planner vs. architect

In this month’s Planning magazine (the magazine of the American Planning Association – and my last copy, since I refused to pay SPA dues for monthly pizza luncheons this year) the executive director wrote his traditional editor’s introduction. However, instead of talking up the latest and greatest TDRs or sustainable zoning codes, he took his precious page to bash architects who attempt act as planners, and in bold no less! Sure, traditionally there hasn’t been a great track record (Plan Voisin anyone?), but shouldn’t architects today be trained in all matters sustainable and have been introduced to the idea of context through their studios?? Apparently not.

The director goes on to explain that the systems of human settlement, from neighborhoods to cities to regions (there goes that idea of scales again) are far different from building systems. And he’s right. But where does that leave me? Little miss dual degree.

“We need to respect the core competencies of allied professions, just as we expect them to respect ours.”

Sounds like he’s drawing the proverbial line in the sand. But aren’t the planning, architecture, engineering, landscape professions becoming more interwoven these days? Aren’t we currently aiming for a hybrid system where careers, ideas, people, jobs, methodologies, technologies, and information overlap? Or by combining ‘core competencies’ are we merely diluting each of the respective profession’s level of expertise . . .

 

soja’s got it down

Ha. So the very next article in my new book, called “Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City”, was written by an LA architect who also teaches regional planning at UCLA, Edward Soja. Pictured, is him at the TransUrbanism symposium hosted by V2|Organization.

The best paragraph:

You describe in many ways the core architectural view when you said that a city consists of streets, roads, and a built environment located within a vaguely defined ‘urban cloud’. In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built environments compacted together to form an urban mas. This view is radically different for the larger scale spatial vision of a city as an expansive system of . . . not just people living in the built environment but in constructed geographies characterized by different patterns of unemployment, income, education levels, ethnic cultures, housing and job densities, etc. All these things are often pushed aside in the obsession – sorry, the passionate concern – architects have for design.

Because architects fix their attention to these cells, or clusters of buildings and their typologies, they reduce everything to design and put blinkers on their ability to think regionally about cities. They miss the power of these multiple scales.

Fun stuff.

 

the structure of vagueness

To waste time before school starts to kick in, I’m reading TransUrbanism, and thus naturally jumped right to the first chapter with Lars’ name in the byline, ‘The Structure of Vagueness’. He actually starts off with the same historical architecture references that he uses in our studio proposal (Transurbanism published in 2002, studio proposal written in 2008, respectively). But at least now I understand the pretense better, the references being Antonio Gaudi (Sagrada Familia) and Frei Otto (Institute for Lightweight Structures).

Apparently, they both deal with ‘materials that can process forces by transformation’.

He experimented with this idea through a studio at Columbia that used the “wool water technique” to ‘calculate the shape of city patterns’ with a merging and bifurcating geometry. (I’m sure all my CP friends/professors would flip right about now – what? using threads to determine the lay out cities?!). I’ll post some scans showing the results of this process later, but basically, what emerges is a not a highly formalized, axial based grid like Paris, Rome or DC, but a “vague order” (with still connecting street blocks, thank goodness) that more resembles an Olmstead-ish Ansley Park. Lars’ names this new experiment “soft rigidity” instead of the “frozen rigidity” of angular geometry past. Thus the voids become the definition of space, rather than the strict and forceful axial roadways.

This is not really a novel idea. Maybe in architecture used to form buildings, but forming a city structure around public space isn’t a new concept. But then he goes on to mess with the architect’s historical penchant for unprogrammed ‘open space’. We all know, through many, many, many poor examples in urban planning, that unplanned, unprogrammed open spaces go vacant, eventually to become derelict and menaces to their surroundings. But the article here seems to suggest that if we just rename this space, we’ll solve the social, political, economic, and psycological problems humans encounter while moving through and trying to operate in it. He suggests,

We must replace the passive flexibility of neutrality with an active flexibility of vagueness.

Uh huh. The theory goes that if neutrality merely allows for formal and informal conduct, vagueness actually relates them. In a vague building, this is named structural Situationism, purposely allowing for derives (woohoo Libero!) as structural properties. If events/spaces/structure is precisely unplanned, that is now ok, because “the structure will engage itself in the ways decisions are made”. The theory opposes Mies’ empty openness and encourages solid vagueness.

Right.

 

sculptural infinity

I’ve been researching molding techniques for Lars’ class. Mostly related to concrete, iron, and resin. Most of the information I’ve been pulling up is in science journals from the 1940s. Which is helpful only to the extent of understanding the historic process, and maybe how to set up a patent. Figuring out how to mold the highly curvilinear patterns from the previous semester is going to be rough. So I was quite surprised when I stumbled upon the work of Erwin Hauer. The methods of molding behind his continua series are very similar to the methods I think we’ll be using in Lars’ class. His screen walls have seen a resurgance of interest since his book was published in 2004 (Hauer was born in 1926).

“Continuity and potential infinity have been at the very center of my sculpture from early on.”

He’s been featured in Arch Record and his interview with Metropolis was quite revealing of the process he’s using now to replicate his decades old designs. Formerly, they just used traditional wood formed concrete molds, but they are now integrating CAD technologies and plastics. Using the techniques Hauer invented over fifty years ago would have been to expensive and time consuming. His partner, Enrique Rosado, spent months working with computers to input all his models and experiment with different materials but ultimately Hauer was dissatisfied.

“When we first made the prototype and he saw it, he was very polite and said, ‘Well, what else are you going to do?’”

“This is my obsession,” Hauer says. “Tension in a surface—it’s almost like a life force.”

This lessens my confidence in our ability to quickly and effectively physically model the designs. If a man who has dedicated his life to 3D sculpting is having difficulty achieving satisfactory results, we might be in trouble.