In the last 5 years, the steadily increasing number of international competitions has promoted the diffusion in design practice and construction of what can be considered a restrained intellectual elite. Names like Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebskind, Renzo Piano, etc., are now associated with projects under construction at the same time in disparate parts of the world - the last page of the catalogue Content shows how a relatively small office like OMA can “Attack” simultaneously, building in China, the USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, Thailand, Portugal and France.⁽¹⁾

In a recent lecture, Rem Koolhaas⁽²⁾ presented the office’s proposal for the competition for the expansion of China’s National Museum in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. In this project Koolhaas expressed his apparent preoccupation with issues of preservation, and its unexpected consideration in design, readdress today the issue of contextual integration in architecture. While on one hand Koolhaas himself explains in his Content catalogue how to “Copy and Paste - How to turn a Dutch house into a Portuguese concert hall in under two weeks,”⁽³⁾ the National Museum project, on the other hand, brings the discussion on locality and site specificity in architecture to the contemporary context of wide proliferation of architectural models and simultaneous interventions of an elite group of architects on a global scale. Within this international panorama, the design strategy adopted for China’s National Museum project, which reflects Koolhaas’ concerns expressed at his lecture, may apparently be read as addressing the recurrent discussion of the local-global dualism in architecture.

Today's reassessment of issues of site and locality in architecture reopens an extensive discussion in contemporary architecture: the controversy initiated over fifty years ago, in the post WWII period, where the debate between the proponents of modern architecture and its critics who advocated vernacular regionalism peaked only after modern architectural models and rules had become nearly universal.⁽⁴⁾ In fact, the exemplary discussion between regionalist local strategies and the global model promoted by modernism may be seen as an early instance of a recurrent and well-articulated problematic debate on the origin of the design project in architecture.

Through a historical reading intentionally superficial, dichotomous relations such as local/global, modern/regionalist, open-system/closed-system, interiority/exteriority or morphodynamic/morphogenetic seem to elaborate on the controversy of the origin of the design project. In other words, each of these expressions appear to be formulating the question – is the design process to be understood as an inside-out or outside-in phenomenon?

In the variations presented here, we see that the architectural debate has always questioned the relation existing between the internal rules of architecture and its partial or total contamination by external input. The regionalist, local or morphodynamic approaches show a total dependency on their exteriority understood as site, local culture, social input, etc. On the other hand, the modern, global and morphogenetic models seem to be completely derived from their interiority or, in other words, from a generative abstract model that is reproduced in a systematic way. As the American architect Karl Chu⁽⁵⁾ explains, “morphodynamical orientation attempts to base form on an external dynamics, morphogenetic generates forms using internal genetic logics”. ⁽⁶⁾

The idea of universal regulatory principles were already present in early 20^th century in Le Corbusier’s research on his five points of architecture, where form and function were defined by univocal standards: “All men have the same organism, the same functions. All men have the same needs. The social contract which has evolved through the ages fixes standardized classes, functions and needs producing standardized products”.⁽⁷⁾ Having been derived from human elementary proportions and functions, these set standards were therefore completely independent from any site considerations.

In the contemporary scenario, the systematic deployment of abstract devices such as diagrams, assumed as pure interiority, is a major conception procedure shared by several architects. According to Chu, “morphogenetic is based on the logic of an internal principle or code that generate morphology… It is related to the Peter Eisenman notion of interiority.” ⁽⁸⁾ In fact, while Chu’s notion of interiority is based “on an algorithmic logic of recursion”,⁽⁹⁾ for Eisenman interiority is the regulating inner logic that establishes the relations between its elements. As a generative regulating system, these relations may be abstracted and isolated from any specific conditions, for their spatial-temporal independence.

While in the interiority of the architectural project a condition of multiplicity is implicit in the potential concretizations, its exteriority is fixed in space and time, and is determined by the specific conditions inherent to a project. Exteriority can refer to any contextual terms, whether physical, programmatic, typological, social, political, or historical. Take the Malagueira housing in Evora by Alvaro Siza: by its dominant reformulation of the traditional housing typology, through its distribution, interior-exterior and neighborhood relations, it is an example of such a condition. The same concept may be found with the typical terminology of a biological paradigm: “Morphodynamics: use interactive morphing models linked with external forces derived from the context” ⁽¹⁰⁾.

The previous considerations seem to manifest a radical opposition between two apparently incompatible approaches to architecture. Is it possible to consider the architectural project as a pure condition of either interiority or exteriority? And what would be the effect of such a procedure?

Going back to the modern elaboration of models, for example, the urban postulates derived from CIAM 4 Functional City in 1933 and widely disseminated through the Athens Charter of 1943 had been systematically adopted in the 1960’s by the authorities of most cities of the world. The modern urbanistic rules were universally applied as a closed system impermeable to particular conditions, leading to a generalized homogeneity of the built environment, an architectural deracination at world scale. According to Eisenman, “the ideology of modernism became normal and generic rather than critical.”⁽¹¹⁾ The set of internal rules characterizing the modern project generated a condition of impermeability to the local influence or external pressures. The resulting estrangement and alienation of the urban citizen in a modern city like Paris are ironically and yet disturbingly documented in films such as “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” by Jean-Luc Godard (1966) and “Playtime” by Jacques Tati (1967). Such examples question the capacity of a design process conceived as pure interiority to respond to the specific demands inherent to an architectural project.

The re-elaboration of this examination on the extreme opposite approach questions the idea of pure exteriority. A design process depending exclusively on site-specific conditions must take in consideration the continuous shift in meaning of the notion of exteriority. Can we consider context simply as the particular physical environment of a specific site, or should it be understood as the socio-historical context in which the project is to be inserted? If, by definition, Exteriority depends on the specific environment of a project, it is then constantly redefined, depending on the spatial-temporal properties of each case. What is then the limit of Exteriority? In the contemporary scene, the dynamics affecting the design process, such as program, are in some cases independent from the local context of each specific building, although still dependent on the expectations of its future local users. The parameters that affect the configuration of space therefore cannot be considered as entirely dependent on a specific spatial condition. This property affects our conception of exteriority. The shift of such expectations towards spaces less attached to their physical qualities causes the displacement of the generative forces of the design process to a more mental dimension. The external input that affects the conception of space is often abstracted from the local physical context and transposed to a mental system. The denial of the influence of such impulses in the design process would lead to the crystallization of the outside-in process as a series of formal clichés, deriving from the stereotyped interpretation of a specific site.

Architecture cannot be conceived as pure interiority or pure exteriority. Multiple examples of contemporary projects result from hybrid formulae of the two design approaches. The original indexical properties of projects such as Ciudad de la Cultura in Santiago de Compostela by Peter Eisenman (1999-ongoing) or the Between the Lines project for the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind (1988-99) attribute partial complementary interaction between the two opposing approaches. The overlay of the plans of the old city of Santiago in the project of Ciudad de la Cultura or of the Star Matrix In the case of the Jewish Museum, causes the work “to be marked by the absence of a former presence” – “an archetypal form of an index”, according to Eisenman.⁽¹²⁾ These indexical references constitute in both cases layers of information with an external origin, which are transformed, coded, modified according to the internal rules of each project. The design process is thus informed with external data related to the specific properties of the project but organized with an inner logic inherent to a closed system: open to the introduction of base material from external sources, but closed in regards to its transformational rules, which will be applied thoroughly, systematically and remain unaffected by particular conditions external to its logic. The resulting projects are therefore conditioned by both their interior and exterior, characterized by a bi-directional process – the outside-in of external data (the existing plans) and the inside-out of the rule (the inner logic which defines the transformation of the imported data).

The exemplified hybridization of the two design approaches questions the possibility of combination of these different modus operandi without compromising or limiting neither of the design philosophies. In other words, how may the architectural project be conceived in order to respect its own interior logic and, at the same time, without renouncing its capacity of response to the specific demands of the physical, social and economic context?

The problematic between a regulating interior device and its exterior condition is not exclusive to the architectural discourse; it is, in fact, a widely researched topic in the scientific world. Questions such as “What is the balance required for a system to be able to answer to the most varied demands without endangering the stability of its genetic patrimony?” or, “What is the relation between what is known as interiority and exteriority?” have been intensively analyzed in the history of sciences. In the 19th century, the biologist Gregory Bateson has demonstrated that not one system is able to change according to an external agent, but can only apply, from all its implicit solutions, the one that adapts the most, where the systems ”generate a large number of alternatives and that there is a selection among these determined by something like reinforcement.”⁽¹³⁾ The selection of one solution to the detriment of others, according to Bateson, is determined by the intervention of an external system. The apparently chaotic demands of this external system provoke an internal response. The multiple combinations of internal responses to distinct external demands will eventually lead to a new element.

It is perhaps this reason that led Eisenman to explore the subtle line between exteriority and interiority in architecture. In face of the limitedness of the open-closed reading when applied to such complex design systems, the notion of interiority – exteriority in architectural design process may become more instrumental in the understanding of permeable conditions. For Eisenman, “An external condition is required in the process, something that will introduce a generative or transformative agent as a final layer in the diagrammatic strata”.⁽¹⁴⁾ The most important property of the notion of interiority-exteriority is it’s becoming operational through mediation, rather than constituting opposite mutually exclusive poles. In this process, Eisenman seems to come close in architecture to what Bateson defends as biologic innovation. In both, the new elements are generated by the activation of an interior logic’s adaptive capacity, stimulated by external forces. In any case, each approach, may be read as both outside-in or inside-out.

Within this logic, the urban projects Functionmixer and the Regionmaker of the Dutch MVRDV can be considered as embryonic representations of serial projects that attempt to establish a design model based on the inter-dependency of interiority and exteriority. The design process is generated through the activation of one or more components dependent on exterior data, while still keeping the integrity of the interior organizing system. By considering in its conception the indeterminacy of one or more components, which are open to exterior information, these serial projects are formed by one concept only that allows multiple configurations, depending on one particular condition. This certain degree of openness of the internal organization to the exterior data confers a dynamic quality to the project for its necessary readjustment in time and space.

The examples mentioned show a shift in interpretation: neither depending on interiority nor exteriority, the design methodologies express a tendency to be articulated systems based on a combinatorial device. Their capacity to adapt to every specific situation depends on the possibility to produce new solutions by re-organizing a set of its internal pre-existing elements. The definition of new rules or conditions has the finality to answer to the most varied demands emerging from a specific context. The idea to use such combinatorial system recalls a recurrent methodology in both philosophical and scientific fields. In effect for the well-known French philosopher Gilles Deleuze one crucial element of innovation depends on the combinatory capacity of the sub element of a pre-existing internal rule. The same approach has been adopted to solve many of the problems emerging in the field of science of complexity. In a recent lecture describing the complex adaptive behavior CAS, John Holland affirmed: “New strategies can be constructed by recombining the components of successful strategies.”⁽¹⁵⁾

The combinatorial device as design methodology in architecture – this possibility has already been suggested in recent discussions on contemporary design strategies currently deployed in the accelerated development, considering for example the Asian case. The conception of a permeable device capable of combining an abstract internal logic with local external input, and therefore developing an adaptive capacity, would find in this case the most adequate grounds for their application. Still, it remains to be seen if these hypothetical formulations on a combinatorial strategy in architecture can in fact yield new possibilities, or if perhaps it results simply in a newer version of Koolhaas’ “Copy Paste”. Seen as a series of copy-paste, the role of the architect in this design process would be limited to the definition of what is to be copied, how many times, to what scale, where is the copy to be placed. The estrangement between program and space produces a temporary notion of innovation. Are these considerations therefore simply the reflection of the influence of the contemporary biological/computational paradigm, or is the mediation between an interior pre-existing logic and the specific exterior conditions a possible generator of newness in architecture?

 

Note:

(1) Rem Koolhaas, “When Buildings Attack”, in Content, Taschen, 2004, p.544 ↩

(2) Rem Koolhaas, “Recent Work”, lecture, Columbia University, September 17, 2004 ↩

(3) Rem Koolhaas, “Copy and Paste - How to turn a Dutch house into a Portuguese concert hall in under two weeks”, in Content, Taschen, 2004, p.302 ↩

(4) As an example of the most relevant and lasting discussions we find the proposal of Critical Regionalism, initially elaborated by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in the 1981 article “The Grid and the Pathway” which was further developed by Kenneth Frampton in his 1983 text “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” ↩

(5) Karl Chu is the director of the Genetic Architecture program at the ESARQ in Barcelona and professor of Architecture at Columbia University ↩

(6) Karl Chu, “Skinless Architecture”, in The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, Monacelli Press, Columbia Books of Architecture, 2003, p. 68. ↩

(7) Le Corbusier, in Towards a New Architecture, Payson and Clarke Ltd., New York 1927, p.136 ↩

(8) Karl Chu, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, in “Skinless Architecture”, The Monacelli Press, Columbia Books of Architecture, 2003, p. 68. ↩

(9) “The concept of interiority I am proposing relies on an algorithmic logic of recursion” - Karl Chu, “Skinless Architecture”, in The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, Monacelli Press, Columbia Books of Architecture, 2003, p. 68 ↩

(10)Karl Chu, “Skinless Architecture”, in The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, The Monacelli Press, Columbia Books of Architecture, 2003, p. 68. ↩

(11) Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries, Universe Publishing, 1999, p.43 ↩

(12) Peter Eisenman, “Digital Scrambler: From Index to Codex”, in Perspecta 35-Building Codes, The Yale Architectural Journal, 2004, p.51 ↩

(13) Gregory Bateson, “Mind and Nature” ↩

(14) Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries, Universe Publishing, 1999, p.35 ↩

(15) John Holland, Professor of Psychology, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, at Complex Systems Summer School lecture, July 2005 ↩