Sebagai awal teori teritori yang digunakan dalam desain ruang publik, pertama kali teori dikembangkan oleh Altman seorang pakar masalah perilaku. Awalnya dia mengembangkan teori ”Behaviour Constraint ” atau yang biasa disebut dengan teori hambatan perilaku. Premis asar teori ini adalah stimulasi yang berlebih atau yang tidak diinginkan, mendorong terjadinya arousal atau hambatan dalam kapasitas pemrosesan informasi. Akibatnya seseorang atau kelompok merasa kehilangan kontrol terhadap situasi yang sedang terjadi. Hal tersebut menjadi awal terbentuknya teori dan konsep teritori pada desain lingkungan.
Selanjutnya menurut Altman ( dalam gifford. 1987), bahwa privasi merupakan konsep yang terdiri dari tiga dimensi :
•Pertama : privasi merupakan proses pengontrolan boundary, artinya pelanggaran terhadap boundary ini merupakan sebuah pelanggaran.
•Kedua : Privasi dilakukan dalam upaya memperoleh optimalisasi, artinya seseorang atu kelompok yang memisahkan diri dari orang lain atau keramaian bukan untuk menghindar, tetapi lebih merupakan suatu kebutuhan untuk mencapai kebutuhan tertentu.
•Ketiga ; Privasi merupakan proses multi mekanisme, artinya ada banyak cara orang melakukan privasi baik melalui ruang personal, teritorial, komunikasi verbal dan non verbal.
Teritori merupakan suatu pembentukan wilayah untuk mencapai privasi yang optimal yang diupayakan dengan menyusun kembali setting fisik atau pindah kewilayah lain.
… a territory is a delimited space that a person or a group uses and defends as an exclusive preserve. It involves psychological identification with a place, symbolizedby attitudes of possessiveness and arrangement of objects in the area…. Lebih lanjut Irwin Altman menyatakan bahwa :
… Territorial behaviour is a self-other boundary regulation mechanism that involves personalization of or marking a place or object and communication that it is owned by a person or group.
Definisi diatas menyatakan karakter dasar dari suatu teritori yaitu tentang
1.Kepemilikan dan tatanan tempat.
2.Personalisasi atau penandaan wilayah.
3.Taturan atau tatanan untuk mempertahankan terhadap gangguan
4.Kemampuan berfungsi yang meliputi jangkauan kebutuhan fisik dasar sampai kepuasan kognitif dan kebutuhan aesthetic
Berdasar teorisasi tersebut diletakkan dasar pengertian sekaligus batasan definisi tentang tempat privat dan tempat public Place pada pernyataan di atas menunjuk pada ruang dalam konteks perilaku lingkungan yang dinyatakan dengan adanya batas fisik yang dibangun melingkupi suatu ruang ( terkadang dengan tujuan untuk membatasi gerak, pandangan atau suara ). Ruang juga ditandai (sebagai batasan) oleh perilaku organisme yang diwadahinya. Pertahanan atas serangan terhadap territorial hendaknya tidak dibaca secara harfiah. Karakter perilaku keruangan dalam suatu ruangan bisa sangat beragam namun ada satu kesamaan mendasar yang disebut ‘teritoriality’.
Manusia berakal mendudukkan teritory sebagai wilayah kekuasaan dan pemilikan yang merupakan organisasi informasi yang berkaitan dengan identitas kelompok.( sebagai contoh adalah pernyataan ‘apa yang kita punya’ dan ‘apa yang mereka punya’).
Irwin Altman (1975) membagi teritori menjadi tiga kategori dikaitkan dengan keterlibatan personal, involvement, kedekatan dengan kehidupan sehari hari individu atau kelompok dan frekuensi penggunaan.
Tiga kategori tersebut adalah primary,secondary dan public territory.
1.Primary territory, adalah suatu area yang dimiliki, digunakan secara eksklusif, disadari oleh orang lain, dikendalikan secara permanen, serta menjadi bagian utama dalam kegiatan sehari-hari penghuninya.
2. Secondary territory, adalah suatu area yang tidak terlalu digunakan secara eksklusif oleh seseorang atau sdekelompok orang mempunyai cakupan area yang relatif luas, dikendalikan secara berkala.
3.Public territory, adalah suatu area yang digunakan dan dapat diamsuki oleh siapapun akan tetapi ia harus mematuhi norma-norma serta aturan yang berlaku di area tersebut.
Ketiga kategori tersebut sangat spesifik dikaitkan dengan kekhasan aspek kultur masyarakatnya. Kalau merujuk pada batasan diatas maka yang disebut dengan tempat privat adalah setara dengan primary teritory sedangkan tempat publik setara dengan public territory.
Dalam terminologi perilaku , hal diatas berkaitan dengan apa yang disebut sebagai privacy manusia. Seperti yang dinyatakan oleh Edney (1976). Type dan derajat privacy tergantung pola perilaku dalam konteks budaya, dalam kepribadiannya serta aspirasi individu tersebut.
Penggunaan dinding, screen, pembatas simbolik dan pembatas teritory nyata, juga jarak merupakan mekanisme untuk menunjukkan privacy.
Model dinamis privacy tergambar dalam diagram :
Konsep privasi dan teritorial memang terkait erat. Namun definisi privasi lebih ditekankan pada kemampuan individu atau kelompok untuk mengkontrol daya visual, auditory, dan olfactory dalam berinteraksi dengan sesamanya. Dalam arti konsep privacy menempatkan manusia sebagai subyeknya bukan tempat /place yang menjadi subyeknya
Tiap individu mempunyai perbedaan perilaku keruangannya. Perbedaan ini merefleksikan perbedaan pengalaman yang dialami dalam pengelolaan perilaku keruangan sehubungan dengan fungsinya sebagai daya proteksi dan daya komunikasi. Yang menyebabkan perbedaan tanggapan ini antara lain jenis kelamin, daya juang, budaya, ego state, status sosial, lingkungan, dan derajat kekerabatan (affinity) sebagai sub system perilaku. Lebih jauh hal ini akan menentukan kualitas dan keluasan personal space yang dimiliki tiap individu ( disamping tentu saja
adanya pengaruh schemata, afeksi, perilaku nyata, pilihan tiap individu).
Seperti yang telah dikemukan, bahwa pada konsep pendekatan perilaku dalam desain ruang publik, teritorialitas merupakan hal yang sangat mempengaruhi perilaku pada ruang publik, karena pembentukan teritori yang lebih luas dari individu atau kelompok akan menyangkut pula pada hak teritorial individu atau kelompok lainnya. Hal tersebut sering kali membuat terjadinya masalah diruang publik, hingga dalam desain ruang publik harus betul-betul memperhatikan dan menekankan desain pada perilaku teritoirlitas.
Teritori interaksi ditujukan untuk sebuah daerah yang secara temporer dikendalikan oleh sekelompok orang yang berinteraksi. Sementara teritori badan dibatasi oleh badan manusia namun berbeda dengan ruang personal yang batasnya bukanlah ruang maya melainkan kulit manusia.
1.Pelanggaran dan pertahanan teritori
Bentuk pelanggaran teritori dapat diindikasikan adalah sebagai suatu invasi ruang. Secara fisik seseorang memasuki teritori orang lain biasanya dengan maksud mengambil kendali atas teritori tersebut.
Bentuk kedua adalah kekerasan sebagai sebuah bentuk pelanggaran yang bersifat temporer atas teritori orang lain, biasanya hal ini bukan untuk menguasai teritori orang lain melainkan suatu bentuk gangguan, seperti gangguan terhadap fasilitas publik.
Bentuk ketiga adalah kontaminasi, yaitu seseorang mengganggu teritori orang lain dengan meninggalkan sesuatu yang tidak menyenangkan seperti sampah, coretan atau merusaknya.
Pertahanan yang dapat dilakukan untuk mencegah pelanggaran teritori antara lain; 1) Pencegahan seperti memberi lapisan pelindung, memberi rambu-rambu atau pagar batas sebagai antisipasi terhadap bentuk pelanggaran.2) Reaksi sebagai respon terhadap terjadinya pelanggaran, seprti menindak si pelanggar.
2.Pengaruh pada teritorialitas.
Beberapa faktor yang mempengaruhi keanekaan teritori adalah karakteristik personal seseorang, perbedaan situasional dan faktor budaya.
a). Faktor Personal
Faktor personal yang mempengaruhi karakteristik seseorang yaitu jenis kelamin, usia dan kepribadian yang diyakini mempunyai pengaruh terhadap sikap teritorialitas.
b). Faktor Situasi
Perbedaan situasi berpengaruh pada teritorialitas, ada dua aspek situasi yaitu tatanan fisik dan sosial budaya yang mempunyai peran dalam menentukan sikap teritorialitas.
c). Faktor budaya
Faktor budaya mempengaruhi sikap teritorialitas. Secara budaya terdapat perbedaan sikap teritori hal ini dilatar belakangi oleh budaya seseorang yang sangat beragam. Apabila seseorang mengunjungi ruang publik yang jauh berada diluar kultur budayanya pasti akan sangat berbeda sikap teritorinya. Sebagai contoh seorang Eropa datang dan berkunjung ke Asia dan dia melakukan interaksi sosial di ruang publik negara yang dikunjungi, ini akan sangat berbeda sikap teritorinya.
3.Teritorialitas dan agresi
Salah satu aspek yang paling menarik dari teritorialitas adalah hubungan antara teritori dan agresi. Walaupun tidak selalu disadari, teritori berfungsi sebagai pemucu agresi dan sekaligus sebagai stabilisator untuk mencegah terjadinya agresi. Salah satu faktor yang mempengaruhi hubungan antara teritorialitas dan agresi adalah status dari teritori tertentu ( apakah teritori tersebut belum terbentuk secara nyata atau dalam perebutan, atau sudah tertata dengan baik ). Ketika teritori belum terbentuk secara nyata, atau masih dalam perebutan agresi lebih sering terjadi.
Apa akibatnya jika terjadi invasi teritori ?, Altman (1975), mengatakan bahwa atribusi yang kita pergunakan untuk menilai suatu tindakan akan menentukan respon terhadap invasi teritori tersebut hingga kita hanya akan merasakan suatu tindakan agresi pada saat kita merasakan tidak orang lain yang kita anggap mengancam. Kemudian secara umum kita memakai respon verbal, kemudian memakai cara-cara fisik seperti memasang papan atau tanda peringatan.
Teritorialitas berfungsi sebagai proses sentral dalam personalisasi, agresi, dominasi, koordinasi dan kontrol.
a). Personalisasi dan penandaan.
Personalisasi dan penandaan seperti memberi nama, tanda atau menempatkan di lokasi strategis, bisa terjadi tanpa kesadaran teritorialitas. Seperti membuat pagar batas, memberi nama kepemilikan. Penandaan juga dipakai untuk mempertahankan haknya di teritori publik, seperti kursi di ruang publik atau naungan.
b). Agresi.
Pertahanan dengan kekerasan yang dilakukan seseorang akan semakin keras bila terjadi pelanggaran di teritori primernya dibandingkan dengan pelanggaran yang terjadi diruang publik. Agresi bisa terjadi disebabkan karena batas teritori tidak jelas.
c). Dominasi dan Kontrol.
Dominasi dan kontrol umumnya banyak terjadi di teritori primer. Kemampuan suatu tatanan ruang untuk menawarkan privasi melalui kontrol teritori menjadi penting.
4.Teritori sebagai perisai perlindungan.
Banyak individu atau kelompok rela melakukan tindakan agresi demi melindungi teritorinya, maka kelihatannya teritori tersebut memiliki beberapa keuntungan atau hal yang dianggap penting. Kebenaran dari kalimat ” Home Sweet Home”, telah diuji dalam berbagai eksperimen. Penelitian mengenai teritori primer, skunder, dan publik menunjukkan, bahwa orang cenderung merasa memiliki kontrol terbesar pada teritori primer, dibanding dengan teritori sekunder maupun teritori publik. Ketika individu mempresepsikan daerah teritorinya sebagai daerah kekuasaannya, itu berarti mempunyai kemungkinan untuk mencegah segala kondisi ketidak nyamanan terhadap teritorinya.
Seringkali desain ruang publik tidak memperhatikan kebutuhan penghuninya untuk memanfaatkan teritori yang dimilikinya.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
PENGARUH TIMBAL BALIK PERILAKU DAN RUANG
Perilaku manusia dalam hubungannya terhadap suatu setting fisik berlangsung dan konsisten sesuai waktu dan situasi. Karenanya pola perilaku yang khas untuk setting fisik tersebut dapat diidentifikasikan.
Dari data yang didapat pada riset perilaku tidak dimaksudkan bahwa asumsi itu hanya sebagian benar, tapi yang lebih penting adalah keyakinan bahwa hal tersebut menyederhanakan pengertian hubungan antara perilaku manusia dan setting fisiknya. Kita dapat menyaksikan bahwa kamar tidur itu secara tetap digunakan untuk bersosial dan makan selain hanya untuk tidur. Ruang makan tidak hanya untuk makan tapi juga untuk membentuk pola berinteraksi sosial.
hubungan antara stimuli dan terjadinya sikap sebagaimana diterangkan di atas dalam diagram berikut :
Hal ini membawa J.B. Watson (1878-1958) memandang psikologi sebagai ilmu yang mempelajari tentang perilaku karena perilaku dianggap lebih mudah diamati, dicatat, dan diukur. Perilaku mencakup perilaku yang kasatmata seperti makan, menangis, memasak, melihat, bekerja, dan Perilaku yang tidak kasatmata, seperti fantasi, motivasi, dan proses yang terjadi pada waktu seseorang diam atau secara fisik tidak bergerak.
Sebagai objek studi empiris, perilaku mempunyai ciri-ciri sebagai berikut.
a.Perilaku itu sendiri kasat mata, tetapi penyebab terjadinya perilaku secara langsung mungkin tidak dapat diamati.
b.Perilaku mengenal berbagai tingkatan, yaitu perilaku sederhana dan stereotip, perilaku kompleks seperti perilaku sosial manusia, perilaku sederhana seperti refleks, tetapi ada juga yang melibatkan proses mental biologis yang lebih tinggi.
c.Perilaku bervariasi klasifikasi : kognitif, afektif dan psikomotorik yang menunjuk pada sifat rasional, emosional dan gerakan fisik dalam berperilaku.
d.Perilaku bisa disadari dan juga tidak di sadari.
Dalam perjalanan perkembangan ilmu perilaku-lingkungan ini banyak dilakukan penelitian dan pengembangan teori. Akan tetapi, tidak ada satu pun teori yang dianggap dapat menjawab semua permasalahan dalam psikologi lingkungan. Berbagai model ditawarkan untuk menggambarkan kompleksitas hubungan manusia dengan lingkungannya. Salah satu model tersebut sebagai berikut .
D. Konsep Perilaku pada Ruang Publik
Each human being is unique, unprecented, un repeatable. The species homo sapiens can be described in lifeless words of physics and chemistry, but not the man of flesh and bone. We recognize him as unique person by voice, his facial expressions. And the way he walks and even more by his creative respons to surroundings and events. Dubois, 1968
Manusia mempunyai keunikan tersendiri, keunikan yang dimiliki setiap individu akan mempengaruhi lingkungan sekitarnya. Sebaliknya, keunikan lingkungan juga mempengaruhi perilakunya. Karena lingkungan bukan hanya menjadi wadah bagi manusia untuk ber aktivitas, tetapi juga menjadi bagian integral dari pola perilaku manusia.
Proses dan pola perilaku manusia di kelompokkan menjadi dua bagian, yaitu : Proses Individual dan Proses Sosial
1.Proses Individual
Dalam hal ini proses psikologis manusia tidak terlepas dari proses tersebut.
Pada proses individu meliputi beberapa hal :
a.Persepsi Lingkungan, yaitu proses bagaimana manusia menerima informasi mengenai lingkungan sekitarnya dan bagaimana informasi mengenai ruang fisik tersebut di organisasikan kedalam pikiran manusia.
b.Kognisi Spasial, yaitu keragaman proses berpikir selanjutnya, mengorganisasikan, menyimpan dan mengingat kembali informasi mengenai lokasi, jarak dan tatanannya.
c. Perilaku Spasial, menunjukan hasil yang termanifestasikan dalam tindakan respon seseorang, termasuk deskripsi dan preferensi personal, respon emosional, ataupun evaluasi kecenderungan perilaku yang muncul dalam interaksi manusia dengan lingkungan fisiknya.
Proses Individual mengacu pada skema pendekatan perilaku yang menggambarkan hubungan antara lingkungan dan perilaku individu
Skema : Proses Perilaku Individual
1). Perilaku Manusia dan Lingkungan
Perilaku manusia akan mempengaruhi dan membentuk setting fisik lingkungannya Rapoport, A, 1986, Pengaruh lingkungan terhadap tingkah laku dapat dikelompokkan menjadi 3 yaitu :
a)Environmemntal Determinism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan menentukan tingkah laku masyarakat di tempat tersebut.
b)Enviromental Posibilism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan fisik dapat memberikan kesempatan atau hambatan terhadap tingkah laku masyarakat.
c)Enviromental probabilism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan memberikan pilihan-pilihan yang berbeda bagi tingkah laku masyarakat.
Pendekatan Perilaku, menekankan pada keterkaitan yang ekletik antara ruang dengan manusia dan masyarakat yang memanfaatkan ruang atau menghuni ruang tersebut. Dengan kata lain pendekatan ini melihat aspek norma, kultur, masyarakat yang berbeda akan menghasilkan konsep dan wujud ruang yang berbeda (Rapoport. A, 1969 ),adanya interaksi antara manusia dan ruang, maka pendekatannya cenderung menggunakan setting dari pada ruang. Istilah seting lebih memberikan penekanan pada unsur-unsur kegiatan manusia yang mengandung empat hal yaitu : Pelaku, Macam kegiatan, tempat dan waktu berlangsungnya kegiatan. Menurut Rapoport pula, kegiatan dapat terdiri dari sub-sub kegiatan yang saling berhubungan sehingga terbentuk sistem kegiatan.
2). Setting Perilaku ( Behaviour Setting )
Behaviour setting merupakan interaksi antara suatu kegiatan dengan tempat yang lebih spesifik. Behaviour setting mengandung unsur-unsur sekelompok orang yang melakukan kegiatan, tempat dimana kegiatan tersebut dilakukan dan waktu spesifik saat kegiatan dilakukan.
Setting perilaku terdiri dari 2 macam yaitu :
a)System of setting ( sistem tempat atau ruang), sebagai rangkaian unsur-unsur fisik atau spasial yang mempunyai hubungan tertentu dan terkait hingga dapat dipakai untuk suatu kegiatan tertentu.
b)System of activity ( sistem kegiatan), sebagai suatu rangkaian perilaku yang secara sengaja dilakukan oleh satu atau beberapa orang.
Dari pengertian tersebut dapat ditegaskan bahwa unsur ruang atau beberapa kegiatan, terdapat suatu struktur atau rangkaian yang menjadikan suatu kegiatan dan pelakunya mempunyai makna.
Pada berbagai pendapat dikatakan bahwa desain Behavior Setting yang baik dan tepat adalah yang sesuai dengan struktur perilaku penggunanya. Dalam desain arsitektur hal tersebut disebut sebagai sebuah proses argumentatif yang dilontarkan dalam membuat desain yang dapat diadaptasikan, Fleksibel atau terbuka terhadap pengguna berdasarkan pola perilakunya.
Edward Hall ( dalam Laurens, 2004 ) mengidentifikasi tiga tipe dasar dalam pola ruang :
Ruang Berbatas Tetap (Fixed-Feature Space),ruang berbatas tetap dilingkupi oleh pembatas yang relatif tetap dan tidak mudah digeser, seperti dinding masif, jendela, pintu atau lantai. Ruang Berbatas SemiTetap ( SemiFixed- Feature Space),ruang yang pembatas nya bisa berpindah, seperti ruang-ruang pameran yang dibatasi oleh partisi yang dapat dipindahkan ketika dibutuhkan menurut setting perilaku yang berbeda. Ruang Informal,ruang yang terbentuk hanya untuk waktu singkat, seperti ruang yang terbentuk kedua orang atau lebih berkumpul. Ruang ini tidak tetap dan terjadi diluar kesadaran.
Desain behavior setting tidak selalu perlu dibentuk ruang-ruang tetap, baik yang ber pembatas maupun semi tetap terlebih lagi dalam desain ruang publik yang di dalamnya terdapat banyak pola perilaku yang beraneka ragam.
Konsep sistem aktivitas dan behaviour setting memberi dasar yang luas dalam mempertimbangkan lingkungan daripada semata-mata tata guna lahan, tipe bangunan, dan tipe ruangan secara fisik. Hal tersebut dapat membebaskan desain ruang publik dari bentuk-bentuk klise, bentuk-bentuk prototip atau memaksakan citra yang tidak sesuai dengan pola perilaku masyarakat penggunanya.
Pengamatan behaviour setting dapat digunakan dalam desain ruang publik karena dapat mengerti preferensi pengguna yang diekspresikan dalam pola perilaku pengguna. Dari pembahasan ini jelas bahwa organisasi ruang pada ruang publik dan perilaku pengguna mempunyai peran yang sangat penting dalam suatu behavior setting
2.Proses Sosial
Manusia mempunyai kepribadian individual, tetapi manusia juga merupakan makhluk sosial hidup dalam masyarakat dalam suatu kolektivitas. Dalam memenuhi kebutuhan sosialnya manusia berperilaku sosial dalam lingkungannya dapat diamati pada , Fenomena perilaku-lingkungan, kelompok pemakai, dan tempat berlangsungnya kegiatan.
Pada proses sosial, perilaku interpersonal manusia meliputi hal-hal sebagai berikut :
a.Ruang Personal ( Personal Space ) berupa domain kecil sejauh jangkauan manusia.
b.Teritorialitas yaitu kecenderungan untuk menguasai daerah yang lebih luas bagi seseorang.
c.Kesesakan dan Kepadatan yaitu keadaan apabila ruang fisik yang tersedia terbatas.
d.Privasi sebagai usaha optimal pemenuhan kebutuhan sosial manusia.
Dalam proses sosial, perilaku interpersonal yang sangat berpengaruh pada perubahan ruang publik adalah teritorialitas.
Konsep teritori dalam studi arsitektur lingkungan dan perilaku yaitu adanya tuntutan manusia atas suatu area untuk memenuhi kebutuhan fisik, emosional dan kultural. Berkaitan dengan kebutuhan emosional ini maka konsep teritori berkaitan dengan ruang privat dan ruang publik. Ruang privat ( personal space) dapat menimbulkan crowding ( kesesakkan ) apabila seseorang atau kelompok sudah tidak mampu mempertahankan personal spacenya.
Dari data yang didapat pada riset perilaku tidak dimaksudkan bahwa asumsi itu hanya sebagian benar, tapi yang lebih penting adalah keyakinan bahwa hal tersebut menyederhanakan pengertian hubungan antara perilaku manusia dan setting fisiknya. Kita dapat menyaksikan bahwa kamar tidur itu secara tetap digunakan untuk bersosial dan makan selain hanya untuk tidur. Ruang makan tidak hanya untuk makan tapi juga untuk membentuk pola berinteraksi sosial.
hubungan antara stimuli dan terjadinya sikap sebagaimana diterangkan di atas dalam diagram berikut :
Hal ini membawa J.B. Watson (1878-1958) memandang psikologi sebagai ilmu yang mempelajari tentang perilaku karena perilaku dianggap lebih mudah diamati, dicatat, dan diukur. Perilaku mencakup perilaku yang kasatmata seperti makan, menangis, memasak, melihat, bekerja, dan Perilaku yang tidak kasatmata, seperti fantasi, motivasi, dan proses yang terjadi pada waktu seseorang diam atau secara fisik tidak bergerak.
Sebagai objek studi empiris, perilaku mempunyai ciri-ciri sebagai berikut.
a.Perilaku itu sendiri kasat mata, tetapi penyebab terjadinya perilaku secara langsung mungkin tidak dapat diamati.
b.Perilaku mengenal berbagai tingkatan, yaitu perilaku sederhana dan stereotip, perilaku kompleks seperti perilaku sosial manusia, perilaku sederhana seperti refleks, tetapi ada juga yang melibatkan proses mental biologis yang lebih tinggi.
c.Perilaku bervariasi klasifikasi : kognitif, afektif dan psikomotorik yang menunjuk pada sifat rasional, emosional dan gerakan fisik dalam berperilaku.
d.Perilaku bisa disadari dan juga tidak di sadari.
Dalam perjalanan perkembangan ilmu perilaku-lingkungan ini banyak dilakukan penelitian dan pengembangan teori. Akan tetapi, tidak ada satu pun teori yang dianggap dapat menjawab semua permasalahan dalam psikologi lingkungan. Berbagai model ditawarkan untuk menggambarkan kompleksitas hubungan manusia dengan lingkungannya. Salah satu model tersebut sebagai berikut .
D. Konsep Perilaku pada Ruang Publik
Each human being is unique, unprecented, un repeatable. The species homo sapiens can be described in lifeless words of physics and chemistry, but not the man of flesh and bone. We recognize him as unique person by voice, his facial expressions. And the way he walks and even more by his creative respons to surroundings and events. Dubois, 1968
Manusia mempunyai keunikan tersendiri, keunikan yang dimiliki setiap individu akan mempengaruhi lingkungan sekitarnya. Sebaliknya, keunikan lingkungan juga mempengaruhi perilakunya. Karena lingkungan bukan hanya menjadi wadah bagi manusia untuk ber aktivitas, tetapi juga menjadi bagian integral dari pola perilaku manusia.
Proses dan pola perilaku manusia di kelompokkan menjadi dua bagian, yaitu : Proses Individual dan Proses Sosial
1.Proses Individual
Dalam hal ini proses psikologis manusia tidak terlepas dari proses tersebut.
Pada proses individu meliputi beberapa hal :
a.Persepsi Lingkungan, yaitu proses bagaimana manusia menerima informasi mengenai lingkungan sekitarnya dan bagaimana informasi mengenai ruang fisik tersebut di organisasikan kedalam pikiran manusia.
b.Kognisi Spasial, yaitu keragaman proses berpikir selanjutnya, mengorganisasikan, menyimpan dan mengingat kembali informasi mengenai lokasi, jarak dan tatanannya.
c. Perilaku Spasial, menunjukan hasil yang termanifestasikan dalam tindakan respon seseorang, termasuk deskripsi dan preferensi personal, respon emosional, ataupun evaluasi kecenderungan perilaku yang muncul dalam interaksi manusia dengan lingkungan fisiknya.
Proses Individual mengacu pada skema pendekatan perilaku yang menggambarkan hubungan antara lingkungan dan perilaku individu
Skema : Proses Perilaku Individual
1). Perilaku Manusia dan Lingkungan
Perilaku manusia akan mempengaruhi dan membentuk setting fisik lingkungannya Rapoport, A, 1986, Pengaruh lingkungan terhadap tingkah laku dapat dikelompokkan menjadi 3 yaitu :
a)Environmemntal Determinism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan menentukan tingkah laku masyarakat di tempat tersebut.
b)Enviromental Posibilism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan fisik dapat memberikan kesempatan atau hambatan terhadap tingkah laku masyarakat.
c)Enviromental probabilism, menyatakan bahwa lingkungan memberikan pilihan-pilihan yang berbeda bagi tingkah laku masyarakat.
Pendekatan Perilaku, menekankan pada keterkaitan yang ekletik antara ruang dengan manusia dan masyarakat yang memanfaatkan ruang atau menghuni ruang tersebut. Dengan kata lain pendekatan ini melihat aspek norma, kultur, masyarakat yang berbeda akan menghasilkan konsep dan wujud ruang yang berbeda (Rapoport. A, 1969 ),adanya interaksi antara manusia dan ruang, maka pendekatannya cenderung menggunakan setting dari pada ruang. Istilah seting lebih memberikan penekanan pada unsur-unsur kegiatan manusia yang mengandung empat hal yaitu : Pelaku, Macam kegiatan, tempat dan waktu berlangsungnya kegiatan. Menurut Rapoport pula, kegiatan dapat terdiri dari sub-sub kegiatan yang saling berhubungan sehingga terbentuk sistem kegiatan.
2). Setting Perilaku ( Behaviour Setting )
Behaviour setting merupakan interaksi antara suatu kegiatan dengan tempat yang lebih spesifik. Behaviour setting mengandung unsur-unsur sekelompok orang yang melakukan kegiatan, tempat dimana kegiatan tersebut dilakukan dan waktu spesifik saat kegiatan dilakukan.
Setting perilaku terdiri dari 2 macam yaitu :
a)System of setting ( sistem tempat atau ruang), sebagai rangkaian unsur-unsur fisik atau spasial yang mempunyai hubungan tertentu dan terkait hingga dapat dipakai untuk suatu kegiatan tertentu.
b)System of activity ( sistem kegiatan), sebagai suatu rangkaian perilaku yang secara sengaja dilakukan oleh satu atau beberapa orang.
Dari pengertian tersebut dapat ditegaskan bahwa unsur ruang atau beberapa kegiatan, terdapat suatu struktur atau rangkaian yang menjadikan suatu kegiatan dan pelakunya mempunyai makna.
Pada berbagai pendapat dikatakan bahwa desain Behavior Setting yang baik dan tepat adalah yang sesuai dengan struktur perilaku penggunanya. Dalam desain arsitektur hal tersebut disebut sebagai sebuah proses argumentatif yang dilontarkan dalam membuat desain yang dapat diadaptasikan, Fleksibel atau terbuka terhadap pengguna berdasarkan pola perilakunya.
Edward Hall ( dalam Laurens, 2004 ) mengidentifikasi tiga tipe dasar dalam pola ruang :
Ruang Berbatas Tetap (Fixed-Feature Space),ruang berbatas tetap dilingkupi oleh pembatas yang relatif tetap dan tidak mudah digeser, seperti dinding masif, jendela, pintu atau lantai. Ruang Berbatas SemiTetap ( SemiFixed- Feature Space),ruang yang pembatas nya bisa berpindah, seperti ruang-ruang pameran yang dibatasi oleh partisi yang dapat dipindahkan ketika dibutuhkan menurut setting perilaku yang berbeda. Ruang Informal,ruang yang terbentuk hanya untuk waktu singkat, seperti ruang yang terbentuk kedua orang atau lebih berkumpul. Ruang ini tidak tetap dan terjadi diluar kesadaran.
Desain behavior setting tidak selalu perlu dibentuk ruang-ruang tetap, baik yang ber pembatas maupun semi tetap terlebih lagi dalam desain ruang publik yang di dalamnya terdapat banyak pola perilaku yang beraneka ragam.
Konsep sistem aktivitas dan behaviour setting memberi dasar yang luas dalam mempertimbangkan lingkungan daripada semata-mata tata guna lahan, tipe bangunan, dan tipe ruangan secara fisik. Hal tersebut dapat membebaskan desain ruang publik dari bentuk-bentuk klise, bentuk-bentuk prototip atau memaksakan citra yang tidak sesuai dengan pola perilaku masyarakat penggunanya.
Pengamatan behaviour setting dapat digunakan dalam desain ruang publik karena dapat mengerti preferensi pengguna yang diekspresikan dalam pola perilaku pengguna. Dari pembahasan ini jelas bahwa organisasi ruang pada ruang publik dan perilaku pengguna mempunyai peran yang sangat penting dalam suatu behavior setting
2.Proses Sosial
Manusia mempunyai kepribadian individual, tetapi manusia juga merupakan makhluk sosial hidup dalam masyarakat dalam suatu kolektivitas. Dalam memenuhi kebutuhan sosialnya manusia berperilaku sosial dalam lingkungannya dapat diamati pada , Fenomena perilaku-lingkungan, kelompok pemakai, dan tempat berlangsungnya kegiatan.
Pada proses sosial, perilaku interpersonal manusia meliputi hal-hal sebagai berikut :
a.Ruang Personal ( Personal Space ) berupa domain kecil sejauh jangkauan manusia.
b.Teritorialitas yaitu kecenderungan untuk menguasai daerah yang lebih luas bagi seseorang.
c.Kesesakan dan Kepadatan yaitu keadaan apabila ruang fisik yang tersedia terbatas.
d.Privasi sebagai usaha optimal pemenuhan kebutuhan sosial manusia.
Dalam proses sosial, perilaku interpersonal yang sangat berpengaruh pada perubahan ruang publik adalah teritorialitas.
Konsep teritori dalam studi arsitektur lingkungan dan perilaku yaitu adanya tuntutan manusia atas suatu area untuk memenuhi kebutuhan fisik, emosional dan kultural. Berkaitan dengan kebutuhan emosional ini maka konsep teritori berkaitan dengan ruang privat dan ruang publik. Ruang privat ( personal space) dapat menimbulkan crowding ( kesesakkan ) apabila seseorang atau kelompok sudah tidak mampu mempertahankan personal spacenya.
FRANK GEHRY( APPLAUSE AND EFFECT)
Joan Ockman
Two years ago I made the trek to Bilbao to find out what all the commotion was about. I went with my critical antennae poised because the slavish adulation was getting irritating. The Bilbao Effect was visible everywhere, from professional journals to travel magazines to middlebrow glossies (the New Yorker was organizing group tours), from the cover of the New York Times Magazine to polemics like Victoria Newhouse's Towards a New Museum. Newhouse's book culminates with Frank Gehry, of course, and the allusion in her title is to Le Corbusier's revolutionary tract (was she implying that museums like Gehry's could save the world?). Other critics were blathering in metaphors: exultant eruption, frozen explosion, stormy volumes, floral splendor, titanium tentacles, Tower of Babel, a Basque bomb, "Lourdes for a crippled culture," the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe (these last two from the imagination of Herbert Muschamp). Someone less charitable said something about a pheasant on a platter, but this was a minority opinion.
And I was disarmed, just like the Basque terrorists. Didn't they declare a cease-fire for a year and a half shortly after the building opened, all because the museum made everyone feel optimistic again about Bilbao? Right. Still, the eyewitnesses had hardly exaggerated. The building was a knockout. Standing in the colossal central space with all that glass, stone, and titanium splintering around you, you were reduced to monosyllables: Wow, wow. The installation of Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" in the soaring, 420-foot-long "fish" gallery. Wow. You could take all your architectural theory, Derridean, Deleuzian, whatever, and make a paper boat out of it and sail it right down Bilbao's muddy river Nervion- standing, of course, on that marvelous promenade along the bank with the exhilarating view of the bridge that springs up and over to the far side of the city and getting mesmerized by the coruscating reflections in the metallic shingles.
What was so bouleversant was not just that one was in the presence of an auratic artwork. Everybody knows that Benjamin's notion that the aura would wither away in the age of technical reproduction was a pipe dream. The spectaculture demands its sites of pilgrimage; architourism requires destinations. But the concept that a single building in a marginal place could so destabilize the gyroscope of contemporary culture was something else. Hadn't the design of architecture been relegated to the job of infill and modification in the late-twentieth-century "collage city"? Wasn't postmodernism all about curbing architectural hubris? (Aldo Rossi: "To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded.") Wasn't the fetishization of bricks and mortar-even glass and titanium- strictly ice age in the epoch of electronic flows?
All the same, one could hardly get rid of the sensation that the architect was huddling behind a little curtain somewhere in that vertiginous atrium, working his effects like the humbug wizard. The spectacular, hyperkinetic play of surfaces, the concealment of the apparatus-unlike at Beaubourg, the counterexample, where the guts hang out in an ostentatious, color-coded display on the transparent facades-left one feeling not just bedazzled but weightless and disoriented. Only the construction photos betrayed the dinosaurlike carcass underneath.
If you want to know how a magician does his tricks, Manfred Tafuri writes (following Benjamin), it is better to observe him from backstage rather than continue to stare at him from a seat in the audience. Such a perspective has been largely absent from the purplish prose written over the years about Frank O. Gehry's creative genius, his intuitive method of design, his sculptural sensibility, his playful and irreverent disposition. He himself has headed off the critics, doing everything possible to bolster the myth of himself as an atheoretical practitioner, an "artist in architecture." He has also presented himself as a kind of schlimazel-hero for the cult of personality-spontaneous, unaffected, an ice-hockey jock who admits that he strives to give his work an "edge" by making it look casual and unprecious. In "The House That Built Gehry," a contribution to the catalogue of the current exhibition, Beatriz Colomina correctly draws attention to Gebry's construction of his own persona. But she misses the crucial point. Gebry isn't just another media phenomenon, despite the Guggenheim's recent efforts to turn him into a brand name and his long desire to be taken seriously as an artist. His self-fashioning is also part of a historically specific aesthetic discourse in which the disavowal of theory amounts to a theoretical position in itself.
In his introduction to an extended interview of 1999 titled "The Architect Who Fell Among the Artists," signifying Gehry's reverse apotheosis, Kurt W. Forster attributes his status as a "late bloomer" to the fact that the practice of normative architecture constrained his artistic creativity for years. It is true that only a handful of the run-of-the-mill projects Gehry executed during the first two decades of his career, mostly for speculative developers and institutional clients, hint at what is to come. Among the significant exceptions are the Schindleresque Danziger Studio and Residence (1964-65), which Reyner Banham included in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and the Ron Davis Studio and Residence (1968-72), with its forced volumetric perspectivalism. Both these projects, for a graphic artist and painter, respectively, demonstrate that Gehry was working through the issues of late-modernist form in sophisticated and original ways.
But it was only in 1978, when he was almost forty, that Gehry burst onto the scene with the modest pink bungalow he renovated for himself in Santa Monica, using materials like chain-link fencing, corrugated metal siding, cinder blocks, asphalt paving (in the dining room), and plywood. This was a full decade after Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's celebration of the ugly and ordinary landscape of Las Vegas as well as of the photos of Ed Ruscha, and in the midst of full-blown postmodernism in architecture. In other words,
Gehry was hardly functioning in a theoretical void. Ten years later, when he found himself included in the Museum of Modern Art's "Deconstructivist Architecture" show, he made sure everyone knew he thought it was a case of strange bedfellows but happily took part in the poststructuralist pillow fight anyway. One would have to go back to Eero Saarinen in the late '5os to find an instance of a major architect who proved equally, but somewhat more innocently, immune to theoretical discussion; with Saarinen, whose career began and ended early, the "style for the job" was the best framing anyone could come up with. With Gehry, the anti-aesthetic aesthetic, the intensely studied unpretentiousness, continues to be received as a vaguely defined architectural expressionism (sources like Hermann Finsterlin, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun, and inevitably Antonio Gaudi and Frank Lloyd Wright are invoked) rather than the consciously evolved position that it is. To say Gehry is "an artist" pure and simple is no more illum inating than to say the same of Le Corbusier, Wright, or Louis Kahn.
Gehry's process has also entered into the current mythography. The introduction of the computer into his practice over the last decade represents an extremely interesting development but also, to some extent, another smoke screen. What is enabled by CATIA- a sophisticated system of computer-aided design and fabrication that the office has adapted from the French aerospace firm Dassault Systemes--is a rationalization and systematization of Gehry's empirical design method, which famously begins at the very low-tech level of crumpled-paper models and assemblages of found objects. As such, it translates the master's quite traditional and inefficient approach to design--based on massing studies, incessantly refined by trial and error-into the smooth logic of contemporary office and construction practice. But Gehry's process, as opposed to that of, say, a younger colleague like Greg Lynn, has never been technologically driven. To claim that CATIA is what gives Gehry's architecture its currency (as William J. Mitche ll, guru of e-topia and dean of architecture at MIT, where Gehry's current Ray and Maria Stata Center is underway, does in another essay in the catalogue) is no more or less true than an analogous observation about Serra's method of fabricating his sculptures.
On the other hand, the influence of art-world ideas on Gehry's thinking has been profound, and as already suggested, affiliates his work with a specific set of historical and theoretical developments. It is worth noting that despite the often-repeated anecdotes of his early biography-the working-class liberal-Jewish upbringing in Toronto, the fish kept alive in the family bathtub for the Sabbath dinner, the initial job in Los Angeles as a truck driver, and so on--Gehry had a fairly broad and not unprivileged aesthetic, architectural, and intellectual formation. He studied studio art, art history, and architecture at the University of Southern California, where he met Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, Garrett Eckbo, and other members of the circle of architects around John Entenza's Arts & Architecture magazine. After receiving a degree in architecture from USC, he worked for a year and half in the Los Angeles office of the Viennese emigre Victor Gruen, a pioneer designer of shopping centers and automobile-conscio us downtowns. He then entered the program in city planning at Harvard on the GI Bill. Although disillusioned by the planning program's bureaucratic orientation in the mid-'5os, which caused him to drop out after a semester, he took advantage of the opportunity to sit in on lectures at the university by figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Margaret Mead, and John Kenneth Galbraith. He was also exposed at Harvard to the work of Le Corbusier and the tradition of European modernism by josep Lluis Sert, Sigfried Giedion, and Jacob Bakema, all teaching in the architecture school at the time. Back in LA, he did a stretch in the office of Pereira & Luckman, big-time operators in the aerospace and corporate arena, and another three and half years in Gruen's office, before leaving in 1961 for a stint in Paris with the architect Andre Remondet (successor to Auguste Perret at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). He opened an office of his own in 1962 with a partner, finally establishing Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1967.
Yet it was Geliry's contact during the late '5os and '6os with the leading artists on the LA scene and subsequently with East Coast figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and others that was ultimately instrumental in shaping his iconoclastic attitude toward architecture and the city. It is no surprise, given Gehry's avoidance of ideological stances, that he would appropriate their ideas over the years in unorthodox and at times unrigorous ways. For example, when his clients for the Winton Guest House (1983-87) turned out to be too fastidious for the messy "potting shed" scheme he initially proposed to them, he was able to switch formal referents, without any sense of self-contradiction, from Rauschenberg to Morandi. As Serra has put it, not without admiration, "One of his greatest achievements is to collect the history of contemporary art and with an unabashed wit, cunning and playfulness make it his own vocabulary."
Still, it is easy enough to trace a coherent path from the late-modernist object-volumetrics of Danziger and Davis in the '6os through the fractured assemblages of the Santa Monica house (first renovation, 1977-78), Loyola Law School (1978-), and the California Aerospace Hall (1982-84) in the late '7os and '8os to the more fluid, performative, and "baroque" idiom of the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991-97) and the Experience Music Project (1995-2000) in the '90s. Interestingly, Gehry's move toward a more disruptive and excessive formal language occurs (one might say creeps in) first at the roof level of his buildings--a literal example is the Norton Simon Gallery and Guest Facility (1974-76). Perhaps his trajectory from the aesthetics of late modernism to neo-Baroque spectacle most closely parallels that of Frank Stella in the art world during these same years, which is not to impute any direct influence (although there have been admiring exchanges between the two over the years, and Stella has attempted a Gehry-inspi red architecture) but rather to suggest that they were responding to similar aesthetic intuitions.
Gehry relates in his 1999 interview with Forster how an installation of a double row of firebricks by Carl Andre at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 was a kind of epiphany for him. Not only did they evoke the world of industrial production, but more important, as installed in the space of the gallery, they offered a radically new form of aesthetic experience. The standardized building material had a tactile and sensuous dimension, but it wholly lacked the interiority associated with more "humanistic" substances like wood and stone. The Minimalist installation thus induced an experience of depthlessness, the ungroundedness of the copy without an original--not 155 firebricks, as Gehry puts it, but "firebrick, firebrick, firebrick, firebrick..." This experiential paradigm extended from the object to the space of the gallery or museum.
Paradoxically, of course, it was precisely the revelation of the lack of depth that proved fatal to the high-art practice of Minimalism. It was no longer possible to sustain the myth of art's autonomy, nor that of the inviolate space of the gallery, nor to draw distinctions between artifacts of industrial production and those of mass culture. The difference between an Andre and, say, an Oldenburg was erased. The whole debased world of consumerism, embraced by Pop art, could thus enter Gehry's architecture. He now turned to the visual chaos and junkscape of the late-twentieth-century city as his material stratum. Ultimately, the ephemerality and superficiality of that world would open the doors to the more fantastical and spectacular conception of architecture he pursues at present, as if to exploit the junkscape's alchemical rather than chemical potential. "I'm taking your language [and] making it into something better," Gehry says he tells his clients. "I'm taking your junk and making something with it." Thu s, unlike some of his architectural contemporaries, who continue either to resist the chaos by returning to Minimalist precepts (for example, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron) or else to analyze and comment on it (Rem Koolhaas), Gehry deliberately seeks to aestheticize, to transmute dross into art. His ribbonlike metallic walls, warped volumes, and bulging window frames evoke a dream--or nightmare--world of sand castles and fairy tales, but uncannily realized in three dimensions and made to accept practical functions. What distinguishes this world from that of Disney, aside from its greater artistry, is its radical heterogeneity and the euphoric acknowledgment of its own superficiality.
In an essay of 1982 entitled "The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence," Jean Baudrillard described the Centre Pompidou as a centripetal and diabolical machine that sucked culture into the void of the warehouse/supermarket for art. The Bilbao Effect (a term Peter Eisenman claims, perhaps with some envy, to have coined) is predicated on opposite dynamics. Centrifugal rather than centripetal, magical rather than machinic, Bilbao celebrates the reconsecration of the museum as a space of art. Here Paul Scheerbart's and Bruno Taut's early twentieth-century vision of a crystalline necklace of "city crowns"--jewel-like buildings serving as both local centerpieces and constituents of a far-flung utopian community--is reprogrammed for the commodity culture's logic of endless circulation. The global Guggenheim materializes in the hollow space of Gehry's architecture.
I am reminded of an old cartoon by Gahan Wilson. A figure in a foolscap is standing on a soapbox inscribed with the letter "N" in the middle of a public square filled with an enormous, cheering crowd. The image is reminiscent of the Bilbao museum in the center of its swirling urban plaza--or perhaps of Jeff Koons's topiary Puppy guarding the descent to the museum's threshold. In the cartoon two tiny figures deep in the crowd are whispering to one another, "Is Nothing sacred?" In the Gehry universe, the answer is that nothing is sacred but Art. Art, that is, understood as an excessive, impossible, even farcical dream of freedom, imagination, and pleasure. No wonder the crowd is cheering.
Two years ago I made the trek to Bilbao to find out what all the commotion was about. I went with my critical antennae poised because the slavish adulation was getting irritating. The Bilbao Effect was visible everywhere, from professional journals to travel magazines to middlebrow glossies (the New Yorker was organizing group tours), from the cover of the New York Times Magazine to polemics like Victoria Newhouse's Towards a New Museum. Newhouse's book culminates with Frank Gehry, of course, and the allusion in her title is to Le Corbusier's revolutionary tract (was she implying that museums like Gehry's could save the world?). Other critics were blathering in metaphors: exultant eruption, frozen explosion, stormy volumes, floral splendor, titanium tentacles, Tower of Babel, a Basque bomb, "Lourdes for a crippled culture," the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe (these last two from the imagination of Herbert Muschamp). Someone less charitable said something about a pheasant on a platter, but this was a minority opinion.
And I was disarmed, just like the Basque terrorists. Didn't they declare a cease-fire for a year and a half shortly after the building opened, all because the museum made everyone feel optimistic again about Bilbao? Right. Still, the eyewitnesses had hardly exaggerated. The building was a knockout. Standing in the colossal central space with all that glass, stone, and titanium splintering around you, you were reduced to monosyllables: Wow, wow. The installation of Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" in the soaring, 420-foot-long "fish" gallery. Wow. You could take all your architectural theory, Derridean, Deleuzian, whatever, and make a paper boat out of it and sail it right down Bilbao's muddy river Nervion- standing, of course, on that marvelous promenade along the bank with the exhilarating view of the bridge that springs up and over to the far side of the city and getting mesmerized by the coruscating reflections in the metallic shingles.
What was so bouleversant was not just that one was in the presence of an auratic artwork. Everybody knows that Benjamin's notion that the aura would wither away in the age of technical reproduction was a pipe dream. The spectaculture demands its sites of pilgrimage; architourism requires destinations. But the concept that a single building in a marginal place could so destabilize the gyroscope of contemporary culture was something else. Hadn't the design of architecture been relegated to the job of infill and modification in the late-twentieth-century "collage city"? Wasn't postmodernism all about curbing architectural hubris? (Aldo Rossi: "To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded.") Wasn't the fetishization of bricks and mortar-even glass and titanium- strictly ice age in the epoch of electronic flows?
All the same, one could hardly get rid of the sensation that the architect was huddling behind a little curtain somewhere in that vertiginous atrium, working his effects like the humbug wizard. The spectacular, hyperkinetic play of surfaces, the concealment of the apparatus-unlike at Beaubourg, the counterexample, where the guts hang out in an ostentatious, color-coded display on the transparent facades-left one feeling not just bedazzled but weightless and disoriented. Only the construction photos betrayed the dinosaurlike carcass underneath.
If you want to know how a magician does his tricks, Manfred Tafuri writes (following Benjamin), it is better to observe him from backstage rather than continue to stare at him from a seat in the audience. Such a perspective has been largely absent from the purplish prose written over the years about Frank O. Gehry's creative genius, his intuitive method of design, his sculptural sensibility, his playful and irreverent disposition. He himself has headed off the critics, doing everything possible to bolster the myth of himself as an atheoretical practitioner, an "artist in architecture." He has also presented himself as a kind of schlimazel-hero for the cult of personality-spontaneous, unaffected, an ice-hockey jock who admits that he strives to give his work an "edge" by making it look casual and unprecious. In "The House That Built Gehry," a contribution to the catalogue of the current exhibition, Beatriz Colomina correctly draws attention to Gebry's construction of his own persona. But she misses the crucial point. Gebry isn't just another media phenomenon, despite the Guggenheim's recent efforts to turn him into a brand name and his long desire to be taken seriously as an artist. His self-fashioning is also part of a historically specific aesthetic discourse in which the disavowal of theory amounts to a theoretical position in itself.
In his introduction to an extended interview of 1999 titled "The Architect Who Fell Among the Artists," signifying Gehry's reverse apotheosis, Kurt W. Forster attributes his status as a "late bloomer" to the fact that the practice of normative architecture constrained his artistic creativity for years. It is true that only a handful of the run-of-the-mill projects Gehry executed during the first two decades of his career, mostly for speculative developers and institutional clients, hint at what is to come. Among the significant exceptions are the Schindleresque Danziger Studio and Residence (1964-65), which Reyner Banham included in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and the Ron Davis Studio and Residence (1968-72), with its forced volumetric perspectivalism. Both these projects, for a graphic artist and painter, respectively, demonstrate that Gehry was working through the issues of late-modernist form in sophisticated and original ways.
But it was only in 1978, when he was almost forty, that Gehry burst onto the scene with the modest pink bungalow he renovated for himself in Santa Monica, using materials like chain-link fencing, corrugated metal siding, cinder blocks, asphalt paving (in the dining room), and plywood. This was a full decade after Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's celebration of the ugly and ordinary landscape of Las Vegas as well as of the photos of Ed Ruscha, and in the midst of full-blown postmodernism in architecture. In other words,
Gehry was hardly functioning in a theoretical void. Ten years later, when he found himself included in the Museum of Modern Art's "Deconstructivist Architecture" show, he made sure everyone knew he thought it was a case of strange bedfellows but happily took part in the poststructuralist pillow fight anyway. One would have to go back to Eero Saarinen in the late '5os to find an instance of a major architect who proved equally, but somewhat more innocently, immune to theoretical discussion; with Saarinen, whose career began and ended early, the "style for the job" was the best framing anyone could come up with. With Gehry, the anti-aesthetic aesthetic, the intensely studied unpretentiousness, continues to be received as a vaguely defined architectural expressionism (sources like Hermann Finsterlin, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun, and inevitably Antonio Gaudi and Frank Lloyd Wright are invoked) rather than the consciously evolved position that it is. To say Gehry is "an artist" pure and simple is no more illum inating than to say the same of Le Corbusier, Wright, or Louis Kahn.
Gehry's process has also entered into the current mythography. The introduction of the computer into his practice over the last decade represents an extremely interesting development but also, to some extent, another smoke screen. What is enabled by CATIA- a sophisticated system of computer-aided design and fabrication that the office has adapted from the French aerospace firm Dassault Systemes--is a rationalization and systematization of Gehry's empirical design method, which famously begins at the very low-tech level of crumpled-paper models and assemblages of found objects. As such, it translates the master's quite traditional and inefficient approach to design--based on massing studies, incessantly refined by trial and error-into the smooth logic of contemporary office and construction practice. But Gehry's process, as opposed to that of, say, a younger colleague like Greg Lynn, has never been technologically driven. To claim that CATIA is what gives Gehry's architecture its currency (as William J. Mitche ll, guru of e-topia and dean of architecture at MIT, where Gehry's current Ray and Maria Stata Center is underway, does in another essay in the catalogue) is no more or less true than an analogous observation about Serra's method of fabricating his sculptures.
On the other hand, the influence of art-world ideas on Gehry's thinking has been profound, and as already suggested, affiliates his work with a specific set of historical and theoretical developments. It is worth noting that despite the often-repeated anecdotes of his early biography-the working-class liberal-Jewish upbringing in Toronto, the fish kept alive in the family bathtub for the Sabbath dinner, the initial job in Los Angeles as a truck driver, and so on--Gehry had a fairly broad and not unprivileged aesthetic, architectural, and intellectual formation. He studied studio art, art history, and architecture at the University of Southern California, where he met Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, Garrett Eckbo, and other members of the circle of architects around John Entenza's Arts & Architecture magazine. After receiving a degree in architecture from USC, he worked for a year and half in the Los Angeles office of the Viennese emigre Victor Gruen, a pioneer designer of shopping centers and automobile-conscio us downtowns. He then entered the program in city planning at Harvard on the GI Bill. Although disillusioned by the planning program's bureaucratic orientation in the mid-'5os, which caused him to drop out after a semester, he took advantage of the opportunity to sit in on lectures at the university by figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Margaret Mead, and John Kenneth Galbraith. He was also exposed at Harvard to the work of Le Corbusier and the tradition of European modernism by josep Lluis Sert, Sigfried Giedion, and Jacob Bakema, all teaching in the architecture school at the time. Back in LA, he did a stretch in the office of Pereira & Luckman, big-time operators in the aerospace and corporate arena, and another three and half years in Gruen's office, before leaving in 1961 for a stint in Paris with the architect Andre Remondet (successor to Auguste Perret at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). He opened an office of his own in 1962 with a partner, finally establishing Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1967.
Yet it was Geliry's contact during the late '5os and '6os with the leading artists on the LA scene and subsequently with East Coast figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and others that was ultimately instrumental in shaping his iconoclastic attitude toward architecture and the city. It is no surprise, given Gehry's avoidance of ideological stances, that he would appropriate their ideas over the years in unorthodox and at times unrigorous ways. For example, when his clients for the Winton Guest House (1983-87) turned out to be too fastidious for the messy "potting shed" scheme he initially proposed to them, he was able to switch formal referents, without any sense of self-contradiction, from Rauschenberg to Morandi. As Serra has put it, not without admiration, "One of his greatest achievements is to collect the history of contemporary art and with an unabashed wit, cunning and playfulness make it his own vocabulary."
Still, it is easy enough to trace a coherent path from the late-modernist object-volumetrics of Danziger and Davis in the '6os through the fractured assemblages of the Santa Monica house (first renovation, 1977-78), Loyola Law School (1978-), and the California Aerospace Hall (1982-84) in the late '7os and '8os to the more fluid, performative, and "baroque" idiom of the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991-97) and the Experience Music Project (1995-2000) in the '90s. Interestingly, Gehry's move toward a more disruptive and excessive formal language occurs (one might say creeps in) first at the roof level of his buildings--a literal example is the Norton Simon Gallery and Guest Facility (1974-76). Perhaps his trajectory from the aesthetics of late modernism to neo-Baroque spectacle most closely parallels that of Frank Stella in the art world during these same years, which is not to impute any direct influence (although there have been admiring exchanges between the two over the years, and Stella has attempted a Gehry-inspi red architecture) but rather to suggest that they were responding to similar aesthetic intuitions.
Gehry relates in his 1999 interview with Forster how an installation of a double row of firebricks by Carl Andre at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 was a kind of epiphany for him. Not only did they evoke the world of industrial production, but more important, as installed in the space of the gallery, they offered a radically new form of aesthetic experience. The standardized building material had a tactile and sensuous dimension, but it wholly lacked the interiority associated with more "humanistic" substances like wood and stone. The Minimalist installation thus induced an experience of depthlessness, the ungroundedness of the copy without an original--not 155 firebricks, as Gehry puts it, but "firebrick, firebrick, firebrick, firebrick..." This experiential paradigm extended from the object to the space of the gallery or museum.
Paradoxically, of course, it was precisely the revelation of the lack of depth that proved fatal to the high-art practice of Minimalism. It was no longer possible to sustain the myth of art's autonomy, nor that of the inviolate space of the gallery, nor to draw distinctions between artifacts of industrial production and those of mass culture. The difference between an Andre and, say, an Oldenburg was erased. The whole debased world of consumerism, embraced by Pop art, could thus enter Gehry's architecture. He now turned to the visual chaos and junkscape of the late-twentieth-century city as his material stratum. Ultimately, the ephemerality and superficiality of that world would open the doors to the more fantastical and spectacular conception of architecture he pursues at present, as if to exploit the junkscape's alchemical rather than chemical potential. "I'm taking your language [and] making it into something better," Gehry says he tells his clients. "I'm taking your junk and making something with it." Thu s, unlike some of his architectural contemporaries, who continue either to resist the chaos by returning to Minimalist precepts (for example, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron) or else to analyze and comment on it (Rem Koolhaas), Gehry deliberately seeks to aestheticize, to transmute dross into art. His ribbonlike metallic walls, warped volumes, and bulging window frames evoke a dream--or nightmare--world of sand castles and fairy tales, but uncannily realized in three dimensions and made to accept practical functions. What distinguishes this world from that of Disney, aside from its greater artistry, is its radical heterogeneity and the euphoric acknowledgment of its own superficiality.
In an essay of 1982 entitled "The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence," Jean Baudrillard described the Centre Pompidou as a centripetal and diabolical machine that sucked culture into the void of the warehouse/supermarket for art. The Bilbao Effect (a term Peter Eisenman claims, perhaps with some envy, to have coined) is predicated on opposite dynamics. Centrifugal rather than centripetal, magical rather than machinic, Bilbao celebrates the reconsecration of the museum as a space of art. Here Paul Scheerbart's and Bruno Taut's early twentieth-century vision of a crystalline necklace of "city crowns"--jewel-like buildings serving as both local centerpieces and constituents of a far-flung utopian community--is reprogrammed for the commodity culture's logic of endless circulation. The global Guggenheim materializes in the hollow space of Gehry's architecture.
I am reminded of an old cartoon by Gahan Wilson. A figure in a foolscap is standing on a soapbox inscribed with the letter "N" in the middle of a public square filled with an enormous, cheering crowd. The image is reminiscent of the Bilbao museum in the center of its swirling urban plaza--or perhaps of Jeff Koons's topiary Puppy guarding the descent to the museum's threshold. In the cartoon two tiny figures deep in the crowd are whispering to one another, "Is Nothing sacred?" In the Gehry universe, the answer is that nothing is sacred but Art. Art, that is, understood as an excessive, impossible, even farcical dream of freedom, imagination, and pleasure. No wonder the crowd is cheering.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)