Hye-Vin Kim

Work/Research

Deliberate Informalities in American Cities 1960s~1980s

The postwar period in the United States saw multiple urban renewal projects that attempted to reconstruct democratic spaces and provide spaces of unimpeded liberty. It was not until the 1970s, however, when architects like Ben Thompson, real estate developers like James Rouse, and theorists like Emilio Ambasz, attempted to create a universal design formula with an x-factor, which represented a variable of the informal and non-quantifiable. They combined both design and nondesign into one process, which I identify as "deliberate informalities."

Deliberate informalities can be defined as both a process and a product of design. This oxymoron sums up the notion of accidents through intent. It postulates a formula with a constant variable that anticipates lapse. The formula is a precondition, or structure that expects and considers more than one use of a space. It is analogous to a stage, where different events can unfold and modify space. This deliberate platform employs the method of decentralization to support heterogeneity. Central planning of decentralized programming is a difficult challenge, because of its paradoxical nature.

The market system, specifically the capitalistic undercurrent, found its way into design, and the marriage between developers and architects emerged symptomatically during the postwar period. Private companies built public spaces, where a single image supported many disparate experiences. They constructed deliberate informalities, which seemed spontaneous, but were quite heavily planned, to market private-public urban environments. Picturesque cityscapes, which tolerated idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, attempted to humanize commercial spaces.

Developers used the rhetoric of "festival" to advertise these socially vibrant and politically anonymous environments. It is crucial to examine the underestimated, yet crucial precedents of festival architecture, such as the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and the South Street Seaport in New York City, and critique their efforts to deliberately create informal spaces especially today, when architecture is in need of another fiscal and social mediation.