Invented scenarios in studio

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INVENTED SCENARIOS IN STUDIO

Patrik Schumacher, in The Architectural Review, objects to the recent flourishing of “improbable narratives”, allegories, and dystopias in British schools of architecture:

The (best?) students of the current generation as well as their teachers seem to think that the ordinary life processes of contemporary society are too boring to merit the avant-garde’s attention. Instead we witness the invention of scenarios that are supposedly more interesting than the challenges actually posed by contemporary reality.

He lists examples including an acoustic lyrical mechanism in a Bangalore quarry, a retreat for Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a sci-fi movie about rebellious worker robots in Brixton; constrasting these with “systematic research and serious design experiments”. He could have a point—some of these projects might be better if they were confronted with a few more design restrictions. And I have only slight reservations in agreeing with him when he writes:

‘Critical architecture’ commits the fallacy of trying to substitute itself for the political process proper. The result might be a provocation at best, but often ends up as nothing but naive (if not pompous) posturing.

But he goes on to say:

Architects are called upon to develop urban and architectural forms that are congenial to contemporary economic and political life. They are neither legitimised, nor competent to argue for a different politics or to ‘disagree with the consensus of global politics’.

I don’t get this. I think he’s saying that, because architects serve the existing economic and political context, they’re not capable of arguing for a different political situation. But this doesn’t follow at all: a person working within a system may be in the best possible position to criticise or modify it. (The phrase “consensus of global politics” sticks in my throat: no matter how dominant western-style consumer capitalism is, neither it nor any other system deserves the name “global politics”).

Léopold Lambert responds with an open letter:

By affirming that architects are not legitimized, nor competent to argue for a different politics, you are, in fact, calling yourself for a different regime, an aristocratic one, in which experts owning a sacred knowledge have the exclusive legitimacy to debate and rule cities and nations. Architects, to the very same extent of bakers, workers, bankers (sic), waiters, lawyers, unemployed people etc. are absolutely competent and legitimized to  argue for a different politics for the good reason that they are concerned by it as citizens and share with other the res-publica (the public thing).

In the ensuing discussion at The Funambulist, everybody’s pet hates get aired: algae farms, CG animations, parametricism, impracticality, big firms, students who become teachers without working in the industry, topicality, atopicality. See if your favourite makes an appearance.

What interests me most, however, is a particular axis around which the discussion turns: the opposition between the realistic and the fantastic. Neither the idea that bland or offensive reality needs to be made more fantastic, nor that fantastic speculations should be eschewed in favour of concrete reality, give enough credit to the strangeness and complexity of reality.

 

 

On first principles

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From a profile of Friedrich Kiesler in Architectural Forum (1947)

“If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he’s never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw”

Reality reduced to a model

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REALITY REDUCED TO A MODEL

Reading through Geoff Manaugh’s interview with Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, I came across this:

“If you lay, side by side, quotations from USC’s discourse on parametric urbanism now and USC’s discourse on cybernetic urbanism thirty years ago, for better or for worse, you can read them as a complete narrative. It’s impossible to distinguish which is which. Both are born out of a fundamental faith in technology and a fundamental notion that, if you feed enough variables into a problem-solving system — now we call it parametric, then we would have called it cybernetic — that an appropriate and robust solution will emerge. I’m not, myself, so sure that’s the case; in fact, I’m pretty certain that it’s not.”

Models are translations of reality, and all translations are partial, reducing some dimensions in order to allow a degree of fidelity in other dimensions. Something is abstracted away in order to concentrate something else: a white paper model might leave out any suggestion of materials to highlight volume; and acoustic properties may be excluded from an electronic model that simulates solar gain. Breaking a situation down into variables and parameters so it can be modelled is no stranger than any other kind of modelling. Problems arise when reality is reduced to the model.

I agree with de Monchaux that appropriate and robust solutions don’t emerge automatically given enough parameters; and appreciate his reminder that, despite a varnish of novelty, parametric approaches are not new.

(Again, I’d plug Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) on this topic).

Drumming about drumming

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DRUMMING ABOUT DRUMMING

Aureli:

“The “silence” of Mies’s architecture has often been interpreted by historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical distance from it.

He gathers a mob of writers who make this proposition about Mies: Tafuri, Cacciari, Hays, Mertins, Wallenstein. I find it completely implausible to see Mies as a critical, ironic or even subversive figure. What exactly is this ‘critical distance’ Mies maintains from modernity? Was Mies actually critical of modernity? I was reminded of this from Graham Harman:

“there are those who remain especially intrigued by artworks about art, films about filming, self-referential cabaret shows, fireworks that explode into shapes of themselves, dog biscuits in the form of dogs, and drummers who drum songs about drumming – a kind of ‘drumming at the limit.’ In each case, the supposed cleverness comes from the fact that the activity in question not only happens, but also refers to itself ‘as’ what it is. But this fashionable trend only represents the worst of metaphysics in the old-fashioned sense, since it declares self-reflexivity to be a privileged moment in the relation between the two faces of being” (p. 75).

Being critical is one possibility of architecture, but the attempt to make criticality the defining characteristic of architecture, as Aureli does, is just strange.

Designing for urban resilience in Australia

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DAN HILL ON DESIGNING FOR URBAN RESILIENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Great piece by Dan Hill at ArchitectureAU on the Australian Government’s National Urban Policy discussion paper, arguing that it doesn’t ask searching-enough questions to enable real change or resilience:

Without addressing these core aspects of why cities exist, or indeed a wider range of policy approaches, a national urban policy focused on the traditional tools of urban planning, architecture and urban design may work for, in Tim Williams’s words, “good times and easy places,” but is unlikely to make Australian cities resilient in the face of real challenges.

He addresses the way that cities can’t be isolated from their surroundings:

There’s also a figure-ground relationship between cities and regions and, at best, a symbiotically linked ecosystem. Paradoxically, any national urban policy should have the regions at its core, finding ways to keep flood plains, allow rivers to run freely, preserve food basin soil to strengthen food security, and replant forests to reinforce flood-mitigating topsoil and act as a fast growing natural carbon sink.

And he questions the excessive reliance on public transport schemes as urban panacea:

[W]hy move so many so far in the first place? Public transport is an easier lever to pull – at least in theory it should be – but surely a better goal is ensuring that everyday needs are met locally, within walking distance, rethinking how we co-locate housing, jobs, services and amenities.

At least the Australian government is attempting to have an overarching discussion of this kind. The Auckland Plan and the Central City Plan for rebuilding Christchurch are a start, but flawed in many of the same ways as the document Hill criticises, and limited to the parochial concerns of single cities.

Krauss versus Latour on the singularity of objects.

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KRAUSS/EISENMAN VS. LATOUR/HARMAN ON OBJECTS

Peter Eisenman on the “autonomy” of architecture:

[Rosalind] Krauss has said that to preserve the singularity of objects we must cut them off from their previous modes of legitimation. This idea will be seen to be important to any project of autonomy (p. 90).

This is completely counter to Bruno Latour’s description of objects (he calls them “actants” to remove the connotation of passivity), which is that they become progressively more singular as they increase their attachments. Harman describes Latour’s position:

Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become (p. 19).

Krauss’s statement (and Eisenman’s use of it) seem naïve to me. Overcoming oppressive modes of legitimation and authority is great, but to extend this to the general claim that objects are more themselves by being more cut off is essentialism.

Critical architecture.

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Aureli:

“It is precisely within the rise of the space of urbanisation that architecture as the project of the finite, and thus separated, form(s) can be read as critical” (p. x)

The idea that architecture should be primarily critical is to me like saying that all writing should be critical. In my experience, it’s always accompanied by the argument that architecture is and should be a privileged subset of building—an exclusive art.

Aureli on the city versus urbanisation.

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AURELI ON THE CITY VS. URBANISATION

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), distinguishes between the city, “the political dimension of coexistence”, and urbanisation, “the economic logic of social management” (p. x). The city is a political space, and urbanisation is an economic space. He claims urbanisation is managerial, driven by private concerns, oriented towards infrastructural functions, and tending towards a totalitarian whole. The city, by contrast, he characterises as agonistic, public, self-critical, and immune to totalitarianism.

Aureli justifies this distinction by appeal to the Greek one between polis, governed by technē politikē and oikos, governed by technē oikonomikē. He finds this reflected (through a little semantic gymnastics) in the Roman civitas and urbs. This appeal-to-the-wisdom-of-the-ancients isn’t convincing. It’s far from clear that Greek or Roman cities provide a good model for contemporary cities or politics.

To my mind, distinguishing between politics and economics is wrong and completely artificial. If that’s all Aureli’s distinction between cities and urbanisation rests on, then I think that’s wrong too.

Bryant’s “The Democracy of Objects”.

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Levi Bryant is one of the most interesting philosophers writing at the moment, in my opinion. Like Harman, Bennett, and Morton, he rejects ‘correlationism’: the belief that whenever we talk about anything, we are only talking about how humans relate to that thing. He is a realist:

[Ontological realism] is the thesis that the world is composed of objects, that these objects are varied and include entities as diverse as mind, language, cultural and social entities, and objects independent of humans such as galaxies, stones, quarks, tardigrades and so on. Above all, ontological realisms refuse to treat objects as constructions of humans. (p. 18)

I think a perspective like this is essential for thinking about cities, infrastructures and public space. His The Democracy of Objects has just been published (2011). You can download a digital copy from the Open Humanities Press, or purchase a hard-copy. Great cover art by Tammy Lu.

Keiran Long on the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower

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Keiran Long on London’s ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower:

Its $35.5 million price conveys significance, but no one is exactly sure what it is or what it means. It is an image, a placeholder, an attraction in a field of attractions. It is a signpost to an absence, a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. In short, it is what you build when you don’t know what the public realm is any more.

Exactly right.