FITNESS WITH EXPLICITY- Ryan Robertson

How is knowledge of context translated into the realm of Post-Modern ‘appropriateness’?The projects of EMBT (Enric Miralles/Benedetta Tagliabue) consistently demonstrate an intimate narrative between site and project. How is the ‘Fitness’ of EMBT design engaged by the manifestation of function through form? The intention of this paper is to interrogate the role of form as a vessel for EMBT design in the post-modern era, as a means to understand the complexities of the cultural, social and spatial linkages between site and their design.

The portfolio of EMBT (circa 1970) highlights their insatiable desire to definitively shift Architecture away from the ‘less is more’ Modernist dogma, to their own indelible ‘more is different’ approach. Around the same time, Ian McHarg adopted an environmentally empathetic Post-modernist approach through his book “Design with Nature’. McHarg contended form expresses the process; that they are indivisible, and indicated that fitness with one’s environment is a prerequisite of existence2. How do Fitness, form and function interact with each other in a built environment;indeed is it possible?

McHarg’s definition of Fitness: “If a creature exists, it is fit and its expression is likely to reveal some of its fitness”3, p1-p2. The architecture of EMBT is governed by this important statement. It is designed with consideration for articulation and empathy toward its context. Catherine Spellman’s labelling of EMBT process as ‘reverse archaeology’4, in that their designs are an etching of cultural ideas and references into the landscape is an apt summation. The EMBT design must not sit ‘on’the landscape, but rather ‘in’ it, social links woven throughout and cultural references embedded within through its form.

If we consider EMBT’s practice as not merely fit, but explicitly so, we seek responses through the design to the statements of its immediate context. In examination of the New Scottish Parliamentp5-p9 and Igualada Cemetery Parkp10-p11 the architecture must ‘speak’ the language of the site. Explicitypromotes the most acute of conversations between site and design. Fitness is not engaged by the manifestation of function though form, it is the manifestation of function though form. The intention is how form and function may be considered one and the same in EMBT design.

“Certainly, we can dispose of the old
canard ‘form follows function’. Form
follows nothing- it is integral with all
processes” 1
Ian McHarg


“Form then is communication,
the presentation of meaning”5
Ian McHarg