Integrated practice is a holistic approach to building in which all project stakeholders and participants – architects, engineers, construction managers, contractors and owners – work together in highly collaborative relationships throughout the facility life cycle. — George Elvin
Born from the design/build movement, integrated practice involves interdisciplinary team efforts to plan, design, and construct architecture. The impetus for team practice is the use of the building information model (BIM) as the mechanism for bringing together all aspects of a project. Thus, integrated practice involves a fundamental realignment of the participants in
135 | I Intelligence
the architecture-making industry. No longer is the architect automatically in an advantaged position as the lead project designer. That responsibility is now delegated, with a project manager as the head of the team. That project manager is most likely not the architect. In the traditional design/bid/ build process, the architect’s drawings formed the template on which the subsequent participants introduced their refinements. All parties worked within the limits specified by the architect’s design. In the new arrangement, design inputs by the various parties are virtually simultaneous. It is design by committee. Of particular concern is the loss of a design meta-concept, or parti. It is the parti that moves a building beyond the pragmatic, and into the poetic and architectural. If the design team coordinator is a project manager, and not an architect, then all parties will be approaching the design challenge as a process of suboptimization of their part of the pie. The whole that is greater than the sum of the parts will be lost.
See also: Building information modeling: BIM • Holism • Parti (Archispeak)
Intelligence
The idea is that architects use “intelligence” in a twofold way: as a specific form of practical knowledge characteristic for the profession, and in the practical way the American C.I.A. or military might want to use “intelligence.” … be able to work from seemingly endless fragments of “information,” rumors even, and disinformation. — Michael Speaks The term intelligence is coming into use in architectural design perhaps due to the twenty-first-century War on Terror. Military metaphors are replacing sports metaphors. It is a sign of our times.
The practice of seeking intelligence before, during, and after design is the revival of an old tradition from the 1970s, when publications such as Problem Seeking (2001) by Willy Pena were in vogue. Even the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) adopted “problem seeking” as the model for the pre-design portion of the architectural licensing examination in the United States. The core idea was that in order to produce good and appropriate design, good intelligence must be sought through asking the right questions, and then supplementing the answers from a variety of other sources of information. The intelligence gathered was then evaluated and published in the form of an architectural program or brief. The brief was intended to launch the designer in the right direction. Later the brief was intended as the measure of the performance of the “solution.” Unfortunately, the emphasis in those days was limited to pragmatic issues. Form following function, as expressed in user needs, was the formula. The entire notion of architectural design as “problem solving” proved to be devoid of the humanizing poetics that distinguish mere building from architecture.
Ironically, in the twenty-first century we are returning to the paradigm of architectural design as problem solving, as we venture ever more into parametric green architecture. Hopefully, the “problem” to be solved through the intelligence process described above by Speaks will be more inclusive and thus more acceptable to the public. After all, there is much more intelligence out there now.
I | 136 Internationalism
See also: Brief (Archispeak) • Chatter • Green building (Archispeak) Further sources: Lang (1987: 47)
Internationalism
The internationalism we experience today represents an
internationalism of nonmaterial financial currents, of scientific and technical information, and of mass communication, with respective laws of behavior and consumption. — Vittorio Gregotti
As the developed world races towards internationalism, as evidenced by the formation of one European economy and parliament, the profession of architecture will follow suit. In the twenty-first century, most successful architects have already become international businessmen and women. Practice is global for the starchitect. Internationalism is taking the form of collaborative, multinational project teams, as well as the standardization of architectural styles and standards (within cultural limits). Before it experienced its financial downturn, Dubai was becoming an international meeting ground for architects. Beijing also served that purpose, as it prepared for the Olympics. Increasingly, innovative British and Dutch firms are eroding the dominance of American architects in the international markets. This may not be an issue in the future as architects will consider themselves to be extra-national – without one country, but of all countries. At one time, architects from Europe migrated to the United States in order to practice. Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind are just a few of the past and present American-based non-American international architects.
Given world demographics, it will only be a matter of time before international Chinese and Indian architects outnumber all of the others. Nationality will be increasingly viewed as largely irrelevant.
See also: Deterritorialization/reterritorialization • Globalization Further sources: Gregotti (1996: 75)
Inversion
Twentieth century architecture has resisted the creative application of inversion as a means of exploring new ideas. Modernism was entirely too serious-minded for such indulgences, and postmodernism, while more tolerant of diversity and humor, lacks the kind of intellectual rigor that can produce strong inversionist work. — James Wines If conflict is the first law of mannerism, then the second law Wittkower identifies is “the principle of inversion.” — Anthony Vidler
Inversion forbids an unequivocal reading of the façade; the eye is led to wander from side to side, up and down, and the movement thus provoked can again be called ambiguous. — Rudolf Wittkower
137 | I Inversion
Inversion is a creativity technique that involves turning something upside down or inside out, in order to dislocate our relationship to it. It is a form of “strange making.” Inversion is a technique used in art and atonal twelve- tone composition in music. The inversionist abstract art of Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinski was influenced by the atonal inversionist music of his long-time friend Arnold Schoenberg. Inversion in Schoenberg’s music involved the reversal of the line of pitch – a descending one replaces each ascending pitch interval. Inversion in the art of Kandinski consisted of his break from representational art.
In architectural design, inversion is a tool of the twenty-first-century architect free of any conventions regarding the “right” way to develop architectural form. This is fairly recent, as the modernist architect did not generally have the freedom to explore composition through inversion. Even the post-modern architect was constrained by an overactive concern for embedding coded meaning into the work. Literal inversion in architecture did occur occasionally. The “Katimavik” Canadian pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal was one such inversion (Figure 70). It remained a gimmick, rather than a breakthrough in architectural form possibilities.
A subtler example of architectural inversion is the orchestration of the entries to the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort Worth Texas by Louis Kahn (1972). Kahn chose to place the main entry at the back of the building, away from the undistinguished vehicular drop-off entry towards the street. To complicate matters even further, he placed a moat and a grove of yaupon trees between the building entry and the park next to it (Figure 71). There is no clear path to get to the park or the building. The entire entry sequence is poetically, rather than functionally, determined. The objective is to place one in the right frame of mind for contemplating the art contained in the building.
Passing from the grove on into the building, on steps up to and under the central portico, barely clearing one’s head of the low branches. — Michael Benedikt See also: Absence/
presence • Abstraction • Allusionism • Ambivalence • Architectural psychology •Creativity • Defamiliarization • Immateriality in architecture • Phenomenology • Sublime • Uncanny Figure 70: Inverted pavilion at Expo 67
J | 138 Junkspace
Junkspace
Yes, we have junk space, but we don’t need architects to theorize it. Just because it is there doesn’t mean we have to love it.
— Robert Stern
Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have
built more than all previous generations together …. According to the new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than survived from the twentieth. — Rem Koolhaas
Peter Blake, in God’s Own Junkyard (1964), first pointed out the obvious – in America we are polluting our environment with suburban sprawl and its accompanying junkspace. In response, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972) argued for architects to stop pretending junkspace does not exist and embrace it for what it is. They even compared the A&P parking lot to an Italian piazza (Figure 72). The “emperor has no clothes” declarations by Venturi (and group) have led to the academic discourse on junkspace that Robert Stern rejects as unsuitable dinner-table conversation. Despite Stern’s objections, the “ugly and ordinary” of junkspace has stuck as legitimate architectural theoretical discourse. Architects as important as Rem Koolhaas have espoused the undeniable importance of junkspace as symptomatic of our current urban malaise. His amusing diatribe of ten dense pages in Content (2004) was probably inspired by the interview with Robert Venturi that preceded the piece. In any case, the beautification of junkspace is dishonest and futile, as there is a lot more junkspace than there are architects, or paying clients, ready to take it on.
Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends. — Rem Koolhaas
Further sources: Koolhaas (2004: 162)
Figure 72: Junkspace parking lot – a piazza?
139 | K Kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is nothing but that which has pretensions to classic status in the
proliferation of voices and tastes. — Gianni Vattimo
The notion of kitsch is familiar to the consumer of designed objects. Although it typically involves something that is in bad taste, in some quarters it has assumed a certain cachet. Folk art is considered to be kitsch by those that are not “folks” (Figure 73). Kitsch is part of the nostalgia movement in our difficult times. It smacks of a simpler world.
Is there emerging a early modernist kitsch? The mid-century modern bungalow is one of the most desired house types for members of the baby boom generation in America. The mythic home of their childhood, with its pink, turquoise, or avocado Formica and pre-IKEA Scandinavian teak furniture, is de rigueur kitsch.
The recent generation of post-contextualist, digitally based architects have few hang-ups about following classical, modern, or post-modern fashion rules. The often audacious, ugly, and awkward architecture that results from their individual artistic voices may qualify as instant kitsch – not a bad thing perhaps. Architects such as Will Alsop, and other blobmeisters of his ilk, are keeping things interesting. Unfortunately, most future architects will not have this luxury due to the growing popularity of integrated team design based upon discrete pragmatic parametrics, supported by a shared digital building information model or BIM. Green design by committee is unlikely to create architecture bold enough to be instant kitsch.
See also: Blob architecture (Archispeak) • Building information modeling: BIM •
Integrated practice
Further sources: Vattimo (in Leach 1997: 153)
Figure 73: Folk kitsch in Souris, Manitoba
L | 140 Late modern architecture