Finding Home Amid Change.

"Speak your mind, even when your voice shakes." Maggie Kuhn.

The quote in spray paint is not the original quote, but the sentiment is loud and clear and remains true to Kuhn's objective. I do not know the story behind this photo, but it reminds me of the east end of Austin as developers moved to quickly provide housing for the growing population. They were worried about population and not people (re: Aldo Van Eyck quote in following text). Humble family homes stood abandoned as people's shared history waited to be demolished beneath a wrecking ball.

Aldo Van Eyck was concerned with the way in which the West had disconnected from their own history. As western nations industrialized, the rural-to-urban shift changed architecture from a place of home and hearth to a sometimes crowded, uncomfortable place.

Well-planned cities adapt to population shifts. The rest are strained as people push the infrastructure to near collapse.

Austin, Texas, is not my hometown, but it is that place that I associate with home. In the years I lived there, I was able to watch Austin grow as the dot.com boom rose and fell and rose again. Large numbers of people moved from Silicon Valley to what was then dubbed the New Silicon Valley in the Austin-Round Rock metro. The new residents brought a change in lifestyle and culture. With that, the city changed. The streets and bypasses were not designed to withstand a huge influx of people. The city was not handling the population shift with ease. Time will tell. As Van Eyck said “People live there, not population.”

Developers bought up the east end for a steal. The people who defined the city were displaced as luxury apartments stood like steel skeletons against the skyline. It was a sad process. I would think that this was the same process that New York City went through in the 20th century. SoHo was once a big thorn in the side of those against gentrification. The artists and galleries that once defined the area were largely forced out. Now, trendy boutiques are the raison d'être in SoHo. For those of us who know nothing else and nothing prior about her history, SoHo is a lovely space with nice little gems of architecture. However, I bet the people who knew the former SoHo can still find that one place that still defines the space for them. They can find home amid progress. This progress (or that necessary evil known as change) does not determine how we relate to a city.

As with any place you love, you gravitate towards the places that have a history for you. My favorite little iced coffee shop in Austin is now a trendy bar. But that's okay. The exposed brick wall takes me right back to the first day I stepped foot in there. I climbed a barrier fence at a construction site the last week that I lived there. On one side was a ma and pop diner. On the other side was a multi-million dollar mixed-use structure. In between, was that place and time where I still had control of how I viewed Austin. People need history; they need a sense of place. In that void, we create our own history and our own understanding of time and place.

It could be argued that responsible architecture anticipates change, but I lean towards Van Eyck’s philosophy that what architecture should do well is “assist our homecoming.” All change takes time to process. In that, we need to provide spaces that allow people to be individuals and not simply mass inhabitants.

Another stab at understanding autonomy (structuralism via Eisenman)

Earlier in this course, we were introduced to the concept of an autonomous architecture through the methods and ideology of the Italian Tendenza. The concept was vague to me, but intriguing. I really did not know how an autonomous architecture would work or why a person would want to remove the historical context. In the essay, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense: Peter Eisenmann, Structuralism, and Deconstruction,” by Patin, I was able to get a better grasp on why (or at least, how) an architect would remove his architecture from himself and the societal context imposed upon his architecture.

I will play the polemic and say that the act of removing any need for human response and context reminds me of the quickening changes in architecture and technology. We move ourselves further and further away from the need to respond or interact on a one-to-one basis. Some students spend the first two years developing a niche and continually manipulate, distort and violate whatever initial truth was in that personal discovery. In a respect, we spend our studios in search of our own House 1, 2, etc. The process is a similar process. We create from what we cast away as often as we are create from what we cleave to in architecture. I suspect the same is true for practicing architects. I’m not sure there is an art or beauty in that and I’m not sure there needs to be.

A self-described cynic and someone we’ll probably discuss in our workshop on star-architects, REM Koolhaus said in an interview for Wired Magazine that:

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming.”

Perhaps what we see today- this act of withdrawal- is less about architecture and more about human expression. Despite the movement toward removing the individual- maybe what we infused was the human aspect and what we removed was architecture.