Brute Force Architecture
by Bryan Boyer
14 May 2012

How Rem Koolhaas’s OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) rewired their office in the late 1990s into a brute force creative machine.

One method stands out: blue foam

New and faster ways to evaluate architectural proposals were needed, namely new means of drawing and model making that shortened the time it required to definitively say yes or no. The answer was blue foam.

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Working with foam is a skill that one learns relatively quickly and it allows quick and easy iterations that would be more time consuming to achieve in cardboard. For instance, making a cube from foam can be done with as few as two or three cuts. The same shape out of cardboard would require 24 cuts and the gluing of 6 pieces. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking.

One can picture the spark that must have lit up in the eye of a young model maker as their tired fingers parted with a bright yellow Olfa knife and embraced the electrically charged wire of a foam cutter, slicing effortlessly through a block of cool blue foam for the first time.

Working with foam instead of more traditional materials allowed the design teams at OMA to model their ideas quicker, which in turn allowed more ideas to be considered in the same span of time. The adoption of this new technique was akin to upgrading the processor speed of the office.

More so than cardboard or other model making materials, blue foam erases the signature of its creator allowing for an easier ‘apples to apples’ comparison. The anonymizing uniformity of the cut surfaces and alien blueness of the foam itself allowed multiple workers to prepare options in parallel without the differences of personal craft becoming an element of distraction during moments of evaluation. The cumulative effect means that a table covered in foam models all produced by different individuals can be assessed for their ideas rather than the quirks of who made them or how they were created. What’s on display are the ideas themselves, without any distracting metadata or decoration. This is the model making equivalent of Edward Tufte’s quest to eliminate chartjunk.

With extraneous degrees of difference eliminated from the process, the signal to noise ratio of the discussion could be as high as possible.

Perfect case study in how design is gendered:

Here is a bike storage solution.
It works by holding on to bikes by the top bar
The designers apparently never considered that some bikes don’t have a top bar…
…Women’s bikes.

Blindness to issues like this: not good design.

Recall making a presentation in architectural theory class arguing that the verticality of skyscrapers wasn’t simply phallicism but as much about the sublime and, ultimately, the divine. Masters of the Universe and all.

This public art, however… Branding and place-marketing absolutely the dominant drive. Still patriarchal in a roundabout way - names are a kind of power, one that 49% of the population get to hold and the other 51% receive through relationships to men (fathers, husbands).

But the ceaseless drive to differentiate, the need to create difference through plonking multi-million pound lumps of art - rather than recognising any of the things that actually make a place a place: history, people, industry, landscape. What is the artistic drive to produce works like this, and how exactly is it different to making a really good Nike ad?

less-ismore:

Farnsworth house turned expressionist by fire.

YES. Reminds me of my Masters thesis, which wanted to be about another deformation of modernism architecture (by dust & human marks - ultimately, by bodies), but sadly failed to find the necessary sources for evidence.

I was in Barcelona in March 2011, and as clearly awesome as its architecture (Gaudi!) and urban design (pedestrianised boulevards!) was, I did not grok the fact that it looked like *this* - an irregular rounded-corners sci-fi - not Bladerunner, less neon - but some endless hacked jerryrigged construction going on and on and on in some low-tech megalopolis sprawl…

The Eixample photo was via P D Smith, incidentally, who is consistently a source of fascinating urban things, btw. Follow him here, there, and preorder his new book City (May 2012)

cw-photographs:

SF 053011 #1

I love the flatness and perspective of this photo - a modern de Chirico.

A couple of days ago I quoted former Open Rights Group head Becky Hogge claim that:

To a hacker, architecture is politics: how you build something will dictate how it will get used.

Architects beg to differ.

The Architects’ Journal has asked a number of prominent architects and spatial thinkers (and Alain De Botton) to comment on the riots and civil disturbance that have spread across Britain last week - Why Britain Is Burning.

Jeremy Till makes a good point:

At least the architects are not blamed this time, as we were with Broadwater. Nor could we be, because (quoting Simmel) the city is not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially. Here the riots spatialise years of ramping up of social inequality. So when my Twitter feed calls for the reintroduction of Jane Jacobs, I blanch (because space is not the solution, just the symptom) and when the Tories say it is ‘pure’ criminality, I rage (because of the implicit disavowal of their political responsibility). One way out? Act on the New Economic Foundation’s Great Transition

However, both Hogge and Till remain somewhat reductionist - Hogge reducing social behaviour to the result of spatial form; Till making the opposite reduction of space to sociology. But:

Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate in the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no.
[Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p.11]

What we need is the dialectic approach of Henri Lefebvre:

The Production of Space is a complex work, at once historical, philosophical, semiotic, and Marxist. It was written at a time when both Althusserianism and deconstructionism were salient, and there are many asides to thinkers who follow these persuasions. It is also a mature work, in which Lefebvre`s command of his dialectical thinking is quite masterful. In Fichtean dialectics and in much deconstructionist or structuralist thought, analytical categories are perceived as oppositions or antinomies. Lefebvre wants nothing to do with this Manichean view because it usually results in static contrasts. Marx’s dialectical moments were flowing, manifold, and complex, especially with regard to “the negation,” a concept that I believe only Adorno and Lefebvre have really understood. According to Lefebvre, dialectical moments are expressed as “triplicite” – as three terms, not two. The third term instantly deconstructs static oppositions or dualisms, and adds a fluid dimension to social process.

The most important “triple” concerns grasping the importance of space according to its manifestations as perceived, conceived and lived. Ever since his early break with orthodox Marxism, Lefebvre had been concerned with avoiding reductionist economism. This triple is meant to convey that space has a complex character and enters social relations at all levels. It is at once a physical environment that can be perceived; a semiotic abstraction that informs both how ordinary people negotiate space (the mental maps studied by geographers) and the space of corporations, planners, politicians, and the like; and, finally, a medium through which the body lives out its life in interaction with other bodies. Social relations also are spatial, relations; we cannot talk about the one without the other.

In working with this triple relation, Lefebvre attempts to avoid reductionism, whether it is of the economistic (Marxist) or the idealistic (deconstructionist) kind. He proposes a unitary theory of space that ties together the physical, the mental, and the social. Developing this generalized approach to space even further, Lefebvre introduces a second triple that amplifies the first. Space is simultaneously a spatial practice (an externalized, material environment), a representation of space (a conceptual model used to direct practice), and a space of representation (the lived social relation of users to the environment).

[Gottdiener, Mark, 1993. ‘A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefèbvre and The Production of Space’ in Sociological Theory, available here.

Becky Hogge writing about the Chaos Communications Congress in Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in search of techno-Utopia.

Chaos Communications Camp 2011 is on now, #ccamp11 for chatter and http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/Streams for livestreams.

Laurent Stalder, an architecture professor at ETH Zurich, has recently been studying two topics: the emergence of the English House as it entered German culture in the 1890s, and the nature of the threshold. Privacy is associated with enclosed spaces, he tells us. The desire for intimacy and protection, enclosed on all sides, reached its apogee with the Victorian house.

Since then, we’ve seen a reconsideration of the wall as a limit between interior and exterior space. We can think of the “unprivate house”, like Philip Jonson’s glass house in New Canaan CT, a house which has the state of being permanently accessible. On the one hand, we have open houses – a thresholdless space, a seamless environment – and on the other hand, spaces that are inherently about control: airports, laboratories.

The traditional door was a clear boundary between public space and complete privacy. The emergence of different threshold devices has fractured that space. These devices are anthropomorphic – they shape our activities by prescribing certain behaviors. And we see rituals associated with thresholds: cleansing, absolution. We need to think through the difference between a border and a threshold – a border can be closed, while threshold is a neutral space, and a contested one.

God I need to work on this.

the show draws on ideas that have been floating around architectural circles for several years now — particularly the view among many academics that preservation movements around the world, working hand in hand with governments and developers, have become a force for gentrification and social displacement, driving out the poor to make room for wealthy homeowners and tourists.

Mr. Koolhaas’s vision is even more apocalyptic. A skilled provocateur, he paints a picture of an army of well-meaning but clueless preservationists who, in their zeal to protect the world’s architectural legacies, end up debasing them by creating tasteful scenery for docile consumers while airbrushing out the most difficult chapters of history. The result, he argues, is a new form of historical amnesia, one that, perversely, only further alienates us from the past.

[…]

Inside, the architects drew a line down the middle of the space, transforming one side into a pristine white gallery and leaving the other raw and untouched.

The result is startling. The uneven, patched-up floors and soiled walls of the old space look vibrant and alive; the new space looks sterile, an illustration of how even the minimalist renovations favored by art galleries today, which often are promoted as ways of preserving a building’s character, can cleanse it of historical meaning.

Obvious, but nonetheless not a bad point to see made.

Minimal Barcelona