Exhibition at Architecture Center Amsterdam (ARCAM), 17 July – 11 September, 2010. Free entrance.

Last week the exhibition Fashion & Architecture kicked off with a good party at the Amsterdam Architecture Center (ARCAM). Along with ARCAM and office for architecture and urbanism V2A, fashion label OntFront has challenged four creative duos to enter into a design process. Each duo comprises a fashion designer and an architect who have teamed up specially for this occasion. The results are interesting and impressive.

Cross-over projects are common in the world of fashion as well as in the world of architecture. However, intensive collaborations between fashion designers and architects are pretty new, while there are lots of similarities between the two professions. Both deal with creation of volumes and take constructive principles in mind. At the same time, more and more fashion designers aim to make timeless products that fight high turnover rates, and architects attempt to create buildings and structures that are increasingly flexible, fluid and responsive to the environment. Mutually inspired, the designers cut through the dogmas of their own discipline and allow the visitor an insight into the creative process. The exhibition shows which new design statements have derived from an intense and extraordinary collaboration between professions that have not much in common at first sight. That makes this exploration very appealing and definitely worth visiting.

The four teams involved in the project are Iris van Herpen and Jan Benthem/Mels Crouwel (Benthem Crouwel Architekten), Mattijs van Bergen (MATTIJS) and Anouk Vogel (Anouk Vogel Landscape Architecture), Farida Sedoc (Hosselaer) and Nicole/Marc Maurer (Maurer United Architects), and Kentroy Yearwood (Intoxica) and Jeroen Bergsma (2012 Architecten).

Wednesday 19 May, 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. Open: 4:30 pm, start: 5 pm. Entrance fee: € 5, reduction fee € 3 (students, Friends of the NAi). Register here.

Speakers will include Ole Bouman, Hani Asfour, Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, and Ronald Wall.

Following the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued, a special issue of Volume Magazine, the NAi will organize a debate in collaboration with OMA, Archis/Volume and Pink Tank. Al Manakh Gulf Continued offers readers another view of urban development in the Gulf region. This time focusing on how the cities remain re-invent themselves and about their position related to the rest of the world.

City as Heart(s)

“As a biologist, I see cities as living organisms. Pulsating bodies made up of new and dying cells and kept alive by the people flowing through their arteries. Cities grow, swell, change shape, absorb and eject. This is not about cities with a heart, but about cities as a heart; pumping oxygen and fresh blood into the greater metropolitan areas.”
- Jacqueline Cramer, minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning

Hearing these words at the closing speech of Morgen/Tomorrow – the International Urban Planning Congress held in Amsterdam – one may travel into the memory of “The Heart of the City”, theme of the 8th International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM VIII, 1951, Hoddesdon, England). Today, as then, it was an important moment where urban planners and architects from all around the world gathered to discuss the City as a living liveable centre (core/cuore/coeur). Still today it has a fundamental role in the balance of the expanded new (Open) City.
As an Open City enthusiast, Kees Christiaanse speech alerted to the present status of worldwide metropolises, dealing with the multiple layers of their multicultural heritage: “The enemies of the open city are the open city itself”. Thus, the coexistence of ethnic communities which do not communicate with one another (the favelas of São Paulo and the city of Jakarta were examples given) and rather just inhabit in the same metropolitan structure it is a phenomenon that must be surpassed by city government. Exploring deeper the Netherlands point of view on the Open City, Zef Hemel’s (Substituting the canceled speech of Anastasia Volynskaya’s) presented his “Free State of Amsterdam” speech in a cheerful tone of positive aura upon Planning, as described by his nine “Amsterdam Principles”. The focus on the city of Amsterdam continued in the afternoon workshop “Urban Governance and Liveable cities”, where Maarten van Poelgeest (Alderman of Amsterdam for Town and Country Planning) and Hessel Boerboom (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) could reveal a bit of Amsterdam projects for the future.

City and Revolution
Nevertheless, the motivation for the congress was to pay a tribute to Floor Wibaut, Amsterdam’s alderman on the beginning of the 20th century and an important city enthusiast and city revolutionary. Inevitably, thinking on the city of tomorrow is also to respect and learn with the past and its examples. Is also to think how extraordinary events, like war and revolution, have such a great impact on the city. This link was made through the emotive love-liberty imagery of the streets of Amsterdam led by the Paris 1968 Uprising that were shown as an appetizer before the beginning of the speakers’ presentation. So the question was posed… Throughout the world of today, ”Who are the new Wibauts?”

As an attempt to answer this question at this second day of congress positive cases of city revolutions worldwide were presented, namely Chicago (USA), Pittsburg (USA), Mumbai (India) and Tirana (Albania) (There were presented more city study cases in the afternoon workshops (being held simultaneously): Helsinki (Finland), Malmö (Sweden), Hamburg (Germany) and Freiburg (Germany)).

On a Chicago community study case, La Donna Redmond presented a revolutionary project involving the Food System Movement. Following a personal motivation (On a very tender age, La Donna Redmond’s son was diagnosed with several food allergies), La Donna was involved and it is still fighting for the implementation of a Soul Food System, searching for a perfect agricultural policy (there is an easy access to all kinds of fast-food but the essential vegetables are not available, unlike what we’re used to in European grocery stores) that affects the values of her community: “Revitalizing Soil is revitalizing Community”.
Pittsburgh was presented as a former flourishing industrial city that faces an identity crisis that has its roots in the 70’s. To address the uncertainty and loss of value of his community, speaker Michael J. Madison pointed out the importance of finding icons for the future, in order to put citizens in love with their city again (‘Let’s go Steelers!’ is the slogan for the Pittsburgh American football team, in a clear relation with the city’s past heritage).
The Mumbai case-study was presented by P. K. Das, an architect-activist that struggles against the shrinkage of open space, brought a vision of the City from a democratic planning perspective: “Open space is a metaphor for democracy.” His demand for designing collectivity was also part of the main CIAM agenda more than 60 years ago, in order to enhance public spaces and act in comprehensive planning. The positivism of this case relies on reclaiming public spaces performed by P.K. Das, a victory over the the total apathy of city government.
Tirana, the last example, gives us a completely different vision upon the citizen’s public space appropriation. Public space was a tangible expression of the communist and previous regime, that late fell in 1990. Ten years later, when Edi Rama became city major, the people of Tirana still had a strong negative feeling towards public space. This was leading to an abusive private appropriation of the City. Starting with a low-budget project, in a period where words were meaningless, Edi Rama used color as an instrument of politics, involving the community into refurbishing the (previously damaged) city façades (for more info visit T.I.C.A). Other projects that emerged where all led by a single leitmotiv: “Beauty intimidates (Albanian) people. (…) So the only answer is to build and invest with quality.”

The purpose of this congress was to review new factors of worldwide global urbanization. These were mentioned at the conference: waste, water, food, mobility and ICT. In the case-studies shown above there is a general conception of “the Revolution(ary)” as key to make cities go through deep change, into development and growth, into the future.

In Paris: Invisible City Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant invite us to look at the city of Paris from a rather unusual perspective, what is usually not showed in social theory studies, to look at a city and try to unveil all the layers that constitute its life, to try to understand the several levels of complexity and their existing and possible intersections.

A city is more than the urban or social environment. That is to summarize what this study tries to show, discussing a metropolis like Paris. Complementary to that, this study also exemplifies the main concepts of Bruno Latour’s theory of actor-networking analysis of the social (explained in his book Re-assembling the social, introduction to actor-network-theory), meaning: picking an object and starting to unveil all the layers like peeling a onion, one after the other, and see where the layers intersect, where they combine, but also where they diverge. Only when we take account of the totality of layers unveiled all together in one flattened perspective instead of a hierarchical one, can we achieve a full understanding of the object we intend to study. Flattening the perspective also means assuming the point of view of the insider according to Latour, and not anymore the scientist who detaches himself from the object. On the contrary, he must be fully embedded in it to fully understand it, to fully acknowledge what the object is made of and how it functions.
The city seems to be the a perfect field to experiment with this methodology by its inherent complexity. Of course this also means that we are facing a job never to be completed but this also seems to be the case every time we debate the city, what it was, is and especially what it will be in the future, where all, or almost all the possibilities are still open. This was the time frame chosen from the conference entitled, “Tomorrow, international urban planning congress” that took place in Amsterdam last 1st and 2nd of October.

Bruno Latour approach seems useful, and the example of his study of Paris even more so, because the whole structure of the conference seemed to go into the same direction, that is, identifying the layers that constitute the problems of the city (planning from a political view, food policies, energy, definitions of urbanity), etc and by discussing them to see where they interact, where and how they establish links of interdependency. The conference wasn’t premised on Latour’s theory. It is not an exercise of it, nor do I intend to discuss the several problems this theory can bring to the analysis of a city, or any other object. The analogy here serves merely to point out the absolute need to try to understand the phenomenon of “urbanity” in the most complete way possible. This seemed to be the main concerns of those who organized this conference.

Now, I can only speak for what happen in the first day, the day I attended it, but the structure of it was common for both. In the morning several lectures and in the afternoon the program was divides between workshops (that were in fact mini-conferences where debate was promotes) or excursions, at the end we all gather again in the main building for a final lecture. If in the morning we all shared the same program, in the afternoon we had to chose what to attend, thus our experience of the conference were all different, just like it’s how our experiences of a city are different, depending on how we look at it.
The lectures, some more interesting than others, all seemed to have in common the assumption that the city is more and more where the future will happen, since we all know that already today, the majority of the world’s population live in it or close to it. The city more and more acquires an autonomous status, a political autonomy that obliges us to look at it through the concept of the “city-state” as it was the case in the ancient world. Eric Corijn (from Brussels open University and Cosmopolis research centre) discussed this perspective elaborately by tracing a history for the city back to the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution re-shaping the city, introducing new problems, like anonymity which re-structured what was understand as “community”. Today it seems we are also in need of re-structuring some concepts associated with the city.
Increasing city autonomy also means the city’s subsistence must be re-thought, as Tim Lang (from London’s City University) remarked when discussing the issues of food policies, the city has always been a parasite in the sense that it is not able to produce all food it needs within its own territory, and it never will, but a more sustainable city is one that is able to produce more within its borders, to sponsor local production instead of importing most of its needs from far away. This goes for energy and water as well as for food.

One final word about the afternoon and specifically about the workshop I attended. We could chose from 6 different topics, from energy, sustainability, communication, and I’ve chosen the one called “Informality”, a concept discussed through 3 different examples: Latin-America with projects from the Supersudaca, Medellin with Alexandro Echeverri and Mumbai with P.K.Das. In the three examples “informality” were directly linked to the built environment and the need to improve it or to change it, but through considering the potential of “informality,” working with it and through it. The discussion had a very peculiar turn, the public struggled with the notion of absolute informality, the absence of rules, in other words how to merge planned elements with the spontaneous nature of these areas, and how to introduce elements that can connect to the anarchy but at the same time not disrupt it. The city also has an informal side to it, that what wasn’t planned. Concluding we can say we should deal more with time and not only space, or time ‘in’ space, how space is being penetrated by time and how space can allow time to be part of it. Time is of the essence when we consider future space.

The Urban Qualities of Refugee Camps. / Report ‘Café Mediterranée X

Dare2Connect, a program by SICA and Felix Meritis, invites Middle East and North Africa experts to research the Arabic and Islamic culture in the Café Mediterranée series. Through discussions on current events the status-quo of Middle East culture and its relation to international developments are placed in a broader context.

In this edition, hosted by Chris Keulemans, Lebanese architect Ismail Sjeich Hassan spoke about his research “Urban Exaggerations and Exceptions – Palestinian Refugee Camp” (which he’s executing as Bakkema research fellow). He described architectural and urban possibilities of improving the life of people in the Palestinian refugee camp; Nahr el Bared in Lebanon.

Nahr el Bared before the 2007 war

Keulemans started by inviting Hassan to start with his presentation on a short history of the people living in Nahr el Bared.

Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el Bared, Lebanon, 1949

In the period of 1947 till 1948 about 400 Palestinian villages have been ‘emptied’ and ‘erased’. 30.000 of those displaced Palestinians found their way, after being displaced from their initial settlement, to Lebanon. The theme of desolation and displacement was severely emphasized by Hassan. The temporary camp of canvas tents became a semi-permanent settlement where the tents were replaced by stone buildings. Local Lebanese land-owners rented their territory out to the camp dwellers and there was a vivid trade with the Lebanese living in Tripoli and other cities in northern Lebanon. This state of affairs was violently brought to an end by a battle between the Lebanese army and the Islamic fundamentalist group Fatah al-Islam in 2007. The battle resulted in the total destruction of the camp, leaving 30.000 refugees homeless, again. Internationally, almost half a billion dollars was available to rebuild the camp. The Lebanese government and army sought to use the reconstruction as an opportunity for controlling the camp through urban design and military presence.

Nahr el Bared after the 2007 war

Hassan became involved in the Nahr el Bared Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies (NBRC). The NBRC is an organization of professionals who voluntarily work on involving the camp residents in the reconstruction of the detroyed camp. During the battle, which left the camp completely ruined, it was the aim of the NBRC to map the layout of the camp, the public areas, its landmarks, and commercial centres in order to document the urban structure and property ownership. The collective memory of the community was tapped for precise owners, locations, sizes of houses through interviews and civil participation sessions. When confronted with the government’s reconstruction plan, based on its ability to be controlled by the government and military, the NBRC, now joined by the UNWRA (UN agency United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), proposed a urban plan based on the former camp. A plan, which expressed the perception of the camp by the Palestinians being a temporary place.

In the discussion after Hassan’s presentation, Keulemans questions were directed at the nature of the sensitive situation of the camp and the role of architects and planners in it. Hassan explained that he and his colleagues, trained architects and urban planners, naturally experienced difficulties. They were faced with the task to redesign the camp which, an operation in which they had to operate in a complex and political arena of interests of the refugees, the Lebanese government, the military and the international community.

The situation of the Palestinian refugees is delicate. They are denied the return to their homeland in historical Palestine and they neither have rights nor duties in Lebanon, for instance it is illegal for them to own property. Palestinians do not accept their status-quo in Lebanon. They regard the camp as a temporary place for living. They fight for their right to return to their original homes. This all places the reconstruction of the camp in odd daylight. The government does not allow the Palestinians to return to their homelands, nor do they grant them Lebanese citizenship. The army seeks to maximize their control over the refugees and the international community aids in rebuilding the camp, but does not in repatriating the refugees.

All these political and cultural issues present themselves in the built environment, but are not limited to that. Hassan acknowledged the importance of perception, to the eye of the outsider, the camp –old and new alike- resembles an urban area of immensely density, and spectacular urban phenomena. For the Palestinians however, the camp represents nothing more than a transitional shelter. A shelter, which lost its temporary characteristic only physically but not mentally.

Unfortunately, throughout the presentation and discussion it did not really become clear what the personal motives of Hassan were to get involved in such a delicate situation. It showed that he is committed to his work in Nahr el Bared, if only by the sheer amount and quality of his work he puts in, but Hassan’s presentation and interview was flat and lacked expression and enthusiasm. It would have been interesting if Keulemans would have unraveled more of Hassan’s motives why he got engaged in such a project.

Up to this day the plan that the NBRC presented to and accepted by the Lebanese government and military has not been executed. The historic, military controlled site of the camp of Nahr el Bared in inaccesible, and access to a wide strip around is only permitted with a day pass granted by the military. No building activities in whatever form are allowed. When building will commence is unknown.

A report from the African Perspectives conference in Pretoria, South Africa

Each year, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, organizes worldwide approximately eight Debates on Tour. Together with a local counterpart, Dutch architects fly to a specific city to discuss specific themes, problems and challenges with their local counterpart. On 28th of September the NAi teamed up with ArchiAfrica to host a debate in Pretoria, South Africa during the African Perspectives conference. Arjen Oosterman joined in to write the following report.

Opening by moderator Antoni Folkers.

A confrontation of experiences from different parts of the world, centered on roughly the same theme or problematics, is rewarding by default. The Debates on Tour-program of the NAi, is based on this format. These debates have more than one edge: it acts as an antenna to ‘receive’ new developments, ideas and positions; it connects Dutch and international networks; it presents the NAi in different contexts throughout the world; and it proposes new agendas for architecture in non-hierarchical order.

This first ever NAi Debate on Tour on African soil took place in Pretoria on the occasion of the African Perspectives conference, that took place from September 25-28, also a program of Dutch making. African Perspectives started at the beginning of this century to bridge the information and knowledge gap between Europe and Africa. Utrecht based initiator ArchiAfrika developed what started as ‘bringing Africa to Europe’ and the Flemish and Dutch universities of architecture in particular, into a full fledged educational and scientific program, including a scientific committee and paper sessions, but also student workshops and presentations.

The starting point of ArchiAfrika is that Europe knows nothing about its material involvement in Africa and that Africa has to deal consciously with the imported tradition of modernism. It is vital to know and understand the heritage/history and to relate this to local, cultural specific traditions, before deciding to accept or reject the modernist approach. The initial annoyance that the rest of the world is hardly interested in what has happened in Africa and what is going on (on the level of architecture, urbanism and planning) has gradually transformed into an ambition to see what is African about the African city and in what ways this can be used for development. That adds to the import/export project an element of self-reflection for the African architectural community (all those professionals active in fields related to architecture and city) and an interesting research perspective for scholars around the globe.

From left to right: Martin Kruger, Paul Meurs, Godfrey Anjumba and Hein de Haan.

City Center = Mixed Use

Explicitly announced as a pilot, this debate on tour gathered architect Heinrich Wolff, architect and urban designer Martin Kruger and urban planner Godfrey Anjumba on the African side, Paul Meurs (architect and advisor on urban heritage) and Hein de Haan (architect activist and tutor urban planning) on the European/Dutch side. As often this division was relative since Anjumba studied in The Netherlands too. ArchiAfrika-host Antoni Folkers acted as moderator.

With public space in the city center – and Pretoria’s center in particular, suffering from an institutional drain and diminishing vitality and importance – as topic, discussion started right away. The very notion ‘city center’ was probably too European, related to a particular urban history and typology, and better indicated as ‘activity center’ (the day before, during the conference ‘CBD’ as indication of the historic center of Pretoria had been discarded as too American and replaced by ‘City Center’).

As a start, it related directly to the first question: what is public space in Africa? Instead of the standard reflex ‘square’, the notion ‘market’ was proposed by Martin Kruger. Godfrey Anjumba added ‘place for ceremony, drama and feast’; qualities instead of boundaries. The Dutch focused immediately on a more architectural concern: the division between private and public and the exchange between the two. Their advice: ‘in planning or analyzing don’t stop at the boundaries of public domain, look ten meters beyond the facade, beyond the border of private ownership to make full use of the urban quality of public space’.

After qualities and legal aspects, Heinrich Wolff introduced the power issue: who owns and controls and has access to public space? And this was not only about privately owned and controlled public space, but also about socio-political convention (exclusion of women in particular). That was all to our liking, but what about a reality check? Hein de Haan explained about the problems of mono-functional districts in the Netherlands (hence his critique on the use of CBD for the historic center) and how to counter degradation by introducing mixed programs in housing areas, office parks and city centers and Paul Meurs narrated about the problems in Brazil to deploy that strategy effectively (mixed use in former office towers). One of the students proposed that mixed programs as redevelopment strategy for empty offices might be a good idea, but zoning laws prevent this. Make creative use of the rules, De Haan responded, introduce typologies that count as ‘work’, but also include commerce and living, like artist studios. Mr. Anjumba added that the challenge is to convince developers and municipalities of what is common knowledge among architects and planners by now: that mixed-use and layering of programs is essential for urban quality and vitality. Paul Meurs explained another Dutch practice: develop specialized (sub)centers in addition to the historic down town that is specializing in tourism, high culture and top market shopping these days.
Interesting ideas if you have national and local authorities in proper control of planning and urban development, but the audience felt this was not reality in South Africa.

Heinrich Wolff

City Center = Safety and Density

More local sentiments came into play. For instance a preference for the ‘American dream’ typology of single family homes on a private plot of land, fenced off to protect these little islands as a safe-haven, which doesn’t produce a sense of center at all. In addition there was mention of a practice to move from one protected ‘bubble’ to another, regarding public space as the short cut between the two. The theme of fear shaping the environment and public space in particular was at the table. Heinrich Wolff opposed this image as only true for a small minority. The majority walks and goes about just as normal as anywhere in the world. And to counter a further loss of public quality one could think of introducing events like street soccer, to enhance ‘publicness’ and a feel of openness and accessibility.

Although this was regarded as both sympathetic and idealistic, the issue of the role of government was raised again. First Mr. Anjumba introduced an interesting ‘reading’ of Sunnyside district, that was described as lively, and with an extensive modern legacy. He stated that this wasn’t threatened the way the historic center of Pretoria is, because Sunnyside has been developed almost optimally. Tearing down and rebuilding won’t add much profit for developers, like it does in older areas. So here you can take your time to adjust and refine.
But who is to blame then, the audience asked, for the deterioration of the center, a diseased heart in a healthy body; developers won’t do the right thing, politicians don’t care it seems, are architects and planners the only people that have to take responsibility? Mr. Kruger tried to neutralize this potential explosive issue in referring to ‘the people’ and the Greek agora. But Mr. Wolff made it personal: the question came from a young person, still able to hold the older generation responsible, but even that young person will grow older and find herself responsible in the end. So why not start right away? Just do it. The architect as entrepreneur entered the scene, adding a VOLUME touch to the debate. ‘Are we talking about the same thing when discussing ‘public space’? New technologies revolutionize the very notion and if public space is shared experience, YouTube, email and internet are universal public spaces just the same. Mr. Meurs responded that the digital environment cannot replace the ‘authentic experience’ and that ticket sales for live concerts for instance prove that point. He wasn’t worried by the advent of new technologies.

Another example was the resurgence of Amsterdam’s historic center. 30 years ago it was in serious decline, the canal houses were almost exclusively occupied by offices, residents were leaving, small shops closing, historic buildings in bad shape. The city was passé, long live the suburb. But look, nowadays inner city apartments are the most expensive in the country. Authenticity as quality survives and wins in the end. And for the redevelopment of the famous Rotterdam Lijnbaan shopping center cum housing in the center the same argument counts: the developer is advised to start from heritage value, not ignore it, since that is the money maker in the long run. With this explicit mention of heritage as an important factor in publicness and public space a more political reading of the African city center was introduced at last.

Contribution from the audience

City Center = Identification

Because whose monuments are we talking about? There is no shared heritage yet, argued Wolff. The classic monuments represent white power, it is only now that monuments of other groups in society are being acknowledged, but there is a long way to go. And that opened the gate for ghetto, separation, cultural minority and what else as expressed in little Chinatown, little India and little Zululand. No problem, according to Anjumba, since identification is more important than the risk of compound-like separation. These ‘pockets’ add flavor and have a quality of their own. Stimulated by public intervention, Mr Kruger opposed that every city has groups and minorities, but public space is about collective use. That should be open to everyone and not ‘owned’ by just one group. And there the argumentation came full circle, because if public space matters, what exactly is its quality and character in the African city center?

And though this Debate on Tour didn’t produce a clear cut conclusion, it did make clear that despite its modern looks and globalized character, the South African city has a serious identity issue to solve. South Africa may be a state since 1910 and independent since 1961, it is in fact a very young nation. Since its political transformation in 1990-94, it had to reinvent itself. Cultural notions like ‘center’ and ‘heritage’ have to re-find their meaning in a new reality. That talking about these subjects proved difficult enough is telling for the challenges to confront.

First of all, I must make a warning: I will not recur to airing a quick succession of 140 characters tweets, nor will I use the latest live-feed technology to try and let you understand how Beyond Media felt to me like a festival haunted by its very initial premises. Nope. Instead, I’ll go back to the very old means of putting up one word after the other, and one paragraph after the other, and try to telescope you into the heart of that simple argument by means of a very personal interpretation.

When I say that this Festival is “haunted by its very initial premises” I do not mean that showing the audiovisual media which are today quintessential to architecture representation should bear any special problem. On the contrary, it is only natural and logical that someone should be doing it. At its 9th edition, the Florence festival also has it in its curriculum to be one of the first to do so. The ghosts I am referring to, instead, are those of the so-called digital culture. When Beyond Media was initiated by multitasking Marco Brizzi in 1997, it was only too obvious to a given few that digital tools were there to change the way we worked, the way we designed reality, the way we represented it and also thought about it. By then, it was also acceptable to let yourself immerge in the fascination that is due to the enormous possibilities granted by these new tools.

Digital tools, though, have by now been culturally absorbed and are now part of the everyday banal of (almost) everybody: think of TV, if not of the means we deploy to pursue any design or technical profession. This banality – what we may expect when what I will call the digital turn is complete – is intrinsically good. It means that, by now, and even if in permanent development, the digital paradigm is, like taste, already acquired. Of course one can, still today, be locked into the early thrills of those who once were at the forefront of digital culture. Just think of blobtecture: a formal approach to architectural shape that is still locked into the early inception of what the digital should look like. But one may also be looking beyond the processes that today invisibly drive architecture’s creation.

In this sense, the effective object of the festival’s – film, videos and digital visualizations of the most varied nature – revealed this year that maybe we are indeed at the turning point of the digital turn. The point in which we can start accepting that the digital turn -the process of passing from an analogue mode of culture production to a digital one- is reaching the point in which the digital is completely overruling the analogical, and that this is definitely influencing our behavior – although, at the same time, this doesn’t have to be the main focus of our attention.

This means something like what Francis Ford Coppola achieved instantly when he did one of the first digital movies back in 1982: One from the Heart. (The other was Tron) Do you remember Coppola’s for being “digital” or just for being a great film, with great characters and great music? (But, then, that is why Coppola is a genius)

Spot on Schools exhibition in the Stazione Leopolda

Being at the turning point, though, also means that, even if we may start looking forward to a more mature approach to digital tools and looks, we must still bear some typically naive flirtations with the medium. In this sense, many of the films and participants in Beyond Media’s “Visions” – the event’s theme for 2009 – were still too obviously encapsulated in the discussion of the digital tools’ nature and possibilities, rather than stepping onto the next platform of the reflection and production of visions that the digital turn welcomes. This was perhaps most explicit in the case of the teaching departments selected to integrate the Spot on Schools exhibition – a quite valuable initiative that kind of offers a background for the festival, occupying two floors of the cave-like, discontinued halls of Stazione Leopolda. It is certainly true that, in terms of architectural education, the learning of the tools should be a major concern. It is true that the most efficient design instruments are now inevitably digital. But are the school departments heavily focused in parametric design the only ones that reflect the consequences of the digital turn? Indeed, for me, it would be far more interesting to explore the subtler ways in which the digital tooling affects the thinking behind architecture and everything else– because it structurally does.

On the other hand, the symposium held through the Festival’s long opening weekend did attempt to drive the debate into the 2.0 aspects of this issue… A well-tempered media historian such as Mario Carpo revealed the ambition to bring in the long perspective – the fact that you can look back at history and anticipate that the digital fad is just… like any other fad. But he was paired with a group of panelists – John Frazer, Furio Barzon and Alvise Simondetti from ARUP – who, as centered as they were in the wondrous updates of the tooling aspects, certainly made it difficult to achieve a more philosophical and distanced approach.

It was only when the starring bright minds came pouring in, that a jump could be felt in this direction. Like in some fast paced talk-show, both Derrick Kerckhove and Marcos Novak raised the political aspects of the new digital social networks. And with the aid of Beatriz Colomina’s historical rereading of little magazines, the core discussion of vision and communication was finally redirected into aspects of radical action towards the whole of society, rather than to a strict focus on the technical apparatus of the “selfless” digital architect aimed at analysis, standardization and cybernetic reproduction of building.

Happily, the symposium curated by Pietro Valle confirmed that there are many possible avenues into the achievement of vision in a digital world – including power, writing, exhibiting and the hidden mission of the festival: archiving. In the benefit of diversity, there was a contribute of those who, in these different areas, are immersed in digital technology, but also a presence of those who haven’t even arrived at the heart of digital, or let’s say, network thinking – although they inevitably use digital tools as a sort of upgraded craftsmanship. This was the case of Tony Fretton, for example, as opposed to Martin Rein-Cano, from Topotek1, on a panel on art visions… While neither addressed the digital turn, their practices certainly reflected a generation gap coming from the eruption of a new interaction, network paradigm. As such, in one of the very few moments in which a spicy confrontation arose, Fretton revealed how the minimalist frame of view is today acquiring a conservative and reductive overtone, as opposed to Rein-Cano’s hybrid linking of nature, technology and social space. Fretton wants to stick to an architectural world of autonomous abstractions, Rein-Cano wants to immerge in the everyday flow of contemporary information. This where the digital turn leaves its less obvious imprints.

“Concerto for infrastructures” by Gilles Delalex (Muoto Architects)

Palimpsest by Eva Sommeregger

Back to the movies, though, these demonstrated with bewildering diversity how digital tools are indeed around the corner, but in the end can simply provide for any world vision you may want to pursue. As you may preview in YouTube, the more revealing pieces in Beyond Media perfectly illustrated that even if digital tools are the rule, freedom of expression is once again the thing. As such, films reached from resolute experimental pieces by the likes of Pilar Ortiz or StudioMuoto to interesting graphic “documentaries” like Eva Sommeregger’s Palimpsest, Maki Gherzi’s Dalla Casa all’Abitare, or Anthony Burke’s States of Convergence.

Squint Opera’s Adamstown

MongoPalace by Interaction Design Lab

And video-portfolios by architects went from the classical digital professionalism of the “viewmasters” such as Zaha Hadid, UnStudio and MVRDV, to recent attempts at developing narrative devices such as those in Lavarita-Navarro or in BIG’s clever take on parkour’s architectural appropriations as filmed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder The best videos selected by Beyond Media thus revealed a clear assumption of existing digital tools, while willing to take these onto their next logical phase: visual originality, narrative, and a more humane approach. Whether corporate or subversive, whether institutional or personal, these films were, after all, looking back into the visual cultures of animation, cartoons and film… so as to discover the new/old paths that may lie beyond the digital turn. This again reveals the impact of the long, historical perspective: history constantly repeats itself through new instruments and media. As such, the sooner we achieve a critical distance from what is hitting us right now, the better we are using the repertoire of past and present to make the new technologies work for our everlasting and recurrent human needs.

Only two years after the pioneering, arty visions of food production in cities featured in 2007 exhibition Edible cities at NAi-Maastricht, we can say that today urban agriculture is considered as an important feature in architecture design and urban planning. And that it’s a fashionable topic too. 
’In the past if you were proposing to put gardens on top of your buildings, you were considered as crazy. Now you’re considered crazy if you don’t’, said architect Andre Viljoen, one of the speakers at the Foodprint symposium, hosted by Stroom, Den Haag on June 26.

Carolyn Steel

Integrating food production with urban activities might sound strange, but in fact cities are always shaped after the type of food system feeding them. 
Author of the influential book Hungry City, Carolyn Steele explained that the first cities were born in the so-called ‘fertile crescent’ in order to manage the surplus of food production in the surrounding countryside. In pre-industrial cities the wealth of the city was linked directly to the wealth of its countryside: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco ‘Allegoria del Buon Governo’ represents the ‘good government’ as a balance of city and countryside. 
In pre-industrial cities food production had to be located in proximity to urban settlements – as German economist Heinrich von Thuenen formalized in his 1826 model. But after the introduction of railroad transportation, and the introduction of industrial processes in agriculture, food production started to progressively disconnect from cities, which in turn could explode in size and population.

The consequences of this phenomenon were summarized by John Thackara, culture critic and ‘collaborative innovation’ promoter. The so-called ‘green revolution’ – i.e. the application of industrial methods in food production, massive use of chemicals in production, preservation and transportation, and a concentration in the retail model – had destructive consequences on health, energy consumption, water management, etc. Interestingly, Thackara’s point of view on what has to be done tries to divert from the mainstream discourse on sustainability. Instead of focusing on purely technological equipment (solar panels, windmills, hybrid automobiles, etc.), Thackara believes that 95% of future ‘green’ economy will be occupied by different ways of social organization. 

Furthermore, Thackara added that we don’t have to invent anything: these different types of organization and business models are already here. For instance, in the US there are many successful examples of community-led urban farms.

Will Allen

One of them is Growing Power Inc. promoted by former professional basketball player Will Allen. Started in 1993 to help African American teenagers in a poor area of Milwaukee to find jobs producing food for their community, today Growing Food Inc. is a flourishing business with 36 full-time employers, many farms across the US and 2 million dollar/year revenue. 
Allen uses low-tech organic farming techniques easily accessible to any community in the US, even the poorest. But his farms are nevertheless very productive. ‘Everyone can have really high yields’, explained Allen, ‘all you have to do is grow your soil’. So composting and vermicomposting are the most important activities of Growing Food Inc. 
Apart from the impressive techniques used by Allen’s farms, it’s important to point out the impact of such activities on poor communities in the US: every year more than 2500 people volunteer in these farms. 

In the US urban agriculture is somehow helped by different concurring factors. Lower urban densities, the real-estate crisis, and a lack of public control make it relatively easy to access land and self-organize (and sometimes even necessary to do so).

Debra Solomon, Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen

In Europe urban agriculture is a different story. Higher densities, hyper-organized and hyper-controlled spaces, and high land values make growing food in cities more difficult. Architects and artists engaged in food systems are nevertheless finding new spaces. 

Debra Solomon is an artist whose practice is focused on ‘food, food culture, and cultures that grow our food’. Her works use food as a way to produce and share knowledge on food processes and connect cultures through the collective practices of growing food, selling products and cooking. 

Solomon’s practice meets its spatial dimension in the work of architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen. The London-based architects started working on the concept of urban agriculture 15 years ago, when the idea of growing food in cities may still have looked crazy. Analyzing the experience of the Cuban ‘periodo especial’, they developed the idea of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs): urban green infrastructures bringing together spaces for leisure, production, oil-free transportation and wild areas. 

Bohn, Viljoen and Solomon are now starting a project in Schilderswijk, a multi-cultural area in The Hague. Their goal is to map opportunities the area has to offer in terms of food production and food-based social cohesion, and to intervene on urban space to facilitate social and productive flows.

Similarly, artist and professor Nils Norman and permaculture expert Menno Swaak are intervening in a park in The Hague. They apply permaculture techniques in bringing together food production, ecological intensification and education. 

Urban agriculture is not anymore a niche idea. Techniques and solutions are now widespread among the design community, and the city council’s planning departments started to show interest in these topics too. Will urban agriculture maintain its grassroots and self-organized character while becoming an ‘official’ practice?

(all photo’s via Stroom’s Foodprint blog)

Drawings, photo-montages, renderings and models have always been powerful means to convey ideas, present scenarios and research the future. The publication Beyond Architecture provides us with a bulky collection of sometimes intelligent and mostly enchanting and simply stunning imagery of how artists are dealing in their work with architecture and the city.

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'

For architects it is interesting to see ‘their’ subject approached by other disciplines. Many artists are using similar architectural techniques, but the difference lies in that for artists the drawing, model and photo-montage is the final product, where for the architect it is a means to an end i.e. to build. According to Lukas Feireiss the book: “charts novel ways of discovering and negotiating the potential of the urban in visual culture, thus also providing alternative and valid critical insights into understanding the city” Where architects in general produce their imagery as means to project the future, the artists in Beyond Architecture are investigating the potency and problematics of the present. The book presents the imagery without accompanying judgement or analysis. The absence of accompanying essays or a framing of the content is a missed opportunity and result in confusion. First of all confusion about the chosen title: Beyond Architecture. Beyond has become a buzzword, and especially when married to ‘architecture’ proven by the Venice biennale and architectural publications, and Volume feels personally addressed in this matter as well, with the ‘to beyond or not to be’ mantra on the cover. In the case of this publication from Gestalten publishers the relation between the title and its content remains unclear. Secondly, the missed opportunity concerns the theme of ‘fiction’ and ‘speculation’ is bubbling up in architecture today and not just in imagery but in architectural writing as well.

2008: Out There, Architecture Beyond Building – 11th Venice Biennale curated by Aaron Betsky

2009: Beyond, short stories on the post-contemporary edited by Pedro Gadanho (SUN)

2009: Beyond Architecture, Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities edited by Lukas Feireiss and Robert Klanten (Gestalten)

One can read the operation of going beyond in many ways. One can go beyond the present (time), beyond the physical (space), beyond the disciplinary (professional) and one can go beyond many other area’s, but in general all the beyonds refer to the movement of crossing the boundaries of the familiar, from the known into the unknown. If we remain within the known, we’re not going beyond in any way. This is also where the notion of beyond has its connections to fiction, speculation and the experiment, but we have to realize that innocent fiction does not really exist. Within fiction there are intentions, agenda’s and signs of the time, either implicit (as coping mechanism/therapy) or explicit (as manifesto/utopia), so what are the intentions of all the beyonds that are circulating in architectural discourse? What are we looking for? What truths do we seek to find? Why is there a necessity to move beyond the familiar? This question is not addressed in anyway by the book, in this sense title and content seem to be completely disconnected. Volume’s slogan: ‘to beyond or not to be’ contains the existential drive associated with the flight forward, into the beyond. The subtext: legitimations of the architecture discipline shouldn’t be searched for in the known, but in engaging the unknown. In order to deal with the unknown we cannot merely trust on the disciplinary body of knowledge we already have, but we have to move beyond disciplinary boundaries to acquire other knowledge that hands us new instruments and tools for thinking and making in an rapidly changing world.

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'

The merits of the book lies in that it illustrates that architectural imagination is not the sole privilege of architects and that we can find the amazing in the ordinary, in the existing, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going ‘beyond’ in any way. While the book correctly registers the emergence of fiction and speculation in architectural discourse, epitomized my blogs such as BLDG BLOG. These fictions are usually liberated from the utopian dimensions and activist manifesto’s formerly associated with photo-collages and grand urban vistas. Of course we have learnt our lessons concerning utopia, but is an attitude that is merely saturated with fascination enough to engage reality seriously?

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'