CONTEXTURE
June - July 1996
| The boundaries and coordinates of the contemporary city are not only becoming more fluid, they are becoming less spatial. So report a number of commentators concerned with the emergence of a new “ageographical” or informational city whose formal arrangement, as one critic has observed, is more televisual than spatial. What many of these new accounts suggest is that though space is still a variable in the contemporary urban equation, it is the flow of global capital, of currencies and of information which includes the flow of bodies through the transportational paths of highways, railways, and air corridors, rather than space, that defines the contemporary city. No longer sheltering mechanisms with distinct interior and exteriors, cities instead take form as amorphous blobs which interrupt, shape, and conduct an immense global material and immaterial flow that has neither interior nor exterior. Manuel Castells has observed of this situation that place and geography have today been superseded by what he calls “the space of flows.” Wim Nijenhuis goes even further proposing that the city was never simply spatial, but was instead, from the first appearance of the Greek City State, a product of the flow of traffic. For Nijenhuis the city was never a stable, grounded site or place, a definer or shaper of space, but only “a qualifying difference in traffic,” a point of converging flows. Instead of viewing this new condition -- if, in fact it is new-- as a lifeless simulation of the traditional, 19th century city, as some of our most prominent urban commentators have suggested, is it not possible to rethink cities as dynamical and complex systems which both limit and give rise to multiplicitous forms of life, including the abstract, machinic intelligence of self organizing systems such as freeway traffic flows. (Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies offers a striking, and regrettably, forgotten example of this complex, life-affirming view of the city.) |
Doing so, might we not then be able to reimagine architecture as one among a whole range of cultural, political, economic, and technological forces which intervenes in and attempts to create a kind of ordered chaos, a chaosmos as James Joyce and Gilles Deleuze say, in the space of flows. No longer burdened by its traditional charge to ground, house, and make safe, architecture could thus become an affirmative and inventive, and not reactive, force in the city and in the space of flows. The speculative urban projects of Winka Dubbeldam offer an instructive example of this inventive, fluid practice of architecture. Still, the true range of Dubbeldam’s work is best evidenced by three built projects all of which are linked by her remarkably inventive use of the pin as a device of material and immaterial connection and layering. In the redesign for the entrance zone of The Art Academy in Rotterdam, long, hardened metal pins sculpturally bind together plate glass and stone surfaces forming screening devices used to filter out unwanted light and traffic flow. In her recently completed CHRISTINEROSE Gallery in New York, Pins (personal identification numbers) also figure prominently in the layering of surveillance and exhibition observation points as they intersect, reverse, and become indistinguishable, ultimately raising the question “who is viewing whom?” Employing the pin as a device which connects her larger scale urban speculations and her more sculptural concerns, Dubbeldam installed in the Form Zero Galleries in Los Angeles an architecture of material and immaterial flow the warp and woof of which took the form of textually and image encoded acetate strips. Each of her previous projects (all of the above mentioned projects were included) was digitized and rendered into an oversized acetate film strip. CONTEXTURE was the name given to the architectural film strip created by splicing all the project-strips together. |
Floating on stabilizing pins somewhere between the traditional materiality of the wall and the perceptual immateriality of Plexiglas, the exquisite acetate strips made their architectural intervention by pulling the gallery observers’ bodies along, shaping them into a parallel flow of information, setting up a morphic resonance between architectural and human information flows. Observers formed their own informational strip which, along with the acetate, was pulled between the models and walls like a film being threaded through the internal mechanisms of an immense projection apparatus. But in the Form Zero Gallery the images were not projected outward onto an exterior viewing screen which then became part of an informational architectural apparatus. Instead they were projected inward creating a fluid architectural cinema in which each strip narrated its own time and place, at its own speed. This inward projection cinematically transported the viewers outward from Form Zero in Los Angeles to Beirut, Rotterdam, Paris, New York, and other sites at speeds that ranged from the geological movements of the Mojave Desert, to the celeritous traffic (auto and political) blur at the United Nations, to the instantaneity of information transfer somewhere between Paris and the outer reaches of satellite space. Once the gallery strip circuit was completed, the viewer was vented back onto the Los Angeles freeway where, following other architectural instructions, they reformed as blobs, circuits, pins, and strips in the circulatory flow of global capital. Indeed, the projects collected in this monograph reconnect us to that interrupted flow, and offer us one example of what architecture must become if it is to reassert a constructive presence in the city.
Michael Speaks |
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