Architecture Without Content 8: Places Of Accumulation: Temporary Residence

Another Short History of Architecture without Content The second iteration of Architecture without Content at EPFL is the eighth incarnation of a studio that started three years ago at Columbia University. Back then it was intended as a study of the Big Box, a big industrial building that can contain many things. Over time, Architecture without Content came to represent an idea of a possible architecture of the perimeter, a pragmatic kind of architecture that remains radical and precise. The first incarnation of Places of Accumulation — entitled Machines — concentrated both on places of production and places of storage. Buildings that concentrate the very essence of our contemporary infrastructure. In most cases they are not considered as possible sites for an architectural project. Machines thus investigated the possibility to accumulate formal knowledge in buildings that do not deserve a specific architectural treatment. We claimed: “Their presence is all they have, but perhaps that is enough.” Temporary Residence is in many ways the inverse of Machines . Site and territory are the defining factors for the architectural type. As much as each of the designed buildings are considered autonomous, it is precisely their performance ‘on site’ that was considered. At first, the project tackled fifteen sites of a wider series of temporary detention centres for migrants in contemporary Greece. As with the Machines , these buildings play a role on a global scale and regulate flows in the even covered field. The sites sprawl around in the entire territory of the country, and are more densely distributed close to the Turkish border and around Athens. During the studio, we drifted away from that initial thought. The buildings in Temporary Residence accumulate people, not machines or data. The temporary residences designed here are to be objects that permanently mark and deal with the specificity of a given territory whilst being able to accumulate transient fluxes of people — now temporary detention centres for immigrants, in the future something else. Ultimately, Temporary Residence considers inhabitants a temporary fad. The ambiguity towards its user is the code of arms of this ignorant piece of architecture. As a true Architecture without Content it turns the inhabitant into its alibi.

Architecture without Content 5: Places Of Accumulation: Machines

Kersten Geers, Jelena Pancevac, Giovanni Piovene Porto Godi, Dries Rodet, Andrea Zanderigo

This book shows the fifth incarnation of Architecture without Content. Architecture without Content started three years ago at Columbia University. Back then it was intended as a study of the Big Box, a big industrial building that could contain many things . Over time, Architecture without Content came to represent an idea of a possible architecture of the perimeter, a pragmatic kind of architecture that remains radical and precise. Architecture without Content 5 was held at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Epfl). This time we were dealing with Places of Accumulation. Places of Accumulation are both places of production and places of storage. They are buildings that concentrate the very essence of our contemporary infrastructure. In most cases they are not considered as possible sites for an architectural project. Places of Accumulation investigates the possibility of accumulating formal knowledge in buildings that do not deserve a specific architectural treatment. Their presence is all they have, but perhaps that is enough. Places of Accumulation starts from the presumption that it might be possible to ignore content and still make precise architecture. For that reason we will make form first, and content later.

2014

Architecture without Content 4: Necessary Architecture

Kersten Geers, Andrea Zanderigo

The Data Center is the most definitive and yet invisible typology of our contemporary world. It is the densest spot in our digital universe, a physically invisible space virtually visited by many. In a time when the collective spirit of the net itself is more and more in peril, these privately owned devices represent, in many ways, the pinnacle of our shared infrastructure. Therefore, Data Centers are intrinsically collective infrastructures. Unfortunately the buildings themselves remain largely invisible. Subject to technical and environmental requirements, they tend to hide in the fringes of our world; fringes that are increasingly scarce. The Cloud, inhabitant of the data center, struggles with its own invisibility as the place where our valuable content is stored. Both dynamics are problematic but offer an opportunity. As in our cities, what was formerly considered collective is increasingly privatized (one thinks of schools and communal offices). It might be argued that Data Centers are amongst the few leftover opportunities that, because of their intrinsic content, have the potential to acquire collective meaning. This is not the first time we have investigated this potential. Two years ago, in the first studio at Columbia called Architecture without Content we tried to portray the absolute potential of these big boxes because of the evident impact of their sheer mass when projected in the even covered field. In this studio Architecture without Content 4 we return to the center of the city and investigate the potential of these enormous buildings if they would be located on Roosevelt Island; formerly the outskirts of Manhattan, today the very center of New York. Roosevelt Island is strategically positioned and highly wired. It has a latent potential for symbolic representation, as was recently exemplified by the posthumous execution of Kahn’s Roosevelt memorial and the numerous paper projects that preceded that monument. In parallel, it is undergoing a process of reinvention as a new center of excellence, as exemplified by the recently announced plans of Cornell University to open a new hightech campus on the island. Within all this activity, an overall project is lacking. Architecture without Content 4 reconnects to Venturi’s concept of a Difficult Whole. The Difficult Whole is not a group form, nor a mere collection of elements, but a formal strategy that seeks for a cohesive composition of parts through inflection. Each of the parts influences each other, while the parts retain their individuality. Each of the Data Centers on Roosevelt Island aspire to do the same. Their content is an alibi for architectural form whereas their position is integrally part of the overall project for the island. The immutable forms of these big boxes are able to capitalize on their invisible content to create a disposable sanctuary for our contemporary Information Age. The project for Roosevelt Island announces its very decay the day of its completion—an empty civic center.

2013

Designing complexity, The relationship between obsolescence systems and densification strategies for large-scale intermodal hubs in contemporary European cities

Mathieu Louis Pierre Mercuriali

The metropolis can be analysed as an infrastructure in perpetual motion, composed of built elements – the system “hardware” – and social networks – the system “software”. The emergence of an overall city-scale infrastructure composed not of a single unit but of intermeshed projects designed by various players has given rise to an observable phenomenon of superdensity. The densification created by the development of these large-scale designs at intermodal hubs is generating new typologies, methodologies and completed projects in response to contemporary urban density. Conceived as an ensemble of services rather than as a built framework, these complex projects generate a paradox between the intrinsic stability of their construction and the instability of their functional programme. This is building within the built environment. Metropolitan development via complex design of this kind involves the production of architecture over another architecture. The city regenerates itself over itself: this is building over the built. Functional obsolescence, infrastructural deterioration, and changing mobility typologies generate the possibility of rethinking the potential of what has already been built. The built sites have been repurposed several times over. This means rethinking the accelerated modification of modes of using buildings and infrastructures by reconfiguring – at various intervention levels – projects from the 1980s and 1990s. How is it possible to intervene yet again without this intervention being the last? The process involves finding new resources for optimising an urban fragment within the existing urban fabric, in places divested of their original purpose. This is rethinking obsolescence through a new urbanism. Optimising the choices available to “building sites of the future” means finding new tools for rethinking dense urban environments. This means reconfiguring a neighbourhood by re-using what already exists, without resorting to façadism or simply gutting existing structures. In an age of “cybercities”, of networked megacities, “open core” development sites need to be created – as a way of facilitating the city’s fragmented transformation via the overlayering of decisions and interventions. The scale of the neighbourhood as urban fragment offers us an entry point for rethinking the existing urban cybercities, by applying tools adapted to a single project comprising various operational sub-ensembles. Unique in terms of their scale and complexity, these designs offer an illuminating field for developing research investigating specific aspects of the architecture profession’s future direction in the 21st century. This is designing complexity.