Writing

Bridges and Doors

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"Highway damaged by the Northridge earthquake, California, January 1994", from Bruce Mau, Massive Change; (2004)

Georg Simmel, in a short text called ‘Bridge and Door’, writes of the dual nature of reality: as simultaneous fully connected and entirely disconnected.

“The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in exernal nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle of matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms.” (1997: 170-71)

Clearly, Simmel is thinking here of disconnection in Cartesian space. For him, space is the medium of connection and disconnection. His assertion that things cannot occupy the same space relies on the assumption that the things in question are made of exclusive lumps of matter. If we make allowances for this, however, permitting a broader conception of ‘things’ that doesn’t presume a spatial medium, there’s a nice resonance here with Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s perspectives on the separation of objects, and the concept of a total referential contexture (Harman’s term).

I’ve been reading Timothy Morton‘s Ecological Thought (2010) and discussing it with students. It’s a nice way into speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, because right at the very outset it presents a simple, intuitive concept with deep rabbit-hole potential:

“The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.” (Morton, 2010: 1)

I’m really enjoying my conversations with students about this. Some students (perhaps a slight majority), saw this as an intimidating proposition. One conceded that it might be a possible way of thinking, but asked if it’s a useful one from a human perspective, and others commented that it gave them a sense of placelessness (how do I position myself in this infinite tangle?) and disempowerment (because the lack of grounding in concepts like Nature or Society gave little to push against). Against this, one student suggested that in fact, this was an empowering understanding, because it meant that things were actually connected and we could therefore have actual effects on the world. Because everything is connected, everything can possibly be affected.

It’s important to balance the idea of connectedness, I think, with the observation that things are only connected because a connection is established. Connections are made. While interconnectedness is a matter of fact, it is a contingent fact: things that are connected, could possibly be disconnected as well (I like Meillassoux’s idea that contingency is the only necessity – that the only thing that is certain is that things could be different to how they are). Simmel presents this dual condition nicely. He refers to the way that bridges and doors are both connectors and separators, revealing decisively, “how separation and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act” (172):

“Precisely because it can also be opened, [the door’s] closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this space than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the door speaks.” (172)

Simmel clearly can’t remotely be considered as an object-oriented-ontologist avant la lettre. His essay goes on to argue that it is an essentially human ability to connect things, and allied to this is the observation that it is only humans who separate things: “Only for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’… Because the human being is the connecting creature who must always seaprate and cannot connect without separating – that is why we myst first conceive intellectually of the merely indifferent existance of two river banks as something separated in order to connect them by means of a bridge.” (171-74)

One of the most subversive and powerful strategies in the object-oriented toolkit is to ask the question, ‘but why only humans?’. Simmel is wrong about the privileged role of humans in separation and connection, but he’s not wrong about the importance of recognising their simultaneity. If we substitue the more general ‘objects’ for humans in Simmel’s text (mad-libs style), we have a fascinating picture of their efficacy. Objects stand in the doorway, as it were:

“Life on the earthly plane, however, as at every moment it throws a bridge between the unconnectedness of things, likewise stands in every moment inside or outside the door through which it will lead from its separate existence into the world, or from the world into its separate existence.” (174)

Harman, G. (2006). Tool-Being. (Chicago, IL: Open Court).

Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. (London, UK: Continuum).

Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Simmel, G. (1997). Simmel on Culture. (London, UK: Sage).

Haptic / Hyperactive

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In 2009 and 2010 I ran a postgraduate research cluster at AUT University, in the Department of Spatial Design with Elvon Young called Haptic Environments. The cluster solicited projects that dealt with bodily effects, and was targeted at two observed areas of weakness in our undergraduate teaching: excessive emphasis on expression instead of effect; and a naive conception of nature. In this series of posts I want to explore these two weaknesses, and describe the shift in my thinking that has lead to what I am now calling the Hyperactive Environments Research Cluster.

1. Expression and Effect

Students are taught (and seem predisposed to operate this way) to design by expressing a concept rather than produce an effect. The difference between expression and effect is like the difference between teaching and learning — you can teach all you like, but you can’t guarantee your students are learning. Similarly, you can express all you like — stand at the top of a hill and bellow to the four winds — but you can’t guarantee that you have had any effect on anything. A fatalistic shrug of the shoulders accompanied with a jaded sigh implying that it is somehow not your problem to consider how your work is received or encountered (perhaps also appealing lamely to the principle that nobody can finally determine how something is interpreted) brings to mind the lecturer who stands and delivers every week, making no concessions to his listeners, heedless of the fact that he is having no effect on anybody at all. Effect asks what difference is produced. Effect is oriented towards the examination and disclosure of effects, not of intentions. Effect takes the other seriously, and notices that translation is required between any two entities. For one thing to have an effect on another, some work has to take place.

Having encountered students who were very sure of themselves in explaining what their designs were ‘about’ or what their intentions were, but who seemed bemused or stunned when they were questioned as to how or whether the desired effect would in fact be produced, I wanted to establish a programme that explicitly asked students to take a more rigorous approach to translation.

(to be continued…)

Queen’s Wharf as a Blank Slate

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You might have seen this confused, offhand little piece about the Queen’s Wharf sheds by historian Professor Paul Moon of AUT in the NZ Herald.

Moon doesn’t like the sheds. They are ‘rightly-maligned’, ‘long-unloved and unlovable’, of ‘negligable’ value even if restored, ‘dour and decaying’, ‘morose’ and slouching, and ‘grim’, holding the wharf ‘hostage’. In their place, he would like to see ‘something genuinely inspirational’. He assumes that works of this kind can only take place on a tabula rasa.

Architecture in New Zealand, Moon avers, is dominated by ‘fashion-infused mimicry’, is ‘safe and bland’, imitative, ‘bereft of any strong urge of creativity’. Apparently architects have become ‘the self-appointed arbiters of public taste’. (No architects I know of have claimed this position; in fact retaining the sheds has proven to be a rather unpopular position to defend). Moon opens with the bizarre argument that architects have forfeited the right to comment on the aesthetic value of buildings because they have become insufficiently artistic, putting their work in thrall to ‘structural capabilities and functional requirements’. It’s disturbing to hear a Treaty historian (of all people!) tell someone they’ve forfeited the right to speak. Moon implies that there hasn’t been any real artistic architecture since prior to the industrial revolution. He feels that architects are supposed to be individual creative geniuses like Bernini or Michelangelo, overlooking the fact that a number of these two architects’ most renowned works are in fact reworkings of (sometimes mediocre) existing buildings.

The idea that architecture springs in purity and force from some magical resource of creativity or inspiration, and must struggle to overcome the sniping of petty technicians is very Ayn-Randian, and completely out-of-touch with the way that design proceeds. Materials, stakeholders, constraints, context and – yes – history, are not wet blankets suffocating the creative life out of architecture. On the contrary, they are the raw materials out of which good design is formed. Moon might be nostalgic for a Howard Roark to sweep in and deposit his creativity all over the wharf, but this isn’t my idea of a good time. Architecture is not simply the production of great artworks. The lives and stories of which the sheds are a trace are common and everyday, but that doesn’t mean they should be erased from memory as unimportant. Again, as an historian, one might expect Moon to be more sensitive to minor histories.

He is preoccupied with questions of artistic style, counting against the sheds that they don’t instantiate the Arts and Crafts movement, modernism, or Gothic Revival. As if the only value in historical architecture is in reinforcing the march of architectural styles. As if, by not falling into a neatly labeled drawer they forfeit any value whatsoever. That Moon can’t think of any merit other than the reinforcement of art-historical meta-narratives is a good reason to seek out people who have spent time developing knowledge and expertise in the field.

Complaining that Queen Street is cluttered with ‘piles of stark steel and glaring glass’, Moon doesn’t seem to notice that an careless attitude towards the built and spatial heritage of the city was a major part of the problem! Similarly, one of the main reasons the leaky ‘caricatures’ of pseudo-Tuscan houses Moon mourns are bad architecture is not that they are insufficiently creative or inspired, it’s because they fail to take proper account of local conditions and traditions of construction.

Few architects are arguing that the sheds should be preserved at all costs. It is kind of Moon to point out that ‘just because something is (relatively) old’ it doesn’t need ‘a protective case placed over it so that it can be preserved in perpetuity’. Nobody that I am aware of has proposed this. But demolition is permanent. We shouldn’t knock the sheds down unless there are concrete plans for something demonstrably better. At the moment, there exists no master-plan for the CBD waterfront, no clarity about whether the wharf is to be a cruise-ship terminal or not and no realistic timetable for new construction to be completed in time for the Rugby World Cup, and no consistency in the process of procuring a design. Demolition should not be a default stance. Inventive, memorable, and imaginative architecture doesn’t have to begin with a clean slate.

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?

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! ]

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.

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.

Infrastructural Space

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I’m at the planning stages for a paper on infrastructural space aimed at undergraduate students. I intend the paper to serve as a springboard for further inquiry: a substantial theoretical background, lots of examples, and raising the question of designing in and alongside, infrastructural systems. This is the abstract I’ve written so far:

In the 21st century, one of the major determiners of our space is infrastructure. We are plugged into motorways, railways, telecommunications networks, wireless data transmitters, air-conditioning systems, financial networks, electricity lines, sewers. Infrastructure is not only an urban condition, either: entire regions of NZ have been harnessed for power-generating, dairy-farming depends on a milk-collecting infrastructure, and irrigation is one of the oldest of human infrastructures. This paper explores the spatiality of infrastructure. It describes how infrastructural space differs from contained space, and outlines some of the implications and opportunities for spatial designers in an infrastructural world.

Networks are a precondition for many of the characteristics of the 21st century world: rapid mobility, instantaneous data transfer, information processing. Many of the things we do that used to require lots of material constructions and artefacts can now be carried out remotely from nearly anywhere. This is commonly seen as a dematerialising effect of networks, but it is more accurate to see it as a rematerialisation. Infrastructure lessens the importance of service spaces to which you go (like banks, bookshops), and increases the importance of spaces through which things pass: hubs, distribution centres, passages.

Manuel Castells argued in 1996 that a new form of society had emerged, which he called ‘network society’. Networks, systems of interconnected nodes, had become a dominant form, not only of the things we make, but of our societies as well. Network society, Castells argued, was characterised by a new kind of space, the space of flows. A number of other writers near the turn of the twenty-first century picked up on this thought: Mark C. Taylor in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001); Negri and Hardt in Empire (2001) followed up by their Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Kazys Varnelis in The Infrastructural City (2007) and Networked Publics (2008). Infrastructure operates in network space. It is based on connectivity. In network space, my presence is not determined by the physical location of my body, but by my connectedness.

The 2009 recession has brought infrastructure to the fore. Many of the governmental stimulus packages initiated globally emphasise infrastructure projects, because they are labour-intensive, providing jobs; because they are too difficult for private capital to undertake; and because by generating new connections, greater flows of people, goods, information, and crucially, capital, can be anticipated in future. In particular, ‘green’ infrastructure is prominent: low-environmental-impact energy generation, and public transport especially. Infrastructure can be environmentally disruptive, and there has been a great deal of concern for how infrastructure might act to integrate natural flows.

This paper will progress through a series of propositions, illustrated with examples: infrastructure indicates a spatiality of connectedness rather than containment; in the present, our space is infrastructurally defined; the concept of nature is being transformed infrastructurally; the position of being off-the-grid is an important critical opportunity.

There are a number of open issues, particularly differences between networks and an infrastructures (can we really conflate the two as synonyms?), and shifts and developments since the turn-of-the-century thinking about them. It’s a major defect in this abstract that no specific examples are addressed yet. There’s probably also a little historical material that needs to get in: the modernist fascination with infrastructure as an abstract assertion of human potency (Corb’s Algiers project, etc.), and some of the 70s oil-shock-triggered sense of a global environment (Fuller), and the 60s displacement of architecture into infrastructure by Archigram. This alone could fill hundreds of papers so I may be limited in what I include. Another open question is the relation between infrastructure and globalism – although current infrastructural practices and discourses incorporate the concepts of a finite environment and the facilitation of global circulation of flows, I don’t believe infrastructure is necessarily derived from a global view. However, it does seem that infrastructural development is increasingly promoted as a fundamental premise for engagement with a global community.

Any thoughts or suggestions from people more expert in this area would be welcomed.