It is my belief that exciting things happen when a variety of overlapping activities designed for all people-the old and the young, the blue and white collar, the local inhabitant and the visitor, different activities for different occasions-meet in a flexible environment, opening up the possibility of interaction outside the confines of institutional limits. When this takes place, deprived areas welcome dynamic places for those who live, work and visit; places where all can participate, rather than less or more beautiful ghettos.
- Richard Rogers
This is a challenge to Modernist zoning.
The Post-Modern City
Post Modernism fractures this regimentation. The bombardment of stimuli that we encounter in the city (as in Simmel's thesis) is intensified. For example, there has been a massive escalation in advertising, involving a more sophisticated understanding of visual culture. Advertising agencies employ artists and psychologists to produce more manipulative adverts. Signs are often the dominant elements in public spaces, more so that buildings. Many spaces are dominated by digital adverts like those in Times Square. They are the digital equivalent of bill-boards and seem to energize and electrify urban space. They seem to play constantly, day and night, and are often silent. We can't afford to stand and watch them; we seem to register them only unconsciously and this may be the intention. You can't help thinking that they are meant to affect us in an insidious, subliminal way.
A consequence of the blasé attitude is that we move through urban spaces, only registering them unconsciously. In fact, architecture is often experienced inattentively. We tend not to look at buildings. It's been argued that architects have to "over-code [their] buildings, using a redundancy of popular signs, if [their] work is to communicate as intended and survive the transformation of fast-changing codes." (Charles Jencks). Buildings have to become adverts. In the same way, Las Vegas is the archetypal Post Modernist city. It represents a physical and spatial manifestation of advertising. The casinos and hotels quote from cultural icons, many of them architectural (the pyramids, Eiffel Tower,) and each building forms a giant three-dimensional sign to encourage people to enter.
A condition of the digital age is the phenomenon of spatial warping. This is covered by Anthony Vidler in his book Warped Space.
The most celebrated example of spatial warping in architecture is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa. This has shiny, metallic surfaces treated in a plastic way, with an interpenetration of voids and volumes. The distorted planes and angles give a changeable, protean form. This cube is coated with a prismatic material, meaning that it changes in relation to lighting conditions and the position if the viewer. Inside the cube there is an animate space of colour, which looks purely digital. In contrast to Modernism, which aims for ideal solutions that are universal, Post Modernism is always contingent, provisional and dependent on individual perception. It replicates the effects of the information age.
New forms of space are opening up. A virtual space has been created in the internet, video games and virtual reality. Can this be seen as a form of public space? It is spatial in a sense: it relies on perspective and Euclidean geometry. These are Modernist and even Renaissance conventions, so it is a Cartesian space: the viewer stands in relation to it. It also has a decidedly architectural terminology: information super highway, restricted area, barrier, firewall. According to Vidler it is blind to the presence of the viewer. It is not just a picture or window, but an ambiguous and unfixed location. Digitisation has altered the way we look and are looked at in space. But can it be seen as public? The internet is often encountered in public spaces, like cyber cafés and libraries, so in a sense it is extending these physical spaces into virtual channels. More importantly, it constitutes a new arena for social interaction. People meet on the internet; it can transmit images and voices; virtual reality technology opens up the possibility of physical interaction.
A related question is how do these digital spaces inform our experience of actual space and architecture? On the internet, webcams give live images of cityscapes and selected interior spaces; and virtual tours replicate the condition of actual spaces. They enable us to experience space without physically setting foot in it and potentially alter our perception of it.
(Mis)using Public Space
I now want to focus on how we use public space. Space is a site for social interaction; as we've seen it can be both authoritarian and fluid. We've looked at Modernist systems for ordering space and hence society, but architecture isn't simply complete once it's been built: it has to be used. Different patterns of use can change the meaning of buildings and spaces. These ideas are discussed by Adrian Forty in his book, Words and Buildings.
