Collective Intelligence, or Collective Stupidity?

Detroit?  Bangkok?  Manila?  Manaus?  South Africa? 

The above image is circulating on the internet accompanied by all sorts of captions of all sorts of cities on all sorts of continents, showing us how images, so easily appropriated and manipulated today, are deployed toward all sorts of ends, all too often sensationalist, demagogical, and misleading.




According to "Del Tirador a la Ciudad", the architecture and design blog of El País, this image is of Detroit, Michigan. Last time I visited Detroit, in 2001, there weren't any palm trees to be found, but who knows, maybe global warming has somewhat altered the flora of the Motor City over the last decade.




I suspect the author, Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, pulled the image from this post at Decrece Madrid, a grassroots environmentalist, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist organization in Madrid calling for the "degrowth" of that metropolis. 




In both of the above websites, this image of "Detroit" serves to highlight the built manifestation of extreme socio-economic contrast, which is certainly visible in this image, and which can certainly be seen in parts of Detroit. Except that this isn't Detroit. Poverty in that city actually looks very different, occupying run-down 19th and early 20th century houses originally built for a white middle class that fled to the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s.




A reverse image search (conducted by talented architect and photographer Manca Ahlin) reveals a list of further cities which this image supposedly represents: Manila, Manaus, South Africa and Bangkok.




Is this collective intelligence, or is this collective stupidity? You can take your pic(k).

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Gaudí in Red Alert

“Gaudí en alerta roja” is the title of an online petition currently the source of much debate in Barcelona. Its proponents, a group of luminaries from the local architectural and cultural establishment, argue that Gaudí’s work should be left "alone" and that he should be allowed to “rest in peace.” In fact, it demands that post-humous additions to projects Gaudí never completed in his lifetime be "undone" so as to revert to the state in which "the author" left them.



There are many problems with this rather romantic manifesto. For one thing, building is not a “pure” or “fine” art, and as Robert Hughes writes in Barcelona, Gaudí fancied himself as more of a builder than an architect: "That he was the son of artisans mattered immensely to Gaudí. He thought of himself as a man of his hands, not a theoretician." (p. 470). The Sagrada Familia was, from day one, a collaborative endeavor between Gaudí and his crew of masons and artisans. He never produced a full set of drawings of the temple (he apparently hated drawing), and is known to have made many design decisions in situ with his co-workers, operating at a level of humility that is unfathomable in the context of today's prima donna architecture. Leaving Gaudí’s work incomplete in the name of a supposed purity of authorship is probably something he himself would never have wished.



Another argument made in the manifesto is that the construction of such an ambitious temple is anachronous with a modern secular nation, and that the exorbitant amount of money it is costing would be better spent on more urgent needs. As far as I know, the construction of the Sagrada Familia is being financed mostly, if not entirely, by the hordes of tourists lining up to buy tickets to visit the site. Just who is to deny tourists and religious fanatics their right to pay tribute to a temple? Aren’t freedom of religion and freedom of mobility the very hallmarks of a modern, secular society?



Of course, it is entirely correct to insist that the Sagrada Familia should not invade public space, that it should have a building permit like any other construction site, and that there is no rational reason for a projected tunnel to have to make a wide detour around its foundations. Yes, the Casa Batlló’s neighbor should never have had four stories added on top of it, and perhaps the Colonia Güell crypt could have been renovated more sensitively (though it doesn’t look that bad either). But to insist that Gaudí’s work be returned to some sort of pure state and be henceforth left untouched?! That smacks of religious fundamentalism to me.

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Everyday Camouflage in the City

INTRODUCTION



"Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth drawers house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales the grocer's....If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel....Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it." –Italo Calvino



Camouflage, in both nature and warfare, is a means for escaping visual detection by an enemy or predator, presupposing a combative relationship between a viewing and a viewed subject. Yet, a civilian, presumably non-adversarial form of camouflage is increasingly present in many Western cities that has little to do with physical conflict and everything to do with (the prevention of) ideological conflict; with appeasing prevailing aesthetic sensibilities and notions of civic rectitude in the interests of creating an image of uniformity and cohesion.



“Everyday camouflage,” as it is identified here, is a strategy for concealing potentially problematic or undesirable building content by means of contrived architectural simulation. Examples include the concealment of new construction—especially urban infrastructure installations—behind traditional building facades; clandestine religious groups operating under the cover of “normal” secular architecture; banality concealed behind spectacular architecture; wealth disguised behind an image of poverty; or buildings whose contentious histories are “cleansed” by the application of new exterior surface materials. More generally, it is possible to identify three main cultural issues which seem to prompt applications of everyday camouflage: modernity, class, and memory.



In cases of everyday camouflage, the notion of “building type” is appropriated and at the same time subverted. The correlation that normally exists between building content and building form is taken advantage of in order to conceal by means of a deceptive simulation. A disjunction is thereby made to exist between what a building contains and what it “looks like” it contains. Any consistency between form and content is made to yield to a consistency among forms. Such an urban formal uniformity appeals to popular fantasies of the city as a harmonious space; a sentiment that is on the rise in an increasingly heterogeneous and pluralist age.



The existence of this everyday form of camouflage puts into question the socio-political construction of the city as the space par excellence of civilized society, revealing instead hidden deceits and the extent to which a mythical urban image must, at times, be made to prevail over reality (2). It shows, moreover, how the city is increasingly constructed and manipulated as a landscape; as “scenery” with which architecture is expected to conform, regardless of content. The very authenticity of what is experienced and seen is put into question by this marginal, relatively unusual phenomenon.



Everyday camouflage also reveals how architectural appearance can be made to perform in a strategic and performative capacity; how architectural aesthetics can comprise a stratagem—a means to an end—as opposed to an object of visual contemplation—an end in itself. The aesthetic of camouflage is, after all, “uninteresting” unless viewed outside of the field in which it operates. Likewise, examples of everyday camouflage in the city tend to make for visually uninteresting architecture: in most cases, these buildings look no different than neighboring buildings. And yet, the odd juxtapositions that these banal-looking buildings embody between interior and exterior result in disjunctions and “complexities and contradictions” that are nevertheless revealing.



In contrast with a stylistic use of camouflage, such as, say, Herzog and de Meuron’s seamless blending of the Dominus Winery into the Napa Valley landscape, the camouflage discussed here is not the result of any architecturally clever and innovative surface treatment. Camouflage here is an operative means of deception; not an aesthetic. This important distinction is analogous to the difference between a military camouflage pattern worn as a fashion style in cities (as has been the vogue), where it is obviously not intended as a means of dissimulation since such a pattern is completely ineffective in an urban context; and a military camouflage pattern worn in the field by soldiers or hunters in action, for whom it is not a “look” but an operative necessity.



Could the Dominus Winery’s exterior surface have been intended as a means of dissimulation? It certainly does not look like a traditional winery, but it also does not resemble any other type of building. In questions of camouflage, there has to be a motive operating within a certain context: if something is camouflage (and not an aesthetic pattern), then what is being concealed and, given the circumstances, why might this concealment be occurring? Just as a hunter is trying to avoid being seen by prey he is stalking or a soldier by an enemy, there may be interests in concealing certain programmatic activities occurring in certain circumstances.



Conversely, the examples of everyday camouflage cited here could very well not have been intended to be acts of concealment, even though the circumstances of the building programs in question could be seen to warrant it. We can really only ever speculate. But architectural theory—and in this case also cultural theory—is precisely that: speculation.





ARCHITECTURE AND CAMOUFLAGE



The surface of a building always conceals from view, to varying degrees, that which it contains and shelters. Historically, architecture’s content has been revealed on the exterior by means of ornament and typological form. While interior styles could vary to reflect private tastes, the outward appearance of a building has traditionally been consistent with its function in some way. Richard Hill puts it quite bluntly: “The connections between the use of a building and aspects of its visible form are powerful and consistent.” (3) The very notion of architectural typology, or the categorization of buildings into ‘types’—not unlike the scientific categorization of plants, rocks or animal species—is premised on such consistency. Camouflage of any sort would not be effective without a set of assumptions on the part of a viewing subject; assumptions that have their basis in “normal” appearances.



Eighteenth-century Architecture Parlante addressed the issue of the outward expression of function theoretically, contending that a building’s façade must represent or symbolize its function on the exterior. In Claude Nicholas Ledoux’s project for a wheelwright’s shop at the royal salt works at Arc-et-Senans, for example, the building’s content is communicated externally by means of a pattern of concentric circles on the façade.

Claude Nicholas Ledoux: Wheelwright’s shop, Royal Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans

Such literal and highly specific display of content remains the exception and not the norm, of course. More typically, a wheelwright’s workshop would have occupied a building that looks like a workshop, with finer ornament or a sign communicating at closer reading a more exact idea of the activity occurring within. Typological form is premised on “types” of activity—public institutions, residences, religious worship, commerce, banking, industry, and so on—and not on “specific” activities. Such general categorization of types, in conjunction with more specific ornamental definition, allows for readings of building content at multiple levels of detail.



The Functionalist movement of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, which sought to do away precisely with ideas of traditional building types and ornament, argued, not unlike the architects of Architecture Parlante, that it is the exact function of a building that should determine its form. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour have noted, with respect to modernism, that “meaning was to be communicated, not through allusion to previously known forms, but through the inherent, physiognomic characteristics of form. The creation of architectural form was to be a logical process, free from the images of past experience, determined solely by program and structure.” (4)



Modernist transparency and form, which would be made possible by new construction techniques such as steel and reinforced concrete, would liberate the façade not only from bearing loads, but also from having to represent a building’s function through ornament and symbolism. Indeed, there was to be no more “façade” in modernism, but an exterior surface that was a seamless result of the interior: “A building is like a soap bubble,” wrote Le Corbusier in 1927. “This building is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is the result of the interior.” (5)



This notion of a more precise functional form, in conjunction with transparency, would become a hallmark of architectural modernism. Yet modernism’s abandonment of the notion of the building type in favor of physiognomic form, coupled with literal transparency, renders the city itself much more polymorphous and difficult to navigate; precisely the basis of much of the humor in Jacques Tati’s 1967 film “Playtime.” As Lewis Mumford writes, “In the past half-century, architecture has turned from enclosure to exposure: a virtual replacement of the wall by the window.” (6)



Architecture’s moral obligation to honestly convey content is reinforced, indeed reified, by modernist transparency. The very idea of transparency was revolutionary in its symbolism and utopian in its potential applications: to shed light into hermetic social enclosures and to open political processes to public participation and inquiry; the sort of values that are epitomized in the glass dome that Norman Foster designed more recently for the Reichstag in Berlin. “Transparency opened up machine architecture to inspection –its functions displayed like anatomical models, its walls hiding no secrets; the very epitome of social morality,” writes Anthony Vidler. “Transparency, it was thought, would eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all the irrational.” (7)



Transparency never really succeeded in opening up the city, of course. For one thing, glass is never perfectly transparent due to its alter-ego; reflectivity. For another, it became apparent that for many modernist architects, transparency and function were alibis for engaging in formalist exercises. Nevertheless, the notion that a building should in some way reveal—as opposed to conceal—its content remained unquestioned throughout modernism. “A building should be true, not dishonest. Forms must be what they seem to be. A building should be a true expression of its purpose and of its age. Materials and structural systems should be used with integrity and be honestly expressed. The society of forms should achieve its goals through harmonious cooperation” wrote Edward Robert de Zurko in 1957. (8)





URBANISM AND CAMOUFLAGE



With the advent of architectural postmodernism, however, the tacit understanding that buildings should be transparent—either literally or figuratively—with respect to content gives way to the imperative that building form must conform with urban context. Everyday camouflage can be seen to represent an extreme form of urban contextualism, where it is no longer a question of architectural mediation between context and communicating or revealing content, but an outright prioritization of the former at the expense of the latter.



As with many aspects of postmodernism, the fantasy of the architecturally consistent city was foreshadowed in an earlier period. Toward the end of the neo-classical period, at the height of European colonial expansion worldwide, a cosmic image of the capital city as an architecturally unified entity began to take hold in the imagination of rulers and architects—even if this image was only a façade. Leonardo Benevolo has observed that "many of the most admired complexes of the late eighteenth century in England--the Circus and Royal Crescent in Bath (J. Wood, 1764 and 1769), the famous squares of Bloomsbury (1775-1827) and, later, Regent's Park (J. Nash, 1812)—consisted in the superimposition of a uniform architecture upon a number of separate houses; symmetry and unity of perspective, originally the elements of structural planning, had now become the vehicle for mere external uniformity." (9)



But whereas late eighteenth-century urban consistency is intended as the architectural expression of a consolidation of power by a ruling class, postmodern urban consistency can be seen more as a reactionary response to an emergent cultural pluralism and aesthetic heterogeneity; a side-effect of growing economic globalization and trans-national migration. In a global marketplace, commodities and the infrastructure and organization required to move them entail the proliferation of new, non-vernacular forms and expressions which, precisely in order to appeal to local consumers, are often dressed up.



Another aspect of globalization is that cities themselves have become internationally recognizable “name-brands” associated closely with certain imagery. This imagery, which is partially fabricated, then becomes one which the “real” city must literally build if it is to physically resemble it. The more consistent the real city becomes with this image, it is believed, the more it will in turn attract tourism and investment. The paradox is, of course, that as cities grow and prosper, they must modernize their infrastructure and, in the case of older cities, their building stock. This creates, in turn, a greater need to employ camouflage strategies for the sake of emulating the idealized urban image; a catch-22 situation.





MODERNITY



Modernity is the object of concealment in most cases of everyday camouflage. Nowhere is this more blatantly visible than with the increasingly common heritage practice of “façadism,” whereby a decrepit building is demolished but its façade retained so that new, modern construction can be incorporated in-behind and, more importantly, out of sight. It involves great expense as the façade must be temporarily braced and supported while demolition and subsequent new construction occurs.



This controversial practice, which represents a compromise between outright conservation and outright modernization, raises the question: to whom does a façade belong—to a building, or to the public space that it faces? For many citizens, the face of a building is an immutable aspect of the collective memory of the city; which explains why façadism is rarely met with public opposition. But façadism is also good for tourism. It is especially common in European and American historical city centers; places where the traditional industrial economic base, which has relocated to the urban periphery or to other parts of the world, is being substituted by cultural tourism.



The very willfulness and expense of façadism suggests that the city is increasingly perceived as scenic landscape; as an object to be consumed rather than as a space of productive activity. Façadism constitutes a “camouflaging” of modernity by a society which increasingly demands the conveniences of modernization but at the same time rejects any image of modernity in the historical public realm. (10)

Rail tunnel ventilation facility behind historical hotel façade, Paris

A public transportation mechanical facility situated in Paris illustrates this very well. The La Fayette ventilation facility, situated between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, contains machinery that draws fresh air into rail tunnels below. It is hidden behind the façade of a Haussmann-era hotel that was retained when the rest of the building was demolished. The content—mechanical infrastructure for public transportation—is hidden entirely from public view behind an architectural façade belonging to another, very different type of building. The concealment of mechanical systems behind historical façades is encouraged in many cities’ architectural conservation policies; policies which were drafted in response to public outrage at the construction of buildings such as the Centre Georges Pompidou by Piano and Rogers in the 1970s; a building whose exterior resembles somewhat the content of the La Fayette ventilation facility.

Cultural institution resembling ventilation facility 

Another practice, similar to façadism, and also increasingly common, is that of entirely new building construction—including new façades—which appear, even at close-range, to be historical. The argument cited in support of this more insidious form of everyday camouflage is not architectural conservation but rather contextualism.



An ensemble of 1986 office buildings in Richmond-Upon-Thames, United Kingdom, by Quinlan Terry, provides an example of everyday camouflage in which modern construction is completely masked behind an exterior that appears to date, in every detail, from a previous century. The buildings contain flexible, open-plan office space with central air conditioning, underground parking, and modern communications infrastructure. The buildings are sited between the banks of the River Thames and the historical center of the town, forming a series of public spaces that link town and river. The high visibility of the site from across the river would surely have been a factor favoring the use of camouflage in order to create an image sympathetic to the Prince of Wales’s vision of Britain.

Quinlan Terry: office building, Richmond-Upon-Thames

Contextualism—the visual blending-in of a building with its surroundings—is of course the operative strategy behind most forms of camouflage in general. (11) Contextualist architecture, especially when containing a modern program such as technologically advanced open-plan office space, clearly establishes a disjunction between form and content in which modernity can be seen, again, to be the object of concealment.



But modernity is not the only object of concealment in everyday camouflage. On the contrary, in the 1960s and 70s, it was common practice to clad older, traditional buildings situated in the central business districts of large North American cities with abstract louvers, screens or large commercial signs that would make them appear to be more modern. Manhattan’s Times Square provides the best-known example of this phenomenon. Here, new architectural layers conceal tradition within an historical context in which the aspired urban image was that of the modern metropolis. Today’s practice of façadism represents a perfect reversal of this form of everyday camouflage. In fact, the addition of new cladding onto older buildings can actually be compared to a long history of architectural palimpsests and the sort of historical layering existing in ancient cities; façadism, on the other hand, entails a resistance against historical layering; a maintenance of the status quo.





CLASS



Another, less usual form of façadism has to do with designer culture, taste, and class distinction in urban situations where these values predominate. As opposed to the populism of retained façades, “designer skins” speak of an elitist form of façadism.

Barcelona Hilton: building by one architectural firm; facade by another.

The Barcelona Hilton Hotel is large business-class hotel in which two different architectural firms collaborated: a “high-profile” firm designed the façades (Viaplana Piñon), and a “production firm” designed the rest of the building (Mir, Coll, Carmona). This building sets a precedent in which, from the very outset of the project, a “designer skin” conceals what is in reality a formulaic, banal building. The hotel’s important situation at the upper end of the Avinguda Diagonal, an important gateway into the city in its wealthiest district, prompted city planners to require that the client hire a firm from a list of architects “approved” to design building façades in strategic locations. As a city that has worked hard to become a global referent in architecture and urban design, Barcelona seems to be reaching a point in its radical transformation in which the growing expectation for everything to be “designed” must be satisfied superficially for reasons of feasibility.

Brian Murphy: Hopper Residence, Venice, California. 

The residence of actor Dennis Hopper in Venice, California, by Brian Murphy provides, on the other hand, an example of a banal exterior strategically concealing an extravagant and unusual interior program: that of a wealthy Hollywood actor who decides to build a house for his extensive contemporary art collection in a tough, working-class part of the city. It thus follows, to the letter, Adolf Loos’s dictum “the house should be silent to the outside; inside it should reveal all its wealth.” The house is windowless on the street façade and clad entirely in corrugated metal, a material that is visible on the many garages and industrial sheds in the area. The white picket fence, retained from the former tenants, is the only domestic interruption to an otherwise inhospitable exterior. Since it in no way resembles neighboring houses, the Hopper Residence is a non-contextualist kind of camouflage, resembling more a type of natural camouflage known as “mimicry” in which a species adopts exterior characteristics of a species that preys on its hunter. Mike Davis considers this house to be part of “an entire species of Los Angeles ‘stealth houses’, dissimulating luxurious qualities with proletarian or gangster façades.” (12)





MEMORY



The built works cited this far employ various camouflage strategies in order to conceal problematic content. Yet camouflage can also be applied retroactively to an older building in order to physically conceal a problematic history with which it is associated. In this sort of application, camouflage attempts to erase a painful collective memory.

Adaptive re-use of military hospital, Brigham City, Utah, before and after

The small town of Brigham City, Utah, is the site of an extensive array of military buildings renovated into housing that give an example of everyday camouflage concealing a problematic collective memory by means of a superficial application of colorful new building materials. What is now “Eagle Village” was originally a World War II military hospital and prisoner of war camp that was subsequently converted into the country’s largest Native Indian residential school. A private developer purchased the abandoned barracks in the early 1990s, after the school closed, with the intention of converting it into a New Urbanist “village” of affordable row houses. In order to present a new “residential” image to the blighted zone, a vertically striped multi-colored pattern was applied to the façades and roofs that corresponds with the new row-house units. Through the use of color and a “dazzle” camouflage tactic of disruptive patterning, the figural unity of this monotonous complex is broken and given a new image with the aim of creating a desirable commodity. Eagle Village raises, moreover, the question of what to do with buildings that were sites of problematic events. In the case of O.J. Simpson’s Los Angeles residence, the solution taken was to demolish a perfectly fine mansion. In the case of Nazi-era buildings in Berlin that were reoccupied when that city was made the capital of a reunited Germany, the solution was to publicly stress the new democratic use that was being made of these structures, psychologically disrupting the association between the form and the memory. (13)

Church of Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam

The conservation of a religious group’s collective memory during a period of religious proscription is another situation in which everyday camouflage has been used. When Amsterdam was made Protestant in the Alteration of 1578, all public displays of Catholic symbols were prohibited—including Catholic churches themselves, many of which were either demolished or renovated into Protestant churches. Collective Catholic worship was allowed as long as it occurred in locations which appeared, on the exterior, to be inconspicuous. One such location, which remains intact today, is the Our Lord in the Attic Roman Catholic Church, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal in the historical center of Amsterdam. This church was constructed between 1661 and 1663 in the attic over a new house and store for the wealthy hosiery merchant Jan Hartman. In contrast with the austerity of the Dutch Classical style used throughout the house, the church, which has two galleries suspended from the roof, is rich in ornamentation. Under Calvinist rule, the architectural concealment of Catholic churches was written into law, thus possibly constituting one of the first written treatises on the subject.





CONCLUSION



The above cases of everyday camouflage involve aspects of modernization, class or memory that, in their respective contexts, could be seen to be “at issue” with prevailing public sensibilities. Rather than provoke or stir up controversy, the buildings employ camouflage in order to avoid detection, and thereby confrontation. Such an attitude stands, interestingly, in complete antithesis to the current climate of spectacular and attention-seeking architecture. As Roy Behrens writes: “Art portrays a unified form and—however daringly—always distinguishes figure from ground in order to utter some “thing,” while camouflage always subverts these laws in order to say “no thing.” (14) How do we judge these works in architectural terms—are they necessarily “bad design” because of their fakery, banality, lack of integrity—because they are, in effect, simulacra? Can buildings designed to dissimulate attention even be considered “architecture,” or will they always be “mere” buildings, albeit unusual ones? Must architecture always look like “architecture”? (15)



These questions may be academically trivial since this phenomenon remains a relatively marginal one. But as Michel Foucault has shown us, it is precisely how a society deals with what it considers to be its aberrations and deviations that can offer more insight into what that society considers normal. Similarly, everyday camouflage sheds insight into urban “normality” precisely because it is a “false” and therefore highly contrived normality.



Everyday camouflage “appears” to occur mainly in technologically advanced urban societies that have undergone massive modernization in recent decades. It is no coincidence that its rise coincides with one of a hegemonic mass-media that employs urban imagery to promote lifestyle consumption. The city is revealed by this phenomenon to be a space of illusion and desire; an illusion that must be maintained, at times, by highly theatrical means. The fact that camouflage, which is adversarial by nature, occurs in the purportedly more civilized realm of the city says perhaps the most about the degree to which the city, as a concept, is shrouded in myth.





NOTES:



1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. Trans: William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) pp. 13-14.



2. Rem Koolhaas writes in S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995) that “the historical city is full of falsifications and manipulations that make it impossible to talk about what is authentic and what is not.” (p. xxviii)



3. Richard Hill, Designs and their Consequences (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) p. 111.



4. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972) pp. 7-8.



5. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927) p. 167.



6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961) pp.268-269.



7. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992) p. 217.



8. Edward Robert de Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) p. 11.



9. Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (London: Routledge, 1967) pp. 13-14.



10. In the United Kingdom, for example, public pressure is increasingly demanding that mobile phone antennas be concealed inside props resembling trees or church steeples so that landscape views are not “spoiled,” while many covenants of home-owner associations in master-planned communities prohibit satellite dishes unless these are made to resemble rocks, trees or architectural ornaments. See www.utilitycamo.com



11. An important exception is “dazzle” camouflage, which uses a disruptive, highly abstract pattern in order to disorient and confuse and which was proved to be successful in protecting warships.



12. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990) p. 238.



13. Stenen Spoken, “Ghosts of Stone”, Archis, 1991. Vol. 3, pp. 69-73.



14. Roy R. Behrens, Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War (Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1981), p. 14.



15. Stan Allen writes, in Points and Lines (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): “I’m more interested in what architecture does than what it looks like.”





Photography and research collaboration: Sheila Nadimi.



Research for this project was made possible thanks to grants from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Art, Design and Architecture.



Thanks to: Roemer van Toorn, Rob Kovitz, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Miguel Roldán, Anjela Wilkes.



[this article originally published in Lotus International # 126. Earlier versions of this research project were presented / published at the Second Savannah Symposium, Authenticity in Architecture (2001) and in On Site Review #9 (2003)]

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Rocket Architecture

Clockwise from top left: Nike, Aerobee, and Universal launchers

The ensemble of structures illustrated here could easily be mistaken for recent work by a number of contemporary architects, were it situated in the vicinity of Los Angeles or Berlin instead of Churchill, Manitoba on the shore of Hudson's Bay. But the Fort Churchill Rocket Range was built in 1957 by scientists and engineers of the International Geophysical Year and the US Military, who were interested in using rockets to study the aurora borealis.

The site plan of the rocket range is as inexplicable and elusive as the plan of Hadrian's Villa, but one would presume that it represents a logical arrangement of spaces for the preparation and launching of unmanned rockets in this cold and hostile environment. Buildings such as the Blockhouse (control centre), the Hazardous Assembly Building and the Aerobee and Nike Launcher Buildings--the roofs and walls of which slide open to release rockets and pressure from thrust--are linked by long enclosed passageways and gravel roads that meander the site. The Operations Building housed staff, offices, laboratories and a radar and weather station, and is the only structure still in use: it is now the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a hostel frequented mostly by eco-tourists and wildlife biologists.

The remarkable thing about these idiosyncratic structures is that they were designed without any architectural pretension whatsoever. Their forms are a straightforward result of functional and practical concerns, not the product of deconstructionist posturing. Here, form simply follows rocket science, not postmodern theory. Yet seen today, these architecturally "naïve" buildings nevertheless strike a chord--they are, after all, avant la lettre by nearly half a century.

The fascination for architecture-without-architects is nothing new, especially in this country. From the Port of Montreal's grain terminal, which was celebrated by Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture, to the prairie grain elevators to which the late Aldo Rossi is indebted, Canada's industrial-agricultural vernacular has long been considered among its most impressive architecture. Could it be that there is something truthful--dare one say authentic--about such structures?



[Originally published in Canadian Architect February 2001]

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Winnipeg: One Great Situation-Normal (1)

"Incredible...one can actually order ‘a cup of coffee’ here without having to specify in greater detail the particular brewing method, the type of coffee bean, the darkness of the roast, or even the flavour. It’s even served in a ceramic cup!" (2)



Winnipeg is the ‘ordinary Canadian’ of cities. Not many other Canadian cities can lay claim to being situated right in the middle of the Trans Canada Highway; nor are many situated on land as flat and undramatic as the Red River floodplain. How many other Canadian cities are as averagely-sized --let alone bilingual? Or able to consistently produce the most reliable test-market data on the viability of new consumer products before they are launched in the rest of the country, a theory that rests on the underlying principle that if Winnipeggers will buy it, then anyone will? (3) Hard-working and frugal, socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Winnipeg is the urban equivalent of the mythical ‘ordinary Canadian’ who is married, has two-point-three children and a house in the suburbs. (4)



This is not a bad thing, though. Compared with the rest of the western world, in which the run-of-the-mill is increasingly displaced by specialized premium brands, designer labels and authentic reproductions, being squarely in the middle-of-the-road is precisely what makes Winnipeg unique and interesting, if not exotic. It is also, of course, what makes this city quintessentially Canadian. Like a big Value Village thrift store, Winnipeg is the sort of place where the generic and the naturalized that was never even known to have been forgotten can be suddenly and happily rediscovered, and all for a bargain.



But ordinariness is not just the stuff of savvy antique collectors. It is an increasingly current preoccupation in the discourse of contemporary art as well. As the grand narratives that not-so-long-ago purported to tell everyone’s story whither, the idea of art as compensation for the reality that surrounds us becomes displaced by an art that addresses this reality instead. The trivial and the ordinary are therefore becoming increasingly the central subject of art, displacing the emphasis on the unique, the heroic, the individual, and the autobiographical. With its high standards of mediocrity and its location in the middle of the North American continent, (5) Winnipeg is optimally positioned to exploit this growing area of interest, a situation that, if seized, could propel it into the next global art centre, the logical next-step in the westward progression after Paris and New York.



Winnipeg’s artists are already fully aware of this situation, exploring the mundane to its fullest, including its crass and shitty aspects. (6) The city offers artists and other researchers of the ‘aesthetics of the commonplace’ excellent field conditions in which to observe normality. (7) The city’s physical mediocrity is consistent in its quality, and its citizens appear to be very relaxed and unself-conscious about it, even during media occasions such as the Pan Am Games. Indeed, contemporary Winnipeg places greater value on the quality of its daily life than on that of its rare public spectacles: even the architecture of the new food court at St. Vital Mall, for example, is far more impressive than the Investor’s Group Athletics Facility completed recently for the Pan Am Games at the University of Manitoba, a campus whose collection of fine historical and modernist buildings would be complemented far more attentively if it were located elsewhere. Only in contemporary Winnipeg would shopping and other daily activities be accorded greater architectural monumentality than education and sport, the twin pillars that have traditionally stood for the pursuit of excellence. (8)



The disdain for elitism, excellence and international prestige in favour of a somewhat higher quality of daily life for all is of course not unique to Winnipeg, but is by-and-large a Canadian characteristic that, like this country’s extreme weather, happens to be more pronounced in this region. The result is that artists, who in many other cities must struggle to eat, are themselves able to enjoy a better quality of life. It is not uncommon for a Winnipeg artist to actually live in a house and work downtown, a significant step up from having to live in a studio.



Indeed, it is precisely its housing affordability that has helped to spare Winnipeg, to date, from the latest development craze, that of the so-called ‘artist’s live-work studio’. The city has been spared from many other planning and development trends as well, most notably the urban renewal craze of the 1960s as well as its subsequent backlash, the movement to turn historical buildings into ‘ye olde’ heritage. For a city with so much exquisite historical architecture, it is very remarkable how little of it has been commercially redeveloped into artist’s live-work studios or boutiques. What this means, of course, is that Winnipeg’s warehouse buildings are actually used by artists, the very people who would ironically be driven out if such development were to take place. (9)



Winnipeg can be seen, then, as a city that is genuinely ‘artist friendly’. This should, theoretically, fare well for the city in the new post-industrial economy of ideas, images and visual culture. After having occupied the sidelines for so long, Winnipeg’s day could still come thanks, in the end, to its persistence in striving to be ordinary. If the city does become the next global art centre, it will, of course, have to be careful not to spoil the very quality that made it great. But who would ever have thought that mediocrity could possibly become a virtue in the new world order?



NOTES:



1. The word ‘situation’ refers, interestingly, to both a geographical location (site) as well as to a “condition as modified or determined by surroundings or attendant circumstances” (OED). “Sit(E)ings: Trajectories for a Future,” as an exhibition situated in Winnipeg, provides itself a site for this city’s art. I will therefore speculate on the city as a present and future urban situation that the works in the exhibition may or may not have in common. In any case, specific references to works in the exhibition are made in these notes.



2. An initial personal observation upon arriving for the first time in Winnipeg from LatteLand Vancouver in 1997.



3. Jean Klimack’s installation, in which different kinds of chewing gum were mailed out to different people, chewed, returned and finally displayed in a typological matrix is itself the result of a form of ‘market-research’ into the nuances and subtle variations between different brands of the same generic product.



4. Harry Symon’s on-going work on the Constitution and Paul Butler’s collages using advertisement both comment on the social construction of the ‘ordinary Canadian’: the former engages in the slippery arena of mass-opinion, while the latter reminds us that mass-opinion is fluid and extensively shaped by corporate interests through advertising.



5. Lori Rogers’s complex and poetic video-installation piece and Jake Moore’s rooftop installation are both representations of a diminishing nature. Rogers’s work is abstract and employs a technological medium, while Moore’s is more figurative and craft-based.



6. This strategy is most clearly deployed in the collage work of Jacek Kosciuk, which combines detritus such as recycled KFC cartons with his own imagery, as well as the self-portraits by Christine Kirouac, which reference the glossy PhotoShop™-improved photographs of sports and entertainment celebrities in the weekly media.



7. As Marcel Dzama’s work points out, however, normalcy is never what it seems. His quirky, disturbing world could be a comic-book variation of a David Lynch movie. Yet like all comics and science fiction, they give insight into human nature in general.



8. Blair Marten’s détournements of sports accessories and hand tools, as well as Kevin Waugh’s sofa-legs-cum-tongue can be seen as humorous institutional critiques with a tactile, haptic touch. Their disdain for the overly verbose discourse of art institutions is especially present in their own artist’s statements.



9. Joel Garreau, in his book Edge Cities, notes that suburban enclaves with names like “Cedar Grove” are often named after species of animals or plants that have been eradicated by the very construction of those enclaves. The commercial development of ‘artist live/work studios,’ which often forces artists to move to other areas, proves that this theory applies equally to humans.

[Orignally published in Winnipeg Art Gallery: Sit(e)ings: Trajectories for a Future]

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The Valparaiso School and the Construct(ion) of Regional Identity

[Originally published in Hispanic Studies vol. 23]

The School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaiso is an important experiment in architectural pedagogy that speculates with the possibility of a distinctly Latin American architecture founded upon values of artisanship and mytho-poetics. The utopian Open City in Viña del Mar, built by students and faculty of the Valparaiso School, is a physical manifestation of these values. Taken in the context of the currently prevailing model of western architecture, the Valparaiso School and the Open City represent, respectively, an implicit critique of—and an explicit alternative to—the industrialized and standardized building practices that dominate much of the built environment today.

With their emphasis on a poetics of place, the activities of the Valparaiso School can be vaguely described as ‘regionalist’ in their disposition. Since the late eighteenth-century rise of modern techno-science, regionalism has represented a de facto ‘architectural resistance movement’ to the technical and positivistic imperatives of a hegemonic, universalizing western civilization. Alan Colquhoun describes regionalism as an “approach [according to which] architecture should be firmly based on specific regional practices based on climate, geography, local materials, and local cultural traditions” (13). Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre write: “Regionalism has dominated architecture in almost all countries at some time during the past two centuries and a half. By way of a general definition we can say that it upholds the individual and local architectonic features against more universal and abstract ones” (apud Frampton 20-21).

Regionalism is thus an architectural theory that espouses the application of (anonymous) vernacular principles toward the (authored) work of architecture. The word ‘vernacular’ refers, of course, not only to a local style of building, but also to a local language or dialect. It is precisely language that distinguishes architecture from building, as Miriam Gusevich writes, referring to Adolf Loos’s famous aphorism that an architect is a builder who has learned Latin:
The term ‘architecture’ is of Greek and Latin provenance; ‘building’ on the other hand, has Anglo-Saxon roots. In common parlance, both have the same referent (structure, construction, edifice); they are synonyms. Nevertheless, they have different connotations: architecture meaning something superior to building (8).

The ‘poetic regionalism’ —a wordplay on the term ‘critical regionalism,’ coined by Tzonis and Lefaivre and elaborated by Kenneth Frampton (for a critique of critical regionalism, see Fredric Jameson)— of the Valparaiso School, however, complicates this language-based architecture-building opposition: it is a school of ‘builder-architects’ who write poetry and who, in addition, undertake travesías, or poetic voyages across the South American continent. These activities of travel, writing and construction are, in the field of architecture, often academic or techno-scientific by nature. At the Valparaiso School, however, they are mainly poetic.

Architectural travel originates in the eighteenth-century Classical Grand Tour of the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, where it is mainly an activity comprising historical research and aesthetic contemplation. But the Valparaiso School’s travesías mark a significant departure from this tradition in that ‘travel’ here becomes, effectively, a form of artistic ‘performance work’ (interestingly, the French word for ‘work’, travail, is the etymological origin of the English word ‘travel’). Not unlike Mexico-based conceptual artist Francis Alÿs, who, in one particular performance work, traveled “from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the border between Mexico and the United States by flying via Santiago, Shanghai etc. to Vladivostok and Vancouver before arriving in California” (Ferguson 54), the Valparaiso School’s travesías are not necessarily means-to-ends but also very much poetic ends in themselves.

Secondly, the written text has a tradition in architecture usually as background research, construction specification document, design explanation, architectural theorization or manifesto. In most cases, these are (con)textual complements to a priori architectural graphic representations or actual buildings. While theoretical texts or manifestos have, at times, been written in a poetic style, the writing of actual poetry is rare in architectural practice —a notable exception is Le Corbusier’s “Poeme de l’angle droit” (1955). Just like its travesías, the Valparaiso School’s poetry is artistically autonomous and not intended as a caption or explanation for a privileged architectural image.

Finally, the ‘hands-on’ involvement of architects in the actual, physical construction of buildings is also quite exceptional. The architect usually oversees a building project: ‘designer-builder’ architects do exist, but they are considered marginal or underground among mainstream architects, who largely perceive this activity as a threat to the profession’s elite social status. The Open City in Viña del Mar attests to the priority that the Valparaiso School places on the hand-made, on the artisanal, on a degree of ‘authenticity’.

Here, it is important to appreciate that as the bureaucratic and technical processes of building have become more complex in this century, and as new professionals such as construction managers and highly specialized technical consultants have become integral components of these processes, the division of labor between designer and builder has widened significantly. With architects increasingly playing more of a mediating or coordinating role between all the parties involved in a complex building project, the art of architecture and the very notion of authorship this entails becomes increasingly anachronistic. But architecture can never be a ‘pure’ art, one that is free of contingency, since it is differentiated from art, at least traditionally, according to the criterion of functionality: architecture is always functional to some degree; while art is precisely non-functional. Furthermore, artists usually initiate and carry out a work themselves, while professional architects work mostly on commission and provide a set of blueprints, or instructions, for builders to carry out the actual construction. But architecture is not purely engineering either. In engineering, the design solution to a problem must always be the optimal one in terms of efficiency. Architectural design is not only a question of quantitative problem-solving, but also, if not more so, a question of giving meaningful expression —indeed identity— to built form, for which there is never a single, optimum ‘solution.’ It is interesting to note, however, that architects and artists have begun to reverse these traditional roles and definitions. Many contemporary artists are today creating environments, furniture and other objects that aspire to functional use, while at the same time contemporary architects are increasingly exploring the poetics of architecture through more autonomous practices such as installation art, artist’s books, sculpture, drawing and painting, objects that have traditionally resided in the art world. While artists are increasingly involving industrial collaboration in their work, a new generation of architects is making things by hand, eschewing industry. It is precisely in this expressive realm that the Valparaiso School researches the poetics of architecture.

It is with the poetics of architecture that the Valparaiso School is mainly concerned. Here, the notion of the architect as an overseeing professional is eschewed in favor of the architect as an artisan, as a maker of things. Indeed, students participate collectively and hands-on in the very construction of the Open City, thus actually bringing designs beyond the level of representation in the form of reduced-scale drawings and models, and to fruition in the form of actual buildings. The role of the architect as a technician, a planner or ‘engineer’ who designs in order to foresee all potential problems in advance, is cast aside, along with the reliance on Cartesian geometry that a division of labor between designer and builder entails. This allows for more organic forms, as form is liberated from the imperative to be efficiently translated, via conventions based in geometry, from drawing to building. Form, at the Open City, is also not principally dictated by function, another external imperative, but by the poetic intent of the artisans. Finally, buildings at the Open City bear no individual stamp, but are the result of collective decision-making, thus rebuking the hero-myth of the architect as a lone genius.

The Open City shares, in this regard, some affinity with counterculture settlements built in the 1960s and 70s in many pockets along the North American West Coast. An example of this is Hornby Island on the west coast of Canada, where a ‘back-to-the-land’ design-build culture emerged whose trademark is a highly expressionistic and rustic architecture built largely out of locally scavenged materials. As in the Open City, Hornby Island’s designer-builders cite the natural land and its mystical and poetic dimension as the source of inspiration for their work. Hornby Island’s structures are also built without first planning and drawing every detail, thereby inviting improvisation to the design-build process. Bo Helliwell and Michael McNamara, two Hornby Island designer-builders, write that "...bureaucratic controls, conventional space standards, manufactured building materials, service grids, mortgages —all of these would quash the spontaneity and delight of these self-build fantasies. None of these homes was the product of a drawing board, but rather a response between a place and its people." (454-455)

Like those of The Open City, Hornby Island’s buildings were constructed in adaptation to their physical and social sites rather than the sites adapted, through the use of earth-moving equipment, to any pre-determined building plan. As in the Open City, many of Hornby Island’s buildings have been freely altered and modified over many years, while others have been left entirely to the mercy of natural forces: "These houses, with their natural materials and often amorphous forms, show a conscious effort to blend into the landscape —in some cases, they actually disappeared. An attitude toward landscape and building is revealed —an attitude of respect...This could be contrasted to another attitude: progress, development, wholesale land clearing and servicing —white houses on the hill." (Ibid. 453)

But whereas Hornby Island represents a self-consciously marginal and countercultural withdrawal from the rest of its continent, the Valparaiso School differs in this regard, appropriating instead the entire South American continent as a site for poetic-architectural action. This is apparent in the very word ‘Amereida’, the title of the poem by Valparaiso School co-founder Godofredo Iommi, which is an amalgamation of the words “América” and “Eneida” (Aeneid). By making reference to Virgil’s poem recounting the myth of the founding of Rome, Amereida presents itself as no less than a founding myth for a new South American destiny. Iommi’s poem effectively represents, for the Valparaiso School, a mission statement or a manifesto, a call for poetic action that is regularly invoked in the writings, travesías and constructions carried out by the School.

Describing South America’s interior as an “abyss,” an “internal sea” that represents “the unknown,” Amereida suggests that the South American continent is open to re-conceptualization and re-discovery, but this time by Americans themselves. For Iommi, America is an alien construct that can only be authentically re-constructed ‘at home.’ He suggests that myth, if not history, can be reinvented, and that a new beginning, assuming a new identity, is legitimate. But this re-construction, however regionally focused, must embrace the world because “no aboriginals ever lived in America —they lived in the world, the universe.” Thus Amereida represents, in fact, a global outlook with a regional perspective. The Valparaiso School has published and mounted exhibitions internationally. Bruno Barla’s contribution contains a full bibliography.

Such a global outlook, from the particular viewpoint of postcolonial South America, is precisely what the French architect Le Corbusier urged in a series of lectures given in 1929 in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, lectures during which giant sketches were drawn before the audience in a manner that bears striking resemblance to Bruno Barla’s lectures at the Open City. In these lectures, Le Corbusier addresses South American identity and its place in the world with characteristically modernist urgency: “You in South America are in a country both old and young; you are young nations and your race is old. Your destiny is to act now” (245). Furthermore, Le Corbusier also invokes Virgil while explaining a scheme to replicate his famous Villa Savoie near Paris in Argentina:
"This same house, I should set it down in a corner of the beautiful Argentine countryside; we shall have twenty [of the same] houses rising from the high grass... The inhabitants, who came here because this countryside with its rural life was beautiful, will contemplate it, maintained intact, from their hanging gardens, or through the four sides of their long windows. Their home life will be set in a Virgilian dream." (139)

The globalism Le Corbusier invokes, then, is that of industrial standardization and mass-production, an attitude that the Valparaiso School clearly rejects. Ann Pendleton Jullian, in her book on the Open City, points out that "It is significant that the founders of the institute [the Valparaiso School] were influenced by the words of Le Corbusier, removing from the entire body of work its plastic qualities, which are clearly influenced by the ‘modern’ promises of technology; extracting his attitude toward the making of architecture, toward creativity, and these in relation to poetry and the poetic, from his forms and materiality." (50)

The Valparaiso School’s importation of some ideas while rejecting others from the same models —even models as dogmatic and totalizing as Le Corbusier’s— and its sampling and synthesizing from different traditions betrays an embrace of ‘hybridity’ and free experimentation. This attitude is especially evident in two of the contributions that follow: Godofreddo Iommi’s ‘Amereida’ as an American Aeneid, and Bruno Barla’s incorporation of an ‘American sense of vastness’ in his drawings of Palladio’s architecture in Italy. Both Barla’s montage of text and image and Roberto Godoy’s discussion of the ‘tangible’ and the ‘intangible’ phenomena of a ‘cause-place’ outline poetic methods for transforming observation and poetic reflection into architectural action. Observation and making are, in this regard, seen as reciprocal—if not ambiguous—activities. The ephemeral ‘works of architectural openness’ that are built during the Valparaiso School’s travesías are themselves ambiguous in that they serve both as devices for perceiving the land in a certain way as well as interventions that transform the land itself into architecture, into landscape. The relation of The Open City to its landscape is illustrated and discussed further by my colleague Herb Enns, whose text and photographs of The Open City serve, in conjunction with this introduction, to frame the contributions of Iommi, Barla and Godoy.

The Valparaiso School proves, in the final analysis, that poiesis has a rightful place in architecture, and a poetic architecture a rightful place in shaping the identity of a region. Appropriately, it does not argue this proposition logically, as I am attempting to do here, but poetically and passionately. Ultimately, the activities of The Valparaiso School convey a passionate love for the craft of making, whether it is that of a poem or of a city. “If the language analogy has something to offer to architectural theory, it would seem to be the discourse of poetry to which we should look, rather than to the discourse of science with its true or false assertions; to rhetoric rather than to logic.” (Harries 89)


WORKS CITED

Colquhoun, Alan. “The Concept of Regionalism.” In Postcolonial Space(s). Ed. Nalbantoglu, Gülsüm Baydar and Wong Chong Thai. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. 13-23

Ferguson, Bruce W. “Restless Productions.” In Walks/Paseos. Mexico: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1997. 53-61

Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” In Hal Foster, Ed. The Anti-Aesthetic. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983. 16-30

Gusevich, Miriam. “The Architecture of Criticism.” In Drawing Building Text. Ed. Andrea Kahn. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991. 8-24

Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998.

Helliwell, Boh and Michael McNamara. “The Hand-Built Houses of Hornby Island.” In Architectural Design Profiles 14 . 48 (1978): 450-455.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Constraints of Postmodernism.” In The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 129-205

Le Corbusier. Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning. Trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991. French original: Précisions sur l’état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme. Paris: Crès et Cie., 1930. Reprint: Paris: Éditions Vincent Fréal et Cie., 1960.

Pendleton Jullian, Ann M. The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996.

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