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THIS IS THE END OF THE BEGINNING
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ARCHITECTURE IS THEMELESS AND SO IS CONDITIONS. WE LEAVE 27 EDITORIALS FOR THE FUTURE AND THOSE WHO WHISH TO CONTINUE THE DEBATE.
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Editorial 1 FROM CONDITIONS #1
STRATEGY FOR EVOLUTION
This text was written the 20th of December 2008 and worked as a backdrop for when we started our quest for contributors. We thought it was interesting to leave this text as it was for you to see our initial thoughts in an Editorial 1. Our afterthoughts you can read in Editorial 2 in the back of the issue. Enjoy! The first issue of Conditions is devoted to strategy for evolution in architecture and urbanism. Evolution is a deceptive and seductive phrase, it has an appealing ring to it and something everyone wants to relate to and be part of. It is easily recognized looking back when you are able to separate actual progress from variations. Our concern is how to interpret the contemporary situation and how to maneuver and act upon the present ensuring that you are truly evolutionary. Architecture has always been a dependent discipline, never able to operate on its own. To discuss the progression of architecture we therefore cannot discuss architecture as a singular profession, but as responsive and dependent. Historically evolution
within architecture has been a reaction or reflection to changed conditions. The technological, political, economical or changes in our society have in the past been readable in architecture. But the architecture produced today seems unable to reflect or interact with the ever changing situation and is therefore seen as arbitrary. The never ending quest for newness overshadows the need for a strategy to act and ensure an actual evolution.
several options; one is evolution as a “gradual passage from one state to another, a different and usually more complex and better one”, meaning that there has not been a break from the past, but a gradual process and a development. Darwin’s theory of evolution includes natural selection and chance as key concepts implying that you survive because of coincidence or because you are the stronger. But who or what endures depends on the conditions.
The strategy, seen as a long-term plan for success, depends on your perception of evolution. There are
Evolution might also be perceived as a punctuated equilibrium. Which means that “species”
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remain virtually unchanged, not even gradually adapting. They are in equilibrium, in balance with the environment or conditions. But when confronted with challenges or changes, sudden climate change, for example, they adapt quite quickly. These periods are understood as punctuations, after which a new equilibrium exists and the “species� remain stable until the next punctuation. Many people will argue that we now are in the middle of a punctuation with a financial disaster, climate crisis and political instability. What would be the most fitting strategy to respond to these rapid changes in our situation? Either you believe in evolution as a gradual passage from one state to another or as a punctuated equilibrium you need a strategy and knowledge of the conditions so you are able to navigate and be part of evolution and not part of the production of quantity. The articles and content of this issue is dedicated to possible strategies to ensure an actual evolution.
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Editorial 2 FROM CONDITIONS #2
COPY AND INTERPRETATION — NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING…
The second issue of CONDITIONS is devoted to the topic of, “Copy and Interpretation”. We wanted to explore the border between the copy and the interpretation in contemporary architecture, by comparing the attitudes in architecture to other disciplines. On the one hand, a particular deep-rooted aversion and taboo exists towards the concept of copying among today’s architects; at the same time the speed of modern media and design makes the copy or interpretation an ever more tempting alternative to the time consuming original design. Why do architects get offended when someone indicates that they are making a copy? Why is it not accepted to copy? The respect for “authorship” is strong in architecture – more as a code of honor among col leagues than in legal terms. The expectations of clients and the competition system play a role as well. The demand for the unique and the new is what sells architecture today; “working within a tradition” just doesn’t sell that well. That being said, one realm in which copying seems
to thrive is within the housing market. Here the copying of floor plans and facades ensures the predictability and minimum of risk that is so important in these most conservative parts of architecture. Here the new experiment is just a threat to “business as usual”. This is obvious in Richard Woditsch’s article about the genotype. In architecture the taboo against copying is paradoxically limited to “original” works, copying is accepted as long as it limits itself to the mediocre market-driven demands, and is not used to boost your own claim to do “interesting” architecture.
building something? Even if there is less money involved in a building than a hit single or a block buster can generate, would you, as an architect, say that it is ok if someone called you and asked politely if they could make a new version of your latest building?
The definition of copying is the duplication of information, or an artifact, based only on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. With analog forms of information, copying is only possible to a limited degree of accuracy, depending on the quality of the equipment Other disciplines such as music and used and the skill of the operator. film seem to thrive; new genres, With digital forms of information, new versions are developed and perfect copying is not only possible, unknown artists given a chance but is, almost by definition, the because the world of music and norm. pictures are treated more or less as an open source, as the illustrations While Interpretation has multiple from Quentin Le Guen-Geffroy understandings depending on shows. It is considered a tribute context, it is a mental represen if someone makes a new version tation of meaning or significance, of your song or movie. Is this as well as the act of interpreting because it is immaterial? Does this something as expressed in an make it more ephemeral and less artistic performance. To interpret is dangerous? Does it become more also to explain something that you serious when you are actually try to understand or make sense of.
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From the definitions we see, there is, paradoxically, both a thin line and a vast grey-area between copying and interpreting, creating room to maneuver without getting “caught.” What are we copying? It seems like architects react when the image or the expression is copied. Are concepts legit to copy? We see in the examples given in the article from Wai ThinkTank that as long as there are different looks it seems to be ok. But, as Justin Fowler argues, no matter how hard you are trying to copy, architecture is contextual and at best you end up with an interpretation. Why are we copying? Today we are desperately trying to keep up with what is going on elsewhere in the world. Because of the endless amount of channels through which images are distributed we are able to keep track of what happens where. Architecture is, as Lars Ramberg elaborated on in issue #1, reduced to a 2 dimensional image and thus fashion. The problem with the image in this case is that you miss the context. You are more focused on the shape and color than the fact that architecture constructs the primary social con text and cannot be just a set of cool images. The end product becomes superficial because you copy the image and you are not familiar with the strategy, development or the background. Scandinavia has traditionally been slow to adopt changes, sometimes being referred to as the “style-graveyard of the world” – where concepts come to die. Instead of looking outward, comparing ourselves to everybody else and trying to be as hip and trendy, it is time for the Scandinavian countries to try to develop their own particularities
and become more Swedish, more Danish and more Norwegian. As the Pirate Party says, copying, or rather “open source”, is not a cause, but an effect. The develop ment of society and the tools available call for a different way of working, one that blurs the boundaries of authorship and copyright. We will be “forced” into collaboration in a different way than before. This way of thinking will require a total change in the way we plan and even build buildings. The communicational infrastructure is already there, but how to implement this new way of working will be a challenge. Will the bureaucracy be able to cope or change accordingly? The open source thinking should also apply to the inspiration of architects. Is the focus of copying too narrow? Why do we copy from architecture when there are so many other fields to copy or interpret from. By interpreting other fields, the gene pool would be much bigger and the outcome more varied. Linguistics and biology, to mention a few, has previously been fruitful sources of inspiration for architects. But because of speed
and the demand for continuous production the space for change of direction and discussion is limited. The tradition of copying is long. Historically, working with, and copying techniques from the finished works of the masters, such as Michelangelo, was a legitimate and encouraged practice; you could trace the work, see the development and the consensus. It seemed like there were only a few exceptional geniuses who were able to create originals. The featured projects by Italian architects Baukuh represent a rare contemporary example of this attitude to tradition. Today most architects consider themselves unique – making one of a kind architecture. As Rolf Hughes elaborates on in his article, there are many ways to innovate and always inventing an original is not the only one. The openness and acceptance of copying, or interpretation, is not even a topic among architects. Some architects are copied more than others. Phillip Johnson said: “What made Mies van der Rohe such a great architect was that
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he was so easy to copy” (see the article from Alexander Maymind). Why are some easier to copy than others? Is it because of recognizable shapes, concepts or expressions? Is there such a thing as inventions in architecture, or do inventions created in other disciplines in turn affect architecture? A relevant question related to our topic. The elevator, the escalator, reinforced concrete, glue laminated wood are all inventions having huge influence on architecture, but cannot be recognized as architec tural inventions. As the case study shows these inventions are possible to protect, while the original piece of architecture which assembles these patented inventions is impossible to protect. Are invent ions in architecture limited to concepts on new assemblies of program and shapes? Hopefully you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed making it.
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Editorial 3 FROM CONDITIONS #3
GLAMOROUS COMPROMISE — MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL OUTCOMES
As a decision making strategy, “compromise” definitely has some what of a negative connotation. A compromise seems to involve losing something, going for the second best. In personal relationships as well, a compromise is often seen as a solution no one is really satisfied with. In Scandinavian languages “compromise” has acquired a more ambiguous meaning. The search for consensus, achieved through compromises, has been so instrumental in shaping the modern Scandinavian societies and defining the “Scandinavian model”,
or the “middle way”, between market capitalism and a planned economy. Despite this tradition, compromise today usually stands as the dull antithesis to the unre strained individualism so dominant in contemporary culture. This is the reason why we want in this issue to show compromise in relation to the notion of “glamour”. What is the glam and glitter of compromise? Is the glamorous side of architec ture in itself a compromise? This third issue of CONDITIONS is devoted to the topic of “Glamorous Compromise”, as an investigation
into the culture of compromise and its influence upon architecture and urbanism. The core of this endeavor is to present a series of interviews with exponents from different roles within the planning process as a portrayal of compromise from different sides of the negotiating table. Many architects would say that compromise has no place in architecture, that it is a purely negative influence that should be avoided at all costs, in the belief that the original “vision” of the architect is at stake. Some architects may understand compromise as a capitulation, referring to a “surrender” of objectives, principles, or material, in the process of negotiating an agreement. Still compromise is deeply embedded in the profession in several ways. A compromise is understood as a concept of finding agreement through communication, through a mutual acceptance of terms— often involving variations or aberration from an original goal or desire. With all the different actors needed to erect a building, the architect always has to enter
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into a dialogue. Every client, every architectural project brief, every architecture competition has stated goals and ambitions like sustainability, universal access, and signal building effect. These preconceived goals are set through mutually accepted terms that define the limits of what is possible to achieve. The Department of Unusual Certainties investigates in their contribution “Heroes and Guidelines” how the glamorous compromise is already established in municipal strategy documents such as Urban Design Guidelines. In larger urban planning projects, with their often slow course of progression from idea to imple mentation, the time aspect itself promotes the compromises. In their case study “The curious case of Arne Garborgs Plaza”, Lucas and Wergeland give an account of such an instance of glamorous compromise on the urban scale. If compromise is such a domin ant and unavoidable part of architectural and planning cul ture, it is surprising how little architects are consciously involved in defining and finding the best possible compromises. Suboptimal agreements seem to be the rule. Mutually beneficial outcomes can often be found by careful investi gation of the involved parties’ interests, especially if done early in negotiations. Compromise can also be seen as a design strategy, to reach beyond the individual idea or even to transcend a failed starting point. This is shown in different ways by the included works of OMBUD and SMAQ. The demands for promotion and marketing within architecture today can be seen as constituting a glamorous compromise in itself. The importance of marketing is strongest in areas where the products are hardly distinguishable. A shampoo commercial and the
promotion of an architectural office follow a similar logic in their insistence on offering something different from their competitors. The language and logic of marketing has been adapted and embraced by the architectural profession. Most young architecture practices and architects today spend a con siderable amount of their time and energy on self-promotion and marketing. Webpage, blogs, publi cations, exhibitions, academic positions are all means to sell their “brand”, to distinguish their “product”. Glamour becomes a tool of self-promoting propaganda according to WAI Think Tank in “What about Glamour?” – work long hours to endure in the so-called world of architecture, where fame and media define who is going to be the next star architect. An increasing number of young architects tend to compromise their beliefs, their health, and their social life, as pointed out in the “Compromise Manifesto”. Or in the words of Blanchet and Farsø in “The Myths that shape your architecture”: Competitions are won and lost, while your parents die. Boris Brorman Jensen’s fake interview with Bjarke Ingels is in itself a glamorous compromise, and underlines the fact that no architect works from a blank sheet. The end result will be a compromise, whether you like it or not.
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Editorial 4 FROM CONDITIONS #4
PRODUCTION OF ADDED VALUE — MORE THAN THIS – THERE IS NOTHING
The current issue of CONDITIONS is an investigation into the produc tion of added value in architecture. The economic crisis has put archi tecture under increased pressure. Everybody wants “more for less” from architecture. The promise of “more” is everywhere in the world of architecture. In this climate it is always tempting to promise more than architecture can really offer. In flashy rendered representations of architecture, the “garniture” of life, the girl with the balloon and the boy with the kite, are still alive. Added value is always in danger of turning into pure ornamentation, an empty promise of future life between buildings. Architects are in danger of get ting reduced to mere service providers, unless they are able to increase the ambition beyond the given assignment. In most countries, citizens pay tax, or VAT, for healthcare, social services, education, and to contribute to society in general. It is a system taking care of, and ensuring the welfare of the citizens. What is the VAT of architecture? Should the architect take on the moral responsibility of securing
the common good? Ambitious architecture goes beyond the primary needs of shelter and buildings, always trying to climb the peak of the Maslow pyramid, satisfying needs and questions never expressed. In this perspective, architecture is a surplus phenomenon, sometimes even a sign of excess. What is the right, or appropriate, strategy to ensure the production of common values within architec ture? The articles and interviews in this issue of CONDITIONS offer many different perspectives and opinions on the production of added value in architecture. Together they form a multi-disci plinary approach to the theme. Topics covered include the eco nomic value of architecture as production of surplus; the social responsibility and engagement of the architect in ethical terms; possible new public dimensions of architecture; the non-standard solution as a right to difference; historical heritage as cultural sur plus; as well as practical solutions for achieving more with limited resources.
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The theme “Added Value� overlaps and extends the investigations and themes of the previous three issues of CONDITIONS, where we have approached themes of Evolution, Copying and Compromise. It is our ambition that the themes covered will be part of an ongoing investigation on the conditions shaping architecture. The theme of the next issue, Quality (see call for papers), will form a continuation of the current theme, moving the focus to architecture politics and its aims, goals and quality criteria. Enjoy the fourth issue
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Editorial 5/6 FROM CONDITIONS #5 & 6
THE POLITICS OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT
The three Scandinavian countries are all developing national strate gies of architecture politics. Each country has now released an official strategy document.1 Their common goal is to bring quality to all levels of architecture and planning. However, the national strategy documents give few answers to the most difficult questions: what constitutes quality in architecture, who should define it, and how should it be implemented? The tendency of these political strategies seems to be based on standards and consensus of opinions. There is little interest in initiating debates on the fundamental level. The aim of these documents appears to be to get rid of conflicting views and marginal players by establishing some very static and non-committing definitions. The current double issue of CONDITIONS, which explores the politics of quality management in architecture, tries to counter this tendency. By presenting more diverse views and complex per spectives we hope to initiate the discussion on the role of quality in architecture politics.
The debate on what constitutes quality in architecture is as old as architecture itself. In architecture, the notion of quality can be approached on several levels. Architectonic quality can be func tional, technical or aesthetic/ formal. Today, functional and technical building quality standards are becoming more and more dominant. Often standardization is seen as a key to achieving quality as well as avoiding mistakes and managing risk. The process of standardization in the building sector is centralized on both the national and international level.
This movement has its roots in early modernity. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) was founded in the aftermath of WWII. The Scandinavian countries have since been among the most respected and loyal members of the club. Indeed, the post-war Scandinavian welfare states were built upon the belief in rules, regu lations and standardization. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life is covered by standards, and all your surroundings are dominated by objects defined and designed according to those standards. The omnipresence of
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standards today achieves almost mythical dimensions, at the same time as the foundation of all standardization, the modern belief in scientific objectivity and rationalism are in crisis. When it comes to the quality of architecture on the aesthetic level, there is less agreement than ever before. “Beauty” as a notion has today become a private and subjective concern, just like religion. The only common ground left here are trends and fashions among architects and the public. A country like Norway has a strong tradition of not letting “expertise” count more than the “will of the people” and “common sense”. People tend not to accept architects and academics to tell them what quality is. How could such a contested notion become the main goal in national architecture politics? The ambition of forging new governmental strategies for architecture politics can actually be seen as an effort to regain lost control of the development of the built environment. In theories of quality management, there are three components of equal importance: quality con trol, quality assurance and quality improvement. Quality manage ment deals not only with defining quality, but also with the means to achieve it. Who shall define quality in architecture, and to what degree should governments control and implement quality in the building sector? Quality comes at a price. It is the wealth of the Scandinavian countries that allows this strong focus on functional and technical standards and norms, often at the expense of more immeasurable qualities, like spatial qualities. Building codes and standardization are today in the process of becom ing too totalitarian, over defined and expensive to follow and imple
ment, leaving little room for alternative thinking and experi menting in architecture. CONDITIONS is seeking to create connecting themes from the different issues, which reinforce each other and initiate a platform for debate on the conditions for architecture and urbanism. Last issue’s topic, “added value”, we see as a prelude to the current issue, and the next issue on “competitions” in turn covers a topic related to this issue. There we will focus on the potential of architectural competitions for ensuring architectural quality and added value. Enjoy the double issue. 1
Denmark 2007, Norway & Sweden 2009. (The Swedish politics is not an official one, it is a suggestion from the architects and the government haven’t formulated one yet.)
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Editorial 7 FROM CONDITIONS #7
THE FUTURE OF COMPETITIONS
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Competition is an inher ent mechanism of life in general, a part the evolutionary process of nature, and plays a role in almost all fields of culture. (This brings us all the way back to the theme of our first issue “Strategy for Evolution”). Societies and economies might embrace competition as a process that leads to the societal progres sion. Or they may take the stance of the traditional Scandinavian welfare states, which try to limit the negative effects of competition on the individual by screening and supporting the weak and marginalized groups against the elitist and exclusive forces of free competition. “Everybody shall take part” is the inclusive approach. In architecture however, this inclusive approach has never gained a significant foothold, even in Scandinavia. Few disciplines or professions have embraced the competition as vigorously as architecture. There is a widespread belief that architects enjoy compet ing, and are willing to risk their income in the process. Does architecture appeal especially to competitive individuals? The belief that only free competition will
ensure maximum quality is the rule of the game. The current issue of CONDITIONS is dedicated to the future potential of architectural competitions and explores both the failure and the potential of competitions to promote quality and evolution in architecture. This builds further on the agenda of the previous double issue, which focused on the notion of quality in architecture politics, and how to achieve it. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, there are several signs pointing towards a state of crisis within the competition system of architecture. Historically the architectural competition has been a testing ground for new ideas. It was understood as a space in which research and development, as well as the creation of critical architectural proposals, were possible. Today, competition architecture has increasingly become a service provision for the jury and a fulfillment of the technical requirements of the brief – in other words, simply what is needed to win the competition. Needs are generating ideas whereas ideas should be generating needs. The outcome is often predictable
and conventional, stripping competitions of their significance as a critical tool. There is also the emerging phenomenon of politicians and clients using competitions as cheap marketing stunts to promote and bring media buzz to cities and brands with little incentive to the implementation of winning projects at all. In this context, architects are willingly exploited and the price of ideas has dropped to next to nothing. In the way architectural competit ions are organized, it is relevant to question how ideas are selected,
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or the client. In competitions for important public projects the whole idea of a professional jury as a kind of representative democracy is increasingly questioned. After the jury has made their profes sional verdict and the public debate starts, you hardly ever see jury members standing up defending their judgments in a professional way. The gods are throwing dice, and then they leave the building. The jury leaves their statements in the jury report (most often written by the competition secretariat) you could say, but this is not how participation and involvement works in the contemporary public debate. The absence of the professional jury in the confron tation with the public tends to inflate the debate of the winning project. The winner takes it all, including the controversy around the jury’s verdict.
then how they are respected and realized. Who regulates and protect the winners and the architectural idea? The jury have great responsibility for the assess ment criterion for competitions, and even more so the people or mechanisms who selects the jury. But who regulates and protects the winners? More often than not, the verdict of the jury meets great resistance from public opinion, the press and some cases even the client. Increasingly, the profes sional jury doesn’t even have the mandate for selecting a winner, leaving the decision to politicians
To investigate the many aspects and challenges of the topic, CONDITIONS launched an architec tural idea competition entitled “The Future of Competitions”. The results of the competition are forming the backbone of the current issue, along with articles and interviews exploring from different angles the historic and contemporary role of architectural competitions. Enjoy the issue.
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Editorial 8 FROM CONDITIONS #8
PREPARING FOR THE UNKNOWN
the future and flexibility toward upcoming challenges. You can find their answers inside, along with a brief overview of the current state of architecture education in Scandinavia.
The future will always be unknown. This is the very nature of the future. The “unknown” is a main protagonist in architecture; you can hardly do anything with out facing an unknown client or an unknown future. Uncertainty is the only certainty. That’s why our images of the future are all from the past, or at best projections of the present. In most graphs trying to predict future developments, the line going into the future is simply a projection of the current development, or based on previous deviations. A big event comes without predictions – that is
what makes them big. The future is hostage to the predictions of trend-spotters and market analysts’ search for the next “BIG” thing. The challenge is not to adapt to a fixed image of the future, but to fixate on adaptation itself. The current issue of CONDITIONS is investigating how to prepare for the unknown. CONDITIONS believes that education should play a central role in developing these strategies for the unknown future. We have given the architectural schools in Scandinavia a particular challenge to find out how they are addressing
What kind of knowledge is needed to prepare for the unknown future? Today, nothing is more outdated than last semester’s course in architecture. Renewal, redefinition and reorientation are the only constants. There is no established canon anymore, no list of books to read, just a wash of ever-changing “cool stuff.” Facebook is the only mandatory book today, and the “tweet” is the longest common attention span. How should architecture and architecture education navi gate in this media saturated sea of instant gratification? The triumph of the one-liner in the professional world of architecture, the neoliberal YES-regime, has made it even harder to advocate more complex and multifaceted answers to architectural and urban problems. “Communicative” and “Easy” are the winning formula. What makes something easy? Usually it implies that you don’t go beyond the already known, that
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you stay within the obvious. This formula has proved so successfully potent in the competition scene, in the realm of realpolitik, and in popularizing architectural ideas; but on the other hand it seems so powerlessly impotent in relation to advancing architectural research and education. That’s why we should look for alternative strategies that contain a long-term perspective, are adaptable to the unknown future, and take coming generations into consideration. Enjoy the issue.
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Editorial 9 FROM CONDITIONS #9
NEW KNOWLEDGE – NEW PRACTICES? — THE PERFECT ARCHITECT After a relentless struggle, Conditions Magazine has finally managed to get an exclusive interview with Dominique Unathi Xenos – also known as “The Perfect Architect.” Some of you might say that “perfection” as such does not exist within architecture, or life in general, least of all, embodied in one exceptional individual. But not having experienced perfection in person is no guaranty of its nonexistence, right? One has a tendency to think they know the limits, but this is the skeptic’s way of thinking. “The Perfect Architect” understands their reality and the limits of existence, yet constantly strives for aesthetic and moral excellence. Dominique Unathi Xenos has maintained a strategy of communicating through deeds, not through images created by the media. For this reason, “The Perfect Architect” imposed strict conditions regarding the questions we posed and maintained a firm commitment to addressing the themes of the current issue.
Conditions: Considering your enormous influence and global outreach, how and why have you managed to stay out of the media for your entire career? Dominique Unathi Xenos: Avoiding the media has for me been a conscious choice. I am not too interested in what architects think of each others as architects. I aim for a more subtle, yet direct relationship, changing people’s attitude through exposure to my work. People listen most attentiv ely when they don’t realize they are listening! The anti-spectacular, non-iconographic and “natural” character of my work has of course made the “disappearance” and
“silence” easier for me to maintain. C: Having this relationship to the media, why do you, for this edition of Conditions Magazine, want to share from your wealth of knowledge? DUX: I was interested in the theme “New Knowledge? New Practices?” because it corresponds to topics I have been interested in for some time. New knowledge and needs have emerged, but have so far not provoked architects to seek new answers or ways to do architecture. One of the reasons is surely the heavy dependence most architects have on wealthy and powerful clients, obstructing them from posing the right questions
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and setting up an autonomous agenda for their work. In my own practice, I have been very conscious on striving to invert this chain of dependence, and by consequence, today my clients need me much more than I need them. This is only possible through always moving faster than the clients, responding to the global flux through a con stant re-evaluation and revision of the office agenda and business model.
EDITORIAL PART 1
MONEY C: This leads us to one of the subtopics we want to put an emphasis on in this issue: money. To put it simply, we’re interested in the way architects select their business models and operate financially. How do you relate to this topic, both in the perspective of theory and from your own experience? DUX: My interest in business models for architecture has always centered on the notions of “speed” and “accelerated response.” It should be quite clear by now that “speed” is the guiding principle of present day capitalism. Of course this is nothing new – the slogan “time is money” has been around for quite some time – but today, “speed” has become absolutely paramount for business, and the accelerated growth in computer power and connection speeds have made the human notion of time and causality obsolete. This is particularly evident in the development of high-frequency trading in stock markets, where immense amounts of money and stocks are shifted around at milliseconds, governed by algorithmic scripts reacting and
re-scripting according to the smallest possible fluctuations on the stock market. Among the implications of this is that the required “cruising speed” on the business superhighway has already reached superhuman velocity. The time span for reaching a decision or solving a problem is fast approaching zero, in the sense that it is already unperceivable and hard to understand for a human being. Time is no longer an orderly string of events, everything now happens in real time, simultaneously. This development is a source of great controversy, but if we accept the reality, it opens new possibilities, also for architecture. In our office we are currently reworking our logistics and decision making strategies to meet these develop ments, allowing us to make split-second decisions and modifi cations, still according to broadly defined, long-term goals, but the demand for swift responses to external influences and forces can be automated, saving our human resources for the work we do best. Another well established aspect of our business model that goes together with the “accelerated response” strategy is our dedication to an even covering of the field. We invest in the whole sector, covering all fields and processes. By this, I
want to point out our involvement in all areas of the building sector and related disciplines – we work directly with governments and NGOs, we have our own building company, real estate agency, a research and development fund and a micro finance fund. In this way, we are not dependent on agendas set by others; we are becoming able to set our own wide reaching aims, allowing none of the compromises that usually take place in architecture and planning.
EDITORIAL PART 2
TOOLS C: As we understand it, you are an autodidactic architect, self-taught in multiple disciplines. Why have you chosen to avoid the university system, both as a student and as a potential teacher? Are there other ways for you to spread your immense understanding, exper ience and unique approach to architecture? DUX: I am sorry to say that the current modes of gathering and transferring knowledge in architecture are extremely limited and biased. Most institutions of architectural education seem to
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exist more for the staff than for students. My advice to young people today would be: if you want to learn about architecture and acquire your own integrity, stay out of school. The harsh realities of life has for me proven a much more fertile testing ground for knowledge than the heavily con trolled situation within learning institutions. History shows us that genuinely new tools in architecture always emerge from a confrontation, or friction, with real problems of the world – not in controlled experiments. As for spreading my own knowledge, I firmly believe in the power of the unique example, the lessons to be told from the exemplary realized project, understood by the chosen few. C: One resurfacing interest in your work has been “invisible” forces and the development of “invisible” architecture. Can you explain why?
physical impact. This becomes a paradox when you realize that the conditions that affect us the most are hardly visible at all, such as global warming, economic reces sions and other “invisible” forces. The closer you look, you can find visual proof, but the full scope remains elusive. What I am trying to put emphasis on is that there is a hidden mechanism behind everything that happens, and it is beyond our perception. If you look closer, zoom in on any object, you will see that it gets more and more complex up to the limit of our technology, and beyond that, we can only go deeper theoretically. Deep knowledge is the driving force behind all serious fields of science. The more time we spend analyzing something, the closer we get and the more we know about its potential performance. This I have tried to transfer to architecture in the way that big changes happen in micro scale. The irony of this is that hardly anybody knows our architecture, even if they are totally engulfed by it in their daily lives. Actually, people would only understand the far reaching effects of our work if the projects were not there anymore. In this way, our projects resemble natural phenomena, and how people react to nature. We somehow take “the natural” for granted, until it’s not there anymore. As an example, the presence of an old tree is less felt than its absence.
EDITORIAL PART 3
NEEDS
C: What are the most relevant problems or topics for architects DUX: The malady of most con to engage in today, and how does temporary architecture is the desire your own office respond to the to make the strongest possible challenges?
DUX: I firmly believe we have to return to the fundamental acts of human existence to understand the challenges of today. We have to focus on the primary needs again in order to be able to steer away from artificially created needs and the culture of greed fed by our economic systems. Reyner Banham, the architecture critic, explained that man started with two basic ways of controlling the environment: One was by avoiding the issue and hiding under a rock or tree (ultimately leading to architecture as we know it). The other was by interfering, usually by the way of a campfire, creating a new freedom. The return to primary needs is the prerequisite for a return to primary deeds in architecture, and that’s where our office has the main focus at the moment. Centering on primary deeds helps us in dealing with deep global problems, such as ecology, genetics, authorship, privacy and ultimately the export of the human life form to other planets. The mistake of a lot of “engaged” and “conscious” architecture today is their ignorance towards the aesthetic needs of people. Having a moral standing doesn’t liberate you from these concerns. Besides, the only way to expose the shortcomings of the aesthetic purists among architects is to excel at their own game, and simul taneously lift the banner of social commitment and higher ethical agendas. Architects have to open their eyes once again and learn anew the game they thought they knew how to master. The stakes are higher, but so also are the rewards.
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Editorial 10 FROM CONDITIONS #10
WHY GOSSIP?
Once upon a time, people compared with their neighbors. Your neighbor was your point of reference and thus the most desirable object of gossip and eavesdropping. Not so anymore. In the world of global networking, you are driven by ambition to compare yourself with the most clever or world-renowned exponents of your trade. Even a critique, satire or parody of the star-system of architecture is an affirmation of its hegemony. Who doesn’t want to be the object of architecture gossip? After all, it’s giving the “stars” more attention, no matter how critical the original intention was. For addicts of gossip, all news is good news, the worst thing is silence, and even a well mediated “scandal” can actually promote your career.
hand, it has the possibility of turning every participant into a creator, blurring the line between the producer and the consumer. This we see more clearly in other cultural fields, as in music where production has become simpler and everybody can create their own music and find an audience. The dependency on labels and expensive studio equipment is waning. In architecture, this has not yet happened to the production side of the business, but certainly the evaluation of architecture has witnessed a rise in amateurism and gossip. It is still an open question whether this represents an opening up of the field, building collective intelligence, or if it is reducing all discussions into short attention span one-liners.
The current issue of CONDITIONS investigates the function of gossip in architecture. Gossip has always been around in architecture as one of the oldest ways of sharing, maneuvering and convincing. But how does it manifest itself today within the instant culture of internet and social media? What is the role of gossip in contemporary networking? Has the logic of gossip and instant gratification also
The retweeting act, or passing along of gossip, is such a big part of architectural culture these days. The risks of being the first one to voice an opinion, is replaced by a viral building up of a “collective opinion.” That’s what gossip has always done, building up a sense of community among the “people who know.” This has implications far beyond the social media world. Decision makers, governments,
penetrated what we used to call architectural critique? Today in architecture, as in other fields of culture, professional criticism is gradually replaced by the like/dislike discourse and gossip of social media. Are the fall of criticism and the triumph of amateurism signaling a new function to gossip? On the one
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architecture competitions are not resistant to the effects of gossip in the form of viral marketing. Talk is cheap, as they say, but in this case, it works.
CIAM(s) of the past. Architects today are not organized by common agendas, but are more united and connected than ever through social and information media. Gossip, in absentia of any pronounced agenda beyond the urge to be connected, updated and influential, still is, for better or worse, the closest thing we have to an international “movement” in architecture today, transgressing the biased views of national interest, organizations and the egos of individual starchitects.
With the Venice Architecture Biennale again approaching, we must reopen the discourse on the festival character of architecture in the international scene. Never have there been so many venues for the celebration of architecture, and most are following the gossip-strategy of biennales and triennales, focusing on personal and national representation at Enjoy the issue, we hope you will regular intervals, rather than as find here some new gossip, and see communication of actual content you in Venice! and messages as the need arise. The national chambers of architecture support this trend by clinging to the nation state and its starchitect citizens as the prime focus of identity on the festival grounds of architecture. The jungle telegraph of architecture moves fast. The constant stream of gossip is a far more effective tool for moving out of local differences and peculiarities to a global “movement” than any other organizational form like the
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In opposition to ignorance and superficiality this magazine is conceived in order to search for knowledge and predicaments of our continuously evolving society. It is organized in a fluctuating network of agents reflecting the present globalized state of a dynamic society, economics, politics and culture which are the motivators of architecture. Through a play of thoughts in an open ended forum, predefined “facts” will be unsecured and constantly reinvented. The forum will gather the architect, client, politician and the public, a communion of ideas creating conditions for evolution. • 4 issues per year • The magazine is printed in color. Size is 27 cm (tall) by 20 cm (wide). 100 pages of editorial content. • Magazine language is English • Editors: Joana Sá Lima, Tor Inge Hjemdal and Anders Melsom •Editorial Board: Boris Brorman Jensen & Björn Ehrlemark • Web Editor: Gislunn Halfdanardottir • Copy Editor: Evan Swisher • Graphic Design: Skin Designstudio (#8 -13), Kristin Bø / comosi.no (#3-7 ), Ole Peder Juve / Juve Design (#1-2 )
ABOUT CONDITIONS
Conditions is a Scandinavian magazine focusing on the conditions of architecture and Urbanism. Presenting new perspectives, in the way of conceiving and analyzing designs, works and theory for architecture.
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Q.
… A. That is a long story, we will try to
Q.
… A. We did, the three of us. We started it from our kitchen table. We realized there were no international Scandinavian magazines focusing on the CONDITIONS for architecture and we decided to do one. At the time we had no financial support, therefore we edited and published independently. And independently, with very little funding, we managed CONDITIONS for 6 years. Q.
… A. Basically, we had no choice. We have explored topics we have been interested in and looking back we have been able to set agenda for others as well. We had an idea that architecture could be the missing link tying together
… A. We released 13 issues, participated in 2 Venice biennales, the Oslo and Moscow triennale and many events all over the world. CONDITIONS had 14 permanent collaborators and more than 150 authors contributing to the debate.
Q.
THEMELESS — FROM NOW ON, YOU WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS!
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Editorial thirteen An editorial pop-quiz
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… A. Yes, we have seen many of the themes we have initiated throughout the issues resurface later in discussions and agendas of entirely different contexts. The idea of the very last issue has been to open up the discussion even further, by mediating several possible fresh starts, in the shape of submitted editorials. What are the questions that will define the future conditions for architecture? Who will ask the vital questions that can initiate new radical solutions? Q.
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Q.
… A. That was the main question. We opted for a paper magazine. We think the main purpose of a magazine is still to inform, educate, and inspire. Above all, magazines give space to interaction and analysis. More specifically, with CONDITIONS we wanted to promote a new agenda and introduce new players in the theory and practice of architecture in order to spread different ideals.
Q.
… A. It was pretty clear from the first issue. At the time there were few magazines around with an agenda and a theoretical content with a low threshold. The architecture at the time was unmotivated and the communication of it even worse, glossy and superficial. The architecture seemed detached from the emerging challenges and not able to respond and fulfill its potential to become the shaper of our future.
answer as concise as possible.
Q.
… A. What do you think? Your answer, or anybody else ' s answer, is probably better than ours. We have included a lot of different actors, developers, engineers, politicians, psychologist, artists, planners, architects, philosophers etc. So yes, we have included, but have we been able to create the missing link? We are not the ones to evaluate that.
… A. Well, possibly the constant flow of ideas within the editorial group. The confidence within the group has made it possible to discuss all kind of ideas, really banal ones, and explore the really good ones. I also think that we have been confident enough to trust our own ideas instead of following others. Humor and playfulness has been a driver for the discussions. Something that we think it has not been communicated that well through the magazine. Q.
urgent challenges with the physical environment.
… A. Yes, it is a great magazine and we are proud of it. The future? Well, we hope a new magazine will emerge and the CONDITIONS will continue being debated. … is up to you! Q.
… A. We are themeless! As CONDITIONS editors and through a magazine we think we have reached our max potential and now we is time to dedicate to other projects. Joana is working with Comte Bureau and Nudgeo. Anders is teaching, writing and working on projects and Tor is the architectural manager at the National Association and initiating theoretical projects. We think we can keep on working on our agenda only through new activities and other platforms. Q.
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… IS UP TO YOU!
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Editorial XIV FUTURE CONDITIONS #14
THE [ARCHITECTURE] COMING INSURRECTION* ´ ´ DPR-BARCELONA [ETHEL BARAONA POHL + CESAR REYES NAJERA]
“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.… An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.” – The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection.
The world has changed and so too the role of the architect. We’re facing new ways of thinking, of trading, of acting. On this arena of speculation, the first step when moving into this new scenario should be to realize that in the end, the crisis is just a way of governing and it’s up to us to legitimate it or not. Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of nonparticipation, a true civic and urban activity is necessary. The re-emergence of Huizinga and Situationist’s homo ludens seems almost a need again, to discover new ways of interacting with the city. The feeling that the [architecture] coming insurrection is close, can be smelled in the air, it can be perceived from autonomous organisation of the prosumers of the new culture, aside from
existing political and ideological establishments, as we all together “can dispute institutions’ capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists” [1] and because such institutions cannot prevent what they are not able to imagine yet.
The riposte of the revolutionary citizens to these old conditions must be a new type of action. Architects and related disciplines have a social, economic and politi cal responsibility and is in our hands to give formal proposals as answers to the current situation.
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According to the political analyst Francis Fukuyama [2], the satis faction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal, and this inequality is why our implication becomes a need. How can we avoid the historical pessimism outlined by Fukuyama and
change our paradigms? Manfredo Tafuri pointed out in his book “Architecture and utopia: design and capitalist development” [3] “Architecture now undertook the task of rendering its work “political.” As a political agent the architect had to assume the task of continual invention of advanced solutions, at the most generally applicable level. In the acceptance of this task, the architect’s role as idealist became prominent.” We can see that this need for political implication is nothing new; it’s now time to demystify complex ideologies and work from the basis of our practice. The city is here to stay, to grow, to de-grow, to change and transform; and the role of the architect needs to adapt itself to these transformations. There are so many lessons that we can learn from the convulsed, immediate past that has left cities full of the undeniable presence of the so-called “in between spaces” [physical and non-physical], where there is another field of action for architecture, so we can try to address real challenges as a response to the current economic and geopolitical relationships. In times when the word “drone” holds more importance than the word “dream”, it’s easy to understand that we need to act, and to act now. Not from our wonderful and shiny studios, but to go back to the street, to talk with people on a daily basis, to reinforce the presence of concepts such as “prosociality”, “urban empathy” and “relational”. We’re facing one of the most wonderful times since many years, because there is an opportunity to take action. It’s time to think how we should be organizing to confront what already exists while working for the world to come. The close and direct
relationship with other agents is more important than ever, because architects are just one more piece of a bigger puzzle called society. According to Keller Easterling in her essay “Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft” [4]: “Today urban space has become a mobile, monetized technology, and some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the spatial information of infrastructure, architecture and urbanism.” If Easterling is describing the real “now”, we can see the importance of the role of the architect to address real changes in the urban environment. But how to do that? How to address a real change? There are new tools that we can use, the growing presence of digital media as com munication tools, new forms of economics and trade, such as
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crowdfunding, social money and micropayments, based on the confidence and support of the network; are here to stay. Bottom-up urban strategies can be a real catalyst for change in our cities; the use of empty spaces are setting the stage for a new commons where urban conflicts can be solved by understanding the dynamics of each community. In cities such as Madrid or Barcelona, which are being increasingly priva tized, we have witnessed powerful citizen movements, and grassroots groups, including Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups from 15M assemblies, who are working to stop and transform the foreclosure processes, being capable of stop ping housing evictions and even forcing legal framework changes. Is this the age of the co-op? The age of Adhocracy? Maybe it is the age of conviviality. As pointed by Ivan Illich [5], “tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a pur pose chosen by the user.” Thus, convivial tools should be accessible, flexible, and non-coercive and we all should have access to them. While the global economy seems to be collapsing, time has come to recover conviviality as a leitmotif of our work. To transform dissatis faction into serious proposals to start taking back the city for the citizens, to remove the distinction of public and private in the urban environment, we must learn to “feel” the city again. It must be very presumptuous to try to give answers or recipes to avoid this symptomatic crisis and to radically change the situation only from the conventional architectural practice. We must be
humble enough to open our senses and start thinking about the city in new ways, beyond our formalarchitectureknowledge in a dérive, through a playful and constructive behavior, that can drive us to work for this necessary insurrection. *
The Coming Insurrection is a French political tract about the “imminent collapse of capitalist culture”, written by The Invisible Committee, and first published in 2007 by French company La Fabrique.
[1]
Situationist Manifesto. Internationale Situationniste#4. 1960. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/ sionline/si/manifesto.html
[visited on January 2013]
[2]
Fukuyama, Francis. The end of history and the last man. Free Press, 1989.
[3]
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. MIT Press, 1979.
[4]
Keller Easterling,“Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft” http://places.designobserver. com/feature/zone-the-spatial-softwares-ofextrastatecraft/34528/ [visited on June 2011]
[5]
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row, 1973.
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Editorial XV FUTURE CONDITIONS #15
NEW COMMONS NEYRAN TURAN
In her recent essay titled “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian Claire Bishop criticizes the recent social turn in contemporary art practices and criticism in which the aesthetic quality of an artwork is determined only through its social or ethical value.1 In other words, if an art work has a social intention and favors relational ideas, such as interactivity, open-endedness, and participation, it is automatically received as good and affirmative while failing to limit the role of the aesthetic merely to the collapse of art into life. A similar critique can be made for contemporary architecture at the moment. Take social
participation, infrastructural urbanism, or sustainability, in all of which architecture’s role is reduced to either problem solving or ethical criteria. Trig gered by global urbanization, environmental problems, and an emerging participatory culture of social networks and Web 2.0, social participation marks a fasci nation with the informality of the city and its bottom-up selforganization while infrastructural managerialism serves as an alibi for solving systemic problems. Both practices utilize “design research” techniques—mapping emergent urban phenomena with analytic tendencies—and favor scenario thinking, pro gramming, interactivity, and
indeterminacy. Consequently, with these practices, architectural engagement turns into a form of neo-environmentalist do-goodism, producing an architectural version of “relational aesthetics.” These contemporary tendencies of engagement have been natural extensions of recent discussions on the inter-disciplinary nature of architecture especially after the early 1990s. Although these and similar approaches have provided valuable interdisciplinary conversations regarding the “expanded field” of architecture during the last two decades, at a much deeper level, however, aesthetic significance of that very same empowerment has been under-speculated. While
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an over-emphasis on content (program, scale, or system) has been pervasive for these discourses, the question of form remained as a mere consequence of processes and systems (be it infrastructural, environmental, parametric, or programmatic). As a result, the role of form and aesthetics for architecture have been limited to autonomous practices of digital form-making or the branding of the fantastic iconic building. In the meantime, architects who have been interested in form and certain aesthetic problems usually denounced the political dimension and condemned it as irrelevant. On the other hand, those who have been working with political and social concerns saw aesthetic problems as useless formalism. Reminding a similar observation made by architect Denise Scott Brown in 1975, this current con dition marks a growing split between the architects’ concern with form and their social idealism.2 Once historicized within the immediate past, the contemporary dilemma described above becomes nothing more than the newest version of an ever evolving disci plinary problem for architecture especially after the dissolution of the direct connection between the aesthetic and the functional attributes of design after modern ism: the dialectic between architecture’s singularity versus its total immersion within exter nal forces, or between context as core versus context as environment. The discourse of the context as core have focused on autonomy and favored disciplinary history and form, whereas the discourse of the context as environment has speculated on interdisciplinary engagement and program. The abovementioned contemporary tendencies of engagement such
as social participation and infra structural urbanism—which could all be formulated as one other version of the context as environment discourse—not only make evident these dualities of context apparent again but more importantly their respective limitations. Take, for instance, recent disciplin ary alignments in relation to the topics of infrastructure and land scape as they were integrated into the architectural knowledge within the last couple of decades. Various practices have explored the liberating possibilities of an urbanism enabled by flows, net works and systems. Positioned as a reaction to the nostalgic historicity and contextualism of the pre vious generation, classical ideas such as form and representation were de-emphasized by most of these practices. Instead, a sweeping tone of instrumental solutions pervaded in relation to abandoned airfields, contaminated waterfronts, or obsolete landfills. For these practices, formlessness was better than form. Flows were more fun than boundaries and objects. Although providing useful frameworks for architecture’s relationship to large-scale systems in its preliminary years, with the current environmental problems and the ubiquitous topic of sustain ability, these ideas present the risk of pure pragmatism and neoenvironmentalist do-goodism. As the instrumental tone has slowly taken over the representational and the aesthetic, problem-solving has become the normative justification of an architectural project for some of these practices. After ubiquitous contents, flows, continuous surfaces, sexy com plexities, wild and soft urban isms, and programmatic diagram architectures, the possibility of
an alternative project haunts our generation. When asked about the relationship between architecture and design in the early 90s, German architect Mathias Ungers wrote: “I see myself as an architect as opposed to a designer. Design is about fashion and styling, whereas architecture is about construction, concepts, and space. Design has an excessive influence on architecture today. What we are left with is architecture of substitution.”3 And, in 2004, a similar tone would repeat when Ungers commented on social engagement at an interview: “Social problems cannot be resolved by architecture. Indeed you can only solve architectural problems.”4 Were these expressions indicative of a firm conservatism against architecture’s relationships with other disciplines or a nostalgic pessimism for its impotence in the world? The answer would actually be none of the above.
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What lied behind these state ments was Ungers’s life-long research and speculation on architecture’s collective capacity to engage with the world (that is, with the environment on the one hand) as well as with its own core (that is, architecture’s history and autonomy on the other) without resorting to naïve postulations at either extreme. This led an architect like Ungers to be dissatisfied with contained architectural dogmas of his time, all of which, in his view, were lost either in facts or within the hermetic nature of the architectural discipline. He was ambitiously looking for an architectural project of both-andneither. Similar to Ungers, rather than an overemphasis on an architec tural core via pure form or an engagement with the world via pure content, can there be a specu lative architectural project located as a third way between the two? Instead of seeing the architect either as an artist (autonomous formalism), an activist (social participation), or a technocrat (infrastructural managerialism), can we have a renewed conver sation for architecture’s role in the city? A possible way out from this dilemma can only be possible with moving away from these limited dualities and searching for experimental ways to redefine the capacity of architectural aesthetics in engaging with the world. This third way, which would be tentatively called, New Commons (N/C) would provide a radical ground for forging new and more productive relationships between aesthetics and engagement. Here, autonomy would not register so
much to a referral of an older definition (autonomy as retreat) but would instigate a yet-to-beelaborated definition of discipline for contemporary architecture. And engagement would be neither perceived as a compromise nor as a celebrative immersion but would be understood as a specific and valuable content to relate to the world. The architect would not merely be portrayed as a respondent to problems, but as an active agent capable of building new ideas and languages as they relate to the city, the environment, and geography. N/C might have bold premises but would not be easily be convinced by just nice statements and good intention. The search of N/C would be for the “how.” Eager to experiment on a particular aesthetic project, N/C would choose to take risks for new methodologies to be engaged. N/C awaits further speculation. N/C calls for a renewed conversation between form and content, one that is committed to the discipline of architecture yet is equally rigorous for original interpretations on both the political and disciplinary levels. N/C would not be scared of new questions regarding aesthetics, form and language while still being extremely rigorous in inter disciplinary engagement. N/C would strive for radical alternatives while being prepared for risks and productive failures. Enough about reductive seduct ions. The time may have already arrived for anomalies of seductive reductions.
1
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 51–79. Bishop’s use of the term “relational aesthetics” is from Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002).
2
Denise Scott Brown, “On Architectural Formalism and Social Concern: A Discourse for Social Planners and Radical Chic Architects,” Opposition 5 (Summer 1976): 99–112.
3
“O. M. Ungers,” Daidalos 40 (June 1991): 74.
4
Rem Koolhaas and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Interview with O. M. Ungers,” Log 16 (2009): 83.
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Editorial XVI FUTURE CONDITIONS #16
TO UN-SIT; OR, THE PARADOX OF DISSIDENCE ARCHITECTURE FACING THE END OF THE END JOSE´ VELA CASTILLO
un-sitting, a sustained effort that cannot be re-appropriated through the general economy of the market and neo-liberalism’s predatory practices. If architecture is the action of resisting (by) standing up, of remaining un-sat, architecture must always be a dissident activity. To a place, to a political regime, to the economic forces in which “it” (as subject or object) is developed and/or expropriated.
Dissidence comes from Latin. Sedeo: to sit. Dis-sedeo: “I. to sit apart, to be remote from, to be divided, separated”1. Literally: to unsit. Hence, dissidens /dissidentis: the one that sits apart, the one that stands up, the one that does not stand sitting. The one that resists (sitting), which opposes some resistance, that is voluntarily separated (divided). From something. Against some thing.
The dissident is the one that remains un-sitting. But what really matters is that he/she (or it) remains un-sitting. Remains. Persists. Standing up. Un-moved, if not for the movement of unrest/ resistance. Remains: once the upright space is opened, the distance stated, it must be held up, sustained, supported. Although its status can be discussed, it can never be canceled. Dissidence opens up a space and enforces its opening through time, holds it open with effort, the effort of
The paradox of dissidence is the paradox of an architecture that resists by sitting (or standing) apart in (an)other site, an architecture that introduces (through both insertion and presentation) a distance. Displaying that very distance as the axiomatic precondition of architecture: “it” fights, nevertheless, for its own disappearance/survival. The paradox happens to be both the necessity (and the desire) of the infinite distance of the separation/ division of architecture to be truly architecture (its remaining un-sat, but also its delimitation as form
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and construction, as limited form and as detached building) and the required interlacing of architecture with the field of its ground, the city (the political) where it founds more than its umwelt, its hope (even as such it is, arguably, its ultimate, cinder-like pre-condition or its yet-to-come2). Beyond any politics of the envelope (but naturalizing its teachings) ultimately grounded in representations (faciality)3, and also beyond the immunitary paradigm (that tries to escape itself from any common condition, but which, nevertheless, needs to be shared to some extent to be safeguarded)4, a dissident architec ture confronts the problem of its separateness not in isolation or as a representation/imposition on the part of power, but as the radical space of democratic politics. In fact, it establishes the very condition of politics.5 Dissidence in architecture intro duces a distance, imposes a separation, deploys some space as the security zone of a “no tres passing” border and negates it. Just like politics. Architecture, in fact, is both the tracing of that insurmountable line and its crossing. In the fearful fight against the voracious appropriation of global capitalism, architecture still has the possibility to offer some resistance, yet one that must be conquered through the paradoxical effect of being dissi dent: Dis-sedeo: “II. to be at variance, to disagree, to think differently”6. Thus, the question arises, then: Is it possible? Is it not the naïve dream of some faded activism? Is it even desirable, given the dayby-day, increasingly omnivorous appropriation of the political by the economical and the conquering of the even more sacred ivory towers
other than the space of global production and consumption, (an)other space that is (the) outside, that is separated, negated (sometimes negotiated), but that, nevertheless, allows dissidence to have a place to escape, a dreamt space of freedom for which an exception must be made, an open space to/wards to un/sit. A space alien to artificially produced (that is to say, marketed) individuality and to fully developed material agency.
of resistance? Hence, the everpresent possible re-appropriation by power of this other power – plus the obvious fact that the former, too, is supposed to resist and/or conquer the latter. The question, nevertheless, has to be reversed. Because it comes from necessity and not from dry speculation, architecture in its dissident mode, in its remaining apart (un-sat) regains the power of being truly political, truly engaged, acting as the very pre-condition of politics, in fact7.
Since the 2008 global financial meltdown (which mostly persists today), all the normalization efforts notwithstanding, and for all the blind misjudgments still very popular, if something is clear it is that the subdued apathy that global capitalism has inflicted upon the Real is coming to an end. That is to say, while it is believed to be the end (end of history, end of politics, end of confrontation and controversy, end of …), we have not even reached the beginning of the end. In fact, the end is alwaysalready begun. The question, never theless, remains: Are we facing, and if so with what tools, The End of the end? The End of this end?8
Lastly, what is at stake is not If architecture is the action of whether and how architecture resisting by means of standing defends its various dissident up, of remaining un-sat, architec modalities, but how architecture in ture is and always be will be its dissidence allows (democratic) agonistic. It is always in constant politics to regain its (public) space. confrontation/opposition to a place, The preliminary answer says: to a political-ideological regime, to Through its opening. Through its the economic forces in which it is inalienable opening to what is to embedded. The space of dissidence come (let’s call it the possibility needs to be an unstable one, a of the event). Or, through the space that must be constantly opening (and holding open) of the re-configured, but a space as well by-now (nearly) closed space of that can never be, nevertheless, politics against the free reign/terror overcome by any possible dialectic of all encompassing economies. (either Hegelian or Marxian). Who can foretell it? So the question is whether (an) other space exists for architecture,
37
1
Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin
8
See Gavin Keeney, “Gray Areas and Black Zones”,
Dictionary. Retrieved 08.01.2013: http://www.
unpublished paper. In this important essay
perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1
discussing the transition from studies in Cultural
999.04.0059:entry=dissideo
History, Cultural Politics, Cultural Ecology, and such, to a critique of Cognitive Capitalism, Keeney
2
See Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone
introduces a most interesting reference to “The
Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” in Harold Coward
End” via Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria
and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative
Martini that is worth quoting: “Neo-liberalism,
Theology (Albany: State University of New York,
while struggling to reformulate and re-establish
1992), p. 27.
itself (while attempting to strangle all opposition in the cradle), in its all-consuming gestures and
3
See Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the
embraces, has, oddly, wrought its own antithesis/
Envelope,” in Alejandro Zaera-Polo, The Sniper’s
nemesis – resistance and the promulgation of
Log: Architectural Chronicles of Generation X
new and integral forms of community that will
(Barcelona: Actar, 2012), p. 477.
and must spell the end of “The End” (and which is always spelled H-o-p-e).” See Carlo Maria
4
See: Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin
Martini, “Hope Puts an End to ‘The End’”, pp.
and Destiny of Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford
23–31, in Umberto Eco, Carlo Maria Martini, Belief
University Press, 2009); and Roberto Esposito,
or Nonbelief?: A Confrontation, trans. Minna Procter
Inmunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life
(London: Continuum, 2000). First published In
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011).
cosa crede chi non crede?, Liberalsentieri, 1 (Rome: Liberal Atlantide, 1997). See also, Derrida, “Of an
5
See the distinction Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
6
7
Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy”:
Jean-Luc Nancy make between la politique (“the
“And whoever would come to refine, to say the
empirical field of politics”) and le politique (“a
finally final [le fin du fin], namely the end of the
specific dimension of alterity”) as presented in Ian
end [la fin de la fin], ten end of ends, that the end
James’ book on Nancy, Ian James, The Fragmentary
has always already begun, that we must still
Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-
distinguish between closure and end, that person
Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
would, whether wanting to or not, participate in
Press, 2006), p. 165. See also the original French
the concert. For it is also the end of metalanguage
discussion, in Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
on the subject of eschatological language.”
Lacoue-Labarthe, Le retrait du politique (Paris:
Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted
Gallimard, 1983).
in Philosophy”, pp. 48–49.
Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary.
As Pier Vittorio Aureli writes: “If politics is agonism through separation and confrontation, it is precisely in the process of separation inherent in the making of architectural form that the political in architecture lies”. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. ix.
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Editorial XVII FUTURE CONDITIONS #17
SOCIAL PRACTICE REBEKAH SCHABERG
As an American working in a Norwegian office, I am constantly at odds with my instinct to claw, scratch, bite and kick my way to the top of a professional pyra mid—a pyramid which in Norway, if it exists, is extremely low and gentle. Norway is soft. It can afford to be soft because its immediate political and economical threats are relatively low. So what, and how, does a country rich in natural resources and low in risk build? I find that the How in the question is more interesting than the What. Our design maga zines are full of barnehagens and interior renovations. On the other end of the spectrum are the fantastic off-shore structures. Scandinavia has consistently led both the industrial fronts as well as the simple, materialsensitive, beautiful-object fronts in our profession. It is beautiful to the point of becoming banal. What I find more interesting as an emerging subject (especially as an American) is how people work together in this region of the world. It is, inevitably, linked to how the political structure has evolved and the theology of the
people who support this structure. Building is a social practice. Again, I have to fight my immediate resistance to any practice which resembles socialism—a political structure denounced and rejected in my primary education. But socialism is perhaps the most suitable EXISTING social structure for the evolved building science. Ayn Rand’s criticism of socialism in her 1940’s book Atlas Shrugged (which I have always found more interesting than the Architects must-read The Fountainhead) reflected a very moment-specific phenomena where the individual need be praised for his resistance to conformity and the conformist (the man or woman who considered other people’s opinions and allowed their own psyche and intellect to continually develop) is degraded as the lowest form of mankind. It is an exhausting point of view. Unfortunately, this 60 year old ideology is still the benchmark in many western architectural educations. Rand was writing in a period during which the architectural profession was riding its last wave on the ancient ideological front—the architect as the master builder. Architects
are no longer Master Builders. We know this. It takes an enormous team to realize a plan. Socialism was, at its formation in the 18th century, a resistance to the social threats that the industrial age presented to a previously agrarian and trade based economy. Since then, it has been adopted and reformatted to represent many
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political and economic structures. As far as America is concerned, socialism (which is equivalent to communism in our educations) represents the opposite and thereby incorrect idealism to our very proud capitalism. But what a social structure in design does that capitalistic structure struggles to achieve is that it acknowledges its vulnerability, which allows it to adapt to changing conditions.
It seems that a capitalistic, vertical professional structure is not the future of architectural relations, but neither can a social, flat structure answer the questions that our evolved practice is asking. We have to share, but we must also be accountable for our decisions. I am currently engaged in the Nordic Challenge Competition to deliver an environmental concept for the renovation of Posthuset in Oslo. This has been one of the more challenging projects in my (short) career. In this competition, the architect is not asked to take the primary role. Neither, though, is the architect put in the backseat. Instead, it seems that we are all (the architects, structural engineers, facade engineers, ventilation experts, etc) riding along in the front seat together. What happens to architects when we are equal partners in a design process? I think it will take some time for us to understand our evolved (but not diminished) role in building, but I have hope that we will find this new definition quite liberating.
Today, communication is immed iate and abundant; more people have higher educations and equal opportunities. It would seem that our profession will only flourish if the playing field is leveled, responsibilities are shared, and information is disseminated. Still, though, there must be pitfalls to a practice which is so relaxed and friendly that no one individual is able to take a decision without the support of the masses. If socialism was the resistance to the Industrial age, what will be the resistance to today’s Information Age? And is resistance even necessary? In Scandinavia, our relationships, both within and between offices, seems to be more like a web on a roller coaster than a hierarchical structure. There is respect and trust between my colleagues, a soft pillow awaiting us if we jump; I can take risks—and fail—knowing that that risk I took is shared by the state, and I will be supported come what may. And here is the danger in a socially equal practice within architecture. When risks and responsibilities are so shared that they become community-based rather than individually accountable, we all have the opportunity to claim plausible deniability. It is very easy to step back and relinquish our accountability. Our salaries are high, our jobs are secure, why would anyone, as an American
would say, ‘stick their neck out’? I believe that architecture requires a sense of ownership over our decisions. We do not actually make anything anymore. We are rarely (compared to historical times) on a building site taking part in the construction of our ideas. If we cannot individually claim our architecture and do not produce anything else of physical value, then our practice must rely on our ability to communicate our ideas and trust in our team to create a product of value and integrity.
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Editorial XVIII FUTURE CONDITIONS #18
CALLING ON THE RESILIENCE OF JAMES BOND ANNA ULAK
The villain in the James Bond films is a manifestation of a paranoid Cold War society, an imaginary enemy; the villain who might use any technocratic weapon to control or destroy Western society. From 1962 until 2012, 23 James Bond movies were created in a span of 50 years. As such, the James Bond movies can be considered phantasmagorias that have allowed audiences to imagine the future of architecture. Perhaps the cultural conditions that have inspired the James Bond villain to have this systems-based approach for world domination are the same cultural conditions that have shaped the explanation of natural systems. One can say that a popular view of nature is that it is constructed on the premise of homeostasis: that is, it is proposed as a closed system with various feedback loops which, despite changing external conditions, is able to sustain a stable inner economy of energy production and consumption. However this view is a mechanical one, and is very similar to the systems based approach the Villain uses to achieve their master schemes and
resulting lairs. It is this prevailing mechanical, even cybernetic view of nature that is shaping our decisions as architects on how to respond to climate change. The way we as a society and architects view nature needs to be investigated and questioned—in order to re-evaluate how we should respond to climate change.
First let’s try to understand where this rational/technocratic mindset may have started its reign of influ ence. It was Freud that used the metaphor of the human brain being similar to a machine in that it gathered information to inform the senses. At that time, Sir Arthur Tansley—a celebrated British botanist—was influenced by this idea. Tansley expanded the metaphor by applying it to the whole of nature and hypothesizing that ecology is a system; that is, ecology is like a machine with input and outputs and feedback loops. This hypothesis is a mechan ical one. The metaphor formed into the word “eco-system” that still resonates in the public imagination today. Jay Forester, a cybernetics professor at MIT and creator of the early warning system during the Cold War, believed that the whole world was just a network of systems with feedback loops. Cybernetics offered an explanation for ecosystems in nature to achieve stability. As a result, ecology became the dominant science of the 20th century. In 1953, ecologists Howard and Eugene Odum further amplified the metaphor by publishing the book “Fundamentals
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of Ecology”; however the ideas in the book were never presented as a hypothesis to be tested. Ecology as machine, machine as ecology— everything can be explained and controlled as a system begins to sink into the public’s imagination, despite various failed test results by other prominent scientists. The ubiquitous belief that net works and systems control and explain everything in the natural environment and that nature is a self regulating cycle or system is apparent when examining various architectural proposals throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Most of these architectural proposals claim to be “sustainable” or “good” for the environment. One example is the Metabolist movement in Japan in the 1970s that explored this idea by proposing flexible and expandable architecture that evoked the pro cesses of organic growth. Today many architects and students are presenting grand master plans and buildings that rely on networks and systems to control their environments both natural and artificial. Like the Odum brothers book Fundamental of Ecology and the James Bond villains’ schemes, these projects are not presented as hypothesis to be tested. Instead, they are presented as solutions to problems.
and everything in the world is programmed like a cybernetic machine—it’s that we want to believe it. After all, it is much easier to accept things the way they are than it is to question or challenge them. Furthermore, as Žižek has expressed time and again after challenging an authority one must have a superior ideology to replace the existing one—and that is the difficult task facing the 21st century.
This is a calling for us as architects to be more like James Bond and less like the villain. James Bond is a hero—a man who saves the day by not only following his instructions given from M16 but by being resil ient, reflexive and adapting to various situations to get the job Thus the absolute faith in a done when faced with uncertainty. systems-based approach to explain This is how he continually foils the everything has become the zeit villain who hopelessly believes in geist in architectural discourses. his own rational master plan and Perhaps it is done to subconsciously that he can use any technocratic sustain an old religious Western weapon against Bond. It does not myth that nature is always selfmatter how many gadgets Q will balancing while the same relig give Bond at the end of the day ious establishments are slowly because it is Bond’s resilience as a deteriorating. Or to preserve an spy that saves the world. We need order, an answer to why the things to be as brave as ecologists who are the way they are. Maybe it’s not have long ago accepted that nature that we sincerely believe humans is dynamic and ever changing and
that we do not fully understand the natural environment let alone believe we can completely control it. A more appropriate architectural response to climate change is not a sustainable one but a resilient one; an approach that works with the dynamic and ever changing natural environment, that is able to respond in a reflexive way. An example of this could be the work of Wang Shu, who works with uncertain tolerances within the Chinese construction process, by allowing the builders to co-author parts of his work through the use of old materials that exist on the site. Through this process Wang Shu creates unimagined new realities and avoids specifying mass-pro duced foreign products. Another example is Japanese infill housing by Atelier Bow-Wow in and around Tokyo. These tiny structures bend, squeeze, and push themselves in physically tight situations and manage to create delightful spaces. These Japanese infill moves could never be generalized into a rational system set, nor do they utilize any technocratic gadgets to achieve what they do. They are simple responses to the tight urban density of Japan. Resilience pre vails over homeostasis.
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Editorial XIX FUTURE CONDITIONS #19
ARCHITECTURE’S VULNERABILITY ANNICK LABECA
The first decade of the 21st century has cast light on a monumental change in the architectural practice revealing a lack of self-confidence, a guilty feeling, a suspicion of vulnerability. The recent Hurricane Sandy was an example, revealing the hidden face of architecture: its vulnerability to random events, its apparent incapacity to adapt to climatic, social, cultural, ecological and economic transformations. Asserting that architecture is vulnerable is potentially provoca tive. The aim, however, is to prompt a future discussion on architecture’s current condition, its vulnerability as well as its accountability in current state of an (un)built environment. Vulnerability is defined as a degree to which a system (or an individual) is able to, or unable to address and to respond to hazardous events, including climatic, sanitary, cultural, ecological, social, and economic crises . Shifting economic and social climates urge architecture’s traditional modes of production to cope with a new set of turbul ence. How can architecture instrumentalize its vulnerable feeling if the future is uncertain
and unstable? Vulnerability could be physical, material, spatial, social, cultural, ecological and political; it could be both operative and theoretical, depressive and creative. The broad failure of architecture over the last century is its incapa city to engage with changing issues and its indifference towards urbanization. Considering the division of the built environment, the obsolescence of urban infra structure and today’s environ mental condition among a variety of pressing issues. First, over the course of the 20th century, architecture has long indicated a lack of interest in the urban environment that results in the division of what is built into two spheres: building and infra structure . The opposing relation ship between building and urban infrastructure can be explained by the fact that architecture was in charge of one—the building— leaving urban planning and civil engineering with the development and management of the second— urban infrastructure. In other words, architecture has positioned itself against urbanization . Its
indifference towards urbanization, ecological systems, and the inhabitants’ behavior in the cities, on the one hand, and its connivance with the economy on the other hand, have accentuated architecture’s vulnerability faced with changing issues. With the current condition of cities, architecture has little choice but to position itself in relation to the urbanization of the world. Infrastructure, then, can no longer be resolved by only urbanism and civil engineering without the implication of architecture. A unification of the three disciplines is needed to redefine infrastructure as interconnected and reliant on the city and its components. A second challenge is the current state of decaying infrastructure. The events in New Orleans (Katrina), parts of the Caribbean, the Mid-Atlantic, and the North east region of the United States (Sandy), parts of Western Europe (Xynthia), the 2011 Tohoku earth quake and tsunami, and the 2011 floods in Thailand should all serve as reminders of the fragility of the basic systems on which cities are reliant. As Kate Orff, founder
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of SCAPE, puts it, “The era of big infrastructure is over” , namely this static foundation on which cities depend should be remediated not only as soft, non-linear but also with the contribution of urbanism, architecture, and civil engineering. With current ecological disturban ces at multiple scales, architecture should incorporate ecological thinking that enables a new approach to building and citymaking. This leads us to a third point that concerns architecture’s contribution to the degradation of landscape in the service of the economy that has been operated over the second half of the 20th century. The current condition of the landscape, in return, should offer generative and strategic possi bilities to articulate the architec ture and (un)built environment nexus as creative, but indetermin ate and multivalent in an ongoing process. Problem-forming systemic con texts—constantly changing built environment, population expansion, economic and social insecurities, obsolescence of infrastructure, housing shortage, degradation of major resource domains, post-conflict issues, ecological crisis—is a first step towards a redefinition of the role of architecture to engage with the world, to elaborate a new agenda, strategic decisions towards relationships between architecture and (un)built environments. What is to be emphasized here is that a better understanding of the limitations of traditional architecture’s skillset, of architecture’s vulnerability is required to account for the com plex and unstable features of interconnected problems. Fore grounding an architecture and (un)built environment nexus that offers a new role for architecture
as interface, as mediator between the population and the (un)built environment is needed to enable architecture to formulate new possibilities and new forms of engagement. In this context, it is urgent for architecture to integrate challenging and changing contexts as central to architecture practice rather than ignoring them. This reposition, in return, can open ways for architecture to rethink, to evaluate its role, to represent and respond to its vulnerability to external turbulence, or better, to address its vulnerability as high opportunity, as driving force, to articulate new protocols, new forms of architecture practice, new modes of operations and representations, new positions for architecture. The architect’s role has shifted from the solver to the active, forward-thinking agent capable of cooperative, proactive forms of engagement along
multiple scales . A few examples of architect’s shifting role are SCAPE, Lateral Office, PosConflicto Laboratory, Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Studio Gang, SOA Architectes, MOS Office, Interboro Partners, and MAP Architects. Some of them do not build but contribute to the improvement of the built environment, encouraging self-management, bottom-up and cooperative inter ventions. For the most, the urgent task is to problem-address a set of systemic and structural problems. This will consist in anticipating, renegotiating with, recovering from the smallest—the building— to the largest—city-making— scale. This can be done through an architecture that pioneers innovative forms of thinking and operation, and collective practice intimately related to the complex realities not only of the constantly changing urbanized world, but also of the ecological systems. i For an understanding of the concept of vulnerability, see: Smit Barry, Wandel Johanna, 2006. “Adaptation, Adaptive Capacity and Vulnerability”, in Global Environmental Change, vol. 16, pdf: http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/ annet/sum/SUM4015/h08/Smit.pdf.
ii Pope Albert, 2012. “The unified project”, in Architectural Design, vol. 82, September/October.
iii Eisenschmidt Alexander, 2012. “The City’s Architectural Project From Formless City to Forms of Architecture”, in Architectural Design, vol. 82, September/October.
iv Feuer Alan, 2012. “Protecting the City, Before Next Time”, in The New York Times, November 3: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/nyregion/ protecting-new-york-city-before-next-time. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
v Hyde Rory, 2012. Future Practice. Conversation from the Edge of Architecture, (London: Routeldge).
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Editorial XX FUTURE CONDITIONS #20
REALLY SUSTAINABLE? – EMERGENT URBAN TERRITORIES AS RESILIENT ASSEMBLAGES OF ENERGY PROCESSES ¨ ARNO SCHLUTER AND SASHA CISAR
What are the basic conditions for thinking about the future of the city and the consumption of energy? We have painfully learned about climate change and the depletion of natural resources and resulting emissions increasing the temperature of our planet. According to the IPCC 2007 the building sector is one of the largest of the economy consumers (depending on which calculation) using up to 40% of resources,40% of energy and is responsible for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions (1/3 through direct combustion, 2/3 through electricity). The IPCC further estimates that buildings have the largest potential, at little economical cost, for saving resources and reducing emissions. Contrary to other economic sectors, the technology for buildings is available, market-ready and economically feasible; mirrored by various programmes promoting the energy-turn (Energiewende) in the EC and Switzerland for instance. Furthermore by 2050 70% of all people will be living in urbanized
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areas hence the inevitable shift in focus toward the city which itself no longer can be regarded solely as the materialization of its elements such as buildings, streets and squares, but the result of an assemblage of energy processes. Therefore the manifestation of a city is also driven by its physical conditions such as thermal, clima tic, light and infrastructures. Peter Sloterdijk describes cities as ‘facilitating wastefulness and indulgence of humans’, where we ‘rather perish than relinquish on wasting energy’. More radically he subsumes, that ‘to persuade spoilt people to austerity has little chance of success’. Hence we have no choice but to move from a fossil to post-fossil standard of waste fulness. Considering the constitutional elements and development of cities in terms of acquiring resources and exchange of goods, the relationship between the city was always one of dependence upon its hinterland. The logistics of energy was for instance a driving factor in the transformation of the hinterland. The distribution of energy resources was highly organized and fuelled city growth. Energy infrastructure was crucial to satisfy the dependence on firewood, coal, gas and later oil. Contrary to the notion that cities where at an equilibrium with their environment (hinterland) in regard to the consumption of fossil fuel before industrialization, energy and its supply was a constant crisis for cities. Hence energy intensive industries only could exist in a decentralized way to meet their demand for firewood; energy had a spatial attribution. Globalization blurred the definition and relation ship between hinterland and the city. Today cities rely on a global network of transportation and
distribution of resources and energy. Similar to localized energy resources and their decentralized application (fireplace) then, new technologies and energy processes could illicit a collapse of the tradi tional dichotomy of hinterland and city. Contrary to the trend of globalization, the emergent terri tory of the hinterland therefore is increasingly the city itself, the city could potentially sustain itself in terms of energy processes, and thus become really sustainable.
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Editorial XXI FUTURE CONDITIONS #21
TOWARDS A THERMODYNAMIC URBAN PLANNING PHILIPPE RAHM
Over the last forty years the history of urban and regional planning has been written from a macroscopic and aesthetic point of view instead of from a microscopic and physiological point of view. By re-analyzing this urban story, through a microscopic prism, we can discover other factors that were really more efficient in the construction of cities and the composition of their forms. A reassessment will allow us to offer an alternative to the present urban development which is based on the current phenomenon of an unbalanced and unfair economic globalization. Our ambition is to propose a more sustainable, humanistic, just and equitable global urbanization for all, based on the criteria of thermodynamics. If we think of urban planning in terms of thermodynamics, we could start to imagine a new strategy of urbanization: a global redeployment of industrial pro duction in the world based on energy and climate criteria rather than on financial or economical criteria, as it is today. Today, in the current crisis of the European model of the “Post-industrial
society”, France, for example, has decided in the last months to reindustrialize itself. This seems necessary in order to achieve a worldwide economical balance in the coming years between the South and the North. If the North is to experience a reindustrialization, the South will have to increase the social and health condition of its workers. So if we are looking for a new equilibrium to achieve this new stage in globalization, we must know which criteria will become important when planning on a global scale.
The division today between design conception and industrial pro duction, something that can be observed globally, is primarily because industrial production is planned around countries where labor is cheaper and the labor laws are the least restrictive. The result is a continual shifting of the place of production as industries search for the cheapest country. Consequently social and ecological inequalities that should no longer be accepted arise. We need to find a future with an overall balance between cost and social conditions of work.
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going to see a radical change in the criteria of geographical value; we could maybe see a relocation of human geography that will cause the creation of new cities and the decline of old one. The climate can play a primary role in the future urbanization of the planet, fol lowing global thermodynamic values related to parameters of geographical location, latitude and altitude can be proposed as a solution for a globalization that will no more be based on wages or working injustices, but on ecological and climatic factors, towards sustainable development for humanity. This issue of Conditions will analyze and develop a new type of urbanization called thermodynamic urban planning, based on the real location of the renewable energy resources today.
To begin to define the concept of urban thermodynamics, we can draw on three examples that have, in a new and special way, managed to exploit energy resources related to their unique geographical position. The first example is the relocation of Facebook servers from California to the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden. Computers that hold huge amounts of digital information overheat and require a lot of energy to be cooled. The average annual temperature of Lulea is 2 degrees celsius, therefore it is easy to understand the decision to relocate the servers from the Californian Mediterranean climate where the annual temperature is 19.5 degree celsius, this shift between climates results in huge energy savings for the American company (which saves several tens of billions of US dollars).
The second example is found in the small village of Trient in Switzerland. The small village, without any ski industry, has a population of 150 inhabitants and is lost in the rugged mountains of Valais. In the coming years, the village will receive several million Swiss Francs in hydraulic royalty. This is thanks to its unique glacial dam whose water supplies electri city to the Swiss railway network. The third example is the German Desertec Project which proposes to cover a small part of the Sahara Desert and will use solar power to fulfill all the electricity needs of North Africa and Europe. These three examples reveal sur prising geographical locations for a new urban development, locations that were in the past years not populated and never urbanized: the far north, desert and mountains. Thus, the twenty-first century is
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Editorial XXII FUTURE CONDITIONS #22
WIDE OPEN MARCO VANUCCI
It should instead be conceived like a living organism whose survival in the hostile environment depends on its possibility for change and adaptation within the context of conservative use of resources.
The ability to change and adapt is a necessary condition for the successful fit of an organism within its environment. This should be true not only within nature but also within the architectural realm which, to remain current and ‘future-proof’, needs to constantly morph itself to the current socio-economic and natural environment. Architecture though is still very much conceived and treated as a static, lifeless, entity. This vision of architecture aligned to a utilitarian paradigm reflects a static and outdated vision of society.
The ever-changing contemporary urban and sub-urban conditions require this more sustainable and dynamic model: the fast turning economic instability has revealed the shortcomings of the contemporary built environment, designed and built to last but not to adapt. The modern and postmodern architecture attempted
to address change by developing ‘generic’ building within rigidly ‘zoned’ planning strategies. This model proved its dramatic shortcomings when faced with the new needs of a changing world order. The radical avant-garde of the 60’s and 70’s explored extensively the notion of a more nomadic, flexible urban condition. These were seductive vision of the glamorous futures of the machine age, leaving however both social and environ mental issues unaddressed. Many years later, the questions posed by the late avant-gardes are still relevant and open to multiple radical interpretations. How can architectural design address the need for a more adaptable built environment while retaining the necessary social functionality as well as its qualitative relevance? In other words, how can we design our buildings and cities in a context where change and uncertainty seem to be the only sure thing? Today more than ever, the role that the avant-garde played in the seems even more poignant:
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the search for innovation, in fact, represents not just a vital form of speculation and critique; it becomes an imperative character of the fittest to survive the con temporary social, economic, technologic and environmental challenges. How does architectural design seek relevant innovation and novelty? Evolutionary biology offers an interesting perspective on the unpredictable nature of the future and change. In nature, evolution and adaptation occur through the specialized use of biomechanical characteristic employed for tasks that were different than the ones initially utilized. In other words, it is through the specialization of (initially) marginal tasks that living forms evolve and adapt to unpredictable future circum stances. Our hands, for instance, have the same characteristics of the hands of the primates: their capacity of playing musical instruments is a functional adaptation initiated as a special ized path. Thus, evolution occurs via the latent capacity of living forms to specialise tasks and adapt to unforeseen needs. In this case the randomized nature of evolution and specialization is what defines the capacity for living forms to adapt. The human eye, for instance, probably descends from light-sensitive cells. These photo tissues have transformed along an extended and non-oriented path: initially driven by chance and then regulated by natural selection. The casual specialization of tasks towards the not-yet-defined needs or functional purposes is what guides the evolutionary process and allow the fittest to adapt to the changing environment. In nature, adaptation is addressed through
the advent of self-constructing, moving architecture built out of organic, self-healing matter. We can’t certainly predict what the future will be like. What’s certain is that tomorrow’s ideas are already circulating and will soon turn into built forms.
the redundant capacity of living systems to perform multiple tasks within an economic use of their resources: nature does more with less. A spider, for instance, uses its silk web to create its habitat and perform a multiplicity of different tasks. The spider, eats, moves, sleep, constructs its living space with the same material using the same construction process. In this sense, the impossibility to predict future scenario is addressed by the redundant production of multidirectional specialized solutions. Moreover, moving away from the idea of innovation as a (sophisticated) response to a specific need/scenario opens the way to a new understanding of sustainable design. A novel architectural sensitivity is blossoming out of the current crisis: one that sees the biological paradigm as the starting point for new architectural experi mentation. Leaving aside the ideological approach to the idea of progress, contemporary avant-garde architecture is turning towards an opportunistic pragmatism that is replacing the dogmatic idealism of the late. Technology plays a paramount role in shaping the horizon of possibility. Advances in material science and construction processes are among the most impactful undertakings of the new Century. Many are already predicting
The paradigmatic shift introduced by novel fabrication processes – from file to fabrication, together with the innovation in material sciences and computational technologies – from product to process – allowed the introduction of a novel approach towards architecture and its relationship with the environ ment: from context neutral to context-aware design. The systemic integration of architecture with the environment and within its constituent parts is one essential feature of the new architectural paradigm. Architecture as a system has a twofold characteristic: systems as whole and generating systems. The former is concerned with the holistic property which can only be understood as a product of interaction among parts. The latter – generating system is a kit of parts, with rules about the way these parts may be combined. Every “system as a whole” is generated by a generating system. “To ensure the holistic system property of buildings and cities we must invent generating systems, whose parts and rules will create the necessary holistic system properties of their own accord”. (C. Alexander) Finally, a new kind of architecture is emerging: one that privileges the ephemeral over the static; the temporary over the firm; the contextual over the generic; the hybrid over the homogeneous; the informal over the rigid. The field is wide open.
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Editorial XXIII FUTURE CONDITIONS #23
ARCHITECTURE AND SYNTHETIC ECOLOGIES RACHEL ARMSTRONG
The biggest opportunities for prosperity at the turn of the millennium reside within the incessant flow of virtual fabrics such as data, communications and energy. However, our greatest challenges exist in their material counterparts that we experience such as the accumulation of waste in our environment, alterations in the chemistry of our gaseous and liquid oceans, resource shortages, unpredictable weather patterns and rising iceberg-fuelled tides. These global material shifts are all augmented by the side effects of the modern age. Architecture represents the human counterpart in these global exchanges and the stresses and strains of 20th century models of architecture, which rely upon Victorian methods of construction, are now painfully evident within our cities. Yet an alternative organizing system to the mechanical world view exists that can unite our virtual and material global net works. ‘Systems theory’, which was developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Ron Ashby, represents a sort of ‘Romantic’ science that is concerned with
relationships between agents and how their interactions build robust networks. Recently, ‘ecology’ has become the operational metaphor for ‘systems theory’ in a similar manner to the way that ‘machine’ came to represent the ideology of the industrial age. Indeed Bruno Latour 1 and David Harvey 2 describe urban environments as complex multi-scalar ‘ecological’ systems where culture, nature, power and capital are all entangled. These are not metaphorical descriptions of cities but regard the relationships within urban environments as literally behaving as ecologies3. Architecture has traditionally sought to embody the dynamic properties of the living world but in real terms: its engagement with them is limited by our expecta tions. Biological systems are constrained by the possibilities of industrial frameworks where they become building substrates (straw bale, wood, flax etc) or inspire ‘biomimicry’ with a portfolio of mechanizable solutions. And yet a new set of possibilities may change the potency of ‘ecolog ical’ architectures, which can embody the dynamic, complex
principles implicit in ‘systems theory’ as a real alternative approach to the production of architecture, and furthermore may complement or eventually replace the prevalent industrial method. Over the last 40 years developments in biotechnology and chemistry have provided a material platform in which dynamic material solut ions can be discovered and actively maintained. Yet these new mater ials are not routinely used in architectural practice because they require different infrastructures to machines and their technological platform is still being developed. My work addresses both the infra structural and technological concerns that may connect the
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biological and inorganic worlds through the language of chemistry, which can articulate and embody the dynamic relationships that underpin ‘systems theory.’ When these principles are applied to matter there is no longer a separa tion between technology and nature but a new set of tools and materials become available as ‘vibrant matter’4 and ‘living technology’5. Indeed, physicist David Deutsch notes that only the material world can compute since everything else we use in mathematics and physics is only a representation of reality. I work with programmable, ‘smart droplets’, which constitute a form of ‘natural’ computing6 that possess life-like qualities such as movement, sensitivity, metabolism, the production of materials and undergo populationscale behaviours. These droplets are not biological and do not possess DNA to instruct them. Yet by applying a deeper, more general chemical programming language these droplets can be programmed to produce useful materials. Although these systems selfassemble at the microscale they can be engineered to work at an architectural scale. Smart droplets were used in architect Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Ground installation for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, which were chemically modified to reach several centimeters in diameter. Entangling the metabolic processes of the droplets across the entire cybernetic framework of the instal lation subsequently increased their operational field. These chemically engineered droplets responded to the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (produced by gallery visitors) by changing colour. They could be thought of as
an artificial olfactory or gustatory system as they responded to the presence of dissolved chemicals just like our own sensory systems do. Future Venice is an architectural project that suggests how the dynamic chemistry may produce architecture on a city scale and connects biological and manmade systems by adopting a non-mechanical approach. Smart droplets are imagined to form an artificial limestone reef underneath the city by accreting carbon dioxide and dissolved minerals. The scheme requires the orchestration of light-sensitive protocells that can move away from the sunshinefilled canals and travel toward the darkened foundation where woodpiles support the weight of the city over a relatively small area. These droplets have already been engineered in the laboratory to vigorously respond to a light stimulus, so it is possible that the energized technology would even be able to move against currents and chemical gradients. Once the protocells had reached the city's foundations, a second metabolism would be activated to use dissolved carbon dioxide to create insoluble crystalline skins from minerals in the water. These residues would accrete on the woodpiles and gradually petrify them. Over time and with monitoring, an artificial limestone reef would be created by the indigenous marine life such as barnacles and clams in combination with the dynamic chemical technology. The natural organisms would make use of the bio-available minerals produced by the protocells and help them build structures that contribute to the synthesis of the reef. The accretion of minerals over an expanded reef-like formation would greatly increase the area over which the city could be spread and would off
load the weight distribution. It could also provide other important benefits such as carbon dioxide fixation, the absorption of pollu tants, and the provision of new niches for the local marine ecology. These explorations suggest an alternative architectural practice that can address challenges differ ently using ‘systems theory’ by working directly with ‘vibrant matter’ and using ‘living techno logy’ to consider our habitats as rich sites for ‘natural’ computing. Ecological architects do not aim to produce a building-object, but to develop new species of materially dynamic systems, that serve as a counterpoint to the ecologically damaging practices implicit in industrial development, so that the process of human development can enhance, rather than reduce, the potency of our biosphere. 1
Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
2
Harvey, D., 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge.
3
Harvey, D., 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge.
4
Jane Bennett coined the term ‘vibrant matter’ to describe the properties of ‘agentised’ materials that can exert a force of their own, independently of human design.
5
A term coined by the Initiative for Science Society and Policy at the Southern University of Denmark, which refers to technologies that possess some of the properties of living things, although they do not possess the status of being fully ‘alive’.
6
Natural computing was first proposed by Alan Turing who recognized the limits of mathematics for engaging in the kinds of ‘calculations’ that natural systems can produce.
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Editorial XXIV FUTURE CONDITIONS #24
THROUGH THICK & THIN CLARK M. THENHAUS
Analog drawing has a long-stand ing relationship with architecture and landscape, one that has been predominantly usurped by digital technologies over the last quarter century. However, the potential partnerships between analog drawing and digital design technologies suggest hybridizations in which concepts may become more or less apparent and nonuniformly translated from state to state across physical and virtual platforms. This partnership opens the possibility for interpretation, intuition, and innovation through a carefully considered blending of analog drawing as expressive materiality with digital design technology. Notable contributions from Robin Evans and Bernard Cache, for example, spoke of the ambiguities and linkages between drawing and architecture or landscape. These pre-texts intersect the critical interface between drawing and architecture as a translational context where meaning may be extracted rather then imparted. As Evans notes, “the assumption that there is a uniform space through which meaning may glide without
modulation is more then just a naïve delusion”i, offering that implied information and concepts may be altered, adjusted, or lost given that there is no requisite for continuity. Cache describes “a universe where objects are not stable but may undergo variations, giving rise to new possibilities of seeing”ii. These early texts suggest that the potency of drawing lies not in what is immediately presented visually or described verbally in narrative, rather in an enabling substratum of material ambiguities tied to new modes of sensing that lie in wait. However, within the last quarter century, and within the last decade to be sure, a chasm between analog drawing processes and digital technique has become increasingly recognizable. This is not simply a matter of technique, rather a philosophical difference in method tied to outcome and objective. Perhaps reactionary to the ‘digital project’ of the early 2000’s, analog drawing is currently acquiring renewed interest among a faction of next generation designers, particularly with regard to metaphor through narrative-
based drawing. The metaphor in narrative format, in its best attempts, aims to borrow a reference from one domain in order to establish a likeness to an otherwise unrelated domain, such as architecture. This, how ever, is limiting in the sense that the metaphor is never more than a partial, author-centric semiotic application of the thing it originally seeks to refer. Conversely, the newest generation of the ‘digital project’ maintain that increased digitization offers potentials otherwise unattainable in architecture that do not require borrowed likenesses between disparate domains. Rather, that digital processes can behave like the domains they suggest with little to no abstraction and thus offer a greater expanse of spatial, tectonic, and atmospheric contexts without the need for authororiented storylines. There is, I believe, truth in this original digi tal promise. Ironically, however, such aspirations are coupled with a worldwide database and communication network that is increasingly demonstrating a new kind of collaborative genericism in which aesthetic
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and conceptual drivers are directly tied to digital technique and prebuilt, downloadable codes. This collective library replaces artistic practices coincident with error and aberration with an optimized tool set and given outcomes. Where narrative lacks the potency of atmospheric spatial affects and an aesthetics independent of rational argumentation, contemporary computation often lacks the curiousness embedded in the imaginative space-enabling fictions calibrated through unrelated domains. This is an admittedly brief overview, yet broadly suggests that the philosophical positions in methodology and approach between the drawing and the digital may become increasingly segregated. It might be asked then, in what ways might artistic (as opposed to biologic) pre-digital material processes in analog drawing form an allegiance with contemporary design technology? One possibility is an analog approach dependent on expressive materiality rather then on Platonic visions, which connects seeing with ideal form, or Cartesian visions “in which an image is conceived as an internal or mental picture of an external object”iii . Expressive materializations are produced by mixing colored pigments, inks, dyes, salt, and wax in a water base initiating unforeseen compositions with latent architectural palettes. The pre-digital mixed material palettes of color, texture, density, intensity, and indeterminate scales initiate organizational stratum with a multiplicity of translatable contexts activated through contemporary design technologies. It could be said that “an ever present technology of architecture converts material into spatial realizations and
realigns external material into forms of knowledge interior to the discipline of architecture.”iv The ‘alchemic’ drawings offer tangible materialities through which ideas are not simply imported from outside reference points, rather formulate internal expressions characterized through sensing rather then deciphering.
as a material synthesis with technical analysis in a middleout process. The introduction of new materials to the ‘alchemic’ drawing initiates unforeseen con tinuities and aberrations calling on computational processes to biopsy implicit architectural qualities within the drawing, such as boundary, mass, density, intensity, or surface as shifting The material drawing offers scales and hierarchies. In this way coexistent formations with a wider ‘fields’ and ‘objects’ within the range of possible acquisitions of drawing or digital compositions architectural geometry accessed not become more or less apparent while through projective mathematics, lacking a priori cognition, external rather through qualitative delinea domains, or ubiquitous aesthetic tions. Neither top down nor codes. Rather a broad spectrum of bottom up, the introduction of variables may undergo a range of material behaviors and intuitive internal allegiances. This middle translatable parameters serves out process parallels principles
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of Object-Oriented Design (OOD) philosophy in software pro gramming in which a process of planning a system of interacting objects emerges a new ecology of heterogeneous interaction into a composite formation. The material drawing maintains the kind of imaginative space-enabling that narrative-based drawings do as a landscape of possibility, however it does not require explanation in the form of a story to make sense of it. Rather, the drawings are understood initially through qualitative, optical engagement and made digitally legible through computational and parametric processes which translate qualita tive fields into tectonic, spatial, and organizational data in the form of surfaces, solids, and vectors.
A recent series of surfaces called ‘Palindromes’ borrows from Evans introduction to ‘translation’ as a language base. A palindrome is a word which spells itself in reverse, like ‘race car’. The Palindrome surfaces are, in their causality, linear like drawing and surface. However within the process between beginning and end, the operative intuitions and sensibilities derived from continuities and aberrations are inherently non-linear in the process of surface formation. Thus, the relationship between drawing and surface may be fixed at both ends, reading in either direction as self referential, while the internal relationships between color, texture, layer, boundary, depth, and/or density are inherently variable and may undergo any number of interrelated variations. While indications suggest the gap between analog drawing and digital technique will widen in future generations, it nevertheless seems the promise of hybrid couplings between them is a gulf of exploration in both architecture and landscape. Technology can’t be a replacement for artistic, creative practice. Nor can digital design technologies be denied. Rather a careful blending is poised to initiate new philosophical positions between idea and technique related to material culture which fosters new strategies, frame diverse methodologies, and establishes new catalysts in design process through the interchange of drawing, intuitive sensibilities, material synthesis coupled with local analysis, digital craft, and design technology.
i
Evans, Robin. Translations From Drawing To Building. Massachusets Institute of Technologu, Cambridge MA. 1978.
ii
Bernard Cahce. Earth Moves; The Furnishing of Territories. Massachusets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 1995. Edited by Michael Speaks. Translated by Anne Boyman
iii
Bernard Cahce. Earth Moves; The Furnishing of Territories. Massachusets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 1995. Edited by Michael Speaks. Translated by Anne Boyman
iv
Karen Burns. Greg Lynn’s Embryological House Project: The “Technology” and Metaphors Of Metorsmof Architecture. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
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Editorial XXV FUTURE CONDITIONS #25
PARAMETRIC SEMIOLOGY – THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AS INTERFACE OF COMMUNICATION PATRIK SCHUMACHER
All design is communication design. The built environment with its complex matrix of territorial distinctions and morphological markings is a giant, navigable, information rich interface of communication. The urban field distinguishes, distributes and connects the myriad social activities that make up the societal process. As an interface of communication it orients the diverse participants of societal cooperation in their vital agenda of finding each other as relevant partners in specific communicative situations. Each territory is itself a communication. It gives potential social actors information about the communicative interactions to be expected within its bounds. It communicates an invitation to participate in the thus framed social situation. Designed spaces are spatial communications that frame and order further communications. They place the participants into specific constellations that are pertinent with respect to the anticipated social situations. Like any communication, a spatial
communication can be accepted or rejected, i.e. the space can be entered or exited. Entry implies the acceptance of the communication as premise of all further communications that take place within its boundaries. Crossing a territorial threshold makes a difference in terms of behavioural dispositions. Entry implies submission to the specific rules
of conduct that the type of social situation inscribed within the territory prescribes. In this way the designed built environment orders and coordinates social actors and thus makes the diverse, specifically required social communication processes possible. This spells the unique societal function of architecture: to order and frame communicative interaction.
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All societies throughout history have relied upon a spatially and morphologically coded built environment to order, stabilize and evolve its social structures and vital processes of social cooperation. In fact, I argue that the built environment is the indispensable material substrate of all socio-cultural evolution, i.e. the equivalent of the DNA as the material substrate of the biological evolution. The cross-generationally stable and incrementally evolving built environment facilitates the accrual and growth of the social organism by distinguishing and laying out social status groups and making a differentiating spectrum of interdependent activity types and communication scenarios manifest and retrievable for the evolving reproduction of society. (This contrasts with the lack of an elaborate, growing and differentiating social structure of a naked group of primates without a built environment as coevolving material substrate.) This reliance on the ordering capacity of the built environment has always been so and continues to be the case today. What is new in the 21st century is the momentous increase in the size and complexity of society with its dynamic differentiation of specific activity and communication types and with its diversity of potential participants distributed within mega-city agglomerations. The complexity and dynamism of society has markedly increased with the socio-economic transition from the fordist society of mechanical mass production to the current post-fordist regime of flexible specialization made possible by the micro-electronic revolution. Instead of advancing via the principles of separation,
specialisation and repetition leading to universal procedures and standards with relatively stable interdependencies, contemporary society is marked by dynamic life and work style diversification and rapid cycles of innovation requiring a continuous recalibration of interdependencies. No firm, nor any individual within a firm, can beaver away in isolation according to stable instructions anymore. Everybody needs to network with everybody else to stay tuned and relevant. We might therefore talk about post-fordist network society. This engenders a massive increase in the amount, complexity and intensity of societal communication. The built environment reflects this radical societal transformation and communicative intensification. The era of Modernism was the era of fordist mass repetition laid out within a neatly zoned matrix. Modernism’s principles are no longer viable. As the canons of Modernism more and more receded during the last 30 years the built environment evolved spontaneously with little guidance by the discipline of architecture. In the meantime the avant-garde segment of the discipline has elaborated a new paradigm with new values, strategies, techniques,
and tools that are able to cope with the new demands of society and thus facilitate the advancement of a contemporary built environment congenial to contemporary network society. This new paradigm is the paradigm of Parametricism. It is the potential new epochal style for the 21st century, ready to go mainstream, to finally make a decisive impact of the physiognomy of the built environment, like modernism did during the 20th century. Architecture emerged as separate profession and academic discipline, i.e. as autopoietic societal function system according to the terminology of my theoretical system, during the Renaissance which can in retrospect be identified as architecture’s first consciously innovative style. All prior built environments were tradition-bound vernaculars. (The Gothic marks the transition from the vernacular to architecture.) Architecture as a self-reflective, theory-led profession coevolved with the advancing civilization. It evolved an elaborate discursive structure innovating its processes via a succession of epochal styles in line with the major stages of societal development. Architecture evolved from the Renaissance aligned with the early capitalist
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city states, via the Baroque adapted to mercantilist absolutism, and via Historicism under the auspices of bourgeois laissez faire industrialisation, to Modernism aligned with Fordism under the auspices of social democratic state capitalism in the West and socialism in the East, and finally to Parametricism congenial to contemporary post-fordism and the globalizing network society. With Parametricism all elements of architecture become parametrically variable. This affords the capacity to articulate adaptive resonances between all elements and in relation to contexts, engendering an intensification of both internal and external relations. Potentially everything associates with everything else. The capacity of Parametricism to legibly differentiate and correlate spatial structures and morphologies allows it to articulate the complexity of network society. If all problems of society are now problems of communication, then the focus on communication is a precondition for upgrading architecture’s social efficacy. Every designer is intuitively concerned with and works on the organisational parti, the perceptual palpability and the semantic legibility/meaning of their designs. The task now is to make the organisational, phenomenological and semiological projects explicit design agendas and build up a theory-led design expertise to accomplish these crucial tasks on a new level of sophistication and efficacy. It is the second and third dimensions, the phenomenological and the semiological dimension (which together constitute ‘articulation’ in distinction to organisation), that should be recognized as constituting the core competency
of architecture in distinction to the engineering disciplines. The engineering disciplines are now responsible for the objective physico-technical aspects of the built environment’s functioning. For them the users are bodies with certain physical properties and physiological requirements. Architecture’s responsibility is the social functionality of the built environment, which primarily means its subjective communicative functioning. For architecture its users are cognitive agents and socialized actors. (This sharp demarcation of competencies is the precondition for an effective cooperation.) Operation cannot be counter-posed to representation. The built environment operates via representation. Post-Fordist network society demands that we continuously browse and scan as much of the social world as possible to remain continuously connected and informed. We must network continuously to ascertain the relevancy of our own efforts. Telecommunication via mobile devices helps but does not suffice. Rapid and effective face-toface communication remains a crucial component of our daily productivity. The ability to navigate dense and complex urban environments is an important aspect of our overall productivity today. The whole built environment must become a 360 degree interface of multi-modal communication. Looked at in this way the amount of information that the screen of a mobile phone can deliver shrinks to nearly zero if compared with the potential density of simultaneous informations and choices of interaction unfolded in front, above, below and all around, layered in the depth of urban space, and with more brought
into view with each step - if the urban environment is designed appropriately. This implies a complex spatial organisation, a perceptually retrievable articulation of the scene into conspicuous units of interaction, and the semiological encoding of all relevant programmatic and social distinctions within a coherent system of signification, all conducted under the auspices of the heuristics of Parametricism. 1
This coevolution of architecture as autopoietic function system within the historical trajectory of modernity has been described and theorized in Volume 1 of my work ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ (AoA). Architecture is here theorized within the framework of Luhmann’s social theory conceived as communication theory. This ties in very well with the fact that within contemporary network/knowledge/information society most problems are problems of communication. In the advanced economies all work is communication work related to the innovation of services, products and production processes. (These production processes itself are more and more given over to robotic production systems.)
2
While AoA Volume 1 explains and validates what architecture has achieved up to now, AoA Volume 2 projects forward and identifies strategic research domains through which the discipline and profession of architecture might upgrade its intelligence and enhance its efficacy in fulfilling its unique societal function – the ordering and framing of communicative interaction – on the new level of complexity required. AoA Vol.2 distinguishes and elaborates three primary dimensions along which this enhancement should proceed: the organisational, the phenomenological and the semiological dimension, respectively drawing on network theory, Gestalt theory, and structural linguistics as source domains for architecture’s theoretical advancement.
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Editorial XXVI FUTURE CONDITIONS #26
PARALLEL UNIVERSE SUPERPOOL
As the world, on one hand is converging with global trends, our experiences are multiplying, fragmenting into our many reflections. While the effects of globalism, neo-liberal economies, the Internet, data networks etc. are discussed in detail a more funda mental shift goes less observed. Since the 1950’s theoretical physi cists are pondering upon the inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum physics in search for a theory of everything. String theory is a possible mathe matical model that describes all fundamental forces and forms of matter and it requires the existence of several extra dimensions to the universe that have been compacted into extremely small scales, in addition to the four known space time dimensions. String theory also implies the concept of Parallel Universe. Below in Brian Greene’s words: “A striking fact is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics – relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, unified physics, computational
physics – have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe… Our universe (is) part of an unexpectedly larger whole, but the complexion of that whole and the nature of member universes differ sharply among them. In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they’re hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes. In some, the laws are the same as in ours, in others they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are a form and structure unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. It’s at once humbling and stirring to imagine how expansive reality may be.” The impact of this re-definition is comparable to when the world changed to round from flat, or to when the sun stopped revolving around the earth and became the center of our solar system. Similarly, it changes everything and nothing.
Definitely it takes us further away from the center of the world, challenges our existence, suggest there is more to the world then what meets the eye. But then it leaves us at the limit of our every day experience, unable to travel further. Here we are with a prom ising mathematical map of our surroundings and left with our imagination, our capacity to dream to explore it.
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How does a building dream? Can it surpass being grounded much like our own bodies? Maybe by burrow ing uncertainty from Situationists, from Surrealists, Dada… Let people surprise the initial design in the ways they occupy buildings. They always will. And we all get excited, celebrating buildings that acquire life and meaning from many users. Parallel narratives come to life. These are common sentiments for talking about buildings. They hardly ever come through in the images. Architecture is represented with a rigor for the perfect image com parable to High Renaissance, prepared with flawless lighting, following rules of perspective to best advantage for dramatic effect. While painting has thought through many other ways of representation since the Renaissance, emphasizing what the mind sees instead of the eyes, architectural illustration hardly followed up.
Returning to physics for thoughts on reality, again in Greene’s words: “After decades of closely studying quantum mechanics, and after having accumulated a wealth of data confirming its probabilistic predictions, no one has been able to explain why only one of the many possible outcomes in any given situation actually happens. When we do experiments, when we examine the world, we all agree that we encounter a single definite reality. Yet, more than a century after the quantum revolution began, there is no consensus among the world’s physicists as to how this basic fact is compatible with the theory’s mathematical expression.”
We invite you to respond to the idea of parallel universes and certainty as we experience it. Take it if you will as a fictional Calvino world or delve into its subatomic reality. Turn it into a metaphor to discuss social injustice or a regional masterplan, and celebrate this confrontation to reality, as we know it.
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Editorial XXVII FUTURE CONDITIONS #27
TO BE SEDUCED BY ARCHITECTURE IS ALL WE ASK… PAVLINA LUCAS
Oh Architecture, what are you? Elusive and concrete at once, you give your charms away in glimp ses and then you cloak yourself in mystery again. You make us thirst for you. You keep us awake all night thinking about you, laboring over you, contriving ways to reach you. And when we finally get to sleep, you haunt our dreams, enchanting us in all your different guises. You give us images that turn in our minds and stir our hearts, so that we can never stop longing for you, never stop hoping that one day you will make us privy to your secrets. Like the Sirens, you lure us with your song
and we follow your seductive call into unchartered territories. And there is no going back, no thread to help us retrace our steps and find the exit from your labyrinth. We forget ourselves and we get lost in the madness of our desire for you. Sometimes we do manage to reach you, to touch you and to be touched by you, albeit briefly, but long enough to feel your pulse. These moments keep us aroused and astir in your pursuit. We travel the world over to meet you and to be in your company. We find you in stately places with high domes and coffered ceilings, we find you perched on mountain
slopes, or hiding away in narrow alleys. Sometimes we find you in the soft contours of a carpet, in the gently carved cavity of a rock, or under a hot tin roof. Majestic and extravagant, or humble and serene, you are always so marvel ous and compelling. In your presence we find ours and in your body we feel our own. You move us and you ground us. You give us the sounds and the smells, you give us the light in your shadows. You give us places where we can escape history, places where we can dream dreams of Bill the Lizard and the Mad Hatter. With you we are at home. We are so enamored of and so captivated by you Architecture. We are at your mercy. You know this of course, and you artfully tease us, pushing us and pulling us hither and thither with the vague promise of giving yourself to us now and then. And we get so excited by this prospect that our hearts begin to beat faster and our bodies tingle with anticipation. Sometimes we even start to hyperventilate and thoughts rush through our heads at an incredible speed. Questing after you keeps us alive. We stage festivals in your name and we all gather from near
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and far, dressed in our best attire, to pay homage to your various manifestations and talk about you. We are all so desperately trying to understand you Architecture. We strive to find your meaning in words, but just as we think that we have pinned you down, you slip away from us again. What do you want from us? We realize that the answer can not be that simple, for you are polymorphous and speak so many languages. So we each address you in our native tongue, pleading with you to give yourself to us and let us decipher your enigma. We photograph you, film you, sketch you, paint you, draw you. Like the maiden from Corinth, who traced the shadow of her departing lover on the wall, we also try to somehow keep you. We are always so afraid of losing you, you see. For sometimes you turn aloof and distant, mumbling incomprehensible theorems to yourself. Then you shed your vigor and your vibrant charm, you wither away and become lifeless and bare. And we drown in despair and loneliness, afraid that we have lost you forever. But then you rise, like a phoenix from your ashes, and so youthful and fresh you are again. You sweep us off our feet with your new vitality and all we wish is that you enchant us and seduce us once again. And so we keep courting you, striving to be your deft lovers and bear offspring that is worthy of your name. What reckless and unscrupulous hedonists we are! We squander our lives indulging in sybaritic liaisons with you while our planet is in dire straits. But we are not going to apologize. No one has ever apologized for loving. For we really do love you Architecture. (And sometimes we really do hate you too.) We need you. Do not forsake us.
ARCHITECTURE, TO BE SEDUCED BY YOU IS ALL WE ASK.* *
Inspired by TO BE WITH ART IS ALL WE ASK‌, Gilbert & George, 1970.
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Editorial XXVIII FUTURE CONDITIONS #28
RETHINKING TRANSPARENCY THOMAS MICAL
become commonplace, its qualities replaced by a repetitive “imaginary signifier,” in the sense of the restricted optical register that overdetermines the material practice.2 Today, following McLuhan’s mediatheory, that in architectural glass is “the transparency is the message.”3 Is this conceptual transparency a dead end?
ABSTRACT This essay offers a quick survey of the development of the theory of transparency from modern architecture to the present, then proposes two radical possibilities in the trajectory: decoupling transparency from the materiality of glass and subverting the preval ence of the dominant production of transparency with a range of speculative and subversive tactical acts of transparency. The position taken is that the pleasures and enigmas of transparency have been normalized, and rendered ineffective, by way of custom and
This pervasive and persistent fantasy of a uniform or universal transparency, in both meanings of the word (an optic and a concept), appears as the highest value and habit, insofar as we now can only the widest symptom of the sense of imagine a narrow range of practical modernity, rationally and optically. transparencies. The fantasy of liberation imbedded in glass walls was originally a novelty of visual dematerialization SURVEY OF TRANSPARENCY – one expected to lead to social deterritorialization erupting The allure of transparency-infrom the industrial practices of glass is the overarching myth modernism. Eventually, through of modern architecture, a myth early avant-garde successes, it is that turns glass into a signifier now a standard business practice of transparency and one that that privileges standard repetition stabilizes the “natural” history of of glass planes, a common framing modern architecture.1 We should both interiority and exteriority ask – why are we still operating identically, framing spaces of all under the myth of a universal manners. How could any specificity transparency? Transparency, in of individual meaning get produced late modern architecture, has in this customary habit? How can
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we activate transparency outside of universal complicity? Transparency, through habit and custom, has moved from a revolutionary practice of exposure to an indexical operation of control. As Krauss stated “the index as a vestige rather than a viable means of representation” in which glass is indexical in that it is pointing to and indicating what was the dream of transparency, as a signifier that is fleetingly present.4 The ubiquity of glass surfaces indicating transparency but not intentionally producing it both codes and recodes our behavior before glass – late modern transparency is also a spectacle, a desensitizing image conspiracy, following Debord.5 Transparency as optical control has been moved beyond determining privacy and publicity, which is a dualism that has dissolved into a spectrum today, which is complicit with our desensitization towards glass surfaces.6 The homogenizing desire for regulated seeing in the present has led to an unconscious film over the world.7 Finally, the slow history of the distillation of the optic of transparency into the ceramic firing processes of industrial pate glass and float glass production is a complex conceptual-material collapse. The descent of the concept of transparency into an indifferent plate surface is a type of capture, one that predetermines all of these above conditions of transparency.8 But this descent is also a type of contract, subject to modification. The 21st century presentations of transparency in the social realm are far different than their original promises were in the early 20th century Expressionist glass utopias or avant-garde proposals by Mies van der Rohe. Since then, transparency is not what is seems. Simple interference from
reflectivity, optical dislocations, fictive continuities, blankness, imperviousness, eroticism, even an endless mise-en-abyme have become possibilities in the material practice of modern transparency.9 Knowing this progression, how can the insightful architect mobilize small-scale or micro-transparen cies? How does the growing range of new forms and materials use tactical openings into the homo genizing gauze of glass walls? What organisms, machines and inten tional permeability can be located in architectural techniques? What, in an ideal world, could these new transparencies do differently?
seamless and uniform. New modes of transparency can exaggerate the minimal differences of once homogenous transparency (perhaps even within the same surface). How exactly can we design minimal spatial differences of sensation and meaning? How can we expand a wider spectrum of transparency and translucency? How can we engage mobility and varied speeds of movement to open up moments of tactical transparency? In the everyday world of fleeting presences and inattention, how can seeing, or seeing through, produce new insights and architectural meanings?
RETHINK TRANSPARENCY AS A CONCEPT
RETHINK TRANSPARENCY AS MATERIALITY
Now with this potentiality to differ, transparency is not neces sarily uniform, and as a concept the subtle differences within the optics of transparency are the locations of meaning. The first operation to consider derives from the concept of difference, differen tiation, and the most subtle but important, minimal difference.10 When all the walls are glass, the ubiquity of transparency (from glass buildings to touch screens to CCTV surveillance) can appear
To liberate sense through vision, we propose as the second thought experiment (already in progress) a trial separation of the interlaced concept of transparency with the materiality of glass – to crack the frame and let the ghost out of the machine. The conditions of transparency are now more easily transplanted or grafted onto a wider palette of materials, such as new plastics and acrylics, new translucent materials, and even punched metal and other meshes
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talized, how can we now think of new arrays of architecture as differentiated “optics by other means”? 1
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972, especially pages 143–144.
2
See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, especially pages
and screens. It is now possible to design glass without transparency, and transparency without glass. The optic of transparency is now capable of disengagement from the materiality of glass, and it can be coaxed to settle into far more diversified and unexpected material practices. The fascinating works of Jun Aoki point to such an expanded tactical response. Which materials today (or tomorrow) could be made tactically transparent? How many types of transparency could be used in projects? What new types of seeing and seeing through could go beyond the autonomy of architectural form?
identified, what would their real performance criteria be?
If systemic transparency-in-glass was the key modern strategy, imagine how easily we could turn to tactical thinking, to imagine a micro-politics of transparency, as a possible source of architectural tension or disequilibrium (again). The opportunity to implement personal-local transparencies within the larger deterministic architectural and social fabric can be a tactical act of liberation. These tactics can re-activate and re-sensitize us to the once exceptional pleasures of seeing and seeing through, but also of being seen. How can an expansive RETHINK TRANSPARENCY AS TACTICS range of tactics of instrumental and performative transparency, The third rethink is with the scale in diverse materials, take us of the performance of transparency, beyond the nostalgic return of the as working in the fine grain voyeuristic keyholes or reflective of 1:1 reality. The unlocking of sunglasses of the past? Imagine universal transparency can offer all sorts of such tactical operations new strategies of transparency of transparency, introduced into across projects, which could open construction drawings – some up possible tactical transparencies tactics of displacement, surround between individual rooms or ing, telescoping, tracking, mis surfaces. The tactical is localized directing, withdrawal, even and specific, repeatable but not startling – and how these could identical, to introduce these new be accomplished in a variety transparencies in deliberate details of materials (and spatial atmo and spatial sequences, so as to spheres). With the desire to see move beyond dull uniformity. becoming universal, how can we How can the singularity of the use these new modes to redirect detail locate the select tactical seeing, or to originate new privacy? deployment of transparency, for Given that transparency and glass rational (or other) pleasures? Once may be separated and instrumen
248–250.
3
This is a revision of the eponymous maxim “the medium is the message” proposed and developed in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. NY: Signet, 1964, pp. 23–35 and 63–67.
4
See the chapter “Notes on the Index 1” in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 196–209.
5
See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, NY: Zone Books, 1995 (1967), p. 12.
6
See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
7
See Toyo Ito, Blurring Architecture: 1971–2005, ed. Ulrich Scheider et al, Charta, 1999.
8
This is the thesis of the upcoming book-in-progress entitled Transparency: Theory and Tactics (c. 2013) by Thomas Mical, for Routledge Press.
9
See Micheal Bell and Jeannie Kim, Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Structured Light, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
10
See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, NY: Continuum, 2005 (1968).
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Editorial XXIX FUTURE CONDITIONS #29
APPROPRIATION: ABANDONED ARCHITECTURE BEYOND RUIN PORN RUTGER HUIBERTS
“The true work of architecture is not a monument, but a receptacle of life […] that is never finished or final, but that is completed as time goes by, flowering again and again into daily perfection” 1 – Aris Konstantinidis
With these words Greek Architect Konstantinidis expressed his view on architecture. A Modernist on a quest for a local Greek expression, Konstantinidis was involved in a programme set up by the Greek Ministry of Tourism during the 1950s and 1960s to equip the national territory with a series of small scale hotel resorts that would set the standard for tourism for the whole of Greece and provide modern tourist facilities to remote cultural and natural beauty spots of the country. Called Xenia, from the Greek word for “friendly hospital ity”, these hotels provided the basic facilities that set in motion a booming tourist industry. Now adays however, out of a total of 45 Xenia that were built, most lie vacant; the government pro gramme that had led to their construction had not reacted to the changing demands of tourism, and the outspokenly Modernist design style of the hotels that unified
them into a single network was unable to adapt to new fashions. The structures of the Xenia are reduced to idle space, waiting for an unknown future. They bear the traces of times that will not return as they gradually decay into ruins. Vacancy is not a new phenomenon; throughout history, the fluctua tions of economies, power struc tures and environmental condit ions have left structures or even entire cities in ruins. At the same time, all through history we have seen cases of re-evaluation of many of these disused relics, resulting in some of the most interesting human creations. However, the once powerful motors of State and Capital of the Western World, that fuelled some of the most confident outings of architectural production and the most active urban fields ever seen, now seem to fade into a permanent state of faintness. It seems that it is exactly the heavily organised character of the
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functioning of these motors that now prevents many of the vacant spaces from being re-appropriated; zoning-laws, building codes and governmental policies that desperately try to protect property markets now regularly seem to inhibit rather than safeguard urban development, ironically resulting sometimes in vacancy even in the most sought-after parts of town. A famous and often referred to case of abandonment is the inner city of Detroit. Discovered first by photographers and artists, and then by architects, the lure of Detroit has been so immense that the term Ruin Porn was coiled for the genre of photography that captures its abandoned spaces. Abandoned Detroit simultaneously vibrates with the immense glory of its past as its current malady in the most spectacular way. But whereas to a photographer these decaying places present an opportunity to capture the uncanny effect of abandonment and desolation and the passing of time, for the architect these places acquire another layer of meaning. Abandoned places confront the architect on the one hand with the sublime cruelty of mortality and the futility of the creation of his predecessors, but on the other, to architects abandoned spaces can be places of potential. The architect sees vacant spaces as places that are merely dormant: sleeping beauties that can be reanimated with a kiss of Photoshop. Traditionally, the architectural practice has responded in different ways to dormant structures. The first strategy is restoration. The nostalgic act of turning back time, especially when done with studied accuracy, is a costly process, and more often than not it requires
the support of institutions and subsidies. The second strategy is that of transforming the aban doned space for new uses. This practice however, requires invest ment and therefore depends highly on the economic potential of the place and time. Over the past decades, many of the dismissed docklands and industrial ware houses have been transformed into environments for new generations of gentry. The most recent strategy for dealing with vacant sites is that of temporary activation. The architect becomes the advocate of festivals, temporary art events, and low budget public installations. Interestingly, in the most suc cessful cases these temporary occupations of space can lead to a more long-term process of genuine appropriation once the momentum of the initiative manages to ignite growth and more stable social and economic connections to the
surrounding urban context take form. Ironically, the Greek Order of Architects has in the last years carried out a crusade to save the remains of the Xenia program by calling for the restoration of some of the Xenia to former glory. Some of the proposals even go as far as turning the surrounding landscape into protected landscape because of the mastery with which the original designs were embedded in the surroundings. But are these attempts not merely based on nostalgic motivations? Can time be reversed for the Xenia, without leading inevitably to the same dismissal? And would future decay be prevented if these buildings were restored without providing them with a proper immune system that could assure their survival? Restoration alone is not enough to arm the Xenia against the fluctuations to come if the activities within the building are not fulfilling the needs and wishes of visitors and if even more constraints to their adaptation and appropriation are put in place. The call for restoration and conser vation of the Xenia as architectural highlights of specific timeframes is a noble initiative, but would Konstantinidis himself agree with the attempts to list his buildings for monument conservation? 1
Konstantinidis, A., About Architecture. Original title in Greek: Gia Tin Architektonikí, 1987, Athens: Agra, page 221
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Editorial XXX FUTURE CONDITIONS #30
BACK TO THE RUIN DAVIDE TOMMASO FERRANDO
The long-term effects of the 2008 financial crisis ask for a paradig matic transformation of the way in which architects understand their discipline. The golden days in which the luxurious projects of a few globalized brands dictated the guidelines of contemporary architecture are finally over, and as our Zeitgeist has already moved away from the shiny stages of showbusiness, designers are beginning to realize that the moment to deal with the epochal changes of our post-capitalist era can no longer be delayed. When, some ninety years ago, Le Corbusier was busy in writing Vers une Architecture, the world was also in crisis, and the birth of a new architecture was strongly invoked by the Swiss homme de lettres as the best option (revolution being the only alternative) to fully address the social, political and economic transformations that were taking place at that time. At first glance, it could seem well advised to pro pose the construction of a bridge between 1923 and 2013, in order to root our possible solutions to today’s new issues in the radical proposals of those who – like Le
Corbusier – strove to transform their own world by defining a new architectural paradigm. Never theless, I am afraid we can’t keep lying to ourselves and pretend, one more time, that all we need is just another change of aesthetics. While, in fact, at the beginning of the past century the desire to realize modern society was going hand-in-hand with the necessity to build its future infrastructures – something intrinsically connected to a specific asset of political, economic, technological and material conditions – today we have no choice but to face the territorial holocaust that the exacerbation of such a positivistic paradigm has led us to, in filling our lands with a surplus of (often disgracefully) built structures that largely exceed the needs of a now shrinking population. A condition so problematic and evident that there’s no need to check the empty homes rate of countries like Spain (20%) and Ireland (15%) to realize that, during the 20th century, the European territory has been assaulted and transformed in the main course of a grande bouffe meticulously organized by private
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speculation – and euphorically assisted by architecture practices. Parallel to this, the 2008 shut down of the financial pump that fueled, over the course of decades, the convenient business of architecture, has caused the shrinkage of both the architects’ customer base and the clients’ budget capacity. As a consequence, the former are being slowly coerced either into switching their focus from construction to representation (a recurrent strategy in periods of weak markets), or into looking for alternative and profitable applications of their multidisciplinary knowledge – as Josemaría de Churtichaga has maintained in a recent speech – while the latter are not only abandoning the possibility of new investments, but also leaving many on-going projects unfinished. How these escapist solutions can resolve the actual problem of architecture, though, is something yet to be proven, and as we compare the ordered, positive and whiteclean modernity propelled by Le Corbusier to the direction taken by our post-capitalist society, all we can see is the slow production of a transnational landscape of social fragmentation, economic
uncertainty and abandoned build ings: something not so differ ent from the cityscape of ruins described in Florent Tillon’s docu mentary Detroit, ville sauvage. Now the theme of the ruin had started crossing architecture’s path already during the Renaissance, when artificially decaying build ings were designed from scratch in order to meet a particular picturesque taste, like in the case of the ruined house built in 1530 by Girolamo Genga in the Barchetto (the Duke of Urbino’s park). Starting from there, it is possible to draw a diachronic line that connects a great quantity of authors – Bernini, Piranesi, Chambers, Gandy, Speer, Kahn, Isozaki, etc. – who all shared an interest for the unique physicality of ruined buildings: a disturbing presence that in the past has been capable of recalling absolute ideas like those of death, nostalgia, sub limity, nature, time.
Practice Architecture’s BT5 Auditorium and Peckham Hotel in London, and Herzog & De Meuron’s Tate Tanks, again in London: these are all projects that, by simply introducing a minimum addiction to a rusty espace trouvé, not only make us recognize the spatial and material value of the degraded structures in which they are set, but also, and most notably here, they provide a realistic, convenient and repeatable strategy for the reuse of the “modern ruins” that have been produced in the last decades – a strategy that could be transferred to a much wider set of hosting structures and hosted programs, and even become the next common vocabulary of architecture.
What’s more, by offering a viable alternative to it, these projects eventually manage to denounce the idea of architecture as a standalone, finished object: an idea that has never been questioned during the past century, while As for today, I maintain that some it was silently supporting the thing that could go far beyond the expansive paradigm under which simple reproposition, in architec our cities were growing wild, tural terms, of the widely analyzed and the consequences of which aesthetic of the ruin, is actually are now being literally shown, taking place. Preceded, as usual, bare naked, in the mentioned by the pioneering work of a small projects. In this sense, to go back group of authors who managed to the ruin means to adopt a to anticipate, in their respective critical attitude towards the built disciplines, future tendencies (I am environment, reconsidering the thinking, for example, of Cyprien temporal dimension of architecture Gaillard’s picturesque drawings of as something dynamic and never modern high-rises, Stanley Wong’s ending, canceling the disciplinary photographs of Chinese unfinished distinctions between restoration, building sites, Lacaton & Vassal’s reuse and construction and, fin project for the Palais de Tokyo in ally, radically rethinking design in Paris), some architects are in fact terms of “mutation” rather than turning to abandoned buildings in “creation”, as Richard Sennett a different way. suggests. Let’s think of Arturo Franco’s reuse of two wings of Madrid’s Slaughterhouse, Garcés de Seta Bonet’s metro station in Barcelona,
The actual crisis could lead us towards the definition of a new architecture: have we got eyes to see it?
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Editorial XXXI FUTURE CONDITIONS #31
THE HEART OF DARKNESS DAN HANDEL
Sustainability is gone. Swallowed in its entirety by bureaucrats and technophiles. Take the recent Venice Architecture Biennale: if it can serve as a barometer of sorts for the condition of architectural culture, then the stocks of sustain ability are down. Instead, one now sees numerous attempts to describe self-organizing, smallscale developments, crystallizing outside the rules of planning and of developmental architecture. In these, as in the preceding sustain ability debate, one can trace the preoccupation with crisis – the reverberations of cultural, social and economic shockwaves that are melting Europe, shaking the US, and bringing out millions of people onto the streets of the Middle East. But crisis is not a real agenda. And trying to minimize the impact of architecture, such as sustainability is preaching, or breaking it into many small operations, as the 99 percent discourse argues for, is missing the point. The point is that architecture is entrenched in power. And power shapes the built environment through capitalist development, whether it be in the United
Or they can use the crisis in another way and infiltrate the heart of darkness. Instead of denouncing it, architecture can learn to operate from within capitalism. In that excursion, the United States may play a key role. While neo-liberal, unregulated capitalist development has become an industry standard around the world, its patterns and its legitim acy still radiates from the hub of its creation. It is there that it has fully exploited its potential; it is there where its vulnerabilities were most violently exposed.
States or in China. Therefore architects can continue to reduce their influence by building zero carbon projects in the desert, or supporting informal organizations with the futile hope of somehow challenging formal ones. Either way, their actions will most likely be absorbed by development mechanisms that have already proved their resilience.
But where does one begin? American cities, for sure, were frequently associated with the vicious cycles of the economy, with urban environments serving both as the grim settings for executives’ fraud and as the built expression of their powers. This pairing was constructed through countless descriptions that span over a century: from Ernst Troelsch’s likening of the New York stock exchange to the “castle and fortification of capital ism”,1 to David Cronenberg’s 2012 Cosmopolis, in which the city exhibits the reflections of the
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financial crisis that is destroying the main character. However, one should overcome this easy target by acknowledging that almost everything that extends outside of cities in the United States, and most definitely everything that has any affinities to the architect’s work ¬– from designed kitchens, to individual homes, to suburban developments, university science campuses, malls of Americas, and logistical super-hubs – is leveraged to the point of disbelief. One can imagine all of these constructions, which constitute a big bulk of contemporary development, suspended in the air, haphazardly held in place by trajectories of already failed economic theories. Pointing to the connections between financial organization and architecture is nothing new. Already in 1997, Fredrick Jameson sought to trace the chain of media tions that connect land rent and architectural forms.2 Arguing that ground rent and the finance capital that is organized around it are permanent structural elements that, in our own period, become “the principal locus of capitalist accumulation”, he posited that the obsession such forms of capital have with potential revenues and accumulation reorganize time itself to become a kind of “futures market”. This market is where architecture finally interacts with capital, an idea later built upon by Reinhold Martin in reference to the current financial crisis. In the context of global cities and world capitalism, architecture, so embedded in “the complex network of cultural practices that make financial globalization…possible” can have a renewed agency in the structuring of “financial imaginaries”.3
own specters than with those of capitalism. And in that context, Jameson’s observations, brilliant as they may be, stay in the realm of critical analysis, and even Martin’s position on agency, supposedly taken from within architecture and with an eye towards practice, remains ambivalent in its inten tions and projected outcomes. With that, they both function as what Martin has called elsewhere “double agents”: more informants than saboteurs.
While each of these accounts, from different disciplinary and ethical perspectives, offer a way to reconceptualize the role architecture might take in the landscapes of finance, they remain confined to two basic assumptions, already mentioned above: first, the identification of a certain placelessness, or geographical indiff erence, as an inherent characteristic of current-day capitalist structures, and second, the equating of the urban with the working of financial mechanisms. By taking these assumptions for granted, one falls back on relying on preconceptions that are not integral to the subject matter. Just to illustrate, very few people would argue that the recent oil boom in North Dakota will have anything to do with the paths American development might take, or, in another sphere, that voters from rural counties would not count in the next presidential elections. The insistence on the urban and on the global has undoubtedly more to do with architecture’s
Alternatively, by insisting on geographical specificity, in this case the United States, and by relegating the immediate associa tion of money and the city that is haunting architectural thinking at least since Georg Simmel, architec ture can begin to operate past the double agent position. In other words, it is in the heart of darkness where things can acquire new clarity, where one can look beyond crisis, and not only in anticipation of the next one. Architects, who have been for so long the dormant agents in the materializations of financial capitalism, can now stab it in its moment of weakness. They can cannibalize its concepts of planning and organization in order to open new avenues to promote architecture’s own program. What should this program be is the topic of another inquiry. 1
Taken from a personal letter wrote in September 1904.
2
Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation”, New Left Review, I/228 (March–April 1998), 25–46.
3
Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Towards a Philosophy of the City.” Grey Room no. 42 (Winter 2011): 60–79.
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Editorial XXXII FUTURE CONDITIONS #32
BUILDINGS AND TWEETS: COMMUNICATING ARCHITECTURE BRENDAN CORMIER
Upon being challenged to write a six word story that could make a person cry, Ernest Hemingway purportedly penned the following: “For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” While most probably a legend, the story speaks to a heralded skill in writing: concision. In an unlikely technological turn, hundreds of millions of people have been turned on to concision through the world’s second-largest social networking site, Twitter. Its 140-character limit compels users to compose their thoughts in short efficient messages. While it doesn’t always produce the most eloquent prose – inane remarks, tired clichés, and blunt insults abound – there exists a dedicated set of users, refining their wit and words to produce meaningful statements and dialogue with their online network. For many, Twitter is teaching them how to write again. There’s a link to architecture to be found here. And it’s not that architects have failed to take to twitter. They have. No, the link lies in communication. Like Twitter, architecture communicates. But how it communicates is no longer clear. Some call for simplicity
and reduction. Others call for complexity and contradiction. On the one hand architects despise one-liners, but on the other hand they adore the diagram, itself a one-liner. They hate the Las Vegas Duck-shed but produce abstracted sculptural ducks all the same. If architecture is at a loss for words can Twitter teach architecture how to communicate again?
scathingly efficient broadcasts. Acclaimed author Teju Cole for example recently published seven tweets that offered a devastating critique of America’s drone pro gram; he called them ‘7 Drone Stories’. Each tweet references a famous novel – quickly establishing a broader context – and then creates a bitter juxtaposition between tragedy and the everyday. In one he evokes the aspirations of the Let’s look at literature. While iconic Moby Dick character, fatally some literati deplore Twitter for cut short: “Call me Ishmael. I was killing the long-form, others are a young man of military age. I exploiting its constraints to produce was immolated at my wedding.
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My parents are inconsolable.” In another tweet he echoes the colonialist critique of Things Fall Apart in fifty-six razor-sharp characters: “Mother died today. The program saves American lives.” Teju is not the only one looking to Twitter for new literary possi bilities. Earlier this year an article appeared in the New York Times entitled ‘#InPraiseOfTheHashtag’, where Julia Turner extols the vir tues and potentials of hashtag usage. The hashtag was initially used as an aggregation tool – users talking about the same subject could type a word preceded by a hash so that similar tweets would be viewed together. But the hash tag quickly developed into a more sophisticated literary device, according to the author: “a versatile tool that could be deployed in a host of linguistically complex ways, allowing for humor, darkness, wordplay and even poetry.” She follows saying “the hashtag gives the writer the opportunity to com ment on his own emotional state, to sarcastically undercut his own tweet, to construct an extra layer of irony, to offer a flash of evocative imagery or to deliver metaphors with striking economy.”
of complexity that few people can decode. But we can combine one-liners with nuance to make architecture communicate at a number of levels. Falling Water and Centre Pompidou contain within them simple oneliners: A house on a waterfall. Mechanical systems exposed. Beneath those one-liners lie great works of architecture.
Twitter offers rich communicative capacity in its deceptively simple platform. But how can architecture borrow from Twitter in its com munication? In hip-hop the influences of the social network have already coalesced into what’s been dubbed hashtag rap. Accordingly this issue of Conditions will explore the possibility of a hashtag architecture: the oneliners, references, hashtags, and memes, that could potentially turn our buildings into richly concise signposts. Consider one-liners. Twitter by definition is an endless stream of one-liners. In the hands of an expert a one-liner can engage the reader in the ambiguity and suggestive force of a few words. Architecture however has a prob lem with one-liners. Spatial com plexity has become the measure of merit, with historians going to great pains to uncover the hidden geometric complexity of masters like Palladio and Le Corbusier. This has ultimately promoted a culture of complexity for the sake
References are another way tweets can effectively infer more meaning through few words. But in architecture’s drive for originality, references are often seen as a sign of weakness, disregarded as kitsch, traditionalist, and reductive. The problem however is not the act of referencing but what is being referenced. Simple analogies in form – gherkins, shards, bathtubs – evoke little added meaning to their respective building. The gabion walls of Herzog and de Meuron’s Dominus Winery, on the other hand, form a quick contextual reference – one that evokes local landscape and infrastructure, establishing a mood with which to experience the building. A hashtag can add uncertainty and contradiction to a tweet. This kind of undercutting and selfdoubt, while so symptomatic of our contemporary culture, is seldom communicated in architecture. Architecture prefers definitive statements and the authoritative voice of a singular author. The oversized brightly colored column blocking the front entrance of Robert Venturi’s Guild House – expressing the tension between grand ambitions and a limited budget – is a lonely example where such deliberate self-deprecation exists.
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Hashtags can also communicate memes, a collective conversation on a certain topic. A recent Domus article highlighted how the history of architectural form can also be viewed as a series of unrecognized memes. What if architects became more honest about their participation in these memes, by adding coded signifiers pledging their allegiance to a particular movement, idea, or value in architecture? The way we read a city street is not unlike the way we browse our Twitter feeds. Each provide short bursts of information from multiple authors; we scan them briefly as we get through our day. A hashtag architecture then understands this communicative dynamic, this need to concisely deliver a message, while managing all the other Herculean tasks that architecture demands. #easiersaidthandone #goforth
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Editorial XXXIII FUTURE CONDITIONS #33
LIKE: THE FORGE OF NEW GEOGRAPHIES ´ EDGAR GONZALEZ
The physical and experiential boundaries that defined mediums have dissolved and continue to dissolve. Differences in types of content are now largely semantic, curatorial democratization and participation practices extend the panoramic of today´s architecture criticism and practice.
Understanding media in our pre sent times departs from looking beyond traditional thinking of mass media, top down structures constructed from orthodox modes of organization: transforming newspapers, magazines, books, TV and radio – even websites – into more granular structures. Today media is everywhere: it surrounds us – like a second skin it reaches us by way of our daily second and third screens or monitors, competing for our attention, and we – kind of – con trol them, at least the way they are delivered to us and for the most part how we produce and distribute them.
compromise of commitment: it places us in the cockpit of the information overload we live in. Like is not just the pixelated blue thumbs up manifestation of Facebook, but Like is also the pin, in Pinterest, the retweet in Twitter, the tumblr or ffffound, or even the forward in email, to mention just a few examples. Like is the capacity of taking control of the digital media, it is the power of being a curator of the information we consume, at any moment, from any source, and in any context.
Like is the condition in which mass media end up being just one way to become bidirectional, The Information Society is over, the consumer is the producer, or kaput, today our lives are immersed at least the curator the prescriber in the Over-Information Society. where content can be forwarded. Like is the most precious claim of One of the most powerful tools the prosumer (producer/consumer). of our contemporary digital lives is Like, It gives us the control, Media no longer just gives us the power of distribution, the information, trends or ways of
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thinking, and that is one of the biggest dérives of contemporary society. We conduct media, we produce media. But what is the relevance of Like beyond the digital realm of social networks? This is a question that haunts us: sooner or later we will experience that the promotion of participative behavior in mass society in general will result in citizens leaving behind the numb and passive attitude in which we just waited for orders and consumed whatever it was an empowered elite had decided for us, an attitude that meant our behavior was dictated to us in an Orwellian manner. It is precisely here, in the trans gression of the digital-analog boundaries where social attitudes become interesting because the translation of former practices found only on the digital realm contravene into its analog counter part: the “real world”. The partition between digital and analog life is getting thinner and thinner, making our “reality” a single one, with complementary digital-analog elements, in which our digital identity makes up an essential part to become an extra layer, a digital skin, which we wear, tear and build; something which Let us not be ingenuous: the ability is inherent to our physical reality – gives each of us a voice and offers a something that is already part of us. voice to those that didn’t have one before, but it also creates noise, lots A daily practice of commitment, of noise, allowing each person their decisions and expression of our opinion, valid or not, and to bring tastes and positions towards it to a global discussion on issues to different irrelevant issues, which which most likely not everyone has even in these early stages is a bit something to contribute. primitive and inconsequential, is making us get used to express Every single individual has become publicly our opinions, to take sides a potential architectural critic, in affairs that only time will tell if with a voice and a channel as big or they can ripen in a more political, as powerful as their own network, responsible and meaningful created organically and full of manner. potential.
Are we prepared to handle this? Is the cacophony of unauthorized voices going to change the fate of architecture? Or to influence it? If power and money are invisible and that is why they hire architects, how does this new kind of power get represented? This is one of the reasons why the role of that character who can tame our realities is more important today than ever before, someone that can filter or at least moderate the pandemonium of information that surrounds us, and the faint shadow of censorship that hovers over the function of an editor or a curator is probably not an accurate figure: perhaps this role has to be given to a new breed of geographer that can learn to immerse themselves and navigate these new geographies in order to draw the maps of these unexplored and soon to appear new worlds. Hybrid worlds where the layers that draw them are not static or even physical, but which are liquid domains that can belong to diverse dimensions and realities. Worlds with the capacity to con struct new entities, half-breeds between a diverse social complex ity, heterogeneous and individual, worlds made of maps and countermaps where new territories and utopias can be fulfilled Worlds that need to be drawn.
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Editorial XXXIV FUTURE CONDITIONS #34
SUPER SUPERFICIAL JOANNA GRANT
It is not surprising to watch the discipline of architecture shift from that of a cold media that requires a person to experience a threedimensional spatial condition in first person to the new experience of architecture via the Internet. Our means of digesting design is significantly faster and more superficial through the means of clicking through numerous
images of competition projects from around the world via certain architecture websites that shall remain anonymous (we all know who they are). Even the method through which we examine architecture from within our own educated discipline has radically changed recently: rarely do we examine architecture through plan or section, but instead act in the
same way as laymen and consume architectural information via renderings and montages. However, in some respects, the transition of architecture from cold media into hot media (see Marshall McLuhan’s Hot and Cold Media) is extremely beneficial to the profession as far as having access to large quantities of information and references is concerned. But as designers we understand that the initial reading is most important due to the sheer volume of resources available; therefore if a project does not communicate or entice within the two or three seconds it takes the next page to load, the project may be easily overlooked. Thus, the representation, which has always been important and relevant when communicating a design, becomes paramount to the success or failure of a project. The story of architecture today begins in 2003, simply because the story of built architecture and paper architecture can be discussed in terms of decades. The span between the conception of a new idea or trend and its crystallization
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is roughly one decade. The speed at which we can design and conceive of architectural trends is far greater than the pace at which we can engineer and construct these conceptions. By the time a truly avant-garde design is built, the trend has been copied or translated or reinterpreted enough that it has either died/evolved into a different interest or trend. The shelf life of formal trends, due to the accessibility of visual architectural media via the Internet, is really about 3–5 years. Therefore, by the time a major project is actually built, the underlying concept has usually been played out and copied by others. Let’s examine a timeline of major built projects in the decade(ish) (dates of completion): 2012 CCTV + Shenzhen Stock Exchange (OMA) 2010 Rolex Learning Center (SANAA) 2009 The High Line (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) 2008 “Bird’s Nest” (Herzog + deMeuron) 2007 BMW Welt (Coop Himmelb(l)au) 2006 Mercedes-Benz Museum (UNStudio) 2005 Casa de Musica (OMA) 2004 Seattle Public Library (OMA) 2003 Taipei 101 2002 Yokohama Pier Port Terminal (FOA)
Starting with the Yokohama Port Terminal and concluding with CCTV’s completion this past year, it seems obvious that the dates of completion are significantly past the original zeitgeist of the design. However, despite the fact that each project must overcome a significant amount of issues (bureaucratic, engineering, political, etc.) it is not surprising that by the completion, the project is no longer the avantgarde design because trends change so quickly. Due to the short shelf life of design today, it is not inconceivable to compare the trajectory of architecture today to that of a product rather than a service. With regards to representation, the idealized renderings and images are hardly different than the lighting and presentation of products for sale. With architects expanding into the field of product design we see formal precedents being tested at a small productsized scale (and as many projects deal with formal affects, it is easy to see how Zaha Hadid’s shoe designs are scalable to the proportions of an inhabitable space). Architects today are not always designing architecture— rather, they are designing inhabit able products with scalable pro portions. The demarcation of the transform ation of focus of the discipline can be highlighted by the permeation of architecture into the realm of art. Undoubtedly, both disciplines have influenced each other, but notable architecture as art installation exhibitions began as a response to the stimulus of a need for a testing ground for architectural affects that are not scalable to the size of a building. The YAP PS1 exhibition began in 1998, and the Serpentine Pavilion
Exhibition with Zaha Hadid in 2000. The emphasis of architecture as art has piqued the interest of the entire discipline, and it seems as though architects today are more interested in the expanded field rather than projects within our own discipline. Projects of a certain scale that is less than a building seem to always revolve around formalism—of this decade we have seen quite a number arise. In the generation in which retroism and throwbacks reigns, a decade in which pop-culture epitomizes eclectic mixtures of bygone eras but has few entirely original contributions, it would be interesting to learn from popculture to reexamine old methods of thinking and reapply them to today. In the spirit of Instagram, perhaps as architects we could rethink our projects in terms of plans and sections instead of perspective and rendering (except, of course, using modern means). Hipster culture samples past eras using a new lens to identify new interpretations of the past; meanwhile, developing new tastes that are an eclectic blend of different decades. The sampling is not necessarily of what was most popular during a certain era, but instead as a more democratic examination of the past. Hipsters do not seek to be authentic or original, rather they choose what seems appealing to them based on personal taste. With ubiquity of design and the Internet serving as a vehicle, originality and individualism is unattainable but maybe no longer interesting or worthy of achieving. With some of the best samplers already seasoned players—Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas—perhaps sampling hipster culture’s method of reinvention is the newest way to be unoriginal.
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Editorial XXXV FUTURE CONDITIONS #35
TAKING A BREAK FROM BIG JULIA SEDLOCK
It is time to take a closer look at what Smallness can do for Architecture. We have benefited from a culture of Bigness for nearly thirty years, empowered by forces previously beyond our control – globalization, urbanization, networks, infrastructures, sprawl, massive quantities of data and information. We have learned to apply these powers sensibly and pragmatically, careful not to utter “Architecture” and “Revolution” in the same sentence. But perhaps this responsible embrace of Bigness is shortsighted. Perhaps by accepting our role as service provider or problem solver at a global scale, we overlook architec ture’s power to conjure and create worlds at the scale of the small. This proposition has nothing to do with the urgent warnings of environmental or economic crisis, bullying us towards the necessity of small footprints, small budgets, and small scopes. As a condition and a state of being, as opposed to a relative size, Smallness is an opportunity for excessive indul gence in narrative, sensation, ideas, form and more.
Nearly twenty years ago, Koolhaas’ essay “Bigness” declared that architecture’s conventions of composition, scale, gesture and detail were ineffective tools for the design of very big buildings, where distances are great, volumes expansive, and legibility impos sible. In “Whatever Happened to Urbanism,” Koolhaas declared: “We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away.” Lastly, in “Junkspace,” Koolhaas described this chaotic sea of modernization’s residue; the disorienting maze of excessively unintentional building conditions made possible by air-conditioning, escalator and sheetrock. Koolhaas’ trilogy not only signaled the death of architecture as we once knew it, but it also killed the humanist subject of architectural inscription. No longer could the Vitruvian Man, nor Le Modulor, tether himself to the geometrical truths that defined architecture’s boundaries. Nor would we want them to – as singular, universal visions of subjecthood, these models repre sent a limited estimation of architecture’s cultural responsi bility.
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Koolhaas’ version of architecture recognizes these limitations, and responds with an indifference that leaves its subject untethered, roaming “freely” amidst the vastly undifferentiated expanses of Bigness and Junkspace. We are indebted to this indifference and its residual freedoms because they are the foundation for new constructions of subjective experience that multiply rather than reduce our engagement with the world. Smallness amplifies this multiplication to produce overlapping sets of perspectival realities. Therefore Smallness is not necessarily independent of
the reality that Koolhaas paints, but rather embedded within it. Peter Sloterdjik’s concept of Spherology describes a similar condition, declaring that there is no such thing as “outside” but rather that we move from one form of conditioned space to another, amongst a series of interconnected bubbles, and that even the smallest bubble that we use to define ourself is not singular and discrete, but varied and rela tional. Bigness is characterized by Lobotomy – Koolhaas’ idea that when a building becomes so vast, and the distance between its interior and exterior so great, a schism occurs between interior contents and exterior facade. The nature of Smallness is that we read its exterior and interior simultaneously, overcoming the schism of Lobotomy to produce the superimposition of schizophrenia. In its denial of relation, Lobotomy denies the subject. As an excess of relation, Smallness makes new subjectivities possible. The unexpected products of Smallness are multiplicity and expansion, which derive from its unique capacity to distort and reorient boundary conditions, both physical and conceptual, through simultaneity and overlap. Smallness is not only a spatial or formal condition made possible by the conventions of architecture that Koolhaas discarded. It is also a mode of operating that pro vides access to a range of extradisciplinary influences in a manner that maintains architecture’s core competencies of gesture, composition, organization and connection. In the following examples, contemporary practices such as WEATHERS (Sean Lally), Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai) and Atelier Bow-Wow illustrate the ways that Smallness is used to
re-orient the boundaries between a disciplinary practice and its extradisciplinary partners of technology, literature, and urbanism.
THE SMALLNESS OF GIZMOS WEATHER’s projects Wanderings and Shagg Carpet reflect Lally’s interest in the architectural responsibilities of material energies (light, heat, sound, humidity). These projects update Reyner Banham’s theory of the Great Gizmo by producing small mobile technology that takes on the mediating responsibilities of architecture. Lally’s Gizmos
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Within the small physical space of the comic, these various creaturelike characters of architecture interact with human (and animal) protagonists to reveal a broad discursive space for the potentials of architecture to shape new subjective realities in everyday life.
THE SMALLNESS OF CITIES
challenge ideals of individual comfort and restructure inter action within larger collective environments by manipulating the immediate (small) surroundings of an individual through the sensa tion and perception of energy.
THE SMALLNESS OF CARTOONS In Citizens of No Place Bureau Spectacular’s Jimenez Lai adopts the comic book as a medium of architecture. The visual and narrative structure of the comic takes on the organizational responsibilities of architecture. Meanwhile, within the stories, architecture is liberated to function as a character – architecture as megastructure, architecture as space ship, architecture as primi tive hut, architecture as ergonomic apparatus, architecture as bigbox store, architecture as robot.
Atelier Bow-Wow’s Pet Architecture catalogs the numerous instances of unusually diminutive buildings that are opportunistically inserted into the fabric of Tokyo as an unintended consequence of the city’s rapid growth patterns, rising property values and hybrid conditions of infrastructure and building. Rather than treat them as random one-off occurrences, Bow-Wow reads these novelties as instances of a broader relational phenomenon that shapes the city, comparing the relationship between these small structures and the city to that between human beings and their pets, friendly companions that bring joy and humor to the serious city streets of Tokyo. These practices challenge the architectural world view inherited from Koolhaas by offering alter native methods of producing pockets of difference within his entropic milieu. Though they are three of a kind, distinct in their formal proclivities and disciplinary hang-ups, they assert these chal lenges through the shared sensi bilities of Smallness:
Smallness is intimate, tactile and haptic. Smallness is too changeable to be comfortable, too full to be understated. Smallness is the densely compressed stimulation of everyday occurrences. Smallness can be serious, without taking itself too seriously. Smallness is chimneys, closets, attics, books, headphones, campfires and crayons. Smallness is not a con sola tion, but a prize. Smallness is re-orienting. Smallness is a lot bigger than it first appears.
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Editorial XXXVI FUTURE CONDITIONS #36
ADRESSING ENTROPY YLVA FRID
We live in a world where the scale of business, buildings, infra structure as well as the amount of available information has increased with a historically incomparable speed during the last decades. Telescopes, satellites and television forever changed the human per ception of the world – during this century it became possible to look at the world from positions previously unknown. Architecture practice has followed a similar
pattern of upscaling, where digital modeling, in combination with the scale of contemporary building projects, often place the architect in a constant superior view.
of human culture has meant a historically incomparable liberty – releasing us from the daily travail of keeping a basic level of survival, giving the freedom to spend time for education, read The 20th century was characterized ing and coffee drinking. In the by unity – taking Scandinavia, this continuation of this technical unity meant a strong state based on development, we are now provided a common ideology to which the with digital communities that technical and social institutions rapidly multiply the number of of the society were connected. The possible, simultaneous realities. It industrialization and digitalization is no longer possible to tell which
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narrative or truth is superior to any other – just as this issue of Conditions, our contemporary reality is in this sense themeless. Our reality is also based on a very high level of complexity. Never before has a human settlement demanded such high amounts of resources just to keep the basic requirements of its own stability. As the ongoing global economic and ecologic crisis clearly reveals, the stability of this system is dis solving –or perhaps already gone. There is a limit when the amount of energy input needed to produce the final outcome is reaching the same level. At this point in time it does: the implosion is a fact, and the initial unity is breaking down into its components. Scandinavia is still one of the calmer patches in the increasing vulnerability of the global econ omy. Still, this entropy must be addressed. Fragmentation holds two mean ings: first, the loss of unity and overall orientation. At the same time, it means an implosion of scale, where it might again be possible to achieve qualities that the standardized processes have made extinct. When the tools for architectural work turned from paper based to digital, there are no longer any set boundaries for scale. The correlation between the human hand, the thickness of the pen and the size of the paper is replaced by the scaleless eternity of our elusive computer sheets, knowing no material boundaries. All scales exist simultaneously, and skyscrapers, megastructures and entire cities can be modeled and visualized in no time. Parallel to this situation, there are signs of how another scale
and approach appears in the background – projects shaping a practice starting from the ground, from the available materials in a 1:1 approach to the site and situation. Some of the most appreciated architectural projects of the last years are performed in a very modest scale – examples such as the Reindeer Pavillion by Snöhetta, the mirror cube of the Tree Hotel in Harads by Tham Videgård or the internationally awarded micro scale projects by TYIN tegnestue appear as an antithesis to the cor porate development projects of our global building sector. The last example is of special interest, since it challenges the typical building process not only in the scale of its final outcome – the object – but of the process behind it. The way
their work is performed challenges the conformity and scale free developments of today. Stepping down from the typical desktop position of an architect, they are instead inventing their projects on the ground, in dialogue with local actors and based on available materials – be it scrap metal, bamboo or re-used brick. Drawings are, if at all, made afterwards. Their architectural skills are used to improve and upgrade the existing situation in a way that re-establishes the meaning of site and context. Despite the small size of the objects, the quality is very high. This could be derived from a sense of authenticity, which, as a notion demands a clear integrity of every
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concept and its initial pieces. Repetition and standardization are always enemies to this. There is a complexity and level of resolution embedded in the use of objects and materials, which allows you to look close and find new details. Natural materials have, in difference with standardized composite sheets, a natural level of resolution, which increases the more you zoom in. This is an example of how entropy and new developments go hand in hand – by simply rearranging a lot of what was already created in terms of resources, the qualitative outcome is increased without any bigger impacts in terms of energy and material usage. Though the crucial point is that these projects were performed far from the strictly regulated planning practice of Scandinavia. They appear in countries where poverty, corruption and lack of human rights are typical features – and just because of this lack of societal trust, it is possible for positive initiatives like these to take place. How would the formal Scandinavian planning system handle such an architectural practice, where it is actually more relevant to be able to zoom in, to see the details and to improvise, than to keep track of the top view and formal legislations? The problematic point of fragmen tation appears when the contact between the consisting pieces is lost. The risk is that the scale might be lost in the other direction: diminishing into details while the really huge actors continue to operate like normal. How do you write an editorial for a themeless magazine? What remains of the editorial text if there is no further content of articles to relate to, and it becomes a disintegrated piece of text in a floating surrounding?
Still, the huge potential of our steadily multiplying amounts of parallel realities lies within this opening towards a more carefully elaborated, qualitative and context dependent structures. The only way to challenge the sameness of our efficient, branded world of consumerism is to simply start at the other end – to build from the scratch pieces of the fading success of industrialization, and watch how small injections of inter ventions might inform a wider context.
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Editorial XXXVII FUTURE CONDITIONS #37
ARCHITECTURE OF KNOWLEDGE? OLE MOYSTAD, NTNU
“You seem to assume that architec ture is governed by the laws of nature!?” – Alberto Perez-Gomez broke me off when I pointed out the relationship between architectural form and gravity.
Norwegian architecture has had an international success comparable to that of the ‘Detour’ exhibition (http://www.norway.org/News_ and_events/Culture/Architecture-Design/architectural_detour/).
I, a young PhD candidate, admit ted that, yes, even though there are a lot of other forces at play in addition to gravity, I did insist, quite firmly in fact, that architecture is part of nature. I added, as a matter of evidence, that even during the baroque era, the Catholic Church would call upon the architect/mathematician Guarino Guarini to calculate the vault of the Turin cathedral. Only at the inauguration would the clerics come in and call upon extranatural forces to give the cathedral their protection.
According to Statistics Norway, however, 80–90% of the Norwegian population lives within 10 kilo metres of the 25 000 km coastline – and the predominant settlement pattern is made up of urban centres; of all sizes from dense, small wooden, mostly coastal, towns to large modern, coastal, cities like Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo, and in 2011 90% of the population growth took place in these agglomerations (www.ssb. no). If one is to believe in statistics, the percentage of people living in rural areas is smaller in Norway than the European average. How does this correspond with the lonely peasant in harmony with pristine nature?
It is often said that basically every Norwegian is a peasant, and that he loves to be alone and in balance with himself – in pristine nature. The Norwegian Tourist Road Project caters to that perception, which has been proven to go down very well with what is internationally expected of Norway and its architec ture. Hardly any exhibition of
The fact that there are large nature reserves in Norway does not mean that the typical Norwegian is living in those reserves. On the other hand it does probably mean that the (urban) culture is one with a rather
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realistic, pragmatic and rather con iv) the financial profits from the scious relationship to the forces of probably largest investment nature – especially with the ocean, fund in the world – the oil fund and cultivating a technology that http://www.regjeringen.no/ makes it possible not only to survive en/dep/fin/Selected-topics/theso close to nature, but to live quite government-pension-fund. comfortably with and off it. html?id=1441 According to the 2011 UN Report on Human Development Norway is still ranked as the world’s best country to live in – for its 5 million inhabitants. The Norwegian stan dard of living is largely based on the following industries: i) the world’s 17th largest oil reserves http:// no.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Petroleumsvirksomhet_i_ Norge#Petroleumsressursenes_ st.C3.B8rrelse ii) one of the largest fishing industries in the world http:// www.eu-norway.org/eu/ policyareas/Fisheries/ iii) the world’s 18th largest arms trade http://www.sipri.org/ googlemaps/2012_of_at_top_20_ exp_map.html
false, but never checked, and never reliable for other purposes than small talk.
The second method is the method of tenacity. Tenacity is needed, for instance in order to go through the hassle of checking if a juicy After all, the three largest cities and generally believed and popular in Norway are the fastest growing rumor is true or not. Let alone of cities in Europe, and today immi checking if a proposition implies grants make up 13% of the national funding an investigation. If closer population. Oslo has 23% today, and scrutiny reveals that the peace expects to have a 50% immigrant broker is also an arms dealer, population in 2040(http://www. there is nothing in the method of ssb.no/innvandring/). tenacity that will prevent us from disregarding the stuff that we don’t The peace brokering, rainforestwant to believe. On the contrary, saving, Brundtland Report writing, it only takes more tenacity to keep Nobel Peace Prize issuing lonelybelieving. peasant Norwegian becomes more interesting when compared to If tenacity is not enough to bring the facts about him; at least to the public into line, there is the the architect who is designing his method of authority. This method architectural environment. I hope. has been known throughout history as an efficient tool for pro ducing social and cultural con WHATS WRONG WITH BELIEF? formity: for governing the masses. The Catholic Church knew this all Even architects need to believe in along, and the Inquisition is the something, don’t we? Sure: most historical example. In modern knowledge starts out as a belief. times, the equivalent mechanism Think of a hypothesis. Who would for producing conformity is embed investigate a hypothesis if nobody ded in the pressure to speak PC believed it had some truth to it? (politically correct). In Peirce’s The philosopher C. S. Peirce poin own words: “If liberty of speech ted out that belief is a precondition is to be untrammeled from the to knowledge, but he also pointed grosser forms of constraint, then out the pitfalls it can contain. uniformity of opinion will be In his words there are basically secured by a moral terrorism to four methods by which we go which the respectability of society from a loose, ephemeral hunch will give its thorough approval.”* about something, via a belief or conviction to a certainty we can This method is obviously more consider knowledge. efficient that the first two, as it can in fact also be used to produce The a priori method is the truths, such as “This is a Centre first step on this ladder. A priori of Excellence” not because it beliefs are the kind of stuff that is excellent, but because I (any is generally accepted (as true), academic or bureaucrat with without any further questioning – sufficient powers) say so”. Peirce: rumors, common sense, prejudice “Thus, the greatest intellectual etc – things that are not necessarily benefactors of mankind have never
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dared, and dare not now, to utter the whole of their thought; and thus a shade of prima facie doubt is cast upon every proposition which is considered essential to the security of society.”* It can be quite distressing to doubt the following proposition: “In this country we are peace loving, and we take care of nature and each other”. Luckily, to most people, and to most intellectuals, it is usually possible to keep ones doubts to oneself. To an architect, however, it is a challenge. If the vault collapses, or the urban environment turns out to be a terrible place to live, it is hard for the architect to explain why he did not study the conditions, the problems presented to him, before he designed his project. “It was generally held for true that…“ won’t do. The architect is obliged to check the facts according to the method of scientific investigation, because this is the only method which goes beyond the firmness of belief, be it based on religion or on political ideology – of any kind. And this is where nature comes in again. The Norwegian would not survive the confrontation with nature, be it alone or in an urban group, if his existence was not based on a thorough knowledge of the facts – as given by nature. A priori assumptions, tenacity or authority will not prevent an ill built house from being blown away by the storm. Building urban environments based on generally assumed truths, no matter how politically correct they appeared in their time, has hardly ever produced a living urban environment. At its best, such methods have produced environments that served as a confirmation to those of its
inhabitants who strongly believed in the same ideals – as long as they were around. At its worst, the results have been as oppressive as the method of authority inevitably will be when adopted to preserve belief against better knowledge.
KNOWLEDGE ARCHITECTURE? During the first years after the Soviet revolution, there was a strong belief in the possibility of questioning every pre-revolutionary truth. This endeavour took the shape of an energetic, artistic as well as scientific questioning of just about everything. We all know the incredible vitality of Soviet avant-garde art and architecture. During the years between 1917 and 1934 belief was almost limitless. This obviously represented a risk for excess and unrealistic dreams, such as projects for changing the direction of Russian rivers, thus making water run upwards, and of flying cities. On the other hand, as long as the inquiry was kept open, the investigations produced incredible amounts of interesting, unforeseen and unpredictable insights and ideas. So much so, that at the 17th party congress in 1934, Stalin decided to stop the process, and to start predicting through the enforcement of five year plans. The revolutionary project was about producing a new, never before seen society where all inequality and oppression was abolished. Such a society inevitably needed an architecture that would serve these ambitions, and the architects boldly set out to question old forms and to experiment with new ones. One of the big discussions was between urbanists and de-urbanists. The
first believing that the city, in spite of having evolved as a spatial structure serving bourgeois power over the working masses, should and could be redesigned to serve the new socialist Soviet republic. The de-urbanists, however, argued in favour of abolishing the city all together. The only way to overcome the opposition between not only the classes, but also the urban and the rural population, was, they argued, to dissolve it all together. They set out to replace it by means of an extensive infrastructure providing energy, high-speed transportation, industrial production units, farming facilities, housing and
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very much like phenomena that we, 100 years later, discuss as the polycentric city, the network city, the rhizomatic city, the down-up, the economic-ecological synergy or the 10km more or less urban (who cares actually?), coastal ribbon around Norway. The topic of the Oslo Architecture Triennale is “Really Sustainable?” Good question. Do economy/ecology really form a dichotomy – or are they rather modalities of the same OIKOS? Let us get the facts together. Not only Norwegians have a direct relationship with the forces of nature, and with the technology that makes it possible to live with and off it. That is a more or less planet-wide condition. If our architecture is political, social, technological, economical, and cultural, so be it. Then that is what architecture needs to be about. Maybe it suggests the outline of a new kind of urban environment? Maybe the abolition of the urban-rural dichotomy, like that dreamed of by the Soviet avant-garde and the de-urbanists? Let us ask such questions. What are social institutions and services the food chains here? Who decides evenly across the endless Russian what? Who owns what? One of the plains. The historical city should Soviet goals was to abolish the city be replaced by a network of smaller as a power structure, as the spatial nodes woven together by an effi organisation of the bourgeois cient infrastructure. The USSR was society. They were looking for an one big scientific investigation for a architecture of knowledge – a new while – until belief and the method knowledge-architecture! of authority kicked in at the 17th Party Congress. Let us stop worrying about the prolific use of the term As it were, neither urbanists nor architecture, as in ‘financial de-urbanists would be able to test architecture’, ‘catastrophe architec their proposals. Russia did not have ture’, ‘management architecture’, the means, neither in economical ‘information architecture’, nor in technological terms, to ‘architecture of politics’, ‘the make experiments on such a scale. architect behind the treaty of The sad fact is, however, that the Rome’, ‘the architecture of the projects of the de-urbanists look Middle-East’, ‘the architecture of
UN’ etc. Sure, it is all architecture. If this is not what architects do, then architects may need to get the facts together and regroup. Maybe we do need to move out of the comfort zone of beliefs? * Charles S. Peirce, Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), 1–15.
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Editorial XXXVIII FUTURE CONDITIONS #38
THE GROUND WE SHARE MARTIN ABBOTT
common – something shared by many, found to be widespread and done often. Around the world cities are expand ing, populations are growing and everyday we march deeper into the urban age. The UN estimates a global population that recently surpassed 7 billion will morph into a figure well in excess of 9 billion by 2050, an increase that will be almost exclusively accommodated in the cities of the developing world. Remarkably for the first time in history a global majority of people are living in urban situations. This move towards a global urban age is expected to rapidly intensify at a time of accelerating instability, a transition to more extreme economic, political and human induced environmental change. For example, the recent heat wave and ferocious bush fires that ravaged Australia and terrifying storms that smashed the US east coast, shutting down New York CIty for days are as alarming as discrete, catastrophic weather events. Yet we know already the rising consumption of oil and coal that continues to fuel urban growth is unsustainable and
places our natural environment in distress. These environmental disasters bluntly illustrate an urban future the World Bank says will be characterized by more extreme weather patterns. In tandem with prolonged economic turmoil and austerity in Europe that has fired dynamic political change, protest and unrest across the region, we are emerging into a world of increasing uncertainty. In combination, these volatile forces accentuate raging disparity amongst urban citizens as exemplified by the emergence of the Occupy movement and reinforced by the inequality in the distribution of family income that can be measured using the GINI index. Starkly, the distribution of income is significantly worse in the developing world. Architecture by nature is a profes sion at the center of public life. As we rapidly converge on this urban flashpoint, where more people will live closer together and in ever greater numbers in the face of rising global tension, how will an increasingly isolated architecture profession respond? While archi tects themselves may have no
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mandate to address these growing urban issues of global concern or recompense to compel others to do so, Fabrica CEO, Dan Hill notes we do not make cities to design buildings and infrastructure, but rather, to live together to create wealth and culture. In response to this urban quandary, the recently concluded Venice Architecture Biennale highlighted divergent and provocative working models that recontextualize the future of a profession. As the leading global architectural event of its kind, the Biennale captures current industry thinking and presents
the opportunity to shape and lead discourse. The 13th edition, curated by the marvelous British Architect, David Chipperfield, registered a profession’s reengagement in the shared ‘common ground’ of the city. In theory, it heralded a welcome shift away from the cult of the individual and singular, built objects to foreground the relationship between architecture and society. A rare opportunity to engage a global audience while reflecting on the role of architecture in an increasingly urbanized world. The curated exhibition held largely in the wondrous interior spaces of the Arsenale juxtaposed however, a rather obtuse reality: a profession’s ongoing inability to address the common ground of cities but rather still largely chooses to prioritize a troupe of architectural hyper-stars. In contrast the Giardini, home to 29 tightly positioned national pavilions, cultural envoys from around the world, showcased an enormous collection of diverse architectural material. Amongst the national pavilions, clues could be discerned about a future profession, whose intuitive interpretation of the theme afforded visitors an equally interesting insight into the state of our cities and the practice of architecture. Informed by urban and environmental pressures, far beyond the realm of general practice, the carefully considered pavilions brought together seemingly distant and unconnected, inter-disciplinary professions. Many exposed the work of obscure and emerging formations, outside standard architectural circles. Models of thinking could be found that encourage a profession to delve further into its own agency and to a future that might have less to do with building and rather more
to do with human relationships and networks. A practice that would enhance and strengthen existing urban connections between city residents, allowing growing numbers of people to live harmoniously together and with greater amenity. A role that could be linked to that of urban ambassador, an inter-disciplinary figure balancing the expectations of society and the demands of individuals, while negotiating the needs of government and business.
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For example, the US Pavilion’s ‘Spontaneous Interventions’ presented a diverse selection of sometimes anonymous, agile urban interventions from citizens and cities across the country. Improvements that endeavor to ameliorate, inexpensively and rapidly, shared common spaces in built-up areas. The founders of Australian not-for-profit ‘Health Habitat’, part of the promising Australian pavilion ‘Formations’, included an architect, anthropolog ist and doctor. Initially established to respond to housing inequality in disadvantaged communities in remote central Australia, they have recently begun work on projects in New York and Nepal. They are making real gains, reducing waste that saving public money, all the while bettering the living standards and health of disadvantaged communities. And then, there is the much talked about Torre David / Gran Horizonte installation from Urban-Think Tank that sheds light on an abandoned 45 story tower in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. It illustrates an encouraging vertical urban future defined by social cooperation that architects could learn much from and while idolized by them, was established without their involvement. It is precisely more of this spirited thinking that underpins these distinct, often anonymous inter disciplinary formations that will be required to shape the urban future of populations around the world. Through these types of socially inspired projects, we can seek to delve further into the agency of the exhibition’s true common ground. Hoping to continue a discussion beyond the biennale and into the future, how might we harness the potential evidenced in these divergent and
provocative working models? And how can they be multiplied across international borders, particularly in the growing cities of the global south where they will be most needed? Any architectural culture and urban agenda must foreground socially inclusive outcomes to promote a practice that will become, not just another trend, but deliver a viable urban future for a profession and a growing world population.
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Editorial XXXIX FUTURE CONDITIONS #39
THE OBSESSION WITH “NEW” JOHANNE BORTHNE
“We have to create something NEW!” I recently heard this from a fellow architect in a project meeting with the developer. The obsession of creating the next NEW is an interesting urge. It indicates that the newness of the project is the most important quality, prioritized over the quality of the facilities that lie within, or the ground floor spaces that binds the city together. Does this mean that a building has to be “boring” or “classical” to create quality-based spaces? Not really, but the terms of how a “classical” building such as a typical housing or office block from the 19th century was created compared to a more contemporary project such as, for example, a housing project at Tjuvholmen in Oslo is fundamental. One is created from the inside-out, thinking thoroughly about the quality of living, while the latter is designed from the outside-in, more preoccupied of entertaining the surroundings through variable shapes and materials. The obses sion of new is generated by a fear of boredom, helplessly solved in a formal way.
The harbor development in Oslo can serve as a recent example of these current architecture and development trends as it is a new part of the city constructed almost from scratch and all in one go. Within the “Fjord-City” both new areas of living and working are erected side by side with cultural buildings with some differences: The large-scale commercial and often privately developed areas are erected at tremendous speed while many of the cultural buildings seem to be stuck in political cul-desacs. The large-scale urban areas that are now starting to define the “Fjord-City” are in many ways created in the same manner as landmark buildings; one project more spectacular than the next, perfectly suited for world-wide publication. Because of their sheer size, the areas are not singular projects but rather new additions to the city. This commits to creating an urban area, an area that can give something back and connect to the city core.
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How to stimulate the diverse range of activities and city life in an area that is still defining its identity? How to simulate diversity in a new, large development? By making use of a collage technique creating artificial variation, the new urban areas find their form. The idea of the collage was initially a more pragmatic approach related to programming, a problem-solving architecture where the functions and the programs dictated the result. The contemporary use of the collage is driven by other forces – it is a rapid way to create variation, to mimic a difference found in the city, combined with a desire to create the next new
thing, to win awards and make it into publications. In a time where the amount of media dedicated to design and architecture is so enormous, where new projects are published online every minute and the threshold for publication is so low, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out, and perhaps even more difficult; to communicate and convince a project that is not immediately seducing. 15 seconds of Facebook fame becomes more important than 30 years of performance, and “prestigious prizes”, where the jury base their judgements solely on image appearance, have started to flourish. In the contemporary collages the buildings are being designed with the objective to entertain, to create stararchitecture, and the striking image of a glamorous project is more important than the quality of the apartments inside. The planning department often calls for variation in new developments, but what should have created diversity in city life is translated and accepted as variable shapes and styles. In 1921 the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau (“The New Spirit”) pub lished a series of essays by Le Corbusier, later published in book form as Towards a new Architecture. It was a manifesto for generations to come advocating an architecture that spoke of functionality before fashion. It dismissed contemporary trends and replaced them with an architecture that was meant as more than a stylistic experiment, rather an architecture that would change how people interacted with buildings, a new architecture that responded to the demands of modern living. It was indeed a demand for a new architecture, but not an architecture searching for newness. Today’s obsession of
new represents in many ways does the opposite, manifested in an architecture that has moved from performance to appearance. In today’s context the manifesto of LeCorbusier becomes again applicable; “Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.”
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Editorial XXXX FUTURE CONDITIONS #40
[…] MAURO GIL-FOURNIER E.
Let us consider architecture as also being “Themeless”, though neither because of the architects nor the architecture itself. Perhaps, all the conditions under which we have been operating are changing so much as to change what we actually know as the nature, the city and the skin. These exterior forms are not so much hierarchical categories, sequential or circular as they are big sets that absorb the previous. That makes a situation: 1) Where it is impossible to distinguish closeness to distance. 2) When you don´t know where you belong because you are multi-belonging. 3) Where the information on movement destroys the scale. 4) Where the possibilities are so wide that they become slim for the majorities. Since the same “theme” is happening in many places at the same time, then there is no “theme” for architecture. The more choices you have, the more homogeneous is the environment. There are two procedures to explain this “themelessness”. One is the concepts of the political and the actions applied to many places at the same time that make up the ubiquity. The other is the construction of parallel realities
or the emancipation of reality as a “reality by proxy” that is hyper reality. These two procedures allow us to not continue using the categories mentioned (nature, city, skin) to operate on our exteriority anymore. They are ubiquitous and hyperreal. That is one of the reasons why our homogeneous environment contributes to the themelessness of architecture. Quoting Aldo Van Eyck in his 1962 writings, “Architecture and urbanism nowadays, have
many problems to breathe in general. Because of the obstacles that society puts in their way, architects and urban planners reject to accept reality.” And our reality today is very different from that of modern times. In the Sixties, Martin Buber talked about the Das Zwischen. Aldo Van Eyck, assimilated this concept and applied it as the twin phenomena. He even added the concept of the relative of the other which means the operation of ancient dualism with fictional opposites and their
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talking about “The right size” of things. Neither too close, nor too far. But the question is “The right size” for who? For what? For where? There could not be discussion for a consensus. That´s the weakness of the Aldo Van Eyck theory: it is not so inclusive an openness as he thinks. Everything should be included in this concept. That is why the In-between concept doesn´t work anymore. We can superimpose one concept over the other at the same time. Things have simultaneous meanings at the same moment and in agreement to their proportion and combination at the same time. As things are simultaneous they do not operate any more as twin phenomena but as hybrid phenomena.
For example, the proximity and ubiquity in general today created the new theme “Proxicuity”. If we apply the In-between to different distances (close-intimacy/ farpublic) it results in the interaction of the intimate distances and the public distances alternating the sequential categories but generating new in-between distances on the reality. For example, the drive-in cinemas where couples are depicting the distant intimacy in a public distance as in the film American Graffiti. Another case is the depicting of beaches as public spaces. But “proxicuity” does not mean this. As Antonio Prete claims today: “In fact fartherness is not far, but close and you can move around it. It´s either domestic The modern dichotomy about or at home, on the computer nature and culture organize the or on the phone but all of these exteriority system. As Donna are converted to a surface on a Haraway says, “nature is not a screen, or to sound.” This is how physical place to which one can proxicuity works and it is in this go, neither a treasure to fence condition that we have to research. association of generating new in or bank, nor an essence to be These two realities must be taken things. The twin phenomena, i.e. saved or violated. Nature is not into account placing them in a individual-collectiveness, alonehidden and so it does not need to balance from the close contact loneliness, unit-multiplicity, quiet- be unveiled. However, nature is a and the dispersion of demand. movement, simplicity-complexity, topos, a place. Nature is strictly a The proxicuity technologies of nature-culture all result in two commonplace where we build our the spaces of communication ways of understanding the same culture. Our fiction as a fact, i.e. a we inhabit under no exteriority thing, togetherness and two types particular nature production.” We conditions have to be defined. of centrality. All these procedures understand that nature is a social Taking this into account we need are based on reciprocity, symmetric creation so it´s not possible to have an architectural mediator operating relations where both sides compen an In-between in nature and city nor in simultaneous distances where sate each other in their relation nature and body. Nature, city and closeness, fartherness and ubiquity along other constituting relations. body are formed by the same things will build a new urban logic. and operate by the same procedure Also the In-between of Aldo Van so you cannot be In-between because Again, the “in-between”, is not Eyck is not only the space of they are all the same. They form the way and it is more about how separation, it is also it´s contrary particular constructions of new the simultaneous conditions affect – the space of connection. But if exteriorities. So nowadays our the initial one. For instance, the we connect two opposite ideas, exterior is no longer categorical, simultaneity of intimacy and like distance and closeness, we continuous or sequential and publicity makes it appear as an also miss out on something. The neither is it made of apparent “Extimacy” condition. That doesn´t ideal modern concept of the whole contradictions or opposites but of mean to extend intimacy on a consensus could not be developed particulars, discontinuous and public sphere. It shows how your today. Aldo Van Eyck tried to define distributed conditions. intimacy changes when you know a consensus on the In-between you are going to show it yourself.
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“Extimacy” does not consist on exposing your intimacy outside. When you show it, your intimacy has an effect the other way. Look at the family TV series “The Louds” – first living as an American family – they lived and changed the decisions under an “extimacy” condition. Intimacy as a spectacle. Intimacy and publicity as opposite concepts, defended by Van Eyck and categorized as “in-between”, and working today as simultaneous meanings at the same time. The construction based on the In-between principle is not possible anymore because opposites such as “twin phenomena” are working today with simultaneous meanings at the same time and not between categories, because those categories also do not exist. There are no more reciprocal concepts. There is a new and different concept made by the hybrid of both opposites. Aldo van Eyck gathers the opposite concepts in his ontology of the twin phenomena making a special notion with the In-between realm. But today we can and we must name it with new words that turn into new meanings to build new procedures for architecture: having actual tools for the perception of further territories.
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Editors Joana da Rocha Sá Lima Tor Inge Hjemdal Anders Melsom contributors Many thanks to the distinguished contributors to the last issue of Conditions! Art direction and design Skin Designstudio / www.skin.no typeface design Corvus Corax by Skin Designstudio/Stefan Ellmer Ur (Beta) by the famous Stefan Ellmer Photographer Nina Hauki Print Fladby AS Editorial office Conditions Magazine Fjordveien 16, 0139 Oslo, Norway Buy single issues www.conditionsmagazine.com 15€ + shipping and handling Subscription www.conditionsmagazine.com subscription@conditionsmagazine.com 4 issues: 60€ + shipping and handling Cancellation policy Cancellation of subscription to be confirmed in writing 1 month after receiving the last issue of your subscription period. Subscription not cancelled on time will be automatically extended for 4 new issues. Advertisement advertisement@conditionsmagazine.com Distribution Interpress, IPS Pressevertrieb GmbH www.conditionsmagazine.com ISSN: 1891-2672 CONDITIONS #9 and #13 have been made possible with the support of: Wingårdh Arkitektkontor AB The editors of CONDITIONS have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identified, please contact CONDITIONS and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in the future issue. Copyright 2014