The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Brief Encounters
imaging of spaces in terms of what they feel like, and what happens in them
(as a moviemaker would imagine them), to having a global overview. Such
contrasts were often deliberately ridiculous, such as thinking—because we
were trying to influence the culture of architecture more than the specific
future of a place—about what happens if Surrey Docks occupied half of the
globe. We knew what would really get built would be a tacky mess.
DISCORD, DIFFERENCE, MOVEMENT, NARRATIVE
In the NATO period there were certain ingredients—in the organization of
space, the understanding of the use of a place, its relationship with the older
fabric of the city, and the kinds of illusion that the environment could make.
Things from quite different sources could come together—all based on
bringing the user into some friendly zone of discord so that questions were
asked. Teaching, I thought, must have the same approach, since it is not
about showing people what to do, but about creating an intellectual environment,
a doing environment, stimulating quite radical juxtapositions,
that can then be passed on through the building into the user.
Generating such an attitude is more difficult in our society than in
say a city like Tokyo—a place where the old rules are so imprinted on people’s
minds that to transgress them is relatively obvious. I prefer places that
are chaotic rather than cities like Rotterdam where everything is in place.
At first Paris seems obvious too, but there is always something interesting
behind the grand facades—the passageways and places where things have
gone slightly wrong. Some cities have evidence of instinctual definitions of
space where paths turn into roads across an unplanned landscape. These are
all characteristics of Arabian cities: the capital of Yemen, Sana, is incredible
for the earthy directness of its labyrinth of towers in symbiotic harmony
with tumultuous activity.
For our early work, the entropic condition of Japanese cities provided
a real testing ground. The layering and distortion of these cities is almost
baroque. Tokyo is strikingly intense, a clashing of city material which
adds up to a consistency of inconsistency; a twenty-story building next to a
small wooden house, that is the condition. It rejects all the traditional thrust
of trying to organize cities. For some of our Japanese projects we developed
this feeling of the baroque, as a sensibility, as Deleuze describes it—as curiously
modern, sensuous, granular, fluid, and mobile.
The question of difference is fundamental in this. A city ought to
be a place which encourages the acknowledgment of differences, not necessarily
addressing particular bits to particular people, but at least asking
questions, being playful enough to permit the other. How to reconcile the