Maybe the intent of the study is a critical examination of all that you bring up. I don't think they are trying to glorify any concept of placelessness, or praise the homogenaiety of 'globalization', at least I hope not. It seems rather an attempt to understand the negative/ambiguous effects of all that. Whether you like it or not, placelessness and cultural erasure are part of the condition now, just as technology is a part of us and not to be viewed as some awesome threat to nature. I think you have to be willing to accept what are endemic trends before you can pose any counter regime to them. At least that is what I gather as the hope of the project. Ultimately it is a dissection of those spatial orders which have helped prop up the loss of a native essence, local characteristics, to a bereft dislocated world identity. But also, there may be positive aspects to the some of the overlap, some of the ambiguiity that is the reult of transnationalism. There may be some positive backlash. I am not saying there is, but maybe we should approach it with an open mind.

I personally am all all all upiddy for it. Once you start disbelieving in God you no longer frequent his/her/its house.
Once you start disbelieving in history (as a notion of wholeness, a thing represented, just a 'thing'), el mismo. There were times when I really wish those international logos can just really filtrate everywhere and remove all those relics of faiths, of human-centred fabrications of nostalgia, diseased home-sickness. The antediluvian muck of humanity, Bachelardian-imbecilic containers of emotive cobwebs, left to weather and decade into fatal idealogies..who owns what, whose history is correcterererer than the others. Buildings that have 'matured' to fuse into the milieu of its surrounding community (and in actual fact, this is an attack on the milieu itself) ..those are nodes of malignity and venom...The most potent symbolic order of historic communal architecture (the architectural actualization of history) is that of the sniper's nest. The most beautiful architecture worn down by its belief in a history is decorated with the calligraphy of bullets.

It is a comfortable world where people are numerated. Standardized ice cubes.

"Icicle Icicle where are you going..."

Critical Regionalism meets Woody Wood Pecker (another presexual sexual nightmare)

UNedITed is soooo controversial and provocative!

massaging the outside creases of chora, the closest thing we can get to, is not controversial or provocative. It is a signifier of your ..maybe stupidity?...to think that I even care, or aim, for controversy. There is an antithesis to a phenomenology of placeness, of the little patesserie, the authentic shoemarket, the patina of the antique. 'Immigration' (not simply in the legalistic term) is not just a physical dislocation, it is a tragicomic tale of balancing erasure with nostalgia. It is the violent castration by Khronos of Ouranos and the symbolic castration by Zeus of Khronos . The unspecified Time and 'Space' (khoros and chora)..'placelessness'..is a synthesis between the violent and the necessary; the Old has to be gotten rid off and in time the New becomes the Old and must follow suit. Behind the characterless depiction of placelessness (and as notion that has been revitalized by modernist urbanism) is a tale of doomed paternity. Place (crafted within a recognizable 'topos') is an accident..a pleasant accident..a spatial kairos of things working out well...but Khoros' tale is the more archaic, the darker, the base, the constant. Place is the momentary catharsis of placelessness...but placelessness is the norm. Being lost in an indecipherable landscape, or drowning in dark water, or being buried alive, or locked up forever...those are the 'placeless' constants of our fear. When that happens (moment of drowning, buried alive...etc), I'm sure one's personal life becomes a vague myth as this most real of realities reveals itself.

Sometimes I lose my car in large parking lots.

Some interesting responses here. One thing I want to point out, not knowing what you guys think because my car might be in the same parking lot as AG: In talking about place and identity, I am not talking about nostaligia or harking to the past. I think modernization and development is hugely important, supremely important, I just believe that a person's environment culturally, economically, Naturally, and socially forms the opinions, thoughts and ideas they bring to global exchange. Seems obvious, but people forget in their own decisions and development and others are simply having Western civilization/capitalism forced down their throats.

I agree with peteypablo….I am little bit sick of the current debate around “placelessness,” non-places etc. It seems too easy and actually contradicts the lived experiences of international airports etc. I mean Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport could be considered one of the ultimate “transnational” places, yet it exists in memory as very much a “place” or “space” in the traditional sense with clear, unique, and specific characteristics and traits.
The US/Mexico border is another example of a “non-place” that is very much a specific realm with a unique cultural vibrancy and character, look at the work art, music ad architecture centered in San Diego/Tijuana or ElPaso/Juarez. Just because a space is always about motion (the transfer of goods or people in an airport or at the border) does not mean it somehow dislodged in the way many would want to believe. Koolhaas notes in “Generic City” how the airport is paradoxical in being both hyper-global and hyper-local, I often feel that the hyper-global is all that is focused on by many of these recent studios and investigations. The organizers are right to question “these spaces [that] we cannot understand…by resorting to existing planning and design strategies”- but perhaps even more interesting and complicated is how traditional strategies for the local must be folded into a new hybrid decentralized tactics.

Michael Beirut makes a much more compelling argument than I do with this rant on the specific character and “placeness” of TWA terminal at

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000184.html#more

laleli district of istanbul. have anyone visited there? non place? give me a break. bauhaus foundation should meet in aksaray with university of istanbul students instead of trying to find solutions in weimar. it is a bustling trade district and the luggage trading is moved to moscow several years now.
alvarado district in los angeles is another story.

I think the reason that the hyper global quality of transnational space receives so much attention is because most of the work made by transnational European and American designers is precisely this global work. Chinese people know how to build chinese houses. They hire international design firms to attract global capital and/or create a cultural identity that can be understood by a transnational audience (eg. Shanghai's new People's Park).
In a recent studio I travelled to ZhuJiaJiao in an attempt to understand and extend the vernacular urban fabric into an urban planning strategy that would address a hybrid of issues ranging from the global like working plumbing and electricity while retaining local qualities of shared and claimed spaces, etc. Our studio drew much attention from the locals in this town. Most asked us why we were studying the 800 year old houses. They couldn't understand what we wanted to learn by looking through these dilapidated dwellings. they wanted to show us the comunist era big block housing. When asked where they would rather live, the answer was always in the big block housing; a completely placeless transnational space devoid of all the vernacl\ular patterns of movement and encounter. Whenever I was allowed entrance into someone's house the first thing they would show me is the TV. They'd turn it on to prove that it worked. These people want an apartment in a six story building at the expense of a vernacular typology teeming with vitality. How can you convince them that this is a bad idea? should you?

if all goes well the eventually the entire world will be obese, corrupt capitalists sipping on starbucks....

i like starbucks, they make nice frappés. Unless you want to go on a frappé tour of greece and italy.

i like starbucks, they make nice frappés. Unless you want to go on a frappé tour of greece and italy.

u dont need starbucks or wallmarts, placelessness is actually a social phenomena of our times, and im not talking about airports, malls, etc. im talking about real cities, think about Tijuana, if u study the real nature of the city u will find is one of the true "non-places" of the world, Tijuana is just a transit-city, meaning that no one really is from Tijuana (there's actually like a first generation of Tijuanenses who now have 10-12 years old max) and the last 10 years Tijuana was the city witrh the most growth (economically and in inhabitants) of the whole American Continent, but still, it lacks of a "downtown" it lacks of a "identity" but still its a very vibrant and interesting place (socially, urbanitically, architecturally) to study (dont be jerk and think about spring break in TJ, that has to do with the whole TJ phenomena, but still is far more interesting to study permanent inhabitants there)

MADianito,

I don't think you could be more off about tj. I have friends from there and have visited the city with them; its extremely close knit with the majority of the population having been born and raised there. they pride themselves in being of a small town mentality and all take great pride in being from a 'small town'. they will be the first ones to tell you people don't want to move there, just out to a big city like mexico city.

SILVERFLAKES...
i never said they wanted to move out, maybe u missunderstood what i was trying to explain (more likely i suck explaining myself in english) my point was that it was a "city" (i said it was more like a true "non-place") built up or gathered by the main reason that it was a transit point, it was not a final destination for all the people who ended up there, and when i said it lacks of an identity, i mean that it "lacks" of one true identity, my point is that it has been formed (their identity) from a bunch of different local identities, form ppl from other cities of mexico, and also from people of the rest of latin america who end up there, as also with influences of american (southern california) culture...and when i said the people is not from there also i adressed a majority, and i can bet u on that SILVERLAKE that the minority is a born-in-tijuana person... anyway, as always i might be wrong, anyway, thanks for the comment, (aqnd i also have been there), and i never said they were not pride of being from there or just for being there, my comments where about the topics that ppl brought up to the discussion: globality?, was it good that "non-places" exist?, does this non-place truly exists?, identity?, wich is the true identity of a place/city/town?, identity has to be related with "pure" cultural local aspects, or, it can be build from outer influences (simple form of a "globalization")??

Solid Starbucks analysis by a fellow student @ SCI_ARC.

That's all.

placeless...you want it to be placeless? you want to illude yourself that what you created can actually reside anywhere in the world? dont you think that would be rather utopic? i agree with what DIT said, placelessness is the norm, yet as soon as you design for a site, that design becomes specific, and so placelessness is just a mask you wear.

Phenomenology? it cannot be created, it cannot be crafted. what makes a building (or a garden, or a square or a bench for that matter) belong to the place it is situated in? there's an apartment block in paris that has been taken over by the chinese comunity and turned into an enclave.the building is a modernistic attempt at placelessness, yet when you walk inside you feel all the geist of the place, the people, the comunity.but you are still in paris, not beijin. a placeless phenomenological place.

So...placelessness is utopic, phenomenon is out of our control.

my two cents:stop worrying about it. a concrete box will not erase your historic town centre. plus, like Zaera said, when you stop talking about all that stuff like phenomenon, art, fun, poetry, you suddenly regaing control over the building you are making, since the people around you understand what you are talikng about.