“Jaggedness” — A New Conceptualization of City Space and Its Architecture
Abstract
The idea of chaos, disorder, incidentality of phenomena and their disjoined and ambivalent presence hale gained notoriety. In contemporary architectural discourse and urbanism, the author proposes to define these phenomena as “jaggedness” which fits contemporary architecture always trying to dismantle, break, or abandon the present nurture of construction. It departs radically from its foundation as in the projects of Coop Himmelblau, Woods, Hadid, Koolhaas or Libeskind, where the relation between the building and the ground become a complex and refined game.
The category of “jaggedness” is suitable for the description of modern city space — the space of rapidly developing cities surrounded by a complex suburban space. Cities with a center defined by a break in urbanistic continuity. On the one hand, there emerge off-limits areas, monitored spaces, commercialized places, yet the long-forgotten and abandoned pieces of old architecture. However, in each such zone there may appear perfectly designed visions of cities or suburbs such as Stary Browar in Poznan or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. Such intriguing contrasts which disregard the architectural chaos or whole blocks of dilapidated buildings become synonymous with the modern jagged city in East-Central Europe.
Keywords
architecture; urbanism; jaggedness; fluidity
Institute of Culture Studies, AMU in Poznań Poland
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