Metropolitan Hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity
Rafael Luna
With an expanding urban field blurring the lines between city boundaries, minimizing available land for constructions, and increasing real estate values, there is a larger need for appropriating existing building stock to address the demand for accommodating diverse programs in a growing city. This effect has conditioned the development of new typologies derived from programmatic relations inscribed into existing structures. The existence of these new typologies comes from a need for maintaining a vibrant, uninterrupted urban landscape, intensifying urban cores, and adapting infrastructure into the urban fabric. These new typologies, which can be identified as metropolitan hybrids, acknowledge the importance of programming and interior architecture as strategies for developing contemporary architecture – not only through adaptive reuse, but also via new construction.
In this discussion, it is important to differentiate the categories of programming. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, yet they describe a very different interior logic with very different intents. In the context of architecture in the twenty-first century, programming can be classified into four categories: single-use buildings, mixed-use buildings, metropolitan, and hybrids, and we can postulate that a relationship exists between the different levels of urbanity and the different building typologies they create. The urban levels can be divided into village, town city, and metropolis. The village, with a population of 100-1,0000 people, is characterized by single-use buildings. The town, with a population of 1,000-100,000 people, introduces mixed-use buildings (generally one program on top of another) such as apartments on top of retail stores as low-rise or mid-rise buildings. The city, with a population of 100,000-1,000,000 people, develops the high-rise. The high-rise allows multiple programs to exist vertically. This is the prototypical mixed-use development, which attempts to maximize real estate. It is also the quintessential typology for the conception of metropolitan architecture. The next level of urbanity, the metropolis, with a population of 1,000,000 and over, starts generating the metropolitan hybrid.
Single-use and mixed-use buildings belong to a more practical group of programming, while metropolitan architecture and hybrids belong to a conceptual group. Single-use and mixed-use buildings are defined through real estate regulations, zoning, and building codes for occupancy. A single-use building would only allow one occupancy, as opposed to a mixed-use building which allow a combination of occupancies within permissible city and code regulations. Architecturally, this is a very compartmentalized relationship between programs, which is why they become terms mostly used in real estate with the intent of maximizing value. A direct appropriation of single-use and mixed-use buildings would require adapting an existing structure with an existing occupancy. Change in occupancy often becomes a factor of real estate commercialism, which as been a condition criticized by Jane Jacobs as described by John McMorrough in his essay “Good Intentions”:
The reevaluation of existing city stock, with the belief that degenerating neighborhoods contained within themselves a richness and diversity not possible in monolithic settlements, and similarly, the reuse of aged buildings, understood as being naturally far more heterogeneous than any feasible new replacements, were implemented as the basis for retail appropriation.[1]
Jacobs had a clear intention of creating a city that was diverse, active, and metropolitan. Her argument for mixed-use programming, short blocks, mixed-use buildings, and sufficient density are valid toward that ideal while reusing the existing building stock. McMorrough, however, points out that these are just “good intentions” that end up being exploited as commercial developments presented as mixed-use buildings. Such appropriations are evident in examples such as Boston’s Quincy Market or London’s Covent Garden. Although these are highly successful commercial developments, they promote a monoculture. Diversity cannot rely on simple commercialism. There exists a need to understand diversity and activation as architectural intervention maximizes the potential of a structure in order to strengthen the image of the city, rather than just a commercial exploitation. This can be explored through the conceptual programming group of metropolitan architecture and hybrids.
Although hybrids have existed for centuries (as seen in medieval walled cities using the wall as a protective infrastructure and housing for soldiers), metropolitan architecture is more closely related to the architecture that erupted from the growth of cities as a result of the American industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century. The development of the high-rise during this era allowed for greater density within a confined city area, and the development of electricity allowed for the city to be active day and night, inside and outside. Conceptually, these are two technological advances that change the way the interior space could eb conceived. In 1969, Elia Zenghelis explored this potential by introducing the Urban Design class at the AA with the intent to explore ”the advantage of millions living together in a restricted area,” finding the “ideological foundations of metropolitan living.”[2] Within a couple of years, the class shifted focus to understand the “values inherent in the artificiality of the man-made world, within which urban form (or architecture) manifests itself.”[3] This is the essence of metropolitan architecture, which could be defined in two ways: first, it mimics the cityscape (buildings that looks like a city); second, it embodies programmatic elements of the city (a building that contains a city).
In the first definition, the form and massing of abuilding is designed to resemble the massing of the city regardless of its interior programming. An example would the New York, New York Hotel in Las Vegas, where a group of several iconic towers from Manhattan are merged into a single building that resembles the New York skyline. OMA also used this strategy in The Hague City Hall competition, where the overall mass was divided into three bars that formed the silhouette of a grouping of skyscrapers. Another example would be the Mirador housing complex by MVRDV, where the building is conceptually a whole city block tilted vertically.
The second definition deals with the programmatic relationship of trying to create a city within the building. The architectural shell acts as a setting, and programming takes a priority role. To use Las Vegas as an example again, this effect happens in most hotels where the intent is to keep visitors inside a single building doing a variety of city activities like shopping, eating out at new restaurants, attending a theater performance, visiting museums, gambling at casinos, walking through parks, and seeing new art in galleries, all while remaining inside the building.
The definitions presented for metropolitan architecture describe buildings that have a certain autonomy from their context in that they create their own microcosms. If that is the case, these buildings can operate in a suburban condition, where they would become an attractor (like hotels on the Las Vegas Strip) as much as they would in a world capital where they would blend in, like a skyscraper in Manhattan. The skyscraper, being the quintessential metropolitan architectural typology, presents a great opportunity for exploring these microcosms in the field of adaptive reuse. The scale of these buildings makes them more prone to be adapted than dismantled, yet the appropriation of this typology becomes a challenge to break away from a commercial strategy. In Venezuela, an example of such an appropriation occurred in La Torre de David. The change in political power stalled major construction, leaving incomplete buildings and a large demand for housing. La Torre de David in Caracas was one of these incomplete buildings and a large demand for housing. La Torre de David in Caracas was one of these incomplete buildings: a 45-story skyscraper that was appropriated by local people facing hardship. The unfinished structure was adapted in an ad hoc fashion, filled with markets, gyms, services, shops, and dwellings. The dwellings were constructed from leftover and found construction materials; each family personalized their own unit, creating a real sense of diversity in this vertical city.
Hybrid architecture combines different typologies in order to create a new one. This can occur by a process of transplanting. Hybrids can also occur through a process of program appropriation, which would take an existing building shell and inject a new program unrelated to the shell to create a new typology; an example would be an abandoned jail building injected with hotel programming to make a jail-hotel. In Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard Tschumi describes this process as one of “distanciation between the architecture and the program,” where he points out three alternatives for this process to occur cross-programming, trans-programming, and dis-programming.[4] Tschumi’s programming process makes it more apparent that the architectural shell can be understood as an independent condition from the program. Appropriating existing structure with different uses generates the potential for unimaginable spaces that could not have been achieved otherwise.
A metropolitan hybrid evolves from the conceptual programming group as an architectural intervention that occurs from the metropolitan condition of density and diversity beyond real estate market demands and commercialization. It would be a merger between metropolitan architecture concepts and hybrid architecture. This demarcates a clear difference between a real estate concept of “mixed-use” and the metropolitan hybrid. Although these goals seem to be very similar – to have a diverse vibrant city – their programmatic intents are very different. The mixed-use development is guided by real estate and zoning factors. Metropolitan architecture is guided by the intent to create its own microcosm. The metropolitan hybrid has the intent of intensifying polycentrality and to maintain a continuous urbanity. This is achieved by conceptualizing programming as urban cores, urban systems, or infrastructure.
The first intent of the metropolitan hybrid (intensifying the polycentricity of the metropolis) can be achieved through multiple urban cores and urban systems. As an urban core, the metropolitan hybrid revisits the preoccupation of unrecognizable city patterns and urban growth. In “The Image of the City,” Deyan Sudjic points out the difficulty of recognizing the shape of the city or defining it by pure statistics.[5] Population, area, density, and administrative boundaries do not tell the full story of a city. The image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it. A tourist might only see fiver percent of a city by visiting its main tourist attractions. Students might focus their attention to areas around their universities. Business people might spend most of their time around financial districts. These areas are centers of activity that are distributed throughout cities and can be defined as urban cores.
Jose Luis Sert understood that there was a problem of loss of identity in sprawling cities and reinstate the need for a civic core. In 1944, Sert explained his concern in “The Human Scale in City Planning”:
I dread the pictures of the “city of tomorrow” which appear frequently in popular magazines, a “city” formed of endless suburbs; one small cottage close to the next one and a helicopter in every backyard! . . . As a whole, suburban trends seem to be favored and little or nothing new is suggested when it comes to the real problem areas or those nearer the center of our cities . . . In all these halfway approaches suburbanism seems to prevail over urbanism.[6]
The civic core would define the city center, which was once the heart of the told city, and would act as an attractor. “This recentralization process demands the creation of new cores that will replace the old ones that the unplanned growth has destroyed.”[7]
Recentralization needs to be better understood as reconcentration of activity, and rather than focusing on a single civic core, the metropolis must be understood as a collection of urban cores. These centers are resultants of singular buildings that infringe upon a hierarchy in the urban fabric and therefore attract development around them. In shrinking and postindustrial cities where either the population or an industry in declining, a variety of building stock is left abandoned, causing a loss of activity and gaps of metropolitanism. The challenge is appropriating these buildings with programming that injects new industries, making them act as catalysts. IN 2012, the 22-story abandoned Middlesex County Jail was put up for sale in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The state expected to have developers transform this brutalist shell into an attractor that brings more activity to that neighborhood. Developers proposed turning the building into a mixed-use building with luxury residential condominiums, offices, and retail to appease the neighbors. If the goals is to create a catalyst, then programming cannot be derived out of real estate speculation. Instead, it should be conceptualized as an urban core that aligns with the city’s objectives for keeping young entrepreneurs interested. If we think about the needs of recent graduates and young entrepreneurs, there is a large demand for more affordable housing, affordable office space, access to venture capitalists and financing, access to human capital, and exposure to the public for networking. The building could have been conceptualized as a micro-industry building filled with smaller offices and micro-housing units that would allow startups to have working space while sharing bigger facilities, create a mixing between industries and merger between work space and living space. The building should include spaces for financial institutions, exhibition spaces, and lecture spaces, as well as shared amenities. In Korea, these types of building programming exists as micro-factory buildings, where a single building houses hundreds of factories that produce merchandise in small rooms, with each room being its own company. These buildings could be adapted by integrating additional social and commercial programming to invite outside people into these scenarios and promote the industry. A catalyst building needs to be an extrovert and cannot rely on programming that promotes monoculture. Commercial appropriations hinder the creative programming process for diversity, especially if the purpose is to have multiple cores.
Polycentrality would also require conceptualization of metropolitan hybrids as urban systems. This would change the notion of a “city within a city” to a “system within a city.” In 2014, the City of Boston announced its bid for the 2024 Olympics. To do this, it needed to meet certain requirements. It would need visitor centers, of which there is currently only one, and it would need to build an additional 15,000 hotel rooms in order to bring the count to the necessary 45,000 required by the Olympic committee. This would mean that Boston would need to build about seventy-five new chain hotels, it could address the need for visitor and information centers and the need for hotel rooms by hybridizing both. This would create a network of recognizable information centers, visitor centers, and accommodations that not only benefit tourists but residents as well, rebranding the city by providing a perceptible typology of organization and city navigation. Through adaptive reuse, a city could brand itself by creating these systems, as seen in Venice for the Venice Biennale, where the whole city functions as a museum by distributing exhibitions in various palaces throughout the city. This encourages visitors to navigate the whole city, as opposed to just visiting key sites, and transforms potentially mundane buildings into part of a bigger agenda.
The second intent of the metropolitan hybrid is to maintain a continuous urbanity. The majority of disruptions in the urban fabric occur from infrastructure. As new technologies emerge and new infrastructure is developed, old infrastructural systems become obsolete, leaving empty voids in the urban fabric. Transportation infrastructure creates the most apparent disruptions; train lines bisect the city and elevated highways leave underutilized spaces. Yet, transportation infrastructure presents the biggest potential for adaptability and reuse because of their existing structures. In Tokyo, highway infrastructures merge with retail or residential, making the best use of a structure that already exists. The High Line in New York City transformed an old elevated train track into a linear park to provide a new pedestrian network. In the Netherlands, NL Architects adapted a highway overpass into a series of urban programs that activated the space with a market, flower shop, skatepark, kayak canal, and parking.
The continuity of growth and prosperity in our cities depends on understanding different programmatic intents. It should not confuse the commercialization of real estate and the true potential of injecting hybrid programming that intensifies the core, generates systems for the city, and optimizes infrastructure. The metropolitan hybrid allows the evolution of the city as real estate speculation, changes in industry, changes in political power, and urban renewal have crated abandoned or unfinished structures across cities worldwide.
Notes
1 John McMorrough, Good Intentions, in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, ed. Judy Chuihua Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tung (Koln: Taschen, 2001), pp. 370-379.
2 Elia Zenghelis, “Syllabus for Urban Design Course at the Architectural Association”, Unpublished manuscript, London, 1969, selected pages.
3 Elia Zenghelis, Urban Design Course: Introduction (London: Architectural Association, 1971), selected pages.
4 Bernard Tschumi, “Abstract Mediation and Strategy”, in Architecture and Disjunction, 6th edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 205.
5 Deyan Sudjic, “The Image of the City”, “The Hundred Mile City”, in The 100 Mile City (New York, London and San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1992), pp. 295-309.
6 Jose Luis Sert, “The Human Scale in City Planning”, in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944) [reprint: New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971], pp. 392-412.
7 Ibid.
