PHREE_URB 02

Theory 101

While you can find a plethora of treatises regarding sustainable design, the more extreme form of PHRWEEU is an emerging phenomenon. Still, Post Humanist Rewilded Eco Ethical Urbanism is exhibited in many recent articles, projects, and competitions, which I am sure that you are all familiar with--probably much more so than me. There are two articles that I particularly want to discuss to provide a background of PHRWEEU: Stefano Boeri’s “Down From the Stand: Arguments in Favor of a Non-Anthropocentric Urban Ethics,” published in the first issue of New Geographies, which discusses a lot of the ideas floating around and the issues involved; and Owen Hatherly’s “Living Facades – Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting,” published in MONU’s Exotic Urbanism issue. In this post I will discuss Boeri’s article.

Boeri writes:

The support for a non-anthropocentric ethical outlook implies the application of a new idea of urbanity, seen as humanity located within a spatial context where cohabitation with the kaleidoscope of life is sought not a preordained hegemony of power. This implies an equal distribution of conditions linked to social mobility, experimentation with the cohabitation of different species, and building a different relationship with the components of the natural world. We need to think about an urban politics based on inclusion, which protects principles and values that affect the future of the whole planet and its ecosystems.

Boeri then goes on to describe three potential strategies for this new urban politics: re-naturalization of urban spaces, cohabitation with various animal species, and finally, to develop a new understanding of human relations which learn from these ideas of bio-diversity and bio-politics and deal with issues of globalization and increased diversity and social mobility. The first two strategies sum up what a lot of the projects that have inspired the idea of PHRWEEU—projects like Farmadelphia by Front Studio and City Zoo by Liam Young (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today).

A key concept of Boeri’s article and these recent projects is the idea of rewilding, from the field of conservational biology. Wikipedia defines rewilding as “passive and active activities intended to result in the reintroduction of extirpated or once-native species back into natural landscapes.” A more extreme version of rewilding is called Pleistocene rewilding, the subject of a recent WIRED article. According to WIRED, “Today, the idea that you can use those same animals, or modern analogs like elephants and Przewalski's horses, to restore an ancient ecosystem is called rewilding, and it goes far beyond conservation. In theory, we could re-create conditions that last existed when mammoths walked the earth and the environment was healthier and more diverse.” Many PHRWEEU designs are looking to do just that—restore urban environments to their natural states by re-introducing flora and fauna to those ‘blighted’ areas.

Boeri’s last strategy is important to keep in mind—let’s make sure that the new PHRWEEU does not distract us from working to reduce the inequalities and injustices that still exist within the human race.

Towards a GeoURBanism

”The highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centers, a sense of the crystalline prevails.”
Robert Smithson, The Crystal Land

Since my posts on Geo-mimicry a while back I’ve been thinking that the concepts of geo-mimicry and the “new geographies” could be combined into a full-fledged geoURBanism. I have been thinking that because geo-mimicry, at least in the formalist incarnation adopted by most designers, is too limited an approach to apply to every design problem. The combination of the two would open up designers to a more fulfilling repertoire of techniques and devices for researching, understanding, and designing buildings and cities.

GeoURBanism, in this nascent stage, has four basic tenets:

Design as geology :: imitation of the processes and forms of geological systems and geological formations, such as geomorphology.

Design as geography :: the setting up of relationships that enable a deeper understanding of a particular location or the world.

Designers* as geologists :: Develop an understanding of a given situation through its dynamic processes of formation; its microscopic structure; and its stratification.

Designers* as geographers :: Develop an understanding of a given situation through its territorial relationships; its topography; the precise dimensions of things as they exist.

The last two points are hard for me to define in a bullet point and as I have been thinking about them the only way to distinguish them from one another is through a kind of dialectical approach, meaning that my understanding of one primarily came about through contrasting it with the other. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

A geographical approach is concerned with the present condition as it currently exists on the ground. It uses techniques of cartography and aerial photography to describe a context from the top down. It is concerned with surface, topography, relationships between objects and themselves and the landscape, and precise dimensions.
A geological approach will want to explain how a condition came to its present state: where do phenomena come from, what forces (global and local) caused it to come about. It examines dynamic forces, processes, tensions, movement, time and history from the bottom up—it begins with the micro structure (i.e. crystals/minerals) and works out. I think it would be more topological than topographic, more dynamic (i.e. fluvial systems) than static.

Questions I still have are how does a geological understanding of a place differ from a geographical understanding? How does a geological project differ from a geographical project? If you have any thoughts please leave some comments!!
Obviously the difficulty in differentiating the two come from the intense overlap in the two fields, at least as they relate to architecture and urbanism, creating a Venn diagram where the overlap is the most substantial portion. Perhaps actual geologists and geographers would be appalled at the idea of overlap—not knowing either a geographer or a geologist I’m not sure how much turf-ism there is in the two fields. I also think that designers and researchers, as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, need to utilize the techniques implied from each field to gain a more rich and nuanced understanding of the condition that is being intervened upon.
Ok…more to come.
Note: All images above from The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, and are the work of Smithson. Smithson's SITES and NON-SITES are inspiration for geoURBanism and examples of potential techniques for new forms of research, analysis, and design.
*I have a hard time defining myself as you may have noticed, and sometimes use architect, other times use urban designer, and other times urbanist. For this piece, and probably from now on, I have substituted designer as a catchall for all design disciplines: architecture, urban design/planning, landscape architecture, etc.

flotation devices - Mendes da Rocha

Paulo Mendes da Rocha's buildings float, levitate, they are suspended between heaven and earth. Mendes da Rocha is the magician and his buildings the lady in that old famous magic trick. Why do they float. In the earlier projects they seem to float to open up the space around and under the buildings for public use. At the same time that they float the act as ruling devices--providing measure the topography of a place and calling attention to relationships between the landscape that previously did not exist. Particularly recently, as his most recent buildings and proposals have taken on a scale that allow Mendes da Rocha to operate at the scale of a vast territory.

Student Dormitory for Cagliari University, 2007

Conhecimento School Park, 2006, Santo Andre, Brazil

Technological City, Vigo University

Especially in three of his more recent projects: Conhecimento School Park, 2006, Santo Andre, Brazil; a project for a Student Dormitory for Cagliari University, 2007; and a masterplan for Technological City, Vigo University, 2004. In the last two this strategy of territorial connection is particularly outstanding. The dormitory hovers over two piers and connects the three water bodies that separate them. The masterplan consists of a series of long bridges that float over hills and ravines, connecting the campus buildings. Also in the rendering there are a number of empty structures that seem to create public spaces on the hillside and create framing devices for viewing the landscape. Of course this is just speculation on my part because there is little information on the particulars of the project.

Over on design boom there are two great interactions with Mendes da Rocha - an interview and a presentation by him at last year's FestArch. In a description of the Cagliari dormitory project Mendes da Rocha describes his intention of synthesizing a number of disparate elements in one gesture:

I felt obligated to make a reflection on the spacial characteristics of cagliari and the identity of sardinia in the universe. I thought I have to consider its primordial architecture and its ongoing transformation with 'naturalezza' (in a natural way). I had to consider the city's topographic specificity, its geomorphology, the original difficulty of human settlements, that big repository of all the intelligence and wisdom of architecture... here in cagliari I tried to embed two aspects in in my project: a 'spacial issue' and that of a 'point / counterpoint' position to america. in america's civilization (and in more or less all the occidental civilization and independent from the disaster of colonization...) the development is towards water. the direction has been from the coasts, the seaside, towards the inland. different to cagliari, which started from the inland, from the mountains developing towards the coast. in cagliari, you see all these monumental buildings, the ancient stone towers / the marvelous st. pancrazio with the elephant... I now synthesize the magnificent inventions that have given new opportunities to people: as building in stone and all this complex and difficult constructions in this specific geo-morphological landscape,developing towards the seaside.

He also mentions aerial photography as a relatively recent phenomena which allows this type of intervention to take place when he states "today there is the possibility for architects and engineers to work from maps but also by photos taken from satellites. this does not seem to young architecture students a novel thing, but when I was 30 or 40 and working as an architect, there was no such opportunity for me to base my work on. no aerial views of the landscape, the cities, the buildings..."

Now with Google earth we can conceptually link projects from around the globe which is an interesting concept--from the territorial perspective to the global perspective. It reminds me of a quote on of my professors made about all architects attempting to produce an idealized city out of their work--that their projects seen together as a whole can represent their own personal utopia. But more on that later.

For now, more de la Rocha buildings that float:
note: all images via Design Boom and Land + Living

Geo-Mimicry Update

Earth's exposed geology, originally uploaded by bldgblog.

Just an update on the earlier post on geo-mimicry:

If you are a flickr user I started a group called Geo-mimicry + Design in order to collect images of geo-mimicry projects and inspiration. If you are interested and have some cool images to contribute please do so!

I have been working on an idea for a full fledged GeoURBanism combining the ideas of geo-mimicry and the growing influence of geography on design and urbanism as exemplified by the New Geographies group at Harvard University, so look for that in the next few weeks.

NewComers: Infranet Lab and New Geographies

Ho-Yeol Ryu, Airport, 2005, via Infranet Blog
InfraNet Lab is a new research organization founded by Mason White and Lola Shepard of Lateral Architecture. The new site for the group also features a blog of the same name which features a great breadth of work, research, and discussion on infrastructure and urbanism. I've long been a fan of Lateral's work and Mason's writing frequently featured on Archinect. Their work often deals with the relationship between suburbia, infrastructure, and geography. Their's is an earnest attempt to transfigure the suburban landscape through the reconfiguration and remodulation of its everyday matter--highway off ramps, big box retail, parking lots, and a nebulous landscape in search of definition. Here is a blurb about the site from its creators:

InfraNet Lab is a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. The laboratory posits the argument that a body of unique built works continues to arise out of the complex negotiation of, and competition for, biotic and abiotic resources. Operating in a manner similar to infrastructures, these works have evolved to merge landscape, urbanism, and architecture into a sophisticated mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers, and conduits.

'Wall' by Andy Goldsworthy

New Geographies is a new journal created by 'Doctor of Design' students that Harvard's GSD under the direction of Professor Hashim Sarkis. I had the pleasure of taking part in the seminal seminar of the same name a couple years back that I assume generated the idea for the journal. The seminar explored emerging concepts in architecture, landscape and urbanism surrounding the enlarging scale of design, an expanded scope for designers, and a new focus on a 'geographic' approach to design instead of a 'topographic' approach.
The last was one of the most interesting ideas of the seminar to me--a geographic project is one which attempts to reveal the inherent nature of a larger territory through the use of geography itself. According to dictionary.com geography originates from the latin word geographia which means "description of the earth's surface," from ge "earth" + -graphia "description," from graphein "write." A geographic project can be understood as a form of writing on the earth's surface in an attempt to describe it. A topographic project, on the other hand, is one which attempts to meld with the landscape. Geographic techniques might include using a strong geometry which allows topography to register against it, creating a micro-scale version of macro-scale geographic formations (see also image below and here), or any number of techniques used by land artists (Andy Goldsworthy's work, shown above, was one strong influence in the seminar).

Mansilla + Tunon, Museum of Cantabria

I have not had a chance to read the issue yet (being in China has me a little out of the print publication loop) but my buddy Chris picked me up a copy a couple of weeks ago and I can't wait to get my hands on it! It features articles by Charles Waldheim, Bruno Latour, and Sarkis himself. Here is the blurb about the journal from its creators:

For more than a decade, architecture and urbanism have been seen as the spatial manifestation of the widespread effects of globalization. As cities became denser, they intensified in their horizontal and vertical thickness with large-scale urban development projects, yet they also became dispersed with urban sprawl. Within the design disciplines, key words such as rapid urbanization, mapping, networks, and flows affected the analyses and interpretation of emergent mutations on the spatial and urban dimension; and design attitudes toward this expanding scale tended to oscillate between research/mapping on emergent urban/global networks and the extra-large (iconic) landmark. On one hand, the production and popularity of design in contemporary culture has increased immensely, and on the other, designers are being compelled to address questions—related to infrastructural, ecological, regional, and cultural issues—that previously were confined to the domains of other disciplines. By encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies to link attributes that had been understood to be either separate from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for architecture.

You can purchase the first issue of New Geographies here.
(My apologies to Hashim and the rest of the NewGeo gang for my bastardization of their concepts)