Recently I had the wonderful idea to spend my spring break doing as many activities related to architecture as possible. Fortunately this included one of Chicago Architecture Foundation's Wednesday lunch lectures on the Wheeler Kearns Architecture Firm and some of the amazing projects they have been doing recently. At the end of this lecture I had the opportunity to meet a student visiting from somewhere on the west coast. She invited me to the SFI 10+1 Conference which she was planning on going to that same weekend. At first I thought it impossible for me to attend a Conference that was so soon but I contacted Design Corps anyways to ask them if it would be possible. Fortunately I was able to attend the conference. Since then my motivation to be an architectural anthropologist has sky rocketed. During the Conference there was one speech in particular done by Tom Fisher which gave a call specifically to anthropologists to help in the field of architecture.
Since this time I have met a large number of people who work with changing the field of architecture and other fields of design. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I am entering the last month of my masters program at the University of Chicago, I will not have much time to post on this site. Therefore the majority of my posts (like my last post Architecture = Building + Art + People) will be posts of papers I am doing for my class entitled Academic / Professional Writing. I will do my best to post on other topics prior to the first week in June (when I will be graduating). However most of my posts will come after that date.
I would like to spend the rest of this particular post adding to a TED Talk given by Bjarke Ingels which you can find at this site: http://www.ted.com/talks/bjarke_ingels_3_warp_speed_architecture_tales.html . Aside from Ingels' beautiful accent and the fact that his name was brought up at a meeting I had today with an anthropologist working for an architecture firm here in Chicago, there is no particular reason for me to start out discussing this particular TED talk. I will start by describing what I am not interested in doing. I am not interested in critiquing his talk or even discussing the entirety of his talk, only very specific points which he brings up. This is also not a critique of Bjarke Ingels himself. This is the only talk that I have heard him give, so it is very unfair for me to criticize his theories in general. Instead what I am interested in doing is adding to what he has in this particular talk to give another idea altogether.
Many of the projects Ingels presents still hark back to this Miesian idea of being able to create the same building anywhere. Design wise, similarities can be drawn from the library in Coppenhagen that Ingels' designed and DC6 by ICE architects + Trinity and Associates in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam which was featured in today's DesignBoom. Ultimately the idea is similar to taking a tower and twisting it like one would a slinky. Similarities can also be drawn from the balconies of Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower in Chicago to the "Leonardo di Caprio balconies" which Ingels' discusses. Ingels himself refers to the fact that the outside is a "Scandinavian version of the Spanish steps in Rome." There is a complete lack of localization, as I mentioned in the beginning the same building could be built anywhere.
Ingels goes on to talk about the fact that this is an idea embraced at the core of the architectural process itself. In creating the design for one client one ends up coming up with the idea that fits for a totally different client in a totally different culture. In my personal opinion this should not be the case at all. The design process should be so localized that moving it from 57th Street in Hyde Park to 43rd Street in Bronzeville (two neighborhoods in the confines of Chicago) should make a vast difference as the building is speaking to extremely different audiences. In this way a thought brought up for the design in Hyde Park would seem absurd for a design in Bronzeville and vice versa. This is, however, not what happens in the architectural process.
Throughout the rest of Ingels' talk he discusses some truly amazing architectural feats the firm has created with regard to sustainable design. Which could literally change the landscape of future buildings and cities. He also discusses the People's Building which they created for the Shanghai Expo. This building succeeds in bringing in culture on some very literal levels, with the Chinese character for people and the ideas of the building fitting the cultural ideas of one Chinese man in particular. Unfortunately Ingels' does not discuss how these buildings have impacted the people that live inside them. The closest he gets to these ideas is when he talks about how one particular building has affected the view from his window. Nor has he discussed how the People's Building has affected the Chinese people of Shanghai, whether the building has been accepted and whether the ideas embraced in the building itself are of one individual or many.
Ingels' discusses the fact that Shanghai has developed from a city of bicycles to a city of cars. However he compares this to Coppenhagen which is "expanding the bicycle lanes." There are a couple cultural problems with comparing these two cities like this. First of all I fear this gives people the idea that China itself has moved away from bicycles which, as one can see from Beijing, is far from true. What Ingels' neglected to mention is as Shanghai and other Chinese cities have embraced the car they have done so to the extent that in many places there are too many cars for the roads creating spaces where bicycles are more efficient than cars.
On two totally separate notes, first it is interesting to compare the architectural process as described here by Ingels, with regard to Darwin, to the design process discussed by Liz Sanders in her speech entitled "Exploring Co-creation on a Large Scale: Designing for New Healthcare Environments and Experiences ."
Secondly, although I have yet had time to read it, what Ingles describes with regard to the office being an archive sounds very similar to what Jeanne Gang discusses in her new book Reveal: Studio Gang Architects.
No comments:
Post a Comment