Seite 5: Towards the abstract urbanisme in the digital era

It is information technology that has done this to architecture. Behind the 'Failure of the Social Programme' of Modernism; the endless, unrefuted attacks on architects by Princes, politicians and the popular press; the massive expansion of architectural education; the uncoordinated development of building technology; the proliferation of unnecessary regulatory, consultative and advisory bodies; the competition racket and the coup d'etat of art history; the spectre of 'security', the rise of risk assessment, value engineering, design and build and project management, the homogenization of building types... Behind all these lies one thing. The threat and reality of redundant floorspace. The growing conviction of the needlessness of architecture and planning in their present form.

If you think this is far-fetched, consider what the electronic information revolution has already done. The coming of 'Stealth Architecture', and the disappearance of an organic connection between the inside and the outside of buildings, represents the greatest change in architectural design of the last 50 years. But it too is not isolated. It parallels what is happening in other fields. In cosmetic surgery and geriatric medicine, attempts to prolong life or enhance appearance by organ transplants, prosthetic devices and body shaping are producing similar results. Just as we have come to terms with the existence of 'spare-part people' with artificial hips, hearts, kidneys, breasts, noses and brains, so have we come to terms with 'spare-part architecture', put together Frankenstein-style out of different elements from different periods for different purposes into a homogenized, fake-historical scene.

As a result of this process, most recognisable categories of building have disappeared, and all authentic differences between historical periods are being lost: their 'strata' compressed as though by some tremendous seismic action.

In the world of computers there has only ever been one use for outmoded equipment, and that is to access old data that cannot be retrieved by any other means. Apart from a few exotic museum specimens, those examples of old computers that are kept in use, are kept not because they are 'Priceless Heritage artifacts', but because the data in their storage systems still has archival value.

In the case of old buildings there is no such practical justification for keeping examples intact. There is no demand for old buildings 'as a means to access old behaviour'. What we are talking about here is obsolescence. About the limits of 'spare part surgery' and traditional aesthetics in architecture. Today, when money can circumnavigate the globe in fractions of a second, even the newest financial services buildings face obsolescence, not so much from advances in information technology, or new ways of building, as from changes in the financial climate -- the air, so to speak, that they were born to breathe -- that can take place in hours. In this sense, many of the most prestigious financial services buildings of the 1980s are obsolete today, and can be said to have been obsolete before they were even completed.

In the world of business economics there is no market for a telephone system delivered three years too late, or an airliner with insufficient range to reach its destination, or a non-industry standard recording device. Yet when buildings are commissioned into a business environment, and fail to perform as expected because the anticipated market opportunities have evaporated by the time they are finished, they are just as functionally obsolete. As Darwin taught us long ago, it is futile to take pity on the ill-adapted species because the environment is hostile. The species must conform to the demands of its environment or face extinction. In architecture today we make endless excuses for the unadapting species -- 33,000 Listed buildings 'at risk' as we quaintly put it -- and never understand that 'at risk' simply means 'useless'.

Future Shock, the link between technological innovation and changes in human perception, was first charted by Marshall MacLuhan over 25 years ago, most vividly in his two picture books 'The Medium is the Massage' and 'War and Peace in the Global Village'. In these books MacLuhan showed that the price mankind has paid for control of the natural world through technology has been the shock, or numbness, produced by each new level of innovation. This shock is a survival function, not for people, but for technology. It acts as a general anaesthetic upon society, paralysing its judgment while destabilizing technological advances take place uninterrupted, despite strong and vocal assertions of undying opposition from carefully prepared positions.

Just as the railway and the motor car transformed the pre-industrial city and colonised the countryside, so have electronic information technology and the new media transformed all our relationships with the environment and with each other. The invisibility of the new media, together with the totality of all the global connections they have made possible, have combined to render old architectural values -- permanence, and individuality of place and form -- as archaic and irrelevant as the old social values of interdependence and community. Today the duality of 'home' and 'job' is progressively eroded and survives only as an atavism in a bewildering mosaic of new employments that are dependent on car phones and faxes, 'distance working', 'job sharing', 'hot desking', 'downsizing' and so on.

It is the inner shock of this continuing change that renders our grip upon the past so tight that the present can hardly be acknowledged. Caught half way between living in a new and largely invisible environment, but thinking and acting out of an old factitious one, induces a mental state of high anxiety, not a reasoned response to change. As a result change comes sweeping through like an armoured division.

For architects and architecture the ephemeralisation of the permanent brought about by the information superhighway brings two immediate consequences. First, with all the factors of the new environment in a state of active interplay, like aircraft in a holding pattern over an airport, the validity of permanent form has come into question. Second, if as soon as information is acquired it is replaced by still newer information, and if all information is freely available and refuses to be compartmentalised, even the notion of a separate profession, like architecture, with a separate, expert body of knowledge may have become obsolete. At the same time the dawn of Virtual Reality promises a three-dimensional capability in cyberspace that outstrips in opulence any full-size architecture. In the next century these virtual reality displays will have become the overt celebrations of economic and cultural power that great architectural commissions used to be.

We are presently on hold, awaiting the terminal decline of the real property market and the rise of the virtual property market. We live in a time of the dual existence of 'architecture bodies' and 'information bodies'. Of recognised but defeated cities, and unrecognised but triumphant non-cities. A time perceptively described by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. In Japan he sees a society "permeated by information and penetrated by communications systems. A society in which each individual has two bodies: a 'real' body consisting of its physical presence, and a 'fictional' body, shaped by the information directed at or received by it."

In Ito's view, these two bodies have not yet been clearly differentiated in everyday life, but the 'fictional' body is becoming more and more demanding. Soon, he believes, the presence and growth of our 'fictional bodies' will dissolve all traditional communal links in our cities. Communities, localities and families and all their contingent relationships based on face-to-face physical contact, will be replaced by non-space-demanding relationships between 'fictional bodies'. A kind of de-socialisation will take place within the city which will then be perceived as a 'fictional' structure, its spaces no longer needed to serve the needs of a 'real' population. At this time the non-city will emerge as the only 'real' answer. In this urbanism without urban design that which will remain for architects will be a supporting role in the production of pure 'zero-defect' enclosures, modeled on the design methodology of those Modern paradigms the airliner, the racing yacht, the curtain walling system and the Grand Prix racing car.

And what of the old architecture? Starting in the late 1970s, all rural Europe in a great dorsal belt running from London in the North to Southern Italy, began to be converted into a new economic landscape. In place of town and city centre shops, millions of square metres of warehouse and distribution centre floorspace have been constructed at breakneck speed. Outside old towns and cities, at thousands of off-ramps and crossings on nearly 50,000 kilometres of auto route, one million new commercial complexes have sprung up with no reference to urban context or the supremacy of art history at all. In England alone more than 100 out of town shopping centres were projected between 1985 and 1989, nearly half of them more than 100,000 square metres in covered area, and no less than nine of them located on the M25 London orbital motorway. Now frenzied efforts are being made to reverse this trend, but to no avail, for these are not 'intelligent' buildings, they are fast buildings. They are part of the unsentimental, computer-generated face of electronic disurbanisation. A manifestation of the abstract, digital communications that link the EC countries and beyond in a seamless web of consumption outlets served by ports and airports, automated freezer stores, sealed warehouses, vast truck parks and transient dormitories of mobile homes. This is the architecture of the new media: the urbanism of the non-urban network of consumption that is enveloping the world.

This new 'abstract urbanism' -- interestingly its locations are digital, often only designated by numbered exits -- is ignored by architects and urban planners, historians and critics. Yet in economic terms it is already more important than all the art-historical architecture ever built. It is, in the terminology of the immigration officer, 'undocumented' construction, for there is no one to document it. No one who understands it. What is the culture of truck drivers whose position is plotted and checked by satellite? Who comprehends the lives of high-mileage car drivers? What is the space occupied by those who sit, day after day, before instruments and monitors? Warehousemen, machine minders, checkout persons, air traffic controllers, traffic policemen, ambulancemen, mechanics, linemen, computer troubleshooters, cashcard loaders, maintenance men, photocopier repairers, security guards... Are these the prototype non-communal persons of the future, linked only by the global heartbeat of satellite TV, FM music and radio news? If they are, then in our future centrality will be an unknown concept. Today's architecture and urbanism as a derivative of the ancient cities of the past will be forgotten. The forgetting has already begun.

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