Koolhaas and metabolist movement - Essay Example

Koolhaas and Metabolist movement Rem Koolhaas -- born in Rotterdam in 1944 defines his work as 'a chaotic adventure' that depends on forces and realities beyond his control. His buildings are minimalist as he does not design more than he has to. His buildings are thus episodic, multipurpose and improvised. Koolhaas was fond of the "Megastructure" concept. This is basically a large size building or plan meant for urban improvement. His company OMA applied Megastructure for its designs for a vast complex of shops, housing, and offices, together with a railway station, in Lille, France or Lille Masterplan. His work is a dramatic combination of the contradictions of two disciplines architecture and urban design. He celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape." As Koolhaas himself has acknowledged, this approach had already been evident in the Japanese Metabolist Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. In his S, M, L, XL book (Koolhaas, Werlemann and Mau, 1994) he discusses a number of concepts such as "Bigness". It basically refers to old architectural principles of composition, scale, proportion, and detail. As per him, these principles no longer apply when a building acquires Bigness. This was demonstrated in OMA's scheme for the development of "Euralille" (1990-94), a new centre for the city of Lille in France. OMA sited a train station, two centres for commerce and trade, an urban park, and 'Congrexpo' (a contemporary Grand Palais with a large concert hall, three auditoria and an exhibition space). For Koolhaas architecture and the city are said to be superseded by Bigness He has organized his designs along the lines of present day society. He incorporates his observations of the contemporary city within his design activities: calling such a condition the 'culture of congestion'. It is common in modern architecture to train architects to be urban designers and this has given us some beautiful pieces such as Bruno Taut's functional modernist housing estates of the late 1920s in Berlin. But there have been failed projects as well such as the Pruitt-Igoe project of the 1950s, in St. Louis. But Koolhaas has been exceptional. He has given some of the contemporary architecture's most-reproduced forms and structures: the giraffe-legged Villa dall'Ava in suburban Paris, one of the greatest buildings of the late twentieth century, and the stupendous fishnet-steel-and-glass-covered Seattle Public Library, which opened in 2004. Some of his best works in Europe are the master plan and Grand Palais for Lille, France which is his largest realized urban planning project; a residence in Bordeaux, France; the Educatorium, a multifunction building for Utrecht University in the Netherlands; and the Kunsthal, providing exhibition space, a restaurant and auditoriums in Rotterdam. The Bordeaux house is one of his most important works and was named as Best Design of 1998 by Time magazine. It was designed to fill the needs of a couple whose old house was problematic to the old man as had been confined to a wheel chair due to an accident. Koolhaas proposed a home in three parts with the lowest part having a series of caverns carved out from the hill. While the top part is divided into spaces for the couple, and spaces for their children. The middle part is an invisible glass room that is a vertically moving platform functioning as an elevator allowing the old man access to all levels. In the 1950s, the Japanese Metabolists proposed giant mega-structures as an answer to the ever-growing problem of overcrowding in their cities. These architects came up with innovative designs of floating cities and giant prefabricated "plug-in" living cells that could be inserted into skyscrapers. But due to the scale and reality constraints Metabolist vision could not be realized completely. They regarded the city as an organic process that featured some of the innovative concepts such as marine civilization, artificial terrain, and metabolic cycle. Their two main ideas or concepts were : the megastructure and the group form. They experimented with new and unusual architecture designs such as an organism, capable of growing and regenerating over time. They developed a new language for architectural and urban design that were sensitive to the changeability of space and function, as opposed to previous notions of fixed form and function (Bognar, 1995, 17). Architects like Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, and others developed designs to reduce the problems of urban congestion using the futuristic visions of cities. These cities were supposed to have moving and interchangeable parts, similar to the work of the contemporary Archigram Group in London. Many of the projects, such as Kikutake's Floating City (1960) and Kenzo Tange's Tokyo Plan (1960), involved urban-scale megastructures built above the sea or on artificial land in order to reduce more load on the land. In their view the traditional laws of form and function were obsolete. They believed that the laws of space and functional transformation held the future for society and culture. Some of their famous projects are the floating city in the sea (Unabara project), Kiyonori Kikutake's tower city, the wall city, the agricultural city and the 'Helix City' by Kisho Kurokawa. Meanwhile, besides these two, there were other significant architectural styles during this time such as Archigram group, London. Archigram dominated the architectural scene in the 1960s and early 1970s with its innovative visions of a technocratic future. It was formed in 1961 by a group of young London architects - Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. Just like Metabolists in Japan, They believed that a city was a unique organism and something more than a collection of buildings. They considered their style as a means of liberating people by embracing technology and empowering them to choose how to lead their lives. Some of their important works are: Plug-in-City, Living Pod and Capsule Tower (Peter Cook 1964-66) ,Walking City and Instant City (Ron Herron 1964-70), Trickling Towers and Layer City (Peter Cook 1978-82) Thus both Koolhaas and Japanese Metabolists were driven by the concept of Bigness or megastructures. Koolhaas was also influenced by the minimalist design and focused more on functionality rather than the outer dcor or ornamentation of the buildings. Infact, both Metabolist and Koolhaas were derisive of ornamentation of the building and both had futuristic visions of urban cities. The influence of Constant and Friedman has been felt equally in the works of both metabolists and Koolhaas. Constant's "New Babylon" (circa 1957) is a global city that does not belong to anyone in particular. There are no boundaries "Life is an endless journey through a world that is changing so fast that it always seems different" (Constant, 1965). The sectors, are interconnected, and stretch in every direction. This is where the social space is concentrated. Similarly, In 1958, Yona Friedman developed the "spatial city", which is a three-dimensional structure, that touches the ground only on a minimal area. In it, constructions can be dismantled and moved, and they can be altered as the occupant so desires. This spatial structure, raised up on piles, contains lived-in volumes, set within some of its void spaces. This concept of voids have been used extensively by Metabolists in Japan. Thus the Metabolists worked with concept of organic structures while these gave away to informatic or virtual structures in mid 1960s and were used by Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom. Alain Guiheux (2000) explains in his article entitled "Collectionner l'Instant" that the influence of networks of communication on space has been a recurring question for the last forty years. The architects have been using the concept of space, flows and infrastructure right from the times of Archizoom, Yona Friedmann, Archigram and the Japanese Metabolists. Metabolists used the concept of the natural flows of air, water, and people in cities. They conceptualized biomorphic mega structures capturing and materializing urban flows. In 1961, Kenzo Tange's studio proposed a plan for Tokyo Bay that clearly illustrates the principles of metabolism. The project comprised of a spine, or trunk, and an array of branches and leaves that together formed a clear tree-like structure. In the same year, Kurokawa produced a series of utopian projects inspired by biological forms and a process of growth representing that of living cells. At the same period, Isosaki developed his project "City in the Air" as a system of urban intersections and interconnections in the air, providing a grand structure supported by infrastructural trunks, like a forest of trees. Each trunk affords commercial and residential plugins like those found in Peter Cook's "Plug-in City". Metabolist architecture shows a tilt towards the evolutive, and irreversible, development of cities. Their projects were inspired by the natural movements of air, water, corporeal fluids and plants, but had a very formal and functional conception of urbanism. Hence, the problem with Metabolist structures is that they remain constrained by a very hierarchical and ultimately simplistic organization (Asada 1998, 67). With the advent of information technology, the focus of architecture shifted from a conception of flows viewed in terms of a biological model to one that is informational. This shift is registered in the works of Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom that proposed an open and virtual architecture consistent with the conditions of informational networks and cybernetic environments. They shift their emphasis from physical movement to information flows. By the 1980s, the phenomena of global exchanges of cultural content introduced a new stage of evolution in the nature and architectures of flows. Thus the substance of flows moved from purely information to a multiple form of cultural exchanges. It contained not only the data, statistics and digital money, but also aesthetic signs and materials such as music, fashion and design. Thus the cities and buildings become the flows themselves. In an interview, Rem Koolhaas (1992, 14 ) professed his admiration for modern masters such as Kahn, Mies van der Rohe, and the Smithsons. In his own projects, an interest in architectural devices allowing the vertical circulation of people : ramps, escalators and elevators, can be noted. He has conceived most of his buildings as large mechanisms of movement, where flows become themselves an integral part of the project's behaviour. More than any contemporary architects, he accepts and comprehends the implications of flows for architecture, and more specifically, the chaotic effects of flows on urban and peri-urban forms (Speaks 1995, 56). While there is a definite influence of metabolist projects using vegetal or biological structures in order to facilitate movements of air and people, He himself sees the logic of flows as an absolutely uncontrollable phenomenon, to which he categorically refuses to give a shape. Yet he acknowledges their indeterminate character and often imagines architectural devices that encase their chaotic fluctuations. Thus we see various similarities between the works of metabolists and Koolhaas. Both have incorporated large-scale forces or megastructures into their projects. Both styles consider buildings, cities and regions as a fragment of a larger surrounding area and try to create exogenous and inclusive forms that disrupt the traditional hierarchy of scales. These forms can be anything from the tree like structures to facilitate flow or the networks of freeways and interchanges, or the grid like pattern of the streets. Thus both worked on concepts which called for a more continuous conception of urban space. Another common thread is the spatial flexibility that their projects have shown. This flexibility allows a building to integrate different uses through its life, and to the capacity of architectural spaces to be endlessly remodelled and reprogrammed. Thus we see that both Metabolists and Koolhaas have effectively tried to use the concepts of movement, flexibility and futuristic visions in urban city planning. References: 1. Asada, Akira. 1998. Beyond the Biomorphic, in Tokyo Bay Experiment, Columbia University 2. Bognar, Botund, 1995 The Japan Guide ,New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 17 3. Constant, "Een schets voor een kultuur", 1960-65 in Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art/ 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p.161 4. Delalex, Gilles, 2006, Go with the flow: Architecture, Infrastructure and the everyday experience of mobility, University of Art and Design, Helsinki 5. Guiheux, Alain, 2000 Collectionner l'Instant, in Architecture Instantane, (sous la direction de Alain Guiheux), Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 6. Koolhaas, Rem, 1978, Delirious New York: A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Academy Editions, London; republished, The Monacelli Press, 1994) 7. Koolhaas, Rem, 1992 , Interviewed by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, in El Croquis no 53, March 1992 8. Koolhaas, Rem, Hans Werlemann, Mau, Bruce. 1994, S,M,L,XL, The Monacelli Press, New York (2nd edition 1997) 9. Lin, Zinghain., 2006, City as process: Tange Kenzo and the Japanese urban utopias, 1959--1970 10. Speaks, Michael, 1995 Artificial Modernism in the Space of Flows, in Space, Seoul, Korea Read More