Publicat a Avui 26/01/11 02:00 - Josep Oliva i Casasemail
“Cal fer compatible la tecnologia, que cada dia va avançant, amb el respecte en la manera de tractar-ho tot, siguin organismes vius o elements físics inanimats”
En el tractament del territori hi ha, per una part, els requeriments i les exigències de cara al manteniment de la Terra (versió Gaia), és a dir, la preservació de les condicions de vida del planeta. És el que es pot etiquetar com a lògica ecològica. Pensem, però, que el terme ecològic es refereix, estrictament, a aspectes biològics i de medi ambient. Per altra part també hi ha la necessitat i el dret dels humans a tenir un hàbitat digne. Ho qualifico de lògica humana, o que també podríem anomenar, en general, urbanística i, en el cas específic de les ciutats, es podria parlar de lògica urbana. Ara bé, dins d'aquest apartat cal afegir els valors paisatgístics els quals pertanyen al camp de l'estètica. Pensem que el concepte de paisatge és veure el territori amb ulls culturals, i, en aquest sentit, el paisatge el fabrica l'home. Amb això encara no s'esgota aquesta lògica perquè, a part de la consideració del paisatge, hi ha un altre component que és l'economia, un factor que l'urbanista mai ha d'oblidar.
Per tant, la lògica ecològica i la lògica humana són els dos eixos al voltant dels quals gira el tractament del territori, però estan contraposats perquè responen a interessos ben diferents. El repte és conjugar-los bé, és a dir, de manera equilibrada. La veritat és que resulta difícil combinar les dues lògiques inclosos els dos elements complementaris adherits a la lògica humana, els quals, al seu torn, són imprescindibles per encaminar-nos cap a societats que subministrin qualitat de vida. I, en aquest sentit, seria bo recordar el principi budista que defensa aconseguir el màxim benestar amb el mínim consum perquè, fora d'aquest entorn òptim, caiem en el consum desaforat que porta a malmetre el planeta. En l'altre extrem, també podríem caure en el que seria l'integrisme ecològic. En definitiva, és un tractament de globalitat, sotmès a un equilibri entre els quatre factors. A més a més, pel que fa a ambdues lògiques caldria intentar frenar l'explosió demogràfica i, alhora, posar en qüestió les baixes densitats en l'edificació.
Tot això s'hauria de traduir en el fet de deixar empremtes de qualitat sobre el territori. I vol dir que cal fer-ho sense deteriorar el medi ambient, sense anar contra la sostenibilitat, tenint en compte la lògica humana, sent sensibles al paisatge i no perdent de vista les necessitats de l'economia al servei de les persones. És a dir: 1) actuar respectant el planeta, 2) construir un hàbitat adient per a la població, 3) conservar i potenciar els valors paisatgístics, 4) afavorir el desenvolupament de l'economia. Reitero que aquesta tasca no és fàcil. Sovint ens trobem amb l'enfrontament idealisme versus pragmatisme que origina molts dubtes pel que fa a les solucions a propugnar. Cal fer compatible la tecnologia, que cada dia va avançant, amb el respecte en la manera de tractar-ho tot, siguin organismes vius o elements físics inanimats.
Ara bé, aquest plantejament necessita intervencionisme polític, i ha d'anar-ne acompanyat, però amb la condició que hi hagi idees clares i amb el compromís d'implementar-les. I, naturalment, ha de posar l'interès general per sobre dels interessos particulars. Sense la gestió de l'administració pública és gairebé impossible que es facin intervencions de qualitat en el territori i amb visió de futur, és a dir, a mitjà i llarg termini. Aquesta exigència és, evidentment, contrària al liberalisme aplicat a l'urbanisme. Més que mai, avui en dia no ens podem permetre fer polítiques del laissez-faire.
No Urbanisme // Nou Urbanisme nourbanisme@gmail.com
jueves, 3 de febrero de 2011
A case for active preservation
An op-ed from Barcelona by Mario Ballesteros
Is preservation really inertia as Koolhaas maintains? Perhaps it's time that architects take on the task of giving life to innovative prospects for the reinterpretation of the past
Who would have thought it: The Past is the Next Big Thing.
Historic preservation is all the rage in avant-garde design journals and in the core curriculums of chic new architecture schools (Strelka), a hot conversational topic in online forums and art-crowd dinner parties. How exactly has preservation made a comeback and what opportunities does it hold for contemporary architecture?
At last year's Venice Biennale, in typically timely fashion and under a title worthy of a Mexican wrestling movie villain (Cronocaos), Rem Koolhaas approached the "under-explored" theme of preservation with his infallible mix of hard facts, intentionally messy collage and pumped-up rhetoric. He described 2010 as a point of "perfect intersection" for two tendencies in architecture: preservation and destruction.
Preservation isn't a new theme for Koolhaas. In 2004, he published a short piece titled Preservation is Overtaking Us. Along with Cronocaos, this text sums up the architect's views on the subject, which can be outlined schematically as: 1) The interest in preservation rises from a continued obsession with the past, 2) Preservation offers architects the possibility of inaction, and 3) Everything is now susceptible to preservation. To what degree are these assumptions, developed four years before the current economic debacle, practically at the height of the boom, still valid?
1. Obsession with the past
The budding interest and newfound relevance of preservation in architecture isn't born from an "obsession with the past," as the brief for Cronocaos affirms, but from a wariness of the present and concern for the immediate future.
The recession has pushed many architects away from building, and forced them into a standstill. Moments of uncertainty often lead to pause and careful consideration of what should or shouldn't be done next, what should be kept and what should be discarded. Coincidentally, this is also the basic focus of architectural preservation. In the deepest sense, preservation is a perfect strategy for moments of radical transition: it stems not only from fear or nostalgia, but also from a survival instinct. (Self-preservation, anyone?)
2. Inaction
Is preservation really a matter of inaction, "an architecture that does nothing," (Preservation is Overtaking Us) as Koolhaas has implied? In a way, preservation does oppose specific actions (destruction or construction), but it is never about "doing nothing." Preservation requires recording and studying and choosing and debating and occasionally fighting.
Preservation might oppose destruction or construction, but it always turns to reconstruction: of buildings, their histories, their briefs, their contexts. In this sense, preservation is as much about research, documentation, interpretation, and disclosure, as it is about physical conservation.
Perhaps it is time for architects to assume a role in generating critical, innovative, and relevant approaches to reconstructing the past. (Particularly the recent past.) Go out! Recover! Collect! Dig! Document! Hurl the important questions to the faces of those that got us here: developers, financiers, politicians, supposed role models and mentors.
Look in front of you: thousands of empty, crappy apartments in the peripheries of just about any city. Piles of construction debris from interrupted projects, and piles of paperwork detailing dubious transactions and backroom deals. Suburban tract houses and mini McMansions left to the wilderness like Mayan ruins. Towering resort skeletons left standing at half their projected height. The obscene, gaping holes of base excavations for failed skyscrapers, waiting hungry for a totem that will never come to fill them up.
In contexts of crisis, architectural preservation—of buildings, but also of structures, archives, discarded or abandoned plans, as well as other minutiae and ephemeral documentation—becomes an indispensable tool for critical, political, and historical disclosure. Historical value, in this sense, transcends formal architectural merit. Preservation needs to move away from nostalgia and surface; it needs to be cold, clinical, and combative.
A call to account, not to inaction.
3. Preserve everything?
If indeed "preservation is overtaking us," if it is no longer a retroactive, but proactive activity, if "everything we inhabit is potentially susceptible to preservation," then, the key question is not what to preserve, but if we should preserve everything. At a time when preservation no longer focuses only on buildings, but "on human experience itself" (Jorge Otero-Pailos), the task of preserving everything seems daunting, bordering on the absurd.
Should we preserve everything? Koolhaas says no. Both "Preservation…" and Cronocaos propose alternatives: a "bar code" for cities with random, alternating, strips of space that "could either be preserved forever or systematically scraped," or a number of guidelines for the obliteration of what AMO considers "Insignificant Universal Junk": "parts of the cultural or natural heritage [that] are insignificant and transient and therefore need to be demolished to facilitate the growth and development of mankind as a whole…" (Designboom) These might be controversial, thought-provoking measures, but they aren't viable solutions. Preservation cannot be left to chance, and the truth is that, in some cases, even junk needs to be preserved, because it's bad for us, and we have to remember that. Leftover or discarded products of corporate or official culture might seem insignificant, but they are never devoid of meaning and cues.
Preserving the ruins of the contemporary is no romantic endeavor. Architects and preservationists should keep in mind Kevin Lynch's simple yet powerful observation: "wastes are full of information." (Wasting Away. An Exploration of Waste: What It Is, How It Happens, Why We Fear It, How To Do It Well , San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1990, 79). An active, almost immediate move in preservation (or at least documentation, analysis, etc.) is needed to salvage evidence among the spoils of the current building debacle and finding ways out of it. If we can't achieve any sort of consensus as to what is, or what might be valuable or not, and if the "wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction [is] destroying [our] sense of a linear evolution of time" (Venice Architecture Biennale 2010) is sandwiching past, present, and future together at a dizzying speed; perhaps we need to begin by asking ourselves how to preserve everything, to which degree, through which strategies.
Perhaps it is time that, instead of lingering on naive utopias, or fixating on formal acrobatics, experimental and digital practices in architecture were put to a better use. Designing mechanisms for preservation and disclosure—through digital reconstruction, archiving and safekeeping, opening up workflow and legal records, building community-based architectural repositories, open spatial registers, digital memory imprints, etc.—could be a good way to begin. Just a thought.
Mario Ballesteros is an editor and researcher based in Barcelona. He sporadically blogs at Mañanarama
lunes, 17 de enero de 2011
Minimalism, An Obituary " the death of nothing"
The Death of Nothing
Architectural Minimalism rose again from the ground this week. Still not dead, it is 38.
Of course, the undead usually don’t get obiturized. That’s because the undead exist outside of those fundamental human frameworks of beginning and end, outside of the narrative arcs that we project onto the world around us. For the undead, there’s no life support machine to turn off, no last words, no final curtain.
In myths, we can finish off the undead with silver bullets, a stake through the heart or by slicing their heads clean off. In real life though, the undead are harder to destroy. They drift on, unchecked through eternity like debris through space. But maybe, in the real world, an obituary might just be the thing to do it. Maybe an obituary is not just a catalogue of the slings and arrows of a particular life form. Maybe it could gain a little agency. Maybe, in some occult manner, an obituary could perform proactively.
So, we come here to bury Minimalism, despite its own protestations. Don’t listen to its pleas as we throw handfuls of soil onto its grave. For all of us, even for Minimalism, scratching against the lid of its sublime onyx coffin down there, this is really for the best.
According to previous architectural obiturists, Modernism died at 3 p.m. on March 16, 1972, in St. Louis, with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. But unnoticed at the time, something rose from the clouds of dust, a spectral architectural form. Minimalism was born—not alive, not dead—in this moment, a ghostly incarnation of one half of its genetic forbear just at the moment of death, like a soul leaving a corpse.
Minimalism sprung from the loins of an unlikely union. On one side of its heritage lies Modernism. The Big M, Continental Modernism, complete with revolutionary zeal and commitment to social progress, bearing its utopian dream and its belief that the very substance of architecture might be able to deliver this shining vision.
The other half of its DNA derives from a condition of totalized and singular aesthetic refinement—of high taste, of aesthetic rightness, of absolute disengagement with the world. A kind of nihilist perfection where things, rather than lives, are ordered, whose grand family tree stretches back through the ages. Its names have been legion, though we might call its secret constancy ”Aesthetic.” Throughout time, its power has operated through slight of hand, its invisible maneuvers assimilating opposition and threat through deployment of the most despicable of all tactics: irresistible cold-hearted beauty.
That Minimalism should emerge from these progenitors is the kind of tragedy that would have resonated with the Greeks. Earlier in the century, Modernism had attempted to assassinate Aesthetic, to overthrow its grip on the throat of culture and society, on the hierarchies of power and economics. Minimalism then was born out of this troubled relationship: out of Aesthetics’ anger at Modernism’s murderous intent, like a child of Hera whose sole purpose was to enact matriarchal revenge.
Out of the dust of Pruitt-Igoe, out of the collapse of belief in architecture’s social program, out of the dissolution of planning and the state, out of everything that Modernism had hoped for architecture—and the world—rose Minimalism. To look at it, you might be forgiven for mistaking it for its dead parent. It has the same eyes, the same frame, the same build. It is, as they say, the spit. This, of course, is part of its curse. Minimalism is condemned to reenact the aesthetics of Modernism cut free from politics and program. Its emptiness is a statement of victory of Aesthetics over everything else. Each iteration is a victory party, a dance on the grave of what will now never happen.
Minimalism is the undead form of Modernism, animated by Aesthetics. Like Ed Gein cavorting in suits made from the skin of his victims, Minimalism is a perverted and psychotic condition. It is there every time we look at something beautifully Modern. Its simplicity, its order, its calmness, its smoothness are displayed like the severed heads on Traitors’ Gate: a beautiful warning to architecture. The real perversion? Architects willingly and joyfully enact this macabre ritual.
Though it’s not really alive, it’s all around us, multiplying with a fury. It’s there in every bathroom ever designed by John Pawson—especially those fucking baths. It’s written huge as though it were real by David Chipperfield. It swirls around in the Conran Shop. Its shadow falls over the IKEAn mass-dissemination of design. It’s there whenever you see a shadow gap. Its there when critics type the word “elegant.” It haunts us all.
Minimalism then is the erection of false history, a zombie culture, a hollow laugh at the failure of architecture. A kind of anti-architecture, replaying Modernism’s tropes to opposite ends. Not utopia, not social progress, not a better world, but an ultimate and mesmerizing nihilism.
Like all the undead, we can suppose its only real desire is for death’s release, for an end, for its animation by an external agent to cease. Which is where we started: an obituary for something that isn’t dead, but was never alive, yet is everywhere, all the time. Maybe we should write obituaries where once we wrote manifestos.
Edited by Strange Harvest is edited by Sam Jacob
Sam is a director of FAT, contributing editor to Icon, columnist for Art Review and teaches at the AA and Yale
Architectural Minimalism rose again from the ground this week. Still not dead, it is 38.
Of course, the undead usually don’t get obiturized. That’s because the undead exist outside of those fundamental human frameworks of beginning and end, outside of the narrative arcs that we project onto the world around us. For the undead, there’s no life support machine to turn off, no last words, no final curtain.
In myths, we can finish off the undead with silver bullets, a stake through the heart or by slicing their heads clean off. In real life though, the undead are harder to destroy. They drift on, unchecked through eternity like debris through space. But maybe, in the real world, an obituary might just be the thing to do it. Maybe an obituary is not just a catalogue of the slings and arrows of a particular life form. Maybe it could gain a little agency. Maybe, in some occult manner, an obituary could perform proactively.
So, we come here to bury Minimalism, despite its own protestations. Don’t listen to its pleas as we throw handfuls of soil onto its grave. For all of us, even for Minimalism, scratching against the lid of its sublime onyx coffin down there, this is really for the best.
According to previous architectural obiturists, Modernism died at 3 p.m. on March 16, 1972, in St. Louis, with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. But unnoticed at the time, something rose from the clouds of dust, a spectral architectural form. Minimalism was born—not alive, not dead—in this moment, a ghostly incarnation of one half of its genetic forbear just at the moment of death, like a soul leaving a corpse.
Minimalism sprung from the loins of an unlikely union. On one side of its heritage lies Modernism. The Big M, Continental Modernism, complete with revolutionary zeal and commitment to social progress, bearing its utopian dream and its belief that the very substance of architecture might be able to deliver this shining vision.
The other half of its DNA derives from a condition of totalized and singular aesthetic refinement—of high taste, of aesthetic rightness, of absolute disengagement with the world. A kind of nihilist perfection where things, rather than lives, are ordered, whose grand family tree stretches back through the ages. Its names have been legion, though we might call its secret constancy ”Aesthetic.” Throughout time, its power has operated through slight of hand, its invisible maneuvers assimilating opposition and threat through deployment of the most despicable of all tactics: irresistible cold-hearted beauty.
That Minimalism should emerge from these progenitors is the kind of tragedy that would have resonated with the Greeks. Earlier in the century, Modernism had attempted to assassinate Aesthetic, to overthrow its grip on the throat of culture and society, on the hierarchies of power and economics. Minimalism then was born out of this troubled relationship: out of Aesthetics’ anger at Modernism’s murderous intent, like a child of Hera whose sole purpose was to enact matriarchal revenge.
Out of the dust of Pruitt-Igoe, out of the collapse of belief in architecture’s social program, out of the dissolution of planning and the state, out of everything that Modernism had hoped for architecture—and the world—rose Minimalism. To look at it, you might be forgiven for mistaking it for its dead parent. It has the same eyes, the same frame, the same build. It is, as they say, the spit. This, of course, is part of its curse. Minimalism is condemned to reenact the aesthetics of Modernism cut free from politics and program. Its emptiness is a statement of victory of Aesthetics over everything else. Each iteration is a victory party, a dance on the grave of what will now never happen.
Minimalism is the undead form of Modernism, animated by Aesthetics. Like Ed Gein cavorting in suits made from the skin of his victims, Minimalism is a perverted and psychotic condition. It is there every time we look at something beautifully Modern. Its simplicity, its order, its calmness, its smoothness are displayed like the severed heads on Traitors’ Gate: a beautiful warning to architecture. The real perversion? Architects willingly and joyfully enact this macabre ritual.
Though it’s not really alive, it’s all around us, multiplying with a fury. It’s there in every bathroom ever designed by John Pawson—especially those fucking baths. It’s written huge as though it were real by David Chipperfield. It swirls around in the Conran Shop. Its shadow falls over the IKEAn mass-dissemination of design. It’s there whenever you see a shadow gap. Its there when critics type the word “elegant.” It haunts us all.
Minimalism then is the erection of false history, a zombie culture, a hollow laugh at the failure of architecture. A kind of anti-architecture, replaying Modernism’s tropes to opposite ends. Not utopia, not social progress, not a better world, but an ultimate and mesmerizing nihilism.
Like all the undead, we can suppose its only real desire is for death’s release, for an end, for its animation by an external agent to cease. Which is where we started: an obituary for something that isn’t dead, but was never alive, yet is everywhere, all the time. Maybe we should write obituaries where once we wrote manifestos.
Edited by Strange Harvest is edited by Sam Jacob
Sam is a director of FAT, contributing editor to Icon, columnist for Art Review and teaches at the AA and Yale
viernes, 7 de enero de 2011
Los Angeles boasts lowest homicide rate in 40 years
Los Angeles boasts lowest homicide rate in 40 years
Emily Henry | 1-4-2011
The LAPD reported a total of 297 homicides in the city this year, making it the quietest year for murder since 1967.
“I am proud to announce that last year the City suffered fewer murders than at any point since 1967," said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during press conference. "This is not just a year-end statistic; it is perhaps the most powerful statement on the state of our city and our Police Department."
More than 40 years have passed since the total number of homicides in the city equaled less than 300.
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck hailed the men and women of the police force for their part in homicide reduction, but added: "There are more lives that can be saved. Working together with our communities, the LAPD will be committed to doing just that in 2011."
The drop in homicides represents a five percent decrease since 2009, and a 22 percent decrease since 2008. Murder rates have continued to fall in the past few years, declining by one third since 2007. With fewer than 300 murders in 2010, the city has experienced a 75 percent drop in homicides since 1992, when murders peaked to 1,092.
Homicides have been decreasing throughout the county, with a total of 596 murders in 2010. The year previous, 2009, saw 739 homicides in L.A. In 2008, there were 879 murders and in 2007 there were 939. Factoring in population, 2010 represents the lowest homicide rate per capita since 1964. In 1992, the most recent peak of violent crime in Los Angeles, there were 3.09 homicides per 10,000 people. In 2010, there were 0.74 homicides per 10,000 people.
“Even during tough economic times, we have kept our sights on a more hopeful, promising and safer future and the statistics once again shed light on a much brighter outcome for our City," said Villaraigosa. "Our unwavering commitment to public safety has yielded tangible results and has saved lives.”
The LAPD Valley Bureau saw the greatest reduction in homicides, with an 11.76 percent drop since 2009. The Central Bureau, however, reported an increase from 93 to 95 killings in the area from 2009 to 2010.
Although the year ended well statistically, a slew of murders around the Christmas period included four killings on Christmas Eve and five murders on Christmas Day. Both 2007 and 2009 had fewer murders on Christmas Day, with 10 murders on Christmas Day in 2008.
Statistics and graph from LAPD Online.
Emily Henry | 1-4-2011
The LAPD reported a total of 297 homicides in the city this year, making it the quietest year for murder since 1967.
“I am proud to announce that last year the City suffered fewer murders than at any point since 1967," said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during press conference. "This is not just a year-end statistic; it is perhaps the most powerful statement on the state of our city and our Police Department."
More than 40 years have passed since the total number of homicides in the city equaled less than 300.
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck hailed the men and women of the police force for their part in homicide reduction, but added: "There are more lives that can be saved. Working together with our communities, the LAPD will be committed to doing just that in 2011."
The drop in homicides represents a five percent decrease since 2009, and a 22 percent decrease since 2008. Murder rates have continued to fall in the past few years, declining by one third since 2007. With fewer than 300 murders in 2010, the city has experienced a 75 percent drop in homicides since 1992, when murders peaked to 1,092.
Homicides have been decreasing throughout the county, with a total of 596 murders in 2010. The year previous, 2009, saw 739 homicides in L.A. In 2008, there were 879 murders and in 2007 there were 939. Factoring in population, 2010 represents the lowest homicide rate per capita since 1964. In 1992, the most recent peak of violent crime in Los Angeles, there were 3.09 homicides per 10,000 people. In 2010, there were 0.74 homicides per 10,000 people.
“Even during tough economic times, we have kept our sights on a more hopeful, promising and safer future and the statistics once again shed light on a much brighter outcome for our City," said Villaraigosa. "Our unwavering commitment to public safety has yielded tangible results and has saved lives.”
The LAPD Valley Bureau saw the greatest reduction in homicides, with an 11.76 percent drop since 2009. The Central Bureau, however, reported an increase from 93 to 95 killings in the area from 2009 to 2010.
Although the year ended well statistically, a slew of murders around the Christmas period included four killings on Christmas Eve and five murders on Christmas Day. Both 2007 and 2009 had fewer murders on Christmas Day, with 10 murders on Christmas Day in 2008.
Statistics and graph from LAPD Online.
The Place Making Dividend (La identidad del lugar )
The Place Making Dividend
22 December 2010 - 2:29pm
Edward T. MacMahon of ULI explains why cities and towns with unique character have an economic advantage over the sameness of chain stores and malls, and why people should fight to preserve and create a sense of place.
It took Apple eight months to build its new store, but it took them more than twice as long to get design approval (19 months) for the new building which replaced the former clothing store. The protracted design review process began when Apple proposed their standard (off-the shelf), modern façade (they are, after all, a high-tech company) that they use in suburban stores all over the country. The Georgetown Design Review Board balked at this and reaped a heap of criticism for letting historic preservation stand in the way of retail progress.
The new building, which is now complete, looks pretty much like dozens of other historic commercial structures that line Georgetown main commercial thoroughfares. Some may think the façade is bland. Others will say it fits right in. Whatever you think, one of the things the new design proves is that when a chain store developer comes to town it generally has at least three designs (A, B, or C) ranging from Anywhere USA to Unique (i.e., sensitive to local character).
According to retail consultant, Bob Gibbs, "which one gets built depends heavily upon how much push back the company gets from local residents and officials about design and its importance."
While the Apple store owners were no doubt frustrated by the community's demands and the design review process, they will assuredly do very well in their Georgetown location. As local blogger Toper Matthews said, "Most simply won't notice the building's architecture at all and will instead hone in on the toys inside."
The Apple Store in Georgetown. Image courtesy of Flickr user trekkyandy.
Georgetown is one of the single best retail locations in the nation. Why? Because the historic neighborhood is one-of-a kind. It is charming, walkable, and filled with tech savvy young adults. Georgetown is the kind of neighborhood that provides "a place making dividend." This simply means that people will stay longer, spend more money, and come back more often to places that attract their affection.
We sometimes forget that every building has a site, every site has a neighborhood, and every neighborhood is part of a community. Georgetown is a successful retail location primarily because it has a unique sense of place. What would happen to the Georgetowns of the world if every chain store operator could build their standard, off-the-shelf building? Georgetown would simply cease to be a special place. It would lose its place-making dividend. Place is more than just a location or a spot on a map. A sense of place is a unique collection of qualities and characteristics – visual, cultural, social, and environmental – that provides meaning to a location. Sense of place is what makes one location (e.g., your hometown) different from another location (e.g., my hometown), but sense of place is also that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about.
Land use planners have spent too much time focusing on numbers: the number of units per acre, the number of cars per hour, the number of floors per building, and not enough time on the values, customs, characteristics, and quirks that make a place worth caring about. Unfortunately, many American communities are suffering the social, economic, and environmental consequences of being places that simply aren't worth caring about. The more one place (one location) comes to be just like every other place, the less reason there is to visit or invest.
Just take tourism, for example: the more a community comes to look just like every other community, the less reason there is to visit. On the other hand, the more a community does to enhance its distinctive identity, whether that is natural, cultural, or architectural, the more reasons there are to visit. Why?
Because tourism is about visiting places that are different, unusual, or unique; if one place was just like everyplace else, there would be no reason to go anyplace. Similarly, when it comes to 21st century economic development, a key concept is "community differentiation." If you can't differentiate your community from any other community, you have no competitive advantage. Capital is footloose in a global economy. Natural resources, highway access, locations along a river or rail line, have all become less important.
Larry Goldman, a leading authority on economic development, has said, 'How people think of a place is less tangible, but more important than just about anything else.”
Where is this? Image courtesy of Flickr user ravenksy.
Today, however, the subtle differences between places are fading and larger regional differences hardly exist. Now, if you were dropped along a road outside of most American cities or towns, you wouldn't have the slightest idea where you were, because it all looks exactly the same: the building materials, the architectural styles, the chain stores, the outdoor advertising.
Building materials can be imported from anywhere. Hills can be flattened and streams put in culverts. We can transform the landscape with great speed and build anything that fits our budget or strikes our fancy. Technological innovation and a global economy make it easy for building plans drawn up at a corporate headquarters in New Jersey to be applied over and over again in Phoenix, Philadelphia, Portland, or a thousand other communities.
Over the past 40 years America’s commercial landscape has progressed from unique to uniform, from the stylized to the standardized. Author Wallace Stegner once said, paraphrasing his friend Wendell Berry, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." We all need points of reference and orientation.
A community's unique identity provides that orientation, while also adding economic and social value to a place. To foster a sense of place, communities must plan for built environments and settlement patterns that are uplifting and memorable – and that create a special feeling of belonging and stewardship by residents. A community also nurtures sense of place by understanding and respecting its natural context, such as rivers and streams, hills and forests, native flora and fauna, but also its community landmarks, whether historic or unique.
This is what heart and soul planning is all about. It is about helping communities adapt to change while maintaining or enhancing the things they value most. It is both a process and a philosophy. The process seeks to engage as many citizens as possible in community decision making. The philosophy recognizes that special places, characteristics, and customs have value.
As Lyman Orton, owner of the Vermont Country Store, and Chairman of the Orton Family Foundation, likes to say, "When a community takes the time to get to know itself, it gains a sense of identity and purpose that informs decisions about the future."
Similarly, for me, heart and soul planning is about helping communities ask the question: "Do you want the character of your community to shape the new development – or do you want the new development to shape the character of your community?"
Given the opportunity, I think I know how most communities will answer this question.
Edward T. McMahon is Senior Resident Fellow/Charles E. Fraser Chair for Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy with the Urban Land Institute.
jueves, 2 de diciembre de 2010
La arquitectura clasica, las tres grandes mentiras
Classical Architecture: Three Fallacies
Classicism has been wronged, argues Robert Adam. Although its longevity proves people still want classical buildings, three fallacies about style, relevance and authenticity are used to justify the hostility it receives from the profession
In Europe, the Americas, the Antipodes and even India you can’t get away from classical architecture. It’s been around for 2,000 years and has had an unbroken run in Europe for 500 years. Classical forms are so deeply lodged in our collective subconscious that every time an architect designs a building with a row of columns, square or round, and puts a beam over them, there seems to be something classical about it. Some contemporary architects, like Eric Parry, say this is deliberate, while others, like David Chipperfield, claim it isn’t. Classicism can even be attributed to its antagonists: RoberVenturi claims that Mies van der Rohe was a classicist and architectural historian Colin Rowe famously linked Le Corbusier’s houses with Palladio’s villas.For all this, 60 years of anti-traditional architectural education have created profession largely ignorant of the history and vocabulary of classical architecture. Although they don’t know much about them, few architects will condemn great buildings of the past. To give their designs some sort of classical pedigree, architects sometimes claim they’ve used classical proportions (often of dubious provenance) or have drawn inspiration from the abstract qualities of a classical building. When dealing with literal new-classical designs, however, there’s little sympathy, and they’re frequently attacked as being ‘pastiches’ or ‘not of our time’.
Justifying this hostility, and fuelled by ignorance, architects entertain three common fallacies about classical architecture. The first is that classicism is just one style. While there is a common ancestry in ancient Greece and Rome, the differences between the renaissance, baroque, rococo and early 20th-century ‘Swedish Grace’ styles (to name only the most obvious) are profound and very visible. Use-types have moved from temples to churches, huts to palaces, and offices to airports. Following the single-style fallacy is the idea that classicism inevitably represents some distasteful political regime that corresponds with one period in its history. But such is the variety, flexibility and ubiquity of the type that it has, in its time, been used to express democracy in the USA, autocracy in Nazi Germany, civic pride in the 19th century, paganism in antiquity, Christianity from the renaissance onwards, and much more besides.
Now, to the surprise of many, the traditional construction at the source of classical design turns out to be the most sustainableThe second fallacy is that, due to its antiquity and origins in ancient building technology, classicism simply doesn’t belong in the modern world. But this can only be claimed if you have some determinist theory of what the modern world ought to be. Classical architecture is a part of the modern world. It continues to be widely demanded and supplied (both well and badly) around the world. It’s never been limited to one form of construction: the ancient Greeks imitated wood; the Romans not only added the arch, but made brick structures look like marble; renaissance domes introduced tension members and the industrial revolution cast-iron; early skyscrapers were classical; and glass walls date back to the 16th century. Now, to the surprise of many, the traditional construction at the source of classical design turns out to be the most sustainable.
lunes, 31 de mayo de 2010
new urbanism in the corviale Rome
Nikos Salingaros presents the case for demolishing a modernist eyesore in Rome and replacing it with a high-density, mixed-use New Urbanist neighborhood.
The Corviale building outside Rome is a social housing block that exemplifies the established Corbusian tradition of treating human beings as battery chickens. It was built during 1972-1982 as a single one-kilometer-long building. It is now estimated to house 6,000 people. Apologists who are nostalgic of Soviet-era social experiments continue to defend its paradigmatic modernist design on the grounds that every resident is EQUALLY oppressed in this inhuman environment, an ideal consistent with totalitarian notions of social equality.
Photo: a depressing view of the front of the Corviale Building.
Apartments in the Corviale Building. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matteo Dudek)
I am involved in an architectural revolution that is occurring today in Italy, and which may hopefully spread to the rest of Europe and the World. We are proposing tearing down the Corviale and replacing it with new urbanist fabric consisting of 3-5 storey buildings tightly knit together with pedestrian and vehicular connections, and supported by a network of urban spaces and green on the human scale. This comes as a shock to many Italian readers.
Immediately after the Italian elections of just a few weeks ago, incoming politician Teodoro Buontempo announced that he is going to tear down the Corviale. The Corviale monster (also called the "Giant Serpent") will be replaced by a high-density mixed-use city. At this moment, we have three very nice projects by three of my friends in Italy: Ettore Maria Mazzola, Gabriele Tagliaventi, and Cristiano Rosponi. These very different new urbanist designs offer three responses to the problem of building new urban fabric and replacing existing urban tissue that is gangrenous.
The Corviale plan.
The Corviale site as it is currently planned.
It is worth discussing what these solutions represent within their broader political, historical, and social implications:
1. This is probably the first time that new urbanist projects are laid out in front of the Italian public accompanied by strong political support. Thus far, the press has conspired with the Universities to bury any traditional urban projects so as to be able to deny their very existence. That way, the architectural establishment could continue to live off the deception that buildings and cities "simply cannot be built that way anymore".
2. Mazzola's project is new (2010). Tagliaventi’s project (A Vision of Europe, 2008) was published in magazines and on the internet but was ignored by the mainstream media so that no one remembers it as having existed at all. Rosponi's project (Agenzia per la Città, 1997) was presented to the Italian government about 13 years ago, which then included Teodoro Buontempo in a less powerful position than he holds today, but the design was not implemented and was buried in the cupboard by the succeeding administrations.
3. Having three very different new urbanist projects on the table exposes the second great deception of modernist urbanists: the claim that traditional architects supposedly offer the same tired solution which copies old buildings. This self-serving statement is false. Having discovered the correct mathematical rules for human-scale architecture and urbanism, we can generate an infinite number of adaptive solutions, each one different from the other, yet all comparably human. It is the modernist image-based pseudo-solutions that turn out oppressively similar in their non-adaptivity to human needs.
The Tagliaventi plan.
.
The Ettore Maria Mazzola Plan
.The Cristiano Rosponi Plan
Since all three protagonists are my friends, and I could be involved with the detailed execution of one of the designs when it is chosen, I will not compare the relative merits of these three alternatives. They are distinct in approach and show many interesting differences in implementation. All three are viable alternatives and have valuable urban lessons to teach. Suffice it to say that we welcome having even more new urbanist suggestions on a new Corviale: even a fourth and fifth design of a living quarter on the human scale, just to show the Italian public the rich variety of adaptive design possibilities without the need for any duplication.
All three proposals plan to build one portion of new city, then move some of the residents and demolish the vacated space, repeating this process in stages until the entire Corviale has been replaced. Increasing the eventual total area of habitable space without spreading beyond the original grounds will enable the new urbanist projects to largely pay for themselves.
The Critics
We are facing competition, unfortunately supported by the Italian press as being of comparable value to our more radical proposals for rebuilding, coming from young architects who are still fixated upon formal geometries and propose some superficial changes such as paint, making the wall surfaces look "contemporary", and other palliatives. Those architects haven't learned that the human use of architecture depends upon its basic geometry, not upon surface appearances. It is the inhuman scale of the cement slabs and they way they are arranged that create the Corviale's deadly oppressive environment. The absolutist out-of-scale geometry was wrong to begin with, and that error has to be admitted before the built environment can be fixed. Friendly surfaces are certainly essential, but if placed upon the wrong forms they can never fix the basic problem.
Another argument that has blocked previous attempts to condemn the Corviale in the past as an architectural, social, and political failure is the following. Apologists keep mentioning the "incompleteness"of the project, supposedly needing more investment to realize its initial dream (of course); with just some more money everything will turn into a dreamland of joy and happiness. The planned shops on the fourth storey were never completed; the lovely play gardens were never built. But children are happy to play anywhere they feel psychologically comfortable, yet such spaces are sadly missing in the Corviale. Here, the most basic laws of urban structure were ignored, because urban complexity arises through people's movement, which can never occur on the fourth storey. Healthy commerce develops and thrives from network connectivity. What happened instead is that the optimistically labeled "commercial" spaces were occupied by squatters (and still are). Calls for evicting those illegal settlers ignore that they are merely obeying urban pressures to occupy vacant unconnected interior space. The squatters turn out to be better informed about urbanism than the original architects.
Commerce did in fact develop as appropriate to the Corviale's geometry of dreary and dark corridors. The Corviale is recognized as a thriving center for the narcotics trade, prostitution, and a variety of criminal activities. The business perfectly matches the architectural and urban form. If you want retail commerce and schools, then you simply need to change the geometry.
Photo: another view of the Corviale Building.
Another view of the Corviale Building. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matteo Dudek)
Tearing down the Corviale is a great opportunity for human-scale urbanism. But there also exist strong obstacles of a deep ideological nature. I urge readers around the world to watch this battle because the modernists and their political allies could choose to make a last stand. It is not simply an argument about a monstrous and ugly building, but about the monstrous and ugly ideology that permitted such a building (and many others like it) to be built in the first place. Losing Corviale to New Urbanism could well represent the beginning of the end of totalitarian rule in urban morphology, and so for the entrenched ideologues, it's worth fighting to preserve it.
The Corviale was sadly built just at the time when the US recognized that monstrous social housing blocks were an inhuman mistake, a failed experiment on a massive scale. Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis began to be dynamited by the Government in 1972, whereas Corviale was begun at exactly this time. It’s a pity that the Italian architecture community did not learn from American mistakes, as it would have saved them a lot of grief. Corviale was called "visionary", a term still used in Italian academia. Urban crimes against humanity are taught to architecture students as examples to follow, and their architects presented as heroes. Severe criticism of inhuman housing projects in Italy over several decades has not made the slightest difference.
If the reader does not mind me quoting from one of my papers, I wish to conclude on a note of warning about the seriousness of the underlying issues:
"Choosing to erect anonymous blocks without the slightest reference to the essential properties of a house, projects are then executed with pseudoscientific accuracy… they have been planned, exalted, advertised, and studied in all the universities. Those projects have been taught as positive examples to students, by architects who have transformed a vision they originally declared to be "ethical" into an "aesthetic" dimension, which ended up as a mix of mechanization and political ideology… Four examples of public housing built in Italy: Monte Amiata in Milan, Corviale in Rome, Scampia in Naples, and Zen in Palermo, were condemned by European urbanists in 1991 as being total and abysmal failures. Nevertheless, 15 years later, those very projects were spotlighted in an exhibition of innovative Italian architecture, which toured the major Italian universities. These examples, wherein similar cases gave rise to opposite lessons, underline that the discipline itself stubbornly sticks to a failed ideology."
-P. Pagliardini, S. Porta & N. A. Salingaros, "Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry", Chapter 17 of: Bin Jiang and Xiaobai Angela Yao, Editors, Geospatial Analysis and Modeling of Urban Structure and Dynamics, Springer, New York, 2010.
Dr. Nikos Salingaros is professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is also on the architecture faculties of the University of Rome III and the Delft University of Technology. He is consultant to the Schools of Architecture of the Catholic University of Portugal, Viseu, and the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico. Dr. Salingaros is Associate Editor of Katarxis III -- an online journal of New Architecture, New Science, and New Urbanism; the Nexus Network Journal; and the Online Planning Journal. He also ranked 11th in Planetizen's 2009 poll of Top Urban Thinkers.
The Corviale building outside Rome is a social housing block that exemplifies the established Corbusian tradition of treating human beings as battery chickens. It was built during 1972-1982 as a single one-kilometer-long building. It is now estimated to house 6,000 people. Apologists who are nostalgic of Soviet-era social experiments continue to defend its paradigmatic modernist design on the grounds that every resident is EQUALLY oppressed in this inhuman environment, an ideal consistent with totalitarian notions of social equality.
Apartments in the Corviale Building. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matteo Dudek)
I am involved in an architectural revolution that is occurring today in Italy, and which may hopefully spread to the rest of Europe and the World. We are proposing tearing down the Corviale and replacing it with new urbanist fabric consisting of 3-5 storey buildings tightly knit together with pedestrian and vehicular connections, and supported by a network of urban spaces and green on the human scale. This comes as a shock to many Italian readers.
Immediately after the Italian elections of just a few weeks ago, incoming politician Teodoro Buontempo announced that he is going to tear down the Corviale. The Corviale monster (also called the "Giant Serpent") will be replaced by a high-density mixed-use city. At this moment, we have three very nice projects by three of my friends in Italy: Ettore Maria Mazzola, Gabriele Tagliaventi, and Cristiano Rosponi. These very different new urbanist designs offer three responses to the problem of building new urban fabric and replacing existing urban tissue that is gangrenous.
The Corviale plan.
The Corviale site as it is currently planned.
It is worth discussing what these solutions represent within their broader political, historical, and social implications:
1. This is probably the first time that new urbanist projects are laid out in front of the Italian public accompanied by strong political support. Thus far, the press has conspired with the Universities to bury any traditional urban projects so as to be able to deny their very existence. That way, the architectural establishment could continue to live off the deception that buildings and cities "simply cannot be built that way anymore".
2. Mazzola's project is new (2010). Tagliaventi’s project (A Vision of Europe, 2008) was published in magazines and on the internet but was ignored by the mainstream media so that no one remembers it as having existed at all. Rosponi's project (Agenzia per la Città, 1997) was presented to the Italian government about 13 years ago, which then included Teodoro Buontempo in a less powerful position than he holds today, but the design was not implemented and was buried in the cupboard by the succeeding administrations.
3. Having three very different new urbanist projects on the table exposes the second great deception of modernist urbanists: the claim that traditional architects supposedly offer the same tired solution which copies old buildings. This self-serving statement is false. Having discovered the correct mathematical rules for human-scale architecture and urbanism, we can generate an infinite number of adaptive solutions, each one different from the other, yet all comparably human. It is the modernist image-based pseudo-solutions that turn out oppressively similar in their non-adaptivity to human needs.
The Tagliaventi plan..
The Ettore Maria Mazzola Plan
Since all three protagonists are my friends, and I could be involved with the detailed execution of one of the designs when it is chosen, I will not compare the relative merits of these three alternatives. They are distinct in approach and show many interesting differences in implementation. All three are viable alternatives and have valuable urban lessons to teach. Suffice it to say that we welcome having even more new urbanist suggestions on a new Corviale: even a fourth and fifth design of a living quarter on the human scale, just to show the Italian public the rich variety of adaptive design possibilities without the need for any duplication.
All three proposals plan to build one portion of new city, then move some of the residents and demolish the vacated space, repeating this process in stages until the entire Corviale has been replaced. Increasing the eventual total area of habitable space without spreading beyond the original grounds will enable the new urbanist projects to largely pay for themselves.
The Critics
We are facing competition, unfortunately supported by the Italian press as being of comparable value to our more radical proposals for rebuilding, coming from young architects who are still fixated upon formal geometries and propose some superficial changes such as paint, making the wall surfaces look "contemporary", and other palliatives. Those architects haven't learned that the human use of architecture depends upon its basic geometry, not upon surface appearances. It is the inhuman scale of the cement slabs and they way they are arranged that create the Corviale's deadly oppressive environment. The absolutist out-of-scale geometry was wrong to begin with, and that error has to be admitted before the built environment can be fixed. Friendly surfaces are certainly essential, but if placed upon the wrong forms they can never fix the basic problem.
Another argument that has blocked previous attempts to condemn the Corviale in the past as an architectural, social, and political failure is the following. Apologists keep mentioning the "incompleteness"of the project, supposedly needing more investment to realize its initial dream (of course); with just some more money everything will turn into a dreamland of joy and happiness. The planned shops on the fourth storey were never completed; the lovely play gardens were never built. But children are happy to play anywhere they feel psychologically comfortable, yet such spaces are sadly missing in the Corviale. Here, the most basic laws of urban structure were ignored, because urban complexity arises through people's movement, which can never occur on the fourth storey. Healthy commerce develops and thrives from network connectivity. What happened instead is that the optimistically labeled "commercial" spaces were occupied by squatters (and still are). Calls for evicting those illegal settlers ignore that they are merely obeying urban pressures to occupy vacant unconnected interior space. The squatters turn out to be better informed about urbanism than the original architects.
Commerce did in fact develop as appropriate to the Corviale's geometry of dreary and dark corridors. The Corviale is recognized as a thriving center for the narcotics trade, prostitution, and a variety of criminal activities. The business perfectly matches the architectural and urban form. If you want retail commerce and schools, then you simply need to change the geometry.
Photo: another view of the Corviale Building.
Another view of the Corviale Building. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matteo Dudek)
Tearing down the Corviale is a great opportunity for human-scale urbanism. But there also exist strong obstacles of a deep ideological nature. I urge readers around the world to watch this battle because the modernists and their political allies could choose to make a last stand. It is not simply an argument about a monstrous and ugly building, but about the monstrous and ugly ideology that permitted such a building (and many others like it) to be built in the first place. Losing Corviale to New Urbanism could well represent the beginning of the end of totalitarian rule in urban morphology, and so for the entrenched ideologues, it's worth fighting to preserve it.
The Corviale was sadly built just at the time when the US recognized that monstrous social housing blocks were an inhuman mistake, a failed experiment on a massive scale. Pruitt-Igoe in Saint Louis began to be dynamited by the Government in 1972, whereas Corviale was begun at exactly this time. It’s a pity that the Italian architecture community did not learn from American mistakes, as it would have saved them a lot of grief. Corviale was called "visionary", a term still used in Italian academia. Urban crimes against humanity are taught to architecture students as examples to follow, and their architects presented as heroes. Severe criticism of inhuman housing projects in Italy over several decades has not made the slightest difference.
If the reader does not mind me quoting from one of my papers, I wish to conclude on a note of warning about the seriousness of the underlying issues:
"Choosing to erect anonymous blocks without the slightest reference to the essential properties of a house, projects are then executed with pseudoscientific accuracy… they have been planned, exalted, advertised, and studied in all the universities. Those projects have been taught as positive examples to students, by architects who have transformed a vision they originally declared to be "ethical" into an "aesthetic" dimension, which ended up as a mix of mechanization and political ideology… Four examples of public housing built in Italy: Monte Amiata in Milan, Corviale in Rome, Scampia in Naples, and Zen in Palermo, were condemned by European urbanists in 1991 as being total and abysmal failures. Nevertheless, 15 years later, those very projects were spotlighted in an exhibition of innovative Italian architecture, which toured the major Italian universities. These examples, wherein similar cases gave rise to opposite lessons, underline that the discipline itself stubbornly sticks to a failed ideology."
-P. Pagliardini, S. Porta & N. A. Salingaros, "Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry", Chapter 17 of: Bin Jiang and Xiaobai Angela Yao, Editors, Geospatial Analysis and Modeling of Urban Structure and Dynamics, Springer, New York, 2010.
Dr. Nikos Salingaros is professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is also on the architecture faculties of the University of Rome III and the Delft University of Technology. He is consultant to the Schools of Architecture of the Catholic University of Portugal, Viseu, and the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico. Dr. Salingaros is Associate Editor of Katarxis III -- an online journal of New Architecture, New Science, and New Urbanism; the Nexus Network Journal; and the Online Planning Journal. He also ranked 11th in Planetizen's 2009 poll of Top Urban Thinkers.
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