EXCERPT

From the Introduction, by Hashim Sarkis

Today mats are everywhere. We call them fields, grounds, carpets, matrices. Whether seen as counterpoint to the preoccupation with sculptural form or as what happens to architecture when it has to cover really large areas, no building type, it could be stated without exaggeration, captures the predicaments but also the imagination of contemporary architecture more fully. The mat answers the recurring calls for indeterminacy in size and shape, flexibility in use, and mixture in program. It expresses architecture's increasing encroachment on both city and landscape and as the open exchange between structure (building) and infrastructure (context) that this encroachment professes. In face of these challenges, and in every other design published in every other magazine, the mat claims to address a wide range of problems preoccupying contemporary architecture.

And yet mat building cannot be associated with a specific formal or stylistic tendency in contemporary architecture. In the words of the late English architect Alison Smithson, it is "still developing." Yet what she justified in the 1970s as a natural condition of the "first primitive state" of mats has become a defining feature. Mats are by definition still developing. Today we apply to this phenomenon attributes as diverse as Kazuyo Sejima's ethereality and Rafael Moneo's compactness. The mat is the image of the promised fluidity of the Foreign Office Architects' Yokohama Terminal. It also occupies the centerfold in Office of Metropolitan Architecture's books on the state of architecture today. To contain all these ideas in one building type would be to miss out on the broad range of real differences between these architects' positions vis-à-vis such fundamental issues as context, the relationship between form and program, and architectural language. The mat category, however, seems to be broad enough to allow for this wide range, even for contradiction. What further binds these contemporary architectures together is their conscious return to mat building as a historical possibility that was never fully explored.

The present fascination has no doubt been triggered by the changes in development culture, particularly by the ever-growing scale of institutions (such as hospitals and schools) and commercial facilities (such as airports and malls). Increasingly developers are also seeking architects to help give form to new programs that have yet to settle on a distinctive type: airport/park/shopping mall or housing/retail/institution. In response, perhaps evasively, architects are seeking ways in which a building could act as a flexible framework rather than a rigid container to these shapeless functions. Avoiding what Stan Allen here refers to as "overall geometric form," today's architects proceed to define buildings that could "give space to the active unfolding of urban life without abrogating the architect's responsibility to provide some form of order." They turn back toward the mat. Allen promptly cautions that contemporary architecture needs to enlarge the scope of mat to include urbanism and landscape. Renaming the phenomenon "mat urbanism," he outlines the mat agenda of today as opening to urbanism and its large scale and multispeed movement and to landscape and its surface and temporal qualities. Mat buildings today aim for a much more aggressive exchange between structure and infrastructure than what was intended in the 1960s. This exchange was assumed to be definitional of the mat, but it did not challenge the permanence and autonomy of infrastructure in the way that contemporary architects are trying to do.