VIII  The Thick 2-D:

Mat-Building in the Contemporary City

The objective of architecture is works of art that

are lived in.  The city is the largest, and at present
the worst of such works of art. … The kinds of
repetition and control that are now offered to the
building industry can be edged towards a kind of
dreamy neutrality.
Alison + Peter Smithson

A t a time when writing about architecture has increasingly become the do-
main of professional academics, it is refreshing to reread Alison Smithson’s 1974 article  “How to Rec-
ognize and Read Mat-Building.” 1  As the title suggests, this is a didactic text, written by a working ar-
chitect for other architects.  The argument is carried as much by images as by words, suggesting that
architects can and should think in images.  It is a short text, which records a thought process, mis-
steps and uncertainties intact.  The tone is self-effacing, and the address is personal — knowing asides
that a small circle of friends and colleagues will understand, and opinions candidly expressed.  The
enabling assumption, as with so much that Alison and Peter Smithson wrote and built, is that archi-
tectural knowledge is ongoing, and practice a kind of conversation.  Architects learn from the past,
not by imitating or repeating, but by extending and developing propositions made by like-minded
practitioners.  This unfolding dialogue of proposition and response is what for the Smithsons con-
stituted architectural discourse — not a series of disengaged texts directed at an academic audience,
but a personal effort to work through issues collectively apprehended.  It is no surprise that a fiercely
independent figure such as Enric Miralles was attracted to the Smithsons.  What links Miralles to the

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Smithsons is not formal language but the idea that each project is a new proposition, and that each
new project is a part of the ongoing conversation that is the discipline of architecture.  For Miralles, as
for the Smithsons, to practice architecture is to pose questions, converting every project into a provo-
cation for more work, and an answering proposition.

After a decade or two in which it was more or less ignored, Smithson’s article seems newly relevant
today.  A brief overview of recent work demonstrates the persistence of mat-building effects at the
scale of individual buildings.  Foreign Office Architect’s Yokohama Port Terminal creates a porous mat
of movement and waiting spaces by means of warped and folded steel plates.  In this project, there
is only minimal formal distinction between gardens and the waiting areas of the terminal.  Garden
and building are simply differing intensities of occupation occurring along a more or less continuous
surface.  Conceived as an artificial landscape, minimal sectional variation separates and smoothes
traffic flows at the same time that it activates complex programmatic variation.  MVRDV’s  Villa  
VPRO works on a mat or hive-like model to support an adaptive social ecology in the workplace.  The
deep section of this office complex required a hollowing out from within to comply with Dutch light
and air requirements.  The porosity that results creates a series of surfaces that can be appropriated
and modified over time by the office workers.  Working within the limits of available infrastructure,
the inhabitants deploy a kind of collective intelligence to refigure the space of their own building. 
Kazuyo Sejima’s Multimedia Studio in Gifu presents a very literal mat-like appearance.  Its gently
cupped roof appears to give in to the effects of gravity, sloping down on one side to allow access from
the lawn.  This topographical surface actualizes the flat, artificial terrain of its campus site, slightly
lifted up to give light to the workspaces below.  The effect is to create a highly suggestive ambiguity
regarding the borders of the project.  The mat-like character is punctuated by an access tower, which
accentuates the compressed section of the building proper.

Tracking back to 1991, OMA’s Nexus World in Fukuoka, Japan adapts the shallow section and intricate
web of interior connections that characterize the mat typology for a group of courtyard houses.  The
site is split into two blocks, each with a defined, and nearly blank perimeter.  Parking and public
space is integrated into the ground floor, along with access to the living spaces above.  Instead of
penetrating the site progressively from the exterior, residents reach their apartments by passing
underneath to the interior and then up through the porous fabric of courtyards and patios.  Visually
and experientially, the project appears highly variable, yet the plan is surprisingly consistent.  Out
of a rational, buildable system, a high degree of variation is achieved through local adjustment, and
the activation of void spaces within the fixed fabric.  At a larger scale, their 1990 project for a ho-
tel and conference center in Agadir, Morocco, incorporates a wide array of disparate programs and
scales.  The syntax of the project recalls Smithson’s description of the Islamic city as “a broadcast
of houses, mosques, bazaars, with a current-bun consistency.”  Here however, there are significant
differences; first of scale and program, and second in the provision of a large organizing substrate,
a medium within which the programs and voids are scattered.  Landscape as a unifying model is
explicitly evoked in the surfaces that link these scattered functions.

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  The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa    Multimedia   Workshop,  Gifu,   Japan,  1996 – 97

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OMA    Plans, Agadir Hotel and Convention Center, Competition, 1990

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Working with a very different architectural vocabulary, the 1997–98 project by Enric Miralles and
Benedetta Tagliabue for the reconstruction of the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona responds to
the constant flux of demolition and rebuilding in historic city centers.  On a site where a long history
of building and rebuilding has left its traces, Miralles and Tagliabue inscribe new traces, and overlay
new uses, without erasing the old.  The site is excavated for parking, the market uses are preserved,
and new public spaces and housing are created.  Instead of clearing and ordering the site, the ar-
chitects respect the raucous mix of activities typical of the city center.  This complex mix in turn
requires a high degree of spatial invention to accommodate these disparate activities in such close
proximity.  A highly figured, lightweight roof both unifies these competing functions, and registers,
through its own deformations, the internal tensions created on the site.  The complex needs of the
city itself trigger architectural invention.

Of all these projects, the Miralles/Tagliabue Santa Caterina Market is perhaps the most effective in
refiguring its urban context, and at the same time the least literal in its deployment of a recognizable
mat-building language.  Mat-building persists here as an organizational strategy and an architectural
effect.  The lessons of mat-building have been internalized as a series of architectural objectives:  a shal-
low but dense section, activated by ramps and double height voids; the unifying capacity of a large open
roof; a site strategy that lets the city flow through the project; a delicate interplay of repetition and varia-
tion; and the incorporation of time and activity as working variables in urban architecture.  The ongoing
dialogue of project and response continues to add to the catalogue of potential mat-building effects.

So while some of the issues raised in the text may seem dated, there is much in this 1974 article that res-
onates today.  This is partly due to the tone, to the openness and generosity of the language, but also
due to the ebb and flow of issues in architecture and urbanism.  Mat-building seems newly relevant, in

 The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

part because of developments in the urban field that the Smithsons could not have anticipated.

One reason for the article’s continuing relevance is the avoidance of questions of style.  Mat-building
has little to do with appearance; its force is diagrammatic and organizational.  That is to say, buildings
that look quite dissimilar are grouped together on the basis of common organizational strategies.  The
predominance of plans among the illustrations underscores this.  But if the category captures diverse
examples, mat-building is also more than a loose description of effects.  In addition to a tendency to-
ward horizontal extension, the buildings illustrated follow certain significant spatial patterns.  They
are mostly similar in the way in which the parts fit together, and the character of the void spaces
formed by their architectural matter.  Hierarchy, centrality, axiality, and symmetry are conspicuously
absent, as are figural objects or voids.  Spaces for movement (streets, corridors) merge with spaces of
assembly.  Internally, nearly all exhibit a porous interconnectivity, in which transitional spaces are as
important as the nodes they connect.  Externally, they are loosely bounded.  Their form is governed
more by the internal connection of part to part than by any overall geometric figure.  They operate
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as field-like assemblages, condensing and redirecting the patterns of urban life, and establishing ex-
tended webs of connectivity, both internally and externally.

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Mat-building is a studied response to a fundamental urbanistic question:  how to make a place for
the active (and unpredictable) unfolding of urban life without abrogating the architect’s responsibility
to provide some form of order.  “If there is no order,” writes Smithson, “there is no identity but only the
chaos of disparate elements in pointless competition.”  Mat-building instead proposes a loose scaf-
folding based on the systematic organization of the parts.  The architect can design the system, but
cannot expect to control all of the individual parts.  “The understanding must come from the percep-
tion of the parts, as the whole system can never be seen.”  Mat-building is based on an operative real-
ism regarding the extent of the architect’s design control.  It recognizes that authentic city culture is
the product of many hands over an extended period of time.  Mat-building anticipates the inevitable
change over time that characterizes the life of the city:  “The systems will have more than the usual
three dimensions.  They will include a time dimension.”  Finally, mat-building is anti-figural, anti-rep-
resentational and anti-monumental.  Its job is not to articulate or represent specified functions, but
rather to create an open field where the fullest range of possible events might take place.  This re-
quires a degree of restraint established as an initial condition from which differentiation occurs, over
time:  “The systems will present, in their beginning, an even over-all intensity of activity, in order not
to compromise the future.”  This over-all intensity based on repetition and accumulation suggests that
there is a scale threshold, below which mat-building effects are not visible.  Mat-building cannot be
isolated as an object — figure against ground — instead it activates context to produce new urban fields.

In mat-building, rather than a relatively neutral architectural frame working to configure space, it
is function and events that activate the void spaces.  This austere, bare-bones architecture is distin-
guished by new patterns of social association:  “Mat-building can be said to epitomize the anonymous
collective; where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedom of ac-
tion through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close knit patterns of association, and
possibilities for growth, diminution and change.”  The promise of mat-building is of things happening
in the voids, outside of architecture’s explicit envelope of control.  Mat-building is characterized by ac-
tive interstitial spaces, where matter shapes and channels the space between things, leaving room for
the unanticipated.  Finally, in mat-building, transitions are not merely the neutral link between defined
nodes; instead, nodes and links together form a continuous fabric of internally differentiated space.

It’s hard to imagine architects more different than the Smithsons and Morris Lapidus, (well know as
the architect of Miami hotels in the 1960s), but Lapidus had an interesting observation that helps to
clarify the mat-building idea.  Dave Hickey recounts that Lapidus, “insisted that there are only two pri-
mal kinds of building:  the souk and the corral.  The corral is a fence around a space; the souk is a car-
pet on the ground and a cloth ceiling.” 2  It’s perhaps an overly simple opposition, and it is easy to raise
objections.  (Abbe Laugier’s primitive hut, Gottfried Semper’s idea of the woven carpets hung on the
walls as the predecessor to the modern wall assemblies, for example, or much contemporary work that
takes the building’s enclosing envelope as the starting point for a topological play of inside and out-
side, all come to mind.)  Nevertheless, it is a powerful distinction, with important consequences:  “In
other words,” Hickey continues, “there are structures that prioritize the walls and insist on a vertical

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199
Kazuyo Sejima  
 Metropolitan House Studies, 1996
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 Le Corbusier    Plan, Venice Hospital, 1964 – 65

200
relationship between the sky and the earth, between God and Nature; and there are structures that
block out God and Nature and insist on the horizontal space of human commerce.”  The corral is the
predecessor to the fortress, the temple, and the law court; the souk resists delimitation as an object or
an institution, and necessarily connects back to the city.  It anticipates the horizontality of mat strate-
gies, and affirms that the mat-building is based on openness and free exchange and, like the souk, is a
place where strangers meet and congregate.

Extended to urbanism, this typology suggests two corresponding stories of the origin of the city.  One
sees the origin of the city in war and the exercise of power.  This yields a vision of a walled city, at once
a place of protection from a hostile world and a fortified center from which power and influence can
spread.  Another, perhaps more generously, sees the origin of the city in trade:  the market established
at the crossroads, where people from the surrounding countryside meet to exchange goods.  “The
urbs or the polis,” writes José Ortega y Gasset, “starts by being an empty space, the forum, the agora,
and all the rest is just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its outlines.” 3  Whatever the
truth of these contrasting accounts — and it is likely that both carry an element of truth — the idea of
the market city suggests an optimistic vision of a place where strangers come together voluntarily
to improve and enrich one another’s lives.  Its values are abundance, tolerance, and trust, and its
architecture is open and indeterminate.

A further elaboration can be found in a lesser-known book by Jane Jacobs.  Published in 1994, her
Systems of Survival:  A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics looks at the interplay
between moral codes and everyday conduct.  She proposes two distinct moral codes, which she calls
“syndromes,” and although she does not explicitly associate them with urban typologies, there is a clear
link.  The first, coupled with the city as a marketplace, she calls the “Commercial Moral Syndrome.” 4 It

 The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

is characterized by values of free exchange and open association.  Precepts such as “Come to volun-
tary agreements” or “Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens” appear here.  This syndrome is fun-
damentally optimistic and cosmopolitan.5  It embraces initiative, enterprise, and inventiveness.  Al-
though conventional values such as thrift, honesty, and efficiency follow, the value of dissent is also
recognized as necessary for innovation and the open exchange of ideas.

Opposed to the commercial syndrome, and associated with the city as walled fortress, is the “Guardian
Moral Syndrome.”  It has its origins in the ancient castes of warriors and priests:  guardian figures who
were exempt from the productive life of the community and were charged instead with the visible exem-
plification of moral codes through ritual and conspicuous consumption.  Indeed there is a strong compo-
nent of ritual behavior underlying the precepts Jacobs identifies with the guardian syndrome:  “Respect
hierarchy;” “Be obedient and disciplined;” and “Adhere to tradition.”  These are the precepts that guide the
behavior of governments and their bureaucracies, as well as the armed forces, religious hierarchies, the
police and traditional ruling classes.  Honor, rather than prosperity or comfort, is an ultimate guardian
CITIES:  VIII  

value.  Identity — national, religious, or ethnic — is primary, and must be protected at all costs.  Whereas
the commercial syndrome shuns the use of force and emphasizes negotiation, the guardian syndrome is

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 Candilis, Josic, Woods    Free   University, Berlin, 1963

suspicious of trading, which so often requires compromise.  The display of strength and the use of force
are instead characteristic of this second syndrome:  “taking” as opposed to “trading.”

This short digression underscores the political dimension of the mat-building proposition, implied
but not made explicit in Smithson’s original article.  Mat-building does not lend itself to institutional
programs or to a representational agenda.  Without enclosing walls, there is no surface on which to
project institutional identity.  It’s hard to imagine a police station, law court or church as a mat, and
the best known mat-building of the 1960s, the Free University Berlin (project, 1963) had a progres-
sive program of free association and open governance.  Not only was ample space for assembly pro-
vided, there was an idea that the building itself could be modified by its users, growing and chang-
ing over time in response to changing programmatic and educational needs.  In reality, the building
proved to be more static than anticipated, which suggests that the mat-building needs a larger field
of operations.  The arena where the mat-building idea may be most effective is perhaps the city itself,
a site where incipient mat-like effects are already evident.

Buildings should be thought of from the beginning

as fragments; as containing within themselves a
capacity to act with other buildings:  they should be
themselves links in systems.
Alison + Peter Smithson

T 
his emphasis on program and architecture’s life in time was clearly at odds with the emer-
gent postmodernism of the mid – 1970s.  It is not surprising that the text received little atten-
tion in the decades that followed.  Nor was the deconstructivism of the later 1980s, with its
emphasis on fragmentation, any more sympathetic to mat-building’s desire for continuity and urban
connectivity.  In that sense, the 1974 text marks the end of a certain line of thought: “Remember,”
Smithson wrote, “we are tracking back.”  For Smithson, the construction of the Free University Berlin

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203
Candilis, Josic, Woods  
 Free   University, Berlin, 1963
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 Candilis, Josic, Woods    Frankfurt Competition, 1963

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marks a broader acceptance of mat-building strategies.  Working back from that starting point, she
exercises the clarity of retrospection to create a more or less continuous narrative out of disparate
architectural and urbanistic experiences.

But if her story is retrospective, it is not closed to the future.  The city has developed in unpredictable
ways since 1974.  Certain effects tentatively described in the 1974 text have become more evident, some
have dead-ended, while others have veered off in strange new directions.  One of the most compelling
images in the article is the 1963 Candilis, Josic and Woods’ proposal for Frankfurt.  This sprawling assem-
blage of non-coincident laminar plates spills out of and around the existing monuments of the city, cre-
ating a dense interconnected fabric.  It is as if the city, in the aftermath of the war’s destruction, grew a
new connective tissue without erasing the scars.  The project’s boundary is indeterminate, and if imag-
ined as an urban experience at street level, it would never be perceived as a whole.  The project promises
a new sense of connectivity and mobility within the historic core of the European city.  Without recourse
to the traditional morphologies of block and street, it effectively stitches together a fragmented and
broken context.  Although formally continuous and architecturally consistent, it could hardly be called
a building in the usual sense.  It is less a building than a new urban network, a series of pathways and
voids superimposed over the old order.  If the Free University Berlin failed in part because it lacked con-
text (nothing for its network to connect up to) the Frankfurt project, like the more or less contempora-
neous Venice Hospital of Le Corbusier, is meaningless except as a highly specific contextual insertion.  It
is this urbanistic potential of the mat-building idea that seems most suggestive today.  By imagining
contemporary practices of “mat-urbanism” we might find some new uses for these old strategies.  Mat-
urbanism would in turn connect to recent tendencies in landscape architecture, where the “thick 2D” of
the forest, field or meadow creates mat-like effects of connectivity and emergence.

 The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

This inevitably raises questions of scale, and speed of movement.  Here a contradiction emerges in the
examples gathered in the text.  Mat-building is traced back to the close grained, cellular organization
of the Islamic city:  “a broadcast of houses, mosques, bazaars, with a current-bun consistency.”  This
implies a fundamentally horizontal space, with a specific architectural character:  a “low enclosure car-
ried lightly above the user … with a high degree of connectedness to allow for change of mind and the
in-roads of time.”  This mat-like organization is in turn translated quite directly into individual building
projects (Free University Berlin, The Venice Hospital, the Smithson’s own Kuwait Ministries).  But as
the Smithsons move up in scale from architecture to urbanism, a key shift occurs in the organizational
logic.  In place of the field-like, cellular aggregates that characterize the earlier examples, a different
organizational principle based on “stem,” or “cluster” patterns appears.  The stem is essentially treelike
and it implies a hierarchy of parts.  It is the basic organizing principle of conventional transportation
infrastructures.  Rather than cultivating exchange, as is the case with the smaller scale, field-like or-
ganizations proposed elsewhere in the article, the stem spreads out laterally, dispersing and distribut-
ing density.  From Golden Lane to the Berlin Projects of the 1960s, the Smithsons developed a parallel
CITIES:  VIII  

urbanistic strategy that consists in the overlay of movement patterns at distinct scales, which serves
to separate functions, speeds and activities, as opposed to the mat-building idea of increasing pro-

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 Alison + Peter Smithson    Cluster City, 1952 – 53

grammatic interaction by concentrating density.  They were among the first to recognize the poten-
tial of infrastructure to influence the future development of the city, but their thinking at this scale did
not show the same willingness to question received ways of doing things.  Ironically, for architects so
committed to local interactivity, their ideas about infrastructure could be said to have underwritten
the conceptual apparatus of urban sprawl in the decades that followed.

Driven by the transportation infrastructure and suburban values of private property, a new kind of ur-
banism, more horizontal, and radically spread out has emerged in the late twentieth century.  In North
America, planning has had minimal impact.  This new city form is more extensive and less controlled than
the post-war English and European suburbs that were the point of reference for the Smithsons.  Cities
like Los Angeles have grown as vast, mat-like fields, where scattered pockets of density are knit together
by high-speed, high-volume roadways.  Their radical scale shifts and extreme social contrast undermine
the ability of architecture to mediate these transitions.  Los Angeles is a polycentric web, coincident in
many ways with the Smithson’s diagrams of urban form.  Yet the Smithsons were highly ambivalent
about this radically dispersed urbanism.  Los Angeles, they write, “lacks legibility,” and they criticize its
form as based too much on movement patterns.6  Their preferred models were older European cities or
the Mediterranean casbah.  They belonged to a second generation of modernists who still believed it
possible to integrate rigorously up-to-date principles of space making with a traditional sense of well be-
ing, of place-making in the phenomenological or anthropological sense.  Working between the diagram
and the“as found,” the Smithsons’ urbanism remained tactical, (even more so in their later work), carefully
working with the intricacies of local scale more than the larger issues of infrastructure and territory.  The
Smithsons are not nostalgic, and they make no attempt to disguise the brutality of modern life.  Their re-
sponse to the alienating forces of modernity was to attempt, with the reduced means available to them,
to recreate the spatial and experiential dimensions of the traditional city.  If mat-building represents a

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reworking of the spatial patterns of the traditional city as they emerge over time, how can the new pat-
terns emerging in the contemporary city be woven into a viable working theory of urbanism today?

The experience of the city today is not so much of the orderly progression of scales as an experience
of rapid shifts in scale and speed of movement. We tend to move with minimal transition from
labyrinthine interiors to movement systems: directly from the mall to the freeway. Emergent
mat-building effects are visible in unexpected locations: Korean mini-malls, freeway interchanges,
suburban cinemaplexes, intermodal transportation centers, informal markets in traditional city
centers, and the proliferating spaces of leisure and recreation.  In all of these cases, architecture’s
mediating role becomes increasingly difficult to maintain; new strategies are required.  The Smithsons,
for all their willingness to rethink the distinction between architecture and urbanism, still hold to a
fairly traditional role of the architect as the provider of urban order, and of architecture as the agency
through which that order becomes legible.  Architecture, for the Smithsons, is still the design of mass
and volume, rather than surface or atmosphere.  But perhaps to learn from the Smithson’s, from their
own openness and willingness to experiment, is to cultivate the in-between:  the extended threshold,
not only between architectural episodes, but between disciplines as well.

One related discipline in which mat-like effects proliferate is landscape architecture.  Increasingly,
landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism.7  Landscape has traditionally been defined as the art of
organizing horizontal surfaces.  It bears an obvious relationship to the extended field of the contempo-
rary city, and also to the newly emerging interest in topological surfaces.  But the surface in landscape

 The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

CITIES:  VIII  

Alison + Peter Smithson    Diagrammatic Plan, Berlin Hauptstadt

overleaf    Alison + Peter Smithson    New  Ways for London

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is more particular than the abstract surfaces currently proliferating in architectural design.  These
folded or warped surfaces (usually computer generated) are thin and immaterial:  ephemeral scrims
of data.  The surface in landscape, on the other hand, is always distinguished by its material or per-
formative characteristics.  Or, to be more precise, its performative effects are the direct result of its
material characteristics.  Slope, hardness, or softness, permeability, depth, or soil chemistry are all
variables that influence the behavior of surfaces.  Performative effects ranging from the tendency to
shed or hold water, to the ability to support traffic, events, or plant life are all the result of specific
material characteristics of landscape surfaces.  By careful attention to these surface conditions — not
only configuration, but also materiality and performance — designers can activate space and produce
urban effects without the weighty apparatus of traditional spacemaking.  Landscape is less about
the design of objects — the occupation of site — than it is about the construction of site and the provi-
sion of an infrastructure of future occupation.

In fact, it is slightly misleading to refer to “surface” in landscape.  Landscape’s matter is spread out in
the horizontal dimension, but landscapes are never, strictly speaking, pure surfaces.  The natural ecol-
ogy of a meadow, field, or forest exhibits horizontal extension in the macro scale, but at the micro
scale it forms a dense mat, a compact and highly differentiated section.  This articulated section, the
“thick 2D” of the landscape, is fundamental to the work that the meadow or the forest performs:  the
processing of sunlight, air or water, the enrichment and protection of the soil through the process of
growth and decay.  In mat-configurations, section is not the product of stacking (discrete layers, as

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 Hans Hollein    Carriercity in Landscape, 1964

in a conventional building section) but of weaving, warping, folding, oozing, interlacing, or knotting
together.  Thick 2-D effects are visible in landscapes and cities, in the forest or the meadow, but also in
the highway interchange, the railway station, or the urban shopping mall.

 The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City

In a similar manner, man-made landscapes tend to exhibit complex sectional behavior within a pre-
dominantly horizontal organization.  Central Park in New York City, to take a familiar example, ex-
hibits only minimal sectional variation at the large scale:  around 50 feet over fifty blocks, or a ratio
of about 1:250.  Drawn to scale, the section of the park resembles a slightly wobbly line.  Yet, from an
experiential and functional perspective, this modest sectional variation is crucial to support both the
natural ecologies that create a vital green space in the heart of the city, and the social ecologies that
produce programmatic variation in the park.  These performative effects go beyond the esthetics of
the picturesque usually evoked in the discussion of Olmsted’s landscape.  Changes of level and slope
smooth movement and vary the visual experience of the park.  Traffic flow is facilitated by separate
levels for differing speeds of movement.  The variations within the natural surfaces — the tree canopy,
the hard-surfaced roads, the undergrowth of the rambles, the springy mat of the lawns — each sup-
port distinct and interrelated functions that make up the varied social ecology of the park.  The warp
and weft of the woven section in turn connects the park back to the city.
CITIES:  VIII  

Finally, it is important to note that landscape is not only a formal model for urbanism today, but
perhaps more importantly, a model for process.  Time is a fundamental variable in landscape work.

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Landscapes cannot be designed and controlled as a totality; they are instead scripted as scenarios pro-
jected into the future, allowed to grow in and evolve over time.  Landscapes are more the product of
management and cultivation than of design.  Like the Islamic cities admired by the Smithsons, these
landscapes are the product of long-term accumulation and change over time.  In both the city and the
landscape, history deposits layers that interact to create density and authentic variation.  This sense
of time can only be simulated, or better, anticipated, in an individual mat-building.  Further, there is
a structural connection between the syntax of parts — small, rather self-contained elements (“cells”)
that allow addition and subtraction over time, and the mat-like configuration of the whole.  Strictly
speaking, these traditional mat-buildings are never finished.  Like a landscape, they are in a state of
constant flux, always evolving.

Landscape architects, especially working at a large scale, must learn to manage this change over
time.  Even a traditional landscape requires constant attention in order to maintain a kind of “steady
state.”  Today landscape architects are embracing change and designing landscapes that anticipate
a succession of states:  the choreography of changing plant regimes, shifting spatial characters and
new uses over time.  These changes are not merely quantitative (plants growing into maturity) but
are qualitative as well.  The designer creates the conditions under which entirely different and perhaps
unanticipated spatial characteristics may emerge from the interplay between designed elements and
the indeterminate events of the future.  Referring to Rem Koolhaas’ suggestive notion of the “irriga-
tion of territories with potential,” landscape architect James Corner writes:

Unlike architecture, which consumes the potential of a site in order to project,

urban infrastructure sows the seeds of future possibility, staging the ground for
both uncertainty and promise.  The preparation of surfaces for future appro-
priation differs from merely formal interest in single surface construction.  It
is much more strategic, emphasizing means over ends, and operational logic
over compositional design.8

This sense of accumulation and change, and its corollary of a city or a landscape always being a work
in progress is most effectively put in play within an urbanistic assemblage.  In the city, unpredict-
able social, economic, and political dynamics interact with the permanent infrastructure to create
indeterminate urban effects.  In this regard, mat-building, with its attention to the space between
things, and its syntax of part-to-part connection is more significant as an urbanistic model than as
a model for individual buildings.  Conversely the notion of a landscape that grows in and changes
over time can be applied to programming, resulting in an architecture that creates a directed field
for the occupation of the site over time:  a kind of loose scaffold that supports the adaptive ecology
of urban life.  Here the Smithson’s infrastructural ideas may be inverted to conceive of systems of
movement, service, and support that give direction to programs without over-determining the use
or meaning of individual spaces.

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Toyo Ito  
 U House, Tokyo, 1975 – 7 7
CITIES:  VIII    The  Thick  2-D: Mat-Building  in  the  Contemporary   City
 Lastly, the renewed interest in mat-building might be traced to a critique of the object building,
and the emergence of a new sensibility for ambient, field-like organizations visible in the work of
architects such as OMA, MVRDV, or Sejima. Two opposing tendencies have coexisted since the
earliest experiments of modernism.  On the one hand, iconic objects that register in a symbolic or
metaphoric way the new conditions of modernity; on the other hand, new spatial formations that
enact the organizational and social dynamics of modernity.  From non-objective painting to serial
music, from structural linguistics to minimalist sculpture, modernity has directed its gaze away from
the thing itself, and toward its constitutive relationships and its position in a contextual field.  Today
we pay increased attention to the interval: the sequence of parts and to the spaces between
things:  silence in music, blankness in painting, or architecture’s empty spaces.
2004/2008

NOTES

1. Alison Smithson, “How to Recognize and Read Mat-Building; Mainstream Architecture as It Has Developed Towards the Mat-Building,”
Architectural Design 1974, no. 9, September, 573–590; all subsequent quotations from this same source.
2. Dave Hickey, “On Not Being Governed,” The New Architectural Pragmatism, ed. William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007) 95–96.
3. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Anthony Kerrigan (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) 109. Thanks to Ryan Neiheiser for this quotation.
4. Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival (New York: Vintage Books 1994).
5. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: Norton, 2006).
6. “Los Angeles is fine in many respects, but it lacks legibility—that factor which ultimately involves identity and the whole business of the
city as an extension of oneself. … The layout of Los Angeles and the form of its buildings do not indicate places-to-stop-and-do-things-
in. What form it has is entirely in its movement pattern, which is virtually an end in itself,” Alison Smithson, Team 10 Primer, ed. Alison
Smithson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974) 64.
7. Winy Mass once remarked that “architects today use the word ‘landscape’ as often as Americans use the word “fuck.” That was around
1994, so the appeal to landscape is not necessarily a new phenomenon.
8. James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) 31.

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