Yaneva, A. (2009). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design
Yaneva, A. (2009). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (1a ed.). Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Recuperado de https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240917039
12
A quick scheme or a slow story?
Shortly after I started working at the oma,13 I met Markus who was the head of amo14 at the time. He was intrigued by my study, but he could not understand why I wanted to spend so much time in the office following projects and architects at work. One day he came to me and sat on the table where I was working. He took a pencil and drew a diagram of the process. This was one of those step-by-step gradual rational design-process schemes that you often find in many books on design.
12-13
Happy with the visual result, Markus made a small ‘to do’ list for me to follow. He wanted to save me time by providing a quick overview of the stages of design at the OMA: ‘1 The research stage – at the end of this stage the content is defined; 2 The concept design – the idea is defined and the building is beautiful; 3 The schematic design – the building is defined. The presentational books very often exhibit the schematic design and design development; or conceptual and schematic design; 4 The design development – the building is feasible. In design development, the building is becoming ugly and uglier, is dismembered into different schemes and files, and then becomes beautiful again at the end; 5 The construction documents – the building is executable; 6 The construction, administration and planning – the building is built; 7 Lectures, publications, exhibitions – once the building is built.’
13
(…) Only after a week of participant observation did I find out that the design process at the oma had its own internal rhythm and tempo, that models and plans have unpredictable trajectories, that the concept of the building is questioned whatever the stage of design may be, that there are many rhythmic conduits through which the building develops and they would not necessarily correspond to one particular stage in the process diagram drawn by Markus.
14
(…) Moving according to different trajectories of space and time, designers perform series of steps with various intensities and speeds.
(…) Accounting for the momentum in the practice of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (2001-4), this book offers an ethnographic glance at design. It gathers small accounts of different design trajectories, reminiscent of short stories.
(…) they provide interpretations of the design process without drawing sequential linear storylines; nor do they rely on predictable narratives of events. Short stories, as a literary genre, revolve around the resolution of a conflict, a tension, a false assumption, an inversed expectation, and often have unexpected ironic or tricky endings.
The common feature of all stories is that they all account for the nature of design invention; the latter is not reduced here to an abstract concept of creation or construction. Instead, I tackle it as something that resolves into concrete actions and practices: in collective rituals, techniques, habits and skills ingrained by training and daily repetition, in reuse of materials and recycling of historical knowledge and foam chunks.
16
(…) To recollect a moment in the office life I simply rely on the way the architects I interviewed understood design. In the process of reading, you, as a reader can also become a producer of another text that transforms, translates, embroiders and adds to the unbroken chain of interpretations of the oma’s design practice. In other words, I do not wish to offer a normal linear matter- of-fact reconstruction of the practice of oma, recalling the different periods and generations of projects in office life,19 recollecting the narratives of the master architect and the different cohorts of designers.
16-17
The stories do not correspond to case studies from office practice, assuming that, like many social scientists would do, the findings of a case study show the larger framework within which the case is situated and by which it is ultimately determined. My stories do not aim at reaching a meta-level of explanation of design, of specific oma buildings or of Koolhaas’s style in general. In contrast, they remain self-exemplifying – they ‘just’ offer the world lived in the office, and depict it, deploy it, whenever the story allows. They recount how models, as virtual beings, gain a concrete reality little by little; they tell of how story-telling reveals traces of their metamorphoses, some of their trajectories. In my efforts to forestall certain outcomes and encourage others, I attempt to gather as many allies as possible; I challenge my ‘adopted’ languages and try out linguistic possibilities.
The meta-reflexive way of writing is based on the idea that the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as relating to a referent out there in some way; it is far from being productive.21 I prefer to follow an infra-reflexive approach that goes against this common belief by asking no privilege for the account at hand. This exercise in infra-reflexive writing can be seen as a test of the short story genre in design studies. In the accounts presented here, architects and their models are free and active anthropological projects, full of life, and ready to take part in an intriguing story; design process appears as a reflexive and responsive event.
(Nota al pie): Here I follow closely Latour’s distinction between meta-reflexive and infra-reflexive writing. As he put it: ‘There is more reflexivity in one account that makes the world alive than in one hundred self-reference loops that return the boring thinking mind to the stage.’ Latour, 1988, p. 173.
18
Explaining design
A critical sociologist or anthropologist would explain the superiority of society or culture by simply introducing into the explanation higher levels of complexity, of emergent properties, of microstructures: How is American culture, for instance, embedded in the design of the Seattle Library, how are Chinese politics mirrored in the CCTV tower in Beijing, how is Portuguese culture reflected in the Casa da Musica? Are they below the tiny scale models or above them, explaining them? That is, the factors that would explain and glorify architecture by placing it on a remote pedestal do not arise within the realm of architecture. Another possible line of explanation is to elucidate Koolhaas’s buildings and design approach with larger, overarching conceptual frameworks and theoretical influences: to what extent was the early Koolhaas influenced by Surrealism? The impact of the Modern Movement on his design work will be recalled, his rapport with functionalism, the theoretical influence of Mies van der Rohe or le Corbusier, of Russian constructivism, of American architecture in the 1920s and 1930s will be quoted.
(…)
19
(…) The admiration of the architectural critics and theorists covers the ‘symbolic’ aspects of buildings, the ideas, the subjective imagination of the creator, whereas ‘matter’ is a term of depreciation, ‘practice’ is seen as a synonym of banality, and ‘design experience’ as trivial, as something to be explained away or apologized for.
19-20
Exploding in the world of architectural history in the 1990s, critical theory embedded itself in the discipline in a myriad of different shapes and means. Criticizing the studies of single architects or architectural practices as limited and trivial, it offered to use any theoretically informed academic discipline (history, cultural studies, anthropology, geography, sociology) as a mental schema, as ‘an [outer] explicit framework in which to situate the architectural objects of study’. As a result, post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, (post-)Marxism, post-modern critical theory and a multitude of other formulations have changed not only the interpretative categories but also the very epistemological foundations on which architectural theory was grounded. Critical theory postulated that in order to see the logical patterns of an architectural process or product, the latter should be extracted from the rather messy and irregular process of a production method full of insignificant details; one should rather go upwards until embracing higher-level theoretical frameworks outside architecture – social factors, cultures, politics. Architectural theorists pursued a wider conceptual framework for architecture, which, as many thinkers denoted, was missing: a framework that could embrace activities from patronage through to construction and use. The main assumption of critical theory is that architecture is something capable of being inserted and understood in wider comprehensions of cultural production. Therefore, to put across the meaning and the relevance of architecture, critical studies find it necessary to position it as a historical subject within various contexts in order to be able to outline its economic, social and political dimensions, and to show that it is always directly tied to these conditions given both its scale of production and public use
20-21
(…) they are all regarded as a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm of society, mimics the organization of universe, follows legal estate patterns and historical forces or dwelling habits and cultures. The small follows and reflects the big; architecture embraces the shapes suggested by society or culture. Thus, in order to be understood, buildings had to be located within the entire spectrum of economics, politics, social practices and architectural theory. The same spectra were also invited to explain the design process, the success or failure of architectural projects, and to elucidate why a particular style emerges or vanishes at a particular moment. of time, or to shed light on urban dynamics and city developments.
21-22
The ‘broader and more inclusive’ types of readings generally address ‘matters of race, sexuality, class, psychoanalysis, social space, the way in which meanings are created and transferred by means of experience, political action, gender and so on’. For the critical authors, ‘dealing with these kinds of things in both architectural production specifically and cultural production in general maximizes the opportunity to learn all that architecture is and might be capable of’. In addition, they consider that ‘to speak about architectural history without reference to these things, to other disciplines, to theory, is not only to dismiss architecture’s relevance to the world in general, but also to trivialize [the italics are mine: ay] current conditions and preoccupations’. To avoid trivialization, critical theorists engage in an exploration of architecture’s hidden meanings and practices, advocating what they believe to be a ‘richer and more significant’ understanding of architecture. Having the ambitious task of providing a space of imaginative abstraction beyond of the immediate remits and dictates of architectural practice, the critical method consists of displacing the conventional objects of study and challenging them by referring to abstract ideas from outside architecture to explain design process, creative thinking and practices. Borrowing concepts from the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the de-constructivist approach of Jacques Derrida, or the archaeology of Michel Foucault, architectural theory assumes that its main operation consists of unveiling hidden mechanisms, constraints or representations, principles and forces behind architectural objects, projects, and urban developments. Yet, by suggesting a theoretical outside from which conventional interpretations could be challenged, critical theory relied on the main assumption that there is a ‘social context’ in which architectural and urban activities take place, and which can explain their meaning and relevance.
22
(…) This mirror-fashioned relationship between architecture and society41 has as its main assumption the notion that the ‘social’ is a separate domain of reality that can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the ‘architectural’ aspects, and is supposed to give solidity, durability and consistency to the domain of architecture which it cannot maintain by itself. Although it is recognized that urban planning has its own strength and internal logic, it is assumed that some aspects of it would be better understood if some ‘social dimensions’ and ‘social conditions’ were added.
(…)
Therefore, to explain a particular building or urban concept, a critical thinker would show its entrenchment in ‘the social context of its time’ and would present it as reminiscent of the ‘political climate of an époque’, of intricate power relations and economic interests. In order to elucidate the design moves and inventive impetus of architects, planners and urban developers, he or she would account for the social and political influences on these ‘creators’, or reflect on the instrumental role of architecture.
22-23
The ambition here is different. My purpose is not to engage in another theoretical interpretation of architecture, much less to argue that social conditions or cultural perceptions are relevant to the perception and interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture.
23
The alternative to a critical theory-inspired approach is to re-establish the connections disclosing, in pragmatic fashion, the way in which these design works come into being and the way they gain meaning in design experience.
24
(…) No one assumed that design, albeit in the office of a Pritzker prize winner, is experience.
25
(…) Yes, design is a trivial, banal, mundane experience, and if we want to understand the oma buildings this experience is to be approached with care and respect.
(…) Before we even begin to unravel the ontology of creativity, we should question what is big and what is small, what explains and what is to be explained. Is Portuguese society higher and more complex than a simple architectural model of the Casa da Musica in Porto? Can American culture explain the making of the Seattle Library?
25-26
(…) No, no one can claim that there is a Zeitgeist somewhere or a culture that could explain why the buildings of Koolhaas are made in this way. It is not the researcher’s responsibility to decide whether a scale model of the library in Seattle, or the printed panel of Hotel Astor in Rem’s office are bigger than America, or whether American culture is the wider, overarching outside context that can explain why these oma buildings are thus made. There are no pre-given explanations of design, no established scales, no recognized-by-all conceptual frames; instead, we need to devote ethnographic attention to what it means to design, to the many local arrangements from which creativity springs.
26
(…) I follow designers at work also because I assume that there is much more logic in each piece of work executed by them, even in the apparently insignificant and unrelated design operations such as classifying models or reusing an old and forgotten piece of foam, than in the totality of their behaviour or design philosophy.
(…) If one follows a model or an architect in their mundane trajectories through the office, traces the small operations of recycling and reusing foam from past projects, watches how a model comes into being, is reused and circulated, one will be able to witness that they are made of a much vaster collection of entities (colour shades, humans, scaling instruments, angles of cutting, chunks of foam, pixels and paints) than the society or culture that is meant to explain them. For any so-called ‘atomic’ or ‘small’ design element to be produced, the designers have to collect and reconsider millions of pixels and colour shades.
27
(…) The design studio does not simply form a microcosm, which would explain, give reason to, or reflect the overarching macro structures. It is rather a universe, an entire cosmos whose distinctive features I try to unravel with ethnographic tools, whose diversity I try to deploy in full. This implies a richer meaning of empiricism as that which is given to our experience, as William James propagated. Far from striving to envelop design processes in as many contextual frameworks outside architecture as possible, the series of stories written in a pragmatist fashion tackle the practices of designers rather than their theories and their ideologies (…) If a project covers the process of step-by-step realization of an idea, a trajectory accounts for the explorations, the discoveries, the numerous detours and unpredictable surprises that might occur.
31
What is it that makes oma specific, different from other architectural offices?’ This was a question I asked many times and at various moments during the development of the projects I followed (…)
Let us start with Rem’s voice:
‘Architecture is very flexible and almost everything is possible except flocking the building in the air. So, in a way, if you really want to do it, you can do it in this office.’
32
[Shogei Shigematsu] sho: (…) the specificity lies in doing something like this (…) and taking these models seriously, trying to analyse the intention and always trying to look for new and interesting ideas out of very naïve-like models. (…) we are pretty serious in analysing what is really good and what is bad, and we try to create new things. We do not think in terms of: ‘ok, this is not impossible, this is possible, we are just experimenting, expressing’.
33
(…) You have to be strong enough to promote your method.
(…) ay: And what is the role of the other tools like sketches, diagrams, and drawings in the design process in the oma?
sho: That’s the specificity of this office – that you make a charade, you make a really big brainstorm session, and try to obtain a really clear idea from it. And this is done by using very clear diagrams so that almost everyone can immediately see what our intention is, then we can achieve something. (…) We use very naïve diagrams almost like cartoons in children’s books. We also spend a lot of time on making books, which is also part of the presentation materials.
There is also an element of clarifying things for ourselves (…)
44
Listening to these voices we can outline two distinctive features of the process at the oma. First, invention happens in the process of ‘taking models seriously’, experimenting and expressing by means of models, and using a variety of other tools in original ways. The work with models is at the basis of novelty and innovation.66 New insights and building shapes emerge from a charade of visuals and the environment in the office. It is a foam – rather than a computer – office. Second, the office ‘liberates’ architects from any kind of formal and media language; there are no conventions that would restrict invention. To further understand the foam-specificity of the oma and question the architects’ attachment to models, I conducted a little test.
45
One month without models!
(…) This experimental ‘one month without models’ never happened. Was it because it appeared to be a difficult task for oma architects to ‘substitute making with thinking’ and for the head architect ‘to force people to first think what they want to do instead of producing some rough quantities of trials and slowly find something that would work’? Or, was it because architects simply cannot think without making, and whatever the experiment is launched, they could stick to alternative schemes of design thinking only attemporarily.
98
Reconnecting Practice And Meaning
99
Whenever one talks about the theoretical influences upon Koolhaas’s work, whenever one speculates on how the culture he is building for is reflected in a built structure or an urban concept, one quickly realizes that architecture is being remitted to a separate realm, cut off from that vital association with design materials and experiences. This compartmentalization brings about separation of design practice from insight, of imagination from making.
(…) The stories told here aimed at establishing connections between some oma projects and the design experiences that accompanied their making; connections of sense, need of enactment and action, of meaning and matter.
99-100
(…) Thus, at any moment in this small ethnography of the oma, we did not witness a radical shift from face-to-face interactions to macrostructures or abstract contexts outside architecture, from pixels on the computer screen or the models in the archive boxes to genuine cultures, societies, nations. We rather kept the same method for all the levels. Follow the architects, their tentative moves, failures and mistakes, their meanderings, cautious search for new materials, adjustments of instruments, scenarios for reuse; here is the social element (it is not ‘out there’), it is in all those simplified, routinized, repetitive elements.147 It is not made outside the practice of Koolhaas, but within the office: in the process of making and scaling a model, recycling a piece of foam, retouching an image on the computer screen; these are all social phenomena.
100
(…) Yet, unravelling how a building happens and travels in design is the opposite of showing how precisely it has been created and realized. Trajectory stands for the opposite of what a project is.
101
the pure purpose of generating infra-reflexive descriptions of invention which would keep the freshness of design experiences and even the roughness of the design language far from the reach of the prevailing meta-reflexive theories of design. Deliberately circumventing any meta-reflexivity that would have increased the layers of methodological reflections, I simply described various design practices without sticking to references outside architecture (…)
101-102
Having followed these stories, can you still explain design in terms of creation and construction? No. Not any longer. ‘Creator’ always implies an architect standing at the beginning of the creation vector, originating a creation. ‘Creation’ implies a genius able to create ex nihilo. Designing requires many more skills as well as obsessive attention to the details instead of relying on the flight of subjective imagination and the grand gestures of emancipated creativity. A building is not obtained in a double-click instant of creation or construction, but through numerous little operations of shaping the foam, scaling it and refining its texture, adjusting the foam-cutters and other devices, classifying and reusing old models, struggling to repeat tentative experimental results and generate a new material. Therefore to grasp architectural work required for our stories, it was essential to devote meticulous attention to the specific trajectories of models, to the minute movements of the foam, to the various ways a model compels its makers, to the series of dismissed projects, to the unfortunate moves of execution. The problem of interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture is, I argue, rooted in his practice – he is not the discoverer, the unique creator, but one of the inventors of these buildings-to-be.
102-103
The stories told here also demonstrate the irrelevance of the modernist opposition between what is social, symbolic, subjective, lived, and what is material, real, objective and factual. In architectural theory, design easily lends itself to semiotics: it is made to be interpreted in terms of language of signs. Yet, a close look at design practices shows that there are no two distinctive ways of grasping an architectural object, i.e., one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or ‘symbolic’ aspects. To design is not simply to add meaning to a brute, passive, and technical matter. The materiality of every oma project, of every model or foam try-out, spreads a meaning with it.
103
The stories also outlined that design never starts from scratch. There is no need for the creative process to be entirely revolutionized, for the architect to have absolute mastery over the materials, to predict experiments without mistakes.
104
You can still appreciate a building, like or dislike it, praise or dismiss it, without knowing anything about the design experience that made it happen; but you cannot understand a building without taking these design experiences into account.
12
A quick scheme or a slow story?
Shortly after I started working at the oma,13 I met Markus who was the head of amo14 at the time. He was intrigued by my study, but he could not understand why I wanted to spend so much time in the office following projects and architects at work. One day he came to me and sat on the table where I was working. He took a pencil and drew a diagram of the process. This was one of those step-by-step gradual rational design-process schemes that you often find in many books on design.
12-13
Happy with the visual result, Markus made a small ‘to do’ list for me to follow. He wanted to save me time by providing a quick overview of the stages of design at the OMA: ‘1 The research stage – at the end of this stage the content is defined; 2 The concept design – the idea is defined and the building is beautiful; 3 The schematic design – the building is defined. The presentational books very often exhibit the schematic design and design development; or conceptual and schematic design; 4 The design development – the building is feasible. In design development, the building is becoming ugly and uglier, is dismembered into different schemes and files, and then becomes beautiful again at the end; 5 The construction documents – the building is executable; 6 The construction, administration and planning – the building is built; 7 Lectures, publications, exhibitions – once the building is built.’
13
(…) Only after a week of participant observation did I find out that the design process at the oma had its own internal rhythm and tempo, that models and plans have unpredictable trajectories, that the concept of the building is questioned whatever the stage of design may be, that there are many rhythmic conduits through which the building develops and they would not necessarily correspond to one particular stage in the process diagram drawn by Markus.
14
(…) Moving according to different trajectories of space and time, designers perform series of steps with various intensities and speeds.
(…) Accounting for the momentum in the practice of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (2001-4), this book offers an ethnographic glance at design. It gathers small accounts of different design trajectories, reminiscent of short stories.
(…) they provide interpretations of the design process without drawing sequential linear storylines; nor do they rely on predictable narratives of events. Short stories, as a literary genre, revolve around the resolution of a conflict, a tension, a false assumption, an inversed expectation, and often have unexpected ironic or tricky endings.
The common feature of all stories is that they all account for the nature of design invention; the latter is not reduced here to an abstract concept of creation or construction. Instead, I tackle it as something that resolves into concrete actions and practices: in collective rituals, techniques, habits and skills ingrained by training and daily repetition, in reuse of materials and recycling of historical knowledge and foam chunks.
16
(…) To recollect a moment in the office life I simply rely on the way the architects I interviewed understood design. In the process of reading, you, as a reader can also become a producer of another text that transforms, translates, embroiders and adds to the unbroken chain of interpretations of the oma’s design practice. In other words, I do not wish to offer a normal linear matter- of-fact reconstruction of the practice of oma, recalling the different periods and generations of projects in office life,19 recollecting the narratives of the master architect and the different cohorts of designers.
16-17
The stories do not correspond to case studies from office practice, assuming that, like many social scientists would do, the findings of a case study show the larger framework within which the case is situated and by which it is ultimately determined. My stories do not aim at reaching a meta-level of explanation of design, of specific oma buildings or of Koolhaas’s style in general. In contrast, they remain self-exemplifying – they ‘just’ offer the world lived in the office, and depict it, deploy it, whenever the story allows. They recount how models, as virtual beings, gain a concrete reality little by little; they tell of how story-telling reveals traces of their metamorphoses, some of their trajectories. In my efforts to forestall certain outcomes and encourage others, I attempt to gather as many allies as possible; I challenge my ‘adopted’ languages and try out linguistic possibilities.
The meta-reflexive way of writing is based on the idea that the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as relating to a referent out there in some way; it is far from being productive.21 I prefer to follow an infra-reflexive approach that goes against this common belief by asking no privilege for the account at hand. This exercise in infra-reflexive writing can be seen as a test of the short story genre in design studies. In the accounts presented here, architects and their models are free and active anthropological projects, full of life, and ready to take part in an intriguing story; design process appears as a reflexive and responsive event.
(Nota al pie): Here I follow closely Latour’s distinction between meta-reflexive and infra-reflexive writing. As he put it: ‘There is more reflexivity in one account that makes the world alive than in one hundred self-reference loops that return the boring thinking mind to the stage.’ Latour, 1988, p. 173.
18
Explaining design
A critical sociologist or anthropologist would explain the superiority of society or culture by simply introducing into the explanation higher levels of complexity, of emergent properties, of microstructures: How is American culture, for instance, embedded in the design of the Seattle Library, how are Chinese politics mirrored in the CCTV tower in Beijing, how is Portuguese culture reflected in the Casa da Musica? Are they below the tiny scale models or above them, explaining them? That is, the factors that would explain and glorify architecture by placing it on a remote pedestal do not arise within the realm of architecture. Another possible line of explanation is to elucidate Koolhaas’s buildings and design approach with larger, overarching conceptual frameworks and theoretical influences: to what extent was the early Koolhaas influenced by Surrealism? The impact of the Modern Movement on his design work will be recalled, his rapport with functionalism, the theoretical influence of Mies van der Rohe or le Corbusier, of Russian constructivism, of American architecture in the 1920s and 1930s will be quoted.
(…)
19
(…) The admiration of the architectural critics and theorists covers the ‘symbolic’ aspects of buildings, the ideas, the subjective imagination of the creator, whereas ‘matter’ is a term of depreciation, ‘practice’ is seen as a synonym of banality, and ‘design experience’ as trivial, as something to be explained away or apologized for.
19-20
Exploding in the world of architectural history in the 1990s, critical theory embedded itself in the discipline in a myriad of different shapes and means. Criticizing the studies of single architects or architectural practices as limited and trivial, it offered to use any theoretically informed academic discipline (history, cultural studies, anthropology, geography, sociology) as a mental schema, as ‘an [outer] explicit framework in which to situate the architectural objects of study’. As a result, post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, (post-)Marxism, post-modern critical theory and a multitude of other formulations have changed not only the interpretative categories but also the very epistemological foundations on which architectural theory was grounded. Critical theory postulated that in order to see the logical patterns of an architectural process or product, the latter should be extracted from the rather messy and irregular process of a production method full of insignificant details; one should rather go upwards until embracing higher-level theoretical frameworks outside architecture – social factors, cultures, politics. Architectural theorists pursued a wider conceptual framework for architecture, which, as many thinkers denoted, was missing: a framework that could embrace activities from patronage through to construction and use. The main assumption of critical theory is that architecture is something capable of being inserted and understood in wider comprehensions of cultural production. Therefore, to put across the meaning and the relevance of architecture, critical studies find it necessary to position it as a historical subject within various contexts in order to be able to outline its economic, social and political dimensions, and to show that it is always directly tied to these conditions given both its scale of production and public use
20-21
(…) they are all regarded as a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm of society, mimics the organization of universe, follows legal estate patterns and historical forces or dwelling habits and cultures. The small follows and reflects the big; architecture embraces the shapes suggested by society or culture. Thus, in order to be understood, buildings had to be located within the entire spectrum of economics, politics, social practices and architectural theory. The same spectra were also invited to explain the design process, the success or failure of architectural projects, and to elucidate why a particular style emerges or vanishes at a particular moment. of time, or to shed light on urban dynamics and city developments.
21-22
The ‘broader and more inclusive’ types of readings generally address ‘matters of race, sexuality, class, psychoanalysis, social space, the way in which meanings are created and transferred by means of experience, political action, gender and so on’. For the critical authors, ‘dealing with these kinds of things in both architectural production specifically and cultural production in general maximizes the opportunity to learn all that architecture is and might be capable of’. In addition, they consider that ‘to speak about architectural history without reference to these things, to other disciplines, to theory, is not only to dismiss architecture’s relevance to the world in general, but also to trivialize [the italics are mine: ay] current conditions and preoccupations’. To avoid trivialization, critical theorists engage in an exploration of architecture’s hidden meanings and practices, advocating what they believe to be a ‘richer and more significant’ understanding of architecture. Having the ambitious task of providing a space of imaginative abstraction beyond of the immediate remits and dictates of architectural practice, the critical method consists of displacing the conventional objects of study and challenging them by referring to abstract ideas from outside architecture to explain design process, creative thinking and practices. Borrowing concepts from the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the de-constructivist approach of Jacques Derrida, or the archaeology of Michel Foucault, architectural theory assumes that its main operation consists of unveiling hidden mechanisms, constraints or representations, principles and forces behind architectural objects, projects, and urban developments. Yet, by suggesting a theoretical outside from which conventional interpretations could be challenged, critical theory relied on the main assumption that there is a ‘social context’ in which architectural and urban activities take place, and which can explain their meaning and relevance.
22
(…) This mirror-fashioned relationship between architecture and society41 has as its main assumption the notion that the ‘social’ is a separate domain of reality that can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the ‘architectural’ aspects, and is supposed to give solidity, durability and consistency to the domain of architecture which it cannot maintain by itself. Although it is recognized that urban planning has its own strength and internal logic, it is assumed that some aspects of it would be better understood if some ‘social dimensions’ and ‘social conditions’ were added.
(…)
Therefore, to explain a particular building or urban concept, a critical thinker would show its entrenchment in ‘the social context of its time’ and would present it as reminiscent of the ‘political climate of an époque’, of intricate power relations and economic interests. In order to elucidate the design moves and inventive impetus of architects, planners and urban developers, he or she would account for the social and political influences on these ‘creators’, or reflect on the instrumental role of architecture.
22-23
The ambition here is different. My purpose is not to engage in another theoretical interpretation of architecture, much less to argue that social conditions or cultural perceptions are relevant to the perception and interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture.
23
The alternative to a critical theory-inspired approach is to re-establish the connections disclosing, in pragmatic fashion, the way in which these design works come into being and the way they gain meaning in design experience.
24
(…) No one assumed that design, albeit in the office of a Pritzker prize winner, is experience.
25
(…) Yes, design is a trivial, banal, mundane experience, and if we want to understand the oma buildings this experience is to be approached with care and respect.
(…) Before we even begin to unravel the ontology of creativity, we should question what is big and what is small, what explains and what is to be explained. Is Portuguese society higher and more complex than a simple architectural model of the Casa da Musica in Porto? Can American culture explain the making of the Seattle Library?
25-26
(…) No, no one can claim that there is a Zeitgeist somewhere or a culture that could explain why the buildings of Koolhaas are made in this way. It is not the researcher’s responsibility to decide whether a scale model of the library in Seattle, or the printed panel of Hotel Astor in Rem’s office are bigger than America, or whether American culture is the wider, overarching outside context that can explain why these oma buildings are thus made. There are no pre-given explanations of design, no established scales, no recognized-by-all conceptual frames; instead, we need to devote ethnographic attention to what it means to design, to the many local arrangements from which creativity springs.
26
(…) I follow designers at work also because I assume that there is much more logic in each piece of work executed by them, even in the apparently insignificant and unrelated design operations such as classifying models or reusing an old and forgotten piece of foam, than in the totality of their behaviour or design philosophy.
(…) If one follows a model or an architect in their mundane trajectories through the office, traces the small operations of recycling and reusing foam from past projects, watches how a model comes into being, is reused and circulated, one will be able to witness that they are made of a much vaster collection of entities (colour shades, humans, scaling instruments, angles of cutting, chunks of foam, pixels and paints) than the society or culture that is meant to explain them. For any so-called ‘atomic’ or ‘small’ design element to be produced, the designers have to collect and reconsider millions of pixels and colour shades.
27
(…) The design studio does not simply form a microcosm, which would explain, give reason to, or reflect the overarching macro structures. It is rather a universe, an entire cosmos whose distinctive features I try to unravel with ethnographic tools, whose diversity I try to deploy in full. This implies a richer meaning of empiricism as that which is given to our experience, as William James propagated. Far from striving to envelop design processes in as many contextual frameworks outside architecture as possible, the series of stories written in a pragmatist fashion tackle the practices of designers rather than their theories and their ideologies (…) If a project covers the process of step-by-step realization of an idea, a trajectory accounts for the explorations, the discoveries, the numerous detours and unpredictable surprises that might occur.
31
What is it that makes oma specific, different from other architectural offices?’ This was a question I asked many times and at various moments during the development of the projects I followed (…)
Let us start with Rem’s voice:
‘Architecture is very flexible and almost everything is possible except flocking the building in the air. So, in a way, if you really want to do it, you can do it in this office.’
32
[Shogei Shigematsu] sho: (…) the specificity lies in doing something like this (…) and taking these models seriously, trying to analyse the intention and always trying to look for new and interesting ideas out of very naïve-like models. (…) we are pretty serious in analysing what is really good and what is bad, and we try to create new things. We do not think in terms of: ‘ok, this is not impossible, this is possible, we are just experimenting, expressing’.
33
(…) You have to be strong enough to promote your method.
(…) ay: And what is the role of the other tools like sketches, diagrams, and drawings in the design process in the oma?
sho: That’s the specificity of this office – that you make a charade, you make a really big brainstorm session, and try to obtain a really clear idea from it. And this is done by using very clear diagrams so that almost everyone can immediately see what our intention is, then we can achieve something. (…) We use very naïve diagrams almost like cartoons in children’s books. We also spend a lot of time on making books, which is also part of the presentation materials.
There is also an element of clarifying things for ourselves (…)
44
Listening to these voices we can outline two distinctive features of the process at the oma. First, invention happens in the process of ‘taking models seriously’, experimenting and expressing by means of models, and using a variety of other tools in original ways. The work with models is at the basis of novelty and innovation.66 New insights and building shapes emerge from a charade of visuals and the environment in the office. It is a foam – rather than a computer – office. Second, the office ‘liberates’ architects from any kind of formal and media language; there are no conventions that would restrict invention. To further understand the foam-specificity of the oma and question the architects’ attachment to models, I conducted a little test.
45
One month without models!
(…) This experimental ‘one month without models’ never happened. Was it because it appeared to be a difficult task for oma architects to ‘substitute making with thinking’ and for the head architect ‘to force people to first think what they want to do instead of producing some rough quantities of trials and slowly find something that would work’? Or, was it because architects simply cannot think without making, and whatever the experiment is launched, they could stick to alternative schemes of design thinking only attemporarily.
98
Reconnecting Practice And Meaning
99
Whenever one talks about the theoretical influences upon Koolhaas’s work, whenever one speculates on how the culture he is building for is reflected in a built structure or an urban concept, one quickly realizes that architecture is being remitted to a separate realm, cut off from that vital association with design materials and experiences. This compartmentalization brings about separation of design practice from insight, of imagination from making.
(…) The stories told here aimed at establishing connections between some oma projects and the design experiences that accompanied their making; connections of sense, need of enactment and action, of meaning and matter.
99-100
(…) Thus, at any moment in this small ethnography of the oma, we did not witness a radical shift from face-to-face interactions to macrostructures or abstract contexts outside architecture, from pixels on the computer screen or the models in the archive boxes to genuine cultures, societies, nations. We rather kept the same method for all the levels. Follow the architects, their tentative moves, failures and mistakes, their meanderings, cautious search for new materials, adjustments of instruments, scenarios for reuse; here is the social element (it is not ‘out there’), it is in all those simplified, routinized, repetitive elements.147 It is not made outside the practice of Koolhaas, but within the office: in the process of making and scaling a model, recycling a piece of foam, retouching an image on the computer screen; these are all social phenomena.
100
(…) Yet, unravelling how a building happens and travels in design is the opposite of showing how precisely it has been created and realized. Trajectory stands for the opposite of what a project is.
101
the pure purpose of generating infra-reflexive descriptions of invention which would keep the freshness of design experiences and even the roughness of the design language far from the reach of the prevailing meta-reflexive theories of design. Deliberately circumventing any meta-reflexivity that would have increased the layers of methodological reflections, I simply described various design practices without sticking to references outside architecture (…)
101-102
Having followed these stories, can you still explain design in terms of creation and construction? No. Not any longer. ‘Creator’ always implies an architect standing at the beginning of the creation vector, originating a creation. ‘Creation’ implies a genius able to create ex nihilo. Designing requires many more skills as well as obsessive attention to the details instead of relying on the flight of subjective imagination and the grand gestures of emancipated creativity. A building is not obtained in a double-click instant of creation or construction, but through numerous little operations of shaping the foam, scaling it and refining its texture, adjusting the foam-cutters and other devices, classifying and reusing old models, struggling to repeat tentative experimental results and generate a new material. Therefore to grasp architectural work required for our stories, it was essential to devote meticulous attention to the specific trajectories of models, to the minute movements of the foam, to the various ways a model compels its makers, to the series of dismissed projects, to the unfortunate moves of execution. The problem of interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture is, I argue, rooted in his practice – he is not the discoverer, the unique creator, but one of the inventors of these buildings-to-be.
102-103
The stories told here also demonstrate the irrelevance of the modernist opposition between what is social, symbolic, subjective, lived, and what is material, real, objective and factual. In architectural theory, design easily lends itself to semiotics: it is made to be interpreted in terms of language of signs. Yet, a close look at design practices shows that there are no two distinctive ways of grasping an architectural object, i.e., one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or ‘symbolic’ aspects. To design is not simply to add meaning to a brute, passive, and technical matter. The materiality of every oma project, of every model or foam try-out, spreads a meaning with it.
103
The stories also outlined that design never starts from scratch. There is no need for the creative process to be entirely revolutionized, for the architect to have absolute mastery over the materials, to predict experiments without mistakes.
104
You can still appreciate a building, like or dislike it, praise or dismiss it, without knowing anything about the design experience that made it happen; but you cannot understand a building without taking these design experiences into account.
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