[in
italiano]
> IT REVOLUTION BOOK SERIES
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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
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[10jan2004] |
