—100 years following the international style, we declare a rejection that architecture should be ‘styled’ at all. The international style revolted against the revival and proliferation of old styles, in order to embrace the new age of technology of mass production--towards a uniformity of architectural style complete with rules.  Today, we see the same proliferation of ‘old styles,’ yet it comes in the form of a checklist of urban requirements.  The apex of this 100 year period of uniformity has resulted in mass produced cities.  

 

— We reject the commodification and flattening of design and cities and any set of rules that we must abide by in order to create a successful design, place, or city.  Therefore, by analyzing, defining and illustrating the checklist of urban components, we strive for a deeper understanding of the current trends of how to create an ‘ideal’ city. These ideals are not real. Yet we strive to decipher who and what is proliferating these powerful ideals that define our cities. You must know the rules before you can break them

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We enter a copy paste phenomenon —

 a commodification of urban components whose ideas and pieces are traded like stocks.  Thus, our existing cities flatten out to become an ‘international city’ devoid of individuality or place.  As an idea is sold across the globe, the project’s value deflates, just as if it was a stock and everyone who wanted it could buy in.  This process begins to occur on the city scale.  Entire new cities will be mass produced, and sold like a self-assembly piece of ikea furniture. 

 

— We declare a non-conformity.  We will not simply accept the rules as prescribed. We reject the rules of international style and of the international city.   The International Style created design solutions indifferent to location, site, and climate. without reference to local history or national vernacular.  Today, we have been sold on the requirements of what a global city needs, indifferent to location—are we no better off than we were 100 years ago?  Have we been convinced of this to an extent that we are constrained to what we can and cannot do in order to ‘sell’ a project to those with financial or political power?  Thus far, it seems as if we as designers have been sold on the pieces of what a good city needs.  We cannot leave the world to design new cities based on rankings or success stories, which can be packaged together and sold as a new investment option.  It is convincing.  It is deceiving.

 

We shall no longer allow media and professional groups to define urban form, or to give us an award and proliferate this idea of what they believe to be  ‘good’ urbanism, which allows others to replicate + proliferate this cycle.. Designers shall no longer be pawns, technicians of sorts that only deliver the project that will sell.  These publications and financial instutions shall be challenged, no longer will we accept the notion that our design is good simply because it has worked in other cities.  

 

We declare the ‘ideal city’ to be dead.  We have been striving for it since the 15th century, as perspective gave us a new way to express our ideals, which simultaneously occurred with the complete alteration of city form.   Yet we are now in the digital world, where it is the programs we use and the ease of creating form, which drives and limits our projects.  We must control our tools, not let them control us. They have the power to create uniform cities across the globe, but to what end?   We shall not be pawns.  We shall not conform to an ideal.  It does not exist.  

 

Adapt, grow, mutate; but do not clone.  How else will we evolve?  Darwinism prevails for cities, and as each strive for the ‘survival of the fittest’ the mutation which allowed one city to thrive, still soon be outcompeted when every other city has the same trait.  When all cities look to copy the same project to define their city, the distinctions between them disappear and uniformity emerges.   The city dies.