[Social condenser]
Social condenser. The term originates from the early 20’s in the post revolutionary Soviet Union.
According to Moses Ginzburg, one of the most prominent figures of the constructivist wave , the “goal” of architecture had changed. It was not to merely erect buildings, but to transform the nation’s way of life, to mutate the ordinary man to a new inconceivable social creature. The revolutionary rhythm was taking everything into consideration and revision, under this glance the word “social condenser” came to life.
This was not an ordinary leisure place. It was the center of gravity for the emerging new culture. Lenin himself once stated that the founding of the Soviet Union was equal with the discovery of a new continent. Not only he was right, but having said that we come close to realize that the condensers and their given formations were the pilgrimage of the new adventurers.
“Like the electrical condensers that transform the nature of the current , the architects proposed the social condensers were to turn the self centered individual of the capitalistic society into a whole man, the informed militant of socialist society in which the interest of each merged with the interests of all.” Kopp
To realize these formations the soviet architects mostly used two main types of structures; the Club and housing. We will involve ourselves mostly with the first case as this is the type of formation that we are mostly linked to through the thesis.
[The Club]
First of all what must be explained is that the Club had nothing to do with the term that coins today’s common sense. What we have today refers to the private, closed spaces reserved only for small groups of people or wealthy members. To quote El Lissitsky:
“The important thing about a club is that the mass of the members must be directly involved. They must not approach it or be channeled into it from the outside as mere entertainment. They themselves must find in it the maximum self expression. […] The ultimate role of the club is to liberate men from the oppression of the State and the Church. “
Lissitsky went a step further when he named these new formations as “social powerhouses”, as he believed that freed from centuries of oppression, finally the human intellect would find the time, the space and the combined resources needed to create the driving shaft of the society.
The first years that followed the revolution the idea stood mostly on improvisations. That was a result of the still fluid state of the project in hand. It was not until 1925 that the first Club was actually realized and immediately came face to face with a whole new world of problems.
The most important one, that will also follow us to the design table, was the question of program. With a vast set of goals like the one the clubs were expected to serve, it was almost impossible to come up with a multifunctional plan of that extent. The original Clubs were supposed to have some amenities, but nothing could prepare them for the demands they had to fulfill.
The answer that was given was a twofold one. On the one hand, the element of improvisation took over the structural part of the demands. Nobody knew better than the workers themselves what was that they needed, so in the Clubs they were the masters of themselves. Improvisation and direct democracy was the hand solver in the first part of the equation. For the second part, the spatial riddle, the answer had to come with a form flexible enough to serve the ever transforming needs of the inhabitants and also stand still as a symbol of a new era.
As it is commonly known, that answer was given by the constructivists, when they abandoned the older designs of a failed society, create something new and capable of meet the above criteria. The most important aspect is that they also decided to trust the inhabitants, as much as the institutional system did. The spaces were designed to be extremely multifunctional and completely transformable in terms of space, volume, quality and in extreme cases even locality.
In order to be able to sustain at least a minimum of referenced activities, the central guidelines gave an example of proposed Club activities.
“According to central guidelines Proletkult clubs had to provide extensive educational services, including classes in the social sciences, art history, law, and socialist theory. In addition, they were supposed to offer a broad array of creative artistic workshops. Yet another crucial function of the club was the transformation of daily life (byt ) to reflect the values of socialism. In this area, however, the center issued no specific instructions; presumably, new patterns of social interaction and collectivity would emerge in the laboratory of the club itself.”
Lynn Mally
In addition to that most of the Clubs that had adequate space, tried to extend the horizon of their activities by incorporating exterior facilities such as sports grounds, pools and even cinemas. Of course the list of these programs had to be extensive and literally unending, as the transformation process of these spaces was indefinite.
[Leonidov]
In an attempt to broaden the extent of our research and also make clearer the spatial formation that we are presenting, we will analyze the work of Ivan Leonidov, one of the most important and influential figures of the time. More precisely we will investigate his proposal on the Club of a New Social Type.
The proposal started its process sometime in the early 20’s , when there was special interest in the mass production of the new workers clubs . Finally in 1928 Leonidov published two variants of an experimental design for a “ Club of a New Social Type”
“Leonidov treated the club complex as a kind of social culture center, with a winter garden , a general purpose hall for lectures, cinemas, planetarium, laboratories, an open ground for glider competitions , motor racing, war games, a sports hall, a pool and a park. In architectural terms , it represented a broadly conceived and loosely organized park like composition with , as its centerpiece the great hall roofed by a parabolic vault like covering.” S.O.Magomedov
One of the most interesting elements of his proposal is that Leonidov conceives the social club as some kind of a park, which contains various cultural and educational facilities. In addition to that , he further extended the usual program of a workers club ( library, conference hall, labs, cinema etc), to involve a whole new spectrum of events like sports areas, winter gardens and more. This not only shows his will to test the new formation to its limits but also to experiment with the vast frontiers of emerging programmatic desires.
In terms of design, he proposed a linear formation that aligned the four specific programmatic sectors. Then each sector was in turn subdivided, using a strict gridiron pattern, to further accommodate the proposed facilities. The first sector was reserved for scientific and historical research, the second for mass activities, the third for demonstrations and the last one for physical activities.
Instead of following his predecessors and using a single elemental building, Leonidov used his program as a series of repetitive events. Under this scope he succeeds into creating an environment prone to improvisation, and in the same time to keep the over unity of the project intact.
“These are the headquarters of the cultural revolution, which on the basis of mass independent work and of wide ranging development of workers’ initiatives will organize the whole system of spreading political knowledge , the whole system of cultural development…” I. Leonidov
The same ideas we can follow also, although in a completely new scale, when he proposes the new urban settlement of Magnitogorsk. He designed a linear settlement, which composed of three interconnected lines of separated programs (sport, residential, cultural) that were served by a major highway, the main provider of communication for the settlement. Apart from the obvious similarity in terms of linearity, with the previous project, he also uses the same design trick by dually subdividing the elements of the plan. By this way not only he defines the different programs, but he also manages with the checkerboard system to create some kind of fractal organization, that on the one hand does never repeat itself, and on the other through repetition it succeeds to go on forever. It is this subdivisions that organize the settlement.
[Formalities of a Social Condenser]
It is easily understandable that one the main challenges when we deal with this kind of program is the simple fact that there is no actual program, or to be more exact, the possibilities of it are infinite. In order to escape this really dangerous shallow waters, we must investigate the way, that the pioneers of the term, use to steer themselves out.
At first glance it seems that one of the most important elements of the solution can actually be found on the problem itself. The multiplicity that creates the problem will eventually be the factor that will give birth to the solver of the riddle. Much like the DNA based algorithms of modern day biophysics, the people that create the demand, will be engaged through a system of solutions, in order to discover and subsequently create the solution that fits the society they are a part of.
Catherine Cook, gives rise to the question when she explicitly speaks about the “general unknowns” and the “particulars”.
“General Unknowns were those identifying characteristics of the epoch as a whole, whose influence must permeate the entire design and construction process of the new society. In Style and Epoch, Ginzburg, discusses the ‘social, national and economical peculiarities’ of a culture, as inevitably influencing building form. From further analysis of their own he recognizes four of these peculiarities for the soviet transition. The first was that the individual client had been replaced by a collective one, a whole society, which was trying to build a new way of life; the second was a concomitant shift in the position of architecture, to become a member of the overall plan. The third was a conjunction of these factors to produce a new, ideological and technical status of norms and standard types. The fourth and final one was an overriding methodological obligation under the new ideology, to solve the architectural task like any other, only through precise evaluation of its unknowns and the pursuit of a correct method of solution.” C.Cooke
“How form should relate to an evolving content.” C.Cooke
This last observation shows us the extent of the problem. An ever evolving content can never be productively served by any spatial formulation, except one that has been recreated to fit its specific needs in relation to time and space. This recreation needs to be done co temporally with every evolution. The only way for a spatial form to do such a thing, is for it to be constructed, every time by the sheer element of the evolution, the participants.
So if the participants are the ones that recreate the space every time, where is the architect’s role and consequently what is the quality of the spatial solution to be given?
The only way for the architect to be involved a solution like that is to become himself a participant. By this we do not imply anything different than for him to trust the evolution of his design to the hands of those that it is being addressed to. In architectural terms this can only mean only a handful of things, and of those it is our concrete belief that the only way is the production of a strategy.
[Strategy and tactics]
When we are talking about the definition of strategy, we could not avoid the reference to the work of Michel de Certeau. What he does is that he defines the term “strategy” by introducing to us another term, “tactic”. According to him “strategies are able to produce, impose and tabulate spaces in which they operate, whereas tactics can only use, divert and manipulate space.” Following his example we can refer to strategy as the syntax of an established language, when the tactics is the act of speaking.
“In reference to Certeau’s discussions, strategy is mainly an index of governing principles, and defines what we do. When tactics are actions of operational logic, and define how we realize what will be done. This mutual, diachronic and interactive relationship between strategy and tactics constructs the mechanism of strategic way of design and produces, reproduces, manipulates and controls the operational tools to cope with the programmatic indeterminacy of an unstable context…” O.Ozkan
So if we add in the equation the above elements we can clearly understand that a participatory design refers to a strategic process that must be formulated for a defined and given space, but furthermore it can be forever evolving in order to fit what Koolhaas calls “programmatic indeterminacy of an unstable context.”
[Example: La Villete Park Proposal , OMA]
In order to follow on the previous considerations, we felt it would really enhance our research if we were able to track down a modern equivalent. Of course due to the historical events that shaped our century, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and even if it would, the Constructivists and their theories, were scrapped before the 15th celebration of the October revolution.
There is however a project that tried to play around and reintroduce, in a somewhat distorted way the old notion of the social condenser. This was the 1982 proposal for the La Villete Park that was submitted by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Strangely the whole project tends to signify an important turn for OMA’s future work, but in the same time it really consists of all the theories that Rem Koolhaas was working on since the beginning of the 70’s.
Most importantly for this thesis, there is another crossover with the theoretical work of Rem Koolhaas, since in his book Delirious New York; he first recognizes the ability of the American skyscraper to act as a social condenser.
The ultimate goal of this research will be to come up with the basic rules , on which we will try to set up our strategic approach to the Seagram building.
[Similarity & Difference]
Koolhaas is a well known studier of Leonidov’s work. So it is not shocking to discover major similarities between the theoretical approaches of the two. But similarities are not the only things that someone discovers in such a cross-reference. Where Leonidov talks about the social role that a condenser ought to play in a rapidly emerging society and in front of him a whole nation takes form and shape, Koolhaas defines it as part of a programmatic architectural process.
“Layering upon vacant terrain to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented effects.” R.Koolhaas
We can understand the immediate relative positions of the two architects, but is still very intriguing to investigate what a 1920’s idea can do in the 21st century dynamics…
[Skyscraper]
As we noticed before in Delirious New York Koolhaas provides the facts that give ground to his argument that an American skyscraper can indeed be a social condenser. First in hand comes his notion of the Grid as transformation of a strategic “individuation tool” and the Skyscrapers as a tactical tool within each plot of the Grid will be analyzed in detail.
He goes on to describe how the grid acts as a main strategy , that formulates the rigid parts of what he calls the “Culture of Congestion”. It is also very interesting to mark his positions as we are well aware that if there is one monolithic gridiron structure in the world then that is the Seagram building. The important part is to note that the grid may engulf the blocks but because of that it allows the inside of them to turn completely wild, baring no relation whatsoever with the neighboring blocks.
Using the same tools and with the addition of A.D. Walkers sketch, Koolhaas turns his attention to the American skyscraper. Easily he notes the similarities between the horizontal grid of the city and the vertical grid of the skyscraper. He also refers to them as “activity generators”.
“As a vehicle of Urbanism, the indeterminacy of the Skyscraper suggests that – in the Metropolis – no single specific function can be matched with a single place. Through this destabilization is possible to absorb “change that is life” by continuously rearranging functions on the individual platforms in an incessant process of adaptation that does not affect the framework of the building itself.” R.Koolhaas
The individuality of the blocks becomes the condition for the separate planes of the scraper. This multi functionality poses as the ignition for the building to be given the term social condenser. The instability of the Culture of Congestion, finds its spatial match in the skyscraper. Once again the participants were up to the task of creating a form effective enough to survive and shape the concurrent timeframe. The grid retains the valuable specificity while the scraper hosts the madness of the congestion. Problem solved; for now.
[La Villete]
In brief, what OMA did in the La Villete competition is to firstly regard the park like a park-like condenser, the kind that Leonidov was envisioning in his sketches. Then use the primmest example of a contemporary condenser, the skyscraper, and manipulate him in order to create a strategy that addressed the site. That manipulation, as Koolhaas himself admitted, was to lay the section of a skyscraper on the site and use the basic functions of it to work.
Here we must introduce another important element that OMA used in the proposal. As Leonidov had done years before, they also needed a vessel to act as a carrier for the formulation – like the grid acted for the city or the line for Leonidov - . Their answer to that was the two-dimensional strip that was multiplied and applied to the north – south axis of the site and acted as the signifier of the system, the specificity.
Next in line were the circulation paths that were already predefined. And they acted as a skyscraper designer would by tolerating them. After that they applied a formula for the dispersion of the minor elements of the site, the causes of congestion.
The biggest elements on site were already there, but gained a new significance with their inclusion to the strip system. So the last but also important detail of the design was the element of nature. They organized this, using three different kinds of formations in order to cover their linear, free formed and programmatic needs.
[Today]
Interestingly, there still exist types of social condensers today. Under different scopes and programmatic goals of course but it is still really fascinating to recognize elements in contemporary formations.
“
Museums and Libraries
- bring visitors together for the shared aim that they require the resources held there. Although some areas within these buildings may be restrictive to certain activities and so may inhibit true social interaction, they may still encourage some level of 'social collision' between the users of the building, perhaps stemming from what visitors may observe within.
Swimming Pools and (Theme) Parks
- may be used in a similar way to the above, yet in a more recreational sense. It could be said that these spaces are used generally for entertainment or sport, most likely by groups rather than individuals, although it is argued that the fact that visitors usually have to pay to use these facilities would limit their true potential to encourage social interaction between the broadest demographic.
Student Accommodation
- similar in function to some aspects of the Narkomfin Communal House, student accommodation (particularly the catered type where only limited kitchenettes are provided) is intended to cause inhabitants to occupy their own private spaces (study bedrooms) for only some of the time, as cooking/ dining/ entertainment facilities are located elsewhere, usually in communal blocks nearby to the study bedrooms. This encourages inhabitants to make use of the communal facilities in order to carry out everyday jobs, and it is usual that social interaction occurs during the course of this. It may be said that the occupation of student accommodation acts to 'socialise' students in the transition (usually) from the private family home environment to university life and its context. Even in self-catered student flats, or 'clusters', inhabitants still live in groups where the kitchen/ bathroom etc is shared; interaction between members of this unconventional 'household' will still take place, yet in a limited way in comparison with larger student halls.
Bars, Clubs and Restaurants
- although seemingly very everyday, the purpose of these establishments is to provide a place for visitors to socialise against the backdrop of food/ drink/ dancing/ celebration and so on. Generally speaking, people visit such places in groups, with the shared intention to socialise. Again, visitors have to pay for the privilege of eating/ drinking in the ambience of these establishments, and perhaps they are not a social condenser in the true sense. Yet they highlight the so-everyday-as-to-be-almost-overlooked connection between social gatherings and the consumption of food/ drink as a communal activity.
The House
- does, in some ways, act as a micro social condenser. Should a house be occupied by a family or group of individuals, it is likely that each resident will have their own private space within the house, or at least a space that they see as being their own. The living room, kitchen and similar spaces are pseudo-public, in that although they are private in a sense that they are not accessible to non-residents, they are shared by the residents of the house. As the residents of the house are very likely to meet or 'bump into' each other in these pseudo-public spaces, this implies that social interaction may occur in these areas, in a more 'public' sense than in the more private realms of the house . “
OMA
[Formula(tion)s]
Following the phenomenal analysis of O.Ozkan, where he analyzes in its full extent the Villete proposal made by OMA, and his consequent investigations of Koolhaas manipulations and their causes, we would like to quote his resulting theory and use it to further enhance the investigation for a new social condenser.
“
Formula 1: “Socially interactive, programmatically condensed architecture”
+ to define a flexible and unified organic process with active improvisation of users
Formula 2: “Minimum architecture, maximum program”
+ to define a script that combines the void with an intense program.
Formula 3: “Innocent pleasure inside versus corruption outside”
+ to define the limits of the inside and to establish a spatial relation between the inside and the outside
Formula 4: “A city (the skyscraper) within a city (the grid)”
+ to create a pattern of activity generators that guarantee perpetual programmatic instability
Formula 5: “Architectural specificity with programmatic indeterminacy”
+ to create an envelope that can absorb perpetual state of revision”
[Seagram]
All of the above research is aimed at the proposed transformation of the Seagram building into a social condenser. This effort shares a lot of similarities with both Koolhaas and Leonidov visions. On the one hand, it is set up to be situated in an environment pretty much in the same state that Leonidov was living in. A society in the (r)evolutionary verge, with a lot of questions to ask and few answers to give.
On the other hand, the same society would evolve out of the Culture of Congestion that Koolhaas describes. The madness, the overflow, the indeterminacy will all be present elements. The same can be said for the need of a society to acquire understand and affiliate itself with an important element like that. As Ginzburg stated, there always were and always will be social condensers of sorts, those are the powerhouses of any given society. Restructuring them essentially means that the society around them has already re institutionalized itself, and the keepers are to follow.
The Seagram offer all of the above mentioned elements to constitute an ideal new formation. It is a monumentary spatial solution that acts as a very particular symbol. And symbols are for change to pass right through them.
In terms of design elements, it is a building situated in a grid, strictly posed on a grid, and Cartesian in every possible way. Mies would never have acted differently, as he actually never did. Using the evolution of the rigid concrete slab, the three dimensional ribbon as a vessel of real proportions, we will attempt define the ever-changing programmatic indeterminacy.
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