Patterns of reuse

interesting and more entertaining as it goes on - how building waste is caused by standardisation - of expectations

The link can be copy and pasted if it doesnt load automatically

Pamphlet Architecture No. 11_ Hybrid Architecture

Shadowland

Also the shadowland website from the exhibition from last year. Proposals on how to tackle some of the problems in Ireland post NAMA

http://www.shadowland.ie/Shadowland/Home.html

Richard Sennett - The Public realm

An article from Richard Sennett's website. I was originally reading for my dissertation but found there were crossovers with some of the discussions we've been having.

http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=16

Over and Under

Two Projects I came across, both looking at the idea of installations to work within existing transport hubs. Thought it might be interesting for some of us.





The first, an Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art museum by Weiss/Manfredi, takes the approach of bridging over the two transport routes, creating an elevated public space with improved views of Seattle bay.




While the second, Underspaces 1 by NL Architects, packs itself into the void present beneath the existing elevated car bridge. It incorporates a skateboarding "park" as well as more commercial units. It would seem to make this gritty underpass a much more populated area. More footfall would increase eyes on the ground and thus heightened "third party" security, displacing antisocial behavior that would have probably occurred in such a hidden sheltered location.

"Below a highway overpass that has split a neighborhood in the Dutch city of Zaanstadt for decades, you can now find a supermarket, soccer fields, a skatepark, a fishmonger and a florist, a basketball court and a car park. There is even a marina.

Developed in part through an open and interactive public design process overseen by NL Architects, A8ernA “provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”

From: openarchitecturenetwork.org

More Exhibitioning

Denis Mc Nulty has an exhibitionon on in Green on Red gallery at the moment. I thought it addressed some of the issues we have been looking at. One piece (attached) seems to be reminiscent of our conversation last week. Two televisions; one new, one old, stacked. Red "noise" on one and two images alternating on the other. The two images go between an abandoned construction site, flooded and with plant life beginning to take hold and Monet's Water Lilies. It reminded me of the conversation we were having about the potential in ghost estates.

Press release from Green on Red...

"Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce The Driver and the Passenger, Dennis McNulty’s second solo exhibition in the gallery. The exhibition will include all new works in a variety of media that draw on sources from other architectures and other epochs, while responding to the gallery space. There is a fragmentation in the treatment of his subject that is both stylistic and philosophical. A series of locations are at the heart of The Driver and the Passenger. An iconic modernist house in New Canaan, Connecticut; a slowly decaying inner city furniture shop; an unincorporated town on the Pennsylvania turnpike; a social housing complex in London; a huge unblockable hole under the sea and the drowned foundations of an abandoned construction project in Dublin city centre. We are presented with a series of scenarios - physical manifestations of the turbulent forces that compete to generate the complexity of the contemporary moment.

The Driver and the Passenger presents a kind of speculative fiction. The processes which produced these scenarios are extrapolated and bent until their logic collapses. Light and sound share the space with reinforced concrete, glass, steel, plywood, aluminium and perspex. Temporal and spatial projections create fleeting moments of equilibrium which then dissolve in the face of new crises, new catastrophes, new complexities. Obscure flows boil underneath. The slow grinding of the physical world simultaneously slows down and speeds up. Certain surfaces remain transparent and impenetrable, while others yield easily. The visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible exchange places.

The passenger turns to the driver, reading from an unfolded sheet of A4 paper. ''In this show McNulty presents a number of works which have been produced over the last year or so.'' The driver looks over at the passenger and smiles as they accelerate up the slip-road onto the motorway. "

Just a reminder of The IMMA Exhibition thats on at the moment - "The Moderns"

It is definitely worth a visit if you havent been yet.

Exhibits include some very nice pencil renderings of Scott Tallon Walker buildings and a model of the goulding house.Also worth going for is the Eileen grey furniture and model of house E1027

There are a number of Patrick Scott paintings which posess something special , maybe architectural

There is also an interesting Church by Liam McCormack, St Aengus's in Donegal - which I thought looks like it inspired Zumthors Sogn Benedet church

Network Society Prologue. Manuel Castells

Network Society Prologue. Manuel Castells

What do we mean by "urban"?

I was reflecting on our understanding of 'urban' during my number 77A bus journey out to see Hassett + Ducatez's Brookfield community centre in Tallaght last week.The journey itself was a sort of derive as the bus crawled through the Liberties, Crumlin, Walkinstown, Greenhills Industrial Estate, over the M50 and into Tallaght before heading out to Brookfield. Once you leave the liberties you are in an urban Ireland that is outside the cultural space of architecture with a capital A. There is a huge amount of building and development but very little that is known or has been studied. There appears to be very little by way of civic infrastructure.

When I came back I searched around and found this table on a german website of population statistics:

Ireland; Principal cities:

Dublin - population = 506,211
Cork - population = 119,418
Galway - population = 72,414
Tallaght - population = 63,978
Blanchardstown - population = 62,976
Limerick - population = 52,539
Waterford - population = 45,748
Clondalkin - population = 43,879
Lucan - population = 37,424

(Source Census 2006)

On wikipedia I found out that Tallaght is seeking to be recognised as a city but has not yet succeeded in getting sufficient support - it requires an act of the Oireachtas.

Architecture and Modernity cont/d

The remainder of the chapter from Hide Heynen's book Architecture and Modernity.

http://www.conormcgarrigle.com/

I came across this guy and thought it might be relevant for a number of us. He does work to do with mapping in Dublin. A lot of his stuff is interactive with iphone apps which is interesting. He's done a walking tour based around the nama sites in Dublin! He's also written stuff on the situationists and psycho-geography.

...permanence; ground; weight...

This little booklet by Michael Warren, celebrated Irish sculptor (www.michaelwarren.ie/) touched on some group themes/ inclinations.

Shrinking Cities

Robin Hood Gardens reminds me (in some ways!) of the Hulme Crescents in Manchester. I was made aware of them when doing a research elective in Hong Kong called Shrinking Cities (http://www.shrinkingcities.com/manchester_liverpool.0.html?&L=1) where we studied previous examples of city centre shrinkage in Manchester (after the failure of the textile industry in the 1950's) and in Detroit (around the same time and still continuing today) and used this information as a base to study current city shrinkage in Shenzhen, China. I'd be interested in doing something similar (with a slight scale change!) for Dublin. It's weird when you think about how much energy is put into city/urban planing for growth but I don't think there's much in the reserves for a decline!

Below is a short documentary about Hulme.
It gets kind of funny when they start talking about how this was supposedly one of the first examples of deck access, how the architects were totally out of touch with reality and how it was supposed to be a scaled up version of the Georgian Crescents in Bath. The Manchester Government were, at the time, encouraging industrialised, large-scale building.

Weirdly, the "slum" that Hulme very quickly turned into, became a breeding ground for the art and music scene in Manchester and so did the many abandoned buildings in the city centre and it was this (along with other factors) that led to Manchester city centre being repopulated.

Detroit never recovered and people never moved back into the city centre, the suburbs expanded massively. Its kind of amazing, in most other places in the world people say - "Oh, I remember when there used to be green fields here" and in Detroit it's more like "Oh, I remember when there used to be housing estates here". There are lots of urban farm incentives on the go there at the moment in the lovely green fields in the former city centre. And, there's a trend for people to have their relatives graves dug up and moved out to the suburbs so the families never have to go back to the city! Theres a great documentary about it but I cant remember what its called. Heres a great BBC documentary instead! The footage of the abandoned buildings is fantastic. Detroit is cited as an example that we should all prepare ourselves for in the future! Can't wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OpXhd7iau8
(I don't know why none of my links are coming up properly, just copy and paste if you are interested!)

Hulme Crescents 1978

map gaps

In relation to the idea of potential that we touched on the last day,I though this was a really fascinating example of what can arise out of map-gaps when you change the scale at which you look at something.http://www.0047.org/exhibitions

The Role of The Architect

This is the link to the data visualisation/mapping site I mentioned before:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

And a link to his Ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html

Inflatocookbook

Last Thursday week I couldn't remember whether it was Antfarm or Archigram who had been involved with inflatable architecture before....... It was Antfarm.

They set up in the late 1960s as a group of recent architecture graduates with a strong interest in graphics, art and the social elements encountered by design.
They described what they were doing as “underground architecture” , a friend responed “oh underground architecture is what ants do!”. Hence the name.

They considered themselves 'inflato-experts' and went as far as to write a cookbook of all the 'recipes' they had come up with. However, they were not precious about their methods - they encouraged people to find their own configurations. At first they used their inflatables as a location for lectures that they held driving around america but they designed them primarily as places for 'happenings'...whatever that may be.

You can download the inflatocookbook at www.letsremake.info. Its in the library option.
I think the book itself is worth a look even if the subject matter doesnt interest everyone. It's written like a fun step by step Ikea construction manual.

Some of the other books in the library also look interesting

Also there are some more pics of the Raumlabor Spacebuster project at the following link

http://lifewithoutbuildings.net/2009/04/spacebuster.html

Situationalist Mapping

Thanks Deirdre for bringing your situationalist map to the discussion, I found an image of it on the web and thought it worth posting.

The linearity of the routes reflects the french love of axes and in particular Hausmann's reconfiguration of Paris between 1848 and 1871. These were both revolutionary years, and the streets of Paris were ripped up to make barricades. Hausmann's scheme was designed to make it easier for the police to control the streets by having straight wide boulevards that they could sweep down and overcome.

The situationalists loved the older parts of the city that had escaped reconfigeration and took great pleasure in their gothic street structure and ambience. Guy Debord produced a very famous artpiece/map called the 'Naked City' which gave a different description of Paris:

Debord was trying to capture the experience of the place rather than just the spatial functionality.

The situationalists has roots in the art group CoBrA which included Aldo Van Eyck amoung it's members and through Van Eyck had links to Team X and the Independent Group (The Smithsons, Reyner Banham etc..) in London. The Smithsons were interested in essences of places but rather disappointingly proposed replacing places with clusters which were designed to capture these essences. Robin Hood Gardens in East London is one of their housing schemes:

The Situationalists fundamentally disagreed with the Independent Group over this approach however traces of it can be detected in situationalist architect Constant's project for a city called 'New Babylon' (fragment below):

Frampton Text: Seven Points for the Next Millenium

Seven Points for the Next Millenium – An Untimely Manifesto

Kenneth Frampton gave the keynote address at the 1999 UIA conference in Beijing (AR August, p15) in which he set out an agenda for the architecture and planning of the next century. This is a slightly edited version of his speech.

We are coming to the close of a century in which contemporary architecture has often been inseparable from the writing of manifestos, so I though that one might indulge, on the occasion of the 20th UIA Congress, in an untimely manifesto, treating seven themes; first, environmental education as this concerns the profession and in relation to the way this affects society as a whole; second, the question of the relative autonomy of architecture as this has had and continues to have an impact on both the profession and the society. The third point attempts to treat the socio-ecological implications of current patterns of land settlement. The fourth point, turns to the need for architects to maintain their leadership role in the building team, retaining as much as possible their mastery over the craft of building in the widest sense. The fifth point tries to argue that the design of landscape is of greater critical consequence than architecture on its own, thereby suggesting that we give as much priority to the greening of the world as to building with bricks and mortar. Point six highlights the need for an incremental urban strategy. Points seven deals with the inevitable conflict between power and reason as the ultimate dialectic in the field of environmental design, architecture and society: environmental education and the future of the profession

1 Environmental education as this concerns the profession

With the demise of the socialist project with which modern architecture was once so intimately involved, the profession has the challenge of trying to determine the scope of its role in the next century. This cannot be coherently addressed without involving the relationship of architecture to society as a whole. It is well known that the intentions of the client are absolutely seminal to the successful outcome of any architectural endeavor and that without a sensitive, intelligent and responsible client, the aspirational range of a project becomes limited. Good clients do not necessarily guarantee architecture of quality, as the architect may not of comparable caliber, but there is little, doubt that the reductive client, born of bureaucratic rigidity or speculative ruthlessness assures a mediocre result well before pencil is set to paper. To cultivate an adequate client base, of the education of society in environmental design matters should be given the highest priority, beginning at high school level, as many have advocated over the past 20 years.

Unfortunately, we have yet to see a society willing to educate its children with regard to environmental ends as well as to the apparent benefit of ever-expanding economic means. The profession also has to restructure its own pedagogical goals, particularly maintaining a balance between professional training and the responsibility of giving aspirants a sufficiently broad education. It is essential to admit that the practice of architecture is still ultimately a craft, however much its processes may be qualified by techno-scientific methods and applications. This should help us to understand why architecture as a discipline has always been situated uncomfortably within the confines of the university. As Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza put it:

We developed the idea that the architect is a specialist in nonspecialization, Building involves so many elements, so many techniques, and such different kinds of problems, that it is impossible to command all the requisite knowledge. What is required is an ability to interrelate diverse elements and disciplines. Because architects have a broad overview and are not constrained by concrete knowledge they are able to connect various factors and maintain the synthesizing capacity of non-specialization. In this sense the architect is ignorant, but he is able to work with many people and coordinate the integration of a vast number of particulars. These are skills one can acquire only through experience. With them; we are able to face the new situations that accompany each project.

As to the appropriate education for this synthesizing the most one can do is to suggest a number of areas that still seem to be essential to the formation of the architect. Among them one may emphasize the following.

* HISTORY. Ideally architectural history should be taught as cultural history which is a challenge since architects and architectural historians are not generally trained to approach the topic in this way. It is important that curricula be developed to include three important subsets; the history of landscape, technology and industrial design. It is certain that different subsets will have to be emphasized in different cultural situations depending on the part of the world in which the architect is being trained.

* DESIGN. Training in building design as a tripartite procedure involving three different media at the same time; (i) hand drafting of initial concepts before passing to other modes of representation, (ii) continual building of models at all scales to assess the concepts under consideration and (iii) computer-aided design to be used for drafting and modeling in relation to the two other modes. Obviously one needs to oscillate constantly between all three modes in the generation of a design.

* TECHNIQUE. At the end of the century; it seems that the teaching of technology may be best approached through two strategies; (i) the teaching of current technique through analytical case-studies of contemporary building culture and (ii) the teaching of technology through simplified comprehensive design projects in order to expose the student to the task of synthesizing different techniques.

The crisis of the architectural academy is at least in some measure a reflection of the crisis facing the profession: the more the practice of architecture becomes removed from the needs of society as a whole, the more it tends to become an overly aestheticized discourse that addresses itself exclusively to the spectacular preoccupations of an arriviste class. Inside architectural schools, this discourse is often served by a mystifying theoretical status, drawn largely from other disciplines, and removed from basic conditions and needs of environmental design. As Vittorio, Gregotti pointed out some time ago, architectural practice requires the presence of societal need and sociological debate and constraint in order to exist at all, even if the rules for the development of the discipline at an intrinsic level can only be found, within architecture itself.

2 The relative autonomy of architecture and its socio-cultural role

If we ask ourselves what belongs to the building art as opposed to other socio-cultural discourses, we may surely identify architecture as the constructed enclosure of volumes for human occupation and use, even if under exceptional circumstances, the fabric does not serve simply as a shelter or the function remains symbolic. A number of corollaries follow from this:

(i) Architecture as opposed to any other form is irredeemably mixed up with the life-world. In this respect it is as much a context for culture and life as it is a cultural expression in and of itself and hence it cannot be convincingly rendered as fine or figurative art writ large: When architecture is reduced to large sculpture, it is not only formalistically reductive but also an acritical mode of expression that may pass muster as art but is hardly architecture.

(ii) Architecture has a quintessentially tectonic character whereby part of its intrinsic expressivity is inseparable form the precise manner of its construction.

(iii) Needless to say this dimension does not preclude the equally essential embodiment of architecture as a spatial assembly: the by now obvious point of the nineteenth-century German theorist August Schmarzow that architecture is the 'creatress of space'.

(iv) These two dimensions, the tectonic and the spatial, are complementary and equally pertinent to the inflected articulation of macro and micro space on which the socio-cultural potential of architecture so evidently depends. Hence the limitations of the minimalist sculptural approach in late modern architecture, which tends to inhibit in different ways the articulation of micro-space.

(v) All of the above do not preclude then representational aspect of architectonic form or its capacity to refer to cultural values lying beyond the parameters of immediate context, so that in tectonic and spatial terms, built form may be as representational in its implications as it is ontological.

(vi) Unlike music, painting, sculpture, literature, or even photography and film, architectural cannot convincingly attain or aspire to the critical autonomy of modern art. In its opening towards the life-world it is indissolubly linked to the progressive ethos of the Enlightenment, to that which Marshall Berman identified as the pastoral, positive, caring mode as opposed to the counterpastoral of the negative avant-garde. Liberative architectural form is invariably critical when it is set against the chaotic, exploitative, alienating environment of everyday life. As Alavro Siza put it in 1979: 'Most of my works were never fulfilled, some of [the] things I did were only carried out in part, others were deeply changed or destroyed. But something remains. Pieces are kept here and there, inside ourselves gathered by someone leaving marks on space and people, melting in a process of total transformation.

3 The crisis of land settlement in the age of the megalopolis

Half a century ago, the dialectical interplay between civilization and culture still afforded the possibility of maintaining some control over the shape and significance of the urban fabric. The past 30 years have radically transformed the metropolitan centers of the developed world. What were still essentially nineteenth-century cities in the early 1960s (e.g. Glasgow, Sydney, San Francisco and Shanghai) have become overlaid by the matrices of megalopolitan development, the free-standing high-rise and the serpentine freeway. The former has come into its own as the instrument for capitalizing on increased land values brought into being by the latter. The typical downtown which, up to 30 years ago, still presented a mixture of residential stock with secondary industry has now become little more than a Motopian landscape dominated by tertiary industry.

By similar token, the unremitting suburbanization of North America and the simultaneous dissolution of the nineteenth-century provincial city structured about the railroad has been brought about by the deliberate maximization of private transport, sponsored by oil and automobile lobbies and by the corresponding contrived decline of public transport. While these symbiotic consumerist processes are at their most extreme in the US, it is clear that this tendency is to be found throughout that developed world, so much so that one is tempted to assert that if there is a single apocalyptic invention in the twentieth century it is the automobile rather than the atomic bomb.

Meanwhile, by a reciprocal and similar process, there is a corresponding implosion of urban populations in the vast hinterland surrounding capital cities, particularly in the Third World where such growth has been exponential. The population of Bombay virtually doubled between 1900 and 1950 when it was 2 million. In the next half century it increased almost eightfold to over 15 million. As in Latin America where the phenomenon was first fully acknowledged, most of this expansion occurs in the form of so-called spontaneous housing; bariadas, fervillas, where land is appropriated en masse and shacks come into being overnight without the infrastructure essential to health: water, sewage disposal, power and public transport. If the projections of a decade and a half are the current by the year 2000, as Charles Correa remarks in this prophetic book The New Urban Landscape, there will be 50 cities in the world with populations of 15 million or more. The spontaneous global urbanization produces urbanized regions comparable to the megalopoli of the developed world, given this name by French geographer Jean Gottman in 1961. I have in mind such well known conglomerations as the Boston-Washington corridor, the so-called Randstad in north-western Europe, the Hokkaido to Osaka megalopolis in Japan that is now fed by the bullet train for the entire length of the island system. With the singular exception of these megalopoli that are relatively well served by public transport, explosions in the US tend socially and economically towards the condition of Third Worlds trapped within so-called First Worlds.

It is demagogic to complain that we lack appropriate strategies to deal with such apocalyptic developments. One way to treat such implosions was posited by Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel in their 1964 plan for New Bombay, through which at least 2 million of Bombay's burgeoning population would have been decanted eastward to the other side of the bay. The hardfact is of course that investment in public transport has not been made and that today, after nearly 40 years, this plan has yet to be fulfilled.

Without lamenting the loss of the traditional city, we may nonetheless claim two factors that must be seriously addressed if we are to come to terms in a socio-ecological sense with the current rate of urbanization. These are (i) the provision of adequate public transport systems of varying interlocking speeds, from high velocity inter-city trains local light-rail, tram and bus systems and (ii) the general establishment of more collective ecological patterns of land-settlement.

I am referring to the concept of low-rise, high-density housing which has been available as a general strategy for residential land settlement ever since the mid-60s, particularly in the so-called developed world, following the realization of Siedlung Halen outside Bern in 1960 and Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander's seminal low-rise, high-density study Community and Privacy (1963).

We are familiar with the paradigms that could be applied to the general dilemma that we confront at the scale of the urbanized region. What we lack is the political and ideological will to bring these models into being. Successful demonstrations of low-rise, high-density housing have been made over the past 30 years, but for such land-settlement patterns to become normative we would have to introduce draconian legislation severely restricting not only high-rise development but almost all forms of low-density suburbs. Speculative suburban subdivision would have to be outlawed and the consumerist illusion attending our exaggerated individuality would have to be relinquished.

4 Landscape Form as a Redemptive Strategy

Since megalopolitan development now takes place at a global scale, few options are available that are capable of significantly improving the socio-cultural and ecological character of the average urbanized region. Other than insertion of new systems of public transport, only one possible strategy seems to be universally available: blanket application of landscape interventions, in one form or another, as a way of improving the environmental harshness of large tracts of our urbanized regions. The ubiquitous black-top parking lots of North America are a case in point, for clearly all such lots could be transformed into shaded parking areas through subsidized application of free planting as a coordinated public program. Given the present escalation of global warming, the ecological low-term benefit accruing from such a provision would be considerable. The related enclosure of such spaces by planted berms would lead to further cultural benefits, together with the enactment of legislation prohibiting the use of asphalt for the surfacing of parking areas, to reduce the destructive distribution of water run-off produced by the automotive system. It is easy to construct parking bays out of perforated, prefabricated concrete paving elements filled with grass, so that the entire parking network throughout a megalopolis could be transformed into a landscape. The ecological and cultural benefits are self-evident.

This general greening strategy possesses other pastoral benefits: first the current tendency to reduce the built environment to an endless proliferation of free-standing objects would be overcome by landscape which would integrate everything into the surface of the ground -- and second, landscape would have the advantage of being more culturally accessible to the man in the street, than the contemporary built environment with all the seemingly unavoidable harshness of its instrumentality. This may also explain why landscape architects may be more readily allowed to treat the reorganization of large tracts of land where planners and urban designers run into different forms of obstruction and resistance.

It is for these reasons among others that I am cortvinced that architectural and planning schools throughout the world should give much greater emphasis to the cultivation of landscape as an overarching system rather than concentrating exclusively, as they have tended to do up to now, on the design of buildings as aesthetic objects.

5 Product-Form versus Place-Form

THE-TERMS product-form and place-form are, I believe, my own coinage and as such they need to be defined. I have in fact borrowed the term product-form from Max Bill. He meant it to mean the way in which industrial design items are invariably determined as much through constraints imposed by modes of production as by ergonomic function. It is fairly obvious that so called high-tech architects who have reinterpreted the craft of building in terms of modern productive methods have in effect been engaged in creating buildings which are largely determined by production methods. It is clear that this deployment of sophisticated technology constitutes a fundamental challenge 5 traditional building methods where these are either too expensive or for other reasons unattainable today.

Against this, we may set the place-form or the foundational, topographic element that in one way or another is cast into the ground as a heavyweight site component that offers a form of quite literal resistance to the productional superstructure poised on top of it. This is exactly the point that Renzo Piano made, when in his contribution to the Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture of 1996, he insisted that: 'the primary structure itself constitutes the place; it is sculpted in position, as it were, like a bas relief. This part is normally massive, opaque and heavy. Then you craft a light, transparent, and even temporary piece of architecture, which is poised on top of it. In such a combination, the heavy is permanent and the light is temporary.

'I believe that it is possible to create a tension between these two aspects, the place and the building, or rather the place and the crafted fabric. They are of two different worlds, but they may certainly coexist.'

Whether the superstructure need be light or temporary may be debated but clearly this perception of the dialogical relationship between the earthwork and the roofwork is a productive way of regarding the interaction between the wet landscaped place-form and the dry, rationally assembled product-form.

The capacity of the place-form to resist the homogenizing tendency of universal technology may not be exclusively restricted to the earthwork, particularly if we turn attention to the roof and the membrane, both of which are potentially susceptible to the specific location of the work. In this respect, the case can be made that both cladding and fenestration are directly expressive of implicit and explicit values as these may be incorporated into a work of architecture in a given location at a specific moment in time.

Some obvious examples may be cited which illustrate the way such values are expressed. For instance under the current building legislation in the Netherlands, it is normally not possible to construct office buildings without openable windows, whereas, in the US, it has long been standard practice to fully air-condition office structures and hermetically seal fenestration throughout the building. This last has two maximizing results, first it becomes impossible to ventilate the building naturally in temperate seasons, and second, there is a corresponding maximization of the amount of energy consumed by the building. As many experts have argued in the past, technological maximization invariably entails negative side effects in whatever field it occurs, whether this be the maximized use of antibiotics in the field of allopathic medicine or the over-dependence on nitrates and insecticides in modern agricultural practice. One may also cite innumerable examples of similar negative consequences in building, for instance bulldozing an undulating site flat to achieve optimum economy, or designing museums in which no natural light is admitted: maximizing the conservation of art objects as opposed to enhancing the sensuous pleasure of perception.

Against such practices we may set recent efforts of certain high-tech architects, such as Kenneth Yeang from Malaysia and Thomas Herzog from Germany, who have attempted to design buildings which are ecologically responsive and which are conceived of as operating climatically in a hybrid fashion: they are designed as louvered, sun-screened and filtered structures that are partly air-conditioned and partly ventilated by natural means. It ought to be self-evident from any examination of traditional building culture that such structures possess the potential of giving specific expression to the cultural and physical values of their regions and that these climatically responsive features may appear as a repetition differente of local cultural mores.

A rather unusual example of such an instance is Renzo Piano's cultural centre for the Kanak people in Noumea, New Caledonia with its so-called timber 'cases' (AR December 1998). Aside from the multiple means provided for ventilating such structures, we enter into the symbolic significance of the materials used and the way in which these can give an idea of the place in an overt way. In this instance, the basket-like timber structures allude rather directly to the traditional dwellings of the Kanak people without literally mimicking them. We will find a parallel cultural reference, but to an entirely different culture, in the dense urban housing that the Renzo Piano Building Workshop realized in the Rue de Meaux, Paris in 1992 (AR March 1992). Here what we might call a high-tech/low-tech finish (terracotta tiles) is clearly Intended to invoke the atmosphere and pattern of traditional building form. Terracotta is commonly read as a traditional low-tech material, so it also opens the door to a reciprocity between the place-form and the product-form that need not necessarily concentrate solely on the use of lightweight systems, moving towards a high-tech expression that is as much heavyweight as it is light and dematerialized.

6 Megaform as Urban Acupuncture

The contemporary environment is now so conditioned by maximized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited. Restrictions imposed by the dominance of automotive distribution and the volatile play of land speculation limit the scope of urban design to such a degree that any intervention tends to be reduced either to the manipulation of elements predetermined by the imperatives of production, or to a kind of superficial masking to which modern development seems to gravitate in order to facilitate marketing while maintaining a prerequisite level of social control. It is this that makes any kind of master planning other than public transportation largely academic. And the same may also be said of large-scale urban design. Since this is an equally harsh reality in both the developed and developing parts of the world, urban designers, architects and planners have tried to evolve alternative piecemeal strategies for development and/or modification of urban form. Among these are such figures as Henri Ciriani and Fumihiko Maki; Ciriani for his concept of a catalytic form urban intervention to which he gave the name la piece urbaine and Maki not only for his concept form first developed with Ohtaka, but also for the way in which he has been able, in his recent practice, to use large roofs as a device for creating identifiable urban place-forms within the unending chaos of the megalopolis.

To this I would like to add the notion of urban acupuncture as developed by my colleague, the distinguished Barcelona urbanist Manuel de Sola Morales. By this term he intends a similar strategy of making catalytic, small-scale interventions, with the condition that they should be realizable within a relatively short period of time, and capable of achieving a maximum impact with regard to the immediate surroundings. I would like to argue that all three propositions converge about the concept of the urban megaform involving the creation of largely horizontal fabric capable of effecting a local transformation in the megalopolitan landscape. While this may seem to be synonymous with the term megastructure, first coined in the 1960s, the two are different in respect of the relative continuity of their form. While a megaform may incorporate a megastructure, a megastructure does not necessarily yield a megaform. A megaform may be defined as being: (i) a large form extending horizontally rather than vertically, (ii) a complex form which does not necessarily express its structural and mechanical elements, and (iii) as a device that is capable of inflecting the existing urban context because of its strong topographical character. Beyond the historical core, a megaform may thus be recognized as an urban difference within the open-ended repetition of the megalopolis -- as in say Henri Ciriani's Barre a Marne in Marne la Vallee (1980) or in Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Sola Morales' L'llla Block completed in Barcelona in 1997. The latter suggests that the horizontality of the megaform should be capable, by virtue of its program, of serving as a civic microcosm. Hence one may suggest types that may have potential for engendering such forms: shopping malls, air terminals, transport interchanges, hospitals, hotels, sports facilities and universities; types in fact that have great applicability within the contemporary megalopolis.

7 Rationality and Power

When we address ourselves at the end of the century to the entire predicament of the environment and the state of the profession, we would do well to bear in mind the unavoidable interplay between reason and power in almost every design and policy decision both large and small. As the Danish planner Bent Flyvbjerg puts it in his book Rationality and Power: Democracy and Practice of 1998, 'Power concerns itself with defining reality rather than discovering what reality really is'. Elsewhere, he says: 'In the longue duree, we see that in practice democratic progress is chiefly achieved not by constitutional and institutional reform alone, but by facing the mechanisms of power and the practices of class and privilege more directly, often head-on: if you want to participate in politics but find the possibilities for doing so constricting, then you team up with like-minded people and you fight for what you want, utilizing the means that work in your context to undermine those who try to limit participation.

'If you want to know what is going on in politics but find little transparency, you do the same. If you want more civic reciprocity in political affairs, you work for civic virtues becoming worthy of praise and others becoming undesirable. At times direct power struggle over specific issues works best; on other occasions changing the ground-rules for such struggle is necessary, which is where constitutional and institutional reform come in ... The focus of modernity and modern democracy has always been on "what should be done", on normative rationality. What I suggest is a reorientation toward the first half of Machiavelli's dictum, "what is actually done", toward verita effetuale.

'We need to rethink and recast the projects of modernity and democracy, and of modern politics, administration, and planning, in terms of not only rationality but of rationality and power, real rationality. Instead of thinking of modernity and democracy as rational means for dissolving power, we need to see them as practical attempts at regulating power and domination. When we do this we obtain a better grasp of what modernity and democracy are in practice and what it takes to change them for the better ...'

I have opted for the theme of rationality and power as my last point for much the same reason that I chose to end my book Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995) with a quote from Guy Debord's Commentary on the Society of Spectacle of 1988, particularly for his contention that the spectacle (the media) has allowed power to assume that it no longer has to take responsibility for its decisions, just as it encouraged science to enter into the service of spectacular domination.

Whether this indictment is justifiable or not, there is surely no doubt as to the perennial play of power and reason in the application of technology. The irony is that while power under democracy ostensibly comes into being as the mandate of the electorate, we also know that it often acts against the electorate's self-interest, due, among other factors, to the influence of the media, the rise of global marketing and the corresponding decline of the nation-state. As a result of this the natural and the human environment becomes even more degraded, from the phenomena of global warming to oceanic pollution, from wholesale deforestation to the destruction of the landscape through tourism.

Accompanying the misinformation of the media, there is also mediatic information of a more positive kind, with the paradoxical result that while the environment as a whole becomes increasingly barbaric, an incidental architecture of richness and subtlety now may be found all over the world. And while there is also a great deal of inauthentic, acritical and insensitive building, there are also many works of exceptional stature. Thanks to the universal distribution of information, these may just as easily be found in the so-called provinces as they are still occasionally to be found in the so-called centers of civilization.

At the same time once one turns attention not to the one-off incidental quality work but rather to the design of the environment at a somewhat larger scale, then the aporia of the spectacular returns with a vengeance, as Flyvbjerg demonstrates in his documentation of the Aalborg project. Basically the struggle rose out of the decision on the part of the mayor and his cohorts, both within and without the council, to locate a new bus terminal adjacent to the ancient castle within the historical center of this provincial Danish town. Notable in this conflict was the fact that the city architect opposed this location from the outset on cultural and environmental grounds, while the city engineer, unquestionably the more powerful of the two, endorsed the council's decision. Flyvbjerg is able to show with painstaking perspicacity and courage how the various vested interests lined up in this controversy, with the local newspaper following the Chamber of Commerce in backing the location of the terminal since it would increase the land value of their centrally located premises. Flyvbjerg records on 18-year long struggle to get a comprehensive urban renewal plan for the city approved, with little to show in the long run save for the fact that the city was awarded the 1995 EC Planning Prize for having gone through the process. Flyvbjerg's conclusion is that while power sets out the ground rules for reason, it deliberately blurs the lines between rationality and rationalization, so that power and rationality are essentially opposed.

Flyvbjerg argues that power always prevails in any showdown between power and reason and that the greater the power the less it is accessible to reason. Contemporary planning is as much marked by pre-modern tribal power relations as it is by rationality and democracy. Thus the ideals of a liberative democracy cannot be realized for once and all, and in fact have never been achieved in this sense. As he puts it, to register a government as democratic is always in some sense a piece of propaganda. Finally Flyvbjerg concludes, after Michel Foucault, that in undermining tradition and religion, modernity and democracy condemn the species being to the unending arduous task of producing itself. Architecture, it should by now be clear, is in some specific sense inseparable from this relentless procedure.

Hilde Heynen Architecture and Modernity Text- check page sequence.