Returning to Site

Earlier this year or I suppose last year, I briefly touched on the relation of site and architecture. Recently I stumbled upon David Heyman’s essay “Site, Ascendant”, which explores the evolution of site in architectural design and makes a compelling argument against the post modernist disregard of site.

Heyman’s essay begins with a brief summation of the various interpretations of site relationships in the land art movement of the late 60’s and 70’s and notes that the “ site is a source of experience that is perceived meaningful because it remains authentic and intransmutable” and this continues to be recognized today. He makes an important distinction that even though the projects are considering the ‘natural’ environment, they are most concerned with site-”nature is subtopic”. Analyzing these assemblies outside of the assumed concern of the surrounding environment sheds a new definition to “environmental art”. Heyman articulates that, “[within Environmental Art] environment refers to clarifying experience within the larger frame of a landscape and not the environment as a biological system” and the responsibility to site surroundings is not necessarily concerned with ecological responsibility. An easily identifiable example is the recent work of James Turrell, Heyman looks to the Roden Crater project and cleverly likens the construction process to having a similar carbon footprint of a bird watcher traveling by plane to view a new species who, “could never imagine being against the environment.” To conceive of Roden Crater, another chapter in Turrell’s decade long fascination with “celestial art”, described as a “a place where humans can meet the sky and revel in space and light” as construction site creates a completely different sort of space in my mind.

Heyman gives a brief overview of the evolution of the site as setting to the site as source with examples of ordinary sites transformed by the responses of the architect. He gives the example of the Greenbelt house, designed by Ralph Ranson as a design case study. Although the house was never built, the innovative design which joined(or separated) the private and communal spaces of the house with interior green-space, continues to influence modern building design. On it’s relationship to the generic site of a measured lot Heyman remarks, “The house is self-sufficient: it has no problem with the anonymity of its location, which merely provides the setting for its normative activities.”

A few buildings are noted and the author ends with a lively critique of the post-modernist argument of the buildings “long standing rules of behavior in the landscape”. Through a range of project examples, Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, and Gehry’s Dancing House, Heyman explores the various ways designers are “resolving and working out the Modern Method”. He looks to OMA’s Seattle Public Library, designed with the specifications of “anywhere-ness”, but finds contradiction in the buildings’ volume and viewpoints that are entirely site specific.

Buildings will always consider site, wether it is important to the architect or not. The idea of Koolhaas’ concept of “anywhere-ness” can successfully apply to the prefab home but when it is placed on the measured subdivision lot it gains a setting that affects how people experience their indoor and outdoor environment.

Sacred City

Hester is noted for his strong conviction in the sacred landscape. In the “Sacredness” chapter in Design for Eco. Democracy, he further explores his ideas through the famous Manteo,NC study.


In the center of Hester’s ideal city form emerges sacredness of place. Hester articulates the process of seeing sacredness in the landscape through the defining lens of symbolism(place represents a virtue or events and synesthesia(similar to another place) and topophilia(love of place).
Hester argues that integrating the identification of sacred places within the community planning process is very important to the vitality and future of the community. He characterizes sacred places and spaces by four qualities:

Recurring Center:
center of city, a neighborhood, “identified by people as inviolable,frequently as a source of shared experience ,personal orientation and identity”

Natural Boundary:
dependent on area of reference, certain topographical,hydrological,ect. characteristics that delineate development from undeveloped land,water,ect.
“In Manteo, the boundary is created by the Shallowbag Bay and wetlands”

Connectedness:
“Connectedness to other people,landscape,family and community traditions..More subconsciously revealing is the designation of places of myth and transcendence as sacred”

Particularness:
“Formal expression of the unique characteristics of a community” This can be attributed to century old traditions or from “the forces of nature or technology are mollified or employed”..or a combination.

Hester further explicates this idea in the 1980 community revitalization project in Manteo,NC., where community participation was key in the planning and design process. In the Manteo project, residents identified what places where sacred to them:structures,businesses,churches; many places that were part of the daily community routine. The author goes on to boldly state, that the “loss of such places would reorder or destroy something or some social process essential to the community’s collective being”. Designers then mapped these sacred places and through this process created a a 20 year plan that reinvented the community while still retaining the buildings and businesses deemed sacred by the residents. The mapping process provided an opportunity for community participation as well as significant information for designers. The long term plan was inspired by what was important to the community. For example, designers identified the importance of the ‘front porch culture’ in Manteo and applied this concept to the civic and waterfront areas by creating a series of medium sized spaces(porch scale) and connecting them with a boardwalk system. Hester also sites the Kiyomizudera in Kyoto and Thorncrown Chapel in Arkansas as sacred built environments that are, “inspired by the landscape and it’s communities highest values.”

(http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc95/to150/p107.html)



While this “sacred structure” mapping process was successful in Manteo, it’s difficult to imagine how it work at an urban scale. However there is possibility the method could be applicable at a neighborhood scale and then in turn create a stronger awareness of the city’s needs and values. In the mid 1990’s, Philadelphia was turning to a new strategic urban planning proposal that incorporated neighborhood participation and GIS. They looked to the successful Manteo project and noted by the authors of Urbanizing GIS:Philadelphia's Strategy to Bring GIS to Neighborhood Planning, “Although the circumstances are vastly different when mapping Philadelphia's urban neighborhoods, the same kind of awareness of the components of their environment can help make neighborhood residents aware of their community values and solidify them behind proposals, and opportunities for change.”

A current example of city-wide participation is Vancouver,(who adopted City Plan in 1995) where success was achieved through surveys,meetings,ect. A few years later the city adopted the “Community Visions” program which focused on the needs of the city at an individual neighborhood level and integrated “community needs and aspirations”. The Community Visions program has been very successful and in Fall 2010, all of Vancouver's neighborhoods had participated.

If the “sacred structure” mapping is indeed an important step for community revitalization and future planning, as Hester suggests and as shown in the Manteo project, there needs to be more case studies in the neighborhood, town, and city scale.

Good Write-up of "Small Scale,Big Change" at MOMA

http://www.architectmagazine.com/exhibitions/small-scale-minor-letdown.aspx

Exhibition Page

Reevaluating Urban Form

I have just begun reading Design for Ecological Democracy by Randy Hester, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design at UC Berkely and author of several community planning texts.  In a nutshell, the book is about redefining and recreating the American city. This remade city would be ecologically and socially integrated and concerned with local knowledge and community participation.


In the Introduction,Hester critiques current American urban development and design; and points to it as the underlying critical issue that has destroyed the ‘sense of community’ and ecological richness in our cities and has lead to environmental crisis. “City makers continues to design urban areas more and more the same and less and less particular to to the vegetative mosaics,microclimates,air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles. We still call resulting urban wildfires,energy shortages and flood damage “natural disasters"(Hester 2).

With the same basic argument of many(many,many) Hester discusses the disconnect from surrounding nature caused by technology,the automobile,poor planning,ect. However while this remains an obvious problem in the developed world, I feel his argument could be a bit more thorough and..recent. He calls for a response of applied ecology and democracy(hence the books title) which  leads to “actions guided by understanding natural processes and social relationships within our locality and larger environmental context”, and there fore a new urban ecology (Hester 4).


He introduces "3 fundamental roots to reformulate better cities":
1. our cities and landscapes must enable us to act where we are now debilitated(which according to Hester is almost everywhere down to our un-anchored soul)
2.) our cities and landscapes must be made to withstand short term shocks to which both are vulnerable.
3.) our cities and landscapes must be alluring rather than simply consumptive or conversely,limiting.


This new thought foundation is encompassed by a "global design process" which is participatory,scientific and adventuresome (Hester 8).


Successful and productive design is::
-inspired by local environmental processes
-ecologically and culturally diverse
-contextually response


to be cont....

Defining Environmental Architecture

This week I sped forward through the literature from early 70's to arrive at the present debate of sustainable design:What is sustainable? How do you design sustainably? ect. ect. Living in the age of "green washing", where for  every product there seems to exist an alternative that is natural, organic, green, eco-friendly, many don't question the actual defining parameters of these terms

In,Taking Shape:A New Contract between Architecture and Nature, author Susannah Hagan calls for a  redefinition of sustainable architecture.  Hagan argues that creating a new sustainable design process based upon environmental ethic and not aesthetics will ultimately fail.  She introduces three criteria which engage with environmental design and can act as tools to examine the idea of "sustainable".

1-Symbiosis: considers the building's life cycle and recognises the dynamic interrelated system of the environment

2-Differentiation: "considers whether biological diversity implies cultural diversity". 
Looks to  architectural diversity and what environmental advantage may be gained by pursuing it.

3-Visibility: "considers if all existing forms and theories are the only options”.

“The criterion of ‘visibility’ therefore asks whether this push towards conscious signification should not be included in environmental architecture.  The issues of visibility pushes beyond architecture made sustainable:it marks out the ground on which some environmental architecture doubles back to architecture as art, that is to directed expression.”

Also, included in the reading in the chapter, “Rules of Engagement”,  Hagan argues for a a restructuring of the BREEAM rating system, which is Britain’s equivalent to the U.S. LEED evaluating system.  While the argument is a bit outdated at present,  since this publication the BREEAM system has revamped their criterion for buildings achieving rated status, Hagan holds the same stance on the issue as many LEED skeptics to in the United States.  Hagan contends that the rating system is superficial and undemanding and, “the most problematic aspect of the award, however, is the fact that is based on work done at design stage and not when the building is up and running”.  She calls for a more holistic design and building approach:

“A symbiotic relationship is only possible if the building flights entropy like a natural system ,blurring the line between the man made and the given”.

Earlier this year, Frank Ghery defended his criticism of the LEED rating system in the U.S:

Ghery believes sustainable building concerns to be too “political” and LEED awards superficial and “bogus” in nature. While a skeptic of the LEED rating system myself, I am a proponent of sustainable design and believe there must be accountability in the design/build/operation. To call these issues political is unreasonable and "short sighted".

Good write up on Ghery:

 http://inhabitat.com/2010/05/11/frank-gehry-calls-sustainable-design-political/

ECT.
"Green wash" critique

Thankfully, there are still those who disagree with Ghery...

http://inhabitat.com/2010/11/16/spanish-highrise-keeps-its-cool-under-a-double-skin/#more-186992

On Robert Smithson:Heterotopia,Entropy,Language

In Chapter 3 of Earthworks, Susan Boetteger introduces Foucault's idea of "heterotopia" and its connection to earth work sites.

Foucault defines “heterotopia” in his 1986 article "Of Other Spaces":

“Places of these kind are outside of all places,even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them by the way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias”

Boetteger also employs  Foucault's description, while initially used to describe social institutions, as applicable to art works which “simultaneously represent, contest and invert” not only only literal vertical,circumscribed masses but also the social ideal of sculptured monuments”.

Video on Heterotopia

entropy_

(Smithson Interview on Entropy)

Robert Smithson provides a prime example of an artist who embraced Foucaultian ideas of place and projected them into his in his sculptured environments. His fascination with entropy in the physical landscape through unnatural processes is investigated by Boetteger and became of keen interest to myself.  The author explains his compulsion with entropy as related to the death of Smithson's older brother, who died before Smithson was born. Boetteger argues that being a  "replacement child" led him to his "morbid preoccupation with the topic of death and with naturally occurring catastrophes". Critics also argue that Smithson’s connection to entropy can also be related to his brother’s death from cancer: the body's interior and exterior entropic disintegration.

quick "entropic architecture" video (slightly silly)

In his earlier work, Smithson maintained a preference towards  crystalline structures and process rather than that of organic shapes and materials. In 1966 Smithson’s story, “Crystal Land” was published in Harper's Bazaar and chronicled a “rock hunting adventure” with his wife and another couple. This acted as the first publicised proclamation of his shifting interest from “discrete crystals to that of desolate land”. This was an important move in Smithson’s career that went  on to influence his later and most important works.

toward the development of an air terminal site_

Towards the end of  Chapter 3, Boettger goes on to critique Smithson's essay entitled “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” which was written during the fated collaboration between Smithson and the T.A.M.S. development group in the late 60’s.  Boetteger refers to the essay as a ,“a very ambitious piece, suffering from its juxtaposition of abstract thinking and only prosaic data…[the only thing to be extracted] was impressively detailed substantiation”.

I decided to review the article for myself. 

I was  immediately puzzled by the disjuncture of subject matter and contextual references. Smithson wanted to create  a new kind of building that brought together “anthropology and linguistics through an esthetic methodology”. (in which non site provides an obvious model)   However, he does not clearly explain how he is going to combine these disciplines. Smithson also fills the essay with tables and numerical data that dissect the text and create a piece that is difficult to navigate and therefore challenging comprehend the entirety of his conclusive(or non conclusive) ideas.

inbetween pt 2_BOUNDARY

Within the text, Land and Environmental Art, the prefacing survey by Bryan Wallis discusses how social practices can determine and evolutionize the site and therefore the experience. In the section, “Radical Dislocation”, Wallis characterizes early earthworks as “based upon on geographical or economic decentering..that were mostly urban oriented and were concerned with patterns of everyday life as well as the social organizations of space.” Projects such as Stanley Brouwns’s “This Way Brouwn” in which Brouwn instructed strangers to draw maps to varied locations addressed these new conceptual spatial interpretations.

Frieze Magazine provides a thoughtful review of Brouwn’s 2005 retrospective a the Van Abbe Museum that best captures Brouwn’s relationship with spatial representation and recording:

“This remarkable retrospective of this peripatetic artist’s career afforded an opportunity not only to reconsider Brouwn’s often overlooked work, with its origins in 1960s Conceptualism, but also to reflect on the legacy of that tradition in an age that seems less concerned with that period’s major preoccupations. Among these could be cited: the dematerialization of the work; the impersonality of creative processes, or the disappearance of the author; and, like the experimental literary group Oulipo, an interest in contingent rules and the permutations of a simple pattern. All of these things also appear in contemporary work, but today the focus seems to be on the personal life and self-exhibition, a desire to be immersed in experience without mediation, and the flaunting of rules, systems and codes.
Brouwn’s habitual obsessions are with geography, distance and direction, scale, measure and dimension. He is a meticulous recorder, giving every indication of keeping his counter and measuring stick close at hand. Between 1960 and 1964 he produced the seminal series ‘This Way Brouwn’, asking passers-by to sketch for him on paper the way from A to B, then appropriating their drawing by adding his stamp ‘This Way Brouwn’. Whether the artist is dealing with his own meanderings, comparing different units of measurement –1 royal cubit: old egyptian measuring unit of length 2500 b.c. (1998) and division of 1m and 1 wari (kenya) according to the golden section (1994) – proposing short walks in the direction of world cities – walk 4m in the direction of havana distance: 7396584.7166m (2005), measured from the very spot where you standing in the museum – or detailing in exact terms what lies behind a square metre section of the museum wall – ‘a 28mm cushion of air separates brick from sand-lime brick’ (1x1m wall exhibition space van abbemuseum eindhoven, 1979-2005) – a cool passion for precision seems to reign."

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Wallis likens Brouwn’s mapping as well as other project confronting traditional ideas of spatial analysis, to what Edward Soja’s “spatialization of cultural politics, a radical rethinking of the intersections between social relations, space and the body..Soja cites in particular, French Sociologist Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices to describe the way a physical place is embodied through social actions, such as peoples movements through it. Certeau’s analysis allows one to recognize in the work of 1960s Conceptual Artist ‘the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of the groups or individual s already caught in the nets of the discipline”. These ideas of the site understood through its social activation became important to understanding and recreating the vernacular landscape. Many of the artists where confronting or addressing “specific historical and social environmental contexts even as they transformed the space”.

 Dennis Oppenhiem’s Annual Rings, an earthwork that involved the artist etching concentric rings into the ice on the U.S.-Canada border. Oppenheim’s photographic documentation of Annual Rings is currently part of the Measure of Time Exhibit at the UC Berkley Art Museum  and below is the curator's description of the photos:

“Cutting back and forth across the boundary line, his massive artistic marks on the land (certainly mocking the Abstract Expressionist–era dominance of the artist’s gesture) not only breached political borders, but also traversed time zones."

The concept of “geopolitical boundaries” in land art is especially interesting to me because of my mild obsession with mapping. The idea of moving along and redefining physical and conceptual boundary lines coupled with the realization that natural processes  would shortly reestablish their own permanence and boundaries was a central concept in earthworks and spatial representation in the landscape.

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