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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[2M4] DEAD SPACE.
The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.86 In her appraisal of the Japanese train station, Sandra Buckley says that "commuter space and commuter movement through that space are generally assumed to be conservative and unproductive, a matter of uninflected movement, an unremarkable space. Dead time, vacuous space."87 As most travelers are aware, this description could be applied to the common transportation terminal typology everywhere. A vast, unconscionable complex comprised of endless, homogeneous corridors lined with fast food chains, pay phones, newsstands, and rest rooms (the necessities of existence?), the ubiquitous modern terminal is utterly predictable, and, therefore, utterly banal. It is a microcosm of the new city which it has spawned, "built on economics rather than ethnicity, on convenience more than culture."88 Understandably, airports and train stations are planned to promote organized, efficient flows of vehicles, people, and goods. But given the massive scale and homogeneity of such terminals, architects should acknowledge the reason for their existence – the traveler – and establish a new spatial legibility, derived from the specific, idiosyncratic traits of the various circulation systems themselves, and a re-articulation of the module as the elemental basis for conception. Martha Rosler writes that the airport "is not organized as a signifying space that creates a public any more than the aeroplane itself is – unless we accept the message of the plane and the terminal equally to be human docility, homogeneity, replaceability, transitoriness."89 The challenge in creating significant space, then, is to emphasize the qualities of the terminal that make it a destination, as well as a place of transit. Unfortunately, because our places of travel are generally not unique, differentiated, and empowering, "the more desperately we seek the unfamiliar, the more familiar it all becomes."90 86Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1970) 87Buckley, Sandra, "Contagion" in Anywise, Ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1996) p. 84 88Spiegler, Marc, "Planes of Existence" in Metropolis (July/August 1997) p. 35 89Rosler, Martha, "In the Place of the Public: Observations of a Traveller" in Architectural Design 109: "Architecture of Transportation" (1994) p. 11 90Katz, Barry M., "Going Nowhere: Tourism as a Global Economy" in Metropolis (July/August 1997) p. 51 Images: 1. O'Hare Airport
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A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
