Adam's House in Paradise

A cluster of 1960s courtyard houses in Lambeth, London. 

The courtyard house may be ancient, but it is still contemporary and modern. This became apparent to me on a recent trip to London, during which I was fortunate enough to stay with a friend who lives in an exquisite single-story L-shaped house with its own private courtyard. The house was originally built as part of the Cotton Garden housing estate in the 1960s and forms part of a cluster of 21 courtyard houses in a park.

Adam bought the house a decade ago and renovated it with the help of Cox Bulleid Architects, converting it from a compact and efficient three bedroom house into more of an open-plan house to suit his lifestyle. The remarkable thing about the renovation is its invisibility: The house barely looks like it's been renovated, updated or restored in any way. Such resilience attests to the exceptional quality of the original design, by none other than the Architect's Department of the London Borough of Lambeth. 

From the exterior, these houses barely look like houses. With their long stretches of one story high solid brick walls in which the only exterior door or window openings occur at offsets, and with trees poking out from behind, the architecture resembles a garden wall (which in fact it is, in part). The idea of unifying the architectural wall with the garden wall can of course be seen in ancient Pompeii, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion as well as his unbuilt courtyard housing schemes of the 1930s, and, in the 1980s, the Casa das Artes in Porto, Portugal, by Eduardo Souto de Moura.

It is worth noting, given the contemporary architectural climate, that there was once a time when talented architects sought to make well-designed housing accessible to a majority of people without seeking fame and notoriety. What a concept.

Cotton Garden Estate courtyard houses and tower blocks

Adam's house

The large sliding door into the courtyard is part of the renovation, as are the
doors of the other wing, which were previously windows.

Image courtesy brutalismandbooze.blogspot.com

Pool Typology

We've all seen that famous aerial photograph of an American Southwest suburb in which each and every house has a swimming pool set in a lush, green, perfectly trimmed back lawn. This is the Spanish Northeast version: more compact, and with "clean line" Narco-minimalist (as opposed to Spanish Colonial) styling. A pool for each and every terrace. Happy World Water Day.

Power to the People: Andrés Jaque activist-architect

The office of Andrés Jaque Arquitectos

Still on the shy side of 40, Andrés Jaque is a leading member of a new generation of Spanish architects that is emerging onto the international scene, a generation that distinguishes itself more by its way of working – networking, to be more precise – than by any singly identifiable architectural style. Indeed, this generation is seemingly more interested in process than in product, quite unlike the previous generation, whose trademark minimalism of the 1980s and ’90s has become a kind of official dogma in Spain. What these generations have in common, nevertheless, is political activism, albeit approached from different positions. Members of the elder generation of architects took on positions of power in new governmental institutions, both municipal and regional, that had to be ‘built’ during the post-Franco transition to democracy, while those of the new generation more often work for NGOs, collaborate with neighbourhood associations and stage media events as acts of protest. The latter are more anti-Establishment. To their way of thinking, the perfectly detailed building is no longer as important as a design process that invites public participation and interaction by using digital platforms and Web 2.0 networks. In short, these architects are more ‘artist-activists’ than ‘professional experts’. Knowing that Andrés Jacque is one of their most outspoken exponents, I eagerly make my way to Madrid on the first high-speed train out of Barcelona one summer morning.

Hidden away in the heart of Malasaña, a lively barrio in Madrid, Andrés Jaque’s small office is on a street so obscure that people from neighbouring streets haven’t even heard of it. Only the news vendor at the nearby Plaza del 2 de Mayo is able to direct me to Calle de la Galería de Roble. Entering the calle, I spot a sign the size of a business card on a storefront: Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. I knock on the door and am greeted instantly by the man himself – no secretary, no receptionist – and shown inside. The interior is minuscule but high, with a small mezzanine overlooking a double-height space. It’s the kind of shop that was probably once occupied by a neighbourhood shoemaker or locksmith.

The size of his office is the first thing I mention to Andrés. ‘We are actually two offices here,’ he says, ‘an architecture firm and the Oficina de Inovación Política (Office for Political Innovation or OPI).’ Oh, like OMA and AMO, but smaller? ‘Not exactly, because in this case one of the offices is not a business but a not-for-profit think-tank.’ Reminder to self: pick up on this topic again soon.

He introduces me to two colleagues: a young architect from Bogotá, Colombia, and a young sociologist from Lanzarote, Canary Islands. Wait a minute: a sociologist? Hmm. Just what does the ‘Office for Political Innovation’ actually do, I ponder aloud, and what, if anything, does it have to do with Jaque’s architecture practice?

‘Field work’ is his answer. ‘You know: research.’ He goes on: ‘Ever since I was a student, I’ve been more interested in the complexity of the life that occurs in architecture than in the complexity [and contradiction?] of architecture itself. I’ve wondered why it is that buildings are designed so that people are inevitably obliged to adapt to the architecture rather than the other way round. I decided to make it my mission to dismantle the widely held notion of architecture as a fait accompli. I believe architecture must adapt to reality.’ I find myself nodding in agreement: Jacque is very persuasive and enthusiastic. He would probably make a good motivational speaker, I think to myself.

‘Reality is extremely complex, so we need descriptions of it that are equally complex. The Office for Political Innovation is interested in qualitative sociology, in detailed descriptions of current ways of living and of social interaction that can inform the design process of buildings. This is why we engage in field work.’

How did Andrés go from having a student interest in field work to engaging in it professionally? ‘It all came about gradually. We were a bunch of friends and colleagues who one day decided to articulate and make public a political agenda. We would look for the “architectural dimension” of everything that was happening around us, especially news items of public concern: the environment, gender inequality, poverty, et cetera. We soon realized that to address these public concerns seriously and legitimately we needed to join people from other fields who were already directly involved in such issues. I’m tired of hearing architects say that we are like film directors, that we ‘direct’ others. No, we architects are a part of something bigger. In a complex urban reality, we don’t want just one person pulling all the strings. We need a multiplicity of agents. We live in a democracy, not a technocracy!’

Jaque is on a roll now. He is speaking in Spanish, and if there’s one thing Spaniards have it’s the gift of gab. This man is especially gifted: I can hardly get a word in edgeways.

‘In the end, what we are interested in is urbanism as a qualitative endeavour. Too often there is a fascination with the quantitative: numbers that generate “datascapes” and “mappings” as if these were ends in themselves. The question of urbanism is ultimately a qualitative one: what kind of social interaction do we want in cities? Koolhaas’s research into the “culture of congestion” and studies by the Multiplicity group are interesting examples of qualitative studies of the city.’

I point to dozens of pieces of coloured paper filled with notations arranged in rows on the wall, and ask if these are part of a field-work project.

‘Yes. One of our research projects involves a qualitative survey of the way people live. It’s called “Current Ways of Living”. We are interviewing hundreds of people in their homes to find out what sort of arrangement they live in – traditional family, single-parent family, gay couple, flatmates, roommates – and what kinds of problems and preoccupations this raises. One of the things we have learned first-hand is that there is no such thing as a traditional family any more. We strive for an urbanism that can accommodate ways of living that are as diverse as possible, not the unifying, pacifying urbanism we have now. Confrontation is more constructive than a fictitious consensus.’

I am reminded of something I read recently: that one of the primary motives behind the construction of spectacular public buildings by celebrity architects over the last decade has been to build consensus among citizens – that the Bilbao Effect is a pacification strategy. By bringing residential architecture into the urban political debate, Jaque is challenging this enshrined model. He is championing an urbanism of the ordinary and the everyday rather than an urbanism of the extraordinary and the holiday.

‘When you think about it, the domestic interior is much more of a politicized space than the innocent and sacred “home sweet home” it’s made out to be. John Lennon and Yoko Ono knew this when they bedded-in for peace. If we look beyond the traditional family at other kinds of cohabitation, such as apartments shared by Erasmus students, we find that the home is where we encounter “the other” and where all sorts of forms of collectivity are negotiated. Internet has also made the home much more public. Some homes are veritable television studios these days: look at the ongoing fascination with reality shows that occur in domestic spaces.’

Residential architecture is indeed what constitutes the bulk of the built environment; there’s little question that it has not been given the architectural attention it deserves, especially in Spain. But I’m still wondering how Andrés transforms field work into design. How are his theories manifested in his built work? Or are both these offices completely separate spheres of activity?

‘Each office has its own business model, priorities and levels of risk. One is an office that delivers a service to paying clients. This office has to deliver on time and on budget; it can’t afford to take too many risks. It has a responsibility to the public and to the client. The other is a not-for-profit organization. I couldn’t ask sociologists to collaborate on a research project if there was a profit motive. The motive has to be a common research interest and a common political goal – nothing else. We’ve received some research commissions, and sometimes an architectural commission has come out of a research project we’ve initiated. So while there is a transfer of knowledge between the two offices, their organizational and economic structures are different.’

I ask if this research finds its way to the real powers that be: politicians, planners and developers. ‘The OPI disseminates its findings by means of exhibitions and publications in places like the University of Alicante’s architecture school and La Casa Encendida Cultural Centre in Madrid. Through these institutions, I hope the information reaches politicians, planners and developers, because the diversity of living arrangements that exists out there is not reflected at all in the built environment. All we seem to find are three-bedroom homes for traditional families, which almost don’t exist any more. As architects, we have to enter into more of a dialogue with developers, who are a lot more willing to innovate their product if it can deliver an advantage for them. The problem is that the property and housing market is not very transparent. It has been driven entirely by speculation, which explains the repetition of three-bedroom units. Look at how developers' advertisements all seem to look and sound the same when compared with the way people describe their own homes in ads that tend to be much more nuanced and detailed. We do field work in order to go into detail, not to generalize. Details help us understand better just how complex reality is. At the Venice Biennale this year, I participated in a round table discussion with a few architects who have very large practices, and they were complaining that architecture is no longer possible because the only design freedom left to architects is in the façade. To this I responded: reduce the size of your practice, collaborate within a multidisciplinary network and refuse to work for big clients. Of course, the remuneration won’t be the same, but the satisfaction and the respect you’ll receive will be much greater.’

As the train pulls out of Atocha Station for the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Barcelona, block after block of soulless new housing blocks filled with three-bedroom dwellings pass by the window. Their formulaic monotony is perfectly revealed as the train accelerates. I come to a realization: this is not so much an architectural problem as it is a political one, and political problems do indeed require political innovation. 


[originally published in Mark Magazine #29]

Top-Down Tower, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, by R+B Arquitectes

Social housing is among the most regulated--and least glamorous--areas of architecture. While all housing is normally subject to a set of minimum room dimensions, social housing is additionally governed by stringent maximum dimensions which happen to be almost equal to the minimum ones, leaving little margin for architectural maneuver. When, moreover, the building envelope is predetermined by a master plan, then little more than the façade and the entrance lobby are left for design consideration. Yet these two elements make a significant difference, as this 77 unit social housing tower by Barcelona’s R+B Architects shows.

Part of an urban master plan by Viaplana & Piñon for L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the Plaça Europa apartment tower was designed, according to architect Miguel Roldán, “from the top-down”. What he really means here is that from the outset, the program was packed as densely as possible into the given building envelope descending from the top floor down, allowing the ground floor communal entrance lobby to become a larger interior street of sorts. On the exterior, three-story high groupings of deeply recessed windows give the fifteen story tower the appearance of containing only five floors, a nod to the traditional lower buildings nearby.

With its elegant façade and generous lobby-cum-interior street, it’s hard to believe this is social housing. R+B have certainly upped the ante with their top-down tower. The downside, however, is that housing regulators now have a new pretext for reducing the architectural margin even more.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27]

Optimization Takes Command: Angelo Roventa's Elastic Dwelling

[originally published in ST/A/R special issue 23 catalogue for the Vienna MAK exhibition "The Game of the Mighty: Heidulf Gerngross archistrates Franz West's Nageltower. With Hofstetter Kurt and Angelo Roventa"]


Architect Angelo Roventa operating his Elastic Dwelling prototype at the MAK, Vienna

Angelo Roventa’s Elastic Dwelling applies a principle—and a mechanism—that is borrowed from a commercially available pre-manufactured industrial product: the high-density mobile storage system that is quite common in large archives, libraries, offices, and warehouses. The principle behind this product is quite simple: the ratio of useable storage space to circulation space increases drastically when storage cabinets can be moved sideways along a track such that only a single access aisle is ever open between any two cabinets at any given time. Space is completely optimized in such a system since circulation space (that all-important difference between net and gross) is reduced to only the location at which it is actually needed.

The Elastic Dwelling transfers this principle to the domestic realm, not in order to increase storage capacity or reduce circulation space, but rather to enable domestic “rooms” to be enlarged and reduced as needed. Instead of storing files or documents that are rarely consulted, the Elastic Dwelling's mobile cabinets contain home furnishings which are used on a daily basis: there are cabinets containing beds, others containing a desk and bookshelf, and others wardrobes. Immobile cabinets at each end contain the “wet” functions of bathroom and kitchen. A generous lateral space from which the elastic rooms are accessed serves as the more public, multi-use living and dining room. All this allows, just as it does in archives and offices, for much fewer square meters to deliver the same level of performance. A saving of square meters entails a saving of construction material, energy, maintenance and, of course, cost. Space is money too.

The idea of space as something to be optimized probably worries some architects. I can think of more than one academic who would very likely disapprove of the Elastic Dwelling's optimization ethos. Their refrain goes something like “optimization only serves capitalism and instrumental rationalism, which architects must resist.” But isn’t the proposal of a real, viable, and yes, financially feasible alternative to business-as-usual more constructive and effective in implementing change than mere resistance? The interesting thing about the Elastic Dwelling is precisely that it withstands some of the typical criticisms levelled at architects by the more conservative building industry. For example, the Elastic Dwelling does not rely on any expensive yet-to-emerge technologies: the high-density mobile storage system has been around for decades. Which raises an obvious question: how is it that no architect has thought of this until now?

The clues have been there all along. What is the most oft-repeated client criticism of architect-designed housing? “There isn’t enough storage space for all my stuff!” (“Hey, this is my way of forcing you to become less materialistic!”) It was a comedian and not an architect who gave us what is arguably the most accurate definition of a house: George Carlin and his famous line “a house is where you keep your stuff while you run around getting more stuff.” In a consumer society, a house becomes a storage depot of sorts, and storage technology is exactly what makes the Elastic Dwelling possible.

But storage technology is applied in the Elastic Dwelling in order to elastically accommodate the activities of everyday life in less space; not to store goods per se. The Elastic Dwelling's ad-hoc use of a pre-manufactured commercial product recalls Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s 1972 book Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, which celebrates a DIY hippy-culture of making-do-and-getting-by with the goods of an overabundant consumer society. Although some of the mobile cabinets are indeed used for storage, their larger purpose in the Elastic Dwelling is to act as mobile partitions. In fact, if there is one thing the Elastic Dwelling possibly lacks it is, ironically, storage space.

An important limitation of the Elastic Dwelling idea is that it is really only suitable for singles or couples at most; certainly not large families (“Mommy: Hans is shrinking my bedroom again!”). The Elastic Dwelling demands consensus when there are multiple dwellers in its interior, something that is increasingly difficult to achieve in these post-modern times. Flexibility, which has been the dream of countless architectural utopias, is a double-edged sword, since it is also potentially a cause of disagreement and difference. Perhaps the Elastic Dwelling is ideally a bachelor machine. But then again, households have become much smaller and taken on diverse forms in the last three to four decades, with “singles” forming one of the fastest-growing market segments. Small households must still all-too-often settle in relatively larger dwellings if they want all the comforts of a modern home. The Elastic Dwelling makes it possible for smaller households, especially singles, to occupy significantly less space without sacrificing comfort. In the end, the Elastic Dwelling optimizes quantity for the sake of quality.

When I studied architecture in Canada, one of the early design projects that we were assigned involved randomly picking three pre-manufactured construction-industry products out of Sweet’s Construction Catalogue and combining them in such a way that put them to new, never before imagined uses. The project was all about eschewing arts-and-crafts values in favor of bricolage and “adhocism”. I vaguely remember picking automatic garage doors, Pirelli rubber flooring and barbed wire, and transforming those into some sort of architectural sado-masochistic contraption (what else?). After seeing Angelo’s invention, I now really wish I had picked high-density mobile storage systems as one my three products, and that my attitude had not been so cocky back then. Perhaps then I might have thought of the Elastic Dwelling first.

Visitant / Local

click on image to enlarge

The scoreboard says it all.

visitor / local
Lord Richard Rogers / Bellvitge
hotel / housing
5 star / no star
architecture / building
custom / prefab
unique / repetitive
landmark / landscape

The local team has the advantage of popular support.
The visiting team has the advantage of money and super-stars.

Could be a close match in the end.

Two Optimistic Architecture Yearboks: a comparative analysis

[originally published in Annuel optimiste d'architecture 2008 / Optimistic Architecture Yearbook 2008, Les Éditions de la French Touch] One of the interesting things about architectural yearbooks is that they provide a snapshot, or to use a more appropriate metaphor, a cross-section of the architectural scene of a part of the world in a given period in time. Comprising a selection that has been vetted from a much larger body of work, a yearbook can be likened loosely to a musical compilation of “greatest hits”, or a “best of” literature collection. These kinds of collections usually contain a number of works that, although adhering to a certain artistic style or genre, are nevertheless highly diverse, precisely to display the range of possibilities or the dynamism of that style or genre. A compilation defines a community without establishing hierarchy. The same goes for a yearbook, which is quite different from a juried awards programme in which a pecking order is established. While the latter is about who is better than whom, the former is about a cultural scene and its activity. But, a year is not a lot of time to see what is happening on a cultural scene, especially one that is dedicated to architecture. As Richard Scoffier remarks in the 2007 Optimistic Yearbook, “a single year is rarely meaningful in architecture, given that even the smallest construction usually takes years to reach completion.” Moreover, modern architecture, just like fashion, political ideology, or rock and roll, tends to be broadly categorized according to decades. It is a commonplace to employ prefixes such as “1920s—” or “60s—” when we want to convey the architectural Zeitgeist of a period, even when the period doesn’t conform very exactly within the frame of a decade. If we go further back in history, the prefix suddenly becomes a century. The mere mention of a certain decade or century is capable of conjuring a plethora of imagery in the mind. So what about the year? Why do we celebrate the end of a year, read year-end reviews, and collect yearbooks? A given year does not constitute a “period” in the way a decade or century does. Would it not make more sense to publish decade-books? It takes the passing of a year, that seasonal cycle that ends with a void in the western calendar, for (at least most of) us to be provoked into reflecting. When a year goes by, we are prompted to look back, take stock, and maybe do some spring-cleaning. This is the essential service that a yearbook provides. It is an annual reflection that results in a selection. In order to come to meaningful conclusions, yearbooks have to be looked at in multiples, not individually. In the meantime, we must do with only two Optimistic yearbooks: 2007 and 2008. Probably not enough to analyze the emergence of a new school or “ism”, or to characterize the decade that is coming to a close, but nevertheless enough to get a snapshot of what happened during these two years. Coincidentally, these happen to be the two years which bracket the onset of a global economic crisis, a record high in the price of oil, and the bursting of what turns out to have been an artifically inflated real estate bubble. Fortunately, France seems to be one of the few countries to have avoided entering into recession in 2008. So while two yearbooks may not serve to paint a definitive picture of the architecture of the 00s in France—though they certainly help in this regard—they can still perhaps provide us with some comparative insight. It is noteworthy that while the 2007 yearbook included 67 entries by 50 different architectural firms, this year’s includes only 61 entries, but by 55 architectural firms. Could this be a sign of harder times in which there is less work to go around, or is it merely that 2008 is not as good a vintage as the year before? Of the 67 works in the 2007 edition yearbook, 10 are housing, while in the 2008 edition that number rises to 12, a significant increase considering there are fewer entries in the latter edition. It is encouraging that housing—especially social housing projects—is on the rise in architecturally qualitative terms. If only the same could be said for other countries! Housing, the largest sector of the construction industry and usually the worst-built and most ill-considered building type is, in theory at least, the most primordial and humane form of architecture, and so it is an important indicator of the level of social commitment on the part of commissioners and architects. Another indicator that is of interest here is the adaptive reuse of older buildings, as this speaks volumes about the degree to which architecture is seen as a contributor to the health of existing communities and to ecological sustainability in general. In the 2007 yearbook, around 27% of the projects involved the adaptive reuse of buildings, while in 2008 that figure declines to only 12%. Hopefully this is only a blip in the longer term, as the adaptive reuse of buildings is an architectural specialization that has been steadily growing in Europe. It is well-known that a building that is upgraded or remodeled instead of demolished and converted into landfill does more to reduce carbon emissions than a comparable building that is built anew no matter how “green” or “ecological” it may be. Similarly, we could analyze the number of brownfield projects. In the same way that adaptive reuse recycles buildings, brownfield construction recycles land. In the 2007 yearbook, a full two-thirds of the projects occupy brownfield sites, several of which are urban infill projects, while in 2008 this is the case for only around half the projects. The lower proportion of brownfield projects in 2008 is, again, hopefully only a blip in the longer term picture, as brownfield development is an effective way of combating urban sprawl. Nevertheless, if we compare with yearbooks (or national awards programs) of other countries, especially in faster growing economies such as Asia, France shows a far greater commitment to brownfield development in its most representational projects. The size of a project, as well as its cost, are also significant factors. If a yearbook is a sampling of “best of” architecture, then it might be interesting to compare what the best costs. In the 2007 yearbook, the cost per square meter of the projects ranged from € 367 for a smart and economical residential renovation to € 5588 for a transportable luxury hotel room by an artist team. The average cost per square meter of all the projects selected in 2007 (for which data is available) is € 1830. In 2008, the cost ranges from € 681 for a covered boulodrome to € 10077 for a mixed-use complex. The average cost per square meter in 2008 is just slightly higher at € 1942. Interestingly, the cost per square meter of yearbook-quality architecture turns out to be only slightly higher than that of standard construction in the end. But what is most significant is the wide range of budgets with which the works included in both yearbooks have been built, clearly a reflection of the broad diversity of project-types that have been selected. Of course, it is understood that architecture yearbooks such as this one do not purport to represent an accurate cross-section of the overall building production taking place in the country, and so this analysis makes no pretense whatsoever at providing across-the-board conclusions. It only looks at the crème-de-la-crème of building production. Another shortcoming is that with only two yearbooks having been published to date, the numbers are not statistically very reliable. An analysis such as this one should really be done with more samples from a longer timespan. Therefore, it is important to understand the outcome as being somewhat aleatory and my conclusions as being highly personal speculation. In a way, this is an exercise in pata-physics more than it is one of serious statistical analysis. If this experiment provides any useful insight at all, it might be interesting to repeat it in a few years to see what has changed, hopefully without the mistakes and shortcomings of this one.

Winnipeg: One Great Situation-Normal (1)

"Incredible...one can actually order ‘a cup of coffee’ here without having to specify in greater detail the particular brewing method, the type of coffee bean, the darkness of the roast, or even the flavour. It’s even served in a ceramic cup!" (2)

Winnipeg is the ‘ordinary Canadian’ of cities. Not many other Canadian cities can lay claim to being situated right in the middle of the Trans Canada Highway; nor are many situated on land as flat and undramatic as the Red River floodplain. How many other Canadian cities are as averagely-sized --let alone bilingual? Or able to consistently produce the most reliable test-market data on the viability of new consumer products before they are launched in the rest of the country, a theory that rests on the underlying principle that if Winnipeggers will buy it, then anyone will? (3) Hard-working and frugal, socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Winnipeg is the urban equivalent of the mythical ‘ordinary Canadian’ who is married, has two-point-three children and a house in the suburbs. (4)

This is not a bad thing, though. Compared with the rest of the western world, in which the run-of-the-mill is increasingly displaced by specialized premium brands, designer labels and authentic reproductions, being squarely in the middle-of-the-road is precisely what makes Winnipeg unique and interesting, if not exotic. It is also, of course, what makes this city quintessentially Canadian. Like a big Value Village thrift store, Winnipeg is the sort of place where the generic and the naturalized that was never even known to have been forgotten can be suddenly and happily rediscovered, and all for a bargain.

But ordinariness is not just the stuff of savvy antique collectors. It is an increasingly current preoccupation in the discourse of contemporary art as well. As the grand narratives that not-so-long-ago purported to tell everyone’s story whither, the idea of art as compensation for the reality that surrounds us becomes displaced by an art that addresses this reality instead. The trivial and the ordinary are therefore becoming increasingly the central subject of art, displacing the emphasis on the unique, the heroic, the individual, and the autobiographical. With its high standards of mediocrity and its location in the middle of the North American continent, (5) Winnipeg is optimally positioned to exploit this growing area of interest, a situation that, if seized, could propel it into the next global art centre, the logical next-step in the westward progression after Paris and New York.

Winnipeg’s artists are already fully aware of this situation, exploring the mundane to its fullest, including its crass and shitty aspects. (6) The city offers artists and other researchers of the ‘aesthetics of the commonplace’ excellent field conditions in which to observe normality. (7) The city’s physical mediocrity is consistent in its quality, and its citizens appear to be very relaxed and unself-conscious about it, even during media occasions such as the Pan Am Games. Indeed, contemporary Winnipeg places greater value on the quality of its daily life than on that of its rare public spectacles: even the architecture of the new food court at St. Vital Mall, for example, is far more impressive than the Investor’s Group Athletics Facility completed recently for the Pan Am Games at the University of Manitoba, a campus whose collection of fine historical and modernist buildings would be complemented far more attentively if it were located elsewhere. Only in contemporary Winnipeg would shopping and other daily activities be accorded greater architectural monumentality than education and sport, the twin pillars that have traditionally stood for the pursuit of excellence. (8)

The disdain for elitism, excellence and international prestige in favour of a somewhat higher quality of daily life for all is of course not unique to Winnipeg, but is by-and-large a Canadian characteristic that, like this country’s extreme weather, happens to be more pronounced in this region. The result is that artists, who in many other cities must struggle to eat, are themselves able to enjoy a better quality of life. It is not uncommon for a Winnipeg artist to actually live in a house and work downtown, a significant step up from having to live in a studio.

Indeed, it is precisely its housing affordability that has helped to spare Winnipeg, to date, from the latest development craze, that of the so-called ‘artist’s live-work studio’. The city has been spared from many other planning and development trends as well, most notably the urban renewal craze of the 1960s as well as its subsequent backlash, the movement to turn historical buildings into ‘ye olde’ heritage. For a city with so much exquisite historical architecture, it is very remarkable how little of it has been commercially redeveloped into artist’s live-work studios or boutiques. What this means, of course, is that Winnipeg’s warehouse buildings are actually used by artists, the very people who would ironically be driven out if such development were to take place. (9)

Winnipeg can be seen, then, as a city that is genuinely ‘artist friendly’. This should, theoretically, fare well for the city in the new post-industrial economy of ideas, images and visual culture. After having occupied the sidelines for so long, Winnipeg’s day could still come thanks, in the end, to its persistence in striving to be ordinary. If the city does become the next global art centre, it will, of course, have to be careful not to spoil the very quality that made it great. But who would ever have thought that mediocrity could possibly become a virtue in the new world order?

NOTES:

1. The word ‘situation’ refers, interestingly, to both a geographical location (site) as well as to a “condition as modified or determined by surroundings or attendant circumstances” (OED). “Sit(E)ings: Trajectories for a Future,” as an exhibition situated in Winnipeg, provides itself a site for this city’s art. I will therefore speculate on the city as a present and future urban situation that the works in the exhibition may or may not have in common. In any case, specific references to works in the exhibition are made in these notes.

2. An initial personal observation upon arriving for the first time in Winnipeg from LatteLand Vancouver in 1997.

3. Jean Klimack’s installation, in which different kinds of chewing gum were mailed out to different people, chewed, returned and finally displayed in a typological matrix is itself the result of a form of ‘market-research’ into the nuances and subtle variations between different brands of the same generic product.

4. Harry Symon’s on-going work on the Constitution and Paul Butler’s collages using advertisement both comment on the social construction of the ‘ordinary Canadian’: the former engages in the slippery arena of mass-opinion, while the latter reminds us that mass-opinion is fluid and extensively shaped by corporate interests through advertising.

5. Lori Rogers’s complex and poetic video-installation piece and Jake Moore’s rooftop installation are both representations of a diminishing nature. Rogers’s work is abstract and employs a technological medium, while Moore’s is more figurative and craft-based.

6. This strategy is most clearly deployed in the collage work of Jacek Kosciuk, which combines detritus such as recycled KFC cartons with his own imagery, as well as the self-portraits by Christine Kirouac, which reference the glossy PhotoShop™-improved photographs of sports and entertainment celebrities in the weekly media.

7. As Marcel Dzama’s work points out, however, normalcy is never what it seems. His quirky, disturbing world could be a comic-book variation of a David Lynch movie. Yet like all comics and science fiction, they give insight into human nature in general.

8. Blair Marten’s détournements of sports accessories and hand tools, as well as Kevin Waugh’s sofa-legs-cum-tongue can be seen as humorous institutional critiques with a tactile, haptic touch. Their disdain for the overly verbose discourse of art institutions is especially present in their own artist’s statements.

9. Joel Garreau, in his book Edge Cities, notes that suburban enclaves with names like “Cedar Grove” are often named after species of animals or plants that have been eradicated by the very construction of those enclaves. The commercial development of ‘artist live/work studios,’ which often forces artists to move to other areas, proves that this theory applies equally to humans.

[Orignally published in Winnipeg Art Gallery: Sit(e)ings: Trajectories for a Future]

Straightforward

[originally published in VMX 95] "Architecture, whether it is a work of art or not, must be utilitarian or else fail completely. Art is not utilitarian." -Sol LeWitt (1) As an endeavour that attempts to transcend the utilitarianism of 'building' with artistic signification, architecture can be understood in a certain way as building made complicated. Building is in and of itself fairly simple and only made 'complicated' when architects choose to make it so; in short, when the architect's subjectivity enters into the equation. This is typically interpreted as meaning, however, that architecture is therefore a vehicle for whimsical personal expression, which often results in a formalist architecture of either tasteful or jarring composition, often willfully forced against the grain of the systematic and rational building industry, not to mention against any given site, programme, and eventual occupants. Such an architecture positions itself in direct binary opposition to questions of utility and economy that are considered to be antithetical to the 'art'. For VMX Architects, however, the building art does not necessarily comprise the literal complicating of building-form, but, on the contrary, the distillation of an idea together with its site and programme down to the simplest possible form of spatial generosity. Their projects have a characteristically straightforward appearance: the right angle figures prominently, as do straight lines and simple bar and box shapes. There is often repetitiveness within a project, almost as though it was designed for expediency of construction; as well as a certain consistency throughout the projects, betraying a sense of aesthetic refinement as well as an ideological position that is quite Miesian: "In Mies [van der Rohe], the realities are, from the very outset, material for the work of architecture..." (2) The ideas behind each of the projects come out of investigations into the very 'realities' that constitute 'the work of architecture'. It is almost only in their ideas that the projects are intuitive, informed as they are by personal observation of the many social and cultural realities with which architecture interacts. The rationality apparent in the work stems from the fact that the ideas are then consequently and methodically taken to an architectural conclusion with the least amount of effort and contrivance. In this way, VMX operates in a manner not unlike that of the Conceptual Art Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Conceptual Art emerged as an avant-garde critique of the relationship between the artist's subjectivity and the art critic's taste. It strove to undermine this relationship by eliminating from art notions of style and aestheticism, even as much as possible the art object itself: these were felt to detract from the notion of 'idea' in art. Conceptual artists attempted "...to eliminate the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible" (3) by relying on an initial idea that would generate a result with a machine-like minimum of subsequent decision-making on the part of the artist. The work was purposely emotionally dry and often did not employ the conventional media of painting and sculpture, but text and drawings, for example, and tended toward repetition, reduction, appropriation of 'ready-made' objects and simple orthogonality in fabricated objects. Interestingly, these themes resonate with the building industry's practices of standardization, economy of means, pre-fabrication of parts and the rectangular shape of most construction products respectively, practices which VMX employ throughout their work. Comparing architecture to art, however, let alone the building industry to Conceptual Art, is in many other respects misleading since art differs from architecture precisely by virtue of its critical role in society and therefore its degree of autonomy. Autonomy is a form of academic freedom premised upon the need for creative and critical activity to maintain a distance from the realities of finance, public opinion and power. While both art and architecture retain their relative autonomy through cultural institutions such as the museum, (4) artistic autonomy is nevertheless ultimately funded by business and industry, for whom maintaining a small, distant critical elite is not entirely against its interests: the sponsorship of art and culture can serve to redeem morally questionable business activities. While art may criticise and shock or move when it holds up its mirror, architecture, as Sol LeWitt points out above, "must be utilitarian", it has to nevertheless accomodate real needs. Architecture is less autonomous and more socially contingent than art, and ignoring this fact in favour of an architecture primarily of personal expression opens a void for business and industry to fill, as can be seen widely today. This is a reality which VMX is well aware of: "We want to take back the profession of architecture from both its disappearance into the margins of artistic activity as well as from its displacement by developers, contractors and project management firms." (5) The projects are made with the aim of proposing ideas for the most generous possible spatial resolution of their respective intersections of site and programme. These are intersections which are recognized as unique for each and every project in architecture, always occuring in a different context and inevitably resulting in a unique 'DNA footprint'. Each project is seen as always representing, therefore, a unique opportunity. The almost banal repetition of forms and materials in the designs is meant to foreground rather than distract from the issue of space and its use and enjoyment in situ. The programmatic allocation and organization of space, both interior and exterior, as well as the material and perceptual mediation between spaces therefore assume importance. The drawings that explain these projects, with the same matter-of-factness as the designs, are 'designed' to no more than represent three-dimensional spaces at reduced scales on two-dimensional paper in the most informative way; they are not painstakingly crafted artistic ends-in-themselves in which architecture becomes effectively a pretext for the activity of drawing. Here, architecture is primarily a pretext for providing space, and drawing is a means. It is moreso the model and especially its expressive portrayal in photographs that generates the 'image' of every project. In the actual designs, there are many aspects of the work that are simplified as much as possible, often, it seems, in spite of complex and difficult requirements. In projects such as Dun Laoghaire and the Souks of Beirut, with their preposterous floor to area requirements, this can be seen as almost a will to straightforwardness, an effort. These projects manifest, for example, a decisive preference for resolving high density in low-rise buildings with carefully positioned and defined exterior spaces rather than high-rise free-standing objects in the centre of the site. Low-rise decisively occupies, defines and fabricates its own ground-scape, whereas the tall building, especially when raised on pilotis à la Le Corbusier, pretends to barely intervene in the nature of the ground. 'Pretends', because it is of course impossible to build anything (except a space station) that does not affect the ground one way or another given that that is still where buildings are usually made physically accessible by infrastructure. Better then to go ahead and design the ground, and by extension what one gazes at, in an architecture / landscape / infrastructure 'Total Design', something that low-rise more readily implies. The low-rise buildings, with their courts and patios, establish a close-range architectural environment with a more tactile, haptic experience of exterior materials than would a taller free-standing building conceived as a 'device to see the world'. (6) The latter's view over large terrain promotes a more colonizing gaze, one that dominates over nature. (7) Even Oostpoort, whose municipal 'envelope' is for a (relatively) high-rise office complex, uses a slightly raised sockle and careful positioning of openings in the building masses to lend qualities precisely to the courtyard at the centre of the scheme, not unlike Alison and Peter Smithson's Economist building in London. While a preference for enclosed exterior spaces with openings is evident in the way VMX occupy a site, further articulation of building mass itself is kept to a rational minimum with the rectilinear box and bar shapes, as epitomized in the Villa Vente and in Beirut's 'Cartesian Transformation'. The purity of the bar form nevertheless becomes somewhat fluid in projects such as 'Heaven Can Wait' and the Olympic Stadium, however, suggesting a certain flexibility within their orthodoxy of the right angle. But this is still not for purposes of capricious composition: the articulation evident in the former, for example, is so because there is a decision to re-use the site's existing elements of pool and parking, which results in the bar shape having to bend in order to circumnavigate these elements while defining exterior spaces. What appears as composition, albeit a simple one, is in fact entirely rational and avoids "the arbitrary, the capricious and the subjective as much as possible." Both 'Heaven Can Wait' and the Olympic Stadium project are transformations of similar perimeter block types: these blocks are both opened to the waterfront and folded in various places to take advantage of views and light, resulting in a hybrid of the nearby Berlage 'Plan Zuid' perimeter block and modernist blocks. Repetitions of compositions occur most clearly in the Metaalunie and van Leer projects, both of which are additions to existing buildings. The former is a two-phased extension onto an idiosynchratic structure, and yet the theme of simple repetition is nowhere else reduced to such an essence: the second extension phase is an exact clone of the first, not in an obvious symmetry of wings attaching onto each side of the original structure but with the second phase directly on top of the first one, complete with base of pilotis. It does so with the utmost of simplicity while providing an upper storey loggia and opening views out of the original building. In the van Leer building extension, on the other hand, three similar single-storey elements are repeated along the ground and rotated into a pinwheel formation. Repetition carries through within elements by the use of similar unit-types, lift cores and column grids. While the exteriors of the projects regularly appear as low, modestly simple box or bar shapes, the interiors, on the other hand, are sometimes extremely complex, as evident in 'Heaven Can Wait'. This project investigates the reality of today's seniors, for whom retirement is almost only a midpoint given today's longer life expectancies. This has changed seniors' lifestyles and is recognised here as essentially a programmatic issue related to leisure and the 'ultimate luxury' of choice, something the highly standardized Dutch housing industry is ill-equipped to deal with. A total of 120 different units, a recognition of the diversity of today's seniors, is generated out of a game of permutations and combinations with Dutch standard residential measurements and concealed behind a uniform facade. There is thus a complete schism between the rational logic of the exterior and the interior 'puzzle of lifestyles', recalling, incidentally, New York's skyscrapers as discussed by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York. The Oostpoort and Olympic Stadium projects combine somewhat less complex interiors with the use of standard construction methods. These methods are so cost-effective that buildings in the Netherlands have effectively become ready-to-build kits whose parts are already in tandem with the stringent Dutch requirements for natural ventilation and daylight admittance. With building heights regulated by each municipality's zoning bylaws and the developer's imperative to generate maximum profit for investors, resultant building masses are effectively pre-determined. The architect is only required for reasons of legal formality and as the final 'cake decorator' who must paint a happy face over this reality and make it appear as if each building is a unique product of genius. It can be said, however, that the systematised production of buildings according to norms and typical construction methods is nevertheless an example of 'complexity and contradiction' that is arguably more beautiful in its pure state than when it is glossed over. VMX views standardization as a given and uses it precisely to generate architecture. The kit of parts is used in the most straightforward manner and becomes the very essence of these projects. This is not to deny, however, the possibility of an architecture of 'reflexivity', one which nevertheless can also comment upon the conditions surrounding its production. In the reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut, for example, historical continuity is established but without the nostalgia: the ancient figure-ground is used as a given, but 'corrected' in a 'Cartesian Transformation' that aligns the buildings with the Earth's lines of latitude and longitude. Cartesian coordinates are the principle behind both the game of 'Battleships' and the Global Positioning System whereby a position is ascribable to anything anywhere in relation to an established set of mutually perpendicular axes. Through the 'Cartesian Transformation', the Souks become part of a global order. Indeed, their reconstruction, whatever form it takes, is likely to be built as a mega-project with international financing and its share of the Benettons and McDonalds that comprise the New World Order. The 'Cartesian Transformation' is then, in this sense, an entirely appropriate metaphor. It also illustrates perfectly VMX's conceptual approach whereby an initial intuitive idea is consequently and consistently carried out with the least amount of formalist composition-making: at the outset it is decided to appropriate the plan of the original Souks, followed by their systematic transformation to arrive at a result. The result is a scheme that is at once cognisant of Beirut's history as well as contextual with its own status as a singularly conceived project. This resolution of site and programme into an architecture that reflects upon the cultural context of its own production bypasses any need for expression. The work of VMX, by its very simplicity, does not set out primarily to claim an autonomous aesthetic realm for architecture, just as it does not stake avant-garde claims of newness for society to eventually learn to live with. Ironically, such avant-gardeness is becoming increasingly expected by certain societies (such as the Dutch), which have come almost to await from architects 'a new architecture every Monday morning.' Their work is in this sense also not just the newest critique of contemporary commodity culture which "...privileges the brand-new product or idea over that of the devalued, most recent 'new' idea in the name of 'progress.'" (8) Architecture resides in ideas for spaces. The spatial ideas in the work of VMX come out of an interest in culture and its dilemmas, with the projects not merely telling it as is, but positing buildable proposals for their resolution. But moreover, the projects approach the very beauty of art in the way their ideas are taken to their architectural essence instead of complicated beyond recognition. If these projects, in the end, make architecture appear beautifully simple, then that is precisely their virtue. NOTES 1. Sol LeWit, 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 836. 2. Ignasi de Solá-Morales Rubió, 'Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism', Detlef Mertins, ed., The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p. 151. 3. Sol LeWitt, op cit, p. 835. 4. Art maintains its autonomy in the museum, as much as it tries to test these institutional limitations; while architecture maintains its autonomy by building the museum, as much as it resists accomodating art 'neutrally'. The museum has, since postmodernism, become the architectural object par excellence. 5. VMX partner Don Murphy in private conversation. 6. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 7. 7. Interestingly, even an urban environment can be said to appear more 'natural' from above. 8. Dan Graham, 'Art in Relation to Architecture / Architecture in Relation to Art', Brian Wallis, ed., Rock my Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 239.