Creative Maintenance

Friedrich Hundertwasser, Residential building of the
City of Vienna 1983-5 (Photo: Schwingenschlögl)
http://www.hundertwasser.com/arch/view-44

 A building usually looks its best on opening day, or perhaps a few weeks later when the final punch list is complete.  Then the photographers are called in, the people are cleared out, and images created for publication.  That’s the best and freshest, and most stylish the building will ever be.   All that’s left after that is maintenance.  

The life of a building, however, takes some time to emerge, years even for people to adjust their habits and discover new patterns and relationships.  Some say it takes twenty years or so for a neighborhood to mature until it has older families and young people and a broadly-recognized identity in the larger community – not just as ‘that new development.’   When the life of the place comes into focus as the goal of design, then maintenance takes on an entirely different meaning.

If the life of a building were considered primary, then maintenance would require looking after the health and well-being of the occupants, community and ecosystem.  To that end the physical object would not only only accept modification but welcome it.  Maintenance would be a continuing process of adjustments to respond to changing conditions of the city, and inhabitation by creative people who build their lives there. 

The best example I can summon is artist Friedrich Hundertwasser’s apartment buildings in Vienna.  He wrote in 1983, “Only a building which grows organically after the occupants have moved in and steadily changes through the constant alterations of the occupants is the alternative to the concentration camps in which we live…”   He went on, “Everyone must have the right to lean out of the window and redo the third skin, the outer wall, as far as his arm reaches, so that people on the street can see from far away, “There lives a human being”.

Was Hundertwasser’s artistic vision diminished by inviting residents to modify the building?  Hardly.  His design strategy is strong enough to welcome change and become richer for it.

Notes:

Jacques Derrida considered the issue of maintaining the ‘maintenant’ or the ‘now’ in an essay on Bernard Tschumi’s design for Park de la Villette.

Friedrich Hundertwasser, “Concrete Utopias for the Green City” delivered at the International Gardening Association symposium in Munich July 27, 1983 http://www.hundertwasser.com/text/1.3.2.5/hl/69.

Half of Urbanism

 

Last Friday I went to dinner with some colleagues to Wynwood Kitchen at Wynwood Walls, the original group of warehouses painted in changing murals.  Always spectacular.  To walk from courtyard to courtyard surrounded by mammoth-sized Art is both stunning and urbane.  And lots of people walking around, filling restaurants and galleries that have moved into the raw warehouse spaces.  It's as much of an urban scene as Miami can produce, like Lincoln Road used to be.  

However, no one lives there.   Everyone drives in to participate in in urban life, then they drive home again.  Is that really urbanism?  Perhaps not yet.  The scene in Wynwood is just a half of city life, adrift with neither infrastructure nor a residential population, like one of Miami's many attractions invented by clever investors.  However Wynwood is now sparking development that will bring housing and perhaps offices and transit and the other elements that fill out a city, bit by bit, by popular demand.  Some residential towers are planned but none are under construction now.

Some of us in front of "Codo a codo" (elbow to elbow) by INTI

Here's the irony.  Some people drive to Wynwood from their apartments in new high-rise buildings on Miami Beach or Biscayne Boulevard.  Bus service is miserable, walking is unpleasant, and transit non-existent.  In fact, they drive everywhere, pouring out of the parking garage in the morning on their way to work and returning at night.  The towers have a few amenities around them, but not much.  They are the other half of city life, detached and adrift, tethered only by traffic.

In the fullness of time both Wynwood and Biscayne Boulevard might accrue enough of the qualities of the other to become fully urban.  But can Miami wait that long?

Expensively Empty

Last week a group of Italian students and I were chased off of the property of the "Apogee" condominium tower in the southernmost tip of South Beach.  The security guard told us it was a "private, very private building."  In fact we were not allowed to step off the sidewalk onto the circular driveway.  Geeez.  Four condo towers stand between the urban grid of Miami Beach and South Pointe Park, a beautiful terminus to the island designed by Hargreaves and Assoc. Landscape architects.  The public has access via two streets that cut between the towers, a beach walk and a bay walk. 

Entrance to Apogee, a very private residence

What struck me was that this well-defended private property, standing so aloof from the city, was also empty.  Luxury condos are often kept as pieds-a-terre for wealthy people who live elsewhere.  The buildings remind me of multi-story boat storage scaffolds, which hold hundreds of boats that people rarely use.  The condo towers similarly stand waiting for their inhabitants to return. 

The city responds in kind, offering very little to the zombie towers.  A few pricey restaurants have set up either inside the towers or nearby, but one cannot find a cup of coffee or slice of pizza short of several blocks away.  The location is so exclusive that almost everyone goes elsewhere.