Implementing Advanced Knowledge
bits
4.1.1 IaaC Lectures Series: The dictionary of Received Ideas Enrique Walker
The dictionary of Received Ideas
(IaaC Lecture Series 30 April 2013; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)
At the age of nine years old, the french writer Gustave Flaubert started to write one of his most peculiar texts: The dictionary of Received Ideas. As it is well known, in this work the writer noted down several expressions that were used in the french social circles of the XIX century in order to suggest hight-class standings. Words and set phrases that in spite of its erudite and grandiloquent appearance, they had lost its original significance and were not adding any semantic meaning to the conversation, beside ornamenting the orator. Flaubert develops this work during more than thirty years, and despite its uncompleted state, it is capable to largely achieve its goal: to produce an inventory of cliches as vast that the reader becomes mute, appalled by falling in one of them. The concept of Received Idea, also known in other spheres as clichĂŠ, is an element that is closely related to all the work of Flaubert, and that with no doubts has a strong presence in many other matters beyond the strictly literary ones. It is an idea that in a particular moment has achieved a great intensity and effect because of being an intelligent resource for a particular
Cover - Virtual network, Archive. Figure 1 - Virtual network, Archive. Figure 2 - IaaC theory workshop, 2011. 2
situation, but that after an exhaustive use has lost freshness and interest. In other words, it’s about a solution that keeps existing although the disappearance of the problem that had raised. One of the most eloquent examples of it is the horizontal position in which we are placing the bottles of wine. When the tops were made out of cork, this position made sense in order to keep the cork wet and complicate the entrance of air in the interior of the bottle and the consequent oxidation of the wine. Nowadays, when the top is made out of plastic, this horizontal position makes no sense anymore, but still we are usually placing bottles in this position in a completely a-critic way. Evidently architecture is not an exception to this kind of operations empty of operative sense, and along history the discipline has develop a list of clichés that is being continuously repeated in our days. One of the most clear cases is the extended use of the miscellanies of windows characteristic of the façade composition of the Villa Müller of Loos. If in this work this apparently hazardous and disordered composition of windows in façade was the result of applying the peculiar method of spatial design called as Raumplan, its façade composition has been incessantly replicated even if the spatial design Figure 3 - “An optimist and purposeful visoin”, Archive. 4
method was the traditional one. Therefore, if in the original case of Loos the windows distribution was intimately related to the programmatic distribution of the space characteristic of the Raumplan, in most of the repeated cases in posterior occasions it was not like that: the will of conferring an apparently disorded distribution of full and empty had nothing to do with its programmatic interior distribution, but was just complicating its functional development. Something similar happened with the idea of projecting a building through a process of piling different programmes: with time this mechanism shifted to a piling of boxes that shared the same program and that as a consequence becomes a mere stylistic tool empty of all semantic content. However, the use of the cliché may become a creative resource, that doesn’t necessarily imply a simple saving of its use in the design. The interest lies in create and establish another disciplinary problem that can bring back to the cliché its lost operational value. One central idea in this direction is the concept of ordinary. Capital works as “Learning from Las Vegas” or “Delirious New York” are not just using the concept of “ordinary”, but they celebrate it converting it in a design method: in the first case through the idea Figure 4 - “An optimist and purposeful visoin”, Archive.
of the ornament of the vulgar and simple box-building, and in the second case through the culture of the congestion and the dissociation in between the discontinuous program of the interior of the skyscraper and the continuity that suggests its façade. The ordinary, that until a certain moment had been kept in distance, suddenly becomes an interesting issue. Cities as Las Vegas or New York, that were difficult to understand, now become interpretable through new arguments. The recuperation of the ordinary consists in giving dignity even to most mediocre form, and to convert it in a starting point to create and to understand. Something that with no doubts was recurrent in artistic movements as the Pop Art lead by Warhol, who also knew how to use the ordinary as a creative and communicative mechanism opposed to the elitist “Beaux Art” tradition, specially through works as the “Brillo Box” or the “Campbell Soup”. In this sense, some of the design mechanisms that from the architectonic academy are proposed in relation to the concept of cliché are similar to the ones that Flaubert was suggesting in his dictionary. On the one hand it is about creating an inventory of all the architectonic clichés that could be detected in the last 10 years, a list that is capable to create in the student that paralysing feeling produced by the fear of falling in the resource of the cliché. This inventory is describing random piles, massive objects, expressive envelops, urban branchings, garden cities, rhizomatic configurations... On the other hand the proposal consists in designing with the cliché as the main tool, that is to say, to design with an element that is required to convert in an allied in order to make him operative instead of insisting in its mere repetitive and not interpretative nature. In any case, its crucial to underline that even if the cliché is a convention, that is to say, a semantic content collectively agreed and relatively close to what we could understand as a typology, one of the specific characteristics of the cliché is the unconsciousness context in which is appearing. Therefore, it is not about producing novelty escaping from the use of the cliché, something that in a certain way is impossible given the cultural difficulty of completely splitting from it, but is about setting a target that is basically aiming at raising awareness of the employed method, that is to say, to have a certain constance and reflection about the design method employed and its genealogy, something that we can easily find in the work of architects like Aldo Rossi or Rem Koolhaas. When this is happening, technic and problem are susceptible of being reconciliated again and therefore the cliché can become an operative and extremely fertile tool to reformulate the discipline.
Figure 4 - Theory workshopt at IaaC, 2013. 6
Copyright Š 2014 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia All rights Reserved.
IAAC BITS
IAAC
DIRECTOR:
IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Manuel Gausa, IaaC Dean
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
EDITORIAL TEAM Manuel Gausa, IaaC Dean Mathilde Marengo, Communication & Publication Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
ADVISORY BOARD: Areti Markopoulou, IaaC Academic Director Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Bcn Director Silvia Brandi, Academic Coordinator Ricardo Devesa, Advanced Theory Concepts Maite Bravo, Advanced Theory Concepts
DESIGN: Ramon Prat, ACTAR Editions
IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands
Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona
PUBLISHED BY: Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia ISSN 2339 - 8647 CONTACT COMMUNICATIONS & PUBLICATIONS OFFICE: communication@iaac.net
Institut for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia Barcelona
8
Pujades 102 08005 Barcelona, Spain T +34 933 209 520 F +34 933 004 333 ana.martinez@coac.net www.iaac.net