Text by Michel Rojkind
Michel Rojkind, founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, is a Mexico City-based architect who, apart from design, focuses on business tactics and experiential innovation. He calls for a questioning of the idealised condition of programmatic spatial determination in architecture and urban planning, in order to better reflect our rapidly changing societies.
In his book, Fear of Small Numbers, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who teaches at New York University, attempts to explain the processes of globalisation after September 11, 2001. He basically describes a fragmentation of the world into vertebrate and cellular states. The first alludes to the institutions and structures that set order (as with the increasingly outmoded national states, for instance), and the second refers to a world connected by “multiple circuits through which money, news, people (identity) and ideas flow, meet, converge and disperse again”.
For Appadurai, the cellular model addresses a simultaneous flowing of the whole, parallel to the behaviour of organic cells, whilst the vertebrate model, despite all its means, is incapable of supporting a diverse and flexible society – one that is increasingly connected, creating simultaneous evolutions and a constant flow and change.
If we try to apply these thoughts to the fields of architecture and urban planning, it seems that the speed and spontaneity of our changing societies makes a programmatic determination of spaces practically impossible. Thus we have to fundamentally question the idealised condition that architectural practice takes as its starting point; this neurotic tradition that has been passed on from generation to generation of architects. Instead of reproducing the institution’s spaces of control, we have to face the absence of expectation of programmatic control.
One example: we know already about the demographic transitions taking place in Latin America, where a very significant decline in the nuclear family is generating a need for a much broader diversity with respect to rooming schemes. But architecture just keeps on reproducing (on a large scale) homes and housing for traditional nuclear families. And at an urban level, public policies, governmental structures and developers are continuing to define our production of space. When do we change our practice?
Michel Rojkind is the founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, a Mexico City-based architecture firm practicing globally and focusing on design, business tactics and experiential innovation. His work explores architectural solutions, social and urban strategies that positively impact society and the environment. He was also a founding member of MXDF, a collaborative research and urban studies centre devoted to exploring how to modify, transform, negotiate and mould the social, economic, political and cultural limits that shape Mexico City.
Far too often, architecture focuses on criteria of structure and tectonics only. But the principles and values of our society are shown and reflected much more by programmatic compositions, not by the shapes or materials of a building. This is a matter that does not tend to predominate in architectural discussions. Yet it should. We should be questioning this traditional architectural practice accustomed to programming behaviours in a society that we perceive as un-programmable.
The building is only the “hardware”. In the implementation of recreational spaces, devoid of significance or prior ideological representation, we should seek to highlight an unexpected flow of events, where in addition to thinking beyond the programmes that question the clients’ demand, we should try to unleash a cellular form of behaviour. Perhaps the role of architecture in the contemporary context lies in designing platforms for “software” to appear; or imagining architectural programmes that enable the unexpected, without neglecting the possibility of becoming a “non-place” (in the sense of Marc Augé).
It is practically impossible to contain complexities. But in cities such as Mexico City, emergent conditions are a common basis and we are trained tactically to react. If you design spaces for “other things to happen”, they will. They will be used and occupied by people in ways we don’t expect. That is the biggest compliment for any architecture. I
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