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créatif, s’adonnant à ses activités de loisirs au
même rang que les travailleurs et les immigrés
désespérément sans attache. Ils forment les
“Smart mobs” (foules intelligentes), ainsi
qu’Howard Rheingold les nomme : de nouvelles
organisations informelles nées de la montée des
réseaux informatiques sans fil 15 .
Cependant, on peut également considérer cette
recherche comme un retour aux “autres” origines
du Modernisme, dans lesquelles des architectes
tels que Le Corbusier, Hilberseimer, Neurath, Van
Eesteren et Van Lohuisen essayèrent de comprendre
en profondeur la ville de leur époque, de façon
à trouver des organisations nouvelles et mieux
adaptées. Dans leurs premières tentatives pour
venir à bout de la croissance chaotique des métropoles
du début du XX siècle, avec la montée des
masses populaires, la pollution, l’industrialisation
et les conséquences de la guerre, ils utilisèrent la
photographie et firent aussi librement des
emprunts aux sciences sociales, pendant environ
une dizaine d’années 16 . Il est peut-être vrai
qu’après cela, ils franchirent trop vite le pas de
l’étude à la planche à dessin, laissant peu de place
au changement et à la flexibilité, mais l’influence
de leurs projets a inspiré de nombreuses villes, qui
continuent à remplir leur rôle encore aujourd’hui.
Et même si nous devons revoir leurs conceptions
de façon radicale, elles sont au moins laissées à
notre disposition pour que nous y travaillions,
qu’elles soient source de controverse, que nous les
analysions, discutions, adaptions ou critiquions.
Un retour à l’origine du Modernisme – dans le cas
présent, à Hannes Meyer – dont nous constatons
toutefois aussi la présence dans des expériences
réalisées avec de nouveaux matériaux, issus par
exemple de la biotechnologie, et dans les
réflexions qu’ils inspirent.
Lentement, les architectes contemporains commencent
à développer de nouvelles méthodes de
contrôle et de conception qui ont soit directement
trait à une recherche entreprise, comme c’est le
cas dans l’œuvre de Raoul Bunschoten, soit sont
nourries par cette même recherche. Ce qui est
frappant, c’est que la plupart des méthodes
recherchent différentes formes d’interactivité,
ouvrant ce champ de création à des participants
encore plus nombreux. Au lieu de simplement utiliser
ou adapter les logiciels existants et disponibles,
conçus à l’origine pour d’autres applications,
par exemple pour des effets spéciaux dans l’industrie
cinématographique, nous voyons les architectes
commençant à développer et écrire leurs propres
logiciels. Et nous constatons très souvent que
les aspects de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme
vers lesquels ils se tournent le plus souvent sont
liés à l’organisation, au lieu d’être formels et
esthétiques ou concerner la réalisation.
L’architecture se résume de plus en plus à une simple
machine, pour paraphraser Winy Maas 17 .
On croit encore fortement au pouvoir de la forme.
Mais il semble que l’intérêt suscité par les aspects
formels de l’architecture part à la dérive, à côté de
celui pour la cohérence interne. L’architecture formelle
la plus récente semble être beaucoup plus
stratégique dans la façon dont soit elle s’adapte
soit manipule les éléments offerts par un site. Elle
recherche délibérément la propagation
que lui apporteraient d’autres
discours : la mode, la bureaucratie,
l’urbanisme et même la culture
populaire. On peut dire que cette
architecture est transmoderne dans
le sens que Jean Baudrillard indique
lorsqu’il parle de figures transpolitiques
dans Les Stratégies
Fatales 18 . C’est une architecture de
l’excès, comme les “Monstres “ de
Périphériques, qui planent au-dessus
du chaos existant, ou les plantes
carnivores étranges de
Xefirotarch qui avalent et digèrent
l’infrastructure.
Sera-t-il possible à nouveau, à un
moment donné, de renouer des discours
qui s’excluent l’un l’autre,
“l’architecture avec un A majuscule”
et la vie de tous les jours au
cœur de la ville, architecture et
urbanisme? Pourra-t-on à nouveau
rendre l’architecture disponible
pour de larges pans de population?
Nous devrons attendre pour le voir.
Mais tout du moins quelques architectes
travaillent-ils à nouveau sur
ce thème.
1. Bart Lootsma, SuperDutch, Thames &
Hudson, London, 2000; Ulrich Schwarz,
Neue Deutsche Architektur, Eine Reflexive
Moderne, Hatje-Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit,
2002; Otto Kapfinger, Transmodernity,
Austrian Architects, Azw/Verlage Anton
Pustet, Austrian Cultural Forum, Vienna,
2002
2. Herbert Muschamp, New York Times
Magazine
3. Rem Koolhaas with Herman Hertzberger,
Rem, do you know what this is?, Hunch 3,
2001
4. Rem Koolhaas lors du débat Prototype
Seminar in Architecture Performing the
City, Porto, 2001
5. Zaha Hadid, Luxus für Alle, Gespräch mit
Zaha Hadid und Patrik Schumacher,
Architektur und BauForum, 4. Juillet 2003
6. C. Greg Chrysler, Writing Spaces,
Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism, and
the Built Environment, 1960-2000, Routledge,
New York and London, 2003
7. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative
Class, Basic Books, 2002
8. Computer Animisms (Two Designs for the
Cardiff Bay Opera House), Assemblage 26,
1995
9. Rem Koolhaas, What Ever Happened to
Urbanism? S,M,L,XL, 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1995
10. Id.
11. Id.
12. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären, Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1998-2004
13. Hou Hanru au vernissage de l’exposition
E-W/N-S, Bordeaux, 2004
14. Molly Nesbit, The Port of Calls, in Heike
Ander, Nadja Rother (ed.), Documenta XI-
Platform 5, catalogue d’exposition, Hatje
Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern, 2002
15. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs,
Perseus Publishing, 2003
16. Bart Lootsma, Research for Research,
Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, 2001
17. Winy Maas, “Architecture is a device”, in
Bart Lootsma, ArchiLab 2004 “The Naked
City”, HYX, Orléans, 2004
18. Jean Baudrillard, Les stratégies fatales
In the international architectural production, set aside the global
success of a banal and everyday Postmodernism, we can witness
an increasing discrepancy between a moderate and restrained
Modernism, mixed with local traditions, and an architecture that
depends on international stardom. The latter attracts a great deal of
attention from the media. However, at the same time we become
aware that the technological and socio-geographical revolution of
the nineteen nineties also produces a series of emerging effects,
new problems and possibilities that need to be addressed. Over the
last couple of years, an increasing group of architects has begun
investigating these phenomena and started to develop new strategies
and methods to deal with them. An important aspect of this
new direction in architecture is an interest in the reality of the new
urban conditions as they take shape today even without the intervention
of architects. These architects first want to see the city
naked.
The first position, which has been named among others ‘Reflexive’
(by Bart Lootsma in ao. SuperDutch), ‘Reflexive Moderne’ (Ulrich
Schwarz, who uses the term in a different way to characterize
German architecture), and ‘Transmodern’ (Otto Kapfinger about
recent Austrian Architecture), seems to be a reworking or upgrading
of nationally existing modernist strategies in which one can
sometimes hear faint echoes of Critical Regionalism. 1 The architects
that belong to this direction start their career in an almost traditional
way with buildings in their own country and gradually gain
international attention because of the consistent quality of their
built work. Even if the work is differentiated, there seems to be a
certain consistency in approach and aesthetics.
The second position is defined by a group of architects that study,
work and teach all over the world from the beginning. Herbert
Muschamp recently characterized this group as follows: “Many of
them, or should I say us, are displaced suburbanites: children of the
postwar suburban exodus who discovered by the onset of adolescence
the unlikelihood that we would ever be able to afford houses
as nice as the ones we grew up in. We could, however, afford plane
tickets. And so, in the 1960’s and 70’s, there commenced the restless
globetrotting of baby boomers, hungry for the sense of otherness
largely absent from suburban life. We went in search of places to
excite us, buildings to show us new ways of seeing and modes of
living.(…) While architecture provides symbolic destinations for
this group, design gives individuals the tools to construct their own
identities – through the clothes they wear, the gadgets they use, the
furniture they choose for their apartments and houses. To a degree,
the search for identity through design echoes the Good Design
movement promoted half a century ago by the Museum of Modern
Art, the Aspen Design Conference and the Illinois Institute of
Technology. Today, as in the earlier era, designers are seeking to
work within the modern system of mass production and distribution.
The new design aesthetic, however, is far more varied.” 2
The generation Muschamp speaks about is the generation of Frank
Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. They build all over the
world in cities that want to distinguish themselves in a global competition.
It is the generation of the Bilbao-effect. Together they form
a new, radically footloose elite. Sometimes one does not even know
what nationality they belong to. Is Gehry an American or a
Canadian? Zaha Hadid was born in Bagdad, lives in London and
teaches in Vienna. What to think of Daniel Libeskind? Is he Polish,
German, American or simply Jewish? Rem Koolhaas likes to speak
melancholically about his youth in Indonesia and has a love-hate
relationship with the Netherlands. The weekends he spends with
his wife in London and the New York Times speaks openly about his
relationships with women all over the world. His book S,M,L,XL
opens with diagrams about his flight schedule. Koolhaas also made
fun about my book ‘SuperDutch’: “Imagine how we would puke if
there were a book called SuperGermans; laugh at SuperBelgians,
snicker at SuperFrench, complain about SuperAmericans.” 3 Indeed,
after a career start in the Netherlands, most architects in
SuperDutch work internationally today and do not want to be con-
sidered ‘Dutch’ any more.
For this generation, globalization was also a traumatic experience,
as can be reconstructed from their biographies and found in quotes
in many cases. It is linked to feelings of exile, on which they react
aggressively. “Fuck Context”, Rem Koolhaas wrote, referring to the
demise of urbanism. At a conference in Porto he replied Vittorio
Lampugnani, who made a plea that we should deal with our historical
cities carefully and respectfully, so that we can share them like
the home of our parents, that he had just calculated with how many
brothers, sisters, cousins and nieces he would have to share this
home, and that that would not be a fair share. 4 As Zaha Hadid told
me in an interview lately: ‘Unsere Arbeit hat immer mit der Setzung
von Zäsuren zu tun, es ging immer um das einziehen neuer Linien,
um alle mögliche Arten der in diesem Moment freigesetzten
Energien. Die Strukturierung des Raumprogramms wurde zum
Beispiel zum wichtigsten Teil der Recherche, was natürlich dazu
führte, bestehende Typologien in Frage zu stellen. Vom formalen
Repertoire abgesehen, war dies der wichtigste Teil unserer Arbeit’. 5
This is the generation of Deconstructivism. It likes to see itself as a
new avant-garde, modelled after the great avant-gardes of the nineteen
twenties, notably Constructivism. Very different from those
avant-gardes, they hardly ever take a political stance, as they have
learned from Manfredo Tafuri that every avant-garde is doomed to
be swallowed by capitalism anyway. This generation is, as Greg
Chrysler suggests in his book ‘Writing Spaces’ not just the generation
of ‘Strategies of Disturbance’ but also the ‘Generation of
Theory’. 6 And indeed, there has probably never been a generation
that produced so much theory to justify and embed their work –so
much that one could justifiably argue that their architecture is the
‘real’ reflexive architecture. At the same time, its surrender to the
reality of capitalism and the extravagant nature of their work drives
them into a position where they can almost only work for a new capitalist
elite that wants to distinguish itself, whether it is larger
multinational corporations in search of an identity or cities that, in a
global competition, are desperate to attract the ‘Creative Class’ as
Richard Florida calls it. 7
Still, in a globalized practice, the relationship between a certain
design approach and local conditions is problematic and has to be
redefined. And again we see a split.
On one hand we see the rise of an even newer generation for whom
the global context is the only normal context which they work in.
From the beginning on, they study abroad, compete in international
competitions and meet in international conferences and exhibitions.
They base their strategies to deal with a locality on generalizing
theories like chaos theory, complexity theory and systems theory.
However, even if they seem to use these theories to deal with
local conditions –the editors of Assemblage even suggested a
return to the nineteen sixties and to ecology – what is even more
important is that they produce a new coherence within the projects,
making them even more autonomous and self-contained than the
mute experiments and exercises with architectural language of the
generation before them. 8
These architects responded to the global and technological
changes most optimistically and they embraced the latest in computer
software to produce daring new forms. Characteristic for this
new mentality is ‘Foreign Office Architects’, an office founded by a
Spaniard and an Iraqi in London, but that moves to Tokyo if they
have a larger project there. They present their projects in the
Spanish just as well as in the British pavilion at the Venice
Biennale. Alejandro Zaera and Farshid Moussavi teach in
Rotterdam and Vienna. And where digital technology is concerned,
Greg Lynn, one of their foremost representatives, once remarked:
“If I turn my computer on in the morning, I don’t ask what it can do
for me, but what I can do for him.” The first ArchiLab presentations
were an important stage for this global digital generation. The work
they produced indeed fitted perfectly in the tradition of the radical
architecture of the nineteen sixties, which is so well represented in
the extraordinary collection of the FRAC Centre. Even if
not many projects have been realized yet, the work
found wide acclaim in exhibitions like Latent Utopias in
Graz in 2002 and Architecture Non Standard in the
Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2003. What links them with
their mentors from the deconstructivist avant-garde
before them is that they mainly focus on buildings, on
‘great architecture’, with an occasional excursion to
infrastructure, leaving us ‘with a world without urbanism,
only architecture, ever more architecture’. 9
Indeed, as Rem Koolhaas formulated it, “What Ever
Happened to Urbanism?” 10
There has probably never been as much writing on the
city and on architecture. Countless books appear on
cities and on the city. Architectural theory tries to
replace the traditional rules formulated by urbanism,
but the architectural debate does not produce a consensus
any more. Instead, there are ever more individual
positions that almost all try to produce exceptionally
great architecture. In the new global market architects
can be successful in finding niches that offer the
possibility of realization. Buildings are the subject of
international competitions and within capitalism infrastructure
is the only remaining field that is subsidized.
But this does not produce knowledge. On the other
hand: social geography, anthropology, sociology and
philosophy do produce knowledge, but no recipes that
would produce architecture.
According to Koolhaas, “our amalgamated wisdom can
easily be caricatured: according to Derrida we cannot
be whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be real,
according to Virilio we cannot be There.” Koolhaas
therefore proposes a redefined urbanism that will not
only be a profession, but a way of thinking, “an ideology:
to accept what exists”. “The seeming failure of the
urban offers an exceptional opportunity, a pretext for
Nietzschean frivolity. We have to imagine 1,001 other
concepts of city; we have to take insane risks; we have
to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow
deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right. The certainty
of failure has to be our laughing gas / oxygen;
modernization our most potent drug. Since we are not
responsible, we have to become irresponsible. In a
landscape of increasing expediency and impermanence,
urbanism no longer is or has to be the most
solemn of our decisions; urbanism can lighten up,
become a Gay Science – Lite Urbanism.” 11
Today we see a group of architects that is aware that
the technological and socio-geographical revolution of
the nineteen nineties also produces a series of emerging
effects and new possibilities that need to be
addressed. They are aware that globalization does not
just produce new prosperous metropolitan concentrations
of urbanity and smooth “Spaces of Flows” but
that it also creates new conflicts and tensions
–because the former Third World folds into the First, for
example – and even causes large areas to shrink. The
dissolution of the nation state and the emergence of a
new kind of capitalist “Empire” produce a crisis of the
communist states and the welfare states. In large parts
of the world, exactly those were intimately connected to
housing programs and urban planning. Now, individualization
creates a demand for a greater diversity in
architecture and the nature and use of public space are
changing.
What is maybe even more important is that this emerging
group of architects realizes that architecture and
urbanism are not necessarily just produced by archi-
tects. Politics, be it in the form of the
state, the city or large corporations, but
also in the form of newer emerging
organizations or multiplicities reorganize
our environment. Sometimes they
are using architecture in the most brutal
way, as in the walls among others
Israel and the United States are building.
But even more often they change
the urban fabric from within by introducing
new programs and new forms of
organization. New communications
media, together with a radically
increased individual mobility produce
new coherences in the city and a different
use of public space.
Over the last couple of years, an
increasing group of architects has
begun investigating these phenomena
and started to develop new strategies
and methods to deal with them. What is
crucial to this tendency is that the
architects involved carry out their
research with the classical tools architecture
has at its disposal: cartography,
plan, elevation and section. This
research is based on realities, read by
architects with architect’s means but it
is informed by writings on the city. The
change in approach is also mirrored in
changes in philosophy, in which an
ontological and cosmological approach
has been replaced by methods that
come closer to and borrow from
anthropology and sociology, as in Peter
Sloterdijks Sphären trilogy for
example. 12 In exhibitions and publications
this research is often presented
as a cultural statement in itself. We find
the same tendency in contemporary art,
in which many artists played the role of
cartographers, documentary photographers
or film makers.
It is a research that, in Hou Hanru’s
words, seems both “fashionable and
necessary”. 13 It is fashionable because
it has become fashionable to make no
distinction between high and low art, to
indulge in banal phenomena and into
the newness of the now. It is however
necessary, because we need to learn to
understand these phenomena and the
often implicit but nevertheless powerful
forces that drive them to be able to
maintain the important role architecture
can play for large parts of the society
instead of just for an elite. Very different
from Rem Koolhaas, who proposed
to accept what exists and surf on
it, these architects show a new engagement,
even if it is not always clear what
the results of that engagement might
be. In the catalogue of Documenta 11,
Molly Nesbit meditates on this engagement
that seems to be missing a
visionary aspect that is traditionally
associated with Utopia, particularly in
architecture. “Is the utopian picture
itself to be considered missing’, she
13