Tricolonnade or La Strada Sobria

An installation by SO – IL for the The Street, part of the 2011 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture.

The materials are veneers, green marble and mirror, the detailing Miesian, and the atmosphere rich. It is a colonnade bent in on itself creating interior routes, ironically a façade and an interior. Serrated edges imply negative space of a green marble fluted column and stepped corners of a tower designed to multiply corner offices. The program is narrative and the sequence, depending on how deep you chose to go, returns you almost from whence you came. The plan is a series of nested brackets problematizing inside and outside, literally bracketing and reproducing the real. [1] The geometry of the plan, articulation of wall surface, and choreographed reflections achieve spatial depth both literal and virtual. The content is the passer-by, inhabitant, and participant. The ambition is public and once inside, less you turn back, you might arrive somewhere new. [2]

Tricolonnade is SO – IL's contribution to The Street, Terence Riley's reenactment of Paolo Portoghesi's Strada Novissima from the 1980 Venice Biennale. This street, as part of the 2011 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture is an exhibition category within the biennale's theme of Architecture creates cities, Cities create architecture, an axiomatic reformatting of Leon Battista Alberti circa early 15th century: "If the city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small city…" [3]

Veneers, green marble and mirror are the materials used by SO—IL for the <i>Tricolonnade</i> installation in Shenzhen — Veneers, green marble and mirror are the materials used by SO—IL for the *Tricolonnade* installation in Shenzhen

The exhibit takes place in Shenzhen's OCT (Overseas China Towns) district within warehouse B10. In a city that otherwise has a challenged pedestrian scale at the street and large districts of homogenous urban program, both symptoms of rapid urbanization, the OCT arts and design campus is an island of cultural production. In both the 1980 and 2011 exhibition the street is the arena where architecture encounters the public realm, aggregates to the scale of cities, and where façade becomes the principle medium of architecture. In 1980 the theme for the biennale was "The Presence of the Past." Post-modernism had recently been canonized and was at play on the Strada Novissima where 20 contemporary architects were asked to design façades. In 2011 the provocateurs on the street are two dimensionality—concern with the superficiality of surface architecture, architecture's reciprocal relationship with urbanism, and post-modernism.

<i>Tricolonnade</i> is a façade of negative space implying six green marble fluted columns — *Tricolonnade* is a façade of negative space implying six green marble fluted columns

As a critique of that which has become implicitly flat Tricolonnade is the visual rhetoric for an argument positioned from within; it is subversive from within. Communication, formal tropes, and social content according to Charles Jencks are the three pillars that constitute the values of radical post-modernism. [4]
SO – IL's installation is a tour de force manifestation of these values synthesized in an abstract whole. Not deploying architecture of shallow surface or direct imagery, Tricolonnade simultaneously reveals post-modernism and radical post-modernism as strikingly insecure dispositions for creative practice.

As a critique of that which has become implicitly flat Tricolonnade is the visual rhetoric for an argument positioned from within; it is subversive from within

<i>Tricolonnade</i> is part of the exhibition <i>The Street</i>, Terence Riley's reenactment of Paolo Portoghesi's <i>Strada Novissima</i>, in Shenzhen's OCT (Overseas China Towns) district, within warehouse B10 — *Tricolonnade* is part of the exhibition *The Street*, Terence Riley's reenactment of Paolo Portoghesi's *Strada Novissima*, in Shenzhen's OCT (Overseas China Towns) district, within warehouse B10

The most abstract reading of Tricolonnade is a façade of negative space implying six green marble fluted columns. In 1980 Oswald Mathias Ungers contributed a façade for the Strada Novissima. It was a single silhouetted opening in a thick wall that produced the negative space of a column—the ultimate position on inhabiting that past, present, and ambitions for the future. SO – IL's façade takes Ungers' abstracted column and turns the volume up. The space of the argument becomes necessarily more abstract and more complex. Both spatialize their position. In 1980 Ungers' column signaled the past and even the present in so far as the column was one of the post-modern formal tropes of his contemporaries. In 2011 the underlying image of the column continues to signal the past, but is insufficient to communicate more recent history or the present.

A serrated edge clad in marble veneer and mirror lines the interior of Tricolonnade's three discrete routes. The semblance is to the strategically replicated corners of late 20th century office towers. In 1985 marble veneer and mirror were identified as being almost as inexpensive as paint. [5] These two formal and material tropes are a signal toward post-modern architecture since the Strada Novissima exhibition. SO – IL ironically deploys cliché materials and shapes to condition space with rich atmosphere, literal, and virtual depth.

Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu recently quipped that architecture is pointed toward a period of growth from within, a timely and conceptually efficient rephrasing of subversion from within and a more apt name for Tricolonnade. This shift from subversion to growth reveals itself with the juxtaposition of two essays ironically almost bearing the same title. "Our New Sobriety" by Rem Koolhaas written to accompany OMA's installation at the Strada Novissima in 1980 and New Sobriety by SO – IL in 2002.

"Our New Sobriety" was a pretext to prospective archaeology, Rem Koolhaas' notion that modern and historical architectures present an inevitable context for a future based on density, technology, and social instability. [6] Prescribed was a method, a return to a specific breed of functionalism and a disavowal of architecture pre-occupied with form. "Our New Sobriety" as a creative practice would be methodologically rigorous and unbridle architecture's imagination. Programs could be organized rationally in plan and provoke new occasions. OMA's study for the renovation of the panoptic Koepel Prison manifests this theory. The panopticon was preserved in the historical sense, modified with aesthetic discretion, and its architecture evolved to promote the contemporary imperative of its 100 year old program. This was achieved by simply inscribing the most reductive elements of urbanism, two streets intersecting, in place of the panoptic tower… radical, especially radical when considering the panopticon as prison architecture aspiring to social rehabilitation. To replace the panoptic tower with two streets achieved an architecture of urbanism as a radical social project. Rem Koolhaas recounts that the show was evidence of OMA's earliest work with preservation. This is a paradoxical subversion, preservation of history and the ambition to achieve a new architecture. OMA's aesthetic discretion embarked on an even more popular trajectory when it began to claim modernism as part of its new sobriety. The epiphany was immortalized with the bent Barcelona Pavilion installed for the 1986 Milan Triennale. Koolhaas and Ungers' installations—as the noble preservation of history and the delicate ambition of achieving a new spatial architecture—provide the context by which Tricolonnade assumes its manifesto.

The façade for OMA's Strada Novissima exhibit was fabric, skewered by metal poles, dancing with the fourth plane, and in love with suspending disbelief. Surrealism was struggling to find a tectonic manifestation. It was already manifest methodologically with the creative practice of the Tektonik and Cadevare Exquis. [7] OMA's façade in 1980 deployed surrealist coding assembling an agenda from a discrete past. It shares this in common with SO – IL's 2010 "Pole Dance" PS-1 installation. Was this OMA's Strada Novissima façade turned into a functionalist plan?! At PS-1 SO – IL was able to achieve an architecture whose tectonic assembly was literally able to affect new program. Witnessing this was surreal. Some guy in a suit wobbling a pole. Social encounter was lubricated. Art history will identify "Pole Dance" as relational art, architecture should claim it as relational-tectonics. [8]

SO – IL's "New Sobriety" is self critical of figuration under Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa at SANAA. Like Koolhaas' article it identifies a method and ambition for creative practice. It acknowledges that expert architecture can achieve an imperative functionalism. Instead of the Tektonik, Cadaver Exquis, or prospective archaeology the method SO – IL describes is pursuit of a rigorously functional diagram simultaneously marveling at the subjective aesthetic it provokes. Such a diagram evolves to a proto-planimetric drawing when it sufficiently orchestrates the functions of its architecture. After that, it is possible to develop architecture with an aesthetic discretion provoked by the drawing itself—a process intensely rigorous, subjective, and today relaxed in comparison to the architectures of OMA. Consider BIG's aesthetic: simple distortions of a platonic form didactically signaling a building's purpose. These platonic deformations result from operative functional diagrams and evolutionary modeling. The architecture of OMA signals its purposes with complex contrasts resulting from a design process that is itself more urban than obsessively evolutionary. [9] While these two practices pursue their own ambitions, to various extents expertly, amateurs encounter the ironic and vainglorious consequence of an architecture preoccupied with communication to the public: the unfortunate lack of confidence in its public's ability to navigate, locate, and comprehend purpose for themselves.

This is the sobering moment for post-modernism that SO – IL's "New Sobriety" identifies, a disposition for creative practice that has greater confidence in its public and itself. If architecture's public has been "moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways" then perhaps architectural design can relax and offer a generation of unknowingly expert navigators some games (read: architectures) with less apparent rules. [10] If post-modernism can make a comeback then the manifesto really might as well too. Post-modern and even the so called radical post-modern architectures are wolves in sheep's clothing. Florian Idenburg in his review ,a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/milstein-hall-oma-reloaded-/" target="_blank">Milstein Hall, OMA Reloaded was wrong to identify Milstein Hall as a wolf in sheep's hide. OMA was able to manifest new territory of spatiality and its creative practice over a quarter century ago. Milstein Hall, like many OMA buildings, is a wolf in wolf's hide and whether a prelude or a coda the real question—the public ambition of Tricolonnade, is: What other animals are out there? SO – IL wobbling Rem bending Mies....

Notes
1. See Reihnold Martin, Utopia's Ghost, Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), XXIV. Martin unpacks a "spatial/territorial imaginary that both brackets and reproduces the real…"
2. SO – IL's description of Tricolonnade: "Our proposal, through a kind of reinvented colonnade, seeks to spatialize and instrumentalize what has become implicitly flat. The 'facade' unfolds, becomes itself the space of occupation and exhibition… Multiplied and reflected, flatness is scrutinized and made spatial, and becomes charged with public engagement. It is high time to revisit this canonical exhibition of post-modernism. 40 years after our predecessors expanded the territory of the architectural discipline into the experience of time, we continue to believe that growth and innovation are limitless if a new territory of spatiality can be defined." says Jing Liu of SO – IL when reflecting on the intention this installation."
3. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books
4. Charles Jencks, What is Radical Post-Modernsim, AD Radical Post-modernism (September/October 2011)
5. Kevin Roche, Kevin Roche on Design and Building: Converstaion with Francesco Dal Co, in Francesco Dal Co, Kevin Roche (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 85
6. Rem Koolhass and Elia Zenghelis, La nostra nuova sobrietà, La Presenza del Passato Prima Mostra Internazionale di Architettura (Venezia 1980)
7. See Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhass |OMA, The Construction of Merveilles, (Italy: EPFL Press, 2008), 77
8. Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics meets Kenneth Frampton's tectonics
9. Urbanism as a model for creative practice itself. Ungers—The studiolo?
10. Hari Kunzru, Postmodernism: From the Cutting Edge to the Museum, 2011

Tricolonnade or La Strada Sobria

An installation by SO – IL for the The Street, part of the 2011 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture.

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