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.

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.