Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1focus is on the epistemological – and not the normative and qualitative –differences between “pure systems” and “mixed structures”: “Pure” is aquestion of conceived low complexity, and not opposed to “impure” or“contaminated”: In that sense I am not interested in speculating on whether orwhen environmental production was involved in a decline or a “fall of manfrom divine grace”, or whether or how potential losses related to such a “fall”could be compensated or repaired with alternative architectural strategies. 198My perspective is that patterns of architectural differentiation within theurban landscape reflect differences in how environmental tool-kits arefunctionally and aesthetically specialized to work as tool for urban life. In amixed structure, perceptions of good or bad may vary between user groupsand over time. In this perspective an investigation of how groups ofarchitectural elements are specialized in relation to other groups ofarchitectural elements in the urban structure will necessarily be open todiverse judgments of “for better” or “for worse”.According to Choay cities, in situations seen as “pure systems”, havederived their characteristics from implicit principles taken for granted by bothsocial individuals and architects, relating to the city and its landscape as onesyntagmatic 199 system. It was a relatively closed system with a limited rangeof elements, acquiring value and meaning in relation to other elements. Thetheoretical situation of “pure systems” can thereby be described as a situationof consensus between conventions for social practices and conventions forarchitectural production. 200 Approaching socio-spatial structures as “puresystems” implies an understanding of the socio-spatial landscape as arelatively stable and determinate system of social and architectural forms. 201The examples from the literature emphasize the clarity of the “pure” systems. But may be the examples thathere are analyzed were not quite as pure, stable and determinate as presented in this literature? Many Europeanmedieval cities contained structures or at least ruins of ancient Roman or Greek cities. Cities are per definitionnot autonomous entities; as long as cities have existed, they have been networks of exchange and interactionbetween cities. Historical cities were also dialectically related to their countryside, backland or ruralcounterpart.198 “Loss of place” related to modern societal development and the moral responsibility of architects to assistthe alienated man in reclaiming contact with place is an essential issue in Christian Norberg-Schulz’ theory ofplace. That is a different project. In general, phenomenological theories, and analytical approaches searchingan understanding of The Meaning of place, are difficult to apply in a project intending to investigate howdifferent architectural aspects of a situation (place) is involved in different individual projects of identityproduction.199 In a discussion of syntagms (1967/in Jencks 1969) Choay refers to how “the word [syntagms] is borrowedfrom linguistics who, following Saussure [Cours de Linguistique Générale, 1970, part 2, chapter V], havedifferentiated two fundamental kinds of relations between linguistic elements: i.e. spatial contiguity andsimilarity (which semantically corresponds to two forms of mental activity: conjunction and association).”Choay further explains that “[r]egarding my own use of the word syntagmatic (I could have used metonymic) if‘placed in a syntagm a term acquires its value only in opposition to preceding or following terms, or both’.”(1969:37).200 A situation in which concepts describing architectural conventions related to social conventions for use ofbuildings and environmental structures makes sense – such as “byggeskikk” (Norwegian normative conceptdescribing a local or regional building tradition or architectural tradition).201 Stable in the sense that, if at all, only little and very slow transformation can be discovered. Determinate inthe sense that it seems within reach to describe the whole socio-spatial system as such and once and for all:both social forms, architectural forms and how they are related.104