We were playing the Warsaw Game, a strategic ‘Open Form’ game based on the improvisation and adaptation to changing conditions, led by
Professor Svein Hatløy (1940–2015), the founder of the Bergen School of Architecture, and Chi Ti-Nan, the author of the Micro-Urbanism concept* and the
initiator of the Urban Flashes workshops. At the Urban Flashes in London (2002), Svein made us collect recycled building materials into a shopping cart and use
them in a way that they would ‘dominate’ and ‘communicate’. Chi was very impressed by the deep philosophy behind this – it was the first time that his Taoist mind encountered Open Form.
After London, Chi begun to teach in Bergen, and Svein – to spend time in China.
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| Third Generation City, M. Casagrande |
Originally formulated in 1959 by visionary architect, theorist and artist Oskar Hansen and developed further by Svein Hatløy, the concept of Open Form is based
on unauthored individual and collective actions that have a potential to generate further reactions. Within this approach, the role of the architect shifts towards directing constructive communication. Open Form is a monument to no one, and the processes it goes by are rather biological.
Svein got me a teaching appointment at the Bergen School of Architecture, where I sought for a deeper understanding of Open Form. Step by step, this led me towards the concept of Urban Acupuncture, which owes as much to Svein as to Chi’s Micro-Urbanism. Today, looking back to the architectural installations we made in different cities with Sami Rintala, I can see that Urban Acupuncture was already present there. Those installations acted as the acupuncture needles that tapped into the
collective conscience of the local communities and tried to communicate with the site-specific knowledge. Our architectural expression was Open Form in the sense that it did not rely on any specific discipline – not even architecture – but glided freely between various fields of art and science.
“First one has to have something to say, and then find the ways how to say it,” said Mauno Koivisto, the President of Finland in 1982–94. “To be present is key to all art,” said Reijo Kela, the legendary dancer and choreographer who had burned our Land(e)scape back in 1999. “Real Reality is something that is total; something that cannot be speculated,” said Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, the Professor of the Arabic Language and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Edinburg and Helsinki. He continued: “The valueless void of today’s society will be filled with ethics; the corners are windy.” We craved to feel this wind and to break in more corners.
Usually design represents a closed form; it relies on the control methodologies that stifle the Local Knowledge. Design should not replace reality. Reality is normal. We chose to believe in the supernormal, and in the works that laughed at their ‘designers’.
I ended up in Taiwan by accident, although Svein declared: “We sent Marco to Asia.” What really happened were two seemingly independent events at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000: Chi visiting our ‘60 Minute Man’ boat and me picking up from the ground his flyer that advertised the Taiwanese pavilion. Then we got in touch with each other, and Chi invited me to my first Urban Flashes in Taipei. Prior to Taipei, Sami and I had worked on a few projects in Japan, but in Taiwan the Open Form really
got me. The final hit was my work in, with and for the Treasure Hill, where everything Svein had been teaching became a reality, because the Treasure Hill was the Open Form fighting against the official city.
Without Open Form, I would have never been able to deal with it. Without Open Form, there would have been no Urban Acupuncture for me, and no teaching at the Tamkang University, where the students started playing the Warsaw Game soon after I became their ‘professor of accident’. In a sense, Svein was right: he did send me to Taiwan.
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| Urban Acupuncture, Hiroki Oya / Casagrande Laboratory |
In Tamkang, I was given full support in taking further the Urban Acupuncture thinking to study the essense of ruins and eventually arrive at the Third Generation City. Later on, the Sustainable Global Technologies research centre (SGT) in the Aalto University gave me a free hand in practicing multi-disciplinary design, which, again, was close to Open Form. More disciplines were stepping in: river engineering, futures studies, cultural studies, landscape architecture, civil engineering, sociology, horticulture, and anthropology.
In 2010, we were able to set up our own independent research center, the Ruin Academy in Taipei. Totally multi-disciplinary and based on Open Form, this platform for academic squatting involved the Aalto SGT, the Tamkang University, and the National Taiwan University, especially its sociology department. In the meantime, in Artena,
Italy, a cross-disciplinary network of university professors founded the International Society of Biourbanism that has also established a strong connection with the Ruin Academy. Through this link, Open Form started to gain some more scientific roots. The biourbanists are as much mathematicians as they are biologists.
Open Form knows no designer. The architect is not an author, but rather a communicator, or a human intelligence officer. Most of the existing architecture is ‘closed form’, a structural manifestation of human control and authority, while nature is Open Form, and therefore the task of architecture should be mediating between the human nature and the big voice of Nature.
Urban Acupuncture strives to penetrate through thin industrial layers of asphalt and concrete in order to connect with the original soil. The resulting cracks in the
city fabric provide the breeding ground for the Local Knowledge and Open Form (which are essentially one and the same thing). The Third Generation City is the city of cracks.
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| Phimenes Sp., M.Casagrande & F. Chen / Casagrande Laboratory |
Architecture is an environmental art. It belongs not to architects, but to nature; it belongs to our senses, and not to our control. What is not sensitive, is not alive – it’s death’s companion.
When I was a student at the Helsinki University of Technology (now the Aalto University), Professor Juhani Pallasmaa, Head of the Architecture Department in 1992–97, made us watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. Stalker – directed by Tarkovsky and based on the ‘Roadside Picnic’ novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – is about the Open Form as it is about life: you either survive your way through the Zone, or you don’t. It’s always the same forest, but the way is never the same. The way is the domain of the accident, yet Open Form is not a mystery. It is about constructing and deconstructing the elements that can maximise the opportunities for life to thrive. These
life-providing elements – be it a house, a place, a community, or a city – are parts of nature, and, as such, they follow biological principles.
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| Existense Maximum, M. Casagrande |
Existense Maximum is the given rule of nature. To enable maximum life in site- specific conditions, human control should be loosened up in order for nature to step in. Nature, life and human are one and the same, but human control is something different; it is the source of pollution and prostitution. Architects are not obliged to be design prostitutes, and architecture should not necessarily be a manifestation of human control. And if not, then the house must be ruined.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets
in.
- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
A ruin is when the man-made becomes part of nature. Open Form seeks to produce ruins – houses, communities and cities that are broken open by human error to turn into platforms of cracks. These cracks are not slums; they are not the smelly parts of the city – they are the apertures through which light comes in. The modern man is an anti-life form in the universe of cracks. A house is not a box, and the man should not stay inside. The architecture provides necessary shelter, an Open Form for the man to have a rest and contemplate. It gives us comfort. But this is not all there is. The house is where the light comes in. The city is the biology itself. It is a biourban galaxy of lights, a star system of cracks.
* In his Micro-Urbanism theory, Taiwanese architect Chi Ti-Nan proposes an alternative to conventional ‘macro-urban’ design and planning practices with their “efforts to invent or resurrect dominant forms, to demonstrate heroic rectifications, to reinforce the regulations, [or] to freeze the historical areas.” Instead, he encourages the
architects to investigate the way things interact and coordinate in the city’s everyday life; to explore the seemingly insignificant sides of contemporary cities; the unique microcosms that develop in response to “both natural environment and existing urban conditions,” and to take cues from the “immediate solutions and consequential behaviours mobilised by people in order to manage limited resources and adapt to the man-made environment.” Referring to the principles of Eastern medicine like ayurveda or acupuncture, Chi speaks about “a meridian system of interrelated energy zones within the preconceived macro-structure of the city” and emphasises the importance of identifying and working with the city’s organic, innate processes that are being “blocked, concealed or simply ignored.”
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