The School of Architecture, Tsinghua Universit, Beijing, looked at turning New York City into a ‘Soft City’ with some great images of a water logged Manhattan with skyscrapers emerging from canals. The influence of a workshop in Venice, perhaps?
Learning from Cities 2: Beijing on New York
December 18th, 2006Learning from Cities 1: Unstable Sameness
December 18th, 2006An international student workshop took place at the bienanle, focusing on different cities. First report by Pippo Ciorra, Facoltà di Architettura di Ascoli Piceno, Università di Camerino:
We considered the participation to the “Learning form Cities” workshop as an important opportunity to study contemporary urban phenomena on a wider basis than our everyday experience of “sprawl”. Thus we choose New York as the perfect site for this task because it is the city of modern density, a place of relentless change that never changes, where everything is unstable within an immobile and everlasting frame. We went there, developed our readings and discussed them there with local critics, on a review at Columbia University. The students focused on four readings - Art and Real Estate, Urban Instability, Public Space, Architecture – and through those drew their own map of the city. Then they identified four “hot” sites - Manhattanville, Hudson Yards, Lower East Side, Redhook Brooklyn - and sketched their critical diagrams, as an overview on the social-architectural future of the city. The students’ project has a final icona – Streets of Light - a “realistic” proposal to build a temporary infrastructure of lights, a sort of a second grid connecting the sequence of “public floors” recently developed on top of a number of Manhattan skyscrapers.
Squeezed with the other 22 teams in the room at the Padiglione Italia we acknowledged a general aim to investigation ad research and a weakening aim to performative and self-referential architecture. The discussion was exciting, but what we possibly missed was the chance to present our work to experts and thinkers not involved in the seminar. The possibility to publish a catalogue can be a valid step further against the risk of wasting all this work and elaborations.
Politics and Prejudices
October 3rd, 2006I brought politics with me to the Biennale, and so shouldn’t have been surprised to find them there. Of course there’s always going to be an element of Nationalism, or of self-promotion from some countries – it’s inherent in the structure of pavilions, all competing for attention, column inches, and a crowd at their openings. Some countries transcended this – Hungary, for example, wittily explored an issue that Europe and the US urgently need to address, the often-ignored influence, through immigration and commerce, of East Asian culture; meanwhile South Africa had tourist brochures available, belying the impact of some of their exhibition with glossy testaments to the country’s achievements.
You could see the relative successes of the publicity games over the opening weekend in the bags on people’s shoulders. Rotterdam 2007 was a big hit, and so were Denmark and Great Britain. And even after all the other shoulder bags had been handed out, Israel couldn’t have given them away. I wasn’t anxious for an Israeli bag, even before I had seen the content of their pavilion, but it was to the United States pavilion that I brought my real prejudices.
I walked around Building on Higher Ground crossly. Asking myself with what hypocrisy could the US present responses to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, when the actual response had been so negligent? Where were the panels addressing the displaced poor? Where were the admissions that the Government had ‘messed up’? And it was only later, after I had visited, been engrossed in, and generally applauded the presentations in the Irish pavilion that I realised how unfair I was being. SubUrban to SuperRural showed the responses of nine Irish architectural practices to Ireland’s growing urban and suburban sprawl. Some of the presentations were sensible, some fantastical, some extremely clever and some thought-provoking. So where was my sense of disgust at the Irish Government? Their historical corruption, which has led to a blighted countryside, and appalling problems for suburban commuter families, is currently being investigated by a Tribunal of Enquiry. While government support is generally necessary to bring an exhibition to the Biennale, I have to remember to try to look at the ideas in the presentation, not the politics of the country. In this, of course, Israel failed on both counts.
‘Starchitects’ travel the world, bringing their visions and solutions across the divisions that the national boundaries (exemplified by the pavilions) create. Commerce also transcends national boundaries, and it seemed to me as I thought about how unfair I was being to the US, that as national political influence loses ground to international trends and multinational finance, political Nationalism grows ever stronger.
As a separate conclusion, I was also struck (yet again) by the misleading (and sometimes downright mendacious) exhibition strategies architects and developers employ. The worst and most brutally disproportionate towers and buildings are usually modelled in gleaming (and sometimes illuminated) perspex. The word ‘podium’ conjures bandstands, but usually means a cement block with a car park underneath. The skies are always blue and nothing is ever ever dirty. This thought came to me in Singapore (the pavilion, not the country), and again while flicking through the Arup book that was handed out to people drunkenly leaving the party at the Gaggiandre. Pages and pages of images of beautiful meadows and blissfully peaceful wildlife seemed rather incompatible with the development the book was intending to promote. Perhaps I’m being unfair, I can’t check back as the book was too much to carry home, along with lots of other bits of paper and books (so many also from pavilions promoting ’sustainability’) that I left it behind in my hotel.
Scattered colors in Venezia
October 3rd, 2006Even in Piazza San Marco crammed with tourists, we can distinguish the Biennale participants during the exhibition preview days. One of the significant signs is bags. Many participants carry bags from each pavilion, the opening party, the exhibition book shops etc. with them. The bags play a role of an icon representing architecture lovers as well as a project/city/country branding.
Liane Lefaivre interviews Saskia Sassen
October 3rd, 2006Liane Lefaivre: What was your role in the Biennale? The theme of the main exhibition of Richard Burdett’s at the Arsenale was global cities, an area of expertise which your work pioneered in so many ways.
Saskia Sassen: Several of us (Ricky Burdett, Richard Sennett, the whole Urban Age tribe) met frequently for intense discussions about what it meant to do a Architecture Biennale on cities. The challenges is how to connect architecture with cities as key places for major new social, political, environmental challenges. Further, and I relaly cared about this, how do you bring “art” (film, photography, sculpture, and the foundational meaning of the artistic as a non-paradigmatic way of seeing, of “theoria”) into a discussion on cities.
I also had my own idiosyncratic take on it all. Beyond the generic issue of cities and why architects and designers should be focusing on them, there was a politco-technical question about global cities and architecture. As I say in the Biennale catalogue essay, architecture and engineering have played critical roles in reshaping vast stretches of global cities into platforms for the new economy. Two features become legible in this process. One of them is that. What is usually interpreted today as the homogenizing of the built environment of cities is partly a mis-interpretation. The new hyperspace for global firms and the new transnational professionals is actually a kind of infrastructure for global business, rather than being about cities. In that sense I speak of architecture as “inhabited infrastructure”. Secondly, in building that platform for global capital, architecgture and engineering, urban planning become political, whether they want it or not. Why? Because that platform reprsents and expanded terrain, that you can measure in kilometers in all these cities. That expanded terrain inevitably wil mean the displacement of others –low-profit firms and low-income households are the most dramatic cases. In this process, the city moves from a civic space to a politicized space. Politics is wired into urban space.
Liane Lefaivre: Sounds like this is an attempt to, if you’ll pardon the term, “urbanize architecture.” And, frankly, to architectural ears it sounds very foreign. It strikes me that you too would have trouble figuring out what a lot of architects have to say about the city. Urbanists and architects are apparently both talking about the city, but in totally different terms. I think this is what is so interesting about this Biennale. It is jumpstarting a discussion that was cut off about 30 years ago.
Liane Lefairve questions America Zabala-Vera
October 3rd, 2006Liane Lefairve: Do you think this Biennale did much to enhance the world’s awareness of the kind of urban issues you are involved in?
America Zabala-Vera: Exhibitions lead in rare occassions to revolutions and I think Ricky Burdett was well aware of that but I think the exhibition on cities did a good thing to start the discussion. The conflict of space that exist in cities existed at the Biennale this year as well and made everyone ask themselves what the space is for. I think the exhibition showed the complex problems but provided no answers. And I missed the issue of participatory democracy.
Real Time Rome
September 28th, 2006Forse l’ispirazione ci venne leggendo una conversazione di Lewis Carroll: ‘Abbiamo realizzato una mappa del paese alla scala uno a uno!”. “L’avete usata molto?” chiesi. “Finora non è mai stata aperta” disse Mein Herr, “i contadini hanno avuto da ridire, sostenendo che avrebbe ricoperto l’intero paese, occultando la luce del sole! Così adesso usiamo l’intero paese come mappa di se stesso, e posso assicurarvi che funziona altrettanto bene”‘.
Il progetto ‘Real Time Rome’, Roma in tempo reale, che presentiamo in questi giorni alla Biennale di Venezia - con la sponsorship di Telecom Italia e la collaborazione tecnica del Comune di Roma, dell’Atac, di Google e della cooperativa di taxi Samarcanda - parte da una constatazione molto semplice. La proliferazione delle reti di comunicazione senza fili permette oggi un approccio nuovo allo studio e alla mappatura della città. Nel caso di Roma ci basiamo sui dati di posizionamento GPS ricevuti in tempo reale dai taxi e dai mezzi pubblici e li incrociamo con informazioni provenienti dalla rete di telefonia cellulare, ricavate in modo aggregato e anonimo (senza nessuna implicazione quindi per la privacy dei cittadini) utilizzando l’innovativa piattaforma Lochness di Telecom Italia.
Alla Biennale è possibile così visualizzare in tempo reale la situazione del traffico e degli ingorghi, ma anche la distribuzione in ogni momento di pedoni e mezzi pubblici, l’utilizzazione della città da parte dei turisti stranieri o la popolarità dei monumenti in funzione del loro affollamento (una specie di top-ten istantanea, dal Colosseo a San Pietro). Utilizzando dati registrati, inoltre, è possibile analizzare le grandi ondate che attraversano la città durante eventi eccezionali, quali i festeggimenti per i mondiali, il concerto di Madonna o la Notte Bianca.
Quali sono le implicazioni di tutto ciò? Si tratta innanzitutto di nuove tecniche conoscitive a livello urbanistico, che in futuro potrebbero aiutarci a progettare meglio città e spazi pubblici. A individuare per esempio i punti critici delle infrastrutture urbane e a intervenire puntualmente per apportare eventuali correzioni. Tutto ciò in tempo reale, creando cioè un interessante sistema di azione e reazione alla scala urbana.
Ma le implicazioni del concetto di ‘città in tempo reale’ sono più ampie e sembrano mettere in crisi i sistemi tradizionali di mappatura, basati su una rappresentazione sintetica, nonché statica, di un territorio. Come visualizzare grandi quantità di informazioni che per di più vengono aggiornate di continuo? I cambiamenti oggi in corso sembrano preconizzare dinamiche simili a quelle che hanno portato alla nascita di Internet: la creazione di grandi database georeferenziati dai quali ciascuno può attingere liberamente le informazioni di cui ha bisgno.
Processi di questo tipo sono già in corso, ma stanno evolvendo rapidamente e acquisteranno ancora maggior importanza nei prossimi anni con l’avvento delle etichette intelligenti e della cosiddetta rivoluzione RFID. Forse allora il territorio e la sua mappa diventeranno la stessa cosa, come nel dialogo surreale di Lewis Carroll?
Interview of Liane Lefaivre with Alain de Botton
September 28th, 2006Liane Lefaivre: The question I would like to ask you is: How did this Biennale, which for the overwhelming part was anything but beautiful, dealing as it did with ugly, sprawling, messy side of cities like Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, Caracas and so forth, strike you, as someone who has definite views about the architecture of beauty. (I am assuming you had time to have a look at the main exhibition at the Arsenale) How do things look from your standpoint? Have architects gone round the bend and perhaps off the deep end? Should the situation be redressed?
Alain de Botton: ‘This was my first trip to the Biennale and my overwhelming impression was of the difficulties of reporting on architecture in an exhibition format. Shows such as these are uneasily poised between the pleasures of witnessing real buildings - and of reading books about them. They are often in danger of missing out on the pleasures of both. The Arsenale exhibition was very well done in its genre, but it was essentially a book on walls and I myself would have loved to sit in a comfortable armchair and read the book version, rather than walking down the eerie and endless corridor. This said, it’s good to see architects considering the problem of the city, though intellectually all the arguments are by now extremely familiar and have been well formulated by people like Jan Gehl. In a sense, most thinking about urban design could be termed ‘What Le Corbusier forgot and Jan Gehl remembered.’ Nowadays, everyone from Richard Rogers to Prince Charles agree on what needs to be done to make cities habitable. No one is proposing schemes as mistaken as those urban designers put forward in the 20th century. Good urban design has become common-sense. So the real challenges lie in the area of delivery: and it would have been good for the show to concentrate a little more on the politics and economics of getting good urban design. This is in a sense much trickier than the architecture. Then again, perhaps these themes are best left to the World Economic Forum or some such body to debate. My most joyful architectural experience of the Biennale came from looking around the French pavilion: it’s cheap, human, lively and inspiring.’
Q&A: Liane Lefaivre and Paul Finch
September 28th, 2006Liane Lefaivre: Reality is pretty nasty. I think I heard you say something to this effect. Do you think this Biennale brought architecture any closer to the real world?
Paul Finch: Architecture is intimately concerned with the real world, dealing as it does with individuals and organisations as clients, planning and regulatory regimes, the construction and materials industries and the other professionals who combine to create buildings.
However, this concern, generally speaking, relates only to partial aspects of architecture’s true canvas – the city. I think the 2006 Biennale compels architects to consider the appropriate role for architecture in respect of at least the following:
• Should the future planning of expanding urban areas be a matter for planners and engineers alone?
• How can the demands of demographic change and developing world industrialisation be reconciled with environmental design?
• Are the most signficant housebuilding programmes in human history to be informed/guided/determined by anything other than the ‘ideology-free’ construction industry?
• Is the idea of a city aesthetic an irrelevance?
•Is the city more than the sum of its parts?
• Where do ideas about public space, both hard and soft, find a voice in cities undergoing uprecedneted growth?
• What conversation needs to take place without the particpants being accued of megalomania on the one hand, or impotence on the other?
Top Models
September 27th, 2006
