weak systems the death of heroics
notes | unfinished ideas by stephanie white
Horizontal spread makes several appearances in this issue: weak systems operate laterally, never hierarchically. From the social interactions on Eduardo Aquino’s beaches to General System Theory and its military appropriation outlined by Cameron Hu, a number of essays moil around the terms weak city , weak architecture , terrain vague and landscape urbanism which above all take plant ecologies as models for urban growth and organisation. There is little room for heroism in any of this; change is incremental and gradual, action is collective and diffuse. Thomas Strickland’s project in Barcelona with a group of LBGTQ refugees is so quiet, so slow, so face-to- face, palm-to-palm that we are stopped in our tracks: it hardly registers on the scale of what constitutes architecture, yet has done more to inscribe value on the city for these refugees than most highly-awarded buildings. This architecture isn’t always about form. Take the iconic thin pencils of the1973 World Trade Centre, strong in form and hubris, weak in structure. Its original enemies were the capacity of limitations: elevator systems and wind. The open joists that acted as bracing for the bundled steel tubes of the exo-skeleton also supported the floors – a loose system, not unlike Karianne Halse’s Venice, interdependent parts as in a tensegrity system – cut one element and it fails completely. This kind of failure was unanticipated, as inconceivable as an attack by a thin-skinned airplane armed with Stanley knives and an ideology. Our conceptions of what constitutes strength in architecture and urbanism must be revised. Not only were the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall superseded immediately by military technology, so the Green Line and the various Red Lines are rendered ineffective as soon as they are made: they come from a paradigm that valorises strength as power, and doesn’t understand weakness as a discrete entity with its own philosophy, its own literature and its own practitioners and, increasingly, useful strategems. Weak, loose, uncertain systems show their resiliance when terms of reference are reconstructed to include not politics, not economics, not military might, but human life where everything is negotiable. My (weak) training was as a modernist, where such ideas were anathema, where architecture was declarative, brutally military, rarely discussed. It is fitting that for a journal which collects starting points, outlines of ideas and theories and little-known projects by relatively unknown people that this issue, 32: weak systems , should finally examine why the unfinished is so appealing. We have had, perhaps, enough of hegemony, enough heroics. ~
In the investigations that collectively constitute this issue of On Site review 32: weak systems , some interesting congruences have emerged between very disparate contributors. There is a refocussing on the architectural theory of the 1960s, especially open form, systems theory and indeterminate structures. Buckminster Fuller keeps cropping up as a kind of exemplar of a new technology that was both dematerialised and able to be endlessly replicable. By coincidence I recently spent some time with an archive of work unseen since the middle 1980s, Jeffrey Burland Lindsay’s domes, tensegrity structures, umbrella sun shades and water reservoir roof systems. While manning the Buckminster Fuller Research Institute in Montreal from 1949-53, he quite literally built what Fuller envisioned. On the facing page is the building of a prototype for Arctic installations on the DEW line, erected near Beaurepaire, north of Montreal, in the winter of 1951. One forgets, looking at end results and subsequent versions, just what 1951 looked like, where men in their mid-twenties wore overcoats, girls wore skirts and furs and everyone wore galoshes, even to build a magical, ephemeral, thin dome of light weight wood and cables in a snowy field. Lindsay spent much of his subsequent career in Los Angeles developing a modular housing system of fibreglas spheres that could be deployed wherever there was a housing need and no wherewithal to provide it – migrant workers camps, poor parts of American cities. He wrote, in 1982 and somewhat bitterly, ‘molded spherical atmospheres weren’t worth the effort, the insolubles notwithstanding’. Yann Ricordel-Healy has written in this issue about the Reyner Banham – Francois Dallegret manifesto ‘A Home is Not a House’ of 1965. On the cover is a plan of a module that can fit together to make a configuration: it was an era when rooms and houses were simply not seen as appropriate or adequate for the future. Curvy bubble-shapes that could attach to each other in infinite patterns seemed much more interesting. The speed with which these ideas were taken up by the counter- culture who wanted nothing to do with the suburban rooms and houses they grew up in must have come as a shock. There was no one more un-counter-cultural than Fuller, or Lindsay, or Reyner Banham: they were, by and large, engineers, Fuller deeply connected to the American military, Lindsay an ex- WWII RCAF pilot, Banham an engineer with Bristol Aeroplane Company. Candilis-Josic-Woods, active CIAM members, proposed an open system for the Berlin Free University in1963. Growth took the form of webs of connections: a built rhizomatic structure. Ania Molenda writes in this issue of Oscar Hansen’s Open Form Manifesto of 1959 realised in his 1969 PREVI project in Peru. There was a dimension to open form that responded to the politics of the Cold War, the impenetrability of the Iron Curtain and the paranoia of the HUAC – a bi-polar world that was rigid and completely controlling. Open form in this context is clearly subversive: like algae, or a virus, a ‘weak’ indefinite informal structure with no centre and no borders is uncontrollable .
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