PUBLIC SPACE AS PRE-CONDITION

Through the posts of this term we have been discussing several times about the role of public space in cities. The design of public space has been mostly described as a tool to control citizens. In a previous post, I have described how bio-politics are deeply influencing public space and how the identity is being shaped through the way we design our built environment.

In this post, however, I want to take another point of view on the role of the public space. Usually more emphasis is put in the design of buildings than in the design of public spaces.  Taking Bogota as example, I want to show how the design of public space can change the nature of a city independently from its buildings.

Bogota is changing drastically. Its former mayor Enrique Peñalosa launched several initiatives to transform the city’s attitude from one of negative hopelessness to one of pride and hope. Key and strategic public spaces were the sparks of this transformation. A part from the whole cycle and bus network that have reconnected the outskirts of the city and reduced the dependency on car, it is the way the future slums were conceived what was really innovative.

Being aware that slums would continue to grow and extend to the periphery, Peñalosa built a series of paved paths and public spaces to locations that were completely inhabited at the moment. Years later, slums organized along this paved paths and appropriated them as their core public spaces. A sense of civility was created in the slums by the simple fact of providing previously a public space with enough quality to be considered as valuable for the slum community. Public space acted as pre-condition. Later, with the insertion of specific programs such as libraries and schools along these paved paths, the slums were suddenly connected with the basic services of the city. Literacy in the slums of Bogota is now the highest in the whole South-America.

PROJECTION

Architectural projection by ETH Zurich students, October 2012. “Change of material” simulated with a projection on a concrete façade by Mario Campi at ETH Zurich, Science City Campus. Image © Lukas Treyer, 2012

Projection is a technology we have been using for years.It can be seen in nearly all the classrooms.I have been fascinated by projection for a long time.I believe this tech of overlapping illusion onto real world has a lot potential.

The picture attached is a experiment made by ETH students 2012.They processed animations designed by them, and projected it onto a concrete facade.It's a great experiment with wonderful effect.Decorations took place of the major part of architectural element of facade and created a fantastic view.The boundaries between illusion and real world have been blurred.

The research of projection of architecture arose many questions.First,it questioned "what's real?" in a radical way.The defining of real is based on the chemical signals moving inside our bodies our minds, that consist consciousness and feelings.That also means, these feelings are not objective and stabilized if their limits of cognition have been passed over.Not need to mention the movie of Matrix,nowadays people's knowing of human body is getting deeper and deeper,people will find out how our bodies can be functional step by step, nothing mysterious, everything is pure science.The protocol of science experiment means everything can be duplicated by other researchers, this everything includes the attempts of cheating the feelings of human bodies.

Projection has a lot of potential of cheating human eyes.If the boundaries have been achieved,we can no longer tell which is projection and which is real ,if it still maters that we should have different materials to create a high qualified space experience? we might use the most generic and high efficient material to create most generic spaces then overlap them with projections as "decorations"

What made the classic become classic? of course not the objective status of existence.If we can replaced it with projection,what would happen?
Imagine everyday you woke up and found yourself inside different classic architectures,isn't it amazing?

THE NEW GENERATION

In my paper,I talked about the mapping between physical spaces and it's type of function.We can work at home, use internet to communicate with colleagues and get comments from bosses.Nowadays,lots of people's works are using the computers and internets ,which can be done in any places that has Wi Fi. But Why people still have to work at offices? not just because they were asked to be,but there's a trigger in subconscious that tells people, OK, it's the office,let's work.

People have been using certain types of architectures to contain certain behaviors for a long time.Everyone has a blurred cognition of the mapping between space and function.You want to do Mass,you go to the church,the building has towers or colorful glass window.That become ordinary and common sense.

But these things might change with the next generation,the new generation.Progressing in technology is liberating us from physical contacts and showing us a cyber space that is also functional and powerful.More and more information is processed with the computing units inside the terminals,now even the "Clouds". A lot of functions that can only be achieved face to face,now can be get by internet,it causes the break of links between function and physical spaces that has continued for centuries.

The new generation won't have the loyalty to some architectural types, because they haven't experience the time that we have functions that strongly related to physical spaces.Architectural type becomes insignificant.They can enjoy their life in a room that has just walls and a computer.

What should we do to react? I think the combining of smart furniture and architecture envelope will be a trend. Architectures can be really touched and used in a interactive way,the identities of architectures will not be about the shapes or constructions,but more detailed into how people can interact with it.   

COMPLEXITY IN THE DIGITAL

It's a conversation I have had since I started architecture school...one that was driven in large part by classes with Ferda Kolatan. Parametric design allows for intricate complexity. We have seen many proposed strategies for how to address the complexity needed in architecture--infrastructure being one option. For me the common criteria in how to address complexity is scalability. Ferda had a theory that the same characteristics that we value in parametric design can be seen in the architecture and art of the Rococo period. Most of the designs are based on one unit, most often the rocaille pictured above. That unit is used to create an atmospheric design that is engulfing because it is used at several levels, furniture to a room to a building. 

That same strategy is used with parametric design and with firms like Zaha Hadid, we have seen how parametricism can be used at the urban scale with masterplans. There is a class offered next semester on how digital design's complexity can be used to address a wide berth of social issues. It is particularly interesting to me because most parametric programs have roots in industrial design where designs needed to be repetitive, scalable, and changed in increments. Its pretty amazing to me that yet again, architecture's roots are based in a industrial practices that when adopted by architecture become focused on aesthetics. 

THE FUTURE LAY IN RUINS

This is one of my favourite images of Arata Isozaki. This collage was done 22 years after Hiroshima was bombed. The megastructures of Isozaki are superposed to a landscape of the devastated Hiroshima.  Everything are ruins, his futuristic constructions are also falling apart.  The future is reduced to ruins. Isozaki has constantly been working on the idea of “ruins”. In his words, "They are dead architecture. Their total image has been lost. The remaining fragments require the operation of the imagination if they are to be restored." Now, let’s look at this image more attentively.

In 1960, the future of Japan was rosy.  Nothing was more important than developing the plans for the future of the city. Japan was utopia. The metabolists dreamed more than ever that architecture could change society. But Isozaki didn’t feel that way. For him, ruins were the inevitable fate of all cities. Hiroshima was still burning in front of his eyes; he could never escape it. “I could not get away from the past when I saw cities, great complex urban structures destroyed in an instant, transformed into mountains of rubble and trash.” For him, future lay in ruins.

With this image Isozaki was deeply critizing utopia. Utopia was misunderstood because it only relied in the absolute time. Usually facts of the past are arranged along a single axis, but we can run our imagination along the line of the past also. Japanese utopia forgot the imaginative past; focused only in the future, it forgot that past has the power to stimulate fantasies, visions, reveries…”Ruins lie in the future of our city, and the future city itself will lie in ruins”. The future formed amidst the ruins.

Architects we should never forget temporality as a pre-condition. I try to keep in my mind that, at the very end, we are designing ruins. Time has always fascinated me. I started this term posting John Soane’s work in ruins and I wanted to end this term with Arata Isozaki. In my thesis, I will get into depth into the issues of time and memory. I will keep you posted!

LOCATION IN DAVID LYNCH'S WORK

Twin Peaks, CBS Television Distribution, 1990

Location, either in a small town or in a large city, plays an active role in David Lynch's filmed work. In this text I'm going to compare how the director uses the representation of the the city to create a - soon to be broken - apparent normality in two of his works: the TV series Twin Peaks and the movie Mulholland Drive, originally conceived as a pilot of a TV series as well.

In the TV series Twin Peaks, the locality is the generator of an atmosphere of normality and familiarity. Everything is initially shown as a typical american small town and its predictable inhabitants. As the series develop, supernatural events start to be revealed to be operating in this place, breaking up with the apparent normality of this setting. To achieve that, the director separates the location into two interconnected realms: the calm and peaceful town of Twin Peaks and its respectable inhabitants, and a supernatural realm and its forces that come to operate in the town. This separation of locality and their eventual superimposition arrive as an interesting resource to reflect the dark double life carried by many of the characters that seemed initially innocent.

This time set in the city of Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive plays with the same common idea of other David Lynch's works: a break up with reality. Even though much is discussed about the movie's meaning and plot, what seems to be a consensus is the relation established between a real world and a world of dreams. It seems that every person watching the film has a particular notion of when the characters were dreaming, and of when the presented events were real or dreams. This confusing idea serves as a tool to depict this allure of Hollywood in contemporary culture. It is by giving his vision over the city of Los Angeles, and most specifically Hollywood, that Lynch, as according to the the movie critic Martha Nochimson, "reveals both his passionate, radiant belief in the rich possibilities of American popular culture and his dark insight into its capacity to destroy its best and brightest".

David Lynch plays with our conception of expectedness. To achieve this, he uses his scenarios, showing that what is real and typical can soon be broken, meaning that normality is nothing but an illusion.

A FIELD OF OBJECTS

Le Corbusier - “La Ville Radieuse” - 1924

The modernist utopia of decongestion and homogeneity was built in two beliefs: crowded spaces are always negative, and every man should be the same, have the same. These assumptions were based on a socialist view of society, in a Marxist understand of production and labor as the basis of life.

The result was a concept to make open, accessible spaces to nature, nature which needs to be controlled and molded to the interests of human beings. This disconnection established what I think was the reason to the failure of the modernist utopia: the blandness of the landscape of events, where the joyful play of light and shadows and masses are less relevant than the machine to live in.

In this very assumption, architecture lost its meaning, and became engineering. Forms of social control through space were developed as the formal basis of architecture. The shift from man’s spirit to the object’s efficiency change what architecture was, and in turn, relegated generations to not know (and in turn, understand and respect) architecture. The effects of these actions are felt even today: apart from a small number of visionaries, architecture is understood at large as a service, to provide a cheap roof, more or less healthy according to the budget. 

To quote Moneo, "The architectural object can no longer be considered as a single, isolated event because it is bounded by the world that surrounds it as well as by its history. It extends life to other objects by virtue of its specific architectural condition, thereby establishing a chain of related events in which it is possible to find common formal structures.” (On Typology - Oppositions, 1978).

It is easy for us to get trapped in academia, starchitects and flashy competitionsand think that this is the whole concept of architecture and its production. But in the real world, as Gehry put, only has 2% of this architecture. So, from the idea that architecture is a tool to the uniformity of conditions, I propose that we should aim to understand architecture by what it is (its formal and spatial qualities, distancing it from other disciplines) and what it could do, and use our buildings as a way to bring playfulness and joy again to the cities. Let’s leave the engineering concerns to the engineers.

THE RESURGENCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE

        

The possibilities that infrastructure provides has the potential to bring back the machine aesthetic. In Allen’s article, he describes it as "a moment in which the technical and the aesthetic formed a unified whole." In a different way, it is the same discussion of form and function. Allen creates an interesting timeline driven by national and international events. The Cold War kept the "modernist dream of an integration of technology and aesthetics was no longer believable." Wartime economies created “spaces of production” that focused on efficiency. This period focused on material concrete processes and the passage of information. He then goes on to say "a postmodern culture of abstract signs and surfaces without depth." It also includes a rediscovery and reappropriation of the past (which often leads to loss in depth). As Allen explains, this means that architecture moves from being driven by organization to surfaces.

         These historical changes can be seen in the architecture. "If the factory floor is the ideal space of early modernism, then the museum is the emblematic space post-modernity." As “postmodernism responded not only to a call to re-inscribe architecture into history, it also responded to a contemporary demand for meaning in architecture.” It is this search for meaning that has led to architecture being a form of critique. What is particularly interesting to me is Allen’s hypothesis that “architecture has surrendered its capacity to imagine, to propose or to construct alternative realities. As Robin Evans has remarked, a building was once 'an opportunity to improve the human condition,' now it is conceived as 'an opportunity to express the human condition.' architecture is understood as a discursive system that expresses, critiques, or makes apparent the hard realities of a world that is held safely at arm's length."

         As other medias have become more ubiquitous, architecture needs to return to its ability to “transform reality” because it is falling behind in its ability to critique as well as other medias. Infrastructure has the ability to bring back the practical and organizational aspects of architecture. It will immediately insert architects again into the real world, and they will no longer be able to “[retreat] from questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice.” This allows for “architecture's instrumentality can be reconceived--not as a mark of modernity's demand for efficient implementation, but as the site of architecture's contact with the complexity of the real." Architecture again becomes material and “an activity that works in and among the world of things and not exclusively with meaning and image...concrete proposals and realistic strategies of implementation and not distanced commentary or critique.” Maybe yet again, architects will be able to contribute to the organization of the city and architects will not continue to “[participate] in their own marginalization.”

BRAZIL'S ASPHALT PARKS

In Brazil, after many years of low investments in public infrastructure such as public spaces and parks, many cities have started adopting the policy of converting street and avenues, used by vehicles during weekdays, into public areas on the weekend. Avenida Vieira Souto in Rio de Janeiro, Elevado Costa e Silva in São Paulo, Avenida Beira Rio in Porto Alegre and many others all around the country.

Even though these conversions have proved to be a great success, given by the large number of visitors and users during the times these streets become parks, the motivations behind such policies remain rather unclear. Brazil has a long history of turning temporary solutions into permanent ones. Isn't it possible that, because of such a demand for more public spaces, cities have found a cheap and convenient way of creating public areas that don't demand investments?

It is a well known fact that most successful parks around the globe are filled with equipment. Benches, litters, proper lighting and kiosks aid in the creation of an open living room, an area where people want to spend their time. What happens in these park-converted streets is just the opposite: asphalt is the only equipment. But still, people enjoy spending time there. What a casual critic may fail to perceive is that all of these "temporary parks" have one thing in common: location.

To me, the key item to determine the success of a public space is it's proper location. These temporary public spaces are all made in streets that are adjacent to major scenic features of the city. Places where people would usually want to go, just for the sake of appreciating the view, for instance. Hence why, when given the opportunity, the public will take these streets and fill them with the most varied types of activities. Running, walking, skating, biking, or just sitting on the ground, enjoying the view.

It is key for architects to understand that sometimes there is only so much that can be done to create a successful public space, many times, the solution can be simply doing nothing.

EXPERIENCES AND QUESTIONS

Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Fiel Chapel, 2007. Interior experience and exterior object.

The architectural experience can be approached as a way to contest the hegemony of the vision over other senses in our contemporary world, and the consequent individual detachment from reality through countless and superfluous images. 

This drives us to an architecture guided not by the final object, the final image, but by the user experience of the architectural space.

However, every time I look at contemporary piece of architecture that is driven by these experiential premisses, no matter how much they move me, I can not help to struggle with several questions. Some of them are:

These projects are normally driven by two elements that have never really convinced me. One of them is the dependence on one single idea of one creative-sensitive author, and the other is the linear process of design. Everything is manipulated to achieve one initial concept without being questioned, tested or compared.

Finally, the effects created commonly rely on an interiority, which supports the fact that one must want to or be allowed to enter a space in order to experience it. I believe there is a way of bringing experience to the urban realm, one that would trigger social and political identification. However, I wonder if there is a way of putting together a collective experience without depending on a mediatic or facadist architecture.

THESIS PRELIMINARY ABSTRACT

Cidade Tiradentes, São Paulo, Brazil

Revising the transportation systems of a metropolis is one of the essential operations that can secure the unpredictability of life, supported by the possibility of directly transforming quotidian conditions of the population.

The thesis’ primary object of study is mass transportation, specifically metro systems, focusing on the fact that currently, a number of large urban agglomerations are not proportionately served in infrastructural terms. São Paulo arises as a crucial example in which the rampant growth of urban sprawl intensified social and spatial inequalities establishing a major challenge to provide accessibility in a congested metropolis of twenty million inhabitants.

The strategy aims to rethink São Paulo metro system approaching design simultaneously in both urban (network) and architectural (station) scales. In this sense, it is crucial to consider the decentralization of infrastructural centers into the peripheral areas of the city, dealing with infrastructure as the primary trigger to generate transformation that must be coordinated with a mixed program approach. The hypothesis is a speculation that the architecture of these great infrastructural works can play a major role in a metropolitan transformation that ultimately will result in social inclusion.

The proposal is grounded on the potential of engaging infrastructure as inclusive urban catalyzer. 

BIOMIMETICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Hylozoic Ground, Philip Beesley, Rob Gorbet, Rachel Armstrong

A major natural disaster occurs, on average, 10 times a year, with minor disasters striking as frequently as once per week. These include floods, tidal waves, tornadoes, ice storms, fires, landslides, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Major global cities, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Mumbai, to mention only few of them, have suffered from numerous disasters and an enormous number of people have died.

Scientists are able to predict the time needed from the starting point of a disastrous event until it reaches the affected areas, but still they are not able to predict when a disaster will happen. For example for the hurricane Sandy the meteorologists could measure the speed of the wind and thus could predict the amount of time needed for the hurricane to reach the northeast areas of United States. In consequence, people living in the coastal areas built barriers in order to protect their properties. However, there still were a large number of constructions that had been destroyed.

Nowadays, architects try to take into consideration these unpredictable events in their design, especially when conceptualizing and designing public spaces in coastal areas. For example, they have started designing different programs in different height levels so the lower could be sacrifice in case of flood emergency and function as barriers or large tanks for flooding water.

There are architects and researchers on environmental disasters who investigate multiples ways that a construction could react during a disaster. These projects are paradigms from biomimetic architecture. For example the researcher Rachel Armstrong in the University of Greenwich is doing a research in protocell architecture. She believes that the problem is that buildings during a disaster react as machines so they don’t have the flexibility of a physical organism. Moreover, she considers that the traditional architecture has separated nature from human activities. In her research ‘’Architecture That Repairs Itself’’ she is dealing with the problem of sickness of the constructions in Venice. She has developed protocells that could create an artificial shell-like structure. Architecture nowadays developed the biomimetic principles one step further by creating living architecture. Other examples of this is the self-healing concrete, in which researchers plug bacteria or the Silk pavilion from MIT media lab, in which they used 6,500 live silkworms to form the pavilion.

As Rachel Armstrong argued, our future cities will be designed more like gardens than machines. This is an idea similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s argument about organic architecture: “may go by the way of the machine to teach his own people not foolishly to rebuild but to build the new beyond the old; to build a nation that is itself more like one great organic life all together; to so now how to go forward into organic life universal…” Wright contemplates that architecture should live with nature as a whole. Could we perhaps visualize Wright’s dream in the near future? Would ever large cities be constructed of living organisms? Are they going to sense and respond in the disasters? For sure the cities of the future will be based on time not on space.  For sure, major cities will be constructed so as to react on disasters, not just receive them catastrophically.

BUILDING A REVOLUTION

Our trip to Russia was an amazing reminder that historically architects still believed that they could use architecture to change society. Part of why they failed was the extent to which they enforced an imposing ideology on the residents. Communal housing tried to fight capitalism with the architecture of the rooms. The size of the rooms was meant to discourage people from bourgeois consumerism. The worker's clubs were intended to spur political discussion. It was an architecture that was intended to create a certain dialogue that could potentially lead to a revolution. Our study of Russian social experiments such as the socialist city Sotsgorod take these social changes to the urban scale. They were trying to develop cities that were completely based on the needs of the worker in effort to celebrate their efforts. The whole city was dependent on their job and specific industry. It was intended to create a live-work dynamic that was ideal for the workers.

It's interesting because it reminds me of something Lucas pointed out in our summer semester. He said that the reason public housing stands out so much in New York is because of the homogeneity. It is heterogeneity that allows blending. It is this reason that I think is part of the reason why projects like this failed. They were too uni-focused. It is also something that I notice in society today. Our jobs have become more and more specialized, and we have lost any semblance of being self-sufficient. I believe it is this self-sufficiency that was was cities and towns were initially built upon. They are built on that exchange between different specializations, and with the advent of the internet, that is what has driven globalization. It is this need for industrial and vocational diversity that was missing from the social experiments of Sotsgorod. 

YES! GENERIC! SO WHAT?

Hong Kong, photography: Michael Wolf

It's undeniable the contemporary trend of cities to copy others' features/elements. Contemporary?

Since trade between different societies existed, globalization had started. Despite the idea of sharing has been with humanity for ages, for many times these cultural relationships were not developed in a peaceful way, like during European colonialism. Over that period, cultural sharing — or imposition — happened in many different levels, including in terms of space. Architecture in the Americas, for example, is, generally speaking, European architecture.

Then, is it bad architecture? Weren't the Americans (from all the Americas) able to adapt, recreate, add, subtract the European styles to meet their own needs? There are many examples that prove that they were, but even when the ones which are just style copies have their qualities and importance in the history of architecture.

So, if the generic is not a contemporary issue, why it's so obvious when you look at — almost — any major city today? I would say it is because of the last decades' rapid urbanization. World's urban population went from 0.7 billion in 1950 to 3.4 billion in 2009 (United Nations, 2010). How spaces could possibly be full of character and local identity when they were just built? Probably most of what humanity ever built was built in the last six decades. It's too much construction for such a short period of time.

Many questions can be raised from this theme, but, based on history, it's not a big deal to be generic. And, if there is, than it's just a matter of time and these spaces might generate their own identities.

BIOPOLITICS IN PUBLIC SPACE

Destruction of Uyghur Settlements in Xinjiang by Chinese government

Yes, it is true that imperialist and nationalist states have one element in common: they both seek to make the public space benign, regulated, clean and healthy, incapable of producing either disease or order. They present a new definition of the public that has usually been at odds with other historical forms of community. We could find many examples that clearly support this argument: the British imposition of public space in India or, just to mention a most recent case, the demolition of the traditional neighborhoods in Kashgar in 2012, and attempt of China to erode the ethnic Uyghur Muslim culture. And hygienic public space is somehow the excuse to assimilate other ethnic minorities but above all a way to assure the healthy workforce required for an efficient capitalism. An efficient capitalism requires disciplined and regulated public spaces.”Biopolitics” indeed. In this way, we could read the informal settlements and the untransformed open spaces as a refusal of citizens to an ideal bourgeois order. Should we then refuse to design public spaces?

In my opinion, the modern conception of public space should not be applied indiscriminately to all countries, it should not be globalized. There are lessons to learn from the South-American favelas, the Indian bazaars and many other types of informal configurations of public space. However, there is a risk of romanticizing these scenarios. When it comes to questions of life and death, of young children dying on the pavements of the streets, a dilemma appears. Should such subaltern citizens have the freedom to die in their ignorance or should we intervene with our knowledge? Not intervening in these open spaces would be simply irresponsible towards our concerns for prolonging life. So for me the question is not if we intervene, but how. Modernity always replaces tradition at some loss and design plays here a key role to make this process more or less painful.

So let`s design public spaces without limiting its appropation. We should design them to precisely challenge the idea of an imposed model of a global disciplined, surveyed and over-regulated public space; to propose new bottom-up urban scenarios. Public spaces able to allow difference, contestation and even disorder, but that guarantees at the same time the right of a prolonged life.

THE COINCIDENCE

Columbus circle in the late 19th century. (courtesy MCNY)

Influenced by the Theory of Chaos and given the changes that occur due to coincidence, I am contemplating if luck or purposeful interventions or perhaps both have shaped the structure of a city. How has architecture reflected on natural disasters or on major social and economic changes? How has architecture responded to climate change or to war and population fluctuations?

After the Civil war (1870 - 1920), the number of Americans living in cities grew from 10 to 54 million. ‘’Cities in the late 19^th century were large, crowded and impersonal places devoted to making money’’. They were not formed and designed to accept the dramatic increase of the population resulting in inefficient constructions and very low quality of life. However, the invention of the elevator and other crucial technological improvements allowed the construction of massive skyscrapers that could accommodate thousands of people. The New City has then inspired many architects to form their own manifestos. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: So our big cities, vampires, must die.

In my mind two questions arise; How the New York would have been formed if the Civil War had never happened? How New York was going to seem if people hadn’t immigrated there or if the immigrant destination was another city?

TYPOLOGICAL REMIX (OR WHY BJARKE IS BIGGER THAN REM)

BIG - W57, New York

From the readings on the suburbs to the Arctic Monkeys’ album, the idea of cataloguing and defining the idea of what is a city has taken its place. For the concept that a city is a walled portion of land, to a virtual construct, to a limitless expanse of free-movement, the concept of suburbia (or any synonym) needs to be defined. 

But I think there are always two conditions in any urban situation: the formal and the relational. The former has to do with the shape of things: how is the city laid out? How the architectural spaces are formed in respect to the land use, access to sun, light and nature? How the infrastructure and its input/output of resources inform the inhabitants? These are questions that concern the limits of the architecture. Questions that (might) be influenced by the product of architects and planners.

The second condition, the relational, is a more tricky one. It exists in respect to the network formed within people. We can call it the idea of community, perhaps. The bonds between people, their personal/social connection to each other and to the whole. The program, events or situations that happen within the boundaries of the architectural space.

And in this disjunction that lies the key to understand the suburban effect. We see a positive longing for the intrinsic qualities of suburbia (access to space, detached houses as a symbol of power, freedom of choice, cleanness and the invisibility of the outside-circle). From Wright to the de-urbanists to recent garden cities in UK, the ideal of sprawl still occupies the imaginary of the middle-class. These are formal conditions elevated as a desire continuum - while the negative aspects (long distances, detachment, dependency on the individual, isolation and sameness) tend to be ignored. 

Building on this relevance, I suggest we tackle the problem the way architects can afford. Why not considering the formal condition as the desired solution and work on the idea of remixing typologies? Why not suburbanize our metropolises? 

Typological understanding of what is interesting in the suburban form can be the key to re-create new urban types that could be apprehended by the urban population, create new formal conditions and, in turn, influence how people live inside the cities. 

Instead of complying with the generic city of today, we can built new forms of living that in turn, can become new relationships to how we experience our city.

THE PUBLIC CYBERSPACE

Can you remember the days, when the whole family gets together, seated around the fireplace, talking to each other, about what happened at school or where to go for the weekend? This ideal has long gone. Fireplace, as the original center of the living space, was taken over by television. We don't talk anymore, instead, we spent days and nights sitting in front of the gleaming screen, no longer using our minds.

Everything is changing. TV time since then has been replaced by the internet entertainment, delivered via iPads and laptops. If we want to talk about any scale of space, such as domestic space, collective space, public space, we can not ignore the invisible cyberspace. Cyberspace rapidly occupied our life both in time and space.
If you had a choice to live in the Palace of Versailles that has no modern system of air conditioning, electricity supply or even running water, or a 3*3*3 cube with no view and no decor, but fitted out with internet access, and satellite TV, which one would you choose? The answer for me depends on the contemporary definition of Architecture. Is it more related to art or is it about functional problem solving? Does form follows function or vice versa?

I prefer the 3*3*3 cube. According to the Moore's Law, the speed of Revolution in technology is much faster than one in Architecture. My understanding of Revolution in Architecture is that it always follows the Revolution in building technologies. Can you imagine modernist architecture without concrete? Without glass BAUHAUS would not exist. Architecture can hardly be the origin of a revolution, it is not as fundamental. Today, the leading technologies are internet, computer science, programming. As always, architecture follows the trend, with parametric design, smart furniture, etc. We first meet the needs of the clients, then we find the solution, and in this process architecture methods are not always efficient. The basic elements of architecture have been redefined by high-tech products: our clients are no longer after better spaces, but rather after stronger WiFi signals.