Mat Urbanism

Stan Allen’s text on Mat Urbanism is a thought-provoking analysis of mat in architecture and urbanism – using Alison Smithson’s 1974 article on Mat-Building as a starting point, Allen builds on the mat concept and takes it from the architectural unit level (a building) to the urbanism mass level (a city). Allen overviews various mat projects reaching a distinction between mat building as an organizational strategy and an architectural effect. Using the Venice Hospital as an example, Allen summarises some of the effects of mat-building in general:
- A shallow but dense section, activated by ramps and double-height voids
- The unifying 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
- The ongoing dialogue of project and response

Mat architecture is not so much about the style or appearance but more about the organization – buildings that can be dissimilar can be grouped together by common organizational strategies. A good analogy may be “seeing the wood for the trees”, or the concept of synergy that states that there is a joint effect that is greater than the sum of all the parts acting alone.
Allen describes the spatial patterns as:
- They are mostly similar in the way which parts fit together and the character of void spaces formed by their architectural matter.
- Internally nearly all exhibit a porous interconnectivity in which transitional spaces area as important as the nodes they connect
- Externally they are loosely bounded
- Their form is governed more by the internal connection of part to part than any overall geometric figure
- They operate as fieldlike assemblages condensing and redirecting the patterns of urban life and establishing extended webs of connectivity both internally and externally

“How do we give space to the active unfolding of urban life without abrogating the architect’s responsibility to provide some form of order?” Mat building is a loose scaffolding based on the systematic organization of the parts – At a large scale it is hard to see the big picture so it is necessary to infer this from the individual parts. This is a very pragmatic view – Allen adds: “authentic city culture is the product of many hands over an extended period of time”. This makes us consider that since design style and effects have little impact on the flow of city life, but instead it is organization, linkage and integration that are important, that maybe we need to refocus architectural practices towards these issues – as Allen says: “functions and events configure space, rather than the architectural frame”.
In Mat building, transitions are not merely the neutral link between defined nodes; instead, nodes and links together form a continuous fabric of internally differentiated space. Building on all the above, Allen moves on to discuss the transplant of Mat from building to urbanism. “Mat urbanism would in turn connect to recent tendencies in landscape architecture, where the “thick 2d” of the forest, field or meadow creates mat like effects of connectivity and emergence.” - says Allen and traces the origins of mat urbanism back to the close-grained cellular structure of the Islamic city. Infrastructure of the urban space is broken down into the “stem” or “cluster” which aggregates similar structures and organizational elements.

Historically speaking, in the late 20th century, Allen discusses the growth of suburbia in the United States as a prime example of the emergence of horizontal urbanism. As the radical scale shifted and extreme social contrast undermined the ability of architecture to mediate these transitions, Allen asks “how can the new patterns of the contemporary city be woven into contemporary urbanism?” An example he mentions is that architecture can’t really play a role in such an environment where someone can drive from their home to the mall and back directly via the freeway. Drawing form landscape architecture, Allen suggests we try to activate space and produce urban effects without the weighty apparatus of traditional space making by paying close attention to the surface conditions of the landscape and not the only the configuration. Building on this, we must recognize that in mat configurations, “a 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” – like the roots of grass, urbanism must become one and blend with the landscape in a natural, organic manner.

As “authentic city culture is the product of many hands over an extended period of time”, so is landscape work – “it cannot be designed and controlled as a totality; they are instead scripted as scenarios projected into the future, allowed to grow and evolve over time”. This can be done through simulation and anticipation – mat buildings are never finished, they are in a constant flux, always evolving.

To conclude, Allen draws from the city and the landscape to emphasize the importance of mat urbanism:
“In the city, unpredictable social, economic, and political dynamics interact with the permanent infrastructure to create indeterminate urban effects. In this regard, mat building, with its attention to the space between things and its syntax of part-to-part connection, is more significant as an urbanistic model than as a model for individual buildings. Conversely the notion of a landscape that grows and changes over time can be applied to programming resulting in an architecture that creates a directed field for the occupation of the site over time: a kind of loose scaffold that supports the adaptive ecology of urban life.”

Allen, S., (2002) Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2D, In: Sakris, Hashim CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat building revival. Prestel. pp. 118-126