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.