Small scale, big change. At MOMA, New York

¨Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience. That’s the message behind “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people. Not incidentally, it is also part of a philosophical shift in the museum’s architecture and design department, which, for most of the eight decades since its founding by Philip Johnson, famously championed architecture’s artistic merits over its social value.

Given that, the big surprise of the show is that so many of the projects are actually good. Organized by Andres Lepik and Margot Weller, the exhibition makes a powerful case that it is possible to create work that is both socially uplifting and architecturally compelling. It’s a notion that dominated architectural thought for much of the first half of the 20th century but that seems so out of keeping with the ethos of the practice today, particularly in New York, that it’s almost jarring.

The show opens with a subtle but clear political message. A wall in the first gallery is dominated by a big photograph of a mud-brick primary school shaded by a cluster of trees in an otherwise barren landscape in Burkina Faso. Designed by Diébédo Francis Kéré and completed in 2001, it’s an appealing building, with a wood truss roof that has the lightness of a tree canopy. But the first impression is of something precariously close to a cliché of socially committed architecture.¨

REFERENCE: Excerpt from the article Real-Life Design: Erecting Solutions to Social Problems. By Nicolai Ouroussoff. For New York Times. Pictures downloaded from the article.

Keep on reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/arts/design/15change.html

Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85

Mandelbrot´s fractal, generated by Myriam B. Mahiques

All researchers on urban morphology must know Mandelbrot´s name, the mathematician who invented the term ¨fractal¨ and who clearly explained the fractals´ properties: complexity, a fine structure, autosimilarity.

Today, I´ve learnt that he has died. One could think that some genious would never die........ Here, more examples of autosimilarity that I developed with Fractal Explorer and the full article from New York Times.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.

His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.

Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”

In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”

For most of his career, Dr. Mandelbrot had a reputation as an outsider to the mathematical establishment. From his perch as a researcher for I.B.M. in New York, where he worked for decades before accepting a position at Yale University, he noticed patterns that other researchers may have overlooked in their own data, then often swooped in to collaborate.

“He knew everybody, with interests going off in every possible direction,” Professor Mumford said. “Every time he gave a talk, it was about something different.”

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot said. “I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.”

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (he added the middle initial himself, though it does not stand for a middle name) was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools.

After the war he enrolled in the École Polytechnique in Paris, where his sharp eye compensated for a lack of conventional education. His career soon spanned the Atlantic. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, returned to Paris for his doctorate in mathematics in 1952, then went on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for a postdoctoral degree under the mathematician John von Neumann.

After several years spent largely at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Dr. Mandelbrot was hired by I.B.M. in 1958 to work at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Although he worked frequently with academic researchers and served as a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was not until 1987 that he began to teach at Yale, where he earned tenure in 1999.

Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.”

Besides his wife, Dr. Mandelbrot is survived by two sons, Laurent, of Paris, and Didier, of Newton, Mass., and three grandchildren.

When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=2

New Songdo City

¨Approached from the 7 1⁄2-mile-long suspension bridge connecting to the airport, NSC emerges from the coastal fog like a mirage. The most striking feature is KPF’s 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower, South Korea’s tallest building to date. Multiblock housing by HOK and the tree-studded Central Park gradually come into focus as the air clears. But they vie for attention with vast stretches of still-empty land and the broad boulevards binding everything together. Already well trafficked, the roads are the most visibly populated part of town. Though NSC has yet to acquire the vibe of a bustling urban center, it is also hard to imagine that only a few years ago, the 1,500-acre reclaimed site did not exist.

While South Korea has been engaged in large-scale landfill construction since the 1970s, necessitated by a shortage of buildable area near the nation’s capital, the impetus for building NSC came after the South Korean economy hit the skids in 1997. At the urging of the International Monetary Fund, the South Korean government designated the site as a free economic zone with a full-fledged city to attract foreign investment. To jump-start the influx of money from abroad, the government made an unprecedented move by selling the land to this private, international joint venture and putting the new owners in charge of the city’s development. “Basically, it is a free-market experiment,” says KPF principal James von Klemperer, FAIA.

Given its lack of overseas experience, Gale was an unlikely partner for POSCO. But the challenge and opportunity to build a whole city from scratch — schools, museums, shopping, and entertainment, as well as housing and offices — was too good for the American developer to pass up.

The firm’s approach entailed synthesizing a number of complex conditions, such as building codes and infrastructure elements prescribed by local authorities; programmatic requirements stipulated by the client with guidance from the South Korean government; and common market practices, including the South Korean penchant for multilane roads and megablocks many times the size of their Manhattan counterparts. Not to mention an ambitious conceptual agenda that championed architectural innovation and sustainability. “Because NSC is a kind of entrance to South Korea and meant to showcase the free economic zone, we had high standards for building quality,” explains S.J. Lee, professor of architecture and engineering at Yonsei University and a former government design review board member.

KPF’s design process began with the development of a hypothetical master plan authored by a small team of architects, engineers, and client representatives. Ten new teams then produced 18-blocks worth of building prototypes to probe the scheme’s strengths and weaknesses. “We needed to test densities, scale, and the feeling of material,” explains von Klemperer. Based on the findings, KPF adjusted its model, discarded the temporary architecture, and, in 2004, got approval from South Korean authorities to proceed.

Inspired by precedents from around the globe, KPF’s cityscape brings to mind London’s garden squares, Paris’s tree-lined boulevards, and the canals that once riddled Seoul. As in New York, the heart of the city is Central Park. Adapting traditional South Korean landscaping, KPF’s 100-acre green space incorporates indigenous geographic features in miniature — craggy granite mounds, topiaries shaped like tea bushes, and a saltwater canal symbolizing the country’s extensive waterfront.

A retail and entertainment center designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind

The city’s tent-shaped density distribution peaks near the park, which is ringed with NSC’s tallest buildings. “In every major city, the most expensive real estate surrounds a park,” comments Charles Reid, executive vice president of design and construction at Gale International. Here, too, high-end office and residential towers face its greenery but will taper off as the city propagates outward, ending in a golf course at one end and a hospital at the other.

While this formation will yield a coherent, Manhattan-style skyline, KPF’s “planned heterogeneity” forms the guiding principle at ground level. It consists of a patchwork of distinct neighborhoods, each one traversable on foot in under 15 minutes and linked by public transportation. Within each sector, KPF specified volume and mass restrictions plus street-wall requirements, but left architectural decisions largely up to the local and foreign firms in charge of individual buildings.

“For us, a pedestrian city is the first measure of sustainability,” says von Klemperer. Because green thinking is fairly new to South Korea, the team adopted the American LEED system as its ecological design standard. In addition to designating 40 percent of the land area as open green space, the central, saltwater canal neither utilizes potable water nor freezes in winter, enabling it to host water taxis year-round. And the reuse of gray water plus a citywide, pneumatic garbage collection system are just two ways that NSC will handle waste efficiently. “Sustainability is no longer a footnote,” says Daniel Libeskind, the architect of Riverstone, a 1 1⁄2-million-square-foot shopping center slated to begin soon.

But high-quality, environmentally sensitive architecture and urban planning alone do not a city make. A lot of square footage was built here in a short time, yet NSC still needs a viable downtown where people do business. Despite brisk sales of housing units, the townscape seems underinhabited. Although the international school is poised to open, the city is short on cultural, entertainment, and shopping facilities. And unless the tax code changes, NSC is not likely to become the next Singapore anytime soon. Unquestionably, the economic downturn has not helped the cause. Yet construction has slowed, not stopped. “Based on satellite cities around Seoul, I think it is almost inevitable that people will move here,” says Lee. That may be. But whether NSC will reach its ambitious goals remains to be seen¨.

REFERENCE: 

Paragraphs from Naomi R. Pollock´s article, at Architectural Record.com

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/new_songdo_city/default.asp

St. Bonaventure´s fair, Huntington Beach

Another example of instant settlement: every year, the catholic church of Saint Bonaventure, in Huntington Beach, California, organizes a great fair to raise funds.  The fair lasts a couple of days, and as one of my daughter´s friends put it ¨it is to gather all people we haven´t seen in 10,000 years¨. That was a nice comment, because it´s a kind of true. Everybody is together, regardless religion, celebrating and having fun. The event brings lots of people together and they socialize while playing and eating. Congratulations to St. Bonaventure´s!

All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques

Great Zimbabwe Ruins

Great Zimbabwe ruins, aerial picture. From wayfairing.info

Great Zimbabwe are the largest and most extraordinary ruins in Africa, covering approximately 1800 acres. From this ruins, the modern nation of Zimbabwe took its name.

They are located 30 km beyond the town of Masyngo,   South Eastern Zimbabwe.

The  undulating structures of rectangular granite stones, were built by indigenous African people between AD 1250 and AD 1450 by Bantu speaking ancestors of the Shona.

There are 300 similar complexes in the Zimbabwean plateau, but Great Zimbabwe has an impressive scale; the Great Enclosure (as commonly referred to) has walls of 19.5 feet wide, by 36 feet in height with a length of near 820 feet. This art of building with stone without the use of mortar persisted along the years, so the ¨venerated houses¨ (per the words origin) are numerous.

Entrance. Picture from wayfairing.info

Chambers. Picture from wayfairing.info

Picture from wikipedia.org

Great Zimbabwe was an early example of a state with much political, economic, and military power. With its formation, social and political organization became more hierarchical. This involved a move from village level organization to a larger, broader social and political organization resulting in the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe.

In SXIX, European travelers and English colonizers, stunned by the structures, attributed them to alien powers. Many of these have been severely impacted and almost demolished, at least 50, as a result of the hunger for gold by Europeans.

Picture from exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu

Picture from wayfairing.info

REFERENCE:

Text adapted from:
 http://www.places.co.za/html/greatzim.html

http://www.wayfaring.info/2007/07/10/important-looking-stone-structures-in-great-zimbabwe/

Top 10 Global Cities

New York. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

From The Wall Street Journal, by Emily Peck:

Half the world’s population lives in cities and you can expect that number to grow in the coming years, according to Foreign Policy magazine, which looks at Global Cities in its latest issue. The 21st century will be dominated by the city, writes Parag Khanna. “The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun.”

Just 100 cities account for more than 30% of the world’s economy, Mr. Khanna writes. What’s more, the 21st century will see the rise of the megacity, “megalopolises whose populations are measures in the tens of millions, with jagged skylines that stretch as far as the eye can see.”

What qualifies as a “global city”? A large population, for starters. The magazine looked at 65 cities with populations of more than 1 million. But more important, the magazine says it “aims to measure how much sway a city has over what happens beyond its own borders.” Among other things, the magazine, working with A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Counsel on Global Affairs, looked at how many Fortune Global 500 company headquarters were in a city, the size of its capital markets, and the number of embassies, think tanks, political organizations, and museums.

While FP mainly focuses on what the rise of the cities will mean for diplomacy, statehood and power, we wondered what it means for real estate. In a separate essay in the magazine, Joel Kotkin takes a look at the rise of the city—the megacity in particular—and finds quality of life lacking.

But bigger might no longer mean better. The most advantaged city of the future could well turn out to be a much smaller one. Cities today are expanding at an unparalleled rate when it comes to size, but wealth, power, and general well-being lag behind. With the exception of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo, most cities of 10 million or more are relatively poor, with a low standard of living and little strategic influence.

The Top 10 Most Global Cities

1. New York

2. London

3. Tokyo

4. Paris

5. Hong Kong

6. Chicago

7. Los Angeles

8. Singapore

9. Sydney

10. Seoul
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/09/09/the-top-10-most-global-cities/?KEYWORDS=cities

Marc Augé habla sobre Buenos Aires 2040

Asentamientos bajo la autopista. Foto de Revista Eñe

Marc Augé es un antropólogo francés, nacido en 1935, director de estudios en la Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de París, institución de la que fue presidente entre 1985 y 1995. Algunos de sus libros publicados son "Los no lugares: espacios del anonimato" (1993), "Hacia una antropología de los mundos contemporáneos" (1995), "El viajero subterráneo: Un etnólogo en el metro" (1998), "Ficciones de fin de siglo" (2001), "Diario de guerra: El mundo después del 11 de septiembre" (2002), "El tiempo en ruinas" (2003), "¿Por qué vivimos?" (2004) y "Elogio de la bicicleta" (2009).

El texto que sigue es la reproducción del artículo de Julián Gorodischer, ¨Utopía Negra¨, publicado en la revista de cultura Eñe, sábado 4 de septiembre de 2010:

Es el año 2040, y Buenos Aires se convirtió –según la predicción del antropólogo francés Marc Augé*– en uno de los núcleos de concentración de miseria y riqueza más importantes de Latinoamérica. Estamos ubicados en uno de los no-lugares más tradicionales (el concepto es de su autoría –en Los no lugares, Gedisa, 1993– y refiere a los espacios donde uno permanece anónimo estando en multitud, solo aunque acompañado): el lobby del hotel NH Tango, edificado sobre los restos del extinto cine Metro, ahora sucursal de una cadena que se apropia y extranjeriza el "valor autóctono".

Le propuse a Augé un ejercicio de anticipación, que aceptó con entusiasmo porque ya dedicó lo mismo a la megalópolis de Europa: hagamos de cuenta que ésta, que nos rodea, es la realidad del 2040. Entonces, empieza a especular. "Afuera –dice– hay una ciudad con los problemas de todas las ciudades del nuevo mundo: ya no hay una democracia que mezcle mercado liberal y democracia representativa." ¿Qué hay entonces?

"Se lo estoy diciendo: no una democracia representativa", sigue, "sino una sociedad desigual, una sociedad de clases o análoga a la de Francia de antes de la Revolución Francesa: un polo en el que se concentran la riqueza, el saber, la ciencia y el poder. El poder será la red misma, más allá de un poder nacional."

–¿Qué otros polos del mismo tipo hay en América Latina?

–Buenos Aires, Río de Janeiro y San Pablo.

La Ciudad de Buenos Aires –dice Augé– sustituyó los lugares de residencia por lugares de trabajo, reemplazó los espacios de paseo por vías de circulación, y los lugares de la vida por un decorado.

Año 2040: salvo raras excepciones nadie vive en Buenos Aires. Los que se quedaron son la presidente de la República, su marido y algunos funcionarios de alto rango del Ejecutivo. Por la mañana y por la noche, multitudes disciplinadas llegan o salen de las oficinas. Los turistas visitan los lugares más importantes de la Capital. El casco histórico sigue siendo el lugar favorito para este público, aunque su refacción y administración fueron confiados a la Disney. La compañía estadounidense –dice Augé– negoció directamente con los propietarios privados la compra de los edificios necesarios para reconstruir la Buenos Aires histórica. Se comprometió a crear cierto número de empleos y a asegurar el mantenimiento de las vías de acceso. Los visitantes se sienten felices cuando entran a la flamante réplica del Cabildo y al Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, exactamente iguales a los edificios que están sustituyendo.

La prohibición de circulación de todos los autos en el perímetro que encierran la 9 de Julio, Paseo Colón, Avenida Belgrano y Avenida de Mayo no tuvo los efectos benéficos esperados en cuanto a la calidad del aire.

–Ya no queda más petróleo –sigue Augé–. Los medios de transporte se han desarrollado usando electricidad. Se crearon nuevas autopistas para ir hasta los aeropuertos. La ciudad se remodeló con la prioridad de entrar en comunicación con el resto del planeta. Algunos estudiantes todavía frecuentan la Biblioteca Nacional o la del Congreso, pero quedaron suprimidas todas las universidades de Buenos Aires y fueron reemplazadas por enormes campus.

Seguimos: la Avenida del Libertador, después de una discutida iniciativa de la jefatura de gobierno, quedó transformada, a partir de 2015, en avenida peatonal. Uno puede recorrerla de arriba abajo para terminar en el Museo Histórico Nacional. Este museo ha sido tomado por el "valor" entretenimiento; es decir, la prioridad es que el público viva una experiencia, que participe en una especie de juego de reconstrucción relacionado con la experiencia histórica. "El arte fue apropiado por la sociedad de consumo. Se ampara en las ferias (las palabras son reveladoras). El arte –repito– ha sido definitivamente dominado por la sociedad de consumo". Los espacios de reconstrucción histórica se transformaron –estos sí– en "no lugares". "Ya no se puede hablar de centro y de periferia, sino de un descentramiento."

En el centro de la ciudad no queda nada más que el espectáculo de la ciudad histórica para el turismo; pero los llamados centros históricos son espectáculos incluso para la gente que vive en la ciudad. Cambió radicalmente la relación que tenemos, en 2040, con el exterior de la Nación, que la mayoría conocemos solamente a través de imágenes. No son muchos los que viajan a otros países, pero muchos tienen una idea de cómo son esos países por las imágenes que nos invaden por televisión y por la computadora.

Pero Buenos Aires es todavía una ciudad. Muchos lugares siguen recomponiéndose, marcando momentos políticos o culturales importantes en la vida colectiva. La permanencia del viejo Colón sigue convocando a veladas animadas. Sigue habiendo espectáculos callejeros en los alrededores de los pocos espacios verdes que se expandieron alrededor del 2025.

El MNBA y el Parque Tres de Febrero fueron renovados de la misma manera: los espacios de circulación son más amplios y se admiten atracciones especiales tomadas a préstamo de la estructura de un parque temático. A la entrada, hay centros de visita virtual que permiten recorrer el museo o el espacio verde sin necesidad de un largo trayecto caminando, viéndolo en gigantescas pantallas que ofrecen imágenes en 3D.

Muchos prefieren este modo de visita, que es menos cansador y optimiza tiempo y energía. La entrada es gratuita para los mayores de 85 y los titulares de una asignación universal por hijo.

En los foros universitarios, los etnólogos que siguieron la huella de Augé en el estudio de los espacios transnacionales de circulación de personas ya no piensan en términos de "no-lugar" sino en el de "híper-lugar", "en el sentido de que se puede hacer cualquier cosa en ellos, como en el aeropuerto –describe el precursor de esas nuevas camadas–, donde se pueden comprar cosas, utilizar el banco, hasta se puede vivir en un aeropuerto. El desarrollo de los espacios de comunicación, circulación y consumo creció hasta convertirlos en centrales para la organización de las sociedades".

"Se puede comprar cualquier cosa en cualquier lugar –dice Augé– proveniente de cualquier confín del mundo. Hay una circulación más intensa de productos. En cambio, en comparación con el auge del concepto de híper-lugar, el de no-lugar perdió vigencia desde que dejó de considerarse como un espacio del anonimato." "La planetarización, la globalización, la seguridad se vuelven, por ciertas razones, más fuertes, y además está esa necesidad de 'papeles'; es un hecho muy remarcable que la situación 'sin papeles' de la gente 'sin papeles', es decir, sin identidad es no tener nada que hacer."

Año 2040: los países pobres están menos lejos de los países ricos. Hay una disminución de la brecha entre los países pobres y los ricos, explica el antropólogo. Pero la diferencia entre los más ricos de los ricos y los más pobres de los pobres, en el interior de esos países, es en todas partes del mundo muy marcada, incluso en los países subdesarrollados.

"La brecha entre los más ricos de los ricos y los más pobres de los pobres crece", sigue. "Se da en todos los países, incluso en los emergentes; se da en los Estados Unidos, la China o Ruanda." Los espacios virtuales articulan la vida social imponiendo una comunicación, que no es del orden de la "relación". El eje de la vida en comunidad es la comunicación con otros que no conocemos.

–¿Cómo se manifiestan esos sistemas de relación?

–No es de relación, dije, es de comunicación. Falta reflexionar a propósito de eso. En Los no lugares he puesto el espacio virtual del lado de los "no lugares", pero es más complicado que eso.

Año 2040: la mira en el futuro del planeta está fuera del planeta. "Iremos a colonizar otros planetas; no sé cuándo, pero el futuro del hombre está fuera del planeta. Como parte de un proceso más o menos reciente, la gente empezó a adquirir una 'identidad planetaria', que quizás sea el principio para salir a buscar a otros mundos."

"Cuando hablamos del mundo-ciudad –sigue Augé– tenemos la idea de que todo está circulando, que el planeta es como una gran ciudad. Lo que en cierto sentido es verdad. Y todo circula. Pero cuando estamos en la ciudad-mundo, vemos que las cosas son menos ideales. Es decir, que la verdad del mundo-ciudad es la ciudad-mundo. Es decir, vivimos en la diversidad, a la vez la riqueza, la pobreza, la ignorancia, el saber, todo junto. No son puros, son lugares de lucha o de diferencia."

Año 2040: la sociedad de consumo es la principal fuerza ideológica, y son mucho más fuertes los efectos de fascinación que ejerce que las expresiones de resistencia o de protesta, que no son sorprendentes.

Por fin asumimos que el planeta es frágil. Las epidemias circulan más rápido; se habla mucho de la gripe. Tenemos miedo.

La agenda está dominada por las malas noticias a propósito de la ecología, que tienen el mismo impacto que las noticias deportivas, captando la atención para hacernos pensar en sólo un par de cosas. La gente es muy pesimista, y no se sabe exactamente por qué. "Bueno, o se pueden suponer muchas razones", dice Marc Augé. –¿Son pesimistas con respecto al futuro?

–Con respecto al futuro y al presente. Tristeza, malhumor, etcétera controlan esta utopía negra. Si no quiere una utopía negra, puedo atenuar... –Sí, prefiero. –Puedo matizar las cosas, diciéndole que el único elemento, no de optimismo pero sí de expectativa, es que después de cada catástrofe, cada guerra, hay necesidad de reconstruir. Y yo no puedo imaginar una implosión de la sociedad humana.

Marc Augé fue Invitado a la Argentina por la Embajada de Francia y el Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires (FILBA). Desgrabaciones: Ana María Mozian.

http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2010/09/04/_-02207686.htm

Forms. In the words of Aristotle

Bali digitalized. By Myriam B. Mahiques

"Again, of the ways in which it is proved that the Forms exist, none is convincing; for from some no inference necessarily follows, and from some arise Forms even of things of which they think there are no Forms. For according to the arguments from the sciences there will be Forms of all things of which there are sciences, and according to the argument of the 'one over many' there will be Forms even of negations, and according to the argument that thought has an object when the individual object has perished, there will be Forms of perishable things; for we have an image of these. Again, of the most accurate arguments, some lead to Ideas of relations, of which they say there is no independent class, and others introduce the 'third man'.

"And in general the arguments for the Forms destroy things for whose existence the believers in Forms are more zealous than for the existence of the Ideas; for it follows that not the dyad but number is first, and that prior to number is the relative, and that this is prior to the absolute-besides all the other points on which certain people, by following out the opinions held about the Forms, came into conflict with the principles of the theory.¨

Excerpt from Metaphysics. By Aristotle, written 350 BC.

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.13.xiii.html

Ruinas del antiguo Egipto en el desierto

Imagen bajada de lanacion.com

NUEVA YORK ( The New York Times ).- Durante las últimas dos décadas, John Coleman Darnell y su esposa, Deborah, estudiaron la zona desértica que se extiende al oeste de Luxor, Egipto, y descubrieron cerámicas y ruinas donde soldados, mercaderes y otros viajeros habían acampado en tiempos de los faraones.

Allí hallaron inscripciones consideradas uno de los primeros ejemplos de escritura alfabética. La Investigación de los Caminos del Desierto, proyecto de la Universidad de Yale dirigido por los Darnell, llamó la atención sobre el significado hasta ahora no apreciado de las rutas de las caravanas y los oasis durante la antigüedad egipcia. Pero hace dos semanas, el gobierno egipcio anunció el hallazgo más espectacular del proyecto: las ruinas de un asentamiento -aparentemente un centro administrativo, económico y militar- que floreció hace más de 3500 años a 175 kilómetros de Luxor. Hasta ahora, no se había hallado un centro urbano tan antiguo en el desierto.

En el oasis de Kharga, una hilera de casi 100 kilómetros de áreas con buen acceso al agua, encontraron restos de paredes de ladrillos, piedras de amolar, hornos, pilas de cenizas y moldes de pan, así como silos, edificios administrativos y talleres de artesanos. Esperan que el descubrimiento ayude a reescribir la historia de un período poco conocido del pasado egipcio.

REFERENCIA:

Artículo publicado en La Nación, suplemento Ciencia y Salud

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1302410&origen=NLCien

Planning, Urban Design and Science

Image from micatv.net

It is very difficult to resolve urban issues without taking into account our perceptions and feelings. I think it is always the same thing, the confrontation between the social (soft) sciences and hard sciences, as we usually know Mathematics, Physics and so on. But now, interdiscipline is helping us, researchers, to combine both of them; let´s say they share blurry frontiers. Well, that´s the basis of my thesis on urban morphology. And I know there are supporters and detractors. At least Pierce´s theory includes the soft sciences into the hard ones.

I recommend today an article by Melissa Hege, called ¨The Search for Scientific Validation: when our feelings are just not good enough¨, published at Planetizen.com, August 30th 2010. She begins with an interesting reflection, and I share her feelings: 

¨Planners are taught to be analytical thinkers who use quantitative data, but also qualitative research. Remember the Myers Briggs personality test? It assesses an individual’s personality based on four preferences: A focus on the outer world (extraversion) or inner world (introversion); basic information (sensing) or interpretation and meaning (intuition); making decision based on logic (thinking) or people and special circumstances (feeling); dealing with the outside world with clear decisions (judging) or staying open to new information and options (perceiving). As planners, we are constantly in conflict with these preferences as we straddle the world of technician and analyst. We use numerical data to understand transportation, economic and demographic trends. Our mapping software offers a precise tool to input this data and perform mathematical extrapolations. But somewhere in our decision capabilities, we need to shift from Thinkers to Feelers, and as planners, we do this quite well.¨

Then, she provides two examples and finally concludes:

¨I’ve always been frustrated that our science of planning and design is too soft and subjective. Evidence based research and long term comprehensive surveys give more credibility to our work by doing something which most professions have always done—justifying strategies by measuring success. By translating more nuanced aspects of planning and urban design into measurable outcomes planners can develop a body of scientific evidence for future planners to make better designs. But while I believe this technique will help our profession tremendously, it should not be a substitute for our ability as Feelers to understand human behavior and hone into the underlying community issues which cannot be calculated in an excel spreadsheet!¨

Read the full article:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/45776

Astana, a capital city designed from zero. By Kisho Kurokawa

The Bayterek tower, designed by president Nursultan Nazarbayev, stands at the centre of Astana's main avenue Photograph: Antoine Lambroschini/AFP/Getty Images

Excerpts from an article by Rowan Moore, For the Observer:

"Peas and beans! Peas and beans!" The famous Japanese architect was in his office, high in a Tokyo tower, its walls crowded with framed honours and diplomas. Assistants of exceptional beauty shimmered in with tea, but what he wanted to talk about was pulses. Rising prosperity in China would lead to rising meat consumption, and in turn a global protein crisis. It was the greatest problem, he said, facing mankind today. The solution lay in Kazakhstan, the vast former Soviet republic, for whose president the architect, Kisho Kurokawa, was masterplanning a new capital. This country, to the south of Russia, stretches from the eastern edge of Europe almost to Mongolia. For Kurokawa it offered ample opportunity for growing peas and beans, and – in a symbolic way – his plan would help. It was based on the interweaving of city and nature, with swaths of green between the buildings. It represented an idea of interdependence of which pulse-growing on an immense scale would be the practical outcome.

This meeting was in 2001, and Kurokawa died in 2007, but his city is now there, more or less following his plan. There are plenty of parks and trees. Called Astana, it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?

Astana's newest monument, the Khan Shatyr. The giant tent-shaped shopping centre, was the brainchild of Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazabayex, and was designed by the British architects Foster + Partners. Photograph by Nigel Young

A sedated and clean city. Picture by Rowan Moore.

To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it's not quite so magical: it's also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city's street vendors.

Astana's ornaments include a 62-metre-high silver pyramid, designed by British architects Foster + Partners, giant gold-green cones and a gold orb resting on a structure of erupting white steel. At night its buildings go purple, pink, green and yellow. Astana's latest, most technically ambitious addition is a 150-metre-high translucent tent, also by Lord Foster. Called Khan Shatyr, a single leaning mast props its roof, which offers shelter from a harsh climate to a shopping and entertainment complex underneath. It follows a familiar Foster strategy, to be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum, or his airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, which is to create an impressively engineered roof – a thing to be looked at and admired but not inhabited – hovering over a lower, less ordered, zone where the activity of the buildings, in this case shops and theme-park rides, takes place. This strategy, derived from the geodesic domes which the visionary American designer Buckminster Fuller once proposed throwing over whole cities, makes for striking architecture but also for awkward clashes where the two zones meet. Top and bottom seem to be different worlds.

The Presidential palace in Astana is a version of The White House in Washington, enhanced by a blue dome, spire, and a dominating position on the city's main axis. Picture by Corbis.

The Pyramid of Peace - or the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation - is also known as the 'Foster Pyramid,' after the British architect Norman Foster who designed it. Picture by Corbis.

A low angle perspective of the tower in Astana which simbolises the Kazakh myth of the magic bird Samruk, who laid a golden egg on the tree of life. Photograph: Antoine Lambroschini/AFP/Getty Images

Such cities are often the work of a single strong man. There is a museum of the founder in Astana, as there are of Kemal Atatürk in Ankara and President Kubitschek in Brasilia, pharaonic insurance against the afterlife that contains such things as Nazarbayev's grandfather's seal of office as a local judge. There is the president's palace, which stands on a long axis linking the two Foster works, the tent and the pyramid, and the golden orb. The palace is a version of the White House, improved by the addition of a blue dome. Also by its dominating location: the American original is placed off-centre from Washington's Mall, signifying a separation of powers that is not quite the Kazakh style.

Artificial trees made of steel rods and coloured lights frame the presidential palace. Picture by Rowan Moore.

The world's most famous Kazakh is the fictional Borat, but people in Astana are nothing like him. Except, perhaps for a taxi driver who growled like a tomcat whenever he saw a woman. In general Astanans are placid and dignified. They gather in the hour or so around dusk, when the hammering heat of the day gives way to deliciously balmy air, and promenade in the city's grand avenue. Children career over the pavements in electric cars like unfenced dodgems, while everyone gasps obediently at the pre-programmed fountain displays. The avenue is decorated with topiary giraffes and elephants, and vast swirling carpets of brightly coloured bedding plants. There are artificial trees, made of steel rods, blossoming with pink or orange lights and the plastic roof of Khan Shatyr now joins the display, lit from within with a spectrum of disco colours. Sam Cooke's Wonderful World plays from the shrubberies. The place offers childish delights, laid on by the unseen hand of a benevolent daddy.

There is not, yet, much more to Astana than this. It doesn't have bohemian quarters, or a rich nightlife, or hidden surprises. It feels sedated. The striking architecture is combined with a lack of excitement in the street life, as if the design of buildings were a cipher for risk and drama. These are very early days, of course, and over the decades Astana might mature into something different.

REFERENCE:

Astana, Kazakhstan: the space station in the steppes. The Observer. August 10, 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/08/astana-kazakhstan-space-station-steppes

First picture from the Observer; next pictures from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Instant cities and attractors: the example of San Cayetano

Attractor. Generated by Myriam Mahiques

Attractor. Generated by Myriam Mahiques

¨An attractor is a set towards which a dynamical system evolves over time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed¨. This is a simple definition from Wikipedia. The geometric result of the attractor image is a fractal.

Conceptually, some cities or neighborhoods have ¨attractors¨, in which inhabitants are a complex system and no matter what, they keep close to a certain attractor. We can imagine a monument, a place of reunion that has a special meaning for the system, like our Plaza de Mayo. But the strongest I¨ve seen, at least in my country, is Luján Cathedral where thousands of parishioners gather for some special dates, and the one that most impresses me is San Cayetano church, in the neighborhood of Liniers, Buenos Aires.

Picture from La Nación

San Cayetano´s day is today. He is the saint of bread and work. To access the church today, parishioners coming from afar, build an instant city in a couple of days, with tents. The streets full of them. They share their experiences and food with other ¨neighbors¨ and keep on waiting till the church is open. After the event is finalized, everybody picks up their stuff and get back home.

A clear example of an instant non regulated ¨city¨ getting closer and closer to an attractor, San Cayetano.

Architectural Exhibition Presents Unrealized Visions of Berlin

German architects (and brothers) Hans and Wassili Luckhardt designed this building for exhibitions and concerts in 1948

Central Potsdamer Platz. A project by Daniel Libeskind, 1991

From Spiegel on line International; article by Ingeborg Wiensowski:

Berlin's state of flux has inspired architects like no other city. There have always been holes in the cityscape, both metaphorically and geographically. A new exhibition presents architectural visions that were never realized. By showing the spirit of the times, the exhibits offer inspiration for the future.

There are plenty of people who agree that Berlin is an ugly city -- especially when compared to more attractive metropolises like London, Paris or Madrid. Then again, which city has seen as much history as Berlin? No other city was destroyed to the same degree in World War II, and no other city divided afterward.

Rather than discouraging architects and urban planners, the German capital's divisive history, with all the joy and tragedy it entails, has never ceased to inspire. They have flocked to compete in architectural contests from all over the world -- and this despite the fact that most of the entries in these competitions, which took place throughout the 20th century, could never become reality.

Currently those unbuilt plans can be seen on display at Café Moskau, an appropriately historical building from the early 1960s in the city center. The exhibition, named "The Unbuilt Berlin," presents a hundred ideas from 100 architects in the form of plans and drawings. These come complete with supplementary information in respective folders, as well as 13 models created especially for the exhibition to demonstrate some of the plans.

Ludwig Hilbersheimer´s project, 1928

Martin Wagner´s project, 1929

Two Years Collecting

Architect Carsten Krohn, 44, spent two years collecting the unbuilt Berlin projects from throughout the 20th century. He used the €40,000 ($51,600) in subsidies from the Capital Cultural Fund in Berlin, money set aside to enhance the culture in Germany's biggest city, to publish a wonderful catalog that documents all of the unbuilt projects chronologically, with images and text.

During the exhibition Krohn is also showing short films in which he conducted interviews with 29 architects. Among them are big names in contemporary architecture like Daniel Libeskind of the United States, Alvaro Siza of Portugal and Dutchman Rem Koolhaas, who, in 1991, famously quit the panel assessing the reconstruction of Berlin's central Potsdamer Platz because he felt the conditions that the city's administration had given for the architecture were too restrictive. Krohn even managed to get an on-camera interview with shy but venerated German architect Ludwig Leo, who gave up the profession after completing several grand buildings in the city.

Unbuilt Icons

The main features of the exhibition, though, are unbuilt architectural projects from between 1907 and 1997. Some have become modern icons, such as Mies van der Rohe's plans for a skyscraper on Friedrich Strasse in 1921 -- such buildings were unheard of at the time -- while others have simply became notorious, such as the gigantic designs for Hitler's utopian German capital, Germania, developed by his architect Albert Speer.

The city's history is seen through the plans that were never realized. With the erection of the Berlin Wall and the division of the city, a lot of planned building never happened: Such as the 1958 blueprint that Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier developed for the city's reconstruction after WWII. A large part of Corbusier's plan, which did not actually win the competition anyway, stretched into the east of the city. The fall of the Wall in 1989 was also disruptive. For example, in 1988 Italian architect Aldo Rossi won the contest to build the Museum of German History in Berlin near the Reichstag. But that design, too, has since been consigned to history.

The exhibition begins with early plans for the central Berlin square, Pariser Platz, by Austrian architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. It is actually astounding to see how many of the locations the exhibition covers that remain unfinished today -- they are either still being planned, are unbuilt or currently under construction.

So Modern They Could Be Built Today

Some of the plans still seem so fresh and so modern that one can imagine them being commissioned today. One example of this is the 1925 plan by Dutch architect Cornelis van Eesteren for Berlin's famous Unter den Linden boulevard. The plan envisages maintaining older buildings at the east end of the street, while building four-story commercial buildings, with towers reaching up to 45 meters (150-feet)high, at the west end. At the interface there would be a 170-meter tall high-rise. Nearby, on the historic Gendarmenmarkt square, German architect Hugo Häring, who once shared an office with van der Rohe, came up with a logical design for a city of high-rise buildings. For Ludwig Hilbersheimer, who taught at the Bauhaus School, this was the ideal place for his radical 1924 vision of a "commercial city," his answer to Le Corbusier's urban planning.

Equally uncompromising was the 1928 "Tiergarten-ring" by young German architect Werner Kallmorgen, who was just 26 at the time. He imagined a 14 kilometer- (8.7 mile-) long, four-story development encircling the famous Berlin park that would enclose it, thereby turning it into a recreational area. Berlin architects Ursulina Schüler-Witte and Ralf Schüler, who established an architectural practice together in the city in 1967, had a similar idea: They wanted to cover 9.5 kilometers of the highway that runs through the city's Grunewald forested area with terrace housing. Crazy? Not really. These sorts of redevelopment plans, where older areas are covered with newer buildings, are currently being planned in Rem Koolhaas' offices as a scheme of last resort.

Holes in Cityscape Inspiring

Science fiction fans will not be disappointed either. In 1988, American architect and artist Lebheus Woods, who now mainly works in architectural theory, developed a plan for a "Berlin Underground." His was a vision that was supposed to lead to the formation of an underground government, which would eventually lead to a reunified Germany.

Of course, there are also less pleasant discoveries to be made at the exhibition. For instance, German architect Emil Fahrenkamp, the architect behind the wonderful 1930s Shell House in Berlin, considered his 1937 plans for a competition for a college complex that might have become part of Albert Speer's notorious "Germania" as a sign of the "glorious past."

Over the years, and especially after reunification, Berlin has been a city of dreams for many architects -- after all, there are not many cities where one would find such huge holes in the center of the such a big city. Even in this century, many of those holes still exist -- and great architectural ideas are still being solicited. Examples include the closed Tempelhof airport and the as-yet-unbuilt, and much disputed, Berlin city palace. There is plenty of inspiration to be found at this exhibition. It is so good that it won't just excite retired architects, it even has the potential to rouse sleepy city planners from their slumber.

Keep on looking at pictures:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,707490,00.html

What is a site plan review in L.A.?

Los Angeles 1950. From http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/

A couple of days ago, I had a hard time trying to explain to a homeowner why he had to pay for a site plan review and after the process, his request was denied.

Any person applying for a new construction, remodel or legalization, has to pass through the site plan review at Regional Planning in Los Angeles. But the case that interests me is the legalization.

If a person receives a letter from Code Inforcement, there is no way he/she can skip the situation. A letter like this, means there is something illegal -or apparently illegal- in the property. Needless to say if the garage or even a storage is rented as a living space. 

Sometimes, if the inspector hasn´t seen the property´s records, he can suppose about the status of the constructions. And once a construction is suspected to be illegal, while the owner doesn´t prove the contrary, he has to submit plans for a site plan review. He will pay the City for a complete analysis of his property. Set backs, lot coverages, parkings, maximum heights, zoning, quantity of units, etc. Even if there is only a very small Code violation.

Then, if a structure is non conforming (it means, built under a different Code from the current one), but it is untouched and nothing has been added to it, you can keep it. But at the very moment you make a remodel on it, everything has to be brought back to the current Code.

The homeowner I mentioned before, was discussing that he bought the house ¨as is¨,  he was not guilty. It doesn´t matter, the responsibility of illegal situations inside the property, lies on the current homeowner.

Then, he said, I used to have a bathroom behind the garage, I have the record here. But, once you demolish a non conforming construction, you cant´rebuild it. He insisted, ¨I still have the pipes¨. No way to rebuild it in unpermitted set backs again.

I don´t think it´s so difficult to understand, but it must be very frustrating to pay for a site plan review (approx. 800$) and then have a ¨denied¨ as an answer after reviewing all the records, even from the Assessor´s office........

At last, in his anguish, he mentioned many neighbors had more than 2 units in district R2. He was right. But he had to consider, when the Code changed, from R3 to R2, whatever was legally built cannot be demolished, unless there is a new construction, and again, the new Code R2 rules. This is a way to ¨clean¨ the urban tissue, to renew the urban morphology. More cars offstreet means more cars inside the property, more open space, and probably 2 stories houses instead of 1 story. In the future, the benefit will be for all, as the neighborhood is being improved. The sacrifice of a few, for the benefit of all the neighbors, including the sacrificed ones. The problem is that homeowners don´t envision it, only architects, urbanists and planners.