MEDITERRANEAN UNION II
I wanted to thank mammoth for some thought provoking feedback regarding the relationship between the studios ambitions and the work, which are characterised as having a sort of tension where the rhetoric does not align with its imagined image. It made me wonder what this sort of rhetoric is ‘meant’ to look like, it’s a great question, one we spent incredible amounts of time thinking and talking about since it bears upon some rather touchy subjects (namely aesthetics) < see I even had to bracket it.
I guess that mammoth is surprised that some of the work evokes a particular strain of modern DNA (Constant) – well to be perfectly honest we were as well.
The first thing to discuss is the images; I should take the projects separately, the “Diversity Machine and Resilient System” takes a classical modernist diagram (the pin wheel) and uses it to create a gradient condition which grows out from around transport nodes. The second by Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie uses parametric typological families (like Greg Lynn’s cutlery set but 8-15 storeys and inhabitable) that modulate climate and lean together to form collective clusters which are staged in discreet patches. The third project reproduced below takes the street/lane organisation of a souk and cross fertilises it with a campus style aggregation of buildings and park on top.
In each case the projects present some strategic argument about urbanism through the frame of the brief articulated as some concrete outcome which is imaged as finished or complete.
There are two ways to approach this sense of completeness; one is to say the completeness is not central to the project, i.e. the intelligence/value lies somewhere else (say in the argument about redundancy) and that the projects should just be read as codifications of design intent (this was the argument by Marcus Trimble and Brian Zulaikha on the crit), the other approach is to assert that yes they are actually proposals that are meant to look ‘exactly like this’ but then to understand that the proposal is only ever a provocation to others.
The fear of this last approach is usually entangled with a distrust of master-planning. The success or failure of master-planning is always understood as measured against the degree of implementation. But what if we understand a master-plan as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one (a good friend had a much more eloquent way of putting this but his formulation escapes me)? In this case we acknowledge that our concrete proposals for projects that are meant to look ‘exactly-like-this’ exist in a highly contingent world whose outcome we do not control – but (and this is the important point) this does not stop us proposing them since we are fully aware that the actual project will emerge from a long drawn out process of negotiation with countless stakeholders..
The question of contingency and control that mammoth rightly brings up is critical here. I admit to having a slightly ambivalent attitude towards contingent phenomena given that my entire master’s research was on emergence. (Actually I recall Slavoj Zizek had the best example of autopoiesis, he said that Michael Hardt told him that the during the anti-globalisation protests at Porto Alegre there was a spontaneous emergence of VIP rooms. Excellent.). I won’t go into the details here but, over time, I find there something increasingly unsettling and self-reflexive about absorbing the ‘lack-of-control-to-come’ into design processes in advance as it were… as if there isn’t enough contingency in the world already. Actually I am all for autopoiesis, it just works better combined with ruthlessly tyrannical mastery.
The final thought: If the work evokes a certain moment in modernity, maybe it is because we want to resuscitate it. We are still modern and so the failed project of modernity must be repeated …one more time with feeling or as Beckett says, we must fail, fail again, fail better. Maybe what happens when modernity fails is that it develops a parasitic relationship to crisis, it feeds on it like some compulsion to repeat, a paranoid defence mechanism that must continually replay what it fears most (big plans and superblocks) while the certain future of failure gets pre-emptively absorbed into our calculations for the present.
All images showing work by TEAM DUTCH (Line Danielsen, Natalie Haydon, Gerwin Heidemann, Judith Verdult)
Model photography by Paul Pavlou
[...] Lahoud has a thoughtful response to mammoth’s earlier post “infrastructural urbanism and fracture-critical [...]
Thanks for the response and provocative questions, Adrian. I definitely think that there’s a problematic tendency (particularly in the discourse that I’ve paid the most attention to, that of contemporary landscape architecture and landscape urbanism) to dismiss ‘modernism’ (a vague word if there ever were one) as something which is past (I think you’re entirely right that “we are still modern”) and which is essentially ‘bad’.
I might be more hopeful about the possibility of reconciling the incorporation of contingency into the design process and the need to design, well, things (necessitating some degree of solidity and control), though. I find infrastructure such an exciting object of design precisely for its ability to be at once fixed and solid while affecting change in the fluid systems it’s embedded in (whether that’s literally fluid, in the case of, say, the Dutch Zuiderzee Works, or figuratively, in the case of a city). Of course, once I say that you’ll ask why buildings aren’t exactly the same way, and I’ll answer with something like what you said before regarding an expanded understanding of infrastructure (infrastructural).
Regardless of that, I greatly enjoyed both the student work and your commentary; thanks for sharing.
we must fail, fail again, fail better
Curiously, this is the action of tradition, the collection of information into a system, as Hayek describes it. Rather than failing and failing at something different, some information is acquired in the process, and a design is evolved to be better, more beautiful, or more interesting, more meaningful. Tradition is useful as long as you don’t see it as right, but rather, useful. Especially now, as we can model cities digitally, and technology continues to tweak society, we can workshop new directions without the social cost of the Taylor Homes.
I find that when I interact with traditionalists and “classicists,” they are often more conservative than the architects of 1909 – they believe that the problems are all solved already and all they have to do is apply the style, etc. (I’ve mentioned this on mammoth’s commentary on this plan). They believe that tradition is a thing, not an act, and so tradition is dead, which is a modern (18th C.) idea.
You say you worked on emergent design – that is in some ways far more tradition-based than a project coming out of Notre Dame, and I say that in a good way. Emergence relies on growing upon the previous conditions – it is traditional, like a city built over 500 years. Whereas, a planned city, like most New Urbanist examples, is still planned to death, and arrives stillborn. Have you ever seen a form-based code printed? It’s terrifying. An inch thick at least – and that is on top of the state and city codes. Think of how much control – aesthetic control – has been ceded to the master planner. And people wonder why they seem so twee.
So, I say (and I know you’re just begging for my unsolicited opinion) keep rocking tradition in modern skin. There are aesthetic differences, and there are conceptual differences. If the neomodern tendency is to recapitulate the worse parts of Modernism (superblocks and master planning), then it is retrograde. If it has moved away, then the aesthetic doesn’t matter half as much.
Hi Rob, the Dutch Zuiderzee Works are beautiful thanks for pointing them out, there is always something that is very exhilarating when I am confronted by structures designed around utterly non-anthropomorphic criteria and that make absolutely no concession to human scale at all! Fit is always a failure of the imagination.It reminds me a little of the Sci-fi flick with Jody Foster. As regards contingency, I play with being a little provocative and devils advocate (maybe too much) but there is so much to contingency that is interesting, I suspect (much like modernity itself) I am suspicious of automatic reflexive praise/criticism for these terms that are so complex. Emergence can be horrific, no?
?ar?chitect, thank you for your comments. I agree, understanding tradition and being traditional are two different things that get confused all the time. So many people are naive of tradition because they are sort of afraid to become guilty by association. There are many ways to innovate but having an intimate knowledge of your history and its reasons for being is usually an important requirement.