05: Reconnecting practice and meaning

Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
05: Reconnecting practice and meaning
Albena Yaneva
Manchester University
Illustration 1: Models in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam
November 2001, Rotterdam: Looking at the scenery in the Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA) in illustration 1 above, one can see different tables of models: the
Seattle Public Library monumental model is kept on a separate table on the ground
floor1; the models for the extension of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York are displayed on another table2, spread across three tables are the models of the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)3. A series of CCTV models are set on
a plinth, while just one huge model of the recently completed la Casa da Música in
Porto is kept4. Why were these buildings made this way? How do OMA architects
come to these shapes?
A critical thinker would explain the superiority of society or culture over these smallscale models by simply introducing into the explanation higher levels of complexity,
of emergent properties, of microstructures. How is American culture, for instance,
embedded in the design of the Seattle Library, how are Chinese politics mirrored in
the CCTV tower in Beijing, how is Portuguese culture reflected in the Casa da
Música?
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1
Seattle Central Library, USA, Seattle, 2004; Built.
Whitney Museum Extension, USA, New York, 2001; concept.
3
Lacma Extension, USA, Los Angeles, 2001; Design proposal for extension of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art; Competition.
4
Casa da Música, , Portugal, Porto, 2005; Concert hall for the City of Porto; Built.
2
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
Another possible line of explanation is to elucidate Koolhaas’s building and design
approach with larger, overarching conceptual frameworks and theoretical influences:
to what extent was the early Koolhaas influenced by Surrealism?5 The impact of the
Modern Movement on his design work will be recalled, his rapport with
functionalism, the theoretical influence of Mies van der Rohe or le Corbusier, of
Russian constructivism, of American architecture in the 1920s and 1930s will be
quoted.6
Another storyline would follow his background as a journalist for the Haagse Post and
his work as a screenwriter, or his childhood in Indonesia, connecting it with his
architectural approach and trying to clarify its distinctive features. His fascination with
Manhattan and his theory of the skyscraper, density and congestion will be explained
by his Dutch-ness and the fact that the first settlers of Manhattan were Dutch,
recreating their own country with nostalgia.7
The list of interpretations can be continued; they all revolve around these lines. I find
it somehow surprising to see architectural theorists desperately trying to understand
Koolhaas’s style and strengths by simply referring to his singularity and individuality
as a “creator” as if we were to judge him as an eighteenth-century unique genius, or to
factors outside the realm of architecture – society, culture, class, gender. Whenever an
account of Koolhaas’s work tackles his great urban ideas and powerful insights, his
design experience is left apart and his office practice is rarely tackled as significant for
the understanding of his buildings.
Architecture is however, we have no doubt about this, a cooperative activity of both
architects and support personnel, humans and models, paints and pixels, material
samples and plans, that all constitute the design world.8 Yet, realistic accounts of the
contemporary architectural practices, of the design worlds, are missing.9
In the prevailing analyses of contemporary architectural theory and critics, buildings
are interpreted as separated from both the conditions of their making and the design
experience of the makers. The admiration of the architectural critics and theorists
tackle the “symbolic” aspects of buildings, the ideas, the subjective imagination of the
creator, whereas “matter” is a term of depreciation, “practice” is seen as a synonym of
banality, “design experience” as trivial; something to be explained away or apologized
for. A wall of critical interpretations is built around buildings that render their general
significance almost opaque. In these interpretations architecture is remitted to a
separate realm, cut off from that vital association with design materials and
experiences. This separates design practice from insight, imagination from making,
meaning from materiality.
5 See Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, London 1978, Thames
and Hudson; Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge,
Mass. 1992, MIT Press; Hill, Jonathan, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users, London
2003, Routledge; Mical, Thomas, Surrealism and Architecture, London 2005, Routledge.
6
See Lucan, Jacques, OMA – Rem Koolhaas. Architecture 1970-1990, New York 1991, Princeton
Architectural Press.
7 See Damisch, Hubert, ‘The Manhattan Transfer’, in Lucan, Jacques, OMA – Rem Koolhaas.
Architecture 1970-1990, New York 1991, Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 21-33.
8 I am following here Becker’s understanding of the world of art as a cooperative activity (see
Becker, Howard S., ‘Art As Collective Action’, American Sociological Review 1974, 39(6): 767-76;
Becker, Howard. S., Art Worlds, Berkeley 1982, University of California Press).
9 For more traditional sociological analyses of architectural firms see Blau, Judith R., Architects and
Firms: a Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice, Cambridge 1984, MIT Press; Cuff, Dana,
Architecture: the Story of Practice, Cambridge 1991, MIT Press.
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
In the last few decades the critical theory believed that in order to see the logical
patterns of an architectural process or product, the latter should be extracted from the
rather messy and irregular process of its production which is full of insignificant
details. The main assumption of critical theory is that architecture is something
capable of being inserted in wider theoretical frameworks outside architecture. In order
to be understood buildings were to be located within the entire spectrum of
economics, politics and social practices (and of architectural theory); the same spectra
were also invited to explain design process, the success or failure of architectural
projects, to elucidate why a particular style emerges or vanishes at a particular moment
of time or to shed light on urban dynamics and city developments.
There is however, a different way to look at the architecture of Rem Koolhaas (or any
other architect today). A pragmatist approach could be an alternative to the critical
method.10 Such an approach would aim at understanding the practices rather than the
theories and the ideologies, the actions rather than the discourses, architecture in the
making rather than the contexts outside architecture. It will disclose in a pragmatist
fashion the way in which the models of the buildings seen on the tables in the OMA
Office, come into being and the way they gain meaning in design experience. Thus, to
understand the nature of architectural design at the OMA, we should not refer to the
bigger frameworks of Surrealism or the Modernist Movement, or any cultural and
social contexts outside architecture. We should rather look at what happens in the
architectural office and grapple the rhythms of design experience. Yet, no one ever
attempted to spend more than a day in this practice. No one ever believed that to
unravel what design means in this practice it would need more than an interview
session with the star architect, more than a bunch of scenarios to be explored for a
project to succeed, more than a couple of public images to be collected to reconstruct
a project trajectory, more than the official media story to be told about the
significance of a building. No one assumed that design, be it in the office of a Prizkerprize winner, is experience. Imagination, big ideas, stylistic influences can have a rest.
Society and culture can wait to be reinvented by design.
As we look at these images hundreds of fellow architects are about to retouch the
contours of an image, scale and rescale a model, stage a project presentation or visit a
building site or negotiate with clients. Yes, design is trivial, banal, mundane experience,
and if we were to understand the OMA buildings this experience is to be accounted with
care and respect (illustration 2).
10
On the pragmatist approach to architecture, see Yaneva, Albena, The Making of a Building: A
Pragmatist Approach to Architecture, Oxford 2009, Peter Lang.
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
Illustration 2: The OMA design experience
We need to give ethnographic attention to understand what it means to design and to unravel
the many local arrangements that creativity springs from. We need to follow designers
at work, just like the sociologist of science Bruno Latour did in the 1970s - following
scientists at work to understand the production of scientific facts. To understand the
meaning of OMA buildings and Koolhaas’s architecture, we need to forget the official
interpretations on the pages of the architectural journals or the theoretical
interpretations inspired by the critical approach.
We need to look instead at the ordinary forces and conditions of experience, to follow
the designers in the office, to see the way their actions spread and the way architects
make sense of their world –the building activities, the routines, the mistakes, and the
workaday choices usually considered of lesser importance for judging the meaning of
a building. By so doing, we can arrive at a better understanding of OMA’s design by
the means of a detour to design experience. The purpose is to avoid the passage
through the vague notions of society, culture, imagination and creativity, which do not
explain anything (as thinkers like Latour and Deleuze argued), but need explanation.
Let us take as an example a mundane story of design invention.11 Let us follow the
metamorphoses of the Porto models (illustrations 3 & 4). “Its design originated in a
commission for a house designed by the OMA in suburban Rotterdam. But the client
was not happy with the design and he dropped the project just as the OMA was
entering a design competition for the Porto concert hall. Thus, the abandoned model
of the private house lingered on the tables of models for months, before it was taken
with new assumptions and re-entered the cycles of design. Scaled up and adapted, the
model was modified to accommodate a concert hall; it entered a competition and won
it: the Casa da Música in Porto.
11
I tell these mundane stories of invention in Yaneva, Albena, Made by the Office for Metropolitan
Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Rotterdam:010 Publishers.
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
Illustration 3: The trajectory of a model
Illustration 4: and its metamorphoses...
One would never expect such a mundane story of invention to be told. And indeed in
public, stories of reuse and recycling existing models are not told that often. What we
usually hear is stories of daring visions and groundbreaking ideas traversing the
designers’ minds. Indeed, the story of reuse is rarely mentioned in the official
interpretations of the Porto building:
Some critics still compare the shape of the Porto building with a desert planet-vehicle
and believe that “somewhere in the inner workings of Koolhaas’ mind, there exists
some subconscious collection pond of sci-fi culture that gets channelled into his
designs.” The building is praised by the critics for its intellectual ardour and sensual
beauty and is treated as a perfect expression of Koolhaas’s vision.
On the other side, there are numerous interpretations of its connections with Porto
and with Portuguese music culture. Yet, behind the eulogy and the enthusiasm of the
critics, there is a mundane story of reuse and re-cycling that is to be told in the context
of design practice and reconnected to design experience.
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
If we follow the metamorphoses of the model, and how it changed meaning in its
trajectory and gained new meaning as it traveled from suburban Rotterdam to Porto,
we will be able to tell a fascinating story of design invention. A story in which there is
no real disjunction between the designers’ ideas and their material practices, a story
that reconnects visions and routines, imagination and doing. Misinterpretation and
mistakes allow new shapes to be created and open up new possibilities for the
building-to-be by triggering scenarios unforeseen in the initial architectural plans.
After having followed the stories of practice, can we still explain design in terms of
creation and construction? No. Not any longer. Rather we can conclude that
“Creation” implies a genius able to create ex nihilo. Design does not start from scratch.
Models at OMA are kept because they can be recycled in design, and for that they are
deliberately maintained to create a prolific ontological milieu for design invention. Reusing, re-collecting, re-interpreting, adapting, re-making – these are all synonyms of
creating. It is impossible to describe the process of invention as being separate from
the course of design. There is no gradual progression to reality, no realization of a
previously conceived plan, but vertiginous hesitation, tentative moves, mistakes,
miscalculated gestures, fundamental meandering.
Thus, stories like these can help us to restore continuity between design products and
everyday events, trials, sufferings and mistakes that are part of the design experience.
The problem of interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture is rooted in his practice – he
is not the discoverer, the unique creator, but one of the inventors of these buildingsto-come, and the setter of a specific studio practice; his buildings are born in the
studio world. Let the critics still interpret his architecture through the narrow metareflexive lens of the irreducible uniqueness of his personality.
This research program demonstrates the irrelevance of the modernist opposition
between what is social, symbolic, subjective, lived, and what is material, real, objective
and factual. In architectural theory, design easily lends itself to semiotics: it is made to
be interpreted in terms of language of signs. Yet, a close look at design practices
shows that there are no two distinctive ways of grasping an architectural object, i.e.
one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or
“symbolic” aspects. To design is not simply to add meaning to a brute, passive, and
technical matter. Meaning is gained in practice, in everyday doing.
The important message for practitioners is:
• Tell your mundane stories of design invention, stories of how innovation
permeates design practice, how the everyday techniques become central to
design across projects and set standards for how buildings and urban
phenomena are to be seen.
• Keep a record of all the trajectories of visuals and models, as they could
become the basis of an innovative way to track architectural invention,
usually considered to be abstract, via the concrete details of the
architectural practice. Document them, or let an anthropologist do so.
Invention does not exist only as an ideal for architectural excellence, but as a number
of workaday choices
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Research Symposium 2009:
Changing Practices
If critical thinkers still argue that the Porto building or the Seattle library are unique
expressions of Koolhaas’s most audacious thinking or projections of society, all they
would do is to segregate the symbolic features of these buildings from their material
aspects and the vibrancy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
Opposing symbolic meaning set apart from “matter” will not lead us to a better
understanding of architecture. No euphoric eulogy or overjoyed interpretations of
buildings can assist their understanding. If you happen to be in Seattle or in Porto you
can still enjoy the Public Library or the Casa da Música without knowing anything
about the design experiments that took place in the OMA before they were built,
without witnessing the trajectory of models and architects, the try-outs and the
experiments.
You can still appreciate these buildings, like them or dislike them, praise them or
dismiss them, without knowing anything about the design practice that made them
happen; but you cannot understand a building without taking these design experiences
into account.
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