Super Ordinary

It never really occurred to me how incredibly potent that phrase is.
Unknown Pleasures.

Unknown pleasures… it is so tantalizing, almost erotic.

Of course, Unknown Pleasures is also the title of Joy Division’s debut album.

The linework on the cover represents the successive pulses of the first discovered pulsar, PSR B1919+21, and is a beautiful drawing of events in time. Each new pulse—at an interval of 1.3373 seconds—represents a new transmission, a new event. Layered together, the potential of each line seems even greater. You wish the transmission would continue, so you can decipher and understand and participate in the rapturous climax.

I wonder whether these undulating waveforms could serve as an architectural diagram, a landscape strategy for the site. Like OMA’s scheme at Parc de la Villette, the site could be infused with programmatic strips (cottages, gardens, pavilions, and waveforms) that tremor with potential activity. Perhaps these undulating strips could serve as a “permanent record” of the manifold events that occur on the Lamport grounds…

“In a park you can join a big group but at the same time, somebody could be next to you alone, reading a book or just drinking juice. I like that feeling, or that character for public buildings.” —Kazuyo Sejima

The park is successful because of the activity of its users. There is always the potential of event, of interaction, of new networks to form.

A city of formal zoning regulations and image-driven architecture loses its ability to create and stage events. The architect must also play choreographer; the building is as much a composition of people and programmes as one of line and colour.

“SANAA does not begin with imagining a form, but with imagining how light and wind flow through a window and a door.” —Ryue Nishizawa

Liberty Village was once defined by the production of physical objects, and the infrastructure needed to serve this industry: carpets, appliances, farm equipment.

Like other post-industrial neighbourhoods, Liberty Village today is home to less-tangible industries: film and television production, new media, artists, designers, chefs, hairstylists.

However, the organization of the area and its infrastructure remains largely unchanged, though the nature of industry has. Liberty Village still feels marginalized, like a fringe neighbourhood, sequestered from the rest of the city… but the intangible cultural exports of the new societal morphology demand narratives, chance, possibility, networking.

Any scheme for Lamport Stadium must invite the city to come unsettle the complacent aggregate of Liberty Village. In a world “ruled by fiction”, as J.G. Ballard asserts, the actors need a stage.

The existing sports field at Lamport is surrounded by fences and concrete bleachers. These are inflexible boundaries, defining a finite edge. Yet the field itself is bounded by three sets of lines are overlaid on top of one another: for soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse. As a result, the actual edge of the pitch becomes blurred; it buzzes and vibrates with unpredictability, never completely defined but always adaptable.

This is even true when the pitch is defined by one sport. In soccer, the fluidity of play is evident in the following heat map of Liverpool midfielder Steven Gerrard in a recent match against Arsenal.

Gerrard typically begins the match in central midfield, but it is evident that he ranges all over the pitch. His movement is mostly spontaneous and highly unpredictable, as it depends on volatile variables such as the movement of the 21 other players, the trajectory of the ball, and luck.

The instability of its programme is what makes the field so compelling, and its enclosure so inadequate.

Therefore, this thesis proposal for Lamport Stadium endeavours to reimagine the enclosure of the field as another fertile ground, a place where activity and use is not prescribed, but unpredictable, like the improvised choreography of the pitch.

From “Accelerating Darwin”, an essay by West 8 founder Adriaan Geuze in Architectural Positions, edited by Tom Avermaete.

Contemporary public space reflects the organization and the bureaucracy of the city. Its efficiency, which is attuned to the collective, has a debilitating effect on the individual. The preprogrammed space is one-dimensional. Human beings are demoted to the status of road users, recreationists, or shoppers. Their behaviour is laid down. All the ingredients of the street scene are geared to a clear and standardized use (107).

Geuze advocates the “self-discovered sensation”: new public spaces should provoke and challenge the increasingly inquisitive urban explorer.

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Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam. Via roel on Flickr.

West 8’s description of their Schouwburgplein project is as follows (emphasis mine):

Situated in the heart of the city and surrounded by shops and theatres, the design emphasizes the importance of a void, which opens a panorama towards the city skyline. The square is designed as an interactive public space, flexible in use, and changing during day and seasons. Its appearance is a reflection the Port of Rotterdam. By raising the surface of the square above the surrounding area, the void was retained and the “city’s stage” created.

By challenging, rather than prescribing, traditional public uses, the square becomes an activator for the city.

Juhani Pallasmaa quoting Milan Kundera:

The degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. (133)

The still is from the opening sequence of Lisbon Story (1994), directed by Wim Wenders. The protagonist completes a monotonous drive from Berlin to Lisbon, remarking on how the open borders of Europe have resulted in a single, indistinguishable, and ultimately forgettable entity.

This, writes Pallasmaa, is indicative of a “temporalization of space”: where speed and efficiency have lead to detachment. The Generic City of Koolhaas.

Cahokia Mounds National Historic Site is what remains of an ancient indigenous city in the Mississipi flood plain. Of the 120 or so mounds that were originally built, 80 remain.

Map from "Investigations in the Cahokia Site Grand Plaza", by George R. Holley, Rinita A. Dalan, and Philip A. Smith from American Antiquity, Vol. 58, No. 2

Monk's Mound, Cahokia. Image credit: Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, the Grand Plaza is an engineered plain, a plateau created from undulating terrain. It is described as a place for large ceremonies and gatherings, as well as for ritual games. This is apparent in the illustration below of Cahokia at its peak:

Image credit: www.sacred-destinations.com

What is striking to me is the similarity of my scheme for a new Lamport Stadium, based on a field and a mountain, to the relationship between Monk’s Mound at Cahokia and the Grand Plaza. A “mountain” of stacked parking and sport courts is faced with strips of  gardens, skylights, water features, and bleacher seating; a ramp winds its way from its peak to the field at its base.

A strong sense of ritual is implied by the axes generated by the geometry of the pitch and mountain typology. This recalls a Japanese notion of public space, one that is not a defined entity with hard borders, but rather a time-oriented axes, intimately bound up with sacred festivals (1). Fred Thompson, in Ritual and Space, wrote:

Like space in a Japanese house, then, exterior space is sequential: it must be experienced through participation, and its parts must be understood in relation to the elusive whole. (10)

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

An “erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty.” -Peter S. Beagle

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effect of Good Government on City Life

The traditional city is depicted as a sort of theatre, where public social space and private individual space interact. Public space is a “rich spatial instrument to see and be seen, to participate and to withdraw, and to be the actor or the spectator in the theatre of social interaction at one’s will” (Juhani Pallasmaa, “Inhabiting Space and Time — the Loss and Recovery of Public Space”, 125).

MVRDV and ADEPT recently won a competition for the House of Culture and Movement in Frederiksberg, Denmark.

The main ambition for the House of Culture and Movement is to offer the Flintholm neighborhood a dynamic meeting point for people of all ages taking part in a wide range of activities. Health, culture, leisure and education should smoothly blend together to create a spectacular architectural experience that will become a destination.

The 4,000 m² project is conceived of as a dynamic and flexible “play-zone”, anchored by six major programmatic elements: Administration, Food, Pulse, Theatre, Think, and Wellness.

Personally, I think the project feels convoluted and more than a little forced. That said, programmatically, it is very intriguing and the contemporary approach to civic space has to be admired. The diagrams below also indicate an emphasis on interactions between people:

Via Bustler.

Excerpted from Super Ordinary 0.72, and building on a previous post, Ecstasy:

All three projects create multivalent, layered spaces that not only accommodate, but celebrate, the complexity of everyday activities; they harness the vitality of the space of flows. At the opening of the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Yuko Hasegawa—who was responsible for commissioning the architects—applauded SANAA’s ability to imbue their architecture with “chronological elements such as events and actions” (Idenburg 74), but she could have described any of the three projects presented here. Stan Allen calls this “dirty realism”; specifically, “SANAA and Koolhaas submit fully to the ecstatic character of contemporary life [...] the architecture opens itself to the unplanned chaos of contemporary urban life” (65). Indeed, the cantilevered entrance canopy of Adjaye’s Idea Store Whitechapel, the plethora of opportunities between the diffuse programmes of OMA’s scheme for Parc de la Villette, and the interstitial tissue of SANAA’s museum in Kanazawa act as those “space of activity, the messy realm of movement and public interaction” (65) that are integral to the network society.