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Brian Massumiwith Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Brian Boigonwith Izabel Gass

MANIFOLD

FORMS OF TIME

Spring 2008



To the ReaderIzabel Gass


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Gilles Deleuzereviewed by Nicholas Risteen

Bergsonism31

Brian Boigonwith Izabel Gass69

Sanford Kwinterreviewed by David Dahlbom Architectures of Time77

Henri Bergsonreviewed by Matthew Conti

Duration and Simultaneity 89

Ambiguous EtiologiesRobert Crawford and Federico Cavazos59

Reinhold Martinreviewed by Jamie Chan

Islands and Worlds95

Yale Universityreviewed by Stephen Nielson

Writing on Architecture99

University of Pennsylvaniareviewed by Jason Nguyentalk20 Philadelphia109

Alejandro Zaera-Poloreviewed by Francis Bitonti

FOA115

Neil Denari

reviewed by Molly Wright Steenson

Shrinkwrapping Vague Things

121David Erdmanreviewed by Izabel Gass

Mass Mysteria125

Gilles Deleuzereviewed by Izabel Gass

Kant’s Critical Philosophy 39



Founding Editor-in-Chief

Izabel Gass

Associate EditorsSanford KwinterNana LastTait Kaplan

Joseph LimNicholas RisteenEtien Santiago

MANIFOLD PUBLISHING [email protected]

First published in 2008

All work copyright the original author.©2008 Manifold Publishing Group

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior writtenpermission from the publisher.

This issue is brought to you through the generosity of the 2006-2007 Dr. BillWilson Student Initiatives Grant.

Manifold is sponsored by Lars Lerup, William Ward Watkin Professor and Deanat Rice School of Architecture.

Cover design by Ann Chou

Printed and bound in the USA by the Manifold Publishing Group



MANIFOLD



9

To the ReaderIzabel Gass

“The traditional concept is that things are in time, whereas the new concept is that

time is in the things”- Karlheinz Stockhausen

Manifold Magazine was founded in May 2007 to provide a platform

for a reinvigoration of philosophical thought within the discipline of archi-tecture. We made a promise to the reader in Manifold 1: the second issueof the journal would be released only when a meaningful philosophicaldiscussion had been generated within its pages. We hope and suspect thattime has come.

The theme of Manifold 2 is “Forms of Time,” (a play on the title ofSanford Kwinter’s 2001 book Architectures of Time ). The editorial directionwas twofold. Our first aim was to generate a discussion of time as a mor- phological order through which form is articulated. This meant returning toscientific developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explainthe scientific grounds for a Modern chronotope in which space, time, andmatter are not maintained as distinct variables but rather are collapsedwithin what Einstein called “the field condition,” or a perfectly immanent material world in which space-time-matter are all one continuous thing (“Immanence” from the Latin immanere , to inhere within). In its philo-sophical use, the term “immanence” indicates a world that is founded innothing transcendent—no timeless “substratum” (Aristotle) against which



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change occurs. There is a parity between the Einsteinian field and ontologi-cal immanence in that what “inheres within” the immanent world—essence,difference, “god” — does not ground it or ontologically precede it; similarly,for Einstein, space and time no longer exist as “carriers” for events (a wordhe uses throughout his writings to describe Newtonian mechanics) but

instead constitute a single time-event, an indistinguishable force. As thequote of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen above suggests, the immanentworld differentiates itself . Despite Gilles Deleuze’s recent oblivion withincontemporary architectural discourse, he remains the central philosopherof an immanent ontology; it was in this light that we sought a thoroughreading of Deleuze’s lesser known texts.

Second to this primary discussion, the editors aimed that a criticalundercurrent run below the surface of Manifold 2, an undercurrent meantto quietly suggest that many contemporary practices which claim owner-ship of “topological” morphology and immanentist philosophy have donelittle to dismantle the notion of the architectural object as fundamentallystatic and individuated from its environment. Hence, the decision to allowthe title of Manifold 2 to echo the propos of Kwinter’s six-year-old book:The problem of Immanence has still yet to be addressed.

The first set of our book reviews covers two of Gilles Deleuze’searly works, Bergsonism (1966) and Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963). Itis my hope that these texts provide a more foundational introduction to

the origins of Deleuzian “immanence” than can be found in the mere pil-laging of Deleuzian jargon still common in architecture today. With thesereviews, we hoped to illuminate a personal statement of Deleuze’s from a1988 interview:



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Setting out a plane of immanence, tracing out a field of imma-

nence, is something all the authors I’ve worked on have done

(even Kant — by denouncing any transcendent application of

the synthesis of the imagination, although he sticks to possible

experience rather than real experimentation). Abstractions

explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there

are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent,

no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes,

sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just pro-

cesses all the same. i

Also, Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis interviewed Brian Massumi onthe intellectual origins of the Deleuzian virtual as well as of the Foucauld-ian diagram, assessing the potential for creating a “temporal architecture”along these lines.

It seemed only fair that Henri Bergson, as the great 20th centuryphilosopher of time, deserved a place of his own in this issue along with

Deleuze’s reading of his work. Matthew Conti studied Bergson’s interpreta-tion of the scientific paradigm shift from classical mechanics to Einsteinianrelativity in Bergson’s brave (though sometimes muddled) book, Durationand Simultaneity (1922). The book requires some amount of historical con-textualization; Robin Durie does a particularly brilliant job in his Englishtranslation. I will try to do half as well:

Classical or “Newtonian” mechanics rested on a notion of time as“absolute.” Absolute time can be understood as a universal framework forthe measurement of movement, outside of or distinct from movement

i. See Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin; Columbia University Press, 1995



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itself; or, as Einstein succinctly phrases it:

According to classical mechanics, time is absolute, ie, it is

independent of the position and the condition of motion of the

system of coordinates.ii

In the classical model, time has no creative agency because timedoes not regulate movement, but merely measures it. Crucial here is thatthe concept of “simultaneity,” the notion that two events can occur “atthe same time,” relies on the relation of distinct events to a standardizedtemporal scale.

The linch-pin is jerked from the theory of “Absolute Time” in the1880’s, when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley discover that the speedof light remains constant regardless of the speed of its point of observation— an observer moving at 65 mph does not perceive light moving faster thanan observer standing still. Einstein eventually uses this finding to reveal thefallacy of the “Theorem of the Addition of Velocities,” the notion that thesum total of the relative velocities of an observer and her object of observa-tion provide the velocity of the system in “Absolute Time”:

Let us assume that the simple law of the constancy of the veloc-

ity of light c (in vacuum) is justifiably believed [...] If a ray of

light be sent along [an] embankment [...] the tip of the ray will

be transmitted with the velocity c relative to the embankment.

Now let us suppose that our railway carriage is [...] travelling

along the railway lines with the velocity v, and that its direction

ii. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory , p. 62



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forms from drifts of snow in Wyoming’s barren landscape. The projectcould be said to operate under the assumption that time and matter exist ina single, continuous, self-integrated manifold, (Einsteinian “field”) not the“dichotomized” (Massumi) world of Newtonian time and space. Einsteinagain:

In Newtonian mechanics, space and time [...] play the part of

carrier or frame for things that happen in physics, in reference

to which events are described by the space co-ordinates and the

time. In principle, matter is thought of as consisting of “mate-

rial points,” the motions of which constitute physical happen-

ing [...] If matter were to disappear, space and time alone would

remain behind (as a kind of stage for physical happening).

By contrast:

The concept of field [replaced] the idea of a particle (mate-

rial point) [...] Temperature is here a simple example of the

concept of field. This is a quantity (or a complex of quantities)

which is a function of the co-ordinates and the time. Another

example is the motion of a liquid. At every point there exists

at any time a velocity, which is quantitatively described by its

three ‘components’ with respect to the axes of a co-ordinate

system (vector). The components of the velocity at a point (field

components), here also, are functions of the co-ordinates (x, y,

z) and the time (t) [...] Even in classical physics the event is

localized by four numbers, three spatial co-ordinates and a time

co-ordinate; the totality of physical “events” is thus thought of

as being embedded in a four-dimensional continuous manifold.



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But the basis of classical mechanics this four-dimensional con-

tinuum breaks up objectively into the one-dimensional time

and into three-dimensional spatial sections, only the latter of

which contain simultaneous events. iv

While Cavazos and Crawford’s design work attempts a materialinterpretation of the field condition, David Dahlbom ventured a reviewof Sanford Kwinter’s 2001 Architectures of Time , homing in on Kwinter’sunderstanding of the “subjective bloc,” or a theory of the subject withinan immanent ontology. Dahlbom particularly raises the question of howfree will and socio-political agency, as they have been typically constitutedin Humanist discourse, are to be rethought in this framework — a hugely

important subject that Kwinter has never managed to fully address.

Lastly, my own interview with Brian Boigon turns to a discussion ofthe mundane world of Perez Hilton, instant messaging and computer gam-ing. Boigon offers a disjunctive and rambling manifesto on the capacity ofcontemporary technology to define a “dynamic architecture” that extends

beyond the disciplinary literalism of architecture as built form.

At the conclusion of his interview, Boigon demands: “if you want tomake your architecture into a building, enter through Marcel Duchamp’sDoor 11.” Door 11, of course, was Marcel Duchamp’s puzzling doorframeconstruction in which one door shared two frames, such that, to close the

door in one frame was to open it in another. I particularly liked Boigon’sreference here, mostly because it is our aim that each issue of Manifold provoke more than explain, which is to say, we hope to never close thedoor on any idea, but merely move our readers and contributors from one

iv. Einstein, pp. 165-166



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room of questions to another. In Deleuze’s words, “abstractions explainnothing.” This is to say, without fail, the elaboration of any thought always yields a complexity that reconfigures the whole of an idea. On that note,we thank you for reading and, as always, challenge you with an invitation tojoin our endeavor.

Sincerely,

Izabel GassEditor-in-Chief



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Nguyen, Davis: Historically, a Western understanding of the material world has relied on a desire to understand things for what they “are.” But the work of Deleuze and Guattari proposes an ontology rooted in “becoming.” Paradoxically, this way of thinking debases the singular moment of instantiation, elevating instead the abstract collection of circumstances that

intersect to produce it. What is the role of the “Virtual” in this ontology,and how does it differ from the Platonic “Ideal”?

Massumi: An effort of thought is required to prevent the Deleuzian “vir-tual” from slipping into the Platonic ideal. The concept automatically shiftsin this direction the instant it is separated from “the singular moment ofinstantiation,” or in deleuzian terms, the “actual.” It is the virtual whichis debased by being separated in thought from actuality — not the actualwhich is debased by its association with the virtual. The two are inseparable.They must be thought strictly together. From a deleuzian point of view theyhave no philosophical meaning apart from their dynamic embrace of eachother. The movement of becoming is not on one side or the other: it is theresult of their coming together. “Dynamic” and “movement” are the keywords. There would be neither dynamism nor movement were the virtualand actual in separate realms. There is one world, and it is they.

The virtual separated from the actual would be utterly “sterile” be-cause it would have nothing through which to express itself. Unexpressed,



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it would not give itself to thought. The actual apart from the virtual wouldbe absolute stasis, because a thing in change is like a doppler effect throughthe present of a just-past moving into the future. The past and future areprecisely what are inactual, so they fall to the virtual. The moment youthink change, you have actually appealed to the virtual. Think the actual

without the virtual, and you have fixity.

Deleuze needs a concept of the virtual because of his project ofthinking the actual. The starting point of that project is the heracliteanobservation that the only constant is change. Conversely, Deleuze needsthe actual to hold the reality of the virtual. Deleuze considers his thought,including the thought of the virtual, to be a variety of empiricism. Heaccepts the dictum that everything that can be considered real must insome way be experienced, with “experienced” minimally defined as havingeffects or taking effect. The actual is nothing other than the taking-effect ofthe virtual. A supernal virtual could never get past the post of this effectivephilosophy.

This is just a first approximation. The virtual is a slippery concept.It is by nature elusive. I call it “recessive.” It does not expend itself in itseffect. It withdraws back into itself, constituting in the same stroke thejust-past of that effect, and the to-come of the next. It is always in the gapsbetween chronological moments, in a nonlinear, recursive time of its own:just past – yet to come; future-past. When the virtual withdraws back into

itself in the gaps in the actual, it has no “place” to go. It goes only into itsown return. You can only think it across its iterations, and the mark of eachiteration is an actual change. However: every change can be expressed as achange in an order of juxtaposition of actual elements. In other words, thevirtual, by nature elusive in a time-like way, takes effect as a spacing . It does



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not take effect without its effects taking place.

This is where the paradox of Deleuze’s thinking lies: not in an alter-native between the actual and the virtual, but in how they come together.The way in which they come together creates a space-time tension that isdifficult to model conceptually because our habits of thought tend both todichotomize space and time (treating them as independent variables) andto erase their difference (for example, by construing time as a “line”). Itis difficult to talk about the virtual without falling into one of these traps,or most often both at the same time. For example, the suspicion that thevirtual is a Platonic ideal has already spatialized it as a realm apart, a higherplane or other world.

Deleuze has two base strategies to deal with this slipperiness of thevirtual in its relation with the actual. First, he multiplies models for it. Agiven model may tend toward spatializing the virtual. He will immediatelyundermine it with a temporalizing counter-model. If you put the two to-gether, you get a space-time tension, or even a paradox. You are making

progress. None of the models are meant to be adequate descriptions of thevirtual. They are conceptual tools meant to assist in following the move-ment of the virtual into and out of the actual. This movement will be dif-ferent in each case. And in each case, a particular set of models will have tobe mobilized. The virtual is most adequately expressed in the interferencepatterns between them. The thought of the virtual is all about process, and

must itself be a process. It can never come in one go.

For example, Deleuze often speaks of the virtual as being composedof sets of “pure singularities.” These are point-like, and taken together form“constellations.” Taken that way, the virtual begins to resemble a fixed



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space-like structure. So Deleuze will go on to say that the singularities“extend” toward one another. This undoes the fixity by adding a vectoraspect carrying a time connotation. The constellation is starting to feel likea projective geometry (in which points and lines are interchanged, and theplotting of space requires a time of transformation). Then just as you’regetting used to that he’ll say that each singularity “includes” all the oth-ers, in the dynamic form of its extensions toward them. The singularity isnow sounding like a curve: an integration of singularities. We’re now in acalculus model, each singularity an integrable differential. If you try to putthe models together, you get points stretching out into lines, lines curv-ing, curves folding back into mutual inclusion -- the whole bending into atopological model. Point, set, structure, vector, curve, differential, integral,topological transformation —all these are the virtual. And that is only afew of the mathematical models you might appeal to (there are others:Riemann space, Markov chains, fractals, and on and on). There are alsophysical models (the singularity as quantum of event). Biological models(rhizome, phylum). Geological models (strata, plateaus). Military models(war-machine, “fleet in being”). The models never end. Their multitude is

only limited in the working out of a particular conceptual problem. Eachproblem approached will take its own selection of them. The materials andformations in question will simply not be able to bear the embarrassmentof conceptual riches. The models will shake down, under pressure, intoa restricted set. The movements into and out of the reduced plurality ofmodels that are left will mimic the actual pattern under study. The problem

will have been processed in thought. Thought will have mimicked its actualobject in and as its own process – making that process analogical.

The thinking of the virtual is always analogical, in an irreduciblycomplex way. Simondon has an ugly name for this kind of analogical think-



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ing of and with complexity. He call it “allagmatics.” Here it means you cannever model the virtual once and for all. And that you can never simplyapply the models of it that you produce. You have to put them to work. You have to work through them, and work them through, differently ineach case, under problematic pressure. You have to enact them. It’s a realprocess.

Mistrust anyone who privileges any one model of the virtual. Theyare standing back from the process. It is a common tactic of critics of De-leuze to take one of his proliferation of models for the model, and thenon that basis critique the concept of the virtual as inadequate. This is likeamputing someone’s thumb and then criticizing them for not living up tothe definition of the human by failing to display opposable digits. You can’tgrasp the virtual without a full conceptual hand. You can’t actually grasp itat all. It’s more like prestidigitation. You make the moves that conjure it upperformatively as a thought-effect.

Nguyen, Davis: As Deleuzian-Guattarian preoccupations seep in to ar-

chitecture, practices are emerging which pose philosophical questions for the process of form-making, yet still have not confronted the largely static nature of the built environment. Is it possible to re-conceive the discipline of architecture entirely as an art of temporal, rather than spatial, organization? What are the implications of such an agenda?

Massumi: Approached processually, there is no contradiction between formand formation, stasis and transformation, or even time and space. The mostuseful way of approaching these “oppositions” is to treat them as phasetransitions. We do not say that ice “contradicts” water. Water becomes ice,and ice water. They are processual extensions of each other. Each contains



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the other as its own potential. They are in a state of “mutual inclusion” inthe same line of variation. They belong to the same “phylum.” Their starklydifferent formal qualities, it is true, commit them to different destinies.Water enters prioritarily into regimes of flow, ice into regimes of rigid ac-cumulation. However, the formal differences do not belie their belongingto the same phylum. Quite the contrary, they express it – differentially. Thetransitions from one phase state to another give the process to which bothforms belong the opportunity to express itself more fully. The potentialseach phase state contains appear differentially, in a distribution bringingto expression at the same time what the process immanently includes, andits engagement with external conditions belonging to other processes. Theice-form expresses at the same time a potential of the material phylum towhich it belongs, and an environing set of weather conditions. The expres-sion of the potential of the water process is conditioned by another, moreencompassing process. The second process takes the first up into itself. Itsets the conditions under which a specific form belonging to the first processwill present itself in it. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “capture.”

Capture is always “double capture,” because as I noted the processtaken up has something to say about what happens, and co-determines themore encompassing process determining what form it takes. Today’s weatherconditions wouldn’t be what they are were water not part of the phylum itis. Weather conditions may determine which of water’s potentials will ap-pear, but the weather is dependent on water’s offering up those potentials

for it to be what it will have been on any given day. It’s the differencebetween rain and snow. The point is: even “static” or frozen forms belongto processual continuums populated by phase transitions between relatedforms which express the same process in starkly different formal qualities.Which form presents itself with what precise qualities, when, where and



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how, is determined in dynamic encounter with another process that is moreencompassing than the first but with which the first is nevertheless in arelation of co-determination.

The design process, what your question calls “formation,” is archi-tecture’s liquid phase. The “static” form that emerges from that phase isthe built structure. The weather is the urban environment (including all itsconstituent dimensions or strata: zoning, circulatory patterns, commercialpressures, cultural preferences, trends in taste) providing the conditions forthat building. Urbanism and architecture are in a relation of double capture.To be thought fully, neither can be thought apart. They are co-determining.The determination doesn’t end at the erection of the building. The urban

process that takes it up may continue to bring new architectural potentialscontained in the building to expression. How a building takes effect, whatarchitectural-urban effects it has, varies according to what passes throughit, how it is inhabited, and what goes on around. A building may be repur-posed, qualitatively changing what difference its formal qualities make inthe life of the city – the architectural equivalent of snow or rain, a city

chill or urban warming trend. An entire architectural genre might modulatewhich potentials actually appear, even without explicit formal reconfigura-tion, in response to economic or cultural changes redefining the prevailing“weather” conditions of the urban environment. The building next doormight be demolished and replaced, changing the local urban fabric in away that modulates the remaining building’s lived qualities and perhaps,

as a consequence of that, its program. The street in front might evolve intoa pedestrian mall, changing patterns of circulation, those changes in theirturn entraining others. The building may deteriorate, contributing throughits very breakdown to the conditions for urban renewal. The possibilitiesare infinite. If you look at the larger picture of the double capture of the



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built form and the urban environment, over the long term the fixity of the“static” form reliquefies. All that is concrete melts into city.

The “static” form is only a provisional stop in the architecturalprocess. It is better conceived of as a threshold in a process that contin-ues past it, and sweeps it up in a co-determined movement of continuingtransformation. The architectural process is ongoing for two reasons: 1) fol-lowing to the principle of mutual inclusion, each form (or phase) virtually“contains,” in processual potential, all others belonging to the architecturalcontinuum; 2) through the encounter with the encompassing, conditioningprocess of the city, different sets of these architectural potentials are seriallyexpressed, with or without actual formal modification (sometimes relation-

ally, much the way one color modulates another by its proximity).

The question, then, is: how can the design process pre-adapt itselfto the continuation of process, which is in any case inevitable? How canit build into its built result as-yet unexpressed architectural potentials,enriching or intensifying the way it lends itself to re-uptake and recursive

reforming by other processes (double capture). How can it multiply its ownco-determining contributions to the double captures it engages? As LarsSpuybroek argues, answering these questions requires shifting the vocabu-lary from, for example, “ambiguities” of code or meaning, to ontogenetic“vagueness.” Ontogenetic vagueness is not a lack of definition. It is a surplusof it: a mutual inclusion in the same actual form of potentially divergent

takings-effect belonging to different phases of the same process. GregLynn also speaks of this surplus-determination when he calls the producedarchitectural form the dynamic “form of a multiplicity.” This question ofthe surplus-determining continuation of the architectural process is theproblem my own work on architecture has focused on.



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Surplus-determination has to do only marginally with what is mostcommonly taken to be the “content” of architecture: the typologies ofconstituted form-defining styles which can be infused with new meaningthrough a recoding or cross-coding of their component formal units. It isless concerned with architecture’s formal disciplinary understanding ofitself than with its living through the encounter with its outside. There is aparticularly important “outside” of architecture that the built environmentactually contains: the body. It cannot be forgotten that the living-throughof the architectural process is always, and always variably, embodied.

There is a third “double capture” in close embrace with the twoalready discussed. The material phylum of the human body, with its im-

manent process of experience-formation and all the potential that processholds, enters into complex relations of co-determining continuation andrecursive reforming with the built structure. The built form is to body asthe built environment is to the building. The qualities of the built environ-ment are the weather conditions for embodied experience.

A logic of perceptual emergence, of experiential ontogenesis, mustbe added to the larger picture. What experiential phase transitions does apassing or inhabiting body engage in double capture with the built form?How do these continuous transformations feed back into urbanism? Orback into architecture, at its interface with urbanism? What unexpressedpotentials are capacitated, at what thresholds, and to what effect? How can

architectural form surplus-determine perception and qualities of experi-ence? Arakawa and Gins answer that question by adapting the concept of“affordances” from J.J. Gibson’s “ecological” approach to perception theory.The unit of architecture, from this processual perspective, is not a formalunit of style. It is the “landing site”: the way in which an architectural



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element beckons the body to actualize one of its experiential potentials.Or many at once. When there are several, without one necessarily beingprivileged over another, the architectural element has become surplus-de-termining: the unitary form of an experiential multiplicity whose conditionsof emergence are an architectural encounter with the phylum of the body,that encounter itself enfolded in the urban encounter with architecture:triple articulation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this foregrounding of percep-tion and experience is not a call for a phenomenology of architecture. Phe-nomenology returns experience to a form of interiority (the transcendentalego) or a closed loop (the “flesh” of the world as preflective of subjective

expression). Experience is but an echo. In the ecological approach I amadvocating experience is an emergence. It returns the body to a processualfield of exteriority (encounter). The same goes for architecture itself. Themodel at all levels is what I have called “relational autonomy”: the emer-gent expression of a process’ singular potentials in a dynamic of encounterwith its processual outside. Applied to architecture, this undermines the

explanatory power of any approach that begins by separating the inside ofthe discipline from its outside, as if architecture itself were effectively aform of interiority defined by historical periods, a repertory of styles, or a setof characteristics procedures. All of these change. All are under continualvariation. Architecture as a “discipline” is what passes through these ongo-ing phase-shifts. It is in the gaps between chronological moments. It is in

the surplus-determination of elements of style in virtue of which they carryan in-built, or immanent, potential for modulation. It is in the inventionof new procedures which retool its interface with other processes. Architec-ture is the indiscipline flowing through its own complexly co-determinediterations. It is not an edifice itself. It is not a structure. It has no definitive



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content. It is a living process. As Deleuze and Guattari were fond of saying,escape is the life-blood of process. A creative discipline is defined by howit escapes its past content and internal constraints. It renews itself throughthe rigorous indiscipline of its effective couplings with processes other thanits own.

Nguyen, Davis: The predominant architectural (mis-)use of Deleuzian- Guattarian philosophy in architecture has been on form-making, oftenconfusing digital tools for “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation.But isn’t architecture itself a socio-political abstract machine, as Foucault showed time and again (Bentham’s Panopticon, the poor houses, the hospi- tals, the public registers, etc.)? If so, what consequences might this present

for a “critical” architectural practice?

Massumi: By the logic I have been advancing, digital tools can indeed beconsidered “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation. And architec-ture itself, in the “big picture,” would be a socio-political abstract machine.These are not mutually exclusive propositions.

The definition of an abstract machine would be: the generativeprinciple by which a continuum of potentials belonging to the same phy-lum are vaguely determined to mutually include one another, and by whichthat mutual inclusion is iteratively expressed through the serial emergenceof fully constituted actual forms punctuating phase transitions occurring

at the interface with an outside process. There is not room to unpack thishere, or to deal adequately with the complicated question of digital tech-nology in architectural design. It will be sufficient to get a provisional ideaof why I would defend digital design procedures as an abstract machine toreplace “generative principle” in the definition I just gave with “algorithm”;



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continuum of potentials with “permutational iterations”; emergence with“stochastic operator”; and to construe any form at which the process ofform-generation is stopped as the fully constituted actual form. What thenare the outside processes with which this digital process interfaces? First:human perceptual processes, at the inter-process threshold of the literalinterface of the screen. Second: the forces of the intended site and thelarger environment, and the values of the architect and/or client. Third:both of these as they return to the process to modulate it.

What is unique about the digital design process it that it allowsany of its encounters with outside processes to be folded back into itself,so as to become creative factors for its own iteration. It can turn outside

constraints into internal factors of creation, simply by folding them backinto its own process in the form of a tweaking of the generative parameters.This infolding of external constraints transformed into internal creativefactors can be of many kinds. It might be a stylistic preference (curvilinear-ity, for example) or a zoning imperative. It may be a desire to pre-engineer astructural characteristic like load-bearing without dichotomizing aesthetic

form and architectonic structure. It may be to enable computer milling orto experiment with modularity in response to cost constraints. One wayin which outside “constraints” may be integrated as creative factors intodigital design is to program basins of attraction or repulsion and limits ofdivergence or fusion which inflect the forms generated so that a certainvalue, or lived quality, is embodied in the resulting building. Lynn was an

early pioneer in this approach, for example in his Long Island House proto-type which translated the constraint placed on the design by the client for acertain view into a generative factor internal to the digital abstract machineof the form-generating process itself.



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I do not mean to privilege digital design techniques over others. Thesame translation of external limits or constraints into creative factors canbe achieved by other means (as the current interest in analogue computingclearly illustrates). I just mean to say that every technical or proceduralinnovation provides architecture as a living process with an opportunityto renegotiate its relation to its outsides, and in doing so to renew therelational autonomy it lives by. There is no reason not to call this process ofdisciplinary readjustment to constituent outsides a “critical” practice. It isnot critical in the sense of judging according to a preestablished standard(of taste, political ideology, etc.). It is creatively critical in its operative en-counter with the outside. It is critical in the sense that it benefits by theseencounters to carry the process across thresholds and to effect phase shifts.

These thresholds and phase shifts are “critical” points in the sense thatwhat is at stake is the changing nature of the process, and as a consequencethe very definition of the discipline claiming that process as its own. Thisbringing into question of the process occurs as a function of its own ongo-ing operations. It is a form of what Deleuze calls “immanent critique.” Youmight also call it “operative” or “effective” critique.

An effective critique belongs to a gift economy, not an administra-tion of judgment. By producing the effects that it does, the process gives ofitself – and gives itself up. It gives itself up to selection. The way in whichits takings-effect couple with outside process will have positive feedbackeffects or inhibiting effects. This will affect the process’ viability and self-

expressive capacity. In short: it is the city that “judges” architecture. Exceptit is not a judgment. It is a living out.

Or is it real estate speculation that “judges” architecture? It couldwell be that the outside process of speculation is in a stronger position to



30

select. Critical architecture practice is more concerned with how the disci-pline gives itself to which outside, than in what content standards it setsfor itself as a discipline. Critical practice is part of what Isabelle Stengerscalls an ecology of practices where “judgment” is lived out processually, inoutside encounter. Prime among the larger processes with which architec-ture couples is the process of capital itself, with its fearsome global powersof capture. It goes without saying that every architectural practice mustgrapple with the forces of capital, which at the same time constitute themost powerfully enabling of the outside constraints that it has availableto translate into a creative factor for itself, and the most cruelly selectiveenvironment. The same could actually be said of any practice today. Im-manent critique of any kind has no choice but to be in some way, however

humble, an operative critique of capitalism.



31

In their introduction to Bergsonism, Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam, both extensive translators of Deleuze, offer an excerpt fromDeleuze’s letter to Michel Cressole relating Deleuze’s efforts to escape the

‘scholasticism of post-war French academic philosophy’:

My way of getting out of it at that time, was, I really think,

to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery

or, what comes to the same thing, immaculate conception. I

imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giv-

ing him a child, which would be his and which would at thesame time be a monster. It is very important that it should

be his child, because the author actually had to say everything

that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because

it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips,

break-ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on

Bergson seems to me a classic of this case.i

This passage underscores Deleuze’s desire to set his text squarelyon Bergson’s shoulders; the words of the text are Bergson’s, the ideas pre-

i. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 8

Gilles DeleuzeBergsonismZone Books, 1990

reviewed by Nicholas Risteen



32

formed, and their explication is a means of discovery more than argument.Deleuze seems to be exploring the work of Bergson as much for himself asfor an academic reader looking to discover some ‘new’ insight on Bergson’sphilosophy. In a sense, Bergsonism construes the accumulated philosophyunder examination as a kind of data set, working in a scientific fashion toelicit the underlying structure of Bergson’s writings.

“Intuition as Method,” the first chapter, details what Deleuze de-clares to be “one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy” ii bydescribing three essential rules to intuition as a method, or more preciselythree “distinct sorts of acts that in turn determine the rules of the method:The first concerns the stating and creating of problems; the second, the

discovery of genuine differences in kind; the third, the apprehension of realtime”.iii Most important in this litany is the issue of ‘problems,’ specificallythe identification of false problems and their most common basis in themisdiagnosis of “differences in degree” as “differences in kind.” Deleuzequotes Bergson directly on this front:

The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a ques-tion of finding the problem and consequently of positing it,

even more than solving it. For a speculative problem is solved

as soon as it is properly stated. iv (emphases his)

Finding the problem, for Bergson (and subsequently here for De-

leuze as well) comes down to distinguishing between differences in kind,and understanding that “there are no differences in kind except in dura-

ii. Ibid, p. 13

iii. Ibid, p. 14

iv. Ibid, p. 15



33

tion—while space is nothing other than the location, the environment, thetotality of differences of degree.” v

Bergson’s concept of “duration,” or lived time, is one of his mostfamous and complex philosophical contributions. This issue occupies thebulk of the next three chapters of Deleuze’s study, as extrapolating the

nuances enveloped in Bergson’s ideas becomes more complicated. Notingthe descriptions given of duration in Bergson’s Time and Free Will andCreative Evolution, Deleuze describes duration as “a case of a ‘transition,’of a ‘change,’ a becoming , but it is a becoming that endures, a change that issubstance itself,” further noting to the reader that “Bergson has no difficultyin reconciling the two fundamental characteristics of duration; continuity

and heterogeneity.” vi How does Bergson presume to do so? By positingduration itself as a multiplicity, based on the realization that duration

...divides up and does so constantly ...but it does not divide

up without changing in kind, it changes in kind in the process

of dividing up: This is why it is a nonnumerical multiplicity,

where we can speak of ‘indivisibles’ at each stage of the divi-sion. There is other without there being several ; number exists

only potentially. In other words, the subjective, or duration, is

the virtual . vii (emphases his)

Enter here another crowning piece to the puzzle: the virtual.

Deleuze’s study appears to flounder a bit at the introduction of the virtual,as Bergson’s philosophy seems to almost spin out of control in a string of

v. Ibid, p. 32

vi. Ibid, p. 37

vii. Ibid, p. 42



34

equanimities: duration is the subjective is the virtual is memory is a multi-plicity... In some instances this could be read as sticky philosophy, and thesubsequent chapters appear a bit convoluted to be sure, but not withoutsignificant gains for Bergson’s argument. Those gains rest primarily on adistinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘possible,’ a distinction which, inBergson’s inspection, philosophy (and also science) seemed to conspicu-

ously lack.

Deleuze draws the distinction between the virtual and the possiblefrom their respective relations to the real (and the means by which bothcome into the real). Within Bergson’s philosophy, the virtual and the pos-sible can be distinguished from each other “from at least two points of

view:”

From a certain point of view, in fact, the possible is the opposite

of the real, it is opposed to the real; but, in quite a different op-

position, the virtual is opposed to the actual. We must take this

terminology seriously: The possible has no reality (although it

may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, butas such possesses a reality . viii (emphasis his)

The second point from which to distinguish the virtual from thepossible rests in the process of ‘realization.’ Possibilities, for Bergson, cometo be realized through a process of limitation, “by which some possibles

are supposed to be repulsed or thwarted, while others ‘pass’ into the real”,ix

and work essentially in a negative fashion. The rules of actualization for thevirtual, by contrast, “are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those

viii. Ibid, p. 96

ix. Ibid, p. 97



35

of difference or divergence and of creation”. x

Bergsonism insists that this movement from the virtual to the actualis not a dialectical process, which leaves the former behind in preference forthe latter (Bergson proffers the dialectic as a “false movement” due to itsimprecision). Instead, duration (or the virtual, or memory) retains its mul-

tiplicity in its process of actualization as “the conservation and preservationof the past in the present” (emphasis his).xi In this way, Bergson’s durationis “defined less by succession than by coexistence”.xii Positing durationas virtual coexistence lends credence to the process of differentiation, asthe process of actualization need not thwart one virtual in preference foranother but instead allow them to develop along divergent lines.

The distinction that Deleuze elicits between the possible and thevirtual is the opposition between a negative and a positive process of re-alization, respectively. That Bergson would come down on the side of thepositive process of actualizing the real should be clear from the introduc-tion of Bergson’s method of intuition, which places the utmost importance

on the proper identification and creation of the problem itself (a positiveact). Reliance on the possible to describe the real would qualify as a falseproblem for Bergson, as “it is not the real that resembles the possible, it isthe possible that resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from thereal once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double”.xiii The movement from the possible to the real is a false movement, a kind

of conceptual back-tracking that seeks to identify a sequence of abstractpossibilities but only after the fact.

x. Ibid, p. 97

xi. Ibid, p. 57

xii. Ibid, p. 60

xiii. Ibid, p. 98



36

Movement for the virtual, by contrast, describes an entirely differ-ent process:

We know that the virtual as virtual has a reality ; this reality,

extended to the whole universe, consists in all the coexisting

degrees of expansion and contraction. A gigantic memory, a

universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except

for the differences of level. On each of these levels there are

some ‘outstanding points,’ which are like remarkable points

particular to it. All these levels or degrees and all these points

are themselves virtual. They belong to a single Time; they

coexist in a Unity; there are enclosed in a Simplicity; they form

the potential parts of a Whole that is itself virtual. They arethe reality of this virtual ... When the virtual is actualized, is

differentiated, is ‘developed,’ when it actualizes and develops

its parts, it does so according to lines that are divergent, but

each of which corresponds to a particular degree in the virtual

totality. There is here no longer any coexisting whole; there are

merely lines of actualization, some successive, others simultaneous, but each representing an actualization of the whole

in one direction and not combining with other lines or other

directions ... For what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist

in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot

be summed up, each one retaining the whole, except from a

certain perspective, from a certain point of view. These lines ofdifferentiation are therefore truly creative: They only actualize

by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital

or psychical representative of the ontological level that they



37

embody. xiv (emphases his)

This truly creative enterprise finds its fullest outlet in ‘the humanorganism’ as expressed through the élan vital . Often translated as the ‘vitalimpetus’ (which lacks particular subtleties of the French ‘élan’), the élanvital manifests as the culmination of self-conscious creation, of the organ-

ism becoming aware of its ability not only to be affected by this process ofactualization but to effect it in turn to “create an instrument of freedom,‘to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism,’ ‘to use thedeterminism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which thisvery determinism had spread.’” xv Using intuition as method to arrive atthe interval between instinct and intelligence (that differentiating point at

which the human organism separates itself from its “animalistic” counter-part), Bergson offers ‘emotion’ as the final working method of his creativeevolution. It is emotion that differs “in nature both from intelligence andinstinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and quasi instinctive so-cial pressure” in an effort to liberate man “from the plane or the level thatis proper to him, in order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole

movement of creation”.xvi

Bergsonism’s ideal creative emotion takes placein a kind of ‘privileged soul,’ like an artist or a mystic, far more so than inthe work of philosophers: “At the limit, it is the mystic who plays with thewhole of creation, who invents an expression of it whose adequacy increaseswith its dynamism.” xvii

Deleuze’s unpacking of Bergson in this short text covers enormousground, and shows numerous inklings of ideas and issues tackled in later

xiv. Ibid, pp. 100-101

xv. Ibid, p. 107

xvi. Ibid, pp. 110-111

xvii. Ibid, p. 112



38

decades in Deleuze’s own philosophy: multiplicity, duration, the virtual.But it is important to remember that initial letter to Michel Cressole, andthe necessity to read this work by Deleuze as the kind of “buggery” or “im-maculate conception” he intended it to be. After all, it is Bergson himselfwho had to “say everything that I made him say .”

As such, tracing lines of descent from Bergson to Deleuze throughthis text becomes a tricky matter. Deleuze does leave us some insight intowhat elements within Bergsonism he took to be worth pursuing further, inshort afterward appended to the translation of the text in 1988 titled “AReturn to Bergson.” In taking stock of Bergson against modern advancesin science, technology and society, Deleuze offers three main features of

Bergsonism that can be useful in continuing his appraisal of metaphysics asa rigorous discipline today: the method of intuition, the necessity of view-ing metaphysics as a complement to science, and a continued examinationof the nature of multiplicities. Those three threads permeate much ofDeleuze’s own work, but it would be overstating the case to offer Bergsonism as the ‘foundation’ (as some have done, even going so far as to say Deleuze’s

work constitutes “the new Bergsonism”). What would be fair, though, isto see this text, this “immaculate conception,” as a work foundational tothe development of Deleuze’s own work in subsequent years, as Deleuzeworked through, against, and within the utility of Bergson to at last create abody of work that was his own ‘monster.’



39

Deleuze’s 1963 study of Kant, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , whichDeleuze once described as a “book on an enemy,” is a subversive exercise

in delineating an impetus toward immanentism within the Kantian theoryof the transcendent subject. While, on one level, Deleuze’s book offers aclose textual reading and faithful synopsis of Kant’s three Critiques, it alsoilluminates particular logical practices within the Kantian method— largelythe philosophical ties that bind Kant to empiricism — that serve to refigurethe traditional conception of the Kantian Transcendental Method. Most

radically, Deleuze depicts Kantian reason as a self-interested process aimedat folding empirical experience into its own framework, exacting a legisla-tive agency on the objects of experiential phenomena. In Deleuze’s readingof Kant, reason becomes an engine or operative function that assimilatesexperience to the mind of the subject, collapsing the distinction between

Kant’s Critical Philosophy Gilles DeleuzeUniversity of Minnesota, 1985

reviewed by Izabel Gass



40

the subject and the objects of the subject’s perception. Deleuze hereinposits a limited commonality between Kant’s transcendent subject and hisown model of ontological immanence in which subject-object distinctionsare obliterated.

An Immanent Critique: Reason as Reason’s End

Deleuze defines Kant’s work as “a struggle on two fronts: againstempiricism and against dogmatic rationalism.” i The conflicting ontologiesof empiricism and rationalism differ fundamentally in their respectiveanswers to the skeptical question: how can we confirm the existence of theself? For the rationalists, cognition objectively confirms being , which is to

say, to think is to exist . Descartes’ well-known formulation, “Cogito ergo Sum,” (I think therefore I am) presupposes an objective existence for thethinking self:

The fact that I [the “I” of Descartes’ formulation] exist is an

objective fact . . . Whatever the world contains, it contains the

thinking being who I am ii

Thus, for the rationalists, the thinking being can objectively con-firm his own existence because of his very cognitive capacity to ask the skeptical question. And because thought confirms being, thought (reason)is determined to precede , or ground , “experience” in the construction of

knowledge, which is to say that

rationalism derives all claims to knowledge from the exercise

i. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. 1

ii. Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction, p. 17



41

of reason, and purports to give an absolute description of theworld, uncontaminated by the experience of any observer. It is

an attempt to give a God’s-eye view of reality iii

In other words, empirical experience is superfluous to the work ofreason because reason is innate to the mind and is the ontological precedent

for experience.

By contrast, the empiricist viewpoint, most radically articulated byDavid Hume and John Locke, skeptically erodes the possibility for objectiveknowledge, positing that only conscious perception or “experience” can besubjected to philosophical inquiry. What “experience” leaves just outside

its purview is any evidence of the mechanism that synthesizes it, which is tosay, any confirmation of a “self,” as differentiable from a world of perceiv-able objects:

In basing all knowledge on experience . . . all claims to objectiv-

ity become spurious and illusory. . . Hume took his scepticism

so far as to cast doubt upon the existence of the self . . .sayingthat neither is there a perceivable object that goes by this name,

nor is there any experience that would give rise to the idea of

it iv

For the empiricists, the “self” has no perceptible correlate, and

therefore falls outside the range of philosophical investigation. Thus, Humeopens his Treatise of Human Nature with the claim that an evaluation ofthe experiential marks the limit of a science of man:

iii. Ibid, p. 21

iv. Ibid, p. 25



42

Tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universalas possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and

explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, ‘tis

still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypoth-

esis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of

human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous

and chimerical v

What is crucial to note here is that, if inquiry into the nature of theself is impossible for the empiricists, it is because the self cannot be distin-guished from experience —in fact, this very indistinguishability between“self” and “phenomena” is what Deleuze particularly takes hold of in his

own work on Hume. Because Hume’s empirical method has no means atits disposal for differentiating the subject (“the ultimate original qualitiesof human nature”) from phenomena (“experience”), he implicitly proposesa collapse of the subject-object dichotomy . The individuation of the selfgoes unconfirmed; experience is a single “plane of immanence” that fullyintegrates both subject and object.

Kant’s “struggle on two fronts” is also a synthesis on two fronts, inthis regard. Kant first rejects empiricism on the grounds that an a priori framework for knowledge must necessarily ground experiential perception.Kant argues that reason is, in Deleuze’s terms, a “faculty of ends,” which isto say, reason is absolutely necessary for the cognitive synthesis of the world

of objects, making reason a faculty without which empirical “experience”would be impossible. Thus, Kant upholds the notion of innate ideas in themind and names them the “a priori .”

v. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature , p. xvii



43

However, Kant also refutes the rationalist notion that all knowledgeis innate, and experience superfluous to thought, positing instead thatwhile the a priori grounds experience, it must be also be actuated throughexperience . Kant’s innate ideas are

concepts and principles which the reason derives from within

itself on the occasion of experience. A child is not born with, forexample, an idea of causality. But on the occasion of experience

its reason derives the concept from within itself. [This is] an a

priori concept in the sense that it is not derived from experience

but is applied to and in a sense governs experience. There are,

therefore a priori concepts and principles which are grounded

in the mind’s own structure. These concepts are ‘pure’, inthe sense that they are, of themselves, empty of all empirical

content or material vi

The Kantian a priori then, as a grounds for the experiential, is alsoparadoxically reliant on experience for its actuation.

Deleuze herein delineates Kant’s rejection of rationalism (the tri-umph of reason over experience) in terms of value, absurdity, and conflict.Kant makes the “argument from value” that without cultural experience,there is nothing to distinguish human reason from “animality,” or an ab-ject, primitive existence — in other words, there is a value to reason as it is

cultivated through experience. Second, Kant poses the “argument from theabsurd,” which, in Deleuze’s terms, makes the claim that “if Nature hadwanted to achieve its own ends in a being endowed with reason” it would

vi. Copleston, A History of Philosophy , p. 213



44

not have provided the possibility for experience.vii Finally, Kant makes the“argument from conflict,” suggesting that if reason were intended to pro-vide an ends to knowledge without experience, or culture, then there wouldbe no conflict between man “as both animal and moral species;” in otherwords, the cultural assimilation of the primitive or animalistic through lawand order would not be necessary. viii

Thus, Deleuze concludes that for Kant, “only the cultural ends ofreason can be described as absolutely final,” meaning, only reason that isactuated within experience has achieved its intended, final “end.” ix Simplyput:

Neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowl-edge [...] Only in their synthesis is knowledge possible; hence

there is no knowledge that does not bear the marks of reason

and of experience together x

It is crucial here that in stock summaries of Kantian philosophy what

Deleuze calls “the ends of reason” is simply referred to as “knowledge,”the nominal term for a sublation of “reason” and “experience.” FrederickCopleston’s above summary comes closer to Deleuze’s aim by describingthe a priori as that which “governs” experience, but it is by selectivelyhoning in on a language of “ends” and “means” that Deleuze uniquely il-luminates Kantian reason as a self-interested process. For Deleuze, reason

is “self-interested” in the sense that it has its own goal (reason is a meansfor achieving its own ends), and reason is a “process” in the sense that its

vii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. 2

viii. Ibid, p. 2

ix. Ibid, p. 1

x. Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction, p. 27



45

“goal” is merely an interminable exercise of its own faculties — simply put,reason’s interest is in reasoning .

Deleuze here illuminates the implicit empiricist immanentism inthe Kantian Transcendental Method. In Deleuze’s formulation, reasongoes beyond itself, or reaches into the realm of experience, only so as to

subsume, or reintegrate, experience into reason’s own logic . In other words,reason wants only to reason, and it assimilates experience to its own self-interest in this regard. Deleuze contrasts this with the rationalist viewpoint,in which

What reason recognizes as an end is still something external

and superior to it: a Being, a Good or a Value, taken as a ruleof will xi

Instead, Deleuze argues

Against rationalism, Kant asserts that supreme ends are not only

ends of reason, but that in positing them reason posits nothingother than itself. In the ends of reason, it is reason which takes

itself as its own end . . . The ends or interests of reason cannot

be justified in terms of experience, or of any other authority

outside or above reason xii

And it is reason pursuing reason’s end that will enable the methodsfor Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which

xi. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. 2

xii. Ibid, p. 2-3



46

an immanent Critique — reason as the judge of reason — [be-comes] the essential principle of the so-called transcendental

method xiii

Kant’s first critique is thus understood as an attempt to “undertakea critical investigation into the powers of the pure reason itself,” delineat-

ing the a priori conditions of the mind and their processes in the role ofthe understanding. xiv As Kant describes in his preface to the Critique , thework presents reason’s inquiry into reason’s capacities, a quest to define theaxioms of metaphysics:

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cogni-

tions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss,since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason

itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend

every capacity of human reason.

Reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. It

begins from principles whose use is unavoidable in the courseof experience and at the same time sufficiently warranted by

it. . . The battlefield of these endless controversies is called

metaphysics . . .

Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks,

namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of

justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while

dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere

xiii. Ibid, p. 3

xiv. Copleston, p. 213



47

decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable

laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure

reason itself xv

Thus, Deleuze emphasizes that Kantian reason, as it governs themind as much as the mode of inquiry for the first Critique , is a machine

for assimilating, collapsing, or folding experience into itself so as to makeknowledge available to its own ends. Deleuze ensuingly describes each of thesubsidiary faculties of the mind as a sequence of self-interested processesthat in turn serve the final ends of reason.

The Self-Interest of the Faculties: Powers of the Mind as Processes

In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets forth the parameters for his Transcendental Method,positing that

Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the

mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (thereceptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cogniz-

ing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of

concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through

the latter it is thought in relation to that representation (as a

mere determination of the mind)xvi

The terminology here functions as follows: a “representation” is anobject as it appears to the mind, the “subject” is the cognitive conscious-

xv. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 99-101

xvi. Ibid, p. 193



48

ness that contains this representation, and the “object” is the representedentity, an entity assumed to be external to the mind of the subject. In Kant’sTranscendental Method, the faculties of the mind synthesize “sensitiveknowledge” (“the receptivity of impressions”) and “intellectual knowledge”(“concepts”). xvii

Deleuze deciphers two implications of the term “faculty,” or powerof the mind, in the Transcendental Method. The first meaning of faculty isthe type of relation constructed between a representation, its subject, and its object :

Every representation is related to something other than itself;

both to an object and to a subject. We can distinguish as manyfaculties of mind as there are types of relations xviii

Deleuze names three primary “types of relations,” or three faculties,each of which informs one of Kant’s three Critiques. Within the faculty ofknowledge, the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason, a representation is

“related to the object from the standpoint of its agreement to or conformitywith it;” that is to say, the capacity of the faculty of knowledge is to pull therepresentation into accordance with the object it represents.

Deleuze demonstrates that each of the faculties of the mind, ortypes of relations, has a “higher form,” which is to say, a capacity to

find in itself the law of its own exercise (even if this law gives

rise to a necessary relationship with one of the other faculties).

xvii. See Copleston, p. 196

xviii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. 3



49

In its higher form, a faculty is thus autonomous. The Critique

of Pure Reason begins by asking: ‘Is there a higher faculty of

knowledge?’ xix

The higher form of the faculty of knowledge —knowledge beingthe relation of conformity between the object and the representation — is

to uncover the law by which the mind draws phenomena into accord withitself. To do this, the faculty must explore the first order cognitive synthesisthat underlies the second order cognitive synthesis of empirical knowledge— the relation of the representation to the object. The first order synthesishere occurs not between the object and the representation, but between therepresentation and the mind . This law is defined as the a priori synthesis:

As long as the synthesis [between phenomena and the mind] is

empirical, the faculty of knowledge appears in its lower form: it

finds its law in experience and not in itself. But the a priori syn-

thesis defines a higher faculty of knowledge. This is in fact no

longer governed by objects which would give a law to it; on the

contrary, it is the a priori synthesis which attributes a propertyto the object which was not contained in the representation xx

The higher form of the faculty of knowledge herein relays empiricalknowledge to reason, inasmuch as “synthetic a priori judgments are them-selves the principles of what should be called ‘the theoretical sciences of

reason.’”xxi

Thus, the higher faculty of knowledge reveals that

xix. Ibid, p. 4

xx. Ibid, p. 5

xxi. Ibid, p. 5



50

Reason has a natural speculative interest: and it has it for ob-jects which are necessarily subject to the faculty of knowledge

in its higher form xxii

Which is to say, yet again, the cognitive process is self-contained:reason governs experience in order that it may return experience to reason’s

end, and, as Deleuze establishes in delineating Kant’s immanent critique,“in the ends of reason, it is reason which takes itself as its own end.” xxiii Thus, the objects of experience are presided over by reason; phenomena isselectively represented by reason so as to return representation to reason’sends.

This first sense of the term “faculty”— faculty as the type ofrelation between the representation, its subject, and its object — revealsthat all of the faculties ultimately serve reason’s end, which is to say, allrepresentational relations are interests of reason. The second sense of theterm “faculty” addresses the question of how these relations perform thefunction of returning experience to reason’s ends:

How does an interest of reason realize itself?’ That is to say,

what assures the subjection of objects [to the mind, to reason],

how are they subjected? What is really legislating in a given

faculty? Is it imagination, understanding, or reason?xxiv

Deleuze answers this question by defining the second meaning ofthe term faculty as “a specific source of representations,” attributing catego-ries of representation to corresponding faculties of (or, sources within) the

xxii. Ibid, p. 5

xxiii. Ibid, p. 3

xxiv. Ibid, p. 9



51

mind. Each of these sources, in containing representations, is then assumedto maintain responsibility for the organization of presentations:

The important thing in representation is the prefix: re -presen-

tation implies an active taking up of that which is presented;

hence an activity and a unity distinct from the passivity and

diversity which characterize sensibility as such. From thisstandpoint we no longer need to define knowledge as a syn-

thesis of representations. It is the representation itself which

is defined as knowledge, that is to say, as the synthesis of that

which is presented xxv

Together, these two senses of the term faculty — a type of relationand a source for representations — delineate the capacity of the mind as aset of self-referential processes that order experience so as to return it to theends of reason. In sum, reason assimilates phenomena to its own end.

Legislators of Nature: Consciousness as a Power Relation

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant put forth what he termedhis “Copernican Revolution,” an inversion of the rationalist philosophicalschema for the relationship of “reason” to “experience.” Kant’s “revolution”proposes that: rather than assuming, as the traditional rationalist viewpointcontends, that reason provides us with a cognitive framework for objective

knowledge, metaphysics could resituate its project from the perspective thatthe objects of experience manifest themselves in accord with the nature ofthe mind, rather than the mind accommodating the objects of experience.In short, the common and colloquial formulation of this is: “objects conform

xxv. Ibid, p. 8



52

to the mind; the mind does not conform to objects.” Kant writes:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must

conform to the objects [of the senses — objects outside of the

mind]; but all attempts to find out something about them a

priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have,

on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once trywhether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics

by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition,

which would agree better with the requested possibility of an

a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something

about objects before they are given to us. This would be just

like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did notmake good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions

if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the

observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if

he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in

metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition

of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of theobjects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a

priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to

the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well

represent this possibility to myself xxvi

Deleuze notes that Kant’s Copernican Revolution is foundational tohis “struggle on two fronts” against empiricism and rationalism inasmuchas:

xxvi. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 110



53

In dogmatic rationalism the theory of knowledge was foundedon the idea of a correspondence between subject and object, of

an accord between the order of ideas and the order of things.

This accord had two aspects: in itself it implied a finality; and

it demanded a theological principle as source and guarantee of

this harmony, this finality. But it is curious that, from a com-

pletely different perspective, Hume’s empiricism had a similaroutcome: in order to explain how the principles of Nature were

in accord with those of human nature Hume was forced to

invoke explicitly a pre-established harmony xxvii

For the rationalists, because cognition precedes and grounds experi-

ence, the mind can be assumed to function in accordance with the objectsof experience; objective knowledge of phenomena is possible because (evenprior to experience) the mind always already possesses it. Similarly, for theempiricists, the mind cannot be individuated from experience, and thus isnecessarily in harmony with — in fact fully integrated with — the objectsof experience. By contrast, Kant’s Copernican Revolution inverts the powerrelation of the mind’s subordination to experience. Deleuze explains this asthe empowerment of the mind, the endowing of the mind with a legislativeagency:

The fundamental idea of what Kant calls his ‘Copernican

Revolution’ is the following: substituting the principle of a

necessary submission of object to subject for the idea of a har-

mony between subject and object (final accord). The essential

discovery is that the faculty of knowledge is legislative, or more

precisely, that there is something which legislates in the faculty

xxvii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. 13



54

of knowledge . . . The rational being thus discovers that he hasnew powers. The first thing that the Copernican Revolution

teaches us is that it is we who are giving the orders. There is

here an inversion of the ancient conception of Wisdom: the

sage was defined partly by his own submission, partly by his

‘final’ accord with Nature. Kant sets up the critical image in

opposition to wisdom: we are the legislators of Naturexxviii

Deleuze depicts reason as a will or force to be executed over andagainst objects, in turn effecting, forming, these objects. Deleuze here rep-resents the Kantian Transcendental Method as a power relation in whichthe act of interpretation actively reformulates the object it interprets.

In this way, Deleuze manages to bring “reason as the ends of reason”full circle to explain reason’s power relation — and thus, its full authorityover and integration within — the experiential. If we recall Deleuze’s stipu-lation that, for the rationalists, the will of reason was to achieve “somethingexternal and superior to it: a Being, a Good or a Value,” then here we seethat the will of Kantian reason is to assimilate experience to its own logic,or to return, through all the processes of the mind, to its own ends. Reasonis an engine that drives all phenomena back into reason. xxix

Time is out of Joint; I is Another

In the introduction to his book, Deleuze proposes four “poeticformulas” for summarizing Kant’s critical philosophy. In understandingreason as a legislative engine, a law which governs the forms of the objects

xxviii. Ibid, p. 13

xxix. Ibid, p. 2



55

of experience, we can unravel the meaning of at least two of the “poeticformulas.” The first of these is

Hamlet’s great formula, ‘The time is out of joint’. Time is out

of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which

the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination

of time to the cardinal points through which the periodicalmovements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on

its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of

movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient

philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the

movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is

subordinate to time. . .Time is no longer related to the move-ment which it measures, but movement is related to the time

which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the

Critique of Pure Reason. xxx

In defining reason as a legislative act, Deleuze illuminates a dy-

namic relation between the time of the subject and the time of experientialphenomena. As opposed to the “objective” framework of rationalist reason,which posits a fixity, or constancy, between the time-space of the subjectand the time-space of experience, for Kant, time is the time of reason as it approaches experience and folds experience back into its own logic . Timeis in flux because it is subject to a continual modulation in accordancewith reason’s legislative function and participation in the experiential. Kantwrites:

time is not something objective and real; it is neither an

xxx. Ibid, p. vii



56

accident, nor a substance, nor a relation; it is the subjectivecondition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind

of coordinating all sensibilia by a certain law xxxi

The second of Deleuze’s poetic formulas is borrowed from Rimbaud:“I is Another,” meaning that

The I is an act which constantly carries out a synthesis of time,

and of that which happens in time, by dividing up the present,

the past, and the future at every instant xxxii

Again, because reason governs the constitution of objects in the

material world, it is the “unity of consciousness” that “synthesizes themanifold” of experiential phenomena:

Representation means the synthesis of that which is presented.

... My representations are mine in so far as they are linked in

the unity of a consciousness, in such a way that the ‘I think’

accompanies them xxxiii

And yet, because Kantian reason relies on experience to actuateitself,

Knowledge implies a necessary relation to an object. That

which constitutes knowledge is not simply the act by which the

manifold is synthesized, but the act by which the represented

xxxi. Kant, quoted in Copleston, p. 197

xxxii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy , p. viii

xxxiii. Ibid, p. 14-15



57

manifold is related to an object xxxiv

Thus, the objects of experience and the reason that governs themare in a continuous, reciprocal self-definition that constitutes the ever-changing “I” of the Kantian consciousness.

xxxiv. Ibid, p. 15



58

Ambiguous EtiologiesRobert Crawford and Federico Cavazos



59

Robert Crawford and Federico Cavazos

Ambiguous Etiologies, a designfor an outdoor pavilion in the

plains of Wyoming, is a reconfigu-rable modular lattice system thatharnesses snow drifts to create alandscape of differentiated spatialzones.

The pavilion challenges theunderstanding of space as a “dis-crete multiplicity,” and insteadapproaches architecture as thedynamic distribution of intensivematerial properties: light, heat,density, turbulence, pressure. Am- biguous Etiologies acknowledgesarchitecture’s full immersion in theflux of material energies, revealingthe absurdity of dialectic categoriessuch as the “natural” and the “arti-ficial,” or the “landscape” and the

“building.” This project is an enginefor the organization of matter.

Conditions

11

12The pavilion is climatic-dependent.

Snow accumulation peaks in late February

A

1

A

2

A

3

A

4



60

H 1 2

Average Temperature (F): 75

Average Wind (mph): 8

Average Snowfall (in): 0



Average Snowfall (in): 7.5



Average Snowfall (in): 4.5


Average Wind (mph): 11Average Snowfall (in): 6

100% Accumulation Level




90

75

60

45

30

15

0

105

J F M A MJ J A S O N D

6

5

4

3

2

1

7

8

9

10


T e m p e r a t u r e ( F )

S n o w f a l l (

i n )

Month

Month

6

5

7

8

9

10

11

12

13


W i n d ( M P H )

Month

Snow accumulation peaks in late February,

which is immediately followed by a spike inwind and a temperate summer that usually

hovers around the 70’s. Our pavilion seeks to

decrease the large swing in temperature to

create an inhabitable space. The modules

act as space heaters in addition to snow

fences during the winter. Their location

upwind heats the spaces downwind. The

snow is melted into a series of pools during

the summer, also upwind, whose purpose isthe opposite: to cool the breeze before it

reaches the inhabitable space.

A

1

A

2

A3

A

4

15H

Snow Fence Diagrams



61

3 4

Height - The higher the fence the

longer the fetch.

Density - Snow mounds up directly

against solid walls, but not porous

walls.

Form + Height - It is clear the hieght

of the snow fence plays a larger role

than the form.

Form - The fetch closely follows the

shape of the fence.

Four Stages of Growth1. A lens-shaped drift forms as saltating particles are caught by the fence. The wind force diminishes for a distance

equal to about 15 times the height of the fence (15H). Some blowing snow deposits on the ground, but the wind still

carries some particles from the shelter of the fence. This lens shaped deposite becomes deeper until the wind no

longer follows its curvature. At this stage, an eddy or recirculation zone forms downwind of the lens, causing a

slip-face to form.

2. At the third stage, the drift adds significant resistance to approaching wind. The recirculation zone helps trap

particles blowing off the top of the drift. The lens-shaped drift becomes deeper but not much longer. The efficiency

of the fence may actually increase as the drift adds resistance to the wind. The slip-face and

recirulation zone that form in this stage trap some of the snow that blows off the top of the drift.

3. As the downwind drift approaches its maximum depth (for 50% porous fences, 1 to 1.2 times the height of the

fence), the third stage of growth begins. The recirculation zone fills in as the drift lengthens downwind. This stage is

characterized by a decline in trapping effiiciency as the recirculation zone diminishes in size.

4. The fourth stage of growth begins when the drift first assumes a smooth profile without the slip-face, marking thedisappearance of the recirculation zone. At this stage, the drift is about 20H in length. Subsequent growth is slow as

the drift elongates to its final length of 35H.

Source: Tabler, Ronald. Snow Fence Guide. National Research Council

35H

Connection Matrix

Connection Type 1

Plan Front Right Axo



62

Connection Type 3

Connection Type 2

Connection Type 10

Connection Type 5

yp

Connection Type 4

Connection Type 7

Connection Type 9

Connection Type 8

Density: Loose

Angle: 90 to 90Legs: Long to Long

Density: LooseAngle: 90 to 90

Legs: Short to Short

Density: Tight

Angle: 90 to 90

Legs: Short to Short

Density: Moderate

Angle: 90 to 90

Legs: Long to Short

Density: Tight

Angle: 90 to 90Legs: Short to Short

Density: Loose

Angle: 90 to 90Legs: Long to Short


Legs: Long to Long


Legs: Medium to Long

Density: Moderate

Angle: 30 to 30Legs: Medium to Medium

Density: TightAngle: 30 to 90

Legs: Medium to Short

Density: Moderate

Angle: 30 to 90Legs: Medium to Short

Connection Type 6

Connection Type 11

Simulations

Connection Type 3Temperature



63

FrontRight

FrontRight

FrontRight

Connection Type 10

Connection Type 6

Environment: 5 °F

Nichrome: 200 °F

The warmth exuded by

tested by holding he environ-

ment temperature and air

velocity constant.

The denser module

configurations block more

wind and give off more

heat, as can be seen in the

following flow trajectory visu-

alizations of temperatue.

Mock-Up

The physical mock-up

tested the wiring, heating,

and structure of the module.

Plan Phases

Phase 4 - 100% Accumulation (with connection types)



64

The fences which do not produce mounds may only make use of

planar connection types such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 11.

The fences in front of the ‘snow fences’ are composed mainly of

dense connection types 10 and 11 as to more easily melt the mounds

they inhabit.

The fences behind the ‘snow fences’ vary much more in density as to

create more or less private micro-climates.

Dance Floor

Outdoor Seating

Bar

Lounge

Phase 1 - 0% AccumulationThe hardscape.



65

Phase 5 - 0% AccumulationThe melted snow is collected into pools in

front of the snow fences. The topography is

constructed to maintain access to the pavil-

ion and maximize the amount of wind that will

blow over the water and cool the space in the

Summer months.

Phase 3 - 70% AccumulationSnow continues to accumulate, but

not where the ground is paved, such as

the dance floor.

Phase 2 - 40% AccumulationThe begining of the snow accumula-

tion.



66

1. Heats Space

2. Melts Moguls

3. Delineates Space

4. Provides Light and Shade

5. Creates Moguls

6. Reduces Wind Chill

The profile of the branch is a triangle to assure a

rigid connection yet allow for variable configurations.

Module



67

Electrical wire is threaded throughout the branches.

Nichrome, a hybrid of nickel and chromium that heats with

electricity, is spliced in at the connections.

The cap piece is

rotated 15 degrees off center

to allow for multiple connec-

tions to occur in a column-like

fashion without the modules

intersecting.



68



69

Brian Boigonwith Izabel Gass

Gass: I want to discuss a pedagogical exercise that you and Sanford Kwinter explored in a studio, “Manual for 5 Appliances in the Alphabetical City.”

You set your students to the task of designing five “appliances” as a way of addressing architecture as a problem of the diagram, in the Foucauld- ian sense — architecture as the manipulation and organization of humanand material activity. While years have passed since Manual’s publication,I think its conception marks an important point in the understanding of what might constitute a “temporal architecture,” — an understanding of

which contemporary discourse has largely lost sight. Two ideas in particular interest me here:

1. First, you proposed Manual as a way to “reconceive architecture outside the classical framework, which is the problem of form and its rep-



70

resentation (hylomorphism).” In many ways, contemporary practices that claim to embrace an ethos of “dynamism” still understand the architectural act as the conjuring of “form” from a formless material substrate. Innova- tions in digital technology have in fact increased this tendency in thinking,providing programs that administer “forces” on “matter”, resulting incomputer-generated representations of “form.” Using “Manual for 5 Ap-

pliances” as a springboard, in what ways could architecture really transcend its reliance on the hylomorphic mindset to become actually dynamic?

Boigon: In the academic mayhem of architecture and urbanism (now oneand the same), the question of what you have called dynamically generatedform should first be historically framed by identifying the mediocrity of its

trailer park attendees and their attendant rules, known, to the outside world,as “Design Pedagogy.” While there have been intensive transformations inthe tools, language, and influencers that have surpassed ‘real’ architecture,there has been very little homework done by the staff of the surroundingamusement parks called “Universities” and “Colleges” to update theirrides.

Compare: The recent computational masterpiece of folding mat-ter in the feature film The Transformers, or the real time online motionpathways contained by X-Box 360s, Halo3, or the new urbanisms calledSocial Networks, such as Facebook (where up to 40% of a teenager’s timeis spent consuming-producing space and event sequences using everythingfrom a mobile phone-cam to the new dimensional elevation of architecture

known to tween-kind as IM chat windows).

With: Architectural teachings.

A d ff k h ld f h f



71

And you get to see: How off-mark the world of architecture is fromits internal banter and its failure to keep up with the downloadable Jone-ses.

We (meaning the pedagogical angels of academia itself) have yetto catch up to the follow-me generation with relevant upgrades to our

pedagogy 1.0 circa 17th Century Descartes, 18th Century Johnson, 19thCentury Rousseau and 20th Century Pavlov. Now this... the 21st Century-South Park, Second Life, Grey’s Anatomy, YouTube, Futurama, Jetman,

Jackass, Perez Hilton, the Ipod, Facebook, Cell phone with unlimited TextMessaging, Bratz TV, Batteries sold separately...are the new fuel and pro-grammable chips for our architecture design schools. Professors then mustpress enter after they type in this question on their computers: “Is this thingworking?,” this thing, meaning the actual production of pedagogy itself.Pedagogy is never really examined in the same way that the actual discourseof form has been audited throughout the centuries.

P f l k b i h l i WiFi d



72

Professors may look better with laptops, internet, WiFi and courseuploads, podcasts and YouTube lectures, but isn’t the pedagogical modelstill basically stuck inside Rousseau’s theory of education as nobilizing thesavagery grafted onto the French Judicial system, (alias — design critique)guilty until proven innocent?

Are we, as teachers, just playing our golden oldies on new plat-forms?

Unaccountable atoms aside, Pedagogy has, since the 17th century,positioned the teacher as the purveyor of intellectual produce and thestudent as mass consumer. The flaw, here in today’s world, of thinking and

being, is that the digital age has reduced all matter to an inconsequentialset of talking numbers...and that has coincided with the rise of new con-sumer-producer culture (Playlists, YouTube, on Demand Cable, Facebook,My Space, Secondlife.com). In truth, the student has become the producerand the teacher has become the consumer. This reversal of informationecology at the level of a Pedagogical discourse (the assembly of pedagogicaltexts, reliable sources— not Wikipedia and Google) has been hiding fromthe guns and roses of video games and flirt networks. We (meaning anyonewho teaches a thing) are negligent in our practice to not look first at whatHeidegger called “the first dwelling,” our bodies, and to see where they havelanded in time and space before we utter a language of knowledge that setsout to describe an order of things which no longer exists.

By the way... I divided your question of student producing com-putational automaton form into two coupled parts: a dynamical system isfundamentally a coupling of A THING, like a car, and another THING,like a trailer. There is the bilateral movement of the hitch pin against the

f i ti f i d l ft t i ht d th th i th b i ti t f d



73

friction of wind, left to right, and then there is the subscription to forwardmotion by the pull of the car. In other words, when you start your engines,everything is moving and you never stand still. Our X and our Y axes arevibrating in a blender.

We must therefore foreground any discussion of dynamical systems

theory in what I currently call the “follow me generation.” This — or rather,“they” — are the moving conveyors of the social. If we are to understanddynamical system theory at all, it would not wholly reside within the math-ematical formula that was first rendered into a CGI script by Alias Softwarein Toronto. To reduce the mathematician’s formula for computationallathing around a behavioral axis called the “spline” would do some justice

to the advancement of life at Pixar but it would also ignore the devices thatintermediate between self and others such as mobile phones, texting andInstant Messaging.

A dynamical system for architecture today is actually a social matrixand not a system at all. Intermittent lines of flight are what we now havehere... and there. Imagine us at a Toshiba ring assembly plant all workingon a car made out of virtual macrame—rendered across a desert of multiplescreens (Computer/Laptop/Mobile Phone/Television). This is the world ofdynamical dwelling. This and That are of concern to me as are Here, Thereand everywhere as the social interweaving rises into a chaotic critical mass...spikes and then settles down to reframe itself like a house party does. I askyou: Design and Pedagogy: “Is this thing working?”

Gass: Secondly, in the Manual, you explore the Diagram as a way of understanding architecture, “not by how it appears but by practices: Those it partakes of and those that take place within it.” What might it mean

for architecture to extrapolate a theory of form along these lines perhaps



74

for architecture to extrapolate a theory of form along these lines, perhapsin the vein of, say, Pierre Bordieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, or any similar anthropological approach? (Certainly Foucault’s work would be of paramount relevance here.)

Boigon: When Sanford Kwinter and I first conceived of the studio “5 Ap-

pliances in The Alphabetical City”, there were several fundamental socialattributes that we decided to define as having architectural meaning. Themost pervasive of those attributes was—and still remains for me—the Dia-gram. Specifically, diagrams that impact the body in real time and space.For example: social lines, chalk on the pavement that becomes a hop-scotchgame; sports lines, such as those inscribed on basketball courts, footballfields, tennis courts and running tracks; traffic control for the “parkingspot” and roadway lines. We referred to these types of diagrams (from aquote in my book Speed Reading Tokyo from 1990) as “DiagrammaticalReality.” Meaning, we found diagrams that were first and foremost castas guidelines for the body and its machines. As we excavated the diagramfrom the thousand plateaus of innocuous presence, we made it clear inour studio that a diagrammatical reality could be as physically restrictiveas the extrusions of windows, walls, floors and corridors which grow out ofthe lines which one uses to distinguish the total architecture of a potentialbuilding. And now this, the diagram was simply a tipping point into a worldof geometry that never led to form and yet changed the movement of bodiesin space which in turn would set off a chain reaction then leading to someawesome climax called a goal, basket, hole, spot, love and culminating in

the coupled words hitched together in the bliss against time: “The FinishLine” and “Game Over.”

Gass: In what ways can the chronotope of the “diagram” permeate the

representational realm? Might we find a correlation for instance between



75

representational realm? Might we find a correlation, for instance, betweenthe Deleuzian notion of “smooth space” (the space of lines rather thancontours, vectors rather than segments, the space of ‘direction’ not ‘place’)and the dynamic landscape that you have explored in technological innova- tions of the cartoon?

Boigon: The answer is yes. One can most certainly draw a correlation be-tween the life of the diagram in “vectors/direction” and landscape in “thecartoon.”

Despite its 2 dimensions, the diagram can impact the third dimen-sion. The 2-cause and 3-effect dyad is not without segmentation and a lossof depth. What is at stake in setting out to demarcate the surface is the“stake” itself. What we have lost is the ability to hold ground for more thanan instant. The Automobile, Electricity, The Internet, Mobile Phone toname but a few of the accelerators of time and space conduct our move-ments. Such is the life of a mobile society which gives up its stake in theground for a currency of lines and interoperability that constantly givesyou the option to either take part with or without your body and multiplepersonality.

As particle physics has revealed, the surface is deep and nowhere isthat more apparent than in the brilliant luminosity of the blinking cursor atthe entry line on a computer text code line/word processing program. TheCursor and its Double has both surface and infinite depth as it breathes,

as it beats, as it glows, as it pulses. The cursor is alive and stakes out life,living computational consciousness, across the screen. There has been noother creature born in computational space that has such profound allu-sions to life and to which we can recall every frame from every television

show feature film how the cursor buys time for the director creates spacef h h ff f li h f i l b i



76

show, feature film, how the cursor buys time for the director, creates spacefor the user, turns the effervescence of light from simply being a screen tothat of becoming a being. We have here, the cursor, the very first offspringof digital space that is both diagram, representation, signage, border andthe emotional intelligence. The cursor is the first interface to dwell in a newarchitecture of computer networks and communications.

To Note: Architecture is one of the great cross disciplinary arts andmust be defended against the master narrative of Architecture = Build-ing. If you want to make your architecture into a building, enter throughMarcel Duchamp’s “Door 11.” An architecture design school should offerDuchamp’s “Door 11” and other doors that lead to absolutely nothing andeverything. We must, still to this day, oppose the reductionism and surren-dering of architecture to its profession as a “building-only” public service,when indeed architecture as a discourse and discipline provides a completelyinfinite and provocative speculation on the meaning of dwelling and shelterfrom the multi-identities that one fashions on through electronic devices— say, the fakery of a cell phone call on the street to create a social buffer.



77

There is an underlying, indeed motivating, dissatisfaction with thecurrent state of affairs evident throughout Sanford Kwinter’s Architecturesof Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (2001, frommaterial originally published 1984 - 87). Kwinter states flatly: “the era ofcultural production we are traversing is unarguably one of impoverishmentand mediocrity.” i His book must therefore be understood as a response to

this condition—an attempt to find a way out. Kwinter emphasizes that thisway out cannot be found in critique, which is doomed by its very nature toa continual re-inscription within existing conditions, but instead in, and

i. Kwinter, Architectures of Time , p. 5

Sanford Kwinter Architectures of TimeMIT Press, 2001

reviewed by David Dahlbom

only in, novelty. Much of the work is therefore dedicated to exploring theconditions necessary for the creation of novelty and specifically defining a



78

y , y p gconditions necessary for the creation of novelty, and specifically defining aconception of novelty in an immanentist cosmology.

Kwinter outlines two conceptions of morhpogenesis, one appropri-ate to a world capable of sustaining transcendental ontological categories,

and the another inherent in a world of perfect immanence. According to theclassical, hylomorphic model, a necessarily limited number of possibilities(forms or images) are reproduced (mirrored in reality) over a substratum, ina linear time-line. The insufficiency of such a model, however, is evident inits inability to find a place for novelty. Something either is or is not possible.This model cannot account for new possibilities and it fails to confront theinevitable imperfections and degradations evident in all of its realizations. Itis indeed the inevitability of corruption and imperfection inherent in classi-cal “creation” that points to the second mode of morphogenesis. This modeis dependent on an understanding of the world as “a ceaseless pullulationand unfolding, a dense evolutionary plasma of perpetual differentiationand innovation.” ii In this world forms are not carried over from some tran-scendent realm, but instead singularities and events emerge from within

a rich “plasma” through the continual and dynamic interaction of forces.The morphogenetic process at work in such a world is not one wherebyan active subject realizes forms from a set of transcendent possibilities,but rather one in which virtualities are actualized through the constantmovement inherent in the very forces that compose the world. Virtuality isunderstood here as “free difference or singularity, not yet combined with

other differences into a complex ensemble or salient form.” iii Kwinter offersthe example of Hans Jenny’s Kymatic images, in which tones were emitted

ii. Ibid, p. 4

iii. Ibid, p. 8

across steel plates on top of which had been placed a layer of fine powder.The patterns produced in this powder (the actualization) are the product



79

p p p y pThe patterns produced in this powder (the actualization) are the productof the way the tone interacts with the complex metallurgical properties ofthe plate (the virtual components). Kwinter is keen to emphasize here boththat the virtual is real even when it is not actualized, and that actualizationitself occurs in and with time.iv

It is of course this immanentist description of the world and its at-tendant mode of morphogenesis that Kwinter posits as viable, and he is clearthat it leaves no room for the classical model, at least from an ontologicalstandpoint. There is no “threshold beneath which classical objects, states,or relations cease to have meaning yet beyond which they are endowed witha full pedigree and privileged status.” v Indeed, it is the nature of real timeto ensure “a constant production of innovation and change” in all condi-tions.vi This is evidenced precisely by the “imperfections” introduced in anact of “realizing” a form. The classical mode of morphogenesis, then, has tobe understood as a false model which is imposed on what is actually a rich,perpetually transforming universe. But the sort of novelty which the enact-ment of the classical model produces, a novelty which from its own perspec-

tive must be construed as a defect, is not of primary concern for Kwinter.The novelty which interests him registers its status as having emerged froma complex collision of forces. Above all, it is a novelty uncontaminated byprocrustean notions of subjectivity and creation.

Kwinter offers a series of models of this sort of novelty, the most

significant of which are found in the works of Sant’Elia and Kafka. Kwinter

iv. For complete discussion, see Ibid. pp. 6-10

v. Ibid, p. 49

vi. Ibid, p. 109

does not, however, put forward their work as something which is to be di-rectly imitated; this would only mean a return to a representational mode of



80

rectly imitated; this would only mean a return to a representational mode ofthought. Indeed, the crux of his examination of both of these figures lies inestablishing the non-representational nature of their productions. Sant’Eliaembodies “a new orientation toward a phenomenal field of events and in-teractions—not objects, but the abstract regimes of force that organize and

deploy them.” It is precisely his “orientation” toward the world that permitsthe works to “assume, rather than represent, an extended field of movementand circulating forces.” vii Similarly, Kafka is portrayed as an author who doesnot attempt to bring forth works from his private, creative internal space,but as someone fully embedded in his world. He is characterized as a sortof catalyst whose productions are the result of his own complex mechanisminteracting with the forces surrounding and traversing him.

What is at stake here then is not establishing models of works tobe imitated so much as identifying the conditions for the emergence ofnovel works. To pose a question more specifically: what behavior or modeof existence is Kwinter encouraging in order to maximize the productionof that radical novelty which might overturn the present state of affairs? To

address this question properly we must first examine the behaving mecha-nism itself, what it has traditionally been called “the subject.”

From the outset, it must be made clear that the category of thesubject (like that of the object) has no place in an immanent world. Therecan be no transcendent, subjective essence. What, then, is the ontological

status of a body and its attendant instance of consciousness? In what wouldit exist? Kwinter here offers:

vii. Ibid, p. 83

It would exist precisely in the ever-shifting pattern of mixtures

or composites: both internal ones —the body as a site marked



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p y

and traversed by forces that converge upon it in continuous

variation; and external ones—the capacity of any individu-

ated substance to combine and recombine with other bodies

or elements (ensembles), both influencing their actions

and undergoing influence by them. The ‘subject’ ... is but a

synthetic unit falling at the midpoint or interface of two more

fundamental systems of articulation: the first composed of the

fluctuating microscopic relations and mixtures of which the

subject is made up, the second of the macro-blocs of relations

or ensembles into which it enters. The image produced at the

interface of these two systems—that which replaces, yet is too

often mistaken for, subjective essence—may in turn have its

own individuality characterized with a certain rigor. For each

mixture at this level introduces into the bloc a certain number

of defining capacities that determine both what the ‘subject’

is capable of bringing to pass outside of itself and what it is

capable of receiving (undergoing) in terms of effects.viii

This description is sufficient to explain the immanent nature of thesubjective bloc as something entirely embedded in and conditioned by itssurroundings. What it does not offer—and what is not offered in any detailin the entirety of the work— is an in-depth account of what, exactly, these“defining capacities” are. To be sure, it would be unfair to demand a com-

plete description of these capacities. Kwinter himself has elsewhere referredto the states of the nervous system as “magically complex” and he continuesto express a deep interest in the study of human cognitive and perceptual

viii. Ibid, p. 110

apparatus.ix

Regardless of the specificity with which these capacities canpresently be defined, we must nonetheless agree that it is at this interface, as



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p y , g ,he calls it, at this location where so many systems are densely overlaid, thatconsciousness is produced. We may be convinced that this consciousness,this apparent internal space of thought, is derived entirely from immanentconditions and can only be granted the ontological status of an effect, but

this effect still manages to produce certain difficulties when attempting todefine modes of behavior appropriate to an immanent world.x

There is a palpable suspicion of the role of consciousness throughoutKwinter’s work, at least insofar as it is equated with some kind of internal,subjective space. (In one text he optimistically awaits the day when thisspace will “be left utterly in shreds.” xi) The basis of this suspicion is mul-tiple and obvious. Among the capacities of consciousness is the ability toattribute to itself the (false) image of a stable and transcendent essence.The workings of consciousness are precisely what allow the subjective blocto orient itself in a sequence of time, separating itself from an absoluteexperience of the moment. It is within consciousness that limiting andarbitrary moral categories seem to most stubbornly lodge themselves. (To

be sure this is the location of all critical thought.) And, above all, conscious-ness may serve as the repository for conditioned behaviors which believethemselves to be free of external determination. Consciousness, in short,contains within itself an enormous number of limiting factors which would

ix. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City, or the Wiring and Waning of the World’, Assemblage 29, p. 92 See

the discussion of architecture and science in the previous issue of Manifold for more on Kwinter’sinterest in the potentials of scientific examination of the human perceptual apparatus.

x. For a discussion of the derived nature of the “subject-effect”, see Kwinter’s discussion of theevent, Architectures of Time , p. 98

xi. Boigon and Kwinter, ‘Manual for 5 Appliances in the Alphabetical City: a pedagogical text’, Assemblage 15, p. 35

retard the production of novelty. Insofar as it appears to possess the ca-pacity for self-determination, this capacity would seem most productively



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p y p y p yapplied by turning on itself—that is, precisely by making the choice notto make conscious decisions and instead to permit oneself to be seized byextra-subjective forces.xii

The basic incongruity of consciousness in an immanent world findsits most clear expression in Kwinter’s invocation of Bataille’s claim that“[t]he true impulse at the basis of life is the impulse towards indistinction,continuity, unconsciousness (notably the philosophical un-self-conscious-ness), and death.” xiii In particular, this impulse may be manifested in afascination with animality: “For animality is immediacy (l’immédiateté )and immanence. The animal, in other words, inhabits its world in pure andperfect continuity; its glance is totally devoid of “intelligence” (science)and self-consciousness—and yet the animal is neither a mere object nordoes it belong to this world of the human.” xiv But for all the desire to freeoneself from the limiting confines of consciousness, it is clear that neitherbecoming animal nor “inflicting a mortal wound to one’s biological being”constitutes a viable option.xv

Kwinter does however offer us various examples of behaviors thatseem to sidestep the limitations of conscious behavior. In his “pedagogi-cal” text, “Manual for Five Appliances in the Alphabet City,” written withBrian Boigon, he notes that in fact an instantaneous, non-reflective mode

xii. Instructive in this connection is Alain Badiou’s characterization of Deleuze’s theory ofchoice. See Badiou, The Clamor of Being , p. 11. See also Deleuze’s discussion of Bresson and the“purified automaton” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image , pp. 177-179

xiii. Kwinter, Architectures of Time , p. 177

xiv. Ibid, p. 178

xv. Ibid, p. 179

of “inhabitation happens all the time, at the cinema and watching TV,weaving through traffic, or reading an air terminal schedule (not to men-



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tion all recently emerged forms of provisional tenancy such as logging on,downloading, jacking in).” xvi Much of the text, moreover, is devoted tostrategies that would limit conscious guidance and critical or evaluativereflection. The “principle of speed,” which does not permit the reflectiveconsciousness to interrupt the constant flow of production, is an obviousexample.xvii Indeed, the whole process of making evaluative judgments ispurposely subverted by a continually affirmative (and explicitly amoral)philosophy of “‘just say yes.’” xviii

Other models of non-reflective behavior are discussed in the open-ing chapter of Architectures of Time , specifically those of the surfer and ofthe rock climber. In these activities also the subjective bloc abandons, orat least does not activate, its capacity for conscious guidance or evaluation.The surfer depicted in the opening image of the book could not possiblysurvive the wave he is about to engage if he were forced to consciouslycalculate and determine every minute adjustment of his body. Rather, hemust intuitively find his way down, spontaneously reacting to the unpre-

dictable development of the water beneath him. Similarly the rock-climber,whose every limb and digit is conditioned to operate spontaneously andindependently in response to a complex and unpredictable surface, couldnever afford “a strategic command center that programmed the body tobehave globally in response” to a generalized understanding of the climbingconditions.

xvi. Boigon and Kwinter, p. 35

xvii. Ibid, p. 36

xviii. Ibid, p. 35

To these examples we might also add the experiment (scientific orotherwise), insofar as this is understood to be an establishment of what isl i l i l h l d l i d d f



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ultimately an impersonal process that leads to results independent of anyspecific guiding hand.xix

While we may agree that genuine novelty cannot be brought intoexistence by some consciously guided, “creative” process, we need to fur-ther specify the role of conscious behavior in the creation of the conditionsfor the production of novelty. We may begin by noting that while all ofthe activities above involve a period in which conscious guidance is neces-sarily relinquished, in every case there is also at least a moment in whichconscious guidance must be exercised. The examples of the rock climberand surfer are particularly notable for the obvious need of prior condition-ing before the more spectacular performances are possible. This processof conditioning inevitably involves some degree of conscious evaluation.One must isolate an area for mastery (surfing, rock-climbing), familiarizeoneself with the basic techniques in this realm, learn to shift one’s weightin ways that at first might seem counterintuitive, tell oneself to stay calm.It is only once these various conscious actions have been ingrained in the

subjective bloc, once they have become automatic mechanisms, that con-scious guidance can again be relinquished. Similarly, the construction of anexperiment demands a period of conscious construction that precedes theimpersonal course of its actual execution.

To approach the same issue from another position, we might note

that the mere ability to get outside of one’s confining internal space,though a necessary condition for the production of substantial novelty, is

xix. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City, or the Wiring and Waning of the World’, Assemblage 29, p. 92. Fora brief discussion of the experiment, see Manifold I, p. 11.

not the only such condition. Let us return to the example of the television,mentioned earlier as a model of non-reflective behavior:



86

Herein lies the specific beauty and insidiousness of television:

it easily lures attention with its flow—it lures attention easily

because it lures it initially along its pathway of least work or

resistance—then, once captured, confines and tunnels it into

rigid, disconnected pathways of predigested, continually, but

only infinitesimally, varying monotony.xx

To be clear, Kwinter never makes the inane suggestion that simplygiving oneself up to anything, be it television or scientific experiment, isa guarantee of novelty. What is perhaps not given sufficient attention,though, is the critical, evaluative process whereby one would make thedetermination of whether watching TV is the worth the time.

All of this is to suggest that the conditioning of the subjective bloccan never be escaped entirely. The dangers and limitations of acting as aself-determining “creator” of forms are made perfectly evident in this study.

Insofar as the consciousness associated with a given subjective bloc takes itsown existence as evidence of some fixed subjective essence, it has become ablockage point in the production of novelty. It is doomed to act within theboundaries of what it thinks it knows, capable only of critique and represen-tation. But activity that is never interrupted by conscious reflection exposesitself to limitations of its own. The subjective bloc that exhibits behavior

characterized by the “relative blindness of an immanent viewpoint” is opento novelty but is incapable of monitoring itself.xxi It exposes itself to the risk

xx. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City’, p. 95

xxi. Kwinter, Architectures of Time , p. 127

of falling into unconscious and unproductive patterns. Consciousness mustfinally be seen not as the grounds for some creative process, but, in part,as an auto regulator mechanism This mechanism must be continuall



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as an auto-regulatory mechanism. This mechanism must be continuallyactivated to introduce alterations not only into “the world,” but also withinthe nebulous and changing boundaries of subjective bloc out of which itarises.



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89

Duration and Simultaneity was written by Henri Bergson in theearly 1920’s to explore how his concept of duration (lived time) fit withEinstein’s special theory of relativity. As with almost all of Bergson’s majorwritings, he set out to see if he could solve a specific problem. In this case,Bergson’s goal was to update philosophy and its conception of time in asimilar manner to the way Einstein’s flurry of papers on relativity displaceda stale Newtonian physics in 1905.

Duration and Simultaneity presents a flawed and at times para-doxical argument that has endured almost continuous controversy in the80 years since its publication. The predicament a reader of Duration and Simultaneity finds oneself in is twofold. On one hand, the reader has tounderstand Einsteinian physics, and the mistakes Bergson is making in hisreading of the special theory of relativity. On the other hand, the readerneeds to understand how this book relates to Bergson’s earlier writings,

Henri BergsonDuration and Simultaneity Clinamen Press, 1999

reviewed by Matthew Conti

especially Bergson’s concept of duration, which he first lays out in Time and Free Will , and develops further in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution.



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Evolution.

In these and other earlier writings, Bergson investigates the char-acteristic differences between time as it is lived and time as a measurableand quantifiable phenomenon. Through this, he builds a scientific founda-tion for intuition that accounts for what he sees as two critically differentand mutually exclusive ways of knowing. One way, the way of Newtonianscience, sees the universe in discrete and spatial terms (as an actual or“discrete multiplicity”). The other way, the way of intuition, sees the uni-verse as continuous, immediate and in a perpetual state of flux (a virtual or“continuous multiplicity”).

Focusing on the continuous multiplicity, Bergson argues that hu-man understanding does not move from perception to recollection, butinstead moves from recollection to perception. With this observation hearticulates his notion of duration, a concept he illustrates with his famousdiagram of a cone (representing the totality of recollections accumulated

in one’s memory) and a plane (representing the perceivable universe). Itis at the intersection of the cone’s point and the plane where differenceis developed in relation to the contraction and relaxation (position in thecone) of the totality of memory, where the past and present exist at once.This differentiation, which can only be grasped by intuition, is continuousand qualitative and is the defining feature of lived time or duration. It is

this immediate and individualized definition of duration, not the expandedversion described in Creative Evolution, which Bergson is attempting toreconcile with the special theory of relativity in Duration and Simultane- ity .

Bergson’s central criticism of Einstein in Duration and Simul- taneity is that Einstein mistakes a discrete multiplicity for a continuousmultiplicity, failing to see that time begins with duration, not the relative



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p y, g g ,speeds of objects in space. Bergson appreciates the radicality of relativity,but believes the theory is undermined by its dependence on the observer.However, as he tries to prove this, the paradoxical aspects of Duration and Simultaneity become apparent. For Bergson, the notion of simultaneityimplies at least two perceptions understood through a single mental act,the smallest possible division of duration. Given this, Bergson is critical ofEinstein’s ability to ascertain if two events are simultaneous, but Bergson isalso locking himself into a phenomenological argument which is even moredependent on the observer than Einstein’s thought experiments with lightclocks. This paradox is further complicated by Bergson’s investigation of

the role of the Lorentz equations, which leads him to believe in completereciprocity between the relative times of different frames of reference. Inessence, Bergson’s conclusion here is that the special theory of relativity canbe simplified because the multiple times it predicts are mathematical fic-tions, and the time dilation which the hypothetical observer sees is nothingmore complicated than the Doppler Effect with lightwaves.

The glaring omission here is that Bergson only briefly discusses timedilation, and when he does, he gets it wrong. To be fair to Bergson, thisconcept is only alluded to in the special theory of relativity, and is explainedwith clarity only in the general theory of relativity, which Bergson does notexplore. Nonetheless, Bergson fails to acknowledge that it is possible for

subjective consciousness to accelerate from one temporal frame of refer-ence to another, which is to say, he fails to acknowledge that duration alsopresents a form of time that is by nature inconstant . Bergson thus falselyconcludes that there is one universal duration (time) encompassing all

other durations.

While this conclusion seems like a fatal error for Bergson’s argu-



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g gment, the mistake does not completely derail Bergson’s central argumentthat the “temporality” of time itself begins with duration. Bergson’s intentis to update the philosophical conception of time through an investigationof Einsteinian relativity. Although his flawed analysis of the special theoryof relativity brings him into conflict with Einstein and other physicists, theconcept of a single duration still has traction regardless of the nature oftime dilation, inasmuch as an intuitive duration does not imply an absoluteand universal temporal frame of reference.

When Bergson and Einstein met in 1922, Einstein concluded their

conversation by stating that there was an unbridgeable gap between thetime of the physicist and the time of the philosopher. The closest a physicistwill get to defining time is to say that it is what we measure with clocks. It istherefore left to the philosopher to interpret time as duration. And thus thegap remains between physics and philosophy, until neuroscience and morerecent developments in physics take us inside the flow of duration.



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LECTURES



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Reinhold Martinreviewed by Jamie Chan

Islands and Worlds

Troubled by the “difficulty thatmany architects, students, and theo-rists seem to have today in thinkinga radical thought and imagining autopian future,” Reinhold Martinspoke boldly of a “re-theorization”of the Postmodern project in archi-tecture — the formulation of a newframework for utopian thinking byway of reexamining postmodern-ism.

According to Martin, utopiais not a place or an ideal city butrather a “thought made possible

by material conditions.” He spokewith urgency, arguing that theability for a creative mind to thinka utopian thought is what drivesfuture change, and thoughts todayabout changing the world are van-ishing rapidly.

Understanding the present is es-sential to thinking about the future.Martin’s introduction therefore

dove straight into the heart of thepresent globalization debate wheremega-structures and transnationalnetworks threaten to ‘undermine



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the authority of capital cities’ andbreed inhuman spaces. This isthe place of the Multi-NationalCity (MNC), and Multi-NationalCorporation—an acronym coinedfrom Martin’s previous work. Heremarked that, ‘The term Multi-National Corporation can seem

dated in one place while all toocurrent in another.’ In essence,our present, globalized condition ischaracterized by “a certain disjunc-tion, a certain déjà vu in both timeand space.” This image of disjunc-

tion led Martin to quote colleague Andreas Huyssen, who describesthe present interdisciplinary de-bates on globalization as analogousto those of postmodernism in the1980’s because both are defined by

the same anachronistic qualities.By matching these descriptions ofanachronism in postmodernismand globalization, Martin implied

that globalization not only paral-lels postmodernism; it upholds it.Clearly more than stylistic mixingor suburban sprawl, the term ‘post-modernism’ in Martin’s lecture isused in an abstract sense, to de-scribe ‘displacement and untimeli-ness.’ The point was driven home

as he referred to ‘that hallmark ofpostmodernism—“the presence ofthe past.”’

And just as we began to ask,‘where is utopia in all of this?’

Martin told us that it never left usinasmuch as Postmodernism’s veryutterance is also a negation—thatis, a negation of Modernism. There-fore, the Modernist desire for uto-pia remains embedded within the

Postmodern ‘undead,’ a ghost thathaunts us in unexpected places;Martin declares: “the name of theghost is Postmodernism itself.”



97

Thus we are haunted intermi-nably, unable to escape this ghost

of Postmodernism as we continuallycatch glimpses of a ghastly utopia,or as Martin tells us, ‘what’s notsupposed to be there.’ Utopia andits ghost were made more evidentin Martin’s numerous examples.

He presented French semiologistLouis Marin’s diagrams of ThomasMore’s Utopia—a crescent-shapedisland drawn three times, each de-picting a capital city in a differentlocation with respect to the water’s

edge—which served the purpose ofdisclaiming Utopia’s fixed image.Martin also showed a map of Dis-neyland, in which its participantswere cut off from the real worldwhile they enjoyed themselves in

a scaled-down reconstruction of it.Martin pointed out that despite thecommon criticism of Disneyland’sisolated, counterfeit reality, the

‘hole’ in the island that leads backto the outside world is real; partici-

pants are never trapped inside. Inanother words, ‘an island is neverjust an island’—it leads back to themainland.

Martin also uncovered the

association between ‘nowhereand no-place’ and utopia, as hewas quick to point out that, inmultiple instances, “postmodernarchitecture is full of roads thatlead to nowhere.” Among many

examples there was the StradaNovissima (‘the very image of his-tory going nowhere’) and Hejduk’sBerlin Mask (which ‘performs astory about nowhere’). He alsodiscussed the work of Ungers, who

documented American communesand created an inventory of uto-pian experiments. Through theseexamples Martin demonstrated



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that the ‘island of architecture hasa hole in it that leads back out tothe world at large.’

It may seem odd at first when

one realizes that Martin, with hisroundabout logic and negation-based dialectics, is using the verything he is trying to escape to makehis argument, but it serves to provehis point that we are still unable toflee the paradigm of Postmodern-ism. We are made aware that if wechoose not to acknowledge it, tothrow it out the window, so to speak,we trap ourselves in another worldwithin it once again. By identifyingthe ‘ghost’, Martin cleverly usesPostmodernism as a springboard—astarting point at which he ushersin a new way of thinking in which“another world can be made pos-

sible” through architecture. If onesees the value of his argument, it isan empowering and enormous firststep.

Yale Universityreviewed by Stephen Nielson

Writing on Architecture



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Panel DiscussionYale School of Architecture “Writing on Architecture”

Peter Eisenman

Luis Fernández-GalianoKurt ForsterPaul GoldbergerRobert A.M. Stern John Donatich, Moderator

Presented in conjunction with theWhitney Humanities Center

Monday, October 8

A panel of six representativesfrom various positions in the fieldconvened to discuss, inflate, anddeflate the role of writing in archi-

tecture. The night’s talk, moderatedby Yale University Press Director John Donatich, aimed to shift ourfocus from the visual to the textual.Summoning the haunting verse of

John Ruskin, Donatich defined thedual nature of architecture as hav-ing both responsibilities to shelterand speak to us. Focusing on thelatter he hoped that with the variedperspectives of the panel the dis-cussion might “parse the qualitiesof not only the ways in which build-ings speak to us [and] chat aboutwhat the jobs of those who writeabout architecture is.” Through aseries of questions directed mostlytowards architectural criticism, heattempted to define oppositionsaround the relationship of people tothe built environment. The critic isasked to try on many hats as poten-



100

tial educator, aesthetic champion,soldier of public well-being, or social

activist. These provocations speakto the question of architecturalcommunication.

As the only official “critic” onthe panel, Paul Goldberger was the

one to address the questions posedby Donatich in defining the roleof the critic. He first cited notable‘critics of critics,’ quoting Sir HenryWalton’s comparison of the critic tothe “washer of nobleman’s clothes”

and increased the fervor of his as-sault with a line from Lord Byronwho wrote that, “one might as soonseek roses in December, ice in June,hope constancy in the wind, or cornin the chaff, believe a woman or an

epitaph before you trust in critics.”To these rather disheartening com-ments Goldberger noted a positiverebuttal in Matthew Arnold who

defined criticism as, “a disinterestedendeavor to learn and propagate the

best that is known and thought inthe world.” It was from this pointthat he built his case for the criticas primarily an educator. To him,the lofty ambition of the critic to,through written communication,

serve as an ambassador of intellectto the people is in fact at least apart of the job. This task, however,comes with the peril of judgment.While honest journalism is ofcourse a necessity to good criticism

it is in promotion and chiding thata qualitative assessment must bemade. For clarity in judgment heinsisted that the critic maintain adistance from issues of aestheticchoice. With these issues in check,

the remaining requirement for thecritic is quite simply a love of thesubject. If the critic can effectivelyconvey that love to his or her read-



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ers, his or her potential to maketheir lives more meaningful and

pleasurable is great.

With a panel comprising threearchitects, a historian and but onecritic, the ensuing conversation wasdominated by the question of why

architects write, and whether theyhave any place doing so. Bob Stern,with stinging efficacy, distilledwhat he believes are the motivatorsbehind architects writing, quotedin part, below:

“1. Very young architects withlittle or no work experience in theprofession write to make space forthemselves. In this they reach out tomembers of their own generation.

They also write to create the kindof intellectual noise that is likely toget the attention of older architects– for better or for worse.

2. Not so young architects withsome professional work under their

belts write about their work to makemore of it than there really is.

3. More mature architectswrite to carry forward a line of in-vestigation with some seriousness.

For example they may look for con-nections with other fields.

4. Architects write to make thepublic aware of the contributionarchitecture makes to the wider

culture.

5. Architects, like those in somany other fields, write to justifythe trajectory of their work with thehope of influencing history, and in

that way with the hope of justifyingtheir lives. While most other cul-tural figures write autobiographies, Architects prefer to gather their work



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together in monographs. Blame Pal-ladio, whose lead we follow. I would

be less-than-candid were I not tosay that the monographs architectswrite about themselves or publishabout themselves are self serving.But insofar as the work and words intheir pages inspire others to spend

time contemplating the discipline,I would also argue that such booksserve architecture as a whole.”

Luis Fernández-Galiano wouldbe the only of the presenters to rise

from the table and take the podium.From his pulpit he expounded on“the asymmetrical relationshipwhere architecture is always themaster and writing is reduced to thestatus of servant” likening the phrase

“architectural writing” to “BritishCuisine” or “German Humor.” Asthe editor of Arquitectura Viva, he,through editorial necessity, must

coax the two “strange bedfellows”of architecture and writing into

cohesive publications, so he furtherdistilled the relationship to the“word” and the “image” in which thesubject, Architecture, clearly favorsthe image. Beyond merely notingthis hierarchy, Fernández-Galiano

persecuted architectural writing,citing the poor writing of Vitruviuswho was, in his words, “sadly lackingsubstance and intellectual distinc-tion.” In confirmation of Stern’scomments on self-promotion,

Fernández-Galiano pointed towardthe image-heavy monograph as ameans of advertising. While thegeneral tone of his talk was a humor-ous and mildly self-deprecating jabat architectural writing, he did not

criticize the architect for a relianceon the image, but simply insistedthat we come to terms with thereality of the situation. In the end,



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Fernández-Galiano admitted that,while the craft of writing within

the field is historically abysmal,there is nothing to be ashamed ofin this regard, and that we may notbe “happier or wiser if in the worldof architecture the word were themaster and the image the slave.”

Kurt Forster’s response providedthe much-needed intoxicationto Fernández-Galiano’s soberingaccusations in a discussion of therecently re-issued articles of George

Nelson. Nelson, a young man of 25,offers what Forster deems, “a kindof writing about architecture whichone could compare to writing homeabout what you’ve seen.” He sum-marized with a German proverb:

“If you take the trip, you’ll havesomething to write home about.”The benefit of this type of writing isthe potential for the writing itself to

offer insight beyond the actual sub-ject under consideration. Forster

evoked Marco Polo, the poet Gurte,and Karl Friedrich Schinkel as hav-ing whetted the appetites of a greatmany readers from the far east tonorthern Europe, respectively. Heobserved that Gurte recognized the

existence of a “...third life, amal-gamating truth and fiction [and]felt that precisely this borrowed lifeenchanted the reader.” Nelson’sjournals, beginning in 1932, offeran American sensibility applied

to a transitional period in Europe.He wrote home about encounterswith an idling Mies van der Rohe,an ambitious though disappointedLe Corbusier, and a remarkableMargarita Sanfranti. Forster folded

his tale back into the lesson of theday when he commiserates on theinability to locate America, thebook of Sanfranti, the “Godmother



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of Italian Architecture.” Forsterconcluded, “so much for the fate of

books that we typically find inter-twined with the fate of buildings.”

Peter Eisenman took specificissue, as he does on a weekly basis inhis design studio at Yale, with Luis

Fernández-Galiano. He counteredthat, while architects may, in fact,be guilty of the self-promotingmonograph, “writers also writebooks about themselves and createcharacters that are surrogates for

themselves,” citing Proust’s Swann,and Roth’s Zuckerman as examples.He argued that we then must allowarchitects a similar outlet. Perhapsthe most striking, and insightful,comment offered by Eisenman was

that “books are more importantthan buildings.” Eisenman notedthat buildings have a “life of aboutthirty years, in terms of their value,”

and so, were it not for publications,we would have no record of the ex-

istence of a number of buildings; inthis service, “there’s nothing wrongwith a few pictures.” Eisenman of-fered the immortalizing examplesof Palladio’s four books – for whichPalladio himself redrew all of his

designs as their initial unrealizedintent – and Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complète and Vers Une Architec- ture as models, without which we’dhave lost the buildings to time andsituation. Beyond the book as a

means of immortalizing the archi-tecture, Eisenman cited Venturi’sComplexity and Contradiction as atext, with minimal readable imag-ery, which will certainly far outlastand take priority over its built

counterparts. Including Koolhaaswith the aforementioned collectionof writing architects, Eisenmanconcluded that their various un-



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dertakings are better described as“writing architecture.” With this,

Eisenman drew a line in the sand,making a distinction between theindependent field of architecturalwriting, which is comprised of crit-ics and most theorists, and “writingarchitecture” which is architecture

in the form of productive text anddiagram in support of, and of equalor greater importance to, the built.

Upon conclusion of theincreasingly specific individual

presentations, the initially moder-ated conversation returned to thequestion of the monograph. Whenasked of the monograph’s value,Paul Goldberger characterized itas mostly reference material for

providing plans and pictures, where“rarely is there critical insight that ismeaningful.” This was a commentwith which Eisenman promptly

agreed, adding that the architectis the last person you’d want to ask

“what it is, or why it is.” Eisenmanthen, again, turned the discussionto Complexity and Contradiction as a book, not about Bob Venturi,but about presenting a new ideato American architecture — “the

most important book written in theUnited States about architecture.”Bob Stern used this remark to rein-force his earlier comments, notingthat what Venturi, Koolhaas, LeCorbusier, and Sullivan do is “[try]

to carve a new place, seeing thingsfresh.”

On the issue of the visual andthe verbal, Eisenman distinguishedbetween the abilities of the ar-

chitect and the writer, offering Jacques Derrida as someone withtremendous ideas to offer thosewho could “see,” whilst lacking



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the ability to “see,” himself. Whenasked to provide a philosopher

who can “see” Paul Goldbergerinstead looked to Marcel Proustand, upon Eisenman’s suggestion,Sal Bellow, both of whose writing,he argued, was about architectureand “describe[s] place and build-

ing often more convincingly thanarchitects have.”

The earlier provocations ofFernández-Galiano then came to ahead with Eisenman over the utili-

zation of images to describe archi-tectural ideas. Fernández-Galianocited the total editorial control ofPalladio and Le Corbusier, illustrat-ing the reliance of architecturaltexts on the image. It is precisely the

definition, or classification, of theimage that he and Eisenman havedifficulty synchronizing: Eisen-man insists that the oft referred

to canonical texts do not rely onrepresentational imagery, and that

there is an important distinctionto be drawn between image as rep-resentation of a reality and imageas clarification of an architecturalconcept—simply a matter of thephotograph versus the diagram.

For Eisenman, plans and sections,while consumed by the eye, are notperceptual phenomena, but insteada means of conveying informationto the intellect. While Fernán-dez-Galiano refuses to allow this

distinction, the point is clarifiedby Paul Goldberger who refinedEisenman’s descriptor of “picturepostcards” to “sexy, colorful, pretty,seductive images ... architecturalporn,” a realm of the visual that,

at least in architecture, Eisenmancannot subscribe to.

Thus, at the conclusion of the



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evening we saw a rift presenting twodistinct camps. Architectural writ-

ing finds its merit, independent ofarchitecture’s theoretical projects,through an inspiration of love forthe subject, or “letters home,” tomuch the same end, while “writingarchitecture” is subsumed into the

project of architectural autonomy.



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University of Pennsylvaniai d b J N

talk20 Philadelphia



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reviewed by Jason Nguyen

Entering the Institute for Con-temporary Art (ICA) at the Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania on the eveningof October 11th, you would havethought you were interrupting anongoing party and not the preludeto a presentation on contemporaryarchitecture and design. With syn-

thesized beats emanating from thelecture hall, beer and wine beingserved by the glassful and throngs ofstudents and young designers mill-ing about the current exhibits, thescene was fitting for the an event

advertising itself as “not as a lecturebut a gathering, an open forum forthe dissemination of ideas in art,architecture and design.”

Given the institution’s predilec-tion for liberal and intellectual aes-

theticism, it’s of little surprise, then,that such an event found its homeat the ICA, that groundbreakinginstitution most known for hostingthe first solo Andy Warhol exhibi-tion in 1965 and originating the

highly controversial Robert Map-plethorpe: “The Perfect Moment”show in 1989. Though it is unlikelythat talk20 will compete with suchmilestone events, what it does dois usher in a refreshing and much-

needed approach to contemporaryarchitectural discourse.

Talk20 began in Philadelphia in



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February of 2006. Since then, it hasspread to six other cities – Boston,

Barcelona, Chicago, Mexico City,Spartanburg (South Carolina) andToronto. Its intrigue lies not onlyin the content covered but also inthe structure of the event itself. As opposed to having one speaker

lecturing, talk20 organizes a centraltheme and opens the podium tothe designers and academics whichtypically constitute the audience.To maintain a swift, steady andbrevity-attuned dialogue, each

speaker is allowed twenty slideswith an allotted speaking time oftwenty seconds per slide. Such astructure forces a direct yet disci-plined conversation which is partdialogic, part artistic, part critical

and wholly dynamic. The discus-sion remains frank, cutting directlyto the conceptual underpinningsof each project. Presenters address

issues of theory, practice, fabrica-tion and culture, all while avoiding

(or attempting to avoid, at least)the trap of esotericism which hascome to plague much of theoreticaldiscussions within academe.

The October 2007 installment

of talk20 Philadelphia, its fourth,centered on “Feedback.” Thoughthe organizers offered little morethan that single word as guidance,it’s hardly shocking that the major-ity of the presenters latched on, at

least implicitly so, to prevailing De-leuzian philosophy. Though somepresented projects which adoptedthe once-revolutionary, but nowseemingly mainstream, use of thealgorithm as a means of producing

an architecture representative ofsuch an ontology, there were quite afew who addressed the theme with arefreshing and slightly more critical



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hand. As a complete review of eachdiscussion would be far too wide-

ranging for a concise review, I’d liketo cover two presentations whichaddressed the theoretical conceptsof “feedback” innovatively.

Scott Knowles, Next American

City

Scott Knowles, a professor ofpolitical science at neighboringDrexel University, offered an inter-esting perspective of “Feedback”

in his presentation on the recentendeavors of non-profit researchgroup, The Next American City—agroup whose interests lie in therealm of psycho- and political-ge-ography. In his short presentation,

Mr. Knowles rather chaoticallypresented an experiment which heand his group conducted the sum-mer prior. Equipped with a video

camera, no set agenda and a jovialspirit, his group set out to see what

it meant to experience Philadelphiafor one twenty-four hour period.The experiment was less a lessonin good urbanism, urban semioticsor post-modern meaning and morean analysis of non-linear, empirical

existence. As the group transitionedfrom one location to another—fromtourist venues leading impromptutours to municipal parks playingfootball—each subsequent movewas determined solely by the

adjacencies of the location andaction taking place. While somecould view this endeavor as merespontaneity gone urban, what it ac-tually constituted was a lighter, lessesoteric, approach of addressing the

temporal existence which makes upthe actual act of experience. The setof events – the actions and reactionswhich conspired in the creation



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of the overall experience – wasnot one of reducible, linear, time-

contingent entities. Instead, theseindividual events fused to create awhole new event altogether. Fur-ther, their treatment of the city lessas an object representing culturalmodulations and more as an active,

participatory container assistingin the propagation of these eventthemselves, proved a fresh, materialalternative to the algorithmic-basedarchitectures of recent years.

Phu Hoang, Phu Hoang Office LLC(New York)

Another presentation which of-fered a fresh and decidedly criticalapproach to “Feedback” concluded

the event. Phu Hoang, New York-based architect and design criticat the University of Pennsylvania,leads a design and research practice

interested in the multiple scales ofurban socio-politics. A quick glance

at his oeuvre reveals an interest inthe dissolving of physical bound-aries, architecturally, politically,economically. In his presentationon the project No Man’s Land, headdressed the dually ecological and

political role that water takes inthe Dead Sea region of the MiddleEast. As the Dead Sea continues toshrink, he claims, the ecological,economical and political nature ofthe ever-volatile region has begun

to shift. His proposal, thus, takesthe resorts which line the shores ofthe Dead Sea (and which have pos-sibly contributed to its recession)and relocates them to a series of ar-tificial islands within the Sea itself.

Interspersed within this system ofartificial islands would be stationsfor desalination for potable watergeneration, ecological refuge and

f d l S h i h f h i hi h



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future development. Such a systemis organized “externally,” each

“island” interacting and affectingits neighbor in innovative architec-tural and political ways. What heappears to suggest in this proposalis that through transposing currentsocial and political entities (enti-

ties being materially converted tophylum-organized “islands” in thisproject), new cultural realities canbecome possible. Furthermore, in aworld where ecological concerns arebecoming increasingly intertwined

with the political, it is becoming in-creasingly imperative to introducemeaningful ideas of sustainabil-ity—and its impacts on the criticalagenda—to the discourse.

During the whole of the event,the lecture hall at the ICA was inun-dated with a series of innovative andnovel proposals implicitly dealing

with many of the issues which per-meate contemporary architectural

discourse. Through the dissemina-tion of theoretical positions in aforum for honest, unpretentiousdialog, the event allowed for anevent both casual and intellectual,dynamic and laid-back, provisional

and sustainable.

Talk20 currently exists in sevencities across the globe: Boston,

Barcelona, Chicago, Mexico City,Philadelphia, Spartanburg (SouthCarolina) and Toronto. For more information, please see http://www.talk20.org .



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Alejandro Zaera-Polo (of For-eign Office Architects) began hislecture by presenting a taxonomy ofenvelope types: flat, spherical andvertical. The lecture brought forththe notion of “envelope” as a coun-ter-critique of common themes that Alejandro Zaera-Polo has identifiedin the past five years, both at FOAand across the discipline. Zaera-Polonoted that architectural projectsare becoming increasingly drivenby envelopes and volumes ratherthan flows of intensive propertiesengaging transformations of surfacedriven geometries. Contemporary

discourse has regarded architecturalsurfaces such as floors, walls etc. asdifferential and continuous. Con-nectivity of surfaces and varioustopological transformations such asstretching and folding have domi-nated an architectural languageoriented towards mediating inten-sive differences between social andmaterial flows.

In his lecture, Zaera-Polobrought into question the role of“the surface” and the significance ofthe building envelope. Zaera-Poloargued that architects are asked by

Alejandro Zaera-Poloreviewed by Francis Bitonti

FOA

developers to define architecture in envelope of a building is inherently



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developers to define architecture interms of dimension with particular

preference to volume rather thantopological models which are moreconcerned with connectivity. Indoing so, Zaera-Polo chooses toemphasize volumes above the non-Euclidian geometries which have

recently dominated architecturaldiscourse. This brings architectureinto an intellectual arena whereextensive rather than intensivethinking assumes paramount im-portance. In his lecture Zaera-Polo

defined envelopes as mediators ofintensive properties rather thansurfaces, and therefore imposed analternate understanding of materi-als and geometric transformationwhich hybridizes extensive and

intensive thinking.

In support of his argument,Zaera-Polo pointed out that the

envelope of a building is inherentlypolitical, and a poignant point of

departure for a discussion about therelationship between politics andarchitecture. The envelope definesthe legal limits of property and ne-gotiates the division between publicand private. Zaera-Polo stated that a

way of thinking about politics, morespecifically a “politics of things,” hasbeen absent from architecture inrecent years. He criticized previousgenerations of architects for beingoverly pragmatic.

As Zaera-Polo describes it, a“politics of things,” can be under-stood through an emphasis towardsthe building envelope. The defini-tion of geometry, described above,

accounts for the differentiation ofthe three envelope types. While asfar as topology is concerned eachof these three envelope types (flat,

spherical and vertical) are identi-



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spherical, and vertical) are identical cells, by standards of Euclidian

geometry they define three uniqueentities. This perspective allowsarchitectural typology rather thantopology and nuanced negotiationsbetween architectural form andfluctuating cultural and economic

conditions to be reflected througha contemporary discourse thatpoliticizes geometric and inten-sive difference. The emphasis onEuclidian and metric differencesallows our understanding of mate-

rial organizations to be more closelylinked to economy. As a result thearchitectural volume is free to as-sume a highly politicized role whileintensive differences are regardedin relation to an understanding

of topology that operates as anorganizing rather than geometricprinciple.

This may seem to be a surpris- analogous to the notion of the



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This may seem to be a surprising argument from Alejandro

Zaera-Polo. However, it shouldbe noted that projects from FOA,despite being topologically drivenfor many years (for example the Yokohama Port Terminal andVirtual House), show a tendency

to understand architectural differ-entiation though formal typology.Phylogenesis, meaning genesis oftype, discusses in great detail theemergence and mutations of archi-tectural form. The introduction to

the text describes the challenge ofmaintaining the identity of a singlearchitectural practice while at thesame time taking advantage of thepotential mutations of architecturalform that occur when the architect

is asked to work within a variety ofgeographic locations.

This argument is somewhat

analogous to the notion of the“epigenome” in contemporary ge-

netics. The notion of an epigenomereflects the idea that certain genescan be activated and deactivated asa result of conditions in the physi-cal environment, thus creatingdifferentiation from a single entity

operating autonomously. In Zaera-Polo’s text, architectural speciationor rather “Phylogenesis” becomesthe product of a particular architec-tural genome operating in opposi-tion to various local factors such as

socio-economic and programmaticdemands.

Rather than discussing archi-tectural projects in terms of statictypologies, the text instead looks to

the patterns through which a typeemerges. This is the realization oftype through intensive differences;in short, architecture has its own in-

telligence and does not necessarily the envelope becomes a mecha-



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g yneed to borrow geometric models

for expression but only for criticism.Intensive differences create tracesupon architecture only in so muchas they inform the evolution of aspecies with its own requirementsfor geometric organization. This

justifies structuring the discussionaround Euclidian transformationswhich are more appropriate fordiscerning differences of type withregard to architecture.

The philosophy of Bruno Latourand Peter Sloterdijk were cited inthe lecture as being an appropriatepoint of reference for this discus-sion. Sloterdijk recently publishedan essay in Log titled “Cell Block,Egospheres, Self-Container” thatdiscusses the emergence and sig-nificance of the apartment buildingin the 20th century. For Sloterdijk,

pnism through which inhabitants

mediate their relationship betweenthemselves and the collective or“foam” as it is described in theessay. Sloterdijk lays a philosophi-cal framework for thinking aboutarchitecture in terms of envelopes.

In the case of the apartment build-ing, Sloterdijk describes the livingunit as a discrete and self referentialentity while at the same time partof a large aggregation.

While Sloterdijk focuses onthe discrete living unit, Zaera-Polodiscussed the building envelope inrelation to the large urban context,rather than as a single self referentialentity part of a larger architecturalcomposition. Zaera-Polo then dis-cussed the three envelope types.

Flat envelopes are horizontal

and serve to redefine the ground



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gplane. Spherical ones are as equally

tall as they are wide; they areneither horizontal nor vertical.These volumes have a tendencyto become extremely dense, so itbecomes important for the designerto always balance their volume with

their surface area. Vertical volumeshave an even stronger relationshipto their skin. The surfaces of thesevolumes become a negotiationbetween expressing program andstructure.

The argument for envelope-based design that Zaera-Polopresented offers a design logic thatengages the larger composition ofthe city through the inward lookingmodel of building construction—the processes and organizationsthat are unique to architecture.

Neil DenariShrinkwrapping Vague Things



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Neil Denari knows how tointeract with his audience, how toexplain his projects, how to gaugethe room, how to wield an image.He can argue about the lineup of80’s bands that you probably don’t

know. Above all, he is a deft archi-tect with a broad portfolio of builtprojects, one who practices designat every scale. Denari’s November 7,2007 lecture at Princeton featuredhis scalar acrobatics and cultural

ergonomics: the process of organiz-ing into place a shrinkwrapping ofvague things.

Ankles, eyes, hands, codes, software

Denari frames arguments withphotographs. The images oper-ate on a Lilliputian level, his lens

catching young adults in Shibuyaon a sultry August night. From thestreet-grade vantage, he catches theankles of his subjects as the cameralooks up at them against a blacknight sky. They are illuminated by

small signs and doorways on a sidestreet, and by Shibuya’s grand-est interface: the Qfront with itsfamous living billboard (the one

Neil Denarireviewed by Molly Wright Steenson

Shrinkwrapping Vague Things

you remember from Lost in Trans- l h h lk l h )

developed in the early 1980’s out ofh d f h b h



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lation, with the walking elephant).

The photographs capture momentsat different scales. These instancesshift from the body, to the door,to the sign, to the street, to thebillboard. They catch people’s in-teractions with devices, and yet the

devices stand in juxtaposition withthe spaces they inhabit: a boy holdsa game controller in a crowdedarcade; a photocopier backs againsta sea of blue cubicles opposite areligious shrine. It is the relation-

ship of the hand, the eye, and thebillboard, a triangular interaction,micro-to-mini-to-macro, that De-nari brilliantly catches.

Denari’s moves reflect the ap-proach of interaction design. Thisdiscipline creates the products,systems and interfaces (usually elec-tronic) with which people engage. It

the desire for the interior behavior

of a computer to meet the moldedexterior of its hardware. Doing thiseffectively requires an understand-ing of several levels of interiority:human behavior, system function,and site limitation, to name a few.

Could we see his projects, especiallyhis interior renovations, as a newtype of software that brings manyinteractions into focus?

Pristine, in effect

Denari twice mentions Antonioni’s Blow-Up during hislecture. This isn’t a surprise, giventhe ways his zooming in and zoom-ing out reveals what is not availableupon first glance. MUFG Nagoya(a private client center for oneof the world’s largest banks) usesseparations of scant millimeters on

panels and joints on its 28-meterbl k t i l t l f d ti

and the eye. In construction, thel t ld t th thl



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black stainless steel façade; zygotic

shapes forming into circles and thenlighting for the entrance; tangerinecustom furniture for the lobby. Butzooming out to the High Line 23,a residential building in New York,Denari occupies a different dimen-

sion altogether. Here, it is a matterof hacking building code. Eachfacet of the “leftover” site the 13-story residential tower will occupy iswon through negotiation. “Zoningx Desire = What it takes to build

in Manhattan,” quips the DMNAwebsite. The building is the mani-festation of these interstices. Forthe projects he showed, the typicalplan and program are straightfor-ward, nearly boring. It is always thebuilding section that shows the po-tential and kinetic energy; it is theceiling plan that shows the ulteriormotive for circulation of the body

elements meld together smoothly,

vacuum-formed and glossy.

Or do they?

With the 1956 House of the Fu-ture, Peter and Alison Smithson cre-

ated a plastic house with undulating,white, pristine surfaces—at least,in effect. In reality, the Smithsonsachieved this surface effect throughlayers of plaster on plywood: the re-sult of detailed crafting and not of

space-age manufacture. As Denarizeroes in on the ceiling detail ofthe MUFG Ginza banking branch,he first shows the underlying metalframing. He then notes the mo-ment where the wooden surfacebends to meet the white, planarpathways of the ceiling. But here,appearance and construction differ.Handworked stucco achieves the

effect, not technology. It is similart th t t i t l i d t i l

to Tokyo. Through all its scales ofti it i th d f i t



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to the prototyping tools industrial

and automotive designers use asthey model the form factor: theysculpt it from clay. Denari winswith cleverness, for knowing theright design tool for the job. Whentechnology can’t offer pristine

effects, it doesn’t matter whetherthe year is 1956 or 2007. The handcompletes the curve and the eye isnone the wiser.

Shrinkwrapping vague things,

then, commands an understandingof motion beneath the surface,bringing things into alignment, thestructures the film clings to. Denariplies these things on all levels in hisconversations as well as his build-ings. It is eye, hand and billboard,the laws and politics governing thesite as much as it is 80’s avant-garderock and a contrail connecting LA

operation, it is the dance of interac-

tion that sculpts his immaculatesurfaces of covert construction.

(Thanks to Shawn Protz and En-rique Ramirez for their insights.)



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David Erdman, formerly amember of the design collaborative

SERVO and now a founding partnerof the firm DavidClovers, was the2007 Cullinan Visiting Professor of Architecture at Rice University. Hepresented his design work to the Ricecommunity in a school-wide lecture

titled, “Mass Mysteria.” Erdmanopened his lecture by announcinghis own professional transitionout of SERVO and into practice

David Erdmanreviewed by Izabel Gass

Mass Mysteria

with wife Clover Lee, explainingthat their design partnership was

between puzzles — quantitativeproblems or questions with a single



126

that their design partnership was

founded “more on our differencesthan our similarities.” Erdman thenshowed a slide in which two col-umns of text read, respectively: HeLikes, She Likes, including state-ments such as “He Likes Mystery;

She Likes Mass,” and so on. Whilethis initial introduction expressed aflippant regurgitation of stereotypi-cal gender roles geared at marketingthe “cuteness” of a husband-wifedesign team, Erdman’s following

description of his work left little tobe desired and in fact suggested atimely and provocative rupture inthe contemporary museum as wellas the domicile.

The title of Erdman’s lecturealludes to a definition of “mystery”derived from pop-Economist Mal-colm Gladwell, who distinguishes

problems, or questions with a single

or definitive answer — and myster-ies — questions that can be resolvedanalytically in a number of differ-ent ways. Erdman sees his work ascultivating “mystery” inasmuch asit develops a visual and spatial com-

plexity that demands to be resolved,or at least explored, by an engagedviewer, rather than reverting to theimmediately recognizable iconicity— or “branding strategies”— com-mon to the visual language of much

contemporary architecture.

Erdman’s field of work backs upthis claim brilliantly. The SERVOexhibit “Dark Places,” an instal-lation for a video art show at theSanta Monica Museum of Art, wasdesigned with the ambition “thatthe artwork could cross contami-nate itself.” A translucent video

projector armed with eight separatescreens showcased the works of sev-



127

screens showcased the works of sev

eral different artists in ever-variablerotation. As Erdman explained, “asmuch as we were working with dif-ferent elements [in designing theprojector] what became importantwas the commingling of strands,”

meaning, the plasticity of thearchitecture lent itself to a similarplasticity in the presentation of thedigital work, inasmuch as the everchanging juxtapositions of the filmsredefined their immediate contex-

tualization and, consequently, theirmeaning. Dark Places effectivelydevelops an architectural morphol-ogy for a hypertextual system ofclassification: the exhibit becomesa liquid archive in which discretecultural artifacts are continuouslyredefined by means of their ever-changing contexts and arrange-ments. The project emulates the

distinctive construction of framesof knowledge in the digital era,

spatial geometries.



128

g g ,

immersing the viewer in a fresh andcomplex perceptual field in whichshe must continually redefine herinterpretation of the visual materialat hand in terms of its ever fluctuat-ing surroundings.

In partnership with Lee, Erd-man has recently won a competi-tion for a housing complex in theGreater Beijing Arts District, inwhich discrete housing units are de-

rived from formal distortions of thegeometric “box,” allowing for a playof luminosity and a liquid interiorspace. The spatially “mysterious”domicile created seems almost acontemporary iteration of the un-heimlich, calling to mind AnthonyVidler’s uncanny house, but forgo-ing the ‘mystery’ of a supernatural‘Other,’ in lieu of the mysteries of

Perhaps the most enticing qual-ity in Erdman’s work, on the whole,is its perceptual difficulty—whichis to say, its capacity to engage theinhabitant/viewer on a level of cog-nitive participation more complex

and provocative than the simplisticimage recognition, or market-oriented branding strategies, thatdominate contemporary visualculture. Erdman’s work maintainsspace and form as its own distinctive

mode of knowledge to be unraveledby a perceiving subject, but does sowithout recourse to Phenomenol-ogy.

manifold 02

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