49 YOKOHAMA FERRY

TERMINAL
FOA

Helene Furján

Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama Ferry Terminal, 2002.*

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture.

Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
INTERNATIONAL PASSENGER TERMINAL

Life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of
this action is not predetermined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which life,
in evolving, sows along is path. Henri Bergson1

Architecture is not a plastic art, but the engineering of material life. Farshid Moussavi
and Alejandro Zaero-Polo.2

When they left Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture in 1992,

Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo started Foreign Office Architects
(FOA), moving the practice to London to teach at the Architectural Association
(AA). The AA in the 1990s, under Chairman Alan Balfour and Jeffery Kipnis, Direc-
tor of the Graduate Design Program, was a crucible for experimental practice and
design research. Zaera-Polo and Moussavi were commissioned to run a three-year
research studio using international competitions to provide content for AA Files, the
in-house scholarly journal. The Yokohama Ferry Terminal was the product of the
1994–95 competition to rebuild the 1894 Osanbashi Pier in the Japanese port city of
Yokohama as an international passenger terminal.3 With their 1995 winning
scheme, FOA and their students took a decisive lead in the shift toward digital
design that no longer distinguished between ground and building mass, or between
surface and depth, section and plan.4
Yokohama was one of a number of competitions that brought young innovators
to public attention: Jussieu Libraries (1992, won by OMA); Cardiff Bay Opera
House (1994, won by Zaha Hadid); IIT Student Center (1997, won by OMA, with
significant entries from Eisenman and Resier Umimoto); West Side Convergence
for IFCCA (1999, notable projects by UN Studio and Resier Umimoto); and Eye
Beam Museum of Art and Technology (2001, notable projects Greg Lynn Form’s
bleb façade, D + S’s continuous surface, and Scott Cohen’s tensegrity circulation).
Significant to Yokohama was not just the cultural shift FOA’s winning proposal
indicated, but the ways in which the competition’s theme – the sea, fluid dynamics,
transportation interchanges, circulation-as-program, temporal flux, transitional
space, hybrid programming – prompted invention. Reiser Umimoto’s similar
scheme, which folded public park and interior circulation through each other,
and OMA’s diagram of program intensities varying over time, are stand-outs,
and the competition enabled exploration of what Stan Allen was later to call “land-
form building” as never before. The postwar mat building had grown up, improved
its ideas about circulation, and understood that it was fundamentally an urban for-
mation, not simply a “city-within-a-city.”
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 3

At Harvard’s GSD, Zaera-Polo and Moussavi were taught computation by Bill

Mitchell and Branco Kolarevic. But surprisingly little else marked this new terri-
tory. The “paperless studio” would not be introduced at Columbia’s GSAPP until
1994. OMA’s Jussieu Libraries entry had manifested in the modest Rotterdam
Kunsthal (1992). UN Studio’s 1993 Mobius House, the only single-surface project
yet built, was important. Coop Himmelb(l)au had, since the early 1980s, begun to
think of form as ‘scape, in which ground plane, roof, walls, skin were no longer
discrete.5 Himmelb(l)au’s 1980 manifesto, “Architecture Must Blaze,” was a call
for non-orthogonal, non-Cartesean design that, like their earlier experiments of
the 1960s, were affective and sensational environments. The accompanying
“Blazing Wing” installation, a tessellated structural skin “clad” in flames, rejected
modernism and postmodernism in favor of dynamic, non-normative form.
Influential were Frank Gehry’s iterations of the unbuilt Lewis House (1989–95),
his Bilbao Guggenheim (1991–97), and the fish sculpture for the 1992 Barcelona
Olympics that led to the horse heads roughly contemporary with Yokohama
(1995–98). However, Gehry’s approach to fabrication – structure as gantry-support
for non-standard skins – was not the structural surface of UN Studio and FOA.
Herzog de Meuron, much admired by Moussavi and Zaera-Polo, had built the first
of their iconic signal boxes and begun the second, but these breaks from normative
geometry were not close to the daring of Yokohama. Peter Eisenman had barely
begun to leave the world of the trace with designs for the Church of the Year 2000
and Bibliotèque de L’IUHEI in 1996. Zaha Hadid’s Monsoon Restaurant and the
Vitra Fire Station of 1994 were still planar compositions if the signature landform
massing of her mature work was already present; her interest in hybridizing
ground, envelope, circulation, and surface emerged in the projects of 1997–99,
and were fully realized by 2000.
At the time of its submission, FOA’s Yokohama was a pioneer for the potential of
emerging digital tools that enabled parametric modeling of dynamic surfaces,
where the form of circulation became the form of the building as a whole. Event
and organization replaced program, adaptive envelope replaced façade, and digit-
ally manipulated surfaces replaced composition. The project, completed in 2002,
marked a paradigm shift that would itself take more than a decade to come to full
fruition.

Form to Formation

An important precursor for Yokohama, close to the AA’s Bedford Square home,
was The Imagination Group’s London headquarters, designed by Ron Herron
in 1987.6 Member of the avant-garde practice Archigram, Herron died in 1994
but was teaching at the AA when Moussavi and Zaera-Polo arrived. The tensile
roofscape, stretching across two existing buildings and a decommissioned street,
4 The Present Generation

can be seen from the terraces in the middle of the AA complex: an undulating min-
imal surface structure that glows at night.7 Homage to Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun
Palace (1960–62), and an embodiment of Archigram’s interest in flexible event-
based spaces (“instant cities”), the new roof creates an urban landscape that verti-
cally connects two buildings across six floors, linked by scaffolding walkways that
cross at random angles, and culminating in a gallery and event space on the
original roofs.
In Herron’s Imagination building was the urban theater that Price and his col-
laborator on the Fun Palace, theater director Joan Littlewood, envisioned as social
catalyst.8 For Price, architects were not in the business of providing meaning or
aesthetics, nor of constructing architecture as a visual symbol. Anticipating Bernard
Tschumi’s late 1970s coinage of the term “event space,” Price believed adaptive
environments should enable a range of changing programmatic potentials.
Tschumi’s notion of urban theater, developed at the AA under Alan Boyarsky
and inscribed in Manhattan Transcripts (1981)9 and Event Cities (1994),10 and other
essays published in the 1980s and early 1990s, was predicated on the argument that
“there is no space without event.”11 Following landscape architect Lawrence
Halperin’s “urban scoring” of the 1960s and 70s, Tschumi sought to “choreograph”
space. Form could no longer “follow function,” but had to enable flux and dynamic
change, catalyzing event and social encounter, and mediating, by interconnecting
with, exterior climates, circulation patterns, urban organizations, and cultural and
social formations.
Central to this thinking was Sanford Kwinter, whose course on complexity at
Harvard’s GSD influenced Zaera-Polo and Moussavi as students. His 1992 “Land-
scapes of Change,” which discussed Conrad Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape,”
developed in the late 1950s to describe the genetic influence of environmental
changes on a population.12 Rene Thom’s idea of “fitness landscapes” followed
in the 1970s – developmental space, within which organisms evolve, as topological
and dynamical models, accounting for the potential combination of chance and pre-
diction. Kwinter enabled “typology” to become “topology,” and “form” to become
“formation,” adapting, mutating, and evolving. Yokohama understood the surface-
landscape not just as a material form, but also as a formation of matter – of potential
pathways of development:

The radicalization of matter requires that matter is from the beginning irreducibly
sensate and responsive; that at every scale sensate, responsive matter organizes itself
hierarchically into discreet, irreproducible configurations with specific emergent
behaviors; and that all discreet material configurations at any and every moment
and any and every scale further arrange into complex ecologies.13

In Phylogenesis, Moussavi and Zaera-Polo classified the office’s work as a

“population” of projects, both the figure for the culture of FOA’s practice and
its protocols and techniques – what they call its “genetic potentials.”14 The
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 5

nineteenth-century biologist, Ernst Haekel, introduced the term “phylum” to

group organisms around a “body plan” or blueprint – families of morphological
and developmental similarity.15 Zaera-Polo and Moussavi described their practice
“as a lineage of ideas that evolve through time and across different environments,”
a “phylogenetic process” generating “differentiated yet consistent organisms,”
organized in the 1990s around the phylum “surface.”16

Formative Processes

Moussavi notes in The Function of Ornament, “Architecture needs mechanisms that

allow it to become connected to culture.”17 The concept of the phylum – the dia-
grammatic lineage that creates a “culture” of work – for both Moussavi and Zaera-
Polo must be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to cultural change. In the 1970s,
Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi compared the “duck” – the building as sym-
bol – with their preferred typology, “the decorated shed,” or the building as sign.18
Yokohama was a direct response: Zaera-Polo and Moussavi were taught by Scott
Brown at the GSD. The decorated shed rethought as mat building was a hybrid
of shed, ground, and circulation. The mat building, a term developed by Alison
and Peter Smithson, was the direct precursor of Yokohama’s shed-ground-flow
hybrid. Zaera-Polo and Moussavi described the mat typology as the organization
of circulation, with architecture then “deployed on the circulation diagram”; Yoko-
hama was to become more consistent – “in which circulation can literally shape
space,” an expression of “landscape urbanism,” a preoccupation of the 1990s.19
Stan Allen, proponent of landscape urbanism, begins his “thick 2-D” manifesto
with an appraisal of Yokohama.20 A “porous mat of movement and waiting spaces,”
Yokohama is a continuous surface of “differing intensities of occupation”: “Con-
ceived as an artificial landscape, minimal sectional variation separates and
smoothes traffic at the same time that it activates complex programmatic varia-
tion.”21 Yokohama proposed that the urban condition operate as a thickened sur-
face in which “program” equated to moments of intensity in the network of the
urban field. As such, it was heir to Koolhaas’ notion of the continuous surface, first
proposed in his analysis of New York, and developed in the Jussieu Libraries and
Kunsthal. The “synthetic carpet” of “programmatic lava” was “a single program-
matic composition” in which the city and building each flowed into the other,
and which, in turn, embraced a wide heterogeneity of program.22 For Koolhaas,
the continuous surface was an urban condenser – “smooth congestion” – and an
urban intensifier – “engineered disorientation” and “enforced detours”: “an
unforseeable and unstable combination of simultaneous activities.”23
Eisenman identifies Le Corbusier’s unbuilt 1964 Palais des Congres Strasbourg
as the source for floor as a ramp, which joins the ground and the roof in a contin-
uum.24 The ground delaminates and rises up through the building, marked as a
continuous urban condition by sectional variation, and by “vertical voids,” forces
6 The Present Generation

that push up and out of the envelope.25 Yokohama, though a horizontal organiza-
tion, follows Jussieu Libraries’ development: “Koolhaas uses the void, which is con-
ceived as an inversion of poché … by conceptualizing it as a latent force contained
between layers of solid floors … Conceptually the circulation and the floor levels
become a continuous surface.”26 The continuous surface as the diagram of pure
circulation was confirmed by Stan Allen’s focus on “field conditions,” leitmotif
for landscape urbanism.27 Allen’s shift from points and lines to waves and fields
was also heavily influenced by Kwinter’s 1987 essay on the post-relativity universe
in Zone 1/2: “an open, far-from equilibrium system, responsive to and willing to
amplify every destabilizing fluctuation in the environment.”28 Yokohama is a clear
manifestation of form understood as a plastic and dynamic field of events, devel-
oped out of rhythms, movements, pulses, and flows, and their effects on form.29
Form is formative process.30

Surface
Bernard Tschumi, describing The Manhattan Transcripts project (1976–81), notes,
“Architecture is not simply about space and form, but also about event, action, and
what happens in space.”31 Successful public spaces emerge, they are not prescribed.
Christopher Alexander’s 1965 “A City is Not a Tree” contrasted the sterile
institutionalized playground “asphalted and fenced in,” to spaces which would
enable play:

Play itself, the play that children practice, goes on somewhere different every day.
One day it may be indoors, another day in a friendly gas station, another day down by
the river, another day in a derelict building, another day on a construction site, which
has been abandoned for the weekend. Each of these play activities, and the objects it
requires, forms a system…The different systems overlap one another, and they over-
lap many other systems besides. The units, the physical places recognized as play
places, must do the same. In a natural city this is what happens. Play takes place
in a thousand places – it fills the interstices of adult life. As they play, children become
full of their surroundings.32
Alexander was interested in the interdependency of urban contexts and events.33
Buildings were to be organized as large-scale self-similar organizations, locally
adaptable microenvironments responding to patterns of behavior, allowing for
the emergence of second-order effects. With multi-dimensional problems and
unpredictable circumstances, performative design processes produced “generative
results”: form as a set of algorithms, anti-figural, anti-representational, anti-monu-
mental, anti-typological. For Alexander, the city was an open, self-regulating,
complex system, not a closed hierarchy of discrete elements: a space of pure
and infinite connection, of networks, flows, and ecologies.
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 7

By thinking of the ferry terminal as an urban formation in these terms, FOA was
able to challenge the normative linear organization of piers, creating circulation
around multiple interconnected loops. This aim required the building to be
conceived as a model of fluid dynamics: an interweaving of flows with different
speeds, orientations, interferences, and eddies. Directional flows connecting points
of departure, arrival, and transfer could be diverted, bifurcating to other pathways,
or slowed, pooling into eddies of programmatic interference. What they termed a
“no-return diagram” involved branched interchanges and nested circuits, such that
visitors to the pier could circulate in either direction along many differing routes:
“In whatever direction the pier is travelled, the experience will be of a continuous
forward movement.”34
Yokohama’s concept is surface-as-ground, rather than surface-as-envelope.
Conceived as a surface that delaminates then (re-)enfolds, the surface-as-ground
is a continuous but layered organization. As a “loosely bounded aggregate,” the
terminal complex was characterized by “porosity and local interconnectivity,”
and by emergent behaviors that self-organized into a coherent, if complex, matrix,
defined by inter-relating, local constraint.35 These localized moments could be
rippled, pinched, or perforated in turn, but were above all sectional. As Allen
has written, “In field configurations section is not the product of stacking (discrete
layers, as in a conventional building section) but of weaving, warping, folding,
oozing, interlacing or knotting together.”36
To translate circulation and surface into a three-dimensional organization, each
segment of the no-return diagram was assigned a surface of specific size, while each
branching node within the circulation network was assigned a bifurcation geom-
etry. The no-return diagram had to be assimilated to the surface-ground: a
branched network overlaid on a field. Program was intensive rather than extensive:

Conventional programmatic distribution is fundamentally related to an extensive use

of space and time: programs are allocated in particular extensions of space and time
with well-defined limits…The potential of intensive space is to set up a degree of
specificity without delimiting extensions.37

Intensive space as a defining concept was, for Zaera-Polo and Moussavi, better
able to negotiate shifting or time-based programmatic conditions, by creating a
continuous but differential variation, not tied to size or volume, nor to fixed
locations or configurations:

Programs link the flows to the overall scheme, where they become like sediments in
the channels created by the folds on the surface, which in turn integrates the seg-
ments of the program through continuous variation of form. Varying degrees of
intensity diminish the rigid segmentation that social machines – especially those that
maintain borders – usually produce.38
8 The Present Generation

Changing diurnal and seasonal demands could thus be seamlessly accommo-

dated. To achieve this, immigration control had to be mobile: the border was estab-
lished not as a fixed line, but as a series of strategic control points, along the axis of
the building. Program, both interior and on the exterior roof deck, was contingent
on the specificities of the surface – curvature, access, exposure or insulation, visual
connection, adjacencies, and proximity. But more importantly, it was determined
by speed. Program adheres to slowness, to the locations in which flow eddies or
stagnates, to moments where circulatory paths are momentarily held, redirected,
or detoured.

Smooth Spaces

Yokohama is a smooth continuum of surface, infrastructure, structure, material,

and program. In this, it is indebted to two iconic works of the postwar period: Frei-
derick Kiesler’s 1959 Endless House, a continuum of life’s cyclicality and rhythms;
and Erwin Hauer’s topological sculpture and screens of the 1950s–1970s. But math-
ematics, geometry, and rules of ordering (algorithms) have always been central to
architecture, and the experimental search for non-standard geometries has existed
since at least the baroque. We could think of the surging, undulating dynamics of
Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, or the sensual curvatures of
Balthazar Neumann’s Vierzehnheiligen Church, whose non-focal transept crossing
requires a series of compound curves that could only be modeled in 3-D, long
before parametric software.
The baroque attempted to synthesize the modular Renaissance church into a
single spatial experience, one, moreover, that was expressly dynamic. Interpene-
trating forms, “smooth” geometries, and complex three-dimensional bodies char-
acterize the baroque, based in geometric calculus.39 Plasticity replaces the planar,
becoming “free form”: restless jumping forms, vibrating or “swaying” forms, on
the cusp of deformation, a dynamic condition in which masses remain in tension,
in a state of unrest or transience.40 The baroque building is a complex system: com-
plex geometries in a continuum, forms within forms, fluid morphing from element
to element, and continuous variation. For Sergei Eisenstein, in his famous essay
comparing different iterations of Piranesi’s Carceri, the Renaissance state of repose
and equilibrium transformed into baroque “ecstasy,” a transformation from a pro-
totype to a dynamic system organized by an intensification of effects: montage.41
FOA’s Yokohama follows this logic, space and form once again relational:

No longer are objects plugged into space but they become relational objects with
intrinsic spatial constructs: space is not just containing, it is a network of relations;
space is not invariant but dynamic; and shape is space (localized and transmutable).42

Space itself becomes “a restless matrix affecting, and affected by, the behaviors to
which it gives form.”43 The ferry terminal is not a demarcated object but an effect
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 9

emerging out of the field: moments of intensity, peaks or valleys, vortexes pro-
duced within a continuous field, “defined not by overarching geometrical schemas
but by intricate local connections”: “Form matters, but not so much the forms of
things as the forms between things.”44 Model of an “emergent metropolis as a
thick, living mat of accumulated patches and layered systems, with no singular
authority or control,” Yokohama is the opposite of the iconic civic monument.45
Form-as-ground is the diagram of Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space,” a
space of pure connection, the space of journeys – trajectories, movements, and
speeds. It is intensive space – temporal, contingent, and dynamic. The ocean
and the boat are both examples. Its opposite is striation. Striated space is of the
old order of Cartesian space, of the modular, extensive, territorializing grid;
smooth space is topological, non-standard intensive, continuous, heterogeneous,
rhizomatic, non-linear, modulated haptic, deterritorializing:

Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this
kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never “in front of,” any more than
one is “in” (one is “on”…).”46

Yokohama’s smooth deformation of surfaces is picturesque – undulating board-

walks spliced with grassy knolls, timber and steel grottos festooned with handrails
and fishing nets, craggy cliffs of structural glass. The warped surface geometry of
Yokohama, mediating between sea, cruise liner, and city, operates as a space that,
like the active picturesque of William Gilpin and Richard Payne Knight, opposes
the pictorial framing of territory, and of one’s place in it: it has to be moved
through, traversed, in order to be understood. This desire, which fueled the
“occluded landscapes” and Romantic ruins of the early nineteenth century, equally
motivated architecture’s embrace of parametric design tools, taken from the movie
industry and engineering, in the 1990s.47
But Yokohama’s smooth space is perforated and striated. This is significant. For
many of their peers, smooth space, so easily generated by Maya or 3D Studio Max,
became a holy grail. But, as Deleuze and Guattari have insisted, smooth space and
striated space exist only in mixture: “Smooth space is constantly being translated,
transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed,
returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in
the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously.”48

Great Waves
Origami is the perfect example of smooth and striated mixtures. It is, of course, a
traditional element of Japanese culture, easily identifiable in the West. But to view
origami as a cliché would be to miss an important point: computational origami has
for some time been a branch of computational geometry, and thus of enormous
relevance to computational design techniques, particularly those that are interested
10 The Present Generation

in surface-structures, that is, surfaces that are also structural, with structure an inte-
grated aspect of surface deformations. Mathematical origami was developed in the
mid-twentieth century, to tackle problems of geometry traditionally unsolvable
using compass and straightedge that could easily and simply be solved by folding
paper. The first International Meeting of Origami Science and Technology was
held in Italy in 1989. In 1991, Italian-Japanese mathematician Humaiki Huzita
developed a sequence of increasingly complex origami axioms. By the turn of
the twenty-first century, computational origami had exploded.
Paul Jackson, who lived in London and taught techniques of origami to designers
there in the 1980s and 1990s, has argued:

All designers fold. That is, all designers crease, pleat, bend, hem, gather, knot, hinge,
corrugate, drape, twist, furl, crumple, collapse, wrinkle, facet, curve, or wrap
two-dimensional sheets of material, and by these processes of folding, create
three-dimensional objects.49

The original concept models for FOA’s ferry terminal competition used origami
tessellation to develop both structural principals and their integration with surface
deformations and perforations. Structure was developed by adjusting the surface
geometries, creating a gradient that shifted from the soft undulations of surface-
ground to sharper v-pleats and x-pleats, creating v-fold and x-fold spans.
This relationship Moussavi and Zaera-Polo referred to as a “metamorphic”
assemblage, “a hollowed ground where loads are not distributed by gravitational
force through columns … but rather by displacing stresses through the folded sur-
face of the shell.”50 These folded span geometries are robust, adjustable, and able to
create single span shell structures that accommodate complex compound curves.
The folded shells also provide seismic performance. They are readily “unfolded,”
that is, able to be documented in 2-D cut sheets. Scale creates differentiation: tigh-
ter pleating where more robust structural support was needed on the one hand; on
the other, looser folds that scaled up to become girders where extra stiffening was
needed, within which were housed ramps, forming sectional connectors between
the layers, and thus perforations in each layer that became folds that created a
topological seamlessness of levels, like a Klein Bottle.
The second significant Japanese reference is to Katsushika Hokusai, artist of the
Edo period. His best known image is The Great Wave off Kanagawa of 1831, part
of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Influential on the development of Jugenstil
and Impressionism in Europe, Hokusai produced a number of prints depicting
wave formations, including Big Wave, Ocean Waves, views of Homoku and
Kajikazawa, and Feminine Wave and Masculine Wave, both intense inhabitations
of the interior of a breaking wave. These images, part of the collection of cultural
artifacts used to spur invention during the competition phase, helped determine
many aspects of the design, from the general undulation and bifurcation of the
levels, to localized details: the interiorized ramps, overhangs of curving
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 11

cantilevered deck, or the valleys and rolling hills of the roof deck, circulation, and
park spaces respectively.
Hokusai’s waves are early examples of images that capture movement, holding
in dynamic tension dramatic experiences. Later in the nineteenth century, in 1882,
Étienne-Jules Marey developed his chronophotography gun, which could capture
movement at 12 frames per second. The image sets produced were less simulta-
neous moments than diagrams of movement as continuous vectors of curvilinear
flow, or “phase portraits.” In 1899–1902, Marey shifted attention to capturing the
effects of interference and turbulence in air movement using smoke arrays. These
photographs were also diagrams – the first notations of fluid dynamics and aero-
dynamics – that tackled a new problem, one that would become crucial to air
travel: the flow of air around a surface. Studying the way air reacted to certain
forms, he focused on curvatures, examining interference patterns such as eddying,
turbulence, updrafts, and drag, by taking images at a rate of 100 frames a second.
Marey’s “graphic method” pioneered the study of curvature as the notation of force
and time, a demonstration of the way topological entities incorporate time and
motion into their shape through inflection.
Yokohama had to develop its own graphical method, most significant of which
was the serial section, which is of the same family as Marey’s serial images of
humans walking or birds in flight. The section set was not descriptive but gener-
ative: the complex single surfaces of each level were originally produced by detail-
ing local conditions every 15 meters, as transverse sections, which were then
overlaid and morphed along the building’s longitudinal axis. The single surface
was produced out of control lines, cuts that in turn generated gradients of topolog-
ical change. From this point on, the project was led by the “resolution” of the trans-
verse sectioning, which shifted from 15-meter intervals, to 3.6-meter, to 1.8-meter.
This technique effectively “built” three-dimensional form by mapping different dia-
grams and distributions to each other: surface deformation geometries to no-return
diagram segments, surface bifurcations to no-return diagram branchings, and
so on.
Using large numbers of two-dimensional sections to create a three-dimensional
form was very much of the moment, and not just as a consequence of documenting
complex topological geometries. In 1989, the US National Library of Medicine
began the Visible Human Project, which documented a male and female human
cadaver by taking cross-sectional photographs at small intervals. The male data set
was completed in 1994, with 1,871 transverse sections taken at 1-millimeter
intervals; the female set was completed in 1995, taken at a finer resolution of
0.33-millimeter intervals. Coinciding with the duration of the Yokohama compe-
tition, the completion of these data sets, and the stunning high-resolution images
produced, caused a sensation. Within the field of architecture, these serial sections
moved notation from diagram to model: the image sets constructed a virtual vis-
ualization, which, if compounded together, reconstructed the three-dimensional
body. Yokohama became the architectural emblem of this new mode of
12 The Present Generation

visualization: the serial transverse sections often appeared alongside their com-
pounding, showing the ways in which the form of the building was “built” out
of these sections. Eventually, the systems had to evolve, moving from “a ‘raster’
space, where each point is determined by local information, to a vectorial space,
where each point is determined by differentiated global orders.”51

Arrival–Departures
FOA’s Yokohama International Ferry Terminal subverts the typology of the trans-
portation pier. In doing so, it works against the “super-modernity” of the type, or
what Marc Augé referred to as “non-places.”52 An influence on Koolhaas’ definition
of junk space, Augé’s non-place identified typologies in which “place” is replaced by
“space” – depersonalized, homogenous, transitory spaces, regimes of transit and
travel, technologies of communication, spaces of control and detention. These
are also spaces of abstract unmediated commerce and leisure. In them, people
are atomized: “community” is broken down into discrete, anonymous individuals –
“customers, passengers, users, listeners” – with all references to the temporality of
the exterior world removed. The international terminal, at once a border zone and
a transit space, with its restaurants and shops, parking and transfer points, decks and
parks, is the epitome of the non-place. The challenge, then, was to find a way to
reintroduce place into the generic space of interval and transience.
How did FOA achieve this? Through “the expression of embedded forces
through processes of construction, assembly and growth.”53 By thinking of a built
ground that was shifting and unstable, but that was also a critical component of an
urban organization, linked to the intense activity of Yokohama Bay, and projected
back into the city proper. By extending the city into the sea, with the civic facilities
as far along the pier as possible. And by shifting the terminal from a gate and con-
duit to an interface, one that replaced a linear circulation structure with a looping,
networked organization: “The structure becomes a warp in urban space, breaking
the polarity between citizens and visitors.”54
By 1999, Lynn had coined the term “animate form” to describe this approach to
morphology.55 Static architectural form becomes a dynamic formation, a field of
force and interaction characterized by “smooth transformation involving the inten-
sive integration of differences within a continuous yet heterogeneous system.”56
No building is ever static; it is a complex interplay of energy transfers and multiple
microclimates, all constantly modulating. As a ferry terminal, Yokohama was the
perfect infrastructural program for this thinking: “the abstract space of design is
imbued with flow, turbulence, viscosity, drag so that the form of a hull can be con-
ceived in motion through water.”57 It was not an autonomous entity but a hybrid
organization, meshed to its environment, in a constant flux of thermodynamic and
socio-political intensities; the coming together of ship, sea, pier, city, and different
modes and vectors of transportation.
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 13

Notes

* Courtesy of Foreign Office Architects.

1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt &
Co., 1911).
2. Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, The Yokohama Project: Foreign Office
Architects (Barcelona: Actar, 2002).
3. The competition, then the largest in Japanese history, drew 660 entries from 41 coun-
tries. FOA won the competition and spent the next five years developing the design,
with construction completed in December 2002.
4. The terminal is 430 meters long and 70 meters wide, with three levels: vehicle access
and parking at the lowest level; the passenger terminal, immigration, lobby, passenger
drop off and pick up, restaurants, and stores on the middle level; and a park/plaza with
viewing decks and event space on the roof.
5. See, for instance, the1982 installation, “Architecture is Now,” the 1983–88 rooftop pent-
house, the 1990 video clip folly, and UFA Cinema Center, begun in 1993. These pro-
jects have typically been discussed in terms of the concatenation of disparate materials
and geometries.
6. The Imagination Group is an event and innovation company started in the late 1970s.
Herron’s building was completed in 1990, and awarded UK Building of the Year in 1991.
7. Not well known in the United States, the building was influential in the UK and Europe.
The building was much admired at the AA, and the visual connection reinforced the kin-
ship of Herron and Archigram’s connection with the school. Its organization captured the
focus on spectacular events environments and experiences of what is referred to as “the
experience economy” Gary Withers founded Imagination to develop.
8. Herron’s building in effect took the AA’s intensely compacted sectional network of
theatrical public spaces – bar, member’s room, library, gallery and event rooms, ter-
races, exterior staircases, and walkways – and turned it into an urban typology. For
everyone who has taught or studied at the AA, the power of these higgledy-piggledy
spaces patched together across several townhouses and mews lies in their role as “social
condenser,” to use the phrase of AA alumnus and former employer of Moussavi and
Zaera-Polo, Rem Koolhaas.
9. Drawing set produced for exhibition from 1976–81, now in the possession of MoMA.
10. Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities (London & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
11. Bernard Tschumi, “Spaces and Events,” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994), 139; originally published in Themes III: The Discourse of Events
(London: Architectural Association, 1983).
12. Sanford Kwinter, “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s ‘Stati d’animo’ as a General The-
ory of Models,” Assemblage 19 (December 1992): 50–65. Sanford Kwinter, a leading the-
orist for this generation, also wrote the influential essay “Soft Systems,” in Culture Lab,
ed. Brian Boigon (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 207–28, and co-
edited the Zone Books 6th volume, Incorporations, with Jonathan Crary, in 1992, look-
ing at the convergence of the machinic and the organism.
13. Jeffrey Kipnis, “On the Wild Side,” in Phylogensis: FOA’s Ark, by Foreign Office Archi-
tects (Barcelona: Actar, 2003), 572. Originally published in 1999.
14 The Present Generation

14. Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark (Barcelona: Actar,
2002), 11. Phylogenesis, Moussavi and Zaera-Polo’s complete works, was published to
accompany the ICA exhibition, Foreign Office Architects: Breeding Architecture, in London
in 2003–04.
15. The term would have been in the news, and thus brought to the attention of architects:
used in biology since Haeckel, botany accepted the designation only in 1993 at the
International Botanical Congress.
16. Moussavi and Zaera-Polo, Phylogenesis, 8.
17. Farshid Moussavi, The Function of Ornament (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 5.
18. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, A Significance for A&P
Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
19. Moussavi and Zaera-Polo, Phylogenesis, 228. On landscape urbanism, see James Corner,
ed., Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), and Charles Waldheim, ed., The Landscape Urban-
ism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).
20. “The lessons of mat building … have been internalized as a series of architectural objec-
tives: a shallow but dense section, activated by ramps and double-height voids; the uni-
fying capacity of the large open roof; a site strategy that lets the city flow through the
project; a delicate interplay of repetition and variation; the incorporation of time as an
active variable in urban architecture.” Stan Allen, “Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D,” in
Hashim Sarkis, CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival
(Munich: Prestel, 2002), 121.
21. Allen, “Mat Urbanism,” 120.
22. “Manhattanism’s unspoken theory of the simultaneous existence of different programs
on a single site.” Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhat-
ten (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 170.
23. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 85.
24. “In section the project implies a continuity between the ground and the roof. This sec-
tional continuity denies the ground as a datum by suggesting that the ground is con-
ceived as a malleable fabric, capable of being pulled up to meet the roof.” Peter
Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000 (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 201, on Le
Corbusier, Palais des Congres Strasbourg (unbuilt), 1964.
25. “The object is no longer merely contained in the volumetric enclosure but rather a
series of forces push the object out through the exterior enclosure of the object, while
the movement of the subject continues to circumscribe the volume.” Eisenman, Ten
Canonical Buildings, 79.
26. Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings, 201–5, on OMA, Jussieu Libraries (unbuilt), 1992–93.
27. See Stan Allen’s “Object to Field,” AD Profile, no. 127, Architecture After Geometry
(London: Wiley & Sons, 1997), reprinted in Allen’s Points + Lines as “Field Conditions”
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997).
28. Sanford Kwinter, “La Città Nuova: Modernity and Continuity,” in Zone 1/2: The Con-
temporary City, ed. Sanford Kwinter and Michel Feher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987), 88–9. Quoted at the beginning of Stan Allen’s “Object to Field.” Field conditions
are a system of organization of loosely bounded aggregates characterized by porosity
and local interconnectivity.
 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 15

29. Kwinter, “La Città Nuova,” 88.

30. “Meanings, communities, persons, organisms, landscapes, and artifacts are configured,
constituted, brought into being – formed – in the relentless emergent relationality that
is the world. Far from connoting a fixed type, form is formative process. No one could
look at an embryo and think anything else.” Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics and Fields
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), xvii.
31. http://www.tschumi.com/projects/18
32. Christopher Alexander “A City is Not a Tree,” Architectural Forum 122 (April 1965):
58–62. Republished in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, ed. Incorporations (Zone
6) (New York: Zone Books, 1992). Zaera-Polo and Moussavi would have known the
essay. Alexander and his colleagues at MIT were writing programs in the early 1960s.
33. See Alexander, “A City is Not a Tree.” See also Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Rel-
evance of Cybernetics” Architectural Design (September 1969): 494–6, an essay produced
out of debates on the limits of science held at the AA: “Design is control of control, i.e.
the designer does much the same job as his system, but be operates at a higher level in
the organizational hierarchy.”
34. Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Sniper’s Log: Architectural Chronicles of Generation X (Barcelona:
Actar, 2012), 329.
35. Allen, “Field Conditions,” 92.
36. Allen, “Field Conditions,” 101.
37. Moussavi and Zaera-Polo, The Yokohama Project, 17.
38. Zareo-Polo, Sniper’s Log, 283.
39. See George Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000).
40. See Heinrich Wöfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (London: Collins, 1964).
41. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Piranesi and the Fluidity of Form,” Oppositions 11 (Winter
1977): 83–103.
42. Dennis Sheldon, “Towards an Ontology of Space,” lecture presented at the University
of Pennsylvania, 28 February 2011.
43. Lindy Roy, “Geometry as a Nervous System,” ANY 17 (1997): 24.
44. Allen, “Field Conditions,” 92.
45. James Corner, “Landscape Urbanism,” in Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Land-
scape, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle (London: Architectural Association, 2003), 59.
46. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 493.
47. For explanation of the “occluded landscape,” see John Barrell, Dark Side of the Land-
scape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980); and Helene Furjan, Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theater
(London: Routledge, 2011).
48. “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” Deleuze and Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus.
49. Paul Jackson, Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form (London: Laurence
King, 2011), 9.
50. Zaera-Polo, Sniper’s Log, 295
51. Moussavi and Zaera-Polo, The Yokohama Project, 91.
16 The Present Generation

52. See Mark Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-Modernity (New York: Verso, 1995).
53. Farshid Moussavi, “The Function of Ornament,” in The Function of Ornament, ed.
Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo (Madrid: Actar, 2006), 8.
54. Zaera-Polo, Sniper’s Log, 282.
55. See Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
56. Greg Lynn, “The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple,” in Folds, Bodies and Blobs (Brussels:
La Lettre Vollée, 1998), 110; first published in AD 102 (March/April 1993).
57. Lynn, Animate Form, 10.

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 Yokohama Ferry Terminal 17

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