Originally posted on my personal city-themed blog in April of 2013.
These three projects dig into the very structure of their settings, addressing less obvious but more imposing problems in blunt and practical ways. Their gestures bring the negotiation with context to an unprecedented level of rationality. In light of the aggressive urbanization the world is undergoing, the time has come to get past appearances and focus on how architecture works with its place. After all, as long as the architecture serves the people within their local context, should we really care if it sits timidly next to an ancient building or not? (The 'New' Context: Learning from Lebanon)
This is a bizarre article arguing that buildings that look out of place (i.e. that are not context-sensitive, or that aesthetically clash with the rest of the urban fabric around them) are fine if they take on deeper social issues --. the 'real context' -- and propose design solutions, regardless of how they look. I don't have anything against the first half of the argument per se -- sometimes strange buildings look good, sometimes they don't. As a non-architect, I can only nod politely and try to suppress a yawn when it comes to that purely aesthetic dimension of "context," and in some ways, if what the author is arguing can actually happen -- i.e. if ill-fitting buildings function in useful ways -- then sure, go for it: why not? I always did have a soft-spot for that "form follows function" aphorism.
Unfortunately, the way this argument is presented rests on a strange reading of the social that doesn't seem to see a difference between private and public space. The three sites discussed are private, elite university buildings on generally unwelcoming, gated campuses (as far as AUB and LAU are concerned).
All these sentences -- "offers access to a large, previously disconnected forest area of the campus both from within the building and from the street," "pays respect to the inhabitants of both the building and campus," "difficulty of pedestrian navigation in Beirut is also tackled through the project [...with] ramps, dedicated to walkers, [which] come as a strong response to the local situation, where citizens often find themselves battling with cars and street shops for a place to walk," "addressed the need to preserve green space for this rapidly urbanizing region," "well defined open communal space [...that] cannot be built over or used as parking space – a common destiny of such spaces in Beirut," "a direct response to the complex local problem of public space, while the roof garden addresses the same issue in a different situation" -- all these sentences speak a wonderful language, but seemingly miss the fact that only students and faculty are the intended users of these spaces. Streets, inhabitants, local situation... these are words describing a public realm, not a private institution's infrastructure.
There is a moment when the author seems to sense the incongruity of his argument, describing one building as sitting "awkwardly in its surroundings, paying very little attention to the buildings and voids that engulf it, but it speaks to ideas that could be a source of change for the city." Were the author clearer about the politics of private/public, this would probably be the point when he would see that, though such projects may be positive case studies of good ideas -- solutions that could be scaled up or applied to less private spaces -- the very foundation of his argument (that these buildings eschew aesthetic sensitivity for an ethic of progressive social intervention) is flawed. The positive ideas he sees, when applied to a private space, cannot be anything more than design inspiration. In other words, he's got the carriage before the horse: creating a walkable campus is not a response to how unfriendly our city is to pedestrians, it's an aesthetic choice inspired by (activism around) a wider social problem.
All in all, there is nothing in this article that isn't purely aesthetic and architectural with a capital-A. I'm all for architects getting involved in social issues, but this requires refining their understanding of urban politics, asking fundamental questions like 'who owns what where?' A superficial engagement with social issues will only lead to the assimilation of the language of "problems" into architecture's design register, keeping us firmly within (not beyond) the realm of aesthetics -- now rebranded as "solution-oriented" and "future-invested" -- gesturing at reform and political engagement.