Writings – Typological Indeterminacy – UPDATED
Architectural Association School of Architecture
5th Year History and Theory Submission Autumn Term
Projective Cities
TYPOLOGICAL INDETERMINACY
Fabrizio Matillana
AA Diploma 14
09/10
Tutors
Christopher C.M. Lee
Sam Jacoby
Abstract
The possibility to consider organisation as a strategy for the indeterminate has been attempted whether considering the idea of indeterminate as the flexible or as universal. Flexibility and its various interpretations, linking to problems of organisation or organic mimesis in form and ideas of growth is a response to the emerging necessity to apply technologies that allowed for mass customization and mass deployment in construction for buildings of increasingly unprecedented scales, au pair with the unprecedented growth of the city. Universality, on the other hand, emerges as an autonomous organisational typology when the myriad of flexible architectures colonise the city of high capitalism. This essay’s ambition is to trace the emergence of indeterminacy as flexibility and its application derived from its multiple interpretations and its later development into a universal condition. Universal indeterminacy is evaluated in terms of its built finite examples and theoretical infinite exponent. As a typological organisation that favoured certain building types and had strong affiliation with the modernist’s ideal of designing the new city, indeterminate flexibility achieved a state of pervasiveness that contributed to its severing to any building type in particular and reached a state of autonomy that challenged its position as a response to the condition of the city and becomes its entire reproduction and definition of the city in itself.
Indeterminate Flexibility
Indeterminacy as a possibility for a typology that favours the systematic flexibility can be traced to Paxton’s Crystal Palace and Brunel Renkioi’s Crimean hospital. The specific interest in both cases for the expandable potential of a building was to serve, in the case of the former, quick assemblage giving “as free as possible from internal walls and thereby permitting flexible sub-division” [1], and in the latter, “[demonstrate] the possibilities of modular design by linking together pre-fabricated ward units to form a corridor building whose length was indeterminate.” [2] This flexibility derived from pragmatism and production of instant big scale unexplored at the time. By the industrial revolution, the technologies that permitted and encouraged modular design and the rate in which cities were densely being populated would have crystallised an initial premise for flexible indeterminacy. The modular construction contributed to the definition of the typologies for mass congregations in the form of train station. (Paddington station, also designed by Brunel) Specific requirements were to build a flexible covered space without columns that will accommodate the railway’s future needs, by taking full advantage to the construction techniques he was pioneering.
By the 1950s, the Victorian city was in a state of reconstruction, partly due to the war, but as a new maxim of form and function dominated architectural production. It is in this new context that the idea of indeterminacy continued to evolve beyond its technological pragmatic approach into one more embedded with the social and scientific consensus of the time. Architects John Weeks and Richard Llewelyn Davies’s project for Northwick Park Hospital [3] continues the discourse of indeterminate via flexibility, but not as statement of the technological avant-garde, but via conceptual association with “neo-Darwinian emphasises on the intrinsic “necessity” of form, or an implicit approval of the market’s ability to adapt continually to satisfy consumer demands. The architectural outcome is a notion of functionalism justifiable on both para-biological and para-economic grounds, at its most efficient when allowed to operate freely, unfettered by distorting constraints, ceaselessly adjusting to changing circumstances.” [4] This link between para-biology and para-economic grounds would associate any further indeterminate buildings into one where the justification for modularity and growth would be a response to a market condition. The typological organisation that is un-finished and indeterminate is determined to external forces that, at the time, where becoming increasingly apparent to be influencing architectural production and starting to be a direct response to a necessity for continual economic growth and continual expansion within the city.
The interconnection and instantaneity of our contemporary living by the 1960s was indeed in evidence and heavily treated in contemporary art at the time, notably, Richard Hamilton’s “Just what is that makes today’s homes so different and appealing” [5]. This is pivotal in the development of a further definition for indeterminacy as universal. It is by the 1950s that Modernist’s totality over design and functional zoning became the new urban condition on which the citizen was to relate to, vis-a-vis with the advancements in the time in mass communication and digitalization of everyday life. It is in this phase that Archigram’s take on indeterminacy evolved the concept beyond the flexible growth and into the realm of the critique of pop-culture: indeterminacy as a response to the endemic condition of modernist repetition and capitalist interconnectivity:
Archigram’s philosophy of “indeterminacy” brought to a head a long-running, rarely mentioned conundrum of modernism. Modernism is a contradictory idea, inasmuch as the word “modern” implies something that is bang up to date and still in formation, whereas the suffix “ism” implies the opposite, a doctrine, a codified method a style. Archigram would ensure that the “ism” would instead stand for a continual state of becoming, the design of the ever new.[6]
The framework on which Archigram was operating was at the margin of the indeterminately controlled and a progressive new state of indeterminacy. The tradition that started with the Crystal Palace and was still continued by architects in Britain such as Weeks and Llewelyn Davies, and in other countries, was altogether locked in the dilemma best summed up Jonathan Hughes in his essay Indeterminate Building:
Whilst the rhetoric of flexibility and adaptive efficiency could draw credibility from neo-Darwinian models of evolution (themselves analogous to Smithian free-market economic optimization), the programme of these buildings was circumscribed by the dirigiste, interventionist framework of Britain’s welfare state. Clearly free-market efficiency was not considered irreconcilable with socially redistributive justice, although economic theory suggests that both are not in practice likely to be coincidental. The result, then, was likely to be a compromise: part freedom, part control.[7]
As their position of a critique to the consumerist society and its non-representation in architectural reproduction, Archigrams’ proposals were a deliberate satire and excess in what was already becoming an everyday condition of the city: disposability and mass consumption. With the exhibition at the ICA Living Cities in 1963, Archigram’s vision was a derivative of pop culture. The projects they presented such as Living City [8], Plug-in City, Walking City, to name a few, each determined a type of approach to an indeterminate characteristic in their architecture: disposable buildings, designing without gravity, plug-in spaces and walking cities. Theirs was a departing point from flexibility as seen by the Modernists in its possibility for fixed reconfiguration and programmatic inhabitation with modular expansion, but more as the change in direction of determining the built form by giving control to the users in shaping their context. As Peter Cook explained:
[Architecture] can be much more related to the ambiguity of life. It can be throw-away or additive; it can be ad-hoc; it can be more allied to the personality and personal situation of the people who may have to use it.[9]
Typologically, Archigram’s proposed a ground zero in which totalising radical architectural constructs would hijack the city and inaugurate an instant living that was alien in its insertion yet was entirely faithful to the ways of living the contemporary citizen is subject to. Archigram’s role in the definition for a new indeterminacy is not in its typological integrity as their approach was one of deliberate architectural volatility, but it is important in revealing within the architectural discourse the radical alternatives to represent the city whilst being critical in the underlying operative framework of high capitalist that modernism was increasingly subjugated by and the citizen, intrinsically linked to.
An example of high capitalist architecture that was operating directly with capitalist agenda is the offices of the downtown American cities in the 1960s[10]. Organisationally purposefully undetermined, the typical plan of the office spaces, as Rem Koolhaas points out “represents the first totally abstract program – it does not demand a particular architecture, its only function is to let its occupants exist.”[11] By this un-specificity of program, the typical plan was flexible to occupation and determined by the users, as Archigram would have intended, yet, as Koolhaas suggests: “The ambition of typical plan is to create new territories for the smooth unfolding of new processes, in this case, ideal accommodation for business.”[12]
Within the capitalist operative framework of business, an organisation that was seeking to maximise efficiency by dissolving specificity from the architecture and giving it to the corporate administrator, the office space of downtown American cities adopted other key features such as the systematic use of artificial lightning and ventilation. This in theory guaranteed internal environmental control and infinite measurements in the floor area of the plan. The shared facilities were kept away from the main office plan and distributed near the staircases as means to preserve the continuity of undetermined floor plan. The space that “gave everything and required nothing”[13] provided a potential model that would liberate architecture from the modernist functional zoning pervasive by the late 1960s through artificiality and organisational indeterminacy.
As a critique to capitalist society, indeterminacy becomes satire, or as a representation of capitalism; indeterminacy becomes open space. The typological principle of organisation is one that oscillates between contained universality in the interior and expansion and growth in the outside. The move towards total infinite indeterminacy develops from within the typical plan and the organisational implosion of the interior turning into the exterior as an indistinguishable city fabric.
Indeterminate Finite Universality
4 years after the exhibition of Living Cities, in 1967, Mies van der Rohe completed his first tower at the Dominion Tower Centre. The significance of the Dominion Centre in the definition for a new indeterminacy, outside the stalemate of part-freedom, part-control, and pop culture critique was one of a modernism that considered the dissolution of organisation as a precondition for a new “publicness”:
“Mies’ well-known preoccupation with the so-called “spirit of the age” would, in all likelihood, have precluded any profound or considered engagement on his part with matters of “publicness” or of “plurality”[14]
Mies in particular, unlike Le Corbusier, pursued throughout his career a focus in a particular modernist architecture that, by utilising a precise palette, would refine his technique and, in the Dominion Centre, one could identify a voluntary emphasis in defining a typological state of universal indeterminacy by means of the restricted palette of elements. The open space raised at street level by the podium and laid out as an open space, regimented by the Miesian grid and dotted with trees and the footprints of the towers is a successful mechanism to interiorize the space within its own confines defined by the grid. More importantly is the way Mies would describe the public area in the Dominion Centre that, unlike the typical plan that would constitute the office space, van der Rohe would emphasise the viewing frame for the figures and for the world as a method to setup an alternative reading to publicness. The figures in Mies’ renders for the Bank Building in Sttutgard[15], 1928, and for the Commons Building in IIT[16], 1946, as George Baird elaborates, would fall into Neumeyer’s category of “space of contemplation”. As Fritz Neumeyer points out:
Secluded from the noisy turbulence of the city and yet visually connected to it, man is here thrown back upon himself and encounters his second nature, culture. Culture steps forward to meet him in double configuration, in the work of art and in the spirit of a built order, and even as the urban environment, in order to become - as Mies outlined as the aim of his art – “part of a larger whole.[17]
The indeterminate space of the plaza in the plan layout the new publicness, emerging with the framing of views operating at the level of the street. Looking at the interior and the confines of the typical plan, in a seminar by Llewelyn Davies at the AA in 1951 titled “Endless Architecture”, the subject of indeterminacy was extended into an organisational infinity. Llewelyn considered endlessness in the work of Mies as an internal latent configuration present within the confines of the limit. The same loose-fit approach of his Northwick Park Hospital in the details of the corner of Mie’s IIT alumni Hall[18] represents for Llewelyn Davies that claim for universal aggregation. Yet, where Davies still sees it as the aggregation of parts, and of a virtual endless horizontal plane, where the wall in the plan is but a slicing into what would be otherwise a continuous plane, Neumeyer in his description of Mies’ comments that the intention of Miesian architecture would in fact aim towards the same totality of space and consideration of the space as the place of the collective and the dissolution of the individual: “the individual bomes less and less important; his fate no longer interests us.”[19]
A critique to the machining of the city and its capitalist framework, akin to Mies search for “public” in relation to Arendt, transcends notions of indeterminacy as an analogy to organic or a representation of a disposable society. Mies encounter with Romano Guardini would consolidate his position to the relationship between the technocratic architecture and the new potential his reductive palette was reaching:
“Guardini called for something with which Mie was in profound agreement: another new, but not unilateral modernism in which subjective forces were restrained by objective limits, but in which, conversely, the potentially threatening powers inherent in technology were subordinated to the subject, to man and his life.”[20]
Indeterminate Infinite Universality
Casabella published and reviewed in 1970 “No-Stop City” from Italian radical architectural group Archizoom Associati. Andre Branzi, one of the members of the group continued the tradition of the grid and continuous space in its extreme representation: an endless interior, homogenous, lit by artificial light and by mechanically assisted ventilation, the ultimate satire on the relationship between the market economy and the city, interlinked, interiorised indistinguishably:
“The only place where the Factory Model and the Consumption Model are identified is the Supermarket. This is the real yardstick model for the future City and, consequently, of reality as a whole: homogenous utopian structure, private functionality, rational sublimation of consumption. Maximum results for minimum effort. The supermarket foreshadows an image-free structure, but one which is an optimum system of information about goods and merchandise, within which the homogeneity of the product is directly produced. As a homogeneity of all real data: there is no longer any zoning.” [21]
The internal and external fabric of the Miesian building relies on elements that detach the building from the context, such as the podium and the gridded plan, in the same manner, the artificial lightning of the supermarket de-contextualises brutally any setup for the possibility of a “site” for no-stop city. In one, hypothetical (Archizoom), and in the other built (Toronto) realms, indeterminacy operates at the same critical level, yet, the programmatic determinacy of Toronto over the unspecified nature of No-Stop City situates the building, within the continuum of capitalist governance, when it comes to the office space in downtown America, as one that is captive to its representative programmatic appropriation. By being universal yet convicted within the office space and inherited as such, the universal space of Mies is left to navigate future and continual reinterpretations of the unscripted program. For No Stop City, the totality of the interior has brought about a way of living that relies exclusively on living modules, as the only connection between the citizen and technology.[22]
No-Stop City took the supermarket as the representation of the state of the metropolis. The homogeny of the interior takes the supermarket organizational premise of infinite dimensions and artificial environment as the final relationship between the citizen and its increasingly technologically interconnected capitalist framework. A city without qualities for a man (finally) without qualities – that is, without compromise – freed society (freed even from architecture).[23] This project further problematizes the notion of organisation and the redundancy of architectural representation by means of radicalizing a contemporary new typology, the supermarket, as an exponent of the postmodern condition in high capitalism and as the organisational principle for the city itself. Indeterminacy is portrayed the city without architecture. Contrary to Archigram, Archizoom’s repetition is a critique to the capitalist society and a parody of the limitlessness that the contemporary society has potentially reached by systematising the supermarket as organising type for the endless city. Repetition is a crucial principle in the organisation of the universal indeterminate, which overruns the initial impasse of the indeterminate-flexible group
Typological indeterminacy is therefore possible when the typology itself resorts to reverting the condition of the city it seeks to inhabit and becomes a detached entity that engages the occupiers with a new system of governance and relationship of building to city. Situating itself on the opposite extreme of functional zoning or on a flexible indeterminate that overturns prescribed building governance, the field and universal space are two conditions that allow for an indeterminacy that serves as a critique to the underlying mechanics of the city. Unlike the typical plan, this infinite indeterminacy coincides with Archigram’s position on the operability of the city by its citizens, yet rather than resorting to pastiche of programs, it becomes, from the organisational premise of the supermarket, an exponent of the market society, a new organisation for the city as an endless interior:
“Foreshadowing later theories of media and immaterial production, Branzi emphasized that if the city was integrated into the cycle of production, then producing it was only a matter of programming, not of designing, its built structures. However, if the call for programming as an alternative strategy to architecture was eventually – thirty years later – to end up in a vague imaginary of diagrams and statistics, Archizoom’s and Tafuri’s ideas of programming and organization converged in the formulation of a cohesive and integral critique of the capitalist metropolis.”[24]
Typological Indeterminacy
After No-Stop City, no suggestion of indeterminacy or “universality” can neglect its association with the project from Archizoom. Either interpretation of the topic becomes a subtle reproduction of the state of the city within the confines of a single building or compound. Archizoom’s is the exclusive interior totality of the state of the city, which is the extrapolation of the premise that Archigram was grasping, both sides interpreting as a condition of pop culture, yet, where one was instrumentalising the satire into an array of extreme conditions that aimed to serve the same motif, Archizoom’s centralised the critique into one that in its reproduction served as the entirety of the city. Unlike plug in city, waking city and living city, No-stop city is an endless interior.
Whether considering indeterminacy via an organisational typology that potentially can replicate the extent of the city itself, akin to Borges’s kingdom from “An Exactitude of Science”[25], and finalise the relationship between the governance of capital and the city it produces, or whether, universal indeterminacy is the overturning of the capital system and the technocratic domain as Guardini implied, when referring to the work of Mies, the organisational principle in itself is a reaction to an urban condition derived from socio-political context. The stalemate of part controlled and part flexible that indeterminacy as flexibility is characterised by, and is an inherent conundrum in architectural design, is reverted by the emergence of the indeterminate, whether planned or unplanned. This essay sought to elaborate the concepts from examples that instrumentalise the condition of indeterminacy. It is valid to point out that, after No-Stop City, no project that rivals the scale of the city or is seriously committed with the representation of our contemporary society could avoid the organisation principles that Archizoom Associati lead to its logical conclusion back in the 60s. Whether it being considered as digital instantaneity and globalised societies, the same interconnectivity that was present in No-Stop City prevails nowadays. The potential of typological indeterminacy has is to further deepened the enquiry in the divide that this interconnectivity and systematisation of living has achieved within our social constructs. Hannah Ardent in the “Human Condition” describes the current state of our contemporary collective:
The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.[26]
Typological indeterminacy operates within the collectivisation of the common, the segregation of the individual, and the inclusion of social systems, within a singular fabric, or an endless one. The enquiry remains and in its various interpretations a new landscape for the city, akin to the same condition that gave rise to the inquiry on indeterminacy by the 1950s, initiated in the Victorian age, would reach again: A city with ruins within a city that attempted a reproduction of its own mechanics. Borges concludes:
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.[27]
Bibliography
ARENDT, Hannah, “The Human Condition”,
AURELI, Pier Vittorio, “The Project of Autonomy”, Buell Center, FORuM Project, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2008.
BRANZI, Andrea, “No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati”, HYX, Paris, 2006.
BRANZI, Andrea, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity”, SKIRA, Milan, Italy, 2006.
HUGHES, Jonathan, SADLER, Simon, “Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism”, Architectural Press, Oxford, UK, 2000.
KOOLHAAS, Rem, “S,M,L,XL”, Monacelli Press, New York, USA, 1997.
LLEWELYN DAVIES, Richard, “Endless Architecture” in “The AA Journal Volume LXVII, No. 756”, London, UK, 1951.
MARTINS, Detlef, “The Presence of Mies”, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, USA, 1994.
NEUMEYER, Fritz “Artless world : Mies van der Rohe on the building art”
SADLER, Simon, “Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture”, MIT Press, Cambridge, USA, 2005.
0[1] HUGHES, Jonathan, SADLER, Simon, “Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern
Architecture and Urbanism”, Architectural Press, Oxford, UK, 2000, p.97. See Figure 1 in Appendix.
0[2] Loc.Cit. See Figure 2 in Appendix.
0[3] See Figure 3 in Appendix.
0[5] See Figure 4 in Appendix.
0[6] SADLER, Simon, “Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture”, MIT Press, Cambridge, USA, 2005, p.91.
0[7] HUGHES, Jonathan, Op. Cit., p. 103.
0[8] See Figure 5 in Appendix.
0[9] SADLER, Simon, Op. Cit., p. 94.
[10] See Figure 6 in Appendix.
[11] KOOLHAAS, Rem, “S,M,L,XL”, p.
[12] Loc.Cit.
[13] Ibid., p. 376.
[14] BAIRD, George, “Looking for “The Public” in Mies van der Rohe’s concept for the Toronto-Dominion Centre” in MARTINS, Detlef, “The Presence of Mies”, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, USA, 1994, p. 160.
[15] See Figure 7 in Appendix.
[16] See Figure 8 in Appendix.
[17] Ibid., p. 166.
[18] See Figure 9 in Appendix.
[19] BAIRD, George, Op. Cit., p. 160.
[20] Ibid., p. 163
[21] BRANZI, Andrea, “No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati”, HYX, Paris, 2006, p. 173.
[22] See Figure10 in Appendix.
[23] BRANZI, ANDREA, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity”, p. 71.
[24]AURELI, Pier Vittorio, “The Project of Autonomy”, Buell Center, FORuM Project, Princeton Architectural Press,
New York, 2008.p. 77
[25] … In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Borges, J. L. 1998. On exactitude in science. P. 325, In, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected
Fictions (Trans. Hurley, H.) Penguin Books.
[26] ARENDT, Hannah, “The Human Condition”, The University of Chicago Press, London, 1998, p. 53.
[27] BORGES, J,L, Op cit.
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