Footprint is an academic journal dedicated to publishing architecture and urban research. The journal promotes the creation and development – or revision - of conceptual frameworks and methods of inquiry. It is engaged in creating a body of critical and reflexive texts with a breadth and depth of thought which would enrich the architecture discipline and produce new knowledge, conceptual methodologies and original understandings.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Transmodality, or What it Means to Have Intelligence
Footprint 36 features eight contributions that each in their own way examines how the discipline of architecture may contribute to resisting stupidity and relearning how to think by moving beyond disaffected apocalyptic forms of reasoning, imagining and creating. In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction, we propose to reframe the concept of stupidity as the inability to discern between the singular (remarkable) and the ordinary (trivial), and not to confuse it with a failure to offer the ‘right’ solution (optimisation). Following Henri Bergson’s understanding of problematisation, the concept of stupidity that we collectively examine is thus understood as the incapacity to properly determine a problem. Its near synonym ‘idiocy’ by definition prevents us from seeing beyond our narrow interests and ready-made solutions, thereby blocking environmental awareness and the possibility of trans-individuation, that is, of living and transforming collectively.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stavros Kousoulas, Andrej Radman http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Fantastic Guide to the Cybersiren, and Everything Else You Need to Know about the Love, Death, Origins, Characteristics and Chronicles of the Neapolitan Port
The separation of Napoli from its port – driven by industrialisation, privatisation and urban neglect – has disconnected the city from the sea. Drawing on the local mythological tradition, the Cybersiren is introduced as an advocate for change and a way to reconnect city, port and people. It is presented as a disruptive force in response to rigid systems of authority and control that currently dominate the Neapolitan port. This is presented in two ways. First, through a guideline that explains the characteristics of the Cybersiren as a queer entity, one that is body- and techno-fluid, is ambiguously alien on the one hand yet familiar on the other. The guideline also speaks of the way in which the Cybersiren attacks, shatters and eventually, dies. Second, these characteristics are translated into a fictional story that uses imagination to consider how change could be brought about in order to foster technodiversity and reconfigure relationships. Mythopoesis, or the formation of a myth, is used as a tool in order to explore how the grotesque could be used to challenge what has become stuck.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miguel Borst, Qiyu Chen, Koen de Nie, Mees van Rhijn, Jean Rojanavilaivudh http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article addresses the relationality of automation and the political-libidinal literacy of citizens. After contextualising the problem of reactive subjectivity in the Global Northwest of a perpetuating Enlightenment dialectics, the role of technology in the political-libidinal mereology is revaluated. Drawing from Bernard Stiegler’s notion of tertial retention and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic theory, the milieu is reconstituted as a plane of transversal desire production and collective anticipation. In times of intensifying multiscalar automation, a lacking attunement to surroundings and responsibility, and general proletarianisation, the article argues for the localisation and sense-ablisation of problems to produce didactic environments for trans-individuative politics. Drawing from an ethics of care as a relational mode of thinking-acting, acts of maintenance are investigated in their potential to modulate the increasing imbalance of investment and passivity in urban subjects to foster de-proletarianisation. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, processes of un-doing and re-doing are argued to deterritorialise and schizophrenise over-concretised automatons, opening up material conditions to participatory, creative appropriation and repair (collectively referred to as ‘alter automation‘) to reintroduce critical reflection and political negotiation into our milieus.
Copyright (c) 2025 Justus Schäfer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism
This issue of Footprint explores the intersection between architecture, technology and cosmology. It does so by examining the concept of ‘cosmotechnics’, as proposed by the philosopher Yuk Hui. Cosmotechnics – defined as ‘the unification of the cosmic and moral order through technical activities’ – proposes that technology is not a universal category but always exists in a co-productive relationship with a specific cosmology. While cosmotechnics has fomented new scholarship in philosophy, STS and cultural theory, its implications for architecture remain underexplored. Here, we introduce the concept of cosmotechnics, distinguish it from previous approaches to technology and cosmology, and outline its unique relevance to architectural discourse. In doing so, we present a core theme of the issue: technologies, cosmologies and architectures do not only influence one another, but are indeed inseparable, mutually Introduction Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism Dulmini Perera and Samuel Koh, editors Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany constitutive, and conjoined in continual coevolution. Finally, we introduce the contributions that comprise the issue – a diverse set of explorations of the theoretical and practical intersections between cosmotechnics and architecture.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dulmini Perera, Samuel Koh http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This contribution starts from a question: in what terms can the design reason that is guiding the action of numerous contemporary architects, city planners and project makers be considered and defined? We argue that that such reason can be defined as ‘forest intelligence’, opposed to the human-animal intelligence that has instead characterised the repertoire of architectural-urban solutions from modernity onwards. The latter is characterised by verticality, exemplified by classes of opposites such as centre and periphery, the space of ‘nature’ and the space of the ‘city’. On the other hand, the new ‘forest intelligence’ is characterised by horizontality – urban polycentrism, interrelation between the parts of the city, absence of a clear division between ‘natural’ and urban space. Therefore, we have investigated three remarkable moments of the first quarter of our century. From the art world, the Documenta 13 exhibition (2012); representing architecture and landscape design, Gilles Clément’s Manifeste du Tiers paysage (2004); and from the field of politics, the ‘New Landscape Declaration’ (2016), an updated manifesto for landscape practice. We believe that these three specific and topical events can be understood as activators, initiators and at the same time as spaces for publicising the aforementioned ‘forest intelligence’.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovanni La Varra, Alberto Cervesato, Tommaso Antiga http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This editorial is an introduction to the issue of Footprint 34, ‘Narrating Shared Futures’. The issue is dedicated to a transdisciplinary encounter between literature and cultural heritage, namely, here we seek to understand how literature can help us unpack complex meanings of places of heritage, and use that knowledge to imagine, design and produce shared and inclusive futures. We elaborate on three notions that appear in the title of the issue – ‘narrating’, ‘shared’ and ‘futures’ – and then we explain how each of the articles featured in this volume contributes to the proposed framing. We conclude with a brief discussion of ways in which the past, present and future are constantly being made in-the-now through both literary and design techniques.
Copyright (c) 2024 Aleksandar Staničić; Angeliki Sioli http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Through a critical experience of reconstruction at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico,we present various ontological components that manifest as spe-cific cosmotechnics of this territory. These cosmotechni-cal manifestations enunciate singularity, resistance and emancipation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Samuel Koh; Diseño Detonante http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this interview, the editors met with Professor Yuk Hui, the originator of the notion of cosmotechnics, to discuss the implications of cosmotechnical thinking for architecture, urbanism and design. While Hui's work contains strong implications for architecture and spatial disciplines, he has rarely addressed them directly. In this far-ranging discussion, Hui brings together diverse topics, including the philosophy of Lewis Mumford, the cross-cultural history of cybernetics, and technology's connection to sacred space.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yuk Hui, Samuel Koh, Dulmini Perera http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On Science Fiction, Heritage Architecture and Other Demons
This conversation with Moira Crone was inspired by her science fiction novel The Not Yet. The interview opens with a question regarding the capacity of architectural heritage to carry past and present values, as well as our stories, and help us make sense of the world. With an emphasis on the historic French quarter in New Orleans, Crone explains why the preservation of the city’s most famous neighborhood was necessary for the plot and how in reality this preservation takes place. She discusses the difficult and cruel history of plantation homes in Louisiana, as well as moments in which the strict racial hierarchies broke down, creating possibilities for different ways of co-existence among its inhabitants. Crone unpacks her ideas about archetypical architectural spaces like the theater, and the subversive role it can play in contemporary or imaginative societies. The interview concludes with a discussion about science fiction’s connections to architectural thinking and the author’s creative process.
Copyright (c) 2024 Angeliki Sioli, Aleksandar Staničić http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This visual essay features students’ projects from the MSc2 design studio ‘Transdiciplinary Encounters: Narrating Shared Futures’ offered at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in Spring of 2022, which served as an inspiration for this issue of Footprint. Designed and taught by the issue editors, Aleksandar Staničić and Angeliki Sioli, the course combined cultural heritage and literary narratives to ask students: How can places of memory be rethought using literary techniques, so that they provide the ground for new meanings to emerge and get shared across different cultures? Seven visionary architectural projects featured in this essay, offered their responses to this pertinent question that is fundamental for narrating, imagining and, ultimately, creating shared futures.
The Transcendental Stupidity of Architecture
This article discusses, within the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze’s philosophy, how stupidity comes to be seen as a positive possibility for thought. Nomad architecture, which is contrasted with the state science of architecture, has a certain stupidity about it, but this is nothing other than the stupidity which allows us access to the groundless ground, the field of the real, which can be perceived as a depth within the forms which architecture creates as an aftereffect. Examples are given, including that of the 2017 Grenfell fire and Anne Querrien’s nomadic architectural work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tim Gough http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Drawing from the imag(in)ing of passing time as a cuckoo’s repetitive passing through a threshold, this article emphasises the active role of repetition in modulating spatio-temporalities and fostering variations. It argues that the systematic organisation and classification of the milieu emerge from the human capacity to perceive and assign differences within the spatio-temporal continuum. This process is enabled by iterative interactions with environmental stimuli, whether immediate or mediated through technological means, serving as an active process of evaluation and unfolding of environmental affordances. In this context, repetition simultaneously serves two seemingly opposing functions: it creates patterns of return to previous encounters while also opening potential lines of flight away from established norms. Intelligence transduces repetition into change, as it evolves through feedback loops, that is, non-linear operations that integrate information across various time scales and through diverse physical mediations, both embodied and exosomatic. As such, intelligence is re-conceptualised not as a state but as a symbiotic, responsive, and anticipatory process that unfolds through failing and adapting to environmental stimuli.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lena Galanopoulou http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The evolution of architecture calls for a redefinition of materialism, urging a departure from deterministic systems towards non-linear causality and systems far from equilibrium. This entails recognising the dissolution of human-inhuman boundaries and advocating for tactile and sensory bodies that initiate metabolic changes by penetrating environments. Isabelle Stengers critiques the tendency to frame thought within pre-existing planes, labelling it as stupidity, and advocates for an architecture that proliferates rather than condemns. With this article, we propose to explore architecture’s singular conditions through the concept of trans-scalability, akin to transitioning from micro-subatomic to macro scales. We look at what enables transitions between scales, agents, fields and the realms of theory and practice. Additionally, we scrutinise how spatial construction practices, influenced by non-cartographic scale considerations and engaged with micro-subatomic dimensions, can impact contemporary architectural practices. To illustrate this, we present an alternative approach to transscalability through the work of Rachel Armstrong. With this new material reading, our aim is to view architecture as an interface between the world’s multiplicities and to explore how an architectural practice more attuned to the intersecting dynamics of various fluxes can be realised. With this approach, we aim to contribute to perceiving the world through its unstable and temporary material dimensions, thereby resisting stupidity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eda Yeyman, Ayse Sentürer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Everyone Knows Who is Stupid Around Here
Far from alien to our daily lives, stupidity seems evident to most people. However, discerning what is stupid may not be as easy as it looks, especially when talking about architecture. To specify what architectural stupidity is, we must acknowledge that not all failures of architecture are ‘errors’, some are worse. This article discusses the already architecturally situated concept of error and distinguishes it from stupidity in terms of ‘technicities’ that fail. The Simondonian concept of technicity helps to locate error and stupidity according to their mutative potentials. We argue that the difference between the two is materialised in a failed theme park in Ankara. Planned as one of the municipality’s signature projects of the 2010s, Ankapark damages the tangible and intangible relationships within the land it sits on, Atatürk Forest Farm. This park, with its seemingly erroneous processes of engagement with the built environment and human and non-human inhabitants, bypasses any rationale and transforms a productive urban territory into an intransitive field for knowledge systems, institutions and disciplines. The cancerous mutation it feeds does not inform any knowledge system to the point that ‘it can no longer stand itself’, providing only ‘stupidity in stupidity’.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sinan Cem Kızıl, Bengisu Derebaşı http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article explores the challenge of designing public spaces in hyperdiverse cities and argues that including knowledge often considered ‘stupid’ is key towards inclusive design approaches. It discusses recent shifts towards co-creation, co-design and placemaking by highlighting the importance of engaging with collective stupidity beyond presumed disciplinary intelligence. The integration of stupid or unconventional ideas in collective creation processes could help better problematise design challenges in public spaces and better engage with diverse perspectives to address diversity effectively. First, we will sketch the main societal pushes and academic turns supporting the enhancement of stupidity through the collective creation of public space for contemporary inclusive and hyperdiverse cities. Then, drawing on a comparative literature study of key authors introducing paradigmatic shifts for today’s theoretical framing and understanding of collective creation, diversity and design ethics in public space, we propose a non-conclusive series of design capacities for public space designers. These designer capacities are situated in contextual and sociocultural awareness, sensitivity to socio-spatial relations and narrative inquiry, and designing with the tacit, hence with empathy and responsibility. Finally, we highlight the relation between stupidity and failure in urban design and present relevant success practices. However complimentary to traditional design capacities, we conclude that these ethico-aesthetic approaches might challenge traditional notions of intelligence, beauty or authorship in design in favour of diversity and inclusivity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mar Muñoz Aparici, Maurice Harteveld http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This issue of Footprint explores techn-natural spatialities and materialities found across operational landscapes of primary production. To the extent that these landscapes are increasingly automated and digitised, production and circulation practices are becoming more capital intensive and even less labour-intensive. While amplifying the precarity of human labour, this process relies on appropriating the work of more-than-human assemblages of machines, plants, animals and microorganisms. Central to the focus of this issue is understanding the way these processes are grounded in specific architectural and landscape configurations. In this way, we also aim to complement the debates on past issues of Footprint, offering an investigation of the impact of technological transformations beyond the concentrated landscapes of human inhabitation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Victor Muñoz Sanz, Nikos Katsikis http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Not-Not as Another Spatial Logic of Constitutive Negation
The article introduces Japanese architect Hiroshi Hara (1936–) and his creative criticism against unilateral globalisation in the 1970–80s as a unique legacy of pioneering cosmotechnical criticism in Japan. The growing vocabulary of cosmotechnics has offered opportunities to revisit the legacies of alternative perspectives to architecture, urbanisation and technology and thereby redefine the role of architecture as a major world-making agency in the Anthropocene. Joining such efforts, the present review examines Hara’s 1987 book Space <From Function to Modality> (1987), which collects six interconnected essays written in 1975–1987, focusing especially on ‘On Homogenous Space’ in 1975 and ‘From Function To Modality’ and ‘Not-Not and a Spatial Tradition of Japan’ both in 1987 to trace the trajectory of his three main concepts ‘function,’ ‘homogenous space’ and ‘modality.” Following how he appropriates of Heideggerian ‘tool’ as its pivot and articulates a constitutive negation called Not-Not, this review contextualises its relevance in contemporary cosmotechnical criticism initiated by Yuk Hui, through their respective reinvestigations into geometrical space and Eastern traditions of constitutive negation. The article concludes by highlighting Hara’s non-essentialist approach to avoid the East-West axis and decentralise globalisation from beyond his own horizon in Japan.
Copyright (c) 2025 Masamichi Tamura http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The unassuming title of the 2021 Australian book Design: Building on Countrypositions Aboriginal making as potentially cosmotechnical, since it restores the inter-dependence of what in the west would be categorised as nature, culture, technology. As the editor of the series to which the book belongs reminds us, ‘in the Aboriginal worldview, everything starts and ends with Country. ... Everything is part of a continuum, and endless flow of life and ideas emanating from Country’ which ‘includes the built environment and objects, which reflects both a conceptual and a physical process with ancestral and cultural dimensions’.And yet colonisation of the continent all but erad-icated Country as it had evolved over 65 000 years. So having carefully pieced together the objects, spiri-tuality, camps, shelters, materials and kinship of what Aboriginal design was (and is, in isolated ways), the book posits something more synthetic – an ‘offering’, as its conclusion graciously puts it, in which ‘this new Australian design will improve the wellbeing of people and create places that ultimately mean more to all of us. It will extend Country, not abrogate it, and it should be created with that in mind – because we are all con-nected to Country’.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simon Sadler http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Building with Jelly, or, Concrete as the Concretion of the Abstract
In his recent book titled *Béton: arme de construction massive du capitalisme*, Marxist thinker Anselm Jappe presents a critique of the emergence and ongoing centrality of reinforced concrete as a hegemonic building material. In this slim volume, Jappe traces its historical trajectory, analysing the economic pressures propelling its hegemonic consolidation, examining the central role it played in political projects of various stripes, and critiquing the social, cultural, and environmental consequences of the latter. What is interesting and novel about his contribution, however, is the conceptual framework deployed for this purpose. Unlike most Marxist critiques of architecture which usually focus on questions of class or ideology, Jappe focuses on matter and abstraction. Value-form theory (and the tradition of German *Wertkritik* which Jappe is part of), reads Marx’s theory of value as a theory of the abstract domination of human life and social practice by the abstract forms set in motion by the capitalist mode of production. What I propose is to write a review of Jappe’s book which attempts to read it in conjunction with the question of cosmotechnics. One of Yuk Hui’s central concerns is the decline of technodiversity as a result of the globalisation of Western technological monoculture throughout capitalist modernity. As the call for contributions rightly points out, the fields of architecture and urbanism have not yet properly addressed their implication in this process. I argue that the homogenization of building practices and the unanimous popularity of reinforced concrete is a major aspect of this process which ought to be examined more closely. While Hui’s project provides us with conceptual tools useful to critique this foreclosing of alternative cosmotechnics and to imagine how modern technologies could be rechannelled towards future divergent trajectories, he does not delve into the precise mechanisms through which this monoculture has been established in the first place. To explain this, I argue, Marxist theory is crucial. Expanding Jappe’s value-critical analysis of reinforced concrete with Moishe Postone’s account of how the peculiar social ‘self-mediating’ character of abstract labour in capitalism explains the transformation of labour into pure means and of its tools and products in mere objects, I intend to complement the question of cosmotechnics with an explanation of the decline of technodiversity grounded on the abstract logic of capital.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alan Diaz http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Shipwreck Architecture draws a connection between cosmotechnics, surrealism, and object-oriented ontology using an architectural design framework as a departure point. An academic introduction will connect the tragic aspects of Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics, to the tragic pairings created by figurative surrealists Rene Magritte and Salvador Dalí, to the ontographic project of shipwreck hauntography. This trajectory of ideas is then projected into a creative project: a speculative history of shipwreck architecture where the cutting edge of biological research is projected into a technological future when the distant aims of today’s technology are ancient history: when the first generations of grown buildings are preserved as ruins, when giant decommissioned carbon-capture factories drift like ghost ships across lakes of their inky waste, when people remember when shipwrecks caused by the hazards of rising sea levels were later exposed by sinking sea levels and converted into hotels and theatres, and finally, when these theatrical memories provoke such nostalgia that shipwreck architecture would be replicated and fabricated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simon Weir, Sara http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The digital turn in architecture seems to have displaced the house as a paradigm for architectural theory. Omitting the house, and with it, housing and dwelling as key sites for the reconstitution of the discipline, recent theorisations of the digital in architecture have almost exclusively focused on new methods of production and notions of materiality alongside profound changes to the urban and social dimensions of the built environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has unveiled the multifaceted dimensions of the impact of the new digital technologies on dwelling as private houses transformed into online workspaces. It calls for a reflection on the question of dwelling as formulated by Martin Heidegger in 1951, when he suggested that answers won’t be found in technology and quantitative approaches to the pressing housing urgency of the time, but rather in a rethinking of culture through existentialist philosophy. The question of dwelling after the digital turn leads to scrutiny of the history of the digitisation of the house and the shifting nature of domesticity, and to an exploration of involved motivations and values, oscillating between a techno-utopianism to a techno-capitalism. While the boundaries between real and virtual realms are blurred, the house and dwelling find a reconceptualisation in ecological and relational terms, thereby dissolving the house as a discrete object or entity. Privacy, autonomy, and physicality are in need of a rebalancing.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dirk van den Heuvel, Nelson Mota http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This visual essay discusses an object-map of Paris basin soil and subsoil, commissioned for the Element Terre exhibition within the Architecture and Landscape Biennial 2022 (Versailles, France). To create this map, we contacted actors and researchers whose work is related to soil: earth scientists, materials specialists, and human habitat specialists. Using a model from the book Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps, we designed a specific reference system, the ‘soil’ model, to map entities, movements and conflicts in the underground environment(s). The resulting map aims to reveal what is going on beneath our feet, what is hidden from view, to go beyond representations that are limited to the surface.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alexandra Arènes, Axelle Grégoire http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Walk Under the Midnight Sun is a large-scale carpet installation originally designed for the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2023 Venetian Architecture Biennale, part of an exhibition proposal by Fuzzy Earth design studio and BÜRO imaginaire curator collective. The project invites the public to explore the entangled historical, social and architectural relationships within greenhouse cultivation practices. The protagonist of the installation is a regionally unique capsicum cultivar, the Hungarian wax pepper, known in Hungary as the Cecei paprika. The themes of the exhibition were inspired by Fuzzy Earth’s ‘Not Quite a California Wonder’ research project.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gréta Tekla Gedeon, Sebastian Gschanes http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The notion of ‘worlds’ has gained much traction in recent discourses. Across the sciences, humanities and arts, including architecture, studies centring on ‘worlds’ aims to establish a new condition for theorising systems and their wider entanglements. Especially in architecture, there is a plethora of studies that often use a cartographic approach to chart various material (trans)formations of planetary spaces, and/or the wider discourses on spatial practices that may serve as the basis for theorising and practicing towards other possible worlds and futures. In this review I attempt to further these inquiries into spatial production by such ‘other’ means, by calling for a complementary posthuman account in which, following Braidotti, environmental, social, and technological transformations can no longer be understood in isolation. Here, I argue, it is necessary to resume and extend Foucault’s initial call to subsume the formation of built environments (and the various practices that create them) under the general history of technē, here generalised in terms of (cultural) technologies and cosmotechnics. With this aim, the following discusses theoretically-grounded approaches through the spatialisation and coupling of (cosmotechnical) difference.
Copyright (c) 2025 Robert Alexander Gorny http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The essay investigates the application of cosmotechnics in architecture through a case study of a large international construction venture, the Zambia World Bank Education Project. Financed in 1969 by the World Bank together with the Norwegian Agency for International Development (NORAD), the project envisioned the construction of sixty-five new secondary schools in under four years. A Norwegian consultancy company hired for the project proposed a modular semi-industrial building system and a computer-aided system of process management that defined the project’s cosmology. Not surprisingly, expectations of a new computerised modernity did not materialise, and the project was plagued by endless problems that seemed to be divine acts of resistance to which only celestial bodies could provide a solution. However, as this essay argues, these resistances can be considered sites of rupture, where the conflict between different cosmotechnics becomes apparent. Based on original archival documents, the essay interrogates these resistances to universalist ideas of technology and ontological assumptions embedded and perpetuated through the architecture of post-colonial “development” projects. This study serves as a first stepping stone towards further investigations into how Western homogenising technologies could be negotiated and challenged for a more pluralistic technological paradigm.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maryia Rusak http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We propose that architectural responses to planetary environmental challenges are a crucial domain for cosmotechnical action. We explore the possibilities of cosmotechnical design by analysing two contrasting responses to the effects of anthropogenic climate change in Jakarta: defensive sea-wall construction and adaptive community action. Jakarta is an essential case for exploring cosmotechnics: a world city at the forefront of planetary environmental challenges, and a capital with a conflicted urban history, deeply shaped by colonisation and by its immersion in global circuits of capital and trade.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roi Salgueiro Barrio, Sasha McKinlay http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cosmotechnologies of Community and Collaboration in Vandana Singh’s Speculative Architectures
Yuk Hui, referring both to climate change and its accompanying social upheavals, writes that ‘to confront the crisis that is before us’, humans will have to rethink the idea of technological universality and how it constructs our relationship to each other and to the natural world. For architects, this means considering how much architecture today is constrained by a singular technological paradigm, and how architects can think the many technologies of architecture differently. This essay considers architectural cosmotechnology through discourses in global speculative fiction (SF), fictions proceeding from different ways of understanding and being in the world, to explore the future implications of these fictions for architecture and other technological practices in contrast to the hegemony of global modernism – what I have called cosmotechnologies of community and collaboration. The short fiction of SF author Vandana Singh supplies an image of architecture that proceeds from different images of and concerns about the future, and is an exemplary practice in cosmotechnology. She reframes existing technologies and invents new technologies in a mode of practice that centres the experience of diverse cultures in technologies of community and collaboration where architecture becomes central to new ways of being in the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joel P.W. Letkemann http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Organised around the advertising language for three co-living platforms—WeLive, Quarters (now Habyt), and the Collective—this essay frames the corporate housing model as inseparable from the digital media infrastructures that distribute its contents. Building, on one side, upon the existing research in the domain of housing, real estate, and media, and on the other, on the performative reading of the real estate advertisements of the contemporary co-living projects, it positions this housing typology as a genuine product of the 'real-estate-media complex,' referring to the close entanglements of speculative property markets, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in commodification of housing.
Copyright (c) 2023 Marija Maric http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines cemeteries as repositories for vernacular literary culture, in the form of epitaphs, and as the inspiration for literature that brings necrogeography into tension with programmes of growth. It starts in the early nineteenth century, when Romantic period notions of individuality, intertwined with the novel, gave birth to modern cemeteries. These spaces have, in the interceding centuries, grown old and been threatened by expanding cities, infrastructure, and changing modes of memorialisation. As sprawling cities encroach on cemeteries, ‘perpetual rest’ has been challenged and headstones have been removed or consolidated, to make way for parks and amenities that benefit the living. Literary depictions of cemeteries in the twentieth century have both reinforced, and troubled the notion, that cemeteries are ‘archives in stone’ that must be protected at all costs.
Copyright (c) 2024 Samuel Holleran http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this visual essay I present a body of artistic work done within informal urban and suburban heritage sites in Kyoto. Through the media of text, photography, film and site-specific painting, my works from the cycle Spirit Grounds engage with these sites involving material physical aspects as well as beliefs, fictions, and more-than-human beings. Building upon this, I propose ‘phantom writing’ or ‘phantasmography’ as a situated, multidisciplinary and multisensory approach aimed at understanding and designing contemporary places, landscapes and environments, acknowledging and mediating the agency of diverse phantoms and phantasms.
Copyright (c) 2024 Michael Hirschbichler http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Understanding a Future Yet to Take Shape
An issue on narrating shared futures (‘How will we live together?’) implies being able to conceive of a mutual and shared experience. The history of shared heritages often contains other figures in the margins: those who were not seen as part of the dominant cultural narrative, or whose contribution to its heritage went unacknowledged. The holistic view of the 2018 Davos declaration on Baukultur embraces a more integral view of the built environment and society. In order to explore some of the cultural narratives that shape our past and envision a shared future, this article takes a closer look at three science fiction authors and how their stories draw lessons from the past into a narration of possible futures. Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood have each envisioned futures that draw from contemporary developments and expand them to an overarching logic as the setting of their tales. Rather than directly examining (un)built heritages, this article examines the underlying cultural logic of building on the past. If architecture provides a foundation for a shared (and inclusive) future, the stories constructed by these authors show how the built environment resonates with societal principles, aiding or hindering particular collective values.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lara Schrijver http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article I introduce the alien view of the traveller, the view from outside, as presented in a number of travel narratives describing the type of the domestic enclosed garden in Nicosia. I focus on three books published between the fourteenth and twentieth century, and do a comparative analysis of the narratives based on the information they provide about Nicosian gardens. I investigate how this knowledge can be used to develop design strategies for gardens as a typology in architectural and urban design. As a demonstration, I discuss the project ‘Nicosian Garden Network’, which uses the historically iconic element of the garden and its narrated spatial qualities as an answer to the problem of urban fragmentation and the presence of a large number of unused plots in the city of Nicosia. The project incorporates unused sites of different sizes into a network of shared semi-public urban spaces that could reconnect the landscape, create conditions of sharing by the different communities on a daily basis, and regain its iconic presence in the contemporary city. The article aims to contribute to the discussion about ways in which travelogues, guides and other forms of travel literature can construct a field of knowledge about vernacular architecture and implement contemporary approaches to architectural design.
Copyright (c) 2024 Christos Papastergiou http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Allied bombing campaigns over the German cities during World War II produced a vast landscape of destruction, which has been the object of reports, accounts and fictional narratives. Cities and buildings, a fundamental architectural heritage binding individuals and communities to their existential spaces, were annihilated in the most extensive act of deliberate destruction in human history. In this article, I look into the work of three authors – Heinrich Böll, Stig Dagerman and Hans Erich Nossack – to outline the effects of the bombings on the survivors, and on their relationship to both urban space and architectural heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federico De Matteis http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article focuses on narrative encounters between people, cities, and stories, and the narrative, material, and futuristic urban plotting. It explores how people engage with narrative heritage, its objects – not just neoliberal wet dreams and dystopias, but also speculative street theatre, participatory utopian fiction, orature, or lyrics – and the practices of co-writing, reading, and listening to ask, beyond Henri Lefebvre, not simply ‘who has the right to the city’, but who can narrate its shared pasts and futures, and how. In the paper, I treat stories and urban architecture as interwoven and co-constitutive modalities of heritage preservation, destruction, repair and futurescaping, drawing attention, after Don Mitchell and Sara Zawde, to the narrative affordances of built landscapes as ‘metaphors to live by’ and to the design-making force of narratives and words. The narrative heritages I center on are, therefore, not simply literary texts but diverse narrative acts, including narrators, different media, spaces, and situated rehearsals of public and collective sci-fi storytelling, writing, and listening for togetherness and less violent futures. The article meanders across several urban narrative situations: ‘Society of the Future’ showcases designed by students after dystopian novels and urbanscapes in Boston; speculative heritage live action role-play (LARP) in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, US; ‘wave writing’ experiments in Trondheim/Tråante, Norway; and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening sessions in the footprints of Sámi Elsa Laula Renberg across Scandinavia. It concludes with a reflection on the archives of narrative ‘repair’ and urban otherworldliness as pedagogies of non-necrotic futuring.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hanna Musiol http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In her acclaimed science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis, Octavia E. Butler presents a narrative of interspecies coexistence involving humans and the alien Oankali. This coexistence is facilitated by living entities known as Lo, which serve as dynamic architectures mediating positive, mutualistic interactions between the two species. These entities offer a valuable framework for analysing architectures that seek to integrate the other. In this article, we propose to extend existing debates on interspecies co-design practices and link them to the concept of xenoarchitecture. Furthermore, we propose the Interspecies Interaction Protocols (IIP) to regulate human/other-than-human interactions in built environments. To demonstrate that xenoarchitecture’s interspecies mediating vision can be applied to non-fictional real-world architecture, we project ideas from Butler’s onto three unusual examples of buildings that achieve this human/other-than-human mediation: the library at the National Palace of Mafra and Coimbra University’s Joanina Library, both located in Portugal, and the Karni Mata temple, located in Rajasthan, India. These case studies illustrate positive IIPs that facilitate mutualistic coexistence between humans and two other species, bats and rats.
Copyright (c) 2024 Aitor Frías-Sánchez, Joaquín Perailes-Santiago, Diego Jiménez-López http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A flexible dwelling commonly refers to housing susceptible to modification to various functions or uses. Between the 1960s and 1970s, Architectural Design magazine published studies and prototypes of flexible architectures, such as container homes and mobile homes, as alternative options to the housing market. Temporary, mobile, modular, containerised, and prefab became synonyms of flexible. These units proliferated to fulfil housing emergencies. The ordinary concept of flexibility, including, for instance, a dwelling capable of different customisations, shifts to a more restrictive meaning, revealing the intrinsic logistic nature of the containerised housing that, rather than goods, controls and distributes human beings. Through field research, the case study is the workers’ housing in the Rotterdam-Venlo corridor, a strategic trajectory of global supply chains. The logistical organisation goes beyond the thin enclosure of productive sites, regulating the mobility of workers and the flexibility of housing. Conceived by employment agencies to provide and discipline the workforce, workers’ housing is merely driven by efficiency criteria. Disclosing contexts where migrant flows are less tangible and visible, this research’s crucial questions revolve around the relationship between flexible housing and rigorous logistic regimes, the corporates’ exploitative strategies and the bottom-up workers’ tactics.
Copyright (c) 2023 Renzo Sgolacchia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dwelling appears as a complex entanglement of dreams and realities, mental representations, and concrete practices. Here the question of its evolution in the digital age is approached at three levels. Firstly, what are the changes that it brings to the concrete experience of the built environment that have accompanied the rise of digital technologies? The Covid19 pandemic has contributed to reveal some of them, but the full picture is still far from clear. Secondly, how are these changes related to this different understanding of the human that is often dubbed as a transition towards a ‘posthuman’ condition, Thirdly, the least evident to address: will these shifts lead to the emergence of new spatial organizations and programs? Central to the argument developed here is that there is a deep relation between dwelling and the constitution of human subjectivity. Dwelling in the digital age is thus inseparable from the question of the evolution of what it means to be human in our contemporary societies.
Copyright (c) 2023 Antoine Picon http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The enormity of the ocean presents as an unusual physical obstacle that complicates claims for spaces being urbanised well beyond the traditional container of the city, such as the focus of this discussion: the Southern Ocean. Though commonly perceived as a pristine wilderness at the end of the earth, the ocean surrounding Antarctica has been imbricated in planetary-scale processes of urbanisation since the late eighteenth century, so the absence of this oceanic volume from twenty-first-century urban debates is troubling. Representations of the Antarctic as remote and disconnected from cities do nothing to contribute to a critical discussion of its ocean volume, technological histories or ongoing colonial settler imaginaries. Instead, attention might turn to codifying what the ocean increasingly contains by way of urban processes and, ultimately, what might be offered by confirming extended forms of urbanisation operating on and, importantly, through the earth. In this article I re-present the Southern Ocean via comparative cartographies and critical image-making to cross-examine what its occlusion signifies for the planetary reach of urbanisation. For underneath the machinery of extraction and exploitation lie significant questions regarding representations of the urban as they manifest outside conventions that overstate ‘the city’ as central to urbanisation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Charity Edwards http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this essay I analyse how energy dreams and epistemologies, constructed on cravings for productivity and profit, connect the spaces that epitomise the ‘Cartesian enclosure’ with the technologies and spaces of everyday life. I examine how destructive habits of extracting, procuring and consuming energy follow predictions that assume the inevitability of growth. Estimates that, even in the face of climate catastrophe, render the need for more energy inevitable and rely on finding new fixes rather than embracing other forms of living. Focusing on the case of lithium extraction in Atacama, I address the struggles sustained by indigenous communities for their lives, sovereignty and rights. Battles that emphasise how, in what has been described as ‘green colonialism’, the development of the ‘green energy futures’ too often is to the detriment of indigenous peoples.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marina Otero Verzier http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The term ‘planetary garden’ was coined by Gilles Clement to refer to the privileged site of the planetary mixing of species that is managed by humans. In the face of the ongoing environmental collapse, we envision the garden as a new locus for symbiotic attachment and original exchange between human and non-human ecologies. Drawing on the garden metaphor, we discuss the conceptual and ecological impacts of human stewardship of the environment. Recognising ecosystems as changing fields of social and technical interactions, we evaluate how conservation strategies shift in tandem with these changes. We explore the influence of emerging technologies on human understanding of natural ecosystems and on societal approaches to conservation. Envisioning the future, we are mapping out the need for human-centric technologies to foster new forms of agency between humans and their environments. While any technological promise does not come without ethical and technical challenges, we advocate for ecological intelligence (EI), a spatialised human-AI collaboration scheme, as a critical condition for reimagining and upscaling conservation practices in the Anthropocene.
Copyright (c) 2024 Katerina Labrou, Christos Montsenigos http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Data platforms increasingly mediate the relationship of society to the data it produces and therefore form a critical layer of the contemporary link between data and urbanisation. However, the current discussion of the impact of data platforms on urbanisation is limited on one hand by an overly metaphoric articulation of platforms, which obscures the material geographies and infrastructural landscapes of data production; and on the other hand, by an administratively bounded reading of platforms, which confines the discussion to only their most visible impact in cities. In this article I argue that to fully capture the impact of platforms on urbanisation we need to overcome these limitations by examining the ‘operational landscapes’ of data production and circulation. This extended ontology of platforms positions the spatial discourse of technology in relationship with other forms of capitalist spatial production and opens up the material geographies and infrastructural landscapes of data production for critical engagement as integral parts of the sociotechnical construction of platforms. By examining the data landscapes of Northern Virginia, I illustrate how historic and contemporary forces, actor networks, and urban dynamics contribute to the construction and maintenance of the extended geography of data platforms.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ali Fard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Azores is an archipelago known for its Edenic landscapes, strongly symbolised by cows grazing in vast pasturelands. These ‘natural’ scenarios, however, obfuscate technologies of ecological restoration resulting from cattle exploitation, which seem to be in a clear collision with the perception of the Azorean scenery as ‘a good way of life’. Impelled by the focus of this Footprint issue, I recently visited two farms in São Miguel Island: a medium-size dairy farm and an intensive beef farm. Through this field inquiry, in this article I intend to problematise the fabrication of productive farming landscapes or, rather, the production of cowscapes. The current livestock political vision appears as twofold: a restorative ideal, promoting the ‘return to’ a supposed bucolic state; and the synchronization of livestock activities through the reconfiguration of the terrain, machines, animals and work. The triad efficiency-optimisation-specialisation might be symptomatic of the current path in the archipelago, within which extensive farming translates into an increased farmland footprint. After all, more efficiency requires more pastureland. Ultimately, the contemporary Azorean cowscapes perpetuate the loss of resilience in global food systems, and the island is only the beginning of the evidentiary trail.
Copyright (c) 2024 Inês Vieira Rodrigues http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article we investigate plantation agriculture as a technology aimed at extracting natural resources, utilising unpaid labour, and installing regulatory authority. Using the oil palm plantation territories of Johor State in Malaysia – a core zone of palm oil production, manufacturing and export – as a case study, we ask how more-than-human assemblages enabled the expansion and refinement of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and contributed to the material transformation of the territory. We also explore how plantations can be mobilised as an analytical device to study the urbanisation of territory through agro-industrial production. To explore those questions, we present three episodes of more-than-human involvement in assembling oil palm plantation territories in Johor. Through the conceptual frame of the operationalisation of territory, we bring into dialogue literature on the Plantationocene with critical urban studies and the history of urbanisation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hans Hortig http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The qualities that characterise open works of art have become prevalent in mainstream architecture theory. Trying to elucidate why openness appears to mean so many different things and at the same time remains an ethereal concept, it seems worthwhile to reflect on potential justifications for its use. While the notion can be effectively and persuasively used to discuss the ethics that should govern our profession, beyond that axiological role its meagre explanatory power suggests that new directions in open architecture might require that we recognise its theoretical shortcomings and start looking for new and better ways to explain exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the architecture of our time.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jorge Mejía Hernández, Esin Komez Daglioglu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rethinking Autonomous and Robotic Systems in Residential Architecture
Informed by twenty years of hands-on experimentation with autonomous and robotic systems in home prototypes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this study provides insight into the motivations and values of integrating computing technologies in residential architecture. Although optimising home adaptability for energy efficiency, ergonomics, and climate control are shown to have benefits, applications intended to influence human behaviour remain questionable. The features of three home prototypes are presented to supply evidence for this claim: a Connected Sustainable Home that is a prototype of connected sustainability; the PlaceLab, a living laboratory for studying health-related home systems; and the CityHome, a series of robotically-transformable apartment prototypes. The case studies are of distinct scales, aim at heterogeneous objectives, and were implemented at different times. They are thematically linked through digital home automation. Evaluating these three prototypes enables the determination of design criteria for integrating autonomous and robotic systems in residential architecture and provokes reflection on the impact of autonomous systems on architectural practice.
Copyright (c) 2023 Sotirios Kotsopoulos, Jason Nawyn http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In the midst of a new Covid-19 variant – Omicron – in winter 2021, the recently rebranded tech giant Meta announced the company’s vision for the ‘metaverse’: a ‘beyond universe’ of constant connection. Only a few days later, the Swedish furniture giant Ikea shared its latest version of the project Tiny Homes: an extremely condensed and cheap micro-apartment in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. This paper investigates these two events, and discusses the progressive upscaling of the digital dwelling and the parallel downsizing of the physical dwelling. It argues that, beyond being a deadly epidemic, Covid-19 upended, overnight, not only traditional living and working practices, but also the spaces that determine and are determined by them. It canonised a flexible life by envisioning a new architecture of hybrid dwelling where people could shift in real time from their tiny physical spaces into an infinite digital space. Yet, this opportunity granted by the immersive, allegedly inclusive and democratic new virtual realm hides a strangely familiar set of relations. It facilitates the establishment of a new and broader economy of continuous worldwide accumulation in which constant connectedness, creation and production construct a highly ephemeral and economised hybrid space that transforms the traditional understanding of dwelling into a condition of uprootedness.
Copyright (c) 2023 Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, María Álvarez García http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneously just around the corner, already here, and yesterday’s news. This is usually put down to hype and hyperbole, but it may well be argued that smart built environments do indeed exist across temporal dimensions – only not in the way we imagine them to. Instead of speaking of a digital turn in housing, we would be better served by employing the plural: digital turns. In fact, once we begin to unravel the history of how the idea of what we today call smart technology has been implemented in multi-household rental dwellings since the early 1980s, a pattern emerges. The article charts how landlords and others have placed smart devices that monitor, encourage or discipline tenants to behave in certain ways. This is a parallel story to the dream of a leisure-centred technology-enabled house of the future. This parallel story is darker and centres on the transformation of the dwelling through its digitalisation.
Copyright (c) 2023 Fredrik Torisson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Writing Open Architecture as a book on Human Rights (and against Nation-States)
Drawing on the author’s book Open Architecture, this essay studies the relation between migration and architecture as a matter of human rights, and thereby exposes the historical roots of contemporary racisms, while giving due acknowledgment to the Black and Brown migrants in the making of even the most established European architectural projects. This analysis not only exposes the weaknesses of a world order predicated on the limited and constructed idea of the nation-state, but also outlines architecture’s ways to build resistance through the concept of openness. Defining open architecture as a new ethic of welcoming toward the immigrant, the essay alludes to the formal, programmatic and procedural aspects of latent open architecture, such as flexibility and adaptability of form, collectivity and collaboration, participatory processes, and multiplicity of meaning.
Copyright (c) 2023 Esra Akcan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The editorial introduction to this issue of Footprint questions the complex concept of populism, explaining how, in recent debates, it has more and more often been related to architectural issues. Partly based on the analysis of political philosopher and historian Jan-Werner Müller, our understanding of the term reaches to both ends of the political spectrum. Yet rather than simply aiming to provide a clear definition of populism, this editorial sheds more light on a debated concept, showing its multi-facetted aspects in relation to space and aesthetics. Through the categories of media, politics and aesthetics, this introduction also shows the logical progression between the different pieces included in the issue. Acknowledging the complex nature of the word populism is essential for the understanding of the variety of takes included in this issue.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lea-Catherine Szacka, Salomon Frausto http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mary McLeod in conversation with Salomon Frausto and Leá-Catherine Szacka
In February 1989, architectural historian and theorist Mary McLeod published her now seminal essay entitled ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism’ in Assemblage 8. In the essay, she examined the relationship between architecture and politics in the 1980s, a time of unprecedented change. The following conversation discusses the circumstances under which the essay was originally written and offers her reflections thirty years later to think about the relationship between architecture and populism today.
Copyright (c) 2022 Mary McLeod http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Is there an architectural and urban planning agenda at work behind the politics of contemporary (neo-)fascists and populist, radical and extremist right-wing forces? The Right-Wing Spaces research project, which has been running since 2018 at the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory) (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart, suggests that the answer to this question is fairly unequivocal, at least in the German context: ‘architecture … seems to have become a key tool of an authoritarian, populist right with a revisionist take on history.’[i] The interim findings of the project were presented in ‘Rechte Räume: Bericht einer Europareise’ (Right-wing spaces: report on a journey through Europe), ARCH+ 235 (2019), an issue that was guest-curated by IGmA, as well as in my 2020 essay collection Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Right-wing spaces: political essays and conversations). [i] Stephan Trüby, Rechte Räume: Politische Essays und Gespräche (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020), 138. The Right-Wing Spaces research project is headed by Philipp Krüpe (IGmA) and myself, https://www.igma.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/research-projects/page_0002_0001/.
Copyright (c) 2022 Stephan Trüby http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Epiphylogenesis to General Organology
Epiphylogenesis is a neologism coined under Stiegler’s anthropotechnical theorisation of the co-evolution of brains and tools. In line with feminist and decolonial theorists like Claire Colebrook and Kathryn Yusoff, it foregrounds that there has never been such a thing as ‘the human’. There are only differentiation processes that historically make humans who they are, and do so in different ways. As such, it has gained some currency in a stream of neo-materialist theories that have revisited anthropogenesis, or the quasi-causality of becoming human, that operates by way of progressively differentiating environments and technics. In addition to primary memory as the genetic information expressed in DNA and secondary memory acquired epigenetically through a complex nervous system, there is also tertiary memory, which Stiegler named ‘epiphylogenetic’. It is the accumulation and retention of historical epigenetic differentiations within the spatio-temporal organisation of material environments. Specifically, the formation of organisational technics includes writing, art, clothing, tools, and machines, but also architecture and urban planning. This outsourcing of memory from the organic changes the conditions for further phylogenetic becomings, given that evolutions continue to be extrinsically organised (‘ex-organised’) by associated technicised milieus.
Copyright (c) 2022 Robert Alexander Gorny, Andrej Radman http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queer Life(lines) Within the Death of an Archive
In this essay turned collective text-archive, I explore, through proliferating Stieglers thought, epigenetics as the genetic transfer of experience, seeing it as our inherited tools, codes, and processes that enable us to construct radical political alternatives. Similarly, the global West has inherited institutions and their systems – such as the archive – retaining specific perspectives founded on a Eurocentric epistemic model proximate to whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity, while obscuring or forgetting Other knowledges. A main question is: who and whose knowledge is in need to be constructed as indispensable, as present outside of the gap? What knowledge constructs whose subjectivity? Part of the confrontation exists of tracing the archive’s outside space, entangling with Other ways of doing that enable us to rethink institutions. This means then partially coming to terms which knowledge and bodies we need to survive collectively and in solidarity. And thus, what urgent, vibrant archives are we already passing on, beyond our own (knowledge) lifespan? This essay-text-archive makes visual the layered and multi-authored process of creating this knowledge resource. It intends to deconstruct and queer the position of the footnote, as archival trace and life’s whisper – with its curator-writer-editors as performing the essential care-work of mediating this archival effort.
Copyright (c) 2022 Setareh Noorani http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What is the problem of epiphylogenesis? We can define and understand the term, but what does it do and what does it demand of us? Indeed, one way of thinking about epiphylogenesis is through Bernard Stiegler’s claim that some forms of technology generate or enable long circuits of desire, and that this needs to be recalled in a time of short-circuits. Epiphylogenesis requires both that we pose problems differently, and that ‘we’ are, or should be, a problem to ourselves. Let me unpack this by beginning with what presents itself as a major problem: climate change, and the end of the world. What are we going to do? How can we change course? How do we save the world? The posing of the question in this way is only possible if there is a distinct ‘we’ who must then deliberate a course of action in relation to the world. Epiphylogenesis shifts the question towards the very possibility of this ‘we.’ How do formations of what comes to think of itself as ‘the human’ come into being, and what worlds and capacities do such formations make possible? For Stiegler the problem of climate change is ultimately the problem of who ‘we’ are, along with a constitutive tendency towards the failure to confront this question.
Copyright (c) 2022 Claire Mary Colebrook http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Under contemporary capitalism and platform urbanism, domesticity distorts to take on new forms. Dwelling is simultaneously decentralised and re-distributed via digital and urban networks. This article argues that these new forms of dwelling necessitate new modes of critique – ones primed for this networked, spatially distributed condition. It proposes to supplement typological and topographical approaches to dwelling with the more ‘anexactly rigorous’ relational cartography offered by the field of topology. The article begins with an outline of topology, drawing on mathematics, philosophy and geography towards a reconceptualisation of architecture as a boundary-drawing apparatus. The topological condition of modern dwelling is then retraced as a genealogy of interpenetrating edifices, mediating membranes, and prosthetic equipment, which have prefigured present-day formations of domesticity. The second half of the article trains this topological lens onto three architectural tendencies in response to platform urbanism: convivial arrangements of networked living, commoning platforms and thresholds, and counter-protocols of distributed domesticity. Through unpacking these trajectories, the article illustrates the potential that a topological approach engenders via new modes of mapping, critiquing, resisting and subverting the unequally distributed agency and power underlying the circuits of platform urbanism.
Copyright (c) 2023 Lorinc Vass, Roy Cloutier, Nicole Sylvia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Kodalak’s essay revisits Gilbert Simondon as a postwar philosopher, who formulated a new way of conceiving individual modalities—from crystals, technical objects and biological organisms to psychic phenomena and social collectives. Simondon’s metaphysical conception of ontogenesis—that explains how individuals emerge from a pre-individual field of metastable potentials through processes of individuation—helped him reconceive technical objects, no longer as passive automata, but as exuberant individuals, active and full of life, with irreducible modes of existence of their own. With this new vision, Simondon invites us to rethink our relationship with technical objects beyond the mythological attitudes of technocracy, technophilia, and technophobia, which can be further developed today for reconceiving architecture’s own technical modes of existence and charged relations with technology. Kousoulas’ essay begs the question: Why Simondon in a volume dedicated to Stiegler? It is not that Stiegler’s oeuvre cannot be examined without referring to the crucial influence that Simondon had for his thought. More important than this, it is only through Simondon that Stiegler makes sense. Simondon is keen to remind us that sense, first and foremost, stands for directionality: to make sense is to grasp a direction. Without Simondon’s critical reformulation of our technological becoming, Stiegler’s project remains null. In a non-zero-sum game, Stiegler through Simondon and (retroactively) Simondon through Stiegler, produce the norms and values of a directing sense that can indeed compel us to engage in our worldly endeavours with neganthropic care.
Copyright (c) 2022 Gokhan Kodalak, Stavros Kousoulas http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
End Times and Architectural Style on the Christian Campus
This paper examines the idea of architectural style on evangelical Christian campuses built during the Cold War, a period during which religious cosmologies came into contact with the prospect of nuclear disaster, allowing for a temporary alliance between secular and religious visions of the end of human history. In this context of Cold War-era end-of-the-world thinking, and in relation to the biblical anticipation of the apocalypse, I consider the contrasting choices of so-called futuristic and neo-vernacular idioms in the building projects of television evangelists. What does it mean to revive styles of the past, or to build in a mode oriented toward the future, when the end of history is imminent? Design undertaken within the framework of assumed apocalyptic narratives troubles notions of permanence and durability—historically vital terms for thinking about building. The paper takes two primary case studies: Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, which hosts the Christian Broadcasting Network and was built in a “Jeffersonian” vernacular; and Oral Roberts’s Tulsa university, unique at the time for its gilded modernism.
Copyright (c) 2022 Rachel Engler http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka near Moscow is a quintessential example of the post-Soviet populist ideology, representating a mixture of ostensibly religious values with multiple secular cult objects.
Copyright (c) 2022 Elena Markus, Nina Frolova http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay explores the defining role that council housing has played in populist politics in Britain from the post-war era to the present. Central to this was Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme – an archetypal populist policy that became totemic of her broader reconfiguration of British society. Building on the demonisation of council housing that paved the way for Right to Buy, today, it stands as the implicit foil for the present right-wing government’s populist advocation of ‘beauty’ (i.e. traditional styles) as a way of removing objections to future development. Meanwhile, the populist left argues for a return to the mass council house building of the post-war era, despite the recent success of small-scale, tactical council housing projects, such as those by Peter Barber Architects. The essay argues that the polarised and asymmetrical nature of this debate, conflating questions of aesthetics, typology and planning and tenure type, is typical of populist politics, ensuring a middle ground is by definition impossible. The essay concludes with the contention that if populist politics tends towards a monocultural architecture and urbanism, then a built environment that allows room for different forms, ideas and agendas may itself help foster a politics of pluralism.
Copyright (c) 2022 Owen Hopkins http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The digital era has supposedly had a drastic impact on contemporary forms of political debate. Live-tweets, podcasts, and posts have become the main channels for politics, polemics, and populism alike. But these tendencies are not only an acceleration of the politics of media brought about by the logics behind television, cybernetics, and computation in the post-war era. They gained strength when populist politics appropriated information access via mass media, which once promised the emancipation of ordinary citizens by architectural means through pop-culture. In this essay I seek to elaborate how Cedric Price’s 1965 design of the Pop-Up Parliament dealt with a media-technical condition of politics, while proposing that architecture was an integral part of the media network of governing. Price’s project is paradigmatic of the 1960s, a period when the media operations of information compression, prediction, and audience targeting became more decisive for politics than the content of debate. This analysis allows us, on the one hand, to problematise conventional definitions of populism towards a media-based concept, and on the other, to further our understanding of architecture as a political medium operating directly with media such as documents, television, and computers. This essay argues that the advent of digital media calls for a different architectural history of populism, one which engages with the operativity of media and cultural techniques, rather than relying upon the symbolic representation of ideology in architecture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dennis Pohl http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Mari Lending http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On the Open Style of Architectural Reasoning
This article departs from Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to argue that open architecture is not necessarily an ontological, but rather a methodological category, and that in order to understand open architecture we require an appropriate style of architectural reasoning. Stanford Anderson’s approach to Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes in architecture is used to develop the idea that a precise style of reasoning forms an explicit understanding of architectural openness, and is elaborated further using Michael Hays’s notion of critical architecture as an alternative approach to open architecture, which is free from any predetermined logic. The article concludes with an attempt to identify similarities between the work of Anderson and Hays as a basis for an open style of architectural reasoning.
Copyright (c) 2023 Konstantinos Apostolidis http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Since the 1960s, open architecture has sought to move away from fixed objects built for eternity and instead towards the development of indeterminate proposals. Today, in the midst of health and climate crises, some architects are reconsidering the need for an evolving and adaptable architecture that encourages multiple uses. Sanitary confinement has made us aware of the urgency of flexibility in housing. Climate crises, on the other hand, require that buildings can be converted in order to avoid obsolescence. This article examines how the different design processes used by Office KGDVS, MVRDV, Sanaa, and Sou Fujimoto, among others, go beyond the unitary and homogeneous models of open architecture proposed in the 1960s in order to respond to a crucial desire of contemporary society: the need for singularity. As we theorise it, the free plan wanted to be singular and specific instead of neutral, in order to absorb obsolete uses into broader programmes. The free room, on the contrary, absorbs multiple uses on the scale of the dwelling and encourages multiple reconfigurations. The confinement measures taken by many governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have taught us that architecture must make uses possible that will undoubtedly be even more diversified tomorrow than they were yesterday.
Copyright (c) 2023 Van Rooyen Xavier http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Unbearable Lightness of an Open System
One of the many ways in which architecture is conceptually opened up is by adopting systems theory in building technology. In this context, open systems denote modular design and construction; a system of standardized, mass-produced parts that can be configured in various ways opens a field of possibilities. However, there is a significant gap between the high expectations for the implication of the open systems principle and its results. This essay explores the potentials and consequences of openness in architecture through a historical case study. The Packaged House project (1941–47), designed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), is a prefabricated housing system devised to meet the housing shortage in the US during and soon after WWII. It was an open spatial design system, a modular construction system and a commercial enterprise all in one. Although it was cultivated in the most favourable political and economic landscape for prefabricated building systems, the Packaged House failed to be widely reproduced. Drawing from the conflicting histories of the Packaged House, the discursive formation of the post-war dwelling, changing definitions of openness, and varied representations, this essay dissects the fantasies of the open building systems as well as their practical and symbolic features.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ezgi İşbilen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Architect Frank van Klingeren was most active during the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands. In response to the social and urban challenges of the time, Van Klingeren developed various experimental architectural forms and concepts. This essay discusses his comparatively well-known community centres De Meerpaal and Het Karregat by focusing on his commitment to unfinished architecture, open plan through wall-less designs, and his insistent attempt at creating social encounters through these spatial principles. To provide historical contextualisation of these architectural principles I engage with a theoretical framework developed by Esra Akcan which provides the first full-fledged conceptualisation of open architecture. I look at archival materials such as Van Klingeren’s poems, essays, and interviews as well as the designs of his community centres and their reception in national and international journals and newspapers. In addition to extending our knowledge of Van Klingeren’s seldom studied architectural practice, this essay aims to contribute to the concept of openness in architectural studies with the case of Van Klingeren’s spatial practice.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ecem Sarıçayır http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article discusses the possibilities of signification in architectural interventions involving historical remnants, focusing on the notions of spolia and of opera aperta. The notion of spolia has been the province of art history since the Renaissance. In bringing it to the field of architectural design, the focus will shift from the historical realm to the conceptual possibilities opened up by spolia in architectural practice. The aim is to analyse the association between the creative reuse of and intervention in historical remnants and the multiplication of possible significations through various examples. Methodologically, the article expands the linguistic drive of the contemporary debate on spolia to the structural linguistics upon which Umberto Eco built the poststructuralist concept of open work. More precisely, the essay resorts to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign structure’ as a vehicle to explore the possibilities for the semantic and syntactical openness of spolia. Toning in with Eco’s arguments on the open work, the openness associated with spolia will be seen as dependent on the loosening of the formal and typological structures of established architectural codes.
Copyright (c) 2023 Armando Rabaça http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay looks at the algorithm written by Franco-Hungarian spatial artist Nicolas Schöffer for the Tour Lumière Cybernétique, a cybernetic light tower created for Paris’s La Défense district in the 1960s and ’70s. By revisiting the tower’s computer programme, this essay aims to understand how it was thought to operate as an open system by receiving data from its surrounding environment. The review of the programme questions how the probability distributions Schöffer included in the algorithm to ensure a random treatment of predictable city data was imagined to avoid stagnation, repetition and programmatic saturation, all elements essential to maintaining the tower’s open framework. The goal of the essay is to provide a coherent interpretation of the computer programme as well as a comprehensive description of its mathematical elements, so that future readers of La Tour Lumière Cybernétique can gain an insight into the behaviour of the tower.
Copyright (c) 2023 Nina Stener Jørgensen, Guillaume Laplante-Anfossi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Maps are preeminent ways of collecting, organising, verifying, historicising, and even mystifying territorial knowledge. They embrace a multiplicity of readings and readers, and mediate between the visible and the invisible. In constant re-definition, maps transform and maximise themselves by connecting different layers of information and initiating uninterrupted performances. Without delineating a fixed meaning, maps respond to the city’s openness via diversity, incompleteness, and unpredictability. New developments in computer science and information technologies have turned maps into grittier models that define the new granular front of the open map. This article studies open maps in terms of participation and multiplicity, part and whole relationships, and resolution vis-à-vis Jasper Johns’s paintings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map and the World Game, and the MIT’s Real-time Rome project.
Copyright (c) 2023 Başak Uçar, Pelin Yoncacı Arslan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay sets out to reflect on the prospective transformation of two Italian panoptical buildings that straddle the border between different places and times: the prison of Ventotene and the hospital of Gorizia. Local authorities have recently put forward a proposal to turn the former into a European school and the latter into a European prison. Both of these hermetic, unbending architectures have particular historical significance. Ventotene is the island where Altiero Spinelli was incarcerated by the Fascist regime and wrote the manifesto that paved the way for the process of European integration. Gorizia is the town where Franco Basaglia began his career, elaborating the theory of mental health that led to the closing of all Italian asylums. The proposed Europeanisation of these structures of confinement and isolation, which embody the exercise of disciplinary power in its most extreme form, speaks to the problem of opening the total institutions of modern statehood and repositioning them within the increasingly decentralised, indeterminate order of the European Union.
Copyright (c) 2023 Sebastiano Fabbrini http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been at the forefront of European architecture for decades, as attested by numerous awards throughout their careers and culminating in the receipt of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2021. Although much has been written and said about their relationship to the notion of openness in architecture, in this essay we explore the cultural context surrounding a particular aspect inherent in their way of working and conceiving the project: the desire to favour the maximum freedom of use, or liberté d’usage, particularly of – but not limited to – domestic spaces. Liberté d’usage is a declination of openness that brings forward the aspects of flexibility and adaptability suitable to contemporary architectural space, while engaging with its imaginative, atmospheric and emancipatory characteristics. This article elaborates on this view of freedom in architecture, pinning it against its cultural backdrop, and particularly the largely forgotten figure of Jacques Hondelatte, Lacaton & Vassal’s professor and mentor.
Copyright (c) 2023 Alberto Geuna, Claudia Mainardi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ars Daemones is a manifesto that responds, problematises and encounters conditions and implications of the practice of technologies of spirit as specified in the Ars Industrialis’ two manifesto written by B. Stiegler in 2005 and 2010. Most importantly, the present manifesto focuses on the question of possible conditions and material implications of practice that Stiegler framed within his word of mystagogy. Here, the mystagogy as a knowledge that escapes capture, that demands “contexts, milieus, practices, gestures, rituals, and technologies” is defined as demonology, following G. Deleuze, where both, mystagogy and demonology, call for condition of relationality, movement and an embodied experience. For Stiegler, the knowledge of mystagogy, because of its risky and excessive character, enables to learn and practice care, and it is through the work of art that we can experience of what degrees of care such an excess of another plane need. Through fables of three bodies as experienced through the work of three artists, Ars Daemones will braid material narratives of care. The selection of the three artists, is contaminated by each other by the common question of the risk of care looking for practices of knowledges that rather than survive, would enable to thrive. The manifesto is thus written through the experience of vegetariat present in the work of Špela Petrič, through transbodies and xenologies in space present in the work of Adriana Knouf and through the practice of virophilia in the work of Pei-Ying Lin. Ars Daemones fabulates while experiencing the practices of “I” that is already contaminated and contaminating.
Copyright (c) 2022 Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Re-Imagining a 'We' Beyond the Gathering of Reductions
In this article Lila Athanasiadou and Goda Klumbytė engage in a conversation with Antoinette Rouvroy to revisit Guattari’s "Three Ecologies" and discuss their dynamics in and for the digital age. While a lot of the discourses on algorithms and digital future invoke catastrophic imaginaries of totalizing control, this conversation works with a propositional format, teasing out affirmative politics by pointing to spaces of potentiality within the environmental, the social and the mental realm. Starting from the environmental ecology and thinking of data as a waste, Rouvroy discusses planetary exhaustion as the result of the depletion of natural resources, forced labour practices and the assumption that data hold the answers to the problems posed by global capital. Proposing a space for material experimentation, she speculates on the potential of emerging subjectivities that remain irreducible to data flows. Within social ecology, Rouvroy advocates for the urgency to center digital policy as the space in which the new forms of institutions emerge in order to reorient the power of computation towards the commons. Lastly, within the mental ecology, Rouvroy reconceptualizes the legal subject as a performance that operates within the proliferation of asignifying data signs, reimagining a “we” beyond the gathering of reductions.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lila Athanasiadou, Goda Klumbyte, Antoinette Rouvroy http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Forethoughts and Afterthoughts on ‘the Productive Organs of Man’
This paper explores the ‘forethought’ of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). In particular, the paper focusses on the coupling of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the impact of these figures on the relay of ideas concerning organs, organic matter and technology, or what Stiegler would come to call ‘organized inorganic matter’. The paper will also consider the ‘afterthought’ that derives from Stiegler’s book and its potential to prompt a rethinking of architectural experimentation and organization. The paper turns to Neil Spiller’s Communicating Vessels project and particularly to one joyous mechanism that came to be titled Little Soft Machinery (2006). The project enfolds all manner of architectural oddity, somewhere between the organic and inorganic.
Copyright (c) 2022 Christopher Smith http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The present essay advances Stiegler’s neganthropological project by supplementing its genetic structural framework with a metabolic plane of analysis. Neganthropology demands the creation of technologies (exosomatic tertiary inscriptions) that arrest and reconfigure entropic flow, enabling thus collective and personal individuation as well as the diversification of noetic life. All life however must live in and through the ‘now’, which it transforms. This ephemeral yet general metabolic operation of life constitutes the minimal negentropic unit that can be maintained, a ‘now’ that neganthropology must attend to. To do so, technology, life and thought must be examined together, none being elevated to the status of a model for the other two. In attempting a non-hierarchic configuration of the three, the essay proposes a new architecture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Georgios Tsagdis http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Dialogical, The Ecological and Beyond
In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education.
Copyright (c) 2021 Jon Goodbun, Ben Sweeting http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Five Points Towards an Architecture In-Formation
While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design methods and practices, while also tackling issues of reflexivity and complex problems. In this introduction, we examine the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share. To this end, we approach cybernetics as the study of the production, consumption and flow of information, an account that has little to do with digital logics, unless one wants to pursue that special case. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials. By introducing five short points on the relation between architecture and cybernetics, we aim to assist in this endeavour.
Copyright (c) 2021 Stavros Kousoulas; Dulmini Perera http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Being in the Hyper City, and the Posthuman Body
Since ancient times, the analogy of the body in relation to buildings was central both in Western and Eastern architectural and urban design. Over time, the prevalence of economies over inhabitants’ experience led to the adoption of architectural and urban strategies to improve spatial efficiency and specialisation. The analogy of body-buildings was affected negatively. Nonetheless, the 21st-century technological revolution transformed the city and its inhabitants into something different. These are quantified cities which are experienced dynamically by quantified post-human beings. Consequently, a renewed paradigm body - built environment is established. Taking this position into consideration, this article critically investigates the paradigm Hyper City – Post-Human body. In this, the article introduces an alternative psychological interpretation of the analogy body - buildings. It is built around an acknowledgement of a necessary continuity between digital and physical domains to effectively question the notion of urbanisation.
Copyright (c) 2022 Davide Landi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper proposes a transductive architecture informed by Stiegler’s organology, and shows how such an organology exists already within the work of Le Corbusier. I show how his early work developed from a more conventional formal ontology, exemplified by his Artist’s Studio project of 1910, firstly towards a more playful compositional strategy in the Dom-ino house and the mass concrete houses of 1915, and then onto a fully organological approach where the relations between elements – existing and new buildings, inhabitants and environments – are primary (in transductive manner), and the terms of those relations (us, the building) come, as it were, afterwards. Citing Vers une architecture and analysing Villa Savoye as a tertiary protention that responds to the tertiary retentions of baroque and neo-classical Paris, I show how our ontology of architecture can profoundly change not only how we talk about it, but how we engage and become it.
Copyright (c) 2022 Tim Gough http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article operationalizes Bernard Stiegler’s conceptualization of the Neganthropocene, expanding his consideration of thinking (penser) as care (panser) or pænsée beyond the anthropo-techne limitations of his thought through the notion of a posthuman asignifying semiotics. It begins with an overview of Stiegler’s notion of the Neganthropocene as a mode of epochal thought building towards noesis and pænsée with the use of epiphylogenetic and exosomatic memory systems. Here, Stiegler’s approach is exposed as anthropo-techne centric, which in turn limits the possibilities of noesis. Turning to the work of C.S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, an alternative formulation of epiphylogenetic memory is provided through the interrelation of trees and forests: in particular the coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens). This asignifying semiotics provides the criteria for infusing Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis beyond the human. In turn, Stiegler is brought closer to the theories of entangled care presented in the work of theorists such as María Puig De La Bellacasa and Natasha Myers, allowing for a more dynamic design process.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jacob Vangeest http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Cybernetics to Systems Theory in the First Space Age
The first space age offers a remarkable context to scrutinise the inverse fates of cybernetics and systems theory in the 1960–70s, the latter taking the place of the former thanks to its operational effectiveness. Both fields appeared to tackle the pilot problem head-on, either to shoot a pilot down (cybernetics in World War II) – or to send some to the moon and back (systems engineering and management in the Apollo programme). The study of three US institutions (TRW, SDC and NASA) demonstrates an intense alliance between them, with a persistent focus on the issues of automation and systems thinking. A selection of written documents produced by each entity shows with utmost clarity their high degree of involvement in a post-cybernetics systemic approach. Incidentally, those analyses also show how the differences and similarities between old space and new space reveal themselves in light of the pilot problem. Overall, the pilot’s role reconfigured the man/machine assemblage as much as the pilot was reconfigured by that assemblage, with the critical assistance of computation.
Copyright (c) 2021 Christian Girard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
'New Classical' Contemporary Architecture
Cet article s’attache à retracer la généalogie des idées portés par le réseau anglo-saxon d’architectes new classical qui partagent le souhait de renouer avec les traditions prémodernes et avec une « architecture classique », largement idéalisée et réinventée. Résonnant avec les arguments réactionnaires et identitaires de la droite populiste actuelle, cette doctrine architecturale s’est structurée au tournant des années 1980 au plus fort des débats autour du postmodernisme et s’est développée depuis lors, en dehors des scènes courantes de l’architecture contemporaine, à la faveur d’importants relais politiques (notamment, au Royaume Uni, celui du Prince de Galles) et de la structuration d’un cadre institutionnel et d’une commande spécifiques. Au-delà de leur positionnement stylistique, les protagonistes de cette new classical architecture revendiquent une volonté de revenir aux modes de construction artisanaux traditionnels et manifestent un certain rapport au temps résolument anti-historiciste qui rejoint ce que Zygmunt Bauman a appelé la retrotopia.
Copyright (c) 2022 Pierre Chabard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Trump’s Aesthetic, Spatial and Architectural Dramalities
This article hypothesises that while drama is primarily a television genre, its operation also appears in the way Trump mediates his political activities. By observing some of the media objects and events staged by Trump, such as his escalator descents from Trump Tower, the popularisation of Trump’s Border Wall, the attempt to institutionalise the executive order entitled ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’, and the transgression of national symbolic spaces embodied by the 4 July 2019 show at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, it will be a matter of questioning the architectural politics conducted by Trump. Then to see in what way the Trumpian dramatisation participates in a populist architectural strategy.
Copyright (c) 2022 Sophie Suma http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Whereas real estate-driven development tends to invest in singular and concentrated sites, resident-led development thrives in scattered patterns. The properties of community land trusts (CLTs) — one of the foremost models of resident-led development whereby land is claimed and used by a community without landlords — are almost always dispersed in a context where every property line is a potential obstacle to development. What these populist landholdings lack in terms of economy of scale is compensated for by virtues of proximity. This article examines the historic phenomena of property scattering and spatial patterns of CLTs across the US, articulating the possibility of designing patterns of scattered landholdings that support the values of resident-led development.
Copyright (c) 2022 Gabriel Cuéllar, Athar Mufreh http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A "housing crisis" is often naively understood as a simple market imbalance between supply and demand, frequently occurring within cities in a capitalist mode of development. If that were the case, the solution would be to simply open the pipes and build more houses, a regulatory action delegated to technocrats. But as Reinhardt Koselleck reveals, crisis is a concept constructed by special interest groups with the aim of challenging absolute power, enlarging a sphere of popular criticism towards business-as-usual. This paper considers the operative nature of 'housing crisis' and related terms by investigating their use as a tool for urban reform in the 19th and 20th centuries in London. In newspaper articles, think tank publications and government reports, criticism often took on qualitative dimensions, leveraging change to housing practices. Crisis itself has had different meanings, from a moral apocalypse to a political risk to an historic opportunity. This is in contrast to how the term is used today, where it is no longer a climactic moment of decision and relief, but a perpetual and seemingly unsurmountable condition. While London's housing crisis is today universally accepted according to experts' statistics, it is rarely addressed on popular aesthetic grounds.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jesse Foster Honsa http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Various forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools.
Copyright (c) 2021 Aleksandar Stanicic, Marc Schoonderbeek, Heidi Sohn, Armina Pilav http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Impact range targets in military training areas can be square, triangular, rectangular, circular, and linear. Some are designed to look like other things, like airbases, villages, convoys, industrial areas, surface-to-air missile sites, and are built out of old airoplanes, trucks, tanks, cars, buses, boats, tires, mounds of earth, and empty shipping containers. Some are meant to be bombed or strafed physically, others electronically. The most focused type of target at these ranges, the classic target you might say, is circular, like a bullseye. Its simple geometric embrace of space defines a periphery, and centre. Though largely two-dimensional when seen from above, shown as a gallery they have a cosmological air, whether a planetary hard mass pulled in by gravity, or a solar gas in a sustained continuous explosion. The tension between being drawn inwards, toward the ground, and exploding outwards, is in equilibrium. Some people say that these days everything is a target. These, however, undoubtedly are, and they are out there for the world to see, through internet-based satellite imagery providers like Google Earth. Like framed photographs on the wall, they narrow our attention, and ask us to overlook everything else.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation CLUI
Copyright (c) 2021 The Center for Land Use Interpretation CLUI http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The editorial introduction to this issue of Footprint follows a double trajectory. On the one hand, it describes an ambition for architecture historiography. The social sciences have long recognised the need for more comprehensive and inclusive methods for writing history. Among them, comparative literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ appears as a useful framework for writing new histories of architecture that recognise the many interrelations that characterise the discipline of architecture. On the other hand the introduction explains why, among many possible contact zones, focus has been set on the architecture competition. A short description of key aspects from the different contributions shows how, seen as a contact zone, the architecture competition emerges as fertile ground for the production of disciplinary knowledge, resulting from exchanges between different cultures. Acknowledging the diverse nature of these cultures, together with the recognition of institutions, legislation and other conceptual frameworks as key elements of architecture as contact zone offers fresh theoretical insight, but also poses unexpected communicative challenges.
Copyright (c) 2020 Jorge Alberto Mejia, Cathelijne Nuijsink
Architecture has always been dealing with machines. Differently but constantly. At the middle of the last century, new kind of machine and its science have emerged: Cybernetics and Information Machine. Architectural theory and practice displayed great interest in these new paradigms and produced some design experimentations and essays but it seems like these scientific and technological results call for recasting the architectural foundations. Not only to figure out how to design new or complex architectural forms but to attempt replaying to the question, “what is form?” then to contribute to the understandability of all kinds of forms —not only architectural or urban forms, but all the forms involved in the built environment— and to link or “translate” one form into another. Such transversal view might renew not only our reading of the past and current built environment but also our manner to interact and to shape it. What if, in contrary to the other former machines, the Information Machine is neither to be represented, nor to be imitated but to be actualized, or better to be modeled?
Copyright (c) 2021 Tewfik Hammoudi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Systems and Relations All the Way Down, All the Way Across
This article proposes a hyper-relational theory of the world, conjoining cybernetics, information theory, general systems theory, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and quantum physics in order to show that systems and relations go all the way down, all the way across. I give an exposition of Shannon’s information theory, and draw connections with quantum mechanics. The work of Bertalanffy is discussed and its relationship to philosophy and quantum mechanics outlined. I then critique the naïve, realist account of reality; what is proposed in its place is a hyper-relational ontology whereby entities (being) are epiphenomena of relations (becoming). The implications of this ontology in relation to architecture are discussed by contrasting it with, on the one hand, a hylomorphic approach to the essence of architecture (which foregrounds entities) and, on the other, a hermeneutic approach (which foregrounds meaning). Buildings are epiphenomena of broader political, interpersonal, ecological and essentially relational matters, assemblages, systems and interplays, and this hyper-relationality is the ontology of architecture.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tim Gough http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Since 1996, ASHRAE Standard 62.2 has provided guidelines for residential ventilation. As ventilation becomes increasingly scientised, quantifiable, and reliant on hyper-specific equipment, technical literacy on ventilation has narrowed. The relationship between architecture, inhabitants and air management has become increasingly reliant on ventilation standards, in turn increasing reliance on technical specialists, and creating a gap in ventilation knowledge. Through an examination of ASHRAE Standard 62.2, this essay asks why is it that, as ventilation processes become increasingly measurable, there is an equal tendency to reverse awareness in relation to the human sensation, when the standard itself underlines the reality of both phenomenal and intellectual knowledge towards air quality assessment. Furthermore, if architecture’s domain centres on formal, aesthetic, and material logics, is an expanded literacy on air management necessary to address mechanical equipment within an architectural domain?
Copyright (c) 2021 Elizabeth Galvez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From 1959 to 1974, Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys developed New Babylon, a speculative city for a future society in which automation would free human life to dedicate itself to creativity, collectivity and play. This essay examines Constant’s thinking about automation and the city. Departing from Constant’s own writings, it argues that automation was not only an economic premise but also, and more importantly, a creative condition of future urban environments. As such it required a re-conceptualisation of the collective habitat. Constant’s vision, a critique of functionalist modern urbanism, imagined the city as a ‘complete environment’, part of an extended and dynamic activity that involved its inhabitants. The speculative framework of this essay wishes to situate New Babylon within the broader discourses of automation and cybernetics that dominated the cultural and scientific arena of the post-war period in the United States and Europe, as well as within the diverse genealogies and theoretical entanglements of these terrains.
Copyright (c) 2021 Iris Giannakopoulou Karamouzi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Cybernetics to an Architecture of Ecology
This article discusses the impact of systems thinking and cybernetics on architectural design by examining the example of the Inter-Action Centre (1970–1977) of British architect Cedric Price. The centre reflects Price’s view of architecture as part of an extensive social and environmental system, or ecology, that influences the inhabitants’ mutual interactions and their relationship with their physical surroundings. Emphasising the link between material resources, technology and individual action, the project design implied a change both in the understanding of architecture and the architect’s role: from the designer of present-day artifacts to the designer of system interventions. Influenced by the cybernetician Gordon Pask, the systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, and the biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, Price developed a relational approach in which architecture functions as an instrument of change within a larger system such as the city, neighbourhood or region. Following this approach, space was no longer perceived merely as a container but as the product of social interactions. Accordingly, the architect’s work represents a fundamental change in the conception of space in the arts and sciences during the 1970s, which is essential for understanding today’s design and planning practice.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tanja Herdt http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines the contradictory circuits of (neo)cybernetics in contemporary architectural and urbanistic discourse by reframing them within the ‘environmentalitarian’ epoch. Cybernetics is today simultaneously exalted as a liberatory mechanism for designing emergence, complexity and open-endedness, and constitutive of an indiscernible mode of decentralised, environmentally modulated control. The history of cyberneticisation has received renewed attention as the key catalyst for environmentalisation, and as the predominant control paradigm underlying late-capitalist Environmentality. Given the profound spatial implications of this trajectory, understanding architecture’s own cybernetic entanglements is a much-needed step towards a critical revaluation of environmentality. The article thus maps the cybernetic imaginary ‘at large’ across architecture – alongside landscape architecture and urbanism – under various guises such as adaptation, responsiveness, cultivation, resilience or conversation. By probing the salient characteristics of these approaches, their problematic proximity to the logic of cybernetic capitalism is contextualised in relation to the broader ontological and ontopolitical questions of the Anthropocene era. The article concludes by tracing possible conceptual trajectories amid and beyond the restrictive circuits of Environmentality: from adaptation to contingency, via Yuk Hui’s proposal for a cosmopolitics grounded in affirmative fortuity; and from responsiveness to response-ability, via Donna Haraway’s experimental material-semiotics of sympoiesis.
Copyright (c) 2021 Lorinc Vass, Roy Cloutier, Nicole Sylvia, Contingent Collective http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article, I posit that for the field of architecture to come to a distinctly architectural application of computational technologies it requires the elaboration of a concept of critical technics. This is premised on a systems-view of technical development, which highlights the importance of time and situatedness for any consideration of change, genesis or becoming. In order to then construct an architectural technicity that can grapple with the external character of technical development, I argue – using the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon and Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics – that what is needed for this is a radical opening-up of the architectural process in the form of a democratisation, to augment architecture’s capacity for producing alternate futurity.
Copyright (c) 2021 Zach Mellas http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cyberneticisation as a Theory and Practice of Matter
The ecological implementation of cybernetic ideas in architecture requires a material theory and practice that enables their propositions to be tested. The need for approaches that move from simulation to cybernetic reality is a documented limitation of cybernetics recognised by Stafford Beer with his pond ecology experiments and Gordon Pask through electrochemical devices. While both experimented with adaptive material platforms as embodiments of designed cybernetic systems, their approaches were limited by the available toolsets. This article considers an ecological trajectory of cybernetisation by revisiting notions of biological computation as a generative material practice. In particular, the growing fields of biodesign and living architecture go beyond notions of biological analogues that inform modern architecture by directly incorporating living systems into the very fabric of buildings as designed expressions of ecology.
Copyright (c) 2021 Rolf Hughes, Professor, Rachel Armstrong, Professor http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article revisits previously overlooked exchanges between pre-eminent figures in British architecture and ecology, William Holford, Julian Huxley, and Max Nicholson, which were incorporated in one of the earliest uses of the term ‘built environment’ in 1964. By examining how an energy-entropy interpretation of the ecosystem had shaped their views on the natural, human-made, and psychosocial milieu, I will consider the way cybernetics conditioned the articulation of the built environment. Contextualising their exchanges in the socio-cultural climate of the early 1960s, I trace an almost concurrent environmental turn made by architecture and ecology. Moreover, the exchange between architecture and ecology has engendered an environmental conception that prioritised the transformative and reciprocal relationship between humans and what surrounds them. In this effort, I pay particular attention to a co-evolutionary view of the technosphere, biosphere, and political sphere formulated by Nicholson. I also discuss the infiltration of eugenic and technocratic views in this reconceptualisation of the environment. Despite the peculiarities of these theories, their conceptualisation of the environment had pointed towards an important question in employing the ecosystemic metaphor: what are people for?
Copyright (c) 2021 Yat Shun Kei http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Trading Zones and the Stickiness of Ideas
Following up on her description of architecture as a discourse, or a long and complex conversation sustained by a multitude of professionals, Sarah Williams Goldhagen elaborates on the way this discourse has evolved over the decades, shifting from style as conveyor of meaning, to climate and technique as central concerns of the contemporary architect. Ranging from current historiography and its role in pedagogy, to the different agendas that inform architecture practice and the architecture competition in our time, this conversation provides a series of powerful leads for further investigation.
Copyright (c) 2020 Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Abstract The purpose of this essay is to explore the political agency of the rond-point, an element of infrastructural design which, since the 1980s, has become a ubiquitous feature of urban planning across the French territoire. Doesn’t the fact that the gilets jaunesseem to choose the peripheral roundabouts as their preferred sites of political contestation – while ignoring the square in the town centre – attest to a proverbial political unconscious? What makes the centres of the roundabouts amidst the informal peri-urban space such attractive mediators for the political causes of the gilets jaunes? The fact that thousands of yellow vests perseveringly chose to assemble at or on roundabouts requires us to come up with alternative ways of thinking the spatial settings for the appearance, the representation and the practice of ‘the political’, the res publicaor public matter. Keywords Architectural theory, political theory, contention, infrastructure
Copyright (c) 2021 Lutz Robbers http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Media Ecologies of the ‘Extractive View’
Abstract Extraction displaces materials and reorganises habitats by accumulating resources – a process that renders populations and natural reserves as extractable data to be mobilised in systems of metabolic exchange. In contemporary practice, collecting, sorting, and processing this data require a complex interoperability between sensors, computing platforms, and databases before they are made into earth observation images. Following the scholarly research on the instrumentality of aerial survey in histories of extractive colonialism, this essay sheds light on the extractive capacity of remote sensing technologies in contemporary mining industries. Engaging with the media infrastructures of resource exploration, the inquiry revisits Heidi Scott’s theory of ‘colonialism’s vertical third dimension’ and extends it from the physical to the sensory, numerical, and temporal domains of extractivism. After Sean Cubitt’s classification of mediated earth observation, the three geomedia, the discussion is organised in three parts: electromagnetic sensing, numerical translations, and financial futures. A media-archaeological analysis of earth observation systems brings forth the extractive codes of the remote view by revealing its selective, vectoral, and speculative capacities in tapping the earth and ordering its resources into materials of exchange. Keywords: extractive view, mining industries, remote sensing, geomedia, digital image, aerial surveillance, urbanisation, datafication
Copyright (c) 2021 Gökçe Önal http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Abstract This paper investigates the blurred borders between civilian and military ways of envisioning, experiencing and mediating space in the context of Israel political geography. It does so by way of a close reading of Detroit, a short video work by Amir Yatziv where the construction plans of an urban combat training facility in the Israeli desert are the focus of attention (2009). Taking Detroitas a point of departure, I will present a number of works of art that address the phenomenon in which a military-inflected construction of space yields material and cognitive consequences, naturalising the military’s status as the guiding principle of daily life. Within this sub-genre of critical city- and landscape imagery in Israeli art, Yatziv’s work stands out as it turns the focus from the land itself towards its mediation. This approach, I argue, is highly productive for critical anti-military visual projects, as it directs attention towards those who code and decode urban military landscapes, and highlights the fact that while the borders between military and civilian mediations of space may be blurred, they are not lost just yet. Keywords: Social geography; critical cartography; Israeli art; militarism, Israel-Palestine; simulacrum, maps and mapping.
Copyright (c) 2021 Noa Roei http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument)
Abstract During the summer of 2014, I scrolled through the images of the Israeli bombings of Gaza, mesmerized behind the computer screen by their beauty. They were stunning and my engagement with them, so far away from the event, was based on purely flat aesthetic grounds– which is uncannily perverse. Attempting to deface the image, I insert the names of the victims of the attack into its script code. Each name typed into the script alters the photograph and leaves its mark. While trying to defile the visual, to escape from the beauty of this violence, a different aesthetic transpires, that of the glitch. With naming the dead, the notion of a monument emerges, reinforced by the sculptural quality of the smoke cloud. The resulting video is entitled I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument) (11h 43min). Keywords Aesthetics, conflict, Palestine, glitch, monument
Copyright (c) 2021 Omar Mismar http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Abstract: The Palestinian village of Lifta, located beneath the western entrance to the city of Jerusalem, holds a deep history within its site. Evacuated by the newly established Israeli military forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – or the Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’) as it is referred to by the Palestinian population – the village and its remains are a unique locus of conflicted histories, archaeology and landscape, and of collective memories. This article presents the work conducted during an experimental design research workshop within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Taking Lifta’s site, as well as it historical and archaeological complexity, both real and imagined, as its archive, students developed their thematics following site-visits, interviews and research, and designed virtual experiences of the village, its multiple histories and narratives. The efforts provide epistemological and experiential cross-sections through the problematics of the site’s complex history. In the process of designing a possible platform for a critical historiography of Lifta, the projects aim to further the potential of immersive technologies as a pedagogical tool. Keywords: Architecture, History, Lifta, Israel-Palestine, Virtual Reality
Copyright (c) 2021 Eliyahu Keller, Mark Jarzombek, Prof., Eytan Mann http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Globalization makes understanding worldmaking processes a crucial issue. During the Cold War the social sciences mainly addressed this issue through comparative studies which mirrored the logic of the world-historical confrontation. In this respect 1989 fostered not only a political turn but an epistemological one. The new political situation fueled the development of approaches dedicated to the study of relations and interdependencies between different parts of the world. Like entangled, shared or connected histories, Histoire croisée takes a cross-border approach.Their common feature is shifting the analysis from comparative approaches centered on territorial entities to the relationships that flow through and the interactions which constitute them, as well as moving away from approaches solely focused on state relationships. Dedicated to the study of intersecting processes in various settings, Histoire croisée is driven by an empirical, methodological and epistemological shift that involves redefining the object of research.
The Spatial Extensions of the Right to Seek Asylum
Abstract: The spatial extensions of the right to seek asylum is a project to investigate the first response of the European mainland to the humanitarian refugee crisis of 2015 through critical mapping. The site of exploration is the Eastern Mediterranean Route (EMR), a passage expanding from Greece to Germany through the Balkans, used for many years as an entry path into Europe. During the first quarter of 2015, the European Union temporarily formalised the EMR. It was the first time after the Second World War that Europe addressed statelessness in its territory. This essay discusses the spatial articulations of the EMR political reality through the analytical frame of the ethics of admissions. It unfolds its institutional geography, infrastructure, programme, and strategies and unveils the EMR territory as a transnational space of exception with its own rules and principles. Keywords: Syrian Refugee Crisis, Eastern Mediterranean Route, Ethics of Admissions, Critical Cartography, Border Management, Camp
Copyright (c) 2021 Melina Philippou http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Relaying Memory through a Generated Environment
Abstract: Khiam Detention Centre (KDC), a detention camp established by Israel in South Lebanon in 1985, is currently under heavy political interference that aims to manipulate and monopolise the writing of its burdened history. The preservation of memory of events that took place in this prison needs to be urgently addressed in the face of multiple attempts of its erasure and biased revisions. This study surveys three types of media sources that contain the memory of KDC: 1) interviews conducted with former prisoners; 2) the data-archives of a radio programme called Nahnu Bikhayr Taminuna Ankom(We are alive, tell us if you are) and 3) the built environment mapped with a sonic device. The extracted memories are then transcluded to a generated environment that virtually relays the mnemonic site of KDC. This project was done out of an urgent need to preserve KDC’s media imprints that are prone to erasure and modification. KDC is situated on the border of South Lebanon, a territory whose land and electromagnetic field have been occupied by state and non-state political actors. Since the claims of technological sovereignty inside the territory are tenuous and rife with the risk of political manipulation, I chose the space of the internet as provisionally more inclusive environment to host the virtual environment of KDC. Through three media sources, the generated environment allows users to experiment with the limitations and imposition of sound, allowing the critical recreation of the KDC site. Keywords: Reconstruction of memory, technological occupation, border territories, electronic surveillance.
Copyright (c) 2021 Ahmad Beydoun http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Abstract: In early 1999 the conflict in Kosovo led to the apocalyptic scenario of NATO-sanctioned bombings of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the targets was the complex of buildings comprising the military headquarters in Belgrade: the Generalštab. Over the past twenty years no intervention has been made to repair and protect this cultural monument damaged by war, but its mental image has inevitably changed, transgressing the identity of the historical event. The drawing project The Generalštab Building as Image: A History Decomposeddeals with an aesthetic reflection on political bodies and conditions, asking how they have re-territorialised the material reality of the Generalštab building as a cultural artifact into the performativity of its political function. Keywords: War, cultural monument, visual narratives, perception.
Copyright (c) 2021 Katarina Andjelkovic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Hannes Meyer Seminars at the Bauhaus Dessau (1980–1986) as a Contact Zone for Finnish and East German Architects
This article charts transnational exchanges between East German and Finnish architects in the development of adaptive housing solutions for urban sites. It focuses on the Hannes Meyer Seminars – a series of annual international design workshops held at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1980 to 1986 – as a contact zone. The seminars challenged dominant forms of mass housing, and put forth alternative models to suit historic contexts. These exchanges went beyond previous (one-directional) material and technical exports that stretched back as far as the mid-1950s. As a result of the policy of détente in the early 1970s, relations between Finland and the GDR began to form an ever more complex and entangled network, with greater emphasis on knowledge transfer and collaboration. Formal agreements on ‘scientific and technical cooperation’ thus provided the framework for the intensification of contacts between design schools such as the College for Architecture and Civil Engineering (HAB, Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen) in Weimar and the Technical University Tampere. This opened a dialogue about contextual design (the adaptation of industrialised housing to the different needs and lifestyles of individual users), as well as historic settings, new tools such as CAD/CAM, sociological and historical research, and the discourse of postmodernism.
The first restoration proposals to emerge after fire destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof and spire were jokes. The more serious schemes that followed Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s announcement of a competition – many markedly similar, recreating what was lost in glass– were collected on mainstream design media websites like Dezeen where they attracted an unusually high volume of angry comments, accusing the architects of insensitivity. Soon after, Ulf Mejergren Architects’ proposal to replace Notre Dame’s roof with a meditative pool was edited into a carpark. It sparked a series of increasingly outlandish edits – first a multi-story carpark, then a ball pit – before the French Senate declared that there would be no competition after all. This at times absurd online interest might be new for architectural competitions, but it is easily explained through meme theory, as conceived of by scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner: systems of interconnected units of cultural exchange operating on both wider cultural and specific sub-cultural levels. In this essay I contend that meme theory can be used, in reverse, to analyse reactions to, and similarities between, even the most serious Notre Dame proposals. In applying this framework, we can begin to understand how competitions operate more broadly as part of a complex network online and how they relate to traditional competition conditions.
Architecture Competitions as Pedagogical Tools
Architecture competitions are considered an essential part of the profession. But when entering the realm of pedagogy, can competitions be understood and used as tools to expand architectural practice and intertwine its professional and pedagogical strands? In this article I question and examine the sites of knowledge production that bridge the gap between academic and professional practice, and explore the idea that architecture competitions can become tools for interconnecting the traditionally separated ways of producing architecture. I explore a case study in which a pedagogical unit and a professional architecture office come together by using professional architecture competitions as pedagogical tools. Following the first ten years of Elia Zenghelis’s simultaneous pedagogical and professional practice at the Architectural Association’s Diploma Unit 9 and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, I trace the original premises and the outcomes of this fruitful relationship. Four architecture competitions that were part of both the academic exercises of the Unit and the professional practice of the Office are explored in detail using archival documents from the Architectural Association. Examining the shifting nature of roles, viewpoints and ideas in this historical account, the professional mechanism of architecture competitions is seen as a crucial tool for collective knowledge production in the space of architecture education, and vice versa. This essay explores a case study in which a pedagogical Unit and a professional architecture Office come together by using professional architecture competitions as pedagogical tools. Following the first ten years of simultaneous architecture pedagogical and professional practice of Elia Zenghelis at the Architectural Association’s Diploma Unit 9 and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this article traces original premises and the outcomes of this fruitful relationship. Four architecture competitions that were part of both the academic exercises of the Unit and the professional practice of the Office are explored in detail using archival documents from the Architectural Association. Examining the shifting nature of roles, viewpoints and ideas in this historical account, the professional mechanism of architecture competitions is seen as a crucial tool for collective knowledge production in the space of architecture education, and vice versa.
The term Man, and the humanist tradition which followed from it, have been challenged in feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critiques, which questioned its nature, or even pondered if we are actually human. What we seek in this issue of Footprint is to add to these perspectives cases of what we call radical conditioning, in which some architectures bypass assumed values of humanism and operate under a wholly different set of values, emanating from industrial and post-industrial economies and its technological developments. These architectures dictate the creation of spaces in which the human body has to operate, and to which it needs to adapt in order to survive. The research articles and visual essays included in this issue shed light on the many ways architects, advertently or inadvertently, coalesce with forces intending to condition humans. Unfolding in the study of histories, architectural types, aesthetics, atmospheres, systems, and users, authors propose inquiries along two main directions: the first trajectory highlights the prolific use in spatial design of concepts borrowed from cybernetics and information technology for the conditioning of human behavior through the built environment; the second deals with architecture conditioning the creation of new subjectivities, placing the body as the territory of intervention. Understanding these spaces, in which humans and their artifacts interact in unprecedented ways, could provide architecture with the timely opportunity to challenge our anticipated redundancy, and reconsider its own humanism in order to charge it with new meanings.
Copyright (c) 2019 Victor Muñoz Sanz, Dan Handel
The divorce between the disciplines of architectural design and systems engineering in conjunction with the scientisation of comfort-standards encourages a year-round and day-round comfort routine to the contemporary human. In his proposal for Air Architecture, French artist Yves Klein proposes the opposite: an architecture devoid of the responsibility to temper human environs. Mechanical machinery enables an architecture to come, while Klein’s proposal for an Architecture of Air imagines a future adaptive-human. Before the popularisation of interior weather, Native populations employed adaptations, or experience a ‘change of human sensitivity’, much like native plants and animals do in order to survive their environment, much like the transformation that Klein describes. In a world where resource reduction and scaremongering tactics regarding climate change do not accomplish enough, we must think towards a more enriched human existence, for a thriving, strengthened human race. Klein uses architecture to imagine a new, joyful world to come, encouraging human evolution through the employment of playful mechanics.
In the final years of the Estado Novo regime (1933–1974), the Amsterdam Town Hall International Competition of 1967 presents the opportunity for seven teams of Portuguese architects to confront their own reality and rehearse distinct visions of building and city. From a national context, politically and geographically distant from the heart of the disciplinary debate of the 1960s, the proposals submitted set the terms on which Portugal competes in Amsterdam, revealing in the diversity of approaches and experiences forwarded by this new generation of architects the vitality of Portuguese architecture on its path to internationalisation. This article retraces the Portuguese participation in the Amsterdam Town Hall Competition to refute the generalised idea of cultural mismatch with the European scene of the time and assesses the impact of this particular event on the transition of Portuguese architecture to international recognition, an impact that Portuguese architecture historiography has to this day completely ignored.
Copyright (c) 2020 Bruno Gil, Susana Lobo, José Ribau Esteves
Competition Juries as Intercultural Spaces
In this article, design competitions, as they are practiced in Canada, are understood as devices that allow the study of interdisciplinary and intercultural dimensions of architecture. From the construction of the brief to the selection of the winning project, competitions are exemplary platforms for communicating design values. For example, competitor project proposals, which comprise many qualities, including constructive, material, and even political, represent the priorities of each design team, in the form of a place. Jurors debate each of these qualities through their own expertise. In their search for excellence, the competition jury is then an exemplar contact zone. By examining the various documents produced in this process, we can uncover the value systems of the many stakeholders. Observations of jury deliberations and analyses of jury reports can help expose how the diversity of jurors influences the selection of the winning project. Furthermore, in a contemporary context where environmental design is at the forefront, this diversity is especially interesting to study. An environmental expert’s evaluation of quantitative eco-measurements is very different from an architect’s judgment of spatial qualities and experiences. The focus of this article is to understand how such a variety of jurors influences the competition outcome.
Although the architecture competition has been analysed through a number of rhetorical lenses, the recurring production of transcultural metaphors, particularly in international competitions, remains to be addressed as a genuine disciplinary phenomenon. The hypothesis of competitions as contact zones is particularly appropriate for the study of international events, in which competitors forge broad analogical figures to bridge cultural differences. Recent studies in the cognitive understanding of analogical matrices have considerably reinforced the theories on metaphors. Our analytical grid characterizes analogical matrices to identify levels of symbolic operations through the differentiation of formal, structural and conceptual analogies. We first dig into a sample of competition projects nicknames (Crystal, Birds’Nest, DNA, Cloud, Lace, Stealth, etc.) to confirm that these tropes have a paradoxical status at the intersection of architects’ intents and the public expectations. We then summarize an in-depth hermeneutical discourse analysis of 40 North American international competitions. This indicates a fourfold series of expectations to which competitors hope to provide answers in an international ‘conflict of interpretations’. Adhering to the theory of speech acts, we suggest that performative metaphors in competitions appear less as indicators of designers’ intentions than as products of the broader context surrounding competitions themselves. We conclude with a proposed grid indexing four types of contact zones in which metaphorical relationships are actively created and not just repeated.
The Architecture Competition: A Beauty Contest or a Learning Opportunity?
The architecture competition is a high point of interaction between very diverse actors, architecture specialists or not. However, is it really an opportunity for exchange and shared learning? Based on surveys conducted in France and in several European countries on behalf of the French Ministry of Culture, this contribution aims to identify the conditions that foster the interactions inherent to competitions, the possible scope of these exchanges and the rationale behind them. When the competition is a chosen procedure, it is most often perceived as a moment of generating ideas that opens a professional debate and also addresses the general public. When it is mandatory, the competition is guided by another logic: that of ensuring the fairness and transparency of the joint choice of a project and a service provider as well as the legality of the contract concluded with the latter. Depending on the place given by decision-makers to this legal and contractual dimension, the nature and scope of the debates around the competition vary widely. If the legalistic approach dominates, it tends to limit interactions. However if the contracting authority adopts a more open approach to the competition, from programming to the dissemination and capitalisation of its results, it can make a real process of collective deliberation and favour the growth of shared competence.
Copyright (c) 2020 Véronique Biau, Jodelle Zetlaoui-Léger, Bendicht Weber
This issue of Footprint brings together housing-as-design with housing-as-policy and housing-as-market to discuss what is, today, the value of housing. It discusses how the architecture of housing plays a role in changing behavioural norms and models of subjectivation promoted by the neoliberal ideological agenda. The contributions included in this issue examine different ways of addressing the production of housing either as a social right or a commodity, or both combined. Reviewing cases from North America, Europe and Asia, they discuss the extent to which the social and economic agendas of the public sector and the market determine the architecture of housing. The background of the discussion is defined by a deadlock: the architectural discourse calls upon the state to re-provide housing and solve the crisis, while the neoliberal state is not interested in commissioning housing. Against this background, this issue examines how the architecture discipline can engage in new ways of responding to the neoliberal state of affairs, examining the entwined relation between ‘architecture’ as a cultural product and ‘housing’ as a socioeconomic need.
Copyright (c) 2019 Nelson Mota, Yael Allweil
This essay focuses on the language architects use to navigate the intersection of architecture, housing, and neoliberalism. Schindler argues that terminology plays a powerful role in allowing architects to avoid the socio-economic assumptions embedded in their work. Schindler traces the emergence, evolution, and codification of two such terms, ‘context’ and ‘community’, and how they have frequently been conflated. She shows how they were central to New York City’s gradual shift from welfare-state to neoliberal housing policies between the mid-1960s and the present day by connecting them to a third key term, ‘capital’. The vest-pocket housing plan developed for the South Bronx as part of the federal Model Cities programme serves as a case study. In the Bronx, the triangulation of community, context, and capital led to new development models, as well as new housing typologies, including the large-scale rehabilitation of existing tenements and small-scale new construction of row houses. The resulting shift in architectural discourse, and the codification of these practices in zoning and tax laws, have remained in force in New York City to this day.
The design of the detached house has been at the core of architectural developments in post-Second World War Japan and the subject of a lively discussion among architects about what makes a good home at a particular moment. Alongside the continuous production of houses, architects actively proposed new ways of living that contrasted with what was increasingly becoming a uniform housing stock based on mass fabrication. However, the intensification of neoliberal policies after a decade of severe economic crisis in the 1990s drove architects towards social involvement once again, initiating a housing trend based on sharing, renovation and re-use of the existing housing stock. This essay will highlight the work of the House Vision think-tank and full-scale building exhibitions – initiated in 2011 by Japanese designer and art director Kenya Hara – as one response to the socio-economic and political conditions after the neoliberal turn. Similar to the efforts of independent architects in recent decades, House Vision aims to generate awareness in society about alternatives to mainstream housing options. Yet what makes this initiative different is that it is not an individual effort but a collaborative project between designers and industries to push the latest technologies in home electronics, energy and mobility devices into new architectural forms.
To deconstruct the still hegemonic narrative of free market ideologists in the realm of housing, this article looks at the provocative position of the German-British architect Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects. Schumacher’s 2016 lecture on housing at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, in which he claims that only wholesale privatisation of urbanism would solve the housing crisis, is scrutinised on the two interrelated concepts of the free market and state intervention. Schumacher’s lecture is analysed within the context of the current housing crisis in the United Kingdom and London in particular, which dates back to the years of the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher. Additionally, the aftermath of the banking and credit crisis of 2008 brought the further breakdown of welfare state arrangements under the politics of so-called austerity. Lastly, the housing situation worsened due to the disruptive rise of the creative classes as depicted by urban sociologist Richard Florida. Schumacher’s position is interpreted in the tradition of the ideas of philosopher Ayn Rand and Nietzschean master-servant morality. A connection with the ideas of Rem Koolhaas is identified, in particular those expounded in his book Delirious New York and with Koolhaas’ conception of the architect as a surfer as well as a hostage, who is at the mercy of larger forces he cannot control. The argument is concluded by referencing a number of renowned alternatives to a delusional free market approach to solve the housing crisis, namely social housing projects from continental Europe. Ultimately, the importance of striking a balance between private opportunity and public planning is emphasised.
Fitness gymnasiums shape subjects and establish communities. The extraordinary rise in the number of high-end, architect-designed fitness gymnasiums responds to, and accelerates market demand as individuals adapt to societal expectations. Yet going to the gym is not experienced as an external directive. It is felt as a desire to be one’s best, to live fully, to succeed. The central role played by design is to (re)produce the desire to voluntarily subject oneself to regimes of self-control and self-transformation. This article looks at how the diverse architecture and interior design of the fitness gymnasium creates this desire and constructs subject positions. Today’s gymnasiums reference elements of bathhouses, spas, surgical clinics, sanatoria, monasteries, discotheques and nightclubs, factories, homes, clubs, hotels, S&M dungeons, massage parlours, beauty salons, cafés, and, even, art galleries – albeit not all in one space. We analyse the richly diverse aesthetics of several commercial chains of gymnasiums and explore the affective experiences established through the manipulation of atmospheric qualities.
Copyright (c) 2019 Sandra Louise Kaji-O'Grady, Sarah Manderson
The body of work by British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) is largely concerned with architecture’s relationship to technology and its impact on society. As contemporary architecture finds itself confronted with similar issues today, Price’s designs are being revisited and hailed for their prospective and inventive visions. As such, it seems timely to ask if Price’s designs can be regarded as precedents for future projects that aim to couple participation and technology through architectural design. In this article, I depart from the economic logic of today’s digital platforms to analyse the participatory elements Cedric Price designed for Oxford Corner House (1965–66) to be ‘self-participatory entertainment’. As user participation has gradually been capitalised on through the evolution of digital technologies, I argue that the conditions for what participatory architecture entails have changed in turn. Whereas Price regarded the transfer of information as an activity for users of the Oxford Corner House to engage with freely, the operation of today’s digital platforms instead suggests that such activities are entirely facilitated in order to retrieve information from its users. In order to make this argument, I look at how Cedric Price envisioned digital technologies to sustain participation and in turn how he understood the concept of user participation and its relation to the architectural programme.
Copyright (c) 2019 Nina Stener Jørgensen
In the late 1950s the Quickborner Team developed a cybernetics-inspired design methodology for organisations, focusing on information flow, with the aim to fully automate administrative labour and to make the organisation constantly adaptable to unpredictable future challenges. Participant analysis allowed them to quantify communication in an organisation and with that envision a new kind of office space. The so-called Bürolandschaft (office landscape), seemingly-endless, chaotic looking interiors, would allow for efficient information flow. One significant aspect of Bürolandschaft design is the non-hierarchic organisation of workers in teams that were bound to quantified decision-making processes, yet addressed as experts, scientists and creatives, ultimately conditioning them to participate voluntarily in reaching the organisation’s goal without questioning
Action Office, or, Another Kind of ‘Architecture Without Architects’
When Robert Propst set out to transform the white-collar office, he began with a research protocol: observe, notate, quantify, represent. This process, based equally on the production of data and the use of representation to turn that data into information, led to Action Office, a system that aimed to transform every action and surface of the office environment into a data-rich cybernetic loop. For Propst, the key to turning the office into a space that produced information, rather than merely managed it, was display; as he wrote, ‘Action Office 2 provides no place for paper to hide or die – all paper material is displayed. You can see it, it is all signalled or marked and it will feed back a strong purge signal when it becomes overabundant.’ Propst’s Action Office system mobilised display to produce an information environment that cuts out noisy signals to frame clear communication.
The emergence of financial institutions such as the exchanges or bourses of northern Europe in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries made possible the emergence of speculation in financial instruments. Speculation evolved into a game with its own logic, and the implied ethos of the speculator prioritised abstract notions and self-interest. This article investigates the relation between this ethos of speculation and architecture in this timeframe. During this period, the architecture of the exchanges transformed; what was a square with an inside at the outset gradually became an enclosed institution with representative façades toward the end of the period. The transition of the physical environment of exchange and the increasingly complex financial instruments interact, and this interaction is traced through a sequence of exchange-structures inspired by one another. The question explored is: what is the relationship between the emergence of an ethos of speculation and the architectural space of the exchange? This relationship can be discussed in terms of a different kind of conditioning that has less to do with industrialisation, but which could, in extension, form a starting point for discussions on architecture’s role in the formation and conditioning of homo œconomicus.
The focal point of this essay is the turn from the display of objects to the display of environments, a change that blurs the line between the body and the display, and arguably absorbs the subject into the object. This turn is enabled by the digital age, as well as ‘the experience economy’, and is manifested in the rise of immersive display systems. The Selfie Museum epitomizes this cultural shift. In the Selfie Museum, subject and object aren’t the sole dichotomies that are conflated; physical space combines with the virtual image; the still moment merges in the temporal experience; and two-dimensional projections are overlaid onto three-dimensional structures. As a result, architects become ‘experience designers’, virtual reality is a mode of design practice, and an ‘instagrammable’ moment is a project deliverable. In this essay I simultaneously acknowledge these changes and critique them. At the same time, I offer the combination of apparent oppositions as a potential new set of tools that can help rethink aspects of the architecture discipline and profession. By studying the Selfie Museum as both an architectural typology and a socio-political entity, I challenge the traditional museum as an institution, classic body image perceptions, and the common concept of a tourist destination.
Over the last three decades Josep Maria Montaner played a key role as an educator in the prestigious Barcelona School of Architecture. Together with Zaida Muxí he initiated the Housing Laboratory of the Twenty-First Century, an advanced master’s programme held at that institution for more than a decade. In 2015, Montaner moved from the world of academia to politics, starting his tenure as housing councillor in the cabinet of Ada Colau, herself a housing activist who became mayor of Barcelona. In this interview, conducted by David H. Falagán, Montaner highlights the crucial importance of aligning housing policies, housing design, and citizens’ participation as a strategy to combat the housing crisis triggered by the dominant neoliberal system.
Copyright (c) 2019 David Hernandez Falagan, Josep Maria Montaner
The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry. The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provides the very possibility of life as such, or, in other words, how logistics is inherently political. The third trajectory tackles the past, present and future of logistics, considered as the most crucial apparatus determining the human impact on the earth, controlling the distribution and organisation of organisms and ecosystems, triggering new and more violent forms of colonisation and exploitation. This issue of Footprint does not seek definitive statements or hypothetic solutions for the monstrous nature of logistics. On the opposite, it aims at unfolding its inner contradictions to propose new possibilities of exploration for an architecture and its project.
Copyright (c) 2018 Negar Sanaan Bensi, Francesco Marullo
The house, having always been the locus of socio-political struggles of Tehrani citizens, after the Iran-Iraq war gradually came to materialise many more complex issues. It became a space and a structure embodying the state’s subjugating agenda, forces of the housing market, its labour and material market, the desires of the people, their political action, and architectural practitioners’ attempts to prove relevant. This visual essay focuses on three threads in Tehran in housing in the the post-Iran-Iraq-war context: the liberalising procedures and regulatory frameworks that still constitute the most common form of housing, positing middle class citizens as the main players in the market; the architectural repercussions of the regulating mechanisms and the subsequent formation of a homogenised form of housing; and a reading of these forms of housing as sites of people’s practices of resistance in a framework of constant re-appropriation.
The surface, container and conduit have become the primary infrastructural formats for logistics, operating and negotiating the scale of urbanism and landscape. ‘Surfaces’ are planes of mediation that typically function at a territorial scale as they are primarily implicated in a form of harvesting or collection. ‘Containers’ are architectural shells of enclosure often sited between the formats of surfaces and conduits – for storing, refining, or distributing a particular good. ‘Conduits’ are used to transfer matter and energy across vast distances, cutting through local settlements, political boundaries, ecosystems, and connecting to both containers and surfaces. These spatial formats typically reside in the ‘background’ of spatial design, yet are increasingly organising large tracts of land both in the hinterland as well as on the periphery of cities. Engaging in these background logistical formats holds promise for designers to have agency over territorial arrangements and could potentially offer alternate organisations that repay nature for its unpaid work. This article uses California’s Central Valley – an operationalised landscape that sustains the state and country’s food and energy needs – as a visual case study to reveal how these formats are deployed and organised.
New Interfaces in the Automated Landscapes of Logistics
Metaphors of flows are often used to describe aspects of logistics, thereby suggesting smooth and inevitable operations while also obscuring the frictions and contingencies that characterize the industry. This article explores the consequences and possibilities of these modes by first elaborating some aspects of logistical operations in order to connect them to the contemporary built environment. It looks at the architectural components of the company Walmart in order to present hypothetical scenarios related to the future of the logistical landscape. By connecting these visual experiments to questions of representation, automation, and systems thinking, the article explores the ways we might challenge and extend the possibilities of logistics.
Cedric Price’s architecture approaches time and space atypically, focusing primarily on the needs and desires of the user. His ‘short-life’ housing system, designed in 1970–1972 in response to a national crisis of housing provision, takes consumer choice as the organising principle of its design. Its formal flexibility blurs the separation between the house and workplace, while its customisability and disposability reduces the family home to an expendable commodity. The short-life house accommodates a lifestyle of precarity characteristic of neoliberal society, aligning with neoliberal discourses on society emergent in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s.
Singapore’s privatised high-rise housing landscape is the nation’s ‘other’ housing project, emerging alongside the city-state’s dominant narrative of its successful public housing project since the 1970s. Unique to Singapore’s privatised high-rise housing developments was the intervention of the state in the close regulation of scarce land. Singapore’s private high-rise housing developments thus reflect a nation’s attitude towards its land as resource, and its subsequent imaginations and productions of more ‘land’ in the construction of high-rise housing estates. State intervention also maximised these housing developments as part of wider national aspirations to the status of a global city, and for its citizens, a ‘green and gracious’ Singaporean society. Taking the Pearlbank Apartments and the Pandan Valley Condominium as two key developments of Singapore’s emerging private high-rise housing landscape in the 1970s, this article examines the production of the nation’s aspirational housing in the confluence of Singaporean state-led vision and a people’s housing aspirations.
The publication of the planning agenda Towards an Urban Renaissance in 1999 marked a turning point in the approach towards urban development in the UK and specifically towards urban density. Density was attributed with a range of physical, environmental and social implications, or at least potentialities. Most significant of these was the association of high urban densities with more sustainable, socially diverse, compact urban models – a positive affiliation that lead to the introduction of minimum density ratios for new urban developments and the gradual introduction of density ratios as a component of development briefs for new urban housing. Elaborating a potted history of architects’ use and manipulation of density ratios, I argue that density has been a critical and effective instrument of the neoliberal agenda. In its capacity to operate as both crude economic measure, and at the same time, qualitative descriptor of the urban experience, density has been a key device in rebranding urban living. In this article, I expound the role that architects have had in negotiating this duality, reviving an image of density that has been essential to its operation as a device for facilitating capital growth.
The production regimes of every era do not remain in the factory but permeate every aspect of a society including its architecture and design culture. Mechanisation transformed space, in particular the household into an efficient machine, with industrial components and standardised dimensions (from the bathtub to the streamlined kitchen), while military manufacturing efficiencies and emerging technologies allowed consumer goods (from TV sets to Tupperware) to fill the middle class suburban home in the post-war era. This essay contemplates how logisticalisation, the latest incarnation of capitalist production, is permeating the design and conception of contemporary space through an exploration of the gadgets and objects that are increasingly used by the public as portals to the larger world of logistical flow. I refer to previous object-based theories of space in architecture as well as to Object-Orientated Ontology, a philosophical movement that elevates the meaning of objects as independent conscious entities beyond human agency. These serve to contextualise my own reading of logistical objects as manifestations that not only allow us intimacy with the larger and complex world of logistics, but more significantly, as dynamic shapers of new types of architectural and urban space, here characterised as territories of equivalence.
This essay proposes a reconstruction of the problem of logistics as seen through the prism of Gaza. Questioning the common approach of logistics strictly in terms of the flows that it releases and speeds up, it argues that the Gaza blockade itself constitutes a vast logistical operation. The essay proceeds by setting Gaza’s architecture of confinement against the ‘architecture of flow’ that typically characterises logistical sites around the world. By underlining the material connections between these, the essay calls for an approach of processes of restriction of mobility as a mirror image of the fast-tracking operations that logistics is primarily known for. On this basis, it proposes a notion of logistical power as a mode of power specifically exerted through the production of a differential regime of mobility.
What can one do when the things and processes used to sustain oneself – physically, economically, emotionally – are executed at a scale and intensity whereby they become poisonous? Such a scenario describes certain addictions. An illustration of such an addiction on a planetary scale is exemplified by the neologism agrilogistics. This planned approach to the environment seeks to organise, divide, and manage the earth in order to increase the likelihood of human survival. From parasite-vulnerable monocrops to systemic biopolitical violence upon indigenous peoples, these conditions expose the dark and unwanted externalities to the logistical algorithm that we have only recently begun to understand as deeply intertwined with each other and within all life on the planet. What can art and design do to intervene in this positive feedback loop of economic growth and environmental catastrophe? Perhaps one thing we can do is to use visual, material, and spatial media to think the world differently by questioning the premise of anthropocentrism, establishing instead new conditions of relation between human and nonhuman and with it, new forms of kinship with other species. The exhibition Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural assembles a shifting tide of practices, objects, and images by architects, landscape architects, and artists that points to ways of operating within this new paradigm.
Copyright (c) 2018 Kathy Velikov, Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon
The deregulation policies implemented in the United States and the European Union in the early 1980s brought forth a significant rise in employment in the field of logistics but at the same contributed to a deterioration of work conditions in the industry – a paradoxical situation largely invisible to many in the age of online shopping. In recent years, a number of cinematographers showed interest in this type of work, depicting it in documentaries. Referring to one of these films, The Weight of Dreams (Francesco Mattuzzi, 2015), this review analyses the implications of the deregulation policies over work conditions, focusing on the relation between workers and space. As seen in the film, work in the field of logistics is a struggle between the desire for an efficient movement of goods and the desires of the humans who move the goods. This translates into an ambivalence of the space they use, which on the one hand, is planned for movement, but on the other, is appropriated by users with the illusion of a sedentary life.
Copyright (c) 2018 Renzo Sgolacchia, Alex Retegan
This article addresses the logistical aspects of colonial and postcolonial governmental practices and the way in which such practices structured the African territory. In particular, it focuses on Zambia (Northern Rhodesia at time of British domination), a landlocked country located in the centre of Southern Africa, whose historical evolution, since it was conquered at the beginning of the twentieth century, is deeply intertwined with the discovery, extraction and export of copper and with the import of fossil fuel. In the first part, I introduce the concept of ‘colonial logistics’ intended as the modification and rationalisation of territories for military and political domination, and extraction and export of resources. In the second part of the article I show how, after independence, Zambia dealt with its complex geopolitical entanglement, partially inherited from colonial planning and partially generated by the end of direct forms of imperialism, which required the rerouting of its resources and the rebalancing of uneven territorial structures. The analysis of infrastructure development in postcolonial Zambia illustrates the competing strategies through which imperialist powers attempted to secure a new form of control on Africa and elucidates the role of logistics as a decisive tool to shape the African territory.
Although transportation infrastructures occupy an important part of public space, they have apparently been lead astray by recent developments in logistics services. Despite the categorical difference between transportation and logistics, narratives of quality, security and standards accompanied by specific spatial patterns, have infiltrated our everyday mobility infrastructures. Space structure is defined by logistics-influenced ‘functional diagrams’ and is reduced to mere transitory settings. This essay is an effort to challenge the contemporary ‘fulfilment’-influenced, network-based perception of human transportation spaces, towards, instead, a relational, and effectively political, understanding of them. This is not to return to previous debates on the re-emergence of place and identity, but rather to seek possible strategies of interruption of that detrimental, endlessly intensified circulation imposed on public space. The essay is structured upon two competing ideas, conceptually represented by the notions of floor and ground. The floor is the most important element of logistics architecture, preparing a smooth surface for commodities circulation. By contrast, the ground embraces anomalies representing finitude, an important notion for the project of interruptions. The essay proposes a recalibration and balancing of both these forces, establishing an ecology that also encourages seemingly ‘unproductive’ relations, detours and other spaces of distractions, ideas that logistical architecture cannot even grasp.
Copyright (c) 2018 George Papam Papamattheakis
At the intersection of logistics and migration, I focus on US for-profit immigrant detention centres as nodes within global capital flows. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres process humans through transnational, encoded power systems, which couple tightly to the logics, infrastructure, and public-private strategies that comprise the international logistics industry. Migrants move from the country of origin to the US as itinerant labour, and as bodies to meet detention-centre quotas, forming patterns where chain migration is transformed into supply chain. The immigration detention system is an industrialisation of humans, and its administration processes are intersectoral and vertically integrated. I use the southeastern US logistics hub of Georgia, and its capital Atlanta, to illustrate the intersection of logistics and immigration detention systems. I demonstrate how the immigrant detention systems’ scale and its architecture – its spatial contours and manifestations – mirror those systems of international supply chain coordination, assembly, transport, and sale.
Energy logistics is the management and implementation of energy flows and their physical artefacts. This sector has perpetuated and profited from a spatial and conceptual void produced by national and corporate strategies in order to optimise logistical flows and to avoid larger societal debate. Offshore developments, in particular, take place far from the public eye and imagination though they form a core layer of the global petroleumscape. This article explores the history and development of the industrialised void of the North Sea and how energy logistics, strongly determined by the oil and gas industries, shields its presence while at the same time shaping and structuring the built environment at sea and across dedicated land-sea thresholds. Throughout this process, it persistently avoids the emergence of architectural form. We propose that the concept of blankness, first formulated by Roberto Mangabiera Unger and further discussed by Jeffrey Kipnis, is a useful framework for interrogating the architecture of energy logistics, its apparent invisibility, and global impact. For both Unger and Kipnis, blankness signified a potential liberation from established norms, opening the way for new forms of democratic life and architectural expression. Such an interpretation of blankness could enable design professionals and the general public to reclaim architectural expression for the spaces left without meaning by logistics. In conclusion we argue for urgent architectural intervention beyond pure logistics and towards an integrated vision for the common space of the sea.
Copyright (c) 2018 Nancy Couling, Carola Hein
What if the city of the twenty-first century was not as we have imagined it? What if the culture of congestion was swept away by an isotropic, weak and diffused urban reality; by the culture of dispersion? A nebulous and potentially limitless city freed from any physical and symbolic centre, where uncertain attempts of urbanity overlap with the idealised landscape of the countryside. From this perspective, the central area of the Veneto region in Italy can still be considered a laboratory that produces urban and architectural forms for the contemporary city. The Veneto territory is here considered as a palimpsest, as the product of a slow and incessant process of accumulation of traces, elements, attempts, which have been overlapping throughout centuries. This article presents only a few of the layers that compose the image of this region; they serve as evidence in the investigation of the role that anthropisation processes have played in the continuous modification of the landscape. Within this frame, the ‘architecture of logistics’ is presented as one of the elements that have imposed a pervasive economic-political control of the territory, to the point of producing specific forms of living.
Vienna’s Resistance to the “Neoliberal Turn"
At the turn of the twenty-first century, when public authorities all over Europe increasingly retreated from their responsibility for housing, Vienna refrained from large-scale privatisations. Upholding the system of state-subsidised housing, the Austrian capital supported new architecture as a means to regenerate the inner city and to promote innovative social policy. This was based on original design inspired by a variety of mostly modernist precedents. Examples for new residences that follow this strategy include the Car-free Model Estate (1996–99, Cornelia Schindler and Rudolf Szedenik), the women-led scheme Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky-Hof (1993–97, Liselotte Peretti, Gisela Podreka, Elsa Prochazka and Franziska Ullmann), and the residences on the former railway station Nordbahnhof (1992–2015, master plan by Boris Podrecca and Heinz Tesar, buildings by various architects). This article will present Vienna’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century housing as a successful strategy to provide affordable residences that respond to current needs, and at the same time a way to harness innovative architecture for social policy goals. The Vienna case also suggests that the ‘neoliberal turn’ in housing provision was a matter of political choice rather than economic necessity.
The Grace Machine: Of Turns, Wheels and Limbs
The following essay revolves around the notion of the figure and its relationship with grace. The figure, both object and event, is posited as what emerges in what is called ‘the gap between habit and inhabitation’. The essay is structured in three parts that each contribute to the argument that habit and inhabitation are part of the ancient structure of grace, which extends to many domains such as religion, economy and art, but above all to technology. The first part establishes the concept of grace within gift exchange where the aesthetics of gracefulness is not defined by gesture or action, but by the combination of a cyclical rhythm and the verticality of stance. The second part restructures the cycle as one of habit, linking our relationship with technology to gift exchange, while developing the central argument of grace as a machine. The final and third part expands the role of play and mimesis in the functioning of the grace machine while defining the gap between habit and inhabitation as a double gap, consisting of a temporal axis that leads from habit to the figure of grace, which again is suspended between object and field on the spatial axis.
In the editorial introduction of this issue of Footprint, the question of architectural form is approached from a population of minor perspectives. Inspired by Bateson’s metalogues, the authors wish to bring forward multiple questions on architectural form instead of a single generalizing one: from ‘what is form’ to ‘how, when, where and why is form’. In this respect, they examine the ways for a possible reconciliation between the genetic and the generic, between the discursive outlines of various formalisms, opting for an approach that is both syncretic and transversal. Committed to architectural form, they conclude by claiming that it stands for much more than simply a concept. Form, in its ambiguity and heterogeneity, stands for a shared problem, one that brings together disciplines, schools of thought and variant methodological practices, turning therefore the discursive constraints of the past in productive chances for the future.
Copyright (c) 2018 Stavros Kousoulas, Jorge Mejía Hernández
Over the years, colleagues at the Architecture School of Stockholm have developed a most remarkable and inspiring approach to architecture and writing in terms of performances and the performative while integrating feminist and queer theory. Of particular interest are the Critical Studies in Architecture group, the group Fatale for feminist architecture theory and practice, and the Mycket collaboration. By way of an interview between Footprint editors Dirk van den Heuvel and Robert Gorny, and the Stockholm colleagues Brady Burroughs, Katarina Bonnevier, Katja Grillner, and Hélène Frichot questions of pedagogy, research and methodology are further investigated, how to ‘stay with the trouble’ and where to situate newly emerging knowledge models.
Copyright (c) 2017 Brady Burroughs, Katatrina Bonnevier, Hélène Frichot, Katja Grillner
Joel Sanders interrogates the intersections of architecture, public space, gender and sexuality with his project for public restrooms Stalled!. Stalled! involves an interdisciplinary design research project in which Sanders collaborates together with gender studies professor Susan Stryker, and law professor Terry Kogan. Stalled! proposes to regard access to public restrooms as a social justice issue with design consequences that can be solved with innovative architectural solutions. The project aims to create restrooms that not only meet the needs of the trans community, but encompass the needs of all embodied subjects of different ages, genders and abilities.
The problem of queer housing can never go away because it is a central component of queerness. Queer housing is a contradiction in terms: not even a queer architect can design a queer house. But where does this leave us, as queer people living in a straight hegemony? Where does it leave us as humans with bodies, craving shelter and safety and a place to live that is in accordance with our experience of self and of living in the world? In this article the author proposes eight architectural strategies for re-occupying the Levittown Cape Cod house from 1947 for queer bodies, minds and hearts. These strategies offer modes by which the key programmatic formal and material components of the Cape Cod House can be attacked, made invalid, or détourned for queer uses, to make of the Cape Cod House a site for our pain, our longing, our anger.
Andreas Angelidakis works between the various fields of curating, theory, architecture and the arts. In his position text the author reflects on the way he develops new narrative and design methods as part of a personal project of a challenging self-reflexive and psychological nature. States of being become inherently fluid as illustrated by the project Troll, which Angelidakis suggests is an autobiographical project, in which a building wants to leave the city to become a mountain: human bodies transition into nature into architecture, and back again. Describing his work and growing up in his hometown Athens Angelidakis discusses architecture and queer identities in terms of being ‘unauthorised’.
Louis H. Sullivan: that Object He Became
Louis H. Sullivan constructed a world view based on a hierarchy of powers. Over this hierarchy he placed the emotion of sympathy. Characterising it as another power he described sympathy as a way of being in communion with the world that manifests in a fusion of identities. Through a close reading of his writings with particular attention paid to his often-encrypted references to Walt Whitman, together with a close reading of selected sources from his library, this essay interrogates his understanding. Sensitive to the question of ‘queering’, it focuses on his conception of fused identities and its effects on gender and sexuality. It excavates an understanding that suggests that Sullivan deliberately constructed an alternative epistemology that overcame a whole host of bipolar oppositions to include male and female. He opted instead for an emotive and fluid ontology where the fixed category of being dissolves in vital consubstantiation – and it was eroticised. Suggesting a uniquely queer stance, Sullivan insists that without a clear vision of it, one may never understand architecture.
Starting from the intense experience of the gay club, this paper asks whether that experience or event can be acknowledged by architectural theory. Via a reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Jacques Derrida’s Before the Law, it posits that the transing of gender can be a clue as to the transing of architecture away from essentialising ontologies. It then uses Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of an assemblage to show how this can be done, making reference to the assemblage of the gay seduction scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the image of the interplay of orchid and wasp that is inspired by it. The paper concludes by showing how this ontology relates to a specific instance of transing architecture in the gay and SM clubs of Vauxhall, South London.
A Surgery Issue: Cutting through the Architectural Fabric
This essay examines the material ontologies of surgical trans-modifications. Focusing on incisions and subsequent scars, the essay argues for the queering of architecture and design as an act of cutting through structures and processes. I start by rereading a topological body plan, used by surgeons as a guide for performing incisions. I suggest that this plan constitutes a variation within topological representations. It is thus reconceptualised as an internally contradictory representation, calling for dis/continuous cutting acts upon the represented body; that is an amphi-topological representation. The notion of the cut is further approached from the point of view of queer theory and ‘agential realism’. This perspective offers affirmative ways of discussing about acts of cutting. When performed into self-organizing fabrics, cuts appear to act as ‘agents of dis/continuity’. Then, the discussion passes through the genealogy of the architectural section and the building cuts of Gordon Matta Clark, so as to show that the production of buildings by ‘cutting through them to come to matter’ is deep-rooted in the architectural discipline. Next, the philosophical origins of the idea of cutting through the material fabric of the world are sought. It is argued that the latter, beginning as a gnosiological tool, was transformed into a fabricating tool and then into a tool of smoothing the striated. The essay concludes with the presentation of SCARchiCAD; a computational design tool which takes the skin’s wound healing process as a model, offering an interpretation of what the ‘cutting through a virtual form’ could suggest for the design of architectural bodies and the queering of architecture.
Opening up Bodyspace: Perspectives from Posthuman and Feminist Theory
A rethinking of space, a rethinking of the body and a rethinking of a design processes involving both are long overdue within space-related disciplines. Over the last decades, architectural discourse has been invigorated by opening up container conceptions of space, by exploring a new dynamic understanding of space and focusing on its production processes. But a systematic, theoretically-informed understanding of the body along the same terms has yet to be achieved. Such a search for new visions and concepts of corporealities can start at different places. This essay attempts a cross-disciplinary, speculative foray into the terrain of posthuman, nonhuman and feminist theory. From this diverse body of scholarship it is possible to develop theses for open, permeable and inextricably entangled bodies inhabiting an equally dynamic space. These theses are examined not only within their own disciplinary discourses but also as aesthetic categories and spatial organisation principles aimed at tentatively exploring the implications for space-related disciplines including architecture and design.
New Figurations in Architecture Theory: From Queer Performance to Becoming Trans
The editorial introduction to this Footprint issue maps some of the latest developments in the field of queer studies and the realm of architecture and urban design. The aim is for a productive exhange between the fields since queer theory can be instrumental in moving beyond the heteronormative dominance in architectural thinking, which is characterized by an essentialist approach based on binary notions, rather than an understanding of architecture as an interface in material processes of becoming and producing differences. After a brief discussion of the history of exchanges between queer studies and architectural history and theory, the authors propose to complement the notion of queering with the new developments in the field of trans studies, which propose to rethink architecture in terms of a materialist understanding of buildings as bodies which are in a constant flux of change and becoming instead of fixed and stable objects or identities.
Copyright (c) 2017 Robert Alexander Gorny, Dirk van den Heuvel
The Explorative Strategy of Engagement: Atelier Bow-Wow’s Rebière Street Project in Paris
The project of Rebière Street in Paris is the first housing project of Atelier Bow-Wow outside Japan. In the framework of the Porte Pouchet renovation project, a portion of the street along the cemetery was declassified to reduce its width and to build 180 apartments in the resulting free strip. The different plots were assigned to several local and foreign architecture offices. This project is symptomatic of an emerging practice in architecture that sees offices with discourses based on local anchorage taking advantage of globalisation to propose cutting-edge spatial quality in remote locations. The close reading of the project with tools provided by the sociology of engagement allows valuable insights in the production of form in remote practice. If human primary relation to the environment coincides with a regime of engagement based on familiarity, in remote practice the relation to the environment and the local anchorage are de facto mediated. This mediation implies a systemisation of the design process. The legitimacy of this systematisation is by nature questionable and can be a source of doubt or anxiety. Addressing the design process in relation to the ideas of scale of confidence, seizure, adherence and the explorative regime of engagement this article examines how the attempts of Atelier Bow-Wow to deal with the remoteness of the site influence the production of form.
Architecture Thinking in a ‘Post-truth Era’: Recalibrations through analytic philosophy
This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of architecture’s typical affinity with continental philosophy over the past three decades. In the last decades of the twentieth century, philosophy became an almost necessary springboard from which to define a work of architecture. Analytic philosophy took a notable backseat to continental philosophy. With this history in mind, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition. The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the various articles attempt to demonstrate that such difference of background assumptions is a common human habit and that some of the techniques of analytic philosophy may help to leap these chasms. The hope is that this is a start of a larger conversation in architecture theory that has as of yet not begun.
Reflections on Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Architecture
Two recent collections on architectural theory and practice invoke the name of pragmatism as marking the hope of a new more intimate alignment of theory and practice after a period of what I call ‘philosophical vampirism’. This paper examines what role the philosophical tradition of pragmatism might play in relation to architecture. I argue that pragmatism is best understood as a method of overcoming intellectualist and metaphysical obstacles to clear thinking as opposed to a philosophical ideology of some kind. Against Rem Koolhaas’s argument for post-criticality I show that we are always already critical. Pragmatism’s task is to make criticism better. I end by invoking the craft ethos as articulated by Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman (2008), as perhaps the best model of what a pragmatist architecture might look like.
Autonomy by Drawing: Gianugo Polesello on Route ’66
This article questions the revival of ‘La Tendenza’ in the recent architectural debate, taking the work of Gianugo Polesello as a privileged vantage point. The Italian architect – along with Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, Guido Canella and other protagonists of that approach – taught in the Venetian PhD programme attended by the author, who recalls here his first-hand experience. The economic, ecological, and social crisis we are dealing with has generated, in academic discussions, a widespread re-emergence of political engagement, felt as a necessary alternative to the neo-liberal pensée unique that has dominated recent decades. Various important theoretical contributions from mid-1960s, such as the ambiguous mixture of populism and formal research, of radicalism and reactions against modernism, are therefore back in the architectural debate. Among the several approaches produced by that agitated moment, the Italian movement ‘La Tendenza’ contributed to redefine the disciplinary field in terms of language and autonomy, shifting its focus from design to composition and from the transformative attitude of the zeitgeist to a continuity with existing typo-morphological contexts. Gianugo Polesello, a partner in some early projects of Aldo Rossi – main protagonist of that movement – and a member, with Rossi and other young architects, of the journal Casabella’s ‘think tank’, shared that theoretical operation, conducted, however, through a more explicit and precise medium: architectural design or, more precisely, architectural drawing applied to design. His approach provides an interesting vantage, able to shed some light on a period and a generation that, at a closer look, appear less coherent than their latest reconstructions.
'Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas...': The smartphones
Three of the most influential chapters of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture are collected under the common title ‘Des yeux qui ne voient pas…’ (Eyes which do not see…). Liners, airplanes, and automobiles are shown as the expression of the powerful beauty of practical form: honest, simple, functional and technological. These very famous pages remind us that form is not only derived from precise typological choices or from reasoned morphogenetic diagrams, but it could also be a direct expression of the Kunstwollen. What are the paquebots of the twenty-first century? Which buildings embody this new paradigm? This graphic analysis starts from the statement that one of the ‘not seen’ features of this era is the smartphone. The subject of the survey is the first BMW Guggenheim Lab, designed in 2010 by Atelier Bow-Wow. Described by the architects themselves as a ‘travel toolbox’ or ‘pop-up fly loft theatre in the city’, this compact architecture is the incarnation of three interesting formal qualities usually associated with smartphones: the clear division between the hardware and the ergonomic user interface; the possibility to operate different functions (or software) in the same space (or screen); and the real and virtual connection with different urban situations.
On Bigness and the Problem of Urban Form
The term ‘bigness’ refers to large-scale, mixed-use buildings and was introduced into the architectural vocabulary by Rem Koolhaas. Contrary to Koolhaas’s focus on the ‘generic city’ and the Asian context, this essay explores the role that large-scale buildings may play in establishing a dialogue between new areas of urban expansion and the formal and typological characteristics of European cities. By looking at three designs by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in the light of the early twentieth-century debate on urban design and the skyscraper in Europe, the problem of bigness will be seen as a continuation of a discussion on urban form and type spanning more than one hundred years. Bigness will thus be seen as a tool capable of reworking and even continuing existing urban formal types, even if devoid of ideological and symbolic meaning.
Calling Rowe: After-lives of Formalism in the Digital Age
Emmanuel Petit recently invoked the work of Colin Rowe to render a discussion of architectural precedent relevant for the digital age. Questioning Petit’s approach, this article explores the implications latent in this invocation. In so doing, it highlights their misalignments with the current concerns of digital design practitioners. The article thus focuses on the question of a possible after-life of Rowe’s formalism for the digital age. It starts by charting its genealogical development from Rudolf Wittkower’s humanist grids to Peter Eisenman’s ‘post-functionalist’ pursuits of autonomous form and Greg Lynn’s ‘pliant’ geometries. This showcases the dual historical effect of Rowe’s analytical formalism. From the late 1940s to the present, his disciples employed it both as a historiographical model and as a generative mechanism for architectural design. The history of Rowe’s formalism is therefore intertwined with the contemporary concerns of digital design practitioners, including Petit’s question of theorising precedent. The digital design practitioners’ assertions of autonomy are historically rooted in Rowe’s analytical formalism. In the final instance, Rowe’s analysis was carried out from the perspective of modernist humanism, and this historically remained the case in its various versions from Wittkower to Eisenman. Updating Rowe, as Petit suggested, would therefore only perpetuate a modernist outlook in a postmodern age. A formalism for the present cannot ignore the enduring points of the postmodern critique that preceded it. In conclusion, a contemporary variant of formalism needs to address the debates around its possible synthesis with contextualist concerns. To do so, it also needs to engage with the poststructuralist critiques of the intervening decades. Some examples from recent literature exemplify such an approach. They could therefore serve as useful precedents towards an integrated formalism for the present.
The Diagrammatic Inquiry of Architectural Media
According to the philosopher C.S. Peirce the diagram is a system of interrelated parts that operates in a manner similar to another system of interrelated parts. It is a mental map of relations. It drives an open-ended inquiry on a given problem. In architectural discourse a diagram is often defined as a particular form of drawing. It is a simplified image and/or it uses a notation system. In this context, the latter is termed a digital diagram. However, an architectural medium has material properties that influence both the making and the translation of the drawing. It is both a singular artefact and a set of instructions for actions undertaken in another space than that of the medium. This article introduces the notion of an immanent diagram to discuss how the composition of a drawing is distributed. The proposition is that the architectural diagrammatic inquiry operates in the struggle between digital and analogue diagrams. I develop the argument using a traditional architectural drawing as a starting point. In the last section, I discuss a contemporary computer based design practice in which drawings and prototype modelling constitute a heterogeneous technological environment.
Reconceptualisation of Architects’ Intentionality in Computational Form Generation: A Tripartite Model
This paper attempts to create a theoretical framework to reconceptualise architects’ intentionality in computational form generation. Parallel to the increasing complexity of design problems and the increased realm of architects’ responsibility, the last two decades have shown that a vast amount of information can be managed and operated within the design process by using computational methods and associated technologies. This condition led to an expansion of the dominant mode in form computation that largely relies on data-driven forms as outcomes of pure calculations and rationalistic determinism. As an alternative, this study proposes a tripartite model as a basis to understand and assess design intentionality by unfolding and thereby reflecting on designers’ internalised processes. Initially defined in the field of computation, network and communication sciences for management and organisation of information, the proposed model – composed of centralised, partial and distributed approaches – is operational in responding to different forms and degrees of design intentionality within computational processes in architecture.
Surform: An Architectural Vocabulary of Morphogenesis
The term morphogenesis in architecture is usually associated with parametric design strategies. I intend ‘morphogenetic’ in a different sense. Architecture in general, and architectural education in particular, are awash in proposals that might be best described as ‘biomorphic.’ Yet, in my experience, students and practitioners have neither fundamental understanding of shape-as-surface nor the vocabulary necessary to describe such designs. This vocabulary, including a powerful generalisation of biomorphic shape, is readily available in the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). Gauss’s generalisation recognised that there are only three types of surface: positively curved, negatively curved and surfaces of zero curvature. This paper offers a concise exposition of Gauss’s formulation, a proposal for a vocabulary sufficient to clearly discuss such shapes in design contexts and a plea for an architectural pedagogy that moves beyond notions of space as bounded emptiness (i.e. beyond perspectival constructions). These reflections are a product of an educational experiment conducted in a first year architectural studio during the spring of 2017. Surform is a neologism, shorthand for ‘shape conceived as surface.’
Footprint 19 focuses on the more recent roles of architecture in the contemporary spaces of conflict. Departing from a spatial understanding of geopolitical, climatological and economical conflicts, the various contributions highlight the large scale and phenomenal transitions in the physical world and in society by extrapolating, through examples, the abundance of relations that can be traced between conflict, territory and architecture. Conflict areas often prove to be fertile grounds for innovation and for the emergence of new spatial forms. The issue reports on the state of perpetual global unrest in architecture through a series of articles and case studies that highlight the consequences of conflicts in the places and spaces that we inhabit. In the introduction, these are discussed as an interlinked global reality rather than as isolated incidents. In doing so, the contemporary spaces of conflict are positioned in the context of emerging global trends, conditions, and discourses in the attempt to address their indicative symptoms while reflecting on their underlying causes.
Urban Terrorism: St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City
In the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks that claimed 130 lives, and in response to FBI warnings about threats by the Islamic State terrorist group, stringent security measures were pre-emptively imposed on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to deter possible attacks. The very nature of exclusion and control brought about by the securitisation corrodes the inherent nature of what the square previously symbolised: a sanctuary where all could enter and be welcome. Using the case of St. Peter’s Square, this work illuminates the three main contradictions between security and architecture apparent in practice today, as a way to understand the role of architecture in contributing to a convivial city under the conditions of terrorism.
Reclaiming Political Urbanism in Peace Building Processes: The Hands-on Famagusta project, Cyprus
This case study is about reclaiming a political form of urbanism before the potential Cyprus reunification by enhancing, through the Hands-on Famagusta project, ‘agonistic’ collective practices across the Cypriot divide.
From Refugee Camp to Resilient City: Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan
This project is about how architecture can transform a refugee camp into a child friendly city designed around existing social networks. The vision is to respond to the refugee crisis with long-term resilient solutions rather than reactionary ones.
Urban in-betweenness: Rotterdam / Mexico City
‘Urban in-betweenness’ offers a short reflection on the way conflicts on a global scale are perceived on an individual level within the urban context and how this will have spatial repercussions. Conflict is considered as an origin of urban resistance and a possible opening for innovation and intervention at a micro scale. The essay is a call to design researchers to re-codify the shattered urban elements in order to make new meaningful connections.
The Interface: Peace Walls, Belfast, Northern Ireland
In 2013, the Northern Ireland Executive outlined a goal to ‘create a ten year programme to reduce, and remove by 2023, all interface barriers’ in Northern Ireland. This unexpected statement helped to focus attention on the difficulties inherent in making this commitment a reality. Made during a period of fieldwork in Belfast between 2014 and 2016, this work of text and image frames the thirteen clusters of separation barriers that divide communities across Belfast as a single system entitled ‘The Interface’.
Indigenous Perspectives: the Post-Conflict Landscapes of Rwanda
Much of Rwanda’s conflict can be traced to the relation between human (culture) and non-human (nature) that defined territories and ethnic divisions in pre-colonial Rwanda. These human and non-human relations, exploited by European colonialism, have become increasingly estranged through the influence of Eurocentric forms of architecture, urban and rural planning. This practice-based research explores the relations between Rwanda’s human settlements and the landscape to provide insight into emergent spaces of conflict. The hope is that where a meeting of different perspectives is articulated a form of architecture as mediation may emerge.
The Persistence of Buildings and the Context Problem
Raising the persistence question about architectural entities consists in asking what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future architectural entity, like a building, to exist now. In this paper I investigate how the persistence question about buildings is affected by their spatial relocation. Why do we normally doubt that Notre Dame can survive its meticulous stone-by-stone transfer to Las Vegas? I argue that, since architectural plans are not capable of specifying all the constitutive properties of a building, the source of differentiation among constitutive and non-constitutive properties for buildings lies in a property’s being eligible or not eligible to be aesthetically relevant in the aesthetic judgements about them. As a matter of fact, our aesthetic judgements about buildings often concern, and are grounded on, extrinsic contextual properties. This explains why buildings can usually not survive relocation: because normally there is no basis for ruling out any extrinsic contextual feature of the building as inessential. I also try to explain why the change from thirteenth century Paris to contemporary Paris proved not to be lethal to Notre Dame’s persistence, in spite of its being more significant than other imaginary context changes that we would easily count as fatal.
The Triumph of Function over Form The Role of Analytic Philosophy in Planning and Analysing Modern Architecture
The most dominant dialectical succession of architectural thinking during the 20th Century was between form and function. The latter of these two modern ways of architectural thinking is based on the results of Carnapian Neopositivism. The keywords of this philosophical school, that are empiricism, logic, verification, unity of language and science, could still be applied to interpreting modern architecture. I will explain the antecedents and the first connection between analytic philosophy and architecture, and some characteristic points of their influence during the 20th Century: the triumph of function over form as analogous to triumph of analytic philosophy over metaphysics. After the theoretic grounding of the form-function debate, I am going to focus first on the characteristic appearance of form: the Façadism of Socialist Realism in the architecture of East-Central Europe. Second, I will explain that architectural tendencies of classical modernism did not disappear in this period, they were just hidden in case of public buildings or migrated to the industrial planning. Third, I am going to claim that after this socialist realist gap, the architectural theory and planning tendencies of the interwar period – especially the work of Le Corbusier – returned and continued.
Possibilia: Possible Worlds and the Limitless in Architecture
Speculative architectural projects, by definition, challenge the viewer to understand the relationship between the fictionalised world they portray and the possible states of affairs that have come into existence for the project to ‘exist’. It is the question of how a speculative project can ‘exist’ in our understanding of the world in a meaningful, non-trivial fashion that is the subject of this article. Employing some basic structural clarity from contemporary modal logic, and from studies in fictionality, it is possible to see a renewed value in the ‘worlds’ that speculative projects describe, and to understand the profound philosophical value in imagining an existence in an ‘other’ world.
G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica and the complex of architecture
G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica of 1903 is generally regarded as a starting point of analytical philosophy. It’s concern with analytical propositions, the pushing of analysis to an end point, its rigorous style, the clarity of its arguments and the precise demolition of the less-than-rigorous work of preceding philosophers provided a template for how twentieth century Anglo-Saxon thought might forge its own path. This paper argues that Moore’s notion of the “organic whole”, together with his concern for the goodness of human intercourse, are inherently architectural thoughts with implications for a non-formalist theory or ontology of architecture. Moore’s emphasis on the intermixture of the work and the subject, his interest in the material quality of things, his championing of the possibilities of valuing the apparently mundane if seen within a broader context, his doubts about representational art compared to environmental beauty, and his valuing of the sociability of human intercourse all point to a rich concept of what architecture can be. The paper will critique Moore’s central idea and will show that what he calls an organic whole is in fact misnamed.
The Pyramid and the Mosaic. Otto Neurath’s encyclopedism as a critical model
Otto Neurath, one of the founding members of the Vienna Circle, took up a firm opposition in relation to his colleagues. Instead of searching for an ideal language, he asserted the possibility of a ‘universal empiricist slang’, including both everyday and scientific language. Particularly, Neurath conceives of a comprehensive theory of a unified science that postulates the necessity of orchestration within the discursive procedures in science, inspired by the model of encyclopedism. In the field of architecture, a similar encyclopedic endeavor was undertaken in Italy by Mario Ridolfi who, together with other leading exponents of architectural culture, conceived the Manuale dell’Architetto at the end of World War II. This construction handbook provided support to engineers during the intense period of post-war reconstruction. Unlike any previous attempt to document building culture, this collective work aspired to create a shared language able to cross the boundaries among the various fields of building science. Finally, encyclopedism is considered as a possible ‘foundation’ for building design as a shared practice, with a specific focus on Ridolfi’s late research on the relation between traditional construction methods and housing design, in the countryside around Umbria.
What difference could Pragmatism have made? From architectural effects to architecture’s consequences
By the late 1990s, the once fruitful alliance between architecture and continental philosophy was perceived as being responsible for the apparent schism between architectural theory and practice. In that context, some saw Pragmatism as a potential alternative for reviving the architectural discourse. This paper first considers how this enterprise was actually more of a continuity than rupture with former philosophical affinities. The introduction of Pragmatism in architecture was discussed in the same breath as previous developments based on Deleuze and Foucault, mostly around the ‘diagram’. Architectural thinkers were then following the recent revival of Pragmatism in American philosophy, carried out by figures like Rorty, and based on a reconciliation between American Pragmatism and Continental philosophies. This might explain why they favoured Pragmatism at the expense of contemporary analytic philosophy. This also explains why their initiative was not as successful as they expected: the alternative did not appear as offering enough of a contrast. In the second part of the paper, I take this non-fulfilment as an opportunity to explore – to speculate – what Pragmatism could have contributed to the ‘post-critical’ scene that followed in the early 2000s. The main post-critical move is a shift away from ‘meaning’ towards the material, sensuous ‘effects’ of architecture. Pragmatism appeared relevant, as its main gesture is to consider effects rather than causes and to dismiss all discussions that have no practical bearings. But Pragmatism has more to offer than just a refocus on practice. My hypothesis is that Pragmatism expands the obligations of architecture. It doesn’t just bring to the fore concrete, seductive ‘effects’ of buildings; it also insists on considering their broader ‘consequences’ on the environment – physical as well as social and cultural – and on inventing ways of dealing with them.
Militarised Safety: Politics of Exclusion
Warfare and armed conflict have evolved radically with the advent of technology and perhaps most importantly, with globalization. Unlike the West, which has come to terms with violence through constant memorialization, multidisciplinary discourse and legislature, cities in the developing world lack audible intellectual trajectories. Therefore, studies on the merits of the non-Western conditions of conflict must take into account the complex structures of organization of society, politics, religion and ethnicities, as a result of the globalization of violence. Developing and less politically stable countries like Pakistan, on the other hand, are losing urban space through attacks from the perpetrators and yet more so from the state as the literal subtraction of the public realm gets framed as security measures Whereas international law states that during times of war, civilian rights can be legally suspended - in Pakistan that suspension has shifted into a state of temporariness without prescribed limits. This paper looks at urban space in the developing world as a dual site of the threat and the threatened while questioning the effectivity of security apparatus that have become the foundations for design of the contemporary city.
This article fossicks through the fragments of historical understandings of the word stasis in ancient Greece – where stasis, in its extreme state, involved conflictual hostilities between kindred parties, often termed ‘civil war’ today. Through a series of readings of ancient Greek texts on topics ranging from pathology to literature and politics, stasis is revealed as a powerfully charged state of located dynamic exchange that operates through a precise temporal and spatial performance. This article teases out relevant aspects of the state of stasis – its high levels of spatial engagement, its inevitable resolution into energetic productivity, its precise restraint, its demand for full participation, and its role in the integration of change – all of which were acknowledged as part of the enactment and resolution of a stasis at that time. The intention of this article is to resurrect a more nuanced understanding of the state of stasis that can enrich current concepts of the dynamic in architectural and urban discourse. This understanding of stasis also poses new questions for the future design of spaces that can accommodate charged kindred engagement: lively spaces where contest becomes opportunity, and located spaces of kindred understanding that promise productive reconciliation as the common aim of all the parties involved.
Envisioning a Post-Conflict Tripoli: The Inclusive Urban Strategy and Action Plan for Bab Al-Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen
The Inclusive Urban Strategy and Action Plan is a study conducted by a multi-disciplinary international team focused on the post-conflict area of Tripoli, the second largest city of Lebanon. The project includes the neighbourhoods of Bab Al-Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen and the conflict zone in between where hostilities ended thanks to the implementation of a security plan in 2014. The aim of the proposal is to initiate and foster peace and reconciliation between the conflicting communities, while addressing spatial, social and economic segregations by a holistic and tactical urban approach. The strategy results from a deep study and understanding of the actual fragile conditions in Tripoli, and derives its guidelines from the fractures and the intrinsic resources of the place. It is structured in three main layers (urban armature, functional injections and placemaking) and envisions the possibility to establish new relations and synergies inside the hugely fragmented environment. Instead of proposing concrete solutions, the strategy aims at initially generating the necessary conditions to trigger processes of recovery and therefore development, encountering positive outcomes and opportunities as well as possible threats. Adaptability and retrofitting thus became keywords in developing a realistic strategy that can take into consideration the difficulty of programming and making decisions in the context of post-conflict reconstruction.
West Bank Settlement and the Transformation of Zionist Housing Ethos from Shelter to Act of Violence
This paper identifies a transformation in Israel's housing ethos from civilian shelter to national and neoliberal violence. Housing, once materializing the State of Israel’s raison d’etre as shelter from Jewish persecution has transformed to offense and retaliation in struggle over the West Bank, as declared by Prime Minister Netanyahu's noted 'they kill- we build' statement. Conducting close analysis of housing and settlement history since 1967 I challenge accepted historiography of the settlement movement and identify the pivotal moment of change by which the settlement project transformed its housing ethos from civilian shelter to 'civilian occupation' to Kudumim outpost in the early 1990s. This transformation parallels the neoliberalization of the housing market in Israel-proper since the 1990s, protested as neoliberal violence by the 2011 housing protest movement. This paper contributes to our understanding of spatial violence by identifying housing as the object of agonistic violence, invoking Chantalle Mouffe's concept of the object of agonism and pointing to housing as the object of contemporary negotiations over the very terms and values of the Israeli polity.
On the Spaces of Guerre Moderne: The French Army in Northern Algeria (1954–1962)
The French Colonial War of Anti-Algerian Independence (1954–1962) is widely regarded as the precursor of civil-military counterinsurgency operations, and thereby of the rhetorical Global War on Terror of today. Its theories, known as the guerre moderne, were secretly transferred to North and South America in the sixties. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, the United States and other Western powers have overtly expressed their interest in French military practices in Algeria, but seldom in the fields of architecture and territorial planning. This article examines the intrinsic relationships between the doctrines of the guerre moderne, the resultant built environments, and the socio-economic consequences of the two over the course of the French war in Algeria. It considers two major timeframes: first, the years between 1954 and 1958, which were characterised by the extraordinary fusion of civil and military authorities, and the construction of camps called centres de regroupement. Second, the period between 1958 and 1962, which brought General Charles de Gaulle back to power, divided military from civil powers, and transformed the camps into ‘rural settlements’. The two phases shared a common attitude, however, which considered the entire Algerian population as potential suspects, and that Algerians should thus be strategically and continuously overseen.
Anxious Architecture: Sleep, Identity, and Death in the US-Mexico Borderlands
The Mexico-US borderlands have been militarised by the technology, weaponry, and policies of both the American Border Patrol agency and Mexican cartels. Upon this contested ground, border-crossers interrupt their taxing journey to build small informal works of architecture. These structures – most commonly fashioned from whatever materials are at hand like thorny mesquite branches, rocks, and grasses – become a locus of crises. Like the migrants, drug mules, or guides who build it, border-crosser architecture has overlapping and competing agendas and motivations. Drawing on the analysis of architectural form, artifacts of material culture, and interviews gathered from fieldwork in the United States and Mexico, I identify three ways architecture acts ‘anxiously’ as a spatial relationship to conflict: 1) sleep (insomnia), 2) identity (anonymity), and 3) death (haunting). In these modes, an architecture born in the borderlands both embodies and emotes anxiety as an adaptive spatial tactic to respond to conflict and trauma.
How to Read (With) Benjamin: From Cultural History of Materialism to Materialist History of Culture
Footprint 18 investigates the following issues: what Benjamin understands by the ‘constellation of awakening’, how he conceptualises ‘dialectical images’, his deployment of montage, his refusal of a conception of either progress or decline, and his undertaking to show that the images belong not only to a particular time but attain legibility only at a particular time. Famously, according to Benjamin, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. With regard to the architectural theory Benjamin engaged directly with the tectonic tradition, especially the work of Bötticher. He posited the tectonic unconscious and the deployment of optical instruments as crucial for understanding the development which architecture carried from the luxus capitalist forms of commodity. In light of technical innovations in iron and glass, it expressed a form of projective dream work of the architectural around material realisations as products of the industrial revolution, with long consequences for the future.
For most architects, architecture is not only art, craft, passion and engagement; it is their ‘bread-and-butter’, too, and has been so since long. Architecture, consciously or unconsciously, is also the ‘bread-and-butter’ of communities across the world: successfully or unsuccessfully it is part of the daily lives of ordinary women and men. Yet practitioners, theoreticians and historians of architecture often disregard the more quotidian side of the discipline, a neglect that is inversely proportional to its importance in the production of the built environment. John Summerson’s writings – particularly his wartime ‘Bread & Butter and Architecture’ essay, a call to arms for effective salaried architects – are the motto and the guiding thread for our exploration of the position of everyday practices in twentieth-century architecture. In this introduction we look at the ‘bread-and-butter’ side of the architecture profession and at how it has modulated throughout time, highlighting the ways in which the exceptional set of articles that make up this issue of Footprint substantially extend the scope and reach of our ‘bread-and-butter’ activities.
Housing and the construction of the city: the Paris Habitat Experience
In Paris, the history and the evolution of social housing provision merge with those of a centennial institution. Created in 1914, the Office Public d’Habitations à Bon Marché, currently called Paris Habitat, manages more than 1,200 operations, 120,000 housing units inhabited by 200,000 residents. This article reviews an investigation to this exceptional heritage commissioned by the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris, which resulted in the exhibition and catalogue Paris Habitat: Cent ans de ville, cent ans de vie, presented by the institution in 2015. The investigation, exhibition and publication were organized around the analysis of ten fragments of reality that, rather than matching administrative divisions or urban planning projects, span municipalities, districts and infrastructures. From low-cost to large-scale housing, from concerns with hygiene to ecology issues, each one of the building ensembles analyzed bears witness to the will to change society through housing. Written by the project’s main curator and catalogue editor, this review details the process through which essential questions formulated early on – What is the city we want like? How is it built? – were answered to: selecting from the wealth of material produced by Paris Habitat over one hundred years of activity, the team exposed their political stance on urban strategies at large. Importantly, Paris Habitat’s ‘actions’ substantiated the team’s belief that our knowledge of this long, continuous urban experiment can contribute to improve the metropolises of today and strengthen its ability to answer contemporary concerns: the transformation of offices into housing, new residents’ participation formulas, new building and conception processes, which are key elements in the making of cities that need to be dense, diverse, intense, fertile and agile.
Layers of Invisibility in Portuguese State Furniture Design, 1940-1974
If the buildings designed in Portugal by and for the state during the long rule of dictatorship are, still today, a challenging, often uncomfortable subject of enquiry – concealed by various layers of interpretation that render them virtually invisible despite their ubiquity –, the furniture that equipped those buildings is even more so. These were objects designed for everyday use, in which technological possibilities and material sturdiness were fundamental concerns, and their designers were frequently little-known architects working within the civil service sphere; better-known names, in turn, are seldom credited with having created the pieces that furnished their own buildings. Yet state-commissioned furniture design can also speak of other aspects of this apparently ordinary, largely invisible side of many architects’ everyday work in government offices. In this brief visual essay, snapshots of a long-term research project recently concluded at the School of Architecture, University of Lisbon prompt us to identify designers and commissioning agencies, locate them within their context(s) of production and discuss significant episodes where diverse aesthetical and ideological stances are followed, each with its own rhetoric: the rift between a generally conservative tutelage and some officials’ drive to keep up with international developments, for example, can be read in these inconspicuous objects and practices of the everyday. Our research, its outputs and initiatives (publications, exhibitions) have illuminated a facet of Portuguese design history that had previously been neglected, and brought in fresh arguments in support of the importance of quotidian artefacts for our understanding of built environment production.
The Elusiveness of Welfare-State Specificity
Review of Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015). Incomprehensibly, the relation of architecture to society is, on the one hand, a trivial fact, and, on the other, a perplexing assumption. Trivial, because the evidence of the tight relationship is ubiquitous, screaming its existence from the tops of skyscrapers, from the basements of gloomy panopticon prisons, and from the doorsteps of Levittown houses. Perplexing, because, despite of such an abundance of evidence, the actual form of such a relationship remains contested and, mostly, obscure. This review article will interrogate the relation of architecture to society via the recently published anthology Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel. The anthology postulates that a rigorous correlation can be established between architectural design and the welfare state. The review article, in turn, posits two questions to the anthology: what is specific about the welfare state which differentiates it from other societies of the era, and how is a rigorous correlation of a specific form of architecture to the welfare state established, beyond limited notions such as zeitgeist?
Bankside Urban Forest: Walter Benjamin and City Making
Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of his experiences of the city, specifically Paris, as a forest informs this review article in considering what conditions within the contemporary metropolis of London might reflect such an experience. Benjamin describes ‘losing oneself’ in the city as a skill that the wanderer can develop as opposed to simply getting lost. Through the direct experience of the studio, Witherford Watson Mann Architect’s proposals for the Bankside Urban Forest in south London is used as a means to explore the themes Benjamin opens up. Bankside’s ‘urban interior’ was a place we lost ourselves in the way Benjamin describes, becoming alert to a series of particular conditions that grow out of the area’s deep structure. By starting with what we encountered we developed a counter-intuitive framework for re-imagining the district’s public spaces and the life these could support. This raises the question of how we should intervene in city making within such districts. Benjamin’s metaphor challenges the conventional commercial models for developing our cities and suggests that other models need to be created.
Without Pictorial Detour: Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image
It can be argued that architectural knowledge was of crucial importance to Walter Benjamin for elaborating his version of an anthropological historical materialism. Between 1929 and 1931 he encounters two publications on architectural history which had a decisive impact on his ensuing works: Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) and Carl Linfert’s Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung (1931). It can be argued that both works played a role in affirming, if not developing his historical method of awakening the dreaming collective into a ‘now of recognisability,’ a method which one can argue is based on a specific image-based epistemology. Especially the architectural image, whether in the form of a printed drawing, photographic illustration, or an actual built object, appears to have been crucial for placing the history of media technologies (architecture being one of these media) in a constellation with the ‘archaic symbol-worlds of mythologies.’ If architecture is, as Benjamin claims in his initial notes for The Arcades Project, ‘the most important testimony to latent “mythology,”’ the architectural image might very well be the agent that causes the moment of awakening, the instance when a constellation between technology and ancient symbol worlds is formed. In the second part of this essay, I will attempt to elaborate such a designation for the specificity of the architectural image by analysing a number of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drawings and collages from the 1920s as architectural images in the Benjaminian sense.
Revolutionary Climatology: Rings of Saturn, Ringed by Red Lightning
Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism is considered as a practice of media archaeology invented through literary montage and photo philosophy. The Arcades Project that facilitated this new research methodology involving a mobile archive. The main case involving architectural theory considers how Benjamin redeployed Sigfried Giedion and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Building in France as a media environment, drawing upon its layout design, photo illustrations and textual systems. In terms of his urban writing, a reading of ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ considers how the diagram contributes to Benjamin’s archaeological methods, as a theory to generate site writing. Benjamin’s mode of media archaeology is then employed to map the arcades architecture onto the train stations and libraries in Berlin and Paris, sites that informed The Arcades Project. The final section assembles a set of citations as ‘Revolutionary Climatology’, thought-images as flashes of red lightning.
Benjamin and Koolhaas: History's Afterlife
Dialectical images are at the core of the methods suggested by two books written four decades apart yet published around the same time. The Arcades Project (first published as Das Passagen-Werk in 1981) and Delirious New York (1978) use images to critique established modes of historical interpretation. Each proposes a methodology of historical speculation based on the interpretation of fragmentary visual phenomena. Both construct alternative historical narratives about the impact of technology, mass culture and economy on the city. This essay contrasts and compares the similarities and differences between the respective authors’ treatments of the nineteenth century arcade and the Manhattan skyscraper to examine how the strategies and definitions suggested by Benjamin and Koolhaas address the function of images as tools for critical architectural analysis and knowledge.
Paris and Berlin: On City Streets and Loggias
This review article probes a conceptual duality that can be recognized as central to two of Benjamin’s essays on cities: his essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),’ and his autobiographical text Berlin Childhood around 1900. On the one hand, Benjamin renders numerous analyses and descriptions of buildings and experiences that present themselves as absolute and internally unified, giving the impression of being autonomous and immutable. On the other hand, Benjamin interrogates objects and perceptions that present themselves as transient and in flux and are therefore experienced as contingent and incomplete. These latter objects and perceptions derive their significance from something that is inevitably external.
The Memory Works: Between Monuments and Ruins, The Case of Contemporary Budapest
This review article argues that Benjamin’s project to construct a political explanation of the surrounding cultural world in developed capitalist societies, raised to a source of knowledge about the historical truth, finds an unmatched case of study in the contemporary ruinous urban nature of Budapest. Departing from the park of statues Memento Park, some urban features of the city are examined in the light of Benjamin’s semantics of the fragment to try to answer whether these thoughts apply to the discarded material world of our time. Could the already-there in Budapest provide a motivational basis for a reconstruction of the surrounding material world from the fragments of the past? The local phenomenon of romkocsma is addressed to wonder whether re-use of ruins could house this emancipatory potential or serve the interests of the hegemonic groups and the contemporary dominant discourse.
The Architecture of a Lifetime: Structures of Remembrance and Invention in Walter Benjamin and Aldo Rossi
This article presents the result of research on the influence of Walter Benjamin’s thinking in the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997). In present-day architectural criticism, Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre still constitutes a rich subject for discussion because of its resistance to easy pinpointing, even if Rossi himself explained his theories and methods of design on numerous occasions. In his writings, among these A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi quotes from a collection of Benjamin’s memoirs: Berlin Childhood around 1900. The architect believes that these short prose pieces express better than anything else what he himself had not been able to explain in his writing. In this paper I intend to show the poignancy of the words Rossi referred to and the implications they had on his architecture by offering close comparisons of Benjamin’s and Rossi’s autobiographical writings. In addition, this study examines how one of Rossi’s most famous architectural artefacts, the ossuary of San Cataldo cemetery at Modena, can be viewed as a coalescence of a Benjaminian thought-image, thereby fortifying the philosopher’s presence in modern architecture.
Benjamin’s Dialectical Image and the Textuality of the Built Landscape
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by discussing it in relation to the practice of translation. This discussion will be further contextualised by discussing a cadre of German/Austrian planners and architects who attempted to translate architectural idioms between cultural identities in Kemalist Era Turkey. The article concludes with a short recapitulation on the dialectical image as both an object of scrutiny and a method of observation, one which also takes into consideration the specific historicity of the observer.
Visual Vertigo, Phantasmagoric Physiognomies: Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin on the Visual Experience of Architecture
This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorisation’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist orientation of his main sources in The Arcades Project (especially Boetticher and Giedion), but that the purported improvements on Benjamin’s distinguished predecessors of architectural non-materialism are by comparison less impressive.
New Media in Old Cities: The Emergence of the New Collective
This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical realm. On the individual level, it looks at the emergence of a new type of citizen whose ludic attitude dynamically adapts the course of his responses to the virtual, real-time inputs that influence his presence in the physical environment. On the collective level, it analyses unintended, swarm-like synchronisations, and the role new media play in redefining the urban commons.
Open-Source Urbanism: Creating, Multiplying and Managing Urban Commons
Within contemporary architecture and urbanism there is marked interest in urban commons. This paper explores the creation of temporary urban commons, or, more specifically, what can be called ‘open-source urbanism’. Citing two practices – urban commons initiated by Atelier d’architecture autogérée in Paris, and Park(ing) Day initiated by San Francisco-based Rebar – I argue that these practices can be understood as open-source urbanism since their initiators act as open-source programmers, constructing practice manuals to be freely copied, used, developed and shared, thus producing self-managed commons. Although this tradition of ‘commoning’ is not new, it is currently being reinvented with the use of digital technologies. Combining Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of self-managed natural resource commons with Yochai Benkler’s assertion that commons-based peer production constitutes a ‘third mode of production’ that lies beyond capitalism, socialism and their blends, I argue that open-source urbanism critiques both government and privately-led urban development by advancing a form of postcapitalist urbanism.
A Monstrous Alliance: Open Architecture and Common Space
The contemporary built environment is absorbed by a dualist spatial organisation model divided between public and private space. Within this restrictive grammar, public space, despite its democratic promise, is heavily indoctrinated and anesthetised under the hegemony of regulatory apparatuses and control mechanisms, whereas private space has catalysed, if not directly engendered, prevalent spatial problems, such as ever-increasing slums, discriminatory gentrification and ecological catastrophes, despite its self-approving assurance. Underneath this dysfunctional couple lies common space, a third category that constitutes the shared spatial commonwealth of our entire natural and cultural milieu. The multitude, as an emerging body of self-organising political and spatial actors, has already started to unearth the potential of common space, actualising emergent and interactive spatial configurations all around the world. In this new, self-organisational model, architects do not become obsolete; rather, they leave behind their conventional roles as submissive experts and cosmetic speculators. By becoming anomalous architects, they affirm and augment the opening of spatial and architectural milieus to a myriad of new possibilities. This article theorises the possibility of a monstrous alliance between anomalous architects and the multitude, between open architectures and common space. Two specific case studies accompany these theoretical frameworks: the Gezi Event (Istanbul, 2013) demonstrates the actual emancipation of common space through the self-organising activity of the multitude, while Open-Cube (Antalya, 2013) attests to an early open architecture experiment based on the potentiating activity of the anomalous architect.
Common Spatialities: The Production of the Multitude
The Gezi Park barricades in Istanbul, the OWS occupation of Zucotti Park in New York City, the tents of the Indignados movement in Spain, the London Blackberry riots and the seizure of Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand the overthrow of a dictator. As new forms of social coexistence and relationships are being configured, and new spaces for encounter and conflict are produced, architecture feels that essential questions regarding its activity are being addressed in each and every one of these situations. And yet we seem unable to relate to them and grasp their significance as we repeatedly turn to old metaphors and tools. If modern architecture pursues the modern liberal state techniques of management and administration of life, then recent forms of political action, which claim a new relation to the sensible, demand – and might help develop – a new understanding of architecture. We are moving from technical and disciplinary knowledge towards a critical practice that integrates with the action of the multitude. Starting from a definition of commons as the production of the multitude, we seek not only to understand the spatial dimension of this production, but also to acknowledge space as common.
New Rights and the Space of Practices: Italian Contributions to a Theory of the Urban Commons
This paper conducts an analysis of two relevant aspects emerging from Italian research on the commons. The first focuses on legal aspects and juridical problems related to the commons, while the second considers practices that enable the collective social reproduction of contemporary urban commons. These two aspects are presented in their theoretical and discursive evolution in relation to their specificity in the Italian context. What is revealed is that they prove to be mutually reliant, and that, when combined, they offer heuristically fruitful perspectives for the advancement of the idea of commons today. A particular emphasis is placed on the difference between customs and practices, the former being the base for traditional arrangements of commoning, the latter being the potential principle for new types of arrangements today. Some specific Italian situations are invoked to illustrate the points made and to provide elements for an analytical approach relevant to different contexts.
Starting from the origins of the notion of management, this paper explores how commons governance is constituted by the earlier influential research of Elinor Ostrom, and pursues this with reference to scholars such as Saki Bailey, who emphasises that the choice of regulatory frame is ultimately a political one. We then argue that commons have to be ‘instituted’ in an open manner in order to remain accessible. This demands a set of scripts, rules or agreements that keep the process of commoning in place, and, simultaneously, keep commoning in a constant process of reproduction. We examine this tension and look at the shift in understanding about what ‘institutions of the commons’ have entailed in practice over the course of the last century and a half. Finally, we return to the political dimension to touch upon the question of whether, with the disappearance of the welfare state, a coherent concept of society can emerge from the current upsurge of commons initiatives.
Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-appropriate Public Space
This paper will explore contemporary practices of urban commoning while attempting to construct a theoretical argument on the inherently emancipating potentialities of common space. Urban commoning will be considered as a set of spatial practices through which space is created both as a good to be shared and as a medium that can give form to institutions of sharing. In order for commoning to remain an open process that continuously expands without being contained in any form of enclosure, it has to invite newcomers. Shared spaces, open to newcomers, are spaces defined neither by a prevailing authority that supervises their use, nor by a closed community that controls them by excluding all ‘outsiders’. Common spaces are thus dependent upon their power to communicate and connect rather than separate. Common spaces are threshold spaces, connecting and comparing adjacent areas at the same time. In practices of common space creation, commoners create areas of encounter and collective self-management. Rules of use are also of a threshold character, constantly in the making. Likewise, subjects of use are threshold subjects: for commoning to remain open and ever expanding, commoners have to consider themselves open to transformative negotiations with newcomers. This paper will thus attempt to understand urban commoning as a multifaceted process which produces spaces, subjects of use (inhabitants) and rules of use (institutions) that share the same qualitative characteristics. In such a prospect, urban commoning can prefigure forms of social relations based on sharing, cooperation and solidarity. In this way, space becomes not simply a common product but also the means through which egalitarian social relations can potentially be shaped.
Introduction: Commoning as Differentiated Publicness
Contemporary commoning practices do not constitute a mere alternative, but instead comprise a qualitative threshold: a moment of critical differentiation. As such, they call out for the development of a set of renewed methodological, analytical and synthetic tools and devices that are better equipped to understand the in-between as a ‘thirding’: as a form of differentiated publicness. The editorial introduction offers a platform of negotiation, which far from disregarding the already established approaches to the thematic in question, aims at expanding their scope, complementing them with non-dialectical readings. By presenting non-hierarchical understandings of urban practices, as well as fostering the intersection of different trajectories and discourses, the introduction to this issue strives to provide a fertile ground for the encounter of the multidimensional and relational potentials of contemporary commoning practices.
Mapping the (Invisible) Salaried Woman Architect: the Australian Parlour Research Project
Since the 1970s, feminist historians and polemicists have struggled to uncover the ordinary lives of women. They believe that gender ideals and biases are a critical part of the weft and weave of daily life. But the quotidian has been a restricted field in our discipline, often used to define a particular building type rather than the lives of architects. For example, we know little about the workdays of professionals or their labour in the workplace. The architectural office - its daily transactions and everyday culture - remains obscure. Even when represented in histories of the profession, the architectural office is filtered through a top-down lens trained on practice directors. The labour and lives of architecture’s male and female employees is unexplored terrain, but we could begin with the demographics: up to three-quarters of Australian women in architecture are salaried workers, continuing a historical trend. In the past, women generally worked for others. The gendering of salaried architectural workers raises questions about the relationship between gender and office work. Feminist historians and theorists have suggested that the office plays a role in forming gender ideals and practices. This paper endeavours to critically describe the lives and labour of women architects at the office, using survey and interview data from a large-scale Australian research project, publicly known through its website Parlour. This research inquires into gender disadvantage and investigates how gender ideals and norms shape the culture of the architectural workplace. The project’s research questions, evidence and explanations form the basis of this essay. The Parlour project is an ongoing platform for sharing information and research, but it gives particular voice to women’s experience in architecture, an experience largely shaped by salaried employment, studentship and the ownership of small practices.
Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader
Between the Roarkian caricature of the heroic modernist and the spectre of the contemporary starchitect, there was a period of resistance in which architectural authoriality came under fire. One of the most explicit challenges was issued through the use of gaming and simulation in both architectural education and practice in the 1960s and the 1970s, particularly in the work of Juan Pablo Bonta and Henry Sanoff - both of them architectural scholars, educators, and game enthusiasts. By tracing the importation of gaming and simulation techniques into architecture, this paper will show how architectural games sought to refigure the architect as a collaborative figure embedded in a network of experts, participants and constituents, and to modulate the architect’s design authority by foregrounding the contributions of viewer-interpreters to the creation of meaning. Situating their work within gaming precedents, from war and business games to urban planning gaming-simulations, I show how architecture games - particularly design games - worked to develop the architectural reader as a creative force, in some quarters going so far as to posit interpretation as the basis of design.
The Architect, the Planner and the Bishop: the Shapers of ‘Ordinary’ Dublin, 1940–60
From the 1930s through the 1960s, Dublin’s development occurred at its periphery: wheels of narrow roadways punctuated by green spaces provided the low-density frameworks for terraced residential boxes surmounted by pitched roofs and fronted by pocket gardens. Vast structures of ecclesiastic authority, Catholic (determinedly revivalist) church building and the suite of Catholic (tentatively modernist) schools were presented as support structures for mass housing, thereby completing the image and experience of Dublin’s new mid-twentieth-century suburbs. Taking the 1950s genesis of one vast north Dublin neighbourhood, Raheny/Coolock, as a case study, this paper sets previously unexamined archive material from the local Catholic bishopric and Dublin Corporation alongside critical thinking about Irish Catholicism and postwar suburbia generally. Startling hand-drawn maps by local priests reveal how John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin from 1940–71, influenced Dublin’s planning processes and controlled the architectural flavour of swathes of developing parishes. This paper seeks to unpick the variously silent and active roles of the architect, the planning office, the patron and the user, in the making of the more recent, everyday built environment that is Irish suburbia.
Humdrum Tasks of the Salaried Men: Edwin Williams, a London County Council Architect at War
Working at the London County Council Architects’ Department through the 1930s to 1950s, and known (if at all) as a member of the design team for the Royal Festival Hall, Edwin Williams is usually presented as a regressive figure, his design work marked by his Beaux Arts training. Using archival evidence and histories of the construction industry, this paper sets out Williams’s role in the organisation of rescue and recovery services in London during the Second World War. The paper argues that through his development of training schools and curricula for Rescue Service personnel, Williams played a key role in the formation of a skilled, mechanised, modern demolition industry. Operating complex emergency projects under extreme conditions, the same contractors and building operatives trained in Williams’s programme were later responsible for the clearance of bomb damaged sites and slums. This paper suggests that certain developments in modern architecture can be considered contingent upon practices of the demolition industry as developed by Williams. By concentrating on the ‘organisation’ and ‘progress’ of production that architects engaged with during the Second World War and after, new configurations of continuity and change emerge in which the ‘humdrum tasks’ of ‘salaried men’ appear crucial.
This essay proposes an ontology of architecture that takes its lead from the bread and butter of architecture: a flat ontology opposed to Cartesianism in the sense that no differentiation between realms (body/mind, high/low) is accepted. The work of Spinoza and Deleuze is referred to in order to flesh out such an ontology, whose aim is to destroy the very desire for architecture and architectural theory to even pose the question about the difference between bread-and-butter architecture and high architecture. Architecture is shown to be of the nature of an assemblage, of a machine or a haecceity (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase), and the implications of this in relation to the question of composition and reception are outlined.
Independent or Bureaucratic? The Early Career Choice of an Architect at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in Germany, France and England
While the general historical perception of the architect conveys an image of him/her as an independent ‘genius-artist’ we should not forget how, in particular around the turn of the twentieth century, architects were primarily employed by communal, or state administrations. The need for architects in administrations was primarily a consequence of the rising independence of cities and the necessity to react to urbanization and property speculation, and later for the mass housing programs in the aftermath of the First World War. In this paper the professional reality of architects in three countries, Germany, France, and England will be addressed and the relationship of the profession to the administrations will be analyzed. This investigation looks at how architects perceived this relationship and the many advantages it gave them, as well as how their reaction against it was articulated and backed up. In each of these countries architects had a different disciplinary background; these differences will be compared and contrasted. This variance subsequently led to a different perception and attitude towards the relevant administrations. Yet, it ought to be added that no general rule can be extracted from these comparisons, as each architect had their own, unique career path.
The Architect as Producer: Hannes Meyer and the Proletarianisation of the Western Architect
With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts and crafts. Contrary to the idea of architecture as art, the programme of the school aimed to assimilate architecture with industry in order to satisfy collective social needs. Yet, despite this programmatic declaration, such a project was realised only after Gropius’ departure from the Bauhaus, under the controversial directorship (1927–1930) of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer achieved unprecedented success both in terms of academic production and financial performance. Yet his realisations were paralleled by the leftist radicalisation of the school’s politics: Meyer transformed the workshops into factory production units and the students into industrial workers. Eventually, the politicisation of the school cost Meyer his office and a negative reputation in historical records that still holds today. This article posits that Meyer achieved his success at the Bauhaus not despite his radical allegiance, but precisely because of it. The realism of Meyer’s strategy is evaluated through his capacity to anticipate many developments in the organisation of architectural production. In particular, his critique of intellectual labour in architecture is confronted with the contemporary proletarisation of architects in the Western world.
Intersecting Knowledge Fields and Integrating Data-Driven Computational Design en Route to Performance-Oriented and Intensely Local Architectures
This paper discusses research by design efforts in architectural education, focused on developing concepts and methods for the design of performance-oriented and intensely local architectures. The pursued notion of performance foregrounds the interaction between a given architecture and its local setting, with consequences not only for the design product but also for the related processes by which it is generated. Integrated approaches to data-driven computational design serve to generate such designs. The outlined approach shifts the focus of design attention away from the delivery of finite architectural objects and towards an expanded range of architecture-environment interactions that are registered, instrumentalised and modulated over time. This paper examines ongoing efforts in integrating specific architectural goals and approaches, computational data-driven design methods and generative design processes, based on a range of context-specific and often real-time data sets. The work discussed is produced in the context of the Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics (RCAT) and the Advanced Computational Design Laboratory (ACDL) at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Data Reshaped: Literalism in the Age of Digital Design and Architectural Fabrication
This essay examines the recent shift in the perception of literalism in architecture as a result of the advent of digital media and the emergence of digital design processes. Whereas pre-digital literalism in art and architecture focused on the object and on space respectively, digital literalism is based on data transliteration and the design processes themselves. Referring to theoretical discourses that frame literal expressions as non-representational, non-metaphorical and non-analogical utterances, the essay delves into the ways in which data-based expressions become literal. The ability to digitally transliterate data and have it articulated in several (virtual or physical) media enables the creation of multiple expressions of the same data that are literal with respect to each other. The essay outlines these transformations and argues that they reflect significant changes in architectural design processes and their literalisation.
Mind the Gap: Reconciling Formalism and Intuitionism in Computational Design Research
The paper discusses the epistemological and methodological implications of an increasing process of formalisation and naturalisation of knowledge within the context of the complexity paradigm. This process is argued to induce a shift in the nature of notations and representations, to which corresponds an epistemic shift from a graphic to a computational rationality, with substantial effects on current design methodologies and strategies used in computational design. The shortcomings of a heavy formalism are discussed with respect to a possible reconciliation between the operational efficiency of formalist representations and the recovery of the phenomenological grounds of design experimentations through a simultaneous articulation of formalist and intuitionist approaches in computational design research.
A New Kind of Art [Based on Autonomous Collective Robotics]
The paper addresses the rationale of a process that produces artworks made by a swarm of robots. This process relies on the interaction, though the environment, of a set of robots designed to create spatiotemporal patterns from an initial homogeneous medium (the canvas). Inspired by social insect societies, the approach presented here exploits robot-robot and robot-environment interactions to develop emergent behaviour. The swarm intelligence concept is crucial to this approach because the viability of the team (group of robots) is required in order to achieve the viability of the individual. Without any central coordination or plan, the group of robots produces its artworks on the basis of a data-driven (bottom-up) process. Moreover, each robot can be viewed as an autonomous agent because it has on board all the resources required to provide the global outcome of the experiment, including sensors, actuators, and the controller, which demonstrates a reactive behaviour by reinforcing a previously made signal (positive feedback). The process is also presented in the context of Machine Art, and a detailed technical description of each robot is given, as well as an example of artworks produced by the collective behaviour of the set of robots.
Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique for Generative Architecture
After a first wave of digital architecture in the 1990s, the last decade saw some approaches where agent-based modelling and simulation (ABM) was used for generative strategies in architectural design. By taking advantage of the self-organisational capabilities of computational agent collectives whose global behaviour emerges from the local interaction of a large number of relatively simple individuals (as it does, for instance, in animal swarms), architects are able to understand buildings and urbanscapes in a novel way as complex spaces that are constituted by the movement of multiple material and informational elements. As a major, zoo-technological branch of ABM, Computational Swarm Intelligence (SI) coalesces all kinds of architectural elements – materials, people, environmental forces, traffic dynamics, etc. – into a collective population. Thereby, SI and ABM initiate a shift from geometric or parametric planning to time-based and less prescriptive software tools. Agent-based applications of this sort are used to model solution strategies in a number of areas where opaque and complex problems present themselves – from epidemiology to logistics, and from market simulations to crowd control. This article seeks to conceptualise SI and ABM as a fundamental and novel cultural technique for governing dynamic processes, taking their employment in generative architectural design as a concrete example. In order to avoid a rather conventional application of philosophical theories to this field, the paper explores how the procedures of such technologies can be understood in relation to the media-historical concept of Cultural Techniques.
Data-Driven Design to Production and Operation
Digital technology has introduced in the last decades data-driven representational and generative methodologies based on principles such as parametric definition and algorithmic processing. In this context, the 15th Footprint issue examines the development of data-driven techniques such as digital drawing, modelling, and simulation with respect to their relationship to design. The data propelling these techniques may consist of qualitative or quantitative values and relations that are algorithmically processed. However, the focus here is not on each technique and its respective representational and generative aspects, but on the interface between these techniques and design conceptualisation, materialization, and use.
What Will the Architect Be Doing Next? How is the profession of the architect evolving as the focus of society shifts from sustainability to resilience or reactivist-driven design demands?
A more engaging and visionary role for architects is emerging, altering focus from a technological advisor to a more sociological engineer or entrepreneur. By researching a selection of current architectural practices an attempt is made to describe this evolution of the architect’s role and to assess if this is truly a new development or even a paradigm shift. Based upon on an analysis of texts by scholars and written conversations with architects on the subject of sustainable architecture, resilient architecture, agency in architecture and reactivist architecture, supplemented with additional statements by architects on the matter of architectural practice, an evolution of this role made clear and put into perspective. The aim of this review therefore is to distil some kind consensus within architectural practice of how the architect’s role is to evolve in the foreseeable future. It appears that reactivist architecture as a descriptive set of principles has absorbed elements of all of the above, becoming more than the sums of its parts and allowing for a new role for the architect to emerge.
What is the relationship of affect to the non- of non-philosophy? And how might asking this question also go some distance toward answering (or raising) questions about the continuing relevance of disciplinarity itself? By first taking up minor remarks made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? – especially around the work of Francois Laurelle – this essay will explore how some of the implications of affect’s relation to the ‘non-‘ intersect with matters of immanence, pedagogy, and, finally, with the resoluteness of disciplinary boundaries.
The Work of Art as Monument: Deleuze and the (After-) Life of Art
In the last chapter of What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise the work of art as a paradoxical monument which does not commemorate a past, but rather, preserves itself in the absence of man. The key to understanding this paradox lies in the further determination of the monument as a ‘being of sensations’: a ‘compound’ of ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’, meaning, a composition of invisible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become. Art would provoke an encounter with inhuman conditions of life which in daily, pragmatic life are often not given a chance. Yet, why still speak in terms of visibility and invisibility if there is not even an eye to perceive? How to understand a conception of art which refuses to think it in terms of human needs, for example exactly of commemorating the past? Deleuze was well aware of these questions, as the chapter on percept, affect and concept repeatedly re-affirms its radical appeal. In this paper I aim to elucidate this novel understanding of art as unwordly monument. I will do so firstly by looking into its implicit dialogue with the phenomenologists Erwin Straus and Henri Maldiney. Secondly, Theodor W. Adorno's essay 'Valéry Proust Museum' will serve as a ground for formulating what might be called the Deleuzian 'after-life' of art.
Moiré Effect: Index and the Digital Image
The moiré effect and phenomena are natural occurring geometric formations that appear during the super-position of grid structures. Most widely recognisable in colour printing practices, generally viewed on screens (computer and TV) they are in most cases examples of interference within a signal or a code, unwanted visual mis-alignment. Especially in digital image capture, moiré patternings appear when a geometrically even pattern, like a fabric or close-up of fine texture, has an appearance of rippled water with blue or red hues of concentric circle formations. The intriguing pattern formation in this case points back not only to the mis-alignment of frequencies, but can be further seen as the intersection point of a speculative ontology for the index of the digital image. Moiré not only as a visually reproducible phenomenon or effect, but a field of vision that blurs the boundaries between analogue and digital, perception and affect, manifesting the photographic as a constant site of becoming, a site of immanence. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, Brian Massumi and Francois Laruelle will be explored alongside the moiré image and phenomenon, to see if there is such a speculative site underlining the becoming of the digital image and its repercussions in contemporary digital culture.
Medium Affect Desire: Hybridising Real Virtual and the Actualised through Affective Medium Ecology
Underneath the turbulent surface of the ubiquitous media-scape lies an even more agile and aggressive set of relations. A central figure in this turmoil of desires seems to be the asignifying sign, which has a hybridising liaison with both the realm of the real virtual and the realm of the actualised. The main question is what does it want? This new materialistic, non-anthropocentric liberty of affect is creating an arena of strange attractors and other topological vector fields in which our own unconscious drive is as effective as that of the steel ball in a pinball machine. Could we isolate the intrinsic drive of the medium from its subservient position in the aesthetic, freeing its desire from the anthropocentric dominion? What does it Yen for? Perhaps this gap is not meant to be filled, as it is this yearning what it yearns for. The asignifying sign cannot be isolated, it is neither here nor there, yet it is conditionally omnipresent, it inhibits the gap, its desire is to affect.
Video Assemblages: ‘Machinic Animism’ and ‘Asignifying Semiotics’ in the Work of Melitopoulos and Lazzarato
In this paper I will analyse the theoretical background of a single video installation – co-created by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato – in order to unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s important but somewhat elusive concepts of ‘machinic animism’ and ‘asignifying semiotics.’ Assemblages (2010) is a three channel audio-visual documentary about the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. I will argue that, in order to fully understand this work, we must interrogate the incredibly dense theoretical context it inhabits. In particular, I will explore the juncture between Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic ideas concerning a potential ‘ecosophy’ – or theory of the different relations between humans and nature that depends upon a new semiotics – and Lazzarato’s conception of ‘videophilosophy,’ which is grounded upon a politicised Bergsonian onto-aesthetics. I will conclude by criticizing Nicolas Bourriaud’s misappropriation of Guattari in his book Relational Aesthetics and propose that Assemblages demands quite a different and more radical gesture of relationality: one that follows an ecosophical logic that envelopes and imbricates the different levels of nature, the individual, and the social in a way that we might qualify with the term ‘unnatural participation.’
How to Think Constructivism? Ruskin, Spuybroek and Deleuze on Gothic Architecture
In the Gothic architecture Lars Spuybroek discovers a vitalist ontology that allows him to rethink the nature of constructivism. The vitalist beauty emerges out of a particular field of material forces and is not an actualisation of a pre-given model. His analysis leads to a critique of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who are portrayed as philosophers of the sublime. Their resistance to the signifying semiotics leads them too far. They unjustly claim that the Gothic structures emerge due to an affirmation of chaos and not in a careful process of construction. In my paper, I will nevertheless demonstrate that Spuybroek’s critique misses a fundamental point of their analysis. Only phantasms or spiritual becomings - concepts lacking in the analysis of Spuybroek - can allow for a proper appreciation of the Gothic and of the process of construction.
The Birthing of Things: Bergson as a Reader of Lucretius
I examine, in this short paper, the work of Henri Bergson on Lucretius first published in 1884, and argue for its vital significance in understanding the development of his philosophical thinking. This publication was to serve as an introduction to extracts from Lucretius, for his students at Clermont-Ferrand, with a commentary and notes on the poetry, philosophy, the physics, language and text of his poem De Rerum Natura. In the published volume most of the overview of Lucretius by Bergson is given in the long preface, and this is followed by extracts in Latin, without translation into French, with comments on lines and individual words, which covers all the books of the original poem. By 1899 it had gone to a third edition, and was still in print until the 1960's. Copies today are very difficult to obtain, and only recently has a full electronic version become available on the Internet Archive, to which readers are here directly referred.
This paper presents a detailed explication of the main tenets of Félix Guattari’s theorisation of asignifying semiotics in the context of the mixed semiotics that he developed in the 1970s and which extended throughout his career. This foundational work on the relationship between asignification and signifying semiologies, and the micropolitical necessity of escaping from meaning in the broadest sense encompassing individuation, double articulation, and limited subjectivation, is contextualised in terms of information theory, in the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, as well in terms of Roland Barthes’ semiology and suggestive extra-structural conception of signifiers without signifieds or obtuse meaning. Guattari’s favourite examples of asignifying technomaterial info-networks and mushrooms sprouting on manure are both discussed.
Asignifying Semiotics as Proto-Theory of Singularity: Drawing is Not Writing and Architecture does Not Speak
We have recently witnessed a confession of a fellow architect with which we fully identify. We, too, belong to the generation educated under the semiotic regime, which – as we will argue in our introduction – has run its course. We also believe that the idea of ‘architecture as language’ might have been useful as an analytical tool but never as a design mechanism. After all, creativity comes first and routinisation follows. As the title of Footprint 14 suggests, this is a general plea to have done with the hegemony of the linguistic signifier. Signifying semiotics is but a fraction of a much broader asignifying semiotics. We propose to approach the issue qua Spinozist practice of ethology, defined as the study of capacities, or – as we would like to think of it – a proto-theory of singularity. This is as much an ethical or political problem as it is an aesthetic one. It concerns what the cultural critic Steven Shaviro recently qualified as a primordial form of sentience that is non-intentional, non-correlational, and anoetic. The Affective Turn will be measured against the unavoidable Digital Turn. We will conclude by reversing the famous Wittgensteinian dictum whereby what we cannot speak about we must not pass over in silence. A brief summary of contributions, which are by no means limited to architecture, is concluded with a politically charged epilogue. The very last paragraph of the epilogue reveals the pink-on-pink reference.
Participation, Housing, and the Question of ‘Good Architecture’
The Tallinn Architecture Biennale ʻRecycling Socialismʼ, held in September 2013, is reviewed in this paper. Key themes and contradictions that crystallised throughout the event are identified and analysed. Participatory approach and its shortcomings are discussed in relation to the Biennaleʼs vision competition winning entry. What is the dual legacy of socialism and modernism for architectural and urban practices? The question is studied via the contrasting practices of raumlabor and DOGMA, two key participants in the Biennaleʼs events. Whereas participation is a goal and an answer to modernist-Fordist city in raumlabor's practice, for DOGMA it is the starting point for interrogating post-Fordist city.
Generative and Participatory Parametric Frameworks for Multi-player Design Games
Generative design processes have been the focus of current architectural research and practice largely due to the phenomenon of emergence explored within self-organisation, generative grammars and evolutionary techniques. These techniques have been informing participatory urban design modalities, which are investigated in this paper by critically reviewing theories, practices, and (software) applications that explore multi-player online urban games, with respect to not only their abilities to facilitate online trans-disciplinary expert collaboration and user participation but also to support implementation of democratic ideals in design practice. The assumption is that even if generative and participatory parametric frameworks for multi-player design games may not replace politics as a discipline concerned with the study of government and policies of government, they may reduce the bureaucratic apparatus supporting government by establishing a direct interface between experts such as politicians, urban planners, designers, and users.
Learning from Failures: Architectures of Emergency in Contested Spaces (Pyla, Cyprus)
One of the characteristics of contested spaces of ethno-religious origin is the failure to work around common projects. This is the case of the community of Pyla, Cyprus, one of a few inter-ethnic communities on the island. Architectural and planning practices are urged to contribute to the process of reconciliation, despite the lack of an on-going official reconciliation process, and their lack of power. Recently, there has been an increasing number of practices in Cyprus that re-examine their field of operation and readjust their design tools accordingly. One of them is the Architectures of Emergency initiative, in which the author participates, which employs characteristics of ‘first aid’ architecture by inserting moments of publicness into the void created by the absence of a common institutional framework between the two communities.
Citizens as Knowledge Producers in Urban Change: Can Participation Change Procedures and Systems
The aim of the article is to understand more about the potentials of citizen participation in planning. The research project in focus was conducted in a stigmatised Swedish context and was participatory in approach, including local interaction activities, case-based participant observation and key informant interviews. The project aim was to develop knowledge about the interplay between top-down invitations for dialogue and bottom-up citizen initiatives. Two cases are discussed in relation to previous research on participation. The participatory process was shown to influence how ‘socially responsible public procurement’ of a construction project was carried out, and hence the article concludes that citizen participation in design can influence systems and procedures. The question of how such knowledge and awareness can develop the planning profession ends the article.
Mainstreaming Urban Interventionist Practices: the Case of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin
The paper examines how practices of urban intervention have entered the mainstream by discussing the case of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Financed by the German BMW group and realised by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, the project addresses issues of contemporary urban life in the form of a ‘mobile laboratory’ with an explicit emphasis on participatory forms of urban intervention. The Lab’s temporary residence in Berlin in 2012 encountered fierce protests from residents and activist groups. I revisit the ensuing public debates and discuss the impact they had on the project. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people involved in the Lab the various notions of participation underlying the project are examined. It is shown that the Lab generated new and unexpected encounters and individual experiences. However, for solving actual problems the debates and experiments held at the Lab were too general, too exclusive and too short-lived to be of lasting relevance.
Infrastructural Critique. The Upside-Down of the Bottom-Up: A Case Study on the IBA Berlin 84/87
Participation in planning is a logical consequence of the democratisation of society due to the social and cultural changes related to modernism. Anarchistic participation, as in Autogestion, within a development process, is a critical utopian alternative draft to existing power structures. The participatory turn represented by the International Building Exhibition Berlin 1987 (IBA) meant the institutionalisation of these utopian ideas, resulting in a heterotopian notion of participation instrumentalised by governing and economic forces. The most important aspect to our argument is that participation is a matter of critique – with critique as the very core of the modern understanding of progress – and thus enabling forms of improvement in planning, regulating and governing with architectural and urbanistic means. Those means simply embody a specific form of resisting critique and certain shifts in the structures of governing revealing an infrastructural critique which both re-forms the elements and the relations of what is to be resisted.
Cooperatives, Control or Compromise? The Changing Role of Participation in Norwegian Housing
What does it mean to participate? Participation used to be an ideological pursuit, conducted for the greater good of society; today, however, the motives and intentions behind it are not so straightforward. This paper presents examples of community participation in Norwegian housing, through which early egalitarian impulses can be seen to clash with the more recent intentions of private developers and a public desire for detached family homes. The situation is, however, changing: desirable development land is running out as the Norwegian population grows – surely we must participate again, but with whom and to what end?
The Importance of Recognition for Equal Representation in Participatory Processes: Lessons from Husby
Despite the ambition to involve people on more equal terms, participation often still means that the audience is involved in clearly demarcated parts of the process and attempts to develop more deliberative democratic processes in urban planning often fail due to unequal representation in the participatory process. While sharing the general idea of the value of participatory processes, we will investigate some problematic features involved and suggest how some of these can be remedied. We employ the concept of recognition to analyse the conditions for public participation in a recent case of urban planning in the Stockholm suburb of Husby. This case is particularly interesting as it clearly demonstrates the impact of globalisation on local participatory processes. The results show the importance of broad recognition for equal representation in participatory processes, and the need for a plurality of public spheres to support long-term participation in the development of the common urban space.
The ʽDiverse Economies’ of Participation
This article begins to construct a theory of participation in architecture, urban design and urban planning as a range of practices undertaken across a landscape of economies that largely exists outside of the capitalist economy. These practices themselves overlap in terms of their material forms, bodily and mental activities with the practices undertaken by labour employed to produce the built environment within the capitalist marketplace. With respect to participation, our aim in articulating practices is to move away from a discussion of levels of participation and legitimacy within individual projects and towards an understanding of the organising, productive and reproductive work that is done in participating in the production of the built environment as part of an ongoing process of social change. They proliferate through multiple instances of performance and those who undertake them act as carriers of these practices, including forms of knowhow, understanding, motivational and emotional knowledge, creating resources through these acts of performance. The article contends that participatory practices are liable to be exploited re-presented or co-opted as commodified resources and this fragility limits the socially transformative potential of participation. Drawing on J.K Gibson-Graham’s conception of ‘diverse economies’, an alternative representation is developed to recognize the landscape of practices constructing alternative economic systems, and exploring means and methods of resistance to co-option or enclosure.
Toward an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia
Adopting Rancière’s principles of equality, his concepts of aesthetics and le partage du sensible as an intellectual toolbox, this paper examines how practices of participation in informal settlement development might encourage one to think differently about the relationship between politics, design and the city – contributing thus to the debate about participatory urbanism. A critical reflection of the Thai programme Baan Mankong (secure housing) and its regional counterpart Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) – an entity aimed at creating an alternative development process in which people that were previously ignored and marginalized are engaged at the centre of a process of transforming their lives, spaces and position in the city – sheds light on such relationship in order to promote a re-conceptualisation of the role of architecture and design in the process of socially just urban development, participatory urbanism and the struggle for democracy.
An Anthropology of Urbanism: How People Make Places (and What Designers and Planners Might Learn from It)
In their word play on what design praxis might succeed the New Urbanism movement in the United States, the July 2013 article “Newest Urbanism” in the Architect introduced to the uninitiated the concept of tactical urbanism. Defining tactical urbanism as “temporary, cheap, and usually grassroots interventions – including so-called guerrilla gardens, pop-up parks, food carts, and ‘open streets’ projects – that are designed to improve city life on a block-by-block, street-by-street basis,” the article claims that it took this approach to shaping the city less than a decade to mainstream into the practices of US cities and firms alike. While Architect used the term tactical urbanism, to characterize this effort, this essay will use the term participatory urbanism to discuss how ordinary people are engaged in making place. This discussion of participatory urbanism will: describe the context from which it emerged in the United States, define the term and its current manifestations, and describe an early example of participatory urbanism seeded by digital tools in order to raise questions about participatory urbanism role in the making of place in the twenty-first century.
Aporia of Participatory Planning: Framing Local Action in the Entrepreneurial City
This essay examines the hegemonic-discursive barriers facing local action in cities today, first, by revisiting the New Left/Frankfurt School critique of modern institutions, which not incidentally proved a key inspirational source for the original grassroots movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this first section of the essay, Adorno's analysis of the Culture Industry is reconsidered alongside Berger’s and Bourdieu's critical sociology. Second, it is argued that the institutional recuperation of localism since the 1970s has resulted in a paradoxical abandoning or overturning of its earlier revolutionary-utopian motives, which has subsequently sowed the seeds for a new counterrevolutionary trend in local politics (so-called NIMBYism). This trend is seen as attendant to still larger city-transformative processes of gentrification and neoliberalisation, or ‘urban entrepreneurialism.’ The essay concludes, finally, with an exposition of the central challenges at hand, and presents an alternative envisioning of participation as a mode of nonintegrative or counterhegemonic praxis.
Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism
This issue of Footprint examines the recent participatory turn in urban planning and urban design. It discusses the co-opting of participatory processes by planning departments, the systematic disregard of inequalities, and the empowering of the market resulting from the ‘anti-statism’ present in many participatory schemes. What is the relationship between the institutionalisation of participation and the practices of autonomy, self-organisation, and inclusion? When and how does genuine empowerment of collectives take place? Does the demand for the empowerment of local organisations and communities strengthen the market forces at the expense of central government? This issue attempts to problematise ‘participation’, to call attentions to some of its shortcomings, deficits, and limitations, not in order to necessarily bypass the demand for the democratisation of the urban, but in order to rectify and strengthen it.
A Tentative Approach to Mapping Street Space: A Case Study of Chinese Central Urban Districts
This paper focuses on exploring a quantitative approach to mapping street space. Characteristics of street space can hardly be described and explained using only the traditional architectural forms of street space. The difficulty arises because of the lack of relevance between these forms and people’s activities in them. This phenomenon presents a challenge to mapping methods. Expanding mapping elements is one viable and ongoing path. Which element could be an effective one and how it should be measured and mapped, are vital questions. Interface signs have been selected as the experimental elements, with an area of central Nanjing selected as the research sample. Database and statistics of interface signs and pedestrian flows have been established and inserted into the GIS (Geographical Information System) where a series of correlation analyses between basic mappings and pedestrian flows are carried out.
War, Trade and Desire: Urban Design and the Counter Public Spheres of Bangkok
This paper analyses an emergent public sphere in Bangkok in order to reveal the gap between ideals of public space as representation of power, nationhood, and modernity, versus its social production in everyday political struggles. The setting for political demonstrations recently shifted from royalist-nationalist Ratchadamnoen Avenue to the Ratchaprasong intersection, the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district. Ratchadamnoen, formerly a stage-set for royalist and nationalist pomp, has been continuously occupied for political uprisings. In contrast, as the political base of protest in Thailand widened, the glittering shopping malls at Ratchaprasong became a new site of protest, fuelled by urban and rural working poor who sensed they could not afford to partake in Bangkok’s phantasmagorical splendours. The paper argues that in following Bangkok’s historical cycles of blood and massacre in the street lies the possibility of finding new forms of urban design and a public sphere not yet imagined in the West.
[Re]Forming Public Space: A Critique of Hong Kong’s Park Governance through Architectural Intervention
This paper’s point of departure is a critique of the Hong Kong government’s somewhat rigid approach to regulating the public spaces of its parks. As an antidote to a rule-bound and somewhat restrictive set of policies, four groups of architecture students at the University of Hong Kong have designed various interventions for a public park in Hong Kong. The projects, entitled Pixel Wall, Fence Off, Border Mender, and Rocky present alternative ways of activating public space through architectural design.
The Temperament of a City: A Postscript to Post-Olympic Beijing
There are two kinds of amazement in art and architecture: one relies on the ingenuity of artifice to arouse a feeling of enchantment, while the other causes an awe-inspiring ecstasy through the shock of the new. Beijing may have won the race in the latter, with spectacles such as the Olympic Games, but does this prove that a new Beijing has been reinvented? This paper examines the two kinds of amazement to examine two pairs of showcase Olympic buildings: 1) Beijing International Airport’s Terminal 3 and the Olympic Tennis Centre and 2) the Olympic Stadium and the CCTV Tower – to ask what they say about Beijing, and its temperament. It also questions whether or not it is possible to reinvent a new city once its temperament has been formed, and in what way this temperament may be related to the creation of public space, or place.
The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Threatened Typology
The Shanghai alleyway house was a rich and vibrant generator of street life. Unique to Shanghai, it occupied the ambiguous space between the traditional Chinese courtyard home and the street. The system of ‘graduated privacy’ within its alleyways ensured a safe and neighbourly place to live. Due to rapid redevelopment in recent decades this once ubiquitous typology is under threat. This paper takes a look at the history of the typology as well as at three recent redevelopments of it in the city: Xintiandi, Jian Ye Li, and Tianzifang, to question what future there can be for a typology that seems to have outlived its usefulness.
(Recovering) China’s Urban Rivers as Public Space
This article focuses on the revered role rivers in China once held – in cartography, history, mythology, festivals, cities, and everyday life. It reviews and summarizes ‘hydraulic civilization’, taking cognizance of feng shui as it does so. Four historical cases testify to the fact that China’s great cities were founded on riverbanks and developed in tandem with floodplain dynamics. Over time, a tension developed between the civilizing force of the city and water’s natural energy. Industrialization saw a growing disconnection between waterways and settlements, with canalization fundamentally altering the nature of rivers, turning them into physical, cultural, and economic dividers, and upsetting natural habitats. Recently, there has been a rediscovery of Chinese riverscapes. Initiated by the government, three case studies highlighting the recovery of the urban, scenic, cultural, and functional nature of rivers inside Ningbo, Kunming, and Qian’an by design firm Turenscape are examined in the final part of this paper.
Asian Public Space since 1945: From Mao to the Mall and Beyond
The form of the city and its public spaces are changing in Asia. This short survey tracks the retreat of the European imperial space systems as Asian nations gained independence and the multi-centered, global corporate system of public space-making that emerged from 1990-2008. It also tracks the appearance of a specifically Asian rural-urban space-making system of urban villages that has emerged as a long cultural continuity in and around Asian cities. Four models of urban space are examined: Metropolis, Megalopolis, Fragmented Metropolis, and Megacity/Metacity. All are simultaneously present in the Asian city, forming parallel timelines weaving around each other. After the 2008 crash there is reason to pause and re-evaluate this highly successful, emerging Asian urban system and its public spaces, especially in view of the likely implications of energy supplies and climate change on key Asian cities located in coastal and river valley situations.
Future Publics: Politics and Space in East Asia’s Cities: Introduction
This special issue of Footprint began life in Shanghai, with the third Annual Delft School of Design (DSD) and International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) workshop, which was organized in conjunction with the Architecture Department of Hong Kong University (HKU) and took place in their Shanghai Study Centre in April 2011. The seven papers presented here look at issues of public space in East-Asian cities, beginning with an overview since 1945 and thereafter concentrating on cities in China, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Nanjing, as well as a realm that is not often considered public space: urban rivers. The issue also considers the city of Bangkok, where urban design is examined as a counter public sphere.
Thesis-Building: Architecture, Alchemy and the Constructive Moment(s) of a Doctoral Dissertation
This paper looks back at the long and sometimes difficult process of doing a ‘PhD’. It asks how certain ‘moments’ in the building of a doctoral thesis – moments of conception, of discovery, of despair, of truth, of revelation and of jouissance – inform the building of a thesis. By revisiting these moments, the paper traces the genesis of the author’s thesis on Architecture and Alchemy and explores the metaphor of construction encountered in the work of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. Drawing on some of the historical sources of the thesis, in particular the emblem books of seventeenth-century alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622), the paper argues that the above-named ‘moments’ in a PhD constitute an ensemble of impassioned investment, which can be known as the PhD-pathos. This paper, then, can be read as no more, or less, than a pathological guide to the PhD, where architecture and alchemy come into play as polar opposites in the process of construction and change that thesis-building is.
The Tradition of Spatial Writing: The Case of the Palindrome in between Literature and Architecture
In this work I define as spatial writing a kind of writing that could be expressed spatially in text and textually in architecture and that includes examples from both text and buildings. In that sense spatial writing is related not only to literary theory but also to architecture, architectural writing or ‘architecture writing’. In the first part of my paper I outline very briefly the tradition of spatial writing in literary theory, but the main focus is on how text is treated spatially and architecturally within such a theory. In the second part I focus on the palindrome as a specific kind of spatial writing and examine how its geometric poetic form stands in between the disciplines of literature and architecture. From the two examples I study the first is taken from literature and is a palindromic poetic composition from a 1745 pamphlet entitled Coelum Orbis Teutonici, and the second from architecture and looks at palindrome’s use as inscriptions at fountains and thresholds.
Architecture’s Awaking from Correlationist Slumber: On Transdisciplinarity and Disciplinary Specificity
Perception cannot be considered independently of the environment since it is defined as an evolved adaptive and constructive relation between the life-form and its milieu. Unfortunately, experimental psychology research has relied overwhelmingly on object perception, rather than environment perception, with the findings of the former providing the basis for understanding the latter. Architectural research continues to suffer from this fallacy. Furthermore, to separate the ‘cultural’ from the ‘natural’ environment – as if there were a world of mental and a world of material products – is a fatal mistake. There is only one world. The paper explores J.J. Gibson’s unwitting affiliation with Deleuze. The most notable point of convergence between the two thinkers is their more or less overt theory of ‘passive synthesis’ of perception with which they vehemently oppose, or better yet complement, the active synthesis of representation.
John Hejduk’s Pursuit of an Architectural Ethos
Reflected, artistic practices and design-based research are drastically expanding fields within architectural academia. However, the interest in uniting theory and practice is not entirely new. Just a few decades ago, before a ‘death of theory’ was proclaimed, questions of architectural epistemology, of the language(s) of architecture, were indeed of profound interest to the discipline. This essay returns to and examines the investigatory practices of John Hejduk in an attempt to identify a poetic method asserting difference through repetition and primarily grounded in the medium of architectural drawing; a method which, when approached on a more general and conceptual level, might even have the potential to inform design-based architectural research today. The author argues that the conceptual framework of such a method is not a theoretical pursuit of logos, but more a matter of character – an embracing pursuit of an architectural ethos.
Science for Architecture: Designing Architectural Research in Post-War Sweden
How did architectural research in Sweden become scientific in its approach rather than artistic, as architecture education in the post-war period was primarily influenced by the Bauhaus pedagogy? Via the American Bauhaus pedagogical developments taking place at the IIT and the GSD, Swedish architecture education adopted the artistic ‘learning by doing’ approach. The most interesting structure signifying this was a permanent exhibition of building materials located in the foreground of the 1957 KTH architecture school. When the new KTH architecture school was completed its architecture illustrated another image: that of the new architecture curriculum, A68, put into practice the same year as the building was designed. A68 reorganized architecture education and put more focus on environmental studies and building function analysis. The new curriculum included the subjects Formlära, Design Principles, and Byggnadsfunktionslära, Building Function Analysis, which were technical in their approach of using empirical research. As a result, the 1969 KTH architecture building included a laboratory for testing technical problems in air-conditioned spaces as well as a laboratory for testing acoustics. The 1961 LTH architecture building included a full-scale-laboratory where studies were directed by Carin Boalt, the first female professor at a technical university.
An Antipodean Imaginary for Architecture+Philosophy: Ficto-Critical Approaches to Design Practice Research
This is a collaborative essay that presents the design practice research of six postgraduate researchers (past and present), who have been working within the Architecture+Philosophy research stream at the School of Architecture, RMIT University, Melbourne. What unites the projects is an aspiration to maintain a creative relationship between architectural design project research and critical theory, with an emphasis on transdisciplinary potentialities. While the design research introduced here is diverse, the researchers all share an engagement in how to construct imaginary worlds using what can be identified as a ficto-critical approach that draws on the productive intersection of architecture and philosophy. Hélène Frichot, who will situate this research from her position as their primary doctoral advisor, argues that by pursuing a productive relay between theory and practice a novel Antipodean design imaginary can be seen to emerge across the collected projects.
Bridging: The Spatial Construction of Knowledge in Architectural Research
This contribution proposes an interdisciplinary approach to architectural research, and states that composition is a methodological act of research. It will first argue that architectural research and practice can gain from a multi-perspectival approach, bringing in knowledge from different fields – in this case the field of literature. Referring to the author’s recently finished dissertation, it proposes a literary approach to architecture and the city, and explains how the ambiguities of architecture (subject-object, author-user and reality-fiction) can be addressed by literary means. Then, it makes clear that bringing together knowledge from different fields requires an act of composition. It argues that knowledge can be seen as a spatial construction rather than a linear one, and that the mediating capacity of the architect offers researchers with a background in architecture the possibility to develop such spatial research compositions.
Haecceity or ‘thisness’ is a philosophical concept that relates to architectural drawing in the sense that a haecceity is something that becomes individual from having been undifferentiated. Haecceities lie at the heart of many interlinking, dynamic processes of ethics, art, instinct, intelligence and life. Haecceities open up for an understanding of architectural drawing distinct from ‘merely’ representing built or buildable architectural space, being rather a method of both acting and thinking. That the architectural drawing represents building and space is inherent, but, for the same reason, the architectural drawing’s power to produce space and buildings is sometimes diminished. This capacity of drawing, along with analogue and digital drawing tools and analogue and digital notational systems, is discussed in the paper, aiming to break down the usual ideas of architectural drawing, the digital and the analogue, and to build up a research method to create thoughts and worlds.
You are Hungry: Flâneuring, Edible Mapping and Feeding Imaginations
The idea of growing food in cities, often termed urban agriculture (UA), is rapidly becoming a popular concept linked to ideas of sustainable cities. However, for most residents it is a difficult concept to visualize due to the complexity of the built environment. This research uses 32 participatory walks with 150 local residents around a 25-hectare site within east London to explore reactions to the idea of potential UA landscapes. The starting point for walks was the ‘edible map’. The edible map is a hand-drawn A2 map of the site that filled the many vacant and grassed areas, common to cities, with food growing suggestions. The map was presented to walkers as a provocation to stimulate discussion. The 32 participatory walks produce an initial engagement with the concept of UA and the need for local food systems but also produced a strong critique of urban spatial design and the desire to place-make. Exploring how these desires interact needs to be further understood because potentially the latter could dominate the former. Therefore, institutions that advocate UA need to be mindful of the interactions between spatial engagements and food-growing practices that may compromise the vital need for local food production at the core of the UA concept.
What is the value, now, in conducting historical research into architectural ideas? The paper addresses the function of contemporary PhD research in light of a) the so-called historiographical turn in architectural history, theory and criticism research consolidated in the last decade or so; b) the broader positions in which critical and historical knowledge and practices are implicated within present-day architectural culture; and c) the particular circumstances of PhD research in architecture in Australian universities. It revisits a paper written in 2005 that constructs the PhD in architecture as a space of authorized release from the burdens of habitual knowledge within the architecture discipline, accountable both to disciplinary knowledge and a broader architectural culture represented most obviously by the architecture profession. In light of the positions it explores and contemporary circumstances, it will consider the question of how legitimacy of subject is construed and defended for the doctorate in architectural history.
Copyright (c) 2015 FOOTPRINT http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Over the past fifteen years most advanced education programmes within Schools of Architecture have been questioning the parameters and requirements of doctoral research both in terms of content and form. This double issue of Footprint was motivated by the question of where the field stands today. Footprint 10|11 presents nine contributions from both recently defended and developing PhD candidates from a variety of institutions. The diversity of their work, as well as the similarities found in the submissions, offers a partial view into research topics currently addressed in PhD programmes within Schools of Architecture. In addition to the nine papers by PhD researchers, we have included a paper by Andrew Leach that we believe provides an overview of the general state of contemporary architecture research. Leach makes an appeal to refrain from making all research operational. At a time when the application of research and its economic value seem to form the primary criteria for judging value, this appeal should not be taken lightly.
The subjects of Owen Hatherley’s A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain are architecture and urban development. The book addresses also some broader cultural, political and economic references, as well as personal anecdotes and memories. It includes many encounters with the remnants of the British welfare state. As an extension to his blog postings and a sequel of sorts to his previous Militant Modernism, Hatherley’s antagonist here is the semi-official architecture of New Labour, which he terms ‘pseudomodernism’: an unimaginative, inferior, and, in its own specific way, also tacky architecture of white stucco, steel and glass. He attacks the Faustian bargain of Richard Rogers and his allies with neoliberalism, a pact that produces a modernism devoid of social content, reflected by the unimaginative, speculation-driven architectural design. While Hatherley produces the promised indictment of recent British architecture, the book is, at the end of the day, primarily a eulogy to the disappearing postwar architecture he so evidently loves.
This article reviews the book Swedish Modernism. Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. In this volume, the editors plea for the construction of ‘multiple modernities’, following which a more diversified understanding of the European welfare state can be constructed. Through twelve contributions by a group of international scholars, Mattsson and Wallenstein aspire to initiate the construction of an emblematic Swedish modernism. The book offers an intricate and diversified reading of the history of the Swedish Folkhemmet, including political history, social sciences and media studies. When it comes to the built environment, however, the volume focuses largely on the home, with a few excursions to exhibition spaces and into corporate culture. In this volume, Mattsson and Wallenstein answer many questions, but raise an equal amount of new questions and thus leave the reader wanting more, as any good book should.
The Odd One Out? Revisiting the Belgian Welfare State
Michael Ryckewaert publication Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State. Infrastructure, planning and architecture 1945-1973 describes the evolution of the welfare state and Belgium, more specifically its spatial characteristics. This by now historical socio-political model had decidedly collectivist traits, culminating in the provision of social security networks and a vast expansion of the public domain. If collectivism was one of the key elements of the welfare state, the absence of centralized planning appears to make the Belgian variant somewhat problematic. Whereas in countries like the Netherlands, Germany and France, modernism became the house style of the welfare state, thanks to the massive investments in public housing, this did not happen in Belgium. Here, the De Taeye Act of 1948 sponsored the construction of individual, detached houses; not surprisingly, most clients preferred traditional architecture and refrained from modern experiments. Industrial parks, office buildings and shops, on the other hand, developed into the cornerstones of Belgian modern architecture after 1945. Both the low-density sprawl and the industrial parks depend heavily on the use of the car, which was accommodated by the construction of a network of highways.
La Défense / Zone B (1953-91): Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State
Planned as early as 1958 by the Etablissement Public d’Aménagement de La Défense (EPAD, the first such agency in France), the business district of La Défense is a typical urban result of the French version of the welfare state: centralism, modernism, alliance between public and private elites. But with its vertical skyline, this district – called Zone A – constitutes only a small part of the operational sector of the EPAD; the other part, Zone B, coincides with the northern part of the city of Nanterre. In the shadows of the crystalline skyscrapers of La Défense, Zone B was not only a kind of ‘back-office’ of the business district, but also an urban laboratory for public housing ‘paved with good intentions’. From the slab projects of Le Corbusier and his epigones to the urban compositions of postmodern architects, along the proliferating textures of Jacques Kalisz, or the humanized ‘grands ensembles’ of Emile Aillaud, the many EPAD projects for Zone B, built or not, constitute a complete collection that documents the evolution of the ‘architecture urbaine’ from the mid 1950s to the turn of the 1990s.
Appropriating Modernism: From the Reception of Team 10 in Portuguese Architectural Culture to the SAAL Programme (1959-74)
This paper aims to map the relations between the Portuguese appropriation of Team 10’s architectural ideas and the housing policies launched by the state, especially through the SAAL programme, which stood for Ambulatory Support to Local Residents Programme and ran for a brief period between 1974 and 1976. Through an intellectual speculation based on an analysis of the historical discourse, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the critical and interpretative reception of Team 10’s ideas by the Portuguese architectural culture played an important role in the process leading up to the SAAL programme. The aim of this approach is to open up a hypothesis for reflection on this reception in its various senses, even if it is mixed with other narratives, in an attempt to understand the way in which Team 10 was critically interpreted, disseminated and assimilated. One could say that the relation between the Portuguese context and Team 10 is an oblique one. However, it is possible to identify some resonances that confirm the importance and pertinence of Team 10’s presence.
Reforming the Welfare State: Camden 1965-73
The housing projects built by the London Borough of Camden in the years 1965-73 belong arguably to the most substantial investigations into the architecture of social housing undertaken in the past half-century. Under borough architect Sydney Cook, Camden aimed to establish a new kind of housing architecture based, not on the Corbusian tabula rasa, but on a radical reinterpretation of traditional English urbanism. The outcome was a series of projects, including Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane, designed by members of Cook’s team, including Neave Brown, Peter Tábori and Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, as well as projects designed by up-and-coming private architects like Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. While it began in what Hobsbawm called the ‘golden age’ of postwar capitalism, the Cook years (1965-73) saw the onset of the crisis of the 1970s and with it the rise of the New Right and the Hard Left, both of which viewed the Camden housing projects as a legitimate target for attack. Based on archival research and interviews, the paper explores the ways in which the Cook projects both mediated and articulated the emergence of these fissures within the British welfare state.
Architecture and the Ideology of Productivity: Four Public Housing Projects by Groupe Structures in Brussels (1950-65)
The field of public housing in Belgium formed the backdrop for two crucial phenomena in the shaping of the welfare state: first, the general compartmentalization along ideological lines of all aspects of society, including housing policy and town planning; second, the adaptation of the nation’s industry, and the building trade in particular, to postwar economic conditions. In the study of welfare state housing policies in Belgium, the latter aspect has so far been overlooked. This paper therefore proposes to look into a couple of public housing projects by Groupe Structures, the largest architectural firm in the country in the postwar period. As it will be argued, the stylistic and typological evolution of these schemes reveals the growing impact of a ‘productivist ideology’ on public housing in the 1950s. Paralyzed by the steeply rising building costs, the central buzzwords became standardization, industrialization and prefabrication. However, as the paper argues, the productivity doctrine failed to live up to its expectations as the sector’s turnover remained too marginal to put sufficient pressure on the construction industry.
From acceptera to Vällingby: The Discourse on Individuality and Community in Sweden (1931-54)
The Swedish suburb of Vällingby, completed in 1954, culminated an investigation into the housing problem which can be traced back to the functionalist manifesto acceptera of 1931, where the issue of finding a ‘Middle Way’ between the individual and the mass, the personal and the universal was presented as being as central to the project of modern architecture as it was to Social Democracy as a whole. The ebb and flow of discourse on housing and policy during the 30s and early 40s engaged directly with the binary of private individualism/public collectivism, drawing on the thinking of figures such as Ellen Key, Torgny T. Segerstedt and Lewis Mumford to arrive at neighbourhood planning as a suitable foil to both the laissez-faire of the capitalist system and the monotonous and alienating results of early attempts at mass social housing. While Vällingby provided improved dwellings and amenity, setting new standards in terms of efficiency, economy and convenience, these very qualities, it is suggested in conclusion, also mask the ‘unfreedoms’ of the modern welfare state, which in the case of Vällingby might be seen as the Social Democratic bias towards a ‘group society’ at the expense of true self-determination.
‘Obama, Please Tax Me!’: Architecture and the Politics of Redistribution
This issue of Footprint is based on the conference session ‘The European Welfare State Project – Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings’ as organized by the editors at the first EAHN Conference in Guimarães, Portugal in 2010, and as elaborated in the second EAHN Conference in Brussels, Belgium in 2012 (together with Mark Swenarton). These sessions were proposed as part of the research programme ‘Changing Ideals – Shifting Realities’ at the TU Delft, which aims to further disclose, map and question the architectural culture of the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on how the welfare state in Western Europe represents a unique time frame in which manifold shifts within the modernist discourse in architecture and planning were paired with societal changes that established new assemblages between producers, designers, governments, clients, builders and users. It is part of the editors’ assumption that the current crisis of capitalism puts the politics of redistribution back on the agenda. In re-investigating the vast legacy of the welfare state, it seems only natural to look for new models for collectivity, not to dwell in nostalgia, but indeed to find alternatives to suit the new situation. At the intersections of building practice, architectural viewpoints, national and local cultural contexts, a nuanced image of welfare state architecture emerges.
The article reviews the exhibition Dreamlands, staged in Centre Pompidou, Paris in summer 2010. The exhibition's main theme is described as urban 'utopia of fun'. In relation to this utopia, the article suggests a field of contradictory positions within which the presented exhibits can be distributed. Curating of the exhibition is discussed in the next step. The inability to bring forward and map these contradictory positions is analysed as a main shortcoming of the exhibition.
If We Are, Indeed, All ‘Embedded’, Then What to Do Next? A Review of BAVO’s Too Active to Act
This article reviews BAVO’s recent publication, Too Active to Act, Cultureel Activisme na het Einde van de Geschiedenis, which forms a critical analysis of cultural production and activism in The Netherlands. This publication is then used as an occasion to question, in more general terms, the possibility of a form of social engagement that is situated and embedded in the real, that is within the system [rather than processed through theory, ideology or oppositional critique]. It argues that, in order to address this question, one needs not just to question what practice can or should do (in order to guarantee criticality, for example), but one also needs to revise the meaning of being ‘marginal’ once we are within the system, and the role of theory in the ‘anti-theory setting’ described by BAVO.
She Said, He Said: Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton on Popular Taste
During the post-war period, the nature of ‘the people’ and popular culture was a matter of intense interest to the disciplines of architecture and urban design. These issues stand behind a debate between Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton in the December 1971 issue of Casabella. The disagreement between Frampton and Scott Brown concerns three issues: the nature of ‘the people’, the character of popular culture, and the role of architects in relation to popular culture. Underlying this last issue is the question of popular taste: whether a debased devolution from that of the educated and cultured classes, or an embodiment of its own intrinsic principles. Scott Brown defines the people in terms of a set of ‘subcultures’, diverse groups of persons with relatively uniform sets of behaviours, values, attitudes, and preferences, coexisting together in society. She terms the emerging post-war urban environments ‘the popular landscape’ and claims that the symbolic additions made to homes constitute a source of information about popular values, attitudes, and preferences. Frampton refers to the people in terms such as ‘the constrained masses’, popular culture as ‘engineered fantasies of mass taste’, and the urban landscape as ‘the alienated environment’ of ‘deculturated forms’, a ‘repressed consensus’ of ‘mid-cult kitsch’. The two also disagree about the role of the architect; Frampton is concerned about the loss of a connection of form to content and the reinforcement of alienation and conformity involved in the contemporary approaches to urban design; Scott Brown recommends helping ‘the people’ to ‘live in houses and cities the way they want to live’.
Discotheques, Magazines and Plexiglas: Superstudio and the Architecture of Mass Culture
This article considers the groundbreaking works of the Italian Radical Architecture collective Superstudio (active 1966–80) with an eye to their complex and contradictory relationship to popular culture. Superstudio’s early pronouncements stating their abstention from building presaged their decision to investigate the radical potential of different non-tectonic mediums culled from consumer culture. Initially, the group embraced popular culture and mass-production for their ability to challenge the hidebound discipline of architecture, leading them to produce an assortment of interior furnishings designed to activate consumers to alter their own living spaces. Later, the group abandoned these pursuits in favour of utopian ‘paper architecture’ projects, simultaneously rejecting the reified consumer object while relying entirely on the magazine as a formal support, a medium fully ingrained in the world of consumerism. Eventually, Superstudio proposed a ‘world without objects’ in which the individual would have a more direct relationship to everyday life by pursuing nomadism and plugging into a networked grid covering the Earth’s surface. Once again, such projects were beholden to advanced information technologies spawned by late capitalism. Studying the neo-avant-garde gambits of Superstudio, therefore, allows us to understand the contradictions inherent in any attempt to contend with popular culture in all its paradoxical forms.
Between Populism and Dogma: Álvaro Siza’s Third Way
In the early 1980s, Kenneth Frampton presented critical regionalism as an umbrella concept to frame some peripheral architectural practices that became instrumental to illustrate an alternative approach both to the modernist dogma and to post-modernist reactions. The architecture of Álvaro Siza was one of those marginal practices frequently used to illustrate that alternative position. In this paper I will bring together critical regionalism and its critique to explore the possibility of its role as a mediator between dogmatic applications of the modern canon and populism. Critical regionalism will be discussed within the broader frame of the redefinition of hegemonic relationships, especially postcolonial critique, and the relation centre-periphery. Using Siza’s project for the Malagueira neighbourhood in Évora (Portugal) as support, I will argue that the architect’s approach created a third way between populism and avant-garde, and represents a re-foundation of the avant-garde, where the gap between high culture and the everyday is shortened, through the use of a mediation strategy supported by the architectural project.
Superstudio 1966-1973: From the World Without Objects to the Universal Grid
The Italian group of architects Superstudio entered the architectural scene in 1966 with the exhibition Superarchitecture, an ironical commentary on cornucopia and the consumption of design objects. Between that show and the publication of a serial project called Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death in 1973, they developed a thorough critique of design and the professional role of architects in information society. This essay traces the development of Superstudio’s critical project, the evolution of their formal repertoire and their operative instruments, studying their designs, projects and texts.
Avant-Garde, Aestheticization and the Economy
It would very much seem as though the avant-garde in post-war Germany had initially lost sight of the previously politically grounded programmatic narratives. Moreover, it seemed quite obsolete to insist on the destruction of the affirmative. After all, had it not been the Nazis who had pursued such destruction far more successfully than the avant-gardes before them, albeit with completely opposite goals in mind? For this reason, it seemed so compelling to regard the restoration of the avant-garde via the renewed recourse to the autonomy of art as an expression of an anti-fascist stance. The linkage of emancipation of individual subjectivity and radical social change called for by the avant-gardes now collapses once again. In the years that followed, the conservative cultural position repeatedly turned on attempts to closely link aesthetic innovation with social change. This taming of a recalcitrant art was followed in the early 1970s, after a brief intermezzo at the end of the 1960s, by talk of the failure of the avant-garde, before being subjected to outrageous defamation ten years later (particularly in architecture). The question of whether today the universalization of the aesthetic has indirectly realized the hopes of the avant-gardes of an aesthetics of and in lived practice, will be the subject of my remarks.
Defying the Avant-Garde Logic: Architecture, Populism, and Mass Culture
As an introduction to this issue of Footprint, which is dedicated to questions pertaining to the role, perception and valuation of mass culture and populism within the twentieth century, avant-garde discourse, this text presents a tentative framework that contextualizes and elaborates the questions at hand. It argues that the specific negotiation in the late twentieth century between the architecture discipline and the phenomenon of the consumer society, and especially mass media technologies, introduced a new, hybrid, and at times contradictory disciplinary discourse and practice, which defies the historic avant-garde logic as described by Peter Bürger. The editors argue that the re-investigations of the late twentieth century avant-garde vis-à-vis mass culture lead to a better understanding of the challenges contemporary architecture faces.
Drawing as Epistemic Practice in Architectural Design
The essay deals with drawing as a genuine form of knowledge in architectural design. Drawing is described as an epistemic practice enmeshed with historically changing, material spaces of knowledge. Starting with a brief examination of historic philosophical positions on the epistemicity of drawing, the essay tries to sketch out a tentative heuristic of the epistemic features of drawing from the perspective of symbol and media theory. In the last part, with reference to Nelson Goodman’s distinction between analogue and digital symbol systems, the digitalization of drawing is critically reviewed. The main point is to emphasize that the transformation of drawing into digital drawing formats always consist of a translation. It is crucial to take the challenges stemming from the indeterminacy of translation (W.v.O. Quine) into consideration in order to understand both the epistemic restrictions and the potentials of drawing under the conditions of the rising digital habitat.
The Woof and the Warp of Architecture: The Figure-Ground in Urban Design
To borrow a metaphor used by Georg W.F. Hegel in the Philosophy of History to describe historical processes, architecture should be understood as a series of complex threads wherein one recognizes the physical forms as the warp, and the temporal, socio-political, natural, and aural contexts as the woof. Fabric is asserted as a concept broader than the immediate spatial and physical situation in which individual buildings are located; and, the threads of the fabric are all of those elements that aid in making the built environment both a designed and lived experience. In order to discuss this proposed understanding of fabric, this paper will look at how drawings informed the process and theory of urban design in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The discussion will focus on the origins of the Nolli plan and its 'rediscovery' by the Cornell School and their use of the figure-ground as a primary tool in the formulation of an urban design theory. The trajectory of the figure-ground can reinvigorate contemporary urban design praxis once more by reasserting drawing as more than mere illustration but as a means to conceptualize design methodologies that support a holistic notion of fabric.
Architects increasingly favour mapping as a means of documentation. Through maps, they question and define the boundaries of their architectural intervention, the premise being that if they can adequately delaminate and map the site's found conditions, they may achieve a more complex understanding of the said site. If maps can successfully represent sets of complex interactions in an effective manner, they also have an objectifying tendency and are often criticized for being tools of domination as well for their propensity to stabilize space-time. Further, architectural mapping is often associated with the possibility to index the 'designer's syntactical code', a possibility coupled with the idea that 'none of the notations take precedence over any other', so as to encourage 'more plural, open-ended "performances" of the project-in-time'. These positions involve if not a pure scientific objectivity, at least the assumption that one may somehow sidestep the projection of the author's intentionality. Bringing these issues to light, the paper explores whether mapping could address temporality with an assumed depth that would re-responsibilize the architect mapmaker while still remaining open to the users' multiple readings in time. Our contention is that rather than relying on rules, syntax and sequences of transformations, architects may approach mapping as a creative act that is open to different temporalities, involving both a willingness to listen and a readiness to act, allowing stories to emerge all the while stepping up as the narrator. Focusing on the phenomenological dimension of drawing and the epistemological bearings of mapping, the paper reveals some of the ways in which architects can question the relation between architecture and time through their graphic representation.
Bernard Tschumi’s delineation prepared for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea provides the starting point for this essay, which discusses the historicity of drawing and highlights the horizontality and the verticality that structure architecture’s contrast with the pictorial realm. Juxtaposing a freehand sketch with the digital image of the same project, Tschumi moves to address the paradox concerning the position of the body and drawing. This drawing also speaks for the reversal in the position of the body brought about by digital reproductivity. The reversal alludes to Tschumi’s theorization of architecture in terms of space and event. These, I will argue, are anticipated in The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) where a set of freehand drawings is used to evoke a filmic mood wherein the image is projected parallel to the spectator’s seated position. The essay goes further, suggesting that the theatricality permeating the present architecture is part of the shift from horizontality to the painterly, and yet the phenomenon is not merely a technical issue. Rather, it alludes to architecture’s dialogical rapport with painting at work since the Renaissance.
The Body Drawn Between Knowledge and Desire
The architectural drawing brings together two aspects of architecture’s inescapable relationship with the human body: knowledge and desire. When Adolf Loos designed the never built Josephine Baker House (1928), his drawings mobilized and transmitted knowledge of the human body in general. At the same time, Loos deployed architectural means to express desire for the dancer’s body. The sections and plans suggest that the Viennese architect imagined Baker swimming in a pool whose submerged walls include large windows looking into the watery stage, enveloping the dancer’s body while putting it on display for guests. Considered more generally, the architectural drawing always contains these two bodily moments, insofar as it describes proposals that give form to the lived world. This dynamic couple in the drawing corresponds to the difference between touching the body and grasping it; between an architect pursuing the desire to affect others through their senses and an architectural discipline extending its knowledge of human existence. This article considers relevant aspects in the writings of Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, William T. Mitchell, and Jean-Luc Nancy to develop a theoretical basis for understanding the tensions and alliances at play when architecture draws the body between knowledge and desire.
Nowadays, drawing practices seem to operate in a rather uncertain field that is typical of an in-between phase of disciplinary development and that needs to be addressed, if an ‘anticipated projection’ of the development of drawing is to be attempted. The field of drawing, as practice and discourse, seems to have entered an end-condition, where the celebration of the extensive production of drawings is combined with a certain fatigue in both its understanding and reflection. Even though the role of drawing is nowadays still regarded as the most common act of architecture, this understanding of drawing is hardly subject to critical inquiries, and, unfortunately, mostly limited to its instrumental role within the representation of the project. A common characteristic in all of the papers in this issue of Footprint is that a specific character of the theoretical field generated by drawing is the elaboration of the correlation between two epistemic regions. This singular character probably belongs to drawing’s structural duality of being simultaneously a simulacrum of a reality and reality itself, memory and anticipation, subject and object, by being in essence the measure of two different facets inherent to architectural thinking. Drawing not only gives consistency to the poles, rendering them architectural matter, but also literally (re)constructs them. At the same time, drawing formalizes the theoretical distance between the two.
Mediated Windows: The Use of Framing and Transparency in Designing for Presence
This paper explores the fusion of architecture and media technology that facilitates collaborative practices across spatial extensions: video-mediated spaces. The example presented is a mediated extension of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm to a neighbouring park area and archaeological excavation site in 2008, referred to as a mediated window, or a glass-door. The concepts framing and transparency are used to outline the significance of windows and glazing in architecture and art. The author then considers the potential contribution of architecture in representing the passage from indoors to outdoors and designing for presence. Presence design assumes a contribution from architects to presence research, a currently diversified field, spanning media-space research, cognitive science, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work, but in which architecture and artistic practices are less represented. The paper thereby addresses the potential of an extended architectural practice, which incorporates the design of mediated spaces, and outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary practice in which presence research meets architectural design, and spatial and aesthetic conceptual tools, derived from related visual practices, may be productively applied.
Modulating Territories, Penetrating Boundaries
Drawing boundaries, defining territories: these are terms one could use to describe the activity of an architect. Architects can create constraints through the use of designed elements that help determine the flow of movement, perception, and usage of space. Boundaries imply the absence of flow, territories control the freedom of movement, and both imply a predetermined constraint. Conventionally a territory is conceived of as being fairly static, or at least moving slowly, on a historical scale through time. However, when the spaces in and around the building body can be programmed and driven, time-based morphology becomes a subject for architectural design. Research at the Hyperbody group at Delft Technical University addresses the development of architecture in terms of changing paradigms indicated by new technology and dynamic forms through prototypes and experiments. Projects such as the InteractiveWall are driven by the advancements in cross-disciplinary technical possibilities, and inspired by profound and ongoing cultural changes reflected in the dynamic dissemination of knowledge and information in our daily lives.
Kinetic Digitally-Driven Architectural Structures as ‘Marginal’ Objects – a Conceptual Framework
Although the most important reasons for designing digitally-driven kinetic architectural structures seem to be practical ones, namely functional flexibility and adaptation to changing conditions and needs, this paper argues that there is possibly an additional socio-cultural aspect driving their design and construction. Through this argument, the paper attempts to debate their status and question their concepts and practices. Looking at the design explorations and discourses of real or visionary technologically-augmented architecture since the 1960s, one cannot fail to notice the use of biological metaphors and concepts to describe them – an attempt to ‘naturalise’ them which culminates today in the conception of kinetic structures and intelligent environments as literally ‘alive’. Examining these attitudes in contemporary examples, the paper demonstrates that digitally-driven kinetic structures can be conceived as artificial ‘living’ machines that undermine the boundary between the natural and the artificial. It argues that by ‘humanising’ these structures, attributing biological characteristics such as self-initiated motion, intelligence and reactivity, their designers are ‘trying’ to subvert and blur the human-machine (-architecture) discontinuity. The argument is developed by building a conceptual framework which is based on evidence from the social studies of science and technology, in particular their critique in modern nature-culture and human-machine distinctions, as well as the history and theory of artificial life which discuss the cultural significance and sociology of ‘living’ objects. In particular, the paper looks into the techno-scientific discourses and practices which, since the 18th century, have been exploring the creation of ‘marginal’ objects, i.e. seemingly alive objects made to challenge the nature-artifice boundary.
Indeterminate Architecture: Scissor-Pair Transformable Structures
Most traditional approaches to architectural design assume that the analysis of present situations and the prediction of future ones will offer unique answers that would ultimately define correct and unique architectural solutions. However, this approach is based on two questionable believes: First, that present situations are representative of a reality to be produced in the future, and, second, that these situations are fixed and invariable throughout time. The vision here is that an alternative approach is needed: a method that assumes and uses the uncertainties about present and future situations through the design of indeterminate solutions. Instead of analysing present and predicting future situations, designers should envision transformable environments able to offer a range of alternatives to be defined and redefined by the users in real-time – an indeterminate architecture, sympathetic to uncertainty, incompleteness and emergent situations that can neither be analysed nor predicted beforehand. This paper addresses the design of an indeterminate architecture, through proposing two main directions: Designing the Range and Enabling the Choice. While the former refers to transformable solutions able to offer a variety of states, the later refers to the selection of states by the user, within that range according to chance and emergent situations. The structure of this paper is organised around these two ideas by presenting an architectural background, some technical methods, and an empirical experiment. While the theoretical background investigates the original ideas and project about indeterminacy within an architectural framework, the technical methods analyse the range of states within the transformation of scissor-pair transformable structures, and study the real-time control and interaction within artificial intelligence (AI) robotic solutions. The empirical experiment uses the architectural background and the technical methods to materialise and radicalise indeterminacy by proposing a novel scissor-pair transformable solution.
Catching up with the Past: A Small Contribution to a Long History of Interactive Environments
This paper documents the evolution of my thinking in the area of interactive architecture over the past 15 years with students and my office. The work is framed within an overview of a long history of work in the area by others. My personal development has taken a number of clear steps in a relatively logical progression. In summary, the work began with kinetics as a means to facilitate adaptation. Work in this area led to integrating computation as a means of controlling the kinetics. The combination of these two areas led to the use of discrete mechanical assemblies as a systems approach to interaction design, which led to the thinking of control as bottom-up and emergent. Consequently I became fascinated with modular autonomous robotics and the notion that actual architectural space could be made of such systems. This in turn led to the exploration of biomimetics in terms of the processes, which eventually led to the idea that the parts in a system should get smaller to the point that they make up the matter itself. The paper concludes with an explanation of how technical advancements in manufacturing, fabrication and computational control will continue to expand the parameters of what is possible in robotics, and consequently influence the scale by which we understand and construct our environments. The future of interactive environments will most certainly involve re-examining the scale by which things operate to the extent that much of the operations happen within the materials themselves. This scaling down is beginning to force a reinterpretation of the mechanical paradigm of adaptation.
The shift from mechanical to digital forces architects to reposition themselves: Architects generate digital information, which can be used not only in designing and fabricating building components but also in embedding behaviours into buildings. This implies that, similar to the way that industrial design and fabrication with its concepts of standardisation and serial production influenced modernist architecture, digital design and fabrication influences contemporary architecture. While standardisation focused on processes of rationalisation of form, mass-customisation as a new paradigm that replaces mass-production, addresses non-standard, complex, and flexible designs. Furthermore, knowledge about the designed object can be encoded in digital data pertaining not just to the geometry of a design but also to its physical or other behaviours within an environment. Digitally-driven architecture implies, therefore, not only digitally-designed and fabricated architecture, it also implies architecture – built form – that can be controlled, actuated, and animated by digital means. In this context, this sixth Footprint issue examines the influence of digital means as pragmatic and conceptual instruments for actuating architecture. The focus is not so much on computer-based systems for the development of architectural designs, but on architecture incorporating digital control, sens­ing, actuating, or other mechanisms that enable buildings to inter­act with their users and surroundings in real time in the real world through physical or sensory change and variation.
Interpreting the Contemporary Metropolis: Notes on the Urban Debate and on Ignasi Solà-Morales
The theory of urbanism faces the difficult task of struggling to make acknowledgeable the complexity of the metropolitan form. In this sense, the legacy of the recently diseased history researcher and architecture theorist Ignási Sola-Morales arises as a sharp, generous and open perspective. Besides an apparent sense of enigma, his work has the genuine capacity of describing the cartography the metropolis and its form in its contemporary complexity. Being a teacher at the COAC (Cataluña’s college of architects) allowed him to draw one of the most remarkable and sharp theoretical cartographies of the contemporaneous condition of the metropolitan architecture. A complex line of thought towards architecture being born from a cross from artistic and philosophical ideas, capable of causing breaches on the architectural culture. His writings correspond, in a certain way, to a selection of “categories” on which to lay the provisory interpretations of a contemporary metropolis and its form that is, in his own words, multiple, non convergent and of an instable shape arising from the crystallization of various forces. From all that, the outcome is a complex system united, as far as I’m concerned, by the permanent generosity of proposing to romantically rise above the bizarreness of a late-capitalism, post-historical world. In this paper we intend to show how the work of Ignási Sola Morales presents, in a generous, sharp and open way besides all the apparent enigma, the genuine capacity of cartographing the city and its form in all its contemporaneous complexity.
The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis
In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition. In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries – in the 18th century as well as in the 21st – in favour of an architecture of change.
Polycentric Metropolitan Form: Application of a ‘Northern’ Concept in Latin America
Since the mid 20th century, large urban areas in advanced economies have experienced a fundamental transformation from relatively compact monocentric cities towards more extended polycentric metropolitan areas. By now, it is being commented repeatedly, but not investigated systematically that the concept of polycentricity is also adequate to characterise recent metropolitan dynamics in Latin-America. This paper aims to present a few key-issues for a future research agenda into polycentricity in Latin-American metropolitan areas. These elements are identified from a review of existing literature. Since no clear-cut definition and operationalisation of polycentricity exist yet, we distinguish some key-elements of this phenomenon in North America as a frame of reference for this review. It reveals that ‘polycentricity U.S. style’ is at best dawning in Latin-America. In order to achieve a more appropriate picture of polycentricity of Latin American metropolitan areas, our ideas for a research agenda take into account these areas typical economic, social and spatial conditions.
Peripheral Cluster versus New Town: A Comparative Study on Two Types of Peripheral Developments in the Beijing Metropolitan Region
Spatial decentralisation has been a planning goal for Beijing city since 1950s. It had not been fully activated until the mid-1990s, when the suburbanisation process started to accelerate rapidly. Under the influence of joint forces of top-down intervention and market-driven development, several large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns have been built in both near and far suburbs. However, the spatial structure of the city remains to be rather mono-centric, which causes severe urban and environmental problems. In the latest Beijing Master Plan, the metropolitan region is considered as a whole. A polycentric spatial structure is proposed with the aim to consolidate the existing regional centralities as stronger counter-weights to central city. The aim of this paper is to investigate the spatial social and economic conditions of the existing large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, in order to give concrete spatial recommendations for future transformation of Beijing metropolitan region. The paper is organized as follows. The first part presents a review of morphological transformation process of Beijing metropolis since 1950s till now. Then in-depth analysis and comparative study will be given to two representative cases of – Tiantongyuan and Tonzhou – peripheral residential district and satellite town. Finally useful lessons and spatial recommendations for realizing poly-nuclear regional structure will be elaborated.
Movement Technologies, Scale Structure and Metropolitan Life – an Empirical Research on the Effects of the Transportation System on the Metropolitan Process in Beijing
This paper is a morphological study on Beijing’s metropolitanisation process based on the development of its transportation networks. By extracting the ‘scale structure’ embedded in them, we construct a movement network model for Beijing and use it to analyse changing metropolitan centralities as shopping areas and market places in 1924, 1987 and 2006. Following Taylor’s proposal of Central Flow as a complementary model to Central Place, our study focuses on how the spatial distribution of metropolitan centralities has been affected by the rapid modernisation of transportation networks.
When the city disintegrates into an archipelago of fragments a new role is imposed on the landscape as a carrier of topographical characterizations, cohesion and continuity. Patterns such as transportation corridors, settlement areas and landscape voids can be regarded as latent macro-landscape forms of the metropolitan territory. In the staging of the metropolis these forms need to be embedded in a compositional structure that addresses fragmentation and disorientation, without relapsing into utopian forms of the traditional city that have proven inadequate for the metropolitan condition. The potential basis to inform this structure is the landscape itself: permanent, neutral and ubiquitous. The underlying landscape also contains an annotated catalogue of situations, in which the genius loci is recorded and secured. These latent compositional elements are transformed into landscape architectural ‘narratives’ within the topography of the emerging metropolis. The enlargement and distortion of specific topographies result in a field of new topologies, drawn from the genius loci and from local cultures and customs. The question is not so much if metropolitan form is determined by landscape, but how we can use it to structure and give meaning to dispersed territories. This involves a delicate choreography of macro-landscape forms and the micro-topography of landscape places.
Changing Perspectives on the Planning of Ankara (1924-2007) and Lessons for a New Master-Planning Approach to Developing Cities
As one of the newly planned capitals in the 20th century – like Islamabad, Canberra and Brazil –, Ankara represents an original case in planning history: from shaping a new town under the influence of early European urbanism to the control of a dynamic metropolitan form by structural planning approaches. Forming its urban core according to the initial planning perspectives between the beginning of 1930s and the mid-1970s, the city has entered a rapid phase of space production in its extensions for about the last thirty years. In the current period of development, highly fragmented urban peripheral formation has being occurred in Ankara. Since the existing trend on the dispersion of urban form lacking spatial coherence at different scale-levels causes the dominance of the private domain and a loss of urbanity, this trend might at first glance be considered as a break with the European tradition and the emergence of Anglo-Americanization in Turkish planning system in terms of looser development control approach on urban form. Before, coming to such a critical end-point, the paper prefers a closer look into the changing dynamics of master plans of the city. It is aimed to reveal the developmental logic of the city by means of master plan analysis. The comprehensive outlook – called plan matrix – is integrated into each master plan schema by correlating the basic components like main policy directions, depth of control, settlement typology, and city structure and form. Such a framework has a potential to be utilized for any kind of plan analysis at metropolitan scale for different cases. At the end of the analysis, the paper tends to address an alternative master planning approach for the similar types of developing cities striving for keeping its urban character within a fragmented urban body.
Another Form: From the ‘Informational’ to the ‘Infrastructural’ City
The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different things to different people on the other. So to speak of its form has never been straightforward. In the last fifty years the city has become enmeshed in momentous processes transforming our societies and our senses of our place in the world. We have seen urban places become drawn into ever more integrated circuits with other places across the boundaries of nations and continents. This leaves us with question marks about the places we inhabit today and has generated problems of place and coherence in the contemporary city. Without offering solutions to problems of sprawl and fragmentation, I propose here a way of understanding the city and its growth as ordered. To do this I extend Castells’s idea of the ‘technological paradigm’ to spaces of places as well as those of flows and outline an urban form comprising limited technical systems, both high and low tech, establishing coherent and bounded infrastructures of objects, subjects and practices. These infrastructures are internally ordered as total technical systems or paradigms while they are also externally related to other infrastructures in backward and forward articulations that are capable of being generative and place-forming. I argue that we need to understand complex processes of boundary and centre formation in these articulations and use this knowledge to deliver a ‘dappled world’ of varying niches or inhabitable places from the very large to the very small. We need to find alternatives to the macrophysics and smooth pervasive power of the space of flows by maintaining, inventing and reinventing microphysical architectures of enabling places offering us multiple ways of being and living in our contemporary city.
The Question of Metropolitan Form: Introduction
Posing the concept of ‘metropolitan form’ as a question, as in the call for papers for this issue of Footprint, is an absolute necessity at this stage of development of urbanised areas. Many of the papers in this issue begin with the straw-man notion of a formless agglomeration of activities and spaces, the – for lack of a better phrase – postmodern urban experience.[1] There is a persistent theme in the related literatures of architecture, urban design and urban and regional planning that the physical form of the contemporary metropolis is un-describable. Soja’s six metaphors (post-Fordist industrial, cosmopolis, expolis, fractal city, carceral archipelago, simcities) are being indicative of the wide range of possible images.[2] The eight papers in this issue of Footprint take an opposite approach. They begin to trace the contours of the debate around how the noun ‘metropolitan form’ might be understood, how it might be studied, and how it might be possible to move from an empirical understanding of its structure to more intuitive design solutions.
Sometime in the 1990s architecture historians shifted their attention from buildings to publications, exhibitions, films and photographs produced by architects. This shift is related to the more general transformation in which ‘society’ has been substituted by ‘culture’. More than any other work it is Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity that has come to represent this growing interest of architecture historians. The following review article closely studies the arguments and methodologies at the centre of Privacy and Publicity as a means of delineating the idealism that is the subtext of this shift.
Whatever Happened to Projective Architecture? Rethinking the Expertise of the Architect
This review article takes the discussion of ‘projective’ architecture as its starting point, and proposes that this recent debate may still be worthwhile to rethink the relationship between practice and theory in architecture. The spirit of ‘projective’ architecture suggests that we rethink how architecture ‘works’. This would entail understanding the reconfigured relation between political/societal and aesthetic/cultural engagement. Drawing from the ideas in the American debate on the ‘projective’ and the recent work of Richard Sennett on ‘craft’, this article puts forward the position that the notion of the ‘projective’ can extend the insights of critical theory towards a more fruitful dialogue with the everyday practice of architecture.
This article offers a critical review of the conference AGENCY (November 2008), written by ‘The Agency’, a research group based in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, where the conference was held. It was hoped that the submissions to the conference would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. The article sets out some of the questions that were explicitly posed, or that were implicit within, or anticipated in response to these relationships. The broad themes of discourse regarding agency from the conference are summarised in the context both of these questions, and of other themes that emerged from the papers presented: urban agencies, pedagogical agencies, social and technological agencies, sustainability, ecology, ethical, and aesthetic agencies. Alongside this strand of academic presentation and reflection, the article also discusses the conference itself as an event through and within which agency was encouraged. It raises the profile of numerous ‘fringe events’, including seminars and workshops, exhibitions, book launches and social gatherings, that were explicitly organised to extend the potential involvement of other audiences, and the dynamics of other discourses. The differences between this approach and conventional academic conferences are considered, particularly the extent to which each can involve and inform practice in the studio, and the benefits and drawbacks reflected upon. All of these influence the potential agency of architecture practitioners, educators and researchers, and will inform the future activities of ‘The Agency’ group.
Beyond Discourse: Notes on Spatial Agency
This article investigates the word ‘agency’ in relation to the role, responsibility and power of the architect. Using Anthony Giddens’s formulation of agency, we discuss the transformative potential of architecture where the lack of a predetermined future is seen as an opportunity and not a threat. Four episodes describe related instances of architectural practice as spatial agency: muf, OSA, Santiago Cirugeda and The New Architecture Movement. The paper concludes with an urgent call for architects to face up to their political and environmental responsibilities.
Theatrical Tectonics: The Mediating Agent for a Contesting Practice
This paper posits the idea that the theme of agency in architecture is parallactic. It discusses the tectonic as an agent through which architecture turns into a state of constant flux. The intention is to promote a discourse of criticality, the thematic of which is drawn from the symptoms that galvanise architecture’s rapport with the image-laden culture of late capitalism. In an attempt to log the thematic of a contested practice, this essay will re-map the recent history of contemporary architecture. Exploring New Brutalism’s criticism of the established ethos of International Style architecture, the first part of this paper will highlight the movement’s tendency towards replacing the painterly with the sculptural, and this in reference to the contemporary interest in monolithic architecture. Having established the import of tectonics for the architecture of Brutalism, the paper then argues that in the present situation, when architecture – like other cultural products – is infatuated with the spectacle of late capitalism, a re-thinking of the Semperian notion of theatricality is useful. Of interest in the tectonic of theatricality is the work’s capacity to bring forth the division between intellectual and physical labours, and this in reference to architecture’s reserved acceptance of technification for which the aforementioned division is vital. Particular attention will be given to two projects, Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Center and OMA’s Casa da Musica, where architectonic aspects of New Brutalism are revisited in the light of the tectonic of theatricality.
Notes on Post-criticality: Towards an Architecture of Reflexive Modernisation
Since around 2002, the performance of critical theory in architecture and the humanities has itself undergone a critical re-evaluation. Authors representing divergent perspectives, from theory’s perennial naysayers to the standard bearers of critical theory themselves, have converged towards a similar conclusion: judged by outcomes, critical theory has proven ineffective at best, and arguably, corrosive to human progress. In architecture, the debate has revolved around the identification of a ‘critical architecture’ in education and production since the 1970s. In apparent rejection of the isolation and purity of critical architecture’s orthodoxy, Rem Koolhaas and others have chosen engagement with the forces (and commissions) of late capitalism to which the term ‘post-criticality’ has been applied. Beyond the confining dichotomies of the post-criticality debate is a perspective offered by sociologists Ulrich Beck, Scott Lash and Anthony Giddens on what they have called a ‘second modernity’ or ‘reflexive modernisation’. This literature re-contextualises the modern-postmodern pairing within the larger trajectory of modernity and identifies a characteristic distinction from former modernities in the term ‘reflexivity’. Where high modernism pursued utopian ideals of pure form and functional simplicity, reflexive modernisation acknowledges contingency in human systems establishing feedback loops that trigger course corrections in the process of modernisation itself. Operating against the ossifications of twentieth-century modernity, reflexivity opens prospects for a second modernisation characterised by a heightened capacity to deal with complexity and time. Speculative architectures of reflexive modernisation benefit from a re-engagement in real-world problems, particularly at the scale of the city. To what extent can considerations of political economy, culture, globalisation, and environmental crisis be translated into the explicit performance criteria and computational parameters? What role is there for tools forged in the fires of ‘critical architecture’ in the emerging architectural creativity increasingly characterised by complexity, provisional outcomes, and unpredictable form?
The Art of Displacement: Designing Experiential Systems and Transverse Epistemologies as Conceptual Criticism
With architects and designers increasingly facing problems that are neither predictable nor simple but highly complex, a particular synthesis of design intelligence and creativity is required. If the art of being a professional is becoming ‘the art of managing complexity’, what are the ‘boundaries’ of professional practice? ‘Trans-disciplinarity’, for example, requires liminal or neither/nor thinking (thus ‘boundary concepts’ remain a core concern). A concern with boundaries and ‘edges’ implies in turn a concern with ‘relationality’ (i.e. how we establish relations, positions, borders between different disciplinary priorities and methods) and thence a problem that affects how we think of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, networks of various kinds, and trans-disciplinarity – that of ‘substance’, ‘content’ or ‘matter’. This paper subjects design research, theory and practice to transverse epistemologies, attempting a ‘flow of transformations’ via such themes as authorship, remediation, smuggling, disruptive innovation, performative knowledge, and gesture versus identity. It brings together an ars combinatoria of conceptual criticism, trans-disciplinary practice as ‘disruptive innovation’, Michael Speaks’s notion of ‘design intelligence’ and Margaret Boden’s three types of creativity – combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational – seeking thereby to suggest new structures that might yield ‘transdisciplines’. Departing from two separate points – Bruno Latour’s call for ‘earthly accounts of buildings and design processes’ and Jack Burnham’s identification of a paradigm shift from an ‘object-oriented’ to a ‘systems-oriented’ culture – the paper describes the formation of a new interdisciplinary practice, experience design (the design of meaningful experience across time), as a form of ‘epistemological Conceptualism’. This prioritises critical thinking and strategy, requiring designers, in the words of Ronald Jones, ‘capable of addressing cross-disciplinary problems by designing the social, political, economic and educational “systems” that give them greater reach, responsibility, influence and relevance’. Ultimately, therefore, any delirious promise of epistemological transformation must remain secondary to questions of ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’.
Vernacular Architecture as Self-Determination: Venturi, Scott Brown and the Controversy over Philadelphia's Crosstown Expressway, 1967-1973
Between 1967 and 1972 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown worked on two projects simultaneously. One culminated in Learning from Las Vegas, their renowned contribution to architectural theory; the other reflected their political engagement in the so-called Crosstown Controversy. In this project, Venturi and Scott Brown spoke on behalf of a citizens’ initiative opposing a proposed inner-city expressway in the South Street area of Philadelphia. The aesthetic criticism exemplified in their study of Las Vegas found parallels in the political critique embodied by the alternative scheme they developed for the Philadelphia citizen group. This scheme proposed to revalorise the vernacular architecture of the existing neighbourhood, against the wholesale demolition implied in the official plans for the Crosstown Expressway. This article investigates the connections between aesthetic ideals and social concern in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown. Embedding the discussion on architectural theory in the concrete context of urban history reveals important links between intellectual discourse and political action. Venturi and Scott Brown’s repeated reference to social aspects of architecture can only be understood, so this article demonstrates, if we analyse the concrete engagements in which they developed their projects. The South Street project offers a concrete occasion wherein the architects were forced to adopt a political position.
Autarky and Material Contingencies in Italian Architectural Debate (1936-1954)
On 3 October 1935, Mussolini’s fascist regime invaded Ethiopia with undesired but foreseeable consequences for its imperialist aims: four days after the conquest, the Society of Nations imposed economic sanctions, promoting an international economic blockade. This soon translated in both a control of foreign currencies in order to purchase iron and steel on the international markets, and a vociferous campaign discouraging the use of materials that were demanded by the military endeavour. Architecture as a discipline and all the industrial activity around it suffered from government directions as well as the scarcity and control of commodities. Hence, its discourse accommodated to the new material situation. National and autochthonous values came to the fore, promoting local materials like wood or stone for construction as well as artificial and newly created ones. By the end of the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s the dispute about available materials became one of the main concerns in Italian architecture. If during the immediate past the defence of modern materials was traditionally articulated around technical and social values, the battle in interwar Italy was understood in political and economic terms. After stigmatising modern materials such as iron and steel as ‘antinational’, the dispute between those who recognised in modern techniques a threat to traditional Italian architecture, and those embracing the formal and intellectual basis of the modern movement, became predominantly ideological and represented both sides of the political spectrum. This paper examines the way these interwar debates were shaped by economic policy, political ideology, and material scarcity, and in turn affected architectural production during Italy’s postwar reconstruction.
Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice
Whether critiquing the architect’s societal position and the role of the user, conceptualising the performative dimension of the architectural object, or considering the effects of theory for architecture at large, current debates in architecture intersect in the notion of agency. As fundamental as it is often taken for granted, this notion forms the keystone of this issue, inviting contributors to rethink architecture’s specificity, its performance, and its social and political relevance. Agency in architecture inevitably entails questioning the relation between theory and practice, and what it might mean to be critical – both inside and outside architecture – today. The main proposal is to rethink contemporary criticality in architecture, by explicating the notion of agency in three major directions: first, ‘the agency of what?’ or the question of multiplicity and relationality; second, ‘how does it work?’, a question referring to location, mode and vehicle; and third, ‘to what effect?’, bringing up the notion of intentionality.
Agency and Architecture: How to Be Critical? (Scott Lash and Antoine Picon, in conversation with Kenny Cupers and Isabelle Doucet. Comments by Margaret Crawford)
Agency is a notion that brings together a variety of concerns that currently echo in diverse segments of the architectural debate. This article, in the form of a conversation, addresses this multifarious notion and attempts to bring to the fore points of intersection between agency-related concerns too often perceived as disconnected. The article has been assembled out of separate interviews with three prominent scholars who have, from different fields, made particular contributions to this theme: Antoine Picon, historian of architecture and technology; Scott Lash, professor of sociology and cultural studies; and Margaret Crawford, professor in architecture and urban studies. This conversation interrogates agency theoretically, and does so through three major questions. One question relates to agency’s binary coupling with structure, perhaps one of the most central concepts in the understanding of modern society. Secondly, because agency is intimately linked to the idea of ‘other’ possible actions and futures, it assumes intentionality and criticality, both of which resonate strongly in the architectural debate. Finally, in order to understand agency better within the specific context of architecture, the article addresses the condition of the architectural object and its relation to the individual and the social.
Between 1890 and 1898 Erik Satie lived at 6 rue Cortot: ‘in a wardrobe’. Satie was a collector […]. After his death his wardrobe was found to contain 84 handkerchiefs besides 12 identical velvet suits and dozens of umbrellas. Trois morceaux en forme de poire […] three pieces in the form of a pear. The title of a piano piece in seven parts by Erik Satie. Satie composed this piece in response to Debussy's criticism that his works lacked a 'sense of form'. What exactly did Debussy mean by this? Where and what actually was this scene of formlessness? The first part of the Paper will advance some possible reasoning behind Debussy's comments. Was Debussy questioning Satie's attitude to what Heidegger [in The Origin of the Work of Art] would term the 'thingly' element of the Work of Art, or more precisely – the relationship between 'things' and the 'thing in itself'? Heidegger's contemplation of 'Form' and his writings on 'tools', 'material' and 'art', and the section dealing with the Temple provides an interesting locus in which to discus Debussy's comments. The second section gives some ideas of how I reinterpreted this argument to produce a series of visual works inspired by another of Satie's works, Furniture Music – Musique d' ameublement, a piece of music that was not to be listened to. Milhaud later recounted: ‘It was no use Satie shouting: “Talk for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen!” They kept quiet. They listened. The whole thing went wrong.’
Architecture and Philosophy: Reflections on Arakawa and Gins
This essay is a critical review of a recent Arakawa and Gins conference – an event that brought phenomenology and architecture into productive dialog through the advancement of interdisciplinary inquiry into the subtle and complex ways that embodied activity structures cognition and perception. To provide the reader with sufficient context to appreciate the ensuing discussion of Arakawa and Gins’s concepts and hypotheses, we open with an overview of their previous collaborations. We then transition to analysis of a unique installation called 'Reading Room', and, immediately afterwards, provide exegetical commentary on select conference presentations. This commentary emphasizes phenomenological perspectives, especially ideas that Don Ihde and Shaun Gallagher conveyed. We conclude by outlining some of the most promising horizons of thought that the conference brought to our consideration.
The Heaven, the Earth and the Optic Array: Norberg Schulz’s Place Phenomenology and its Degree of Operationability
This contribution aims to present the core of Christian Norberg-Schultz' later work about place phenomenology and architectural existentialism, its strengths and weaknesses and challenges for improvement. Christian Norberg-Schultz's book Intentions in Architecture is probably his most internationally known publication. One of his books, unfortunately only published in Norwegian, with the title Mellom himmel og jord ('between heaven and earth'), presents a continuation of Intentions in Architecture. It gives a presentation of Norberg-Schultz' architectural existentialism and his theory on places. It is build further up on Heidegger's text 'Bauen Wohnen Denken'. This book presents the frame and core of Norberg-Schultz's work from his last 30 years. In order to reflect upon the degree of operationability of his place theory, examples from Dutch and the Norwegian built environments will be used throughout the article.
Temporal Architecture: Poetic Dwelling in Japanese buildings
Heidegger’s thinking about poetic dwelling and Derrida’s impressions of Freudian estrangement are employed to provide a constitutional analysis of the experience of Japanese architecture, in particular, the Japanese vestibule (genkan). This analysis is supplemented by writings by Japanese architects and poets. The principal elements of Japanese architecture are: (1) ma, and (2) en. Ma is usually translated as ‘interval’ because, like the English word, it applies to both space and time. However, in Japanese thinking, it is not so much an either/or, but rather a both/and. In other words, Japanese architecture emphasises the temporal aspect of dwelling in a way that Western architectural thinking usually does not. En means ‘joint, edge, the in-between’ as an ambiguous, often asymmetrical spanning of interior and exterior, rather than a demarcation of these regions. Both elements are aimed at producing an experience of temporality and transiency.
The paper uses Peirce’s notion of the index and Arendt’s conception of action and reification to cast light on a phenomenological consideration of architecture. The relation that Arendt establishes within a larger historical context between the contemporary reification of art and the socio-political role of action sets up a framework in which the need for a phenomenological approach to architecture is reasserted. In the past two hundred years, from the first age of historicism, marked by nineteenth-century historical relativism, to our second age of historicism, characterised by the recognition of relative historicity, there always were architects who sought the essence of architecture at a fundamentally human and experiential level. It is significant that in a period that wavered between eclectic relativism and rigid objectivism, a situation still felt today, the experience of architecture was consistently considered as an essential means to architecture. How does phenomenology operate beyond the categories of the objective and the relative, between the visible and the tangible? The paper explores ways in which architecture can physically question the user – is it a trace from the past, an imprint of its time, an index requiring movement for comprehension? Making space for the interpenetration of personal and shared times, the translation of the index in architecture does not dictate meaning or reduce it to an endless play between signifier and signified: it throws the question back to the level of the embodied encounter. Steering clear of a consideration of autonomous constructions, architecture is dynamically considered within a triadic relation that equally involves the architecture itself, the world in which it takes shape, and the people that experience it.
Placing the Fourfold: Topology as Environmental Design
In his later writing, Martin Heidegger outlines an existential structure called the fourfold, which is composed of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. Gathering the fourfold is the ‘thing’, which, by its ‘thinging’ makes manifest a world. This is the happening of ‘place’, and Heidegger’s descriptions of this happening offer a certain lyrical beauty, but are not particularly illuminating if left undigested. In order to get to the real wealth one must examine the phenomena suggested, moving beyond the intellect into the experiences themselves. In light of such reading, considering environmental issues – particularly the way we build– might suggest directions toward more responsive and attuned practices that both acknowledge and activate the nuances of place. Although Heidegger says at the beginning of his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” that he is not trying to ‘discover architectural ideas’ or develop ‘rules for building’, I still believe it is important to delve into this work with an eye toward architecture, as he lays out some beautiful and insightful ideas by which we might better assess our place in the environment. If we read Heidegger with the phenomena in mind, a richness emerges from the poetic quality of his writing that reflects the imbrication of time, culture, growth, human responsibility, and those things of significance within our world. My hope is that through such reading and thinking, possibilities might surface for designers to develop deeper phenomenological connections between building and place. In this way, Heidegger’s poetic descriptions of the thing and the fourfold can be a catalyst in shedding new light on the way we think about building with environments. This approach seeks to question the often myopic view of sustainability as technological upgrade and instrumental efficiency; for example, solar panels on a sweatshop would not demonstrate the depth of attunement that Heidegger’s writings endorse. In order to move beyond simply limiting ecological damage and maximising natural resources, it becomes important for mortals to create things that bring us together with the earth, sky, and divinities; and in so doing gather a place for a sustainable future.
You Are Not Here: Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the Architecture of Absence
This paper examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological ontology in relationship to experiences with architecture that account for absence. While interest in Sartre’s phenomenology has waned over the past thirty years, philosophers of art are revisiting his work, particularly the way imagination figures in his phenomenology. As educators, students, and practitioners who have the task of imagining what could be, Sartre’s grasp of the imagining consciousness in experience is especially relevant. His three main forms of the imagining consciousness – negation, nothingness, and being – are explored in the context space, place, and location. These forms of consciousness are drawn from his major phenomenological studies regarding the imagination, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943; 1956), The Imaginary (1940; 2004), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; 1976). Examples of absence include in-situ memorial structures that literally provide the space for negation, sites of religious veneration that render the place of nothingness, and spontaneous memorials that serve as the location for being (pour-soi, en-soi, and pour-autrui). Ultimately, Sartre’s phenomenological ontology reveals that imagination plays a vital role in understanding the experiential power of architecture in relationship to space, place, and location. In doing so, this paper also suggests that the imagining conscious itself may be an important part of an ontology of architecture.
In Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, a virtual explosion occured of thought, creativity and revolutionary energy. At the origins of phenomenology, Franz Brentano took inspiration from Aristotle's de Anima in order to provide the bridge between mental acts [psychisch] and sensible phenomena [physisch]; the link or relationship which he called intentional in-existence. Phenomenology would completely change the direction of how philosophy constituted its problems – the relation between the “physical” and the “psychic”, the inter-relatedness of all things, the relation of our body to space and time, as well as how phenomena “appear” to consciousness. This essay briefly sketches out this geneology, and explicates the importance of Brentano's thought on the issues of space-time-continuum.
This paper explores different perspectives on the concept of place. It deals with questions that arose from this subject during my practice as a visual art student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Accordingly this text can be read as a theoretical and literary inquiry, investigating those questions which I see myself confronted with in my artistic practice. It starts with an attempt to clarify ideas that have been formed by thought and theory until now about the content of this subject. Subsequently it has been my intention to introduce ideas about the impossibility and the desire of inhabiting an empty place, ideas about the role of invisibility and absence. For maybe the empty place resists any attempt to understand it, even the conception of it being a place, and becomes a dimension of absence.
Technicity and Publicness: Steps towards an Urban Space
Heidegger’s space, with its emphasis on the disclosure of entities in settings of mutually referring entities, and the integration of settings and action, requires us to think carefully about issues like the identities and being of people and things and their relations with each other in a realm of plurality. All entities are captured in webs of co-reference, which make their relations between themselves and to ourselves a very public matter. These webs themselves are at the same time the very channels by which we know and access all things, and relations of power become built into them which affect the ways we know things and the possibilities we see for acting. This paper explores and reviews issues of technicity, intersubjectivity, and plurality in relation to Heidegger’s thinking, in order to begin the process of outlining an urban space of the settings ‘between men’ for coherence and action, and to define a direction for further research on urban space and place.
Architecture and Phenomenology: Introduction
The implications of philosophical aesthetics in the consideration of architecture have been relatively slight. Part of the reason is the neglect of architecture in the work of Baumgarten, Burke and Kant. Within the discourse of architecture the questions raised for philosophical consideration arising out of practice restricted the area of reflection and investigation. The dominant positions were to become either a version of neo-Kantianism, or a direct re-working of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. The significance of Kant’s distinction between ‘free’ and ‘dependent beauty’ is analysed, and in consequence the need to philosophically question again the relation of architecture to buiding, to dwelling and space. For this the question of accessibility as raised in the phenomenological enquiry, in the work of Brentano, Sartre, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and especially Heidegger points to a different route for the appraisal of philosophical and architectural relations which are exhibited in the contributions of the 10 authors to this issue of Footprint.
The ‘Agency of Mapping’ in South Asia: Galle-Matara (Sri Lanka), Mumbai (India) and Khulna (Bangladesh)
The territories – cities and landscapes – of South Asia are under incredible transformation due to man-made and natural conditions. Globalisation is spatially leaving its imprint as cities and landscapes are progressively being built by an ever-more fragmented, piecemeal and ad-hoc project modus – funded by established and new-found fortunes of national and international developers and lenders, development aid projects and (often corrupt) governments. At the same time, ‘natural’ disasters are increasing in severity and frequency – due to climate change and the flagrant disregard of the environment in the relentless dive to impose imported terms of reference for modernisation and urbanisation. The challenges and strategic importance of realising urban design in South Asia’s contemporary context of borrowed visions, abstract land-use planning and a diminishing political will are, obviously, innumerable. How to qualitatively intervene as an urbanist in such a context? This paper will argue that an understanding of contexts, based on fieldwork, is necessary in order to project feasible urban visions and strategic urban design projects that can make more evident particular sites’ inherent qualities and creatively marry ecological, infrastructural, and urbanisation issues by solutions that cut across multiple scales and sectoral divisions. Interpretative mapping is a first step to transform a territory. An understanding of the context and the reading of sites are necessary in order to create modifications that have logic and relate to the particularities of places and situations. Three scales of mapping (territorial, urban, and tissue) will be presented. The territories/cities investigated are the southwest (Galle-Matara) coast of Sri Lanka, Mumbai, the economic engine of India, and Khulna, the third largest city in Bangladesh.
This paper explores the potential for using alternative forms of inscriptive practice to describe the urban space of the Tokyo Subway. I begin with an account of the process of getting lost in Shinjuku Subway Station in the heart of Tokyo. This station represents a limit condition of place, being dense and complex beyond the powers of traditional architectural representation. The station is explored through serial translations, beginning with narrative, moving to a flowchart diagram, Laban dance notation, recurring motifs and archetypes, architectural drawing, photography, and cartography. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour and Tim Ingold describe, the form our inscriptive practices take are crucial to the ways in which we conceptualise those places. How much of the experience of a place is lost in the traditional inscriptive practices of the architect? This description of the urban space of the Tokyo subway forms the basis for an extended study exploring the description of this experience of place, and the power of such description to theorise space. The ultimate aim of this is to shift the focus of urban design away from geometric principles and towards the experiences that might be enjoyed in such places.
Caves of Steel: Mapping Hong Kong in the 21st Century
Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its climate and consumer economy, has in fact effected a wholesale interiorisation of public society unprecedented in contemporary urban form. 'Caves of Steel' is borrowed from the title of a 1954 novel by science fiction master Isaac Azimov, in which humanity has been divided into interior and exterior factions. The radical separation of public society in Hong Kong that accompanies the growing disparity of interior and exterior urban space is perhaps better understood through Manuel DeLanda’s (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002) application of the terms ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ from the physical sciences to a description of abstract space. Through Reiser (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2005) ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ properties may be understood in the urban context as competing and collaborating ‘infrastructural’ and ‘topological’ conditions. In Hong Kong the infrastructural (dense interiorised infrastructure of multilevel shopping warrens) and the topological (vast open topology of country parks, new towns, and industrial estates) exist often in immediate proximity, while the gap between their respective public societies continues to grow. Recent proposals for the development of a variety of sites on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour waterfront are examined in detail as a case study of this condition and its attendant effects on mapping complex and three-dimensional urban conditions, on notions of post-colonial and post-industrial image and identity, and on the evolution of public space in an Asian context.
The Rise of the Private: Shanghai’s Transforming Housing Typologies
‘On top of the sea’ is the literal translation of Shanghai, whose urban structure was built around thin canals that crossed the city. These canals, just as the traditional street in Chinese culture, were able to move people and goods while creating a public arena for interaction. It was infrastructure – streets and canals – that was the basis for the city’s morphology. As the rivers and streets eventually grew, merged, and monumentalised, they created separation. Thus, infrastructure, which once was used to collect, now divided – as is witnessed in the new six-(or more) lane-streets or the Huangpu River, isolating Puxi from Pudong. This transforming notion of infrastructure is directly linked to changes in Shanghai’s housing typologies. The traditional lilong housing structure is comprised of a unit that multiplies through group linkages to create streets. In these lilong dwellings, the street and the architectural type are one. More recently, an influx of high-rise apartment typologies has dislocated the relationship between infrastructure and building. Here, infrastructure is used to subdivide massive plots onto which built form is whimsically placed. The disconnection and monumentalisation of infrastructure that corresponds to these shifting building typologies reveals an even deeper transformation of the public sphere – one in which isolation and alienation are substituting a loss of reality. It is here that we witness the rise of the Private and the emerging loss of public life.
Performing Mimetic Mapping: A Non-Visualisable Map of the Suzhou River Area of Shanghai
This paper questions issues concerning the mapping of experience, through the concept of mimesis – the creative re-performance of the site experience onto the map. The place mapped is the Suzhou River area, a significant part of Shanghai, the former boundary between the British and American Settlements, and an ever-changing and transforming territory. Through the detailed description of the mapping processes, we analyse the position of this particular map within contemporary discourse about mapping. Here, we question the purpose of the process, the desired outcome, the consciousness of the significance of each step/event, and the possible significance of the final traces that the mapping leaves behind. Although after the mapping had been carried out, the procedure was analysed, post-rationalised, and justified through its partial documentation (as part of an educational process), this paper questions the way and the reason for these practices (the post-rationalising of the mapping activity, justifying the strategy, etc.), and their possible meaning, purpose, demand or context. Thus we conclude that the subject matter is not the final outcome of an object or ‘map’; there is no final map to be exhibited. What this paper brings forth is the mapping as an event, an action performed by the embodied experience of the actual place and by the trans-local materiality of the tools and elements involved in the process of its making.
Politicisation and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
Despite the spectacular contemporary metropolis image of Luijiazui, the new Central Business District (CBD) of Shanghai on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River, this paper discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through the ‘reality’ of its urbanism. The purpose is to check in a practical way the actuality of the built environment in relation to its history and political presence through first-hand primary sources, which is intended to fill unanticipated voids that surfaced in the understanding of Shanghai in a physical sense. This can be done from the four following perspectives: urban form; individual buildings and urban imagery; visualization of the skylines; and streetscape. Using the city as a primary source, this paper succinctly presents specific information derived from the observations needed to authenticate the research, i.e. to understand the existence of contemporary architecture as a means of urban iconography, which will contribute to the theory of how we conceive and experience the hybridized urban complexity in Asian cities in a practical manner from the perspectives of both the pedestrian and architect-planner critical to the awareness the far-reaching consequence of Shanghai’s urban environment.
Spatial ‘Complexity’: Analysis of the Evolution of Beijing’s Movement Network and its Effects on Urban Functions
This paper is an attempt to read the dramatic transformations happening in Beijing from a spatial perspective. Based on a model developed by Spacelab, which understands scale as being constructed in movement and communications technologies, we try to represent this process on two levels: first, on the morphology of the movement network itself, I would like to show how technological development of highway, metro and bus systems change the way people move in the city; second, on the effects of changing movement networks, I would like to examine how shops and other public activities locate and relocate themselves within urban space. In general, Beijing is a good example, with a combination of old and new patterns of movement networks, whose spatial composition results in a different pattern for emerging economies and public activities compared with western city centres. However, it is still possible to uncover a strong and consistent logic based on the way individuals move and appropriate different scales of networks. In short, this paper will try to illustrate this difference based on the local pattern of space and explain the underlying, yet simple, spatial logic behind dynamic interaction between changing movement networks and the urban functions emerging from them.
Diagnosing Beijing 2020: Mapping the Ungovernable City
Beijing Municipality, characterised by the ‘off-ground’ architecture distinguishing neo-liberal privatisation, is attempting to mitigate the damaging effects of rampant development on the social fabric, cultural heritage, and the environment by adopting sustainable urban planning. I argue that the sustainability rhetoric in the Beijing Municipality 2020 Plans functions in part as strategic metaphors masking unnamed, imminent threats to governance. In this article I diagnose four Beijing plans (Beijing 2006-2015 ‘Rail Transit Plan’ for Compact City, Beijing 2005-2020 ‘Underground Space Plan’ for Alternative Space, Beijing 2006-2020 ‘Undeveloped Area Plan’ for Ecological Responsibility, and Beijing 2006-2010 ‘Low-income Housing Plan’ for Affordability and Liveability). A diagrammatics of the plans illuminates not so much a mapping of Beijing’s future as the forms of spontaneity preoccupying the nation at this historical juncture. The Beijing 2020 plan, as city mapping more generally, discloses the imminence of ungovernable city. The fact that citizens are demanding greater authority over Beijing governance suggests that radical alterations to its urban fabric and quality of life have incited the imminent sociability that is the city.
A China that is in a frenzied state of economic boom and potential social instability, which is most vividly represented in its architectural and urban developments, is, I hope I will convince you, ephemeral. A quite different China, perhaps is not so visible as its new buildings and cities, is metaphorically ‘handmade’. I should like to extend the meanings of the handmade to the more stable and long lasting attitudes towards social life, and even mortality. My sources for the second China are partially from literature (not from architecture). With the construction boom since the mid-1990s, mainstream Western architectural journals and galleries have been racing to expose new architecture in China; celebrity Western architects have been winning major commissions in China: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a case in point. The sheer quantity and speed of China’s development, as evidenced in architecture and urbanisation, causes an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (to paraphrase Milan Kundera). Does all this then suggest that China, as solidified in its buildings and cities, is no longer ‘handmade’ in the sense that memory and a sense of history are redundant (particularly for a country that has a recorded history of more than 5000 years, which have been so lovingly recorded in handmade artefacts)? The true meaning of the handmade, which absorbs labour — an ‘honourable labour’ as Joseph Conrad lovingly put it in his Mirror of the Sea, as well as memory, like that of a home, is a static artefact, which harbours our changing emotion, the frailties of human life, and indeed, the growing awareness that comes with time of our mortality: the handmade offers the necessary enshrinement of life’s vulnerability. Let me assure you, the seemingly fast-changing China, as represented in its new architecture and city forms, as well in its frenzied urbanisation and booming economy, is but a smoke screen. It is, in other words, ephemeral. The other China is, or has to be, handmade.
Mapping Urban Complexity in an Asian Context
The second issue of Footprint aims at reuniting two themes which are receiving a great deal of attention in recent times: Asia’s extraordinary urban growth, and the problematique of mapping highly complex urban environments. The 21st century, forecasted by many as the ‘Pacific Century’, brings to the fore the region's economic, social, political and cultural changes, wide-ranging in their manifestation and far-reaching in their consequence. All of these factors are inscribed in the urban environment. In a region where a population of one million constitutes a small settlement and mega-cities such as Tokyo and Shanghai have come to dominate the global network, sheer size is itself an important issue and not just in practical terms. Then there is the apparent chaos that is actually a delicately balanced autopoeisis in cities such as Mumbai, as well as the interesting and potentially useful city-state model of Hong Kong. These conditions and rising phenomena bring important questions on the potentials and relevance of mapping to the fore.
Fuel to the Urban Debate or, at Last, an End to the Brussels Trauma?
In her article Isabelle Doucet discusses the recent exhibition ‘A Vision for Brussels: Imagining the Capital of Europe’, curated by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Joachim Declerck from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, at the BOZAR Centre of Fine Arts in Brussels. Rather than discussing the exhibition as such, she re-positions it within the broader context of recent as well as concurrent contributions to the Brussels debate. By doing so, she treats the exhibition and its accompanying publication as the departure point for a reflection on how Brussels reflects on Brussels. She relates the exhibition to some ‘brand new’ attempts to provide a strong vision for this European Capital: two new journals about ‘planning the capital’ and another Europe-in-Brussels exhibition. However, while she argues that ‘A Vision for Brussels’ aims to formulate a vision for the architectural discipline too, she questions whether ‘A Vision for Brussels’ produces a ‘vision’ for the city, a full-blown ‘project’ for Brussels and/or a ‘solution’ to the crisis of architecture and the city as well. In other words, who is leading the show in the exhibition: Brussels, Europe or the architecture and urban design disciplines?
For quite a while, Peter Eisenman’s dissertation lived the life of a mystery text. Many architectural theorists knew about it, but it was not published until 2006. The facsimile reprint by Lars Müller finally makes available the complete typographic script that Eisenman defended in August 1963 at the University of Cambridge.
On Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and 'The Unilever Series'
Since the opening Tate Modern in 2000, the vast space of the Turbine Hall has hosted The Unilever Series. Widely acclaimed artists Louise Bourgeois, Juan Munõz, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Whiteread, Carsten Höller and most lately Doris Salcedo accepted the invitation to ‘tackle’ what is arguably the biggest museum space in the world and realized what is invariably held to be their ‘biggest work ever.’ The Unilever Series is not the only large-scale installation series. In recent years, we witnessed the worldwide launch of ever-larger art commissions for increasingly vaster spaces, resulting in all the more colossal artworks. Only recently, Paris announced its own yearly art commission for the central nave of the Grand Palais, suitably entitled Monumenta. The essay examines The Unilever Series in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and discuss it within the global leap in scale and massive expansion of the art and museum world, of which the London institution and its vestibule in particular are the most blatant exponents. While it is certainly true that the spectacular expansion of art installations has occurred in tandem with a profusion of large international exhibitions and ‘destination’ museum of inordinately vast proportions, the assumption that large exhibition spaces demand an art of size is too simplistic. By examining the institutional, spatial and material disposition of the Turbine Hall, I will demonstrate that it is far more than a plain and abstract emblem of the global inflation and growth of museum and exhibition spaces. It’s a distinct architectural exponent of this tendency that essentially in and of itself has informed the inflation of the artworks that have been commissioned for it.
The article outlines what is required for a theory of art in the late work of Max Raphael, by showing that it is a response to a problematic first formulated, but left unanswered, by Marx, and which can be seen as developed by Raphael in his writing, especially the text he devoted to a dialectic interpretation of Greek art, with special reference to temple architecture. In detailing this latter study it is possible to see how Raphael’s understanding and analysis is guided by his account of an empirical theory of art, and contributes to its further elaboration.
Architectural Theory: A Construction Site
Around 1968 we saw the birth of a new architectural theory as the conjunction of architectural history and politically engaged architectural criticism. Not the aesthetics of architecture, but architecture itself in its structural relations with social life became the focus of attention. As a result of this development, it is no longer possible to study architectural history without a critical reflection on the method of the study itself and without a grade of interdisciplinarity. Traditional methods of historiography and iconography have been replaced by new approaches configured by psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural studies etc. Appropriation has become the proof of criticality both in architectural theory and in design; however, the understanding of the concepts and methods of other disciplines is basically metaphorical. The problem for a school of architecture lies not in the ‘criticality’ of the kind of architectural theory we described as emerging from the spirit of 1968, but in its discursive nature. The disciplinary specificity of architecture resists a discursive approach, and architectural students frequently question the usefulness of theory which undermines the notion of the ‘project’, without articulating a constructive proposal. Projectivity does not seem to provide an answer; its claim of performativity lacks the program to regain its organising power over contributions from other specialised disciplines and practices. Theory should focus on the terms of our discipline, which are so close to our ‘core beliefs’ regarding architecture that we usually take their meaning for granted. It would be wrong to see this focus of theory as a withdrawal into the realm of language. Indeed, after a period of theory alienating architects and the general public, it could now create a rhetoric to influence our understanding of our environment, which is itself organised on the level of language. The requirement that theory should not be directly involved in design practice, but help students to grasp the underlying problems and their historic roots, will allow theory to exert its influence on design development.
In the past decade, what has been understood by the word 'theory' has been a discourse that has serviced two types of architectural positions. One the one side there is the language of ‘flow’ and its associated liberalist position of open-ended experientialism. On the other side there is ‘techtonics’ and its associations with reactionary imperatives of a phenomenological reclamation of essence. This paper tries to open a third space, one that has received less attention in recent years, but that hones closer to the philosophical problematic of architecture. To that purpose and to resist the tendency to pull philosophy into an operative design position, I will reassess the philosophies of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger to argue that when taken together they constitute a type of closure to the conventions of theory that needs to be addressed before the potential for an exteriority to theory can be formulated. The question of how to locate theory, which is of course an extension of the question of how to locate modernity, is, I shall argue, still tied up in Hegel’s studied – and cunning – ambivalence to architecture as a philosophical project. It is this ambivalence that I attempt to deconstruct in order to make it more operational as a theoretical position.
Notes on Narrative Method in Historical Interpretation
These notes are offered as a sketch of interpretive method. I suggest that the writing of architectural history is, or should be, a deeply theoretical sort of symptomatology – an account of how the very forms and experiences of architecture both construct and repress the absent thing we call the social, and are its most material symbolizations. Such an account benefits from an idea and a practice of narrative. Narrative is an ideological production that avoids any copy theories of representation even as it insists on the real, material forms and events that are its subject matter.
Why and How 'To Do Science'? On the Often Ambiguous Relationship between Architecture and the Social Sciences in France in the Wake of May '68
Around the time of the ‘events’ of May ’68, ‘architectural research’ in France posited itself as a direct challenge to the education of the ‘Beaux-Arts’, to the school’s insulation from academic disciplines and to its common lack of a critical dimension required by any ‘scientific’ approach. In this context, the sociologists’ contribution to architecture was long awaited but soon proved to be disappointing, undoubtedly disappointing because the expectations were unreasonably high. In the early 1970s, the contributions of sociologists were perceived as a way to respond to doubts about the professional status of the architect; increasingly, sociologists discerned a desire to escape from the responsibilities and risks of the architectural project, into the sociological discourse. At the same time, following numerous disappointments, even the formerly zealous partisans of the arrival of sociologists finally returned to more skeptical positions towards the role of sociologists in architectural education. This uneasiness is marked by the silence, not to say the omerta, that veils today in France the adhesion of a number of architects of that generation to an ‘architectural postmodernism’ as it was defined during the 1970s, a moment embodied by the contribution of sociologists to the recent history of architecture. Nevertheless, it is the inheritance that makes the heir, as Pierre Bourdieu used to say.
Trans-disciplinarity: The Singularities and Multiplicities of Architecture
This inaugural issue of Footprint aims at understanding today’s architecture culture as a negotiation between two antithetical definitions of architecture’s identity. The belief in the disciplinary singularity of architectural objects, irreducible to the conditions of their production, is confronted – in discourse and design – with the perception of architecture as an interdisciplinary mediation between multiple political, economic, social, technological and cultural factors. With the concept of trans-disciplinarity, the negotiation between these two positions is investigated here as an engine of the ‘tradition of the present’ of contemporary architecture – the discourses and designs which emerged in the 1960s and defined orientation points for today’s architectural thought and practice.