a city without objects
Typeset in American Typewriter, Caveat, Oswald, Times New Roman
All rights reserved
Published in 2022 at the University of Dundee Perth Road, Dundee, Scotland, DD1 4HN
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
University of Dundee
Master of Architecture
figures: by author unless otherwise stated in figure list, p. 102
Thesis by Kamen Rusev
keywords: climate, environment, city, density, object, analogy, dream-work
School of Architecture
studio: rooms+cities 2021-22
word count: 5935
tutor: Lorens Holm
34 suburbia, roads to nowhere and planning by parking - the symptoms of a sprawling city a city without objects inward expansion - an anti-plan argument preservation of desire capitalism, architecture and the city the crisis - an uncomfortable condition the object - summary conclusion
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14 introduction the project of the city
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17 density as a necessary condition
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abstract method statement
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Dundee in two hundred years the city without objects
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Dundee, a narrative of density
102 figures 104 bibliography
thesis guide
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abstract
In order to investigate links between the individual and the forms of the city, the work brings together: analogical urbanism - the field of analogous objects; commodity capitalism - fixation on objects as com modities; environmental destruction - accelerated by commodity capitalism; dreams and the unconscious - the field of displaced and condensed objects.
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Our cities are increasingly characterised by care less expansion and wasteful development. They negate ideas of togetherness and collective life. Instead, cities resemble compartmentalised infra structured fields interconnected by the car.
of this city are not space, buildings and circulation; its fabric is defined by interruptions of the previ ously mentioned, which comprise our desires as physical misplaced objects.
Here, psychoanalysis and architecture find each other in close proximity. Rossi’s Analogous city and the unconscious, as manifested in Freud’s concept of dream-work, are the only fields where objects are blurred, reconfigured, substituted, merged, condensed, and displaced, but not destroyed.
We traditionally think of the city as a collection of buildings and streets. The car-centric city, however, is shaped by flows. It isn’t a city where the experi ence of the street matters, nor is it a city where the public hall is of any importance. Instead, departure and destination become the projects of priority, and everything in-between becomes an other - an object. The city’s objects are legitimated by the space or, in architectural terms, the ground that urban sprawl Againstprovides.this scenario, this project imagines a dense city where objects, such as they exist, do not have the binary logic of figure-ground. The basic datums
method statement
1. Immanuel Kant, ProlegomenatoAnyFutureMetaphysics (1783)
The city without objects is a speculative project that is conducted mostly through freehand drawing, photography and exploration of physical models. These methods open up a conceptual space that gives freedom to think across the humanities. In this sense, it is similar to the speculative nature of Berlin: A Green Archipelago and Yona Friedman’s Spatial City. This same speculative possibility of architecture is explored by the practices of the Soviet constructivists, Superstudio, Archizoom, Archigram, OMA, Cedric Price, Dogma, to name a few. The proposition is a prolegomenon to any future urbanism that may emerge as a city.1
Boullée
The project discusses the intricate relationship between seeing and perceiving, representing, and making the city. The process is one of thinking by iterative making. The text is, therefore, led by the drawings. The project addresses the future by critically reading and communicating the present.
I cannot think of any form of fantastic art without imagining aimless, unconnected ideas scattered here and there in no order, aberrations of the mind, in short, dreams. (Architecture, Essay on Art, 1796-7)
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method statement
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Koolhaas
[ ] its [ the city’s] existence has become like the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible, certainly indescribable. (Delirious New York, p. 293)
introduction
the project of the city
of city thinking lies in our reciprocal relationship with the environment we build for our selves. Holm and McEwan argue that we construct col lective life by constructing our environment.2 Since there are parts of us that are shaped by what is external to us, this means that we also construct ourselves by constructing our environment.3
The first narrative of this project addresses the cli mate debate at the urban scale. It speculates den sification by projecting growth along three city strips and, therefore, limiting the city’s horizontal expansion.
If the collective goal of rooms+cities is exploring new ways of living together, then our project is its mani festation - the city. This is a task established by the modern movement with propositions such as The City for Three Million Inhabitants, critically revised by a lineage of projects such as The New City of Melun Sénart, and both materialised and abandoned inside the multiple urban realities of our current cities.
Against the questions of ‘How we live with ourselves?’, ‘How we live with others?‘, and ‘How we live with the environment?‘, architecture becomes a crucial tool.
This challenge of living together seems to be most problematic; it is one of the preconditions for the emergence of civilisation but also the origin of envi ronmental damage.
The symbol of the man-made landscape is the city, and its byproduct - environmental damage. Why, then, should we consider the city to be a crucial
Theproject?importance
The work should be considered within the con text that the three rooms+cities publications have established.
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2. Lorens Holm & Cameron McEwan, 'We Construct Collective Life by Constructing Our Environment' in Architecture and Culture 2021; Vol. 8, No. 3-4. pp. 529-548. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2021.1885164 [Accessed: 16.12.2021]
3. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the ID (1923), p.25. A reference to Freud’s concept of Ego - the part of us that is shaped by what is external to ourselves.
Dundee in two hundred years
- the Ideal city & the City ideal, part I - readings of canonic cities
- the Ideal city & the City ideal, part II - Dundee -2022-2222Emptiness, a visual essay
the city without objects
The second narrative, however, interprets the densi fication of the city not as confronting the urban fab ric with a limit but as confronting the city with itself. Due to the complicated subject-object relationship that we have with the city, this means confronting ourselves with our desires.
Dundee in two hundred years. a narrative of density
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density as a necessary condition
Usually, cities expand outwards, spreading into areas that were not previously urbanised. The dis persed car city has a larger carbon footprint per capita than the dense city. Living close together is one of the preconditions for an efficient allocation of resources, such as energy and materials, that are currently scattered throughout our sprawling cities. Therefore, if we want to build sustainable settlements, we need to build more densely.
This project splits the city into three projected areas of growth, three east-west strips defined by its river edges and its Kingsway edge. It imagines a process of city expansion that happens inward within established limits. Dundee becomes a dense ly-populated and horizontally-constrained urban Theenvironment.proposal aims at a population density of 40,000 p/sq.km - a figure similar to the population density of Barcelona’s grid. The speculated den sity within these three strips corresponds to pop ulation projections for Dundee in 200 years' time.
figure 1. Dundee in two hundred years
This plan represents the vision of a condensed Dundee. It addresses the absence of figures between the strips as a contrast between existing infrastructure and - depending upon our outlook - either a decaying or a regenerating environment.
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The second image in the composition, situated in the lower left-corner of the plan, is a particular perspective of Dundee’s future. The image locates the spectator in the position of the driver’s seat. The car is symbolic to our current way of life and, at the same time, our attitude towards it is central to change.
Following the Archipelago’s lead, this project envi sions the three strips along the city’s edges as enclaves of multiple and overlapping visions. This collage of experiences would increase the desira bility of each strip and accelerate its densification. In this sense, the proposal bears an outlook on the city’s future that is comparable to the Green Archipelago. It is similar in its attempt to find innate elements in the urban fabric and bring the qual ities of a metropolis that could catalyse density. The Archipelago comprises islands of city fabric with unique characteristics - physical and sym bolic entities. This proposal, however, embodies a narrative of condensation of multiple objects that refuse to be read as distinct - a continuous hybrid mat.
reading Dundee against the Archipelago
the population within the new city limits grows, the rest of the city is allowed to be ingested by greenery. This scenario would create extraor dinary conditions such as the immediate jux taposition of a dense urban environment with forests, farmland, lakes and rivers - a direct con tact between the city and the natural - rather like Arturo Soria’s Linear city [1882] or Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk [1930]. (figure 9)
usually marked by the desires of citizens and developers, we should consider a third, which is located across the river. This is an area that consists of three settlements - Wormit, Newport and Tayport. While they are not always regarded as parts of Dundee, they connect to it socially and economically, hence, cannot be con sidered autonomous. On these grounds, we can defend a reading of Dundee as a city with a river running through.
5. O. M. Ungers and R. Koolhaas with P. Riemann, H. Kollhoff and A. Ovaska, The City in The City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, 1977; ed. F. Hertweck and S. Marot (Lars Müller Publishers,
2007).As
The city in the city defined the challenge of future planning as the rebuilding of what already exists.4 In other words, the future form of the city is uncov ered as opposed to discovered. The proposition argued that the idea of the archipelago is inherent in the nature of Berlin - a city that had developed as a network of towns.5 This attitude was different from that of the International Building Exhibition (launched in 1979) in its honesty about the condition of the city as well as in its multi-level approach to the project of Berlin. It was a plan for a city in retrench ment. The proposal argued for an urban structure that consists of distinct islands; each would be based on existing districts with identifiable fea tures that were to be preserved and accentuated.
Dundee has been developing in a few recognisable ways through the centuries. Its history could be read as islands of distinct identity (figure 2) or shape (figure 18); ribbons (figure 3, figure 4); established edges (figure 5); or a continuous mat of single-layered development (figure 6). Its status as a settlement on the river, however, has always been a constant.
Its river edge is its only limit. It is where most of Dundee’s hopes are directed due to its proxim ity to key infrastructure and the city centre. To the north, suburbs dominate the urban structure. Here, a highway defines an edge in the city’s fabric that has been transgressed by post-WWII subur ban Sincedevelopment.cityedgesare
4. O. M. Ungers, Citieswithinthecity, Proposals by the Sommer Akademie for Berlin.
20/21 figure 2. distinct settlements, end of 16th c. figure 3. ribbons, end of 18th c. figure 4. a growing network, end of 19th c. figure 5. establishing and transgressing edges, 1950 figure 6. temporary city limits, 2020 figure 7. city strips, 2220
figure 9. new city conditions
The city is surrounded and penetrated by water and a forest which now separates the north and middle strips.
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figure 10. new city conditions
This plan depicts the higher sea level that has entered the city centre. The top part of the plan represents the forest which comes inside the city to almost meet the water.
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figure 11. A derelict suburban house within the projected conditions between the dense city strips. Only a fragment of the street and a broken street sign are left in this view.
figure 12. edge samples - location
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Dundee, middle edge [top]; Budapest, water edge [bottom]
Dundee, Kingsway edge [top]; Manhattan, water edge and green edge [bottom]
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Dundee, middle edge [top]; Barcelona, water edge [bottom]
figure 13. city edge - analogies In each instance, Dundee sits on top of the coupled images.
Dundee, middle edge, city centre [top]; Berlin, islands [bottom]
Dundee, south edge, Wormit & Newport Berlin,[top]; water edge on river [bottom]
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Dundee, middle edge [top]; Magnitogorsk, linear city [bottom]
figure 14. the picturesque potential of edge conditions A dense urban environment reduces distances to the natural conditions that the city is situated in.
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Park
8. Ibid.
We perceive the city from a sedentary position and the result is its fragmented public space. The quali ties of central areas are in direct dialogue with the city’s edges. Enabled by the car, suburban sprawl continuously alters its outer and inner surfaces, both necessary preconditions for city experience.
11. ‘Quality Housing and Sustainable Communities’ and ‘Sustainable Transport & Digital Connectivity’ in Dundee Local DevelopmentPlan, 2019. Dundee’s development plan actively encourages car use through policies.p. 34-43; p.85-89; p. 100-102.
The idea of a densified Dundee is a reaction to its sprawl, facilitated by mechanised transport or more specifically - by the car. It is a form of resist ance to the indefinite expansion of man-made land scapes and dissolving urban experience.
6. Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, (Chicago, 1967), p. 3; cited in David Harvey, The Right to The City
suburbia, roads to nowhere and planning by parking - the symptoms of a sprawling city
9. Le Corbusier, Surles4Routes(TheFourRoutes), 1941. Translation by Dorothy Todd (Published: London, 1947); p.70.
Historically,other. the car-pedestrian relationship has been difficult to reconcile. The modern movement,
10. Denise Scott-Brown, Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 1972) & John Myer, Kevin Lynch, The View From the Road, (The MIT Press, 1964)
they [Americans] should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television. Chores around the house or the weekend drive have replaced the passeggiata. The traditional piazza is for collec tive use as well as individual use, and public ceremo nies involving crowds are even harder to imagine in Copley Square [project site] than passeggiate
Venturi would describe the piazza, in the context of public space in the American city, as a place of gathering for non-existent crowds. In other words, it is a useless tool. His description of the suburban lifestyle and its symptoms in the inner city are analogous to our observation of Dundee today. He points out the abundance of open space in the city - a condition of emptiness that is directly related to the scale and functions of the car-centric city.12 (figure 16)
for example, divided the city into separate flows of traffic and public life. Dundee’s cars and pedestri ans use the same ground space (as in figure-ground); they both struggle for space in the same hori zontal plane. Naturally, the car - the larger and more dynamic entity - is given a higher priority. Mandatory parking provision reinforces the com forts of car use.11
For Hannah Arendt, living close together is the only way that power can remain in the hands of cit izens.7 Our cities, however, are no forms of togeth erness. Suburban developments and car-centric planning practices weaken the urban experience of the inner city. This results in less social interac tion and fewer potentialities for action 8 If the city is a reflection of us and the collective, then parking should be regarded as a symptom of a pathological human Corbusiercondition.speculated that the car would help repopulate the abandoned countryside.9 We are still under the misapprehension that the car is a device which connects and provides freedom. Instead, however, it clogs our cities and facilitates the distancing between us. Its detrimental effects come down to its presence as a commodity and, at the same time, a second subject in our cities. Learning from Las Vegas & The View from the Road demonstrate to us that the experience from the car seat differs from the experience of the pedestri an.10 The higher speed of the car and the necessary linearity of its path require a completely different planning practice than that of the pedestrian-fo cused street. In other words, the human and the car exist in two urban realities which affect each
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p.154.
[ ... ] man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. 6
Venturi
12. Venturi, ComplexityandContradiction, Second Edition (New York: MoMA, 1977[1966]), p. 131
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figure 15. The suburban house amidst the ruins of the city
figure 16. the city according to cars Parking-ground map of Dundee. The drawing thinks of the car as the second subject in the city.
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figure 17. dead ends
A map of Dundee’s cul-de-sacs within the boundary of Kingsway. The map is only partial as the city’s suburbs continue further out and so do the cul-de-sacs. Plan by Sean Noon, part of group work.
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figure 18. a typical Dundee suburb figure 19. a typical dead end in Dundee
figure 20. a typical empty parking multi-storey car park in Dundee’s city centre.
figure 21. a typical empty fields Emptiness in Dundee’s city centre.
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figure 26. current city edge The suburb has almost reached the white house in the countryside.
figure 24. imitating countryside Learning from Las Vegas, p. 158, where the image is titled ‘Precedents of Suburban Symbols’.
figure 27. big sheds almost ruin the illusion This typology usually sits within a close distance of suburban housing, sometimes even across the street.
figure 28. the features of our landscapes A bench with a view towards a tree in a parking lot
figure 29. a world of cars Kingsway retail park
figure 25. this field is private property There are fences everywhere.
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figure 30. a typical event in the suburban pedestrian scenario
a city without objects a narrative of a city that is impossible to objectify
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The city without objects is an extension of the city of 3 edges; it concentrates on the city centre, located in the middle strip. The project imagines the process of densification as a three-dimensional challenge.
Dundee’s plan becomes contaminated with fragments from other places; each is symbolic of a certain form of living. The fragments introduce new geometries for the architectural layers within the strip.
figure 32. cities and orders
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figure 33. a city without objects
The project of reimagining Dundee is a challenge of imagining a city beyond the conventional spatial and temporal logic defined by figure-ground. This plan disregards the ground as an element of the city. It puts a limit to circulation, which usually dominates open space.
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Traditional two-dimensional planning allows cit ies to be interrogated by a figure-ground plan. It is a form of representation that puts the object in a binary relation to space. The current city-archi tecture order is characterised by the opposition between the limits of the architectural object and the rest of the city fabric.
inward expansion - an anti-plan argument
The city without objects proposes a reversal of the established figure-ground logic which celebrates objects. It enables the condition of limited hori zontal expansion of the city by an inward expan sion of its architectural layers. Its fabric is built up of analogical fragments of other cities which are overlaid upon each other and blended into each other. This process creates hybrids and begins to challenge the clarity of the origins and identities of individual fragments.
figure 35. analogical field a city without objects
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figure 34. figure-ground existing Dundee
-spacesopenofmiddletheinspacesopenarrivallinearityunimportantinfrastructureorganisesthecity objects as found in Dundee analogous objects plan planperspective
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figure 36. city image, analogies, absurdity
abstractionannotisfigure-ground centre?whatgreencity
This introduction of new unknown objects is not so different to the way architecture functions in its capitalist context - an approach embodied by Dundee's V&A. The analogical process, however, is a more complex reading of Dundee’s physical fabric but also its symbolic characteristics. Parts of the city are related to entities in other cities through their shape and use. The method is influenced by Ungers’ reading of Berlin in A Green Archipelago. It highlights, critiques and strengthens parts of Dundee. For example, upon arriving in the city, one is greeted by directions (signs), flows (roads, cars, buses) and objects of potential interest, but no actual place of arrival. Circulation is dominant within the city experience. The analogous objects are inserted within Dundee’s fabric and become key disturbing elements of the new city.
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figure 37. the order of objects, figure-ground map, Dundee's central area
figure 38. the order of grey space, parking-ground map
figure 39. the order of interruptons
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figure 40. the order of flows, street map
figure 41. the city captured in a moment in time
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Campo Marzio highlighted the contra diction between the demand for order at the level of the building ( the rational, the finite, the whole ) and the city’s will to formlessness (the irrational, the infinite dimension, the incomplete).13(figure 45 on p. 64) This is a relationship that Rossi would try to reconcile. He argues that, while the city cannot be reduced to the singularity of an object, the only way to read its typological structures is through the individ uality of its artefacts. Rossi regards housing and monuments as the most important fragments of the city.14 If the artefact contains traces of his tory, geography and connection with the life of the city, then we can add a third category - amenities. The supermarket has largely substituted the civic
building, while the status of the monument has been reduced to forms.
13. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1973, trnsl. Barbara Luigia La Penta (The MIT Press, 1976), p. 15
14. Aldo Rossi, ArchitectureoftheCity, (The MIT Press, 1966[1982]) p. 29
The proposed narrative thinks of the city as an object to be taken apart and brought back together as a condensed representation of its current con tent. If forms of living are signified by forms of the city, then one of the tasks of this project is to delineate currently prevalent formal typolo gies - the architectural language of Dundee This is a challenge of disarticulating the human-city Piranesi’srelationship.
preservation of desire
This proposal introduces housing and amenities within the limits of each strip. They constitute the brief for the previously mentioned analogical frag ments. These large structures initially obtain the status of objects within the city fabric - a monu ment. ( figure 35, p. 59 ) Their strong geometrical qualities that would determine the trajectories of the city’s architectural layers. The expansion of those layers destroys the physical object qualities of new and old urban fragments.
Vincent Scully
15. Note to the Second Edition of Venturi’s ComplexityandContradictioninArchitecture, p.11.
There is no way to separate form from meaning; one cannot exist without the other. There can only be dif ferent critical assessments of the major ways through which form transmits meaning to the viewer: through empathy, said the nineteenth century, it embodies it through the recognition of signs, say the linguists, it conveys it.15
desired object marketed object commodity
figure 42. The commodity object takes advantage of desire. It identifies and objectifies desire in order to provide a physical item that can satisfy it.
housing monument amenities
figure 43. In the city without objects, housing and amenities are brought together to form new fragments.
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figure 44. the morphology of a monument that would fit housing and amenities
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figure 45. detail from Campo Marzio Here, each object comes with its own axis, hence, its own demand for order.
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figure 46. Each tower (each object in the new order) represents a commodity object in the past order of the city. Here, the exterior design is reminiscent of suburban forms such as the pitched roof. One of the towers mimics a tenement building, while another - Dundee's old and ruined train station that was built in 2017.
This project is not defined by the absence of objects but, rather, by the clash of their commodity forms One of the implications of a project that rejects figure and ground as datums for city thinking is the impossibility to definitively outline a product; hence, to commodify the object of desire. The city, therefore, preserves only the latter. This forces citizens to confront the consequences of their collective actions (degrading environmental conditions). The hybrid form of the city represents a juxtapo sition of current habits of life with the condition of density.
Marx
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satis fies these wants, whether directly as means of subsist ence, or indirectly as means of production 16
We can read the commodity form in Dundee’s fab ric when we acknowledge its attempts to satisfy desires. In this sense, the city is analogous to the human; today, a city without objects would be con sidered a non-city with partial human beings. Suburban housing and expensive new monu ments are two examples where the desired object
the commodity form
16. Karl Marx, Chapter 1. 'Commodities' in DasKapital,Part1.CommoditiesandMoney
image is even inscribed in the design of the V&A, which attempts to mimic natural characteristics. Here, the only relevant context for architecture is the product image.
17. Stijn Vanheule, ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, in FrontiersinPsychology, (2016)
This scenario exaggerates our and the city’s com pulsion to strive for completeness.
The other is possessed by the city. The investments in Dundee’s waterfront are aimed at changing its status into one of prosperity. The strive for an
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is encapsulated within the commodity object. They are both products of images.
One is usually possessed by the individual. The qualities of the suburb lay in its promise of prox imity to nature and overall mimicking of the rural.
It structures lifestyles that come to be defined by repetitiveness; this is in strong contrast to the dynamics of social interaction or with the condi tions of the rural. Its single-layered and dispersed nature, defined by individually owned objects, dis cards it as a place of collective memory of the city.
The psychoanalyst Vanheule argues that Capitalist discourse promises that the attainment of our objects of desire will render our subjectivity com plete. In this sense capitalist discourse refuses to recognise the incompleteness inherent in the desiring subject.17
figure 47. surfaces of objects
This sketch section reaches Dundee's waterfront (to the right). It represents the possibility of a multi-layered section of the city instead of the one that corresponds to figure-ground. Driven by images, the urban area becomes a continuum of objects.
figure 48. rooms in the city Here, the room is the object of desire as opposed to the locus. Superstudio, influenced by Debord’s notion of the spectacle, discussed the destruction of the object. They rejected the status of the object as a disposable commodity, and instead proposed that we live with our objects of desire in a condition of constant confrontation. Superstudio, ‘Counterdesign as postulation’, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, pp. 240-250, 245
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figure 49. city gates Dundee's waterfront flooded and dilapidated.
figure 50. housing as a shelf item, kitchen view Through this kitchen window, one can see the 'vegetables' section in the city.
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Getting off the train, one is directly confronted with the choice of housing.
figure 51. shelves of housing
figure 52. ‘A Sunday Drive to Tesco’ on TV at 9 p.m. A family sits down to watch the drive; this is something that families would do together in the past.
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figure 53. a room on the 7th floor
The interior design is reminiscent of the exterior of an early-c. 21st suburban house. Through the window, one can see the rest of the city, which is defined by the unique shapes of endless monumental architectural layers.
figure 54. billboard to the city
The view of the city is blocked by the next development. This scenario is reminiscent of the suburbs in the past, where the view from the edge of the city was blocked by the next built house.
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[...] place of analogy [...] abstracted from the real city. Linking type-forms and specific places [...] dispos sesses, reassociates [...] transforms real places [...] real times. [...] no place [...] different from [...] mod ernist utopia [...] rooted in [...] history [...] memory. [...] suppression [...] boundaries of time and place within [...] analogue [...] dialectic [...] in memory [...] remembering and forgetting.23
19. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia
the image, the object and the unconscious
20. Jane Rendell, ‘Conclusion: the social condenser—a thing in itself?’ in TheJournalofArchitecture,22:3 (2017), pp. 578-583; 578. Available in: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1323996 [Accessed: 15.04.2022]
21. Through their work, the two architects would position themselves as subjects and inhabitants in their relationship to the city. Rossi would draw from his memories, while Piranesi would actively survey the city.
Nolli’s plan described Rome as a totality; it repre sented the city in a fixed state. On the other hand, Piranesi’s Campo Marzio was a critical project in opposition to the previously described Rome. It dismantles the completeness of the city that Nolli’s figure-ground plan represented so well. (figure 39-fig ure 54). Campo Marzio is a physically and tempo rally pluralistic entity. Tafuri argues that, through its order of historically developed building types, it highlights Rome’s negation of its own historic
Kant
18. Mario Gandelsonas, The City as the Object of Architecture, Assemblage, No. 37 (Dec.1998), p. 131
23. Peter Eisenman, Introduction to Rossi,
ArchitectureoftheCityeyes
Campo Marzio and the Analogous city can be understood as attempting to address the tempo ral contradictions of the city and the static nature of its totality portrayed by its image. Behind the insistence on the indeterminacy of the city sits the recognition of our subject-object relationship with it. The two works recognise the city as an object of reflection for its occupant.21 Piranesi inhabited Rome by surveying it. He would not only read its ruins but also bring them forward as temporally and physically condensed fragments in a critical expressive act
Eisenman
of its inhabitants.20 This is where the absurd ity of the city image lies; it is a carefully structured Bothappearance.
The [empirical use] of a concept in any sort of prin ciple consists in its being related merely to appear ances, i.e., objects of a possible experience. [...]For every concept there is requisite, first, the logical form of a concept (of thinking) in general, and then, sec ond, the possibility of giving it an object to which it is to be related.
Gandelsonas
The Critique of Pure Reason , Kant regards the experience that we have of an object as an appear ance, and the object - as an autonomous thing of possible experience.
In this sense, the city exists twice: once the way it is in itself, and another - infinite realities in the
[The] reality of the city [ ] has always resisted [ ] its reduction to the status of a building.18
Inprogress.19
22. Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, p. 45
Rossi, on the other hand, inhabited the city through memory. He would tell us that [in] order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten [...].22 The Analogous city regards the city’s temporal dimension as a dialogue between forgetting and remembering.
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figure 55. Campo Marzio (1762), Giovanni Battista Piranesi
figure 56. Campo Marzio's field of walls and columns is a field of signs
figure 57. it is also a field of signifiers
figure
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figure 58. that make up individual figures 59. with multiple meanings
figure 61. geometries of the unconscious; Exodus does not exist in the field of geometry as it was never conceived as being within the territory of Berlin.
figure 60. realised, unrealised, condensed, displaced; Both Rossi and Ungers would consider the unrealised architecture of the city as much a part of the architecture of the city. The plan positions together realities of Berlin that are non-existent in their totality in the current figure-ground plan. The drawings bring together the Berlin Wall, Albert Speer’s North-South Axis (1938-1950), Interbau (1957) and Exodus (1972) - the only project not in its exact location. Koolhaas’ project can be thought of as a reflection of Berlin, and therefore a kind of a description and a reality of the city.
figure 62. Berlin, a figure-ground map.
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Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past - an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. 24
25. Michel de Certeau, ‘Psychoanalysis and its History’, in Heterologies:DiscourseontheOther,BrianMassumi, trsl., Foreword, Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986 [1978]), pp. 3–16; 4. The quote was found in Jane Rendell, ‘Conclusion: the social condenser—a thing in itself?’ in TheJournalofArchitecture, 22:3 (2017), pp. 578-583; 582. Available in: 27.26.https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1323996Tafuri,ArchitectureandUtopia,p.3ItaloCalvino,InvisibleCities,(1972)
Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.27
Michel de Certeau
The unconscious is a part of the psyche that we have no access to; it is a field where that which is for gotten finds a place. Through forgetting, meaning is preserved. The forgotten can appear in various ways; one such example is through our dreams.
We can understand Rossi’s forgotten architecture as that which will naturally undergo an evolution before returning to the city. He would displace typologies and therefore exaggerates aspects of
24. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trnsl. Jaon Riviere and James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963 [1930]) p. 7
Psychoanalysis and historiography […] conceive of the relation between the past and the present differ ently. Psychoanalysis recognizes the past in the pres ent; historiography places them beside one another. […] Two strategies of time thus confront one another.25
Calvino
This is where psychoanalysis and architecture find each other in close proximity. Both propositions are irrational city projects; neither accepts the constraints of geography and time in rethinking the city. In this sense, they become analogous to the unconscious, which, according to Freud’s top ographical model, consists of co-existing mental states. Freud attempts to describe this by refer encing Rome’s historical layers:
The city without objects is analogous to an urban model of the unconscious; it can neither be thought of in its totality nor be reduced to or described with objects. It presents an end to, what Tafuri would call, the opposition between architectural object and urban organisation [...].26
architecture that are otherwise unappreciated and accepted as typological constraints.
We can argue that Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the city in the unconscious - multiple realities of the same totality; here represented as different geographical entities.
Freud
figure 63. Città analoga (1976), Aldo Rossi
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figure 64. displacement The object and its perspective come as a package. Each object has its own graphical projection different from the rest.
29. Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, TheLanguageofPsycho-Analysis, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973) pp. 82-83. Lacan would relate condensation to metaphor and displacement to metonymy. Ungers would relate metaphor to analogy in Morphologie:CityMetaphors, [Köln: Walther König, (2007)1982].
Dreams are formed of images; their mechanisms - condensation and displacement - work towards creating images from content that cannot neces sarily be visualised (words, ideas, etc.). Raw material is selected and transformed in order to be made representable.28 Certain meanings, for example, might only be pictured by displacing their expres sion to an image of something that is easier to be visualised.
and displacement disrupt the sym bolic logic that we use when we refer to an object. The outcome of dream mechanisms is the dream image. It is, as is Campo Marzio, a completely dif ferent place from any existing one; it is an other scene. 30
Condensation29
While we cannot directly access the city as it is in the unconscious, we can imagine it through a conceptual process. Here, the project draws from Freud’s concept of dream-work.
28. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Means of Representation in Dreams’ in Chapter VI, The Interpretations of Dreams (1900)
Kant's transcendental idealism argues that human experience structures the appearance of what we see. In other words, our mind has an active role in making reality. Our vision, guided by perspective, always reflects space by structuring the three-di mensional, and time - by structuring memory. The spatial and temporal dimensions of these events are the realm of architecture.
30. Freud, ‘The Psychology of the Dream Prcess’ in Chapter VII, The Interpretations of Dreams
considerations of representability
figure 65. from the unconscious to architecture
condensation (Freud) - metaphor (Lacan)
metonymy - relating two notions (that have a pre-established relationship)
psychoanalysis, linguistics, architecture
also/ 1 latent meaning in multiple manifest elements
unconscious > preconscious - distorted con tent (censored)
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condensation (Freud)
preconscious - whatever is present in men tal activity without constituting an object of the conscious (conscious knowledge, accessible memories, etc.)
unconscious | conscious - separate realms
transformation of raw material in order to pro duce the manifest dream
/object > distorted other
if/ manifest elements ----/---- meanings they might connect to
preconscious > conscious - selected and, maybe, distorted content (censored)
unconscious - repressed content, denied access to preconscious-conscious, governed by the mechanisms of displacement and condensation
multiple images into one, everything is blurred besides the coinciding element so as to maintain and reinforce the common ones
if/ element (resulting image) = place then/ 2 latent meanings in 1 manifest element or/ 2 meanings in 1 element and/ 2 objects in 1 place
== multiple objects into one distinguishable unity
or/1 meaning in 2 elements and/ 1 object in 2 places nodal point (person, theme, etc.) - an element is preserved because it occurs within multiple thoughts = object
dream-work
then/ places ----/---- objects they might con nect to displacement
displacement invests an insignificant idea with all psychical value, depth of meaning and inten sity originally attributed to another one
if/ meaning (starting thought) = object
metaphor - relating two notions (that have no obvious connection to each other)
displacement (Freud) - metonymy (Lacan)
metaphor (Lacan) - analogy (Ungers, Rossi)
figure 66. layers of urban fabric architectural layer has a trajectory that is defined by its geometry.
Each
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figure 67. layers of urban fabric, detail
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figure 68. layers of urban fabric, detail
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figure 69. capturing objects the outline of the object starts to disappear when its singularity is transgressed
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figure 70. city detail; a moment in time
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figure 71. objects of desire
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Tafuri argued that the problems which architecture was set to solve were independent of the profession.31 In the context of capitalism, archi tecture was to shrink back to form without utopia, to sublime uselessness, and, arguably, it has. He viewed architecture as a discipline that was ceasing to exist within a context that had no need for it. Capitalism represents both the genius loci and the zeitgeist that determine the product of the discipline. It is accepted that in order for Architecture to have meaning to the public, it is to be marketed; it Utopia,
capitalism, architecture and the city
Our society is not equipped to deal with the envi ronmental catastrophes it is causing. It is too in the thrall of commodity capitalism. As we await the changes that will resolve the damage we are causing, our hopes are exploited by concentrated capital and corporate power that tell us we need not give up our comfort.
Whilst the market adopts the language of changegreen technology and sustainability - the issue of climate damage remains. The promise of change (desired object) is directed towards the comfort of the spectator, whose desire to make a difference is sat isfied by the market (recyclable bags and bamboo tooth brushes - the commodity object). Symbols of environmental damage are twisted to embody hope (the electric car). In this sense, worldwide public action is not only late but also misguided.
attempts to become a product that satisfies the desires of a society conditioned to regard all cul tural products as objects of consumption.32
Architecture is on the periphery of necessity due to its disengagement from the critical issues of the day. The opportunity to bring it back into pub lic discourse comes with the need to rethink the landscapes we build in the face of environmental catastrophes.
31. Tafuri, Architecture and
This work does not refer to an alternative world economy in the place of commodity capitalism; our desire to reform earth in our image isn’t inherent to it. However, the tools of capitalism are used to exploit the desires that we already possess.
The generation of the commodity form, which is responsible for our comfortable way of life, happens at the expense of nature. We treat our environment as an external autonomous entity, and its deterio ration - as a disconnected phenomenon. The envi ronmental problem is internal to us; we are trying to resolve the damage that we are simultaneously Incausing.the70s,
Preface, viii-x 32. Autonomous Architecture, The Harvard Architecture Review, Volume 3 (Winter 1984), pp. 6-7
-fall back to total withdrawal
-conceive of objects and their users as an ensemble of interrelated processes, whose interaction results in con stantly changing patterns of relationships.
Perhaps change does start with the car - one of our most precious and crucial commodities. Instead of following market-driven narratives, we ought to question our attitude towards the car and start to imagine its absence. This would be the sudden twist of public narrative that we always anticipate but never commit to.
[ ] torn by the dilemma of having been trained as creators of objects, and yet being incapable of con trolling either the significance or the ultimate uses of these objects, they find themselves unable to reconcile the conflicts between their social concerns and their professional practices.
98/99
35. Emilio Ambasz, Introduction in Italy: TheNewDomesticLandscape, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972), pp.19-20
-refuse to take part in the present socioindustrial sys tem and act through political action and philosophical postulation
33. Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo, ‘The Cartographer’s Dilemma’ in SustainableArchitectureandUrbanDevelopment, Vol. 4 (July 2010)
-Design objects with no remorse
This is a discussion about the object nature of the city as a subjective reality, that is, our view of the city; our way of structuring that object nature is inherent to our reading of the city.
-Maintain our ambiguous attitude toward the object by justifying our activity through deliberate formal commentary upon the roles that these objects are nor mally expected to play in our society
Ambasz would describe his observations of the architect's choice as:
34. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 5 in October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7.
We should recognise that such a change is depend ent on density. If our current priority is our comfort, then this would be considered an uncomfortable condition - a crisis. Architecture has the tools to imagine the testing ground for this kind of crisis. This project, for example, imagines the direct con flict between suburban life and inner-city fabric, comfort and density; this is ultimately a physical conflict between desires and necessity.
the crisis - an uncomfortable condition
the object - summary
Holm argues that our cities lack the forums to facil itate public knowledge and collective sensibility, without which the debate about ecological sustain ability cannot take place.33 Instead, social media is used to dictate public narratives. As a result, it becomes difficult to imagine the prevention of the environmental crisis.
The object is usually understood to be in a binary relation with the subject, which is inscribed in grammar. We can deduce from our status as sub jects a position of responsibility; its denial makes us the object of a man-made order that we think we are in control of. Deleuze would describe our status as dividuals among other objectifications.34
The forces that currently shape our cities do not regard it as a form of collective life, nor do they ques tion the landscapes we build in order to live well. Our attitude towards living together, manifested in the project of the city, is reflected in the environment that we knowingly damage.
This city is a consequence of the discipline of archi tecture that refuses to think outside the limits of the figure. It cannot escape the representation of objects. Emilio Ambasz would refer to such design work as comformist. 35
Ambasz
The inferno of the living is [ ] where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first [ ]: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. (Invisible Cities, p. 147)
conclusion
Calvino
At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape [ ] setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the per fect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. [ ... ] the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.
[ ]
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
100/101
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it (Pour ce qui est de l’avenir, il ne s’agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible.)
The city without objects is a form of resistance to the established order of the civic, as well as to our desires upon which we act in the making of our landscapes. It presents an image of the city that is always tentative, always under revision; all pro cess and no objects. It raises questions about the nature of objects and, hence, the nature of subjects. It puts forward a vision of the city that - whilst not conforming to any recognisable forms of sus tainability, technology, and agendas - nevertheless endeavours to present a city beyond the context of commodity capitalism that has been so destruc tive of our environment.
figures
p. 21 | figure 4 'a growing network, end of 19th c.' - Plan by William Mackison
p. 80 | figure 60 'realised, unrealised, condensed, displaced; Both Rossi and Ungers would consider the unrealised architecture of the city as much a part of the architecture of the city. The plan positions together realities of Berlin that are non-existent in their totality in the current figure-ground plan. The drawings bring together the Berlin Wall, Albert Speer’s North-South Axis (1938-1950), Interbau (1957) and Exodus (1972) - the only project not in its exact location. Koolhaas’ project can be thought of as a reflection of Berlin, and therefore a kind of a description and a reality of the city.'
p. 18 | figure 1 'Dundee in two hundred years' - Collage of multiple city plans, among which are: Nolli’s Rome (1748); Piranesi’s Campo Marzio (1762); Rome (2021); Arturo Soria’s Linear city (1882); Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk (1930); Manhattan (2021); Barcelona (2021); Berlin (2021). Graphics from Learning from Las Vegas were used to indicate the character of the space between the condensed city strips.
p. 32 | figure 14 'the picturesque potential of edge conditions'Photos by author
p. 78 | figure 56 'Campo Marzio's field of walls and columns is a field of signs' - Disarticulation of Piranesi's Campo Marzio, part of room+cities 2020-21group work p. 78 | figure 57 'it is also a field of signifiers' - Disarticulation of Piranesi's Campo Marzio, part of room+cities 2020-21group work
p. 66 | figure 46 'Each tower (each object in the new order) represents a commodity object in the past order of the city. Here, the exterior design is reminiscent of suburban forms such as the pitched roof. One of the towers mimics a tenement building, while anotherDundee's old and ruined train station that was built in 2017.' - This is a collage of photographs, 3D model and hand-drawing.
p. 21 | figure 5 'establishing and transgressing edges, 1950'Aerial imagery by RAF
p. 26 | figure 12 'fragment locations' - The image uses as a base map the figure-ground plan of Dundee. Plan by all members of rooms+cities studio.
p. 79 | figure 58 'that make up individual figures'Disarticulation of Piranesi's Campo Marzio, part of room+cities 2020-21group work p. 79 | figure 59 'with multiple meanings' - Disarticulation of Piranesi's Campo Marzio, part of room+cities 2020-21group work
p. 81 | figure 62 'Berlin, a figure-ground map.' - Drawing by author, part of rooms+cities group work.
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p. 64 | figure 45 'detail from Campo Marzio' - Redrawn by author at 1:1000/A1, part of rooms+cities 2020-21 group work.
p. 21 | figure 2 'distinct settlements, end of 16th c.' - Plan by Timothy Pont p. 21 | figure 3 'ribbons, end of 18th c.' - Plan by William Crawford
p. 36 | figure 16 'the city according to cars'- Plan by all members of rooms+cities studio.
p. 26 | figure 11 'A derelict suburban house within the projected conditions between the dense city strips. Only a fragment of the street and a broken street sign are left in this view.' - The photo collage uses a photo from a forest in Scotland. Author is unknown.
p. 41 | figure 20 'a typical empty parking' - Photo by Hemant Ginda, part of rooms+cities group work.
- Drawing by author, part of rooms+cities group work. p. 80 | figure 61 'geometries of the unconscious; Exodus does not exist in the field of geometry as it was never conceived as being within the territory of Berlin.' - Drawing by author, part of rooms+cities group work.
p. 40 | figure 18 'a typical Dundee suburb' - Graphic stylised by author. Image taken from Google Earth.
p. 41 | figure 21 'a typical empty fields'- Photo by Hemant Ginda, part of rooms+cities group work.
p. 38 | figure 17 'dead ends' - Plan by Sean Noon, part of rooms+cities group work.
p. 40 | figure 19 'a typical dead end in Dundee' - Graphic stylised by author. Image taken from Google Earth.
p. 86 | figure 66 'layers of urban fabric' - Digital effects and digital linework overlaid upon a photograph of a laser-cut model.
p. 35 - This collage uses parts of Piranesi’s etching of The Canopus, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, (1769), part of his Vedute Di Roma
Aldo Rossi, ‘The Analogous City’ panel (1976) Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City, (The MIT Press, Autonomous1966[1982])Architecture, The Harvard
The Society of the Spectacle (1967) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)
Jane Rendell, ‘Conclusion: the social condenser—a thing in itself?’ in The Journal of Architecture, 22:3 (2017), pp. 578-583; 578. Available in: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1323996 [Accessed: 15.04.2022]
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 5 in October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. Guy3-7.Debord,
Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973)
Dundee Local Development Plan, 2019
Emilio Ambasz, Introduction in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972), pp.19-20
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
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