On continuity and quasi-circulation:
Casa da Música and the architectural work of OMA in Porto
This paper was presented at CA2RE 2017
Preamble
The academic research on the work of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture — OMA — can be notably classified into object-oriented and process-oriented focuses, in which four schools of thought are present: formal, ideological, sociological, and historiographical approach.
The architectural work of Rem Koolhaas/OMA is usually discussed within the paradoxes of his architectural thinking and OMA’s design practice, that are influenced by diverse cultural contexts and result in the coexistence of seemingly opposite approaches, such as strategies of differentiation and standardization, and diagrammatic processes and radical eclecticism through collage techniques. Furthermore, a formal reading takes a significant position on this postmodern viewpoint, bringing up the reflections of consumerism, the banality of the contemporary city and the metropolitan condition in contemporary architecture and urban culture, especially in Koolhaas’s theoretical work (Figueira, 2005, 2014; Jencks, 2002, 2005; Johnson and Wigley, 1988; Lefaivre, 1989; Muschamp, 1984, 2004).
The debate of critical theory and projective practice, moreover, places OMA’s work in the centre of general themes of architectural culture. Through this understanding, Koolhaas’s theoretical oeuvre in relation to socioeconomic reflections and how OMA’s architecture is constantly expressing a projective practice while conquering new freedoms within the discipline of architecture. However, within the most representative reactions to post-criticism, as Figueira (2011, 189) put it, “Koolhaas emerges […] as being part of the critical equation when others place him in the ‘projective’ category” (Figueira, 2011; Ibelings, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2014; Grande, 2014; Kipnis, 1996; Jameson, 1992; Zaera-Polo, 1996; Foster, 2002).
The process-oriented investigation relates OMA architectural production to the general intellectual thought of the late nineteen-sixties and beginning of the twenty-first century: structuralism, postmodern and post-critical theories. In addition, the zeitgeist condition is usually present in this debate, exposing the innovative aspects of Koolhaas’s designs. Another thread on this perspective links Koolhaas’s biographical history to OMA’s approach to architecture, relating it to the Dutch culture of the nineteen-sixties in general and to the situationist group. However, a new approach within this school of knowledge expanded the academic investigations over the work of OMA to a diverse study realm through a sociological reading. Their methodology of developing knowledge through research and design, revealing a central part in their architectural production by engaging OMA’s design process in an ethnological analysis (Yaneva, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Porto Filho, 2014; Lootsma, 2000; Gargiani, 2009).
Most of the historiographical researches on Rem Koolhaas’s/OMA’s work regard the genealogy of concepts and ideas of their architectural design, often in an in-depth analysis of individual case studies using proximity comparators to other architects and architectural expressions (Kipnis, 1996; Böck, 2015; Veras, 2015; Foster, 2002).
Continuity, Collage, and Encyclopedic completeness
It can be argued that the architectural work of Rem Koolhaas/OMA has a sense of coherence embedded in the incoherence and randomness of their last decades’ architectural practice (Ibelings, 2014). Moreover, his designs are driven by a collective approach that manipulates different ideas, concepts, materials, spaces, as a result of a strategy of collage managed through a diagrammatic process. In this context, it is evident that the role of that architecture collection changes into a generic degree in which everything is an element of architecture — also almost turned into data -, and it will be used guiltlessly within Koolhaas’s process-oriented design (Figueira, 2014).
Although Koolhaas is consciously searching for new ways — in practice and theory – through the full control of elements of architecture, comparable to Michel Haneke’s way of filmmaking, his mechanism of collage reaches a strategy of subversion, in which it’s impossible to conceive the presence of great themes, great feelings, therefore “the end of the Big Story…” (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995; 508). Between extreme poles of newness and revisited concepts, Koolhaas’s design approach is still essentially postmodern (Ibelings, 1995; Figueira, 2014).
Navigating in-between, Koolhaas’s buildings dismantle but don’t disappear in the air. If most of his designs aspire the status of a building that is “decomposed into incompatible fractals of uniqueness […] a paroxysm of fragmentation that turns the particular into a system” (Figueira, 2014; 81) it can be said that the local architectural culture is decomposed and absorbed into his “systematic-encyclopedic enterprise” (Ibelings, 2014; 169) — as if the modernity process was happening backwards in which modernity is absorbing architecture –, and intertwined with revisited canonical concepts of architecture.
Revisiting elements in Casa da Música: on Quasi-circulation
To begin with, it’s inevitable to address the question of circulation on Koolhaas’s buildings without concerning Le Corbusier’s concept of promenade architecturale (Böck, 2015), since the absorption of metropolitan congestions into the building frequently uses the architectural promenade as a device of continuous urban public space. Moreover, the transformation of the architectural promenade into “a curving topology that traverses the structure” (Böck, 2015; 208) can be understood as a trajectory gesture because of its circulatory attributes similar to an urban open block, but instead with a final point. Although this may be true, to get a closer notion of what the circulation of Casa da Música is, it is necessary to take in consideration that the intelligence behind the project might be, in fact, a result of a patchwork of programmatic hybridizations, proximities, frictions, overlaps, superpositions, to paraphrase Koolhaas’s own words.
Hence, what I argue is, what can be orthodoxly considered as circulation — a place that aggregate people’s motion and flux within the building (Koolhaas, 2014) — is better understood in the case of Casa da Música as Quasi circulation. But, this kind of circulatory system is not unique of Casa da Música, it is notably identified on Koolhaas’s previous designs, such as the Kunsthal, in Rotterdam (1987–92) and the competition entry for the Jussieu Libraries in Paris (1993).
So marked by the use of ramps, the Kunsthal and the Jussieu Libraries are an experiment of liberating the floors from their notion of separated levels by destroying their individuality. Although the Loop-Trick (1987) strategy applied to the Kunsthal provides a clash of space typologies, intersecting different ramps and leading the visitor from the bottom up to the roof over the street that split the building, and is, in fact, a mechanism to reinvent the architectural promenade, the circulation system of the Kunsthal is a vital space component in its program (Koolhaas et al, 2004).
The overlapping aspect of its uses and functions tend to expand the notion of a mere ramp or mere corridor. It is not only an architectural element to organize space, neither it is just a continuous trajectory. Rather, it is a social space in-between spaces where a meeting and exchange point has equal importance as the guidance of motion through the building. Yet the quasi circulation system in the Kunsthal may not fulfil in reality its whole conceptual capacity as a multifunctional space.
If it can be argued that the spatial hybridization of the Kunsthal is a reflection of the city of Rotterdam, or in other words, a narrative built within a specific scenario, in the case of the project for the Jussieu Libraries in Paris, the absorptive aspect between building and city is clear. Koolhaas’s intention to “generate vertical interior boulevard that exposes and relates all programs in a single sequence” is straightforward (Koolhaas et al, 2004; 79).
Once again, the experiment of transforming the circulation into something more than a utilitarian element of architecture is expressively central in the conceptual organization of his design. The “Inside-out city” (1993) idea is the main experimentation behind the Jussieu Libraries project and, here, it is understood as a continuation and expansion of the knowledge gained by the “Loop-Trick” of the Kunsthal (Koolhaas et al, 2004). It is important to realize the collage approach in the Jussieu project, especially the use of a collection of architectural — and urban — elements that expand the idea of public space motion. According to Koolhaas, “[…] elements such as plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafés, shops, elevators, escalators, and short circuits that equally support movement and circulation similar to public space outside” (Böck, 2015; 210).
While Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery’s way to express the difference between the city space and the space for art into its program gives us a hint of the Kunsthal’s vocation for modernist model’s synthesis, the design for the Jussieu Libraries tries to grasp the sense of a generic modern European metropolis (Kipnis, 1996). The seamless result of a montage of architectural elements is common for both cases, although the Quasi-circulation is, in fact, a coalition of frictions, surely it is an ode to the oblique plane.
Furthermore, the design for the Dutch Embassy in Berlin is another example of the manipulation of different elements in the circulation, in this case transforming it into a multifunctional circulation that resembles the fourteenth-century European corridor, like an outer space of the main program of the embassy, yet connecting the building to the city in a two-way voyeuristic approach (Koolhaas, 2014). In like manner, the curved ascending trajectory is more than a path, in the sense that “Koolhaas’s design of the Dutch Embassy proposes a narrative composed of a sequence of architectural elements, which are not inside the building but dispersed all over the city.” (Böck, 2015; 215).
He tried, albeit without success. Because of strict regulation of security within the functionality of an embassy, what was once a space of meeting, encounter, walking and contemplation, fades in its whole capacity as space. Assuming that “the ramp is a speculative springboard, constantly pulled down by realities” (Koolhaas, 2014; 283), in the case of the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the quasi-circulation got to be the victim of reality.
Likewise, the design for the Casa da Música is a catalogue of ideas, concepts and elements put together. Originally designed to be an extension of Porto public space, the space designated to conduct and lead the flux of people to the main concert halls and secondary program rooms, works as a horizontal loop around the shoe-box shaped concert hall. Notably, the quasi-circulation concept is constructed with a variation following the experiences obtained on the previous experimentations. If in the Kunsthal and in the design for the Jussieu Libraries, Koolhaas explores the destruction of the sense of separated levels, in Porto he liberates the architecture of that notion by combining this approach to the one applied to the Dutch Embassy in Berlin; in Casa da Música there is no sense of individual floors when it comes to circulation.
To walk within the Casa da Música is to constantly be reminded of Porto streets. Space-wise, the building’s quasi-circulation simulates the narrow and labyrinth aspects of Porto’s old urban structure, intercalated by unexpected squares that generate different speeds of motion while one walks around in and out the Casa da Música. Additionally, the approach of absorption applied to this building involves the literal application of Portuguese architectural elements as a mechanism of semiotics, in order to create a narrative and strengthen the Inside-Out City concept (Figueira, 2014).
The freedom of walking around in the building, as it supposed to happen, faces difficult realities within a system of commercialized tourism and security issues. The multiple collections of staircases, escalators, ramps, and elevators, is barely perceived in the scarcely allowed public spaces, and the guided visits that dictate a single trajectory inhibiting the various possibilities of ambulation.
Similarly, as in the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, to walk within the Casa da Música is to constantly capture and look to the City and to be contrasted to the exterior solid aspects of the building. But on the other hand, the main program on Casa da Música has better access to the outer skin of the building, as a result of subtractions, or creation of voids and of volumes that originated the main concert halls and the complementary music rooms; strategy also present in the project for the Trés Grande Bibliothèque, in Paris.
Afterthoughts
Within this context, the exercise of finding coherence through the exercise of finding processes of continuity on the work of Rem Koolhaas, taking Casa da Música as a study brings to the surface different conclusions and opens new perspectives on understanding this building.
The existence of different continuities is perceptible through this analysis. One continuity is related to the strategies developed through the design experimentation in previous projects, for instance, the question of quasi circulation as a compiled and multifunctional space applied to the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Jussieu Libraries in Paris, and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin.
What is argued here is that these processes of continuity not only exist, but those concepts are carried on within a systematic process-oriented practice as elements of architecture, assuming roles of equal importance. In an extended condition that guarantees a guiltless use of any idea of concept as elements in the conception of a building.
In a specific case, the Casa da Música can reveal the presence of both processes. Although this design approach may push further the search for new ways to do architecture within the contemporary condition of the metropolitan city, in reality, it has its own flaws and conflicts in the long run. After all, the Casa da Música design perhaps is facing the same destiny as the ramp; a victim of reality.
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