Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity

Author: Rafael Luna Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 43 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/luna-2018-metropolitan-hybrids.md

Summary

Luna's chapter defines the metropolitan hybrid as a new typology derived from "programmatic relations inscribed into existing structures": the merger of two conceptual programming categories — metropolitan architecture (the building as microcosm of the city) and hybrid architecture (the combining of typologies by transplanting or program appropriation) — deployed against the expanding urban field's scarcity of construction land. The chapter classifies programming into four categories (single-use, mixed-use, metropolitan, hybrid) mapped onto four levels of urbanity (village, town, city, metropolis), and sharply separates the "practical" programming group (defined by zoning, codes, and real-estate value) from the "conceptual" group (metropolitan architecture and hybrids). Against the commercial exploitation of Jane Jacobs's mixed-use "good intentions" (Quincy Market, Covent Garden's monoculture), Luna assigns the metropolitan hybrid two intents: intensifying polycentrality (urban cores, reconcentration, catalyst buildings) and maintaining continuous urbanity (urban systems and the adaptive reuse of obsolete infrastructure). Programming — read through Tschumi's distanciation of shell and program — and adaptive reuse become the strategies by which the abandoned, unfinished, and infrastructural leftovers of the metropolis are converted into "extrovert" diversity-producing architecture.

Key Claims

Expanding urban fields blur city boundaries, minimize available construction land, and increase real-estate values — conditioning the development of "new typologies derived from programmatic relations inscribed into existing structures," identified as metropolitan hybrids; they deploy programming and interior architecture "not only through adaptive reuse, but also via new construction."
Programming falls into four categories mapped onto four levels of urbanity: the village (100–1,000 people, single-use buildings), the town (1,000–100,000, mixed-use — "generally one program on top of another," low/mid-rise), the city (100,000–1,000,000, the high-rise that "allows multiple programs to exist vertically" — the "prototypical mixed-use development" maximizing real estate and "the quintessential typology for the conception of metropolitan architecture"), and the metropolis (1,000,000+, which "starts generating the metropolitan hybrid") — "a relationship exists between the different levels of urbanity and the different building typologies they create."
Single-use and mixed-use buildings belong to a practical programming group ("defined through real estate regulations, zoning, and building codes for occupancy," "a very compartmentalized relationship between programs," used "mostly in real estate with the intent of maximizing value"); metropolitan architecture and hybrids belong to a conceptual group.
Via John McMorrough's "Good Intentions," Luna indicts the commercialization of Jacobsian reuse: reevaluation of existing city stock and reuse of aged buildings were "implemented as the basis for retail appropriation" — Boston's Quincy Market and London's Covent Garden are "highly successful commercial developments" that nonetheless "promote a monoculture. Diversity cannot rely on simple commercialism." Jacobs's mixed-use programming, short blocks, and sufficient density remain "valid toward" the diverse, active, metropolitan ideal, but the intentions were exploited as commercial development.
Hybrids are historically old (medieval walled cities using the wall "as a protective infrastructure and housing for soldiers"), but metropolitan architecture erupts from the American industrial revolution's city growth: the high-rise (density in a confined area) and electricity (the city "active day and night, inside and outside") are "two technological advances that changed the way the interior space could be conceived."
Metropolitan architecture is defined two ways: first, it mimics the cityscape ("buildings that looks like a city" — the New York, New York Hotel in Las Vegas merging Manhattan icons into one skyline; OMA's The Hague City Hall competition silhouette; MVRDV's Mirador as "a whole city block tilted vertically"); second, it embodies the programmatic elements of the city ("a building that contains a city" — the Las Vegas hotel that keeps visitors shopping, dining, gambling, and gallery-going inside a single building). Its origin story is Elia Zenghelis's 1969 AA Urban Design class: "the advantage of millions living together in a restricted area," the "ideological foundations of metropolitan living," then the "values inherent in the artificiality of the man-made world."
Metropolitan buildings have autonomy from their context: they create their own microcosms, operating as attractors in suburban conditions (Vegas Strip hotels) as much as they blend into world capitals (the Manhattan skyscraper).
The skyscraper — "the quintessential metropolitan architectural typology" — is the field's great adaptive-reuse opportunity: its scale "makes them more prone to be adapted than dismantled, yet the appropriation of this typology becomes a challenge to break away from a commercial strategy."
La Torre de David (Caracas) is the non-commercial counter-case: a 45-story unfinished skyscraper, stalled by political change, appropriated ad hoc by locals facing hardship — markets, gyms, services, shops, dwellings built from leftover materials, each family personalizing its unit, "creating a real sense of diversity in this vertical city."
Hybrid architecture creates new typologies by transplanting (Fig. 43.2) or program appropriation (Fig. 43.3): injecting a new program unrelated to an existing shell (the abandoned jail injected with hotel programming to make a jail-hotel). Tschumi's "distanciation between the architecture and the program" supplies the theory: cross-programming, trans-programming, dis-programming — the shell as "an independent condition from the program," with appropriation generating "the potential for unimaginable spaces that could not have been achieved otherwise."
The metropolitan hybrid is the merger of the two conceptual categories — and a sharp demarcation from real-estate "mixed-use": "The mixed-use development is guided by real estate and zoning factors. Metropolitan architecture is guided by the intent to create its own microcosm. The metropolitan hybrid has the intent of intensifying polycentrality and to maintain a continuous urbanity" — achieved "by conceptualizing programming as urban cores, urban systems, or infrastructure."
Polycentrality reframes recentralization: not Sert's single civic core but the metropolis as "a collection of urban cores" — "resultants of singular buildings that infringe upon a hierarchy in the urban fabric and therefore attract development around them." Via Sudjic, statistics (population, area, density, boundaries) "do not tell the full story of a city"; "the image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it" — the tourist sees five percent, students cluster around universities, business people around financial districts; these distributed centers of activity are urban cores.
In shrinking and postindustrial cities, abandoned stock causes "a loss of activity and gaps of metropolitanism"; the challenge is appropriating these buildings with programming that injects new industries, "making them act as catalysts."
The Middlesex County Jail case (Cambridge, MA, 2012): a 22-story abandoned brutalist jail put up for sale, for which developers proposed luxury condominiums, offices, and retail "to appease the neighbors" — but "If the goal is to create a catalyst, then programming cannot be derived out of real estate speculation." The counter-program: a micro-industry building of micro-offices and micro-housing serving startups — affordable space, venture capital access, human capital, public exposure — mixing industries, merging workspace and living space.
Korea's micro-factory buildings — "a single building houses hundreds of factories that produce merchandise in small rooms, with each room being its own company" — are the existing typological precedent, adaptable "by integrating additional social and commercial programming to invite outside people into these scenarios and promote the industry."
"A catalyst building needs to be an extrovert and cannot rely on programming that promotes monoculture. Commercial appropriations hinder the creative programming process for diversity, especially if the purpose is to have multiple cores."
Urban systems change "the notion of a 'city within a city' to a 'system within a city'": the Boston 2024 Olympics bid case — instead of building ~75 new 200-room chain hotels (to reach the required 45,000) plus visitor centers, hybridize the two into "a network of recognizable information centers, visitor centers, and accommodations that not only benefit tourists but residents as well, rebranding the city by providing a perceptible typology of organization and city navigation."
Adaptive reuse can brand a city through systems, as with the Venice Biennale: "the whole city functions as a museum by distributing exhibitions in various palaces throughout the city… encourage[ing] visitors to navigate the whole city, as opposed to just visiting key sites, and transform[ing] potentially mundane buildings into part of a bigger agenda."
Continuous urbanity: "The majority of disruptions in the urban fabric occur from infrastructure" — obsolete infrastructure leaves voids; transportation creates the most apparent disruptions (bisecting train lines, underused elevated highways) yet "presents the biggest potential for adaptability and reuse because of their existing structures" — Tokyo's highways merged with retail and residential, the High Line, NL Architects' overpass converted into market, flower shop, skatepark, kayak canal, and parking.
The chapter's economy thesis: continuity of urban growth "depends on understanding different programmatic intents" — not confusing "the commercialization of real estate" with "the true potential of injecting hybrid programming that intensifies the core, generates systems for the city, and optimizes infrastructure."

Connections

Concepts: metropolitan-hybrids (this chapter's central concept), metropolitan-architecture (its first parent concept — the microcosm), programming (the four categories), polycentrality (first intent: urban cores, reconcentration, catalysts), urban-systems (second intent: "system within a city"), hybrids (the typological register of the wiki's hybrid concept), adaptive-reuse (skyscraper and infrastructure registers), typology (new typologies from programmatic relations; the urbanity-level ladder), change-of-use (change in occupancy as real-estate commercialism), interior-urbanism (the "building that contains a city" and its polycentric critique), atrium-hotel (Las Vegas hotels as metropolitan architecture's second definition), housing (Torre David's ad-hoc vertical dwelling; micro-housing), terrain-vague (abandoned and unfinished structures; obsolete infrastructure voids), obsolescence (infrastructural obsolescence as urban disruption), urbanism (urbanity levels; Sert's suburbanism-vs-urbanism), urban-sprawl (Sert's "endless suburbs"), interior-architecture (programming as interior-architectural strategy), skyscraper-interior (the vertical city).

Authors: Rafael Luna; Bernard Tschumi (distanciation; cross/trans/dis-programming), Jane Jacobs (mixed-use "good intentions" via McMorrough), Deyan Sudjic (the image of the city), OMA/Rem Koolhaas (The Hague City Hall massing), MVRDV (Mirador), NL Architects (overpass adaptation); cited without pages: John McMorrough, Elia Zenghelis, Josep Lluís Sert; Gregory Marinic (editor).

Debates: form-vs-program (Tschumi's three programming alternatives; the shell's independence from program; the metropolitan hybrid as the program pole's urban-extensive form).

Related source notes: Luna & Yim - A Language of Contemporary Architecture (2023) — Luna's later book with Dongwoo Yim (PRAUD), where topology and typology become a non-stylistic method; Brooker 2018 (reuse and appropriation as interior architecture's basis — Luna's urban-scale complement); Berger 2018 (appropriation's register; Luna's Torre David as its un-designed limit case); Qureshi 2018 (post-industrial reuse as therapeutic programming); Marinic 2018 (the Portman microcosm — metropolitan architecture's second definition built and later eroded); Venturi 1977 (Las Vegas as the metropolitan-architecture laboratory); Wainwright 2021 (the skyscraper's adaptive-reuse horizon); Qureshi and Stalking Detroit (the shrinking-city register); Hannah 2018 (Tschumi's event-program lineage); Vaughan 2013 (the Jacobsian diversity legacy).

Direct Quotes

"With an expanding urban field blurring the lines between city boundaries, minimizing available land for construction, and increasing real estate values, there is a larger need for appropriating existing building stock to address the demand for accommodating diverse programs in a growing city." (n.p.)

"This effect has conditioned the development of new typologies derived from programmatic relations inscribed into existing structures." (n.p.)

"These new typologies, which can be identified as metropolitan hybrids, acknowledge the importance of programming and interior architecture as strategies for developing contemporary architecture – not only through adaptive reuse, but also via new construction." (n.p.)

"The high-rise allows multiple programs to exist vertically. This is the prototypical mixed-use development, which attempts to maximize real estate. It is also the quintessential typology for the conception of metropolitan architecture." (n.p.)

"The reevaluation of existing city stock, with the belief that degenerating neighborhoods contained within themselves a richness and diversity not possible in monolithic settlements, and similarly, the reuse of aged buildings, understood as being naturally far more heterogeneous than any feasible new replacements, were implemented as the basis for retail appropriation." (John McMorrough, "Good Intentions," quoted by Luna, n.p.)

"Although these are highly successful commercial developments, they promote a monoculture. Diversity cannot rely on simple commercialism. There exists a need to understand diversity and activation as architectural intervention maximizes the potential of a structure in order to strengthen the image of the city, rather than just a commercial exploitation." (n.p.)

"Conceptually, these are two technological advances that changed the way the interior space could be conceived." (on the high-rise and electricity, n.p.)

"In 1969, Elia Zenghelis explored this potential by introducing the Urban Design class at the AA with the intent to explore 'the advantage of millions living together in a restricted area,' finding the 'ideological foundations of metropolitan living.'" (n.p.)

"[the class shifted focus to understand] the values inherent in the artificiality of the man-made world, within which urban form (or architecture) manifests itself." (Zenghelis 1971, quoted by Luna, n.p.)

"The second definition deals with the programmatic relationship of trying to create a city within the building. The architectural shell acts as a setting, and programming takes a priority role." (n.p.)

"The definitions presented for metropolitan architecture describe buildings that have a certain autonomy from their context in that they create their own microcosms." (n.p.)

"The skyscraper, being the quintessential metropolitan architectural typology, presents a great opportunity for exploring these microcosms in the field of adaptive reuse. The scale of these buildings makes them more prone to be adapted than dismantled, yet the appropriation of this typology becomes a challenge to break away from a commercial strategy." (n.p.)

"The unfinished structure was adapted in an ad hoc fashion, filled with markets, gyms, services, shops, and dwellings. The dwellings were constructed from leftover and found construction materials; each family personalized their own unit, creating a real sense of diversity in this vertical city." (on La Torre de David, n.p.)

"In Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard Tschumi describes this process as one of 'distanciation between the architecture and the program,' where he points out three alternatives for this process to occur: cross-programming, trans-programming, and dis-programming." (n.p.)

"Appropriating existing structures with different uses generates the potential for unimaginable spaces that could not have been achieved otherwise." (n.p.)

"The mixed-use development is guided by real estate and zoning factors. Metropolitan architecture is guided by the intent to create its own microcosm. The metropolitan hybrid has the intent of intensifying polycentrality and to maintain a continuous urbanity. This is achieved by conceptualizing programming as urban cores, urban systems, or infrastructure." (n.p.)

"Population, area, density, and administrative boundaries do not tell the full story of a city. The image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it." (via Sudjic, n.p.)

"I dread the pictures of the 'city of tomorrow' which appear frequently in popular magazines, a 'city' formed of endless suburbs; one small cottage close to the next one and a helicopter in every backyard! … As a whole, suburban trends seem to be favored and little or nothing new is suggested when it comes to the real problem areas or those nearer the center of our cities… In all these halfway approaches suburbanism seems to prevail over urbanism." (Josep Lluís Sert, "The Human Scale in City Planning" (1944), quoted by Luna, n.p.)

"This recentralization process demands the creation of new cores that will replace the old ones that the unplanned growth has destroyed." (Sert, quoted by Luna, n.p.)

"Recentralization needs to be better understood as reconcentration of activity, and rather than focusing on a single civic core, the metropolis must be understood as a collection of urban cores. These centers are resultants of singular buildings that infringe upon a hierarchy in the urban fabric and therefore attract development around them." (n.p.)

"In shrinking and postindustrial cities where either the population or an industry is declining, a variety of building stock is left abandoned, causing a loss of activity and gaps of metropolitanism." (n.p.)

"If the goal is to create a catalyst, then programming cannot be derived out of real estate speculation." (n.p.)

"In Korea, these types of building and programming exist as micro-factory buildings, where a single building houses hundreds of factories that produce merchandise in small rooms, with each room being its own company." (n.p.)

"A catalyst building needs to be an extrovert and cannot rely on programming that promotes monoculture. Commercial appropriations hinder the creative programming process for diversity, especially if the purpose is to have multiple cores." (n.p.)

"This would change the notion of a 'city within a city' to a 'system within a city.'" (n.p.)

"Instead of building seventy-five new chain hotels, it could address the need for visitor and information centers and the need for hotel rooms by hybridizing both. This would create a network of recognizable information centers, visitor centers, and accommodations that not only benefit tourists but residents as well, rebranding the city by providing a perceptible typology of organization and city navigation." (on the Boston 2024 Olympics bid, n.p.)

"Through adaptive reuse, a city could brand itself by creating these systems, as seen in Venice for the Venice Biennale, where the whole city functions as a museum by distributing exhibitions in various palaces throughout the city. This encourages visitors to navigate the whole city, as opposed to just visiting key sites, and transforms potentially mundane buildings into part of a bigger agenda." (n.p.)

"The majority of disruptions in the urban fabric occur from infrastructure. As new technologies emerge and new infrastructure is developed, old infrastructural systems become obsolete, leaving empty voids in the urban fabric." (n.p.)

"Yet, transportation infrastructure presents the biggest potential for adaptability and reuse because of their existing structures." (n.p.)

"The continuity of growth and prosperity in our cities depends on understanding different programmatic intents. It should not confuse the commercialization of real estate and the true potential of injecting hybrid programming that intensifies the core, generates systems for the city, and optimizes infrastructure." (n.p.)

"The metropolitan hybrid allows the evolution of the city as real estate speculation, changes in industry, changes in political power, and urban renewal have created abandoned or unfinished structures across cities worldwide." (n.p.)

Open Questions

Luna's four-category ladder ties each programming category to a population band — but the high-rise "prototypical mixed-use development" appears at the city level while the metropolitan hybrid emerges only at the metropolis level: can a metropolitan hybrid exist in a shrinking city of 100,000 (the Middlesex case suggests yes), and does the typology actually track population or rather the condition of surplus stock?
The chapter distinguishes the practical and conceptual programming groups but treats adaptive reuse as deployable by both ("not only through adaptive reuse, but also via new construction"): is there a test that distinguishes a genuinely conceptual reuse from a commercially appropriated one, other than the monoculture/extroversion criterion?
Torre David's ad hoc appropriation produced "a real sense of diversity in this vertical city" without designers — does the metropolitan hybrid need the architect at all, or is it precisely the conceptual frame the un-designed city already obeys (see Berger's aneignung)?
If "programming cannot be derived out of real estate speculation," what funds the catalyst building? The micro-industry counter-program for the Middlesex County Jail names tenants and amenities but no financial mechanism — is the metropolitan hybrid an economic fiction, or a brief for public/venture intervention the chapter leaves implicit?
Can "a system within a city" survive the event it was designed for? Boston lost the 2024 Olympic bid — do the hybridized visitor-center/hotels retain their systemic legibility in the bid's absence, or are urban systems event-dependent the way the Venice Biennale's dispersed museum is?
Luna criticizes the metropolitan building's microcosmic autonomy as too detached (Vegas) yet praises Venice's city-as-museum — is the difference that the system distributes the microcosm across the existing fabric? Where is the threshold at which a "building that contains a city" becomes a "system within a city"?
The chapter folds interior architecture into the strategy ("the importance of programming and interior architecture as strategies") — but the programmatic-injection cases (jail-hotel, overpass programs, micro-factory) are largely interior-design operations at urban scale: is the metropolitan hybrid the proof that interior architecture's true scale is the metropolis, or a chapter from an urbanist borrowing the Reader's discipline?