hybrid identities: mutating type

Hybrid Identities: Mutating TypeAuthor(s): Farshid MoussaviSource: Log, No. 10 (Summer/Fall 2007), pp. 81-87, 35Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765165 .

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Farshid Moussavi

Hybrid Identities:

Mutating Type

"What's really important, cultures or people?" asks Kwame

Anthony Appiah in his argument in favor of cultural contamination and cosmopolitanism.1 If, in architectural terms, the word people designates process (designers, clients, users, and the exchanges between them) and culture designates products (buildings and artifacts), what are the architectural

implications of Appiah's question? Can architectural culture - that is, its products - be

cosmopolitan? One can agree when Appiah says, "Human

variety matters, cosmopolitans think, because people are entitled to options." As architects, we produce options in the form of buildings, and in so doing, we make decisions on behalf of not-yet-existent inhabitants. There is a limit to how much an architect can program options into a building before it becomes fallible, imperfect, or provisional. A build-

ing must fit within a certain set of fixed requirements, and its durability must be guaranteed. Alternative options are

ultimately introduced by its inhabitants. There are many examples of inhabitants altering the

architectural product - buildings and spaces - through a

reappropriation of use. The pedestrians who populate Michel de Cert e au' s The Practice Of Everyday Life find subversive uses for architecture while walking in the city. The Sunday picnics that Filipino women orchestrate under the raised

lobby of Norman Foster's HSBC Bank building in Hong Kong are an example of architectural reappropriation. Emerging extreme sports such as parkour, buildering, or base jumping reconfigure the urban environment as a field of play. Such spatial practices opportunistically annex architecture for activities that the architect or urban designer rarely sets out to accommodate.

As completed buildings are limited in their capacity for

change, cosmopolitanism - Appiah's "endless process of imitation and revision" - should be pursued in the architectural design process. Appiah illustrates the way changes are

brought about in cosmopolitan life, how identities and biog- raphies are wrought in the hybridization of places and cultures. Yet to take this as an operational and not merely descriptive claim raises an interesting possibility in the

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1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Case for Contamination," The New York Times Magazine (January 1, 2006): 30-39.



context of architecture: can architecture be made increas-

ingly unique (and local) and still be diverse, plural, or per- haps cosmopolitan?

Architectural problems involve a multiplicity of forces and introduce many different types of material into the

design process, ranging from physical material such as wood or steel to program, lifestyle, time, imagery, economy, context, atmosphere, culture, etc. Any architectural process searches for a transversal connection across these diverse materials to form a design concept, whether it is one of inte-

grating them, as in a hybrid, or pursuing style as a form of

purity that overrides material specificities. The first leads a

process that constructs new identities through hybridization; the second produces "style" as a pure concept to be deployed.

In the 1980s, architects pursued an approach in which the architectural product was based primarily on individual

authorship and not on context. Having witnessed the early stages of globalization in the 1970s, they devised branding strategies that would be applicable wherever they might operate, conceived to maintain a degree of consistency in the work of their practice. That style produces, as Appiah says, "global homogeneity," probably explains some architects'

critique of the authorial approach and their tendency to

develop projects from local situations. Neither a stylistic approach that insists on being the

same everywhere nor the proposal to always derive a project purely from its situation allow for the "endless process of imitation and revision" that Appiah suggests is part of the act of creating. The architectural potential in Appiah's argument is in its suggestion of a hybridization of what already exists in different domains, creating new identities and therefore new knowledge over time. Appiah' s proposal requires a practice that is the coming together of the two reactions to globalization: a practice that intersects with the

specificities of given projects and grows new identities that are unique to a situation, while benefiting and evolving from

expertise and knowledge gained in other domains. The challenge for architecture is how to avoid the literal

mixing that leads to stylistic eclecticism. Applying Appiah's model to architecture, one would need to go beyond the par- ticipatory design processes used by Ralph Erskine in the

Byker Wall Housing, or Venturi + Scott Brown's use of mul-

tiple sources from high and low culture. The tendency to

simply "mix" iconographies rather than integrate them failed to produce an original iconography. The Disney Building by Michael Graves, the Chiat/Day Building by Frank Gehry and

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Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama International Port Terminal, Yokohama, Japan, 2002. Photo: Satoru Mishima.

Claes Oldenburg, and the appropriation of the Vanna Venturi House by Ashton Raggatt and McDougal from Australia are instances of simply laying one material on top of the other. In order to move beyond just mixing, and to produce new hybrid materialities, we need to construct a mechanism whereby different architectural materials can "contaminate" one another, producing new material aggregates.

At FOA, conscious of the opportunity to work across cultures, we consider one of our main challenges to be the construction of new identities that result from the merging of our evolving (technical) expertise with the specificities of each project. In line with Nicolas Bourriaud's proposals in

Postproduction y in which new meanings and ideas are generated through recycling, repositioning, and the reorientation of existing ideas,2 we aim to use material unique to each

project to reorient our research toward new directions and to produce identities that are hybrid rather than suppressed by personal style. Style is the "pure" concept that we have aimed to contaminate. Rather than attach an artificial sym- bolism to a project, we use hybridization as a tactic of introducing contamination into already existing material. Our aim is to open each new project to material that is not already internalized within our work, to question our own logic each time, and, in turn, to trigger new experimentation. This tactic consumes ideas and products in order to generate architectural opportunities.

The Yokohama International Port Terminal [colorplate 3] explored the hybridization between a ferry terminal and other civic uses. A single, differentiated topography inte- grates a variety of material: the load-bearing system, the circulation system, the programmatic uses, the services, and the physical materials. This produces a number of new conditions

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2. Cited in Dennis Kaspori, "A Communism of Ideas," Archis 3 (2003).



Foreign Office Architects, South-East Coastal Park, Barcelona, Spain, 2004.

and experiences within the development as the terminal use and civic use together construct a shared public space. The combination of the roof plaza with terminal facilities means that both uses are activated by one another. In addition, the

continuity between the terminal facilities and the boarding area allows passengers on the "airside" to converse visually with the citizens on the "landside." The integration of structure, services, and circulation into a single surface results in

many types of coincidences across the spaces of the pier. In combination they produce the shape and identity of the

building. For example, areas with low headroom, resulting from the integration of the load-bearing structure with the

envelope, form pockets of intimacy within the public space of the terminal.

The design of the South-East Coastal Park in Barcelona

explores the hybridization of the natural and the artificial. The project is generated from three conditions: the need for a circulation system that would bridge the 11-meter drop between the city and sea level, the programmatic require- ment for two large outdoor auditoria, and the planting of

greenery that must be able to withstand the polluted sea breezes. The integration of auditoria and ramps produces a

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single topography that enables the public to access the park and the seafront via its sloped surfaces. Greenery fills out the

topography and is specifically oriented away from the sea to avoid the polluted air, while the spaces under the slopes are dedicated to support facilities: cafés, storage areas for events, etc. The construction of this system enables a single ground surface to organize both the topography and the retaining walls that contain the greenery. The smooth continuity between the ground surface of the park and the retaining structures generates a haven for skateboarders, who appro- priate the oblique surfaces. A series of thick, crescent-shaped concrete tiles were designed to construct the varying topography by branching and changing their orientation without the need to be individually cut on site. The introduction of color to the material mix emphasizes an east-west orientation in contrast to the north-south topographical slope. The combination of these diverse materials produces a complex geometry that organizes the natural and the artificial into a single topography/landscape.

A recent design for a high-rise in London aimed to mix the technical and economic constraints that drive the design of tall buildings with the material context of the city's curvilinear river and organic street pattern. This led to a changing profile that would alter viewers' perceptions of the tower as they traversed the city. We produced a floor plate that would perform efficiently from a space -planning per- spective and then skewed it to create a diamond shape. Extruded, the diamond plan made the tower appear broad from one side and very slender from another. However, to avoid making a simple extrusion and to produce feedback between external function and internal organization, every 12 floors we rotated the ground-floor plan 360 degrees, repeating this operation three times to achieve the total floor area required. This intervention in the internal systems based on the site's context produced intermediate floors that formed a stretched hexagon rather than a diamond. Although the intermediate floor plates every 12th floor may have compromised the efficiency of repetition favored in tall buildings, it introduced different spatial qualities into the tower. Whereas the diamond floor plates are primarily bi- directional - offering only two views - the intermediate hexagonal floors offered many more orientations, improved light, and more exterior frontage.

Given the triangulation already in the form, a diagrid steel structure was introduced. The integration of a fenestra- tion system and the closely packed openings in the skin led to

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Foreign Office Architects, John Lewis Department Store, Leicester, England, ongoing.

an asymmetry in the diagrid structure, producing hexagonal windows that virtually came into contact with each other. Further space-planning constraints involved modulating the interior on a 1.5-meter bay, and scaling the tessellation so that

partitions could meet the tessellation pattern at 1.5-meter centers. This hybridization of internal systems (space planning, structure, vertical circulation) and external pressures (planning restrictions on height, finishes, views) produced highly differentiated interiors and gave the tower a radically shifting exterior profile seen from across London.

The John Lewis Department Store in the city of Leicester

explores the hybridization between the context and the

department store. Department stores usually resist connec- tions with their environment from the inside, as seeing the

city beyond the store is considered a distraction from the business of consumption. In order to infiltrate the "black retail box" with views and natural light, allowing the city to filter in and the dynamics of the store to filter out, a glass façade is used as the enclosure. This is frit with a pattern, giving the necessary privacy to the interior while providing it with natural light and views of the exterior. To design the

pattern, we mixed material relating to the John Lewis

company and to Leicester. For 200 years, weaving has been an industry integral to life in Leicester, and John Lewis is renowned for its textiles, which led to our decision to use a lace pattern from the John Lewis archive. The motif was

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geometricized and four varying templates were produced in order to integrate the differing privacy and light needs of the interior through a seamless pattern around the perimeter, giving the skin a textile-like quality. The context is reflected onto the glass skin and the mirror-frit pattern. Concern for

energy efficiency is integrated in the density of the pattern, which provides the required area of opacity to control heat

gain through the skin and complies with environmental

regulations. The resulting double skin acts as a "net cur- tain," mediating light and views between the interior and the exterior. The double layer of pattern performs as a semi-

transparent skin when viewed frontally from the retail floors, and performs as a translucent skin when viewed

obliquely from the street. This allows the department store to see out while views into the store are limited from the street level. The integration of the diverse materials in this

project leads to an interactive double-façade system that

engages with the dynamics of the urban space without. We have found that the construction of hybrid forms

suggests a completely different approach to how one constructs architectural identities, or "wholes." As opposed to starting from an already imagined whole (as is the case with stylistic approaches), in hybrid materials the part is not the smallest unit of an imagined whole but rather the whole is grown out of a unique integration of the parts. In our experiments, we have found that hybridization dissolves or transforms fixed architectural categories and unleashes possibilities for architectural experimentation, introducing certain resistances or transformative forces which cause type to mutate into new forms of organization.

Farshid Mous savi is cofounder of Foreign Office Architects and a MEMBER OF THE MASTER JURY OF the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

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COLORPLATE ?. FOREIGN OFFICE ARCHITECTS, YOKOHAMA INTERNATIONAL PORT TERMINAL, 2002. Photo: Satoru Mishima.

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hybrid identities: mutating type

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