatial and technological variables that constitute our time. If we forget about

the instinctive obligation to conclude with an object, and look at alternative forms of engagement with the forces around us in order to create desirable conditions, perhaps we will (re)discover the potentiality of the notion of time and its related concepts such as impermanence, flexibility and indeterminacy.

I doubt the relevance of the concept of Town Centre, Town and Balanced Community. Calculated suburban Sprawl sounds good to me. (1966)

Top: POTTERIES THINKBELT, Perspective sketch of transfer area, 1966, Gelatin silver print of photomontage, Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Front left: DUCKLANDS, Sketch for the ‘mud-mobile’ between 1989 and 1991, Ink, coloured pencil, graphite and montage on paper, Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Front right: DETROIT THINKGRID, Illustration of selfcontained, information cubicles at a service station, 1968, Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

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BREAKFAST WITH CEDRIC by Paul Finch England best known as being a center for Scientologists. Unwanted visitors or phone-callers trying to speak to Cedric could be told, in all semi-honesty, that ‘Mr. Price is not available: he is in East Grinstead’.

Breakfasts were generally an uninterrupted affair; going to the office afterwards, my head would generally be buzzing with ideas, unexpected information, and often-hilarious anecdotes. Breakfast was a private affair: on other occasions, East Grinstead would be transformed for an election night party or the annual Christmas gathering for staff past and present, clients, and pals. CP’s compartmentalized groups and individuals would be mixed up for short while, old anecdotes re-told, new adventures recounted, to the accompaniment of excellent cheddar cheese, Bath chaps (an almost forgotten cut of gammon) and good red wine.

When the lease finally ran out on the Alfred Place property and no deal could be done with the despised landlord (the City of London Corporation), it was the end of an era. Breakfast continued in other locations, but it was never quite the same. Cedric and his office had become one and the same thing: a complex and creative life mirrored in the geography and content of his townhouse office.

I had always wondered what exactly was in the secret room on the first floor, and after breakfast one day, Cedric opened it up. To my surprise, there was a fax machine in the room. In typical Cedric fashion, however, he never checked anything being sent to him with the new-fangled machine, since he assumed it would be of little interest. The floor was therefore covered with reams of fax messages that were entirely unread. The man who theorized interactive technology years before it came into existence had no interest in the practicalities of fax machines, photocopiers or (God help us) mobile phones, all of which he detested. On the other hand, Cedric liked mechanical objects like his hard-boiled egg slicer, or that most useful of implements, a Nelson knife (a fold-away knife and fork designed for the one-armed).

These stage props were just one part of the actor-architect’s studio; the main part was always the man himself. I wouldn’t say I go around asking myself “what would Cedric have thought about this”, at least not often. On the other hand, I frequently catch myself thinking about something in a manner that stems from all those early morning conversations; it was the questions, the propositions, and the analyses into which he put genuine intellectual effort for which I will be forever grateful.

Above all, he taught you not to be mentally idle.

Ends

Shortly after I took over the editorship of Building Design in 1983, I met Cedric Price at an industry event, probably at the Building Centre on Store Street, opposite his office in Alfred Place. He suggested we might have breakfast at his office. It was the beginning of a long run of breakfasts, conversations, initiatives, magazine columns, and occasional excursions at home and abroad. It provided me with the architectural education that, as a history graduate, I had never had. Cedric thought my lack of architectural education a good thing.

The first breakfast, like all the rest over the next two decades, was a marvelous mix (for a journalist) of anecdote, gossip, political speculation, architectural analysis – plus, of course, breakfast itself. Breakfast was fresh orange juice and strong coffee (supplied by CP), while I would bring in cheese and tomato rolls from Sidoli, the old-fashioned greasy spoon downstairs. These were the long ones with poppy seeds; black pepper had to be added. And then there was the more or less obligatory brandy, which it always seemed a shame to refuse, though my breakfast drinking began and ended with Cedric. We would meet promptly at 8am, with CP having been in the office for some time before, apart from one or two occasions when he arrived late – and rather grumpy (possibly with himself) at seeing me already there.

Most of the time, Cedric would have arranged an informal agenda with various newspaper cuttings at hand, plus the occasional book or official report from yesteryear, marked up for reference. The breakfast might begin with a question about the tonnage of material carried by British Rail as freight, or who might be in line for the Gold Medal, or what people were saying about this or that exhibition. We generally stayed away from foreign affairs, probably because this was territory he discussed with others, like the former Conservative Party treasurer Alastair McAlpine, who once referred to having breakfast with CP as a ‘form of mental gymnastics’.

Cedric was quite precise about columns – how many and at what frequency. Like breakfast (typically one hour), he liked the idea of the finite, and indeed the strictly organized. If there was one thing he hated, it was the unexpected interruption of our meetings, not that this happened very often for several reasons.

First, breakfast was held in East Grinstead, on the third floor of the building he occupied from top to bottom. It was a bit of a climb and there was nothing to encourage the idea that there might be anyone there. Instructions at the top of the first flight of stairs, to wipe your shoes on the mat, suggested a certain desire for order.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it should be said that the top room, which was entirely white, was known as East Grinstead, an obscure part of southern 3

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BREAKFAST WITH CEDRIC by Paul Finch

Envelope from Cedric Price, from the private archive of Paul Finch

4

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As a satellite component to the exhibition at Bureau Europa, a special Cedric Price insert magazine is created in collaboration with Volume Magazine. Newly drawn material from the archives is presented in combination with contemporary narrative and analysis from the Memory Bank interview project. Combining ‘then’ and ‘now’, the insert is both a catalogue to the exhibition as well an investigative piece about the role of the architect today, forming the basis of the symposium to be held in February 2015.

The Cedric Price insert offers a unique precedent of an architect ‘working in the principled pursuit’. It describes the way Price defined his own role as an architect: highly principled (he was always prepared to say no to a client), wholly pragmatic (his fascination for construction, architecture, and cities), peculiarly inventive (he was propositional) and always with wit and good-humour (as shown by his drawings and day-to-day operations).

Bureau Europa presents the third iteration of an exhibition of the work of architect Cedric Price and the first public appearance of some of his selected projects in the Netherlands.

The geneology of the exhibition starts with VENIC VENIC, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Samantha Hardingham and first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2010. Featuring additional material and under the new title of Wish We Were Here it was remounted in 2011 at the Architectural Association in London by Jan Nauta and the Public Occasion Agency.

Editors: Jan Nauta, Arjen Oosterman Graphic Design: Jeremy Jansen Contributors to this insert: Samantha Hardingham, Steve Mullin, Paul Finch Copy editors: Billy Nolan, Adam Nowek Commissioned by: Bureau Europa Published as: Insert to Volume 42, December 2014 Special thanks to: The Architectural Association, Lady McAlpine, Eleanor Bron This insert has been made possible with the support of the municipality of Maastricht, the province of Limburg and the Creative Industries Fund NL. For project Memory Bank, please see: www.cedricprice.com

Wish We Were Here portrait, The Cedric Price Estate

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The answers to the questions ’Where?’, ‘When?’ and ‘To whom?’ in relation to being socially useful, often make me and the fourth dimension ‘How?’ redundant. (1975)

POTTERIES THINKBELT, Perspective between 1963 and 1966, Black marker and crayon, white gouache and pen and ink on translucent paper affixed to a pasteboard with blue crayon, orange marker, graphite and black ink inscriptions, Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

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Volume 42 Art & Science of Real Estate

In today’s rapidly changing World, the role of real estate has been affected deeply. To such a degree that the Center for Urban Real Estate sees an opportunity to transform the profession from within, stressing its creative potential and introducing an ethical code. CURE’s ambition is to create a continuum between architecture and real estate, as part of the design disciplines. It may be a good moment to dive into the archives and look at some architects’ attempts to provide for an open society. How much help do people need?

Art & Science of Real Estate INSERT INSIDE

Cedric Price INSERT INSIDE

To beyond or not to be

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Archis 2014 #4 Per issue € 19.50 (NL, B, D, E, P) Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + CURE

Struc­ turalism

... AND

Kate Ascher Guus Beumer Piet Blom Eleanor Bron Vishaan Chakrabarti Benedict Clouette Paul Finch Samantha Hardingham Joop Hardy Dirk van den Heuvel Jeffrey Inaba Catherine Ingraham Lada Hršak Jesse M. Keenan David A. King Andrew Laing Steve Mullin Jan Nauta James Sanders Francis Strauven Julia Vitullo-Martin Piet Vollaard 4/12/14 15:30