ARCHITECTURE'S CLAY FEET
"Even if one no longer speaks of painting as a 'window opened onto the world' [as in the Renaissance], the modernist picture is still conceived as a vertical section that presupposes the viewer's having forgotten that his or her feet are in the dirt." --Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide
Heterologies
Architecture and Landscape Architecture have embarked on a long-distance voyage into territory of both a cerebral and material virtuosity (and virtuality) - the emergent patterns and heterologies are compelling signs of a vitalistic philosophical undercurrent in architectural discourse. Virtuality is expressed not only in the literal de-materialization of form but also in the high poetic and liminal codes of the prevailing fusion. This is evidenced by both new and revitalized contingencies - the extraordinary rebirth of formalism in the late-twentieth century and the uneasy reconfiguration of ecology as a humanist system versus its former status as a scientific system diametrically opposed to human activity.Foreign Office Architects - founded by Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera Polo in 1993 - is at the forefront of the ship of architecture in 2001, plying, at this time, the waters of Yokohama Harbor with their gigantic International Port Terminal (50 meters by 500 meters) "decoding the rituals of travel" while embracing the adjacent Yamashita Park and integrating the urban field with the strategic point of de- and embarkation. The project is the outcome of an international design competition staged in 1997, the jury chaired by Japanese architect Toyo Ito. The volume of 2G devoted to their work, Foreign Office Architects (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2000), 2G, No.16, edited by Moises Puenta, Lluis Ortega, foreword by Jeffrey Kipnis, essay by Ciro Najle, is the first comprehensive and perhaps comprehensible look into the herculean labors of this au courant design firm, these near mythic labors a product of years in the trenches, including a stint by the two principals at the Rotterdam Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Toyo Ito has contributed a telling essay, here, on the jury's deliberations. The book includes a significant appendix in the form of "FOA Code Remix 2000", a philosophical etude composed of "a series of reflections and propositions made in relation to the construction of the idea of professional and academic practice". This is, in fact, a manifesto - in line with architectural manifestos et passim - and the section "On Landscape" ends with the extraordinary: "The geometries of pure indeterminacy or pure linearity are a trace of the past, rather than a possibility for the future. The opportunity that lies ahead of us is to overcome the disciplinary barrier that resorts to contradiction as a form of complexity [...] and instead to exploit complexity through coherence and consistency: to learn to produce forms and topographies that are entirely artificial and yet complex; to generate them through a mediated, integrated addition of rigorous orders." Apropos these remarks, the volume of space wrapped into the Yokohama terminal is fluid and intentionally ill-defined as a means of encoding a physical indeterminacy consistent with the quixotic quest for placing form and space on equal footing. Construction images included in the book evoke perfectly the hybrid architecture of the facility, with the rebar-reinforced primary forms and the scaffolding of the site generating a field of warped, folded and vertiginous continuity. The final product will be a twisted sandwich composed predominantly of prefabricated steel plates and trusses. FOA's interior perspectives show a ribbed, Italian-Futurist concourse that opens to the horizon and the bay with receding ramps and supporting piers mediating the provisional upper and lower decks of the complex. FOA considers this methodology an elaboration of Origami - "thus the traditional separation between building-envelope and load-bearing structure disappears." Paths rise and fall within the enormous structure with the surface supporting a range of leisure activities and functioning as a de facto park for Yokohama's citizenry.
A second FOA project included in this book is their Downsview Park Competition entry, the landmark 2000 competition for an ex-urban piece of Toronto and former air force base slated to be converted to a mixed-use facility under the winning scheme by OMA, graphic designer Bruce Mau and collaborators. FOA's proposal is a prescient amalgam of surfaces ("a function based circuit system") and hollows ("a north-south corrugation pattern") that is allocated to both specific and vague usages. Their precis suggests that the site might self-generate an identity crisis and stand somewhere between a theme park for extreme sports and an urban park with areas devoted to nothing whatsoever. "Downsview will become a park dedicated to the exploration of the relationships between the physical self and the landscape, from the most strenuous to the most soothing." Oddly, the winners of the competition, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, placed second in the celebrated 1980s competition for Parc de la Villette in Paris. In architectural circles the OMA plan was perceived as superior to Bernard Tschumi's, the winning plan. In this case, at Downsview, Koolhaas has won - despite much grumbling - whereas the FOA may benefit from a parallel wave of admiration for their exquisite vision of a stealth park. And, oh yes, Tschumi's entry for Downsview was universally panned. What comes round goes round, but it takes some time to turn the ship of architecture. The signals go out, the coordinates are charted, and the leaden leviathan leans into the turn, trailing a foaming, churning wake.Viral Contagion
It is this complex hybridity of building types and forms that marks the new formalism, which at times is indeed purely virtual and exists only within the rarefied realm of the computer work station - imagination reified as computation. Virtual architectures of all kinds have spread like contagion, the somewhat zany, inspired influenza resulting in both built and utterly unbuildable works. See The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), edited by John Beckmann, for the full range of agonistic adventurism now sweeping architecture off its feet. Blob architecture has instigated a veritable tidal wave of amorphous, plastic building types, in part sponsoring the revival of the inflatable architecture of the 1960s. Within this maelstrom of competing visions for systems-derived morphologies is the more staid and applicable architecture of the new urbanity - the revitalization of urban infrastructure through mega-structural implantations - of which FOA is a part and an exemplar. There is, today, a spate of architecture firms renegotiating the relevance of the monstrous through technical and spatial imbrication, applying the vastly superior computer modeling and milling techniques of the 1990s - tools not available to the last wave of futurists - in the ongoing re-colonization of cities world wide. Gehry's output, the Bilbao Guggenheim especially, but also his forthcoming New York City Guggenheim, is evidence of this wide-ranging assault on conventional and normative architectural systems.
This architectural revolution is founded on the belief that architecture is topographical and that topology - the generation of form through the random interaction of fields and forces - is the great fulcrum, the archimedian point of leverage, that produces innovation. The influx of technological systems and the marriage of heaven and hell suggested by the merging of high-tech and natural systems has produced this unparalleled wave of smart architecture. Not unlike smart weapons, smart architecture finds its own way to its target utilizing advanced telemetry and sophisticated guidance systems, advancing at breakneck speed to the designated site. Much of it does actually explode upon impact.
Neo-Ecology
Eco-tecture - Bioclimatic Trends and Landscape Architecture in the Year 2001 (Barcelona: Loft Publications, 2000), edited by Aurora Cuito, is a collection of smart buildings on smart sites. The Dutch firm MVRDV figures prominently. The Netherlands have long been the ur-site of unrepentant modernism. Since the rise of Rem Koolhaas and OMA in the 1980s, Rotterdam and Amsterdam have blitzed the world with ultra-sleek solutions to the most mundane problems. MVRDV is renowned for their low-rise, horizontally quizzical architecture. Exploiting the image and the materiality of Dutch Modernism, MVRDV, as OMA, has introduced a volumetric architecture that is fluid and uncanny, in the sense that the voids and ramped or plunging interiors provide no small measure of sublimity in a context (container) reminiscent of the most orthodox of modernist boxes. Compactness and complexity come to an uneasy truce in MVRDV's VPRO office building (1997) in Hilversum, Holland. Like Norman Foster and Partners' Commerzbank (1997) in Frankfurt, Germany, VPRO is a building that engages landscape by emptying itself of the prototypical office program - the cubical and the module - and by adopting the heterogeneous factors of site - an eccentric heliotropism - that undermines the objective nature of structure. Foster and Partners' 50-story office tower, featured here, as is their renovation of the Berlin Reichstag (1999), exploits the most recent technological wonders applied to a triple-skinned glass curtain wall - in ways that might humble Mies van der Rohe - and Foster inserts a glassed atrium that extends the full height of the structure. A very clever system of disruptions and alterations within the vertical plan produces four-story garden terraces (on the inside) and suites of offices are offset by green spiraling around the interior of the tower. These conservation measures are integral to the image and function of the building and collectively produce an enviable work space by any standard.Renzo Piano Building Workshop has produced the most iconic of modern 'im-modern' gestures in their Cultural Center Jean Marie Tjibaou (1991-98) for the Kanak peoples of Noumea, New Caledonia. The complex was conceived as environmental architecture consistent with native traditions. The ten circular, double-shell forms are open, wood-ribbed structures arrayed along a wooded peninsula (between sea and lagoon) and constitute villages where specific cultural activities are enacted. Piano in his Logbook (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997) recorded the evolution of the project and its universal narrative - a narrative that relies less on endogenous factors than heterogeneous factors. The ten shells stand facing inland, away from stiff offshore breezes, enclosing elegant interiors that are by no means evocations of primitive stature. The exhibition spaces are liminal zones that embrace a universally eloquent minimalism without descending to anthropological mimicry. Piano has proven his versatility by moving from massive (Kansai Airport - Osaka, 1994) to modest (Fondation Beyeler - Riehen, Switzerland, 1997) to archaic (Noumea) in the narrow space of ten years.
Landscape's Revenge
German Adell characterizes relatively recent European urban design projects - in particular Dominique Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale (1996) and Jean Nouvel's Fondation Cartier (1994) - as "landscape's revenge" in his essay "The Landscape Takes Flight: Notes on Some Parisian Projects" in New Territories / New Landscapes (Barcelona: Actar, 1997), a catalogue of projects exhibited in 1997 at the Consorci del Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona curated by Eduard Bru. The book is organized into sections entitled "Infiltrations", "Landmarks", "Borders" and "Interior Landscapes". This system represents particular manifestations of the "revenge" of landscape, a somewhat problematic locution given that landscape and urbanism, landscape and architecture are bedfellows. New Territories / New Landscapes is in part a somewhat retrospective look at the decade of the 1980s, when the resurrection of landscape urbanism was fostered by significant restructuring of European cities, Paris and Barcelona gaining the most attention. Paris was revamped under Mitterand's so-called grand projets and Barcelona was reconfigured in advance of the 1992 Summer Olympics. (The Olympics, with its demand for large, crowd-friendly open spaces often drives advanced urban design, as the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia also demonstrate.) Regarding Paris, the completion/extension of the grand axis of the Champs Elysee, Otto von Spreckelsen's La Grand Arche at La Defense (1982-90) the signature gesture in this campaign, focussed attention on the disintegration of edge conditions in urban topography and the closing of the city-suburb equation. Such sites have come to be known as "ex-urban". Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale was the last of Mitterand's projects, part of a campaign to revitalize the eastern edges of the City. Adell notes in his essay that "Landscape is showing that it is not a backdrop against which to place certain architectural 'pieces' which will endow it with meaning. It is not a passive element to be arranged by geometries, however elaborate. The landscape - particularly today's 'new landscapes' - being produced beyond the historical city centre is bringing to crisis point both the old theoretical paradigms such as city-countryside and centre-outskirts, and operative instruments like the Plan and even the Project." That Adell points to the sunken garden at the Bibliotheque Nationale or the accommodation of trees reputedly planted by Chateaubriand by the Fondation Cartier is more than adequate evidence that urban landscape was, in 1994-96, still - how shall we say - a trifle, or a truffle. One had to look high and low to find it, and once it was found it was - well - a momentary sensation. This is now changing.
Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 1999), by Linda Pollak and Anita Berrizbeitia, explores this dance between the environment and buildings in a series of strategic operations and is both an analytical and discursive tour of significant modernist and post-modernist projects ranging from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum (1966-1972) to Villa Dall'Ava (1984-1991) by Rem Koolhaas. The former is discussed under the rubric "Threshold", the latter "Reciprocity". The remaining conceptual operations include "Materiality", "Insertion", and "Infrastructure". These terminologies unveil the manifold stratagems utilized in bringing architecture down to earth. In the case of Dan Graham's Two-Way Mirror Cylinder (1991), high atop Manhattan's Dia Center in Chelsea, this involves bringing architecture to the light and to the sky. In the clamor for height in Manhattan, architecture that embraces nature must struggle all the more to find purchase, that archimedian point of exacting leverage (and revenge). Graham's reflective glass pavilion is a lyrical-polemical exercise staged outside the white box of the contemporary art gallery, on the roof with views of the Hudson River, and engages in a clever doublespeak regarding its surroundings. The cylinder is half mocking the water tower nearby and the mirrored glass is certainly an outgrowth of Graham's ascerbic critique of the modernist skyscraper and its pretension to omniscience.
Pollak and Berrizbeitia's discursus embarks into the nebulous region of the antitheses that have driven architecture mad for the last several generations: the object-subject dialectic of modernist space and the obsfucation of context perpetrated by dogmatists such as Philip Johnson, during his reign at MoMA with Alfred Barr. These latter two protagonists perpetrated a hoax on the public by denaturing the denatured modernist forms - a doubled denaturing - that excised the contingent and immanent factors of modernist architecture in favor of the universal and abstract. Pollak and Berrizbeitia's book seeks to restore this suppressed entelechy. The quest for the Absolute was (and remains) a provisional program to pull human artifice towards the stars while gesturing at the earth with secret hand signals of a cursory sort (Johnson's garden at MoMA or the ubiquitous, appalling inhumane plaza beneath the signature office tower). Johnson famously excised the landscape aspects of Mies van der Rohe's buildings - villas included - as a means of exacting even more profound anomie in his personal campaign to inflict architectural pain. Architecture has been exorcising this demon - this repression - for decades. It is only now that we are finding in Mies an aesthetic benevolence prefigured in his attempts to unveil the tectonic of modern, industrial-strength architectural form in association with landscape. The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), edited by Detlef Mertins, is a collection of musings of this nature presented in Toronto in 1992 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, designed by Mies van der Rohe, though it deals more with the ambient forces of nature as absorbed or refracted by the glass tower of the complex than the condition on the ground. Mies' seminal villas (e.g., the Barcelona Pavilion, 1929 and Villa Tugendhat, 1928-30) have all but been absorbed by the fictions of modernist rhetoric at the expense of natural entourage. This legacy of negation is soon to be set straight, however, in the forthcoming Summer of Mies, with two concurrent exhibitions of his work to be staged in 2001 in NYC at MoMA and the Whitney.Perhaps Carlo Scarpa, represented in Inside Outside by Brion Family Tomb (1967-78), best embodies the tug of war between immanence and transcendence in architecture, twin terms used to masterful effect in Walter Benjamin's On the Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), a series of essays written in 1924-25 but not published till 1928. Brion is dealt with in Pollak and Berrizbeitia's text within the section entitled "Materiality". "The operation of materiality displaces matter from its traditional position as 'base' at the service of form, to become significant content of the work." In these terse remarks Pollak and Berrizbeitia touch upon Scarpa's ingenious exploitation of second nature, the imbrication of earth itself with symbolic and gestural form that then brings the exacting concrete architectural forms of Brion into an equation or algorithm exquisitely tied to the rural Italian site (surrounded by fields) and the adjacent cemetery (Brion is a cemetery within a cemetery). Scarpa is renowned for this gift of grafting onto contingent forms (sites or former architectures) his own obsessive materiality and mathesis universalis. Embedded within Scarpa's work is a quotidian pleasure in number and facticity. Scarpa's brilliance, in this respect, was the subject of an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 1999. The catalogue for the exhibition, Carlo Scarpa: Intervening in History (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Monacelli Press, 1999), is a visual and textual feast for the eye and the mind - for the mind's eye. At Brion, as in Alexandre Chemetoff's Bamboo Garden at Parc de la Villette, Paris (1986-1989), included in Inside Outside, a microcosmic, natural sub-figural language is intoned. This language of sub-liminal artifacts, the urfaktum of all language systems, is prefigured in the subject-object dyad that is played out in all the new architectures of sub-liminal or sur-rational types - a fusion of 'above' and 'below' - a Dionysian/Apollonian set that is hardly at odds but, in fact, intimately intertwined and highly productive of stunning works of architecture. For the full value of these linguistic terminologies see Giorgio Agamben's Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1978). This language of forms has arrived at the starting point of language itself - in the wilderness of phonemes (elemental pre-verbal forms) and the thicket of prepositions (forms that express spatial, temporal, or other types of relationship). Works of this order are simultaneously profoundly contingent and insistently far-fetching. The Dionysian/Apollonian dialectic is, after all, the foundation of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and Benjamin's analysis of Baroque Trauerspiel is more than an homage to Nietzsche's astute plumbing of the depths of the Western psyche.
The latest and the most promising acts of architectural deep-sea diving have resurrected a close reading of contingency - the 'here' and the long now (duration and synchrony) - without the attendant epoche or bracketing of universal and transcendent (a priori) exigencies - the 'over there' and the utopian (teleology and diachrony). Intimations of something extraordinary are evident if, once and for all, the nature of things and ideas are not (again) artificially relegated to mutually exclusive categories of experience and thought. If there is one thing that has become more than apparent in this sensational tidal wave of innovation, it is that architecture has - in a strict epistemological sense - feet of clay. Landscape and Architecture has always been, and will always be, one and the same thing.Gavin Keeney (New York, March 2001)
Apologies - The PDF was taken offline 07/16/05
See also Reconnaissance (Raw Data) for links to sites representing the landscape + architecture "fusion thing".
