Sunday, August 15, 2010
Taxonomy and City
The measure of our lives has become the tabulation and catalogue of the locations we have been successful at placing our bodies in.
It sounds odd, or preposterous at the first instance. But more and more we have begun to value the record of having been able to place ourselves there. Of course that is not the complete measure: that is half. The other half is the further acknowledgment of having placed ourselves, by others who have before us, and yet other who will want to after us. Somehow the record of placing ourselves ‘there’ has become the extent of the interaction with place.
Our present lives consist of mad rushes from point to point, in fevered activity. And each day is repetition of the same idea. Abstracted, our lives could look like red dots spotted across the city with thin black lines that join them. Thin, black, economic and self referential lines. Each sealed in and isolated. These are paths of least resistance and thus of the least engagement that transport us from one controlled environment to another.
Each environment a clone of the other, the last or the next. Our lives then become the ticking off of these red dots on the map of our lives, the map-supreme in the making of the megalomania-cal city of the 21st century.
Gradually the city and its architecture have morphed into vestibules of codified clones of standardized material, shape and image. And the visitation to these similar or same places seem to become the measure of a human life’s worth.
Unless coded, marked , and labeled it has no claim. And human life, seems like a ricochet between taxonomies spread within the labyrinth of (now)no particular consequence. With label removed, each immediately fades from memory and fuses into may similar and in-differentiable images , each without any claim to memory.
The city seems slowly to be heading to a state where without taxonomy it would fade into a placeless, un-remember-able, un-identifiable mass.
The name-tag now offers the future city’s claim to the human mind, much in the spirit of the four way cross road in the middle of a deserted plain , each as un-usable as the next without its special sign board.
Is this the city of the future, made of the architecture of the future?
A city from within which has been removed any idea of memory, and the human memory of the city itself. Where place has progressively been reduced to name . Where architecture relies not on its nature, but on a sign board or a visual naming device to lay claim to the human mind. A signboard without which that very same claim would be void. Without the necessary taxonomy, the architecture of the city would cease to exist.
What would we call landmark then? Similar places, same places, with a different name with the only recognizable mark of a flashing red arrow saying, “HERE”.Labels: architecture, city, landmark, new delhi, placeless-ness, taxonomy, urbanism
Friday, September 15, 2006
De-Controlling the Place
There is suddenly a marked rise in the Engineered, “programmed” surfaces. It appears desirable now that at no point does the city user get to interact/commune with “raw surface”. A manicured interface as seal as if enclosing, with no room for the original. The engineered surface becomes the reference model of the planet. Nature assumes a fictitious, mathematical homogeneity. There is an altered model of “environmental” referance.
With the last two decades obsessive fear (of architects) of the ambiguous space, the modern day city has turned more and more rigid. The loop hole, the faux pas, the erratic, which would have been responsible for the chance happening seem to be altogether disappearing from the public realm.
The surgical precision of designed intervention and desired control over the place and space, seem to render almost all public space near sterile.
There seems no room for the non-agenda. The city seems to have no regard for the space without program or the space that denies program. The urbanity seems to eschew the lack of definition as dangerous. Almost unlawful, unsafe and pregnant with imminent crime. The physical construct must be definitive; the human being must be, at all times, subject to a directing influence. Autonomy is undesirable. The experience must be homogeneous. There is no room for the independent reading or alternate interpretation.
Architecture, if understood beyond the process of expressing it, is the scene for action. It is not event, but accomplice. A loci that facilitates, advocates and then continuously informs the event.
The event, however, is not discreet. One might argue that the event might be absent, yet, the possibility, or imminence might not be negated. Then absence of event might also be treated as interstitial event, or event per se.(Human presence or absence unrequited to formulate event.
The existence of place thereby directly and automatically translates into event. There is no choice or debate, or sanction. Space directly causes event. Space and event are synonymous.
Architecture must be aware of this possibility of event. And architecture must allow for the event. Event as the uncalculated human activity that will (once played out) add further dimensions, signification, memory, association and subsequently icon/identity.
The architecture makes for the event(architecture is not the event). Event is what architecture allowed, or what the architecture is not.
Event is where the architecture is not, the interstitial mediation between, within or without the physical construct that is architecture. Arising out of the conscious act of removal or non provision of the physical that allows for action to unfold and thus create event. Yet the architecture and the event it fosters are inseparable. Each symbiotically embedded into the others construction. Thereby architecture seeks relevance or import by/ via the loci of its absence or where it is not. A calculated removal of definition that allows for a definition of ambiguity pregnant with possibility. That allows for a human ingenuity, combination, and permutation that would be called event.
Thus the event is not architecture. The event is non architecture. The event is between architecture, within architecture but not architecture. Architecture is the non event.
In the future urbanism there seems no place for event. The excessive control seems to point at Urban system and a collection of human codified activities and set directives within its confines.
Calculated activity, regulated, quantified and defined is not event. These are process. Embedded into, and coded into the physical construct.
Where intended process is absent, event is possible. The new Urbanism seeks to “make” space for process. The new Urbanism seeks to establish process and deny possibility.
Possibility is event. The event makes place.
Architecture (to generate place) must allow for the subversion of process. It must allow for usurp-tion by other consciousness or chaos.
The appropriation of the place by use, and varying collective memory and consequently varying individual association.
loci : process : Architecture : process : architecture : process
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loci : architecture : no-process : event : memory : place
To generate successful place one must limit its architecture. One must establish limits it must not transgress. And at the same time define models or strategies by which it is to engage not oppose and antagonise the uncontrolled space.
The process leads to knowledge of process or activity. Process becomes everything . The machine is perfect the architecture is absent.
The absence of process allows for self determination. The possibility of the multiple and variation. The possibility of experience and event. The birth of association and eventually memory.
The beginning of Place
(The manifesto for de-processing space).
The need to de-control the (architectural) place.
Labels: architecture, city, city and perfection, control place, de-control, de-processing, event, memory, perfection, placeless-ness, program, space
