Editors
Lisa-Marie Androsch
Jade Bailey
Adriana Boeck
Velina Iantcheva
Moritz Kuehn
Emma Sanson
Viktoria Tudzharova
The intent is to develop an inspiring and diverse perspective on how the future of architecture will be juxtaposed with other disciplines and expanded to a scope yet undiscovered, achieved by discussing matters of global, social and technological pertinence.
The fourth issue of Abstrakt probes into public space and its shifting boundaries, specifically in the context of extensive amounts of privatization within the urban public domain and alternative modes of interaction occurring on digital platforms. As various forms of exchange — from economic to cultural and social — have moved online, our relationship with the material city is being reevaluated. Architecture can assume the role of a mediator between private influence and city dwellers, while also seeking to shape the connection between the digital and physical layers of the public realm, in order to multiply possibilities for social exchange in physically shared spaces. To explore this topic, we have invited Greg Lynn, Clare Lyster, Baerbel Mueller and Siqi Zhu, bringing intense conversations on a scope of pertinent issues. Topics range from the consideration of context and idiosyncrasies, community engagement in the design process and ownership on the one hand, to matters related to the technologization of space on the other — such as the omnipresence of digital interfaces, or the impact of logistical systems and new forms of mobility on public space. These contributions are accompanied by a series of architectural designs gathered from students and alumni at the Institute of Architecture at the Angewandte that rethink the fluid border between public and private.
Greg Lynn is an architect, writer, educator and pioneer in the field of digital design methodologies in architecture. He is the founder and owner of Greg Lynn FORM and the co-founder of the robotics company Piaggio Fast Forward. He is currently teaching as a professor of architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles. In 2009, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Time Magazine has named him one of the 100 most innovative people of the twenty-first century.
Greg Lynn
©Greg Lynn
The terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ as extreme opposites are becoming obsolete due to an ever-increasing dissolution of boundaries in urban occupation under the influence, on the one hand, of alternative modes of interaction in digital platforms, and on the other, of an increasing number of private ventures operating in open spaces in our cities. Where would you propose shifting the focus to when discussing urban spaces to achieve a better grasp on those contemporary issues that redefine the boundaries in navigating and inhabiting cities?
I risk sounding conservative, which I don’t normally think I am, but a critical ingredient for cities are civic spaces. By definition, civic spaces are dedicated to citizens — not users, customers, or inhabitants but citizens. Only recently have I thought about what makes a citizen in a building or space. I consider that a citizen is characterized by a decorum and agreement about etiquette when interacting with others in civic spaces. There are behaviors that characterize people as citizens that are related to spaces in cities and towns and villages. Social interactions are different in those spaces than they are on, say, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where civic conduct or decorum is either totally different or nonessential. This might be because people are having private relationships with their phones or it may be because people are not physically with one another while they’re interacting. For whatever the reason, in the world today, there’s a change in what it is to be a citizen and what behavior is expected from citizens in what you have referred to as ‘public spaces.’ Behaviors and etiquette have changed very, very quickly. Our field of architecture has yet to think about what this means in terms of space making and buildings. I agree that the distinction between public and private interaction and behavior has broken down, but the spatial distinction might have become more extreme. More people are spending more time on screens, not being aware of their surroundings. The attention to architecture and the built environment
“I consider that a citizen is characterized by a decorum and agreement about etiquette when interacting with others in civic spaces. [...] Social interactions are different in those spaces than they are on, say, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where civic conduct or decorum is either totally different or nonessential.”
is different while you move around space with, or sit in a space focused on, a screen. Additionally, we are sharing a lot of things on devices that do not require spatial interaction. This all suggests a different awareness of the built environment. The one thing diminishing is interaction with other people in space without a screen occupying their attention.
So would you say the screens are almost an enemy to civicness at present?
Not an enemy, but they are definitely a distraction. Even the developers of these apps are worried about people falling off of cliffs or walking into traffic. Screens distract from interacting in space with other people, especially strangers. The amount of time people spend on screens is incredible. The majority of our waking lives are spent on, or in proximity of, screens of one type or another.
“From large screens to phones, people are just spending tons of time distracted from all subtle signals and the cues from people and the architecture they are occupying.”
For example, Netflix’s CEO said that “their only competitor is sleep, and they are winning.” From large screens to phones, people are just spending tons of time distracted from all subtle signals and cues from people and the architecture they are occupying.
And do you think there is a potentially positive relationship between screens and architecture — a way to integrate digital interfaces into the design of physical spaces such that they would not simply take away from our attention to our surroundings and reduce the added value of spatial experience, but rather enhance those spaces?
It could be progress that I’m not seeing. I was recently at a championship American football game in a new stadium in Los Angeles, where there happened to be a one-billion-dollar screen that’s a ring floating over the field. The resolution and motion was the most incredible digital thing I’d ever seen. During the game, nobody was looking at their phones. The screen was so much better than a telephone’s. And everyone was connected to events happening in the moment and focused on the same live event and digital content hovering above it. That’s the only place I’ve been in a crowd where it wasn’t everybody with their phones. A few weeks later, I was at a Billy Strings concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl with a view to the ocean next to the stage and I was distracted by everybody’s recording and streaming through the medium of their phones. I don’t know, it might be that more digital content needs to be lifted off the phone and integrated into architecture.
So if the attention is directed in the same way, forming a collective viewing experience, then you would say social interaction is not diminished, or the civicness of those spaces is not reduced?
I felt connected. And present in that event in a way that I haven’t felt connected and present in an event for a while, because so much was being mediated,
that it kind of focused a lot of people’s attention on what was happening in the moment.
Would you say this is one of the biggest upcoming challenges for architects in the production of public spaces? Or are there other such challenges you could identify when taking digitalization into account?
The first challenge is societal. What used to be a shopping place in the center of New York City is now half vacant storefronts; all over Los Angeles shops are empty. It’s because people are consuming and shopping in a totally different way and sharing remotely rather than sharing the spatial experience of shopping in stores.
Restaurants are not as busy as they were, because people are getting food delivered more and more. Markets and stores are less busy because people are getting all of that stuff delivered. There’s much less interaction in civic spaces that relies on in-person commerce and exchange. Is that a problem for architecture? I don’t know. Architecture has become more and more downstream from cultural innovation and change. Architecture is rarely part of the contemporary conversation. That’s why the studios at the Angewandte that I teach — the food studio, the market studio and the mobility studio — all start by looking at ride hailing and micro-mobility to figure out
“Restaurants are not as busy as they were, because people are getting food delivered more and more. Markets and stores are less busy because people are getting all of that stuff delivered. There’s much less interaction in civic spaces that relies on in-person commerce and exchange.
I don’t know. Architecture has become more and more downstream from cultural innovation and change. Architecture is rarely part of the contemporary conversation.”
where architecture can have an impact on this change. I wouldn’t judge these changes as good or bad. It’s definitely different and something is being lost in favor of more time on screens.
By initiating the company Piaggio Fast Forward with the aim to develop cargo-carrying robots, you are taking part in a larger effort to increase walkability in the urban environment. How do you see the impact of autonomous vehicles on public spaces developing in the future?
We started Piaggio Fast Forward with a very specific insight and attitude, which is that in the United States, in particular, people choose where they live based on walkability. There’s a score that’s given to every address in the United States called the walkability index. It’s based on things like, Is there a sidewalk? How far away are you from a grocery store, from entertainment, from a school, from a park? A lot of people are finding that to have an urban experience, you don’t have to live in a metropolis, that you can have all the components of urbanism you need in Nashville, Tennessee, or Charlotte, North Carolina. Somebody living in a suburb can walk to a school or a farmers’ market, all of it, a mile or less away, but they choose to drive. In the United States, the average number of trips a person takes in a car right now, which includes ride hailing, is five and a half trips a day. Two of those trips involve work, the other three and a half are running errands and most of these trips are in the range of walking but
not carrying. People will say they will carry 20 to 40 pounds for a one-mile walk, but their behavior is they drive or hail a ride for really short trips over a half-full shopping bag.
So what we tried to do when we formed Piaggio Fast Forward is to think, How do we replace some of those trips, and what’s the quality of the trip? If you walk that one mile, what happens on that journey? You see people that you live with, who are strangers, but who are familiar. You start to see what’s in your environment as an amenity, and you start to understand a little bit more about your local lifestyle. That desire for local amenities and local living is what most people think about when they choose to live somewhere. But then once they get there, they’re taking a lot of Uber trips and they’re doing a lot of driving. We use robots that move the way people move in pedestrian environments to help replace that. Most of our customers share that desire to have a higher-quality walking experience rather than driving for these short errands.
You have mentioned the private sector a lot restaurants and retail as the activators of public space. They are often relied on for programming, maintaining, and bringing to life a huge portion of cities. As a result, spending time in those spaces becomes to a large extent bound to a monetary transaction, so in a way, they are rendered somewhat exclusive to the customers of these private ventures. What do you think would be the role of the architect in negotiating the boundaries between private occupation and open use of public space?
I think it is true, a lot of times when people are out being pedestrians in civic spaces they are in spaces that belong to a municipality, rather than a private company or individual, such as sidewalks, parks, streets — they’re on public property. Ride hailing companies are doing business on public property, that is, streets. The reason there’s a reaction against push scooters is they get left on sidewalks
and sidewalks are seen as a civic space. That’s not a place for a business to just drop their products and let people pick them up and leave them. So, organizing pick up points — like bus stops, but instead for ride hailing and parking places for scooters and electric bikes — this is a priority in major cities, all over the world, so that they have a clear place in the civic realm. I think one job is to just think through, with all of these new services for transportation, where do they belong? How regulated should they be, and spatially, where should they live when they’re not being used to ride in and ride on?
The other thing is that you don’t really need an architect for a park or a sidewalk, but the way buildings address parks and sidewalks is very important. And so, thinking about the relationship to land use and zoning is, I would say, more important for architecture than it’s been in a while, just because if you don’t do it, then people aren’t going to get out and enjoy a city. They’re going to just take whatever route their telephone tells them to take. And they’re going to be sitting there texting while they’re driving the car or driving in the car. They just won’t pay attention to it.
So you have to make an extra effort to make that civic experience even better to compete with the fact that they could otherwise just be checking social media feeds and watching videos on a phone.
...also when it comes to retail or restaurants, and what their relationship is to those open areas?
I’m working on a very ambitious project for a motorcycle company called Moto Guzzi and what we’re doing there is inviting the general public into a big plaza in the middle of the factory and giving them an opportunity to go on a tour and be able to look into all the different stages throughout which a motorcycle is built. We have a museum where they can go see historic versions of the motorcycle, experience the brand and what it’s about. And then we’ve got restaurants and cafes and even builder labs where people are invited in to customize things. The factory has been there for a hundred years on Lake Como. So it’s a place where tourists will go and that place will for sure augment, if not replace, a dealership, because somebody that goes there and sees this big plaza with motorcycles, motorcyclists, all parked there, goes on a tour of the factory, looks around in the museum… It’s a very compelling experience that makes you want to go for a ride on one of the motorcycles. It’s an even better experience than watching Ewan McGregor on TikTok, who is their brand ambassador. It’s more comparable to watching a documentary film with Ewan McGregor riding a motorcycle from China to Europe — it’s understanding that storytelling and experience is what the architecture’s job is there. And it takes the place of the retail shop. Frankly, as an architect, it’s much more fun to think about how to connect the language and the buildings and their massing to the brand, to think about the materials, to think about the design of all the spaces and the experience of people moving through the spaces. There’s less of architecture, but the quality of it is much higher and the thoughtfulness is much more sophisticated than just doing retail shops.
“[...T]hinking about the relationship [of buildings] to land use and zoning is, I would say, more important for architecture than it’s been in a while, just because if you don’t do it, then people aren’t going to get out and enjoy a city. They’re going to just take whatever route their telephone tells them to take. And they’re going to be sitting there texting while they’re driving the car or driving in the car.”
You mentioned these two contexts of Italy and of the USA, the different movement patterns of people. To what extent is context specificity important in the creation of successful public spaces compared to more generic or prototypical approaches to urban activation?
I think cultural and spatial context is getting more and more rare. If context is considered as the expanded field for your experience and memory of the building, it is now job number one. It used to be that you think
I have a lot of favorite public spaces. The places that I like the most are places where you could combine a lot of different modes of attention. In Tokyo, there are some places I love, especially at night, because you drive through them, you walk across the street at them, you see them from an adjacent building. You come into them on a subway and the space holds up with all those different scales and speeds of experience. I also enjoy spaces that have big changes throughout the day, that really feel like a big public empty room in the morning and really feel like a kind of a civic agora during the day. Places like Campo de’ Fiori in Rome that turn into something vulgar and amazing at night after being beautiful and vibrant markets during the day.
Since you were mentioning all those characteristics that you appreciate, as well as how online you don’t get to experience civicness — what about virtual public spaces, such as VR meeting rooms? Do you see potential in those, and do you think architects will be progressively more involved in designing such virtual environments?
about context in the sense of playing off some strong fabric or structure. Now so much of the world is feeling exactly the same, that context is something you need to create rather than find with any kind of authenticity.
You go to Bratislava, you go to Milan, you go to Boston, you go to Santa Monica, and it’s all generic. There’s a new global generic that is our context, but it’s not the kind of context you play off of, or that you would necessarily reproduce.
How to do something that is memorable within that is easy if you get the chance. But those projects are less frequent.
I don’t even know who my neighbor is in Boston. I’m in a loft and there’s somebody that lives next door who’s screaming all the time. Yelling from three in the afternoon until 10 at night, sometimes laughing hysterically, and often screaming in agony. There were several months where I just thought this person was insane. Obviously, nobody could possibly cohabitate with this person, so they’ve got to be alone in this loft. Yet they seemed to be yelling and screaming at someone or something. I couldn’t put it together. Then I watched my son playing a video game with some of his friends online together and I realized — this person next to me is just playing video games with an excessive intensity and for most of the day! Games are obviously a very powerful medium when my neighbor can spend more than six hours a
“If context is considered as the expanded field for your experience and memory of the building, it is now job number one. It used to be that you think about context in the sense of playing off some strong fabric or structure. Now so much of the world is feeling exactly the same, that context is something you need to create rather than find with any kind of authenticity.”
“A phone app that provokes people to have adventures and experience the world, mixing the virtual with the real, this is spectacular. An app that motivates people to get on airplanes and travel to get Pokemons is such an achievement. [...] I get much more excited about that than about trading spatial experience with other people for screen time, and I am not even that social a person.”
day, every single day, animated like a person who would be considered certifiably insane in public space. So games must work. Personally, I’ve never really gotten that excited about interacting with people in a virtual space. I was very excited about the work I did with Hololens, where I started to see augmented things in a space where there were two people looking at the same virtual model or two people walking through the same virtual model, but in real space.
Pokemon Go I haven’t played much, but I love the idea of it more than anything. The statistics about how many times to the moon and back people have walked, searching for Pokemons, and how a community gets formed out of people that are all looking for Pokemons — that I love. A phone app that provokes people to have adventures and experience the world, mixing the virtual with the real, this is spectacular. An app that motivates people to get on airplanes and travel to get Pokemons is such an achievement. When they dropped a Snorlax in Rotterdam, there were something like 300,000 people that were there to get it all at the same time in the same places — it’s incredible.
So the digital for you should serve rather as an activator of physical space and not as an alternative?
I get much more excited about that than about trading spatial experience with other people for screen time, and I am not even that social a person.
“More people are spending more time on screens, not being aware of their surroundings. [...] Additionally, we are sharing a lot of things on devices that do not require spatial interaction. This all suggests a different awareness of the built environment. The one thing diminishing is interaction with other people in space without a screen occupying their attention.”
Greg Lynn
The Digital Colosseum statistics show that the rising number of gamers has surpassed the total US population, indicating that the rise of e-sports is not temporary and therefore a notable development in the way sport is spectated. Unlike the arenas of today, the project proposes an e-arena that will house a number of functions to give back public space to the heart of any community. Doing so demands a new arena typology, one that incorporates a diverse and progressive method of interaction between people, space, technology, data and the surrounding context. In turn, e-sports will become an integral aspect of the daily lives of people as a potential future of sport, entertainment and technology. In the arena, spectators no longer have dedicated seats but instead move around, experiencing a juxtaposition of moments, from augmented reality popups of gameplay, to virtual reality experiences, to being an active member in the game itself within gaming booths or from mobile devices. The arena is proposed as an architectural spectacle to wander through a mixed reality world, similar to a music festival typology, bringing spectators and gamers closer together than ever before.
A Performance of Relocation
Events in public spaces define to a large extent the quality of life in any cultural metropolis. In the course of our research, we observed that the boulevard of Vienna Ringstrasse needs a vast infrastructure to sustain its functions. So why not use these elements to build up events? For each time of the year, a specific event setting is programmed and autonomously set up.
Bus stops and benches, bicycle stands, billboards and streetlights, the entire urban inventory swarm together and reconfigure into a modular pattern to become a concert stage, a festival, or even a part of a fashion show.
Pedestrians would experience this spectacle during their evening stroll. The architecture would ‘crawl’ at night to let the city dwellers find a slightly different city the next morning. This system would change the way we think about logistics and storage.
(1-4) Helen Andres, Janna Eberharter, Naomi Neururer, Benedikt Schambeck,Viktoria Tudzharova
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WS21/22
Siqi Zhu is a NYC-based urbanist-technologist working across technology incubation, human-centered design, and the built environment. As a Director of Planning & Delivery for Sidewalk Labs, he provides urban innovation consulting to the real estate development industry and works on reimagining how technology could transform the design and implementation of urban streets. He is currently teaching a graduate studio at Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering program.
How would you define public space at present and what challenges can you identify in the design and use of public spaces?
I guess there are a couple of ways of talking about this one. In one sense, the definition of public space hasn’t really changed all that much in the era of visualization. We have parks, plazas, streets and things that we’ve traditionally considered part of the sort of public realm and civic infrastructure of the welfare state. We have maybe a permutation of that that are sort of privately owned, privately operated public spaces that are accessible by the public and yet remain under private control. We have things like privately owned public spaces called ‘POPs’ in New York City, these are part of a program whereby private development provides open spaces and public spaces in exchange for greater development permission. They can be atriums and even sort of plazas on public spaces. So this might be a slightly newer permutation of the notion of public space. There are spheres that are not personally private, but where public life sort of happens in them.
And you know, one could always make the argument that digital platforms — Twitter, Facebook and others — all constitute a sort of a public sphere in the digital world, where though, you know, there are obviously degrees of publicness when you talk about all of these spaces.
I think there are very particular challenges related to today, this moment that we’re in, right now, having to do, for example, with climate change and the fact that many cities will become less inhabitable because of climate change and the role of public spaces in these places wanting to evolve, to accommodate that reality.
Over the last 20 to 30 years, the idea of fiscal austerity has really degraded the quality of parks and other kinds of public infrastructure in our cities. So I would say a common challenge over the last 20, 30, 40 years is the challenge of upkeep and funding and maintenance and how to do those things to a certain
level of standard while at the same time, contending with diminishing resources for those things. There are fundamental values of good public spaces that involve inclusion and accessibility and a vibrancy. I think an ongoing question is how to accommodate different kinds of bodies. People don’t come in normal shapes and sizes, right? People’s bodies and abilities and their cultural contexts around public spaces are increasingly different. I think how to recognize that diversity and design for those things has become really interesting. A particular question I have is, What does a truly multigenerational public space look like?
”I think an ongoing question is how to accommodate different kinds of bodies. People don’t come in normal shapes and sizes, right? People’s bodies and abilities and their cultural contexts around public spaces are increasingly different. I think how to recognize that diversity and design for those things has become really interesting. A particular question I have is, What does a truly multigenerational public space look like?”
I don’t know if you guys know this phenomenon in China, in public spaces, in the evenings, a lot of elderly women come together and gather to do dances, dance classes and plazas, and they blare music. And that’s been a huge source of conflict between these people, these elderly women, and everybody else who uses the park. So that’s just a good illustration to me that we haven’t really figured out how to design spaces for multigenerational occupancy.
To what extent is context specificity important in the creation of successful public spaces, compared to generic or prototypical approaches to urban activation?
I do think context provides kind of, not just constraints, but really creative drivers for design projects, right? One thing that could be interesting is thinking about the notion of value. What is valuable to people? Because in urban regeneration projects, the narrative is always, you know, we take a derelict piece of land and we redevelop it into a high-value, highly active, highly usable public space and adjacent development. But, that’s sort of discounting the value of the space as it is today and the way that some people might already know it.
I mean, you can think of so many examples where you know, maybe it was, a skate park, you know, for skaters or for like illegal raves, for example. And then over time that space becomes normalized and regularized as a civic public space and a lot of sort of what the nice quality of these spaces was actually got lost in the process.
How do you envisage digital technologies being applied in the process of shaping public spaces?
Several different ways — develop a taxonomy for the use of technology in public space. I think in the front end, it’s a tool for analysis, for information gathering, and a tool for a collaborative sort of collaborative visioning. The technology of monitoring and analysis, that’s also another, different family of technologies. Sensors that monitor usage, that monitor, for example, the buildup of trash, the coming and going of people and vehicles where there might be conflict between these two modes.
And then there is also a class of technology that is sort of making the physical aspects of a physical environment into tangible computing interfaces. They’re basically sort of making inanimate physical objects interactive and physically actuated. There are like connected streetlights, for example, that you can control via the network. There’s even, you know, a very recent central example: Central Park in New York has been doing these ‘sound walks’ that are location-based sound media works. You basically take your phone, for which an artist was asked to create different soundscapes. And various parts of the park get activated when you’re with your phone, traveling to that area. So this idea that technology can provide an additional a sort of sensorial overlay to the park is interesting.
What’s interesting to me as a future direction for exploration: How do we use technology to create larger spatio-temporal communities around a single public space? What I mean by that is, you have this experience of going to a public space and you are alone there by yourself. And there are other people, but you realize that you and all the other people there at the moment, and all the people that were there before and will be after you, are really part of a larger collectivity.
So how do you think that data analysis could improve physical public space?
”One thing that could be interesting is thinking about the notion of value. What is valuable to people? Because in urban regeneration projects, the narrative is always, you know, we take a derelict piece of land and we redevelop it into a high-value, highly active, highly usable public space and adjacent development. But, that’s sort of discounting the value of the space as it is today and the way that some people might already know it.”
I can only think of a really concrete example. One sensor technology I’ve worked with extensively is called Numina. It was developed here in Brooklyn, and it basically uses anonymized computer vision to detect and count people in vehicles. And one of the analyses that you can do with it is understanding conflict areas where people and vehicles tend to come into conflict, creating danger. So I think that’s just one tangible example where data analysis can be used to identify gaps, shortcomings in safety and accessibility. I think that’s a very tangible and a fairly realistic use case for technology in this case.
In your lecture you gave to Studio Lynn last semester, “Streets Ahead”, you discussed the possibility of turning the street surface into a technology platform by creating a spatial and temporal zoning for multiple constituents such as technologies, private ventures that operate on the curbside, their clients, and the remaining inhabitants of the city. How do you think each of those stakeholders would benefit from such an organization?
They have a need for a space that can benefit from being on the curbside and a sort of sharing platform for space on the street would allow everyone to have access to that space — pretty self-evident as a good thing.
Now, I think that the risk here is, How do you fairly sort of adjudicate between competing uses on the street right there? People are always in competition for the same space. How do you make that allocation fair? I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know if there’s like an across-the-board answer for that, I think maybe the best thing I can say is, people need to recognize that that decision of how to allocate time and space in public spaces generally is a highly value-laden decision, right? I think there was always a tension between regulation and flexibility. I don’t think that there can be one without the other. The sort of minimum threshold for safety and accessibility needs to be respected.
We were very curious about the Charlestown Navy visitor experience plan. In this project, you took up the role of a mediator between multiple stakeholders, including the local community, employing a mix of hands-on and computational methods. Can you describe the reasons for choosing those methods and the outcome, and how do you integrate the community’s opinion into the planning process?
It was the city of Boston. It was a museum. It was also the US Navy. And besides that, it was the members of the public. So it was really, really a lot of different people. So the challenge was how to get
“People are not always available at the same time. Digital technology plays a role of creating a sort of virtual forum for people to meet across space and time. And that is why we use digital methods in addition to the analog and physical ones. You de facto create exclusion of certain people that maybe for various reasons can’t come to these physical conversations.”
everybody together in the same physical space and time to be able to talk together at the same time. People are not always available at the same time. Digital technology plays a role of creating a sort of virtual forum for people to meet across space and time. And that is why we use digital methods in addition to the analog and physical ones. You de facto create exclusion of certain people that maybe for various reasons can’t come to these physical conversations. So you need a bit of both to really ensure that you have a fair and representative cross section of insights and people’s opinions.
I think we have some very practical, on-the-ground, early evidence for what that digitization is doing to physical environments, whether you’re talking about what’s happening with Amazon deliveries or what that is doing to urban streets and sidewalks — the virtualization of retail and what that is doing to urban retail spaces. I think there is some early evidence that the impact has been quite negative, in the short run anyway. And then, you know, this might be partly a function of the fact that we just haven’t really had a lot of time to let these effects play out. But I think the idea of using the digital to augment the physical has not been fully explored yet. I think one of the interesting things to me is always this notion of spaces that are rendered obsolete by digitized retail. I think there are some really easy examples, those large suburban shopping centers, suburban malls in the U S. So many of them are being redeveloped into housing and new mixed-use communities, that’s already happening. US-based developers who are redeveloping suburban malls, all they’re trying to do is to make it look more urban, make it look happier, build some of the textures of the normal city back into the suburban, vast sort of a mall by creating public spaces and plazas and even streets in some cases, pedestrianized streets.
How do you see the role of architects and urban planners evolving in the future in the negotiation between different stakeholders?
I think architecture always has its job of how to communicate a function to it, right? This idea that you are the conduit through which other people speak their desires and visualize their desires. And I think that remains true. I think where things might change a little bit is at least for some architects, this idea of using architecture as advocacy, to give voices to communities that have been up to this point, less represented. I hope that’s going to be more of the sort of practice that people incubate with their architecture. I also think there is increasing digital proficiency, and proficiency of architects to not just leverage, but also in some cases, design and implement digital technologies in physical space.
“I think where things might change a little bit is at least for some architects, this idea of architecture as advocacy, to give voices to communities that are up to this point, less represented. I hope that’s going to be more of the sort of practice that people incubate with their architecture.”
“What’s interesting to me as a future direction for exploration: How do we use technology to create larger spatio-temporal communities around a single public space? [...] You have this experience of going to a public space and you are alone there by yourself. And there are other people, but you realize that you and all the other people there at the moment, and all the people that were there before and after you, are really part of a larger collectivity.”
Siqi Zhu
The project deals with the question of how hyperfunctional landscapes can be transformed into the pleasure gardens of the twenty-first century. The excessive and interesting character of the site (car park) is directly related to the historic type of garden that emerged in London in the eighteenth century: the Vauxhall Pleasure Garden. The project tries to curate the notion of escapism and strangeness that the site already has. What makes car parks especially interesting for this project is that most social norms don’t apply to them due to their purely functional nature. It’s a scenario that allows activities to happen which are commonly not accepted in public spaces. The project uses digital phenomena that are emerging in nonplaces like this, putting them in a relationship with people. The diversity of strange elements is the starting point of the design and is used to further develop their strangeness into follies of the future garden, based on the historic model of the English pleasure garden.
studio díazmoreno garcíagrinda studio project
WS21/22
Project by Alexander Klapsch, Moritz Kuehn, Ludwig Rieger
This project translates unused nonresidential property through the act of squatting into a hub for the CV Dazzle community to meet and exchange within a new spectrum of intimacy. Here, translations are a series of actions that gradually reconfigure an existing structure to a new typology and through these, opens itself to the public shifting from unused space to a common place for all. Intimacy: being able to contemplate and meet without the fear of being seen, heard or tracked.
Reminisce Architecture is about storing and revisualizing zeitgeist memories through architecture — specifically, how memories can become an architectural manifestation within a museum typology, as a monument and as a time capsule. Executed by three main design components and their corresponding technologies, digital fossils serve as memory-archives, memory theatres for the experience, and an agora as a place for discourse. A main influence for the project was Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre, specifically because it was not only an archive of knowledge, but even more, a renaissance search machine. Icons help to find our way through a labyrinth of information. Inspired by that, the digital fossils are accessible and browsing through the archive is made possible by making the stored memories visible as holograms with AR contact lenses. As a hybrid architecture, you can visit Reminisce Architecture on site, but also from all over the world with a digital device. As every visitor will be wearing AR lenses, the hybrid agora is a place where virtual avatars and actual individuals can meet and discuss zeitgeist memories.
In conclusion, the building is not only a storage for zeitgeist memories collected from all over the world, it is also a place to reimmerse oneself in and experience collective moments turning into a fossil over time…
Clare Lyster is an architect based in Chicago, where she is an associate professor at the UIC School of Architecture. Her work looks at urban sociotechnical systems and how they shape the built environment. She has authored or co-edited several books, including Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhäuser, 2016). Recently, she focused on data information systems for her project, Entanglement (Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021), and is currently looking at agricultural systems for a book called Future Farm Formats.
We are really interested in your latest work, the book, Learning from Logistics, and we wanted to know from you, why logistics? Why do you think it’s so important to bring the logistics discourse specifically back to the attention of designers and architects?
Well, the book isn’t really that new. It was published in 2016, but it is having another moment because there’s so much talk about logistics now. For example, during Covid, we were shuttled into this virtual world by relying more on streaming media and e-commerce much quicker than we would have otherwise. So the book has a new relevance. But even 10 years ago (in fact, ever since the 1970s), if you looked around the world, it was hard not to notice that infrastructure and mobility systems were suddenly becoming more important to city-building than architecture. Everything was moving.
Architectural form used to be the way that we would think about making the city, and then it began to become apparent that, if you look around at information flows, material flows, people flows, architecture, which is traditionally the study of the object or the figure, was becoming unable to deal with all these new mobility systems in the city. And so that’s really why I wrote the book, to explore and to question how, as designers, can we move from thinking about the city from figure to flow? And if we start to do that, then what changes? There are a couple of images that I use comparatively, to clearly articulate this idea. One is the traditional figure-ground image of the city that all of us learn to draw. From the get-go, we think of the city from the perspective of the figure-ground drawing: black figures on a white background. But there’s a very famous drawing by Louis Kahn produced in the late 1950s for a project in Philadelphia where he starts to draw the downtown area through traffic flow systems. He is using notational systems like dots and dash lines and arrows rather than pochéd figures. Yet this drawing is an equally valid image of the city, one that completely dematerializes the building fabric of the
city in favor of flow.
That image was a precedent for the book. How do we take that project of representation and how do we draw the city in this kind of moment of flow?
While the book analyzes many emerging logistical platforms, Amazon, Fed Ex, Ryanair, etc., which became the lens through which I wrote the book, but from a disciplinary perspective, it deals with the representation and design of the built environment in an era where flows dominate.
So that’s the idea behind the book. How do we, as architects, move away from solely building figures to integrating architecture with systems of flow into the design of the city?
“How do we, as architects, move away from solely building figures to integrating architecture with systems of flow into the design of the city?”
In your book, you also talk a lot about this comparison of these traditional infrastructures, as we’ve seen in the nineteenth century, to these new virtual or digital infrastructures that we now see in the twenty-first century. How are these virtual infrastructures affecting our build environment today in comparison to before?
The book looks at a very particular set of flows, what we now call logistical platforms. As I mentioned above, it looks at Amazon, FedEx, and Ryanair, which are the anchor platforms, and I look at these from the perspective of five different themes: planning the city, siting the city, time, architecture and landscape, and circulation. Each chapter tries to make a comparison between older or even existing circulation systems with these new platforms, so taking lessons from previous logistical systems in cities. It’s not as if this is a new way to think about the city. There has always been logistics in some shape or form historically.
For example, the second chapter looks at the industrial city, which was geographically determined. If you look at all the great cities of the industrial era, like Manchester in the UK, or even in France, cities that emerged from the first wave of industrialization, they all developed in areas next to natural resources — coal mines, or streams, and rivers in the case of the mill towns in the UK. They were all tied to some sort of natural or extractive resource. But now if you start to look at how logistical systems operate, place has less meaning. The city is less tied to geographic criteria and emerges instead out of a network condition. Ryanair exemplifies this. Post-‘89, it leveraged the political situation of the opening up of Europe, and started to fly to areas in the Eastern Bloc. This, combined with landing in airports outside of the main tour circuits as a way to save money, opened up a new map of Europe. So rather than fly to Paris, you went to Beauvais instead. Since its landing slots are always in smaller airports on the periphery of a big city, the Ryanair network became a catalyst for the popularization of second- and third-tier cities. For
example, Charleroi, a postindustrial town in Belgium, suddenly became a headquarters for Ryanair and development comes with that. So, it seemed to me then that the network was now the agent for urbanization in the way geography or resources were the agents of urbanization in the industrial city. Maybe my favorite chapter in the book, or at least one of the more successful ones, starts to look at the infrastructural systems and the attendant spaces of logistics. It focuses on Amazon. I’m interested in these platforms as proto-infrastructural landscapes, given that the warehouses (fulfillment centers), which are vast big boxes measured in acres, are calibrating space with measurement systems, more akin to landscape than architecture. Moreover, Amazon is evidence of a hybrid assemblage – a mixture of online with the physical and the digital. Just look at all the gadgets and apps that we use as an interface between ourselves and the company. Finally, I’m looking at how these fulfillment centers are located on the outskirts of cities, although that’s changed a lot since I wrote the book, because now it’s moving the fulfillment centers closer and closer to urban areas so that it can enact same-day delivery in dense urban areas. The format of the fulfillment center is changing.
Considering our experience of cities and more particularly, shared urban spaces, do you believe that they are the consequences of these shifts? How would you define public space at all and how do you think this definition has actually changed over the last few years?
That’s a tricky question. I mean, on the one hand, logistics have not changed the city as much as I might’ve thought they would. Other than what I mentioned above about the exurbs, the downtown city that we live in is still very much the nineteenth-century industrial city, at least the Western city. Chicago looks the same as it did pretty much 150 years ago. I’m not sure about Vienna. It’s interesting, these new systems are infiltrating the city, but sometimes they’re hard to
“So, it seemed to me then that the network was now the agent for urbanization in the way geography or resources were the agents of urbanization in the industrial city.”
“Amazon is evidence of a hybrid assemblage – a mixture of online with the physical and the digital. Just look at all the gadgets and apps that we use as an interface between ourselves and the company.”
find and they don’t register very strongly. Maybe in the retail environment, not to say that retail is the only kind of public space, but as we do more online shopping, I do think the city is emptying out. Like in Chicago, we have a lot of vacant real estate on our main city streets, the city streets that everyone would go to, where in previous eras, you would dress up to go out on a weekend, and it was an urban event. The demise of retail was even happening before Covid. So, there’s a certain emptying out of the city that I think is impacting public space.
In the American city in the 1980s, when we started to revitalize the downtowns, retail was presented as a savior of the city. If you were doing an urban development, you had to have ground-floor retail because that would activate the street. I think our streetscapes are suffering because of online commerce and in some areas, there is not the same busy atmosphere on the streetscape. And that’s a little sad. So I think that’s the biggest impact on public space so far. But then again, I’m always looking for new ways to think about public space. The sharing economy made possible by logistics will start to
A modular pontoon system, assembled in the canal waterway, proposes an adaptive reuse of selected stretches of the Erie Canal in wintertime, now that commercial navigation of the canal is over. The Erie Canal, a 363-mile inland waterway completed in 1825, connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and was responsible for the urbanization of many of North America’s largest cities.
become even more legible in the public realm –logistics matches people up as well as things and events and in so doing, other things happen, maybe very different things, and public events that piggyback as a result. In this way, logistics can leverage the atomization of contemporary culture by curating microspaces that respond to niche collectives.
Taking into account the current developments of digitalization, information technology, and the globalized networks that you are talking about, where do you see the biggest challenges for architects and urban planners in the production of urban space?
The problem with these systems is that they homogenize space. Amazon looks the same, no matter where it is. These logistical platforms operate on universal rules. Yet the design of the built environment needs to amplify the specificity of place. We still need to have atmosphere and experiences and spaces be different, no matter if you’re in Vienna or Chicago. And so for me, the challenge is how to resolve the kind of universal claims of these logistical
platforms with the specificity of a place.
I was involved in the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year with a group called Annex. We were looking at data infrastructure systems, which is really the backstage of logistics because, without information networks and data centers to store the information, none of these contemporary platforms can work. We were looking at how Ireland has emerged as a sort of data hub in Europe. There are many reasons for this, and I’ll just highlight one reason here. The high-speed transatlantic cables coming from the US to mainland Europe and beyond come aground here to link up to other terrestrial networks, given Ireland’s location at the western edge of Europe. And so a Google cable, that’s sending your Instagram pictures in nanoseconds, is coming aground in these really rural coastal villages where 500 people live. And so that’s an example of the overlay of this global universal system on this super tiny, specific rural space.
One job of the architect is to reveal these very strange contradictions. People go on these logistical platforms and have absolutely no clue about what
goes into shipping a book that you order on Amazon to your door and all the spaces and locations that are involved in that flow. This might not be the realistic answer you’re looking for, but I think part of our job is exposing or unveiling these contradictions between technology and place and representing these graphically so we can grasp the implications and opportunities.
Outside Dublin (Ireland’s capital city), we have multiple data centers, as many as 60-100 of them, including large hyperscale facilities for Microsoft and Google, and Amazon is currently building a gigantic data campus. There’s a ton of design in these spaces, but it’s not designed in the way that you and I think of design. The design is in the equipment and the interior and the security systems and in berms around the edge that hide the facility. But these big warehouses and data centers are located in suburban areas. There are schools and houses on the next lot and there’s no integration of those systems into that neighborhood. So, I think another area where planners and architects can get involved is to synthesize across the material manifestations of these systems in a much more holistic as well as an aesthetic way.
At the moment in Vienna, there is a trend to mix different functions and programs together. So in one block there might be housing, mixed with industry, retail, infrastructure and so on. Do you think that mixing these different functions could be a way to avoid homogenizing and separation and to liven up public space?
I do. And that’s great that you can look at some examples in Vienna. I mean, the ethos of the modern
“[F]or me, the challenge is how to resolve the kind of universal claims of these logistical platforms with the specificity of a place.”
city was separation. You have industry here, you live there, you’ve institution here, you’ve civic there. That was the model for the modern city. But we’re now seeing that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. And so now we’re rethinking the city in terms of zoning and mixing occupations or functions that used to be separated. And I think that’s because now, the industry is different than it used to be. Obviously, you can’t live next to a plant where there’s toxic smoke coming out, but mostly industry is cleaner now, allowing adjacencies that were not possible previously, that allow for new mixes in a healthy way that we couldn’t have before.
Furthermore, there is a kind of cultural awareness now that favors mixing things. And that’s very promising. This is emerging out of the crisis that we’re finding ourselves in and the necessity to think about hybridizing, not just spatially, but in terms of energy systems and resources. How can we invent synergies between programs from the perspective of energy savings or energy demand? The public is also becoming more curious about where things come from suddenly. If you look at agricultural systems for
(2)
“Synergistic States,” Pier, Isometric, 2021. Speculative design proposal for a data farm with housing and greenhouse farming on the coast in Dublin, Ireland.
(3)
Entanglement, Irish Pavilion, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. The pavilion curated by ANNEX explores the materiality of data infrastructure with a focus on the data industry in Ireland both historically and in the present day.
©Alan
Butler
example, the industrialized food economy separates production and consumption. Up until maybe five to ten years ago, people were not bothered about where their food came from. Now there’s a cultural shift occuring to understand where things come from and wanting to trace metabolic flows from source to plate. So all these shifts are enabling new mixes, which will, in turn, generate new types of public space moving forward.
During the pandemic, we have seen a sharp increase in the popularity of digital alternatives for social exchange on digital platforms, as well as the purchase of goods and services which, as mentioned earlier, reduces physical encounters. Do you see this as a threat to physical space, or as a design potential — considering hybrid modes that we are recently seeing more and more of?
Yes, to hybrid modes and a mixture of both online and physical. During Covid, we were all online, on Zoom, watching movies, etc., but then people really wanted to get out into nature. If you look at the statistics for regional parks outside major cities, visitor attendance
“Hand in hand with the super technologization of space, there is also a return to a primitive notion about being in the world and looking at architecture at a far more fundamental and elemental level.”
to natural areas completely peaked during Covid. Obviously, this was a result of lockdown and needing to social distance but the hyperdigital lifestyle somehow prompted a longing for more fundamental territories. I think this is something that’s going to stay. So I’m really excited to think about new forms of nature (constructed and real) in cities, as well as on the periphery of urban areas, and thinking about integrating nature into the everyday in a new way. The emphasis on greening old infrastructure and opening it up for public use (The High Line effect) is one example. The fusion of high-tech (virtual) with more ritualistic practices is also palpable. I usually have my students look at the film Blade Runner 2049. And there’s a very nice interview between Liam Young and Paul Inglis (in Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene [Architectural Design], edited by Liam), who was the urban designer for the film. And if you look at the scenes in the movie, they’re super high-tech in some places, but then super primitive in others. Hand in hand with the super technologization of space, there is also a return to a primitive notion about being in the world and looking
at architecture at a far more fundamental and elemental level. This is a central theme in the Irish Pavilion called Entanglement at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. And so that movie is interesting in that way. Taken together, a reclaiming of nature and a reclaiming of the primitive suggests a need to find something much more fundamental and elemental as an antidote to the digital or in tandem with it. There’s a lot of opportunity for rethinking cities from that perspective.
I believe the combination of the digital with natural ecosystems will provide many opportunities for public space, moving forward.
I don’t think the digital is a threat to public space or physical space, but it’s part of our lifestyle and it’s part of the spaces we inhabit moving forward. I’m an optimist, I mean I’m a technological optimist. I think it’s exciting that we can start to devise new hybrids, technologies and physical space.
What has been or what is for you, your favorite public space or urban situation?
I like busy airports – not that I have been in one for two and a half years. I like that there’s public space and commercial space and lots of activity around an infrastructure node. So not necessarily a particular city, but I think the airport is an interesting urban moment. The flow and the operation of the place is very legible in the space. And so, it’s kind of nice.
interview from April 4, 2022 conducted by Adriana Boeck, Velina Iantcheva, Moritz Kuehn
“I don’t think the digital is a threat to public space or physical space, but it’s part of our lifestyle and it’s part of the spaces we inhabit moving forward. [...] I’m a technological optimist.”
“The sharing economy made possible by logistics will start to become even more legible in the public realm – logistics matches people up as well as things and events [...]. In this way, logistics can leverage the atomization of contemporary culture by curating microspaces that respond to niche collectives.”
Clare LysterBaerbel Mueller is an architect and researcher based in Austria and Ghana. She is associate professor and dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is also head of the [applied] Foreign Affairs lab, which investigates spatial, environmental and cultural phenomena in rural and urban Sub‐Saharan Africa and the Middle‐East. She is founder of nav_s baerbel mueller [navigations in the field of architecture and urban research within diverse cultural contexts], which has focused on projects located on the African continent since 2002.
How would you define public space and what challenges would you identify in the design and use of public spaces?
Talking about public space is super interesting. And therefore I’m excited about the new Abstrakt Issue. I would say there are two definitions of public space: on the one hand, there is more like a twentieth-century definition, and then we have a twenty-first-century reality of public space. I would say the twentiethcentury definition for me is, or was, that public space is the space where basically every individual in society can freely move and be in an open space, mostly open space. But that might also be easily related to open space because I’m so used to public space in the nonWestern world. But what is crucial in the twentiethcentury definition I would say is that it is also a space which is free or can be free of consumption, where I as an individual can enter with little constraints and just be and stay and gather. And I think the twentyfirst-century definition needs to be very different, as we are not private and public individuals anymore in our private and public spaces. So I would say that the time-space relations we experience today are very different. We are never necessarily fully private and never fully public
anymore. I can be in public space and have a very private encounter through my smartphone, let’s say, and I can basically stay in bed and be an influencer with an audience of millions via Instagram, for example. So I think this idea of public and private is very upside down and very different nowadays. And that obviously has repercussions on the use and design of public spaces.
Having spent a lot of time in Ghana and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, how would you describe public spaces in Ghana and what are their biggest differences to cities in Western/Central Europe?
Actually, it was around 2005, 2007, that I did research on that topic together with Andrea Börner in Kumasi, looking at public spaces and market spaces in Ghana at that time. And it was very interesting to identify that. First of all, I would say that I don’t really use the definition or the notion of public space in this context. I would rather talk about open spaces because like I said before, with this twenty-first- century situation, we are never fully public or private. That led to the fact that I only talk about open space in the inner West African context.
So in a place like Vienna, for example, you have a public space or an open space, and there are certain given regulations. There are certain clearly defined zones where appropriation takes place or like where someone is putting up a kiosk, let’s say to sell drinks or if an event is happening, you need to reserve it and it’s very restrictive. But I would say in the West African context, it’s still more fluid. I mean, there are more regulations coming year after year, but there’s this fluidity of appropriating open space. I was amazed that it was possible that a lady would lay a towel down on the floor and put onions on top and that was basically considered a shop. And everyone would respect these two dimensions of borders of the towel. Or that someone would demarcate a kind of border with a line on the floor, and would position himself under a mango tree, putting up a chair and a table and
“I think the 21st century definition [of public space needs to be very different as we are not private and public individuals anymore in our private and public spaces. [...] I can be in public space and have a very private encounter through my smartphone, let’s say, and I can be basically in bed and be an influencer with an audience of millions via Instagram, for example.”
being a barber or a hairdresser. So very little is needed to appropriate space. And there is also of course negotiation. Like, you cannot just put up whatever you want. So there are regulations, but these gestures then are really respected, even if they are tiny, and I think in a Western city, it needs more formal setups to be respected.
One of aFA’s latest projects, the New Guabuliga Market, is a perfect example of creating new public space for the local community to enhance commercial and social activities. Could you tell us more about the process, its intention and visions?
That’s a very interesting example because it’s somehow approved that architecture matters or buildings matter. So the genesis was that the authorities of Guabuliga, their local NGO, which aFA had already been working with for years, approached us and asked if we would be willing and available to
design a market for Guabuliga. And the background was that there was no physical space. There was a location in the village which served as a marketplace and there would be like two or three women putting up tables and selling stuff, but they were exposed to the sun and they really suffered from that. And the result was that most traders in this small town or village would just put bowls on their heads and sell whatever they had to sell and move from house to house. And then there was this wish to have a proper marketplace. And it was clear that there were certain spatial requirements, such as the provision of shade and a sealed surface.
At first, I was quite sceptical that architecture would be the solution because it’s a matter of attitude and also a matter of economics. And that was really fascinating and wonderful to see that it really attracted traders, also traders from neighboring communities and even regional towns, to sell and to come to buy. I was really doubtful if behaviour and movement patterns would change that easily only because there was a physical structure. And the other thing I have to say is that there are very rigid designs of markets, all over Ghana, which are these very rectangular, equally shared places where, women and also male traders would have their portion of their square meter to sell, or sometimes even a physical, shop-like structure. And we decided
differently, we felt that the roofscape was super necessary and urgent, and that it should be modular so that there was a potential for expansion.
The majority of developments in cities are shaped predominantly by private influence, while in your projects, you work closely with local communities. What do you believe to be the role of the architect in the negotiation between interests of different stakeholders in a project?
I mean, what I think is the beauty in our profession is that we are really trained to understand complex processes. And therefore we are really capable of understanding situations in a holistic manner. I think we are somehow capable of orchestrating complex processes on the one hand, but also the interests of different stakeholders. And yes, it’s true that there is a lot of communal involvement in at least the projects I do through aFA, but I also always insist that we come in as experts. So I’m quite critical, nevertheless, when it comes to participatory processes. I think that we bring a certain expertise and we need to address all stakeholders, but nevertheless, we’re the ones who orchestrate this process and then we also
(1) New Guabuliga Market by [applied] Foreign Affairs
©Juergen Strohmayer
(2)
New Guabuliga Market, Axonometry, Market Day
©[a]FA
(3) New Guabuliga Market by [applied] Foreign Affairs
©Juergen Strohmayer
need to translate that into our spatial findings and architectural manifestation.
What public space have you enjoyed the most and found the most engaging?
Oh, this is not an easy question because I also think that it’s always the question of who you consume or enjoy or spend time with in a certain place. There was a time when I was living in the second district in Vienna and I really enjoyed being at the Augarten. And also as an architect, I think the Augarten is one of these spaces where there is the potential to spend a lot of time in very different ways together without the need to consume or spend money. And it’s very inclusive. Like basically everyone can go there, be there, and you can do whatever you like. You can sit on a bench and read, you can meet your friends and play. So I think that’s a huge quality in an urban setting. Maybe it’s also now because the climate is changing. For example, if you are in New York, at one point you’re going to Central Park. And also in Vienna, if you have an apartment and you don’t have a balcony, you go to Augarten. So, I think that’s also something which is becoming more and more interesting to
people, being in green space, and the Augarten is one of these.
What else comes to my mind obviously is the Plaza del Campo in Sienna, which on the one hand is a touristic place, but I think it’s one of these examples where you approach a public space and you really have this wow effect because it’s so beautiful in its design and it is also very engaging like that. It is somehow boarded and there are opportunities to consume, but then there is also this dome. And then there is also the possibility to just sit on the floor and be, while also consuming privately or enjoying gatherings in the atmosphere. And the other space I have in mind is in Marrakesh, the Djemaa el Fna, which is again very touristy, but where you can consume food, and then you have musicians and people setting themselves up to entertain. So these are somehow very touristic, classic, examples, but I think they function quite well. And besides that, of course, as an architect, I’m always impressed by huge open spaces. For example, there is the Independent Square in Accra, where you have a huge sealed surface and it’s again, boarded by seatings. There is basically nothing going on there, but there is also a certain attraction of bigness, of big open spaces, to me as an architect.
What would be the most important message that you would like to teach the next generation of architects?
I really think we should be aware that we are really, through our education, capable of understanding complex processes, and therefore we are capable of orchestrating complex tasks. And then talking about the next generation of architects… That’s also the reason why I really love teaching at I oA and therefore I also strongly believe in the education of I oA that, as architects, it is about creating a surplus. I don’t define architecture as building only — investors and individuals are capable of building — but there always needs to be a surplus if we come in as architects. And the other thing is that what is beautiful about our profession is that we are capable of working on all scales. We can detail a piece of furniture or a door but we can also really think about the infrastructure, the beauty and the spatial manifestations of a whole city. Of course, we always need to involve partners from related professions, but nevertheless, we have the whole spectrum of scales and that makes us predestined to contribute to the becoming of public spaces.
One more comment:
Talking about this term at I oA or this semester or academic year, I think it’s very exciting. And when we talk about public space, basically all three studios are engaged in very different ways. Studio Lynn is looking at the Ringstrasse (Vienna) and thinking about what this street could become if it were free of cars. And then in Studio Hani_Rashid, they are looking at extreme climatic challenges and coming up with large-scale proposals to solve these. And there are a lot of questions about how public spaces look in their respective self-chosen locations and also design proposals. And then Studio Díazmoreno Garcíagrinda is looking at London and how to engage with marginalized or difficult parts of the city and open spaces and green spaces. And so I think your Abstrakt topic is coming at the right time.
interview from January 6, 2022 conducted by Andriana Boeck, Velina Iantcheva, Viktoria Tudzharova
“What is beautiful about our profession is that we are capable of working in all scales. We can detail a piece of furniture or door but we can also really think about the infrastructure, the beauty and the spatial manifestations of a whole city.”
“I think [architects] are somehow capable of orchestrating complex processes on the one hand, but also the interests of different stakeholders. [...] I’m quite critical, nevertheless, when it comes to participatory processes. I think that we bring a certain expertise and we need to address all stakeholders, but we’re the ones who orchestrate this process, and then we also need to translate that into our spatial findings and architectural manifestation.”
Baerbel Mueller
The digital market of NFTs, rather than keeping the promise of a great disrupted future of new financialization, gives a cute little piece of the action from global capitalism to the artists, reproducing the traditional art market performed on the grounds of museums and art galleries. The project speculates about the radical cooperative residency for artistic production, its display, domesticity and storage in the City of London. It is focused on digital artists and art practices, rather than only exhibiting the end products of their work. The speculation about the ownership of objects or tokens and the private/public relationship of land and property lays the ground for creating a public space for collectors and digital audiences. The dirty matter accumulates heat to create apparently fat structures that act as thermal devices. The dirty construction builds up the space for the mess.
Our proposal reimagines the traditional museum and extends the museum experience outdoors in a motional and dynamic way. It links the cultural facilities and provides a preview highlighting a bigger exhibition at a permanent museum. It combines mobility and pedestrianization. We treat the Ring as a running sushi table, where self-driving modular galleries and complementary museum programs travel along the street on the existing tram tracks. By adding to the existing transportation system, we get the opportunity to engage people with art while they are moving through the city, without signing up, for having a museum experience.
The Ar[T]ram turns the vehicle into a public space that offers an unconventional experience to its visitors. The ambition is to transform the Ringstrasse into a cultural and artistic hub that is constantly moving and inviting the public to gather and interact.
Modern Museum of Audible Space is a network of installations, art galleries, and spaces for artists to create – proposed as an expansion of the public space around New York’s shoreline. Using sound as the connective tissue of this network, it embodies the ambition of creating a form of languageless communication between the different components that compose the art world. Therefore, the project not only accommodates sound-related installations, it is also itself an instrument capable of producing and manipulating sound. Formally, the design is based upon sound visualization methods derived from the research of physicist and musician Ernst Chladni. With cohabitating spaces for artists, New York is kept available to a diverse population. The spaces open for social interactions, encouraging discourse and cross-disciplinary collaborations. The adaptable galleries are constantly reforming and transforming the adjoining public areas, while the areas for ‘creation and research’ are envisioned as a place where radical and critical thought can be incubated.
Culture has become the common language. It is an interconnected collection of spaces created to support, display and integrate art and artists into the fast-paced – and quite challenging – life of the dense city of New York.
This project aims to democratize access to both the limelight and the viewing seat by treating the facades as interfaces between theaters and a wider audience and by defining spaces for performance as an extension of the public realm.
Located in Helsinki, Finland, the proposal caters not only to summer activities, but aims to extend the calendar of street performances and informal social dances to the cold winter months by programming the circulation of the building with sequences of plazas, stages and cafes.
The visual relationships within the interior street network challenge the dichotomy of active actor versus passive spectator. The role of an individual is ambiguous — each visitor both observes and is observed, or rather becomes a participant in a collective performance.
