1 John Biln This Essay Considers the Significance of a Body of Early Work
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L INES OF E NCOUNTER John Biln This is an unpublished combination of two articles which appeared separately in print form. Biln, John. "Translating Tactility.” Azero 1 (1998); Biln, John. "Lines of Encounter.” In Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces, edited by Kristin Feireiss. Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994. This essay considers the significance of a body of early work by the Dutch architectural firm of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, known now as UN Studio. Their design program is positioned squarely within the complex and shifting field of contemporary urban culture. Here, the architectural work is subject to conflicting and mutable economic, social, regulatory, technical, and programmatic demands. Van Berkel and Bos acknowledge that architectural works can no longer claim any sweeping powers to enact social change. Although architects cannot be entirely sure of the social effects their works may produce, Van Berkel and Bos neither despair over lost visions of social effect, nor appear willing to abandon a direct engagement with the various human uses, activities and practices that situate the architectural object. In part, their design program derives from a critique of the apparent unwillingness within architectural culture to seriously address human activity and lived experience. The work of Van Berkel and Bos suggests that the power of architecture lies in very real, but perhaps necessarily unstable, social impacts of the architectural object. The investigative agenda set out by Van Berkel and Bos – firmly rooted in form-making – begins to open a space for reconceiving the relationships, and related design strategies, by which architectural forms and social practices may once again be linked. In reflective distance and cautious optimism, the architectural writings, projects, and built works of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos have begun to suggest some new directions and some interesting questions for the discipline of architecture. Van Berkel and Bos are thoughtful, flexible, engaged, and genuinely hopeful without at the same time being blind to the difficulties of building in the contemporary city. Their resilient and productive approach stands in contrast to much debate and discussion taking place elsewhere in architecture. flexible realism Recently, architectural thought has displayed a disturbing oscillation in its attitudes toward prevailing political and economic realities, and toward cultural conditions in general. Available options have rather too frequently and artificially been reduced either to those that are openly critical of, or resistant to emerging realities, on the one hand, or to those that are widely complicit with, or affirmative of these conditions, on the other. And this division is no longer drawn along the lines suggested by simple aestheticist dualities such as high culture/low culture or theory/practice, nor for that matter can it unproblematically be produced along political axes suggested by oppositions such as left/right or progressive/conservative. Rather this division cuts through a variety of architectural orientations and practices in a rather uneven fashion. The logics of contemporary capital or global culture are as often and as enthusiastically embraced by the so-called critical theorist as by the transnational corporation. Equally, even the most disparate of radical or reactionary voices in architectural theory and practice have found themselves uncomfortably united in resistance to at least some of these same forces. 1 In urbanism, while apparently traditional notions of the responsibilities of architecture to contribute to the collective "good of the city" continue to be articulated in various ways, these have vigorously (if sometimes nostalgically) been challenged by architectural imperatives to oppose power asymmetries realized in established or emerging urban patterns. It is quite possible to identify some consensual ethic of continuity or collective adjustment at the same time that one might discern a fragmentary and divisive politics of partisan intervention in the urban field. And although these camps can no longer be broken out along strictly political or ideological lines, there is still ample evidence of alliances and coalitions of convenience, however unlikely or uneasy, in the pursuit of various "visions" of the urban. Often these alliances are believed to indicate a "politics of conjuncture" or to suggest the beginning of some radical democracy or progressive multi-culturalism.1 Recently, a number of architects have begun to approach contemporary urban and cultural conditions with a somewhat different attitude. No longer content simply to construct either critical or affirmative positions, visions, or missions from which to empower or justify their design work, architects as diverse as Baram Shirdel, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, Hani Rashid & Lise Anne Couture, among others, have begun to collectively outline an alternative approach. Since there are very substantial differences among their attitudes and pronouncements, the works and writings of these architects cannot be considered a coherent movement. However, these architects are part of a generation of designers influenced by Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Jean Nouvel. And although these younger architects differ in their attitudes about the architectural culture they have inherited, they apparently share number of concerns which taken together suggest the beginning of a new approach. Among the indices of this emerging sensibility about design might be counted a commitment to open programs, a thematic interest in non- specific or residual spaces, a tendency toward highly flexible or dynamic project processes, an increasing level of comfort with unforeseen or opportunistic branchings, discontinuities and reversals in a project's direction, and a pervasively non-judgmental attitude with respect to the full range of uncertainties and vicissitudes in a project's external terms and conditions. In general, it would seem that the work of these architects signals an accommodation with the radical fluidity of the urban and cultural fields in which they operate. The work suggests not only that the architects tend for the most part to refuse ideological, polemical, or theoretical positions, but that this new pragmatism, if it can be called that, while grounded in the facts and conditions of contemporary life, owes something to a wider disciplinary skepticism about the transformative power of the architectural object.2 While these architects have hardly lost faith in the social or cultural value of architecture, they recognize that assertions of its power can no longer be founded on deterministic myths of direct and unmediated social or cultural effect. This evolving approach is flexible and realistic, without despair over lost visions. 1 For a recent discussion of these topics, see October 61, a special issue entitled "The Identity in Question" (Summer 1992). 2 Pragmatism, however, may also be treated as a theoretical position. For a debate on the topic, see W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 2 tactile form For some time now the work of Van Berkel and Bos has involved a difficult struggle to accommodate two trajectories that on first sight appear impossibly divergent. On the one hand, Ben van Berkel and his partner Caroline Bos recognize that architectural work today must accommodate the dynamic cultural currents of the urban fields in which it is produced. They have repeatedly written about the complex social, political, and material circumstances that condition the pre-design and early development of a building project. They have also paid considerable attention to the human uses, activities, and practices that situate the post-design and public appropriation of this work. On the other hand, Van Berkel and Bos’s work suggests a long apprenticeship to formalist design strategies, and it is quite clear that the success of this work owes much to an extraordinary control over composition, configuration, texture, material, and “abstract” processes of form-making. To the extent that formalism tends to bracket precisely those wider situations and contexts with which Van Berkel and Bos are concerned, these two trajectories, which might be called “realist” and “formalist” respectively, appear especially difficult to reconcile. This is all the more so since each has undeniably strong, and, at certain moments, almost exclusive presence in the firm’s work. However, it is by orientation to these two trajectories that the architects’ work is best understood. Van Berkel and Bos’s preoccupation with what they have referred to as a “tactile programme”, that is, a careful recouping of the various “physical” aspects of architecture, must be understood within the space marked out by these two concerns. Indeed, it appears that this tactile program allows the architects to negotiate in a novel and potentially powerful way the space that lies between formalist and realist impulses in a design work. At its most basic, this tactile program involves a renewed interest in the “physical side” of architecture, and a careful recouping of the architectural work’s sensual and material possibilities.3 Van Berkel and Bos’s recent work focuses on finding original and affirmative ways of translating their tactile program into architecture, although from the beginning this recovery of “tactility” has been based on a far-reaching critique of the discipline’s failure