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| George Steinmetz, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn |
While departing New York's JFK Airport, the anxiety to see Moscow from the airplane window grew. I was curious to see those massive residential areas all covered with very similar buildings — a supposed materialization of the communist system where everyone would have the same living conditions.
It was a moment of distraction of what was just in front of me in the plane's window: Brooklyn's massive residential areas all covered with identical buildings. Despite the political/social system, both cities where the materialization of the same treatment towards people seen as masses. The individuality plays a very little role, sometimes even insignificant, in the middle of the repetition of typologies.
This issue resembles Rem Koolhaas' Generic City, but applied in a local scale: among suburbs, they are all suburbs, not much different from each other. And as most parts of contemporary metropolises today are covered with suburbs, maybe it's important to keep this issue in today's architecture agenda. However, to know what architects can do and how far they can go, we first have to address another question: Is the city really a living organism where, in an ideal "state of anarchy", people would appropriate space and transform it according to their own needs?
I am going to start one more time my post with Guy Debord’s notion: ‘‘The right to the city is not merely a right to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire’’. Influenced from the last sentence of this post many thoughts were born in my mind, particularly liked one about writing an individual’s rights in the city.
ReplyDeleteAs cities grow immensely the individual rights are being diminished and underestimated. Cities adapting to the global trend of ‘’designing for the masses’’ cause a loss of familiarity where people are alienated from the public space. Meaning, a public space where a person cannot feel familiar with, cannot adapt. Even the private spaces are designed in that unfamiliar mode (for masses e.g., blocks of flats designed with typical floor plans or similar industrial houses like these in Brooklyn. Are we living like ants? Are we all the same?
New technological inventions may change that. Sensors in the constructions feel and respond to each person's needs. Transformable design can easily change the space to once will. People cannot change the whole public space, but they can change the square meters of their bedroom. Going one step further, will the biomimicry give the opportunity to people to change the city according to their wills?