Columbia GSAPP Award Winning Portfolio

ARCHIPELAGOS AND BRIDGES Giovanni Cozzani Portfolio Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation Advanced Architectural Design 2016-2017

Public School; Public Square Abstract Technology

Instructors: Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo Advanced Studio VI - Spring 2017

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first floor

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1. Sport Field 2. Bathrooms 3. Storage 4. Dressing Room 5. Swimming Pool 6. Gymnasium 7. Cafè 8. Auditorium 9. Library 10. Administration 11. Retail Activities 12. Cafeteria 13. Kitchen 14. Basketball Court 15. Vegetable Garden 16. Science Lab 17. Computer Room 18. Video Room 19. Kitchen Class 20. Art Class

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Public School; Public Square 1:400

didactic building section

public square section

sports field section

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gallery + public square detail

gallery + sports field detail

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The project consists in an elementary school for 500 students in New York City school district 15, specifically in Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn. This area, composed once mainly by industrial activities, is being transformed by developments composed by relatively massive new residential buildings, either completed or planned to be built, that will use the canal as a new green axis. In this scenario, I decided to propose a school on an empty plot not yet developed, maintaining the scale of the existing industrial and residential buildings. My intention was to develop a school working both as a service for the existing neighbors and as a sport and cultural center able to attract the new residents and reduce the seclusion typical of gentrificated areas. Taking as a reference the reasearches that I conducted on Frank Gehry’s Loyola Law School (my “ancestor� case study, 7) , I designed the school as a composition of a series of different small buildings arranged to generate a central public square (accessible by everyone) surrounded by a continuous gallery that redefines the usually opaque and inaccessible boundary of public schools, acting both as a filter and as a tool to obtain differentiated circulatory paths for students and general public.

The Role of the Architect

Agonism and Architectural Communication Series of Interviews

Instructor: Cristina Goberna Pesudo Spring 2017

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THE SOCIAL AMBITION OF DRAWINGS MOMOYO KAIJIMA ATELIER BOW-WOW Partner: Gabriel Ruiz-Larrea

Giovanni Cozzani

To start, I would like to focus on the agenda of your representation techniques. Your drawings tends to be very easily readable, and through which one (even not being an architect) can immediately understand the project and the spaces designed. Is there an attempt from you to achieve this, and to make your representation system understandable by everyone? If yes, how does this relates to the current tendency of using hyper-realistic drawings or virtual-reality with the claim that this is the only way to show architectural ideas to people?

Momoyo Kaijima

In fact, we did several books of drawings that are educational, for students. These drawings are not for clients.

With Made in Tokyo we did not want to do an academic book but an authentic way representing architecture thinking on a wider audience. Made in Tokyo is also a guide book for the city, so people can also visit the place by themselves. This kind of practical representation is important for people to understand the situation of the city, of a space and its problems. So that means that we try to encourage these people who want to know more about a specific condition to go deeper by themselves.

We also worked with our architecture students, with our studio, so Made in Tokyo can be utilised as a study method. For example, recently there was a young researcher visiting the Made in Tokyo buildings in Tokyo.

Some of them have disappeared, and some of them have experienced changes in use and other transformations.

This makes us think that the book is then very open and accessible for a lot of people. And regarding to your question about the social engagement of these kind of graphic representation, it depends. Sometimes if a client ask for a rendering, we do a rendering too. We understand it because our clients may have to push forward their idea in their companies, and there they become of course very effective. So although we try to keep doing our simplified and selective drawings, we understand that sometimes they are not easy to understand. Some people just wants to see how a building looks like, not the concept but the appearance. So it really depends on the kind of work we are doing, and moreover, to whom we are doing it.

Giovanni Cozzani

Your anatomical drawings (plan and section) try to superimpose different elements in one entity: thanks to

the perspective and the material details, one can perceive the space and the building as one coherent environment; and thanks to the everyday life objects, you describe the behaviour of the new residents, compressing the time and debunking the dichotomy of anterior/ posterior that usually affects architectural representations. In the larger urban drawings you use axonometry in order to represent a usually complex urban environment, made of buildings and city elements, but also of people, their activities, their behaviours. Or in your oblique projections like the one of Made in Tokyo, you represent the Da-me architectures suspending aesthetic judgement and cancelling any cultural value assigned.

In all of them, the common element is the description of the architecture or the reality as they are, in a very serious way, without trying to use diagrams or conceptual drawings in order to project concepts or ideas over the architecture, as some other architects do. Why this choice, and why do you think is important to represent the architecture as it is. And what do you think about a more diagrammatic way of representing architecture?

Momoyo Kaijima

We belong to a generation that started before computers existed, we actually began using them during our studies. Lots of architects started then doing computer drawings, like for instance, Tschumi and Rem, using sequences. But I think most architects just try to find a personal way of representing their ideal architecture.

And I respect that, they find very interesting and beautiful drawings, like the ones of Zaha Hadid or Steven Holl, which become very important architecture concepts by themselves. Of course we also wanted to propose our personal way of representation, but as we use different drawings depending on the part of the process we are in, from fast drawings for research or competition developments to, for example, the Made in Tokyo drawings, we can say that the different kinds of representation go parallel in our practice. I think we are always trying to keep us on a common base among architects, what interests us is to see how people react to our ideas.

Giovanni Cozzani

It is interesting when you mention the appearance of computers in architecture and how it changed architecture representation. Could you also talk about your

academic references, the importance of your teachers, people like Sakamoto or Shinohara, and how have they influenced your practice? Do you find a connection to the Japanese architects who were teaching and practicing in that moment?

Momoyo Kaijima

Yes, and that strong connection comes from education.

The influence of Tokyo Tech (The Tokyo Institute of Technology), where I studied and where they were professors, was very important. It created a very powerful culture of social technology and architecture. People like Shinohara started doing housing projects, and others like Arata Isozaki had bigger public buildings. But in a sense they were competing, although one was more into the public commissions and the other into private projects. They were both very interested in creating a very strong architecture representation, through their drawings and photographs, in order to provoke society to rethink about the meaning of architecture itself. They are both interested about form and graphics, and they created a growing theoretical approach to the production of architecture, and this kind of dialogue became the core of the architectural discourse after the World War II, which led to other people like Toyo Ito or Sakamoto to rethink about the meaning of social architecture, about the meaning of the public, raising that kind of discussion. And they were all very connected to a very strong thinker and philosopher, Koji Taji, who influenced them to conceive architecture as a more philosophical and cultural issue. When I was studying in Tokyo Tech I remember they had very long, sometimes 10 hours or more, dialogues and conversations about these topics, and I think that this kind of endless discussion, going deeper and deeper trying to find the meaning of architecture, became very influential to us.

Giovanni Cozzani

Looking at some of your public buildings, like the Kitamoto Station or the BMW Guggenheim Pavilion, or the Bruges Canal Swimmer’s Club, all these project seem to be proposing a certain kind of public space with a very defined size, not too monumental, so could you explain how the scale of the public buildings is important for you?

Momoyo Kaijima

We also like making large scale projects. Sometimes

huge landscape architecture can become very effective in order to become part of nature. The projects you mentioned are dealing directly with existing contexts, with a sort of leftover spaces or boundary areas, and in these conditions we have tried to create a better accessibility between different spaces, focusing on the importance of generating spatial relations and connections. We believe that boundaries should be redesigned, we like to negotiate between the different agents involved in the city.

Giovanni Cozzani

Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had an exhibition (with a certain mediatic resonance) called “A Japanese Constellation” presenting the work of Toyo Ito and a constellation of architects chosen by him like SANAA, Ishigami, Fujimoto, ecc., in which there was in my opinion and effort in trying to promote a certain kind of Japanese architectural aesthetic (the whiteness or the minimal). What do you think about that show, particularly in reference to your exhibition “Architectural Ethnography” recently presented at Harvard GSD, in which you touched very different topics?

Momoyo Kaijima

Toyo Ito was my professor, and I am still very close to him so I can’t really say anything bad (laughs) He has a very bright and wide range of work, from very symbolic works like the recent Opera house or the Mediatheque, with simple and strong spatial concepts, but on the other side, when you see his variety of his work you see a lot of very “normal” projects, and I like that, because it shows his deep observation and commitment to the local conditions, which makes his architecture very open to the public. Of course there is a sort of photogenic representation of his space, which gives that selected whiteness image you´re referring to, but I really believe that Toyo Ito has a wider range of projects. With SANAA happens the same, I also know Sejima very well (laughs) I think she always tries to come with something new and different from what people expect. She is really opened to technology and test new ways of doing things and experimenting with openness and lightness without fear, she is very strong in that sense. And I always tell my students that not everyone can do that kind architecture. So we try to teach more an architecture related to its context, and in that sense we are very interested in the work of Sakamoto, who was also my professor.

He has always been very interested in typologies, which give a very strong sense of architecture as a language of society. And we like to understand these languages to find out how we can transform, if we need to, the future of architecture. Architecture should be always very connected with its urban context or landscape, it is a tool to understand a culture. So sometimes the whiteness can kill this kind of relation. White is a symbolic color for something which is somehow fresh and detached from its context.

THE ARCHITECT AS A CULTURAL PRODUCER KERSTEN GEERS OFFICE KGDVS Partners: Ali Fouladi, Abubakr Hayder Ali

Giovanni Cozzani

I would like to start talking about representation. In your way of representing architecture, working on this duality of black and white line drawings and the perspectives or pictures, you approach it in a very serious way. You don’t try to distort the reality through diagrams in order to emphasize a concept. This makes me think about a question asked to Christian Kerez during a recent lecture at Columbia GSAPP, when he was asked if the ideas reside in the drawings and then the buildings are a finalization of them, or if viceversa the ideas are in the buildings, and the drawings are a mere representation of how the buildings should look like. His position was more in favor of this last condition, but I’m curious to know how would you answer to the same question?

Kersten Geers

I think that it is how I see the ambiguity of oeuvre, if I have to use that heavy word. In some cases the drawing is there because you understand that is the only thing that matters, and in some cases the drawing indeed is not much more than a tool to build the building because in some sense you are aware of the fact that the building will be there. In some cases both the drawing, and the prospective, and the Bas photograph, and the building itself somehow contribute to the reality of the building.

And the building itself exists outside of the photograph of Bas, but maybe you need both the photograph and the building and the drawing. Personally I believe that architecture is exactly that cloud that touches all these things. I certainly don’t think that you have a set of ideas that you draw and that sometimes you execute, and that in a way is a vector of propaganda where the idea is first, the drawing of the idea is second and the building as a kind of realization of the idea is third.

Because also, even if maybe it is a strange example, I’ve been always fascinated by the Sendai Mediatheque of Ito presented as a project when I was roughly a student.

I remember when the project was presented at the beginning it was a set of rather ephemeral drawings. Then the building was finally built, and I remember many people being very disappointed that the building was so much materic. But was very fascinating that the actual building was so different from the drawings. It did not make the drawings irrelevant. There were two realities: in the reality of that building many things happened, but I did not see that as compromising. That was just

the negotiation between a set of ideas not yet resolved and a particular aspect of the reality. I tend to think that good architecture can very much succeed in that, even after realization both aspects exist, not in conflict.

Giovanni Cozzani

About San Rocco. How is it important to have this kind of independent platform to write, compared particularly to those practises that mainly use academia as a platform for developing knowledge or use academic publications to write.m

Kersten Geers

San Rocco has been very important for all of us involved, because indeed it’s like an island where you can develop a couple of train of thoughts. In the end I hope that it’s clear to people that San Rocco as a project is very coherent, which has very few topics. And that’s not so strange because it’s run but a very small group of people and I think it’s a place where we discuss and exchange this interest we share. And of course practice itself it’s ultimately a very different place, it’s in a way a commercial place, whether you want it or not. You build a building with a budget, with the clients and so forth. So for that reason it’s extremely important that you have space outside of that. But also without pretentions. I think that good news for me about San Rocco is that it doesn’t have a lot of pretentions. You can write silly texts.

Abubakr Hayder

About the studios, how do you see the new iterations of the studio changing? You started with more architecture without content, how do you imagine that changing moving on?

Kersten Geers

I don’t know that. I cannot say. Ultimately it is really trying to understand where architecture plays a role, where you can still do architecture. Economy of means always comes back, but it’s even that a little of a common place. It’s a lot about trying to free architecture from wanting to be too spectacular perhaps. But it’s also trying to reconnect with the culture of architecture, with history of architecture. It’s trying to understand if there is really difference between Europe and America.

It is all these things.

But again, as I said, this project is not finished. There is a tendency from our side to look more at renaissance architecture, for the moment. But in the moment we

realize that, like what we do here at GSAPP, it was very important also to embrace soft tech or light high tech or Japanese architecture from the 80’s. And I think also helps you to not walk in the trap to say that now all architecture should look like five hundred years ago, you have to stay open minded.

Ali Fouladi

Where do you think your work stands in the history of architecture? Is you work responding to something or is it totally new?

Kersten Geers

Architecture can never be totally new. I feel that as an architect if you take your position seriously, you are a cultural producer. That means that you are in the realm of culture, you have to understand it. Maybe you find inspiration in other cultural expressions, but ultimately the new can be a confusing word. You cannot make architecture as 1000 years ago, but even the architects of 16th century were making something entirely new but at the same time entirely old. There was a lot of misunderstanding, but you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. I’m a little bit skeptical towards people who seem to claim that they have the truth in their hands. You work in this realm of architecture, trying to understand what was done before, interpreting and appropriating ideas, but maybe what you understood is based on misinterpretation. In this sense architects like Loos on one hand, and all his ambiguous interpretations and claims, and on the other Bramante, with his negotiations with Lombard and Roman traditions, are extremely contemporary.

They were without fear in simplifying, in showing the conflict. Rossi in his seminal text Architecture for Museums writes exactly about that.

Giovanni Cozzani

I would like to ask about the ancestors. I’m interested about the reason that push to you the select certain kind of architects rather than other. Is there a specific reason for the selection of them, or is it more an informal process?

Kersten Geers

I think is a rather informal process, and it has to do with what you discover o rediscover. Some projects get into your radar, and in the end one influences the other. The only thing that I see right now as a selection criteria is more about intentionality or consciousness. I am fasci-

nated the most by architects that at least appear conscious about what they do.

Abubakr Hayder

AH: San Rocco is coming into an end, this is the last edition. Where do you see that discourse going?

Kersten Geers

KG: I don’t know if everyone would agree in San Rocco, but personally I think that is time for other people to develop other thoughts, you have to be very realistic about that. We have been discussing architecture in the past, the long life of ideas, but I think there is a limit to all of that. I think is a healthy thing that other ideas now emerge.

Giovanni Cozzani

About art: in a recent interview in 2014 you mentioned in a quote: “I have a big interest in music and art, to be honest I’m more interested in art than in architecture. I always look at art and study how the artists work and it really fascinates me.” So, why art and how art affect your decisions in term of representation?

Kersten Geers

You know, the word art is a such complicated word. I think it is very difficult to do architecture and only find inspiration in architecture. We had a conversation few days ago when we opened the exhibition for the book The Architecture of the City by Rossi, and he was never that interested in other architecture up to a point. I mean, we are here in New York next to the Flatiron and it is an interesting piece of architecture you look at, but I’m not sure if ultimately you start from the fact that you study these things and it is then part of your background. If you try to understand what kind of project you need to do and how you position yourself in front of these buildings, they bring many ideas in terms of strategy. So I guess that culture in general, maybe art in specific, is one way or one source of possible strategies that you can look at. I think that for you as an architect is more inspiring simply because they put certain things in question. Robert Smithson’s art is interesting because you look and see that he deals with a non-size somehow.

THE ARCHITECT AS A PUBLIC EDUCATOR KONSTANTINOS PANTAZIS AND MARIANNA RENTZOU POINT SUPREME

Giovanni Cozzani

First of all I want to start from your references. In a recent lecture (at GSAPP) you mentioned them, but I want to understand better how they affect your design process.Can you expand a little bit further about them?

Konstantinos Pantazis

We start first doing some research and understanding the given problem. We try to study different references, historical examples, that dealt with the similar problem, program or urban situation. We try to formulate a kind of intelligence. We try also to bring many references, so that there is not only one reference influencing the projects too much. The collection of references create their own world, and the projects then develops on his own.

Hopefully then is not very clear where the references start, usually is invisible also to us. But their presence is very strong I think.

Marianna Rentzou

We cannot work without references. I cannot imagine any other way.

Giovanni Cozzani

In this sense, I want to expand also a little bit more about your past experiences that you had as architects before starting your own firm, because we have been discussing how them affects the work of every architect. Particularly in your case, you both had the chance of working at OMA and we know that usually architects working there can either position them self along or against it, but rarely remain neutral. Can you explain how this experiences have affected your production, and how you position yourself towards them now?

Konstantinos Pantazis

It is a good point, I tend to forget, but indeed our experience at OMA has been very influential. Although I think that OMA at that time was not as influential as it was at the beginning, when the firm was smaller and it was more about the Rem’s way of thinking, being more open minded. What is interesting with Rem is that he is not a very usual architect, so he’s references were not very common. He was doing a much more interesting investigation of possibilities, either coming from architecture or the arts, interesting movements of thought like surrealism or constructivism, etc. This is what we have tried to learn.

Marianna Rentzou

When I started with OMA we were working mainly

with references. For me it was the first time that I used them extensively. And then we kept them because usually you have so much freedom, that you can look back at what has happened, and try to make it more personal.

So in a way this is more liberating than trying to find something new from the beginning.

Konstantinos Pantazis

KP: It is about not starting from a blank page, but a creating a world in which you are already very skilled or very informed. What is also very important in this method is forgetting about your personal stigma. Allowing the world to develop on its own, without you being the author, the artist that signs the work. Allowing the project to decide for itself. But we also experienced other working environments: offices in other countries like Japan, Belgium, London; but also postgraduate studies, I did urbanism at Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, Marianna did the Bartlett and the Design Academy. Very different scales. Our work has been influenced by all these different environments. It is not just about references, but also about different working methods.

Giovanni Cozzani

I want to focus now more on your own work, particularly about your drawings. In an exhibition at Graham Foundation called Athens Projects showing some of them, it mention, and I quote, that “the series argues that utopia doesn’t need to refer to idealized non-existing cities but instead can refer to illuminating our cities in new ways”.

So, what is the role of utopia in your projects (like in Athens Heaven) and how much is important to keep talking about utopia today?

Konstantinos Pantazis

It is a very crucial question. For us the critical point is to talk about an ideal world, an ideal version of ours cities, but in a way it is already embodied in the forms that we have today. Being ideal, perfect, but without ignoring what we have now. We don’t believe in ideal imaginary that are new. Sometimes is more direct in our projects, maybe more satisfactory, sometimes less. Athens Heaven is the most extreme, but even in that, there’s a lot of very realistic parameters that are not very evident in the collages, like the size and shape of the erasure matching with the local municipalities.

Marianna Rentzou

Some of these drawings were done when we started the

office. But later projects provide smaller interventions.

We still talk about utopia, but on a smaller scale.

Konstantinos Pantazis

KP: In terms of the scale, is a matter of communication.

The advantage of a big scale is that is more direct in communicating with the general public. Smaller projects, like 100 Squares, that is collection of very small things, are much harder to communicate. Is the communication that force us to deal with a bigger scale.

Giovanni Cozzani

I am interested in this issue of communicating with the general public. In some lectures, you show quite often some pages of newspapers from Greece talking about your projects. How is important for you the reaction of the general public towards your projects, and in what way do you interface with this world?

Konstantinos Pantazis

It is very important to communicate with the public.

In Greece there is a huge lack of ideas and imagination about the city. Athens has happened without involvement of architects or planners and there is no sense of public space as an object of design or thought. The public space is just a leftover of private constructions. What is the most shocking is that people are trained or educated about the possibilities of public space is supposed to have. So for an architect it is a very important territory. We decided to open our office here in Greece because we wanted to deal with this big void of thinking.

The projects are all about educating the people. With the first projects we wanted to try to test this condition, and the press immediately give great attention to this projects. With the first exhibition, came also a very important interview with a local magazine, and it was surprising also for us.

Marianna Rentzou

For us was also a clarification about what Athens is.

Because you can give much more attention to details or elements that are usually forgotten. You start seeing the city in a very different way. While you work on the city in this way, you start understanding it in a much stronger way.

Giovanni Cozzani

Getting back to the references, I want to ask you about postmodernism, since recently it has been largely debated as a potential revival, either in a positive or in a

negative sense. Does it have an impact over your work?

If yes, why do you think it is relevant today to reappropriate some postmodern ideas.

Konstantinos Pantazis

What is extremely relevant to us in postmodernism, is the fact that it is an inclusive way of thinking. It is the opposite of the dogmatic orthodox approach of modernism. Postmodernism is interesting to us because is about having no rules. The kind of revival is more of a stylistic theme and I hope we are far from this stylistic connection. Our work is in some moments very strict and rigid, in some others more free and liberated, as in the postmodern. In general we are against dogmas.

Giovanni Cozzani

Talking about Greece, I want to ask you about the Faliro Pier competition that you won. In a recent lecture you showed some of the other entries, proposing a different kind of design, mentioning the fact that some of the public was preferring them to yours. How do you position yourselves towards this other kind of architecture, both in terms of design and of representation? Because your winning collages were very different from the kind of representation that is usually adopted by architects in order to win competitions (like hyper realistic renderings).

Konstantinos Pantazis

It is such a complex question for us, it embeds so many issues. About the collages , our project tries still to represent the pier in a quite simple way, in contrast with a much more intellectual or academic way of proposing it. In the context of this competition, they were clearly asking for some kind of icon, realized through weird forms. The ironic thing is that our project was all about program and about use, and the jury was smart enough to understand it, and that’s why we won. So instead of giving them the icon that they wanted, we offered this program alternative, emphasizing use. But our priority of making it kind of understandable for the general public became a sort of boomerang. The other proposals where the architects imposed such complex things, that people couldn’t understand or access into, resulted being more appealing for the people. This inaccessible objects were satisfactory for people because they were communicating certain ideas of progress or future. Our proposal was too understandable in a way.

Marianna Rentzou

Beside the competition, I would say that for us is harder working in Greece because of this condition. There is not much education about architecture, is not like in other countries like in Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, etc. It is something that we are always discussing with Konstantinos, how to make our life easier let’s say, but the path that we have chosen here in Greece is becoming a little bit harder, due also to the crisis.

Museum of Contemporary Music in Mornignside Park Concept + Site: Revisiting “The Gym” Instructor: Bernard Tschumi Partner: Colin Joyce

Advanced Studio V - Fall 2016

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If the park in a metropolis (like Morningside Park) has always been a massive artificial manipulation of nature; if its design has had as final goal the one of creating a fictional world made of romantic perspectives and botanical illusions; if the park is all this, an urban void for human leisure no more natural that the city itself, then landscape and architecture are interchangeable, and building in a park becomes an act of honest revelation. The museum of contemporary music is composed by the exaggeration of both the park and the urban conditions: a green canopy is laid as a blanket over an articulated system of fragments, eventually revealing isolated moments. The fragments are arranged as notes in a musical notation, and the in between spaces become the place for informal musical performances. The visitors can access to both levels from different sides of the site, and the building not only avoids limitations to the existing circulation system, but it improves it, amplifying it and allowing a free movement and connections between the fragments.

Fake News, Fake Shapes Final Research Papers

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CLIMITIC REPRESENTATIONS THE GENEALOGY OF A FAILURE Seminar: Climatic Imaginaries Instructor: James Graham

On September 2014 United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon designated Leonardo DiCaprio as a UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change. During the presentation, the secretary defined DiCaprio as “a credible voice in the environmental movement” and referred to his “considerable platform to amplify its message, […] to raise awareness of the urgency and benefits of acting now to combat climate change.”1 For DiCaprio this was probably the latest and most important recognition for his commitment in the climate change war since he established his foundation in 1998.

At the time of the designation, DiCaprio was already working, together with the director Fisher Stevens, on the documentary Before The Flood, released then in October 21 2016. The documentary is built around the figure of DiCaprio, traveling around the globe to document the impacts of climate change and discussing with experts, scientist and political personalities (already involved in the fight) about politics and strategies to face the problem.

The layout is familiar, since the documentary stands as the ultimate attempt, already seen in other documentaries, to use the media impact of a celebrity to give emphasis to social or political issues. In this case, DiCaprio is able to make a step further, involving in the documentary personalities like President Obama or Pope Francis, that allows the whole film to reach a higher level of credibility and visibility.

As he mentioned at the European premiere in London, the main aim was “to create a film that gave people a sense of urgency, that made them understand what particular things are going to solve this problem”. In fact, as we already saw in other films, together with an articulated (and sometimes too simplistic) descriptive body of the documentary, it came a likewise simplistic preceptive conclusion. In this way, the now educated viewer could easily understand how to apply his awareness through a series of to-dos, helping him shifting from being part of the problem, to being part of the solution.

Through a series of recommendations stated along the different stop-overs of DiCaprio’s journey, and through a series of more clear and direct slides that conclude the movie, the documentary urge to avoid eating beef meat, to not use shampoos with palm oil, to reduce fos-

sil-fuels dependency, to support a carbon-tax, and so on.

The last and maybe more political of these precept, is about using the vote to support candidates that believe in climate change, and are really devoted to solve the problem. In the same London premiere speech he remarkably focuses on this point indeed: “We need to use our vote […] We cannot afford to have political leaders out there that do not believe in modern science or the scientific method or empirical truths […] We cannot afford to waste time having people in power that choose to believe in the 2 percent of the scientific community that is basically bought off by lobbyists and oil companies.”

If thought in this term, it is not surprising that the film was released just 18 days before the 2016 United States presidential elections. What was surprising was the outcome of those elections: Donald Trump won, even though his positions on climate change, and his absolute deny of the existence of global warming itself, were largely known. This event has shown how the United Sates population is generously composed by voters that either don’t believe in climate change, or don’t consider climate change a primary important issue in terms of national politics. In the 4 years of presidency, Trump’s climate positions are probably going to become slightly miter, but still this apparent populist overturn is going to delay dramatically the climate politics change that the world second emission country needs.

At this point, it is necessary a deeper analysis on the way climate change is represented and communicated to really understand the verdict of this election. Is the recurring scholastic approach, that uses celebrities as amplifiers, the most effective to give “people a sense of urgency”? Does it still make sense to dictate direct rules that pretend to change rooted way of living, as a solution to reduce pollution? Is this the proper imaginary to reach the electorate composed by climate deniers or unawares?

Before the Flood is in a way complete and powerful: it analyses some of the main global evidences that prove manmade climate change; it shows the dominant scientific support about human impact over the climate; it tries to explain the principal social issues related to climate justice. It has a state of the art photography, and a powerful soundtrack. In a way, it is evident how ev-

erything is planned to reach the largest audience possible, simplifying the contents and making them more appealing for them. The choice of using a documentary itself as informative tool, is certainly based on the fact that it has a huge potential in term of representation and in order to create new imaginaries. Books, for instance, have a more limited possibility to get access to a large global audience, and their imaginary potential is limited to words. Movies and novels are constrained by the incredibly powerful, but potentially risky language of the fiction, that after decades of apocalyptic scenarios and afterworld tales, have proved to have provided a debatable and limited awareness about climate issues.

Another channel abundantly used in the recent years in order to sensitize about man impact over the planet, is the one of art exhibitions and installations. With a larger freedom in terms of expressive solutions and different interactions, it tries to establish a thiner (and probably more efficient) connection with the viewer.

In A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, for instance, the California-based artist Amy Balkin tries to break the limited spatial and temporal determination of canonical climate change representations, overcoming the redundant visualizations of polar bears struggling for surviving in a melting arctic environment, or the satellite pictures that completely detach the viewer from the dramatic reality that they try to represent. As Emily Eliza Scott perfectly synthesize, the archive “differs sharply from works of contemporary art and design that invoke ‘alternative futures,’ often with a strikingly utopian overtones. It occupies an odd and overlapping temporality, what Balkin calls the ‘future anterior,’ asking us ‘to think forward in time to look back’.”2 These kind of experiments are trying to enlarge the possible ways in which we should experience the effects and the possible future scenarios of global warming; still, if compared to documentaries, there is an evident lack in terms of mass delivery of this knowledge due to the physical persistence of an art exhibition. At the same time, they suggest new and strong approaches to the problem that are completely ignored in main stream documentaries like Before the Flood.

Looking for a connection in the past, it is easy to understand how Before the Flood is rather more linked to a language and to a general layout that we can find in

documentaries like the 2006 An inconvenient truth by Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim. Based on the probably most viewed climate change keynote ever, the film has reached an unusually high level of notoriety and became one of the most grossing documentaries in the United States, thanks also to the 2007 Academy Award.

The two documentaries share a common aim: to create a bridge between the scientific community (that investigates the climate change causes, effects and solutions) and the public at large, through a process of synthesis and simplification of the contents in order to make those informations accessible to everyone. What can be argued is that, after years of this overwhelming propaganda, this kind of language has already reached most of the voters really sensitive to it; all the others, the deniers or the ones that just don’t care about it, are probably unresponsive to these stimulations. The final images of Before the Flood, those dogmatic slides dictating the ideal behavior of a responsible cosmopolitan citizen, are just the ultimate expression of this. Like with the tobacco packaging warning messages, direct and terror managed approach is far away to be a proven and effective strategy.

We can see a similar approach, even if expressed in a completely different way, in the short films of the Welcome to the Anthropocene web portal. The aim of these films is to “inspire, educate and engage people about the interactions between humans and the planet.� 3 They use dynamic virtual images of the planet seen from the space to diagrammatically show phenomena like urbanization, climate change or water pollution. Even if the visual impact of the images is incredibly strong, there is still a feeling of detachment due to the authoritative voice-over commentary, and due to the overwhelming amount of datas and informations that are chaotically unwrapped during the films. Furthermore, the fact that the scale remains almost the same (similar to the language of satellite images) without allowing the viewer to get virtually inside the areas analyzed (into a more human scale), amplifies this detachment.

Getting back to the Amy Balkin approach, it looks like there is still a lot of potential from which the documentaries can take inspiration in order to redefine the representation strategies and the communication language used to deliver the knowledge about climate change. In

the past, some artists and directors already tried to work in the space between art and documentaries, in order to achieve this. In the 1983 documentary Koyaanisqatsi, Geoffrey Reggio tried exactly to do that, and the results can still provide answers today. The film is the first chapter of a trilogy, produced along the decades, in which the author developed some particular cinematographic techniques (working with time and scale) in order to amplify the communication of the contents.

The word Koyaanisqatsi comes from the Hopi language and, how it is explained clearly at the end of the film, it means crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living. The documentary is not directly about climate change, considering the fact that in those years the perception of it was still not very clear. What the author has tried to address is the human life and all its excesses, particularly the one happening inside hyper dense metropolitan conditions, or in close contact with industrial realities. More generally, as the author explain, it is based on the idea that “we do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.”4 The topic, even if being closely connected to the ones related to man made climate change, is not the main point. The aspect that could be inspiring in order to build a climatic imaginary, is rather more the way the arguments are enrolled throughout the documentary: “The film’s role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form.”

Raising questions rather than offering (debatable) solutions. The encounter rather than the meaning. A work of art, rather than an advertisement. Following this logic, the film propose a incredibly strong visual catalogue, comparing slow natural landscapes to frenetical urban moments, using the incredibly powerful Philip Glass original music to emphasize this contrast. In this aim of focusing more on the encounter, Reggio plays with time, using time-lapses and slow-motions to compress or expand it according to the needs, and in this way allowing the images to offer new meanings to the viewer.

Manipulating time, it transcends usual man rhythms, and jump into different time frames perceptions . A mass production cycle of hotdogs is compared to timelapse images of people coming out of a station through escalators; crowds walking down the street are filmed in slow-motion to emphasize the feelings and emotions remaining untold in the metropolitan indifference; a long clip showing the flames produced by the takeoff of a space shuttle is dramatically expanded through another slow-motion, that pairs with the final images of the same shuttle exploding in the air after the takeoff (still in slow motion). Reggio tries also to play with the concept of scale: images of huge urban developments are compared to zoomed images of computer mainboards and chips, trying to redefine the way the audience can perceive satellite images of a city expanding in the landscape. These kind of space and time elaborations are a key component missing from canonical documentaries about men impact over the planet.

Another documentary that is able to break the detachment between viewers and contents, still without approaching directly climate change themes, is Voyage of Time by Terence Malick. The director, after other movies that were investigating the relationship between human and natural, tries in this occasion to compress the history of the universe and of humanity in ninety minutes. From the birth of the universe, the film focuses on some key moments, like the development of life on our planet, or the moment in which humans reach a level of intelligent consciousness. It goes even further, depicting a distant future when the sun has expanded and burnt off the Earth’s atmosphere, avoiding in this way the cliche of post-apocalyptical scenarios, in which the man himself is the cause of the death of the planet. The film turns out to be incredibly engaging for the viewer, and not because of the topics threaten: thanks again to the ability of the director to manipulate time and scale, he can make the audience really feel to be active part of the story, establishing in this way a stronger connection between human and natural, rarely achieved through a visual representation before. Like in the short films of Welcome to the Anthropocene, there is a voice-over commentary, but this time is less authoritative; it flows with the images, and touch in a deeper way the viewer (like it does in other Malick’s movies such as The Tree of

Life). The general layout is thought to break the linearity of events: jumping from one moment to the other, without following a chronological order, the documentary is able to put in sequence events apparently very diverse, that in this way result to be more connected to the viewer. The elements, analyzed in three main groups (universe, life on the planet, and human), are reconnected in a more organic way, through visual associations that enables scale-breaking interpretations. In the end, the documentary seem to be way more engaging, not because of the contents, but because the way they are narrated.

Finally, it is relevant to focus on one last example that could be taken as a reference to understand new ways to build a climatic imaginary . This time it is more focused on climate change (compared to Koyaanisqatsi or Voyage of Time), but it is still thought and developed by someone more connected to the world of artistic representations. It is the 2012 documentary Chasing Ice by the American photographer James Balog. His work has always been focusing on the relationship between human and natural, and he particularly focused on trying to find new way to represent the polar ice and the way it is changing due to global warming. In 2007 Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), “an innovative, long-term photography program that integrates art and science to give a ‘visual voice’ to the planet’s changing ecosystems.”5 The main idea of the documentary is that “the creative integration of art and science can shape public perception and inspire action more effectively than either art or science can do alone.” Balog and his team placed forty-three Nikon cameras watching over twenty-four glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, Austria, and the Rocky Mountains.

They started recording changes in the glaciers every hour, year-round during daylight, and yield approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. The documentary focuses on the material produced during several years of shootings. The images are combined together in dramatically impacting time-lapses that shows how, just in 2 or 3 years, some of the greatest glaciers around the north pole are incredibly disappearing due to higher temperatures. A key aspect is the choice of the point of view. We already had the ability to have a chronological satellite report of glaciers melting, like in the time-laps-

es recently produced by Google, able to rebuild the last 30+ years through its visual historical archive. What we didn’t have was the possibility to physically place cameras inside those glaciers, avoiding the detachment generated by the satellite representations, and allowing the viewer to virtually stand in front of these melting giants . Furthermore, we can see again here how the manipulation of time is a key feature to allow the viewers to understand a process (the global warming) that is impossible to understand if overlooked according to the human rhythms. In terms of scale, they had to constantly insert human figures or city representations inside the scenes, in order to have comparative elements that report to the audience the dimensions of these huge melting glaciers.

The outcome of this is a pictorial archive that “serves as a visual legacy and provides a baseline—useful in years, decades and even centuries to come—for revealing how climate change and other human activity is dramatically impacting the planet.” It establish a new way of generating a visual evidence that is not scientifically exact and precise as datas and diagrams that we can find in Before the Flood, Welcome to the Anthropocene or An Inconvenient Truth, but it proved to be way more incisive and convincing to the general public. Chasing Ice shares some common problems of usual documentaries, like having a propagandistic website that tries to dictate more civic ways of living through its “MAKE A DIFFERENCE” section. But what is interesting is the way it tries to invent new way of representations that could help to enrich the climate imaginary.

The political failure of Before the Flood is something that should be probably analyzed in a deeper way. The outcome of the last American elections is just partially related to climate politics, while is largely affected by other political contingencies, and the causes of it are perhaps going to be fully understood only after some years, through retrospective interpretations. But what can be assumed already is that climate change (and its related “solutions”), is risking to be associated to a larger sphere of social and global issues (like the one related to migration fluxes in Europe and North America), due to the uncertain and debatable representation approach through which it is communicated. In an epoch in which new walls are being built or proposed, and in which populistic movements are already dramatically

affecting decades of political achievements, we cannot afford to have a drastic slow down in the development of shared strategies to reduce the human impact over the planet. It is something that has been already delayed for too many years, and the COP21 in Paris has shown how it is still insufficient if we want to seriously face and solve the problem. Considering the fact that the scientific evidence and contents have already proven to be complete and clear about climate change effects and causes, we have to investigate new ways of representation to allow these contents to become an unquestionable shared knowledge that cannot be argued in humiliating one-on-one television debates. In this sense, Before the Flood representation strategies has proven to be inadequate to the current western political condition and its needs. The three documentaries here analyzed as alternatives (Koyaanisqatsi, Voyage of Time and Chasing Ice) are all coming from professionals operating outside the scientific, politic or mass media world: they draw from a more artistic or a more philosophical (in the case of Malick) approach and language, in order to overtake the long-standing representation and imaginary limits connected to the scientific knowledge. Ultimately, they prompt interesting hints to deeply rethink the way we are elaborating and representing climate change.

http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/2014/09/secretary-general-designates-leonardo-di-caprio-un-messenger-peace

1

Emily Eliza Scott, “Archives of the Present-Future: On Climate Change and Representational Breakdown� in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Avery Review (2016)

2

3

http://anthropocene.info/about.php

4

http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php

5

http://extremeicesurvey.org

THE RESPONSABILITY OF THE ARCHITECT BMW Central Building and the role of architecture after the post-critical

Seminar: Architecture: The Contemporary Instructor: Bernard Tschumi

BMW Central Building by Zaha Hadid Architects is a paradigm of architectural production of the first 15 years of the 21st century.

In 2005 BMW presented his recently finished plant in Leipzig. At the center of it, the brain of the complex designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The BMW Central Building project has been developed in a crucial moment of the Hadid’s career, and the positive critics were part of a larger appreciation of her work at the time.

The construction was completed in the same year she received the Pritzker Prize, and is not by accident that it was mentioned (together with other few projects) in the announcement of the prize.1 The whole building is designed around the system of flows that connects different production facilities arranged around it. The central part of this system acts as a relatively empty space, with two main stairs of terraces that grows in opposite directions, hosting the main program of office spaces. The flows, that dictate also the composition of the walls, are echoed on top by a relatively intricate network of suspended production tapes that allow the cars, at different stages of production, to move from one factory unit to another. The result of the combination of all these layers of vectors and flows has been properly defined by Patrick Schumacher as an “articulated complexity”.2 The idea of a fluid architecture, in which the movement flows are the main articulating element of the composition, was already part of Hadid’s research and production, particularly evident in the 1998 wining entry for the MAXXI museum in Rome, whose construction was completed only several years after. Bu t in the case of the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, the concept was pushed even further, using the flows in order to obtain a transparency between the production and the administration of the plant, and to demolish the rigid compartmentation of the Fordist factory model. But, as we are going to see, the building itself prove to be one of the precursors of the mainstream architectural production of the following years: extremely complex and expensive geometries whose architectural conceptualization consists in a rather thin layer covering more consistent economical interests and media speculations.

Analyzing deeply the project, one can understand how

the main driving forces were not used to generate an architecture able to satisfy the needs of the users of the building. The program (consisting in offices, labs, a visitor center and a cafeteria), with its rather static nature, tends to generate a friction with the dynamism of the architecture surrounding it, and the use of the building remains formally unresolved.

The production lines floating over the office desks seem to be the only relevant element that justifies, then, such a configuration. But they are not placed in this peculiar position in order to obtain a more efficient production system. The lines are numerically redundant, their placement not convenient, and the speed at which they operate extremely low (due to the noise interfering with the open office spaces). Furthermore, analyzing the other entries of the two stages competition won by Hadid, it is possible to understand how these tapes were a basic requirement dictated by BMW, rather then an original element of Hadid’s proposal.

Indeed, BMW was very specific to dictate the main architectural choices (leaving to the architects the sole clarification of how those choices should have been applied). They were trying to achieve a defined model of architecture, in which the building should have acted as a marketing platform. The achievement of a spectacular architecture was in fact part of a larger program, applied then through a huge amount of advertisements (on different media) in which the design of the building and the cinematic effects involved were associated with the design qualities of the goods produced by the plant itself (the cars). At this regard, the voice-over of one of the advertisements involving the building is exemplifying: “We have a few key beliefs at BMW. Autonomy makes better cars, for example, not taking risks is risky, and great thinking spawns more great thinking. Holding fast to these principles explains why, when most companies would settle for easy and cheap, we went through the trouble and expense of creating a factory unlike any other... we invested in a high-profile design competition for the Central Building of our Leipzig plant... Zaha Hadid Architects, one of the world’s most innovative architects and a Pritzker prize winner to boot, chose to be bold where other companies would be cautious.

Their thought-provoking building turns convention on its ear... Sure we could have saved money and produced

a plant like any other... but at BMW we believe that everything we do should express our support of great thinking.”3 The concept of the building, the dream of an architecture able to generate a metropolitan condition in which there are no more boundaries between the different working forces, and in which the design can become the key for a post-capitalist and more equal society, becomes then inconsistent. The choices are not made by the architects but by the company whose real aim is to use architecture as an advertisement tool. A process that may be assimilated with a Bilbao effect, in which huge economical investments are made through a deliberately formal architecture in order to attract tourism and generate consistent revenues. But in this case, not having even a public interest, the building tends to be, instead, more close to what Tafuri would have defined as “reklamearchitektur” (advertisement architecture) as he did in the account of Mendelsohn’s department stores.

But if then the supposed concept demonstrate to be inconsistent up to a point in which there is no concept anymore, what is left to the role of the architect is the ability of transforming economical interests in a correspondingly appropriate formalism, aspect in which Zaha Hadid has proven to be extremely able at, allowing his office to win the competition, and delivering a building as an extremely well designed and detailed example of contemporary architecture. As Reinhold Martin was arguing in 2005, “the responsibility of professionals in the new world order is confined in facilitating the arrival of the “new”, while washing their hands of the overdetermined historical narratives—and dead bodies—through which this new is named”.4 On a cultural level, one could accept the building as such: an exquisite piece of 21st century technological architecture without any particular revolutionary conceptual intention. But the media interest orbiting around this building (as around most of Hadid’s production) tends to raise questions about what is the responsibility of the architect in the new millennium.

Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, stated: “…we shall face the new millennium, without hoping to find any more in it than what we ourselves are able to bring to it.”5 The field of architecture at large,

seems to have faced it in a diametrically opposite way.

In the last years of 19th century, architecture firms were dealing with extremely relevant changes, both outside and inside the profession, that were affecting their operational rules.

A key role was played by the introduction of computers and new softwares in the design process. As in any technological revolution, the economical interests behind the innovation tended, at first, to put the tools involved at the center of the process, instead of maintaining them as sub-sequential to the intentions. In architecture competitions around the world, the introduction of these tools was appearing in a certain amount of proposals in which extremely complex geometries (controllable only trough the new softwares) were becoming the key element in order to win the first prizes. Furthermore, these tools were not only giving to the architects the ability of developing and parametrically controlling new shapes, but also the possibility of developing in parallel new systems of representation whose logics were dangerously sliding away from the thoughtful research in representation methods that has historically connoted the production of architects.

At the same time, the configuration of the offices themselves was dramatically changing. As Micheal Speaks was already noticing few weeks after 9/11, “during the 1990s, architecture underwent fundamental changes, many of which followed the contours of the new economy and the technological, political, and organizational transformations it prompted.”6 The Dutch experiences of offices like UN Studio, MVRDV or AMO (the offshoot of OMA), were speculating on ideas such as virtual architecture studios, datascaping, and cross-cultural networks as “intangible things”, reinventing the specific boundaries of the architecture offices in the industry.

Promptly followed by larger groups like Gensler Consulting, or by younger practices like SHoP, they proved the existence of a general intention to develop form of practice that could survive in a world in which brands, identity, terror or fear were becoming forces more and more relevant.

In such a condition, is then extremely difficult to understand the differences (on a conceptual level) form the BMW Central Building and the architectural produc-

tion developed in the following years in geo-economical contexts such as the middle east or south-east Asia.

The differences in terms of architectural qualities of the buildings were not as strong as the similarities based on a certain monumental formalism and strong phenomenological component; based on impacting images built around an obsession for a spectacular or hyper-iconic architecture. It is then difficult to confute a consequential relationship between the initial researches about new complex geometries, and the practical applications that spread around the world due the economical advantages of developing such striking parametric forms in certain contexts.

In this sense, the mass media played a decisive role. The architectural communication system, once mainly based on strong authorial responsibilities of the magazines and newspapers, found in the digital revolution, and in the new architecture websites in particular, a fertile field in which the impact of the image could become the dictating element in the representation of the projects. The architects found new platforms through which enlarge as much as possible their audience, and they adapted their design and representation systems to the needs of such larger audience.

But after years in which the media impact and the spectacular have been dominating conditions in the building industry, where can we find the answers to the questions related to the role of the architect in the 21st century?

Renzo Piano, in the book La Responsabilità dell’Architetto (the responsibility of the architect), tried to define how the role of the architect should have changed in the new millennium. In the long conversation with Renzo Cassigoli, he found in the obsession for innovation and modernity the main obstacle for the cultural advancement of the field. The substantially founding elements of the BMW Central Building rhetoric, the realization of a metropolitan innovative condition compressed inside of a building, and the consequent complex geometrical expression of it, are those that Piano saw as the misguiding lines for the future of the profession. He insisted, in fact, in how “architecture is a socially dangerous art, because it is imposed to everyone” and when asked about what are the trajectories that architecture should follow in the future, he argues that “at the threshold of the third millennium, this broad theme

of a less rhetoric and less symbolistic interpretation of ‘modernity’ ” should become a central one. In the conclusion of the conversation he then raised two key questions: “we have extraordinary tools in hour hands, but for doing what? For going where? This is the enigma that we bring with ourselves in the new millennium.”7 After some years, we probably haven’t found yet the answers to these questions. We are now moving across an architectural era in which nothing is certain, and in which there are no defined mainstream movements or tendencies. The 21st century taxonomy of architecture (like the one recently depicted by Alejandro Zaera-Polo8) seems to be more heterogeneous than ever, more sensible and fragile to exterior pressures and forces, and unable to generate clear answers, with a general tendency to draw from the past. The new political conditions, made of fake news and deformation over information, is destabilizing even more the production of culture.

Due to the post post-critical effects, we started to question several aspects of the profession, from the representation techniques up to the role of the theory, arriving to question if theory itself is still alive today.

But if it is true that theory “…will come back when everyone is bored with the hegemony of good feelings and widespread complacency”,and if “its role is to be suspicious of all methods and all techniques, raising questions about them”9, then is possible that in the recent years we are witnessing the rise of a still ambiguous movement composed by young firms which are probably bored of the hegemony of good feelings, and that are definitely raising questions about the previous methods and techniques. A generation of architects born in the 70s, whose activity started in early 2000s, and whose positions were strongly against the dominance of the post-critical of those years. Guided by firms such as OFFICE KGDVS or DOGMA (just to name few), they have responded to the parametric obsessions “trying to free architecture from wanting to be too spectacular.”10 This group of architects is trying to redefine the basic rules proposing collages when everyone was doing hyper-realistic renderings; developing a “classicist architecture” when historicism was banned and censored; bringing back theory to the center of the debate, using as platforms both academia and independent maga-

zines (like San Rocco); and, ultimately, redefining the role of the architect as a “cultural producer�, with responsibilities going far beyond the obsession of being innovative.

While their success as a movement is still to be proved, we can say that their work and research is, at the moment, the most tangible evidence of a strong reaction (already happening on different levels) against the ideals that are ultimately and intimately embed in the BMW Central Building.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize. (2004) Announcement: Zaha Hadid Becomes the First Woman to Receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Available at: http:// www.pritzkerprize.com/2004/announcement. [Accessed May 3, 2017]

1

Gannon, T. (2006) Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building: Source Books in Architecture 7. New York, Princeton Architectural Press.

2

3

BMW television advertisement, 2005.

Martin, R. (2005) Critical of What? Toward an Utopian Realism. Harvard Design Magazine. 22, 104-109.

4

Calvino, I. (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.

5

Speaks, M. (2002) Design intelligence and the new economy. Architectural Record. 190 (1), 72-76.

6

Piano, R., Cassigoli R. (2000) La Responsabilità dell’Architetto, conversazione con Renzo Cassigoli. Florence, Italy, Passigli Editori, 73-93. [Translated by this article’s author]

7

Zaera-Polo, A. (2016) Well Into the 21st Century - The Architectures of Post-Capitalism?. El Croquis. 187, 252-254.

8

Tschumi, B. (2015) Some notes on architectural theory. In: Graham, J. (ed) 2000+ The urgencies of architectural theory. New York, Columbia University Press.

9

10

Geers, Kersten. Architect (Personal interview, February 25, 2017)

VIA 57 WEST

BY BIG MARKETING ARCHITECTURE Seminar: Metropolis Instructor: Ashraf Abdalla

Approaching the building from the west side is maybe the most interesting way to take a first look at it: from here, it is possible to see the ruled surface of the roof as a whole, facing the Hudson river. The friction that its triangular shape generates with the surrounding skyline is the most aesthetically evident aspect that stands out from a distance. The nearby buildings, with their orthogonal masses, can’t do anything but helping VIA 57 West to become the protagonist of the riverfront, and this is something very unusual for a residential tower.

After a while, the attention skips to a less explicit but more prominent tension: the presence of a big courtyard full of trees in the midst of a tall residential building. It is the result of a declared hybridization of the tower and the courtyard typologies, at the center of BIG design proposal, which really affected the volumetric form of the block.

Getting closer, it’s possible to understand how the ground floor is clearly separated by the upper floors; here the building offers nothing more than what any other Manhattan blocks would do: a continuous tape of glass filled with (still unfinished) shops and retail activities.

The courtyard of the building turns out to be completely invisible, as this does not come down to the ground level, bringing light and air to the commercial area (as you would expect from a faraway look). Instead it overhangs the ground volume, serving only the residential levels, fiercely denouncing its semiprivate nature. The pivotal theme of the architectural proposal remains enclosed in an anti-public sphere, and the non-residents can hardly notice its presence, barely seeing the top of some trees appearing from the roof. The ground floor of the building, therefore, acts, both volumetrically and materially, as a separate and distinct element over which the roof and the triangular façades are suspended.

The opportunity of giving back to the city some of the precious space occupied by the new development, opening it to the light and the urban interactions, is just hinted through the transparency of the coating, but never really accomplished.

Analyzing the roof then, it is possible to see how the aluminum film covering it is diffusely drilled in order to host a huge amount of balconies and terraces. They are arranged in order to offer differently orientated views of

the river for the largest number of apartments.

The glass façades overlooking the courtyard, and the external triangular ones, are fragmented, turning into pixelated surfaces of glass volumes. This particular solution, at first, may look like an escamotage useful to add some architectural dynamism to the usually boring plain glass surfaces of the New York developments. But still, is possible to feel behind these choices the pressure of the river view as a dominant topic pushed by the most obvious real-estate dynamics.

Moving in to the apartments interior, the morphology of these spaces strongly denounces an unconventional configuration. The building present a linear floor circulation, natural result of the presence of just one main elevators core. But the façades fragmented geometry show an incompatibility with the long and straight corridors. The result of these choices is a noticeable geometric friction: the apartments, standing in the midst of this friction, are forced to mitigate it. And that’s why we can find inside of them a huge amount of bulk spaces, unresolved corners and isolated pillars generating a diffuse feeling of hesitation.

Apparently all the problems of the interior configuration are related to the formal system of the envelope of the building, and it is evident how all the volumetric and architectural choices related to this formal system are driven mostly by the obsessive need of ensuring a perfect river view to the largest amount of apartments, and all the economical benefits that it provides to the properties value.

According to the architect, the celebrated design (recently enabled it to be named “America’s best tall building of the year” by the CTBUH1) was just the spontaneous result of a series of compositional operations, perfectly represented by the popular diagrams that distinguish BIG proposals. These operations are justified by the need of ensuring light, air, and the (repeatedly mentioned) wonderful river view to the apartments; all promises hard to keep if you are dealing with a massive Manhattan block.

But if we analyze the south east façade of the building (the one facing the tall Manhattan skyscrapers), for instance, the architects admitted that the dramatic diagonal cut of the roof it’s mainly driven by the aim

of “graciously preserving the adjacent Helena Tower’s views of the river”2. The Helena Tower is a residential skyscraper, owned by the same real-estate organization, Durst, that is also behind the VIA 57 WEST development. They could not let typological or architectural choices to drastically lower the market values and prices of their own preexisting river front apartments.

At the same time, the other cut does nothing but emulating what was done years ago in the very nearby Clinton Park by Ten Arquitectos, in which the number of floors gradually reduces getting closer to the river, generating a big amount of terraces for the apartments.

This didn’t only unleashed the plagiarism accusations of Enrique Norten3 (Ten Arquitectos), but mainly showed how that particular solution was already used in other similar river facing buildings, in which realization of a system of terraces was clearly achieved in order to raise the market value of the apartments, rather than “bringing low western sun to the block”2, as it is formally declared by the architects.

Furthermore, other recently built architectures facing the Hudson river have proved how opening themselves to the river view is often just a cliché. The new Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano Building Workshop for instance, even if offering completely different programatic contents (but still sharing with VIA 57 West the same bold intention of emerging architecturally an visually from a monotonous riverfront), has shown how turning its back on the river and opening up to the city can be an even more powerful strategy, that allowed its system of terraces to become a terrific attractive and successful space.

In conclusion it is evident how the very intriguing and interesting aspects of VIA 57 WEST remained only hinted, and not completely developed. Behind these great potentialities, that could have allowed the building to become the first opened and socially innovative residential tower in Manhattan, are concealed very different interests, that have silently reached their purposes, realizing what ultimately proves to be a very ordinary, unaccessible, and repulsing tower.

Warerkar T. (6/23/2016). Surprise! Bjarke Ingels’s Tetrahedron Named Americas’ Best Tall Building. Retrieved from http://ny.curbed.com/2016/6/23/12008298/bjarke-ingels-tetrahedron-best-tall-building-nyc

1

Bjarke Ingles Group, VIA 57 WEST. Retrieved from http://www.big.dk/#projects-w57

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Barkitecture. (2/11/2011). BIG TEN battle? Bjarke Ingels seriously pisses off Enrique Norten. Retrieved from http://barkitecturemag.com/2011/02/11/big-tenbattle-bjarke-ingels-seriously-pisses-off-enrique-norten/

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New Interactions in Mott Haven

Hybrid Residential Infrastructure in the Bronx Instructors: Juan Herreros, Ignacio GalĂ n Partner: Jugal Rana

Advanced Architectural Design Studio - Summer 2016

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The design proposal operates on the NYCHA project of Mott Haven, in south Bronx. This area, today mainly occupied by industrial and manufactory buildings, will host in the future a big amount of new luxury residential developments, defining a new riverfront facing Manhattan, that tries to avoid any possible contact with the surrounding neighborhood. The expressway, previously acting as a dividing element between the residential blocks to the productive ones, will be used to separate the new luxury houses from the social ones and the whole South Bronx. We tried to speculate on this, offering new architectural spaces in which this friction could be solved and developed in new and unexpected ways. Looking at the area with the eyes of the future, the intervention tries to generate a new web of connections between existing social housing towers and upcoming luxury ones, increasing the density of the whole area, and fragmenting the system of open green spaces in a series of smaller and more defined ones. The new volumes get in contact with the old ones without precise alignments, trying to generate different moments of contamination.

The Forms of Abstraction Photographic Report Studio Trip in Japan Spring 2017

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The photographs collected here are a report of “Abstract Technology� (1) studio trip in Japan. Some of them represents a sereis of buildings chosen in the studio as part of our research about Japanese Hi-Tech.

Some others, represents buildings visited autonomously outside the studio trip, that I found, in a way or another, relevant for the research that we were conducting as a studio. The year of the buildings is intentionally not shown here: even if spanning around 50 years of architectural production in Japan, involving several generations of architects, the ideas behind them are somehow without time, and their temporal localization becomes almost irrelevant.

The final outcome represent an investigation about the different forms of abstraction, and how they have affected the more or less technological examples shown in the following pages.

Bokutei House Tokyo Atelier Bow-Wow

Sumida Hokusai Museum Tokyo Kazuyo Sejima

St. Mary Cathedral Tokyo Kenzo Tange

House at Kumamoto Kumamoto Itsuko Hasegawa

Takuma Housing Public Project Kumamoto Itsuko Hasegawa

Yatsushiro Municipal Museum Yatsushiro Toyo Ito

Old People’s House Yatsushiro Toyo Ito

Il Palazzo Fukuoka Aldo Rossi

Kitakyushu Central Library Kitakyushu Arata Isozaki

Byhouse Tokyo Itsuko Hasegawa

House at Nerima Tokyo Itsuko Hasegawa

Sendai Mediateque Sendai Toyo Ito

Pharaoh Dental Clinic Kyoto Shin Takamatsu

The Ark Kyoto Shin Takamatsu

Chichu Art Museum Naoshima Tadao Ando

Naoshima Ferry Terminal Naoshima SANAA

Loyola Law School by Frank Gehry Studio Research

Instructors: Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo Partner: Jil Bentz

Advanced Studio VI - Spring 2017

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This research has been developed as the initial part of the design studio “Abstract Technology” (1), focusing on the early production of Frank Gehry, and in particular on the 1988 Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

We started from the assumptions that “in the late 70s, Frank Gehry developed an architectonic language that was both simple and sophisticated and perfectly fit for a casual expression of ‘some things public’ in the laidback sea of suburban California. Gehry’s early buildings are cheap and unpretentious, simple boxes made casually complex through sudden collisions, fragmentary additions and bursts of surprising honesty.” Loyola Law School proved to be a fertile track as “an architecture of a radically formalist economy of means”. Its strong potential doesn’t appear in the architecture of the individual buildings (threated as individual volumes) but resides in the tention between the different parts. The whole system, redefining the typical open spaces of the LA fabric (mainly used as parking lots), is designed from the voids to generate a urban condition with a precise scale, in which the formal elements (like the monumental plaster columns, or the fake bell tower) are used in their full exuberance as tools to develope the scenographic dynamics of the campus.

ARCHIPELAGOS AND BRIDGES Giovanni Cozzani Portfolio Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation Advanced Architectural Design 2016-2017