One of the most
heartbreaking things about living in Los Angeles is how routinely architectural
gems are demolished without warning.
In April of this year, the Architects Newspaper reported that the
Brentwood home of William Krisel, the iconic mid-century architect of as many
as 40,000 dwelling units across Southern California, was being razed. This would be a huge story almost
anywhere except for the fact that it happens so often here, people have be come
inured to it. Perhaps LA is just
too vast, with too many potential travesties for anyone to keep track of, let
alone care about; still the end result is that the city is diminished in a
small but real way each time this happens.
How do we deal with the
anxiety over the changing city?
Thinking about it through the lens of Urban Successionism was a good start for me: viewing the city as formed
through a natural process – but instead of evolving as a forest does in
response to changes in ecological conditions, the city adapts to a shifting economic
environment, growing in bursts of development, characterized by the
architectural styles popular at the time, with all the stages of succession in ecosystems:
the arrival of propagates, a sequence of dominant species, the fugitive equilibria,
as well as the traumas and how the systems react to them. Just as a forest contains within it a
record of its growth and development, a city takes shape as an archive of successive
economies.
Considering the city
in this way at first did bring some relief to my anxiety, but it did not cure it
completely – urban successionism misses the fine grain of what happens between economic
expansions, between those styles that define an era. In Los Angeles, for instance, it does not account for the
work of Schindler or Neutra, or the great textile-block houses of Frank Lloyd
Wright or his son Lloyd Wright, or even the more recent work of Eric Owen Moss,
Morphosis or Frank Gehry, all of whom are important, even canonical, to
architects, yet have scant representation across the built landscape of the
Southland.
Urban Successionism is
inherently retrospective and thus insufficient in apprehending the evolution of
a city as it happens. A
closer, more sustained look reveals that cities evolve not in a series of large
movements but in small, incremental ones –in fact, very small: it turns out
that a city evolves building by building.
Each project, no matter how seemingly insignificant, changes the city
just a little. Furthermore, each building is the product of a specific
interaction of particular individuals, a negotiation that bears imprint of each participant,
and thus is a unique response to economic, social, or programmatic imbalance
perceived by each of those individuals.
I call this process Architectural
Fermentation.
***
The term came as a sort
of epiphany following the convergence of three events: I was beginning the construction
phase on a house in the Silverlake neighborhood in Los Angeles with an engaged
client who started the project with an unusual request: if I wanted to be his
architect I had to watch the HBO series True
Blood. At the same time I was
taking an online winemaking class through UC Davis. I was reading about stuck
fermentations – what happens when things don’t go quite as planned – when I
came upon a phrase credited to noted oenoligist Hans Lüthi who, in his 1957 article, Symbiotic problems related to bacterial
deterioration of wines, described all fermentation – good and bad – as a
“succession of microbial onslaughts.”
So there I was,
fast-forwarding through part of a True
Blood episode I had already seen, when it hit me: sped up, the scenes appeared to be similar to what Lüthi described
– a succession of interactions between two or more agents that together formed
a story arc and resulting in some sort of resolution at the end of each
show. Like making wine, but
at a scale virtually invisible to us: our own.
That’s when I began to
look more closely at the process behind my Silverlake project: how the
interaction between the client and the architect could be thought of as the
primary fermentation, the product of which – after 72 iterations in this case –
was the design; which was then filtered through the building department; which
was followed by the interaction of the client and contractor through
construction, AKA the secondary fermentation; which was followed by the punch list
and final sign-off from the building department before the structure could be occupied. With a little creative license, the
process seemed to mirror that of making a bottle of wine.
***
Emboldened by this
epiphany I turned to science to back me up. As one might imagine, there is nothing on architectural
fermentation; but there is plenty of literature on the evolution of systems.
Jumping off from Hans
Lüthi’s observation on microbial activity, I turned to the late evolutionary
biologist Lynn Margulis who, in her book Acquiring
Genomes echoes the translation of Lord Kelvin’s second law of
thermodynamics from physics to biology to be reread as “Nature abhors a
gradient.” She applies this law to
systems both living and non-living, at all scales, even to the point of talking
about the myth of the individual, that all organisms are systems of systems in
a flexible hierarchy occurring at all scales at all times time, each of which
is concerned primarily with overcoming any gradient it perceives. “we must begin thinking of organisms as
communities,” she writes, ”and communities are ecological entities.” She goes on to say, “As natural
selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever
more efficiently use environmental energy to ‘purposefully’ (her quotes) reduce
their gradients.”
The importance of
gradients is also emphasized by Nick Lane in his book, Life Ascending. In that volume
he explain the work of Mike Russell, the iconoclastic scientist currently at
Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in particular his
study of the sea vents in Tynagh, Ireland. The argument is long and complicated, but seems to boil down
to this: “bubbling alkaline fluids into acidic oceans produced a natural proton
gradient” between carbon dioxide and hydrogen that, through chemiosmosis,
created organic molecules as well as ATP, and eventually proteins and DNA, the
building blocks of life itself.
Lane is convinced that
if Russell and his colleagues are correct—and he thinks they are – that all
life proceeds from such a gradient or imbalance; more, he contends that
contrary to the conventional understanding of entropy, equilibrium is never
achieved. Instead, persistent imbalance
is what fuels interactions in all systems, both living and non-living.
DNA, while remarkably
good at replicating itself, does produce enough variation, generation by
generation, to give evolution options when faced with imbalance. Thus a species evolves one mutation at
a time, an iterative process that, like imbalance itself, is never ending. But does this apply non-living systems
as well?
***
In a recent article in
the Science Times section of The New York Times, George Johnson wrote
an article, Creation, in the Eye of the
Beholder, in which he states, “the brains and hands that design
civilizations artifacts are products of the same evolutionary algorithm –
random generation and testing” that drives evolution itself.
This is algorithm is especially
evident in the field of entrepreneurial innovation. In The Innovator’s
Dilemma, Clayton Christiansen talks at great length about how successful
companies inevitably outgrow their capacity to adapt to the market and thus
become vulnerable to “disruptive technologies” that almost always deliver a
less expensive product that targets a market need more simply and
precisely. So, just as in natural
systems, evolution of the man-made operates through survival of the fittest.
But how do these
disruptive technologies come about?
What is the process through which they are developed? MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald, with
colleagues Andreas Wankerl and Carl Schramm outline a very specific process
that they feel delivers innovation most efficiently. In their book, Inside
Real Innovation, they distinguish between “incremental innovation” and
“fundamental innovation,” the former being more adaptive and the latter being
more revolutionary. Focusing on
fundamental innovation, they identify a team made up of individuals – not
groups – that must be in constant interaction for a true breakthrough to occur,
each individual representing three different points of view and thus bring
their expertise to bear: technology, market, and implementation.
The person representing
technology is most often an inventor of a new product or process that addresses
a perceived imbalance and may or may not have an application; the person who
represents the market is someone who understands what will work in the
marketplace and how the technology might be embraced by the public at some
point in the future; the person representing implementation is the one who
knows how to connect the technology to the market, how to make the invention
functional, and how to deliver it to the market.
What is compelling is
how much importance is stressed on these three people interacting. It is a long, often 15-year process to
bring a technology to market, and that time is spent creating iteration after
iteration then subjecting them to the critique of each member of the team. Only if a product or process can
survive this relentless gauntlet of judgment will it ever see the light of day.
The key they stress is
that for the interaction to really work, each of the three team members must
have some experience of the other two points of view. It can never be a productive interaction if one member is
unable to compromise due to an inability to comprehend what the others are
saying. That said, the other key
is that all of the team members have strongly-held opinions and that they must
fight for them.
Would the same sort of
interaction work for architecture?
What if every building project underwent a prolonged and heated interaction
between the architect – who understands the technological side; the developer –
who initiates the project due to a perceived imbalance in the market; and the
contractor – who understands how to implement the architect’s ideas and deliver
the building to the developer? Wouldn’t
that create better buildings? Let
the opinions fly if it improves cities just a little bit! Instead, most buildings are the
byproduct of stuck fermentations caused by a lack understanding, communication
– and respect – between these three team members.
***
Simply knowing that a
city evolves one project at a time through this complex interaction does not
really relieve the anxiety of the changing city or guarantee that a corner of
town will be improved by a particular project. However, one would hope that having this knowledge would motivate
all participants make any project the best it can possibly be. But the imbalance we perceive as
architects and urban designers may not be the imbalance perceived by
contractors or developers; they still are compelled to address their own
concerns. Thus, it is incumbent upon
us to own the imbalances we see, to have a clear opinion of how to fix them,
and to fight to the bitter end to ensure we prevail.
