anti-object #2

Brett Steele – AA head honcho – writes in the introduction to Kuma’s text that he is against “self-centred architecture… deliberately distinct from its surroundings”.
He continues:

“‘My ultimate aim’, [Kuma] writes early on in his book, ‘is to “erase” architecture’. Such an ambition couldn’t be further removed from the majority of a younger generation of digital experiementalists today, pursuing a renewal of formalism not seen within architecture for decades.”

As founder of the AADRL, and therefore one of the driving forces behind the pursuit of neo-formalism, and the advance of digital experimentalism, this comment is not without a certain hypocrisy. The younger generation are largely that way because Steele made them so. I am not making a value judgement about the worth of digital experimentalism (which has obviously been a tremendously important force in the recent history of global architecture), I am simply noting my surprise that Steele would distance himself from a movement he helped create.

+++++

In the first part, Max mostly focussed on the division of subject and object as proposed by Kuma’s text: the possibility of relating the subject to the landscape through the power of the floor plane, and the ability to blur formal boundaries of architecture by the ‘particlisation’ of materials and elements.

Both of these main points relate to Kuma’s definition of an object as being something wilfully separate from the ground plane – a finite figure cut off from the earth (as opposed to the earth itself, which is continuous in all directions and thus infinite). However, this definition also excludes burying a building. The new millennium fad of concealing buildings in the landscape by submerging them, or employing other mechanical modes for hiding their structure, does not actually change the nature of the building's limits (a wall is not less definitive because it is underground).

Max discussed what it isn’t, but what is an architectural object?

“Kuma sees new digital and informational technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form” Steele notes. Images and forms are the current architectural stock-in-trade, and Kuma makes the historical reason for this quite clear: communication. At a period in Modernism when only black and white images were being published in grainy magazines, the architects that succeeded in drawing attention (and subsequently more projects) were those who could capture the essential forms of their buildings and diffuse them through B+W photographs (Barcelona Pavilion, Villa Savoye, etc). The legacy of this period is the ubiquity of the ‘metalevel’ image: an imagined point of view that portrays the whole building. This manner of viewing architecture necessarily renders it an object for consideration.

Bruno Taut, according to Kuma, lost out to rival Modernists because he “failed to understand the twentieth-century paradox, that individuals as isolated subjects shunned groups in any form. They were sustained in their mediocrity through the possession of attractive products.” Modern architecture became an 'attractive product' by appealing first to the spirit of domestic rivalry – the Modernist home was an object that could be packaged, sold, and used as a means to escape the mediocrity that was the inevitable result of the era of machine reproduction.

I mention the escape from mediocrity because Kuma lets us know that the architectural object is not, whatever Corbusier might argue, for the people. It is the production of one-of-a-kind jewels, founded on capital. It is the Burj Dubai, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Phaeno Science Museum, the Gherkin, and a million other projects – today with no exclusion of function or program.

From the text, I can only conclude this: the architectural object is full of form, but empty of meaning; found in one location, but conceived independently of place; sexy without being in the least bit seductive.

fistful of links

New Babylon: crazy utopian dreams.

Chain chain chain. Chain of fools: some news.

Banning porn may harm soldiers' morale, presumably because since 1917 soldiers have been discouraged from getting any from prostitutes ("for the sake of the girl back home chaps, don't take risks, the hospital is full of fellows that did"). Puts me in mind of this real-time WW1 blog. And while I'm on audacious public safety films, this has to be the worst ever made, via 30gms).

But I feel for the soldiers. Ask anyone, it's not easy being a young man (as the graph makes clear). Still on war, my cousin Ivan's stop motion lego videos (I particularly like the grenade effects). Related, Lego Escher. Not related, the photography of Terry Evans.

Friends recently compared my blog activity to this fathead, which I tried to laugh off. If only I could be as witty as the 60's answer to Oscar Wilde: Marshal McLuhan ("LSD may just be the lazy man's form of Finnigan's wake"). I diverted my negative thoughts by looking at a whole bunch of mining explosions and the top ten scenes from Twin Peaks.

Ah, Mother London! But what do they do? Unlikely to be related, current affairs from the Londonist. Although I tend to get more interested by the city's possible future than its present: 40 awesome futuristic cities; Sisto's tunnel of automotive love; underwater NY by Alex Lukas. Or equally, how it might have been: the Guggenheims that never were.

Word from home is that the Australian National University has found a way to de-salinate water using nanotubes. I love my Mac, and I love you Steve Jobs: Apple creates a micro-camera for the new Nano. But I don't love you Michael (you kiddie-fiddler): finalists for the memorial, over at Bustler.

Finally, all the world is in uproar about Ikea's font decisions (I first heard from Canabula, and last heard from Things) but at an emotional level, I am far more concerned by this, from Carrefour. Unlike Things I make no effort to put the web in context: the gingers are out in force, and blondes get their own keyboard (can they do that?).


Keith Loutit presents a moving maquette of Australia – this one reminds me of home... (similar)

retroactive: calanques

A retroactive post.

The landscape around Marseille is quite spectacular, as chalky as Greece but not as arid.
The city is bookended by dramatic mountain ranges, which thrust into the sea. Gorges and valleys cut into these soft limestone faces terminate in deep and narrow inlets called Calanques. According to Wiki, a Calanque is a kind of Mediterranean fjord. I have my doubts. In any case, they are staggeringly beautiful:

retroactive: marseille[s]

Marseille: city of the 'bar'. Note the amazing building right at the back with a great hole in it.

A retroactive post.

Marseille houses the largest Playmobil city in Europe. That is the only thing you really need to know, which is why I put it first. The city's history is long and complicated: Caesar put it under his thumb, while Cesar gave it a big thumb's up; it's home to one of the oldest European places of Christian worship, a pimping cathedral, you know, all that kind of historical jazz. In modern times, the city was Corbu's Radiant City guinea pig (more on that later in the week) and his mass-housing project started a trend that continues to this day – almost every building in the city is a "bar" (a linear tower block ).





As the 'Premier Port of the Empire', the city received the millions of immigrants coming from North Africa and the Near East (resulting from France's colonial wars). The image I got from those I talked to (friends of friends and locals I met) is of a city struggling to integrate and accomodate its population. Poor public transport encourages excessive car usage, or possibly vice versa (the Marseillais' are obsessed with auto-tuning (super-charging their cars, custom body work/art, mag wheels, etc). While racial and socio-economic divisions are pronounced (Marseille is not a wealthy city), the people are friendly and community orientated. They are talkative, even by my own standards.


From the Old Port looking up to Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.

The urban planning is what really flipped me out though: mass-residential blocks have been ruthlessly superposed over the old urban fabric, sometimes erasing it and sometimes sitting incongruently next to it. The prolongation of the city limits by suburbs of strip towers has resulted in a metropolis that is extremely spread out. It reminded me much more of the type of urban thinking I saw in Texan cities than those elsewhere in Europe.

Left: 'Modern Bakery'; Right: Luminy district school of architecture, just sat down in the middle of nowhere.

retroactive: the first tower

Responsible response to context.

Marseille is modernising rapidly. The idea is to develop the run-down part of the port into a type of starchitect theme park (join the queue). At the moment the only tower block under construction is by Millennium People's bete noir. I am always surprised, given her reputation, that her actual built work is always so corporate. All alone, that tower is an eyesore alright. I tried to be nice and capture a sunset shot from an apartment I found myself in, but it didn't change much. The next one to be built (assuming the recession lets up) is a building by Jean Nouvel (looking like this, or perhaps like this) Hopefully it wont look too bad when its all done (maybe like this).


The sunset of unbridled success over Zaha's ivory tower.

retroactive: bunker archeology

Bunker complex on the island of Ratonneau, part of the Frioul archipeligo. Map.

A retroactive post.

There are an enormous amount of bunkers in and around Marseille, in varying states of decay and disrepair. Some have been re-purposed as houses, or restaurants, I even saw an ice-cream parlour where the wide-angle machine-gun slot was used as a countertop... others are abandoned, ruined or squatted.

Just off the coast is a chain of islands, the Frioul archipeligo, home to the Chateau d'If (of Monte Cristo fame).
On the western tip of Ratonneau, the most remote of the islands, is a large complex of bunker and trench systems, mostly abandoned. Those that still look to be in use (signs on their doors bearing the legend "No public access. Construction site.") are possibly used only for training. Confusingly, some of the structures seem to have been purposefully destroyed: shell holes blocking entries; re-bar split, bent and rusted; gun emplacements buried under rubble; while others seem to have been painstakingly repaired, maintained and even extended (and from the look of the concrete, quite recently too).

just a little bit fitter

In the Cretaceous Period, tens of millions of years after the laying down of the Devonian platform, but still at so remote a distance from the present day that the imagination boggles at it, the site of modern London lay below the surface of a clear, tranquil sea that stretched away northwards to the Pennines and westwards to the Welsh marches. In this sea, more than fifty million years ago, countless billions of minute creatures died every day for at least ten million years. Their hard shells sank into the chemically-deposited ooze at the bottom of the sea, and in the course of time the whole consolidated into the thick beds of chalk which form the cup of the London basin…

London's Natural History (out of print)
by R.S.R Fitter, 1945.

Still at so remote a distance from the present day that imagination boggles. I am boggled. Today was going to be a post on the V&A's most recent one, and in particular on the work of Studio Job – Robber Barron – but at the last minute I read this quote and thought better of it. I can see from the Google Analytics reports that my readers come from almost every country on the planet (none yet from middle Africa or central Asia), with a bias towards the States (mainly East Coast, West Coast and Texas), London and Australia. France, Norway and Switzerland are all pretty up there too. Hence my question: what are your cities founded on?

I am off to Marsailles (or Marsaille, as you like) for the weekend, to stay in the Unité d'Habitation – so expect a post on the subject sometime next week. This break will finally give regular readers a respite from the relentless onslaught of Millennium People posts.
I leave you with an amazing timelapse of the LA fires, and a link to a modern-day disco track that has got very stuck in my head (I didn't even know I liked disco).

metabolism: icons that are not objects

One of Kenzo Tange's early Metabolist (not yet Structuralist) projects, 1961.

From the point of view of its visionaries, Metabolism was a failure. Only a handful of buildings identified with the style were built, and (like the Archigram movement that followed it) the vast majority of projects remain to this day just dreams – the stuff of student reviews and utopian retrospectives.

Ironically, the key to the failure lies in the very basis of the movement: ephemerality (the Structuralists, who employed more or less the same ideals but without this quality were equally unsuccessful, but for other reasons). The Metabolists were trying to use architecture as a means to physically describe conditions of the metropolis that until then had remained intangible– though nonetheless extremely real– the ever-changing and ephemeral association of people, buildings, infrastructure, goods and information. The sum of these activities might be referred to as the ‘metropolitan flux’.

They recognised that the success of a city, and in broader terms of any species, was tied to how fast and with how much ease it could adapt to the needs of the moment, how capable it was of dealing with the metropolitan flux. They consequently proposed buildings that were comprised of adaptable modules bolted to permanent frames – this year the building is a tower block, but next year it might be a school or a hospital or a factory.

And there’s the rub: psychologically, people don’t like the idea that next year their home might be a factory. They like to feel that the structure they reside in is permanent. The Metabolists made the mistake of interpreting the city as being an essentially empty field filled with urban nomads. But the metropolitan flux is far more rooted than one might think: people still have a very strong sense of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. The absurdity of this mentality is evidenced by the fact people are willing to buy McMansions with 25 year life-spans; it is after all not real permanence that the people seek, but the semblance of permanence.

Residential fluidity is thus impossible; public fluidity is not particularly welcomed – we like our civic spaces even more permanent than our domestic ones. Statues. Monuments. Important landmarks. All these form the basis of an urban fabric, and inform our relationship to it. The conceptual eternity of public space is an important factor the citizen's perception of belonging to a city.

Somewhat behind the times, I recently discovered that Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower is slated for demolition. It is one of the few built examples of module/modular construction, and the building is an icon of its era. So what prevents it from being an ‘object’?

Its form, while wilful, it not arbitrary and has little in common with the form-finding exercises used to produce contemporary architecture (I am not only referring to the digital curves of Zaha, but quite equally the gracious profiles of Murcutt).

The form of a Metabolist structure is dictated largely by its module. And the way of thinking about the module is a product of an agenda about the future of society. Moreover, specular/speculative architecture is almost always positive, in that it describes a response to an existing social situation. In this respect the architectural object reinforces the social status quo, and belongs to the order of social commentary.

Conversely, the social arguments of a Metabolist building are normative – they describe how things ought to be, and in this respect Metabolist architecture proposes itself as a tool for change, and thus belongs to the order of social progress.

Capsule Tower: a powerful symbol of Japan's post-war cultural revival.

anti-object #1

Guest post by Max Rosin-Melser.
This is the first of three posts Jack and I will be writing that focus on the book ‘Anti-Object: The dissolution and disintegration of Architecture’ by Kengo Kuma which is an AA publication that came out in late 2008. We feel it’s a pretty important read, posing some interesting questions about the current state and future direction of contemporary architecture. So, the first of these posts will take the form of a review of the material in the book – so all of you following along at home are in the know – and the next two posts will be responses to this content by Jack and myself.

Firstly, let me start by saying that this book has left me with many questions about just what exactly an ‘object’ in architecture really is, and if an architecture opposed to this concept is truly necessary and important for our times. Kuma most definitely thinks it is, saying:

“The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined”

Kuma wants to create an architecture that breaks away from dividing subject and object, and bring about an architecture that works with the subject and operates almost as an open-ended, ambiguous filter to help connect them with the landscape of a given site. Kuma calls this filter a layered ‘feild’ or a ‘wilderness’ where the user engages with this landscape as a ‘body moving in time’. This is architecture as a temporal and vulnerable entity that becomes experiential in nature.

How, you might ask, does Kuma propose we go about making this inclusive field or ‘wilderness’? Well the answer lies in two interconnected directions – first, Kuma believes that it is not the framed window / wall, but rather the floor that mediates and creates positive relationships with the user and the outside environment, and second, by scrutinising material and building dimensions and their relation to the specifics of a given site - or as Kuma calls it ‘breaking down into particles’.


Kuma's own project "water / glass".

For the first point Kuma has this to add “All physical beings return to the floor form because they have to stand on a floor. Therefore, almost all possible relationships between the world and the subject are merely variations on the floor form”. The floor form is thus seen as more innate and also more flexible in how it allows people to engage with the landscape – it does not offer just one static and contained view of nature. Kuma explores this concept further in his work ‘water / glass’ through the use of a veranda ‘made of water’ that flows out into the sea and blurs the boundaries between the lower and upper planes of water, forming one continuous surface extending out into the landscape. The impacts of weather, time of day and wind all shift and modify this relationship so the architecture is seen as “responding to the changing moods of nature”.

"Detail of wall, the stone is cut into slices nearly as thin as wooden slats." The best way I can find to explain Kuma’s idea of ‘breaking down into particles’ is by relating an experience he cites in the book, one in which he experiments with extracting stones one by one from a masonry wall. What he found as he kept subtracting from this wall was that that the coherent mass of the ‘object’ / wall “wavered between being and representation, between its essential heaviness and its apparent lightness, between its opaque attribute and its actual transparency”. The wall is dissolved through "particlisation", with this being indicative of what Kuma hopes to achieve on the small scale of the material and also on the larger scale of the enclosure itself. It is within this dissolving that Kuma sees a rhythm, within the sparse subtraction of material / enclosure that a force tantamount to music is created and activated by its changing and multi-faceted relationship to the user and the landscape.

a fistful of links

via Eric's Little Dark Star.

The daisy chain of links that groups us all together: some news.

Its was the Awaodori festival in Tokyo last Sunday – whose enchanting dances I first saw in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (sorry I can't actually find the video). The results for the worst british architecture awards are in – funnily enough, partly judged by Bad British Architectecture. I'm still in love with the stop-motion architecture site of Flores Prats, (thanks to the Twitter source for the reminder). In the world of photography Nick Veasey has some dope x-rays, and Alex Prager tries to capture the 70's girl. Bit of a thinking one, Michael Tawa's design lexicon, a dense site of interesting etymology.

Saudi Arabia is pretending that the country has no history before The Prophet. Cause and effect: the Bush-Saudi connection / the last column from the Twins is back at square one. Possibly also related, Kevin Spacey and George Clooney star in a new film about psychic soldiers. Certainly related, MyNinjaPlease also goes back to NY, and visits Frank. ClickMuslim, a dating service. Another religious group trying to capitalise on the internet: Laser Monks (sadly, apparently not like an existential laser tag) – just "Real Savings. Real Monks." Mum, if you're reading, blessed toner for Christmas please.

Young, amazingly self-obsessed women seem to be getting louder (or maybe I'm just receiving a heavy dose at the moment) and they're asking the hard webcam questions: 'How do I do a neutral midde-school look?', 'How do I fake abs?' Still, it is amazing the difference a bit of make-up can make. Natalie Portman plays with some kittens, Arrested Development's George Michael (Michael Cera) is abused Between Two Ferns, and Charlie the sci-fi writer goes on tour of a nuclear facility.

A lonely housewife is driven to insanity by her boring husband and trains her cat to eat with fork. Why Hooters waitresses are the most coveted sexual partners. A video that did the rounds in Paris a while back, even though the song is of dubious quality: a naked woman walking down the street, sex sells I guess... Your New Reality, a blog. Volcanoes versus lightning, not as exciting as Mothera versus Godzilla. Segway: what does the phrase 'post-nature' mean, anyway?

Robot hookers of the future will recognise you and remember your preferences, but I can't work out if that will make it better or boring. Time Team's Mick Aston tells us about his work (Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons have become acceptable as nerd activities, but I still get no respect for my 'archaeology, yes!' t-shirt). Some of those dead bodies in the Thames I mentioned are much older than you might think. Confusingly, there are spaces in space that are going no place, and we want to go to them; Nasa chews over the possibility of sending astronauts on a Venus flyby in a lunar lander (not exactly what I had in mind).

Copy or original? Larry David makes a show about making a show about a Seinfeld re-union that's about a Seinfeld re-union. The Call of Duty city, real versus digital: Hexkey on informatic dross. New type of photography? Time captured in some amazing animated gifs. Detroit is in ruins, while the tallest building in the world has some surpisingly normal interiors.

To wrap things up, a good old fashioned On This Day: 1902, humanity starts thinking seriously about going to the moon; 1939, Hitler invades Poland (don't mention the war); 1974, the Blackbird flies London to New York in a little over an hour; 1985, the Titanic is discovered (Conrad on its loss).