NEGOTIATING THE VIRTUAL-VISUAL – PHYSICAL ENVIRONEMNTS
ARX THEN AND NOW

Complex ideas and simple coincidences are not mutually exclusive. The Foundation of ARX in Osaka in 1988 is inscribed in both of these conditions. It could be looked at through the eyes of the contemporary philosophical and technological condition of the late XX century culture. It could also be looked at the meeting of four young architects who happened to cross path through their curiosity in exploring and negotiating the world.

At the crossroad between observation and actualization, there was the recognition by the group members that new technologies have allowed the planet to be shrunk to the size of a Global Village – as Marshall McLuhan eloquently had defined it. New telecommunication extensions allowed individual to interact at a multiplicity of place at one time. New technologies offered the dematerialization opportunity of the coincident-multi-place, while at the same time the physical body of an architecture student from Switzerland moved from Europe to New York and Osaka. Wanting to keep these international connections active, while at the same time recognizing the complexities of the contemporary world, ARX was founded as an exploratory and conceptual group, investigating the possibility of cross cultural interactions in regard to the imagined and constructed environment.

The founders of the group – Frederic Levrat, Takashi Yamaguchi, Nobuaki Ishimaru, Nuno Mateus – realized that telecommunication was possible, and not only from one powerful state controlled television studio to a household, but from one’s living room to another one’s office. The Fax machine allowed us to communicate instantaneously, exchanging text, images and ideas. This was all before the invention of the World Wide Web and what we know now of the emails, shared digital screens, video conferencing and facetime. New means of communication allowed the world to communicate more efficiently and space to shrink rapidly. Not only space shrunk but potentially cultures could be reduced to a single large melting pot. Nevertheless, the distance could not be completely erased, and a cultural “distance’ emerged, in the interpretation of the drawings, words and symbols. Our exploration attempted to reveal how much the physical world was actually resisting the communication world – or the non-material world.

Being at a multiplicity of places at the same time is now a conceptual possibility with our contemporary tools – such as the smart phone and the internet. It is not a new desire, but an old and fundamental one, brought forward thousands of years ago through imagination, nostalgia, text and meditation. One’s body could be at one place, but the mind, the thoughts, the imagination, could transport us somewhere else.

ARX started long before the emails and the avatars. It was clearly an avant-guard movement in the sense that it was a precursor of things to come. Understanding that technology would soon bring us “everything anywhere anytime”. ARX was fascinated by these agents of transformation, and this dissolution of space and time. On the other hand, as architects we were wondering what was left for the physical component of our environment? ARX wanted to explore in a critical way, not only what was possible, but what was transformative – what would be the impact on the build environment, as well as the distribution of capital, the social, political and economic impact of that newly connected environment. We could transmit information, but was it a seamless and meaningful communication? The specificity of the location, the culture, the physical body in space, did not fully translate. The digitalization, like any translation – from a complex physical context into a reduced aggregation of zeros and ones, or black and white pixels for the Fax – into a symbolized form is always reduced and needs to be extracted to make sense at the place of the reception.

ARX wanted to explore and reveal this paradox of the possibility of the exchange, overlapped with the cultural specificity of the place. As Architects, we were fascinated by this tension between the mind and the matter. The Concept, the Image, the Thinking could be communicated, but we were also aware of the impossibility to transmit the material, the texture, the physical presence, the specificity of Time and Space and the heaviness of the physical properties. In other words, what is left for Architecture, in this information revolution?

Exploring this tension between the “Virtual” and the “Physical” – or the “immaterial” and the “material” – became the principal tool of the ARX Group. Not just intellectually, but literally living it through its interactions between different continents. The infrastructure of communication between New York, Osaka, Lisbon and Geneva was the basis for the experimentation of the communication – as well as the resistance of matter. It was also the dissolution of the single authorship.

 

The two original ARX Manifestos are the following:

ARX Non-Manifesto – Frederic Levrat – New York

Today the conflict generated between Information Space and Physical Space, Media Reality and Experience, Collective Consciousness and Personal Thinking, Trained Perception and Haptic Perception has reached a new level of development. This potential has always existed in some form – magic, religion, etc. – but our ability to produce, control and free up an “Information Environment” that would have a greater influence on our everyday life than the environment we experience directly has been limited by technology. These oppositions, which influence almost every facets of our everyday lives, shape the political, social and economic organizations of the societies we form.

Architecture is supposed to organize the “tecton”, to deal with a specific sense of space and time, but the signification and representation of a building are also important in the production of architecture. Architectural production is an expression – both representational and material – that must take into consideration the condition of “multiple reality”. If the primary concern of architects as the beginning of the century was man’s domination over nature – achieved through mechanization, reproduction and repetition – today the disappearance of homogeneous space and “real time” challenge architecture’s very foundations.

If architecture is to remain something that can still be considered an art, it must deal precisely with the extension, dislocation and fragmentation of our body and our mind. This can be achieved either by producing a certain jouissance of dislocation or by reenacting or reinscribing this multiplicity in a way that allow each individual to redefine his or her own singularity.

Architecture in its present and future applications must address these issues in ways that continue to allow the mind to exercise some control and that allow the body to find its specificity and dignity.

 

The Second Manifesto was by Takashi Yamaguchi:

Melting the Creator – Takashi Yamaguchi – Osaka

Melting the Creator: Toward Decentralism.
The only absolute during the Middle Ages in the West was God. God reigned over everything and was considered the absolute creator. During the Renaissance man assumed the role of creator. The Renaissance should have been a period of deconstructing centralism through a denial of the absolute referent, God. Instead, man assumed God’s position as the absolute referent. Centralism was finally critiqued and displaced with the emergence of modern thinking. In the process of continuous modernization, the centered subject has melted and dispersed.

Yet many architects still adhere to the centralism that belong to the past: they only pretend to make decisions, even though they know it is impossible for them to do so – architects as afterimages of the past.

The decision making protocols of ARX group – the melted creators:

To communicate repeatedly with an accelerated, beyond the body speed; to melt the form between the components.

To shift from a coincidental to an imperfect view of mutual understanding; to encourage the productivity of difference and chance.

ARX took the concept of the multiple logic a step further, establishing this idea as its Design Process, overlapping the design proposal of multiple designers from different cultures onto one project. The project result was not a synthetic compromise, rather a revelation of the differences, of the cracks, the misalignment, and therefore the beauties and the richness of our multicultural society.

 

FOUNDATION CONTEXT

We could take all the credit for inventing our group thinking and strategy out of thin air, but this was obviously not the case as we were also indebted to our cultural context. I had worked with Peter Eisenman and Tadao Ando, both referring to different legacies, but both convinced that architecture could affect its environment.

Peter Eisenman was very influential in his statement such as:

Architecture is not only for the pleasure of the body but also for the pleasure of the mind.

Architecture has always been to shelter us from our most dangerous environment. Historically it has been a protection against the rain, the cold, the mud, the wild beast. In the Middle Ages fortress have been built to protect us against the aggression of other human being. Today, architecture should shelter us against the product of human thinking.

How do we build for the pleasure of the mind?

Another important source was the philosopher Henri Bergson, who explain his notion of active perception and perception filter. We do not passively look at the world, but we recognize an environment that is already partially preconceived in our mind, so the recognition can be a lot more efficient.

But it means our mediate (or virtual) environment form our thinking process. Similarly one could say that our non-mediated physical experience form our perception and thinking process.

Lars Spuybroek at the conference organized at Columbia University “The State of Architecture at the beginning of the XXI century” related an experiment of the cognitive experience of the visual space and the physical activation of the point of view in space.

 

ARX NOW

30 Years later, the world has evolved fast and ARX initial intuition has been entirely vindicated. The development of the Internet has been exponential, the introduction of digital technology, replacing the Fax machine – has entirely transformed the way we interact with our surroundings.

The Smart phone has offered us information literally “Everywhere All the Time” to the point that we are not sure how to educate the new generation of Screenagers, who know the world mostly through their devices.

But we were warned, as Marshall McLuhan had very early on understood the power and the danger of the new technologies. His interpretation of the influence of the communication technology on society is something that would take too much time to go through today, but his “war and Peace in the global village” published in 1964 is an intriguing warning of the danger of concentered information distribution.

More recently, the anthropologist Yuval Noha Harari came to define the rise of the human species due to its unique power to organize itself around myth that existed only in our collective imaginations. Literally, the domination of the human species as we know it know, became the dominating specie on this planet because it was able to believe in things that never existed, such as religions, nation state, or corporations. From his writing in Sapiens, Nation states, Religions, and corporation are all virtual construction which allows a large societal organization to cooperate together.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

In other words, the tension between the virtual and the Physical, as expressed in the ArX Manifesto has currently evolved to such a degree that the physical world today, our physical ecosystem is in serious danger from the non physical world – such as the abstract valuation of corporation shares on the stock market. In fact that balance between the physical and the non physically constructed environment has been instrumentalized with new technological tools and has taken some fairly scary proportion.

For instance, the rise of the of the public figure, who first operate as a celebrity actor in a completely fictional world to then be trusted with an important social role in a public office due to his fictional heroics. Here represented among other by Arnold Scharzeneger – Conan the Barbarian, Terminator 2,3,4,5 or the Governor of the 6 largest economy in the world.

This led to a template for what is considered the election to the most powerful position on the world, as commander in chief of the largest army in the world, and the largest economy in the world, among other responsibilities, mostly based on a media constructed environment.

Over these last 30 years we have witnessed some very powerful presence of the constructed information reality, which has generated devastating wars, based on fabricated stories which were not based on any physical evidence. Nevertheless, these information constructed environments, or virtual realities, justified and self-reinforced by the echo chambers of one media form to another, newspaper citing television, citing radio, citing website, as a proof of a logical reality, had very violent impact on the physical constructed environment. About half a million dead, a million injured, and close to 4 millions refugees only in Iraq, with similar numbers piling up in Syria and Yemen.

So how do we address this complexity of the Information manufactured environment in architecture?

We embrace it. Some of the largest budgets for new buildings are not to build new hospital or environmental friendly water purification plants, but to build fantastic backdrop to televised events, such as the Olympic games or the World Cup. Why would the capital of the most populous country in the world fight to get the 2008 Olympics, well just to be in the news, to exist in the digital world for just one month, not knowing what to do with the colossal – and beautiful – construction once the event is over.

Or we embrace the digitally animated large signage enhancing building “images” such as exemplified by Times Square in New York, where gigantic commercials invade the public space without much question about who own or control this urban public space.

In fact some entire cities urbanism have embraced the simple consumption of space as an image. Admittedly based in an arid climate – with no agriculture and very little oil – Dubai has reinvented itself as a dreamscape. As a place where people can invest their abstract capital into an image, a manufactured lifestyle.

Every construction has a name, a story, a marketing manager, an assigned lifestyle, a “virtuality”. And this virtuality in everyway codifies and generates its physicality. The Palm Jumeirah for instance. A well marketed simple name, an image, flattened as a 2D plan, existing clearly in the potential investors head. All of the houses were presold in 48 hours, before the land was even “constructed”. In everyway, the virtual, or image driven and constructed environment of marketing, propaganda and visualization managed to raise enough funds to allow the physical world to be enacted. The Palm Jumeirah is slightly larger than the City of San Francisco, emerging from the Persian Gulf and constructed in less than 5 years. The mental image as the generator of a physical materialization.

The question might be, what does it means to Live in an image?

I have spent time with my university student analysing cities like Dubai and neighbourhood like Times Squares, not cynically, but as actual example of our complex overlap of the information world and the physical world. We have to recognize today that what we call “reality’ is a multi layered environment encompassing the virtual, the visual and the Physical realms.

ARX Kobe, ArX Osaka, ArX Portugal and ArX new York have been aware of this and has tried to address these issues over the last 30 years, each in their own interpretation. But ARX is not the only movement celebrating its 30 year anniversary. The summer 1988 was also the opening of the deconstructivist show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Mark Wigley and Phillip Jonhson. Based on the philosophical writing of Jacques Derrida, embracing the notion of complexity and the multiplicity of point of views, mostly due to the presence of multiple layers of information, Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebesking, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himelblau were well placed to address this notion of “disjunction”. Surprisingly, their initial awareness of the multi layered environment got absorbed by the economic forces of the developers and the notion of the Media was not used as a condition of multiple logics but as a simplification tool for capitalist profit. From critical thinkers, questioning the social and philosophical role of the profession, they became transformed as Star-architects, bringing back the simplicity of the absolute Authorship and the name recognition as a saleable product. Therefore, they mostly became image providers for enhancing developer profit margins.

Another avenue in regard to the influence of new technologies onto the constitution of our architecture and urban environment can be found in the writing of William Mitchell. Seven years after the foundation of ARX, William Mitchell publishes the City Of Bits, Space, Place and the InfoBahn. His writing is interesting as he argues that new technology will make the physical city entirely obsolete. Digital Networks will allow us to be connected and have access to “everything, everywhere all the time”. The theory sounds good, but the fact on the ground are quite the opposite. Never has humanity lived so densely in urban centres. Currently, over half of the world population is living in cities, an unprecedented condition in the history of human civilization. But why are we paying so much rent to live in the centre of Tokyo, Shanghai or New York? Why, if we can have access to “everything, everywhere all the time”?

Maybe it is because we do have unlimited access to information, because we are inundated with data and news, fake news and other layers of the information environment. We need a place to contextualize data, to understand and “experience” information. As we know, Information without context is meaningless.

What do we need a Physical City for in the XXI Century? Well it seems we need the Physical City as an interface to contextualize data. To make sense of information, the experience space and communication in an immediate condition. The Physical city has become the place to experience physically information. Here is a picture of the Champs Elysees in Paris, during the 1998 World Cup, where the citizen went to the street to celebrate and to try to understand what the information they had seen on their TV meant.

If this contextualization of information is the new role of the city, the education and experience of space, is used by all citizen. Nevertheless, it is the education sector that is the most interested by this condition, and we see the higher education institution investing in the physical cities. In New York, the very expansive centre of Manhattan has seen the rapid extension of the urban campus with Columbia University, or NYU, blurring the boundaries between the campus and the city.

In the digital age, I have come to the conclusion that the main function of the physical city is the Knowledge City, offering an interface between the abstract information and the physical environment.

If the City is a Physical interactive construct for the collective to “experience” information, how do we establish a similar function at an architectural scale?

Can Architecture be the Interface between the Mediated and the Personal Experience?

It gives an extremely important function to contemporary architecture, which happen to be critically located at the intersection of the information world and the physical world.

Can we produce an architecture that reside somewhere between information space and physical space? That educate and protect us from the product of Human thinking? Architecture as an Education of our senses, as an Interface between the Mind and the Body?

I will briefly show three projects which attempts to address these issues at different scales: The Object scale, the spatial scale and the Building tower scale.

The first project, the Axonometric Chair, is questioning the notion of the Materialization of Representation, as a reversal process. Rather than drawing a physical object, I am building a representation of an object, extracting in three dimension the representation in 2D of a visual 3D construct. It is intentionally a very simple chair, which nevertheless question our convention of reading and the accepted cultural codes of representation.

I tried to send this chair to the Patent office in Bern, Switzerland to protect my design, but they returned my application asking why I was paying only for one chair and submitting three designs. I argued through a second letter that it was three pictures of the same chair, which was the specificity of the design. Nevertheless, they returned the application arguing the images were not coherent. In other words, following the multiple logic of representation and of anthropomorphic physicality the images were too complex for its understanding.

The second project is a Showroom, located in the middle of Manhattan, in the Fashion District on 37 Street and 7 Avenue.

New York is well known for its efficient grid. A symbol of efficient organization. The Orthogonal grid, not only in plan but in x,y,z, is the representation of the commodification of space as an orthogonal subdivision of capital. Therefore the logic of gravity and capital regulate all the space and is so easy to understand it almost offer no resistance. We understand space as we have been educated to experience orthogonal space. We can assume the physical distance of a room by projecting and interpreting our visual perception in an orthogonal room.

The project wanted to destabilize the perception, forcing the more personal education of the senses, forcing the experience of space. By creating the main wall as a folded surface, not only at an angle in plan but also in the vertical axis. The visual clues are suddenly much more complex and the imposition of a completely white finish, to the floor, the wall, the ceiling and the furniture, force an exploration of the space with the entire body.

Quite a number of visitors would actually use the tactile quality of touching the wall with their hand, while walking along the wall, negotiation and recording space as an experience between theirs mental, visual and physical understanding of the space.

The last project is for a large tower in Abu Dhabi, on a new island, recently developed. I had designed a few project for Dubai and Abu Dhabi, looking at the tower as an image production and the possible resistance of such consumption of the image. The relation between the surface and the volume, where the image-surface becomes the main condition of the vertical tower, exploring the notion of the hyper-surface, folding, etc. A few project attempted to question the idea of the surface, through compression or expansion.

The physical site on Reem Island was on a corner, between a boulevard and an open park. The volume had to be massed on the corner and the volumes ended up as a six sided diamond shape. The interesting part was that we always want to read a tower as an extruded rectangle.

The real desire of this project was again the resistance to the consumption of the simplified image. I wanted to question the hierarchy between the visual space and the physical space, or between verticality and an angled self-referential positioning. In other words, by questioning the hierarchy of visual space and physical space, I was attempting to question the ultimate parameter of the physical environment: gravity. Five similar volumes are repeated, each with a 5 degree rotation, where the top volume reside at 95 degree with the ground. But you would not know as you are looking at the sky.

30 years ago ARX was founded on the understanding that we could communicate across the newly connected globe. That we could test the relations between Information space and Physical space, between mediated information and immediate experience.

Today I would say we have an Ethical duty as architects and urbanist to explore these relations between Information Space and Physical Space, more urgently than ever.
Our profession is strategically located as an intersection between the Information Environment and the Physical Environment.

 

 

Frederic Levrat is a passionate educator, having taught Architecture studio for 20 years at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation as well as at Pratt School of Architecture, New York City University of Technology.

Levrat founded the international group ARX in 1988. Currently he practices as the principal of Levrat Design in Manhattan, producing a number of projects recognized internationally, from audacious large tower design for Dubai and Abu Dhabi to a research center for the European Space Agency in Switzerland, bars and restaurants in New York, as well as humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, building eight primary schools and twelves clinics.

Levrat is currently working on the publication “Knowledge City”, exploring the relationship between the immaterial and the material in the contemporary urban configuration.