The using the word fabric seems so different in architecture and fashion. In fashion, fabric is about how fashion could be expressed and in urban and architectural view, it’s about the organization of city.
The Quinn’s article mentioned that the production and consumption of space could come from fashion industry. And the fabric of city could be all about form, system of common urban life.
In addition to the meaning of fabric as skin, urban fabric system could also show the concept of ’trasformation over tine takes place Hertzberger, 55). The basic concept of fabric shows the history of city. ‘The Venetian fabric as a coherent whole : it is composed of parts created in different but akin to one another’ (Hertzberger, 60) Merging the time of confliction between gothic and renaissance, the article said we could easily find out parts of city as different in shape, but similar in sturctire. It expressed to living field as it shows relationship between individual architecture space and urban context.
Also fabric is not just appearance but the space of living life. There are so many possibility to change the environmental fabric for citizen. Users are born, live an die in urban space and while they use the space, they change, adapt and translate the space. (Hertzberger, 63) All the phenomenon could change the fabric of space and also it affect the our life
Usually fabric seems to be 2-d appearance in city. And it could be read as form or shape of space. However, the form or shape could be translated for our use of space and it also affects urban fabric. So that’s the reason why Pompidou center which broke the flow or urban appearance is weird in Paris, but also it became the part of city currently because people use and translate it to adapt contemporary part with old historical spaces.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
FABRIC
Hertzberger describes fabric as the grid of a masterplan - here the fabric is a top-down implementation and/or overlay in which its threads provides the 'objective pattern' or 'proto-form'. He writes: "The grid functions as a generative framework which contains within it the basic inclination that it transmitted to each solution...not only will the parts determine the identity of the whole, but conversely the whole will contribute to the identity of the parts." Whereas Hertzberger and Habraken's articles dwell upon the idea of urban fabric on a conceptual level, Coates focuses on a more physical implementation of fabrics in architecture and design. He concedes that with the advent of digital technology, it is now possible to explore architecture with the properties of fabric, such as reviving the Baroque style 'beyond the limitations of masonry.' He establishes a link between fabric and skin, speaks of skin's dynamic qualities that are architecturally compelling: "skin has the quality of adapting and stretching, but ultimately it needs flesh and bone to support it. It is true that some textiles are so close to the body that they become a second skin, and on other occasions it is the distance between body and textile surface that makes them wearable." Quinn takes it one step further, or one scale down, directly to the fabric that engages our bodies. Most compelling for me is Quinn's statement "Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially. In these respects, clothing and housing are near twins, though clothing is both nearer and elder; for housing extends the inner heat-control mechanisms of our organism, while clothing is a more direct extension of the outer surface of the body." Using the body as an anchor, 'fabric' can then be freely scaled in relationship to it, from clothing itself to the skin of a building, to the connections of a city.
‘As technology accelerates the interface between fashion and architecture, the synergy between them could even rearrange the patters of human association and community, dislocating and dividing individuals into their own self-contained shells rather than unifying them into a single environment.’ (Quinn, 5)
‘That’s hot.’ (Paris Hilton, Tom Wiscombe)
‘That’s hot.’ (Paris Hilton, Tom Wiscombe)
Fabric will soon be an outdated metaphor for an infrastructure that presupposes coherence. Paris and Tom’s famous declaration is the natural result of the emerging nature of the metaphor of fabric into an idea of fashion and further. With mass housing, digital technology, late-capitalism, and the commoditization of common shelter, the means of understanding our urban fabric, even the metaphor of urban fabric, has to be as flexible as a sheet of Mongolian silk, and maybe, as Nigel Coats might argue, much thicker.
Hertzberger discusses the warp and weft of a fabric and uses the metaphor to describe an interdependent relationship between infrastructure and style, but we can see that the two-dimensionality of the metaphor allows for many other possibilities: Structure and geometry, grids and plans, cohesiveness and variation as in Habraken’s writing. The metaphor serves well for initial understanding, but it also presupposes a necessary relationship between coherence spatial continuity.
Habraken discusses fabric the least literally, and, I would argue, the most insightfully. Tracing the history of the modern American and European urban fabric, societal memory and a collective understanding, a cohesion, is shown to be critically important, even in the case of a massive planning event as shown in the example of Paris. ‘In the history of architecture, the emergence of downtown fabric as we have known it for more then a century did not come from an act of volition but from a condition thrust upon the profession.’ (Habraken, 71) This seems to imply that it is the weft of the fabric where architecture finds its agency, and the warp is an emergent phenomena. Hertzberger however argues that the warp and weft are ‘reciprocally generative’, (119) the whole informing the part and the part informing the whole.
This seems a comprehensive means to understand the notion of urban fabric. Until one realizes that given the right means, one could find a big mac on six continents within twelve hours without a map, and likely a Starbucks coffee to wash it down. Mass housing and so-called ‘junk spaces’ have rendered obsolete any notion of urban fabric without an understanding of it as also a discontinuous network.
‘[Mass housing] represented a new process broadly applied to the ongoing piecemeal transformation of the fine grained fabric. . . Fine grained transformation in response to life, itself, was effectively excluded. . . Mass housing did not evolve out of historical ways of building. Nor did it embody universal cultural understanding. . . They cannot properly be called fields.’ (Habraken, 76-77)
Mark Auge begins Non Places – the Anthropology of Supermodernity with the most familiar scene so that almost everyone reading is reading their own first person account. It is the scene of getting through an airport and into the air, from a generic commercial sector onto banal transportation, arriving at a neutral destination to stay in the same new hotel. ‘The artificiality, fragmentation and transience common to urban spaces are, paradoxically, the cohesive elements binding them together.’ (Quinn, 4) The modern global identity is by definition not bound by local conditions, but it is not undefined in its multiplicity. Instead it is often constrained (to use Hertzberger’s word) by what Koolhaas calls ‘…the architecture of junk space…[which] organizes society’s time and space in accordance with consumer agendas.’ (Quinn, 4)
So if one aims to understand the local urban fabric, it is necessary to understand the global trends and nodal relationships. Our metaphor for fabric must be at once both 600 thread count cotton and a thick net. Continuous at a local scale and nodal in nature. In effect, it must be quantum fabric. It is thus that one could argue that San Francisco and Shanghai have more in common than San Francisco and Portland.
‘But the special can also be constructed by the builders of the common house. Is spatial organization can parallel or sharply contrast the typology common to the field. In all such cases, however, we find meaning in the relation of the two, and an expression of the culture of the age.’ (78)
In most of the developed and developing world, formal and informal, it would be hard to find a newly built work that was not in some way a manifestation of a simultaneously local and global culture. In Habraken’s description of Cairo, we see an dense emerging local fabric of houses, concrete slabs upon pillars, with steel reaching out, waiting for the next floor. In my travels to Ecuador last summer, one of the most vivid scenes I can remember is looking out over the Barrios of Guayaquil, seeing these steel flagposts of optimism. A fabric slowly accumulating as societal memory dictates, but reinforced by a network of global trade and production of steel and concrete. A raw, rugged site, but filled with optimism. I, like the owners of the houses, and the reaching steel, can’t wait to see what’s next.
Fabric: Woven vs Surface
Fabric: Woven vs Surface
The idea of fabric seems to go only skin deep in Nigel Coates article skin/weave/pattern. He presents a proposal for the Rainham Marsh in Essex as a culmination of fabric elements in plan that will layer against other random patterns in section to create a three dimensional environment. As if the collage of random geometric patterns applied from high above in the designers chair would somehow create an “identity built into the local DNA” for that community. In another example the author strews jackets across the room to study the architectural potential of the fabrics folds however he does not delve into the potential of fabrics layers, construction methodologies or veiling characteristics. For Coates, fabric is simple a malleable surface that contains two dimensional patterns that should be applied everywhere. He talks about the three dimensional aspects that can be studied with computer modeling, yet the images are about two dimensional surface slapped on a terrain.
Lebbeus Woods presents a poetic article in “Radical Reconstruction,” however idea for inhabiting the devastated city is a more romantic view of the desolation of place than a viable solution. He states that “wherever the restoration of war devastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as a parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourist.” Many of the worlds most culturally diverse and vibrant cities were war torn and rebuilt including London, Paris, and Rome. The fact that tourist visit these places do not make them equivalent to visiting Epcot in Orlando because a rich local fabric exist with or without visitors. I agree that the local fabric should not be imitated or superficially memorialized. There is richness to these virgin war zones and his says it beautifully writing, “ there exists within this degraded layer of urban fabric another, more intimate scale of complexity that can serve as there point of origin for a new urban fabric.” The pictures that he is trying to paint are not backed by viable models shown through history and begin to make him sound like another quixotic socialist visionary. These environments have always existed and grow further, yet today we call them slums.
Habraken’s commentary “Palladio’s Children” takes a strong urbanist approach of architectural history. He claims that while the buildings facades change overtime, the guts of the building remain ordered by time honored cultural customs. He asserts that the cities architecture can be broken into type, pattern, system which create the block and ultimately the city. It is this social memory that creates the architecture for even those removed from the architecture community, and that while architects try to stylistically break free, the customs ultimately prevail. While I agree with most of Habraken’s urban commentary on field, the conclusions prognoses seems to be a stretch. He grounds his argument for the departure of the time told thematic variety to a centralized shelter on a massive scale as being a decision of professionals. While it is true that the modernist architects were thinking about how to improve the social condition through large scale housing projects, this could only have been a discussion after large scale industrial buildings were already being built in communist and socialist countries. He mentions this, but as an afterthought leading you to believe that it was primarily the ingenuity of the design professional that revolutionized the new housing type rather than the new economic models, industrialized methods and importantly the radical change in political ideologies.
The idea of fabric seems to go only skin deep in Nigel Coates article skin/weave/pattern. He presents a proposal for the Rainham Marsh in Essex as a culmination of fabric elements in plan that will layer against other random patterns in section to create a three dimensional environment. As if the collage of random geometric patterns applied from high above in the designers chair would somehow create an “identity built into the local DNA” for that community. In another example the author strews jackets across the room to study the architectural potential of the fabrics folds however he does not delve into the potential of fabrics layers, construction methodologies or veiling characteristics. For Coates, fabric is simple a malleable surface that contains two dimensional patterns that should be applied everywhere. He talks about the three dimensional aspects that can be studied with computer modeling, yet the images are about two dimensional surface slapped on a terrain.
Lebbeus Woods presents a poetic article in “Radical Reconstruction,” however idea for inhabiting the devastated city is a more romantic view of the desolation of place than a viable solution. He states that “wherever the restoration of war devastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as a parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourist.” Many of the worlds most culturally diverse and vibrant cities were war torn and rebuilt including London, Paris, and Rome. The fact that tourist visit these places do not make them equivalent to visiting Epcot in Orlando because a rich local fabric exist with or without visitors. I agree that the local fabric should not be imitated or superficially memorialized. There is richness to these virgin war zones and his says it beautifully writing, “ there exists within this degraded layer of urban fabric another, more intimate scale of complexity that can serve as there point of origin for a new urban fabric.” The pictures that he is trying to paint are not backed by viable models shown through history and begin to make him sound like another quixotic socialist visionary. These environments have always existed and grow further, yet today we call them slums.
Habraken’s commentary “Palladio’s Children” takes a strong urbanist approach of architectural history. He claims that while the buildings facades change overtime, the guts of the building remain ordered by time honored cultural customs. He asserts that the cities architecture can be broken into type, pattern, system which create the block and ultimately the city. It is this social memory that creates the architecture for even those removed from the architecture community, and that while architects try to stylistically break free, the customs ultimately prevail. While I agree with most of Habraken’s urban commentary on field, the conclusions prognoses seems to be a stretch. He grounds his argument for the departure of the time told thematic variety to a centralized shelter on a massive scale as being a decision of professionals. While it is true that the modernist architects were thinking about how to improve the social condition through large scale housing projects, this could only have been a discussion after large scale industrial buildings were already being built in communist and socialist countries. He mentions this, but as an afterthought leading you to believe that it was primarily the ingenuity of the design professional that revolutionized the new housing type rather than the new economic models, industrialized methods and importantly the radical change in political ideologies.
Fabric - Anders
Fabric
In the “Palladio's children” reading Habraken talks about spatial organization as the greatest quality in a field. How they are able to combine coherence and variation. The cultural preference has great influence on the urban fabric. In today’s global society where the cultural preference and building technique is getting unified what will happen to the urban fabric? Will a newly planned urban area in China look just like one in America? Are the variations between cities becoming the buildings instead of the urban fabric?
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Fabric__rather off topic but nonetheless...
Fabric
Liwen Zhang
When reading the variety on interesting texts that are posted for the word fabric this week, I felt especially drawn to Bradley Quinn’s piece, The Metropolis, which attempts to bring out the parallels between fashion and architecture.
Having lived most of my life in Hong Kong, an urban metropolis with hyperdensity (of people, cultures, buildings, fashion, trends…etc), the term “culture of hypervisibility” in particular resonated to me. There is definitely a codified surveillance present when you walk through the streets of Hong Kong, where the term “eyes on the street”, as Jane Jacobs would say, is taken to a whole new level – hypervisibility in an area of hyperdensity.
In Hong Kong, fashion is definitely what Quinn would argue as “walking signifiers” of “urban space”. This coupled with the city’s inherent need for speed and efficiency, brings about an intense and accelerated circulation of commodities. The competitive nature of the market in Hong Kong demands products to be consistently recalibrated to not only achieve high turnover rates but also to keep up with demanding consumers. The city has, in a certain sense, gone beyond what Quinn describes as “glorified consumption zones” unto what Walter Benjamin would call a “place of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity”.
What is interesting about Quinn’s article in this context is how he relates fashion to contemporary discourse in architecture, namely Augé’s non-places and the Foucaultian notion of the ‘heterotopia’ (perhaps not really contemporary discourse in architecture, but nevertheless has a huge impact on how we think about the city). In Ananya Roy’s ED 100 course, we learn of heterotopias to be impossible, ambiguous and imaginative spaces that are not easily pinned down. Aside from the many examples given by Quinn of spaces that could be heterotopias (such as parks, theatres, galleries, libraries), we learn of the camp as another genre of heterotopic space. The example given in class is the detainment camp in Guantanamo Bay, where despite being a US territory, the prisons at the camp exist outside of US laws and jurisdiction. Thus vile acts of violence happen unaccounted for in such spaces. Roy described it to be a “strange extension of American power”, where the prisons are spaces of exception and desubjectification , where there is a suspension of one’s status as a subject. After that particular lecture I felt quite depressed – Roy was basically suggesting that the prison or refugee camp is now a paradigmatical space which questions the way we think about cities and perhaps even serves as a marker to the end of the city. This rather longwinded description has a connection to the Quinn reading, I promise – I basically wanted to bring out a certain contrast to Quinn’s overly optimistic and perhaps even superficial reading of the “potential uses of heterotopic spaces” – as warehouse turned catwalk for high fashion. I understand that it is not the goal of Quinn’s work at all to talk about human desubjectification, however I cannot help but see a vast contrast in the application of the notion of heterotopia illustrated between the two examples.
In our current networked society which requires architecture and planning to respond in hybrid ways, the idea of heterotopia is perhaps fitting – programmatic organization of space then becomes ambiguous and multifaceted. However, as Quinn briefly mentions, this may result in fragmentation of space and culture. How do we as architects and planners then respond to spaces like Guantanamo Bay, where fragmentation has basically taken up a life of its own?
Liwen Zhang
When reading the variety on interesting texts that are posted for the word fabric this week, I felt especially drawn to Bradley Quinn’s piece, The Metropolis, which attempts to bring out the parallels between fashion and architecture.
Having lived most of my life in Hong Kong, an urban metropolis with hyperdensity (of people, cultures, buildings, fashion, trends…etc), the term “culture of hypervisibility” in particular resonated to me. There is definitely a codified surveillance present when you walk through the streets of Hong Kong, where the term “eyes on the street”, as Jane Jacobs would say, is taken to a whole new level – hypervisibility in an area of hyperdensity.
In Hong Kong, fashion is definitely what Quinn would argue as “walking signifiers” of “urban space”. This coupled with the city’s inherent need for speed and efficiency, brings about an intense and accelerated circulation of commodities. The competitive nature of the market in Hong Kong demands products to be consistently recalibrated to not only achieve high turnover rates but also to keep up with demanding consumers. The city has, in a certain sense, gone beyond what Quinn describes as “glorified consumption zones” unto what Walter Benjamin would call a “place of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity”.
What is interesting about Quinn’s article in this context is how he relates fashion to contemporary discourse in architecture, namely Augé’s non-places and the Foucaultian notion of the ‘heterotopia’ (perhaps not really contemporary discourse in architecture, but nevertheless has a huge impact on how we think about the city). In Ananya Roy’s ED 100 course, we learn of heterotopias to be impossible, ambiguous and imaginative spaces that are not easily pinned down. Aside from the many examples given by Quinn of spaces that could be heterotopias (such as parks, theatres, galleries, libraries), we learn of the camp as another genre of heterotopic space. The example given in class is the detainment camp in Guantanamo Bay, where despite being a US territory, the prisons at the camp exist outside of US laws and jurisdiction. Thus vile acts of violence happen unaccounted for in such spaces. Roy described it to be a “strange extension of American power”, where the prisons are spaces of exception and desubjectification , where there is a suspension of one’s status as a subject. After that particular lecture I felt quite depressed – Roy was basically suggesting that the prison or refugee camp is now a paradigmatical space which questions the way we think about cities and perhaps even serves as a marker to the end of the city. This rather longwinded description has a connection to the Quinn reading, I promise – I basically wanted to bring out a certain contrast to Quinn’s overly optimistic and perhaps even superficial reading of the “potential uses of heterotopic spaces” – as warehouse turned catwalk for high fashion. I understand that it is not the goal of Quinn’s work at all to talk about human desubjectification, however I cannot help but see a vast contrast in the application of the notion of heterotopia illustrated between the two examples.
In our current networked society which requires architecture and planning to respond in hybrid ways, the idea of heterotopia is perhaps fitting – programmatic organization of space then becomes ambiguous and multifaceted. However, as Quinn briefly mentions, this may result in fragmentation of space and culture. How do we as architects and planners then respond to spaces like Guantanamo Bay, where fragmentation has basically taken up a life of its own?
Urban fabric- Digging inside ot it
Jungmi Won
N.J. Habraken examined urban fabric at the aspect of social memory and transformation of the city. With this article, I came up with a question about the eye view seeing urban fabric. In spite that he dealt with transforming issue of city, is it valuable or even possible to think a city as an urban fabric itself? When we think our face, fabric of our face is only a tissue covering bone structure. One’s appearance is already decided in the level of bone figure. Then, if urban fabric makes a character or impression of a city, don’t we have to focus on its structure, energy flow or inner layer than fabric to scrutinize its route of transform?
Ram Koolhass said that ‘Not only are large of its surface occupied by architectural mutations, utopian fragments and irrational phenomena, but in addition each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies…’ e in his book, Delirious NY. He saw NY as a city covered with fabric expressing desires.
Urban fabric is a subject that we can approach in terms of transformation and it is the main figure of city. But, I cannot shake off a thought it is a superficial approach without level of somewhat software. It’s because I keep thinking the radical transforming of city like Lebbeus. ‘In the spaces voided by deconstruction, new structure can be injected. Complete in themselves, they do not fit exactly into the voids, but exist as spaces within spaces, making no attempt to reconcile the gaps between what is new and old, between two radically different system of spatial order and thought.’ (2page, Radical reconstruction)
Also, with this phrase, ‘Healing is not illusory, cosmetic process, but something that-by articulating difference-both deeply divides and joins together’. I come up with a sentence ‘The professionals of the city are like chess players who lose to computers…We have to imagine 1,001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risk; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right. (P971, What ever happened to Urbanism?)
What we see in the city is how we pursue. I wish urban fabric can be accepted as a result not a phenomenon.
N.J. Habraken examined urban fabric at the aspect of social memory and transformation of the city. With this article, I came up with a question about the eye view seeing urban fabric. In spite that he dealt with transforming issue of city, is it valuable or even possible to think a city as an urban fabric itself? When we think our face, fabric of our face is only a tissue covering bone structure. One’s appearance is already decided in the level of bone figure. Then, if urban fabric makes a character or impression of a city, don’t we have to focus on its structure, energy flow or inner layer than fabric to scrutinize its route of transform?
Ram Koolhass said that ‘Not only are large of its surface occupied by architectural mutations, utopian fragments and irrational phenomena, but in addition each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies…’ e in his book, Delirious NY. He saw NY as a city covered with fabric expressing desires.
Urban fabric is a subject that we can approach in terms of transformation and it is the main figure of city. But, I cannot shake off a thought it is a superficial approach without level of somewhat software. It’s because I keep thinking the radical transforming of city like Lebbeus. ‘In the spaces voided by deconstruction, new structure can be injected. Complete in themselves, they do not fit exactly into the voids, but exist as spaces within spaces, making no attempt to reconcile the gaps between what is new and old, between two radically different system of spatial order and thought.’ (2page, Radical reconstruction)
Also, with this phrase, ‘Healing is not illusory, cosmetic process, but something that-by articulating difference-both deeply divides and joins together’. I come up with a sentence ‘The professionals of the city are like chess players who lose to computers…We have to imagine 1,001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risk; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right. (P971, What ever happened to Urbanism?)
What we see in the city is how we pursue. I wish urban fabric can be accepted as a result not a phenomenon.
fabric
Fabric/Bin
The cities before modernism are more about hierarchy while cities after modernism are more about typology. In the maps displayed in “Palladio’s Children”, we can probably tell where the high class buildings are just by the size and position, but it is hard to tell where houses, temples, shops are respectively. The cities are as a whole. They are constructed on experience. In modern city, we can easily know the function of a building just by passing the building but it is difficult to distinguish the identity of a house’s owner. Although typology is based on experience, most times experience beats types.
The cities before modernism are more about coherency while cites after modernism are more about difference. The old cities have very organic fabric while “the Modernist era was the first in history where the dialogue between field and architecture was disrupted”(from “Palladio’s Children) In modern cities, housing, industry, public space are separated apparently that the organization of the city is totally different than the old cities. Actually, deconstruction is also a kind of construction. Demolishing and Removing are significant forces which embody development and transformation. The reason why modern fabric so much differs from the past is that science, technology changed dramatically in the last century, hence changed people’s life tremendously.
As the modern technique tends to be universal, architects turn to seek their personal differences. We know more about “Gehry Building”, “Zaha Building” rather than “American Building” or “European Building”. We have so many master marks in this world. The paradox is that when buildings become different, cities become the same. A Gehry building can be in LA, in Spain and I am sure it will show up in China someday.
One thing hasn’t been changed is the power that architecture conveys. In any times, buildings represent the social power of the owner. For example, CCTV in China chose Koolhaas’s project to show its center status in media corporations. Actually China chose this project intending to show the world its development and openness, just like building a palace in old time. Interesting enough, clothing shares the similarity of architecture. While people wore different classes of clothing in ancient time, people today wear the same: T-shirt, suit, etc. The difference is that if it is an Armani or LV.
Regionalism is important, but globalism is the tendency . City is an environment for people to live in. City fabric reflects from political policies to ordinary life.
New technology changes the way people living. It is the way people live that changes the fabric. It is less difficult for us to preserve the fabric rather than to maintain the way people live. If old fabric merely become a place for tourists, at some extend they are meaningless.
The cities before modernism are more about hierarchy while cities after modernism are more about typology. In the maps displayed in “Palladio’s Children”, we can probably tell where the high class buildings are just by the size and position, but it is hard to tell where houses, temples, shops are respectively. The cities are as a whole. They are constructed on experience. In modern city, we can easily know the function of a building just by passing the building but it is difficult to distinguish the identity of a house’s owner. Although typology is based on experience, most times experience beats types.
The cities before modernism are more about coherency while cites after modernism are more about difference. The old cities have very organic fabric while “the Modernist era was the first in history where the dialogue between field and architecture was disrupted”(from “Palladio’s Children) In modern cities, housing, industry, public space are separated apparently that the organization of the city is totally different than the old cities. Actually, deconstruction is also a kind of construction. Demolishing and Removing are significant forces which embody development and transformation. The reason why modern fabric so much differs from the past is that science, technology changed dramatically in the last century, hence changed people’s life tremendously.
As the modern technique tends to be universal, architects turn to seek their personal differences. We know more about “Gehry Building”, “Zaha Building” rather than “American Building” or “European Building”. We have so many master marks in this world. The paradox is that when buildings become different, cities become the same. A Gehry building can be in LA, in Spain and I am sure it will show up in China someday.
One thing hasn’t been changed is the power that architecture conveys. In any times, buildings represent the social power of the owner. For example, CCTV in China chose Koolhaas’s project to show its center status in media corporations. Actually China chose this project intending to show the world its development and openness, just like building a palace in old time. Interesting enough, clothing shares the similarity of architecture. While people wore different classes of clothing in ancient time, people today wear the same: T-shirt, suit, etc. The difference is that if it is an Armani or LV.
Regionalism is important, but globalism is the tendency . City is an environment for people to live in. City fabric reflects from political policies to ordinary life.
New technology changes the way people living. It is the way people live that changes the fabric. It is less difficult for us to preserve the fabric rather than to maintain the way people live. If old fabric merely become a place for tourists, at some extend they are meaningless.
Fabric
Architecture 209X, Spring 2007
Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases
Nicholas De Monchaux
Qing Wang
Fabric
The richness of the word – fabric makes it so intriguing. In WiKi, there are three different meanings of it:
A textile or cloth (Cotton fabric)
A grouping bound together (The Internet is a fabric of computers connected by routers.)
Interconnections between people and events
Although the meanings are quite different in different fields, the shared meaning of three of them is apparent that is a sort of embedded internal structure that is recognized as fiber in textile, computer in Internet, connection of people in society and urban pattern in city. In Radical Reconstruction, Lebbeus Wood stresses the importance of urban fabric in a city reconstruction. He sees the city as a dynamic entity full of changing, in which urban fabric is made of static architectural form, but also subject to this fluidity. Apparently, he is against two kinds of views: one is that the ruler totally disregards the continuity of the living culture of a city and rebuilds the
“The erasure of old cities in order to build a better and more humane world is by now a widely discredited concept, yet it lives on wherever a totalizing system of space and of thinking is imposed in the name of a common cause…..Wherever buildings are broken by the explosion of bombs or artillery shells, by lack of maintenance or repair, by fire or structural collapse, their form must be respected in its integrity, embodying a history that must not be denied. In their damaged state they suggest new forms of thought and comprehension, and new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate with the building, to be whole and free outside of any predetermined, totalising system.”
He regards the urban fabric is the formal presentation of living culture in a long systematic history. For the second view, he says:
“The attempt to restore the fabric of old cities to their former conditions is, therefore, a folly that not only denies post-war conditions, but impedes the emergence of an urban fabric and way of life based upon them. Wherever the restoration of wardevastated urban fabric has occurred in the form of replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, it ends as parody, worthy only of the admiration of tourists.”
Again, he emphasizes the dynamic of urban changing as well as urban fabric changing. He insists that the reconstruction has to be done on a systematic consideration of the essence of old urban fabric. “However, there exists within this degraded layer of urban fabric another, more intimate scale of complexity that can serve as there point of origin for a new urban fabric.” The relation between urban and it fabric is like the fiber and cloth. The urban is made up of urban fabric - blocks, streets, public space just like the cloth is weaved by cotton fiber.
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