THE LSA REVIEWLEICESTER SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE JOURNAL 2015

OECUMENE AND THE GLOBAL CONDITION OF ARCHITECTURE

The LSA review (Online)ISSN 2059-0970

Published in Leicester, United Kingdom June 2016 by Leicester School of Architec-ture

EditorsAnna Chorzepa

Introduction

Welcome to the 1st edition the LSA Review. In a past era, the Leicester School of Archi-tecture produced DEMO, and some copies are kept in our library for those who may wish to peruse them. The LSA review is a different kind of production. Each year, one MArch student or a team of March students will edit a thematic production and this will be published mainly in digital form, though a few print copies will be made for select libraries and as gift copies. This first edition has been conceived by one student, Anna Chorzepa, and will be the first of a new line of annual collection of writing, ideas, imag-es and propositions about architecture.

In past eras, Schools produced graduates who ventured into local economies. We now educate for the world. It is therefore fitting that our first theme is the notion of Oikumene, or in the modern contemporary world better recognized now as Globalisa-tion. This theme addresses several of the topical concerns of our current condition, and as a University, DMU has recognized this through the agency of DMUglobal.

Whilst we are concerned quite rightly about climatic issues, those are really planetary concerns. Architecture is concerned not only with the planet, but the worlds – cultural worlds, trans-figurative worlds, world of ex-perience and differences, world of emotions and meaning. Our students have travelled in their minds and spirits, with and without baggage and bodies and learnt very much. As we continue to grapple with the issues before us in this conflicted and very com-plicated world, I present you this inaugural issue of the LSA Review which hopefully contributes a small part to the wide world of architectural knowledge.

Prof. Raymond Quek

CONTENT

EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA CHORZEPA - OECUMENE AND THE GLOBAL CONDITION OF ARCHITECTURE - EDITORIAL - 8

FRANCOIS JOULIEN FRAGMENT FROM A BOOK – ‘’FIRST ENCOUNTER OF THE UNIVERSAL AND THE COMMON: ROMAN CITIZENSHIP EXTENDED TO THE EMPIRE ‘’ - 12

RODRIGO PEREZ DE ARCE – ‘’URBAN TRANSFOR-MATIONS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF ADDITIONS’’ - 17

BERINA ALIMAJSTROVIC – ‘’GLOBALIZATION AND NATIONALISM AND ARCHITECTURE OF NON ALIGN-MENT OF SARAJEWO WINTER OLYMPIC’’ - 30

IMRE AZEM – ‘’EKUMENOPOLIS’’ - 39

KALIOPE KONTOZOGLOU AND NIGEL WESTBROOK – ‘’RETURNING TO ATHENS AND URBANISM OF NE-GOTIATION -ATHENS 2015’’ - 47

YANNIS AESOPOS – ‘’LESS FORM, MORE COL-LECTIVE: POST-CRISIS TOURISM INHABITATION STRATEGIES’’ - 59

THOMAS KONG – ‘’UNBUILDING’’ - 69

NIKOLAOS ION TERZOGLOU, RAYMOND QUEK – ‘’CONCEPTS IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN’’ - 75

LEICESTER SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE SELECT-ED GRADUATE PROJECTS MARCH2 2015 - 93

EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA CHORZEPA - OECUMENE AND THE GLOBAL CONDITION OF ARCHITECTURE - EDITORIAL

9

Is Globalisation really a novel concept?

The construct of an inter-connected world was already anticipated in Hellenistic times with Alexandrian expansion, and the idea of oecumene with Rome as caput mundi of its conquered and constructed cultural world in Western terms became the reference not only of Roman influence but a living accu-mulation of all of their cultural conquests.1 History has shaped our landscapes, ar-chitecture and infrastructure: the ancient Greco-Roman empires were particularly dominating forces in their time, their gain of territories imparted cultural exchange by force but it must be argued that much of the continuity of these exchanges were adop-tions and adaptations. The combinations in-fluenced an inertia of commonality that we now celebrate as global, though the pace of commonality is almost instantaneous in fibre optic exchange. The contemporary cities of our time are not immune to the problem of the globally common: cultures have adapted accordingly over time and in the twenty-first century global adaptation thrives: every day we are introduced to new combinations of cultural mixture, all of which possess poten-tial of eventual global commonality.

The discourse of globalisation in architec-ture has been subject of much enquiry, yet it still has many unresolved issues. Transcul-tural and international exchange bequeath an interesting blend of the vernacular and the foreign. Together, they represent varied interests that enrich diverse modern cities where architecture must confront the local, glo-cal and the global in search of creating habitats situated in worlds that have mean-ing. The idea of world building, with the ar-chitect as weltbaumeister is a critical recog-nition of the phenomenal aura that sits as a heavy fog over gridded infrastructure, roads, sewers, pipe and gas lines, electric supply, fibre optic cables, parks, aggregated build-ings, suburbs and business districts, without which cities have no worth.

“This contemporary ‘search of a world’ prompts us to consider the capacity of ar-chitecture today to convey a sense of oe-cumene, albeit of course fundamentally dif-ferent from the Greco-Roman world-view.

1 Temple, N. (2013). Changing identities in the Oecumene: geog-raphy and architecture in the Greco- Roman world. In: SoumyenBandyopad-hyay and Guillermo GarmaMontielThe territories of identity. Architecture in the age of evolving globalisation. Oxon: Routledge. 17.

But is Rossbach’s idea of a global oecumene merely a wishful ideological construct, con-sidering the contemporary reality of increas-ing nationalism, ideological / religious con-flict and contested territorial claims? On the other hand it is evident that the once strong historical ties of ethnic or religious commu-nities to specific geographical locations or regions (on account of a common ancestry or tradition) is less prevalent today - par-ticularly in the west - than ever in the past; the global Diaspora has created new and emerging relationships between people, which are no longer simply geographically defined.”2

In Europe, the discovery of other ‘worlds’ from the sixteenth century onwards started as a curiosity and quickly reached a peak in cultural and political exchange, best exem-plified by ‘Chinoiserie’- the meeting of oc-cidental and oriental cultures. By the nine-teenth century, this was no longer curious intrigue but a contest of domain not different from prior empirical conquests. The domin-ion of the city was a form of particularisation that became concretized in architecture in the ‘civilising’ of other space through colo-nisation, much in the same way as the Ro-man oecumene. As one of the most pow-erful collective representations of a nation, architecture engages the global arena by expressing, defining and sometimes negat-ing a representation of particularity in order to participate in the interconnected world.3

One of the most established scholars on the sino-western exchange is French phi-losopher Francois Jullien. His chapter On the Universal: The Uniform, the Common and Dialogue between Cultures probes the problematic interchange of universal values and different perceptions of the concept of universality. Famously quoted by Kenneth Frampton at the suggestion of Dalibor Ves-ely, architectural readers are familiar with Ricouer’s framing of the dilemma of univer-sality and modern architecture.4

2 Ibid. 17.3 Quek et al, Nationalism in Architecture,4 Ricouer, History and Truth

10

The dilemma of the ethical position was in the absence of the Cold War, the non-aligned movement was a peculiar tension of nationalist expression in the face of over-arching political allegiance, which trans-posed this bipartisan abstinence onto its architecture. Berina Alimajstorovic, in her study on Yugoslavia and post Tito Architec-ture at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics 1984 explores the compressed spring of Yugosla-vian non-alignment and its manifest spatial order. The Sarajevo Olympics is riddled with contradictions that are typical of the global phenomenon, it has many fragile and barely coherent guises: a world sporting event for specific climatic conditions excluding archi-tecture of austere modernism suppressing ethnic, religious and political divisions, in the era of populist postmodern expression.

Is symbiosis of varied and divergent inhab-itant values not possible in modern cities? Rodrigo Perez de Arce argues the case for cities as tangible living organisms pulsat-ing in concert with humanity in his essay Urban Transformations and the Architecture of Additions, exploring the ‘global city’ and the condition of variety. The global city of ecumenopolis was a notion given attention through the work of Constantinos Doxiadis, intellectual father of Ekistics. In direct hom-age, Imre Azem’s Ecumenopolis documents complexity of the Turkish variant of ‘glob-al city’ that has been since man first set-tled the Bosphorus. Istanbul straddles that east-west division and is perhaps a prime exemplar of a globalised city, in both con-temporary and historical senses. In many fast-growing global cities, rapid change of the landscape can be observed. Istanbul is no exception abandoned and uninhabited modern development in still expanding me-tropolis has had a catastrophic influence on the natural environment.

The Games of the XXVIII Olympiad re-turned the Global sporting event to the city where it all began: Athens. In similar spirit, returning to the source, Nigel Westbrook, professor at the University of Western Aus-tralia observes the coping strategies in criti-cal situations of economic crisis in our era of globalisation. He records that Yiorgos Simeoforides anticipated the consequences of the 2004 Athens Olympics:

‘What about the homeless castaways of globalisation? The refugees of dismantled socialism? Cumbersome infrastructure? The reuse of abandoned industrialization? Our degraded and forsaken peripheries? Public spaces, swallowed up by privatized video monitors?’1

The discussion turns to plykatoikoia as a plausible model that ‘attempted a bottom-up form of anarchist urban action’ leading to a conversation on the motivations and origins of the Athens based collaborative studio which LSA is now a participant with University of Western Australia’s Architec-ture Students.2

Responding to the theme of post-crisis architecture, Yannis Aesopos, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Patras, explored inhabitation strategies in the Greek competition entry for the Venice Biennale 2014.

Architect Thomas Kong, in his project Zero, has made a thorough study of the vacant spaces in the dense Asian cities, and doc-umented the way people are making use of them. This exploration showed differ-ent possibilities of a void as a place of hu-man interaction, rather than an ephemeral empty space caused by economic loss that can only be filled temporally by more con-struction. This is reflected in a talk between Nikolaos Ion Terzoglou and Raymond Quek, about the Creative use of Concepts in Ar-chitectural Design and Education. They dis-cuss the enormous potential of the concept of void in design studio education, and how the discourse in theoretical architecture has adapted over time.

The global condition of architecture is an ever-changing phenomena, and architec-ture as profession has to respond to this new situation. We can observe other pro-fessions using this to their advantage for example by branching out their global prod-ucts into locally specialised editions to ac-commodate different cultural needs, is this a route architecture should follow?

5 Westbrook, Returning to Athens, this volume, p. 496 Friends and colleagues since the 1980s hothouse of the Archi-tectural Association, Nigel Westbrook, Professor of Architecture at University of Western Australia and Greek architect Kalliope Kontozoglou, have been collaborating on summer studios for students from Australia for some years. In 2015 students from The Leicester School of Architecture joined this stu-dio.

FRANCOIS JOULIEN FRAGMENT FROM A BOOK – ‘’FIRST ENCOUNTER OF THE UNIVERSAL AND THE COMMON:

ROMAN CITIZENSHIP EXTENDED TO THE EMPIRE ‘’

13

Francois JullienOn the universal, The uniform, the common and dialogue between cultures.First encounter of the universal and the common: roman citizenship extended to the empire.

When confronted with the Greek heritage, what did Rome bring not only to it but also to the divisions it raised and the exclusions it left? Ordinarily Rome is credited precisely with having taken further, into the heart of the ‘concrete’, that of History and its institu-tions, the exigency of universality that phi-losophy has defined. But how exactly should this be understood if we do not want to con-tent ourselves overly complacently with set-ting in motion those great simplistic binaries which, seen from afar, make the history of civilization seem like interconnections fore-seen ahead of time (Greeks/Romans, ab-stract/concentrate, and so on)? What, in the words, beyond the development brought to cosmopolitanism in intermediate Stoicism (Panetius, Posidonius and, after them, Cic-ero), does the Roman period add to the question of the universal blocked in its con-tradiction with the singular? Isn’t it precisely that it begins to find a solution to it using the junction sketched out between these different levels, those of the universal (as a formal notion) a common (as a political project)? In fact, in the way Roman citizen-ship sprang up, the two meet for the first time: its juridical status, on the one hand, in the mode of imperative [devoir – etre] and not being able to tolerate exceptions, defined a necessary perception which had a universal value; and, on the other hand, the sharing of this citizenship was progressively extended to the point of rendering the ‘’Ro-man land’’ common to the whole Empire, without further exclusion. The importance of Rome is thereby to have united the two un-der the same legal bond: the ‘City State’ and the ‘world’, the urbs and the orbis.

Rome therefore provided Europe’s first ex-periment in globalization which went be-

yond the wide – ranging uniformization of customs (togas, thermae, the circus, the games, the harangues and so on), which inevitably proceeded from the cross- ferti-lization of populations and the circulation, on such a vast scale, of goods and ideas. Along with the status of Roman citizen a single institutional and legal form was su-perimposed on the diversity of places, peo-ples, morals and religions. Supported as it was by the figure of the Sage alone, the appeal to virtue and fusion with cosmos, the world- city of the Stoics remained more a moral than a properly political concept. In Rome, in contrast, ‘universal citizenship’, universa civitas, begins to become effective: in law, the universal emerges from philoso-phy and from its logical seed so as to define a unity of status and condition. This juridical status of citizenship is then distributed, little by little, from the Italian municipalities, from the last centuries of the Republic to the first ones of the Empire, through remits that be-came more and more immense, decided as a whole and extended to the most distant territories: those which were bordered by the limes and thereby designated the end of the habitable, or at least integratable, world. With the Caracalla edict in AD 212 this citi-zenship was finally conceded to all of the inhabitants of the Empire, as though it was really a matter of a necessary evolution. Thus, the a-priori exigency of the one (the universal of prescription) and the extensity of the other (the common of sharing) finally managed to join in this institutional form of Roman citizenship, before the jolts of inva-sions overturned it.

14

A characteristically nonexclusive Roman conception of the common has often been invoked (and recently in an intelligent way by Claudia Moatti (1997)) to explain this capacity Rome had for absorbing so many diverse histories, peoples and sparse lands into a community which seemed to be un-limited - for military success is not sufficient to account for this prodigious extension. The evidence for it is in the founding nar-ratives. Rome incarnated a spirit of opening ab initio which radically opposed it to the principle of the restricted, and even fiercely private, community of which the Greek cities were so proud. While the citizens of Athens entertained no doubts about their noble ori-gin (since they considered themselves to be born as „indigenous” from that very earth and drew pride from their ethnic longevity), Rome was happy to recognise itself, on the contrary, as a ‚jumble of strangers’. Wheth-er we trace its foundation to Aeneas and therefore to Troy, or believe the city was established by the Greeks, and whether we still consider it to have a barbarous origin, Rome has no difficulty in admitting (as is, moreover, common sense) that the urbs was born from immigration and that it expe-rienced mixing from the very outset. Indeed, under cover of the story of Romulus and Remus, it avowed that it was peopled at the beginning by bandits and fugitive slaves who came to seek sanctuary on the Palantine Hill. They were, as Titus Livius says of the first Romans, an ‚indistinct mix of free men and slaves, all of them seeking something new’ (1, 8, 4-6). Indeed, far from wanting to conceal this, to say the least, questionable origin, Roman historiography stressed the positive aspects of such a composite foun-dation that allowed Rome to develop.

There were no limits, then, to Rome’s ex-pansion, since the essence of the Roman, strictly speaking, arose neither from soil nor from blood. In any case the identity of a city was not, from the point of view of the Romans, of an ethnic nature; far from be-ing a stain, the mixing of populations con-stituted, in their eyes, an advantage. In the same way, while Greek thinkers associated the perfected character of their city with its limited nature (teleios, as first predicate of the polis, linked by Aristotle with the idea of perfection to finiteness), the Romans did not themselves envisage any termina-tion of their growth. In a different way from the Greek cities, Rome discovered, through what was nevertheless its imperialism, its syncretic vocation: by absorbing so many foreign, especially Oriental peoples, it would compensate for its youth with their antiquity, and thereby take support from their past age. The ideal recognised by those who, already in those days, looked into its astonishing destiny is less to have sought to conserve (the identity and the specific: a pure blood, original cults, an ancestral language...) than to have known how to integrate. The native welcomed the transient element, or prof-ited from it and in its way the rape of the Sabine’s illustrated this marked tendency for adoption. Indeed, Rome took no pride at all in being first and barely claimed originality at source. Its opening, favouring its indefi-nite extension, was on the contrary based upon what has been called, so as to char-acterise the ‚Roman way’, it’s principle of ‚secondarity’ (Remi Brague, 1992)1. With-out false modesty, the Romans recognised themselves as descendants and not pio-neers. Rome imitated, borrowed, absorbed; it adopted and adapted; it developed, as did its language, by successive accretions. For, rather than seeing this continuous influx as a threat, it knew that it would be enriched by it. In spite of what often appeared to be clever propaganda, which its periods of ora-tory gladly served, it has to be recognised that Rome founded its societas on a new connection: no longer of a segregationist nature, whose purity would be defended, but rather, effectively, of ‚association’, re-sulting in the establishment of a common world from shared traditions and ideals.

1 Remi Brague, Europe, la voie romaine (Paris: Criterion, 1992).

15

But Rome was remarkable not only for hav-ing enlarged its frontiers to this extent and pushed back its limits so far. In this new age of globalization, it is exemplary for us not only because of its capacity for integra-tion which, over several centuries, allowed so many diverse peoples, races, languages and cults to cohabit. Rome most certainly teaches us a lesson in being a success-ful melting pot. More instructive, however, is that in the end it knew how to link one and the other: to embed this territorial and civilizational extension, favouring the com-mon, in a unique legal status (Roman citizenship), and so founding universal-ity. The question then becomes one of the whether this should be understood within a frame which would now be juridical rather than philosophical. As recent work (nota-bly that of Yan Thomas, 1996)1 has shown, and contrary to what has too often been reported about the ‚concrete’ spirit of the Romans, such a diffusion of Roman citizen-ship outside of Rome could not have been carried out other than by the construction of a very elaborated and even astonishing abstract law.

For, as Rome did not conceive, by devel-oping and conquering the peninsula, of a territorial (Italic) State as such, one that would be normative - homogeneous, in other words as it did not actually think of itself outside of the physical frame of its own city, the new civic community formed by the colonies and the Italic municipalities could not be conceived of except by means of a fiction, that of the ‚homeland commune’, ac-cording to which the territory of the City in-corporated that of the other localities. One thereby found oneself, even though a citi-zen of some other city, at the same time be-ing permitted also to be a citizen of Rome. With juridical construction substituted for the reality, this principle of a ‚ubiquity’ of Rome led to a legal homeland (patria juris) being established everywhere else, which would then be superimposed upon any local sense of belonging. The citizens of cities external to Rome thereby found themselves Roman citizens on the same basis as if they had been living in Rome itself. Thanks to this casuistry, one found oneself Roman while remaining in one’s own (local) homeland. And one continued to be in one’s own land when one journeyed to Rome...

2 Thomas Yan, ‘’Origine’’ et ‘’commune patrie’’: etude de droit public romain , Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome , 1996), p. 89-212.

In this way the celebrated distinction estab-lished by Cicero assumed a rigorous insti-tutional meaning and led to the two being juxtaposed in a theoretical complementarity (De legibus, 11, 5): the lesser and greater land, one ‚natural’ and the other of ‚citizen-ship’. As was said of Cato, ‚he was Tus-culan by origin and Roman by citizenship’, and one possessed at the same time a ge-ographical country and a legal homeland: the first is where we were born while the other has ‚welcomed’ us. But the latter must reign over the former even in our affection, because the name of the ‚public thing’ be-comes in its example, Cicero proposes, that of a ‚universal citizenship’, civitas universa. It was therefore in Rome that the community began to universalize itself in a positive way through the law. Not only did it extend to the limit of the frequented space, but it also acquired a formal status which was presup-posed to be rational, the source of all ob-ligations and arbiter of legality. With what constitutes a Roman being no longer given but constructed by means of the juridical connection, ‚Rome’ ceases to be limited to an individual and concrete city on the map, but is now the ‚second mother of the world’, parens mundi altera (Pliny, Natural History, XXXVII, 201-205)2 and becomes a unique space, abstracted from geography and born from a new consanguinity, that of all the citi-zens of other cities gathered together by the same, equally protective, civic law, in the civitas romana, now maxima.

3 Pliny, Natural History, Vol.X, trans. by H. Rackham (London: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 201-205.

16

Hence arises the idea we see celebrated by the Romans themselves: that, in uniting all people under Roman Law, by revealing to them a common land, Rome, putting the fin-ishing touches to nature, has given mankind humanity (withdrawing it from its ‚immanity’: immantas) . The Greek seperation between Hellenic and Barbarian vanishes. Even be-fore having recourse to the distinction be-tween two lands, the local and that of right [de doit], the De legibus posed in a logical way, as a preliminary condition for this civic universality, the unity of the ‚human species’ (Cicero, I, 28-33)1. As a notion, it no longer triumphs by being concretized, as in Plato, but is now central and rests on a principle of natural equality. It resolutely lends itself to the character of universality which takes it back to its definition. It raises ‚man’ to abstraction and so ‚whatever definition one gives of man, it is unique and valid for all’ (while ‚if there is difference in the species, a single definition would not grasp all indi-viduals ‚ (1, 28 - 33))2.

4 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De offciis, trans. by Walter Miller (Lon-don: Harvard University Press, 1913), p. 28-33.5 Ibid., p. 28-33.

Admittedly, Roman citizenship, in the age in which Cicero was speaking in this man-ner, barely extended beyond the Italian municipalities. Nevertheless, thanks to the law, the logical universality of the definition of man, whatever the content, already car-ried within it the principle of an extension of the common as an internal requirement, even though centuries would have to pass for it to be ratified by History: ‚It therefore follows that nature has created us to share with one another and place the law in com-mon among us all’ (1, 28-33)3. The law has actually become the stable base, the rec-ognised guarantee, of humanism, at least in European culture, and it was under these conditions that humanism was actually for-mulated in Rome, as Cicero incarnated it, rather than in Greece. For all that, we know that it couldn’t reign alone like this for very long - for it could not remain linked to the destiny of a City state opening out in an unlimited way under the auspices of its pro-tective gods and representing the world.Indeed, in the same age and in this same Empire, it would fall to Saint Paul - by ap-pealing not to the law but to faith, and who wanted, by taking apart every statute with a view only to salvation - to reverse this formal universality of citizens. In so doing, he sought to substitute for it another univer-sality which would be capable of affecting the intimate life of subjects even in its most singular destiny. This would therefore occur without any further addition to the member-ship of the group, as Cicero’s citizenship demanded, but rather by abolishing it.

6 Ibid., p. 28-33.

RODRIGO PEREZ DE ARCE – ‘’URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF ADDITIONS’’

18

Rodrigo Perez de ArceUrban Transformations and Architecture of Additions

The various modes in which towns are ex-panded, renovated and updated are broadly restricted to three basic types:Urban growth by extension –characterized by the urbanization of new areas which are incorporated into the town;Growth by substitution – which occurs whenever new urban elements replace the pre- existing ones, and involves demolition and reconstruction; Growth by additive transformation – in which an original nucleus is transformed by a sedimentary and incremental process of Addition of new parts.

This third form of growth has been almost completely ignored in recent periods of ur-ban development, and the notion of bal-anced form of development has been dis-regarded in favor of indiscriminate and wild urban extension, often combined with unre-stricted destruction and renewal. Additive transformation is only one of the possible mechanisms of growth and change, but it presents some characteristics which are important for the quality of the town.

First, by being a gradual and organized in-corporation of parts into an existing core, it implies the use of a pre- existing structure, and by doing so it extends the likelihood of this being in use for a prolonged period.

Second, by being based on the retention of what already exists, additive transformation allows for a form of development charac-terized by its low costs in both social and material terms: it doesn’t necessitate the compulsory migration which – whether tem-porary or permanent- is required in other cases. Some kind of continuity of the nor-mal rhythm of life in the affected area in maintained; and the material costs are low since extensive use is made of existing ele-ments and facilities. Third, because it is a sedimentary process, additive transformation ensures a sense of continuity in the construction of the town, and a sense of ‘place’ in both historical and spatial terms: in historical terms, because it is in this way that this cit builds upon itself, and buildings become repositories of suc-cessive interventions; and in spatial terms, because a true complexity and a meaning-

ful variety arise from the gradual accumula-tion of elements which confirm and reinforce the space in an incremental process. This sense of continuity is further reinforced by the intelligence of successive generations which, through trial and error, produces a type of architecture which, by being so meaningful in social terms, by being elabo-rated with the concurrence of so many peo-ple, becomes almost necessarily a product of great quality.

How different has been the approach to all forms of development (including naturally urban development) in the modern period when society squanders its resources as though permament abundance were no less the obligation of history.1

The idea that the old mechanisms by which towns evolved are no longer valid for the modern town has gained support with the belief that the complexity of the modern town has reached such a degree that it has become a unique phenomenon in the histo-ry of planning, and totally isolated from past experience. But this supposed complexity is in many respects a fallacy. Considered from the point of view of their fabric, of their ar-chitecture, modern towns appear to have a poor, sometimes very loose, and frequently mechanical and repetitive structure of spac-es. Spatial identity is often non-existent and the types of accommodation it is possible to find in modern developments are almost always very standardized and reduced to a minimum of set variations.

This reduction of complexity can be experi-enced at many levels and it is perhaps very much tied up to a centralised systemof con-trol. Thus the hypermarket which caters for a vast number of inhabitants is completely isolated and more elementary as a build-ing than the supermarket which at least has to keep some relationship to the immediate context. Traditionally the same volume of transactions took place in an infinity of small shops, alleys, arcades and market squares. The significance of a traditional structure of the town is of very great importance.

1 Segal, R; America’s Receding Future, Pelican, 1970

19

Also from the point of view of the activi-ties which take place in the town, there has been a radical change into a pattern of high-ly segregate zones where different activities take place in isolation. The disastrous effect of ‘zoning’ has been widely discussed but it is worth repeating that zoning constitutes yet another form of compulsory and ruthless schematisation of the town into elementary and well-defined parts, which can be more readily administered from a central body.

Whether buildings are used as quarries to extract building materials, as foundations for emergent buildings, as support for addition-al structures, whether they are rearranged, subdivided, added to, or transformed in terms of modifying their structure of con-nections and access, whether they are up-graded in terms of their quality for habitabil-ity or whether they are changed in terms of their symbolic role - the variations indicate gradations only on an overall process of continuous adjustment, rearrangement and transformation which occurs constantly and at different levels to the towns.

The selective and organised salvage of components is but one way of building with inherited parts: the Al Naqah mosque in Tripoli (8th to 10th century) serves to il-lustrate a case where an imaginative and resourceful use was made of columns and capitals of disparate character obtained from the dismantling of Roman and Byzan-tine buildings. There is a similar case in the mosque of Cordoba where columns of dif-ferent height had to be buried as needed until the same level was obtained at the top of the capitals for the construction of the arches.

In a small house in the roman countryside, fragments of ancient sculptures were in-serted into the walls to become part of the building. It is difficult to visualise situations where old and new become integrated to the same extent as they are in this small building.

It is in Rome that much evidence can be found of this confrontation of the inheritance from the past with a positive, pratical sense, simply by making the best use of that which is innherited.

Rome is indeed unique amongst the Euro-pean capitals in that after having been the

largest city of antiquity, it fell - as a conse-quence of the collapse of the empire - into an extremely prolonged period throughout which the still standing structure of the im-perial town largely overshadowed the pre-carious structure of the emergent medieval town.

It is the very fact of the continuity of use of Rome as a town that explains the preser-vation of so many of its ancient structures. This was, however, basically an utilitarian preservation.

It is a motive of joy rather than sorrow that the new was built upon the old one. If it wasn’t for this circumstance, a great number of ruins and works of art would have been irremediably lost.1

It is utilitarian preservation because it ap-proaches its built legacy by functionally incorporating it into the present, by reab-sorbing it into the living city rather than pre-serving it in isolation as it so often happens when urban preservation is carried out with a dominating archaeological purpose.

Travellers described with amazement this peculiar association of old and new. But they didn’t always approve of the results of such combinations:

and as for the buildings which were now being built on top of the old ruins, although they did contain some qualities which could enrapture our present times, they were more likely to remind us of the nests which spar-rows and rooks were building inn France in the walls of chruches demolished by the Huguenots.2

The buildings of the second Rome were hybrid products of the unique historical cir-cumstances which this town experienced. But the process was by no means reduced to isolated phenomena, and in effect it can be observed in all major towns up to the 19th century. The Romans ‘transformed without mercy the ancient monuments’.3

2 Les Monuments de Rome Apres la Chute de L’Empire3 Montaigne; Journal4 Ibid

20

But the ancients themselves resorted to the pre-existing structures with similar lack of mercy. Masonry stones were recycled from one building to another, components were reassembled.

Some stones were employed in a sequence of different uses; the pedestal of a statue erected in a small countryside locality to the memory of an illustrious citizen...served in 285 for the restoration of the baths of Ca-racalla and later in 365 was used for the construction of a monument to be erected in the honour of Valentiano the 1st.1

Many of the important Roman constructions of the ancient period are in fact good ex-amples of this process of dismantling and recombination.

The Aurelian wall was erected using the de-bris of destroyed monuments..for the com-pletion of the Basilique Julia at the Forum, GabinioVessio made us inn 377 of the mar-ble masonry of the forum Svarium.. The col-osseum itself was completed at the expense of other monuments...The Arch of Constan-tine is ornated with statues and stone carv-ings which had belonged to another arch, perhaps to the Trajan arch which has since disappeared completely.2

Discussions on conservation were held by the representatives of the town, and the senate also maintained surveillance over what was built.

The transformation of Roman temples was carried on for centuries, to such an extent that anaylsis of the various resulting en-sembles is extremely useful.

The temple type is one of the most persis-tent types in the history of architecture. Its pagan origins and its association with pa-gan rituals were a challenge to the Christian builders of the ‘second’ Rome and the fate of these buildings was far from predictable.

The temple of Antonio and Faustina in the Forum was converted into a Christian church; a tympanum was added to it in

5 Les Monuments de Rome Apres la Chute de L’Empire6 Ibid

1602. The church was arranged within the enclosure of the temple; its front, recessed in relation to the temple front, left the free-standing colonnade of the original buildings. To no other building are more appropriate the observations of Louis Khan:

Each part was built with so much anxiety and joy and willingness to proceed tries to say when you are using the building ‘Let me tell you how I was made’. Nobody is listen-ing because the building is now satisfying need. The desire in its making is not evi-dent...As time passes, when it is a ruin the spirit of its making comes back...everyone who passes can hear the story it wants to tell about its making. It is no longer in servi-tude; the spirit is back.3

But this building, half ruin, half habitable, is still ‘in servitude’ and yet the presence of the ruin is perhaps so much stronger by virtue of this very relationship to which it is bound.The temple of Saturn, surrounded by hous-es and absorbed into the texture of domes-tic buildings in the town, was disengaged from all additional constructions and the im-pressive but somewhat pathetic remains of the pronaos are still visible today amidst the historical remains of the Forum. The Church of S Lorenzo in Miranda was built within an ancient temple in a similar fashion to the of the church built on the temple of Antonio and Faustina. The temple of Neptune (in the present Piazza di Pietra) was first erected by Marcus Agrippa in celebratin of his naval victories and formed part of a large complex which included a hugh portico, whose re-mains are still to be seen in the in the base-ment of the adjoining streets. Eleven of the columns of the northern side of the building are stil standing and the building of the Ro-man stock exchange has been incorporated into it.

7 Cook, J W and Klotz, H; Conversations with Architects (from chapter on Louis Kahn), Lund Humphries, London

21

This is, in its way, almost as interesting a relic as the temple, as it is one of the most extensive examples of a Roman architec-tural palimpsest to have survived the ar-chaeological fervour of the fascist period.1

The temple of Vesta in the forum was trans-formed into the church of S Stefano alle-Carozze which was later to be named Sta Maria del Sole. And numerous other exam-ples could be cited.

So, on the one hand, the temple ramins were demonumentalised and incorporated into the anonymous scale of the fabric of the town, while on the other hand, what could be described as the appropriation of the symbolic value of the temple - as a sacred building, but also as a monument - occured, and consequently temples could transformed into Christian churches or conversely, they could be secularised and transformed into civil monuments.

The temple form had a strong attraction, perhaps because it was a form product of such a prolonged period of selection and perfectioning. But it was still too closely at-tached to all that was regarded as pagan. A synthesis had to be found whereby it was possible to combine the quality of this per-fect form with some architectural element of equivalent weight which belonged unques-tionably to the Christian cultural tradition. The Spire was an ideal element for this pur-pose. Thus, in many instances, there was an attempt to combine the spire with the temple-like church nave. The design of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields by Gibbs is perhaps the most interesting solution. Unlike his pre-decessors who built the spire as an adjunct to their churches, Gibbs built his tower in-side the west hall of the church and made it emerge through the roof.

This church is important not only as an achievement in itself but for its enormous widespread and continuous influence...It became the type of the Anglican parish church and was imitated wherever in the world English was spoken and Anglican worship was held.2

So it happened that two types which had 8 Masson, G; Rome, Fontana Collins, London, 19659 Summerson, J; Architects in Britain; 1530-1830, The Pelican History of Art, Penguin, 1953

quite different origins and evolutions be-came associated by proximity, when one was attached to the other, and ended up combined in a single composition which generated a new type form.

The fact that components could be reas-sembled worked both ways: the process could happen on a temporal basis simply by a sequence of interventions over the same building to which porticoes towers, rooms, could be added. On the other hand a natu-ral evolution of styles could result in the selection of elements from a range available from the cultural patrimony of a period and the creations of new combinations resulting in the invention of new types would occur.

So when Palladio said that

In all the villas, but also in some of the city houses, I have put a frontispiece on the forward facade where the principal doors are because such frontispieces show the entrance of the house and add very much to the grandeur and magnificence of the work...3

he was referring directly to this process. In the same manner he referred to the origin of the portico from the temple which had originally borrowed it from the Greek house - and indeed for all these elements to be taken apart and re-combined they had to have some integrity, some quality in them-selves even when seen in isolation.

The portico could be added onto a building as a second intervention, and if it could be added onto a house it could certainly - and perhaps with more propriety - be added to a church as well. This happened to the old St Paul’s cathedral transformation devised by Inigo Jones. The west front facade was refaced and a large Corinthian portico was added to the main entrance. One existing tower was re-cased and a new one was added to the other side for symmetry. The aim was to give the church a classical ex-pression, but the bizarre result lacked unity.

10 Palladio, A

22

I t is ironical that so much ingenuity and effort was invested to transform Roman temples into churches while architects were working on the difficult task of disguising the church behind the temple in the reverse process...

Ruins were reincorporated into the functions and uses of the town in a varity of ways. Transformations were carried on to such an extent that in many instances it is impos-sible to reconstruct the image of the original buildings.

The portico of Ottavia in Rome formed part of a large complex of porticoes which en-closed a precinct where there were temples, libraries, and public rooms, and it was in-tended to be a foyer for the adjacent theatre of Marcellus. A fish market grew up in the portico and a church was built into the re-mains of the original buildings which by then had suffered from decay. The church was known as S Angelo in Pescheria due to its proximity to the fish market. It was rebuilt in the 8th century and again in 1869. Arch-es were erected during the middle ages to support the Roma fabric of the portico. This curious complex has fortunately remained up to the present days. Even though the re-mains of each period are fragmented there exists a strong cohesion between the parts; buildings of different periods are held to-gether conforming a dense urban block.

In the triumphal arch we find again a build-ing type of incredible persistence and wide-spread diffusion. There existed different types of triumphal arches in Rome, some built as isolated entrances to monumental zones, others were built spanning a road or as a base for statues. But while the most famous ones in ancient Rome did stand in isolation, on key locations along a route, they never reached the monumental char-acter which, by scale and location, the one erected in the Champs Elysees achieved as a focal point for a vast area of Paris Here the arch became an enourmous building, detached and commanding. In England one was built not only detached from the other buildings, but also from the city, standing as a focal point in the central perspective of the gardens in Stowe, Buckinghamshire. It is difficult to find an architectural arrange-ment with a similar feeling of immensity an-ywhere else in England. So the arch, born in the centre of the busy areas of Rome,

was placed in a different contexts, and was eventually located in the exact opposite context of the original the absolute isolation of private grounds in the countryside.

Another process also occured: the use of the triumphal arch within diverse composi-tions. Such cases exist in the monumen-tal facades such as the Fontana de trevi in Rome and that of the Fontaine St Michel in Paris, or the incorporatio of the arch as one of the several elements which were care-fully piled up, one on top of the other, to create the tower of Christ Church in Spital-fields, London.

The amphitheatre has got a precise and un-equivocal form and also a function; it is not thought to be an indifferent container, quite on the contrary, it is extremely precise in its shape, in its architecture and its structure...but an extraordinary event, one of most ex-traordinary moments in the history of hu-manity transforms its functions; a theatre is transformed into a city...1

Aldo Rossi refers with these words to the uique transformation of the amphitheatres of Arles and Nimes. The in Nimes, built for 25,000 spectators, fell into disuse until six centuries later when:

The region became a dangerous area and the amphitheatre was converted...into an im-pregnable fortress. The arcades were filled in during the 12th century and transformed into defensive walls...The interior became a village with houses, chapels dedicated to St Martin and St Peter, public squares and al-leys...arranged over the arena and over the sitting areas. Francois I ordered the demoli-tion of additional buildings in 1535, but it was at the end of the 18th century when the arena was entirely cleared...At the begin-ning of the 19th century the engineer Gran-gent was put in charge of the reconstruc-tion of the amphitheatre and he ordered the demolition of a number of buildings which included a palace of justice, a theatre and around a hundred houses...2

11 Rossi, A; La Arquitectura de la Ciudad, Editorial Gustavo Gilli, Barcelona, 197112 Le Merdy, P; ‘Reconversion: La Cite Fortifiee, Nimes’, Architec-ture D’Aujourd’Hui, 12/77

23

The amphitheatre of Arles was also trans-formed into a citadel, houses were built within the piers, over the arena, the sitting areas, and were also attached to the build-ing externally. The amphitheatre of Florence was absorbed until it disappeared into the homogenous fabric of the town. The ground plan indicates clearly that the reason for the oval shape of the plan lies in the Roman building; party walls and foundations follow faithfully the layout of the radial walls and piers of the amphitheatre. Two streets were opened through what had been the arena. No traces of the original structure are eas-ily recognisable in Lucca either, except for the central space which has evolved into a public square, and the main entrance ways, arranged symmetrically in relation to the arena. And something similar occurred to the stadium of Domitian in Rome which was destroyed during the middle ages and served later as a foundation for the build-ings which were erected around the Piazza Navona. This permanence of urban spaces of monumental character was one of the consequences of the superimposition of one town upon the remains of a previous one:

To this phenomenon was due the presence in the town structures of certain grandiose vistas and epic dimensions which otherwise would have been inexplicable, such as the vast scale of the Piazza Navona and the long rectilinear line of the Corso.1

Sixtus V has a project for transforming the coliseum into a workshop. Working spaces would occupy the ground floor, spaces and workers’ dwellings would have been ar-ranged on the upper floors (has this project been realised)... the coliseum would have become a worker’s quarter and also the ra-tionalist factory.2

And indeed had the coliseum been used continuously to the present day, that whole section of Rome in which it stands would have evolved in a different way.

Another project was devised by Carlo Fon-tana for the building of a church inside the arena with a colonnade which would encir-cle the open space. Had it been built, the most imposing of the ancient Roman build-ings would have changed not only in its use but also, substantially, in its significance for the town. T he cupola and towers of the

13 Portoghesi, P; Rome of the Renaissance, Phaidon Press, 197214 Rossi, A; op cit

church would have been seen from outside the ruins depending on the relative posi-tion of the observer. The silent presence of the empty tiers of seats would have added drama to a place in the city already charged with memories.

The fate of the ruins was a different one though, the remaining rooms were never going to be occupied again. The fabric of the coliseum was used as a quarry right up to the 18th century.

According to Augustus Hare in 1840 the arena of the coliseum was still like an Eng-lish abbey, an uneven grassy space littered with masses of ruins, amid which large trees grew and flourished...the flora of the coliseum numbered 420 species some al-leged to be exotic importations. After 1870 all vegetation was extirpated and the cells beneath the arena were excavated.3

And such is the condition in which it remains now, cleared of its exotic plants, protected as a monument, isolated as a traffic island, and internally rather like an impressive toy which has been torn apart to see how it works.

The roman palace of Diocletian in Spalato, on the Dalmatian coast, was built in an unu-sually short period, for the Emperor had ab-dicated and wanted to spend the last years of his life in this quiet and beautiful locality. The enormous rectangular building was di-vided, in the usual Roman manner by two roads which crossed each other at right an-gles. The area next to the seaside was des-ignated for the Emperor’s quarters, for the palace proper. These buildings were built over enormous basements which extend-ed all along the front of the palace. Direct connection was provided from the peristyle court through the basements to a small door which lead to a pier and the vastness of the Adriatic Sea. The other quarters were inhabited by soldiers and servants.

15 Masson, G; op cit

24

The Emperor died in 316 AD and the pal-ace complex fell into a long period of decay. Peasants and villagers of the neighboring areas created legends around this imposing building, half palace and half fortress. But an unexpected event was to have perdur-able consequences in the history of the pal-ace, when the nearby city of Salona was in-vaded and sacked by the Slavs around the year 614AD. The inhabitants who escaped the massacres first fled to the safe refuge of the islands in the Adriatic Sea, but once they could return in safety they did so, not to their destroyed town but to the remains of the palace.

A conversion operation of enormous scale took place from that moment onwards: the ruins of the palace were gradually trans-formed into a town and the social stratifi-cation of the inhabitants were reflected in the way the grounds and available spaces were used. Thus, the wealthy took posses-sion of the areas inside the palace precincts where they could build their mansions, the less powerful citizens inhabited the rooms and spaces which had remained from the original fabric, and the plebeians were left with the crypts, basements and cellars New buildings and a new street layout were su-perimposed on the Roman ones. Existing buildings were converted: the mausoleum of the Emperor was transformed into a church and a campanile was built next to it; the Palatine temple was transformed into a baptistry.

The town expanded beyond the boundaries of the Roman walls, land was reclaimed from the sea, and houses were built against the front wall of the palace.

Another case of such a large scale trans-formation happened in Cuzco, Peru, the old capital of the Inca empire. The town is located on a narrow valley high up in the mountains, midway between the Pacific coast and the Amazonian forests. Its char-acter was not a monumental one, although there existed impressive stone built palaces and temples and a very large central square. Inca palaces surrounded the square as it was customary for every Inca to construct his own palace. It is estimated that the old town had some 4000 dwellings when it was still the capital of the Inca rulers, but it is known that many times this must have been scattered through the suburbs. The Span-

iards violently entered the town in 1553 and, after sacking it and stripping the build-ings of everything of value, they designated plots of land to every soldier, taking posses-sion of the conquered place.

In a few decades the physiognomy of the city changed. The Inca square was reduced to less than a fourth of its size, churches re-placed the Inca religious constructions and many fine walls of hewn stone belonging to the palaces of erstwhile lords of Cuzco were used as foundations for the large houses of the conqueror. The layout of the Cuzco of the Incas is still partially in existence...1

The tall plastered and whitewashed walls of Spanish mansions were built upon the interlocked stones of the pre existing Inca fabric which remained exposed as a rus-ticated ground floor and sometimes up the first floor.

It is still possible to admire the skill of Inca Stone masons in the walls of the extant palaces and temples which the stroller en-counters as the facade of a street, the base of a church, or the framework of a colo-nial gateway. It would seem that different qualities of stone were used according to the importance of the buildings, thus a hard dark nearly black stone was used in the constructions of the center, while the more common types, such as limestone, were used for fortifications and other gen-eral purposes. Nevertheless it was adobe, or clay, in the form of large blocks which was the most frequently used construction material...2

The adobe walls have since disappeared but the sight of the stone masonry as the foundation for the Spanish buildings is one of the most graphic examples of sedimen-tary growth one can find in any town. This sedimentation is literal in Cuzco, with lay-ers which correspond to two cultures, one dominant, the other one destroyed.

16 Hardoy, J; Urban Planning in Pre-Columbian America, Studio Vista, London17 Ibid

25

It is interesting to notice that while the lay-out of the old town remained unchanged to a great extent, spaces were entirely trans-formed when the proportions were distorted, and the expression of the buildings became entirely different.

But if anything, the structure of the town as a system of spaces has been improved. And it is in a the nature of an urban lay-out that it can be interpreted in a variety of ways without losing its quality. Cuzco is a case of such radical reinterpretation, but its transformation was as unique as that of Diocletian’s palace in that it happened as a total operation - affecting the totality of the pre existing plan, and happening simultane-ously throughout the whole place.Cuzco, Spalato, and Rome testify to the validity and permanence of an urban plan well beyond its original and foreseeable de-velopment. But in the three cases (which are taken as archetypical ones) there has been one rule which has commanded the process: a correct relationship between urban morphology and building types has been maintained.

But these transformations have gone fur-ther than a reinterpretation of a pre-existing layout or the conversation of a multitude of isolated buildings. On the one hand there are transformations of buildings through the functional transformation of almost every single space; while on the other hand there are profound transformations of the urban morphology. These have happened within certain areas of the town (as in the trans-formation of the main square of Cuzco by the Spaniards) or to the whole of the town’s pre existing plan (as with the ancient plan of Rome of which only a few traces remain).

The Inca square of Cuzco was divided into two sectors separated by the canalised bed of a river, but it was essentially one very large space. The Spanish intervention in this area consisted of ‘invading’ the open space and organising it into a more com-plex structure of open spaces and building blocks, so that three new squares were cre-ated on the space of the old one. The old boundaries were partly retained and partly over grown by new buildings. These re-quired more space and took over part of the open space. However, except for the east side of the Inca square which was com-pletely redefined, other alterations to the

old boundaries took the form of minor re-adjustments.

This form of growth - internal extension which occurs within the boundaries of the built up area of a city - is similar to additive growth in that it requires a carefully con-trolled operation which very much related to pre-existing elements. Developed of this kind take place with the advantages, but also within the constraints, of the pre- exist-ing framework. And it is in this context that the development can be seen as a variety of additive transformations which almost in-variably become associated with urban in-tervention.

Towns need permanence at least as much as they need transformation. An urban place without memory or reference of any kind would become oppressive. Meaning-ful urban transformation occurs in relation to meaningful urban places. Additive trans-formation occurs on a great scale in mod-ern towns, but it occurs as an infinitely frag-mented process of repair and enlargement. Such additive transformations are typical of suburban districts, but because of their fragmented nature, it is unlikely that they will have any real power to transform sub-urban districts into urban ones. The modern city has become degraded to a fragmented collection of suburbs and its dynamic has been degraded in the process.

Understanding the relationship between permanent and temporary elements in the city is most important for the understand-ing of the process of urban evolution. The very permanence of elements in the town depends on their capacity for being trans-formed and adjusted, there exist buildings or parts of towns which become consolidat-ed to the extent that they can be intimately associated with the character of a particular town; while the continuous collective use of these buildings and parts of towns results in continuous changes in their architecture.

26

The plan of a town is a permanent element in so far as its essential features tend to remain. It is difficult to think that the entire structure of streets and open spaces can be altered, but it allows for some changes: the street network may become denser; open spaces can be built upon; urban blocks can occasionally be cleared to give way to new open spaces; and the relationship between open spaces and buildings occurs within a boundary zone which is constantly revised. The plans of Cuzco, Spalato or Rome il-lustrate this capacity of the plan for trans-formation and permanence. But this is valid within certain marginswhich regulate the process. Neither indiscriminate clearance nor densification to the extent of overcrowd-ing can produce beneficial effects. Rather the breakdown of the urban balance and the paralysation of urban life is caused by the complete destruction of urban continuity that results from indiscriminate clearance, while normal human relations become impossible with overcrowding. The monuments are per-manent elements of significant importance:

...This permanency is given by their con-stitutive value, by their history, by art...by memory...1

They are unique buildings differentiated from the fabric of the towns by their archi-tecture, urban location, symbolic value, and their fixation in time. But while they may have very precise and definitive forms they can, at the same time (and in apparently contradictory process), accept radical trans-formation. The anlysis of urban transforma-tions has produced evidence to the effect that those elements which have reached the maximum degree of architectural precision - as it happens with monuments - offer, con-sequently, the maximum distributive choice and in a more general sense the maximum functional choice.2

But some other characteristics also explain the capacity of buildings for transformation: built form is ambiguous in relation to func-tion, it transcends the circumstantial condi-tions under which it has first been materi-alised.

Distributive indifference is, according to Rossi, in the nature of architecture. And this indifference explains finally the adaptability

18 Rossi, A; as quoted in Architettura Razionale19 Scolari, M; as quoted in Architettura Razionale

of buildings for different functions.Buildings are also ambiguous in relation to their meaning in that though it is difficult to eliminate the symbolic value of outstanding buildings it is possible to manipulate it so that the building will represent something different from that which was originally in-tended.

Periods of transformation and stabilisation occur one after the other. Once the pos-sibilities of a building are exhausted it will become obsolete and eventually be aban-doned or destroyed.

Stabilisation is - in a sense - completion. But completeness of a building is not an entirely objective concept. It depends on functional level there exists a basic state of completeness when a building is fit for habi-tation. But this fitness depends very much on the evolution of material and technologi-cal standards of habitability for a particular society: systems for lighting, heating, water provision...

At a cultural level the concept of com-pleteness corresponds with predetermined images. It is for this reason that ‘brutalist’ buildings of exposed concrete facades were resisted as unfinished by the laymen while they were considered as complete by the architects. And in a similar sense a cultural-ly pre-defined image affects the interpreta-tion of the past. That is why classical Greek buildings, eroded by the effect of time and cleaned of their paintings and decorations, are more akin to the present epoch’s tastes and expectations than they would have been had they retained all their features. And this is equally true of many contempo-rary architects’ references to ancient Roman monuments.

Monuments constitute unique nuclei around which developments will take place. The collective internal space of a monument (such as a major church) will generate uses which tend in time to diversify and require even further space.

27

Such internal, collective space is not dif-ferent from the collective open space of a public square. Indeed some of the most suggestive examples of monumental space within a building show similar architectural features to monumental spaces outside.

So, in the same way in which the public square becomes a privileged location for buildings, the perimeter of a collective inter-nal space also tends to become a privileged location for further buildings and spaces. And, these additional buildings and spac-es are yet another case of additive trans-formation. Further, the external perimeter of a monument also becomes a preferred location for those activities which depend for their existence on their close proxim-ity to such large collective internal spaces. Such is the case of numerous monuments which have been slowly surrounded by mi-nor buildings, shops, workshops, houses. In addition to this one must take into account the urban tendency to maintain the conti-nuity of the street front; for, the street wall of a monument - how - ever architecturally rich it may be - usually signifies an inter-ruption in the sequence of activities along that portion of the street - a sequence which has to be restored to regain the full use of the street. The case of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome seems to be an appropriate one to close this presentation on historical examples.

This short account of instances of urban transformation gives some insight into an often forgotten mechanism of urban de-velopment and renewal. These few case studies have only been briefly been ana-lysed, and although they represent different scales in which the process takes place, it is not intended that they be considered a comprehensive picture of the process. In-numerable other cases could have been mentioned and analysed: the great Gothic cathedrals continuously enlarged and trans-formed throughout the ages, the great Ba-roque complexes, palaces, churches, pub-lic buildings, the urban bridges of London, Paris, Florence - the pontemaisons - those complex urban streets spanning rivers, tem-porary constructions in public places erect-ed for significant events...What has been stressed here is the nature of the process of transformation of built space, the different mechanisms by which a town can develop and incorporate new parts, the peculiarities

of these mechanisms, and the role of addi-tive transformation in the need for attaining historical and spatial identity for the places in the city.

In all transformations there exists an ele-ment of predetermination and an element of circumstance. Transformation is predeter-mined in the sense that the range of trans-formations possible are restricted at any particular time by the culture within which they occur. The limits as to which transfor-mations a particular culture can conceive will depend on its technical capabilities, its capacity for organisation, and also on the language of architectural forms and spatial arrangements understood by that culture.

This element of predetermination that un-derlies all transformations, arises out of the restrictions which are imposed by pre-ex-isting buildings, by the morphology of the urban context, by the evolution of building types, by the specific historical and geo-graphical location o f the transformations.

The circumstantial conditions governing transformations spring from the particu-lar needs which generate the brief for the extension and transformation of a building, from the balance of power (economic or otherwise) within society, from the coinci-dence of ideas, and from fortuitous and ac-cidental events.

While there always exist several architec-tural possibilities for the development of any single building or any part of the city, only one materializes at a time . But however dif-ferent these possibilities might look they are all, nevertheless, determined by common cultural factors. It is exactly in this sense that science-fiction-type projections for the future of our cities tell as much about the characteristics of our present society, about our limitations and achievements, as any actual modern part of a town does.

28

Science-fiction is limited by the range of what is possible to society at any point in its development; while innumerable varia-tions about the form of buildings could be explored before the invention of the arch, none of them could include this element and its possibilities. The contemporary case is somewhat different: the problem confront-ing architects is not what can be imagined when imagination is the only limit, but rath-er, what can be imagined, however radical, that could be materialised under present contingencies for an actual society and in a real place?

All the transformations analysed so far have been actual historical cases or projects, that is, transformations which actually took place or which were envisaged at a particular pe-riod but didn’t occur. However, it is also possible - on the basis of extensive solid knowledge of a particular historical period - to speculate on those alternatives which could have materialised historically

The reason for exploring this field of imagi-nary transformations lies not so much in the need to investigate a particular historical pe-riod, but in the opportunity these permit for exploring the nature of the transformation process. Some examples dealt with on the following pages illustrate particular forms of consolidation which didn’t take place, but which could have occurred (since they were feasible in relation to technical means available). For example, the analysis of the progressive development, enlargement, and consolidation of the basilica of Sta Maria Maggiore, as it actually happened, is fol-lowed by a speculation on ‘ the Sta Maria Maggiore which didn’t happen’. The com-parative analysis should bring out some of the peculiarities of this building, as much as it should reveal something of the mecha-nisms of additive transformation.

Finally, a set of examples of contemporary work is presented. The analysis of buildings by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn will pre-sent the case of contemporary buildings de-vised as ensembles of rooms and groups of rooms, which in themselves constitute com-plete building units. They are no different in this respect from those classical buildings analysed on the previous pages. Le Cor-busier and Kahn did not have to deal with the restrictions imposed by pre-existing ele-ments (except in a few projects such as the

early town houses by Le Corbusier or the museum in Yale by Kahn). Their projects do, however, suggest innumerable possible transformations. This is particularly true for Chandigarh and Dacca.

One form in which these monumental cen-tres could be transformed is suggested, on the basis of a further development of their plans. In addition, the work of some of the contemporary architects who have pro-duced work based on the principles of ad-ditive transformations to pre-existing build-ings is briefly analysed.

The majority of these architects share an in-terest in the study of urban form and urban history, in the study of history as a source of material for the construction of the town, in the investigation of urban building types, in the design of buildings which are composed of well defined and highly integrated parts. They also share an awareness of the impor-tance of the spatial continuity and functional diversity of the city, of the necessity of a policy of de-zoning as the basis for a nor-mal urban development. These architects share a common purpose of recapturing the integrity of the urban fabric by making use of the existing elements, and also for creating as many additional elements as are needed for reconstructing the unity and continuity lacking in the contemporary city.

All Projects presented here are feasible, they could be implemented and realised. These are not fictions but images of a re-ality which could happen today, and could help to restore the infinite richness of urban life which is so absent in the modern town.

29

To conclude this study, two divergent opin-ions on the conception of the city are quoted here. They reflect the profound differences which existbetween those who on the one hand cannot understand the remains of the past in anyway other than as anomalous el-ements which, depending on the value they place on them, should be either preserved or destroyed; and, on the other hand, those who understand the construction and struc-ture of the city, and accept no valid differ-ence between ‘old’ and ‘new’ when integrat-ing the remains of the past into the living city.

I should like to divide the problem of Rome, the Rome of the 20th century, into two cat-egories: the problems of necessity and the problems of grandeur. One cannot confront the latter unless the first has been resolved. The problems of necessity rise from the growth of Rome and are encompassed in this binomial: housing and communications. The problems of grandeur are of another kind: We must liberate all of Ancient Rome from the mediocre construction that dis-figures it...but side by side with the Rome of Antiquity and Christianity we must also create the monumental Rome of the 20th Century.1

To understand monuments as pieces of cit-ies, sedimentations of materials that can be transformed, adapted, and arranged for a fresh life, does not mean a cultural adven-ture, but a great project for the principal na-tions of Europe. This, to some extent, hap-pened - and often catastrophically - during the Napoleonic era and after the Unification of Italy, but despite the way it was carried out, it constituted a progressive fact. To-day this analysis can and must be carried out upon the city’s outskirts too. There are factories, farms, ad suburbs that need to be used not simply in terms of reuse, but through a plan.2

21 Kostoff, S; The Third Rome (the quotation is from Mussolini’s speech on the development of Rome, 1924), University Art Museum, Berk-ley, 197322 Rossi, A; ‘The Analogous City Panel, Lotus 13

BERINA ALIMAJSTROVIC – ‘’GLOBALIZATION AND NATIONALISM AND AR-CHITECTURE OF NON ALIGNMENT OF SARAJEWO WINTER OLYMPIC’’

31

Globalization,Nationalism and Yugosla-via: Post Tito Architecture for the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games, 1984

BerinaAlimajstorovic

In 1978 it was announced by the Olympic committee that Sarajevo, then part of Yugo-slavia would be the host for the 1984 Winter Olympic Games. This made history, as the winter Olympics had never been previously set in a communist state or in a develop-ing country. It was a break from the current global trend.It should be noted term ‘devel-oping’ is a Western adjective used to de-scribe Yugoslavia due to the undeveloped industries in the country at the time.Sara-jevo, now the capital city of the independent Bosnia and Herzegovina,historically had a troubled reputation ever since the assas-sination of Franz Ferdinand, which led to the First World War in 1914.1 The Olympics were an opportunity to change the glo-balised view of the city. Yugoslavia was a unique country; while it was fundamentally communist it differed from its neighbours in the Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia permitted freedom of religion, travel and work.2 It was a country built up of six Socialist republics thatfor decades worked together under the unified slogan of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. The country was loyal to its famous leader Marshall Tito. The leader after World War Two focused on bringing the variety of Yu-goslavian people together, by destroying the former class system and the previous economic order. Marshall Tito, for Yugo-slavia, made the population equal to one another. It was in 1980, four years prior to the games, that the death of the leader was announced. This has recently been stated as the start of the decline for Yugoslavia.3 Tito was no longer in power and was not controlling the increasing rise of nationalism in the area.4 This raised such questions as; was the design for the Olympic Games in Sarajevoused as a reminder to its people of the power and reputation Yugoslavia had amongst the international community? Also, could the design of the games symbolise the diverse ethnic groups, and provide glo-balised architectural structures that were also the epitome of the great Yugoslavia?

1 Robert.J.Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (United Kingdom: C.Hurst and Co, 2006), p.112.2 John.R.Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Coun-try (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 265- 284.3 ibid., p. 3004 ibid., pp. 299-327.

Prior to the Olympic bid, in 1968 Sarajevo was noticed as an area of interest for a fu-ture winter resort. Being an established city with an infrastructure and developed popu-lation, the mountainous terrain and high altitude level only highlighted the possible potential for the region. However, by 1978 the year of the selection process, the city was a not a pleasant one.5 Tourism in Sa-rajevo was at an all-time low; the rate of unemployment was increasing, and there was not enough social housing to meet the growing demands of migrants relocating to Sarajevo from the countryside. The air was also harsh; the city did not have a gas sys-tem, but instead used coal to heat homes, as the development for such a scheme was not available.6

Yugoslavia at the time of the selection pro-cess was very much considered ‘Tito’s Yu-goslavia’. It was a communist state that never allowed the now defunct Soviet Un-ion and the likes of Joseph Stalin to influ-ence its regime. Politically Yugoslavia was a country with its own identity and national agenda. Historically, Sarajevo had a mixed representation of its character, which was due to it being the most multi-ethnic city in Yugoslavia. Sarajevo housed diverse reli-gions amongst its citizens, and the archi-tecture reflected this.Mosques, Churches and Synagogues stood side by side, and the range of religious buildings were con-structed very densely to one another.7 At the time, Tito resolved Yugoslavia’s religious difference, simply by allowing its citizens to be uniformly identified as Yugoslavs.

It is important to understand the influences Marshall Tito had on the country in order to appreciate how globalization later affected the now defunct Yugoslavia. In a sense Yu-goslavia was caught in the middle. While its political character was very much com-munist, Tito permitted the population to live more like westerners. Therefore it was also important to design architecture, which was not soviet looking to aesthetically differ from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

5 John E. Findling, Kimberly D. Pelle, Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement (London:Greenwood Press, 2004), pp.381-384.6 Anna Callaghan, ‘1984 Winter Olympics a lasting bright spot in Sarajevo’s past’, The Spokesman, (05/02/2014) <http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/feb/05/1984-winter-olympics-a-lasting-bright-spot-in/> [Accessed on 15/02/15].7 Robert.J.Donia, p. 186.

32

Historically Marshall Tito was a colourful political character. Up until his death Tito had a long history of political involvement in Yugoslavia. Tito somewhat distanced Yu-goslavia from the political globalised trends post World War Two. For example, it would be Tito in 1944 who urged Yugoslavia to be a communist state, however, his commu-nist mould and scheme was different from Joseph Stalin’s in terms of politics, eco-nomics and military requirements, hence distancing themselves from the globalised idiom of communism. This infuriated the Soviet Union. Stalin even attempted to split the leaders of the Socialist Republics from Tito. This failed and by 1951 Tito and Sta-lin had publicly fallen out. This led Stalin to limit resources to Yugoslavia andattempted to isolate the Communist Yugoslavia. This meant that Western countries, especially the United States, had to provide resources and raw materials to Yugoslavia in an at-tempt to stabilise the Yugoslavian economy. Nevertheless, Tito publicly declared that the acceptance of such possessions was not going to have an influence on the politics within Yugoslavia.

Tito created an example of Yugoslavia. Dur-ing his reign the country’s political agenda was very much run with a regard to Na-tionalism. Marshall Tito never succumbed to the Soviets or the West; it was never about globalisation with Tito, but instead the ‘Yugoslav way’. While at the time in Eu-rope countries characterised themselves as Eastern or Western, as well as communist or democratic, Yugoslavia did not fit into either global trend. While Tito was a dedi-cated dictator in Yugoslavia, it was this that gained him a lot of respect from around the world. Tito clearly appreciated that his posi-tion in Europe was unique, he was aware of the growing need for economic help. While so publicly declaring a standoff with Stalin, and not allowing any political infringement from the Western countries, Tito was con-cerned about the future of Yugoslavia. Ob-viously going against such strong powers such as the Soviet Union, and not uniting with the west left Yugoslavia very vulner-able. Therefore, Tito systematically devel-oped the ‘non-alignment’ movement, which would involve diplomatic support from Asian and African countries. The formation of the non-alignment movement provided Tito a ‘distinctive and prominent role, this time in

the world arena’.1 The non-alignment flat-tered the Brotherhood and Unity slogan of Yugoslavia. It involved countries declaring being neither anally nor enemy of powerful political influences, which at the time would be the Soviet Union and the West. The non-alignment movement provided Yugo-slavia and Tito with a globalised power, and stance in the international world, and repu-tation. Invigorated by Western loans, Tito was given important say over international conflicts including his view on theCuban missile crisis and the Middle East conflict,.as well the East-West divide. It also inter-nally made Yugoslavia a desired country. The Yugoslavian population felt that they were more independent and better-off, and by far in a better position than any socialist country.

When Tito’sYugoslavia and Sarajevo was awarded the title of host city, the Yugoslavs were delighted and blossomed in pride about staging the prestigious event.2 The nation welcomed the idea of the ‘Olympic Movement’ in order to provide a better fu-ture for Yugoslavia. The legacy from Mar-shall Tito was powerful, which was proven when the Yugoslavs were given a vote to increase taxes in what was a difficult time already to fund the Olympic Games; 96% voted in favour. This was the epitome of Ti-to’s Yugoslavia and ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. This would be the national idiom and driving force for the creation of the structures for the Sarajevo Olympic Games.3

In 1980,with the recent death of Marshall Tito, a growing rise of Nationalism was occurring and Yugoslavia found it diffi-cult to overcome inner political disputes. Sarajevo,being a citypopulated by Muslims, Croats and Serbs was at the heart of the controversy. A rivalry amongst the Socialist Republics was noticeable. It would be only ten years prior to the games that legisla-tion was passed that allowed one to declare themselves Muslim, a positive alternative from the reference ‘other’. There was also a large outcry over the distribution of econ-omy within Yugoslavia. Developed regions such as Slovenia and Croatia were unhappy that the money they developed would be distributed to undeveloped regions such as

8 JovicDejan, Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away (West Lafayette, USA: Purdue University Press, 2009), p.60.9 Anna Callaghan, p.1.10 ibid, p.1.

33

There was also a growing concern about the economic stability of Yugoslavia, and the influence of the USSR and the West.1 It was made clear that Yugoslavia recognised the fact that the help of outside countries was needed in order to avoid an impending economic crisis. For decades the political structure in Yugoslavia was based around the people of the state.

Nationalism, not ideology [...] would drive Yugoslav policies.2

After the death of Marshall Tito there was not a unified symbolic character to guide the nation. While Yugoslavia would always be loyal to Tito, there was a realisation that a country cannot solely develop on one’s pride and fanatical patriotism. While histori-cally Marshall Tito had stood up to the So-viet Union and allowed his people daily con-veniences that Soviets did not experience, it was now clear that Yugoslavia needed an economic strategy and the guidance from other countries in order to find comfort in its power. Globalization was a way towards this.This could be why the Sarajevo Olym-pics were so warmly welcomed by the peo-ple and politicians as it was an attempt to create economic stability.

It could be stated that Sarajevo, through its selfish needs, decided to bid for the host of such an event in order to tackle its domestic problems and provide a better standard of living for its citizens. It was on the basis of providing a future winter resort, boosting a rundown area and providing more social housing that won Sarajevo the title of the host city. The Olympics were also an oppor-tunity to break down the East-West divide that was ongoing in Europe, and while its political structure was different from West-ern Europe it was an opportunity to portray that Yugoslavia was also not a Soviet ally.3 They did this by developing hotels for tour-ists, contemporary recreational buildings, a new national television headquarters and even former Austro Hungarian buildings re-ceived new facades to make them fit in with the Yugoslav typology.

12 John.R.Lampe, p. 321.13 Thomas Fingar, Yugoslavia: from “national communism” to national collapse : US Intelligence, Estimate Products on Yugoslvia, 1948 -1990, 1stedn. (USA: Government Printing Office, 2006) p. 632-639 in, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hYzo_TJ1BM4C&pg=PA641&dq=ethnic+tension+yugoslavia&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Y5_xVJvqB6fY7AbU64EQ&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=ethnic%20tension%20yugoslavia&f=false [Accessed 27/02/2015].14 John.R.Lampe, p. 321.

Yugoslavia’s main enemy in the 1980’s post Tito death was itself. It was a confused country, which had lost security, unity and an influential dictator. With the Olympic Games Yugoslavia attempted to represent its roots, however this, it realised, would have been impossible without globalized technology and theories of the time. The Sarajevo Olympic Games therefore forced the country for the first time to loosen its boundaries and connect with the rest of the world.

Mojmilo Olympic Village

Due to the increased movement of migrants relocating to Sarajevo from the rural coun-tryside, the demand for social housing was consistently increasing. This is what trig-gered the size and location of the Mojmi-lo Olympic Village. The location of such a complex was due to the good transport links for the future planned tourism sector. The roads connected easily to mount ‘Bjelsanica’ and ‘Trebevic’, the location of the ski resorts created for the Olympics and planned post tourism boom.4 In the long run it was envis-aged that the citizens would live in the new apartments and work in the winter resorts, creating both social housing and increas-ing the employment rates. This style of town planning was based on global trends at the time. The creation of such dwellings would create trade within Bosnia, meaning that Yugoslavia controlled its own economy and would not need to worry about Moscow lim-iting its resources and how much the West would provide in aid.5 It was also located on the south side of Sarajevo, which had good connecting links to the airport, the dual car-riageways, as well as good distances to the coach station, train station and next to the city tram-line. Yugoslavia was think-ing about its people. The Olympic Village was never about the athletes, but it was the Nationalism of looking after one self, which dictated the design.6 Something Marshall Tito would have been proud of.

15 Tim. Clancy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4th Edition, (England: Bradt Travel Guides), pp. 141 – 142.16 JovicDejan, Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away (West Lafayette, USA: Purdue University Press, 2009), p.6017 VjekoslavPerica , Balkan Idols : Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2002), p. 93.

34

35

The new Olympic Village in Mojmilo was completed before the start of the Olympic Games. The apartments were in such high demand that they had already been rented out to the people of Sarajevo under the con-dition of use post Olympics. The use of high rise flats were not common in Sarajevo at the time, only new developing areas such as Cengic Vila and Marin Dvor had commis-sioned them, and only a handful were built. However, in this case, the Mojmilo Olympic Village for Sarajevo represented source of income, a resolution to the housing crisis, and a basis economic power. Sarajevo a prime contender within the global market of winter resorts. The design of the village nevertheless, could be one that fitted into any European city at the time. This can be visualised by simply comparing the Olympic village to a housing complex in Western Eu-rope completed around the same time. For example, the Red Rose flats in Glasgow-built in 1970, shares a stark resemblance to Mojmilo, with the shared use of build-ing height, style, coloured facades and win-dow design.1 The nationalism of the nation seemed to dictate that Yugoslavia was de-signing buildings to fit in with the on-going Western trends.

Distancing the architecture from Soviet structures emphasised the global non-aligned movement, which Marshall Tito cre-ated for Yugoslavia. The Olympic Village resembled Western European architecture, with Western influences, rather than harsh Soviet structures. Although, Yugoslavia was proud to be a communist state, it never al-lowed itself to be part of a Soviet regime and very much distanced itself from the So-viet Bloc, and the architecture was a way to express this.2 Western trends at the time included the use of open balconies, which allowed a means of escape from the en-closed interior towards a view of the city-scape; however in the case of Mojmilo Vil-lage all of the balconies faced one another which suggested the term of community and togetherness, which Yugoslavia always portrayed amongst its people. The Brutalist structures were all situated closely together and due to the height of the structures, cre-ated a very dominating stance in the city landscape, which is still visible today.

18 John. R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (Oxon, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis ltd. 2007), p.182.19 Robert.J.Donia, p. 264.

Mojmilo housing complex dominating the Sarajevo landscape.

Erecting such a grand housing complex in the city was an expression of the nation and the desire to be perceived powerful. At this point in history this was the global norm. This could suggest the choice of the facade colours.Red and blue were patriotic colours; they were a symbol of Yugoslavia. Yugo-slavs never described themselves as a de-veloping country but instead wanted to be perceived as a growing economy. While it was also known that ethnic tensions were arising in the country especially with the re-cent death of Marshall Tito, the politicians at the time tried to show unity and put on a united front for the sake of the games and investing in the area depicted togetherness and solidarity.

Holiday Inn

The Holiday Inn was built to house athletes, politicians and journalists. It was envisaged as an upmarket, modern and state of the art hotel for Sarajevo. It was also representa-tive of the Western world as the Holiday Inn was a recognised American brand. This was an example of Yugoslavia permitting the idea of globalization in the region, and approving Western Influences. However, the finalised structure caused an outcry all over Yugoslavia.

The choice of colours for the facade differed greatly from the mixture of the Brutalist, Neo Byzantine and Post-Modernist structures al-ready developed in Sarajevo (Figure Four). One could assume that it symbolised the Soviet regime as it was similar to the Len-ingrad Hotel built for the Olympic Games in Moscow four years prior.3 Holiday Inn may have been a globally recognised brand, however at Mojmilo village the architecture was not Western. It was something that Yu-goslavia could not stand for. It did not reflect the Western trends at the time but it also did not represent the non-aligned agreement of Marshal Tito. It was not associate itself with anything in the city nor were there refer-ences to the national colours, and for this reason it was not part of the brotherhood. Most importantly it was not an authoritative representation of the country.

20 Y. Korshak, Leningrad. To the Olympic games 1980, [n.d]http://www.enlight.ru/camera/olymp_1980/index_e.html[Accessed 20 February 2015].

36

Had the building been left in its natural form, the purity of the materials may have been better suited; however, the yellow and brown mixture of colours seemed to visually weaken it. For many in Yugoslavia, Nation-alism expressed in this way was confusing and odd, especially as it was designed by Yugoslav architect, Ivan Straus. The build-ing was not aesthetically pleasing. The Na-tionals critiqued the facade as a joke’1 on the people of Sarajevo.

The Holiday Inn may have been the focus of the backdrop for the media. Nevertheless, despite the outcry the Yugoslavs exhibited against it they never demanded its removal. This was because Yugoslavia wanted to fin-ish the planned structures on time. Yugo-slavia did not demand it to be taken down because for them it was always crucial to be perceived unified, and omitting the build-ing would suggest weakness to the design. Weakness was not an option in Yugosla-via at the time especially as the world was watching.

The Zetra Olympic Hall

Unlike the Holiday Inn that was constructed in downtown Sarajevo, the Zetra Olympic Hall was one that was favoured by the citi-zens of Sarajevo. 2 It was a structure that the Yugoslavs were very proud of and wanted to cast the spotlight on (Figure Six). Sara-jevo at the time needed a structure to hold such sporting facilities. It needed an indoor ice rink to train the future Olympians.3 It re-quired a stadium that could compete with Western facilities, one that was equal to if not better than the predecessor in New York in 1980. It was the largest of the structures to be created for the Olympic Games, with a size of over 16,000m2. The complex cre-ated state of the art facilities, including a new hockey rink, a gym, dance halls and even bowling alleys.4

The Zetra Olympic Hall needed to be de-duced as efficacious, one that was modern and the finished design portrayed this. The structure combined steel, concrete and cop-per, the first of its kind for Sarajevo. The copper emphasised the fact that this building

21 Kenneth Morrison, ‘Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn: Eventful past of historic hotel’, The BBC,(02/11/13) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24730400[Accessed 14 February 2015].22 Robert.J.Donia, p. 264.23 John E. Findling, p.381-384.24 ZimskeOlimpiade 84, Olimpiski Complex Zetra, (30 12 2015), http://www.zoi84.ba/wp/[Accessed 27 January 2015].

was here to stay. The copper roof could al-low the building structure to last up to a hun-dred years.5 This, however, would not come to pass as the Zetra was heavily bombed in the Bosnian War seven years later, and the roof was not salvageable.6 The angled roof provided the structure with a post-modern style, unlike the Holiday Inn, and worked well within its rural surroundings. Located right next to the refurbished Kosovo Sta-dium, the structure was portrayed as a key feature of the Olympic Games.7 The mod-ern roof techniques highlighted the cities growing construction processes and pushed through the post-modern style. It provided world-class facilities, and allowed the city to be the host of future sporting competitions. The triangular roofed building was visible all over Sarajevo as it was also lit in the even-ing. The triangular structure could be seen as a symbolic statement as it did not reflect any particular religion in the region but was neutral, everything the non-aligned move-ment and Marshall Tito stood for. The trian-gle is also representational as it is classed as the strongest form of construction, and figuratively could have suggested that if the Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholics stuck together then they would be more for-midable.

Zetra portrayed Yugoslavia in a positive light. Yugoslavia was different from the Eastern Bloc, its political structure may have been socialist, however the people and citi-zens in the country lived like Westerners. The non-alignment was a global trend. It permitted Yugoslavian traits that communist countries had not experienced before. The materials chosen for the project highlighted the importance and the reasoning behind them. The design was also commissioned so winter indoor concerts could be staged, not only for Yugoslavian acts, but also for Western acts.8 Cities in Yugoslavia such as Zagreb and Belgrade already had estab-lished premises. It was putting Sarajevo on the map with improved facilities, uniting the growing ethnic divide, and different views on Nationalism. Also, by erecting a modern-ist structure, the Zetra personified ‘Brother-hood and Unity’.

25 NnamdiAnyadike, Copper: A Material for the New Millennium (Cambrigde: Woodhead Publishing, 2002), p.103.<https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V5GkAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA103&dq=copper+roofs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_iHyVJ_vDeSC7gbLs4DYDw&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=copper%20roofs&f=false>[Accessed 27/02/2015].26 ZimskeOlimpiade, p.7.27 Robert.J.Donia, p.246.28 ZimskeOlimpiade, p.7.

37

National Television Building

The national radio and television building when built was an iconic structure for Sa-rajevo (Figure Seven). Built in a Brutalist form, the vigorous structure was created from pre-cast concrete blocks; lead lined with steel armour in the façade.1 From Tito’s standoff with Stalin, the fear was always there that one could attack and declare war. Being part on the Non Aligned agreement did not necessarily grant immunity from at-tack. Milan Kusan and Branko Bolic, the ar-chitects of the design were provided with a brief; the mission to create a structure powerful enough to withstand any possible attack, and so they did. The armour in the facade was intentionally applied as a pri-mary defence mechanism. If a bullet is fired into the structure it does minimal damage to the building. This was unfortunately proven otherwise seven years later, when the Serb forces fired upon the building in the Bosnian war in the 1990’s.2 However, at the time, the Brutalist structure was the epitome of modernism for Yugoslavia.

The architectural expression in Yugosla-via at the time was very much inspired by structures, which had already been initiated across Western Europe. However, what dif-ferentiated Yugoslavia from Western Europe was its socialist way of life, and the need to defend itself. Being a television and radio headquarters for the city, the building was created in the long run to house all domestic television and radio stations, and new tech-nology provided them with state of the art equipment. Having all communicational in-dustries under one roof it was important for Yugoslavia to protect its nationals; should there be an attack on the country, Sarajevo could have still broadcast to its people and the rest of the world.

In scrutinising the design, one immediate-ly notices the facade. It can be assumed that the small windows were used to al-low daylight to filter in; however, with the facade looking directly at the mountains it can also be an easy access should an attack be implemented.3 This explains the design of the balconies. Balconies allow a means of escape, refuge and camouflage for a response attack. The building typol-ogy was also a power stance, epitomising

29 Robert.J.Donia, p.247.30 Robert.J.Donia, p.323.31 Robert.J.Donia, p.247.

the safety of Sarajevo. For the use of the Olympics, knowing that the World’s journal-ists and broadcasting teams were going to be housed here, the Olympics had to have safety in mind; another reason behind the design of such an iconic and strong struc-ture. Surely if the Winter Olympics went without a hitch, then the rise of tourism in the area would be imminent? This is what Yugoslavia desperately needed.

The building was also iconic as it was not located in the Ottoman and Austria-Hungar-ian quarters where most of Sarajevo’s busi-ness headquarters were housed; instead it was located amongst the newly formed Yu-goslavian area of the city. The building was also a representation of the battle within Yugoslavia. The country at this point was disordered as it was battling Tito’s historical legacy and the modern world.

To conclude, we now know the staging of the Olympic Games was set in a gospel of flawed political involvement, growing views of nationalism and globalised influences. While ethnic tensions were arising in the country, the Olympic Games were staged in hope of unifying the people, and the ar-chitecture attempted to express this. It was also an attempt of a communist country to compete with Western global architec-ture trends at the time. It was a vindication to the dysfunctional political system. The structures themselves were mostly influ-enced by Western sources. However, the political cracks of Yugoslavia were begin-ning to show, and Yugoslavia’s response was to articulate an architectural vision in order remind the nation along with the rest of the world what ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ stood for.

This essay has attempted to show the rea-soning behind the architectural designs. The National Television Headquarters was built to advertise the strength of the country, and portray the grand defence mechanism and equipment that Yugoslavia enclosed. The Zetra Arena was inspired by Western influences and the technology behind the structure was to showcase to the world that Yugoslavian architecture was very much a part of the West. Yugoslavia may have been considered a developing country, however, they were not going to be willingly charac-terised this way.

38

The Holiday Inn hotel was the structure that was regarded as an intruder. The façade colours were ill advised. The design of the structure had nothing to do with the past heritage of Sarajevo nor was it reflected as Yugoslavian. The nation detested it, it was portrayed as a traitor and struggled to il-lustrate the positive effects it would have on the city post Olympics. Mojmilo Olym-pic Village on the contrary was warmly wel-comed. The design was one that could fea-ture in any Western city at the time. The use of the light red and blue on the building fa-cades was patriotic and Yugoslavian. It was an answer not only for the demand of social housing but was a hope for the future. The long-term plans were a vision formore jobs, financial security and the community spirit, which would symbolise the long legacy of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ that at the time was steadily declining.

IMRE AZEM – ‘’EKUMENOPOLIS’’

41

Ekumenopolis: City without limits - Docu-mentary film about Istanbul directed by Imre Azem.

Ecumenopolis is a word invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxi-adis to represent the idea that in the fu-ture urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous worldwide city as a progression from the current urbanization and popula-tion growth trends. The neoliberal trans-formation that swept through the world economy during the 1980’s, and along with it the globalization process that picked up speed, brought with it a deep transforma-tion in cities all over the world. For this new finance-centered economic structure, urban land became a tool for capital accumulation, which had deep effects on major cities of developing countries. In Istanbul, which al-ready lacked a tradition of principled plan-ning, the administrators of the city blindly adopted the neoliberal approach that put fi-nancial gain ahead of people’s needs; eve-ryone fought to get a piece of the loot; and the result is a megashanty town of 15 mil-lion struggling with mesh of life-threatening problems. Especially in the past 10 years, as the World Bank foresaw in its reports, Istanbul has been changing from an indus-trial city to a finance and service-centered city, competing with other world cities for investment. Making Istanbul attractive for investors requires not only the abolishment of legal controls that look out for the public good, but also a parallel transformation of the users of the city. This means that the working class who actually built the city as an industrial center no longer have a place in the new consumption-centered finance and service city. So what is planned for these people? This is where the “urban renewal” projects come into play. Armed with new powers never before imagined, TOKI (State Housing Administration), together with the municipalities and private investors, are try-ing to reshape the urban landscape in this new vision. With international capital behind them, land plans in their hands, square me-ters and building coefficients in their minds, they are demolishing neighbourhoods, and instead building skyscrapers, highways and shopping malls. But who do these new spaces serve? The huge gap between the rich and the poor in Istanbul is reflected more and more in the urban landscape, and at the same time feeds on the spatial segre-

gation. While the rich isolate themselves in gated communities, residences and plazas; new poverty cycles born in social housing communities on the prifery of the city de-signed as human depots continue to push millions to desperation and hopelessness. So who is responsible for this social legacy that we are leaving for future generations? While billions of dollars are wasted on new road tunnels, junctions, and viaducts with a complete disregard for the scientific fact that all new roads eventually create their own traffic, Istanbul in 2010 has to con-tend with a single-line eight-station metro “system”. Due to insufficient budget alloca-tions for mass public transportation, rail and other alternative transport systems, millions of people are tormented in traffic, and bil-lions of dollars’ worth of time go out the ex-haust pipe. What do our administrators do? You guessed right: more roads! Everything changes so fast in this city of 15 million that it is impossible to even take a snap-shot for planning. Plans are outdated even as they are being made. . A chronic case of plan-lessness. Meanwhile, the population keeps increasing and the city expands uncontrolla-bly pushing up against Tekirdag in the east and Kocaeli in the west. But does Istanbul really have a plan? In 1980 the first plan for Istanbul on a metropolitan scale was pro-duced. In that plan report, it is noted that the topography and the geographic nature of the city would only support a maximum population of 5 million. At the time, Istanbul had 3.5 million people living in it. Now we are 15 million, and in 15 years we will be 23 million. Almost 5 times the sustainable size. Today we bring water to Istanbul from as far away as Bolu, and suck-up the entire water in Thrace, destroying the natural en-vironment there. The northern forest areas disappear at a rapid pace, and the project for a 3rd bridge over the Bosphorous is threatening the remaining forests and water reservoirs giving life to Istanbul.

42

The bridges that connect the two continents are segregating our society through the ur-ban land speculation that they trigger. So what are we, the people of Istanbul, doing against this pillage? If cities are a reflec-tion of the society, what can we say about ourselves by looking at Istanbul? What kind of city are we leaving behind for future generations? Ecological limits have been surpassed. Economic limits have been sur-passed. Population limits have been sur-passed. Social cohesion has been lost. Here is the picture of neoliberal urbanism: Ecu-menopolis. Ecumenopolis aims for a holistic approach to Istanbul, questioning not only the transformation, but the dynamics behind it as well. From demolished shantytowns to the tops of skyscrapers, from the depths of Marmaray to the alternative routes of the 3rd bridge, from real estate investors to ur-ban opposition, the film will take us on a long journey in this city without limits. We will speak with experts, academics, writ-ers, investors, city-dwellers, and community leaders; and we will take a look at the city on a macro level through animated maps and graphics. Perhaps you will rediscover the city that you live in and we hope that you will not sit back and watch this trans-formation but question it. In the end this is what democracy requires of us.

44

Interview with Imre Azem, director of Ecumenopolis.

Anna Chorzepa - Taking for consideration your background what is your personal defi-nition and expectation of ecumenopolis?

Imre Azem - Ecumenopolis is a dystopia: the hypothetical concept of a planet wide city. The word was invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolis would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous worldwide city. In the documentary we use it to identify the growth of Istanbul in a way that will eventually engulf the cities around it. Today if you travel to Tekirdag in the west or to Kocaeli in the east, you can see that there are no more empty spaces. All along the highways that connect these cities are developments: either industrial, commercial or residential.

AC - The global cities are developing very rapidly and in that respect what would you say has changed in Istanbul since you have made your movie?

IA - Many things actually. When we made the film, the 3rd airport project was not an-nounced yet. Neither was the famous canal project, linking the Black Sea to the Mar-mara Sea. A second Bosphorous of some sort. Another major development was the “disaster law” passed in 2012. Before this law, urban transformation was justified based on three existing law under the ju-risdiction of the municipalities: prevention of informal housing; urban renewal; and the protection of cultural and historic areas. For example Sulukule, the 1000 year-old gyp-sy neighbourhood, was demolished based on this last one. But the court cases that were against the transformation projects based on these laws really slowed things down, which made the transformation of larger areas almost impossible. So in 2012, right after the big earthquake in Van prov-ince in eastern Turkey where 600 people died and thousands were injured, the AKP government seized the opportunity to pass the “disaster law”. The new law calls for the transformation of areas or buildings that are under “disaster risk”. The new law central-izes the authority of urban transformation, hence the rent, in the central government. It

also makes it much harder for people living in those areas to object to the decisions of the government in courts. While all this is happening, opposition against these practices has also grown since we make Ecumenopolis. The neigh-bourhoods under threat of demolition are getting organized and learning from each other’s experiences. They are also coming together under an umbrella group to wage a unified struggle to save their neighbour-hoods. They are demanding to be allowed to renew their own houses instead of a costly demolition and rebuilding process that ends up displacing them. Since the Gezi protests, a lot more people, especially the younger generation, have shown an acute awareness of their “right-to-the-city”, organizing into neighbourhood forums to protect their living spaces, parks, and public areas from turning into shopping malls, mosques, or hotels. The Northern Forests Defence group also was born out of these neighbourhood forums. The “urban” issues are clearly moving to the centre of the political debate, which is a very positive sign for the future of our democracy.

AC - In the movie a lot of people have raised the big issue of there being no right to shelter in Istanbul and the rich develop-ers destroy the poor areas of the city and initially leave them homeless to then con-tinue with building the concrete, uninhabited forest. During your research did you man-age to discover any solutions for the poor community?

IA - Right to affordable housing is a fun-damental human right, but it is insepara-ble from other social rights such as right to free healthcare, right to free education, right to a healthy environment, right to a secure employment. It is not possible to solve the problem of housing detached from all other issues. If you do not solve the more fun-damental issues of exploitation, equal op-portunity, discrimination, etc. it will not be possible to solve individual problems. “Af-fordable housing” has little meaning when you have a 300 EUR minimum wage where the hunger level for a family of four is 500 EUR.

45

AC - With this reality would you say there is a way for Istanbul to stay a global city and at the same time have consideration for lo-cal issues?

IA - If by “global city” we mean the attracting of capital, then it is clear that this comes at the expense of the rights of the local pop-ulations. When capital comes to a city, it comes not to make the lives of the people better, but to make a profit. This is not me saying this, but also the expert speakers at MIPIM, the world’s biggest real estate fair held every year in Cannes, France. We were there to film for our upcoming documentary, and they clearly do not hide their expecta-tion that cities are run like businesses. In such a city, we can no longer speak of “citizens” with rights, but rather of “consum-ers” with tastes. Cities are becoming more and more like places of consumption, huge open-air shopping malls. When David Har-vey speaks of right-to-the-city as an inclu-sive idea, he also stresses that it must ex-clude “capital”, because when capital enters the city as a force that shapes the city, it overrides all the needs and desires of the citizens. It always wants to dominate the planning process, and most often succeeds.

AC - The relationship between a mayor of the city and architects is very important be-cause they can make him aware of the so-cial issues caused by the architecture and new developments.

IA - There are of course of architects who have sold their skills in exchange for high financial returns. They do not question the ethics of the projects they undertake. Does it displace people? Does it unfairly disad-vantage a population, or privatize a previ-ously public space? A good example is the the Dalieh of Raoucheh project in Beirut by Rem Koolhaas. We have many of this kind of architects here in Istanbul, and I do not doubt that they have great relations with Kadir Topbas, the mayor. However with no MIPIM awards to show for themselves, another group of architects play a much more important role for the fu-ture of Istanbul: the Chamber of Architects. Composed of progressive architects who have dedicated themselves to the protec-tion of what is left of Istanbul’s history and culture, the Chamber has really been at the forefront in the struggle for the advance-ment of the public interest. For example

the Chamber of Architects had founded the Taksim Solidarity in February 2012, which spearheaded the Gezi Park protests a year and a half later.I must say that in the current polarized po-litical climate in Turkey, where construction and urban issues are at the focus of the political fight, it is not the best time to be a socially conscious architect here.

AC - With the majority of the most recent in-vestments in Istanbul it seems that they are destroying the culture of this areas but a lot of the politicians talk about the city becom-ing the cultural centre?

IA - During the 4 days we spent at MIPIM, we attended many panels, talks, etc. about Istanbul, and how great it is for investment. It seems that this cliché of Istanbul being the “bridge of cultures” will always be the top marketing point. Of course the irony is that the multi-layered culture that they are exploiting to market Istanbul to investors and developers is being destroyed by the projects that they build or invest in. For cul-ture to flourish, one must invest in people, not buildings. The sad thing is that, in the future it might be possible to bring back na-ture by rehabilitating developed areas, but once culture, history, the collective memory of a city is lost, it is not possible to ever bring it back. We must also not miss yet another irony in this phenomena: those who destroy the cultural and historic heritage of Istanbul (or Turkey in general) are the peo-ple who call themselves “conservative”.

46

AC - Could you please reveal some more information about your new project that talks about the money that fuels this system in Istanbul?

IA - In the new project we will attempt to show the mechanisms through which for-eign and domestic capital shape our cit-ies, our living spaces and our lives. We will again focus on Istanbul as an example, because we live here, but also looking at other examples from around the world. In Germany you have a handful of huge real-estate companies that own 1 million homes; in Stockholm you have a car lobby that spends millions of dollars lobbying for high-ways and opposing bike lanes. An inves-tor in Wall Street may not even be aware that the money he puts into a hedge fund ultimately finances the bulldozing of a poor family’s house. Basically, we will do the old-est trick in the book: follow the money, and see where that leads us.

You can find more information on the movie and watch the trailer here: www.ekumenopolis.net

KALIOPE KONTOZOGLOU AND NIGEL WESTBROOK – ‘’RETURNING TO ATHENS AND URBANISM OF NEGOTIATION -ATHENS 2015’’

48

Returning to AthensNigel Westbrook Kalliope Kontozoglou

A spider conducts operations that resem-ble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construc-tion of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his struc-ture in imagination before he erects it in reality.1

2008. An international economic collapse had come close to the shores of isolated Australia without causing a recession. But in Southern Europe, the situation was dis-astrous. In Athens, the evidence was all too apparent- unfinished buildings boarded up and abandoned. Streets of empty shop fronts. Graffiti and vandalism everywhere. So what role could architecture take in this new situation. In retrospect, architects had been all too complicit in an orgy of prop-erty speculation. In Athens, the driver had been the 2004 Olympics – while interna-tional star architects had been brought in to project a new image for the city: Calatrava designing a stadium and bridge, Tschumi completing the new Acropolis Museum, new buildings had appeared all over the city, a process fuelled by cheap credit. But under the new disposition, there was almost noth-ing under construction. Central Syntagma Square in 2013 was being deconstructed – stone paving had been broken up and used as a weapon by rioters. So what could be the new role for architects? 2008 raised the uncomfortable question of whether ar-chitects could avoid being implicated in an economic system of speculation, waste and useless consumption. Questions of style and form bacame reunderstood as imbri-cated within the processes of commercial branding. Tafuri had, after a similar eco-nomic collapse – the 1973 oil crisis – pro-nounced that „The search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms.”2

1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production Vol. I – Part I, (1867; this edition N.Y.: Cosimo 1997) 1982 M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Devel-opment (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1976) 181.

Or more elegantly, as he later put it: „we pass from the object itself to the system that gives meaning to it.”3

Une architecture autre? The history of such attempts to escape the contamination of the real – from the dérive of the Situa-tioniste Internationale, the opium dreams of Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom to the graphical utopias of Raimund Abraham and Massimo Scolari leads us to conclude that this ambition can only be achieved within the visionary, the dream-like state of suspension of reality, in fact from within a mode of thinking that is in essence cinemat-ic. And again it was Tafuri who placed the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in a central position within his discussion of the histori-cal ‘Project’ in which fragments are put into motion within an explosive montage. Ben-jamin famously argued that the reproduced image exemplified by the cinematic narra-tive had stripped art of its aura, as cult ob-ject, reducing it to ‘exhibition value’. 4 If the historical project is work directed toward the laying bare and demystifying of historical processes and the production of material culture then, as Adorno argued, it is the im-age as the dis-illusioned artwork, indexical of the process of economic exchange, and as fragment, that is resistent to the nihilistic and totalizing process of this exchange.5 It was out of this desire for an architecture as critical fragment, simultaneously both uto-pian and without illusion that we conceived of the idea of a series of design workshops in Athens, in which neither we, nor the stu-dent participants, came equipped with the answers.

3 M. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir’, Oppositions 3 (1974) reprinted in M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-gardes and Ar-chitecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) 284.4 W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-duction.” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 217-251at 239.5 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1994) 87.

49

These workshops were to go beyond both the usual picturesque or touristic consump-tion of the exotic, and a fetishistic preoc-cupation with urban disaster and decay, and instead instil a confrontation with the multilayered and complex city in a state not just of of crisis, but also of rapid change. They were to pose the questions of what tools the architect could bring to a creative encounter with the city, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and the too-obvious futility of formalist obsessions. Indeed Athens has been the subject – willing or otherwise – of several recent research projects. Perhaps the most profound investigation was under-taken by Yiorgos Simeoforides who asked, before the 2004 Olympics:

What about the homeless castaways of globalization? The refugees of dismantled socialism? Cumbersome infrastructure? The reuse of abandoned industrialization? Our degraded and forsaken peripheries? Public spaces, swallowed up by privatized video monitors?1

More recently, the neo-rationalist Pier Vitto-rio Aureli with Elia Zenghelis, Maria Guidici and Platon Issaias in 2010-11 ran a stu-dio for the Berlage Institute on the generic Athenian apartment house, the polyka-toikoia, on the premise of the interrelation „...between the nature of labour, the generic in architecture, and the appropriation of this generic aspect of the city as a common space’.2 Reading the post-war proliferation of the polykatoikoia as a form of ideological-ly driven anti-leftist policy directed towards the political pacification of the population, the studio tutors, and Aureli in particular, sought to „... to expose the generic nature of the polykatoikoia, while recovering the architecture of the city beyond the pixel of the single dwelling. Instead of a master plan we propose a catalogue of architectural ac-tions that aim to connect the fragmented dwellings into coherent and formally finite collective urban forms. These forms are the courtyard, the block, the street, and the most collective layer of the city: the ground floor.”3

6 Y. Simeoforides, in Stefano Boeri & Yorgos Simeoforidis, “Why Research? (Answers to Yorgos)”, in Jennifer Sigler (ed.), Hunch 6/7, (The Berlage Institue Report), summer 2003, pp. 99-104, cited by Hilda Heynan, ‘Utopia, Critique And Contemporary Discourse’. http://mimarikritik.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/utopia-critique-and-contemporary.html7 P. V. Aureli, ‘Dalla Dom-ino alla Polykatoikia [From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia]’, Domus 962 (October 2012) 74-87.8 P. V. Aureli, ‘Dalla Dom-ino alla Polykatoikia (2102) 85.

This breathtaking utopianism would seem to fly in the face of Tafuri’s call to abandon the illusion that „...by means of the image alone, tries to anticipate the conditions of an architecture ‚for a liberated society’”.4 Finally, the Greek multi-disciplinary collec-tive SARCHA, organized by Dr. Maria The-odorou, has attempted a bottom-up form of anarchist urban action, based upon de-tailed interviews and mapping of the ways in which the Greek cities of Athens and Thes-salonica are actually inhabited.5 In particu-lar, their study of the inner-city market dis-trict of Gerani formed the research basis for our first studio in 2013. To their sociological and political activist perspective, we added a desire to explore the condition of imma-nence pervading this city in a state of crisis and becoming, to explore the particularities of this specific ‚exploding montage’. Signifi-cantly, the outcomes had to be unpredict-able. Rather than allowing an image of the city, real or imagined, to predominate over its social space, we attempted the inverse. For precedents, we turned to the example of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and to the fragmentary urban imaginings of Lou-is Aragon’s Paris Peasant.

9 M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (1975) 179.10 M. Theodorou-SARCHA, ΠολήΚοινόςΠορός – City-Common Resource, Athens 2010.

50

Cunningham notes:

The obsolescent remnants of an earlier form of commodity capitalism were an un-bidden spatial unconscious. Thus, “when the pickaxe menaces them” the arcades suggest to Aragon that “Future mysteries will arise from the ruins of todays” and the ephemeral decomposition of commodi-fied space becomes evident. „Progress” for Surrealists such as Aragon was al-ready undercut and outmoded without the intercession of a mythical nature.1

This idea of the past that resurfaces as a memory that flashes up momentarily at a moment of crisis may be juxtaposed with that of the citation or trace of the past within a new construct. This contrast between the past as a fleeting image and the past given new agency through citation may go towards explaining the operation of image and the experience of imageability in projects that appear to embody contnuity – both the frag-mentary projects of Pikionis, and the social housing projects by Siza in Portugal. Here ‚image’ acquires a ‚thickness’, qualitatively different from the contemporary theoriza-tion of cultural mediatization and estrange-ment. Image as citation or trace entails the construction of place through recollection of fragment, through the exploding montage of fragments. Rather than attempting to im-pose a semblance of formal unity upon this montage, it is proposed that a close reading of the social and physical fabric of a terri-tory, understood through traversing a ter-ritory, recording significant traces of urban artefacts, the historical stratigraphy of build-ings, topography and spatial practices, may form the basis for a contingent sense of place through which the broader complexity of the city – its memory, identity and laten-cies – may be apprehended. Athens, un-like ancient ruined cities, or the modern-day ruin of Detroit, is persisting in the face of, in spite of, its abandonment by international capital, is reforming itself into another con-dition, another economy, as had Aragon’s Paris.

So – a workshop for architecture students – students who are foreign to Greece and Athens, who, for the most part, misunder-

11 Louis Aragon, Trans: S.W. Taylor, Paris Peasant, (UK: Picador, 1987); Walter Benjamin, Trans: Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Arcades Project, (Cambridge (USA)/ London (UK): Belknap Press/ Har-vard University Press, 1999). John Cunningham, ‘Boredom in the Charnel House. Theses on ‘Post-industrial’ Ruins’, Variant 42 (2011) 18-21 at 21.

stand the contexts they are placed in, who react instinctively to the confronting images that everyday life throws up – office build-ings with openings bricked up and turned into doss-houses for illegal immigrants, Chinese wholesale ‚shops’ that appear to be fronts for activities rather more sinister, an explosive increase in drug addiction on the streets – no longer concealed beneath a facade of respectability. But they also encounter a city where people inhabit the street as an extension of their private world, where moments of richness and authenticity may be discovered everywhere – a vibrant city that is both modern and incredibly an-cient. We set them the task of mapping this city as a modern-day Marco Polo. We set out, as cartographers, to explore a complex entity. Our desire was to extract a personal narrative that was to be communicated in words, images and drawings – individual and group narratives/journeys in 2 and 3 dimensions. Rather than representing an existing linear geographical composition, these mappings were to reveal latencies, traces, qualities potentials for intervention.

We took a multi-layered approach, embrac-ing both pragmatic, as well as the more in-tangible aspects. Students navigated into unknown territories, speculated on poten-tial correspondences and relationships, and formed connections across cultural and physical distances. We were interested in the idea of a true sustainability – recapturing and sustaining a sense of wonderment and flow of possibilities within an architectural framing of the world. This was approached through an obsessive and focused map-ping, tracing and observation of particular places, both known and unknown.

Within the projects, spaces were inscribed with events, out of which a sense of the particular and specific emerged. Students were immersed in talks by architects, so-cial activists, local students and archaeolo-gists, bringing their diverse perspectives on the complex problems of Athens. We intro-duced them to theories of Psychogeography developed by the French Situationists, and to the profound strangeness of Tarkovs-ky’s surrealist films, notably Stalker, which evoked a landscape of wonderment out of the ruins of the recent past, and a dreamlike sense of imminent revelation, that resonat-ed strangely and profoundly with the experi-ence of Athens.

51

But why, in the end Athens? It is not on the surface of things a great European modern-ist capital – a cultural centre, but nowadays is on the periphery. Something of the rea-son lies in notes the late Yiorgos Simeo-forides wrote for our first exhibition, which took place in January 1997. It is worth citing them in full:

In recent years, I seem to have been spending more and more time giving friends guided tours round Athens. These tours started out simply enough, and quite by chance, but they have turned out into something of a permanent concern and occupation. I was astonished to note that my initial walks around the city, without any predetermined plan, had begun to repeat themselves and to form one, or perhaps two, repetitive itineraries that are not found in any book on the architectural history of Athens (not that there are any books, in any case) or in any tourist guide. Those are driftings of my own through the space of the city and among its buildings, forming a mesh of places and stories without any visible links...

[He proceeds to list a group of these build-ings and sites...]

I have often wondered what is that links these buildings; what secret thread am I following along this itinerary - an itiner-ary which could best be described as paradoxical and heterogeneous, avoid-ing anything neo-Classical while focusing on the modern both in isolated examples (Zenetos’ vision of an open society, the introverted cosmopolitanism of the Hil-ton, the multifunctional robustness of the quasi-Classical Army Share Fund -the only building in the heart of Athens to oc-cupy an entire block-, Konstantinidis’ ethi-cal rationality and the fierce beauty of the electricity sub-station in terms of its mate-rials) and units of buildings (such as the pre-war residences of the Patisia district, with their superb details in iron, the spa-cious entrance halls of the Sixties’ apart-ment blocks, the penthouse balconies with trees growing in miniature gardens). The truth of the matter is that there is no easy answer.

Drifting in the city does not obey, is not subject to, the chronological and histori-cal periods into which history has been

fragmented. It is in fact a living experi-ence within the body of the city, where all the signs are recorded. The description of a city entails a travel in time, not space, as Benjamin would say. It is a journey over a distance through the lost time of the city, where our eyes are those of both the adult and the child as we search for glimpses of the primordial shock and following a laby-rinthine course in search of the untried. The lost thread that unites all these itin-eraries, that perhaps, is the object of the quest of the modern (regardless of style): multi-habitation, collective education, mixed uses urban blocks, introverted oa-ses of public space, the quality of the un-finished, elementary architecture; the lost metropolis. If the debate in art lies some-where between arte povera and minimal art, this repeated itinerary (itself a para-dox) walks a tightrope between differing sensibilities and alludes to a new mode of organising knowledge in the mind of the traveller/ architect.

53

URBANISM OF NEGOTIATIONATHENS 2015

Interview with Nigel Westbrook from UWA and Architect Kalliope Kontozoglou dur-ing the Athens Studio 2015 for UWA and Leicester School of Architecture students.

Anna Chorzepa- How did you start the Ath-ens Studio?

Kalliope Kontozoglou- Back in 1993, I was teaching at this stage and away for a semester, I obviously lost a lot of jobs be-cause I was away, When I came back Nigel said, why don’t you come over to us as well, I said you must be joking, bring the students over and I was joking, and he said ok, I’ll do that. And he did

Nigel Westbrook- That is true. You’ve al-ways had several overseas studios prior to that, one was in an Italian hill town in the middle of winter which was a disaster and I think there where one or two others that had been organised, basically it was connected, the people who come from the AA, quite a few people where in our faculty at the time, wanted to perpetuate the AA pattern of vis-iting studios that visit sites, so this was kind of following in that pattern, but clearly it was making use of the fact that in Athens unlike most places, it would be possible to stay for a longer period of time, reasonably eco-nomically and logistically, the big coup was to form a connection to this place that it was this nice mesh, archaeological institutes ba-sically just die during the winter, they are really busy in summer, spring and autumn but they die in winter and they are all strug-gling for funds, so it was a really kind of fortuitous coincidence, these two things, putting these two things together. Since then it has grown, in our university it has grown, so we’ve had almost half a dozen studios in Milan connecting with Milan poly-technic, we’ve had one in IIT in Chicago, We’ve had one in Barcelona connecting to the Barcelona school of architecture and others in Bali and elsewhere, so it’s actually grown to become an expectation that every student will have an opportunity to have an overseas studio experience, but in a way the Athens one was the one that really took root and established the parameters for the other ones that came afterwards.

A - Was the form of this studio similar at the beginning or has it changed since then?

N- Very similar actually.

K- Yes, the first studio was actually not a very ambitious project as we were just test-ing the waters, so to speak, it was to design the new Australian architecture institute in Athens.

N- There was a wealthy benefactor, so it expands from a little office down the road and this apartment to having accommoda-tion, library and workspace.

K- The thing that even back then was am-bitious I suppose was that we didn’t have one site we had six different sites and they could choose their own site if they didn’t like those, they were all scattered around Ath-ens.

N- One was in Calamancos which was for the students and one was in (Metz? 6.20) which was a great site, there was the pol-ykatakia type site and others, there was a whole range of different sites and the other thing about that first studio, the students, there was a fine art student, there were two landscape students and there was architec-ture students ranging from second year to fifth year.

N - The other courses we run, it was a real mistake but they decided to make their courses closed to collaboration, which means they miss out but we would love to have them, I think they would add a lot.

A- I’ve heard that a lot, that it used to be more collaboration between different stu-dents from different departments.

N- Most of the projects this year, It would of been perfect to have a landscape architect collaborating because they would be bring-ing echo system, they don’t know a huge amount but they know more than architec-ture students and just the methodology they use, it would be interesting to how students from different backgrounds approach the same problem or even collaborate together.

54

A- What did you, Kaliope, think to the stu-dents from Australia at the beginning, be-cause obviously they were from a complete-ly different continent, different background, did you feel the difference?

K- Well, they got a shock, because Athens in the nineties was completely different to Athens now, so I remember they had a cul-tural shock, which forced me in the second workshop to think of an alternative way of introducing Athens, Nigel and I decided to take them to Istanbul first.

N- Which completely traumatised them.K- It was an interesting introduction because they came to Athens and they thought ‘oh my god what a civilised place’. And I got introduced to my PHD topic, so that was good.

A- Do you think that with us joining the pro-gram, the studio will grow and other univer-sities will join the program and some years down the line it will be almost a global thing?

N- Well that’s Kaliope’s big plan.

K- Yes, I had this dream, it might not come true but my ambition is to create a virtual university, a kind of post grad school of architecture that would meet every year in Athens for a project, people will come from all over the globe and friends of ours who are scattered across the world will come here and meet up again for a project and we will all collaborate.

N- it’s a long tradition of really important summer schools, although this is more of a winter school, notably the one ran in Ber-lin, which brought students from all over the place to work on projects for a period of a month or two, or even seminars that would take place once a year on a boat sailing around, so there’s a tradition of it, the great thing is that temporarily it avoids the bu-reaucracy of universities, temporarily.

A- Although we still had to write our essay here.

N- Yes, well you did, and we have to do all our feedback and meet all those hoops to jump through, but basically they can’t get at you for six weeks so you can actually run it yourself, and as long as there’s not disas-ters happening, we can basically establish

the pace of something and get students to focus on issues within a certain timeframe, which is obviously much more abbreviated back in the university context where they fall back in to the usual I’ll just leave it till two weeks before submission mentality.

K- But also it’s much more free for the stu-dents, it’s freer for us, well I’m not part of a university so I’m free anyway, but freer for the people who come here, it’s freer for the students because they can come here and do a project which is nothing like the pro-jects they do back at their school.

N- the important thing is they are actually, generally speaking, designing their own projects, most of our studies within the uni-versity context, the content is prescribed, the brief is prescribed, everyone’s doing the same project, all variations on the same project, but in this case you are actually designing your own project, you are com-ing up with your own brief, which is partly a response to a site and is partly a response to a whole load of stuff that is thrown at you, for us that’s an experience that only the top scoring honour students get in their final semester, so here we have students who are in their third year, fourth year or fifth year getting to design their own brief let alone their own project, that’s kind of a rare experience.

A- Nigel, do you notice any change from the students after they come back from this trip?

N- Well yes, there are the students who come back to Athens and there have been a few of those, there are the students who before the studio I would classify as strug-glers to put it mildly, who discover things they are capable of doing in this context, maybe they didn’t necessarily produce a ground-breaking design but afterwards they are able to work independently and they ei-ther end up as teachers or a number of them have become independent architects, one of the most talented ones actually ended up running a restaurant, but it encourages you to think for yourself and work independently and it definitely changes some of the stu-dents from maybe confused and apathetic to quite focused.

55

A- Was that a Greek restaurant that the stu-dent opened?

N- No it was a Chinese restaurant,

A- Oh ok, I thought maybe she was inspired by Greek food.

N- No, she was inspired by her boyfriend.

A- After the presentation from Yannis Ae-sopos about the Greek Biennale, when we were saying you can’t really tell which projects are from the Greeks or from other nationalities, do you think if the Greek stu-dents were to join us in the studio you could see the difference between our work?

N- I think you would certainly see, well it depends, when you say Greek students, if they were Greek students from an American university or from the AA or from the Bartlet, you would have a very fruitful interchange, having Greek students from a government university with a very prescribed program, I think you would get an indication of how prescribed it is, how structured, I think they would struggle quite frankly, I think they would be very good at maybe the analysis but I think working rapidly in design they would struggle to basically adapt to a differ-ent system. Do you agree?

K- Yes, the Greeks at the AA were eas-ily amongst the top students, they had a completely different way of thinking about architecture compared to the students who studied in the local system here and never left it.

A- We have a lot of Greek and Cypriot stu-dents, they are usually on top of the class as well, but they have a completely different lifestyle to the rest of the students, which seems to work.

N- Well I think this is pretty typical isn’t it, anyway just getting back to you asking about the effects of the studio on students, there was that one John who was half Greek, first off what really brought it home to him was how much Greek was in him and the other thing it convinced him to take up a full time career as a rock musician, I don’t know why but he did, produced a wonderful project and then went full time as a musician.

K- He worked in an architect’s office for a while and I think that’s where he got the schism with architecture.

N- Hopefully it wasn’t us.

A- So basically people come here to discov-er themselves and end up wanting to own restaurants or be a rock musician.

K- It sounds awful, but yes it does that, it forces them to think about the project but also to think about themselves.

YANNIS AESOPOS – ‘’LESS FORM, MORE COLLECTIVE: POST-CRISIS TOURISM INHABITATION STRATEGIES’’

60

Yannis Aeosopos ‘Less Form, More Col-lective’Post-Crisis Tourism Inhabitation Strate-gies

Assortments of Privacies

Starting in the 1970s, the process of es-tablishment of ever increasing legal limita-tions in the design of tourism inhabitation buildings and the insistent search for local identity led to the separation between ex-terior and interior. The modern, harmoni-ous coexistence of building and landscape – in certain cases through a relationship of tension– was replaced, half a century lat-er, by the amorphous layers of urbaniza-tion that, under their indifferent local (tra-ditional) garb, conceal ever more luxurious and comfortable interiors. The greater the luxury and comfort of the interiors –based on design clichés and elements extrane-ous to architecture: technological gadgets and wellness accessories– the greater the increase of their iconographical dimension that seemed to eliminate any possibility for the appearance of architectural innovation.Urbanized tourism landscapes were placed indifferently on the natural landscapes, in a process of continuous expansion, constitut-ing assemblages of interiors, assortments of privacies.Crisis The financial crisis in the end of the ’00s brought about a sudden pause in the flow of resources that were intended for the ever-increasing luxury and comfort of inte-riors.We now find ourselves at a turning point to determine a new paradigm for tourism de-velopment based on a new role of architec-ture per se. What is needed is a reformula-tion of priorities and the pathway towards the ‘less’ – in terms of both form and mate-riality. This pathway takes up a spiritual sig-nificance that outweighs the diminishment in quantitative terms.

The 15 projects for a ‘Post-Crisis Tourism Inhabitation’ that were part of the Greek participation in the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, are not ‘lost’ within the un-differentiated layer of diffused tourism ur-banization. Buildings and building structures confront the issue of their relationship to the landscape and declare their presence with confidence; they constitute large, distinctive gestures.

When their ‘concealment’ within the land-scape is chosen, it is conscious, intelligently designed. Their form is minimal, unrefined, and low-voiced – it is not traditional or ‘lo-cal’. Formal ‘retreat’ is counterbalanced by their scale. In their majority, they constitute ‘large structures’ that invent centralities and reconstruct the lost collective – they explore the space of commons.

Large Structures. The significance of econ-omy (which crisis renders obvious), the aimed-for containment of the expense and the increase of the influence of the result lead to the search for a compact building footprint seeking the avoidance of the un-considered ‘consumption’ of the landscape (the ‘economy of the landscape’) and the empowerment of the collective. Compact-ness gathers, creates ‘condensers’, produc-es collectivities.

Without any openings on its elevations, the large, projecting ‘foundation rock’ of ‘Bed-rock’ by Bertaki/ Loukopoulou/ Paniyiris, questions the cliché of the individual, unob-structed view from the interior of the room or its veranda and ‘forces’ the coexistence of the tenants in the large roof-top or the shaded sheltered space. The extruded, ar-tificial, programmatically dense ‘landscape slice’ of ‘a hotel’ by kse studio, operates as a ‘secret condenser’ behind an exterior belt of rooms. The roof-top of ‘a hotel’ remakes the natural landscape as a collective space. The inhabitation tower of ‘as if’ by burger katsota architects is founded in the sea in order to accumulate, in a vertical coexist-ence, the entire ‘plankton of tourism urbani-zation’ of the seaside, liberating and restor-ing the (natural) landscape.The linear, 300-meters long inhabitation ‘drywall’ of ‘Con-tour’ by Tense architec-ture Network reproduces the landscape’s geometry and becomes part of it. All these large structures can be viewed as program-matically dense, distinctive, to a greater or lesser degree, large pieces of the geology of the (dry, rocky, Greek) landscape.

Large structures can be seen as infrastruc-tures (or, literally, superstructures) that pro-vide the preconditions for the appearance of new (loose) forms of co-inhabitation in na-ture. The large curvilinear canopy in ‘Veiled’ by Ilias Papageorgiou.

61

SO-IL protects from natural phenomena and allows for the inhabitation of the natural slope in a non-present manner, by an un-determined community – within it, manmade and natural elements coexist. The develop-ment of a community of campers is the aim of ‘Mechanism of Suspension. Infrastructure and Legislation for Free Camping’ by Platon Issaias, Theodossis Issaias and Alexandra Vougia.

The reversible infrastructure mechanism provides for, but also ‘displays’ the elements that make possible free inhabitation in na-ture. The ‘Mechanism’ is supported by a new legal framework that defines communal living of individuals who have repudiated all proprietary claims or rights.

Stock – Reoccupation

The prime importance of economizing leads to the realization that new structures do not represent the only choice for the creation of spaces for tourism inhabitation.On the contrary, within the logic of recy-cling, the utilization of the available ‘build-ing stock’ acquires operational value. The buildings that make up the stock appear in a variety of conditions – ruins, shut down buildings, half-finished structures, buildings that are occupied for just a few weeks every year– seeming to stand in the landscape waiting to be given a second chance.

‘The Naxos Ruin’ by Studio Angelidakis, ‘Lakonis’ by Flux Office and the ‘Landscape Preservation Camouflage’ by AZPML ‘re-occupy’ ruined buildings, which are not restored or repaired, but are used in the (ruinous) condition in which they are to be found. They are perceived as ‘frameworks for inhabitation’ of particular aesthetics, spatial organization and materiality. New uses and elements or constructions that al-low for their new, unconventional use are inserted: a large pool, tents, furniture and accessories in the ‘The Naxos Ruin’, a new water-way with small pools that leads to the different spaces for living, connecting them with the surrounding landscape in ‘Lakonis’, a new ‘natural costume’ that ‘dresses’ and ‘eliminates’ the preexisting modernist vol-ume in

‘Landscape Preservation’. ‘Landscape Preservation’ supplements the existing legal framework: the new camou-

flaged ‘arcadian dress’ provides legitimation to the illegal building stock so that, once camouflaged, it could “preserve the [pris-tine] identity of the Greek landscape”. The ‘building stock’ logic reaches its peak with the proposal ‘Greek Tourism is not in Cri-sis’ by HHF Architects. Here, the new digital possibilities of the AirBnB website applica-tions in finding tourism inhabitation any-where around the world ‘democratize’ sup-ply and demand and lead to (infinite) new personalized types of tourism inhabitation.

Nature – Irony, Spirituality, Pleasure

Landscape –as the receptacle of inhabi-tation in nature– had been an element of origination, of self-awareness. Then tourism expansion transformed the landscape, ren-dering it ever more artificial, remade.

‘The Shelters of Spengler’ by Antonas Of-fice mock the stage-like ascetic inhabita-tion in nature and its inherent sensuality, as well as its various degrees of acces-sibility to information networks – from the prefabricated wired ‘Concrete Beds’ to the unplugged ‘Bath Houses’. ‘The Shelters’ are supplemented with ready-made elements of contemporary consumerist culture: vending machines (that constitute ephemeral col-lectivities), photovoltaic panels and water barrels.

The use of ready-mades and the minimum footprint in the landscape (nearly nil, aim-ing at total reversibility) characterizes the ‘Amphibian Colony. In Ecsta-Sea’ by Zissis Kotionis. Decommissioned ferryboats are re-used in order to transport and deposit into the sea (and pick up, several months later) the enlarged orange-colored buoys-inhabitations. This way, they propose a spatially undetermined, ephemeral tourist community.

62

The specificity of the landscape, as a geographical space with a particular and transformable geometry, de-termines architectural form in ‘100 Etchings: A Journey Within’ by Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. The sequence of 100 consecutive sections in the changing natural topography of an (island) landscape produces 100 different spaces of inhabitation in the ground that offer different spatial experiences of “an introspective journey of self-discovery”.The spiritual dimension of nature as an element of self-awareness emerges from the dematerialized mini-mal structures of the project ‘On Tourism in Greece’ by Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus. The minimal su-perstructure activates the underlying ground creating a contemporary ‘primitive hut’ that does not primarily aim at the fulfilment of functional needs (protection from the weather), but rather at the unleashing of the sensuality of nature.The exquisite natural beauty of the Greek landscape al-lows for its perception as a paradisiac garden that en-ergizes the senses and leads to a quest after unique pleasures as described in ‘The Aegean Pairi-Daeza’ by Amid.Cero9. In this case too, the architectural elements are minimal –the spaces are carved in the ground and covered by a vast silk canopy– allowing for the growth of the imagination.New ParadigmThough the 15 architectural practices stem from different backgrounds, the 15 proposals for a post-crisis tourism inhabitation seem to converge in declaring shared pri-orities and directions. The crisis interrelates architecture and the economy: ‘less’ seems to have become the ines-capable condition. The need for a distinctive, conscious architectural gesture is combined with a frugal, unpre-tentious form. Interior and exterior are reconnected to one another, giving meaning to the exterior once again, in an architecture that shall remake the (lost) collective.

66

Interview with Yannis Aesopos, Profes-sor of Architecture and Urban Design and former Chair, Department of Architecture, University of Patras, Greece.

Anna Chorzepa- I wanted to talk to you be-cause of the theme of our journal which is the global condition of architecture. When you gave us your talk in Athens about the 2014 Biennale you were saying how differ-ent people from around the world applied for the competition you organised, it inter-ested me how you said they were almost striped of their culture and you couldn’t tell where the projects come from, so I’d like to ask you, what did you think after the com-petition, did you expect it to turn out like that or was it a surprise to you?

Yannis Aesopos- Well firstly let me explain a little more about how this competition was organised, the contributors come from dif-ferent countries and in the end there where fifteen, and out of the fifteen, ten where Greeks and the five where other nationali-ties, with the five ones in a way I kind of invited them, so they are people with offices and practises who in my view were able to respond in a manner I was interested in to this certain theme. The theme was the post crisis in Greek architecture I was trying to find out, in that turning point, how architects around the world would actually respond to the theme of post crisis in Greek architec-ture in a way accepting certain principles or a set of rules, you would have to accept that we are in a specific period that I call post crisis. In Greece we still have a crisis, so whenever you say post crisis, they say you a really optimistic right, because we are still somehow in the crisis, so I have to frame this condition saying that both a crisis and post crisis is a period of limited resources, both are natural, economical. It’s a period when a new relationship to nature should be explored and in a way it’s also a period where form, in my view at least, should be-come more reduced and honest. In my view it’s this kind of frame in which I ask archi-tects to work in, which they have to do in a condition of limited resources and a new approach to nature, a mental footprint and the new reduced kind of formal presence I would say, so it’s within the framework. We have to somehow respond to this, after that I realised that different countries ap-

pear to express similar concerns, it wasn’t as if they started from scratch, they had a framework from the beginning. The Greek teams that applied for this opportunity were asked to write a text in order to explain their approach to the theme and they also had to include a short CD and we had to examine if they would approach this project in a way that I would like them to. I hope that an-swers your question.

A- You were telling us it’s a very aesthetic project and it’s more about the nature rather than the culture. So would you say that this theme that you chose for this competition brings architects more or less to the same place, which is not very cultural but more natural and has more of a connection with the landscape rather than people’s back-ground and upbringing?

Y - Definitely it has a lot to do with a recon-nection with the nature and the landscape, in the meantime since we met in Athens I have written a clinical text, trying to ana-lyse this project. Its purpose is to analyse the project and try to assign them to main categories. I found there to be three main directions and I realised that in all of them there was a formal reduction, at the same time there was a try and an effort by the architects to redefine the collective. For ex-ample you may co-exist with other tourists but you never interact with them, you may be in a hotel that has five hundred rooms, you might stay next door to one of them but it is very possible you have no interaction with him or her, so with this project I found that many architects trying re-establish this collective and redefine the tourist’s experi-ence as an experience that has to do with an interaction with others as well. I organ-ised the city project in to three main direc-tions. The first direction was the large con-structions it had to do with the architects having to create large constructions in the landscape that have a clear presence and never dissolve in to the landscape, and this was the first direction.

67

The second direction had to do with re-oc-cupation of the building stock, and this had to do with understanding that in the begin-ning of a crisis it is not really necessary to build from scratch and that you could actu-ally re-use structures that are out there in the landscape, waiting for a second chance, for example buildings that were abandoned, buildings that were unfinished or buildings that are only used for a few days a year. I think this is a very interesting category, be-cause the crisis has a lot to do with re-using the building stock and that was the second category. And the third category is called nature, irony, spirituality and pleasure and it was mostly about reconnecting with nature and it had majority of the foreign projects in it. The Greek landscape has a very strong spiritual character and the architects had proposed living on the land and bring out more of the spiritual character. This are the three categories.

A – With a lot of the projects from the com-petition we could observe that relation to nature and at the same time they were al-most hiding their own identity and showing the identity of the Greek landscape which was especially surprising from the foreign contestants. Did they have an opportunity to visit Greece during the project or would you say it is more of an international approach to the topic and they didn’t need to visit the site?

Y – I think most of them have been to Greece before that project so they had to relate to their previous experience and oth-ers have learned about it through the books or their own interpretation of the Greek con-dition. So I think as you said this project caused them to differentiate themselves from the trend of star architecture but what I find interesting is that they don’t actually become local. They pick a theme in a sub-ject that could be applied in other countries as well despite that they very much relate to the Greek landscape same thing could be applied somewhere else. I tried to do something like that last year when I taught a studio of Masters in University of Columbia which was called ‘Post crisis through inhabi-tation’ and I applied the very same brief as in the Biennale and the students used dif-ferent sites all over the world and this was a very interesting not- site specific approach that they took on this theme as well.

A – It seems that in that theme people who we design for have been through cri-sis and now they need us to be optimistic and to give them something light and joy-ful. In many global cities this joyful natural connection with landscape has been lost. Would you say that this approach could be also successful when applied in an urban context?

Y – In a way in order to appreciate this pro-ject you need an event which shifts people’s priorities and crisis is a very good example of this shift. This limited resource and re-duction of form and other elements which somehow describe this new condition be-come an impoverishment and I think this is something very important that it wants you to look at this condition in a new frame of mind where you realise that it has a sig-nificance on its own. In the brief I was try-ing to imply that we have to get rid of all the elements that are somehow external to architecture for example all the technologi-cal gadgets which are not part of it but are plugged into architecture. This new condi-tion gives us architecture which is stripped from all this glamorous things which can sometimes make the architecture actually missing.

68

A – It is very interesting what you are say-ing and I can see how this kind of additions are almost like ‘accessories’ for architecture which are colourful and playful but when you take them away you have to almost go back to the basics.

Y – Exactly, I think ‘accessories’ is the word I was looking for. This are things that are additions which are usually used to cover the absence of architecture itself. The ab-sence of the quality of space. The idea of the project was to get rid of all the accesso-ries and gadgets and go back to the pure-ness of space. The contestants enjoyed the brief very much and I think it is very good that they understand that the crisis is not a Greek condition but it has to do with the rest of the world and it is a global condition that has various different faces. For example if the rate of economic development in China goes down like 4% it creates a crisis where many jobs are lost. And with all this condi-tions happening around the world we can see that they are somehow related and that is why it is important that we look for a new approach to architecture cause the megalo-maniac approach has reached its end.

A – Would you say in that case that as-cetic projects from the competition could be treated as futuristic?

Y – I think we can already observe the be-ginning of application of it. I believe that the projects which are majorly based on glam-our are not going to disappear suddenly and we will be heading into a condition where we will have both. We will still have people who enjoy the glamour and want to spend their money on it but more and more people start to appreciate basic fundamental un-decorated projects which will focus on the quality of the experience and the condition of ‘less’ as a kind of spiritual condition. It is not a less complicated but it is a mental state.

THOMAS KONG – ‘’UNBUILDING’’

70

PROJECT ZERO. UNBUILDING.An essay for Dutch architecture maga-zine, A10Thomas Kong The award of the 3rd Jaap Bakema Fellowship for my traveling research pro-ject ZERO amidst the Great Recession opened up a reflexive space for me to question the current limited opportunities in the architecture profession and its role in society.

A critique of the architectural profession today is inevitably a criticism of the global free market phenomenon (in which architec-ture is complicit), and of the unbridled capi-talism practised worldwide, which has enor-mous economic and social consequences. As early as 1998, John Gray warned of the dangers of the global free market system. In False Dawn, he wrote that ‘global markets are engines of creative destructions. Like the markets of the past, they do not ad-vance in smooth, steady waves. They make progress through cycles of boom and bust, speculative manias and financial crises.’1

Sociologist Richard Sennett has de-scribed the loss of sociality in modern-day consumption, where a fixed-price policy for goods and services has done away with the reciprocity of haggling and bargaining.2 In so-called less developed countries, such interactions between seller and buyer in a market or bazaar still retain this social di-mension. For Sennett, consumption as a discursive activity has become an abstract, impersonal monetary transaction. Similarly, drawing on Sennett and his reading of Marx, the process of dematerialization separates production from consumption – how a thing is made from its use – leading to the de-valuation of things and a diminished role for craftsmanship, and promoting a desire for future consumption through advertising and marketing. Rather than focusing on the pre-sent and the practical, the shift from actual-ity to potentiality, as described by Sennett, gives the consumer an illusion of freedom and choice because they are no longer con-cerned with how a thing is used now, but

1 Gray, John (1998). False dawn: The Delusions of Global Capi-talism. London: Granta Books, p. 210.2 London School of Economics (17 November, 2009). ‘Cities, Design and Climate Change’ [Video File]. Retrieved 9 April 2010 from http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2009/20090825t1340z001.aspx

with its future possibility.3 Reduced to ob-jects of consumption and uncontrolled fan-tasy, architecture faces similar challenges, as exemplified by that former playground of architects called Dubai. Architecture is mis-takenly perceived to be progressive, and heralds a new future. In reality, what it does is merely to perpetuate and stimulate the thirst for an untenable culture of consump-tion and excess at the urban level. Architec-ture becomes a search for newness and is reduced to a spectacle.

Contrariness

As an architect with a deep affinity for the arts, and who also teaches in an art school, I am inspired by artists who have discov-ered the manifold expressions of zero as a rich ground for experimentation. Their ac-tivities, ranging from making works that are formally incomplete to adopting subversive inaction and radical unmaking as strategies, challenge our comfortable and cherished view of what art means and by extension our own assumptions, prejudices and per-ceptions about the world. This is especially significant for me as an architect, since use and economic values are so closely tied up with architecture that they can sometimes create a myopic view of the architect’s role in society.

As far back as the 1970s, Robert Smith-son and Gordon Matta-Clark were making works that ran contrary to accepted notions of art as a formally complete work. In the process, they overturned our attachment to object hood, aura, presence and author-ship in art; values still clung to by many ar-chitects and perpetuated by academics in spite of overwhelming evidence that they are reserved for an elite group of iconic architects. Robert Smithson’s 1970 work, Partially Buried Woodshed, on the campus of Kent State University, where an excava-tor dumped loads of soil onto the shed until the centre beam cracked, exemplified his theory of entropy, which situates art on the inexorable path towards ‘the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank’.4

3 Ibid.4 Ibid., p. 13

71

Through a combination of time, the natu-ral process of weathering and human inter-vention, the work eventually ‘returned’ to the land where it once stood.

Gordon Matta-Clark, on the other hand, reacted against his formal architectural education at Cornell through his brief but compelling oeuvre. His works exposed the ideology of professional architecture that legitimized the stranglehold of experts and their abstract ideals. By cutting up aban-doned and soon to be erased buildings, Matta-Clark also questioned the assump-tion of utility and the misplaced belief in property and ownership.

Both Smithson and Matta-Clark eschewed traditional materials and techniques of art-making. Instead of creating objects to be placed on the land, Smithson’s Land Art and Matta-Clark’s Building Cuts re-inscribed art in the site, steering it away from the hermet-ic and rarefied environment of the museum.

Strategy

It is with this spirit of inquiry, reclamation and re-examination, reinforced by a dose of art-inspired resistance that I wish to in-troduce the strategy of ‘unbuilding’ in this essay. I interpret unbuilding as a gradual erasure from something to nothing, the nec-essary ‘other’ of building and a creative act within the cycle of creation and destruction. With cities declining and buildings becom-ing obsolete more quickly than ever before, the process of unbuilding, which opens up new spaces for different opportunities and engenders the emergence of an alternative practice, will necessarily become part of what an architect does. In Detroit, where city authorities demolish two to three thousand buildings a year, companies specializing in demolition works became much sought af-ter.1 However, since architecture as taught, practised and regulated is squarely situated within the narrow bandwidth of design and creation of an artefact, it will take significant effort and a major shift from a business-as-usual attitude to embrace the notion of ‘de-sign’.

As history shows, the perceived per-manence of buildings can be erased within minutes by a natural or man-made disas-

5 Time Online. (April 1989) ‘Crime: Dismantling Detroit’. Retrieved 11 November 2009 from Time website: http://www.time.com/time/maga-zine/article/0,9171,957494,00.html

ter, government actions and a civil or in-ternational conflict. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami caused widespread destruction to the coastal towns of eleven countries, stretching from Asia to Africa.2 The haunting physical emptiness of the A-bomb dome of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial serves as a searing and lasting symbol of the devasta-tion caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, where many hec-tares of buildings were reduced to a hor-rific wasteland. In more recent times, the destruction of the World Trade Center Tow-ers in New York City, the devastation ac-companying the continuing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan are other examples of the violence buildings are subjected to.

Despite its apparent negativity, I would dispute that unbuilding is concerned only with demolition or destruction. If demolition and destruction are akin to fast food, then unbuilding is slow food: a careful and deli-cate process of disassembling, cataloguing, re-purposing and erasing an existing build-ing. Furthermore, the process of unbuilding as in deliberately making something ab-sent, also overturns the accepted role of the architect as a creator through design and accumulation. Ultimately, unbuilding and building co-exist as two sides of the same coin. The following examples highlight how the process of unbuilding can be a mean-ingful act across different scales, cultures and purposes.

Ise Shrine, Japan

The Ise Shrine is a well-known Shinto site that is disassembled and rebuilt every twen-ty years. In contrast to accepted notions of architectural preservation and of buildings as cultural artefacts that will bear witness to the course of human history through their enduring presence, the ephemeral nature of the Ise Shrine serves the same purpose in reverse, through the process of unbuilding and rebuilding. Besides the significance of spiritual renewal in Shinto belief, unbuild-ing is also necessary for more practical rea-sons, as Svend M. Hvass pointed out in Ise: Japan’s Ise Shrine, Ancient Yet New.3

6 ‘The Deadliest Tsunami in History?’ (7 January, 2005). National Geographic News. Retrieved 24 April 2010 from http://news.nationalgeo-graphic.com/news/2004/12/1227_041226_tsunami.html7 Hvass, Svend M. (1999). Ise: Japan’s Ise Shrine, Ancient Yet

New. Copenhagen: Aristo Publishing, pp. 40-41, 96.

72

The twenty-year span is also the lifespan of the timber beams, columns and thatched roof. Shorter than the lifespan of a person, the twenty-year cycle permits the older gen-eration of carpenters to pass down valuable knowledge to the younger ones during the process of rebuilding. If the shrine buildings had persisted as an enduring presence, these older craftsmen would have died out, together with their construction wisdom and expertise. The timbers from the dismantled shrine are reused for different elements within the shrine compound, such as the vertical poles of the Torii gateways and as replacement timbers for the less important shrines. The remaining timbers are distrib-uted to shrines throughout the country for the same purpose. The thatch roof, which is not reusable, is burnt and any metal ele-ments are melted down and recycled.

Unbuilding Beppu: Building Dismantling School and The Materials Bank

The slow economic decline of the Japa-nese city of Beppu has resulted in many houses that are either completely aban-doned or demolished or that are slowly de-teriorating around their occupants. Since the old traditional timber houses were built close together, forming a dense network of narrow footpaths, small open spaces and residential units, the removal of a single house causes the compact organization to fall apart and the houses that remain stand-ing are left without the protection from the weather offered by the proximity of neigh-bouring houses. The common practice is to use the readily available and cheap corru-gated metal sheets to cover the ‘open face’ of the surviving house. Two interdependent proposals by architect Kenta Kishi, entitled ‘The Building Dismantling School’ and ‘The Materials Bank’, offered bottom-up strate-gies for creating jobs, recycling materials and reprogramming the many vacant build-ings for new uses. The Building Dismantling School offers an unconventional approach to teaching the skills needed for the careful unbuilding of abandoned houses that can-not be reused. The Materials Bank, on the other hand, provides a dedicated space in the city where salvaged recyclable building materials can be stored and where they can be given away or exchanged.

Material Harvesting: The Work of Murco Recycling Enterprises Inc.

Murco Recycling was founded by Chica-goan Jodi Murphy, who pioneered an ingen-ious business that combines material har-vesting, recycling and public auction in the process of unbuilding a house.81 Ironically, whereas architecture and interior design are professionally separated in the course of building, Murco Recycling reunites them, since the flotsam of architectural elements like timber beams, frames, furniture, fittings and interior decorations need to be sorted and recycled, either as usable materials or rubbish. The social activity of buying and selling of the traditional marketplace re-turned with the auctioning of the furniture, fittings and building materials harvested by Jodi’s company. Instead of the anonymity associated with online auction sites and the more formal real-life versions, the auctions of Murco Recycling are celebratory and per-formative events filled with laughter, teasing and serious haggling and bargaining, which owe much to the exuberance, energy and sharp business acumen of the company’s founder. She plays multiple roles – as auc-tioneer, organizer, publicist, broker, pro-vocateur, and networker and, last but not least, a business person driven to do her part for the environment. To ensure that the materials and fittings are affordable, suc-cessful bidders at Murco Recycling’s home salvage auctions are required to return to the house and carefully remove the mate-rial themselves. In one of the company’s projects, as much as ninety per cent of the building materials, finishing and fittings are reused in new contexts.

Motor City Blight Busters

The Motor City Blight Busters (MCBB) is a not-for-profit organization led by founder John J. George.2 Following its motto, ‘Fight Blight, Stabilize, Revitalize’, the more than twenty-year-old organization has carried out thousands of community-based pro-jects, ranging from simple house painting and trash removal from empty lots to se-curing abandoned houses and demolishing those that cannot be restored for living.

8 Murco Recycling. Retrieved 24 April, 2010 from http://www.murco.net/what_we_do.php9 Motor City Blight Busters. Retrieved 24 April, 2010 from http://

www..blightbusters.org/about.html

73

Although the unbuilding process is not un-like a commercial house demolition opera-tion, one major difference is the way MCBB harnesses the strength and volunteer spirit of the community in carrying it out. By us-ing sledgehammers, power tools and small crawler loaders for tougher tasks, the un-building of abandoned houses and the re-moval of ‘negative energy’, a term often used by John J. George, becomes an act of collective catharsis for the community in Detroit. It restores community pride and confidence, as well as giving those who are still living the city a sense of hope. Through unbuilding, the new emerges in the form of a community garden, a playground or a new home.

Unbuilding and Obduracy: The Dutch Ex-perience

In Unbuilding Cities. Obduracy in Social-Technological Change, Anique Hommels draws attention to the tension and contes-tation among stakeholders as they struggle to reconcile renewal and preservation.1 She researched the phenomenon of obduracy in the city through an analysis of spatially dis-tinct case studies in the Netherlands, using a combination of three conceptual frame-works: frames, embeddedness and persis-tent traditions. For Hommels, unbuilding is a natural process of change in the city as the new replaces the old. However, because what is built is layered through time with traditions, memories and political agendas, new initiatives are met with strong resist-ances. Of particular interest are the four unbuilding strategies for overcoming obdu-racy she identified in her case studies. The first strategy involves acknowledging and engaging the multiple voices of social ac-tors and communities in the redesign pro-cess. The second strategy recognizes ur-ban structures as embedded in a network of relationships rather than existing as discrete elements. Unbuilding therefore entails a thoughtful search for and negotiation of ele-ments that can be unbuilt. The third strategy involves identifying the specific role tradi-tions play in the obduracy of urban struc-tures and discovering ways to overcome them. The last strategy places emphasis on material and technological characteristics in the belief that the ills of obduracy will be eliminated by new and innovative design ideas and planning.

10 Hommels, Anique (2005). Unbuilding Cities. Obduracy in Social-Technological Change. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

The selected examples and strategies of unbuilding form the necessary first steps towards reclamation, recovery, restora-tion, renewal, recycling and rebuilding. As Hommel’s book shows, this process is nei-ther easy nor smooth. Nevertheless, the process of unbuilding questions what has been categorized as waste and prompts its revaluation in economic, social, ecological and spiritual terms. Unbuilding empowers residents to action and self-determination. It is a conduit through which tradition and wisdom is passed from one generation to another. It opens up new opportunities for a more socially and environmentally focused business. Finally, unbuilding can be a new and practical skill set. The process from something to nothing reveals the potent act of subtraction and the positive value of de-sign. Design is no longer focused solely on accumulation, novelty and the arbitrary distinction between the cast-off and the re-tained. To expand the work of an architect or a designer to include the deliberate act of unbuilding, especially at a time of econom-ic recession, opens up new opportunities where existing knowledge can be deployed in meaningful and sustaining ways.

NIKOLAOS ION TERZOGLOU, RAYMOND QUEK – ‘’CONCEPTS IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN’’

76

NIKOLAOS-ION TERZOGLOUDr. Architect N.T.U.A., Assistant Professor National Technical University of Athens

Three Types of Design Intentions

Athens, May 2015

Introduction: Design, Project, Concept

A central problem in contemporary architec-tural design is related to a deepening am-biguity regarding the definition of the terms design, project and concept, along with a relevant failing to determine the epistemo-logical prerequisites and the methodological processes that can render them consist-ent and cohesive. The various normative, procedural and strategic approaches to the concept of ‘design’ that were developed historically prove the complexity of the pa-rameters that affect its meaning1. Raymond Quek reminds us that disegno, apart from a physical manifestation of drawing and a form for the manipulation of visual knowl-edge, denotes the intellectual intent and principle behind the form2.

Today, design processes tend to become arbitrary intuitions of concrete and specific images, based on a subjective judgment of taste. The architectural project is thus ab-sorbed by the dominance of the photore-alistic image, which translates into digital graphic mediums momentary conceptions of forms, usually without a rational argu-mentation as their foundation. Architects tend to call this strategy a ‘concept’. I claim that its reductionist character is quite obvi-ous. Through the operation of the concept, design processes regress into a new em-piricism. However, projecting an architec-tural space should be (and has sometimes been) a more complex procedure. And the original and more profound meaning of the term ‘concept’ is lost if equated with image-making in recent photorealistic fashion. A concept is not an image. Based on this argument, I will attempt to reveal the hid-den agendas behind certain types of design intentions developed in the modern era, showing the relevance of history for the un-derstanding and critique of contemporary design trends.

A historical mapping of the philosophical 1 Lévy, 2008: p. 77–802 Quek, 2010: pp. 1–3, 11; Quek, 2007: p. 62

presuppositions of design intentions should focus on various normative discourses of design, coupled with an epistemological approach to the design process as a se-ries of mental steps and logical sequences that could guarantee ‘reasonableness’. This historical research brings forward the philo-sophical problem of the connection between the ideology of a subject-designer and the built work as a final result. At the same time, this relation addresses the philosophical is-sue of the type and the nature of the con-nections between a conceptual projection of an architectural space into the human mind and its material representation, recording and construction into real and social space.

In the present article I will refer to three types of design intentions/conceptions that cor-respond to different relationships between the creative subject and the cosmos. Those three types derive from a hermeneutical schematization of selected paradigms from the theory of art and the philosophy of the Renaissance. I choose the age of the Re-naissance as a field of reference because it constituted the conceptual gate of moder-nity and determined the kind of problems that relate to creative processes in architec-ture and art that seem to have preoccupied designers until today.

My aim is to contribute towards a contem-porary elucidation of the above terms and touch on the philosophical prerequisites of design conception. The types of design intentions that I will analyse are the result of an abstract interpretation and classifica-tion of three theoretical approaches to de-sign and thus could be understood as ideal types, according to Max Weber’s definition of the term3. He writes: ‘An ideal type is formed by the one-sid-ed accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete indi-vidual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly empha-sized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild). In its concep-tual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia.’4

3 Ritzer, 19962: pp. 225–2284 Weber, 1949: p. 90

77

Ficino: Design as a Conception of Meta-physical Ideas

The first ideal type of design intention un-derstands the design process as an activity of conceiving ideas. I argue that this ideal type can be identified mainly during the Early Renaissance of the 15th century, when vari-ous humanistic, Platonic and Christian influ-ences are integrated into complex systems of discourses. In the context of those sys-tems, the mind, man, God and the cosmos are unified and are permeated by a common structure of laws, by a uniform order. In oth-er words, the general principles of harmony and the universal mathematical structures inscribe man, architecture and the cosmos into a common framework of negotiation1, which can be dealt with a proto-rational or quasi-rational method. Consequently, when the creative designer attempts to conceive the structure and the form of space, he is actually trying, in direct analogy to the crea-tor of the world, namely God, to shape a universal idea into his mind, an idea which will reflect the order of the cosmos.

This Platonic conception of the archi-tect, as Chastel names it 2, originates in Brunelleschi3, is codified in the writings of Alberti and is imprinted into the texts of the Neoplatonic thinker Marsilio Ficino4. More specifically, in his work titled Platonic The-ology, Ficino explains the mental nature of God with a reference to the idea of the order of the cosmos, which He conceives in His mind5. In direct analogy to God, the architect conceives in his mind the type and the idea of the edifice that he is about to construct (aedificii speciem). This idea, according to the Renaissance Neo-Platonist, is the ideal exemplar of a species6, namely the para-digm, the archetype, the rational, abstract and metaphysical principle7 that concen-trates its multiple particular features 8.

The understanding of design as a concep-tion of metaphysical ideas-archetypes rec-ognizes the universal, absolute, necessary and objective substance of the idea as a principle that unifies man, the cosmos and architecture with the divine order of the uni-

5 Chastel, 1959: p. 1366 1959: p. 1317 Quek, 2010: p. 5–68 Chastel, 1959: p. 1329 idea ordinis universi; Ficino, 1482: pp. 170–17110 speciei exemplar; Ficino, 1482: pp. 170–17111 Chastel, 1959: p. 13212 Ficino, 1482: pp. 172–173

verse. It is this idea which guarantees the correctness of the architectural endeavour and the inscription of the material building into the framework of the cosmic whole9. This idea is an immaterial order of the mind and the cosmos that reveals its Platonic ori-gin10.

The affinity between Ficino’s idea and the concept of lineamentum in the work De Re Aedificatoria by L. B. Alberti11 strengthens the above genealogy. I have argued else-where that lineamenta denote the ideas and mental concepts of an architectural work, schematizing the metaphysical foundations and the logical prerequisites of the order of space as a whole12. Ficino had recognized the importance of Alberti’s theoretical views on architecture for his own Platonic and Neo-Platonic programme13. John Hendrix re-lates the lineament to a ‘Platonic archetypal idea’14, confirming the conceptual affinities between Alberti and Ficino as regards the first ideal type of design intention15.

Vasari: Disegno as a Normative Concept

The second ideal type of design intention is connected to the Renaissance tradition of the history and theory of art and, more spe-cifically, to the complex use and meaning of the term disegn, especially during the 16th century. As Lichtenstein and Kemp have shown16 the word disegno acquires a dou-ble meaning during the Renaissance. On the one hand, it describes the intellectual intention and the invention in the mind of an artist-designer, and, on the other hand, it denotes its sensible and designed trace, namely the outline of the conceived form into a material base. The coexistence of those two meanings in the same word re-veals the indissoluble connection between ideation and materialization, subject and cosmos and concept and thing, together with their semantic distinction, in the context of Renaissance culture.

13 Chastel, 1959: p. 131; Chastel, 1975: pp. 71–7214 Chastel, 1975: p. 77, n. 315 Alberti, 1485/1966: pp. 15, 19–21; Alberti 1485/2004: pp. 51–5616 Terzoglou, 2010: p. 13817 Chastel, 1959: p. 131; Chastel, 1975: pp. 99, 107–114, 105, n. 318 Hendrix, 2013: p. 6719 Hendrix, 2010: p. 166; Quek, 2010: p. 720 Lichtenstein, 2004: pp. 322–325; Gänshirt, 2007: p. 45

78

This double understanding survives well into the conceptual dualism of disegno in-terno/disegno esterno1 albeit with a wholly different content in relation to that devel-oped during the 16th century, especially by its major historian and theorist of art, Gior-gio Vasari2. The first, notional dimension of disegno as an intentional conception and an intellectual design of the mind, a mean-ing which is still preserved until today in the word project, presents an affinity with the concept as the gnoseological cognate of a theory of artistic creativity. The concept of the mind (mentis conceptus), especially af-ter Thomas Aquinas, as Panaccio reminds us3, acquired the meaning of an ideal inten-tional object, which was the result of intel-lectual activity and synthesized and unified into an abstract generalization a multitude of elements, as can be shown by the ety-mological origin con-capere, which means ‘to accept together’.I claim that Vasari’s work proves the con-nection between design as an intentional conception of the human mind4 and the concept as a synopsis and concentration of disparate elements into a whole. Quek claims that Vasari’s thinking is “syncretic of Aristotelian and Platonic traditions”5. Bara-sch also recognizes the double, intellectual-mental and material-sensible, meaning of the concept of disegno in the written work of Vasari6. At the same time, the historical ex-position of the artists’ lives in the most well-known work by Vasari recognizes a ‘perfect law of art’ (perfetta regola dell’arte) as an absolute normative ideal for the evaluation of the history of design of artistic works7. Consequently, in an attempt to unite the two interpretations above, and extending their argumentation, I propose to name the idea of disegno in Vasari, a normative concept.

As Vasari writes:

‘Procédant de l’intellect, le dessin, père de nos trois arts-architecture, sculpture et pei-nture- élabore à partir d’éléments multiples un concept global. Celui-ci est comme la forme ou idée (idea) de tous les objets de la nature, toujours originale dans ses mesures.’8

21 Zuccaro, 160722 Gänshirt, 2007: p. 4623 2004: pp. 248–25024 Lichtenstein, 2004: pp. 323–324; Groulier, 2004: p. 25225 Quek, 2007: p. 4826 Barasch, 2000: pp. 218–21927 Barasch, 2000: p. 21328 Vasari, 15682: p. 149)

Raymond Quek translates the above pas-sage in English as follows:

‘Disegno, father of our three arts of archi-tecture, sculpture, and painting, that pro-ceed from the intellect, derives from many things a universal judgement of form or idea of all things in nature, and is unique in its measurements.’9 Thus, design for Vasari, in its first, intel-lectual meaning, is a universal concept that springs from the experience of natural ob-jects and is founded on it, generalizing it into an abstract structure. Vasari continues:

‘De cette appréhension se forme un con-cept (certo concetto), une raison (giudizio), engendrée dans l’esprit par l’objet, dont l’expression manuelle se nomme dessin. Celui-ci est donc l’expression sensible, la formulation explicite d’une notion intèrieure à l’esprit ou mentalement imaginée par d’autres et élaborée en idée.’10

Quek translates:

‘From this we recognise a certain notion and judgement such that something is formed in the mind which, when expressed, is nothing other than a visible expression and declara-tion of that notion of the mind, and this we refer to as disegno. We may conclude that disegno is not other than a visible expres-sion and a revelation of our inner concep-tion, or that which others have imagined and given form to in their idea.’11 We should note the dependence of the Vasarian ‘concept’ on guidizio, an innate ability for the judgement of excellence12.

From the above dependence it becomes clear that design as a judicious schema-tism of concepts in the mind is the basis that directs the material imprinting of sen-sible traces on paper by the artist’s hand13. The second ideal type of design conception can be regarded as a solid epistemological structure which legitimatizes the sensible construction of a drawing or a preliminary sketch.

29 Quek, 2007: p. 4730 Vasari, 15682: p. 14931 Quek, 2007: p. 4732 Quek, 2010: p. 1133 Vasari, 15682: pp. 149–150

79

The second ideal type of design conception can be regarded as a solid epistemological structure which legitimatizes the sensible construction of a drawing or a preliminary sketch. The Vasarian concept, almost in a pre-Kantian sense, regulates the organiza-tion and the schematization of the sensible world into structural orders of judgments. Moreover, the concept is founded on the measures of nature, its experience and the dialectical connection between subject and cosmos. In that way, the concept-design in Vasari has an objective, universal and normative character, as a synopsis of the empirical features of real space and a co-ordination of the relations between its parts and the whole.

Zuccaro: Disegno Interno as a Psycho-logical Image

The third ideal type of design conception/intention is codified in the late 16th cen-tury and the early 17th century, in a tran-sitional period of European culture that is characterized very often by the term Man-nerism. The transgression of the dialecti-cal and conciliatory conceptual dualisms of the Renaissance leads to a thought that is founded on ruptures, tensions, negations and contradictions1. As Barasch shows, an unresolved conflict in the context of the Mannerist worldview is revealed through the conceptual duality of tradition and innova-tion: the belief in established rules and prin-ciples of art seems irreconcilable with the free, primary creativity of genius, which is put forward as a new human type of the art-ist-architect-designer. The critique towards authority in the field of literary theory is a parallel manifestation of the same radical perspective2.In this context, a new value emerges into the field of creative design: the value of originality, as it is expressed, for exam-ple, in the work of Bruno. According to this idea, the original designer offers something completely new each time he creates, tran-scending the established rules, in defiance of any rational principle of art3. The most important theorist of Mannerism who codi-fies the views above into the field of artistic theory is Federico Zuccaro, president of the Academia del Disegno in Rome 4. Zuccaro’s theory of disegno signals a break

34 Panofsky, 1924: pp. 100–10135 Barasch, 2000: pp. 291–29436 Panofsky, 1924: pp. 87–8837 Alberti and Zuccaro, 1961

with the Early Renaissance worldview: its most important feature is the complete re-jection of universal mathematical laws and principles for the interpretation of reality and the construction of the work of art. In this way, scientific objectivity and rationality are sacrificed on the altar of other ideals: the artist’s freedom5 or the ‘bizzarro’ as a self-referential game6. This freedom of invention is crystallized in the first part of the impor-tant work of Zuccaro titled L’ Idea de’Pittori, Scultori e Architetti which treats what he calls disegno interno. According to Zuccaro, disegno interno is the image that is formed in the mind of the artist, which corresponds to the pure line of disegno esterno, namely to the external form of the work7. Disegno interno gives birth to disegno esterno, lead-ing to the completion of the work of art.8 The Italian theorist describes disegno interno as an internal conception that is shaped into the human mind9. But does Zuccaro use the word concept (concetto) in the same way as Vasari understood it?

I argue that the word concept in the context of Zuccaro’s theoretical thinking has a dif-ferent notional content. From Zuccaro’s own analysis in chapter III of the First Book of his treatise, it becomes clear that disegno interno does not possess primarily a gen-eralizing, critical and holistic function, as Vasari’s concept did: it is not mainly a syn-opsis of a multitude of empirical features of real entities into an ideal whole-judgment but constitutes the form (forma) and the representation of a partial, special object: it is in fact singular and individual ‘rappre-sentante espressamente e distintamente la cosa intesa da quello’.10 In that way, Zuc-caro’s disegno interno, according to my in-terpretation, is just a form-image, or, as he writes himself, an ‘idol of the mind’ (idolo della mente), a psychological-imaginary representation.11

38 Barasch, 2000: pp. 296–297; Panofsky, 1924: pp. 96–99; Zuc-caro, 1607: pp. 249–25139 Hendrix, 2013: pp. 73–7740 Barasch, 2000: pp. 299–30141 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 22142 concetto interno formato nella mente; Zuccaro, 1607: p. 15243 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 15344 Zuccaro, 1607: pp. 95, 153–154, 222

80

As a singular, individual representation, Zuccaro’s image transforms the design pro-cess into a pure, arbitrary invention, which is not bound by generalizing functions of reason or laws with universal validity, but rather constitutes the imprint of an individual personality, of a psychological idiosyncrasy.

The conception of design as a process of an original invention of images and their execution through lines (disegno esterno)1 breaks off the unity of mind and cosmos that prevailed in the Renaissance contempla-tion of art, putting forward the psychological uniqueness of imagination as the ultimate model of creativity.2 The separation of the imaginary representation in the artist’s mind from any natural, cosmic or higher logical order that could guarantee its objective va-lidity forces Zuccaro to recognize the con-tingent and accidental (accidente) birth of disegno interno from the senses (sensi) and the multiple representations of differ-ent objects of perception.3 Thus, inescap-ably, disegno interno contains phantasms, sensible and fleeting images (fantasmati).4 Hendrix rightly observes:

‘For Zuccari, forms of design can only be the result of accident … the spark being the first concept created … in the sensory imagina-tion, being … indeterminate and confused.’5

How can Zuccaro guarantee the legitimacy of the design process when it is founded on arbitrary, subjective images of fancy and sensations and not on concepts and ideas objectively determined?

The only solution is for him to take refuge in God as the ultimate warrantor of the ex-istence of those momentary resplendence-images in the mind of the designer, which reflect his irrational inspiration, the freedom and the originality of his creations. In this way, the empirical sensationalism of a de-sign process which recognizes only partial, singular, subjective image-representations finds its ‘natural’ correlation and its neces-sary complement into a theological mysti-cism. In this context, disegno interno hu-mano is, according to Zuccaro, a brilliancy, a flash of divinity (scintilla della divinità).6

45 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 22246 Groulier, 2004: pp. 252–25347 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 16248 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 18549 Hendrix, 2010: p.16750 Zuccaro, 1607: p. 162; Barasch, 2000: p. 300; Gänshirt, 2007: p. 46; Panofsky, 1924: pp. 108–113, 238–239, n. 202

According to Hendrix,

‘disegno interno is a … spark of the fire of the divine intellect, which is manifest in nous … The spark in nous creates dream im-ages, phantasms, and imaginations, along with artistic designs.’7

Panofsky rightly observes that the basis of design as a conception of psychological im-ages in the mind, as it is typically expressed in Zuccaro’s work, is Aristotelian-scholastic, namely medieval.8

Conclusions: Return to Reason

Panofsky, in his study Idea, claims that a major transformation and a reversal of the Platonic conception of the idea as a meta-physical entity occurred during modernity, which led to the recent understanding of art and design as a conceptual re-structuring of reality into the mind of the artist-designer9. I believe that Panofsky’s dualism between the idea as a metaphysical essence and the idea as a conception or a representa-tion within the intellect is very general and vague. The real problem of a theory of de-sign in the modern era is the nature of this conception in the mind and the type of rela-tion between the subject and the object that this nature suggests.

As I tried to show above, the three ideal types of conceiving the design intention as an idea, a concept or an image are found-ed on a different worldview regarding the complex relationships between mind and world. Consequently, idea, concept and im-age organize a hierarchy of distinct levels of intentionality in the constitution of the creative mind during the design concep-tion of a work. Whereas the idea and the concept possess an objective and, more or less, universal character, the image, on the contrary, clearly has a subjective and rela-tive character. I argue that the above ideal types of design have a constant heuristic and explanatory value.

51 Hendrix, 2010: 16052 Panofsky, 1924: pp. 106–107, 112–11453 Panofsky, 1924: p. 22–23

81

I could define an ‘image’ as a set of inter-nal perceptions of an aggregate of external stimuli. A ‘concept’ is a coherent matrix that organizes those internal perceptions into meaningful wholes, clusters of hierarchized values. An ‘idea’ is a system or nexus of concepts forming co-ordinated nebulae of mental configurations of meaning that pro-duce knowledge.

I believe that the modern movement at the beginning of the 20th century attempts to put forward and to strengthen the impor-tance of the conception of ideas into the mind, for the objective formation and the ethical correctness of the design process as a whole, reminding us of the thinking of Fi-cino or Alberti. For example, Le Corbusier, in his important manifesto titled Vers une Architecture, writes in 1923:

‘Faire un plan, c’est préciser, fixer des idées. C’est avoir eu des idées. C’est ordonner ces idées pour qu’elles deviennent intelligibles, exécutables et transmissibles. Il faut donc manifester d’une intention précise, avoir eu des idées pour avoir pu se donner une intention.’1

The English translation by John Goodman goes as follows:

‘To make a plan is to clarify, to fix ideas. It is to have had ideas. It is ordering these ideas such that they become intelligible, feasi-ble, and transmissible. So it is necessary to manifest a clear intention, to have had ideas that made it possible to set oneself an intention.’2

Contrary to this modernist view, some recent developments in architectural and artistic design, along with a new use and mean-ing of the term concept, present an analogy with Zuccaro’s thought: the design process is understood as a conception of singular psychological images that lay claim to an absolute originality and are individual, sub-jective, idiosyncratic, phenomenal forms. The dualism he inaugurated between dis-egno interno and disegno esterno ‘set the scene for the possibility in the modern era for disegno to split into … drawing without intent’3. In Vitruvius’ thinking, ‘ideas’ were forms of drawings. In the post-modern era, design practice has regressed into a similar

54 Le Corbusier, 1995: p. 14555 Le Corbusier, 2007: p. 21556 Quek, 2010: p. 16

empiricism, albeit with a digital cloak. To-day, there is a tendency to identify ideas with their photorealistic images, confusing them with the production of digital repre-sentations and, often, losing sight of their creative intention and meaningful purpose. However, as I have tried to show, ideas are types, indexes of species, characteristic at-tributes and not sensory information.

If the central focus of architectural design process becomes the production and the rendering of photorealistic images, there is a danger of disregarding qualities that are inherent within the core idea or the concept of the projected work: scale, spatial order, correspondence with the context, appro-priateness of the functional programme to the social character and the anthropological landscape of the place, historical references to precedents and their transformations. Of course a good image does not always pre-clude a good idea behind it. It just tends to absorb it into an urge to impress through its pixelated perfection. The practice of visuali-zation tends to displace creative intellection.

A digital image possesses the character of a fabrication, a contrivance showing a highly artificial, almost fake concreteness. While it purports to reproduce ‘reality’, pho-torealistic illusionism actually moves away from the ‘real’, towards an unreal, imagi-nary, formalistic perfection: Zuccaro’s idols and phantasms. We have to consider the relation of the power of the new digital tools to produce hyper-realistic renderings to the rise of a new ‘digital formalism’, especially evident in architectural competitions. Digital image-making betrays an internal tendency to transform architecture into a self-referen-tial icon. The real difficulty and challenge of architecture as a discipline, however, is to transcend itself and relate to the context: to address the social texture of the everyday life-world.

Another important consequence of the digi-tal tools we use to project space is that, sometimes, representation becomes the dominant protagonist of design, and, re-cently, of the building process itself. Some buildings imitate their photorealistic images during their construction.

82

They usually end up becoming hyper-real, shallow and illusory, communicating an ambiguous effect, based more on a formal impression consumed by sight alone. They lose their spatial and experiential character. The image or the representation, however, cannot be seen as ends in themselves or as guiding patterns to be perfectly imitated during construction. Rather, they should have a mediatory role: to communicate an idea, a conception, a general concept.

The real protagonist should be the idea. Buildings would then be corporeal incarna-tions and spatial manifestations of this idea, without directly imitating and reproducing its various images. In that way, materiality will not be reduced to imagery, and space will not be equated with surface decoration. Ar-chitecture could then focus on the total ex-perience of space through a multi-sensory apprehension of the body and the mind. I argue that such a normative basis is nec-essary in the contemporary, hypermodern era, due to the highly complex economic, ecological and social problems that demand objectively founded and consistent solutions with wide consensus.

Thus, I propose a return to a concep-tion of design as an objective intentional ideation.1This turn will allow for an enrich-ment of contemporary design pluralism with inter-subjective concepts, ideals, criteria and values2 that can guarantee the social legitimization of the design outcome, its cor-rect construction and its critical evaluation according to general laws and principles. A dialectical equalization between idea, con-cept and image will probably allow for an acquiescence among normative, procedural and strategic dimensions of design. Ray-mond Quek argues that

‘the unity that existed in disegno has largely been lost; and lost with it is the integral re-lationship with giudizio … Without this inte-gral relationship, disegno … suffers from an exposure to relativism.’3

57 Quek, 2007: 59, n. 358 Pellegrino, 2007: pp. 7–1059 Quek, 2007: p. 58

In order to restore the above unity architects should transgress the descriptive, mannerist individualism of the ‘image’ and move to the collective character of conceptual structures that could transform spatial design into an ethical task. What I am suggesting is a re-turn to reason.

83

A Colloquy in Athens between Raymond Quek, Professor, Head of the Leicester School of Architecture, andNikolaos-Ion Terzoglou, Assistant Profes-sor, NTUA School of Architectureon Ideas of Space and the Creative Use of Concepts in Architectural Design and Education

14 FEBRUARY 2015, near the Lysikrates Monument in Plaka districtTranscription: Anna Chorzepa, Editor in Chief, The LSA Review, Leicester School of Architecture

ABBREVIATIONS:Anna Chorzepa: ACRaymond Quek: RQNikolaos-Ion Terzoglou: NIT

NIT- To start our discussion, let me argue that the creative use of concepts is crucial in order to counter intuitive and empirical notions of design which, often, prevent stu-dents from developing their own legitimate, coherent and substantive design strategies. We have developed a methodological dis-course in Department III (Architectural Lan-guage, Communication and Design) at the NTUA, where we want concepts to become active generators of the design process. Of course one has to define what a concept is. It sounds deceptively simple because it is something that architects are used to doing, but we wanted to do it in a more disciplined way. The idea behind it was that concepts (constructional, functional, logical or sym-bolic) can help the design process to mini-mize arbitrariness and acquire substance so that the designer can assume control of the production of space and form. Sometimes architects pick up ready-made concepts from other disciplines, and they don’t elabo-rate on them. But this elaboration is neces-sary in order for concepts to be able to work inside the discipline of architecture. A recent example is how ‘deconstructivist’ architecture tried to incorporate concepts from Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of De-construction. And so starting from there you can see differences in the way great architects have been using those concepts, elaborating, appropriating them or simply transposing them without this necessary process of translation and interpretation. We tried to focus on the relevant discus-sion first and then to select a limited number of concepts that we think are crucial. For

example, the concept of ‘the void’ is some-thing that we’ve been working on very in-tensely during the last ten years because we think that the void could be very useful for architects. The void is something that is worked on by physics, philosophy and other disciplines. The question for us is how can we get some information from those disci-plines and transform it in order to make it our own working tool. The idea behind con-cepts as design tools is the fact that philo-sophical concepts need to be transformed in a certain way in order to become opera-tive in architecture.

RQ – I wonder whether this has to do with the American fascination the last part of the 20th century America with the idea of ar-chitectural autonomy. Bernard Tschumi has raised an issue about how architecture bor-rows parts of other disciplines, internalizes them and makes them architectural. . I think for him it was a bit different because he had a desire that architecture could infect other disciplines like psychoanalysis and philoso-phy. I think to some extent there is always some exchange. For example take the Alain de Botton book ‘The Architecture of Hap-piness’; he is not an architect but he uses architecture as a kind of device or foil to speculate and this is an example of a trans-fer to some other territory or discipline. It’s not as if we own this territory of architecture but there’s an activity around architectural engagement. Going back to Bernard Tschu-mi he was accused of basically under-using this deconstructive process because he took this kind of meridian notions and basi-cally transposed them transposing ideas, a light hearted way of describing plagiarism if you will. Much of architectural application is a transposition and analogy, , and even in architectural schools when concepts are spoken about they are often an analogue. In a worst case a student worst say ‚’my concept is a pink elephant and therefore I have built this pink temple in a shape of an elephant because they worship elephants’’. On the other hand you could say ‚’my con-cept is …’ but it is not an idea or a concept but a description of what can be an aspect that is a transposition onto a project either via similarity or some kind of relevance. The concept is already objectified at this stage.

84

The process is often fraught with this trans-position where it stops and grows no further in the process. The process could carry on for the idea to grow, for meaning to develop and sediment though it depends on how you take it and activate it. NIT- I agree with that, and I will also claim that today there is a transformation in the idea of the concept as well. I mean today, if architects say “I have a concept”, they usually mean a kind of an image which is not actually the concept they’re looking for. We should differentiate between a concept and an image. A concept is something more general and more vague: it enables trans-formations. The image is very stable, and it’s concrete. It’s immediate, and it’s there, if you know what I mean. And so we try to use Immanuel Kant to show this diver-gence, because Kant distinguished some-how between the concept and the image as an external (or internal) sensation, and this is very useful. The concept is something that generates the design process and is not just a singular image: this enables the concept to become active. Images probably enfeeble the intellectual capacity to think in terms of a conceptual method and a gradual logical sequence of hierarchies and deci-sions that gives order, content and mean-ing to the process of architectural design. We think that the beginning of the design process is a kind of conceptual operation where you organize data and you try to find your way around the project. If a nexus of concepts is well defined at the beginning, it enables you to have a kind of rational-ity during the design process. Of course we are ready to use interdisciplinary borrowings but we try to be very cautious in the way we transform those concepts. Let me give you an example, if I may. For about 2000 years the concept of the void was considered as a non-being. Basically, Aristotle was the one who founded that idea. He believed that there can be no void in nature. That nature is full of matter. So, according to this view, the void is nothing; it’s a non being; it’s a negative non-presence. This conception, of course, goes as far as the concept of horror vacui in the Middle Ages, the idea that na-ture abhors a vacuum. But then you have a very interesting switch that occurred during the 17th century, where you can see the de-velopment of ideas and experimental pro-cedures showing, first, that the vacuum can exist, and, second, that it’s not something

negative: it’s not the left-over of matter, but something that has a presence of its own.

RQ- It is a scientific vacuum, it’s unfilled.NIT- Right, it’s unfilled. Otto von Guericke even claimed that the vacuum may be even more important than matter. It’s a whole switch to a new mentality. This is where ar-chitecture comes in, because, if you take, for example, Etienne-Louis Boullée’s pro-jects, you might prove that the void has at least the same importance as matter. You can follow the transformation of an idea which originally came from physics and phi-losophy inside the discipline and discourse of architecture. So that’s the way we want to work with a concept, trying to find out crucial historical moments that could work for us. For example, if we think that the void has some importance, or a presence of its own, we might develop a different design attitude.

RQ- Is this not a volumetric sense of the void, where it’s contrast is matter. The Pan-theon is always discussed as being empty in the modern era, as being de-void of physi-cal matter such as furniture in the space under the dome, there is nothing there, but one thing is for sure, that from whatever reli-gious background you come from, or even if you are an atheist, there is something about that space that suggests that it is spiritually occupied. That is a meta-physical thing as opposed to being matter- physical.

NIT- Yes, actually this sort of void goes back to a discussion that has been going on since the Middle Ages. It concerns the rela-tion between God and the world, and there the void becomes entangled in the meta-physical realm.

RQ- Yes, it is a metaphysical void as op-posed to a cosmic void. NIT- So you have this extra mundane void which is outside the natural world. Meta-physics, however, is related to physics dur-ing the 17th century. Take Isaac Newton’s absolute space, for example. It’s a kind of general framework that pre-exists matter and enables the location of material entities inside it.

85

Absolute space is a ‘mathematical’, but real, framework which may exist without mat-ter, and it’s empty, more or less. It’s a void space, and the interesting thing about it (which is where the metaphysics comes in) is that Newton explicitly says that absolute space is the sensorium of God. So there is a very theological idea behind that.

RQ- In the search for new science, as far as I am concerned, the motivation was to discover theological underpinnings, it was trying to discover the natural beauty of the physical order of the world, to have a bet-ter understanding of it as it was ordained to be. In that sense I don’t see Newton to be any different to let’s say another scientist say Leonardo studying dissected parts of a horse, because that person wanted to find out how god crafted the anatomy of a horse. This was a search for an order.

NIT- And you have this idea that there is a cosmic order, and the architectural order has to decipher the cosmic order in order to legitimize the act of building. It is very clear, you can sense that correspondence through harmonic proportions and analogies.

RQ- It’s always been there, the idea is a search for order. But the point of departure has been the confusion of matter and the non-material, one concern develops and the other subsides, the immaterial subsides and the material considerations become much more explicit in our daily lives.

NIT- That’s very interesting. Aristotle was successful because he had this empirical approach which was very common, and many people can attach to it. We see ma-terial entities around us; we don’t see the void; it’s not very sensible; it’s not some-thing you can conceptualize very easily. It’s very natural that Aristotle’s view of the world, his legacy, lasted so long.

RQ- The view on nature that lasted right through to medieval times through the Re-naissance had no notion of void but there wasnature as natura naturata and natura naturans. Nature existed, and it was or-dained that matter pre-existed or matter that weas human interfere with and impose an manner of artifice over matter. NIT- Yes, matter was hugely debated. But after the 17th century you have this new idea of the void, which somehow lasts 200

years. And then Albert Einstein comes in, changes the Newtonian model, and there you have a world that does not dwell on the void necessarily because the void during the 19th century was associated with ether in the discussion of physics.

RQ- But ether is material no?

NIT- Yes, it’s a very subtle material. As-sumed to exist within this absolute space of Newton. Then Einstein does away with the idea of absolute space: he doesn’t need it for his physics, so we go back to a kind of ‘relative space’ which is more closely re-lated to Leibniz. Perhaps that is the reason why, basically after the 60s and 70s, you have people like Gilles Deleuze interested in Leibniz, the baroque and all that stuff again. However, thinking about the void and not about matter is useful for architects be-cause it could lead them to what Aymonino and Mosco called an un-volumetric archi-tecture. Our discussion reminds me of their recently published book. That was a very interesting book, because they wanted to open up the possibility of considering archi-tectural conceptions of meaning that do not start from a given material volume or from the idea of building. For example, in the first year of architectural studies at the NTUA, for 20 years now, we have had this same exercise for the undergraduate students: we say, take a cube, a given cube, and then transform it to become a habitable space. The cube is there, like a stereotyped condi-tion of architecture, meaning that students cannot conceive of architecture apart from a volumetric envelope or a given material shape. That is extremely restrictive, I think.

RQ- We try and start differently, we ques-tion our year ones, the first question they come across in architecture school is what is the difference between architecture and building.

NIT- Wow, that’s an interesting question. RQ- We are trying to approach it from the other way, instead of starting with the vol-umetric and then trying to understand the metaphysical through the years, we start with a metaphysical question. It’s an inter-esting experiment: some get it, some don’t.

86

At the early stage it doesn’t really matter, hopefully some of them get a seed planted and down the years you hope that they un-derstand the value of it all. But it’s inter-esting because, I don’t even have to pre-suppose the cube, because I think in the education when they all arrive at university they are already thinking about it within that frame of mind that Architecture is either the addition or the subtraction of a cube and the cube is your apriori element, your default architectural entity. Whereas I am trying to suggest to forget the cube as a default modern condition, but to think about archi-tecture as a metaphysical difference from the start. I give them the Pevsner question, what is a difference between a building and a bicycle shed?

NIT- That’s very crucial.

RQ- So I show an example which is a single metal post on a pavement with a sign that says ‘bus stop’. and ask, where does the bus stop start and where does it end? There is no physicality, but there is a presence of a human behavior: If 50 people line up at the bus stop, the bus stop is 50 people long, if 2 people line up at and the bus stop, it is only 2 people long, and so there is a dynamic aspect of how you understand ar-chitectural presence.

NIT- We are working intensely on this too, mainly using a forgotten work of Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension.

RQ- Yes, we are using that as well. The first two chapters always throw off the stu-dents because it is all about animals. I come from the phenomenological end, which comes from Dalibor Vesely but to be truth-ful I had an argument with him about the nature of volumetric space some 30 years ago in his flat one summer. My interest in Edward Hall’s proxemics, is in what I call cultural dimensions. I always use this idea of how space is really not volumetric, for example the space between two strangers in a very crowded train who are physically are close to each other, say 1cm apart. But the space between two lovers in a bathtub might be the same physical distance as the two strangers on the crowded bus but is an intimate space the other is not.

NIT- Absolutely. Working on Hall, we tend to develop the idea that it is bodily place

which is fundamental and not volumet-ric space. Hall has three or four spheres around the body, which range from intimate distance (very close) up to public distance, which is more formal. The question is: can we take this idea about a ‘hidden dimen-sion’ further? Of course this idea can lead to ergonomics: specific design requirements when we design an object and we want to control the distances between the bodies. But, if we take it in another direction, a phe-nomenological direction, we have to raise the question of spatial meaning – it’s what you put forward in your previous discussion – because spatial distances are not only physical, metrical and quantitative, they are qualitative as well. It is very important to be able to conceptualize the idea that architec-ture is not about quantifiable space but also about place and quality and distance. So we have a lot of phenomenology as well. We use that framework to develop the idea of a bodily space, which is at least as crucial as geometrical space.

RQ- There is certainly a really interesting connection between corporeality, humanity and space with regards to perception which Merleau Ponty has recognised. I use this example in teaching where your centre of gravity is altered, your idea of anticipation of space changes. I show ramps by Steven Holl and Richard Meier, and I swear that Meier does not understand the ramp, be-cause he is reveals where you going as a drudgery, there is no revelation or tease. In a Steven Holl ramp you can see that there is an idea of anticipation, so as you walk your centre of gravity is being challenged and you lean forward in anticipation. As you approach the top you can’t quite see it all, and it’s a mysterious tease – again rais-ing the sense of anticipation. As you come down a Holl ramp there is a release and again your CG works so that your sense of release is heightened. With a typical Meier ramp you can see where the landings are and it already look laborious compared to a stair. We’re not talking about disability ac-cess here but the sense in which architec-ture is about the human experience of mov-ing through space in time, there is a forward time of anticipation to come, and a forward time of release

87

NIT- Which is something that is connected to the void. We tend to say to our students: ok, the material elements of space are there, but action takes place within the void, with our bodies moving between those ele-ments. So it is very crucial to try and think of the world as a series of different, qualitative, spatial and bodily levels that are somehow related one to the other. A kind of articu-lation of a language, a language of space based on the different qualities of the void.

RQ- If we can flip the cards back to the commencement of this conversation about concepts, we are still in that situation, where, I think architects often think that they conceptualize, but that conceptualiza-tion is still a transposition and not yet trans-formation. Even when they understand this, the language of architecture is not precise enough in separation. Typology is used a lot and it is really a descendant from that stream of volumetric thinking where objects externalise the containment of the volume, in how you take a particular building and you qualify it in terms of various types. Typi-cality is something else, it is experiential. Being in a church or being in a library is completely different to being in a bathroom and yes there is typology but typicality it is something different altogether. It is not a conceptualisation but a cultural understand-ing of behaviour that determines space and its typicality. Reading a book after a meal in a cafédoes not make that space a study or a library, it is still a café spatially.I try to think of the conceptualization as a form of activation, and for me it is different, because its demands andsometimes scares a lot of architects. I’ve had a lot of students really struggle with this, where we challenge them and ask them exactly what they be-lieve, because if you cannot activate until you believe. It is not so much that I take a concept and apply it, anyone can do that, but to say I believe it and I act on it and then I can be transformational about it be-cause I am continually acting on conceptual motivation to realize space in architecture. It disturbs a lot of people because it seems like quasi-religious speak.

NIT- Yes, we try to work in the same di-rection. For example, we give a certain de-sign problem, relating it to a specific place, focusing on Athens. What we try to do is get the students to visit the place on many different occasions, at different times, dur-

ing the day, during the night, so that they will acquire a kind of exploration that is their own, not taken from maps. So they form a kind of general idea about the space, and, as soon as they have this kind of attachment to the place, we then ask them, without giv-ing them a specific functional program: what do you think is the most appropriate use for the place, based on the way you have experienced it and the way you have ab-sorbed all the information? So this research process creates a kind of concept which is more related to the idea of typicality, to re-ality as an experiential fact and not as a formal exercise.

RQ- It’s psycho-geography. We’ve been trying to do this for a number of years now. Typically though there is this pseudo-sci-entific ‘site analysis’ a student takes a map, draws some red lines and says they have analyzed pedestrian movement. What is that? You see the same thing from Sydney to Vancouver and all the students around the world have been doing this. It’s much more important to have a lived experience of a space during night time and day time, it’s an interpretation. Even with the diagram-matic studies on sites, very few people will admit that they are not really making an analysis or any sort, they’re actually giving an interpretation about what they think.

NIT- Exactly. That’s where Nietzsche comes in. We tend to say, following Nietzsche, that there are not facts out there you can just collect, there are only interpretations of those facts. It’s very crucial because there is this positivistic tendency today to see architecture as a kind of management of readymade data, which are out there: they are ‘objective’; you just have to collect and rearrange them. We try to move things in another direction by saying that you have to be involved as a person; you have to be-lieve, and you have to formulate your own concepts and not use readymade ones.

RQ- How does this then present a chal-lenge, let’s say you are given a project and you are based in Berlin and your project is in India, how does one do a project for it? You have to then always assume to have an Indian experience.

NIT- You go there and visit the place.

88

RQ - But then you fall into another kind of trap, like in the tourist trap I’ve been to St Petersburg and in 5 days I’ve done it, it’s a problem right, so are we saying that archi-tects can only go so far?

NIT- No, because this experiential basis can then be systematized in a way and become more abstract. It will create tools to manipu-late space, which are more genuine, which are inter-subjective, let’s say. Interpreting a place through a personal involvement does not mean just sticking to the subjective as-pect of it. We certainly try to move it to an-other conceptual level, but, if the subjective basis exists, it enables the students to have a control stemming from reality. This control will not lead them to formalistic gestures. It is something we want to avoid. Formal-ism sometimes comes from the fact that the character of a place is not recognized as a crucial factor of design. As a consequence, students tend to generate solutions that could be applied to anywhere, regardless of the characteristics of the place. We try to put the notion of place at the heart of the action of architecture. Living in the global condition does not prohibit us from studying locality. On the other hand, locality is not cut off from global tendencies. Of course there is a discussion going on related to Martin Heidegger’s notion of place, which is a bit problematic. If you define place in a very closed way, there is a danger of na-tionalism, of racist attitudes. You have to be open enough.

RQ- Well, we certainly found that when we tried to get the book on nationalism out, it seemed to disturb people. We found a col-lection of academics all around the world who got together for this conference and we got a book out in the end. There was this deep seated discomfort in viewing this topic and architecture is caught up in this very weird dilemma where it wants to be national, but at the same time it doesn’t want to view this neo-nationalism. National-ism is about further segregation and forms of political segregation and seperation, in the last 100 years we have probably seen more nations than we have ever had in the history of mankind. The Soviet Union has fractured into so many nations, another ex-ample is sub-continental India and there’s still China which hasn’t really fragmented which is made up of multiple identities, and the United States. The whole idea of this is

a unity of different differences.NIT- Yes, I would say regarding this very wide topic that it touches upon a political and ethical dimension of architecture. Ken-neth Frampton based his argument about ‘critical regionalism’ on Paul Ricoeur’s dual-ism between national cultures and universal civilization, what we call globalization today. Even today, within Greek architectural cir-cles, there is a tendency not to discuss lo-cality because we are in a global condition, a universal ‘global village’ that, somehow, we have to accept as an absolute, given fact. That is a political issue with various moral dimensions. However, back in the 30s, there was a big discussion in Greek intellectual circles of what ‘Greekness’ is about, what it means to create an architec-ture of ‘’Greekness’’. Along with it, there was a re-appropriation of vernacular, particular typologies in architectural design. This in-tense public debate does not happen now, because somehow we take for granted that we are all global citizens and we are con-nected through global networks.

RQ- At the same time it’s caught in this kind of dilemma, this drive for ‘’Greekness’’ and it’s actually kind of odd, with the conclusion being that you will know it when you see it. It is really quite anonymous. The funny thing is when you try and speak about it on an intellectual level, then it wants to manifest itself in a separatist way, you want to kind of isolate it and manifest it and at the same time ‘’anonymise’’ it. You don’t really want to see it come out because it needs to be anonymous to be in the vernacular, to be the Greek vernacular, because otherwise it is not, it’s this really kind of strange irony behind these things.

NIT- Also if, for example, you take Amos Rapoport and his discussion of anonymous architecture, you could see that this vernac-ular idea actually springs from 19th century Romanticism. It has its root in the romantic re-appropriation of national cultures, so it has a national flavour about it. It’s a cultural construction which has very specific ideolo-gies behind it. During the 30s in Greece, there were figures like Dimitris Pikionis, who actually started out as a modernist in a very wide sense and then, in the last phase of his career, switched to a new vernacular and the search for anonymous architecture. Pikionis tried to return to place against an international style.

89

The discussion in Greece was polarized be-tween those two options: either you were international, modern, you used high tech-nology and somehow you disregarded place and tradition (basically the way modernism did) or you were a vernacular architect and very much an enthusiast of local qualities and local climates, a national romantic. There was little space for negotiating be-tween those two directions, which could both be fruitful for today. I think that today we can be local and global at the same time; we just have to find a way of negotiat-ing those two worldviews.

RQ- It’s interesting that you bring up the word negotiation because one of the things we learnt in the context of nationalism is that it really has nothing to do with inter-relations, it’s this transactional negotiation, whereas if it really was inter-national, then your national romanticism and my national romanticism would have a conversation, which it would never do, the conversation is about how we transact in anon-national manner, the only time we ever trade about anything is when we trade in a non-national manner and this is very curious.

NIT- I would like to argue that it depends on the way you define place and the way you set up the platform for inter-disciplinarity. I’m thinking of Jeff Malpas, for example. I think he tries to open up the idea of place, away from the national-socialist context of Heidegger’s thinking, struggling to create a more hybrid concept. I think Doreen Mas-sey was working in a similar direction a few years ago, thinking of place as a network of localities which are connected in a global context. This might make sense for contem-porary architects and students of architec-ture.

RQ- The funny thing is the guide book gave us the international architecture theme, one of the guys who gave us the architecture theme is Phillip Johnson. Immediately after he finished that book for MOMA, he put on a Nazi uniform and joined the Nazi youth.

NIT- We have to consider this book again. It was called The International Style. There’s a problem with that. Modern architecture, if we read its manifestoes carefully, was rather aggressive towards the idea of ‘style’. Then, Hitchcock and Johnson create this umbrel-la of an ‘international style’, which kind of

contradicts the act itself. Modern architects wanted to move away from it; that was their main objective: they wanted to create an ar-chitecture that was beyond style.

RQ- It was meant to be away from style.

NIT- “The ‘styles’ are a lie” (Le Corbusier). Modern architecture was a moral attack on style. Hitchcock and Johnson appropriated modern architectural design from an Ameri-can perspective and aestheticized it into a kind of formalistic language, which was rather far from the initial intentions.

RQ - We have come a long way, from dis-cussing all this from the void. It’s still my be-lief that unless you are a part of a subscrip-tion of certain notions, that you can only be an activist, and architecture is an activist of certain notions, notions that you would in-ternalize.

NIT- Maybe the crucial argument here would be that one concept is not enough: you have to create connections between various concepts, which means that you have to use the concept of an idea. You can see that perhaps an idea is a nexus of concepts that are organised under a coher-ent scheme. This scheme is needed, when architectural design strives to become more conscious of its process.

RQ- But then you need to have an ideology to be able to activate the idea, that’s my thinking. You can’t borrow the idea’s without necessarily internalizing the ideology.

NIT- Without introspection.

RQ- It’s almost like when you get a Buddhist priest trying to conduct a Roman Catholic ritual. You’ve borrowed the robes but you still haven’t internalized it, doesn’t have the authenticity.

NIT- That process requires more work from the student, focusing on his own language, his own argument, against a kind of man-aging of readymade images, which is very easy today, mainly through the internet: stu-dents have all this information, coming from everywhere, without being able to put it on a scale of values.

90

RQ- It’s difficult for us as educators, be-cause we cannot run the kind of ideal stu-dios, which we would like you to.

NIT- Students are using images too much, even in the second year. We have at least 30% of the students come up and say: “Ok, I saw this picture, and I like it, so I will bor-row it and transfer it to my own solution.” I am trying to suggest that they cannot bor-row spectacular fragments of images, un-less they have developed a coherent strat-egy of how to use them, to appropriate them into an idea of their own: borrowing things and images can become infertile.

RQ- It’s the same sort of problem I have with site analysis and precedence. When you internalize why they have done it, then you critique it and then you move on from it. Which is why don’t realize how much is embedded in them, even today where we don’t have this kind of functionalist method-ology, you don’t realize how embedded and how disguised this Durand methodology is in there, you borrow and you take and you reassemble.

NIT- Durand’s model was very present in my school as well, disguised under a mod-ernist positivism of readymade elements, of ‘archetypes’ which are there, and you just have to use them. Of course this whole idea of ‘primary elements’ (the column, the beam, the slab) is useful to students in the first year, because they learn the syntax of their craft. Afterwards, nevertheless, it be-comes a kind of stereotype that prevents them from developing their spatial thinking.

RQ- It does, but I think it goes beyond an-other element, because there is a stylistic precedent, for me it is the same as method-ology. You may as well just take it all, you reappropriate it, and you don’t consider the original context of it all.

NIT- The context and the place are very cru-cial to this process. Regarding this topic, I am reminded of Quatermere de Quincy and his discussion on the idea of type. I think Quincy was misunderstood. Some of the typological occurrences and design strate-gies that you mentioned, in the 60s, were actually more akin to a formalistic interpre-tation of his idea of type. However, Quincy actually mentions that the type is different from the model. A model is something to be

taken and reproduced as it is, like a form or a readymade image, imitated and applied, whereas the type, as a general idea, ena-bles variations. It’s vague; it’s not concrete. RQ- It’s an exemplar.

NIT- Yes. So if we think of concepts as types, in Quincy’s sense, they would work better, because we would have a general core which can be manipulated in different ways and lead to different design results. That’s why we tend to encourage students to make a lot of variations in order to check the fertility of the initial idea-type and where it can lead them. If you take a model as a starting point, there is a kind of deterministic sequence that is limited. The model cannot lead you to wide variations. We propose, instead, general concepts: the concept of the trace and the concept of time are very general notions, absolutely vague. We en-courage the students to develop their own arguments around these concepts and ana-lyse them from different perspectives, us-ing philosophical resources, whatever they want. As soon as they are engaged for two or three weeks in a kind of reading process, trying to define what the trace means for them, this idea, this concept-type, becomes a kind of active operator that will enable them to go forward. Then we ask them to try and visualize this concept, which is a tricky situation, because it can lead to descriptive analogues, illustrations. We are trying to avoid this by postulating that the students can use whatever means they want in order to show us this abstract idea. It could be a sketch, a model, a collage or even a live performance. It’s a very useful exercise be-cause you get to see the very different ways that each student understands each con-cept. You give the same concept, and you have a variety of solutions: the outcomes and combinations are very different. For ex-ample, we give the concept of the void, and some students choose to focus on the ‘sen-timental void’ during Hyper-modernity. The argument is that the void is something that it exists somehow; it’s a kind of presence. We usually claim that it is a ‘material’ at the disposal of the architect. The architect has to deal with the void spaces in the city, the streets, the squares, the empty spaces, the desolate spaces, the voids that have no us-age, no function, the void buildings, all that kind.

91

Then we ask them if the void has a struc-ture: can they describe an empty courtyard? What tools would they have to develop in order to describe it? It’s not just the lefto-ver of the built environment; it’s not just the residue of something more important, which is matter. We try to see the void in its own terms. Charles Correa is a great example; he has a very interesting book called Zero, in which he is working on nothingness, ar-guing how important it is for architecture.

RQ- Correa always gave the same lecture titled ‘transfer and transformations’. He felt very Indian in the modern world and you have to think that India during his time, is not the modern India of today We are talk-ing about India in the 60’s, and the idea that you take what you take and you activate them and the activation is not just trans-formative.

NIT- Well, I wanted to go back to the ques-tion about the difference between archi-tecture and building. It is a very important topic. We have to find a way to reconcep-tualize that question today. I have in mind John Ruskin’s formulation that architecture is something beyond building, basically be-cause of the formal decoration of its sur-faces. Are we still content with Ruskin’s definition?

RQ- Edification is a strange word, we don’t use anymore, edification is used in religious circles, in communal reconstruction of emo-tion, and in that word, I think is where we lost it, because if you take all that out, you are really just left with the object aren’t you, you have the building but you don’t have the edification of it.

NIT- Well, that’s a very good point. I was working on Leon Battista Alberti a few years ago, and I came to the conclusion that the English translation of his treatise De Re Ae-dificatoria as On the Art of Building is incor-rect; it’s not very good. Alberti speaks of the fact that we put things together, we struc-ture things or, even, concepts, ideas. How-ever, a ‘structure’ is a much more general concept than (a single) ‘building’. I would even argue that ‘structuring’ is the opposite of building, since structure involves a highly mental process, whereas building has much more to do with materials, adding and piling them up. De Re Aedificatoria would then be translated as On the Question of Structur-

ing. Alberti codifies the architect as a new subject, emerging from the Renaissance, who has to find the methods, the ideolo-gies and the concepts that will enable him to think of structuring in general; and that includes the structuring of character, the idea that architecture, apart from material-ity, structures society as well.

RQ- He was very clear on that, in renais-sance there was an appropriate type, there was appropriate decoration, a decorum for a gentleman and his family, I think in the modern day there is a place for that, we are in a modern society and there is a need for structure and relationships between hu-mans.

NIT- There is a second instance of this Al-bertian dichotomy between structure and building. It takes place during the Enlight-enment. You can see it transformed into Boullée’s thinking. Boullée says explicitly that we should distinguish, in architecture, between the science of building and the pro-duction and creation of the spirit. The third instance is Ruskin, as I already mentioned. And the fourth is Le Corbusier: he says that we have to distinguish between the aes-thetic of the engineer and architecture. Ar-chitecture is a pure creation of the mind. Again, Le Corbusier uses almost the same terminology Boullée does. According to Le Corbusier, engineering has to do with how things stand up and hold together, whereas architecture is about stirring emotion, some-thing quite different. In relation to building, architecture has a quite different objective. This is really important. And I think today, if I may say, we tend to underestimate the emotional aspect. We are more focused on technological issues, issues of building per-formance.

RQ- This is now certainly a method of oper-ation around the world, it’s not so much the productive aspects, the methodology is now becoming, ingrained in the processes of de-livery and of what’s expected of them in a communal level, a real level, and a societal level of what the architect does. It reduces architecture to a process of delivery and product, and this basically now enshrines this whole process, we deliver a service in the manufacture of a product. You want to enter a competition that is a major competi-tion around the world you have to have an ISO rating and that comes

92

with the manufacturing, so your quality as-surance is highly rated, it’s a manufacturing service process.

NIT- You can sense that during the final one or two decades, you have all of these professional. Yes, but the requirements, the technical requirements, are so new, so strict, that you tend to disregard many fac-ets of spatial meaning and just be absorbed by professional technicalities.

R- You can be completely, self-sufficient, you can produce a professional architect without this conversation so you can com-pletely avoid all of this, you can just channel through.

NIT- Of course. I wonder if this develop-ment is related to the existence of more powerful digital tools that enable designers to see the production, to visualize the pro-duction in a very specific and concrete way. This possibility is very alluring, and maybe there’s a danger of putting aside those other questions of ontological order and meaning.

RQ- How do you conceptualize a digital void, maybe you should have a conversa-tion with some of these people. I always tell people what they do isn’t analogue, it’s the x, y, z universe of Gaspard Monge is in-ternalized in the computer, without that you don’t have AutoCAD, it’s the x, y, z of the mathematical universe, but there has to be some notion of the digital void.

NIT- Maybe the question is much bigger. What have the new digital tools done for architecture as a discipline? It’s a huge dis-cussion again; I’m not sure I control it. Ob-viously, there are things that we could not do before digital computing regarding the matter of form generation, but I’m not sure if we possess better control in our discipline now than before. Digitalization was a kind of a shock, and it happened too quickly. I remember in our school, till at least 2000, almost all diploma projects were made by hand, and, within two or three years, you didn’t have that. It was a very sudden change. Now you see that some people don’t even sketch anymore. I don’t want to be nostalgic or romantic or even conserva-tive, but we have to consider what we lose and what we gain; it’s really important.

RQ- I think we lose a lot more, because

if you see all over the world a reduction in architecture education is a process. Even the EU PQD has tried to reduce this to a 6 or 7 year process, in Australia we see a reduction in design in architecture educa-tion. I think there’s an illusion that you can do it very quickly, because I remember a time when you could identify pretty quickly a student, whether year 1, 2, 3 , 4 or 5 when they drew a line, and you could see from the drawing, what level of maturity they are at, now the computer erases all the differ-ences, the truth and immaturity, they all look similar, visually it’s an illusion which leads us all to believe that architecture can be un-derstood in a shorter frame of time.

NIT- Yes. Also I would suggest that the sketch is a very useful tool, having an anal-ogy with the conceptual type before its elaboration. The sketch bears the trace of a mental insight; it’s not the finished product; it’s a kind of searching operation, where the mind and the hand try to come to a mutual dialectic. The sketch can lead you to very different final forms, whereas, if you start working in an AutoCAD environment from the very beginning, the nature of the de-sign process is much defined: it tends to stereotype your thinking into ready-made decisions.

RQ- Yes, I think you are right because the AutoCAD universe is one where you can only add and subtract and you are forced to do this, whereas you are able to almost, conceptually at least, in a sketch return to the void completely and start again.

NIT- And one other crucial aspect of this process is the concept of scale. I think that the new digital media do not have an implicit humanistic sense of scale. The fact that you can minimize and maximize very quickly tends to put the question of scale out of the game altogether. There was a very interest-ing recent book by the University of Kent on the subject of scale, showing how scale is of high importance for architecture. Also there was a French theorist, Philippe Bou-don, who actually advanced the argument that architecture’s specific quality and char-acteristic in relation to abstract geometry is that the initial conceptual projection in ar-chitecture already bears the stamp of scale.(The conversation carried on …. for 2 hours)

LEICESTER SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE SELECTED GRADUATE PROJECTS MARCH2 2015

94

THE LOFOTEN SEASONAL FISHERYAlistair Wood

The demise of the fishing industry as a community initiative has been taking place throughout the Lofoten Islands since the Second World War. However, recently the situation has escalated. Export businesses are tak-ing away the process and production from the people’s hands and into factories, this is having a correlating effect on the town of Reine, causing community values, traditions and cultural identity to be lost.

This projects was an examination of the opportunity to revitalise the old industrial community of Reine that breaks the current detrimental cycle of exportation. The goal of the project was to rejuvenate the community through providing the facilities and environment for local fishermen to fish, process and sell their products from the cod fishery. This in turn would reengage the surrounding community with their cultural heritage, with the building and process plugging itself back into the town, becoming a central monument and community space that local industry and business could thrive around.

Taking reference from Lofotens vernacular, created through the unique ‘Rorbuer’ fishing huts, painted red and elevated on stilts to cantilever over the water’s edge, the project explores the life of a local fisherman on a more industrial scale. A fishery that steps into the water celebrates the process of deconstructing the cod fish, creating a spectacle to be admired. From here the Cod are hung out to ferment in the sun to create Stockfish - a Norwegian delicacy - on a huge lattice canopy, taking reference from the local timber hang-ing structures dotted around the island. Accommoda-tion for traveling fishermen soars over the water’s edge and snakes back up the landscape to connect with the marketplace and eatery where the stock fish is sold to the public. From here one can enjoy a unique experi-ence of being intertwined as part of the process that is creating the stockfish that you are eating.

98

DNA STORAGE FACILITYJamie Evans

Based in Holyrood Park, Scotland, the project pro-poses the integration of a DNA storage and research facility into the face of the Salisbury Crag. The loss of global animal populations is well documented it is estimated that at least 30% of all land, fresh-water and marine animals will go extinct within the next 50 years.

Research suggests that there are between 2 and 100 million species in the world and that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species become extinct each year. This means that when taking the best case scenario, between 200 and 2000 species of animal are dying out annually, and when they are gone their genetic information may also be lost forever. Conservation is the best means of protecting biodiversity but there is clearly the need for a backup. The Frozen ark is a consortium on international institutions that collec-tively catalogue and bank DNA samples and I used them as my client, in conjunction to with Edinburgh University’s renown biomedical school, to focus the programme.

Similar to the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens and The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which store seeds for the protection of crop and plant genomes, the proposal stores animal DNA. The purpose is to securely preserve the DNA of endangered species so that their genomes are not lost if they were to become extinct. The samples are maintained in a ‘vi-able’ condition so that they can potentially be cloned from to support struggling communities or to reinte-grate extinct species.

The vault is set within the hard extrusion of dolerite which forms the crag, a hard igneous rock extru-sion formed millions of years ago when the volcanic site was active. This forms extra natural protection around the two metre thick concrete bunker which houses just fewer than 5 million individual samples in liquid nitrogen freezers. This is connected to the surface down a 150m reinforced tunnel.

Above ground, research labs are shielded behind a large dolerite wall constructed from the excavated material from the tunnel and vault visually acting as a secondary crag to visually settle the scientific building within its rural surroundings. The labs are kept at 12 degrees Celsius so as to preserve the DNA’s viability to be used and potentially cloned in future years.

Over the two levels of labs is a public exhibit which explains the work being done on site and allows visitors to view into the operational labs. An impor-

tant link is also formed through cable car terminals located at the top and bottom of the crag slope. In addition the upper terminal houses reintegration roosts for local wild birds to safely lay eggs away from predatory birds and establish a population.

The proposal is in effect a genetic insurance against the risk of extinction of endangered species. The structure and form look to relate to the site context and take advantage of local resources in a skilled workforce from Edinburgh University and geological occurrences in the strength and security of the crag.

100

WATER FILTERING SYSTEM Matthew Jones

Many marine animals and plants have the ability to clean and filter their environment to make it suitable for their survival. The study of filter feeders showed that in large numbers, could have the ability to restore and pu-rify large areas of water, damaged by human pollution.

This programme explores how such a system could be used to clean and filter the rivers, lakes and oceans of Scotland damaged by acid rain, waste disposal and carbon emissions.

The project is split into two major aspects. The first is to provide a new, sustainable food source for small communities along the Scottish coastline. By grow-ing and harvesting sea vegetables, small towns and villages would be able to reduce their dependency on land grown fruit and vegetables.

The second aim is to reduce the pollution levels of large areas of water, damaged by a century of acid rain. The site in Millport provides enough space to allow for large areas of seaweed to be grown. The seaweed would be used to purify the water, allowing for the local communities to grow their own sea vegetables safely. The large crops of seaweed would be used to provide a new, clean source of biofuel.

102

THE (ARC) CENTRELuke Riggall

Preliminary investigations in urban expansion high-lighted the growing trend of de-densification, which if accelerated may redefine the city as we know it. It is predicted that developed land will have tripled in just 30 years time. After an initial spike in growth, a city will expand in size faster than its population will grow, this is the start of urban de-densification. This is often due to improved transport links which en-able developments to thrive along their routes. As these links continue to improve, I believe this will become a catalyst for urban dilation and opens up opportunities for the built environment far beyond the threshold of todays cities. This then enables populations to live within previously unexploited landscapes.More than ever, we should now consider the relationship between the natural and built environ-ments, towards a symbiotic, interdependent approach; this is the underlying theme of this proposal.

The project manifests itself in the form of a multi-lay-ered, mixed use community working to monitor, analyse and restore an eroding marsh land within the Scottish highlands. The project includes research and visitor facilities, interlinked with an autonomous settlement addressing the essential needs of living within isolated and climatically intense landscapes.

The chosen site has been identified as one of the most significant, yet vulnerable peat marshes within the UK, with the majority of erosion due to artificial tree plan-tations which have drained the water levels. The project responds by repurposing this vast timber supply into the schemes structure and materiality. Not only is this stunning and vital landscape in need of preservation, but it also posses a threat to us by releasing high levels of carbon into the atmosphere. In other words, we need this landscape just as much as it needs us.

The site is accessed along a dirt track and cable car system connecting to the main visitor centre. From there the rest of the development may be accessed along a timber walkway and there is also the option to explore by boat.In order to avoid damaging the areas of peat deposits within the land, the proposal is built on the water using pile foundations, driven directly into the base rock.The visitor centre includes a main entrance atrium, seminar spaces, an information centre and a first floor restaurant with views over the designated nature reserve. The first floor offices bridge over to the research wing of the main build-ing, acting as the control point between the public and private areas and includes a central break out space for staff as well as 6 specialist laboratories.Looking at the north of the development, there is a visitors

retreat which overlooks a nature reserve and con-sists of 9 high quality guest accommodation units with access to a 2km circular walkway following the waterways. To the South, there is a sepa-rated staff community with 18 accommodation units overlooking the less healthy (but no less stunning) landscape and the mountain range beyond. There are also 3 observation towers on the peripheries of the development used for bird watching, electric-ity generation and as control towers for automated field modules.The defensive, aerodynamic forms of the scheme respond to the sites intense climatic conditions, with exterior spaces being shielded by densely woven timber windbreaks. The design of the accommodation units also take subtle referenc-es from the native highland buildings “blackhouses”. The scheme also aims to harness its climatic by integrating wind turbines, water harvesting roofs and photovoltaic panels supported by log burners. Fi-nally, a proportion of the food can be grown on site via floating cultivation units and integrated planters.

As a vision for the future - if transportation can overcome the requirement for built infrastructure towards infrastructure-less methods - I believe com-munities could settle in very remote and naturally rich locations. I would like to see this hyper-site-specific approach replicated and adapted to different conditions, introducing a symbiotic relationship between the natural and built environments, bleeding into the urban fringe