Volume 29: The Urban Conspiracy

VOLUME 29

Archis 2011 #3 Per issue € 19.50 (nl, b, d, e, p) Volume is a project by Archis + amo + c-lab…

TO BEYOND OR NOT TO BE

Photo front cover: Naho Kubota

THE URBAN CONSPIRACY

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The Urban Con spiracy

Paola Antonelli John Beard Francesco Bonami Andrew Carle Rebecca L.H. Chiu Benedict Clouette Felipe Correa Sean Donahue Ted C. Fishman Linda Fried Rama Gheerawo Michael Graves Aubrey de Grey Junya Ishigami Leon Krier Naho Kubota Gesine Marquardt Yoko Ono Anne-Sophie Parent Jeffrey P. Rosenfeld Alan Simpson Deane Simpson Tsukamoto Laboratory Marlisa Wise Lebbeus Woods 17/10/11 18:31

The Urban Conspiracy

A covert organization has been plotting to take over man­ kind. The number involved is not entirely known, but estimates are in the millions. They are present through­out the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and with the greatest concentration in Europe. They are typ­ically in their 60s, 70s, and 80s and claim to be ‘retired’, ‘part-time volunteers’, or ‘mostly spending time with grandchildren’.

Having been raised in the aftermath of the Second World War and coming of age during the paranoia of the Cold War, these so-called senior citizens reacted to the treacherous battles for power by banding together behind a mission that is only now beginning to surface.

The anguish of growing up amid political upheaval motivated them to form a world where discord ceases to exist. The immediate experience of seeing extensively damaged urban areas led this group of seniors to work through back door channels to try to make cities places of harmony. Their efforts are visible today in the form of parks, plazas, waterfronts, sustainable greenbelts, reclaimed infrastructure, farmers markets, bike paths, streetscapes, and communal gardens.

Who would have thought that this band of elderly – part of an age group often believed to be checked out and removed from decision-making processes – is trying to shape cities? It is no coincidence that we are expe­ri­ encing an aging society at the same time as we are seeing an abundance of well-groomed parks. Reports suggest the graying confederates have been waiting for this moment to make one final overwhelming push. They are using their advanced appearances to appeal for public spaces that benefit the elderly so as to bring them closer to their ultimate objective of assuring the abundant proliferation of friendlier urban environments.

This population of seniors is regarded by some political leaders as ‘the greediest generation’, hell-bent on bank­ rupting the developed world’s social safety nets. But in actuality they have been posturing as self-centered Baby Boomers to conceal their efforts toward an un­ selfish social end. It has become clear that their coun­ter­ culture rebellion as youths was a test to see if they could operate together in large numbers in the name of a single cause. (Cleverly, they espoused a rhetoric of individualism to mask their true power in multitude.)

It is likely that their frenetic consumerism later in life was also a smokescreen. They were plagued with an anxiety that more things would be destroyed and taken away – a feeling that stemmed from the profound trauma they experienced as youths. This anxiety was first manifest in an unresolved desire to acquire con­ sumer goods, but over time, this generation realized that hiding behind an aura of self-absorbed spending helped to divert unwanted attention from their humanistic in­ tentions. Several observers indeed believe the ex­pres­sed interest by some elderly in current popular notions of growing old is parallel in motive; Aging in Place, AgeFriendly Cities, Multi-generational Living, Active Aging, Longevity, Life Course, Third Age, etc, serve as elaborate alibi that further cover their tracks as they develop urban land for general public benefit.

The Urban Conspiracy (which has yet to be dis­ proved) reveals that seniors are not a passive segment of society that lacks agency. It also suggests that inas­ much as many are motivated to remain vital and engaged, they aren’t entirely sold on Baby Boomer values of per­ sonal fulfillment. As the following events already indicate, they have taken sweeping actions in the interest of

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Jeffrey Inaba

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the public far beyond anyone’s expectation, let alone suspicion.

First Europe, Then the World

Most of Europe’s oldest neighborhoods (those with the highest number of retirees to people of working age) were severely damaged during the Second World War. Living at the epicenter of cities in ruin and growing up in a deformed urban fabric left such a psychic wound on those who were young and impressionable that they are still incapable of leaving. The fear that their urban surroundings might suddenly evaporate inspired the in­ vention of public space, which was specifically modeled to secure land ownership in perpetuity. Experts warn it is likely these neighborhoods are senior strongholds with command centers that transmit plans to take over urban properties globally.

such as the elderly. Seniors, on the other hand, com­ passionately understand this impulse and also recognize that architects of all ages are premature seniors at heart.

As much as designers obsess about the timeliness of their work, their real concerns are maturation and long­ evity: they want to prolong their lives and make as many enduring buildings as possible.

All the while, the elderly happily pretend to be uninformed about architecture because their feigned ignorance gives them wide berth to move about unde­ tected. They know very well that contemporary archi­ tec­ture, figurative and atmospheric alike, offers formal means to redistribute the area of a given program to allocate greater space for public use. Thousands of up­ loaded photos of grandparents posing in front of con­ tem­porary architecture contribute to a database cata­ loging building configurations that can be used in the future to aid their cause.

Recruitment

Improvements in medical care, diet, and environment are cited as the reasons for the rise in the number of elderly in recent decades. But the greatest headway in recruit­ ment today has come about with the decrease in the age at which one regards oneself as old. Thirty- and fortyyear-olds are reacting against their parents by opting out of their forbearers’ ‘60 is the new 40’ worldview.

They choose to act with extreme prevention in mind, con­ vinced that living a maximum number of years requires acknowledging being old at a younger age. Certain that every slight physiological change in their bodies is a sign of aging, they have decided to start a longevity regime early on by living low-key lives of managed risk and evenbalanced performance. The disinterest in wild youthoriented living is boosting the number of people who consider themselves old ominously higher than birth year statistics indicate, fueling speculation that this organi­ zation is more insidious than previously thought.

Resilience and Stewardship

In her informative model of aging, epidemiology and geriatric expert Linda Fried illustrates that as we grow older, we become less resilient to external forces. As a result, we rely increasingly on our physical environment to support our needs. Architects and industrial designers are attempting to create hospitable environments and keep up with the growing demand for senior-oriented products. But their efforts are overshadowed by uncon­ firmed reports that the elderly have been secretly sup­ porting major architectural projects. Applying their knowledge of the financing models and real estate laws that they helped implement, seniors have been raising capital to acquire land using public-private partnerships, Business Improvement Districts, conservancies, and public trusts. By securing ownership of large land areas, legal entities to maintain them, and seed operation funding, they have quietly organized commissions in their effort to accumulate more public space in cities. Such activity suggests that contrary to the decline in their personal resilience, seniors have been plotting to make cities resistant to neglect and decay.

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Grand Tour

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Because architects peak in the later years of life, they feel professional pressure to appear youthful in order for their work to be viewed as informed and contemporary.

Bowing to this expectation, they avoid associating with whomever could suggest they are old and out of touch,

Disclosures

As a storytelling device, a conspiracy theory can create an alternative set of facts that challenge what is cur­ rently believed about a given situation. It can portray the conspirators as a group possessing more power than they are given credit for, and, as a result, it can elevate the perception of the conspirators’ ability and effect.

A conspiracy theory can also call attention to real circumstances. For example, the discourse on the city is growing and has become one of the principle objects of global policy. In the past year alone, the UN launched The World Urban Campaign, The 100 Cities Initiative, and the international body’s first-ever Public Spaces reso­ lution – all in recognition of the city as an important form for human development interventions. The belief that aging should first and foremost be addressed through the city is demonstrated by WHO’s recent introduction of the Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities, whose requisite set of commitments have already been adopted by dozens of municipalities. Softly alerting readers to facts such as these prompts the question of how we as architects will manage the current investment in the city.

First the World, Then the City

Two historic shifts in humankind are now taking place. As we all know, more than half the world’s population live in cities. Also, for the first time ever, the elderly will outnumber the children on the planet. Is the convergence of these epic events a coin­ cidence? Or does it signal the final stage of a plan unfolding before our eyes?

C-Lab

World population over age 65 the year of the 7th CIAM Congress, ‘Reconstruction of the Cities’ (1949).

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UN World Population Prospects, 2010

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World population over age 65 the year of ‘Better City, Better Life’ World Expo, Shanghai (2010).

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UN World Population Prospects, 2010

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What Did We Miss?

After the urban trauma of the Second World War, the psyche of the affected gen­ eration was primed to endure an extended process of recovery. The Kübler-Ross Model defines ‘five stages of grief’ for coming to terms with trauma: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Charting the evolution of the urban zeitgeist through this lens against the disciplinary keystones of architecture in the last half-century suggests that architects have not always paid attention to the life course development of the ‘trauma generation’. The misalignment between the progression of grief and the ways in which architects chose to engage or disengage from the social obscures the original trauma. Detached from these origins, architects who chose to engage with the social did so by aligning with the visible popular causes manifest in the aftershocks of grief, whereas those focused on the discipline missed an opportunity to resonate with the dominant generational subconscious.

Today, as an aging trauma generation edges closer to the acceptance of themselves and their environment, their recovery process is set to culminate in the convergence between human development and city development. How will architects respond to this psychic investment in the city?

C-Lab

Five stages of grief (based on Mwalimu Imara’s diagram) overlaid onto the frequency of the word ‘city’ mentioned in books (Google Books Archive).

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Five Stages of Grief 1. Denial (Shock) Heightened awareness of things left behind

2. Anger (Emotion) Internal conflict, feeling of meaninglessness, and outward expression of rage

3. Bargaining (Deferral) Conceptual postponement of consequences while looking for a way out

4. Depression (Slump) Passive behavior and isolation

5. Acceptance (Increased Self-Reliance) Movement toward selfawareness and contact with others

Countercultural reaction to Modernist ‘failures’

Vernacular design

Everyday urbanism; suburbanization

Sustainability, social design, globalization

1949 Charles and Ray Eames: Eames House – Case Study House no. 8, Pacific Palisades 1952 SOM: Lever House, New York 1952 Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz: UN Head­ quarters, New York 1953 Team X at 9th Con­gress of CIAM 1954 Le Corbusier: Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp 1958 Mies van der Rohe: Seagram Building, New York 1960 Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City 1964 Archigram: Plug-in City 1965 Louis Kahn: Salk Institute, La Jolla 1965 Cedric Price: Fun Palace 1965 Alison and Peter Smithson: The Economist Building, London 1966 Reyner Banham: The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?

1966 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City 1966 Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contra­ diction in Architecture 1967 Buckminster Fuller: US Pavilion, Montreal Expo 1969 Manfredo Tafuri: ‘Toward a Critique of

1970 Archizoom Associati: No-Stop City 1970 Osaka Expo 1971 Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers: Pompidou Center 1971 Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Archi­tec­ ture of Four Ecologies 1972 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: Learning from Las Vegas 1972 Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier: Five Architects 1972 Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt Igoe housing demolished 1972 Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo 1972 Alison and Peter Smithson: Robin Hood Gardens, London 1973 Robert A.M. Stern, Allan Greenberg, Romaldo Giurgola, Jaquelin Robertson, Charles Moore: ‘Five on Five’; the ‘Grays’ versus the ‘Whites’ 1973 ‘Oppositions’ founded as the journal of the IAUS 1976 Christian NorbergSchulz: ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ 1977 OM Ungers: Berlin as Green Archipelago 1977 Charles Jencks:

1981 Bernard Tschumi: ‘The Manhattan Transcripts’ 1981 Duany Plater-Zyberk: Seaside, Florida 1982 Bernard Tschumi: Parc de la Villette 1982 Michael Graves: Portland Municipal Services Building 1982 Steven Holl: Pamphlet Architecture 9: Rural and Urban House Types 1982 AutoCAD version 1.0 1983 Kenneth Frampton: ‘Towards a Critical Region­ alism: Six points for an architecture of resistance’ 1983 Daniel Libeskind: ‘Chamber Works’ 1984 Philip Johnson: AT&T Building, New York 1984 Peter Eisenman: ‘The Futility of Objects: Decom­ position and the Processes of Difference’ 1985 John Hejduk: Mask of Medusa 1986 ‘Assemblage’ journal founded 1986 Werner Oechslin: ‘Premises for the Resump­ tion of the Discussion of Typology’ 1986 Richard Rogers: Lloyd’s Building, London 1988 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley: ‘Decon­ structivist Architecture’

1991 Lebbeus Woods: ‘Berlin-Free Zone’ 1992 William McDonough and Michael Braungart: ‘Hannover Principles’ on sustainability 1993 Jeffrey Kipnis: ‘Toward a New Architec­ ture’ 1993 Congress for the New Urbanism founded 1993 Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth found the Rural Studio at Auburn University 1994 Bernard Tschumi: Architecture and Disjunction 1995 Rem Koolhaas: S, M, L, XL 1996 Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals 1996 Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin: Archi­ tecture and the Senses 1997 Frank Gehry: Guggenheim Bilbao 1998 Leon Krier: Archi­ tecture: Choice or Fate 1998 Hans Ibelings: Supermodernism 1998 Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis: Pamphlet Architecture 21: Situation Normal 1999 Stan Allen: Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City 1999 Greg Lynn: Animate Form 1999 Kenneth Frampton:

2001 OMA: Casa da Musica, Porto 2002 Diller Scofidio: Blur Building, Yverdon-lesBains, Switzerland 2002 FOA: Yokohama Terminal 2002 Zaha Hadid: Bergisel Ski Jump, Innsbruck 2002 Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting: ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’ 2004 FOA: Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark 2005 Peter Eisenman: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin 2005 Charles Jencks: The Iconic Building 2006 Charles Waldheim: The Landscape Urbanism Reader 2009 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: High Line, New York 2009 Bjarke Ingels: Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution 2009 Pier Vittorio Aureli: The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism 2010 Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty Ecological Urbanism

Architectural Ideology’ 1969 Superstudio: The Continuous Monument

The Language of PostModern Architecture 1977 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein: A Pattern Language 1978 Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York 1978 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter: Collage City

exhibit, MoMA

Megaform as Urban Landscape 1999 John Chase, John Kaliski, Margaret Crawford: Everyday Urbanism 1999 MVRDV: Metacity/ Datatown

2010 SANAA: Rolex Center, Lausanne, Switzerland 2010 Steven Holl: Horizontal Skyscraper – Vanke Center, Shenzhen 2010 Patrik Schumacher: The Autopoiesis of Archi­ tecture, Volume 1 2011 Foster + Partners: Masdar Institute phase 1

Popular Causes Postwar housing and urban renewal

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Disciplinary Milestones

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Photo: copyright Naho Kubota

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A place for recreation would need to be preserved within the optimized economies of the city.

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Political Questions

Justin Fowler Unlike a number of your peers, you

seem to view architecture through a lens that emphasizes the persistence of types, symbols, and materials within a broader historical lineage. As you’ve grown older do you see your design process as one of exploration and experimentation or of distilling your core design values?

A little bit of both. People used to ask me: “What are you going to do next?” as if it were fashion.

And I would always say that I’m working on a set of values that I hope to improve as I have more experience with them. That’s also tempered by the kinds of projects you get. Many of us don’t have the luxury of saying I’d like to do an xyz building today and something else tomorrow.

Sometimes that expands the practice and sometimes it limits it. People ask me, “Why would you do retail pro­ ducts for Target stores?” And I always say, “Why would you not?” The right question is why people don’t diversify what they’re doing?

Michael Graves

You position your work not so much in relation to style, but rather you attempt to connect with something much deeper. What role does your choice of materials play in this formulation?

JF

That’s true, but let me answer your question as Ken Frampton would, in terms of material. When given a choice, I use permanent materials. I use stone and wood and masonry that change their characteristics over time and acquire a patina. I was at a symposium with Frank Gehry recently here in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study and he said, ‘I wish I could find a really good red for my buildings’. And I said, ‘well Frank, there are a lot of good reds for your buildings’. And he said, ‘No; one that won’t weather’. And I said, ‘We’re coming MG

At 77 years of age and having recently returned to practice after an infection in 2003 left him paralyzed from the waist down, Michael Graves is not pining for retirement just yet. For an architect whose body of work emphasizes the endurance of forms and ideas over the fleeting pleasures of fashion, Graves’ embrace of product design might seem something of a departure from his early practice. But, as he suggests, the demands of accessibility and intuitive use have been embedded within design practice from the very begin­ ning. So while Graves’ general approach remains grounded in the principles of the discipline, his newfound expertise in the environment faced by the disabled has put him at the forefront of the public debate about the role of design for those with spe­ cial needs. Here Graves candidly reflects on the physicality of design and the political necessities that now drive his work.

from that question from opposite ends then’. I look at reds or terra cottas or ochres or anything and think, what will they look like in 20 years, 50 years, 100 years?

And generally it’s better for me. But he wanted the ab­ straction of red to be permanent and in architecture that’s not going to happen unless it’s redone every year. Ques­ tions that piss me off the most are ones like, “How do you freshen your work?” So many of the kinds of inquiries we get have to do with throw-away design and throwaway culture and I don’t really think we participate in that; or at least we try not to anyway.

You’ve suggested before that this mentality developed from your excursion to Rome at the start of your career. Have you always attempted to translate the study of ruins or materials that bear the marks of time into your practice?

JF

Absolutely, however it didn’t happen immediately.

I did a big house in Indiana I covered in a new product that had made claims that had to do with doing away with flashing and such so you could have a plane and every corner would be smoothed over with a stucco-like liquid that would dry and harden. Since it was made by a re­ spected company I trusted the product but it didn’t per­ form as promised. Fortunately I had time to redo that part of the building. So I learned very early on that if I wanted to participate in technological advances that would be one kind of practice and if I wanted to participate in architecture without always paying attention to each and every new material or technological advance then I would have a totally different kind of practice. And that kind of architecture, as you point out, is something you find in Italy. I’ve even gone so far as to say that some of the great Florentine palazzi would make great green MG

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Michael Graves: Hanselmann House, Fort Wayne Indiana (1967-1971)

buildings because the windows are the right size, the ceilings are twice the height of ours thereby capturing the heat in the summer, they’re based on cross-ventilation, the materials are found locally and so on. It’s all there.

Beyond the literal issues of materiality, how would you describe the physicality, or rather, the substance of your work?

JF

My own house, which I look at every day, has aged brilliantly. The building has good bones. So you could make changes – a wall here or there – not that it’s really adapted to that. I haven’t needed to do that except when I was learning how to drive my wheelchair around pretty tight corners. Obviously these corners would’ve been widened if I had been paralyzed before the design, but now it was up to me to find a way to do it. I can get around pretty well without scraping the wall too often. But short of that the building seems to have substance.

Outside of museum design most people don’t think about how a wall meets the floor. That’s amusing because usually they want it to go away. Some people make floor pieces, some people make wall pieces, some people make both or they do something that starts on the wall and melds into the floor. Saarinen’s TWA terminal pas­ sageways certainly had to deal with how that trans­for­ma­ tion would take place, how one would end and the other would start since the concept of ‘wall to floor’ is ambig­ uous in a space that was elliptical. But if you look at Renaissance buildings there’s a clear admission of that connection in material and their proportion. And I empha­ size proportion: in Modernist work one would try to make a board at the base of a wall go away, in traditional work it would be something like 4-6 inches. But what if you made that 18 inches? What if you made it out of

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masonry? What if it really were something that would stand there in an unexpected way? Mine are about a foot tall and it gives the whole room a sense of permanence I don’t think you have with something more fragile. Now if you take that kind of condition to the wall meeting the soffit, you continue to discuss the room, its volume, and its permanency by virtue of the way you detail it when you’re not using significant materials, wall board, for example.

I still want the volume of the room read, so it’s a bit of a dilemma, but nevertheless, with a bump and grind here or there you can make those two join each other as if somebody thought about the join and it’s not just an L in section, but something a little more complex than that.

Are there projects of yours from early on that you think have aged particularly well?

JF

MG The office buildings and the hotels that were built with a little more substance than some of the houses have aged well. It’s interesting that we never got a lot of houses for rich people and so there wasn’t the chance to do something with material. There were always budget concerns with the Hanselmann House, the Benacerraf House and some other things. But then we haven’t done that many houses. Schemes, but not very many built.

So looking back at the Humana Building and a hotel we did in La Jolla and the winery in the Napa Valley, I think all those things have a kind of quality of being there permanently. It’s tough to get people to think of archi­ tecture in that way.

If preservation is considered as one response to aging, then your Washington Monument res­to­ ration project is interesting in its ambivalence to­ ward its subject. On the one hand, you don’t want to be­tray the timeless ambitions of its ideo­logical JF

Warm Atmosphere

Best known for buildings that are abstract, if not ethereal, Junya Ishigami has taken a different direction with the design of a facility for patients afflicted with dementia.

While his projects often have elements of reduced proportions that are made of contemporary materials whose properties are pushed to their structural extreme, he has collected parts of old traditional houses from all over Japan and recombined them into a group assisted living residence in Akita Prefecture that will be completed next year. Ishigami discusses this original and nuanced arrangement of warm interiors.

Jeffrey Inaba What were the most important reasons

to develop a more domestic, enclosed feel through the repetition of traditionally proportioned ele­ments and by limiting the amount of light through the use of the existing roofs. Can you discuss your interest in these qualities?

for deciding to adopt old buildings? And how do you see this project in relation to your body of work so far?

From the beginning, the client was not in­ter­ ested in the typical nursing care facility for dementia pa­ tients because they wanted to avoid having a hospital feel.

They wanted a completely different concept for a group home. The client had researched examples outside of Japan and liked one in which each room had its own en­trance, like a ‘house’. Leading up to each house, there was a ‘street’ for circulation. It was important for them to cre­ate an envi­ ronment where patients could recognize their own place by virtue of the approach and entry to their room.

In response to their request, I did various studies to see how I could approach the project in a contemporary way. I thought that attaching a generic entrance onto a modern building would make the whole thing appear fake.

The example the client described was in Europe: it had a stepped entry porch with a mailbox attached to the side and a wooden door to enter. I concluded that these ele­ ments wouldn’t work well with contemporary architecture, and thought it can’t be built without reconsidering the language of contemporary architecture. Thus, the design was arrived at by an idea not about form or history, but in response to this particular demand by the client.

Junya Ishigami

Your cultural and institutional projects are striking for how little mass there appears to be.

Their nearly invisible quality is paradoxically what gives them such a presence. A sense of scale is often established by very slender structural com­ ponents and large areas of glazing that draw light into the space. In contrast, it seems you have tried JI

The group home is a nursing care facility but it es­ sentially is a residential house. I can’t imagine an elderly dementia patient being cozy and having a happy life in a hospital-like setting.

As I started to the think about the warm atmos­phere of a residential house, I did not want the building to just have the appearance of being warm. Rather I wanted this warmth to be based on a principle about the architecture.

This residential feeling comes from homes that already exist in the world that were not designed by me. I wanted to produce a new environment through their assembly.

IJ

People with dementia lose ability to orient them­selves and to reliably navigate even once fami­liar spaces. Given this unfortunate but real fact, what do you hope patients will experience living in the building?

JI

One of the requirements was there were to be dis­ tinctions among rooms so that patients would recognize their varying identities and appreciate the variety in the interior as a whole. We selected existing homes from all over Japan that were planned to be demolished and relocated them to the site. We wanted to connect these homes together respecting the regional characteristics and existing conditions. Hopefully, the patients will appreciate these slight differences.

IJ

Structure is a central part of your work.

Often it is used to organize the space and program.

Is that the case with this project?

JI

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