Memory and Urban Landscape

The difficulty of providing for the space of memory is compounded in the context of programming urban landscapes. The program and potentials of site can be combined with the with memory in the form of building, monument, and other physical constructs, which has some relation to previous discourse on historical research, as well as the suggested neighborhood interviews, and it is the intersection of these elements that allows for the most appealing space. At the junction of program and memory, the site acts as a field that receives the broadcast of the neighborhood. In this case the inclination might be to generate a memorial, a museum, or perhaps a community center. However, programmatic imposition conflicts with the advantages of flexible urban space. (Note that a flexible urban space in West Oakland should become ‘democratic’, and democratic does not necessarily imply heterogeneous)

The broadcast of the neighborhood, as superimposed over the site, and rebroadcast out to others can be accommodated by a flexible framework. I had previously suggested the suspended graffiti walls to embrace the culture of resistance that West Oakland has fostered. However, these walls are a temporal and flexible surface upon which any message can be broadcast. In order to preserve past messages and broadcast new ones, the walls can be mobile, track mounted elements that change configuration to display various encoding.

The mobile, changing graffiti walls become the narrative of the present. They are changing in time. On the other hand, the memory of the site is embedded in the ground, partially fixed. This permanent portion of the site might begin to receive assigned meaning, as is suggested in ‘Erasing Traces’. The imprint might suggest the ‘screen’ memories that carry a “new set of association that mask the original associations”, allowing for the ‘greater’ historic memory, or similarly, a return to a ‘golden age’, as suggested by ‘The Necessity for Ruins’. However, while the ‘ruins’ of West Oakland allow for the recreation of history, history does not cease to exist; its fragments are present in the ruins, and should be present in the site.

Alex Wall’s discussion of the manipulation and use of the urban surface as landscape urbanism seems relevant in thinking about our project in the median strip outside of the Cheeseboard. In this instance, as we’ve discussed at length over the course of the semester, what I find especially interesting is the porous boundary of the restaurant, and the subsequent inhabitation of the urban surface that takes place. The median strip, because of the proximity of the Cheeseboard, functions very much as “an active surface, structuring conditions for new relationships and interactions among the things it supports”. Is this a case of a private/public surface (the Cheeseboard) running into the urban surface, or the urban surface bleeding into the restaurant?

I also find it particularly interesting to contemplate our space in terms of Tschumi’s discussion of the relationship between action and space. Tschumi states that one must consider whether the relationship between action and a particular space are symmetrical or asymmetrical. Is this a condition where the space dominates the people, or one in which the people dominate the space? One can make an argument either way, I think. On the one hand, the slow space of the median strip, as perceived from the median strip, is a rather intimidating and thrilling place to be. Cars whizzing by seem to be moving much faster from your position at eye level with the tires and close proximity to them. In this way, the space clearly dominates the people. But then there’s the violence done by the people in inserting themselves in a place where pedestrians are not supposed to be present. This questions the hierarchy and dominance of the car in this space, and no doubt makes the people inhabiting the fast space of the road feel violated in some way. These inversions—of the dominance of the car in the roadway and the inversion of urban surface and private/public space—are what make the space so rich and excite both its users and observers.

Schedule

Just in case you didn't know...

seminar	date	subject			presentations		breakfast
	Oct. 10	suburban landscapes			Shivang		Christina
	Oct. 18	Social. landscapes			Tuan + Sabina		Evan
	Oct. 25	programming urb. Landscapes			John and Evan		Nat/Adr
	Nov. 1	memory and urban landscapes			Adriana and Natalia		James
	Nov. 8	climate change			James		Shivang
	Nov. 16	networks and exchange			Nicolette		John
	Nov. 22	THANKSGIVING
	Nov. 29	landscape art			Yes		Yes
	Dec. 6	integrating site region infrastructure			Matt		Veronica

Insert Live Action “Here”

Contemporary philosophy and new art sensibility begin to influence the architecture of an academic Tschumi and schoolmates used “as ‘live’ insert(s)” to challenge the programming of space. Text used to outwardly respond to the architecture became a structure with which to challenge the visual realm and to realize space. To what extent does the story parallel space? Is it through the nature of event or the sequencing of spaces for programmatic surrealism that we challenge architecture to activate? Once active, what does this exploration in reciprocal information exchange (between event and space with words) offer? Is a diversity of events and the variety of how to represent that shift simply the how-to guide for realizing architecture?

“There is no space without events, no architecture without program.”

(Ten years later) inside the space, the event as body, through movement, violates architecture as space. Here we're confronted with an uncomfortable if not masochistically painful relationship, our relationship to architecture as intensity. Must all constructed space be psychologically traumatic?

Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill (or Programming Urban Landscapes)

vi·o·lence vahy-uh-luhns

1. swift and intense force: the violence of a storm
2. rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment: to die by violence.
3. damage through distortion or unwarranted alteration: to do editorial violence to a text.

In ‘Violence of Architecture’, Tschumi seems to think of violence mostly in this last sense, and suggests, or rather advocates for its presence in architecture as “it contains the possibility of change, or renewal”. He categorizes violence into two types, formal and programmatic. He describes formal violence as the collision of objects and the disruption of site. Programmatic violence is described as evil or destructive program. In his earlier work, ‘Spaces and Events’, he argues the importance of collisions of program, which also suggests violence, or disjunction.

The value of program that is suggested in Tschumi’s work has multiple readings when juxtaposed with ‘Programming the Urban Surface’, which argues for “non-programed use" as a strategy for addressing the surface. It might be suggested that such a strategy takes Tschumi’s argument one step further in that it advocates the elimination of program in order to allow for variation and juxtaposition. However, a lack of programmatic enforcement may simply allow for nothingness, an empty void. In addition, providing a space for the user to develop program may permit a dominant group to exclude a weaker one. However, some of the examples provided are more specifically in the realm of what Tschumi suggests. The OMA Yokohama Design Forum project “invents new programs and provisions”, and “shows a more heterogeneous mix of functions”. This is also true in the Yokohama Port Terminal.

In the end, Alex Wall and Tschumi are advocating for the same result (heterogeneous space) through different methodologies. While Tschumi argues for the designed, violent juxtaposition of program, Wall argues for an undesigned surface that will inevitably become heterogeneous. In the end the absolute is inconclusive: heterogeneity cannot be designed nor can it be anticipated. This leads us back to questions the class has already been asking. Is 'good' or 'successful' urban space heterogeneous? Can it be exclusionary? Can it be designed?

Landscape Urbanism and the Event

POINT1: In Tschumi's first article, he analyzes of architecture and event begins with the declaration that "there is no space without event." Later, he amends this academic preconception with the idea that Architecture is no longer the backdrop for events, but rather becomes the event itself.
POINT:2 Alex Wall, discussing a more urban condition - specifically the urban surface - proposes that the urban surface unfolds events in time. He references OMA's Yokohama Design proposal as a project that designed a heterogeneous mix of functions and activities throughout the day. "The space of form is here replaced by the space of events in time."
POINT3: Tschumi's second piece, and more developed thesis, talks about spaces and actions (events) as being qualified by each other. "One does not trigger the other, they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another."
So which point of view most accurately portrays the relationship between Landscape Urbanism and Event? I think Wall's urban examples are most similar because he is discussing an complex and chaotic scape where event is probably inherent, unavoidable even. When design involves flows, connections, and networks, it is hard to imagine a space that exists separate from an associated event. The definition of event will always be another important aspect of this debate. Is the Hoover Dam an example of architecture/landscape urbanism or event?

As promised, Oakland Archeology