Mobility: A Room With A View

Rating:
Summary: THE NEW PICTURESQUE
Review: Mobility & The First Architecture Biennale In Rotterdam.
Take a look at any major city or small village today, and you'll find that road building dominates the view from any moving vehicle. Highways, flyovers, tunnels, off ramps and airports are clearly indicating a new form of urban re-organization that is currently taking place everywhere.

Mirroring Norman Bel Geddes Futurama Exhibition (Highways & Horizons) at the 1939 World Fair in New York, the First Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam is a city wide attempt to understand how mobility and its infrastructure are radically transforming everyday life. As a record of the Biennale and the symposium held at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in the Spring 2003, Mobility: A Room with a View is organized as a research project to find new meaning in the generic aspects of modern infrastructure and the local conditions of urban ommunities. The purpose of the book daylights one of the most marginalized space in the history of the twentieth century: the street. Void of nostalgic intention, co-editors Houben & Calabrese collect the work of over 25 academic research projects completed over the past year to build the foundation of a new spatial order that situates itself somewhere between the circumstances of congestion, traffic and sprawl. Professor of Mobility & Urbanism at TU Delft and trained at IUAV in Italy, Luisa Maria Calabrese delivers a sweeping historical survey of postwar architectural visions in the first part of the book that by and large sets up the polemic of the Biennale. As a strategy, Calabrese appropriates past and present realities to inflect the possible outcome of a more immediate, more satisfying future. Debunking the myth of scenic highways, the second part of the book World Avenue visualizes new roadway conditions in 10 different cities while privileging the emergent, the odd and the curious. The final part of the book draws a historical cross-section through the past one hundred years of highway construction in North America and Europe. From Haussmann to Hitler, the historiographic detour exposes hidden paradoxes and contradictions that have led in part to the explosion of modern highway infrastructure.

The First Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam emerges at a critical time for the fields of design: a period where the role of the architect has been relinquished to that of interior decorator or cosmetic surgeon, Calabrese & Houben position architects as influential leaders in the field of urbanism through the paradigm of mobility. Despite the worldwide interiorization of urban living, the editors' visions opens up a new horizon focused on the road as most latent alternative in the city today. Street culture as we know it, is probably more vibrant and more relevant that ever before.

The Rotterdam Architecture Biennale ran from May 1 to September 1, 2003 at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (www.1ab.nl). The exhibition included urban research (World Avenue) projects from Beirut, Jakarta, and Los Angeles as well as design projects (Holland Avenue) from selected universities including Columbia, Berkeley and Toronto. Mobility: A Room with a View (NAI Publishers, 2003) is edited by Francine Houben and Maria Luisa Calabrese with contributions from Jan Van Adrichem, Joerg Retikke, Pierre Bélanger, Odile Odecq and Paul Meurs.