What Architectural Images Do
Recently I was at a large London architectural office for a meeting to discuss whether spandrels on a residential tower in the city’s south east should be expressed in glass, metal or stone. The end of the discussion took a different tack and became an opportunity to discuss how the building was to be represented to the public in an exhibition of the design in its respective borough. It was quickly established that the question of the height of the building (then pencilled in at 198 metres) was the first problem the residents would have with the scheme. Thereafter much of the discussion was geared towards how the height could be downplayed in the imagery so the prospect of its construction would simultaneously excite the public yet subdue its true height. The office demanded that a cabal be formed immediately to confront their fear that local residents of myriad enthusiasms and political leanings could turn, and stem their architectural desires from becoming real. It was decided that the images were to suppress the height of the building by choosing a strategic point at which to illustrate it with the right angle of perspective.
The architectural image is not just tailored to censor or accentuate aspects of a design, they also contain an intrinsic duality that is used by the architectural press to exploit the disconnection between viewing and inhabiting, namely that a temporal empirical reality which governs inhabitation is lost and replaced by the frozen eternal Idea. The image as a limning of material form negates architecture’s own ability to harbour ‘the external conditions of political and social struggle’[1] that ‘scatters us around in a maelstrom of controversies: namely passions, subjectivities, cultures, religions, tastes.’[2] Architectural images are so beguiling because they are political vacuums. This loss of the political dimension of space in the image masks everyday life and serves only to suggest a utopian clause of architecture: its triumph over mediocre design.[3]
The images of the residential tower in question was also to be framed in such a way to coax audiences into falling for what Robin Boyd called the feature eye-trap set by the architect[4], when we ignore what is around the gestalt, or dominating thing. A double-team of: a system of Hegelian negations that are describing what the architecture is not, and traps that focus our attention, both haggle our deepest desires to inhabit the image itself. The image creates a division of lived-space between the Real spaces we normally inhabit and what it offers us as an antidote to our space-poor experience. This becomes particularly challenging as the pervasiveness of the architectural image in contemporary culture contends with the inhabitation of our Real space because images are equipped with political and emotional instruments that don’t come with us when we visit Real space.
This reality loss is many things: the press’ cash cow, slippage, it just happens, the audience doesn’t notice or they don’t care, or comment ironically, or a part of a large ironic commentary on the way we live now, artistic in nature, postmodern paraphernalia. Whatever it is, it is endemic.
WYW - Only Look Here, and Here.
Bibliography
Boyd, Robin, 1963. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Latour, Bruno, 2001. “Which protocol for the new collective experiments?” in Ciudades para un Futuro más Sostenible [Online]. Available at: http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n32/ablat.en.html [Accessed 25 August 2011].
Vidler, Anthony, 1993. “Spatial Violence” in Assemblage, no. 20 (April), pp. 84-85.
Žižek, Slavoj, 2007. “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” in Lacan dot com [Online]. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm [Accessed 25 August 2011].
[1] Vidler (pp.84)
[2] Latour (2001)
[3] Žižek (2007)
[4] Boyd (1963, pp.186)
Wiry Ghosts and Informed Decisions
Again, this post takes snippets from a forthcoming article commemorating the 50th year in print of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness:
Boyd insists, that Featurist things are ‘non-intellectual, non-emotional and entirely optical’1 and that ugliness is class relative: ‘Georgian for high income, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured plastics, paint, and flat black steel welded into hard geometrical shapes.’2 Furthermore, he notes that non-English visitors regard ‘the difference between an English and an Australian accent [as] a class distinction, and that a visiting Englishman cannot really take seriously any intellectual or artistic idea [of Australians]’.3 As though in accordance Boyd feels that ‘in England, unlike America and Australia, there is always something of genuine beauty around the corner, a medieval church or a glimpse of field, hedge and honest stonework, even if it is hemmed in by rival service stations and haunted by the wiry ghosts of electricity and telephones.’4 Comparatively, in Australia he finds ‘diggerdom where all men are equally inferior.’5
L to R: High income, low and the Great Majority. (The ever-desirable Phonia-Colonial style, Wolfgang Sievers’s Housing Commission flats and post-Fordist plastic cells.
But Boyd wasn’t alone in attacking the masses and their decorative misdemeanours. Starched, dyed-in-the-wool modernists Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier alike, were a little more stern. Loos: primitive people ornament. Le Corbusier: everyone else has eyes that do not see.
Whether, as Boyd points out, Featurist decisions and objects are “non-intellectual” or markers of class distinctions is open to doubt. Even people equipped with the minimum of will, voluntarily choose to conform, or fall victim to Kant’s notion of public reason. Immanuel Kant’s thinking contains a notable distinction between public and private reason. The former regards the masses following prescribed knowledge rather than thinking for themselves, and the latter regards the masses taking initiative, working things out for themselves. But to Kant, the majority is always wrong. A liberal market economy defines freedom of choice as key, and uses forces to invite participation. Freedom of choice and participation mixed with Slavoj Žižek labels as a spontaneous unreflective ideology where the masses actively choose stupidity leaves Boyd’s argument that the general public are stupid, conformist or conservative misleading and borderline offensive. Masses, rather, skirt rational decision-making unaided and indeed provoked by a remorseless market.
Wiry ghosts of electricity and telephones.
Add to that Loïc Wacquant, recounting that ‘the culture of everyday life, the production of desire, [is] generally not much interested in the state’6, nor class distinctions or even about making rational and informed decisions. Responsibility to original thought is taken away from the masses. Featurism flourishes amidst an inundation of perplexed, run-of-the-mill choices orchestrated by the market.
Bibliography
Boyd, R., 1963 [1960]. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Wacquant, L., 2009. “The Body, The Ghetto and the Penal State” in Qualitative Sociology, Vol.32 (1). Heidelberg: Springer, pp.101-129.
Notes
1Boyd (1963, pp.141)
2Ibid. (pp.110)
3Ibid. (pp.75)
4Ibid. (pp.16)
5Ibid. (pp.77)
6Wacquant (2009, pp.114)
Plastic-Profit Offices (Architects as Nerve-Workers)
How Resilient is your Organisation?
Melbourne University’s Paolo Tombesi’s fine-tooth comb through the rise and fall of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) in Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994) provides a relevant starting point when looking at the make-up of today’s profit-driven architectural office. It pieces together the beginnings of CRS and their initial attraction to school architecture, their diversification into wider disciplines, the effects of a Saudi petrodollar injection, its public offering and ultimately their collapse and buyout by HOK (formerly Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum).
CRS finding their place in 1950s unabashed American capitalism.
CRS’s evangelical quest for growth began with their early specialisation in schools, planned to coincide with America’s post-war (post-GI Bill) school-building program to rectify its shortage of public education facilities. Following these productive years, Tombesi (2006, pp. 156) says, CRS eventually found that ‘architecture had an intrinsic cash-flow problem that hindered the implementation of a proper self-funded business growth plan.’ Hence, their humble office that began above a grocery shop took to (2006, pp. 163) ‘finance-design-construct-and-operate infrastructural projects that … could provide a solid alternative to the fluctuations of the building industry’ because as the discussions within the partnership eventually concluded ‘…an external injection of capital was needed’ if growth was to occur.
Diversification of services and expansion into other industries is commonplace within the evolution of large multinational companies. Take HOK’s current counter-crisis motto “how resilient is your organisation?”. HOK’s resilience can be seen in telling keywords of their website metadata: ‘fast track global real estate facility advance strategies consulting corporate tower high rise education university government healthcare jail laboratory stadium high performance post occupancy evaluation business call center work’. All of them reserve an acute interest in expansion/diversification in general, four of them in particular (education university government healthcare) reveal their cognisance of the investments of government.
In what seems similar to CRS’s intimate knowledge of school building coinciding with Eisenhower’s progressivism of the day (and also their opening of a small branch in Washington entitled ‘Office for Government Affairs’), HOK use a “trend watch” (just their delicious account) to keep abreast of Obama’s legislative moves (such as this, this and this). (I wonder then--if policy and specialisation are by this means connected--why the Department of Defense isn’t a major provider for firms seeking to build capital muscle? If it is, it’s not publicised.)
Petrodollars for everyone! CRS partners in ‘74 at the Initial Public Offering of CRS, American Stock Exchange. (in ‘75 HOK too wins a 2.44€ billion contract for King Saudi University in Saudi Arabia)
What this mercantile inclination risks is--as is the case with many privately held firms--the potential of design quality being subordinated to their search for surplus. Remember that HOK is not “public”, but CRS was, and yet one could be mistaken in believing that the old CRS mission (2006, pp.157) to ‘seek high levels of profitability as part of its responsibilities towards shareholders’, is now, to fulfill its responsibility towards HOK’s own bank account.
Plastic Humanisation
Click here to watch Life At HOK (tumblr. has not permitted video embedding yet)
Watch Life At HOK.
When asked what a typical day at HOK would entail, the…
man in the checked shirt says, ‘going to marketing, reading the paper’, followed by…
a suited-up man saying, ‘a clear agenda on my part’. Then…
Riccardo (blue-shirted and starched) enlightens us to the fact that he was welcomed with open arms (flown to Brazil after having started only two weeks earlier) after suggesting that the company should expand to the South American markets, because ‘things rise and fall’. [Suggesting that any proposal offered for the sole purpose of economic gain get you places around there]
Michelle (yet more evidence of why latent anti-American sentiment grows) says ‘at HOK, you get to run’ [an insulting joke to the sedentary architect]
Pam (down the back from interiors) is joyful of being given the “freedom” to use ‘any laminate colour’. Tagged on the end as it fades to under her breath, she adds ‘as long as it functions for the client’. [We presume she shared a laugh off camera with the interviewer].
Colin (as the world sits on his lap) says that, ‘a lot of really genuine work, that really is sustainable, is good to see.’ [Colin plays the urban green-collar hard sell]. It’s obvious as…
Jodi (a generic-looking advance strategies consultant, armoured behind a place-less business park) says, the ‘whole sustainability thing’ spearheads HOK’s design agenda: ‘A healthier planet, a healthier building (then with a strange pause, a quick breath and a guilty look to the side, she says), healthier people, better work-life balance, all those sorts of things…’ [One can’t help but notice that the pause is a recognition that ‘better work-life balance’ is perhaps the most difficult demand of a client’s brief to resolve these days]
Kate (a graphic designer), took delight in the completion of a community project. [Judging by the photos the work appears to be polar to the sorts of run-of-the-mill, client-driven projects HOK does]
Toby, whose taken a liking to Hong Kong, confesses that his ‘office is (his) mobile phone’.
Valery, under the title of The Culture of HOK reveals ‘that there are some core values that haven’t changed in 55 years’.
Bill (the president, who is forming his cult of personality with a pair of transparent glasses) uses the example of ‘mid-western values’ to explain how ‘everyone is pulling for everyone else’ in an environment that ‘can be tough’, and yet if you slide back the video a minute or so…
Larry (a design director) explains that there are ‘39 nationalities represented’ in the London office alone.
Reception with No Appointments Receiving Nobody for No-one, Nowhere.
This runs like a scripted marketing ploy where you forget your watching an architecture firm, and it becomes something more like a wee-hour infomercial, with a cast full over-selling pitchwo(men), for a product only the depressed/rich take interest in but you sit there, forgetting how you should be repulsed by this. Whatever happened to sensibilities or (dare I say) art (or better still dirt) in architecture? This reminds me of Gibson’s discourteous description of Singapore way back in ‘93 and how he says Changi Airport ‘seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things.’
And so if it is not ‘mid-western values’ drawn from the very beginnings of HOK in St. Louis in 1955, and if, as the interviewer says, ‘for such a large company I feel that there is very little beaucracy’, how then does HOK run itself? Surely there is, as Tombesi (2006, pp. 160) found at CRS (in ‘76) an ‘internal quality control entity to monitor production routines’, especially as there is such incessant attention on turnover and that even, as Valery revealed, its core values ‘haven’t changed in 55 years’.
Scientifically Arranged Nerve-Workers
Owen Hatherley’s incursion into the Aesthetics of Civil Enforcement somehow fills the middle of all of this--between the private structure of the “corporate” architecture firm and the plastic humanisation of their front-ends (ie. HOKlife, Populous formerly HOK Sport)--which is essentially the work they produce (eg. 1, 2, 3). Their work is all ‘glass and steel atrium(s), all criss-cross trusses and 24 colours/Blairite aesthetics/chrome armrail(s) and … streamlined grille(s)’/all today’s class war.
Infinite Reflections (Limitless/Bottomless-ness): The distorted Winter Garden at the World Financial Centre, New York City.
Graham, Dan. 1991. Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube. Mirrored Glass, Wood, Stainless Steel (Photo by Dan Graham)
Dan Graham’s work could be described too as all “glass and steel”, yet this is precisely what forms his fascination with “corporatised” environments--in particular the corporate make-overs of open public spaces (using gardens and atria). His work claims that these spaces not only contribute to the slow suburbanisation of New York, but also attempt to have a supervised, semi-public green space, to keep the city occupied and “turning-over”. Thus Graham’s work investigates a triunity of “architecture, urban space and power”, the latter related to the corporation’s re-territorialisation of the urban landscape of New York.
Langlands and Bell, 1990. Logo Works: Unilever, Hamburg Wood. Paint, Lacquer Glass. 90 x 90 x 15cm. “I think I see a pagan symbol”
In a similar way, Langlands and Bell’s, Logo Works dissects corporate headquarters revealing what they call a ”super logo”--a public image strategy that also reveals corporate intentions to employees. Even aside from the artist’s intentions, the works leave an open-endedness where one is propelled to ask, “is that a coded message I can see in there (or is that a pagan symbol that is revealing to me system riddled with ritualistic behaviours and a work-life disfigured)? If the conditions in these spaces are advanced applications of what Ford laid out in 1922 (ie. Ford (2004, pp.80)…the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement.’) then the inside of “super logo’s”--these “corporate intentions”--have given way to what Kwinter (2008, pp.115) calls the new, more refined, “invasive reality of nerve-work.”
Nerve-work, it seems, is becoming more prevalent when materialising architecture as Building Information Modeling packages make their way to every privatised personal computer. What BIM software does is further ground the sedentary architect to the point, as Kwinter (2008, pp.115) describes, where they do “what the majority of humans do now…, essentially watch, discern, correct and respond…” This anatomic-tyranny of the workplace (“from muscle-work to nerve-work”) would remind Will Self of his aim to rekindle humanity’s lost affair with space (‘We don’t know where we are’). Most specifically his explanation that it was through the exertion of corporeal forces that the counterchange of place occurred (he uses the example of horse-back riding), and that “changing places” today (from post-steam locomotive onwards) means that we are mediated by barely any physical exertion (if none at all).
Caudill, Bill, 1971. “The Architect is a Team” from Architecture by Team. The Architect is a (“scientifically arranged”) Team.
The following is an intriguing look at the lengths capitalists go to optimise environments (something like CRS’s (or HOK’s [If it is, it’s not publicised]) “internal quality control entity to monitor production routines”)--from 1922:
Ford (2004, pp.118) ’One point that is absolutely essential to high capacity, as well as to humane production, is a clean, well-lighted and well-ventilated factory. Our machines are placed very close together
--every foot of floor space in the factory carries, of course, the same overhead charge. The consumer must pay the extra overhead and the extra transportation involved in having machines even six inches farther apart than they have to be. We measure on each job the exact amount of room that a man needs; he must not be cramped--that would be waste. But if he and his machine occupy more space than is required, that also is waste. This brings our machines closer together than in probably any other factory in the world. To a stranger they may seem piled right on top of one another, but they are scientifically arranged, not only in the sequence of operations, but to give every man and every machine every square inch that he requires and, if possible, not a square inch, and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires. Our factory buildings are not intended to be used as parks.’
Fridays
It could be said that today’s profit-driven architectural office operates with a number of devices to maintain expansion and to fulfill missions. The problem is that this plastic humanisation of the front-end, contradicts the scientific arrangement that underpins the office out the back. Soft-bureaucracy is the means by which core-values can stay the same and old regimes can evolve to more profound levels. Now, doing architecture means just doing nerve-work.
Yet still employees are forever non-reactionary. Why? Because as Koolhaas (2004) admits, labour-theft architects are all just “…marooned in a never-ending casual Friday…”
Bibliography
Ford, H., 2004 [1922]. My Life and Work. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing.
Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp.162-171.
Kwinter, S., 2008. Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture. Barcelona: Actar.
Tombesi, P., 2006 “Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994)” in The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 11, No. 2. London: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Routledge, pp.145-168.
(Advanced Capitalistic) ‘Planned-Neglect’
The behavioural patterns of the rural and the city have now been reversed. Rural land is now meticulously organised, perpetually executed/exploited beyond what could have been imagined when the industrialisation of agricultural land began. Today, as Jameson (2004, pp.49) puts it, ‘it is the city and the urban that grows wild like the state of nature… whereas it is nature which has, in late capitalism and the green revolution--but perhaps all the way back to the original neolithic revolution itself--been subject to careful planning and engineering.’ Thus, it is not ironic that there increasingly exists places, at the centres of cities, that ‘appear’ as explicit cases of ‘non-design’, or deliberate dilapidation or as manifestations of what Lacaton & Vassal might say as spaces that are ‘better-left-alone’. It is strange though that this phenomena sometimes represents the pertinent sites on any tourists’ agenda, for example Berlin. Yet when you look at it closely, these contradictory territories make a mockery of places in which neglect of a central is the only answer to solve other real and pressing economic problems. I can’t help but see a link here between these (advanced capitalistic) spaces of ‘planned-neglect’ (see images below) and the way Hollywood stars ‘dress-down’ and don a pair of jeans like something miners would wear in Harlan County, USA, Come Back, Africa or from deep down the limitless caverns of Coober Pedy. Why then--even in cities where tourism represents a large portion of its own economic condition--do these sites remain as ‘non-designed’? Similarly what motives do the Hollywood mega-stars have to ‘dress-down’ to appear more say ‘of the working class’? Only in this highly commodified landscape/existence we live in, can the ‘non-designed’ be itself a commodity: it represents the frontier of the commodity spectrum which, after so much market/spatial diversification, can the mimetic spatial/bodily accoutrements of poor/decay become accepted (like the Beuysian quest for a Gesamtkunstwerk).
Fashion trend-setters, West Virginia’s Finest.
Stars in Miner’s Jeans. Incidently the jeans are put through a labour-intensive “enzyme wash process, giving them the authentic look and feel of the jeans”.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 2: Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin. Left: Tacheles three years after the fall of European communism. Right: Now. Coincidently, this site is off Oranienburger Straße in Mitte (the bearer of Berlin’s tourism core).
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 3: Caledonian Lane, Melbourne. Left: This highly contradictory space at once appears as urban residue, a site of state/commercial neglect, however this area is directly abutting Melbourne’s ‘main street’ and serves as a cove for a muddle of those whom determine the covert embourgeoisement of the space itself. Right: The new renovation of Myer department store next to Caledonian Lane. The project promises a “state-of-the-art shopping environment, inspired by some of the world’s great retailers in London, New York and Paris”. This is the architectural moment Caledonian Lane seeks to resist but actively participates in as it struggles to ‘appear’ critical of its captialistic subsumption.
Bonus (irresistible) image:
Marxian-capitalism-space-vortex: circulation | money-as-engine-fluid (credit-as-nitrogen-oxide). The finiteness of space = maxed-out credit-card. An early artist’s impression of the renovation of Myer department store. A romantic Koolhaas (2004) on ‘Junkspace’--his self-exclusionary rationale for architecture’s defecations--“…enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles…facism minus dictator…”
Jameson, F., 2004. “The Politics of Utopia” in New Left Review 25(272), pp.35–54 Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp. 162-171.
Voluntary Common Land
Kibbutzim were created before the first Jewish settlement in the 1950s by Zionists that were mainly Russian-Jewish emigrants. The first funded community was called ‘Degrania’ in Israel, 1909. Kibbutzim became independent-social, economic and cultural units, somewhat like cooperative-socialist islands in capitalist seas.
A community can not be free if does not produce resources to be itself.
On small plots, farmers grow vegetables and fruits for their household and for a common market. Regional cooperation in agriculture saves expenses by common use of farming equipment, warehouses, other facilities, schools, clinics, communal halls, shops etc., located centrally. The aim is to reduce the running costs of diversified farming and increase production of industrial crops such as cotton, sugar beet and ground nuts, which could be processed at the central point; and as a consequence, a reduction in transportation costs results.
Nahalal moshav, Israel. Established by the Women’s International Zionist Organization as a Girls’ Agricultural Training Farm in 1929. The inner-most circle contains the communal buildings and resources, which are surrounded by individually owned farms. Contrary to the collective kibbutzim, farms in a moshav tended to be individually owned but of fixed and equal size. Sourced from Sourced from J. Robertson McIlwain [dot] com.
Kibbutzim originated the first building blocks of modern day Israel. Most, if not all of Israel’s main industries grew out of the Kibbutz environment. Most of the nation’s income is created by agriculture whist still using classic traditions established in productive agriculture (although there is present the use of high-technology to the achieve the level of ‘laboratories for research’; aiming to experiment with growth methods while increasing the production of crops without jeopardising quality). They are desirable places to test experimental agricultural techniques and many of them are adopt environmental approaches (see Green Kibbutz movement). The Algatech and the Geshem projects are large-scale projects designed for on-site production whilst managing natural resources.
Alga Technologies (Algatech), Kibbutz Ketura, mass-produces algae for cosmetics, nutritional supplements and for energy conversion and production. Sourced from Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute.
Kibbutzim also exist in the urban context: they are a means to resolve conflicts and social problems. There are more 75 Kibbutzim nationwide in which over 129,300 Israelis reside and collaborate. The Zionists defined the organization of Kibbutzim not only as a necessity but also the new Jews in Palestine (the founders of the Kibbutz movement), felt that they couldn’t rely on others only themselves - belonging to a Kibbutz was a form of societal identity. 
Kibbutzim are seen as the most effective way of taking control over land in Palestine - a tool for any Zionist. Sourced from Google.
Kibbutzim are miniature communal societies wherein the principle that all wealth is common property presides. The inhabitants usually are allowed some notion of private property, however all inhabitants are provided for, with all necessities such as: food, housing, clothes and social and medical services. The inhabitants cook and dine together - normally adults and children do not form standard families, even if the adults have private quarters. The raising of children, is also a common task of the Kibbutzim.
The Ideal Settlement: the Utopian settlement behavior. Kibbutzim, for the past 80 years, have been concurrently reflecting the changes in ideology that take place in society and consequently reconfiguring their layout and evolving the aesthetics. Sourced from Google.
Notes on Arabic Adoption
Dubai is a double-edged sword. At once there is an encounter with tarnished terrain – a lucid, lagoon of baroness propagated into hard-scaped, impenetrable reality of unprecedented scales. The other, a more global and serious reality, deals with the question of the fixed, temporary and the permanency of architecture now. Dubai garners the wealth to exploit construction at a never-before-seen rate – bypassing values like craftsmanship (the lack of which is a ubiquitous problem), tactility, durability and poignantly, adoption.
The fate of architecture is to become ‘pillar-less’ cages of fragility, non-dependency and un-attachment, suspect to Warhol’s fame but rapidly forced into the shadows of its newer, more ‘world’s biggest’ successor on some other terrain vague in another part of the city with a function that nobody really cares about. The landscape and its migrant labourers that set stone upon it have to admirably and muted, like the deterioration of the value of architecture, handle the changes to their existence, to the point that what really is at stake is survival.
Dubai “Another World”. Sourced from Photobucket.
The constructed conclusion, is a non-linear array of impersonalities, that change their function over time, not by choreography, but through definition by the State, relocation of resources, flip-sides to economic prosperity and the pressures of the success of capitalistic endeavours. What remains is the mechanical, rhythmic motion of the worker, and the memory of the architect aiming to recreate another masterpiece.
Dubai workers in the shadow of a UAE national. Sourced from Asia News.
Until the 1950s and the discovery of oil, Dubai was predominantly empty, home to Bedouins and open sand plains. The construction methods were textbook examples of Frampton’s “critical regionalism”; materials hard-packed from the earth, courtyards so as to keep the heat out, intelligent, breathable buildings and clusters allowing sheltered lane ways. It was a workers town, this was the silent vernacular that existed, world’s away from Simmel’s Metropolis. The acceptance of concrete in the 70s as the preferred material terminated any possibility of Dubai having an honest identity and pastiche development thereafter proceeded.
It is the validity of surface and the strength of program/locale that serves as indicators of the sustainability of an architecture’s adornment. The validity of surface is naturally achieved given the age of building, its defiance against ecological circumstance and wrong treatment in the militaristic sense. Dubai is not an old city (The Al Fahidi Fort, built in 1787 is believed to be the oldest building in Dubai) and does not possess architecture of artefactual significance compared to that of nearby Mashriq.
The Al Fahidi Fort, Dubai, 1787. Sourced from Trekway.
The strength of program dictates that, for example, a building of religious importance is more likely to be widely adorned than that of a hotel or banking institution. The reproduction of the ‘same-old’, a visible by-product of the industrial revolution and pre-fabricated age, may fight against fiscal pressures but greatly reduce the chances of public adoration. Success stories of modern public adoration in architecture can be found in the youthfulness of the Pompidou and the early works of Lacaton and Vassal – they speak wholeheartedly, honestly and beg for adoption. The pity is the infrastructure of Dubai relies on the tourist turnover. Perhaps the issue is not of the pastiche, copy-paste language of Dubai, but simply that the city is a transient one.
Lacaton, Anne, Vassal, Jean-Philippe, 1984, Straw matting hut, Niamey. Sourced from Lacaton and Vassal.
Continue reading in the Texts section (If not, soon).
Semiotic Mythologies and the Green Agenda
The frontier of the post-icon era, brought about by the downward-spiralling economy/ecology, has formed a new breed of architect of less moral stature than the capitalist’s ‘building designer’. Previously embedded as part of the marketing strategy of a brand, the architect today is tailored for a token green agenda. Governed by state dictation, most buildings today require efficiency attributes, some without a trace of carbon-emission; a nominal paradigm shifts exists in this newly created responsibility in which there appears to be two serious issues with the deployment of the ‘green icon’.
Semiotics:
The contemporary icon is conceived by a marriage of a successfully marketed entity and the established architect. The aim of the icon is to manifest a physical representation of the identity of the brand - the most potent example being Bank headquarters. Early 19th Century mercantile architecture resembled important civic institutional buildings; fortresses, allowing little light to permeate. Today they represent more than they are; transparent, readable, attainable, reflective, open and with a green agenda, certainly not the model modern banking stipulates. The misdemeanour of specifying sustainability as corporate identity wreaks of tokenism and fallibility. What best represents a banking institution today? A trough.
The image of banking institutions today. Sourced from Poor William.
The advent of green architectural marketing are second-order signs where buildings have fallen victim to Barthes’ Red Wine analogy. The bourgeois’ full, dark bottle is to signify healthy, robust, relaxing wine. The reality is that this image contains subtle embedded semiotic manipulations with the desire to sell the product and the simple desire to maintain the status quo (Barthes, Mythologies, p. 60). Sustainability is the bottle in this case.
Roland Barthes. Sourced from Islakotero.
Palace, 2009. Banking institutions then and now. Left: Former brank of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh (1847). Right: Cook+Fox Architects. Bank of America Tower, New York (2009).
Mis-education:
Architects are caught in the Green agenda, speculating merely as no-man’s-land designers, in the same way Government tries to regulate emerging technologies or the internet, albeit on a nominalistic scale. The thinking stops at the formulation of infrastructure embedded in the building and green baton is passed to environmental engineer/consultant/designer/specialist. This is merely a problem of specialisation, the age-old ‘jack-of-all-trades’ debate, which is why architects should choose their friends wisely. The issue is in the presentation of the design being flawed, superficial and let alone misconceived, however fulfilling the market appeal of the brand.
The running joke is that apparently today, icons are sensitive too.
The noble orientation of our established architects today is that of an architectural iconoclast.
Suburban Survival
The plight of the traditional American way of life will lead to a reassessment of one’s way of being, the regulation of consuming, a new urban infrastructure and a civil war. The genesis of the suburb was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution of 1850s America. In it’s original form, the suburb was considered relief from the industrialised city, complete with it’s factories and production plants. It offered a rural setting with access to the city as a place of work - the city, the machine, the suburb, the relief. This was the suburb without the sub-division we know today: it comprised of farm-style living, manor houses, light-rail (streetcar) connection to the city - this was the American Dream. It took nearly 100 years for the rest of the population to realise that this was indeed the form of living most comfortable. This comparison between what the suburb was to suburb-dwellers of the 1850s and the failed attempt to recreate this ideology today is laughable perhaps pitiful, on many levels. This way of life is now an outdated infrastructure.
Not only is it not anything comparable to the genuine intention of the original suburb, but today’s quest for one’s own piece of land is not sustainable. The inception of the automobile in the early 20th century formed the first demanded change to the suburb in the form of designated access and expressways. At a time when oil and land was aplenty, there weren’t foreseeable problems to confining the city and solving expansion or growth issues. The possibility of owning your own land, customising your own home, having a family car was something of a democratised ‘luxury’. James Howard Kunstler is a straight-talker who is adamant about the downfall of the contemporary suburban life, “…the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips…all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting, for a different kind of future, for a more energy-efficient future.” He catagorises it as a mis-investment of resources. One could extrapolate that it is going to remain as that and require a more resource and labour-intensive future if it is going be improved.
The automobile is the all-American lifeblood of the suburb and is the instrument that it has become dependant on, it is also the major cause of the oil crisis that we are embarking on. Up until now there has been a constant, accessible level of crude oil distributable for requiring nations (the crisis of ‘73 was a controlled situation whereby oil was not distributed to the U.S as it was affiliated with Israel in its conflict with Syria, Egypt, and Iraq), …
Oilfields, California, 1938
Oil refineries and petrochemical factories, Texas City, 2008
… now however it is the latent demand of the resource to keep afloat the suburban lifestyle. Two important determining diagrams that outline what is demanded and what we ‘might’ have, paint a grim picture of our future. Fig. 1 is the diagram that represents all nations and their rate of oil imports by the billions of barrels per day.
Fig. 1: Global oil imports in bbl/day: The digram reveals that the top oil consumer is the United States (@ 20,680 bbls/day).
Fig. 2 is Marion King Hubbert’s diagram of peak oil. Basically, the peak oil diagram represents the global production level of oil against the year. The poignant information that this diagram illustrates is that at certain level the production level hits a peak and begins to decline because the rate the maximum oil being extracted is reached. It outlines that we are in this peak oil moment.
Fig. 2: Hubbert’s Peak Oil diagram of 1956.
Hubbert’s diagram is evidence for adopting a new suburban lifestyle - no longer living an existence mediated by the car. As well as the general population, it is the developers of these pastiche, new communities that elect not to recognise the crisis we are in. The crime lies in expanding on green space, and building stylised so as to recreate a lifestyle that existed in Victorian England.
Queen Victoria in 1887.
All is not lost on the Andalusian coast of Spain as the rate ruthless construction, considered a large contributor to the economic growth of the region, exhibits a paradigm that is becoming all to familiar to coastal regions globally (a comparable situation is in Abidjan, Ivory Coast where the population has gone from 400,000 in 1968 to over 1,500,000 in 1981). The southern coast of Malaga, the region that garners an international airport, consistently triplicates its off-season population. The remaining sections of the coast also tell a similar story: a homogeneous, hard-scape of housing, each attaining a view of the ocean, staining the coastline. The geological arrangement provides a barrier as it is mainly mountainous region, however it flattens just before it reaches sea-level - which explains the latitudinal expansion. The residents of these localities are well-off retired Spaniards, a large population of English expatriates and Russian mafioso. The land is now non-desirable.
The rectification of problems of oil, consuming levels and expansion is ubiquitous, the answer lies in the centres of large cities, particularly in Europe. This model is stacked apartments, shared cores, densely located, satellite commercial nodes and a lesser reliance on the automobile as everything is neatly connected with public transport or accessible by bike or foot. There is no sure-fire way of converting the American dream into this sustainable response. It will be a process of taking away the life that has been common to generations and blindingly easy to live in. It might just generate a civil uprising if running politicians promise the un-promise-able: that one can keep their SUV, and their double-story house, and the luxuries that come with it.
The lives of ordinary Americans will have to be re-evaluated and every measure to implement alternative energies will have to be considered following the reduction of oil extraction from the earth.
