dictionary of advanced architecture

AA >> Advanced Architecture>> Action>> Antytipe

AA >> Advanced Architecture

An action (an architecture) that is advanced is an action (an architecture) which is necessarily projective: propositive and anticipatory/anticipating. An action (an architecture) with the capacity to connect with technological change (industry and technique), with cultural progress (thought and creation) and with scientific logic (research and development).

Action and activity in public space, Temporary installations for ludic uses, Abalos & Herreros, Vincente Guallart, MVRDV, Riegler & Riewe, Barcellona 1998

Action

What we are interested in today is an ‘action architecture’ defined by a desire to act, to (inter)act. That is to activate, to generate, to produce, to express, to move, to exchange and to relate.

To promote interaction between things, rather than interventions on them. Movements, rather than positions. Actions rather than figurations. Process, rather than occurrences.

nArchitects, Party Wall, 2005

ma0, Elastic Space, Berna, 2006

West 8, Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, 1991-96

ma0, Playsacpe, Drancy, 2003

Alejandro Aravena, Elemental, Cile, 2003-2004

“In France an important public program is being mounted to deconstruct the high-rise housing estates from the 1960s and 70s (demolition/reconstruction on a one-to-one basis), thus expressing a strong will to transform the image of the city.At the same time an important deficit is observed of public housing, one which would, on the contrary, call for an increase and an acceleration in building terms.In this context, we consider that demolition is aberrant and that transformation would permit one to respond to needs in a more economic, more effective and more qualitative way.”PLUS -Les grands ensembles de logementsMinistère de la culture et de la communication, 2004

Antitypes

A surprising image shows a car coupled to an aeroplane…This is not an univocal object… it is not a typological design, but rather an a-typological mechanism; an antitype.

Lotek, Skateboard Park, New York

MVRDV, Pig City, 2001

MVRDV, Frosilos, Copenaghen 2005

IAN+, Sportcity, HiperCatalunya,

consultazione internazionale per la regione Catalana,

Barcellona 2003

>> Form (and no-form) >> ambiguity>> Interfaces>> Devices>> Dispositions>> Situation >>“Excited place” >> form >> ambiguity

Nox, Fresh H2O eXPO, 1994-97

Form (and no-form)The interest lies in an architecture that has neither image nor form. That does not express explicitly the scale in which it is produced.Today shape is disposition.

AQ architettura quotidiana, Mar dei piccoli, Taranto, 2004

Ambiguity

Univocal space now yields to a space decidedly ambivalent…

In a multifaceted, polyphase, definitively non-essential reality, architecture can create spaces that are more plural, by virtue, precisely, of being indeterminate. Implicitly changing and (in)formal. Multiple. Multiplied and multiplicative.

A building can be a garden. A garden, a building.

Francois & Lewis, Stazione di trattamento dell'acqua, Nantes, Francia 1995

Francois & Lewis, Case Rurali, Jupilles, Francia 1996

Francois, Tower Flower, Parigi 1999

Patrick Blanc e Jean Nouvel, Branly Museum, Parigi 2006

Herzog & De Meuron, Caixa Forum Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid 2008

MVRDV, 3D-Garden, 2001 Hangelo, Netherlands.

NL, Basketbar, Utrecht, 2003

FOA, International Port Terminal, Yokohama, Giappone, 2002

Francois Roche, Silverelif, B-mu, Contemporary art Museum, Bangkok, Thaïlande 2002 <<Collecting the dust of the city ("Breeding the dust" of Duchamp...) by an aluminium envelop and electrostatics system. >>

2a+p, Round Blur, Torino, 2002-05

DevicesOur challenge as architects is to produce new devices of action… Dispositifs (devices) (open and evolutionary) rather than design (closed and exact).

PPAG, Blocchi di polistirene aggregabili, Vienna, 2002

Topotek 1, Temporary Playground, Garden Show, Wolfsburg, Germany 2004

ma0, Piazza Risorgimento, Bari, 2002-2006

>> Diversity>> Housys>> Inhabiting>> Livrid (live+hybrid)>> Lightness>> Precarious(ly)>> Reversible

DiversityOurs is a time of diversity, calling for constant simultaneity of individual events in global structures… evidencing the impact –the emergence- of the singular upon the collective, not as “part of the whole”, but rather as specificity “interconnected with the whole”.In our time there exists the conditions for assuming creatively this fragmentation, and thereby attaining an anthropological universality which also integrates plurality, difference and discontinuity.

MVRDV, Hageneiland , Netherlands, 2001

InhabitingToday, we are witnessing the generalised collapse of the mythical residential “stereotype”: the “sitting room-dining room-kitchen-laundry- room-bathroom- plus three bedrooms, all in ninety square metres” scheme as the commonly accepted formula.

There is also new awareness of a wandering type of domestic life, increasingly disseminated throughout the metropolis: replacement of private space with service space scattered at the urban level (bar, restaurants, laundries, sports clubs, leisure centres, etc) in a city converted into a large dispersed home for nomadic user.

Lotek, Container House

IAN+, Teletubi, Mostra Lavorare in Casa, Tokio, 2003

Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, Immaginare Corviale, 2003-2005

Edouard Francois, Eden Bio, Paris, 2008

Eden Bio is a 100-unit social housing development in Paris.The project features terraced houses along pedestrian alleyways. Staircases to reach upstairs units will be mounted externally and covered in plants. The lush, green atmosphere of the development will be enhanced by the organic gardens all along the pedestrian alleys, as well as the greenery covering the buildings’ facades.

Francois planned a vertical garden ...not forgetting to furnish each flat with some flowerpots, so that everybody got the chance to grow his/her own plant on the window board!

LightnessLightness is a term, along with levity, that can amply claim to be characteristic of current architecture. Insulating layers have lost weight, becoming habitable spaces, and the concepts of interior and exterior have lost their definition, having become mixed one another, thereby suggesting other interventions.

"catalogue house"

Lacaton e Vassal, Casa Ferret, 1988

Junia Ishigamil, KAIT Studio for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, 2008

Precarious(ly)An approach made up of reversible relationship, unstable links, impermanent constructions, lightweight structures and fragile presences.Certain forms of architecture can… accept their inconsistency, their physical and conceptual precariousness, as a new value rather than as a negative quality.

Lacaton e Vassal, Maison Latapie, 1993

ReversibleReversible is action which is capable of changing the direction of its own movement. There is something of an elastic braid about it. It has an unstable presence.Such strategies could possibly even throw into crisis the old idea of permanent colonization of and on the territory… dynamics which would suggest the capacity to act with the place and with the user with a less formal, and more informal –unstable and mutable- attitude.

A12, LAB, Kröller Müller Museum, Temporary pavillion, Otterlo, Netherlands, 2004

HybridLand-archLand(s) in landsEcology >> Ambiguity

Land-arch…as an instrument. This shift has been favoured by the passage from a generation obsessed with the relationship between architecture and city to another, the latter more aware of a new contract with nature (a nature evidently epic, mongrel, manipulated, rather than domestic and bucolic).

MVRDV, Dutch pavilion Expo 2000, Hanover

New dynamics conform to an incipient vocabulary of a hybrid contract… Construction that would artificially integrate movements –or moments- of nature, in some cases “architecturalising” the landscape (modelling, cutting, folding…), proposing new topological shapes (reliefs, waves, folds)…

…in others, landscaping (lining, enveloping, covering) an architecture in ambiguous synergy with the strange nature that surrounds it.

Imaginative formulas capable of favouring this new natural contract… would reside precisely in its capacity to incorporate the technical, plastic and perhaps unheard-of solutions neither paralysed nor diminished by the presence of the nature, but rather stimulated precisely by the possibility to incorporating it, of spurring it, of reformulating it –of enriching it rather than conserving it.

Tod’s Shop, Tokyo, 2004

Toyo Ito, Mediateca, Sendai, 2001

Land(s) in lands“Operative landscapes” rather than “host landscape”.As with the city, which has blurred the boundaries separating it from former extramural territories, today the architectural project too can blur its profiles –and its edges- in new geographies of transition. The application of new structural and technical concepts… now permit the positing of a deformation of the old Euclidean structures, transforming them into multilayered spaces… towards almost geological processes… spaces of folding rather than prismatic volumes…Topographies rather than volumes.“Lands over other lands”.Constructed geographies rather than architectures.No longer lovely volumes under the light, but rather ambiguous landscapes under the sky.Fields within other fields. Lands in lands.

Sejima, Multimedia Studio, 1996

SANAA, Rolex Learning Center, EPFL Losanna, 2004-2010

NL, Het Funee, 10 individual houses, Amsterdam 1999 - 2009

Plot, Maritime Youth Centre, Copenhagen 2004

Francois, Urban Development, Marne la Valee 2003

ma0, giardini del Pincetto, Perugia, 1998/2004

Lugar Especifico, Calaf, Spagna, 2A+P architettura, 2007

Vincente Guallart, Dénia Mountain Project, 2002

EcologyInstead of old nostalgic or pseudobucolic ecology (which freezes landscapes, territories and environments), we suggest a bold ecology. Based no longer upon a timid, merely defensive –resistant- non-intervention, but rather upon a non-impositive, projecting and qualifying –restimulating- intervention in synergy with the environment and, also, with technology.An ecology in which sustainability is interaction.In which nature is also artificial.In which energy is information and technology is vehiclisation.In which to conserve implies always to intervene.

Diller + Scofidio, Blur

SustainabilityEcology >> Active>>nature

Ecoboulevard, Ecosistema Urbano, Madrid 2007

Bosco verticale, Studio Boeri, Milano, in costruzionee

IaN+, Re-living the historic center, Biennale di Venezia 2008