Von Bart Lootsma.
Von Bart Lootsma.
Central to MVRDV’s method is the belief that the reality architecture and urbanism try to organize is to a large degree quantifiable. It is a landscape that consists of data, in other words a datascape, as MVRDV calls it. In the beginning, this landscape was largely seen from the perspective of an architect, consistent with the kind of commissions a young architectural office becomes: buildings. Datascapes are visual representations of all the quantifiable forces that can influence or even define and control the architect’s work. These influences could be planning and building regulations such as zoning laws, ‘laws of experience’ developed by investors, developers or builders, technical constraints, natural conditions such as sun and wind, but they could just as well be jurisprudence, for example about minimum working conditions, or political pressure from interest groups from both inside and outside the organization that provides the commission. Every architectural commission is constrained by many of these forces that are often contradictory. When visualized, all of these forces together form a new and more complex version of what used to be the site plan. In fact, this part of the method finds its origins in the office of OMA, where it was used to quickly find the constraints of a complex situation, for example for a competition project, and discover the loopholes within it. Most architects try to fight these constraints but MVRDV refined the method developed at OMA by introducing a process of negotiations that largely generates the design, for example in projects like the VPRO studio complex in Hilversum and the Villa KBWW in Utrecht.2)
Apart from the practical and pragmatic use of datascapes within the design process as a tool, MVRDV became very quickly interested in the collective effects of datascapes and the way they not just rule one building but large parts of the (urban) landscape. In the beginning, the goal seemed to be again to discover loopholes in this system, for example in the competition project for Bergen op Zoom. This could be interpreted as a pragmatic approach, but already this project is also ideologically driven as it is a plea to avoid sprawl and to concentrate most built volume in the area. As Bergen op Zoom is a protected historical cityscape however, it is not allowed that newly built volume is seen from the inner city. Therefore MVRDV drew sightlines from all the streets that together produce a possible envelope in which the new extension could be built respecting the regulations.
In the course of time however, datascapes appeared to offer a way to understand the development of the environment in a more general way, particularly in situations with a high density where the different ruling forces inevitably clash. MVRDV started to collect such situations from their own and other’s practices in handbooks of which FARMAX is the best example. In studios conducted by Winy Maas at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, students developed series of datascapes within a cubic city of 100 by 100 by 100 meters and a Floor Area Ratio of minimally 10, which is the equivalent of Hong Kong. Every single one of these datascapes deals with only one or two external influences and reveals their impact on the design process by showing their most extreme effects. These datascapes show that architectural design in the traditional sense only plays a very limited role. It is the society, in all its complexities and contradictions that shapes the environment in the most detailed way, producing ‘gravity fields’ in the apparent chaos of developments, hidden logicalities that eventually ensure that whole areas acquire their own special characteristics –even without knowing it.
Datascapes are visualizations of what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls the ‘expert systems’ and ‘abstract systems’ that have replaced traditional authority in contemporary society. They are bureaucratic systems in which trust in the system is grounded in an assumed expertise in a particular field. 3) The status of a person who is a caretaker in one system says nothing about his or her status in another. Moreover, even the objectivity of the information in the various systems is debatable. Particular interest groups can hire their own experts to dispute the information used by another. Laws and regulations are depending on interpretation. Modern-day society is dominated by a multiplicity of such abstract systems and so is our built-up environment. ‘Because of tax differences, the borders between Belgium and the Netherlands are occupied with vast numbers of villas generating a linear town along the frontier. In Holland market demands have precipitated a “slick” of houses-with-a-small-garden. Political constraints in Hong Kong generate “piles” of dwellings around its boundaries. The popularity of white brick in Friesland causes a “white cancer” of housing estates alongside all the villages. In it’s desire for a nineteenth century identity, Berlin forces its new buildings into tight envelopes. This pushes larger programs underground, turning the streets into mere components in the midst of vast programs. Monumental regulations in Amsterdam limit the demand for modern programs, generating “mountains of programs” invisible from the street behind the medieval facades. Throughout the Ruhr, demands of accessability create virtually enclosed types of infrastructure, precipitating a string of linear towns. In La Defense in Paris, to avoid the high-rise regulations massive programs have manifested themselves as ziggurats with 18-meter high accessible “steps” so that all offices can be entered by the maximum length of the fire ladders. Psychological issues, anti disaster patterns, lighting regulations, acoustic treatments. All these manifestations can be seen as “scapes” of the data behind it.’4)
MVRDV has been criticized from many different sides for their datascapes. Many critics have mistaken them for immediate design proposals but they are not –even if Winy Maas has often suggested that their outcome might be more spectacular than the most visionary proposals architects could make. ‘Claustro City’ for example, by Sven Grooten and Chris Rankin, involuntary looks like a giant Liebeskind project indeed and the internal void as it appears in the ‘Noise Scape’ developed by Penelope Dean needed only a little bit of photoshopping to make it appear in FARMAX as a voluptuous John Portman-like atrium, but than even bigger, with an artificial lake for indoor sailing. But Maas’ intention with this rhetoric was not so much to demonstrate what brilliant designs his office could make –even though there was of course a suggestion of that as well- but almost the opposite: it was much more about pointing out that society itself, a democratic society with all its complex rules, the people together could produce more than just mediocrity if architects would be willing to take collective demands, desires and fears seriously instead of focusing on their own signature and stardom –particularly if society grows denser and denser. Of course, the rules and regulations that fascinate MVRDV get in the way of that. Most architects hate them but no one can deny that the forces the datascapes visualize actually exist and that they all have to deal with them –if they want to or not.
However, over the last thirty years or so, this has become a very unpopular position to defend. Within the international architectural discourse, with all its differences and debates, there was –and is- a broad consensus about it that architecture should not so easily surrender to ‘the system’ and ideally find ways out of it. This critique manifested itself first as a critique of Modernist architecture and planning, second as a critique of society and third as a philosophical critique. These critiques are always overlapping and interrelated.
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s ‘Les Mots et les Choses’, Manfredo Tafuri questioned the degree to which architecture can relate to reality in his brilliant and famous article ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’ from 1976. According to Tafuri, Modern architecture had avoided this problem by trying to construct an immediate relationship with reality, with both the everyday life and with society, to which architecture wanted to adapt itself as well as it wanted to change them. He agreed with Foucault that this would never be possible and at best could be a play, a utopia or a fear –even though Foucault argued in later publications that it was indeed possible to organize society through buildings, may it not be in the way he appreciated.5) Earlier, in 1973 in ‘Progetto e Utopia’, Tafuri had already demonstrated how the emancipatory power of any avant-garde was in the end inevitably absorbed by the capitalist system.6) What remained was the postmodernist play with language, the language of architecture, but Tafuri left no doubt that this is an empty, perverse game. ‘Wie heden het woord wil teruggeven aan de architectuur is dus noodzakelijkerwijze aangewezen op materialen die van alle betekenis geledigd zijn. Hij wordt gedwongen alle architecturale ideologie, alle dromen over sociale functie, alle utopische residuen tot een nulgraad te herleiden. In zijn handen worden de materialen van de moderne architectonische traditie plotseling gereduceerd tot raadselachtige brokstukken, verstomde signalen van een taal waarvan de code verloren is gegaan, signalen waarop hij toevallig beslag kon leggen in de woestijn van de geschiedenis. De architecten die sinds het einde van de jaren vijftig tot heden gepoogd hebben een discursief universum te reconstrueren voor hun discipline, hebben zich op hun manier verplicht gevoeld hun toevlucht te nemen tot een nieuwe ‘inhoudelijke moraal’. Hun purisme of rigorisme is dat van iemand die weet dat hij een uitzichtloze daad voltrekt, die geen rechtvaardiging vindt buiten zichzelf. De woorden van hun vocabularium, samengeraapt op het maanlandschap dat achterbleef na het uiteenspatten van de grote illusies, hangen gevaarlijk op de helling die de wereld scheidt van de taal.’7)
However, MVRDV are not at all interested in the architectural language Tafuri was talking about. In fact, even though their projects inevitably make use of architectural language(s) the aesthetical aspect of their architecture is usually the most neglected, uninspired and sometimes even sloppy part of their work. Large parts of the schemes are left open for the inhabitants to introduce and apply their own aesthetics and languages. In fact, thirty years after Tafuri Winy Maas concludes that today ‘everything can be made, every object is imaginable, nothing seems strange or extravagant anymore.’ The desolate image Tafuri painted has become reality on a large scale, the scale of urbanism. MVRDV wonder what one should make under such circumstances: ‘Do we still aspire to the ultimate extravaganza? Are we suffering from “object fatigue”, a consequence of the multitude of objects competing for our attention, all these buildings clamoring to tell us something? In our search for the “one off” in a veritable slew of the “unique”, the expression of the individual object has become ridiculous: in a massive “sea of uniqueness” the individual object simply ceases to exist. In this massiveness, architecture becomes synonymous with urbanism.’8)
Much of the confusion, misunderstanding and irritation about and criticism of the work of MVRDV originate from it that in exactly this situation they return to one of the hardest essences of Modernism, which is the relation between architecture, planning, everyday politics and everyday life as it took shape in early twentieth century Europe. This relation is not sought in an architectural language, but in a quantitative approach. Of course one may argue that numbers, used in this way, form a language as well and that the relationship to reality is just as problematic as with any other language. Philosophically speaking, this may be true but as long as it works it might be less relevant, as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say. There is of course no reason to ask more from architecture and urbanism than this, unless one demands that architecture is in the first place the three dimensional cultural representation of a particular civilization or cosmology.
There are several reasons why a quantitative approach might work again today to bring us a step forward both in understanding and in transforming realities. The way MVRDV use data, it works as a kind of intermediate language between other languages: a language that enables to translate one language into the other or at least creates an intermediate platform between them. Again, it was Wittgenstein who called the act of translation a mathematical task.9) In fact, data have already established themselves as the prevailing international language already before any other languages. They have taken over the role money used to have as the ‘body without organs’ of the contemporary world. In Deleuzian terms they can be ‘miraculized’ by almost anything, from money to material. Even emotions, insofar as they are collective in nature, are quantifiable and affect decision-making, for instance in the case of elections, referendums, opinion surveys and market research. The importance of quantification has increased with the introduction of the computer and increases more with every increase in processor speed and every expansion of the network. But data are also flexible, malleable and open to interpretation and of course this also can make them highly irrational. They can become comparable to the gases that drive Marcel Duchamp’s bachelor machines. But there is also a development in the real world that makes quantification more and more important, inevitable and appropriate and that is the growth of the world’s population. Indeed, MVRDV emphasize the increasing density and the collective risks it produces that demand collective answers and solutions. This is not primarily a matter of language, but of organization.
Basically MVRDV return to the tradition of the Le Corbusier from the City for 3.000.000 inhabitants, to Ludwig Hilberseimer, to Otto Neurath and particularly to Cornelis Van Eesteren and Theodoor Karel Van Lohuizen. Similarly as MVRDV today, in the beginning of the twentieth century they saw themselves faced with the increasing problems that were caused by the rise of the metropolis: an explosive growth of the population, changes in the production apparatus, congestion and pollution. They tried to reorganize the existing city in such a way that it could deal with those issues.10) Even though this tradition may be largely forgotten it is still latently alive in the Netherlands, because, in the Netherlands more than anywhere else, it has left strong marks on the political, legal and bureaucratic organization of the planning and building process. For almost a century, this system has proven to work.
Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen are probably the most successful urban planners of the twentieth century. The first is internationally known as an architect, as a member of De Stijl, because of his collaboration with Theo Van Doesburg and as a chairman of the CIAM. Van Eesteren’s role has been emphasized enough by art historians. What is important here is to understand that the introduction of the aesthetics and ideology of ‘De Stijl’ that is so characteristic of many of Amsterdam’s extensions was not the starting point of his collaboration with Van Lohuizen, but that his role was to translate the programs the latter developed into plans that were more than the sum of their parts. In fact, Van Lohuizen started working for the city of Amsterdam before Van Eesteren joined him. Together Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen are responsible for the planning of Amsterdam from 1929 on, a planning that largely defines the development of Amsterdam until today, even when it reaches its limits today.
Van Lohuizen was a specialist in survey techniques. Constantly, he researched the city and other cities to understand how they work. That was necessary, as in the nineteen twenties the cities were growing rapidly and people feared that Amsterdam would explode in a similar way as London and Berlin had already done. At the same time new programs were coming to the city, such as railways, stations, industry, car traffic and leisure. Van Lohuizen thought of all these numbers as parts of developments, that he characterized as ‘mobile forces’ on the city –a term recently rediscovered by Ben van Berkel 11)- and he translated all these programs into statistical data and quantitative prognoses. On his walks through the city, a kind of Situationist dérives avant la lettre, Van Lohuizen, often accompanied by Van Eesteren, counted literally everything and tried to translate it in spatial consequences for the new city. Because of this spatial translation, he could anticipate many new developments. Even in retrospect it is absolutely incredible that Van Lohuizen estimated already in 1929 that Amsterdam would have between 900.000 and 1.100.000 inhabitants in the year 2000 and that this has proven quite correct.
In the nineteen twenties, large parts of the Amsterdam community were enthousiastic about it that their life, needs and desires were taken so seriously. And they knew they were. Certain counts even became collective events, for example when on a certain day all traffic movements were counted. Today, we have all kind of technical solutions to do that, but at the time everything was counted by hand by over a 1000 volunteers. For a reliable result, they needed a day with good weather, which is rare in the Netherlands. The day before, the weather service had to be consulted. But how to tell the 1000 volunteers that the count would go on? Radio and telephone were not normal at the time. So, it was decided that the count would be on if an airplane with orange banners would fly over the city. One can imagine that all inhabitants of Amsterdam were waiting for this airplane. It was in all newspapers and weeks after the day of the count men, women and children that were not even part of the actual group of volunteers, would bring counts. After this, the political decision was relatively easy and Van Lohuizen and Van Eesteren worked for the city for many years.
Particularly the Social Democratic Party that was in power in Amsterdam supported Van Lohuizen’s surveys. Of course, it is inherent to statistical methods that in the end they produce averages, which meant that all programs were spread over the city in an equal way. The extreme way in which all functions were spread over the city was not just a result of a social democratic ideology however. It was just as well a consequence of the Dutch ‘pillared’ society, in which different groups, for example different religions, the workers and the liberals, all had equal rights on funding for certain facilities, such as housing corporations, schools, churches, clubs, air time on radio and television, etcetera. This probably explains the broad and long lasting political basis for the method Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen developed. More important than the realization of their projects is therefore that the political/bureaucratic structure they set up for the city of Amsterdam was widely adapted by other Dutch cities and even by the Dutch state –even when the original modernist aesthetics were replaced by others in the course of time. Van Lohuizen’s concept for the interrelation between the most important cities in the western part of the Netherlands, today known as the ‘Randstad’, was the basis to develop a particular form of national planning in the Netherlands. Van Eesteren was very influential in the planning and design of the Dutch polders. They were no stars however but rather modest, maybe even boring and proud of it. After the Second World War they shared a chair for urban planning at the University of Delft, where they taught many Dutch urban planners and designers.12)
MVRDV appear on the scene exactly at the moment that the Dutch planning system finds itself in a deep crisis. The year that Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries started to work together on their first competition entries (1989, the year the Berlin Wall collapsed) is almost symbolic as from that moment on not only Eastern but also Western Europe largely gave up the belief in the makeability of society –apart from some social engineering here and there- and started processes of deregulation and privatization. If the rise of global networks of communication and mobility already started to undermine the jurisdiction of the nation state, the opening of the borders within the European Union and the introduction of the Euro did the rest. Most European cities have reached their legal borders and in large parts of Europe, notably in the border crossing Blue Banana, they even grow together in vast urban landscapes. At the same time we witness stunning processes of migration and individualization, first and third worlds are folding into each other and we fear new kinds of collective environmental risks. Last but not least, and because of all this, we witness a crisis of the representational democracy as it manifests itself in the rise of a new kind of populist parties in Europe that try to ground themselves in the smallest local conditions possible and try to work their way up without any new larger concept. Just because of this, MVRDV’s outspoken optimistic belief in democracy and the makeability of society is extremely important and courageous. It is completely incomprehensible that a critic like Sanford Kwinter interprets it as surrender to neo-capitalism, where it is about the only and certainly the most elaborated contemporary position in architecture that at least tries to offer a functional and viable alternative. 13)
The best example of this alternative is still the installation ‘Metacity/Datatown’. It demonstrates how datascapes can be applied in political decision-making with regard to large-scale planning issues by showing the spatial consequences in the constructed landscape of transformations of collective behaviors. With the assumption that certain regions throughout the world will develop into extended urban fields, or ‘megacities’, MVRDV conceived the hypothetical ‘Datatown’, a self-running city of 400x400 kilometres and a density of nearly 1500 inhabitants per square kilometer –about the same as Hong Kong and four times that of the Netherlands. A number of ‘what if’ scenarios are let loose on this city to consider the implications for the urban environment. For instance, what would happen if all the residents of Datatown want to live in detached houses, or s structure of urban blocks, as preferred in Barcelona. What would happen if waste was dealt with in a different way or if we were all to become vegetarian? A total of fourteen of these virtual cities or scenarios were developed, which change as the visitor walks through them.
The growth in population density of this imaginary city, moreover, remains an important instrument because it reduces the margins. But clearly it is also a form of rhetoric since it refers to a disturbing future scenario in which the population increases so much that it is necessary to take rigorous steps. And the inhabitants of the Netherlands, a country that is heavily populated, fear this scenario of the future more than any other place on the globe.
Consequently, Metacity/Datatown is above all a didactic tool that forces us, viewers and potential inhabitants of the city, to make political choices of such a scale that they might even become ideological choices. These choices may eventually lead to models that have nothing in common with the models presented in the installation.
Datatown is both a game and a serious study, an educational aid and a political instrument. In this regard, like MVRDV's earlier designs, Metacity/Datatown is first and foremost a reflexive project, as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens understand the term, namely, a tool in a democratic design process that explicitly grants the socius an active role by confronting him with social and environmental risks and their possible solutions in the form of future scenarios.14) The same can be said about Pig City, a possible scenario to deal spatially with the consequences of the environmental policies concerning pig farming in the Netherlands.
On the other hand, the collective risks that the audience is presented with in Pig City and Metacity/Datatown are so enormous and ungraspable that they become almost irrational and therefore very difficult to deal with, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out in a criticism of Ulrich Beck’s theory of the ‘Risk Society’. 15) In further theoretical projects developed by Winy Maas at the Berlage Institute this becomes more and more problematic, whereas the reactions to them vary between angry refusal and panic.
'3-D City', for example, explores the limits within which a highly dense and compact situation is possible in a series of large architectural models that examine specific programs for the city. In this project, however, MVRDV's secret program is becoming increasingly clear. Suddenly, the piece is no longer a mere didactic design that forces viewers to choose. Indeed, Winy Maas openly describes it as an attempt to create a utopian city in order to anticipate the problems posed by both the increase in the world's population and the protection of the environment. The EXPO-pavilion in Hannover also revealed this change since the building was designed in such a way that it passed for an isolated fragment of a large city that remained to be constructed. In this regard, it was a prototype, recalling the experiments carried out by the Japanese metabolists in the 1960s.
As we have seen, Winy Maas already made rhetorical comparisons with some of the famous spectacular designs in the history of architecture when he was still working on the Datascapes. In '3-D City', however, the intention from the start is to create a spectacular city mixing images of Archizoom's ‘No-Stop City’, Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’, Archigram's ‘Walking City’, Hilberseimer’s ‘Groszstadtsarchitektur’; filmsets like Fritz Lang's ‘Metropolis’, and Beneix’s ‘Fifth Element’; and science fiction, without Maas's seeming to worry about the intentions concealed by these images or the public's reaction. A certain ambiguity thus continues to weigh on the question of whether the '3-D City' design constitutes a (makeshift) pragmatic solution for a spectacular problem, a radical extrapolation from an existing situation altogether in keeping with Superstudio's 'Twelve Ideal Cities' resulting in a dystopia, or an actual utopia to be realized with pragmatic means. A large number of ideas and values associated with this utopia remained unspoken, not to mention the paranoia of what would happen if we refuse to build ‘3-D City’
With ‘3-D City’ the exploration of the physics of the constructed environment, which MVRDV inaugurated with Datascapes, seems to turn into an exploration of what Alfred Jarry called 'pataphysics', that is, the disturbing, surrealist physics of the possible. And this is precisely the physics of the schizophrenic that serves as a basis for Michel Carrouges's bachelor machines and the desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari.16) As I see it, it would be preferable to undertake a critical evaluation of the 'physics' that the Datascapes temporarily provide. We might perhaps deduce the values that would be useful in the next stage. Admittedly, the debate has only just started because most architects and critics unduly persist in viewing the 'Datascapes' design only as one of the many mini-theories that today's architects put by in order to justify their work. In that context, the '3-D City' design may be a necessary, though risky, provocation, since exploration of the Datascapes is in danger of getting lost in an increasingly strong demand for staggering quantities and intensities.
But apart from these issues there are more methodological problems with MVRDV’s research projects that immediately relate to the crisis in planning and politics that I referred earlier to. Indeed, we are witnessing the shift from metropolises to metacities today –to stick to the term MVRDV introduced- but this is much more than a quantitative jump. It means that one cannot so easily apply the statistical methods of early modernists like Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen any more. In the process of city planning as it was developed in the first half of the last century, the area of investigation could easily be defined and framed within the territory of a city, a province or a nation –a territory with a clearly defined governmental jurisdiction. This meant that one could deal with a relatively stable set of parameters (statistical data, for example) that were almost solely distilled from the area itself, although they might be compared to data from other closed territories.
On the other hand, if the data would not be complete, in terms of planning, unpredictable or undesirable side effects could be realized in the periphery of the city, or even abroad: from death (hospitals, slaughterhouses, cemeteries), anarchistic and illegal behavior and pollution (waste dumps, polluting industry) to cheap labor. This meant that these factors had almost no consequences for the planning procedures of the city or country itself. Even in a country like the Netherlands, in which everything is planned, it was no problem to develop the Maasvlakte as an artificial piece of land in the sea as a special area for everything that could not be planned and/or was too big or dangerous to find a place in the cities’ peripheries.
Today, in a situation in which cities grow together in larger urban regions they not only influence each other more directly, for example because they specialize in certain activities, but MVRDV’s metacity falls under the jurisdiction of (maybe many) different democratic bodies. Apart from that, the data distilled from the cities in the beginning of the twentieth century were influenced by external forces by a far lesser degree than in a globalized world. This means that the survey has to take a different methodology and the set of parameters has to be developed into a more interactive matrix that is able to give an insight into processes. But also for the planning process this means that it becomes more and more impossible to externalize unexpected or undesirable programs. These problems were by the way already recognized by Van Lohuizen when he developed the concept of the Randstad and by Hilberseimer when he stressed the importance of the regional plan.
MVRDV’s studies however always refer to an autarchichal, self-sustaining city or nation with a clearly defined territory and one governmental jurisdiction. They always create petri dish situations, which is completely acceptable to carry out a thought experiment but not realistic. In the case of Pig City for example, the real effects of the new regulations concerning pig farming are that Dutch farmers move to Denmark, the former DDR part of Germany or Poland; that their role is taken over by farmers in other countries or that the Dutch they convert to fish farming.
Winy Maas tries to address the issue of externalization with projects like the ‘Region Mixer’, in which he graphically demonstrates among others migration pressures and issues of food and energy production on a global level. Indeed, these projects produce stunning graphics and give an insight in these processes in a graphic way. However, the morale of the project is almost inevitably that the world should somehow establish a more equal and coordinated distribution of money, people and resources –particularly in the light of the reports of the Club of Rome and the United Nations about explosion of the world’s population and the exhaustion of its resources. No one will deny that these are crucially important issues for the future globalized world and are already explosive issues today. However again the correspondences to the ideals working methods of the early modernists are striking. Basically Maas treats the whole world in the same way Van Lohuizen came up with the concept of the Randstad in the Netherlands, which is a ring of autonomous cities that are nevertheless interrelated. Together with NASA Maas even develops a concept for a gigantic, satellite like space station, which would circle around the earth to accommodate energy and food production. The term ‘space station’ is an understatement here, as it would in fact be so big that, when it would pass over, it would leave underlying cities like New York in a temporary shadow or darkness, comparable to the effects caused by the alien space city in the movie ‘Independence Day’. But of course on the other hand it would be nothing else than an enormously enlarged, global version of the Maasvlakte, the overspill area of the Randstad and the Rotterdam harbor in the North Sea.
Where Van Eesteren, Van Lohuizen, Hilberseimer and later Le Corbusier made pleas for regional and national planning, Maas’ ‘Region Mixer’ is in fact a plea for global planning. It is almost as if we hear an echo of Le Corbusier who, instead of weapons and ammunition, asked for housing to avoid revolution.17) But what is lacking is the global political body that would enable the ‘Region Mixer’ to work and, more particularly in comparison to the situation Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen worked in, the Social Democratic color of it that was ideologically in favor of the equal distribution that fits a statistical method so well.
Maas sees the ‘Region Mixer’ as a machine or, more specifically, as a piece of software with a graphic interface comparable to the sound systems that one can find on a computer. These sound systems usually have an equalizer function that enables the user to adapt the acoustical settings to the kind of music he wants to hear. It can simulate the acoustics of a concert hall, a more intimate space for chamber music or a rock hall or anything in between. What is striking here is not so much the immediate architectural analogy or metaphor but the political one: the way population, wealth and resources are distributed over the world is compared to acoustics. Indeed, Maas claims that the ‘Region Mixer’ –very different from the proposals of the early modernists, who always had a particular political organization in mind - can work for any political system whereby he almost reduces politics to a murmuring in the background. His theoretical projects stand in the tradition of utopias that, in an answer to scarcity, believe they can calculate the tension in society between needs and resources. We find this already in Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the inhabitants are consciously aware that the pleasures they enjoy do not get in the way of greater common interests. We also see the continuation of this tradition in Bentham’s panopticon that he saw as a machine that would function completely independent from the motives of the people involved but produce behavior ‘automatically’. 18) Apart from the naïve belief in technological progress this is of course highly questionable, as the very concept of a machine implicates that there is always someone or some organization who finances and builds it or who is on the knobs –be it a dictator or a representational democratic body. For Maas, as a former UNESCO worker, this may be not such a problematic question but the collaboration with NASA is already of a very different nature.
If MVRDV indeed believe in the makeability of the democratic society, it may not so much be the technological aspect of it that is most problematic, but first and foremost the aspect of democracy. Maybe they were thinking of the Netherlands, but even the satisfaction with the Dutch ‘Poldermodel’ in the 90s, which was a refined version of a Western democracy including endless advocacy and negotiations between traditionally opposing parties to achieve consensus on every level, has recently come to a sudden end. In Europe, the role of the Europarliament is unclear and the position of the United Nations remains weak. In contrast or even in opposition to this Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt see the rise of a new global ‘Empire’ that, in contrast to the traditional empires, is not centrally controlled and coordinated.19) Between the different forms and levels of representational democracy as we know them and this new empire, that seems to be driven by multitudes of private initiatives, there seems to be a huge gap. Indeed, individualization is the flip side of globalization. It is a process that works from within the traditional nation states, as a process of emancipation, and from without, fueled by immigration and leads to an unprecedented fragmentation of society. Apart from that, international networks, companies and organizations more and more take over the role the nation states used to have. This inevitably leads to a crisis of the representational democracies we have known, as they were based on collective, class or group interests and local, provincial and national jurisdictions. 20) In architecture and urbanism this leads to a crisis in the production of public housing in the European welfare states as it has lost its broad basis in the masses of the working class and thereby of a crisis in urban planning and design, in which public housing was always the most certain and controllable factor.
We have already seen that MVRDV do not take this individualization process very seriously: they simply see all the expressions of individuality go under in one homogeneous sea whereby they forget that these individual expressions also represent private entrepreneurship, ad hoc collaborations, flows of money and power that together form new multiplicities, gravities, turbulences, swarms, herds and flocks that have an even greater power –even if it does not find a representational form.
In this light it suddenly becomes clear why (apart from his gross misjudgement of the intentions behind their work that have probably much to do with the ignorant way Northern Americans see Europe) it is no coincidence that Sanford Kwinter, a former student of Michel Foucault in Paris and scholar of Gilles Deleuze, is one of MVRDV’s most severe critics. In accordance with Michel Foucault he not only sees the problematic discrepancy between the representational form of a democracy and society itself but as a follower of Deleuze he shares the metaphysical belief in the ‘order of Nature as a whole’ as Deleuze took it from Spinoza.21) Therefore it is no wonder that Kwinter emphasizes the importance of the role of the architect as inventor of images of freedom.22)
Within the political concept of Spinoza, as it has been recently revitalized by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who were inspired by Deleuzes reading of his work, the power of the multiplicities –even if it is still embedded in the latest version of global capitalism- comes closer to what he calls the ‘power of nature’ than the necessarily artificial power of the state. This natural power will always challenge and ultimately throw over the power of the state –even if it is embedded in or softened by a form of representational democracy. Therefore Negri and Hardt can believe that we have to go through this phase of Empire –be it that we constantly criticize, protest and revolt to it- to finally arrive at the ultimate, organic and natural society that they call communism.22) Now, if we share this ultimate belief of Negri and Hardt or not, their analysis makes clear that it is very unlikely that we will see the new, highly powerful and international forms of democratic organization that MVRDV need to realize their national, multinational and global planning methods. And if they would to a certain degree, Negri and Hardt would probably consider it as a reformist position.
Whatever political or ideological framework one might want to choose, we have reached a stage in history that the forces that the multiplicities produce have to be taken into account in any policy, strategy or project for a metacity. At the same time, we still have to find a way to deal with collective risks, to which, in contrast to MVRDV, neither Deleuze and Kwinter nor Negri and Hardt provide an answer. In reaction to Negri and Hardt and referring to Ulrich Beck’s criticism of the Risk Society, Slavoj Zizek makes a plea for a return to Lenin and his famous reply: ‘Freedom –yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?’ In the context of the crumbling of the Western European welfare states under influence of Third Way politics, a move towards capitalism that is ironically or cynically presented to us an increase in our individual freedom to choose, Zizek does not remind us of Lenin’s rhetoric as a choice between freedom and totalitarianism or between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ freedom but to remind us that we (should) have the possibility to make real and conscious choices about why and how we organize ourselves collectively or not.23) Particularly in the Western European tradition of the welfare state, that has somehow always carefully but successfully found a position between the totalitarianism of the communist world and the fake freedom of the capitalist world, it would be a pity if these choices would be reduced to one extreme position or the other, torn apart between a paranoid fear for ungraspable collective risks and an equally irrational belief in a metaphysics that at some point in the future promises us a natural order that will bring us the ultimate freedom. Together with politicians, it is the task of architects and planners to come up with concepts, proposals, projects and plans that enable us to make serious choices that give us an indication of, to paraphrase Lenin, what is really to be done? 24)