As Found - A new design paradigm

AS FOUND

AS FOUND

Ellen Braae and Svava Riesto

AS FOUND A NEW DESIGN PARADIGM Ellen Braae and Svava Riesto

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rchitecture is not the craft of making autonomous objects. Any design product influences and hence alters the surroundings in which it is situated. And vice versa: the situation that designers attempt to improve also has an impact on the design idea and the process of realization. Any design intervention—from building detail to urban plan, from physical form to strategic process— depends on certain ways of dealing with what is already there. These approaches often stay tacit; designers tend to present the way they relate to an existing building or urban situation as self-evident—as if it was the only way to do it. However, how we inscribe ourselves in an existing situation is anything but obvious. It always implies numerous choices. How does a design intervention relate to the everyday culture of a site’s inhabitants, to its climate, to its urban form or texture? What do we understand as the context of the design project? How can our understanding of this existing situation be discussed, and possibly be challenged and deepened? How can we refine our sensibility towards what is already there? And why at all? The guest-edited “As Found” section of the first issue of Nordic Journal of Architecture is devoted to these questions. The contributions derive from the sixth World in Denmark conference, June 2010, entitled “As Found,” and organized by the Research Group for Landscape Architecture and -Urbanism, Forest & Landscape, University of Copenhagen. The broad theme called for a crossing of disciplinary boundaries: landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, geography, cultural history, and heritage studies are some of the fields involved in the present-day discussion, which are also represented in this volume. The contributions provide different perspectives on how to approach what is already there—which for lack of a better term might be labelled “the existing urban landscape.” Architecture is an activity of alteration and transformation—and therefore a hemeneutic task. Seen from this perspective, the two dominating 20th century ideas on design—novelty and authorship in architecture—must be replaced by an interest in continuity and the unfinished. Rather than being fixed works of art, design projects are interventions in the ongoing transformation of landscape. The three selected projects by the landscape architects João Nunes, Günther Vogt, and Alexandre Chemetoff demonstrate how designers can conceive of their metier as intervention rather than as total solutions. These projects suggest different ways for urban development to be based on dialogue and relational thinking, through new con-

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NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE VOL 1 2011

ceptions of the design project and the way it is represented. Furthermore, they show how new programs can be developed in close relation with a careful reading of the existing site. While such approaches can be found among many contemporary designers, they nevertheless mark a radical departure from the conception of planning that has prevailed until only a few decades ago, as Thomas Sieverts reminds us in his explicitly future-oriented reflection. The concept of “as found” dates back to the 1950s. The English architect Reyner Banham, wanting to focus on the specific rather than the absolute, first introduced the term. Simultaneously, artists in the London-based Independent Group reused visual imagery from magazines and advertisements, which at the time were excluded from “fine arts.” Around the same time, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson explored the potential of everyday culture and the existing materiality of the city, as discussed by Stefania Kenley. These early explorations can be understood in the context of war-torn Europe and the collapse of utopian ideologies. Nevertheless, enhancing the experience for a location with few means is no less relevant in the present era when industry is relocating and climate change is causing massive challenges. The ecological imperative calls for a radical rethinking of the practices of architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture. It affects the way we choose to interact with natural processes. By unravelling the long-term changes of a Vietnamese canal landscape, Kelly Shannon and Annelies De Nijs show that a close interaction between cultural and natural processes can be traced back to pre-modern city building, which can be a fertile source of inspiration for future practices of intervention. The post-war critique of modern architecture and urbanism attempted to reintroduce local identity and human environments with notions like genius loci, place identity, context, (critical) regionalism and more. In its extreme form, place in the 20th century became an absolute to be revealed by the skilled expert. Today, these concepts are still part of the rhetoric and critique of architecture. But the content has become diverse and practices and attitudes have changed. We need an adjusted vocabulary to understand how designers relate to existing situations. Can sites be discussed in less fixed and dominating ways than before? Can an existing concept like genius loci be revisited in order to understand design concepts that embrace the dynamics and complexity of the urban landscape, as suggested by Saskia de Wit? The ultimate relativist point of view would be that there is no such thing as a site. But such a view restricts us from dis-

covering the heterogeneity and possible potential of a specific existing urban situation. Instead, as the contributions show, a site can be understood as relational, in the sense of not absolute, but constituted by the interaction between what is found and our uses and interpretations of it. This complex mutual interaction is at the very heart of the design professions, whose metier today it is to shape the future in the existing urban landscapes. The “As Found” section also concerns the temporal aspect of sites. The term stresses the qualities of what is already there as a positive starting point for an interaction between the past, the present, and the future. How this relationship is regarded in a design project depends on certain mind-sets, ideas, agendas, and values that can be contested. When confronting industrial environments along the Aker River in Oslo, Sveinung Krokann Berg and Kari Larsen argue that designers tend to prioritise embellishment and “order.” The Aker river case shows that designers consequently marginalize a nuanced documentation of a “messy,” historical, workers’ environment. The authors outline, on the one hand, a tension between an archaeological or pathological approach and on the other, what they regard as the design disciplines’ tentative but dominating practice. Svava Riesto’s case study leads to a more optimistic conclusion on behalf of the design disciplines; the design proposals for the former site of the Carlsberg brewery constitute various alternatives to a normative heritage practice that appears locked in certain aesthetical preferences. Imposing ideas and searching for a leitmotif are crucial components in any architectural practice. These activities prevailed in the understanding of design in the 1960s, when the profession of landscape architecture was redefined, as Karsten Jørgensen shows by a Norwegian example. Yet aesthetic norms often restrain us from discussing the political implications of discovering sites. Sites are increasingly mediated and their narratives turned into products. The importance of being aware of the differences between sites as a physical reality and sites as a mediated and communicated phenomenon is explored in Maria Hellström Reimer’s article about the mechanisms of small towns with aspirations in the media-landscape. Using the concept of “as found” becomes a critique of the Enlightenment’s claim to universal knowledge. How can we articulate, discuss and evaluate different approaches while focussing on what is specific to each situation? Which kind of epistemological paradigm are “as found” approaches to design part of ? The current celebration of site can be understood as part of a wider tendency that appreciates situated, practiceoriented and transdisciplinary knowledge. A theoretical theme that meanders through the “As Found” section is how

an object-focussed approach to sites can be replaced by relational understandings. This is dealt with in the article by Ellen Braae and Anne Tietjen, who propose “translation”—a central concept from actor-network theory—as a productive conceptual framework when addressing relational large scale design. In each issue, Nordic Journal of Architecture will present teaching in architecture, in various forms and format, in the section entitled “Studio.” For this issue, all the “Studio” contributions deal with the “as found,” through different approaches, pedagogics, and strategies. Directing attention towards the ordinary is crucial from a pragmatic point of view. It can also enhance our ability to shape a better future by broadening the scope of possibilities. Dealing with materials on site that are seemingly without further value is a fertile point of departure for enhancing the way that the urban landscape is experienced through the senses, as shown by Jörg Rainer Noennig and Michael Wieczorek. Tanu Sankalia’s morphological study of Victorian quarters in San Francisco turns the eye around and discovers the qualities of those parts of the city that are unseen by designers and others who influence the way the city develops. For landscape architects, urban designers, and architects, site reading and site intervention are now considered part of the same operation. Designers are thus required to situate their work in multiple contextual frames simultaneously. This challenges the notion of scale; neither “urban scale” nor “architectural scale” exist. This simple realization should lead to a new and critically informed educational praxis, as claimed in Thordis Arrhenius’ “Studio”-manifesto on architecture as alteration, as explored in studio teaching on the transformation of historical structures. The implicit approach in the concept of “as found” is antiutopian and pragmatic. It holds promises of une bonheur, promises linked to the richness of what is already there, something that we cannot imagine, plan, or build but with which we can engage through dialogue and by creating new solutions. This dialogue profoundly depends on the finder and constitutes the basis for a new design paradigm. By reintroducing “as found” we are looking for ways to deal with what is there—rather than looking for new objects that can represent “reality,” as was the challenge in the 1950s. The contributions lingering on the “as found” set out to develop this kind of dialogue and expand the range of theoretical investigations and interventions in the urban landscape. Some of these are presented here with the aim to explore, articulate, twist and question the ground beneath the drawing boards.

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