Time, Performance, Use
THE FIELD-LIKE condition of the architectural typologies emerged in the last decades implies not only the necessity to deal with visible and invisible data, as formerly described in the case of the data centers, but has also generated a cartography of concepts and terms that have been gradually incorporated in the syntax of architecture. To some extent, it’s possible to structure a discourse around artificial landscapes starting from three interpretative clues, whose interpenetration generates multiple articulations: a notion of time intended as duration, performativity, and the transition from the idea of program to the idea of use.
The notion of time, as already seen in some prodromal manifestations of the 1960s (remember Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, see page 34, or Archigram’s Walking City, see page 36), is certainly crucial to understand the anti-hierarchical character of the recent architectures: the distinction operated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson between the concepts of homogeneous time and pure duration, in fact, has been influencing not only the philosophical debate in the second half of the 20th century, but has also had architectural consequences. According to Bergson homogeneous time is the time we measure, is a practical concept, an agreement to celebrate the scientific progress. On the contrary, the real duration is our interior time, something that occurs and evolves constantly. Reason why it can’t be measurable or classifiable, and is always composed of different rhythms.1 If homogeneous time is a concept used by science, duration implies an individual and personal experience. By borrowing such conceptual separation, recently architecture has attempted to work on the definition of perceptive landscapes, where time is a really intimate dimension. For the Modern Movement, narrative was one of the constitutive elements of its essence: Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade, for instance, guided the subject through a predetermined path in order to provoke in them a set of emotional and psychological reactions, contained in the physical boundaries of the designed space, that is, within a closed system, the user reaches the point B from point A after a sequence of controlled spaces and atmospheres. It‘s a linear trajectory that leaves no possibility for unexpected events to emerge. In contrast, contemporary architecture rejects the imposition of pre-configured methods and models, to encourage the possibility of an open system, one that is open to a free and individual experience, and open to the uncontrolled use of the space. So, the rigid scheme imagined by modern architecture is replaced, in most of the recent episodes, by the interaction of visible and invisible flows, with no orientation or hierarchical space organization.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman, is a clear example of the new concept of time transferred to physical space. Its conceptual genesis is connected to Henri Bergson’s thought, because in this project it is evident the reference to the distinction between chronological, narrative time, and time as duration. The time of the memorial, its duration, aims to be different from the time of experience and comprehension. The traditional monument is interpreted by its symbolic imaginary, not for what it represents. The duration of the individual experience doesn’t offer any explication or logic: there is no nostalgia, only memory. So, in this kind of interior landscape, constituted by the intersection of real and fictitious grids, a perceptive divergence between topography and architecture is created (see also Plate 47). Furthermore, the result of the total contamination between figure and ground is a notion of form that doesn’t correspond with the one we have always analyzed as a product of Modernity. It is an idea of form that contains the potentialities and the characteristics of a possible change, of a contamination with other questions associated with experience and time as an individual private dimension.
One of the other fundamental topics deriving from the rise of artificial landscapes deals with performance. In fact, as already displayed in some pioneer examples (FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal), the potentialities offered by information technology and digital culture have allowed to control the growth and the evolution of any formal configuration in response to specific requirements, namely structural, climatic, programmatic. Energy flows, information, and different gradients of density define the space, that is, form no longer follows function. If FOA’s and MVRDV’s work each represented a sort of primordial prototype, a germinal state that contained the premises of a new syntax, one may argue that the real attempts to design interactive systems, that is, those capable of integrating humankind, architecture and environment into a multilevel organism, came from Japan at the beginning of the 1990s. For example, the Sendai Mediatheque, designed by Toyo Ito and inaugurated in 2001, has played for many years the role of programmatic manifesto for a new era. Like a sort of contemporary Maison Dom-Ino, this project announced the challenges that the architectural debate would be dealing with in the future. Toyo Ito himself conceived his project as the contemporary evolution of Le Corbusier’s didactic project in that it is a potentially infinite superpositioning of layers, extendable and changeable at any moment. For that reason the Sendai Mediatheque was configured as a shared network, based on the interaction of distinct programmatic layers. Every layer has a specific height; even every façade has its own color. Any spatial hierarchy is annulled by avoiding fixing precise functions within precise physical spaces. But the manifesto-character of the Sendai Mediatheque is also due to four fundamental features, namely that Ito conceives architecture only by considering its surrounding context; that its overall image should be open, and gradually changing; that architecture should achieve different degrees of complexity, even if determined by clear principles; and that architecture’s limits should be blurry. While for Modernism architecture had to be based on geometry, grids and purity, the new architecture (preannounced by Sendai Mediatheque) is served by a single concept: fluidity. However, the starting point of Ito’s process of design is still something traditional, if compared with the final result, yet by working at the beginning with a simple Cartesian grid, the Japanese architect begins to manipulate it, and introduce different unstable configurations. The traditional columns, which characterized modern architecture, are replaced by organic fluid tubes that represent at once a kind of artificialization of nature and express an organic process of growth inside the building. Their role is not only decorative—they work like structural trees, have differently sized shapes, and contain lifts, ducts for air conditioning, stairways, etc. In the Sendai project, Ito’s general strategy (which comprised redrawing the classical typologies inherent to museums, libraries or any other public facilities, thus questioning their 19th-century idealized image) is aimed at defining a responsive platform where the concept of public facility is continually discussed and re-interpreted by users, through their participation and interaction. Architecture not only manages natural flows (air, water, etc.), but it is also programmed to manage social information flows (see also Plate 42).
In this sense, the Sendai Mediatheque works as a public space in which the traditional boundaries between interior (architecture) and exterior (environment) are totally blurred. In questioning such millenary opposition, Ito looks at the interior/exterior relationship according to a Neo-Metabolist approach, so connected with the Japanese tradition, and focused on a renovated harmony between nature and architecture. But at the same time, Ito also seems to clearly refer to those provocative proposals of radical groups like Archigram or Archizoom, who in the 1960s claimed the conceptual analogy between architecture and clothing. Many years later, in fact, Toyo Ito affirms that architecture and clothing are both extension of our body and that they protect us from the exterior world, and control energy, yet they also need to be sensitive and delicate. For that reason, architecture as epidermis cannot be a thick layer that isolates from the exterior. Rather, it has to function as a sensor that’s capable of detecting external stimuli, and then exchange information. For the first time, Sendai Mediatheque encourages questions about the interior/exterior relationship, thus, the connection between architecture and environment from a different point of view. Fluidity implies interactive models of use and manages the complete superpositioning between physical and virtual bodies, to use Toyo Ito’s words.2 Ito designs an architecture capable of dealing with a real body, which is linked to the world by physical connections, and a virtual body, which is constituted by the flows of energy and information. The physical and virtual bodies don’t contrast each other, that’s why architecture has to include and overlay them in any design process. The dialogue between a real and virtual body produces what Ito calls “bodies transition,” that is, an environment made of fluid spaces, with no obstacles, completely interconnected each other, where any visitor can receive different perceptive stimulus.
