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IT REVOLUTION

Information Landscapes

Antonino Saggio


Paola Gregory
"New Scapes. Territories of complexity"
(The IT Revolution in Architecture)
Switzerland 2003
Birkhäuser
pp96, $12,50
preface by Antonino Saggio

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[in italiano]



> IT REVOLUTION BOOK SERIES

If it is true that architecture is based on its specific materials (patterns of use, concepts of space, construction methods and technologies, research into expressive language), then it is just as true that it is also built through the use of "other" materials; materials apparently foreign to architecture, but ones that in reality make up the backbone of a broader and deeper reference connecting architectural considerations to the world and society, to the scientific and philosophical concepts of their own time.

The book you hold in your hands, Newscapes, completes a sort of trilogy in this series, one characterized precisely by the central presence of a theme that, though apparently eccentric, has always influenced architectural thought. Alicia Imperiale in New Flatness dealt with the idea of the informational and descriptive substrata of architecture and its representation, and Maria Luisa Palumbo in New Wombs investigated the relationship between man (and the concept of man and body) and architecture, and now Paola Gregory will concentrate on the relationship between architecture and concepts of nature and landscape.



All three of these fields are fertile both individually as well as seen as a whole. They are even more fertile since we are now at a moment of passage. The prefix "New", that all three titles have in common, indicates specifically those opportunities that have opened up for architecture within the IT paradigm. Interesting analogies can be found by looking at all three volumes together, interesting "common movements". The movement toward complexity, toward the conceptual depth that has opened up before us and is revealed in the subtitle Territory of Complexity. "The new scapes indicate a new way on the horizon of seeing, designing and inhabiting space through the interpretation of the work as a complex system of connections, interchanges and retro-actions, constantly open, flexible and modifiable." Contrary to what one might think at first, the conscious acceptance of the IT paradigm and its tools makes reasons, influences and processes more profound.

Along with helping create great tools for simulating complexity, a fundamental outcome of the research and modeling allowed by the scientific and mathematical basis of information technology, a vector is also connected that penetrates into the richness of relations with the material, in a continuous hypothesizing of changing and interrelated relationships, in giving center place to the method of hypotheses and simulation instead of rigid theoretical assumptions. And so research goes deep: into a surface that becomes loaded with interwoven movements and active flows, into a body that is transformed to its core, and even into a new concept of landscape and nature.

Landscape as a fundamental paradigm in the creation of architecture has, for at least twenty years or so, been a reference word for the entire architectural debate. Paola Gregory has already dedicated a book to this theme (La dimensione paesaggistica dell'architettura, [The Landscape Dimension of Architecture] Laterza, Bari 1998). Human beings from the electronic and post-industrial civilization can re-settle their account with nature because if the manufacturing industry dominated and exploited natural resources, then the information technology industry can help increase their appreciation and conservation.

At least in technologically advanced countries, this structural change of direction opens up the opportunity for a "compensation" of historic proportions. Green areas, nature, structures for leisure time activities can all now be placed in areas built up frequently with very high density construction. In other words, precisely because of those reasons we have already mentioned, the process is not "on the surface". We are not dealing with circumscribing and fencing off green areas to contrast with those other residential, tertiary and managerial areas as was part of the logic of organizing by dividing the industrial city. On the contrary, we mean creating new integrated parts of the city where that interacting group of activities typical of the information society exist alongside a powerful presence of nature. Naturally, the tools change as well. If zoning was the method for planning the industrial city through the division into homogeneous zones that were distinct among themselves and simulated the Tayloristic concept of industrial production, then multi-functionality and integration have now become the necessities for the information city and its new anti-zoning areas. The nature intended in this concept of landscape is no longer floral or "liberty-style"; neither is it the nature of the masters of organicism, counterpoint to the mechanical and industrial world. This concept of nature has in fact become much more complex, much more difficult, much more "hidden" and is also investigated by architects with an anti-romantic eye through the formalisms of contemporary science (fractals, DNA, atoms, the leaps of an expanding universe, the relationship between life and matter, topological geometry, animated forms). In other words, through the categories of complexity to which this book rightly dedicates space. Hidden in this context are the figures of flows, the wave, whirlpools, crevasses and liquid crystals; fluidity becomes the key word. It describes the constant mutation of information and places architecture face to face with the most advanced research frontiers, from biology to engineering, to the new fertile areas of superimposition such as morphogenisis, bioengineering or biotechnology.

The idea is that architecture, after having made itself into landscape, whether in the stratifications and palimpsests of Eisenman, or the residual urbanscape of Gehry, or the waves of Hadid or again in the precipitous movements of the late Miralles, can become a reactive landscape, complex, animated and alive. Thus Information Technology plays three key roles in this context: First of all, it supplies the "mathematical models" to investigate the geological, biological, physical and chemical complexity of nature and, beginning with these models of simulation, allows the structuring of new relations in projects that exploit reasons and dynamics. In the second place, IT supplies decisive weapons for the real construction of projects conceived with this complex "all digital" logic, (and finally we not only have words but real examples as well, just consider the Yokohama Terminal by those two architects Born with the Computer, Moussavi and Zaera-Polo); In the third place, IT endows architecture with reactive systems capable of simulating types of behavior in nature, in reacting to climate, usage flows and ultimately also emotional behavior, and so offers a new phase of esthetic research we have frequently discussed when speaking of the challenges of Interactivity.

And in the fourth place, IT, or rather the Information Age, also supplies an overall different model of the city and urban landscape: mixed in its uses, superimposed in its flows, open 24 hours a day, with "nature and artifice" structurally interwoven into production, leisure, social and residential activities. These are Information Landscapes if we look at them with eyes open to the world of technology, New Scapes if we also consider the group of considerations and comparisons that this book confronts in a voyage that neglects neither philosophical implications nor the methods of concretely considering the basic principals of this new architecture, and one that we feel is very exciting.

Antonino Saggio

[10jan2004]

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