Publish at September 07 2022 Updated September 07 2022
The "De Rotterdam" building (the Rotterdam) that illustrates the article is the work of Dutch architect, urban planner and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas.
Located in the eponymous city and built in 2013, the building was designed to be seen in motion from the New Meuse, or even from the road. The moving and changing viewpoint distorts the building, reshaping it, reshaping it: as we move forward, in our eyes, the towers separate and come together.
Historically, monuments have represented landmarks and the shaping of human ideals. They represent our aspirations, the way we organize our societies. We hope for them - our societies and monuments - to be immutable, enduring, present for eternity.
From the theories of Alberti, for five centuries, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, architectural rules responded to the need for a composed and harmonious beauty. That is, in an architectural composition, nothing could be added or subtracted.
Mutation, adaptation, even dialogue, was not an option. This remained for some time in the minds of citizens. Thus, in 1984, a year before construction began, the pyramid made by I. M. Pei at the Louvre was still causing a scandal.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, composition had been challenged by the "absolute freedom of the plan" of the Corbusier (the "free plan").
However, "the quest for flexibility offered by the free plan generated only a fixed architecture, incapable of responding to the perpetual mutations of society, to its rapid transformation."
In the 1960s, the group of architects Team X (Team 10) wrote that:
"Any architectural response[must] henceforth be situated in a constantly shifting and evolving space/time, and no longer in the immobile eternity of the work of art."
It is a matter of conceiving of, and anticipating, the change in usage. Indeed, today's world is changing, so much so that notions of fluidity and liquid theories continue to advance.
To return to the 1960s, they saw the emergence of theories of indeterminacy in architecture. However, concretizations (constructed projects) were rare and realizations (non-constructed projects) partial.
This indeterminacy in architecture is the subject of Xavier Van Rooyen's thesis.
He proceeded through a comparative architecture modality. In this work, he identified principles for shaping indeterminacy in architecture.
His research is articulated in three axes :
The thesis cites Peter Cook, who contrasts the Oxford dictionary definition with the usage of Archigram:
"Oxford dictionary definition:
Indefinite: "Not of fixed extent or character, vague, left to doubt."
Archigram usage: Of variable evaluation. Not a single answer. Infinitely open."
How indeed to articulate the notion of the indeterminate, which is the open, and architecture, which is the structured?
In architecture, indeterminacy applies at three levels:
Rem Koolhaas works on the urban scale and on the architectural scale, in its specific / indeterminate polarity.
On the grid scale, the urban is subject to the vagaries of external factors, which are not controllable.
Here, it is "the void [that]ensures the stability of the whole."
At the architectural scale, that is, at the level of the exterior, specific envelope, it intervenes on the interior with generic, indeterminate and neutral programs.
For the researcher, the vectors of the indeterminate are the three concepts:
From the free plan and the free cut, Koolhaas developed fragments, islands:
"Each volumetric fragment incorporates the idea of change. [...] The aggregation [...] takes place in the vertical or horizontal plane."
"The programmatic island [...] develops freely among diversity."
The fragments are stabilized by emptiness: streets, interstitial spaces.
In the conclusion, for architects, the author takes up a diagram with all the structures of indeterminacy, expressed in realized and unrealized programs (fig. 133). The concepts of indeterminacy are also listed in a chronological table that recapitulates the processes and levels of indeterminacy.
Architects and non-architects alike can also meditate on this notion of the void, which frames and makes livable the dynamism of change.
Illustration: podk from Pixabay.
Xavier Van Rooyen, Indefinite Architecture. Architecture and theories of indeterminacy since the 1960s.Art of building and urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, University of Liege, 2021.
Thesis available at: https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/256683
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