TBT: network
D/A: eccentric
Keller Easterling's introduction to the 1994 book Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America, is a brief preview of her application of network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. Concerning architecture, Easterling`s investigations suggests that the design discipline has yet to truly tap the full potential of the concept of the network. She observes:
(1)"architects are typically more fluent in description of activity and relationship that result in artifacts or forms within conventions that favor the designation of site as single entity."
….Despite the design profession having accumulated a descriptive vocabulary on forms and geometries, there is a dearth of commonly accepted terms when describing spatial organizations with "active parts, temporal components, or differential change."
An example of this is in the way the design profession conceptualizes the organization of a site as a singular entity instead of many entities distributed across a network. According to her, the real power of the network organization is that each of those entities have a relation to one another and that are both "collectively and individually adjustable" over time. In other words, architecture is but one of the many ecologies of a descriptive set of protocols or parameters that are established for formatting space over a given length of time (see also, development & planning). She even admits that this complex ecology of space making is not always according to the plan as it is often improvisational and responsive to changing circumstances, anomalies, and even mistakes (4). The resulting spatial conditions are thus truly `eccentric` in its diversity, circumstances, and incompleteness.
Perhaps it is in these eccentric sites where Easterling offers up hope and opportunity for architects to be cognoscent of a network approach in their creative space making endeavors. One might be able to see this kind of creative work already taking place in the areas of restructuring suburban traffic, stripmall churches, or the retrofitting of gray-malls as community-health centers. At the same time, other players in the space making ecology (i.e., legislators, developers, planners, etc…) should consider what types of legislation and economic proposals can be leveraged in the design of an infrastructure that can host more of these eccentric sites.
Easterling`s observation suggests to architects, managers, and planners to not be so rash in our attempts to comprehensively label, affix, proceduralize, typologize any spatial complexities that we encounter as these will all change in its relative position and time. Our impulse to `control` space may simply be an anthropocentric bias of survival to quickly know the unknown, solve a problem at hand, and then get on with our immediate lives. It may also be more indicative of our current state of humanity that is still very engaged in the project of modernization.
Fair enough, Easterling has been descriptive of a holistic approach to how space making has taken place everyday. However, from an ethical and pragmatic viewpoint, is it neither plausible nor just to design with this network approach for a future with multiple uses? The question is very similar to the way parents in these last hundred years have been confronted for the first time of how to go about raising children. Aspirations of the parents to instill morality, persona, and behavior all eventually reached a point in human development where their designer baby goes out of their hands and has grown up (at least we hope). Despite our good intentions, the needs and demands of the future generation may be quite different and the long-term view of networking approaches becomes burdens for future generations to come? Analogously, we can see the development of infrastructure sites changing over time as it may have once served production of industry and transit, leading to abandonment and rediscovery of its informal uses into a fully developed park such as the High Line.
Also remaining unclear are what those common terms describing spatial organizations with `active parts, temporal components, and differential changes? I think Easterling would hesitate to name a few without admitting a need for the existence of any kind of short-sighted anthropocentric definitions. We humans still have a short event horizon that cannot possibly map all the rules for space making over time. While the digital era has extended our ability see beyond this horizon by granting us access to large untapped information and wielding the computing prowess possibilities of a computer, paradoxically this has lead to an even more shortsighted event horizon than ever before. In our endeavor to understand things or research before we enter the design phase of a project, we have all likely to have suffered episodes of pure information overload, utter confusion as to what is true, and an inability to keep up and organization information. Inevitably, paralysis of our mind ensues as we resort back to certain basic human instincts of limiting our selves to flexible but consumable shortsighted definitions.
Easterling and other writers such as Kwinter would likely warn us of the danger of becoming entrenched in this short cited view of the network approach. However, I actually believe this is some merit in such things as shortsighted definitions. The paradoxical nature of necessity and aversion for having a broad networked horizon implies the need for designers to have two concurrent time horizons: concrete short-term deadlines and a more flexible and reflective long-term deadlines.
Why not offer both the short and long-term deadlines? While the long term is meant to sustain, the short term is the speculative R&D for the long-term future infrastructure! It is exactly at this cross roads that we should be working at!
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