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3.1.1 Lecture + Interview Aaron Betsky
Aaron Betsky: Lecture + Interview
(IaaC Lecture Series 01 december 2014; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)
IaaC Lecture Series: The architecture of huntering and gathering A deeply rooted assumption seems to exist in the contemporaneous activity of most of our architects: the imperious disciplinary necessity to produce forms that stand out by its completely novelty. These configurations would directly emerge from the genius of the architect, equipped with the original and creative thought required to constantly add formal newness to the world, being then mainly judged by this parameter. However, we already have a great line-up of formal resources and even an exhaustive formal alphabet: it seems that everything has been already done. In this sense, we can only deform existing elements trying to get an attractive and suggesting appearance, without necessarily obtaining a better result and without necessarily adding something relevant to the world. That’s why in a way, the architectonical work is being dissolved into a certain neutrality and nihilism that culminate in what could be understood as the main celebration of this defeat: the Foster Apple Headquarters. The Cupertino brand, one of the most fresh and creative companies in the world, it is dissolved into a building that is the perfect zero: no start and no end, no front and no back, pure in itself and in its dramatic reduction to the complete nothing. The negation of architecture and the clearest manifesto about its inutility as we can see in most of the nihilist apple architecture: there is actually no store in the apple store. Every time seem more obvious that it wouldn’t be ridiculous to think that we are living in a fiction created by the modernity, in which its usual narrative that was anchored in fixed points of significance through architecture has been replaced by a continuous stream of images and stories. These ones try to provide sense and coherence to our life, and the logic answer to this circumstance is to follow the proposed flow, assuming that permanence does no longer exist and that all the reality can be purely reduced to relations. Is in this context when architecture dissolves, leaving only its fixed skeleton that contrasts with the effervescence and acceleration of the world that moves around it. Cover - Turó de la Rovira, IaaC Archive. Figure 1 - German Pavilion, IaaC Archive. Figure 2 - German Pavilion, IaaC Archive. 2
However, when architecture becomes interesting is not when is producing death masses that try to alienate us through any capitalist fiction, but when tries to reveal us how do we inhabit the world, how do we survive in it and, overall, through which myths are we doing it. We can find examples of this attempt in the Belgium and German pavilions of the Venice Biennale, works that shows us to what extent we are lost in between the infinite reflections of the electronic world, in which even its physicality can be reduced into a halo of projections. We can find other works that operate through the same vector, as the production of the artist John Bennet and its questions about how to give back some life in this world through an active occupation of the dramatic emptiness of many public spaces. The way to create architecture consists in reimagine the world through escaping from the permanence value of the artificial planet in which we exist.
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A world that stops making a clear and evident sense and that denies the concept of equilibrium as a leading ideal. It is about an architecture that nor produce novelty anymore neither understand its being as fixed, but that on the contrary is aware of its lie, of its deliberated fiction. A beautiful useless construction that can inspire us to think in architecture not as a solution to our problems but as a discipline that can promote us to critically rethink our place in the world. In this direction, the work of the urbanist Theaster Gates in Chicago is revealing. Its work consists in gather existing objects in a new organization, creating a social project through it. This production reveals us the materiality of the world that is around us, and achieves, without the need of adding any new element, the possibility to find a certain beaut in what is already existing simply by reorienting and reorganization its mode of appearance.
Architecture becomes therefore a continuation of what is already existing, constantly elaborating the past, collecting it in a critical manner, reflection on it and above all, finding its underlying structures. One way to implement this methodology is the modern one, that is to say, to use all the resources that have to do with abstraction, elimination, eradication and destruction. In short, all the resources that have to do with nihilism. And, with no doubts, there is a great beauty on it. A second option is the one already described, an alternative that operates in the modern world through revealing its form and that finds one of its main representatives in Mark Bradfort. Its canvas in Los Angeles, full of signs of its streets are already an icon of this methodology. It is about reassembling all what is surround us, like François Roche in its Thailand Museum, in order to be really aware of the materiality of our landscape. An architecture that does not start by doing, but with revealing, that doesn’t try to be original, but to be nostalgic, that understands that its work consists in informing us instead of just trying to disappear. It is no longer about pretending that the architect should propose the right idea, or that he should have proper answers and solutions to all the problems, because those ones are the fix and hierarchical relations of always. On the contrary, the interesting point consists in producing what already exists, in using what we have, what is already built, in order to finally recombine it and use it in a manner that explains something, any detail that can deliberately reveal the fiction in which we live.
Figure 3 - IaaC Lecture, IaaC Archive. Figure 4 - Theaster Gates, IaaC Archive. Figure 5 - Mark Bradfort, IaaC Archive. Figure 6 - Mark Bradfort, IaaC Archive. 6
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Interview
(Interview done by Mathilde Marengo on 01 december 2014 at IaaC)
MM: My research over the last years has been focused on the Contemporary City, and in particular on the contemporary city in the Mediterranean context, hypothesising that with the uncontrollable growth that the city has undergone today, the Mediterranean, as a whole, could be considered the body of a single city. (Marengo, Mathilde, Multi City Coast, The evolving forms and structures of the Mediterranean multi-city. New models of urban thinking and perspective. Supervisors: Gausa, Manuel & Ricci, Mosè; Co-Supervisor: Eduard Bru; University of Genoa, ADD, XXVI cycle, April 2014) In the context of the contemporary city, in more general terms, we are facing a new phase in urbanisation. There are currently 3.6 billion people living in cities, by 2050 this number is estimated to duplicate (source, United Nations). In 2025, it is said that there will be around 37 mega cities over the face of the globe, each thought to have a population of at least 10 million people (Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mutations, Actar, Barcelona, 2001). The impacts of this urbanisation on the global economy and on the existing urban infrastructure and resources are already evident, and ask for innovation in urban design, technologies and services. In your opinion, which are the immense opportunities that this new phase of urbanisation offer us? AB: (Laughs) MM: And more specifically, with regards to an article you wrote recently entitled “Let’s rebuild the American Dream” (http://www. architectmagazine.com/design/lets-rebuild-the-american-dream_o) where you state that “the American dream is there to be rebuilt and built on, no rejected. […] What we really need is to make the suburbs better places to live, work and play” ; what I wonder is, is this something that applies also to the Mediterranean cities? In the sense that the Mediterranean city in general is not built as the American city, but do we need to take this opportunity to rethink the models our cities are based on? Which are the key global urban factors to attack in order to form a new urban planning that is energetically, socially and economically sustainable? Basically what is your vision of the city of the future? 10
AB: One thing that I think might be a helpful start is to stop talking about cities, because when we start talking about cities, we assume this kind of centralised situation where there is a hierarchy of everything from wealth to services, to planning, that radiates out from the centre and dissipates towards the edges. I am working on this biennale in Shenzhen, of course Shenzhen is astonishing, but also typical in the sense that you call it a city, but it really is a conglomeration of different more or less urbanised areas, that stretches for an hour drive to either end of the long dimension. And it, in itself, is part of what is the real megalopolis, which is the Pearl River Delta, stretching from slightly to the north of Guangzhou down to Hong Kong, Macau and Shenzhen, and brings a whole host of other cities with it, just over 60 million in population (confirmed by source: Wikipedia). Within such an area there are all the issues of development, impacting both social relations and the environment, which are the 2 fundamental aspects, or question which one has to ask about for any kind of concentrated urban dwelling. In other words, the question of urban development is, for me, not one much of how to create correct from for it, as it is what can we do through and by design that, first of all, will be a catalyst for creating communities that are cohesive and yet open, that are critical of social and economic hierarchies, and conducive to social freedom. And secondly, what can we do that the development of human occupation of places to live, work and play, with out using up natural resources, either locally or remotely, and in fact what can we do to improve the relationship between human beings and the physical environments that they inhabit. I think that would be the answer to your very large scale question, on a very large scale! And in all of that, we need to stop worrying about centre and periphery, and about planning to make them cohere, and we have to start worrying about different communities spread through a landscape, and about how we can address these 2 issues. Now the question of the Mediterranean brings in 2 interesting variations of that that I can think of immediately: one is on the level of the physical environment, one thing that we forget about the Mediterranean is that so much of it has been used and abused for so long that it has degraded that relationship, in a much broader way than in the way we are used to, as in seeing factories etc‌. MM: And this fact is a total paradox, because people chose where to settle into in the Mediterranean in the beginning because of its landscape and the benefits this could offer‌
AB: Exactly. It was astonishing for me the first time I went to Israel, and its the land of milk and honey, and there’s just nothing left. Now they have to pump in huge amounts of irrigation and nutrients to make it work. Sicily for me was equally astonishing, Sicily was the bread basket for the Greeks, that’s how they survived; as the North of Africa was for the Romans, and now those areas are semi-arid, and some of that has to do with the weather pattern changing, but most of it has to do with the extraction of nutrients, and the removal of trees, and all the kinds of things we human beings have done. So this is a kind of special question in that sense. Paradoxically the social question is a difficult one because by the very length of human occupation the Mediterranean has built up forms of sociality, that we love and cherish, and that in fact often become our romantic models, for what we think urban areas should be. This ranges from the New Jerusalem, that is the model of Jerusalem, to San Gimignano, to Barcelona, and these models need to be taken seriously. But they also need to be taken seriously in terms of how they work, and not necessarily how they look. MM: I totally agree, and I think that what you were saying about the megalopolis and Shenzen, and the fact of still using the term city, as this has in fact been one of the central topics of my research. When I started out, I very optimistically decided that I was going to define what a city is, and I understood very quickly that possibly this wasn’t even possible in one lifetime, because of the simple fact that the city is continuously changing. You say that the idea of the city is linked to a hierarchy, so do we need a new term to define now what we have on the scale of urbanism, or is this fact of defining also itself obsolete? AB: I would love for us to come up with a better term, because of course the notion of city is so wound up with all kinds of associations, as well as with legal definitions. The whole notion that within the city walls you are one person, you are free, and beyond the city walls you are a serf, that carries on today into our legal notions of what makes the city function, and what makes it attractive. So if we could come up with a term that would have that same kind of weight of associations, but address this much more porous environment. MM: During my research on the contemporary city, and what I was calling the Mediterranean Multi-city, I had at a point interviewed Areti Markopoulou, the IAAC Academic Director, and she had in fact suggested the term “living hubs” which I think is a term that is going somewhere: a dynamic node in constant growth. Figure 7 - Lecture at Iaac, IaaC Archive. Figure 8 - Complexity, Mathilde Marengo. 12
AB: Yet its so clinical again… MM: Maybe, but the fact is that the city itself is changing so rapidly now, as well as the evolution of urbanism as a discipline, that even if we were to find the perfect term to describe that moment, it too would have to be in continuous evolution. Landscape urbanists in fact started talking about the landscape, rather than the city, changing the paradigm or key with which we study and look at our current urban environment, finally defining a new city. This for me is a central question, because in the course of my research I was confronted by many people who point blank said that there was no way that the Mediterranean could be considered a city, and others - Vicente Guallart interviewed by Mathilde Marengo, July 2013 - said that they felt that the definition of a city really depended on the person, and could range from your bedroom to the entire globe. It was extremely fascinating for me to see the difficulty that one is faced when posed such an apparently simple question how no one really manages to give a simple answer, and everyones’ vision differs drastically according to how they themselves live the urban environment, and the world today.
Figure 4 - “An optimist and purposeful visoin”, Archive.
AB: Part of what I was trying to get at with my essay on the America Dream you mentioned before, and you asked that question about what would be the “Mediterranean Dream�, is an interesting question. What I think is important to recuperate or to reuse about the American Dream is in fact that there is an alternative to the concentrated city that is tied to notions of democracy, selfsufficiency, and was tied to notions of access to education, knowledge, as well as to green. It is also tied to mobility and continual change is built into it. So the American Dream as it is, built into the suburb, has a lot of qualities, both good and bad, that have some of the reascends of the city, but its been defined as a negative of the city, rather than as an extrapolation of the city. In the Mediterranean situation, there has been such a long tradition in terms of thinking of countryside and city as being so opposite, that, in Italy for instance, it is astonishing how the theoretical and planning apparatus can ignore the fact that vast stretches of the country are essentially one
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urbanisation. For example the whole of the Po area is urban. And as you said the coast line as well, as it is here - in Spain -, with for example the MVRDV project on the Costa Iberica, what they call the 1000km long city. In Israel or Palestine you get the same kind of thing. We still think so much in terms of old models that we don’t come to the realisation that its basically from Tel Aviv to almost Amman is one city. So what I guess I am trying to say is that in America there is a kind of theoretical background, which I have been trying for the last couple of years to point towards, that says that there are good qualities about urban living that is not citified and densified*. *”In Italy or Spain, I don’t know of any models that are the equivalent: you are either out in exile in the country side being a farmer, whether you are Virgil or Cincinatis, or any of these people; or you’re in the city being urban.” Aaron Betsky, Same interview.
Figure 4 - Theory workshopt at IaaC, 2013.
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Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona
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