Essays 2000-2001 by Julian Varas

Essays 2000/01 JULIAN VARAS

CONTENTS

ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS OF THE EXTRA LARGE, p. 3

NOTES ON THE GENERIC CITY, p. 31

LANDSCAPES OF ENTERTAINMENT The urbanism of the Quaternary Society, p. 44

PUBLIC / PRIVATE REGIMES, p. 66 spanish translation, p. 77

organizational models of the XL1

A POINT OF DEPARTURE: ARCHITECTURAL SELF ORGANIZATION

In contemporary physics, self organization has come to designate processes involving the spontaneous appearance of behaviors that do not comply with the principle of â&#x20AC;&#x153;production of minimum entropyâ&#x20AC;?. They result in complex though consistent spatial organizations, which emerge when systems are pushed far from equilibrium. The notion came to replace the general idea which regarded certain natural phenomena as purely chaotic, lacking any type of organizational pattern. One of the widest known cases involved the generation of turbulence in

Submission for the AA Graduate School, February 2000.

hydrodynamics. As Prigogine and Stengers explain: “For a long time turbulence was indentified with disorder or noise. Today we know that this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macrosocopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self organization.” According to current theoretical discourse, architecture would seem to possess it‟s own self organizing capabilities. Beyond specific thresholds in scale, the architectural cause-effect chain stretches to the point that it can no longer yield a predictable result: the increase of sheer quantity renders 3

traditional architectural principles null . A concrete instance of this phenomenon is represented by the change in the function of the façade of a building, as its depth increases. If the façade was typically conceived of as mediating between exterior and interior conditions, how can it react when internal dimensions prevent it from exerting anything else but “local” or “peripheric” 2

I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984, page 141. 3 The issue of “quality out quantity” has been treated explicitly by Koolhaas in “Bigness or the problem of the large”. See R. Koolhaas, SMLXL. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995. p. 495-516.

effects on the overall mass? Whenever those conditions occur, it has been observed, the function of mediation becomes negligible in its effects, whereas that of stabilization (offering the

city

visual

stability)

the

programmatic

and

environmental diversity of the interior, becomes its most relevant aspect. The organizational principles of the façade, thus loose every connection with the interior to become ruled only by external – urban- necessities. Another case of architectural self organization takes place whenever an autonomous built mass stretches over such a distance, that its visual coherence can only be attained by means of a megalomaniac gesture. Every time one such threshold is crossed, although it represents only a point in a continuous graded field, some new qualities emerge: they are the result of a certain form of self organizing processes, given that no intentional act is needed on the part of the designer for them to happen. Within the philosophical framework of a “materialism of the incorporeal”, acknowledging the effects of self organization helps material practices to reconfigure themselves. By identifying new conditions, it prevents them from falling back into exhausted discussions, overcoming limitations inherited from the fixating apparatus of 60‟s typological thought.

Is it possible, within this context, to work out new thresholds – to recognize specific moments- whereby architecture acquires the properties of the extra-large? How can this new domain be individualized? and, What new qualities and conditions are then generated?

A SPECIFICITY OF THE EXTRA LARGE

Despite the explicit contention –in SMLXL- on the existence of a form of “extra large” architecture, it is necessary to keep in mind that neither that category nor any other concerning architectural form can be asserted “a priori” of form itself. Therefore, neither the extra-large nor anything else matters, if it can‟t be explained on the basis of already existing material 4

and historical evidence . The ways by which novelty comes about cannot be known beforehand –just like the threshold of speed at which a vortex appears in a flow-; they can only be acknowledged

they happen. This

precisely the

mechanism whereby notions such as the large or the extra-

It would seem as if, then, the only function of theoretical discourse would be that of “producing like out of like”. There is a friction however, a subtle yet fundamental incongrutiy between language and matter, by means of which a certain virtuality is reserved for the word.

large are constructed; it‟s always a post rationalization aimed 5

at explaining what is already there . Yet, at a general level, it is important to state the “a priori” possiblity of differentiating certain areas wherefrom, because of the convergence of certain type of programmes, materials and techniques, a relatively high degree of consistency can be achieved for a practice. The specificity of a practice can then be conceived of as the result of the solidification of tendencies inherent to the materials which it deals with, into technical knowledge. In traditional definitions of design practices, materiality too played

substantial

role

establishing

distinctions,

competences and specificities. (When speaking of materiality, it is important to be reminded that it is not the physical substance of “things” that is being referred to, but rather the “matter”

out

which

problems

are

constituted)

The

subsequent failures of XXth century‟s attempts in dealing with the complexity of the metropolitan condition, lead to a situation in which

all disciplinary knowledge was broken down into

politically rival segments. A widespread defensive attitude accounted for a definition of practices on the basis of qualitatively irreconcilable polarities such as city-nature, publicprivate, 5

representative-infrastructural…Radical

ideological

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998,

separations prevailed, whereby architecture was mainly concerned with the private or semi-private, while urban design –the domesticated version of post WWII urbanism- was supposed to deal with the public realm ( especially in the sense of giving a physical expression to ready-made ideas about it ). Their respective competences were not defined, as it were, on scales of intervention: some of the hybrid architectural/urban

aggregates

that

originated

with

the

pervasiveness of capitalism since the 50‟s were produced as pieces of architecture or infrastructure in America, whereas european interventions –most of the times being comparatively small- were labeled as “urban” in their intentions. Applying the same rationale, landscape design used to claim authority over the “natural”, while architecture looked down on it, busy in the determination of the unchanging. Such

rough

epistemologically

depiction

fragmented

ideologically

knowledge

within

and design

practices, is meant as a historic contextualization of some more recent attitudes seeking to regenerate themselves under the light of a less restraining –yet all encompassing- ethics. A profoundly discouraging intellectual alchemy has managed since the 50‟s, to combine into an articulate architectural doctrine, all the impossiblities of our present age. “According

p.51.

to Derrida we cannot be Whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be Real, according to Virilio we cannot be There”, as Koolhaas caricatures this situation. But, even if they may have constituted useful tools in the description of certain facts, concepts of fragmentation, simulacrum and placelesness only served to undermine the role and to diminish the potential inherent to material practices in the current state of capitalism. Sanford Kwinter has been very explicit in this regard, in his “plea for the need for a new trial and for the ultimate liberation of these demonized concepts from what may now be an outdated ideological mode that wrongly confuses „wholes‟ with 6

totalities…” ; at the same time that Koohaas reminds us of his own struggle: “Bigness became a double polemic, confronting earlier

attempts

integration

and

concentration

and

contemporary doctrines that question the possibility of the Whole and the Real as viable categories and resign themselves

architecture‟s

supposedly

inevitable

disassembly and dissolution” .

Urbanism, Urban Design, Landscape Design or Urban Planning, are the practices which have undertaken in one way or another the task of proving organizational models for

6 7

Sanford Kwinter, Politics and Pastoralism. Assemblage n. 27, 1994. Rem Koolhaas, op. cit., p. 503.

territorial expanses of land. Excluding the discipline of Urban Planning, which generally refused to provide physical models, it is hard to think of any of their proposals as being still useful for dealing with the present metropolitan condition (the metropolitan condition, just like modernity itself, problematizes not only the consideration of those cities usually considered “metropolitan”, but actually of every urban settlement). These practices of the Extra-Large that the XXI century is inheriting are still embedded with two basic tendencies that linger from a pre-metropolitan thought. The first one is the idea that the materials that are to be organized are “urban”

in a most

traditional way –arising out of the isolation of the city, so that it remains conceptually or ideologically different from the countryside,

against

its

conceptualization

mere

concentration of program, as a singularity originating out of tremendous density. The second has to do with the fact that, having spread all over the globe, capitalism has evolved in the last quarter of a century from an expansive mode into an 8

implosive phase . The models of organization that it had generated in the last two hundred years were aimed at optimizing the expansion of existing settlements, or at 8

Following authors David Harvey, Fredric Jameson or Gilles Deleuze, the spatial implications of globalization as the current stage of the productive system have been theorized extensively by A. Zaera Polo. See: A. Zaera Polo, Order out of chaos. AD, The Periphery, 1995; Notes for a topographic survey. El Croquis n. 53, 1990.

controlling vast areas devoid of previous occupation (or liberated of it by means of brute force). In view of this, practices of the XL are being challenged, on the one hand, to devise models of occupation that can productively take into account temporalities of use -so as to ensure an optimal exploitation of available space- and, for the same purpose, to foresee strategies of decay and re-use; and on the other, to imagine models that are capable of incorporating all sorts of programmatic materials (especially considering the whole cycle of production, leisure and consumption). In short, what has now grown into a very evident reality is the need to search for renewed ways of engagement between material organizations and patterns of human activity.

Stadium as showroom. Osaka, Japan.

ORGANIZATION AND DURATION

The most notable attemps in this direction are to be found not in recent architectural or urbanistic agendas, but rather in the secret evolution taking place since aerial photography started to be exploited for military or large scale engineering purposes. Since then, also, it has been discovered how large-scale spatial organizations acquire consistent patterns in the course of time, which can only be seen from the air. A good example of an early work (1976) pointing in that direction is Georg Gerster‟s 9

“Grand Design” . Although this kind of production may have been regarded by the 70‟s design culture as a rather naïve, if not altogether celebratory, account of the contrasts between the industrialized, the underdeveloped and the unspoiled, what was certainly not grasped was the common substrate whereby all of the organizations presented could be explained as a result of a few form generating processes, acting on different materials. In Gerster‟s work, although perhaps more consciuosly so in 10

other recent publications , certain type of organizational phyla

Georg Gerster, Grand Design: The earth from above. London: Paddington Press, 1976 10 James Corner and Alex S. Maclean, “Taking measures across the american landscape”. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Corner and Maclean‟s work is intended explicitly at expanding the idea of landscape, by showing how the realm of production has engendered systems of territorial control that render it visually coherent. Their approach is somehow limiting, however, in that it impliciltly presents landscape as essentially devoid of human occupation. In this sense, it reinforces the traditional opposition between city

are being identified and exploited esthetically. Standing out among them, however, Gersterâ&#x20AC;&#x;s pictures cut across a great variety of organizations by pointing at the machinic processes they embody. No matter how diverse their materiality, artificiality or cultural specificity, all of them show common and landscape. See also:Yann Arthus-Bertrand, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Earth from the airâ&#x20AC;?. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.

characterisitcs derived from the diagrammatics of their process of production.

The genesis of form is entrusted not to a

centralized intelligence, capable of devising the final results before the process is even started –which would amount to the design of an “object”-; but to localized, individualized and perfomative

rationalities,

each

them

equipped

with

personalized, hardly consistent aims. In Bergsonian terms, what distinguishes them from mechanistic (linear evolution) or finalistic (oriented towards a final form) organizational models, is the fact that they incorporate duration as a fundamental dimension of

the

creative process. The meaning and

implications of durational morphogenetic modalilites have become more evident as current explorations in CAD have started to rely progressively on animation techniques in order to produce form. In an extensive theorization of the evolution from static models to stability models, Greg Lynn

has tried to

demonstrate how the Leibnizian-Deleuzian idea of space can

Regarding the continuity between natural/cultural productions J. Reiser writes: “Recent advances in experimental mathematics have shown that the onset of these [machinic] processes may be described by the same mathematical model. It is as is the principles that guide the self-assembly of these „machines‟, for example, chemical clocks, multicellular organisms or nestbuilding insect colonies, are at some deep level essentially similar. The notion of „machinic phylum‟ thus blurs the distinction between organic and non-organic life.” Jesse Reiser, Water Garden project description, Andrew Benjamin, Reiser+Umemoto. London: Academy Editions, 1998. 12 The work of Greg Lynn, can be cited as one of the most consistent explorations into the nature of durational morphogenetic processes. For an

Village of LabbĂŠzanga, Mali.

become a productive concept in architecture. Contrary to the neutrality of Cartesian geometrical space, where every position is equal to any other, in the sense that it has no particular overview, see: Greg Lynn, Animate From. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

attributes except for itâ&#x20AC;&#x;s spatial coordinates, Lynn seeks to define space as a continuous vectorial field, where every location is unique, since it is affected to a particular degree by a great number of forces. Organizations that result from explicit duration-based processes are thus dependent on the notion of a space that is graded by the forces that populate it, and, on the other hand, on the nonlinear dynamics of the rule-based processes that generate them;

calculus

(replacing

linear

algebra)

being

the

mathematical ground by which the results of their interactions can be determined.

CASE STUDIES

1: The farmer as designer Freed from the explicit demands of representative visual culture, the realm of production has been a consistent source of esthetical input for material practices throughout the (XX) century. The logics of optimal performance, acting mostly on â&#x20AC;&#x153;amoralâ&#x20AC;? domains, have managed to draw esthetic attention on themselves repeatedly.

Wheat Fields. Washington, USA

To the early (and late ) XXth century fascination with machines and industrial constructions, to the understanding of beauty in

Although works like Jan Kaplicky‟s “Just for inspiration” still insist on drawing on the same sources of inspiration, nowadays the teleological content has been almost completely removed. It is no longer an expectation to find “ the new” at the end of the path –whichever it is -, but somewhere “on the way”. Jan Kaplicky / Future Systems, Just for Inspiration. London: Academy Editions, 1997.

nature as a product (as opposed to an originality), farmlands 14

can now be added as an entity that is loaded with virtuality . Negotiation, environmental sensitivity, lack of iconographic constraints, ephemerality, contingency: these are some of the main concerns of the farming process. The forms generated in farming are devoid of an overall visual control, but nevertheless they result from the interaction of very precisely determined (and strictly followed) rules of action. The only questioning here to the authority of efficiency as the main parameter of control, is that of sustainability â&#x20AC;&#x201C;because it implies more and better production. The action is informed by simultaneous demands of internal and external consistency. Internally, the capabilities offered by the harvesting machines, the opportunities and limitations imposed by soil and weather conditions, the several regimes of temporality influencing every process, represent some of the factors responsible for the machinic behavior of the system. Some of its features can only be explained, on the other hand, with regard to its external consistency. Just like any other system that can be individualized as such, the process of farming can be understood as belonging to a broader ecology where

exchanges

information

with

other

systems.

Virtuallity is understood here as the capacity to produce form not through resemblance to a pre-given model, but through the actualization of a diagram.

Technological, cultural and meteorological milieus exert an indirect but decisive influence on the internal unfolding of the process.

2: Leveling off urban formations Within the context of the aforementioned holistic approaches to material reality, one of the most important implications about urban organizations brought about by aerial photography, has been the unequivocal disposal of the opposing traditional notions of “planned city” and “organic city”. Although today those categories could be equated to more advanced concepts arising out of theories of organization (perhaps the concepts of meshwork and hierarchy could serve for that purpose), this is precisely so, because there has been a significant shift whereby they have been detached from their former implications of “order” and “disorder”, respectively. The basic mistake that triggered this operation was that of simply ignoring

market

generators of order.

organizational

logics

–meshworks-

See: Sanford Kwinter, A materialism of the incorporeal, in I. Abalos and J. Herreros (Eds), Natural Artificial. Madrid: Exit LMI, 1999. 15 There is a more fundamental aspect to this problem, however, if we are to consider the problematic nature of the negation of order. Alongside other “false problems” the idea of disorder is condemned by Bergson as a case of a “retrograde movement of the true”. “In the idea of disorder there is already the idea of order, plus it‟s negation, plus the motive for that negation (when we

Market –or meshwork- organizational logics are not necessarily linked to actual markets in the sense that economics usually refer to them. Instead, they imply the effects of collective behaviors generated through the interaction of a number of

encounter an order that is not the one we expected……When we ask „Why is there something rather than nothing?‟ or „Why is there order rather than disorder‟ or „Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?‟ we fall into the same error: We mistake the more for the less, we behave as though nonbeing existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before exsitence. As though being came to fill in a void, order to organize a preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility”. G. Deleuze, op. cit, pp. 17-18.

heterogeneous agents, acting on a same hierarchical level. Although meshworks never exist at an ideal state –actually, every urban organization can be analyzed as a composite of market and command elements-, they seem to be the main force accounting for the endogenous emergence of complex organizational patterns, in every settlement that used to be misunderstood as lacking order. The comparison between grid-based American cities and some building-type-based Asian cities, reveals how two extremely dissimilar urban patterns can be ultimately explained on the 16

basis of a difference in degree . Their diversity, according to this view, is a consequence of variations in the amounts and interlockings of “command” and “market” structures. Whereas in the American case the infrastructure is clearly shaped bureaucratically and its infill (the architecture) has been unleashed to the shaping of the market, the Asian case (but also recent sub urban developments in America) inverts the 16

Much of the current theoretical struggle to overcome fragmentary perceptions of reality takes after Henri Bergson‟s analysis of the nature of difference. A whole tradition of western metaphysics falls under his critique, for not taking into account that real –qualitative- difference only exists in duration. “This is the Bergsonian leitmotif: People have seen only differences in degree where there are differences in kind…His fundamental criticism of metaphysics is that it sees differences in degree between a spatialized time and an eternity which is assumed to be primary”. “Duration is always the location and the environment of differences in kind; it is even their totality and multiplicity. There are no differences in kind except in duration –while space is nothing other than the location, the environment, the totality of differences in degree.” G. Deleuze, Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1991. p. 32.

relation of the two types of components: the final deployment of architecture results from the non linear negotiation of several

forces

–economical,

topographical,

cultural-,

while

the

architecture itself boils down to just a few archetypes which nevertheless allow for the customization of some of its elements.

3: Traces of flow Historically, material infrastructures have consisted of large deployments of facilities that enable, foster or increase the productive capacities of a given civilization. Their large scale is temporal as much as it is spatial: they outlive almost any other structure, not just because of themselves, but especially through their influence over the configuration –material, political,

cultural-

extensive

territories.

scale

and

performance parameters are maximized in infrastructure, representation, monumentality, and other esthetical concerns are usually disregarded. The kind of polemics that Koolhaas, as 17

early as 1972, was trying to raise with his project at the AA , was aimed at expanding the reach of architectural practice through the incorporation of long neglected infrastructural operations. While the elite disciplinary debates were en route to an ever increasing detachment from such seriously ongoing processes as the extreme politicizing, militarizing and sheer 17

“The Berlin Wall as Architecture”, Rem Koolhaas, op. cit.

economic exploitation of urban space; his point was that, in the face of these processes, the ethics of resistance were only serving to reduce the scope of architecture, and so to deprive

City freeways, Los Angeles, California, USA.

society of its alleged benefits. But what is unique, however, in Koolhaas‟s conceptual operation is the recongnition of the sheer performativity of the Berlin wall in terms of flow controls. Building up on this scarcely noticed implication, infrastructure could be understood more comprehensively as the set of material devices that control, channel, formalize or prevent the flows of “stuff” over a certain territory. Under this light, structures that appear to be extremely heterogenous, in terms of form and function, can be analyzed in their capacity to exert control over diverse types of flows: human flows, traffic flows, water flows, information / energy flows…

Revetments along the Missouri River, Missouri, USA.

A key concept in the explanation of flow dynamics –otherwise known as hydrodynamics- is that of “path of least resistance”. In the context of a material field of differential resistencies, it constitutes the route between two points which demands the fluid to spend the least amount of kinetic energy, in order to transverse it. As a general principle, it can account -although only partially- for the shapes acquiered by entities such as riverbeds, highways, drainage systems or railway tracks. By reversing its direction, the principle can also explain the workings of flow stopping or diverting devices, such as certain military constructions (from the China Wall to the Berlin Wall), damns and irrigation systems, erosion preventing barriers, etc.

EPILOGUE

What is the notion of the Extra-Large that can be extracted from SMLXL? Although Koolhaas himself has discouraged the attempts to search for consistency in an architects oeuvre, it is also clear that he has somehow sketched his own plane. Acknowledging the exhaustion of the gesture and the futility of the object, is part of an integral operation that undermines authorship and cinically condemns the idea of the sublime. Therefore, instead of stating a taxative definition, it holds ideas of what the XL is not. If Bigness posited a qualitative threshold as a result of an increase in size, here, it could be argued, the distancing of the observer and the disclosure of his achievements, embody an ideological program in itself: a different threshold appears, not as a singularity in the continuity of an object‟s attributes but rather in one of the parameters that describe the relationship between observer and object. (Beauty as a consequence of our ability to extract new knowledge from reality?) Organizations falling within this domain, we have added, are never “pre-given” in their material configuration, that is, they acquire their shape –never final- only as a result of non linear genetic processes, for which duration implies the only truly creative dimension. Specifically, the unpredictability of the

results does away at once with the possibility of a finished object and establishes contingency as a rule. The realms of industrial and agricultural production provide useful examples of modalities able to exert control over a territory. But, perhaps most importantly, they reveal the necessity of their integration into a hybrid condition that overrides established functional boundaries and accounts for a spatial organization of the whole cycle of flow of matter/energy. This is particularly challenging, since it implies the need to incorporate conflicting interests -from radical environmentalism to ruthless developmentalism- by negotiating them into consistent wholes. Production of form is not machinic because of our capacity to design pieces of software that are able to model such type of behaviours and render them productive according to more or less arbitrary aims, but essentially because of a diagrammatics in which human intelligence and action are mere catalysts of processes that ensure, simultaneously, the reproduction of form in general â&#x20AC;&#x201C;its persistence and survival- and its creation anew at every single moment in time and space.

References Yann Arthus-Bertrand, The Earth from the air. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998. James Corner and Alex S. Maclean, Taking measures across the american landscape. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of non-linear history. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Georg Gerster, Grand Design: The earth from above. London: Paddington Press, 1976. Jan Kaplicky / Future Systems, Just for Inspiration. London: Academy Editions, 1997. Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995. Sanford Kwinter, A materialism of the incorporeal, in I. Abalos and J. Herreros (Eds), Natural Artificial. Madrid: Exit LMI, 1999. Greg Lynn, Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Ilya Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Alejandro Zaera Polo, Order out of chaos. London: AD, The Periphery, 1996; Notes for a topographic survey. Madrid: El Croquis n. 53,1990.

NOTES ON THE GENERIC CITY IN THE FORM OF A DIALOGUE18

It is possible that we are witnessing the Second Coming of the Generic City in the context of a worldwide sprawl of capitalism as the prevailing mode of production. The quest for character, uniqueness and distinction that obsessed architectural culture since the late 1960‟s can be retrospectively regarded as a horrified reaction to its First Coming. The boosting of western economy after WWII in conjunction with an ideological context that promoted (and demanded)

intense

technological

and

infrastructural

development, provided the necessary conditions for its first appearance. Peter Hall: “…the great post-war economic boom got under way, bringing pressures for new investment in factories and offices. And, as boom generated affluence, these

Submission for the AA Graduate School, February 2000.

countries soon passed into the realms of high massconsumption societies, with unprecedented demands for durable consumer goods…”

Did the Generic City start in America? Is it so profoundly unoriginal that it can only be imported? The “natural” habitat of mass society, the Generic City started to develop somewhere in America, around the middle of XX century. Why did it start in America? On the one hand because of the economic expansion that followed the second world war in the United States, but perhaps more significantly, due to the existence of a certain cultural ground that was a lot less resistive to the forces of modernization. The european context, on the contrary, had a deeper concern with the iconographic, which ultimately led to a later, and for that reason more painful, emergence of the Generic City. In fact, what was born quite naturally in America, was and still is resisted in Europe, as a syndrome of global homogenization (the case of Paris can be quoted as clinging to it‟s traditional identity)

Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice have to share the original bait.

Because once identity has been irreversibly commodified, once it has been acknowledged as a potential income generator, it automatically freezes, it stops evolving, it stiffens, it becomes a cultural trap since it will not yield anything but dead matter. To worsen things, the demand for it is ever increasing, which intensifies the process geometrically.

Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy.

It has been said that postmodern culture is characterized by a lack of “Center”. This coincides with the realization that urban – historic- centers are no longer venues capable of issuing meaning to their surroundings. The only meaningful event is actually the effort put into the maintenance of this generator of moral and aesthetical doctrines, at the cost of exploiting what remains of the city (most of it) and returning to it a form of second hand, worn out and malfunctioning cultural principles. In most cases the only raison d’ être for the historic city centers is their tourist economic function.

The in-transit condition has become universal

There were times when leaving / arriving at a city meant a whole ritual of “passage”. In the Generic City, however, there are no more thresholds differentiating it from “other” places. The whole idea of getting somewhere that is different in “character” vanishes with the advent of the Generic City and along with it, the possibility and the excitement of change. Traveling is now just a function, and airports are just catalysts to that process.

Like the flakes that are suddenly formed in a clear liquid by joining two chemical substances, eventually to accumulate in an uncertain heap on the bottom, the collision or confluence of two migrations establishes, out of the blue, a settlement.

The transcendental ideas of origin and finality are remiss to the Generic City. It is more likely that it will emerge spontaneously out the opportunistic assemblage of crowds in search of benign conditions and specific locations that offer such conditions. The Generic City –certainly fictional in its idealized statusincreasingly exposes patterns of social and demographic self

organization

systematically

relinquishing

historical

teleological commitments.

Housing is not a problem. It has either been completely solved or totally left to chance; in the first case it is legal, in the second “illegal”, in the first case, towers or, usually, slabs …in the second, a crust of improvised hovels.

The Generic City has finally disposed of all social agendas. Spaces once meant to enhance social cohesion –the street-, or those supposedly illustrative of ideas of social and individual well being –“green spaces”, “public plazas”- have now been supplanted by The Residual™. Housing is no longer a rightful claim or a well intentioned initiative: no more social cross breeding

between

bureaucratic

elites

and

impoverished

masses. To each its own idiosyncrasy, its own legality and its own misfortune.

In certain frightening spots all three [roads, buildings and nature] are simultaneously absent. On these “sites” (actually, what is the opposite of a site? They are like holes bored through the concept of city) public

art emerges like the Loch Ness Monster, equal parts figurative and abstract, usually self-cleaning. If the idea of a non-site (or the opposite of “site”) is possible at all, then it raises the question if control can be turned against itself. Non sites are essentially spots which, being currently devoid of economic activity, were once intensely rooted in the process of production. They are actually going through a change-of-use period in which control has been relaxed. Is it an insurmountable contradiction to try to artificially engineer such residual spaces (“junkspaces”)? –control that the uncontrolled stays as such. …its most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no difference whatsoever. Buildings may be placed well (a tower near a metro station) or badly (whole centers miles away from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Networks become overstretched, age, rot, become obsolescent; populations

double,

triple,

quadruple,

suddenly

disappear.

Given that it does not seem possible to give up a certain need for planning, it would be useful to redefine its use, its scope and

its aims, and indeed, its techniques. In the face of such crude realizations the concepts of “good” or “bad” planning must certainly evolve. Planning will become completely useless so long as it is not able to make space for the unpredictable. Determination of land uses, for instance, can no longer aspire to an extreme precision. The project for Melun-Senart serves to illustrate one such possibility: establishing the boundaries of land to be developed (and conversely, that which is to be preserved as “natural”) is as much as can possibly be controlled.

While infinitely patient, the Generic City is also persistently resistant to speculation: it proves that sociology can be the worst system to capture sociology in the making. It outwits each established critique. It contributes huge amounts of evidence for and against each hypothesis.

The fact that almost every sociological hypothesis is being proved simultaneously in the Generic City shows that most established notions regarding the relation between architecture / urbanism and collective behavior have to be revised. There is a positive side to this transient lack of certainty, however, since it re opens fields of investigation for architecture and urbanism

that had been closed down on the basis of a few sketchy sociological “recommendations”.

spite

preoccupation,

its

absence,

even

history

industry,

the

major Generic

City…History returns not as a farce here, but as service.

The Generic City, as a phenomenon, is being constantly shaped and re-shaped by the industry of tourism. As an economic activity that is based on the visual consumption of the city‟s icons, tourism has turned the productive system of the city into a sheer economy of symbols of identity. In such context, history becomes increasingly commodified as it is enacted and sold for the price of a hot-dog. Thus, every account of social history is reduced to a bunch of marketable clichés which ultimately turn out to be in compliance with a very reduced set of oral and visual narrative modes. Debord: “As with the fashionable adoption of seemingly rare aristocratic first names which turn out in the end to be borne by a whole generation, so the would-be singularity of an object [history] can be offered to the eager hordes only if it has been mass produced”

…obviously, after initial experimentation, Mies made up his mind once and for all against interest, for boredom…The Generic City proves him wrong: its more daring architects have taken up the challenge Mies abandoned, to the point where it is now hard to find a box.

The architecture of the Generic City is itself generic. But contrary to the common belief, generic architecture is not made out of simplistic volumetric solutions. In the pursuit of uniqueness, every resource is valid -and necessary- to achieve identity. Interestingly, the box is here not an “alternative” solution, but rather one that simply augments the existing catalog –although it is certainly not the most popular one. The architectural choices aimed at establishing a visual identity are not positive ones, instead, they are the result of negative thinking: because of the need for differentiation, all that is known is what should not be done.

Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a mutation in professional architecture that produces results fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s development.

Whichever the ideological reasons that initially substantiated Postmodernism

were,

its

functionality

relation

modernization can now undoubtedly be asserted. The fact that in its most sophisticated versions it was aimed at introducing cultural thinking into architectural discourse, has somehow triggered the opposite response. “Culture” has been relentlessly incorporated, yet not as an operative notion that serves to put into question accepted values, but as a ready-made catalog of “cultural” icons, ready to be deployed as architecture. This has come to constitute a system whereby it is no longer necessary to

“invent”

any

architectural

image,

with

the

obvious

implications on productivity.

Infrastructure is no longer a more or less delayed response to a more or less urgent need, but a strategic weapon, a prediction.

As the most valuable investment that the Generic City can make, infrastructural operations are supposed to be aimed at optimizing its productive capacities and at enhancing the life of its inhabitants. Now that is rarely the case, since it has become the most potent weapon in the political struggle of the cities to “attract” the capital. Thus, the structure of the Generic City

cannot be explained exclusively with relation to its own internal dynamics. Its fate is inexorably linked to that of its rival cities. In this context, public investment has stopped being an end in itself to become a mere catalyst to flows that exceed its limits in quality and quantity. The basis for strategic action in the Generic City is no longer a given material condition, but the set of possible scenarios that could emerge had no action been taken at all.

The city is no longer. We can leave the theater nowâ&#x20AC;Ś

There is no real Generic City. It is only an abstraction, a virtual condition, whereby it is possible to reconstruct the idea of a city as an operative system. It is an assertion aimed at recovering the possibility of the city as a real artifact, beyond (or perhaps including) all claims to its purely representational â&#x20AC;&#x201C;spectacular, theatrical- function. Even if its image has been subjected to commodification, if tourism in its hunger for icons has debased any former authenticity, or if its history has been translated for mass consumption into a clumsy array of theme parks / trails / squares or

any other

sort of

one-day-long perceptual

experience; or perhaps precisely because of all these reasons, the tragedy of urban life is becoming ever more intense. In spite

of all efforts aimed at artificially increasing differences between cities â&#x20AC;&#x201C;or, again, precisely because of them- the urban experience has regained a status of universality that yields the pleasurable feeling of being at home, on most places of the planet.

References Rem Koolhaas, The Generic City. in SMLXL. New York: THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1995. Peter Hall, The city in theory. in “The City Reader”. R. T. Le Gates and F. Stout, Eds. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Second Edition.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

LANDSCAPES OF ENTERTAINMENT19 The Urbanism of the Quaternary Society

A THIRD CONSTRUCTION

Based on the assumption that the urban condition can be productively thought of as concrete assemblage of the forces at play on a virtual diagram of development, this text posits a theoretical framework where Urban Models are understood as sedimented typologies of growth that emerge out of the interaction

and

differentiation

small

scale

components, and regional and global processes.

Submission for the AA Graduate School, June 2000.

pre-urban

A particular conception of the relationship between the notions of project and material reality is also one of its main cohesive forces. The project has two different ways of participating in the concept of reality. One is through its physicality, by “being” itself a material and perceptible reality, contained by a larger thing of the same kind (“reality”); the other one is through its capacity to pre-figure it, or, to speak more literally, to “forecast”

it. In this

case there is a qualitative distinction between them, since what differentiates them is precisely time (project + time = reality). If this latter affirmation does not necessarily hold true for every single project (sometimes, project + time = old project), to accept the implications of an inversion of its terms (project = reality – time) creates a different viewpoint. As exemplified in the “retroactive manifesto”, to understand emergent orders – higher levels of organization arising out collective behavioursas unspoken projects, surely implies a questioning of the exclusive authority –in the sense of being “author”- of the subject in a process of material making. (If reality can be conceived of as a construction of desire, it is important then not to restrict to the subject the ability to exert that desire.)

The word “Project” is the literary latin [ pro- (preposition denoting forward direction) + iacere (verb: to throw or cast )] translation (and viceversa) of the anglosaxon term “Forecast”.

ON MODELS, STRATEGIES AND MODALITIES

As a framework for the analysis of modern and contemporary urban phenomena we can understand their processes of construction and evolution by way of two distinct categories. Models of urban organization are diagrammatic representations of ways in which cities emerge, expand, differentiate, mutate or evolve, with regard to some aspect of their functionality. In modernity, this functionality has often been that of an instrument of mediation between the material necessities of social and technological development and the land, as a limited stock of energetic resources and physical space. Urban models, therefore, serve to categorize the city as a performative apparatus. Instead of conceptualizing the urban under the perspective of the signifying object -and therefore confining almost any interest entailed by its modification to that of a cultural statement- the stress will be laid here on the concept of urbanization as particular function within the material process of production. As such, it involves the artificialization of the land through its rationalization or striation, under operational regimes that are dictated by its function.

From the point of view of the interrelations between the aims, means and specific resistancies of the field upon which the action unfolds, the problem of the urban can also be framed as a series of distinct strategies of urbanization. Strategies of urbanization, as specific sets of correspondences between abstractly pursued aims, available technologies and concrete opportunities offered by the territory, are thus the first move in the chain of spatial and material determinations whereby the abstract urban models become actualized in urban forms. They represent patterns of adaptation and reciprocal influence between the generic condition of the diagram and the specific configuration of a field. A second group of materials comprises a set of modalities whereby a simple primitive undergoes regimes of systematic differentiation. As typological constructs, these primitives are elementary spatial and / or functional units, that are artificially isolated from a material continuum by deliberately ceasing to open the chain of relationalities that dissolves them into a combination of other systems. It is a conventional unit that is contingent for the job assigned to it in the specific context of the construction of an operable urban systematicity. The result of constructing a description of an urban system using this tools, is thus operative in the sense of allowing for the codification of the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x;s performance in a diagrammatic

fashion. This is ultimately a means whereby architectural knowledge can be codified abstractly as sets of active relations, rather than exclusively in the form of imagery –which is itself no more than a specific kind of media for registering a concrete actualization of that operative knowledge.

In this context, “performance” plays an key role as it has taken over the discussions that were formerly concerned with the production

and

intepretation

meaning

material

organisations. In linguistics, meaning and performance are the effects associated to the semantic and pragmatic functions of the language, respectively. During the decades of 1970 and 1980, semiological criticism became a widespread model for the explanation of material organisations. If this could initially be attributed to an alleged critique of the homogenizing and universalizing

tendencies

modernism

–which

were

denounced for imposing regimes of functional efficiency over the existing fabrics of society, without any sensibility towards material, social or historical pre-existencies-, in the longer run, its migration from the realm of criticism and interpretation into the field of architectural practice confined it to an exercise in textual or symbolic mediation. This instrumentalization of semiotics was unable to theorize an active role for architecture

There is, of course, the whole issue of the performativity of the image. To operate mainly on the basis of images, however, means to reduce the

and the material practices in the context of a system of production ever more demanding, both in terms of quantity and of performance. The current preoccupation with the issue of performance can therefore be explained as the endeavour to tackle the constitutive â&#x20AC;&#x201C;in the sense of having direct consequences over the physical environment- rather than the signifying effects of the material practice. It is about the possibility to establish chains of predictable cause-effect relationships between the material and the vital realms, between form and behaviour.

FANTASY ISLANDS AS URBAN MODELS

A first critical observation that underpins the relevance of this subject consists in recognizing that material organizations as diverse as Disney Land, the Las Vegas Strip, a luxury resort in Seychelles, the city of Cancun, an amusement park like Coney Islandâ&#x20AC;&#x;s, and other examples the like constitute, in fact, fullblown modes of urbanization. What would have been formerly thought of as urban fragments, have nowadays acquired a complexity of spatial relationships to a problem subdivision and hierarchy within a limited bi-dimensional plane.

certain critical mass, both in terms of their size and their techno-functional complexity, that allows for their consideration as in-themselves urban entities. This does not mean that, as such, they have become functionally independent from their surroundings, but rather that they have expanded their sphere of influence to a global scale, and that they have also become the main sources of employment and economic activity for vast regions under their influence. There is a variety of meanings and images, however, that are conveyed by the concept of Fantasy Islands. The gradual isolation or the enclosing of different types of functions in the city â&#x20AC;&#x201C;even cities themselves- is a traditional means of controlling flows of resources, energy and people. It is also a critical feature of the type of infrastructures of entertainment that are typical of the modern metropolis, and the way in which this condition is achieved largely determines their functionality and performance. On a broader level, the same designation applies to a general portrayal of the prevailing trend in the cultural and economic organization of the contemporary city. Following the spatial and productive readjustments of industrial capitalism after the seventiesâ&#x20AC;&#x; crises, the magnification and industrialization of the services of leisure and tourism have emerged as the leading forces shaping the re organization of the cities. The processes

of industrial tertiarization in the main capitals, implying the liberation of lands formerly devoted to industrial or port activities, converged with the ever increasing transnational displacements of resources –human as well as material- and financial capital, in a self-sustaining cycle. The economic resources of the cities have become more and more dependent on these types of industries, which, in turn rely in the exploitation and marketing of the city‟s material and symbolic assets.

In this text, I have chosen to refer to its condition as

that of a “quaternary society”: the amount of mediation introduced in the process of production has rendered leisure time (“improductive”) services more important –or at least equally important- from the point of view of their cultural and economic consequences than services oriented towards material production proper. From the wide range of structural transformations and reconfigurations that cities are undergoing in order to cope with these new modalities of economic integration, three different

In the current “economies of signs and space”, places and identities are the industry‟s main resource and –paradoxically- also their main product. “It is rarely self-evident that a location must be visited; thus, some significance must be assigned to it that invests it with importance”, this is, in essence, why the processes of city-marketing, place-marketing or identity-marketing are generally conservative and reluctant to inventiveness: they are based on the recycling of their own detritus, with virtually no new information added into every new phase of the cycle. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (Eds.), “The Tourist City”, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. p. 262.

types stand out as prototypical.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Resort Citiesâ&#x20AC;?, like Las

Vegas, Cancun or Walt Disney, come out as the result of an explicit project of exploitation of the industries of leisure and tourism, as their main source of activity. Tourist-Historic cities ( Prague and Jerusalem, for example ), in turn, are characterized by their proclivity to profit from the commodification of their historical centers and their general material and cultural heritage; whilst Converted Cities ( like London, Barcelona or Buenos Aires) represent cases of intensive and circumscribed urban refurbishment meant specifically for the purposes of tourist and business developments.

FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE

All these urban prototypes resort, in different ways and to different degrees, to the techniques of the fantastic as a means to divert financial and human flows towards them. Indeed, if production of fantasy is understood as an alienation of the experience through the production of intensely artificial and mediated environmental conditions, then it would not be altogether unfair to describe the contemporary urban condition 23

Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein , op. cit., p. 262.

as outright Fantastic. The case with which we would like to deal more specifically is represented, however, by those urban models in which the issue of Fantasy Production is part of a deliberate strategy and is thus consciously elaborated in terms of an architectural or landscape-urbanistic projectual problem.

Yet, within this restricted scope it is important to distinguish at least two distinct strands which take up the issue of the Fantastic. If intentionality itself is one of them, then the specific purposes that initially lead one to pursuing the production of such fictitious conditions, undoubtedly constitute another major axis of the problem. Regardless of the different techniques that have performed most suitably in each particular case, Architectural Fantasy, as a sort of fictitious material narrative, 24

embodies a whole tradition of critical and utopian thinking . Form the very inception of modernity, the theme comes up repeatedly, since the projects of Boulle, the etchings of 24

“Utopia is infeasible: a utopian project is an unfeasible project. It may be so by default or by choice (when no attempt is made to concretize a project, „choosing‟ infeasibility as its basis), or by a failure to evaluate ceratain aspects or structural risks (employing „structural‟ here in the broadest sense), or by ignoring economic considerations (when means do not match ends, when a plans concrete context does not match its cost, etc). Being utopian, then, means being distinctly „out of it‟. In a more positive vein, it is generally acknowledged –at best- that utopia is a question of „imagination‟ or „fantasy‟. The terms „fanciful‟, „fantastic‟, and „imaginary‟ thereby become positive synomyms, and are the labels that are inevitably applied to utopian architecture”. See Franco Borsi, “Architecture and Utopia”, Editions Hazam, Paris, 1997. p. 10.

Piranesi, or even the drawings of Escher, until the more recent technological and social fantasies of the 1960â&#x20AC;&#x;s, or the intensely narrative proposals of the early Koolhaas; in most of these cases the function of the fantastic is that of defining a liminal â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or, what would amount to more or less the same thing, utopiancondition of the material practice, a gravitational center that is far enough from the everydayness to be relegated to the realm of the fantastic, yet one which speaks the language of the real, acting critically by declaring itself unreal despite its material existence, but being also productive by addressing concrete problems through its figuration.

A LANDSCAPE OF ICONS The recent development of Las Vegas â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stripâ&#x20AC;?

The kind of fantastic projects that are of interest here, share with the former certain techniques, certain intentionality but differ with them in their sheer facticity, which is a consequence of their opportunism, their non-criticality and their radically pragmatic attitude. They are the output of the American productive organization, a system where the condition of artificiality was accepted in its entirety from the moment of its

inception . Only with the advent of postmodernism and its attendant redemption of mass cultures (entailing a similar sympathetic idealization), were these projects brought back to light, after having been systematically ignored or looked down on by the disciplinary elites of high modernism. It comes as no surprise then, that some of the key observations of XXth century urban culture generated in the late sixties and seventies are in fact inquiries into the condition and development of cities in North America. Having little or no historical heritage to preserve, and a sustained economic growth after WWII, the american city and territory were developed on the basis of a few generic protocols which 26

applied to the “natural” landscape served to render it artificial .

“In America landscapes are constructed; it is necessary to construct them before one can settle in them. The artificiality of North American nature can be appreciated on flying over the geometrical designs created by the harvesting machines and the irrigation systems of the Midwest. It might be that the break with tradition is nothing more than a manifestation of the rupture with nature, of a civilisation whose origin does not lie organically in a particular place, but rather in disharmony with it”. A. Zaera Polo, “USA 1990: Topography of an Artificial Territory”, Quaderns 184 26 For a collection of images of 50‟s and 60‟s early consummerist cultural artifacts and urban prototypes, see Phaidon‟s “Boring Postcards – USA”, Phaidon Press, London, 2000.

“Learning from Las Vegas” constituted one of the first attempts to theorize the condition of the non utopian urban developments that had relied heavily on the exploitation of the leisure industry to sustain its economy. Today, a historical perspective reveals more clearly the least regressive side of the authors‟ theoretical agenda. Most of the academic debate that it generated was concerned either with its polemical criticism of modernism or with the most evident architectural repertoire that was being reclaimed as “legitimate” architecture. This latter movement, as was pointed out by

Koolhaas, had enormous consequences on the american and especially asian productive organizations during the 80‟s, for whom it provided a concrete set of design motives ready to be deployed as the architecture of the “Reagan Era”. In neither case, however, was there a explicit recognition of the abstract generative power of the descriptions –and its built-in criticalityof the Las Vegas Strip that the text formulated. In defending the trascendence of the sign in architecture, a set of research programs were put forward which intended to deal more or less 27

directly with the issue of urban and architectural performance . In spite of the fact that the studio work conducted by Venturi and Izenour was strongly influenced sintactical analysis, great emphasis was layed in recognizing the spatial configuration of the strip, and the several modalities that control its form and growth. The description of the Strip was constructed through the use of protocols: Gasoline Stations and Motels are some of the cases studied. In Gas Stations, the site would be “determined by the traffic count, cost of the land and competition”, while the building itself would comprise “two or three service bays, facing the front; the office; storage space; customer services; vending machines, rest rooms, and so on”. In the case of Motels, the site would be chosen on the basis of

Amidst the more “political” statements, the middle section (“Studio Notes”) raises very specific questions about signs and their relation with behavioural

“traffic counts, access to freeways, frontage costs, easy visibility”. The building is also described in similar terms: “bedrooms near parking and connected by covered walkways to other facilities; standard room size is 14 feet wide by 27, 24 or 21 feet long; enter off a double loaded corridor, luggage rack, closet and shelf space on one side, dressing room with sink and bathroom on another; then bed sitting room; large sliding glass window to patio, balcony, pool…”

Each of this

descriptions embodies a virtual architectural or urbanistic project; and its potentiality does not reside in its capacity to reproduce a given iconography, but rather in its ability to deal with established sets of relationships between performance and spatial organization.

At the time of the writing of LfLV, the organisation of The Strip could be diagrammed as a complex set of systems of circulation and interchange. Most evidently the movement of tourists and gamblers in their cars -though perhaps more subtly the energetic and financial exchanges- defined loose and timedependent boundaries between different areas of the Strip. The kind of chaos –order- thereby exhibited was based on a seemingly random proliferation of signs, parking lots and casino patterns. See, for example, “Las Vegas Signs”, Learning from Las Vegas, pp. 80-81. 28 Learning from Las Vegas, pp. 78-79.

/ hotel structures, unfolding upon a regular infrastructural pattern of traffic lights, asphalt surfaces and a continuous median strip. Formal control on the Strip was thus exerted parametrically, that is, not through visual criteria aiming at the resemblance of a given model, but through the non linear interaction

planning

restrictions,

economic

criteria,

merchandising techniques and overall efficiency. The visual “randomness” that it acquired was mostly the result of the struggle of signs to achieve maximum visibility. Ultimately, the relative sizes of images and letters constituted an index of the speeds of circulation, car driver maneuvering times and general distribution of functions. Both the Las Vegas Strip and the “Sprawl City‟s image (are) a result of process. In this respect they follow the canons of modern architecture that require form to result from function, structure and construction methods, that is from the process of its making…Modern architects contradict themselves

when

they

support

functionalism

and

the

megastructure. They do not recognize the image of the process city when they see it on the Strip, because it is both too familiar 29

and too diferent from what they have been trained to accept ” In this way, LfLV was claiming the social and aesthetic legitimacy of the most radically capitalist city, where sheer

Learning from Las Vegas, p. 119.

competition, rather than planning theory was the engine of the urban machine.

Over the three decades that followed LfLV, the process that originated the urban configuration of the Strip has been subject to intensification and diversification. In the most recent developments, the traditional dichotomy between building and sign has dissolved. The progressively larger size of the new buildings has rendered pointless any strategy of publicity that is

based on the detachment of signage and “shed”. Such is the case, for instance, with New York-New York, perhaps the most interesting recent piece of architecture to have been completed. As R. Somol pointed out in relation with the production of an extremely artificial environment in NY-NY, “this endopolis proliferates through a massively conditioned

mixture of

circulation, landscape and entertainment; it no longer operates along the architecture-urbanism axis (with its terms “building” 30

and “town”) but along the quite other axis interior-landscape” . The intensification of artificiality and theming has lead in many cases to the “interiorization” of whole areas of the city –the “Fremont Street Experience” being the paradigmatic casewhile simultaneoulsy promoting the “exteriorization” of hotel lobbies, restaurants and casino spaces, like NY-NY „s. Contrary to the common belief which states that theming –as being essentially a problem of faking the appearance of things- can never entail real programmatic or organizational novelty, the extreme simulation carried out in the food courts in NY-NY has relieved the architects –or should we say planners?- of having to resort to a much more complex system for the removal of garbage. By having a troupe of workers theatricize the action of removal in front of the customers, it not only becomes domesticated –and thus made productive in a themed 30

Robert E. Somol, “Start Spreading the News…”, ANY 21, New York, 1997.

environment- but also allows for a scattered distribution of food services, without a central core.

On a broader level, the intense process of development undergone by The Strip constitutes only a partial aspect within the evolution of the overall urban system. The expansion of the so-called gaming industry, that initially boosted the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x;s economy, has reached the status where it has triggered autocatalytic loops, whereby not only the scale but also the complexity of the system has increased exponentially. The vitality of the process has crossed all boundaries of economic activity and therefore has projected its effects to the extent of imposing completely novel regimes and scales of urban development. Its sheer rhythm of growth has imposed the necessity of a diversification of the sources of entertainment, bringing about an increased number of jobs. Seen by many as a kind of new promised land, the amount of new settlers has reached 6000 thousand per month in recent years.

PROVISIONAL CONCLUSIONS: FANTASY MACHINES AND THE ENGINEERING OF SENSATIONS

In the tidal flows of modern urban ideology, the extensive discussions on fantastic architecture and urbanism have nourished some key manifestoes and critical writings that intended to set down ethical positions regarding the relationship between those practices and the mass culture from which they felt inevitably detached. In most cases, this relationship â&#x20AC;&#x201C; beyond its specific forms of articulation- was the product of an idealization of the mass. While a historian like Reyner Banham

“had to learn to drive” to somehow shorten the distance that would prevent him from experiencing Los Angeles in full, Venturi set off from New England in a clairvoyant field trip intended to vindicate the otherwise berated “commercial vernacular” architecture and imagery of the Las Vegas Strip. Even Rem Koolhaas, whose main achievement consisted in identifying the social performance of the new architectural and technological devices engendered in Manhattan, was ultimately driven by a profound belief in the separation between architect and mass. Beyond its ethical implications, however, Koolhaas‟ and Venturi‟s work represent two extreme positions that arose from a positive interpretation of the urban culture of C20 american city.

Their main divergences become fully exposed through

their respective choices and analises of the devices of fantasy. Whereas Venturi was attracted by the political dimension and the powerful critical effects of figuration embedded in the commercial architecture of The Strip, Koolhaas‟s interest was laid on the technical and spatial apparatuses and dispostions that fostered –or were fostered by- the engineering of new bodily experiences. Even if both of them shared an interest in the artificial environments of neon lights and the seemingly chaotic aggregations of discrete architectural motifs, the further

projection of those concerns into their respective oeuvres has produced very different, if not opposing, material results. In the history of cultural modernization, the progressive artificialization of the urban experience was made possible with the introduction of certain architectural prototypes such as the ones which were initally tested in the leisure parks at Coney Island. One of the vectors that crosses transversally through a great variety of programs is that of the severing of interior and exterior conditions. A whole architectural genealogy could be traced, for example, starting programmatic evolution

with the Panorama. The

and differentiation of this early

prototype has yielded, in the last century, typologies ranging from the screen based spectacles to the current complexes like enclosed beaches or ski resorts that re-create complete physical and sensorial experiences. Challenging the most radically utopian prognoses of 20th century urbanism, these pervasive typologies offer very rich and complex â&#x20AC;&#x201C;both spatially and technologically speakingpossibilities for the configuration of interior worlds, but, as a consequence of their increasingly autonomous nature, they pose unsettling questions about the character of the resulting urban spaces that will contain them. In this context, it seems likely, and somehow promising, that the practices of Urbanism will have to renounce any lingering aspirations of producing an

environment that is homogeneously â&#x20AC;&#x201C;though not rigorouslycontrolled. Instead, they will need to adopt strategies where a careful administration of spatial control is the defining condition; this will approach them even more than now to the practice of museum design.

References Books Reyner Banham, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies”, Allen Lane, London, 1971. Walter Benjamin, “Illuminations”, Pimlico, London 1999. Franco Borsi, “Architecture and Utopia”, Editions Hazan, Paris, 1997. Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books, New York, 1995. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Verso, London and New York, 1991. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (Eds.), “The Tourist City”, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999 Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1994 Scott Lash and John Urry, “Economies of Signs and Space”, SAGE Publications, London, 1994 Alex Mac Lean, “America”, in “Mutations”, Stefano Boeri et alt., Actar, Barcelona, 2000. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Donald N. Levine (ed.) “Georg Simmel. On Individuality and Social Forms”, The University of Chicago Press, Chicgo and London, 1971 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, “Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form”, MIT Press, 1997.

Articles Aaron Betsky, “An Urban Fata Morgana: The growth of Las Vegas”, Archis, June 1997. Robert E. Somol, “Start Spreading the News…”, ANY 21, New York, 1997. Paolo Tombasi, “Las Vegas: from road to town”, Casabella 613, June 1994 Alejandro Zaera Polo, “USA 1990: Topography of an Artificial Territory”, Quaderns 185, Jan/Feb/March 1990.

REGIMENES PUBLICO / PRIVADO31

Durante los últimos años tuve la oportunidad de participar del desarrollo de varios proyectos que involucraron decisiones concretas sobre la conformación del espacio público. Más allá de las distancias geográficas, culturales e ideológicas que los separan, creo que es posible identificar un conjunto de problemáticas que los subyacen, y que contribuyen a delinear algunos de los rasgos de una discusión global sobre la condición de lo público y las relaciones público-privado en el ámbito de la arquitectura y el urbanismo.

Desde los múltiples sistemas sociales de acciones y valores, de instituciones y de discursos, hasta las actuales redes de información, lo que se entiende históricamente por espacio 31

Published in the argentine journal “Cero 5”, June 2001.

público excede ampliamente el dominio de lo material. La evidencia ahora no podría ser más clara: las comunicaciones, tanto como los sistemas de control y transmisión de información en general, necesitan una base material cada vez más reducida y menos engorrosa para cumplir eficazmente las funciones que antes desempañaban sistemas físicos. El que una gran cantidad de funciones sociales básicas estén siendo crecientemente mediatizadas por conexiones inmateriales ha llevado a Rem Koolhaas a describir la “evacuación” del espacio público. Y sin embargo, este proceso va dejando áreas vacantes, que no tardan en ser colonizadas por funciones y rituales nuevos, patrones de acción y comportamiento que requieren un sustento físico determinado. Las disciplinas burocráticas –como tradicionalmente lo han sido la arquitectura y el urbanismo- de ordenamiento y racionalización del espacio deben así prestar extrema atención a estos procesos, ya que ellos cristalizan tendencias sociales emergentes lejos de las cuales esas prácticas materiales corren el riesgo de caer en el monólogo y la autoreferencia.

A la luz de estas preocupaciones, la propuesta es revisar tres de aquellos casos, con la intención de poder clarificar y evaluar la manera en que sus determinaciones proyectuales responden a una concepción especial de los regímenes de lo público /

privado, y emergen de diferentes visiones del usuario, de la ciudad y de la disciplina.

Políticas de la determinación: el Proyecto Retiro

El concurso nacional para el área Retiro (1995) sirvió para compensar un proceso decisorio que hasta el momento había tenido una naturaleza excesivamente burocrática, permitiendo que se expusieran públicamente las visiones de los arquitectos y urbanistas. Las propuestas resultantes pusieron en evidencia diferentes modos de pensar las configuraciones y usos del espacio urbano. Frente a la persistencia de la actitud modernista en que el espacio urbano adquiere sus atributos luego de que se hayan distribuido sobre él los sistemas edilicios e infraestructurales, el proyecto premiado pareció distinguirse –junto a algún otro- por asignar un papel preponderante a la determinación formal del espacio público,

como instancia previa o al menos simultánea respecto de la aparición de los componentes programáticos. El proyecto pretendía así establecer cualidades espaciales propias del plano público.

bien

carácter

esencialmente

burocrático

del

emprendimiento implicaba de por sí la implementación de una estrategia “top-down”, las bases del concurso apuntaban ya la imposibilidad de aspirar a un proyecto unitario como el resultado exclusivo de un proceso de adición de intervenciones en el tiempo. Ello implicaba la necesidad de que el proyecto se compusiera de un cierta cantidad de piezas formalmente autónomas, pero que gradualmente pudiesen integrar una unidad mayor. Este requerimiento, al cual el trabajo premiado respondió

con

eficacia,

proviene

una

tradición

pensamiento según la cual la unidad formal es un efecto impuesto al momento de la concepción del proyecto; razón por la que éste queda incapacitado para incorporar desarrollos no ideales que emergen por auto-organización. Por más que la unidad global fuera distribuida en unidades menores, el criterio de consistencia subyacente presuponía que su identidad formal (en cualquiera de sus escalas) debía estar dada de antemano. Esta tradición, que exige el conocer a priori los resultados formales de un proceso de urbanización, basa su proceder en

la búsqueda de identidad como instauración de un orden visual reconocible. Como actitud reconstruccionista puede que haya resultado pertinente en determinados contextos históricoproductivos, pero es ciertamente inoperante como modelo en el marco de un sistema económico y cultural que fluctúa velozmente. Dentro del ciclo productivo tardo capitalista, las modalidades

compositivas

representacionales

determinación se vuelven obsoletas incluso antes de que se las permita abandonar la condición de pura representación. En el transcurso de los 6 años de desarrollo intermitente que ya lleva,

proyecto

Retiro

fue

objeto

numerosas

observaciones y consecuentes ajustes y redefiniciones, sin que prácticamente nada de ello haya logrado salir del papel.

Frankfurt: la perspectiva como tecnología de integración

La tendencia a identificar lo público con el acto ritual de la representación –donde la representación constituye un fin en sí mismo- es tal vez la que mejor describe la posición que han construído concienzudamente Rodolfo Machado y Jorge Silvetti a través los años, en el marco de su práctica bostoniana. Esta ritualidad de lo público aparece cuidadosamente articulada en el proyecto para el “Centro de Entretenimiento Urbano” en la

ciudad de Frankfurt (1998). Se trata de un desarrollo privado (pero de dimensión colosal, y por lo tanto pública) en que se entretejen usos comerciales, culturales, esparcimiento – incluyendo un teatro lírico-, oficinas, centro de convenciones, viviendas y un enorme “spa”. La ambición central del proyecto consiste

introducción

una

pieza

elaborada

fundamentalmente sobre la base de criterios perceptivos. Como en varios otros trabajos –incluso obras enteramente privadas, como la casa de Concord, Massachusetts- la organización escenográfica del campo visual mediante técnicas de compresión o expansión ilusoria del espacio, constituye una de las herramientas básicas de diseño. En tanto que dispositivo de control, la representación perspectiva adquiere el status de tecnología de producción material.

El proyecto para Frankfurt se va formando a través de una serie de operaciones de sustracción respecto de un sólido virtual. El edificio ofrece así una imagen monolítica consistente con las preocupaciones estéticas enunciadas en la exhibición y el volumen “Monolithic Architecture”, curado por el mismo 32

Machado y Rodolphe el-Khoury . Si bien Machado y Silvetti han construido una posición propia en la Arquitectura Americana, este proyecto parece hacerse eco de un discurso contemporáneo que procura dejar atrás la idea de complejidad como resultado de técnicas collagísticas o como expresión de la incongruencia entre sistemas. Del mismo modo, en el Dormitorio para Estudiantes de la Universidad de Rice, una cinta de ladrillo se enrolla sobre sí misma para generar un patio cerrado para actividades sociales. Quizás estos sean los aspectos que caracterizan la evolución más reciente de su obra. En Frankfurt, sin embargo, el interés por la tensión espacial derivada de la inconsistencia de sistemas, persiste en la contradicción entre el criterio organizativo ortogonal – cercano a la lógica eficientista del developer- que adoptan en conjunto las diferentes unidades programáticas y la estructura portante; y el casi manierista tratamiento dado a la envolvente, que se pliega y recorta diagonalmente según fugas visuales distorsionadas, asimetrías equilibradas, y otros recursos que 32

R. Machado y R. el-Khoury, Monolithic Architecture. (New York: Prestel,

ayudan a crear una condición monumental y escenográfica. Para asegurar la continuidad del tejido y la textura urbana de la ciudad el proyecto pretende fusionar las lógicas funcionales y técnicas de los nuevos programas metropolitanos con una performace típica de la escala media de la ciudad tradicional. Se trata de una estrategia que persigue un delicado equilibrio entre fragmentación y disolución, e integración formal del “mamut” urbano. Un tipo de integración, sin embargo, que hubiese dependido, una vez más, de la completitud del esquema para su verificación empírica. Yokohama: El espacio público como hiper artificio

Todo proyecto de arquitectura puede entenderse como la organización material emergente de la interacción de ciertos impulsos vitales –de la materia, de la sociedad, del deseo- y la distribución de intensidades que define el campo sobre el que ellos actúan.

La Terminal Internacional del Puerto de Yokohama (Japón), ofrecerá dentro de escasos meses una interesante oportunidad para poner a prueba las prestaciones de un tipo de espacio público en que resuena ese vitalismo de la materia.

1995)

Fundandose en el criterio de performatividad del espacio público mas que en el de representación, el proyecto rehuye polémicamente –o al menos así lo declaran sus autores- toda búsqueda de carácter iconográfico o monumental.

Uno de los conceptos principales que animan la estrategia del edificio es el de “camino sin retorno”. Si en el UEC de Machado&Silvetti el diagrama circulatorio poseía dos sentidos diferenciados jerárquicamente (ida y vuelta) y un destino principal (la piazza elevada), aquí solamente hay un sentido (ida o vuelta) y no hay punto claro de llegada (pues se trata de un loop). Lejos de la distinción tradicional entre el plano de la representación y el plano de la acción –vertical y horizontal, respectivamente-, el proyecto plantea la posibilidad de manufacturar una experiencia del espacio público en base a la continuidad de un suelo que se ondula, se pliega y se bifurca generando

diversas

oportunidades

programáticas.

topografía del edificio resulta de graduar rigurosamente la

cantidad de resistencia que las conexiones materiales entre distintos tipos de actividades imponen -según exigencias programáticas y los deseos de FOA- a los flujos de personas, equipajes, automóviles y mercaderías que atraviesan el edificio. El diagrama circulatorio entreteje así un circuito urbano que, prolongando el sistema de espacio público del parque Yamashita hacia el interior de la bahía, combina y extrae potencial generativo de los patrones de movimiento generados por el tráfico de pasajeros domésticos e internacionales. Frente a la posibilidad de establecer límites espaciales precisos y

categóricos,

proyecto

propone

régimen

determinación funcional “blando”, basado en sistemas de particiones móviles, retráctiles o colapsables. Determina los sistemas, sus prestaciones y sus rangos operativos, más que competencias estrictas o relaciones fijas forma-función. De manera implícita, el proyecto sugiere la posibilidad de establecer un gradiente público / privado mediante una administración estratégica de los sistemas de control. De ello se desprende –dado que la mayoría de esos sistemas no funcionan ya sobre la base de un diagrama de continuidad visual- lo que a mi criterio es una de sus formulaciones más inquietantes: que las diferencias de carácter entre lo público y lo privado son cada vez más irrelevantes frente al hecho de que sus prestaciones (su performance) están siendo cada vez más fuertemente condicionadas por sistemas infraestructurales prácticamente invisibles. La misma agenda teórica que a fines de los „70 impulsó a Rem Koolhaas a analizar las complejas ecologías programáticas y figurativas de los rascacielos de Manhattan como efecto de la explotación de la discontinuidad espacial entre sus distintos niveles (reconstruida como secuencia temporal mediante el ascensor), señala hoy la necesidad de reconocer el modo en que los cada vez más sofisticados sistemas de infraestructura –el de vigilancia, por ejemplo- imponen simultáneamente

regímenes de homogeinización del espacio y de diferenciación temporal. Por eso, los gradientes de privacidad ya no pueden establecerse puramente en función de criterios de distribución de competencias en el espacio, sino que deben pensarse básicamente como modalidades de uso y comportamiento que se alteran en el tiempo. Afortunadamente ello no implica una amenaza a la posibilidad de la intimidad, ni tampoco sugiere la disolución de lo público en tanto que espacio de comunicación y confrontación, sino que, por el contrario, abre la posibilidad de generar para estas categorías, actualizaciones más relevantes, eficaces y significativas.

Referencias: El Proyecto Retiro fue desarollado por Baudizzone Lestard Varas, sobre la base del anteproyecto premiado en 1995, con Becker y Ferrari como arquitectos asociados. El “Urban Entertainment Center” (UEC) fue concebido por Machado&Silvetti en ocasión de un concurso privado, en 1998. La terminal de pasajeros del puerto internacional de Yokohama, premiada en concurso internacional de anteproyectos en 1995, es de autoria de Foreign Office Architects.