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.