Jacques vs. Winy (+ Ricky)

       
Jacques Herzog, Winy Maas, and Richard Burdett’s dialogue at the Swissbau fair in Basel last Saturday was both thought-provoking and entertaining. The event, titled “Small Cities, Big Buildings,” started with each of them giving a presentation, and then it got funnier and funnier in the roundtable discussion. Jacques and Winy really did what they were supposed to do – fight. Ricky tried to mediate but he eventually realized that there was not much he could do, and he was right.

Big thinking

If there were one common message from the three individual talks, it would be: good cities, big or small, and good buildings, big or small, all require big thinking. Ricky Burdett kicked off his presentation by saying “I don’t know much about small cities, so I am going to talk about London.” He used London Olympic Park as an example of how building a piece of the city through design could help rebalancing the city and stitching back neglected and fragmented neighborhoods.

The siting of London Olympic Park is to rebalance the east-west sides of the city.

KCAP’s London Olympic Legacy Master Plan Framework

Winy Maas showed several ways of tackling the problem of big vs. small: cutting (Berlin Cumberland Palace), splitting (Oslo DnB NOR), porosity, making small building bigger with big effects (Spijkenisse Library), making big city smaller through intensification (Grand Paris), etc. Didden Village, for example, is a small roof expansion. But its success made the city of Rotterdam rethink and change their urban regulations.

MVRDV, Cumberland Palace, Berlin

MVRDV, Didden Village, Rotterdam

Jacques Herzog was really playing the local card in his presentation. He began by the claim that “Basel is a small Swiss city, but it’s on its way towards a tri-national metropolitan.” HdM is currently involved in several big buildings in Basel – a scale that many Swiss are still not comfortable with. In these projects, there are always concerns about the city and ways of engagement in the smaller scale. The Novartis building, for instance, doubles the height limit to provide an iconic corner presence of the campus on the Rhine riverside. At the same time, it reactivates the waterfront promenade with a public restaurant and cafe. The addition to the Messe is another big one. I have to say, I was quite surprised to see the end of Clarastrasse completely blocked by the massive new construction. But the hole, which takes the shape of the round inner courtyard of Hall 2, really creates a new public locale within the vast plaza. I can totally see people talking on their phone, “I am right under the hole. Let’s meet here.”

HdM, Novartis building, Basel

HdM, Messe Basel, Basel

“European Paradigm”

Winy Maas claimed that “small city” is fundamentally a European paradigm. It’s all about small scale and “cuteness.” And the one country that has the most acute “small cities syndrome” is Switzerland, where there are many cute little villages. In his study of the “spatial future” of Switzerland, he proposed to densify around Lake Zurich to create a so-called “Super-Zurich” with a huge gridded array of towers. It looks like a big lipstick mark on the map. Winy said, “This is my biggest kiss to Switzerland.”

MVRDV, “Spatial Future of Switzerland” study

MVRDV, “Super-Zurich”

I thought this was really just a grandstand flubdub for a good laugh, even it could still be a compelling hypothetical statement. As Jacques said during the discussion, “This is the most stupid thing I saw today.” To my surprise, Winy tried to defend it as a real serious project. Jacques flipped, “It destroys everything that makes Switzerland Swiss!” “The conservative parties in Switzerland are still extremely anti-urban. We need to educate them by illustrating how things could work in cities. But it’s still not right to touch some ‘holy sites,’ like the lakes and the mountains.” He continued, “I believe in specificity. Places are different and it’s good like that and we should maintain it. Talking about difference is talking about the future.” Now Ricky jumped in, “Yes, I think how to calibrate the difference is key.”

Winy also presented “New Basel” in his talk – a master plan he won in Basel to turn a post-industrial site in the Klybeck area into an island with funny-looking towers. Local newspaper said it would be the Manhattan in Basel. Winy admitted that it’s nothing like Manhattan. “The cuteness of it just makes things look like a scale mistake.” In Jacques’s presentation, he showed an urban study of Basel that HdM did with Rémy Zaugg in the early 1990s. One image indicated towers on the exact same industrial site. He didn’t say it out loud, but it was clear that it meant “Hey dude, I had this idea 20 years ago!”

MVRDV, “New Basel,” Basel

MVRDV, “New Basel,” Basel

Image from “Eine Stadt im Werden?” urban study by HdM + Rémy Zaugg

Rigorous, careful, and modest

Jacques said, “We should be careful and modest to cities, although by nature I am not a modest person.” “The more I work on the urban scale, the more I feel it’s important to be rigorous. It’s not rigid in the Lampugnani way. But the city is not a battlefield for everybody to do their own freaky things.” Tate Modern is about enhancing the existing conditions and continuing the potentials. The Basel urban study and the Dreispitz area study are also about discovering possibilities of the city based on extensive research and design considerations.

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Novartis Campus Master Plan 

HdM + Rémy Zaugg, “Eine Stadt im Werden?” urban study, Basel

HdM, Dreispitz area urban study: three distinct fields based on existing potentials.

City planning and democracy

Another interesting point brought up by Jacques was that most good cities, like Paris, London, Berlin, and even Amsterdam, were not made in a democratic regime. He called Paris the most beautiful city in the world. And its beauty lies both in the royal monuments and the “monotonous” Haussmannian urban fabric. Winy didn’t agree on the monotony part, but Ricky picked up the point, “London Olympics could only happen when planning power is taken from democracy.” It was not to say they ignore the general public. But city planning is by nature a “top-down” process. In the Swiss hyper-democratic system, nothing is easy in the cities. Jacques said, “In Switzerland, urbanism needs to seek an alternative form of ‘bottom-up’ monumentality.”

I guess ultimately, the judge of a good city form is still the general public. As Jacques said, “A city has to work. People have to love it.” No matter how ugly it is, Westfield Stratford City is still quite a successful project in the sense that it’s the first catalyst to attract people and revitalize the area.
       

Zenghelis notes

           
Last Friday night, Elia Zenghelis gave a lecture at EPFL's Laboratoire Bâle (laba), a studio focuses on urban and complex architectural design led by Harry Gugger. Titled "Athens: Labor, City, Architecture. Towards a common architectural language," the lecture was primarily about a studio Zenghelis taught at the Berlage Institute in the last academic year. It was very proper old school and intellectual - no sexy renderings or bold manifestos. But it was actually quite refreshing to see a knowledgeable scholar's approach to urbanism.

Zenghelis started off by reviewing several keywords/themes of the studio:
Formal. A form has borders and an autonomous interior, and there’s also an exterior. John Hejduk's nine square grid implies a dialogue between two entities: the interior and the exterior.

John Hejduk, The Nine Square Problem

Generic. A plan made by typewriter, with undefined functions that can be reprogrammed whenever necessary. All of a sudden, architecture is liberated from constraints.

Archizoom, No-Stop City

Labor. According to Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition, an active life (vita activa) is formed by three types of activities: labor (necessity to survive biologically, like seeking water, food, and shelter), work (objectified products of labor, something to leave behind for prosperity, like architecture), and action (political involvement, the public realm and the social, like the ancient Greek Agora). In modern society, labor takes over the other two spheres. It's important to revoke political actions and understand the politics of labor.

The round city of Gur, Iran

Urbanization. The breaking of boundaries to unlimited expansion.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square

Zenghelis said, when you look at the urban form of Athens, you may think about words like informal, spontaneous, unplanned. In fact, the city of Athens is the result of very specific but unspoken political projects. He then started to describe Greek history and politics in extensive details, through the various dynasties and regimes - from the ancient "happy village" of mixed population, the Ottoman rule, to the population explosion in 1921 triggered by the Greco-Turkish War; from the massive suburbanization in the 1980s and gentrification of the center in the 90s, to the 2004 Olympics, the 2008 riots after a police shooting incident, and finally the current economic collapse (he actually used the word "demise").

Platon Issaias, Athens grid samples

Now I realized all the emphasis on history and politics was trying to understand the issues. The urban form and its transformations have always been so related to politics. We see how the Kleanthis-Schaubert plan for the new state capital defined the grid orientations in modern Athens, how prime minister Karamanlis' policies on infrastructure reshaped the city, and how property laws led to the ubiquitous archetype Polykatoikia (apartment block).

First master plan for Athens by German-trained Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert, 1832

J. A. Kaupert's map of Athens, 1875

Athens cityscape with Polykatoikia everywhere

Finally it came to the studio projects. I was quite amazed by the setup and methodology of the studio. Derived from the lengthy research on history and politics, the students' ideas were tested in the Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio districts in the center of Athens. Their work operated beyond master plan, creating a sort of pilot projects, or paradigms, for the city. The eight projects eventually came together in a way similar to Rossi's città analoga or Piranesi's map of Rome.

Aldo Rossi, La città analoga

Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma

The studio took a very anti-iconic approach - common, "unbranded," and re-appliable in different locations. (Zenghelis actually said after the lecture that most of the architects he used to admire have corrupted to icon makers. And you know who he was talking about.) Thanks to the thorough understanding of the existing issues, the sensible interventions offer inspiring alternatives to the brutal tabula rasa operations. They are so clear conceptually that they only need single fundamental words or short phases for explanation: cloister, wall, roof, stoa, etc. "Vertical+Horizontal" means piers in between existing buildings and a ring of communal facilities on top. One project clears out the ground floor to create a continuous "platform" for the public realm. Another injects "theatre"-like elements into the urban fabric in regular intervals, creating a system of catalytic points like the Constructivist clubs. Their choice of references were also amazing - quite an insightful collection of relevant historic projects.

"Cloister" reference: Bramante, Santa Maria della Pace

"Cloister" reference: Karl Marx-Hof Vienna

"Wall" reference: Le Corbusier, Plan Obus for Algiers

"Wall" reference: John Hejduk, Wall House

"Wall" reference: Louis Kahn, Dominican Motherhouse

"Vertical+Horizontal" reference: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel (Cloud Iron)

"Platform" reference: Mies van der Rohe, Lake Shore Drive Apartments

"Theatre" reference: Cedric Price, Fun Palace

Some people said, there was a lack of humor in the lecture. I agree it was intense and packed with dense information, which sometimes could mean boring. But hey, the guy is in his 70s and he did all those provocative illustrations in Delirious New York. He lost his notes the day before and had to rewrite everything up till 5 minutes before the lecture. What else do you ask for?
       

It's all about the twist

            
At the beginning of the month, I went to a Ben van Berkel lecture at the Cooper. Stan Allen did the introduction and the two joined force in a conversation after BvB's talk. I had the feeling that the whole evening was just about two words: "twist" from BvB and "diagram" from SA.

SA started off the introduction by talking about diagrams, saying that UNStudio's use of diagrams cuts across the usual program-form dichotomy. Then BvB took the stage. He looked back to the IFCCA competition entry that UNStudio did in 1999, where a series of diagrams mapped the performance of Manhattan and extracted parameters that defined the design of West Side. He said, diagram is in a way a "twist" of information, instrumentalizing it as a tool to organize program and infrastructure. He explained the method of
"deep planning," which means to plan in a formally rich way. By doing this, infographs are turned into abstract design models. They are like mathematical models that adapts easily. They give orientation to the design but not illustrating it. This mathematics of UNStudio's design models reminded me of their early Mobius House. Similarly, the Mercedes Museum clearly follows the geometric model of trefoil knot.

Cross Section of Mid-town Manhattan

Mobius House, Het Gooi

Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart

Among the many design models, the twist is perhaps the most consistent in UNStudio's work. It appeared frequently across scale and typology. In Villa NM, the twist materialized as a physical expression of the spatial organization, visualizing the intertwining of domestic and social programs. In the Star Place in Taiwan, the atrium becomes a vertical twist - a "seamless organization of disconnected parts." (Yes, BvB showed that snake-horse-lion-man head again.)

Villa NM, Upstate New York

Star Place Atrium, Kaohsiung

Burnham Pavilion, Chicago

One of the recent works BvB showed was the Burnham Pavilion in Chicago's Millenium Park. He referred to it as a prototype, some sort of a 1:1 diagram rather than a building. He argued that there are currently too many external references (politics, economy, art, etc.) in our profession. He wants to concentrate on the internal forces of architecture. And geometric design models give him the opportunity to group the projects into series. Here I have some doubts. Is this autonomy all over again? Maybe he has cut across the usual program-form dichotomy and reached the side of pure forms.

        

Communication in architecture

   

Storefront held a dialogue between Bernard Tschumi and Peter Cook last night. It was kind of a loose chat and it didn't really have a theme. But as I went through my notes, I actually found a hidden threat: the conversation had a lot to do with different means of communication in architecture. That makes sense. The event was supposed to be a book launch for Event-Cities 4 after all.

Books

There are telephone book kind of books - simply documenting projects with drawings and images. There are shopping catalog kind of books - grouping buildings according to their use, size, or location. And then there are story book kind of books - trying to construct a narrative with the materials at hand. Event-Cities 4 is more like the last type. Tschumi said, "When you practice, you have no time to theorize things. But when you are making a book, you start to realize the hidden consistent passion or idea behind the projects. In that sense, book-making is like conceptualizing a concept." Making a book allows you to think retrospectively and summarize what you have done in a way that might imply directions in the future.

Peter Cook saw this process of editing post-rationalization, while he also said concept is pre-rationalization to begin with. Perhaps we can say Archigram valued "the moment" more than what's before or after. But to me, whether post- or pre-, rationalization is not a bad thing. The key is whether the pre-construction or re-construction of narrative still conveys the truth of "the moment," reflecting what really happened in that particular set of circumstances. The act of editing should be the application of a new layer of meanings on top of the old ones, rather than replacing them (i.e. not simply to make things sound better intellectually).

Diagrams

Peter Cook entered this topic by quoting Tschumi: "The most precise architectural diagrams have nothing to do with forms or with words. They precede form and word; they are the graphic translation of thought." Cook argued that precision is a lost art now because it requires boring insistence. To be precise, you need to be thoughtful even with the selection of diagrams. In Tschumi's opinion, a diagram can be about relations - how the parts are grouped and interact; or about movements - arrows that could be corridors, stairs, or elevators; or simply a red cross on the things that you don't want to do. It doesn't need verbal explanations or formal expressions.

Tschumi said, "Architecture is not the knowledge of form but a form of knowledge." When asked what has changed in the way of thinking through the years, Peter Cook said, "When I was younger I was interested in architecture. As I get older, I am more interested in people. And with that I start to inhabit the diagrams." Architecture is not about the object. It's a container, an instrument. As Cook said, architects "manipulate" people.

Anecdotes

Peter Cook is not an abstractionist. He prefers anecdotes to diagrams. To him, anecdotes are just another medium to tell the story, and they are more fun and potentially more effective.

Metaphors

Tschumi sounded terribly annoyed by the return of what he called "violent metaphors." "Bird's nest," "Water cube," "Sails"... A name of the form is not an architectural concept, especially when it is largely arbitrary. He gave insights on its cause: metaphors are potent because mass consumption has made images the most direct and effective communication tool. In our fast-paced information-loaded society, people desire answers, not questions. And metaphors go straight to answers - not much conceptual thinking is required.

I have to say, not all of the accused architects are responsible for the metaphors. Many of those are just nicknames other people come up with. I remember Luis Mansilla talking about how the local newspaper described MUSAC as waves, flowers, etc., and that was never part of their concept. But he appreciated different interpretations. People want to talk about it, and the formal/visual aspect of things is the easiest to grasp onto. In a way, this is not architects manipulating people, but people manipulating architecture.

Peter Cook was completely comfortable with metaphors. I guess part of the reason is that metaphors sound rather anecdotal. And mostly, it tells the fundamental difference between an enthusiastic celebration of high consumerism in the 1960s vs. the abstract philosophical discourse on architectural semantics in the 80s.

  

Important engagement

       
There are many differences in our world. Politics, cultures, personalities... They all have very different opinions and values. At the Al Manakh 2 launch event at Columbia last Friday, Rem Koolhaas situated the research on the Gulf region in the global political context, and argued that the topic of the Middle East is still extremely relevant and remains a very important engagement. He advocated, "the different political systems need a continued commitment to communicate."

Unfortunately, they are not talking. 911 and the current economic crisis were cited by Rem as events that made the US and Europe turn their backs to the rest of the world. Sorrow turned into anger and bias, and the narrow-mindedness stirred up our societies with controversies like the Danish cartoon, Swiss minarets ban, WTC mosque protests, and the stupid Koran burning proposal. Arrogance comes from ignorance. And the refusal to communicate only makes the sad misunderstanding even worse.

Rem was clearly annoyed by the fact that this ridicule even appears on an intellectual level, when he quoted Joshua Hammer's description of Dubai in his review in The New York Review of Books: "Here, Americans stick with Americans, Brits stick with Brits, Indians with Indians. Everyone keeps to his own kind." Rem said, "He wrote this critique as if its different everywhere else... In fact, when I was in Dubai, I experienced a level of social mixture that even this room can't compare."

In this context, Al Manakh 2 is a valuable attempt to understand. If Al Manakh 1 was an academic observation from the outside, this second installment is more a down-to-earth version trying to form an inside-out perspective. It features a collection of 140 essays, mostly written by local authors reflecting on their own situation and expectations. In a way, this has broadened the notion of research in our field to a rather open-minded and open-ended process of curation.

After American journalist Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered in Pakistan in 2002, his widow Mariane Pearl turned sorrow into strength. It was not strength to seek revenge but to continue Pearl's mission, to address the root causes of his death. She and the family formed the Daniel Pearl Foundation. The homepage of their website states: "The foundation's mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and innovative communications." This reminds me of a quote from Thomas Szasz: "The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget."

Related: Notes: "Al Manakh 2" debate 12/12/09
         

Have you heard the call?

      

Patrik Schumacher gave a talk at Columbia tonight. It was really a talk because it was all words. Too much of just words. The basic message he wanted to communicate was: there should be only one direction of architecture, and that one direction is Parametricism. It was unbearable. But I challenged myself and managed to stay until the end.

(Below: quotes in italics, reactions in regular.)

Part 1. One Direction

We the protagonists...
"Artists should be a kind of antagonists of their culture." - Keith Haring

There is a premise of a unified system of architecture, but we see no "collective action" by architects now.
A unified system doesn't mean a singular expression. If architects are all willing to take on their social responsibility, the "collective action" could be to make our world better. We set out with the same belief, but means may vary.

There can't be many parallel practices that contradict each other.
It's shocking that somebody still thinks like that in our level of civilization now. Our world has reached a degree of complexity that different voices can co-exist. The social structure is flattened by the internet platform and grassroots can express their opinions freely and make their talents visible. Healthy rivals bring more interesting colors to our world.

Architecture is an open discourse. There should be different trajectories that challenge each other in order to foster discussion. New ideas emerge from discussions, or even fights. If there were only one voice, our world would be monotonous and static. No discussion, no challenge, and there would be no development. Who's THE ONE we should listen to anyways? Are you proposing we just make our beloved Iraqi princess dictator of our discipline and put all the angry young men into a concentration camp?

Individual practice has to be coherent. If you do something different tomorrow, all your work today is undone.
I wrote about consistency before. It's important to try different things. And that doesn't make what you did disappear. I am not saying you should change your mind every day. But we should not just stick to one thing and reject other possibilities. Curiosity and the courage to explore is what creativity is all about.

That's Karl Marx's observation of social relations. Here I will talk about architecture and design.

Who are you?

Form is internal to architecture (self-referential), while function is external.
It sounds like autonomy all over again. Just drop the curtains and start masturbating!

Function is something imposed onto architecture? Architecture exists because of its forms? Ask Laugier about that.

Two binary codes of architecture: codes of utility - functioning (useful) and disfunctional (useless); codes of beauty - formally resolved (beautiful) and formally unresolved (ugly).
What an insightful observation! What a novel discovery!

Everything is bankrupt. Parametricism is the only way to avoid crisis. So many young architects are eager to jump on this ship because there's no other ship!

Yeah, you're right...

Parametricism continues the autopoiesis of architecture... It creates endless forms!
Alas! Form-making is the ultimate goal of architecture, and architecture can self-generate. Architects should just all die.

Part 2. Parametricism

Essential definition of Parametricism: All the elements of architecture have become parametrically malleable. The striking advantage is the intensification of relations.
I totally support parametric design technique for its superb capacity of dealing with complicated relations. In the digital age, our computers can handle such great amount of data in such a short time! The potential of dealing with intensified relations is huge. But from what I've seen so far, the only application of parametric design is to manipulate the FORMAL elements of architecture, not ALL the elements. When will the users come into the formula? How can we include the truly intense relations between all the socio-economic realms? Environmental issues?

Parametricism is the great new style after modernism.
I would agree this is a valid claim if there's not the word "great." Post-modernism and Deconstructivism were just transitional. And now parametrics is really everywhere! But the question is, do we really need it as a style? Or do we still need a style at all?

Minimalism is nothing but neo-modernism.

I wish I had been to Marfa so I can argue with more confidence. But I think I have seen enough elsewhere.

Where are we going then? Nature! We see complex variegated order!
Wow, almighty nature! There are many things to say about nature, but you forget one important fact: nature evolves. Diversity is key to evolution. And it always seeks a balance between different species. It's the harmonious co-existence of multiplicity, not singularity...

Principles of Parametricism:

Taboos - No rigid forms; no repetition; no pure difference (collage of isolated unrelated elements).
Dogmas - Soft forms (intelligent!); differentiation; correlation.
Really? Everything should only be curved because there are no straight lines in nature? Buildings should only look like jellyfish or slugs to be "smart"? I like the notion of correlation though. It tells the complex nature of design and suggests the inter-articulation of multiple sub-systems. They inform each other and adapt to an overall optimum. And for sure, parametric design is a great tool to test and visualize that.

(Pointing at some renderings)These are some arbitrary moves to initiate beauty.
Everybody dance!

Avoid to think in terms of essence. You should think about gradient fields of activity.
Wait, did you just talk about the "essential definition" of Parametricism? And why isn't activity something essential? Maybe by activity you mean the "arbitrary moves" mentioned above? OK, let's just stay with superficiality. Let's dance.

We gave our students a harder time in order to push them to do what we can't do in the office.
Why are  there double standards? What are the constraints limiting you from doing what you want the students to do? Structure? Site? Budget? If those are the reality of our profession, why should the students be set away from them? If you advocate to widen the distance between academia and practice, how dare you condemn Archigram and Yona Friedman as utopian nonsense?

(Note: I apologize if I sound like an old man who complains about every new change in life. I don't oppose parametric design per se. I value the effort to theorize things. It's just not convincing when someone pretends to be a thinker.)

         

Positive attitudes

Michel Rojkind's Emerging Voices lecture tonight was uplifting. I can't say every single project he showed was fantastic. But it was the passion and the energy at the lecture that were refreshing. I saw again in the young generation of architects a cheerful and positive way of thinking, as I saw before in Bjake Ingels and Minsuk Cho. I started to think, what exactly are those positive attitudes that inspired me? Here, to list a few:

1. Up for the challenge.
One of the many interesting stories Michel told at the lecture was about the Nestlé Chocolate Museum. Nestlé called him one day and said, there was good news and bad news. Good news was they got the project. Bad news was, they had to get it done in two and a half months. Michel was all excited - "Yeah, no problem! We will call up all our friends and deliver the drawings in two and a half months!" Then the client said, no, two and a half months to finish construction. Crap! Better run away... But Michel was up for the challenge. They worked three 8-hour shifts (not two 12-hour ones) and made a lot of decisions on site. The building opened 2.5 months later.

Talking about Mexico, he said, "Some people complain about where they are from, whining about how fancy things can never be realized in their hometowns. But I love working in Mexico." Michel likes to experiment with digital design, but also wants to get things built locally. Construction techniques may be limited, but he went out to find local manufacturers who can do the job. For example, he hired auto repair workers to do the metal work for the PR34 house.

2. Never say "No" right away.
Here is another story about Nestlé. The client called again and said, "Hey, we are going to build another new facility. Are you interested? But you may not like it this time because you have to build arches. It's in a heritage site." "No no no, we love arches!" In fact, he doesn't. But he managed to pick up something undesirable, reinterpret, and perversely turn it into gold. Pseudoclassic arches became a series of intersected spherical excavations we see in Nestlé Application Group Querétaro.

3. Embrace collaboration.
Maybe it's the spirit of the tight-knit Mexican society, Michel believes in collaboration. Architecture is not a one-man show. "Everybody is working with everybody." You need consultants for your own projects since you can't possibly know every advanced aspect of building construction. And you would team up with other architects for design efforts as well, like Michel did in the Museo Tamayo competition with Bjarke Ingels.

4. Learn from mistakes.
Sometimes improper collaboration could be a disaster. Michel was invited by Ma Yansong and participated in the Huaxi project. It was an amazing collection of young architects. "We all wanted to do something together. But I don't know if we did it the right way." He admitted the result was not very appealing. But the good news is, since he realized that, he would learn from it. Constant denial of failures only leads to a blind self-indulgence. Every baby falls when he/she learns how to walk.

5. Think young.
Michel said, "I still feel like a boy and keep asking why about many things." To satisfy the curiosity and the desire to keep thinking, he and three other friends from different disciplines came together and formed AGENT, a "strategic intelligence embassy." To give an example, he showed their first project: CTRUS - the first transparent soccer ball. It has GPS/RFID and mechanical sensors, so it can locate itself and record kick force and travel speed. It changes color at critical situations such as goal, offside and out of bounds. Make sure you watch the video - it's cool!

Everything is envelope

Alejandro Zaera-Polo gave a lecture titled "Cheapness" at the Cooper Union last Friday. The narrative went like this:

Somebody said I didn't have much political sense, so I made the following observation: political movements in the last century were primarily about equality - social, geopolitical, class, race, gender, etc... Then a bunch of businessmen operated within the capitalist system and actually achieved equality through cheapness. Cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap furniture, cheap flights... I think instead of asking for more and more luxury, architects should think about cheapness too... There is a shift from plan and section as organizational devices to the envelope, which is the assemblage of massing and the construction of it... Now I will show you some projects.

Hmm... OK. Let me try to make sense of this. I think the "political statements" are valid and quite interesting. But how do they influence design decisions in projects? If "cheapness" is the conclusion, how does dressing an existing building with shiny wavy stainless steel illustrate the choice of cheapness? If the claims of intelligence are all about "I can make this sophisticated-looking pattern with only three types of tiles," or "the pattern is scaled in relation to the human head," I'll ask, do we need those patterns in the first place?

New Street Station Redevelopment, Birmingham
"The new envelope reflects different fragments of the context."

Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, London
"The facade pattern consists of only three types of tiles."

John Lewis Department Store, Leicester
"The smallest circle in the pattern is the size of a head."

I saw a problematic theory/practice schism that prevails our profession now. It just sounds silly that everybody is trying to intellectualize things no matter how obvious or superficial they actually are. More disturbingly, these so-called theories are usually so stretched to include the whole world with one simple word or phrase - in AZP's case, "envelope." I couldn't keep from rolling my eyes when I heard "the city is envelope." AZP's logic is, envelope is almost the only thing architects are commissioned to do these days, so you'd better focus on it and try to get some theory out of it. A false premise can only result in unsound strategies. Architects are degraded from spatial creators to facade decorators. "What's your project about?" "Textile patterns from the John Lewis Archive!" "Nice!" "William Morris wallpaper!" "Cool!"

I also saw an effort to differentiate "envelope" from "skin," but I was not convinced. AZP kept saying that his concept of "envelope" integrates the pragmatics of construction. But the rhetorical efficiency of the three-tile inventory in Ravensbourne College is not even about the construction of the exterior walls. It could be interesting if the three shapes are building aggregates and they actually form the circular windows. But judging from the construction photos, they just form a thin layer of decorative pattern. How come this applied wallpaper dictates the shape of the windows and doors and therefore the type of wall construction behind? Oh, sorry. I forgot "ornaments have functions."

Ravensbourne College under construction