This is Hybrid_texts_architecture

This is Hybrid An analysis of mixed-use buildings by a+t. Prologue by Steven Holl Aurora Fernández Per, Javier Mozas, Javier Arpa Soft cover (17 x 23.5): 280 Pages English/Spanish Year 2011 978-84-614-6452-4

http://www.urbanhybridization.net/apertures.htm

URBAN APERTURE(S) >< POROSITY AS A NEW MODEL FOR HYBRID PUBLIC SPACE Francesco Cingolani, Domenico Di Siena, Manu Fernandez, Paco Gonzalez, Cesar Reyes Najera and Ethel Baraona Pohl http://thinkark.com/ Abstract In the past 20 years, the communications revolution produced by the Internet substantially affected the way we interact with the world. This has driven us to a change of perception in the traditionally recognized opposition between real and virtual. Nowadays, a new paradigm is actually re-drawing reality as a complex system of relations between layers as "face" (physical) and virtual. Architects and urban planners can no longer ignore this new reality generated by ubiquitous computer technologies that we have translated to the reconfiguration of physical space in urban areas, with the term "hybrid public spaces". This "hybridization" of space is only an expression of wider radical changes between analytical systems (order and spacing) to synthetic (complexity, connectivity, permeability) ones. In a system characterized by its high capacity for communication, if space becomes a mix between reality and virtual presence, the separation between private and public space becomes obsolete. According to this theory of urban permeability, the concept of "filter" is important as a new indispensable (Technological? Architectural? Social? Cultural? ) device. Filter as a mean of connection with the capacity of handling private/public, real/virtual, inside a system where the channels are not separated anymore. Now these channels are communicating -APERTURE-. In this model, public space is defined as the space in which information can flow freely. The public information consists in the communication generated from private channels screened by urban filters. In our point of view, this filter function cannot be automated: only people, through his sensitivity and emotions, can solve this function of discernment. We propose an anthropocentric definition of these "hybrid public spaces": considering the technological importance of information channels but restoring spirituality and intelligence that can only be provided by humans beings. Tags: # Urban Pore/porosity # Hybrid typologies of public urban spaces # Hybridization design strategies and case-study in urban, landscape or architectural design 1. CURRENT MODEL: HYBRID SPACE'S THEORY As commented by Daniel Innerarity in 2006, talking about the city: homogeneous and stable space is now an extreme case within a global area of local manifolds connected. Rather than neighbourhoods, local networks are developed and public debate is conducted in a virtual space, where streets and squares are no longer the primary venue and staging. Internet seems to offer an alternative "place" to the "traditional" sites for social relationships. This fact can be understood as a problem that can increase the subsequent depletion of public space, or conversely, may be regarded as an extraordinary opportunity to strength local social relationships, creating the necessary budgets to improve the vitality of the public spaces. Internet is now the "place" where the most successful models of collective management are being tested. According to Juan Freire, the crisis of urban public spaces (physical) is also due to the lack of (open) design that generate into citizens a genuine interest to use it. Freire has successfully introduced into the discussion concepts like "hybrid spaces" to refer to the opportunities offered by the hybridization of the physical and digital in public spaces.

Social Networks: Communities 3.0 When Internet access became popular, in the late nineties, many fans spent hours chatting with anyone, in open chat rooms. Today, in social networks the behaviour is different. In these networks we're not interested in talk just with someone else, rather than that, we want to meet people with whom we share a certain passion. A social network consists of two things, first a window (a personal description) and secondly, a system to establish contact (friendship) with other users (that's communication). The space has been transformed into a network, a permanent flow. When these relationships used to happen in a presential space, in most of the cases it was a public space. This was the space in which everyone was able to show himself and where he could meet and communicate with other people. This public open window is probably not enough anymore for one reason: it's too generic. Now...prior to "spend" time in getting to know someone deeply, you want to know more, or have some more safeguards, such as the fact that he or she is friend of your friends, or likely that both of you have similar ideas and tastes, like attending the same entertainment venues. The importance of Self-organization Image: Self-organization & "prosumer" New communication technologies enable new ways of collaboration and organization oriented to the management of common property (public spaces). From one side, there are emerging self-organizing phenomena as described by Kevin Kelly in "http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/" (1994) and by Howard Rheingold in "http://www.smartmobs.com/" (2002), while, in the other hand, methods and collaborative Open Source movements are constantly developing, improving and spreading. The selforganizing capabilities of informed societies, capable of reinvent their structures, are being discovered, and the way they use the phenomenon of virtual mirror allowing the interaction between information about an specific situation with individual decisions. Digital citizen participation, supported by computer tools, is not based on a model that express the plurality and organization of constituted communities. This is a non-collective way of participation since the dynamic comes from individual action and interaction. Decentralization The networks boost a new type of control: decentralized control operated by a plurality of independent individuals who collaborate using distributed mobile computing and communication capabilities. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) do not represent the solution, but an opportunity to improve our ability to manage the territory. They can be used for completely different and contradictory purposes. On one side you can take advantage of its enormous data processing capacity to centralize all information and try to "solve" the urban complexity, but they can also be used to open and decentralized decision making. It is about explore how ICTs can define an urban management structure where discontinuous control poles can coexist between an environment of self-determination (ownership) and freedom. This is a close idea to Buckminster Fuller's definition of tensegrity: "The integrity of the whole structure is invested in the finitely closed, tensional-embracement network, and the compressions are local islands". The presence of a centralized entity is not required when the control devices and return of information (feedback) allows the actors to see or realize the consequences of their actions. The phenomenon of unconscious self-organization becomes conscious and intentional control when it allows individuals to understand the effects of their actions. Here we can talk about the concept of tensegrity, when referring to a management model where decentralized decisions join centralized ones preventing a fully closed and omnipresent "dynamic of control". Reversing the supremacy of centralization on individual decisions, citizens can become aware of their actions and coordinate them intentionally. This process can get back the necessary legitimacy and credibility to interventions in degraded urban areas.

Open Source City The Open Source (OS) development model presents quite interesting features that could be applied in urban management processes. Very interesting is the concept of "integrator", which coordinates new software's versions, approving or rejecting the integration of new pieces in the code: a coordination position without the possibility of liability of any kind. This model has three different advantages when it is adopted for the development of an urban project: 1) Avoid arbitrary exclusions. The project accurately reflects the needs and uses. 2) Rapid and evolutionary benefits from the dynamism of your community. 3) Durability, once the project is relevant, its developments and adjustments are secure. The Open Source philosophy shares with cities the economic principles of urban agglomeration and networking. Just like the OS that appears where the common benefit is bigger than the sum of private interests; cities appear when their infrastructure and facilities benefit the community in such way, that justify high expenditures. At the same time it has been observed that the development of urban areas are largely the result of spontaneous actions and communitarian dynamism, while no institution is able to centralize the decisions. These dynamics allow the possibility of freeing the distribution of services and public goods (at least in part) of some political decisions that end up damaging some urban areas with its low coherence and slowness. 2. SOME EXAMPLES ABOUT HYBRID SPACE'S MODELS Opportunities Internet offers two interesting things: horizontal communication and transparency. Both characteristics differs from what our contemporary society is used to. Transparent communication means that everyone can communicate with everyone, there is no hierarchy and information travels with the same rights in all directions. Many projects have proved nowadays that Internet is capable of contacting people from the same neighbourhood and then organize physical events, due to the fact of living nearby. This means that Internet is able to create synergies between physical and virtual networks. The proposals listed below, research such synergies: Critical City - "http://www.criticalcity.org" Augusto Pirovano, Matteo Battaglia, Davide Portanome, Matteo Uguzzoni, Duccio Machnitz / Italy This is a local social network for recreational urban re-qualification. Users of this network can propose urban actions, meet their neighbours and improve living environment in enhancing the networking between residents of the neighbourhood. Under the� circumstance of games and challenges offered by its users, it can be developed different actions in the physical public space, connecting in an interesting way the virtual with the physical environment. Image: Critical City S.O.S - www.eseoese.info Platoniq (www.platoniq.net) / Spain SOS is a virtual device to post messages (offers, requests and alerts to citizens) in public spaces and events. It's inspired by the traditional English Speaker's Corner and is linked to other Platoniq's projects, as Burn Station and the Bank of Common Knowledge. Its scoop is to link people from the same area with common interests that wants to share information and resources. With the SOS application, interested people can record advertisements that are searchable on the Internet, according to topics and keywords. When it finds connections between specific responses to messages or advertisements, an SMS is automatically sent to the interested persons to fix a possible meeting. SOS is aimed to small communities of users sharing a problem, which are close geographically, but doesn't know each other, or users that are seeking to exchange something. This new paradigm can

also be applied in organizations that were born from networking and ICTs. Using creative dynamics, they seek to solve problem through cooperation and self-organization of equals. MEIPI, Collaborative Spaces - www.meipi.org Alfonso Sanchez Uzabal, Domenico Di Siena, Francesco Cingolani, Guillermo Alvaro Rey, Jorge Alvaro Rey, Pablo Rey Meipi proposes an innovative model of georeferenced content management through the creation of collaborative spaces called "geoblog" or "wikimap". This is a way to publish information, which is part of a georeferenced collective publication, in the same way as the blog is a way of individual posting on the Internet. Also, Meipi can be the start point of local media and hyper-local social networks, where virtual relationships can become "real" contacts or events in the nearest public space. It can reinforce local networks through new types of social media (news media which are produced by a particular community) that can be defined as "local social media", where the community producing the news is made up of people from the same local environment, i.e. the same neighborhood. NeighbourTXT Chris Vanstone, Micka�l Charbonnel / UK (www.fusedspace.org) With new technologies there are new opportunities to create virtual public spaces, capable of developing new interactions in a local context. Communication between neighbours is the first step for increasing social capital and also improve the quality of life in a neighbourhood. NeighbourTXT assigns a phone number to each district - allowing fragmented communities to communicate and interact. It aims to help residents improve their quality of life through increased social capital. screen Neil Matthew / UK - Oyvind Billington Larsen / Norway (www.fusedspace.org) 'screen' connects people, places and time zones, while proposing an exchange of perceptions between people from different cultures. Using a positive approach to the concept of monitoring, it allows the virtual space's characteristics to reach the public space. 'screen' permits people to see how other culture acts, select a square from another country and see by themselves what happens there, instead of having the media as intermediaries. People often have a negative reaction to these technologies. This project takes the idea and technology of CCTV surveillance and uses it in a positive way, not only to expand the potential of public space and make connections between spaces and people, but also to help people to accept the reality of a future in which surveillance in public space will be a commonplace. Image: screen Bus Browser Chris Vanstone, Jennie Winhall / UK (www.fusedspace.org) Bus Browser proposes to redesign public buses as vehicles for the community, beginning with the replacement of mass media advertising used to "invade" the buses with an information system generated by the local community. Bus Browser adds value to the virtual information, giving it a physical context. Passengers face opportunities in real time, while going through real places. Image: Bus Browser A google architecture Andreas Ferm + Jani Kristoffersen / Jani Kristoffersen + Andreas Ferm / Sweden

(www.fusedspace.org) This project creates a scenario for a not so distant future. This is a reflection about architecture, politics and the possibilities offered by new technologies. It presents new ways to associate virtual information to physical spaces that are now almost a reality: Augmented Reality. Who will control the city average? Image: A google architecture Interactive city.film.museum Beatrix Vogler / Austria (www.fusedspace.org) Each city has its cinematic history that allows us to reconstruct the different roles that has played through history. City.film.museum gives us ideas on what the city has been, what the city is this and what could be a possible future through a projection of desires, hopes and fears. The interaction between the film and the real city allows to explore the city in new ways. The structure is a hybrid, which stands in the urban space, enriching it through the addition of a new perception layer. Artificial Sky David Ruy, Karel / USA (www.fusedspace.org) This is a proposal for an artificial sky in Central Park, New York. Exploring new possibilities for interlinking natural and artificial systems, it merges the virtual and real using high technological conditions. A light structure formed by a cable network is deployed to become an ephemeral infrastructure. This cable network will operate as a "sponge" that absorbs and reflects the natural and artificial means. With this Artificial Sky, it will be induced climate zones (fogging systems, heat lamps, etc.) with lighting effects and also areas with environmental sounds. Image: Artificial Sky 3. HOW TO IMPROVE THE HYBRID SPACE MODEL: permeability as an urban anthropocentric model > URBAN APERTURE(S) > Paradigm shift The examples of hybrid spaces we have mentioned above show a breakdown in traditional conception that used to establish an opposition between between real and virtual space. This hybridisation of space is actually an expression of a radical and comprehensive change, that moves us from an analytical system (order and separation) to a synthetic (complexity, connectivity, permeability). Thus, there is a perceptual transference of reality, reflected in the step from a bipolar structure of opposition (material / immaterial) to a multilayer structure and interconnections, in which the physical represents only one of these layers. Accepting the existence of intangible factors in the world's settings is obviously not something new. What changes now is the perception of such intangibles as structuring the world and our daily life, besides being fundamental for their interaction. It could be say that technology is reducing the gap between the material and spiritual. Image: Communicating vessels Andre' Breton used physical process as a metaphor for the restoration of unity between the world of wakefulness and sleep In a system characterized by its high capacity of communication, micro-communications are multiplied and with them, the contents that produce reality. Much of the impressions that are traditionally considered as part of the private sphere, are now transformed into media content, travelling through different technologies, each one with different level of privacy (or publicity). This variable privacy level

makes obsolete the traditional gap between private and public. THE BIG REAL: Exhibition of private SMS in public spaces - CREDITS: Manuele Baldoni, Francesco Cingolani (Algomas Arte RIVOLUZIONARIO) From an architectural point of view, the space is reconfigured as a diffuse and decentralized structure. The nodal model of public space (the square) is evolving towards a model of micro public spaces with a completely new horizontal and hyperlocal nature. Image: Micro-Public Spaces Urban systems now have new development opportunities, which allow a renewal of the urban experience with a humanization of public space. Facing the growing complexity of cities and the fragmentation of urban space, the experience of the city ceases to be static-reflected by city maps and grows as dynamic flows. New technologies allows new possibilities to experience the city in a decentralized way, participating in urban projects without the need of physical presence. Thus, public spaces become the sum of the built environment and the entire virtual interactions that also build on them. Proposal: Space + relationships = URBAN APERTURE(S) These considerations impose a revision on the definition of "public space", understood until now as the place where anyone is free to move. This definition has been established based on a purely physical interpretation of the space, in fact focused on the right of the body (physical) to move freely. In our model, public space is defined as the place where information reaches its lower levels of privacy and runs transparently. From the standpoint of sociology, this definition implies a relational vision of public space, where communication is free. That's why we called our model URBAN APERTURE(S), focusing our research towards porous urban settings (filters), which replaces the analytical model of separations (walls). The word APERTURE means "small opening" while at the same time it refers to a device that controls amount of light admitted through cameras. We believe that urban and architectural research should move towards this model of openness, and try to configure the spaces following these assumptions of permeability, transparency and mixed nature. APERTURE(S) would be therefore a new device - Technological? Architectural? Social? Cultural? able to make connections between private and public, physical and virtual, in a system where these media are not presented separately but communicating. Image: APERTURE(S) concept visualisation These changes, despite being inspired by new technologies, are presented as an opportunity to change the current material and the technocentric system, toward a new order that restores spirituality and intelligence that can only be provided by human beings. This anthropocentric view, spatially founded in a relational interpretation of architecture and space, is also presented in a historical moment in which the former organizational structure, based on the consumption of objects, tragically shows its economic and environmental limits. http://www.unizar.es/innerarity/editores4.htm http://nomada.blogs.com/ http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ http://www.smartmobs.com/ http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s07/p0000.html http://www.bancocomun.org/

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/05/juan-freire.php

Juan Freire - From the Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces Back in November i was at Medialab Prado in Madrid to visit the Visualizar workshop and i had the pleasure to hear the talk that Juan Freire gave there. I was really looking forward to know better about the thoughts of someone whose keen observation on open knowledge, digital culture and everyware'd city i was following with interest for some time. Juan Freire is one of the very very few people who keep track of what is written in the field of ubiquitous computing, free software and technology but who would also hang around with media art curators and mingle with the hackers and the urbanists. And his everyday job doesn't have much to do with all of the above. He has a PhD in Biology, he is Associate Professor and Coordinator research group at University of Corunna. As a leader of the research group in Marine Resources and Fisheries, he was involved in several R+D projects. He collaborates with businesses, public organizations and NGOs in topics related to sustainability and environmental management. He is CEO of Fismare, an environmental consulting firm. There's more but i'm starting to be convinced that there are hyper-active clones of Freire all over Spain.

Exterior of Medialab Prado His blogs are in spanish: there's Piel digital (Digital skin), nomada and Ciudades enredadas (Networked cities). And obviously his talk was in spanish as well but i found it so inspiring that i've dutifully spent a few hours translating it. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we all enjoyed listening to it in Madrid. That November evening in Madrid, Juan Freire shared with us his thoughts about public space, whether it is obsolescent or necessary, what is the meaning of the expression in the 21st century, and what could happen should public space as we know it disappear.

The video of his presentation is online and in spanish, and so are the slides of Juan's talk. But the excerpt of his talk is here (and in english).

The issues he made us reflect upon that evening were:

1. What are the commons?, What is the pro-common? 2. Do public spaces suffer from a Tragedy of the Commons or from a Tragedy of the AntiCommons? 3. Post-modern public space 4. Do public spaces still exist? 5. The hybrid public spaces of the net society 6. The future of hyperlocal networks 7. The hidden face of the hybrid public spaces. Freire started with a tour of what the term Commons means today. The term sounds rather old-fashioned and probably most people wouldn't feel comfortable defining it today. It's something that comes right from Medieval Times but do the Commons still play a role in our life today? Is it limited to natural resources? Couldn't internet be also part of the Commons? And digital knowledge? Public Spaces? What happens when we put side by side a series of elements which seem to be distinct but are getting increasingly connected such as internet, knowledge and public spaces? Juan Freire's talk tried to explore some of those issues and bring a few answers. What will the future bring? There are two scenarios, two alternatives of a possible future. Each of these scenarios will be more or less viable depending on many circumstances, one of them being the way we regard our role as citizens: - we behave passively and accept the future as it comes. - we decide that we can take an active role and grab the opportunity to participate to the shaping of our future.

Photo WWF Besides the Commons, exists another key concept: the Tragedy of the commons. The concept was born in the context of natural resources. Years ago, you could fish many big species in the sea. Today, we have to face an over-exploitation of the resources of sea. Many people have explained that the problem lays in the fact that these resources are for everyone to use. That's the Tragedy of the Commons. The expression was coined by a biologist whose work had a big impact on sociologists and economists (while biologists have just started now to discover his thoughts).

Some 40 years ago, Professor Garrett Hardin described the Tragedy of the commons using the hypothetical example of sheep in Scotland in the 19th century. Local herders share a pasture. The wool and meat from their sheep is selling well, they wish to increase their herd size and maximize their yield. More animals means more profit but each additional animal further degrades the pasture which is bad for all herders using the same pasture. However, the rational choice of an individual is selfish and stimulated by short-term gains, they won't let themselves be worried by what is best for the whole herder community and their behaviour will eventually lead to the destruction of the resources on which they all depend. The solution Hardin proposes to the drama of open access is to impose an external governing structure to manage the fields. What started with a few sheep in Scotland had a big impact on our vision of the world and on the way to manage the commons. The story doesn't stop there, the government having shown his lack of competence to manage the commons, the ideal solution would involve privatization of the Commons.

Cement-lined canal and cross-flow system in the Chiregad irrigation system in Nepal (image) Fortunately, some people saw the glitches in Hardin's stark statements and they started to analyze other systems. The case study of a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal proves the unreliability of Hardin's view. Farmer-constructed canal which seem rather simple and primitive were actually much more efficient that the ones built for efficiency with a greater expense of money by the Nepal government. The traditional ones irrigated more crops than the newly constructed, government-owned ones. The infrastructure was old-fashioned but they were better managed. The problem didn't lay in the engineering but in the way the canals were managed. The new infrastructure that came with government ownership had the effect of destroying the traditional rules established over generations to manage common resources. The Nepal example and many other have shown that the Commons can also be managed efficiently using methods which do not have to involve privatization or governmentownership of the resources. An excess of regulations actually leads to another tragedy, the Tragedy of the Anticommons. The term was coined in 1998 by Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School. In his papers Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research and Do

Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis, Heller argued that patents are an obstacle to innovation and sharing of knowledge in science. Biomedical research is one of the key areas where competing patent rights could prevent useful and affordable products from reaching the marketplace.

Image BBC news Heller also observed public spaces as his paper The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets demonstrates. His essay wonders why many storefronts in Moscow are empty, while street kiosks are full of goods? Heller observed that in post-Communism Moscow there were a lot of open air kiosks, but also a lot of empty stores. He concluded that in the transition from Marxism to capitalism, those commercial spaces had been over-regulated making it difficult for a startup retailer to successfully negotiate for the use of that space. Lawrence Lessig mentioned and commented on Heller's paper and even transfered the discussion about the commons from biomedicine and public space to internet and knowledge. The concepts of Commons and Anticommons are thus far from obsolete and internet has revived their relevance. What happens to today's public space? Do they suffer from a tragedy of the Commons or of the anticommons? Are we over-exploiting them or are they paralyzed by an excess of regulations? Have good old public spaces stopped to be useful and functional, do they still bring an added value to the life of citizens? We often wonder why people attend a particular space rather than another one and how they use that space. Public spaces are often designed from top down with little attention on how citizens will eventually use them which will obviously lead to yet another example of the tragedy of the anticommons. The first image Juan Freire used to illustrate his point was made by Nicolas Nova in Amsterdam. It shows a street that "defends itself" with elements that prevent people from using the street. This is a case of anticommons.

Photo Nicolas Nova who has more images and thoughts On the picture below, congested traffic in the streets of Bangkok. This looks like an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. The excessive use of a road that everyone is free to ride makes the road useless, annihilates the public space.

Image source The problem is that we haven't progressed much since the 19th century, which is when an article published in the magazine of the Franklin Institute showed up. Titled On the Best Arrangement of City Streets, the publication(image) gave an example of excessive planning which forgets the role and needs of the citizen. A drawing and two pages of text describe a mathematical formula, an urban science, that ensures the "right" agency of the streets. Such magical formula can lead to an under-used public space. Unfortunately, on a certain number of aspects, we haven't found a method that improves the 1877 drawing. There's another problem: Can the ineffectiveness of the "analogical" public space, which we can also call the analogical procommon, be explained by privatization? Many people complain that public space is useful and well designed but because there is a Wal-mart or a Carrefour in the neighbourhoud, we desert public spaces and go to Carrefour (or Wall-mart). Freire believes that that vision needs to be nuanced. Such vision is the one of someone who looks for someone else to blame, does not assume any responsibility and does not even try to solve the problem.

Why is that so? Despite the fact that we live in a capitalist system, there are antagonistic concepts of capitalism but there are also models of capitalism which, although they are very antagonistic, coexist in the same space: the oligarchic model, the State model, the bureaucratic model. They don't really follow the rules of the market. There's a whole structure that prevents the market economy to function properly or that allows it to function only for a few entities. But there is now another form of understanding the market and it's brought to us by internet. "Markets are conversations." The market here is seen as a deliberate form of aggregation of information, debate, decision making, deliberation between individuals. This is of course an ideal vision of how the market should function and it takes life when a series of barriers of access disappear or when a system enables information to flow freely and be accessed by everyone. See Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm. The solution is not only to eliminate "bad" capitalism but the alternative is "good" capitalism, the one that envisions market as a conversation. That's where internet plays a key role, it eliminates those barriers and when it functions properly, it enables this idea of perfect markets with information that goes both way. This model is hypothetical but we are getting closer to it.

The public spaces we inherited from the 19th century can be called modernist. They were designed from top down, by an elite that cared for the wellbeing of the citizens yet, they have failed under several points of view. Those public space have given way in the 20th century to what we can call the Post-Modernist Public Spaces (even if the expression is questionable). They emerge as an answer to the obsolescence of the previous ones. If people are not going to the public spaces anymore, new -and this time private- opportunities are created for them: the shopping malls, the perfect example of post-modernist public space.

Las Vegas Many people believe that cathedrals have been substituted by shopping malls. For many they are only simulacra of the city. The acme of this idea is Las Vegas. A project of creating a new Las Vegas in Los Monegros (Aragón, SP) could turn out to be an interesting experiment. The shopping mall is the mirror of the society of spectacle. Shopping malls are the new public spaces but not all evil comes from them: in many cases we use them because we don't have alternative or because they represent the best alternative at our disposal. Private initiative, in some cases, has managed to provide us with what public spaces designed by the State have not offered us. The next question is therefore: How can we take back those old public space and update them? What is left of them? Berkley University urbanist Christopher Alexander has written: For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for "going through," not for "staying in.

The traditional public space, made of squares and streets, have become what anthropologist Marc Augé calls the "Non-Places". Rem Koolhaas goes further by christening them as Junkspace. In the post-modern vision, we move from private space we have to pay for and, as they are often located outside city centers, we have to drive through junkspace, non-places, spaces which have no immediate utility. The problem in the scenario is that interaction seem to have vanished. Social networks have shrunk to our own family circle or to shopping malls. A huge part of social interaction is missing. Are we ready to loose it? If we translate the scenario to the internet we have to imagine an internet where we can only find a commercial space and all the rest will just be junkspace.

Image by Tony de Marco To put the finishing touch to the panorama we cannot leave aside the issue of publicity. The spaces between the private spaces we shop to, those junkspaces, are getting filled with advertisement. The vision about publicity is usually very critical and negative. When the

Mayor of Sao Paulo in Brazil decided to eradicate any kind of advertisement in the city, his move has been welcome with not only wonder but also praise. Sao Paulo is the third city in the world. It counts almost 11 million inhabitants. Citizens, foreign observers, the press applauded the measure. Those who live from the revenues of publicity were less enthusiastic about it. But to which extent isn't publicity part of our genome, of our ADN today? If you look at photos and videos of Sao Paulo without its billboards and advertising posters you get a slightly deshumanized vision. The structures that supported advertising are still there but they are empty, switched off. The buildings do not seem to be complete anymore. It seems that a crucial part of the city has been lost in the process. Maybe this effect is only transitory.

Image Tony de Marco The following question is: To what extent can we say that publicity is not part of our public space? And of ourselves? The answer is not clear of course. Do public spaces still exist? Or are we left with only post-modernist spaces, connected between themselves by non-spaces or junkspaces?

Image city of sound Freire illustrated the point by making an exercise of inverse engineering. The case study is the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit which took place last year in Sydney. It shows clearly what remains of a city when access to all public spaces is prohibited. All the security measures were taken to ensure that the event, the most impressive gathering of Heads of State the city had ever witnessed, would unfold without any glitch. Two blogs such as Subtopia (Fenceland and Subverting "Military IKEA") and City of Sound (The AntiFun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown) documented and analyzed quite shrewdly what happened in a city where access to public space was negated to its inhabitants, where extreme measures of security bring a whole city to a standstill with, for example, a 5km fence surrounding the Opera House area and Google Earth/Maps images of the area (and others) being blanked out or blurred. Important zones of public use where most of the city life was usually concentrated were militarized, closed down or saw their access strictly restricted.

Image city of sound Streets, bike lanes, jogging tracks were closed, spaces where people would go to meet and chat were unaccessible. Fences had taken over the city. What is interesting is what you cannot see in the pictures collected by the bloggers: a way of living in the city being destroyed. When the public space and even the junkspace are eliminated from urban life, the city changes radically. Although we tend to be very critical of the way public space is deteriorating, is becoming useless, etc. reality is that public space is still a fundamental part of the city and not only as place of transit from one shopping mall to our house. By making

this forced exercise of inverse engineering, we discover the value of places and things we have stopped to pay attention to.

Image subtopia What is a public space? It depends on the capacity of auto-organization but also on market and community management Public space depends on the capacity of auto-organization that we have. We must see further the concept of public space designed by the government for the citizen. The space cannot really be public if it doesn't come with a certain capacity of self-management. Public spaces are hybrid, they combine market with community processes. The Common is much more sophisticated than we might think.

Image Google earth Burning Man A fascinating exploration of public space is Burning Man. An outsider who attended the Fallas in Spain compared them with the Nevada-based festival. The former is organized by the State. Just after the party, the streets are filthy, there are traces of chaos all over the city. Burning Man instead is built and de-constructed by the community of participants without any top down supervision. After the party, the desert is left to its pristine state. No trash is left, the space is clean. The process is totally self-organized. The Burning Man community is able to create a public space which is not only dynamic but also ordered. Burning Man is a public space that lives at the margins of Hardin's theories. Burning Man Time Lapse video

Image polar inertia

Another example is Quartzsite (Arizona) which functioning and dynamics have been described in Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell's book Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (i'll join Juan Freire in his enthusiasm about the book, it's a gem.) Quartzsite is a desert town of some 3,000 people that every Winter swells to over a million residents (making it the 15th-largest city in the USA) as a horde of modern nomads descends upon it in their motorhome. With very little planning, they create a city which works perfectly, it has its own dynamics, its own market (unlike Burning Man, there is a moneybased economy), exchanges of goods and services, etc. It is spontaneous, yet very efficient.

Image polar inertia As Freire added, this is not the future of our cities but, making once again some exercises in reverse engineering, there are a few lessons that can be learnt from the Quartzsite experience. People as a group have far more intelligence than most would suspect. Sumrell and Varnelis call it 'swarm intelligence' - a human version of the behaviour often seen in ant colonies and the like. Juan Freire then illustrated how hybrid a public space can be by showing us the main square of his city, A Coruña (Spain)

Public space functions quite well, it's a very active area of the city. The secret to its success is the mix of private, community and public initiatives which take place on the Square. To be lively a square needs bars and there are plenty of bars here. There is also some space for people to self-organize and develop freely their own activities in a way that neither a bar nor a shopping mall can provide. The other requirement is some entity to think and design the whole experience and to create some urban furniture and other elements susceptible to foster all those activities. Internet is the element missing from today's equation. We cannot leave the internet aside anymore when we discuss public space. We live in a networked society. Many people say that we live both a physical life and a virtual life but Freire thinks that these two realities are getting more intertwined every day. The networked society opens a new Commons. People don't call it this way but the digital element is nevertheless essential. Internet was designed to be free and the knowledge that comes with it should be free as well. Although there is a huge amount of effort from above (copy right) to prevent knowledge from being free, it is nevertheless freeing itself. We should see beyond the modernist vision of a traditional, well-planned public space. Today we are living a reality which is quite complex, hybrid and multi-faceted. Freire calls it an hyper-reality (in the "hyper-link" sense). Our public space today is hybrid in two ways: - its environment is both physical and virtual, - its management which is public, private and community-based at the same time. Freire believes that we can achieve this hyper-reality through a re-appropriation of public space. 4 key elements will help us get there: 1. free knowledge, 2. free electro-magnetic space, 3. a post-spectacular architecture, 4. a digital skin layered over tarmac and concrete. A few words about Free Knowledge, starting with a quote from Stephen Downes: The greatest non-technical issue is the mindset. We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. It's like electricity or water. It's there, it's available and it flows. It's not stuff you collect.... Many people are horrified by the fact that knowledge flows continuously. They wouldn't have any qualms about electricity flowing around us freely but they find the idea of a never stopping flow of information highly disturbing. They would like to be able to control it, to store it on the shelves of a library. But that's a lost battle because information is going to increase more and more every day. An you know what? That's a good thing. Especially if we manage to become curators of information. "We", the users, not the so-called experts. We must become "digital chefs" and cook delicious dishes of information. The ingredients are out there on the web, the kitchen is packed with instruments which are free, or very cheap even when they come from some private or commercial initiative like Yahoo! or Google.

Reclaim the Spectrum The second element we need is what Jose Luis de Vicente calls the "free spectrum", we need to reclaim the use of the electromagnetic space. We need these electromagnetic infrastructures, no matter how intangible they are. As JL de Vicente wrote: "The radio spectrum - the electromagnetic space through which radio and TV broadcasts, mobile phone and GPS signals and WiFi networks circulate - is the real estate of the information society." We can't guarantee the freedom of information if we can't control the structure that gives us access to it.

Reina Sofia Museum Extension, Madrid. Photo: Philippe Ruault (via arkhitekton) Thirdly, we need those architects whom Freire calls the "post-spectacular architects". Sure, we like the architects of the "spectacular", we like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim, Moneo's addition to the Prado, Jean Nouvel's extension of the Reina Sofia, etc. But these spaces have not been designed for physical nor digital interaction. We need architects who think from the perspective of the people who will "use" the spaces, not just the tourists. But how should we design with a perspective of participation? The focus should be less on the aesthetics and more on the efficiency and on the functionality (what are we building for?) These ideas won't lead to an anti-aesthetics but to a new form of aesthetics. This aesthetics will not only be better suited to our requirements but it will also start adopting something of the open source philosophy, by sharing designs, methods, etc. Besides, this architecture will be cheaper and faster. The main problem is that cities change very slowly. We live in the same Madrid as centuries ago, even if society is not the same as centuries ago. Physical changes are way slower than intangible changes. We'll never manage to keep pace with society's changes but we can do something about it. Freire gave a few examples of the kind of projects that he would like to see bloom over the cities, adding that some of them start to get out of the "workshops ghetto" and appear in glossy magazines:

- Ecoboulevard of Vallecas near Madrid, designed by [ecosistema urbano]. Fast architecture that solves several problems while proposing an innovative and appealing aesthetics.

Ecoboulevard - Santiago Cirugeda's Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions). Cirugeda hacks the legal code. Because his home town would not authorize him to build a playground, Santiago Cirugeda obtained a dumpster permit and installed a playground that looked like a dumpster. He also built and occupied a rooftop crane that passersby believed was there only to move building materials. There used to be a video on you tube where the architect used Playmobil toys to demonstrate how to build a temporary flat in your rooftop. The solutions Cirugeda proposes are cheap, fast, accessible to everyone and the key ingredient is to find out the gaps in administrative structure and official procedures, to intervene where the law falls short. Is Cirugeda doing art, architecture or activism? Probably the three of them but does it really matter?

Inside Cirugeda's insect house - Vicente Guallart whose work is more often found in museums than in the streets, probably because his vision is still too futuristic. His Sociopolis project is a neighbourhood designed with a mind set on efficiency, functionality, digital networks,

Sociopolis

- Jose Perez de Lama, a member of the Sevilla-based collective hackitectura, believes that we need to build layers of digital information over physical spaces. Architecture, in its traditional definition, is relevant but not central. The space is built using mostly intangible elements: electronic flux, interfaces, audio, projections, words, bodies, landscapes, etc. We need to combine the tectonic with the electronic. Hackitectura has illustrated their concepts with a series of interventions in public space. The most famous of which being the wikiplaza project in Sevilla which regards public space as multi-layered: there are bars, grass, cements and tarmac but there's also the digital space. Finally a bit of futuristic speculation. Future is in the hyperlocal networks. Paradoxically, internet has allowed us to be globally connected but it doesn't help us enough when we want to be connected with what is in our own neighbourhood. That's mobile telephony that we use (intensely) for local connections. The development of hyperlocal networks is a big opportunity, a double opportunity: both from the commercial and the citizen point of view. Last July, Bruce Sterling wrote an inspiring article, Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future. A protagonist narrates his life in 2017 and how he moves in those hyperlocal networks. In the 20th century appeared the Situationists. Among their ideas was the Dérive, an invitation to use the city in a new way. The Situationists failed in their attempt to radically change the world but they manage to predict what the future would bring. We use more and more the city like they said we ought to. This concept of the city as a space for exploration is getting more and more appealing. The hyperlocal networks are made of elements which are already existing around us but they still have to be connected one to another. However, every day new initiatives appear that tell us that the situation is about to change. Here's a rapid list of projects which Freire find as thought-provoking as inspiring. They might seem to be disconnected but if you put them together in a broader picture, you'll see glimpses of a new reality emerge. - hyperlinks with physical space, like google maps.

Aram Bartholl's project The Map - the concept of ubiquitous computing which highlight the upcoming urbanism 2.0, cf. Adam Greenfield's essay Everyware. - mobile internet, ubiquitous connectivity (ex. urban tapestries). - the internet of things, of objects, what Bruce Sterling defined Spimes back in 2004. More in his book Shaping Things.

Image Bruce Sterling - new initiatives like Semapedia to hyperlink the whole world. - new possibilities to visualize people and the flux of information in urban space. One of the most famous example is Real Time Rome, the MIT SENSEable City Lab's contribution to the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. - collaborative cartography. Geographical information is still private and is often submitted to copyrights. People can view the database but they are not allowed to take the data and use them as they wish. Fortunately some initiative are attempting to put an end to the geomonopoly. E.g. the open and collaborative OpenStreetMap. - the mash-ups which use google tools to propose more personal visions of space. Besides, these mashups enable users to monitor what is happening in physical space right here and right now (to track fires in California for example). All these initiatives demonstrates that we have the opportunity to layer a digital skin over the city. The skin is not just a fad, it will make the urban experience more meaningful and useful. E.g. Urban Tapestries, a research project born in 2003, Dodgeball, Outside.in which aggregates, tags and structures local information available online, using thus individual activities to build instruments useful for everyone.

G. Orwell place, Barcelona Freire, being the astute and realistic observer he is, also pointed out the darker face of public spaces by quoting Stephen Graham who wrote in Subtopia: The real architectures of control already are algorithms, software, databases and microelectronic tracking systems, satellites and sensors, linked intimately to physical spaces, infrastructures and bodies, rather than the obvious architectonic brute force of walls and ramparts. The future might be of the Orwellian type or it can be the one that Freire described in his presentation. It's in the hands of citizens and whether they will adopt an active or passive role. Today we have the opportunity not only to protest but also to take things in our hands and push changes. However, there's another danger: the one created by people who do not understand internet. German philosopher and sociologist Juergen Habermas wrote that ... in the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chat room across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics. Freire believes that instead of just creating fragmentation, internet enable us to go beyond fragmentations. Facebook, for example, counts many advantages but also many downsides. It's a network you can close and keep for your friends exclusively LifeAt creates private online communities for residential properties. It's closed and "secure" with control over who has the right to use it and what can be published or not. There's an absolute control over people and content. The model can be interesting for commercial companies or for facebook but in the context of public space, it would do more harm than good, it would mean applying post-modern concepts to new hybrid space. As a conclusion, Freire quoted an article that urbanist José María Ezquiaga wrote for national newspaper El Pais. He adopted the Mai 68 moto "Sous les pavés la plage" (Under the cobblestones lies the beach) to tell us that we have to see beyond the ugliness of cobblestones and uncover the beaches that exist beneath them. Freire added, this time quoting Jose Pérez

de Lama, that above the tarmac there is a digital layer. Although that layer is neither tangible nor visible, it set to fulfill a crucial role. If we use this additional layer intelligently and openly, then the future might indeed be appealing. The Q&A which followed was almost as fascinating as the presentation itself but i'm done with the translation. 5 Comments: William Thirteen

May 28, 2008

Juan Freire

Wow! thanks for the translation! May 29, 2008 Regine, Thank you very much for your wonderful work. The talk sounds now better than when I was presenting it at Medialab

Shaun McWhinnie

May 29, 2008 Really interesting. Thanks for translating. I'm intrigued to see the next generation, or next stage of evolution of public spaces, how we can use this networked urban layer to promote public experiences, instead of encouraging anti-social networking - urban Facebookers.

AG

The intertwining of the virtual life to the public may have a detrimental effect: where everyone has continuous access to their own communities online, why bother with making new connections in person? May 29, 2008 Great stuff! Small point of correction: the quote above (*way* above) is from Bernard Rudofsky's "Streets for People," not from Christopher Alexander.

mimi

December 6, 2010 I agree with the concept of living in a hyper reality, the way that humans interact socially has changed completely. The internet has changed everything about society but it appears that many sectors have yet to catch up, many still holding on to old ways and views (copyright of knowledge being a good example)

This is Hybrid An analysis of mixed-use buildings by a+t. Prologue by Steven Holl Aurora Fernández Per, Javier Mozas, Javier Arpa Soft cover (17 x 23.5): 280 Pages English/Spanish Year 2011 978-84-614-6452-4

This is Hybrid JAVIER MOZAS

... Richard Sennett wrote that a cosmopolitan is someone who moves comfortably in diversity, who is at home in situations which are not connected or parallel to what is familiar to him. Just like hybrid buildings. They are cosmopolitan buildings, placed in fragmented forms that do not correspond, in volumes based on remnants of previous mixed typologies, where its body fits with more or less fortune. They produce a new being with a unifying personality. The following paragraphs define the characteristics and personality of hybrids. They are, consciously, absolute maxims, grouped by themes that point out the categorical and defining, so that their personality traits are as noticeable as possible. Personality

The personality of the hybrid is a celebration of complexity, diversity and variety of programmes. It is the crucible for a mixture of different interdependent activities. The hybrid building is a self-tribute to the individual creation of the architect. Each hybrid is a unique creation, without previous models. The very building comes from an innovative idea, which is resolved against the established combination of usual programmes and bases its reason for existence on the novelty of the approach and the unexpected mixing of functions. The hybrid is an opportunist building, which takes advantages of its multiple skills. The hybrid building looks for unexpected, unpredictable, intimate relationships, encourages coexistence and is conscious that unprogrammed situations are the keys to its own future. The hybrid shows its many facets and its own personality. As it depends on the individual nature of its creation process, it can take on multiple representations, even apparently contradictory representations, urban landmark, sculpture, landscape or anonymous volume. The landmark hybrid is not subject to indifference. It is meant to impact the observer. It does not go unnoticed, but publicly manifests its skills, its extroverted character and its attractive points. The hybrid building as a milestone, is an actor in a starring role on the urban stage. The anonymous hybrid, on the contrary, requires each part of the programme to lose its originality. If it holds a public programme, what is collective will have to dissolve its character and conform to being another simple secondary actor on the daily stage of the city. Sociability The ideal hybrid feeds on the meeting of the private and public spheres. The intimacy of private life and the sociability of public life find anchors of development in the hybrid building. The permeability of the hybrid makes it accessible from the city and the private use of its services extends its timetable to 24 hours a day. This means that activity is constant and is not controlled by private or public rhythms. Another use category is created, a full-time building. Form The Modernism insistence upon correspondence between form and function of a building no longer works. The form-function relationship in a hybrid can be explicit or implicit. The first case leans towards fragmentation, the second towards integration. A generic hybrid is a building-container that attempts a habitat undifferentiated from the diversity of functions that are grouped inside. The hybrid building will always fight against those segregationist morphologies that allow the escape from some use and looks to unite, inside their area of influence, all of the activities that can provide life to it. Typology The primitive hybrid, or proto-hybrid, has not reached the highest point of integration among its functions and is seen as a set of typologies that have not yet been fused. One cannot classify hybrid buildings by typologies, because in the very essence of the hybrid exists the

escape from categories. The hybrid is the consequence of a rebound with tradition, a two-fingered salute to typology. Processes The mixture of uses is a part of the general processes of the hybridation. Property and land development can also be hybrid, by means of a combination of public and private developing. Structure can be hybrid, based on mixed solutions of concrete and steel. Construction can be hybrid with dry assembled elements with wet joints, or the same can be done with prefabrication and traditional assembly methods. Management can be hybrid, with individual and community multi-properties. Programmes The mixing of uses in a hybrid building generates a potential which is transferred, as in a system of connected vessels, to those weaker activities so that all involved are benefited. Hybrid buildings are organisms with multiple interconnected programmes, prepared to house both planned activities as well as those unplanned activities in a city. Density Dense environments with land use limitations are a good field of cultivation for hybrid situations. The hybrid scheme proposes intense environments of cross fertilisation, which mix known genotypes and create genetic allies to improve living conditions and revitalise their surrounding environments. Scale Hybrids have the character of super-buildings, super-blocks, megastructures or of Buildingas-a-City. As some of the projects included in this issue suggest, they are “urban monsters of a new and generous breed.” Hybrids are associated with a certain form of grandeur, splendor and gigantism, because mixing implies size and superposition demands height. The taking over of the surface to extend the programme takes up land. It also needs a creative impulse and economic confidence, since it produces new situations inadequate for times of indecision. The scale of a hybrid and its relationship with the environment is measured by the juxtaposition of programmatic sections. In vertical hybrids, functions are joined by superposition and in horizontal hybrids, by on-floor additions. City Because of its scale, urban composition strategies can be added to a hybrid. The definition of a hybrid includes perspective, grid insertion, dialogue with other urban landmarks and interrelationships with the surrounding public space. Occasionally, what is hybrid is the urban plan, made up of a series of mono-functional buildings gathered around a common stage, which represents most of the citizen theatrical world. The hybrid goes beyond the domain of architecture and enters the realm of urban planning...

Hybrid versus Social Condenser AURORA FERNANDEZ PER

... In the search for models capable of economising resources, Hybrid Buildings, especially those with residential uses, are chance samples that include the gene of mixed-use development in its code. This gene is necessary in order to adapt to the signs of the times. Nevertheless, this mixed condition makes them mistakenly similar to another avant-garde model, a model that at first sight seems to be its predecessor when in fact it is the complete opposite. We are referring to the Social Condenser. In the first study done on hybrids, Joseph Fenton states that they came about in the first quarter of the 20th century, in order to revitalise American cities and make optimum use of land. Simultaneously, the constructivist movement brought about the social condenser. It was described by Moisei Ginzburg as a building designed to transform relationships among citizens in the three areas of the new socialist state: collective housing, clubs and factories. Both are the fruit of the avant-garde era, when historical events provided a clean slate for many new approaches. The condenser was developed in the recently created Soviet Union, where there was total land availability and the need for housing was urgent. This was an opportunity for expirimentation that the constructivist architects of the OSA (Union of Contemporary Architects) took full advantage of. In the competition for new residential proposals, organised in 1927 by the group‟s journal, Sovremmennaya Arkhitektura, duplex and triplex housing, interior streets and entrance galleries appeared in projects. Ginzburg developed some of these proposals, crystallised in the minimum living cell (27-30 m2), which made up large residential blocks called dom-komuna. They would serve to house the proletarian masses and aimed to influence the social behaviour of its inhabitants. Most of the activities which previously were part of private life, took place in common kitchens, canteens, launderettes or nurseries. For the first time, the design of circulation considered human fluxes to be an opportunity for events and socialisation. The collectivisation of most domestic functions encouraged women to become part of public life, at the expense of, among other collateral effects, having to endure mutual surveillance and increased control. Reducing privacy in the bedroom effectively helped to get rid of bourgeouis conventionalism. The social condenser was born of the State, while the hybrid is the offspring of the capitalist system. It is the commercial result of a sum of private interests and subtraction of urban determiners. Speculation and profitability were its parents and the American city was its kindergarten. While the condenser was the manifestation of an ideology, even a homage to architecture , the history of the hybrid was written in accounting books. On the one hand, the young Soviet state was teeming with experimentation. Modern European architects were affected by this and inserted it into a less inflamed discourse and

presented it at the CIAM congresses. On the other hand, land prices spurred the initiative of investors. Europe ignored the development of the American city, where ideology was not part of the programme. The condenser was the result of functional thinking, which was the guiding light of the constructivist method: “a method indicating with determination which path to follow, and suggesting a solution to the architect‟s problems, taking into account the premises he is confronted to”. The hybrid was also the result of functional thinking but on a scale where user flux was just as important as economic flux. While the condenser concentrated all of its transformation capacity on the members of a closed community, –the inhabitants of communal housing, club members, factory workers– the hybrid opened up to the city and encouraged contact among strangers, intensified land use, densifying relationships and left room for indetermination, as opposed to the control that the condenser imposed. As far as relationships are concerned, in the hybrid they are established outside of the domestic area, while in the condenser, they go into the private realm up to the bedroom door. So why is there that misunderstanding nowadays between hybrid and condenser? Hybrids are characterised by a mix of uses in the same project. It integrates different programmes which also have different developers, different management and, obviously, different users. This is to say that a hybrid can be as diverse as a city in users, use times and programme. On the other hand, condensers –developed until the 1980s due to the influence that constructivists had on Le Corbusier and his followers –were mostly buildings with minimum housing where, because of economic and ideological reasons, a series of functions of private life were segregated and converted into public functions. The machine-like vision of housing facilitated the separation of functions as productive processes. Just as productive processes become cheaper as space is maximised, systemisation and compression of vital functions are result in savings for the developer, in this case the State. The programmatic features of these prototypes, capable of housing over 1,000 inhabitants, spreads out over floor and section with the variety of a small city. The same functions that can be found in a hybrid can be found here, especially in Unités and those that followed, where businesses and even offices were inserted on the so-called inner street. Nevertheless, the difference rests in the fact that each function is thought out not to create intensity and vitality in the city, nor to attract flux of outside users or even to favour mixing and indetermination, but to achieve a self-sufficient and „complete‟ building that can isolate itself from the conventional city. This means that the presence of various subordinate functions on floor and section does not make a housing building a hybrid. Along the same lines, a facilities building that includes a varied public use programme would not be a hybrid, but a modern version of the social condenser, as a club type. Hybridisation is not only in the programme but in initiative, investment and management. During his delirious route along New York history, Rem Koolhaas, a devoted follower of the constructivists, stops at the Downtown Athletic Club and describes it as a building where the social condenser‟s powers of transformation succeeded for the first time. He does not refer to the communal housing version, but the workers‟ club typology. The high-rise programme of a building dedicated to leisure and physical fitness, where financial district singles went to „to reach new strata of maturity by transforming themselves into new beings‟ seemed to him to be the culmination of tests done by Leonidov in the 1920s, differing in that the Downtown Athletic Club did not need Stalin‟s approval and thus could be built. It is symptomatic that he stops at this building and compare it to a condenser because, if we

pay attention to Fenton, this building is a hybrid because it is made up of a sports club on lower floors, a hotel on upper floors and a restaurant in the middle, for users of both programmes. However, the fact that from one reality such different analyses can be extracted is symptomatic of the potential that those first hybrids held and that the segregation of uses, following the Athens Charter, pushed into obscurity for decades. The American hybrid was fatally wounded after World War II. Its contemporary, the condenser, had succumbed much earlier, not only in its club version, considered by Stalinists to be too elitist, but also in its domestic version. The dom-komuna were rejected by their own inhabitants, desiring more privacy, and by their managers, who showed that with the technology of the day, they were unmanageable structures. Nevertheless, these two visions of the world, represented in antagonistic models, the fruit of ideology as opposed to the fruit of money, have continued to reincarnate, whether more or less intensely, up to current times. Throughout the past 80 years, condensers have gone through some defeats, most of them due to the desire to programme and enclose the lives of its users The Corviale or Park Hill cases were the most painful for the model‟s defenders. Meanwhile, hybrids have had a time of mutation on the hybrid block to attract investment and facilitate management, with results like the Barbican or Ihme Zentrum, along with other important examples. A selection of both is included in the comparative analysis that follows this text. In the last ten years, the balance of models to be followed seemed to favour the hybrid. After the theoretic recovery in the 1980s, where we have examples in Steven Holl‟s work and the work of Ábalos & Herreros, among others, it reappeared at the beginning of the 21st century, again as a saviour to American cities through projects such as the Museum Plaza. Devoid of ideology and endowed with great versatility, the hybrid is also finding its place in Europe, not to mention Asia, where the mixing of uses has been inherent in the development of its cities. The hybrid may possibly have exhausted the power of its antagonist to model human conduct, though not in the way Russian idealists had thought. It may also have added its natural capacity to activate the city. Its vigour as a hybrid favours it in times of crisis, though it does have an Achilles‟ heel called financing. It is not a disciplinary prototype, but a concentration of interests. It is not based on tradition but on the future. Its survival depends on consensus. Being confused with a social condenser is really the least of its concerns...

Verticalism. The future of skyscraper IñAKI ÁBALOS, URTZI GRAU

... Modern architects thought of the skyscraper as associated with the organization of work, with the office. In fact, the prototypic skyscraper of modernity is the expression of such

organization; a optimized arrangement for archiving and connecting workers that archive and connect data. This reification of bureaucracy, without and pejorative connotation, was symbolically interpreted in steel and glass rectilinear prisms, artificially climatized, ordered in rings around nodes of communication. Buildings as the Seagram Building in New York gave the definitive and everlasting shape to this conception. That was Modernity with capital M: the triumph of organization, the beauty of organization. Today the skyscrapers under construction are manly located in Asia. They are residential buildings with concrete structures and natural ventilation. Deprived of any monumental aura, they are consumer products, not exceptional anymore, a norm. Without dramatizing, one can say that all contemporary metropolises are doomed to densification and even the most recalcitrant mayors are beginning to understand that they have to familiarize with this instrument. Meanwhile, some architects seem abducted by the iconic character of these constructions, as if we were witnessing the terminal phase and mannerist of the history of the typology. Nothing further from the forecoming reality. „Verticalism‟, the conception of the space and the contemporary city in vertical terms has only just started. We are witness of a passionate transformation process. We have just begun to think the city from positions that efficiently substitute the bi-dimensionality of urban planning for a new verticalism. Blossoming in the professional work of our generation we see vertical libraries, vertical laboratories, vertical fashion buildings, vertical universities, vertical museums, vertical parks and vertical sport facilities as well as combinations of all them mixed with residential, hotel and office typologies (a.k.a. mix-use buildings), sometimes conforming complete cities in which the section of the of the building becomes what the plan just to be for the city. The successful experience of the modern skyscraper, essentially grounded on the private business, is being rethought in the public realm–or in an agreement between public and private benefit–testing new modalities of urban management that prefigure the future. The incorporation of public and institutional typologies, caught for years in 19th century conformations, points to certain adaptation also in the institutional domain. The mix identical towers with variety of uses (a.k.a. „bundle of towers‟) is also an effective and appropriate alternative to large vertical mixuse in multiple contexts. Compared to the Parisian boulevard, the infiltration of small towers, a sort of acupuncture strategy, has the benefit of a minimized footprint and maximizes its transformative capacity. The public space liberated by a small footprints and the evident sustainability of a synergetic utilization of a mix-use section are factors that are increasing the acceptance of skyscrapers. The public Space in the Skyscraper–a mix of streets, comercial spaces and parks inaugurated with Central Park–is one of the most successful collective spaces, with an incredible capacity to achieve universal acceptation. It possibly contains the genetic code of the contemporary public space. This studio is an exploration of the possibilities that the T line, the MTA new subway line under construction beneath 2nd avenue, opens for implementing „Verticalism‟ and contemporary public space in Manhattan. Originally proposed in 1929, and planned again in 1945, 1947, 1949, 1954 and 1964, under construction in the early 1970s and abandoned in 1975, the new T line is schedule to open in 2014 and to be fully operative in 2020, connecting 125th Street in Harlem with the Lower Manhattan and reorganizing the public transportation in the East side of the island. The public investment that such infrastructure requires is only comparable to the projected real estate benefits that will redraw the blueprint of neighborhoods like el Barrio (East Harlem), Alphabet City or the Lower East Side. Taking advantage this future conditions, the students are asked to imagine and design models

of development that substitute the omnipresent condominiums for cohabitations between institutional and residential typologies. The final goal is to test different vertiticalist strategies (super tall mix-use, bundle of towers, súper block, etc) in Manhattan. The sites will be defined by subway stations, traditional spaces of experimental cohabitations between public and private developments guarantors of an intense of public use. At least 60% of the program will be residential, while the rest will house a 19th typology (libraries, laboratories, casinos, zoos, observatories, aquariums, asylums, fashion i

Advanced Studio V: Global Institute of Topology Karl Chu, Martin Melioranski

The project for the studio is the design and development of the Global Institute of Topology in Manhattan. There are two foci to the project. The first will be the design of a building that reflects the subject matter of the research Institute: topology. It is the desire of the Institute that the building embodies a topological organization of programmatic facilities. The second intention will be the genetic/generative formation of the structure of the building. With these two intentions, the geometry of surfaces and forms shall be designed and organized in such a manner that it would develop into a cohesive relationship of topological forms with complex nesting and mutation. In addition, it is expected to embody the program of the research center by adaptively modulating a smooth flow of functional spaces from one surface condition to another. The structure and form of the building should exemplify a new form of building topology that is mechanic and biomorphic at the same time and unlike previous building typologies that have existed in the history of architectural design.

Given such a program, the studio focused on an intensive investigation into the design and resolution of a new form of topological morphology for the building by working extensively with large - scale physical models. The project was structured in two phases. Phase one was experimentation and development based on the genetic software and phase two was the application of topological surfaces into the structure of programmatic organization and its relationship to the context of the site.