Von Bart Lootsma.
Von Bart Lootsma.
What is individualization?
According to Ulrich Beck, together with globalization, the phenomenon of individualization is one of the greatest changes to have occurred in the western European society in recent decades and one that can be expected to continue in the foreseeable future. Globalization and individualization are related in many ways. To a certain extent, they are different sides of the same coin. Both are processes. Put very simply, individualization means that people are getting more individual –but you already guessed that.
As such, it seems to be something very nice, something that is right and something that has to do with freedom. In the Western world, we have all been raised to see people that way: as individuals, with equal rights maybe, but each with his or her own particularities. It explains our fascination for portraits, for example: not just the portraits of emperors and kings, generals and philosophers, but also the portraits of people as collected in exhibitions as ‘The Family of Man’, the portraits of people that we see in the newspaper and the portraits of our loved ones that we collect in our living room and on our desks. These photographs seem to convey emotions that we consider highly individual.
But, unavoidably, individualization also creates many smaller or larger conflicts, as it becomes very difficult to grant someone’s individual freedom if it conflicts with someone else’s. Than suddenly, we can use people’s individuality in passports, police photographs, fingerprints, iris scans etc. for our security and for control.
These are however not aspects of individualization I want to talk about here, although many values that are attached to them most certainly play a role in the background. I want to speak about individualization as a sociological process, which means that I want to focus much more on human relationships and the way they are organized, because that is also where architecture and urbanism come in. In architecture and urbanism, human relationships are organized spatially.
One thing has to be clear: individualization does not mean people get more and more autarchic, even if this sometimes seems a goal. Individualization is much more about being part of multiple networks and multiple abstract and caretaking systems, as Anthony Giddens calls them.2) It is because of this, because of the fact that people rarely use the same mix of networks, that individualization takes place. Media and mobility play a crucial role in this process. When we look at individualization this way, there are some enormous changes between the industrial society and the society we live in today.
Until recently, individualization seemed to be something to fight for. Wars were literally fought in the name of individual freedom. And I do not just mean wars in the name of capitalism. Left-wing intellectuals from the sixties and seventies also fought for individual freedom and they meant something very different.
But today there is also a difference, as we realize more and more that individualization is forced upon us somehow -be it by the soft seductive strategies of the media industry and politicians or by the economical and political forces that create migration. Paradoxically, the basis of individualization is formed by both the eternal desires for the dream worlds of freedom and the fear of poverty, starvation and war. It is produced by prosperity and high levels of education that make people able to choose and to come up for themselves, just as well as by economical deprivation that tears people away from their traditional bonds, families and communities. The neo-liberal market ideology forces atomization, with all political consequences.3)
Reflexive Modernization
Politcial theorists as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt 4), but also sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens view individualization as an unavoidable and necessary intermediate phase on the way to new forms of social life. They speak of a First Modernity that was linked to the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and a Second Modernity that is linked to such events as the emergence of the computer, post?Fordist production methods, biotechnology and world?wide communication and transport networks. While in classical industrial society there were direct interconnections between class, family, marriage, sexual roles, the division of labor between men and women, and architectural typologies ?the factory, the station, the tenement block? today, many more people have the opportunity or are forced to live biographies that deviate from this pattern: >do?it?yourself biographies=, as Roland Hitzler has calls them, or, as Giddens puts it, a >reflexive= biographies. In this case, the reflexive element consists above all in the confrontation with the other. According to Beck, individualization also means >first the disembedding and second, the re?embedding of industrial society's ways of life by new ones in which the individuals must produce, stage, and cobble together their biographies themselves=. 5)
It is interesting to note here, that Ulrich Beck, in the English edition of the book Reflexive Modernization that he published together with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash in 1994, is still quite optimistic about the re-embedding of society and has a great belief in the self-organizing potential of the individuals. Beck believed that if society would grow denser, people would be faced with problems that would force them to come up with new, collective solutions. As an example he mentioned the sign that Munich motorists can read at a heavily congested location: ‘You are not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam’. He believed that this change of awareness would change collective behavior, that people would organize themselves again from bottom up.6) It was an optimism that corresponded with the attitudes and strategies some Dutch offices, like OMA, West 8 and MVRDV developed in the same period, in which they confronted the Dutch society and politicians with the effects of their desires.7) Beck was heavily criticized for his opinions and accused of being a neo-liberal. OMA and MVRDV are increasingly faced with similar criticism.
To my surprise I found out that in the later German edition of ‘Reflexive Modernisierung’ of 1996, Beck replaced his original text by a completely different one that is much more pessimistic in nature. In this text, Beck does not speak any more about the self organizational potential of the society. Instead, he is much more concerned about the side effects of the Second Modernity: social insecurities, lack of safety due to pollution, criminality and violence, uncertainties caused by the belief in progress, science and experts. 8) In another recent text, Beck also speaks of risk-biographies and broken or interrupted biographies.9) The way illegal immigrants live is a good example of this. It is certainly an example of self organization. But it operates literally in the margins or better: on the back side of the society and is linked to it in many ways.
Americanization
Individualization is often associated with Americanization and indeed the process of individualization in Europe seems to have speeded up after the collapse of the communist world in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if Western Europe has suddenly lost its traditional counterbalance. The main goal of the European Union seems to be the development and expansion of a free trade zone that can compete with that of the United States. The ideological basis of the American political and economical system has always been liberal individualism. That is the belief that individual freedom in the sense of the guarantee of a private sphere and individual entrepreneurship go hand in hand and that instead of a strong state an ‘invisible hand’ will regulate society in an ‘organic’ way. However, as Colin Bird puts it in his book ‘The Myth of Liberal Individualism’: we can believe that society is organic, but that does not help us to make the numerous decisions we have to make every day in that same society. ‘If a jellyfish is organic, that does not give the animal the moral status that is generally attributed to people.’10) This argument particularly suits architecture and urbanisation. What nobody seems to realize is that the abolition of rules and laws only causes a shifting to jurisprudence, for everybody appeals to the judge or the media in every conflict. It simply causes chaotic inequality in justice, and even stickier decision-making processes than we are already familiar with. Nevertheless, now that the decision making processes in the Netherlands are slowing down in the same period massive deregulation and privatisations take place, in a Pavlov reaction everyone still immediately points at the state and the government. These processes create a schizophrenic world that is paradoxically smooth and fragmented at the same time: the kind of food you would not like to eat.
But, even though aspects of Americanization do play a role in the process of individualization, what is more manifest in Europe is the crisis of the Welfare state and social democracy. In fact, one could say that it is the Welfare state itself that produces its own crisis. We are so rich and so well educated that the middle class has become the dominant class. It feels secure and now wants to capitalize on its own wealth.
Social democrats were never interested in a revolution. Instead of that they always propagated a better distribution of wealth in the society. Social housing, education, medical care and social security were used to give people a better starting position in a society that remained basically capitalist.
It is interesting to see how social democratic strategies don’t work any more in a country like the Netherlands, as is demonstrated in the policies Armand Akdogan has investigated in Rotterdam. Immigrants that want to start their own individual businesses get a subsidy to renovate shops in the 19th century housing estates at the Binnenweg. However, the shops in the city center are booming because bigger and bigger attractors create a flow of people from the Central Station to the heart of the shopping center. At the Binnenweg, no such attractors are planned and there is a big gap between the Binnenweg and the Lijnbaan, the main shopping district. That means that the immigrants may start their own small businesses, possibly because the whole family works in them, but that at the same time the segregation increases –how proud the politicians may be of their multicultural street.
After the collapse of the Communist empire, there was never a real choice in Europe, as Slavoj Zizek writes, never a real free choice in the sense that the existing situation could be transcended. The inhabitants of the European welfare states may very well see the risks and side effects Beck is speaking about, but the politicians of the Third Way give them the feeling that they are strong enough to deal with them. Who would like to admit that he or she is really a coward?
Zizek makes a plea for a reinterpretation of Lenin’s ‘What is to be done?’: to take the courage to make dirty hands again.11) It seems indeed as if the politicians from the Third Way do not want to make dirty hands, but ofcourse, in reality, they do when they produce the side effects Ulrich Beck is referring to, even if they manifest themselves in other parts of the world.
But, apart from skepticism on a more general level, individuals do organize themselves. If one thing has become clear, it is that individualization has nothing to to with the individual as a unique individual. I mean: the individual as a face, as a fingerprint or whatever. At best he is a DNA structure, in which the genes come from many different places. He is a moment in a landscape, as the complex individuals the antropologist Arjun Appadurai describes. Appadurai uses many different approaches, but basically when reading his book ‘Modernity at Large’ the general impression of landscape paintings remains.12) In the case of Appadurai, they have a kind of Biedermeier character, painted with warm overtones, describing Indian people that have become internationally successful and still maintain strong family bonds. It is not so difficult to see them in a different light as well however, as Romantic landscape paintings, with small, less succesful individuals in front of or surrounded by a sublime nature, on top of a mountain that they have just climbed with great difficulty, near a ravine in which they almost fall, caught in the ice that has frozen an ocean. Whereby in the case of Appadurai the landscape is a complex construct of cultural, financial, ethnic, technological and many other overlapping and often conflicting scapes and the small figure in the foreground is a machine attached to different flows that he can connect to or cut off like the Deleuzian schizo.13) In architectural and urbanistic terms, the many different case studies Stefano Boeri has collected in his Multiplicity/USE project for the exhibition and the book Mutations, follow a similar approach, just as many research projects the Berlage Institute has produced over the last couple of years.14) Where Boeri focuses on territories, the Berlage Institute focuses more on the processes of organization themselves. These case studies demonstrate also that individuals do organize themselves in very different ways than they traditionally would when they were limited to a particular territory all their life. Networks of media and mobility increasingly allow them to do so, even across national borders, as Diego Barajas’ study of the Cape Verdians learns. Cape Verdians have spread over the world, but the interesting thing is that the organizational structures that connect them are still very similar to those of the original islanders. There are a few larger settlements of Cape Verdians, traditionally in larger harbor cities like Oporto, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Paris and Boston. However, what connects these settlements are their own system of banks, travel agencies, radio stations, magazines, hairdressers, music groups etcetera. The music groups travel along the different cities, for example, like they would originally have done by boat from island to island. But also within the cities themselves the organizations, shops and institutions are scattered and linked like smaller archipelagoes. The Cape Verdians, like the Chinese do on a much larger scale, operate like a transnational community and almost like a transnational society. In the case of Ben Ladens Al Quaida network, we realize that such networks today can achieve a quite considerable political and military power; that they can transgress traditional spatial relationships and in the most extreme case can even destroy architecture.
Urbanism
Individualization means for the city that it is no longer synonymous with the spatial manifestation of one community with a clear -preferably hierarchical- structure. This means that one can no longer draw conclusions about the structure of a society based on the physical, morphological structure of a city like we used to do and neither can we expect that the traditional society or traditional forms of communality will return when we build the city according to traditional typologies. The city is no longer simply the enumeration of more of the same things and programs; it is the enumeration of many different things and programs. Many of these new programs are hidden within the existing, traditional structures, mutating and converting them from within. Indeed: the city is many cities and these cities are bound in many different networks themselves.
But, with the growth of the world’s population, the consequences of individualization become most visible and tangible in the new parts of the built-up environment. Architecture and urbanism always dealt with how these things and programs relate to each other. But what happens to architecture and urbanism when they are torn apart between the small, intimate scale of the highly individual and the huge, abstract scale of global networks of media, mobility and economy? How do people deal with that? How do they organize themselves?
If I still use the word >city= here, it is just because better or more specific words do not yet exist. I would like to use it here in the broadest sense of >urbanized area=. A number of smaller and larger communities find space side by side and in continually changing combinations in this sprawling, practically unbounded field. These communities are no longer defined here by their consistent spatial proximity within a limited territory. Increasingly, communities are formed by active conscious choice and by proximity measured in time spans. This goes beyond the half-baked and vague hints of something that is often referred to as the >multicultural society=, which, however well intented, invariably connotes the >invasion= of aliens from outside.
Instead of looking for difference, we will have to look for ‘sameness’ again, but maybe on a very different level than we used to do. The analysis of the Royal Flying Doctors in Australia by Peter Trummer and Penelope Dean is a good example of this. The Australian Outback is a metropolis that lacks the traditional appearance of a city. The traditional infrastructure of roads and telephone lines is completely replaced by an infrastructure of airplanes and an open radio system. The city governement is replaced by a hughe caretaking system: that of the RFDS. But in the analysis of Trummer and Dean this seemingly shapeless city, this city that does not even seem to be a city, appears to have a very distinctive, collective form on a higher, abstract, virtual level. It is a form that can be visualized though and it can be altered by changing the parameters on different levels. That means it is a form that can be designed and is actually designed. The tools or means to do this are however radically different from the traditional tools of urban planning. 15)
Architecture
Instead of looking for new forms of ‘sameness’, over the last four decades or so, architecture has focused on finding all kinds of techniques to create difference. This was a reaction to Modern Architecture.
Modern architecture was –and is- blamed for causing monotonous quarters and cities, in which one couldn’t even recognize one’s own apartment, because they were all the same. After the Second World War, Modern Architecture, that began as a liberating movement, had become part of a system that was criticized more and more for being oppressive. In fact, it had become so much part of this system, that it was –and sometimes is- regarded as not only the perfect symbol of this system, but also its most important tool. And, even though particularly during the eighties officially the belief that architecture could change society was largely abandoned, architects ofcourse secretly believed it could. From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism, this was the secret agenda of architecture. So, architecture had to be deconstructed. In terms of plans and sections, irritations had to be built in the form of in-between zones and unexpected confrontations of programmes that traditionally excluded each other. And if these confrontations were not forced, smooth, folding open plans were proposed on which populations could organize themselves more or less spontaneously.
Apart from these general approaches, in the architectural debate, individualization is almost solely discussed in relation the issue of the housing production and the market. This debate is politically completely overloaded with ideological issues that are still related to the good old left-right debate from the Cold War. The arguments from the left are that individuals should have the right to live their chosen lifestyle against the disciplinary oppression of the ‘system’ and to express their culture and creativity in their immediate environment. The arguments from the right are based on the liberalist-individualist position that is both related to the inviolability of the private sphere and on the basis of the economy in private ownership as the start of individual entrepreneurship.
No wonder that in countries that are ruled by politicians from the ‘Third Way’, like Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and soon Austria, the issue of individual home ownership has become a kind of ‘grandstanding’ in which politicians can score easily. The most extreme case of this grandstanding and the political momentum it can create is without doubt the propagandistic debate around ‘Het Wilde Wonen’ (Wild Habitation), as it was triggered by architect and former BNA-chairman Carel Weeber in the Netherlands in the mid-nineties. It was immediately taken up by politicians from the left like Adri Duyvestein, to break the power of the housing corporations and the building industry, and by his collegues from the right like Secretary of State Remkes, to increase individual home ownership. The propagandistic aspect of this debate is given further profile by semi governmental cultural institutions like the Dutch Architecture Fund and the Architectural Institute, who encourage architects to develop seductive plans and images for individual houses. At this moment, there is an exhibition in the Netherlands Architectural Institute that for the first time in Dutch architectural history wants to show the great tradition of individual homes, whereas this was always considered only a minor or even politically incorrect issue. A market was even organized, where potential clients could find their architect.16) Counterarguments, like they could still be heard in the early nineties, that this development would swallow large parts of the landscape and ruin the ecology, that it would create a new segregation and an increased mobility, have been almost completely silenced. In the next years, the percentage of homes that are to be commissioned by individual clients is to be raised to 30 percent of the total production.
Charles Bessard has analyzed how these new individualized quarters are produced in Almere. In fact, Almere is the city where individualization has been an urban planning and design strategy from the beginning. Driving through Almere one doesn’t even realize one is in a city. Housing quarters are hidden from the road by dikes and bushes. They are separated from each other by dikes, bushes and canals. Almere purposely has no center: there is a lake. The new quarters with individual lots are divided into simple themes: farm houses, traditional houses and modern houses, as in the beginning sometimes a modern house in the middle of traditional ones caused a curse. As there is a shortage of plots, people can inscribe for a lottery. If they want a modern house, they inscribe for the modern quarter and so on. But because of the shortage, they also inscribe in other quarters. Thus, it can happen that someone who wants to build a modern house ends up in a quarter dedicated to farms or the other way around and has to use all kinds of tricks to more or less realize his or her dream. In the end, everything looks more or less similar ofcourse.
Bessard also investigated the real dreams the people had and discovered that they were always related to holiday destinations far away: a farm in Africa, a mansion in Scotland, an apartment in New York….. It is painful to see than what really came out of it. In the end, what the building industry has to offer for the money the clients have is more than ever decisive for the final result.
In the cultural debate, one can see similar developments. We witness a shift from a policy in which Culture was written with a capital C and people were educated to understand this culture to a policy that tries to take different cultural expressions equally serious by distributing subsidies as broadly as possible. Again, arguments from the traditional left form a coalition with arguments from the traditional right, for both multicultural initiatives as well as commercial initiatives are supported. In this context, subsidies have become more like prizes, official governmental blessings of cultural initiatives. From steering devices, subsidies have turned into tokens that show that as many different initiatives as possible are officially recognized by the state or city government. ‘Rotterdam is Many Cities’, is the carefully chosen official slogan of the Cultural Capital 2001. Just as in the case of the new housing policy, cultural politics take the form of a general amnesty. ‘I am OK, you are OK’, as we used to say in the seventies. It is interesting to note however, that when we were to judge the Cultural Capital as an event that one would expect it to produce, be it in the form of unique events or in terms of something that is more than the sum of its parts, nothing seems to be happening that wouldn’t be happening in Rotterdam anyway.
So, on an official political level, individualization is accepted and even encouraged and everyone seems happy. No one would like to be called an elitist, would one? No one would like to be accused of discrimination, would one? No one would like to restrict anyones personal freedom, would one? But why then does this current policy seem so toothless and tasteless, why does it create such mediocre results in itself and why does nobody seem to be interested in the side effects? Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt write in ‘Empire’ that ‘in this regard, Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle, more than thirty years after its compostion, seems more apt and urgent. In imperial society (the current global society Negri and Hardt describe, B.L.) the spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish any inside from outside –the natural from the social, the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been both universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others, monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in the virtual spaces of the spectacle.’ According to Negri and Hardt, and with a similar optimism Ulrich Beck originally had, ‘the end of the outside is the end of liberal politics’. 17) That remains to be seen ofcourse and remains unclear what kind of society they imagine will replace the current one. It will not simply happen by itself. This is exactly why, for now, it is necessary to investigate the phenomenon of individualization more deeply.
Andreas Gursky’s monumental photograph ‘Montparnasse’ shows an enormous modernist apartment building from the nineteen seventies in Paris. The façade is a regular grid, reflecting the apartments inside, that all have more or less the same size and plan. A list of the names of the inhabitants shows that this building, that was made for average French families of two parents and one and a half child, is now inhabited by people coming from a wide range of different countries. When we look at the photograph more closely, we see that each inhabitant uses his or her apartment in a completely different way. In reality, the crisis of this kind of modern public housing is even more manifest and shows itself in a chaotic and kaleidoscopic mix of different lifestyles. A student of mine, Charles Bessard, who used to live in this building, told me that, because of the poor sound isolation, one is constantly confronted with the musical tastes of one’s neighbors, that mix in a way not even the coolest Parisian DJ could achieve. Maybe cool, maybe annoying, but what this demonstrates at least is that individuals have the tendency to expand their private sphere beyond the actual borders of their private domain.
One of the case studies in the Mutations exhibition in Bordeaux examines a similar case. Here the modernist ‘Italie’ or ‘les Olympiades’ slab in the 13th Arrondissement in Paris contains a Chinatown that uses the building in an incredibly creative way, using the underground parking as a public space and market and the apartments for sweat shops and restaurants during the day and as sleeping quarters during the night. The elevators work overtime, connecting different apartments and functions within this city within a city; moving people, products and furniture quickly in order to escape from the control of the Parisian police.
However, these examples are only part of the story. The real multicultural society develops just as well from within. In a text on the history of the Maaskantflat in Rotterdam, one of the highlights of the modern postwar reconstruction of the city, Adriaan Geuze has shown enormous differences in the homogeneity and sense of community between the original inhabitants and those who have moved into apartments that became vacant in recent years. Here he is speaking not of people from different countries, but merely of mainly young people with a more individualistic way of life. If one visits the Donaucity and the Copa Kagrana in Vienna or the surroundings of Graz and Linz one can see similar phenomena happening. In all these cases, we can see the result of an aggresive individualism that nests itself in a parasitical way in the public architecture and urbanism that are so typical of the Western European welfare state. Very often, this individualism also manifests itself in an aggressive capitalist entrepreneurship that, in a seemingly paradoxical way, shows similarities with the mentality of squatters and hackers, that we always associated with an anti capitalist, anarchist attitude. Joep van Lieshout’s AVL-Ville is the most radical expression of this tendency: an artist that has developed his practice to a larger firm that becomes a village that he wants to turn it into a freestate, gates and guns included.
We may be fascinated by this kind of developments and experiments, as we are fascinated by the vital processes of self organization in China, in Lagos, in the shanty towns in South America, Africa and India and by the Walled City, but aren’t they just the larger flipside of the tendency that creates Common Interest Developments, the themed and often gated communities that the new rich middle class builds?
Individualization has far?reaching consequences for the way in which we think about culture. This is currently being expressed chiefly in debates between the cultural relativists, who accept a variety of cultures (ethnic, religious, >high= and >low=) existing next to one another and value this variety as an asset in its own right, and the cultural pessimists who at the very least wish to preserve certain (>Western=) values and attainments that, whether they actually say so or not, they deem superior to others. Some say individualization has gone too far, others say it is not going far enough, because it is unavoidable that in the future, in a unified Europe and in general in a globalized world, individuals will have to take larger responsabilities.
The cultural implications of individualization, however, go farther than this debate. This is particularly true for those aspects of culture, such as architecture, urbanism and the visual arts, which take an effect in public space and in fact largely owe their legitimacy to the public sphere. After all, architecture traditionally mediates between the individual desires of a person commissioning a work and the public interest. Public art has to be understood by larger parts of the community. Urbanism largely creates the physical conditions for the public sphere. Sooner or later, therefore, the concept of public interest, some kind of sameness, will need to be reformulated. However this is increasingly difficult in a globalized world in which national borders become increasingly meaningless and therefore national policies become increasingly meaningless.
Multinational companies seem to have found part of the solution in terms of the design of their products, as another photograph by Andreas Gursky (Untitled V, with Nina Pohl from 199..) demonstrates. The photograph shows a year’s collection of countless different sports shoes in a PRADA vitrine. Originally, these shoes were made for particular sports, but nowadays people wear them to show an aspect of their identity and for the purpose of fashion. Basically, in a kind of democratization process, they have taken over the role fashion brands like PRADA used to have to enable people to distinguish themselves. Different brands of sports shoes carry many different styles next to each other. Today, only a few years after the photograph was made, most sports shoes are not even made with the purpose to use them for sports, but just to provide a cultural identity. At the Nike website, you can even design your own shoe –to a certain degree: Nike keeps the right to refuse some designs. 18) It is interesting that OMA’s new PRADA shops use a similar strategy as Nike does in its larger stores.
What the long?term architectonic and urbanistic consequences of this will be is still open to speculation. Architects like Greg Lynn, Lars Spuybroek and Kolatan/McDonald develop ways to design, produce and market non-standard individualized housing types, in an attempt to use similar strategies as Nike does .
Even if they share certain common interests and characteristics, like the intensive use of the computer in the design process, the latest flexible production and marketing techniques and the relationship between architecture and the natural environment, all three of them approach the issue of individualized housing in their own way.
Greg Lynn has been conducting specialised research, both in his own firm (FORM) and at Columbia University, UCLA, and ETH in Zürich, into the possibilities of applying the computer-operated flexible manufacturing technologies that have been developed in the car industry to the construction of housing. In the car industry, it has long been common practice that a single factory is not limited to manufacturing a single kind of car. Instead, several different models and even different brands will be produced on the same production line. What is more, the models are entirely custom built to suit the wishes of the customer so that practically no two identical cars are ever produced. This production method requires the cars to have a more or less similar ‘genetic code’, e.g. an equal number of basic parts. This would also have to apply to houses: they would have to be composed of a standard number of parts. In Lynn’s case, these are 2,048 panels, 9 steel frames, and 72 aluminium ribbings. If this condition is met, houses can be constructed in an almost infinite variety of shapes and sizes. Just as with cars, the construction of these houses is based on a self-supporting monocoque, thus the project’s name ‘embryological housing’.
Sulan Kolatan and William McDonald (Kolatan/McDonald Studio) emphasize the marketing of homes. The various types they have developed are geared to the various existing lifestyles as seen on the American housing market, examples being ‘The Golf Course House,’, the ‘Hot Tub House’, the ‘Infinity Pool House’, the ‘Ramp House’, the ‘Bungalow House’, and the ‘Shingle House’, but also allow the inhabitants to express their individuality within the given types. Like Greg Lynn, Kolatan/McDonald belong to the first generation of architects conducting research at Columbia University into the use of computers in architecture. They present their work by way of ‘product placement’, inserting them into commercials for various products as is the custom in the American film industry: the commercials remain the same, but somehow one of the Kolatan/McDonald homes has been inserted into the familiar suburban environment.
In the project entitled ‘Off-the-road 5-speed’ created by Lars Spuybroek (NOX), the focus is on finding a new system for building an urban district that consists entirely of individual, different, industrially produced homes geared to various lifestyles and living arrangements but that still form a single unit in terms of urban development. In fact, the point of departure for the project was an urban planning problem: the original commission by the Stadsbeeld Committee involved designing an acoustic baffle. However, using a computer model NOX was able to show that a careful arrangement of houses, taking into account the way in which sound travels, would make an acoustic baffle unnecessary. The contours thus developed made it possible to create a district in which each building plot and the building shape on it would be completely different. The Trudo housing association liked this idea so much that they asked NOX to develop the plan further. The result is a district containing only individual homes that are nevertheless generated by means of a single design principle – that of the ‘fluid grid’. Research is still being conducted into the best industrial method for constructing these homes, however it seems at the moment that the project would only be realizable if many more houses would be constructed with the same machines to reduce the costs.
Very different from the period in which the nation states controlled the housing production and in which architects played an important role in the housing production, this kind of approaches is more and more marginalized. One of the things that has changed due to the process of individualization is that Architecture with a big A will not be able any more to achieve the kind of power modern architecture had. The large bulk of the market production goes in a totally different direction. That architects like the ones mentioned above will hardly play a role in that development is in itself not the issue. There will certainly be a niche market that is big enough for them to survive. The question is if the market system that we are collectively embracing really offers the individual freedom it promises. When we see Charles Bessards analysis of Almere we can answer: no, not really. Lynn, Spuybroek and Kolatan/McDonald will remain the PRADA’s of built production.
But how do individuals organize themselves in, be dependent of or link themselves with groups and how does this manifest itself spatially, in representation and aesthetically for example? What kinds of organizations are desirable and what kinds of organizations, like the beforementioned gated Common Interest Developments for example, are not? These are largely political decisions.
What role can architects and urban designers play in that process in the future? That is also a question that is very difficult to answer at this point. One thing is clear for me however: the real changes in architecture and urbanism we are looking for do not so much depend on individual design proposals by architects, as also these approaches become more and more individualized that they simply get lost in the quantity of proposals and realized projects. I think however that at a level of urban planning, much more care should be given to bureaucratic measures than design. At least in the faster growing parts of the world we will simply not be able anymore to design and control everything. But when we are able to simulate the growth of cities, as we can for example with models based on Cellular Automatons like the one Keith Clarke has developed, we should also be able to figure out where to intervene to avoid problems or to stimulate certain other developments.19) We should be able to present these simulations to democratic bodies that can make a choice.
But also in architecture, a lot of care will have to be given to regulations, norms and new building technologies. New building technologies will have to be developed to answer the demand for individualization and non-standard products. That is however not so easy, as the current regulations, norms and technologies were all developed during the rise of Modern Architecture. Technologies were often subsidized by nation states and the laws were implemented by the same nation states, within the social housing policies in order to reduce the housing shortage as soon as possible. That means that our current norms and regulations are intrinsically linked to the industrial production. They are intrinsically linked with standardization. If we want a different architecture and urbanism, large investments in the building industry will have to be made again. But who will make them? And why should they? Therefore architectural policies will be a crucial keyword for the next decades, but in a very different way than the policies we have known the last decade.
After six years of doing research at the Berlage, exlusively in the form of case studies, this year we make a start with an attempt to come to new procedures, to create a new software for urban planning. But to arrive at that, a lot of issues still have to be solved. I hope you have the patience to wait for that.