Plantation 1

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I’ve been thinking about heterogenous assemblages, and the way that nonhuman things relate to one another. So the idea here is that the derelict washing machines would rust slowly into the ground, providing iron and other nutrients for the soil, and habitat for the rabbits. The rabbits eat and breed quickly, but bamboo is able to recover quickly from being gnawed. Bamboo is also known to be a bioabsorber, so the more toxic materials such as lead and pvc contained by the washing machines can be trapped and prevented from polluting the soil. Rabbits aerate the ground with their burrows, and bamboo stabilises the soil. Although the plantation has little direct benefit for humans, and may even be unsightly (bamboo, rabbits, and derelict washing machines are all counted as pests in some locations), they are anticipated to form a coherent network.

The drawing contains one rabbit for each washing machine, in case anyone wanted to keep count.

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Plantation 1: Bamboo, rabbits, derelict washing machines, Carl Douglas, 2010. Pencil on paper, 594x841.

Conservation

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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…

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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).

Suppressing the Ground

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Plan of the theatre at Olympia, drawn by Wilhelm Dörpfeld

Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) was trained as an architect, at the Bauakademie in Berlin and gained archaeological experience working on the excavations at Olympia. He was headhunted by Heinrich Schliemann, and went on to found the German School in Athens, which now takes his name,  and become the Director of the Athens branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Dörpfeld was a very capable draftsman and the drawings in his book Das Griechische Theater (1896) are typical of his work: precise, complete and detailed.

In Dörpfeld’s plan of the theatre certainty and interest are shown through exactitude and solidity of line, while presumption and conjecture are marked with dotted lines which skip across the surface of the page. Dörpfeld pays considerable attention to the paving pattern of the theatre floor; to the blockwork and cavities above “N”, and in the vicinity of “E”. He indicates subtle distinctions in materiality in these areas and notes alignments and misalignments. But what about the large areas of the drawing that escape attention altogether? The spaces between blocks, walls and drains are entirely empty, apart from the texture of the page on which they are printed. What takes place in these spaces? What purpose do they serve?

 

The theatre in Dörpfeld’s drawing stands out as a clear figure. Each block sits distinctly against a white ground. The sharp lines of the original ink drawing, and of the published engraving, lend themselves to describing sharp-edged objects. In this clear construction of figure and ground, the empty spaces of the page represent the condition of the ground. In opposition to the plenitude of significance which is sought in the objects disclosed by archaeology, the ground is represented as a place from which no significance is to be extracted. The ground is that which escapes attention. Representing the archaeological site as a place of painstaking clarity is only possible by subsuming all the various problems of ground in archaeological practice under the blanket representation of emptiness.

 

Dörpfeld’s plan suppresses the archaeologist’s problematic encounter with the ground. However, there are even moments in his precise drawing where the ground emerges as a difficulty. In the areas marked “V” and “F”, a flurry of little lines marks out the ground’s rumpled surface. They seem to gather together to mark out edges. If we consult the key, we might conclude that they are intended to signify marble (“MARMOR”), but there is a distinct difference between this and other instances of marble in the drawing: compared to the stones marked above “L”, the surface at “V” is rough. These scratchy lines do not seem to signify the veins of marble. They are ambiguous moments in which the archaeologist has been unable to suppress the ground completely. Again, in areas to the far left and right of the drawing, the rendering of solid stone fades away indistinctly into the empty ground (above “W” and near “B”). At these moments, the archaeologist’s ability to define an edge, to clearly mark the contour between something that is present and something that is not, fails. The problem of resolving an architectural figure from an archaeological ground merges with the problem of resolving an architectural figure from a drawn ground.

 

It is noteworthy that such failures are permissible at the periphery of the drawings – at a distance from the centre which is marked by the dotted circles and the centre line of the theatre – but not near the centre itself. Uncertainty occurs at the periphery.

 

The ability to form a strong figure is paramount for Dörpfeld. If the image was grey and murky, he would be unable to resolve architecture as independent and autonomous. Dörpfeld constructs a clear architectural figure, but in doing so, he also posits the ground as a vacancy, as that which escapes attention because it cannot be delineated.

 

In the publications of Layard and Schliemann, the site is morcellated and scattered through the text as a myriad small engravings: objects, architectural details, profiles, landscape scenes, ethnographic details, comparisons, speculative renderings, tracings, inscriptions, maps. Together this collection of details and fragments comprise an archive that is sorted according to the order of the archaeologist’s experience. The architectural plan is only one more artefact in this archive. Dörpfeld and Theodore Fyfe (architect for Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos), conversely, privilege the plan over the site, over the ground. The plan is the central document, the system of ordering to which all the other details are referred, the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion which functions to define the modern archaeological site. As such, plan substitutes for the ground in its function as a repository of archaeological knowledge.

 

More recently, archaeological criticism has queried the presumption of the archaeologist’s observational distance and noted the political dimension of the archaeological gaze. Julian Thomas writes:

 

The means by which we characteristically represent place, the distribution map, the air photo, the satellite image and the Geographical Information System, are all distinctively specular. They all imply a considerable distance between subject and object, and they all present a picture of past landscapes which the inhabitant would hardly recognise. All attempt to lay the world bare, like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table”, or like the corpse under the pathologist’s knife.

 

The distantiation of archaeological subject from object is produced by the representational techniques considered above, which chart a process of modernisation from the end of the nineteenth century. Archaeological drawing shifts to exclude the registers of the private and the uncertain. It remains possible, though, to see these registers re-surfacing in the most strictly controlled of drawings. Catherine Ingraham describes architecture as a practice of delineation associated with the ‘tactics of ideality’. These tactics can be clearly seen at work in the constitution of the archaeological site as a representation that can be shared publicly. The ground is problematic under these terms for two reasons: the ground is a necessary pre-condition of the line; yet it resists delineation. The ground is thus a representational problem for architecture, archaeology, and the complex interactions between the two fields. Ground cannot simply be “represented”, because it is a necessary condition of representation itself.

Density and Delineation

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Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik (1853)

“Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik” is a drawing from Austen Henry Layard’s Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). It is a grey image, closely hatched, depicting a vaulted underground space that divides into two vaults in the midground, and shades off into darkness in the distance. It is presented as a vignette without a distinct frame. The deep space contains artefacts and workers: in the foreground, one man gestures towards the most distinctly delineated element in the picture, a relief panel on the wall, which appears to have taken two other men by surprise. Baskets and tools sit at the feet of this foreground group. Deeper in the image the two vaults frame a pair of figures and a standing vase. The two figures face in opposite directions, one facing the viewer, mirroring the gesture of the man in the foreground. At the top of the picture, the subterranean space opens to the sky. It is not entirely clear if the vaults are caverns or chambers. The largest opening at the front is sufficiently irregular as to appear natural, while the central column between the two more regular vaults appears to be made of bricks.

 

To resolve the architecture of this space, one must carefully examine the engraver’s marks. Viewed closely, the image is an obsessive hail of tiny scratches. The engraver varies the materiality and tone of the image by adjusting the pattern and direction of this rendered continuum. At the very top of the image, against the fine, evenly ruled lines of the sky, a sharp edge – marked with a line – suggests that the face below it is constructed. The cracks and seams in this face are formed by the dark edges of each hatched patch. Before it, to the right and left is a sharp but irregular line of heavily cross-hatched shadow. On the right, though, this cavernous line and the smoother face are made continuous: the engraver has blended the hatching in order to dissolve the edge. Further down the page, the same thing happens on the left. Similarly it is unclear whether the large bank of irregular rubble directly behind the foreground group of figures is intended to be continuous or discontinuous with the smoother face above. A cut stone block appears to be embedded in the wall above the heads of the figures, as does something else that forms a dark edge, and other details that might be artificial fragments; but they are rendered in such a way that we are welcome to read them as mere clumps or irregularities in the earth. At its base, the central pier appears to be made of consistent if irregular blockwork; further up it appears to change into a more compact small-stone construction, shading off into surfaces of indistinguishable materiality.

 

Of this scene, Layard writes:

 

After the departure of Mr. Ross, the accumulation of earth above the ruins had become so considerable, frequently exceeding thirty feet, that the workmen, to avoid the labor of clearing it away, began to tunnel along the walls, sinking shafts at intervals to admit light and air. The hardness of the soil, mixed with pottery, bricks and remains of buildings raised at various times over the buried ruins of the Assyrian palace, rendered this process easy and safe with ordinary care and precaution. The subterraneous passages were narrow, and were propped up when necessary either by leaving columns of earth, as in mines, or by wooden beams. These long galleries, dimly lighted, lined with the remains of ancient art, broken urns projecting from the crumbling sides, and the wild Arab and hardy Nestorian wandering through their intricacies, or working in their dark recesses, were singularly picturesque.

 

Layard’s description shows that even the figure we think we have been able to discern in the image is illusory. The vaulted architecture of the image is not the ancient structure of the Assyrian palace referred to by Layard, but the architecture of the excavation itself. Architecture is present in the image not as the object, but as the result of the investigation. The only object that is clearly antique is the relief panel at the lower right. The earth is described as a thick conglomerate, a solid compaction of soil, pottery, brick and other architectural remains. Ancient artifacts – fragments of pottery and architecture – are not contained within the space, but fused with the matter that defines the space.

 

The spatiality of the image – comprehending image as a figure – relies on a reading of density, not delineation. In the same way, the spatiality of the archaeological site also relies on a reading of density. There is no clear figure discernable against a consistent and neutral ground. Both the image and the archaeological ground present a figure-ground problem that cannot be resolved with a mere increase in detail. The epistemic condition of the drawing, the forms of knowledge it allows, mirrors the epistemic condition of the archaeological excavation.

 

Hard Problems

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A symposium held a couple of weeks ago by the Division of Social Science at Harvard asked: what are the hard problems in Social Science? Referring to mathematician David Hilbert, who in 1900 set out what he saw as the twenty-three most fundamental and vexing mathematical problems facing the field; the symposium asks for an analogous set of the ‘hardest unsolved problems in social science’, in order ‘to inspire new research’ and ‘serve to focus funding and inform policy.’ The symposium has prompted others to ask what the hard problems in their own respective fields might be.

Is such a list of questions possible in the field of architectural research? Would a problem-focused approach too constrained for a design field? Is there a sufficiently-widely-accepted epistemology of architecture that can support a question like this? My own answers would be ‘no’ and ‘with reservations, yes’ for the second and third of these questions. Although I’m undecided on the first question, it does seem to me that the concept of hard problems could have some value in focusing architectural research.

So what are the hard problems in architecture? What is a problem in architecture? How do we decide what makes a problem difficult? How is difficulty related to importance? How do we know whether a proposed solution is actually a solution?

Interior as a Spiderweb

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In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir.”

Walter Benjamin (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.216. [ emphasis mine ]

Collectivity

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“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if any Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

What is the matter? Does this upset you? And what is the matter? What is at hand? What is it that matters here? In particular, what does matter matter here? Who matters? And who matters?

One of the matters here is earth: clods of it, islands of it, entire continents of it. But that is not the matter. Although these clumps of matter are certainly at hand, they are not what matters here. According to the practice of metaphor, what is given directly is not the subject matter. As if to confirm this, the very first phrase tells us that no man is an island: there is to be no confusion between men and islands; no mistaking the one for the other. The subject (matter) is subject to the subject matter.

But without this matter (clods of dirt, earth raised up into mounds and promontories, islands and continents) the matter (whatever it is that really matters here) remains unspoken, unwritten, unthought. What is the relationship between matter and thinking? Between clods, promontories, islands, continents, and the matter to which our attention is being drawn? A thought is written thing, a recorded thing, a thing heard and repeated, a thing constructed. Mere thoughts, entirely private ideas, may exist, but they certainly don’t matter, except possibly to God.

The word ‘matter’ has several senses, some of which we have already tested here. There is physical matter (something is matter). There is the significance or importance of something (something matters). There is a state of affairs (something is a matter which concerns us); and this state of affairs can be a problem (we might ask what the matter is). If we were to hazard a definition for architecture (which is the underlying matter of these brief thoughts), we could do worse than to suggest it is a practice of mattering, in all these senses.

Let us set this matter aside temporarily and turn to another matter, specifically the subject matter of the statement with which we began.

Immediately it will be seen that it is not a matter of what, but of who. Who is it that matters, and who is it that matters to me? A corpse: a person-become-matter, who-become-what. John Donne (although his name probably doesn’t matter) is listening to the sound of a bell announcing another plague death in London. For whom does the bell toll? Who does the bell concern? Who is the subject matter of the bell?

Donne himself is ill at the time, but it is not the matter of the individual that concerns him or the bell. Rather it is the matter of the collective, the matter which is collectively given the name ‘Mankinde‘. Collectivity is the subject. It is what matters here (although, as we have noted, it is the earthy matter that enables collectivity to matter in this piece of Donne’s writing). The point to which these matters (the subject matter and the earthy matter) are brought is that a collective is not a grouping but a massing which can occur at any scale.

According to some structure of our psyches, or some process of learning in our childhood, we come to identify how much of the matter of the world is us. We identify ourselves as individuals. But there are identities, selves, that are not circumscribed within indiviidual psyches. If thoughts have matter (and they only matter if they do); and if thinking is the relating of thoughts; and if a self is something that thinks (cogito ergo sum); then not all selves are necessarily people, and one person might be a participant in many concentric and overlapping selves.

How does a collective think? Not as a sum of the mental activity of its participants. Consider the situation of working collectively in a design studio. The design studio is premised on the value of working in close proximity to others. The collective is thinking, and each individual production (each statement, model, drawing, reference) is a collective thought. No one person has all these thoughts; they are thought by the group. A model constructed by one of the participants, for example, is not a representation of the ‘real thought’ which occurs in that individual’s mind. It is itself a real thought, a thought which matters. It can be encountered by the other individuals in the group in the same terms as any of their productions. The relationships between the various thoughts of the collective can be varied, and new thoughts can be had by the collective. Able to think in this way, a collective such as a studio group can be spoken of as a self with its own identity.

This publication has, for six years now, operated on the premise that each graduating year-group of students can have some kind of common identity. At the very least it acts to provide such an identity. By gathering on more-or-less equal terms the visual statements of each student it tries to make explicit the loose collectivity of the studio.

Architecture, this practice of mattering, concerns things which exist in the experience of more than one person, that matter to more than one person. This may seem an unambitious definition, but it is the heart of the matter. Architectural matter (whether it be concrete, graphite or data) is not mere matter that is to be elided or seen through in favour of some real subject matter. The subject matter exists only insofar as it matters, insofar as it exists in the experience of more than one person, insofar as it is a collective thought.

Collectivity is not defined by the separating off of a group. Nationalism, for example, is a negative collectivity, defined by exclusion. Collectivity is defined by an act of identification, an act of involvement, incorporation. You are not a single person. You are an operating element within many selves, only one of which is coextant with your individual psyche.

Architectural production is an act of collectivity.
Identify widely.
Matter.

[ Written in 2006 for Modos, the journal of graduating students at the University of Auckland School of Architecture. It feels pretty dated now! ]

Southern

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Before air-conditioning, on some full summer nights in Atlanta occurred a black physics less rarely than you might have imagined. Precise and intricate, matter itself reorganized; it began with a circulation of heat, humidity, and imperceptible motes of red clay that hung in the air suspended. Hung endlessly like Ernest, Red, Hickey, and the other winos at Lou’s bar on Edgewood Avenue, who, with a mere precession of their shoulders, could fend off the gravities that would pull them away from their King Cotton Peach, and down.

Into that circulation spilled the attars of wisteria and honeysuckle, the sweat and stink of cars and trucks and animals and sex and race, and other ingredients too many and too ordinary to mention. Cricket rhythms massaged the flux and cicadian crescendos pressurized it, irritating component after component until each abandoned its identity and the mixture condensed into a sweet, thick, elemental Dark. This Dark spread everywhere, broaching no resistance; whatever It touches It became and it became It until everything cohered in its flavor and murk and listlessness.

By morning the Dark itself dissipated, but left a sticky residue on things and people that could not be rinsed off for days. Despite all efforts to take up life again at a normal pace, the viscous coating retarded all motion, and it is this more than anything else, It and its ruddy patina, that was being named when one said ‘Southern.’

Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘Southern’, Log 17, Fall 2009, p.136.

Hiroshi Nakao, Dark Box Bird Cage

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This weekend house consists of a large living room capable of accommodating two automobiles; small bedrooms in which the bed completely fills the floor; a study that doubles as a studio; two enclosed gardens; bathroom; and external garage. The layout plan involved disposing the component elements on a basic 3×3 meter grid. Since all surfaces are painted black, the interior is a somewhat dark box. However, daylight entering from the large and small enclosed gardens creates a varying mixture of light and dark areas.

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Gained by a ladder, a small loft is provided above the living room, which is used for book storage and a reading place. A base of pebbles is placed at the bottom of the ladder, whose sounds when people are going up and down it make this little collection of pebbles something of an interior sound effect system. None of the walls are pierced by sizable openings, with lines of sight running to the exterior only in the vertical direction. Which is not to say, however, that this is a sealed space. It would be much more accurate to describe it as an open space. A ‘dark box’ it may appear, but with its innumerable holes, it is much more of a ‘bird cage’.

Weekend House: Dark Box and Bird Cage (1993), Hiroshi Nakao, Masahiko Inoue, and Hiroko Serizawa. Text and images from Japan Architect 9, Spring 1993, pp. 228-29.

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Zinc, Bats, Yuan, Carbon-Fibre

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Municipal Bat Roost, San Antonio, Texas, 1914 via shorpy

‘Phenomenological’ architecture emerged in the nineties as a response to an increasingly cerebral and abstract brand of architecture which privileged meaning, process, and the authorial operation of the architect over daily use, materiality, and the sensory experience of architecture’s occupants. Since then it has run as a strong parallel stream to that of digital formalism; offering an alternative for those who find the latter barren and technofetishist (or more cynically, those who don’t know how to work a computer). Phenomenological architecture is often lauded as more humane than its alternatives.

But Phenomenological architecture is open to the same kind of criticisms as the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Phenomenology, by nature, privileges the relation of human and world in a way that causes the universe to fall neatly into two parts. The relation between a person and a table is of an inherently different type to the relation between a glacier and mountain-range. Phenomenology has nothing to say about the latter, except insofar as it is given in human consciousness. In fact, it has nothing to say about any relation that does not involve a human as one of its terms. The result of this is that glaciers, ultraviolet radiation, mesons, and apple trees are reduced to human stimulants. Juhani Pallasmaa’s excellent and influential essay The Eyes of the Skin (2005) exemplifies this. The entire second part is dedicated to cataloguing the diverse ways that the body can be affected architecturally: pressing against the skin, darkening the eyes or glaring at them, pacing the body’s rhythms, echoing in the ears, persisting in the nostrils, resisting the muscles. Pallasmaa offers an embodied theory of architecture, aligning with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied philosophy. But as Merleau-Ponty does, Pallasmaa places architecture between person and world. He writes:

“Architecture is the art of reconciliation between ourselves and the world, and this mediation takes place through the senses” (Pallasmaa, 2005: 72)

The universe is severed into human and world by the concept of mediation. Merleau-Ponty’s language of organic unity (“our body is in the world as the heart is in the organism”; Pallasmaa, 2005: 40) denies this schism, but only by centralising the human, and according the human-world relation greater significance than any other relation. This is why, although I have great respect for the phenomenological perspective for pragmatic reasons, and I greatly admire work of so-called Phenomenological architects like Zumthor and Holl; I cannot see Phenomenological architecture as any kind of comprehensive theory. Architecture is, in fact, part of a proliferation of relations; many of which are human, but many of which are not. Phenomenological architecture has little to say about the relation between, say, the zinc used in galvanising steel and the contamination of the Derwent River in Tasmania; or between bats and belfries; or between the yuan and China’s expanding High-Speed-Rail network; or between strands of carbon-fibre.

Stress-Testing

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I came across this image at Telstar Logistics of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner undergoing stress-testing of the wing assembly. The 787’s carbon-fibre composite wings were loaded to 150% of the maximum expected service loading on a purpose-built rig, flexing them upwards cartoonishly. This improbable spectacle reminded me of an essay by Sanford Kwinter from 1996, describing the spatiality of air-to-air combat in an analogy with the work of Rem Koolhaas, who he suggests exploits space like a dogfighter:

“Koolhaas’s work, with its fierce, stark geometries and imperious logic, is in many senses an extreme architecture and bears philosophical and ontological kinship with all extremity (even virtual or unrealised) in all domains of cultural activity. What these extreme states and activities have in common is sudden precipitation and total blending of diverse materialities, of wild fluxes, in an organic computational ensemble that defies both predetermination and ‘hard’ or rational control.”

The domains of cultural activity to which Kwinter refers include enterprises like BMX riding, surfing, and other ‘extreme’ sports: practices based on inhabiting the edge of stability. Pilots, like practitioners of parkour or half-pipe snowboarding, exploit continuously variable forces and materials that define a performance envelope. Legendary American test-pilot Chuck Yeager exemplifies this:

“Yeager could know what no physicist ever could: he was a pure creature of movement and speed, among the most instinctive pilots the air force has ever seen. “The only pilot I’ve ever flown with who gives the impression that he’s part of the cockpit hardware, so in tune with the machine that instead of being flesh and blood, he could be an autopilot. He could make an airplane talk.” In the space-time world of the dogfight, where Yeager’s instincts were trained, everything takes place right at the limit, perhaps even a little beyond. To survive, “you’ve got to fly the airplane close to the ragged edge where you’ve got to keep it if you really want to make that machine talk.” Knowing the critical tolerances of the aircraft in a variety of violent, dangerous manoeuvres was everything. One had to know exactly “where the outside of the envelope was… [to] know about the part where you reached the outside and then stretched her a little… without breaking through.” Aerial dogfighting, more than anything else, is like space-time arbitrage: one must exploit discrepancies that appear between parallel flows (the twisting vectors of adversarial aircraft). But these flows are so far from equilibrium – so stretched – that the critical discrepancies must be snatched from any dimension that is not already totally strained to the max. No one knew this “fine feathered edge” better than Yeager… In air-to-air combat [the stabilised space of horizon, earth, and sun] becomes not only liquid but turbulent: the sun, the earth, and the horizon spin, volley, and fly – in a phrase, they go ballistic. The pilot episodically uses these elements (and their ballistic pathways) to hide against, the blind the opponent, or to create vertiginous relationships of weaving, gyrating motion.” (77-79)

Yes, Kwinter did just use the phrases ‘to the max’ and ‘go ballistic’ unironically. Yeager, he avers, manipulates an envelope of spatial performance, which is tested against other envelopes in combat. The envelope is not simply a list of properties of the plane (its trim characteristics, power-to-weight ratio, stall angles, etc.) but a relational envelope formed by the pilot, plane, atmospheric conditions, gravity and momentum. Kwinter’s description has affinities to Viollet-le-Duc’s account of the diffusion of fortresses into field of strategic relations and distributed materials, which I’ve previously written about.

The model of air combat Kwinter describes is now dated. Dogfighting was a mainstay of eighties action films, and emblematic of the Cold War: technologically augmented heroes from East and West square off in the stratosphere as 20th century knights. In the 21st century, air combat is dominated by air-to-ground and surveillance capabilities: Global Hawks watch on while Predator drones and AC-130’s visit sudden destruction from on high. If we accept Kwinters analogy between architects and fighter-pilots, the decline of the heroic pilot aligns with the decline of the heroic mode of architectural production. Although a cult of celebrity is obviously still present, it’s clear that this is, and has only ever been, a minority condition. Most architecture is not produced this way, and the emerging generation of architects are more comfortable with collaboration, alternative modes of practice, and operation that exceeds the traditional disciplinary boundaries of architecture.

But although Kwinter’s essay, specifically indexed as it is to Late Capitalism and postmodernism, is of limited use as contemporary architectural anthropology, I think it still contains at least two valuable concepts pertaining to stress-testing.

1. The concept of the limit-state. Performance-testing of physical or digitally-simulated prototypes is nothing new. The experimental systems designed in the Architectural Association’s DRL are a good example: a material model is subjected to testing to establish the parameters of its operation (its ability to mediate light, structural performance, environmental control). In practice, software analysis of structural loading is commonplace in all but the simplest of structural scenarios; and thermal modelling is becoming increasingly important given the widespread interest in controlling energy consumption in buildings. But this kind of performance analysis is concerned with predictability. Prototypes are tested for their performance against a set of normative conditions. What Kwinter’s concept of inhabiting limit-states suggests to me is that stress-testing might not be a way of reassuring ourselves, but might reveal pockets of unexpected performance: areas of ductility to be exploited.

2. The non-dualistic relation between pilot and plane. Theories of technology that emphasise prosthetic operation, or the mediating role of technology between human subject and world are limited, because they only provide a satisfactory account of what happens at the interface between human and tool. The dogfight, as Kwinter describes it, is a relational event involving pilots and planes, but also atmospheric conditions, forces, internal stresses, official procedures, and chemical reactions. To emphasise the prosthetic role of the plane is to reduce all this complexity to Top Gun-style duelling human subjects, and to imply that what they are duelling with is more-or-less interchangeable: it could be swords, pistols at dawn, or rootkits and botnets. This is not really an adequate description of the situation. In Kwinter’s language of fluxes and flows, the situation looks like this:

“free matter, energy, and information become perfectly coextensive fluxes, the translation of one into the other is simultaneous, and events are ‘computed’ instantly. Matter, like history is an aggregate, partly fluid and partly solid, a ‘colloid’ or liquid crystal that shifts its pattern rhythmically in relation to the flow of inputs and outputs that traverse it. The shifts are distributed like stages with triggers that are tripped when variables extend beyond their local ‘equilibria,’ or envelopes.”

The idea of a limit-state spatiality of performance envelopes runs into an issue i’m trying to deal with right now regarding incompatibilities between Latourian object-oriented ontology and the Delandian emphasis on flow. I’m going to go think about that now.

Latour on Foucault

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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.

And

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On the subject of interdisciplinarity, this is the prologue from my MArch thesis a few years ago:

an architecture-and essay: conjunction of generalities. Here, architecture-and-archaeology.

The presumption of the innocuous ‘and’, with its two little hyphens (present as above, or implied) is interchangability. -and- is the joint of a modular system in which an endless series of substitutions could be made: architecture-and-text; architecture-and-politics; architecture-and-film; architecture-and-literature. To articulate a discussion jointed in this way would already be to assume the distinctiveness of the two terms: that architecture is a something; that archaeology is a different something; and that some conjunction can reasonably be expected. The agenda for an architecture-and-archaeology essay would apparently be to briefly outline some common ground, and to conclude with propositions for how architecture might profit from this exchange. Architecture-and-archaeology would be a foray into a foreign territory, followed by an about-face, and a return home bearing exotic goods. This thesis will, among other things, demonstrate why this conjunction cannot simply be performed. The disciplines of architecture and archaeology will be challenged as to their integrity; the extent to which they are distinct enterprises; and the validity of the generality implied by naming them as terms of an equation. As the distinctiveness of the terms breaks down, the problem will become one of description.

In particular, the -and- is often used to invoke interdisciplinarity: lines of communication are established between departments and disciplines, in order to bring under examination the various spaces which have, for one reason or another, slipped between departments. In this case the hyphens would mark the path of the interdisciplinary writer pacing back and forth between departmental libraries. This essay is not interdisciplinary (although this statement might be taken as one of the best pieces of evidence that it is in fact so). This essay will attempt to question, from the very cut of the spade, the divisibility of archaeology and architecture. Interdisciplinarity breaks down when there is no longer an interstitial space to occupy, and when it is precisely disciplinary distinctiveness that is under close examination. Standing on a bridge is difficult place to argue against the integrity of riverbanks.