Exploring the Unforeseen—Porosity as a Concept

Christian Zöhrer

Porosity is a prolific concept for architects and urban designers in addressing the principle challenges of
urban space. As designing urban space means dealing with wicked problems (Rittel and Webber 1973)
there is an urgent need for tools that are precise in description and at the same time allow for the appear-
ance of unforeseen aspects within the process of planning and designing. This chapter illustrates how a
metaphor can be made productive as a concept for architecture and urban design.
“Designers use the metaphor as an instrument of thought that serves the function of clarity and
vividness antedating or bypassing logical processes” (Ungers 1982, 11). This is of fundamental impor-
tance for the protagonists of the discipline in overcoming the hermetic boundaries of modernist zoning
in urban planning, and to avoid designing buildings as isolated objects. Instead they need to be under-
stood as relational spaces creating specific qualities and atmospheres within their individual urban
­context. Thus the special emphasis on porosity is not so much concerned with its function as a purely
descriptive metaphor, but as a Denkbild that combines conceptual power with imagination. This concept
focuses on architecturally designed urban spaces with its main interests in openness, ambiguousness,
and interpenetration on all scales.
For this, the complementarity of spatial form and physical form is important to the concept of
porous city. The volumes of buildings always have to be perceived in relation to the (urban) spaces in
between them. Alban Janson points out the importance of these dialectics of mass and pores in the urban
tissue when he talks about the “Ambiguous Figure and Cloud.” Gianbattista Nolli’s Rome-Plan of 1748 is
the perfect illustration of this figure-ground-illusion of urban space. But this aspect also appears on other
scales of the urban tissue. From the metropolitan area, as shown in the large-scale figure-ground-plans
of different European metropolitan regions in Xaveer DeGeyter’s After-Sprawl (DeGeyter 2002) down to
the ground-floor plans of Venice, drawn by Saverio Muratori’s morphological school in 1959.
The wall as a double edge in this dichotomy of mass and hollow acquires a different meaning
within the concept of porosity. It is no longer the abstract line or solid surface that draws boundaries
around enclosed objects, buildings, or areas. The porous edge creates a communicative relationship
between different spaces of the city in the form of thresholds. “The architecture of the city, could, in fact
be conceived as the art of thresholds” Sophie Wolfrum argues (Wolfrum, 63). Stephen Bates and Bruno
Krucker show some fascinating examples of deep thresholds they have explored with their students,
focusing on the emotive and atmospheric aspects of these as-found situations.
A recent publication on baroque staircases in Naples illustrates the porous qualities of the various
vertical thresholds which Benjamin and Lacis were so enthusiastic about (De Meyer 2017). The ambiguity­­­
of hiding and seeking, being inside or outside, appearing and disappearing at the same time as entering
or leaving a building contains so much dramaturgical potential that this architectural space transforms
the street or the courtyard into a stage and the people into actors. We have forgotten the great potential
and the specific qualities these transitional spaces offer to the city. Thus, Francesca Fornasier uses Georges
Perec’s request that “We should learn to live more on staircases” as an opportunity to point out the rich-
ness and diversity of these ambiguous spaces of vertical access in an urban context (Fornasier, 79).
With the aim of enabling communication, interaction, and improvisation, the concept of the
porous city provides architecturally designed elements of pervasion and multiple-coded spaces on all
­different levels and scales. These elements are not buildings, objects, or architectural artifacts but rather
thresholds or transitions, created as relational spaces connecting the inside with the outside or the
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­ rivate with the public. There seems to be a contradiction within this space in-between, which Doris
p
Zoller is focused on. These situations have to be designed very precisely in form, material, scale, atmos-
phere, and cultural context to create an ambiguity and openness, which enables a both rich and situated
spatial practice. The concept of a porous city, resolves this apparent contradiction.
In terms of large-scale urban phenomena, the blurring of conceptual borders between the archi- 58

tectural object, landscape, and infrastructure could be a possible approach to generating typological 59

ambiguity and openness, as Rita Pinto de Freitas outlines in her definition of hybrid architecture (Pinto
de Freitas, 76). This fluid understanding of disciplines and typologies offers potential to the design pro-
cess and it forces all the disciplines involved to overcome their particular and limiting preconceptions
to see the bigger picture.
While Gunther Laux identifies a loss of porosity within the present practice of transforming
urban space and highlights his arguments by using the example of the Stuttgart21 project, Margitta
Buchert unfolds the qualities of another large-scale architectural project, De Rotterdam, finished in 2013
by AMO. She shows that a public space within the volume of a big building can create a porous space by
means of architectural design alone. This demand for porous space as an architecturally designed open
situation can be transferred from the large scale of a whole city to an individual private apartment. As
urban space not only offers thresholds and openness in terms of built spaces, but also includes specific
spatial practices and cultural techniques to create spatial structures, the concept of a porous city suggests
permeability to the process of designing, too. This means participation and negotiations are crucial to
the production of porous urban space (see also chapter 4, “Urban Regulations and Planning”). When
Christoph Heinemann argues that in architectural design he is more interested in articulating a problem
than providing ultimate solutions to pregiven tasks, the productive use of conflicts becomes graspable
as an integral part of design processes.
The concept of a porous city avoids simple solutions to problems in binary categories of right or
wrong. It seeks to create urban space as an open system but with a specific and architecturally designed
spatial structure, which allows for future rearrangements and reappropriations. As Richard Sennett
(2013, 14) puts it: “All good narrative has the property of exploring the unforeseen, of discovery; the
­novelist’s art is to shape the process of that exploration. The Urban designer’s art is akin.”

References:
DeGeyter, X., ed. 2002. After-Sprawl: Research for the Contemporary City. Rotterdam. | De Meyer, D. 2017. Showpiece and Utility:
Eighteenth-century Neapolitan Staircases. Ghent. | Rittel, H., and M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,”
Policy Sciences 4: 155–69. | Sennett, R. 2013. “The Open City,” accessed October 27, 2017, https://www.richardsennett.com/site/
senn/UploadedResources/The%20Open%20City.pdf. | Ungers, O. 1982. Morphology, City Metaphors. Cologne.

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