Casas vitorianas do bairro Alamo Squaro, objetos de estudo do livro MOUDON, A. V. Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco
Foto Alessandro Filla Rosaneli, 2007 [fonte: Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986]
Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: One of the most excited assumptions supported in the last decades by architects and urban planners is the attention on the context searching for the design of the “place”. However, you emphasize that is impossible to design the place; we can only design the “space”. In your book “Built for Change” (The MIT Press, 1986), one of the lessons pointed out is that architects and urban planners have not to worry with the total design: we have to leave space for the ambiguities of individual manifestations. What are the implications of that for the Architecture and Urban Design and Planning today?
Anne Vernez Moudon: I still agree with that idea that planners and designers can only create space, not place, and I am not the only one to think like that. For instance, Gianfranco Caniggia called himself a “technician of the built or human environment”, and he believed that he needed to understand tradition and the evolution of the built environment in order to be a good architect. The architect’s role is to carry on this tradition and to introduce change with modesty, moderation, and based on clues that we (society and its different people) may need change. Caniggia showed in the transformation of the collective house of medieval times into the row house of the late Middle Ages, early Baroque times. That kind of change was societal change demanding that architects and builders respond to social processes and try to interpret them for the next generations. Caniggia and, I believe, Muratori, had the theory that the act of building and the resulting buildings were part of biological processes. In other words, what was built resulted from deeper forces than just the sensory forces that we refer to when we talk about place. To make place, to transform the building as object into place, there were deeper, more basic, processes at work than social ones. They believed that the object qualities of buildings we produce were actually part of our DNA. Buildings were made and inhabited, much like we make children and take care of them!
Saying we make “space” doesn’t mean that the act doesn’t have a spiritual or psychological or even biological dimension. And once “space” is made, it can be interpreted, used and experienced in very different ways, by you as well as by other people. But, when you think of it and you are honest about it, designing and building only involves the making of material space. As a designer or builder, you don’t really know if someone will say “Wow” or will feel great or will love this wall or that room. What you know is that different people will have different feelings about it. So that leads me to the notion of “Affordance” that Gibson best explained in the early 70s; the notion of “Affordance” is that we know what the object qualities are and we can describe them fairly well. We can describe them from the micro scale if one wanted to, and certainly the 3D space is not so difficult to describe – the materiality of the space maybe with a little bit more difficult to capture. Yet we all agree that the materiality of space exists. And I think that everybody can agree that material space can be and indeed is interpreted and used in different ways, depending on the person and the circumstance: it can be good or bad, so there are different measures of space. Gibson provides the example of the knife, which has a material dimension common to all of us, but can be seen and used differently, as a utilitarian tool or as a weapon. Similarly, a wall can be a barrier or a protective devise. Gibson thought it would be a good idea to try and find measures of space and objects that combined both their materiality and their “interpretability” or use. So in the case of the knife, it’s use to cut something versus cutting someone, it should be given multiple definitions related to context, which would describe its eventual “affordance.” The affordance of an object is of course very difficult to capture in its entirety. Yet in order to start defining the affordance of an object, one needs to establish its physical dimension—and hence accept its existence! Applying this concept of affordance to the city, and saying that designers, planners, developers make space not place, is essentially agreeing, supporting and using the concept of “affordance” and saying that “affordance” is sort of the next “internet”.
AFR / DSP: How about the reactions of the people when you talk about “Affordance”? What do they say? If you look at the explanation of the Architects, when they explain their projects it is just about feelings and about “place” not about space…
AVM: They think that making “space” is like a low level activity (read technically bounded activity) and making “place” is a high level of activity (read spiritually driven activity). There is the notion of the designer has ways to “save” the world. I think this stand is at best silly, and at worst irresponsible. Well, we should know better than to try and save the world, shouldn’t we? Don’t we have a few thousand years of history teaching us lessons?
AFR / DSP: Is it a behavior coming from the Modernism, where architects are supposed to control everything or is it an historical approach?
AVM: I think that the tipping point of the Modern Movement was its self-righteousness. In other words, modern urbanists or architects were convinced that they had the right answers. In the pre-modern period, architects had a limited impact on the city. They worked for the elites, producing special buildings and complexes for very targeted and small numbers of people. They could “know” these elites, being close to them and having to relate to small, homogenous, groups—indeed they often dealt with the single individuals at the top of the societal structure. In this context, it is much more possible to do a “place” as oppose to “space” because the values of your “users” are known, and so are the often limited variances between these values. So in that sense, the process of translating values into “spaces” that correspond with these values, and therefore to make “place” is possible. And it is much more so than when you start working for the whole humanity, which was the modernists perspective. I think that a lot of modernism is novel and challenging, I am not putting down either the forms or the theories proposed. Their downfall, however, was to think that designing or planning for “humanity” could employ the same processes as designing or planning for the elite. Addressing the whole of humanity requires changing your attitude, your methods, and the way you position yourself as an individual or as a profession vis a vis the world. It is no longer an elite occupation. Unfortunately, much of the architectural profession continues to function as if it served the “elite.”
So to conclude, if the architects believe or want to serve a large portion today’s society, then they need a very different preparation from what we have given them. They probably have to have more skills grounded in psychology, sociology, anthropology. Alternatively, they should continue to design buildings only for their own kind... I told you informally that I went to UC Berkeley to attend the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Journal “Places” (edited by Donlyn Lyndon). Of course we talked about place. I listened carefully to the speeches and realized that what speakers meant by “place” was “architecture for everyone”. It seemed that those shaping the journal had adopted the modernist approach – that of architecture not only for the elite or monuments, but of the “people”. They were not making the “scientific” distinction between space and place. I doubt that space was even considered separately from place. And place was also the appropriation, use, and reuse of the built space by people.
Health studies have their own definition of place as well. This means that we have to be quite careful in how to define things. What I meant by saying that designers have no control about place making was that they have no control in how people eventually use, understand, relate to the space that they make. Realizing this lack of control means that designers have to actually know a lot about how different people can use spaces differently. Casas vitorianas do bairro Alamo Squaro, objetos de estudo do livro MOUDON, A. V. Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco
Foto Alessandro Filla Rosaneli, 2007 [fonte: Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986]
