Having just been looking at the sample images available online from Piotr Brych’s mammoth Great Atlas of the Sky, which plots the location of 2,430,768 stars, along with other celestial objects, I read David Eagleman’s short story ‘Conservation’ (collected with other posthumous vignettes in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009). Eagleman imagines a universe drawn by the tireless movement of a single tiny particle:

If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun, painting the world: each leaf on every tree, every coral in the oceans, each car tire, every bird carried on the wind, all the hair on all the heads in the world…

The quark despondently resigned itself to the fact that it could keep the show going only if it saved energy. It realized it could accomplish this by drawing only those entities that were being observed by someone. Under this conservation program, the great meadows and mountains were only drawn when there was someone there to look. There was nothing drawn under the sea surface where submarines did not travel; there were no jungles where explorers did not probe. These measures of savings were already in place before you were born.

Like a modern 3D game engine, the quark economises on processing power by drawing only what falls into the field of view of an observer. As the story progresses, the quark begins to put living creatures to sleep, in order to reduce the number of viewers and reduce the detail necessary in the scene.

Now I’m thinking about what sophisticated spatial structures game engines like Source or CryEngine 3 are. See also LOD, distance fogs).

In a footnote in Reassembling the Social Latour writes of Foucault:

No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault as translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had ‘revealed’ power relations behind every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.

Power relations are not behind anything, but constituted in things. This analytical Foucault appeals to me, and it’s why The Archaeology of Knowledge remains my favourite of his books (that I’ve read). Cousins and Hussein remark that the book, essentially a methodological treatise, “is a curiously underexploited text, not least by Foucault himself.” I would guess this is because of the inversion that Latour notes.

Sorry this has all been just words recently. I’ll find some pretty pictures to post.

When you look at it, it looks like any other piece of land. The sun shines on it like on any other part of the earth. And it’s as though nothing had particularly changed in it. Like everything was the way it was thirty years ago. My father, rest his soul, could look at it and not notice anything out of place at all. Except maybe he’d ask why the plant’s smokestack was still. Was there a strike or something? yellow ore piled up in cone-shaped mounds, blast furnaces gleaming in the sun, rails, rails, and more rails, a locomotive with flatcars on the rails. In other words, an industry town. Only there were no people. Neither living nor dead. You could see the garage, too: a long gray intestine, its doors wide open. The trucks were parked on the paved lot next to it. He was right about the trucks–his brains were functioning. God forbid you should stick your head between two trucks. You have to sidle around them. There’s a crack in the asphalt, if it hasn’t been overgrown with bramble yet. Forty yards. Where was he counting from? Oh, probably from the last pylon. He’s right, it wouldn’t be further than that from there. Those egghead scientists were making progress. They’ve got the road hung all the way to the dump, and cleverly hung at that! There’s that ditch where Slimy ended up, just two yards from their road. Knuckles had told Slimy: stay as far away from the ditches as you can, jerk, or there won’t be anything to bury. When I looked down into the water, there was nothing. This is the way it is with the Zone: if you come back with swag–it’s a miracle; if you come back alive–it’s a success; if the patrol bullets miss you–it’s a stroke of luck. And as for anything else –that’s fate.”

[ From Roadside Picnic (1971), by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic was the short story on which Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) was based. ]

The best thing I ever heard someone say when I was at graduate school was “Great things happen in terrible buildings and terrible things happen in great buildings”. If you think as an architect that you can pre-determine experience, you are hoping for something that’s just not going to happen. The idea that a designer is creating their perfect vision which no one is supposed to touch. I’m completely shocked by that. How weirdly perverse for an architect to even want that.

Joshua Prince-Ramus, here. ( Thanks ryanj )

Architecture is a demanding study, requiring long hours, hard work, frequent failure and criticism. But why is going through architecture school so punishing? There are some destructive patterns built into the intense, even tribal, culture of architecture schools that have little or nothing to do with learning to be a good architect, or personal development. There seems to be a common attitude amongst teachers and practitioners that ‘it was good enough for me’, and that students just need to toughen up and deal with monumental workloads, seventy-two hour sleepless runs, and hostile, even abusive criticism. Teachers who try to run studios in a different way are fighting institutional inertia. A recent article by Jennifer Epstein on Inside Higher Ed (referring to this 2002 report; discussed here) points out recent efforts by a number of American schools to make changes to studio culture to make it more positive and healthy.

Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends (MIT Press: 2009), a strongly-felt polemic against the stultifying aspects of contemporary architectural practice and education, addresses some of these concerns. Many aspects of the culture of architectural education are not about good training as architects, but about perpetuating professional and institutional authority:

“[T]he main way that architectural education avoids staring the stasis of its own processes in the eye is by confusing radical making with radical thinking. Because things look different, from school to school, and from year to year, the assumption is made that the formative educational processes are equally different and equally evolving.”

One of the most strongly entrenched ideas, Till argues, is that architecture is a discrete and autonomous enterprise; a pure field that only engages with the mess and disruption of the world under duress; that the work of architects is primarily answerable to other architects. Professional institutes such as the RIBA frame architects’ responsibilities as primarily to the clent, neglecting far greater, or at least equivalent, responsibilities to users.

The modernist tradition of equating ethics with aesthetics exemplifies the concept of an autonomous architecture. It is actually a way of escaping genuine ethical concerns by calling what you’re already doing a kind of ethics. If aesthetics are ethics, then architects can carry on worrying about formal elegance and feel good about their ethical standards. Architecture is contingent, Till points out: contingent on external forces, social conditions, inherited ideas and images, finance, material inconsistencies, the mess of human existence. The cover image of Architecture Depends shows a man in a bear suit (artist Mark Wallinger) wandering around Mies’s Crown Hall. Wallinger satirises the concept of abstract, autonomous architecture by becoming a conglomerate of things it excludes: animals, wildness, the low-brow, humour. Till’s book is like this: it confronts the hermetic closure of the discipline with the messy, contingent world that it often seems to ignore.

However, the book is explicitly polemical, an impassioned editorial rather than an a study, and with this have come some flaws: generalisation, condescension, and poor editing. The main line of the text is punctuated with anecdotes that serve to illustrate aspects of the arguments. Common in these parables are people not getting things that are patently obvious, and Till seems to be inviting us to shake our heads with a wry smile at each one.

“Some time ago there was a wonderful television series called ‘Sign of the Times.’ In it the photographer Martin Parr and social commentator Nicholas Barker quietly observed the British in their homes… One such moment is set in a sparse modernist interior. A woman, voice choked with emotion, is lamenting that her husband will not allow her to have ‘normal’ things such as curtains: the camera dwells on expanses of glazing. When her husband Henry appears, he despairs of the ‘rogue objects’ disturbing his ordered interior. ‘To come home in the evening,’ he says, ‘and to find the kids have carried out their own form of anarchy is just about the last thing I can face.’

The rogue objects are his children’s toys.

Henry is an architect.”

Oh, Henry. This was pompous and snarky when Adolf Loos did it (cf. his ‘Tale of a Poor Rich Man’), and it comes off as snarky here, too. There are crowds of these straw men wandering around between the covers of Architecture Depends. The author takes a reductive approach to the arguments of people whose work he doesn’t appreciate, reducing their arguments to simplified outlines. For example, faced with Mark C. Taylor’s suggestion that “aesthetic principles (of twists, curves, and color) are coded in ways that carry significant ethical and social weight”, Till does not even pay the courtesy of examining the proposition. He argues in the chapter in question that architects have repeatedly tried to equate ethics with aesthetics as a way of escaping actual ethical concerns, but he doesn’t convince us that this is what Taylor is doing. Especially for someone who further down the same page is insisting that his own words be weighed up carefully, this is a bit hard to swallow. And the argument of the chapter would not be weakened by a less dismissive treatment of his interlocutors.

Similarly, Till makes assumptions about teaching and practice that are generic and not necessarily representative. He may have a far wider experience of schools of architecture than I, and I certainly recognised the architectural education he described, but the program I am teaching on now (not technically an architecture school) bears little resemblance to this, and I am aware of other schools that operate quite differently. Similarly, his characterisation of practice is very generalised. There are already many design/art/object/architecture/landscape/furniture/detail/interior practices working in some of the ways he suggests, undermining the status quo, engaging aspects of society traditionally ignored by architects, operating across disciplinary boundaries. If Till intended to promote this kind of work, he might have spent more time talking about it.

It is perfectly fine that the book has a strong authorial voice, but I think Mr Till’s editors have taken too light a hand in the text. There are sprawling passages that need cropping, vague passages of which the editor needed to demand more substantiation and precision, and passages that are just badly written (take for example this Dan-Brown-esque line: “Space and time. Time and space. Inseperably linked”).

Many aspects of Till’s argument are more fully handled by others: the relationship between theory and practice in Stan Allen’s Architecture: Practice, Technique, Representation; the supposed linearity of practice in Catherine Ingraham’s Architecture and the Burden of Linearity; the machinations of power at work in Vitruvius’s theory of architecture in Indra Kagis McEwen’s Vitruvius, the social construction of space in Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, the workings of institutional power in Foucault or one of his many explicators. But of course this is not possible or desirable for all. The book has value, then, in transmitting some of the provocative value of these other books.

Architecture Depends itself is a book of uneven quality. I didn’t enjoy the tone, and as Till himself predicts in the Preface, I found some parts to be operating not much above the level of truism. At its worst, the reader is offered commonplaces as insights. The better parts are marked by flashes of wit and the scent of a provocative architectural counter-culture. In particular, students and teachers immersed in the thick hothouse air of studio could find the book bracing. The concerns which underly this polemic, however are of undoubted importance to the future of architectural education, and the urgency with which Till presses his case, understandable.

In a postscript to his lesser-known work Histoire d’une Forteresse (1874), Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) describes the diffusion of fortifications brought about by the introduction of ranged artillery. The morphology of fortified towns was redefined by the need to operate in increasingly large arenas of conflict.

Histoire d’une Forteresse recounts the history of a fictional town in a valley in eastern France. Positioned strategically, it undergoes a series of sieges and rebuildings illustrating the practice of fortification from Stone Age Gaulish tribes to the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century. Some of the town’s seven sieges result in it’s capture, while in others the town is able to hold out against the invaders. Illustrated with the lucid metal engravings characteristic of Viollet-le-Duc’s books, the text describes military architecture as fundamentally a problem of tactically exploiting matter. Neither tactics nor constructed matter alone are able to keep the fortress secure or overrun it. Instead security consists in a strategic conjunction between matter (the physical matter of the fortress and the surrounding terrain) and military practices. The fortess is a practiced site.

The conclusion, which is the only part of the text we will be concerned with in this paper, purports to be extracted from the notes of one Captain Jean, dated 1871, a year in which French military confidence had been shaken by the Prussian seige of Paris. “Attack,” writes Jean,

“implies a shock or onset; defence is a resistence to this onset. Whether a piece of ordnance discharges a ball against a plate of iron, or a casing of masonry, or an earthwork; or an assaulting column climbs a breach, the problem is substantially the same; in either case we have to oppose to the impulsive force a resistance that will neutralise its effect.” (Viollet-le-Duc, 1876: 357)

Defensive strategy, tactics, and technology therefore, aim to oppose, resist, and neutralise the effect of shock, at whatever scale it comes. Jean’s brief essay uses a series of ten geometrical plan diagrams to describe a fundamental shift in the nature of fortification, brought about by the shock of artillery.

In the simplest case of attack, a series of blows are exchanged in one-to-one combat. Advantage can be taken by outnumbering the enemy, or alternatively, by surrounding oneself with an enclosure. Jean’s first drawing shows that a group protected in this fashion strictly limits the way attackers can engage them. No matter how the attackers configure themselves, or what numeric advantage they hold, they can only confront the defenders individually.

When ranged weapons, “projectile arms”, are taken into account, the attackers receive an advantage. They can set up a line of weapons which can converge their fire on a point on the circumference of the defenders. Because of the nature of a circular fortress, the defenders are extremely limited in their ability to converge fire on the attackers. They are constrainted to scatter their fire outwards, while the attackers can concentrate it inwards. To ameliorate this asymmetry, the fortress can be constructed with external appendages, salients, that allow the defenders to establish a broader base of fire, as well as offering better visibility of the foot of the main wall. In response, however, the attackers can reconfigure, beginning their assault by concentrating fire on the exposed, outflung salients. Defender and attacker compete for the ability to converge fire on the other while remaining protected. This is the central tension of fortification, which Jean writes,

“regulates and will always regulate attack and defense; distances alone modify its applications… The more eccentric the defence is, the more distant must be the attack, and the wider the perimeter it must occupy; but it should be observed, that the more widely the defence is extended, the more open its flanks are to attack.” (Viollet-le-Duc, 1876: 360).

The 17th century fortifications of Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), based on the star-shaped forts of the Renaissance, work according to this principle [3]. By extending salients out from the main fort to form bastions, the defenders create a wider line of fire which can be concentrated at any point on a circumference around the fortress corresponding to the range of the artillery, while minimising the exposure of any individual salients to concentrated fire from attackers. In the fourth of his sequence of diagrams, the geometry of the star-shaped fort is seen to be partially material (in the form of the stone walls), and partially immaterial (in the form of sight-lines, firing ranges, and trajectories). These lines of force or agency form a coherent system with lines of solid material. The trajectories do not simply inform the walls, nor do the walls simply define the trajectories. These immaterial lines are as essentially architectural as rows of cut stone. Captain Jean notes that this worked very well for the ranges of the artillery in use in Vauban’s time, but as the range of artillery increases (he notes that late nineteenth-century artillery was effective at ranges of eight or nine kilometres), the balance swings again. In operations at these greater distances, the fortress is proportionally reduced to a point. The attacker, “taking advantage of an indefinite amount of space” is hidden and free to move, while the defender, “soon encumbered with débris of all kinds” is slowed and confused. Under these asymmetrical conditions of mobility, Jean says, the end result is never in doubt. The solution? “In proportion to the length of the trajectory, therefore, the defence must remove its defensive arrangement from the centre of the place.” (VIollet-le-Duc, 1876: 363).

In the sixth diagram in this section, Viollet-le-Duc re-plots Vauban’s geometry for these larger dimensions. Vauban’s star-forts presented fronts of about 360m, but the new situation called for fronts twelve or thirteen kilometres long. To achieve this, the salients are detached from the main fortress; instead of bastions, they are distributed as separate forts forming a defensive ring. They are positioned at the limit of their own firing range from the central fortress, so they themselves cannot be used to bombard it. The arrangement is then refined into a dual ring of forts, so that no one fort is exposed without other forts being able to provide supporting fire from the flanks. In the drawing, the solid material of the fortress appears as a small hatched mass embedded in an increasingly complex field of radii and circumferences demarcating the domains of projected firepower. Railways are necessary to connect the distant forts, and communication lines must be kept open. The territory surrounding the fortress proper becomes a zone of mobility.

In the eighth drawing, the solid material of the fortress walls is given no presence at all; the entire fortress has dissolved into arcs and radii, with certain key points marked algebraically. However, the fortress has not become obsolete, but ubiquitous. The ninth drawing reveals that each individual fort retains the articulation of salients and angles appropriate to smaller arms and closer quarters. The efficacy of the new system was no longer in the solidity of a fixed centrepoint but in the furnishing of a territory. In the tenth drawing, we are shown how this abstract geometry is deformed by the terrain itself. We see the fortress with its wall, but the arced lines of the wall no longer indicate the presence of solid material, as they did in the first drawings. The wall is the extent of the artillery’s range; it is a horizon of effect surrounding a zone of mobility rather than an enclosure.

[ This older post from David Gissen’s HTC Experiments makes an interesting connection between Viollet-le-Duc and conceptions of crowds in the nineteenth century. ]

[ Part II ]

This is the first section of a paper to be published in the forthcoming issue of Interstices. It argues for the existence of implicit theories of assemblage. I think overall I’m trying to make a connection between architectural assemblages and social or political ones – a stronger connection than just suggesting that the former represents the latter. Something like this is going to feed into my PhD research (whenever that finally gets going). I haven’t included the footnotes or anything, and it ends a bit abruptly. And its far too long for a blog post.

Laugier, Frontispiece to 2nd ed. of Essai sur l'Architecture, 1753

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” The Social Contract begins with chains, and remains entangled in questions of binding. The chain is a figure of arbitrary constraint, and is represented as something to be thrown off. But in Rousseau’s text it is not a matter of aspiring to a state of absolute unconstraint. The very concept of society, of a social order, implies some kind or degree of attachment; and it is the proper form of this attachment which is the concern of The Social Contract.

Rousseau makes a primary distinction between the arbitrary bond of the chain and the natural bond of the family, “the oldest of all societies, and the only natural one” (1968: 50). The child is bound to the father by necessity (the maternal bond is never raised), and once the child becomes independent, this bond dissolves: the child and father are freed from this relation, and if it persists, it is by mutual consent: “If they continue to remain united, it is no longer nature, but their own choice, which unites them; and the family as such is kept in being only by agreement” (50). In this shift from dependence to agreement Rousseau locates the shift from the natural to the social. All legitimate authority, asserts Rousseau, must be based on agreement, and he sets himself the task of describing a society of this kind. Rousseau, who has occasionally been misunderstood as advocating a return to nature, actually describes the social as a second nature[1]. Natural order does not authorise social order. Social order must consist of covenants, freely entered into.

As Mark Wigley points out, Rousseau explicitly describes the constitution of social order as a building project, for which the ground must be cleared and tested, the structure carefully maintained, and collapse avoided, “as an architect who puts up a large building first surveys the ground to see if it can bear the weight”  (Rousseau, 1968: 88; see Wigley, 1993: 133). The state is a collective identity formed by very specific relationships between individual elements. By freely entering into the social contract, an aggregate is formed, a corporate body, a “public person… once called the city” (61). This agglomeration is given its internal cohesion by the social contract subscribed to by each individual. The contract is the fundamental joint, the bond or bind by which the entire social edifice takes shape and holds together. The social body acquires unity, life and will.

Although a social whole is formed, however,  the parts must remain autonomous, such that each individual has a private will distinct from the general will: “His private interest may speak with a very different voice from that of the public interest” (63). This freedom runs to the extent that the individual may at any time withdraw from the contract entirely. Society exists only so long as the social contract is freely maintained by its constituents. The freedom to renounce society is essential. The joints of Rousseau’s social structure must not be bound or fused. There cannot be forceful constraints in the social contract.

Rousseau’s social contract is in many respects a gloss on Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes proposed that the state should be conceived as a collective body, of which the sovereign was the head. The famous frontispiece of Hobbes’ treatise show what he has in mind: a body comprised of individual humans as cells, all looking up towards the sovereign. Rousseau’s innovation is in shifting focus from the exterior relations to interior relations. Where Hobbes begins with the image of a human organism, and proceeds to show how society can be fitted into this authorising metaphor, Rousseau begins with individual connections, and attempts to discover what the whole body might look like. [fn useful critique of the organismal metaphor in delanda] Put simply, where Hobbes tendentially assumed the primacy of social form, Rousseau was concerned with social formation. [fn for a fuller discussion of Hobbes’ Leviathan, see McEwen]

Joseph Rykwert has suggested a correlation between Rousseau’s primitivism and that of his contemporary, Marc-Antoine Laugier. The famous frontispiece image of Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1753) is one of the key coordinates for Rykwerts study of the idea of the primitive hut in architectural theory, On Adam’s House in Paradise. Laugier proposes that the basic elements of the classical tradition in architecture are already present in an imagined primitive scene: seeking environmental control over light, heat, dampness and air, a primitive man finds four trees arranged in a square, and constructs a raised roof; thus inventing column, entablature, and gable. Rykwert writes “Allowing for the inevitable differences between the two men, and the differing scale of their enterprises, this view of the authority of the primitive hut is not unlike that which Rousseau attributed to the family as the archetype of social organisation” (Rykwert, 1981: 44).

In his The Contribution of Art and Science to the Refinement of Manners, Rousseau describes in parallel the socialisation of human beings, and the degenerate elaboration of architecture: “Here is a calm riverbank, dressed by the hand of unaided nature, towards which the eye turns constantly, and which you leave with regret… then came the height of degradation, and vice was never carried so far as when it was seen, to speak figuratively, supported by marble columns and engraved on Corinthian capitals” (Rykwert, 1981: 46-47). How to properly house human beings is a question allied to that of proper social relations.

In his drawing for the 1755 edition of the Essay on Architecture, Laugier’s hut is conspicuous for its structural self-sufficiency. The individual elements: the still-living columns, the cross-beams and the rafters, all rest together naturally, without pins or bonds. The four tree-columns have been pruned, and the stumps of the branches become brackets to support the beams. The trees retain their leafy growth, except possibly for the front left tree, which looks as if it has been trimmed back to the trunk. The rafter branches sit up at an improbably steep angle. They rest on the beams without any evident support: under close inspection, the expected bindings are found to be absent, and the rafters do not appear to be notched onto the beams. At the ridge, the rafters rest against one another. A ridge-beam is possibly hinted at, but looks as if it is suspended under the rafters rather than providing any substantive support. Again, there is no hint that the rafters are bound or pinned together at the top; and they cannot be interwoven, because the branches are conspicuously thick and blunt.

Perhaps the gesture of Architecture personified in the foreground could be re-interpreted as a gesture of blame for the collapse of the Ionic edifice in the foreground that has attempted to follow the structural logic of the Laugier’s hut – in which case it is no wonder that the cherub appears shocked.

It is evident, of course, that Laugier did not intend his hut to be understood as an exemplar of construction practice, but as a moral “first model” (Laugier, 1756: 11). It is used to demonstrate the essential elements of architecture, and to exclude those elements which are superfluous additions, “essential defects” (12). If performs the same role (and has the same anthropological nonspecificity[3]) as Rousseau’s primitive family. But to point out the strange condition of the joints in Laugier’s image is not entirely perverse – this model does, after all, deliberately express principles of construction. And in fact, the disjointedness of Laugier’s hut is entirely consistent with his thinking about architectural attachment, and the relationship between part and whole. In the Essay on Architecture, there is little written directly concerning joints. Perhaps consideration of joints is included amongst those details with which Laugier felt disinclined “to load this little work” for fear they might “trouble and distaste the reader” (xvi). Connection and attachment are, however, important subthemes of Laugier’s text.

In the chapter of his essay which directly addresses construction, the strength of a building is said to depend on the choice of good material, disposed with consideration of loadpaths and bearing. Laugier writes, “There are three things which render a wall strong and immoveable. The foundation upon which it bears its thickness, the connection and right line of its parts” (138). It is obvious that in his text he has in mind one type of joint, stacked masonry; this is in spite of what he has asserted about the timber origins of architecture. Stones are to be laid accurately and tightly, “that there may be no void in the thickness of the wall” (141), and the use of mortar, a concession, is to be minimised. Laugier’s ideal structure would be held together by nothing other than gravity. Beams are “laid” on the columns. Columns are to “bear immediately upon the pavement, as the pillars of the rustic cabin bear immediately on the ground” (15).

For Laugier, working from the model of his primitive hut, the column was the only proper means of bearing vertical loads. Walls were to be treated as infill panels, concerned solely with sealing up a spatial envelope. Engaged columns are only permitted as a “licence authorised by necessity” (16), but they must not be lost into the mass of the wall – they should be engaged “a fourth part at most… so that even in their use they may always retain something of that air of freedom and disengagement,” (16). For Laugier, parts must remain distinct, even while they form an integrated architectural body. They must be seen to be distinct (as the columns must be seen to be distinct from the wall); and they should need a minimum of concern for attachment: there is an expected natural co-dependence of parts. The disconnection of parts which Laugier encourages could be seen as a foundational principle for later tectonic conceptions of the joint, the role and expression of which became one of the central preoccupations of modernist architecture.

Laugier and Rousseau share more than an authorising appeal to a fictional primitive scene. Both idealise connections in the same way, envisaging a kind of joint which is held together without binding. Their respective edifices, social and architectural are complete wholes comprised of individual elements, which must remain free and discrete, even as they constitute this wholeness. Both edifices are only conceivable on the basis of a very particular mereology. This joint is primitive, in the sense that it is taken to emerge from primitive social and technical conditions. Although these conditions place the joint close to nature, the joint itself is not understood as natural, except insofar as rationalism is natural. For Rousseau, there are three joints: the paternal bond, the agreement, the chain. The first is natural and primitive, the second rational and natural, the third unnatural and irrational. The social contract is of the second of these orders. Laugier fumbles the question of origin by treating it over-literally, but he too seeks to authorise architectural production by demonstrating it to be a rational and natural assembly.

See, I told you it ended abruptly. If you actually read all the way to the end, free virtual cookies for you.

Some thoughts from Peter Sloterdijk on the spatiality of apartments:

“I interpret apartment construction as the creation of a world-island for a single person. To understand this, you need to concede that the word world not only means the big whole that God and other jovial observers have before them. From the outset, worlds take the stage in the plural and have an insular structure. Islands are miniatures of worlds that can be inhabited as world models. For this reason, one must know what constitutes a minimally complete island, one capable of being a world.”

“You must understand that houses are initially machines to kill time… In other words, people initially only live in a house because they confess to the conviction that it is rewarding to await an event outside the house.”

“I claim that the apartment (along with the sports stadium) is the primary architectural icon of the 20th century. A monadology is needed to think the interior today. One man—one apartment. One monad—one world cell…”

“Modern apartment construction rests on a celibate-based ontology… the architects of the one-person apartments have enabled the mass version of a historically singular type of human being—at best it was otherwise prefigured by the Christian hermit monks.”

“Being means someone (1) being together with someone else (2) and with something else (3) in something (4)… A house is a three-dimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something.”

An alternative to Heidegger’s fourfold, perhaps. Sloterdijk calls Heidegger the last rural thinker (burn). I think it would be true to say that Heidegger doesn’t find much to admire in the urban context.

Walter Gropius, Office interior, 1923