THE JAMES STIRLING MEMORIAL LECTURES ON THE
CITY
Gregory Cowan, architect
Abstract
“James
Stirling believed that urban design is integral to the practice of architecture,
and a vital topic for public debate.” Urban environments are challenged where public debate transforms into
direct action, and citizens manifest their concerns in the street. Critical dissent often transgresses the
physical architecture of the city.
Direct physical action favours collective political spatial performance
in the street over mediated urbane processes, like writing. Collective mobilisations have occurred
since well before the advent of modern urban design, with protesters ‘designating’
streets, routes and squares to topical causes. During the past year, for example, people in the small city
of Perth, Australia gathered to ‘Reclaim the Streets’, while in London,
anti-war protesters opposed the state visit of the American president. Rather than writing letters at home,
publicly demonstrated their dissent by parading their numbers in city streets.
Urban design silently
provides for habitable streets through architectural spaces and materials. Urban design processes charge architectural
practice with a concern for communally occupied public space. Dynamic cities fruitfully manage the
tension between ‘designating’ occupations of streets and fostering spontaneous,
temporal street occupation. To
think innovatively about urban design as a way of enabling shared ownership of
streets, it will be vital to understand ‘aberrant’ occupations of urban street
‘architecture’. Architecture can
be repositioned at the centre of debates on the city by recognising this
polemical role of urban design.
This lecture challenges thinking about the city, by critically
presenting aberrations in the occupation of civic streets, and discussing their
urban design significance. (251 words)
Reclaim the Streets Perth Australia September 2003
Peace
Protest London United Kingdom November 2003
Challenging the street: politics and architecture in
urban design of streets
1. Genesis of the Topic
Challenging the Street
has developed from a current project, Street Occupations, which has been evolving since 2001, overlapping the
writing of the dissertation Nomadology in Architecture.
Informed by professional and private experiences living in Perth, Graz,
Vienna, Kuala Lumpur and London, the project on Street Occupations reflects on professional and private involvement in
the formations of streets and communities. Streets are a primary element of urban existence. As Celik et. al. note, they “provide
the structure onto which the complex interactions of the architectural fabric with
human organisation… are …woven”[1]. The fit between lived occupation and
architecture is highlighted by transport, urban walking and, in particular, by
politically motivated gathering and walking in the streets.
As identities of urban
places are increasingly decentralised and networked, a pressing question for
urban design in the 21st century is the role of the physical and
socio-political architecture of the street as an urban space.
The forms of
communities, constituted and maintained increasingly by virtual means, were
influenced by the telephone and televisual communication’s transformations to
ways of living in the past. Now
networks, travel and migration all affect our ownership of dwelling. Accordingly, there is an interest in
the grass roots level of politics and active citizenship today, suggesting that
the construction of the physical neighbourhood has an impact on the ways
communities work.
Debates have long raged
in architecture and urban design about the relations between form and function
of the street – Oscar Newman’s defensible space theory suggested that the
criminogenic capacity of streets can be studied empirically, Neville Gruzman in
Australia even made claims about the capacity of urban built environments to
inspire criminal activity. Kevin
Lynch’s theories of reading the city connect to Bill Hillier’s Space Syntax model, and Christopher Alexander et al’s A
City is Not a Tree and A
Pattern Language remain
essential polemical reading. The street
architecture is viewed organically, as an ecology, as something more than
buildings and pavement, including the occupants and their behaviour, as
temporal phenomena. The codes of
pedestrian ‘behaviour’ and comparative ‘misbehaviour’ – civil obedience and
disobedience are defined here in process.
2. Previous Investigations
From the personal experience of relocating in the past year from a fringe city (Perth) to a world city (London), with an period studying communities in India, I feel I have gained a heightened awareness of ownership of street architecture by informal communities. These recent experiences add to the insights gained from living in cities and working on urban projects in Vienna and Perth.
Solvitur ambulando – medieval maxim (The answer is through walking)
Strolling
in the city and its suburbs involves multiple, repeated and deeply imbricated
border crossings including nested neighbourhoods, traffic flows, ethnic
enclaves, residential and commercial zones, subcultures, historical sites,
sacred spaces and outcroppings of the wild in parks, cemeteries and abandoned
lots. In this sense, urban walking
is by its very nature a transformative practice because the moving body and the
plurality of places it inhabits are constantly conjoined and then decoupled in
ways that come to reveal the metropolitan world in its manifold
dimensions. (In the following
essay)… pedestrian practices and problems in the urban environment are explored
along with their broader relation to what may be called peripatetic politics.
(Walking in the City,
MacAulay, 2000 in CNS 11(4)
December 2000)
3. Publications
A recent journal article “Street Protest Architecture — Dissent Space in Australia” (Bad
Subjects, Issue
no.65, January 2004) held that an architecture of protest has been developing
in Australia as an effective performative spatial expression of dissent.
In the text Nomadology in Architecture: ephemerality, mobility and collaboration (Adelaide University 2002), I suggest that the nomads’ way of thinking allows us critical insights for collaborative practice of a globally conscious architecture. It suggests ephemerality mobility and collaboration are three features of what can be learned from Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology. The text was recently placed on the reading list at Concordia University Montreal’s DART390 - Collaborative Research in Design Art.
4. Research Plan
The proposed Stirling lecture would set out the experiences within the frameworks of politics and ecology in relation to the architecture of the street. Literature would include Street Protests and Fantasy Parks (Cameron and Gross Stein), on Streets (Stanford Anderson 1978) on urban ecology, and Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (Celik, Favro and Ingersoll 1994) and Guide to Ecstacity (Coates 2003)
Street Occupations, is concerned with a range of themes from the temporal to the durable. Occupations include thinking in the street, walking in the street, running in the street, living in the street, dwelling in the street. Pedestrians, animals, vegetation, objects of municipal infrastructure, furniture, vehicles, all play a role in the complex political, and spatial and material architecture of the street. Commonplace activities and phenomena affect and interact, physically or psychologically, remotely or directly, forming an architecture of the street as a social an physical space. The effects of specific street occupations and street architecture are manifested in several ways to be addressed in this lecture; between the objective and the subjective, the tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible.
The space of the street, whether pedestrian and unremarkable or uncanny and unsettling, contrasts with ‘home’ – an undomesticated, unhomely space, of danger, traffic, excrement; the space of homeless people, threatening to the vulnerable. In the twenty-first century, the street is the counterpoint to the enduring twentieth century institutions of contemporary cities; the library, the courtroom, the café. Increasingly, the spaces of the street are depersonalised and corporatised. The state institutions of the street; policemen, lamplightermen and street sweepers are replaced by CCTV, security patrols (contractors) and sanitation (sub-)contractors. There are fewer telephone booths in view of private mobile telephony, while bus shelters and public toilets are increasingly privatised. As the ‘surplus’ space of the twenty-first century city shifts from public ownership to private ownership how does this affect the user of the street architecture?
There are some users who regard the street as heimlich or familiar – a retreat and escape from the bondage of sedentary institutions, and liberated from social hierarchy. It is a space for twenty first century youth culture, for urban guerilla tactics, graffiti art, performance and protest culture. At home in the street are those with tacit understanding – a clandestine knowledge. The street can be a place of flight and of refuge from unpleasant authorities institutions and regimes; a space of liminality. Some see the right to sleep rough as a civil right – it allows them a state of relative autonomy from the state.
“The schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than the neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” Deleuze and Guattari cited in MacAuley (2000)
Depending on point of view, the street can be a space of inclusion or a space of exclusion. As public institutions and services fragment and ‘privatise’ in the twenty-first century, can the street respond to its new role, for wall banking, street telephoning, street counselling, street protesting, street preaching, public meditating, ‘wap’[2] shopping, etc. Within the enormous field of the design of cities, the design of streets is a very complex issue, from the subterranean infrastructures of optical fibre and sewage, to the design of environmental planting and streetscapes. While the architecture of streets in the urbanized twenty-first century world is increasingly complex, in the context of increasingly ‘virtual’ human relations in the urbanised world, the social importance of the street is growing correspondingly.
Paradoxically, the need for the credible and authentic sense of “being there” in the street seems to grow with the increasingly mediated communication of the ‘everyday’. Beneath the surface of civilisation, citizens seem to harbour a passion for the raw unmediated urban wilderness of the cold hard paving stones, the closed building fronts, the open sky, where they can be dogging, urban climbing and free rooftop jumping.
“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.” Situationist reprise.
This lecture will argue the position that the theme of ‘urban design’ as ‘architecture of the street’ is one of critical importance for architectural debate in the twenty first century. Comparing architecture and culture in the postcolonial world with that of Europe is problematic. Architectural composition encompasses art and science – in Vitruvius’ terms, ‘well’ (good) architecture has durability, commodity and beauty (firmitas, utilitas, venustas)[3] Understanding the street, an archetypal public space, might be approached by considering these conditions, yet a great many contemporary urban streets are perceived as comparatively expendable, as uninhabitable, and as dangerous or ugly. In the past, streets have often been outside the scope of architectural interest, especially in the ‘new world’. Yet the spatial surplus resulting from the convergence of built space on a movement corridor is increasingly important to the urban architecture of the contemporary city.
“Die Straße wird zur Wohnung
für den Flâneur, der zwischen den Häuserfronten so wie der Bürger zwischen
seine vier Wänden zuhause ist.” (Walter Benjamin 1938)[4]
“The street becomes the home of the flaneur, who, like the citizen between his four walls, is at home between the fronts of the buildings” (W. Benjamin trans. G Cowan)
THE JAMES STIRLING MEMORIAL
LECTURES ON THE CITY
A new lecture competition organized in collaboration between:
Canadian Centre for Architecture and
London School of Economics and
Political Sciences,
in association with Van Alen Institute.
Submissions must be received by 15
March, 2004
http://www.cca.qc.ca/stirlinglectures
Photo: Portrait of James Stirling,
Unknown photographer
copyright Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
CCA Announces a New Competition
for Critical Thinking:
THE JAMES STIRLING MEMORIAL
LECTURES ON THE CITY
This competition is conceived in homage to architect James
Stirling, who believed that urban design is integral to the practice of
architecture and a vital topic for public debate. The James Stirling Memorial
Lectures will be inaugurated in 2004 as a forum to advance new perspectives on
the role of urban design and urban architecture in the development of the urban
environment. The intent is to promote innovative approaches to the city and its
territories, and to re-position architecture at the centre of debates on the
city of the 21st century.
Over the last several decades, the world's cities-both large and
small-have witnessed major shifts that have dramatically affected urban form
and density, as well as programming. These, combined with the emergence of new
patterns of urbanization and innovative approaches to the design and management
of cities, call for strategic thinking commensurate with the radical nature of
changes that have occurred. We are seeking proposals for projects that
simultaneously advance practical knowledge and provoke critical as well as
theoretical debate.
A Stirling Lecturer will be selected every other year by an
international jury of architects and urban planners, and the winning lecture
will be presented in two versions. The first presentation takes place in autumn
at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The theme is then taken up as the
subject of a colloquium co-organized by the Van Alen Institute in New York City
and the CCA, with the participation of the Stirling Lecturer and a group of
invited critics, theorists, and practitioners. Taking into account critical
debate arising in the context of the colloquium as well as further reflection
on the part of the Stirling Lecturer, another elaboration of the lecture is
presented in spring at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Submission Requirements &
Deadline
The following materials must be submitted electronically (as
Microsoft Word document attachments accompanied by TIFF or JPEG image files) to
the attention of Benjamin Prosky at the CCA (stirlinglectures@cca.qc.ca).
Submissions must be received by midnight, 15 March 2004.
- Name, address, title & professional affiliation, telephone
& fax numbers, e-mail address
- Curriculum vitae
- 250 word Abstract of proposed lecture topic, which
may be supported by up to 5 images
- 1500 word Statement of Purpose describing
the genesis of this topic within the context of the applicant's work,
explaining how this project relates to previous investigations and publications,
and laying out a general research plan for the proposed Stirling Lecture.
*All materials must be submitted in English. Likewise, lectures
will be presented in English, in Montreal as well as in London.
Award
Applicants will be notified of the jury's decision no later than
1 May 2004. The Stirling Lecturer will receive an award of 5,000 $CAD, plus
travel expenses in connection with the Montreal and London presentations, and
the colloquium in New York City.
For further information, see the
CCA website at http://www.cca.qc.ca/stirlinglectures.
General information:
Benjamin Prosky
E-mail stirlinglectures@cca.qc.ca
Press contact:
Patrick-J. Poirier
Ph. 514-939-7001 ext. 2628,
E-mail pjpoirier@cca.qc.ca