Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure

Making and Using the Urban Environment

Nigel Bertram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351935173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Observation and analysis are types of invention. They make things apparent which perhaps were invisible. By noticing, drawing and naming something we bring it into being. On the other hand, building and making can be thought of as analytical observations, pointing out what had not been so clear before and revealing the potential for other actions yet to occur. This book is a collection of urban research and architectural projects by award-winning architects Nigel Bertram / NMBW Architecture Studio, using observation as a design tool and design as an observational method. Through this process, a position on the making of architecture and on the role of architecture within the wider urban environment is established; embracing the full messy reality of the present, finding delight in the everyday and developing sensitivity to a range of found environments. By taking pre-existing conditions seriously, each project, architectural or analytical, large or small, becomes understood as the strategic renovation of a continuing state. This method of working operates by thinking simultaneously at different scales, from furniture to structure and infrastructure, searching for combinations of what might normally be separated into different categories, moving between the many small and ad-hoc actions of individuals to wider systems of collective organisation. Thinking about the effects of small moves on the larger urban field (and vice-versa), the role of unplanned or uncontrolled events in relation to the inward focus of design; thinking about the combinatory effect of what is newly made with what is already there, for example, enables architecture and the city to be understood in relative terms - in terms of relationships. Between people, groups of people, things, and parts of things, actions and groups of actions: urban architecture is the social arrangement of activity with the physical arrangement of large and small parts of its environment. But what people do also changes the place in which they do it. Considering different scales and types of relationships between individuals and groups, insiders and outsiders, expected and unexpected actions can be a way of crossing categories and establishing new relations. Breaking down components of a given situation or brief, before re-grouping, can be used to flatten and redistribute hierarchies embedded within. Similarly, finding ways of carefully observing things just as they are in the present, helps to see around the presuppositions of familiarity, without worrying about cause or effect. These aims, techniques and thoughts are presented through the discipline of the architectural project, where precise strategies must in the end be found to define an exact physical arrangement and materiality, usually at minimum cost. This collection of works researches the manner in which such precision can also generate openness and indeterminacy, allowing and provoking the engagement of others.

Openings

This collection and arrangement (this work) contains three simultaneous and ongoing subsets or bodies of work that overlap but that can also be isolated:

1. a series of investigations into how the urban environment is made
2. a series of investigations into how the urban environment is used
3. a series of proposals for making and using that same environment

The fact that these three are happening together is important. They are not sequential activities, but are able to influence each other dynamically. The raw material for all these projects is drawn from the everyday urban environment. We are continuously and simultaneously inhabiting and remaking this environment. Through the dynamics of our use and interaction, it is constantly being modified, whether on a large or small scale, visibly or invisibly. The way in which the urban environment is made / remade and used / reused is the subject of this work.

The term ‘urban environment’ refers to a total sum of parts understood as a single, interrelated but non-organic system. This includes infrastructure, buildings, plants, constructed landscapes, fittings, people, signs, things, vehicles, etc. ‘Urban’ is also not restricted to metropolitan conditions. The word is used here to denote all constructed space, from agricultural fields to suburbs to country towns to large conurbations (but excluding wild or truly natural space). All of these environments are combinations of a similar set of elements, only in a different arrangement or to a different degree.

If the urban environment is understood as being continually in flux, then every action – from pulling up a chair to gardening to constructing a new building or to driving a car – can be considered as a renovation, or the adjustment of a previous condition. It also follows that the existing state of affairs has a certain authority – simply because it is there. An existing condition, taken as a totality at a certain point in time, describes the combined set of forces – economic, social, historical, political, natural, chance – which caused it to exist. Looking carefully and analytically at existing conditions in real time can teach us about the forces that produced them. Learning from the city in this way helps us make more finely-tuned decisions and strategies in the ongoing act of making and using it.

There have, of course, been innumerable and detailed previous studies of the existing built fabric, organisation and behaviour of cities and suburbs, infrastructures and landscapes. What is particular to this collection of studies is firstly their location – their specific place and time; and secondly their method – the way in which the study has taken place. This ‘way’ refers to the type of study, its selection of precise subject matter, and to the medium through which it occurs: looking, analysing, documenting, teaching and building. The process of learning from the city whilst simultaneously making and using it has been considered as an interdependent cycle. Each of the works in this collection, whether analytical or built, is a study; a reflective observation of what exists, but also a modification of that condition – the creation of something that was not there before.

The process starts by looking for openings; looking for a way in. Gaps or discontinuities in logic are useful types of openings which allow new thoughts to find a place. Openings (possibilities, gaps, unresolved conditions) are also characteristic of what might be called an ‘open’ environment, as will be discussed in the following sections. Seeking out openings is a way of seeking out ‘openness’, and a delaying or deferral of closure. Thought of in this way, the aim of each work as arranged here is to locate (find) and maintain (keep) both openings and openness in the specific environment of that work.

Walking around the city with our eyes open, we act like ‘urban detectives’. Historian and architect Terinobu Fujimori coined this term with the Tokyo Architectural Detective Agency in 1974 and with the subsequent ROJO Society (ROJO translates as ‘roadway observation study’). Over decades he collected a range of carefully selected evidence, from humorous chance assemblages to previously unnoticed but beautiful fragments of infrastructure, landscape and building. Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour, in Learning from Las Vegas, also saw and collected things that others had missed in their haste to get out of the ‘ugly’ / debased commercial environment. They were able to demonstrate the Strip’s logic and validity as a system by looking coldly and analytically at their subject matter (but also creatively and projectively, with a certain delight in the forbidden). Kaijima, Kuroda and Tsukamoto in Made in Tokyo and subsequent projects draw on Venturi and Scott-Brown, ROJO and others to define a manner of looking ‘flatly’ at their environment, looking without prejudice in order to see through the blind spots of prejudgement. Their willingness to treat the ‘da-me [no good] architecture’ of Tokyo seriously provoked a new definition and understanding of what that city is, based simply on looking carefully and creatively at what was directly in front of them.

Richard Sennett has defined ‘openness’ as an essential quality of a vibrant and real public realm. He discusses the public realm as a process; something which is participated in and evolves over time. Open systems (those in unstable evolution) are contrasted with closed systems (those in harmonious equilibrium) and the inherent dynamic tension of the former is argued as liberating for a participatory urban environment. He also challenges architects and planners with the value of ‘incomplete form’ as a political act – physical structure which is somehow loose in specification and ‘flexible’ enough to accommodate and encourage difference; multiple interpretations and uses by different individuals over time. (Richard Sennett, ‘The Public Realm’, 2008). Exactly how this is to occur, however, is left open.

Looking for openings can also be understood as a strategy for practice. Openings are places where things are less crowded, where no one is looking. Team sports players know this, and talk of both creating and using openings. By looking at what exists in a careful way, by studying and building such things as fences, chairs and tables, side walls, informal events, farms and small country towns. By suggesting that removal or not acting can be a strategic, feasible and even desirable course of action at a time focused on urban expansion, densification and growth is one way of creating an opening for something new to occur. This practice is similar to that of artists moving to neglected parts of the city (whether by choice or necessity) and transforming these places over time into something that others can also see value in.

1.1 Melbourne GPO, demolition, 2003.

1.2 Fitzroy Town Hall, reconstruction, 2001.

DEFLECTIONS

While going through the act of collecting and arranging the found conditions of these works, an idea started to emerge. This gathers around concepts of ‘deflection’ and the act of deflecting as a strategy. By deflection, I mean the glancing movement or bending of focus from one singular point, conclusion or object; diverting attention strategically away from the thing itself. If each of the works (including this one) is a ‘study’, then it is not a theory. If each of the works is focused internally and reaches a precise (built, printed) conclusion, it is also a provisional conclusion, always with the aim of maintaining openness for another study, and so on. If each of these works is a focus, it also deflects that focus away from itself – towards other things, pointing things out, which are then also changed and enabled because this deflection has occurred.

Within the practice we have discussed many times the strategy of concentrating on the very large (urban) scale and very small (material / experiential) scale as a method of avoiding or bypassing the middle scale, which is the usual scale and preoccupation of architecture. This middle scale is that of the ‘object’, the whole thing, in isolation and complete. It is the scale on which form is often studied, modelled, considered and communicated. By comparison, the very large is the scale of infrastructure, or shared metropolitan systems, and the very small is the scale of furniture, or personalised and highly responsive microenvironments.

The middle scale of architecture is also the scale of bureaucracy: it is the frame on which town planning applications are considered and understood, it is the scale of regulation, of massing, of envelope and also of ‘image’: understood in a singular, gestural way. If, however, we consider an action or strategy in terms of its impact and consequences on a broader urban-environmental field, then much of the nuance of this scale of bureaucracy becomes lost, unperceivable or irrelevant. If we consider architecture in terms of what is actually experienced by people at a given point in time, then in many cases the whole is also irrelevant, or invisible and obscured, by the foci of everyday inhabitation. Often, the minute and immediate actions of people and things at the level of experience flies under the radar of bureaucracy and control, which remains focused on the static totality of the whole.

But defining things precisely at the middle scale of the whole is the architect’s task. We need to decide on – and then describe exactly – where things go, how big things are and what they are made of, in order that they can be understood, approved, priced and made (within the established systems of the democratic / commercial city). One aim of the works collected here has been to investigate ways in which actions and decisions can be made logically and precisely, but in a way that also encourages other things to happen; that does not limit or define absolutely the meaning, interpretation or potential inhabitation of spaces; that leaves room for and encourages appropriation and customisation (active engagement) in the everyday urban realm. In order to do this, it is necessary to continually study ways in which such things as customisation and appropriation occur (how the urban environment is used), and also continually reflect upon the nature and potential of the fundamental decisions and limits that everyday architecture entails. This includes aspects such as spatial organisation, structure, expression, materials and fittings (how the urban environment is made).

In pursuit of this, the overall balancing / juggling of forces and competing requirements that is the process of architecture can also be seen as a strategy for producing outcomes which, although precise, remain open and contingent. Thinking of the urban field as an environment means that we are always thinking of our actions not as isolated or complete in themselves, but in combination with other actions; the actions of others.

Working combinations of:

1. – small things and big things
2. – hard things and soft things
3. – permanent things and impermanent things
4. – designed things and undesigned things
5. – resolved things and unresolved things

It follows that any new thing that we make, any ‘renovation’ of an existing condition, is already a composite entity. A composite of:

1. – urban and architectural
2. – designed and undesigned
3. – the things that we found and the things that we made
4. – what is of the place and what we bring to it
5. – physical structure and active human inhabitation

We want to be conscious of this composite nature, to bring it to the foreground as subject matter.

We have found that one way of doing this is to work simultaneously at a number of levels, a number of scales, and to find methods for looking not only at what is right in front of us (the thing itself), but also at the edges of that thing – the periphery. Working at extremities is a type of technique for resisting the central focal pull of the object being made, the thing under our own control.

PERIPHERALITY

Working at the extremities (of scale, etc.).

In terms of the three categories / bodies of work set up at the start of this chapter, this notion can be further specified as:

1. simultaneously thinking about concrete material effect / rules of architecture and the abstract legal / organisational constructs of urban planning
2. speculating on little ecosystems of micro-effect (inhabitation, customisation) in relation to macro-scale urban infrastructures and landscapes
3. actively suppressing the middle ground of form / gesture in order to deflect atten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Openings
• 2 Division and Multiplication
• 3 Intersections
• 4 By-Product-Tokyo
• 5 Appropriations
• 6 Elwood House
• 7 Thresholds
• 8 Fitzroy Apartments
• 9 Plans
• 10 Somers House …
• 11 Details
• 12 RMIT Building
• 13 Materials
• 14 Pioneer Museum Plaza …
• 15 Furniture
• 16 Conversations
• Project Data
• References
• Index