Architecture of informality - DIA elective course
prof. Ivan Kucina
student: Djordje Zdravkovic
Urban informality has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years, with a resurgence of interest in informal housing areas from architects and urbanists. As Ananya Roy (2005, page 148) observes, “Informality is back on the agenda of international development and urban planning”. Hernando de Soto’s arguments about formalising informal property to combat poverty are one of important strand in current debates (de Soto, 2000). In 2008, for example, the Harvard Design Magazine produced a special issue asking “Can designers improve life in non formal cities?”
For some of those contributing to postcolonial, literature a focus on informality is inherently suspect. Jennifer Robinson (2006, page 123), rejects megacity and developmentalist approaches that extend to the entire city the characterisation of ephasising lack, classify cities in the global South as essentialy inferior to those in the West.
Sarrah Nuttall and achile Mbembe (2005) criticise Michael Watts for depicting “the slum as the defining feature of contemporary African metropolises” and thereby denying the “critiness” of urban Africa.
Seeing thing informal or formal way, directly depends on point of view. When it comes to discusion about very tiny border where informal becomes formal and other way around, it is very hard to find right solution for defining it. As the interpretation of both concepts is different from person to person, perhaps the best way to discuss it will be shuffling trough various examples and trying to find that mentioned translation moment between informal and formal.
McAllen library case:
To better understand the question and nature of things we are dealing with, the best way is to take a first look trough explicit example of a certain translation from formal to informal and back to formal again.
The primary challenge of reusing an abandoned Walmart buildingwas to create a highly functional, flexible library of 124,500 square feet on a single level. This area is equivalent to nearly two and a half footbal fields, making the new library the largest single story library in the United States.
The interior of the abandoned buildingand new mechanical systems were paintedwhite to form a neutral shell for new patron and service areas, which are designated with color. Primary program areas - including comunity meeting roomsthe childrens library, adult services, and the staff area - are located in the quadrants of the building. This clear organisation allows easy wayfindingand patron access from the cenrtal service spine, delineated by a patterned wood ceiling that runs the lenght of the building. A secondary spine in orange bisects the first to further distinguish the public community meeting rooms from the private staff area and the childrens’s from adult service areas.
Adrianna Ramirez, who teaches creative writting at the University of Pittsburgh, grew up in McAllen. “The old library on Main Street was not so beautiful”, she told. Jacked Copy. “It was packed with books and seemd to small for the people it serviced. Of course, that was part of the charm - always waiting for your turn for the computer and spending a good amount of time finding a corner where you can read uninterrupted. The new library solves all that.”
As these two terms constantly chase each other, as mentioned, the best way to understand the thin line between these concepts is by adding and discussing certain examples.
San Diego - Tijuana case:
”So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana”. (Teddy Cruz - TED talks 2013)
If we think more about this phenomenon of literaly moving city parts from one country to another, we must ask ourselves if this, man drawn, border between United States and Mexico is in fact a line where formal becomes informal. People living in one side of the border are seeing and using materials in their own way, which is different than way of using same materials on the other side. We can clearly see there is a noticeable line where thigs change completely. In this particural case, it can easily be considered as an act of transforming formal to informal and the other way around.
Skatepark case:
”As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway.” (Teddy Cruz - TED talks 2013)
The complete informal concept, of skatepark, and hangout place for young people needs approval from formal elements of society and formal fact producers, so it can be made and used. There are two main ways of seeing things. First of all, as soon as informal “hangout” concept enters the law layer of selfproducing, it becomes part of the system and is instantly transformed to formality as it is. Including every single idea of space using, planning, negotiating etc... After the formalisation process, there is mentioned two way path: either the whole idea gets back to being informal, as the goal is achieved, or new made park is now considered as a part of formality, because it is law approved, it is in the books, it is controled... However, a strict boundary is clearly drawn, and as soon as informal idea of skate park entered the process, it becomes formal.
Musichall case:
With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing. Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind.” (David Byrne - TED talks 2010)
As we all are introduced to architecture as a process that creates things out of it’s initial area of producing, there is a not so thorough examination of these outer area or how those two term affect each other.making architectural objects, or can we say producing architecture, is more of a formal act. We are producing spaces that are to be used as music spaces. However, as soon as music enters the space, architecture as it is goes back to second place, and music takes the prime role. It doesn’t mean that architecture stops being present at the moment, actually it is quite opposite, it is supporting music and fullfiling it’s own goal. The transformation from architectural space to music space, can be considered like some kind of translation from formal to informal and opposite. If we put music first, architecture becomes more informal at that moment, but if we put architecture in first place, music can fill it and make it more understandable. Borders of formality and informality in this particural case are very flexible, if the even exist after all, and can be changed just with switching points of view.
And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting. (David Byrne - TED talks 2010)
PREVI experimental social housing case:
In PREVI, 13 internationally renowned architects, along with as many Peruvian architects, were commissioned to develop a model neighbourhood of 1,500 dwellings to develop prototypes of urban housing that would internalise programmes for any future transformation. Thus each unit contained the terms of its own growth. This was perhaps the first act that recognised the value of the dynamics of growth adopted in the informal slums. In contrast to a growth model based on large, out-of-scale gestures—from megastructures to gigantic superblocks—the PREVI experiment fielded new dynamics based on a model of low-rise, high-density housing. (Justin McGuirk - PREVI: The metabolist Utopia)
In a certain way, we can say that this case of intervention on urban settlement have similiarities with skatepark case. What is in common for this two situations, is that informal and formal are interwowen with each other, to the point where the boundary is very hard to define. Also, from different points of view, conclusions on whether some processes and moments are formal or informal, distincts. At the moment of summoning architects, the whole story becomes process, and therefore, very formal. However, their designs are dealt with in very informal ways, still. Anyway, we have to admit that this process is making the whole thing formal now. At the point where architects stop designing, and “terms of its own growth” start taking place, everything stops being formal, and becomes informal again. Each of the units starts to develop themselves, which is, seen from the previous process, very informal like.
”If Weissenhof Siedlung is the natural childbirth of social housing in the First World, PREVI is the coitus interruptus of Third World housing“
Curitiba city planning case:
”If you want creativity, cut one zero from your budget. If you want sustainability, cut two zeroes from your budget. And if you want solidarity, assume your identity and respect others' diversity. There are three main issues that are becoming important, not only for your city, but for the whole of mankind. These relate to three key issues in cities: mobility, sustainability, and tolerance” (Jamie Lerner - Interview for American society of landscape architects)
Jamie Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, makes great ideas of development of his city. Using creative ways of thinking, we can surely say that at that point, informality takes place. But as soon as ideas becomes planning and concepts become put into elements of plan, the whole thing becomes formal and starts going by plan. This concrete case of Curitiba planning, can be used as model by which many more cities are developed.
”For us though, the question wasn't about money; the question was about mentality. We didn't have that money so we started to clean our bays through an agreement with fishermen. If the fisherman catches a fish, it belongs to him. If he catches garbage, we bought the garbage. If the day was not good for fishing, the fishermen went to fish garbage. The more garbage they catch, the cleaner the bays became. The cleaner the bay is, more fish they would have.” (Jamie Lerner - Interview for American society of landscape architects)
The point where creative idea is shared with fishermen, is the turning point between informal and formal. Being creative concept is, in this case, informal approach to a problem. After spreading the idea, process takes part, and the whole thing becomes formal, and continues to be formal.
”Some places in some cities have become decayed. There's no life. When that happens, it's very difficult to bring back life because people don't want to live in a place like that. However, the moment we bring street life, people will want to live there again. That's why we designed the portable streets. On a Friday night, we can deliver a portable street and remove it Monday morning. We can put a whole street life in front of a university or any place, bringing street life back.” (Jamie Lerner - Interview for American society of landscape architects)
Another situation in Curitiba planning and development, makes great example how informal and formal switch places. In Friday night, informal detachable street takes formal statement by taking place in city square. However, in Monday morning, same mobile street elements become informal again.
Flea market case:
Flea markets are worldwide known phenomenon. Happenings connected to this kind of spending time, and this way of trading among citizen are very popular. However, Flea Markets are established and taken form from completely informal way of trading and occupying space, to formal act of trade and city life.
"Today's American flea market is a modern version of a phenomenon that has endured throughout history in all civilized societies - wherever there is a high concentration of people, there will be market days when they assemble for the exchange of goods and services.”(Albert LaFarge, author of U.S. Flea Market Directory)
As we know, Flea Markets exist since very old times. Alber LaFarge put it as it is. There is no way to avoid Flea markets here and there. The thing is, that city goverment want them controled. Otherwise, once closed Flea market will take another place whether goverment wants it or not. This whole changing places thing, is completely informal. Flea market can be put down, but it will eventualy find new place. The best way to control it is simply by allowing its existence. This is clearly formal act and turning point from informal to formal. City allows market to take its place, but makes a certain time of the week or of the month, when market is allowed. Also small charges are often required from people who have stores in these markets. This way, people get their market place, and by that they do not compromise city rules and plans, but becomes more formal than it was before.
Bibliography & sources:
1. http://www.ted.com/talks/teddy_cruz_how_architectural_innovations_migrate_across_borders
2. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve
3. http://www.asla.org/ContentDetail.aspx?id=30875
4. Postcolonialising informality - Ann Varley, Department of Geography
5. Monitor stories - Jose Gamez, McAllen library director
6. http://www.hollisflea.com/flea_market_history.html
7. http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2011/04/21/previ-the-metabolist-utopia.html
8. Justin McGuirk - Previ, the metabolist utopia
