Fundamental #13

http://m.designobserver.com/places/feature/038450

Al-Wakrah Stadium
Qatar, Zaha Hadid
theguardian.com

Hello Everyone:

Before I get going today, I would like to remind of my latest challenge, breaking 15,000 page views by the end of the summer, September 20, 2014.  We're closing in on 13,000, so let's see if we can add about 2,000 more.  Now for today's subject "Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture."  Below is a post on the first part of a rather difficult article, littered with English grammatical errors and oblique references.  I've tried to make some sense out of it in hopes that it'll make sense to you.

Modernity, if it could be said, is many things all at once.  Mostly, it has engendered the magical , occasionally violent transformation of substance into money and back.  The substance, in this case, being architecture.  Sometimes this architecture is built, other times is exists in the computer or in model form.  "Fundamentals #13" posits the question when the power to make the invisible visible (i.e architecture), how and when is it possible to resist this power, limit it, redirect or neutralize, or at the very least not be seduced by it?

Al Wakrah Stadium interior
youtube.com

This question cannot be simply asked by the individuals who hold the power within the small realm of the architecture profession.  Nor can it be easily posed in the realm of the elite, transnational cultural milieu in which the architectural discourse takes place.  This is not to say that opposing views and practices do not exist but they can be rendered moot by being given the privilege of sharing the world stage with what they oppose.  By contrast, officially blessed architecture, such as urbanism, with its unquestioning and happy complicity, allows unfettered access to the rationale of the world system-this access is necessary to anyone who thinks that cognitive maps of this system are necessary to change it.

Where architecture and the world collide is typically in the multi-national, multi-local, cross border world of real estate, which sometimes can take the form of a cultural monument, places of recreation, or other places of political-economic significance.  One example of a building as infrastructure is Zaha Hadid Al-Wakrah Sports Complex, designed for the 2022 World Cup Football (Soccer for you Americans) Competition in Qatar.  Ms. Hadid recently commemorated the deaths of hundreds of migrant workers, killed during the construction of the infrastructure, by issuing a rambling statement about power in the cultural realm being exchanged for silence in the political realm, the role of architecture in rising nation-states, finally divesting herself from solidarity with the workers after she famously declared her unity with them.

Foreign workers in Qatar
theguardian.com

Al Wakrah Stadium is an element of a larger more comprehensive program of converting oil money into cultural capital and real estate invest. This program includes a residential enclave-Lusail City, a "city with a vision-" which according to the developers Diar Real Estate Investment Company, "continually striving to improve and enhance people's quality of life and abiding [by] the most stringent international standards."  Yet, those so-called stringent international standards do not include the hundreds of foreign laborers who are building the stadium and live in virtual squalor.  This disingenuous statement from Diar Real Estate Company simply fuels the cry of worker exploitation and the real estate company will stand to profit from this exploitation.

Rem Koolhaus
dezeen.com

Thus, "Fundamentals" takes the position of agreeing with the curatorial program established by architect Rem Koolhaus at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy.  Perhaps the profession has strayed too far into flights of design fancy and it's time to get back to basics? Why not return go back to the beginning through incorporating historical perspective? For the Biennale, Mr. Koolhaus proposed the rubric "Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014."  A century ago, World War began and was immediately followed by revolution in Europe and Russia, sweeping away the old and replacing it with something that reflect a more industrial aesthetic.  Even Le Corbusier felt compelled to address these cataclysmic changes-"Architecture or revolution?"  Now, one hundred years later, we are in the position to address the consequences.

However, Mr. Koolhaus is not advocating and Nietzschean-type "transvaluation of values" serviced by history, rather he seems to have interpreted fundamentals  as an eternal recurrence within the "architecture of twelve subsets: floor, door, wall, ceiling, toilet, façade, balcony, window, corridor, hearth, roof, and stairs."  The basic components of any building, large or small, from the dawn of time through today.  In the case of the Biennale exhibitions, the "Elements of Architecture," as they represent what the architect refers to  as "the fundamentals of our buildings used by any architect, anywhere, anytime."  They are understood are "unstable compounds" guided by heterogeneous forces.  The article wonders if this list is not some particular way of giving order to things.  Is this list some artifact of the very same modernity that is supposed to be absorbed in the sixty-five pavilions by an unsuspecting world?  By the time the Biennale program was announced, the list had grown to fifteen, with the more banal fireplace substituted for hearth and the addition of the more modern escalator, elevator, and ramp.  Still, the question remains, let's pretend those additional elements are folded into the "stair" component and go back to the original twelve.

Poster for the 2014 Venice Biennale
labrj.org.br

Regardless of how precisely we define the fundamentals, they remain just that. "Fundamentals" observes that the original list seems  somewhat archaic, recalling a typology of days gone by.  The reduces the meaning of "type" to the more utilitarian type that recalls the "kit of parts" relegated to the history books.  They become commodities, fetishes, if you will.  The fact that they are fetishized elevates this elements to a sacred almost magical level in the "invocation of architecture" as a timeless rational subset.  Timelessness meaning anytime, anywhere, part of what makes this "kit of parts" modern.  That and twelve is a good number with religious connotations, that might inspire magical qualities.

The modernity that Rem Koolhaus has in mind is focused on a tightly encapsulated one hundred year "phase-change from distinct national architecture to a 'single modern language,' with 'hidden ways of remaining 'national..."  The "Fundamental #13" dismisses this as an elitist cultural argument saddled with the European nineteenth century concept of style regardless whether it is international or national in character.  The modernity that Rem Koolhaus is referring to is globalization.  Quoting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Globalization takes place only in capital and data.  Everything else is damage control." (Spivak, 1, 2012)  This simplified approach clarifies the idea of "land" or "real estate"are temporal "global" things like money.  If this is the case, then why is no land or ground on the Biennale program, except those of the disappearing nation?  "Fundamental #13" calls this triskaidekaphobia-fear of the number thirteen.  A fear that "Fundamental #13" will perform some sleight-of-hand to ward off the erasure of history by capital.  Uncharacteristically for Mr. Koolhaus, this hesitation presents itself as a hesitation before a globalizing force, bracketed in order to study its secondary qualities as they were the main focus.

Model of Venice Biennale
Rem Koolhaus
dezeen.com

The 2014 Venice Biennale is supposed to be about architecture and only architecture-not "staritects," urbanism, site, landscape, war, or poverty.  Ah, but that's the beauty of the grand exhibitions, the afore mentioned find their way into the mix, issues that architects and urbanists have been grappling with since the end of World War I.  The fundamental goes on to make an argument connecting Marcel Duchamp's upside urinal, infrastructure and its connection to the outside world.  Admittedly, it's a little hard to grasp the point of the article's case for globalization.  As a measure of helpfulness, the article does offer up a bibliography complied by the Buell Center that might illuminate the reader.  However, the article does offer this caveat, "...learning to read real estate as a contingent historical construction, in relation to architecture.  Which is not the same as reading the signs stuck into the lawn by real estate agents to advertise the qualities of a particular lot..." Infrastructure is what repeats.  Land in the modern sense of real estate is a primary form of infrastructure, we take its repetitious qualities for granted, staying put while changing hands.  By detaching architecture from the land (metaphorically and literally) are attention is diverted from the bankers, realtors, developers, and the client.  This true of a single building or a planned urban development.

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