thomas' graphic laboratory: 2012

BEIHUODAY-YAOSHANG

As the expansion of the vast metropolis Beijing keeps on speeding up, village upon village of neatly arranged rows of equal courtyard houses, all facing the same direction, are wiped out. Walled compounds with row upon row of shiny new high rise blocks, all facing the same direction, appear where just a few months before the rows of siheyuan courtyard houses formed a walled farming village. Working in the lotus ponds has been abandoned for an office job, the courtyard house has been replaced by a 25th storey apartment, the tricycle by the latest new car model, the bustling streets by enormous highway traffic jams.

As the new life rolls from the epicentre of the Forbidden City it reaches Beihuoday-Yaoshang at the sixth ring road. No time to waste on demolition, it spreads over the village. New streets appear on the terracotta tile roofs, houses are erected around the former courtyards, electricity, water, sewage, internet appear, the old town is covered. But when you look closely at the new layer you start seeing a pattern of communal courtyards facing the same direction, holes where jujubee trees appear popping out from the smaller courtyards below, an intricate pattern from public to private, repeated on all levels. The village is still there giving shape to the new city.

ANDERLECHT

Cities are on the one hand made of houses, corner shops, libraries, cinemas, high-rise office towers, garages, factories, but maybe even more by the interconnection of all these pieces and the interconnection between the cities themselves. As a result the areas around the cities are covered by complex patterns of roads in the shapes of a pentagon, a circle or a straight line radiating from the centre. Here you can find railway lines crossing a canal or a road, each trying to find the right course. But now the jungle of the city reaches this outer fringe covered with overlapping and criss-crossing traffic lines.

Still, housing takes root in the irregular armpit of an intersecting street, railroad and canal. The houses cannot but adapt. Some pop up as a large tower to distance themselves from the jumble below, but for the others high facades appear on all the borders as response to the large surrounding figures: the railway track, the tower, the road. But when you enter you see each house reaching for light, opening up to create a private spot hidden from the tower, covering an open space next to the entrance. These are individual reactions to their surroundings: a terrace on the top floor, an introvert logia halfway up, a carport at ground level. The opening up or closing off according to their position generates a range of clearly related but distinctly different forms, just like the crooked shapes of the trees at the border of a forest. The city is maybe not a tree, but perhaps a forest.

NAZARETH

The city of Nazareth has all the quintessential Arab characteristics: white houses climb the ridiculously steep hillside where the shadowy streets are overrun by the colourful merchandise of the shopkeepers of the local souk. But to navigate the labyrinth of small passages between the White Mosque, the Muslim Mausoleum, the Orthodox church, the Roman church, the Coptic church, the Baptist church and many religious sanctuaries, you have to know that next to the extreme topography this city is dictated by a particular sequence of successive places. From the congested main street you can easily trace the sequence via the bustling souk to ever narrower alleys until you reach the private terraces in the inner patio of the hámula, the family house.

But right in the middle of the city all steps of the sequence converge on one spot, shortcutting the intricate balance and juxtaposing congestion and desolation. Only in height can the sequence be restored, stacking one square on top of another, one patio in another, one roof over another. Not only outside, but also inside one activity follows another generating interwoven complex gradually changing spirals. At this junction you can truly find the vertical city.

EVORA

If I wanted to describe Alvaro Siza’s residential housing neighbourhood in Malagueira, I could start tracing back the steps in history. I could talk of the meandering path the gypsies used to take to go and fetch water from the fountains. Or I could even go back to the ancient stone arches of the aqueduct of the old Evora town centre and how they are mirrored in the grey blocks that form square openings under a raised carrier casting its shadow on the neighbourhood. I could describe how the many white houses follow the contours of the hilly Portuguese landscape, overlooking the green fields running alongside the stream.

But to do this I would have to talk about the asphalt of the slightly winding road that crosses the entire area, or about the water and gas pipes, the electricity, television and telephone lines that are distributed on a raised aqueduct, or about the efficiency with which all identical white houses are placed on a rigid grid. It is clear after this description that the Malagueira district spans two worlds, following both old and modern principles, and that its true building component is in fact time.

Based on one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities:

"Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants.

...

The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts.

...

Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of non-extinct species, the other fauna was coming back to the light from the library's basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and drainpipes, erching at the sleepers' bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city."

Italo Calvino, 'Invisible Cities', hidden cities 4