2000 Master of Architecture
A Guide to Adaptive Urbanism: Containers, Fields, Folds, Mats, and Groundscrapers

This is a didactic text. The arguments will be carried as much by images as by words. It records a thought process, missteps, and uncertainties intact. Above all, the argument assumes that architectural knowledge is ongoing. Architects learn from the past not by imitating or repeating, but by extending and developing propositions by like-minded practitioners. This ongoing dialogue and response are what constitutes architectural discourse, not a series of disengaged academic texts, but a personal effort.

Architecture is typically fluent in descriptions of process that are deterministic or that can be named by form or geometry. Activity is often turned to attract or express in forms representative of dynamism. With computer tools, for instance, it is often the software environment and its representational virtuality rather than the organizations behind the screen that are most attractive. Or network fascinations seem scripted by the rather positivistic agendas of midcentury cybernetics and the more recursive organizations that they favored. Process operations are routine in architectural practice but are usually performed without identification or in support of what is regarded as the real artistic product, one which has some kind of representational currency.

The goal for the investigation is to rethink the specific structure of contemporary space, which is undergoing increasing dissolution and fragmentation and which would no longer be manifested as form—a literal, recognizable framed figure—but as a progressively abstract system defined by combinatory and open relationing of fluxes and strata. Conceiving of an architecture not in the production of statis but instead a network of material and immaterial events: infrastructural networks and interrelated places in their most physical form. A complex multiscale and detypified system that is only orientable in qualitative terms with the help of flexible and tactical commands—with room for evolution and distortion. Open devices that express through process rather than closed compositions. “Form is to be reconceptualized as a condition conductive to certain outcomes, certain possibilities of activity and habitation. Form is instigator of performances and responses, a frame that suggests rather than fixes, that maps or diagrams possibilities that will be realized only partially at any one time.” [1] With dynamics of a present-day reality in constant change, the durability implicit in traditional architectural practice is in question. Any attempt at permanent definition is obsolete and, in its place, only a prospective planning seems to constitute a means of control for changing programs.

My proposal is to study a series of large-scale, tertiary buildings. Macrobuildings, microcities. Representing an architecture that tends increasingly to respond to circumstances with temporary formalizations, these complexes set out to adapt themselves strategically to functional movements and are conceived as basic mechanisms of regeneration. Their designs are based on dimensional modulation—atectonic values and void as an expression of extreme flexibility. There are no inert built surroundings and their materialization is not a final result, but rather a first configuration of a process that will develop through time.

One can have a certain flexibility. Flexibility is a major discussion subject, and idea of the 1960s, where one thought that every user could do what he wanted, and so produce variable results. Now, this flexibility is considered as being more a flexibility in time, not provided to manage in an idealistic way by users but created by various layers of diverse systems that provide varying solutions spread over time.

Notes

[1] K. Michael Hays, introduction to Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).