HYPER PUBLIC: THE TOPIC FOR MADRID INTERCULTURAL 2019

The scale of the city is unstable. The human scale is unstable too. Our actions, implications and relationships go from the most intimate and limited to the social interconnection and, sometimes, to the physically and digitally massive connection with other people.

The structure of the city suffers those same impulses. The form that serves, sometimes with difficulty, to the habitual functioning of the users of the city, must, suddenly and due to very different reasons, multiply its density, maximize its capacity. On the one hand, the scale of the city is transformed, it is much larger because it gives service to many more people, and simultaneously much smaller because the space available to each person ―their fragment of city― seems much smaller. On the other hand, the public nature of the city is triggered, the dimension of the hyper-public appears.

The history of architecture has addressed this problem. The successive enlargements made in the Hollywood Bowl of Los Angeles since 1922 or the interventions made in Chicago's Millennium Park since 2004 are examples of this tradition in the American city. The paradigmatic Convention Hall project designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1953-54 or the roof for Festival Plaza by Kenzo Tange and Taro Okamoto in Osaka World Expo 1970 exemplify the interest of modern masters in these places of public hyper-densification.

The moments when the city becomes hyperpublic are not just affecting urban planning. On the contrary, overcrowding is an exceptional circumstance for the understanding of the person, the community, coexistence, social inclusion, and also for creativity, communication, celebration and, of course, the radical effect of the current connectivity.

The European city receives these impacts with much more difficulty although, nevertheless, it must experience them frequently. Also in Europe, architecture have to respond to the super-busyness of the city, architecture have to face the challenge of their hyper-public significance and action.


Image: Taro Okamoto, The Tower of Sun, and Kenzo Tange, Festival Plaza, Osaka, 1970, Osaka 70 World Fair.