Designing Change - professional mutations in urban design 1980-2020

Professional Mutations in Urban Design 1980-2020 Eric Firley yberk Christopher Choa (AECOM) Bruno Fortier (Agence Bruno Fortier) Finn Geipel (LIN) Adriaan Geuze (West 8) Djamel Klouche (AUC) Winy Maas (MVRDV) Dennis Pieprz (Sasaki Associates) Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) Albert Speer (AS+P) with Michael Denkel Paola Viganò (Studio Paola Viganò) Liu Xiaodu (Urbanus) with Wang Hui Wenyi Zhu (ZhuWenyi-Atelier) naioıo publishers Contents Foreword Introduction 6 10 CHRISTOPHER CHOA (AECOM), London Reconciling Opposites Al Shamal Masterplan, Qatar Riyadh Airport City Global Palestine – Connected Gaza 16 36 40 44 BRUNO FORTIER (Agence Bruno Fortier), Paris Nature and Artifice in the Production of French Urbanism Île Feydeau, Nantes Masséna-Chevaleret, Paris Brest Capucins 56 FINN GEIPEL (LIN), Berlin The Emergence of a New Type of Urbanity Cité du Design, Saint Étienne Grand Paris Métropole Douce Urban densification and innovative living through serial timber construction, Bremen 94 68 72 76 114 118 122 ADRIAAN GEUZE (West 8), Rotterdam Contemplating the Squatter Legacy as a Reminder of Urban Diversity Borneo-Sporenburg, Amsterdam Strijp-S, Eindhoven Toronto Central Waterfront 132 DJAMEL KLOUCHE (AUC), Paris Digital Acceleration and Environmental Restraint Fives Cail, Lille Pleyel-Landy Sector, Saint-Denis Tangram, Paris 168 WINY MAAS (MVRDV), Rotterdam Mission Impossible Ypenburg-Waterwijk, The Hague ZAC Bastide Niel, Bordeaux Oosterwold Freeland, Almere 208 148 152 156 180 184 188 226 230 234 DENNIS PIEPRZ (Sasaki Associates), Boston North-American Campus Work from the 1980s onwards University of South Florida Master Plan, Tampa University of Pennsylvania Penn Connects, Philadelphia Tecnológico de Monterrey Urban Regeneration Plan 244 ELIZABETH PLATER-ZYBERK (DPZ), Miami A Recent History of Zoning and Design Codes in the US Charleston Place, Boca Raton Kentlands, Gaithersburgh Miami 21 280 ALBERT SPEER (AS+P) with MICHAEL DENKEL, Frankfurt The German Way of Keeping the Power Balance in City-Making Europaviertel, Frankfurt Städtebaulicher Masterplan Innenstadt Köln InnovationCity Ruhr - Modellstadt Bottrop 316 258 262 266 292 296 300 338 342 346 PAOLA VIGANÒ (Studio Paola Viganò), Milan Concrete Descriptions of Future Situations Plan for Prato De Hoge Rielen, Flanders The Horizontal Metropolis, Brussels 354 LIU XIAODU (Urbanus) with WANG HUI, Shenzen China as a Place of Attainable Utopias Tulou Collective Housing, Nanhai Shum Yip UpperHills Loft, Shenzen DenCity – a reachable Utopia 394 WENYI ZHU (ZhuWenyi-Atelier), Beijing From Triumphal Arches to QR Codes Green Field & Lane, Shanghai Guangzhou University City Group 3 The Water-Line, New York City 430 Interview text analysis Epilogue Index Bio 468 478 502 511 372 376 380 402 406 410 452 456 460 Foreword by Regula Lüscher The urban designer is just one participant in the process of citymaking, but it is impossible to make the city without the urban designer, because of his ability to transform societal goals and programmes into physical form and space. This simple recognition predestines him or her to a leading role, one that arguably should be further strengthened. The question, however, is how? How can we use the urban designer’s knowledge and work methods to improve the outcome for the citizens, and to better defend the common good? Designing Change approaches this question through international comparisons of not only case studies, but of viewpoints, in placing particular emphasis on the interface between politics and urban design. This drew my attention, also because it reflects parts of my own history. As a Swiss, and trained as an architect, I came to Berlin 11 years ago, invited to head the urban planning and building department, and to become a professional politician with the title of a state secretary at the same time. My contribution to Berlin is quite specific and has to do with international exchange but just as much with discussion culture. I was socialized in a Swiss participatory democracy in which citizens vote on many issues directly, a practice that is much less common in the German representative system. This experience enabled me to advise the city administration in financially highly precarious times in which topics such as participation and self-organization had become a necessity. Today, this trend continues and is as relevant and topical as ever. In my office, rather than to design buildings or masterplans, we design, adapt, and try to perfect the processes that translate the needs and political will of the citizens and stakeholders into lived reality. This requires precision and experience, but also resources, for which I constantly have to fight. 7 In my opinion the originality of this book lies in its insistence on not only the multitude of implementation processes, but on the pluralism of opinions, and opinion making in general. How do we know what we want, and under what conditions are we inclined to rejoin dissenters? Designing Change suggests that a healthy and informed debate about the city can contribute to this phase that precedes the one of implementation. The new generation does not see the world in terms of party politics anymore, neither do they use the media and public sphere in the same way as their parents. New tools have to be invented to satisfy an ever-growing appetite for co-determination in all sorts of societal aspects, including the built environment. Regarding my own convictions, after twenty years of work in the public sector—first for nine years in Zürich and now here in Berlin—I have come to realize that an unrestricted market economy and forces of globalization, for example in the form of real-estate speculation, make it almost impossible to defend land against individual interests in favour of the common good and the needs of minorities. Currently, Berlin attracts investors from all over the world, but a substantial part of the population cannot cope with the resulting rise of rental costs. Our city government, a red-redgreen coalition, has therefore been empowered by the people to experiment with tools that differ from the economically liberal ones. This is the policy that I have and want to implement, but I am aware that not everybody with whom we make the city shares this viewpoint. Agreement can therefore only be found by applying a healthy debate culture and a mutual willingness to compromise. This, among more practical and programmatic points, is also linked to what I call ‘shared authorship’, a concept that is not always welcomed by people who follow a formalistic approach, or who still use Berlin’s urban fabric as a battleground for ideological disputes, universally preaching for or against the symbolic reconstruction of the pre-war morphology, without further consideration of the everyday qualities that urban design is supposed to deliver. 8 In this highly complex context I perceive my role as a guiding and advising one, between citizens and stakeholders, but also in support of the experts who bear the necessary knowledge to turn intentions into spatial plans. On the following pages, twelve of these experts share their experiences with us. Some of it is highly inspiring, some of it does not reflect my own convictions, but the overall mixture is very useful. Regula Lüscher Senate Director of Urban Development of Berlin Hon. Prof. Berlin University of Arts September 2018 9 DESIGNING CHANGE Introduction Both the structure and concept of this book are simple. It consists of twelve illustrated interviews with practicing urban designers, complemented with three project sheets per participant. The overarching theme—change in urban design—has been delimited in a fairly loose manner, and by the actual focus of each discussion as chosen by the respective interview partners. As a matter of fact, one of the project’s explicit aims is to keep a certain standalone and unplugged quality of each exchange, as well as the kaleidoscopic nature of the book as a whole. The aim is not to hijack the participants’ contributions for a personal agenda, neither to put them in a historical or theoretical context. This would be an interesting exercise, but it should be done by others, or at a later stage in the form of academic papers. Therefore, this introduction is mainly to describe the general approach, and to put the project itself in context. 10 INTRODUCTION A. Background This project started several years ago from the consideration to write an urban design text book for college students, a so-called ‘primer’. Encouraged by the fairly modest choice on the market, the plan was to analyze, categorize, and visualize the different ways one could build the city. Fairly quickly however, while working on the content list, it became evident that over time my interests had shifted not only from a morphology-oriented perspective to a processoriented one—something that could still have fit into the straightforward format of a primer— but that more recently this shift had guided me even further away, into the realm of the social sciences and politics. I hesitated to spend years working on a book that could show what one could do, but that would struggle to explain why it usually did not happen. I had become intrigued by an understanding of the built environment as a translation or even mirror of specific societal conditions, a perspective that is fairly common, but rarely a component of architectural education. This may sound abstract, but it starts to take shape in the form of concrete examples: these include, as part of my new life experience in the US, viewing the sprawling and decentralized American cityscape not only as a car- and zoningrelated issue, as I would have before, but as a spatial expression of excessive liberalism and individualism, fuelled by the state-sponsored availability of suburban mortgages. It was difficult to say what came first. In terms of research, I started to wonder if cases such as the new tower typologies of Vancouver—the object of a former housing study—really were in the first place a means of innercity densification, or whether architectural hybridization following the influx of Hong Kong-Chinese money and apartment culture was not an equally relevant phenomenon. Another example, the German co-housing revival, the so-called Baugruppen, brought to my attention by a lawyer from Berlin, were first analyzed as an alternative development and ownership model to the condo type, but soon unravelled in my and many other people’s imagination as a symptom of increasing societal demand for customization and selfdetermination, in line with the development of social media and digital fabrication. As a last and somehow summarizing case, projects such as Oosterwold, featured in this book, illustrate a personal fascination for the idea that the development of a settlement—in terms of both process and built form—can influence the political culture of a place as much as the political culture undoubtedly influences the shape and workings of the built environment. There can be little doubt that years in the construction of such a new place will have an impact on the participants’ political convictions, and that it would not just be the political convictions and socio-economic realities that retroact on physical form. It works both ways. The Dutch example’s liberal spirit and bottom-up nature might accentuate this quality and facilitate its reading, but there is no reason to believe that the impact is less pronounced in the more common situation of a technocratic top-down planning system in which most of us are involved. We are just less aware of it, of how intrinsically political every process of city-making is, and to what extent it co-defines the essence of what the word ‘political’ actually signifies. Obviously, these changing perspectives, which I tried to illustrate by the four above-mentioned examples, are neither mutually exclusive nor even contradictory, quite the opposite, but then again each perspective entails a slightly different reading and research method, a different type of interdisciplinary approach. None of this is particularly original or new. To venture, as a trained architect, from the profession’s formal and physical origins towards the nebulous boundaries with the social, economic, and political disciplines arguably is nothing but the urban designer’s logical fate. But what this emphasis on the socio-political aspect of city-making underlines in the context of this book is the importance and reality of choices. In my understanding 11 ADRIAAN GEUZE West 8, Rotterdam INTERVIEW 134 Contemplating the Squatter Legacy as a Reminder of Urban Diversity Or How To Counter the Destructive Advance of Mass Culture Adriaan Geuze PROJECTS 148 Borneo-Sporenburg, Amsterdam 152 Strijp-S, Eindhoven 156 Toronto Central Waterfront ADRIAAN GEUZE Contemplating the Squatter Legacy as a Reminder of Urban Diversity – Or How To Counter the Destructive Advance of Mass Culture Adriaan Geuze won his first major award at the age of 30 and with his partner Edzo Bindels developed internationally acclaimed projects such as Borneo-Sporenburg and Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam already in the early 1990s. A trained agricultural engineer and landscape architect—and fervent admirer of the Dutch tradition of land reclamation—Geuze is the only non-architect participating in this book. On the following pages he elaborates on his split nature as an engineer and a romantic, his confidence in progress, but also on the change of framework conditions that his profession has experienced over the last thirty years, culminating in the identification of mass culture as one of the most debilitating and detrimental influences on society. Geuze explains how his work tries to sidestep and combat this, and how the legacy of the squatter movement may contribute to this endeavour. 134 CONTEMPLATING THE SQUATTER LEGACY AS A REMINDER OF URBAN DIVERSITY Eric Firley: Your background is in landscape design, and I thought that it would make sense to map out the difference that this background may constitute for your way of doing urban design, compared to most of your competitors who entered the field from an architectural perspective. As this is a vast question, I would like to begin our discussion by trying to better understand what the notions of progress and technology mean in the field of landscape architecture. I guess that it is not just about green roofs, is it? Are there any new tools available, components of public space or landscape design that have something to do with technological progress? Adriaan Geuze: I find landscape architecture is by its very nature conservative, so I would not be too overwhelmed about the impact of technology on the field. Of course, the development of new materials and methods such as new techniques of milling and 3D printing does have an influence on the industry. Adriaan Geuze EF: The Madrid project incorporates such techniques if I recall? I remember the transformation of an image of a cycling boy into murals on a pedestrian bridge. AG: I will give you an interesting and less obvious example: through advances in robotics we are once again incorporating brick paving into public spaces. This had become very complex due to legal restrictions. It was labour-intensive work with workers developing health problems because they were constantly on their knees. Now robotic machines can do the job with an even higher-quality outcome. Technology helps to make methods available again that were abandoned because of their unfeasibility. Another example is in the field of artificial, or synthesized soils: 100 years of international laboratory research have resulted in a very clear logic of how you design soil according to precise specifications. Previously, people knew approximately what good or bad soil was, what worked and what didn’t. Now we can predict soil performance, according to specific parameters of use, temperature, annual rainfall, sun hours, altitude, etc. The knowledge about this is shared within the professional realm and we can even look it up on the internet. We can synthesize these soils on site with special machines. Globalization is the other catalyst for progress in the profession. In many contemporary designs we see an abundance of the use of granite. Because China has started to mass-produce and export granite at a phenomenal scale, public space and park design can be detailed in stone. If I bring a container full of granite to London it costs me just 400 dollars in transport. That’s how efficiently the international transport network works. Now you can construct out of stone what was previously, for at least a hundred years, made out of concrete. That makes a fundamental difference. I find landscape architecture is by its very nature conservative. Granite waiting to be installed on a West 8 project site 135 ADRIAAN GEUZE EF: How about regulatory changes and design prescriptions? When you came to Miami for the opening of Gehry’s New World Symphony and West 8’s Soundscape Park, you also gave a presentation at our School. In this presentation you talked about the design of the dividers that you were supposed to put on the sitting surfaces of the benches in the park. AG: Yes, we designed them as pillows, trying to somehow bypass the fact that these dividers are meant to hinder people from laying down and sleeping on the benches. SoundScape Park and bench detail in Miami Beach Image of Lichtenreuth project in Nuremberg EF: Yes, exactly. You actually said that in the Netherlands you would consider it to be a compliment if somebody wanted to sleep on a bench that you designed. Be that as it may, the point is not to blindly criticize, but what I take out of this, is that alleged details can turn out to have a certain social and political connotation. They can be symptoms of a societal change, without necessarily having been conceived with bad intention. Do you often find yourself in these situations? AG: I cannot even begin to fantasize... this is the second nature of public space design. Groups of stakeholders, local communities, politicians, and investors all have their own interests. In our profession, social and political positioning is relevant: which users are to be included or excluded? On top of that, we often face severe legal constrains that limit tailor-made solutions. It’s a mad world. EF: So, it’s a common thing? AG: Yes. If you want to work in public space, and not be an artist, you have to work with these constraints constantly. EF: And what would be other examples? AG: Currently, we are designing a park in Nuremberg and 50% of the area is designated as a playground by the authorities. From my point of view, the entire park should be a playground, just like our Governors Island project in New York where grownups and children share the play. That idea needs to be tailored to a German legal framework. Those frameworks can be very limiting and could easily undermine the idea of the park. Children are intelligent and they like to explore, so you don’t necessarily need to offer them a catalogue playground. But we have to deliver within the German regulations. Officials or politicians cannot undo that for us, even if they wanted to. It’s an example of how strongly legal parameters can influence the world of design. EF: I wonder if this can be linked to another question. I recently wrote a paper with a lawyer from Berlin, focusing on how to provide publicly accessible space through the private sector, on property that remains private. We have a lot of that, private gardens or malls being the most 136 In our profession, social and political positioning is relevant: which users are to be included or excluded? ZAC BASTIDE NIEL / BORDEAUX / FRANCE 13 14 13 Queyries block rendering in bird’s-eye view 14 Interior rendering of Queyries block 233 DE HOGE RIELEN / KASTERLEE / FLANDERS / BELGIUM 1 2 3 4 1 De Hoge Rielen Masterplan 2 The layers of the masterplan 3 Context model of the Wadi Youth Hostel 4 Floorplan of the Wadi Youth Hostel 377 DENCITY – A REACHABLE UTOPIA / SHENZEN / CHINA 7 8 9 7 Future expansion scenario in the Pearl River Delta 8 Model in work 9 Preparation sketch 413 INTERVIEW TEXT ANALYSIS PAOLA VIGANÒ (Studio Paola Viganò) Concrete Descriptions of Future Situations territory research space today water social change school questions public landscape economic type moment studies reading perspective caniggia bernardo prato florence sense natural past experience centre future situations paris debate spatial grand nature small starting region study experts forest europe process environmental university military society ideas understanding form diffuse ecological concrete italy clear address knowledge tool citizens spaces solution scale 475 DESIGNING CHANGE It has already been stated in the introduction that the book’s interviews are meant to stand on their own, part of a kaleidoscopic whole rather than tools of substantiation for any overarching or unifying thesis. The aim is to exhibit a selection of subjective views regarding current trends and expectations for the future, based on an understanding of what has happened over the last three to five decades in the professional career of each participant. This might explain a certain reluctance to further summarize what already has been treated—through the very flexible format of edited interviews—as a form of scientific popularization. Therefore, a particularly fine line separates misleading generalizations from hopefully useful comments, made by industry leaders, that have professional and societal relevance without fitting the tight armature of an academic article. The point, however, is not to say that this tight armature is not needed anymore. Quite to the contrary, the exercise undertaken here also proves that not everything can be done while neglecting academic rigor. It is, for example, difficult to address in this context and format the issue of transferability of research outcomes, a central concern of every scientific study. The topics and situations presented here are too mixed-up to deduct anything substantial from one interview to the other, at least not without additional layers of investigation. The profession’s increasingly global outlook further accentuates this problematic, subjected in many markets to an often hieroglyphic and ambiguous mix of cultural specificities on the one hand, and global standardization on the other. I would like to conclude these slightly theoretical considerations by making clear that this book and the following paragraphs see their value in helping to identify potential hypotheses, rather than in providing material to validate existing ones. It is hence in the spirit of what has already been claimed in the introduction to acquaint the participants’ views with each other, in view of an exchange and debate, that in the following paragraphs I will try to repeat and situate, rather than summarize, some of what has been said in the interviews. It is of crucial importance in this context to understand that the topics listed here are not only not exhaustive, but that they are the ones that create usually at least three links between the various participants. This does not mean that these topics carry more importance than those that can only be found in the interviews. Many relevant points have been made by just one or two urban designers that will not be found hereafter. I did not see any sense in repeating with less eloquence what can or already has been appreciated undilutedly within the respective interview texts. The themes of the introduction and this concluding chapter obviously overlap, but the difference is that the content of the following paragraphs is based on an analysis of the participants’ output rather than a review of my own questions. 480 CREDITS Eric Firley, of French-German origin, is Associate Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture. He joined the School in 2011, after having worked for ten years in Paris and London in design practices, the real-estate sector and as an independent book author. He studied architecture at the EPFL in Lausanne and at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, before graduating as a city designer at the London School of Economics. Firley is the initiator and co-author of The Urban Housing Handbook (2009), The Urban Towers Handbook (2011) and The Urban Masterplanning Handbook (2013). Text: Eric Firley Copy editing: Leo Reijnen (Taal & Teken) Design: Studio Sander Boon, Amsterdam Lithography and Printing: epopee Paper: Fly 05, 115 gr Publisher: Marcel Witvoet, nai010 publishers We would like to thank the participants for their support of the book. We also would like to thank the University of Miami School of Architecture and Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury for their support of ‘Designing Change’. © 2019 the author, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC-organization the copyrights have been settled with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © 2019, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Although every effort was made to find the copyright holders for the illustrations used, it has not been possible to trace them all. Interested parties are requested to contact nai010 publishers, Mauritsweg 23, 3012 JR Rotterdam, the Netherlands. nai010 publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in developing, producing and distributing books in the fields of architecture, urbanism, art and design. www.nai010.com nai010 books are available internationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution partners: North, Central and South America - Artbook | D.A.P., New York, USA, [email protected] Rest of the world - Idea Books, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, [email protected] For general questions, please contact nai010 publishers directly at [email protected] or visit our website www.nai010.com for further information. Printed and bound in the Netherlands ISBN 978-94-6208-481-0 NUR 648 BISAC ARC015000, ARC010000 Designing Change is also available as: Designing Change e-book (PDF) ISBN 978-94-6208-XXX-X 512