Standing on the Beach with a Gun in my Hand book presentation in Geneva

Three Scottish waterfront regeneration programmes

The Limits of Openness? Reassessing the Contribution of Communicative Action Theory to Urban Planning

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality.

Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

"After the dust has settled over the war, architecture turns into evidence." In conversation with Eyal Weizman

Forensic science and the production of truth. The only subject that does not lie is the object.

EYAL WEIZMAN is head of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and author of books like Hollow Land and The Least of All Possible Evils, in which the same meticulous critical methods are used to scrutinise built environments and cultural constructs. He is also the co-founder of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR), a Palestine-based collective that acts through its interventions on the architectural space and on the space described by international law. This is the transcription of a conversation between Gabriele Oropallo and Eyal Weizman about his current project on forensics. The conversation took place on June 18th, 2011 in the rural setting of the DAAR Architecture Rehab Camp organised by DAAR and Iaspis in the Stockholm Archipelago.

The palimsepst is revealing

Jaffa Flat photograph © Amit Geron from dezeen.com

When Dezeen featured images and the usual scant captions on a flat renovation in Jaffa, the first enthusiastic (and omnivorous) comments on the elegance of the minimalist furniture and the attractiveness of the girls modelling in the photography left at some point the stage to a more complex, if fragmented and delayed conversation that touched upon issues as the ethics of design and architecture, the appropriateness for architects to talk about social and political justice, and finally which platforms are more suited to these discussions.

The flat in itself, remarked some of the commenters, is conceptually quite simple. A contemporary flat is carved out of the existing space in an ancient building. The designers provide it with all mods cons and use tasteful, minimalistic furniture throughout the rooms. Plaster is stripped from walls and ceilings to expose the underlying layers and highlight the geometry of the arches. Lots of light (we are on the shores of the Mediterranean) and a sensual effect provided by the roughness of the bricks and sandy, crumbling concrete.

However, revealing the structural palimsepst behind the plaster of an old flat is a risqué cultural intervention in Jaffa, now a suburb of Tel Aviv. A bit like in those horror b-movies of the nineteen-eighties, where the dark side of the American past reemerged in the form of a stream of poltergeists coming from an Indian cemetery below a haunted house or a funky high school. My first reaction was to ponder whether living in this flat ever makes the current tenants wonder where the original owners are now and exactly how they lost possession of their home. Then I realised how powerful a metaphor is provided by this flat. It seems that the only way the new inhabitants of this side of the Fertile Crescent can adapt to the newly conquered territory is by slowly turning into Palestinians and progressively absorbing little elements of native culture into their daily lives, as you see in this flat happening with the elements of the vernacular architecture.

Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 and evolved from a few tents in the sand to take off as a modernist city when Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in the nineteen-thirties as refugees. Today the city prides herself on having the highest concentration of Bauhaus buildings in the world (though with little Bauhaus planning). Yet, their grandchildren today crave to live under Moresque ceilings and go to the length of stripping the plaster from the walls to visually project their act of dwelling into a possible past. Whose past is it?

Human, all too human

“Parametricism,” in the words of one of his main theorists, “is the great new style after modernism.” A design style in which “buildings are developed using problem-solving as the driving force rather than by grouping together architectural objects.” We have seen this in recent years in the voluptuous shapes of Zaha Hadid studio’s computer-generated designs, in the sculptural iconicity of buildings as Rome's Maxxi.

Wait a moment. “Problem-solving is the driving force.” This sounds quite similar to the old modernist tenet according to which “form follows function.” What is the difference?

According to Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, author of the above quotation, the difference is in the direction of the design intervention. So far we have juxtaposed Eucledian structures in order to create space or harness portions of it into environments. The rationale of the design is in the concept that links these solids. The reader may be familiar with the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed in Vienna in 1927 for his sister, today seat of the Bulgarian cultural institute. There is maybe this concept expressed at its best, mind you, by a non professional architect. Volumes in Wittgenstein House develop from each other in an orderly albeit ambitious manner, as in a logical deduction. Rather than created, space is acknowledged, as it happens when shedding light in the dark.

A later variation on this deductive way to building was dubbed “deconstructionism,” and consisted in disassembling these configuration of solids before they were even erected. Its purpose was to show the relations between the basic components in a more honest (and post-modern) fashion. The elements put on display were not only structural and material, but also ideological and symbolic. This approach was aimed at favouring inclusion: anyone was entitled to read and experience the building their own way.

Parametric design, on the contrary, is nothing about deduction. It is an attempt to let structures grow systematically, according to their relation with the environment, as a living organism would do in order to survive. Everything is interconnected, and to take into account everything, sophisticated softwares are necessary and do much of the work. Instead of “spaces,” Schumacher actually speaks of “fields,” which fluidly articulate themselves to accomodate the complexity of contemporary life.

Parametric design therefore bears a striking resemblance to organic forms. Curiously, it is visually very close also to surrealist decoration patterns. Both styles share an oblique, decadent appeal. This is because both styles took a great deal of inspiration from nature. Organic structures are economical: organisms – as also computers if they are so programmed – always try to find the shortest way between A and B. This is why living forms are usually curvilinear and not square, Cartesian or Euclidean. A parametric city would resemble a circulatory system, rather than a modernist grid. Every element would be interconnected and the complexity of functions would lead the growth of the system.

Transition and fluidity are greatly praised by Schumacher. This makes one remember of the “natura non facit saltus” (nature does not make sudden jumps) motto by Lucretius. Also Gaudì’s architectures were supposed to imitate nature – praising god's magnificent design skills in the process. The Sagrada Familia, if designed today, would look a lot like a building by Zaha Hadid. Intriguingly enough, that decadent architecture was constructed according to principles that are very similar to the construction of organic matter. One ray of light descends from the sky and divides itself at each hub in four lines, which progressively multiply, one to four, until the structure touches the ground. Even if fluid, its architecture is stable and solid because based on four "legs," as chairs, tables and horses. Also organic matter is physically built on the atom of carbon which combines with other atoms of carbon four by four, forming very stable, never-ending chains (a process known as catenation).  We thought the dispute on whether art should or not imitate nature was finished two centuries ago, but it is clearly an ever-present motif in human psyche.

I like the idea of an architecture whose form develops according to fractal geometry (the geometry of leaves, plants, clouds and all natural structures) instead of being constrained by platonic solids. And yet, all this organic matter makes me feel like a virus, a parasite in a host body, as though I should not be walking along these circulatory systems. Or, in the best case scenario, I feel like a part of the system, inextricably linked to it and forced to give away some individuality.

I have taken some time to reflect upon this, and now I think the underlying reason for this awkward feeling is that this ideal biomimicry in architecture eventually eschews one crucial aspect of design I am otherwise used to. This is the confrontation between built space and human being, which is made necessary exactly of the artificiality of the constructed space. Parametric architecture is often soft, and gives way, thus making it difficult to recognise the boundaries between my individual perception of space and the built space that I find around me.

This is a structural confrontation in which one usually develops a critical, informed understanding of things. It may just be premature to say, but parametric architecture to me feels like being sucked back in an ideal utero, in which the spatial sense that characterizes human beings as a species is dimmed and left unripe. No wonder it is actually becoming the favourite style of iconic public buildings, airports and other non-spaces. Ultimately, parametricism can be very useful and exciting as a design method, but the designer should always somehow work against the methodology rather than let it take total control.

The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Fractal geometry describes forms that are regular in their development, as crystals, clouds, organic structures and all other natural shapes, but are too irregular to be described by Euclidean geometry. In fractal geometry the shape of a leaf can be described by equations, like triangles, squares and other man-made forms can in classical geometry.