THE NONVISUALIZATION OF INFORMATION VISULIZATION

Can information visualization really make us understand more?

I doubt it.

Not just doubt it, I would say, some times information visualization is misleading us.

make us arrogant, make us less humble to talk about something we know nothing at all.

"We are visual animals"

We always use this sentence, at every occasion that  Graphic involved.

But please don't use this to judge research.


We never hesitate to claim that we have free will. We are the most talented on earth, because we can use tools. It's even the sign between intellectual and animals.We can change our environment by using tools.There comes a long-discussed controversy, are we controlling tools, or tools manipulating us.

Our ancestors accidentally acquired fire, and they used it to fight beasts and lighten their residences.They know how to use it, but they don't know why was it bright, and warm.But it doesn't matter, because they are the first and only kind that can use them, so they get used to them, with fire the civilization started.Even today, we can still notice some evidences that can trace to the first dawn of human being.Like the fireplace, even our body are generated to fit the use of fire, which can tell from our bone, these changes are written in our body, and in details of our modern lives.

People from eastern countries use trop-sticks to meal. Western use knife and folk. This custom can trace to the early civilization. Easterners are the earliest farmers, Westerners are the earliest hunters. People from ancient Asia, they grow rice and harvest every year, centralism keeps the society in a smooth circulation system. Westerners prefer to hunt, then they feed animals, to get meat. Trop-sticks is a  transformed form of farming tools,
knife and folk are transformed from swards and knives, in the early days, there's no specifically dining tools,these knives are used to kill animals and also put the meat in mouth. 

except the history, we can also find that, Chinese people use trop-sticks to eat everything, people from western countries use different tools to eat different thing.It's not a coincidence, the core of Chinese logic and philosophy is to find the inner peace, that is the called the "道" which can be interpreted as the discipline of everything, they believe everything is similar from the very basic,like the YinYang the positive and negative, that's the one answer to everything, this is the basic experimentalism, which is always right in strategy but not working well with details, the westerners have a believe of science, so they want accurate in tools.

From these stories, we can see that, tools and the people who use tools are choosing each other,tools recorded the users' ideas and customs, users after generations get used to be trained to become tool users.We always have the thing that the tool brought us.

Nowadays, we are having more smart tools, big data, computer modeling.information visualization.We should always be alarmed don't let the tools to manipulate you.
When we architects use pencils to hand draw drawings.We can experience the scale the math with our hand, and our mind, when 10 20years ago, most people live in the rural area, every child play with muds and bricks.That's the resource that some architects have a sensitive feeling towards materials. We were born in modern society, some people never really touched the rural soil, they don't know the feeling of touching the soil.So how can we expect someone design something that contains the respect to the real material, the real identity of different small town.Architects like Zumthor, who grow up in a small village among mountains, that's why he can use these stones to create fabulous architectures. All he's got is from the mountains.

We now use computers to model, physical model seems to be toys or 3d presentation. We even use 3d printing to print these shapes. Tool logic totally infected our design process, just as 3d printing. We don't care the details how different material combined together the details, we just create strange shapes and tell everyone look, it's a building you have never seen, then applause.  That's why I hate Zaha, a terrible sculpture designer.

Information visualization is having a serious bug.  
They can't tell the process, they just can provide you simple conclusions.And behind the conclusions, the information has been flattened.We just know, A town is bigger than B town, how is the difference? if the difference is just 1 people, can we really use this conclusion of "B town is bigger than A town"? this can be miscounting or anything, what's worse?After holding a result, we feel that we got the answer,so we just use this conclusion, ignoring any possibilities that leads this difference.

Information is hard to understand, so it is.
If we push to make it seems easier,
that means some layers of information is lost.
flattened.

This kind of presentation skill make the audience can be easily manipulated by someone who want to take advantage of these data.Which is how we use inforgraphic, we use it to terminate controversy, in the name of scientific, destroy the curiosity, and hide the truth deeper and deeper until nobody cares about the truth.

The whole article is about visible and invisible.It's very interesting, something is invisible but last long even can compare with human history.Something is become visible, but actually made the truth to be totally invisible. We use tools, which is obviously visible.Actually tools are manipulating us more or less, it's invisible but can be visible if you think about different tools.

ON SLUMS AND THE PICTURESQUE

Mumbai slum

“Aestheticizing the self-help living conditions of poor people squatting in buildings becomes an attractive option when there is no social housing. And yet even more problematic is that participatory practices attempt to compensate for this situation with strategies that see our increasingly precarious life as something normal, even creative. What these practices seem to prefigure is an ethos in which a forceful normality is restored and, to use Benjamin’s words 'exception has become the rule'” Pier Vittorio Aureli, The theology of tabula rasa: Walter Benjamin and architecture in the age of precarity, in:LOG 27, 2013.

The statement above sums up the political convergence of what Aureli suggests as "less is enough": the rulers turn calamity and the state of despair into a stylistic fashion. To have less is to be more. It is easy to suggest that it is an obvious relation, to comply with the norm and say that architecture must strive to be creative and use less resources, but as Aureli exposes, this does not and will not solve the problem, it will perpetuate the state in which the workers creativity (from where its "power" comes from) are abused from the capitalist status quo to a condition of exploitation.


I bring this issue due to the relevance of the astheticization of poverty, what I want to combat as the naiveté of the architect from its Ivory Tower to give the best solution to the problem, as if ever there was one. Stating that mixed income housing, a respect to traditional dwellings, the glorification of informality, is not the same as attacking the causes of the problem as much as creating a false invisible dome above the problems and calling it a day. Before talking about the right to the city, I suggest we, architects, to understand the dynamics of the economical power more critically, and try to do more than to visit a slum with our expensive cameras and bottles of water. Pity is not an answer. Architecture et révolution. Architecture can be avoided. 

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

Six memos for the next millennium (1985) - Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer. In Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for literature.Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of Calvino's lectures at Harvard in 1985.

In this book, he predicted the following millennium in six keywords, as a manifesto. 
These six keywords surprisingly matches series of  contemporary social phenomenon.
I would first talk about the "lightness" in architecture.  

Lightness

"Software" of the  post-industrial age would finally dominate "hardware" of the industrial age.
Which matches the internet revolution on going today. Websites and applications, instead of combining everything making complicated navigation and collections, started to make everything "lighter" with the minim steps to a specific target. People always have expressions of architectures as solid volume, making of concrete or other heavy material that has "Weight" .As a contrary to "lightness" architectures seemingly to be "Weight" and immortal. But this idea has been deconstructed in post-modern societies.  Despite the material, the physical status of architecture, they are still a  part of the changing history of contemporary culture. Architecture had always been forced to adapt the changes in technology or lifestyle, and this will continue.

Architectures can be "light" also mentioned by Toyo Ito, since he studied the temporary architecture. So we can say "lightness" in different ways infects architecture.From it's form, we would prefer glass and having transparency in architecture, not like the concrete volume, modern architecture want to communicate with the surroundings, it greatly depends on the social condition, as Sakamoto Kazunari
 talked in his book < The Poetic Ordinary > Before 1970s, the city is declining, the public space is a threaten to people not a welcoming attitude. According to this, houses that time, always have a thick concrete wall with low saturation color (mostly grey) and having really small windows.After 1970s, with the economy recovery, the public spaces are being safer, people would like to step out their homes which used to be considered as barrier or prison, and then, architects started to consider designing big windows or having communication between in and out.

There's a story about the wall streets, there used to be a trading floor with hundreds of traders working and shouting to each other, making phone calls to buy and sale stocks. The professional traders even injected clostridium botulinum to make them look poker-faced, so they can hide their moods. But now a days, the deals are mostly made in a small architecture in Jersey as a information center. The original trading floor in wall streets has become a exhibition space to show how people works before.This story tells us, technology is liberating space from sticking with it's original functions, also gives us opportunities to have more space creation.

light as birds, not feather.

It's connected to the story above, this "lightness" is alive. Internet and other modern technology makes function and form can be totally separate. Some "required" functions are not that necessary ever since, some "optional" functions which can improve the quality of living can be well considered.
Sharing, Public spaces, Co-working, Co-living. These ideas can have their place. I believe the improvement in technology is the way to liberate people from duplicate work, from physical living. Life can be simplified or say "light lifestyle" with the help of technology, we can understand our life in a new way, to think what is really necessary. Breaking the chain of old social pressure, social value system. Living condition is not talking about the physical existence of luxury rooms or decorations, but more concerning about the public environment, the social network and so on.

Global cities, metropolitan, also generic cities, same issues are threatening young people who want to have a career in them.Heavy traffic/Price increases/High rent/Pollution/Crime....... In Asian countries, people are thinking a lot of buying houses not renting, since having the property of a house is a "social requirement" of marriage. These all making the young a heavy duty to carry, these are real "weight" to young people, they need a "light lifestyle", a well designed ultra small apartment might be a good choice.

Technology improvement not just changed our physical environment, it's also liberating our minds, we can have autonomy in thinking of what we need, what we don't, in having a life quality of "lightness"

DHARAVI TOOL-HOUSES, BHULESHWAR STREET MARKETS, AND THE PHOENIX MARKET CITY MEGA MALL

In "Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating architecture and urbanism" (2005) Jyoti Hosagrahar writes about New Delhi’s public spaces after colonization: “Rebuilt, redefined, reasoned, and reconstituted, public spaces in their many hues were indigenous modernities […] A constantly shifting ‘middle ground’, of hybrid space and less-than-ordered use, signaled the local people’s subversion and contestation of the colonial state’s vision. […] The city’s streets and squares were the collective expression of multiple and emergent settlements of these contradictions. In their plurality the forms and meanings, Delhi’s public spaces and urban form were neither entirely planned and regulated, nor completely traditional and spontaneous, but the result of conflict, mediation, and negotiation”.

Hosagrahar further explains where or what the public spaces were before the colonization of India; “The bazaars, the chowk or intersections of major streets, the courtyards of mosques and temples, the entertainment houses of the tava’if (courtesans), the tombs of saints, the sites of ancient ruins, fairgrounds, water tanks, and the river bank and the many gardens were places of public gathering for the residents of Delhi”. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British officials strove to redefine the public realm through a massive urban restructuring “public space became a contested terrain” (Hosgrahar p.47). First they demolished large parts of the city clearing up the density and opening a large boulevard called “Champs de Mars”(Hosagrahar p.58); this Haussmanization was then followed by the introduction of new civic buildings which “included facilities like hospitals and clubs that were for Europeans only while some others were open to all Indians.” The new spaces included facilities for finance, education, health, and administration “to improve the physical and mental well-being of people” (Hosagrahar p.60). Furthermore, the officials tried to define strict delineations between what’s public and what’s private. This is due to the fact that the private and public spaces were many shades of gray. Hosagrahar explains “Pathways that cut through private properties created ambiguous ownership. The bazaars such as Chandni Chowk, Faiz Bazaar, Meena Bazaar, and Chawri Bazaar were the most public of spaces where anyone could pass […] As one moved inwards from the bazaar the streets got increasingly narrow and more private. In the old world of face-to-face interaction the gradation from public to private were one of decreasing anonymity and increasing control”(Hosagrahar p.68). In addition, the public space for the locals meant that if needed they would appropriate the spaces through agreements, such as enlarging the house as the family grows, adding a floor, converting street front rooms to shops (Hoagrahar p.69).

Looking at the significance of bazaars as the “most public” of spaces in India where the society that’s “divided as it was by race, caste, community, and religion, bazaars, […] were spaces of anonymity, identity, display, and interaction” (Hosagrahar p.53). I therefore decided to study three sites, the Dharavi tool-houses, the Bhuleshwar neighborhood’s markets, and the most recently built mega-mall in Mumbai Phoenix Market City (2011). These three public spaces which also act as spaces of commerce, have varying spatial organizational systems, economic outputs, and users.

In a New York Times article published in 2011 titled In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope, Jim Yardley explains “In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion.” Interestingly, despite it being the most notorious of slums, it is also home to some prominent millionaires such as “Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy. He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has 300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20 million” (Yradley, 2011). The markets in the Bhuleshwar neighborhood on the other hand, are street markets in close proximity to one another built during the 19th century which include Bhuleshwar and Crawford market where fruits and vegetables are sold, Mangaldos Market where silk and cloths are sold, Zaveri Bazaar for jewellery specifically diamonds, and Chor Bazaar for antiques and furniture. Finally, the Phoenix Market City, “measuring around 4 million square feet, it houses over 300 Indian and international stores, 55 food and beverage outlets, an 8 screen cinema, and a massive family entertainment area.”

The aim is to study these three commercial public spaces, and try to find a hybrid space where both corporate spaces and local individuals thrive and live interdependently. An interesting precedent is the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona that was re-structures with the collaboration of the locals in accordance with their needs, practices and traditions, rather than being transformed into a mall where luxury goods are sold.

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.