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Summary: Water: New Urban Configurations
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| Maurizio Vitta |
Acqua: nuove configurazioni urbane Water: New Urban Configurations
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| Coop Himmelb(l)au, Liechti Schmid, Architectes, Jean Nouvel, Multipack, Diller + Scofidio |
A pelo d`acqua Expo Suisse 2002 / Three Lakes Region of Switzerland (2002)
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| Philippe Samyn |
Reminiscenze e modernit? Henriquez Bridge, Copiapo (1994)
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| Ateliers Jean Nouvel |
Variabili trasparenze Water Complex, Le Havre (2004)
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| Von Gerkan, Marg + Partner |
Citt? di rifondazione Luchao Harbour City, Luchao (2004)
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Chiatta natatoria Floating Swimming Pool, Paris (2004)
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| UCX Architects |
Esistenzialismo post-urbano Adrenalin Tower, Rotterdam (2005)
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| 3c+t Capolei Cavalli Architetti Associati |
Un parco termale per la citt? Acque Albule Spa Complex, Tivoli (2005)
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| Bar Architects |
Protesi riflessa Bridgehouse, Middelburg (2005)
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| Moshe Safdie |
Aquapolis futurista Marina Bay Sands, Singapore (2006)
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| Studio De Ferrari Architetti |
Uno sguardo dal ponte New Domenico Carpanini Bridge, Turin (2006)
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| Matteo Thun & Partners |
Naturalmente sostenibile Terme Meran, Meran (2006)
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| Diller Scofidio + Renfro |
Galleggiare con arte Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2006)
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Introduction: Water: New Urban Configurations
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There are various ways at looking at the issue of how water relates to architecture.
The first, of course, is the most general approach. You start by noting something obvious: water is an increasingly important player in the age in which we live. It is now considered an irreplaceable asset for mankind, to the extent that even major international projects are now being constructed around saving and supplying it, and it is the topic of various disputes between different States, often even verging on wars over its control.
After all, the 21st century is expected to see the melting of the ice caps, the raising of water levels, and a reduction in the amount of dry land compared to the oceans. On one hand we have scarcity, thirst and a yearning for ownership; on the other there are natural catastrophes, floods and inundations.
This partly explains why water has turned into an almost ever-present cultural metaphor now characterising an entire age. There is plenty of talk about "liquid modernity" because, as Zygmunt Bauman (who coined the expression) tells us "fluids travel with great ease. They ?run?, ?pour?, ?spread?, ?filter?, ?overflow?, ?drip? and ?seep?; unlike solids they are hard to stop: they can get around, over or even inside obstacles (...) The incredible mobility of fluids is what associates them with the idea of ?lightness?. (...) We associate the concepts of ?lightness? or ?absence of weight? with mobility or variability... These are the reasons why fluidity and liquidity are taken as relevant metaphors when we are trying to understand the nature of the present age and, in many respects, this new phase in the history of modernity".
It is a pity that Italo Calvino did not live long enough to bring his American Lectures up-to-date, including this concept of liquidity. Of course he would most certainly have expounded upon it, perhaps reflecting not only ? on not so much ? on the speeding up of our experiences and the breathtaking increase in our mobility through space, as on the cancelling out of the spatio-temporal dimension in the name of the kind of simultaneity provided exclusively by the fluidity of information.
These initial considerations are enough to clarify the importance of water for architecture, often expected to compete with this resource for control over areas of land and to take it into account right in the heart of the design process. But we can go even further.
Plasticity, sinuosity, flow, transformation and multi-formality are now part of our everyday lives not just as conceptual images but as concrete forms of life: forms of objects, tools and spaces, all inspired by a watery, liquid substance, which, in itself, has no form but can take on any form, which is elastic and flexible yet extremely powerful, which has no bounds and yet marks often unsurpassable boundaries. In this light, the metaphor of liquidity turns into a design paradigm: in the past architecture was always geared to the ground, solidity, heaviness and mass, but now a new horizon is emerging composed of a liquid, yielding, light and fluid element. The comparison with the Liberty period of just over a century ago is inevitable, but it does not hold.
The Liberty style certainly developed along the lines of winding forms, sinuosity and dilation through space, following the caprice of biological and phyto-morphological evolution, but it is primary benchmark was still vegetation deeply rooted in the earth.
Nowadays architecture?s scope and range of action confronts new norms and models all focusing on the fluidity of thinking, communication and individual-collective reality abandoned to a certain liquid rippling of ideas, forms and tendencies. The guiding concepts (which are also liquid) are transformation, change, metamorphosis and hybridation. Things ? and hence architectural objects ? tend to take on multi-formal, shimmering identities, multiplying their appearance and meaning so that they are perceived and understood as having a kaleidoscopic image refracting and mobilising every single detail of a strategy of constant sensorial and semantic re-projection.
All this makes relations between architecture and water both crucial and, at the same time, new; relations between the material substance of artefact and its immersion in a physical-cultural environment marked by liquidity and fluidity.
There are two approaches to this issue: immediate, physical and spatial relations between an architectural body and the liquid environment represented by water in all its manifestations ? rivers, seas, oceans, lakes, riverbanks and insularity ? and the intimate, fluent and fluid nature of the very material architecture is made of.
The first approach is incorporated in the realm of architectural history and criticism ? particularly but not just modern-day architecture. In fact antiquity featured many episodes of direction interaction between building and its location in a watery setting. There is no need to point out relations between cities and rivers, water sources, boundaries to be controlled, transport and trade routes; or, more specifically, relations between cities and the sea. But even the idea of building a city on the sea is often a very prominent place in urban history and utopian visions of the city. The visionary Platonic city of Atlantis was not the only city to be crisscrossed by concentric canals acting as streets, when Cort?s saw the Aztec capital of Temixtitan it was full of waterways. The example of Venice is anything but unique. So cities set along river banks ? rivers, canals or seas ? has resulted in the development of very specific architectural types, ranging from the bridge to the waterfront and seaside to riverside, with buildings and other structures variously reflected on these shimmering surfaces.
The bridge, in particular, was for a long time designed based on morphological forms whose plasticity and beauty were always gauged to constantly developing technology, and even now its creative possibilities still have not been exhausted: using wood and stone, iron and reinforced concrete, they led to an industrial revolution ready to take on radically renovated architecture, characterizing entire periods in history right up to the daring aerial structures of the present day, whose lightness and airiness are capable of being reflected in the liquid element they cross.
There has also been no lack of attempts to reconnect history to the future, for instance by re-proposing the old model of a medieval bridge flanked by commercial and craft activities, only developing its structure based on more up-to-date and refined technical solutions.
Water has also penetrated inside architecture. In time neighbourhoods have been designed in war three settings, setting out works of architecture in accordance with the insular layout of the archipelago, in other words allowing constructions to interact on a par with their watery-earthy surroundings, from which they emerge as features on an elaborate landscape. More recently water has penetrated right into the architectural body of works by Kengo Kuma, Makoto Sei Watanabe or Emilio Ambasz, actually turning into architecture and setting out spaces and structures doubled by reflections, injected with uncertainty by reflective surfaces and incorporated in a kind of fluidity contradicted only by those very few support points of a structure which is precariously anchored to the ground like a boat along the riverbank. The need to come up with new construction areas has projected architecture not just onto water but even into water, letting it flicker like a virtual, unsubstantial, fluid image.
But the key step forward came when increasingly intricate and refined technology made architecture itself a liquid element - in other words, the moment when building material lost all weight, opacity and mass and turned into a transparent, light and elastic film capable of being shaped in endless ways.
Glass is the new protagonist of architectural design. In the novel entitled Heart of Glass by H.M. van den Brink, the main character dreams of building a tower made entirely of glass in a brand-new residential neighbourhood: "A city in the city, complete with squares and streets instead of lobbies and corridors, but all covered.
During the day and night, in summer and winter, the temperature must not be exactly the same as outside, just a pleasant variation on it, summer rain which does not wet people, an improved version of the Dutch climate, while the outside world continues to be visible, because the fa?ade and also part of the floors in the heart of the building are made of glass. (...) for over a century now glass has been described as the building material of the future. It is harder than steel. Indestructible. Impenetrable. Its transparency means that the things built out of it have an unusually cool and, at the same time, bold beauty, mysterious without hiding anything".
But glass is still an enigmatic player in architecture, a protagonist whose potential is not really totally understood.
The very transparency which makes it such a triumphant part of the utopian dream of Glasarchitektur, actually frightens people. Glass is considered to be cold and impersonal. This perhaps also emerges in the novel mentioned above; "it has something to do with the fact that glass is, ultimately, a liquid. (...) A liquid, just light water. Only water settles again after it has been disturbed, it closes up again, while for glass it is everything or nothing, intact all broken". So glass architecture is liquid architecture, which solidifies the form of water into an invisible material which can be shaped, whose spaces, structures and surfaces are organized into architectural structures in an environment for living in. Of course, water has no breaking point like glass. But glass reproduces its crystalline transparency, making a construction not a closed body interrupting the flow of experience, but a hazy shell immersed in the world as if in some magical habitat in which natural light can spread in all its variations and artificial light can shine like a pearl inside the valves of a shell.
So relations between water and architecture are embodied in multiformity, metamorphosis and variation. More than in some building design, these relations envisage a new landscape. It points towards a different way of living and way of life; it opens up to perception stimulating a more sophisticated form of sensibility; it draws close to nature along different lines from the earthy, impervious, hard paths of tradition. More than some kind of new design approach, it sets the terms of a new type of ecology: it starts with cutting-edge technological solutions to eventually achieve the simplicity of a St. Francis-style message, in which "sister water" is re-proposed in its "very useful, humble, precious and cast" image.
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