2005
THE ADAPTABLE MODULE PROJECT Mathieu de Genot de Nieukerken
Threat in Brisbane! Fear in Queensland! Terror in Australia! Terror is highly effective because fear costs nothing to produce and it spreads very easily. Be afraid, something could harm you! You start being paranoid and having delusions of persecution. You hide. You blend in. You camouflage. You are suspicious. You denounce. Suspicion and denunciation feed into paranoia. Hiding, blending in, and camouflaging threaten identity. There is a higher possibility of hurting ourselves than there is of suffering an external attack. Just take a look at the amount of waste our lifestyle produces and imagine its increase as the population grows. Or see how the standardization of every street in every city in every country is really threatening local identities. Let’s recycle endangered identities. Let’s re-use ready made objects. Let’s reappropriate existing sites. Let’s use an adaptable module, an interactive space to heal old wounds of a mutilated city. A double-skin architectural device: light and protective outside, open and personalized inside. A plug-in box. A cozy-corner. The exterior adapts to the site, the interior to its use. Do you want a kitchen module for an old factory turned into a loft? No problem; just order a cooking module, a washing module, and a storage module. Do you need an information booth for a new tourist destination? Fine. Order the office module, a couple of display modules, and the souvenir shop module! Everything is provided with the module, except flavors and identity. Those come with the site. The adaptable module helps the existing site stay alive, keeping its identity safe.
PROPOSAL CU 53
be designed as tourist attractions from the beginnings. Cities will be branded from the beginning. The branding of cities—indeed of countries—is already underway. 7. In the cities of tomorrow, distribution networks will be defined according to their own inner logic and requirements. This is already true with most airports today: Hong Kong International Airport and the Denver International Airport, for example—and will be true with a new generation of offshore ports. Cities are no longer necessarily hubs, but in reverse, all hubs are cities. 8. The street as the carrier of infrastructure defining a “plot,” basically a void without infrastructure that is filled with architecture: This should be rejected. A street is a type of construction just like architecture. 9. The old system of superhighways with cloverleafs connecting regional highways to streets, with an overlay of episodic rapid transit, is obsolete, based on a model generated in the 1940s, when the primary need for highways was intercity traffic. Highways today need to be rethought. Highways, rapid transit, and differentdensity traffic can be coordinated to create more integrated flow systems. 10. Spatial density and proximity are still a necessity. Though distribution means that an office can be in contact with a client next door just as easily as 1,000 miles away, the city provides a psychological frame for life and its experiences. The cities of tomorrow should, however, be designed without sentimentality. Nonetheless, cities are places of sentiment. To bridge this gap, the cities of tomorrow, like those now increasingly of today, will be designed along a different philosophy of private-public.