Contemporary spatiality: experiencing a multitude of cells

The Euclidean display and overall design of a room inside the MIT museum, Cambridge. Personal archives, 2024

Inside the MIT museum, Cambridge. See how the free standing displays have the same conceptual design as the displays on the wall. Note the shape of the benches as well. Personal archives, 2024.

 I have been thinking about current semiology in architectural spatiality. There is a new meaning based in our contemporary digital pre-conceptions, the different options of spatial relationships and representation techniques. We are becoming more skilled at abstracting the external stimuli, hence the qualities of the objects, since we have so much available information and optical devices to select, being the cell phone the most typical example that allows us to see the world filtered through cameras....

Spatial cognition depends on many factors: our culture, our experience, gender, age, social context, etc. I am particularly influenced by long years working on urban morphology with different mathematical software, but this time, I have also felt impressed by my recent visit to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard museums. The architectural arrangement of the MIT technological exhibition captured my attention as unusual -due to my unconscious expectation of a typical exhibit- . At least in one room, the objects were enclosed by cubes defined by linear lighting. Every cube or rectangular prism, could be seen as a cell. So I missed the interior object in order to recreate the spatiality of the room, or even the wall, since it became a 3D Euclidean construction at a short distance, so pure and strictly mathematical.

Harvard Museum of Natural History. See the many reflections on the glass displays. Personal archives. 2024.

Harvard Museum of Natural History. See the many reflections on the glass displays. Personal archives. 2024.

Of course my mind is ready to understand and digest the contemporary exhibit, but when I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I was walking among glass cells, which is quite different from the other Natural Science museums. All of a sudden, the 3D cells were conforming space, and progressively, there was this feeling of being dehumanized, one is immersed in a multitude of reflections (our own and the animals'), like a in mirror maze; the archaeology becomes part of the fantasy. 

Immersive Van Gogh, Los Angeles. Personal archives, 2021.

Immersive Van Gogh and the static experience. Los Angeles, personal archives, 2021.

Somehow, the historical composition in Harvard is a sort of prelude to the imaginary current immersive experiences, like Van Gogh's among so many others, with a substantial difference though, the cells and their contents are tangible, the person walking along the displays is lured by the animals, and the experience is dynamic, interactive, the space is re-created by the circulation towards a point of interest (a window, a staircase, an exit....), while the immersive art is realized with distant projections in an empty building, usually a warehouse, where people stand or sit still and the space is conceived by just one's mind perception of the moving images; the orientation is given by the location of isolated structural elements, like a staircase or columns.

Aerial view of Los Angeles Downtown and suburbs, California. Personal archive, 2024.

The spatial perception becomes completely different when we change the scale or the point of view.

I still remember the first time arriving to Los Angeles by plane, I was wondering where is Downtown? My first impression was the industrial flat areas with so little landscape, all of them rectangles. And a colleague of mine reminded me the great purpose of Los Angeles: the creation of movies in an extended city that sells lots of cars: in consequence, the industrial zoning is quite noticeable. 

This year, I had the chance to enjoy the aerial views that I am sharing here, and finally I have seen Los Angeles from above and afar, all blue filtered by the plane window and the residential low areas with lots of dark green. I made the effort to zoom my cell phone camera as much as I could, but for every capture, my impression was that I was looking at a pixelated city. Without history or social input, I was observing the result of Zoning codes, a map created with pixels, quite monotonous, even in its third dimension, and monochrome. While the plane was flying to destine, the view was still a multitude of little cubes and prisms like a projection on the ground where I was not immersed at all. For me was another version of the museums cells experience.

Aerial view of Los Angeles Downtown on the left and suburbs with a huge industrial area, California. Personal archive, 2024.

Antoine Picon, in his article "Anxious Landscapes: From Ruin to Rust" (2000) * on a similar idea, adds the concept of distance and texture, as explained in the following excerpts:

"...the anxious character of many contemporary landscapes is the indication of profound transformations affecting the definition of the subject who contemplates them,..."

"....this is not the first time that the look that we cast over our surroundings has been modified. Each time, such a transformation proves inseparable from a mutation of the ideal image we project of ourselves."

".... one cannot help by be struck by the extent of the mutations that already affect the category of vision."

".... familiar forms seem to give way to luminous effects -scintillations, iridescence, reflections- as well as to textures often based upon contradictory impressions like smoothness, glossiness or graininess. Configurations, both immediately perceptible by the senses and more abstract, substitute themselves for the contours of the world that is familiar. Seen by satellite, Los Angeles doesn't look much different from a section of matter observed in a microscope. The importance of the dominion of lights and textures in the contemporary technological landscape could well originate from this transformation in the categories of vision . Such a transformation leads us to suspend, if only provisionally, questions such as those of "far" and "near." Who tells us that it's Los Angeles we're contemplating, instead of a piece of sidewalk?.... the contemporary urban landscape is organized according to textures that owe more to woven design than to form in a traditional sense."

* From Architectural Theory. Volume II. An Anthology from 1871-2005. Page 595. Massachusetts, 2010.

A partial detail of a tapestry exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is similar to an aerial view of a residential neighborhood and a central district. Personal archives, 2024.

Urban Fractality and "The Concise Landscape"

 

Binary aerial picture of an area of Downton Buenos Aires

Binary aerial picture of a the historical sector of Downtown Boston

There are many publications about the analysis of the Fractal Dimension of different cities in the world. Each publication leading to conclusions about the methods used, and sometimes a projection of the city growth in the future, given a certain pattern.

I took a rest from writing about the subject, I traveled instead, and took notes and lots of pictures of the (visited) cities perceptions to open my mind to several urban morphologies, which at first where focused on Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. This year, I went to waterfront cities, among them, Buenos Aires and Boston, and I immediately realized their Fractal Dimension would be pretty similar. But the perception, the experience of said cities, are radically different.

I selected two downtown areal pictures of them, and decided to run a quick analysis of their Fractal Dimension, using the ImageJ medical software. As a side note, ImageJ has newer versions: Image J2 and Fiji. But I could not upload jpgs, pdfs and pngs files with them, so I returned to the original old version.

If it were a strict analysis, I would have drawn the buildings solids and streets emptiness with Autocad, but for the purpose of this post it was not necessary, and I even left the Google references and the trees, which we may be considered or not part of the urban morphology, depending on the research objectives.

Buenos Aires Fractal Dimension and Boston Fractal Dimension of the first two binary images

The results for the first two images were, respectively, Buenos Aires 1.8462 and Boston 1.8130

I have also considered inverting the solid and empty areas, to test if the results are quite different or not. Here we have two binary images inverted for both cities:

Buenos Aires aerial binary image, inverted.

Boston, binary aerial image, inverted.

Then I took the Fractal Dimension of both inverted images:

Buenos Aires, inverted fractal Dimension= 1.8402

Boston, inverted Fractal Dimension= 1.8654

There is not a significant change in the results, so I'm taking an average of 1.8. Now, let us see how different the plot surfaces are:

Surface plot of Buenos Aires, where we can read the urban orthogonal grid.

Surface plot of Boston, with more morphological irregularity.

When I was in Boston, one of my favorite urban books "The Concise Landscape", written by British architect and urban designer Gordon Cullen in 1961, came to my mind. It was the first book I have read on urbanism. Walking around Boston contained the perfect examples to illustrate the book, most probably due to its British origins, while Buenos Aires grid is Spanish.

For us who work on Urban Morphology based on science, (and sociology in my case), I think that somehow, Cullen has stated a visionary concept on page 8 of the 1971 edition:

.."we have to rid ourselves of the thought that the excitement and drama that we seek can be born automatically out of the scientific research and solutions arrived at by the technical man"....

And he takes into account the perception of the city, in general terms, and per my brief summary below:

. Element of surprise and serial vision.

. The relationship between urban buildings is different with added elements (trees, water, traffic, etc...).

. The relationship between our human body with space and scale.

. Content: colors, texture, scale, style.... -I will add the weather-.

In other words, even if we have the same or similar Fractal Dimension between two cities, our experience of them is not the same. 

For example, Boston has tunnels of traffic circulation, while Buenos Aires streets are wide open (it does not snow in Buenos Aires) with long -French- perspectives and monuments as focal points. We are not allowed to have such a view in Boston, when you walk or drive in Downtown, there is always a building or block intersecting the perspective, giving us the feeling of "being inside" the city.

I am posting some of my pictures for better explanation, they belong to my personal archives, dated 2022. Please do not share without my permission.

Let us begin with Buenos Aires:

A typical avenue in Buenos Aires and the infinite perspective

A street in Buenos Aires with eclectic styles (French, Spanish...)

The corner is usually designed as an important element. See the trees, the mullions, the light color. The British green is incidental, just for doors here.

More interesting corners of Buenos Aires. The beautiful corner cupolas everywhere.

A street of Buenos Aires which is slightly winding. The gray cement "medianeras" (demising walls), the cupolas and most of all, this morphology of "decayed teeth", which is a result of different zoning regulations along the years. The balconies, for residential and offices uses as well, add architectural articulation.

 One of the many monuments in Buenos Aires, as seen from a car.

Nocturnal view of Downtown Buenos Aires. The endless avenue with aligned trees, the "decayed tooth" morphology.

Now, let us continue with some pictures from Boston:

Access to the underground train, a broken perspective, lots of materials together. The typical Boston brick (there are different colors), modern glass and classical gray finishes.

The British colors and the broken perspective. See that the green extends beyond the doors. The red is added for commercial purposes.

An open plaza among buildings. We feel "inside". Note the lack of balconies.

A broken perspective and lack of balconies.

This is pretty interesting for me, the building at the end of the perspective is rotated.

Broken perspective and the use of dark color.

The serial vision with columns on the front. The broken perspective while the urban lamps are perfectly aligned.

This is a picture of the Beacon Hill neighborhood, with the brick buildings combined with the English deep green. But, here, more textures are added with a climber on the left. This type of climbers are unusual in Downtown Buenos Aires (the Ciudad Autonoma) but the sidewalks are wider and with lots of trees.

To get to the Boston Tea Party building, on the waterfront, I had to walk through a park so covered in vegetation. It took me a while to find the water, but here it is, the element of surprise.

Of course I could find common elements between the two cities, but they would be isolated examples.

It is clear that a fractal urban analysis cannot get rid of The Concise Landscape basic but primary teachings. Any research should be completed with historical and social facts in order to deeply understand the urban shape, this is not only a matter of numbers. This is what makes us architects more extensive and less scientists in our points of view, compared with physicists and geographers who share our field of research.

Orange County Museum of Art. From the mass model to the building

 

Approaching OCMA, Costa Mesa, CA.

NOTE: All pictures belong to my personal archives, please do not reproduce-share without my permission.

I have been a visitor of the Orange County Museum of Art since it was in Newport Beach, then it was moved to a provisory building in Costa Mesa, right in front of the Segerstrom Concert Hall.

Back in March 2019, I took some quick pictures of the mass model of the upcoming building, designed by Thom Mayne's studio Morphosis. I am happy to say I had the chance to talk to him in person long years ago, during an architectural exhibition in our FADU Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of Buenos Aires. We briefly discussed a post graduate project designed by architect Luis Makianich and me. And he left us a very good impression, at least speaking about theory of architecture.

And once I emigrated to California, I had the opportunity to visit his building for Caltrans in Los Angeles and now the OCMA, which was inaugurated a few months ago. 

My impression of the Caltrans building is barely mentioned in my post about Trees that Conform Social Space. I remember very well the lack of human scale while walking around the building, the heat in the cement plaza and the emptiness of the bar in the shadows, an intermediate space of multiple height were people did not want to stay (I questioned the employees). That imprinted in my mind that maybe our beloved Thom Mayne designed his buildings as objects, the morphology prevailing over the human scale and sensorial, human perception necessities. 

My two pictures below are from 2009. The bar is in the dark left corner. People preferred stay in the plaza across the street, drinking a juice sold at the mobile stands, under the shadow of the welcoming trees.

An empty plaza with benches like sculptures, under 100F degree or more...

This picture shows how the side street offers a solid wall as a basement, see the scale compared to the men in the corner. Well, this is part of the main problem I see in Los Angeles, a city that has evolved for and with the cars. It is not pedestrian friendly.

The next pictures are cell phone snapshots of the OCMA building mass model, from 2009. Yesterday, I was wondering what was so "off" from the mass model to the final product. 

Approaching OCMA. On the right side, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, designed by Cesar Pelli studio. 

Basically, the resolution of spaces is the same, but in a closer analysis, I have seen that the intersecting planes, have become undulating surfaces on which the straight lines in the massive model are materialized with thick rigid ceramics (!!), what is worse, the ceramics are installed in diagonals, in consequence, there are a lot of unsolved triangular cuts.

The upper undulating surface, I have taken this picture standing on the terrace. The red building behind is not part of OCMA.

A corner view, which looks OK. See how the ceramics change direction on the left and compare the photo with the mass model above.

Now, let us take a closer look at the joints. So obviously wrong and without care, to the expert eye. Besides, the joints have different thickness, due to them being forced to adapt to the shape.

A macro shot of the tile next to the Aluminum

The problem of the materials intersection is seen inside as well (precisely, the curve on the left), though I truly like how the light and volumes play at the entry hall. 

This one is my favorite interior view, the dark ceiling extends above the longitudinal bar.

I believe the use of brick would have been better for this morphology, a prefab brick with the same or similar color. Because the continuity with the neighboring Pelli's Segerstrom building is kept without a doubt.

OCMA on the left and the Segerstrom Concert Hall on the right. Alike colors, and an impeccable resolution for the Segerstrom curved surfaces.

I took this picture for a colleague and friend at the University, so he can show it to the students, to learn that even the minor details should be solved.

I have had long conversations about this building with some colleagues today. Should we worry about minor details or should we enjoy the overall display of technology? Can we still praise the functional resolution, regardless the morphology, which a friend of mine calls "totally whimsical" ?.

I am in favor of "whimsical" new shapes that are allowed due to the advance of technology, but most of all due to us being accustomed to new images and sensorial spaces, for exampl, all those immersive "out of this world" experiences inside buildings like warehouses. I still remember when our students played with Zaha Hadid designs, and we warned them "remember, we need to build it!", the first GA magazine with Zaha Hadid projects that had no chance to be materialized, at the time, of course. So now, I feel like the architects have a sort of victory, while, of course, these "liberties" are allowed by the City planners, who are not architects but expert on zoning codes where politics are also at play. But this is another story.

OCMA galleries are an example of a revised Museum concept. The galleries are open to a common corridor and we can take a quick look at what is going on from afar, or turn around and be tempted to enter the gift shop, which is open as well, like at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.

We can also have a preview from the upper galleries, through narrow openings on the white walls. Of course, it depends on your height. As I'm short, then I could take the following pictures, if your height is 6' or so, the narrow opening is below your line of sight, unless the staircase down is taken. The minor details: you will also see the dust accumulated on the free standing partition walls and the horizontal part of the wall beyond the columns, as no human arm can reach there to clean. Needless to say, the white walls next to the gallery stairs are stained already. A colleague's opinion was they should have been painted another color where the dust can't be noticed. I proposed a change of material, but the Minimalist white would have been lost. 

Where you see the line of the glass, on the walking side it is clean, on the other side, there is dust.

If this picture is zoomed, there is a visible line of cleanliness vs dust. I extended my own arm to see how far I could reach to clean without an extended dust brush.

The sort of white Minimalism is extended to the bathroom stalls, and there it was where I had my surprise. I felt this weird sensation that I was inside a closet. The feeling of uneasiness made me choose the pull knob for handicap. I wanted to get out of this bathroom space as soon as possible. In the back of my brain, I recalled the horror movies with labs and dead frozen bodies. Too much of my imagination I suppose :)

The uneasiness is repeated outside, in the (empty again) terrace, when I reached the stairs or sort of theatre wide hemicycle where one can seat and view a narrow circulation to the side entry door, or just the street beyond. I expected a space to enjoy a performance, more like in the Getty Museum style, but not. And there is lack of middle handrails (of course, it is not a formal stair), so I stayed a while observing what people would do: 

just take pictures facing the flat sculpture which is nonsense to be "walked around", sit for a few minutes on the upper stairs or close to the handrails on the sides. I had to avoid a couple in order to reach the handrail. I think nobody would venture to go downstairs taking the middle part of the it.

If we compare this pictures with the mass models, we'll notice the side guardrail which was meant to be glass was replaced by a solid high guardrail. The sculpture is meant to be seen from below, and the back has the just the braces painted alike. It is more a scenography than a 3D sculpture.

The empty terrace and the back of the flat sculpture.

The planter on the terrace. The row of trees on the side looks very good but sculptural. The planter seems to be like "we need a planter somewhere, given it's a barren terrace". Some people were sitting there, but there is no hope of future good shadow, just to see the species. A reminder of the Caltrans plaza?

Looking up from the ground plaza. The building on the left does not belong to the museum. What makes me think maybe complex morphology buildings should be erected on open spaces without any other building around. One may guess at first sight which building is which or part of.

The gift shop has this interesting "sculpture" which reflects the building and on the back contains glass cabinets for art products. I was astonished to see, a few rubber bands for hair pony tails, hardened in free standing curly shapes, were 45$ each one (!!). 

A colleague that visited the museum with me found this tempered glass railing over the steps pretty funny and out of sense. We were doubting if this sculptural construction was finished or not. A climber would grow and cover all of it, I will have to come back to see if the climber would hide the guardrail, and then give an answer to my friend who asked, how much would you think it was the cost of the diagonal tempered glass? While I was looking at the climber trying to reach it. 

A final consideration about the landscape. If the climber was meant to add some green area to the barren open space, then it is not significative.  The plaza has a few trees, and the palm trees are part of the buildings across the street. 

The row of trees, as seen in the massive model, are not to enjoy them from a practical and useful point of view. They are just like sculptures, one cannot step on the planters. There is also a physical barrier to the side garden, as seen from the terrace. I am against this design decision, since any architect can use the landscape as a mean of relax and healing. This decorative landscape is reinforcing the idea of the architecture as an object, pretty far form the  users natural need of being in close contact with nature. Which is the consequence? People taking their beverages outside the building, looking for a plaza with canopy trees. 

Regardless my personal opinion, the OCMA is worth the visit.

A row of trees dividing two buildings. No matter the effort, this space will be always empty, it is just a service corridor. The trees are planted where some space was left.