Digital Modelling for Urban Design

Brian McGrath Brian McGrath A highly topical text book that introduces the powerful technique of digital modelling to a wide audience of students, architects, designers, planners and urban citizens – and anyone else involved in the complex decision-making processes involved in shaping the urban environment. Drawing on two decades of teaching and practising urban design, Brian McGrath explores new theories and technologies of digital modelling to create moving and interactive 3-d drawing situated within the histories of urban theory, design and representation. The book is both theoretical and practical. For the main examples – Rome, New York and Bangkok – McGrath draws on his own experience of living and working in these three cities on three different continents. Analytical discussions of the cities combine historical and abstract knowledge with the ‘ground truth’ of empirical experience. While a rich array of urban studies books have been published over the last thirty years, there is currently no single book like this that brings together urban design theory and new digital technologies in urban information mapping, modelling and 3-d simulation, as a way of understanding how cities transform and differentiate over time. Brian McGrath is Associate Professor of Urban Design at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York. For many years, he also taught urban design at Columbia. He has taught internationally in Taiwan, Denmark, Hong Kong and Thailand, where he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 1998-99. He recently completed a research fellowship at the India China Institute at the New School. McGrath is co-author with Jean Gardner of Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (2007) and co-guest-editor of Sensing the 21st-Century City: Close-Up and Remote (2005), both published by John Wiley & Sons. ‘Brian McGrath is that rare writer and teacher who can portray the complexity of the city without reducing it to simple stereotypes.’ Grahame Shane, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Columbia University. ‘Brian McGrath is an urban inventor who has developed nuanced techniques to approach the impossible complexity of representing the city. This book shares those techniques while also transporting the reader deep into some of the world's most intricate urban fabric.’ Keller Easterling, Associate Professor, Yale School of Architecture. Digital Modeling for Urban Design Academy/Wiley, London 2008 d.4 ]– DIGITAL MODELLING FOR URBAN DESIGN DIGITAL MODELLING FOR URBAN DESIGN Brian McGrath FOR URBAN DESIGN –[ d.5 Table of Contents 8 Prelude Digital Modelling for Urban Design 52 Chapter 1 Archaeology 120 Chapter 3 Genealogy 196 Chapter 5 Schizoanalysis 1985–1995: Transparent Cities Descent and Emergence 1745–1778: A Schizoanalysis of War Flattening Urban Design 1995–2005: An Archaeology of Three Urban Design Genealogies 1978–2008: A Schizoanalysis of Trade 248 Conclusion Modelling Urban Design Futures in India and China Modelling Discourse Globalisation Rome: A Genealogy of the Master Plan 2000–2005: A Schizoanalysis of Desire Liberalisation Development of the Book From Transparent Cities to New York: A Genealogy of the Spectacular Feedback Gentle Arrivals: Fatehpur Sikri Organisation of the Book Archaeological Modelling Central Business District Archaeology and War 1893–1901: Forma Urban Romae The Urban Designer as Genealogy and Trade 1915–1928: The Iconography of Organisation Man Schizoanalysis and Desire Manhattan Island Possible Urban Futures Acknowledgements and West Lake World Financial Capitals: Mumbai Bangkok: A Genealogy of 224 Chapter 6 Desire 1890–1932: The Geo-body of Bangkok Lifestyle Centres Simultopia Migration and Resettlement Assembling New Urban Design Models Bangkok’s CSD Pathumwan Intersection Short- and Long-Term Plans Collateral Space The Dispersal of Power Siam Central Interchange Station Happiness, Harmony and Sufficiency 32 Introduction The Spectacularisation of Urban Design Correlative Space Ground Zero Chitlom Station Timing Attentive Circuits Innovative Design Study 84 Chapter 2 War The Design Exhibition Spectacle 1801–1893: The Emergence of Mapping, Monitoring and Modelling Transit Hub, Memorial Design and Scientific Archaeology Collaborating Freedom Tower 50 BC – AD 203: Modelling the Interfacing Other Representations Spoils of War Diagramming Beyond the Spectacle Urban Design as Triumphal Model Back to Ground Zero 300–1300: The Recycling City Model Urban Design as the Production Churches: The New Urban Artefacts of Difference Preliminary Design Concepts Multiplicities and Seriality Governance: Delhi and Beijing Ratchaprasong Intersection 162 Chapter 4 Trade Complementary Space and Shanghai Complementary Space Virtual Itineraries Gaming Texting 1300–1944: Urban Design as Representation and Destruction The Dispersed City Model Destructions and Dispersals Chapter 1 Archaeology d.6 ]– New York’s early-20th-century industrial landscape was in a state of ruins in the 1980s as the city changed from an industrial to an informational economy. Detail Hudson River piers drawing, pencil on Canson paper, 1988. 54 The floor of the New York Stock Exchange was unusually full of activity over one weekend in 1981. Instead of the frantic shouts and rush of stock traders, brokers and their clerks and regulators that accompanies the normal weekday frenzy on the floor of the ‘Big Board’, this spring weekend saw a rush of movers and construction workers. The old wooden desks, counters and cabinets that filled George B Post’s 14,000-square-foot neoclassical trading room were hurriedly dismantled and dumped outside, along with the litter of left-over paper trails. Suddenly from above, circular UFO-like objects with bright lights underneath were lowered from the 72foot-high ceiling, like a scene from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When the stock traders left work on Friday, they conducted their last trades by paper. When they next arrived on Monday morning they began to trade within a computer network called the Intermarket Trading System (ITS) that linked several major US stock exchanges for the first time in 1978. Post’s 1903 building was designated a National Historic Landmark two months later. By the end of 2006, the New York Stock Exchange had significantly reduced its space for physical trading of stocks and introduced its Hybrid Market for expanded electronic trading traders could now fly through a virtual trading floor, observing trading activity and monitoring the markets in a 3-D modelling environment. The New York Stock Exchange Advanced Trading Floor was designed in 2001 by Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture). I was living in New York in 1981, unaware that the gritty post-industrial city suffering from a severe financial downturn was about to reorganise itself as a global financial hub with the advent of financial deregulation and new computer technologies. ITS ushered in a revolution in global business, and the first years of my professional practice in the early 1980s were dominated by the renovations of corporate interiors to accommodate the computerisation of the workplace. The abandoned industrial places and decaying blue-collar neighbourhoods in Manhattan, such as the waterfront piers, SoHo, the East Village and Chelsea, became a frontier for artists and a new species called ‘yuppies’. Novelist Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, both from 1987, appeared as morality tales of a decade in New York where the deadly sin of greed was hailed as good. Between 1981 and 1985 I worked in New York with Polshek Partnership on many projects fuelled by the massive transformation due to digitalisation of the workplace. However, it was only when I founded my own professional practice, between 1985 and 1990, that I began my own archaeology of urban design . During these five years I lived and worked in both Rome and New York and was able to document and map the massive transformation under way in New York City as part of a larger historical cycle of urban change evident in Rome. I travelled between these two cities at a moment of rupture in the history of globalisation marked by the widespread introduction of personal computers and the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Travelling in China and Eastern Europe too, during this period, instilled in me a great hope for the future. It was an era of great optimism with the end of the Cold War and the promise of new communication technologies. It is in this historical context that I began to assemble an archive of maps, city views and on-the-ground perceptions of Rome and New York which culminated in the publication of Transparent 1 Cities by SITES Books in 1994. 55 Transparent Cities is a boxed archive of acetate plates of maps of Rome and New York which can be overlain in thousands of combinations, SITES Books, 1994. 56 1985–95: Transparent Cities The 24 transparent plates of Transparent Cities record instances of the fluctuations and changes in the spatial and political structure of the urban landscapes of Rome over two millennia and New York over three and a half centuries. Selected information from historical and contemporary maps of both Rome and New York was redrawn at the same scale and reproduced on transparent plates, which can be examined individually or as overlays in any combination or sequence the viewer desires. The project was inspired by Cubist painting and the seminal essay by Robert Slutsky and Colin Rowe on literal and phenomenal transparency in art and 2 architecture. The two cities can be studied diachronically or synchronically, individually or analogously. By manipulating the plates in literally hundreds of possible combinations, the reader may recombine past and present, existing and demolished, seen and hidden. The overlays show plans at street level as well as under and above ground, exploring the city in cross section and in three dimensions. Manipulating the plates introduces the fourth dimension of time. Transparent Cities offers an alternative way of seeing and imagining the city, one that reflects rather than suppresses the dynamic and heterogeneous space Kevin Lynch found missing in contemporary city models and which was so evident in my observations of the changing urban landscape around me. Modelling the city as transparent does not fix one layer or interpretation over another. By not preferring any authoritative map, moment in time or urban idea, the transparencies reveal the coexistence of a multiplicity of spatial ideas within cities. By depicting cities in the process of becoming, rather than in a static, final or fixed state of completion, transparent modelling can be used for understanding and designing the emerging city. It is a tool and methodology that reflects the contemporary city’s impermanence and diversity. The plates of Transparent Cities contain fragmentary and partial tracings from selected archival maps from the rich cartographic histories of Rome and New York. While the plates are literally transparent – reproduced on acetate – transparency is explored more in the sense of Gregory Kepes’s idea of overlapping Cubist space. 57 –[ d.7 National Capital 19th-Century Fabric Rails, Parks and Cemetaries Modern Institutions 20th-Century Fabric Christian Capital Medieval Fabric Disabitato Churches Renaissance and Baroque Streets Imperial Capital Walls and Aqueducts Topography Ancient Monuments Ancient Roads 58 If one sees two or more figures partly overlapping one another, and each of them claims for itself the common, overlapped part, then one is confronted with a contradiction of spatial dimensions. To resolve this contradiction, one must assume the presence of a new optical quality. The figures are endowed with transparency: that is, they are able to interpenetrate without an optical destruction of each other. Transparency, however, implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not 3 only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity. d.8 ]– Matrix of the digital archive and Matrix of the digital archive archaeological analysis of and archaeological analysis Rome’s urban design elements of New York’s urban design from top to bottom: Imperial, elements from top to bottom: Christian and the National Financial, Industrial and Capital. All maps are oriented Mercantile Capitalism, 1996. with north to the top, 1996. Financial Capitalism Subways Zoning Districts High-Rise Office Buildings Highways and Urban Renewal 59 Industrial Capitalism Early Grids 1811 Grid Landmarks, Parks and Bridges Piers, Ferries and Railroads Mercantile Capitalism New Amsterdam Topography Farms British Army Headquarters By overlaying transparent maps of Rome, the ruptures and discontinuities in the landscapes, institutions and spatial practices of the Imperial, Christian and National Capitals can be mapped as marked by different regimes of power in different ways during different eras. In New York, the city is not a political capital, and its space is more the result of the ‘creative’ destruction of capitalist development and fuelled by ideas of progress and modernity. According to Marshall Berman, capitalism and modernity are always marked by the search for continuity in a landscape of constant 4 upheaval. An overlay of maps reveals the transformation to the logics of Mercantile, Industrial and Financial Capital. New York City’s economic cycles of boom and bust demonstrate the creative destruction of capitalism as notions of progress and modernity continually push spatial transformations according to new social, political and technological conditions. In 1985 I also started to teach architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Students accompanied me to Rome during the summer, sketching in the field, and working on urban architectural design projects in the New York area. We worked with the organisation Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility in the spring semester of 1990, on an urban design project for resolving the conflict between housing and community garden advocates in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The studio used the transparent modelling method, the lessons of the spatial palimpsest of Rome and a collaborative working technique to develop a project where a rapidly changing New York 5 neighbourhood could have both houses and gardens. –[ d.9 Digital model of Baroque over Imperial Rome showing the shift of the centre of the city from the twin peaks of the Capitoline Hill seen in the centre of the map to the trident of Piazza del Popolo to the north and the Vatican enclave to the north-east. 64 1893–1901: Forma Urbis Romae Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929) was the chief archaeologist of Rome, who excavated many monuments of the Forum, including the House of Vestals. His monumental atlas, Forma Urbis Romae (1893–1901) mapped four million square metres of the unearthed ancient city, previously unknown, on 46 plates at 1:1000 12 scale. Not just a resource for the study of the ancient city, it was meant to be used as a basis for the organisation of modern development and a blueprint for new construction. The vast amount of new knowledge and physical remains of antiquity uncovered in the wake of rapid redevelopment and modernisation of the city prompted Lanciani to promote his atlas as an archaeological urban design model for the new Rome. Lanciani’s atlas distinguishes ruptures or moments of epochal change in the history of the city with three colours: the Imperial City until the fall of the empire is in black, the papal city until the 1870 liberation of Rome in red, and the expansion and redevelopment schemes of Lanciani’s own time – the emerging National Capital in blue. For us we will refer to the three disjunctive periods in Rome’s history as the Imperial Capital, Christian Capital and National Capital. However, Rome’s Definitive Regulatory Plan of June 1871 called for two new boulevards: Via Nazionale near the new train terminal and Via Cavour near the Vatican which disregarded Lanciani’s discoveries and recommendations. Developers from northern Italy, England, Germany and Austria quickly constructed new neighbourhoods in these areas. The design competition for the nationalist monument to Vittorio Emanuele II which now towers over and turning its back on the Imperial Fora was held in 1884. Between 1870 and 1885 – the first 15 years Rome served as national capital – 1150 acres were developed, 140 kilometres of new roads were constructed, new neighbourhoods containing 95,000 new rooms in 3000 new buildings were built, and 81 million cubic metres of dirt excavated. As a consequence many antiquities and much new scholarship came to light along with four square kilometres of the ancient city. Lanciani conceived of his map as a guide to builders who needed to record the superimposition of previous buildings to act like a geological map – the soil of Rome is the soil of 13 archaeology. For Lanciani, nothing was more banal and disharmonious than the new quarters that replaced the ancient villas of the disabitato as the population doubled in 15 years due to frenzied real-estate speculation. Lanciani blames Rome’s aristocracy for selling the old estates: ‘To our great names our misfortune … a disgraced race discovered they could make a little of 14 what their ancestors had built and maintained.’ Everyone joined a race to destroy the quickest. The atlas, intended to be used as instrument of conscience for democratic dialogue, failed, for ‘ignorance is great ally of 15 controlling power and land owners’. 65 Model of the new Model of 20th-century neighbourhoods which developments over the Imperial developed after 1871 City no longer contained by the beyond the medieval city, yet Aurelian Walls. mostly within the 3rd-century Aurelian Walls. 66 d.10 ]– 67 78 18th-c. key in Italian 8th-c. inscription in Latin 8th-c. figures carved in stone 16th-c. figures atop Farnese Villa gate 18th-c. figures drawn by Piranesi 18th-c. figures etched in copper Piranesi’s etchings of the Roman Forum (1760). Fragments of ancient ruins are juxtaposed with Renaissance landmarks and scenes from everyday life. The triumphal Arch of Titus is in the foreground to the right, while the grand entry to the Farnese Orchards can be seen to the left. Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III (1468–1549) built the gardens on top of the Palatine Assembling New Urban Design Models Deleuze outlines three different spatial realms which encircle any archaeological statement in Foucault’s writing. In digital modelling for urban design, these imply different ways in which urban design is practised through the interaction of actors in specific environments involved in what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘the social 25 production of locality’. Locus does not just emanate from the ‘genus’ of a place, as suggested by Christian NorbergSchulz and Aldo Rossi (see the following chapter), but from the continuous work of social actors. Similarly, mapping is not the literal act of colonial surveying that Thongchai has critiqued in Thailand, but is much more strategic. There must be a careful analysis and critical positioning of urban design practice within different kinds of spatial and representational production. We will conclude this chapter on archaeology by considering three types of space which can be generated from the ruptures in our digital archives. Rather than through the seduction of walk-through simulation discussed in the Introduction, archaeological digital modelling can result in more critical urban design practices. New forms of archaeological modelling can focus on the disruptive nature of urban design as a tool to locate interventions within and between the disjunctive global flows which mark the contemporary city. The three kinds of space that can be generated between the layers of digital archaeological models are collateral, correlative and complementary space. Collateral Space Collateral space is ‘an associate or adjacent domain formed from other statements that are part of the same 26 group’. Grahame Shane has called such spatial formation the creation of urban enclaves, bounded areas which comprise special districts based on a common collective imagination of a civic body or group of urban 27 citizens. Collateral space defines the group and the group defines the space and must necessarily exclude others outside the boundary of the enclave. Ordering and coding through spatial position, time and significance is important in the collateral space of enclaves. This is how urban design becomes a statement of the power of a certain group’s discourse – it moves from description of a cultural norm to the prescription of a bounded spatial logic. This book will compare models of the collateral space created in three specific urban localities: the Roman Forum (Chapter 2), Manhattan’s skyscraper business districts (Chapter 4), and Bangkok’sCentral Shopping District (Chapter 6). For digital modelling for urban design, collateral space introduces the construction of digital archives to carefully analyse new construction in relation to existing built or natural conditions, in order to examine what in war is called collateral damage – the unintended consequences of military action. 79 Hill to legitimise his authority and the Church’s through its collateral relation to the monuments of the Forum. Compare this view with Piranesi’s second etching of the Arch analysed in Chapter 5. Renaissance and Baroque construction exerted collateral damage as well; the Forum became a marble quarry for the new landmarks of the city. 90 According to James Packer, the scientific discipline of archaeology in Rome grew out of the desire to consecrate contemporary power through a direct connection to 4 history. Packer acknowledges that the contemporary appearance of Rome’s monuments as isolated and preserved fragments of antiquity is ‘… a comparatively recent phenomenon, an effect of the first tentative 5 “scientific” excavations of the early 19th century’. Just two hundred years before the rushed efforts to excavate the ruins of the remains of the World Trade Center, archaeologists began the slow, painstaking process of removing centuries of rubble, fill and debris from the Roman Forum, thereby dissecting and diluting the collapsed collateral space of Christian and Pagan Rome. Archaeology as a scientific field of knowledge begins with the earliest efforts to clean and restore the relics of Roman antiquity in 1801, when Pope Pius VII commissioned Carlo Fea and Antonio Canova to inspect and maintain the ruins of antiquity. This new practice introduced by the papacy was later inherited by secular political figures from Italy and around Europe looking to legitimise their political authority. Shortly after Pius’s first archaeological efforts, French troops invaded Rome and Napoleon annexed the city in 1809. Napoleon, eager to associate his new empire with that of Rome, allocated huge funds for the excavation and repair of antiquities in 6 the ‘free and imperial city’ of Rome, but much of the portable remains were looted and, together with the spoils from the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, embellished the ‘Musée Napoléon’ at the Louvre in Paris. The first archaeological digs in 91 the first decades of the 19th century began to uncover small areas around Trajan’s Column and some monuments in the Forum such as the Arch of Septimius Severus (excavations shown in red). –[ d.11 92 94 d.12 ]– Aldo Rossi quotes the Comte De Tournon’s programme for restoration work in the Roman Forum undertaken during Napoleon I’s occupation. ‘The restoration of these monuments consists above all in freeing them from the earth that covers their lower parts, connecting them to one another, and finally rendering 7 access easy and pleasurable.’ Rossi focuses on the activity of embellishment rather than the looting of the Forum to assert the fundamental role of situated urban artefacts in creating the architecture of the city based on urban locus rather than relational context. However, Napoleon I’s wartime looting and Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s creation of triumphal monuments in Paris point to an architecture not based on the situated collateral space locus, but on appropriation and the correlative space of linkage – physically between modern monuments and by association with their historical antecedents, and the creation of mass urban spectacles such as grand parades and international exhibitions. The re-imagination of ‘Roma Capitale’ was behind the vast demolitions of the Fascist regime between 1932 and 1943. On 21 April 1924, Mussolini outlined his plans to modernise the capital and to ‘liberate the antiquities’ from the ‘unsightly’ medieval fabric. In October 1932, the Via dei Imperiali, now called the Via dei Fori Imperiali, was inaugurated. By 1978 pollution and car vibrations had taken their toll even on the protected areas of the vast archaeological park in the centre of the city. A project, yet to be realised, was inaugurated to close the Via dei Fori Imperiali and remove Via Consolazione in 1980. This slow progress in reclaiming the space of archaeology from Mussolini’s modern city of the car is now accompanied by the continued progress on Rome’s underground metropolitan transit system. After 1814, the papacy continued excavations and restorations on their own, including the reconstruction of the Arch of Titus, the east gate to the Forum. However, Rome changed very little until 2 October 1870, when the newly formed Italian state inherited a provincial city from the popes. After that date, archaeology in Rome – the capital of the new Republic of Italy – became a politically charged urban problem tied to discourses on national identity and urban redevelopment. Archaeology became a critical political instrument as well as a physical impediment in ‘the massive building campaigns which transformed Rome from a sleepy papal town into a 8 bustling late nineteenth century metropolis’. In 1870, Rome became the 93 National Capital of Italy. Archaeological excavations went hand in hand with new road construction and expansion of the city. In this view we can see the excavations of the Republican Forum, which uprooted the centuries-old trees that bisected the Forum. In 1932, Mussolini inaugurated the Via dei Imperiali, connecting his headquarters at Palazzo Venezia to the Coliseum and beyond. The medieval fabric was demolished to make way for his tree-lined boulevard. 95 Physical model showing the embedded layers of the Basilica of San Clemente, an 11th-century church built within the shrunken footprint of an 8th-century church, which itself was built on top of the house of Roman Consul and martyr Titus Flavius Clemens (1990). 108 The great shift in the centre of Rome from the Forum to the bend of the Tiber River followed the siege of AD 537–8 when the aqueducts were cut during the Gothic War, resulting in the abandonment of the great baths, and the drying of the fountains and reservoirs. Although the Tiber periodically flooded this area, the reduced population relied on the lifeline of the river for provisions – agricultural 20 products, floating flour mills, fish and water supply. In medieval Rome, the hills no longer counted, except where they carried outlying clusters – on the Caelian, the Esquiline, and the Aventine. The abitato moved into the unhealthy low land, the città bassa near the river, (over the ruins of) the ancient show area (the military Campus Martius or Field of Mars dedicated to the god of war). Ancient Rome had grown from the settlements on its hills and it remained centered on the Forum, the Capitoline, and the Palatine. Medieval Rome was 21 anchored to the Tiber. The growth and importance of the suburb at that time was probably tied to the Frangipani’s occupation of the Coliseum, [sic] the slope of the Palatine, since the late eleventh century. Around the church of S. Maria Nova the cluster of housing swelled and extended both in front of the church and southward up the slope of the Palatine along a path ascending to the church of S. Maria in Pallara, now S. Sebastiano alla Polveriera. Two streets, one across the Roman Forums and another passing by the Imperial Fora, linked the area to the edge of the abitato along the north cliff of the Capitoline Hill and on the south stretch of the 25 Corso. Access [to this suburb] was defended by a tower built against the Arch of Titus, known as the turris cartulari.26 Higher quarters of the city suffered the most; the hills were abandoned and the Campus Martius at the bend of the Tiber became the only place in the city with a ready water supply until Pope Sixtus V built the Acqua Felice aqueduct in 1587. The infrastructure to supply water for a large population was no longer adequate after the 22 6th century. Spreading east behind the Capitoline Hill was the disabitato – the vast uninhabited part of the medieval city contained within the ancient Aurelian Walls. The Forum became a threshold and crossroads between the inhabited and uninhabited areas of the city. In AD 608, the last monument was erected in the Forum – the Column of Phocas – and by the end of the 7th century, ‘A worshiper raising his eyes toward the apse of the Church of SS Cosmos and Camarius could behold at the same time the great mosaic figure of the Saviour and a group 23 of the twin founders of the city sucking the wolf’. In AD 630, Pope Honorius I removed the gilt-bronze tiles from the Temple of Venus and Rome at the Forum and in AD 663 Emperor Costante II removed bronze tiles from the 24 Pantheon for the roof of St Peter’s, according to Lanciani. From the 9th century on, the east end of the Forum around the location of the Arch of Titus became a fortified suburb close to the abitato – the compact inhabited quarter of the city at the bend in the Tiber River. Centered on the church of S Maria Nova, built around 855 atop the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome, Richard Krautheimer discovers from 10th-century leases, houses and workspaces for coppersmiths, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, cobblers, masons, and many lime burners – given the abundance of marble from the Forum’s ruins. There was even a ‘banker’s crossroads’ near the Coliseum serving pilgrims on their way from the abitato to the Lateran. 109 Krautheimer’s research reveals much of the social activity of the Forum during the Middle Ages: the lime burners and craftsmen intersecting with the clerics, travellers and pilgrims at this crossroads between the inhabited and uninhabited parts of the city. Churches: The New Urban Artefacts Christianity was born at the periphery of the Roman Empire in the province of Judea, and slowly occupied peripheral places in the Imperial city of Rome. While Constantine (272–337), the first Christian Emperor, built large Roman-style basilicas in four opposite corners outside the city at St Peter’s, Santa Maria Maggiore, St John’s in the Lateran and St Paul outside the Walls, most early churches occupied ordinary houses in the city. The architecture of these churches reflects the vicissitudes endured by the city itself. A short circuit around the periphery of the Forum still reveals the character of these buildings as artefacts of the medieval city. Sectional drawing showing the layers of the Basilica of San Clemente. The 11th-century nave and one side aisle fit within the width of the 8th-century nave and the courtyard of the Roman house (1989). 110 San Clemente is entered from the side door off the road to the Lateran. A few stairs descend into the side of a dark basilica. The proportions seem strange, but the top of a column and archway poke out of the floor of the far wall, giving an indication of something below. Fortunately a door in this wall leads to a small office where a friendly monk indicates a stair leading down. Below the floor of the church is another basilica, wider than the one above. The space is a strange amalgamation of columns from the earlier basilica and foundations for the new walls and columns above. There are two semicircular apses as well, and you can squeeze between the curving walls, like through a Richard Serra sculpture, and find yet another stair down. This subterranean level is the Roman house in which the church was first inaugurated as a titular church in the 4th century. Towering on a hill over both San Clemente and the Coliseum is the church and convent dedicated to the four crowned saints. The complex still has the aspect of a fortified retreat outside the city. A brick tower looms over the huge doors of the front gate which leads to a square atrium. A small window on the side is open, and a nun agrees to open the next set of doors which leads to a second courtyard. The side walls of this courtyard contain a colonnade of an earlier church and a third doorway leads to the basilica itself. It is a shallow, tall space with an enormous apse. Both San Clemente and Santi Quattro Coronati were splendidly rebuilt in the 12th century within the larger ruins of 4th-century basilicas. While San Clemente shrank and reorganised five metres above the earlier church, the church of the four crowned saints shrank laterally within its older shell. 111 –[ d.13 112 1300–1944: Urban Design as Representation and Destruction The rusticated Renaissance retaining wall of the Orti Farnesiani leads to a suburban retreat built by Alessandro Farnese on the top of the Palatine hill within the ruins of Augustus’s former palace. The first botanical orchards of the world, the Farnesiani Orchards were designed in 1535 by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola. The 15th century brought a renewed interest in the antiquities of Rome through the activity of both aristocratic families and foreign visitors documenting its ancient artefacts and disseminating visual representations and material fragments from Rome around Europe. 134 d.14 ]– The red tone indicates the disabitato, the uninhabited part of the city consisting of isolated farms, monasteries and convents, including the Papal enclave at the Lateran. Three Urban Design Genealogies Genealogical Modelling for Urban Design begins with an analysis of temporal planes in order to understand the descent and emergence of urban design practices in different places at different moments of time. Our genealogical time planes will form the basis of creating new digital models in which layered spatial and temporal information can be cross-referenced. We begin with a simple comparison of three genealogies of urban design: Rome and the Master Plan, New York and the Central Business District, and lastly Bangkok and Life-style. Eugene Holland has written: ‘Genealogy is based on the premise that historical institutions and other features of social organization evolve not smoothly and continuously, gradually developing their potential through time, but discontinuously, and must be understood in terms of difference rather than continuity as one social formation appropriates and abruptly reconfigures older institution or revives various features of extant social organization by selectively recombining them to suit its 17 own purposes.’ The Forum underwent a major facelift during the papacy of Alexander VII between 1655 and 1667. In its ruined state it had been mostly used as pasture land for sheep and cows, and even served as a bi-weekly cattle 27 market. Alexander moved the market, levelled the surface and planted four rows of trees serving as a wide carriageway with two shaded sidewalks. This beautification and greening programme provided the elegant travellers between city and suburbs with a shaded promenade for their coaches, and common folk on foot could take in the cool evening air. ‘Thus the Forum not only regained dignity but also became a suburban 28 public green, part of the town, yet reaching out.’ Archaeological model showing the Christian churches built above the Fora over the garbage and landfill that began to accumulate following the termination of municipal services in the 4th century. The goal of the genealogical technique of constructing temporal planes, therefore, is to understand the 18 production of urban difference over time. Cities evolve through continual change. The production of difference is the result of the exertion of various external and internal forces: natural, environmental, political, social, economic and psychological. The production of difference, the result of emergent and self-organising principles, must be strategically supported, sorted and redirected rather than suppressed, separated and controlled through the practice of urban design. Digital genealogical modelling for urban design will give us a new understanding of these multiple forces and how they are continually reshaping urban environments, social space and individual psyches. 113 Exploding our archaeological models of the Forum on time planes reveals two distinct construction periods: the Papal and Imperial Capitals, interrupted by a millennium of retrenchment. Rome: A Genealogy of the Master Plan According to Sigfried Giedion, Sixtus V climbed the same streets of Rome that the pilgrims had to follow. This bodily experience of distance and topography led, for Giedion, not only to a physical destination but to the conception of a plan for the city that was not drawn on paper, but within the bones of the pope himself. In March 1588, he opened the new road by walking with his cardinals all the way from the Coliseum to the Lateran 19 Palace. Many modern architects and planners in America drew inspiration from Giedion at Harvard, as a means to heroically justify the will of a single individual in shaping the city, and it is therefore following Sixtus V up the hills of Rome that we can trace the birth of the Master Plan in urban design. In Design of Cities (1976) and the series of documentary films Understanding Cities, Edmund Bacon (1910–2005) makes the claim that a single powerful idea can create an urban design. Clips from his films show his accomplishments as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (1949–70) in relation to the development of Rome under Sixtus V. He in fact shows a younger avatar of himself wilfully walking through a gushing fountain to maintain the singularity of his destination along the central axis of Benjamin Franklin Parkway. His book begins with a quote from Daniel Burnham, ‘… a noble logical diagram once recorded will never die; long after we are gone it will be a living 20 thing asserting itself with ever-growing insistency’. 135 –[ d.15 Chapter 3 Genealogy Online fly-through of Manhattan Timeformations, www.skyscraper.org/timefor mations (2000). 122 The fly-through animation glides up Broadway from Lower to Midtown Manhattan. The ‘canyon of heroes’ of the financial district is familiar, with the Art Deco towers of Wall Street looming on the skyline. However, the buildings do not sit on the ground, but are floating in an empty void, with the ground of the island of Manhattan deep below. The on-line view travels along a temporal plane – 1950 – within a 3-D computer model where time is literally given a dimension. In the x/y/z Cartesian space of a 3-D modelling environment, time is here measured along the z-axis where one year equals 100 feet. Post-Second World War glass towers loom overhead, while the Art Deco limestone spires of Wall Street emerge from below. The fly-through not only travels through space up Broadway, but along a temporal plane within the gap in construction between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the post-war 1 building boom which began in the 1960s. Graph of the number of high-rise office buildings constructed in Manhattan between 1890 and 1990. The lower line is Lower Manhattan, the middle line is Midtown Manhattan and the top line is the total number. Three economic peaks are evident – the stock market boom in the late 1920s, the postwar boom in New York as a corporate headquarters peaking in the late 1960s and the ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ that followed the computerisation of the workplace in the 1980s. Two valleys of economic busts are also evident: the long lull from the Great Depression in 1929 to the end of the Second World War and the precipitous decline during the oil shock of the mid-1970s (hand drawing, 1994). d.16 ]– The transition from an archaeological to a genealogical modelling moves from an understanding of the discipline of urban design as a situated subject of historical knowledge, towards understanding the generation of urban design practice in relation to a larger discursive field within which urban actors and agents 2 constitute themselves as subjects interacting in space. In the last chapters of this book, Schizoanalytical Modelling for Urban Design, we will learn to imagine urban designs in relation to internal, psychological forces as well as outside social and environmental conditions. Schizoanalysis will help us to understand how urban subjects constitute themselves as social agents – in other words, how we see and perceive ourselves in relation to others in a mediated, urbanising and globalising world. 123 The first construction boom in 3-D models of high-rise office Midtown Manhattan was buildings built before the scattered along Broadway Second World War in and travelled up 5th Avenue. Midtown. Buildings in yellow Cross-town armatures were were built before the 1916 developing already along set-back law. 42nd and 57th Streets. 124 Foucault traces his development of a genealogical approach to Darwin’s influence on Nietzsche: we must understand our place in an external world structured by 3 chance, accident and succession. Genealogical Modelling for Urban Design will not employ genealogy as lines of family descent, but in the sense Foucault employs – as a way to map the emergence of spatial patterns in time. The genealogical approach examines urban design deploying different models, technologies and tools distributed in space, ordered in time and composed in space-time. We will now examine the city as shaped by the constant exertion and resistance of force by urban actors and agents relating to linkages and relations of people, institutions and flows across space and time, which encompass global as well as local imaginations. We have seen how urban design distributes forces in space by enclosing, controlling, arranging and placing in series. Now we will examine how urban design orders time by subdividing temporal increments, programming action, and directing gestures of everyday life. Finally, in the last section we will examine urban design composition as 4 experienced in space-time blocks. 125 How have the Central Business Districts of Lower and Midtown Manhattan emerged over time? Manhattan Timeformations is a genealogical modelling of urban design as a bureaucratic rather than master planning discipline. 132 Emergence, for Foucault, is ‘the moment of arising. It stands as the principle and the singular law of an apparition. As it is wrong to search for descent in an uninterrupted continuity, we should avoid thinking of emergence as the final term of a historical development. … Emergence is always produced through the generation of forces and the analysis of emergence “must delineate this interaction, the struggle these forces wage against 13 each other or against adverse circumstances”.’ For Shane, heterotopias are the elements of change in the city. They house all exceptions in the dominant city model, and are therefore key triggers to the emergence 14 of new urban design models. The aim of an analysis of emergence is to capture 15 forces at the moment of their eruption. Urban design must be analysed as a destructive as well as constructive force which radically alters environmental and social relations. Genealogical modelling will examine descent and emergence in the sometimes bloody succession of emperors and popes in Rome or kings in Siam, but also in the ‘creative destruction’ of the capitalist city struggling with the contesting agendas of different urban actors in 16 participatory democracies. We can also translate the emergence of new urban design models as a struggle or conflict between spatial entrenched norms and new technologies, flows and images. Emergence is analysed in relation to larger environmental forces, in localised social interactions with others and in our internalised battles with ourselves. 133 –[ d.17 Manhattan Timeformations timeline looking west, showing Lower Manhattan on the left and Midtown on the right. The timeline divides into three building booms: pre- and post-Second World War periods, and one following the introduction of electronic trading in the 1980s. We will look at three zoning laws that shaped the skyline during those building booms: the 1916 Set Back Law, the 1961 Plaza Bonus and the 1982 Special Midtown District. 142 New York: A Genealogy of the Central Business District In spite of periodic calls for Master Planning, New York City directs urban design decisions through zoning rather than through a Master Plan. The instrument of zoning was instituted with the Zoning Resolution of 1916 in reaction to both the growth of manufacturing uses in residential areas and the arrival of the skyscraper. Land-use restrictions were instituted separating manufacturing from commercial and residential use, and set-back laws required high rises to step back according to a prescribed sky plane angle to allow light to hit the streets of the city. The zoning resolution has been constantly amended, but it was only in 1961, with the radical changes that suburbanisation and the automobile brought to the city, that a complete revision was enacted. The Zoning Resolution of 1961 ‘coordinated use and bulk regulations, incorporated parking requirements and 29 emphasized the creation of open space’. The other invention of this period is incentive zoning giving added floor space to encourage the construction of public plazas. Politically contested, the zoning resolution was passed only when an agreement was made to down-zone much of the outer boroughs of the city and concentrate density in Manhattan. 143 1916 Set Back Law legislated that all buildings must step back behind a sky plane to allow light to the streets. Before the law, buildings could rise straight from the sidewalk. The law dictated the slender towers that made Manhattan’s skyline famous. 144 d.18 ]– A timeline of the descent and emergence of Manhattan’s two high-rise business districts – Lower and Midtown Manhattan – reveals the boom-and-bust cycles of the real estate market, but also the way architecture, technology, planning and urban design respond to the rhythms of capitalism. After steel-frame construction and the elevator were introduced in the late 19th century, the new form of high-rise office buildings emerged along Broadway – the main commercial thoroughfare of the 30 city. The boom of construction and the shock of the effect of these new structures which rose to unlimited height up from the canyon-like narrow streets of the city, resulted in the creation of the first New York City Zoning Resolution of 1916, which dictated an inclined sky-plane, behind which all building must be set back. This new bureaucratic regulation was an exertion of governmental authority towards an assumed public good: the availability of sunlight and fresh air on the streets of the city. The zoning resolution was well timed, because a building boom ensued with the rise of the stock market of the ‘roaring ’20s’. The towering new stone ziggurats grouped along Wall Street and contained within the old Dutch walled city of the 1630s, marked the first clustering of these new buildings in a distinct enclave and imprinted a new image of the modern city on the public’s consciousness. The image of the skyline of Lower Manhattan, featured in countless photographs and movies, as we have seen, was the one representational trope that all the schemes for the redesign of Ground Zero repeated. The effects of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression ended this construction boom. The Great Depression was followed by the Second World War, and high-rise office building construction in New York did not resume until the 1950s. Although the pre-war building codes and zoning resolution persisted, new technologies – such as light steel framing, glass curtain walls and air conditioning – produced strange hybrid architecture of new construction technologies and old zoning laws distinctive to Manhattan: the glass wedding cake. Some exceptional architects and corporate clients broke the mould of this awkward crossbreeding of pre-war urban planning regulations and the goals of modern architecture. Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House (1952) and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building (1958) both created privately owned, yet publicly accessible plazas and simple cubic building forms to build a purer expression of modern architecture within 31 the zoning regulations. 145 New York: Here and Now, New York: Here and Now, sequence 1 depicts a time lapse digital installation at the World view of the growth of the Lower Financial Center, 2002. Manhattan Financial District showing the successive landfill, infrastructure and skyscraper construction as a layered map. The pace of the animation adjusts to the speeds of various periods of time. 1978–2008: A Schizoanalysis of Trade Seven months prior to the opening of the mass spectacle of the Innovative Design Study, nine artists were invited by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the World Financial Center Arts & Events Program to participate in an Artist Residency at the World Financial Center. This residency was part of the process of restoration and reoccupation of Lower Manhattan which culminated in the reopening of the Winter Garden with an exhibition of the art works, developed during the residency, in September 2002 at the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. My own digital installation New York: Here and Now in the upper level of the Winter Garden looking over both the void of Ground Zero and down across the new giant palm trees towards the Hudson River, provides the basis for an argument about the rich potential of digital technologies in supporting a polyvocal urban design practice. Battery Park City (BPC) was constructed on landfill at the mouth of the Hudson River estuary on earth excavated for the basement parking levels of the World Trade Center. Ground Zero straddles three rail transit lines and sits within a concrete bathtub holding back the Hudson River estuary and the landfill under BPC. As soon as emergency efforts were completed, and the red-zone that police established around Lower Manhattan was slowly reduced to the immediate perimeter of Ground Zero, visitors began arriving to visit the site as if participating in a sacred pilgrimage. The images of the towers’ collapse were broadcast and mediated repeatedly into a global collective consciousness. Millions of tourists, visitors and mourners still circle the site’s perimeter, attentive to every minor change in this large hole despite efforts to screen most direct views of the site. 214 215 The installation was shown on a horizontally displayed plasma screen within an elliptical Plexiglas frame encouraging viewers to orbit the animation. In sequence 2, the layered plan view rotates to reveal a timeline of the Lower Manhattan skyline. 216 BPC’s Winter Garden is a huge glass-roofed room dominated by a grove of giant palm trees. Windows overlook the Hudson River to the west, and, from a second-level mezzanine, Ground Zero to the east. The digital animation New York: Here and Now was displayed horizontally on a flat plasma screen surrounded by an elliptical transparent frame. The colour of the frame and the background of the animation were Caribbean blue – a nod to the giant palms and climate change predictions. The installation was visible during the exhibition of the Innovative Design Studies, and offered a hypnotic space of reflection and relief from the grand designs and virtual simulations offered below. The intention of the installation was not just to provide thoughtful art for the thousands of visitors who now included the Winter Garden and World Financial Center as part of their promenade around Ground Zero, but also to create a contemplative moment in the working day of the thousands of employees who witnessed the events of September 11 and had only recently returned to their offices at the site of horrific trauma. From a distance the plasma screen table looks like a blue reflecting pool with small colourful tropical fish swimming across the screen with the giant palm trees in the background. An approaching viewer discovers that the screen in fact is displaying a map of Lower Manhattan animated with layers to illustrate the development of the Financial District over time. When finished loading, the layered map rotates to reveal 3-D models of Lower Manhattan’s high-rise office buildings arrayed along vertical time planes. The tropical fish are in fact miniature skyscrapers moving across the screen. The rotation completes a 360-degree loop revealing the history and geology of the area from above and below. The view from below is washed by the Hudson River Estuary in which all these monumental yet fragile buildings submerge, float and then fly. 217 –[ d.19 218 d.20 ]– In sequence 3, the timeline flips to a view from below the model, as if one were going underwater. While the first sequence showed the successive landfills in Lower Manhattan, this sequence suggests a water-submerged future for the island. The installation refers to navigational maps of the world’s oceans which are incised into the marble floor of the Burgerzaal in Amsterdam. This hall was the meeting place of the first modern-world capitalists, where they could discuss financial deals and shipping routes while walking on the giant map of the globe and pinpoint locations of the East and West Indies Corporations’ outposts. Similarly, in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, the employees of Merrill Lynch and American Express would have the orbit of their usual trajectories through the commercial complex of the World Financial Center diverted by the gravitational pull of the elliptical disc. For a moment in their working day, financiers can engage in this illusive and hypnotic work as a moment of reflection of their place among other participants in recreating Lower Manhattan as a world financial centre, and over time grow to understand its reference to the concrete-lined void in the city just outside the installation. For the ellipse also directs views to the giant windows overlooking Ground Zero, and creates a larger context for the discussions of rebuilding on the site. In addition to all the actors who have already played a part in the discussion – the families of the victims, the Port Authority, Silverstein Properties, the architects and the neighbourhood – the installation also shows the Hudson estuary and New York Bay as a major actor on the site, given sea-level rise and the predictions of flooding from storm surge in the near future. From the opening in September 2002 to the end of January 2003, all the art works engaged issues of public space, viewing, nature, ruin, renewal, memory and life. New York: Here and Now served as a modest orientation device overlooking the open wound of Ground Zero, as witness not only to the reopening of this vital node of New York’s financial industry, but also to the dawn of a new era for urban design. As introduced in the Prelude, the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) promotes a digital cultural resistance to authoritarian cultural production. Combining Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and Claude Shannon’s invention enabling the transmission of digitally coded information over wires at Bell Labs, recombinant theatre and digital resistance utilise advances in molecular biology and communication technology not as specialised knowledge, but as the ‘foundation of a new cosmology – a new way of understanding, ordering, valuing and performing in the 23 world’. Was Piranesi’s recombination of experiences and drawings from the Forum, in etchings distributed around the world, not a form of recombinant theatre and mechanically reproduced resistance through the technology of print? Capitalism is primarily a digital political-economy, much as the medieval economy was primarily analogic. Digital aesthetics, for CAE, ‘is a process of copying – a process that offers dominant culture minimal material for recuperation by recycling the same images, actions and sounds into 24 radical discourse’. 219 –[ d.21 Chapter 5 Schizoanalysis Twin escalators ascend to the mezzanine level of Siam Central Interchange Station of the Bangkok Transit System (BTS) Skytrain. A bridge leads directly from the station to Siam Center, to the left. 198 d.22 ]– The twin escalators glide silently up from opposite sides of King Rama I Road, rising three storeys to the passenger mezzanine of the Siam Central Interchange Station where the two lines of the Bangkok Transit Systems (BTS) Skytrain meet. The escalators bring passengers up from the hot and crowded street, under the massive concrete viaduct where the lines torque, to converge two levels above. Arriving at the crowded mezzanine before the electronic entry, there is a profusion of small shops and advertisements. A call on your cell phone tells you that your friends are waiting by the fountain in the square in front of Siam Paragon. Descending half a flight of stairs leads you through the giant glass wall of Siam Center, where your bags are checked by security guards. Another stair to the right leads down again to the second-level plaza of Paragon. The crowd has swelled in anticipation of the grand opening of Siam Paragon. A rock band is performing in front of the giant glimmering blue aluminium Christmas tree sponsored by Visa cards. Cell phones are recording digital photographs of the event broadcast live on TV. Grand openings of new or renovated malls in Bangkok are usually timed for the beginning of December when the King’s birthday can be honoured and the stores readied for Christmas and New Year holidays. February brings sale banners emblazoned in red to celebrate both the lunar Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day. April brings Songkran, the Thai New Year timed with the beginning of the rainy season. The rains stop in October, when the Queen’s birthday can be celebrated, and in November small votive boats made from banana leaves and containing offerings and a candle are floated downstream at Loy Krathong. While Bangkok ignored decades of calls for a Master Plan, and has yet to create a Central Business District, in the decade following the 1997 economic crisis a Central Shopping District emerged along the two-kilometre stretch of Rama I Road under the BTS interchange. Bangkok residents were amazed at the cosmopolitan space created around the privately owned public spaces on Crown Bureau and Chulalongkorn University property. While we have traced the genealogy of the Master Plan to Pope Sixtus V’s Rome, and the zoning of the Central Business Districts in Manhattan, as well as the emergence of the central shopping district of Bangkok, in this final section on Schizoanalytical Modelling for Urban Design we will look at the immersive space of each city's time geography. Schizoanalysis, while initially a difficult term in relation to its reference to the psychological ailment of schizophrenia, is in fact a call for a more creative, subversive and playful response to capitalism by its inventors – philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychologist Félix Guattari. The provocation in subtitling their two books Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, is that capitalism is by its nature a schizophrenic system that substitutes psychological repression for creative desire. Guattari developed schizoanalysis as a tool to uncover the repressive aspects of capitalism in order to create social experiments to recreate human relations with Nature by unleashing the creative capacity of desire. In urban design, a schizoanalytical approach splits our analytical framework into a comprehensive multi-layered and multidimensional analysis of cities, as well as an immersive and embedded understanding of the psychological dimensions of the multi-layered and multi-dimensional 1 urban space of late capitalism. Rather than focusing on the descent and emergence of urban design practices as outlined in the second section with the exploration of genealogical modelling, we now analyse the spatial and temporal capacities and restraints on individual social behaviour in the global city. Our schizoanalytical models will take us back to the Forum in Rome, Ground Zero in Manhattan and Rama I Road in Bangkok, utilising the time geography of Torsten Hägerstrand as a guide. Hägerstrand examines human migration and flows based on three limitations or constraints. Capability includes the limits of human movement based on physical or biological factors, but also includes the technological means which increase human mobility such as cars and skytrains. Coupling refers to the need to interact with other people. Finally, authority considers the constraints on movement 2 controlled by other people or institutions. 199 Street section in front of Siam View of Siam Paragon and Paragon. A broad terrace of Siam Center from the lower fountains and coconut palm trees platform of the Skytrain at descends from Paragon’s main Siam Central Interchange. plaza to the taxi drop-off from Rama I Road. The Skytrain mezzanine can be seen on the right leading to a pedestrian bridge connecting to the mall in the background. 200 Movement will not be considered only in relation to the physical, social and authority constraints, but also in relation to the city as an archive of stratified knowledge. The world is made up of superimposed surfaces, archives or strata. The world is thus knowledge. But strata crossed by a central fissure that separates on the one hand the visual scenes, and on the other the sound curves: the articulable and the visible on each stratum, the two irreducible forms of knowledge, Light and Language, two vast environments of exteriority where visibilities and statements are respectively deposited. So we are caught in a double movement. We immerse ourselves from stratum to stratum, from band to band; we cross the surfaces, scenes and curves; we follow the fissure, in order to reach an interior of the world. But at the same time we try to climb above the strata in order to reach an outside, an atmospheric element, a ‘non-stratified substance’ that would be capable of explaining how the two forms of knowledge can embrace and intertwine on each stratum, form one edge of the fissure to the other. If not, then how could the two halves of the archive communicate, how could statements 3 explain scenes, or scenes illustrate statements? The spatial archive of archaeology and the temporal diagram of genealogy together form a basis for a third analytical technique in digital modelling for urban design: schizoanalysis. While archaeological modelling situated urban design knowledge within the collateral space of strata, and genealogical modelling diagrammed the correlative space created by exertion of forces of various urban actors and agents over time, schizoanalytical modelling will analyse the complementary space of the 222 Thaksinomics led to a growth rate for the Thai economy that increased from 1.9 per cent in 2001 to 6.5 29 per cent in 2003. The wider availability of credit and government stimulus produced for the first time in Thailand a mass-consumer society completely at odds with the dictates of the Sufficiency Economy. Thaksin was the first Thai Prime Minister to complete a full term, and was re-elected by an overwhelming mandate of the rural poor in 2005. It was during those years that the emergence of Bangkok’s central shopping district became both a symbol of Thaksinomics and its basis in consumer spending, and the site of Thaksin’s ultimate political demise. Almost immediately after Thaksin’s re-election, his consolidation of power and signs of corruption brought the Bangkok middle class to the front door of Parliament House, the great square at the end of Ratchadamnoen Road. After months of growing unrest, the protesters gathered in Rama I Road, in the shadow of the Skytrain, and brought Bangkok’s CSD to a halt, forcing Thaksin to resign. Thaksin regained power as caretaker Prime Minister, but on 19 September 2006, a coup d’état placed Surayud Chulanont as Premier with a mandate to institute the Sufficiency philosophy. Elections in December 2007 replaced the interim government with the People’s Power Party led by Samak Sundaravej based on a platform which allied itself with Thaksin and the banned ‘Thai love Thai’ political party. Schizoanalysis primarily examines human desire released by capitalist consumerism. Today’s dense and complex urban contexts continually present divergent choices rather than unitary directions. Schizoanalysis in urban design leads to the production of difference and diversity rather than singularities and uniformity based on the polyvocal nature of contemporary society. Desire is seen as a positive force rather than a lack or a need. Desire sets the psyche in motion to make new connections and trajectories – in other words to actively create new urban design models. However, according to Eugene Holland, desire gets tricked by representations and the critical task of schizoanalysis is to destroy and 6 critique the power of representation in all its forms. Guattari defines the analytical aim of schizoanalysis as a shift away from prescribed ways of thinking within disciplinary structures of representation, by instead ‘fashioning new coordinates for reading and for “bringing to life” hitherto unknown representations and 7 propositions’. Urban design, as we have seen in our archaeological and genealogical analyses, is a system of representation – it makes knowledge, power and the exertion of social forces concrete over time. What happens when the world explodes with multiple and conflicting signs, languages and images? Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, with their students from Yale, developed a revolutionary method of analysing such a world by exploring the Las Vegas strip in 1972 as an assemblage of enunciation. In the decades since they published their work, Las Vegas has become an urban design model for much of the urbanising world. Through an analysis of the space, scale and speed of the strip in section through serial photography and analytical diagrams, Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour and their students developed a basis for a schizoanalytical approach for urban design. disjunctive flows which comprise our rapidly urbanising and globalising world. Schizoanalytical modelling cuts multiple sections through the layered archaeological and genealogical time frames to evaluate the disjunctive space of global flows of information, people, material and media. While we referred to Aldo Rossi’s theories of the city through archaeological modelling, and Grahame Shane’s theories of recombinant urbanism with genealogical models, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas will assist us in developing a schizoanalytical model for urban design based on the role urban design plays in situating 4 symbolic language in space. Since its publication, the new Las Vegas has become a destination not just for gamblers, but on the new Grand Tour for public officials as well as architects, urban designers and their developer clients from Dubai to Shanghai. For psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, the schizoanalytical project is both modest, because it just requires observation of the here and now, and also broad, in that it has the potential for becoming a discipline for reading other systems of modelling. Guattari sees schizoanalysis not as a general model, but as a tool for deciphering the way various fields or disciplines 5 construct models. Schizoanalysis is therefore presented, not just as a way to revolutionise his field of psychoanalysis, but as a meta-model for examining the everyday world around us. Meta-modelling – a kind of model that exists to look above and beyond specific disciplinary models – brings us back to a re-examination of Kevin Lynch’s different definitions of modelling outlined in the Prelude of this book. Can urban design look beyond the limits of any particular discipline and construct a way of understanding how urban space is generated through multiple forces and flows acting at different speeds and intensities? Spectacular Feedback Bangkok’s CSD is not just a shopping district, but a symbol of all the conflicts inherent in the global city of disjunctive flows. In the following chapter, we will present a schizoanalytical model of Bangkok’s central shopping district as a final example of digital modelling for urban design. While urban design has traditionally prioritised the physical context of an urban site, schizoanalysis looks at contextualisation in a deeper sense by considering the micro-politics of subjective meaning. There is never any correct interpretation of an urban context, and schizoanalysis uncovers the multiple assemblages of codes and meanings which constitute an urban site. Schizoanalysis is located within the various disjunctive flows which pass through any urban context. These include the ecosystem fluxes of water, materials, nutrients and organisms, but also the mechanical flows which convey these materials as well as people, information and ideas through cities. The informational and media flows which constitute the semiotic flux of contemporary life are accompanied by a continual sound and visual track which complements the material and human flows. It is the intersections and interstices between these flows which constitute the object of schizoanalytical modelling. Human perception and social organisation occurs also at the intersection of these flows, and schizoanalytical modelling can begin to capture the relationship between human subjectivity and the mechanics of flows. Urban design captures the transformational capacity of redirecting these flows in relation to human agency and social life. 152 Félix Guattari, ‘Schizoanalysis’, translated by Mohamed Zayani, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 11.2, 1998. John Corbett, Torsten Hägerstrand: Time Geography, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science, http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/29 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp 120–1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972. Guattari, p 433. Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1999, pp 54–7. Guattari, p 433. Ibid, pp 338/404. Ibid, pp 277/329. Ibid, p 435. Steward Pickett and Mary Cadenasso, ‘Meaning, Models and Metaphor of Patch Dynamics’, Designing Patch Dynamics, edited by Brian McGrath et al, New York Columbia University Books on Architecture, 2008, pp 18–31. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, p 98. Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp 317–19. Yourcenar, pp 88 and 93. Ibid, p 95. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’, Assemblage 10, Cambridge: MIT Press, Dec 1989, pp 110–31. Yourcenar, p 92. Ibid, p 101. Ibid, p 102. Rodolfo Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome, New York: Macmillan, 1901, p 206. Yourcenar, p 98. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia Vol 2, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp 111–48. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2001, p 83. Ibid, p 85. Thai Embassy, News Division, Department of Information, 23 April 2007, http://www.thaiembassy.be/pdf/sufficiency_economy.pdf Ibid, http://www.thaiembassy.be/images/stories/sufficiency_economy/ sufficiency_economy.pdf, p 6. http://www.thaksinomics.com/ Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand’s Boom and Bust, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1998. http://www.thaksinomics.com/ For Guattari, ‘the task of Schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject’s desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case. This positive task cannot be separated from indispensable destructions, the destruction of … the structures and representations that 8 prevent the machine from functioning.’ Ultimately, the revolutionary transformation and redirection of this vast reservoir of human psychic energy for Guattari is a new environmentalism, creating a ‘new earth’. ‘A revolution may occur only after capitalist super-exploitation of resources has so severely impaired or even reversed its ability to continue developing productive forces and energies that some other mode of social relation to the 9 earth shows visible signs of doing better.’ There is no consistent schizoanalytical protocol for urban design, but only constant re-evaluation of urban mutations and assemblages at various scales, created through effects of environmental, social and psychological feedback. This feedback can take positive and negative forms. For Guattari, negative feedback leads to a simple re-equilibrium, while positive feedback engages splitting processes, such as disturbance or 10 catastrophes. Guattari’s distinguishing between equilibrium and disturbance ecologies mirrors contemporary urban ecosystem science. As ecologists Steward Pickett and Mary Cadenasso have demonstrated, 11 disequilibrium is the ‘natural’ state of ecosystems. Pickett and Cadenasso are disturbance ecologists, and their theories provide a radically different view of nature, one in which equilibrium is just one state in an ecosystem of constant dynamism and flux. For them, the city is a network of patches in which human movement is just one of many types of flows. 201 2005 2000 1995 1990 1985 1980 1975 1970 1965 1960 –[ d.23 226 Commuters head to the centre Morning delivery of crushed of Bangkok on the San Saeb ice for Siam Center at Soi Canal ferry. Kasemsan 1. The early call to prayer drifts with the morning fog on the Saen Saeb Canal. A taxi boat’s engine idles for a few moments while picking up commuting passengers. As the boat takes off, its wake splashes into the tiny lanes which wind to the mosque. Across the canal, the monks from Wat Pathum Wanaram make their morning rounds through the Buddhist monastery community that lines the small soi – or alley – that connects the canal to the broad Rama I Road. People sit quietly meditating on the cool floor of the temple. The first Skytrain of the morning crosses the canal, a slowly moving arch of light turns over Pathumwan Intersection before pulling into Siam Central Station. The sound of train wheels on a steel track barely filters through the thick temple walls. Traffic is stopped at Pathumwan Intersection for a moment to allow Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn to leave Sra Pathum Palace to perform her Royal duties. The icemakers on the narrow Soi Kasemsan 1 have ground and bagged the blocks of ice which have been stored in the ground floor of the shop house all night, cooling the workers in their dormitory above. As they have for four decades, they load their bicycle samlors to deliver crushed ice for cool refreshment to the vendors diagonally across in the shopping centre Siam Square. The snack vendors have gathered in front of Siam Paragon Mall, where they are allowed to sell freshly prepared food, in small plastic bags wound tightly with rubber bands, to the workers who will serve the customers arriving after 10am, among them university students coming for a coffee and doughnut before heading off to class. This is morning in Bangkok Simultopia, as the great arenas of globalisation, the huge malls of Bangkok’s central shopping district, prepare to open again for the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, alongside diverse local activities from earlier times which still persist. Simultopia Simultopia is a purposely ambiguous term coined to give meaning to the complex experience of place in late capitalist global cities. While -topia means place, simulimplies both the Modernist dream of simultaneity – the ability to understand multiple actions in one place – and Post-Modern theories of simulation and the simulacra, which refer to copies without an original. Simultopia, therefore, describes the mediated experience of globalisation which includes both that of speed, movement, transparency and simultaneity which captivated historical Modernist aesthetics, and revisionist notions of the phenomenology of place which grew in reaction to ‘placelessness’ of Modernist technological 1 space. The term resonates critically in two directions, towards regressive utopian Modernisms which still imagine heroic possibilities of human physical overachievement, and theories of place which are inadequate in describing the mediated experiential possibilities of contemporary environments, societies and psyches. In Bangkok it is used to describe the coexistence of extremely localised environments along canals and alleyways (sois), juxtaposed with the huge commercial spaces of globalisation. In this sense, simultopia resonates between 2 Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra and the vast knowledge embedded in Bangkok’s Theravada Buddhist scriptures and practices. The Traibumikatha, Thailand’s Theravada Buddhist canon, describes three worlds – one formless, one comprising form but no sensation, and finally the world of form and sensation – divided into 34 3 levels of existence. For eight centuries, Siam has constructed symbolic urban realms embodying modes of behaviour which interpret this cosmological model in architectural details, ritual space as well as city planning and design. Simultopia also dreams of inventing new paradigms for city production, ones which neither transcend nor simulate place, but inhabit space as different layers of reality. Furthermore, simultopia embraces a philosophy of the new and the now, to understand a world of changing perceptions and experience, rather than symbolically fixed representations and signs of place. Through careful self-examination, the philosopher Henri Bergson found himself split into two individuals, one an actor in his role, the automaton, and the other an independent spectator, free and real, who observes the 4 other like on a stage. For Bergson, time and memory are not inside us, but it is the interiority that we are in, in which we move, live and change. The actual and the virtual, physical and mental, present and past are inseparable ongoing coexistences. Theravada Buddhist meditation practice, likewise, enables the attainment of such perception by the development of a separate consciousness which surveys sensory-motor stimulations from a floating, detached, non-reacting vantage point. This practice is most ideally developed in isolation – the most learned priests in the ancient capitals in Siam were located in the forest monasteries. In modern Thailand, wandering ascetic monks still seek enlightenment in the forests; equipped only with a tent-like umbrella they live off the land and offerings from villagers. Wat Pathum Wanaram, now surrounded by the forest of signs of Bangkok’s Central Shopping District, was originally a forest meditation retreat, outside the royal city of Bangkok and accessible only by canal. Even today temple monks with offering bowls make their rounds in the small streets leading to Rama I Road, and cross Pathumwan Intersection before the malls open. 227 Blocks of ice are delivered every night under the red neon light of a short-stay motel. The ice workers sleep in cool comfort above the refrigerated shop house 228 d.24 ]– Radical contemporary Buddhism now interprets the Traibumikatha’s super-mundane realms as psychological 5 states in the here and now. The repeating cycles of human existence based on suffering, death, karma, merit-making and rebirth can be understood best through meditation practices which still the body and mind in order to bring attention to reality as constant flux and change. Contemporary ecological thinking has also been radicalised through new open, non-equilibrium, disturbance models. Rather than seeing ecologies as closed systems in balance, ecosystem science today conceives of the world as comprised of an open 6 impermanent system of patches in constant flux. The global context in which both contemporary Buddhism and disturbance ecology are imagined has radically shifted as well. For the first time in human history, the majority of people are urban dwellers. Nature can no longer be conceived as the wild ‘other’ of the city, isolated from human disturbance, and cities can no longer be conceived as closed human systems outside Nature. Bangkok Simultopia revisits the mediated human ecosystem which comprises the large commercial blocks surrounding Wat Pathum Wanaram. This conjunction of historical space and time is an architectural expression of Bangkok’s current collective psyche at a time of social, political and economic uncertainty. Félix Guattari has said that schizoanalysis is setting all objects in relation to 7 connectivity, disjunctive and conjunctive value. While Grahame Shane8 has examined the connective architecture of urban armatures, here in addition to the connective value of urban design, its disjunctive and conjunctive value will be analysed in Bangkok central shopping district as a schizoanalytical model of globalisation. We will employ digital modelling to cut through the spatial and temporal compression within this corner of contemporary Bangkok – a collapse of histories, geographies and cultures. As Foucault reminds us: History becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. ‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is 9 made for cutting. 229 Section through National Stadium Station with bridge to MBK Center on the right. 230 Pathumwan Intersection We begin our digital cutting at the National Stadium Station, the terminal station of the Bangkok Transit System’s (BTS) Skytrain Silom Line. The broad concrete platform completely covers congested Rama I Road – the most direct connection to the heart of Bangkok – and after crossing the three city moats to the west, ends at the gates of the Grand Palace. But the concrete viaduct of the BTS Skytrain terminates abruptly here, and you have to contend with a multitude of road-based vehicular options to travel to the historical centre of the city, unless you know about the hidden municipal canal boat service tucked at the end of the narrow sois that line Rama I Road. Travelling eastward, however, has become quite easy with Bangkok’s first mass transit system. The Silom Line travels east for two kilometres before turning south past Lumphini Park, and snaking along the business districts of Silom and Sathorn Roads, before terminating at the Thaksin Bridge pier, where the Chao Phraya express boat provides another way to the palace and temple enclaves of Rattanakosin Island. The station platform looks over the old National Stadium and the green oasis of Chulalongkorn University to the south, and the short, crowded sois of shop houses, guest houses, bungalows and street vendors which end at the Saen Saeb Canal. More than just a transit stop, National Stadium Station is the beginning of a schizoanalytical journey through the heart of Bangkok Simultopia. This chapter will travel by cutting through the layered space of the multi-level armature, as the Silom Line transfers to the Sukhumvit Line at Siam Central Station, before coming to a rest at Chitlom Station and Central Department Store. Just south of National Stadium Station, across the street from Soi Kasemsan, is MBK Center, one of the largest shopping malls in Asia. Two thousand micro stores and services, a hundred eating places and a large entertainment complex consisting of a cinema city, karaoke complex and bowling alleys extend south from Pathumwan Intersection. Locals and tourists come here because it is a multi-level souk – prices are negotiable and brand products are reproduced at a fraction of their original prices. The east end of National Stadium Station’s mezzanine extends to a bridge leading to MBK through the Tokyu Department Store. MBK Center’s website boasts that 150,000 customers, including 30,000 tourists, circulate through eight floors of the 330-foot-long mall every day. The complex also contains an office building and the Pathumwan Princess Hotel above, as well as a 4000-space car parking deck. The mall’s exterior was renovated in 2000, in celebration of both the new millennium and the opening of the Skytrain. It is the success of MBK’s direct connection and resurfacing that led other businesses to follow suit along the entire length of the BTS, creating one continuous interconnected multi-level shopping armature. 231 Hawkers spread out their goods on the BTS mezzanine outside National Stadium Station platform after the malls close. Central World Plaza is the lit tower in the background, and two steel bridges to MBK Center can be seen in the foreground and middle ground. Events plaza located between Siam Discovery and Siam Center. 232 The giant concrete National Stadium Station mezzanine extends across Pathumwan Intersection, and two semicircular steel bridges lead to curving stairways descending to the four corners of the intersection. The bridge at the south-west corner has a second stair which climbs up to provide direct access to the third floor of MBK. After MBK closes, the raised mezzanine platform is filled with hawkers, entertainers and people just enjoying the cool evening breeze. Food vendors, taxi, motorcycle and tuk-tuk drivers strategically congregate in shifts at the points where the transit system stairs touch the ground. A journey along the Skytrain not only demonstrates how developers have reorganised their large commercial spaces around the new infrastructure of the city, but how the micro economic and informal sectors adapt to these new urban flows as well. Diagonally opposite Pathumwan Intersection from MBK Center, the north-east corner of the semicircular bridge from the National Stadium Station mezzanine extension provides direct access through the shiny aluminium facade of Siam Discovery Center. The bridge leads to a glittering six-storey atrium, consisting of overlapping circular walkways. Siam Discovery Center opened in 1997, just as the Thai economy collapsed, initiating a financial crisis across East Asia. However, it was positioned to serve a more sophisticated and mature clientele than the bargain hunters at MBK. Riding the exterior glass elevator you ascend from the plaza entry level, past the pedestrian bridge level, above the Skytrain mezzanine, lower track, and finally above the upper tracks to the ‘gold class’ cinemas on top. Above the cinemas sits a 36-storey office tower. 233 Section through Pathumwan Intersection with Siam Discovery Center on the left. –[ d.25 236 Siam Central Interchange Station Straddling Rama I Road between Siam Center and Siam Square is the giant Siam Central Interchange Station connecting the two BTS Skytrain lines. While all the other stations along the Skytrain face inward towards parallel tracks, here two platform levels face outward – both north and south – towards the city. Both Siam Center and Siam Square responded to this greater public exposure with new glass walls, billboards and media screens facing the BTS. The north platforms faced the lush gardens of the old Intercontinental Hotel, which stretched to the Saen Saeb Canal to the north, the Sra Pathum Palace to the west and the Buddhist monastery and temple complex, Wat Pathum Wanaram, to the east. Twin escalators lead directly up to the station mezzanine from Rama I Road, and a broad raised covered plaza and grand staircase runs the entire length of Siam Center. With the Skytrain viaduct above, the entire effect between the two shopping centres is of an outdoor living room for the city, usually filled with traffic, although for a few days before the 2006 coup it was the site of massive political demonstrations. The grand opening of Bangkok’s glittering new upscale shopping mall, Siam Paragon, was broadcast throughout the kingdom in December 2005. The mall replaced the verdant Siam Intercontinental Hotel, torn down in 2002 on Crown Property Bureau land next to the royal gardens of Sra Pathum Palace, just west of Wat Pathum Wanaram. The grand entrance to the mall, according to its website, is a faceted glass ‘jewel’ meant to glitter like diamonds in the day and glow with the colours of gems – from ruby, sapphire and emerald to topaz – in the evening. Inside Siam Paragon are luxury car showrooms, a food court, fountains and the largest aquarium in South-East Asia – Siam Ocean World. The mall as jewel has nine different ‘facets’: Luxury, Fashion, Lifestyle, Leisure, Technology, Living, Divine Dining, as well as Education and Exploration. The 300,000-squaremetre mall expects to draw, like MBK, 100,000 visitors a day. Siam Paragon (left) secondlevel plaza provides a stage for the passengers awaiting trains on the two platforms at Siam Central Interchange (right). d.26 ]– The faceted jewel-like entry to Siam Paragon (right) faces a raised plaza with direct access to Siam Central Interchange Station (centre). 237 –[ d.27