INFRATECTURE. Zero-Degree Architecture.

[2S4] ZERO-DEGREE ARCHITECTURE.

Typical Office

In his assessment of the Western office building, Rem Koolhaas says that "Typical Plan is an American invention. It is zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity. It belongs to the New World."¹⁰² Indeed, the ubiquitous workplace today is defined by its very lack of character; with its empty grid of columns, carpet and ceiling tiles, and fluorescent light fixtures. Typical Plan, the product of SOM, Mies, and Raymond Hood, was the ultimate triumph of flexibility, but also the "End of Architectural History,"¹⁰³ for if all plans are ruthlessly indeterminate, then what exists is an ‘architecture without qualities’. Typical Office Plan Koolhaas says that "Typical Plan is as empty as possible: a floor, a core, a perimeter, and a minimum of columns. All other architecture is about inclusion and accommodation, incident and event; Typical Plan is about exclusion, evacuation, non-event."¹⁰⁴ Because of its relentless enabling, Typical Plan has produced the Trauma of the New Interior. Koolhaas says, "Suddenly, the graph blamed the graph paper for its lack of character. It was as if Typical Plan created the castrated white-collar caricature, suppressed family photos, frowned on the fern, resisted the personal debris that now – 20 years later – makes most offices ghastly repositories of individual trophies, packed with alarming assertions of millions of individual mini-ecologies. An environment that demanded nothing and gave everything was suddenly seen as an infernal machine for stripping identity."¹⁰⁵

What, then, is the antidote to Typical Plan? What architectural affirmations of diversity and identity can stand up to the unforgiving efficiency of The Grid? Who can advocate friction and contamination in an utterly smooth, antiseptic interior world? The best answer lies in the re-examination of the operations of this interior. Typical Plan does, after all, possess some specificity, in the form of The Core: "Ingenious architectural arrangements of miniature, very understandable labyrinths organize the traffic between the exalted and impure zones of Typical Plan. These spaces – restrooms, urinals, pantries, service stairs, trucking bays – are the sanctuaries for all those primitive aspects upon whose exclusion the correct unfolding of business depends."¹⁰⁶ Of course, Koolhaas is being ironic here. Business could not take place without The Core; the elevator has in fact supplied the possibility for the existence of Typical Plan.

Photograph by Pico Harnden

As the metropolis gives way to the megalopolis, however, we see the skyscraper tilted on its side. The ‘new interior’ I have been describing is, in fact, a horizontal one, defined by the sprawling perimeter of the mall, the airport, the factory-turned-office, the warehouse-turned-domicile, or the ‘big box’ superstore. This transformation in typology has opened up new possibilities for architecture. What other means for movement, then, or other occupational necessities exist in the ‘horizontal skyscraper?’ This new building evolved according to mobility considerations. Even the elevator, with its relatively unlimited vertical flexibility, cannot compete with the Free Section. Photograph by Pico Harnden It would stand to reason that the mass movement of people, vehicles, and goods occurs most efficiently on the ground; hence the relocation of downtown offices to suburban office parks – not only is land cheaper, but so is the construction. What would otherwise seem a subsequent step in the complete homogenization of our physical environment, however, promises new potential for architecture. For where the section is reintroduced, so is the promenade.

Because of its particular formal disposition and vast size, the horizontal skyscraper relates directly to the automobile, where the tall building did not. This is a crucial factor, for the speed and directional capabilities of the car defy the grid. Cloverleaf interchanges and curvilinear, suburban road networks attest to this fact. To many, the freedom of movement that the automobile represents is synonymous with the escape from the inner city grid. The road can follow the irregular flows of natural terrain, and is not confined to the regimented control of the bidirectional grid. In what way, then, will the automobile reshape architecture? As the car is internalized, the horizontal skyscraper will utilize two systems of formal organization: the grid, and the roadway. One system is rectilinear and generic, while the other is curvilinear and idiosyncratic. Both systems are inherently repetitive, but the space in which they commingle is specialized, and offers great architectural potential. This space harbors the friction and contamination which is necessary for diversity and identity. This space is our architectural horizon.

This new world seemed to force upon us an entirely new – or at least different – type of geometry... that first broke with the conveniences and classical pieties of homogeneous, linear, or isotropic space; these were the protogeometries of a new, still-premature form of reason, one predicated on acausality, deformability, creative diversification, and active variability. Though it took nearly another century to reach a threshold, the crisis of geometry and reason finally arrived.¹⁰⁷

¹⁰²Koolhaas, Rem, "Typical Plan" in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995) p. 335

¹⁰³Ibid., p. 336

¹⁰⁴Ibid., p. 344

¹⁰⁵Ibid., p. 346

¹⁰⁶Ibid., p. 340

¹⁰⁷Kwinter, Sanford, "The Reinvention of Geometry" in Assemblage 18, p. 84

Images: 1. Typical Office, 2. Typical Office Plan, 3. Photograph by Pico Harnden, 4. Photograph by Pico Harnden

A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell.