On the Park Bench - Unbuilt Intentions: Towards a New Phenomenology of Cities and Architecture

we're going to give people a minute or so to come in and then we're going to start the webinar okay i'm going leave and go into the audience piece okay okay again we're giving people a minute to come in and then we'll begin so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and their allies providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues of our time the author's form of on the park bench discusses recently published books by urbanists and or books of interest to urbanists the author's form is produced by diro tadani architect and urbanist who works behind the scenes to put these together this on the park bench features unbuilt intentions towards a new phenomenology of cities and architecture hold on a second share my screen here we go this on the park bench features unbuilt intentions towards a new phenomenology of cities and architecture with author jaime correa and a discussion with stephen fett and we're waiting on andres juani who hopefully will join us as well share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and find out more about future webinars at cnu.org slash resources on the park bench is an associate professor in practice at the school of architecture of the university of miami his professional work explores the intersection among philosophy architecture urbanism art and culture he was among the first generation of new urbanists and his work was featured in peter katz's 1994 book the new urbanism andreas duane who has just joined us is co-founder of dbz co-design and also co-founder of the congress for the new urbanism he is a designer of hundreds of new towns and neighborhoods across these is new to around the world stephen fett is practicing architect is a practicing architect and educator his firm stephen fett architecture based in downtown miami was established in 2004. stephen is a full-time lecturer at the university of miami and director of the school's center for urban and community design stephen is a founding member of the research and design firm monte leone dedicated to the pursuit of sustainable civic art i'm rob studeville editor of cnu's online journal public square and again dura tadani is the producer unbuilt intentions towards a new phenomenology of cities and architecture combines philosophy urbanism and architecture and you're going to be hearing a whole lot more about this book in this webinar uh this webinar will feature a present but it's working really well here korea followed by a discussion with jaime stephen in andres and then we will take questions from the audience please use the q a function of zoom with that i'm going to turn the screen over to jaime korea you can share your screen jaime so thank you thank you very much rob diro steve and andres four thousand two percent some basic concepts which are gonna be rather vague and i would much rather if people will um buy the book and read it because most probably my presentation is going to be very limited i mean i'm only 20 minutes the the book that i'm about to present it's an introductory book it's a book on theory it's a book on practice it's a book on representation but mainly it's a book about what phenomenologists call imaginative variations and i'll explain that in a second and most importantly it is i mean whether we like it or not a book on place making now in the book i have projects that are rural i mean object buildings i have projects that have to do with so retrofit i always show projects that have to do with urban sustainability and resilience and i have utopian artistic global project global projects this wall um which i produce for um i mean i said as a as an ontological project against what donald trump was proposing back in 2016. now for a second i'm going to ask you to forget that this presentation is about a book and more more than that to to go into a reflective meditation on what is now the current state of affairs in architecture and urbanism in in in a way in which we together combine theory and practice obviously immediately when i say theory and practice 50 of these audience will go numb i mean and uh say oh we don't want philosophy i mean philosophy is too much for us or that those of you that are interested in philosophy are going to say why so much practice so i'm going to do my best to find a mid point between platonic ideas and aristotelian ideas of theory and practice for those who practice only i mean you know that schools of architecture nowadays only advocate technical skills that it's all about being realistic on the other hand i mean there are other uh positions that are more idealist and that advocate human rationality and in question in everything that we that we see and that we perceive those are the ones i mean like me that are interested in a more intellectual approach to architecture and urbanism and that think that theory is important i mean uh nowadays that portion i mean it's not taught in schools of architecture schools of architecture we only advocate uh technical skills we don't do theory anymore to me theory is a transformational tool it's the the fact that provides the essence and substance of architecture and cities but what kind of theory would be the one that i would like to advocate particularly to members of the congress for the new urbanism i mean a theory that that either challenges or advocates the concept of modernity in cities and architecture modernity back i mean since the renaissance say the post-renaissance period 17th century cities in architecture modernity has always been understood as applied philosophy of science there have been five factors that really shape the way that we understand architecture in cities uh nowadays those are the the discovery that the earth was not no longer the center of the universe that humans were no longer the the center of creation but that we were just uh i mean part of the cosmological consciousness and that there was something that was uh sublime i mean a deity a god that had created a world that was sort of mechanistic in terms of architecture and urbanism i mean that was translated in the late 19th century as the garden city movement when man became infatuated with trying to figure everything out and to make intelligible what god had made and god had created and these i mean of course i mean because it was dealing with the sublime became a way to do series in in uh with the mythology that we call nowadays the picturesque the second the second issue was the publication of principia mathematica by newton uh in which he argued that everything was mechanical that everything was in motion that things had cause and effect therefore everything was predictable determined or predetermined that there were ways to create composition out of a few elements and so violet leduc i mean is the one that i think is the protagonist of this he argued that i mean you could compose elements in order to have or to create as what he called aesthetic responsibilities the third one was darwin and the idea that uh everything comes in the world by common dissent by competition and that all the decisions that we take are binary decisions yes or no i mean we tend to go like that uh into the world this brought about the idea of taxonomy idea of categorizations the idea of typology and morphology particularly in the work of john nicolas durant the polytechnic of architecture in what he called his persistent zones architecture decisions in the built world were also binary i mean i will either do this or i will do that and if i don't do this this is what is going to be the result uh the fourth uh has to do with the card and the idea that the card thought that humans were imperfect that everything that we perceive needs to be questioned and that all knowledge requires a methodology i mean you i'm not going to say that the card was not not continuous being influential right now i mean even in the work of andres uh with his transect i mean he he is providing a method for us to be able to do some sort of cohesive and rational architecture and urbanism the way that this was um expressed at the end of the 18th century beginning of the 19th century is by monumentality uh and by uh attaching significance to buildings what was called at the time architectura parlante by le du architecture and cities then require a design method and then finally can't uh this uh or uh discuss the idea there were two worlds one world that was out there the objective world which was outside of us in the world in one world that was inside of us that was totally subjective that basically screwed up everything in the world because from that point on i mean we became i mean beauty instead of being based on universal principles became a matter of taste i mean whether i like it or not these two um items the objective world and the subjective world and in addition to motion i mean to the fact that cities are never static were explored by camilo city when i mean he went city by city looking for the best examples of urban design and later in the 1920s or basically i mean the first two decades of the 20th century which were compiled by students of joseph steuben in their stat about i mean one of the best books on architecture and urbanism ever produced by a human no now modernity was again challenged at the end of the 19th century by a whole bunch of phenomenologists which at the time i mean they yes they indeed talk about phenomenology but they were more interested on change on movement on time and perception on emergencies on what is called process philosophy and uh i i'm particular i mean i'm a fan of the all the ones on the left-hand side but i'm particularly interested because i'm in america i'm operating from miami i'm interested in uh the ones on the right john dewey charles sander pears and alfred north a white head who was actually an englishman who thought i'm my alma mater cambridge uh and who decided that i mean it was better to come to harvard to explore what he called philosophy of organism i mean which is the way that cities are constantly movement constantly changing now we don't teach this anymore uh as we don't teach many other things now what is phenomenology phenomenology the word comes from two greek words none in logos phenomenon is uh the the study of appearances in logos is the the the the essence of everything the order the foundation the world in uh if you put these two things together will be the philosophical activity which gives full account of human experience that is why what where and how we perceive and judge the world around us if you think about this in terms of design what we're asking you to do is to get uh to understand how we give order to the world how we construct the world of architecture and urbanism obviously i mean because we're only interested in technology in technical aspects in developing skills we don't teach this anymore in schools of architecture around this country what to me became a paradigmatic for the study of phenomenology was that phenomenologists were very much interested in the idea of place but they saw it in a very unique manner in a manner that we at the congress for the new urbanism uh rarely i mean there are a few people that are interested in this but very rarely we hear the discussion of place as a combination of space time qualities and meaning and i mean and there are other other items i mean under space extension time is duration memories imagination qualities are qualities of materiality sensations points of view and meaning obviously i mean all those things that are symbolic cultural and historic now also phenomenologists in this ideal place uh argue that we cannot exist in the absence of place and that somehow place influences our human condo i mean for many years i try to uh understand why i felt good in good places and bad in places that were ugly and ordinary and i i through phenomenology i was able to understand how the world around us the the objective world around us influences everything that we do and most importantly i mean phenomenologists believe in this idea of flocks that everything is changing constantly that individual and communal decisions are creating what they call emerging properties and that that is what characterizes one city and or differentiates one city from another so rome miami new york and paris are different because they have different qualities of place in other words certain areas of space certain areas of time qualities and meaning vary between all of them they all have one essence which is the essence of place making but the way that they express space-time qualities and meaning vary from one place to another you know you know the the the other thing that was to me important is that when you discuss emerging properties you also discuss legibility from the from the most essential point of view from the point of view of asceticism and simplicity because that is the beginning of entropy if you you really want to create a city in which you give free will to the people to change it over time like all the cities where we are we never wake up in the same city i mean even though i call it miami i mean if i look through my balcony everything has changed from one minute to the next as heraclitus used to say we never stay in the same river twice no so these levels of entropy start from the most simple to the most complicated and they require i mean if you're doing the most simple then they require legibility and to require legibility means that uh we have to use what in the 20s and 30s was called gestalt qualities symmetry balance i mean all of these also explore uh in in the renaissance quite truly no but in in the 20s they come back clarity contrast continuity rhythm tension substance edges etc now do we teach this no we don't i mean and if you ask to teach these they tell you that i mean these things are no longer necessary that somehow i mean the students are getting this a priori i mean that they come with the knowledge of these things already the the other thing that is interesting to me on uh on this issue phenomenology is the issue of representation because they very quickly uh move into what is real and what is imagined and they think that the mind cannot differentiate between what is real what is imagined so that opens a whole bunch of possibilities to architects and urban designers i mean that's exactly what we do that's exactly how we operate we imagine things that nobody else can see we think in images we don't think in words um now uh representation also comes in three from three points of view from the point of view aspects and moons as i move say around the uh cube i mean sometimes i see three faces sometimes i see two and in my mind i'm composing these views i'm composing all these aspects all these moments and in my mind i'm realizing that that's a house that's a building that's a city etc there's also the the the idea of not moving and that's the ideal perspective in which there's a static point of view and which is selected because you think that that section of time is of importance to a project that you're creating and and uh you know i mean these we use more i mean it's more subjective we use it more for marketing purposes and then there's another uh way of looking at things which is a mechanical which is this idea of assemblies i mean the typical ikea drawing in which they give you the elements and you recompose them but in architecture and urbanism what we do is we have a composite or we have a whole bunch of elements that we know have been produced over the course of history and what we do is we recompose them i mean to create something that is absolutely innovative and new every time that we create a project i mean those projects are of the moment and as you as we know the availability of those compositional elements are infinite and because they're infinite we have come up with this notion of uh consolidating everything into what we call typology but typology is nothing but a construction of the mind except the point of departure typology is not about the model but about the rules that make the model and that's uh that's how catherine merdekinsi described this um a notion of typology in his book uh in his dictionary of architecture which is which was a place at the end of uh his book called the limitations now typology is also uh a no no word uh nowadays in schools of architecture i mean you're supposed to somehow be connected with god or somewhere uh out there in the world and come up with uh projects that have space-time qualities and meaning now that method that i use in my book to produce projects is also phenomenological method that is called imaginative variations what i do is i take one of these i mean i say i take the qualities i materiality sensations points of view and i started and i started exaggerating them i start recomposing them moving them in directions that are innovative and trying to understand what will be the effects of doing something like that or i mean notions of space or doing two at the same time and seeing what will be the results of doing that so back to the book i mean the book is an introduction it's about fear it's about practice it's about representation now that you know what imagine imaginative variations are and now you know what i do and then about place making so if we go into this realm of imaginative variations i mean this is at the dissolution of the jose luisart produced this drawing to advocate the ideas of the congress and of international architecture from boston i mean when he was the dean and he he argued that cities were cans sardines i mean like hands of sardines and that we needed to exploit i mean the the this world of sardines and move everyone i mean now that we we we had a highways and and cars i mean to the sobers i took that image and i produce because i'm in miami and and we're really concerned with this notion of sea level rise i flooded uh the background of joseon research uh project and i by doing this i i mean i was doing an analogy between what will happen in miami when it floods at six feet and um and this this image and i realized that in miami i mean when it floats most of the high areas of the city will be located in areas that are incomplete meaning that they will be single use i mean all single family houses all all skyscrapers and and basically no uh means to be able to have everything that you need uh for your daily living at walking distance so what you have to do i mean you have to understand where these places are located and you have to reconfigure them so that they can become walkable and uh operable and at the same time advocate innovation which is what you see with those floating houses in there so it's a and then i look at this product in more i mean in a more essential manner i mean like an archaeologist i look i mean i i traced a series of um uh greets over the city of miami look at what was gonna happen in terms of flooding and then went and and studied i mean how to intervene how to uh make it more uh complete uh by um sort of understanding where to include markets markets that were not just markets but like the one on the left which is a market in the center with down house surrounded by town houses theaters theaters above penthouses uh at the top floor uh that creates some sort of meaning i mean if you look at this picture i mean you see the market right there on the water i mean because as you know the issue of food security is a huge problem at the time of sea level rise i mean maybe 30 40 years from now the right side i mean what i call the church for perpetual experimentation which is which is a church that combines all the religions that we have all the major religions that we have now in the world and then uh a sort of a center a new center created uh as a close i mean in the tradition of the english clothes surrounded by uh say townhouses that have uh the first floor and sort of available i mean with the potential to become a retail then i explored the the the um idea of raising buildings i mean completely uh destroying them i mean because of sea level rise i mean of the potential silence or raising them on pilates i mean which is the two conversations that we're having right now in miami i mean raising the infrastructure or simply moving the historic building somewhere else and creating historic uh uh districts that are absolutely fake so i took one of these ideas and i extruded i mean uh five portions of the city of miami up up there in the sky with everything that you need for your daily living at the bottom of the buildings creating a sort of i mean five palm trees one for each letter of the um word miami so uh five m m-i-a-m-i um and then uh and then i began to uh realize that no i mean there will be people that will stay and people that will uh go somewhere else so i did a very quick project on what will be the effects of moving people outside of miami and i did this project on a high on a high piece of land on the outskirts of a little town in central florida called arcadia it was i mean i love the name arcadia so um the the the town i mean if you start looking at it i mean it's based on traditional urbanism i mean traditional american urbanism sorry i'm it's not um let me see yeah traditional american urbanism it's a greed that has air recollections of savannah maybe philadelphia central park in new york but the blocks are configured as blocks in barceloneta so i mean before you judge what you're seeing because i mean i know that it looks very mechanical remember that we're gonna have to move thousands of people in a hurry somewhere else so we're gonna have to build these things we're not gonna have the the luxury of time we're gonna have to do this very quickly so uh the buildings i mean uh obviously i mean i would not like to live in a city like this right now myself i would think that this would be chaotic but if this is the only thing that we can have available in 30 or 40 years from now in a hurry i mean i would much rather prefer this that someone doing a train tracks i mean putting things all over the place in a faster manner now and i also experimented with this notion of um quick production of cities with this project which i call the pyramid the new city and uh it's a project that has two readings and one that is urban i mean from the south to the north and if you see all the the cigarettes i mean these cigarettes are aligned against the street and when you move east west there's a a cigarette a square a cigarette square so the sensation going north south is very urban the sensation going east west is very rural two conditions that in my opinion are truly american i mean this notion of the greed and the notion of the duality between what is urban and what is rural all combined into one place the same time i mean because of the materiality of the buildings i mean there's always a beginning a middle and an end there's a center that is clear i mean with the buildings that are painted in red et cetera et cetera i mean you can read more about this in the book i'm just doing this very quickly so you can have an idea of uh what i'm doing or what i wrote and the the uh i have other counter proposals and encounter proposals to say the plan was on by le corbusier but applied to a city of miami in which the towers of the planet wasan a plan was on by le corbusier become courtyards and basically i filled the ghost of the towns with program in order to form cordial buildings that had that were raised on pilates but in which each one of the buildings became like an island and at the bottom of that island you will have a market in places that uh will be occupied by by retail then the issue of racing i mean i raised a portion of little river in miami which is one of the most endangered areas of the city and did a series of typological studies to see what can be placed on a on a on a on a podium like this and what kind of urbanism i mean if you could do the type of picture as urbanism that the congress or the new urbanism advocates and i i think that uh i mean that the the results are um speak by themselves then i did a series of um so urban retrofits and particularly this one with containers in the rear part of the yard which triplicates the density of um of the of the city i mean by just adding two uh units at the rear of the lot then i did one that was in between in the gaps in the gaps between buildings those gaps that are uh basically gaps for fire uh protection i filled them in with a program and uh created very small units temporary units that could be used for temporary housing i also looked at the reconfiguration of blocks into linear sort of buildings creating public space uh also in the interior of the blocks and uh i mean if you um are still there i mean you should also know that i am looked at projects all over the world i mean i have projects that are in mexico and spain in china i mean in all those places where i've been a visiting professor in the last six seven years and i always try to go there and configure a project to be able to see to be able to test the ideas of phenomenology in these places so this was one of the projects that i did in china when i was a visiting professor at zhuhai university in the province of guangdong now back to a book so it's a book on theory it's a book on practice it's an introductory book that talks about phenomenology representation place making and a methodology called imaginative variations the book can be found in lulu it can also be found in amazon and barnes and noble barnes and noble is the cheapest lulu and the fastest lulu is the cheapest but it takes a little while and amazon for some reason charges you an arm and a leg for the book and that's it i mean thank you very much okay i wanted to remind people to to use a q a function for questions that they had and uh in the meantime we can get to a discussion with uh stephen anders great um i can begin our andres if you i'm happy to defer to you if you have initial thoughts go ahead can you hear me though he's all gone yes okay yeah we can hear you uh thanks jaime for your presentation um i think it digs into the deepest roots of our shared professions simultaneously inspiring alarming call to action um i wrote down a few general topics pertaining to the book that we could dig uh deeper into um maybe i can start by asking a few uh sort of exploratory questions andres can probably riff off of that or have his own thoughts and then maybe we would open it up to the to the audience as well um the first deals with phenomenology and your in the title of your book unbuilt intentions and if phenomenology studies in individuals lived experiences in the world the projects shown in your book are for the most part unbuilt and therefore unexperienced physically one resolution to this paradox seems to be that your projects confront social political environmental realities of our time and provide real solutions or commentary on those issues albeit highly theoretical nevertheless this conflict is no doubt purposeful and i think worth probing a little bit further could you expand upon this so as i said before the mind does not understand what is real and what's imaginary now the purpose or the reason why i um elected to have a practice of and build projects right on build projects um is because i'm more interested in the advancement of knowledge i mean as an academic i'm more interested in the advancement of knowledge that in the production of i mean spending years and years and years trying to convince public officials that what i'm saying is true so i'd rather i mean i'd rather take the phenomenological approach and uh and bracket all my my intentions i mean in my my my views of the world and produce projects that are unconventional and uh and and say projects that are controversial so that there can be some sort of discussion so the projects are not projects that i will build myself i mean the projects are there to become i mean to become seeds of discussion i mean like i would not like to live in a pantry like the one that i showed before up there 300 feet on the air but that country i mean spur days caution in miami beach about what to do i mean with the historic district or whether what the mayor at the time was doing was the right thing to do i mean raising the infrastructure and leaving everything below i mean at the mercy of the of the elements also the the interesting thing for me is this issue of um creating images that are controversial i mean that have some sort of symbolic attachment to the images so that people can start an informed conversation and so that's the the the difference between uh what i call in the book praxis and what i call in the book voices i mean dealing with uh the practice of architecture or the intellectual part of architecture in urbanism would you want to alternate commentaries sure okay um i'm very aware i know i've known jaime since when jaime 19 years 1980 i was in 1980 okay your first employees yeah actually you were volunteer which was wonderful uh straight straight in from latin america and that is getting to be 40 years ago and uh i think i need to i'm probably well equipped to translate jaime to the rest of the congress of the new urbanism and i think he's he is much more interesting in translation than in reality and first i'd like to say that jaime when we in the new urbanism encounter theoretical projects especially such radically different ones we immediately assume that this person does not know what the new urbanism is about you know they're just off somewhere else and they're attempting some kind of slight thread-like connection as a critique or to to share some of the some of the prestige of the new urbanism that's not the case with jaime jaime knows perfectly the new urbanism okay he was there before 90 of the rest of us he was one of the 14 if if the list of founders had been had been uh more liberal if you look at the original photograph in alexandria he was there okay so jaime was there from the beginning from the very first projects that we did and he is able what what is demonstrated here is not only the range of jaime which is remarkable but the unique range of the university of miami uh which is problematic to many the fact that straight up new urbanism can be taught as well as what jaime teaches in a sympathetic way is unique to our school and it should be understood this way now the confirmation of this is that is something my jaime had the opportunity to describe a lot of a lot of cultural uh a lot of cultural i would say positions or philosophies and what we're seeing here is something that i call magic realism okay and there is a latin american specialty which is all over the caribbean and has has um um i think um has contaminates um contaminates for example new orleans it contaminates miami which is this that's that if you believe it is it is true and you state it as if it were true it becomes true okay and this is very peculiar to the wasp or the anglo-saxon uh rather more um i would say practical uh uh way of looking at the world but it is very widespread and it is very useful uh garcia marquez is this most prominent practitioner in english so let me say how how well this has worked this is not the book that i suggested to be reviewed today okay uh but it has been but the book that i suggested was one that has been on my desk for about eight or ten years right jaime the prior your prior book i wrote in 1995. 1995 okay so that's a book really jaime but i published it in 2007 okay so it's about 12 years ago and this is a book called self-sufficient urbanism and it is a a book on what happens after mitigation fails it is absolutely prescient it is absolutely practical and absolutely clear it is it just shows you both the range of jaime and hopefully the range of new urbanism and that's the book that i was actually expecting to be to be reviewing today and i'm very happy that i didn't because it forced me to confront a book which is the one you see the cover of which i may have taken another 10 years to pick up you know but but as it was i did and i'm very happy and i think it is very salubrious for the new urbanism in a very specific way okay and uh and it is this what the new urbanism is lacking and what a book like this and some others do is they increase our range okay we are a an organization enormously successful that arguably has become the paradigm and is spiraling inward with ever ever more more esoteric expertise like for example if you look at the original form-based code which is um or the original smart codes which are very few pages the current codes based on the same dna and with the same name are 300 pages long we are we are spiraling inwards and what we need is a nudge like jaime presents here to increase the range of what we do you know by looking at jaime's work you can actually see the beauty of repetition okay repetition is one of the themes here and as you know we're allergic to repetition you know we think it's dishonorable and unimaginative to repeat buildings or windows etc and here you see jaime showing very beautifully that it is repetitive repetitive landscapes repetitive tree planting repetitive fenestration and that is an enormous increase in range and a useful one for the things that we must be done very very quickly let's just give you a very superficial example jaime for example allows you know but when i looked at this book somehow it clicked that i should be looking at burning man as a serious proposition as a serious urban proposition and as you know i'm intrigued by mobile home parks which are very repetitive and very similar to what jaime is actually suggesting here and we need this desperately we need this increase in range now i actually happen to have read most of this book and it is not it has nothing to do with anything jaime has said uh this current book jaime seems to be writing his next book in his head this book is an incredible paradox it is incredibly clear and organized incredibly clear although it deals with very very sophisticated and complex issues the writing is so clear that you may not understand the entire chapter and certainly not the entire book but you always understand what you're reading okay you always understand it it's a it's a remarkable piece of writing which you understand and although you may not be able to pull it together like hyena has into a single book there is a tendency to want to underline it very substantially okay like i can say well i can learn something from this paragraph and i can learn something from that paragraph and i can learn something from this and that now you may not be able to conceive of it together as a unified theory because i couldn't but i do i do i did learn a lot of empowering thinking by by actually reading what i could and so it's useful in that in that sense and i just like to say uh one other thing about um about the other book the one that should have been reviewed you have to get that one absolutely okay it's called it's called um self-sufficient urbanism and it is beautifully put together it's very small it's beautifully put together and it is absolutely practical and useful and so i think you should order both of them jaime do you have a cover of the other one yeah okay that okay that is a really that's the book i thought we're reviewing and maybe we should review it but it's a wonderful wonderful and important book to the new urbanism now i think that both are wonderful and important now i want to make one last thing about reading our usual reading there are many good books by the new urbanists for example there is one by doug kelball on trees in urban design in urban uh there is one by uh by um auerbach that is about but about the grid what i find when i read books by new urbanist which are excellent is that i read very fat books but in the end what i learn is a very little bit because we're all experts already and if we read what we already know the satisfaction in the investment is very small because the increment of knowledge increases by a small amount because we know already what is being said the thing about this book is that we don't know anything that's being said in it nothing and so even if you only pick up 20 of it it's still much more than you would pick up from a book that you already know you see and i found it very stimulating in that sense okay this isn't going to be a brain transfer between jaime and the new urbanism okay but it is exactly what it's intended to be which is which is a which is an incredible stimulus to an organization that is actually reveling and in fact i think being becoming rigid in its own doctrine this uh this is nothing but the breaking of our own doctrine and so uh i i'm i'm very glad i was forced to read it i have to say jaime i would never have read it i know you hadn't tricked me into it but i'm glad i did you told me thank you very much i mean indeed i mean to me the cnu is the place where i realized for the first time in my life that there was a professional community interested in intellectual pursuits similar to mine the early cnu the one that you spoke about uh the one from the 1990s alexandria yeah alexandria was the the place where i could vent my doubt and where i came with proposals and discoveries in an environment that was very friendly and very supportive somehow as everything in this world i mean everything changed and it became very pragmatic absolutely technical dogmatic and very solid and i tried i mean i tried my best in the early 2000s with what we call at the time a call for academic papers in the congress foreign and all i got what were papers from uh i mean countries that you have never heard from before and uh that were absolutely boring and so so i decided that i didn't want to uh proceed in that direction and it was there more or less around 2014 when i decided that i needed to be expect a spectator of the congress for the new urban issue that instead of being at the forefront of everything it was for me much better to be i mean on the side of counter proposing and and that's how this book was generated you know in 2016 steve and uh dean el huri at the school of architecture asked me to do a a solo exhibition and i mean there is this book is the result of that exhibit which you attended yeah so i mean that's more or less the general well i may i was contextualizing it there's a tradition at the university of miami from from decades uh which is uh which is which there are several professors that are very sympathetic to what you're doing in support of and i thought i thought this was just part of that you know unique university of miami tradition you know between towers et cetera but actually the text is different completely you're absolutely right that the representation the way that i represent the products is very similar to the way that we that you call magic realism yeah which is more like metaphysical painting it's in the the tradition of the kiriko for instance well jaime i'm doing now a a book very uh designing actually writing a book also but but designing a model village for adaptation and i have to say i do not have the the drawing technique that's adequate okay because uh because i'm i'm i'm working politically and culturally and so we have a great deal of picturesque variety which is extraneous to the concept but at the same time i think that it would be unacceptable to those viewers if we didn't have the expected picturesque variety you know that eye candy which actually brings you into the concept and it's always bothered me because every time that i draw it uh you know every you know a little sketch now every time that i draw it conceptually it's a turn off to the people who must actually follow who must actually believe and implement how do you deal with that like how do you deal with people so i think that the answer is at the very beginning of the world townscapes by gordon collins do you remember that book he has a series of vignettes that go from outside an english town then he sees the english town a little bit closer then he goes through a gate goes through a street so it's the rep the the thing with picture schism is that you have to represent movement and emotion the way to represent motion is by capturing sections moments of emotion you know like in a movie i mean you do one frame and then another frame and then another frame rather than doing what you usually do in the project in your office which is more i mean like trying to represent uh incredible moments of the of the project no time is moving on yeah honey uh if we could we could get to a few of the questions from the audience um because we're almost at the one hour point um don't we go for an hour and a half uh well we didn't necessarily go yes but uh you know some people may have to leave so um so maybe if we uh uh get to a few of these at least and then maybe even continue the discussion um uh bruce donnelly uh talks about the uh um uh how you have addressed the gap between the freestanding houses and uh and interesting that it's uh that you mentioned the barcelonita and the actual place he says is one example of where very minor variations can have a disproportionate impact on the streetscape is that not correct and could you uh um address that a little bit um yes um so so to me i mean to me the american city has never been the most perfect uh paradigm of i mean professional paradigm every time that i look at it uh an urban block of a traditional american city which is not philadelphia or savannah or boston or new york i mean the the typical suburban say first ring of sword in american cities to me they're like missing teeth no no there's always big gaps between buildings i mean say coral gables no in this notion that uh there's a gap between see between buildings and so the the the transformation of that um so orbit area into an urban area can only be on i mean by filling the gaps in that that project that i showed was precisely a project that addresses that that i may i i think people have to people don't know this project let's spell it properly could you spell it and show where it is so that people can look it up in google this is a 19th century working class project could you spell it uh the project that i was talking about barceloneta oh [Music] [Music] like barcelona but eta at the end and it's it's it's absolutely unique and it works perfectly and it looks just like jaime's most rigid project [Music] so we're at the the one hour mark and we'll continue to have this discussion for probably for another half an hour but i just wanted to let people know that we will be posting this video on cnu.org in about uh 24 hours or a day or two and you can uh um you can see the the remaining discussion uh at that point if you have any questions and you don't have time to continue um so uh we have another question uh um uh from benjamin if your goal is to advance and disseminate knowledge do you think it would be possible to simplify the vocabulary you're using in order to reach a wider audience is it possible to make this this thinking more accessible to the wider world or is it too complicated to be addressed expressed in a simple way no it can be simplified i mean to a kindergarten level it's just that i i mean i was assuming that people were a little bit familiar with notions of phenomenology and so i was using the vocabulary of philosophers or phenomenology but it can be i mean i i teach this to first-year students at the school of architecture and for sure for sure they will not will never be able to understand if i if i would have uh had a presentation like this to them yeah by the way i wanted to say that you know steve or andres i think you can jump in and talk about any of these questions if you have thoughts um um we have another question from alexander um we as new evidence are visual future looking and looking to solutions and he says that jaime explains as well it's logical it's a logical thought process and we have to confront the the engineering companies and many uh other specialists dealing with with some of the issues that uh that come up with climate change and uh he mentions there's a proposal for miami to have a 20-foot wall and he asks shouldn't we be addressing the root of the problems and that's what cnu practitioners do and he thanks you and thanks seeing you and uh problem with the wall around miami is um i mean that's uh that we are not the netherlands i mean it happens to be that our on the underground material uh in i mean under the city of miami it's a porous material so the water basically i mean is showing up not on the coastlines but in the mainland i mean like 50 miles away from the coastline so even if we put a wall that is i mean uh 50 feet tall i mean the water still will go under the jesus i can't even believe it your methodology can solve this only you can solve it with your thinking that wall but i mean like i people say oh no why don't you do a wall i mean like show us i may you would you would occupy the wall yeah behind me you can do a wall no one else help us do a wall i've done it i did it for trump yeah there's a wall in the book you don't like it um robert tullis he raises a point that he says that that you can maybe address as a phenomenologist and designer how may and how would you uh respond to his idea that neurology and embodied cognition have essentially replaced phenomenologists philosophy with environmental science and embodied cognition theory seems to be more useful for human oriented designers because it deals with common shared perceptions of space and form as opposed to individual slash personal perceptions do you have any thoughts on that well it's not that it's been replaced i mean that one has replaced the other it's just that it has evolved into that so now yes i mean we now have a better understanding of how the brain works and how we perceive things i mean in fact there's a fantastic audible if that if you can get it it's called perception i mean perception it's by the great courses the great teaching courses and its own perception actually own perception and it explains exactly how i mean the human brain perceives everything now the importance of i mean there's a difference between that because that's technical in the way that we imagine things as architects and urban designers and that's the the area that i'm more focused on in this book it's the way that we use imagination to be able to come up with uh projects you know i mean there's a there's a uh uh very interesting story by jose luis borges about a cartographer who wanted to be super accurate and he ends up drawing a map that is dia i mean it's actually coincidental with the land that he was uh i mean the whole country that he was uh recording i mean inch by inch nowadays i mean we don't do that i mean we don't we don't do that i mean as architects and urban designers we imagine that first we draw it and then somebody builds it so the the point of imagination is the point that i'm trying to emphasize that we have to use our intellectual capacity to be able to imagine things that are not maybe in the common realm but that can cause controversy and that can cause a conversation well uh jaime there are you said that you weren't i don't think you can practice with this kind of drawing but you can stimulate those who practice with additional uh almost by giving them license to think about things like for example it is very obvious that in the 21st century we have the problem of large numbers you know large immigrants huge production and it's going to require repetition the new urbanism has no ability whatsoever to deal with repetition we're allergic to it it's not part of our of our repertoire when one sees for example that checkerboard behind you of those you know those ziggurat buildings or one sees um a square made out of exactly the same kind of tree you know you basically give us license to think about repetition and the beauty of repetition and the problems of repetition okay you're bringing up you're bringing up uh the vil radios which actually supremely intelligent uh uh proposition actually but but undermined by its repetition you know and i think that just even alone bringing up the beauty of repetition you know of systems of that kind is is a huge is a huge contribution just just that and of course there are many others thank you thank you yeah um uh dean gunderson um uh he had a question for andreas actually he said he pointed out the differences between new urbanist illustrations in landscape urbanism's highly refined cgi illustrations could you expand on this for the resilient village illustration needs well i think that what the i think actually that the land landscape urbanists are uh another one of those uh completely outside groups that is um that uh increases our range tremendously as we confront issues of for example hydrology you know how do we actually handle the fact that now with all the laws we do have to stay away 30 feet away from every stream you know and it's not a matter of of you know polemically daylighting every stream or having any raindrop that falls go directly into the into the aquifer without being piped that those are polemics but we do have the problem the fact that we have we have to engage nature uh which is highly irregular and and our our formal repertoire doesn't do it gracefully for example so the landscape urbanists have contributed quite a lot to us you know and we have i believe we're well in the process of absorbing uh their lessons um and i think that the attitude you know the one of the original uh premises of land of um of nu was the prac the pragmatic american statement which is we will will absorb anything that works well in the long run we are non-ideological whatever works well in the long run and so at first of course i was hostile to the landscape urbanist because it didn't look like what we did and of course we could find its flaws very easily have written about that but it they still have a huge contribution to what we what we must do and so does jaime like for example just to personalize it i'm i'm i'm designing highly repetitive units now highly repetitive housing and mobile homes and all sorts of things that are very repetitive and there's a there's an unquestioning allergy to it by the sheer the fact that it's not picturesque you know and i think that that beautiful drawings of repetitive projects would help break that those blinders that we have you know and so yes i think that the kind of drawing that jaime showed if you get if you look at them sympathetically if you suspend um skepticism they can increase our vocabulary and something we need to do very badly i had a question i get the repetitive um you know aspect in proposal but um you know looking at the ziggurat buildings back there i mean are you seriously proposing those as a building type or is there another reason for that why didn't you use uh kind of you know building types that might be uh more common for actual uh american cities in your drawings could i do a translation on that just no because because i know what happens it's because we don't think of ziggurats what's being introduced here is a type that not one of us has ever thought of and it is polemically exaggerated just so we notice exactly you know jaime knows very well those floor plans have difficulty but that's not what it's about it's a polemic it's just now oh let's look at ziggurats with outdoor stairs that looks well isn't that an interesting typology you know especially facing as he said a certain direction yeah i think that if i could jump in here too i think that the exploration of the typology which as a study has always been there in jaime's work too when we were looking at those beautiful prismacolors you know back in the let's say early 90s right um the way that were and which which i think embody in some in some respects that sort of magic realism that um as you were talking about earlier but i think jaime has always had a more medieval approach to drawing in a way and i mean that as a sort of pre-perspectival approach to drawing which sees an object for what it is rather than from a particular point of view right and then in that translation is the essence of the building itself rather than seeing something that in fact is picturesque describes the project more more fully let's say a question from sarah and if the brain feels more most in tranquility in repetitive but simple public places even if those places are boring aren't they better for public health i don't know sincerely i don't know yeah i mean i may i would like to propose something that comes from uh asplund the villa snellman at the villa snellman is as simple and repetitive as your as your buildings right you know the villa snellman yes and yet it is repetition without precision you know the windows are the same but the spacing is off you know you see what i mean it's there are there the there's a long building but it might bend slightly or or nudge slightly and i think the key is actually repetition without precision because i think precision is necessary repetition is necessary but each of them are deadly alone and uh that's something to look forward to look for you can see it always yeah very interesting yeah less mechanical and more um natural well it's very hard to do do you know what ostwood does he does his hand drawings if you look at the villa nelman the hand drawings have the imperfection of a hand drawing and then he builds in the imperfection into the working drawings without correcting them and i think computers have that terrible problem that they require the constant correction of the sketch you know and it's i think that might be something that can be can be uh can be looked at how do we you know keep the vitality of the sketch which is perforce repetitive but not not precise right anyways thank you thank you very much robert and andres and um steve for allowing me to present this and for your questions and comments and for andreas to be supportive of this project i mean i'm so so overwhelmed by your support andres thank you and steve has been behind everything the new urbanism has done for 25 years since since he said i remember when he did the model i mean in hiding all of a sudden i mean he showed up with a model of seaside yeah and organizing the first congress exactly yeah yeah it's just that dito understands that you have to be to get anything done you have to maintain a low-grade bad humor which he does privately do we have any final points from uh panelists i mean steve do you have anything um more to ask or comment not really i'm looking forward to the next week's discussion on self-sufficient urbanism i guess right oh yes i think we should do that oh can i just say something about about townscape a gordon collins book which everybody should have at the paperback it's a book that's systematizing systematizes picturesque design it's from probably around 1960 it's a collection of essays in architectural review so i was in london bored at a conference and there was a bookseller called uh i think his name was david inch and he was the number one architecture bookshelf in london so i quit the conference and i sat next to him and in conversation i said what what books did the really cool architects buy you know what do the and these were the early days of decon it says what are these people secretly buying from you you know because they pretend they don't look at anything but they do and he says by far gordon cullen's book which leads me to think that a lot of the geometric just to think of steve hall's work okay steve hall's work by our reading is random geometry absolutely random geometry and yet if you say oh he looks at he looks at gordon cullen then everything he designs is from a from a propylene you know from a from a vantage point and it's designed picturesquely to be seen from certain points of view and i think that that's a breakthrough for me that was now i look at these people who seem to be random designers like steve hall for example and i actually most of them are random designers but some of them are and all these things that are unintel all these geometries that are unintelligible to us are actually in gordon cullen's book which i said again it's still in print it's called townscape and i think we could use it all of us could okay well i guess we'll wrap it up now and i wanted to thank jaime for your thoughts and presentation on a very interesting book and uh andreas and steve for coming in and having this discussion it's been great thank you thank you very much bye bye everybody thank you