Philadelphia Skyline (c) Michael Tompsett

The following are few considerations arisen during the last Asia Design Forum meeting, at the Architectural Association. The topic was Design and Geography.

Architecture and geography should be strictly connected to space, but speakers talked mostly about time.

Christopher Lee mentioned Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh project as a perfect matching between traditional Indian features, rooted in the past, and the essence of modernity inspired by Le Corbusier himself. Blending zeitgeist and genius loci, architecture reaches universal meanings, Lee essentially said.

Emily So focused on post earthquake rebuilding processes. An earthquake is a dramatic time marker: the time preceding and the time after an earthquake are imprinted in the populations’ history. The responsibility to build (and rebuild) safely requires a deep understanding of the local features and the traditional building technologies that are rooted in the historical context.

The airport presented by Mustafa Chehabeddine is symptomatic of human being’s needs of physical connection, but is also the apotheosis of that social phenomenon called Non-Lieux by Marc Augè over twenty years ago. Few things are so unrelated to a territory as a big airport. It’s no hard to imagine a sort of extra territorial country, made of airports, cabs trips, big hotels’ hall, luxurious offices. The perception of time and the seasons is distorted by artificial lighting and heating. Non-Lieux with no Time, we should assume.

Melissa Woolford’s approach focused on a renewing design process: great opportunities for architectural business offered by globalisations in a sort of shared design process to save time. Shahira Fahmy mentioned the Google Time Machine and, talking about geography, she focused on time rather than space. Dynamic maps describing events or on going phenomenon can be tools to understand a place and to design accordingly.

The most witty contribute was that by Paul Finch: by questioning the “clockwork architecture”, as the multi million projects with a best-before date as a yogurt, he closed the circle opened by Christopher Lee. They presented the two side of coin: the repetitive design of similar things in different places, as a sign of contemporary time, and, on the other hand, the constant search for a new-look, where a new-look is confused with innovation, as Lee highlighted.

I’ve appreciated Finch’s definition of Branded Architecture. A brand is a guarantee of quality, but sometimes the brand awareness is the most important feature in a project. Architecture designed by Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry (two examples of brand firms mentioned by Finch) is easily recognisable. Shapes are always the same and yet, at the same time, they also offer a new-look (not always innovative). Such branded architecture strategies reminds me of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility and it’s quite ironic that the buildings of today financial capitalism made me think of the eighty years old Benjamin’s Marxist approach. Therefore, when it comes to design and geography, the link with “La conquête de l’ubiquité” by Paul Valery, who mentioned Benjamin’s work, can be inspiring.

I think that all the speakers that talked about geography and time, implicitly reflected around identity. Identity is a wide concept that includes both space and time, and sometime it’s so elusive that the meaning switch between personality and its opposite, the sameness, it’s blurred.

A recognisable identity requires sameness in brand design, leading to a lack of relationship between a building and its host place. The International Style’s prophets developed a theory to explain the sameness in their design approach. This was eighty years ago. Where are contemporary architectural theories? Where is the newness in today’s skyscrapers? Today’s sameness seems  symptomatic of a weak identity.

On the contrary, a strong identity achieves different results in different contexts. Wright at the Tokyo Hotel is not the same architect who worked at the Prairie Houses or at Falling Water. Le Corbusier at Chandigarh is different from Le Corbusier at the Unitè d’Abitation or at Ronchamp. We could say the same thing about Louis Khan, for example, and, in contemporary time about Renzo Piano. The architectures are different but there is always a particular touch that is recognisable. This happens when two strong identities get in touch.

If both the designer and the place have a strong identity, when they meet something exceptional takes place.

Talking about the relationship between geography, that is space, and design, that is the transformation of space, leads to include the concept of time. By combining space and time we obtain the experience, and experiences shapes identity, making the emerging personality something unique and able to pick up the sense of places.

Architecture without a clear identity is always identical to itself and it leads to anything but experience. Experience is change.

I think that from this point of view, clockwork architectures definitely are the perfect mirror of the today’s financial identity and of its rules: within fifty years we’ll forget about them.