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Urban Porosity

In Walter Benjamin's Reflections, there is a description of the urban porosity of the city of Naples. He observes porous architecture in which "building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways... to become a theater of new unforeseen constellations... Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere."

Rather than a preoccupation with solid, independent object-like forms, it is the experiential phenomena of spatial sequences with, around, and between which emotions are triggered. There is a scale of distances walked and seen and passages available in the area around rue du Bac in Paris which offers a gentle urban porosity of movement. The pedestrian can change direction in seconds; the pedestrian is not blocked by large urban constructions without entry or exit. This freedom of pedestrian movement, championed by Jane Jacobs as the ideal matrix, is based on the case of Greenwich Village in Manhattan and can be envisioned in different ways for the 21st century.

For larger urban projects made up of several buildings, porosity becomes essential for the vitality of street life. Especially in the city of Beijing where the urban grid layout (inherited from the Hutong blocks) tends toward "superblock" dimensions, urban porosity is crucial. Our Beijing Linked Hybrid, a project of eight towers ranging from 12 to 21 stories, linked by bridges with public functions, is an experiment in urban porosity. Passages from all sides leading into the central space are lined and activated with shops. A diagonal spatial porosity animates this "city within a city," connecting different layers of public activity

Spatiality of Night

The luminosity of 18th- and 19th-century cities was radically altered in the 20th and 21st centuries. The shocking joy of vast quantities of urban night light alters our perceptions of the shape and form of urban space. New York's Times Square — a crowded, dirty-grey intersection by day — is an astonishing volume of glowing light at night; space is defined by the interrelationship of light, color, and atmospheric conditions. In a slight mist, space is liquid. Dynamic color, reflected in wet streets, blurs and multiplies the exhilaration of this metropolitan space to intense, cinematic levels.

The extreme contrast to this blast of urban color is felt in the mystery of a rural valley in winter, carpeted with a fresh powder of snow and bathed in moonlight. The spatiality here is quite different from the urban and it depends on surrounding darkness for its primary effect.

The spatiality of night transforms the sculpture gardens between the glass "lenses" of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. By day these individual outdoor "rooms" for sculpture offer a neutral white backdrop, formed by the structural glass planks of the lenses, which bring light to the galleries below. At night the spatiality is reversed; the lenses become blocks of light that dramatically backlight a sculpture by Tony Cragg, changing its reading to silhouette. In a transformation of weight to light, a different spatiality is described: the spatiality of night.

At the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, shadows of students moving about in the drafting studio can be seen from the glowing light of the entrance court. The projection of light in this new courtyard is a soft wash rather than the regimented light of a streetlamp, a new urban courtyard with a golden penumbra. Urban space at night may have a veiled charm and mystery.

A rural spatiality of night requires restoring darkness. The suburban light pollution that is rapidly erasing the stars from our night skies negatively affects animals and migrating birds. An aim toward new urban space and its metropolitan vitality has its complement in clarified rural landscape and the restoration of the inspiring and mysterious glow of the nighttime firmament.

Banalization versus Qualitative Power

The fact that explosive urban growth yields banalization without architectural quality is no surprise. What is surprising, however, is the attempt of the current generation of urban theorists to write apologetically for this flattening banality, as if we could be immunized to its effects via charts and data.

Recently, rapidly constructed developments in Asia have reached nerve-shattering proportions whose lassitude yields brutal urban conditions. Abrupt construction of back-to-back-to-front high-rise apartments continues regardless of intelligent critics in schools of architecture advocating more density with a specious smile. This different sort of banality — the banality of the detached critical argument — develops from a lack of firsthand observation.

Our aim is to realize at least some constructions of exemplary qualitative power; as urban constructions, these are vehicles of transformation. Constructed with a plurality of meanings, an intense urban architecture of quality can be an instrument of abstract thought: unforeseen, resistant to banalization, and capable of changing and shaping urban life with phenomenal experiences.

As an example of large-scale intensity, consider a 1953 project by Oscar Niemeyer: Copan in São Paulo, with over 1,000 apartments. Treatises have been written on the subject of how people take pleasure in living there and how the detail of the shopping center underneath the building was carefully worked out and still functions today.

The artist Jürgen Partenheimer writes about his experiences from his apartment on the 28th floor: "Copan is a philosophy. With thirty-two floors and more than seventy apartments on each floor, the building is a veritable town in itself with five thousand inhabitants... The extravagant sensuality of its undulating form and its majestic elegance and grandeur rubs off on the people who live here and fills all who work with it, its managers and caretakers, with pride."

Any student, urbanist, or architect visiting São Paulo must visit the Copan Building to see this dimension of qualitative power on a massive scale

Negative Capability

Time is dying on the moon
I hear the minutes limping
round and round.
Forgive me this minute;
the hours are creaking
past these midnite bones.
—Theodore Rothke, "Straw for the Fire"

Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
—John Keats in a letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817

Negative capability is a positive capacity. Negative capability is to be able to take in all the problematic aspects of the surrounding world, to see and acknowledge, to entertain uncertainty and still be able to act: a modus operandi for the 21st century. As an architect you go to a site to study every angle available — to feel in your body what needs to be done; intuitively you create.

Past and ongoing failures in this world include: the deterioration of natural and built environments, discrepancies of wealth and poverty, and the inability of capitalist democracy to manage economies while waging unnecessary wars. The first of these three issues can be directly engaged with urban projects of vision. Architecture and urbanism might have a 3/5 position in the potential to redirect and to shape the future. Urban examples of change, even if modest in scale, can lead to hopes and expectations. They can serve as a positive catalyst.

Working with doubt and openness is, in essence, a form of optimism. Regardless of how unfortunate and difficult elements accumulate in our daily lives, as architects and urbanists it is important to aim with optimism at a long-term view.

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Steven Holl is founder and principal of Steven Holl Architects, and is a tenured professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. He has received many awards and prizes, has lectured and exhibited widely, and has published numerous books, including Anchoring, Intertwining, Parallax, and House: Black Swan Theory.

This article is excerpted from Urbanisms: Working with Doubt by Steven Holl, copyright © 2009, with permission of the publisher, Princeton Architectural Press.

SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Steven Holl's design for the Akbuk Peninsula Dense Pack in Akbuk, Turkey, includes an assembly hall with three spiral skylights. Photo: Courtesy Steven Holl Architects Extra Large Image SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Site model of the Akbuk Peninsula Dense Pack. Photo: Courtesy Steven Holl Architects Extra Large Image Akbuk Peninsula Dense Pack precinct plan drawing of the main urban "island." Image: Steven Holl Architects Extra Large Image SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Akbuk Peninsula Dense Pack site plan drawing. Image: Steven Holl Architects Extra Large Image Akbuk Peninsula Dense Pack site plan concept sketch. Image: Steven Holl Architects Plan drawing of Miletos, an ancient Greek city near Akbuk, Turkey. Image: Steven Holl Architects Extra Large Image Urbanisms: Working with Doubt by Steven Holl. Image: Princeton Architectural Press Extra Large Image   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.