Afternoon House II 2006 / 2009, pencil on film, 594x841mm.

This was published in Architecture NZ (#6/2009). Tony van Raat of Unitec’s SCALA invited a group of participants who he felt represented the ‘edges’ of architecture in NZ. I’m not sure how edgy mine, or any of the other work actually is, but I was very pleased to be included. Afternoon House II was mostly drawn in 2006, and was revisited mostly for cleaning up and reformatting in 2009.

The Afternoon House series is an ongoing research project leveraging belated or obsolete architectural techniques and ideas to explore the way that architecture makes world-order perceptible. What is the nature of the world, and how do we fit into it? Is it a chaos to be protected from? An ecology we must not upset? A pleasure-garden to marvel at? A blank canvas? A pool of resources with economic value? Architecture answers this question over and over again. Andrea Palladio, for example, believed in a stable and orderly world, with humans its most important occupant. Thus his Villa Rotonda is an orientation device, a compass rose inhabited by a rational and dignified subject. Postmodern philosophy, by contrast, tended to describe the world as essentially incomprehensible. For some this was intoxicating, a world of unrestricted play; while for others it was frightening, a world without ethics or purpose. This view, premised on disconnection and fragmentation has given way in the twenty-first century to interconnection and complexity: ecologies, networks, programs.

Afternoon House II is a revision of Palladio’s Villa for a world he could not imagine. It consists of a black shell of layered in-situ concrete, enclosed, partitioned, and furnished in light timber and fine steel joinery. The shell is formed by linear rhythms of solid and void. One rhythm establishes three semi-circular spaces: a library at the east end, a salon, and a dining room. As these spaces intersect with the niches, vestibules, and skylights of the longitudinal corridor, they break up the mass of the house, allowing the afternoon sun to break in. Complexity develops as simple rhythms slip in and out of phase with each other, converge and interfere. Although each pattern is rigorous and repetitive, no two of the resulting spaces are identical.

This abstract geometry played out in plan may seem to be an intellectual exercise. After all, nobody experiences a plan, do they? In response to the high level of conceptual abstraction in late twentieth-century architecture, a number of architects have emphasised the direct realities of perception – the warmth of sun on stone, the fragrance of a garden drifting in through a window, the weight of a door. This school is sometimes referred to as ‘haptic’ or ‘phenomenological’. But this is a misunderstanding of perception (to say nothing of phenomenology). Perception is a cognitive operation. Your eyes, for example, are not cameras sending fully-formed pictures to the brain. Sight is an active process. Streaming data from at least two types of optical sensor in the eyeball, the brain constructs an approximate working model which is continually being refined or redefined. New sensory data is either assimilated to the model or requires it to be updated. Gaps, ambiguities, or contradictions in the model prompt the brain to direct further sensory resources to the problem. The sense that you are seeing one cohesive world is an illusion your neural systems work very hard to produce. No perception is ‘direct’, and there is no reason to accord simple perceptions a greater degree of reality than complex perceptions, like that of a plan. Although the plan is not sensed directly in the way that heat, darkness, or solidity are sensed, it is nonetheless perceived. It is not a matter of the mind against the senses: it is incorrect to oppose cognitive order and sensory experience. Experience is also cognitive and order sensory.

Palladio wants the body’s model of the Villa to coincide directly with the geometry used to construct it. This order is to be disclosed as quickly as possible: lucid geometry presented directly to the mind’s eye. Beyond seeing the house, he wants us to recognise it (believing wrongly that in this way the rational mind, feeding on sensory data, had access to ultimate natural realities). The perception of architectural order in Afternoon House II is the slow subconscious piecing together of consistencies and inconsistencies, repetition and difference. It may take some time – many visits, or the intimate engagement of long-term inhabitation – to form a coherent model. Rather than a centring machine like the Villa Rotonda, Afternoon House II is carved by orders that originate at a distance, and are only passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Afternoon House II, hand drawn, generated in plan and devoid of context, is belated in every respect but one: insistence on a world of complexity perceived from within, not Renaissance anthropomorphism or postmodern fragmentation. It aims to be the inverse of architecture that is radical in form but conservative in substance.

Some notes on a drawing by Enric Miralles of his Calle Mercaders Apartment (1995), previously noted here.

1. The drawing lacks heirarchy. Miralles has no interest in establishing a clear heirarchical reading of the drawing. There is no variation in line weight (although occasionally, he doubles lines closely enough to approximate a thicker stroke). Mobile objects: tables, doors, etc. are not accorded any status distinct from stationary objects. The swings of doors and cupboards are not given a lighter line. Even the heirarchy of drawings is flattened: this drawing was not one of a set, and in it elevations are projected into the same plane, even the same paper space as the plan. Indoor-outdoor are not accorded any heirarchy: the drawing spills into outdoor spaces.

2. Miralles describes the apartment as a heterogenous collection of interacting elements. “Learning how to live with a given, second-hand, structure, like rummaging through the pockets of an old coat, setting the things one finds on a clean surface.” The apartment is historically layered. Each element has its own allegiances. Miralles speaks of “a profound conviction that projects are never finished, but merely enter successive phases in which we perhaps do not have direct control over them or perhaps are reincarnated in other projects of ours.” He describes this as a game of differentials like chess, in which each piece is freighted with its own regulations, capabilities.

“This house works like a chessboard. The pieces move according to the rules of each object… They must always return to the starting point to restart the game… Hence the floor, which set the existing items back in front of the windows… or the paint on the walls, which reveals the discovered fragments, are the rules of the game… Amongst them, moving in an orderly fashion, are tables, books, chairs…”

It has become common to contrast Go and Chess (at least since Deleuze and Guattari did so in A Thousand Plateaus); Go being a game of essentially equivalent and valueless points used to create operative configurations, while chess is a game of innate properties. For Miralles elements are not equal: each is heavily freighted, with allegiances that lie outside the game. There is a process of learning to live with givens, things drawn from the pocket of a coat, things that come from somewhere else, import their own contexts, embody their own rules.

3. This heterogenous field is not a playground of juxtaposed references; nor a chaos or an aporia. I want to distinguish this drawing from two other types of differential field: the semantic field of early postmodernism in architecture, and the fragmentary field of deconstructivist architecture. These are fine distinctions that need some work, because naturally there is overlap. Unlike Moore’s Piazza d’Italia or Stirling’s Staatsgalerie, for example, which are Jencksian fields of reference, Miralles’s drawing of the Calle Mercaders apartment, with its high degree of abstraction, does not juxtapose references. Nor is there the kind of fragmentation or deformation at work that there is in Morphosis or Gehry. It is a field of differences, but without the kenotic impliation that this difference opens onto an aporia.

4. Miralles claims his drawings operate in a non-representative register. He claims his drawings are not representations but operations. They are not a static description of an idea originating elsewhere. The drawing is a kind of calculation.

“I feel I am a participant in the tradition that prizes doing, manufacturing, as the source of thought… Shifts and turns make the paper lose its sheet nature. It is a working structure. Its rules are those of economics and commodity. On these planes there is no concern to represent… it is a task of multiplying a single intuition: of seeing it appear in all its possible forms… of aligning acrobatically, like a game, all the rays of lines that go in a direction… of keeping all the aspects of one’s project on paper. It is not a question of accumulating data, but of multiplying them; of enabling what you had not thought of to appear”

5. Miralles insists on the animate qualities of the elements of the project. Elements have a ‘life’ or rules of their own. If we recall Latour’s proposition that we should acknowledge action on the part of nonhumans, this stops sounding like anthropomorphism or psychological projection. A line across a page divides it. It doesn’t simply represent or refer to a division. Once the line is in place, there is no preventing it from dividing, or at least from differing. Miralles expresses something similar: “I would say this is not so much a line as a beam. A project consists of knowing how to tie up multiple lines, multiple ramifications that open up in different directions”.

These notes formed part of my recent paper for the Interstices Traction of Drawing symposium. They are part of an attempt to think drawing strictly in terms of its operation, something I think is desirable for two reasons. Firstly, by dodging a basically hermeneutic framework, it allows us to avoid unproductively elevating expressivity to a primary role; expression being one among many of the operations performed by drawing. Secondly, it allows for a better reconciliation with some attractive materialist theories (on which more later).