In the last few years, architecture programs have started offering more courses that address current problems. I’m referring specifically to sustainability classes and social housing studios. This may be partly because of a general move in education to accommodate a growing market and student demand for green practice. Although this is great news, and there is still work to be done, I’d like to take this opportunity to issue some warnings on the subject.
The moment the concept of sustainability became not only acceptable, but (finally!) desirable, it also became a target of manipulation. There are several practices and studios around that have the appearance of greenness, with little of the substance. We only have to look at the oxymoron that is the “green skyscraper”. To clarify: no matter how advanced your daylighting system is, and how many plants you show in your renderings, no skyscraper can be ‘truly’ green: there is too much energy required to carry air, water, people to the last floors, and the excessive accumulation of people in one point (not the same as density!) usually implies a system of towers in a green park that fosters long commutes from the suburbs. There is a fascination for high tech ‘instant’ solutions which automatically acquit the user from any green guilt, and more importantly, advertise their fabulous greenness to eager consumers. I understand it is less profitable to tell your client that a series of 6-floor buildings filling in empty lots in the city, or perhaps making a new mixed-use area in the suburbs, will increase density and reduce commuting, helping out city centers by using retail at the bottom. Or, even more [irony]exciting[/irony], how about re-using some abandoned buildings for a change? Which is, of course, very sustainable, but does not LOOK sustainable.
The increased amount of courses focused on third world city growth and its problematics should come as no surprise to anyone that has been following archinect blogger Quilian Riano (also check out his thesis blog, Fruitful Contradictions, and his recent Nicaragua Studio with Teddy Cruz). But along with excellent examples like Teddy Cruz and Alejandro Aravena, there are also more problematic experiments that focus excessively on the problem as an isolated unit (an abstraction that may be more palatable for studios that wish to focus on formal aspects) or studios that go to the other extreme, forgetting the formal tools of architecture and involving themselves with highly commendable community work that is devoid of the contributions our discipline has to offer. In their specialization, these efforts tend to separate the worlds of theory and practice. As a result, the scope of the discipline is reduced.
We should be discussing housing projects in theory classes and using community restraints to condition abstract, beautiful algorithmic creations. I understand these are studios with huge time limitations, but can’t we have both sides? Isn’t that the point of our discipline? This is NOT to say that problems of social need, sustainability, or urban density should be required study in academia, making it part of a canon or moral obligation that may limit creativity (of form development for example), but rather as a challenge, as part of the problem solving that architects can engage in through the formal tools that are internal to the discipline. I would speculate that one of the reasons for a limited number of social housing studios is that they often privilege factors outside the discipline and are not seen as good places to develop form-making tools. On the other side, form making studios often delight in self-gratifying exercises that never realize their potential in solving real problems. The obsession of these studios with towers and skin systems is exemplary of such unconcerned architecture – they focus on isolating themselves from any ‘messy’ problems to privilege the exercise, but lose opportunities in the process. The balance of material need and formal invention is not an easy equation to solve, but it is one of the basic questions of our discipline (and digital fabrication such as these examples might be a place to start, by the way). Isolating these problems has its merits in skill learning, but lately isolation seems to dominate the field, turning architects into exterior decorators. There needs to be more space in the education of an architect for exercises that reconcile both.
Some of these incongruences were visible in the last MoMa show. I would agree with Quilian’s last op-ed, in that I found the work inside the MoMA –the work from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s- to be much more radical and inspiring that the work outside –the six contemporary proposals, which have shifted the focus towards the unit, and therefore do not address issues of density vs. sprawl. See also dual workshop for fellow archinecter architphil’s review focused on the houses. For example, I didn’t see a proposal for how these units might assemble themselves at an urban scale or even just fit into a neighborhood. I understand that was not the aim of the exhibit, but that is precisely the point: why wasn’t it? If the visionary architects of the 60’s and 70’s were thinking about it, why not ask today’s representatives to give it a go? This key issue of urban density (which intersects issues of housing and sustainability) is often left behind as the focus stays on newer technologies as fast solutions for both sustainability and housing.
While it has been gratifying to see academia addressing these problems, it is important to remember that only in academia do we have the luxury of approaching them through a critical, experimental lens. In other words, we are not accountable, and we can push for the radical experimentation that we had in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, while addressing these very urgent, real problems. I remain convinced that, in order to maintain its relevance, architecture needs to be involved in the processes of production. Or else, as Tafuri warned us, it is condemned to remain in the boudoir of irrelevance. It needs to address these issues that cannot be postponed. But in doing so, the danger is that the scope of the discipline is reduced, following the demands of science and capital. The fascination with high tech solutions often leads to looking outside the discipline for solutions, while architecture remains uncommitted, without using the tools at our disposal to help out with these problems. With the current economic situation, both energy conservation and housing solutions are no longer just a third world issue, and are becoming relevant to all. It might be useful to look at people that have been dealing with these problems for a while. Going back to Alejandro Aravena (link in Spanish), there are questions within these issues that only architecture can solve, using specifically architectural tools such as the strategic use of form, to solve non-specific problems outside the discipline, such as social housing and sustainable solutions. Academia is a good place to resolve these questions, because it provides an environment where we can test different solutions to these non-specific problems while honing the tools of our trade.
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25 Comments
I like how these last few op-eds are aligning and interlocking. Nice.
There are always at least two issues that occur to me whenever we start talking about this territory, and you kind of touch on both of these:
1) How can this be different from (read: better than) just another inevitable pendulum swing from Form back into Function? If concerns about disciplinary autonomy over the last quarter century were driving architecture away from engagement with production, energy, and social structure, how do we learn more from this latest pass back through all that stuff so we're not just rehashing the 60s and 70s?
2) How do we keep it interesting and critical? How do we use concerns like this productively while avoiding loaded language about morals and 'doing the right thing?' Not that there's anything wrong with it, it just tends to, at best, shut down the conversation, and at worst, engender a righteousness that can blind us to our own mistakes.
765, those are exactly the issues that concern me... for now, i don't have a clear answer but there are models of action that interest me...
1...i think this goes back to your op-ed, but for example the work of jaime lerner in curitiba- an architect that became mayor, and then has occupied other government posts- as someone that has effected change by setting up new systems [public transport, but also incentives for people that live in slums to move to organized rural communities and be responsable for farming land] that operate at a large scale while leaving the individual responsability at a small scale. i'm not saying that going into government is the only way, just this is one particular example that comes to mind.
2... this is what hit me the most about aravena's talk, and it's a pity it's in spanish... when i get some time i would be happy to translate. but he emphasizes how he's using architectural, formal tools to solve social problems. his example is the use of the square to solve a community development with lots of corner lots, so that he was able to use the same housing module, standardize and reduce costs.
i think the point here is that form is not only a tool for random 3d play but must be reclaimed as an instrument for problem solving. this sounds so obvious but i keep seeing elaborate formal solutions for non-problems [aravena says: we've been finding complicated answers for simple problems, and we must start finding answers to complicated problems]... why make up a problem [let's say a la eisenman] when there are enough complicated problems to solve already?
ps. i agree completely with avoiding moralistic language
as soon as some start to use "we," morality starts to form.
yes but that would be morality as the basis of an opinion on where architecture should be headed, which is inevitable [any manifesto will imply a morality of sorts]. what i'm refering to is avoiding morality as the argument on why it should be headed in a particular direction.
it is the difference between 'we should focus on social housing because it is needed' vs. 'we should focus on social housing because our lack of engagement with reality has rendered the profession powerless.'
back to 765's question, the functionalism of the 60s and 70s put form as dependent on function and dependent on outside sources -behavioral sciences, etc-. i think the way to avoid this is to refuse this dependency within the profession and accept that form should not be dependent to outside sources but rather organize them. which sounds very naive and 'easier said than done' when i write it, but i guess it's a start.
For the past 20 years, there has been a lack of dialog about the social and cultural implications of form making in most of the architectural academia. Finally, we realize that we have not given an entire generation of architects the tools that are needed to expand the profession back into relevance, and are trying to make amends.
thank you aml for voicing my sentiment. well done.
"We should be discussing housing projects in theory classes and using community restraints to condition abstract, beautiful algorithmic creations."
- Why algorithmic?
"...only in academia do we have the luxury of approaching them through a critical, experimental lens. In other words, we are not accountable..."
- How are we not accountable? How is anybody never accountable?
- Sounds like you just want to have fun making forms... don't see why you need to drag down 'green' and 'socially responsive' practice in order to do so.
sure. that's always been the banner for any creativity "go to wards the unknown." i prefer that to, "for the sake of creativity."
creativity has became a marketing tool and reason for production. a capitalist hegemony and a pig.
i think that's really bad. i dislike 'creative office space' even though it only means computer graphics for video games or a dot com company that promotes non-profit for profit, in reality.
social bends in architectural academies are little bit like those and usually surface in bad economic times.
entire schools have been teaching how to make cnc'd decorative objects for overa a decade now.
i like people like you guys are stirring this shit now. keep it up please!
See, this is what I'm afraid of, that factions have become so partisan about this stuff that nobody even talks the same language, or even wants to do anything but start a fight.
This is what I really like about the way aml's talking about this: it's not either/or, it's both/and.
Why algorithmic? Because energy performance, construction methods, spatial needs and all these other constraints are rule-based. Go look up the word instead of knee jerking.
How are we not accountable? Because sticks and stones break bones, utopian skylarking in architecture school doesn't. I've actually heard New Urbanists stand up in front of impressionable undergrads and say "Modernism is Toxic!" with a straight face. Lighten up, a little form never hurt anybody: disenfranchisement and disinvestment did far more to damage the legacy of the 60s than Corbusian Urbanism.
Do we want to have fun? Hell yes, is that a problem? This is exactly the kind of unproductive moralistic language I'm talking about. Fun is like, bad, right? Nobody's dragging down your moral high ground, fun is fun, try it sometime.
But back to your original question, The Academy Transformed?, would you say that it has been transformed? I'm not sure it has.
I'm curious as to the term "non-specific problems outside the discipline" -- I feel like that this phrase not only admits of the discipline's marginalization of other factors, but that it wants to keep them at arm's length. Why can't architecture look at specific problems outside the discipline? Does keeping those very issues that spur your argument -- social housing and sustainability -- in the testbeds and proving grounds of academia provide a satisfactory answer?
Although you are right to evoke Tafuri explicitly (and Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer", albeit implicitly), I also wonder to what extent does academia today, in 2008, keep itself in the "processes of production".
You know that I'm making an argument for history of course ... there was a time when social housing and sustainability were deemed specific enough to invite a role for architecture. This invitation certainly solidified architects' role in the "processes of production".
I think that one of the many great things about this op-ed (and the whole series in general), is that it invites ideas about method. But in this specific instance, how will schools operationalize aml's call to confront the challenge of embracing issues of social housing and sustainability.
In other words, once this has taken place, what next?
765, it's both/and: you got it, thanks!
smokety: i agree it hasn't been transformed [yet!]
the term 'non-specific...' etc., is borrowed from aravena's lecture, and i guess it is refering to the fact that these problems are not easy to pin down - they keep branching out to different areas.
on tafuri [and benjamin], 2 points: aravena studied with tafuri [which i think is a confirmation of the direction of his argument towards production, although i don't know if it was influential in his case]. and log 11 cut off the 2nd part of my essay there [it was really too long] which was specifically on production. when looking at production, tafuri looks exactly at architects that got involved into these problems, specifically ernst may. this 'side' of tafuri [and his reading of wb] is the focus of my research.
This is a timely article and I look forward to hearing more. I find the reminders about theory and form making while so many studios strive to "cure" the world refreshing. And the ideas that those are the tools of our discipline and through them we can begin to move towards solutions are right on time. I would push a bit further even, at least while we are allowing a bit of utopian backsliding- especially in the context of academia, the ultimate experiment. Perhaps we can think about what has been lost in society or humanity that has deadened us to certain issues and paved the way for that which we now seek to remedy. And then we can explore architecture that allows us to rediscover these connections, be it to nature or to each other, and start to chip away at the problem from its core. Humanity seems to have, in many places, divorced itself from the things that make it humanity, and from the things that make it a member of an ecosystem. I think we can choose to re-introduce or explore situations that might permit this co-existence to flourish.
Thanks for the clarification on the term "non-specific" ... jittery internet means that I cannot watch Aravena's video.
One of my colleagues here has done quite a bit of research and written on Leberecht Migge ... he was May's landscape architect/collaborator. He's the only example that comes to my mind of a Weimar-era modernist who tackled "green" issues. I believe that Marco De Michelis has a long essay on him.
Ah, now I really want to hear/read this Aravena lecture, pero mi español es muy malo.
the challenge of the architect is not what to design but, rather when NOT to design. Unfortunately, this profession is too ANALogous to being a vegetarian abotoire attendent.
pobrecito. :-)
some of the commentary is dismissive of the critical response, which i am not so sure of. why so defensive? "why algorithmic?" is a good question. "energy performance, construction methods, spatial needs and all these other constraints are rule-based" is a so-so answer. Why/how are those things rule-based? Why are spatial needs rule based? They may be. They also may not be, or even more importantly may be rule-based in an irrelevant way. Sometimes rules don't matter. I'm not judging the legitimacy of the idea, only the fact that you blew off the question as moronic when it was not. It is still a good question.
Anyway, the piece is interesting. I like that it recognizes that density does not equal sustainability. I would offer up the possibility that reducing commuting/car use is also not greener in itself. I have reasons, but will leave them out for now except to ask whether the automobile is an energy issue or a planning issue? Which is another way of asking, if cars do not pollute what happens to green design?
This is important because at some point green design loses its legitimacy when it is defined only by energy use. In the broader context of sustainable development, the explicit "how" of sustainability is left open.
It is only when we get into the Design aspect that people make choices and set limits.
I agree that in academia there is certainly less accountability and we should take advantage of it. I would even hope that students and teachers would be willing to dump the orthodoxy that has accumulated over the years and really look at the problems from a fresh, radical perspective. That means suspending judgment for awhile. It may yield nothing, but i suspect such an approach could lead to amazing answers we are all ignoring from inside our isolated cells.
Verdad, I was perhaps a little too cranky with that response. That word 'algorithmic' always raises hackles among the anti formalists, and I thought it was important to point out that aml's use of it here could be seen in a different light. 'Spatial needs' is definitely the weak link here, algorithmically speaking, and I even hesitated for a second to type that.
aml, this is a beautiful op-ed. it is very unifying.
765 made it easier to misunderstand the "a" word while trying to clarify.;.)
orhan, thanks! i'm very happy with the response. jump, good comments, and i will try to address the critiques... tomorrow. right now i have to go back to my 'day job' of reading all night for tomorrow's class.
This discussion is wonderful and I'm glad to see it occurring on a mainstream blog of sorts.
I am currently a third year B.Arch student and would agree that a direct discussion of this thought process in regards to form being a real problem solving tool is void from both the academia and the minds of most of my peers.
However, as I have discussed with one of my professors, the first installment of architecture that students - at least the recent classes at my university - are introduced to is architecture that serves as free standing gems and representatives of cultural capitalism. Frank Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Gehry. Our raw minds are exposed to dull slideshows of how these modern structures are emblematic of successful design. Now while I feel it is critically for us to be exposed to these works while still fresh, I felt that there was an imbalance of understanding architecture and form as art and opportunity. It is through my own endeavors that I am exploring architecture as a true opportunity to address the second portion of this op-ed discussion; architecture as a tool to address issues of housing provision.
So I suppose through this I am wondering when is it appropriate for the leaders of institutions to introduce this concept of form as problem solvers and to what degree should they encourage the future of this profession to explore that concept.
sevensixfive, they were just questions, sorry, didn't mean to get anyone too excited.
becker, to address your questions-
algorithmic- really, just used the word as an example of how usually isolated discussions could mingle and dialogue with each other.
accountability- as 765 mentioned, in the sense that an academic project is an experimental test, not a real one- people are not moving in, money is not being invested in buying land, etc. you are only putting your tuition there, and it's being invested in experimentation, which is a way of learning.
jump- you're an expert on this in a way that i'm not, but my sense of it is that hypotetically, if cars did not pollute, they would still be forwarding a type of development that is more horizontal and therefore consumes more land. i'm not taking a position of absolute density, just really arguing against the green skyscraper specifically.
smokety- what's next? i avoided your question because i don't know- but definitely what's next comes from the results of this new and/both, right? [also, it was archinect that decided the title of this op-ed, i just agreed because i couldn't think of a better one- i like 765's: not neither/nor but and/both. that would have made a great title]
r12:6-8: on when it is appropriate- well this is very hypothetical- my initial training as an architect is southamerica [by very left leaning teachers] always involved some sort of application to situations of need. i think that was a problem, because it was always restricting formal experimentation. so its a matter of balance, of learning some formal tools and then going on to the more difficult task of using them in situations that can act [then] not as restrictive or constraining but can set a catalyst for formal development. and/both.
thanks guys for the comments. i was afraid nobody would say anything, so this is great.
Sorry for getting too excited, Becker.
Had a T-shirt idea I wrote down somewhere a while ago: 'Operational Form is better than Formal Operations'
aml - It was more of a rhetorical question ... not one that I was hoping to have answered in this thread. However, the quality of this op-ed and the resultant discussion are really inspiring ... so obviously the and/both approach is generating some good traction here.
So give yourself some credit :)
thanks smokes! i like how these are building up, and am looking forward to the next one. good job by nam, btw, on getting these rolling.
rule-based, digitally driven approaches to architectural design were actually present and in development before many of the run-of-the-mill ("stupid") CAD solutions we're (also) using nowadays.
Most of them didn't quite cut it, or we'd all be mere operators by now (and I don't mean CAD monkeys by that).
See Yehuda E. Kalay, "Architecture's New Media", for an in-depth discussion of that subject.
The rule stuff gets cooked up again and again.. seems cyclical to me & occurs when some other paradigm of production approaches a state of crisis. Does the hyped up scripting frenzy approach that moment of clarity?
I'm just glad that some people are realizing that by glorifying algorithmic form - finding processes many folks were (in their education) abstracted from the actual field of their study: how to create meaningful and well-performing physical artefacts that (at least) serve the initial requirement & are situated in an ecological, societal, and economical context.
cheers,
Max
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