Ruptures in Architecture: Toward an Alternative Post-Fordism

The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and urban space. The seminar examines architects’ automobile vision. Objectives of the seminar The main objective of the seminar is to help students understand how the automobile influenced architects’ perception of the environment and how its generalized use provoked the emergence of new theoretical concepts and eventually led to new design perspectives. It aims to untie the specificity of car traveemergence of the generalised use of the car is related not only to a new epistemological regime, but also to a new representational regime. The latter, which relies upon photography, film, new modes of visual mapping and particular diagrams, serves to capture this new epistemological regime. The seminar will make students aware that there is an agency and an intentionality behind this new representational regime. The themes addressed will be grouped per means of visualization including three sections: “Drawing and the View from the Car”, “Film and the View from the Car”, and “Photography and the View from the Car”. A fourth section will concern “Cross-Fertilization between the View from the Car and Design Strategies”. The structure of the seminar is organized in clusters of architects that were interested in similar questions related to the emergence of the new perceptual regime due to the generalized use of the car. This seminar will help students understand the difference between capturing and interpreting reality when one films or photographs during a car trip. It will help students realize that each of these modes of representation is based on a different way of retrieving an experience later on. By the end of the course, the students will be able to argue why, when we decide to represent an experience of the city and more specifically a trajectory which is based on the sequential experience of landscape in a specific way, we make choices about what we extract from reality. These choices are based on what we consider to be the most important features of an urban landscape and depends on our own values and methods regarding not only the interpretation of architecture but also the strategies of intervention on a given site. By the end of the seminar, the students will acquire the skill of achieving the best possible alignment between what they consider to be the most important characteristics and the means for representing them. In parallel, by the end of the teaching process, the students will be able to explain why the choice of specific fragments of reality and the ways in which we relate them goes hand in hand with the taxonomies we wish to build while narrating an experience of driving through a landscape. They will also be expected to understand that there is a tension between stimulation and documentation and that the quick change of views while driving though a landscape promotes a ‘snapshot aesthetics’ and connects to memory in a different way based on the superimposition and juxtaposition of visual impressions. The objective is to help students realise that even if we intend to focus on the same features of reality each mode of representation is characterised by a capacity to focus on certain aspects of reality. Focusing of the analysis of the different modes of representation, the seminar will help students become aware that when one chooses a means of representation over another, one is setting priorities. Content of the seminar An important component of the course will be the exploration of the interconnection between theory and architectural design practice. In parallel, the analysis of the connections between epistemological regimes and representational regimes will help them become aware of the intentionality characterizing the use of specific modes of representation. The seminar will also aim to help students understand how to choose the mode of representation that most efficiently promotes their architectural and urban design objectives. Special attention will be paid to the improvement of their skills in elaborating concepts coming from the history and theory of architecture and urban design for self-analysing their design processes, and to the enhancement of interactive learning through the organisation of several sessions of peer feedback on the texts, drawings and photographs produced by the students. Telling regarding the understanding of car travel as a new episteme is Reyner Banham’s following remark, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, [Banham had to learn] […] to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”. During the second half of the 20th century, architects became increasingly aware of the impact of the car. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fact that the new perceptual regime related to its generalised use became more apparent within the American context. Some seminal books in which this becomes evident are Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer’s The View from the Road (1964), Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972). For instance, in the latter, it becomes evident that one cannot make sense of Las Vegas by walking. Special attention will be paid to the analysis of cases that demonstrate that the view from the car as a new perceptual regime, instead of functioning simply as a tool serving to document visual impressions during travel, plays an important role in shaping the architects’ own architectural and urban design strategies. Throughout the seminar the students will work collaboratively in order to contribute to the production of an exhibition entitled “The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime”, which will be displayed at the gta exhibitions foyer space. An ensemble of exercises that will be held every two sessions will help students get familiarized with the theoretical concepts and the modes of representation analysed in the seminar. A booklet published at the end of the seminar will bring together the outcomes of these different exercises. The final presentation of the seminar will take place within the exhibition space and will be accompanied by the feedback of a jury consisting of different professors from the school. Structure of the seminar 1. Drawing and the view from the car 1.1. Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and John Myer’s Mapping Strategies: Cognitive Maps, 25.02.2021 1.2. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Diagrams: The Specificity of the American Urban and the View from the Car, 04.03.2021 1.3. Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen’s “serial vision”, Outrage and subtopia, 11.03.2021 2. The film and the view from the car 2.1. Kevin Lynch’s movie “View from The Road", 18.03.2021 2.2. Reyner Banham’s movie “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles”, 01.04.2021 2.3. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “Deadpan” film, 15.04.2021 3. Photography and the view from the car 3.1. John Lautner’s residences as equivalents of cameras: The ‘autophotographic grasp’, 22.04.2021 3.2. The “as found” and the act of capturing very materiality of the artefacts through street photography, 29.04.2021 3.3. Aldo Rossi’s act of taking photographs from the car: Shaping mental maps of the cities, 06.05.2021 3.4. The cross-fertilization between the view from the car and the design strategies, 20.05.2021

City, Territory and Architecture, 2021

The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory in multiple ways, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and the city. Despite the fact that many architects and architectural critics and theorists have been attracted to automobile vision, in the field of history and theory of architecture and urban design, many questions concerning the impact of the automobile on our perception of the city and its territory have not yet been explored in depth. This is surprising when one considers that no other single factor changed the city so drastically during the twentieth century as the pervasive presence of the automobile. The article examines three different cases of architects-John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Aldo Rossi-who tried to construct new visual regimes in photography from the car. The main objective is to present how new visual regimes in photography from the car informed in various ways the visual attitudes in their designs of buildings. The interexchange between the ways of capturing the views from the car and the formation of new design methods can explain the necessity to establish a new theoretical framework offering the possibility to historians of architecture and urban design to address in a sharp and concrete way the reciprocal relation between automobile vision and design approaches.

In Le Corbusier’s work the threshold is represented like a revealing and enigmatic space that define the relations of the limit or boundary, the separation and the union between the buildings and the urban spaces, and the space that defines, qualifies and characterises the minimum condition of urbanity of any work of architecture, irrespective of its use or scale. Through an analysis of the draws based on the study of the six notebooks of The Voyage d’Orient (1911), and of the study of the urban settings visited, we verified that the threshold is, for Le Corbusier, a space or sequence of spaces organised under the idea of “plan” of variable thickness or extension, that includes both criteria and guidelines of order as well as solutions for managing the limits or boundaries in architecture, as well as its relation with space and the involvement with its surroundings, that is to say, we have also focused on highlighting how the architecture in itself, attends to an order that as well as being articulated and unitary, is extended by means of doors, frames, courtyards, terraces, sheds and exterior spaces, that incorporate both the nearby urban landscape as well as the distant cityscape.

Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 2016

In Le Corbusier’s work the threshold is represented like a revealing and enigmatic space that define the relations of the limit or boundary, the separation and the union between the buildings and the urban spaces, and the space that defines, qualifies and characterises the minimum condition of urbanity of any work of architecture, irrespective of its use or scale. Through an analysis of the draws based on the study of the six notebooks of The Voyage d’Orient (1911), and of the study of the urban settings visited, we verified that the threshold is, for Le Corbusier, a space or sequence of spaces organised under the idea of “plan” of variable thickness or extension, that includes both criteria and guidelines of order as well as solutions for managing the limits or boundaries in architecture, as well as its relation with space and the involvement with its surroundings, that is to say, we have also focused on highlighting how the architecture in itself, attends to an order that as well ...

This course focuses on the impact of the view from the car in the invention of new representational strategies in architectural and urban design. The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory in multiple ways, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and the city. The course will examine the architects’ automobile vision. Its main objective is to help students understand how the automobile influenced the architects’ perception of the environment and how its generalized used provoked the emergence of new theoretical concepts and eventually led to new design perspectives. It aims to untie the specificity of car travel as a new episteme of the urban landscape.

Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 2016

The relationship of Le Corbusier with the street is complex and sometimes contradictory. Young Jeanneret seems to be persuaded by certain sites, which we may define as urban scenarios, during his visits to cities like Istanbul in his formative years. Unlike his hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds – identified by a regular set of streets – these places may have been a picturesque counterpoint activated by a significant topography. Streets meandering along a set of ‘Dom-ino’ houses in the Oeuvre Complete, as the tracking rails of a long shot recording, offer a changing viewpoint that may be considered in relation with such casual arrangements. The claim to kill the ‘rue corridor’ made in Précisions, together with his later writings, deeply contrast with his own comments on an empty Paris in the summer of 1942 – as published in Les Trois Établissements Humains – praising the same streets he pretended to erase by means of operations like the ‘Ilôt Insalubre No 6’. The objective of this paper is to highlight and discuss those contradictions, which can be illustrated by the technical machine-streets conceived for the Ville Contemporaine of 1922 versus the V4 streets formulated in 1947 to reconcile with traditional streets. . Xavier Monteys & Pere Fuertes (2016) Le Corbusier. Streets, promenades, scenes and artefacts, Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 40:2, 151-161, DOI: 10.3846/20297955.2016.1194606

Anima Loci, 2021

Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture and Urbanism, 2019

The following stage play features a fictional conversation between people of radically different cultural and social backgrounds on the question of living together in the collective high-rise housing of Paris’s banlieues. Its object is Les Espaces d’Abraxas (hereafter: Abraxas), a monumental neo-historic housing complex of about 600 apartments realized between 1978 and 1983 in the new town Marne-la-Vallée by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill and his office Taller de Arquitectura. Publicized as one of the first visible manifestations of postmodernism in France1 and subsequently used as a backdrop for several dystopian Hollywood movies—Brazil (1984), The Hunger Games (2015)— the associations related to this building range from a penal colony to a surreal dream. The main subject of this conversation, however, is not the building and its spectacular façade, but the transformation of collective housing during the social and political upheavals that occurred in France and other northern European countries after thirty years of welfare state provision came to an end. Apart from being a postmodern icon, Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued in France after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. Its accelerated decline in less than a decade resulted from the mortgage credits with which it was marketed: their flexible interest rates led to the bankruptcy of Abraxas’s housing company in 1985. On the other hand, the building complex conveys intentions of welfare state policies of social redis- tribution and was built by procedures that emerged out of the logic of Fordist production. Its eclectic pillared façade made out of prefabricated concrete panels originates in the mass housing pro- duction of the postwar boom years; and its seemingly excessive monumentality can be traced back to the ambition of the Parisian new town planners of the 1960s to structure the Paris region with modern, thriving centralities that were to fulfill not only a right to housing, but also a the “right to the city. This play confronts the memories of Abraxas’s first generation of inhabitants—which I collected in narrative biographic interviews during a six-month stay in the building in 2012—with the cultural discourse that constructed it and which permeates its social spaces. Taking the lived experience of the inhabitants as a starting point and situating the discussion inside the building changes the viewpoint from which the narrative of the demise of the social housing high- rise is usually told. The resulting polylogue of testimony and stories as well as excerpts from publications explores the emancipatory potential of discourse, which occurs at the moment when this dis- course opens up towards what, for the sake of its functioning, has to be kept outside. Torn out of context, oral statements and fragments of sentences can lose their original meaning, but their reassembly creates new relations between otherwise often incommensurable registers of speech. I have left temporal incongruencies intention- ally unresolved: discursive utterings, which extend over a time span of fifty years, remain in the present tense whereas the memories of inhabitants recalling in 2012 their experience of the 1980s and 1990s are narrated in the past tense. Finally, my own voice as an author is transmitted in the stage directions that transform Abraxas and the new town center of Mont d’Est into a stage set and thereby into a central agent of this piece. “Architecture,” then, becomes an instance that occurs in specific settings and exists only within the simultaneous entanglement of practice and representation within which it makes sense.

2011

In an urban context-there is an increasing need to find adequate architectural responses to urban challenges, where tourism and the experience economy are in focus. New architectural concepts are looking away from modernism's strong attachment to 'form and function' towards 'the sensual and the narrative'. In large prestige projects you often see that new expressive architecture is coupled with old industrial buildings in order to create strong stories about a future; similar art installations and temporary architecture are emerging providing the audience with spatial experiences questioning the way we are using urban spaces and interact in every day city life. This article presents concepts of performative architecture and urban scenography. It draws lines back to the artistic and architectural avant-garde in the 1960s. The aim is to evaluate the phenomenon of aesthetic experience in the urban environment and to look at the artistic methods and architectural tools that are involved in large art installations today. The article pays special attention to the use of temporary architecture in relation to festivals and events. It is an allegation that the temporary architecture provides a special freedom to construct spatial situations that promote an experimental life. Through symbols, ornaments and decorations it is possible create recognizable urban environments in which people can orient themselves, but also experience an aesthetically and bodily challenging environment. Through 'constructed situations' and grotesque aesthetics of temporary architectural design it is possible to create cross-border experiences. The thesis is that it may contribute to reflection and provide new demands to the performance of our urban environments in general.