Megacity 2050

In 1972 the cellphone was invented, and with it the beginning of a global communication. A new human species appears, one attached to technology and a virtual reality. This human has forgotten the physical space, the slow processes, and the analog thinking to be part of a global virtual metropolis.

 Today in 2050, the capitalist model has taken over the maximum space of the cities, leaving no exterior space, no light, no ventilation, just a continuous spread of crowded towers, a continued global vertical city. Do we care about this? Obviously, no. We are immersed in our virtual living. All form of life now depends on a virtual counselor. We need to ask Siri, Alexa or Cortana how to have friends, how to have sex, how to behave with your boss. We have forgotten how to be humans.

People cannot leave the city, they have never been in nature. Everybody (except the ones that controls or owns) are attached to work, forced by the capitalist model, we now travel just looking pictures of others helped by virtual applications. Nature is too far away since the cities had ground in extension, and there is traffic jam 24/7. This invisible network of total communication has covered all the face of the earth, allowing us to abandon the physical space. We have given up. We have made comfortable. We have been domesticated by the city. The world's health has been affected.

Let’s create a resistance, and a series of space without a network, without Twitter, Uber or Instagram. A primitive space that will use the interstices spaces of the metropolis. A pure natural space, no landscape design, no park, no square. A design has owners, a design is for someone, a design is specific, in contrast, pure natural space is the original democratic space. These primitive spaces will bring air, nature, light to feel, smell and walk. The basic elements of physical and mental health in the density of a global metropolis.

A disconnection will be created, allowing us to go back and evolve to be human, again.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ANALOG CITY AS DESIGN THEORY

The Analog City represents Aldo Rossi’s design theory. As a way to understand the concept of analog design in Rossi’s theory, this essay will explore his work on the Analog City and the concepts, references, and ideas that imply. As an analog project itself, this concept has been mentioned throughout his books, essays, and drawings, but it has been developed especially in his work on the Analog City but without a straight declaration of his theory behind it. By analyzing Rossi’s concepts of memory, catalogs, experiences, and fantasy we can re-create this irrational world that Rossi has transformed into reality in his Analog City. This essay will speculate on an analog design theory which will allow us to relate, understand, apply, reinterpret or reject its intentions 34 years after its conception.

The first step in this analysis is to understand the specific definition and relation between analog and logos that best match Rossi’s theory. Carl Jung defined and contrasted the critical and rational characteristics of Logos with the emotional, non-reason oriented of Eros. This could present the base of a dialectic between logos vs analogs, reason vs no-reason. Related with Rossi’s theory, he explored both: the reason and no-reason; the former related to sciences, history, and archeology and the later with the concepts of memory and fantasy, as a way to make unreal things real. For Rossi, his irrationality is based on memory which is the catalog of references, projects, things that he has seen and transferred through his experiences and observation, for being used as a superposition of memories in his internal catalog for design. As an example of this concept, Rossi states “In the Architecture of the City, I spoke of the cities of Andalusia; buildings like the Alhambra in Granada and the Mesquita in Cordoba were the paradigms of an architecture which is transformed over time, of an architecture acquainted with immense spaces and delicate solutions and constituting the city. I now realize that these impressions are reflected in my architecture. The analogical links, the associations between things and situations, became multiplied during my stay in Andalusia, so that images of the structure of the house of Seville began to emerge elsewhere, mixing autobiography and civic history”[1].

Rossi introduces the concept of time in his idea of the monument, by architecture that has overpasses the human existence and has lost its original meaning in its context, allowing new interpretations and uses. For that reason, he makes the analogy with the concept of skeletons, which are structures that we know nothing more than the final result. In this idea, Rossi uses the dialectic of history and typology, where history is analogous to the skeleton as a measure of time. On the other hand, the typology becomes the instrument of this time measurement. This skeleton serves to bring the past into the present, giving to the city a past that could be experienced. These elements are incorporated into the city not because of its original function, nor by their context, but just because of their form. This form could allow new and different function and relate to other skeletons forms in the city through time. In this case, Rossi’s Analog city disrupts the idea of time and place of the real city by creating a new city base on the dialectic of history and memories with no place and no time. “Where the skeleton was seen as the form and measure of specific times and places in the city, the analogous design process displaces the specifics of time and place in the city for another reality, a psychological one based on memory. While the skeleton, as a physical and analytical object embedded in a humanist and modernist context, represents verifiable data, archaeological artifact, memory and analogy bring the process of architecture into the realm of the psychological, transforming both subject and object. The analogous process, when applied to the actual geography of the city, therefore acts as a corrosive agent”[2].

The use of operations such as repetition, collage, displacement and distortion from one project to another can create a new project but at the same time with the memory of the old one. Rossi states “Throughout my life I have often been hospitalized for fractures and other injuries to my bones, and this has given me some sense and knowledge of the engineering of the body, which would otherwise have been inconceivable to me”[3].  Things that had been broken or have lost their meaning, Rossi used them to reassemble as an archeological and, at the same time, surgical operation. Again, we can see the dialectics of analog and logos that Rossi’s presents, as a way to make real the unreal. By using the analog concept, it has been allowed to work with different dialectics, such as relating memory to history, autobiography to civic history, and the individual with the collective experience.

The first Analog City was designed and painted by the architect-painter Arduino Cantafora in collaboration with Aldo Rossi in 1973 as part of La Tendenza group. The 7x2 meter oil canvas presented on the XV Milan Triennale, as the end of the of the exhibition of the Italian cities (Rome, Milan, Venice, etc.) as an Analog City that summaries all the memories of a journey through the exhibition. A center perspective of a public space through multiple streets, composed by a series of real buildings, but in different places and time, now share a common ground on this painting. It is composed of 11 buildings from which they are part historical, other part architectural from the early 20 century and Rossi’s own projects: The Monumento ai Partigiani in Segrate and Quartiere Gallaratese in Milano by A. Rossi, Casa sulla Michaelerplatz in Vienna by A. Loos, Mole Antonelliana in Torino by A. Antonelli, Mausoleo tronco-conico by E.L. Boulée, Pantheon in Roma, Piramide Cestia in Roma, Grosztadt di Hilberseimer, Fabbrica AEG di Berlino, P. Behrens, Casa del Fascio di Como by G. Terragni and Villa Reale di Monza by G. Piermarini.  In the painting, we can start looking some perspective modification in these elements presented, breaking with the traditional Renaissance scheme. This idea of modification will be later used and exploited in the second Analog City of 1976.  The lack of people presented in this frame gives to it an oneiric atmosphere, a space of fantasy. This could be transformed into the main critic. All the buildings are monuments, and there is a lack of texture that brings everything together as a city, the monuments are present next to it, but without a generic city texture that links them in a more complex system. As a Chirico’s paintings, the Analog City has a nostalgic light that gives us the idea of an abandoned or deserted city where the only thing that is left are the buildings and objects with their meanings staring at each other. As a contrast, we can use Canaletto’s capriccio with Palladian buildings, as a representation that has a dynamic urban life, that works as texture bringing the composition together.

The Analog City of 1976, was a collective work made by Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart and Eraldo Consolascio at the ETH in Zurich. As a visual piece for the Europa-America: Centro storico-suburbio at the 1976 Biennale di Venezia, Rossi propose a theory of design in a single, and collectively produced image. The technique of collage allows collaboration and the creation of this city as an arrangement of multiple memories, references, and projects displayed all together as a single composition. The collage is more suggestive than concrete because it referees to memories, objects, and events. Is more dynamic than stable, because of the superimposition of the images. It represents more a process that an end result, the collage could continue evolving with time, and this gives an open-ended characteristic. Rossi highlights the importance of this open-ended process as a possibility for cross contamination of meanings between elements. The 43 projects presented in the composition are a mixture of references from rationalism, the Neues Bauen, neo-platonicism, the architecture of the enlightenment, vernacular construction of the Ticino, Piranese’s carcieri, and baroque paintings with Rossi’s personal projects such as the Gallaratese housing units, the Beach huts and the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena. This has created a city that has been developed and evolved through years, without a definitive program, but with types of buildings that defines the city. “As reported by Rossi’s former students at the ETH, he proposed that architectural images should be located outside the dominant references used at the school, and more generally, outside the international context of architectural production at the time”[4] .

In the creation of the Analog City, Rossi’s used the concept of memory as a catalog of elements that are merged with fantasy in order to create a new order and meaning for his projects and the city. As an example, Rossi states “The tower of my Venetian theater might be a lighthouse or a clock; the campanile might be a minaret or one of the towers of the Kremlin: the analogies are limitless, seen, as they are, against the background of this preeminently Analogous City”[5]. For Rossi, the catalog rediscovers a secret and unexpected history and use of the image. The idea that memories can be accumulated on images on paper and can be used in different form while their original meaning is lost because of time. This allows him to use the collage of multiple photocopies taken in its majority from Bernhard Hoesli’s book collection as the technique used for the composition of the Analog City. He states “Once everything has stopped forever, there is something to see: the little backgrounds of the yellowish photos, the unexpected appearance of an interior, the very dust on an image in which one recognizes the value of time”[6]. With this notion appears the concept of forgetting and the ruin as a filter used in its memory to forget the mundane and just leave what is important to be used in his project. Another concept present in Rossi’s Analog city is the negation of scale. With the dissolution of scale in the analog process, there is a return to the very same humanist position first proposed in Alberti’s reciprocal metaphor of the house and the city: “The city is like a large house, and the house, in turn, is like a small city”[7]. As an example, in the Analog City of 76’, we can see the mixture of scales used in the elements presented in the composition that suggests different points of views for the same element. As an example, it is possible to identify a project such the Rossi’s Moka Coffee Maker transformed into a building in the city, or part of Rossi’s Spazio Chiuso, an internal view that features a man looking outside a window with a lamp above of him, is transforming the lamp into a city plaza and the window frame into a square building with 4 courtyards. All this gives a new interpretation to an existing object in relation to their context in the Analog City.

The technique of representation of the Analog City is fundamental because it shares the notions that Rossi wanted to express in his theory. As a technique allows to relate things in a new order and creating new meanings. He states “The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings”[8]. For him, nothing can be beautiful, nor a person, a thing or a city if it signifies nothing but its own use, and the creation of beauty comes in the creation of new meanings from the contamination in its comparison.  Because of this, we can state that the second Analog City of 1976 achieves a conceptual design more precise than the first one. Both share the quality of been created through a composition of existing buildings in Rossi’s memory, but the collage as a technique allows a better tie of the elements, creating of different scales and perspective, allowing the use of plans, elevations, and details, making it more dynamic and powerful as a composition. In contrast, the painting as a single view perspective is limited to the first-person view, lacking the fabric that ties these monuments altogether.

In conclusion, the silence made by Rossi about the theory behind the Analog City is an analog declaration in itself, leaving one single image as a response to his theory. In this sense, this essay appears as a treason to Rossi’s idea with the Analog City as a self-declaration work of intentions. By defragmenting Rossi’s composition, we can understand his theory as an open-ended system, which is a declaration of freedom in design by using the dialectic of the logos an analog. The Analog City as design theory without instructions allows multiple speculations in the present and future, giving us a project without conclusion. As the Analog City, Rossi has taken away the time and place out of his design theory, in which anyone can reach it, reinterpreted and applied. Rossi has left us to discuss the Analog City as a monument, as the building in the city that has lost its meaning, and there is nobody to explain it, just like a skeleton that stands out by itself as a creation of the past, but that still finds it’s meaning in the present.

Bibliography

Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City.

Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography.

Szacka, Léa-Catherine. Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Eraldo Consolascio. Radical Pedagogies.

Rossi, Aldo. The Analogous City: panel.

Rodighiero, Daria. The Analogous City, The Map.

Projects presented in the Analog City of 1976.

Knossos palace, Crete, 15th-16th Century BC, Bouleuterion, Mileto, 2nd Century BC, Church of Santa Costanza, Roma, 4th Century, Chapter House of York Minster, York, 1230-1472, Mosque-madrasa of Murad I, _ rst-_ oor, Bursa, 14th Century, Bayezid II Külliye, Edirne, 1488, Donato Bramante, Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, Roma, 1502, Michelangelo, Laurentian Library, Firenze, 1525-1571, Giovanni Battista Caporali, Drawing of Vitruvius’ city, 1536, Andrea Palladio, Palazzo _ iene, Vicenza, 1542, Galileo Galilei, Drawing of Pleiades Constellation, 1610, Tanzio da Varallo, David and Goliath, ca 1625, Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Roma, 1638-1641, Paulaner Monastery, Nová Paka, 1654-1732, Francesco de Sanctis, Alessandro Specchi, Spanish Steps, Roma, 1725, George Bähr, Frauenkirche, Dresden, 1726-1743, Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Figures of geometry principles, 1738, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Plan of the Campus Martius in Rome, 1746-1778, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, _ e Prison V, the lion bas-reliefs, 1746-1778, Andrea Palladio, Doric column, 1786, Giuseppe Pistocchi, Project for a monument-barrack on Mont Cenis, 1813, Dufour Map, _ rst edition, 1864, Giuseppe Terragni, Project for the Danteum, 1934, Le Corbusier, _ e chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1954, Gianfranco Caniggia, Como map, 1963, Aldo Rossi, Square and monument to the partisans, Segrate (MI), 1965, Giorgio Grassi, Aldo Rossi, Project of San Rocco housing unit, Monza (MB), 1966, Aldo Rossi, Project of the square, Sannazzaro de’ Burgondi (PV), 1967, Aldo Rossi, M. Fortis, M. Scolari, Project of the town hall, Scandicci (FI), 1968, Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing unit, Milano, 1969-70, Aldo Rossi, Beach huts, 1970, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Tonini House, Torricella, 1972-1974, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Single-family houses, Broni (PV), 1973, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Villa, Borgo Ticino, 1973, Aldo Rossi, Moka Co_ ee Maker, 1975, Aldo Rossi, Spazio Chiuso, interno, 1974, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Restoration project of Castel Grande, Bellinzona, 1974, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Project for connecting the walls to the main door of Castel Grande, Bellinzona, 1974, Aldo Rossi, Max Bosshard, Gianni Braghieri, Project for the regional administrative center, Trieste, 1974, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, House, Vezio, 1975, Brontallo Ground Floor, survey by Max Bosshard, Eraldo Consolascio and Orlando Pampuri, 1974, Corippo Elevation, after the work of Luigi Snozzi and Henk Block, 1979.

[1] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 18,19.

[2] Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. 8,9.

[3] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 82.

[4] Szacka, Léa-Catherine. Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Eraldo Consolascio. Radical Pedagogies.

[5] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 67.

[6] Idem. 47.

[7] Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. 9.

[8] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 19.

LIVING IN AMERICA EXHIBITION FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, HARLEM & MODERN HOUSING / Politics of Space / Mary McLeod

The exhibition, named after one of the phrases on a wooden panel of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city model, questions the concepts and characteristics of what implies the statement “to live in America”. By several projects, the exhibition grasps two different approaches to housing throughout the mid-twentieth. On the one hand, Wright’s proposal for an exurban settlement compose by a single-family house, and on the other hand, large public or subsidized housing located in urban areas. This essay focus on comparing two projects displayed on the exhibition as a way to extract their concepts and daily life idea. The first one, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city (1929-58) as an example of suburban living, and the second one, Paul Laurence Dunbar apartments (1926-28) as an urban housing project in Harlem, New York.

    Starting with Broadacre city, Wright’s idea to decentralize the urban settlements in America was based on individualism and private ownership, in order to provide every head of household with an acre of land. This was a masterplan model inspired by the rural Midwestern scenery that included civic, cultural, and industrial buildings with a single-family house design in the middle of the landscape. As a low-density city, it incorporates 1,400 houses per 4 square miles. The project consists of an extended landscape of isolated objects related by generous broad streets. Moreover, with its continuous green areas, private and public, the buildings merge with the generic landscape including a hill and a river that should reflect the ability of the project to adapt to any condition. Because of this, it is interesting that the project didn’t have any definitive location, neither client, this means that the relationship with a previous context was completely irrelevant. The city was planned without borders itself, with the possibility of extension in the horizontal, but with a clear disconnection with the next existent city. The project could be related to a contemporary close condominium, as indicates Teresa P.R. Caldeira “Their advertisements [close condominiums] propose a “total way of life” which would represent an alternative to the quality of life offered by the city and it’s deteriorated public space” 1.

    By contrast, the Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments develops a communitarian way of living in an urban context in a dense and vertical neighborhood. The project was composed of six multifamily building with six stories each, articulated internal courtyards with communitarian gardens in the inside, and the inclusion of commercial spaces. With the idea of a garden apartment, the project shapes their 511 units with access from the inside courtyard, in contrast to the close façade that limits the interaction with the street. Despite being a self-contained neighborhood located in an urban area, the project integrated mix-used programs including bank, nursery, recreation areas, and commercial spaces. Because of this, even though the façade strong limits, the project blends into the urban fabric, thus it erases the physical perimeter that the project had. Furthermore, the idea of the commercial areas integrated into the project was created to foster a sense of community and to complement the actual neighborhood’s needs. These ideas could be reflected on posterior avant-garde works on the value of the context as a found place, reflected in Nigel Henderson’s pictures of children playing on the streets in Bethnal Green Neighborhood and their mix-use street concept as a value of the social and physical realities on the cities.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City first exhibition was displayed at the Industrial Arts Exposition at the Rockefeller Center, Midtown Manhattan in 1935. This could be understood as a contradiction of all the concepts that the project reflects, as a rejection to the urban crowded city. On another point of view, this could be read as a critic to the urban context, the act of installing an alternative exurban living could work as Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center, “At the service of the Rockefellers, he will fix for eternity a Communist Fata Morgana in Manhattan – if not a “Kremlin on the banks of the Hudson”, at least a Red Square on Fifth Avenue” 2. But at the same time that Wright was exhibiting his ideas at the Rockefeller Center, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was financing The Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, as an affordable communitarian building in an urban context exclusively for African American residents.

    Since Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments where located in an urban context with the idea of integration, they couldn’t achieve this objective, first of all, as previously mentioned, the apartments were exclusively for African Americans residents, which generates, even more, segregation on the urban context. Secondly, because of the private financial model and the rejection of John D. Rockefeller Jr. of using public funds, the rent by that time was relatively high compared to similar housing options. Resulting in the reduction of the possibility of living in these apartments to a small group of people: the elite of the African American in New York City. At the same time, Wright’s project also creates a clear segregation on the urban fabric. Even though at the beginning the master plan anticipated a degree of economic diversity, the project focused on a resident that was implicitly white which fosters exclusion on the city, as it was expressed on the exhibition “the symbol of a predominantly white, nostalgic, and chauvinistic nation” 3.

    Moreover, in both projects, there was an idea of control and surveillance of the everyday life “[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers”. In the case of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, a set of rules of behavior controlled the aspects of social life: “drying clothes, wringing out mops, and storing milk bottles on windows sills were all prohibited” 4. In addition, because of the courtyard configuration, surveillance was generated in a peer to peer positive relation because of a permanent presence of the community in the public space: “there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street” 5, as Jane Jacobs expressed. The social control was also present in Broadacre city, where Wright created a series of religious, political and philosophical concepts that supposed to guide residents in their daily life. In the case of the street, it was a space for the car transportation, there is no walkable city, there was no space in-between, as Caldeira points “Therefore, public streets become spaces for elite’s circulation by car and for poor people’s circulation by foot or public transportation” 6. In this case, there are no eyes on the street, basically, is not needed because there are no strangers in this exurban city. “No longer using streets as spaces of sociability, the elite now wants to prevent street life from entering their enclaves” 7, thus control is given as a Foucault relation of surveillance of a permanent controlled environment, always as a vertical relation with power from which you can’t hide from.

    In conclusion, the exhibition successfully allows the generation of contrast views on how to live in America. Also, both analyzed projects answer the question in different aspects, but neither of them achieves the social integration that they were looking for. Then, how we can start creating new models and ways of livings that re-think the relation with the street, the social fabric and the integration with the city? It is evident that this problem is still unanswered and applies to the contemporary discussion regarding housing crisis and gentrification in the city.
 

1 Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation”, 309.
2  Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 225.
3 Culler, Deborah, director and Chief curator. “Broadacre city” Living in America exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing. (2017).
4 Ibid
5  Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 35
6 Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation”, 309.
7 Ibid

Bibliography:
Caldeira, Theresa. “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,” Public Culture 8, no. 2 (1996).
Culler, Deborah, director and Chief curator. “Living in America exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing”. (2017).
Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison”, translated by Alan Sheridan (1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Jacobs, Jane. “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Koolhaas, Rem. “Delirious New York” (New York: Monacelli, 1994).

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY AS A CRITIQUE TO THE MODERN MOVEMENT / The History of Architecture Theory / Mark Wigley

The Architecture of the city written by Aldo Rossi in 1966 reflects a new critique and reactive position to the Modern Movement Functionalist theory as the predominant and wide accepted way to understand the city until that period of time. As Peter Eisenman describes on the editor’s introduction of the book, Rossi was “part of a generation progressively more distanced from the positivism of modern architecture by the collapse of historical time and left drifting into an uncertain present”.1 Acknowledging the different topics that this book covers, this essay focuses on Aldo Rossi’s theory of architecture as a critique to functionalism widely used among architects in the Modern Movement and the introduction of his theories to the American context. In order to question this specific critique and make a more accurate analysis of Rossi’s theory, this essay grasp parts of the book, exposing the intentions of the author and helping to have a critical understanding of how Rossi’s theory operates.

    The book is composed of a series of parts, but I will focus on the cover, the editor’s preface, the editor’s introduction (both written by Peter Eisenman), the introduction to the first American Edition (written by Aldo Rossi), the introduction to the theory (Urban Artifacts and a Theory of the City), and parts of the four chapters that relates to the critique of Modern Movement. With the book’s complex structure, we can state that Rossi’s theory is a continuous research, a “collective artifact” itself, as Peter Eisenman states “a singular and parallel record of ideas that Rossi has been developed in both drawing and writing over the last fifteen years” 2. The book is not just a concrete moment in time, in addition, it is a collection of complex layers of information that could be continually developed until today’s contemporary moment. Rossi states that this book works as a continues research and not as a simple confirmation of results. With this statement, he justifies the series of editions of this book and as a collective knowledge presents a new framework for future studies of the city that modern movement had limited.

    First, to understand Aldo Rossi’s architectural theory is important to clarify the context of the architecture and how it operates at the time that Rossi practice. In the post-war welfare, Rossi found that architecture was instrumentalized by the pressures of the market, therefore the city had to be built under the production model, meaning at a great speed and in mass construction. The consequence was an architecture design based on repetition and a complete ignoration of the concept of place as a unique form, with its own identity and relation to the context. We can see as an example, the suburban city of Levittown, NY, constructed between the 1947 and 1951. The mass-production model was clear: same houses built together, side by side, following a masterplan that shapes them in the same patron of size, design, and coloring, putting the same distance from each other, fomenting the use of cars and the distance to the crowded   city. That was the modern suburbia in the United States. In the case of Europe, he was against of Modern Movement urbanist operations of tabula rasa on the city as an act of elimination of the condense collective memory of the place, for example, Modern Movement urbanist projects as Le Corbusier Plan Voisin for the center of Paris, Ville Radieuse for cities like Antwerp, Moscow, Algiers and Morocco or Kenzo Tange Tokyo bay masterplan.

    In this context, Rossi understood the loss of the historical city and its complexity. Because of these, in The Architecture of the City, he puts in value this historical city and the Urban Fabric as a way of structure the city, in which urban artifacts and fabric crisscross each other and continues transforming in its multiples meanings. As consequence, Rossi rejection to the Modern Movement urbanism that proposed an abstract planning of the city, which eliminates the city’s complex Urban Fabric.
    According to the text, Aldo Rossi bases its theory principally on individuality, locus, memory, and design itself, rejecting function as one of the characteristics to explain urban artifacts. Moreover, he states that function on urban artifacts can change over time or even a specific function could not exist for a specific urban artifact. As an example, he brings the idea of monuments, a building with no specific function in the city, but an essential element for preserving cities history, art, memory, myth, and rituals, something that the Modern Movement could never explain in its theories. As an example, Rossi claims how in almost all European cities there are large palaces, building complexes, or agglomeration of structures that constitute whole pieces of the city and whose function now is no longer the original one. He develops the idea using the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, “one is struck by the multiplicity of functions that a building of this type can contain over time and how these functions are entirely independent of the form” 3. For Rossi The Roman Forum is the most representative urban artifact: “bound up as it is with the origin of the city; extremely, almost unbelievably, transformed over time but always growing upon itself; parallel to the history of Rome as it is documented in every historical stone and legend” 4. Furthermore, it is the form of the building that impresses us, the one that shapes our experiences and meaning, and from which it structures the city. We can state that for Rossi’s theory unbuild projects are as important as the built ones because they also represent the changes in meanings of urban artifacts through history. Some of the projects that that Rossi references in the book are examples of how a monument can change its meaning over time. One is built and the other is unbuilt. The Roman monument in Arles, France (image 55), originally a theater and amphitheater was transformed and trade to different proprietors and at the same time the structure of the monument has been maintained in the city. The building has changed the meaning but it continues structuring the city (image 57). The other is the unbuilt projects for the Roman Coliseum, the project changes it uses into a forum for a centrally planned church in 1707 (image 58) or another project of Popes Sixtux V that transform the Coliseum into a wool factory with worker’s apartments in it, 1590. (image 60)

    Aldo Rossi’s theory main critique was made on Modern Movements functionalism due to its limitations on explaining the city and the complex relation between the meaning of different artifacts and the city, as a result, Modern Movement simplification of the urban artifacts to simple schemes of organizations, diagrams of circulation routes, that results in an architecture without autonomous value. Functionalism has limited the studies of the cities and a deep understanding of architecture, resulting in obvious and superficial classifications: commercial cities, cultural cities, industrial cities, military cities, etc.

    According to Aldo Rossi, with a classification of cities based on functionalism, “the permanence of buildings and forms would have no significance, and the very idea of the transmission of a culture, of which the city is an element, would be questionable. None of this corresponds to reality” 5. Here we have to understand Rossi’s context as something that the book presupposes: the possibility of understanding the limitations of functionalism is based on the imposition of these force scheme to cities with history or memory, such as Rossi’s Italy, where function could leave behind deep layer of information, “history as the structure of urban artifacts is affirmed by the continuities that exist in the deepest layers of the urban structure, where certain fundamental characteristics that are common to the entire urban dynamic can be seen” 6. But what is the case in cities without history or memory? What are the roles of multifunction artifacts in the city today? Acknowledging the complexity of cities that Rossi states, a function could be balanced in different cases, contemporary residential cities connected just by car to the city center could be created just for a functional reason without the Urban Fabric that Rossi puts in value. On the other hand, multifunction artifacts can be identified in the cities of today, and how this change the classification of the cities not as a fixed concept and more as a dynamic one. As an example, we have the Atelier Bow-Wow Tokyo’s urban idea of combinational functionalism, where the same building is design by its multiples functions all at the same time, and not by an aesthetic concept.

    On one hand, Aldo Rossi recognizes and develops the idea of function as an intrinsic part of the architecture and he identifies it as one more of the complexities and characteristics that shape buildings. On the other hand, he completely rejects the cause and effect relations, and the ingenuous empiricism which holds that “function bring from together”, and themselves constituted urban artifacts and architecture. Moreover, he accepts the validity of functionalism to create an elementary classification of the city but recognizes that function as a simple instrumental fact has its limitation to grasp deeper and more complex understandings of the city. This statement is a direct rejection to the Modern Movement, in which function has created disconnection with the history and memory, looking forward to a more technological and surgical relation to the city, also in this context, Walter Gropius elimination of the history courses in the Bauhaus curriculum. “But in the view of the polemicists of the Modern Movement, this natural time had run out, and in its place succeeded the time of historicism” 7. Aldo Rossi proposes a return to the definition of type. On Rossi’s point of view, the definition of type, first proposed in the Enlightenment, allows an accurate classification of urban artifacts, and ultimately includes the function as part of the complexities. As Rossi states, “The architecture of the city summarizes the city’s form, and from, this form we can consider the city’s problems” 8.

    As Aldo Rossi claims, The Architecture of the City is a collective artifact, a work in progress. This is why he presents 3 interpretations of architecture and the city, that challenge the actual functionalism that has had a great influence in the architects around the world with a new and holistic approach that includes sociology, urban geography and imaginary. In contrast to functionalism that breaks the present and the past, these theories are based on a continuous reading of the city and its architecture. First, the social geographer Jean Tricart which include a social content to the city, second the theory of persistence of Marcel Poete as a formal study of city plans, and finally the Enlightenment theory establishing principles of architecture that understands a single element as a part of a system and distinguishes the form as the final manifestation of structure. Is important the influence on Rossi’s theory of Maurice Halbwachs idea of collective memory, “The soul of the city, becomes the city’s history, the sign on the walls of the municipium, the city’s distinctive and definitive character, its memory” 9 and Kevin Lich’s idea of the image of the city and how the city is remembered and read by fragments or elements that our mind compose in a virtual map. Rossi’s objective is to change from a structural way of classification related to the Modern Movement to a dialectical thinking that acknowledges the complexities of cities and architecture.

    As a critic of the Modern Movement and the introductions of categories for understanding the city, the use of structuralism has limited and homogenized the understanding of the city itself. Aldo Rossi acknowledges the complexity that the city involves, and he uses dialectical thinking to open the discussion and compare concepts in a way that creates new possibilities of analysis. As an example of this urgency, he repeated the word ‘complex’ in the text 82 times and the word ‘dynamic’ almost 40 times. As the most commons words in the text, we can understand the idea of change, urgency, and shift from something old to something new. Aldo Rossi, identifies the problems of structuralism and classification used by the Modern Movement to understand cities, “the most difficult historical problems of the city are resolved by dividing history into periods and hence ignoring or misunderstanding the universal and permanent character of the forces or  the urban dynamics” 10 Here he identifies the importance of using a comparative method, a collective knowledge or a dialectical thinking.

    Rossi’s teaching Typology at Venice Universities led him to use a scientific framework base on tendencies that he further develops in his theory of type with the cities. He describes typologies not as a program, not as a function, neither as a layout. For him, it is a formal organization of a building. This formal organization could just be read by comparison with other buildings, creating a family or a typology. Rossi states that this comparison is just allowed by the city or locus as “the relationship between a certain specific location and the building that are in it. It is at once singular and universal” 11 the collective fabric in which the typologies are related. At the same time, he defines in his Theory of Type that, “Type is thus a constant and manifests itself with a character of necessity; but even though it is predetermined, it reacts dialectically with technique, function, and style, as well as with both the collective and the individual moment of the architectural artifacts”.12 This is an example how types are modified dialectically by different elements resulting in many variations of the same theme in the city. Moreover, one typology is not just one building, but one building is just one typology.

    This allows the creation of the paradox of the Architecture of the city, in which Rossi, calls for a general reading of the city as an Urban Fabric that collect multiples typologies that are merged together. But at the same time, the reading of the typologies could only be made in isolation of the artifact, they as architectural elements self-contained in its own dimensions and forms, as monuments with its own architectural characteristics. This is transformed into a new argument against Modern Movement urbanism, in which he states that the modern city could never exist, just because the city is always based on a previous and existent urban fabric, with social relations, preexisting buildings, and history that relate them and work as its structure merging them together. This is connected again with Kevin Lich idea of reading the city, in which Rossi changes the reading of buildings from authors or styles as in Modern Movements to a reading as a collective memory based in typologies.

    What issues The Architecture of the City leaves behind? The connection between Rossi’s architectural theory and a design strategy’s that incorporates its theory is not mentioned in the book. We can read Rossi’s architectural projects as an exaggeration of the typological aspect of architecture, leaving behind this premise all other aspects. Examples are the Gallaratese Quarter in Milano 1972 and San Cataldo Cemetery 1971. The connection from the theory of The Architecture of the City and Rossi’s design methodology could be presented in Rossi’s Citta Analoga 1976. Created after The Architecture of the City, the Citta Analoga is a collage of different existent references composed together as a non-plan. Preexisting elements that had dimensions, forms, and different scales are merged with the existent city. This is a critic of the abstract Modern Movements masterplans and his non-plan transform his projects into a real manifestation of form based on examples.
    In relation to the structure of the book, the first interaction that the audience has with the book is the cover image. Eisenman in his introduction mentions the image on the cover of the last edition, the fourth Italian edition of Aldo Rossi’s L’ Architectura della città, that showed a horizontal section of the Mausoleum of Hadrian in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome. He explains that this image summarizes in a condensed form not only the ambivalent nature of Rossi’s work, but also the idea of city which this book proposes. “first, in terms of the spiral as a mausoleum, as representing a symbolic place of death, in this case -even if unconsciously on his part- that of humanism; and at the same time, in terms of the spiral as labyrinth, as representing a place of transformation”. In relation to the cover of this English edition, a wooden armature for the construction of vaults, from “Principj di Architettura Civile” Francesco Milizia in 1932, we can ask, what concept or ideas this image transmits? If this book is a critique of the Modern Movement, why is this bridge similar to the image of Pont de Garabit, designed by Eiffel that appears in the first chapter of Towards a new Architecture of Le Corbusier? The difference between the edition’s cover is quite relevant, despite this, the English edition cover is not referred in the book, so we must interpret its meaning. This could be a reference to the book as a continues process of construction, an artifact itself with past, present, and future. As we can see in the book, images are fundamental for Rossi’s theory development. First, the images display through the book are an important part of the theory that Rossi transmits, because all of them are tied to the text as a reflection of architecture and the city, based in his research through history. Second, Rossi doesn’t include any of this own build project or any image related to the stylistics or esthetic representation of his theory. All of them, ancient monuments or artifacts in the city, for example, the already mentioned Roman monuments in Arles, France or the project for the transformation of the Coliseum in Rome. We can understand this as a reaction to the futuristic images of the radical Italian movements groups of the same period. Superstudio, Archizoom, Zzoggurat, Ufo and 9999 that were born in 1966 in Florence and were proposing a new theory based on technology and a post-urban context. As a contrast with the international style, where images of buildings were displayed as models, transforming what originally was a theory to a style. Rossi’s statement with the selection of images in the Architecture of the City is that theory is independent of any design method. We can assume that this is part of his rejection of the International Style where projects are displayed as objects and models to follow. We could state that Rossi’s theory could be read as incomplete on the idea, on how the theory could be transformed into a design method, giving no answer to this in the book. Finally, only a few images in the introduction to the first American edition are from America, all the rest are European historical references. That shows that the original intention of the book is given by the European context, and the American introduction is a forced way to achieve new audiences in a new geographical context.

    We can assume that Peter Eisenman’s first intention in the preface was to introduce the tradition of architecture writers in Italy, as an entry point to this book. The long story of Italian treatise from the Renaissance, Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio, and Palladio to the nineteenth-century writers gives Aldo Rossi and the Architecture of the city a justification based on the architectural theories tradition. Furthermore, Eisenman gives us a socio-political context where the first Italian edition was originally written in 1966. Based on Aldo Rossi’s lectures and notes, this book reflected the critical context of Italy between 1960 and 1969, where students discontent was generalized against the Modern Movement’s position for the city. Rossi’s theory gives to this agitated audience a new framework post-Modern Movement, and persuade architects and architecture students, into a new way of thinking the city. One thing to consider in this explanation is that the text isolates Italy social movements of a broader context. We have to consider that this was part of a global social discontent in Europe, especially Paris in which a general student and workers protest reaches its climax in May 1968.
    The difference between the European and the American context at the time the English edition was released in 1984, generate the question of the importance of this theory in that socio and geopolitical moment. Had the English edition lost the urgency that the first edition had? Is not a coincidence that a strategic preface and introduction were written by Peter Eisenman, edition by  Kenneth  Frampton and  the  back  cover  written  by  Mary  McLeod,  all  of  them, American architects from the academia. Having well-known architects validating Rossi’s theory opens the door for a new debate in America at a time that the original urgency already was lost. The overall intention of this part of the book, the preface and the introduction, is a collective effort to make Rossi’s theory accepted in the American context, and transmit to the readers, quoting Mark Wiggly a “good, good, good” to Rossi’s theory and a “bad, bad, bad” to the old Modern Movement. Moreover, we can assume the importance of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and their magazine Opposition funded by the Museum of Modern Art and Princeton University, for the production of ideas connected to the context of the time. In which both, Peter Eisenman and Aldo Rossi where involve, and as result of this relation, the publication of The Architecture of the City in the English version.

    Rossi’s first edition of the book was originally written in Italian in 1966, with notes and parts of Rossi’s lectures, and translated in English in 1984 by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman, long after its first publication. Furthermore, according to Eisenman’s introduction, the book the “The Architecture of the City” is not a literal transcription of the original text “Architettura della città ”. With the objective to provide the same style and flavor of the original, the translation has removed the repetitive passages which were part of the original text. This editorial decision opens a series of questions, does the elimination of the repetitive passages had modified the sense of importance and urgency to what Aldo Rossi states? Has the text become flatter losing part of its original intentions? The editor’s intention to give more relevance to the clarity and simplicity over
the original translation into this English edition ultimately has affected the original idea and narrative. With the elimination of the intentional repetitive passages of the original book, the sense of urgency and intentionality of Rossi’s text has been lost. In this sense, we have to be aware of this through the reading of the book.
 
    Rossi wrote a new introduction to this first American edition, in which he states the importance of this book to the United States context. This is based on two arguments that let him apply the Architecture of the city to American cities. First, Rossi discovers that the American architecture is composed of primary elements, monuments, and parts. Second, the application of style in the American cities is influenced by the European cities. He presents this edition as a paradox, as a rediscovery of the American city and countryside, and as result, the confirmation of the concepts in the book. At the time the first edition was written, the interest of Rossi’s concept to American city was null. We can see in the text a new interest, and a justification of preexisting concepts to a new location. Aldo Rossi states “America is by now an ‘old’ country full of monuments and traditions, or because in America the city of parts is a historic and dynamic reality”13. We can argue that at the time the first edition was written, American cities were old enough to be an interesting point of study of this theory, but in 1966, the real focus of the social conflicts were in Europe, and this transforms the argument in just a justification for a new application of this theory to the new American audience.

    The argument of an intersection of Europe and the American cities, and the creation of the “Analog City”, as Aldo Rossi states “cities with unexpected meaning, as unexpected as the meaning of the style and orders that have been applied to it” 14. An example of this is Adolf Loos project for the Chicago Tribune competition, an enormous Doric column, is the synthesis of the distorting effects of scale and application of style in an American framework. Aldo Rossi is giving us a framework of the Architecture of the City to the American context, which generates assumptions that we could argue. On the one hand, Rossi’s argument acknowledges the complexities of cities, and on the other, he presents basic examples of the influences of Europe in America, such as he states “Spanish corral and the patio in Latin America, and the English country house in the United States” 15. So, isn’t this a simplification in the understanding of American cities? Is it not an elimination of the complexities between monuments, history, external influences, geography, climate, economic and migrations between others that creates the urban fabrics of the American cities? We could agree that the influences that Aldo Rossi identifies are correct, but at the same time, these relations are too limited to the real complexities that he defines.
Another critique to Aldo Rossi’s argument is the use of the term America as the United States and America as a continent as an interchangeable concept creating confusion to the reader. For example, on one side his talks about the United States: “America… for this country I have decided to write a special introduction” 16. On the other side, referring to the continent, as: “the American house has maintained two fundamental European typologies: The Spanish corral and patio in Latin America, and the English country house in the United States”17. This could be a problem of mistranslation of the English edition or evidence that this book was translated just for the United States’ audience, leaving behind the other countries in America.

    In conclusion, in this book, we can find a double objective. On one hand, is Aldo Rossi’s theories of the Architecture of the city that rejects the functionalism of the Modern Movement. Also, he understands the complexities of the cities using his Theory of Types as the connection to history and a dialectical way of thinking of cities and architecture. On the other hand, Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton, as Editors of the book and members of The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, intended to connect Aldo Rossi’s theory with America, giving a sense of urgency that the actual context of the theory had been lost because of time. But if the Architecture of the City as Rossi declares, is a continuous process of research, which are the applications of the Architecture of the city today? Can we use Rossi’s theories for architectural design or his theories are just a way to understand the complexities of the city? We can identify the isolation and individualism of the actual towers, as a parallel to the Modern Movement clinical intervention of the city, now based on their verticality. How we can return to understand the complexities of the city, that privatization and capitalism have hidden? Self-named public buildings that isolate themselves and open their doors just to their best customers. This is why I think that The Architecture of the City is relevant today, not as a treaty of style, fashion, or beauty but as a way to understand the complexities of our contemporary cities, and a challenge for architects to work with the city as found. We just need to find the parallels.
 

1 Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City; introduction by Peter Eisenman; translation by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman; revised for the American edition by Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982. pp. 03.
2 Ibid. pp. 01. 3 Ibid pp. 29. 4 Ibid pp. 120. 5 Ibid. pp. 47. 6 Ibid. pp. 128. 7 Ibid. pp. 03. 8 Ibid. pp. 29. 9 Ibid pp. 130. 10 Ibid. pp. 27. 11 Ibid. pp. 103. 12 Ibid. pp. 41. 13 Ibid. pp. 13. 14 Ibid. pp. 15.
15 Ibid. pp. 13. 16 Ibid. pp. 13. 17 Ibid. pp. 13.

Bibliography
Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City; introduction by Peter Eisenman; translation by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman ; revised for the American edition by Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982.

THE BEAUBOURG-EFFECT IN A SOCIETY OF THE SPECTABLE / Politics of Space / Mary McLeod

According to Guy Debord, the spectacle has reached and transform every part of our daily life. Therefore, this essay links Debord concepts from The Society of the Spectacle with The Beaubourg-Effect, written by Jean Baudrillard, as an example of how Architecture is part of the daily spectacle in our cities. As Debord states, the spectacle is not just a collection of images, is a social relation among people, mediated by images. In this context, what is the role of the Beaubourg Center as a social space that promotes images? Does the Beaubourg Center manifest all the characteristics of spectacle as a mass culture entertainment? This essay explores three concepts associated with both, The Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard’s text: the alienation of the audience, the hypermarket of culture, and the contrast between content and container.

    Debord states that the spectacle has alienated our modern life, changing our relationships and modifying our behavior in society. For example, he mentions the changes that the spectacle has done to the human senses: “Since, the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied buy touch”1. A social space without controversies and space of acceptance, is the example of the alienation of the spectator, into a submission to the contemplated object, “the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires”2, Debord says. In this context, we can see how the Beaubourg Center as a social space, alienates people’s experiences. Baudrillard states the irony of Beaubourg “the masses rush there not because they slaver for this culture which has been denied them for centuries, but because, for the first time, they have a chance to participate, en masse, in this immense work of mourning for a culture they have always detested”3. As we can see, new desires and ways of behavior, as the elimination of voice and touch, and the overstimulated sight, has changed how we interact in the space. Therefore, the alienation of the human senses is a way to control the audience experiences.

As Baudrillard claims, “the hypermarket of culture, is already the model of all future forms of controlled “socialization”: the retotalization of all the dispersed functions of the body and of social life (work, leisure, media, culture)”4. In relation to this, the Beaubourge Center, has been transformed in the perfect example of the hypermarket of culture, a controlled social space for the mass: a continuous circulation of people in huge numbers, an elimination of individuality and personal space, a homogenization of the person by a ticket, among others. We could relate this idea to Debord’s impression of the spectacle as a commodity, were “The world the spectacle holds up to view is at ones here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience”5. Moreover, today we can compare these ideas to companies such as WeWork, Google, and Facebook, that had created a new hypermarket of work. They transform the space of work into a controlled social space, a new re-totalization of all life aspects, from work, leisure, and social life. This is a contemporary example of capitalism controlling all aspects of life, in which the companies provide all necessary elements for permanent living at work.

    In relation to the disconnection between signifier and signifies, between container and content, Baudrillard disagrees with the external aesthetics of the building in relation to its traditional internal content. In its exterior works as an urban advertisement device, though its architectural ideas of transparency, fluency, and interaction. In contrast, the interior is a static space without meaning. Thus, he satirically proposes the elimination of all the content inside the center, as a complete disappearance of the cultural meaning and the aesthetic sensibility. Hence, it is possible to connect Debord’s arguments of the spectacle at the exterior performance of the building, especially the external circulation. “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”6 Jean Baudrillard also recognizes the importance of the external circulation in the Beaubourg Center, and at the same time, he critiques in a sarcastic way how this idea of circulation of fluids is not achieved by the Center. “All traditional fluids – exhaust, coolant, electricity – flow smoothly. But already the circulation of humans’ masses is less assured (the archaic solution of escalators moving through plastic tubes… they should have used suction, propulsion, or what have you, some kind of motion in the image of that baroque theatricality of flux”7. On the other hand, it is possible to find a different aim for this translucent plastic tube, regarding the spectacle. As Debord states in his thesis 168 “Human circulation considered as something to be consumed- tourism- is a by-product of the circulation of commodities; basically, tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite”8. The importance of seen and been seen in this case is relevant, it works as an image of spectacle from the building to the city and the vice versa.

    In summary, the Beaubourg Center described by Baudrillard shares some of the ideas of The Society of the Spectacle by Debord, developed through the concepts of alienation of the audience experiences, hypermarket of culture for mass consumption and a disconnection between content and container. All of this, especially display in its façade as a maximum expression of the contemplation and the passive gaze of mass tourism.

1  Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 17.
2 Ibid pp. 23.
3 Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-effect: Implosion and Deterrance,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). pp.07
4 Ibid pp. 08.
5 Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 26.
6  Ibid pp. 15.
7 Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-effect: Implosion and Deterrance,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). pp. 03
8  Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 120.

Bibliography
Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-effect: Implosion and Deterrance,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

STRUCTURALISM AND THE CONTRADICTORY SPACE / Politics of Space / Mary McLeod

The objective of this essay is to present Michael Foucault’s systemic description of spaces and Henri Lefebvre’s perspective on how it has limited the analysis and comprehension of complex spaces. The latter, as a critique of the rationalization process, has used the dialectic thinking in order to develop the concepts of grids in an open-ended system. To analyze the complexities and contradictions between them, is fair to ask, how Michael Foucault use structuralism in order to understand spaces, and what are the downsides that Henri Lefebvre identifies in it? What are the differences between the classification of spaces in utopias and heterotopias that Foucault describes and the classification in grids that Lefebvre propose?

    For Michael Foucault, we are in an age of space, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period where it is not enough just to think over the concept of time, but to make connections and link points together in order to create our own understanding of space. Structuralism is presented as the system or method of thinking to achieve this. In his own words “is the attempt to establish between elements that may have been split over the course of time, a set of relationships that juxtapose them, set them in opposition or link them together, so as to create a sort of shape”1. As we create relationships between elements, we arranged them in a position in space and patterns. In this order, Foucault brings the idea of pairs of opposition (created by institutions and social practice), as a way of understanding space by contrast. As examples, we can find the public and private space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space, the space of pleasure and the space of work, among others - all of them, oppositional spaces that are presented in our everyday life. In this types of spatial arrangements Foucault presents the utopias and heterotopias, as spaces “with the curious property of being in relation with all others, but in such way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relationships designed, reflected, or mirrored by themselves”.2

    A concordant idea of space had Henri Lefebvre, understanding that the pure, transparent and neutral space has permeated the Western culture, creating an illusion that is now disappearing. According to Lefebvre, we are immersed in a Capitalist space that defines spaces of contradictions, such as, center and periphery, global and partial, inclusion and exclusion, conjunction and disjunction, implication and explications, iteration and reiteration, recurrence and repetition. As a critic to the structuralism formulated by Michael Foucault, understandings elements related in space using Cartesian classification, has the objective to eliminate contradictions, to demonstrate coherence and to reduce the dialectic to logic, in the case of Michael Foucault, logic of power. For Henri Lefebvre, reducing the concepts of spaces as an absolute will only work to benefit the interests of power. Considering this, he proposes the use of dialectical thinking into the concept of space, before used by Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx in the subject of time, achieving different perspectives, constructive conflicts and finally allowing contradictions to be part of the understanding of space.

    Furthermore, Henri Lefebvre questions the idea of a ‘plural’, ‘polyscopic’ or ‘polyvalent’ space, introducing the concept of the grid, not to create opposition and contrast, thus to develop more complex relations between concepts, highlighting Foucault isotopias, heterotopias, and utopias as the most relevant of these oppositions. The grid is a new perspective that does not isolate elements from one another in an abstract Cartesian space; it envisions different spaces all at once, places of encounters, places of transition, places of meditation and solitude. This also allows the analysis on three different levels, “a ‘micro’ level (architecture; residence versus housing; neighbourhood), a ‘medium’ level (the city; town-planning; the town-country dichotomy), and finally a ‘macro’ level (spatial strategies, town and country planning, land considered in national, global or worldwide terms)”3. Henri Lefebvre, claims that the number of possible grids is unlimited and it is impossible to prefer one grid over another, giving us an open-ended system. As Lefebvre quotes Nietzsche “But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the human-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly- palpable! You should follow your own sense to the end”4. With this idea, Lefebvre gives the final responsibility to the human in understanding and theorizing space.

    To illustrate the difference between both, we can analyze the third principle of Foucault heterotopias. Here, he describes these spaces as the ones that had “the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other”5. As an example, the cinema, which is a rectangular void, projects a tridimensional space into a two-dimensional screen. A dark space with contradictory locations, it transports us into different parts of the world, but at the same time, we are seated in a space with a row and a seat number, a rational space. The example of the cinema is important to Henri Lefebvre, which he states, spaces could not be understood as a single logic relation of inclusion and exclusion, “‘Human beings’ do not stand before, or amidst, social space; they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they are in this space”6. He critiques the passive role of people in spaces that Foucault implies, on the other hand, he thinks that in social spaces, like this case, humans can situate themselves in space and have an active role in it. At the same time that we are seated in the cinema, we are involved in a series of different enveloping levels, which their relation and sequence are part of the social practice.

    In sum, at the same time that Michael Foucault develops the complexity of spaces, bringing new ideas to space (relation between elements, phenomenologist, aura, symbolism, dreams, passions) by using structuralism to arrange these concepts, the results according to Henri Lefebvre is a reductionist categorization of relations by opposition, a systematic description, losing the complexity that at the beginning achieves. On the other hand, Lefebvre, agree with the complexity of space but understands that structuralism is too limited to grasp such complex matter, and he uses dialectical thinking in order to explain more accurate and at the same time contradictories elements of space, giving us a grid system that by definition is open-ended.

1 Michael Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 420.
2 Michael Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 421, 422.
3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 388.
4 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 399.
5 Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 424.
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 294.

Bibliography
Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” in Critical Sociology: European Perspectives (New York, Irving (Wiley), 1979).

A FRAGILE CONNECTION / ALICE TULLY HALL AND THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL RENOVATION (2009) DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO WITH FXFOWLE ARCHITECTS AND BEYER BLINDER BELLE / Arguments / Enrique Walker

When I think of the Lincoln Center Institutions, the idea of unity is a key element. The project was born to give a permanent home to the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Julliard School which were spread in different locations in New York City until 1969. The Pietro Belluschi, Eduardo Catalano and Helge Westermann brutalist style project has been the Julliard School until 2009 when Diller Scofidio + Renfro and associates renovated the original building bringing a new agenda: open the building to the city. In this context, which are the new urban relations that had been won and what others had been lost? What does it mean to “open the building” for the Julliard School? Design decisions give an impression of transparency and a democratic use of the public space, but if we analyze the new project in relation to the original one, the former had a different concept of what public means.

    According to the architects, the main idea of the renovation was an “architectural striptease”, taking off the solid material that generates opacity and blocks the connection at the ground level. In the words of the architects: “the street itself became part of the theater”. In contrast, the original project solved the connection to the city using a series of covered in-between public spaces on a second floor that connected the public street on the ground level to the inside of the building. Moreover, there was a network of circulations and plazas that goes inside Lincoln Center block and connect the Julliard’s building all around, this spatial connection between both buildings used to give the idea of a unified campus space. Also, a second-floor public plaza was placed between the Julliard building and Broadway street to give continuity to the inside-outside public space. Now as part of the renovation, those original in-between spaces have been eliminated, leaving a series of points of no return in this exterior public circulation. This is explained because these spaces can only be accessed from the inside of the Julliard’s building and from the Samuel B. & David Rose building, Julliard’s housing (both private institutions). Also, the north and west circulation around Julliard had been blocked as private spaces, and finally, the south circulation has been trimmed with the Julliard’s new double-high access at 65th street, resulting in spaces without continuity.
  
    One of the most important architectural design strategies was to uncover the Broadway façade changing the materiality from travertine veneer marble into crystal; as the architects claim “Displaying the studio on Broadway was like having the dancers see the world and the world see the dancers”. To prove this idea, I needed to experience the building from the inside. As a private institution, it wasn’t a surprise that the public was not allowed to enter the building, but as a 60’s secret agent I managed to get in as a prospective student. Hidden as a dancer, it was difficult to understand the renovation and the relation to the city from the inside because none of the corridors or rehearsal studios have any connection to the exterior, either physical or visual. Only as a superficial renovation, one circulation, two rehearsal spaces and a few administration offices in the Broadway façade had a new, but fragile visual relation to the city given from the natural light and the urban skyline. In contrast, as the audience, we can see a series of photogenic new perspectives of the building. From the inside, there is a succession of theaters, lobbies, gift shops, coffee shops, restaurants that gives us the idea of a contemporary public use. From the outside, the project constructs a cantilevered volume over what previously was public space on Broadway, living an outdoor sunken plaza beneath with a stair seating space that faces a four-story crystal walled restaurant. This architectonic gesture of “opening the building” and showing the inside, results in a luxurious private program that has nothing to do with the exposure of the inside performing arts of the Julliard School.

    In contrast to the other Lincoln Center buildings, the Julliard School is the only building located in a different block. The original project faced this point with a pedestrian footbridge named the Paul Milstein Plaza that crossed over 65th street and connected the Lincoln Center Plaza with Julliard School access at the second floor. This provided a public space for the city and the students, a common space where they can share. The elimination of this space by the renovation was replaced by a light bridge in order to revitalize 65th street in between and make it more pedestrian friendly, but these have had consequences. Now the Julliard building is in complete isolation, even though with a common architectural language of diagonals and materiality, both buildings, the Julliard and the Lincoln Center, are hardly understood as a unity. Moreover, the common public space around Julliard building, from the original project, has been transformed into a fragmentation of unconnected spaces privatized by the School. For example, the times when students used to take their breaks rehearsing in the outdoor Paul Milstein Plaza while people pass by has ended, and now the students only inhabit inside the building, leaving them with a more distant relation to the city than the previous one. Furthermore, the new pedestrian 65th street renovation has resulted in the transformation of the ground level into a series of private programs that, because of their translucent materials, gives us the impression of being public; a restaurant, gift shop and ticket office, has transformed the relation to the city into a commercial one.

    To conclude, the connection between Julliard’s School and the Lincoln Center has been broken, and now is only given by a few architectural design elements that give a fragile impression of unity. As a contradiction, programmatically they are independent, and with the public space in-between eliminated, Julliard’s has been isolated from the city and the public, leaving no opportunities for the city-student interaction. In other words, the artist has gone from the street and now only plays inside the fancy halls.