Francesc Magrinyà wrote on his article “Inhabited Infrastructures: Plaça de les Glòries, an Urban Centrality?” that the Glòries flyover and its evolution is a paradigmatic case in the design of centralities. Andhe added that to this day, it is a space of unconscious experimentation.

Following the recent competition to design the public space at Plaça de les Glòries Catalans and the public presentation of the ten proposals, we want to revisit this interesting article first published on Quaderns #261 “After the Party”

Plaça de les Glòries, una centralitat urbana? by Quaderns

/// More info: Les Gloriès
/// Public presentation of the ten proposals and round table organized by ArquinFAD, COAC and Cambra d’empreses de serveis professionals a la construcció. More info, here.
/// Header image, pic from the cover of Quaderns #261 “After the Party” [fragment]. Photomontage by Adrià Goula.

More than ever, architecture treats infrastructure as its object of desire. But, as is always the case in such affairs, we find that this intensity obscures both infrastructure and architecture’s relationship to it.

How has infrastructure come into vogue, and what does it mean for architects? To understand the vector uniting both fields today and prognosticate the near future requires that we trace that their trajectory over the last century.

Modern architects understood themselves as planners, imposing a new, rational spatial order on the world. For them, infrastructural technologies were the foundation on which the new order would be built. On the first page of Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier declared that “the engineer puts us in accord with natural law. He achieves harmony”. Upon that foundation, the architect could create “an order which is a pure creation of the spirit”.[1] This becoming infrastructural of the world was equivalent to its modernization. But modernity was a condition of becoming, not being. Once the last traces of the old regimes vanished and the world was modernized, we entered into postmodernity. With this transition, too, society began to shift from an economy based on production to an economy based on information.

There is no clearer marker in the transition from modernity to postmodernity than 1968, the point at which it became clear that the older, production-oriented model of modernization could no longer sustain the long economic boom nor satisfy a populace alienated by its rationalizing tendencies. The postmodernity of the next 25 years was a confused time, an interregnum in which a new condition was emerging, even though its dimensions could not yet adequately be understood. In this context, a generation of postmodern architects set out to address what they understood as, first and foremost, a crisis of meaning, abandoning the idea of planning large-scale interventions and turning to small-scale interventions and semiotic strategies for communicating with the public.

In 1999, reflecting on this turn of events, Stan Allen offered up infrastructure as a means of resuscitating the material practice of architecture. Eloquently synthesizing the intellectual trends among the neo-avant-garde architects of the day, Allen called for a renewed practice of architecture based on infrastructural ambition, a practice that would allow architecture to turn away from the dead end it had reached as a discursive practice, returning it to its status as a discipline concerned with material. Eschewing both modernism’s excesses and postmodernism’s obsession with the local and idiosyncratic, infrastructural urbanism instead embraced the basic organizational strategies of network culture of our day: instead of singular, overarching plans, it turned to emergent, bottom-up schemes, produced by countless actors.[2]

As practised, however, infrastructural urbanism has drifted away from such forward-looking ideals and indulged itself in an unhealthy relationship with modernism. Too frequently, contemporary infrastructural urbanism consists mainly of modern infrastructure retrofitted for the purposes of tourism. Take the High Line in New York City, for example, which opened in 2009 and is perhaps the most celebrated instance of infrastructural urbanism to date. Here Diller Scofidio + Renfro, together with James Corner Field Architects, grafted a meandering landscape onto an abandoned elevated freight railroad built in the 1920s. This sort of strategy seems to be more and more common these days as we try to find a way to live with the ruins of the recent past, a modernity that, in T. J. Clark’s words, has become our antiquity, a crucial reference point for us, no longer directly comprehendible.[3]

Just as Rome left its aqueducts and sewers behind after it collapsed, so modern infrastructures remain among us. Many of these infrastructures still serve us, but slowly bridges are declared unsafe, railroads cease to run and highways become potholed. Now, there is nothing wrong per se with the High Line, and the sort of imaginative reuse that Gary Paige undertook in his retrofit of an old railway depot into the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles in 2001 is to be applauded, but too often retrofit is postmodern, concerned with creating tourist attractions out of the ruins of the modern.

Governments want little to do with infrastructure anymore. Of course, from time to time, a bullet train is built, and new airport terminals are an inevitable necessity for global cities, but the short event horizon of recent investment compounded with the rampant fear that new infrastructure might impact property values or result in higher taxes actively represses new infrastructural construction.[4] Allen is right in saying that by abandoning infrastructure, architects have contributed to its defunding.[5] As he puts it: “If architects assert that signs and information are more important than infrastructure, why would bureaucrats or politicians disagree?” A forward-looking infrastructural urbanism can certainly help accustom the broader population to thinking about infrastructure again.

But more than this, a forward-looking infrastructural urbanism would seek to understand not only modern infrastructural systems but also systems more appropriate to network culture.

In his “Postscript on Control Societies”, Gilles Deleuze outlines how power has changed its mode of operation, from the (modern) model of operating through enclosures to the contemporary model in which it operates through endless modulations. Notwithstanding that Deleuze’s aim is to critique such forms of power, those states can be understood as dominant spatial regimes that architects need to grasp and work with. Indeed, infrastructural urbanism is already a step in the right direction, less a matter of discrete spaces and more the construction of variations within fields formed by—and forming—infrastructures.[6]

But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations that govern our society are increasingly invisible. Like it or not, just as industry once took over from agriculture, finance has come to dominate economies across the globe. We all need to eat, we all need to dress in clothes and inhabit houses, but economies are increasingly governed by the financial sector and its demands. Nor does finance find itself easily grounded: trading floors across the world are emptying out, unable to keep up with the ultra-rapid movements of liquidity in anonymous facilities such as the NYSE Euronext installations in Mahwah, New Jersey, and Basildon, a suburb east of London.

The financial services sector reflects our condition of living in Hertzian space—the cloud of electromagnetic signals that surrounds us—as much as in physical space. Take a look at a city street: passers-by relentlessly text each other, listen to music on their iPods, navigate with geolocative devices or talk on wireless phones.

Physicists tell us that electromagnetic forces are far more powerful than gravity (a tiny magnet holds up a paperclip against the entire gravity of the Earth). As I write this, destroyed nuclear power plants smoulder on Japan’s Pacific coast, carving out vast exclusion zones across the island nation’s inland territory. Proponents of infrastructural urbanism often cite flocking conditions exhibited by birds, marine mammals and other animals as examples of the sort of effects they wish to achieve, embracing both the individual and the collective, autonomous agency and massive change. But these behaviours are not made solely according to a genetically encoded rule set. Rather, they are done with reference to the invisible but very real electromagnetic world. Even though we cannot directly perceive the electromagnetic spectrum, the way we have reshaped its modulations impacts the behaviour of such creatures. It is time for architects to understand that the structures of infrastructural modernity are just so many ruins and, in conceiving of new infrastructures for the millennium, to learn how to embrace the new modulated world of invisible fields.

References

[1] Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture. New York, Dover Publications, 1986, p. 1.

[2] Stan Allen: “Infrastructural Urbanism”, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 48–57.

[3] T. J. Clark: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 3.

[4] I cover this condition in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Barcelona, ACTAR, 2008.

[5] Stan Allen: ibid., p. 51.

[6] Gilles Deleuze: “Postscript on Control Societies”, Negotiations. New York, Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 177-182.

Martial arts employ two groups of techniques, the hard and the soft. Hard techniques involve striking an opponent head-on with maximum force and are improved by physical strength and conditioning. Hard responses to hard attacks involve blocks and diagonal cuts across the path of the oncoming assault. Soft techniques, on the other hand, are concerned with harnessing and redirecting the energy of an opponent to both disarm and attack, and require flexibility and skill. Jujitsu, of all the martial arts, elevates softness (ju) to the level of an art (jitsu).

For its adherents, jujitsu is superior to all hard techniques because of a familiar philosophical inversion—the greatest hardness can only be achieved through its opposite. “The word ‘flexible’ never means weakness but something more akin to adaptability and open-mindedness. Gentleness always overcomes strength.” [1] Rather than an expectation of ever-increasing levels of energy to overcome a given situation, jujitsu requires a willingness to redirect energy and therefore to invent a response that suits the form of the attack.

In a 21st-century mature city like London, urbanity is the existing condition. Vast amounts of energy have been expended over centuries to create the dense structures in which the city’s inhabitants go about their daily business. In this context, 19th-century railway lines represent an extreme of hard technique. Cutting across streets, squares, parks and rivers, they achieve their goal with brutal muscularity. Mass access into the hearts of dense populations was created with a violence that, 150 years on, there is neither the political nor the economic appetite to match.

Jujitsu urbanism might describe a 21st-century approach to contending with the potential energy of the contemporary city. Rather than meeting problems of migration, densification, contraction, transportation and poverty with the kinetic energy of wrecking balls, piling, formwork and heavy lifting, an art of gentle energy redeployment could be adopted. The strength of the jujitsu analogy lies precisely in its violent origins. Too often in urban debates, any notion of subtlety, flexibility or adaptability of technique is perceived as being ultimately weak—confirmation of the Victorians’ greatness in contrast with our relative lack of backbone and, ultimately, an acquiescence to the inevitable decline of cities. Jujitsu urbanism, on the other hand, having been informed by centuries of Samurai warriors, is battle-proven to defeat head-on onslaughts.

References

[1] Carl, Peter: “David Kohn’s ‘Hedgehog and the Fox’ lecture and exhibition at the London Met”, The Architects’ Journal, no. 10, 229 (19 March 2009), pp. 48-49.

* This is an abridged version of an article first published in issue five of MADE, the journal of the Welsh School of Architecture.
** Photo by Will Pryce

davidkohn.co.uk

AM I was just finishing my degree. I worked with Josep Lluis Mateo for a year, during the competition that was organized for Quaderns. After completing my final year project, I went back to his practice in 1985. Then I started working for Barcelona City Council, in Urban Projects. That was the second phase of my career. With Mateo, our reflections centred more on works of architecture, whereas the approach at Urban Projects was somewhat different.

There, we were dealing with a series of reflections and knowledge about public space. Rafael Cáceres was there too, a man with vision and a very considered approach, sometimes bordering on urban engineering. The city was seen not as a sum of things but as something more mass produced—that is, the point of departure was that the city doesn’t always have to be an invention, that a series of common elements can serve to piece together the city rather than allowing individual architects to introduce whatever they want, generating a city that is a collection of disparate elements.

Q This issue of Quaderns is refered to the year 1993. Were you working at Urban Projects during the Olympic years?

We built non-Olympic Barcelona. At Urban Projects, we were involved in other works, such as the remodelling of Meridiana and Carrer de Ferran. In these projects rather than inventing a world out of nothing, which is a frequent temptation, the idea was to piece together public space using common elements.

Q After your time at Urban Projects, you worked for the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona…

Yes, I worked at Urban Projects from 1988 to 2004. Then there was an opening at AMB. The concept of city was a similar one, but at a metropolitan scale with its corresponding viewpoint, involving not just major works and urban interventions but also the smaller scale. Ultimately, it is also these small spaces that go to make up the city.

Sometimes impressive architecture is not actually capable of creating city fabric.

Q It doesn’t add much…

No. I think that a good building is capable of generating similar operations by means of positive influence. Coderch’s building in La Barceloneta is judiciously inserted and well designed; the one next to it strives to do the same and create city fabric, but some other buildings are quite the opposite, they serve only to disfigure.

Q What about the case of Montgat?

My first impression was of the road. Rather than seeing a place, I saw a road cutting through a town. If you drive there from Barcelona, you come off the motorway and there is nothing there: a minor junction, a cutting in the hillside, embankments, guardrails, hoardings, closed-down buildings with no commercial bustle, a language of the roadside. But it was probable good that the place had all these negative connotations. As work advanced, I discovered just how singular the location was; a raised vantage point like this simply doesn’t occur anywhere on the coast road. There are points along it where you could be anywhere and then, suddenly, comes this vantage point with vistas of the sea, a raised vantage point like this simply doesn’t occur anywhere on the Maresme coast road.

Then, gradually, realized that the road was not just that strip but also a series of spaces around it, the project grew and the result became more interesting. Our first step was to carry out a study of the trunk road in the urban area of Montgat, which is a singular municipality. On the one hand, you have the sea, on the other, infrastructures. It is run through by the railway line, the motorway and the national trunk road. It is also very bitty; one part is a continuation of Badalona, the other stretches away towards the hillside, on the other side of the motorway. The idea was to make the trunk road permeable again, turning it into an artery that brings together all of these points. Regarding the construction of the project, mostly in the stops and vantage point areas, there is a significant focus on materials. Concrete as a flexural element has the opposite formalization to the walls, which work by means of gravity, following the slope of the terrain. The project sets out to explain the way each material works.

Q Economy of resources is another issue.

That’s right. The quality materials are concentrated at singular points, in the kerbstones, in the no parking areas, in elements subject to more wear and tear, requiring greater resistance. The rest uses relatively economical, prefabricated materials—concrete panel, gabions. I have nothing against the world of engineering; a well constructed motorway is a thing of beauty. I’ve learned a lot from the well designed motorways of the 1970s, like the A2, with its guardrails, and so on.

Q To date, you’ve always worked on rehabilitation or remodelling projects, things that already exist, improving the situation of something.

There’s something beautiful in the act of construction, which is exploiting the moment. When you’re constructing a project you become aware, suddenly, of something that had gone unnoticed. For example, the curve at the highest level of the Montgat project. There was a tree there. On site, we saw that it could be incorporated into the project, as a space in the final stretch. We discovered there’s a school near the site and when people drop their children off they stay around, chatting. So we extended the slope and transformes it into a small plaza. tris only comes from capturing the moment.

DVS “Architecture has to do with order and disorder, with the rule and the exception to the rule. We are interested in subjecting our laws to pressure, finding the moment of indefinable poetry within a harsh set of rules. The unexpected is very important, the exception within the system, showing that the system has faults; the struggle to make things perfect where they never can be.”

“We learned from Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros, and they of course took that from Alejandro de la Sota, that architecture is about intention and not about invention. You try to show the intentions you have towards reality but you do not need to reinvent the world nor to reinvent architecture.”

After the Party

K.G. “The question was: How do you show architecture in a biennale? We immediately thought of putting an enormous wall around the existing pavilion. We wanted to make architecture, not just an installation, a demarcation of a limit. Architecture is about perimeters, architecture as an obstruction makes things possible. It brings hierarchy and organization. Outside is the circus of the Biennale, inside you have all this beautiful, colorful confetti, but it is melancholic at the same time.”

Buggenhout Villa

K.G. “The functional concept of organization is disconnected from the way you live in your house. In old urban mansions one sees how they have been organized in very different ways throughout the years. Sometimes they have become separate flats or a living room has become a bedroom. Everything goes so fast…We believe form should not follow function.”

“Housing Block in Ciudad Vella — Josep LLinàs”
pp. 70-74

Photograph: Jordi Bernadó
p. 74

Recuperamos en este primer número una fotografía tomada por Jordi Bernadó recogida en la revista Quaderns 203, pág. 74. La cámara se detiene un instante sobre un espacio urbano en transformación, durante la construcción del edificio de viviendas de la calle del Carme, núm. 55, obra de Josep Llinàs i Carmona. La imagen fue publicada el año 1993.

PDF: Quaderns #203 “Housing Block in Ciudad Vella — Josep LLinàs”