"They grabbed everything that could be taken from where it was and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as sheets; in marble funerary urns they planted basil; wrought-iron gratings torn from the harem windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of inlaid wood. Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivor's Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants' needs than it had been before."(Calvino p.106)
The mayor of Lille (and former French prime minister), Pierre Mauroy, promotes that the planned Paris-London high-speed train is rerouted and Lille gets "a key role in the new TGV Nord express rail routes"(AT 55, p 19). The idea generates unexpected problems with dimension; since the old dead-end station cannot be used for the train, a new station has to be built underground. The tunnel for the train crosses the heart of the city, the metro system has to be changed, even a major highway has to be redirected.
All these measures normally prevent that the theoretically ingenious fast trains really touch the city centers as it would be very much desireable. The mayor of Lille faces the decision either to stop the ambitious project or to open up new categories. How to spot references now how to handle the task?
Traffic: after being spotted as a problem, thousands of publications and studies have been settled around it while at the same time the problem seems to increase continuously. The discussion focuses on the equation: traffic destroys the city.
Suburbanization and edge city: Dissolved, oversized, specialized areas which rise out of only economic considerations and do not respect forms of traditional and "proved" human settlements. Edge cities subtract working spaces from the inner city and force people either in commuting or moving towards the work and out of the city.
Shopping malls: they are responsible for the destruction of the economic base of inner city commerce.
All these forms change rapidly according to the changes in economy and not according to peoples' life cycles or building endurance.
The city remains as the only constant factor but as the point of problem accumulation.
John Rajchman characterizes as one of Rem Koolhaas's major characteristics that he is annoyed by any form of complaints around the often cited destruction of the city and the loss of public space.
Koolhaas's approach could remind in some respect on some fighting tradition: do not be defense but take the energy of the enemy and turn it back where you want it to have.
It was an approach begun with the Modern Movement and refined in the sixties which claimed that the perfect architectural solution is a function of the perfect analysis. It was especially the search for the leaks which, similar to sociology or ecology, attracted a lot of attention, as the leaks were believed to tell the truth about the system.
Careful analysis takes time. Maybe this is one important reason why analysis with the aim towards a building solution did in some respect never reached importance; analytical fields very quickly turn into academic disciplines, and have like the typological school massive difficulties in the application of their truths to the actual design scene.
There is analysis done, there has to be a lot of analysis before a building design can achieve appropriate forms.
It seems to be more an analysis which is in the traditional sense not careful, works like a vacuum cleaner, like a scanner, tries to suck the relevant facts out of information of many fields. It is open to surprises and it is open to draw advantage out of the weirdest cross-references.
The most literal example for browsing is thereby the mosaic browser as the cutting edge instrument for the unlimited possibilities of the Internet.
Browsing might be called the Lite-version of analysis. If light architecture expresses dynamic and flexible times, browsing occurs to be the appropriate method of research in these times. It supplements the lightness of structures with lightness of references and citations, rules and laws, approaches and research. It could be one way to follow the call for a light philosophy.
The rhythm of work of the time is the one of browsing; this is the technique of the information age, having huge resources which become only useful when one has learned to browse, to associate, to select, to find the point when browsing has to stop since the results and surprises begin to get poor, and then translate the accumulated bits into usable fractions with the potentiality of assembly to a whole. This is what "modern technology" is about: to support associative processes in giving easy access to all kind of fragments, storing the essences of these fragments in the background ready for immediate call, and finally providing control in the field of virtuality by rendering events and artifacts in a way realistic or inspiring enough to support everyone's imagination.
Hints for critical parts of design comes often from casual and most unorthodox detail searches, not scientific but intense, and occurring within a very short time frame; again information technology provides these means of quick communication and affirmation, of data ready to be displayed in the very moment they enter a net, far away from traditional methods of research and their assigned problems.
Browsing seems to be a honorable source for contemporary architectural work.
Other Chapters:
1 Venice I
2 Venice II
3 Venice III
5 Blueprint
6 Construction
7 Bigness
8 Lille
9 Literature