Baghdad: Al Mansur & the Urban Void

Abstract

Baghdad is an ancient city. Its continued lineage from ancient to contemporary has seen it embody every phase of human existence. Recently it has hosted violence destruction and chaos. This project explores a response to that turbulent history on two interrelated levels.

The first is architecture. The project proposes a reinstatement of Kaliph Al Mansur’s original Baghdad into its original position within the contemporary city fabric. It explores of the problems of security and civil collapse on architecture and how built form might influence a solution. It’s response, an enforced return to culture and order through a distinct architectural form. Modern concepts of expansion are culpable for the distraught situation of the city today. A different way must be sought. By appropriating the archetype of the citadel and reorganising the chronology of Baghdad’s development, the proposal creates a new city by returning to the old. It seeks to progress through consolidation and retreat.

The second level is the city. The project explores the idea of the urban void. It translates the unformed emptiness of the current site condition into a very specific emptiness. An emptiness charged with a concrete purpose. Place is created from the original site material by framing it within a perfect form.

In doing so, through symbolic formal and programmatic analysis of Al Mansur’s city, the project interrogates evolving concepts of civic space within the altered priorities urbanisation. The creation of such space by carving void from a substrate of blocks cannot be achieved within the infrastructural network that defines the city today. The proposal as a project for the city looks to circumvent this contradiction and find a new means of creating an urban void. A void that Baghdad can retreat into, so it may survive long enough for recent wounds to heal.

Aerial view of central Baghdad

Plan showing major and minor roads

Plan that uses existing roads to determine the location of the original city

Violent site clearance

Image showing outer perimeter wall and reinstatement of main generative axes

Fuck Iconicism

In yesterday's post about circles I touched on the philosophical intentions behind the collective embassy project. As I am sure you are all gagging for a more detailed position, here is the text written in condemnation of the iconic. Framed by a particularly anti-consumerist stance it is basically a love note to Superstudio, accepting and rephrasing their ideas for the specific context of my project.

Objects are cultural DNA

Architecture is the idea behind or contemplative purpose of a building that defines the form and the space. Therefore building ultimately represents an analogous relationship to nature of contemporary society. Humanity is intrinsically attached to objects and their creation. Both running in parallel to our origins and propelling us towards our future, they are a manifestation of their creator and users’ collective psyche. This confers enormous responsibility upon objects to immortalise cultural values and define future ones. They are the mode by which culture survives and thrives.  The resultant bond creates a reciprocal relationship whereby objects influence users as much as they are influenced. The shifts in this balance of power provide the impetus for humanity’s material and cultural growth.

Infinite objects used finitely

When placed in the political framework of conflict and interrogation, objects diversify into the taxonomy of types. Prototypes emerge to meet fresh needs; over successive generations they are gradually sculpted through an organic process of selection into types. The most successful, i.e. the most persistent, become archetypes.  Some may die, as society deems them obsolescent, but the cultural knowledge is not lost. This DNA is conferred for future generations’ benefit through more successful iterations. Therefore each artefact does not exist in isolation, but as part of a continuum that projects it across time.

Finite objects repeated infinitely

However contemporary culture has almost totally subscribed to the principles of consumerist capitalism. The system works through a rigid adherence to forces of the free market. Here the priorities regarding objects and their creation are entirely alien to their fundamental relationship with humanity. Wrenched from their duty as custodians of our memory, objects are forced into slavery. They are now by-products, stripped of any meaning. Each reiteration is the generic result of a predetermined economic checklist, superficially optimised to maximise its new value as a unit of consumption. Its service to the market hideously mutates the object to suit external pressures and arbitrary trends. Now isolated and finite, objects become the sole preserve of the present. Upon their exhaustion, they are consumed and the economic machine spits out a new wave of wilful criteria, to simulate evolution. The object must be ‘new’, or nobody will buy it. The nature of the evolution is unimportant, merely that is appears divergent enough to mimic a new type or prototype. Discrete waves of consumption and production simulate the growth of cultural knowledge, but in actuality merely recycle it. This neurosis is engaged in compulsively, perpetuating objects simply by default.

So what of the creation of objects? The designers and architects have not scuttled into caves, awaiting the revolution of the political artefact. So what purpose does architecture now hold? The architect is a necromancer, charged with conferring new un-life on the viral objects of consumerism. It is therefore impossible to resolve an architectural response to the problem of developing a building without serving the machinations current system.

Here we see the devolution of architecture into the iconic.

It is skyscraper that truly embodies the contemporary paradigm. Their motives are intrinsically linked to the vicissitudes of the free market because the fundamental logic behind them directly linked value of land.  The type is defined by a plastic response to the rigid questions posed by the market.

Pre Iconic Monolith

Such unilateral dictation forces the form of skyscrapers to adopt some projection of humanity, to prevent the inevitable rejection of such a desolate concept in its raw state. They attempt to exert some illusion of control over the market forces that predetermine the majority of form. With so little room for manoeuvre, the default resort is to attach meaning to the building by synthetically connecting it to recognisable reference points in collective culture. These elements constitute the architecture of the building by forming the basis of an origin myth, that self justifies its existence in the city and by extension culture in general. By far the most common myth chosen is a representation of ‘selective aspirations’. Achieved by creating or recycling architectural and cultural motifs with discrete meanings and amalgamating them into a visual manifestation of the desired ideal.  This can be seen in the slavish adherence to neoclassical rationalism during the Enlightenment, or the moral superiority of Pugin’s Gothic applied ornamentally to toxic factories and schools alike. 

God's own architecutre

However the maturation of skyscrapers finally ossified this economic parody of architecture. As mentioned above, the stringent parameters of their realisation, coupled with the inherited monumentality of scale, cemented the tower’s purpose as a symbol to advertise the success and power of its owners. Despite existing in typological ubiquity, inherent resistance to discourse and reinterpretation fixes buildings at specific locus in history. 

Such ozymandian feats of individual expression retard any possibility of change from the original message, conferring a totalitarian persistence of those ideals across history. Their finite message must therefore be simplified to the lowest common denominator to ensure continued acceptance by a consensus. This totally devalues the building’s idea, i.e. its architecture, relegating it to an icon. Under these conditions, architecture is conscripted into codifying and immortalising the current system.

Chicago Tribune Competition 1922

However though sharing the same aim, to store the collective memory of its civilisation, iconic buildings are not monuments and thus incapable of true cultural aspirations, merely facsimiles of them. The flaws of these buildings are myriad, but perhaps their greatest sin is the resultant imposition of the power and aspirations of the few unilaterally on the many, especially on such a flimsy premise of authority. They are unable to convey any other meaning or hold any sense of collective identity, so unable to function as vital cultural DNA. 

They negate political discourse by yelling their statements across the city, so that nobody can hear themselves think.

I met a traveller from an antique land. Who said: 

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelly

Nemesis (It's not imperialism honest)

The iconic could perhaps be forgiven in the brutal economic world of commerce, but it has insidiously pervaded across the whole taxonomy of building. The new US embassy in Nine Elms highlights the expansion of this economic architecture and exemplifies the ubiquity of the economy in contemporary culture.

The architect sought to resolve the apparently elitist attitude of a more traditional compound, by placing the Embassy in a park. Though alluding to other urban parks in London, the integration of security into the landscaping immediately prevents a truly public space emerging; ensuing conflicts between civil liberty and private security will have only one outcome.

The new embassy aims to embody the self-proclaimed ideals of transparency, openness and equality. These aspirations constituent the iconic metaphors that aggregate into a physical manifestation of American Self Image.

The inherent strength of such a platonic form clearly defines the true purpose of the façade as this outward expression of desired identity. Both invincibly monolithic and delicately crystalline, each elevation reads as a veneer that shrouds the clandestine mass within. In organising the internal plan and external circulation and access, the spiral simultaneously alludes to the labyrinth. Like the mythical lair of the Minotaur, the embassy defines American interest. In their totality these structures state an explicit and unilateral purpose, to create a triumphant monument to the supremacy of an autonomous nation.

An Architectural Advertising Campaign

The old world of autocracy, supremacy and empire is no longer acceptable and falls woefully short of the problems faced by this new global civilisation. Yet echoes of these ideas persist still; the only difference is method of implementation. The resulting effects on the concepts of nation, state and identity appear negligible. However upon closer inspection we reveal a fundamental contradiction in current geopolitics. 

The dissolution of a few huge nations/states into numerous identities would imply a paradigm shift in the mode of global interaction. However the intrinsic qualities of empire coexist in consumerism. Through the mutation of explicit historical state apparatus into implicit economic bondage, these instruments have been rebranded to imply freedom and benefit to the majority. However the system remains unchanged. 

There persists an oligarchic cabal of powers exerting almost total influence over a global majority. However that underlying contradiction may absolve itself by presenting a solution. 

A new collective world

Therefore to challenge the status quo and subvert the omnipresence of consumerist rule, a new archetype must be established. It must legitimise the position of the collective in culture through its manifestation as a physical object: the monument.

This is a monument to a political position. The building is analogous to the political system that requires it, thus should establish itself in the environment, as the system should state itself to culture. 

The global nature of this position requires the response to be as egalitarian as possible.  However despite their size, the countries (in the broadest sense) occupying the building still deserve a fair sense of civic representation. This dichotomy presents a requirement for a collective monumentality, a simultaneous expression of many individuals’ endeavours and dreams. 

By sharing in a single supermonument, both conditions emerge from thousands of voices whispering together. However this presents its own problems, ones that architecture cannot really achieve.  Architecture is a codifying device that both records the collective history and ensures the persistence of the current system. Ensconced within an inflexible economic framework, it states a fixed idea that is eroded, degraded, mutated or lost over time. Such a fate cannot befall a monument. So to achieve this collective idea for the collective building; architecture must essentially be abandoned.

Circles and Ritual: Two Approaches to Form

This post is a re-evaluation of work produced for a student project based in Nine Elms from 2014/15. We have already discussed an approach to understanding this particular area, now it seems prudent to see how I actually responded. 

To briefly contextualise, the brief entailed the creation of a mixed use tower of about 30 storeys. That's about it. Given our programmatic freedom, I became fixated on the dominance of the proposed US embassy over the masterplan. I suggested, in opposition, a collective diplomatic mission that allowed smaller countries to cohabit and thus access facilities otherwise reserved for larger powers. There are a number of other embassies being inserted into Nine Elms, and given the state of global flux we are currently experiencing, my proposal became a counterpoint to the American project and explored the balance between civic representation and public engagement. Ultimately it was a bit shit, but a couple of interesting strands of thought developed.

Chief amongst them was the idea of monumentality, ritual and their relationship to the public realm. The most interesting part of my brief was the creation of an assembly space on the ground levels. There were two very different (and probably quite contradictory means) by which I arrived at the conceptual position that determined the form of this assembly [ritual] space. 

The primary issue I found in developing such a pluralistic international brief, was how to represent all cultures equally. It would have been too easy to simply take the Eurocentric approach and smugly use its historically pervasive reach across the globe as pretext for creating a fundamentally Western building. The building required universality, but not ubiquity. It had to be special for everyone and exclude no-one at any time in the building's use (a key aspect of the brief was that diplomatic missions could come and go as their countries expanded and contracted). This was largely impossible to achieve ingenuously within the timeframe as the actual purpose of this year was to fulfil various technical aspects of the ARB Part 2.

So I quickly dove into typology. I noticed a certain similarities between ritual and gathering spaces throughout history. Primarily that they are circular in plan.  I set out distil this into a several archetypal spaces. I then compiled it into that most visually arresting of formats, the matrix.

The column headings describe the particulars of each object and the rows arrange them in time.

Name: obvious
Locus: place where the example of each archetype can be found
Behaviours: what fundamental purpose/ activity inhabited the object
Conception: refers to Gideon's three conceptions of space and the key formal attributes
Intrinsics: Which aspect of humanity was best embodied by the object (inspired by Superstudio's Fundamental Acts series)

The matrix provided an understanding of what the form 'circle' meant on a basic human level and its inherent application across human history. Although in hindsight all of these examples are Western (we just can't help ourselves). However sleep deprived and excitable at the time, I was convinced that it was the only plan form suitable to the task of providing my imagined cohort of embassies with a worthy space to congregate. The work intended to analytically show a lineage for the Assembly Space that transcended any particular culture and related instead to something fundamentally more human. 

Then I leafed through Yes is More.

It then occurred to me that perhaps the sober analytical approach wasn't the best means to find the origins of the Assembly Space's form. I had been attracted to the unit because at the bottom of the abstract were the words 'speculated environment'. Whilst this probably referred to the vacuous crap that was intended to populate Nine Elms, I felt that the lack of actual context could be an opportunity. 

Every culture on Earth has some form of origin story, so I thought I could make one up for my building. So I drew a wee comic feeling it was only way to honestly portray such a dishonest means for conceiving of a building. But this was a speculative environment, so why not?

The purpose of the comic was to imply that the Assembly Space was a found archaeological artefact. The details were kept vague, it was only a shell that had passed out of time and memory. Its original purpose lost. Its original meaning eroded. But the edifice remained, latent and waiting to be filled with rituals once more. 

The purpose of these two pieces of work was the same; to create a universally understandable concept for the collective Assembly Space. However they differ radically as both modes of representation, levels of seriousness and a desire to subvert. I have placed them here chronologically and to this day I cannot tell whether this was a conceptual progression or a descent into madness. Below are drawings of the final scheme. You can decide for yourselves which direction I took.

Plan Level -1, 0, 1 

Cross Section

Perspective Images

Axonometric

THE GRID: Washington and Utopia Part 2

A Versailles for the People

What the States required was a common social contract, a means to bind these individual entities into a cohesive whole. The foundation of a capital was crucial to this, as it manifested the creation of this new world in physical terms; the translation of utopia into reality. However, an American visual language had not yet formed. The only real option was to import values from Europe and reinterpret them to better suit American thinking. Jefferson saw in classicism the means to achieve this goal. Its heroic connotations of a glorious pinnacle in human development established a myth that could be re-figured for American minds. The weight of history would validate the new civic institutions, but to work as values these classical imports needed to embody an accessible social dimension (Tafuri 1976).

An example of this can be seen in Jefferson’s design for the Richmond Capitol in 1786 (Brownell 1992). Aside from changing the exterior order of the columns, the Maison Carée was lifted readymade into Virginia. The use of a Roman temple allowed for the glorification of democracy, by alluding to the archetypal republic (Tafuri 1976). Its literal transposition into a virgin landscape emancipated the model from the historical baggage accreted in Europe. Selectively contextualised antiquity became the resource for the new world. Therefore the proposal for Washington DC was entirely political in motive. The nation’s isolation and new social agenda meant that European values and models could be carefully selected and shaped autonomously. Their sole purpose then became the political construction of the US and subsequently manufacturing authority and credence for its ideals. It transcends the District of Columbia and establishes itself as the generator of the whole nation’s values. 

Richmond Capitol & Maison Caree. Or is it the other way around?

This utopian ambition manifests itself in several ways. Firstly, L’Enfant’s scheme expands the Roman metaphor at Richmond to an urban scale. Replacing the Tiber is the Potomac; like Rome, the city is surrounded by hills. With the majority of the city held within the meander of the river, the Potomac provides the salient geographical feature possessed by ‘true cities’. Ancient Rome developed a fabric of dwelling around the central Campo Marzio district. This district formed both the secular and religious centre to Rome and by extension the rest of the Empire. L’Enfant’s plan does the same thing morphologically. The street patterns weave a fabric of urbs, to accommodate the government workers and their families. At the functional and metaphorical heart of the plan is the Mall. This reinterpretation of the Roman Forum condensed the US into a single point, with all the armatures of its power arranged around a monumental park. With a monument to the first president as a fulcrum, the Capitol and White House set the primary axes and imply a zone for all other government buildings.  A critical difference between the Mall and Forum is the notable absence of religious buildings on the former. The National Cathedral (initially designed by L’Enfant in 1791), supposedly a prerequisite of ‘cityhood’ and the centre of many European cities, was banished to the periphery. Instead, temples to the secular age, like the Botanic Gardens, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museums, populate the gaps left by the democratic institutions.

Nolli’s survey of Rome superimposed with L’Enfant’s plan of Washington

Secondly, the plan employs two grids. In Washington the colonial grid defines a substrate, an initial imprint into which the symbolism of the plan can be inserted with the empirical rigour demanded by rationalism. It also perhaps reinforces the Roman paradigm and entrenches the concept of urbs (Aureli 2011). Cut across it are broad avenues that emanate diagonally from the Mall. These boulevards define the Capitol and White House as focal points and their intersections create public squares. The generative effect of these grids on the form of the city sits at odds with the ‘planless’ form of Rome, both ancient and contemporary (Aureli 2011). Whilst the Eternal City is defined by a juxtaposition of monumental forms where streets become incidental (Corbusier 1931), the root of the Washington plan is infrastructural and was based upon contemporary principles of urban planning. This lifts the plan above mere historicist metaphor and highlights the priority Jefferson et al placed when importing culture. The importance lay in the values espoused, rather than the forms created. Washington is not a copy of Rome. It is a descendant, built to manifest the same ideals but accepting of its temporal distance.

Aerial Image of Washington DC Capitol with radial and orthogonal grids superimposed

The grids also form vital elements in another strand in creating the capital of the US. A synthesis of their principles provided the counter-position necessary in formation of a new democracy.  Both these grids are inherently European: the first used to impose supremacy over new territories, whilst the second reinforced aristocratic supremacy of the domestic. Furthermore, they are polar opposites, their governing principles and underlying meanings appear to contradict one another. Whereas the isotropic gridiron removes any hierarchy from the city, the radial grid is predicated on such hierarchies. The gridiron defines the expansion of and movement through the city. The radial grid prioritises the city’s concentration into key nodes and the axes that frame these main points. This is beautifully exemplified at Versailles. Though not strictly a city plan, the landscaping performs a similar duty to street patterns. The message is very clear: the king of France sits at the centre of his universe, second only to God (Tafuri 1976). The radial grid is therefore the ultimate regressive metaphor. It uses progressive ideas put forward during the Renaissance and Enlightenment to enforce the medieval construct of absolute monarchy. This model exemplifies the despotism and inequality endemic to Europe that spawned both the French Revolution in 1789 and the American Revolution before it. 

Aerial images of Washington and Versailles. Democratic and autocratic form seem eerily similar 

Washington’s radial grid is therefore highly subversive, but not because its use in city planning was particularly radical. Examples can be found in Wren’s proposal for London, in Karlsruhe and in Paris before any conception of Washington (Tafuri 1976). Indeed, the formal ideas expressed in the capital form the vanguard of contemporary urban thought. Essentially the grid does the same things here as in Europe, focusing attention and placing symbolic importance on the objects at their nexus. The subversion derives from replacing the autocratic palace at Versailles and Antoinette’s decadent ‘farm’ with the Capitol building and the White House. The diagonal Pennsylvania Avenue connects these symbols of legislative and executive power. Outwith the Mall the intersections of radial and colonial grid create spaces intended for general public use, fifteen to represent the members of the US as of 1792. Apparently gimmicky, this move is crucial to understanding the symbolism behind Washington’s morphology. These squares encircle the Mall, sitting within the mundane fabric of the colonial grid. They are connected back to the Mall and one another by the radial grid. One could find a route using the orthogonal streets, but the most direct (and most symbolic connection) is formed by the diagonal boulevards. Therefore each state has a relationship to the other and they all relate back to the central government, i.e. the Capitol. The national government is at the centre of this universe and, with it, democracy.  

Idyllic views of Washington

The realisation of Washington DC was entirely due to a collective need for cohesive political identity, an identity that was ultimately misleading. The intention of generating new ideals, rather than representing existing ones, using something as fixed as a city, placed L’Enfant’s plan squarely within utopian territory. This highlights the fundamental flaw of Washington DC. It does not relate to the actuality of American culture and its development. Instead it represents a single strand of thought about the potential of this new country and the need to validate that existence on comparable terms with the European powers. What Tafuri calls America’s ‘bad conscience’, Washington DC became a political monument to values that were being rapidly eroded by the vicissitudes of the economic and industrial development that actually defined recognisably American urban planning (1976). The grid here is propaganda.

A Twentysomething architect's checklist

A checklist of priorities for twentysomething architects. 
For everyone else, a young person yelling about things they probably don't understand. In my defence I don't think it's meant to be understood.

If it hurts your feelings, I am sorry. ish.
If it makes you angry, good. Do something about it.
If it makes you happy, I'd advise medical attention.

Contains bad language 

•             Fuck Critical Regionalism
•      Fuck Parametricism
•          Fuck Zaha Hadid
•          Fuck Revit
•          Fuck urbanisation
•          Fuck neoliberals
•          Fuck socialists
•          Fuck extremists
•          Fuck disciplines
•          Fuck Frank Gehry
•          Fuck suburbs
•          Fuck High Rise
•          Fuck facadism
•          Fuck technologists
•          Fuck project managing
•          Fuck consultants
•          Fuck convention
•          Fuck conformity
•          Fuck meetings
•          Fuck facebook groups
•          Fuck methodology diagrams
•          Fuck flow charts
•          Fuck laser cutting
•          Fuck hashtags
•          Fuck crits
•          Fuck groupwork
•          Fuck railroads
•          Fuck results
•          Fuck outcomes
•          Fuck advertising
•          Fuck CVs
•          Fuck competitions
•          Fuck megacites
•      FUCK BANALITY

Meditations on Metropolis

Of all the modernists Ludwig Hilbersheimer is perhaps the most compelling, prescient and relevant to anyone with the slightest inkling of a project for the city. He has been of enormous influence on my thinking and below is an abortive attempt to unpick his concept of Metropolis.

A table comparing the idea of 'City' with the idea of 'Metropolis'

Text (unfinished) that begins to describe the difference between city and metropolis

We are fifteen years into the 3^rd Millennium. The statement appears overly portentous, but it is necessary to highlight the extraordinary shift humanity has undertaken in the past thirty five years.

 The 20^th Century was defined by a dichotomous, almost paradoxical, relationship between conflict and expansion; our capacity to stand on the Moon and commit genocide were realised within the same epoch. This era is now history. However the ideologies wrought, the discoveries made and the cultures formed, when coupled with our innate desire for persistence, had consequences that continue to shape our present. An exhaustive compilation and analysis would be futile and unhelpful. There are however a number of elements that underpin our existence, reduced for now to the paradigmatic conclusion that; that the way we think is out of step with our technological means. 

The most salient element germinated in the early 20^th Century and eventually defined it. The drastic revaluation of economics became the primary driver of human existence. Whilst this irrefutably brought great improvements to life during that period, in our contemporary predicament economics has begun to subversively counteract progress. The production of capital and its primacy in economics was exaggerated per absurdum by the neoliberal capitalism of the late 20^th Century. Everything is now put to work, everything is productive.  An innocuous ideal at face value, in fact our entire existence is underwritten by the continued survival of a system is built on several paradoxes. Firstly in theory, everything must simultaneously be both limitless and totally organised (to ensure maximum productivity). Try organising infinity and the ramifications become damningly apparent. When this absurd theory is applied to practice, the paradox mutates and poses the question: how can the production of capital be limitless in a world of very finite resources? The resultant conflicts and contradictions underpin all endeavours to perpetuate and propagate capitalism. One of the most malignant ‘solutions’ merely presents another paradox. In order to ensure that the aforementioned resources never run out, nothing in our world can be discounted as productive, nothing is absolute from exploitation. Economics (recently synonymous with capitalism) has thus subsumed every other aspect of human life, bending it to conform to principles of the market. Economics becomes the relative field into which humanity can be further subdivided and refined into increasingly atomised cells.  However, occurring in tandem and in contrast to this artificial multiplication of culture is the almost pathological need to make this process efficient, to reduce anything and everything to its most basic incarnation. The reductive logic results in a fundamental sameness that rejects any and all costs, perceived to be extraneous in regard to profit. How then does one reconcile the desire for a maximal variety presented by atomisation, with the totalitarian compulsion to strip that variety back to its most cost efficient form? The world enters a state of insanity, mimicking ingenuous progress by perpetually consuming and reconstructing itself. Each time the most superficial layer is altered purely for the sake of newness, giving the impression we have moved forward.  Are we doomed to our Promethean fate? Will we ever break this cycle of bad infinity?

Urban form has been reduced by market forces to fragmented islands of emeralds labyrinths and fortresses

We must question the resounding impact of our immediate history and examine its impact upon our lives, to discern a less bleak direction for this epoch. Our concern in this work is architectural inquiry.  It is bounded to understanding the manifestation of this problem within the construct of the city. Nowhere has the impact of capitalism been more explicit or more damaging than on our urban environment. Therefore we will explore the role of architecture and its complicity in this transformation. 

A pessimistic view of what remains to architects (Archifactory project, will elucidate in a future post)

   

To begin a clear distinction must be made. The urban environment can be viewed as a blanket term for human settlement. The aforementioned changes can be most quickly surmised in the question what is a city and what is a metropolis?

Cities and metropolises both occupy physical space. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The physical size and population of a settlement only offer cursory understandings of either entity, more important are the desires of its populace. How a settlement is defined is based upon the forces governing its creation. We can therefore state that ‘city’ and ‘metropolis’ are descriptors. Identifiable by specific conditions present within a settlement, crucially they define its generative identity. This identity is what allows us to understand society and diagnose its problems. Differentiating between the city and the metropolis, how they evolved and the resultant conflicts that arise is unlikely to provide a comprehensive solution to the problems of society. The aim of this thesis is to establish a coherent understanding of the contemporary urban environment, in order to suggest a platform for reclaiming that environment. Maybe the metropolis is simply the natural evolution of the urban environment. Maybe it cannot be resisted and should not be destroyed, maybe the only answer its to embrace it. Plunge headlong into developing the concept of the metropolis based upon its principles. What does that mean for people?

The relationship between politics, economics and the city has been evolving since the 18^th Century when Giovanni Batista Nolli charted the ‘Eternal City’ of Rome as a system for infrastructural management, with isolated architectural islands. Nolli’s map made cartographic distinction between architecture, drawn in poche and the urban fabric, block footprints drawn with a linear hatch. The former’s inclusion of the interior plan establish architecture as immutable and fixed, the later free to be altered and reformed according to newly emerging principles of urban management. Emerging just a few decades before Adam Smith’s paradigmatic treatise The Wealth of Nations, the Nolli map becomes a prescient project for the city that foresees the shift towards economics and resultant concept of the modern metropolis. The city is a fundamentally political entity. Its growth form and life is both governed by a collective will and a manifestation of it. This collective will is usually represented by some form of government. As a manifestation of collective the city is an absolute idea, the flow of people and economics is governed by the political identity of a recognisable artefact.

Venturi compounds the metropolitan nature of Nolli's Rome

The word metropolis has existed in English since the medieval period. Initially used to define the capital or primary city of a state the word evolved to mean a large and busy city, manifested in the capitalist cities that were expanding from the late 18^th Century onward. This semantic mutation coupled with its etymology surmise the shifts in humanity explored in this thesis. Translated literally to ‘mother city’ there is an inference to the most enduring and intimate interpersonal relationship, that of mother and child. The metropolis therefore evokes a deep connection between it and its inhabitants. When viewed in this context we see the change in our mother from a political to an economic entity as a re-balancing of settlement patterns, emphasising the urban over the rural. Use of the word metropolis is not synonymous with the word city; indeed the difference in meaning and connotation exemplifies the problem at hand. The metropolis is a private entity, propelled by the singular desires of an assembled multitude. Unity cannot be achieved because civic ideology is too constrictive. The foundation of a metropolitan society relies instead upon the impartiality of free markets, that the trade of goods and services is determined by economic laws of supply and demand. The role of politics then changes, no longer the forge of life and purpose, it now just acts as a failsafe. The actions of the population are now a reaction to market changes and more or less political shepherding and private will becomes mutual self interest.

The key distinction between the metropolis and the city lies in relationship to two polar conditions exhibited by humanity. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The city presupposes form, governed by an architectonic manifestation of the inhabitants’ political will. It is a discrete object, to be understood as absolute from its territory. In the metropolis however morphology is secondary to systems that ensure its productivity. 

Hilbersheimer's Hochhausstadt and a plan of Dunfermline inspired by Piranesi's Scenografia
Paradigms of Metropolis and City