a space pool: expanding/contracting program zones

flexibility and redundancy

program and event

“revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program, and relating them to a particularly appropriate spatial configuration, may create conditions for unexpected events to occur”1

The centre looks to promote Britain through the process of curating the creative economy in a market retail scenario. The piazza becomes a market for cultural exchange in a variety of degrees of formality. The marketplace defines the piazza level of the building which uses theatrical gantry technologies to allow for walls or elements of shelter to be positioned into an arrangement to suit the current set of ‘exhibitions’. This is in line with current FCO policy which agrees that “the nature of diplomacy is changing. Where Embassies have historically been seen as the most un-public of public buildings…public diplomacy initiatives are leading us to increase the spaces within an Embassy where we can show off British culture and products and where visitors can find out more about Britain in our one-stop shops”.2 Whilst this is an extract from a government report there are, as yet, no examples of this concept in built form. The Sao Paulo centre (see appendix) is the closest it comes to a precedent but it is desperately short-sighted in its design where an atrium is the exhibition space which is only accessibly through the perimeter fence and security at the door.

“We expect flexibility from our buildings, to be able to respond to future changes anticipated throughout their operative lives…flexibility includes scope for expansion where practicable, and scope for reduction of activity through subletting or disposal of surplus space, without compromising ongoing activities or security.”3

The general term ‘creative’ is dangerous as it assumes all the products from the industry are alike in form. The reality is that the exports range from completely virtual like consultancy and digital technology to the classically physical such as crafts or fashion. The flexibility of the marketplace is essential then because the ‘products’ cannot always be treated as objects like in a museum. The building must be the definition of flexible is it is to serve all the elements of its potential activity. The program is not so much a set of static spaces but a space of potential and shifting character.

1: Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p13
2: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Estates Strategy Plan, 2004
3: Ibid

24hr programming for the British Centre

the market need

“not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping…shopping has methodically encroached on a widening spectrum of territories so that it is now, arguably, the defining activity of public life”1

When in Rome, we were all assigned a public space at random which gave me the Piazza di Trevi as a site of focus, the space in which the famous Baroque Trevi Fountain stands. Giovanni Battista Nolli drew his map of the city for the Pope in 1748, around the time Salvi was in the final stages of constructing the Trevi Fountain. The Piranesi etchings of this period (far left) and later ones showing it completed demonstrate the cart selling beginnings of the fringe retail activity that the piazza now exhibits with a surround of retail units such as United Colours of Bennetton and Gelaterias.

My updated version of the map uses the same graphical principles of civic space shown in white. So the retail units and shopping arcade of the Galleria Piazza Colonna are examples of the new civic typologies that evolved over the past few centuries. In addition to this massive growth of the presence of shopping in the city, the government of Italy and the Roman mayor’s office seek to increase tourism and streamline the capital’s infrastructure to allow tours to flow through the sights of the city more efficiently.2 Technologies that are the evolutionary descendent of space syntax3 have been developed and are used by huge corporations like Wall-Mart to model statistics to create a numerical image of the city which they can use to predict future trends and sites for new retail zones.4 It can only be a matter of time before this is applied to Rome as a study of tourist flows for economic gain, and the city becomes a giant theme park where the perimeter boundary is unknown but the rides are unique.
1: Sze Tsung Leong, And then there was shopping, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p129
2: Sebastiano Brandolini, Rome New Architecture, Skira, 2008, p12
3: A theory of urban planning and design created by Bill Hillier and colleagues which uses axis of movement to predict and design hierarchies of human behaviour in the city
4: Sze Tsung Leong, Ulterior Spaces, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p765

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“[shopping} why has it become such a basic aspect of our existence? Because it is synonymous with perhaps the most significant and fundamental development to give form to modern life: the unfettered growth and acceptance of the market economy as the dominant global standard”1

Crystal Palace
Crystal Palace was designed to house the ‘Exhibition and Industry of All Nations’ in 1851 and it became a pivotal moment in the history of public spectacle, mass gathering, tourism, and trade. As a vehicle to demostrate the creativity and industrial power of the nations of the world it was the first of its kind. It was unparalleled as an event, and provided a new architectural format capable of absorbing unprecedented urban congestion. During the 6 months of the term of the exhibition, 6.1 million persons arrived in London, 65 percent more than in the preceding year, and foreign visitors to the city increased by 275 percent.2

As a result of its acclaim it sparked the invention of the department store, a progression which was commented on by historian John McKean when he said…

“this sense of the voyeur in a transformed nature moves directly from the Crystal Palace to the department store, where the exhibition’s prohibition ‘no price labels allowed’ has been thrown off. Thus its immediate progeny are those exhibitions where the goods may be devoured not just by the eyes but by the wallets too.”3

The Next Big Thing
Recent events have shown shopping to be one of the most unstable activities despite its scale of operation. Its reliance on external factors like national economy means it has to keep up with society, which is one of the reasons it has to constantly keep shifting and reinventing itself. The diagram on the left demonstrates this idea as it traces the new forms of retail and their ever expanding scale in the city.

“the Next Big Thing is the recurring promise of a new typology that will deliver greater profits and higher consumer satisfaction” 4

So instead of going against this irrefutable social condition and despite recent dips in the retail industry, my project looks to take advantage of the market economy. Over the past decade, Britain’s creative sector has grown at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. “The creative industries must move from the margins to the mainstream of economic and policy thinking, as we look to create the jobs of the future”.5 Taking the precedent we set with the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the inventive skill demonstrated by its design, can we provide a scenario for the trade of British exports in the international market, a sector which the government is so keen to push our prestigious creative industry out into.
1: Sze Tsung Leong, And then there was shopping, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p129
2: Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1978, p457-60
3: John McKean, Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox, London, Phaidon Press, 1994, p32
4: Harvard Guide, p527
5: DCMS, Creative Britain: New talents for the new economy, 2008, p8
*: draws on Sze Tsung Leong’s diagram ‘Evolution of retail types’ from The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping

the British creative economy infrastructure

client mapping

The project works with the existing frameworks of British presence in Rome. The historic significance of the three entities; the British Embassy (designed by Basil Spence), the British School at Rome (designed by Edward Lutyens) and the British Council (an enigmatic promotional and commerical operation) can be seen in the drawings above which chart the progression of foreign institutes in the city of Rome, originally for academic purposes but increasingly for diplomatic and commercial operations.

the British Centre: project primer

a British archival superstructure lightly touches the Roman soil

‘It is well established…that nowadays we prefer the replica to the original. We prefer the reproduction of the work of art to the work of art itself…when such discoveries were first made…it was like the discovery that masturbation with pornographic material is more fun than sex. Quelle horreur!’

‘permit me to cite one of my fellow-countrymen, “All that was once directly lived”, he wrote, “has become mere representation.”…he intended it, astonishingly, as criticism not praise. I would prefer to advance his thought in the following way. Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is the re-presentation of the world. It is not a substitute for the plain primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment…This is where we live today. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory. We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonise, reorder, find jouissance in’
a manifesto: creative architecture

In Julian Barnes’ novel England England, the billionaire Jack Pitman hires advisers to consult with him about his massive project to create a luxury leisure experience on the Isle of Wight which recreates the essence of England. The theory of the consumption of replica over original is an extension of the argument for museums being a transformed format. They are no longer the national collection for preservation and re-presentation of cultural artefacts, it is a global entity of

The illustration shows a potential hyper rational advancement of this argument to the stage that we remove the original from the city to the safe confines of a massive archive in the air above. The new super-museum is a repository for a nations culture, much like the national archives are the singular place to find documents on governmental activities. The new layer of cultural sediment follows the Roman method of building upon the ruins and foundations of the last city thereby assimilating the material and elevating the living level upwards over the centuries of development. This new layer creates a final ceiling to this idea though, removing historic elements from the urban leaving it as the live laboratory for the invention and speculation over replica and experiential culture.

The shift in thinking about preservation from retrospective to prospective is afforded by this removal of all historic artefacts, leaving only the architecture which is a fixed fitting of culture, a hard furnishing. This shift is made possible by the realisation that preservation is an invention of our industrial revolution, and like all inventions it has a period of relevance before it must either evolve or be replaced. The ‘very fabric of society’ which may proclaimed to be under threat is in fact non-existent in the exclaimant’s definition, society is no longer interested or revolves around originality. To copy is now more relevant than mere influence or re-interpretation. What began with the love affair in the aesthetic of the machine and its process of reproduction, has now evolved into an expanding global scale where the action of influence and copy occurs at the rate of  conversational exchange.

In this current situation then, the idea of authorship is highly contentious. How do we determine the ‘rights’ to an idea, concept or even argument. Academic protocol calls for reference to prevent fraud but also to guide the reader to tangential or parallel arguments. In the creative industries, where the idea and knowledge that a person or collective possess is as valuable as the tangible products they produce, there is a system of defining Intellectual Property. Increasingly though we are seeing the replica preferred over the original as the users demand and can gain access to ‘protected’ products. The creation of interfaces that promote access over ownership are an acknowledgement that we are no longer interested in originality, merely the variety and complexity of numerous inputs. Also, this scenario means that those who produce and share are subject to a public rating or relevance. Here those with the precedented success or respect of society will prosper along with the quick rise of fashion or fad. It is this which the creative industry of Britain needs to acknowledge if it is to define suitable authorship protocol on an international level.

‘time is a problem,’ Jerry began. “you are only as old as you feel,” they say. Correction. You are as old, and exactly old, as you are. True of individuals, relationships, societies, nations. So England comes to me, and what do I say to her? I say, “Listen baby, face facts. We’re in the third millennium and your tits have dropped. The solution is not a push-up bra.”

‘We are no longer mega. Why do some people find that so hard to admit? The spinning jenny is in a museum, the oil is drying up. Other people makes things cheaper. Sometimes we are ahead of the game, sometimes behind. But what we do have, what we shall always have, is what others don’t: an accumulation of time…It’s a question of placing the product correctly, that’s all.’

‘England is a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history-stacks of it, reams of it-eminently marketable. If I may coin a phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. We are the new pioneers. We must sell our past to other nations as their future!

Imagine Coney: curating world culture

Piazza Trevi: interventions

1]

2]

transcribing piazza rituals

“people do not let themselves be manipulated the way spaces are. There are ceremonies that determine space… the ceremonies, or rather these rituals (after all, a ritual is a formalised event in the same way that architecture is a formailsed space) determine spaces. They regulate these spaces.”  B. Tschumi

gestures and translation

“the extraordinary animation is what strikes one at first, the vigorous ant-hill life of the natives. Streets, squares, market-places teem with people, noisy, elated, gay, energetic, busy people…everything is displayed everywhere, in
dramatic and artistic disorder…the noise is usually deafening. People chat, whistle, swear, sing, curse, cry, howl, weep, call to each other and shout, carrying on elaborate discussions or delicate negotiations… it is a gay and
happy noise, magnifyed by the stone walls, the absence of greenery, the narrowness of the street. It goes on from dawn to the small hours of the night…”
Luigi Barzini, The Italians