The tasks facing the professions that develop and design the environment are changing.
Half a century of peace in Western Europe and the accelerated globalization of migration and capital have broadened architects’ and planners’ scope of operations.
The self-image of German architecture, developed as it was during the postwar building boom, is now being thrown into question.
The task today is not just to deliver buildings, but also and to an increasing extent, to conduct and direct the cycles of growth, transformation and recycling of the urban landscape.
Publication Architecture of Succession @ Deutsche Bauzeitung, Germany, 5 January 2005

Designing
Processes
&
Developing
Systems
In these processes – and the shrinking city must be cited in this context – it is not a question simply of a short phase in a period of decelerated growth that has haunted the zeitgeist and been demonized by the anxieties of loss. These developments still lie ahead for most European countries; however, in Germany, the subject has been intensively researched and problematized. They are rising to the challenge by developing notable expertise in dealing with the cycles of the urban landscape in order to accomplish the tasks of the future.
In order to be able to direct the cycles of building and use that are part and parcel of our urban landscape, it is necessary to shake off our fixation on growth. Only then can the opportunities inherent in these processes be taken advantage of, in order to ensure that a potential reduction in building development does not result in a reduction in quality of life.
It would also be helpful to throw off our obsession with building and to develop a holistic perspective that takes into account the whole space of the urban landscape that includes not only the built but also the un-built areas, not only the physical and architectural but also the digital and media spaces in the urban transformation processes. In this article, we will go into the relations between the built and the non-built spaces in the urban landscape, the green areas and the media networks.
It is essential to acquire an understanding of these symbiotic interdependencies in order to be able to help direct the dynamic space of the urban landscape in its continual interlocking transformation processes. The planning of buildings will therefore turn into the design of processes, into the development of systems.
Fields
of
Succession
Processes
Our view of environmental development processes changes automatically when the dichotomy between ‘town versus ‘landscape’ is cancelled out in favour of a holistic perspective on the urban landscape. The areas that come into being through the demolition of buildings in the course of urban reconstruction could be seen not only as simply the holes and discontinuities of a perforated city, but also as the potential of urban development that is landscape-based.
The empty spaces that emerge in the process of urban reconstruction and revitalisation can be implemented to qualify existing urban structures at comparatively low costs. Such usage of vacant space is suited to temporary interim solutions that do not block the availability of areas for needs that might arise in the future and thus do not become an obstacle to the long-term dynamics and a city’s efficiency.
Against the backdrop of the financial crises the communities find themselves in and the accompanying problem of financing maintenance costs from the public purse, in the sister disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and the new field of landscape-based urban development or landscape urbanism, reduced-cost approaches for these newly emerging urban green spaces are being sought. Green succession as urban wilderness appears to be an interim solution for the new urban wastelands appearing in the cities.
Cost-efficient but more ‘cultivated’ solutions are being sought for the development of open spaces in urban areas that can serve to conserve the urban and social continuum. In urban agriculture, acreage that is used for agriculture or forestry and whose yield can cover its maintenance costs is implemented for energy production, for example (energy crops for biomass).
Both of the approaches briefly described here for dealing with urban waste land – “urban wilderness” and “urban agriculture” – are process-oriented and cyclically oriented. A cyclical conception is the basis for a symbiotic relationship between “urban agriculture” as energy producer and (energy-consuming) urban culture. Design takes as its object not just the vacant urban space but instead, the whole lifecycle of the site. Maintenance costs are taken into account and the future implementations of the site are integrated into the design. It is interim solutions that mark the phases of the urban cycle of succession in the perpetual dynamic process of the transformation of the urban landscape.
This process-orientedness is close to landscape architecture, as it has to do with growing and decaying material. But there are also several architectural approaches in which cycles are taken into account. In this connection, it is not just a question of energy cycles (buildings as energy converters or material flows (material recycling and recycling materials) but also of the lifecycles of whole buildings (right up to the “Demontagefabrik”: “demolition factory”, a project of the University of the Arts Berlin). Architecture’s focus of attention is shifting away from the completion of new buildings to the treatment of existing substance. Conversion, building conservation, building renovation and facility management have long since been recognized as the fields of the future.

Urban
Networks
Systems
Frequently it is a case of developing intelligent solutions for multiple-shift usage of buildings. Innovative and resourceful designs for combining different uses (some of which are quite stringent in their requirements) under a single (old) roof are increasingly in demand, even if the basic fabric is abundantly available, as building conservation is often the critical cost factor.
A new task has been added to that of supplying buildings (hardware) – that of the (software) programming of the building project. Such multiple-shift usage (for different times of day and times of the week) of buildings can be supported by digital technologies. Buildings can be “programmed” with the aid of soft tools. The electronic access controls of constant identification have long since been implemented in many hotels, as well as office buildings and plants. Building security technology is now a growth industry.
Supported by the omnipresence of digital networks, the “deterritorialisation” processes of disengagement from constructed space and spatial fixing are now advancing. Digital technologies and media spaces suck functions out of real architectural-urban spaces. The sale of books over the Internet is driving neighbourhood bookshops out of business.
In contrast, however, the larger bookstores are increasingly finding out that the (book) event venue is a market niche as yet unoccupied. Telecommuting, even if it is only a few days a week, has consequences not only for the space available, but also for the structure, the qualities and the choice of site for office buildings. Now more than ever, they ought to offer space for the communicative elements of the daily workday. This modifies the spatial hierarchies and changes the qualities of the built environment. It also reduces the need for built space.
And nonetheless, in dealing with the problems of “shrinking cities” the upgrading of media spaces for taking over functions from the physical-urban space is proposed. “One can learn shrinking – for example, by travelling through Scandinavia” as Elisabeth Niejahr writes in Die Zeit. She continues: “in May 2004, the prime minister of Brandenburg, Matthias Platzcek, visited thinly-populated Finland, where in remote villages, the youth already take part in classes where students and teachers communicate by video link, and rural hospitals call on experts in Helsinki for aid by video during difficult operations.”[1]
Media services are regarded as the solution for infrastructure facilities that are not working to full capacity and are therefore no longer sustainable. The implementation of mobile services is thought to be the solution to counteract the thinning of the network of the social infrastructure, and thus to guarantee quality of life for the more immobile parts of the population too, pensioners and the economically disadvantaged in the shrinking regions. In the article just quoted, the film projectionist who travels from village to village and the bus that brings the individual passengers to the place of their choice are mentioned. Such models combining mobile and media services are being tested in several regions in Germany.
These can make simultaneous use of the simplest low-tech and state-of-the-art developments in information and communication technology. At the moment, the interfaces by means of which the inhabitants of the wealthier half of the world can remain permanently online with each other are becoming ever smaller and thereby more mobile, for example, with the aid of radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that can be implanted in literally anything, from shirts and yoghourt containers to household pets.
At the same time, buildings are turning into interfaces. The house is developing into an intelligent networked environment like the car, the connected car that is not just a Microsoft project, but has long since become reality. In today’s ambient intelligence and domotica applications, the so-called digital home, e-home or smart home, digital music, video and television entertainment (digital entertainment) take centre stage, but all the same, the last Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was full of house-prototypes in which the heating, the refrigerators, and special control modules of tele-care and tele-medication for pensioners as well as nursing-aid and care robots communicate wirelessly with the computer or the personal digital assistant (PDA).
In building design, it is certainly necessary to take into account these uses of space in the grip of change and the thus changing building typologies: the larger house that also serves as a home office, and which can become reality in the city liberated from the pressure of use, the office building, which will be used primarily for regular meetings on fixed dates and therefore has to satisfy communicative and representative requirements above all, the bookshop transformed into an event-venue or the newly arising need for small-scale distribution centres for teleshopping and conference rooms that can be rented by the hour in the midst of residential areas.
But more than this, at issue is understanding buildings as the interfaces of a space rendered dynamic. It is not just a matter of getting involved in the design of the building, but instead of devoting ourselves to the development of systems in the totality of their immobile, mobile and network elements. That means not only designing ‘housings’, but also programming their changing uses and conversions. Such a process-oriented perspective takes into account not only the completion of buildings, but also their cycles, from their daily and weekly cycles and their lifecycles to their recycling.
This does not necessarily mean, however, that there will be less architecture. The spaces emancipated from their “deterritorialized“uses and multiple-shift usages do not have to be “neutral” in the sense of “characterless.”
Architecture
Attractors
The sum of 40 billion Euro has been budgeted for the Olympic Games taking place in Beijing in 2008. It is anticipated that only 10% of this will be spent on stadiums and sport facilities, while circa 40% will flow into hardware and software for infrastructure and information technologies.
All the same, these large-scale architectural projects are of great importance for the Olympics – which are really a media event – in the competition for attention in the global economy. Already these stadium projects and skyscrapers are being implemented in the creation of a new image of China.
Even the transformation that appears to be taking place in the attitude of the Chinese government toward large architectural projects, which could eventually result in them being stopped (which has already been broached) is not a rejection of architecture. It will be an expression of this emerging giant’s self-image adapting to changing circumstances and the internal (economic, social, ecological) problems. And the Chinese state’s re-discovery of the historical buildings, the majority of which have already been destroyed, is also the expression of the change in orientation. In China too, architecture is implemented symbolically.
An architecture that conceives of itself less as functional housing will become ever stronger on the representational level. To this is suited not just the individual gesture of the extravagant solitaire, but architecture’s ability to situate a building in a particular locality that is determined by culture and tradition, through climate, resources, and topography etc. can also help to take over this identity-bestowing function.
Today, architecture has not only a compensatory function in reaction to our “high-speed, short-term society” with its ‘dynamized’ spaces and its accelerated time. Architecture as an attractor can be a pole of reference, both as an enduring image and as at the moment of bound tactility, and is thus a prerequisite for lasting existence in this world turning ever more quickly.
Notes
[1] Elisabeth Niejahr: “More Affluence for All – The German Population is Shrinking. There is no reason to panic – instead, this is an opportunity.” In DIE ZEIT No. 43, 14 October 2004.
related PRESS