Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. THE IMPLOSION OF MODERN PUBLIC LIFE

Caldeira rings in this chapter the alarm bell when it comes to public space: ‘People feel restricted in their movements, afraid, and controlled; they go out less at night, walk less on the street, and avoid the “forbidden zones” that loom larger and larger in every resident’s mental map of the city, especially among the elite. Encounters in the public space become increasingly tense, even violent, because discrimination, and suspicion are the new hallmarks of public life.’ The most important question in this chapter is: ‘how to conceive of the relationships between urban form, politics, and everyday life. These relationships are very complex and usually disjunctive: simultaneous processes with opposite meaning may take place in the same public sphere. São Paulo offers a compelling example of disjunction: its walling process has coincided with the organization of urban social movements, the expansion of citizenship rights for the working classes, and political democratization. (…) Nonetheless, the build environment is not a neutral stage for the unfolding of social relations. The quality of the build environment inevitably influences the quality of the social interaction that take place there. It does not determine them completely; there is always room for diverse and sometimes dubversive appropriations of space and for the organization of siacila actions that counter those shaoed by spatial practices. However, the material space that constitute the stage for public life influence the types of social relations possible on it. (…) Usually it takes organized political action to resist walls or to dismantle patterns of segregation.’

The modern ideal of public space and the city life
[Caldeira takes a few social theorist and philosophers to explain her idea of public space. What strikes me is the fact that Caldeira uses only very western European or north American scholars. In this part of the chapter there are no south American scholars. What does this mean for the conception of public space in the Latin American city? JvB]
About Jane Jacobs: ‘When public life is absent, the alternative to sharing too much may be sharing nothing, and suspicion and fear of neighbor are the expected outcomes.’
About Iris Marion Young: she ‘defines city life as “the being together of strangers,” whose ideal is “an openness to unassimilated otherness.” Young tries to sketch an ideal image of the city containing in four main virtues: ‘(1) social differentiation without exclusion; (2) multi-use differentiation of social space; (3) eroticism, understood broadly as “an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising”; and (4) publicity, which refers to public space as being by definition a place open and accessible to anyone and where one always risks encountering those who are different.’ [Interesting writer… JvB]
Caldeira distinguishes two types of social movement: the fist that emphasizes the sameness of the discriminated group (blacks, gay, women) and second, the fact that “universalism” is often the basis for exclusion and that we should focus on, what Young calls, “difference without exclusion.” This second notion is also comparable with the writings of theorist like Claude Leford, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Étienne Balibar. The modern city forces confrontation among strangers. ‘Such spaces [public spaces, JvB] promote interactions among people who are forced to confront each other’s anonymity on the basis of citizenship and therefore to acknowledge and respect each other’s rights.’

Garden city and modernism: the lineage of the fortified enclave
According to Caldeira the rise of the condominium in Brazil and United States has its origin in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model. This because it had the same idea of living in a green area and it has the principle separated functions. The condominium can also be seen as a variation on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, that he himself once described as a “vertical garden city”. The condominium follows naturally from modernistic planning, except the walling of the space. [It think this is not true. JvB] What Caldeira is arguing is that in São Paulo the city is build by the bad aspect of modernism, and the good aspects are left aside. This results in a public space that ‘expresses the new intolerance. (…) In the ideal modern city life, “borders are open and undecidable,” suggest Young. Fixed boundaries create nonmodern spaces, an undemocratic space.’ [I do not agree on this. JvB]
The strange relation between democratization and the walls in the city Caldeira reacts as follows: ‘While the political system opened up, the streets were closed, and fear of crime became the talk of the city.’

Street life: Incivility and aggression
Both the rich and the poor neighborhoods are not accessible: Morumbi is a neighborhood for a car, the pavement is bad; the favela has only a few entrances and is not surveyable. Other people privatized their streets by closing them of with gates or other objects.
The systems of security are not only for safety reason but also to ‘discipline’ and to ‘discriminate’. ‘The image of the suspect is made up of stereotypes, and therefore systems of screening discriminate especially against the poor and black people. The entrance guards do not bother people with the right class signs, but they give a hard time to everyone else. (…) In a city in which systems of identification and strategies of security are spreading everywhere, the experience of urban life becomes one of social differences, separations, exclusions, and reminders of the limitations of one’s possibilities in the public space. It is, in reality, a city of walls, the opposite of the boundless public space of the modern ideal city. The rich and the middle classes, more and more try to avoid the street and start to do their shopping in enclosed shopping centers and hypermarkets. The street is also very dangerous because of the traffic. Nobody obeys the traffic regulation.

Experiencing the public
Another interesting disjunction in the process of democratization is has to do with the occupation of former elite space (for example the movie theater) by the poor. ‘With fewer obvious signs of differentiation at hand and with more difficulty in asserting their privileges and codes of behavior in the public space, the upper classes turn instead to systems of indentification. Thus, spaces of controlled circulation (such as shopping centers) come to assure that distinction and separation are still possible in public. Signs of social distance are replaced with material walls.’
In this chapter Caldeira names only two public space that are, in her opinion, exceptional in terms that they have a plural public space. The first one is Ibirapuera Park and Praça da Sé.

Praça da Sé
This central square is extensively discussed because it is a very important public space in São Paulo. It contains tree important landmarks, namely the cathedral, the central subway and the “zero mark” of the city, indicated by a stone on top of a compass engraved on the ground. Teresa Caldeira thinks that the space has become more and more a place for the poor people, because of the homeless people, beggars, street vendors, ect. However, still today we see a lot of business man in suits, but also preachers of different kind of Christian movements, musicians and policeman. According to Caldeira the rich start to avoid Praça da Sé, because of its dominance by the poor. 

But Praça da Sé has also a very political component. During the military dictatorship this was the only place were demonstrations were held, such as on 25 January 1984 when three hundred thousand congregated in Praça da Sé to demand free elections. ‘Demonstrations were moved to Vale do Anhangabaú on only two occasions, when the square was too small for the expected crowd of one million: the last rally for direct elections in April 1984, and the demonstration for the impeachment of President Collor in September 1992. (…) On the one hand, Praça da Sé symbolizes the political reappropriation of public space by the citizens in the transition to democracy. On the other hand, it represents the detoriation of public space, danger, crime, anxieties about downward mobility, and impoverishment of the workers who continue to commuting, working in the informal market, and consuming its cheap products. It symbolizes both the strength and the deterioration of public space and, therefore, the disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy. [Caldeira refers here to a text she wrote together with James Holston called ‘Democracy, Law, and Violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian Citizenship’, published in “Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-transition Latin America”. Zie literatuurlijst voor beschikbaarheid. JvB]


Contradictory public space
Something very interesting in my opinion is the argument Charles Jencks uses. He thinks that we simply should deal with the process of walling the city, architects should find an aesthetic solution for it, referring to Frank O. Gehry. The fences are good because they prevent conflict. A totally different approach towards this problem has Mike Davis, who sees the fencing as a “destruction of public space,” and also as a consequence of postliberal politics (Reagan – Bush). However, Caldeira is more carefull making the link between politics and the ‘implosion of modern public live’, referring to the process of democratization.
Caldeira sees certain similarities between São Paulo and Los Angeles, such as ‘the garden city model, modernist design and city planning, (…) the fortified enclaves and theme parks (…) the intense fear of crime and the production of stereotypes of dangerous others (...) high rates of crime.’
The last part of this chapter is very strong so I quote is completely: 

‘The new urban morphologies of fear give new forms to inequality, keeps groups apart, and inscribe a new sociablity that runs against the ideals of the modern public and democratic freedoms. When some people are denied access to certain areas and when different groups do not interact in public space, then reference to ideals of openness, equality, and freedom as organizing principles for social life are no longer possible, even as fiction. The consequence of the new separateness and restriction of public life are serious: contrary to what Jencks (1993) thinks, defensible architecture and planning may promote confict instead of preventing it, by making explicit the social inequalities and the lack of common ground. In fact, we may argue that the Los Angeles uprising was caused by social segregation rather than by the lack of separation and defenses. If the experiences of separateness expressed in the urban environment become dominant in their societies, people will distance themselves from democracy.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 297-355.

Centros Educacionais Unificados – CEU

Critique:
[1] Relation to the street or the city fabric is poor
[2] The definition of the public space is a missed opportunity.
[3] No possibility of “appropriation of space”.
[4] To standardized
[5] It does not relate to commercial space.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 7. FORTIFIED ENCLAVES: BUILDING UP WALLS AND CREATING A NEW PRIVATE ORDER

Brazil is not the only country with a lot of condominiums, in the USA it is also a quit common phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are some differences. In the USA the condominiums are not so often gated compared to Brazil, only twenty percent of them. In São Paulo the condominium are still more urban than suburban. [A tendency that is probably changing right know. I don’t have hard proof for it but when I see all these parcels on google earth it is plausible that the suburban condominium becomes more popular. I have to look at it. JvB] Another aspect that is different from the USA is that the houses are not patterned because the elite sees patterned houses as something for the working class. The house is a expression of you personality and needs a ‘individualized appearance.’ ‘Condominiums are never called “communities,” and they are never advertised as a type of housing that could enhance the value of doing things together. In fact, residents seem to resent deeply this idea of community.’
The famous condominium Alphaville ‘covered an urbanized area of 13 square kilometer and had a fixed population of around twenty thousand inhabitants. Its office center housed 360 enterprises, and commercial area had 600 enterprises. On average, 75,000 non residents passed through it daily. In 1989, 55.4 percent of the tax revenues of the city of Barueri came from Alphaville. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. Each residential area, office center, and commercial center hires its own security force to maintain internal order, and there is a common security force to take care of the public spaces (the avenues and even the highway connecting to São Paulo).
The condominiums provide all possible services you can image, like nannies, hairdresser, gardening, libraries, shops, ect. These services are done by poor people who often live in favelas close by. ‘The upper class fear contact and contamination by the poor, but they conitinue to depend on their low-class servants.
A lot of problems inside the condominium are caused by the children of the people who live there. They vandalize collective equipment, use drugs and drive without license. Especially the car accidents are a problem. Between March 1989 and January 1991, the police registered 646 car accidents occurred inside the residential areas, that is, inside the walls and on the private streets to which only residents and their visitors have access. The majority of accidents were caused by teenagers, the majority of victims were either children or teenagers playing in the streets (only one of the people who died was over eighteen).’
The problems with children in Alphaville is thought to be solved by ‘more love and attention, stronger families, and more controle. (…) To discuss the question in terms of public order or public responsibility is unheard-of. [This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt argues about the household and the political. JvB]
Teresa Caldeira sees the privatization of the public space as a new phenomenon. Brazilian society has always been unequal but the creation of private islands has grown stronger. Very interesting is that see things that the retreat of the elite from the public sphere is actually a retreat form the process of democratization. The reason for this is because the working classes, ‘through their social movements, were for the first time participating effectively in political life. There is a parallel to make with the US where the ‘flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s and to gated communities in the 1990s may be related to the expansion of citizenship rights of the black population and the incorporation into American society of an increased number of immigrants. In Europe, the increase of racism and of new patterns of segregation seem to be similarly associated with the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants.
By giving a lot of examples of advertisement Caldeira shows that the concept of the condominium and the feeling of being unsafe is really something that is exploited by the real estate market.
People living in a closed and secured place do not see this as a negative thing. They also see their way of living as a form of ‘freedom’. [I think this is a very strange contradictory thing. JvB] ‘Interestingly, the people (…) never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism.’ However, for the people who live in houses in Moóca this seems to be different. ‘The transformation of the house in a prison adds to the feeling of restriction and loss associated with the economic crisis and anguish about the social decay. The closed door is a strong metaphor.
But, the walls, fences, bars have also another function: “aesthetics of security”, as Caldeira calls it. The elements of security have become symbols of status. Security has also become part of the design of the house. ‘By the early 1990s the new “architecture of security” was making its way into the newspaper articles. This architecture creates explicit means of keeping away undesirables, especially the homeless.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 256-296.

São Paulo: The appearance of the dual city

Summary from:
Luiz Recamán, ‘High-speed urbanization’ in: Elisabetta Andreoli, Adrian Forty (ed.), Brazil’s Modern Architecture, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2004, p. 134-138.

Luiz Recamán has been an architect since 1983. Having gained a PhD in Philosophy, he now teaches Aesthetics at the São Carlos School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo (USP) and has published articles in various journals.

The process of segregation finds its origin in the abolishment of slavery, according to Luiz Recamán. The former slaves were of no use anymore to the landowners, and in there eyes also unsuited for paid employment. These people started to move to the city hoping to find work there. At the same moment however the Brazilian government actively encourage people in Europe to come to Brazil to do the jobs that has been done by the slaves. The black population had therefore no official role in society and also no place to live. Form this was the moment that the illegal settlement at the periphery of the city started to appear. Although these settlements were illegal, they were tolerated. Luiz Recamán sees this as the birth of the ‘dual society, in which pre-modern social relations, inherited from the colonial structure, were updated but not fundamentally changed, to fulfill new roles in modernization.’ Poor people from the periphery became the small service providers of the rich. The autoconstructed neighborhoods in the periphery never became official parts of the city and therefore lacked public services.
While at the moment the Brazils population as a whole is decreasing, the number of people who started to live in a favela grew. In São Paulo there was a growth of 4,6 percent - in the district of Guarulhos they grew with the enormous amount of 112 percent. The migration to the autoconstructed periphery during the 90s coincided with the implosion of the rental marked. ‘Between 1994 and 1998, the number of families living in favelas in the city of São Paulo grew with 47 percent. ‘The ‘Map of Social Exclusion’, which indicates differences in the quality of life in São Paulo’s districts, shows an emptying of the regulated, legal areas of the city towards the unregulated outskirts. Between 1991 and 1996 there was an increase of 470,000 inhabitants in the 53 districts where the quality of life was deemed to have worsened, while within the 37 districts where the quality of life had improved, there was a decrease of 260,000 inhabitants.
Luiz Recamán distinguishes two different dynamics that caused the contemporary spatial and social layout of the city: ‘economic gain and social segregation.’
In the centre of São Paulo there are at the moment a lot of empty buildings. The reason is that a lot of business, shopping, luxery housing culture and leisure has moved to the south-west of the city where the land is cheaper. Investment produces higher rates of return here than in the city center. [A consequence of this that the empty buildings in the center are squatted by the poor, a phenomenon that is called cortiços in Brazil. The precarious situation people live in are grinding; in many case families live in very small spaces, sharing sanitary facilities with a lot of people. These people pay a lot of rent and have no rights at all because the occupation is in many cases illegal. JvB]
‘At the same time, increasing violence, the result of a massive degree of social exclusion, pushes the wealthy inside their homes.’ Recamán sees the deterioration of the public spaces as a result of the overvaluation of the private sphere. Another aspect in this is that the private investors are not interested in public space.

[The other chapter can also be interesting: they are all written by Brazilian scholars.]

Mike Davis: The fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space

Mike Davis has in his book Planet of Slums (2006) a passage that summerises the problematics I want to work with. He writes:

‘It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation. Some Brazilian writers have recently talked about “the return to the medieval city,” but the implications of the middle-class secession [Dutch: afscheiding, JvB] from public space – as well as from any vestige [Dutch: spoor, JvB] of a shared civic life with the poor – are more radical. Rodgers, following Anthony Giddes, conceptualizes the core process as a “disembedding” of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence.’[1]

Davis refers here to an article by Dennis Rodgers called “Disembedding” the City: Crime, Insecurity and Spatial Organization in Managua. This article, about Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua can be used as a comparable situation with São Paulo.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006, p119.

First sketch about building public space to claim ‘The Right to the City’.

It is the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) who wrote about ‘The Right to the City’ for the first time. How this theme is elaborated in his writings I have to investigate further but it is the geographer David Harvey who also used this as a subject in his writings. In his essay ‘The Right to the City’ (2008) he writes: ‘The right to the city is far more that the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of human rights.’ What sometimes annoys me a bit is the lack of practical examples in these theories. Maybe its up to the architect the come up with these ideas. Maybe the it is especially the architect who can function between the theory and the ‘build practice’. Let’s give it a try:
I am really wondering whether it is possible to give people in autoconstructed neighborhoods the possibility the construct their own ‘res publica’, something like a number of buildings that provide public space. This process could work into two directions: first: the process of making should be a process of community, and second: afterwards there is the ‘artifact’ that represents a common achievement and that is of common use. By doing so it is possible people to, literally, reclaim ‘the right to city’, by building it. The question however, what is the role of the architect in this? And, isn’t this a bit too idealistic?
I have to work on this idea.

The transformation of Public Space according to Jean Baudrillard

In the book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay's on Postmodern Cultures Jean Baudrillard wrote the text The Ecstacy of Communication. What interest me professionally about this essay are the things he writes about in relation to 'public space':

“… body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Advertising in its new version – with is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocutor and the social virtues of communication – advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition. No longer limited to its traditional language, advertising organizes the architecture and realization of superobjects like Beaubourg and the Forum des Halles, and of future projects (e.g., Parc de la Villette) which are monuments (or anti-monuments) to advertising, not because they will be geared to consumption but because they are immediately proposed as an anticipated demonstration of the operation of culture, commodities, mass movement and social flux. It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections.”

Baudrillard describes here the consequences of the focus on commodities and advertising in the public space. Public space is no longer a stage for social and political life, as it was in history, but it has become a space of circulation, shopping and billboards and neon.