| Dictionary
Extract from The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture
Ed. Actar 2003
A B C
D E F G H
I J K L M
N O P Q R
S T U V W
X Y Z
A
action
What we are interested in today is an ‘action-architecture’ defined
by a desire to act, to (inter)act. That is, to activate, to generate, to produce,
to express, to move, to exchange... and to relate.
To ‘agitate’ events, spaces, concepts and inertias.
Promoting interactions between things rather than interventions on them. Movements
rather than positions. Actions, then, rather than figurations.
Processes rather than occurrences.
advanced architecture
• In order to build the future, it is necessary to accept that major changes
will be taking place in the near future due to the information revolution, and
that this revolution will come and affect every level of the human being.
• The advent of the digital world is a new possibility for humankind: for
it to reinvent both itself and its environment.
• Digital culture may help humankind to advance in knowledge, to find answers
to the old questions and to formulate new questions.
• The world is waiting to be built, innovation is the source of every project;
we live in a state of permanent creation.
• The entire planet is a city, and empty and full spaces must be planned
with the same degree of interest.
• We think more in terms of landscape than of construction, of nature than
of occupation, of integration than of superposition.
• The hybridisation of cultures, natures, processes, leads to a greater
complexity of proposals and opens up new lines of action.
• We are talking of processes rather than occurrences, of open forms rather
than closed designs, of operating strategies rather than finished pieces.
• Individuals are defined one by one, not as a mass.
• Where hierarchies exist, they are produced by knowledge rather than norms.
• The world is built by the coming together of multiple individual persons;
the traditional hierarchies of business and politics will disappear in coming
years.
• People must be valued for their qualities, not for their quantities (years,
money, etc.).
• A city is built inwards, it does not grow indefinitely, it is re-informed
and protects its own environment.
• Sustainable development on a global and a local scale calls for urban
and territorial ecosystems that have to function for centuries.
• The digital world and the physical world will merge into a single interface
that embraces everything, so the two have to be planned with the same intensity.
• We have to act locally and globally at the same time; cultures have to
adopt dynamics of their own and interact.
• Education comes from within each individual rather than from external
systems. Learning requires training.
• Artificial intelligence will be one of the pillars of human and cybernetic
activities in coming years, and this will change the way we work, the way we act.
advanced archaeology
The best way of protecting heritage is to increase it. Traditional archaeology
has studied, catalogued and exhibited the remains of the past as inert matter.
From a physical point of view, a ‘fragment of a wall’ is a ruin. But
seen as reactivated ‘information’ it can, once again, be a living
(and active) urban element. That same wall, converted into an ‘urban document’,
can issue information about the history of the city by ordering the genetic traces
of our forefathers. Traces that need to be conserved, transmitted and integrated
into the city’s cultural-museistic-touristic activity.
An on-line ‘urban editor’ could, then, act as an intelligent agent
— an interface — that would help to show and order a considered route
around historical environments. The new constructions should also use foundation
techniques that are able to conserve most of the remains on which they rest, by
means of partially glazed floors with underlighting. The multilayer city would,
in this way, highlight its multistrata nature.
advanced culture
1. In advanced culture the ultimate aim is the quality of life of the individual,
seen as an independent entity that participates in a collective. In the industrial
world, the masses come first, followed by the individual.
2. Information and communication technologies amplify creative actions. Advanced
culture aims to achieve active interaction between sustainable development and
the integration of new technologies with a view to achieving increased quality
of life.
3. Advanced culture arises from the interaction between all of humankind’s
activities and information and communication technologies.
4. In advanced culture, information technologies are not just an instrument for
carrying out the same activities as always but more efficiently (as in the case
of electronic mail), they actually transform the very bases of the activity they
affect.
5. Advanced culture sees the reappearance of optimism in the construction of a
future that is foreseen as differing from the conditions in which we live today:
more intelligent buildings, sustainable cities, large quantities of information
that can be accessed from anywhere, much more leisure time, etc.
aformal
The state of maximum freedom of architecture is that in which the form, rather
than being sought, appears as the result of a process. The aformal is weightless,
profound, mysterious, black.
agriculture
For centuries, man has colonised the territory by means of agriculture, creating
irrigation systems and planting crops according to the laws of geometry. He has
denaturalised natural spaces by planting natural elements. The distance left between
the various trees and plants depends both on the size of the actual crops and
on the systems used to harvest them.
Each crop produces a texture and a colour on the territory. On mountainous terrain,
the slopes have been converted into finite elements by the construction of terraces.
In aggressive climates, greenhouses can be used to overcome the specific conditions
of place, creating light-weight constructions that contain microclimates imported
from other latitudes. Agriculture is being industrialised. The landscape is being
urbanised.
The spectacle of nature and that of the city are now comparable.
architecture
Can architecture be digital?
Architecture is the process by which the organisation of activities in space is
defined. Physical or virtual.
The architect and architecture have traditionally operated by manipulating material
in order to define the limits of spaces to allow for activities.
From a physical point of view, the aims of traditional architecture are clear.
The gravity of the physical world always works in the same direction.
Now, the digital material created using information, intangible, without gravity
and mutable in time, leads us to reflect on the essence of architecture: how much
of architecture is material and how much is information?
Cultural, functional, aesthetic, economic, physical, energy information.
Information that becomes saturated in time and space, defining a solid, visual,
tactile fact.
Producing architecture is this abstract process that relates information to material,
in space and in time. This is the task of the architect. Architecture is the process,
not the result.
Buildings, parks, objects are all results of architecture.
Therefore certain buildings that have remained unbuilt physically are also the
result of architecture as a process. Many of the best buildings in history were
never built (this does not contradict the fact that architecture has on many occasions
been produced by the sublimation of construction processes, with given materials,
at a given moment in history).
In fact, in most cases, buildings are more beautiful during the construction process
than when complete, because they represent the staging of a process of construction
of ideas.
The ideal state of a building would be one of constant construction, supporting
human activities.
The project for a motorway in a territory covering five thousand kilometres, the
construction of a reservoir, a chair design or the soundproofing of a city is
Architecture. Even, in spite of the economic logic that prevails in our world,
the project for a building of dwellings ought to emerge from an architectural
process. Specialisation and the complexity of processes have, on most occasions,
forced the architect to forgo designing large infrastructures built on the territory
as well as objects that contain space, be they fixed or moving.
Defining virtual reality, places of transit, meeting places, how we access information
by means of a spatial code, using virtual material (noughts and ones), with a
result that, whether or not it is similar to the constructions of the physical
world, is an activity proper to architecture. Up until now, architecture has operated
principally with space, because building meant finishing a process. Now, in the
digital world, time too belongs to architecture. The new architecture organises
what has come to be referred to as ‘heightened reality’, where the
physical and the digital relate. Buildings and spaces will also begin to more
actively include time and its self-transformation. Architecture is, then, the
creator of processes rather than of finite events. As a process, it can be digital
because it does not require material.
arkitektor
The artificial intelligence that, as explained by Ray Kurzweil in his book The
Age of Spiritual Machines (Texere Publishing, 2001), will become an everyday reality
when a standard computer has the same processing capacity as a human brain (set
for 2020), suggests that the coming years will bring computer programs that can
produce architecture projects.
‘Starting with a fixed site, with specific requirements, respecting legislation,
the ARKITEKTOR program will be capable of offering different solutions to clients
all over the world, who will be able to receive as many projects as they wish
(and pay for) for their site, with an explanation of their advantages and drawbacks.
The program will subsequently draw up the executive project, include the construction
details of the geographic area of the world in question, calculate the structure
and apply for building permission. And it will be built, using artisan or industrial
means.’
This reduction to the absurd shows how the architect either brings added value
to the process of the conception and construction of a building, or ceases to
be necessary in the drawing up of projects.
– Architect: We’re going to create a program that produces architecture
projects. So we need to find the genetic laws necessary to develop it.
– Programmer: Yes, that is quite possible.
– Architect: Just like Deep Blue, that knows all the principal chess matches
in history and applies them as required, we will have to analyse history’s
foremost buildings and extract their basic principles.
– Programmer: Perfect.
– Architect: Producing buildings as Le Corbusier did, or like Gothic palaces,
can’t be difficult.
– Programmer: Of course not.
– Architect: Still, we have to think that someone might want a house in
the style of Le Corbusier with Gothic windows. That ought to be more expensive,
because the program will have more thinking to do. Or perhaps it should crash…
– Programmer: As far as programming is concerned, everything is possible.
Both a strict definition of patterns and orders that, when logically applied,
generate coherent buildings, and the absolute freedom of kitsch. To produce ‘new
buildings’ we’ll have to define the laws of innovation, if they exist.
It’s your job to define the rules of play for the ARKITEKTOR.
– Architect: That’s what we’ll do.
artificial
Natural nature ceased to exist when humankind left the planet and we were able
to see ourselves from the outside. Everything is artificial.
artificial intelligence
See ‘arkitektor’.
avatar
Virtual personality of a physical entity. An avatar of a person may be a three-dimensional
model of that person, or any other form that represents him or her.
(urban)
If in the virtual world there are representations of physical beings that are
not pure mimesis of that which is represented, the physical world can construct
elements whose forms differ substantially from those that are traditionally attributed
to them. It would be unthinkable to place a musical instrument (a piano or a synthesiser)
as an item of urban furniture beside a fountain in a children’s play area.
But sound instruments could be designed for public space that react, with sound,
to human activity. Musical series produced by man’s interaction with space
and with other men. Instruments produced with natural or artificial forms. A tree,
a rock, a cylinder. A world behind another world.
B
black holes
Cities, organisations, are centres that accumulate informational energy. They
can be stars. Environments in which the attitude of the governors has the effect
of one idea being amplified by another, producing a chain reaction that illuminates
its environment. Or they can be black holes. Places with great potential due to
their infrastructure, places that receive large amounts of information, though
they overload their interior. That nothing comes out of. Their energy can be felt
around them. And sometimes cause fear…
C
cartography
‘To represent a reality is to begin to transform it.’
client
Client: I’d like to have a big house. When I was little, I lived in a conventional
house, with an L-shaped living room and a little bedroom where I could always
hear the television. Now I’d like to be able to enjoy a large, high space,
with lots of light and not very much furniture. The bedroom will be on the top
floor overlooking the mountains.
Architect: That sounds good.
Client: I’d also like a garden, with trees and flowers, a tennis court and
a swimming pool, but I don’t want to have to look after it, like my father
did his allotment.
Architect: We’ll make it all artificial. Astroturf, iron trees, artificial
mountains with the earth dug away, flowers with coloured lights inside them...
It won’t be a ‘consolation’ project.
Client: But I’ve only got a very low budget.
Architect: Achieving the highest quality at a low cost is a good challenge. We’ll
construct a noble building out of simple materials.
Client: How will you manage it?
Architect: The house will be hard and comfortable; abstract and natural, all at
once.
congresses
Congress centres are the meeting places of the information society.
A suitable setting not only for the issuing of contents but also for the interaction
of people.
Two at a time, four at a time, ten at a time, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand...
In the face of the Virtual Reality that is advancing and conquering moments of
human relation, congress centres are the place of Real Space.
conservation
The best way of conserving something is to increase its number. The best way of
conserving heritage is to increase it.
convincing
See ‘direct logic’ and ‘uppercut’.
creators
‘Talento llevaba un traje de terciopelo verde botella y zapatos de ante;
era apenas más alto que ella y algo estaba torcido en su espalda o en sus
caderas, de modo que caminaba con una pronunciada cojera que realzaba la impresión
general de asimetría.’
(GIBSON, William, Mona Lisa acelerada, Barcelona: Minotauro, 1992)
criteria
The orientation of a universe that is multiplied by communication and information
requires a precise selection of the operating data that can be processed with
a view to action. Exploration then becomes ‘tactical intentionality’.
Capable of formulating criteria rather than following models. At once diagnoses,
hypotheses and predictions of movements, able to connect physical data and strategic
information; generic conditions and specific responses; ideas and materials. Criteria
as positionings, as formulations that are both flexible and precise, directly
related to the idea of disposition. We prefer the terms ‘positioning’
and ‘disposition’ to that of ‘position’: both designate
an elastic situation; a contingent, unstable action rather than a position that
is fixed or stabilised (whether by dogma, conquest or permanence). Strategic criteria
for the global and tactical criteria for the local. Criteria of relation and action.
They are, then, operating criteria — that is, ‘active machinations’.
culture
The construction of the city environment is a cultural problem, taking culture
in the broadest sense of the word — that is, the focus of intervention for
economy, art, science, thought, etc. Culture is a driving force of the economy:
creating a product according to the guidelines of the advertising market, directing
it at the right people at the right time and in the right place and selling it
at the highest admissible price having invested what was needed for its production.
Architecture is a product of our time. And the only way to be timeless is to be
absolutely of a time: for buildings to reflect the hour and the minute in which
they were designed and constructed.
cyberspace
‘No hay un donde, allí. A los niños se les enseña eso
para explicar el ciberespacio. Recordó la clase de una sonriente maestra
en la guardería ejecutiva de la arcología, imágenes que se
sucedían en una pantalla: pilotos con cascos enormes y guantes de torpe
aspecto, una primitiva tecnología neuroelectrónica del “mundo
virtual” que los unía más eficazmente a sus planos, pares
de terminales de vídeo en miniatura que les proporcionaban un flujo de
datos de combate; los guantes vibrotáctiles de retroalimentación
ofrecían un universo táctil de botones y conmutadores... A medida
que la tecnología fue evolucionando, los cascos empequeñecieron,
las terminales de vídeo se atrofiaron...
Se inclinó y levantó el juego de trodos y lo sacudió para
desenredar los cables.
No hay dónde, allí. Estiró la tira elástica y se aplicó
los trodos a las sienes: uno de los gestos más característicamente
humanos, pero un gesto que ella rara vez ejecutaba. Pulsó el botón
que verificaba la carga de la batería de la Ono-Sendai. Verde: listo. Tocó
el conmutador de alimentación y el dormitorio se desvaneció tras
una pared incolora de estática sensorial. Le inundó la cabeza un
torrente de ruido blanco. Sus dedos encontraron al azar un conmutador y fue catapultada
al otro lado de la pared elástica, hacia la abigarrada inmensidad, el vacío
nocional del ciberespacio, y la brillante retícula de la matriz se extendió
a su alrededor como una jaula infinita.’
(GIBSON, William, Mona Lisa acelerada, Barcelona: Minotauro, 1992)
cybrid
An object or an environment produced by the interaction between cyberspace and
the physical world. It is the state in which we permanently operate when nanotechnology
is widespread throughout the physical world.
D
demolition
Action carried out when architecture is worth less than the space it occupies.
density
(density and scale)
The historic city also exists in the ‘place supply’ that is a metapolitan
city. The differential value of each of these cities in the city is its scale.
Urban scale is the relation between humankind and the spaces offered by the city
(streets, squares, etc.). For this reason, scale, the relation between the size
of things, is always more important than the form of the things themselves. Formal
mimesis produces grotesque situations in the city that merely undermine the originals.
Spatial mimesis, in the traditional places of the city, differentiates this part
of the city from others. This is why many of the regular interventions that take
the form of demolishing buildings to produce decompressed spaces in historic centres
merely dispossess them of one of their differential qualities.
Something quite different is the discovery of new spaces for and in the city,
where it is possible to innovate. In built-up environments, roof tops are a place
to be conquered. They are places that enjoy the conditions of light, ventilation
and views that are characteristic of environments further from the centre. The
dwelling is, however, a contrast in this urban density. The large spaces of traditional
constructions (large houses, very high ceilings) make for good climatic conditions
and are generous in terms of space. New dwellings ought to recover this adimensional
condition of generous spaces. Strategically situated tunnels would also enable
vehicle access to dwellings and commercial areas in a potential operative use
of a new reinterpretation of density.
digital
New technologies make it possible to transform data flow to the point of creating
authentic landscapes.
Spaces with or without limits.
Spaces with or without gravity.
The paradigms and the physical laws of the real world are not necessarily applicable
to the virtual world.
But this virtual world could be a clone of a real world, or generate infinite
possible spaces, like a world with infinite times and therefore infinite possible,
parallel histories.
Quasi-real spaces.
An acoustic space: a music room.
A fractal trajectory.
A mountain of infinite dimensions.
A cloudy dawn: a city.
Settings for virtual meeting and real use.
Spaces and computer programs accessible from an intermediate space that can lead
into a virtual world full of real content.
digital world
The digital world is like a stratum superposed on an existing human geography.
Geography formed by cultural, social, technological, economic strata, and so on,
which are, in turn, all constantly interacting. A stratum that issues digital
material, like radioactive rain that soaks the layers through which it seeps,
transforming old substances and creating new chemistries.
discipline
Discipline in all fields of human knowledge has been created by individuals who
broke the rules of play of their historic context in their eagerness to invent
the future.
Projects that seek solutions within their own discipline, insensitive to their
cultural environment, produce autistic interventions that conceal the most entrenched
immobilism behind their apparent refinement. A dead weight in history.
domestic
The dwelling is the individual’s skin, the ultimate space that divides the
individual from the collective. Each dwelling reflects the soul of its inhabitants.
The house is the computer. The structure is the network.
(Media House Project. Metapolis-MIT Media Lab)
domotics
Domotics came into being with a view to automating the dwelling. It is the robotics
of domestic space and therefore a product of the industrial era.
The new applications related to the dwelling seek to develop informational relations
between users, objects and spaces that emit and receive the data flowing around
the dwelling’s various networks, via interfaces inserted into everything.
dwelling
If the dwelling was transformed by the advent of mains water and, years later,
by electricity, the arrival en masse of information will produce a transformation
on a similar scale.
E
economy
In the industrial economy, economic growth required physical growth. In the new
information economy this is no longer necessarily true. Cities ought to behave
like chips, that are increasingly able to do more things in less space.
education
Educating consists in conveying the logic followed by processes that lead to something.
Order as a principle, and the result as the logical end of a process. To show
the result of a creation without understanding its order is to deprive the spectator
of the creative principle that, in turn, enables creation. Showing the result
without understanding the process only produces a copy which, as in human reproduction,
degenerates the species. Architecture, the good architecture we know and love,
is creation. And it was promoted by generous persons (developers, the state, the
church, princes, a housewife...) who allowed creation. Creators, those who had
access to a degree of education, have the moral (and strategic) duty to disseminate
their knowledge, their way of seeing and acting in the world. The education of
the users of architecture is a basic task of the architects themselves, comparable
to the literature of writers and the music of musicians. Architecture and pleasure
in quality spaces should be taught from a very early age.
energy
energy as an impulse
Places have energy of their own, built up throughout their history by physical
or spiritual phenomena. Any human action should amplify the energy of a place,
they should be on the same wavelength. Any work of architecture should amplify
the conditions of a place, give the place energy, never detract from it.
F
fractal (and fractals)
Architecture has traditionally used Euclidean geometry that represents pure volumes
that can be defined by equations. It enables us to describe smooth surfaces and
regular forms. However, natural objects such as mountains have irregular, fragmented
characteristics.
Natural models can be described realistically by using methods of fractal geometry,
using procedures and equations. A fractal object has two basic characteristics:
infinite detail in each point and a degree of self-similarity between the parts
of the object and its overall characteristics. Processes rather than equations.
Processes to represent the object viewed from different distances, with the same
degree of detail. And also to analyse and represent things in the course of time.
Fractal methods have shown themselves to be useful in moulding terrains, clouds,
water, trees and other plants. Fractal patterns have been identified in the behaviour
of stars, meanders, stock-market variations, traffic flows, the use of urban property...
Processes rather than occurrences.
franchise
Today, there are just two ways of succeeding in the global economy: being an innovative
city, a leader in culture, in industry or in international economy (such as Hollywood,
London or Salzburg), or adopting the role of franchise, an intermediate role,
that imports models created in other places and participates in a network of influences
(like the case of Bilbao with the Guggenheim).
Success is possible in both cases.
The problem lies in being neither one thing nor the other.
function
In a world in which work, leisure and commerce can be carried out by means of
computers occupying spaces that do not require spatial classification, function
should not be a basic parameter in defining a portion of land within the territory.
functionalism
Functionalism is a concept linked to the industrial society, that sets out to
efficiently organise humankind’s activities in a space or on the territory.
In the information society, people’s individual activities no longer classify
space because they do not modify it. Any activity related to the information society
(be it work, leisure or commerce) can be carried out by means of minuscule interfaces
that can appear or disappear from places as required.
future
(vision) One possible scenario that has been described for the future of our habitable
environments suggests a virtual reality, accessible by means of glasses, that
functions effectively, a fast, light-filled, beautiful, excited world. When we
take off the glasses, the city we live in is dark and dangerous, full of waste
and violence. A dynamic, light-filled virtual world and a dark, decadent physical
world.
(hybridisation) The best way to prevent the two worlds — physical and virtual
— from separating is for them to be the same. For the energy put into the
construction of the virtual world to also be applied to the re-information of
the physical world. Why should cities grow physically if their populations don’t?
In fact the cities of coming years will have to grow inwards. They will have to
make and produce things in less space. Increase the quality of existing buildings
and public spaces. And when building new spaces, we have to think about both the
quality and the permanence of solid construction and about the mobility and flexibility
required by their interaction with the virtual world.
Each new street to be built has to be prepared to reflect and to be reflected
in the virtual world. Not only does this require the construction of cabled streets
which convey information at high speeds to the adjacent dwellings, but information
also has to flow through public space. And public space has to be sensitive to
the people who inhabit it. It has to allow the active expansion (in the form of
sport and leisure) of the people who are digitally concentrated in the surrounding
dwellings. It must enable the flexible regulation of flows of vehicles and persons,
and actively manage the climatic and atmospheric phenomena of its environment.
The industrial society brought about a transformation to produce basic quality
for as many people as possible, in the city and in the dwelling. The information
society has to seek maximum quality for a maximum number of places. More is More.
G
generation
Paul Virilio maintains that a generation is twenty years. Twenty years is the
time that Ray Kurzweil calculates it will takes a conventional computer to have
the same reasoning capacity as a human being. Will the next generation interact
with people and computers without distinguishing between them?
geography
(geographies)
The twenty-first century will see the inversion of the process that began during
the Renaissance, in which men and women began to gather together in cities to
live.
The development of physical transport networks (car, train, plane) and telematic
networks means that any point on the planet is suitable for living and working.
City and country.
Motorways criss-cross a territory modified by man using agriculture or border
natural spaces that are now the green areas of inhabited territory. These motorways
are the avenues of a new city that has no limits.
They are constructed in the landscape by making a section of the earth and displaying
its internal nature.
The streets no longer run between facades, but between stratified masses.
Man has ‘urbanised’ the territory by means of agriculture for centuries
now, creating irrigation systems and planting crops in keeping with the laws of
geometry.
He has denaturalised natural spaces by planting natural elements. The spacing
of the various trees and plants depends both on the size of the crop itself and
on the harvesting systems used. Each crop produces its own texture and colour
on the territory.
In mountainous terrain, the slopes have been turned into finite elements by the
construction of terraces. In harsh climates, greenhouses can be used to overcome
the specific conditions of place with the creation of light-weight constructions
containing microclimates imported from other latitudes.
Agriculture is being industrialised.
The landscape is being urbanised.
The spectacle of nature and that of the city are now comparable.
Represented in this way, nature can now be reconstructed by man. The world is
turning into a habitable environment, into the city of 1,000 geographies...
geomancy
MG (citat per en Manuel)
‘Ya no se trata de dibujar tramas urbanas, tráficos, flujos, usos,
secciones de calles, fachadas..., sino de sintetizar las montañas, sus
perfiles, los cursos del agua, los vientos, el soleamiento, los espacios libres,
las vistas, la vegetación, las vías de transporte... La articulación
de todos estos modelos entre sí parece asegurar la continuidad del pensamiento
arquitectónico: del mundo al hábitat, de la naturaleza a la cultura,
del lugar al edificio, del grupo al individuo. Si en China se dibujó la
naturaleza con pincel, en blanco y negro (representando simultáneamente
planta y alzado), ahora nuestros medios son otros y a ellos hemos de referirnos.’
(GUALLART, Vicente, ‘La Ciudad de las mil geografías’, Quaderns
217, 1997)
Building in cities calls for an analysis of the place;
building in non-cities requires a similar process of analysis.
Any analysis requires a process of representation.
In Chinese tradition there is a science, geomancy, to determine the appropriate
positioning of cities and dwellings in the landscape.
Geomancy involves, firstly, a theoretical model that reflects the organisation
of the world, and then an analytical model that allows the specific observation
of places, as well as determining a system of correspondence that is used for
composition and allows the combination of space of representation, project and
living space.
In the traditional thought of the Far East, we note the absence of dichotomy between
nature and culture, bringing an overall approach to the environment, be it natural
place or urban environment. Unlike fixed architectural models (orders, types,
etc.), geomancy prefigures the rules of play of a form of conception that remains
open.
Our immediate physical environment (the vineyards of El Penedès, the plains
of Zamora or the cork oak forests of Badajoz), about to be manipulated by the
forces of history and economy, ought to be analysed in a similar way.
geometry
If architecture is landscape, buildings are mountains. If buildings are mountains,
geometry is geography.
glocal
Think global, act local.
Gibson’s sprawl
‘La casa era EMBA, el Ensanche, el Eje Metropolitano [...]. Programa un
mapa que muestre la frecuencia de intercambio de información, cada mil
megabytes, un único píxel en una gran pantalla, Manhattan y Atlanta
arden en sólido blanco. Luego empiezan a palpitar; el índice de
tráfico amenaza con una sobrecarga. Tu mapa está a punto de convertirse
en una nova. Enfríalo. Aumenta la escala. Cada píxel, un millón
de megabytes. A cien millones de megabytes por segundo comienzas a distinguir
ciertos bloques del área central de Manhattan, contornos de centenarios
parques industriales en el centro antiguo de Atlanta.’
(GIBSON, William, Neuromante, Barcelona: Minotauro, 1997)
glass
See ‘intelligent production’, ‘material’ and ‘product’.
global village
See ‘city?’ and ‘global’.
H
high speed
Concentrate to design; where the urban concentration is greatest, at the inner
limit of the city (historic centres), or at its outer limit, beyond the city periphery;
in an environment formerly referred to as rural that is now a different kind of
city. There, thirty minutes by car and by motorway from a high-speed train station,
in the middle of a ‘desert’, with the constant background noise of
planes, trains and cars, permanently observed by satellites, man can create his
own individual world.
When 100 km measure 20 minutes.
history
If the cultural revolution brought about by machines and their aesthetic (hardware)
in the twenties produced a tabula rasa with regard to history, the digital revolution
of information (software) has to voice its alternative for action in the existing
city. Four proposals:
Culture: how to integrate the knowledge that emanates from historic cities with
universal knowledge in order to take action in our times (using new technologies,
evidently).
Image: how to take action in an environment that has many languages and codes
accumulated over the course of history (obviously by creating a new one).
Mobility: how to achieve the mobility required today to be an active part of the
city, maintaining the scale of historic cities (acting level by level, of course).
Uses: which activities are compatible with the spaces offered by the old cities?
How should we act on the territorial scale of the macrocity without distorting
the spatial qualities of the microcity (the historic centre is one enormous building
and ought to function as such...)?
I
individual
The information society ought to encourage the individual qualities of things
and territories, as opposed to the total continuity of cyberspace, in which the
conditions are the same for every place on the planet. In many cities and in European
territory, history has contributed fundamentally to fixing their present. History
and the present are vital data to determining the starting point of a project
and defining an overall strategy (not necessarily coinciding with the legal framework)
for inventing the future of that place.
No dwelling is the same as another. No dwelling should
be the same as another.
Question: On a construction site of 50 plots, how many different types should
there be? Two, three, five, fifteen? Fifty.
Typology no longer exists. The systematic repetition of compartmentalised spaces
rationally intended for dwellings was the product of an era that began with the
mass manufacture of cars. They all had to be the same so that thousands of people
could have access to a minimum standard of living.
Information technology makes for an almost infinite flexibility in the process
of production and transmission of information and in the use made of it.
The problem is no longer one of the masses, but of the individual. The culture
of sameness is succeeded by the culture of difference. Each person is a world.
Each dwelling is a world.
information
See ‘digital’, ‘inform(ation)al’ and ‘exchange’.
innovation
The capacity for innovation should be understood here as being exclusive not to
the youngest but to those with most energy.
In architecture, innovation is not a totally shared collective phenomenon, but
a fact driven by individual forces and attitudes that are capable of correlating,
that ultimately creates its own expression.
But this desire to forge channels of development tends to be set in a given atmosphere,
generally promoted by the public authorities.
High quality architecture represents just 1% of real-estate activity in our country,
whereas meaningless construction, junk building, is gradually spreading. We have
to vindicate Architecture as a cultural aspect of the territory. The authorities
should not continue to organise architecture competitions in the same way as those
for the adjudication of services or urban furniture. What they should do is consider
the cultural and environmental added value of architecture and promote a truly
qualitative development of the profession.
The real problem, then, is not so much one of generation as of ideas, attitudes
and, ultimately, qualities and, therefore, horizons.
instrument
Architecture, the city, physical space is an instrument that allows human activity
to be performed; it is tuned according to previously established data (man’s
measurements, climatic conditions, the speed of transport, etc.).
As the American architect Marcos Novak holds, the task of the architect should
not centre solely on the design of the instrument, but also on writing scores
to be performed in space. Scores written using data produced by man — and
cities — on a scale that is both near and far, allowing awareness of the
environments in which they are acting and how they transform them.
intelligent construction
See ‘intelligent production’.
intelligent production
Repeating variation. The aim of any system of intelligent manufacture is to be
able to produce pieces with a totally free form, by industrial means — that
is, to repeat variation.
Advanced industrial systems, in association with the digital world, enable the
production of pieces with an absolute flexibility, provided the machines needed
to manufacture them can be parameterised.
It is the architect’s drawing, in digital format, that is assimilated by
the machine to produce the pieces needed to construct a surface or a complex structure.
interactivity
If objects think, react and take action beyond their material qualities, spaces
and places have to react with them.
Objects think because someone has thought about them. Someone has programmed and
given them qualities so that they can be integrated into a new logic of the world
in which everything is connected to everything. In coming years, not only will
the capacity for computation will be attributed to machines with monitors that
allow work and leisure, but the digital effect will reach every strata of the
physical world. Man will know himself better after the human genome project and
the development of the nanochips that will be incorporated into him.
The traditional atmospheric and climatic air-bound medium in which the physical
world is built will have the digital medium superposed over it, leading to the
disappearance of traditional space-time relations on the planetary scale. Intelligence
will therefore have to be breathed into houses, buildings, public spaces, cities,
by means of precise codes that make spaces react to objects and persons, knowing
who’s who, who does what... The world as one great Net.
interface
While in the early days of personal computing the simile of the desktop was used
to access information, these days there are more and more virtual buildings, in
three-dimensional environments, where activities can be carried out. But with
real uses! Real uses in virtual spaces. And it is in this new world that architecture
can be heard, where spaces transform the shape, the colour and the texture of
its borders, where objects react to external pulses and are transformed, where
gravity is just another parameter that can be controlled, like space and time,
where we can learn a new way of doing things. This kind of architecture would
be splendid!
Architecture has always been the interface of human activity. It has always supported
uses. Now, architecture has to be functional and aesthetically sensitive to the
digital world.
Faced with the possibility of imagining an environment on the basis of which to
take action in the hypertextual or hypervisual world (characteristic of the late
twentieth-century web), an overall understanding of the world by means of its
spaces and the actual functions of architecture propose a hyperreal future. Where
reality, accessible to man through his five senses, extended by nanoprosthesis
or otherwise, is the surround by means of which to take action in the world.
interior
See ‘territory’.
We come to know the world from an interior. The security
of an interior: a car speeding along a motorway; a high-speed train crossing a
territory at 300 km/h; a dwelling that leads to anywhere in the world in real
time.
Projecting. Projecting ourselves.
Windows and balconies were useful in the past, when we became aware of the world
through them. Today, our windows on the world are à la carte television
channels, the presence via satellite of the worldwide network of landscape-cameras,
that bring to a studio in a Barcelona neighbourhood the light and the sounds of
dusk in the Grand Canyon, real time. Intensity in light and sound. The acceleration
of space and time. Planetary scale.
intermediary
In the information society, the intermediary disappears. There will be direct
communication between the manufacturer and the user, between teacher and learner.
Anyone or anything that makes no contribution to the chain of transmission of
knowledge will disappear.
A creator or researcher writes a book explaining his
ideas. A critic gives a lecture, taking these ideas as his basis. A university
lecturer teaches a class on the basis of this lecture and evaluates his students
according to what he thinks someone who says they have read the work of a creator
says. The average exam result is 4.3.
(without)
There are people who invent or create ideas, processes, materials, solutions.
The information society needs invention. Not the evolution of old ideas, but the
creation of new paradigms produced by a new age. Education in people has to allow
for the direct transmission of knowledge, from the creator to the receptor.
invent
As the chef Ferran Adrià says, the cutting edge of creation is not ‘inventing
the onion omelette, but inventing the omelette itself’. Inventing means
going back to the roots of human activity and contributing to it by opening up
new paths for the development of plural applications of what has been invented.
The development of the information society represents a new moment in history
that redefines paradigms in architecture. Many technological inventions have transformed
architecture and urbanism. Electricity, the lift, the car...
The term invention is rarely applied to architecture. But as architecture becomes
the result of advanced processes, the product of informational and industrial
developments that affect the way architecture is thought of, represented, produced
and carried out, the concept of invention can be assimilated to it. So new processes
of representation can be invented that transform construction systems; materials
and mechanisms that transform the functioning of skins and structures; spaces
for thinking and action that may suppose multiple specific applications, using
the resources available in each economic and cultural surround.
Inventing architecture means going back to the prototype when projects of architecture
are produced. Not knowing beforehand what the result will be. And proposing that
the result be a specific response to the object of the project, at the same time
bringing a new approach to general, commonly accepted bases in architecture for
this question. In fact, one fundamental strategy for the advance of architecture
is to invent questions that respond to situations affecting architecture as a
whole.
With his office building in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse in 1919, Mies van
der Rohe invented the question of high-rise glass architecture, a question he
himself resolved with his Lake Shore Drive apartments twenty nine years later,
the first apartment buildings to have a glass and steel facade. Le Corbusier invented
the question of separating structure and facing using his Domino structure in
1914, which became a central theme of architecture in the following years.
In both cases, the proposals pick up technological solutions developed by other
persons or organisations. Their basic contribution consisted in presenting the
question in the realm of architecture.
islands
The active reaction to a city without direction, with no capacity for renovation,
in the face of a megacity that is formed or in the process of formation, is the
creation of island-cities.
Island-cities are new settlements in the territory, in non-urban surrounds, that
institute a new use in the territory, such as leisure centres, business parks,
shopping complexes, residential areas, or a combination of several of the above,
on the premise that it is a private, reserved place with access restricted to
the owners or to people who identify themselves and pay a sum to be, for a period
of time, inhabitants of this new artificial surround.
These islands, with their defined perimeter, situated in the amorphous territorial
magma, strategically select their location in the territory on the basis of criteria
of ease of access, surroundings and climate.
It is a similar process to that of the founding of cities in the past.
Except in the case of theme parks, all the functions generated by these island-cities
are the same as those of traditional cities. But the quality of life offered by
the latter is not enough for certain social classes that are capable of organising
an environment in accordance with their needs. In this case, the city may find
itself immersed in a process of loss of economic, social and cultural content.
Island-cities are the natural result of the city of motorways and individual mobility.
Islands are accumulations of capital and energy with
defined limits, in an environment apart. Port Aventura is an island. Majorca is
an island. The need to concentrate latest generation activities in the territory
means that, alongside the recycling of historic urban accumulations, new territories
have to be colonised.
Physical and virtual. By land, sea and air.
J
K
knowledge
We can no longer believe in the transmission of knowledge by dictating given information.
Instead, we have to design and create physical or mental places and frameworks
that provide the conditions (operating environments) for knowledge to emerge from
within the individual: a person only accumulates in his active memory the things
he discovers for himself. Only the knowledge that emerges from within can establish
links with other knowledge of his own and produce individual progress, be useful
for thought and action.
L
light
Today’s images and traditional architecture come together in light.
These days, every image is light. On TV, in computers, in the cinema, or in commercial
night.
Architecture was ‘the magnificent meeting of volumes in the light’.
These days, it is not made with volumes, or with forms, and is not seen in the
light.
The light can only be artificial.
living-working-resting
The dwelling is a micro-city in and from which we work, shop and rest.
M
m3
Space is measured in m3 rather than in m2. Houses should be sold by m3, and would
be occupied by furniture-room pieces, free to be arranged by the inhabitant. The
section and the floor plan of a house are equally important.
maieutics
See ‘knowledge’.
Process of transmission of knowledge developed by Socrates, according to which
the individual learns (remembers) a concept by answering a series of precisely
formulated questions.
masses (silence)
The masses are lost in the mass.
But we are seeing the rebirth of the individual who flees the city, hitherto a
synonym of culture, to a new refuge in the middle of nowhere, or who flees in
a constant attempt to follow the trace of digital information. Silence is his
living space. With so much information-communication, silence is heaven.
material
Architecture’s new construction material is information. Just as modern
architecture is indebted to reinforced concrete, steel and glass, our age has
not yet invented a material that changes the deep-rooted principles of construction.
The process of re-information of the physical world means developing intelligent,
re-active materials, that recognise the environmental or functional phenomena
occurring around them and react with them.
mayor
Mr Mayor: is your city advanced?
Media Lab
The Media Lab is the Bauhaus of the information society. The list of projects
by MIT’s Media Lab (founded in 1985) presents a programme of action for
investigation and development as digital information is superposed on the physical
world we live in every day. Here are some examples:
Consortia: Digital Life (DL), News in the Future (NiF), Things That Think (TTT).
Special Interest Groups: Broadercasting, CC++, Counter Intelligence, e-markets,
Gray Matters, Penny PC, Toys of Tomorrow (TOT).
Research Groups: Aesthetics and Computation, Affective Computing, Context Aware
Computing, Electronic Publishing, Epistemology and Learning, Explanation Architecture,
Gesture & Narrative Language, Interactive Cinema, Machine Listening, Machine
Understanding, Micromedia, Nanoscale Sensing, Object-Based Media, Opera of the
Future, Personal Information Architecture, Physics and Media, Responsive Environments,
Sociable Media, Software Agents, Spatial Imaging, Speech Interface, Synthetic
Characters, Tangible Media, Vision and Modeling.
(www.media.mit.edu)
Metapolis
Beyond the metropolis of the industrial era emerges the metapolis of the digital
era. The city is now a place of places, where numerous urban models coexist, each
with its own qualities that make it different from the rest.
Where the dwelling becomes a place where we live, work and rest, thanks to audiovisual
and telematic systems. And where the neighbourhood is a multinational environment
of direct relation between citizens. Zoning no longer has any meaning in this
new city that sets out to create complete environments (dwelling, leisure, commerce,
education) in the proximity of the dwelling.
metareality
Metareality is the broadest most perfect interface for action in the world, the
place where the physical and the digital meet.
Metareality is a new state in the physical world, transformed by the energy of
the virtual world.
Metareality emerges from the re-information of the physical world.
It is an environment where places are sensitive to people, and where the generosity
of creation receives the impetus of a new digital culture.
Where the best source of information about the world is reality itself.
Where all matter and all empty space connect with each other and, in turn, with
individuals. Where total disconnection is also possible.
Where cities exist as nodes in the planetary network. Of the global village. And
are splendid. And transform themselves to accept their new state.
Where the arts and sciences are related in virtual and metareal exploration. Where
the two worlds are compatible.
Where weightlessness exists and is inhabited. Where the virtual world, with its
new physics and its immaterial condition, is inspiration for the construction
of the physical world.
Where emptiness is a rare commodity that has to be treasured as though it were
gold.
Where nature and its fractal order are inspiration for the construction of the
physical world.
Where all things are as different as their users are.
Where educated man, with the capacity to make decisions, is once again the centre
of the world.
The necessary condition for preventing a rupture between a hypothetical virtual
world — fantastic, full of creative energy, in a constant state of transformation,
where the planet’s best brains work for its construction, as it generates
a new economy — and a solid physical world — heavy, weighed down by
a history, conditioned by tradition— is for the two worlds to be the same;
for the virtual world to affect and transform the physical world at the same time
as it constructs itself, not just economically and socially, but culturally, and
spatially; for each innovation in the virtual world to transform the physical
world.
mountain
Mountains are concentrations of natural or artificial energy that can be inhabited.
They are ascale folds in extra or intraurban land.
They are accumulations of matter. Organic or economic.
The organic mountain emerges as part of a natural cycle, in the form of the folding
of sedimentary strata, of the thrust of internal forces, or as a magmatic eruption.
The artificial mountain emerges as an instant accumulation of man’s activity.
His intellectual, economic, human, religious activity...
The mountain defines its instant form as a product of its origins and of the interaction
with its environment.
A mountain has neither beginning nor end. We can observe just one moment in its
history. A mountain is an X-ray of a place. Its section shows us its history.
Its near and far environments allow us to predict its future. The mountain has
absolutely no predisposition to a predetermined shape. The mountain is constructed
more as a process than as an event with a beginning and an end. It is constructed
by fractal geometry, allowing complex relations between its parts, following a
coherent process.
The crystalline arrangement of its atoms conditions its final shape. It gives
it its colour and texture. The interactions of its microscopic components with
the conditions of the environment define its final shape.
Its upper limit is the ground, the limit between fullness and emptiness. Between
all the mass of the earth and the atmosphere that surrounds it. The mountain’s
skin may have different resolutions according to the conditions of the environment.
Each chemical organisation of its raw material generates a form with its own resolution.
Rocks are a part of the mountain constructed in its likeness. They concentrate
information about the whole. In terms of size, the rock may be likened to human
beings.
Different types of mountains can be recognised:
The interior mountain is a cavity in a mass. It is a space without light and,
therefore, adirectional.
The ground mountain is a flat space, where interior and exterior blend with no
discontinuity. It is a horizon that moves.
The rock-mountain is a vigorous irregularity in a terrain that energetically manifests
the presence of local interior forces that have modified that place.
The light-mountain is an accumulation of activity, of light, of gas.
Building is a natural act that generates economic, human, material and cultural
sediments. Buildings, mountains form a coherent system with the place’s
other energies.
multicity
See ‘m. city’ or, better, ‘Metapolis’.
multifunctional environment
Hybridisation of uses, landscapes, programmes, activities and multiple spaces
in a reinformed environment that is mixed in nature.
N
nature (advanced)
MEDIA, MOUNTAIN & ARCHITECTURE are interfaces of the three inhabitable natures:
digital, natural and artificial. Three manifestations that need a new order (or
dis-order) to organise their interaction.
the Net
INTERNET: the Net.
The Internet is the overcoming of physical distances by means of the machinery
of war.
War has always generated centralisation, physical limits (town walls, refuges,
etc.) behind which to protect oneself.
Once physical distances had been overcome by intercontinental missiles, the threat
of war changed from physical invasion to total destruction.
It became necessary to decentralise the location of information.
In 1957 the first letter was sent via the Internet.
It was an L.
network of cities
As opposed to the big metropolises of the twentieth century, the information society
will create Networks of Cities.
Cities are to the territory what computers are to the net. Nodes of accumulation,
territorial IP numbers, points of concentration that need to be absolutely efficient
for the system to function.
Otherwise, like on the Internet, information flows are diverted and reach their
destination by other paths.
Cities are entering a state of decadence.
Traditionally, urban nucleuses emerged in two ways: either at crossroads as meeting
places, in places of easy territorial accessibility (Paris, London, etc.), or
along paths, as the result of intermediate stops marked out by the transport of
each age (the pilgrims’ walk of Santiago, the American wagon trails, etc.).
In both cases, the ultimate aim of a city in the course of its history, social
and military circumstances allowing, has been to grow. Like companies: economic
growth required physical growth.
The urban model produced by the evolution of medieval cities up until the present
day is the great metropolis.
Today, we are witnessing a phenomenon in which cities are working simultaneously
on their internal renovation, increasing their efficiency from within at the same
time as they organise themselves territorially in the form of NETWORKS OF CITIES.
The network is a structure in which two orders exist: the local and the global.
The two are equally important to the perfect functioning of the system. Without
nodes there is no network, just lines taking information nowhere. If there is
no communication between the nodes, they are no longer part of a network, just
isolated points in an unknown environment.
The network in turn has a fractal structure, in which the part is self-similar
to the rest, allowing multiple zooms without changing the structure.
The basic social node would be an individual person (human node), or any object
(object node) provided with a chip and able to interact with the network.
The urban order of the network begins, then, with the individual, who acts in
a space (room), or in a house, or in a building, or in a street, or in a district,
or in a city, or in a region, or in a country, or in a supercommunity, or on the
planet.
The classical notions of territorial identities may therefore be strengthened
by the existence of mechanisms that allow them to strengthen the communities with
which they feel identified. The most identifying territorial orders in recent
decades, the country and the city, are now watered down in comparison with the
district and the region, which have more powerful identifying signs. Nonetheless,
each level has its internal and external function which is vital to the global
system.
The net, which organises different communities, allows the creation of a network
of networks, due to its self-similar nature.
In this way, not only will district organisations connected by local networks
be created, but there is also the Intranet, the possibility of being related to
other similar neighbourhood networks on a similar scale (a city), which in turn
will connect with district networks throughout a country, or all over the world.
O
operating landscapes
If the city is a landscape, buildings are mountains.
operation desert storm
Journalist: General Schwartzkopf, how did the attack on Iraq begin, by land, by
sea or by air?
General Schwartzkopf: The attack began simultaneously by land, by sea and by air,
from inside and from outside, by shutting down communications and with missiles...
It’s all-out war.
optimism
See ‘progress’.
P
photovoltaic
In the course of this year, the Sun will shine down onto the Earth four thousand
times more energy than we will consume. By duly collecting the solar radiation,
we can obtain heat and electricity. Heat is produced by heat collectors, and electricity,
by means of photovoltaic surfaces (www.censolar.es).
places
(energy, place and corpse)
1. Architecture has to bring vital energy to a place, never detract from it.
Only too frequently, in the name of place (a monumental setting, a sea front,
an archaeological complex), the buildings constructed are soulless. Experiments
have been carried out with architectural corpses, in an unsuccessful attempt to
revive them. Interventions of spiritism that invoke the dead of the past to build
the present. Success in these experiments is impossible. It’s the night
of the living dead!
Only buildings created with a soul of their own, that are more than mere appearance,
that interact with their social, spatial and aesthetic surroundings, that demand
a place of their own in history because they know when and for what purpose they
were created, can give a place energy.
2. The architect is increasingly becoming a creator of places. Unlike the traditional
situation, when the architect was given a brief and a definition of uses, the
plot is often no longer a vital datum for the project.
Projects, like films, follow a strategy. The choice of a place in the territorial
magma is the first decision that characterises a work.
In a convulsed city, in a territory that requires active protection (rather than
freezing its activity), the position of what is built (or of the empty space to
be protected) is far more transcendent than the work itself. When a place is built,
it is there for good.
principles
The principles on which architecture is based are so open and generous that they
allow its reinvention with every new age.
process
Architecture is a process that allows us to generate habitable spaces. Architecture
is alive when, once its construction is complete and it is inhabited, it is installed
in a process of transformation and interaction with the people who inhabit it
and with the environment in which it is situated. Like processes, architecture
and the city constantly evaluate the information they receive and issue, and have
the capacity to analyse their actions over time. Processes rather than occurrences.
produce
Advanced architecture is produced rather than constructed.
progress
Progress is not linear. Progress is re-information.
(history)
A progressive society is one that leaves a greater inheritance than it inherited.
In the city and in the country. We citizens cannot be spendthrift heirs who squander
history’s fortune. History is a fortune because it allows us to be what
we are; to have been born where we were. We have to collaborate with history in
order to improve it.
If what is left to us of history is innovation (Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance
palaces, all innovative constructions in their time), we can only respond to it
with innovation. Not with imitation.
progression
Progression comes from progress. From a dynamic system that advances. Like the
transformation of an initial position.
projection
Virtual displacement of image. Superposition of light on material.
protection
See ‘Liceu syndrome’.
The best way of protecting heritage is to take action on it. Fundamentalist protection,
representing the inactive freezing of an environment, can only lead to its degradation.
Q
R
R+3D
Research + Development, but also + eDucation + Diffusion.
re-
See ‘recycling’ and ‘re-information’.
Since the definition of the global village in the sixties by Marshall McLuhan,
now implemented by today’s satellite communications network, any intervention
on the territory is an act on a known environment. The entire planet is a city.
Taking action on any place (the centre of Paris, the Amazon jungle, an island
in the Pacific, the American desert or the neighbourhood of El Raval in Barcelona)
can never again be an act of conquest of an unknown territory. The limit between
city and country, between dwelling and landscape, between the natural and the
artificial, no longer exists. Expansion is no longer possible. Any action on the
territory is an act directed towards the interior of the global village. It is
a re-act.
reality
‘Physical and virtual, rather than real and virtual.’ (From a conversation
with Artur Serra)
refounding
Today we need to set forward a possible refounding of the city — of Barcelona,
for instance — that enables us to operate with the topography and with the
built continuum as our points of departure, encouraging its progress by means
of improved management and design of infrastructures, allowing telematic and cable
networks to reach everywhere, promoting recycling in zones of physical decadence
(creating new urban icons as the product of architectural innovation that permanently
display an image of progress to the outside), just as theme parks do when they
renovate their attractions and create new spectacles year after year.
This calls for new freedoms and a form of development based not on rigid regulations
but on an intelligent dialogue between developers and government agencies. In
this way we will avoid creating ‘exquisite corpses’ that quickly begin
to smell of decomposition...
regional parks
The territory is just another of a country’s assets, and ought to be treasured
as though it were gold. Mediterranean forest fires were produced by the pressure
of civilisation and the lack of economic interest. This situation calls for action
on the appropriate scale. Regional parks should be created, planned as green zones
in the territory-city. Territories controlled by new technologies and protected
from fire by huge territorial sprinklers. Trees should be replanted to create
firebreaks, with a geometric organisation that illustrates man’s action
on the large scale. Like agricultural plantations. Like Christo’s projects.
re-information
Re-information. To form something anew using information as the basic raw material.
In a city that cannot (and must not) grow physically outwards, it is necessary,
as with computer chips, to ‘do more things in the same space’, in
order to enable its economy to progress. To do this, it is necessary to analyse
the information emitted by the city according to multiple parameters and to design
ways of increasing its complexity without a corresponding increase in the ‘quantity’
of chaos. Urban re-information sets out to invest effort in finding out precisely,
and in real time, the social, environmental, physical, functional, economic and
cultural information of a city with a view to taking action in it.
The urban territory to be re-informed should be analysed with a view both to affecting
existing buildings and conditioning new constructions, and to stimulating the
construction of a new public space.
Re-information of buildings.
Faced with a world where work, leisure and commerce can be carried out by computer
(which occupies a space that does not require spatial classification), function
should not be a fundamental parameter in defining a portion of the city’s
land.
If we accept that the number of levels of a terrain (that is, how many times a
portion of land can be multiplied over itself) is a parameter to be defined, the
re-information of buildings ought to influence the capacity to organise their
functioning in the section rather than in the floor plan. With the basement given
over to storage functions (cars, objects), the ground floor and its surround to
the functions of commerce and public attention, and the higher floors to mixed
uses (dwelling, processing of information), the roof would become the new space
to be discovered, a place for public or semi-public leisure and recreational activities.
The organisation of the floors should provide for total flexibility that allows
variation in the use of spaces in the course of the day and the life of the building.
The re-information of building represents a massive input of information, principally
by means of fibre-optic cable. Cable should produce a similar transformation in
the building to the advent of running water or mains electricity, over a hundred
years ago.
Telework (carried out in the dwelling, or in an apartment or on premises nearby)
will require specific spaces in domestic settings to prevent ‘non-stop work
syndrome’.
The increase in domestic leisure time will allow people to enjoy large-format
spectacles in their own homes, in audiovisual lounges.
The dwelling, now domotic, will become part of the network of places where people
live their lives (it includes the car, the place of work and places of leisure)
in keeping with the process that we will witness of the disappearance of computers
and the creation of a connected environment.
Further, the re-information of buildings means that the building is sensitive
to its surroundings, and therefore organises its interaction with the urban eco-system
in sustainable fashion. The building therefore produces most of the energy it
consumes by means of photovoltaic surfaces installed in the facade of the actual
building or photovoltaic trees positioned on the roof. Likewise, the building
should be capable of accumulating water, or extracting it from the nearby subsoil
with a view to decreasing external consumption.
With the re-information of public space, each new street to be developed has to
be prepared to reflect and be reflected in the virtual world. Not only does this
require the construction of cabled streets which convey information at high speeds
to the adjacent dwellings, but information also has to flow through public space.
And public space has to be sensitive to the people who inhabit it continuously
(from the ground), and by means of new urban icons that interact with inhabitants
in near and far environments. It has to allow active expansion in the form of
sport and leisure for the people who are digitally concentrated in the surrounding
dwellings. It must enable the flexible regulation of flows of vehicles and persons
in the course of the day, of the week and of the year, with permanent interaction
with the actual vehicles that also process its information. It has to allow new
relations between organic elements (trees, plants, etc.), not now as elements
that respond to an urban logic (alignment, perspective, repetition), but allowing
them to have their own logics. To actively assimilate the climatic and atmospheric
phenomena of its environment, producing the energy consumed. New urban elements
characteristic of digital culture will emerge such as the photovoltaic tree, the
urban avatar, reactive paving, sport rocks, urban agriculture and mini-telecentres.
If industrial society produced a transformation intended to obtain basic quality
for the maximum number of people, both in the city and in the dwelling, the information
society has to seek maximum quality for all those places it transforms.
The re-information of buildings enables:
1. Functional regulation in section.
2. Functional flexibility in floor plan with the appearance of new spaces.
3. Use of the roof for recreational purposes.
4. The mass advent of information by cable for work, leisure and commerce.
5. Interaction between the dwelling and individuals’ other objects and places.
6. Sustainable interaction with the environment.
The re-information of public space enables:
1. The design of reactive spaces that are sensitive to individuals with access
to telematic environments.
2. Production of new urban icons that interact with individuals.
3. Zones of continuous recreation and leisure.
4. Flexibility in traffic flows and in the relation between pedestrians and vehicles.
5. Production of energy in the street and intelligent interaction with the environment.
6. New types of plantations.
to represent
Only that which can be represented can be constructed.
rurban
As the twenty-first century approached, the information era transformed the traditional
concepts of ownership and dwelling.
Information workers (analysts, lawyers, consultants, computer programmers, translators,
artists, etc.), 15% of the population, are people who work with knowledge that
can be transmitted to their clients all over the world, from anywhere in the world,
via telematic systems.
In the information era, all that is left is the earth, covered by satellites that
retransmit bits of money, science, culture, etc., and criss-crossed by motorways
providing rapid access to cities.
Hardware as opposed to software.
Information workers no longer need to live in cities to live an urban life. Five
days in the country, teleworking, two days in a city in the world, for business
and leisure. A big house in the country, a small, jointly owned apartment in the
city. The entire territory is now inhabitable. For this very reason it deserves
a project. Its cities. Its agriculture. Its regional parks (now green spaces in
the landscape-city).
The new dwellings, mono-volume spaces (like the cars) occupied by furniture-room
pieces that can be bought at shopping centres as though they were consumer products,
can be located on farm land, that continues to be productive.
Superposition of uses. Multiplicity of lives.
rurban loft
Principles of the metapolitan dwelling:
1. Integration into the landscape: an analysis of the landscape and its natural
elements is the origin of the project, just as the analysis of a street or an
urban fabric is the origin of the city. The whole plot merits a project, by action
or by omission. The construction of the dwelling is a naturally artificial or
an artificially natural process. Dwelling and landscape are integrated to form
a new unit.
2. High quality at low cost: this means making the most out of the least. Money
is a limited commodity these days. We have to optimise available resources. The
beauty of a place does not lie in the quality of its materials but in its spatial
qualities. Quality is a question of ethics. Of precision. Of an attitude to the
construction process that depends on everyone who takes part in that process,
from the client to the least of the industrialists.
3. Concentration, making the very most of everything: accumulation and concentration
make for optimisation of resources in the functioning of a building or a city
and, rather than dispersion, permanently require resources to allow its functioning
(energy, movement, etc.). The material of the place (rocks, earth, water, air,
etc.), urban energy can potentially be integrated into the project at no extra
cost.
4. Artificial materials: industry provides increasingly intelligent materials
at lower prices. Materials that preserve their properties and their effect in
spaces independently of the time of year or the time of day. Materials that require
next to no maintenance.
5. Mobility of interior space: dwellings are large empty spaces occupied by mobile
objects that allow the inhabitant to carry out activities in that space. Intelligent
objects, sometimes multifunctional, that turn the entire interior into an item
of furniture. The inhabitant lives in a piece of furniture.
6. Intelligent limits: empty, single-material spaces have intelligent limits compounded
in a thin surface: aluminium, wood, blocks, glass. The glass in the facades is
made up of different sheets that, depending on the case, provide thermal, solar
or anti-theft protection, and can be printed with images and textures using the
screen process. The reconstruction of the floor on the artificial terrain involves
inserting electricity, water and heating installations that will give the habitable
space the necessary comfort level.
7. Uses are developed in section: the subsoil, introduced into the earth, and
the roof, in contact with the sky, are spaces to be used with the same intensity
as the level of the natural terrain. Taking as its point of departure a simple
shape for its floor plan, the building or the city is organised by means of the
superposition of layers with a nature of their own. The route around the building
is produced by means of ramps or stairs, as though it were a walk.
8. The measurements of space: quantity is quality. Every use requires a space
of a given size. The dwelling is organised on the basis of the contrast between
sizes of spaces. There is no standard height or standard measurement: generous
height, width and length at the service of quality.
S
self-urbanism
(as an individual action)
New urbanism is aimed not at the masses but at individuals. One by one, not as
a collective.
Faced with the menu of possibilities offered by the city and the territory now
that information technologies reach any point in the territory equally, each individual
can decide where and how he wants to live. There is no single model of city. In
fact, each house is a micro-city from which its inhabitant works, shops and rests.
The decision as to where to situate a home is an operation of self-urbanism; and
the way in which the individual relates with his surroundings is an operation
of self-urbanism.
(as a process of spontaneous settlement)
These days we are aware that the biggest housing crisis is taking place not in
the most developed countries, but in developing countries that are subject to
vertiginous mutations and exponential growth: one fifth of the world’s population
is currently located in fringe areas and ‘clandestine’ human settlements:
spontaneous structures that have developed in poorly structured spaces, the consequence
of fast population growth and the generalised deficit of affordable dwellings.
Bidonvilles, favelas and shantytowns configure such structures independently of
any kind of order or planning.
These are, then, self-organised structures that should be regarded without prejudice,
with attention to the internal logics of this kind of spontaneous growth; processes
arising from a mutual interaction between self-planning and self-organisation,
leading to complex functional configurations that in no case convey an impression
of disorder or arbitrariness. They present these notable similarities with self-generated
structures to exist in nature (the veins in an insect’s wing, irrigation
vessels in the leaf of a tree, fissures in breaking processes, bubble wrap, etc.)
that, despite their diversity and irregularity, adjust their development to given
rules or generic patterns, whose dynamics can be analysed by analogue simulation
models.
simultaneity
Formerly ‘duality’. We might imagine digital aliens who only operate
on the Net. Or farmers who live off the resources they generate. But the spirit
of our time will always be dual (simultaneous): physical and virtual.
software
INFORMATION is the fundamental raw material of our century and software is the
tool we use to process it.
At the start of the twentieth century, the big problem to be solved was the living
standards of the masses, whereas now the problem is individuals. Then, mass production
had to be developed, whereas now, personalised production is required. Both the
fact that the first mass production line was for the production of cars and the
appearance of the lift changed the concept of space and time in buildings and
cities. The next change is that of software, of the intangible, of flexibility
in production, of à la carte television. Of a form of interactivity that
creates a favourable atmosphere for individualism. Of the decision-making capacity
that calls for criteria rather than knowledge.
Spain
Spain is (a) multinational.
sport rock
Artificial rocks, introduced into the city, that create circuits for stretching
exercises. These rocks, that vary in size, are created on the basis of Boolean
operations in volumes with faceted surfaces.
A new layer to public space.
sustainability
See ‘advanced’.
syndrome (Liceu)
See ‘archaeology’.
‘To preserve something, you have to take action on it, otherwise it degenerates
or is destroyed. Or burnt. This syndrome detected in the case of Barcelona’s
opera house has in recent decades affected Mediterranean forests.
synthetic
Synthesis of concentrated information.
system
(operating)
The operating system is the series of laws allowing an environment to function
and develop. Be it physical or digital. The architecture of recent decades has
fundamentally operated in the design of the most superficial part of the urban
system that is the design of icons, objects that act as attractors but that have
no overall repercussion on the system. The buildings constructed in recent decades
whose value is greater than that of the simple accumulation of the materials they
contain are minimal. It is highly likely that the actual system prevents architecture
from having a presence beyond the purely iconographical. We will therefore have
to think about changing the rules of play if we truly aim for our interventions
to acquire spatial and moral quality and leave a large inheritance for future
generations. We therefore have to propose a new form of interaction between the
creators of programmes and contents and the designers of icons. In fact, this
difference does not exist in the most advanced operating systems. The icon emerges
coherent from the interface of development. In this way, architecture will have
to mutate into an activity that initially participates in the creation of this
new system. And then go on to develop strategies to operate actively in the process
of technical, artistic and functional development.
Operating system
T
telecentre
A telecentre is a petrol station of information.
telework
‘Jack Nilles, the North American inventor of the term telecommuting, the
equivalent of the British English teleworking, suggested that telework could be
a solution to traffic jams. However, while it initially referred to the work of
those people who managed to avoid motorway snarl-ups because they worked near
home, in time the term was distorted and came to mean precisely the opposite:
work in a place a long way from home, obliging workers to take various means of
transport, even aeroplanes, to get to work. This progression is determined by
the evolution of the world of the economy, which forces companies to continually
exercise flexibility, innovation and globalisation. A professional who reaches
the world of the Internet experiences an increase in physical as well as telematic
mobility.
This opinion is shared by the expert Manuel Castells. He holds that transport
problems will increase instead of improving, as increasing mobility and the condensation
of time allowed by the new organisation of the Net is translated into a greater
concentration of markets in certain areas and an increase in the physical mobility
of labour, that used to be confined to its workplaces during working hours (La
Sociedad Red, 1997).
The evolution of telework, moreover, is not determined only by the possibilities
of teleworking at a distance (or from home), but also by the economic and production
context (marked by globalisation and high levels of competitiveness), meaning
that teleworkers have to compete in a global labour market. As a result, today
telecommuters are leaving behind their role of teleworkers who go from one place
of work to another to become people who work as they go, be it on line, on the
road or in the air.’
(GUALLART, Vicente; SERRA, Artur; SOLÀ, Francesc. El teletrabajo y los
Telecentres como impulsores del equilibrio territorial. Generalitat de Catalunya,
Barcelona, 1998)
time
Time is a new material in the project. Architecture as an open process, as a non-finite
act, has to be able to incorporate time into the score of its organisation.
tourism
Architecture, unlike other artistic expressions (such as sculpture or painting),
is difficult to transport. Nonetheless, large works of architecture have been
dismounted and moved to museums in order to be studied and exhibited (such as,
partially, the Parthenon of Athens, some Romanesque churches, etc.). In the face
of this impossibility, some of the theme parks emerging in our country that simulate
entire cultural environments (including architecture, folklore, customs, cuisine,
etc.) are an example of this desire to get to know other cultures without physically
going there. By this token, it is, if possible, even more valuable for a city
to possess original elements that can be shown in situ, where they were built,
and create touristic and cultural circuits around them. Tourism is our country’s
number one economic activity and a phenomenon that marks the difference in the
face of the extensive range of similar offers proposed by various resorts. If
a city has architectural and cultural elements, they should be exploited with
a view to encouraging a flow of visitors and, therefore, the economic flow.
tree
(photovoltaic tree)
See also ‘re-information’.
A photovoltaic tree is an item of urban furniture whose structure and functioning
are similar to those of a tree, but whose fruit is light.
Photovoltaic trees are a hybridisation between a natural process (the functioning
of a tree) and artificial nature (arboreal structure and photovoltaic cells).
The light captured by the photovoltaic leaves descends to the tree’s roots
via the cabled branches and trunk, where there are either batteries to store the
accumulated energy or a transformer that transfers it to the grid.
At night, the projectors at its base send the light flowing upwards towards the
lines of fibres forming the actual tree or towards lights arranged in its proximity.
There are no standard models. An intelligent programme produces personalised designs
in accordance with the contour conditions of each place (building height, orientation,
etc.), the energy needs and the available budget, generating the necessary documents
for its development.
U
urban implosion
See ‘re-information’ and ‘urban recycling’.
urban multimedia
Using multimedia technologies we can convert architecture into the interface of
its own history. Provided with the appropriate mechanisms, we can obtain sound
information about buildings and urban spaces as we visit them contextually and
randomly. The images superposed on stone may highlight certain historical and
aesthetic aspects of archaeological documents. They allow ephemeral intervention
on the historical remains that create a new unity between the virtual (light)
and the physical and heavy (stone), between future and history, between movement
and staticness. Buildings speak!
Developer: Mr Architect, we’d like you to draw up an urban development plan,
have you thought about the installations yet?
urban recycling
(re-cycle)
Recycling (introducing old structures into a new cycle) rather than rebuilding
(building anew something that has existed) or re-habilitating (habilitating a
decrepit construction). Urban recycling means beginning a new cultural, physical,
economic and social cycle in a city.
Re-cycling means accepting that something has reached the end of its life cycle
and that another cycle has to be begun on the basis of an existing condition.
The culture of re-cycling, proper to the twenty-first century, is different to
the culture of re-habilitation, proper to the late twentieth century, which aimed
to habilitate something that was valid in its time and that, after a period of
abandonment, was to be restored to its original state. Recycling allows construction
on existing bases (it does not require the creation or importing of new products),
turning it into a material that is coherent in itself.
The history and the culture of a place is a fundamental datum on the basis of
which a new cycle is begun. Urban recycling not only affects the physical aspect
of the city, but also the behaviour of its inhabitants, a new attitude on the
part of its managers, the development of new economies.
Recycling is innovating.
(re-economising)
In the new economy, a territory’s principal capital is human capital. And
not only does it have to preserve it, it has to endeavour to extend it, offering
quality of life and an environment fit for economic development. In this way,
cities have to grow inwards, with a view to preserving the nature that surrounds
them. To construct themselves over themselves.
The economic and cultural substratum has to be maintained and exploited because
the new information economy requires spaces for collective culture and leisure.
And Barcelona has a heritage to be exploited that was built in past ages. The
best way to maintain heritage is to increase it.
The leading cities of coming years have to know how to grow economically without
growing physically.
(re-inventing)
Once the territory of cities is finished, or once cities have been constructed
to a vast extent, the city will have to reinvent itself, go back to believing
in its capacity to transform and create new and innovative realities by means
of architecture, like in the years of modernity (with the recognition of historical
data as another value).
Otherwise the collective will disappear, assimilated and diluted in an environment
of limited individual interests.
V
W
WebHotel
The WebHotel is a hybrid building, constructed between the physical and the virtual
world. Its facade is built using a metal structure and fabric with graphics in
an urban space. Its rooms are built out of virtual objects and with lines of code
on the Internet. When a person enters a virtual room, he can manipulate its walls
and the objects it contains. Its virtual presence is manifested in the physical
world by means of lights and sounds that are superposed onto its thin skin. In
this way, for the first time a facade manifests an occurrence that rather than
taking place behind it in a nearby environment is the product of actions in different
places in the world. A webcam trained on the building sends real-time images to
the Internet so that the user of the room can view the effects of his action.
The actual building, with a server inside, produces its physical and its virtual
images simultaneously.
(The WebHotel was produced in Barcelona during the exhibition Fabrications organised
simultaneously by the MACBA, the MOMA, the SFMOMA and the WEXNER)
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