Chapter Number 2 – Street Level -

Lebbeus Woods | Havana | radically reconstructed | 1994 | http://lebbeuswoods.net

Collective intelligence is based on the concept of “swarm logic” where the resolutions and decisions made by individuals are produced from their relationships with others without knowing the outcome or consequences of their actions on a global scale.

Steve Johnson in his book “Emergence” explained through the analysis of an ant colony, the importance of the actions of individuals and their effects at different scales through various examples: he shows how ants seeking the shortest route to stock food, how to prioritise resources to food access taking into account the distance and the easiest access, or how to change their tasks according to the external conditions of their individual activities.

Thus, a community in which none of the ants is responsible for the overall operation of the colony, there is an amazing connection to the system and organisation, in both levels: micro and macro.

One of the key terms to understand the “swarm logic” is “local” because everything starts from the individual to the local activity, but is a local scale which can not take place without the participation of others or the interaction with others. How incredible and amazing it is that none of them have the slightest idea of ​​the effect generated by their actions on the macro scale, since, as the author says, these ants have not the general overview; the bird-eye view concept. These individuals pay attention to their neighbours rather than wait for orders from above which generates an Emergent Behaviour.

The “pay attention” behaviour is related to the signs, those signs in the case of ants are “chemical signals” a group of signs that make maybe are no more than a dozen but made their communication a very effective structure, since a single individual can not assess their own efficiency because they are unable to see the whole as it is because is a perceptual and conceptual impossibility for them.

This phenomenon of “local” and their relationships with others, make the concepts of Deleuze’s rhizome as a “horizontal” system, in which relations between objects, stable and resilient qualities of the systems, and processing qualities, leads to the concept of emergence, where systems are generated and regenerated without specificity of the elements, it is more a result of single efforts, coordinated, changing and changeable in which, without the interaction of individuals by including almost no communication, overall development occurs. It is, in a way what Negroponte described achieving the sequence of an event, a manifestation and the representation.

Steve Johnson moves to what happens in the cities, the streets and the relationships between its inhabitants, so the strength of the city’s skyline depends on the kind and the number of the sidewalks. The way they manage data and how its succeed. He says that cities should not be defined by its skyline but by what happens in the ground floor, the street level, which is what really defines a city.

Marc Augé talks about the “non-place” as anything where we do not relate to each other, like in the example of the Steven Johnson’s friend, when he drives from some point of the city and he cross in front of a slum and he believes they are part of the city, in the same way how we connect from one point to another within the cities, but nothing happens in this between sometimes… there is only from a watcher’s point of view reflection but nothing else and we think we’ve been there, without having been… It would be like arriving at Charles de Gaulle and connect for 8 hours and then pretend to say we were in Paris.

If the street is a place and the road is a non-place, and the place is where the interactions of individuals that generate an emergence occur, what is the relationship of the thousands of individuals who inevitably also go through non-places like this, but they are also part of the emergence system? Is there then a temporary emergence within which we can be part of it and sometimes not? Or is there no non-place as such, and the importance of the highway and the like, are a fundamental part of the “places” and their conformation and thus, the strength of the skyline not only depends on the kind and number of sidewalks, but also the kind and number of elements as defined by Auge Non -places?

 | Gustavo Triana |

“The Architecture of Dreams”

There are concerns that have increased in recent years and is about how the natural environment is related to the built environment and how it is no longer the sole concern of the architects and the way we, as architects we approach it.

The rapid growth of cities, generated mainly due to population growth and migration of people from rural areas to cities continued proliferation of vertical solutions that solves one of the many problems associated with population density, but not the problems that architects must solve in an urban environment related to the conditions of the inhabitants. The resolution of these problems related to human habitat, which should be solved by the subject matter experts, such as architects, urban designers and planners, no longer seem to matter, as the economic interests of the private sector and the proliferation of technological solutions somehow have addressed the problem, but can not meet the needs and requirements from the intangible conditions and their relationship with the environment inhabited. These intangible conditions are the most important components for the inhabitants of the architectural project.

What are those intangibles conditions? As mentioned by Mark Wigley in his text “The Architecture of Atmosphere” The noise, light, temperature, location, humidity, etc…, make it a difficult task for the architect to fulfil the condition of comfort, and comfort is what determines the specificity of each atmosphere. We can then define the atmosphere as the comfort and its relation to the space.

Tadao Ando focuses his speech to the lack of integration of the built environment with nature, he is  creating this atmosphere by combining the vertical height with certain horizontal deployment in looking for those components that generate the comfort of the inhabitants of spaces, also questions the search for alternative solutions that talk about sustainability but do not relate the nature found in the exterior with the interior created. He reminds us that architecture should be open to the environment, through the creation of ambiguous boundaries between the inside and the outside.

In this whole context of the relationship between the physical environment and the built environment, Alison Smithson in his “Saint Jerome” makes a comparison about the built environment and the nature, where through the study of paintings he try to find the balance in between the outside and the inside and how the inhabitant can come together.

Philippe Rahm also insists that the built environment should be the result of some logic applied to the environment. The form must be consistent with the physical/atmospherical place, following this principle, constructed objects must adapt intelligently to the place, as mentioned by Tadao Ando when he refers to the Byōbu, and how the asians have lived in cities that have integrated nature and architecture as how the architecture is adapted to the place.

This suggested relationship between nature and the built object clearly speaks about the limits; both: physical and intangible. Sou Fujimoto in his “Future Primitive”, where he talks, in addition to the topics mentioned above, also he questions when the work of the architect should stop and what is the physical limit that defines the architecture.

Fujimoto talks about that intermediate space as something indefinite and somewhat mysterious, “the architecture of dreams…”

The exploration of this intermediate architecture, this architecture created from the generation of voids as Ando mentioned and that is part of that relationship epiphenomenonal on trees, in which the interaction between them occurs in a protective behaviour also becomes a sensitive and intelligent strategy of relations of subsistence based in intangible components.

I would like then to research if it is then that the intermediate architecture, the architecture of the spaces between the branches of the trees, are the intangible and invisible components that generate mutual benefit between buildings, between the cities and its inhabitants.

Is there really an “architecture of dreams” and  is it really the one that produces the quality of the space?

 | Gustavo Triana |