Introduction
The City of three Objects
Towards an object-oriented pedagogy
In 1971 Reyner Banham published his famous book on Los Angeles.1 As the subtitle The Architecture of Four Ecology already suggests, Banham was in search to find, as a European-educated historian, a new access to grasp the uniqueness of Los Angeles.
„It is difficult to register the total artefact as a distinctive human construct because there is nothing else with which to compare it, and thus no class into which it may be pigeonholed. And we historians are too prone to behave like Socrates in Paul Valery’s Eupalinos, to reject the inscrutable, to hurl the unknown in the ocean.“2
It was clear that Banham was confronted with an artifact he had never seen or experienced before. Its mixture of geographical topography, climatic uniqueness, and environmental beauty confronted with the zeitgeist of mechanization of life through technology, especially expressed by the car, became the entrance for Bantham the discover new forms of architecture, like the shopping mall, the drive-in, banks, churches, restaurants, etc. It became obvious that as a neo-functionalist, Banham not only admired the works of Ed Ruscha on the industrial, mass-produced objects like the petrol stations and the car, which triggered this new urban culture. Ruscha’s objects of desire became Banham devices. Not only did Banham learn how to drive a car to discover LA, but what I mean is that Banham realized that the belief in the machine age needed a different approach as the European formal readings of new urban patterns produced by Sixtus V in his Plan of Rome, Baron Haussmann’s Grands Travaux for Paris, Vienna’ Ringstrasse or even Cerda’s Barcelona Grid.
Banham’s Methodology
Banham’s approach to analyzing Los Angeles leaned on methodologies from another discipline, like Biology. In opposition to other postmodern readings of the city as layers of history and its permanences like Rossi, or
the formal racing of the city as a figure/ground diagram like Rowe or as a semiological phenomenon like Scott. Brown and Venturi did this in Las Vegas, he used the idea of ecology, as used in biology. As defined by Ernst Häckel, Ecology unites the two Greek: οἶκος, “house”; -λο γία, and describes the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have concerning each other and their natural environment. What he did, is not just to describe the ecologies. He wanted to know what they produce. As a modernist, he was interested in the new life or new life forms that emerge when two entities, two different kinds of objects: ´the natural environment: the beaches, its hills, its plane topography between them and the technical objects, like the car, the fiberglass, and the new film industry. Let’s take the example of his first ecology Surfurbia, for example, It is this rise of new urban beach culture that came to life when the technological material properties of fiberglass met the wave of the LA beaches and produced the surfboards or thought about new fantasies on the foothill, which due to its edge between the hills and the Plains of ID produces the Hollywood boulevard which all its Theaters, Bowls and Studios through the technological innovation of a new medium: the film. Reading Banham’s approach from a more object-oriented viewpoint, we could argue that Los Angeles is the outcome of the fusion of the qualities of two kinds of objects, a natural one and a technological one, one describing what is given to us, one describes what we produced out of it.
Towards an object-oriented pedagogy of design
The presented projects within this book attempt to develop, based on the thesis of Graham Harman’s Object Oriented ontology (OOO)3 and the work of Gilbert Simondon On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects4 and a new form of design methodology.
To summarise what such a methodology could mean or how it works can be best described by my reading on the emergence of Los Angeles shopping malls. As many might know, it was the Austrian Architect Victor Gruen, a born Viennese who needed to escape from Nazi Austria, who invented the first shopping mall. When we try to understand how this new kind of building might have come into existence without just being an idea of an Architect, we might see that what happens is nothing else as the exchange or fusion of qualities of one object with the qualities of another. The first quality of the shopping is the convergence of an urban piazza, or middle-aged marketplace, with the interiority of a huge climatized shed. As Viktor Gruen described it once, he wanted to reproduce the second district, I guess his memories of the Karmeliterplatz, into the non-historical context of LA. But for this new interiority to work within an urban landscape of no density, other qualities of two objects had to converge as well:
the streets of cities and the roofs of buildings. What we can find in the first shopping mall is the fusion of the roads of LA with the roof of a building, to produce a new urban ground on the top of the building to host a car park. What can be learned from the described examples is that in opposition to classic Gestalt pedagogies, whereby architects would start with abstract geometrical figuration (just remember the oval circular drawings of baroque churches or the formal composition of the Bauhaus) the design research studio explores the exchange of qualities of various objects and fuse them with the qualities of another to form a new kind of urban artifacts.
In the presented studio three kinds of Los Angeles objects are converged together: natural objects: the hills; cultural objects: the sta dium and bowls and an infrastructural object: the carpark. To be looked for in this studio are the kind of LA’s that are embedded within these 3 Objects Los Angeles is made of its public containers, its utilitarian infrastructures, and its natural sublime.
Peter Trummer
Innsbruck 2018
1.) Reyner Banham, Los Angeles-The Architecture of Four Ecologies, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971.
2.) Reyner Banham, Los Angeles-The Architecture of Four Ecologies, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971, p.23.
3.) Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology. A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books. New York: Penguin Random House, 2018.
4.) Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. (Originally published 1958). Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017.
Works
TITEL
Geiser Michaela | Rammler Stefanie
TITEL
Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
TITEL
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef
TITEL
Fröwis Alexandra | Pinggera Hannah
TITEL
Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
TITEL
Geiser Michaela | Rammler Stefanie
TITEL
Geiser Michaela | Rammler Stefanie
TITEL
Geiser Michaela | Rammler Stefanie
TITEL
Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Geiser Michaela | Rammler Stefanie Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Geiser Oppitz Maximilian| Hamberger Zeno| Hamberger Caspar
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Birlmair Marco | Feichtner Michael Hubert
TITEL
Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
TITEL
Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
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Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
Langer Tobias | Lechner Paul
TITEL
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef
TITEL
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef close
TITEL
Eberharter Janna |Kreuzsaler Daniel Josef
TITEL
Fröwis Alexandra | Pinggera Hannah
Fröwis Alexandra | Pinggera Hannah
Fröwis Alexandra | Pinggera Hannah
TITEL Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte
Charlotte Thorn Luca Zanarini
TITEL
Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte
TITEL
Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte
TITEL
Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte close up
TITEL
Zanarini Luca | Thorn Charlotte
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
TITEL
Öztürk Ali | Kasem Abdul Rahim
IMPRESSUM 2022
IOUD
Institute of Urban Design / Universtität Innsbruck
Univ.-Prof. Peter Trummer
Technikerstraße 21c
6020 Innsbruck AUSTRIA
This book has been financed by the Institute of Urban Design –IOUD, University of Innsbruck. lou.d
