Month: April 2010

Hard Problems

Posted by

0

A symposium held a couple of weeks ago by the Division of Social Science at Harvard asked: what are the hard problems in Social Science? Referring to mathematician David Hilbert, who in 1900 set out what he saw as the twenty-three most fundamental and vexing mathematical problems facing the field; the symposium asks for an analogous set of the ‘hardest unsolved problems in social science’, in order ‘to inspire new research’ and ‘serve to focus funding and inform policy.’ The symposium has prompted others to ask what the hard problems in their own respective fields might be.

Is such a list of questions possible in the field of architectural research? Would a problem-focused approach too constrained for a design field? Is there a sufficiently-widely-accepted epistemology of architecture that can support a question like this? My own answers would be ‘no’ and ‘with reservations, yes’ for the second and third of these questions. Although I’m undecided on the first question, it does seem to me that the concept of hard problems could have some value in focusing architectural research.

So what are the hard problems in architecture? What is a problem in architecture? How do we decide what makes a problem difficult? How is difficulty related to importance? How do we know whether a proposed solution is actually a solution?

Interior as a Spiderweb

Posted by

0

In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir.”

Walter Benjamin (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.216. [ emphasis mine ]

Collectivity

Posted by

0

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if any Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

What is the matter? Does this upset you? And what is the matter? What is at hand? What is it that matters here? In particular, what does matter matter here? Who matters? And who matters?

One of the matters here is earth: clods of it, islands of it, entire continents of it. But that is not the matter. Although these clumps of matter are certainly at hand, they are not what matters here. According to the practice of metaphor, what is given directly is not the subject matter. As if to confirm this, the very first phrase tells us that no man is an island: there is to be no confusion between men and islands; no mistaking the one for the other. The subject (matter) is subject to the subject matter.

But without this matter (clods of dirt, earth raised up into mounds and promontories, islands and continents) the matter (whatever it is that really matters here) remains unspoken, unwritten, unthought. What is the relationship between matter and thinking? Between clods, promontories, islands, continents, and the matter to which our attention is being drawn? A thought is written thing, a recorded thing, a thing heard and repeated, a thing constructed. Mere thoughts, entirely private ideas, may exist, but they certainly don’t matter, except possibly to God.

The word ‘matter’ has several senses, some of which we have already tested here. There is physical matter (something is matter). There is the significance or importance of something (something matters). There is a state of affairs (something is a matter which concerns us); and this state of affairs can be a problem (we might ask what the matter is). If we were to hazard a definition for architecture (which is the underlying matter of these brief thoughts), we could do worse than to suggest it is a practice of mattering, in all these senses.

Let us set this matter aside temporarily and turn to another matter, specifically the subject matter of the statement with which we began.

Immediately it will be seen that it is not a matter of what, but of who. Who is it that matters, and who is it that matters to me? A corpse: a person-become-matter, who-become-what. John Donne (although his name probably doesn’t matter) is listening to the sound of a bell announcing another plague death in London. For whom does the bell toll? Who does the bell concern? Who is the subject matter of the bell?

Donne himself is ill at the time, but it is not the matter of the individual that concerns him or the bell. Rather it is the matter of the collective, the matter which is collectively given the name ‘Mankinde‘. Collectivity is the subject. It is what matters here (although, as we have noted, it is the earthy matter that enables collectivity to matter in this piece of Donne’s writing). The point to which these matters (the subject matter and the earthy matter) are brought is that a collective is not a grouping but a massing which can occur at any scale.

According to some structure of our psyches, or some process of learning in our childhood, we come to identify how much of the matter of the world is us. We identify ourselves as individuals. But there are identities, selves, that are not circumscribed within indiviidual psyches. If thoughts have matter (and they only matter if they do); and if thinking is the relating of thoughts; and if a self is something that thinks (cogito ergo sum); then not all selves are necessarily people, and one person might be a participant in many concentric and overlapping selves.

How does a collective think? Not as a sum of the mental activity of its participants. Consider the situation of working collectively in a design studio. The design studio is premised on the value of working in close proximity to others. The collective is thinking, and each individual production (each statement, model, drawing, reference) is a collective thought. No one person has all these thoughts; they are thought by the group. A model constructed by one of the participants, for example, is not a representation of the ‘real thought’ which occurs in that individual’s mind. It is itself a real thought, a thought which matters. It can be encountered by the other individuals in the group in the same terms as any of their productions. The relationships between the various thoughts of the collective can be varied, and new thoughts can be had by the collective. Able to think in this way, a collective such as a studio group can be spoken of as a self with its own identity.

This publication has, for six years now, operated on the premise that each graduating year-group of students can have some kind of common identity. At the very least it acts to provide such an identity. By gathering on more-or-less equal terms the visual statements of each student it tries to make explicit the loose collectivity of the studio.

Architecture, this practice of mattering, concerns things which exist in the experience of more than one person, that matter to more than one person. This may seem an unambitious definition, but it is the heart of the matter. Architectural matter (whether it be concrete, graphite or data) is not mere matter that is to be elided or seen through in favour of some real subject matter. The subject matter exists only insofar as it matters, insofar as it exists in the experience of more than one person, insofar as it is a collective thought.

Collectivity is not defined by the separating off of a group. Nationalism, for example, is a negative collectivity, defined by exclusion. Collectivity is defined by an act of identification, an act of involvement, incorporation. You are not a single person. You are an operating element within many selves, only one of which is coextant with your individual psyche.

Architectural production is an act of collectivity.
Identify widely.
Matter.

[ Written in 2006 for Modos, the journal of graduating students at the University of Auckland School of Architecture. It feels pretty dated now! ]

Southern

Posted by

2

Before air-conditioning, on some full summer nights in Atlanta occurred a black physics less rarely than you might have imagined. Precise and intricate, matter itself reorganized; it began with a circulation of heat, humidity, and imperceptible motes of red clay that hung in the air suspended. Hung endlessly like Ernest, Red, Hickey, and the other winos at Lou’s bar on Edgewood Avenue, who, with a mere precession of their shoulders, could fend off the gravities that would pull them away from their King Cotton Peach, and down.

Into that circulation spilled the attars of wisteria and honeysuckle, the sweat and stink of cars and trucks and animals and sex and race, and other ingredients too many and too ordinary to mention. Cricket rhythms massaged the flux and cicadian crescendos pressurized it, irritating component after component until each abandoned its identity and the mixture condensed into a sweet, thick, elemental Dark. This Dark spread everywhere, broaching no resistance; whatever It touches It became and it became It until everything cohered in its flavor and murk and listlessness.

By morning the Dark itself dissipated, but left a sticky residue on things and people that could not be rinsed off for days. Despite all efforts to take up life again at a normal pace, the viscous coating retarded all motion, and it is this more than anything else, It and its ruddy patina, that was being named when one said ‘Southern.’

Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘Southern’, Log 17, Fall 2009, p.136.

Hiroshi Nakao, Dark Box Bird Cage

Posted by

0

This weekend house consists of a large living room capable of accommodating two automobiles; small bedrooms in which the bed completely fills the floor; a study that doubles as a studio; two enclosed gardens; bathroom; and external garage. The layout plan involved disposing the component elements on a basic 3×3 meter grid. Since all surfaces are painted black, the interior is a somewhat dark box. However, daylight entering from the large and small enclosed gardens creates a varying mixture of light and dark areas.

Gained by a ladder, a small loft is provided above the living room, which is used for book storage and a reading place. A base of pebbles is placed at the bottom of the ladder, whose sounds when people are going up and down it make this little collection of pebbles something of an interior sound effect system. None of the walls are pierced by sizable openings, with lines of sight running to the exterior only in the vertical direction. Which is not to say, however, that this is a sealed space. It would be much more accurate to describe it as an open space. A ‘dark box’ it may appear, but with its innumerable holes, it is much more of a ‘bird cage’.

Weekend House: Dark Box and Bird Cage (1993), Hiroshi Nakao, Masahiko Inoue, and Hiroko Serizawa. Text and images from Japan Architect 9, Spring 1993, pp. 228-29.

Zinc, Bats, Yuan, Carbon-Fibre

Posted by

0

Municipal Bat Roost, San Antonio, Texas, 1914 via shorpy

‘Phenomenological’ architecture emerged in the nineties as a response to an increasingly cerebral and abstract brand of architecture which privileged meaning, process, and the authorial operation of the architect over daily use, materiality, and the sensory experience of architecture’s occupants. Since then it has run as a strong parallel stream to that of digital formalism; offering an alternative for those who find the latter barren and technofetishist (or more cynically, those who don’t know how to work a computer). Phenomenological architecture is often lauded as more humane than its alternatives.

But Phenomenological architecture is open to the same kind of criticisms as the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Phenomenology, by nature, privileges the relation of human and world in a way that causes the universe to fall neatly into two parts. The relation between a person and a table is of an inherently different type to the relation between a glacier and mountain-range. Phenomenology has nothing to say about the latter, except insofar as it is given in human consciousness. In fact, it has nothing to say about any relation that does not involve a human as one of its terms. The result of this is that glaciers, ultraviolet radiation, mesons, and apple trees are reduced to human stimulants. Juhani Pallasmaa’s excellent and influential essay The Eyes of the Skin (2005) exemplifies this. The entire second part is dedicated to cataloguing the diverse ways that the body can be affected architecturally: pressing against the skin, darkening the eyes or glaring at them, pacing the body’s rhythms, echoing in the ears, persisting in the nostrils, resisting the muscles. Pallasmaa offers an embodied theory of architecture, aligning with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied philosophy. But as Merleau-Ponty does, Pallasmaa places architecture between person and world. He writes:

“Architecture is the art of reconciliation between ourselves and the world, and this mediation takes place through the senses” (Pallasmaa, 2005: 72)

The universe is severed into human and world by the concept of mediation. Merleau-Ponty’s language of organic unity (“our body is in the world as the heart is in the organism”; Pallasmaa, 2005: 40) denies this schism, but only by centralising the human, and according the human-world relation greater significance than any other relation. This is why, although I have great respect for the phenomenological perspective for pragmatic reasons, and I greatly admire work of so-called Phenomenological architects like Zumthor and Holl; I cannot see Phenomenological architecture as any kind of comprehensive theory. Architecture is, in fact, part of a proliferation of relations; many of which are human, but many of which are not. Phenomenological architecture has little to say about the relation between, say, the zinc used in galvanising steel and the contamination of the Derwent River in Tasmania; or between bats and belfries; or between the yuan and China’s expanding High-Speed-Rail network; or between strands of carbon-fibre.