Rip It Up and Start Again 2010 Rip It Up #1 What is the Contemporary City Made of? Owen Hatherley 14.10.10 KIERAN LONG: Owen’s here, I'm really grateful to Owen Hatherley for being here this evening to speak to us, but before he starts I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking by way of introduction. A bit about last week, and perhaps the meaning of last week in the context of this week, and then introducing Owen who wasn’t here last week, so it also will help him to understand the journey we’re on with Rip it Up and Start Again and with these first two lectures in particular. Because we sort of think of it as a kind of soap opera and this is a catch up. I don’t know how good I’ll be. Is Peter in the room? That's good because when I get it all... when I terribly misrepresent him, he won’t get too angry. But the reason I was able to do this is that we have a transcript and we have recordings of the lectures and we will be doing this stuff on line, but we don’t know when yet and the point is to be here in the room of course. So we’re... I'm really happy there are so many people here again and that's credit to you all and to Owen and that's a good start. But Peter’s challenge to us last week was to ask this question of, “What is a city for?” And he asked it in many, many different ways and I tried to make a few bullet points, which I think might help us kind of navigate some of the lectures that are to come, the evenings that are to come in the series. Perhaps it can kind of best be summarised by his theory about how various architectural approaches have, as he said, flattened the richness of the city in to kind of concepts. And a lot of that bears on the way we as architecture students, or people involved in the world of architecture, speak about the city and then how we operate on it. And he made six points, if you remember, it was quite hard to follow the second or third actually, some of you might remember that too, but there were six. The first was the Renaissance Distinction. The renaissance happens and then suddenly there's a distinction between the life of the city and the buildings of the city. This was one, in his words, conceptual flattening that he mentioned. The second, a Reciprocity Between Technology and Art that appears in the renaissance which leads to, as he put it, “Individual isolated buildings sitting in a civil lawn mowing project.” And I think we all know what that means, isolated monuments in the city. The third was a Perception of Collective Life less as a political order, less as something like a polis but as statistical generalisations that was his world of what housing is, housing, housing statistics and not citizens. Fourth, was this whole raft of metaphors that we all use every day to talk about the city and even made an amazing list, Space, Form, Morphology, System, Typology, Statistical or Sociological Distribution, Rizome, Network, Abstract Machine. These kind of ways we describe things that flatten the richness of the city in Peter’s view. Fifthly, the Perception of the City as a City of Signs, Codes; the city as a semiotic system. And sixthly, the idea that you can transform the city into pure information and then manipulate that information, this to him was the kind of most recent flattening, conceptual flattening of city making, if you like. - 1 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org What he said to us, which I think is really worth remembering is that all of those things make the city too easy to design. They take away the complexity and richness of the city, and they allow us to deal with single layers or things in a single horizon. And I was struck by an exchange I saw in the Guardian newspaper, who here has been to see the Ai Weiwei thing at Tate Modern? Hands up. Not that many, but you know what it is? More or less. It’s just he’s done the Turbine Hall and in the Turbine Hall are 100 million, 10 million, millions of sun flower seeds made out of ceramics. And I read... did anyone read the Guardian review of this by Adrian Searle by any chance? He made this kind of quite interesting point where he said, “The thing is about this Ai Weiwei thing is that it has multiple meanings, multiple interpretations” and he thought that was a good thing. And there was a really interesting letter in the paper the next day by somebody from a tiny gallery in London, I looked him up, who said that he felt that that Adrian Searle had made a mistake, that he’d confused meaning with back story and I thought this was very interesting. This was an example of what Peter’s talking about. What's the difference between a meaning of something and just its back story? He mentioned lots of other things but I think I took two things that could be thought of as direct challenges to the student body, to us as tutors/students starting the year. One of them bears directly on how we begin projects in architecture schools. He said, he questioned the idea that a building somehow appears from in between the statistical research that you do and then what he called poetic research, i.e. you go and you make beautiful photographs and you make films and you cast your body and all that kind of stuff. And then somewhere in between that and statistics a building appears and he questioned that and he asked us, “How can that be true? Is that how a building is? What does that mean?” And if I can find my second page I can tell you the second thing that he... the second thing that he asked us to do which I think actually London Met has the potential to be really good at. Is what is the role of conflict, contest, collaboration in the urban order? What is... how can our cities accommodate bad buildings? How many bad buildings do you need for a good city? How much violence do you need for peace? How much illness for health? That question which seems so fundamental to the way that Peter thinks. So that in a way is my little summary of last week for those of you who weren’t here, to bring alive some of those things for those of you who were. Now I’d like to introduce Owen in the theme of tonight, our title for tonight which I foisted on Owen and he probably won’t thank me for, what is the contemporary city made of? Just felt like an important question, we’ve asked what it’s for but we have these cities, we have them, they exist, we’ve seen a... or I've been writing about nearly 15 years of orthodox architecture and planning practice in the UK. What's that left us with? I ask myself, and Robert and I when we were thinking of this felt this was something good to look at and Owen is the absolutely perfect person to be talking to us about this tonight. Owen came to my attention first as a blogger of a really interesting blog, which he still is active on called, “Sit down man you're a bloody tragedy” which he may or may not explain the meaning of that title later, “nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com” for those of you who haven’t seen it. And he came to my attention as a magazine editor, as one of a generation of interesting bloggers, a few really interesting bloggers who have now since really made an entry into mainstream media, both architectural media and national media. He calls himself a writer and a researcher and his last two... he’s published two recent books, - 2 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org which you may be aware of. Last year Militant Modernism by Zero Books, which the Guardian described as, “An intelligent and passionately argued attempt to excavate Utopia from the ruins of modernism” which is rather grand. But a very exciting book. Most recently though, this year, which has just come out as I showed it to you last week, this book, “A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain” which was exactly the reason I asked Owen to come and talk to us and what this, I think, comes from and you’ll tell us more about it I'm sure, is the series of articles that he’s done for building design which involves him going to British cities. Some British cities, that frankly architecture magazines haven’t visited in years, and look at them for what they really are, look at them in a kind of, in a sense with testimony. Looking at the reality of these places in terms of both architectural monuments and also less formal places and found an outlet for that in a mainstream architectural publication and they're very interesting pieces. The book I think grows out of those pieces, and is expanded and deeper than those pieces were and very, very interesting indeed and it’s been really well reviewed.