The best thing I ever heard someone say when I was at graduate school was “Great things happen in terrible buildings and terrible things happen in great buildings”. If you think as an architect that you can pre-determine experience, you are hoping for something that’s just not going to happen. The idea that a designer is creating their perfect vision which no one is supposed to touch. I’m completely shocked by that. How weirdly perverse for an architect to even want that.
Month: October 2009
Architecture Depends, Jeremy Till
Architecture is a demanding study, requiring long hours, hard work, frequent failure and criticism. But why is going through architecture school so punishing? There are some destructive patterns built into the intense, even tribal, culture of architecture schools that have little or nothing to do with learning to be a good architect, or personal development. There seems to be a common attitude amongst teachers and practitioners that ‘it was good enough for me’, and that students just need to toughen up and deal with monumental workloads, seventy-two hour sleepless runs, and hostile, even abusive criticism. Teachers who try to run studios in a different way are fighting institutional inertia. A recent article by Jennifer Epstein on Inside Higher Ed (referring to this 2002 report; discussed here) points out recent efforts by a number of American schools to make changes to studio culture to make it more positive and healthy.
Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends (MIT Press: 2009), a strongly-felt polemic against the stultifying aspects of contemporary architectural practice and education, addresses some of these concerns. Many aspects of the culture of architectural education are not about good training as architects, but about perpetuating professional and institutional authority:
“[T]he main way that architectural education avoids staring the stasis of its own processes in the eye is by confusing radical making with radical thinking. Because things look different, from school to school, and from year to year, the assumption is made that the formative educational processes are equally different and equally evolving.”
One of the most strongly entrenched ideas, Till argues, is that architecture is a discrete and autonomous enterprise; a pure field that only engages with the mess and disruption of the world under duress; that the work of architects is primarily answerable to other architects. Professional institutes such as the RIBA frame architects’ responsibilities as primarily to the clent, neglecting far greater, or at least equivalent, responsibilities to users.
The modernist tradition of equating ethics with aesthetics exemplifies the concept of an autonomous architecture. It is actually a way of escaping genuine ethical concerns by calling what you’re already doing a kind of ethics. If aesthetics are ethics, then architects can carry on worrying about formal elegance and feel good about their ethical standards. Architecture is contingent, Till points out: contingent on external forces, social conditions, inherited ideas and images, finance, material inconsistencies, the mess of human existence. The cover image of Architecture Depends shows a man in a bear suit (artist Mark Wallinger) wandering around Mies’s Crown Hall. Wallinger satirises the concept of abstract, autonomous architecture by becoming a conglomerate of things it excludes: animals, wildness, the low-brow, humour. Till’s book is like this: it confronts the hermetic closure of the discipline with the messy, contingent world that it often seems to ignore.
However, the book is explicitly polemical, an impassioned editorial rather than an a study, and with this have come some flaws: generalisation, condescension, and poor editing. The main line of the text is punctuated with anecdotes that serve to illustrate aspects of the arguments. Common in these parables are people not getting things that are patently obvious, and Till seems to be inviting us to shake our heads with a wry smile at each one.
“Some time ago there was a wonderful television series called ‘Sign of the Times.’ In it the photographer Martin Parr and social commentator Nicholas Barker quietly observed the British in their homes… One such moment is set in a sparse modernist interior. A woman, voice choked with emotion, is lamenting that her husband will not allow her to have ‘normal’ things such as curtains: the camera dwells on expanses of glazing. When her husband Henry appears, he despairs of the ‘rogue objects’ disturbing his ordered interior. ‘To come home in the evening,’ he says, ‘and to find the kids have carried out their own form of anarchy is just about the last thing I can face.’
The rogue objects are his children’s toys.
Henry is an architect.”
Oh, Henry. This was pompous and snarky when Adolf Loos did it (cf. his ‘Tale of a Poor Rich Man’), and it comes off as snarky here, too. There are crowds of these straw men wandering around between the covers of Architecture Depends. The author takes a reductive approach to the arguments of people whose work he doesn’t appreciate, reducing their arguments to simplified outlines. For example, faced with Mark C. Taylor’s suggestion that “aesthetic principles (of twists, curves, and color) are coded in ways that carry significant ethical and social weight”, Till does not even pay the courtesy of examining the proposition. He argues in the chapter in question that architects have repeatedly tried to equate ethics with aesthetics as a way of escaping actual ethical concerns, but he doesn’t convince us that this is what Taylor is doing. Especially for someone who further down the same page is insisting that his own words be weighed up carefully, this is a bit hard to swallow. And the argument of the chapter would not be weakened by a less dismissive treatment of his interlocutors.
Similarly, Till makes assumptions about teaching and practice that are generic and not necessarily representative. He may have a far wider experience of schools of architecture than I, and I certainly recognised the architectural education he described, but the program I am teaching on now (not technically an architecture school) bears little resemblance to this, and I am aware of other schools that operate quite differently. Similarly, his characterisation of practice is very generalised. There are already many design/art/object/architecture/landscape/furniture/detail/interior practices working in some of the ways he suggests, undermining the status quo, engaging aspects of society traditionally ignored by architects, operating across disciplinary boundaries. If Till intended to promote this kind of work, he might have spent more time talking about it.
It is perfectly fine that the book has a strong authorial voice, but I think Mr Till’s editors have taken too light a hand in the text. There are sprawling passages that need cropping, vague passages of which the editor needed to demand more substantiation and precision, and passages that are just badly written (take for example this Dan-Brown-esque line: “Space and time. Time and space. Inseperably linked”).
Many aspects of Till’s argument are more fully handled by others: the relationship between theory and practice in Stan Allen’s Architecture: Practice, Technique, Representation; the supposed linearity of practice in Catherine Ingraham’s Architecture and the Burden of Linearity; the machinations of power at work in Vitruvius’s theory of architecture in Indra Kagis McEwen’s Vitruvius, the social construction of space in Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, the workings of institutional power in Foucault or one of his many explicators. But of course this is not possible or desirable for all. The book has value, then, in transmitting some of the provocative value of these other books.
Architecture Depends itself is a book of uneven quality. I didn’t enjoy the tone, and as Till himself predicts in the Preface, I found some parts to be operating not much above the level of truism. At its worst, the reader is offered commonplaces as insights. The better parts are marked by flashes of wit and the scent of a provocative architectural counter-culture. In particular, students and teachers immersed in the thick hothouse air of studio could find the book bracing. The concerns which underly this polemic, however are of undoubted importance to the future of architectural education, and the urgency with which Till presses his case, understandable.
Note on Modernism as Rurality
A curious thought following from the previous post: what if for Schinkel, the stripping of ornament that is performed at the New Pavilion is actually a marker of rurality, rather than urbanity, as Loos claims? In favour of this thought, the fact that the Pavilion is in fact a rural, or at least semi-rural building. It is constructed in the grounds of the Schloss Charlottenhof as a retreat for the Emperor, a place to withdraw from the formalities of the court and European politics, a place for ‘slumming it’. The simple form of the house would then be understood as a kind of poverty. The New Pavilion requires no extensive tour to reveal its extents. Rather, it sits in a clearing, able to be apprehended as a single block. Loos similarly makes his Moller house in Prague a single white block. But Loos calls on this blankness, these scraped surfaces, to signify the dislocated condition which he argues is innate to civility and urbanity; and perhaps it is in this movement that we might seek Loos’ greatest originality.
Daemonization
At the close of ‘Architecture (1910)’, an essay in which Adolf Loos has described formulated his theory of the alienation of the architect, he concludes with a stellar commendation of Karl Friedrich Schinkel:
“But every time the minor architects who use ornament move architecture away from its grand model, a great architect is at hand to guide them back to antiquity. Fischer von Erlach in the south, Schluter in the north, were justifiably the great masters of the eighteenth century. And at the threshold to the nineteenth century stood Schinkel. We have forgotten him. May the light of this towering figure shine upon our forthcoming generation of architects!”
Schinkel is commended as a kind of lighthouse, invoked to shine forward onto the following generation, and simultaneously a guide to a return path, (along with Fischer von Erlach and Andreas Schlüter, to the ‘grand model’ of Classical antiquity. Just a little earlier, prior to this monumental figuring of Schinkel as an illuminating tower, Loos has remarked upon the potency of the Classical, which appears as a autonomous cultural force:
“Our culture is based on the knowledge of the all-surpassing grandeur of classical antiquity. We have adopted the technique of thinking and feeling from the Romans. We have inherited our social conscience and the discipline of our souls form the Romans… Ever since humanity sensed the greatness of classical antiquity, one common thought has unified all great architects. They think: the way I build is the same as the way the Romans would have built.”
The true power of great architects, it is implied, derives from the amorphous potency of Roman classicism, the ‘one common thought’. In this way, Loos disarms Schinkel, too, and places him on a pedestal as a lamp. Schinkel’s greatness, his potency, is in his channeling of the historical force which Loos has just described. It follows that when Loos makes his own claim to be carrying out a purified form of classicism, he is opening himself up more fully even than Schinkel to this classical daemon. Classicism is not merely a style, but an expression of a daemonic force, openness to which is associated with the stripping-off of ornamentation. He observes:
“It is no coincidence that the Romans were incapable of inventing a new column order, or a new ornament. For they had already progressed so far. they had taken all that knowledge from the Greeks and had adapted it to their needs. The Greeks were individualists. Every building had to have its own profile, its own ornamentation. But the Romans considered things socially. The Greeks could hardly administer their cities; the Romans administered the globe. The Greeks squandered their inventiveness on the orders; the Romans wasted theirs on the plan. And he who can solve the great plan does not think of new mouldings.”
The Greeks, not the Romans, were inventors of ornament. The Roman advancement is in the disregard they developed for ornament. Their inability to invent ornament is not a failure, but a mark of their progressiveness. Loos argues that the time has now come to move even closer to the ideal which the Romans represented. Not only should the production of new ornament be ceased by civilised people, but what ornament remains should be actively stripped off. Ornament may continue in the country, or for the non-urbane: the farmer and the shoemaker are less civilised in Loos’ terms, and there would be a sort of parental cruelty involved in taking ornamentation from them. The progressiveness of the Romans is in their urbanity, characterised by their disinterest in ornament. And it is this force of Roman progressiveness that Schinkel is taken to be a herald for.
The one work of Schinkel’s which could most easily be Loos’ is his New Pavilion in the Schloss Charlottenburg Park, built in 1824-25 for Freidrich Wilhelm III. It is a white, almost cubic mass, like Loos’ houses of the late twenties, especially the Moller and Muller houses. It does not present a distinct facade: in each face at the first floor level there is a dark recessed balcony; there is scant difference in the treatment of the front and side balconies. The facade retreats into the face of the block. It develops no baroque thickness, instead becoming a surface, as thin as a coat of white paint. Loos also repeatedly used the seating-niche arrangement which Schinkel uses in his Charlottenburg Pavilion: in the first floor Garden Room, the niche is opposite the balcony, and so someone seated in the niche looks across the room and out the window. Loos’ arrangement is more complex, but retains the basic pattern: seated in niche of the Moller House, we would be looking back through the interior and out towards the back garden.
Loosian touches are seen elsewhere in Schinkel’s oeuvre: the tent-room of the Charlottenhoff Palace uses fabric to create a ceiling canopy that drapes the walls and forms a canopy over the bed. In Loos’ bedroom for Lina Loos, the interior is similarly shaped by draping and spilling fabric: the fur which covers the bed spills onto the floor, and meets the wall-hangings.
What Loos would have us believe about the relationship between Schinkel and himself is that they share a common daemon. Schinkel’s significance for Loos is that he has opened himself to the civilising and urbanising force of this daemon; and this opening is marked particularly by Schinkel’s attitude to the removal of ornamentation as a movement of civility. Loos then casts himself in Schinkel’s light, as advancing this daemon‘s purposes even further, by opening himself more fully to it. Harold Bloom, according to his Anxiety of Influence (1973) calls this movement Daemonization, and suggests that it is a defensive move, a way to fend off the overbearing weight of a precursor. In this way, some of the elements of Loos’ mature work which we might take to be his most personal of touches: those signatory marks which we look for in order to recognise Loos in his work, might in fact be seen to be the points at which he is most closely Schinkel’s disciple.
UA Divergent Forces
A few images from critting yesterday in Mike Davis’s third- and fourth-year studio Divergent Forces at UA. There was some very slick presentation work, some very adept formal manipulation, and some clever application of abstract systems to a specific architectural problem: the council-owned Cook St site where Placemakers used to be. Perhaps not done so well in general was working out how the site engaged with the city: quite a few projects were just sitting in the middle of the site being cool.
[ If any of this work is yours and you would prefer I didn’t have it up here, let me know and I’ll take it down. ]
UC National Conservatorium of Music
The University of Canterbury National Conservorium of Music have posted plans and images of Miles Warren’s concept for their new building next door to the historical Old Arts Centre in Christchurch. It’s a bit rubbish, unfortunately. Discussion here.
The architect is clearly trying to follow the grain of the existing urban fabric, mimicking the agglomerative logic of the Old Arts Centre. It adds a third quadrangle to the block and maintains the street-edge line of the existing buildings.
But what is the building trying to say? It doesn’t seem to convey much of anything.
It looks about thirty years out of date. The design certainly doesn’t say ‘international institution of the arts’ like the University seems to think it does. There is a bunch of arbitrary divisions into blocks and gables, as if ameliorating the substantial mass of the building was the sole design agenda. The building doesn’t contribute to the historical block so much as blush embarrassed in the corner.
Two of Warren’s buildings are among my favourite buildings in the country: his own house and studio, and the College House dormitories and chapel. Warren and Mahoney have done some great buildings, but also some truly awful ones (I haven’t forgiven them for the Royal Oak Mall). Perhaps the University gave a little too much credence to a big name? I realise you aren’t supposed to say this in NZ for fear of disloyalty, but perhaps an international competition might have yielded some more worthy results?
Transformers
A few random pictures from Friday night’s Architecture Week exhibition Trans-Form-ers, a joint venture between the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, the Unitec School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and AUT’s Department of Spatial Design. The whole thing was crazy: a convoy of cars, trailers, utes, vans, and trucks departed from Unitec and jammed up traffic all the way into the old ARC workshops near Victoria Park. When they got inside, complete chaos ensued as everyone unloaded their vehicles, tried to deploy their contraptions and get them working properly. Things were folding out, stretching, making a racket, being bolting together, lighting up, inflating, getting wired and tuned up. Madness.
I didn’t write down who did the ones pictured, or even what school they were from, so sorry about that.
City as Battlesuit / Criticism and Enthusiasm
Kind of late to the party here, but an interesting discussion based on this piece by Matt Jones at io9 is nicely signposted by Rob Holmes at mammoth. Jones’ piece groups together a collection of thoughts about science fiction and the future of cities, with particular reference to invisible infrastructure. His clearest proposition is that Archigram was influenced by comic-book cities like Megacity One from 2000AD, but the post is really held together by an enthusiasm for future cities as sprawling, amorphous prosthetics. The assertion that he makes in the title of his post, ‘The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future’ is repeated at the end, but I have to confess the proposition seems underthought to me. Why see the future as a hostile environment to be confronted by a conceptually weaponised city? Battlesuits express the fantasy of being in a powerful body, specifically a body with destructive power (cf. the Prawn battlesuit worn by van der Merwe in District 9, or the demigod robots of Neon Genesis Evangelion). If Jones is suggesting that the city of the future needs to be understood prosthetically, I think he is right, but of course cities have always been prosthetic. Delanda points out that from a planetary perspective, cities can essentially be seen as a mineralisation of human populations, parallel to the evolution of biological exoskeletons.
In a follow-up discussion at Kazys Varnelis’ site, the discussion turned towards an apparent conflict between enthusiasm and criticism. Varnelis suggests that Jones’ piece reflects an enthusiastic but uncritical approach to its subject-matter. Geoff Manaugh joins in with a great comment on the way Archigram’s ideals were co-opted by naked capitalism; and he takes issue with the idea that criticism, rather than enthusiasm, is needed.
I’m not sure I can accept Geoff’s premise that criticism is negative (based on picking things apart) and enthusiasm positive (based on amplifying something you respond to positively). I don’t see pure enthusiasm as particularly liberating: for me, it too easily slips back into the most airheaded post-modernism (a kind of enthusiasm that seems to feel any systematic or rigorous approach is a throwback to discredited aspects of modernism), and plays into an increasingly cynical entertainment culture (not that this extreme form of the argument in any way resembles what I take to be Geoff or anyone else’s position). Nor does a return to the capital-C Criticism of previous generations (that seemed to want to drag everything off to it’s own particular hermeneutic lair) sound particularly attractive. I think everyone in the discussion seems to recognise that what is needed is a new sense of criticism, one that is capable of accommodating enthusiasm, but isn’t reduced to it. So what is criticism, then – or more importantly, what does criticism need to be?
To hazard a suggestion, perhaps criticism could be best conceived as the probing of limit states. This doesn’t necessarily mean the establishing of limits, as if criticism was all about putting walls around things; but it does mean trying to trace out the interfaces between things, and discover as-yet undetected surfaces of connection.
We can’t do without criticism or enthusiasm; but we can certainly live without Criticism or Enthusiasm.
The Diffused Fortress II: Diagram
[ Part I ]
The significance of Viollet-le-Duc’s analysis is that he describes the problem of fortification as a morphogenetic flux. The fortress is not an immutable architectural type, but a pattern which forms and then dissipates in a reciprocal relationship with various generative pressures (here primarily the increasing range of artillery and speed of infantry movement). In Viollet-le-Duc’s thinking, things are typically seen to begin from some rudimentary point and develop towards complexity and refinement. In the case of the fortress, however, he encounters a force which tends towards dissipation. In this respect the dispersal of the fortress is an uncharacteristic problem for Viollet-le-Duc, and marks its importance as a schismatic architectural event. According to Viollet-le-Duc, there had been a general unwillingness “to realise exactly the new state of things produced by artillery of long range” (1876: 367).
It is now taken as a commonplace that military strategies based on front lines are obsolete. Paul Virilio, in his Speed and Politics (1977) cites von Metch’s assertion: “In total war, everything is a front!” (Virilio, 2006: 96). Virilio, advances the argument that warfare is no longer a limited engagement between clearly defined armies, but is essentially a logistical conflict. Vauban is not simply a designer of fortresses, according to Virilio, but a logistician who believes “that the basis of war is geo-political and universal, that human geography should depend not on chance but on organisational techniques able to control vast spaces” (Virilio, 2006: 42). Virilio describes Vauban’s approach as the construction of a “topological universe” comprised of mechanisms which receive, transform, and return the shock of attack. This is exactly how Viollet-le-Duc’s account should be understood: the point is not to construct a line of enclosure and defense, but to administer an entire territory, polarising it, activating it as a strategic domain, and mapping it through the careful application of geometry. The efficacy of the fortress relies on the space it projects, rather than the space it contains.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, Viollet-le-Duc is describing a deterritorialisation of the fortress wall. In their seminal account of the smooth space of the war machine, Deleuze and Guattari, drawing heavily on Virilio, write: “one longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialisation in perpetual motion.” (1987: 387). Viollet-le-Duc describes the goal in congruous terms: “The important point is to possess an accurate acquaintance with the ground to be defended… an army ought to be able to fortify itself everwhere, and take advantage of every position” (1876: 374). The wall of the fortress is distributed into open space, its functions transferred to the territory itself. The true power of Viollet-le-Duc’s observation is, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, not that the army can be fortified anywhere, but that it is fortified everywhere.
One of the symptoms of this transfer is the move from planning individual fortresses to the maintenance of a diagram. It is no accident that Viollet-le-Duc, who is fascinated by tectonic detail and fills his books with sections and engravings of joints, employs the logistical device of the diagram here. The fortress is no longer an edifice, but a set of logistical and geometric relations governed by speed of movement, range of artillery, landform, facility of communication, angles of fire. Virilio notes the alliance between diagrammatic thinking and the problem of the fortress, remarking that one of the earliest flowcharts is Charles de Fourcroy’s ‘Sketch for a poleometric table’ (1782). What counts under this new logistical regime is the ability to maintain the cohesion of a diagram. Benjamin Bratton describes Virilio’s attitude to two of the archetypal spaces of modernity: the bunker and the camp: “Both are hygenic, defensive… both spaces, even as they are often architecturally identical, are in their way zones of pure logistics. They are sites where the only compulsion is the execution of governance on a raw mass, mobilizing it, diagramming it.” (in Virilio, 2006: 19).
Distraction
Thomas Demand, Klause V, 2006
For Benjamin, architecture was experienced in a state of distraction.
A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.
Against works of art which demand specifically directed attention (the dominant tradition of art, according to Benjamin), architecture epitomises the art of distraction. There is a frontality implicit in the gallery situation: we are confronted with a work. The belief that art should provoke aligns with this, as do more traditional ideas of art that emphasise expression or presentation. In each case, art is assigned a frontal, even facial role. Film ‘meets this mode of reception halfway’. Although the audience are placed ‘in the position of the critic’, no attention is demanded of them. Architecture, however, in comparison to its ubiquity, is rarely looked at. It is used, but it rarely becomes the subject of an explicit, directed attention. Even when it does suddenly intrude on our awareness, it often does so in part: it is the doorframe, or the reflection off a window, or the shakiness of a handrail, rather than any cohesive architectural unity that arrests us. Architecture occupies the peripheral vision. It is also noteworthy that architecture does not present itself to the individual, but to the mass: architecture as a shared peripheral experience.
Junya Ishigami, Balloon (2008)
This angular, helium-filled balloon was produced for atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo by Junya Ishigami (who is too cool to have a website), for an exhibition entitled Space for Your Future. It uses an aluminium truss frame and thin reflective alumnium panels (they look almost like foil, but I think they are a bit thicker than that). Apparently it weighs about a ton! Images are from Japan Architect 72. A couple of flickr images here.
Gas
Early in the third volume of his Spheres trilogy, Foams, Sloterdijk says that to understand the twentieth century, you need to understand terrorism, industrial design and the concept of the environment. These three things come together in a crucial scene early in the century: at 6pm on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, 150 tonnes of chlorine gas were released into a north-north-easterly breeze by a newly formed German gas regiment. The efficacy of this attack is still debated: the Germans claimed that 5 000 had died, and many more had been injured, while French officals insisted that while 625 had been injured, only three had died. Gas warfare was to become a major element of the battlefields of World War I. A range of toxic gases were employed on both sides of the trenches. For Sloterdijk, this event marks a crucial innovation; instead of attacking the bodies of its enemies, the war machine could now attack their environment, their very conditions of life. The weaponisation of the landscape (see previously: The Diffused Fortress) had given way to the weaponisation of the atmosphere.
The decisive element was rather that the techniques of Modernity pierced, by means of gaseous terrorism, the horizon of a non-objective design – which imposed the explicitation of latent themes like the physical qualities of the air, artifical atmospheric supplements, and other factors of climate creation in sites of human occupation. Humanism and terrorism are chained to one another by progressivist explicitation. [dodgy translation via French mine]
Explicitation is Sloterdijk’s term for the process by which something becomes a subject of intention or operation (well, it has a more nuanced sense than that, I think, but I’m still working it out, and that will do for now). He follows the way that this explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life leads on to later examples of gas chambers used to exterminate humans, either one at a time, as in the USA, or en masse, as in Germany. The explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life can also be traced in the development of air-conditioning. Reyner Banham’s Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see previously: Chilling) gives an historical account of the modern development of architecture as the maintenance of a certain climatic condition. (There is also a good chapter ‘Air Conditioning’ by Sze Tsung Leong in The Harvard Design Guide to Shopping ). The implication is that architecture is a form of life-support system.
Diller+Scofidio’s Blur building (2002) explicitated architectural atmosphere in a new way. The solid matter of architecture is diminished to an apparatus for generating an atmospheric state. The project marks the end of a period of emphasis on how architecture produces meaning or content, and inaugurates an era of affect: the question is longer ‘what does it signify?’ but ‘what effects does it produce?’ In the context of Sloterdijk’s observations on the explicitation of the atmosphere brought about by gas warfare, interest in a dematerialised architecture of atmospheric effect takes on a troubling cast. Sloterdijk does not propose that atmospheric design be rejected as tainted by its military origins. But he does require us to recognise that humanist and terrorist aims are not separated by much. The apparently humanist idea of constructing sensory experience rather than abstract form is not at all far from the terroristic idea of using the environment as a means of manipulating another’s body.
A Brief Exchange Regarding Infinity
J.T. Nimoy, The color of art is #A79F94, 2009
A: “Since then, in the infinite course of the universe, the world is fleeting, we must regard it as precious. This world, its lives and deaths, its towering glories and spectacular failures, and we ourselves, must be regarded as merely a local glimmering of significance in a meaningless universe. But this is no cause for fear or sorrow: it is a great liberation. Our only duty is to burn as brightly as we can in the short time the universe permits.”
Z: “But you have failed to recognise the monumental indifference and claustrophobia of infinity. Your thought is shot through with aesthetic desire. You speak of the world as a glorious flash, like a firework, or the life of a butterfly: fragile, short, beautiful and therefore precious. But all these things unfold in time: you are actually delighting in quickness, lightness and intensity. In a truly infinite universe, neither the momentary nor the epochal count for anything. Infinity is not the the infinite possibility of value, but the end of all value. Conversely, to imagine the universe’s origins, ends and branches: all of this is motivated by an aesthetic desire for the sublime: the desire to be dwarfed by something unspeakably huge. But eternity does not follow hugeness. On the contrary, the eternal universe would be the triumph of mundanity: it would be neither a cruel master against which we strive for survival, nor a glorious blossoming. Contemplation of this universe is neither fearful, nor wonderful: in doing so, you are neither a hero, nor a poet. The eternal universe would be like the sickly grey plastic of this keyboard; the slight headache produced by flickering strip-lights. It would be the casual death of slavery. It is a wonder you can keep from groaning as infinity pours through your letterbox in the form of real-estate magazines. We must hope desperately for the destruction of the universe, which is long overdue.”
Invisible Liquid Topographies
This article in the NYT (previously noticed by mammoth and jargon etc) reports on studies of large-scale fluid-dynamics at Monterey Bay in California. Scientists using a land-based network of high-frequency radar sensors have made detailed maps of flows and currents, revealing a ‘hidden skeleton’ of hydronamic structures that determine their movements. Across the mouth of the bay, for example, is a line of turbulence, ‘like the filaments created by stirring milk into cold coffee’. This line forms a barrier: a floating object on one side will drift out to sea, while on the other it will not escape the bay. The structure is not fixed in place, but although it drifts, it doesn’t disperse.
“The structures are invisible because they often exist only as dividing lines between parts of a flow that are moving at different speeds and in different directions… ‘They aren’t something you can walk up to and touch… but they are not purely mathematical constructions, either’… The line is not a fence or a road, but it still marks a physical barrier.”
The article refers to these as Lagrangian coherent structures, and points out that they exist in water currents, turbulent airflow, and blood circulation. A more general term for these regularities in dynamic systems is singularity. Singularities can be static (the rest state of a system for example), or periodic (an oscillating equilibrium like a pendulum or orbital path). The collection of singularities that determine the behaviour of a system forms an invariant manifold. Manuel Delanda describes them this way:
“Singularities may influence behaviour by acting as attractors for the trajectories. What this means is that a large number of different trajectories, starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold, may end up in exactly the same final state (the attractor), as long as all of them begin somewhere within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the attractor (the basin of attraction)… singularities are said to represent the inherent or intrinsic long-term tendencies of a system.”
It is fascinating to consider the possibilites of specifying matter not through its static positions, or as a series of temporal frames, but in terms of the singularities which form it: an invisible topography. The currently ubiquitous arch-school procedure of analysing a dynamic condition and then using it to generate static form barely scratches the surface of this way of specifying matter and its behaviour.
Three Curious Singularities
The behaviour of two masses orbiting each other can be accurately modelled using the equations of classical mechanics; but as soon as a third is added to the scenario it becomes irreducibly complex. This is the famous three-body problem. However, in the complex phase-space of a three-body system, there are five stable points – called Lagrange points – in this system, at which one object will remain stationary relative to the others. From a spaceship at a Lagrange point, the sun and earth would appear fixed.
Above the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, there is a lightning storm that has been there at least since the sixteenth century. On each of about 150 nights per year there are over 200 lightning strikes. The storm, which was first described by Francis Drake in 1595 complaining that the lightning gave away the position of his soldiers waiting to capture the city of Maracaibo, is fed by anomalies of atmospheric composition, and is a major source of the world’s ozone.
Solitons are stable waves which form in turbulent conditions. Rogue waves, spontaneously generated mountains of water, are believed to be phenomena of this kind, as is the Morning Glory Cloud, which forms over the Gulf of Carpenteria in North Australia. In studies of traffic flows, the term ‘jamiton‘ has been proposed (I’m not sure if that’s serious or not).
Diffusive Architectures 
