The Useless Space: Abandoned Potentials

 

A lot of times we find ourselves fascinated by abandoned buildings. The buildings tragically lay around with their impressive structures in decay. They are either buildings that are located outside of the city like factories or power plants or they are located within it… In some cases, even whole cities can be abandoned due to catastrophes or lack of work etc. There are many vital flows that keep a city going and, through it, buildings going. When the flow moves, much like the flow of a river, the abandoned river bed that was been left behind is not only a representative of the past river, but also something new carved into the space network in which we navigate: new and now purposeless. Purposeless means only one thing: infinity of possible purposes. In turn, this means that reusing these new spaces is not only a brave act towards sustainability, but also an access to these possibilities. Mostly we find ourselves lingering on the environmental benefices of reusing and recycling but this is only the one side of the coin that leads to reclaiming the abandoned, the rejected and the waste. The other side of the coin which links back the abandoned, the rejected and the waste back into the social flow of desirables is this new potential of use that is automatically activated when the former use of the object is erased. The object that was created for a purpose and which is now devoid of this use, i.e., useless, in its uselessness, dips into the immense possibility of  uses that it can now take on. It is now an object full of possibilities, potentials and intensities. It is similar to a raw material in its array of possibilities except that it is happening on a whole new level: it is not the same as metal ore because an object that is abandoned/rejected/a waste has many dimensions that are set. It already has a structure, a shape, a color/materiality and dimensions and it is in those that its new potential lay and not only in its raw materiality. The structure/shape/dimension/materiality that are abandoned/rejected/a waste are now ready to be used differently, they are open for new suggestions and new interpretations and therefor for unexpected and new spatial experiences: designing a space or in fact any other object does not only rely on the premise of what a material can achieve or what volumetric design can achieve. Design relies on determined premises whatever their number or nature. The more interesting the premises, the more creative the designed object can become. When we are tackling an object that has a structure/shape/dimension/materiality  these become part of the premises of the upcoming design that is meant to reintegrate these abandoned/rejected/wastes back into the flow of the social life. As such, they will guide the design’s unfolding in the same way that the design guides them back to society, to usefulness and to reintegration into the urban. A smart architect or designer is the one who can unlock fully the now raw potential of the abandoned/rejected/waste.

There are many examples today of adaptive-reuse of spaces and of recycling objects from trash that suddenly re-become desirable by society after hacking into the object’s potential. Alterations and new layers over the abandoned/rejected/waste can naturally either work, work exceedingly well or fail to work completely but that depends solely on the ability of the architect/designer because the potential is always there. In other words, adaptive-reuse is not only a way to keep historical buildings and to be sustainable and responsible towards our environment, but also a way to design spaces that would not have been possible without the premises of the existing buildings, without the potential that they offer.

If we rethink adaptive reuse from the point of view of functionality and design this time, we can notice that every building, as we design them for specific functions, we’re also making an object that can one day fulfill its functionality and become useless: a well of infinite uses waiting to be unlocked. This is probably one of the more intriguing and fascinating things about buildings in general but especially in buildings that showcase this well of potentials: the abandoned buildings.

A place reclaimed from the public : public space problems

There’s a twist in the way some starchitects understand public space. And yet another twist in the way they implement it. Now what is public space? A public space is the space, in the city, which belongs to everyone and the risk of such things that belong to everyone is that they therefore belong to no one. When it’s your own private property, you tend to look at it differently than when it’s a property that belongs to no-one except that you are confusing two notions here that are really holding the same meaning: belongs to no-one is exactly the same as belongs to everyone. As such, a public space becomes a complicated space where one cannot behave exactly as though it belongs only to them and cannot behave exactly as though it does not belong to them at all. In some cultures, this becomes a very complicated relationship: if we open the park to the public, they will destroy the plants; if we implement a public transport they will destroy the furniture; if we open a public library, they will tear up the books; and so it goes because the public has no understanding of public space. In an attempt to save the public space, some governments decide to take control of the situation or try to find ways to control the public space: camera, gates, policing… but sometimes they do one more thing: they hire starchitects. The problem with hiring a starchitect usually falls into turning a public space into a property of the state leading to more cameras, gates and policing: even if the space is still called a public space, it loses all the dimensions that make it public. Well, is it so dramatic to have cameras, gates, rules and policing in a public space? when the state starts to monopolize the public space by adding rules to it, it behaves as though this space belonged to the state. Then we ask: could public space actually be a private space that happens to belong to the government? Let’s look back at the public space (1) a person is supposed to have a minimal amount of privacy in a public space: the government should not imposes laws or take security measures that violate this privacy; (2) a person should have free access to a public space: the government should not impose laws that prohibit access; (3) a person should be able to use public space to a certain extent as long as they are not violating basic social norms: the government should not prohibit these possibilities. Basically what all this means is that the security, privacy and freedom of the citizens should be protected by the government in a public space just as it is done in any other part of the city: imposing extra security, extra rules and behavioral norms in a public space becomes quite suspicious. When the government brings in a starchitect whose only worry is to financially support its firm and keep its images, the public space becomes at risk of losing its casual side and turning into a space heavily guarded by the government. One major example of this is the so called Zaitunay Bay in Beirut Downtown designed by starchitect Steven Holl. Although the bay is open to public, it is over-run by ridiculous rules (including no skateboarding, no music, no pets) about what you cannot do in this space and also over-run by extremely expensive restaurants that take over most of the space, limiting accessibility and psychologically impacting the visitor who is self aware of their social status creating further segregation. How can this space still be called a public space? A city like Beirut that has a scarcity of public spaces, watches its few remaining public spaces being locked up behind steel gates or over-run by starchitects like the case of Zaitunay Bay and currently suffering from the same problem is the Dalieh beach of Beirut, a haven for a lot of Beirutis, which is now threatened by the mayor of Beirut who has shook hands with OMA, starchitect Rem Koolhaas.

The fact is, Starchitects have a considerable impact on the cityscape today and with their earned immunity, fragile as it may be, they could make a positive impact on the city instead of just on their firm’s future. Let’s not forget that a city and its buildings cannot impose themselves on the people and that they become hollow and meaningless without them. Can we really rely on starchitects to design public spaces where people can gather instead of what they offer as privatized luxurious spaces that alienate the people and that are, if ever, only accessible to the eyes?

FaceLifting

There’s a strange thing that happens to buildings sometimes… it happens to them through their owners after a long time has passed. They seem to fall out of fashion? Become boring? Dull? Therefore, the good owner decides that something new must be brought in to make this building more popular, so that, of course, people are more interested in the owner’s business through this building’s bright new style. Well… Isn’t the building that is housing the business also the face of that business? But if the owner finds the building dull then everyone else must be seeing the face of the business dull. So! A face-lift must be in order! A great change of wardrobe! Maybe a new stylized pimping up to be right back in fashion? The unfortunate side of this whole sad story is that the owners are sometimes unaware that some buildings they own happen to be classics which evidently means that they can never fall out of fashion: classic! It is sad that the owner is unaware that the facelift, the new stylized wardrobe for their building will only deteriorate its value as a classic. But of course, the building has been there for so long that it’s become dull! We all agree to that: the problem doesn’t seem to be resolved. Funny that it is absolutely true that the building has become dull but for different reasons than that which seem to be preoccupying the owners. Over the years layers of dust and dirt from the city have been covering the building’s facade. The building has been recoiling under these layers blending slowly into the monotonous colors of the city. All that was really needed to do to avoid this was to upkeep it and restore it so the dust and dirt of the city wouldn’t cover its glory to such an extent that over time even the owner wouldn’t be able to recognize the true value of their building. It is sad when people don’t upkeep their buildings and renovate them on regular basis to prolong the building’s lifespan as means of keeping their good face to the public. The ideal way is to have a proper architect raise your building and then to upkeep it because you know that the building will not loose value since it’s well designed. When you own a well designed building, you do not go to slumber and wait for the building to cave in and then find the cheapest way to fix your problems. If the well designed building represents your business, how can you decide to give it a facelift after decades? Is it even real that these business owners really care about the face of their business along the run? Here is a link protesting about one such sad story between a classic building by Alvar Alto on Hamra street in Beirut and its owners.

‘This is Art’

If Art talks and its raison d’être is to give a statement, what are these statements like? Are they intentionally made? Are there specific kinds of statement or is any statement Art? Are there good statements and bad statements whereby bad ones can’t be qualified as Art? Just like there’s a wide range of personalities, there is a wide range of artists but then, what is it that qualifies a person as artist? Artists have to first be accomplished artisans and then through their artisanship must be able to evoke and capture the new: the new is that which is creative. And the creative is that which is conveyed. We learn that the artist emerged first in history the moment they signed on their work. But this was not enough to qualify someone as an artist because they may still be just artisans. The question is then when do artisans become artists? Artisans have supreme mastery of a skill in manipulating material and this is showcased in their work. But artists do more than just showcase their skill: they tell us something new. In the modern area, art has taken a new turn… maybe a turn that should be called awakening after slumbering in repetition. A lot of artists decided to simply follow what they wanted to express in their art rather than follow what now was a strict table of rules prohibiting newness in art: art was falling back to the level of artisanship, to the level of repetition without newness. Breaking free from the rule of repetition, artists started to explore new topics, painted things that had never been painted before. Painted in new ways that have never been used before. Some of them tried to break the two dimensional canvas. Some found new ways to express light and shade. Some tried to depict motion, emotion and sound. Always in new ways. The statements varied from the topic questioning art itself to topics of questioning social norms and problems. The statements were always new because their lexicon itself is what carried them. Art is always accompanied by the claim: this is art. And if we look closely at this claim that is common to all art, we notice that it conveys one specific notion: there is newness in this work. ‘This is art‘ is a claim that invites people to explore the newness brought by the work and invite others to do the same. It is true that these statements might not have been put there intentionally by the artist, that they might as well have been stumbled upon in their efforts to forge a new lexicon but the only norm that defines them is that of being new. The art work then seem to always articulate within the dimensions of newness that is detected by a person who will thus call out: This is art!

Sci-Fi steps closer to architecture

“Architectural fantasy tends to be oriented towards the future. This links it with science fiction and futurology, indeed with every farsighted and long-term trend in transportation, or in the employment of new technologies and their aesthetic” (Thomsen, 1994). Science fiction would be the opportune place where an architect can explore new spatial constructions and come up with new ways of approaching space and designing it. But what is science fiction and what does it entail? “Science fiction is a literary genre that grew out of utopias and projected ideal states of antiquity and of renaissance” (Thomsen, 1994). Science fiction is rather difficult to define. Although, the first thing one would try to define it with is the word “science” but science in science fiction is not dealt with “the same way that a crime story is concerned with crime, a sports story with sports or a spy story with spies.” In fact, “science fiction is an assemblage of genres and sub-genres that are not intrinsically closely related, but are generally accepted as an area of publication by a marketplace”. Sci-fi is classified under three types that may overlap in some narratives: (1) the quasi-scientific story: containing pretended science or technology; (2) the lost-race story: a highly schematized story based on survival of otherwise extinct people with sometimes a certain amount of trivial supernaturalism, like prophecies that are fulfilled or reincarnation; (3) the future story: elements of pretended science or technology may or may not be present. “Science-fiction fits in the general area of modern fiction. It has attitudes towards our real world []. No fiction, strictly speaking, can exactly represent reality, either in quantity or specific points, or it would be no longer fiction. Overlaps exist between genres” (Bleiler, 1990). In a sum, sci-fi picks an aspect of a given period of time in human history – usually this is a scientific and/or cultural and/or religious aspect – and exaggerates and amplifies it and then projects it in a possible future vis-à-vis this time period, and explores the possible scenarios or result of such a possibility, often bringing up a criticism of the originally picked time period. How to recognize sci-fi? Narratives are filled with new information, or Datum which are “a discrete fact stated or implied in a passage.” These populate any narrative text, but in the case of sci-fi they become Nova Datum – new data, or Novum. A novum is “a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly-impossible. The reader must put the novums together” (Shippey, 1991). These novum create an alternative and imaginative framework to the empirical environment. And although at surface value it seems contradictory but credibility stays as an important part of sci-fi. Credibility helps the reader to stay in the flow of the text, a not-true narrative that is not-unlike-true for example using parts of real cities known to readers in a different mood to convey an image of a probability of a future. This grounds the story and sets a more credible mood to the narrative (Neumann, 1996).

Intricate Design Mechanisms (or how the mature architect works)

Architects have their egos attached to some mysterious superpowers that they seem to acquire over time and that’s why we ask all to trust in the architect’s intricate design mechanism. These take decades of hard work and study, deprivation from sleep and other basic leisure, to be instilled inside of the architect. For an architect aspiring to perfect their work, this becomes leisure itself. But what are these intricate design mechanisms? We sometimes give less credit to our bodies and our habits as we value our intelligence more… but the truth is, just like you and I can type on the keyboard without sparing a look, there are mechanisms we develop in ourselves, as reflexes, that are sometimes far more trustworthy than our intelligence can ever be. Similarly, an architect instills habits in themselves as means to calculate almost instantaneously what the best solution is for a given set of problems in a given situation because of practice, learning and repetition. Sometimes, they don’t need to think about it as it simply flows from the tip of their pencils or the idea just appears in front of their eyes. This seems to be a mental mechanism that calculates and organizes a million of things in our minds without us being too conscious of it. Ideas flow from a specific automated mechanism: the mind has picked up the habit of generating ideas by following clear guidelines for observation of the environment and its analysis. Scale, light, volume and flow are things that the mind captures easily after a bit of training. In parallel to practice, by experiencing different architectural buildings and by analyzing them and understanding them, an architect creates these subliminal mechanisms. These mechanisms save them a lot of preliminary intellectual effort and gives them more time to focus on more specific details and/or attempt a new set of strategies which, when successful, become part of this flexible mechanism. So, what really happens on the ground is a constant refinement of one’s design reflexes through the intellect: the automated mechanism grows through learning whenever the intellect successfully finds new means of recognizing organizing and analyzing new and old data. When asked why the architect’s design idea or concept is adequate, the architect needs a backwards process now to expound on what the mechanism had been compiling in seconds because of an effort of ages to instill them and providing them with almost instantaneous answers. This expounding may take time as the architect tries to re-intellectualize what has now become second nature to them, but they will nevertheless try to provide a short and accessible answer to a life long mechanism’s results: for this reason, the answer may sound rather enigmatic to the rest of us, however, this does not mean that it is any less trustworthy… unless of course the mechanism they have been setting up were flawed…

Art talks

Yes. Art talks: that is its raison d’être. Have you ever noticed that each artist creates a new lexicon and uses it to tell us something? A lexicon of colors, smells, sounds, tastes, materials, textures, shapes, movements, utterances, symbols, spaces, technologies… every combination of these seems to want to touch our spirits directly, spreading their seeds that bloom inside our imagination, and make it their home and become part of us. That is when art talks to us. We think of art as beautiful and as a showcase of skill and talent. But, we also tend to misplace beauty and skill in art: we tend to seek for them in the wrong places like in aesthetic. Art needs not be aesthetically beautiful although it certainly can be if that is its statement. Beauty and skill are the epiphenomena of a successful communication between the artist and the spectator, i.e., it is never explicit before then. Beauty and skill are enhanced when the communicated is new and fresh to our minds and our imaginations.Today, a lot of artists are also activists, bringing to our attention diverse problems in our societies. They speak to us with new languages that sometimes work better than a thousand known words. Their work needs no further elaboration as the obviousness of those complex ideas conveyed to our souls leave us in awe: that is what is beautiful, that is what is skillful. Art’s lexicon is fun to discover and with the discovery comes the reward. Through the joy that the reward brings us, art becomes precious to us: we love it! We find it beautiful, we think it skillful. Art is about the presentation of a new thought in a new way, an interesting way, a rigorous way, a striking way. For this it requires skill, it requires deep insight into the intricacies of life, it requires wisdom and honesty. A lot of times we want to quickly understand a work and we fail to see its layers of beauty and skill. We seek to understand it with the lexicon we already know. We fail to capture its new lexicon. We’re quick to call it ugly and inept. Each true artwork has its own lexicon and if you don’t grasp it then you can’t understand what it is communicating to you. Its raison d’être left unfulfilled. Its utterance comes to you as a stream of continuous noise: meaningless therefore repugnant. So, next time you’re in a museum, standing in front of an artwork and you don’t know how to react to it, be patient and be curious about it, what you find ugly and lame could very well turn out to be very interesting with just a little effort: place the work in its context where meaning would flood into it and it will elevate you to that refined place that only art is capable of reaching.

AR[chi]T[ecture]…?

When you lay on your back during pitch black nights, you watch the skies and feel overwhelmed by twinkling beauty and find yourself thinking: this is pure art. When you’re in a beautiful forest and basking in the drops of sunlight reflected in green and shadowed in brown magic, you find yourself thinking: this is pure art. It is no surprise that many philosophers have claimed that nature and art are intrinsically related. But sometimes, when you are in a building and you are overwhelmed by the scale and detail of its architecture, you find yourself thinking again: this is pure art. Art is a medium that has as sole purpose to communicate a statement directly to our spirits, hence the holiness it emanates. The reality of things is that there is a fundamental problem in equating architecture (or design) with art just like there would be a fundamental problem in equating nature with art! Ask yourself, is a city an over scaled work of art populated by works of art or is it a space populated by us? Nevertheless, we do experience art in spaces from time to time. That is because architecture (or design) can communicate a statement as part of its existence, however unlike art that is not its raison d’être; similarly making a statement is not the raison d’être of nature. Architecture has many layers that have to be harmonized between each other and from this harmony sometimes stems that holy feeling we attribute to art. That’s what we feel in nature as well: unfathomable harmony. Even if architecture does convey a strong statement, it is still not art because first and foremost, it is architecture. Therefore, whenever you encounter an architect expressing a need to make an artwork instead of a need to make architecture, you should be very weary: in order to achieve their goal of creating a statement, these architects had to dismiss many of the layers that fundamentally define architecture and have meddled with that very fragile harmonious structure that makes architecture what it is. Their architectural work might be a wonderful artefact, but, they fail to deliver architecture.

Lines

Sometimes, no no, correct that: most times, I find myself staring at the tile lines in a room I’m at. I wonder about what would have been the better way to line these tiles so things are aligned in a neater way… I look at the furniture, the door edges, the windows, light fixtures. I weigh the size and dimensions of the room versus the size and dimensions of the tile. Before all that however, the first thing I do is check to see if the skirting, if there is one, is aligned with the tiles. That is surely the bare minimum one must provide in the alignment of things of floor-ish nature and it is most definitely frustrating if that bare minimum is not met. On the other hand, if the lines are perfect in the room, I sit there and marvel at the genius that took care to line things up so well. I enjoy following how lines naturally follow up lines so perfectly and how everything is so… aligned. After quite a while of doing this mental juggle, in whichever kind of room I’m at, I suddenly become self conscious and directly look for a visual frame that contains no obvious lines that need to be aligned with other lines. I try to sink into some sort of zen state before I end up overloading my circuit on something as trivial as the alignment of lines on the flooring of some room. It’s that sort of skill that you pick up in training for your career that sometimes make you think again about your existence: what the hell was I doing that for?  And yet. And yet you keep doing it. Obsessive complusive disorder? No… you keep doing it because it just makes a lot of sense to have things well aligned. Things have to be linked one way or another because experiencing a space is a flow, a flow of time and space and if the spatial flow contains disruptive elements, when it’s disconnected and no logic links its visual aspects, it becomes disturbing for the ones experiencing the space. Even if subconsciously, the disturbance is very well present and uncomforting. This makes things that seem to be unimportant, such as tile alignment, a very important part of the space. The amount of effort put into what seems to be a simple task of lining up tiles on the ground could in fact reach very high complexity, given the kind of space. A lot of times people will opt for no lines in order to get rid of the complexity which means that at least they are aware of the importance of ligning things up. And so, next time you see a skirting that doesn’t match the pattern of the lines of the tiles in a room you’re at, you can be sure that not the least amount of care was given implementing any aspect of that space.

Ego

Architects are notoriously known for their overwhelming egos. It’s quite wondrous. It’s tough when an architect says “this is how it should be”. If you try to argue back, you will be rewarded with a luxurious parade of the architect’s ego and I should say, rightfully so. No one can be qualified as an architect without this ego. However, there is an underlying truth to where this ego comes from. In reality, it is the culmination of long processes of design that stretch on a lifetime; a process that includes multiple information and delicate layers of values: human values, environmental values, cultural and social values, economic values, personal value and so on. Expecting an architect to explain their statements further by bombarding them with preferences and arguments is to dismiss the intricate design mechanisms they instilled inside of them for decades for the sake of everyone. In other words, you must simply trust your architect to know better than you because they previously bled in order to know better for you. But, there are times when the architect deceives themselves and through that they deceive everyone. They switch the source of their ego from being in the service of everyone to being in the service of them. This happens frequently with starchitects. It is not a scenario unique to the world of architects, and that’s only because architects are a humble subgroup of humans. However, pay attention next time when your architect’s ego is displayed at you with such succumbing power: does it stem from care to the entire universe which includes me or just from their personal arrogance?