ON THEORY, PRACTICE AND MY 3/4 REVIEW

3/4 review interior view

In a desk crit after the 3/4 review, Enrique Walker gave me some interesting feedback about my design process and further steps to take. I was frustrated for not succeeding in explaining my project to the jury, that kept asking literal things such as "why is the building not camouflaged" or "where is the pixelation?." Walker's answer was that none of these is my main subject. 

As designers, we tend to divide our activities into two different categories: practice and theory. One of the main consequences to that is architects saying they do not like theory, or that they think it is not important, or even that we should leave it to the critics. This is probably due to the overall notion that theory is "difficult", "untouchable", or "too academic". What is often missed is that designing is inevitably about making decisions, which involves thinking, which is essentially theorizing. The very definition of theory in the Oxford Dictionary involves practice: "1.1. A set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based”. Tschumi illustrates their interdependence: "Kill theory and practice dies. Kill practice and theory dies. [...] Think theory is dead? Don’t worry: it will come back when everyone is bored with the hegemony of good feelings and widespread complacency. Practice is dead? Unlikely, unless a moratorium on building becomes a norm."

Once I came to the concept of the 3d labyrinth in my design process, I left behind the pixelation, and in the same way, once I came to the pixelation, I left behind the camouflage. That does not mean that these exercises were in vain, on the contrary: they were tools that helped me advance my theory through design. Now I have to look at my project as an outsider, understand what it is actually dealing with, its potentialities and weaknesses, and edit both: my discourse and project. Practice also injects ideas and perhaps it is in this feedback loop that design can truly be seen as research rather than just the representation of an idea conceived a priori of everything (that might be wrong!). 

Walker in his seminars keeps insisting on the idea that concepts are [too] formed after we design and suggesting "we learn by making". I would add a word to this statement: we learn by consciously making, conscious of our precedents and of our own designing methods (why do I chose or discard this or that option over another?). Here I believe is where we as designers have the opportunity of advancing ideas in which design and theory are by default connected. 

ROOM WITHOUT PROGRAM

London Underground WWII

If we think about it, there might be infinite possibilities in considering how mankind and space interact. Industrialization and mass-production has forced us to reduce these infinite possibilities into a list of rooms, a standardized set of interactions that the industry could design and respond to. Our homes have become nests, spaces perfectly adapted to specific functions. When designing an apartment or a house, the function has become a static notion: each space responds to a one of the specific activities that mass-industry has catalogued under the category of “home”. In some way, we are all actors in the Truman Show with a cozy plateau designed by IKEA. Intuition is killed, preconception imposed.

However, what about all the other interactions that IKEA is not taking into account? What about all those domestic interactions with space that industrialization has never grasped to systematize and to domesticate into its production chain? These are the kind of relations that I find interesting to explore. If the idea of the nest is a space made according to standard functions, then I am interested in the idea of a cave. In a cave, function is dynamic, not a static concept. Space is not made according to functions but humans, when inhabiting it, gradually begin to assimilate and appropriate its spaces in an intuitive manner. Its geomorphology offers certain spatial conditions that awake human intuition: depressions, changes of height, alcoves, darkness…every spatial feature becomes an opportunity. In a cave, function is dynamic; we humans can continue to learn how to inhabit spaces and change the preconceptions.

So the question here is, how to design artificial caves? How to provide maximal spatial difference inside an apartment? How to avoid homogeneous conditions? It might be helpful to get rid of the notion of “room”. Words as bedroom, kitchen, bathroom or living room are just limits to our imagination. It is not coincidence that some of these spaces, such as bed-room, are named depending on the kind of industrial product they are thought from. I don’t know when the name sleeping-room (still referred to an activity) was changed to bed-room, but I just wonder when spaces such as the bath-room or living-room might become the wc-room and the sofa-room if globalization succeeds in imposing particular practices. As architects, I prefer to think about how the sleeping-room might become the living-room when the living-room becomes the washing-room.

CIRCULATION ORGANIZATION

A section of the barrios in Bogota. Courtesy of Lebbeus Woods

One of the largest complaints of the SRA schemes is that they do not keep the character that is most beneficial from the slums. I identified the qualities that I think are most in creating the tight-knit community. I believe the tight-knit community and interaction is based on the circulation and intricacy of the walkways. They touch every home and reflect the exact organization, whether it is logical or not, resulting in many dead-ends. Illogical as it may be, it is this unpredictability that is intriguing about the informal or "home-grown" development i.e. unplanned. So how can this unpredictable quality be planned for?

In terms of horizontal circulation, a main driver is the multiplicity of entrances. This is typically not done in buildings for security purposes, but it may just be this vulnerability that forces the community to police itself.  In terms of vertical circulation, it contains the same multiplicity. The units allow for a central core (that could potential used for universal access) but also for individualized access, again like Dharavi. So the units aggregation is customizable horizontally and vertically. 

Typically the circulation is bordered by double wide housing units back to back, so that each has a connection to the circulation. I paralleled that organization in the units. While it is not double wide necessarily for separate family units, there is living space on both sides of the corridor. This circulation can left open for single residences or closed off to enclose a family space. This central circulation that leads to the communal areas. The circulation intersects with the non-sleeping/living spaces. There is an element of planning that is left up to the residents, as it is in Dharavi and other informal/"home-grown" settlements currently. 

DESIGN PROGRESS - ISLAND OVER ISLAND

The High line park have been called the "Miracle above Manhattan". The up-High line park has not been open to public.I purposed to creating a floating layer above Hudson Yard, and reference the building code in Dharavi, the up level are mostly residential Co-living spaces, the ground level is an open plan park with Co-working spaces. The height of the floating area is defined by the view line from the context. Since the middle-raised building around Hudson yard is around 70-100 meters, the lifted surface of the floating area have been set to 100 meters, so to reduce the block of view from the surroundings, and also allows the people live on the floating surface to see the sky line of Manhattan.

Size of grids in downtown is around 66 m * 245 m. This proportion has directivity, the length have always been considered as "inner street" and the width aligned together become avenues. I tried to separate this proportion to make the area more humanistic, 66 m * 81.5 m as the basic module to control. This proportion is also according to my experiment in plan design, I found this proportion to be proper to duplicate.

THE PROGRAM

In their long and prolific collaboration, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari introduced the concept of a Body without Organs – a term borrowed (yet re-defined) from the French playwright Antonin Artaud. Deleuze and Guattari re-define the BwO, comparing it to an egg, which has a somewhat consistent shape yet carries with it a reservoir of potentials, networks, and qualities. They explain:

“The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.” (Capitalism and Schizophrenia p.19)

In A Thousand Plateaus, they further elaborate and expand on the shapes and forms of this Body without Organ – classifying it into three categories the cancerous, the empty, and the full/healthy BwO. The cancerous BwO is caught in an endless vicious cycle, the empty BwO is un-productive, and finally the full BwO is productive explaining:

“This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjuctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.” (A Thousand Plateaus, p161)

Mumbai can be seen as a Body without Organs, a city with no punctuation marks but constantly moving with no particular (or so it seems) direction. The real-estate market acting as a cancerous BwO – constantly speculating, inflating, creating bubbles with no end, the residential luxury high-rise towers as empty unproductive BwO, and finally the slums as a full and healthy BwO where people flow and produce without a looming hegemonic hierarchical organization – hierarchies are made, broken, re-defined, re-territorialized in continuum.

Programmatically, the project strives to become a full BwO, even within its possibly “empty” or “unproductive” programs.  With three elements overlapped the project comprises of a time-based structure of steel I-beams carrying workshops and informal markets, and two constant components the conditioned stores and shops and the infrastructural transit bridge carrying the entertainment programs. The aim is to provide the infrastructural matrix for the highly productive slums to re-territorialize and infiltrate their surroundings. Therefore, the introduction of workshops into the commercial space does not intend to eliminate their existence within the slums but rather their expansion into their immediate environment. The steel structures allow for the 6x6 modules to be re-adjusted with time according to varying needs (accessibility, height, area etc.) The structures are rotated to face the East for maximum sunlight and in accordance to the most productive orientation according to the India planning strategies the Vastu Shastra. The shops and stores stand massive, static, and un-changing at each level, after a long meandering promenade through the workshops. Finally the transit landscaped bridge carrying the entertainment activities (theater, stages, food courts etc.) connects surrounding public assets which otherwise stand locked away, barricaded behind a tall fence – the Colaba Woods and the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The purpose of these three programs is to re-evaluate capitalism and its alienation of the producer. An attempt to bring the full and healthy BwO, the highly productive and skillful individuals living in the utmost poverty, to the empty rotten BwO, the luxury malls where individuals and citizens are transformed into consumers and eventually commodities. The aim is to invite people to be exposed, re-awaken their awareness to their realities, and start a discourse re-vitalizing the public realm.      

INFORMATIVE PROGRAM

Archizoom's Internal Landscapes

Program initiates the projects beginning (in time) and initial identity (in character). However, there is a downside to the agency of program: it defines, but it also limits. This limitation is registered not only in the nominalism of the brief - house, museum, hospital - but also, with the very action, program implies to arrange, and at times, in excess. It alternates between an evocation of arrangement and a surplus of such arrangements 

John McMorrough, Praxis 8.

Paraphrasing Rafael Moneo, to define program is to define architecture. I would say that the difference between program and function lies in agency: a deeper project implied actively by the architect, instead of a series of accepted assumptions. The current logic of the program concerns the idea that anything can happen, and we can see projects that avoid a formal definition of acceptable functions become the holy grail of contemporary architecture (and Cedric Price its Indiana Jones). 

In my research, I propose another look at the concept of program, one that is limited by the spatial possibilities of type: there are no direct relationship between function and form, but the same cannot be said that any form could allow any function. The architect must create through a series of types, different conditions that absorb the multiplicity of possible programs, and then operate within the realm of the possible, yet, unexpected. By that, I mean that it is still possible to skydive in an elevator shaft, as long as the shaft becomes a long, vertical rectangular space spanning multiple floors. To re-enact the classification system - bringing Borges’ again to discussion - opens up possibilities to really free the relationships between form and possible function, and the deconstruction of the naming system is the first step to the rebuilding of this relations. Understanding the formal possibilities of the typologies, we can open up an array of possible uses, and by specifically controlling and designing these conditions, I suggest that we can avoid creating big-sheds of mono functional universal space but definite arrangements of possibilites. Less Pompidous and more Seattles. 

My project sets out to create a set of controlled relationships between different types of spaces, that in turn allow positive interrelations between possible programs to be occupied with. Usually, a system like this fail in understand the question of scale, ending in a conflict with spatial and environmental qualities desired. Here I propose the concept developed by Cecil Balmond in his book Informal. The conditions of local, juxtaposition and hybridization are to be applied on different scales, with focus on a non-linear system of adjacencies, with each object (or space, function) is specifically controlled on a local level, while when combined with another object by a close adjacency, implies the effects of juxtaposition, when each one influences the other. If this influence becomes not only of proximity, but reaches a critical-mass that interferes with the deeper structure of the object, it becomes hard to separate what is one or the other, and a new condition is created, one of hybridity and unexpectedness. This condition, I would argue, is what drives vitality, the unexpected and creativity in the cities we inhabit. 

The concept of the project is to, instead of liberating the program to allow it to be whatever it wants to be, create spatial possibilites that hybridize the architectural and urban space to let the program make its magic.

WATERSCAPER

Diagram of living

Taking into consideration the analysis of coral reefs, this project proposes the creation of multiple islands that function as a system and succeeds to coexist with environmental and physical conditions. This system is responsible for the symbiosis between people and water. Through its porous structure that is composed of different size openings, it allows the natural flow of water and it uses the same principles in order to create habitable space. Moreover, there is not a specific categorization of landscape, water breaker or infrastructure because they all have the same function that of allowing the natural flow of water through the different size openings and protecting the people from the strong water currents while they create the infrastructure for habitable space.

The first priority in this proposal is the creation of a system– infrastructure that allows natural flow of the water and protects from the strong waves. In this way it not only prevents flooding but also filtrate the city in order to reduce pollution.  The city needs the water and it is designed according to this principle. The program of habitable space is based on the water management masterplan. In most architectural proposals the primary concern is where people go, while in this project it is where the water goes. The program is about creating environments that organically allow water to move, while every other decision is based on the same principle.

How do people inhabit this system?  There are different physical conditions that define the zoning and consequently different size, scale, density and thickness of the openings. Most of the islands are in-between the Arabian Sea and the creek. Small, dense openings create a strong infrastructure against the waves. This area cannot be habited because the strong waves will create uncomfortable places for living. The strong wave intensity will cause an unstable structure and the sound will make people feel stress. Moreover these place need to be dense enough in order to avoid breaking from the wave so the infrastructure cannot be hollow. Big openings next to the wave breakers are needed so the wave after hitting in the submerged breaker could pass through the openings under water with less intensity. Large openings allow the water to pass freely while they slow it down. In this area the openings cannot be filled, the most appropriate living type is inside the infrastructure. The same type is found to the side of the creek. This habitable space is defined from water tidal, some days it will be underwater and others above water. This space is mostly for manufacture area because it is uncomfortable place to live due to the uncertain tidal and water conditions but a functional space to work. In the center there is the most protective area from strong water currents as it is mostly above water and it is protected from the openings that are found on the periphery. There are brittle structures that have no limitation to the height but they stand on pilotes structure that allows the natural flow of water in case of flooding. The infrastructure on the center has microscopic opening that allow the water to pass through. The buildings are connected both above and on the infrastructure of the island.  They are constructed in the same principles of the island construction, that of different opening size that filter the water, protect from the environmental conditions while proving a comfortable habitable space. There are mostly housing and public facilities.

In-between the periphery and the center there are small structures function both as habitable space and wave breakers. These structures fill some of the smaller scale openings and are mostly enclosed. There will be commercial space, as it does not need to be completely open in order to function. The connectivity between the habitable spaces is through the infrastructure. The transportation is inside the structure; in this way it allows the top of the infrastructure to be public space free of vehicles. Green areas are found in parts of the structure. Close to the water are mostly mangroves that filter physically the water, while they increase the biodiversity of the city.  In the center green areas are found above the infrastructure, while in some parts that they need thickness in order to be developed they fill the openings. The city function as a system. Different typologies of buildings are defined from the water management. People live inside or above the infrastructure. In the center there is the possibility to fill some of the openings and create sky or water scaper. The transportation is happening inside the infrastructure. Moreover the tidal water level creates different experiences for habitats…

CASE STUDY | BYCULLA TRAIN STATION

Platform in Byculla Train Station, Mumbai

Maybe the largest area in the program of a train station is devoted to a single activity that is no activity at all: waiting. Train platforms serve for the simple purpose of allowing people to have the space to stay and adjust the time between coming from an activity and starting their commute to another one. In a sense, the activity developed in a train platform is a passive one. That's why this space becomes so explored by advertising and communication vehicles - through billboards, free newspapers, television etc -, anything to take away people's contemporary dread of having to face the clock with nothing to spend time with. People become eager to find anything to read and spend some time.

Informally, the city of Mumbai found a particularly efficient way of providing means for people to adjust their schedules and long waiting times. They did it by placing low-cost cinemas in the adjacency of every major train station. The Byculla Train Station is no exception to that. Located a few steps from its entrance is the Palace Talkies, a street cinema that has resisted the public's shift to movies in Multi-plex theaters and shopping malls. The main reason behind its long existence is that by offering C rated Hindi movies aiming to a less educated crowd and charging 30 rupees for a ticket (around US$0.25), they managed to establish a fixed crowd: that of the people waiting, or looking for entertainment before taking the train back home to the city's outskirts.

TYPE AS APPARATUS

Typology is, simply put, a categorization and classification of given characteristics. It follows Foucault introduction quoting Borges as “strange categories [with] precise meaning and a demonstrable content”, that by demonstrating another system of thought makes clear the limitation of our own.

In architecture, typology is often defined as a programatic categorization of functions: types of housing, offices, markets and so on. This approach implies a modernist view on the relationship between space and its use. Namely, it recalls the concept of zoning on the architectural planning. It is interesting to start this section talking about zoning in a sense brought by Peter Blake in Form follows fiasco, in which the separation of functions is stated as one of the reasons of the failure of the modernist ideal. The concept of housing, for that matter, could be today understood as outdated, with architectural theory claiming more and more integration and a dynamic relationship between different activities and events in society. The very idea of zoning does not make sense in our contemporary society - we can just bring to mind the revolution caused by a smartphone in the way we communicate with the outside. To avoid the conceptualization of type as a zoning classification, I would suggest using another definition of typology.

On the other hand, the definition of typological architecture advanced on this research follows the line described by Aldo Rossi, based on purely architectural-formal terms, in what the author calls it a formal apparatus, where “type preserves and defines the internal logic of forms not by techniques or programs” and is a “juxtaposition of memory and reason”. By that, Rossi prescribe an architecture in which its values are derived from the idea of the city, of a dynamic of uses and representations through time that became rules instead of models, in other words, modes of understanding spatial relationships instead of the copy of received examples. From this definition, Rossi defines an architectural "theory of the city form", that could lead to an understanding of real problem, and in itself, an architecture of autonomy. In this sense, typological studies are the only way as architects to understand the politics of the city, once the build environment, through time, is always a reflection of the “expression of the dominant class”.

Advancing the concept of type, thus, is a way to void the built examples from specific qualities, that although important as an object overview, do not contribute to a historical understanding of the relationships between the city, its politics and society. By that I mean first, the idea of the function - once it is presupposed that that are no direct fixed relationships between form and function, and secondly, the idea of ornament. Specific detailing and representational elements concern the individual but I suggest that do not alter the spatial articulation between the building and society.

Typology then becomes a tool to read the city in its history. Following Holl (Pamphlet - Alphabet City) and Willis (Form follows finance), I argue that architectural form in general - hence, type - is a result of society's relationship to space through economy and policies in a deeper and more profound way than to stylistic or theoretical desires of architects in any period. As stated by Willis, rules and regulations put forth are the responsible to shape the existing buildings, and alongside financial movements create the possibilities for the advance of architectural enterprises. Abstracted then from its individuality, the building become a model, a series of spatial relationships that relate to the role it can play on society at any given time. And my interest in a typological study of the city is to advance the articulation of this relationships as the creation of the city itself. By understanding spatial types as the form of the city, spaces that can contain - due to their formal characteristics - a different set of programs in which the city could be derived, we can articulate a new mode of building the city.

LANDSCAPES: BETWEEN FIGURE AND GROUND

Landscape became a buzzword in architectural circles in the last decades. From the picturesque green lawns to colorful dutch nature to background to photographic essays, the idea of a landscape assumed a prominent role on architectural relations. Specifically in mid-1990’s it transformed itself into a projective tool, through the projects from offices like UNStudio and MVRDV, landscape-buildings enveloped data and diagrams into a single structure. I bring this concept of the word to argue that there are no “voids" in architecture any more. I compared here two moments of the landscape architecture as discipline: to the most prominent modernist landscape-architect, Roberto Burle Marx to the dutch appropriation of the term in the 90’s. 

In Burle Marx’s concept, put forward on projects in Rio de Janeiro and in Brasilia, for example, the idea of the void was similiar to a canvas, where the open space could be created and nurtured following the principles established by the architectural objects. The relationship between figure and ground was clear, and the approach to landscape was to be the backdrop for the architectural object. This lead to the idea of fixed open-spaces, planned and controlled with the same rigidity as the functionalist plans delivered by the architects.

On the other moment, landscape became bigger than “gardening" and encompassed a programatic element in its conception. Winy Maas coined the term datascapes to define the informational compound that goes into the decision making process, that in turn is treated as a formal device to blur the boundaries between the physicality of inside and outside, and the barriers from public to collective space. The importance of this distinction lies in the relationship between building and ground it creates on the contemporary city. I propose that the old model, understood as a modernist painting, is prejudicial to the dynamic of the city, and thus the new approach could be developed to create a more fluid hierarchy of spaces. In understanding the open space not as a compositional device, but as a fluid space between buildings, a set of voids - in a sense, closer to the medieval models of city morphology - the value of the space can aggregate another quality: informality. I would argue here that informality is related to the landscape by advancing the definition proposed by Balmond (Informal), where through the principles of locality, juxtaposition and hybridization, a set of forces are not isolated or independent, but have different degrees of interdependency that “transfers to each other, from separated natures” their effects.

This concept, I propose, when used with the idea of typology earlier presented, makes possible that the different spatial conditions created by the architectural planning could absorb the diversity of programs and functions of the city, making it flexible and in the end, becoming responsive to the demands of the city in formation.

HOME SWEET HOME

Sweet Parliament Home - Andres Jaque

Only in the UE there are 80 million people living in shared houses. Paris, Berlin, London, none of them are the capital of Europe. The real capital of Europe is a city without exteriors, a city of 80 million domestic interiors connected through skype and the social networks. As Andres Jaque states, “ sharing home is a massive and diverse phenomenon, an invisible urbanism that challenges the way housing and the city have been thought in the last decades. A metropolis without urban designers, an architecture without architects that discredit the most sublime disciplines”.

Indeed these 80 million of domestic interiors are no more than dilapidated and ramshackle flats, full of old furniture and objects whose owner is uncertain. These interiors are the background scenery of the nomadism, of this state of temporality that most of these buildings imply. Home doesn’t represent us because it doesn’t belong to us. Home is just a stop.

In a shared apartment, home is no longer familiar but a space of uncertainty. The dialectic public/private recognized in the Greek polis has no more sense.  Home is no longer the pacific and apolitical space of the oikos , but the very core of the political activity.  Home is no longer the refuge of pacific intimacy but a piece of disputed urbanity. “Home sweet home” is over. 

ON DOMESTICITY: THE PUBLICNESS OF THE PRIVATE

The -Otla- / Pol Houses in Ahmedabad

The notion of privacy is not universal. Privacy is not a need but a cultural outcome of the established canons of a society. In a Darwinian sense, privacy is the result of the slow but relentless adaptation of the human being to a particular climate, place and culture. Technology, with innovations like the toilet or the washing machine, plays a key role in defining the boundaries of privacy, but to link the notion of privacy just to the technological evolution is too reductive.

India is a particular interesting case that challenges the conventions of the notion of privacy. The historic city of Ahmedabad provides a wonderful case study.  The walled city is divided in neighborhoods (-Pur-) that in turn are divided in clusters of houses ( -Pol-). Ahmedabad is the sum of Pols. The Pols are clusters of houses grouped along dead-end streets sometimes separated from the city by historic gates. There is a strong sense of community in each Pol that comes from caste, economic activity or religion. Any citizen living in a Pol has to accept its particular rules of behavior and the interaction between the members of a Pol takes place in the dead-end street where the boundaries between private and public become blur.

The Pol Houses are a typology of housing that respond to this sense of community.

The typology is characterized by the “otla”, an elevated platform at the front of each house that serves for multiple purposes. Elevated at different levels from the street, not only it provides protection against floods but becomes a real extension of the house in the street. The difference of level demarcates its degree of privacy. Despite its small dimensions (sometimes no more than 1m width), the otla houses a great range of domestic activities that, externalized in the street, become the space of interaction between the neighbors. The interesting point here is that the activities externalized are precisely those related to water: laundry, bathing, etc. There is not only a technical reason (water sewage) why precisely such tasks as bathing and doing the laundry are the ones externalized. These tasks are deeply rooted in the Indian tradition, where public bathing in tanks and rivers has always had a sacred connotation.

The Pol Houses challenge every notion of privacy as they make public precisely the tasks that Western societies have condemned to isolation in the name of efficiency.