Bazaarchitecture
May 20, 2008
The historical center of Mexico city is taken over by tens of thousands of vendors. Around 5 million people visit this area every day. The Bazaar extends well over a radius of 15 kilometers. You can get clothes here for as low as 1 Peso a piece.
Much has been made of the need to look beyond built form and architecture when talking of the city. The need to focus on people who use built forms and the need to focus on the ‘soul’ of a building have become well-enshrined objectives in the best of architectural practices. So much so that they generate as much cynicism or alternatively, allow reactive architectural statements to be made all the time.
From green architecture to nomadic shelters, passing through augmented reality, every dimension of the architectural realm is being explored, theorized, critiqued and remixed. It looks like as if architectural professions have reached a level of knowledge and practice never attained before, thanks in part to an advance in technological education.
In spite of this, Rem Koolhaas observes, “Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement…†(2006). There seems to be a deep disconnect between the intelligence embedded in architectural artifacts and the dumbness of the cities we are developing for ourselves.
What if the problem does not lie in the body or soul of the architectural object? What if the uses and abuses of architecture are themselves only symptoms of a deeper conceptual malaise? Should the over-arching concept of the city itself, within which most architectural moments are located – need to be critically interrogated? Would we be able to move to an understanding of urban architecture in a less embattled way?
There is something solid and quantifiable to the idea of the city that allows architectural narratives to dominate our idea of urbanism, and through it, all contemporary life. The idea of the city starts from the fiction of evolutionary growth – from the tribal to civilized man, from the unsettled and light to the rooted and heavy, making the notions of scale, monumentalism, and density, some sort of in-built genetic conceptual pools that dictate the way human civilization evolves. It’s as if they contribute as much to the escalation of urban intensity as does the impulse of urbanization itself. Every civilizational moment that feels it has arrived has its own peculiar notion of evolutionary movement from the tribal primitive to the urban sophisticated.
According to a dialectical conception of history, the urban is superior to the natural in evolutionary terms, or at least, it represents an advanced expression of nature’s evolution. The imagined opposition between the natural environment and the city confers a heroic status to the architect whose practice seemingly consists in extricating tomorrow’s civilization from today’s material conditions.
In today’s endlessly sprawling, densifying cities, ‘savage nature’ that we once believed we had successfully contained, comes to haunt us in all kinds of ways. The new frontiers of our cities exist within. The urban wilderness of American inner-city ghettos or Asian slums for instance clashes with urban planners’ and real estate developers’ aspirations of controlling space and modernizing.
For all their grandeur and pretension, masterpieces of Modern architecture are as many doomed attempts at defying the city’s anarchic expansion. All around the globe, clones of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building are proudly erected, forcing the chaotic city “to look at itself reflected… in the neutral mirror that breaks the city web†(Tafuri & Dal Co, 1979). The dramatic moment when the pure architectural form finally stands and confronts the urban mess around is on some kind of perpetual repeat mode, as if planners and architects have not been able to get over its illusory thrill. However, the mess always wins in the end.
Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe, 1969
New York for instance once again became the city of the future on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers disintegrated back into the city web releasing a billion tiny glass and steel particles that reflected, for an instant, the ultimate failure of the Modern project. The debacle was quickly draped up like a Christo piece. A “work in progress†sign was left in front of Ground Zero and our brains were plugged right back onto the sedative media stream, fed with rhetoric of civilization and dreams of progress.
In our growth-obsessed civilization, destruction is nothing more than an opportunity for construction. The new Freedom Tower was selected and designed with great speed and by fewer people than was necessary to bring down the Twin Towers in the first place. The new Freedom Tower will have an asymmetric shape, which seems to be more in vogue these days. That’s about the only change to expect. Otherwise, the repeat button has been furiously pressed as expected, as if to contain the surrounding urban chaos threatening to spill over into Ground Zero. No time was left for any possible reflection on the bankrupt proposition the Towers symbolized.
Yet, for all their bigness, aesthetic purity, and ‘land-marking’ power, monuments have never made a city. The moment of urbanity lies, in fact, in the surrounding mess they are meant to resolve. To see that, we need to put our architect, urbanist, and activist defences down and experience the city from within. As if it were a giant art installation one could get lost in.
Let’s imagine a city. Not any particular city but rather a mix of cities; a messy collage of Mumbai, Goa, Tokyo, Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and a few others. An endlessly sprawling global village looking like Cedric Price’s “Scrambled egg cityâ€, where everything is distributed evenly in “small granules or pavilions across the landscape in a continuous network†(Shane 2006.4).
In typical postmodern fashion, this city is composed of disparate architectural elements: an art-deco hotel, a tourist resort, an electronic billboard, a neon sign, a delirious cathedral, mass housing, sun-breaking office towers, and so on. These archetypes majestically come together to produce the skyline of our imaginary city. Spreading over and under, within and between, even spilling outside, the “continuous network†is everywhere. Formless more than informal, it is the glue tying urban elements together. This is what we could call the ‘Bazaar City’ – the city in its raw form.
It is this history of ‘ground level urbanism’ that we want to evoke here. It is a simple way of getting out of the body/soul discourse of architecture that dominates our reading of cities today. How exactly did we arrive at this observation? What is the connection between urbanism, the bazaar, and the need to see cities beyond the issue of architecture in any dominant form? How does the bazaar tell us that urbanism lies not in the architecture at all and how does the bazaar help us understand this by never really dismissing the architectural moment? How do we keep architecture in its rightful place – body, soul, and whatever – and how is it always one step below the energy that really creates a city?
Chor Bazaar: Mumbai is the ultimate bazaar city.
History reveals that tribal and peasant-driven markets were the real sites where diverse identities, goods and artisanal skills were exchanged – always as part of larger networks of trade across the globe. However, contemporary accounts of urban history only focus on the eventual manifestation of these exchanges in the form of power centres. The bustling markets and habitats within or outside forts and palaces that nourished kingdoms and were the primary generators of wealth have slowly faded from our imagination. Only the shells remain. They offer the blueprints for modern societies to imagine the highest forms of civilizational aspiration through a partial version of the past.
These blueprints are imagined to be the nodes of kingdoms and empires, dense with people and physical structures – the earliest examples of urban spaces as we know them today. In reality they constituted only the tip of the human civilizational iceberg.
Seen in totality, civilizations were composed of the flows of wealth, goods, people, and culture, across vast spaces beyond these centres, following trade routes over land and sea. These may never have produced robust structural expressions but were full of intense urban moments.
Lets transcend the idea of urbanism as a kind of physical manifestation (or even as urban density in terms of scale of population aggregates). Instead, see it in those moments of interaction, of movement, in weekly or seasonal bazaars and flea-markets, that feed the political and economic nerve centres. What emerges is a different notion of urbanism. One in which, it does not matter if twenty people set up shop at the edge of a forest or two thousand on the outskirts of a kingdom. Urban intensity lies in that moment of buying and selling. Not just that – the context of exchange showcases many other things. The thrill of meeting new people, the excitement of discovering a new object, forging friendships and simply enjoying the thrill of crowds.
It is this moment that contemporary urban life yearns for. It is this simple moment that is regenerated in billion-dollar cities with heavy and expensive architectural legacies. Contemporary cities yearn for the thrill of the bazaar, but instead of creating appropriate contexts where its natural energies can be expressed, they produce contemporary translations that loose the subtleties of the moment. The most dominant urban spaces today – the shopping malls – reduce the idea of the bazaar to its bare minimum – shopping.
Universal and ubiquitous, the bazaar, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, is “obviously an abstraction of certain structural characteristics†– it is an organizational principle based on the most instinctual human propensity to trade and exchange. It is “a meeting point of several communitiesâ€. The bazaar is necessarily “unenclosed, exposed, and the interstitial outside.†(Dipesh 1991)
No wonder the bazaar is making a comeback in post-industrial cities: farmers’ markets, music festivals, and the like, are appealing to an increasingly cosmopolitan and bohemian generation that constructs its identity in a way similar to how we constructed our imaginary city in this essay – with bits and pieces from here and there. The remix and collage culture that drives today’s ‘creative economy’ relies on spaces of exchange where the new can be made out of the old.
The eagerness to reinvent one’s own ‘cultural self’ is nowhere as apparent as in urban Japan, where a growing segment of the youth is rejecting older generations’ lifestyles and values, which include, among others, a respect for ‘patriarchal order’. The bazaar, for such radical denizens, becomes an outer space of socialization where another world is possible.
This vernacular style building in one of the hippest neighbrohoods of Tokyo, Daikanyama is used by the Japanese designer brand Okura. On the right side is the entrance to the very trendy Bombay Bazaar restaurant, serving curry on Japanese rice.
A makeshift bazaar aesthetic is making a comeback in Tokyo’s fashionable neighbourhoods, as exemplified by the Bombay Bazaar in Daikanyama in Tokyo. This restaurant is part of a new group of venues that have adopted a slummy-looking vernacular architecture as a fashion statement. There is no signboard announcing the place, just an old table with empty Coke bottles, a few metal sheets on the walls, and a ‘handicapped’ sign. As is typical of Tokyo, one could never find this venue, unless taken there by someone in the know. Its interior is resolutely bohemian with heteroclite second-hand furniture chosen with taste. A dreadlocked woman eats curry rice in the corner and a French couple drink lassi served by a cute hippieish waitress. In the same building, a store sells casual-chic cloth. Further down an Italian brand tries hard to ‘look ghetto’. 20 metres away, Bonjour records is packed with collectors items and features a deliberately low-key front. Tokyo’s low-rise high-density urban fabric and small-scale architectural structures allow all kinds of independent shops, small-time retail outlets, food joints and bars to flourish.
The bazaar city spreads all over the world, beyond national and cultural boundaries, with its continuous network of streets and shops. There is a fascinating continuum from the streets of Tokyo’s Daikanyama or Shimokitazawa to Ingo’s Saturday Night Flea market in Goa. where a diverse set of ‘global people’ are engaged in trading trinkets, weed-smoking pipes, high-end and low-brow cuisine, wines and local intoxicants, art and fashionable clothes, and shoes, from a thousand tiny stalls made up of bamboo and cloth. This spectacle frames the moment of pure bazaar, simultaneously evoking ancient tribal traditions and futuristic global cosmopolitan fantasies.
Read the full article in the current issue of Art India magazine available in all good bookstores in India, Europe and the US.
Dear all here are some thoughts for you to ponder.
Let me have your reactions.
Aspects of a contemporary programmatics.
Not for some considerable time have architects turned their attentions towards the thorny issues raised by conditions of use. Indeed it must be more than fair to say that for some considerable time, certainly since the late sixties, architects have been driven by issues concerned primarily with conditions of form and of form making. I mean by this that they have concerned themselves with those aspects of architectural production which fall beyond the realm of use, beyond what was referred to by the Modernist faction as function and which in more contemporary circles has now been termed programme.
Since the sixties form and use have been divided. This dividing is not however, a condition of exclusion, such that form has excluded use, but rather a condition of authority, such that form and form making have dominated the intellectual researches of the architectural fringe, retaining issues of use as merely a foil to the primary work.
This shift in the intellectual affections of architects reflected a general intellectual shift in the West away from Materialist instrumentalism towards a new Idealism and to an affection for form, pattern and structure. It brought with it also, a keen interest in diversity and complexity which from the outset had intrigued post-war architects and encouraged the best of them to seek wider anthropologically diverse approaches to conditions of inhabitation and use. The Smithsons, Aldo Van Eyke, Herman Herzberger established a social dimension and a new programmatics in which relevant social patterns could be examined as the basis of a programmatically driven architecture. This nascent social formalism was relatively short lived however, countered at the end of the Sixties by the radical materialism of the Situationist International and its popular re-presentation by Archigramme. The mature and patient research of the Dutch Structuralist school, as it has since been erroneously named, derived in large part from the CIAM tradition, could not be sustained in the face of a single issue architecture. Concerns for complex problems of inhabitation, mass housing and social provision across the social spectrum proved less enticing than concerns for temporaryness or moving architectures which had an immediate popular appeal fed by a spectacular graphic style.
It would not have proved so inimical to the state of architectural programmatics had a single issue formalism retained any political dimension. One harbours a distinct suspicion, however, that most of its appeal derived precisely from this fact. What followed is well documented, and usually in glowing terms, but a comprehensive understanding of precisely how the contemporary city is used, fell short of the Post-modern project in all its guises; Neo-Classical, Neo-Rationalist and Neo-Suprematist. From Ungers to Rossi, from Hadid to Eisenman issues of space were constructed from formal paradigms often collated from separate compositional traditions. Aspects of a socio-political analysis were understood to be of no particular relevance and part of the concerns of a previous generation of architects. The articulation and research of programmatic use found no champions during this period.
Commercial development, on the other hand was quick to claim new programmatic territories and to see the importance and relevance of new data collection techniques in order to improve and expand its business concerns. The hyper-mall and the theme park, a kind of pragmatic topographical demography of retail and leisure consumerism, were established, as the primary shibboleths of late twentieth century development culture, without a hint of prissiness. As workload shifted from commercial office to commercial retail, no corresponding intellectual shift followed it. This shift, either misread or dismissed by the discipline in general was considered irrelevant to its predominantly formal concerns. It remained unexamined by the leading thinkers of the discipline until quite recently and in the absence of any perceived need to articulate the discipline’s contemporary relationship to a changing geo-demography and geo-economy will remain so for the foreseeable future
Las Vegas a venal example.
Las Vegas, perhaps the most unremittingly venal of all cities, due to force of circumstance, has seen fit to comprehensively redevelop its commercial core becoming a leader in this form of development and stands as its primary example of an entirely new and commercially provocative development of architectural production.
Since the fifties fundamental changes have occurred in the marketing of the Vegas casino/hotel to meet this change in demographic patterns. The contraction of the amount individuals are prepared to spend has been associated with a change in the types of visitors themselves. The rise of post-permanent populations , of selective tourist economies, marked the nature of the Vegas economy from the first. Since the fifties however, the expansion of tourism has made a significant impact on the nature of retailing in major population centers. Vegas has witnessed major transformations in its demographic and socio-metric mix of visitors. More families and foreign tourists have ensured that the classic Vegas casino/hotel has moved into new and more adventurous programmatic experiments. Circus Circus extended the classic Vegas programmatic mix. The once detached event, a Cher concert or a Boxing world title for example, was no longer merely contiguous but was now integrated within the gaming plate itself. The event-attractor and the primary programme were now allied for the first time.
Emphasis on geo-demographic and geo-economic data as the foundation for a comprehensive reappraisal of the conditions of urban use can only be broached by architects when they finally deign to accept such data as relevant and present.
The coincidence of architectural theory and Vegas.
Certain developments at the theoretical limits of architectural practice have recently come together. Firstly the wider acceptance of the ideas of Bernard Tschumi, most specifically concerning the reappraisal of an exclusive modernist programmatics, is of primary importance. Tschumi’s investigations into what is widely referred to as ‘cross-programming’, the juxtaposition of otherwise exclusive and antithetical programmes -sky diving in the elevator shaft, roller-skating in the Laundromat- provoked not only a reinvigorated interest in programme, per se, but the idea that distinct programmes might be juxtaposed in the same space rather than exclusively preserved in a cellular arrangement. The notion of a broad floor plate, which juxtaposed different programmatic types without separation, now became possible. Speculation concerning an architecture, which might contain this kind of programmatics, has lead to a number of developments that extend the floor slab as a deep plan facility and to its further development in section as a continuous ramped plate unencumbered by fixed vertical circulation.
The interest of practices such as OMA and MRVDV in this approach stems from a coincidence of these issues and has developed into a full blown topological or landscape paradigm in the work of FOA, Jesse Reiser, Stanley Allen and latterly Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid. What has driven this shift compositionally is a wish to rid the floor plate of all intervening objects, to make of it a flow space constructed from conditions of intra-programmatic flow rather than a space implied by the navigation of fixed objects or ranked cells. Its derivation owes a great deal to the nature of the Vegas casino/hotel and the development of a full-blown event/programme amalgamation. From this perspective architectural planning is no longer concerned with the division of space into discrete and discontinuous entities like eggs in a basket. Rather this space, which we might call field space for the sake of this argument, has a continuous quality subtending flows, thickenings and areas of high density, more like a weather map than a traditional architectural plan.
Additionally field space embraces the homogeneity of globalisation as globalised extension through the figure of the continuous programmable plate. The Vegas casino is its quintessential paradigm. All probable programmes are simultaneously present in one deep space; a field of ubiquitous programmatic inclusions in which everything is simultaneously available on the same surface. The apparent limitlessness of this space, the lack of internal divisions, the remoteness and invisibility of the perimeter container reduces any opportunity to fashion architectural effects to the floor and the ceiling. While the ceiling remains the plane of major spectacle the floor is coded to exaggerate the total spend. In the contemporary Vegas hotel/casino, retail has been comprehensively introduced to the gaming plate. Navigation within the casino floor is now articulated by set piece retail structures offering not only food and refreshment but also branded goods. Within the gaming plate -organised increasingly on a landscape model- the most desirable branded commodities are distributed as brand islands.
The architectural organisation of these spatialities has now passed beyond a familiar Modernist picturesque vocabulary. The organisation of the multi-programmed plate can no longer be achieved by neo-plastic or classical compositional devices, which have concentrated traditionally on the organisation of objects within an undifferentiated field of space. The organisation of objects as programmatic containers and dividers is now redundant. What this new architecture requires is the inversion of the traditional object/field relationship ; moving away from an object-based architecture to one now dominated by field. The organisational vocabulary of architecture is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation. A new one is emerging having forsaken the articulation of ‘objects’ in favour of flows, densities, horizons, territories, concentrations, singularities, attractors and so on, a vocabulary which purposively avoids the discontinuities of an objectness and a containing space.
A Weak Architecture
This re-focusing constructs an architecture of WEAK FORM, precisely a WEAK ARCHITECTURE disinterested in the resisting and closed geometries of the Miesian aesthetic paradigm; an architecture driven by a much more flexible response to programme. Pleural, inclusive, complex and formally pliable, such an approach constructs an architecture based on the needs of a broadening and more variegated social mix and in terms of the conditions of an unprecedented social mobility, which establishes a relevant aesthetic, formulated from these conditions on the basis of an inventive economy and practical execution.
Comment by Kevin Rhowbotham — May 25, 2008 @ 5:09 am
Maybe I’m wrong but Rhowbotham’s musing seems to accredit ‘field organisations with an interest in the social.’WEAK FORM’ (which obviously likes to shout) might create a spatial typology that is ‘plural, inclusive, complex and formally pliable’ but it is misguided to suggest this has any social dimension.
Recent airports display the same kinds of ‘field’ qualities Rhowbotham attributes to casinos but are rather more obviously highly controlled consumption environments. While the ‘field’ might excit in formalistic terms by forsaking the terror of the ‘object’, but make no mistake, its ‘flows, densities, horizons, territories, concentrations etc’ do not escape the tyranny of privatised space, there is no debordian ‘derive’ possible here – only manufactured ‘dwell time’.
Like all the resorts in Vegas are no clocks in Circus Circus – little signage and no views of outdoors – it is instead perpetually ‘casino time’. Our pay off is the fabulous spectacle of ‘the field’ itself, with its rhizomatic planning offering an intoxicating drift through consumption.
Rhowbotham suggests ’such an approach constructs an architecture based on the needs of a broadening and more variegated social mix and in terms of the conditions of an unprecedented social mobility’
Really?
Does the mall-casino-airport model ‘establish a relevant aesthetic’?
Maybe in our moment of post/late/hyper capitalism Rhowbotham is right – but I suspect not for the reasons he wishes – this cannot be a redemptive programme.
Great thinking – but for me the best fields still have grass in them.
Comment by Clive Williams — August 13, 2008 @ 8:17 pm