Bigness

Implies a web of umbilical cords to other disciplines whose performance is as critical as the architect’s: like mountain climbers tied together by life-saving ropes, the makers of Bigness are a team… Beyond signature, Bigness surrenders to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others. It promises architecture a kind of post-heroic status—a realignment with neutrality.(2)

Katrina

Early in the morning on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States. When the storm made landfall, it had a Category 3 rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale—it brought sustained winds of 100 to 140 miles per hour—and stretched some 400 miles across. The storm itself did a great deal of damage, but its aftermath was catastrophic. Levee breaches led to massive flooding, and many people charged that the federal government was slow to meet the needs of the people affected by the storm. Hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were displaced from their homes, and experts estimate that Katrina caused more than $100 billion in damage.(3)

- https://www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/hurricane-katrina

For context, two moments have led me to question my role as an architect in relation to larger, contemporary issues of the built environment, and by extension why architects, as well as other design disciplines, should be part of such efforts. At first glance, both may seem an odd couple, and a borderline, let alone superficial way to theoretically underpin a book about water-based design. But in all honesty, both are how I came to this body of work, so it’s kind of personal, and please take it as it is.

1) The publication of S,M,L,XL in October 1995, featuring Rem Koolhaas’s manifesto Bigness, or the problem of Large.

2) The landfall of Hurricane Katrina just outside of New Orleans in August 2005.

In “Bigness,” Rem Koolhaas specifically targeted architects to surrender to complex modes of technologies, politics, and economics. When the essay was published in 1995, it was set within emerging issues of globalization in the 1990s, that is emerging at least to the architecture discipline. At the time, I was an architecture student and fascinated by Koolhaas’s provocation, albeit with naïveté. As he states in the above quote, Koolhaas challenged “the makers of Bigness [to be] a team.” But as time has passed and as I have moved through my academic and professional career, I now wonder if Koolhaas was actually charging architects to work outside of the scale of a building, or just to better work with consultants to design bigger and bigger buildings. And bigger buildings that ultimately could consume the notion of the city, or become the city? All the while, set within a globalized, neoliberal economic context? I argue that we (architects, landscape architects, urban designers) need to go “Way Beyond” what I believe can be regarded in our contemporary context as a myopic definition of “Bigness.”

Rather, specific to the themes I present in this book, the contemporary question to ask is: Why should the term architecture, or any design discipline for that matter, be part of river basin–scale decision-making? And ones, particularly in the United States, that are designed both in policy and physicality through engineered forms?

In order to address the complex challenges impacting multiple scales set within river basin contexts, I believe a new synthetic notion of architecture, as well as landscape architecture, urban design, and other design disciplines needs to emerge and work far beyond an envelope of a building, or a definition of a landscape, or a boundary of a city, or a predominantly engineered system.

Designers need to be part of a new type of interdisciplinary, trans-boundary, decision-making design table. This table is a messy one for sure, and one rife with conflict. But designers possess a particularly unique toolset to negotiate possibilities within such a milieu.

Ten years later, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina catapulted the fields of design into an unprecedented human-altered “natural disaster,” and as such, challenged designers to prove their relevance. Although still the costliest “natural disaster” in U.S. history, we would soon realize that Hurricane Katrina was not just a one-off, let alone a disaster specific to the Gulf Coast of the United States, or other coastal contexts for that matter. Since Katrina in 2005, and especially since 2008, frequent extreme weather events and water-related catastrophes in the United States—both coastal and inland—have repeated over and over and over again. Couple this with the accelerating realities of the effects of climate change and crises in the U.S. and elsewhere, and we can only assume that more events will continue relentlessly and with intensity. While Koolhaas does not refer to water in “Bigness,” Hurricane Katrina was almost all about water. But both “Bigness” and Katrina are definitely what I define as “watershed,” or tippingpoint events for the design disciplines, and more selfishly for my research interests as an architect. To repeat, although Koolhaas targeted architecture in “Bigness,” I extend this is not limited to the discipline of architecture.

Highlighting U.S. water-based catastrophes since 2005:4

(NOTE: these do not include other water-based catastrophes representing lack of water, such as droughts or fires.)

2005: Hurricane Katrina, Gulf Coast ($125 billion USD damage, tied for costliest in U.S. history, 1,833 fatalities)

Hurricane Rita, Gulf Coast ($18.5 billion USD damage, 120 fatalities)

Hurricane Wilma, Florida ($22.4 billion USD damage, 62 fatalities)

2008: Hurricane Gustav, Louisiana ($8 billion USD damage, 153 fatalities)

Hurricane Ike, Texas ($34.8 billion USD damage, 195 fatalities)

Mississippi river spring floods

Definitions

Watershed, Architecture

Way Beyond Bigness

Water is the reason we can say its name.(1)

— Edward Burtynsky, Water, 2003

An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas.

- Oxford Dictionary

An event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs.

- Oxford Dictionary

Tonle Sekong River, Stung Treng, Cambodia, 2011

(bottom) Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2005

(images credit: Derek Hoeferlin)