Reversing the Urbanized Interior

After decades of late modernism’s urbanization or infrastructuralization of the interior, of experience, of everything, this era is finally coming to an end due to a confluence of social, cultural, and disciplinary revelations that collectively suppress the role of the urban, instead revisiting the spatial opportunities of the domesticated interior. Whether we speak of development along infrastructural corridors, pulling sidewalks up and through buildings, or making ex urban zones habitable, the realization of key projects throughout the 90’s espoused the limitations of this methodology. In a global society that continues to evolve as a network of region-cities, why have these projects of interior urbanization failed to yield experiential fluidity between interior and exterior? Perhaps, a key component – the surface of the domesticated interior – is a spatial condition which affects experience more than infrastructure, land use, or policy. In order to understand the growing proliferation of the domesticated surface, two critical projects of the past three decades may best depict the growing opposition to reading architecture as tectonics, in favor of an architecture of familiar, communicative, and oftentimes opulent surfaces.

The peak of interior urbanization – or the proliferation of infrastructural programs, services, and textures – can be best depicted through the early work of OMA. The Jussieu Library competition entry in 1992 proposed one continuous surface, weaving its way up the library while creating connections to varying programs. Nowhere was there a semblance of a façade or skin of the building. Though a provocative strategy, the decision to leave the façade[s] absent was a direct criticism of the building as symbol, especially within the context of the competition for a public library. Ironically, OMA’s commission for Seattle Public Library less than a decade later, reinterpreted their previous project of interior urbanization through strategic domestications of space, creating a collection of richly-textured moments rather than a singular horizontal surface of gradual ascent.

The Prada Epicenter Store in Los Angeles attempts to urbanize the interior through slightly different means. In this case, the façade is completely non-existent; the building relies on technologies of surveillance and ‘air-curtains’ to provide the protections expected for a street-front commercial program. By eradicating any sense of enclosure, the performance of urban pedestrians – usually limited to the sidewalk – plays itself out inside the store. Shoppers are put on display as an attempt to reverse the common condition of the performance of urbanites for the entertainment of the interiorized urban citizen. The lack of threshold is disorienting, especially in the context of a place of consumption. Clothing, shoes, and accessories are displayed as if in a museum, channeling a response of admiration rather than consumption.

Fast forwarding to the turn of the century, Alejandro Zaera-Polo – who worked under Rem Koolhaas at the time of the Jussieu Library competition – developed a hefty body of research on the envelope through work in both academia and practice. Specifically the work of FOA (Foreign Office Architects) and AZPA (Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architects) after the commission of the Yokohama Port Terminal placed much emphasis on the envelope, explained by Zaera-Polo as “a revision, a device that is environmental, visual, hermetic.” Zaera-Polo’s lecture at Taubman College in March of 2012 depicted a differentiation of the envelope based on four spatial categories [tower, sphere, block, bar]. Despite the somewhat reductionist categorization of typology, the theoretical abstraction of the varying envelope typologies allows for a point of departure for the necessary attention to surface, especially considering that, according to Zaera-Polo, “architects are deprived of opportunity to affect internal structures of building, specifically with they typologies of social housing, offices, and shopping malls.” The office’s more recent has emphasized this very topic, undertaking projects that have little to no interior resolution necessary, instead focused on the building’s presence through its exterior surfaces. Perhaps, the most compelling aspect of this is the emphasis on the façade, not through its compositional qualities, but through the affects created within an urban context. Surely, OMA’s weaving circulation of dissolving the opposition between urban and interior has an undeniably provocative connection to context. However, instead of viewing contextualism though the building’s spatial performance, should the emphasis rest on the building’s surface, specifically in the way it moderates circulation, views, and visual cues from its surroundings?

One of the more recent projects by AZPA (and the project in which Zaera-Polo spent the most
time discussing) is the Ravensbourne School in London. The exterior surface can be abstracted to two main components: the tesselated pattern and circular apertures, both of varying dimensions and spatial affects. Any semblance of interior articulation is solely dependent on the repercussions of the placement of apertures on the façade. Therefore, the project inhabits a theoretical territory of in-betweenness, where the interior opposes urbanization, but the urban [façade] attempts to extrovert the interior. Although this provides a potential reading of the domestication of the urban, the interior is left unattended. This is likely more to do with the ethos of Zaera-Polo – to focus attention and resources to the envelope – rather than a particular compositional or theoretical framework. However, if we imagine every spatial component of the urban condition – habitation, production, transportation – ONLY through their textural qualities, the question arises as to the level of clarity in which architects operate. The discipline has evolved into a mirror, portraying, augmenting, or criticizing, not the contemporary condition, but the discipline itself. The perception of architecture as ultimately dependent on its perception through the textured anterior surface can be reduced to the notion that people like to look at, inhabit, pass through, and experience a facade which depicts either beauty, polemics, or provocation. After uttering this statement to oneself, there may be an inclination to oppose this, or any statement where architecture is discussed relative to “beauty,” instead swaying the discussion of architecture toward that of quantifiability, performance, and tectonics. Surely, architecture of the 21st century must necessarily respond to cultural, economic, and environmental anxieties, however, using these conditions as points of conceptual departure in the discipline has led to a scientific, objectified reading of architecture, increasingly devoid of experience. What would the metropolis look and feel like if it was read only through its fronts, its vertical surfaces, its anteriors?