CalArts two-day symposium on “The Politics of Parametricism” opened last Friday with a conversation between Reinhold Martin, associate professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, and Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. Their debate, while at times tending more towards dysfunctional improv theater than academic discussion, revolved around the relationship between architecture and politics -- generally speaking, Martin sees the two as indelibly linked, while Schumacher idealizes their explicit separation. Their debate didn’t concern the visual aesthetics of parametric design, so much as argue about its utility in political systems.
Patrik Schumacher
As an event presented by CalArts’ MA Aesthetics & Politics program, the Martin-Schumacher debate did not explicitly discuss individual architecture projects, but tended more on the side of critical architectural theory. To introduce their debate, both Martin and Schumacher presented papers on their approach to parametric design, which I will try my darndest to make accessible. Martin took an intellectual historical angle, relating parametricism to linguistic theory and our construction of grammatical systems that determine “right” and “wrong” communication. Considering design based on the grammar of scripted parameters, the aesthetic outcome is simply an expression of that procedure, what Martin referred to as the “performativity of procedure”. The power to have a written code dictate the aesthetic terms of the architecture completely, and come to wholly define the architecture, is to Martin a “legitimation of power”. So if politics can generally be understood as a network of power systems, then parametricism is certainly in the political pocket.
Schumacher, who coined the term parametricism and has certainly taken flak for it before, took a much more divisive approach to defining the genre. He saw politics as best left to the “professionals”, and certainly not appropriate for architectural intervention, which could only make things worse. Because architecture has no power to affect political realities, it can only reinforce hegemony and can’t be counted on to resolve anything. When architecture is allowed to float on the whims of a liberal democracy, it produces a “garbage spill” of varied forms and styles within a city, leading to a dissonant and illegible, “white noise” urbanism. To fix this, Schumacher argues for a “private planning” city-building system: a free-market-driven collaboration between private development corporations and architects. These collaborators can then consistently apply their parametric designs to the city texture, increasing order and therefore, legibility.
Reinhold Martin
Even while discussing systems of legibility, the conversation that followed was pretty muddled. Initiated by co-organizer Manuel Shvartzberg’s prompt, “What makes a good city?”, the conversation devolved into that dysfunctional improv, where neither party said “yes” to the other long enough to establish any argumentative threads. By the Q&A period, the only clearly established trend was a public shaming of Schumacher’s parametricism as a totalitarian design method. It seemed as if many people had showed up to the conference only to (eloquently) bash Schumacher, leaving a good-humored Martin to try and pick up the pieces.
Maybe Day 2’s round of speakers brought more clarity, with lectures from Teddy Cruz, Phil Bernstein, Neil Leach, Christina Cogdell, Peggy Deamer, Laura Kurgan, Benjamin Bratton and Andrés Jaque. More information on the conference can be found here, courtesy of CalArts:
167 Comments
jla-x, i think our posts just met in substance.
I will post this when I get a chance. I would be nice to get some feedback from you guys.
Thank you Tammuz!
my previous admonishing post might come across as taking a high moral ground...but actually, i'm responding to the high moral ground already implied vide patrick schumacher's own position apropos the nature of the existing environment he wishes to eradicate. it is, his stance, condescending and prescriptive.
Again, a truly more democratic model would be to actually conduct feasibility studies at the level of the inhabitants, what to do they want, how their life will be ameliorated.
Instead, we get a clever theorist telling us that : "why are you so hateful if people aspire to live in a modernized, elegant environment"
but this is vulgar, baseless and egocentric; what is elegant to patrick and people who share his background and outlook might not be elegant to people elsewhere. this really is a futile and vapid point to argue from.
furthermore, patrick's discourse is rife with gaps illogically bridged:
1. there is no implicit association (either proved empirically or could be deduced rationally) between "parametricism" and any positive influences that this style has on the local populace. THIS IS A BELIEF on patrick's part. no feasibility studies, no grass root work, no incorporation of these people's needs..
2. there is there is no implicit association (either proved empirically or could be deduced rationally) between "parametricism" and neoliberalism . THIS IS AN IMAGINED ASSOCIATION at the figurative level - not the cause and effect level. In other words, neoliberalism is not waiting for parametricism - it could occupy a big OMA box or a big ZHA crafted genitalia-like building.
3. there is there is no implicit association (either proved empirically or could be deduced rationally) between neoliberalism and the consequential improvement of the overriding majority of the populace (living in the area or affected by it). In fact, studies show that there is now increasingly less of a middle class around the world in direct association to the increasing propagation of the so called free market. In other words, not only is the association being made by patrick incorrect - it is exactly the opposite that is true.
As such, the connections Patrick Schumacher forges to justify his theory and his architecture are untenable.
Why does an intelligent person dismiss the disconnect in the connections?
My own conclusion is that he is working backwards (as stated in a previous post) to post-rationalize his architecture as a solution to a problem being created in order to profit from the solution.
Does this remind you of something in our current global economic and military climate? Sort of like destroying countries in order to profit from them in "assisting" them to build up the countries again...usually leading to increasingly decreasing levels of populace well being
edited:
Does this remind you of something in our current global economic and military climate? Sort of like destroying countries, on the basis of faked premises/problems in order to profit from them in "assisting" them to build up the countries again... leading to increasingly decreasing levels of populace well being
Yes...I agree. I also noted that it was suspicions I had. So I did not really dismisss outright.
In Kartal existing conditions are "to be demolished." People were not part of the process. A euphoria of artificially and speculatively elevated market rate life style which became an urban design formula, which also solved the world's political and growth problems via a patterned site plan. Construction and real estate, a win win situation, what a creative approach, why didn't I think of that?
Patrik, there is no hate. Your work in Kartal is by no means apolitical. Your architecture has a potential regardless of deep pocket dependency, but your political and economic thinking falls apart. You serve your power clients. You seem to believe in that permanently and it is hard to expect the curveporn would produce any kind of social fluidity.
I know you keep asking but I don't have an immediate solution to economic and societal problems. Mine is an everyday visionary thing and I am a proponent of justice for all.
I don't buy yours because it plays "only the stronger shall survive" kind of a conservative pov. You talk about technology but your calcs are crude. You eliminate the lower caste. Your condos will sell to mid-upper management finance and corporate buyers, to service industry owners, to the privileged, to the artificially and unsustainably created consumer class who wears clothing with brand name logos on them.
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I am now thinking about all that academic support, popular media pumping and pimping for real estate architecture. I am wondering if architecture is done by majority conservatives who believe in doggie style politics. Perhaps those constructions are not that fluid and progressive. The conversation here really makes me think that.
I really suspected it but didn't know mainstreamed avant-garde architecture was this severely disconnected. This might as well be forgotten as the political apolitical manifesto from the newly middle classed Istanbul Condominium Society.
_____________
Remember the old rule, if you build it overnight, Kartal can be yours. Now finally it is funny.
While checking out ZHA's website I spotted a Freudian slip in the project description. Instanbul? As in instant? Either there is an extra 'n' or someone forgot a 't'.
Draw your own conclusions?
As the Kartal Pendik masterplan takes shape, a new urban centre is rising in the city of Instanbul following the redevelopment of an abandoned industrial area.
This new city-within-a-city will comprise a central business district, high-end residential development, cultural facilities including concert halls, museums and theatres, alongside a new marina and resort hotels.
Kartal Pendik is strategically placed at the confluence of several important infrastructural links – the point at which highways connecting Europe and Asia converge, meeting the coastal highway, sea terminals and rail links to the greater metropolitan area. Indeed, these very elements form the starting point for our masterplan design, which utilizes lateral lines to stitch together major road connections from Karal to the west and Pendik to the east.
Integration of these lateral connections with a central longitudinal axis creates a soft grid – the underlying framework for our concept, its fabric further articulated by an urban script which generates different typologies – buildings that respond to the different demands of each district within the whole. This calligraphic script creates open conditions – open conditions which can transform from detached buildings to perimeter blocks and ultimately, hybrid systems – together forming a porous, interconnected network of open spaces which ‘meanders’ throughout this new urban centre.
from http://www.archello.com/en/project/kartal-pendik-masterplan
first, one notes the quite honestly expressed "city within the city", ie. it has been deliberately fashioned to be an Istanbul-exorcised part of Istanbul. I believe that it is safe to draw that aside from there has been no consideration of local socio-economic conditions (aside from necessary site and traffic routing ones) pertinent to the preexisting inhabitants. I believe we can safely conclude that but the architect would have mentioned it explicitly (and indeed, would have used it as an arsenal within his project description statement in order to give full defense to the project).
1- the architect does not mention anywhere the appropriation of these conditions - and such absence of information here is a positive indication of a negative incorporation
2- the presentation explicitly employs typical toolkits of the generic neoliberal city hotels; "cultural distrcits" :theatres, musuems; shopping districts and so on. there is not a single non-logistical (ie, we exclude the traffic routes) reference to the requisite of belonging to the city, the deep rooted daily goingons in that area, the small businesses and no indication that any of the design decisions has been informed on the basis of studying the impact on current residents and users of the site.
3- the presentation within the video link above is clear. the predominant element is the grid that has been 'warped' (i guess parametrically warped) around certain major axes (seemingly to reflect traffic routes) with modulation of size. in other words, there is no study of the urban tissue of istanbul and how the proposed development responds to it.
4- the resultant architecture is nothing but an unmitigated consequence of the said parceling and warping. we cannot imagine that the architect intends the masterplan as a guideline for other architects (the shape of the proposed urban design seems inherently dependent on the shapes of the buildings) - thus we are led to believe that the architect is presenting -without having shown any malleability to the local socio-economic environment- a massive finalized masterplan exactly in contrast to the preference stated above by the architect for a bottom-up development. It seems that this is the quintessential top-down project subsequent to the erasure of a rooted piece of a city and grafting a generic (in fact, its more likely hyper-generic) tissue of neoliberalism.
this part of the above-quoted i find funny, like not odd, but funny: "This calligraphic script creates open conditions"
when one compares this to the rest of the literature and indeed to the diskurs that we clearly find on display with schumacher, there is a clear seeimingly extraneous demand to incorporate "calligraphy" (a pan/proto-zaha-hadid conceptual interest) within the discourse. it seems to me that thisis further proof that ZHA is somewhat of a monster, by that i mean it is an unusual and conflicting sum of parts. Analog Zaha herself and Parametric Patrick.
we know ZHA projects that are clearly Zaha projects (fire station, cincinatti, the rome project, the landformation...etc) ...projects that display extreme finesse in the handling of the line and volume, the non parametric and the analog - a method of working that cannot be but the complete contrast of, for instance, this work and many latter day projects of her office.
its not that i find that there is a tendency to bring both these skills together but indeed that i find that Zaha's work as a traditional architect is being compromised by the very nature, the very non-elegance (patrick like to believe its elegant) that results in the complete self/part-relational bastardization of a mentality thinks in terms of calligraphy: an art that uses abruptness just as it uses continuity, that does not think in terms of wholes and parts, that stages itself around the line and not a grid...
And so, my question is...how did this union of incompatibilities (in my view of course) result? what drove zaha to need patrick and vice vera?
on further though..
but then, perhaps it is because there was a growing concern for relating parts to each other - lets go back to the seminal vitra fire museum for instance, one gets the sense that the elements are disturbed with respect to each other by a virtual directive energy - like when you blow wind on some sawdust, the resultant distribution reflects that motivational force.
but this is not altogether true. although, yes, the incurred dynamism owed itself to such an allusion of directive force, there was not. on display, a mind numbing monotony. in fact, one got the impression that there an element of imaginative abruptness was also on display, between forms. unlike parametricism which looks like an indexical growth around the directive forces/parameters.
and so, one finds in her good work a balance between following directive forces- a clear spine of a diagram- and that imaginative abruptness, that deliberate analog insertion of mind between cause and effect - thus making for a far richer, more interest reading.
parametric architecture however does not concern itself with such a paradoxical reading; it seeks to be the mind-dead evidence of causuality, a clear resolution with no ambiguity. it seeks to borrow the non-thing-in-itselfness and the guise of inevitability of nature's objects: snail shells, leaves, pine cones...etc.
i think that Zaha was seduced with the ease that parametricism gave her in allowing the building to fall clearly along the trajectory of forces (Again, as above, a very zaha hadid thing)...but equally, it led to the detriment (within the overtly parametric projects of hers) to the distinguished element of her work, the ability to construe such a balance.
(continued)
the ability to construe such a balance between following the directive evidence and creating localized drama between elements (hence the analog ambiguity)
tammuz:
Again, a truly more democratic model would be to actually conduct feasibility studies at the level of the inhabitants, what to do they want, how their life will be ameliorated.
It's funny you should wonder what ordinary people might want to see. I was recently part of a plus 1600 comment on this very subject where the relevance of the general population was dismissed as being either uneducated or simply irrelevant. I think you are right to point out how this development is meant to be a city with-in a city, subtly invoking a class system whereby prospective residents and tenants would be entitled to feel in a class apart from the rest of the city, much like developers tout their gated enclaves. Life is defined by motion though, and some of this motion represents real change, but Patrick seems to have bought into the natural and one must say, pedestrian impulse to equate high-tech means and methods with progress. And while there's always existed a fearful reaction to the speed of modernity, some larger cultural shift is taking place whereby the futurist vs. luddite false dichotomy is being challenged.
In the way we feed ourselves, for example, the efficiency of industrialized agriculture with the army of chemicals used to generate maximum yield is coming into conflict with natures ability to best our efforts to control disease. Whether it be pesticides or genetically modified agriculture, nature's design has a way of humbling our best intentioned efforts. The quality of food being delivered across oceans is also being questioned where one needn't be a child of the 60's to appreciate the importance of organic food. Even the geo-political ramifications of maintaining our globalized delivery system afloat is being questioned when the unseen economic and human costs of "spreading democracy" are tabulated into the "bottom line".
As the speed and sophistication of our technology continues unabated, the chasm between it and our own slow evolving physiology becomes ever more apparent. So while the internet will continue to further blur the lines between local culture and geography, there is also be a growing awareness of what is being sacrificed in the name of efficiency. In the case of this Istanbul project, it looks like another case where sense of place is being sacrificed to the exigencies of production enabled by the false salesmanship of "progress".
I suspect much of the "debate" here comes from misunderstanding. I attended the conference and Patrik was clear from his opening statement that he believed that architects had a responsibility that they had historically tacitly abdicated and that is to get involved in the political discourse of the existing government systems so that they are not just tools of said system. The other side of the "debate" was beyond unreasonable. Each projected their own political agenda and it can easily be summed up. They essential said that neo-liberal philosophy is a failed ideology and to work within it you must be a right wing extremist - therefore, Parametricism is a right-wing movement. I'm not exaggerating - these are some of the exact words and the exact sentiment sprinkled in among the pretentious jargon. There was even one speaker who literally showed a slide of the evolution from train to bullet train and said it was phallic because men run the show. Seriously. Apparently, it had nothing to do with streamlining for wind resistance (shame on you Patrik). As an outsider (from your profession) I have to say - is this really what you want for discourse among the architectural "elite"?
Maybe it might help to listen to see how ZHA negotiates and advocates rather than attacking a man personally (which happened repeatedly and rudely). There is some wisdom to be garnered from the daily battles fought by those in the trenches that those in the ivory towers can learn from - or, I suppose they can continue to carp - they didn't show the spunk to be actual "roll up your sleeves" revolutionaries.
I read the whole thing as practitioners transparently expressing jealousy of another practitioner's influential trend and using poorly wielded political philosophy to attempt to dismiss it. Failing that . . . personal attacks.
Summing up the political discourse I have witnessed here:
"I say your 3 cent titanium tax goes too far."
"And I say your 3 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough."
- Futurama
I came across this item, the debate as reported and the comments, late in the game.
Honestly, this is something I would have expected to read in The Onion.
Is there any question after 10,000 years of practice that politics and architecture are inextricably intertwined? And that any "remedy" will itself embody elements of the very "problem" it's alleged to solve?
This is why I went into urban planning and technology, two fields where the power of the state (hegemonic public and private forces in command of ideology) and its implications for society are givens, rather than architecture where they are still in question. In these fields, one acknowledges current power relationships without a lot of banter and then does what one or a crowd of ones can do to alter the reality in their favor. In architecture as in design, one must make a ritual sacrifice to reason in the form of faux invention and argumentation before getting down to seeking power and altering reality in one's favor.
Over four decades I've come to feel as if this tired ceremony, though an apparent human necessity -- it happens the same way, everywhere, all the time -- should be consigned to an arena dedicated to such disputation, there to entertain acolytes and others into bop 'em mayhem, leaving the rest of us to get on with our own power grabs for our own purposes, without distraction.
PS May I venture a guess that the "public" of urban inhabitants that was the subject of this evening was only sparsely (if at all) represented at the event? That's the beauty of the Ivory Tower, so easily maintained through exclusion. Is exclusion a valid parameter? It seems to be in the cities I've lived in and visited, here replicated in the academy -- just as one might expect.
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