The Historical Lineage of the Empty Platform What if creating complexity and liveliness is not a task for architectural form, as in the organicist lineage described above, but rather a reality of urban life, and if we want to show complexity, all we have to do is stage life itself. Such a project would not favor any kind of specific utopian form in Kateb’s taxonomy, but rather produce the canvas onto which all possible dreams can be projected by inhabitants and users. Is there a lineage with formal consequences for this approach? There is. The reference here is not Yona Friedman’s utopian abstractions, but a more fine-grained attitude detectable in the work of people like James Stirling, Louis Kahn, and Aldo Van Eyck. In the below paragraphs, their position appears to resolve a desire for absolute open-endedness with a realization that such indeterminacy paradoxically requires a strong formal and curatorial position by the architect, to avoid a reduction of architecture to a mere piece of technocracy, or infrastructure. The post-war period witnessed a moment, starting with the work of John Weeks in the early 1950s and ending shortly after 1973, when architects and urbanists articulated a theory of built form as an open structure, in principle capable of hosting almost any kind of infill. Some protagonists argued for architecture to relinquish its duty to make articulate aesthetic statements, and instead offered what John Habraken called ‘supports’ (1961)2, not just for any function, but also for any ideology or aesthetic to take over. This is commonly referred to as structuralist architecture and participatory urbanism. Structuralism considered the social and psychological reality of the human world in analogy to language as a complex system of relations without a center. “The mental processes of man are the same everywhere, regardless of race and culture, regardless of the apparently absurdity of beliefs and customs.”3 Architects such as Aldo Van Eyck, Herman Hertzberger, John Habraken, Ralph Erskine, and others intuited that structuralist thinking would unearth the authentic relations immanent to human culture, and structuralist architecture would build these relations. They hoped that, through scientific inquiry, structuralist architecture could restore an organic
Under the Influence
2. John Habraken, Supports: An Alternate to Mass Housing, U.K. (Tyne & Wear: Urban International Press, 2000). Reprint of the 1972 English edition. First printed in Dutch: De Dragers en de Mensen, Het Einde van de Massa Woningbouw (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema N.V., 1961).
Reference: Kasbah Housing Estate, Piet Blom, The Netherlands 3. Franz Boas, as cited in Forum, 1959. Also noted in Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck (Amsterdam: Architecture and Nature, 1998), op. cit, 348. This quote of the anthropologist Franz Boas adorned the first issue Forum in 1959. It is a structuralist statement par ex-
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