A crowded bus and a Coolhaas

 

A crowded bus and a Coolhaas

I was thinking about Koolhaas on the bus. Public transportation has always really interesting for me. You get to experience extremes of human behavior and shifted social norms. You can sleep inches away from a stranger, get sneezed on with no apology, small talk and social spontaneity still occurs. The recipe is one where you take the rhythms and patterns of everyday life and compact them into an absurdly tiny place to get a microcosm of life. It's taking the naturalness of being human, jamming it together, multiplying it with itself to make it something unnatural.

You can hate it or love it. Koolhaas loves it.

As he writes in 'The Culture of Congestion':

"This technology is not the agent of objective and quantifiable improvements, [...] it is a superior substitute for the 'natural' reality that is being depleted by the sheer density of human consumers."

In some fashion Koolhaas believes that technology is here to change the natural order of things. Technology, in this case in the form of cities, allows us to surpass the natural and create something better, like spiking your unsweet tea with psychoactive drugs or 4x4ing with cobras - kinda natural, but a hell of a lot more interesting. As Koolhaas puts it; it is a "neck race between an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster that is only just exceeded by a still more astronomical increase in the potential to avert disaster." It is unnatural and prone to failure and thus becomes a fantasy, that needs a fantasy to perpetuate it, and so the fantasy becomes ordinary.

Two other readings deal with this idea of the ordinary and architecture. Both Denise Scott Brown in Learning from Pop and Atelier Bow-wow in MIT = Made In Tokyo have some interesting parallels about their analysis of the everyday. Both ask the reader for a deferral of judgement on what was previously judged. As they write, "shamelessness can become useful." And similarly, there is a call for pragmatism, a separation from modernism and utopian theories, to engage with the here and now of common architecture. As Atelier Bow-wow puts it; "We strongly wanted to get away from the attitude that the city can be summarized by metaphorical expression."

And Scott Brown; "The first lesson for architects is the pluralism of need. No builder-developer in his right mind would announce: I am building for Man."

There is this grounding and embrace of as-built architecture, and with it a concern for the masses of everyday citizens that forgets class and cultural separations. Taking this idea alone, it is quite beautiful. It rings of the ethics that architects are steeping in today: concern for the public and common good. However, with this grounding comes the answer of what is next? The question asked after modernism and the question continually asked in the search for perennial new forms.

Denise Scott Brown writes that, "New sources are sought when the old forms go stale and the way out is not clear."

And later on she writes that these new forms don't always have to be physical, they can be ideas; "Modern architects can now admit that whatever forces, processes, and technologies determine architectural forms, ideas about form determine it as well; that a formal vocabulary is as much a part of architecture as are bricks and mortar..."

And similarly, Atelier Bow-wow sees innovation in these 'new forms' in the form of program (Similar to Koolhaas)- "the co-existence of unrelated functions in a single structure, the joint utilization of several differing and adjacent buildings and structures, or the packaging of an unusual urban ecology in a single building."

These new forms will come from the new ways of seeing program and function resulting from the analysis of the ordinary. Jumping back to Koolhaas, just like Bow-wow and Scott Brown, there is a new conception of program.

As he writes, in analyzing the metropolis, "each site in the Metropolis accommodates- in theory at least - an unstable and unforeseeable combination of superimposed and simultaneous activities whose configuration is fundamentally beyond the control of architect or planner."

In short, "no single specific function can be matched with a single place"

The form follows function is dead of modernism is dead. Forms need to accommodate the constant rearranging of functions in this evolutionary process of adaption and life.

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The result of these retroactive manifestos are fascinating, and the source for a pretty wild turn in architecture. The elevation of the ordinary and commonness as something to be studied is something to be embraced and replicated. But I think the microscope can only linger so long, after a point it becomes myopic. Ironically, we can’t live in a society that ever presently accepts itself and it's built forms- that leads to a staleness and nostalgia that these writers are exactly concerned with. I think there must be to some level, a dissatisfaction with the past and the ordinary that generates new forms and functions.

For me this point is proven by Koolhass’ Bigness. A retroactive manifesto to big buildings: the skyscraper and monumental building which houses a world inside. Koolhaas writes how this scale of building creates a new form of architecture, a culmination of context, makers, and participants. To him it creates a new horizon of human interaction and possibility, "instead of enforcing coexistence Bigness depends on regimes of freedoms, the assembly of maximum difference."

Thanks Koolhaas, for the 14 pages of bullshit. The closer we can examine this theory the more it sours into inhumane, authoritarian gibberish. You can't reinvent the collective, you can't hijack common life, and you can't "fuck context." As we have seen in so many of the "Big" buildings constructed around the world, we construct them at the expense of personal freedoms (Dubai), we plan them at the expense of the common welfare (New York), we fund them through the expense of the public (London). Bigness is the product of control, of hegemony, of wealth.

I've run out of time, but I think architects need to deal with and embrace the ordinary, the human - but perhaps in more democratic methods (Christopher Alexander).