PROJECT: BERLIN|BEIRUT 2008

The post-traumatic urbanism research project is dedicated to thinking through urbanism in the aftermath of conflict via architectural practice. Architecture as a mode of spatial research works to redistribute a field of possibilities that is unique to other modes of inquiry. Certain questions can only be raised through the proposition of a design project. Architecture is a unique mode of provocation.

There is no significant development without cost, no social transformation without trauma. The problem of how to deal with urban trauma is an urgent one. The rapid transformation of cities, nations, economies and the attendant risks of political instability and environmental damage make demands on the profession that cannot be ignored. The complex question we face is how to mediate the demands of development with the fragility of the situations we find ourselves in. In this sense, the role of the architect with regards to trauma is not to prevent or heal but to assume complicity for its production, that is to act without innocence.

Through a series of workshops, starting with Berlin and Beirut in 2008, design projects will be used to test and rehearse a series of techniques and strategies in different post-traumatic urban conditions.  The content of these studios will lie in their organisation as much as their object of study These workshops aim to replicate the conditions of contemporary architectural practice in the following ways:  Simulating the speed of contemporary architectural production through short intensive workshops with project based outcomes, by developing urban design teams that momentarily coalesce around a project, by having team members in different cities collaborate on a single project across different time zones.

Shenzhen Studio

Ubiquitous City by Amanda Clarke

Shenzhen is a belt city stretched along the mouth of the great Pearl River. Across the region where this delta discharges into the South China Sea we find a constellation of industrial might and global finance, stretching from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. One of the busiest manufacturing and shipping areas in the world, the Pearl River Delta is a once-contained experiment in capitalism that long since migrated out of the laboratory and across the borders set out to restrain it.

“Ubiquitous city” by Amanda Clarke is an obsessive visual recording of Shenzhen. What appears at first to be a series of relatively banal yet discreet spatial scenarios reveals via its connective irrationality to be a hallucinatory panorama of fantastic proportions. Produced in obsessive detail – the cumulative effect of these carefully recorded spatial moments is to reveal something of the unrestrained explosive growth that we find in many contemporary cities from Shenzhen to Dubai. It reads more like a drug induced vision of Escher and Piranesi than a design proposal, continually distorting reality so that it can be revealed more clearly, the project demonstrates that we should never see fantasy and reality in opposition. Fantasy works to support reality, reality has fantasmatic aspects that can only be revealed by via complex distortions and subtle fabrications. Evoking the endless towers sheathed in scaffold that stretch into the haze and a sky coloured by unprecedented industrial output, this project refuses any nostalgia or sentimentality. In fact, the project almost refuses the possibility of ‘the project’ itself, by understanding quite clearly the fraught position in which UTS students in Shenzhen were placed, Clarke decides that the first project is less a projection of the architects will then a projection of the cities. This is Shenzhen left to its own considerable auto-poetic devices; the author of the project is the city itself.

Post-traumatic urbanism studio: Berlin|Beirut

Mark Wigley notes that between the twin poles of extreme formal possibility, and the crises of climate, conflict and under development, architects must ‘construct workable forms of optimism…even amongst the most pessimistic of scenarios’.

Given that there is no development or social transformation without some form of trauma, this studio sets out to question the relationship between trauma, conflict and the imperatives of development. The question of how to deal with urban trauma is urgent for all those who must begin to respond to rapid transformation of nations, economies and cities, while negotiating the ethical cost of this change. Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure, but also the social and cultural networks of a city. In the aftermath of instability one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed or otherwise see the post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp on new potentialities: a strategy of critical optimism. Issues relating to conflict, trauma and its aftermath in urban areas will become increasingly pressing in the decades to come due to explosive population growth, uneven development and resource shortages. Further, these effects are felt globally, even in cities that have that have no history of political instability. Similarly, cities with long histories of urban conflict are now conceived as laboratories of spatial research, with the lessons being learnt in them now being exported across the world.

Beirut

Beirut suffered 15 long years of civil war during which the heart of the city was scraped empty by shelling, car bombs and sniper fire. The war engulfed the city until 1990 when the Taif accords brought an end to this period of hostilities. In 2006 Beirut once again shook with the sound of bombs as the Israeli Defence Force punished the city and its civilians for weeks.

This continual lack of stability produces some very interesting situations. Very little can be taken for granted; opportunism, resilience, exploitation, robustness, fragility- it is all here. It is clichéd to talk of scars in the case of Beirut, but the city is a visceral testament to the ambiguous relationship between conflict and development, more buildings were destroyed during the reconstruction then during the civil war. In this sense Beirut crystallises some very contemporary problems despite (or perhaps because of) its political uncertainty

Bachoura Masterplan by Grace Uy, Farouk Kork, Hugh Irving, Diana Hani, Tobias Robinson.

The first stage of this student project was completed in September 2008 during a one week intensive design studio held in collaboration with students and staff from the American University of Beirut. The subject site for the project is Bachoura, a small area located on the border of the old green line that once divided east and west Beirut during the war. The site is now severed from its surrounding areas by infrastructure, the ring road and the road to Damascus, it is also located on the edge of the Beirut Central District that was redeveloped by Rafik Hariri and his construction company Solidere. The disparity between the low socioeconomic environment of Bachoura and the wealth in the Beirut Central District is marked. As such Bachoura is poised on the rim of a wave front of gentrification that is steadily expanding out from the BCD.

This project sets out to produce a diverse series of spatial typologies in the hope of better integrating the possibility of future development in Bachoura with the existing scale of development in the area. To do this, students have developed a typological matrix in which a broad ecology of spatial types is deployed to offer maximum opportunity for highly differentiated development and to lower the entry threshold into both inhabitation and business ownership.

Current Beirut typologies are taken as an already existing sedimented cultural material. This material is then subject to a series of typological manipulations in order to produce a set of variable spatial outcomes. These spatial types are then deployed according to knowledge gained during discussions with local students and site investigation to produce a range of public and semi-public open spaces that cater to the existing use patterns of the local community.

Berlin

Berlin is a city marked by its history of spatial discontinuity and by the large empty zones that lay vacant throughout the city. Without the development pressure that drives new work in  other cities, the question of how to intervene begins to take on a different sense. Most of the projects produced by the studio focused on two site conditions on the edge of the Spree River. The first site was the area surrounding the O2 Arena with its expansive datum of blank paving and lack of a mediating or transitional scale between it and its neighbouring structures. The O2 Arena forecourt is also characterised by a recently removed fragment of the Berlin Wall (which it faces) in surprisingly ideological gesture that aims to assert an axial relation between the stadium and the river. The second site is a relatively well known allotment of land on the opposite bank of the river which has lay vacant for a number of years.

Berlin project by Jessica Patterson

In this project by Jessica Patterson, the wall condition that forms the only constructed edge of the vacant lot described above is thickened so as to produce a new zone within the cavity that can act as a potential site. This zone becomes occupied by a new rectilinear volume that generates a diagonal through the wall, simultaneously seeming to cross it out and enlarge it.

Apartments are arranged in elongated sequences of rooms that intertwine and overlap. The siting is rudimentary, the planning is crystalline but what at first appears as totally deadpan rewards closer inspection. It is in the multiplication of ‘other’ walls between these apartment containers where a cinematic procedure is deployed to edit and frame ones neighbour. Hands, shoes, shoulders intermingle in an endless montage shot played out between adjoining inhabitants. The wall is multiplied and folded internally until it forms a visual frame between fetishized partial objects. In this charged zone inhabited by body fragments, Patterson raises important questions about the insulating role of the interior and the extent of our tolerance for the strange proximity of the neighbour.

Berlin project by Andrew Willes

There is a minor lineage in the history of architecture that could be written about a particular conception of space as the pure potentiality of Cartesian extension. From the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys to Konrad Wachsmann and up to Superstudio and Cedric Price, the possibility of an infinitely pliable spatial armature extending to infinity in all three axes weds the determination of a space frame to the openness of the functions it might play host to. This is not so much architecture as a new foundation for subsequent action – the space frame doesn’t set out to replace the intervention – rather it sets out to replace the world in which it exists through an annihilating universality.

Andrew Willes project for Berlin imagines a type of nested 3 dimensional Penrose armature extending over a blank infrastructural zone near the O2 stadium. The product of a geometrical three way between Benoit Mandlebrot, Peter Sloterdijk, and ‘gap filler’, these fractal foams subdivide and multiply according to various readings of the site conditions. The self similarity of the structural component allows for scale to be explored through a highly recursive geometry that condenses and dissipates to produce and modulate the atmospheric conditions of the interior. This project is also unique in that though it posits a truly organic part to whole relation, the component geometries are still conceived as flexible units that can deform around the rectilinear context and adapt to its variation in scale.

Berlin  project by Regina Chan, Natalie Condon, Jemma David Mcgirr

The condition of the contemporary metropolis is fundamentally discontinuous, this discontinuity operates in two registers. Firstly it marks the basic heterogeneity that pertains between nested scales of material and secondly it works to produce a series of gaps and interruptions on the horizontal plane of the city. It is to this second sense of discontinuity that this project for an island in the Spree turns to for its inspiration. Conceived as one part of an archipelago of exceptional spaces that are distributed through the city, this vacant lot of land floats free of the city and those processes that would reclaim and re-incorporate it into the cycle of urban use-value.

In producing a ruthlessly violent spatial amputation on the city, these students repeat – as design – an urban dialectic of deficit and excess that characterizes contemporary urban development. This lot has been decommissioned, extracted from the city proper so that it can be more completely delivered to the imagination.

Conclusion

What these projects all share is a clear comprehension of both the physical and intellectual terrain of an urban intervention. Rather than locate themselves in a critical space which would exist in advance of the project’s manifestation, these interventions produce a critical position by virtue of their production. In other words the projects assert a position whereby the act of intervention, the particularity of the project, its articulation and deployment create a critical space of their own. The value of the experimental project or proposition lies in its ability to redistribute those questions that are considered significant with regards to a context.  ‘The project’ in its generic sense is able to articulate this redistribution in ways that are not possible through other modes of inquiry such as writing. This is the value of experimentation always operating through a concrete proposition, different types of questions will always be raised.