Dichotomy 20: OLD by dichotomy udm

20 OLD

Editors Joseph Raffin Krysia BussiĂ¨re Business Manager Freddy Quintana Staff Tyler Barron Kamara Fant Susan Haweel Julia Kowalski Sandra Nava Molly Redigan Ethan Sims Christopher Zahaluk Faculty Advisors Professor Noah Resnick Professor Tadd Heidgerken

PRICE $20.00 US University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 4001 W McNichols Rd Detroit, Michigan 48221 313.993.1523 Our digital archive can be found at: http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/

Printing: Heath Press, Royal Oak, MI Copyright ÂŠ 2014 by Dichotomy | University of Detroit Mercy All rights reserved. No part of this issue may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Dichotomy.

ISSN # 0276-5748

mission Dichotomy, a student published journal of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, strives to be the critical link to the discourse on design, architecture, urbanism, and community development. Like the institution, Dichotomy focuses on social justice and critical thought concerning intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and social development issues occurring in and outside of Detroit. The aim of Dichotomy is to disseminate these relevant investigations conducted by students, faculty, and professionals.

20 Cover Images by: Julia Kowalski

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Editors’ Note: Joseph Raffin & Krysia Bussiere

Ryan Murphy: FORM HUNTING

Amy Nicole Swift: THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Serafina Amoroso: PIRANESI, TAFURI & ROSSI

Thomas Roberts: OLD BUILDINGS

Diamadis Tegelidis: THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES

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Ida D.K. Tam: RECONSIDERING AUTHENTICITY

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Lee Dykxhoorn: HOW TO HIJACK A MUSEUM

Chris Tsui: URBAN PARADOX

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Joseph Odoerfer: OLD VISIONS OF NEW CITIES

Ana Gisele Ozaki: REVITALIZATION

PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICTS

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Andrew Santa Lucia & Matt Messner: NOVEL OR NEVER

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Shurid Rahman: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Ariane Lourie Harrison: ECOLOGY OF AGING

Ayesha Moghal: SPECULATIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF HISTORY

Claire Mitchell: NEW THRESHOLDS AT THE EDGE OF A DIGITAL WORLD

Joseph Raffin: FIVE ALLEGORICAL CITIES

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UDM|SOA NEWS

editors’ note Dichotomy 20 OLD marks the fourth edition in a dramatic rethinking and reinstitution of the journal itself and its relationship with the student body. We are proud to release Dichotomy 20 as a continuation of a larger effort of sustainability and reputability carried out by the staff of Dichotomy 17, 18, 19, and 20. Moreover, this edition is evidence of the school’s careful attention to the complexity of broad, overreaching architectural and design themes. This edition takes on a fundamental topic in art, culture, and design. All intervention, at its most essential scale, deals both directly and indirectly with questions of past, present, and future -- and, often times, with all three at once. In this sense the things we create are not merely frozen in time, but transcend the tenses. Through this thematic lens, we ask ourselves, “As nostalgic people, how are we to relate to old things and how do they relate to us?” This journal provides an endless number of angles by which one can approach the question of OLD. Old form, as it were, is of incomprehensible value to the society around it. Tom Roberts presents a traditional historic preservation project involving the Tibbits Opera House. However, there are societies with volatile histories where old things are difficult to address; Ayesha Moghal presents her own view on the monumentality of structure within the city of Berlin. Chris Tsui focuses on reversing one’s original notions of abandonment towards a means of optimistic inverted construction by indicating the opportunistic qualities of the Packard Plant in Detroit, Michigan. Diamadis Tegelidis takes this idea of conversation still further by speculating on the future preservation of digital geocities. Some authors take an angle that tries to understand OLD and the process of old things. This usually comes with the topic of obsolescence. Amy Nicole Swift specifically approaches the subject of planned obsolescence within changing consumption patterns. Ariane Lourie Harrison relates obsolescence of form to the way that dancers adapt for their old age. Finally, Joseph Raffin whimsically predicts cities in a paradigm where quick obsolescence has caused a cultural scarcity. Other angles seem to bend towards challenging traditional modes of seeing and using old things. Matt Messner and Andrew San Lucia call for the mobilization of old things as a materiality, unit, program, and shape. Ryan Murphy indicates an opportunity for “form hunting” through the combination of architectural cannon and new technologies. Claire Mitchell adjusts our view of the physical through digital means. Lastly, Lee Dykxhoorn cites Oslo, Norway in his tool kit for reframing historical artifacts. The last few pieces indicate that OLD things are an opportunistic teaching mechanism. Joseph Odoerfer looks back to the era of world fairs as the beginning of modern utopian urban planning. Serafina Amoroso speaks on the way by which the past continually restructures itself in the present. On behalf of the entire student staff, we are pleased to present you the twentieth edition of Dichotomy OLD. We sincerely hope you enjoy the articles for your personal browsing and musing.

Your Editors,

Joseph Raffin and Krysia Bussière

introduction With this journal, the twentieth volume of Dichotomy, the editors have selected a theme which offers the opportunity to examine a topic through the lens of time and to consider the meaning of Old in relation to a commentator’s view of the present. For certainly that which is Old is so, in some way, when compared to something more current. And perhaps the pleasure of Old is that it offers such a diversity of opinion to emerge through individual interpretation. All things, events, people are at some point Old when compared to something or someone more recent. Nor should it be said that new is better than Old nor that Old is better than new. From that point of view is only the difference of age between the two. One must compare the two by a different set of values than that of age. To describe something as Old, merely to dismiss it as antiquated, is to dismiss that which is Old in favor of that which is new without considered comparisons being made essential to understanding the two. No relative value emerges from such an evaluation. And it is precisely in the explorations of those considered evaluations that the editors have chosen to structure this volume. A more fruitful way of looking at the idea of Old may be found in the nostalgic or possibly romantic view of things Old or of things passed. On the face of it, this view may be counterproductive or misguided. After all, that which has passed, that is to say Old, is not the realm of firsthand experience. What value is there to be found in the past when the present is so ubiquitous? Antiquarians find value and richness in the Old things of the past. The values that they find are not to be found, first of all, in monetary value, but in an aesthetic measure of quality. To recognize this quality is in fact a judgment made from the point of view of the present, therefore transcending the issue of time. Painters, sculptors, and poets have found fertile ground in the Old, in the realm of the past. Consider Ballade des dames du temps jadis, “Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past” by Francois Villon, the fifteenth century French lyric poet. Each stanza ends with the refrain “…Mais ou sant les neiges d’antan?”, “…where are the snows of yesteryear?”. Is there a greater evocation of the yearning for things past, for things Old? Villon’s yearning may be personal, the love of women, but so deeply felt, so timeless, so Old. It may be that the most valuable, yet most contentious, way of considering Old may be from the point of view of history. The sphere of history is both instructive and at the same time subjective. The value of things Old can be found in the way they inform those of the present of the lessons to be found through an understanding of these things. The interpretation of these values is the product of debate which is conducted on the field of academic controversy. The editors of this volume are to be complimented for constructing an issue that, at once, offers the contributors such an open ended topic directive within which to offer their various points of view on questions of Old and, at the same time, does this in such a way as to encourage further debate on the topics presented. The observations above are offered by someone who can be described as Old and about whom it can be said in the words of the Stoics: Ignis exardescit et exstinguitur cineres manent Haec veritas vitae est.

Professor John Mueller

010 012 014 016 018 020 022 Ryan Murphy

FORM HUNTING

Ryan Murphy, Registered Architect, received his masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in architecture from the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT in 2009. In 2010, he and Carla Ceruzzi began C&MP (Ceruzzi & Murphy Projects) to create an ongoing series of speculative building designs working within the bounds of traditional architectural practice. The projects seek civic engagement through an inherited vocabulary of architectural form and representation. Ryan currently teaches architectural design at Rhode Island School of Design and has been a studio instructor at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and a frequent guest critic.

Image Credit: Ryan Murphy

In the last decade, using computer modeling and advanced fabrication techniques, architects and designers have rigorously explored form-making. For a designer working now, the formal possibilities are unlimited; but with everything possible, designers risk retreating into irrelevant mastery, tinkering with exquisite formal studies with diminishing impact on the trajectory of architecture as a discipline. In an environment where questions of design need not be about how to make, describe, or even realize form, C&MPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s projects find allies in historic architectural form. C&MPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent projects demonstrate a renewed appreciation for and unapologetic use of architectural history. This new use of history is more sincere than the Postmodernistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

FORM HUNTING

rhetorical, sometimes sly “quotation” of historic form and style. More akin to Kahn’s mining historic proportional rules and material logic to achieve new effects, a historically-aware practice today makes full and exuberant use of contemporary digital techniques (particularly the rigorous understanding of geometry), but also uses the architectural canon as a rich source of new and evocative formal ideas. The following projects have been selected to illustrate C&MP’s recent approach to “form hunting,” in which historic forms – often with attendant structural logics – are appropriated as a means of invention, not quotation. Some of the tactics used in our work find traction in modifying those qualities that have defined form. Familiar historic forms come with embedded expectations about how and where they are typically deployed. Simple changes in scale and number allow formal references to be both legible and surprising. Often rescaling an “adopted” form requires us to completely re-imagine it; the thickness mandated by load-bearing structure becomes occupiable space, while a complex spanning tectonic is excessively multiplied to support nothing more than a seating surface. Although some of our recent work deliberately “misreads” structural constraints of the masonry arch and the vault for architectural inspiration, we are deeply interested in structure as an architectural concern. In the last century or more, modern structural

logics have tended towards openness and simplicity in an effort to allow for flexible, neutral architecture. Flexibility as a premise is important in the canon of modern architecture, but too often contemporary projects rely on the structural engineer’s nimbleness to work around the design rather than with it. By contrast, architectural precedents predating Modernism rarely concern themselves with re-configurability, and often the structure is complicit in, if not responsible for, this fixedness. We believe that structural logic, even today, can support a design agenda and give permanence to architectural form. Program, finishes, even skin can change, but a structural logic has the potential to impose a spatial organization, scale, and order that is definite. Our hunt for form is not limited to the physical properties alone. A benefit of looking at older precedents for formal inspiration is that they have had time to be assessed within the social context of their making and occupation. How specific historic forms have performed as architecture is known, whereas newer investigations in form making are not always concerned with an architectural effect beyond the sensory. The origins and modifications of formal typologies through history leave a wake of knowledge about how architecture can shape and be shaped by society and its users. This knowledge is a tool that aids in making intentional decisions about how we prescribe form.

The following projects represent the beginnings of a line of inquiry into the architectural use of historic form. The methods and tactics of formal inspiration deployed are limited only by the number of projects that make up this article; we are confident that a renewed appreciation for historic form is an inexhaustible tool for the contemporary practice. Although we hunt from an existing catalogue of form, the projects aspire to a body of work that is not merely referential but fully aware of its place in a longer trajectory of architectural practice.

Figure 2: Axonometric section through vault on bias

Vaulted & Tufted This outdoor seating piece is designed to complement the massive late-19th-century buildings of a former industrial district in Boston. The arched, masonry-based forms, more typical of buildings than of furniture, challenge the scale of public seating. Scalar manipulation produces an ambiguous form that is both a groin vault and a tufted seat. Using the groin vault tectonic at a diminutive scale allows the geometry of the top of the vault (typically unseen) to be revealed. This geometry resembles a tufted cushion, further confusing the reading of the piece. The resulting bench has a dual identity dependent on vantage point â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from above, it looks like a soft upholstered bench, while from a lower perspective it might be mistaken for a colonnade at the scale of a building.

Figure 3: Detail of illusion of tufting

Figure 4: Geometry of an upholstered bench

FORM HUNTING

Figure 1: View from above - bench as tufted surface

Typically, the geometry of a tufted surface is turned 45 degrees from the upholstery edge. By cutting the vaults on this bias, the illusion of tufting is supported. However, this cut confuses the reading of the underside of the colonnade. Instead of a vaulted system that reveals its primary axis through a frontal reading, the bench must be seen on the oblique to see the pure vault. The frontal reading is that of a series of vaulted spans that are all occupied by another set of columns.

This public space in the shadow of a visually heavy and imposing casino building reflects the uneasy relationship between the gaming program and its host community. The bias cut used in the bench to confuse the frontal reading of the vault is re-appropriated here to support an urban agenda. Although the building faces are perpendicular to their respective street fronts, the colonnade encourages a new path of movement through the site, entering through the corners and crossing diagonally across the plaza. View from below - bench as colonnade

Coming Soon Vaulted and Tuftedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scalar ambiguity and geometric play with the bias-cut groin vault were used in a subsequent project, Coming Soon. Conceived as a response to a political debate on casino gaming in the city of Boston, this unsolicited project sought to use the architectural rendering as a means of political speech. The casino design needed to be immediately legible as a monumental insertion into the urban fabric. The groin vaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scale is this time exaggerated in the other direction, creating massive piers that allow the hotel and ballroom components of the casino to loom over their downtown context. The gaming programs are buried below grade, and a new plaza is inserted into the space at grade.

CoHousing CoHousing, a residential model in which kitchens, living rooms, and other social spaces are communally owned, challenges contemporary conceptions of private housing. Privacy in a cohousing project becomes a gradient rather than a clearly delineated public-and-private split. Looking back to historic ideas of space planning, we found that the plan logic of the Renaissance villa resonated with the new approach to privacy suggested by the social model of cohousing. Circulation through the building consists of a series of room-to-room connections. A hierarchy of privacy is established through scale and axial organization. Communal spaces are defined both by their larger size and by the circulation routes through them. Private spaces are accessible from these public spaces and exist at the ends of circulation routes.

FORM HUNTING

Axonometric view of colonade

View from below-grade casino Colonade elevation

(above): Reappropriation of the gambling space allows for new relationship of the public space and the casino (left): View from Washington St.

Cohousing exterior elevation

Exterior rendering

FORM HUNTING

Without the corridors typical of a multiunit residential building, the plan of this project became cellular, with every space corresponding to a program. Again, the Renaissance villa was an inspiration for subtractive plan-making, where rooms are imagined volumetrically and defined through the use of poché. Poché originated with the structural requirements of the load-bearing wall; here, in a multistory contemporary project, it not only gives shape to the structural piers but also gives permanence to the spatial configuration in direct opposition to the “flexible” modernist free plan. This permanence is a way of restoring the architectural specificity of pre-modern architecture to a housing typology that is based on contemporary economic and social concerns.

Parallel Play In this design for a Children’s Museum in Louisville, KY, parallel walls (conceived as a series of 13 building elevations) define the building’s scale and create an interior with surprising complexity and unexpected spatial juxtapositions. The project brief required the use of ramps as primary means of circulation. A regular series of parallel walls challenges the resulting system of very long ramps. The walls are made porous with arched openings that allow the ramping circulation and thicken to accommodate stair and elevator cores, mechanical shafts, bathrooms, and service spaces.

Historically, the parallel wall system was directly linked to limitations in structural spanning, and the arched opening was a means of either allowing passage/daylight through the wall or gaining material efficiency and lightness in construction. This project takes advantage of the structural simplicity of the closely spaced wall but uses the arched openings to create larger effects that happen across many walls. Four methods of opening/ arching are deployed throughout the project, giving variety across the seemingly singular tectonic, the wall: •

Multiple openings repeated in series over a defined territory create a type of hypostyle hall.

•

Singular openings that connect linear gallery spaces between the walls create an enfilade.

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Controlled variation in serial openings create figural spaces “carved” out of the walls

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Scaling the openings to pass multiple floors create the central atrium void.

The timeless language of the arched walls evokes aqueducts and basilicas. Architecturally specific but not programmatically didactic, the resultant spaces can be inhabited in a variety of ways and can accommodate future change. As programming and exhibitions continually evolve within this environment, its inherent spatial variety creates a sense of discovery and play. The sense of the museum as a continuously inhabited, ad-hoc environment

Plan drawings

Level 6

Level 5 Level 2

Level 4

Floor plan - Level 1

Level 3

FORM HUNTING

Exterior elevation

Structural grid

Columns shifted to define centers of 9 square grid

Section cut

Structural piers define spatial volume

View from interior atrium

Exploded axonometric - parallel walls & ramp system

FORM HUNTING Plan drawings

Floor plan - Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

is reinforced by the reading of each wall as a faรงade, creating a playful city to explore in three dimensions. As children move along the ramp, they encounter and pass through these elevations, each threshold revealing new experiences and vistas.

Figure 21: Parallel walls as hypostyle hall

Figure 22: Parallel walls as gallery & enfilade

Figure 23: Parallel walls carved to create spatial figure

Figure 25: View of a 4th floor gallery

024 028 032 036 040 042 Amy Nicole Swift

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE:

A LOSS OF MEANING IN THE PURSUIT OF “NEWNESS”

Amy Nicole Swift is an architectural design-builder, writer, and artist living-working-advocating in the city of Detroit. In 2012, she formed Building Hugger to fill what she saw as a void in accessible renovation design and development services focused on marginalized vernacular structures. BH also serves as a platform for experimentation with and promotion of creative methods of material and building reuse. Amy taught adaptive architectural design at the University of Detroit Mercy in 2012. She now teaches 20th Century Architecture and Integrated Design Studio labs focused on building tectonics, materials, and space at Lawrence Technological University. She studied Architecture at Kent State University, holds a BS in Interior Architecture from Lawrence Technological University, and completed a MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University in NYC. She boasts 8 years of experience in architectural practice and has worked previously with firms in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

Facing: 1,000 Assembled Chassis, Record Daily Output from Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park plant circa 1913

The Age of Industry, with all of its advances, has unwittingly ushered in another more ominous period of Human development. Industry requires production and, in order to sustain itself, Industry must continuously find reasons to produce. In its earliest years, Industry relied on invention to feed its impulses by finding novel ways to solve problems and make life better – or more “modern” – for Humans. This initial arrangement required that Humans found value in the products of Industry. Products fulfilled a need or improved a condition which gave them an inherent meaning. But as the processes of Industry relied increasingly on the generation of capital, there was an erosion of this meaning, forcing Industry to find new strategies to uphold production. This ushered in the Age of Obsolescence – an ideology based on the notion that what need or economy cannot not sell, psychologically contrived desirability can. Throughout the course of the 20th century, newness became a desired attribute in all areas of Human consumption. This externalized the physical value of the art object to a perceived value determined by abstract capital markets and consumer whims. The value of newness waned intrinsically with shifting fashions and innovations and that which was not new became undesirable; this effectively created an entirely different concept of what was considered old or obsolete. Prior to this emphasis on newness, the passage of time determined what was old. But old did not necessarily equal obsolete, as the condition of obsolescence had once been

tied to usefulness. With the advent of newness as a market driver, the tenacity of the capital system – which ostensibly sustained a steady workforce and maintained a stabilized economy – relied on a fast-tracked cycle of obsolescence. The pervasiveness of this ideology of flux led to capriciousness in modern consumer culture, ultimately affecting the way art objects, and eventually architecture, were valued in the capital industrial system.

Shifting Values of the Industrial Age Prior to the 19th century organization of society around the development of industry, the pace of creation of the so-called small arts1 was reflective of available handicraft technologies. The effort with which these objects were created added to the embedded value that society placed on them. Since perceived artand use-value2 was always high, objects became obsolete at much slower rates than modern goods. Inventions were the daughters of need. Styles were cultivated over generations with the benefit of time and popular custom to inform suitable developments.3 But with the subjugation of science and the arts by industrial capitalism throughout the course of the 19th century, both the scientist and the artist became subject to invent and create with consumption in mind, always conscious of the forces of feasibility, marketability, and profitability.4 It became necessary to create objects of artificial need in order to

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figure 1: Nestleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s food for Infants poster by Alphonse Mucha (1897)

encourage sales. Consequently, as the pace of the production of goods quickened with improvements in efficiencies, so too did the obsolescence of those goods. Gottfried Semper noted as early as 1860: “Products scarcely introduced are removed from the market as obsolete before they can be developed technically, let alone artistically. Something new, but not necessarily better, always takes their place.”5 By neglecting the feedback cycle of design improvement, the opportunity to develop a product to its fullest potential was lost. Thus, though new products were successfully engineered to fulfill a scripted need, they inevitably proved inferior in terms of quality – either technically or artistically. Deeply concerned with the organized and efficient arrangement and execution of the production process, the goal of scientific management was to cut down the duration of time required to produce a good, thereby stimulating productivity and reducing unit cost. The implementation of this method led to a maniacal emphasis on efficiencies that absolved the meaningfulness of productive tasks, making the act of creation a rationalized numbers game.6 The inevitable division of labor, in which workers performed smaller, more focused tasks, reduced the requisite skillset of the worker and likened his role to that of a machine. This dismantled the connection of craftsman to his individual handicraft, leading to the production of meaningless objects that lacked inspired authorship. It also served to bolster industry’s

increasing focus on stimulating sales by creating objects with a predilection for obsolescence. With the productive aspects executed en masse by the unskilled or reduced-skilled worker, the employed artist served as little more than an advisor of taste in the design of products, catering instinctively to the fashion of the day.7 By further separating the ornamental and technical aspects of art into specializations within the creative process, the mechanical process through which objects were conceived destroyed the relationship between artist and object, producing flat, meaningless art. This drove the development of iconographic art that sought to boast a richness of meaning that it ironically lacked. Art was losing its meaning through this market-driven emphasis on newness. In seeking to maintain art’s relevancy, the trendiest philosophy of speculative aesthetics – that is, the pursuit of and emphasis on rhetoric in art – tried to fill the void in meaning that industry created.8 But Semper saw this as a degradation of art’s esteem and noted that architecture was beginning to find itself in a similar predicament, “since speculation and mechanics [had] taken hold of it in the same way.”9 Conservatist John Ruskin, writing in this same period of shifting values, also noted the degradation of architectural value as a result of industry. With the development of capital markets and industrial building materials – namely structural steel and veneered or cast products – architecture became subject to the

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figures 2: 1,000 Assembled Chassis, Record Daily Output from Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park plant circa 1913

same pressures as the smaller arts. Ornamental and structural aspects of the field were separated like in the arts and specializations grew. As mechanical efficiencies and standardization decreased construction time, architecture became more responsive to fads in the smaller arts, which appeased developers seeking speculative success. While preindustrial architecture, as Ruskin suggests, may not have been “considered in its prime until four or five centuries [had] passed over it,”10 the development of capitalized industry and its cult of newness introduced obsolescence into the realm of architecture. In these ways, the fate of architecture and the small arts have become inextricably linked through the development of industrial systems and have thus been subject to the same patterns of consumption throughout

the 20th century.

Retooling Industry to Spur Demand While industry in the 19th century was focused on finding new inventions to bring to market, industry at the start of the 20th century was motivated by increasing production efficiencies through scientific management in order to lower costs and increase saturation – a concept that reached its zenith in the automobile industry’s adoption of the assembly line. Henry Ford was a pioneer in maximizing production efficiencies and by sticking to a basic design for his Model T he was able to reduce the price from $780 to just $290 between 1908 and 1923. Seeing that the industry’s focus on reduced pricing was approaching its limit, competitors of Ford

attempted to increase sales and their share of the market through the introduction of more frequent product updates. Through the twenties and thirties, GM took over leadership of the automobile industry by introducing such technological innovations as balloon tires, shock absorbers, and four-wheel breaks – items that consumers felt justified spending a little more on.11 This approach fared well during the economic boom of the twenties; however, the automobile industry struggled under this speculative approach when overall demand slumped during the Great Depression. Architecture of this period saw a similar fate. As evidenced in the success of Chicago’s mammoth Monadnock Building in 1891, speculation had become a major driver in the field. Urban towers shot up to unprecedented heights and sizes in American cities. As markets reached saturation, developers looked to technological innovations, such as electricity and air conditioning, to increase occupancy. However, too reliant on bank financing, the momentum of the system of large-scale development broke down when the market crashed in 1929. By the early fifties the automobile industry was finding significantly fewer technological improvements to market to the public and was in need of an innovative way to drive sales. They found it in Bernard London’s essay Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, in which London blames the economic problems of the Great Depression on the inadequate organization of buyers and the system’s reliance

Figure 3: Advertisemsent for the 1034 Plymouth Six tells buyers to insist on 4 vital features tp get their money’s worth: individual springing; floating power; safety steel body; and hydraulic brakes

on “the unpredictable whims and caprices of the consumer.”12 London believed the way to stabilize the economy and put people back to work in factories and on construction sites was to control the length of a product’s life, thereby making markets more predictable and sustainable.13 The automobile industry, supported by the emergent advertising industry, sought to control the demand of buyers by imitating the methods of women’s fashion stylists and instituting what GM’s chief of

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figure 4: (above) 1930 advertisement for the General Electric All-Steel Refrifgerator claimes to have proven efficiency and economy for the buyer , reflecting consumer interest of the period Figure 5: (Right) Chrysler Corp. lineup of cars in 1957

styling Harley Earl referred to as dynamic obsolescence.14 Under this concept, manufacturers sought to instill demand through exuberant designs updated more frequently. Riding the rave of the post-war economic boom, the automobiles of the early 1950s reflected the high-spirited materialism of the period with increasingly flashy designs, though little focus was initially given to the decades-old 3-year retooling cycle. More frequent design updates started in 1957 when the industry moved to develop a major overhaul every 2 years – one year for the basic shell change and the following year for trim change. The process of retooling was incredibly expensive but became a necessity in a market increasingly focused on newness. Smaller manufacturers that could not adapt, such as Packard and Hudson, were bought out or went bankrupt when the “Big Three” moved to yearly overhauls of their lines. GM was able to achieve efficiencies by creating a common body shell for multiple lines and models of cars, which were given discrete stylistic variations through trimmings and interchangeable parts including chrome trim, rear deck lids, quarter panels, and bumpers, among other things.15 In essence, the

common base components were simply dressed in stylistic elements to create an illusion of newness in order to drive sales. New became the buzzword of the automobile industry. When the 1957 lineup of cars was announced, “Chrysler revealed it had ‘The Newest New Cars in Twenty Years.’ Nash had ‘The World’s Newest… Car.” And Pontiac was ‘Completely New From Power to Personality.’”16 That same year Buick, arguably the least changed of the bunch, used the word new 20 times in its ad. Fanciful imagery and other stylistic marketing devices became systematized to instill the obsolescence of desirability – that is, the buyer’s desire for what he or she already owned waned as newer designs were released. This taught the buyer to be conscious of the conspicuous fashionability of his or her vehicle, and the success of these campaigns inspired other industries to adopt similar methods.17 The term planned obsolescence was popularized by industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1954 as a way of “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”18 The automobile industry was able to plan the obsolescence cycle of its products by stirring desirability through an emphasis on newness and what became known as the “Detroit Influence” began permeating into other industries. Home products in particular were leading on this front. The nostalgia of the decades-old washing machine or refrigerator became a thing of the past. The

Figure 6: A variety of colors home appliances in the 1950s Figure 7: Frigidaire Sheer advertisement emphasizes appliances

were introduced to to encourage sales Look Refrigerator fashion in home

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figure 8: The wall mounted General Electric refrigirator illustrates the practice of unveiling novelty product development without meaningful technical improvements

notion of “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” had gradually been worked into a cross-market standard, perfecting the status-based practice of artificially shortening product lifecycles in order to influence the buying patterns of consumers in favor of the manufacturers.19 A business writer for the Times commented in 1959: “The force that gives the U.S. economy its pep is being generated more and more in the teeming aisles of the nation’s stores… U.S. consumers no longer hold on to suits, coats, and dresses as if they were heirlooms… Furniture, refrigerators, rugs – all once bought to last for years or life – are now replaced with registertingling regularity.”20

But manufacturers of home goods did not rely solely on styling. Instead, to ensure the buyer would purchase a new model in a desired timeframe, manufacturers began “watering” their products in order to cheapen the quality.21 Consumers Union reports from the period fault flimsy gadgets, less durable plastic accessories, thin plating, and knotty wood, among other shortcuts. While the public was initially disgruntled over the deteriorating quality of American products, time and routine tempered their protest. Manufacturers wised up too by cutting back their warranties and designing their shoddy products to just barely outlast their warranties – a concept called “death dating.”22

Thus, newness became not just an object of desire, but rather a thing of increasing necessity.

High Mechanization of Architecture Similar to how the high, or total, mechanization of the small arts created a hastened cycle of obsolescence, the high mechanization of architecture throughout the 20th century has yielded the same result. During the adoption of mechanization in the productive arts during the later half of the 19th century, smaller examples of handicraft components in architecture began to cede to the machine. Siegfried Giedion researches many of these modern contrivances in his Mechanization Takes Command (1948). As an example, Giedion discusses the evolution of lock mechanisms from, at its earliest stages, a wood handicraft executed by master carpenters, to a metal handicraft executed by skilled smiths, to eventually a fully mechanized industrial product of standardized components.23 The same line of progression is followed in other products considered to lie in the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s realm of design influence, such as furniture. Influenced by the patent furniture of the 19th century that explored emergent materials and rudimentary mechanical production techniques, architects of the early 20th century sought to embrace the industrial methods by which these products were created through their adoption of a new machine aesthetic. Tubular furniture, for example, was not a 20th century development. Rather, it was inspired by earlier prototypes, like

Figure 9: The inner workings of the fully mechanized Yale lock, patented 188

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figure 10: (left) Gandillotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manufactured hollow tubular metal chair, painted to look like wood (1844) Figure 11: (right) Marcel Breuerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tubular metal chair from 1926 embraces the developing machine aesthetic, creating a chair dervied from the materialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bending and welding characteristics

the tubular iron chair by Gandillot introduced in France in 1844; however, this design was fashioned after a wooden chair design and the material was painted with a faux finish to imitate wood grain.24 It was the Modernists therefore that brought the concept into a fully mechanized realm of production by allowing industrial production techniques to drive design and eliminating the need for a skilled painter. The increasing development of household machines to ease workflow and increase comfort influenced architecture in other ways. The introduction of in-home refrigeration,

electric irons, cast-iron cooking ranges, vacuum cleaners, and the like moved home life away from a servant-based domestic economy to one where women were encouraged to master efficient housekeeping. This encouraged a fanatical study of the organization of workflow in the American home around 1912 in order to create efficiencies in materials and use, similar to the developments in the industrial workflow of the era. While this affected the arrangement of American homes in subtle ways, household organization would not see a dramatic overhaul until the European Modernists focused on

re-stating the entire problem of the home during the interstitial war years. As Giedion states, “[The architect] became once more the specialist to build a framework for living. He opened up the house, re-shaped its interior space, created its furniture types, and found his own social awareness. No longer isolated, the kitchen grows out of the organism of the house.”25 The highly mechanized kitchen was first given artistic concern by J.J.P. Oud at the Deutscher Werkbund’s Weissenhof housing project (1919) with the goal of providing a lowcost, efficient solution with maximum comfort. The L-shaped design offered continuous storage, cleaning-preparation surfaces, and a cooking zone, and embodied nearly every amenity that manufacturers would later offer in luxury kitchen options in the 1940s. But while Oud’s Weissenhof kitchen embodied a highly mechanized result, the architecture of

his rowhouses only superficially referenced the machine. The use of industrial materials and the reduction of ornamentation certainly exemplifies the machine aesthetic of the Modernists; however, the architectural forms are static and lack the mutable qualities of a fully mechanized architecture.26 This can be best explained in examining the factories of Albert Kahn and Walter Gropius. In working for the automotive industrialists in Detroit, Kahn developed a method of factory design considered to be one of the purest expressions of a functionalist architecture of the period. Inspired by the process of production and the rapidity of its evolution to meet or encourage demand, Kahn designed a fully adaptable architectural framework around the needs of industry. The Packard No. 10 building (1904) was pioneering for

Figure 12: (left) axonometric of J.J.P. Oud’s L-Shaped Kitchen, designed for his workers’ rowhouses in the Weissenhoff Settlement, Stuttgart (1927). Figure 13( right) The exterior of J.J .P Oud’s rowhouses in the Weissenhoff Settlement, Stuttgart (c. 1927)

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

its use of reinforced concrete, but perhaps more importantly the high-strength material and modular structural framework allowed the facility to grow and adapt to the changing functional needs demanded by the industrial function it supported. In contrast, Gropius’s Faguswerk Shoelast Factory (1914) executed with Adolf Meyer in Alfeld, Germany was a compositional work of architecture. While the facility was derived from its function, the aesthetic was static and expressed completeness. The sensible asymmetry of the entry façade lends itself poorly to future expansion, the flare of the entry stairs breaks utility, and the banded coursing in the brickwork shows an attention to design that reaches beyond a minimalist expression of function. Additionally, the application of the glass curtain wall pushes its structure inward from the exterior wall, wasting valuable floor space and prohibiting expansion of the facility. Thus, while Modernism in its hayday did much to progress the field towards a machine aesthetic organized around the tenets of functionalism, in 1955 Reynar Banham criticized the profession for lagging behind the small arts in remaining relevant to modern culture. Offering a “pop-eyed OK” to the evolutionary annual design styling of Detroit’s industrial designers, Banham called into question the ability of the architect to provide relevant and desirable objects for a throwaway culture – a culture that placed its highest value in newness and anticipated the depreciation of retrograde design. Traditional architects, he asserted,

are “by training, aesthetics, and psychological predisposition narrowly committed to the design of big permanent single structures, and their efforts are directed merely to focusing big, permanent human values on unrepeatable works of unique art.”27 Banham therefore introduced the automobile stylist and his aesthetics of expendability as the new model architect for the changing intellectual attitudes required for designing in a throwaway economy. This aesthetic of expendability, according to Banham, should eventually carry the same “sense and the dynamism of that extraordinary continuum of emotional-engineering-bypublic-consent which enables the automobile industry to create vehicles of palpable desire.”28 Banham remained openly critical on the state of architecture in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960),29 describing the affluent and self-satisfied institution as being the “staid Queen Mother of the arts.”30 His polemical critique chastised architects of the First Machine Age for their preoccupation with merely representing technology and sent a challenge to the architects of the Second Machine Age to instead embrace it. Banham declared rather apocalyptically that in order to survive the technological revolution, architects must propose a “continual renovation of the built environment”31 – a notion not dissimilar to London’s plea for American industry to adopt planned obsolescence as an operating model. This marks a critical introduction of obsolescence as a distinct design characteristic of architectural anti-form making.

Price’s Fun Palace (1960-1961), undertaken in collaboration with Joan Littlewood, introduced an architectural language of radical impermanence meant to adequately service and ultimately encourage a type of socially dynamic environment. The approach re-envisioned an expendable architectural tectonic in response to the transient social configurations emerging from mass culture. 32 The building and its components by nature of their conception could not rely on a static ethos and were thus reduced dramatically to a kit of minimal parts intended to be “as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself.”33 Acting like a craneway, the building’s structure supported a system of gantries meant to maneuver the interchangeable programmatic elements. Circulation existed as a series of moving catwalks, escalators, or travelators. The conventional notion of a building envelope was superseded by environmental control that relied on mutable elements such as skyblinds, movable and warm-air screens, optical barriers, and static vapor zones.34 Through the archetypal anti-form of the Fun Palace, Price was able to surrender the notion that architecture was a product pursuant of an aesthetic goal and devised a fully mechanized, transitory architecture that resembled, to Banham’s approval, a gigantic erector set.35 Perhaps the most influential transitional theories interpreting capitalist values into architectural principles were penned by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who wrote widely on their ideas of architecture as sign rather than space.

Their concept that a generic loft architecture, whose simple structure and nonspecific interiors were liberated from the architecture of form-making, was a foundational framework for the edifice of an image-laden architecture. Beyond the duck and the decorated shed, their touted idiom became the glove and the mitten. The glove referred to a static functionalism expressed as immutable form, fated for obsolescence due to its rigidity to change; the mitten referred to a generic loft architecture whose interior elements were alterable, offering the highest possible level of functional freedom within the adaptable structural shell.36 Both the glove and the mitten accommodated the concept of image-laden architecture, though they dealt with the inevitability of obsolescence in different ways. The glove accepted its future as obsolescent art object, and unapologetically explored the expression of architecture as consumptive form. The mitten, on the other hand, allowed the formal emphasis of architecture to cede artistic meaning to the communicative aspects of an adaptable architectural framework. This returns to Kahn’s purest functionalist approach where form and aesthetics were inconsequential so long as the functional processes were supported – except now the emphasis is on the process of consumption. Interestingly, this is a trope on GM’s approach of producing a common structural body with interchangeable stylistic elements meant to entice an image-laden architecture of desire. In either case, glove or mitten, the emphasis has shifted to a focus on

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

Figure 14: (left) the interior view of the Harundale Mall, the first enclosed shopping center on the East Coast of the U.S., in Glen Burnie, Maryland (1958). Figure 15: (right) Interior view of the World Duty Free retail outlet in the Gatwick Airport (2012).

the new and an acceptance of an inevitable obsolescence. There is no room for meaning in this equation.

It’s All Junk Tracing the adoption of emergent industrial technology and production processes into not only architectural materials, but also its design philosophies, architecture has made the transition from being a product of art to a product of industry. Consequently, this highly mechanized architecture is now subject to the same pressures of capital industry, which readily sacrifices art- and use-value for the economically sustaining qualities of newnessvalue. The resulting fervor for the disposability of everything ranging from diapers to cell phones to toilet bowl cleaning pads is a uniquely American invention – one of its most popular

exports, spreading the world over through the voraciousness of globalization. But for most of the 20th century, the process of disposability was a linear concept – raw materials in, waste out. As a consequence of producing objects of limited value for nearly a century, the junk is starting to pile up. Rem Koolhaas brilliantly exposes the state of disposable architecture of the 21st century in his epigrammatic essay Junkspace (2001), in which he likens the mounting piles of discarded junk littering the planet to the trite manifestations of a consumable architecture. “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”37 The essay was first published in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, which has been defined as “a slab of graphics and stats

describing malls the mallification of cities and space in general.”38 The rambling, oft incoherent tone of the essay serves well to describe the rambling, oft incoherent tone of this new kind of architecture advancing over the face of the planet. “Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is an apotheosis, or meltdown.”39 Unlike the Modernists who mined industry for its aesthetic or formal inspiration, junkspace is the fulfillment of the prophecy of an aesthetic of expendability. “Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing …”40 Republished in Content (2004), the essay is presented amidst a 7 year compilation of OMA-AMO’s work, bound in a magazine-like format with thin glossy pages that are jam-packed with rambling text and whiz-bang graphics – there are even ads – making the volume seem cheap and disposable like a periodical. But that’s precisely the point. “We do not leave pyramids,” Koolhaas asserts. Indeed, industrialized culture has little currency left for what is not new, which means everything else is old and destined for obsolescence. “Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an insidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace – a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad – turns into a slum overnight without warning.”41 Mounting environmental concerns in the 21st century are largely the result of the rampant production and subsequent disposal of consumer products of 20th century industry. John Kouwenhoven, a writer for Harper Monthly, predicted in 1959, “we may not be able to get rid of the mess without also getting rid of the abundance.”42 Indeed, many of the solutions offered to ease the effects of widespread consumption are timid in questioning the very basis of consumption. The LEED system is one such solution, placing an importance on the reduced impact of new construction activities, while assigning little value to maintaining or improving existing structures. William McDonough, in attempting to make ecological sense of this wastefulness in Cradle-to-Cradle (2002), introduces the concept of a closed-loop lifecycle to industrial production philosophies. McDonough suggests that, instead of addressing or even acknowledging consumption as a problem, the systemic issues of waste in a productive economy are best addressed by producing better waste – that is, waste that can be cycled back into the productive system, thus avoiding the negative effects associated with its disposal. Using the metaphor of a cherry tree, he describes how the tree produces blossoms in order to yield fruit and participate in the rich tapestry of biodiversity. The wasted blossoms and spent fruit fall to the ground to enrich the soil that in turn feeds the tree – a philosophy he dubs “waste equals food.” 43 In essence, McDonough is proposing a value system that introduces the concept of replacement-value, 44 effectively ranking recyclable products at high esteem. This process continues to overlook a product’s art- and use-values in the pursuit of

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

designing better waste, thus a product finds meaning only through its predisposed obsolescence. By alleviating the guilt of unremitting production and consumption activities in the industrial spectrum, the adoption of this philosophy serves merely to bolster the practice of creating new objects of fleeting desire. In considering architectural products as synonymous with consumer products, McDonough seals the fate of architecture to that of the small arts, effectively degrading architecture from its oncepreeminent status as a fine art. In this subjugation of architecture by capital industry, many of the forces that tainted art’s esteem have become forces shaping the field of 21st century architecture. Architecture is now subject to the same capital forces that mandate feasibility, marketability, and profitability. It is consumable and therefore valued as such. There is an increased focus on newness, buttressed by technical glitz and media pomp. The growing specialization within the field suggests a separation of technical and aesthetic aspects, fracturing the art of building. Technical practitioners exist in specialization silos. Designers concerned with aesthetics cater to the fashion of the day, driving the development of iconographic architecture in the pursuit of relevancy. This has led to an increasing dependence on rhetoric in the field, similar to the earlier philosophy of speculative aesthetics that, as Semper suggested, attempted to assuage the emptiness of the physical object. But Koolhaas, like Semper, chastised this coping mechanism, stating: “Architects should never explain space; junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications.”45 Architecture in the Age of Obsolescence is either new or it is obsolete. It is either iconic or a generic and mutable skeletal framework. Patina is no longer a valued asset. Architecture is either freshly minted or it is dead – a casualty of the machine that gave it life.

NOTES 1.

Characterized as daily items, such as adornment, weapons, weavings, pottery, and household effects. Also referred to as the practical arts.

Alois Riegl’s valuation system in has been used as a reference for terminology. Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus. SeinWe-

sen und seine Entstehung” (Vienna, 1903) reprinted in George Dehio, A. Riegl, Konservieren, nicht restaurieren: Streitschriften zur Denkmalphlege um 1900, Braunschweig-Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, 1988. English translation: “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin”, transl. Forster and Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), pp. 21–56.

Semper, Gottfried. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics: A Handbook for Technicians, Artists, and Friends of the Arts. 1860. Trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004. Print. Pg. 71-76.

Ibid

Ibid 75

Giedeon 101

Semper 75

9. 10.

Ibid 193-198

11.

Ibid 76

12.

Ruskin, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 2nd ed. Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent: G. Allen, 1880. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989. Reprint.

13.

Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. New York: Van Rees Press, 1960. Print. Pg. 78-91

14.

London, Bernard. Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. 1932. Web. http:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/London_(1932)_Ending_the_depression_ through_planned_obsolescence.pdf

15.

Ibid

16.

Packard 79

17.

Ibid 78-91

18.

Ibid 79

19.

Ibid

20.

Brook Stevens: Industrial Strength Design. Featured exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum June 7 – September 7 2003. Online archive: http://www.mam.org/collection/archives/brooks/ biography.asp. Accessed December 16, 2010.

21.

Packard 41

22.

Ibid

23.

Packard 118-127

THE AGE OF OBSOLESCENCE

24.

Ibid

25.

Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Oxford University Press. 1948. Pg. 51-76. Print.

26.

Ibid 489

27.

Ibid 522-523

28.

Ibid 523-526

29.

Banham, Reyner. “Vehicles of Desire,” in A Critic Writes, 3. Original essay published in Art, September 1955.

30.

Ibid

31.

Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Praeger. 1960.

32.

Design Museum, “Archigram: Architects 1961-1974,” online archive, designmuseum.org/design/archigram. Accessed December 15, 2010.

33.

Lobsinger, Mary Louise. “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price's Fun Palace.” In Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, 119-139. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.

34.

Price was inspired by the Cybernetics theory of communication in his work. The theory was first introduced in 1948 to describe the system of verbal and non-verbal communication and control exhibited between humans, comparing humans to machines using information feedback to learn from and control their environment. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics in History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Pg. 15-27.

35.

Lobsinger (124)

36.

Lobsinger (120)

37.

Ibid

38.

Venturi, Robert; Brown, Denise Scott. Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

39.

Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” Content. Taschen, 2004. Pg. 162-171.

40.

Wiles, Will. “Icon of the Month: Junkspace.” IconEye: Icon Magazine Online. (2014) n.d.

41.

Koolhaas

42.

Ibid

43.

Ibid

44.

Kouwenhoven, John. “Waste Not, Have Not – A Clue to American Prosperity.” Harper’s Monthly March 1959: 72-81. Print.

45.

McDonough, William. Cradle-to-Cradle. New York: North Point Press, 2002. Pg. 92.

46.

For the purposes of this paper, this is an invented definition to Riegl’s Cult of Monuments system of valuation.

47.

Koolhaas

2007.

http://

044 046 048 050 052 054 056 058 Chris Tsui

URBAN PARADOX

ARCHITECTURAL ITERATION TO PRANOIAC TENSIONS Chris Tsui is interested in urban architecture and visual communications. Graduated from The University of Hong Kong, Master Architecture in 2013, he also finished his Bachelor degree there with First Class Honor and Deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Honor in 2010. His graduate thesis explored the potential of the relationship between paranoia and architecture with the background in Detroit, gained recognition in multiple international competitions and events, including the First Prize of IATA International Architectural Thesis Competition 2013, Grand Prize of d3 Unbuilt Vision 2013, and exhibited at the International Exhibition of 2013 Architecture Graduate Design at Taiwan. His innovative design and ambitions led him to be awarded the Special Mentions of The Hong Kong Young Design Talents Awards 2013. He is currently working at KPF(Hong Kong) Ltd. He has also worked at CL3 Architects Ltd. and Index Architecture Ltd. in Hong Kong. With his artistic sensibility, he has also taught the Visual Communications Course of Associate Degree of Architecture at The City University of Hong Kong, and being the Teaching Assistant at the University of Hong Kong before. Image Credit: Chris Tsui

URBAN PARADOX

From study of the Cold War Fallout shelters and terrorist attack at 9-11, there is a cyclical relationship between architecture and paranoia. The Cold War fallout shelter is brought by the anxiety towards nuclear war which demonstrated a sense of paranoia which leads to the creation of a new definition of architecture, called Bunker Architecture, while, 9-11 illustrated that the destruction of architecture can create a new set of paranoia.This sense of paranoia could feed back to the creation of architecture again, and even lead to another level of paranoia. So, the architectural iteration on construction and destruction could create paranoia, and vice versa. So, the tension between architecture and paranoia can be presented as a never-ending cyclical relationship, a mutual restriction upon a balancing tendency. The site for the project is the largest abandoned automobile-manufacturing factory at Detroit, Michigan, the Packard Plant, designed by the prominent industrial architect Albert Kahn. It was constructed between 1903 and 1910. It was closed in 1956 and has been abandoned since. Since its abandonment, this massive complex has become home to stray dogs, homeless squatters, graffiti artists, scrappers and urban explorers. It has a certain anxiet and conflict of interest which provides a testing ground to explore the potential of architecture through construction and demolition, in response to the existing paranoia tension between stakeholders and even lead to certain impact on the creation of paranoia. Instead of thinking of the Packard Plant as a sick, dangerous and unsightly decaying megastructure, my project tries to rethink and celebrate the destruction process as inverted construction, so that its paranoiac nature is converted to be creative and inclusive.

My project seeks to depict these national and domestic conflicts and turn it into potential for new architecture to re-inhabit the site, responding to the paranoiac situations in phases. To respond to the paranoiac tensions between the city and the scrappers, the first architecture introduced to the site is a construction waste recycling plant which formalized the scrapping industry by centralizing the material treatment process within a mega block. The existing Packard Plant would endure the risk of change when more and more scrappers come to the site in different forms of re-occupation. Due to the influx of Chinese capital on car industry in Detroit, the centralized scrap metal treatment allures General Motors to set up a new headquarters, financially supported by the Chinese car companies. The new car assembly line is built by demolishing the existing tallest building in the site. These 2 parties, both mutually beneficial and competitive, create a hidden dialogue in the possession of the site, material exchange and manpower competition. With more and more stakeholders concerned, the paranoiac tensions become convoluted and bring questions to the role of historical building changes and the role that new architecture performs in paranoiac tensions so that construction and destruction can achieve to sustain an equilibrium. On a city level, it could be imagined that the recycling plant becomes a system to facilitate the destruction of the abandoned structures of the city and provide new materials and incentives for re-construction to be carried on by the new car manufacturing plant. It further performs as a role of reconstructing the city by reoccupying vacant lots and taking control of the land again. Once the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traditional automotive center, its emerge

and collapse were both brought by the car manufactoring industry. Its rebirth would be paradoxically led by the automobile industry again, but with Chinese capital supported behind. As there is always coexistence between architecture and paranoia, architecture is not only about relieving or solving the paranoia. To bear in mind that architecture can create paranoia and paranoia can lead to architecture again, the potential would be even more provocative.

URBAN PARADOX

18 58

URBAN URBAN PARADOX PARADOX

060 064 068 072 074 076 078 Serafina Amoroso

PIRANESI, TAFURI AND ROSSI:

THE LEGACY OF THEIR UNAPPEASED RELATIONSHIP WITH HISTORY Serafina Amoroso is an architect. After graduating in Florence in 2001, she got a PhD degree in Architecture and Urban design from the University of Reggio Calabria in 2006. Her professional activity has been always accompanied by research commitments, teaching experiences and participation in national and international workshops and competitions. She currently lives and works between Italy and Spain, where in 2012 she completed the MArch II in Advanced Architectural Design from ETSAM, Madrid.

Santâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Andrea in Mantua (photo by Renaud Camus, 2011)

T. S. Eliot famously stated that ‘‘the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence […]. […] the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”1 Viewed through the corrective lens of the new interpretations given to it from time to time, the past no longer remains the same. Nor does it remain fixed in its new order, for it continues to lend itself to new critical and creative interpretations. The positions on the (uncomfortable) relationship between architecture and the history of the past as well as of the present taken by Manfredo Tafuri, by Aldo Rossi and, more than three centuries earlier, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi evoke various questions about the concept of the “old.” Their re-readings of the history of the past constitute a legacy whose issues haven’t yet been exhausted. Taking a cue from their ideas and interpretations of a “historical” approach to architecture, my paper intends to point out - without pretending to make an exhaustive exegesis - whether or not these methods can be imported or assumed by contemporary architectural practice, without distorting their message. Specifically, I will identify their similarities and idiosyncrasies as well as their common characteristics which are of contemporary relevance and that continue to “defy” the conventional disciplinary boundaries and operational scopes of architecture, for instance, the complicated and unresolved relationship between ideology, theory and practice and our present architectural concerns

in relation to the city. Nowadays,

architecture

suffers

from

identification crisis – to a certain extent induced

by Tafuri and his ideological demonization of language – the main expressions of which are both the loss of the “object” and the marginalization of theory, with theory considered as critical or utopian (simply because it’s no longer intended to provide design scripts and solutions) and practice considered as realistic. But an increasing awareness of the history of the present is taking shape in the modus operandi of a wide group of architectural theorists and practitioners, above all with respect to their way of going beyond the contingencies of professional practice (that may or may not lead to the construction of physical environmental artifacts) and their way of considering drawing, writing (both as an autonomous mediator between architecture and other disciplines and as the discursive dimension of architecture) and designing as specific forms of thought. These contemporary spatial practices occupy the (historical) space between (disciplinary) autonomy and engagement (with an inherent multiplicity of topics), which coexist on the border line between detachment and involvement. Architects can engage “outer” topics (social and economic, for instance) as experts of design without renouncing the selfreflective dimension of architecture. A new concept of (inter)disciplinarity is developing, intended as a diagonal/transversal approach focusing on procedures that prioritize

PIRANESI, TAFURI AND ROSSI

horizontal actions where emphasis is put on both the final product and the process. As I hope to demonstrate, many of these approaches of architectural practices can be traced back to some key concepts like fragment, delirium, erasure/erased which are ascribable to Piranesi’s, Rossi’s and Tafuri’s legacy. Their experiences have proved that the (re-)reading of the history (of the present) can mediate, even though not conciliate, the discrepancy between the specificity/partiality of the project and the incompleteness of the city, that is to say the social consciousness of its necessary and continual process of re-structuring.

Fragment (and the City) The Ichnografia of the Campo Marzio (1761) – hinge of Piranesi’s work Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma, published in 1762 - is presented as a plan of Rome fictionally carved on a marble slab. The landmark buildings of Rome are presented as fragments that fill to saturation the plan, almost erasing the given topography, or, better, replacing it with a topography of invention, both real and fantastic. The Campo Marzio obviously has never looked like Piranesi’s idealized “construction” which is, therefore, the realm of possibilities: a fragmented, becoming, layered (im)possible space of tension. For this very reason, it has triggered a wide range of interpretations that assert the role of the subject in establishing the values that history can offer to him:

1. Tafuri detected in Piranesi’s (archeological and arbitrary) exploration of the ancient architecture the exploration of the depths of the subject. 2. Stan Allen uncovered (his) further meanings of Campo Marzio by conceiving Piranesi’s plan as a site “to be colonized, covered and modified, as when a building is erected on ruins”2 3. Peter Eisenman revisited Piranesi’s work projecting into it his own poetics 4. Jennifer Bloomer approached Piranesi through her desire for a deep renewal of architecture’s theoretical framework. Each of them represents a different approach to Piranesi’s work: Tafuri from the viewpoint of architectural (critical) history; Allen and Eisenmann from the viewpoint of architectural design; Bloomer from the viewpoint of the interstitial (and literary) spaces between the previous approaches. Piranesi’s works (both etchings and plans) aren’t so much representations as “constructions.” They are active images that create a new experimental manner of being in space and of inhabiting it. They create a new notion of space in which (classical) language and form are destabilized from within. Fragments don’t need any re-contextualization: they aren’t relics or parts to be re-assembled in order to re-enact a broken whole. They don’t evoke anything.

Tafuri defines the Ichnografia as a “formless heap of fragments colliding one against the other.”3 But “The idea of fragment is not an idea of origin. Fragment demands a preceding action. The act is collision; the object is fragment. The cause is collision; the effect is fragment.”4 According to Allen, in the Campo Marzio Piranesi demonstrates the futility of a return to origins.5 Allen’s work on it demonstrates his attempt to uncover “the surplus residue of meaning that confirms the inexhaustibility of a work of architecture”6 in the wake of Piranesi’s attitude towards his sources, that was “dreamlike, inventive and improvisational.”7 In Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri says that the Campo Marzio is a “gigantic useless machine,”8 “a colossal piece of bricolage.”9 With respect to the notions of bricolage/bricoleur and of montage,10 that is to say, with respect to those project strategies consisting in manipulating and playing with the given, in The Sphere and The Labyrinth Tafuri referred to Koolhaas’s early works as “scherzi” (jokes/tricks). In Project of Crisis, M. Biraghi states that Koolhaas is “the person who most effectively appropriates Tafuri’s discourse on the productivity of crisis - going beyond all its limits and making it act, and react, in the present day.”11 Koolhaas would better define himself as “surfer,” one who “employs a dexterity that includes the ability to adapt his skills (and their rules) to play with the given […]. While the demiurge forms the shapeless and the bricoleur recycles the broken to give it a new use (and form),

the surfer interacts with forces of making that are already at play.”12 Koolhaas’s strategies are based on the re-working of the given materials of the city and the forces that are at play within it. A more effective key concept for interpreting these issues is offered by a late work by Tafuri, Research on the Renaissance, in which he deals with Baldassare Castiglione`s (1478-1529) notion of “sprezzatura”, a sort of design strategy based on a “discreet” transgression of the classical rules without ostentation. The term “sprezzatura” is connected to the notion of license and nonchalance; to transgress implies necessarily the question of its limits: to establish to what extents this transgression – implying the use of the given, assembling and disassembling fragments - becomes tolerable. In other words, here Tafuri seems to legitimate the inaccuracy and the same technique of shock he had negatively criticized in Piranesi. The rule may exist because there is the exception. Francesco Garofalo13 mentions Kahn, Scarpa, Stirling and Rossi as architects in whose works Tafuri’s words found a consonance. Some key notions of their methods - such as the project as a narration of the fragment, the fracturing of the unity and the transformation of architecture into a self-reflective activity – can be traced back to Tafuri’s engagement with history. The Tafuri-Rossi ambiguous and unresolved relationship is emblematic of the uncomfortable relations between history and practice, historical and architectural project.14 As far as the montage strategy is concerned, it’s possible to identify it with Rossi’s additive logic of

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juxtaposed and decontextualized archetypical fragments, which are at the same time a purified abstraction from the reality of the city, an analogical representation of the given reduced to figure, the result of the work of his memory. According to Fulvio Irace,15 Rossi “opens the project to history,” choosing, in the words of Francesco Moschini, to be “outdated” and proposing architecture as an “act of resistance” against the modernist tabula rasa. Tafuri was very critical towards Rossi’s last works, stating that they lacked the energy of his early urban investigations. For Tafuri, only Rossi’s early works represent an attempt to merge a criticism of architecture with a criticism of the city by using (urban) fragments and renouncing the control of urban plan as a whole, his partial projects being inserted in the city as a critical act that operates in and by architecture. Tafuri’s reading of Rossi’s block in the Gallaratese complex, which he planned together with Carlo Aymonino (1967-70, built 1970-73), recognizes in it the effort to implement the “by part” strategy of formation of the city by enacting the (critical) distance from real city that is necessary to enable the critical labor of the architectural project within “the city as the locus of collective memory.”16 Indeed, Rossi’s last works seem to be suspended in a sort of oblivion atmosphere, but, as far as his Berlin experience is concerned [FIG. 1], I think that paradoxically it’s just this kind of atmosphere that befits the city [FIG. 2].”The last work in Berlin revealed an ironical shadow and a playful joy.”17 The result is a constant

sense of disorientation or of Pirandellian eradication, which throws the project into a new spatial dimension.18 Although it seems to me a little forced, in light of his own personal architectural poetics of form and field conditions, Allen traces his notion of Landform building back to Aldo Rossi’s ideas of the Architecture of the City, conceived as both a “gigantic, man-made object”19 and as its “urban artifacts, which like the city are characterized by their own history and thus by their own form.”20 Allen says that “Rossi understood urban forms as geological matter: hard and persistent, yet capable of accommodating change over time.”21 To get back to Piranesi’s Campo Marzio, Tafuri defines it as a place where “irrational and rational are no longer to be mutually exclusive.”22 It’s “an experimental design and the city, therefore, remains an unknown.”23 It’s interesting to notice that what for Tafuri was a negative value is exactly what makes Piranesi’s work still open-ended, capable of being reinterpreted and therefore still alive. “Piranesi shatters history and geography, time and space.”24 His “drawings map a city, both a real city (Rome) and a city located in a geography of the imagination.”25 In Aureli’s view, Piranesi “seems to suggest that the form of the city is the unsolvable confrontation between the individuality of its part.”26 Piranesi overcomes the impossibility of architectural forms and morphology to accommodate urban scale by rethinking architectural design “not as what exhausts the form of the city, but as what opens

Figure 1: Panorama of Berlin (photo by Seier+Seier, 2006)

the potential for imaging it differently.”27 Piranesi shows the city in “its palimpsestic, [PATCHWORK]like form. The city […] is an intricate network of sites of interpretation.”28 His research attitude provides interpretations that combine (in)accuracy with polemic and invention. This was the reason why he actually understood the real synchronic dimension of the city, a place where the history of the past and of the present overlap in fragmented, ambiguous spaces.

Erasures/Erased In the Campo Marzio Piranesi seems to be inspired by amnesia and a displacing force that causes him to operate selectively on historical materials by erasures and manipulations that at the same time negate and affirm the values of history. His fragments redefine the rules from within the composition, from within history interrupting its continuity in such a way as to free space to reinvent it. His archeological inaccuracies demonstrate that the Campo Marzio is neither a representation nor a designed plan of Rome; it’s rather an interpretation where the opposition between objectivity (rationality)

and subjectivity (irrationality), technical control and arbitrariness dissolves: there are no more binary categories in which one is privileged over the other. Time acquires an autonomous value and the accumulation and deterioration of materials create new formally open-ended and uncontrollable conditions. Piranesi, Eisenman says, establishes “an autonomous discourse of architectural time.”29 Tafuri defines Piranesi’s Campo Marzio as “a semantic void created by an excess of visual noise,”30 in which the “clash of the organisms, immersed in a sea of formal fragments, dissolves even the remotest memory of the city as a place of Form.”31 In his reading, the plan is a heap of signs, of signifiers that have definitely lost their signified. With respect to these issues, Eisenman sees in it a call for the autonomy of architectural language, which matches his own design methodology. For Diane Ghirardo, Eisenman’s and Libeskind’s self-referential “theoretical delirium”32 clearly represents a misunderstanding and misappropriation of Tafuri’s position which advocated for a return to the ideological and political engagement in architecture. They buried the above mentioned

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(critical) distance translating criticism into design. Tafuri defines this attitude as “operative criticism”33 that is to say a criticism intended to support a design trend or poetical tendency or to justify a design option. Piranesi indeed took (classical) language to its extremes by emptying its semantic dimensions in order to open it to new constantly redefining materials and meanings, but his “formal” excess and exuberance is actually a sort of mnemonic (critical) devise to re-orient an urban space made up of fragments, interrupted and overlapped axis. The figure/ground relationship is totally questioned and overcome by a space of indecisions where figures are added to other figures. Buildings are “traces of function,”34 being the all city “a fabric of fact and fiction,”35 the expression of a “figure/figure urbanism,”36 where “the trace is the presence of an absence” that exceeds the traditional dialectic of absence opposite to presence: “it is more like a nonabsent absence.”37 Tafuri captures this aspect precisely when he observes that: “the Campo Marzio, precisely because of the absurdity of its horror vacui,

becomes a demand for language, a paradoxical revelation of its absence. […]The absolute disintegration of formal order,[…] logically also affects the subject of Piranesi’s work: the relationship between history and the present. On one side, there is painstaking, scientific study of archeological findings; on the other, the most absolute arbitrariness in their resolution. […] History no longer offers values as such.[…] it is the experience of the subject that establishes value […] Cannot this interest in “what is hidden” in ancient architecture be interpreted as a metaphor for the search for a place in which the exploration of the “roots” of the monuments meets with the exploration of the depths of the subject?”38 The Carceri (above all in their edition of 1761, whose marks are multiplied and darker) are a sort of visual manifesto of Piranesi’s critical approach to architecture, a critical reinterpretation of the city and an exploration of its underground spaces. As can be seen in this work, he combines enduring stone ruins with provisional structures such as pulleys, carpenter’s trestles, jacks, scaffolding. The use of smoke puffs (especially at the intersection

Figure 2: Aldo Rossi. Quartier Schützenstrasse in Berlin Mitte (photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2008)

between horizontal and vertical structures: “what lies behind the smoke is not continuity, but a broken link”)39 becomes an escamotage to disclose the uncertain dimension of its visions, provoking spatial ambiguity, erasures, lack of clarity and, ultimately, showing the openness and the dynamicity of his representations and of their possible interpretations, in a process of making and undoing. “Erasure always selects, removes and adds”40 But it’s in Santa Maria del Priorato where his dissecting the rules of architecture as a discipline is fleshed out in practice, reinventing the use of given elements by recycling, infiltrating, contaminating, interrupting, re-processing

materials into fresh, creative, experimental combinations. His language, its contaminations and fragmentations, are completely at odds with the wholeness of the classical idea of language. Santa Maria del Priorato is “an argument about architecture.”41 Overloaded with ornaments, his façade looks more like a two-dimensional “etching plate or printed page”42 than an architectural structure. Beyond the church’s rhetorical position – while working on it, Piranesi wrote his Parere sull’architettura, which is strongly linked to the polemical and heated Greek-Roman debate, with Piranesi obviously supporting the Roman and Etruscan superiority – what is interesting is its altarpiece, whose “hidden face” Tafuri defined as the fulcrum of

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all the church [FIG. 3 and 4]: “the two faces of the altar cannot be separated. The destruction of the symbolic universe is seen to be closely linked to the last, pathetic triumph of the allegory, which unfolds itself on the side facing the faithful.”43 By interrupting the decorations, the stuccoed swirls and the carved motifs on the back of the altar, without identifying a rationally determined point of interruption, he emphasizes the dialectic destruction between language and its absence, giving rise to creative and inventive freedom.

Delirium I think that Tafuri wasn’t wrong when he stated that “The control of reality lacking organic structure, achieved by operating on that very lack, not in order to give it a structure but, rather, to draw forth from it a whole complex of coexisting meanings” is “what the writings of […] Piranesi […] introduced into architectural thought.”44 In Parere su l’architettura (1775), Piranesi’s alter ego Didascalo focuses on two very crucial issues (among others): ornament and creativity. Almost automatically, these trigger connections with other important architectural issues: the ornament theme links to the variety theme, creativity to autonomy. For Piranesi-Didascalo, architecture should be designed to change and not to repeat itself as if it were a mechanical skill; at the same time, architecture should dismiss external referents but only to put into question its own existing languages and make room for a new language to come. He doesn’t propose an alternative vision: he only saturates deliriously the

existing language. In Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Lecercle says that “Délire […] is at the frontier between two languages, the embodiment of contradiction between them. Abstract language is systematic; […] it is an instrument of control, mastered by a regulating subject. Material language, on the other hand, is unsystematic, a series of noises […] and therefore self-contradictory”45 Recovering Lecercle’s notion of délire, Jennifer Bloomer affirms that “Délire is the name and the condition of the overlay. It is the ‘shady side’ […]. Délire is related to delirium etymologically but is not synonymous. Lecercle explains that délire relates only to a particular form of delirium, ‘the kind of reflexive delirium in which the patient expounds his system, attempts to go beyond the limits of his madness to introduce method into it, […] in which also he hesitated between science […] and the wildest fiction” […] Lecercle continues: ‘Mere delirium is poor and repetitive: this other type,…délire, is rich and imaginative.’”46 The notion of delirium which I refer to can be traced back to the above mentioned definitions and to my reflections on an article by T. Stoppani in which she links “delirium” in architecture with Tafuri’s historical project.47 As dealt with in the preface of The Sphere and the Labyrinth,48 Tafuri’s historical project defines the historical space of “production” of ideas (both theoretical and historical) where complexity and multiple meanings are allowed in order to question continuously its own limits. It’s an unquiet scenario, a situation of crisis and

ambiguities that raises questions and doubts. History, as Tafuri writes, “is always a project of crisis.”49 The historical project is an open-ended issue, a work to be continued. It isn’t an ex post discourse or finite (hi)story on the past; it’s a project made up of many possible “provisional constructions”50 continuously re-engaging with the present, being embedded and implied in it. The present itself “becomes a complex and complicated system of relationships rather than a singular and circumscribed moment.”51 “There is no criticism, only history.”52 For Tafuri, the historical project is an autonomous project separate from the architectural project, but only in order to provide the tool to get back to it with a critical analysis from a (critical) distance. In this distance no pacification can reside. The (architectural) project itself to enter the practice requires a narrow scope, and is forced to mark boundaries, which are consciously tentative and uncertain. “Delirium” thus understood seems to me a possible key concept to comprehend the new relationship between theory and practice and retain a certain utopian impulse in both of them. Beyond its etymological sense of transgression from linearity and its acceptance, in Freudian terms, as intentional censorship and erasure, my notion of delirium is a way of thinking that blurs the boundaries of identity and of architecture as a discipline in order to come back to architecture after travelling through ideas and concepts generated elsewhere and emerged out of other disciplines.

Koolhaas’s notion of delirium “becomes ‘operative’ in a Tafurian sense;”53 it’s therefore closer to the etymological origin of the word than to a theoretical approach internal to the architectural discourse. Delirium considered as a mere design strategy or as an instrumental critic discourse on a design trend turns into a closed project that can be activated only by its translation to practice. If considered as a tool that allows maintaining open and inclusive the space of difference, destabilizing any fixed structure that tends to exclusion, delirium becomes an open project.54 Ideologies as “delirious representations”55 (which however are historically necessary) act as “dams” whose deconstruction is the main task of the historical project. Therefore, delirium engaged with the historical project can focus not so much on erasures intended as deleted possibilities, but rather on the erased intended as the unveiled possibilities, in other words, the space of silenced traces buried by official history that can be reactivated and revealed by re-embedding them in the present. This space is, at the same time, the proper space of architecture.

Some Conclusive Remarks The engagement of contemporary architectural discourse with Piranesi’s work depends on the current validity and topicality of his critique of language and form as predefined entities and the shift that took place in his work from form to change, chance matters.57 Architecture always needs a historical reframing and disciplinary definition, something Piranesi had already understood, registering the passing of

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Figure 3: G. B. Piranesi. S. Maria del Priorato, Altar (back)

Figure 4: G. B. Piranesi. S. Maria del Priorato, Ornamental Detail on Altar

time in his images in which time is still at work after construction. As T. Stoppani argues, the elements which make visible transformations are plug-in structures:58 there is no replacement. For example, in Piranesiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Carceri (1749-50, but above all in their edition of 1761) the presence of (human) figures, besides providing a measurement element of scale comparison, has the task of representing the precarious, the unpredictable that coexists with the solid of ancient ruins. These biological elements represent one more material, together with

stone and wood. Figures inhabit and occupy these incomplete spaces without questioning whether or not they will be finished and reconstructed. Figures are spatial (and semantic) activators, agents of chance/change. At the beginning of the 1970s, many disenchanted and disillusioned architects began to wage a war against modernism, believing that architecture should continuously mount opposition to capitalist society. Among others, there were Kenneth Frampton, Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi. The first still continues

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to maintain similar positions.59 The last two have been defined by Andrea Branzi60 as “bad masters,” however he admits that their precocious deaths (Tafuri in 1994 and Rossi in 1997) have left a traumatic silence and a cultural gap in the debates on architecture. Taking into account the larger narrative in which Tafuri positioned his criticism of modernism, his analysis of capitalist standardization, mass production attempted to demand a better product for everyone.61 As to the urban questions, “Tafuri, taken in combination with Rossi, was important.”62 “Rossi with his understanding of the rules governing European urban structures and production provided the guides for autonomous design.”63 His relationship with history can be summed up in three elements which he considered essential for architecture to be progressive, that is, capable of producing a turning point in history: transmissibility; the ability to interpret the contingencies of reality; the capacity to be situated in a historical (rational) process. Rossi is credited with a brave defense of the autonomy of architecture, but the autonomy he referred to is a relational and conditioned concept and a pedagogical project as well,64 framed by a precise technical (and transmittable) knowledge and an operational ground of (technical) “skills”. In his “Autobiografia scientifica”, Rossi seems to have a deeper insight and awareness of the double sense of time, both meteorological and chronological, which implicitly opens up to his own concept of typology the possibility of change. While staying inside

the Sant’Andrea Basilica in Mantua [FIG. 5], he describes how the fog entering became “l’elemento imprevedibile che modifica e altera.”65 This description is not focused on the building in itself: the presence of architecture is transformed into something that allows the unpredictable to take place. Architecture is understood as a device / apparatus that allows the unfolding of more functions, overcoming the concept of functionalism. “Con gli strumenti architettonci noi […] favoriamo un evento, indipendentemente dal fatto che esso accada; […] il dimensionamento[…] è molto importante; non come pensavano i funzionalisti, per assolvere una determinata funzione ma per permettere più funzioni.”66 In his first book L’architettura della città he identified this same double sense of time with the form-function relationship: “la forma e presiedeva alla costruzione e permaneva, in un mondo dove le funzioni si modificavano continuamente e nella forma si modificava il materiale.”67 His research is an unfinished work that should be taken up in order to question the real responsibilities of architecture as “constructive” activity (that evidently has nothing to do with “construction” activity). Tafuri has been accused of having caused the demonization of language, the political and ideological drying up of modern culture, dismissing the centrality of the market and provoking the development of our current star system. Tafuri’s theories reflect the internal mechanisms of his era and the Italian landscape obscured by terrorism. All Tafuri’s claims and

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theories, his Marxist dogmatism and categories, his class-based critique of architecture and his analysis of its relations with power, exploitation, oppression were historically grounded in his historic and ideological background and context; they cannot be used tout court as prescriptive truths. His pessimism should be re-read and converted into a new viewpoint that adheres better to (our) reality. The apocalyptic tone he used in declaring that the role of architecture as a discipline has ceased to exist and that the new tasks architecture is called on to carry out are “something besides or beyond architecture”68 should necessarily be reconsidered and revised. Moreover, from a reflection on Tafuri’s historical project a different outcome can emerge and the theoretical development of some key concepts - such as “historical project”, “delirium” and “sprezzatura” – could open up new interpretative horizons of the history of the present. Although involuntary, I think that his work on the historical project provided new plug-ins for other field of investigation, for instance, for gender studies and post-colonial studies, because his method can be unfolded to unmask other type of exploitation of other oppressed groups. After Tafuri’s symptomatic resignation in the 70’s and the sense of alienation professional practitioners derived from intellectuals (and vice versa), today, architects’ challenge is to engage with a wide range of contingencies as design experts who move in an interdisciplinary field and in an interdisciplinary manner that

overcomes the rigid patterns of oppositional/ exclusive dialectics - culture vs. form; literal vs. phenomenal; capitalism vs. design. Many other approaches69 have been developing in the last decades; they can be identified on the basis of their kind of engagement with reality, with its given materials (globalization, information society, global migration of people, new media, etc), with its local contexts, with its urban culture, in short, with our historical dimension. In contemporary cities, spatial and temporal relations have to be constantly questioned and renegotiated. It’s impossible to think of modernity and modernization as only negative; postindustrial society is a place full of interstices and in which many potential alternatives are available. An a priori position of mere resistance is therefore self-defeating. Involvement with given conditions is as necessary

as a utopian attitude in order to provide a historical frame of reference for actions in the present. Utopian dreams are no longer necessary since it’s impossible to predict how dynamic reality will be. But a utopian impulse should be retained in order to generate new knowledge and advances and a renewed idea of the project that transforms the way in which we have always performed in front of the real. A detached view of reality from a delirious perspective, far away from a sort of addiction to reality, is necessary in order to develop new social and political viewpoints, because excluding both directions is in itself an ideological direction.70

Figure 5: Sant’Andrea in Mantua (photo by Renaud Camus, 2011)

END NOTES

T.S. Eliot. ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919). In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1922, p. 44

Allen, Stan. “Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design.” In Assemblage. CambridgEndmate, MA: MIT Press Journals, December, 1989, p. 72

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth - Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 34

Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the text: the (s)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 68

See: Stanley Allen, “Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design.” Op. cit., pp.71-109.

Stanley Allen, “Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design.” Op. cit., p. 72

7. Ibid. 8.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976, p. 15

Ibid.

10.

The montage and collage are fully included among the main artistic strategies of modernity, which have turned into aesthetic categories. From Sergei Eisenstein to Walter Benjamin, the montage technique has become a method of materialist historiography, whose materials are also the untold and the unseen, the pending and the unfinished, the residual and the marginal. In Passagen-Werk (1955), this issue is combined with the disappearance of any hierarchical criterion of value: any material, even scrapped, regains full dignity by using it.

11.

Biraghi, Marco. Project of Crisis. Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013, p. 189

12.

Stoppani, Teresa. Paradigm islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourse on Architetcure and the City. New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 33

13.

See: Tafuri Instant Forum (14th April 2007) <http://architettura.it/instant/20070414/index_ en.htm>, accessed 08 February 2014

14.

Rossi and Tafuri lived and worked in the same years, institution (the IUAV in Venice) and city. Rossi’s watercolor L’Architecture assassinée represents at the same time a response to Tafuri’s declaration that architecture was dead (and to his denunciation of the crisis of architectural language with respect to its political/social engagement with the present) and a sort of implicit admission of “guilt”, since it shows the (abstract, analogical and formal) swerves of Rossi’s language.

15.

See: Irace, Fulvio. “Lo scandalo di Aldo Rossi”. In Il Sole 24 ore, 3.2.2008

16.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944–1985. Turin: Einaudi, 1986, p. 167-68

17.

See: Irace, Fulvio. Op. cit. (translation from Italian is mine)

18.

Renato Pallavicini on the pages of the Italian newspaper L’Unità compares the architectural scenes of Rossi’s works to the theatrical backdrops of the set designer Emanuele Luzzati (…and even in this

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element it is possible to find an affinity with Piranesi’s training as a stage designer). See: Pallavicini, Renato. Aldo Rossi, la città diventa un teatro. In L’Unità. 27.01.08

19.

Rossi, Aldo. Architecture of the city. (Trans. By Ghirardo, Diane and Ockman, Joan). Cambridge, MASS.: MIT Press and The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1982, p. 29

20.

Ibid.

21.

Allen, Stan and McQuade, Marc (ed. by). Landform building: architecture’s new terrain. Bade: Lar Mulser; New Jersey: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2011, p. 36

22.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia. Op. Cit., 15

23.

Ibid.

24.

Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the text. Op. cit., p. 70

25.

Ibid., p. 72

26.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio, The Possibility of an absolute architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, MA 2011, p. 131

27.

Ibid., p. 140

28.

Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the text. Op. cit., p. 72

29.

Eisenman, Peter. Autonomy and Ideology: positioning an avant-garde in America. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997, p. 79

30.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, p. 35

31.

Ibid., 36

32.

Ghirardo, Diane. “Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970–2000”. In Perspecta. The Yale Architectural Journal, 33, 2002, p. 45

33.

See Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and History of Architecture. London: Granada, 1980; in particular, see chapter 4 ‘Operative Criticism’, pp.141-170

34.

Eisenman, Peter. “A critial Analysis: Giovan Battista Piranesi” in Molinari, Luca (ed.), Peter Eisenman: Feints. Milan: Skira Editore, 2006, p. 40

35.

Ibid.

36.

Eisenman, Peter. “Zones of Undecidability: The Interstitial Figure” in Anybody. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, p.243

37.

Eisenman, Peter. “A critial Analysis: Giovan Battista Piranesi.” Op. cit., p. 40

38.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Op. cit., p. 38

39.

Small, Irene. “Polarités. Piranesi’s Shape of Time”. in Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 18 (2007)

40.

Stoppani, Teresa. “Material and Critical: Piranesi’s Erasures”. In Wingham, Ivana (ed.). Mobility of the Line. Art, Architecture, Design. Basel: Birkhäuser, p. 241

41.

Small, Irene. Op. cit.

42.

Ibid.

43.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Op. cit., p. 48-49

44.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia. Op. cit., p. 21

45.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking Glass: Language, nonsense, desire. London: Hutchinson, 1985, pp. 44-45

46.

Jennifer Bloomer. Architecture and the text. Op. cit., p. 120

47.

See: Stoppani, Teresa, “Delirium and Historical project” in Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, (2003) Heft 4, pp. 22-29. In her article, T. Stoppani identifies a sort of filiation from Tafuri’s legacy in the work of a group of (women) architectural theorists (she mentions Diana Agrest, Jennifer Bloomer and Catherine Ingraham), whom she refers to as “mulieres delirantes”.

48.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Op. cit.

49.

Ibid., p. 3

50.

bid., p. 21

51.

Stoppani, Teresa. “L’histoire assassinée. Manfredo Tafuri and the Present”. In Bandyopadhyay. Soumyen, Lomholt, Jane, Temple, Nicholas and Tobe, Renée (eds). The Humanities in Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective. London: Routledge, 2010, p. 213

52.

See: Ingersoll, Richard. “There is no such thing as criticism, there is only history”. (interview with Manfredo Tafuri). In Casabella 619–20, 1995, p. 97.

53.

Stoppani, Teresa. “Unfinished Business: the Historical Project after Manfredo Tafuri”. In Rendell, Jane, Hill, Jonathan, Fraser, Murray and Dorrian, Mark. Critical Architecture. New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 24

54.

See Teresa Stoppani’s above mentioned article

55.

Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Op. cit., pp. 9–10

56.

Ibid.

57.

See. Stoppani, Teresa. “Material and Critical: Piranesi’s Erasures.” Op. cit., pp. 234-246

58.

See: Stoppani, Teresa. The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis. In Footprint, 5, ‘Metropolitan Form’, pp. 147-160

59.

In 1983, in his book “Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, Frampton tried to vindicate the possibility of a regionally resistant culture against the standardization of global late capitalism and the spectacular domination of corporatism embodied, for example, by the instant city of Dubai. In his most recent article on Domus magazine, titled “Towards an agonistic Architecture”, he goes back to these concepts advocating a pluralist and “agonistic architecture

PIRANESI, TAFURI AND ROSSI

of the periphery”, with respect to which differences should remain always open to “subtle forms of hybridisation”. See: Frampton, Kenneth, “Towards an agonistic Architecture” in Domus n. 972/2013, p. 7

60.

See Andrea Branzi’s article in Tafuri Instant Forum (14th April 2007) <http://architetura.it/instant/20070414/index_en.htm>, accessed 08 February 2014

61.

See David Grahame Shane’s article in Tafuri Instant Forum (14th April 2007) <http://architettura.it/instant/20070414/index_en.htm>, accessed 08 February 2014

62.

Ibid.

63.

Ibid.

64.

See: GRUPO 2C. “Conversación con Aldo Rossi”. In 2C Construcción de la Ciudad, 0 (1972), 8-13

65.

Rossi, Aldo. Autobiografia scientifica Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2009 [1981], p. 19

66.

Ibid., p. 23

67.

Ibid., p. 18

68. 69.

70.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia. Op. cit., p. IX In addition to the above mentioned critical regionalism (with its attitude of resistance against modern urban life on the themes of topography, tectonics, light, anthropology), other examples come to mind. The deconstructivist approach and the formalist attitude have both a linguistic and textual bias; the projective attitude takes into account the interdisciplinarity of the influences that play a role in processing a project. The latter has been identified by Roemer Van Toorn in a group of Dutch architects. For instance, Rapp + Rapp seem to be inspired by the early, less figurative work of Aldo Rossi as far as the typological research (conceived as the research of historical residuum) is concerned. See: Van Toorn, Roemer. “No more dreams? The passion for realism in recent Dutch architecture and its limitations”. In Saunders, William S. The new architectural pragmatism: a Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp. 54-75 Van Toorn, Roemer. “No more dreams?” Op. cit.

IMAGES

Aldo Rossi. Quartier Schützenstrasse in Berlin Mitte (photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2008) Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Panorama of Berlin (photo by Seier+Seier, 2006) Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

G. B. Piranesi. S. Maria del Priorato, altar (back) Source: Small, I. Polarités. Piranesi’s Shape of Time. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 18 (2007). Available: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/thinking_ pictures/small.htm

G. B. Piranesi. S. Maria del Priorato, ornamental detail on altarSource: Small, I. Polarités. Piranesi’s Shape of Time. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], (2007). Available: http://www.imageandnarrative. be/thinking_pictures/small.htm

Sant’Andrea in Mantua (photo by Renaud Camus, 2011) Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

080 082 084 086 088 Thomas Roberts

OLD BUILDINGS:

PLACE MAKING THROUGH THE PRESERVATION AND RESTORATION OF THE TIBBITS OPERA HOUSE

Thomas Roberts, AIA is principal of Thomas Roberts Architect, LLC. He is a 1994 graduate of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture as well as an Adjunct Professor of Design. Tom has served on the Board of Michigan’s Historic Preservation Network since 2001. In 2008, the American Institute of Architecture Detroit Chapter awarded Tom with the Young Architect of the Year and in 2009 he received the same award from AIA Michigan. Tom’s professional experience spans almost 20 years and includes extensive experience in Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse. Tom has worked on several of the oldest structures in the region including Saints Peter & Paul Jesuit Church Detroit (1848), Christ Church Detroit (1863), and the Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater (1882).

Tibbits Opera House is the second oldest operating theatre in Michigan. Built in 1882, the Tibbits Opera House was designed by Detroit architect, Mortimer Smith with modest decoration and an elaborate Second Empire façade making it far more impressive than other theatres of its era. Barton S. Tibbits, then Mayor of the City of Coldwater, financed the construction of the project for $25,000. Tibbits is listed on the State and National Historic Register for Historic Places as a contributing building in Downtown Coldwater’s Historic District. Unique to other theatres of the period, Tibbits is a stand alone structure. At that time, most opera houses were often on upper floors of multi-use buildings. In the 1930’s the theatre was converted into a “modern” movie theater. The Second Empire detailing, mansard roof, cupola, and balcony were removed and glazed block was installed, covering the entire façade. The Art Deco façade was removed in the 1960s and recovered with plain brick to protect the original brick from further deterioration until restoration funds could be raised. In 1999, the Tibbits Opera Foundation and Arts Council began efforts to have the theatre restored to its original architectural grandeur. Efforts included feasibility studies, design development, and fundraising from the local community. In 2012, with significant funding in place including a $500,000 National Park Service Scenic Byways Grant, scaffolding was erected and the complete restoration of the façade

began. The project design included materials and techniques that are intended to last for a 100-year plus life cycle. The Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation were followed during all procedures including cleaning, repairing and replacing brick on the entire face of the building. The cupola was designed and reconstructed to match the original profile and roofing tile was installed to reflect the original B.S.T. pattern. Craftsmen recreated, with painstaking detail all of the metal decorative elements of the façade. Windows and doors were fabricated to match the original carpentry and all painted elements were recreated and match original pigment colors. The mansard roof and balcony were also rebuilt to match the original profile.

OLD BUILDINGS

The Art Deco Style faรงade was removed in the 1960s and covered with plain brick and plaster infill arches to protect what remained of the original 1882 facade until restoration funds could be raised.

Built in 1882, the Tibbits Opera House was designed by Detroit architect, Mortimer Smith in the Second Empire Style. Typical details of the style included mansard roofs with patterned slate, cornice at upper and lower roofs, brackets and dentils at eaves, cupola, roof cresting, tall windows and doors at entry level, and a small entry porch or terrace. Figure on Left: In the 1930’s the theatre was converted into a “modern” movie theater. The Second Empire detailing, mansard roof, cupola, and balcony were removed and glazed block was installed, covering the entire façade.

Restoration of Tibbits Opera House façade recaptures an authentic sense of place in its historic town, preserves a rare piece of Coldwater’s past and shares a brief step back in time to the grandeur of the late 19th century with

every visitor. People who were unfamiliar with the Tibbits Opera House had no way of recognizing the value of the building and what lies beyond the doors prior to the restoration. A transformed facade has strengthened local

OLD BUILDINGS

In 2010, design efforts and reconstruction were initiated to painstakingly restore the original façade in every detail. The Tibbits façade restoration incorporates the lost art of intricate craftsmanship with authentic preservation techniques including masonry, metal, stone, and carpentry. In March of 2013, the façade transformation was completed with the installation of the “Lady Lights”, standing proud on the corner posts of the balcony.

pride for the community asset, reinforced the value of its unique attribute, and has promoted preserving history in the creation of sustainable environments for otherwise decaying downtowns. Since completion of

the façade, Tibbits has been honored by the Coldwater Chamber of Commerce, receiving “Project of the Year,” and awarded the 2013 Michigan Governor’s award for Historic Preservation.

OLD BUILDINGS

090 092 094 096 098 Diamadis Tegelidis

THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES Adamantios Tegkelidis studied architecture in the University of Patras, Greece and the Technical University of Berlin. Currently, he is a master student in the University of Delft, the Netherlands, under the chair of Design as Politics and owner of the blog: (un)architecture.blog.com that focuses mostly on paper architecture and abstract approaches to contemporary issues. He also worked as an assistant architect in Andreas Angelidakis office, Athens, actively participating in the Biennale of Venice, 2012 as design cooperator for the project “Troll Casino” presented in the Greek pavilion. The book “the future of architecture” and the magazines “Dichotomy” and “Ampersand” have also featured parts of his work.

Facing: Diamadis Tegelidis

THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES

Around 1994, GeoCities.com™ (one of the first free web hosts) initiated what is believed to be the predecessor of the contemporary social networks such as “MySpace™” and “Facebook™”, under the moniker “GeoCities”. Since its repurchasing by one of the largest corporations in web development five years later and right before its permanent closure on 27.10.2009 [oocities.org], GeoCities was an Internet-established community counting hundreds of smaller, clustered neighborhoods, millions of web pages and even more active users scrolling around in search of information and communication. It is of high importance to consider the currently obsolete GeoCities both as an architectural/urban phenomenon and a social one – which in turn does not relate directly to the built environment that is real, yet immaterial and thus, examine it relatively – but first and foremost as a “withdrawal or disappearance from the excess of reality into the cybernetic representations of the virtual world of computers” [Boyer 1996, p. 10]. Geocities, as such, were constituted by three indicative, operative forces with diametrically opposed vectors; utopian philosophy; as an idealistic token of the “Ubricandian” structural maze [hoodedutilitarian.com], modernistic apparatus; in terms of its simplistic, repetitive, binary basis and postmodern countenance; concerning its 2-dimensional advert-oriented interference with the users: a translation of the Sophist idea of apate as found in Proust [Virilio 1991, p. 35]. The latter argument derives Image Credit: Diamadis Tegelidis

from the undisputed, postmodern philosophy permeated through the computer (screen), while its modernist aspect relates to the computer as a machine in its very essence [Boyer 1996, p. 10]. The “new modes of perception” that Boyer suggests to be developed are still on a primitive level, since the human-computer reciprocity is established through already tested means. As we will see, these means are about to be seriously questioned, while we are moving through an era of computer-evolution. The pattern of the GeoCities’ world is one derived by computational methods. If one could take a bird’s eye view over this pattern, he would definitely distinguish aspects of science fiction literature, especially the dramatic representation of the futuristic States of America in William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “the city has no longer any image-able form or definable boundary”. A more experienced “traveler” would probably perceive it more as an amalgam, a digital metaphor between Virilio’s “informational city” and Calvino’s “invisible cities”; bombarded with ephemeral and interchangeable images which are hard to keep track, covered with an unstable veil of insufficient memory that facilitates a possible erase of its history – a term that raises many questions whether it should be used here. But it is also “a city made of mixed fragments, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them” [Boyer 1996, p. 138]. This metropolitan fragmentation resulted in a “geographical metaphor” [De La Rosa 2012]; a

large list of smaller cities which were given a name, a title, or maybe a signifier that in turn was related to its very enclosed, stereotype notion and not to its picturesque inkling. The GeoCities-Athens was not a place where one could visit the Acropolis undergoing the senses of the smooth, sterile texture of the ancient marble; instead it was an abstract virtual informational locus, where all the web pages related to teaching, education, philosophy, reading and writing were compiled as a group. Similarly, the dense urban conditions of Tokyo, its colorful ethnic neighborhoods next to the huge modern skyscrapers, all weaved into the distinctive aroma of fresh fish, was reincarnated as an accumulation of data concerning Far East and other Asiatic religiously/culturally oriented info. Athens and Tokyo, followed by many similar concept-cities that resembled the polis-kratos of the ancient Greek epoch, were basically an intertwined mélange of indexical informational corners governed by the same set of principles applied by the GeoCities authority. Alternatively, we can think of it as a digital representation of Oswald Mathias Ungers’ “Archipelagos” project that roughly translated Leon Krier’s suggestion of a “city within a city” and his following arguments against the sacrosanct axioms of modernistic urban zoning with its severe consequences [Aureli 2011, p. 177]. While being separated in categories based on their alterity, their boundaries were blurred, integrated under a stratum of similitude, making it easier to produce and express something in common. In the meantime, users could swiftly jump from one subject to another;

a manifestation of the Pop era [Ranciere, p. 43, 51] spirit that grew with the Internet-boom leading to the dot-com bubble. Accordingly, the introduction and implementation of “hypertext” made it possible to oscillate among the various virtual cities replacing the linear transportation system of the real world with an obtuse, phantom system of interlinkage that enabled an undistracted, perpetual peregrination throughout GeoCities and the rest of the Web. To quote Boyer, “based on associative indexing and connectioning modes of thought rather than traditional methods of categorization, hypertext theory abandons the ideas of the center versus the margin, of hierarchy, and of linearity, replacing them with the concepts of multi-linearity, nodes, links and networks” [Boyer 1996, p. 48] imposed by the Internet culture. An embedded and ciphered paraphernalia inside the basic structure of each of the cities, making it almost impossible for the user to turn in an awk [sic] direction; a road block fused with the construction elements of the interface, very similar to the concept of the Kafkian office space as a continuity of the city street on a flowing urban scenery, as envisioned by Orson Welles in the movie “the Trial”. In general, hypertext gave users the opportunity to select multiple routes from which a variety of conclusions might emerge [Boyer 1996, p. 142] based on the series they chose to follow, enhancing the way we perceive Internet mobility and reassuring that our ultimate goal is just one mouse-click away. Despite their built-

THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES

in dynamic abilities, in most cases hypertext is mostly apprehended as a much defined driving margin with multiple lanes, a digital autobahn. In that sense, it can be easily undermined or sabotaged during the invisible virtual war. However, the shared affinity among the (virtual) hypertext and the (physical) autobahn is limited to the functionality and the aim they already incorporate as ideas; there is not any kind of connection in structural terms. “Physical transport technology has been evolved to support and facilitate the conclusive personal motion on a layer weaved above the vital urban characteristics and coming to be a definite variable that affected the deadening of the city” [Sennett 1977, p. 262]. Hypertext, just like the fake city-domains of Geocities, marks the inception of the (physical) object transcendence into its idealized form, obtaining the role of the Shadows in Plato’s allegory of the Cave. The physical human body, largely separated from its species managed to overcome the axioms of individuality which was imposed as the sign of a superior race and an already developed civilization [Deamer 2014]; social networking became the antidote, enabling humans to (virtually) overcome the unbearable melancholy that haunted them [Keller 2009]. Surprisingly, in October 2009 Geocities were taken down from the servers. The vague mystery that surrounds this “digital massacre” [Lialina Olia, contemporary-home-computing. org] has been investigated by various journalists and prior web-page owners resulting in an interesting reasoning list that covers two major

problematic aspects which are summarized by the backstage actions of Yahoo™. The well-known digital tycoon and its entrepreneurs’ marketing policy backsteps threatened the existence of “the most significant virtual museum in recent history that practically documented almost every facet of culture” [Milian Mark, latimesblogs. latimes.com]; besides, Geocities were partially created by the personal data and memories of the individual users, their residents, assigning immediately to Yahoo the role of the governor, the “protector of the city” whom unfortunately commited the same mistakes discussed by Socrates in the “Republic”[Plato, Republic]. The corporation’s nonchalance to evolve their “product” thus being unresponsive to the needs of the users, and the failure to keep track of the technological assets that could possibly fix the bandwidth issues and enlarge the datadisplay capabilities marked the doom of one of the most important parts in networking history resulting in an non-estimated number of abandoned sites; the digital ruins of the primitive internet era. The latter term is a momentum of the unending “temporality” of system networks data, which in turn are incapable of being holistically “taken out of service” and far from correlated to the users’ “lifecycle” [Brubaker, jedbrubaker. com]. One could visualize them as “an (un) intentionally uninhabited, unresponsive digital space” but generally they are identified as a rather forced state of digital data contradicting a logical, computational, evolutionary process

that connives the already established notion of “legacy” [Gulotta et al, 2013]. Before turning into ruins, digital/virtual objects are threatened by a set of processes that do not generate any similarities to the physical ones. One major issue “is the rapid rate with which formats change and become obsolete. Another is that small amounts of damage to the code of a digital object can render it instantaneously and entirely inaccessible” [Gulotta et al 2013, p. 3]. By the time Yahoo realized that “no tangible profit can be obtained directly from them”, Geocities ended up as a “derelict website, pathetically trapped”, the death of which was marked by their administrators’ faults [De la Rosa, 2012]. In this case, it is the “memory of their existence” [Gulotta et al 2013, p. 3] that turned them into ruins, leaving behind a great amount of objet trouvé that digital archeologists since brought to light. At this point, I should add one more argument concerning Geocities’ “death”, which enhances further their close relation to the physical realm, the transformations in capitalism after 1978 and the slow birth of “neoliberalism” as a global economical doctrine; a system devoted to informational technologies that can perform an in-depth analyze and draw conclusions from massive databases in order to “guide decisions in the global marketplace” [Harvey 2005, p. 03]. In that sense, Geocities were generally governed by a certain weakness to comply with the rules already imposed by the capital globalization. Their site format was abstract, in a sense that it could not be further examined or manipulated using pattern recognition strategies which in turn help to develop the guide marketing decision. Each personal web-page was easily

customizable by the users themselves, sharing none of the characteristics that came along with “Facebook”; personal info, tastes and interests were not obligatory, thus omitted most of the times. The announcement of Geocities’ death triggered the creation of a few smaller web organizations of Internet-archaeologists that focused on meticulously “exploring, recovering, archiving and showcasing the graphic artifacts found within the earlier Internet culture of Geocities” heyday, taking advantage of the networks’ memory banks, which in turn maintain the information of these matrixes even after erasing them – meaning that information is not obliterated. On the contrary, it is still being maintained inside computer memory since some of them are indispensable for the Web’s basic functions. “The preservation of digital ruins is of high importance in order to understand the birth of Internet in general. Internet archaeology focuses on graphic artifacts only, with the belief that images are most culturally revealing and immediate. Unlike traditional archaeology, where physical artifacts are unearthed; these artifacts are digital, thus more temporal and transient” (internetarchaeology.org), with a few of them still being supported by Japanese web hosts. Moreover, there is a diacritic commonplace between the physical and virtual aspects of ruins, especially as the raw products of isolation and abandonment processes, accelerated inside the relativity of virtual time. The aforementioned Image Credit: Diamadis Tegelidis

THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES

processes are simultaneously taking place in the parallel, physical space, magnified in scale. Interestingly, the virtual condition, instead of exhausting itself in its verbal description, is slowly building itself up, over the leftovers of a decaying postmodern society just as modernism did at the dawn of the previous century, molding itself during the disastrous aftermath of two global wars and a generative wish for a better future. A larvae form of virtual reality, GeoCities was the pedestal for expediting our perception of the virtual world; the altar on which the physical object was sacrificed for its dissemination to the Virtual, initially as an idea and gradually as mutation. Slowly and steadily, each physical, tangible (or ideal) object (or notion) will have its interpreted doppelganger inside the virtual interspace. Dissociated from its former structural elements, the newlyencrypted clone is in fact a mutation of its progenitor, unable to wear out, with an embedded scripted tendency to immortality. Ranging from linguistic transmutations to holistic space surrogates, either driven by the principles of capitalism’s mere acquisitiveness - which also dominate the web - or simply by the human fear in front of an ever inundated physical environment, the disappearance of the physical object had a straight impact on our parallel reality. Human and Internet history – if one can draw a separating line among them – share the unequal and discriminatory research methods of the events that burst out in their region of interest [Asimov 1988]. However, the latter is blustering throughout birth traces, contradicting the

former and its obsession on death fossils. The crystallization of death momentums that have been preserved by various scientific means, from image generation to object preservation is accounted to a “fetichization” of death and the banal that brings along both as notion and practice, shaping our memories as humans mostly through propagandistic exposure curried along the ages. Almost every aspect of human culture, scientific, religious or political can be described as a concatenation of destructive forces and death events. Yet, inside the Virtual, death is ignorant or absent. Even after almost 35 years, the Socratic Method that Sennett manipulated to correlate the inability of the outside world to respond to humans leading to the inevitable isolation maintains its probative power mostly due to the concurrent dialectic between the post-human and the city as software. Humanity is moving through a transitional phase of cognition, appreciating the physical city as a failed experiment, an environment that we shouldn’t further deal with, a space of disclosure and mere disappointment. Using the memorial data provided by internet users, produced in hypes due to “the absence of further processing delays” [Dourish & Mazmanian 2011, p. 13], Geocities has been the virtual embryo whose body devoured the hype of uploaded data that carried a certain amount of empiricism into the Virtual, shaping its topology; their cursory investigation hints the fact that “the future is something we have started a long time ago” [Heinlein, 1987].

THE DIGITAL RUINS OF GEOCITIES

ENDNOTES: BOOKS 1.

1. Asimov, I. (1988) Prelude to foundation, New York, NY: Doubleday.

1. Aureli, P. V. (2011) the possibility of an absolute architecture, Cambridge-MA, London-England: the MIT press.

2. Boyer, C. M. (1996) Cybercities, New York-NY, Princeton Architectural Press.

3. Deamer, P. (2014) Architecture and capitalism; 1845 to the present, New York-NY: Routledge.

4. Harvey, D. (2005) a brief history of neoliberalism, New York-NY: Oxford University Press.

5. Heinlein R. A. (1987), Stranger in a strange land, New York, N.Y: Ace books.

6. Keller, T. [2009] Counterfeit Gods, USA: Penguin Group Inc.

7. Plato, Emlyn-Jones, C. J. Preddy, William, (2013), Republic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

8. RanciĂ¨re, J. (2007) the Future of the Image, [no place of edition]: Verso.

10.

9. Sennett, R. (1977) the fall of public man, London-England: Penguin Books.

11.

10. Virilio, P. (1991) the aesthetics of disappearance, United States of America: Semiotext (e).

DISSERTATIONS 1.

Dourish, P. Mazmanian, M. [2011], Media as Material: Information Representations as Material Foundations for Organizational Practice, Working Paper for the Third International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, University of California, Irvine.

Gulotta et al. [2013], Digital Artifacts as Legacy: Exploring the Lifespan and Value of Digital Data, Thesis, HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

E-TEXT 1.

WEB

De La Rosa, L., [date unknown]. On Digital Ruins; [E-book] Available at: inxilio.files.wordpress. com/2012/04/ondigitalruins-delarosa.pdf > [Accessed 12 May 2013].

<www.oocities.org> [accessed 25.01.2014],

<www.internetarchaeology.org> [accessed 27.01.2014]

<www. hoodedutilitarian.com>, [accessed 13.01.2014]

<www.contemporary-home-computing.org>, [accessed 24.04.2013]

<www.latimesblogs.latimes.com>, [accessed 24.04.2013]

<www.jedbrubaker.com>, [accessed 30.06.2013]

100 104 108 112 116 120 124 Joseph Odoerfer

OLD VISIONS OF NEW CITIES Joseph Odoerfer is a professor of architecture and associate dean of architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught for the last twenty-seven years. He studied art history at Wayne State University and earned his B.S. in Architecture and Masters in Architecture at the University of Detroit, where he was awarded the American Institute of Architects Scholarship for Academic Excellence and the American Institute of Architects School Medal. Professor Odoerfer teaches classes in architectural history, building technology, and architectural design. In 1994 he was named Michigan Architectural Educator of the Year. He is also a registered architect and has worked as a consultant for a number of Detroit area architectural firms. He interned under Harold H. Fisher, winner of the 2000 Arthur Ross Award for excellence in the classical tradition. It is through Harold Fisher, that Professor Odoerfer developed an interest in the architecture of the American Beaux-Arts Movement.

Figure 5: The Court of Honor looking east. Photographer unknown, From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

Introduction Between 1828 and 1984, more than sixty major expositions were held in the United States, many of these World’s Fairs. The rationale for these expositions was to promote the material achievements of world culture. Four of these fairs – the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, and Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 – transcended this function to become utopian visions of the future city. Unlike their European counterparts of the same period, which expressed their temporary nature, these American expositions attempted to create an image of permanency and reality with impermanent materials, such as staff. This was done because they were intended to be models of an ideal city. This image was so strong that in 1901 John Brisben Walker ,writing for The Cosmopolitan, described them as “the city of the future,” writing that at their “close the aggregation of palaces might have been converted into a model city …”1

The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 The site for the World’s Columbian Exposition was Jackson Park, a 600 acre, triangular-shaped tract of flat, swampy land on Lake Michigan. About six miles south of downtown Chicago, it was one of seven sites to be considered. The Chicago architect Daniel Burnham was named chief of construction and his partner, John

102

OLD VISIONS OF FUTURE CITIES

Root, was appointed consulting architect. The original exposition plan, although drawn by John Root, was a collaborative work between the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, his assistant Henry Codman, Burnham, Root, and the engineer A. Gottlieb (Figure 1). Charles Moore, a friend and biographer of Burnham, wrote that the “general scheme of land and water for the Exposition was suggested by Mr. Olmsted, but the arrangement of the terraces, bridges, and landings was made by his partner, Harry Codman. The size and number of the buildings was determined by Olmsted, Codman, Burnham, and Root, working on a schedule made by the Classification Committee …”2 A system of lagoons ran through the site, although in the exposition plan at the south end – the base of the triangle – the lagoon became a formal basin; this area was called the Court of Honor. The basin was surrounded by an orthogonal arrangement of buildings. To the north was a wooded island surrounded by a naturalistic water feature and an informal arrangement of buildings; this area was called the Lagoon. Once this plan was approved, Burnham selected a team of architects to design the individual exposition buildings. To design the buildings around the more formal and monumental Court of Honor (Figure 2), Burnham selected a group of architects who had some form of Beaux-Arts training. Richard Morris Hunt, the

Figure 1: Studebaker Map of the World’s Columbian Fairgrounds, Ink on paper. Cartographer unknown, c. 1893. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

Figure 2: Court of Honor. Photograph by C.D. Arnold, 1893. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

first American to study at the École des BeauxArts in Paris, led the group. Hunt designed the centerpiece of the composition, the Administration Building. Also included in this group of architects were Robert Swain Peabody, Charles Follen McKim, George B. Post, Henry Van Brunt, and Charles Atwood, who designed the Peristyle opposite Hunt’s Administration Building. To design the buildings around the Lagoon, Burnham selected Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, Henry Ives Cobb, and the firm of Jenney Mundie. Willoughby J. Edbrooke of Washington, D.C. was selected to design the U.S. Government Building, and Sophia Hayden of Boston won the competition to design the Woman’s Building. Augustus Saint-Gaudens of New York was chosen to select the sculptors for the fair and Francis Millet, the fair’s director of decoration, who worked with John LaFarge on the murals of Trinity Church in Boston, selected the muralists for the exposition. The expressed purpose of the exposition was to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Its utopian vision of the “White City,” as it came to be known, however, proved to be its most lasting influence. “The White City’ was a utopian city, a model for redefining modern urban life, a striking contradiction to the Grey City of industrialism, capitalism, labor strife, disease, overcrowding, vast gulfs of class and race, and equal gulfs between architectural monuments and the shacks, shanties and temporary buildings that characterized the chaotic and unpredictable conditions of urban

104

Figure 3: Looking south across the west end of the Court of Honor, Photograph by C.D. Arnold, 1893. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

Figure 4: Administration Building at night, Richard Morris Hunt, architect. Photographer unknown. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

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life in 1893”3 The author, William Dean Howels, after visiting the White City, “used the fair as a utopian symbol of the planned society in his Letters of an Altrurian Traveler.”4 English professor, Katharine Lee Bates, after visiting the White City penned the line “thine alabaster cities gleam” in her song America the Beautiful.5 The appellation of the White City stemmed from two aspects of the Chicago Fair’s design. First, white was the color chosen for the exposition buildings framing the Court of Honor (Figure 3). The decision to use white was made by Francis Millet whose assistant, Charles Yardley Turner, invented a system that allowed the white paint to be applied by compressed-air squirt guns. A single color for the buildings increased the speed of the painting processes by eliminating concerns of overspray. The use of white was in stark contrast to the dark brown color palette of American Victorian architecture. Second, the use of electric exterior lighting caused the buildings to gleam at night. This was the first mass display of the use of electricity to illuminate large areas (Figure 4). As such, the buildings of the fair were probably startlingly bright to viewers unaccustomed to electric lighting. Thus, the name “White City” reflects the classical past and the industrial future. The Court of Honor was the most highly structured ensemble of buildings at the Chicago Fair. It was a rectangular space 350 feet by 1,110 feet with a T-shaped water basin filling the center. The arrangement was balanced, but not symmetrical. Hunt’s Administration building to the west, with its 250-foot tall dome, was the agreed upon centerpiece of the composition. At the east end was Atwood’s Peristyle, a double colonnade open to Lake Michigan. The buildings forming the space were all designed in Roman and Renaissance adaptations of the classical orders taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. They also shared a common cornice height and bay width; buildings defining the Court of Honor had a standard bay width of twenty feet6 and a common cornice height of sixty feet7. With both of these devices, a measure of flexibility was allowed. Bay widths could vary slightly from the standard twenty feet and domes and pavilions could break the sixty feet height restriction. Stylistic variation was provided as well. Hunt designed his Administration Building in a French Renaissance style, McKim used Roman Classicism for his Agriculture Building, and Peabody and Sterns chose Spanish Renaissance for their Machinery Building. In fact, Burnham insisted that, “all buildings be as distinct from each other as they could possibly be.”8 The new urban system being taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, keeping with the classical tradition, taught that a central function of architecture was to organize urban space. Unlike the monuments of the Gothic period, which were typically autonomous objects in the urban context, this new urban system resulted in buildings that yielded to the power of the street and square.9 The structures in the Court of Honor were subordinate to the 350 foot by 1,100 foot space they framed, defining the edges of the rectangular court with a continuous arcade. Entrances and end pavilions were allowed

Figure 5: The Court of Honor looking east. Photographer unknown, From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

to push beyond the edges of the space (Figure 5). Even the ubiquitous white was relieved by accent colors: the domes were gilded; the walls behind the Administrative building’s second-stage colonnade were painted a dull red;10 the Machinery hall used strong colors in the porch ceilings.11 This use of variation kept the order from being oppressive and was to become a reoccurring theme in fair design. The Lagoon (Figure 6) offered a contrast to the strong order of the Court of Honor. The water feature was organized organically rather than geometrically and the building arrangement was freer. The Horticulture and Women’s Buildings were skewed with respect to the Transportation, U.S. Government, and Fisheries buildings. Trees and vegetation were more naturalistically arranged and were used to separate the buildings. Stylistically, there is more freedom as well. The Horticulture and Women’s buildings are both in a Renaissance style while the Fisheries building is Romanesque and Sullivan’s Transportation building is an eclectic mix of Islamic and Byzantine decorative motifs. And on the wooded island in the center of the lagoon was a complex of Japanese pavilions called Ho-o-den. The Lagoon and the Court of Honor were contrasting conceptions of public space,

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Figure 6: The Lagoon. Photographer unknown. From the Chicago Historical Society.

one agrarian and the other urban. Nearly all the exposition buildings were embellished with sculpture. This is especially true of the Court of Honor, where buildings were decorated with allegorical figures and plant motifs. The entrance to Hunt’s Administration building was framed by large sculpture groupings by Karl Bitter, who would go on to be director of sculpture at the Pan-American and Louisiana Purchase expositions. Enormous sculpture groups topped the building’s corners. The roof of Atwood’s Peristyle was lined with statues by Theodore Baur. Daniel Chester French and Edward Clark Potter designed a quadriga representing Columbus in a Roman triumphal chariot above the central triumphal arch. McKim, Mead and White’s Agriculture building had one of the most elaborate sculptural programs with a pediment group depicting the Triumph of Ceres (the Roman goddess of agriculture). A series of angels sculpted by Philip Martiny lined the attic. All the sculpture had a clear relationship to the building it embellished. Martiny’s angels were placed above columns reinforcing the rhythm of the twenty-foot bay spacing (Figure 7). Sculpture was used to emphasize entrances, to give visual weight to corners, to fill the plank spaces of pediments and

spandrel panels, and to mark the top of domes and pediments. In the Agriculture building, quadrigas above projecting bays were used to break the monotony of the repeating twentyfoot bay module over the building’s 800-foot length. Freestanding sculptural pieces and groupings were also used to mark key points in the spatial composition. Daniel Chester French’s 65-foot-high gilded statue titled The Republic marked the east end of the basin. Frederick MacMonnies’ Columbia Fountain, a lower and broader sculptural grouping, punctuated the opposite end of the Basin. On bridges and in front of buildings were statues of animals native to the United States such as bison, bears, moose, and elk (Figure 8). Freestanding columns topped and ornamented with sculpture defined the edges of the Basin as it met the canals and the Columbia Fountain. The building’s interiors were decorated with sculpture as well as mural paintings that also had a clear relationship to the building. Mural paints were designed to fill pendentives and decorate vaults and tympanum. Except for a few oil-on-canvas lunettes, the murals were painted directly on plaster and exist now only in black and white photographs and studies.12 The aesthetic experience must have been remarkable for in April of 1893, a month before the Chicago fair ended, the Municipal Art Society in New York was founded.13 The fair also inspired a series of Municipal Arts projects such as the interior decoration of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. where many alumni from the Chicago fair were employed.

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Figure 7: Agricultural Building, McKim, Mead & White, architects. Photographer unknown. From the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Figure 9: Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building under construction, George B. Post, architect. Photograph by C.D. Arnold, 1892. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

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Figure 8: Administration Building, Richard Morris Hunt, architect. Photographer unknown, October 9, 1893. From the Collection of the Chicago History Museum.

The Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Columbian Exposition also made significant contributions to building technology. It was the first mass display of the use of electricity to illuminate large areas. Buildings, fountains, and boulevards made use of night illumination. More than 120,000 incandescent lights and 7,000 arc lights were used. Ten times the electric power was used at the Chicago fair as was used at the 1889 Paris exposition, and three times the electricity as was used in the city of Chicago during the time of the fair.14 The sewage from the fair was chemically treated and incinerated onsite.15 Fair goers could ride a movable sidewalk from Casino Pier to and from the Court of Honor. Steel was used to construct the exposition buildings, providing relatively column-free interior space (Figure 9). Although the exposition buildings were clad in the historical styles of the past, their interiors were built using modern train shed technology.

The Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 The Pan-American Exposition was not a world’s fair, but a fair of the Americas. Its purpose was to celebrate the achievements of civilization in the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenthcentury. The Buffalo fair was smaller, less successful economically, and was never the epochmaking event that the Chicago fair proved to be. The site for the Buffalo fair was the 350-acre, Dexter Rumsey farm, adjacent to Frederick Law Olmstead’s Delaware Park. Only 8 million people visited the Buffalo Fair compared to over 27 million visitors to the Chicago fair, resulting in expenses outstripping revenues two-to-one16 and ultimately leading to a Congressional bailout. Despite these shortcomings, the Buffalo fair made significant contributions to the development of the utopian vision provide by the Chicago fair. John Carrère of the New York firm of Carrère and Hastings was selected as Chair of the Board of Architects at Daniel Burnham’s recommendation. Carrère, educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, had worked in the office of McKim, Mead and White. All but one of the Board members had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts or worked for an architect who did, so the French influence continued, particularly in planning. Karl Bitter was appointed Director of Sculpture, Charles Yardley Turner was Director of Color, Rudolf Ulrich was in charge of horticulture, and Luther Stieringer directed electric lighting; all four were veterans of the Chicago fair. The Board of Directors of the exposition restricted the architectural style with the following statement: “This is to be an American Exposition – North, South and Middle Americas and our Islands of the Seas. Neither Greece nor Rome, nor yet Turkey come into this thing. It shouldn’t be particularly classic, Gothic or Byzantine. Perhaps we cannot get away altogether from the old principles of construction, but we can at least make an effort to exemplify American architectural ideas, if we can find them.”17 This charge led the Architectural Board to look for a style of architecture indigenous to both North and South America or at least a style with some history in both continents. Initially the SpanishAmerican mission style was chosen, but this became more liberally interpreted to mean Spanish Renaissance. Many architects of this period, including Carrère’s partner Thomas Hastings, believed that American architects should follow the principles established during the Renaissance; over time the American spirit, and modern social conditions and technology would result in a uniquely American version of classical architecture.18 Today, we have a tendency to think of style as the embodiment of a particular time and place, but architects like Hastings (and probably Carrère) believed that historical styles contained universal aspects, as well as temporal. The reasoning

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Figure 10: Aerial View of the Pan-American Exposition, 1901, From the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division.

behind beginning with the Renaissance was that the social conditions of that period most closely resembled those of America at the turn of the century. In starting with a historical model, the architect drew from the wealth of knowledge of previous generations, and also maintained the presence of the past in their utopian visions for the future city. The exposition buildings were formally arranged in a rectangular area 3,000 feet by 5,000 feet (Figure 10). It was said to be the most compact fair ever built.19 A canal, 30 to 50 feet wide encircled the entire group of exposition buildings, widening into a small pond (called Mirror Lake) at the south entrance. The canal placed the exposition buildings within well-defined, formal limits and allowed more freedom in the arrangement of fair buildings beyond its limits.20 The exposition buildings were arranged around a central north-south axis and two large public spaces, the Esplanade and the Court of Fountains. Carrère’s concept was to combine the formality of

French planning with the flexibility and visual interest of the picturesque architecture that was popular in America during the nineteenthcentury. The result was a picturesque ensemble on a formal ground plan, an approach Carrère called “formality picturesquely developed.”21 This arrangement allowed building groupings to define public spaces, but provided the individual architect considerable freedom in the design of the building façade. The thought was that this system would allow the common cornice height used in the Chicago Fair to be abandoned without a loss of formal or spatial unity, permitting adjacent buildings to substantially vary in height (Figure 11). Although the Buffalo fair was smaller than Chicago, it had a larger number of public spaces. Carrère designed the areas between buildings and delegated the work of designing the fair’s exhibition palaces to other architects. He designed the site furniture, bridges, colonnades and pergolas that articulated and defined the public spaces of the fair. As was mentioned earlier, the Buffalo fair had two main public spaces, but it also had a number of secondary spaces of varying scales. Spaces were also organized on the main north-south axis. Beginning at the south end of the northsouth axis was a forecourt that collected visitors entering from the Lincoln Parkway Gate, Water Gate, Meadow Gate, and Elmwood Gate. From the forecourt, fairgoers passed over the Triumphal Bridge (Figure 12), the main entrance to the complex of exposition buildings. The bridge design was a collaboration between John

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Carrère and the sculptor Karl Bitter. At each corner of this bridge was a gigantic pylon; these pylons were 40 feet by 50 feet in plan and were capped by equestrian statues by Bitter that were thirty feet tall. The four pylons marked the crossing of the fair’s entrance and defined a large space. From the bridge, the exposition buildings and main spaces of the fair were revealed. Opposite the Triumphal Bridge terminating the Axis of the Esplanade was John Galen Howard’s Electric Tower soaring to a height of 375 feet (Figure13). The vertical mass of the Electric tower created a powerful visual counterpoint to the void defined by the four pylons of the Triumphal Bridge. 22 Water gushed from the base of the Electric Tower, symbolic of the power generated from Niagara Falls, while the Triumphal Bridge spanned the placid waters of Mirror Lake. The grade rose 10 feet from the south entrance to the Electric Tower; this required considerable land-fill since the original grade at the Tower was two feet lower than entrance level. This was done to avoid the perception that the Tower was sinking into its supporting ground. 23 Visitors crossing the bridge entered the Esplanade, a huge space designed to hold a quarter of a million people. The Esplanade’s longest dimension ran perpendicular to the main north-south axis, establishing the first in a series of secondary axes running east and west. To the north is Philip Martiny’s Fountain of Abundance, a large pyramidal fountain which is centered on the north-south axis between the Esplanade and the Court of Fountains. Just north of the Fountain of Abundance is the second east-west cross-axis where two smaller courts were placed to the east and west of the south end of the Court of Fountains. The courts were identical in plan but developed with differing characters in elevation. These two courts had centralized arrangements and were intended to be resting places. In contrast, the Court of Fountains was designed to celebrate the spectacle of crowds and movement (Figure 14). Its long axis ran north and south, and was centered on the main north-south axis of movement. Its center was filled with a huge water basin whose long axis directed the eye to the Tower of Electricity. Between the Court of Fountains and the Electric Tower was the third cross axis. This secondary axis, called the Mall, was a broad concourse, 150 feet wide, and extended the full width of the exposition area, connecting via bridges to the other fair buildings. Beyond the Electric Tower was the last cross axis, the Plaza. This space served as a transitional area between the exposition buildings and the train station to Figure 11: Court of Fountains, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY, 1901, Photographer unknown. From the photographic collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. Figure 12: Triumphal Bridge, John Carrère, architect. Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY, 1901, Photographer unknown. From the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. Figure 13: Electric Tower, John Galen Howard, architect. Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY, 1901, Photograph by C.D. Arnold, Official Views of Pan-American Exposition.

Figure 14: Court of Fountains, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY, 1901, Photograph by C.D. Arnold, U.C. Berkeley, Bancroft Library.

the north of the grounds which was intended to be a minor entrance. Carrère saw the south as the main entrance to the exposition, where he envisioned fairgoers entering through Delaware Park to the Fore Court and the Triumphal Bridge where all 13 major exposition buildings would be visible and the Electric Tower the focal point. Unfortunately, the railway entrance to the north proved to be the most popular, resulting in many visitors failing to experience the orchestrated progression as intended. Like the Chicago fair, the Pan-American Exposition was a collaborative effort among architects, sculptors, painters, horticulturists, and engineers with the intent of creating a city as a work of art; although its vision was of a “Rainbow City” rather than a “White City.” The color scheme for the Rainbow City was an intellectual extension of the expressed purpose of the fair, but rather than celebrating 100 years of progress, it attempted to “show human development from primitive animal origins to the advanced industrial state.”24 The idea began with Karl Bitter who, inspired by

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Figure 15: Night Scene taken from the East Esplanade looking toward the Electric Tower, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY, 1901, Photographer unknown. From the photographic collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Social-Darwinism, proposed it as a system for organizing the profusion of statuary and fountains throughout the Exposition. This symbolic development would begin at the south entrance with animalistic and agricultural themes, and then progress north to mythological and more culturally elevated themes. This culminated in the Electric Tower, the symbolic pinnacle of Western social evolution and focal point of the composition. Charles Yardley Turner, the Director of Color, followed suit by proposing a color scheme that progressed from intense, primitive colors and strong contrasts in the south to softer, more refined and harmonious colors as one moved north. The colors changed until the whole prismatic spectrum seemed to be exhausted.25 The intent was to create a system for integrating color and sculpture on an urban scale. The Pan-American Exposition also embraced the latest technology and even made refinements in electric lighting over Chicago (Figure 15). There was a much more extensive use of electricity for exterior lighting, made possible because of innovations at Niagara Falls that allowed alternating

current to be transmitted to Buffalo. Gas arclamps were almost completely eliminated on the exterior. There was also an attempt to create more uniform illumination through the use of eight candle-power lamps, which softened the light and reduced glare.26 The lights were turned on at night by passing the current through a rheostat bringing the lights from zero to full candle-power in 80-seconds, creating a novel and spectacular lighting effect.27

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 The St. Louis Fair celebrated the centennial of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, although its opening was delayed from 1903 to 1904 to coincide with the 1904 Olympic Games. It was the intention of the fair’s executive committee to build a more extravagant fair than either the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago or the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.28 To this end, a large site totaling 1,240 acres was selected, making it the largest fair to date in land area. Its site was so large that an intramural railroad was required to transport visitors within the fair grounds. 29 The site presented another challenge not faced at the other two fairs: that of a sixty-foot change in elevation. The general layout for the fair was the work of the fair’s director of works, Isaac S. Taylor. 30 As with previous fairs, the exhibition palaces formed the architectural and aesthetic centerpiece of the fair grounds. New York architect Cass Gilbert chaired the committee responsible for the plan of this area (Figure

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Figure 16: Map of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO, 1904, Map Maker: Buxton and Skinner Company, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Figure 17: Grand Basin in Front of Festival Hall, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO, 1904. Photograph: 1904. From Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections.

Opposite Page, Figure 18: Aerial View of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO, 1904. Chromolithograph by Gray Lithographic Company after Charles Graham, 1903. From Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections.

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16).31 The organization was fan-shaped with the fair’s focal point, Festival Hall, at its apex (Figure 17). Gilbert was responsible for the design of this 200’ tall, domed auditorium. Festival Hall was placed on the site’s high point thus aligning the topographical and architectural focal points. The Hall and main entrance were on axis and connected by a series of spaces open to the north allowing the vista to continue from the entrance to Festival Hall. Like the Buffalo Fair, the movement was from south to north, and from lower to higher. Unlike the Buffalo and Chicago fairs, which relied on rectangular compositions, the St. Louis fair plan was more Baroque in conception with three radial axes that met at a point some three hundred feet beyond Festival Hall. Although the central axis was terminated by Festival Hall, the axes to the east and west were not (Figure 18). These secondary axes were terminated with smaller, domed restaurant pavilions located east and west of Festival Hall. These pavilions rested on the same hill as Festival Hall and were connected to it by two crescent-shaped colonnades to form one large structure. The three pavilion structures were linked to a central grand basin by elaborate waterfalls called the Cascades, one emanating from

each pavilion (Figure 19). The Cascades were illuminated with underwater electric lighting (Figure 20). This arrangement created a unique terminus for each axis, which facilitated orientation in the large complex by day or night (Figure 21). Stylistically, the St. Louis Fair continued the tradition of Beaux-Arts inspired architecture established at the two previous fairs with French-born Emmanuel Louis Masqueray as Chief of Design. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1879 to 1884 and was a classmate of John Carrère. Under Masqueray’s guidance, the St. Louis Fair used the same classical vocabulary as earlier fairs, but with a more Baroque exuberance. Domes were more vertical, the forms more dynamic, and the decoration more lavish, showing a clear intent to excite the fair goer. Like the Chicago fair, sculpture both embellished buildings and marked key points in the composition. The Cascades and the surrounding hillside, known as “Art Hill,” were embellished with freestanding sculpture in dynamic compositions. The general theme for the sculpture was a celebration of the American Manifest Destiny encouraged by the Louisiana Purchase. Given the historical theme, there was more portraiture than in the previous fairs, although the director of sculpture, Karl Bitter, did manage to include some allegorical sculpture. Unlike his scheme for the Buffalo fair, Bitter did not attempt to create a thematic progression as one moved through the fair. The only attempt at an overall organization of the sculptural program was a general movement

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Figure 19: Post card of Festival Hall and the Cascades. Artist: unknown. From the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

Figure 20: Central Cascades and Festival Hall at night, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO, 1904. Photographer: unknown. From the St. Louis Public Library.

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Figure 21: The East Lagoon, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MO, 1904. Photographer: unknown. From Cosmopolitan Magazine, September 1904.

from portrait sculpture to allegorical sculpture moving from north to south. Like the other fairs, water was a major feature; over 90,000 gallons of water per minute poured from the three Cascades of Art Hill into the Grand Basin.32 One and a half miles of canal looped through the exhibition palaces giving the fair a Venetian atmosphere, reinforced by the presence of singing gondoliers imported from Venice. Like the Chicago and Buffalo Fairs, space was treated as a constituent element of the composition. The areas between the buildings were as carefully planned as the buildings themselves, with the same Beaux-Arts hierarchical arrangement of spaces. Like the two previous fairs, the major exterior spaces were placed on a central axis, but in this case the exhibition palaces were arranged on three axes rather than a single main axis. The entrance to each circulation axis was placed at the north rather than at both ends of the axis, as was the case in the Chicago and Buffalo fairs. This controlled the entrance sequence and avoided the awkward situation that occurred at the Buffalo fair where the majority of fair goers entered from the ‘back door’. Another change from the Buffalo fair was the return to a common cornice height rather than Carrère’s concept of

“formality picturesquely developed.” This is surprising, given that Carrère was on the planning committee and a close friend of Masqueray. Perhaps “formality picturesquely developed” was seen as inappropriate given the larger scale of the plan. The bold color scheme of the Buffalo fair was not repeated either. The major buildings were painted a glistening white, resulting in the fair being called the “Ivory City.”

Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition, planned by architects Willis Polk, Edward Bennett, and George Kelham, celebrated the construction and 1914 opening of the Panama Canal. The fair’s plan was to some extent a reaction to criticism of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Many fair goers in St. Louis complained about long walking distances between the exposition palaces. The San Francisco fair was a fraction of the size of St. Louis – about 625 acres – although it handled nearly the same number of visitors. The site was a two-and-one- half-mile strip of land along the San Francisco Bay. Eight of the main exhibition palaces were grouped together in a single block divided into eight sections by one longitudinal and three transverse axial streets (Figure 22).33 In this arrangement, the greatest distance between two exhibition halls was about eight city blocks.34 The various exhibition palaces played a subordinate role to the spaces they defined. The plan was

Figure 22: Plan Grounds and Buildings of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. From the Special Collections of UC Santa Cruz.

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Figure 24: The Palace of Fine Arts, Bernard Maybeck, architect, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. Photographer: James David. From the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division.

conceived as a series of interconnected courtyards.35 Space was considered so important that the architects were assigned to the design of courtyards rather than individual buildings; for example, the architect of the Court of the Four Seasons was Henry Bacon who not only determined the shape and amenities of the courtyard, but also designed the facades facing the space as well. The three intersection points of the four axial streets were celebrated with three courtyards: the Court of Four Seasons, the Court of the Universe, and the Court of Abundance. The central and largest of these courtyards was the Court of the Universe, designed by McKim, Mead and White (Figure 23). This courtyard was nearly as large as Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro in Rome on which it was based. The Court of the Universe was oval in plan, celebrating the meeting of east and west made possible by the Panama Canal. The long axis of the oval ran east and west. At the east end was the Arch of the Rising Sun, a gigantic triumphal arch capped with a quadriga depicting the Spirit of the East riding on an elephant surrounded by a variety of figures symbolizing aspects of eastern culture. To the west was another triumphal arch, but there the quadriga grouping gathered around a Conestoga wagon. The axis continued through both arches and linked a series of courtyards. To the east were the Florentine Court, then the Court of Abundance, and then the Court of Mines with the axis terminating in the east with the Machinery Palace. To the west were the

Figure 23: The Court of the Universe, McKim, Mead and White, architects, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. Photographer: unknown. From Shaping San Francisco’s Digital Archive.

Venetian Court, the Court of Four Seasons, and the Sunset Court, with the axis culminating in a large lagoon and Bernard Maybeck’s Fine Arts Palace (Figure 24). The north-south axis began at the south end with the main fair entrance, followed by the South Gardens and the Tower of Jewels which served as a gateway to the Court of the Universe. Then to the north of the Court of the Universe was the Forecourt of the Stars and the Column of Progress with the vista continuing to the Bay and the mountains beyond. The axes organized and linked these courtyards, which varied in size and character to create a rich urban ensemble. Stylistically, the San Francisco fair continued the Beaux-Arts classicism used in the previous fairs. Given the fair location in California, the state’s Spanish heritage was an architectural source; this was mingled with sources from the Italian Renaissance, Byzantine, and even Aztec elements. The intended architectural centerpiece of the fair was Thomas Hasting’s Tower of Jewels, which served the dual function of focal point and principal gateway (Figure 25). The structure was a strange combination of a tower and a triumphal arch. The design was criticized at the time for its use of horizontal layering in an essentially vertical form and for its overuse of ornament, but it did make the main entrance clearly identifiable throughout the fair. The Figure 25: Fountain of Energy, A. Stirling Calder, sculptor. Tower of Jewels, Thomas Hastings, architect. Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. Photographer: unknown. From Views of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition vol. 2 (San Francisco: Cardinell-Vincent Co., 1915). Figure 26: Star Maiden finial, Colonnade of the Court of the Universe, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. From Architectural Record, March, 1915, p. 213.

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Tower was 435 feet tall and the heights of other architectural elements in the fair were limited to half that height, which allowed the Tower of Jewels to serve an orientation function. The director of color, Jules GuĂŠrin, created an elaborate system for using a variety of colors throughout the fair. Buildings were finished in a high-grade gypsum plaster that was embellished with pigments of French ochre, raw umber, and Italian burnt sienna. This, and the addition of hemp to the plaster, simulated the appearance of Roman travertine.36 He also established a series of eight accent colors that were applied to a strict set of elements. For example, deep cerulean blue was applied to recessed panels and ceiling vaults; golden burnt-orange was used on the molding and the small domes. This system allowed a number of vibrant colors to be used in the fair, but maintained a visual order. The allied arts played a major role at the San Francisco Fair. Karl Bitter, the official Director of Sculpture, provided a general scheme for the sculpture to be placed on buildings and grounds. However, he refused to go to the exposition grounds to supervise the execution of his design. In his place, Alexander Stirling Calder was named Acting Director of Sculpture. Under Calderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s direction there was a great deal of innovation and deviation from standard types. The unusual quadriga groupings in the Figure 27: Fountain of Energy, A. Stirling Calder, sculptor. Tower of Jewels, Thomas Hastings, architect. Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. Photographer: unknown. From Views of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition vol. 2 (San Francisco: Cardinell-Vincent Co., 1915). Figure 28: Electric Lighting, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1915. Photographer: unknown. From The Project Gutenberg EBook of Artificial Lighting, by M. Luckiesh.

Court of the Universe have already been mentioned. Also for the same court he created a new type of repeating architectural finial by abstracting a female figure (Figure 26 & 27). The fountain in this court, as well as the Fountain of Energy (Figure 25) in the South Gardens and Fountain of the Earth in the Court of Abundance, also deviate from classical prototypes.37 There was also an extensive use of mural painting at the fair. Unlike the other fairs, a large number of murals were placed outdoors under the protection of arcades and triumphal arches. With an elaborate landscape program, 80 acres of the exposition site were dedicated to gardens. Evergreens were selected exclusively for shrubs and trees and combined with a variety of flowers so that there would be color and blooms in all seasons. John McLaren, the Chief of Landscape Gardening, designed a green wall to enclose the fair on the city side. This wall was 30 feet high and 1,150 feet long and covered in ice plants. W.D. Arcy Ryan of General Electric was responsible for lighting at the fair, and his design was equally innovative; no light bulbs were visible in the exposition area (Figure 28). Ryan illuminated the exhibition area entirely with indirect lighting, rather than the light bulb stringcourses that outlined the buildings at the previous fairs. In its place, masked lamps flooded the walls and ornament of buildings. He also used an unprecedented level of decorative lighting. A battery of searchlights on a barge in the Bay projected light through steam creating an aurora like effect overhead.38 He placed 102,000 pieces of multicolored cut Bohemian glass on Hasting’s Tower of Jewels, which swayed in the breezes off the bay, reflecting colored light and creating a dazzling effect. The result of these new methods of illumination was so dramatic that Hastings, who was initially skeptical, became an ardent supporter of Ryan’s methods as did many of the other architects at the fair.39

Conclusion: The fairs were unique in the fact that they were realized visions. They went beyond drawings and models to become inhabitable, though temporary, urban developments. This allowed ideas of what constituted a perfect city to be tested. Architects and planners had the opportunity to see how people responded to the environments they created. It also made it possible for the designers themselves to experience directly the spaces and forms they envisioned. In addition, with the fairs following one another fairly quickly, it gave the designers of subsequent fairs the opportunity to assess previous fairs to incorporate what was successful and respond to weaknesses. The fairs, in particular the Chicago Fair, were instrumental in establishing the profession of city planner in America. As a result of the success of the fairs, many of their designers were launched into cityplanning careers and were able to apply what they had learned from their exposition experience to actual urban projects. Daniel Burnham, John Carrère, and Edward Bennett went on to careers as city planners. Many of the sculptors such as Augustus Saint Gaudens, Karl Bitter, and Frederick MacMonnies went on to design major pieces of urban sculpture.

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Each of these fairs shared a common vision of the ideal city: it should be a planned community as opposed to the haphazard development of most traditional cities; and it should be beautiful, integrating architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, and painting into the fabric of the city. The designers of these fairs also saw the ideal city as a series of articulated public spaces, varying in scale and character. The ideal city was one that incorporated all the scientific and engineering developments of the industrial revolution. They also looked to the future in their willingness to incorporate developments in sanitation, water supply, transportation, communication, power generation and lighting that were not yet used in modern cities at the time. In their arrangement of buildings and spaces, concept of beauty, and architectural vocabulary they drew from historical precedent, which made their solution easily transferable to an existing urban context. This willingness to draw from the past, present, and future makes the fairs unique in the history of twentieth century urban utopian schemes that tend to look to the future and disregard the past in creating the ideal. ENDNOTES: 1.

John Brisben Walker, “The City of the Future – A Prophecy,” The Cosmopolitan, v. 31, no. 5, Semptember 1901, p. 473.

Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham, Architect, Planner of Cities, New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921, p. 35.

Peter Bacon Hales, introduction to Spectacle in the White City: The Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, Mineola, New York: Calla Editions, 2009, p.xii.

Thomas S, Hine, Burnham of Chicago: Architect & Planner, Second Edition, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p.119.

Ace Collins, Songs Sung Red, White, and Blue: The Stories Behing America’s Best Loved Patriot Songs, New York: Harper, 2003, p. 19.

Stanley Appelbaum, Spectacle in the White City: The Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, Mineola, New York: Calla Editions, 2009, p.18.

Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White, McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks, New York, Rizzoli, 2003, p.121.

Daniel Burnham, quoted by Thomas S, Hine, Burnham of Chicago: Architect & Planner, Second Edition, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p.87.

Francois Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism, trans. Charles Lynn Clark, (New York, Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 260. Stanley Appelbaum, Spectacle in the White City: The Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, Mineola, New York: Calla Editions, 2009, p.19.

10. 11.

Ibid, p. 36.

12.

Bailey Van Hook, The Virgin & the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture 18931917, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003, p. 19.

13.

Ibid, p. 24.

14.

Norman Bolotin and Norman and Christine Laing, The World’s Columbian Exposition, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, p. 20.

15.

Ibid, p. 20.

16.

Thomas Leary and Elizabeth Sholes, Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 1998, p. 124-126.

17.

Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo May 1 to November 1, 1901. Its Purpose and Plan, Buffalo, New York: The Pan-American Exposition Company, 1901, 26.

18.

Thomas Hastings, “The Relations of Life to Style in Architecture,” Harpers Magazine, May 1894, pp. 957-962.

19.

Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo May 1 to November 1, 1901: Its Purpose and Plan, Buffalo, New York: The Pan-American Exposition Company, p.31.

20.

John Carrère, “The Architectural Scheme,” Art Hand-Book, Official Handbook of Architecture and Sculpture and Art Catalogue to the Pan-American Exposition, Ed. David Gray, Buffalo, New York: 1901, p. 11.

21.

Ibid, p. 11.

22.

Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison, and Charles D. Warren, Carrère & Hastings Architects, Volume II, New York: Acathus Press, 2006, p. 222.

23.

William Welles Bosworth, “How the Plan was Carried Out,” Art Hand-Book, Official Handbook of Architecture and Sculpture and Art Catalogue to the Pan-American Exposition, Ed. David Gray, Buffalo, New York: 1901, p. 13.

24.

Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison, and Charles D. Warren, Carrère & Hastings Architects, Volume II, New York: Acathus Press, 2006, p. 222.

25.

John Brisben Walker, “The City of the Future – A Prophecy,” The Cosmopolitan, v. 31, no. 5, Semptember 1901, p. 474.

26.

Henry Rustin, “The Exposition Illuminated,” Art Hand-Book, Official Handbook of Architecture and Sculpture and Art Catalogue to the Pan-American Exposition, Ed. David Gray, Buffalo, New York: 1901, p. 17.

27.

Ibid, p. 18.

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28.

Alan K. Lathrop, “A French Architect in Minnesota: Emmanuel L. Masqueray 1861-1917,” Minnesota Profiles, Summer 1980, p.47.

29.

Ingrid A. Steffensen, “St. Louis: Public Architecture, Civic Ideals,” Cass Gilbert, Life and Work: Architect of the Public Domain, New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001, p. 241, edited by Barbara S. Christen and Steven Flanders.

30.

Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison, and Charles D. Warren, Carrere & Hastings Architects, Vol. II, New York: Acanthus Press, 2006, p. 225.

31.

Sharon Irish, Cass Gilbert, Architect: Modern Traditionalist, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998, p. 76.

32.

Joe Sonerman and Mike Truax, St. Louis: The 1904 World’s Fair, Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2008, p. 20.

33.

Donna Ewald and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991, p.7.

34.

Dr. William Lipsky, San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press, 2005, p. 47.

35.

Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison, and Charles D. Warren, Carrere & Hastings Architects, Vol. II, New York: Acanthus Press, 2006, p. 232.

36.

Donna Ewald and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991, p.16.

37.

Stella George (Stern) Perry, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition: A Pictorial Survey of the Art of the Panama-Pacific International Expostion (1915), San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915, p.8.

38.

Donna Ewald and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991, p.9.

39.

Mark Alan Hewitt, Kate Lemos, William Morrison, and Charles D. Warren, Carrere & Hastings Architects, Vol. II, New York: Acanthus Press, 2006, p. 235.

128 132 136 140 144 148 150 Ida D.K. Tam

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COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH FOR PRESERVATION OF SIHEYUAN IN BEIJING A New York based architectural designer, photographer and film maker. Ida D.K. Tam holds degrees in Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Nottingham (UK) and a Master of Architecture from Cornell University (US). She has published and practiced architecture internationally, working on projects in London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York. She specializes in computational design, building information modeling and digital simulation. She is also very passionate about adaptive reuse of historic public and cultural buildings, and has been actively exploring the connection between historic preservation and computational design tools. Her research has been recently published on the Architecture and Civil Engineering Journal in the US and Journal of Urban Construction and Theory Research in China.

Image Credit: Ida D.K. Tam

1. INTRODUCTION As Beijing became more urbanised in the 1960s, the resulting explosion in population and motor-vehicle traffic demanded urgent infrastructural change. The result was manifold destruction, from severance and subdivision to complete demolition of Beijing’s historical building typology- “Siheyuan”. To make way for development, walls of Siheyuan are being cut, sliced and subdivided into multi-family units; temporary structures are being plugged in to accommodate new roads and living spaces. To preserve Siheyuan we first have to understand the tangible and intangible qualities that shape its characters, the qualities that make Siheyuan neighborhood a “place,” that makes it instantly recognizable. To preservationists, authenticity is the key word. The notion of authenticity symbolizes genuineness, localness, origins, and sincerity. These are crucial qualities in forming a unique identity of a “place”. However, is the state of “authenticity” a stable condition? Is the authenticity of Beijing in the past equal to the authenticity of Beijing today? When we say we want to preserve the “authenticity” of Siheyuan, what do we actually mean? Is it about keeping physical fabric of the entire architectural landscape intact? Is it about

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keeping our favorite landmarks and to avoid their being replaced by faceless towers? Or is it about stopping transnational brands such as Starbucks, H&M from placing themselves in the area before they homogenize Beijing and turn it into a disenchanted generic area? By prioritizing the preservation of a people and their cultural evolution rather than their past physical, typological embodiment, this article recognizes the inevitability of change and calls for opportunities for preservation strategies that add relevance to the historic typology. The objective of the article is to evaluate the consequences of current Beijing preservation and urban design policies, through review of the criteria for what to preserve, specific to the protection and rehabilitation of Siheyuan and Hutong. Based on an analysis of the district of Dazhalan as a case study, this article proposes to expand the scope and function of preservation in Beijing to include community building, sustainable and computational design strategies and methodologies to better accommodate social and cultural evolution.

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Figure 1. Changes in Siheyuan since 19491 (a)In 1949, Total residential area 13,540,000sqm; Siheyuan 12,720,000sqm (b) In 2000, Total residential area 0.42 bil sqm Siheyuan 3,000,000sqm (c) Population Density in Siheyuan (d) 2010, Number of Siheyuan

2. Background Materials and Methods 2.1. Overview of historic preservation in Beijing The government of Beijing adopted preservation policies as early as 19572, when shortly after the Cultural Revolution, the government identified individual monuments for protection. By the year 2000, more than 8003 sites were placed under protection and underwent restoration. The attitude of historic conservation in Beijing and in China at large differs greatly from that of the West. The goal of conservation in the Western world, particularly Europe by the 18th century4, is to present the object in a way that the object’s message remain comprehensible without distortion; efforts are made to protect the actual pieces of artifacts of important historic buildings. Any interventions to the state of an object should be minimal, with preference given to methods of intervention that are reversible, identifiable, and will not prejudice possible future interventions5. As a consequence, European landmarks tend to show their age. On the other hand, the objective of preservation in China, has historically been politically motivated. Historic Chinese capital cities were often destroyed in the warfare between newer and older dynasties. Damaged buildings were repaired with an emphasis toward establishing a continuity of form and usage, which would in turn sustain cultural continuity and imperial

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pride6. Today, the monumentalizing of historic sites acts to glorify political power7 through honoring the past, with the goals to stimulate patriotism and help to ensure the political stability of the country. Methods used in historic conservation tend to rebuild, restore, replace, and repaint elements of monuments to the extent that they look brand new. These interventions are not meant to be identifiable or reversible, and they would not likely fit Western definitions of preservation. In 1982, national preservation legislation expanded the scope of protection for zones by adding the protective measure of ‘drawing certain construction control zones in the vicinity of the preservation site’ to ensure the maintenance of the environmental character of the monuments8. But it was not until 1999 that the Beijing municipal government approved the boundaries and detailed plans for the protection of twenty-five preservation districts9. However, neither of the legislative acts provided guidelines for the appearance of new buildings or for their relationships to each other and to public space. The only implied guidance for the design of individual projects was the suggestion that each new development should mimic the treatment of monuments by being set off from its context and surrounded with greenery and open space. Though new buildings within the zones were required to be limited in height and stylistically harmonious with the historic architecture, this stipulation lacked specificity, providing no definition of ‘style’ or ‘harmony.’10

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2.2. Overview of the architectural components of Hutong neighborhood 2.2.1. Siheyuan Siheyuan (Figure 2), meaning “quadrangle,” is an 800 year-old traditional building typology prevalent in Beijing, consisting of four one-story, tile-roofed, grey brick buildings surrounding a central courtyard. Siheyuan are of sociological interest in that their physical characteristics reflects the socio-economic status of the owners in relation to their community, while residential Siheyuan’s internal organization and composition reflects the familial hierarchical structure of its residents.

This basic unit is the typological model used for residences, palaces, temples, monasteries, family businesses and government offices11. Variations on the Siheyuan structure include increasing the number of courtyards, which, in addition to size of buildings, and material finish or ornament, reflect the wealth and status of the owner. For example, a typical person’s residential Siheyuan will likely have one courtyard with a primary building to the North, while a titled or wealthy family’s residential Siheyuan would likely have two or more courtyards in which the major courtyard would be situated in the center, separated and protected by the “Fore courtyard”, a walk-through pavilion, and “corner courtyards” at the rear end12.

Figure 2. Siheyuan 800 year-old traditional building typology

Figure 3. Different components of a Hutong neighborhood

2.2.2. Hutong, the alleyway Hutong (Figure 3) is the alleyway that forms in between blocks of Siheyuan planned according to the etiquette systems of Beijing. It follows a clear hierarchical organization and classification system: a big street (DaJie) is 19-36 meters wide, a small street (Lu) is 10-18 meters wide, and alleyway (Hutong) is 1-9 meters wide, spaced 60–70 meters apart, and run east-west in parallel lines. Hutong form the living room of Beijing. For example, contrary to the private courtyard within Siheyuan, these circulation routes serve

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as open spaces providing venues for T’ai Chi, mahjong and chess, and playground for children’s play.

2.2.3 The cultural meaning of Hutong neighborhood The wall and its organization plays is a very important role in the organization of Siheyuang and Hutong neighborhoods; it represents stereotypical characteristics of Chinese people. The inner courtyard satisfy the introverted, quiet demeanor, private and domination of

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family-minded values13. It is a physical, as well as psychological boundary that separates the family from the external world. In addition to the tall and windowless perimeter wall that borders the Siheyuan, the gate at the southeastern corner is connected to a screen wall to minimize external visual intrusion. In contrast, the Hutong spatial organization limits visitors to only pedestrians and cyclist, thus enabling a way of life that creates a strong sense of community within its neighborhoods.

2.3. Evolution of Hutong neighborhood since 1960s 2.3.1 Densification During land reform of the 1960s, rooms in courtyard houses were assigned to different residents. To accommodate more families, larger rooms were subdivided into more units by transforming Siheyuan from single family to multi-family occupation. During the population explosion of the 1970s, “selfhelp housing activities” started to emerge as informal unit extensions constructed by residents to cope with overcrowded living conditions. (Figure 4)

Figure 4: Densification Black- Self-help housing activities” to increase living spaces White- Original Siheyuan Structure

2.3.2 Widening of Road As Beijing became more urbanized, car ownership became widespread and infrastructure for emergency vehicle access became necessary by modern building codes. In 1993, the Beijing Master Plan required nearly all street rights-of-way to be widened to

Figure 5: “Widening of Road

relieve congestion14. However, there was no consideration given to the environmental and social impact of such requirement. In many instances, Hutong are widened by literally slicing off the fronts of Siheyuan (Figure 5), the fragmented facades are then patched with poorly made or found materials. The configuration and privacy of the typology are tremendously altered.

2.3.3 Historic Preservation of Siheyuan and Hutong Neighborhood The earliest designation of Siheyuan for historic preservation started in 1984. At that time, only individual Siheyuan were considered worthy of preservation as examples of classic Qing residential architecture to be protected. As of the 1993 Master Plan revision, the number of Siheyuan being designated to municipal-level has grown to thirteen. Preservation of Siheyuan as a neighborhood only began in 1990, when the Municipal Government initiated designation of twenty-five sites as “historic-cultural districts”. However it was not until 1999 that the municipal government approved specific boundaries and detailed plans for the districts to be protected.15

3.0 Case study

To understand the impact of Beijing’s current preservation policy beyond the theoretical implications, the Dazhalan Preservation District has been selected as a case study. Dazhalan, a grassroots neighborhood situated immediately south of the impartial wall, Northwest of

Figure 6. Location and historic context of Dazhalan

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Figure 7.Different areas of Dazhalan (1) East Dazhalan (2) Noth-SouthDazhalan (3) West Dazhalan

Tiananmen Square, South of the Forbidden City, and north of the Temple of Heavens, is one of the twenty-five designated preservation districts in Beijing. Since the Ming Dynasty (AD1369), Dazhalan has been one of the most important commercial and residential regions in Beijing. (Figure 6) Unlike most neighborhoods in inner Beijing, which functioned to serve the imperial family and nobles, Dazhalan is unique in that its primary function was to serve the commoners(laobaixing). It is comprised of diverse typologies including traditional retail, factories, academic, public and residential spaces. As a result of its unique grassroots

socioeconomic status, its infrastructural grid has unconventionally deformed from the rest of the city grid. In addition to the conventional East-West Hutong, Dazhalan also has Hutong running perpendicularly from North to South, and diagonally from Northwest to Southwest to maximize the economic efficiency needed. Based on the above factors, Dazhalan provides a representative case study to evaluate the successes and shortcomings of current Beijing preservation and urban design policies.

Figure 8. East Dazhalan (For location refer to Figure 7) Black- New Built Structure White- Original Siheyuan Structure

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3.1. Restoration: Commercial Sector (East Dazhalan)

diversity and close neighborhood ties that once defined the area have now disappeared.

East Dazhalan has been occupied by traditionally well-known commercial institutions, corporations and old brand name businesses (Lao zihaos).

3.2. Reconstruction: Cultural Sector (West Dazhalan)

Notable retailers exceeding 100 years in business include: Tongrentang – Chinese herbal medicine; Rui Fu Xiang – silk fabric; Ma Ju Yuan – hats; Nei Lian Sheng – shoes; Zhang Yi Yuan – the tea shop. Dazhalan was also the former entertainment center of Beijing hosting the five grand Chinese opera theaters. In the 1980s when the commercial strip of East Dazhalan was pedestrianized, retail landmarks and theaters were restored to their original appearances; broken elements were being replaced. Notable residences were restored and repurposed to house government offices, hotels, clubhouses and restaurants to exclusively serve high-end customers and politicians. The facades of these structures remain physically intact, look newly built, and the interior retail spaces have been expanded as much as permissible. However, the original configuration, in which retail is situated at the front face of the building connected to living quarters via a courtyard, no longer exists. The current main demographics of visitors include day-workers, tourist and high-income consumers. Neighborhood shop owners, sales persons, laborers, who used to work and live in the community, have moved to the outskirts of the city where rent is more affordable. The

West Dazhalan, an area that includes the famous Liulichang arts and crafts street and Rong Bao Zhai Arts Academy, once housed the most reputational art institutions, colleges and bookstores in the country. However the fact that West Dazhalan is located within the boundary of Dazhalan Preservation District did not save the area from destruction. Under the pressures of skyrocketing land values and low economic incentive to preserve academic typologies, the original historic buildings were demolished. New identical standardized grey brick shells are constructed in place of the historic facades. These new constructions are set back to allow for vehicle access in Hutong. They are rented out to antique, arts and crafts retailers who sell low end art pieces, souvenirs, and often fake antiques catered towards tourists. Since most art academies and institutions were not reinstated, West Dazhalan is no longer a place for knowledge exchange and art creation. In an attempt to emulate the past, West Dazhalan falls just short of resembling a Chinese version of Disneyland theme park.

3.3. Neglected: The Local Community (North-South Dazhalan)

North-South Dazhalan is a region that is mostly residential, connected by a network of local community and local retail services. Off the bustling boulevards and major avenues of commercial activities, this area has been less attractive to real estate developers and therefore remains highly residential, occupied by multiple families and filled with “self-help housing activities”. As deduced from the surveys, these “self-help housing structures” are direct extensions adjacent to the subdivided Siheyuan houses. They are 2-3 meters in width, and often used as kitchens and cooking spaces. These units usually only contain one room in which living and sleeping are integrated. In some instances, bigger units are rented out by bunk beds equipped with no living and dining areas. Furthermore, these “self-help structures” are often built of temporary materials, construction waste and scavenged materials characterized by short life spans, structurally unstable and non-compliant of building code and fire regulations. The high density of “self-help housing structures” leaves circulation spaces between units to less than 1 meter, and eliminates almost all open spaces of the courtyard. As residents generally lack living and leisure spaces within their own unit, the role of the Hutong as the communal space has gained growing importance. It often becomes play and study areas for children, and kitchen and dining area for families during unbearably hot summers. The original private courtyard spaces are turned into semi-public corridors; these corridors are turned into small courtyards whenever possible. To widen the roads with the least cost, Siheyuan houses were being cut and sliced off a meter inwards. This dismantled one facet of the perimeter wall of Siheyuan; the four sided wall then became 3 sided. In low-income areas with little investment, the fragmented facades can only be patched with shoddy materials. The boundaries between public and private, inside and outside, become further blurred, redefining the privacy levels of the Siheyuan.

4. Discussion 4.1 Evaluation of current scope and goals of preservation in Beijing In order to preserve Siheyuan and its Hutong neighborhood, we first have to understand the tangible and intangible qualities that shape its character – the qualities that make Hutong a “place,” that makes it instantly recognizable. To preservationists, authenticity is the key

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Figure 9. West Dazhalan (For location refer to Figure 7) Black- New Built Structure White- Original Siheyuan Structure

Figure 10. North South Dazhalan (For location refer to Figure 7) Black- New Built Structure White- Original Siheyuan Structure

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word. The notion of authenticity symbolizes genuineness, localness, origins, and sincerity. These are crucial qualities in forming a unique identity of a “place”. When we say we want to preserve the “authenticity” of Hutong, what do we actually mean? Is it about keeping the physical fabric of the architectural landscape intact? Is it about keeping our favorite landmarks and to avoid them replacing by faceless towers? Or is it about stopping transnational brands from such as Starbucks, H&M from placing themselves in the area; before they homogenized Hutong and turn it into a part of a disenchanted generic city? In East and West Dazhalan, their physical fabrics are “preserved”, but the social goals, the preservation of classes, are lost. The 100-year old silk garment shop remains, but the tailors can no longer afford to live there; people who first gave the neighborhood its authentic aura: manufacturers, artists or even middle class residents, have been displaced. This definition of authenticity: preservation of classes, will seek continuous evolution of courtyard housing typology through transformation and adaption; alternative design methodologies will have to be a balance between economic and environmental sustainability. The case study of Dazhalan has exposed three main issues regarding its current scope and goals of preservation in Beijing: museumification, gentrification, and false preservation.

4.1.1 Museumification The 1990s Master plan for preservation attempted to define an overall characteristic form for historic Beijing. With the goal of preservation, primarily political and patriotic, Beijing is designed to be appreciated “from up high, rather than on the ground, in the street.”16 This over-simplified, top-down policy suggested that preservation is more an expression of state power than an act aimed at sustaining the local culture embodied within everyday life. The city of Beijing is in the danger of being ‘museumified.’ Museumification is a process originated from museums, though not necessarily confined within one. In the interpretive medium of museumification, everything is a potential ‘artefact’ - entire villages, or abstractions such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation,’ or even human beings. Yet, reality cannot be represented: museumification distorts, inverts and subverts meanings.17 In East Dazhalan, it is true that investments from tourism and high-end service industries have maintained individual monuments and notable Siheyuan alive. Meanwhile, the Hutong, which lie off the major avenues of the imperial city, such as those of North-South Dazhalan, wait in neglect, undergoing rapid deterioration. Among others, Kees van der Ploeg18 theorized: by trying to freeze

the city in time, it is in danger of becoming “a sugary-sweet backdrop” that “bears hardly any real relation to normal urban activities, between image and reality”. In addition, on a city scale there are far greater historic buildings than can be turned into museums; it is not financially realistic to restore all buildings worthy of preservation without creating conflicts with present needs. By attempting to turn the city in an open air museum is also making it incapable of coping with contemporary challenges.

4.1.2 Gentrification The historic designation of neighborhoods and the attempts to preserve the city often lead to gentrification; East and West Dazhalan, are no exception. Architectural preservation has created an enclave of wealth, business, and tourism. The market forces forced the poor to move, frequently pushing them outside the city’s center. These new typologies marginalized populations such as laborers, artisans, neighborhood store-owners, the underemployed and the elderly. They are expelled from the historic environments of their own culture, often by forceful clearance and minimal compensation. Since 1990, more than 580,000 Siheyuan residents19 have been relocated to the outskirts of Beijing. Frustrations from these forceful clearances have led to public protests and lawsuits against lower-level government agencies and real estate – and in extreme cases, suicide attempts.

4.1.3 False Preservation As discussed earlier in section 2.2, based on the differences in attitude of conservation between East and West, whether reconstruction and restoration of the Siheyuan can be classified as historic preservation is still largely disputed. Nonetheless, the effort of restoration in East Dazhalan, similar to other historic landmarks in Beijing such as those on Qianmen Main Street, is hardly an accurate depiction of the original buildings as they appeared in any dynasty. They have failed to demonstrate the potential historical significance of these ancient structures and to achieve the objective of restoration which is to retain as much of the historic period fabric as possible. The method of ‘reconstruction’ in West Dazhalan is also a very representative example of preservation in Beijing and can be found in the vicinity of major landmarks such as Houhai and Qianhai lakes, the Drum and Bell tower. Unfortunately, it has proven to be unfaithful to the definition of reconstruction; and did not attempt to retain as much of the evidence of the historic period as possible. The new construction methodologies are standard shells that are being plugged

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into the site. Other than material palette and scale, these reconstruction methods have no relation to the historic property that once existed. Despite being protected by legislation, by no means has the historic fabric been faithfully preserved.

4.2 Expanding scope and goals of preservation in Beijing The singular and formal aims of the current preservation policies have reinforced the narrow and exclusive approach to urban investment. This has resulted in the loss of historic architectural heritage and displaced previously diverse socio-economic classes, further exacerbating social inequity between rich and poor. As argued by Rose[33] on the evolution of scope and goals of historic preservation of the United States in 1981, on top of the two phases which is first â&#x20AC;&#x153;to inspire the observer with a sense of patriotism,â&#x20AC;? and second to preserve for cultural, artistic and architectural merits, in order to maintain the physical environment necessary for an urban community, it is more important in providing procedural vehicles for community organization and activity. As demonstrated in the case study of Dazhalan, there is an emerging urgency to expand the preservation with the aim of strengthening local community ties and social organization. The following sections propose an expanded scope and function of preservation in Beijing to include community building, sustainable design strategies and methodologies to better accommodate social and cultural evolution.

4.3. Design considerations in the expanded scope of preservation 4.3.1 Typology and demographic If authenticity and aura are the integral and desirable aspects of a neighborhood, to capture and preserve a historic neighborhood is more than preserving the formal qualities of the neighborhood. It also requires the preservation of the kinds of people who make up the community of that neighborhood. Therefore, when assessing a buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s importance to the community, criteria to be considered should not be limited to its age, historic significance and architectural merits, but must also include the present typologies of the community.

4.3.2. Energy optimization Similar to vernacular housing types in other cultures, Siheyuan evolved as inherently efficient and sustainable responses to the geographic and climatic factors by building organization, orientation

and scale. However, such sustainability principles are compromised by the unplanned densification and overpopulation of residents. Therefore, any design solutions should try to generate value through high energy performance, low maintenance and cost-effective construction solutions, in order to provide better living conditions, and incentives for continuous investment.

4.3.3. Computational and digital simulations tools Consider the inseparable link between computational tools and performance. As computational tools, such as digital simulation, rationalize scientific behaviors and turn them into design trials and viable alternatives, design solutions generated are inherently efficient and performative. Digital simulation design tools also allow designers to develop inclusive site strategy that potentially improves the environmental conditions and prepares for repercussions in future crisis. Not only does it offer new sets of nonlinear constraints and opportunities, working both bottom-up and top-down, it also forms a series of feedback loops that connect varied scales and scopes, providing more inventive, performative and economic alternatives.

4.3.4. Conceptual reconsideration of traditional building elements In East Dazhalan and West Dazhalan, restoration and reconstruction preservation approaches have adopted the strategy of referencing the past. They utilize the symbolic value of traditional architectural elements and forms to rebuild the identity of the location, and make it instantly recognizable as very â&#x20AC;&#x153;Chinese.â&#x20AC;? Traditional building elements of Siheyuan have rich and intricate values that used to be cultural, functional and economical. However, such literal translation of architectural languages diminishes their relevance to us, and much of the meanings and functions are lost in the relentless evolution of human societies. Therefore, to effectively deploy the symbolic values of traditional building elements, we must repurpose them and give them meaning and function that is relevant to our time and demands.

4.3. Potential Design Methodologies 4.3.1. Daylight System Assuming the need to increase occupancy capacity of Siheyuanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original accommodation, the daylight system attempts to search for the most energy-optimized scenario for densification. By inputting 3-dimensional data of the site into energy analysis software, building mass, geography and climate information is utilized to generate a datamap of daylight factors of each site subdivision. (Figure 13) Datamaps of optimized locations for light wells and outdoor spaces are being identified.

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Figure 11. Daylight datamap model

Figure 12. Progressive datamaps of optimized locations for light well and outdoor spaces

Figure 14. Wind vector translated into orientation and spacing between bricks

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Progressive densification scenarios are also being generated, ranging from most dense to least dense. (Figure 14) All these scenarios are then consolidated into one single datamap incorporating different priority of factors such as growth, economics and program.

4.3.2. Wind System Much of the Hutongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s characteristics are defined by walls; namely, the height and distances between the perimeter walls that bordered the Siheyuan. As a consequence of road widening, privacy has decreased, and the wall has opened up new privacy levels. This might give rise to a new opportunity in which we can reinterpret the cultural significance of the wall that defines the characteristics of Hutong. Traditionally, brick was only allowed to move in 2 dimensions creating a flat facade. If we turn the normative arrangement into three dimensional structural configurations, we can begin to generate porosity and volume using its modularity efficiency and produce a new wall that has different degrees of porosity that encourages interaction and filtration between inside and outside. The frequent sandstorms in winter and heat waves in summer have posed difficult challenges to the building performance in Beijing. By beginning with behavioral studies of seasonal air-flow in Beijing (Figure 15), computational models are set up to translate the data of direction and magnitude of wind vectors into variable parameters. These parameters govern the degree of rotation and separation in between bricks, forming a 3-dimensional structure that will be further refined by daylight, natural ventilation and programmatic strategies. (Figure 16) We can then efficiently generate variation in porosity and volume due to its inherent modularity

5. Conclusion In conclusion, a lack of development of a formalized set of criteria for strategically prioritizing buildings for preservation, with financial realities and a preserve-all attitude, have resulted in the deterioration and ultimate loss of potentially invaluable architectural gems. This handicap, imposed by the blanket desire to maintain formal characteristics of Hutong across all of historic Beijing, functions to suffocate the city by neglecting development of the non-monumental, yet still important, neighborhood communities. Through insights gained from Dazhalan, we can see that despite the effort to emulate the past, the preservation of classes is lost and thus reminds us the need to design for the community, which

Figure 13. (a) Wind rose of Beijing (b) Wind vector

includes their socioeconomic, cultural and behavioral patterns. Ultimately, identity and authenticity is generated and regenerated by the people who live in Hutong. By proposing the use of computational and digital simulation tools, it is suggested that any resulting interventions should not be just an object with architectural merits, or a new skin that possesses material and textural connection between the past and present, but also a performancebased solution that is capable of dynamically responding to community building, environmental and pragmatic considerations.

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RECONSIDERING AUTHENTICITY

ENDNOTES 1.

M. Greist, Making Place for Neighborhood in Beijing, University of Florida, Journal of Under graduate Research Volume 8, Issue 6 - July / August 2007. Online available from: www.clas. ufl.edu/jur/200707/papers/paper_greist.html

Beijing Municipal Cultural Relics Bureau, Xin Bian Wenwu Gongzuo Shouce [New Edition of the Handbook for Cultural Relics Work]. Beijing: Beijing Yanshan Press, 1996, p. 457.

Beijing Municipal Cultural Relics Bureau, Op. cit [2]

A. M. Tung, Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis. New York, p. 163

A. Stille, The future of the past, Picador, 2003, p. 56

B. M. Feilden, Conservation of Historic Buildings, Architectural Press, 1982, p.5

A. M. Tung, Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis. New York, p. 165

A. M. Tung, Op. cit [7], p. 165

D. B. Abramson, The aesthetics of city-scale preservation policy in Beijing Planning Perspectives, 22 (April 2007), p. 139

10.

D. B. Abramson, Op. cit [9], p. 139

11.

G. Wang, “Kaifa Jianshe Zhong de Beijing Jinrong Jie: Ji Beijing Jinrong Jie de Guihua yu Jianshe [Beijing’s Financial Street in Development and Construction: Notes on the Planning and Construction of Beijing’s Financial Street],” Beijing Guihua Jianshe [Beijing City Planning and Construction Review], Vol.41 No.4 (July 1995) p. 32–34.

12.

Da Zhou Yang, Take a Lesiure Stroll in Hutong of Beijing, Wa Wen Press (2003), p.5

13.

Mingde Li, A Culture Tour to Beijing Hutong, China Architecture & Building Press, 1st edition (November 2005), p. 19

14.

X. Hu, Boundaries and openings: spatial strategies in the Chinese dwelling, Policy and Practice, J Hous and the Built Environ, 2008, p. 357

15.

D. B. Abramson, Op. cit [1], p. 141

16.

D. B. Abramson, Op. cit [1], p. 139

17. 18.

D. B. Abramson, Op. cit [1], p. 141 P. Dellios, The museumification of the village: cultural subversion in the 21st Century, Culture Mandala: The Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies, The Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies, Volume 5 | Issue 1 Article 4, 11-1- 2002, p. 1

19.

W. Denslagen, Romantic Modernism Nostalgia in the World of Conservation, Translated by Donald Gardner Amsterdam University Press, 2009, p.9

152 156 160 164 168 170 172 Ana Gisele Ozaki

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICTS: COMPARING TWO REVITALIZATION APPROACHES

Ana Gisele Ozaki is an architect, artist, urban planner, and scholar from Brazil. After pursuing a degree in Architecture & Urbanism and another one in Fine Arts (Printmaking), she came to the USA in 2011 to get a Master of Science in Architecture and Master of Community Planning, both from the prestigious College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP) of the University of Cincinnati. Ana teaches at the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the same university, practices architecture and writes in her spare time. Cities, historic districts, grassroots movements, interdisciplinary work and design processes are amongst her main interests. <ozakiag@mail.uc.edu> Facing: Bordeauxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Historic District and the tramway system

Abstract Discussions about historic preservation have been dramatically reinvigorated by the economic struggles of cities to accommodate new uses without loss of identity. The need to change areas that are not supposed to change has created a dichotomy for architects and urban planners. The purpose of this paper is to compare two different approaches of revitalization of historic districts: Bordeaux, France and Cincinnati in the United States. Despite the first antagonistic impression of this comparison, it is quite evident that both cities were successful in their endeavors to transform their historic cores into attraction points. The city of Bordeaux represents a mainly top-down approach concerning historic preservation. The city renovated its historic district in 2000, an action that was closely coordinated by the local government. This culminated in Bordeauxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s submission into the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 2007. On the other hand, Cincinnati represents how an American city revitalized one of its historic districts through mostly private actions. The city experienced an abrupt decline within its core despite having one of the largest collections of 19th Century Italianate Architecture of any American city. Through the 3CDC private organization new redevelopments have been taking place in the district, creating an interesting dialogue between its reminiscent past, changing present and future. The concentration of power is fundamental in both case studies, but each city carried its own definition of preservation and hierarchy amongst the stakeholders involved. This comparison aims to provide insight into the best practices concerning the process of revitalizing historic districts. This should lead to a further study on how to balance top-down and bottom-up approaches into a more inclusionary model of historic preservation of urban settings.

1. Revitalization of Urban Historic Districts In most cities, urban renovations represent opportunities to change economic hierarchies and functions within the urban region, creating new jobs and strengthening the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s position in the urban division of labor.1 According to Anthony Downs, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., every downtown has three important functions: to provide jobs and income for local and regional residents; to provide a net tax revenue surplus that supports local government services, and to act as the focal point for the entire community. Adding to Downâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective,

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central areas are also usually the oldest part of a city, therefore containing local structures of architectural and historic importance. These are areas of substantial capital investment (both public and private) in buildings, streets, utilities, and other structures and services. Finally, they are also the representation of a community’s pride and identity. By investing in these areas, communities have better chances to prosper as a whole and maintain a healthy economic and social base. However, downtown areas have reduced their ability to remain competitive. This is due, in part, to the migration of people from the city to the suburbs, the competition from chain stores and shopping malls with local businesses, and especially the increased use of automobiles.2 This paper will address the actions taken by major stakeholders in Bordeaux and Cincinnati: InCité and 3CDC respectively. Even though they both represent similar tools in the process of urban revitalization, they follow different power structures. While France relies on a centralized and top-down approach to preserve its urban heritage, Cincinnati utilizes its historic assets as a way to achieve economic development through actions from the private sector.

1.1 Bordeaux Bordeaux, France has preserved its urban core in the new light of Alain Juppé’s renovation plan of 2000 and the city’s submission in the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 2007. The city’s originality in historic preservation

relies not only in buildings and their preserved façades but especially in the preservation of the urban fabric, responsible for the city’s identity. The city is located in the Southwest of France; it was founded during the Roman Empire and its historic center is one of the most significant urban and architectural ensembles of the 18th Century. It retained its generally medieval design until the 18th Century, when during the Age of Enlightenment, the city’s identity and urban design emerged and was consolidated. Bordeaux is also the second largest urban district protected by the highest level of historic preservation in France (Secteurs de Sauvegardés).3 Punctuated by classical monuments, the Secteur de Sauvegardé encompasses the boundaries of the walled city of the 14th - 18th Centuries, the neighborhoods of the Medieval Quarter, the architectural and urban ensembles of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and the especially distinctive system of articulated places and 18th Century façades along the quays. The policies of the Secteur de Sauvegardé are applied by the municipality in the local level and supervised by a strict commission from the national level.3 However, from 1965 to 2005, the historic core suffered a gradual declining of its population. Many of the subsidized social housing had deteriorated, almost 12% of them were in an inhabitable state and almost 20% were vacant. In addition, there were not many housing options, 85% of which were rentals, and 66%

were not suitable for families. These conditions created a significant turnover of residents and were detrimental to the neighborhood’s life and urban vibrancy.4 Along with that, due to the landscape that the city is situated on, sprawling and its effects on public finances were issues to be immediately addressed. In this context, an action was required to reinvigorate the central part of the city. Bordeaux was already one of the main centers of employment and services of the region and by strengthening the existing economy and bringing new businesses, the city would become an even stronger attraction point. Finally, the city’s identity and architectural heritage needed to be enhanced, giving infrastructure to permit new uses and activities not only related to visitation.5 Starting in 1996, two main questions guided Alan Juppé’s vision: how to provide these different actions that enable older neighborhoods to be reinvested in by locals and visitors so that they become available to everyone, and how to find the perfect balance between economic activity, tourism, habitat and everyday life.5 In light of a new discourse, in 11 years the city went through a top-down transformation process that incorporated new criteria of preservation considering heritage as a human and economic asset, defined mainly by the public sector. Alain Juppé’s approach of urban planning and redevelopment managed to satisfy two urban forces: on one hand, the strict national and local historic preservation requirements and

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constraints; and on the other hand, its urgency to re-adapt itself to contemporary needs and uses. The main actors implementing these policies of rehabilitation were the City of Bordeaux, the institution created for the operation called InCité, the Regional Planning Commission, the CUB (Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux)— responsible for the development and unity of the region and therefore, also for the

Perimeter of InCité’s interventions (Convention Publique d’Aménagement)

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICS

Inventory of Architecture Heritage by period (CUB, 2006)

implementation of the regional tramway system. The CUB is composed of 28 communes with the purpose to achieve cooperation and joint administration between Bordeaux and its independent suburbs. All of these actions would then culminate into the UNESCO nomination, in 2007.6 The revitalization of the center of the urban operation included: the implementation of the tramway system that aimed to reorganize the urban exchanges and the displacement in the center of the city, improving the sharing of free spaces by releasing the streets from the huge automobile presence; the redevelopment of the quays, allowing Bordeaux to return to its river and reclaim its quays as a place of acquaintanceship; and the project of rehabilitation of the ancient neighborhoods through a partnership between

the State, ANAH (National Housing Agency), Fund of Deposits and Consignations and the Urban Community of Bordeaux (CUB), representing the metropolitan region.5 7 Like many other French cities, Bordeaux relied on a new tramway system for the revitalization of iconic public spaces, and on the encouragement of public and private partnerships to help attract new inhabitants back into the city center; which helped brand the city and make up for the â&#x20AC;&#x153;lost timeâ&#x20AC;? in the competition with other mid-tier European cities such as Bilbao, Nantes, and Toulouse.8 This global approach also required more legibility of legal and administrative constraints, simplification of financial arrangements both for the public and private spheres. On January 2002, the City of Bordeaux engaged the CUB, the State, the Fund of Deposits and

Bordeauxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Historic District and the tramway system

Consignations, and the ANAH into a discussion about a vast territory between the Garonne River and its courses, which culminated in the release of a plan for general actions concerning the revitalization of the historic central district of the city.7 The target area consisted of 501 acres and extends from within the courses (Arnozan to

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the Marne) to the Garonne River including the area between the Course de la Somme and the Rue de BĂ¨gles.4 According to Catherine Chimits, chef for the revitalization of the historic center project for the City of Bordeaux from 1996 till 2009, the action plan aimed to improve the quality of life and residential comfort of the local population (current and future), to stop the progressive decline of the center but also

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICS

seeking to strengthen the social diversity (age, marital status and household composition), therefore branching out the residential offer.3 In 2002, the City of Bordeaux and other public partners fixed tasks and means of InCité, which was previously called SBUC (Mixed Association of Construction and Planning of Bordeaux), in charge of what the State had established as public interest—referring to the habitat component—through a convention of Public Land for a period of 8 years until 2014. The company took the name of InCité to “better communicate its new missions of urban renewal”.4 InCité is an institution of mixed economy dedicated to the missions of construction, real estate management, redevelopment, planning of complex transactions, land purchase, marketing, housing, and social support. In July 1957, the municipal council of Bordeaux, composed by the City of Bordeaux and other public partners (the State, the Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux, Agence Nationale pour l’Amérlioration de l’Habitat and others) decided to create a mixed economy company, the SBUC (Mixed Association of Construction and Planning of Bordeaux), with the mission of opening the new areas of Bordeaux to the urbanization process. The city was going through a housing crisis and the institution. The Board of Directors was then chaired by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the mayor of Bordeaux of that time. Then began then a period devoted to the development of new neighborhoods

and the construction and management of nearly 4,000 homes and local businesses within the districts of Grand-Parc, Bordeaux Lac, Benauge, Chartrons, Meriadeck and others.4 By the beginning of InCité’s work, the city presented 230,000 inhabitants and 114,000 of residential units, the historic district, 27,700 people and only 23,5000 residential units, while the National government required 20% to be social housing, the existing was limited to 14.7% and 70% was rented and 12% was vacant. By 1999, the urban core of the city was mostly vacant, populated by poor and minorities groups and lacking of social diversity. Under the municipality’s designation, InCité directed all the actions performed by the private developers in order to prevent gentrification and guarantee equitable conditions. Work within the previously neglected historic district had to be carried out under new, updated urban policies and incentives and needed to accommodate specific guidelines, incorporating not only the protection of the historic urban landscape, but also the social use of the buildings.7 InCité works with almost 50 other partners including local residents in order to reassure the social diversity of the central population. Since 2002, 1,876 units have been renewed within the historic district, 83% of which are social housing units. Concerning the contemporary habitats within the renewed historic heritage, the goal was to rehabilitate 2,400 units of which 30% should be social housing, and to create 53,820 square feet of commercial use and 330

new parking spots by 2014.4 The effectiveness of InCité’s actions is due to its high leadership in directing the actions performed by the public and private sectors within a well-defined framework. The ultimate goals led to the abolishment of inadequate and safe risk buildings, and the implimentation of affordable and social housing in the urban core. The scope of its work was defined by at least five different plans concerning the same area: •

Plan of Development - SCOT 2000: envisioned a population growth of 33% for the regional conurbation

•

Local Housing Program - PLT 2002-2006: aimed to diversify the housing offer, renew the ancient neighborhoods and offer social housing

•

Urban Displacement Plan – PDU: wanted to protect the center from traffic by developing an efficient mode of public transportation

•

Local Urbanism Plan – 2005

•

Preservation and Enhancement Plan.7

•

The institution’s initiatives have become reality through tools such as tax incentives, oversight features and power to buy and sell properties

•

Programmed Operation for Housing Improvement (OPAH): this tax incentive aims to assist the rehabilitation of housing in ancient

160

buildings and offers subsidized rental in private properties within a specific perimeter.4 •

Tax incentives from the Malraux Law: intended to protect the architectural heritage of the Secteurs de Sauvegardé.

•

Property Restoration Perimeter (PRI): intended to initiate the process of restoration of buildings in bad conditions of housing, to trigger the intervention from private owners in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, to avoid poor quality rehabilitation that could lead to subdivisions and small dwellings, and to enable the complete restructuring of an established perimeter at a given time.

•

Relocation: InCité can temporarily or permanently relocate former tenants of buildings targeted for redevelopment. They could either be placed in a private rental unit subsidized by OPAH, buildings or units acquired by InCité, property of social housing administrators, or a hotel if the case is of a shortterm relocation. The relocation process is also provided with social accompaniment, considering the economic fragility of each tenant.

•

Declaration of Public Utility (DUP): once the PRI is defined, studies are addressed to areas of most priority, considering the DUP. These studies focus on sanitation, security, livability and enhancement of the heritage.

•

Land

tenure

monitoring

for

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICS

friendly purchase: for the purpose of demolition (ventilating the middle of dense blocks and creating inner gardens) or sale to enhance home ownership, social rents, or restructuring by private renters •

Right of urban preemption: from over 21,000 declarations of alienation intention, 0.6% has been preempted, since 2003.7

In parallel, more than 350 buildings were listed on the inventory of the Monuments Historiques (French National Trust), a protection structure established in the country in the 19th Century. The Architect du Bâtiment de France, overseen by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage of France, assures the local quality and preservation of the urban space. Any interventions in protected buildings or districts (Secteurs de Sauvegardé) are required to be approved by the Architect du Bâtiment de France responsible for that area. Along with the Architect de Bâtiment de France specifically in charge of Bordeaux’s historic district, InCité and the city of Bordeaux were able to define a new approach of preservation, not only focused on the façades or on preservation as the former practice, but open to nuances according to each case. In a joint work, gradually the interventions focused on the whole building, its use and contribution to the surrounding context. In some cases, the policy was to “destroy in order to protect” as Catherine Chimit affirms, prioritizing the quality of the urban space as a whole.6

From 2003 to 2006, in partnership with the city, a considerable and active specialist class formed by architects, town planners, historians, researchers, and representatives of associations involved in heritage preservation actively developed and defended Bordeaux’s inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List. These local advocates worked together on a detailed document involving rigorous criteria for the city’s nomination which was based on integrity and authenticity of the site. The UNESCO boundary was then defined covering over 4,472 acres, or nearly half of the city’s surface area. According to Anne-Laure Moniot, chief of the UNESCO project, the inclusion of Bordeaux on the World Heritage List requires the City of Bordeaux to communicate regularly with the Ministry of Culture, to assure the respect to the UNESCO nomination although it did not result in any additional legal constraints on protection. In 2009, in order to meet this demand, to manage these values, and monitor new projects in the submitted and sensitive areas, the City established a UNESCO Local Committee (CLUB - Comité Local UNESCO Bordelais).9 Using the new way of interpreting its architectural and urban heritage, and inevitable changes, the City of Bordeaux has taken on a new urban project, Bordeaux 2030. Undertaken in 2009, this ongoing project aims to be complementary to and a continuation of the previous plans, keeping Alain Juppé’s vision while incorporating the UNESCO criteria and more improving community outreach.10

1.2 Cincinnati The city of Cincinnati hosts one of the richest historic districts in the United States with one of the largest collections of Italianate architecture of the 19th Century. Its historic district, Overthe-Rhine, experienced an abrupt decline of its core but has managed to accommodate an urban renovation through bottom-up actions originating from the local and private spheres. Cincinnati is located in the Midwest region of the United States in the State of Ohio; it borders the states of Kentucky and Indiana. Just like Bordeaux, Cincinnati’s metropolitan region is also crossed by a river, the Ohio River. The Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana (OKI) Regional Council of Governments would be the institution equivalent to the Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux (CUB) in terms of regional scale, though it encompasses not only local governments but also business organizations and community groups, and it’s primary mission is the development of the regional transportation system.11 In Cincinnati, specifically in the Over-theRhine neighborhood, for decades people and businesses left downtown resulting in a continuous deterioration process as the result of social and economic forces. This situation has led city leaders to sometimes speed up redevelopment projects and approve policies to facilitate developers’ ambitions. Unlike Bordeaux, the revitalization of the Over-theRhine district was driven mostly by the private sector, with the City of Cincinnati or the

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Federal Government signing up as partners, providers of tax incremental financing, creating what are called TIF districts. The result of this partnership was the foundation of an institution called 3CDC (Cincinnati City Center Development Corporation). According to Lann Field, development manager of 3CDC, the challenges surrounding tax credits rely on Overthe-Rhine’s past, considering that amongst the most important criteria of eligibility is how many times the same type of fund has been approved in that certain location and its rate of vacancy, both very sensible aspects in this area.12 This not only gives opportunity and freedom of the private sector a thirst for redevelopment, but also induces action. 3CDC is responsible for the development of two neighborhoods: the downtown Central Business District (CBD) and Over-the-Rhine. Historic Over-the-Rhine is located on the northern edge of Cincinnati’s Central Business District, which is comprised of 100 blocks (362 acres) and is one of the largest and most intact 19th Century urban historic districts in the United States. Throughout its still dense streetscapes full of tenements, churches, theatres, storefronts and social halls, the urban landscape remains true to its origins, which were molded by its first immigrants—mostly German—in the 1800s. The originality of the neighborhood relies on the fact that most of its architecture and landscape represents a past of great diversity in socio-economic classes and mixed uses. Its public tenement stock, its brewing heritage, its role in German-American history, and 19th Century immigration all make

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICS

the neighborhood of national significance.13 The neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, with 943 contributing buildings.14 However, most of the demolitions occurred before the designation. Again, this protection still concerns only the façades of the buildings exclusively. In 2006, due to the national significance of the architecture and its threat of destruction, the neighborhood was placed on the National Trust of Historic Preservation’s list of the “Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in America”.13 In addition to its diverse past, this historic district also stands out due to its evolving process of demolition of neglected buildings throughout the 20th century as a standardized and reactionary operation. Although Cincinnati City Council passed Historic Conservation Legislation in 1980, creating a nine-member Historic Conservation Board—composed of an historic preservationist, an historian, an urban designer or planner, an attorney, a developer or realtor, architects, and community representatives appointed by the City Manager—most of the demolitions had already happened.12 Since 1930, approximately half of the building stock had been removed, most of it by city-sponsored demolition. Between 2001 and 2006, over 50 historic buildings were demolished for being considered public threats. In 2013, many buildings remain vacant and in great need of repair, yet some building owners are unwilling to bring their properties up to code. Once buildings reach a critical stage of dilapidation, they are deemed a danger

to the public and are slated for “emergency demolition” by the city.13 The years of inner city decay of Over-the-Rhine reflected on poverty, white flight, increased crime, population decline, lack of traditional employment opportunities, and a shrinking tax base. In the 1960’s, much of the older urban housing stock downtown in the West End neighborhood (immediately to the West of Over-the-Rhine) was replaced by subsidized housing projects as well as by the construction of Interstate 75, turning the neighborhood into a slum.15 Over-the-Rhine was once one of the most densely occupied neighborhoods in America. However, various factors at the beginning of the 20th Century contributed to the neighborhood’s decline, and by the 1960’s, it had become a poor and vacant area. From a population of 44,475 in the 1900, it fell gradually to about 30,000 by the 1960s, and a decade later it shrank to half of that. It acquired a newly significant minority with 5,380 African Americans moving into the area.16 By 1990, 71% of 9,752 people were African Americans, more than a quarter of the area’s apartments had become vacant, and the rest were mostly occupied by low-income tenants significantly below the city’s poverty line. As a result of this negligence, crimes, street fights and prostitution proliferated.17 Unlike many other historic cities, Cincinnati had not yet been able to capitalize on its historic assets. Over the 1970s most of the new developments were concentrated in the Central

Business District of the city, while Over-theRhine and the West End were neglected. In the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, a building boom occurred, bringing new office towers and some hotels to the area.17

in Over-the-Rhine and downtown Cincinnati. Seven area banks, the city of Cincinnati, and local foundations have contributed to the fund, which provides loans for rental projects, condominiums, and new home construction.18

The historic neighborhood was neglected until the 1990’s, when it started to show signs of life when many artists and entrepreneurs began embracing the bohemian lifestyle emerging in the area. However, in 2001 the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer and ensuing race riots abruptly interrupted the transit renovation that was under way, with more than 600 people being arrested in less than a week, a total cost estimating at $13.7 million and resulting in a number of businesses closing down for weeks, and in some cases months afterward.17

In 2002, the Center City Plan conceived by consultants as a report to the city’s Economic Development Task Force, laid out a vision for the city to begin restoring the vitality of its largest economic center. The task force made 23 recommendations, including the creation of

In 2000, the city began a comprehensive master neighborhood plan for Overthe-Rhine that advocated mixed-income housing, entrepreneurship, and preservation/ rehabilitation of prominent civic institutions to return the area to productive use. Two thousand housing units were proposed, including a combination of rehab projects and new constructions on 300 vacant lots. All stakeholders—residents, business owners, CDCs (Community Development Corporations), and faith-based and social service organizations—in the neighborhood were invited to participate in this planning process. Most recently, the Urban Living Loan Fund was established for new housing

164

3CDC’s area of operation

REVITALIZATION PROCESSES OF URBAN HISTORIC DISTRICS

a one-stop permit shop, establishment of the Port Authority as an economic development agency, and the formation of the Cincinnati Center City development Corporation (3CDC).18 The catalyst for change came in 2003 when 3CDC was formed. Funded mostly by corporate contributions, it has the exclusive rights to spearhead the development of both areas. 3CDC was formed by corporate community members, including a former mayor of Cincinnati, as a recommendation by the City of Cincinnati Economic Development Task Force.15 Since its implementation, there has been an expansion of development, accounting for the redevelopment of over 200 buildings and 169 parcels, and the crime rates have decreased by 48% from 2004 to 2012, according to Field.12 In 2004, 3CDC accepted responsibility for overseeing the Cincinnati New Markets Fund, which supports real estate development and complements the low-income housing market and the Cincinnati Equity Fund, which is composed of 13 leading Cincinnati corporations that have invested over 29.7 million dollars in the area. Working together with the City of Cincinnati, the State of Ohio, and members of Cincinnati’s corporate community, 3CDC is committed to spurring redevelopment and investments in Cincinnati’s urban core. Their main goals include: creating great civic spaces, high density/mixed-use development, diverse, mixed-income neighborhoods supported by local businesses, preserving historic structures,

and improving streetscapes.19 The institution comprehends the functions of a master developer in targeted redevelopments, providing strategic and long-range planning, and of a lender/fund manager, acting like a bank and managing the private funds for developers. 3CDC has undertaken the construction of 200 condominiums, 70 rental units and 100,000 square feet of commercial space as part of a public-private effort to revitalize Over-theRhine. According to its Chief Executive Officer Stephen G. Leeper, the entrepreneur is viable through substantial corporate support, not limited to operating funds but also for capital funding.18 City officials and 3CDC were tasked with making the goals laid out in the Center City Plan a reality. The plan detailed four initiatives aimed at restoring vitality in particular: •

Redevelopment of Fountain Square

•

Revitalization of Over-the-Rhine

•

Restoration of Washington Park in Overthe-Rhine18

In general terms, those involved in the revitalization of historic district areas can be classified as: downtown property owners and merchants, local government leaders, lenders, professionals, community groups, residents, and the media.2 In the case of Cincinnati, the first and ongoing impulse came from the private

Above: UNESCO buffer zone, 2007 Left: UNESCO inscribed area, 2007

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Urban fabric of Over-the-Rhine in 1930

Demolished buildings in Over-the-Rhine Distric since 1930

sector, reuniting corporations that had interest in investing in the area, such as P&G, Macy’s and Kroger, whose headquarters are located in the CBD.12 However, the movement also finds strength in less financial powerful institutions and grassroots movements, such as local entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations. It seems that after so many past mistakes and attempts to promote equality and preserve the built environment of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati’s residents and advocates decided to take matters into their own hands. Even though the resurgence of the neighborhood’s vitality is not as bottom-up as during the 1990s entrepreneurships’ reactions (just before the riots of 2001), some nonprofits are following the premise of “If you want to see it done, you need to do it yourself ”. Listed are some of the main nonprofits and organizations acting in the redevelopment of Over-the-Rhine: •

•

Over-the-Rhine Foundation: works with the public to promote awareness and education of the importance of historic preservation and why the neighborhood should be preserved, actual preservation and redevelopment strategies along with the public realm and community’s partners, protective actions through oversight of properties, and promotion of events and attractiveness to the area.13 Over-the-Rhine Chamber of Commerce: representing the main businesses of the neighborhood.

168

•

Over-the-Rhine Community Housing: formed in 2006 by the merger of two organizations supporting affordable housing.

•

Drop Inn Center and Mercy Health Saint John: a homeless shelter which offers chemical dependency treatment and an agency that offers comprehensive social service, respectively.

•

Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation: works to develop the northern half of the neighborhood, emphasizing Overthe-Rhine’s brewing heritage and the mixed-use neighborhood created by use of the nineteenthcentury brewery building stock.

•

Over-the-Rhine Community Council: since 1970, it has represented the interests of residents and partnered with other organizations in service to the neighborhood.18

1.3 Conclusions In both cases, although still ongoing processes, the success of each is quite evident in their endeavors of restructuring and rehabilitating their respective central historic districts. While Bordeaux presents a policy-based, detailed global approach with a more defined structure of power, and Cincinnati relies on a strategic and punctual approach, they are both cases of gradual, incremental change. However, it becomes evident that one of the key points in

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the comparison is the different systems of power. Although they differ in their initial priorities, both of the cases prove the point that highly focused leaderships and capital can solve most problems. Tracing the paths of both institutions, in practical terms, InCitĂŠ and 3CDC have many similarities in how they have accomplished the successful initiatives of implementing change and the revitalization

3CDCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boundary of action in Over-the-Rhine

of the historic district in question. Also, in terms of accommodating the dichotomy of old and new, despite different concentrations of power in the process, both cases seem to follow the same premise of historic preservation, mostly centralized. The two cities share as well similarities in their past of deterioration of the historic urban cores and in the time frame that the redevelopment processes were undertaken. However, the opposing contexts these two institutions are embedded in reflect much in

Cincinnatiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Over-the-Rhine Historic District

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the structures of government and power, the demographic dynamics, and reasons that lead these two enterprises. Both institutions and approaches share similar goals for the improvement of the conditions of these two historic districts, especially in providing vibrancy and vitality in their domains. Nevertheless, the priorities of each, their goals, and the nature of the funding to implement them seem to be determinants in

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defining public/collective interests. InCité and 3CDC have both been victims of great local criticism due to the new social dynamics that have taken place in the historic districts. Due also to market forces, the institutions have been made responsible for the gentrification—the displacement of original low-income residents due to market value aggregation—of the two areas. Historically, the concept of public interest in France is very strong, and the State provides plenty of tools in order to apply what they define as common good and main long-term priorities. For this reason, private properties are subjected to public interventions, especially if they do not achieve their social purpose of equity. This is also true concerning the historic preservation in France. Over the centuries, a consolidated culture conscious of the importance of a city’s heritage has been cultivated, which finds in plenty of urban policies and tools ways to assure its preservation. At the same time, there seems to be a lack of community input, participation, and spontaneity due to the residents’ reliance on the strong central power. Even though public audiences and the community’s participation are under InCité’s scope of action, compared to Cincinnati, advocacy manifestations are less notable. On the other hand, Cincinnati still struggles in finding its path towards an effective historic preservation policy within the consolidated culture of private property. Some of the nonprofit institutions acting in Over-the-Rhine

invest most of their initiatives in education and public awareness (of the population and its local power) concerning the neighborhood’s built environment relevance, in shaping the city’s history and identity. However, the local power’s weakness in concentrating leadership to implement historic preservation and modernization of its built heritage gives great opportunities to grassroots movements as well as greater mediation from market and real estate dynamics. In addition, the lack of a central guidance with a long-term vision allows parking garage buildings, for example, to still be possible in historic districts like Over-theRhine. On the other hand, Bordeaux dealt with a smaller scope: vacancy, insalubrious housing conditions, deterioration of historic buildings and public spaces, unattractiveness of its core, and low-income housing in unlivable conditions. The social dynamics behind the issues within its historic district were primordially related to the population’s income. On the other hand, in Cincinnati the scenario includes not only the income inequality of the space distribution and conditions, but also racial segregation (not to say Bordeaux did not experience any of this, but for the terms of comparison, in Cincinnati’s case, this problem seems larger). Past decisions of allocation of resources and people, slum clearances and the difficulty in matching the criteria of public grants concerning social and public housing, are still in the way of Cincinnati’s path to equitable urban spaces.

Taking into consideration the best-practices of both cases, it is evident that, instead of choosing one approach over the other, a balanced model of governance should be envisioned and further research should be undertaken in order to define a more strict matrix of comparison. On the one hand, top-down approaches provide the long-term vision and tools necesasary to ensure the collective good is being considered in each endeavor. On the other hand, private sector initiatives, grassroots movements and communites’ inputs could sometimes be more efficient and everlasting than imposed initiatives. However, without the balanced combination of the elements of the community’s input and a global approach, also controlling the marketplace to ensure that all residents and participants co-inhabit historic districts in equitable terms, individual efforts can pass by without being noticed.

END NOTES 1.

SWYNGEDOUW, E., MOULAERT, F. and RODRIGUEZ, A. “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy”. Antipode. 2002, vol. 34, p.542–577.

OHIO, DEPT. OF ECONOMIC AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, OFFICE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES. Main Street, Ohio: Opportunities or Bringing People Back Downtown. Columbus: State of Ohio, Dept. of Economic and Community Development, Community Development Division, Office of Local Government Services, 1981, p. 2-9.

UNESCO - WHC. Advisory Body Evaluation: Bordeaux Port of the Moon. Paris: World Heritage Centre [online]. Paris: UNESCO, 2007. Available on: http://whc.unesco.org/archive/ advisory_body_evaluation/1256.pdf

http://www.incite-bordeaux.fr/pageseditos,17,left_B2F70BF8.html

AGENCE D’URBANISME BORDEAUX METROPOLE AQUITAINE. Patrimoine et développement des cœurs de ville. In 4e Assises du Patrimoine du Grand-Ouest. Proceedings of. Bordeaux: Éditions Confluences, 2003, p.7-37. Chimits, Catherine. Personal Interview. 26 Nov. 2012.

6. 7.

INCITÉ. Integrar a Renovação Urbana à Reabilitação do Patrimônio Histórico e à Produção habitacional: O Exemplo do Centro Histórico de Bordeaux. [Slideshow]. Brasília: Ministério das Cidades, 2008.

GODIER, TAPIE & SORBETS, P., G. & C. Bordeaux Métropole: Un future sans rupture. 1ª ed. Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 2009, p.10-14.

Moniot, Anne-Laure. Personal Interview. 27 Nov. 2012.

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10.

http://www.bordeaux2030.fr/bordeaux-unesco/patrimoine-mouvement/suivi-permanent/ comite-local-unesco-bordelais

11.

http://www.oki.org/about-oki/

12.

Field, Lann. Personal Interview. 22 March 2013.

13.

http://www.otrfoundation.org/OTR_Architecture.htm

14.

http://www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com/OH/Hamilton/districts.html

15.

Tarbell, Jim. Personal Interview. 18 Feb. 2013.

16.

MILLER, TUCKER, Z., B. Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities: Cincinnati’s Over-theRhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism.Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. GEPHARD, A. “Policy Planning and the Intricacies of Urban Development: the case of Cincinnati”. Direction: Elizabeth Honadle. Univeristy of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, Arts and Plannins, 2012. http://www.urbancincy.com/2012/06/the-triumph-of-cincinnatis-center-city-plan/ http://3cdc.org/

17. 18. 19.

182 184 186 188 190 Andrew Santa Lucia & Matt Messner

NOVEL OR NEVER Andrew Santa Lucia is an architectural designer/critic in Chicago. He is an adjunct faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s AIADO department, as well as the Illinois Institute of technology’s College of Architecture, where he teaches design studios, theory, communications and matter(s). He is also the creative director of AND/OR US Architecture Collaborative in Chicago. He has also held adjunct faculty positions at Florida International University’s College of Architecture and the Arts in Miami, FL. He holds a post-professional Masters of Arts in Design Criticism (MAD-Crit) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a Masters of Architecture (M.Arch), Bachelors of Arts (BA) in Architecture and Philosophy from Florida International University. His design and criticism looks at the opportunistic exchanges between the city, audiences, culture and lifestyle, with a focus of changing the ways we converse publicly about architecture. Matthew Messner is an Architectural Designer and Critic. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Architectural Studies (BSAS) with a minor in Art History from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and will soon graduate with a Masters of Architecture (M.Arch) and a Masters of Art in Design Criticism (MAD-Crit) from University of Illinois Chicago. His writing focuses on pop culture media, and how architecture can be designed for our hyper-visual world. His design work has been shown internationally, and he has built work in Los Angeles. His favorite foods are ice cream and pizza. Figure D1 - D2: Building Model, 24”x24”, Scale 1:200, Jogged Sectional Model

“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”

comfortable skin as a quality of something not from this age and instead engrain it as an emergent aspect of a project now. Rather than Old as being temporally quantitative, it is infinitely qualitative. We can then say things like, “that Old is awesome” or “the way your Old shapes the skin is ingenious” or “being inside an Old makes me feel at home”.

-Simon Pegg Architecture makes worlds where new narratives can be realized. This is Novelism. It is invested in materialism, but not nostalgia; aggregation, but not repetition; re-origination, but not derivation; and position without meaning. In this way, architecture is free to do what it does best -- be architecture. Matthew Messner’s A Go-Go is an aggregative tale of architecture’s fight with architecture and its audience, where a building breaks away from its formal reception and creates new positions through actually being unfixed to any one reading of itself. Untethered and unfettered, Novelist approaches to architecture are reinvigorating disciplinarity by shaping a new position toward history, shape, space and people -- all old things. Novelism is ushering in an era that motivates architecture outside a consideration of its exterior historicization or futurist implication. A Go-Go’s novelist Olds can be formed into an aggregative unit; deployed as a structural element; mobilized as a colorful appliqué; and/or dematerialized to shape program. To motivate an Old means to move it out of it’s

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FauxMo adj. /fō/ /mō/ Term for a ‘false Modernism’ - Referring specifically to a pre-meditated state of false modernism, aimed at soliciting attention or affection from consumer audiences by the profession of architecture and design. E.g. Minimalism, ‘Dwell-modern’, green wash sustainable, etc. Novelism is an inevitable reaction to FauxMo, which is manifested through many trends in architecture. For example, minimalism is not old, organic or traditional... it’s a sterilized austerity measure, while Dwell-modern projects are posers, pretending to be something they’re not, but dressed up to fit the part. FauxMo fetishizes a modernism through corporate consumerism. Novelism sees all paradigms as potential jump-off points for the sake of architectural possibility. Novelism deploys architectural moments as seen fit. This is Novelism’s Old and it cannot be killed, resurrected or kept on

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life support. An Old is something that just is -- something that can be used. As the first Novelist project, A Go-Go’s story is all punchline without posture. Its Old does not rely on a single understood history or an idealized future. It fills in its historical gaps with shapeful devices that are abundant and seemingly endless, where anyone can connect with its lines, colors, shape, spaces, forms or recognizable signs that say or mean nothing other than I’m right here, look!! Novelism’s power is in its volume, turnt up to eleven. It provides an excuse to be loud and unapologetic about the amount of noise it produces through its architectural riffs.

deployed to produce an architectural drawing of non-architecture. The image is not a standin or direct reference to any reality outside of itself, as a normal architectural drawing might be. Instead, indirect references take form in uncanny familiar patterns, shapes, and congruencies. This results in each viewer’s particular understanding being reliant on his or her own individual biases. With no preconceived goal of a specific outcome, the drawing was produced and deemed finished when the author felt it so. This also relied on the same personal biases. The square shape negates an overall formal reading besides that of a finite, yet neutral shape. A circle would have also worked to achieve these ends, but a square more closely connotes the typical architectural drawing.

Novelism allows for our generation of architects to be excited about history without being historicist. Free to embrace or discard everything that has been branded as bad or good, Olds allow architecture to stand without baggage. As a position, Novelism provides several opportunities to motivate Old and put it to work in new ways. Ultimately, novelism is and/or, not both/and/either. A specter is haunting architecture and it is a novel form of itself interested solely in making fantastic shit, by any means necessary.

As an exploration in form making, this model condenses pattern, symbol, and texture into an aggregation which challenges typical architectural models. A tool of investigation, this model is not a representation of an architecture or an urbanism. With no scale, orientation, or context, viewers are allowed to question their understanding of the project. Shapes and patterns that are typically part of architectural projects are deployed in near proximity, changing their inherited meanings and connotations.

Rather than a representation of a building or an urbanism, this drawing is meant to test graphic and formal relationships on the most basic level -- lines, color, weight, pattern, shape. Conventions from design process, construction documentation, and graphic representation are

Drawn simultaneously, all three drawings share one root drawing that is worked into the plan, section, and elevation. This conflation undermines any simple reading of space or form. What is at once understood as a specific element in one drawing works completely differently

Figure A1 Drawing 6’x6’ adirectional and ascaler

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Figure B2

Figure B1

in another; columns become balconies, and windows become atria. Purposeful misreading throughout the design process facilitates complex reorigination with every choice. In this way personal biases permeate the entire process from design through reception of the work -- from the designer through the viewer. This set of drawings moves the project of the original drawing and model into the realm of “architecture” by denoting a scale, program, and space. Designed as a set of large urban mansions and smaller “couch houses,” domestic tropes were extensively, yet selectively, copied from typical domesticity. Through aggregation ad nauseam, these typical domestic tropes shift

Figure B3

Figure B4

Figure C1: Building Section C1 - C3 Building Drawings 36â&#x20AC;?x36â&#x20AC;? Scale 1:200 18 mansion units 18 couch house units 500ft tall 400ft wide and long

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Figure C2: Building Plan

from the familiar to the uncanny. As a nod to normal architectural drawings, color is stripped from the project. Patterns are drawn in the same fashion as architectural elements, often becoming part of, or informing, the formal decisions. The physical model approaches the project in a similar way as the drawings. Not a direct translation of the drawings, the model is yet another exploration of sign, pattern, and aggregation. Similarly to the original color model, the building model is shown sans-

Figure C3: Building Elevation

context as a statement about its relationship to the city (a space in the South Loop of Chicago along the Chicago River). Contrary to the assertion that the building â&#x20AC;&#x153;ignoresâ&#x20AC;? its contextual conditions, its equal treatment of all directions -- six facades -- allows for the context itself to act upon the building.

Figure D1 - D2: Building Model, 24”x24”, Scale 1:200, Jogged Sectional Model

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Figure D2 Building Model

192 196 200 204 208 212 214 Shurid Rahman

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THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN MEMORY AND POTENTIAL IN URBAN LANDSCAPES

Shurid Rahman is a graduate of University of Detroit Mercy (Master of Architecture, 2012) and University of Maryland College Park (Bachelors of Architecture, 2007). His interests in urbanism lie in the environmental and demographic shifts within cities caused by economic impetuses. When he is not working as a designer at Smithgroup JJR in order to pay his rent in San Francisco, he is often seen observing these impacts while listening to or playing music at various drinking establishments in neighborhoods such as the Mission.

Facing: The Bowery, New York Daily, 2013

i. Double Agents “I can pay my rent! Can you pay your rent? Well why don’t you go to a city that you can afford it!” Max was furious at the protesters lined all around his ride to work, a white, unmarked, double decker Google bus held hostage at the corner of Valencia and 24th street in the Inner Mission district of San Francisco. Clad in reflective yellow jackets, they carried picket signs saying “Public $$$$”, “Stop Displacement Now”, “Fine $271, Total Fine 1$ Billion,” and “Warning: Two Tier System.” In June 2013 the Municipal Transportation indeed sanctioned the Google bus to operate on a public bus stop. However, such claims were not sovereign to the group staging the protest, the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency, who seeks to stop “the injustice in the city’s two tier system where the public pays and private corporations gain.” For them the Google bus was a symbol of tech-fueled gentrification in the Inner Mission, and a representation of economic inequality between the creative class of city transplants, and the mix of working class Latinos, artists and activists already residing in the Inner Mission. Adelle (@FashionistaLab) tweeted around 9:30 from inside the bus, “Some people on this Google bus are/were sympathetic to your cause, but way to paint a broad brush and demonize innocent people”.

Mountain View Googleplex campus about 40 miles away (according to Google Maps), he lambasted the protesters one last time. “This is a city for the right people, who can afford it. If you can’t [afford it] its time for you to leave!” Max the Google Employee never made it to work in Mountain View that day, but not because of an unfortunately timed protest. It was because he never had a job at Google to begin with. His true identity was Max Alper, an activist and organizer with organizations such as Making Change Media, and he was partaking in “improv political theater.” He was actually in solidarity with the protestors that Monday morning, identifying the tech workers as part of an unrelenting free market force that has displaced 3703 families through the Ellis Act. (The Ellis Act is a provision in California Law that provides landlords the ability to evict tenants in order to go out of business and remove units from the rental market, usually with the intent of selling them.)

Max meanwhile absolutely had it. Before walking off to find another way to reach the Figure 2: The Ellis Act, Anti Eviction Mapping Project, 2014

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Figure 3: Max Bell Alper pretends to be a Googler upset that the google bus is blocked by the protest, Steve Rhodes.

Alper is not only joining a growing number of protesters and activist in present day San Francisco, but of yesteryear as well. During the 1990s dot com boom, local artist Gordon Winiemko, frustrated at the displacement of artists from the Inner Mission, reinvented himself as E. Victor. Wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, he issued eviction papers to the then bourgeoisie at restaurants and bars in the Inner Mission, making the point that their consumption practices came at too high a price for many of the people living in the neighborhood before their arrival. Winiemko described his motives in the Adam Woods’ documentary Boom! The Sound of Eviction: “Its hard not to notice… when a new restaurant opens up seemingly every day, replacing a small grocery store or auto body shop… when snow white, picture perfect Buffy and Ken come out to play at night, their shiny new luxury tanks lining the middle of the street… when you can’t walk ten feet without tripping over yet another

‘artist loft’ development without any artists in it… one day you walk up and realize that they city is being white washed, its poly glot bohemia surgically replaced by a corporate, consumption loving monoculture…” The debate about gentrification reaches well before the 1990s. The relationship between the present identity of a place and new forecasted free market conditions for a place, have defined the economy, demographics and identity of the modern city since the industrial revolution of 19th century America. British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964 to describe the influx of middle class people in urban neighborhoods such the Islington district in London. American neighborhoods, such as the Lower East in New York City, Sound End in Boston, the U Street Corridor in Washington DC, and Darien Street in Philadelphia have all been part of cyclical gentrification waves responding to market dynamics that make it profitable for landowners to raise living expenses in order to capitalize from new

Figure 4: LA Mission, 2013

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potential real estate demographics. To the working class facing eviction and higher rent, gentrification may seem like a class struggle, a modern manifest destiny in which the upper class are either completely ignorant, or sadistically concerted to displace populations to satiate their demands in the real estate market. To the neoliberal city planner, developer or governmental adminstrator, it may mean a logical response to a simple supply and demand issue, or an effective means to diversify a population to ensure longevity of an economy. Like the double identities of Max Alper and Gordon Winiemko, each side of the argument reciprocates, and in fact affirms each other in a tautological manner. In an urban-economic context, the depreciation of neighborhoods directly leads to the appreciation of adjacent areas, which eventually conversely leads to real estate demand appreciating with gentrification. By understanding the beginnings of gentrification and its mechanisms through the rent gap theory, one can abstract this urban phenomenon to a dialectic between the history of a neighborhood and the economic potential it holds due to that memory. By focusing on the Inner Mission neighborhood in San Francisco, and relating this contemporary landscape to others in history, one can see this is a not a simple repulsion but a cycle of dissociation and synthesis between memory and potential, charged by economic conditions that work through networks of urban landscapes. Like escaping the cycle of samsara within eastern religions such as Buddhism, perhaps there is

chance to emancipate neighborhoods from such perpetual relations by working beyond the process--not endlessly reacting to it. With Mountain View Googleplex campus about 40 miles away (according to Google Maps), he lambasted the protesters one last time.

ii. The “G” Word To map the beginnings of gentrification in the modern American city, one can start with the condition of its old industrial cities in the 1970s. Their city centers were battered by deindustrialization and the development of a global market that created opportunities for industries such as automobile and garment manufacturing in places like India, China and Japan. The National Housing Act of 1934 created agencies such as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which had spent decades actively promoting affordable mortgages in outlying suburban areas, while consequently disinvesting in minority inner city neighborhoods. The United States Housing Authority further affirmed class and real estate differentials between suburban areas and the inner city by providing low-interest, long term loans to local public agencies for slum clearance and construction of low-income dwellings. The disinvested urban core of cities in the 1960s and 70s were not an instantaneous phenomenon, but, as seen in urban and economic studies, had a clear build up beginning with the industrialization of the American city

ii. The “G” Word

Figure 5: Coalbrookdale By Night, Philip James, 2013

at the end of the 19th century. Critiquing the polluted, overcrowded, and unsafe conditions of industrial cities, urban planning academics followed the narrative of dissociation from the city center, by championing concepts such as the Garden City. Originally espoused by Sir Ebenezar Howard in the 1898 “A Peaceful Path to Real Reform”, he described his vision of clusters of several self-sufficient garden cities off a central city of about 50,000. The dissociative, charged relationship of the city center and suburb could also be found in urban sociology, and the views of The Chicago School, who argued that the urban environment tends towards equilibrium much as an organism does,

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with individuals and groups sorting themselves into ‘natural areas’ that constituted a city symbiotically balanced between cooperation and conflict. Neo-classical economists followed this logic by explaining suburbanization in terms of an overriding consumer preference for space, combined with differences in the ability of high and low income households to engage in locational trade-offs between access to centralized employment and cheaper land prices available on the lower density urban fringe. Other forces were at work as well to enable the exodus from urban centers. The first half of

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the 20th century saw the meteoric rise of the automobile in the US, with the advent of large scale production line manufacturing debuted by Ransom Olds in Lansing, and greatly expanded by Henry Ford in 1914. This powerful industry worked in concert with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (at the time being the largest public works project in American history, authorizing 25 billion dollars for the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway system) creating and expanding the vital transportation system to link and disengage the suburb from urban centers. The demise of the city core seemed to be ensured, while the development of the suburb looked to have a bright future. The 1973-74 market crash changed that fate. In wake of one of the worst stock market downturns and the 1973 oil crisis, the urbanist concept of the peripheral idyllic suburb

Figure 6: Garden Cities regional planning diagram, Ebenezer Howard, 2013

along with the neoliberal logic of consumer preferences for space and affordable land were both directly threatened by the new rising commuting costs along with the effects of recession, inflation, and high interest rates. For the first time ever, the promise of The American Dream, represented by the single family suburban house since the turn of the 20th century, became unattainable for many in the middle class. Within the uncertain economic context, certain inner-city neighborhoods, such as Park Slope in Brooklyn, suddenly began to flower promising housing markets. In 1977 Everett Ortner, the managing editor of Popular Science, claimed that “back to the city is an important movement that is going on in every city in the country.” Gregory Lipton, (as quoted in Gentrification, pg 43) suggested that: “while the dominant pattern may involve

Figure 7: The Bowery, New York, New York Times, 2013

the loss of a middle and upper income, predominately white population from the center and their replacement by lower income, predominantly black and other minority populations, a fairly large number of cities are experiencing some population changes running counter to this major trend.” Assessments from economists such as Schill and Nathan also summarized: “[a]lthough [these] land use models have most frequently been used to explain the creation of affluent suburbs, they can also explain the location of affluent neighborhoods near the central business district..” They go on to say “the well to do people who move into revitalizing neighborhoods value both land and accessibility, and can afford to pay for them both. They thus outbid all other groups for land close to the urban core.” With this blunt assessment of class superiority, the neoliberal economist found a way to justify the diametric shift from growth of the suburb to the reinvestment of the city in residential land use. Academic urban thinking also challenged typical models, such as the suburban model, with roots in the Garden City concept, as well as the segregated land use and grand scale model found in the City Beautification Movement of the 1920’s, and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which originally addressed the squalid conditions of industrialized city cores. At the forefront of this argument during the

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1960s and 70s, was Jane Jacobs, perhaps the most outspoken urbanist in modern times. Lumping the three historic and entrenched urban concepts sarcastically as “Radiant City Beautiful”, in her seminal book “The Death and Life of Great Americans Cities” in 1961, she unabashedly challenged these trains of thought by advocating for high density, smallscale, pedestrian-filled, vibrant streets and, most importantly, a mixture of economic activities for the inner city neighborhood. Of Ebenezar Howard’s Garden City she derided: “[Ebenezar Howard] simply wrote off the intricate, many-faceted, cultural life of the metropolis. He was uninterested in such problems as the way great cities police themselves, or exchange ideas, or operate politically, or invent economic arrangements…” What she failed to include in her arguments however, as written by Witold Rybczynski in Makeshift Metropolis, “is that cities were not in trouble because of poor planning, but because, since before the First World War, the middle class had been decamping for the suburbs, leaving behind poverty, rising crime and racial tensions and abandoning precisely those dense downtown neighborhoods that she extolled.” Sparked by one of the worst market crashes in modern times, the 1970s saw markets emerge in the previously disinvested urban core that stood in utter contradiction to the theories of urban development and economics of

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suburbanization that defined the American city since the turn of the century. Forgetting the industrial memory of the inner city in the middle of the 20th century simultaneously produced the burgeoning market potential of gentrification.

iii. Mission Dolores If we look closer at a specific location we can see that the dialectic between memory and potential has precipitated many transformative shifts throughout its history. “The Mission” or Mission District in San Francisco is one such dynamic landscape, and is not only defined by this state now, but in fact has been charged by this relationship since its conception. Approximately 5,000 years ago, a tribe called the Yelamu arrived at the San Francisco peninsula, succeeding an earlier group of which little is known. Their summer and winter camps were both located in the present day Mission Dolores neighborhood of San Francisco, likely due to its sunny climate and (then) direct access to the bay. 1776 however brought sweeping changes to the region as the Spanish established twenty-one Catholic mission settlements along the California coast, each a day’s walk apart. The Chapel of Mission Dolores, still standing at the intersection of Dolores and Sixteenth streets today, succeeded in converting over 1000 indigenous peoples to the Catholic faith. After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and took California the next year, the government ordered secularization of the mission amid concerns that they

were too expensive to maintain. The foreign trade embargo under Spain was lifted, and a commercial seaport began to develop in the 1830s on San Francisco Bay. The capture of Yerba Buena by the U.S. Navy in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo in 1848 transformed San Francisco from a seaport village into a full-blown mercantile city within a few years. Concurrently (and no doubt motivated by the discovery of gold veins in the foothills of the Sierras in 1848) the young city’s population swelled from under 1,000 in 1848 to 36,000 in 1852 to 57,000 in 1860. By the turn of the 20th century, we see the changes of the Mission within the context of San Francisco, in sudden and sweeping redevelopment of past identities by economic potentials previously dissociated from the landscape. For the Spanish, the religious directive to subjugate the Yelamu and claim lands in California was rooted in feudal economies derived from the “Mission” establishment and its history of stern religious order. For the Mexicans riding the wave of the Mexican Revolution, one of the most transformative revolutions in 20th century politics, the opening of the seaport exposed the region to free market dynamics that immediately dismantled old colonial structures. For the United States, and the pioneers that combed its adjacent landscape for precious metals, San Francisco was the nearperfect West Coast metropolis, with the Mission being a critical flat landscape with access to the bay and a link for future waterfront industries. Transportation networks of streets, rail and

Figure 8: San Francisco de Asis--Mission Dolores, Robert Estremo, 2004

streetcar systems transformed the Mission and other neighborhoods from being organized by pastoral rancho settlements under the Mexican government to dense, gridded residential developments. With the development of these transportation systems, distinctions intensified between the areas north and south of the Market Street, in many ways the central axis of the city. North of Market transit lines connected new residential neighborhoods to downtown commercial areas, and were generally considered to be upper middle class. South of Market, transit lines connected the Mission to

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the industries of the South of Market district, as well as the busy waterfront, developed to be residential areas for working class citizens. Identities subsequently formed around North of Market neighborhoods, such as Western Addition, which were developed as attractive and convenient neighborhoods for those who worked and shopped downtown, generally professionals, merchants upper middle class. South of Market neighborhoods developed working class identities, and consisted of factory and mill workers, longshoremen, construction contractors, self-employed skilled

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laborers, and the like. The sunny, sheltered Mission in particular developed a very distinctive identity as a desirable and practical place to live for people of many backgrounds that worked in South of Market industries. It offered new lots and house in various sizes and configurations, affordable to a wide range of economic classes. Geographically, it remained somewhat separated from the rest of the city by Mission Bay and Mission Creek, as well as the surrounding hills, which did not develop at the same rate as flatlands in the peninsula. The most important driver of urban form in the early 20th century for the Mission and the city of San Francisco was not the transportation systems, but the earthquake of 1906 and the resultant fire, in which 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed. In an unprecedented reconstruction effort, civic leaders and the general populace brought the city back to a world class metropolis by 1909. As Bronson wrote in 1959: “[S]omehow San Francisco got the job done. And the job was not only done, but it was done faster and better than anyone thought possible. In three years, almost all of the burned area was rebuilt… In 1909, more than half of America’s steel and concrete buildings stood in San Francisco. In three years, the assessed valuation of the City was half again as much as it had been before the fire. Twenty thousand buildings – bigger, stronger, more modern than the 28,000 which went up in smoke –

had been finished in that space and time.” But the reconstruction did not also come without economic consequences. The varying abilities for people and classes to recover from the devastation to their urban environments produced inequities. As Fradkin 2006 states: “San Francisco became more stratified – physically, socially, economically… as a study of the reconstruction process pointed out: ‘At one end of the spectrum, upper-class districts and individuals stabilized rapidly, whereas unskilled workers at the low end of the spectrum were still in motion five years after the disaster.’” It seemed that rather than challenge the memory of the Mission as a cultural nexus for working class involved in the waterfront industries of San Francisco, the developments of transportation and the phenomenon of reconstruction after the earthquake and fire of 1906 affirmed this identity. Vital to the economic potentials of the city were the continued development of commercial centers such as the Financial District north of market, in concert with (but distinctive to) the industries of areas like Bayview, South of Market and the residences and developing industries of the Mission District. Fradkin states, “One characteristic of post-disaster cities is that they tend to replicate their former selves… Other characteristics are that property rights

remain sacrosanct, the tax base is restored as quickly as possible, and the speed of reconstruction becomes a mania. All of these characteristics were true of San Francisco’s reconstruction. For the most part, the populace of San Francisco rebuilt what had previously existed. A notable exception was the South of Market, a formerly mixed-use district that was reconstructed as predominantly industrial/ commercial, which in turn affected higher density residential reconstruction in the Mission District.” As a result of this affirmed working class identity, organized labor played an important role in the social history of the Mission District, and as San Francisco’s largest and most influential working-class neighborhood, the Mission became a hotbed of union activism throughout the early 20th century. By the mid twentieth century, areas south of Market represented exactly the industrialized urban core from which urban thinkers such as Howard, Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford sought to either order or find reprieve. Suburban development proliferated in the Bay Area, and new suburbs such as Daly City became the home for the burgeoning middle class. As the once predominant Irish, Italians, Scandinavians and Germansmoved to suburbs for more lucrative and stable housing markets, new predominately working class demographic groups like Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan immigrants came to the Mission in the 1950’s and 60s. As renters became more prevalent, and more owners

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Figure 9: By Author

were low income or negligent, maintenance and repairs to older structures were often deferred, and disinvestment occurred within the neighborhood. In addition to the Latino populations, populations of Bohemians and artists also began to rehabilitate and inhabit older structures, and sought the same high density, street life and mixed economic demographic ideals as preached by Jane Jacobs. The identity of the 20th century industrial working class Mission was all but a memory, and new economic winds were calling for changing demographics to find new potentials within its bounds. The 1990s dot com bubble, described anecdotally by Gordon Winiewko’s alter ego E. Victor, was perhaps the most marked

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Figure 10: San Francisco Fire Sacramento Street 1906-04, 2013

example of real estate potential in the Mission, concurrent with the most significant shift in working class to creative/upper class demographics since the turn of the century at the time. The advent of the internet, coupled with risk-taking venture capitalists, took the high tech industries of Silicon Valley to an unparalled economic boom. The employment growth of half a million jobs from 1995 to 2000 greatly outstripped available housing, as only one housing unit was created for 3.14 jobs from 1990 to 2000. Rents climbed 225 percent from 1996 to 2000, while spaces for the remaining manufacturing jobs were converted to lucrative lofts and warehouses and longtime non-profit and community centers made way for offices and high end restaurants. At the same time, there was a massive increase in Ellis Act evictions,

the California State Law which allows property owners to remove their property from the rental market and evict all tenants. Organizations like the Mission Anti-Displacement coalition spearheaded community organization and activism that challenged the San Francisco Planning Department, and defeated projects such as the transformation of an empty former National Guard Armory into 300,000 square feet of dot com office space. However the relative stabilization of the housing market in the Mission during the early 2000â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s was not due to policy change, but enabled by the dot com bubble burst in 2001. The market effects of the bubble had passed, and the Missionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s economic potential lay relatively dormant in its identity of working class Hispanic populations until another economic windfall precipitated shifts

Figure 11

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of even greater magnitude.

iv. Mind the Gap The Tech Boom 2.0 moniker for San Francisco’s recent economic upsurge seems to underestimate the national importance and radical nature of the recent tech industry within the city. Companies with headquarters within city limits such as Twitter (valued at 31.29 billion dollars), Yelp (valued at 5,97 billion dollars), and Zynga (valued at 3.97 billion dollars), have helped to anchor the US economy in the aftermath of the 2008-09 Recession. According to a report by SPUR, a Bay area nonprofit membership organization that promotes good planning and good government, the number of tech jobs in San Francisco has grown by 13,000 between 2011 and 2012, totaling at 41,000, a number far outstripping the previous dot com boom of the 1990s. The economic potential of tech is also channeled through San Francisco at a regional level. As Max the Google Employee knew very well, private shuttles provided by companies like Google have the capacity to transport 14,000 people per day to Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara county, approximately 40 miles south of the city center. The influx of the tech industry has inflated housing prices and living expenses drastically in all neighborhoods, and between 2011 and 2012 the Mission neighborhood saw the price for average apartments increase by $591 or 40% . The invisible hand has not been present to increase the supply of housing stock to meet rising demands in the city, as over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced

an average of 1,500 new housing units per year, compared to Seattle’s 3,000 units. Even with relatively high minimum wages in the nation at $10.74 an hour (compared to the federal rate at $7.25), it would still take at least three full time minimum wage jobs to afford to live in a two bedroom apartment in any neighborhood in the city. According to the SF Department of Public Health, the fair market rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $2,920, and the household income to afford this is rent is $116,800. This puts the affordability gap at -$52,000, and incentivizes current landlords to retrieve the higher yield of selling their properties to speculative developers rather than continue to invest in their businesses. This logic is affirmed by a 170% increase in Ellis Act Evictions since 2010, which provides landlords the ability to evict tenants in order to go out of business and remove units from the rental market, usually with the intent of selling them. This underlying motive in economic potential in the gentrification of rental housing can be most clearly defined in urban terms by the rent gap theory, framed by Neil Smith in his seminal 1979 essay, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People”. As adapted by Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly in their text Gentrification: “The rent gap, is the shortfall between the actual economic return from a land parcel given its present land use (capitalized ground rent) and the potential return

Figure 12: The Brooklyn Rail, 2004

if it were put to its optimal highest and best use (potential ground rent). Nearly every aspect of urban growth [produces] mismatches between existing land uses and optimal, highest and best uses (Smith spoke about capitalized ground rent being constrained by terms and conditions of previous investments and commitments of labor and is undermined by mounting costs of repair and maintenance. Potential ground rent, or the optimal land use, by

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contrast almost always increases steadily if the region enjoys population growth, employment expansion and technological innovation, as is the case with San Francisco.) Urban investment and growth inevitably produce disinvestment and rent gaps for older portions of the urban fabric. As the rent gap grows larger, it creates lucrative profit opportunities for developers, investors, home buyers and local government to orchestrate a shift in

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Figure 13: Mission Yuppie Education Project, Kevin Keat, 1999

land use.” He goes on to write: “The logic behind uneven development is that the development of one area creates barriers to further development, thus leading to underdevelopment, and that the underdevelopment of that area creates opportunities for a new phase of development. Geographically this leads to the possibility of what we might call a “locational seesaw”: the successive development, underdevelopment, and redevelopment of given areas as capital jumps from one place to another, then back again, both creating and destroying its own opportunities for development.” The dialectic of American urban planning is

thus described; the memory of neighborhood is defined not only in its older physical structures, which mount increasing costs in maintenance over time, but also by the economic classes that are bound to invest in them. This intrinsically void or inactive characteristic is bound yet opposite to the solid or proactive potential of a neighborhood, as defined by appreciating the best land uses which will yield the most profit within the current housing market. Each concept effects itself over individual and systems of communities in a landscape, shifting due to charges brought by regional demographic and economic catalysts such as population growth, employment expansion and technological innovation, perpetually creating and destroying the other.

v. Aufheben? “Capitalism [...] is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. [...] The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. [...] The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation [...] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly Figure 14: By Author

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Figure 15: By Author

destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.â&#x20AC;? This passage by Joseph SchumpeterJoseph SchumpeterJ refers to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of Â wealth under capitalism described in the Communist Manifesto, and places the rent gap theory in a larger socio-economic and even behavioral context of capitalistic democratic societies. In it organizations, industry and economic structures are continually building and destroying each other at polemic positions. The revolutions come from within, and beget themselves through dissociation. The dialectic becomes

Figure 16: Rent Gap, Nach Smith, 2008

Figure 18: Bhavachakra, 2010

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Figure 17: By Author

about abstract relations, in which opposites are contradictory yet complementary. Hegel, as a precursor to Marxism, also considered dialectics in some of his most influential examinations. For him the interaction of opposites generates in dialectical fashion all concepts we use to understand the world. The aufheben, meaning “abolish”, “preserve”, and “transcend”, was a sophisticated term Hegel used to describe this productive state which resulted from the interaction of the thesis and antithesis. This lead to his views on speculative thought, which espoused reasoning in which two contradictory elements are held together, uplifted and sublated without completely destroying one another. Are the dissociative, shifting states of creation and destruction between memory and potential within a space part of an iterative process to which we are only temporarily bound while we search for a real consensus? Perhaps the double identities of Max Alper as Google Worker and Gordon Winiewko as E. Victor bring us closer to accepting the contradiction of our perception of space and economics in some form of synthesis. Or will the sublation result from a path of least resistance in which the desires that define economic systems, from which potential, and subsequently memory, are derived are released, negating the whole process, much like the Buddhist achieving moksha or release from the perpetual cycle of samsara, as enacted by karma. Only by shuffling between what we remember about places like the Mission, and what we dream about it becoming, will be able to figure this out. END NOTES 1.

http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/12/09/protesters-block-google-bus-in-s-f-mission/

http://blog.sfgate.com/chronstyle/2013/12/09/what-do-you-wear-to-look-like-a-google-employee/

http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/11/07/117540/Priced-Out-Ellis-Act-San-Francisco-eviction

Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (Routledge, 2008), 257

Lees, Slater, Wyly, 45

10.

Lees, Slater, Wyly, 43

11.

City and County of San Francisco Planning Department, City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District (San Francisco, 2007), 14

12.

City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District, 14

13.

City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District, 31

14.

City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District, 84

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IMAGE NOTES 15.

City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Franciscoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mission District, 66

16.

Goldman 12

17.

Bhavachakra, 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Buddhism/Intro/Image

18.

By Author

New York Daily, The Bowery, 2013

The Ellis Act, Anti Eviction Mapping Project, 2014, http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis. html

Rhodes, Steve, Max Bell Alper pretends to be a Googler upset the google bus is blocked by the protestors, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/11303890955/

LA Mission, 2013, http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/files/2013/11/fiss_street11-6905.jpg

James, Philip, Coalbrookdale By Night, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/20979973

Howard, Ebenezer, Garden Cities Regional Planning Diagram, 2013, http://www.pinterest.com/ pin/367465650816940195/

New York Times, The Bowery, New York, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/gritty-newyork-city-1970s-gallery-1.1318521?pmSlide=1.1318503

Estremo, Robert, San Francisco de Asis--Mission Dolores, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:San_Francisco_de_Asis--Mission_Dolores.JPG

By Author

10.

San Francisco Fire Sacramento Street 1906-04, 2013, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/8/8e/San_Francisco_Fire_Sacramento_Street_1906-04-18.jpg

11.

The Brooklyn Rail, 2004, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2002/08/film/didnt-we-all-leave-you-sanfrancisco

12.

Keat, Kevin, Mission Yuppie Education Project, 1999, http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron. htm

13.

By Author

14.

By Author

15.

Smith, Nach, Rent Gap, 2008, http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm

16.

Gentrification, 262

17.

Salon Article

18.

Salon Article

19.

http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_wag.php

20.

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/11/07/117540/Priced-Out-Ellis-Act-San-Francisco-eviction

21.

Gentrification, 52

216 218 220 222 Ariane Lourie Harrison & Seth Harrison

ECOLOGY OF AGING Harrison Atelier is a Brooklyn-based design firm whose architecture, performance and design works explore the impact of technology on culture. It was founded in 2009 by Seth Harrison, a writer, designer and biotechnologist, and Ariane Lourie Harrison, an architect and educator at the Yale School of Architecture. Harrison Atelier’s activities include performance design, master planning, architectural design and writing. Each area of work adopts an ecological approach and reflects the firm’s interest in exploring the “posthuman” entanglement of human, technology and nature within the built environment. Harrison Atelier has partnered with world-renowned choreographers and performing artists to design and create multi-disciplinary performance projects. These include Anchises (2010), a performance on the subject of aging which was listed among the New York Times’ Top Ten performances of the year; Pharmacophore 1 & 2 (2011) for the opening of the Orpheum Theater in Tannersville, NY, Pharmacophore: Architectural Placebo (2011), an installation and performance at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and Veal (2013), an installation-performance at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Harrison Atelier was recently recognized for its innovative installation design at the 2013 World Stage Design exhibition, and Veal has been selected for display at ACSA 102 in Miami, April 2014. Harrison Atelier is currently developing its fourth performance-installation, “Species Niches”. Facing: Harrison Atelier, Anchises scene 1 Bournemouth Cat Miller, Jonah Bokar, Valda Setterfield (c)Harrison Atelier 2010

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Performing an ecology of aging Technology has altered the global environment, defining man (anthropos) as the main force of change in a new geological age: the Anthropocene. From the battle against disease waged by the medical research complex to bio-digital extensions of human capabilities, technology challenges the ‘natural’ arc of a human life. Over the past half-century we have extended the average life expectancy in developed countries by some thirty years. Even if, in the US, public policy struggles to keep up with the extension of human productivity it is less clear why cultural narratives have not already shifted to incorporate the new extents of old age. One way to construct ‘new old age’ narratives is to understand aging not as a monolithic concept but as a contingent mixture of genetic, economic, social and technological factors: a ‘space of controversy,’ to borrow sociologist Bruno Latour’s description of an ecology. Harrison Atelier would not be the first to regard aging as an ecology. Many themes in Simone de Beauvoir’s 1970 book, La Vieillesse, echo her period’s almost reflexive sense of ecological and social responsibility. Beauvoir writes from an autobiographical perspective, highlighting the tensions between medical-scientific and culturalliterary-philosophical discourses on aging. But principally, Beauvoir wants us to understand that our experience of aging refuses to stabilize; indeed, as we age, identity metamorphoses as much as bodies do. In the discipline of dance, the aging body itself presents a site of controversy: for most dancers,

the body is considered “old” by age thirty-five, creating a population of “aged” dancers who find little representation in contemporary dance performance. Dance is a system generally concerned with representations of physicality and community developed from gesture; to introduce older dancers highlights what it means to form a community integrating the aged through gesture on stage. Harrison Atelier’s 2010 work Anchises, a collaboration with the choreographer Jonah Bokaer, gave form to cultural myths and present techno-capital realities that condition our understanding of the aging human body, as well as its role within ambivalent intergenerational dynamics.

Constructing a ‘new’ narrative of old age The narrative framework that we chose to convey the controversy surrounding human aging today relied on the mythical idealized account of caring for the elderly in the Aeneid. When the Greeks invaded Troy, they allowed the Trojans to take with them what they could carry. Aeneas, a Trojan war hero who would eventually found Rome, chose, not gold or jewels, but his father: Anchises. Anchises in turn, carried the ancestor figurines of Troy, figuratively bearing forward traditions that later metamorphosed into the household gods of Rome. Anchises died at sea shortly after the flight from Troy. Aeneas’ perfect act of filial piety contrasts with the reality of aging today— nursing homes and hospices, medicalization and estrangement among the generations. We proposed an alternative ending for the story of Anchises, by asking: Could Aeneas have

Facing: Harrison Atelier, Anchises scene 1 Bournemouth Cat Miller, Jonah Bokar, Valda Setterfield (c) Harrison Atelier 2010

sustained the mythical ideal of filial piety had his father lived well into old age? How would the burden of an elderly parent have weighed upon the epic hero? Would Aeneas have turned to a nursing home as the best means of “assisting” his elderly father? One of the goals in creating Anchises was to invert the stereotype that dance has made for itself, by finding those same qualities of physicality and beauty typically associated with young performers in the interactions of young and old – and yet to find those same qualities in the interactions of the old with the young, and in the older performers themselves. Early research for the work involved the digital diagramming of the ranges of motion and gestural vocabularies of dancers who were in their sixties: during a residency at Bournemouth University, we spent several days in a motion-capture lab recording the movements of retired local dancers. We sought to record these movements in order to avoid stereotypical “old” gestures in the choreography—thereby, to “not transcend the situation.” In fact, in building the choreography, we sought to confound the received meanings implicit in what might be perceived as “older” gestures by distributing the roles of the two mythological characters, Aeneas and Anchises, among a multigenerational cast of five dancers, ages twenty-four to seventy-five. These layers of counterfiction—the “scientific” capturing of qualities of motion, the extension of longevity, and the nonlinear dramaturgical mapping of two onto five (two Anchiseses, three Aeneases)—became the basis of the choreography. For example, the gesture of “assisting” can be interpreted and experienced in contradictory ways: in the first, one performer guides another, or receives guidance from

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another; in the second, which is the opposite of the first, a performer pretends to assist, but only provides the requisite minimum, seeking to be unburdened and remain autonomous. We visualized the desire to break free from versus to support the generation prior as two equal and opposite vectors. This led to a choreographic language in which dancers gripped hands, straining in opposite directions, each uncertain when the other would let go—a situation made precarious and uncomfortable for the audience when one of the participants in the dyad was one of the an older cast members. In her New York Times review of Anchises, Roslyn Sulcas noted that Harrison Atelier’s dramaturgy and set design interacted with Bokaer’s choreography of slow waltzes, bent bodies and shoulder touches to efface distinctions between the old and the young, uniting all five performers.

Materializing aging as a ‘space of controversy’ The set of Anchises challenged performers with physical entanglements, reiterating what Latour terms the ‘attachments’ present in any ecology. This dialectic of assistance and burden is embodied in the gravitational logic of the set’s central hanging structure: a giant envelope made of medical tubing, filled with foam cylinder cores, representing a scaled-up version of the bag in which Anchises carried the Trojan ancestral figurines. After Anchises’ bag spills open, the tubing dangles free and the performers twine within its transparent forest. Dancing within a hanging field of medical tubing requires that performers assist one another, while resisting attachment; ultimately the dancers must break free of both set and each other in order to perform. Flexible medical tubing seemed simultaneously to support but

ECOLOGY OF AGING

2 Motion capture at Access MoCap Bournemouth 2010 (C) Harrison Atelier

also to give way, and the use of soft foam blocks required that performers collaborate to create the performance environment. In Anchises, considerations of narrative forms suited to the Anthropocene period, characterized by coextensive relations among nature, technology and body, prompted us to propose an interactive structure among performance modalities: a set that responds to the performers, a dramaturgy that requires the performers to respond to the set. Scene 1 opens in a medical waiting room, in which a parliamentary array of 18-inch foam cubes is organized to encourage ‘discussion.’

In Scene 2, triangular compositions of bodies and blocks allude to triangulation and reiterate intergenerational tensions. In Scene 3, the squared composition of the philosopher’s garden scripts the interaction of Anchises and his grandson Ascanius. In Scene 4, the foam cylinders tumble from Anchises’ bag onto the stage, representing the destruction of the old city. The performance then asks, in a sense, whether a complex ecology can be reconfigured to integrate both old (columns) and new (rectilinear blocks), or, instead, if the old must be segregated to enable a simplified ecology, comprised of like elements. Scene 5 features a pair of waltzing dancers, looters romping across the stage, who gleefully kick apart the

remaining structures of the city. In Scene 6, the chaos modulates into an economical sorting as performers realize that they must horde selfishly to survive. They triage set pieces and each other: blocks are separated from columns; older performers are sidelined along with the column drums; so that by the end of Scene 6, all the symbols of what came before have been removed, from center stage and the center of consciousness. In Scene 7, the older performers stage their return; and the cast, reunified, acting as a community, builds a monument: an absurd ziggurat, a Tower of Babel, which they inhabit, then dismantle in failure. In Scene 8, columns are again sidelined and rectilinear ensembles are re-embraced, as the cast, unable to eke out any sort of organic order, acquiesces to modular construction and control. The twin Anchises are forced to separate out the conflicting parts in their ambivalent natures: one Anchises (in the 2010 production: Meg Harper) dances in military formation with the younger performers; the other Anchises (in the 2010 production: Valda Setterfield) is relegated to the position of victim. A series of death tableaux commence, a pas de deux between choreography and set design in which unstable bodies and blocky towers alike both lean and are laid to rest. In the final scene, the cast marches toward two enormous foam blocks, drawing these together

to create a platform—a coffin, an altar and a nursing home bed—on which the philosophical Anchises (Setterfield), rendered real from myth, lays down her weary head.

Performing an ‘ecology of aging’ We evolve as we age, and our younger and older selves can be regarded as different persons, so that any individual, viewed retrospectively as a succession of selves, can be regarded as an ecology. We idealize the younger self, medicalize the older; assigning the management of the aged to institutions. Yet an increased understanding of the scientific underpinnings of aging will lead to treatment rather than segregation. As aging is reconfigured into a disease responsive to molecular methods of treatment, the social apparatus that has justified treating the aging as a separate class will fall away, and representations of the increasingly complex ecology of aging will become important in contemporary posthuman culture. With the phrase ‘ecology of aging,’ we are suggesting that, in a fully recognized Anthropocene era in which technologies are redefining what it means to grow old, narratives and approaches to representing aging should be developed that possess the nuance and complexity that we attempted to achieve in Anchises.

END NOTES 1.

Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Bruno Latour, ‘The Space of Controversies: An Interview with Bruno Latour,’ New Geographies 0 (2008), 122-136.

In the 2010 production, Merce Cunningham Dance Company veterans Valda Setterfield and Meg Harper became the doubled female Anchises: one historical, the other hypothetical. Catherine Miller’s flame-colored hair and powerful solos made her the ‘romantic’ figure as she alternately played Aeneas and his son Ascanius. James McGinn’s youthful figurations of Ascanius switched between playful grandchild and adolescent military recruit. Jonah Bokaer’s

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Harrison Atelier, Anchises Scene 5, Valda Setterfield, Jonah Bokaer and Meg Harper at Abrons Art Center in NYC 2010 (c) Benjamin Nicholas

reserved Aeneas set filial duty against will to power. The lighting design of Aaron Copp addressed the cyclicality of generations while undermining the narrative of progress from old Troy to new Rome, or from waiting room to hospice. Loren Dempster’s original musical score for Anchises included a digital re-mastering of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, a collection of sound fragments and live performance by Loren and his father, New Music composer Stuart Dempster. Anchises premiered at Bournemouth’s Pavilion Dance in October of 2010. It toured to the Arnolfini Theater in Bristol and to the Abrons Art Center in New York City in November 2010. 3.

Roslyn Sulcas, ‘From a Trojan War Hero, Lessons About Aging,’ New York Times, November 18, 2010.

224 226 228 230 232 234 236 Ayesha Moghal

SPECULATIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF HISTORY Ayesha Moghal is a recent graduate of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Toronto. She holds a Bachelor degree in psychology and fine art history also from the University of Toronto and a diploma in architectural technology from Sheridan College where she received the Board of Governors Silver Medal. An avid traveller who has lived in various parts of the world, her interests are focused on exploring culturally and historically diverse urban landscapes. Her thesis research, nominated for the 2013 Canadian Architect Student Award of Excellence, examined historic preservation/reconstruction and the implications these common practices have on cultural identity. She spent a year living and working in Berlin, the city that became the backdrop to this ongoing research. Ayesha currently works in Toronto and is a visiting critic at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Image Credit: Ayesha Moghal

Figure 1: Existing Site Ruins

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Humboldt Box with the Berliner Dome, published: July 5, 2011

Memory is an incomplete practice. It is a mere impression of the past that re-emerges in fragments. Although it is incapable of capturing a moment in its entirety, the act of remembering has a unique ability to isolate and exaggerate the essential components of the moment that was so important. This skewed recollection then becomes a meaningful entity in its own right. Reconstruction can be considered an act of practicing memory. A cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s representational form reflects the ideologies of its time. Evidence of cultural renaissance, political propaganda, and economic prosperity can be read like a story in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban fabric. So in moments of cultural revival, history is often used to reinforce a sense of identity. Struggling with an uncertain future it is easy to retrace back to a moment of prosperity that once was so certain. But something is lost in the process of retracing back to the past. The recreation no longer holds the same value as the old. It is something new altogether.

No other city has faced the dilemma of reconstruction to the same degree as Berlin, a city that has rebuilt itself out of the rubbles of war in only a few decades. However gracefully it has recomposed itself, as it stands today, there is a gaping hole in Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart. In the center of the city, on the island of its birthplace, lies an empty site that has been wiped clear of its past on more than one occasion. Like a blank canvas, it awaits its next inscription. The possibilities of redefining the heart of a capital are exciting and endless. Given the rare opportunity of a clean slate, why has the city settled with reconstructing a relic of the past? The fall of the Berlin wall nearing its 25th anniversary marked the end of a century filled with warfare, division and destruction. Since then, the city and its collective unconscious has been painstakingly trying to put its pieces back together. It is no wonder that Berlin is suffering through an identity crisis. On the one hand it is a thriving European

Figure 2: Original State Palace before and after the blight of war

Figure 3: Left image- The palace of the (DDR) republic in Berlin, Germany Right Image - Palace of the Republic in East Germany (GDR/Berlin) in 1977. Photo by: Istvan

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capital, a force of economic stability and technological progress, while on the other hand, it is anchored in its past. The word history bares a burden that cannot be forgotten nor relived. This insecure relationship between the past and future are reflected in decisions like the one to reconstruct the Berlin State Palace. A hollow facsimile of the Baroque palace is set to reclaim its place on Museum Island as the new Humboldt Forum. A welcome centre called the Humboldt box currently stands as a placeholder on the site. Purposefully designed to avert the eye away from modern aesthetics, the box is like a warning against the evils of contemporary architecture on such a historic site. Promoting the authenticity of a fake nostalgic monument and warning against modern architecture through the veil of a stumpy angled box does not at all correspond with the progressive nature of this contemporary city, which begs the question: how can this significant site better reflect its heritage and also serve the city’s current spirit? The possibility of successfully replicating history is not only questionable in practice but also in principle. Piranasi’s Pianta di Roma articulates this notion addressing the impossibility of reconstructing antiquity by mere scientific evidence (Fig 1). The clusters of ruins that remain are like memories, which are used as points of entry to

re-imagine a new form of the city. Accepting the impossibility of replicating the past invites a new outlook on reconstruction, one which is not solely based on archaeological evidence and precision but rather on speculations of the imagination founded on incomplete memories. The speculative nature of the reconstruction leaves room for something new.

Damnatio Memoriae The lifespan of the original state palace stretched over five hundred years of cultural, political and architectural development. The complex structure was amalgamated over five centuries by the hands of great artisans like Andreas Schlüter, Friedrich August Stüler, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Fig.2). Over the course of its extensive history, the palace became a museum unto itself, as it was a container of the entire course of the Prussian reign and of a vast collection of European art and culture through its lavish artwork and furnishings. The newly elected German Democratic Republic condemned the palace as a reminder of the Prussian imperial and feudal past. The palace, along with its historic content, was demolished in 1950. The hole that remained became known as Marx Engles platz. An open square was used for political demonstrations and parades in support of the GDR. History was wiped clean to make room for a new icon. The Palace of the Republic,

completed in 1976, was no less remarkable of a building than its predecessor (Fig.3). The five storey concrete and glass behemoth was one of the most iconic multifunctional modernist buildings of the 19th century. Over 50,000 square meters of flexible space incorporated everything from a bowling alley to a 5,000 seat theatre hall. The building was a truly monumental encapsulation of the modernist idea of the volkshaus, a house for the people. Following the end of the cold war, all state functions of the palace were shut down. In true Berlin fashion, the palace was appropriated by the public as an informal place of cultural exchange and expression of ideas.

one faĂ§ade will be left for the designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interpretation. Constrained also to the footprint of the palace, the new Humboldt Forum, as it is called, will contain a vast collection of new program to serve the city. A snippet of the proposed facade stands adjacent to the construction site as a severed appendage of a body that was buried a century ago (Fig. 4). Berlin is set to rebuild itself around a hollow shell of its past.

In the spirit of damnatio memoriae, both palaces suffered the same fate. The Latin phrase, which means the condemnation of memory, was enforced as punishment in ancient Rome by erasing someone from history forcefully, thus removing their memory from society. History has repeated itself on this site, yet nothing has been learned from it. Advocates of the reconstruction argue that the baroque Palace will restore the unity of the historical centre of Berlin. In this version of memory, the palace is reminiscent of Germanyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nineteenth century enlightened past of scientific and academic progress. In 2009, an international competition was held to rebuild the State Palace in its original glory. Three facades of the new/ old building will match the original, while Figure 4: Berlin - model of the proposed facade of the Stadtschloss. Photo by: Wladyslaw

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Figure 5: Form studies

Methodology As reconstruction of antiquity is often based on historical evidence. A counter proposal is presented based on a methodology fixated on the archaeology of the site. The numerous footprints and foundations of past constructions were investigated. The Palace of the Republic intersects the State Palace on a cross axis. (Fig. 5). In-between the two constructions, Marx Engles Platz, a bleachered promenade marks its territory along the east bank of the Spree River. The intersections of these past histories became the focus of interest for reintroducing the historical interventions in the form of reinvented artefacts. Each isolated instance holds a functional and aesthetic significance particular to its time and place. Articulation of the artefacts fluctuates between the precision of historic preservation and speculative reinvention. In the same manner in which memory is incomplete, the re-imagined artefacts become a recollected impression of their predecessors. This is made possible through the exaggeration of materiality and formal expression (Fig. 5).

height and elevation. The artefacts not only resonate memories of the site but, through a new formal language befitting to their contemporary setting, they are equipped to anticipate possibilities of a future that does not yet exist.

Descent

Portal

Plausible Fictions These physical manifestations of memory are situated along a procession through time and space in a crafted landscape. The strategy resulted in a range of architectural conditions that take the visitor from a subterranean experience of excavation to moments of great P El an

as s

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Container

Cognizan

SPECULATIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF HISTORY

Figure 6: Portal

Figure 7: Elephant

Figure 6: The Portal Referencing knowledge and time, the Portal is located at an intersection of two of the Palaces that once stood on the site at different moments in history. The Portal provides an outdoor exhibition space with a light flexible structure accommodating various uses of display and appropriation. Figure 7: The Elephant The faded materiality of the Elephant in the landscape reflects the austere presence of the Palace of the Republic. A symbol that was once feared was later re-appropriated for public use and exploitation. The Elephant is a precursor to and stands as guard of the landscape beyond. Figure 8: Passage The arch symbolizes a threshold; a ceremonial entrance. Stripped of its robustness in one dimension, the archway becomes an impression of itself casting only a majestic shadow. Across the street, the original entryway of the palace is preserved. Figure 9: Cognizance An exclusive group of towers peer through Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homogenous and low urban fabric. Together these moments of elevation provide a collective glimpse of the city. The tower joins the family of vertical monuments and provides a sense of awareness of the parts and of the whole city. Figure 10: Descent Descendants of the site are the layers of past constructions that lay beneath the surface. The existing excavation of the original palace on the site is made accessible to the public. The site is a museum to its own history. Figure 11: Container The landscape struggles with the desire for openness and a necessity for enclosure. The container interferes with the landscape, interrupting views and terrain to create a sense of boundary.

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Figure 8: Passage

Figure 9: Cognizance

Figure 10: Descent

Figure 11: Container

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011). Boyer, Christine, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Buttlar, Adrian Von, Berlin’s Castle Versus Palace: A Proper Past for Germany’s Future? Future Anterior Volume IV, Number 1, Summer 2007. Ungers, Oswald Mathias, The City in the City- Berlin: A Green Archipelago (Zürich: Lars Muller, 2013

238 240 242 244 246 248 250 Claire Mitchell

NEW THRESHOLDS AT THE EDGE OF A DIGITAL WORLD: REASSESSING PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL INFLUENCE IN USER INTERFACE DESIGN

Claire Mitchell is a UX Designer and Creative Technologist in New York City. She has a Master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from St. Edward’s University where she focused in Bioethics. Prior to NYU, she was the Head of Creative Development for New York-based VFX / Content production company, 1stAveMachine. Claire is passionate about fostering collaborations between artists and scientists, and the use of creativity as a vehicle to bring the benefits of cutting edge research to a broad audience.

Figure 1: Two Worlds

An old paradigm is shifting and the perceived division between digital and physical worlds is being challenged. Interaction and user interface designers are increasingly required to think spatially, while designers of physical objects and spaces have an opportunity to consider the potential for digital integration in both design and process. The personal computer has arguably been the most transformative and democratizing invention of the last century. There’s a paradoxical relationship, however, between the speed of advancement in our connection to digital media and the outdated mental models that pervade user interfaces. Only thirty years ago, most people could not have imagined working with computers on a daily basis. Now it’s rare to meet anyone who’s daily interactions don’t require it. The personal computer has revolutionized the way we view, store, send and think about information, and its success is largely credited to the metaphorical use of the “desktop” in the graphical user interface and it’s subsequent use in the Apple II computer in the mid to late 80’s. The pictorial icons of the desktop GUI could be easily understood by anyone who had ever stepped into an office, and that was the idea.1 Those who might hesitate to adopt the machine of the command line days could be comforted with knowledge that working with a personal computer was just like working at your physical desk.

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Even with the desktop metaphor, there certainly had to be some confusion, among those who had never touched a computer, about what it meant to have a “file folder” on screen that “documents” could be placed in.2 As evidenced by the pervasive metaphors in software interfaces today, however, the GUI introduced the masses to digital life through the widespread adoption of personal computers and the coinciding metaphors. But as the inherent mutability of language necessitates, metaphors are transitory. They acquire new meaning or become so concrete that it’s difficult for users to imagine that things could have been any other way, and alternative models are difficult to accept.3

Exploring the Universe on a Bicycle As time increasingly separates new generations of computer users from the old habits and connotations from which metaphorical office interfaces are derived, a question of relevance becomes unavoidable. Thirty years from the time of the Apple II, screen interfaces are still filled with flat tributes to relics of the past, requiring us to acknowledge and memorialize representations of objects that were once taken for granted.4 Deleted information is dragged into a picture of a ‘trash can’, despite there being no real need for any ‘container’ for reallocated bits. Even in the most recent mobile phone interfaces, icons modeled after handheld landline phones are used to indicate the

NEW THRESHOLDS

Figure 2: Trash

act of making two-way audible contact with an acquaintance using data-packets sent through the air -- despite the lack of popularity in the walltethered telephones that inspire them. Is there a danger in the misinformation contained in how we shape our knowledge about computation to fit our expectations of the behavior of unrelated objects? Despite the innovative activities and range of nondesk confining professions that computers are used for (from rendering photo-real 3D graphics, to visualizing data in real-time) and despite being empowered with the capability to collaborate remotely with colleagues on the opposite side of the world, the user is ultimately forced back into the creatively-stifling mentality of the restrictive iconographic models hidden within the interface; i.e., being confined to a â&#x20AC;&#x153;deskâ&#x20AC;?. Why should

such radical potential be constrained by such dull imagery?

Between a Physical Rock and a Digital Hard Place The evolution from physical to digital is inextricably linked to the design and production tangible artifacts. The machines that provide the means and temptation to increasingly relegate our selves to a solely digital existence have roots in a technology that was created for the purpose of fabricating tangible objects -- the Jacquard loom and its predecessors. These magnificent primitive machines were of the first to be fully automated, designed for creating tactile patterns of tapestry encoded with mathematical information and ,as precursor to the punch card system, served as inspiration for subsequent automation of

digital calculation. They also required physical interaction in a spatial context on the part of the user. As personal computers came on the market and screen interfaces became a standard, were opportunities to design computers in ways that integrate digital information with physical experience lost?

Design Against Mental Atrophy

Today the inevitable blurring of a line between physical and digital worlds has never been so apparent, but something is preventing a complete synthesis. As the stubborn physical world refuses to be forgotten, we are forced to live in between, dividing our attention between the world in the ‘screen’ and engaging with ‘reality’.

The ancient Greeks exploited this innate sense for mapping to correlate spatial structures with memorization. Relying heavily on the mental fabrication of detailed buildings as a way to remember narratives and speeches, rhetoricians used the Method of Locii to easily retrieve information from imagined physical places in architectural spaces.1 The technique proved a successful way to organize memories without the need for recording or writing, much less committing data to an artificial memory.

Perhaps some hesitation derives from the fact that at the moment, our lives as physically present, attentive beings are constantly interrupted by the need to dive into screens of graphics that lack the depth of what the hardware and our imaginations are capable of. There’s a temptation on the part of the designer to perpetuate the visual language of current user interface models simply because of their sustained prevalence, and an equal complacency on the part of the user to accept what is presented on the consumer market. The “desktop”, a perpetual reminder of the monotony and limitations of office work pre-personal computer revolution, is now an outdated representation of objects whose relevance is evermore negated by the very technology that pays tribute to them.4

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Humans have an inherent instinct for spatial comprehension. Cognitive development has been shown to be strengthened both by physical activity and through the exploration and manipulation of physical objects.2

Computational devices have become part of everyday interaction; an extension of and a storage device for our own individual memory rather than a tool to enhance it; a catalyst for communication and a simultaneous temptation to push away the physical a bit further. Could the use of deeper spatial metaphors that extend beyond desktops and overlapping windows be beneficial for neurological development? Could our experience with digitally stored information enhance cognitive capabilities, and empower the user through imagery and interactions that allude to spatial exploration and synthesis between the physical and digital?

NEW THRESHOLDS

Figure 3: Jacquard Loom

Figure 4: Babbage Analytical Engine

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Figure 5: ENIAC Machine, Wiki Commons

Figure 6: Engelbartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Workstation

Figure 7: Screenshot of Microsoft Bob OS. Microsoft ÂŠ 1995

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As the authors of a study on the use of space in user interfaces declare, “allowing and encouraging users to utilize their spatial memory whenever possible should be an important goal for interface designers”1 Some failed designs in the history of the GUI have been sited as attempts to represent more spatial metaphors, or to use spatial metaphors to more realistically correlate on screen interactions with the real world. Bob was a project out of Microsoft that allowed the user to customize a “room”, where address books on tables and other everyday objects could be moved or placed to store or retrieve information.3 However, the limitations of graphics at the time, coupled with the juvenile design, hardly bridge the gap between the physical experience of spatial interaction and dragging cartoon elements around on a screen. Well into the second decade of the 21st century, enhanced speed and graphics capabilities make it possible to create more realistic, responsive user interface environments that compliment the need for spatial exploration, with the ability to virtually do it. The spatial nature of immersive video games has become incredibly convincing in the past 5-10 years.

Jumping into the (Simulated) Unknown There’s a huge potential for user interface designers to benefit from the contribution

architects might have in influencing the redesign of more spatial graphic user interfaces. Just as experts in cognition have been consulted for their expertise in user experience design2 architects might serve as equally influential collaborators in the direction of digitally designed interactive spaces. What if, rather than putting “files” into “folders”, graphic designers “store” in-progress compositions in spatial “galleries”? Settling for on-screen simulations, while potentially creating a more immersive experience in the user interface, perpetuates the division between physical and digital. Something more radical is already happening. New interfaces are being designed, where interaction in the space between matter and information is possible. The mediator of communication between individuals will less often be a screen of graphics. Idea and iteration with distant colleagues will have the feel of more in-person collaboration. Community engagement will become more “social” than “social media”. Education will put more emphasis on exploration than typing on a keyboard. Digital integration with physical experiences will offer the best of both worlds.

Esc Shift Alt Natural user interfaces, materials research, the prevalence of cloud computing and tangible user

interfaces are emerging, enabling us to completely rethink what it means to work with a computer. Days behind the desktop are numbered. Natural user interfaces sense gestural, voiceactivated, touch and biometric data to bypass the need for keyboards or mice and to anticipate the intentions of the user. Materials research is demonstrating the potential to integrate sensing technology directly into objects and the environment; for example, force-sensing tiles can indicate how foot traffic flows through a building, or be used by a physical therapist to record impact pressure of a runner rather than inputting observational data into a spreadsheet. Cloud computing is making it possible to collect, store and do real-time analysis at an unprecedented speed. One can still maintain access to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s information without being tethered to a single location or device. Tangible user interfaces will make it possible to integrate digital information into physical objects, while the manipulation of physical objects is recorded for digital analysis. Physical objects will have a digital presence, and the pixel of the future may have corresponding presence as a physical block. Groups at university labs like the Tangible Media group at MITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Media Lab, the students at NYUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ITP and other interaction design researchers and artists have been experimenting with the vast potential that integrating digital information with physical interactivity holds.

vision. Industrial designers can model with clay using a 3d scanner to capture the contours as the object is formed. Drawing surfaces may be a place to sketch ideas as those ideas are projected on the surface of a remote collaborator in another city, both editing in real time. Windows of a conference room may change in opacity to accommodate the display of information directly related to the discussion. Tiles on a wall may change orientation to represent incoming data about a topic of interest. At the city scale, patterns in bicycle and foot traffic using mobile phone signals may provide urban planners with insight into identifying the location for bike lanes or city parks.6 As research from the labs is available for exploration by designers in various fields, spatial ways of interacting with digital information will become the dominant paradigm.3 Collaboration between coders, digital experience designers and those from disciplines in urban planning, architecture and spatial organization will be integral in shaping the landscape of these hybrid interfaces. There will be an increasing crossover between design disciplines that we currently consider being confined to either physical space or only a screen. As the screen disappears, architects and user interface designers will bridge the perceived divide between material atoms and information bits, crossing physical thresholds at the edge of a digital world.

Rather than moving pixels on a screen, a prototype of a building could be rendered with blocks and tracked using embedded sensors, or computer Figure 8 (Facing): GUI Museum

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ENDNOTES 1.

Burgess, Neil. Spatial Cognition and the Brain. NY Accademy of Science. 1124: 77-79, 2008.

Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. The MIT Press 2007.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University if Chicago Press. 3rd Ed. 1996.

Blackwell, Alan F. The Reification of Metaphor as a Design Tool. ACM .Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2006.

Johnson, Stephen. Interface Culture. Basic Books. 1999.

McCullough, Michael. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing. The MIT Press. 2005.

IMAGES 1.

Two Worlds. Illustration by Claire Mitchell

Trash. Collage by Claire Mitchell

Jacquard Loom. <http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2009/Industrialization.html>

Babbage Analytical Engine. Available: <www.computerhistory.org>

ENIAC Machine. Source: wiki commons. Available: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Two_women_operating ENIAC_(full_resolution).jpg>

Engelbart Workstation. Available: <http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_engelbart.htm>

Screenshot of Microsoft Bob OS. Wikipedia. Available: <http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Bob_home.png>. Microsoft ÂŠ1995

GUI Museum. Illustration by Claire Mitchell

Touch wall. Illustration by Claire Mitchell

Figure 9 (Facing): Touch Wall

174 176 178 180 Lee Dykxhoorn

HOW TO HIJACK A MUSEUM Lee Dykxhoorn received his Masters in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently works at Gund in Boston. His graduate work explored the sociocultural context of civic buildings and the political influences in design of public spaces. Today, Lee continues to investigate the production of the built environment as an intentional transformation to promote social change. He has won awards for several projects challenging preconceptions of public space - he was the codesigner of an audio installation that won the Permeable Building Competition in 2009, and was the designer of an exhibition on housing at the United Nations World Urban Forum in 2010. Lee actively promotes design education in collaboration with Learning By Design.

Rendering by Herreros Arquitectos of view from the proposed Munch Museum (2009)

“...there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” -Jacques Derrida In April of 2008, the Oslo Opera House opened on the Bjørvika Peninsula to welldeserved critical acclaim. Part of an ambitious urban renewal plan seeking to reposition the post-industrial waterfront of the Oslofjord in Norway’s capital, the Opera House has become incredibly popular as a public space as well as the most visible first step in a transformation that is currently reshaping how the city meets the water. Development plans for the surrounding area include one million square meters of new construction, an underwater tunnel to reroute traffic, increased density, and a consolidation of the cultural infrastructure of the city to create a museum district. The architecture of the Opera House set the pace of development in the new Fjord City as both monumental and nationalistic, and is selfconsciously an expression of globalization in a city caught between modernity and tradition. The text of Snøhetta’s competition winning entry for the building describes the area as the historic “meeting point with the rest of the world. The dividing line between the ground ‘here’ and the water ‘there’ is both a real and symbolic threshold. This threshold is realised as... the meeting between land and sea, Norway and the world, art and everyday life.”1 From the beginning, the rhetoric of this waterfront as the intersection of Norway with the world immediately evokes various spatial

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tensions that will be played out in the changes to the waterfront in Oslo. The timing of this project of reinvention is not insignificant, colliding with several forces acting in the Norwegian public sphere over the last decade. The Opera House marked an inflection point in the city’s history, with the grandeur of the Snøhetta design immediately lending legitimacy to the shift toward a post-industrial Oslo. At the opening, Norway was in a unique position among the international community; while the rest of the world was mired in the developing global financial crisis in 2008, Norway was largely unaffected by economic uncertainty. Years of Social Democratic economic policy that focused on channeling substantial revenue from the North Sea oil industry directly into the sovereign wealth fund created a buffer that has allowed Norway to increase social programs at a time primarily defined by the economics of austerity elsewhere in the world.2 At the same time, Norway is in the midst of a significant demographic shift through immigration, with a sharp increase over the last decade. Changes in policy and favorable living conditions have contributed to the rise in the number of foreign-born citizens living in the country, from 1.4 percent in 1950 to 10 percent in 2010.3 In the capital, 25% of residents were either born outside of the country or had parents who were, making up a sizable portion of the population that has roots outside of the traditional Nordic collective heritage that was de facto until very recently.

HOW TO HIJACK A MUSEUM

As a nation, Norway has historically had little experience with cultural diversity. Never having been an imperial power and largely isolated from the population movements of mainland Europe, outside influences were limited for much of the last century since Norway achieved autonomy from Sweden in 1905. However, today the realities of a significant population that is culturally distinct from ethnic Norwegians is challenging the notion of citizenship and what it means to be Norwegian. Against this backdrop of demographic shifts, cultural changes and political nationalism, one of the most interesting public debates has been around the legacy of the painter Edvard Munch. The City of Oslo owns a substantial collection of Munch paintings, etchings and murals, which he left to the city at his death in 1944. While many of his most famous works such as the painting The Scream were created in the 1890’s, Munch continued to paint throughout the rest of his life in a career that spanned many political and social changes in Norway. He was a public figure in the European art community, but his exposure there was often presented in context of being an outsider - a Norwegian artist practicing on the Continent. His most productive years coincided with the rising currents of nationalism that swept Norway during the movement toward independence.

Figure 01 - 1000 Kroner Bank Note with the Portrait of Edvard Munch (2001)

Even though much of his work is introspective, Munch’s timing and popularity situated his work in context of what it means to be Norwegian, becoming the symbol of Nordic achievement. Today, his work adorns the Rådhuset (City Hall) in epic murals depicting pastoral scenes and the Norwegian people. One face of the 1000 kroner note, the highest denomination in circulation,

bears his portrait while the reverse features one of his paintings. His authority as a cultural figure is unassailable, which in the recent cultural shifts has lead to his work being associated with the idea of a collective Nordic heritage. However, the relevance of any unifying cultural narrative becomes increasingly contested as large percentages of the citizens hail from outside Scandinavia. The anthropologist Homi Bhabha writes in his seminal study of cultural formation The Location of Culture that, “The present of the people’s history, then, is a practice that attempts to hark back to a ‘true’ national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype.”4 History is ever a constructed narrative, an intentional reworking of the past that is a constant act of curation. Evidence of this repositioning of history over time can be traced through the architectural forms generated to frame the Munch collection. The current manifestation of Munch’s legacy is an undersized, largely unappealing structure that was built in 1963 from the profits from state cinema ticket sales. Located in Tøyen, a neighborhood in East Oslo which in the Sixties was an emerging immigrant area in East Oslo, it was the embodiment of a museum for the people. Under the Social Democratic policies that prevailed in Norway during the last half of the 20th century, the cultural capital of the city was seen as a public resource to be shared equitably. As a result museums, libraries, performance spaces, etc. were scattered about the various districts of Oslo. However, the current Munch Museum is perhaps best known the site of an art heist of 2004 in which several of the most famous paintings, The Scream and Madonna were stolen. Two men wearing masks walked in and stole them with almost no resistance. Due to related security concerns as well as a lack of adequate gallery space, there has been pressure to find a new home for the Munch collection in a more contemporary, accessible building. However, this would mean a reversal of the egalitarian urban planning policies that drove its original location far from the city center. Several proposals have been made to build a new location in Bjørvika, alongside the new Oslo Opera house and as a cornerstone of the new museum district there. However, when viewed in context of the larger social trends, this expansion represents a reconception of the basic role of cultural buildings in relation to the city. Instead of being seen as a public resource to be shared by all, there is a move to use the institution of the museum and all of the authority that represents to promote a narrative of Nordic history. In 2008 an international competition was held to produce the design of the new Munch Museum. Given in the brief was the assumption that the museum would move from its current location to the Bjørvika peninsula, in the plot immediately adjacent to the Opera. The structure of the competition meant that although a range of creative design options were explored for the museum itself, very

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little critical thought was given to the reasons behind why the museum was being moved. It was enough that another iconic cultural building was called for, and the mass producers of international architectural icons lined up to present. Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, FOA, Diller Scofidio, Kengo Kuma and REX, among others, were all beat out by a formally austere scheme by the Spanish firm Herreros Arquitectos. The winning scheme is an anonymous glass box tower, where the primary design move is to tilt one of the walls of the galleries at the top to create a framed view back down to the Opera House and the developing cultural district.

Figure 02 - Rendering by Herreros Arquitectos of view from the proposed Munch Museum (2009)

While many of the entries had innovative ideas about gallery organization, public space or material experimentation, the design that won over the jury was the one that presented Munchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art in direct visual comparison with the other collected landmarks of Nordic heritage being planned for the Fjord City. The selected scheme is defined by a moment of architectural transformation that makes the entire form of the building about viewing the area it sits in. The architectural staged view becomes a cultural construction for tourism and the occupants of the city alike. Seeking to repurpose the cultural legitimacy of Edvard Munch comes as one move among many that are rewriting the urban fabric of Osloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waterfront to show a curated, sanitized, and approved version of Norwegian history. When the Munch Museum is completed in 2018, it will join not only the Oslo Opera House, but the new Oslo Public Library, the Stenersen Museum, a new Central Train Station and a medieval Viking ruin. The ruins of the old settlement are a masterpiece

Figure 03 - Traditional costume at the Norsk Folkemuseum, photo by author (2010)

of constructed history -- authentic ruins presented in a park artificially constructed to recreate the shoreline as it existed in 1350. In addition, plans have existed off and on over the last decade to move the Viking Ship Museum to BjĂ¸rvika. The impulse to relocate these artifacts and signifiers of Nordic culture marks a shift in the way cultural buildings are perceived, from being a common resource to which all are entitled access to a tool to define the character of the capital. National identity is made up a dialectic between the authority of the historic past and cultural identification. While the relics of the past are often used to reinforce power structures, continuist national narratives are a simplification that do not account for the complexity of influences on a people. For this reason Oslo is at an inflection point in its development, in which the monuments being built to reinforce national politics are out of step with the citizens they serve. Currently much of the planned development is still in progress, and this is the moment in which there should be an open, transparent discussion about the possibilities of public architecture and for whom it should be built.

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While the Oslo Opera house has been for a the most part a critical success, the failure of architectural critics to look at it as more than just a very compelling stand-alone building is a deficiency in process. Instead we should see it as part of the urban trend that is seeking to use the public institutions of the city, including the Munch Museum, to provide cultural legitimation the Fjord City. Museums and their archives are inherently involved in the project of architectural narrative. The experience that unfolds in a building designed to tell a story should not be unintentional or undiscussed.

ENDNOTES: 1.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oslo Opera House / Snohettaâ&#x20AC;? 07 May 2008. ArchDaily. Accessed 13 Feb 2014.

Thomas, Landon, Jr. (2009, May 13) Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson. New York Times retreived from nytimes.com

From Statistics Norway, Retreived from ssb.no/en

Bhabha, Homi. (1991) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Lyall, Sarah. (2006, February 6) The Case of the Missing Munchs. New York Times Retreived from nytimes.com

252 254 256 258 260 262 264 266 268 Joseph Raffin

FIVE ALLEGORICAL CITIES THE FUTURE OF OLD FORM IN THE NEW PARADIGM

Joseph Raffin is a candidate for his Masters in Architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy. He was raised in Valparaiso, Indiana and participates in track and field at his university. He takes interest in history and theory of architecture design; and gravitates towards projects that forefront absurdity. His thesis work and research speculates on the new paradigm as a reaction to severe cultural and formal depreciation. Joe enjoys fishing when he has the time. He prefers Francesco Borromini over Gian Lorenzo Bernini as his favorite architect. He also thinks that Adam Cook is the next big hitter.

Figure 1: cube and duck collision, drawing

A very primitive understanding of culture points at some crossing between man’s need to not only physically evolve, but evolve the craft by which he survives. This tendency is something innate within man. Where primitive survival may be very accessible, man is to this day in a constant struggle to survive better. Being both innate and primate, this drive easily consumes the mind and distracts one from their own humanity. The wish to become cultural, indicative of our underlying nostalgic sensibilities, allows man to create methods and rituals by which the past, however recent, may be present in our progressive strife. The Caves of Lascaux may have been dualistically a means by which man can be strategic as well as historical. The primate people successfully synthesized forms of strategy and forms of history. Their paintings could have served as maps or documentation of past hunts and hunting strategy. They are also evidence of ritual and return that pre-settlement man has left behind. However hard this is to actually prove, it is an example of viewing culture as a synthesis between these two forces – though the synthesis is careful and seems to take time. It takes on a nature of the two acting within and informing each other rather than a mere compromise. Architecture, being a product of culture, acts much in the same way. Our need to shelter ourselves better and better is a faction of our need to survive. Our drive to be historical

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explains the relevance that Old things have in the contemporary conversation. Even the most avant-garde theorists were making very profound statements about architecture of the past. Jean Baudrillard begins to bring a growing situation to light when he cites the Pompidou Centre as an instance where an architectural form has ruptured the symbiotic relationship between an object and its simulacra1. The initial shock of the building’s innards being outwards is amplified by the apparent duality of this neofaçade. Its symbol and its face have folded into the machine that the building really is. The building simulacra are one in the same. The “situation” becomes more complex when other buildings like Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim museum display facades that become ways of wrapping and rewrapping what is essentially a Pompidou machine beneath2. Etienne Turpin observes that the most supposedly progressive buildings face stainless expression somewhat indicative of the erosion of the earth’s surface due to mass human appropriation3. Aspects that seem to be culturally progressive in architecture may actually be culturally erosive. The situation that transcends all these observations is that today, buildings have become ways by which one wraps the machine. This method tends to favor materials that are smooth, stainless, and ultimately material-less. The outer sign becomes a singular expression, a smooth object. Furthermore, our original

FIVE ALLIGORICAL CITIES

Figure 1.0 Cube and Duck Series The cube and duck series investigates the idea of autonomous machine and abstracted symbol: the polarized form. However, a collision of the two reveals the restoration of meaning towards the autonomous thing, and autonomy to the over-scrutinized symbol. The collision provides insight into the complexity of synthesizing objects that are purely utilitarian and symbols that arise from culture making. The separated cube and duck then become a narrative of architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current treatment of progressive and Old forms.

synthesis of culture becomes a staunch polarity. The building is an autonomous structure capped by a total symbolic abstraction. They may be totally a autonomous, or a totally singular object, but never a complex synthesis. The hypothesis would arise that the synthetic understanding of culture is in a state of flux, or maybe even crisis. Within the ever accelerating pace of progression, it could be becoming harder and harder to reconcile our ways of turning Old form into dynamic culture. A series of timelines have been assembled by a philosophy professor at the Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands. In the graphs abstracted from the timeline [figure 2.0] less attention is paid to the accuracy of the actual start and end date of each style, and more attention is paid to the narrative of the abstracted projections. The projections tell a narrative about the future of style. It suggests various ideas about speed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the speed of things becoming obsolete and the speed of things becoming imminent. As the projections become more asymptotic and the rate of obsolescence and imminence become instant; as the typical time span for an identifiable style diminishes to nothing, the ideas of infinity and scarcity rise to the surface. The nature of the narrative brings more fruition to the cultural crisis. It speculates on a future of formal flux. In a way, the diminishing of style is indicative of a whitewashing of regional tendencies. The dually infinite and singular nature of cultural, ritual, or Old forms has created a global aesthetic that is material-less, vague, and machine.

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The following images are a carrying-out of this narrative. They predict a future where urban form reacts, not so much with the struggles of context and land, but a coping with the ever fading form of culture. The scarcest resource to the citizens of each city is culture. Here the rate of what is obsolete and imminent comes almost instantly. Each city weighs its strengths and weaknesses against this phenomenon. They constantly seek ways of achieving cultural form in their compounding progression.

FIVE ALLIGORICAL CITIES

Several narratives of style and form have been mapped over 8,000 years.

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SOFT CITY Technology has a way of reversing our notions of what form is soft and what form is hard. The temporal qualities in form allow it over time, usually within a hard space, tp act as a soft condition. As designers it is necessary to contain soft form within hard form. However, the rate of progression allows one to view form as being soft on ever more large scales. This city’s entire urban structure has become soft over the pace of progression. Its urban plan is not one centered around efficiency of movement or transportation, nor does it center any direct hierarchy. Rather, the “hard” urban plan is the city’s attempt to create form by which it can seek identity. The urban structure is purely a vague symbol; an autonomous skeleton.

PLATE CITY The perfection of instant unimpeded mass production has allowed urbanization to thrive at a massive scale. Plate city mass produces entire city blocks as it appropriates itself across the landscape. In an effort to be cultural, the city seeks meaningful form. Trying to find value in nature, Plate City covers the mountain and adapts its form in a parasitic relationship. Here, the members of old Los Angeles have migrated to Plate City as sea levels rise to consume the old city. It identifies with the old skyscrapers beyond the horizon that now look like distant giants.

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EATING CITY An ideal form crawls across a mountainous terrain. It is an extruded grid, the envy of urbanity. However the citizens of Eating City are constantly hungry for cultural expression. As it grows across the landscape, the city consumes natural form, thinking that it will heal their disconnect from context and breed culture. However, as the natural form breaks down within the bowels of the city, the natural form only becomes once again over-abstracted and culture-less. The city is never satisfied. The citizens are on the brink of war with Plate City, who believe Eating City is destroying their precious formal resource.

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ORGANIZING CITY (following page) This is another ideal grid city. An extruded grid is by which this city organizes itself. The actual structure of the city is so forward in its efficiency that its citizens have become increasingly nostalgic. They turn to the most cultural forms they know from the nearby vacant old Chicago. Having no understanding or real need for the forms, the citizens place them within the grid as trophy object to mused over. They are especially proud of their Preston Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Center by Bertrand Goldberg. There is, however, fierce debate over which Trump Tower by SOM is the original.

ORGANIZING CITY

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DISTANT CITY Having no need to attach itself to the land, Distant City is forced to look to its own obsolescence and imminence to find cultural form. Ideal forms are realized at the top of the city at instantaneous rates. Equally as instantaneous is how they morph and divide in order to become useful. As they become obsolete, the exhausted urban forms hang from the bottom of the city as way of being historical. The historical forms are eventually dropped off to the ground as the city makes room for new form.

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NOTES

Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2003. PrintThis Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2003.

This is not to say the interior of Ghery’s Guggenheim is in anyway like that of a machine, but the building, as a machine, has allowed architects on almost all levels to fracture traditional notions of building façade.

Turpin, Etienne. “Jimmie Durham in Lasceaux – A Parable for Artists in the Anthropocene” University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 2012 Lecture Series. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills. 21st December 2012. Lecture.

Voorthuis, Jacob. “Timelines.” Www.voorthuis.net. Www.voorthuis.net, 2008. Web.

UDM|SOA NEWS 50th ANNIVERSARY Dean Will Wittig

The occasion of a significant anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on the legacy that a community inherits from the traditions of the past and the lessons and accomplishments that have been handed down from those who have come before. At the same time, one cannot help pondering simultaneously what new opportunities and advancements might lie ahead, and in turn how future generations might look back on a history that is yet to be written. This is a particularly relevant exercise for the School of Architecture, which is rooted in a culturally based discipline. “All cultural products contain a mixture of two elements: conventions and inventions. Convention and invention have quite different cultural functions. Conventions represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values; inventions confront us with a new perception of meaning, which we have not realized before. Both these functions are important to culture. Conventions help maintain a culture’s stability while inventions help it respond to changing circumstances and provide new information about the world.” -John G. Cawelti All of us who have had the privilege to be members of the UDM SOA family during this past year have been honored to participate in a number of wonderful celebrations that have reminded us all of the perpetual balance between invention and tradition. We have come to recognize more fully during this year that the traditions and accomplishments that we have inherited do not draw our attention to the past, but rather point us confidently toward the future. Left to Right: Current Dean Will Wittig; first Dean of the UDM SOA, Bruno Leon, and former Dean Stephen Vogel

Our collective history actually spans more than 50 years. The School of Architecture traces its roots to the establishment of the Department of Architectural Engineering within the College of Engineering in 1922. In 1957, Fr. Lawrence J. Green, S.J., was able to transform the curriculum and re-title the program as the Department of Architecture. From 1961 to 1963, Professor Bruno Leon served as chair and began the transformation of the program into an autonomous School of Architecture. In 1964, the degree was accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board, and Bruno Leon was named the School’s first dean.

In 1975 the old Science Building was renamed the Architecture Building and was renovated to accommodate the School. In the 80’s two semester-long international studies programs were created. The first was a full exchange program with the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland followed a few years later by a summer semester in Tuscany -- part in Florence and part in Volterra. In 1992, Bruno Leon retired as dean after thirty years of service. During the 1992–1993 academic year, Nicholas Chatas, a tenured professor, served as acting dean while a national search was conducted. In May of 1993, Stephen Vogel began duties as the new Dean of the School of Architecture. Dean Vogel brought to the School a renewed commitment to a broad based liberal education and an understanding of the role of the School in serving the urban community of Detroit. The establishment of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center in 1994 formalized this commitment. In 2006 the interdisciplinary Master of Community Development degree was founded as a direct response to the University and School commitment to engagement in the community and participation in the redevelopment of Detroit. The interdisciplinary undergraduate Digital Media Studies program was moved from the English Department to the School of Architecture in 2008. In 2009 the School formed a new collaboration

Bruno Leon, the first Dean of UDM’s SOA, 1964

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with The University of Windsor to form the Visual Arts and the Built Environment program. In 2010 Dean Vogel announced his intention to step down as dean and return to teaching full time, and in May of 2011 Professor Will Wittig was named the third dean of the School of Architecture. Throughout its history, the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture has produced graduates who are uniquely qualified to lead and serve in their communities. Since its inception over 50 years ago, the School has been committed to a student-centered approach, ensuring a rich and diverse experience rooted in the University’s mission of community engagement. We remain focused on an educational experience that benefits from three key hands-on experiences that prepare our students to lead and serve in their profession and their communities. These include: a mandatory cooperative education experience that gives students real-world experience working alongside seasoned professionals; opportunities to work in direct service to the community in studios that collaborate with realworld clients, including engagement with our exemplary Detroit Collaborative Design Center; and a global perspective provided through a semester-long international experience with our outstanding study abroad programs. Tying these initiatives together is a commitment first and foremost to the personal development of all of our students. Our founding dean described the role of a professor in the School

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James Timberlake’s lecture during the 50th Anniversary celebration

2013 Distinguished Alumni Awards

in this way: “If a man of great knowledge has no compassion for the human condition, he will be a bad teacher.” Current students would find this sentiment very familiar, as our faculty remain focused on the student experience. Echoing this point of view in the present, Professor John Mueller stated that the goal of our efforts “is a thoughtful and considered human being, who happens to have studied architecture.”

UDM SOA NEWS

One of many renovations that have modernized the School of Architecture

This anniversary year has been marked by a number of significant accomplishments that also reflect the themes that have guided the work of the School throughout its history. The year began with the completion of the renovation of a new facility for our program in Volterra, Italy, and the return of our students to Volterra for a full-semester experience in this amazing new facility. Back home, the studios in the building were being renovated to provide excellent working conditions for our students, including being outfitted with new customdesigned workstations for the first time in our history. Meanwhile, the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (which is celebrating its 20th Anniversary) is coming off of a year in which they successfully conducted a massive community engagement process that gave all Detroiters the opportunity to play a role in crafting the ground breaking Detroit Future City project. The Master of Community Development program landed the largest academic grant in the Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history this summer, which will help to establish new levels of partnership with area non-profits, including a post-graduate fellowship program. The anniversary itself was marked by a celebratory weekend that brought hundreds of alumni and other supporters back to campus for a whole slate of celebrations, including a keynote lecture by James Timberlake, and the honoring of Warren Loranger as our inaugural distinguished alumnus and Bruno Leon posthumously as our Founder. The dinner celebration was punctuated by the

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2013 renovated studio spaces at the UDM, SOA

Renovation of the Volterra Architecture Facility

announcement of a tremendous new gift of support from Warren Loranger, which has enabled us to establish a significant endowed scholarship. In fact, in the last several years, the Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endowed scholarship portfolio, which is so important to the success of our students, has almost quadrupled.

UDM SOA NEWS

As many have noted during our gatherings over this past year, these themes of engagement with the profession, the larger community, and the world are part of the DNA of this place, which we fully expect to continue to guide us into the future. What else might the future hold? New technologies, new forms of education, new areas of academic focus? Nothing that we can be certain of, other than the fact that

young people will continue to come to UDM, not simply to gain an education and a better lot in life, but to develop into thoughtful adults with great leadership and critical thinking skills that will enable them to more fully serve the communities in which they work.

Students and Dean Will Wittig at the 50th Anniversary kick-off event, 2013

UDM|SOA NEWS Dan Pitera

DESIGN + LEADING FROM THE SIDE There has been a consistently unresolved debate on whether great design and/or grand citywide urban visions and the ideas of an individual citizen can coexist. We often hear that civic engagement means we have to abandon the tools that make great architecture, landscape and great urban design and accept mediocre products. The work of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center is grounded in the position that people in the city are catalysts for urban innovation. How can people be key operators in inspiring and creating new ecological and equitable urban environments and spaces (in planning and implementation)? This essay provides a sneak peak into the upcoming book, Syncopating Detroit: More People, More Programs, More Geographies, celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the DCDC.

Figure 4: Livernois Community Storefront, Detroit, 2009.

Leadership + Civic Engagement: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford. Though there seems to be enough evidence to show that Henry Ford may have never said this quote, we hear things like this statement a lot in our work. “Why are we asking the community? It will only slow the process down. They will not be able to tell us anything we don’t already know.” Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions and in the wrong way. Or maybe we should not be asking questions at all and move toward a process of knowledge exchange—where questions are formed and asked together as a group, rather than directing questions toward each other… It does not matter if Henry Ford said the prior statement or not. What matters is that we expect our leaders to think and speak this way. What does it mean to be a leader today. What did it mean? Is a leader a person who tells other people what to do? What do leaders look like? We have all heard people say: Leaders have clear vision. They think outside of the box. She was a born leader. They see things and opportunities others cannot. They take people where they did not know they wanted to go. Or do they…? There are many books and articles (online and off) defining leaders and leadership. This essay is not going restate them or provide a new or alternative definition. Instead, I intend to connect leadership and the value it holds in

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our society as the bridge between civic engagement and great design. Sometimes our vision of what a leader is and what a leader does is in direct contrast to what we want and expect from civic engagement. There are all kinds of leaders and leadership styles. I admittedly selected the example statements above, which celebrate the leader as a person in a position of authority—and who stands out above the rest. These statements also center on the leader as a person with unique character traits. We want to know these traits so we can be better leaders ourselves or perhaps build other leaders in the future. It may be true that a leader does have some unique characteristics, but what if we look at leadership as an activity? (For a comprehensive description of leadership as an activity, please reference Ronald Heifetz: Leadership Without Easy Answers) This vantage point turns the attention away from the person and moves it to the way the person works with a community—whether the community is defined as a neighborhood, a business or a group of friends. This may seem like an odd beginning. I begin here because it is our stance in our office—the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC)—that civic engagement is at the core of effective leadership, which mobilizes communities and generates great and meaningful design.

Design + Civic Engagement: There are a couple of key operating principles behind our work at the DCDC. We define leaders as people who synthesize the values and desires of many people to articulate a dynamic vision forward rather than dictate their own personal values and desires. Leaders should influence communities to face their future versus influencing communities to follow the leader’s vision. We define civic engagement as the open and ongoing two-way dialogue between all stakeholders— essentially, people talking together and working together to move forward together. The second principle centers on the consistently unresolved debate on whether great design and/or grand citywide urban visions and the ideas of an individual citizen can coexist. We often hear that civic engagement means we have to abandon the tools that make great architecture, landscape and urban design and accept mediocre products. Our work is grounded in the position that people in the city are catalysts for urban innovation. We are guided and governed by the question: How can people be key operators in inspiring and creating new ecological and equitable urban environments and spaces? With this position, we develop meaningful and productive methods of community participation, where community expertise is blended with discipline expertise—where communities and designers work as partners. Many people enter our design and engagement process in many different ways. The DCDC looks for ways to make everyone’s participation meaningful—from the business leader to the nonprofit leader, and from the pastor to the resident down the street. A successful civic

engagement process lies in the many opportunities to engage a broad range of communities, to work across silos and boundaries, and to increase the capacity of all community sectors to more effectively engage and partner. As leaders in this particular type of process, it is our responsibility to synthesize this knowledge exchange versus dictating specific knowledge or ideas. We work to be clear about the purpose of the engagement tactics and whom they reach. We define two general groupings of tactics: 1. The methods we use to open the process to a wide variety of people. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;andâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; 2. The methods we use to make their participation meaningful. Figure 1 illustrates the mosaic of tactics used to open the process for a variety of people to engage in our citywide planning work known as the Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning from November 2011 to November 2012. It engaged people 163,000 times with 30,700 one-on-one conversations resulting in a report titled: Detroit Future City. Many people do not have the ability or do not want to attend traditional community planning meetings or town hall events. For example, evening meetings do not work for the people who work in the evening or have long commutes to/from the

Figure 1: Engagement Tactics Month-to-Month Diagram, 2012.

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suburbs. Also, you will rarely find youth or young adults attending community meetings. The list continues… This diagram was reviewed and updated monthly using the participant demographic data from the previous months to ensure that we were reaching a range of people. We try to enter the process with little preconceived knowledge of what the final response should look like. Our engagement processes are not methods to achieve specific and particular responses. They are not intended to validate what we already think. They provide the content for our design process. Our workshops are a series of designed activities that are active and meaningful ways to encourage dialogue that potentially reveal hidden intentions, agendas, desires, and needs. They do not attempt to put words into the stakeholders’ mouths. The aim of each workshop is to listen to the words of each stakeholder and find connections and relationships with other stakeholders that reveal unique possibilities. We call this creative amnesia—where we try to enter every project with our partners with as little preconception as possible and use our creative processes to provoke engagement and instigate locally driven responses. Case in point (Figure 2): In the process of designing a public recreational park in Southwest Detroit, the stakeholders requested to surround the perimeter of the park with a six-foot iron fence. We did not take this specific directive at face value. When we along with the community questioned a bit more, we learned that the fence was their design solution to handle a larger and very specific issue. The park currently exists as a large dirt and grassy area about two-thirds of a city block. Drivers jump the curb in their vehicles and do “donuts” ripping up the grass. To the stakeholders, the only solution was to surround the

Figure 2: Section Diagram, Dingeman Park, Detroit, 2008.

park with a fence. We shared with them through design study drawings and precedent images that changing the park with varied grade changes particularly at the perimeter of the park would cause the vehicles to â&#x20AC;&#x153;bottom out.â&#x20AC;? The result of this learning exchange is a design for the park environment that feels open and inviting, while not being susceptible to vehicle trespassing, which is ultimately what the residents were trying to achieve with the fence. It is our responsibility at the DCDC to work through the exchange of information (creative listening), synthesize it and find connections (creative thinking), and develop a series of recommendations (creative designing).

Figure 3: PlayHouse, Detroit, 2009.

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Failure is an Optionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Design + Leadership + Civic Engagement: Whether at the scale of a building, landscape, neighborhood or city, we already know that if the problems are tough and they have been around a while, then the answers will be tougher. In other words, the easy answers have most likely already been tested. This means, as a community, we have to be prepared to make mistakes and to fail. New innovative ways for solving a problem rarely, if ever, happen on the first try. The path to success is found by making many failed turn offs, or by missing all together an exit or two. But these mistakes provide or reveal unexpected opportunities. We know that this sounds like a clichĂŠ. But with this in mind, the people working together through these intense and dynamic issues must be prepared to adapt to change. We must be willing to admit mistakes and adjust to the new potential and unexpected opportunity. This requires leaders who do not see their vision as the end goal. Many or most of us have probably seen at least one of the endless number of movies and stories written about leaders who have convinced a community, town or institution to follow their vision. When the vision does not quite work out as planed, the leader then skips town escaping the angry mob. As a way to escape this fate, the end goal is for the community to work through and find the yet-to-be-found solution to the very tough question(s). Effective civic engagement is where more people have a stake and ownership in finding and implementing the answers. Failing is perhaps easier to swallow when we have joint ownership and authorship in the process. This perspective begins to align the value of a leader as someone who works with and along side the community. In other words, this type of leader brings an expertise that works with and along

Figure 4: Livernois Community Storefront, Detroit, 2009.

side the varied expertise present in the community. This is a more intimate relationship, which in turn provides room for mutual learning and growth. The community influences the leader and the leader influences the community. Like the tiles in a mosaic, each person influences and connects with the other to create a bigger picture. This picture still retains the identity of the individual while creating larger community impact. With this in mind, civic engagement is not something that occurs as a transactional activity—when “it is needed”. Instead, it is something that occurs as an integral part of people’s day-to-day lives transforming how they live, negotiate and design/plan with one another. To conclude, spaces and places designed through effective engagement can reveal hidden histories and instigate future traditions. In other words, as we design the community spaces, which people will make into their familiar and special places, the DCDC tries to celebrate the things and activities that are often overlooked or perhaps seen as deficits and not assets. Designers and planners do not design and plan future traditions. We design the opportunities for traditions to be made. This is all connected through the power of storytelling. We strive to design spaces, which inspire people to make stories and tell them.

Figure 5: The Alley Project (TAP), Detroit, 2011.

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Figure 6-7: St Joseph Rebuild Center, New Orleans, 2009.

The 8 Stretches of John Mueller (or How to Gauge the Success of Your Critique)

THE 8 STRETCHES by Theresa Skora â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;10 OF JOHN MUELLER (or How to Gauge the Success of Your Critique)

This issue is dedicated to Professor John Mueller. After thirty-seven years of teaching and service to the UDM SOA community, he will be retiring in the Summer of 2014. We wish him well.

1. Well, Here Goes Another One...

2. Ok, So Far So Good, Kid.

5. Still Listening...

6. Patience is Running Out.

3. Time to Adjust.

4. Listening.

7. Alright Kid, Wrap it Up!

8. Finally, The End! Image Credit: Theresa Skora â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;10