8/10/2019 Typological remix pre-arguments

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TYPOLOGICAL REMIX (OR WHY BJARKE IS BIGGER THAN REM) 

From the readings on the suburbs to the Arctic Monkeys’ album, the idea of cataloguing anddefining the idea of what is a city has taken its place. For the concept that a city is a walledportion of land, to a virtual construct, to a limitless expanse of free-movement, the concept ofsuburbia (or any synonym) needs to be defined.

But I think there are always two conditions in any urban situation: the formal and the relational.The former has to do with the shape of things: how is the city laid out? How the architecturalspaces are formed in respect to the land use, access to sun, light and nature? How theinfrastructure and its input/output of resources inform the inhabitants? These are questions thatconcern the limits of the architecture. Questions that (might) be influenced by the product ofarchitects and planners.

 

The second condition, the relational, is a more tricky one. It exists in respect to the networkformed within people. We can call it the idea of community, perhaps. The bonds betweenpeople, their personal/social connection to each other and to the whole. The program, events orsituations that happen within the boundaries of the architectural space.

 

And in this disjunction that lies the key to understand the suburban effect. We see a positivelonging for the intrinsic qualities of suburbia (access to space, detached houses as a symbol ofpower, freedom of choice, cleanness and the invisibility of the outside-circle). From Wright to thede-urbanists to recent garden cities in UK, the ideal of sprawl still occupies the imaginary of themiddle-class. These are formal conditions elevated as a desire continuum - while the negativeaspects (long distances, detachment, dependency on the individual, isolation and sameness)tend to be ignored.

Building on this relevance, I suggest we tackle the problem the way architects can afford. Whynot considering the formal condition as the desired solution and work on the idea of remixingtypologies? Why not suburbanize our metropolises?

Typological understanding of what is interesting in the suburban form can be the key to re-create new urban types that could be apprehended by the urban population, create new formalconditions and, in turn, influence how people live inside the cities.

Instead of complying with the generic city of today, we can built new forms of living that in turn,can become new relationships to how we experience our city. 

8/10/2019 Typological remix pre-arguments

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A FIELD OF OBJECTS 

The modernist utopia of decongestion and homogeneity was built in two beliefs: crowdedspaces are always negative, and every man should be the same, have the same. Theseassumptions were based on a socialist view of society, in a Marxist understand of productionand labor as the basis of life. 

The result was a concept to make open, accessible spaces to nature, nature whichneeds to be controlled and molded to the interests of human beings. This disconnectionestablished what I think was the reason to the failure of the modernist utopia: the blandness ofthe landscape of events, where the joyful play of light and shadows and masses are lessrelevant than the machine to live in. 

In this very assumption, architecture lost its meaning, and became engineering. Formsof social control through space were developed as the formal basis of architecture. The shiftfrom man’s spirit to the object’s efficiency change what architecture was, and in turn, relegatedgenerations to not know (and in turn, understand and respect) architecture. The effects of theseactions are felt even today: apart from a small number of visionaries, architecture is understoodat large as a service, to provide a cheap roof, more or less healthy according to the budget.

To quote Moneo, "The architectural object can no longer be considered as a single, isolatedevent because it is bounded by the world that surrounds it as well as by its history. It extends lifeto other objects by virtue of its specific architectural condition, thereby establishing a chain ofrelated events in which it is possible to find common formal structures.” (On Typology -Oppositions, 1978).

 

It is easy for us to get trapped in academia, starchitects and flashy competitions andthink that this is the whole concept of architecture and its production. But in the real world, asGehry put, only has 2% of this architecture. So, from the idea that architecture is a tool to theuniformity of conditions, I propose that we should aim to understand architecture by what it is(its formal and spatial qualities, distancing it from other disciplines) and what it could do, anduse our buildings as a way to bring playfulness and joy again to the cities. Let’s leave theengineering concerns to the engineers.