The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

THEATERS, GARDENS, ROME, LONDON
As students of Bernard Tschumi at the Architectural Association [AA] we
investigated what architecture meant as well as how it worked. Conceptual
art and performance art—which could generate strong meanings out of relatively
little—were very influential. In particular, most of our work had an
art influence where there were strong metaphors for being in space; they addressed
the body as an important component of the space you were in. Many
of the projects were about devices which could reveal such ideas. For example,
a housing project was a grid of blocks that were mirrored and cut
through by a neon cross—which amplified the awareness of being in a particular
place against the continuous texture of the city.
Some years later I became very interested in theater and gardens,
which were both, in a sense, metaphors for experiences and real places. The
theater relies heavily on conceptual strategies linking the stage and the auditorium,
which was a formalization of the far more individual experiences
that happen in gardens. The gardens around Rome, Siena, and Florence provided
a highly mutated classical situation enabling the discovery of an existential
quality beyond history.
Then there was Rome—I did not see it as just a collection of fabulous
buildings with baroque city jammed between, but also a very sexy city.
The obvious activities of the city—the shops, houses, and offices—were
threaded with an additional layer, with other undercurrents that were
erotic, sexy, and transgressive, and which in some way converted the spaces.
The Piazza Navona was in fact an amazing theater of people—at night it was
a huge melting pot for pickup and exchange. In other words you could read
Rome as Fellini had in La Dolce Vita—that the coming together of a contemporary
world of desire and gratification could make use of the baroque
city in a way that was never intended. Such experiences helped me understand
what I was interested in—about gardens, about spaces and cities,
which most books merely describe in formal ways.
At this time we were also working under the waning influence of
utopian architecture, of Superstudio and Archizoom, who had driven the
tendencies of Archigram to a limit of a bland inevitability. This had converted
the discussions that had been traditionally associated with architecture
through the ages into new ironic possibilities. Therefore London,
which was by no means Rome, became the focus of both the AA and our
early work. The same sorts of things were beginning to happen whereby
huge quarters of the city were losing their original interiors and had become
ambiguous ruins—for example, Docklands. This change, in conjunction
with shifts in street culture (which was no longer about glamour and