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| Touching
the Second Skin Raoul Bunschoten |
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| The
Landing is the project by Chora, GroosMax e Joost Grootens, winner
in the invited competition for a new public park in Arnhem, The Netherlands.
ARCH'IT presents its theme and strategies through the words of Raoul
Bunschoten of Chora: 'Touching the Second Skin' offers an occasion for
better understanding the research of the Dutch/English group, whose
last exhibition, 'From Matter to Metaspace', just opened at The Institute
for Cultural Policy in Hamburg. |
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| [in italiano] | META-SPACE.
There is an image taken during the project Copenhagen X Urban Gallery
that stirs me: a group of students sitting on a large aerial view of
the city of Copenhagen. They transfer points on the map created by throwing
4000 beans. They inhabit the map, which is itself a representation of
a view from a clerestory of the city, a meta-space suspended above the
city usually only entered by airplanes and helicopters, who rarely linger
for long in this rarefied part of the city from which you can see its
apparent totality. After the transfer of points they visit each site,
and zoom into the reality represented by the aerial map. They visit
places marked by the points and touch the life of that place, 'undressing'
it using four filters that each frame a basic set of processes. What
is revealed here is the naked city in its bare and primal form: mere
organisms and motion, force, resistance and fluidity of the processes
that constitute a city. |
[06nov2005] | ||
 4000 bean are thrown on the aerial map of Copenhagen. CPHX is the first project in which CHORA was commissioned to apply the Urban Gallery to the scale of a city, and to collaborate with its planning departments. The commission came from Copenhagen X, a de facto Urban Curator. The request was to set up a project in which participation of various parts of the population could take place in the debate on new projects and issues in urban planning that affected all, but in which only few had access to the decision making processes. The context for this project was, and remains highly political: in the last elections the people of Denmark had voted a very conservative government into power that adopted a harsh attitude towards, among other issues, immigrants. The desire of Copenhagen X reflected other values: to touch on the reality of life in Copenhagen that is, as in most other European cities, increasingly heterogeneous. The city was in the process of enormous expansion projects: new metro lines were being built, a bridge to Sweden had recently been opened, the Øresund, the straight between Denmark and Sweden, was increasingly becoming a unified economic and social trans-national region. The project was ambitious: to develop the prototype of the Urban Gallery for the scale of the city, specifically focussing on existing and planned prototypes anywhere in its territory. What happened was a lesson in the difficulties of introducing a new interactive medium for the scale of a city, a medium that would fuse political, economic and social trends with new technologies and methodologies, that would link a large range of urban actors through a medium that would act as a kind of public realm while being a shop window, laboratory and management tool at the same time. How do we operate in a situation like that? Where does the work of a planner stop? How many threads can you connect? |
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 The students inhabit the Copenhagen meta-space.  CPHX. Scenario Games. |
DIDACTICS.
What is at stake is a cultural shift in the way cities are used, experienced,
managed, planned, the way we teach people new ways of planning, designing
and governing cities. It is a long drawn didactic process with two tracks:
as practitioners we are involved with clients and local authorities,
therefore our task is in influencing their decision making processes,
but more so, use any project as a didactic vehicle as well as for realising
a design, build a building and prolong the life of an office. The other
track is the school and university: How early can the 'nakedness'
of a city be experienced, the workings of its life forms taught, its
motions understood as pure plastic form that can be handled, shaped?
But after a certain point we are helpless, where life forms emerge by
themselves and evade manipulation, change the shape of things so radically
that the process of observing, learning, recognizing starts again all
over. If we take this further: a practice is both a laboratory and an
educational tool for the agents in society that make and handle cities.
But it is a question of creativity and control. Creativity: can the
practice be ahead of what is needed, and build in the argument and the
response to a yet unseen need? Control: can it use the existing regulations, budgetary constraints to make sure a project stays on target and the process of change is sustained? The architecture school is put to task by professional organisations to serve the professional community well, but its guidance serves the 'good practice' aspect more than any aspect of leadership, guidance and educational purpose of the practice. Schools have to lead the profession into the next watershed, schools have to give the young professionals the tools to practice and the tools to be in this aerial space above a city, above the map of processes, in a meta-space where the connections are and can be made or altered. The school is positioned with its legs in the world of regulations and practice and with its head in the meta-space of society, beyond the immediate horizon of society, formulating its ever-shifting thesis. The current obsession with various new technologies only helps to go some of the way. There is no doubt new technologies create vastly new possibilities to plan, design, manage. But a technology is not a scenario, it does not sketch either the unexpected use of its potential or an innovation that does not now exist but can be imagined from the position of a meta-space. The Archigram group, now seen in full colour in their wonderful revival exhibition, lived in such a meta-space, unemployable, unable to practice in any serious way, they were not as much fascinated by the revolutionary technologies of the time of their flourishing, but by the society as a whole in all its aspects, embedding new technologies in its daily ablutions while dreaming up visions Dalibor Vesely used to call 'possible realities', rather than 'real possibilities'. |
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THE
MODEL: OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS. The Urban Gallery is a concept, a metaphor,
a practice and a prototype. The concept is that of a meta-space we can
build, control, manage, use as didactic tool, as planning instrument.
It is a metaphor of an art gallery showing an expression of society
in which it looks at itself through other means than the regulations
of the building or any other profession: it dreams up the world but
constructs links, hyperlinks, to and between anything at will, on intuition
or following, as did the Situationists, random pathways of logic and
determinacy. Hom_X: unique programmatic mixes give way to prototypes. THE MODEL: OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS. The Urban Gallery is a concept, a metaphor, a practice and a prototype. The concept is that of a meta-space we can build, control, manage, use as didactic tool, as planning instrument. It is a metaphor of an art gallery showing an expression of society in which it looks at itself through other means than the regulations of the building or any other profession: it dreams up the world but constructs links, hyperlinks, to and between anything at will, on intuition or following, as did the Situationists, random pathways of logic and determinacy. The Gallery shows this work, an editor edits it and combines it into trends, directions, collections, provocations, performing a service to the public as well as nurturing the work itself. The Urban Gallery is a place to display projects, processes, connectivity, associations. But it also is a practice. The curator works with regulations, safety, public acceptance, the law, budgets. The Urban Gallery and the Urban Curator together form a practice placed somewhere in the landscape of planning and design, but also in that of management, regulatory bodies, educational institutions. The Urban Gallery becomes a model of the natural interactivity of the city as second skin, it is a meta-space itself: a Taschenwelt, a term coined by Arno Schmidt, or small pocket world. That means also that the full sum of materials in its four components -database, prototypes, scenario games, action plans- somehow are a version of the piece of second skin the Urban Gallery is applied to. But qua technology it is an open source system, a public realm into which everybody, but through various media and interfaces, can enter, contribute to, take things away. |
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POWER
AND CONTROL. When I presented the Urban Gallery projects in Bucharest
recently I was confronted with a question which has become one of my
main concerns: who controls the Urban Gallery? Is there a danger it
becomes, and this was a country which only ten years ago got rid of
its communist dictator, a totalitarian instrument of control, an Orwellian
Big Brother tool? Who has the power to control this tool? Is it an instrument
embedded in and furthering democracy or a threat to democracy, given
its totalitarian potential? The balance to this image is that of empowerment
of the many, the individual or the weak, and the multiplicity character
of successive curators. The Arts Council of England has expressed interest
in supporting experiments of the Urban Gallery in Homerton, East London,
precisely because of the potential of the Urban Gallery to reveal large-scale
transformations in for example the Thames Gateway in all its nakedness
or to empower smaller agents, groups, organisations to play a part in
such large schemes, in this case to extend London eastwards along the
Thames. Homerton X. Choreography plan. Orchestration of projects and interweaving of different events. In Homerton we are already testing the Urban Gallery through a commission from the local council (jointly with Tom Young Architects) to develop a master plan and vision for this very difficult area in Hackney. Here we developed a local projection of the Urban Gallery in the form of a 'Loom', which is where the UG becomes visible in the form of striations, like the strings of a loom or of a violin, that are used to weave a patterned carpet, or to create the music for an urban choreography, the incremental stages of a dynamic master plan. The curatorial nature of the UG (orchestration, choreography, weaving) plays an organisational role in the linking of elements that shape complex urban environments. The UG links local grain, character, specificity with the wind of global phenomena, and enables small things, or incremental steps (the 'stepping stones') to have larger repercussions (a form of resonance, the context has to adjust to the steps or a particular project), or to create shocks to an environment (to create the effect of a jump).  Homerton X. Hands in action. |
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| PRACTICE.
To implement the Urban Gallery requires a rethinking of the practice.
First it has to be able to address emergent trends and phenomena in
society that shape the city in new ways, this requires commissions that
have no clients, therefore are dependent on grants. Grants are often
product oriented, institution based or locked in particular theme zones
or disciplinary or sectoral territories. Hybrid tools have notorious
difficulty attracting the right amounts of money. The essential capacity
of the UG is its cross-sectoral interdisciplinary form of practice,
which makes it hard to define it within specific financial frames. But
interdisciplinarity is related to negotiation between different actors
and between actors and agents, such as specialists, decision makers.
In the increasing interdisciplinary character of the architectural practice
specialization and global organisation are becoming major issues but
are becoming contradictory and very hard to handle by individual architects
and practices. Chora, like other practices, operates more and more in association with other practices to create a network that can proliferate and adapt, much like an urban prototype. But there are other effects: those triggered by certain new media and new technologies but lying outside the projected use and cross into very different social and political spaces. The UG as planning tool needs to address both the source territory as well as the new territory of political use (emergent communities related to wireless technology, deaf people using video telecommunication technology, the spread of voyeuristic and other sexual practices on the web, light-weight technologies from space explorations used in the construction of parasitical buildings, special clothing etc.) The practice applying a tool such as the UG has to follow cultural shifts but anticipate the slowness with which other practices such as public commissioning bodies, local authorities etc. follow the same shifts. For example trans national regions in Europe are increasingly empowered culturally, socially, economically, but politically, and with that planning authorities, they are still largely rooted in the national structure of the European Community. |
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| SCALING
AND TRANSLATION (MAPPING AND LINGUISTIC DEVICES). The Argentinian writer
Borges has written a story about a Chinese emperor ordering a map of
his empire, but never being satisfied with its resolution, until at
the end the map makers construct a map as large as the empire which
was not very practical; so only fragments remain in some deserts, inhabited
by animals. We have tried to apply the Urban Gallery to very different
scales. In a small scale the interactivity between territory or object
and the meta-space as instrument and open source system can be easily
imagined, and exists in the work by other practices. When the scale
of the territory is larger the exchange becomes more difficult, there
is much less clarity who decides, gives commissions. In our Osaka proposal
a new public authority is needed to manage and curate the exchange and
adaptation mechanism for the new Osaka Centre, 'Osaka Stepping
Stones'. This authority is sensitive to changes in society, cultural
trends, and orchestrates changes in the real estate and the composition
of stakeholders to adapt the urban space. But the issue of scaling (to work in multiple scales simultaneously) calls up another question: How to manage trajectories between different scales? This becomes a real political issue: the control and/or appropriation of links. The curatorial condition of the UG plays an organisational role in this control of links. This forms the choreography in a dynamic master plan such as Homerton Cross, but also forms the potential for democratic and participatory processes to be embedded in the practice protocols of the Urban Gallery as planning tool. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel portrays human hubris in trying to make a universal tool to reach God, or the heavens, the aerial meta-space mentioned earlier on. But the project failed when the people building the tower started to speak different languages, communication between them broke down leading to the failure and abandonment of the project. The apparent universality of the Urban Gallery project and our ambition to apply it to increasingly transnational territories will certainly meet terrible if not fatal resistance from precisely that problem. But there is another translation issue: when the UG is applied in a specific territory the whole linguistic tool box of concepts, has to be reinvented, new languages have to be constructed, borrowed or subsumed from the locality, in order to embed the UG structure into local processes. This reinvention is itself a form of translation. But the moment we use translation and linguistic structures we deal with tropes: metaphors, metonyms, all essential to work with different kinds of people, their collective emotions, memories and desires. Symbols, habits, expressions, behaviour all have to invade or percolate into the meta-space from the locality and give form and expression to the whole structure and its contents. In the construction of collective space and the public realm language becomes a curatorial device, that in order to create real transmissibility needs to be locally reinvented as part of an active communicational role of the architect or urban planner in the process of dynamic master planning. In the Homerton Cross project a Landscape of Communities emerges from local negotiations between multiple actors, a social landscape woven in time. Raoul Bunschoten |
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| Excerpt from the article originally published in The Naked City, catalogue of Archilab, Edition Hyx, 2004. | ||||
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ARCHITETTURE: CHORA, GROSS MAX, J. GROOTENS. THE LANDING > CHORA |
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