Utzon

Jorn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House and recipient of the Pritzker Prize, passed away over the weekend. One of the 20th Century's greatest architects, who unfortunately was not able to build as much as we would have liked, will surely be missed. But his grace, passion, experimental nature, and sensitivity will persevere through his wonderful masterpieces.

Bagsvaerd Church, Jorn Utzon. Photo by Ole Robin via Flickr

28

What are/were/will you be doing at age 28?

Some people* were making one of the greatest albums in the history of ROCK, pushing their creativity to the limits, expanding their craft, impacting the lives of millions of people for 40+ years….

….and all I’m doing is writing this shoddy blog…humbling...

*actually, George was only 25…and he wrote ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’!!! That’s like…rock god status material!!!

ECOTRANSITIONAL URBANISM

Jorge Ayala, Aerial View

From Jorge Ayala, a student in the AA’s Landscape Urbanism Unit, comes a project exploring ecotourism in China’s Pearl River Delta. The project, like most work from the AALU, is beautifully illustrated, diagrammed, and modeled. The AALU has developed amazing techniques for representing the various complexities of a site’s urban and ecological phenomena, kind of like Ian McHarg on steroids.
It is great to see a studio focused on these issues for that region of China. One of the biggest issues confronting China is the process of 'rurbanization', due to the "New Socialist Village" mandate from Hu Jintao. There need to be more innovative scenarios for how this process can take place and be more beneficial to both the people and places that are effected by this transition. The LU's process of intense ecological analysis is imperative for creating a better understanding of how to intervene. The key will be how we come to understand the complexities uncovered and develop strategies for projection and intervention.

Here is Ayala’s project description:

ECOTRANSITIONAL URBANISM, Pearl River Delta, China

JORGE AYALA
The project, located on a 27 square kilometer island called Qi Ao located in the Pearl River Delta, has the potential to become a gateway for Hong Kong/Shenzhen due to its strategic location and the increasing passenger flows through it. The site is threatened to become another generic Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands and rural life. Thus the signs of scarcity of water resources, deforestation, fish farming and industrial pollution are already present.
Based on the Landscape Urbanism emergent discipline, the city proposal seeks to establish an eco-tourism strategy that embraces the existing site and its natural energies such as tidal variations, local mangroves and seasonal rainfall to assure the viability and sustainability of the island.

On Ayala’s blog he publishes a fascinating discussion between two AA critics and himself, which simultaneously validates and questions the work of the AALU. I bring this up not to discuss the work of Ayala, which is obviously quite thought provoking and skillfully executed, but to further the discussion of LU and also some concerns that I have voiced previously here on _URB_. One critic, ‘Rob’, questions the special brand of formalism being developed in the AALU and his quote reminds Alexander Tzonis’ article “The Last Identity Crisis of Architecture,” (although one would wonder if he would still think it was the last 40 years later), when Tzonis states that “the misdirected central thrust of the academic community is responsible in the schools of architecture …for engaging students into a futile game of perpetuating and perfecting arbitrary…hows without questioning the whys of their discipline…”
I am not trying to say that the LU does not have good whys to go along with their hows, but one thing I would question in the end is the typically diagrammatic level of the final designs and how they actually operate in relation to the incredible data sets uncovered in the initial process. The data itself is developed into such visually stunning diagrams that I wonder if there is a tendency to suffer from a form of what Tzonis calls “paralysis through over-analysis”, leading to an inability to transform the data into productive interventions. To close, here is ‘Rob’s’ side of the debate (more detailed images of Ayala's project after the quote):

Much of the work of the landscape urbanists strikes me as essentially a formal game, which we designers play to amuse ourselves. That is, there is a set of rules (determined in part by the professional history of landscape/architecture and planning and in part by developments in contemporary European philosophy, particularly Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze), a limited set of players, and a limited set of interested parties (those with sufficient training in the previously mentioned disciplines to appreciate the ways in which the actions of the players subvert the rules of the game). Most importantly, though, the game does not intersect reality (that is what a game is – an exercise which imitates but does not intersect reality). Typologies are generated, ecologies are analyzed, but cities are not changed, much less reorganized to accommodate ecological processes. The work of AALU typically strikes me as possessing only the formal characteristics of a diagram; data filtered through algorithms and passed off as innovative by virtue of its alien formal qualities. This is the return of the artist's obsession with form, robbed of their devotion to creating meaningful places. Meanwhile, the concern for ecology and process is reduced to a passing nod, a diagram that proclaims the designer concerned with ecology, without requiring the design to be altered in significant ways to accommodate that concern for ecology. Obviously, this concern could be allayed with further explanation of how "tidal variations, local mangroves, and seasonal rainfall" are embraced by the design. I worry, though, (based on previous impressions of AALU), that these (wonderful) concerns might only intersect the design when a set of data points is needed to generate a form, and fail to inform the design at a deeper level. While adapting form to data is an interesting exercise and, in the hands of skilled folks such as AALU, generates beautiful drawings and renderings, it merely exchanges one kind of formalism (the modernist variety) for another kind (the landscape urbanist variety). A better post-modern urbanism, I think, would be one that is concerned not just with adapting the forms of urbanism to data, but the processes - a much, much more difficult task...
(emphasis mine)

Material Formations

note: all images are the work of Jorge Ayala. A very special thank you to him for notifying me about the project and for allowing me to publish it here on _URB_.

_urb_ Updates :: 21 November

Some of my photos of Wang Shu’s Central Academy of Art project in Hangzhou are featured in archidose’s A Weekly Dose of Architecture.

 

I also want to point out that the excellent post Iteration City was written by Mark Collins of Proxy, who is working with Urban Think Tank and the Columbia GSAPP Slum Lab.  If you are interested in the issues brought up in the discussion you should check out more of their work and the publication Informal Toolbox about the work they are doing in Sao Paolo.  Let’s hope Mark contributes more in the future!!

 

I wrote a piece recently discussing similar issues but from a different viewpoint called Architecture of Mediation for an upcoming issue of Urban China which I will post here once the magazine is published.  For me mediatory architecture is a form of practice that seeks to negotiate the transitional space between diametrically opposed issues of globalization and regionalism, progress and resistance, first and third worlds, and avant-garde and arriere-garde positions.  I hope to expand upon this line of thought in the future.  What I find interesting about Proxy’s work in ‘critical urban areas’ is their use of advanced computational design and information management to innovate in this unchartered territory of practice and helping bridge the gap between spiked and flat descriptions of the global economy.

Iteration City, more on bottom-up

[This post is in response to Elemental and Are we ready for bottom up?]

Can we, as architects, sitting on a peak of professionalism and 'expertise', meaningfully inject ourselves into bottom-up processes?

Our own vantage point suggests that we can, but the negotiation is fraught with contradictions and assumptions. Bottom up means complexity, diverse conceptions of space and use, contradictory motives, opportunism that can verge on the self destructive. To be bottom up is to forgoe the sense of morality and 'consensus' that architecture depends on - instead one must act opportunistically, to make alliances with other opportunists.

Surveying Paraisopolis, a hillside slum in Sao Paulo

Take the circumstance of the Brazilian favela, typical of the majority of unplanned urbanism in its dense, ad-hoc construction and lack of infrastructure. These are 'critical urban areas' - so named by the Sao Paulo architect Hector Vigliecca, who believes the stigma of the word 'slum' is one of the means in which these zones are marginalized. The favela of Paraisopolis, embedded within the fashionable Morumbi district of Sao Paulo,  developed rapidly in the 90's, both because of its resilience to massive influxes of population as well as its ability to create a *credible* and even attractive lifestyle to many upwardly mobile citizens. Far from being a monoculture of poverty, the favela's of Sao Paulo are economically diverse - alongside the expected swell of the rural immigrants you can find bussinessmen and students, even the owner of Brazil's largest appliance producer. The favela is most striking in its phsyical characteristics more-so than its demographics - as all construction takes place in a legal void, ad-hoc construction, DIY engineering and chaotic spatial planning govern. The farbic, in its unceasing invention and novelty, can create flexibility and ineffiency in equal parts,  unmitigated beauty as well as saddening neglect.

Scheme for Paraisopolis, Hector Vigliecca

Paraisopolis through time, satellite images. From 'Informal Toolbox'

Most bottom up processes are resilient - they self-heal, self-regulate. This is true from physiology up to eco-systems. Self-built slums have their own cycle of catastrophe and healing, usually brought on by over-building or land-slides. The wreckage of older homes becomes the foundation for the new - subsequent clearing and excavation can reveal several meters of construction debris creating a kind of artificial mound. Overbuilding can result in distaster, as foundations are not implemented to support it. The city is constantly being built up and falling down. Despite the density the hillside suggests, the slum sprawls - there is redudancy everywhere. A thin encrustation of building envelops the hill, implicitly hardscaping the terrain. Water runoff is an issue everywhere; sewers, if present, overflow into the streets and ground floors. Residents cope through a variety of mechanisms, including their own ingenuity. Networks of PVC pipes interconnect roofscapes, re-directing problematic flows to the next patch of land.

Statistical view of Paraisopolis, from 'Informal Toolbox'

Our colleagues Urban Think Tank like to think of the hill-side settlements as a hill of houses, a literal interconnected mound of construction. This mental slight-of-hand can be helpful when imagining this complex urbanism as an integrated whole - its articulation, as highly individual 'shacks', is misleading. Some slum dwellers live between several houses, moving through sliver courtyards between small homes, sometimes living in the inbetween spaces - one finds hanging laundry, children playing. Alternately, a grouping of houses can be knit together - an articulated exterior hides a highly integrated interior. These homes are most readily identified not by their morphology, but rather the gates that embelish their entrances.

So what is an architect to do in the face of this plurality and dynamism?

Slum 'upgrading', as it is understood by municipalities across the world, is about infrastructure. Sao Paulo has been extremely aggresive in introducing electrical metering, road construction, sewage channeling and other infrastructural efforts to alleviate the ill-effects of overcrowding and unplanned growth. These efforts were highlighted in a recent 'Global Dialogue', which brought together representatives from governments in China, India (Mumbai), Egypt (Cairo), Kenya (Nairobi). Sao Paulo's methodologies were hailed as the standard bearer for slum upgrading and each delegate seemed to suggest that it could serve as a template for urban remediation  in their own locality.

But what about the space? Infrastructure upgrades invariably mean demolition, wich means relocation. Sao Paulo's response has been zero-degree public housing. Its unforunate, since it is the last stage in a herculian effort of social work which has produced the richest archive of information related to large scale slum inhabitation (for those interested, the city's online GIS system can be accessed at http://www.habisp.inf.br/gethtml/inicial/inicial.htm).

At the Slum Lab, we have identified three modalities of approaching the slum, each of which can be engaged in in parallel, continuing within the framework of opportunism. One can sense the need for preservation, albeit frustrated by the slum's insistence on continual self-transformance. We have engaged in attempts to record the spatial characteristics of the favela, through photo, video, 3d models and data sets. You can approach the slum as a researcher and look to formulate hypothesis and construct models. That is our preferred modality at Proxy - we are foremost interested in architecture as an informational medium. Finding connections between emergent morphology and the myriad variables of sociability, financing, politics and physical circumstance is a deep project, which is made more substantial by the availability of new data and more capable software (software that speeks specifically to the 'bottom-up'). Lastly, the slum is a place of architectural intervention and invention. It must not only act in unconventional ways, but it must do unconventional things. By necessity, infrastructure, community and sustainability invest projects with a moral compass while the challenges of geography frustrate normative designs. These are interesting places for creative minds to work and experiment - especially given the void of conventional practices - but it means coming to terms with 'bottom up', whether through grudging co-existance or synergistic opportunism.

Slum Growth Models, from 'Informal Toolbox'

The 'Informal Toolbox' is edited by Proxy and Urban Thank Tank, presenting strategies for slum upgrading and the discourse that accompanies these tactics. It is published by the Cidade de São Paulo. For availability, contact Mark, email: mark at proxyarch.com

Unremitting Gloom = Major Bummer

Here I am, enjoying my Monday, getting my week off to a good start when I open up the China Daily website and discover:

UNREMITTING GLOOM AND CAPITAL FLIGHT AWAIT NEW WEEK.  

Damn!  That sucks!  Well, here’s to looking forward to next week then…let’s just hope there’s something to be thankful for.

ELEMENTAL on Dezeen

In a recent post I mentioned Alejandro Aravena’s group ELEMENTAL and their project for social housing in Chile.  Dezeen just posted a series of images of the project on their website.

 

Along with the images is a nice short text, outlining Aravena’s concept of ELEMENTAL as a “DO-TANK”, rather than the typical “think-tank” that has become so popular in recent years (also known as LABs in some architecture schools).  Of course architecture will needs more of both do-tanks and think-tanks and I think we will see a growing interest in self-initiated design and research projects in the coming years.

 

Here are Elemental’s three points (quoted from Dezeen):

1. To think, design and build better neighborhoods, housing and the necessary urban infrastructure to promote social development and overcome the circle of poverty and inequity of our cities;
2. In order to trigger a relevant qualitative leap-forward, our projects must be built under the same market and policy conditions than any other, working to achieve “more with the same”.
3. By quality we understand projects whose design guarantees incremental value and returns on investment over time, in order to stop considering it a mere “social expense”.

 

I think I mentioned before, but just in case I left it out, what I find fascinating about this project is the combination of top-down and bottom-up design systems.  The Elemental housing initially builds a kind of existenz minimum series of row houses which create a framework that can be filled in as the inhabitants obtain the material and financial means to do so.  The initial construction sets up an urban spatial framework as well as a solid material foundation for the expansion of the homes.  This strategy seeks to counteract two of the main problems of traditional slum settlements—problems of super high density and over crowding, and faulty construction which leads to unsafe structures (easily collapsible and flammable).