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| SMALL BLACK FLIES OR PLACE – ENVIRONMENT – SPACE Ieva Auziņa "It's better to make use of the possibilities than to solve problems." (Peter Drucker) | |
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Place
Going for a walk in one of Riga's parks, for example, you can walk along the clearly marked stone paths but you can also follow those trodden by the people that, over time, have formed independent routes - opposite to those designed by the gardener, the landscape architect, city planner or private owner. Similarly, one can also move around the city itself from point A to point B, not by using the stops determined by public transport, but by crossing the city through the courtyards that connect blocks, along side streets and any other way apart from those designated for the movement of pedestrians and cyclists. I think that is not only a purely human trait - stubborness and disobedience -, but also part of the magic of Riga (or any other large Eastern European city) - the back doors, open courtyards, the secret entrances (not so many of those left in Riga either). I doubt if this is still possible in New York or in any other Western megapolis. This is partly because public space is becoming less and less and partly because today too, we are walking along the paths marked out by the "town planners" of previous centuries (who saw the city as the "eye of God" (M. Decartier) from above). And the people walking along these paths appeared as small black flies. These days people do not want to feel like "small black flies", nevertheless outside their homes, work places, a few favourite pubs, cafes and shops that they frequent regularly, it is becoming more common for them not even to think, "what if..." But let us return to the idea that, alongside the city-machine, designed by narrow field specialists, there exist cities of ideas. For architects and artists they might be quite real and unlimited "paper cities" that, most probably, won't happen rather than will happen; for the poor consumers-pedestrians they are most often utopian visions brought on by dissatisfaction with life; for the well-off consumers they mean castles of new shops, bridges and car parks underground, underwater and in the air. And I think it is this last group who will be able to see the fulfilment of their wishes. The question of who has the right to talk about the city and who can influence it is certainly not in the hands of academic or public discussion but is determined by political power and money. Romantics, idealists and others for whom the city also extends beyond the depato1 are left with looking for alternative techniques and instruments to nevertheless make the existing into the desired. Roughly speaking, the modernists' idea of the city was to sweep away the chaos and dirtiness of the 19th century city. It is possible that already then, people being so obsessed by the idea of progress, that the streets were transformed from paths of communication and meeting into traffic cables. In the "new city" they joined places intended for specific functions. In time this led to "places" that, having been cleaned of everything that was superfluous, became a closed space where you could meet only your own kind and there was no longer any diversity. Post-modern architecture? Even this (with some exceptions) was dominated by a desire, characteristic of several early 20th century avant-garde directions, to shake off the existing and also by the 1980s avant-garde theory to resist that which was already accessible. And to a certain extent in this context too, the city continued to shrink as a space to meet and communicate. It continued to transform into a channel of consumer transport leading from one shopping place to the next, from one cult object to another. The world wide web. What does it have in common with the city in which we move around every day? Environment Today, some of the most innovative architectural projects of the 21st century emerge from OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the architectural office headed by Rem Koolhaas2. Here, the existing situation is especially perceived. In discussions with many other leading architects, Koolhaas argues his opinion on architecture as being less the art of form and ideology but more a condition created by the metropolis, as a complex field of research into the logic and technologies of its creation. He tends to see architecture not as a "fine art", but as a "business based on research" that extends beyond the disciplines of traditional architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. In his architectural projects and books, Koolhaas shows the scale and density of the city and examines those new situations that the contemporary metropolitan inhabitant is forced to find himself in as a result of the influences of globalisation. As Michael Speaks, writing in his book "Archilab. Radical Experiments in Global Architecture" says: "Free from the historical mission to create the future, the OMA architects - space designers - evaluate the situation and intervene in the currently happening." Today, a new species of manager and entrepreneur is evolving everywhere in the world, especially in North America and Europe. One can see specimens in the pages of lifestyle magazines such as "Business 2.0.", "Fast Company" and "Red Herring". These new managers, supported by the overall achievements of the IT industry and fuelled by the poisonous and aggressive style of flourishing North Californian risk capital, have become heroes in their way. Their task is to tame and exploit the complex world "tossed" to them by the globalisation powers. The new managerial avantgardists really are led by a managerial approach and not by an interest in, for example, Jacques Deleuze, post-Euclidian geometry, diagram or data theories that mutually unite the newest architectonic solutions in the world today. Koolhaas and OMA in particular are regarded as the pioneers and innovators in architectural practice based on research.3 Following the experience of today's multi-dimensional city, research may mean not only complicated many-layered town planning development projects involving expensive statistical publications and historical research on various levels. It may also spring from an elementary interest based on intuition and trust or curiosity about one's surroundings, about the space containing "my" house, "my" office or "my" street. Architects must display this interest as a professional quality about others' houses, offices and streets, blocks and even whole cities. The new media culture centre RIXC invited four young artists to Riga (Tuomas Toivonen, Bjarke Ingels, Laszlo Fecske and Shohei Shigematsu4). All four had worked with the OMA office and the early correspondence by e-mail showed that theirs was not only a professional interest in the "wonders" of Eastern European architecture, but also a creative and human interest in ideas that come from situations of new forms of public and private space relations; "when houses - private space - becomes much more private, and the functions of public space are essentially changing" (Tuomas Toivonen). Media space - a common contemporary metaphor for our various languages "The city space adapts to the demands of the info-economy created by communications technology. At this moment it is a branching labyrinth of runways with waiting portals where boundaries are broken down between work and leisure, public and private. The thinking space that should be home to meaning forming content is shrinking in the immateriality created by the economy of flows. The new media space offers an alternative that exists in the reconstruction of the logic of the flow. The social dynamic of co-operative networks, translated into the physical world, creates new conditions for the re-expansion of the social space. During the sequential transformations of the space the formation process itself is made into an artistic, conceptual and communicative platform for co-operation with the participation of representatives from various fields - artists, designers, architects, technicians, scientists." (Normunds Kozlovs. From the manifesto of the "Media Space" symposium.) The international architecture and digital art symposium "Media Space" took place in Riga from 11 to 15 March (http://rixc.lv). It was one of the first events in the project to reconstruct sculptor Lea Davidova-Medene's former studio, an extension of the Artists' Union building. "As new art forms become active, the need arises for locations and the formation of public space compatible with specifics of media art and the technological possibilities. The creation of such open meeting and project spaces in the city has great importance. This has been proven by similar initiatives in other European cities, for example Lava in Stockholm, AULA and Lassi Palatsi in Helsinki and others. The question of expanding public space that would use new communications technology and the social dynamics of co-operative networks is relevant for Riga too. As a result, the idea and motivation came to regard the development of the Media Space (as well as during the whole period of its reconstruction) as a creative art process. An interdisciplinary and international environment of co-operation had already developed during the construction of the building. During the various stages of development of Media Space creative workshops will search for visually conceptual solutions for the building's reconstruction and for the realisation of an experimental technological art project within it. (Rasa Šmite. From the "Media Space" press information.) The process that goes on at various levels in time between the architect's ideal solution on paper and the actual execution itself begins to resemble a network that, in a strange way, unites apparently contradictory opinions (Soviet trained engineers offering solutions coming from the suggestions of world class architects with a wealth of international experience), contradictory ideas ("a morally obsolete building") with virtual reality and, finally, dreams with reality. This too is another Riga alongside the historical Riga centre - Old Riga -, that wishes to change the preconception of people in the new public space, where relationships would have to be "measured" on a scale of 1:1 and not, for example, 1:10 because a person, after all, is still not just a small black fly on this or another city's geographical map. (Architect Juris Kronbergs on the Latvian Artists' Union building.)n 1 Depato - Japanese department store that is not just for shopping, but is seen more as a component of the surrounding city almost to the point that the boundary between shop and city is indistinguishable. Many depato were built by the railway planners, who strategically merged them with transport routes in the hope of attracting new customers, thereby increasing revenue. Koolhaas, R. Project on the City. - 2001. - P. 243. 2 Rem Koolhaas - architecht and writer, professor of architecture and urban design at the School of Design, Harvard University. Author of several books: Delirious New York, S, M, L, X, XL (together with Bruce May), Project on the City and others. Director of the OMA architectural office in Rotterdam. 3 Speaks, M. Two Stories for the Avant-garde // Archilab.Radical Experiments in Global Architecture. - London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. - P. 201. 4 For more details see http://rixc.lv | |
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