Once again going back to the current architectural discourse, we saw the icon of the diagram succeeding as a good selling spectacle, the logo as a form combining action and form, and the call for a refocusing on the traditional tasks of a 5000 year old Discipline. Can we really continue debating about regional styles, or architecture as a programmatic diagram? What kind of architecture should be taught to a Chinese student at an US American university by a Middle Eastern teacher grown up in Europe?
Not only in the current emerging field of “situated-”, “responsive-”, “interactive-” etc- architecture people tend to fetishize the detail. Loosing the heuristics and hiding behind technical problems seems to avoid the broader conflict.
Instead of trying to revive form or symbolic meaning whose functions have long vanished, architects must rethink its potential tasks in order to find its place and relevance in the future.
Architecture must differentiate itself from the execution of demands for structure and space.
If architecture fails to do so it will be absorbed by the marketing machinery and by the ideology of market economy.
We can’t assume that any space is constructed by society and is therefore legitimized or even inevitable.
It is not the “extended body” of individuals or society which constructs space, rather larger systems like economic networks can be described as acting “in their own advantage”.
In this sense Lefebvre’s notion that every society constructs its space might have to be questioned. If we are not able to remove ourselves from the space surrounding us than it might be indeed hopeless to speculate on active involvement. But if we have arrived at a point where we understand biological systems and even ourselves not as unities but consisting of parts with different agencies then we must acknowledge that the combined effects of whatever organic or non organic, technological or natural parts might creates its own space. Such a space cannot be considered as being constructed by society.
In my opinion this is the point where architecture has to situate itself: On the one hand we might not be able to change existing models, but we have to negotiate between them. We can’t change them because the constituting parts are self-supporting and anchored in many different domains. But the notion that there is a need for actually intervening in the spatial construction might be worth considering.
Architects must operate between the layers of space generated by networks and agents. Such architecture must not depend on clients it must be deliberately placed in between conflicting agencies. Of course there is still the need for the traditional construction business but I would see this as a secondary or detached aspect of architecture. Its preliminary task should be the exploration of a potential where it can get actively involved. It needs to negotiate the massive changes and conflicts we see on a territorial and spatial scale. Changes triggered by the clash between the agency of global networks and local identities, political agendas and individual resistance, as well as unforeseeable changes caused by the environment.
The second notion of a situated architecture is the task to design scenarios and environments.
We have to avoid designing emptiness but also answer the question how to draw a line between a consumerist spectacle and the concept of an open playable scene.
As opposed to closed systems the parts defining an environment doesn’t necessarily form a unity.
They must be defined as interfaces, links, switches boundaries, edges etc. At this level we can start thinking about technical applications and communication devices.
In all these scenarios the event, the moment when energy is exchanged between systems must be seen as the foundation of Architecture. Such a concept includes the micro scale where an event is defined as change or as exchange of information and the macro scale where an Event is usually understand as a accumulation of people.
Today such events like festivals are already creating new temporal places. The effect of lights blinking in the darkness can be compared to an agglomeration of people. It is the collectiveness that creates place not symbols or historic memory. Even supermarkets traditionally considered as the non-space are in fact complex environments of events creating places.
Codes and protocols rapidly evolve and vanish and places can exist for centuries as well as only for minutes. We can’t see spaces as closed systems but must focus on the wider networks of events in order to create a potential for negotiation.
I think the most important conclusion we can draw from this observation is that our traditional understanding of architecture as typology (making enclosures) has arrived in its must simplistic reduction of the global box which is like the economic model generating it, almost invulnerable and undisputed.
Avoiding the collapse of the discipline, which would be architecture only located in the world of luxury commodities, the framework of thought I tried to summarize here should point in a different, more optimistic direction.
At least inside the academic world we are talking not only about global cities but also about the forming of a global architectural culture which should be discussed in the near future. Such architecture has no culture per se it is action as well as space, it is physical and event simultaneously, and it establishes differences and negotiates the occupation of space.
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