T 30 Start Again #3: The Idea of City

9/12/10 Florian Beigel and Philip Christou - Architecture as city.

An approach to the design of space: infrastructural and inhabitation in S M L XL, from furniture configuration to the design of a city in Korea, always finding the city within space, and the spaces between spaces.

The lecture began with the image of a Korean folding screen depicting civil life in a hierarchical layering of nature, buildings, people and civil ceremony, folding up and disappearing after supper is over.

The metaphor of the space inbetween Morandi's paintings cropped up once more. So did Hans Scharoun's library, Berlin, illustrating a natural geological order within the envelope of a building. I liked the analogy in this context. I've been inside this library on a studio trip in third year, and somehow it did seem to have a very natural order within. Big hulking tree trunk columns that fly into the sky of circular lamps, with the bookshelves to desks to chairs forming the city skyline in the distance. They're swaying me round to their way of thinking...

Hans Scharoun's Library in Berlin. Especially soft carpets if I remember correctly.

The scale and order of the city is always present. Leading to ideas of contrasts between artificial and natural to create legible definition in human scale, giving form to public space, somewhere to explore contrast as seen at the sea's edge in Porto. Natural rock vs sharp concrete paths.

'All allude to, or are the city in different ways'

Searching for a meaning between planning and what's built, finding a relationship between the landscape and paths, as seen in their project in Cirencester, building up the landscape's inhabitation incrementally with a personal touch.

These examples were used as a means of guiding us through the practice's approach to their design work in Korea, (the content of the book being launched). Analysing existing successful and unsuccessful built forms and bringing them together to create a new city space in a controlled sea plain.

Is this how we, as architects, should proceed to design? Learning from personal critique of the form of every building, breaking each building and space down into a list of good and bad, in terms of proportion, symmetry and contrasting size, ie the first impression of aesthetic, and lumping all the good together? Were the examples shown only seen to be of a 'human scale' because of the carefully chosen images of people in the buildings' openings? I found myself questioning in my Moleskin. Quite a new thing for me. In some instances, I think pictures can do a great deal in selling the proportion of a building or object, but I trusted what they were saying. The form of things define everyday life. Which toilet brush we choose to buy, which apple or orange, it's just that I think you have to be careful when 'Thinking on a small scale and blowing up' that you think of the bigger picture, and the spaces in between. : if we do think on a small scale, taking ques from human proportions of window openings, and the ratios of dimension, how can these proportions be blown up to an urban scale without losing the intimacy of the original 'human' size of that window opening? Sometimes seemed a little contrived.

In describing a series of new library buildings in Korea, it was said 'Each building has its own character, standing shoulder to shoulder like people in the ground': surely most buildings in an urban setting stand shoulder to shoulder regardless of their scale, and does that building have its own character if it is a collage of previous 'successful' buildings taken from such examples as Portland Place, London?

Though it was stated by Phil that in essence they were not 'ripping up and starting again, surely the basis of the Korean project was starting from scratch, starting again, therefore their approach to starting again was to rip up and collage existing cities. Does this new framework for a city in Korea plant the seed for it to become its own city, or will it always be like another?

Favourite quotes:
'Form is passe, figure is in'
....and programme: 'What it looks like is important, it is not about programme, that comes second...Architecture has a life of its own. It's about beauty. Content is something else, is this not for planners?' ???
'Creating the rug for the picnic'