So, I wrote an op-ed for Archinect, that mixes up the topics of big bangs, slums, and suburbia.

Check it out here.

last week i was playing translator again, this time live into the earphones of a group of visitors from princeton (see poster).

the lectures and discussions were interesting in a casual way.   the topic nominally was about the 1960′s Japanese answer to Archigram, which became the movement we now call metabolism.  I am not sure what the connection was for many of the presentations to be honest, which is i suppose not so uncommon for meetings of this sort.

The Japanese contingent were able to make a direct claim of course, since they are almost all current professors at the University of Tokyo and knew the main players personally.  My PhD adviser, the architect Dr. Hidetoshi Ohno, was for instance assistant to Fumihiko Maki, and much of his current work can be connected directly to that relationship (Maki was one of the Metabolist group members).

Whether the connections were strong or not, there were some interesting things said.

The main point from the Japanese side was that Metabolism might look like the work of Archigram in a lot of ways, yet in fact is fundamentally different.  Different because while Archigram unapologetically looked to the future, Metabolism had a strong continuity with the past.  Much of its stylistic imbelleshments are direct copies of traditional Japanese buildings.  Why this was so is hard to say, but Suzuki made an intersting observation about post war Japan that shed some light for me a least.  He spoke of the transformations brought to Japan by the occupying army, but the one that sticks in my mind is the arbitrary and mechanical naming of streets in Tokyo.  This stuck in my mind because most Japanese streets don’t have names now, and I assumed they never did.  The very idea is in opposition to the way cities are organised here (areas have names, streets don’t), but for about 15 years they all had names.  The way Suzuki explained it once the army had left it was as if they had never been and many of the changes they imposed evaporated.  The older patterns returned as soon as the pressure for change was removed.  The implication was that Metabolism never was reactionary in the way of Archigram.  The Japanese architects were not trying to do away with the past, only shifting the trajectory of their history and culture.  Which pretty much sums up the way things are today too, as far as I can tell.

There were lots of other interesting observations from both sides of the aisle, but it would take an essay to get it all down, so I will just throw down a few snapshots:

Jeff Kipnis said:

Architecture in urban planning is the icing on the cake.  The actual cake is formed by mundane things like the sewage system.  Without that base much of the architect-designed urban plans seem rather fake.  When Kenzo Tange proposed a city built over Tokyo Bay, where did he think the shit would go?

Metabolism was/is a problem of the role of the individual vs the collective.    In contemporary architecture the subgroup is acknowledged, but it is the collective that dominates, even in work that seems to be overtly individualistic like Frank Gehry.  For example, comparing the Disney Concert Hall by Gehry with a similar work by the expressionis architect Hans Scharoun -  on the outside they share similar forms, but the interior of Gehry’s hall reveals his desire to bring everyone together.  In contrast, Sharoun’s design of the interior is fragmented and allows for expression of the individual.

Stan Allen said:

Contemporary architecture deals with a different question when it comes to the collective versus the individual (as a result of the effect of post-modernist theory?) – while it used to be the case that big architecture projects struggled with how to bring together a collection of individuals ( metabolism, etc), the problem now is how to bring together a collection of realities.  How to do that remains an open question.

That is a pretty interesting observation, and since Stan Allen is the man of Landscape Urbanism, I expected he would offer it up as one of the alternatives.  Instead he started off by admitting that Landscape Urbanism hits its limits when it takes on density and verticality, which pretty much rules out any modern city in Asia. By implication a new look at metabolism may offer more fruitful results.  That was actually pretty refreshing, although he had nothing more to say about what that might actually mean.

Hitoshi Abe said:

The megastructure used to be something that architects would construct.  But the CITY is the new megastructure, a system that people tap into.  In Tokyo, in fact, the city is treated by its inhabitants as an enormous extended home, with convenience stores (insanely ubiquitous in Tokyo) working like the fridge and medicine cabinet.  The home just plugs in. In other words metabolism is still here and very real.  It is just not so eassy to see.

Kengo Kuma said:

The monolithic presence of architecture comes from the landscape rather than from the buildings.

So, what does that all mean?  It is hard to say.  I guess it means we will be hearing a bit more about metabolism in the near future.

In the middle of last winter the editors of the Russian version of Interni approached us with a mini-questionnaire on modernism and rationalism.  Our answers would be combined with the responses of a few other firms to make a kind of history of modernism from the eyes of contemporary practitioners.  We sent off our answers and in December the issues was published.   We haven’t got our copy yet, but thanks to the magic of flickr and the internet we were able to get a glimpse, which i am sharing here.

Unfortunately, we don’t read Russian but love the look of the magazine, and we are delighted to be included in it again.

While it would be difficult to say with a straight face that we actually improved the content in any way, below is an abbreviated version of their questions and our answers, in English.  The intent of the editors was to make a picture book of sorts and so we were asked to sprinkle references to built projects as touchstone to our text.  This gives the text an unusual flavor, but was awesome to finally confirm all those history courses in school would actually be put to use someday!

Interni – How would you explain rationalism (modernism) to your children, co-workers, or clients? What building would you consider the best and earliest manifestations of its principles?

Us – The way we were taught the subject Rationalism in architecture began as an theory where the starting point was function –  everything designed, and everything built, was supposed to be useful.  In hindsight it is pretty clear that when it comes down to it the actual measuring and value-ing of function is next to impossible with any subject that requires human participation as much as architecture deos.  Let’s face it,  it is a nearly impossible task, unless the definition of usefulness is made artificially narrow.  Which is probably why modernism took on a fetishistic air in the end, and persists today mostly as that highest art of fetish delight, namely with minimalism.

At its best functionalism transformed engineering into art, converting necessity into beautiful form, like the tubular steel chairs of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand (for example the B306 Chaise Longue, 1926).  At its worst it treated human experience – the need to touch materials and to experience architecture as inhabited space – as irrelevant.  In the case of the latter, architecture was simplistically reduced to the plan, and repeated ad infinitum, with powerful negative costs to society.

However, for us the movement, as a historical precedent only became interesting when it shed its overt ties with classicism and accepted the possibility that the idealism of symmetry and hierarchy were neither rational nor functional, even not particularly necessary.  The most obvious example of this approach can be seen in Gropius’ Bauhaus in Dessau (1925). (1925).  For us a favorite example is also seen in the work of Mart Stam, for instance at the Weissenhofsiedlung (1926), and the Van Nelle Factory (1927), and Mies van der Rohe’s early work, such as the Tugendhat House in Brno (1930).

Interni- About a hundred years have passed since the idea of rationalism was conceived. Is it still an issue today, when technology makes every thing possible and common taste does not seem to reside in mere decoration anymore?

Us – Early Modernists/Rationalists wrote about design in a scientific way, treating it as though it were merely the process of responding to a correctly formed question.  The job of the architect was to pose the right questions – and the answer, in the form of a design, would then be automatically “correct”.

That aspect of rationalism is still part of architectural practice today, though it has clearly evolved.  The role of function in particular is now more easily understood as part of a narrative, rather than as an explicit goal.  In fact, in its current incarnation rationalism separates function and form entirely.  This means that FORM DOESN’T FOLLOW FUNCTION and the argument for the correctness of a design is no longer attached to what it looks like, but is instead entirely grounded in what it DOES.

Some of the clearest examples of this approach are on display in the work of hyper-rationalists Rem Koolhaas/OMA and MVRDV, as well as the Japanese architects Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima.  In particular OMA’s Seattle Library, MVRDV’s PIG CITY, and SANAA’s 21^st Century Museum of Art come to mind.  In each of these works the aesthetic is powerful but entirely separated from each building’s argument for organization (either in plan or section).  As such they are perhaps the ultimate evolution of the modernist project.

Ironically, while Rationalism became possible in the last century because of the new capacity for mass production, today’s technology offers the opportunity to be irrational without being inefficient.  Because of computer aided technology standardization is no longer a pre-requisite for efficiency.  In that sense the future of Rationalism may look entirely whimsical, as in the structure for Foreign Office Architect’s Ferry Terminal in Yokohama (1995-2002), Diller and Scofidio’s Eyebeam gallery (2001) or MVRDV’s Hannover pavilion (2000) and still be perfectly logical.  Architecture has become incredibly interesting in the last few decades because while we all tend to focus on what buildings look like, such concerns are finally almost irrelevant.

Interni – Rationalism lead to new types of buildings – factories, clubs (especially in Russia) and skyscrapers. What new types of building appeared in the last century?

Us – The ultimate icon of the last century may very well be the shopping mall.  Clothed in comfortable aesthetic wrapping it is nonetheless a new form of uncompromising rationality.  As a building type it has taken on ever more power, becoming not only a receptacle for shops, but now also the locus for urban revitalization.  Examples include Almere’s city center master-plan by OMA ( 1999 – 2007), and Birmingham Selfridges store by Future Systems (1999).

Interni – New ideas often led not only to a new round of progress, but also to some new disasters. Did the rationalism in architecture cause any wrong, harmful after-effects? What examples illustrate these effects?

Us – The ubiquitous reductive housing blocks, built all over the world, from the 1950s to 1980s is the obvious example that comes to mind.  While there is nothing inherently wrong or inhuman about this kind of housing typology, exemplified with places such as Pruitt-Igoe in the USA (Yamasaki, 1951), the possibility for failure seems to increase when rationality is substituted for creativity in architecture.  This is especially true when the definition of usefulness does not include human comfort, nor delight.   The place of humanity is at the center of architecture, and the worst of “Rational architecture” ignores this, or assumes it is simply not so.

And here is a glimpse of how they put it all together.