What About LA?

WAI’s The Story of the Tower to be featured in the group exhibit:

UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale

25 March 2010 – 2 July 2010
Opening Reception Thursday March 25, 2010 5PM – 8PM
Pacific Design Center (PDC) Suite B208 | West Hollywood, CA | 90069

SUPERFRONT is proud to present UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, the first SUPERFRONT LA exhibit of 2010.

Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence. Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s). Leveraging an interdisciplinary focus, UNPLANNED: RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS AT THE URBAN SCALE boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale.

Curated by Mitch McEwen the exhibition also includes work from ae.i.ou (San Juan), Salottobuono (Venice), Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (London), Francisca Benitez (New York), Benjamin Cadena (Brooklyn), McLain Clutter (University of Michigan TCAUP), Alex Delaunay (New York/Paris), Johanna Ferrer Guldager and Stine Laurberg Hansen (Copenhagen/ Los Angeles), Dennis Maher (Buffalo), Riitta Oittinen (Helsinki), Hyeri Park (Seoul/Delft), Dubravka Sekulić (Belgrade/Maastricht), Alvaro Urbano (Madrid/Berlin), architects AGENCY (New York), ZellnerPlus (Los Angeles), INABA (Los Angeles), an advanced architecture studio at Columbia GSAPP taught by Mabel Wilson, and a student workshop from the Southern California Institute of Architecture directed by Micheal Pinto of Project Food / LA (Los Angeles).

For more information about the exhibit:

http://losangeles.superfront.org/2010/01/unplanned-research-experiments-at-the-urban-scale/

For more information about The Story of the Tower stay tuned to WAI.

What About a Conditional Glamour?

Architect's Delight

What about Glamour?

A cynical guide for a peepshow of urban frivolity

By N. Frankowski and C. García

What happens when we are no longer entertained by the glitter of the stars, the waves of fashion, the high gossip of competitions or prizes? What happens when we lose faith in architecture itself, when we perceive it in the end as no more than a gentlemanly sport for educated minds and well-trained eyes?

-Luis Fernández-Galiano

Every other city we go, every other video, no matter where I go, I see the same…

-2Pac

The cosmetic is the new cosmic…

-Rem Koolhaas

Glamour is the new black. The contemporary city lies as a catwalk for the showcase of sexy fetishistic architectural products (of contemporary Starchitects). Glittering facades, exclusive brand names, flashing lights and slick materials are the Botox and silicone of the glamorous twenty first century architecture and its urbanism. So what about glamour and the city?

The architecture of the spectacle has been running a hasty race for stardom. The survivors from the generation of May ’68 have finally reached the long sought stratospheric élite of high fashion and fame. In fact, this selected group of every-where-I-look-I-see-them architects has managed to fool an entire pop generation of groupies into copying the cynicism without the critique. Sous le pavé la plage has been reimbursed with an un-equivalent sous le pavé les boutiques Prada.

The plan of Modernism to exploit the Mass Media as its deus ex machina is finally accomplished. Now more than ever architecture is dependent on the power of branding and eye candy pleasures. Magazine covers, TV Shows, music videos, and movie sets have pushed architecture into the midst of a self-claimed glory. Not only has the architect seemed to be floating in the “amniotic fluid” of fashion and glamour, he (and a few exceptions of she) has become a superstar.

The Koolhaas’s, Hadid’s, Calatrava’s, Foster’s, Libeskind’s, and Gehry’s have become brand names like Chanel, Versace and Dolce and Gabbana; every global city wants its own. Architecture has become more infatuated by the centerfold images, the glitter of the papier couché, and by the flash of the cameras than by their auspicious role as agents for social change. The crux of the problem is that architects have become rock stars; the city their red carpet.

In order to understand the conditions of the architecture of glamour and its effects on the city we must update our jargon; glorify our lexicon. A new terminology has to be applied, (or at least proposed) to describe the urbanistic narcissism that has taken over the city like plastic surgery over a model’s face. Our previous database is outdated; it has expired. Therefore, the urban dictionary must be reinvented. In constant revision, never serious, these new concepts, or “disposable speculations” portray the zeitgeist of the modern grozsdtadt.

Bling Bling Urbanism- In Bling Bling Urbanism eye candy is applied on a one to one thousand scale. Removing all the layers of human evidence, it shows a surrealist alternative of a non-existent reality. Bling Bling Urbanism turns the world into an image; it is the apotheosis of synthesis and the meltdown of analysis.

Bling Bling Urbanism seduces into doing lèche vitrine on windows filled with empty urban promises. Graphically efficient we lie to ourselves in order to lie to everybody. Too far from eyesight; too distant from a critical standpoint, glamour is being grafted onto the city. Bling Bling urbanism is ornament the size of a city. From the palm tree shapes of man made islands, to the perfectly gridded urban blocks ―and superblocks, to the parametric spontaneities of software simulacra, entire shapes are being rendered over Google Earth images of toy sized cities. Glamour adds glitter to the city; Bling Bling Urbanism dazzles the spectator.

Sexy Shapes-Previously used exclusively to describe attributes that provoked sexual excitement; “sexy” is not longer attached to the human figure. After recognizing the power of iconography, sexy-man made machines are being raised with lust and desire. The more the tower twists, bends, or spread wide open, the more exposure it receives. In this world driven by paraphernalia, sexy describes it the best, and the expression is becoming ever more popular in magazines, public presentations, and even the most sacred events at the academia.

Like an adrenaline rush, lust anesthetizes our logic as we become unable to distinguish the obvious lack of content behind the sexy shapes. Incapable of identifying the repeated plot we fall in the scheme like a lover blinded by “the moment.” The scene has been set: a flock of birds flying through a sun irradiated, clean, happy sky; the joyous effect of a summer lapped by a gentle wafting fog, and in the background, sexy shapes are erected.

Bimbo Towers- Like a supermodel, high rise is getting prime broadcast time. In fact, clients are pouring obscene amounts of time, architects and money to erect towers that, like bimbo girls, look attractive but don’t confer anything else than their looks. The skyscraper is indeed the definitive typology predilection of the architecture of glamour. It has become a fetishistic silhouette of whatever is à la mode.

Erected as the objectification of a desire for virility, the bimbo towers dominate the urban skyline. Their sexy shapes have swallowed everything else that was urban ―monoliths of conceptual emptiness have substituted substance with “Junkspace”. A new race aiming to conquer the sky with Bimbo Towers seems to on; and like Yona Friedman’s architecture mobile (1958) this frivolous incarnation of whatever that is wrong with architecture grow equally over a desert, a rice field or a slum. Sooner than expected, glamour will take over and every city will proudly raise its bimbo tower.

Sassy Facades- Distinctively stylish, these pretty faces create boulevards reminiscent of boutiques with exclusive brand names. Entire urban contexts are transformed into shopping malls; making every city look the same. The sassy facades are achieved through a surgical approach that operates over the urban epidermis ―no wonder that more than often they are referred to as “skins.” An overwhelming amalgamation of nicely done facades decorate our expérience psychogéographique as the city finally becomes a Debordean spectacle.

Libraries, churches, shopping malls, restaurants, supermarkets, and banks are induced into a collective camouflage of urban frivolity; a sassy make-up of sassy facades. Clinging to catch the eye of the spectator, a new urban swagger is arrogantly thrown in everybody’s face. Sassy facades offer to the pedestrian a peepshow of glamour, a private lap dance of urban chic.

Chic Interiors-This is the most intimate and perhaps exclusive part of the glamour scheme. The interiors seduce, but don’t satisfy. Identity is dropped intentionally in order to gain credibility. You are not longer able to identify the function of the place (or the purpose of it). All neon lit, chic interiors suggest you are in a hotel lobby. At the same time you could be waiting for food, for a shoe, for a book or an airplane. Typology is transfigured into ambience and environment. Not only the interiors are not exposed to the outside, but are totally “disconnected”; the air conditioner helped to emancipate the building from the city.

The Chic Interiors don’t clarify their intentions with the city, instead they blur them. They offer each visitor a retreat into a paradisiacal taste of irresistible attractions. And while they create an eternal flow of first-level visitors, the Chic Interiors could be nothing but a fifth category in the urban lexicon; lacking substance and just trying to be glamorous.

Blinded by the glittering features and exclusivity of architecture and the perfect neatness of man-made shapes, the city is about to be dead (again). Not only have we unwittingly surrendered to the luxurious life of high fashion, but we have become the ultimate manipulators of the urban avatar, the definitive cosmeticians of the city. We have turned the city into a gigantic decoration. If for Adolf Loos ornament in an architectural scale was a crime, then ornamental urbanism would have been a felony.

After so much gossip and camera flash our urbanism has turned self-conscious; we have turned the city into an anorexic model that cannot see itself in the mirror anymore. After modernism we have failed to see ourselves again as urban alchemists, not because our inability to remember previous Zarathustran efforts, but because we don’t care anymore. Our city has become a polished caricature of our worst urban cynicism.

Glamour is addictive. More and more we want more glamour, and in fact we get more glamour. The urban portrait of the 21^st century reveals cities ignored for the sake of the prolific production of architectural artifacts. The mountains of Styrofoam models grow at the same speed that the stack of pages of architectural publications. The servers are full of speculative figurations; we show videos of our projects in development, of our buildings in construction. We are the architectural voyeur, the glamorous exhibitionists. The architectural “process” has enhanced the spectacle by letting it all be exposed.

We have become unable to do anything if it doesn’t become a spectacle. We want every image of every attempt, however futile or sterile, to become a tool for propaganda. We get satisfied not by how much substance we have built, but by how many publications we have been featured in; by how much prizes we have won. The potential of Glamour has been a miscarriage; a tool undermined. Used by the modernists to gain credibility for their ambitious vision of a brave new world, Glamour never really reached its climax. Instead, we have eroded all its potential; stopped its initial momentum. Glamour has been banalized. It has passed from a spontaneous opportunity to address an issue to an opportunistic overload of paraphernalia. Never before have we been so infatuated by the strass et paillettes of the glamorous world of Architecture with a capital A.

Luis Fernandez-Galiano asked in a soul tearing note what happens when we lose faith in architecture? What happens when the glamour issue is over and we are left standing “empty-handed” and “empty-minded” in front of a vanishing audience? Are we then to assume responsibility for what has been intentionally irresponsible? Or are we to surrender to a Mephistophelean seduction and find more ways to polish the mirrors of our narcissistic profession?

The reality check is imminent; the dream is over. We have all been shouting insipid slogans hoping they will turn into a manifesto; a contemporary urban gospel. The recent economic crisis just showed that the bubble of the architectural crisis bursted long time ago; long before Wall Street. We have been constructing ideological edifications on artificial foundations. The only coherent statements have come when we claim that we don’t make statements anymore.

A young generation of architects is left a midst the crisis of the crisis. If between architecture and the city the relationship is often problematic, then between glamour and architecture the problem has been cancelled, subtracted, since there is not intellectual dialectic anymore. We keep on trying the same formula with stubborn perseverance enforcing an opportunistic amnesia that erases the memories of a post-Bilbao glamour breakdown. We don’t recognize that while the covers of fashion magazine help promote the image of individual architects, it does very little to help the entire profession, and much less to contribute to the development of the city. Glamour has enlarged the architect to become bigger than his architecture, and his architectures to outsize the city.

An arrogant and egocentric approach towards the city has reduced the possibilities of discovering alternatives to the problems we have created. The frivolous search for glamour has turned the city into a distorted apotheosis of Rem Koolhaas’s The City of the Captive Globe (1972). In it the sensationalistic pleasure of the hedonistic mind has run out of proportion, obstructing the construction of artificial conceptions and births of theories and making it impossible for the self-centered architectures to breed on a globe which, no longer being within their attention has vanished from their captivity.

In the post-glamour city where looks don’t deceive anymore, and where nobody looks at the covers of the magazines, only those who were brave enough to reinvent themselves and maintain critical distance from the intoxicating aroma of the glamour will be the ones who can attempt to rescue the city, and perhaps the globe. Meanwhile, in the contemporary city the fashionable offerings keep on being dumped on top of the urban substance. Architecture is still a self-conscious profession that hides behind cosmetics, and the “big” and the “powerful” are still using the Glamour as a tool of self-promoting propaganda. It is time for us to wonder what will happen when the fireworks are finished and the smoke clears; will the city (or the Globe) still be there? ■

Debord Unlimited: The frivolous peepshow

What About a Glamorous Compromise?

WAI has been featured in Conditions Magazine

The third issue of CONDITIONS is devoted to the topic of “Glamorous Compromise”, “as an investigation into the culture of compromise and its influence upon architecture and urbanism.” Again the panoramic spectrum of the Scandinavian publication includes perspectives from politicians, developers, architects, critics, and artists like Bård Folke Fredriksen, Jan Kristiansen, Håkan Danielsson & Gert Wingårdh, Tor Inge Hjemdal, Anders Melsom, Pavlina Andrea Lucas & Evan Smith Wergeland, Brendan Cormier & Christopher Pandolfi, Gerard Reinmuth,Yusuke Koshima, Sabine Müller & Andreas Quednau (SMAQ), Sabin Borș, Clément Blanchet & Mads Farsø, Måns Wrange/OMBUD and Spetz & Holst, anonymous, Rosetta Sarah Elkin, Jimenez Lai, and Boris Brorman Jensen, between others.

www.conditionsmagazine.com/index.php?/current-issue/2/

to order a printed copy:

http://www.conditionsmagazine.com/index.php?/shop--subscriptions/

What About Understanding Contemporary Architecture?

The Shapes of Hardcore Architecture

By N. Frankowski and C. García (WAI)

Modernism

Modern Architecture was a fashion statement. Coated with an ideology of social impromptu and urban reconstruction, it seems undeniable and remarkable that the dominant gene of the Modern Movement’s DNA was its aesthetics.

Everything, from the “hygienic” appearance of its white villas, to its revolutionary materials—glass, steel and concrete, to its grid-restricted urban plans and its desolated tree-less plazas, was a trend; a stylistic straightjacket fiercely defended through an almost endless list of manifestoes and catalogues that prophesied how the modernist Zeitgeist should be portrayed.

Modernism’s plan was to become alchemistic through fashion; it was trying to transform positivism, rationalism, and Cartesianism into an architectural style, and its aesthetics into a science.

Style

Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier introduced modernism from two opposite directions. While Loos anounced the advent of a modern architecture by emphatically denouncing previous styles, Le Corbusier welcome its arrival by creating five categories which would soon become the modernist's ethos.

In 1908, Loos published Crime and Ornament —a written plead for a halt to the use and production of ornamentation. In it he banned the use of ornament in order to instate the “rational” design of the new century.

A decade and a half later, Le Corbusier published the first catalogue of modernist aesthetics. In the Almanach de l’Architecture moderne; les pilotis, le toit-terrasse, le plan libre, la fenêtre en longueur, and la façade libre became the five official organs of the modernist anatomy.

Even though Loos and Le Corbusier sketched different routes to becoming “modern”, the bottom line was that Modernism was still about style.

Plot

In total contrast to the modernist dogma, contemporary architecture defies classification. Despite its unprecedented amount of production—both speculative and materialized—it is still waiting for a screen to project its intentions.

The paradox of contemporary architecture is that even though it doesn’t have a written manifesto—like Loos’s or Le Corbusier’s—it does have a shared visual language; an unclaimed common plot.

Progress

In 1992, Peter Eisenman presented a “work in progress” in front of a battalion of architects, urbanists, and critics of intimidating gravitas. The project—a looping tower—was being grafted onto the former Max Reinhardt Schauspielhaus site in Berlin, just in front of Mies’s original unrealized glass tower.(1)

In the discussion after the presentation, Rem Koolhaas –who was amongst the observers—tried to disarm Eisenman’s claims, over a project that the Dutch architect found “extremely beautiful.” Thus he found the looping tower appealing; Koolhaas was not convinced by Eisenman’s explanation of the project.

The final conclusion of the debate was that while the project was still a “work in progress” it should be criticized for its image and not for its architect’s words.

Looping

Ten years later Koolhaas presented a building in Beijing —a looping tower. Although in a different context and with a totally unrelated program, this project raised eyebrows because of its striking resemblance to Eisenman’s previous proposal.

In Delirious New York, Koolhaas compared Le Corbusier to a magician who gives his trick away when, inside the black velvet pouch he made the American Skyscraper “disappear” and pulled out his “Cartesian rabbit”: the Horizontal Skyscraper. (2)

With his proposal of the headquarters of the CCTV Koolhaas became an impersonation of his own “delirious magician.” He pulled out of his top hat his own version of the looping skyscraper, this time making disappear the corrugated folds of the facade, and sticking the building in Beijing—far from Berlin and from Mies’s ominous presence.

Patent

In 2004 the Office for Metropolitan Architecture claimed in their Universal Modernization Patent that they had “invented” the skyscraper loop. (3) Had they forgotten the fact that Eisenman had proposed a similar shape for a building ten years before? Or was the patent a hoax, ironically outlining the fact that contemporary architecture doesn’t invent, only “shares” shapes?

Shape

These two versions of the looping tower—the Max Reindhardt Haus and the CCTV—not only marked a revolution in skyscraper design, but in the dialectics of contemporary architecture.

The reappearance of the looping skyscraper reinforced the idea that a tower could be done as a Moebius strip and, more importantly, that after the abolition of concepts like scale, function, site or program, architecture can assume any shape in any place.

Additionally the seducing glitter of the papier couché, the fame of competitions, the glamour of awards and the virulent speed of websites, blogs and other types of e-fiction have propelled and multiplied the amount of images that are produced and consumed, badly outpacing a discipline as slow as architecture.

The result is a subconscious recognition of architecture’s limited amount of “shapes” and consequently their repetition as a fashion trend.

Hardcore

While in hardcore modernism the aesthetics were strongly defended by sharp statements, in contemporary hardcore architecture the shapes don’t have a stated manifesto, they have become the manifesto itself.

There are no doctrinal texts for contemporary architecture. It simply refuels itself visually by modernism and its multiple reincarnations; it draws inspiration from the unrealized schemes of Le Corbusier, Mies, Alexander Vesnin, El Lissitzky and Ivan Leonidov; it reinterprets the social utopias of Ledoux and Boullé; it recycles strategies aborted decades ago, and invokes schemes from totally contrasting historical, political and economic situations.

In contemporary architecture the shapes are indifferently repeated, from the sanded no man’s land in the mid-east, to the bamboo fields in Asia, to the flat landscapes in the Netherlands, to the sheetrock solid soil of New York.

Modernism’s ultimate goal of conquering the world through abstraction and repetition is finally being achieved, albeit on “steroids.” The buildings are twisted, bent, melted; in fact they’ve become the absolute incarnations of software simulacra and Styrofoam models.

Catalogue

Part of an extensive research, The Shapes of Hardcore Architecture proposes an understanding of contemporary architecture through the creation of a taxonomic catalogue of shapes; an ontology of forms. This study shows how leading contemporary practices find their common language without any official statement to justify any political ideology or aesthetic trend.

The following categories are an assemblage of buildings that, grouped according to their share of coincidental similarities and stripped from their original context, are displayed as “evidence” of the condition of contemporary architecture.

The possible categories which can emanate from a classification based on building shapes are to contemporary architecture what the Lecorbusian “five points” were to Modernism.

Sharing the romantic political ideals of the Russian Constructivist that evoked highly mechanized utopias at the advent of a “communal way of life,” the Horizontal Condensers are towers connected through built-on bridges. These horizontal segments once attached to individual towers not only act as physical links but integrate the otherwise isolated programs throughout collective and communal space. (4)

Blow-Up Fonts is a “trend” of buildings whose shapes emulate letters from the alphabet. The use of these typographic buildings can change according to the spelling of its intentions; referring in some recent examples to the name of the designer office (OMA’s “OMA”) or to the city where the project is proposed (JDS Architects’ “BE”).

In Ziggurat-Polis, Hans Konwiarz’s 1966 proposal for an urban intervention in Hamburg is revisited. The general scheme in this category consists of a common ground plan that in its higher levels get separated into a series of individual ziggurat-shaped towers. As in the other categories, the program can vary, from residential apartments, to hotel rooms, to office space.

Another revival of the Constructivist unbuilt proposals, Tower(s) and Box recalls El Lissitzky provocative photomontage for a Wolkenbügel (Cloud Iron). The proposal that showed a tower crowned at the top by a pronounced cantilever, proved to be basically impossible to build under the technological and economic limitations of its period. Meanwhile, further advances in engineering have launched a series of modifications of the Russian’s original design, allowing the cantilevered box to be reshuffled and redistributed at different heights on the building.

The Loop is named after the shape of a tower which instead of going just up and down in a straight vertical line, gets bent and connected to itself at its top and ground levels, creating a continuous Escherean form or a vertical “Moebius Strip.”

Stacking Boxes as the name suggests, simulate a conglomeration of volumes that are collocated one on top of another and next to each other to create the impression of being a random amalgamation of boxes. Highly popular during the 60’s it was one of the preferred shapes of the Japanese Metabolists. Its climax came with Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 in Montreal. These last years have seen a resurrection on the use of Stacking Boxes as an architectural strategy due to the high flexibility of its uses, as the boxes can be scaled to host an endless variety of programs, ranging from housing schemes (MVRDV’s Skyvillage) to mixed programs (OMA’s Bryghusprojektek), to exhibition space (SANAA’s New New Museum).

References

1. Peter Eisenman, “(K)nowhere to fold”, Anywhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson, (Rizolli: New York, 1992), 218-235.

2. Rem Koolhaas, “Europeans: Biuer!; Dalí and Le Corbusier Conquer New York”, Delirious New York, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1978), 253.

3. Rem Koolhaas, “Universal Modernization Patent: Skyscraper Loop(2002)”, Content, (Kölhn: Taschen , 2003), 511.

4. Camilla Gray, “1917-21”, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), 219.

What About Oslo?

Conditions Magazine #2: Copy and Interpretation release party in the 0047 Gallery in Oslo

RELEASE PARTY FOR CONDITIONS #2: COPY & INTERPRETATION
14 October 2009
.....................................................................................................................................

CONDITIONS MAGAZINE and 0047 invite you to the release of
CONDITIONS #2: COPY & INTERPRETATION.

TIME: Thursday 22 October, from 19:00

PLACE: 0047, Schweigaardsgt 34 D, Oslo

WAI is an intellectual collaborator of Conditions Magazine. The second issue contains the article “The Shapes of Hardcore Architecture”, which consist of an abstract of the upcoming book of the same name.

www.0047.org