"Countryside"/ Rem Koolhaas/ 書き起こし・要約
レム・コールハースのハーバードGSDでのプロジェクト「カントリーサイド」の講義を書き起こし、要約します。
はじめに/ガイドライン
レムも初めに「講義ではない」と前置きしているように、これはGSDでのプロジェクトのオリエンテーションです。スライドは、アムステルダムでの講演(2012年)のものに幾つか加わっているようで、こちらから見ることができます。
以下に、大まかな内容をまとめてみました。個人的に「中身のない建築」に興味があるので、14:23からの工場・そして大きさの話を重点的に訳しています。
02:21 導入。都市から田舎へ意識を向ける。
06:17 カントリーサイドで起こっている変化
10:30 アクティビティの変化
12:17 農業のデジタル化。ラップトップの中の緑
14:23 人工的な田舎
19:04 大きさ。ランドアートの参照
28:02 新しい局面としてのカントリーサイド。無人化する田舎、そして同様に都市も見捨てられていく
34:32 移民問題 (書き起こし割愛)
Introduction 02:21
都市の人口が田舎の人口が半々になったというクリシェ。ここ百年の思考はほとんど都市にまつわるものだった。
Hi. This is not really a lecture. I'm just going to present a number or themes that I've been looking at, and a number of themes that I hope to look at with some of you in the coming year. And it's going to really work in progress, because at this point, there are many different directions, many possible outcomes. We will probably have both a book and, at some point, an exhibition. But this is kind of really midway. And to some extent, that is why it is also exciting for me to present it. There's a cliche, and that cliche is that we have reached the point that more than half of mankind is living in cities, and the rest is stuck in the countryside. I think that all of the recent thinking in the last 100 years has been mostly about a city. I have participated in that, and now there is, and has been, a number of books and other media events that are going to basically celebrate this switch where the urban condition is the dominant condition. These are some entities. And at some point, there was almost urban triumphalism, and that made me keen to look at what happened to the countryside. What happened to all the territories that the people who are now living-- new people living in the city-- left behind. There's been precious little thinking about the countryside, or arguing about the countryside.
田舎の存在感は増している。
But weirdly enough, I think if you look at the current modern unconscious, the countryside has a large presence. This is a random newsstand in the Netherlands. And if you look at the magazines dedicated in some way to the countryside, it's about more than half. So I would say that, maybe, the countryside represent currently our repressed. This is the territory of the city to-- sorry. This is 2% of the territory-- sorry. Disbelieve everything you read here. [laughter] Anyway-- 2% of the territory and more than half of mankind.
And then this is everything which is not city and which, currently, I would argue-- particularly in architecture and planning-- leads largely unchartered on one hand, but also [? in ?] [? theorized ?] and speculation-free territory. Although, of course, as Moisen reminds you and me that many people are now switching to thinking about the countryside. There are a number of subjects that I will not raise, for instance, the effect of global warming on the countryside. That's a project that I cannot show you now, but which we have done in the recent past, which was an effort to understand what the impact of Russia would be on climate change, and how the currently very fertile areas of Russia that produce a lot of food will dry out, but where other territories that are currently infertile will develop. So in other words, there are many zooms that are possible in this territory, and I want mostly focus on two zooms tonight.
Changement in countryside 06:17
レムがよく訪れるスイスの田舎における変化。人口減少と、大規模な介入が同時におこっている状況。
Basically, my interest in the countryside was produced by the fact that my partner actually had a house in Switzerland, and that enabled me to very often-- a couple of months a year-- basically walk in the countryside, which was an entirely new experience for me. And at some point, by simply being alert to the village and to the events in a village that was where her house was, I began to notice significant changes, not only in their expected changes-- such as the countryside is emptying, farms are turned into houses, the original population is disappearing to the city-- but more radical changes. And, for instance, this was the village when I first came in there probably in the mid '80s. And this is the village now. So there is a curious situation that the countryside depopulating. But at the same time, the physical scale of innovation is increasing. And if you look around, then you see that also an authenticity like this one, which used to be, of course, the absolute essence of the country is being replaced by a particular style of renovation-- very discreet and minimalistic, where simply the enormous amount of cushions kind of indicate, perhaps, the overhidden agony that accompanies gentrification. [laughter]
「私たち は、イタリアの特定の村やパルメザンチーズのような典型的なイタリアの農産物がインド人によって生産されているのをみつけた 」。
But when I, for instance, started to-- slightly alerted to these changes, began to document on a daily basis what is going on, I asked this guy how long his family had, for instance, been in the neighborhood. And he said, well, I arrived here in the '90s. [inaudible] this affected nuclear scientist from Frankfurt, and I didn't like my job anymore. And, also, if you look at who is actually husbanding the countryside, working on it, it turned out that fewer and fewer people were Swiss. And that there's an enormous and not very well documented migration to this countryside. When I looked in Italy, for instance-- and this was part of the Viennalee effort-- we discovered that certain villages in Italy, and certain typical Italian produce, like Parmesan cheese was actually being produced, increasingly, by Indian farmers that are responsible for both the cows in large parts of Italy, but also the cheese. So if you want to really know what I wanted to try to understand, is how the countryside could change in 100 years from this condition. And if you look at this condition, you see that, in spite of the fact that it's countryside, in spite of the fact that it's poor, you still see a highly organized, almost ritualistic, very codified life, which is now in these [inaudible] years replaced by a population which is relentlessly informal, which is definitely not local, and which is, in every sense, the urban population influx, which is, perhaps, the characteristic of our times. So I really wanted to understand what happened in this interval.
Only Activities can change in countryside 10:30
「田舎の美しさとは、それ自体が縮小しないことだ。」
Now, if you look at the countryside, you see the countryside-- the beauty of the countryside is that it cannot shrink. And so, therefore, whatever happens it will be there, and the only thing that can change are the activities on the countryside, or the densities in the countryside. This is a documentation where you can see that agriculture is occupying fewer and fewer people in the northern part of the world. It's still strong in Africa, of course, in India, in China, and in South America. This is the Netherlands, where in 150 years, the rural population went from one quarter to almost 1%. So the theory underlying the entire study is that ostensibly, the city is changing a lot, but that, in fact, the countryside is changing a lot more and has to adapt much more radically.
And that it is currently the territory of genetic experiment, industrial nostalgia, seasonal immigration, territorial buying sprees, massive subsidies, incidental-- anyway, whatever. So I will, later, also suggest what I think the effect of all of this will be on architecture, and by also presenting it, perhaps, as a kind of early warning as what could happen in architecture, in my view.
Digitalization in Agriculture
都市よりもデジタル化された田舎、ラップトップ上でコントロールされる緑。
So, let's first look at agriculture. The tractor is a kind of quasi-familiar entity. It's still being produced, but produced of increasing not only strength, but increasing sophistication, increasingly digitized, increasingly digital apparatus, and, you could almost say, increasingly an office. Because this is the way in which kind of current agriculture is being kind of reproduced-- each parcel digitized in kind of small fragments in each little pixel program of how to treat it which is partly based on [inaudible] yield-- in other words, highly technological kind of work.
So we still think naively of the countryside as kind of green territory, but, actually, that green territory and the real countryside is actually happening on the laptop, on the screen, and highly programmed as much as it clearly never was before. And you could even say, more digitized than large parts of our current urban culture because it is simply easier to digitize in its entirety.
So farming has become this. It can also be done over the phone and increasingly uses also technologies such as drones and other entities. It's becoming kind of more, partly because it's so susceptible of becoming kind of part of the internet of things, it is actually becoming part of internet of things. Silicon Valley is going to invest in startups. These are new words-- precision architecture, inspection firms,, surveillance. All these elements that we tend to associate with the kind of urban civilization are more rampant and maybe higher developed in the countryside.
Artificial Countryside14:23
人工的な田舎について。土壌を必要としない農業。自動化され、ラップトップ上で効率的に管理されている酪農。狂気的な効率化。
There's also artificial countryside. We see a lot of factories, and former factories, and a lot of corporations that used to be in electronics actually use some of their kind of plant to turn into agriculture, highly artificial agriculture, such as, in this case, agriculture without any ground. So the notion that the ground is necessary is also being going to increasingly surpassed. You know all of this. And everyone knows it. But probably not the kind of scale of it. Here, the same thing for keeping animals, highly automated in every condition, even the cleaning. And it's really phenomenal, of course, that machines can be devised that deal with this. And then come in every kind of farm, no longer a farm, one of these kind of emblematic offices where some people behind a kind of laptop runs, manages, and creates, therefore, insanely efficient agriculture.
昔は自然が一定の存在感を持っていた田舎がますますデザインされていて、ますます幾何学的になっていくということもありえます。自然は無くなったといえるかもしれない。知識人が支持し導入していることは、一種の理論です。そしてそれは、ある意味では、ノスタルジアの必要性から、おそらく、私たちを解放します。
The pattern of territories is really very radically changing. This is part of Khartoum. These are farms in Bolivia where central village-like condition is the middle, or the center, of radial developments that are then kind of separated by kind of sections of tree. So what you see is that the countryside, which used to be, of course, the territory where nature had a certain presence, is becoming increasingly designed and you could even say increasingly geometrical. The same is true in America, as you know, or if you fly. And if these are agriculture, then the kind of implementation of the scale for animals is increasing astronomically to producing landscapes such as this one. So nature, you could say nature is over. It's a kind of theory that intellectuals have supported and are introducing. And it, in a way, relieves us, perhaps, for from the need for nostalgia.
都市自体もポジティブ・ネガティブに拡大している。例:核処理施設。
And you could maybe argue that it therefore liberates us to engage this as a project. And as a kind of exciting project, or is a source even, perhaps, of a renewal of the culture. So what has become really staggering to me is that the more I looked at it, the more the countryside is considered, or almost treated, as a kind of enormous canvas on which almost any form of organized activity, which would be extremely hard to make compatible with urban life, and with the city, is now spreading over the countryside simply both positive and negatives, such as nuclear reaction, nuclear waste. If you see how complex some of the nuclear waste stations are, also inscribed on this campus, and that their complexity is not only limited to two dimensional organization of the ground but actually deeply three dimensional configurations that go really deep, about 2,000 feet deep, it's kind of really incredible how complex and artificial all of this is becoming. And then if you look at server farms, so we've now talked about the natural things. But then the unnatural things that are also forced into the countryside, you could say, or choosing to be in the countryside, is phenomenal, such as this.
Scale 19:04
James Turrell,Walter De Maria, Smithson, Michael Heizerらのランドアート。それらが、今カントリーサイドで起きている開発のスケール感。
Now I want to do a kind of parenthesis because what I can see happening is that perhaps the only way in which to look at this phenomenon of high organization in the countryside is to look at the kind of history of Land Art. And that is maybe a weird leap of my imagination. But if I look at the kind of plants, there's a strong resonance with, for instance, the Spiral Jetty of Smithson in the 70s, or the Lightning Field of Walter De Maria. Of course, you don't see any traces, but it also had a kind of similar desire for establishing order in the seemingly natural. James Turrell, and maybe most architecturally, that Michael Heizer, in Nevada, who has been kind of really trying to find analogues of urban conditions that have really phenomenal scale. And both in terms of scale and even in terms of aesthetics, it's striking to me how similar these are to what are currently emerging realities.
カリフォルニアとネバダの境。ネバダでは税がかからないので、シリコンバレーの副次的な産物としての巨大なデータ倉庫が建ち並ぶ。それらは、オフィスや人間の介入から離れていて、想像できないほど大きい。
I was recently on the border of California and Nevada. As you know, in California, you pay taxes. And in Nevada, you don't. So that many of the infrastructural needs for Silicon Valley are, apart from office space and human interaction, are now organized in this neighborhood as a kind of invisible complement. And I would say that there is a new aesthetic emerging there that I'd like to introduce to you as perhaps significant. This is the kind of situation in '94. This is the situation in 2015, so 20 years later. And what you see is the proliferation of rectangles that have a tendency to become kind of increasingly large. And what I would say is perhaps the most important quality of this urbanization is that it is becoming an urbanization almost without people. And I think that that has never before been kind of possible to really think about that urbanisation actually seemed to be the essence of the human endeavor but that what we're witnessing here is perhaps more robotic or a more machine-like existence that doesn't need us, but that we need very intensely, and that we depend on, even though it doesn't depend on us. So these are warehouses but also server farms. The scale is almost unimaginable. This is 1,500 feet (=457m). And I would here say, if this is the history of land art in terms of scale, this is the history of these kinds of boxes, with the currently largest building ever attempted by man being prepared.
And as I hinted, I think there is an implication for architecture of these and perhaps Frank Gerry’s Facebook is the first one, to his credit, to explore that condition. And I want to show you, for instance, this is colossal factory, of course, covered in solar panels and surrounded by wind farms. But again, an incredibly intense piece of architecture but without almost any need for inhabitation. I wanted to going to show you [? supernet ?] constructions in Nevada. And sorry for the speed. And obviously, this is not a very intellectual, well-argued kind of presentation. And the transformation of architecture that this kind of building announces is what I would like to explore in the Harvard studio that we will organize now-- is this kind of building.
このような建築をどのように語るか。ヒューマンスケールの欠如。
「誰も想像しなかっただろう。ここまで根本的・抽象的で私たちとかけ離れた建築が存在し、それが私たちによって作り出され、そして必要とされていることを。」
What is this kind of building? What are its properties? How does it work? And how do we relate to it? This is the interior. And when I say this, is that this is an architecture that nobody is prepared for. I think that none of us have thought that the a building could be this radical, perhaps, first, this extremely abstract, this codified, this uninflected by human need, this distant from us, and, nevertheless, kind of produced by us, and needed for us. So what I find very interesting-- life in this building, do you call it life, or do you call it process, or do you call it-- and so what are we, as a profession, kind of doing with this kind of environment? So here you see kind of some other images, all highly regimented and organized with kind of very few and occasional kind of signs of human scale, such as this one.
Obviously, not intended to facilitate communication and with a kind of occasional architectural articulation of the main ingredients. And here, you see the grimness, weird kind of combination of grimness and a kind of '60s frivolities in the color. I really am deeply ignorant of this kind of thing. And I hope that by the end of our activity, we will understand why this column is red, and the floor is red, and not green because, presumably, there is a reason. So here, some kind of human work in it. And therefore, inside the kind of [inaudible] casual.
That is the kind of human counterpart of those environments. So what I think this is announces, and you can see not only in America, not only here, but also Singapore, for instance, in the industrial part of Singapore, the emergence of an urbanism which is kind of basically really based on these containers that presume some kind of urban public space because it's not all building. But there is space between the buildings. And that somehow has to be either maintained or is there for the convenience, I guess, of barely extant population. So how do you conceive that kind of space? How do you conceive buildings that are extremely demanding and kind of highly technological but barely inhabited and still based on human control to some extent? And still needing some percentage of human presence? I think that if you would kind of, for instance, look at a portion of the [inaudible] in this kind of environment. It's kind of probably less than 1/100 of a percent of the total surface that would then be kind of dedicated to human happiness, or human intercourse, or human comfort.
New Repertoire 28:02
この新しい状況を冒険するのは、とても重要でエキサイティングだと思う。二十世紀の問題の一つに、新しいものを形作る必要以上に、新しいものを形作りたいという欲望が勝ってしまったことがある。その結果、多くの場合、新しいものは実際的ではなく象徴的なものになってしまった。しかし、いま私たちは真に新しい局面にいて新たなレパートリーについて考える必要がある。
And for me, I find it kind of really important but also exciting to begin to explore what kind of new conditions and what kind of new possibilities that offers for us-- not only in kind of choosing colors but also in conceptualizing the new because I think that one of the kind of problems of the 20th century has been a desire to shape the new that exceeded the need to shape the new. And therefore the new became a kind rather symbolic enterprise than a kind of real enterprise, in many cases. But I think we're now confronted, genuinely, with an entirely new situation. And therefore, the need to invent or think about a new repertoire.
So my underlying thesis is that we're facing a kind of situation where, to be happy, and to be human, we are kind of whimsical in cities and increasingly unconcerned with need and increasingly preoccupied with fun, or pleasure, or interaction. And that we can only do that at the expense of, or as a kind of counterweight, to an enormous hyper-Cartesian organization of the rest of the world. And so I think we are clearly all kind of stuck here. But I have an intuition that it might be actually deeply exciting and probably also deeply worrying and kind of highly agonizing to begin to think about this.
都市における、捉え難い要素。
This is a kind of typical graph that we see. OK, the rural population is decreasing, and the urban population is increasing. But I predict that, actually, this red territory, will offer much more kind of surprising conditions than this blatant-- one increases, the other decreases. Because in order to maintain this declining countryside, I think some of this population will share, perhaps, both urban and rural presence. And if you look, for instance, at the world population, you see that kind of basically 50% is urban, is employees. Very few are left as farmers. But there is this whole wide category that is currently quite hard to define, or hard to know.
ここが建築が文化人類学や社会学と真剣に結びつかなくてはいけないところだ。田舎と同時に都市も、半廃墟化していく。閉ざされている。
And that's where I think that architecture has to connect itself seriously with anthropology and sociology to begin to understand what is happening here in its own. Or this [? shot ?]. So this ambiguity of population I think you can already begin to see it. This house of the agonized hedonist in Switzerland, and this apartment in this view of Dubai probably have something in common that they look both abandoned, or at least, at large part of the year, they are abandoned, that are only occasionally inhabited. And I think that one of the effects of this transformation of the countryside is that the state of semi-abandonment will begin to categorize much of the countryside, as it already does, but also much of the city because there is a kind of shuttling.
ニューヨークにおいても、同様な現象が起きている。建物の多くの部分が空いている。
And if you look at New York, you can see a very similar phenomenon already happening. Kind of buildings that are incredibly intense, but the largest part of the year, empty. I actually could stop here.
(この後、移民問題に話が移りますが、「ここで終われる」とレムも言っていますので、割愛します)
-以上-
展望
今回を含む数回で、OFFICE KGDVSの「中身のない建築」を読み解こうと、いくつかのテキスト/講義を雑訳・要約してきました。レムのランドアートを参照する姿勢や、無人化が都市においても起こっているという指摘は、「中身のない建築」を考えるにあたって示唆的です。ただし、こうした地方への関心に対する、パトリック・シューマッハ(ザハ・ハディド・アーキテクツのパートナー)による批判「田舎に時間を費やすな」などもおさえながら、都市-地方の対立軸を超えて理解する必要があります。次回は、今回までの数回をまとめる予定です。