Thesis Positioning Statement #4
Because cultural identity is tied up in the mechanism of cultural production, control of those mechanisms is a hotly contested battleground. Those who are able to garner power over the way our representations of space are generated, are in turn able to manage our broader cultural identities. Because how we identify ourselves in turn affects basically any daily decision process we make (our behavioural patterns, consumer patterns, voting strategies, commitment to education, family roles etc.) the importance for a benign presence driving these processes cannot be stressed more highly.
One vehicle of cultural production that plays an important role in our cultural identity is information. In all its guises, information is a closely guarded thing. Most information reaches the general population through the highly filtered lense of the media, or through strategised PR teams. This only gives us a part of the picture and will very quickly begin to alter the way we see our environment, and, by extension, the way we see ourselves in that environment.
Recently, organisations have sought to redistribute the structure of the information landscape into a more democratic model. Wikileaks has made numerous enemies, both governmental and corporate, by publishing wholesale undoctered documents and communiqués. Their commitment to transparency stems from a journalistic promise to reveal the truth. Slight more nefarious are the grey-hat hacking groups LulzSec and Anonymous. Their online vigilantism presents the sensitive information of companies that they feel have wandered outside the normal moral and legal conventions. Although one group relies on whistleblowers, and the other on hacking (both legally sensitive activities) both groups are striving to democratise the information landscape. The future surely holds greater standards of transparency, as these groups shift public expectations and promote greater levels of accountability for corruption and ill deeds.
Translating this idea of transparency into architecture is a tricky and rare thing. Most often, architecture strives for control by muddying the flow of information, or ensuring it flows in only one direction. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a prime example of this. But there are some instances where architecture serves to democratise information.
Materially, glass is a very useful part of the architectural palette for this. The transparency creates visual links which can then be used to process information. There are many cases where this has been used, but none more effectively than the Manchester Civil Justice Centre, by Denton Corker Marshall. Here, a deliberate attempt to convey transparency in the legal system was translated into design decisions.
The largest courthouse to be built in Britain since the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 1882. It is a huge building, at 15 levels high and overshadows the rest of the Manchester urban landscape. It combats its daunting presence by replacing the entire middle section of east façade with a curtain glass wall and capping each end with protruding glass rectangular boxes, which also contain law courts. This is not simply a strategy employed to ‘pretty up’ the building, but holds serious conceptual connections to the city, and considers this in the relation to the function of the building. The glass façade signals and literally displays the accessibility of the law courts, demystifying the legal process and making connections with the city of Manchester. By allowing information to pass two ways through the boundary condition of the law courts, they have democratised the information flow, and created greater understanding in the broader community.
Another significant building for the promotion of transparency is the approved proposal for the New US Embassy in London, by KieranTimberlake. This is a project surrounded in local controversy mainly because of the intrusive security arrangements at the current site in Belgravia. The architects have an interesting problematic – in the firm’s own words “what an embassy aspires to be and what present realities dictate it must do.”
Their solution is to promote the accessibility of the public to deep within the realms of the embassy. Progressively secure zones enable visitors to gain an insight into the inner workings of the building, relax in the grounds and mingle with embassy employees. The proposal begins with an urban park, open to all, designed in the English tradition, but with typical US trees. The landscape spirals around using grading, walks and landscaping and sweeps into the entry court that then opens into the main lobby. The garden continues into “the great arc of the Consular Garden” and up into a second lobby, providing vistas over the Thames and London. You then continue to rise up around the open core, all the while able to survey the interior space below. It is only here that the first security barrier is seen; a significant moment considering how deep into the building this takes place. The necessarily separate worlds of embassy visitor and staff visually intermingle for just a moment.
The significance of this strategy must not be overlooked considering the high security around most (US) embassies around the world. A tactic that, given the global political turmoil, must take on added resonance. It certainly points to a new strategy with regards to how the US Government wishes to be viewed abroad. The employment of strategies of transparency is clearly a deliberate political gesture both to proclaim the ambitions of US democracy as being transparent, open and equal, and also as a gesture of goodwill to Londoners who for nearly ten years have been severely restricted in their access around the current site.
The two case studies clearly show how strategies of transparency can be implemented for extremely large institutions. Both are figurehead icons that are intended to not only function programmatically, but also to act as a vehicle to communicate an ideal.
Are these kinds of strategies limited to large-scale institutions? What other situations could benefit from this kind of tactic?
