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KENNETH FRAMPTON: "LATE MODERN LARES: RANDIC AND TURATO"

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To paraphrase Holderlin, "What are architects for in a destitute time?" Destitute for whom, destitute in respect of what? These challenging, virtually unanswerable questions may be formulated differently such as what are architects for in our post-historical times, when the global triumph of Fukayama's neo-liberal democracy makes any coherent, larger environmental vision virtually impossible? Whence the city in the age of the Megalopolis and whence the city after the failure of the neo -capitalist welfare state to realize even a fragment of the city that is worthy of the name! Witness the inexplicably cacophonic landscape of Marne la Vallee or London's Docklands or even Almere in The Netherlands lying before the rigors of the North Sea as a parody of Texas. No doubt we are the absolute masters of the automotive infrastructure that is to say of Donald Appleyard's erstwhile "view from the road", or William Mitchell's "city of bits" barely distinguishable from the "city blown to bits"; from Grozny, Sarajevo, Mostar and Hue. Let us recall the immortal American sergeant who said of Hue, "It was necessary to destroy the city in order to save it?" All of which returns us to the original question and perhaps to the only possible response; namely, that the architect must become an urban guerilla, an inventor of new strategies, or let us say, at the very least, an aesthete amid the ruins or an agent provocateur.

Surely this is how these two young Croatian architect-urbanists, Randic andTurato, must be seen. Agents provocateurs is written all over their dossier from their ingenious application of the computer to a geographic information system for the city of Rijeka to their 1993 proposal for a World Trade Center in the core of the same city; from their first topographic intervention applied to a large perimeter block in Sete, to a similar strategy re-worked for an application to a disused industrial site in Spain. It is this last perhaps that most clearly reveals that line of affinity that runs via the Berlage Institute between Croatia and The Netherlands; this virtually invisible influence that extends from the architecture of OMA in Rotterdam to a generation od Slav architects both within and without the Balkans. And while Rem Koolhaas has virtually no extensive track record as teacher, his strong influence in this geographic region is undeniable. Such an influence is surely evident in Randic and Turato's brilliantly inventive, interstital project for Cartagena in Spain, a three-dimensional, re-working of the original Redburn land settlement pattern of the mid-30's. In this updated 3D version, cars no longer feed interstitally between pedestrian enclaves but scoot along embankments - raised above the two story patio houses to either side. The interstitial spaces at ground level are still there but unlike Radburn they are now woven together with a transverse pattern of movement that is more complex and noticeably more public. Many paradigms are creatively synthesized in this work from Chermayeff and Alexander's Community and Privacy of 1963 to the dyke theme as this occurs in Koolhaas' topographically inflected Kunsthall built in Rotterdam in 1993. There is yet another syndrome, that is hardly to be accounted for by any connection with OMA. This we may recognize as an altogether softer, more plastic, eve Baroque way of thinking that paradoxically may be said to have links via Alvar Aalto to the Nordic vernacular. Proof of this resides in their 1999 proposal for a house in Kostrena, a kind of middle-class, crystallized Klein bottle that expands to the south and inclines towards the west in order to take full advantage of the climate, the view, the topography and the existing vegetation.

In all of this there is, as in OMA, the presence of a disturbing schism, running between the megalopolis conceived as a redeemable landscape and the suburbs seen as a site of utter devastation. Hence in this portflio we find a total division between the easy benevolence of the Kostrena house and the clinical, shining, dematerialized "otherness" of a museum for the outskirts of Zagreb. As they put it in their laconic description of the latter: "The site can be best described as an absence, and according to growth forecasts, it will remain like that for some time. The area does not have an urban character, it is not a natural environment, it does not have pedestrians, it does not have scale...", In short, a prescription for the ubiquitous late modern Alphaville, the combined fruit of random, speculative development and the dissolution of any recognizable vestige of city form. To this impasse Randic and Turato respond with a virtually invisible, yet monumental and logically planned, exhibiting machine, suspended only too ironically between a museum on the one hand and a mausoleum on the other. What are architects for in our destitute but affluent time? Perhaps, notwithstanding the occasional building they are at their best as quardians of our critical consciousness.

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