Von Bart Lootsma.

The Naked City

The first position, which has been named among others ‘Reflexive’ (by me in ao. SuperDutch), ‘Reflexive Moderne’ (Ulrich Schwarz, who uses the term in a different way to characterize German architecture), and ‘Transmodern’ (Otto Kapfinger about recent Austrian Architecture), seems to be a reworking or upgrading of nationally existing modernist strategies in which one can sometimes hear faint echoes of Critical Regionalism.1) The architects that belong to this direction start their career in an almost traditional way with buildings in their own country and gradually gain international attention because of the consistent quality of their built work. Even if the work is differentiated, there seems to be a certain consistency in approach and aesthetics.

The second position is defined by a group of architects that study, work and teach all over the world from the beginning. Herbert Muschamp recently characterized this group as follows: “Many of them, or should I say us, are displaced suburbanites: children of the postwar suburban exodus who discovered by the onset of adolescence the unlikelihood that we would ever be able to afford houses as nice as the ones we grew up in. We could, however, afford plane tickets. And so, in the 1960’s and 70’s, there commenced the restless globetrotting of baby boomers, hungry for the sense of otherness largely absent from suburban life. We went in search of places to excite us, buildings to show us new ways of seeing and modes of living.(…) While architecture provides symbolic destinations for this group, design gives individuals the tools to construct their own identities – through the clothes they wear, the gadgets they use, the furniture they choose for their apartments and houses. To a degree, the search for identity through design echoes the Good Design movement promoted half a century ago by the Museum of Modern Art, the Aspen Design Conference and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Today, as in the earlier era, designers are seeking to work within the modern system of mass production and distribution. The new design aesthetic, however, is far more varied.”2)
The generation Muschamp speaks about is the generation of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebeskind. They build all over the world in cities that want to distinguish themselves in a global competition. It is the generation of the Bilbao-effect. Together they form a new, radically footloose elite. Sometimes one does not even know what nationality they belong to. Is Gehry an American or a Canadian? Zaha Hadid was born in Bagdad, lives in London and teaches in Vienna. What to think of Daniel Liebeskind? Is he Polish, German, American or simply Jewish? Rem Koolhaas likes to speak melancholically about his youth in Indonesia and has a love-hate relationship with the Netherlands. The weekends he spends with his wife in London and the New York Times speaks openly about his relationships with women all over the world. His book S,M,L,XL opens with diagrams about his flight schedule. Koolhaas also made fun about my book ‘SuperDutch’: “Imagine how we would puke if there were a book called SuperGermans; laugh at SuperBelgians, snicker at SuperFrench, complain about SuperAmericans.”3) Indeed, after a career start in the Netherlands, most architects in SuperDutch work internationally today and do not want to be considered ‘Dutch’ any more.

For this generation, globalization was also a traumatic experience, as can be reconstructed from their biographies and found in quotes in many cases. It is linked to feelings of exile, on which they react aggressively. “Fuck Context”, Rem Koolhaas wrote, referring to the demise of urbanism. At a conference in Porto he replied Vittorio Lampugnani, who made a plea that we should deal with our historical cities carefully and respectfully, so that we can share them like the home of our parents, that he had just calculated with how many brothers, sisters, cousins and nieces he would have to share this home, and that that would not be a fair share.4) As Zaha Hadid told me in an interview lately: ‘Unsere Arbeit hat immer mit der Setzung von Zäsuren zu tun, es ging immer um das einziehen neuer Linien, um alle mögliche Arten der in diesem Moment freigesetzten Energien. Die Strukturierung des Raumprogramms wurde zum Beispiel zum wichtigsten Teil der Recherche, was natürlich dazu führte, bestehende Typologien in Frage zu stellen. Vom formalen Repertoire abgesehen, war dies der wichtigste Teil unserer Arbeit’.5)

This is the generation of Deconstructivism. It likes to see itself as a new avant-garde, modelled after the great avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties, notably Constructivism. Very different from those avant-gardes, they hardly ever take a political stance, as they have learned from Manfredo Tafuri that every avant-garde is doomed to be swallowed by capitalism anyway. This generation is, as Greg Chrysler suggests in his book ‘Writing Spaces’ not just the generation of ‘Strategies of Disturbance’ but also the ‘Generation of Theory’.6) And indeed, there has probably never been a generation that produced so much theory to justify and embed their work –so much that one could justifiably argue that their architecture is the ‘real’ reflexive architecture. At the same time, its surrender to the reality of capitalism and the extravagant nature of their work drives them into a position where they can almost only work for a new capitalist elite that wants to distinguish itself, whether it is larger multinational corporations in search of an identity or cities that, in a global competition, are desperate to attract the ‘Creative Class’ as Richard Florida calls it. 7)

Still, in a globalized practice, the relationship between a certain design approach and local conditions is problematic and has to be redefined. And again we see a split.
On one hand we see the rise of an even newer generation for whom the global context is the only normal context which they work in. From the beginning on, they study abroad, compete in international competitions and meet in international conferences and exhibitions. They base their strategies to deal with a locality on generalizing theories like chaos theory, complexity theory and systems theory. However, even if they seem to use these theories to deal with local conditions –the editors of Assemblage even suggested a return to the nineteen sixties and to ecology- what is even more important is that they produce a new coherence within the projects, making them even more autonomous and self-contained than the mute experiments and exercises with architectural language of the generation before them.8)
These architects responded to the global and technological changes most optimistically and they embraced the latest in computer software to produce daring new forms. Characteristic for this new mentality is ‘Foreign Office Architects’, an office founded by a Spaniard and an Iraqi in London, but that moves to Tokyo if they have a larger project there. They present their projects in the Spanish just as well as in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Alejandro Zaera and Farshid Moussavi teach in Rotterdam and Vienna. And where digital technology is concerned, Greg Lynn, one of their foremost representatives, once remarked: “If I turn my computer on in the morning, I don’t ask what it can do for me, but what I can do for him.” The first ArchiLab presentations were an important stage for this global digital generation. The work they produced indeed fitted perfectly in the tradition of the radical architecture of the nineteen sixties, which is so well represented in the extraordinary collection of the FRAC Centre. Even if not many projects have been realized yet, the work found wide acclaim in exhibitions like Latent Utopias in Graz in 2002 and Architecture Non Standard in the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2003. What links them with their mentors from the deconstructivist avant-garde before them is that they mainly focus on buildings, on ‘great architecture’, with an occasional excursion to infrastructure, leaving us ‘with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture’. 9)

Indeed, as Rem Koolhaas formulated it, ‘What Ever Happened to Urbanism?’10)
There has probably never been as much writing on the city and on architecture. Countless books appear on cities and on the city. Architectural theory tries to replace the traditional rules formulated by urbanism, but the architectural debate does not produce a consensus any more. Instead, there are ever more individual positions that almost all try to produce exceptionally great architecture. In the new global market architects can be successful in finding niches that offer the possibility of realization. Buildings are the subject of international competitions and within capitalism infrastructure is the only remaining field that is subsidized. But this does not produce knowledge. On the other hand: social geography, anthropology, sociology and philosophy do produce knowledge, but no recipes that would produce architecture.
According to Koolhaas, ‘our amalgamated wisdom can easily be caricatured: according to Derrida we cannot be whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be real, according to Virilio we cannot be There.’ Koolhaas therefore proposes a redefined urbanism that will not only be a profession, but a way of thinking, ‘an ideology: to accept what exists’. ‘The seeming failure of the urban offers an exceptional opportunity, a pretext for Nietzschean frivolity. We have to imagine 1,001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risks; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right. The certainty of failure has to be our laughing gas/oxygen; modernization our most potent drug. Since we are not responsible, we have to become irresponsible. In a landscape of increasing expediency and impermanence, urbanism no longer is or has to be the most solemn of our decisions; urbanism can lighten up, become a Gay Science –Lite Urbanism.’ 11)

Today we see a group of architects that is aware that the technological and socio-geographical revolution of the nineteen nineties also produces a series of emerging effects and new possibilities that need to be addressed. They are aware that globalization does not just produce new prosperous metropolitan concentrations of urbanity and smooth ‘Spaces of Flows’ but that it also creates new conflicts and tensions –because the former Third World folds into the First, for example- and even causes large areas to shrink. The dissolution of the nation state and the emergence of a new kind of capitalist ‘Empire’ produce a crisis of the communist states and the welfare states. In large parts of the world, exactly those were intimately connected to housing programs and urban planning. Now, individualization creates a demand for a greater diversity in architecture and the nature and use of public space are changing.
What is maybe even more important is that this emerging group of architects realizes that architecture and urbanism are not necessarily just produced by architects. Politics, be it in the form of the state, the city or large corporations, but also in the form of newer emerging organizations or multiplicities reorganize our environment. Sometimes they are using architecture in the most brutal way, as in the walls among others Israel and the United States are building. But even more often they change the urban fabric from within by introducing new programs and new forms of organization. New communications media, together with a radically increased individual mobility produce new coherences in the city and a different use of public space.

Over the last couple of years, an increasing group of architects has begun investigating these phenomena and started to develop new strategies and methods to deal with them. What is crucial to this tendency is that the architects involved carry out their research with the classical tools architecture has at its disposal: cartography, plan, elevation and section. This research is based on realities, read by architects with architect’s means but it is informed by writings on the city. The change in approach is also mirrored in changes in philosophy, in which an ontological and cosmological approach has been replaced by methods that come closer to and borrow from anthropology and sociology, as in Peter Sloterdijks ‘Sphären’ trilogy for example.12) In exhibitions and publications this research is often presented as a cultural statement in itself. We find the same tendency in contemporary art, in which many artists played the role of cartographers, documentary photographers or film makers.
It is a research that, in Hou Hanru’s words, seems both ‘fashionable and necessary’.13) It is fashionable because it has become fashionable to make no distinction between high and low art, to indulge in banal phenomena and into the newness of the now. It is however necessary, because we need to learn to understand these phenomena and the often implicit but nevertheless powerful forces that drive them to be able to maintain the important role architecture can play for large parts of the society instead of just for an elite. Very different from Rem Koolhaas, who proposed to accept what exists and surf on it, these architects show a new engagement, even if it is not always clear what the results of that engagement might be. In the catalogue of Documenta 11, Molly Nesbit meditates on this engagement that seems to be missing a visionary aspect that is traditionally associated with Utopia, particularly in architecture. ‘Is the utopian picture itself to be considered missing’, she asks herself, ‘or may we see utopia in a picture with something missing, a picture that comes with empty pockets?’14)

In many ways the current research looks for a continuation of the tradition that was started by Situationists like Guy Debord and Constant Nieuwenhuys. To get in touch with the reality of the city as a ‘lived space’ the dérive, a walk through the city, returns in different forms –be it sometimes with different and clearer intentions. References to Guy Debords and Asger Jorns seminal work ‘The Naked City’ appear in many analyses –be it on a much larger scale than the Paris of the nineteen fifties. In many ways, the Situationist city seems to be realized. It appears as a loose collection of fragments with a certain intensity of program and/or atmosphere, linked by flows of traffic and communication. But the protagonists of this city are not just gypsies and an avant-garde of artists, the inhabitants themselves are the avant-garde: the playful creative ‘homo ludens’ indulging in leisure activities just as well as the desperately footloose workers and immigrants. They form ‘Smart Mobs’, as Howard Rheingold calls them: new informal organizations produced by the rise of wireless computer networks.15)

But one can also see this research as a return to the ‘other’ origins of Modernism, in which architects like Le Corbusier, Hilberseimer, Neurath, Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen tried to come to a deeper understanding of the existing city of their time to be able to come up with new, more appropriate organizations. In their first attempts to come to terms with the chaotic growth of the metropolises of the early twentieth century, with the rise of the masses, with pollution, with industrialization and the consequences of war they used photography and borrowed from the social sciences just as well.16) This took almost a decade. Maybe it is true that after that they made the step from survey to design too quickly, leaving little space for change and flexibility, but the influence of their projects has inspired many cities that still function today. And even if we have to radically revise their concepts, they did at least leave them for us to work with, to vote for or against, to analyze, to discuss, adapt and criticize. A return to the origins of Modernism –in this case to Hannes Meyer- we see however also in experiments with and reflections on new materials, such as they are produced by biotechnology.

Slowly, contemporary architects are developing new methods for control and design that are either immediately related to the research they do, as in Raoul Bunschotens work, or nourished by it. What is striking is that most methods are looking for different forms of interactivity, opening the creative field for more participants. Instead of simply using or adapting off the shelve software, that was originally made for other purposes, for example for visual special effects in the film industry, we see that architects start developing and writing their own software. Very often, we see that this software focuses more on the organizational aspects of architecture and urbanism than on formal and aesthetical aspects and aspects of manufacturing. More and more, architecture becomes a device, to paraphrase Winy Maas.17)

Still, there is a great believe in the power of form. But it seems that the interest in the formal aspects of architecture drifts away from the interest in internal coherence. The more recent formal architecture seems to be much more strategic in the way it either adapts to or tries to manipulate the conditions of a site. It deliberately wants to contaminate itself with other discourses: fashion, bureaucracy, urbanism and even popular culture. This architecture might be called Transmodern in the sense Jean Baudrillard intends when talking about transpolitical figures in ‘Les Stratégies Fatales’.18) It is an architecture of excess, like Périphériques’ ‘Monsters’, that hover over the existing chaos, or Xefirotarch’s strange meat eating plants, that swallow and digest infrastructure.

Will it be possible again at some point to reconnect the discourses that now seem to exclude each other, the ‘simply great architecture’ with the everyday life in the city, architecture and urbanism? Will it be possible to make architecture available again to large parts of the population? We will have to see. But at least some architects started working on it again.

Bart Lootsma


Footnotes


1. Bart Lootsma, SuperDutch, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000; Ulrich Schwarz, Neue Deutsche Architektur, Eine Reflexive Moderne, Hatje-Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002; Otto Kapfinger, Transmodernity, Austrian Architects, Azw/Verlage Anton Pustet, Austrian Cultural Forum, Vienna, 2002
2. Herbert Muschamp, New Yrok Times Magazine
3. Rem Koolhaas with Herman Hertzberger, Rem, do you know what this is?, HUNCH 3, 2001
4. Rem Koolhaas during a debate at the Prototypo Seminar in Architecture Performing the City, Porto, 2001.
5. Zaha Hadid, Luxus für Alle, Gespräch mit Zaha Hadid und Patrik Schumacher, Architektur und BauForum, 4. juli 2003
6. C. Greig Chrysler, Writing Spaces, Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Built Environment, 1960-2000, Routledge, New york and London, 2003
7. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, 2002
8. Computer Animisms (Two Designs for the Cardiff Bay Opera House), Assemblage 26, 1995
9. Rem Koolhaas, What Ever Happened to Urbanism? S,M,L,XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1995
10. Idem
11. Idem
12. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1998-2004
13. Hou Hanru at the opening of the exhibition E-W/N-S, Bordeaux, 2004
14. Molly Nesbit, The Port of Calls, in: Heike Ander, Nadja Rother (ed.), Documenta 11-Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern, 2002
15. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, Perseus Publishing, 2003
16. Bart Lootsma (ed.), Research for Research, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, 2001
17. Winy Maas, Architecture is a device, in: Bart Lootsma, ArchiLab 2004 The Naked City, HYX, Orléans, 2004
18. Jean Baudrillard, Les stratégies fatales. Paris: éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983.