“Flexibility to Resilience," Making the Metropolitan Landscape, Standing Firm on Middle Ground, edited by Jacqueline Tatom and Jennifer Stauber (London and New York: Routledge)

Flexibility to Resilience
“Flexibility to Resilience," Making the Metropolitan Landscape, Standing Firm on Middle Ground, edited by Jacqueline Tatom and Jennifer Stauber (London and New York: Routledge)
(lecture at the Istanbul Technical University, November 2005)
The projects I will show this evening are all in Lebanon , both in remote rural areas and in Beirut, on two ends of a development spectrum that is quite similar to the one that exists here in Turkey between rural areas and cosmopolitan centers like Istanbul . In that sense, I feel relieved because I can get into the formal discussion of the work almost directly. Every time I present the projects in the United States or in Europe I feel compelled to introduce the context, to talk about development as a struggle and issue, to show how the context or rural Lebanon or Beirut is different in order to validate the work. Yet despite these differences in context, I always feel compelled to bring the projects into the formal discussions that preoccupy the discipline and the profession of architecture in general. It may very well have to do with the fact that most of the design gets produced in my office is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that I teach at Harvard, and that I am immersed in the studio environment of the school and that I inadvertently carry with me discussions about fluidity, filleted forms, or aggregation to projects in Lebanon.
While on the one hand, I feel compelled to connect, teaching in such a stimulating and internationally oriented environment like Harvard, should and does make me more aware of the diversity of the debates and design concerns around the world.
Yet, what is more striking, after just a few encounters with young designers who come to lecture at Harvard like Alejandro Aravena from Chile, or Han Tumertekin from Turkey, or Manuel Mateus from Portugal, is that those designers working on a particular local front always feel the necessity to link to the discipline at large. Across borders, designers are seeking distinction, not in terms of uniqueness derived from geographic setting, but in terms of transgressing their contexts and making direct contributions to the singular platform, to design, one which we constantly seek to define and analyze at large in order to be able to enter into it and effect change in it through our work.
I would like to spend the first ten minutes outlining one such definition and analysis in order to present the projects through it, a definition and analysis that may help further explain this impulse to address the discipline at large.
Contemporary design has been heavily invested in exploring the potentials of the flexibilization of form, the ways in which building, urban, and landscape forms could be designed to accommodate and express changes in scale, function, shape, or identity over time.
Some of this preoccupation with flexibility is linked to the possibilities that new technologies offer to design, whether construction technologies (for example: glass that changes opacity with light) and representation and production technologies (for example: the fact that the computer technologies and software can now help describe the fluid shapes of a Gehry building and help build them).
Let me start out with four examples of how the pursuit of flexibility manifests itself in architecture:
Expandibility, (the idea that form could expand to accommodate the growth of institutions and urban areas). Form changes size. (Examples mat buildings, MoMA but Guggenheim and Whitney)
Versatility, (the idea that forms could be designed in such a way as to allow for a variety of possible uses to occur within the same space). Form changes function. (Example MVRDV Les Halles)
Convertibility, (the idea that buildings or spaces could be physically transformed to accommodate for needs to change size, shape or opacity). Form changes shape. (Wes Jo nes convertible container buildings and Nicolas Michelin's Metafort building)
Fluidity, (the idea that the identity and components of a form (its gestalt) could evolve over time to accommodate changes in context and function). Form changes identity. (Highline)
The Social and Economic Dimension of Flexibility
These formal explorations in flexibility are no doubt driven by social and economic changes. Just to give one example, a well studied example: In order to avert risks of real estate market fluctuation, new real estate developments are being made increasingly flexible in terms of land use restrictions and as a result, whether in Manhattan or Dubai, designers are being asked to come up with forms that are adaptive to changes in use. In Dubai, a colleague had to change the function of a tower from residential to commercial (while the tower was already under construction).
More indirect but deeper links could be traced between social and economic changes and this phenomenon of flexibility in design.
In the Second Industrial Divide, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel detected that in order to accommodate for constant change, industry and society were moving back to a form of “flexible specialization” that was characteristic of traditional craft. This form of specialization has been enabled by the computer and the emergence of niche markets and is requiring a transformation in the nature and organization of labor and an increase of cooperation among competitors. Accordingly, many business models today also rely on the concept of flexibility as the main guarantee of organizational success.
Some social scientists have cautioned against the uncritical embrace of this contemporary condition. German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Beck argues that “flexibilization” is occurring at the level of structure of work, place of work, and work time. It represents an attempt to mediate between individual tracks of life in an increasingly complex global structure. Beck describes this structure as “risk society” a society constantly confronted with the dangers of self-elimination. Until the advent of nuclear warfare, no human act could threaten to annihilate humanity. Since then, and with rapid advances in technology, several hazards have multiplied this risk, be they nuclear, ecological, or genetic. Importantly these hazards are trans-national, they are global (think of the bird flu disease or extreme weather conditions).
Flexibilization also represents a response to the increased individualization of society, Beck argues. Flexibilization is understood here as another coping mechanism in risk society. It is a quality that many seek as if to guarantee that these large, complex and incomprehensible structures that govern our lives accommodate individual needs and local positions. In other words, flexibility is one of the means by which today's society tries to handle the inability to fit the local in the global and to effectively mobilize, and coordinate among, individual actions. Sociologist Richard Sennett has added another worrisome ramification, the inability of flexible forms of organization to provide long-term security guarantees for the worker, but also to recognize and respect them.
In its first phase, risk society does not fully understand the complexity of the technologies that run it. It blames technology for having produced the hazards but then delegates to the professionals (the technologists) themselves the responsibility of dealing with these hazards.
Piano: This could be one of the reasons behind the embrace of high-tech architecture particularly as a sign of commitment to environment, one of the hazards.
Equally important is that in this risk society, many of the central political questions have left politics. Questions about how we should live are not decided on the political platforms of parliaments or government, but in the professions and disciplines such as medicine, law, public health, and design. Beck for example suggests that advances in child bearing technologies were generated by medical research autonomously even if they affected such traditional social institutions like marriage. Politics could not guide or limit medical research. It simply coped with its consequences and developed new frameworks to deal with them.
In order to effect change in this risk society, the professions, design included, are being urged to uncover the political content of their undertakings, to “defrost the technical discourses” as Roberto Unger proposes, and engage their publics directly. In order to do so, the deep structures of the professions should undergo change. They need to become more open to revision from a diversity of sources and practices. This, I believe, explains in a more convincing and positive way, the impulse to address the discipline at large from different designers across the world.
Architectural Critiques
To be sure, the preoccupation with flexibility has different motivations and origins in modern architecture. I have been looking at the evolution of this idea from the speculative Chicago Frame, to the mass production of schools and housing in the post WWII era, to the urban typology of the mat building. The recent revival of the '50s and '60s may have carried with it some of the concerns of that period, flexibility being one of them. (I mention in passing the proliferation on dissertations on topics like Archizoom, Plug in Cities, and the Non-Plan movement in England ).
If we are to link the current fascination with flexibility with the '50s and '60s, we should mention the attacks on modern architecture's claim to flexibility launched by the likes of Rossi and Venturi. Aldo Rossi and the neo-rationalists in Italy, argued that modern functionalism did not fulfill the promise of flexibility. Instead, Rossi proposed that traditional urban forms were more flexible, more capable of adapting to change of use and identity over time. In a parallel critique, the American architect Robert Venturi, put forward his famous “both and” idea. Arguing against the exclusionary puritanism of high modern architecture, against the possibility that buildings should be tailor made to suit their functions, Venturi favored muti-functioning spaces. “The multi-functioning room is a possibly truer answer to the Modern architect's concern with flexibility. The room with a generic rather than a specific purpose, and with movable furniture rather than movable partitions, promotes a perceptual flexibility rather than a physical flexibility, and permits the toughness and permanence still necessary in our building. Valid ambiguity promotes useful flexibility.”
Today, we can notice other alternatives to this model. The unabashed romanticism we saw in Manuel Aires Mateus's powerful work last week, its pursuit of the ruin as the ultimate destination of architecture, represents a deliberate rejection of flexibility that we can also find in the work of other contemporary architects like Peter Zumthor. It is a path worth observing and studying.
The alternative direction that I would like to outline is one that is emerging from within the search for flexibility. Many young architects practicing today, are beginning to move from the expressions of flexibility I described earlier to focus on the physical means for its social realization. In doing so they are also discovering that certain specific forms may be more accommodating for, and expressive of, social change.
Four such explorations stand out:
1) Looking for new underlying armatures that allow for this flexibility to occur. The grid may have been the original model of such structures (Koolhaas' analysis of the New York grid) but contemporary architects are uncovering different types of grids and armatures with different degrees of propensity.
2) A search for highly-articulated building components that allow for different interpretations of their inhabitation to occur without dictating uses too closely. I am referring for example to the phylogenesis categories that architects like FOA are developing: continuous roofs, discontinuous grounds, etc., in short, over-determined surfaces that help inspire the uses of the underdetermined spaces they contain.
3) Exploring the potential of emptiness in design. Sociologist Isaac Joseph has distinguished between full and empty spaces. Full spaces are architecturally and/or programmatically full that prescribe the way they are to be used and received by their users. Empty spaces are those void of architectural signification but that are nevertheless charged with possibilities of social signification. This is not at all a call for the abandonment of architecture. To the contrary, making design disappear requires very sophisticated design skills. This has become in my mind one the stronger currents in the work of Landscape Urbanists and designers like James Corner whose focus on change in landscape over time has led them to inadvertently discover its resilient attributes, attributes that have been outlined by landscape ecology, but to invest in their precise formal consequences.
4) Developing forms that reach out to engage broader realities, the very large and the very small. Preferably in the same form. Evoking the work of Castoriadis on social imaginary, Historian Antoine Picon has argued that architecture provides the armature for social imagination precisely by synthesizing between disparate images and scales and by “plugging into a broader reality, into grand narratives about the world at large.” I am fascinated by the way that Elias Torres pavilion in the Barcelona forum fluctuates between being geographic and digital without mimicking either, how Souta de Moura's stadium in Braga calls out the rocks through the precision of structure and geometry.
It may be too early and even too limiting to suggest that these explorations are converging into a singular new direction, but for the sake of pushing the exploration forward, even if a bit ahead of itself, I want to suggest that we may be witnessing a shift of gear from a pursuit of physical flexibility that represents change to a search for formal qualities that inspire change without imposing it: not so much flexibility but resilience, the kind of resilience found in the propensity of armature, intensity of surfaces, suggestive voids, and forms that stretch between geography and graphics without being reduced to either.
With this provisional definition of resilience, allow me then to spend the second, and hopefully lighter, part of the lecture to elaborate on some of these ideas by way of example.
Date: 2009
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