Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely: On the Unpredictability of the Past 9783839461112

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Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl (ed.) Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely

Architecture | Volume 66

Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl (Dr.) teaches architectural design and theory at Universität Innsbruck. Her research and design focus on spatial and temporal epistemologies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, technology, and science.

Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl (ed.)

Architecture, Futurability and the Untimely On the Unpredictability of the Past

This publication was printed with financial support from the Faculty of Architecture and the Institute of Urban Design at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. The book is peer-reviewed at the manuscript stage by two independent, anonymous experts in the field.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Refik Anadol Studio. Image from the “Renaissance Dreams” series, 2020. Proofread: Andrew McNeely Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6111-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6111-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839461112 ISSN of series: 2702-8070 eISSN of series: 2702-8089 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Content Acknowledgement � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9

Introduction Untimely Architecture In Search of Time in Architecture Lost and Newly Found Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11

Architecture as a Time Complex Out of Key with the Times Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger Patzsch Look at the Trees and Rocks Kurt W. Forster � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 35

Real Fictions A Case for Hybrid Architecture in Cairo Ferda Kolatan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 61

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse An Untimely Practice of Ancient Spolia and its Contemporary Re-emergence Aleksandr Mergold� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 81

As a Snake Sheds its Skin Bramante in Milan, Bramante in Rome Pier Paolo Tamburelli    � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 103

Learning to “See” Like A Machine Artificial Intelligence‘s Impact on the Field of Architecture   Benjamin Ennemoser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 121

The Past is Yet to Come Computational Architecture, Architectonic Models  Vera Bühlmann  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 139

Sublime Uselessness On the Speculative Virtues of the Architectural Project Riccardo M. Villa � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 161

Making the Donkey Drink Water or the “Problem” of Stopping in the Digital Age Skender Luarasi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 173

Temporalization of “Seeing” Depth in Aesthetic Perception Eugene Han� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 189

Virtualities of the Visible The Architecture of Mixed Realities   Maja Ozvaldič � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 213

Radical Acts in the Architectural Representation of Space A Comparison between Structures and Sequences of Space and Baroque Topologies Andrew Saunders � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 231

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality Johan Bettum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 247

List of Figures � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 263 List of Contributors � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 267

Acknowledgements

The topic of this book arose out of my dissertation, submitted to the Faculty of Architecture at Innsbruck (2016), and found some sort of continuation in a symposium called Untimely Aesthetics that I organized with Giacomo Pala at the University of Innsbruck in 2017. I enjoyed the numerous discussions Giacomo and I had on this topic while organizing this event and the stimulating conference papers presented by our invited speakers. I am indebted to all the authors who in every case offered more than I had expected. I am grateful to Andrew McNeely for proofreading and commenting on the manuscript and to Ushma Thakrar for helpful comments and suggestions for its Introduction. In the final preparation of this manuscript, I am thankful to the suggestions and advice of two anonymous peer reviewers. I am deeply indebted to Refik Anadol for his exceptionally generous permission to use his image from “Renaissance Dreams” for this book’s jacket design. At transcript publishing house, I am grateful to Jennifer Niediek for her help and support in guiding me through the publication process. I need to thank Jonas Mertens for taking on the task of assisting me in editing this book. But beyond that, I am immensely grateful to my husband and my two sons, who were born during the years I worked on this book, for enduring countless hours of loneliness and still loving and supporting me unconditionally. Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl

Untimely Architecture In Search of Time in Architecture Lost and Newly Found Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and there by acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Time itself is the task. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscripts

Readers expecting to have picked up a book on architectural history will be disappointed—as will those who have begun reading in anticipation of a reappraisal of Nietzsche’s work on architecture. Instead of a true exegesis of Nietzsche’s goals and work, this project attempts to make Nietzschean thinking operative for contemporary concerns. To the reader who thinks that they will receive a new view of the past by reading this book, it’s possible, but first, we need to clarify what is meant by “the past” in our present of ubiquitous computation and global interconnectivity that have brought about a new planetary thinking. This book addresses the futurability of architecture, and to do so it deals with profound questions that include: How do we innovate? How do novelty and creativity emerge? How are new ideas thought? What are the vectors that provoke originality? These questions hold a particular poignancy in our current situation in which we find ourselves to be “caught in routines

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of ‘changeless change,’”1 to have lost sight of the future,2 and to be buffeted by simultaneous and diverse crises (ecological, economic, demographic, et cetera). With his notion of the untimely, Friedrich Nietzsche makes time the very method for change and for novelty and by doing so envisions a different theory of time, a concept that serves as the starting point and offers a toolkit for this conceptual project. The notion of time and an understanding of temporal logic is not only essential for our understanding of architectural history, not only as the mechanism by which we identify periods, techniques, and movements but also for the generation of form, of becoming new, and of becoming novel. The notion of untimeliness is oriented toward the future, since its application alters how the past operates within the present. The reference point for an untimely architecture is a speculative horizon that allows the future to return to itself, and, in this manner, it establishes an unpredictable past. With the idea of the untimely, Nietzsche was essentially attempting to identify the conditions from which novelty emerges.3 It is unsurprising that throughout his works on becoming, understanding differently, and historicity, Nietzsche considered a theory of time to be a fundamental concept.4 Though he rarely addressed time explicitly, Nietzsche located time as the essential condition for change, evolutionary thought, and unpredictable futures. In rejecting a linear and progress-oriented understanding of time, Nietzsche illustrated that the past is something that lies ahead of us, but that 1  Patricia Reed, “Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization,” in Artificial Labor, VIENNA BIENNALE 2017: Robots. Work. Our Future, e-flux Architecture and MAK Vienna, September 18, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140674/ xenophily-and-computational-denaturalization/. 2  The philosopher and cultural critic Boris Groys says of contemporary art—though the idea clearly has resonance for contemporary architecture—that, “Today, we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future.” Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux journal no. 11 (December 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/ comrades-of-time/. 3  Following Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze argues that, “True philosophy, as a philosophy of the future … must be untimely, always untimely.” Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2002),1. 4  Martin Heidegger also considers time fundamental. His concept of not yet time renders the “interpretation of time as the possible horizon of any understanding whatsoever of being.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 19.

Untimely Architecture

it must first be removed from the prevailing historical picture so that the past can happen. Untimeliness is less about the exertion and revivification of the past in the present than it is about proffering a less secure and predictable foothold from which movement toward the future can be made. Untimeliness advocates for a future that is neither able to be grasped by the present nor found in the present but is rather a deviation from it.5 To be untimely is a way to escape the zeitgeist and to stand outside of the mainstream. For Nietzsche, the past offers the venue for this escape to be performed, because it is a n-dimensional repository that contains elements, fragments, and parts that have yet to be affected by the present that positions it to be generative of multiple futures that circumvents the constraints of the present. When treated in this way, the past is also a critical ref lection of the present. It is precisely this mode of critical ref lection by being out of sync with one’s own time—its conventions and expectations—to which Nietzsche points with his notion of the untimely. In this sense, the past is never exhausted by the present nor is it simply the background to or the cause of the present; rather, it is the precondition of any conceivable future. But what does it mean to be out of time today? In contrast to the world to which Nietzsche responded, today, given the level of technological operativity of contemporary media, we are dealing with a time complex (rather than a complexity of form) that transcends cognitive human ability, and the phenomenological sense of the present collapses into a myriad of different time processes. For example, the knowledge of climate change is considered an epistemological achievement of planetary computation, but, in addition to these long spans of time (deep time)—that are difficult to conceive—our everyday lives are also affected by the operative micro temporalities of electronic media and data-processing operations. In contrast to the former, they describe the opposite time distance, a time span that seems uncannily present and almost as if it had been annulled. (Our hu5  Elizabeth Grosz, “The Untimeliness of Feminist Theory,” NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18, no. 1 (2010), 48–51: https://doi.org/10.1080/08038741003627039. See also Giorgio Agamben‘s concept of contemporaneity, which he develops in reference to Nietzsche’s untimeliness. (by also quoting Roland Barth’s interpretation of untimely that he called l’inactualité) He defines the contemporary as the untimely and locates the claim of contemporaneity as a disjunction from the present. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54.

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man perception may sometimes experience both more as stagnation than as movement.) We also deal with operational logics such as that of preemption in which the future is anticipated—futurum exactum—and is directly able to act recursively on the present. Most people have experience with preemption through entities like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, which offer people ads for things that they did not even realize they wanted until the algorithm makes them aware of their desires by preempting them. The data-driven dream is that, if there is enough data available, the future will be condensed into the present (with all the previous pasts contained in it), and its distinctive dimension of uncertainty can be eliminated. Preemption is about compressing temporalities that simulate an expected or predictable future in the present in order to react to it before it can happen. Even though an automated and predictable future is initially based on the linear continuity of time, preemption reverses the arrow of time in that the cause-effect relationship deviates from the rigidity of temporal linearity. As such, the future has the potential to act similarly to the way Nietzsche imagined the past to operate and transform what the future may eventually be. In this sense, the coming together of temporalities is inherently discordant and complex. So, instead of focusing on the omnipresence of the present, the key may be that it is no longer feasible to be contemporaries of our present, and that an intervention in the now will inevitably become obsolete, due to the possibility that a certain natural law of time no longer exists, and because we do not yet know how to operate within this complex temporality. Some may argue that temporal distinctions have become irrelevant in the presence of technological possibilities in which everything can theoretically be stored, archived, and retrieved within a matter of milliseconds or even nanoseconds (an ever-available past). Consequently, it is argued that the past, present, and future all equally lead to the dissolution of time and subsequently to “the end of history.” David Harvey describes this postmodern phenomenon as “time-space-compression,”6 which basically means the f lattening of all time horizons into the present. This implosion of time is conceptualized as a non-linear temporality within the postmodern discourse that also allows one to speak of an all-encompassing simultaneity (of the world). The argument about the end of history is reinforced by the fact that 6  David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 284.

Untimely Architecture

nothing is forgotten in the context of Big Data. Nietzsche, however, makes it unmistakably clear that forgetting is necessary to keep the future open. He conceived of wirkliche history as a process that “invents” a past while opening up another future.7 While it is obvious that we are at a point at which our modern and Western understanding of history (as a collective singular) needs effectively to be challenged as the norm, it is hypothesized here that this conclusion stems from a viewpoint that still generalizes and synchronizes the different temporal logics in a usual manner. The normative explanatory models present a distorted picture, and we tend to overlook or continue to fail to see problems with our unref lective productivity. This means that any attempt to explain new timescales with our modern understanding and conception of space and time will necessarily fail. That said, we know about processes and phenomena that function on scales that are beyond the typical human experience and perception and that put into question and emphasize the gap between human and machine time, between objective measurable time and our subjective perception of time and between the duration of nanoseconds and the planetary scale. So, instead of theorizing our time as an extended present and merging the past and future into a unified and smooth present, we should recognize the numerous scales and forms of a time complex. Therefore, the time complex should not be understood within the postmodern concept of a non-linear temporality but rather with what I would like to call spectral temporalities.8 This new plurality of times not only dissolves the transcendent referent time as a collective singular (breaking open the term “history” itself) but replaces it with techniques and design concepts that generate their own temporality, as the contributions in this volume will report. The concern is not simply to expand the architect’s perspective through the time complex but to present a non-historical perspective on what we classically call “the past” in favor of a futurability of architecture. In this sense, forgetting must also be reevaluated. Even though it is technically possible to “remember” everything, a universal archive of historical data can never be fully accessible—the “accessed moment” becomes time-data. For7  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874,” in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München, Berlin, New York: Dt. Taschenbuch-Verl; De Gruyter), 7, 27, 81, and 611. 8  The metaphysics of presence is lost in such a spectrality of time(s). Spectrality establishes alternative temporalities (alongside the historiographic notion of time) like recursion, jumps, interruptions, loops, and interleaving.

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getting is being micro-temporalized, on the one hand. On the other hand, an ars oblivionalis is essentially a mnemonic technology in algorithmic operations; the range of available memories must be multiplied. In short, when the number of memories (the storage and processing of data) increases, information is lost in the mass and is thus forgotten.9 This means that the ability to store and retrieve unlimited data can also be used as a technique for forgetting. To achieve this, strategies have been developed that generate deceptive, ambiguous, fictitious, or inaccurate data for a corresponding transaction, thereby multiplying the data and thus manipulating the search results. The fundamental difference is that algorithms encourage forgetting by multiplying (which is not to say inventing) rather than eliminating the past. It is, therefore, more about which past than it is to dissolve the past. The goal is, then, to develop a time-literate sensibility—a close reading— that aims to understand how our everyday lives are shaped by processes that transcend our cognitive abilities and habitual perceptions. How can we rethink time and deprioritize our experiential understanding of it? How do we use a notion of time to construct the future? And how long is the future anyway? As practicing architects, we are used to imagining the near future, but what about the far future? How can we construct models and scenarios for a wider time span than a social media timeline? At the same time, as architects, we create works in a different time-space than the one that the viewer sees or inhabits. Architectural works simultaneously refer backward to preexisting works or previously written theory and forward to future recipients who may revive fragments of it. Inherent in every architectural work is a complexity of times. But temporal complexity is not only located within the object; it is also in the methods and media we use to analyze and synthesize architectural information and design objects. Thus, when we speak of the past, it is insufficient to understand it as a digital archive or as a constantly growing memory that indiscriminately stores each piece of information. The past should instead be conceived of in the sense of a time complex that takes the multimodal time configurations (recursive, ephemeral, retrievable, preemptive, predictive, and nostalgic) inherent 9  Mega Leta Ambrose, “You Are What Google Says You Are: The Right to Be Forgotten and Information Stewardship,” The International Review of Information Ethics 17 (July 2012): 21–30. Elena Esposito, “Algorithmic Memory and the Right to be Forgotten on the Web,” Big Data & Society (June 2017): 1–11.

Untimely Architecture

in this “radically temporalized” past into account.10 This basically means that time(s) operates on different speeds, directions, and scales, and also integrates the function of many interrelated systems. We are dealing with multiple arrows of time and therefore with different timescales of past(s) and future(s) alike. The question is how these different timescales can be understood and how they can be related to one another and be made operative? Instead of considering the lack of a hegemonic time as an irresolvable problem for those wishing to operate in an untimely fashion, the temporal complexity creates completely new possibilities— in the sense that the Nietzschean leap need not to be restricted to a singular past but could also leap into diverse spaces and times, creating spatiotemporal overlays. Furthermore, elaborating on the potential of preemptions to act on the present from the future could be an illuminating step for architects attempting to make sense of the history of architecture and earlier works by shifting their points of view from the present to the future. Instead of predetermining and predicting the future, which is then channeled back into the present, an untimely future is fictional and transitional—as are the retrospective impressions of the present and the past that it creates. By this point, it should be clear why the topic of time is significant for the discipline of architecture, which is essentially about space—aside from the problem of the historiography of architecture (time as a means of ordering), which questions and promises to overcome the cultural, temporal, and object-related limitations and hierarchizations of modern and Western architectural history. Architecture is a time object; it consists of times. Not only are space and time inextricably linked because movement is required to perceive space—a concept that has been clearly explained by August Schmarsow, and, needless to say, Sigfried Giedion11 —and movement presupposes time. 10 Wolfgang Ernst, Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive (Barcelona: MACBA, 2013), 6. 11 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 356. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der Architektonischen Schöpfung: Antrittsvorlesung, gehalten in der Aula der K. Universität Leipzig am 8. November 1893 (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894). Alongside Giedion and Schmarsow, the art historian Alois Riegel, who like Schmarsow was influenced by Gottfried Semper, is among the first to produce profound theoretical explanations on the notion of space. For further comprehensive elaborations of the idea, see Ákos Moravánszky, “Die Warhnehmung des Raumes,” in Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine kritische Anthologie, ed. Ákos Moravánszky

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Though architects typically consider the motion of the body through space, the movement of the eye—both human and machine—and the movement of ideas are also relevant to the discipline and require different perceptions of time. Technological developments and new media change this perception and architectural understandings of movement; take for instance cinema’s early reception, leading to theories of montage advanced by Eisenstein, such ideas inf luenced prominent architects like Le Corbusier, exemplified by his promenade architecturale, explicitly based on principles of filmic time. Both ideas have engendered new understandings of space and alternative conceptions of visuality from the temporality and movement of seeing. Here, we must take note that both Le Corbusier’s and Eisenstein’s concepts can be considered untimely, since they challenge the prevalent aesthetic theories of the late 1920s, which were largely indebted to Lessing’s division of arts, time, and space and to Kant’s elimination of duration as a parameter of aesthetic experience.12 Today, aerial imagery and GPS technologies have dramatically changed our spatial and temporal orientation, as Hito Steyerl draws attention to in the article “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” in which she addresses the loss of a stable horizon created by this new perspective from above.13 This idea brings us back to questioning what we think we know about how we see. The concept of time is also associated with the concept of change (movement and change are often used interchangeably in the literature on time) and thus with innovation, novelty, and creativity. As Sanford Kwinter wri-

(Vienna and New York City: Springer, 2003), 121–146; Anthony Vidler, “Space, Time, and Movement,” in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York City: Harry Abrams; Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 100–125; Peter Eisenman, “Time Warps: The Monument,” in Anytime, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (New York: Anyone Corporation/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press): 250–257. Bettina Kohler, “Architekturgeschichte als Geschichte der Raumwahrnehmung,” Daidalos 67 (1998): 36–43; Cornelius van de Ven, Space in Architecture: The Evolution of a New Idea in the Theory and History of Modern Movements (Assen, Maastricht, and Wolfeboro: Van Gorcum, 1987); Paul Zucker, “The Aesthetics of Space in Architecture, Sculpture, and City Planning,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4, no.1 (September 1945): 12–19. 12 Yve-Alain Bois, “Sergei M. Eisenstein. Montage and Architecture: Introduction,” Assemblage, no. 10 (December 1989): 110–115, and 113. 13  Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux journal, no. 24 (April 2011).

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tes, “All change is change over time; no novelty appears without becoming.”14 Change is, therefore, presupposed by time, such that one has to extrapolate from change to infer time, which is in itself not easily tangible. Change is not a direct representation of time but the comparative relation of changes to one another. Things do not develop over time; things change in relation to one another. What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the nature of change, including the details of its dynamics and its possibilities and impossibilities. In the classical theory of becoming, the focus is on the process by which things pass from one state to another state, and time is invoked as the measure of the necessary change and lawful becoming. This should, however, not be misunderstood as the concept of time being a fixed one. On the contrary, what history and Kwinter clearly define is that novelty goes along with a redefinition and radicalization of a theory of time.15 Kwinter, for instance, bases time on the dynamic principle of the biological model of morphogenesis. Forms are nothing fixed but only structurally stable moments, their genesis—the new—is based on the crossing of a qualitative threshold: the event. This means that the continuous supply of information (energy)—whereby the form remains dynamic—can no longer be absorbed by the system, and form genesis (novelty) occurs.16 Sanford Kwinter’s exposé of a philosophy of the event is based on the virtual (in which temporality is Aîon) and the actual (where time is Chronos), reinforcing Gilles Deleuze’s declarations about the continuous production of the new. The temporality of Aîon is not chronological but rather is the temporality of eternal recurrence, which Deleuze defines as a constant differentiation process of becoming. This becoming is characterized by the fact that there is a constant change between the individual states. Everything is connected to everything else and, therefore, every state is only the expression of all other states. There is nothing beyond these regularities that can inf luence the course of things. This understanding, however, dissolves the structure of time to the point that the difference between the three dimensions of time (past, present, and future) are suspended, which 14  Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 5. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 The influence of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation as a process of metastable states can be seen here. Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen, Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 297–319.

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Quentin Meillassoux critically describes as “an immutable web of transmissions of movements. One is faced with an immobility made of movements.”17 What is at stake for Kwinter is describing one universal law of becoming. That said, what is of interest in the context of a time complex is contrasting different forms of becoming where each is characterized by a particular temporal becoming and collectively creating the possibility of discordant time. In this respect, George Kubler’s notion of time that he develops from the “things” themselves is useful. Kubler develops a historiographical model of art that questions the cultural and temporal restrictions and hierarchies of previous art histories and attempts to overcome them. Rejecting the rhetoric of progress in favor of more chaotic theories of time, he demonstrates how artistic innovation, transformation and imitation never unfold in a single uninterrupted path. In particular, Kubler criticizes the concept of style as being too monolithic and, instead, argues for a historical temporality that is inherent in art itself.18 The originality of his theoretical outline can be explained by the fact that the art historian mainly worked with pre-Columbian and Ibero-American artifacts for which the established methods of art history, which were developed to address Western culture, were not primarily helpful. Instead of undertaking an explicitly transcultural approach that emphasizes change rather than an actual investigation of artifacts themselves, Kubler developed a model in which art history becomes a story of its own logic, based on the development processes held within the artifacts. These processes extend beyond particular epochs and regions and can take place discontinuously with numerous interruptions that can be read in contrast to the uninterrupted durations of biological time. He uses the language of electrodynamics to describe the conditions of artistic development: objects, including artworks, emit pulses that are picked up elsewhere, redirected by certain relays, accumulate at centers of force, are slowed by resistances, et cetera. The connections between the individual links of this chain need not be linear; rather, pulses can be conveyed across vast geographical distances, as well as across great temporal interruptions. Kubler develops an appealing 17  Quentin Meillassoux, “Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory,” in Collapse Volume III: Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism], ed. Robin Mackay (Cornwall: Urbanomic, 2012), 63–107, and 88. 18  This is an approach that Aby Warburg had previously pursued, and Peter Osborn applied later on.

Untimely Architecture

conceptual system that makes dynamic, transcultural exchange processes describable and tangible. For Kubler, history is intertwined: it changes direction, falters, starts up again, and unfolds a narrative based on connections and detours. In his view, a chronological, linear history (or style), which is based on the continuity of organic growth and progress, cannot be successfully applied to non-European phenomena. The art historian radically rejects the biological metaphor of art, drawing into focus the breaks and the temporal and cultural shifts by writing, “Natural form is the consequence of laws. Artistic form is the consequence of thought.”19 Though his project focuses on the innumerable ways of understanding the relationship between the past and the present, instead of style, he uses more detailed methods such as speculation, observation, and comparison. As an art historian, Kubler himself can be viewed as untimely because not only did his divergent history model and his entropic development scheme of a “finite world” anticipate approaches that were popularized during the globalization debates in the art historical studies of the 1990s but also his theories continue to be useful in today’s global art and communication systems—particularly its consideration of non-European artistic positions and the attention paid to cultural transfers. Sanford Kwinter’s theory of novelty is based on the thesis that everything that exists and becomes is singular and thus, in a sense, always “new”—a futurity that is already inherent (and thus predictable) in the present or what Kwinter calls the virtual. Put differently, this theory of novelty (of becoming), for all its pluralistic evocations, remains ultimately monistic, since all immanent differences are constitutively gradual, intense differences that constrict nature and all of its parts in their diversification into an (ultimately unbroken) unity of becoming. And this issue seems to be exactly the point at present; everything is constantly “new”—predictable—but nothing is really different and thus out of time. 19  George Kubler, “George A. Kubler’s Notes on the Focillion Method,” January 5, 1940, George Alexander Kubler Paper (MS 843), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 2 (no. 44314). (Emphasis mine). In the Shape of Time, Kubler notes that in order to adequately account for art and architecture as a multidirectional transmission of energy (information) rather than a series of causally defined linear links, “the language of electrodynamics might have suited us better than the language of botany; and Michael Faraday might have been a better mentor than Linnaeus for the study of material culture.” George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1962), 9.

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In contrast to Kwinter, Nietzsche’s untimeliness allows distancing from time as continuous. To do so, we try to think about space through time and not vice versa (if time is derived from space, the derivation is typically understood as a continuum). However, what is ultimately of interest is the resulting consequences for space from the contemporary time complex. In this regard, we find some hints in Nietzsche’s Zeitatomenlehre [time-atom theory] in which he posits a theory of time that consists of a relation of points of time instead of a continuum.20 It is important to understand that the points are not in time, but that time is in the points. The points are indivisible, not in terms of their intensities—which are continua that can gradually be divided in thought—but in terms of the rhythm of time. These points come together in complex temporal structures, through Wirkverhältnis [actio in distans], which Nietzsche understands as a creative act. This action is essentially an erratic movement from one point to another that can be fast at times and slow at others. These different time proportionalities, or laws of motion, as he calls them, spatialize time.21 Nietzsche sketches space as dissonant (overlapping) spatial intervals or clusters as it is composed of essentially moving and changing time-matter points, where each of these points follows a different motion in time.22 Through Nietzsche, we find a conception of time in which time is not a continuum, does not form a line, and is not bound to an arrow of time but is a discrete ensemble of different points in time. As a result, there is no continuous change of the space. In contemporary physics, a continuous space-time as well as the smooth appearance of matter are considered to be illusions. In loop quantum gravity theory, not only the idea of continuous (smooth) space disappears but also the notion of a single (absolute) time. The disappearance of absolute time 20  Nietzsche‘s Zeitatomenlehre has received little attention in scholarly works due to its fragmentary nature and brevity. His aim was to propose a non-metaphysical theory of being and becoming. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente: Sommer 1872– Ende 1874, eds. Giorgio Colli and Manzino Montinari (München: De Gruyter, 1977), 26 [11–13]. 21  Here, Nietzsche’s priority is arithmetic, as invoking geometry too early in his argument would have run the risk of thinking of time from space which would then appear as a continuum. 22  It follows that there are degrees of differences within spatial constructs, differing significantly, therefore, from mathematical space, which is homogeneous and has the same property at every point.

Untimely Architecture

does not mean that there is no change; on the contrary, it implies that processes can no longer be arranged in a continuous sequence of moments. They are not subject to a single rhythm but rather to their own temporality that is independent of that of their neighbors. Processes (events) arise from the interaction of the quanta of space (that combine to form a network and that, in turn, form space), which continually rearrange themselves—creating the changes in the structure that define time. This means that space-time does not change continuously or gradually because there is more than just one space-time that exist simultaneously. As a result, transitions do not take place continuously but abruptly. Translating this idea to architecture would mean that its primary consideration is no longer about the multiplicity of matter and thus of form but about the multiplicity of time itself. Therefore, it is less about the mode of becoming of form than it is about the becoming of time itself. It is also about how to make the tension in the different temporalities of a time complex spatially operative. How should we think about the “compossibility” of temporally divergent worlds? Within the complex and spectral temporality, time may become archi-tectonic itself, not in a static way but rather different temporalities moving through and over one another, a muddled and thickened condition of times—a blurred “order of time.” This collection is an experiment of allowing the facts of the past to overlap in different ways and form new constellations. The book lends itself to being read in a number of different ways—from beginning to end, from end to beginning, or through a random selection of texts. A selection of chapters to be read could be made on the basis of the different temporal scales they address, from deep time to the micro temporalities of the machine. Books, as a format, are actually contradictory of a time complex, which is why, this book specifically should not be read in the normative linear fashion. Understanding the argument of each chapter is not dependent on understanding the argumentation of others, but the relationship between the individual chapters is to be understood transversally in the context of a time complex. The reader is encouraged to explore the different approaches presented in the book through one another and identify the connections and undertake trajectories that most interest them. The texts compiled in this volume do share a number of overlapping architectural concerns, namely the problems of form and space, specific techniques and methods and the architectural object—ranging from the city to the building, and parts of it—as a coming

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together of different times. This methodology allows the reader to pay attention to entanglements while reading approaches, disciplinary positions, and insights through one another and consider how theories, artifacts, and positions inform and inf luence each other. Notably, the untimely is not only addressed differently by each of the contributing authors but also is activated by the reader, who recursively writes their way into the texts by developing the untimely gaps between the different positions. Because temporal boundaries are difficult to define, this book will illustrate that each author as well as each reader has a decidedly different understanding of the past, present, and future. To a certain extent, we are always being confronted with a multiplicity of different times, as the cultural critic and philosopher Ernst Bloch writes: Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others. They rather carry an earlier element with them; this interferes.23 Bloch’s remark is, arguably, more poignant today than ever before but, because everything happens in real time, we tend to mistakenly think of ourselves as being in a supposed gleichzeitigkeit des gleichzeitigen [the same-time-ness of non-same-time-ness]. Being untimely in the present moment is anything but easy. Creating and reading untimeliness within such a plurality of times requires careful attention to detail—by noticing discrepancies and their effects, different elaborations become possible. These elaborations are at once new and not new, as they are folded into a temporality of the yet to come. For some readers, the texts in this book may not seem “new” enough and, for other readers, the same texts may not have a strong enough foundation in the past. However, the intention of the untimely is to put phenomena into perspective, which becomes visible in their multidimensionality and situatedness. The untimely is about mutual conditionalities and overlaps as well as about constitutive contradictions that can be situated but not dissolved. By starting from this constitutive ambivalence of overlapping pasts (and fu-

23  Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1991), 97.

Untimely Architecture

tures)—of which we ourselves are always an intra-active part24 —the focus is placed on the dynamic entanglement of architectural tropes, and, if done correctly, their ongoing tension with theoretical and normative perspectives or categories might be overcome. This volume lays no claims to being exhaustive. On the contrary, it should be understood more as a methodological stimulus to deal with radical revisions of known histories via different contexts, new historical discoveries, and with a past that is unknown to Western history. In the sense of the untimely, it is about understanding it in the process of becoming, such that it can respond to our time’s urgent need to invent multiple and fresh histories for a future that we desire rather than one we dread. The contributions in the first section of the book, “Architecture as a Time Complex,” consider time beyond the human lifespan and cultural narratives and position the human experience within a larger (and longer) context. This long history is not a precise demarcation; it is a concept that allows us to consider time scales too large for our own experience and too abstract for our brains to comprehend and, therefore, change the way we analyze and design the built environment. Put differently, long history points to a diachronic time that cannot be a correlate of our present consciousness but can nevertheless be described scientifically. Photography, for instance, remembers the past in a radically different way than what is normative in historical discourse. Other contributions in this section can be read in connection to George Kubler’s theory on form in the context of a variegated time model. In addition to the perspectives on the architectural form and urbanistic object, this section presents the possibility of a transcultural extension and a new vision of architecture and the city across time. While looking at a long period of architecture, different architectural styles are mingled and, therefore, avoid a reading of the history of architecture in the tradition of Erwin Panofsky by means of the clear demarcation of epochal styles and privileging the historical and strict chronology of the Western perspective. Some contri24  Intra-action is a neologism developed by Karen Barad which, within her agentive realism, refers semantically to the fact that the designated relations are constituted only in relation to each other and do not represent pre-fixed entities or phenomena. In contrast to interaction (“between”), intra-action (“within”) describes an ontological inseparability of all the agencies involved in the phenomena. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

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butions in this section remind us of Bruno Latour’s statement that a building is rather “a moving project, and that, even once it has been built, it ages; it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what happens inside and outside, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated, and transformed beyond recognition.”25 For Kurt W. Forster, it is the metaphorical engagement of images and imagination that reveals an untimely gap. He points to the detailed and microscopic reading of scenes as a methodology to gain distance from one’s own time while simultaneously adhering to it. He takes a unique approach to demonstrating the temporal complexities inherent in artworks. Finally, the reader may recognize the untimeliness of Forster’s contribution, which can itself be read as both a prophetic warning of things to come (particularly in the context of the Anthropocene) or as a scene from a remote past. Ferda Kolatan views the city as a millennial time complex through which he questions the typical linear and monocultural understanding of architectural history. He considers the city as a kaleidoscope of architectural objects from different times. These hybrid objects within the city form his critical and untimely tool. On the one hand, he uses them to grasp the idea of novelty, specifically as an act of entangling existing urban objects with one another in radical ways. On the other hand, he makes the Nietzschean leap by recreating found urban elements from different times as alternative fictions to the present, anticipating a different future for our megacities. Aleksandr Mergold’s contribution also focuses on preexisting artifacts and leftovers by addressing the ancient phenomenon of spolia. He considers spolia as an untimely practice that simultaneously gives visibility to multiple dimensions of history and conf lates moments and periods of different epochs. In the past, spolia was a method of reconfiguring old buildings and creating new settings through the opportunistic sampling of diverse material and ephemera of the past that were both destructive and productive. Today, however, spolia is increasingly seen as a mechanism for undermining the status quo and fusing parts of the past into new and original forms through sampling, alienation, and misunderstanding.

25  Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “‘ Give Me Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move ’: An ANT’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 80–89, 80.

Untimely Architecture

Through the notion of ruins, which has a peculiar and labyrinthine connection to time—its current existence is relative to the past and yet it is reliant and revitalized by the present—Pier Paolo Tamburelli addresses architecture within a temporal dimension and allows the question of form to reemerge. By quoting Giorgio Vasari, Tamburelli pinpoints the recursiveness of the past to operate similarly to Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely. This concept presupposes a present in which the past recurs as something different or new and which then leads to an unknown future. In this formulation, the past follows the present in accordance with the maxim that to rethink or reread the old is to transform it in the present. Tamburelli’s argument implies that the past should be selectively used and intentionally forgotten. Benjamin Ennemoser’s project is guided by the question whether a machine can better relate to urban and architectural structures than a human can, since machine time can adapt much more easily to the slowed-down time of a city. Through his contribution, Ennemoser considers the possibility of machines mediating between humans and the architectural experience of time. The architectural data sets introduced by Ennemoser are anachronistic. His data are neither pre-categorized nor classified according to styles or any other linear order, and it offers fortuitous collisions and surprising encounters instead of the sort everyone has become familiar with through digital browsing and searching. Such an anachronistic approach would suggest an architectural history of dispersion. Ennemoser pursues a new disjunctive approach that allows for cross-chronological comparisons. The second part of the book, “The Past is Yet to Come,” draws on revisions of known histories by means of detailed understandings of different theories and contexts to reveal a past that is not yet known. One could say that this section is dedicated to the third movement theorized by August Schmarsow, for the ways this group of contributions address the scales and changing directions of time to bring future architecture into the present, enabling a leap into the future. With her piece, Vera Bühlmann shows that when architecture is thought of holistically, it also implies the aspect of time. In this sense, architecture not only models space but it articulates time. In her paper, Bühlmann defines the architectural model as a model of time that reverses the direction and separates itself in a speculative way from a linear and epistemological notion of time. She conceptualizes the architectural model as having a computationally coded, numerical imagination that enables its transformation

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across different scales—a “scalar inversion” of sorts. The architectural model is not to be understood as a representation but as a model that codes the complex state. Riccardo M. Villa demonstrates the operationalization of derivative temporality26 in architecture in his contribution. In reference to Manfredo Tafuri, Villa addresses the particular shift in temporal operations that the logic of financialization (as opposed to the purely capitalist logic) has generated. Villa articulates the “sublime uselessness” of architecture, not as something to be lamented (as Manfredo Tafuri did) but as a form of resistance to blind economic utilitarianism—a resistance that transcends all dead determinism through its inherent sophistication. He illustrates that neither the history of architecture nor architectural production—particularly the production that responds to the regime of architecture competitions—start from factual givens. Rather, there are always speculative constructions that suspend the possibility of a deterministic telos and filter the images of history from the domain of purely fictional possibility to one of credible probability through the disposition of an immanent structure. In his contribution, Skender Luarasi questions the prevailing ideology of self-generation in our deceptively f luid digital age by pointing to the problem of stopping. Luarasi shows that stopping is less of an epistemological problem than it is an aesthetic one. He illustrates how the art of stopping has always been a part of the discourse, but that it is eclipsed by today’s fashionable applications of self-generation in architecture. He introduces an alternative (untimely) reading of the prevailing theories of the 1990s that supported the digital project to point toward a spatiotemporality that is discontinuous, mixed, and entangled rather than continuously in f lux. In theorizing a technique of stopping, he focuses on toggling between different spatiotemporal “distances” as a kind of irreversible and entropic dynamism that opens up the possibility of the new—the untimely. He reminds us that creating novelty involves an aspect of time, and if there is no time, there is no stopping. The problem of stopping leads to more general considerations

26  Elena Esposito has illustrated a derivative temporality through financialization. Here, the temporal relationship is reversed in the sense that unpredictable future contingencies are operationalized in the present, where they affect and transform it. Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 21–22.

Untimely Architecture

of media-induced temporality from which new forms of temporal processes and proportion and performances have developed. “Temporalization of Seeing” is centered on the viewer’s eye—from the human eye to machine vision, encompassing mobile and static humans and non-human observers—through which different temporal scales that exist within and go beyond the human experience of time are examined. This also leads us back to some of the previous chapters in the first part of the book. Following Friedrich Nietzsche’s insight that all writing tools take participate in shaping our thoughts, the remaining authors expand this argument to include the idea that the categorical perception of space and time is redefined by the apparatuses in which both dimensions are experienced. Since the experimental arrangements of the nineteenth century revealed that so-called sense perception is nothing more than signal processing, these senses have been subjected to a radical temporal and time-critical index—from geometric-perspective to frequency-based techniques of looking and from from representing to scanning.27 The contributions inductively derive new conceptualizations, terminologies, techniques, and methods from time-critical media processes in the technological sense. That is, they identify those moments in which ultra-temporal “events” are decisive and make other space-time relations visible. Eugene Han draws our attention to the aesthetic perception of the depth of the image as different from the commonplace understanding of depth as distance in linear perspective. Depth is conceived of as the collision of intra-image moments that inform a total, yet dynamic, “picture” through a subject’s perception of it. He makes the untimely leap into “impossible” scenarios that are physically irrational. Han asserts that, in turn, this subjective experience of perception defines what Henri Bergson describes as the épaisseur de durée [depth of duration].28 He elaborates on the aspects of time 27  See Hans-Christian von Herrmann, “Fantaskopie. Zur Technik des Blicks im Kino,” Kaleidoskopien. Stroboskop: Die Zersplitterung des festen Blickpunktes, no. 1 (1996): 17–23. 28  Henri Bergson describes time as a constant passing. To measure time is basically unimaginable, only the effect of time can be measured. For Bergson, time is only the measure of duration and the concept of duration is always connected to the movement of bodies moving in space. Furthermore, Bergson addresses how change can be perceived of when we can only grasp states fixed in a given moment, which are in perpetual change and continuously transitioning into other states. He tries to give movement back its mobility by changing its flow and duration. Henri Bergson, Denken und schöpferisches

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and temporality inscribed in the static image or in the “f lat” drawing and the sequential nature of aesthetic perception introduced by Sergei Eisenstein’s theory. In this vein, Han’s research brilliantly establishes depth in the temporal and sequential perception of space of an image by employing eye tracking—not as a means of explaining perceptual behaviors but to provide additional insight into an aesthetic problem. In doing so, he argues that “depth in perception” is fundamentally qualitative, whereas techniques such as linear perspective simulate a quantitative understanding of depth. The importance of the qualitative is exemplified by Eisenstein in his theory of montage in which the space of an image is recognized through the inherent tensions that arise from its internal structure and consequently shape the perception of it. “Through the inherently co-creative role of the subject in their perception, moments of any given work are in a constant state of reconstruction and collision, framed by the subject’s perceptual attention and given depth through the engagement of the observer with the work of art,” Han concludes. Similarly, Maja Ozvaldic also begins with the linear perspective and the accompanying understanding of time in the modern era that leads to the “dynamization of space and the spatialization of time” through cinema. The focus of her research is the human-machine visual system in which the static observer of cinema turns into a mobile user of it, physically maneuvering through a three-dimensional space of mixed realities. The translation of Nietzsche’s idea of the untimely into architecture may indeed produce visual hybrids, which, by means of palimpsest, combine the here and now with the historical past and fictitious future, thereby disrupting the commonly experienced linear progression of time. Ozvaldic argues that virtual and augmented realities suggest such a spatial hybridization of physical and virtual spaces. In the piece, she also draws our attention to the planetary scale and the broadly networked infrastructure in which the glass surfaces of our smart devices are integrated. The growing importance of aerial imagery— satellite images and Google Maps—and GPS technology have dramatically changed our spatial and temporal orientation. In comparison to linear perspective, she connects the loss of the horizon to the departure from the sta-

Werden: Aufsätze und Vorträge, Unveränd. Nachdr. [der Ausg.] Paris, 1946, Eva-Taschenbuch 50 (Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1993), 223 and 227.

Untimely Architecture

ble orientation paradigm that has located us in relation to time and space throughout modernity. This new sense of space and time is also theorized by Andrew Saunders in his paper in which he places the concepts in the context of new technologies of surveying tools. Light detection and ranging scans determine depth by calculating the amount of time it takes for light to travel to and from an object, which is coded on a pixel-by-pixel basis. When seen through this technology, obscured locations produce gaps—time gaps—making “temporal” overlaps, elicited from a series of scan locations, which become necessary to ensure complete coverage of the entire areas being scanned. Saunders’s research on Italian Baroque churches offers unprecedented and immersive viewpoints that are not typically accessible as part of the human experience or even through physical cameras. Spaces such as those that curve away from the viewer and present perspective limitations make photography— even in wide-angle shots—representationally inadequate. The novel effect of transparency, which point clouds produce, enable a new vantage point to “view the spatial envelope of the interior from the ‘outside’ as well as from the ‘inside,’ simultaneously,” yielding “a view never before imagined.” This new mode of representation visualizes a “space that f loats between surface and volume.”29 Therefore, it is not the two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object that we are dealing with but the strange overlay of the volume of the image (the measurable depth of the image) and where it becomes the volumetric object. Working against the popular and rarely productive practice of engaging with form in the discipline, Johan Bettum returns to nineteenth-century theories. He positions the temporal components of kinesthetic and visual movement as central to spatial perception, which, through virtual reality, not only clarifies but recalibrates the complex spatiotemporal nature of architecture. Bettum’s research also considers the indisputably dominant role of image-making in architecture. He points to the radically different status of the image in virtual reality and shows how the image is spatialized through the medium in ways that contrast traditional modes of representation like line drawings and the digital images. Additionally, in his piece, Bettum demonstrates that the computer-generated image is itself subject to a dynamic and thus temporal process and explores the temporality of the technology. 29  Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.”

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If we look at architecture in terms of its objects, ideas, concepts, methods, and techniques, we recognize a productive confusion of architectural epochs. As the contributions here show, we may readily uncover evidence of temporal and spatial entanglements and layered histories at a variety of scales and spectra. This insight not only opens up new methodological possibilities but requires an alternative way of writing history and generating form—one that goes beyond the reductive distinction between past and future and between the old and the new and recognizes that these categories necessarily overlap and coexist in the city, in its architecture, and in the ideas and concepts that underpin it. In such a spectral temporality, the temporal hierarchies of idea, design, and its materialization are confused. Though this book does not offer a ready-made solution in this regard (that would far exceed its scope), I hope it projects a different kind of temporal orientation and broadens our thinking about the theory of time and how we construct the future and the past. The approach taken here is something that is not only messier but, I hope, more productive, disjointed, and dissonant than traditional approaches to a linear understanding of architectural history, a genetic interpretation of form, and to genealogy. In this sense, this anthology offers strategies to shift historiographical and design methodologies and transform the way we do architecture.

Out of Key with the Times Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch Look at Trees and Rocks Kurt W. Forster In 1958, when the head of the chemical firm Boehringer & Co. commissioned the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch to document remarkable trees throughout (Western) Germany, he also requested an essay from the still-controversial writer Ernst Jünger. The success of this volume of Trees, exquisitely produced by the Valdonega Press of Giovanni Mardersteig in 1962, prompted the decision to follow up with the even more ambitious Rocks in 1966.1 For Rocks, the photographer ranged widely across Europe, much farther than he had done for Trees, and Jünger delved more deeply into nature and its history. Unlike Jünger, whose reputation was cleft because his novel On Marble Cliffs (1939), which was widely understood as a premonition of civilization’s collapse during the Second World War when he continued to serve in uniform as a cultural officer in occupied Paris, Renger-Patzsch’s record was untainted, although his perception of the Ruhr Valley and his architectural photography seemed to bear the excess weight of monumentalized German lands. He had not only published a seminal book of photography Die Welt ist schön [The World is Beautiful] but also the volume Eisen und Stahl [Iron and Steel], presenting from cover and typography to sumptuous plates a stark view of heavy industry.

1  For a detailed chronolgy of Bäume and Gestein, see: Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel 1943–1966 und weitere Dokumente, eds. Matthias Schöning, Bernd Stiegler, Ann and Jürgen Wilde (Munich: Fink, 2010). Since the Boehringer Company produced these volumes as gifts for clients, there is no commercial index of their ‘success’ other than their critical reception and the concession to publish a small version. There is ample evidence of Dr. Boehringer’s pride and pleasure in having sponsored the books.

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Fig. 1: Renger-Patzsch, Selfportrait as ref lected in one of his car’s headlights

The reclusive photographer and the worldly writer knew of each other and in the course of their postwar collaboration gained a fresh understanding of cultural geography (in a country divided during the Cold War) and of the impending ecological calamities caused by heavy industry and dying forests. Jünger’s diaries and essays on landscape and cities recall writers such as Franz Hessel, Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Walser, Josef Roth, and Walter Benjamin. They were all interested in photography, particularly in pictures taken by August Sander, Sasha Stein, Umbo, and Renger-Patzsch, and crafted their own ‘snapshot’ perception of the contemporary world. The postwar return of trees and rocks as all-absorbing subjects stands in sharp contrast to the caustic attitude to nature after the First World War. If Walter Benjamin famously ref lected on his childhood Berlin in ways deeply akin to the photography of a Sasha Stein, who actually designed the dust jacket for his Einbahnstrasse [One-way Street] of 1928, Ernst Jünger’s Gärten und Strassen [Gardens and Streets] of 1942 has the antiquated charm of a writer’s diary be-

Out of Key with the Times

Fig. 2: Jünger, Selfportrait with camera

fore chronicling, reluctantly, the outbreak of the war and the experience of a drôle de guerre from his Etappenquartier.2 Photography of nature had long taken a scientific turn, partly in response to the illustration of single-cell organisms and Radiolaria by Erich Haeckel and his Darwinian interest in the mutability of nature, partly on the macro-level in Karl Blossfeldt’s hugely enlarged images of plant growth, published as Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Plants] in 1928 and greatly valued by Benjamin. 1928 is also the year another book of photographs appeared under the title Die Welt ist schön, a collection of sachlich images by Renger-Patzsch. As a student of insects and an entomological collector, Jünger devoted microscopic attention to insects, to anonymity, and to the experience of pain that squared with the image-making strategies of numerous interwar photographers. 2  Jumping ahead, one glimpses from a moment in Montmirail, on 19 June 1940, a scene that corresponds exactly to Anton von Werner’s picture, Im Etappenquartier vor Paris, of 1894 : es “gehört zum Schicksal diese Platzes … daß Heere an ihm vorbeiziehen, und daß er hin und wieder preußische Offiziere zu beherbergen hat, so 1814, 1870, 1914 und nun ein neues Mal,” Gärten und Strassen (Berlin: Mittler, 1942), cited after the special edition for the armed forces (Paris: Zentrale der Frontbuchhandlungen, 1942), 175.

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Fig. 3: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Ruhrlandschaf t, 1929

Another strand running through the Jünger’s Gärten und Strassen and tying together what might otherwise appear to be a casual series of observations is a story of self-transformation: the conversion of Jünger from a heroic militarist in the First World War to an anxious analyst of civilization’s demise as Europe careened toward the Second World War. The diary of Harry Count Kessler traces a similar personal evolution and casts an ever-wider net of connections over the years when photography emerged not only as an art (apart from, and beyond, its documentary role), but also lent itself as a key metaphor for processes of observation, representation, and memorization. With the collaboration of Jünger and Renger-Patzsch, the diffuse but ubiquitous presence of photography—from newsprint and advertisement to

Out of Key with the Times

cinema—was to change the cultural status of all images and deeply affect writing, whether newspaper copy or lyrical effusion. Trees and Rocks, I would claim, revisit the first half of the twentieth century during the second, exposing in the collective desire to disregard devastation and put nature back into place as the source of all life and the only secular consolation for a fatally damaged civilization. In contrast to their own leanings, the collaboration of photographer and writer exposed, even dramatized, the convulsive energies in nature, their manifestation in the history of the earth, and their tragic persistence in the shape of every tree.3 Inadvertently perhaps, the writer and the photographer pulled apart what united them as their quest produced uncertain ideas about nature but stunning insights into its life, revealing in the process how deeply the sense of life was bound up with death. In the course of attempting to come to terms with the later writings of Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), strange coincidences began tumbling in. Maybe unexpected connections are strange in appearance only because their sheer occurrence raises the suspicion that something special is at stake with the subject. What makes coincidences so uncanny is their tendency to multiply and link up with one another, heightening one’s suspicion that the subject may be haunted. Some writers, such as a Massimo Bontempelli or a W.G. Sebald tend to take uncanny coincidences in strides and even provocatively expect them to confirm that they are on the right track. Ernst Jünger reacted in kind when his friend, the chemist Albert Hofmann, who initiated him into experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens since the 1950s, recalled one such unlikely occurrence in which “the probability is extremely low that at one and the same time the identical amount is being charged on totally unrelated bills.”4 Hofmann confessed, “For some time now when I looked at my wristwatch the two hands were in the same position.” In Jünger’s view, both the identical amounts and the overlapping hands suggested that inner and clock time were momentarily “synchronous” and made fate a charade in

3  Trees are among the oldest fossils conserving the fibers of plant life in crystallized grain: see Andreas Honegger, Urs Möckli, Das Gedächtnis der Bäume. Versteinerte Hölzer. Erinnerte Spuren (Munich: Sandmann, 2018) This book, too, is the result of collaboration between a technical journalist and a photographer. 4  “LSD. Albert Hofmann und Ernst Jünger. Der Briefwechsel 1947 bis 1997,” Marbachmagazin 142/143 (2013), 159.

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ciphers.5 What was clear despite all the hocus-pocus was that time played tricks and slipped out of its otherwise unshakable frame. Rather than confirming its iron hold over all things, time fell subject to a yet larger unknown force as it appeared to do in the physics of relativity. Unverifiable in experience, to be sure, but still powerful in effect, such coincidences insinuated connections among things that were, for all intents and purposes, unrelated, and most of all unhinged from time. A coincidence I noticed while preparing this text lay hidden in a periodical I had left unread during a long absence and, when it accidentally fell into my hands, reminded me of a familiar misunderstanding about Jünger. No doubt the writer had survived incalculable dangers, leaving trench warfare of the First World War severely wounded but with the highest decoration bestowed on his rank only to articulate with Stahlgewitter [Storms of Steel] perhaps the most astute opposite of the later war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970). Jünger spent a spell of military service during the Second World War in Paris as a cultural officer, both a fitting and a compromising role for a war hero continuing to hold the Nazi regime at bay while serving in uniform to the bitter end. Not that German intellectuals and artists with a love for France were lacking: it is enough to think of Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), the fervent advocate of writers such as André Gide and Marcel Proust,6 or even of Hans Robert Jauss (1921– 1997), who held rank in special SS-Volunteer Divisions, helping the desperados in the SS-Charlemagne-Division, in the very last phases of the collapsing Eastern Front, to a sauve-qui-peut.7 With his ability of a mental contortionist, 5  Ibid., “Ich glaube, ich habe Dir schon gesagt, dass seit einiger Zeit wenn ich auf die Uhr schaue sehr oft der kleine und der grosse Zeiger genau sich überdecken.” “Mit der Ziffer (Rechnung) hat sich das Schicksal vermummt.” 6  Ernst Robert Curtius, Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer,1919, 1920, 1923 and subsequent reprints) discusses André Gide, Romain Rolland, Paul Claudel, André Suarès and Charles Péguy within a broad panorama of French literature, based on his prewar lectures at Bonn but now cast in a sharper, searching light after 1918. Later on Curtius was especially taken with Marcel Proust. 7  For a documentation of Jauss’s military career, his mendacious return to civilian life and a distinguished academic career, see: Jens Westemeier, Hans Robert Jauß. Jugend, Krieg und Internierung (Constance: Konstanz University Press, 2016). By comparison with Jünger, Jauss cuts a sharply contrasting figure who, under the influence of Heidegger, wrote a dissertation at the University of Bonn on “Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Proust.” Hans Blumenberg, Der Mann vom Mond. Über Ernst Jünger, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Mar-

Out of Key with the Times

Jauss managed, after the war, to insinuate himself into literary studies with significant works, starting with a dissertation on Proust and building an interpretative “theory of reception” that protected him, until late in his career, from being unmasked as a Nazi with a heart for France. Jünger never had to dissimulate his actions and his words, committing them to his diary and avowing his misgivings, his pain, and his mental anguish. Although his role proved deeply cleft, his person remained indivisible. On Jünger’s one-hundredth birthday, in an act of rare statesmanship, both French president François Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to his Swabian country house to pay their respects.8 If one could be in a single century a military hero and a cultural officer with deep affinity for the enemy, one could also resist a devastating regime and be courted by it without turning into an ideologue, a traitor, or a swindler. Because all of this occurred not only in life but also in writing, fate and life cannot be disentangled nor simply braided together. Neither can exist without the other; neither can be held responsible or appealed to for justification. Revealing a deep rift in time, or more precisely, an untimely gap, life and literature engage each other metaphorically. Metaphors are a way of hinting at a truth that neither experience nor its transposition into imagery can match; only by their conjunction, like the two hands of a watch overlapping perfectly at the moment one looks up time, metaphoric thoughts may be the only kind able to bridge such an abyss.9 The English writer Adam Thirlwell looks askance at Jünger’s fraught relation with power and violence while cultivating a highly stylish art of description. He censures “such dedication to style and surface in the midst of destruction” cel Lepper (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 40. This volume gathers together texts, notes, and a few articles published mainly in newspapers from 1949 to 1995, documenting Blumenberg’s lifelong preoccupation with Jünger, a writer he never sought to meet in person while continuing to puzzle out the nihilism and theology of his thoughts. 8  The small town of Wilflingen where Jünger took up residence after WWII is located in Swabia (today part of the State of Baden-Württemberg) and now a Jünger Museum. It adds more than a tinge of irony that the house had been the residence of the forest warden for the von Stauffenberg family that lost Klaus Schenk for his lead role in the plot on the Führer’s life at Rastenburg on 20 July 1944. 9  The philosopher who is most enlightening on metaphor also happens to be a writer who followed Jünger’s thinking more closely than most; see Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); see also note 21 below.

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and considers it to be “at once so dazzling and so dispiriting [because] it’s a dedication that finds its final complication in the fallout from the emerging German loss.”10 Thirlwell thinks that the protracted dilemma of Jünger’s wartime years deadlocked him “between intellectual posing and personal absolution.”11 How else, one may ask, could such an ideal of clinical clarity as Jünger’s be cultivated in a neutral setting? Does it not need to be etched on the smoke-filled background of destruction in order to acquire its authority and perfection? Does it not follow from the unimaginable outbreak of violence, staggeringly magnified by the machinery of modern warfare that only moments—intervals in the battering barrages and silent pauses of fear—allow for droplets of thought to form? Is this rather unappealing conjunction of calm observation and utter destruction not the quintessence of a century that left little to the imagination but imagination itself? Not that Jünger was unfamiliar with mixed feelings or mixed messages. On Marble Cliffs, which, according to how you care to read it, renders a fearful state of civilization’s undoing in a remote past or a prophetic warning of things to come, was outgunned by the outbreak of the war. Real events rather than poetic tidings furnish readers with a key to both.12 Dolf Sternberger recalled that upon first reading On Marble Cliffs, “No one among readers I knew was in doubt that the scenes ... expressed the condition in which we found ourselves. One rubbed one’s eyes in disbelief that this was possible.”13 10 Adam Thirlwell, “Lunches in the Maelstrom,” The New York Review of Books 66, no.11 (27 June 2019), 50–52. See also https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/ernst-junger-journals-lunches-maelstrom (accessed March 25, 2020). 11 Ibid, 51. 12 Arguably, the German title Auf den Marmor Klippen would have been better rendered by On Marble Clif fs, without the article, because the topography of the novel revolves around the elevated forest areas, the seaside cliffs and a marina, both “original locations” of deeply inimical cultures that evoke the European generalization about a forested north and an indistinct Mediterranean south. After the war, an astonishing parallel to such a distinction took form in Le Corbusier’s cabanon (Roquebrune, 1951) with its bark-clad outside and pristine geometry inside, every detail of which reflects the rigorous application of the Modulor. The architect created a hermitage for himself, untiringly translating for the vulgo divine wisdom in the light of the Mediterranean, or so one might think. 13 Dolf Sternberger, Romane von gestern, heute gelesen, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Frankfurt a.M. 1990), 199: “Niemand unter den Lesern, die ich kannte, hat daran gezweifelt, daß in den Visionen dieser Erzählung die Erkenntnis unserer eigenen Lage ausgesprochen war. Man rieb sich die Augen, fast unglaublich, daß dergleichen möglich war.”

Out of Key with the Times

Before I read Thirlwell’s article, I had discovered an essay by the French writer Julien Gracq (1910–2007) who began to fascinate me when I found, in a deeply introspective text by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare (1936–), the experience of an unnerving moment in the early years of his exile in Paris after 1990—waiting routinely at the same traffic light where Kadare imagines Gracq also stopped on the way to his publisher at a time when Gracq and Jünger resided simultaneously in the city under German occupation.14 Gracq wrote a remarkable essay on Jünger, emphasizing that he “does not know, in our time, of a work polarized by greater force, by almost telluric violence,” than Jünger’s, whose “wisdom and lucidity have been won against the worst moments in history.”15 Based on his reading of Jünger and perhaps strengthened by personal acquaintance, however distant it may have been at the time, Gracq grasped that the German writer’s work could not be other than simultaneously “cold and intense,” distant and stinging. The intersection between Kadare and Jünger would never have come about were it not that I had taken an interest in the Albanian writer quite some time before I ever met him and immersed myself in his work as a result of a modest role in transforming his apartment in Tirana into a foyer of literature.16 Like cobwebs, the traces of Kadare’s and Gracq’s interest in Jünger also enmesh them both in the fabric of postwar Europe and its Cold War partition into East and West, as if these tenuous threads were now twisted into the shape of a primitive antenna, the sort that were attached to old wireless sets in order to catch the insect sounds of remote transmitters. This last image, too, find its counterpart in Jünger’s wartime diary: rather than on the Western or Eastern fronts where he had been stationed before, Jünger was now anxiously awaiting the arrival of American troops near his residence in Westphalia. On 11 April 1945, he noted “that since our gaze always fastens on certain details, I’m particularly struck by the long radio antennae that

14  According to Jünger’s biographer Heimo Schwilk (Ernst Jünger. Ein Jahrhundertleben (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2014), 262) he encountered André Gide, Julien Green, and Julien Gracq in Paris in Summer 1937. 15  Julien Gracq, “Sur Ernst Jünger” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995): II, 1160; 1161. 16  Elisabetta Terragni and Kurt W. Forster, “L’appartement d’Ismail Kadaré à Tirana: un site pour écrire à l’abri du regard,” Culture et Musée, (2019): 288–294.

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swerve above tanks and escort vehicles and put me in mind of a magical fishing expedition, perhaps to catch the Leviathan.”17 From the start, Jünger is caught between arriving just in time with his perception of hidden forces and his clairvoyant intimations, while keeping obscure and frightening sign at bay. His way of being spot-on can also put him wide of the mark if one adopts a pedestrian point of view or expects the writer to tie events in the world to visions of his inner eye. Perhaps setting down the right word at the right time when no one recognizes their timeliness removes him from the familiar, often chimeric, context of daily experience and endows his views with an otherworldly quality that converts precision into hallucination. Another link with Jünger that dates from my high school years in Zürich has left me wondering why a writer of such polyhedral character could be held up to Swiss students in the early postwar years as a model of style that called for reading aloud as if one were reciting a poem rather than some entomological description. Leafing through Jünger’s only publication from his Paris years, Gärten und Strassen of 1942, published just before he was for a time stationed near the Eastern Front rather than being marooned in the eerie atmosphere of occupied Paris, I promptly noticed a passage in which he acknowledges receiving a letter from Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer, a high school teacher at a girls’ school in Zürich I knew and an inf luential critic who wrote to him that she received an essay from one of her students in response to the challenge of writing a “description exacte d’un objet.”18 The student crafted her description of a dead lobster with a skill that was bound to delight Jünger. He admits that the thought alone promises results.”19

17  Ernst Jünger, “Strahlungen,” Second journal parisien Journal III 1943–45 (Paris: Bourgois, 1980, p. 438): “et puisque notre regard s’accroche toujourd à certains details, je suis particulièremen frappé par les longues antennes de radio qui se balancent au-dessus des tanks et des voitures d’escorte: il se forme en moi l’image d’une partie de pêche magique, peut-être la pêche au Léviathan.” 18  Ernst Jünger, Gärten und Strassen. Aus den Tagebüchern von 1939 und 1940 (Berlin: Mittler, 1942), quoted from the second edition, (Paris: Zentrale der Frontbuchhandlungen, 1942), 8. 19  Ibid, 8; even at a distance of many years I cannot suppress my puzzlement about the Zurich high school teacher writing to Jünger about a “description exacte” on the eve of the war, moreover a description of a lobster.

Out of Key with the Times

Like the students in Brock’s class, I too was instructed to adopt a Jüngerian “objective tone” and attempt writing in this vein. In my high school, two German writers were held up as models: Werner Bergengrün and Ernst Jünger. In retrospect, one may wonder why in the postwar years high school teachers in neutral Switzerland, a country having survived the inferno of the European War practically unscathed, could have made such a choice of literary paragons. Beyond the obvious cultural ties with Germany that were never severed entirely even during the worst of conditions, the pair of writers selected from a long roster of possible authors lent themselves to a cleft reading of Germany’s cultural struggle: How to survive a regime of the kind that had to be brought down by a military world alliance and how to attempt to do so without seeking exile? How to muster a sufficiently “detached” attitude to be able to face horrendous destruction and, in the end, a collapse more total than the regime’s totalitarian nature? Jünger had forged literary tools that enabled him to survive (as a writer) in nearly unlivable circumstances, be it the trenches of the First or the tank columns and merciless exterminations of the Second World War—matching the detachment of an entomologist who closely observes the behavior of insects that, while seemingly innumerable, are frightfully vulnerable, with an intensity bordering on mania, not to say deadly fascination or, perhaps more accurately, a fascination with death. This psychological disposition of the writer in its turn mirrors, however distorted in an anamorphic fashion, the death cult of the Nazi regime.20 Precisely such a contradictory connection between life and death surfaced in the slim volume of On Marble Cliffs that came off the press along with the tanks rolling into Poland. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who collected his thoughts on Jünger over many years, recognized in the timeliness of the novel both a key to its significance and an accident of circumstance: it possessed, in the eyes of Jünger’s contemporaries, “a singularity beyond any consideration of content and especially beyond the intentions of its author, due to the moment of its publication. No one who read it in 1939 will forget the precision with which Jünger struck the moment.”21 Readers 20  It is remarkable that one of the best-known anamorphic images is that of a skull, virtually unrecognizable as such when looking at Hans Holbein’s Double-Portrait of the French Ambassadors of 1533 (London, National Gallery). 21  Hans Blumenberg, Der Mann vom Mond. Über Ernst Jünger, eds, Alexander Schmitz and Marcel Lepper (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 40. This volume gathers together texts, notes, and a few articles published mainly in newspapers from 1949 to 1995, do-

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Fig. 4: Albert Renger Patzsch, Dying Oak Tree [Sterbende Eiche]

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Fig. 5: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Shape of a Beech Tree [Buchengestalt]

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of the novel entered into an allegorical timelessness [allegorische Zeitlosigkeit] that was as “baff ling as an alien geological feature in an indeterminate landscape, leaving them uncertain about what caused the smell of blood and putrefaction, of murder and conf lagration.” Without exaggeration one could claim that almost all of Jünger’s stories and many of his subjects take shape under extreme circumstances, even such accidental ones as delivery dates and their timing with respect to world events. If they do so, it is by the skin of their teeth, or rather by the writer’s heartbeat. It was in fact his heart that figures in the title of a book of literary cameos requiring, in order to dazzle, an intrepid but sympathetic heart, matched by a cold eye and a steady hand: Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart).22 This anthology dwells on exquisite imagery, such as the justly famous one of Lillium tigrinum, which entices readers with a picture edged in words into an incantatory moment when the waxen petals silently mutate into the inside of a snake charmer’s tent in India with a soft music announcing unheard mysteries. But there are also passages that make one’s blood curdle as when Jünger spots a purple head of endive in a store window and is lured into the shop where he learns, on the way down to the meat locker, that this vegetable is best served as an accompaniment to human f lesh. The humans hung in the cellar have all been caught on the run, the grocer claims, not bread on farms, hence they’re really of lean and delectable quality. Jünger is dumbfounded and expresses his amazement at the progress of civilization. Jünger’s art of describing is capable of vaulting over the most violent contrasts; rather than casting the spell of a fairytale over the book, he detonates the episodes or capriccios with the accuracy of a bomb squad. The images exercise such power over the imagination because they shield from view, exactly as the regime did, their omnipresence without being recognized. There is, then, an uncanny, even a frightening, equilibrium at the heart of Jünger’s prose, a taut wire threatening to snap while provocatively swaying under the feet of the tightrope dancer. As a dancer in danger, the artist seems to have cumenting Blumenberg’s lifelong preoccupation with Jünger, a writer he never sought to meet in person while continuing to puzzle out the nihilism and theology of his thoughts. 22  As for the connection with Switzerland, an edition of Das abenteuerliche Herz was licensed to the Rentsch Verlag (Erlenbach/Zurich: 1942) Several editions with varying selections followed upon the first of 1929, a number of army-sponsored printings were put out until 1944, remaining in circulation until the end of the war.

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Fig. 6: Paul Nash, Menin Road

stared down death and he wagers to have the last laugh even where there is no cause for laughter. The years after the war were humbling for Jünger who took ill to such exercises as denazification, and his comeback drew criticism for the dark prognostications that now replaced his earlier poetic subjects with odd touches of science fiction. There was, however, a domain that gained meaning for him, as it did for many of his compatriots after the war: nature. Once again, the word had lost its power and Jünger, along with authors from Martin Heidegger to Theodore W. Adorno, grappled with an unnatural condition that burdened the very idea of a “natural world” with irresolvable contradictions, perhaps instantiating a true ideological fallacy. If “nature” had been claimed as ground and origin, however dominated, domesticated or devastated it might be, it was now “Boden” soaked with “Blut,” the ideology that put nature back into humans only to release its worst through them and thereby justify as innate what had been diabolically awakened and whipped into frenzy for purposes of aggression and conquest. Any reference to natural conditions, anything instinctual and violent in “human nature” lost its appeal as both source and solace. Looking to nature and expecting to discover a peaceable kingdom was precluded when crimes of political violence had covered the

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continent with the ashen specter of death. To see nature die, to feel empathy for trees struck by lightning or recognizing in layers of pyroclastic folds the convulsive elevation of mountain chains many million years ago, opened up a deeper vision than naive observation could ever achieve. Berthold Brecht sharpened the polemics against pious “contemplation of nature” when he averred, in his poem addressed to the Nachgeborenen of the late 1930s: Was sind das für Zeiten, wo Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! 23 What times are these When a conversation about trees seems to be a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors! Thus were the times on the eve of the Second World War, and they returned, tattered by desperation, after 1945. It is perhaps ironic that the chemical industry of C.H. Boehringer & Son in Ingelheim, a major pharmaceutical firm established in the 1880s following after Badische Anilin- und SodaFabrik (BASF) and others in the Rhenish region, turned to some of nature’s most elemental and seemingly innocent manifestations when they wished to present a dignified publication to their major clients. The head of this privately held company, Dr. Ernst Boehringer, sought a subject that would affirm the company’s connection with natural resources on which it drew for the pharmaceuticals it had begun producing since the late nineteenth century. Boehringer’s wish for such a poetic product, as for his industrial ones, followed in the footsteps of its giant model and competitor BASF, which had approached Renger-Patzsch thirty years earlier about providing photographs of ‘nature.’ BASF, the giant chemical conglomerate, was known instead for its production of solvents, toxins, and ammunition for both World Wars.24

23  Brecht’s An die Nachgeborenen was published for the first time in the Parisian exile journal Die neue Weltbühne on 15 June 1939. 24  Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections: Renger-Patzsch Archive, 3MS, Box 1, Call# 861187, folder 3: IG Farben (a subsidiary of BASF) requested in a letter of 10 Oktober 1929 photographs of Renger-Patzsch’s personal selection for a publication of Agfa Photographs, another IG Farben product line: “ein ganz Ihrer Wahl überlasse-

Out of Key with the Times

The complex story of the Boehringer publication, promoted at great expense by the firm’s highly educated head, goes some way toward explaining, even where it is covering rather than revealing, the ramified conditions of its making.25 There were to be photographic images by Albert Renger-Patzsch, one of the preeminent German photographers who had managed to steer clear of Nazi involvement, although, apart from a good deal of architectural documentation, the Ruhr Valley industries and German landscapes had been among his favorite subjects. Dr. Boehringer was fond of Renger-Patzsch’s photographs and in a letter of January 1958 broke his plan of a major publication to him: “I would like you to photograph,” he writes to Renger-Patzsch, “the most beautiful examples of trees in Germany from among which you would select typical species such as oak, beech, fir and linden.”26 Counseled by dendrologists and forest wardens, Renger-Patzsch was to spend several years tracking down the desired tree samples and taking astonishing pictures of them. What sets them apart from so much familiar photography that had virtually “killed” the subject is brought to light by the short essay Jünger had been persuaded to write. The writer was certainly aware that “we live in a time that is unfavorable for trees. The woods shrink, old trees fall, and not only for reasons of economy.”27 What captured Jünger’s imagination in the contemplation of trees was “the power of an Urbild.”28 The precise nes Thema auf dem Gebiet der modernen Photographie (etwa über moderne Auffassung des Pflanzen-Bildes).” 25  Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel 1943-1966 und weitere Dokumente, eds, Matthias Schöning, Bernd Stiegler, Ann and Jürgen Wilde (Munich: Fink, 2010), 195–212. 26  Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections, Renger-Patzsch Archiv, partially reproduced in Ernst Jünger – Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel, p. 17–19: “…die schönsten Bäume in den prächtigsten Exemplaren in Deutschland photographieren lassen, wobei einzelne Typen wie die Eiche, die Buche, die Tanne, die Linde usw. ausgesucht werden sollen.” As director of the Getty Research Institute I was able to acquire a substantial part of Renger-Patzsch’s personal archive which also includes his correspondence with Ernst Jünger. The writer’s archive, on the other hand, is housed at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, near Stuttgart. 27  The essay is conveniently reprinted in Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel, this citation p. 149. The original volumes Bäume und Gestein have, as privately printed books, remained relatively scarce. 28  Ibid, 149: “Im Baum bewundern wir die Macht des Urbildes.” Ernst Robert Curtius (Die geistigen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich, 1923, 3rd ed., 141), quotes Paul Claudel with the phrase: “Der Baum ist zunächst Bild für den einzelnen Menschen.”

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Fig. 7: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Pine Forest [Fichtenbestand im Bayerischen Wald]

Out of Key with the Times

Fig. 8: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Pine Tree [Astwerk einer Solitärfichte]

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meaning of such an Ur-image remains justifiably vague without losing its hold on the imagination. Wilhelm von Humboldt, among numerous contemporaries ranging from the painter Caspar David Friedrich and the etcher Wilhelm Kolbe to the physician Carl Gustav Carus, found in trees, particularly in battered survivors, a poignant counterpart to their own emotional travails, even a sort of alter ego.29 Beyond such natural figurations of private existence, it was the collective aspect of the forest rather than the solitary tree that appealed especially to Jünger: “Whoever thinks of trees,” he wrote, “needs to think not only of their roots but of the forest. Forests are an extension of trees, that is why one can imagine trees without woods, but no woods without trees.”30 With this variation on the proverbial difficulty of seeing the forest for the trees, Jünger meant to stress the ecology of the forest that creates conditions that differ from those of species growing in isolation. Are these allusions betraying the idea of a “Volk of trees”? Are woods treating the observant eye to the life spectacle of evolution, selection and extinction? Probably, as when Jünger observes the competitive conditions that sharply set off one specie’s advantage against another’s disadvantages. Renger-Patzsch’s photographs strike a different balance between individual trees and the woods, capturing the almost theatrical ensemble of the forest no less than struggling individual trees, some of them nearunique exemplars, memorable for their contorted shape, others for the role of bystanders among others. The results are striking in the extreme when a beech tree resembles the snakes coiling around Laocoon or when an ancient Ginkgo wears a frothy coat of leaves belying its legendary girth and age. In a word, Renger-Patzsch cannot help looking at trees as bearers of a Schicksal, as survivors after an infinite number of escaped deaths that leave them, in the end, all alone.31 29  For Wilhelm von Humboldt’s correspondence with his friend Charlotte Diede on the subject of trees, see: Kurt W. Forster, Schinkel. A Meander Through His Life and Work (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018), 206–208. 30  Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel, 144: “Wer an den Baum denkt, muß nicht nur die Wurzel, er muß auch den Wald mitdenken. Der Wald ist eine Fakultät des Baumes, daher kann man sich zwar den Baum ohne Wald, nicht aber den Wald ohne Bäume vorstellen.” 31  See especially plates 15 (Buchengestalt), 52 (Fichtenbestand im Bayerischen Wald), 55 (Astwerk einer Solitärfichte).

Out of Key with the Times

The production of the stately volume Bäume (35 x 27 cm) left little if anything to be desired. Dr. Boehringer pulled all stops, securing printing in Giovanni Mardersteig’s Officina Bodoni in Verona and sparing no expense in a complex and nearly extinct printing process for the large format photographs. They beguile with the somber darkness that envelopes ancient trunks and the silvery f lutter of leaves in the wind. Renger-Patzsch was well aware that this publication was going to do justice to some of the elusive qualities of his photography, and he was on alert to make any adjustments that were necessary in order to “rebuild” the tonalities of the plates in the process of printing. The photographer’s involvement in all stages was unremitting and the product so impressive that one could not suppress the desire for a repeat performance.32 The idea of a second volume on Stones quickly took shape in the spring of 1962 and was being debated with Jünger in an exchange between all parties that reached contractual agreement and obliged the photographer to range well beyond the essentially German domain of his trees. Accompanied, or at least prompted, by the geologist Max Richter, Renger-Patzsch traveled to several of the famous sites where the earliest modern geologists, such as James Hutton and James Lyell, began to detect hidden chapters in the book of nature’s own history, that is to say, the coasts of Scotland and Scandinavia, the volcanoes of Italy, the high Alps, as well as the sites of famous quarries such as those in the Apuan mountains.33 If the range of tree species and the choice of individual samples gave scope and variety to the images Renger-Patzsch so painstakingly tracked down, the same can certainly be said of the rock sites, the many geological locales where the eons of the earth’s formation could be glimpsed through eruptions and collapses, along telluric upheavals and endless erosion. Their sequence implied a narrative, 32  The Renger-Patzsch Archive at the Getty Research Institute holds reams of papers and letters documenting the tireless efforts to secure perfect printing; see Box 4, ID: 861187, F-5, F-6. 33  See Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel 1943-1966 und weitere Dokumente, 206f., based chiefly on the documents in the Renger-Patzsch Archive at the Getty Research Institute. Renger-Patzsch argued for a small white margin around the plates, thereby confirming their iconic separateness, and a faint gray tone for the text pages so as to avoid draining the photographs of their somehow enigmatic darkness: “die Textseite wird mit einem kaum sichtbaren feinen grauen Ton unterdruckt, um die Kraft der Bilder nicht zu schädigen.”

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Fig. 9: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Ancient Lime Sediments in the Oslo Fjord [Alte Sedimentite im Oslofjord]

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Fig. 10: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Tectonic Folding in the Alps [Faltung]

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Fig. 11: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Marble Quarry in the Apuan Mountains

beginning with sedimentary levels resurfacing on shallow coastlines and rising to forbidding heights where the immense crush of pyroclastic folding was frozen into images of violence and transformation. In contrast to such chaos, sunlit quarries exposed the intrinsic geometry of crystalline cliffs.34 Explanations by the geologist Max Richter accompany every phenomenon and extend the Zeiträume, or timeframe, to which they belong beyond conventional measures. In a letter to a friend, Renger-Patzsch acknowledges his predicament in life and his difficulties with photography as a result of “a baff ling new concept of time” (“ein ganz verwirrender neuer Zeitbegriff”).35 In the same breath he refers to his partner in crafting these books, Ernst Jünger, 34  The following plates are especially forceful in exposing the drama of geological formation: pl. 1 (Alte Sedimente im Oslofjord), pl. 39 (Faltung), pl. 52 (Marmor in den Apuaner Alpen). 35  Ernst Jünger and Albert Renger-Patzsch, Briefwechsel 1943-1966, 210.

Out of Key with the Times

and agrees with his diagnosis “that we are huddled against a Zeitmauer,” that is to say marginalized by the very power that Renger-Patzsch had been able to “arrest” in his images—images that record in various ways processes that took either a very long time or were altered cataclysmically. While Trees was certainly the appropriate title for the first volume, Stones, though its obvious complement, left something to be desired in Jünger’s view for lack of an ontological perspective. He proposed Gestein, rendering stone more stone in the Nietzschean sense of being both more and more profoundly rock. The novel On Marble Cliffs holds many passages that bear on human nature in its metaphoric relationship with power and stone, or more precisely “Gestein”: it is said of one of the manipulators of power in the terminal struggle between two inimical cultures, Braquemart, that “no one is more terrifying than an individual of rank.” They “approach the nature of Gestein,” but lose audacity and désinvolture.36 “Gestein,” then, possesses a hardness that puts one in mind of the ancient telluric violence through which it has come into existence, and that is precisely the dimension Jünger did not want to lose. The danger that humans run when they submit to power and become themselves powerful through submission is what makes them stone hard, akin to rocks whose original elasticity has long been compressed into brittle hardness. The archaic connotation rests on an “Ur-Gestein,” something as fundamental as the “Ur-Bild” that Jünger sought in trees but found instead in the human heart.37 Since the heartbeat must be considered the original pulse of human time, allowing it, in Jünger’s mind, to become “abenteuerlich” and accelerate the pace of life, Renger-Patzsch’s photography aimed in the opposite direction: contemplating, bearing down, and holding still. Jointly they set images—whose ontological priority is inadvertently asserted—against words, stories against the shutter, teaching us how to hold our breath against the click of time.

36  Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, p. 102 and 112. The aristocratic virtues that distinguish those in power from those that have usurped it are ambivalent to the highest degree, for daring more than one should makes one “abenteuerlich”—intrepid, téméraire—and able to disregard the consequences of one’s actions, vesting in an individual the désinvolture that subaltern executors of power cannot muster. Note that two terms especially dear to Jünger, désinvolture and témérair, are not only French words but also French virtues. 37  See note 25 above.

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I wish to dedicate this article to my research collaborator and curator of the photography section at the Venice Architecture Biennale I directed in 2004, Dr. Nanni Baltzer, with whom I have enjoyed an unending conversation about all things that have to do with photography and, in the end, with the abenteuerliche Herz. Nanni died in Zurich before the end of the year 2018. I’m grateful to Dr. Maristella Casciato, head of Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, for granting me unlimited access to the Renger-Patzsch Archive.

Real Fictions A Case for Hybrid Architecture in Cairo Ferda Kolatan And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. Donna Haraway/Staying with the Trouble

Introduction If nature abhors a vacuum so does Cairo. Every part of the city teems with objects large and small; some of them are buildings and ornaments, others are infrastructure, and yet others are bits and pieces of indeterminable origin adorning the streets, clinging to facades, and sitting on rooftops. Layer upon layer of built and often forgotten strata have over millennia accumulated into a highly compressed urban substratum. Inside and all around it, an abundance of congested streets, gentrified neighborhoods, and polluted air attest to the various material effects of industrialized modernity. In today’s climate, cultural and otherwise, it has become commonplace to view contemporary large-scale cities in the mold of Cairo as primarily the locus of crises. After all, nowhere else can we see so clearly the manifestation of the material effects asserted by today’s logistical, economical, and ecological pressures. The dramatic consequences of rapid urban growth and densification, informal developments, and infrastructural disintegration all converge to contribute to the tumultuous amalgamation we have come to know as the 21st century megalopolis. But if we avoid, just momentarily, to see in the frenetic urban aggregation the obligatory expression of a crisis, if instead we train ourselves to adopt a deliberately uncritical and even naïve point of view, then the very same city

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Fig. 1: Izbit Khayrallah, Cairo

reveals to us quite a different side—one of infinite complexity, unusual beauty, and exciting possibilities. Wherever we turn our heads, we see countless artifacts from different times and material realms that mingle, collide, and merge into odd combinations. What makes these aggregates odd is the ambiguity they display toward both function and style and their penchant to combine—within themselves—qualities that we consider averse or even contradictory, such as new, old, organic, synthetic, ordinary, precious, familiar, strange. Our naïve point of view reveals to us an entire group of objects that otherwise are deemed insignificant and slip away into the background of our experience. Once we discover the existence of composite objects from within the city, it is crucial to acknowledge the distinct urban ecology that generates them and understand how that ecology manages to operate before our eyes while remaining largely unseen. This “stealth mode” is partially a function of the perceived undesirability of the objects and composites at hand, understood as mere residual elements, leftovers, and misfits. In addition, the common characterization of being an “unplanned” consequence of larger cultural and technological processes further ensures that these objects are viewed as random overf low and therefore of no particular significance to architecture or the city. In a way, it is almost as if they do not exist or as if they are not “real.”

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Fig. 2: Existing Facades along the Highway

The aim of this text, then, is to argue that the composites, conglomerates, and fusions we encounter in cities like Cairo are not just real—as in deserving of having a meaningful presence—but, in fact, could be full of productive potential if we only designate and utilize them as actual “architecture.” There are several obvious advantages to an architectural design ethic that is based, partially at least, on re-organizing, recycling, and recombining the fallout of the productive systems of cities. One advantage is the resourcefulness of dealing with “stuff” that already exists—to look for the new not as a formal or technological innovation or a utopian projection but rather as an act of rewiring or tangling existing urban objects in radically different ways. Another advantage, or perhaps benefit, lies in the reassessment of what the term “original” can mean for an architecture produced by a collection of diverse elements with no definitive author. Given our current culture of decontextualization through medial image proliferation and replication, it may not be unreasonable to speculate on different forms of origination in the material world as well. In some sense, the hybridization of out-of-context, uprooted objects into new original forms may be our only way forward to engender real change in a world where the dangerous effects of a ruthless progress and novelty-oriented agenda have become undeniable. What I am proposing is a speculative realist urbanism1 —described in this text as well as through the accompanying images of pro1  The “Real Fictions Cairo” design studios were conducted over three semesters between 2016–18 with students from my graduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design. All studio sections were taught together with my tea-

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jects from my Cairo design studios2 —that is contingent on hybridized artifacts as the harbingers of an alternative fiction to our current real. These “Hybrid Objects,” I believe, are an adequate urban expression of our time as well as a compelling critical tool for challenging how we assign value to objects in the city.

Hybrid Objects Hybrids are everywhere. In her inf luential text, Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway speaks of hybrids (cyborgs) as “our ontology” and “as a condensed image of both imagination and material reality.”3 Bruno Latour views hybrids as the inevitable f lipside of modernity’s desire for ideological “purification”4 and Timothy Morton depicts chimerical “Hyperobjects”5 as the quintessential nature/culture hybrids of the Anthropocene. For a few decades now (Haraway’s text is from 1985), philosophy and the social sciences have borrowed creatures from mythology and literature like cyborgs, chimeras, monsters, and hybrids in order to ref lect on some of the most pertinent questions of our era. Hybrids seem especially well suited to serve as metaphors and critical tools for illuminating our current ecological predicament and the problems we face on a global level. One reason why this is the case is that the hybrid’s inherent aberration from a perceived norm, its promiscuity regarding alliances, and its transgressive attitude toward the established order of things positions it well to break open the homogenous and restrictive ching assistant, Michael Zimmerman. The Center of Harmony at the Egyptian Cultural Ministry funded our travel and hosted us in Cairo. 2  With “Speculative Realist Urbanism,” I deliberately reference the philosophical school of Speculative Realism, the ideas of which have been inspiring and influential to my teaching and the work produced in my design studios. In particular, thoughts developed for Object-Oriented Ontology by Graham Harman; Timothy Morton, and others, ha had an important impact on the development of my ideas regarding the Hybrid Object. 3  Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, The Macat Library (London: Routledge, 2018). (Originally published in 1985 in the Socialist Review). 4  Bruno Latour provides a seminal definition of “hybrids” when he speaks about the “Modern Constitution” in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,1993), 30–31. 5  Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, MINN: Univ. of Minn. Press, 2013).

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Fig. 3: Typical Rosette Sold by Street Vendors

elements of the modern paradigm, which thus leads to concepts privileging more inclusivity and diversity. Another reason why hybrid concepts resonate in our current culture is the expanding recognition that the material world itself may just be more accurately understood through combinatorial and collaborative principles rather than through modernist universalisms. Witnessing the teeming urban aggregate that is Cairo, with its odd aggregates and hybrid objects, it is hard not to see—and eventually draw parallels from—the larger theoretical, societal, and natural observations that revolve around various notions of hybridity. But what exactly are hybrids in Cairo and where do we commonly find them? When and in what shape do we encounter them? And what are their typical properties and specific characteristics? Before we can speculate on any kind of hybrid approach to architecture and urbanism, we need to examine these questions a little further. Cairo’s overall character is inseparably linked to hybrid objects that populate the city along with the many religious and cultural landmarks, the endless rows of modernist residences, tall office towers, and defunct informal housing blocks. At times, we encounter Cairo’s hybrid objects abruptly in an unanticipated, momentary jolt, but, at other times, they appear rather gently, emerging slowly from the noisy thicket of the city to reveal their manifold shapes. Ironically, though, as ubiquitous and varied these hybrids are, these objects also remain somewhat invisible to the casual observer because they often lack any clear boundary to help define their beginning or their

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Fig. 4: Door-Rosette Hybrid

end. With no set boundaries, our ability to see hybrid objects greatly diminishes. In addition, these artifacts are composed in ways that do not signal to us a clear intentionality or purpose, leaving us therefore confused regarding their author and meaning. But how do we establish an object’s hybrid nature in the first place? What characterizes hybridity when all architecture, urban or not, is ultimately built of diverse parts with different material and functional histories? Does it not follow, then that all buildings are hybrid to begin with? In some regard this is true, of course, but what I refer to as a Hybrid Object has some rather distinct properties. For instance, hybrids do not obey the Albertian concept of part-to-whole relationships with their clear rules, hierarchies, and mutual dependency. Hybrids do not seek harmony or beauty—or any other more updated idea based on totality—and they are technically not made from “components,” which by definition require other parts in order to become “complete.” In contrast to components or parts with their fixed hierarchies,

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Fig. 5: Small Fountain Hybrid

Hybrid Objects are simply made from other “objects” and thus not subordinate to the logic of preexisting ideals (be it aesthetic or functional). One distinct property of the Hybrid Object can then be summarized as follows: Hybrid Objects are not made of interdependent parts with a larger whole (ideal) in mind but from other objects that are either made, found, or encountered somewhat or fully autonomously from one another and then brought into a new coherence. This does not preclude, however, the possibility of these individual objects of having once acted in more conventional terms as components—or as Albertian parts—for yet other objects, or that they themselves depicted wholes made of other components in the past. In other words, components become objects once they are no longer physically or conceptually part of a prior hierarchical whole. The Hybrid Object thus describes a current conglomerate made from other objects or from parts that no longer serve exclusively their “original” purpose (or now exist in a radically transformed context).

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But where do we draw the line with such a loose sounding definition? After all, could the object at hand not simply be a coincidental assembly of several unrelated pieces? If our sole objective was to seek out-of-context relationships in an effort to establish unlikely combinations, we could probably conjure them up at will in all kinds of arbitrary ways. So, there needs to be a more explicit characteristic by which we can identify the Hybrid Object—a second distinct property. Hybrid Objects “re-originate” urban artifacts, randomly or purposively, that over time or through displacement have become estranged from their original context. Through this act of re-origination (or by re-familiarizing the strange), we can distinguish Hybrid Objects from

Fig. 6: Large Fountain Hybrid

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other arbitrary urban phenomena. To illustrate this, let us look at a concrete example.

The Wall At the far end of a busy street in Izbit Khayrallah,6 a derelict neighborhood in Cairo, stands a wall. Made from unfinished concrete and measuring about twelve feet high, this wall runs laterally across the street, effectively cutting it off from whatever is behind. For the casual passerby, the wall may appear just as a crude relic, once meant to do “something” but now just a blank, pointless impediment. But on second glance, the blankness disappears and all kinds of wondrous things happen. From the small breaks and fissures in the concrete spills organic matter in form of soil and plants. On the wall’s scarred surface some corroding pipes nest and meander, inscribing it with a mysterious copper calligraphy. From inside a small drill hole, lined with yellowish insulation foam, protrudes a shiny faucet with a large brass handle, depicting an Ottoman seal. The faucet is framed by a symmetrical array of blue tiles that form a rich arabesque pattern, and sitting just below it is a voluptuous marble basin, adorned with French Rocaille motifs and supported by two standardized aluminum angles. Finally, balancing in a straight line on top of the wall is a collection of eclectic architectural components in white plaster such as columns, balustrades, and ceiling rosettes. Leftover pieces, out-of-context appliances, ornaments, surface materials, and objects that once had a specific function, place, or origin, are, in the above example, all re-originated into a new artifact (but explicitly not a “whole”). Following all the different elements that make or become the Hybrid Object “wall” is a fascinating exercise—a game of tracing through different historical and cultural realms, of detangling pieces of utility from those of decor and pleasure, and of alternately encountering the familiar and the strange. The idiosyncratic mix of stylistic forms, ready-made fixtures, and electrical wiring or plumbing pipes compose, rather unexpectedly, the wall’s unique

6  Izbit Khayrallah is an impoverished neighborhood in Cairo that was split in two by the construction of the Ring Road in the late 1990s. The “wall” that I refer to in my text is one of the two retaining walls supporting the elevated highway structure of the Ring Road.

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Fig. 7: Hybrid Object Wall, Izbit Khayrallah

character and encourage spontaneous interactions with people from the neighborhood and visitors. All these observations above are happening in close distance to the wall. From a different vantage point, however, on Google Maps, for instance, the picture of what the wall really “is” changes drastically. The aerial view exposes our Hybrid Object as belonging to a miles-long retaining wall for an elevated highway. As it turns out, the wall’s local hybridity, spinning off a number of ad hoc street-level activities, is further hybridized with a much larger engineering project, which, by the way, provides an explanation of sorts for why there is a dividing wall cutting through the middle of Izbit Khayrallah in the first place. The bird’s-eye-view discovery of the wall’s relationship to a larger transportation infrastructure brings into focus the political aspect of this urban hybrid. The incidental, amalgamated character of the wall, as it presents itself to local inhabitants or visitors, is the direct consequence of municipal planning strategies devised far away, on abstract drawing boards, with little concern for the affected communities. As such, the peculiar aesthetic of the hybrid wall is fundamentally an expression of local civic resistance driven by efforts to work locally around the obstacle of the highway and to come up with ways to minimize its destructive effects on the neighborhood. Yet, it is

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important to not limit the potentialities of hybrid artifacts solely to acts of resistance or a bottom-up defense mounted against top-down governmental overreach; for if we want to examine how these objects can turn “productive,” we cannot depart from a defensive position that considers them primarily as a reactionary stance. Rather, we need to probe their capacity to be (or become) active, material participants in the city and speculate on their potentialities to engender meaningful change. In other words, we need to think of them as “architecture.” As we have seen, our wall example integrates and displays many aspects we consider “architectural.” The wall is structurally sound, made of concrete, and features functional, decorative, and even symbolic elements. Yet, our habitual tendency is to not see the wall as “architecture” but to dismiss it merely as the product of random incidents, a curiosity at best, useful for a quick Instagram post but not much else. On what grounds do we reject the wall as architecture? Is it because it was not planned and constructed in a deliberate fashion, say by an architect? Or is it because it lacks the unambiguous, programmatic, functional, or historic origin by which we traditionally define architecture? As will become evident below, hybrids are in many ways inherently antithetical to the norms and categories with which we judge and distinguish architecture from non-architecture. They do not fulfill the “rules and laws” of the real and, hence, are considered neither architecture nor real. To change this perception and to potentially fold Hybrid Objects into the discourse and practice of architecture, we need to examine more closely how hybridization contradicts those norms and categories.

Post-Categorical Architecture Hybrids are by their very nature impure because they have an ambiguous relationship to identity and origin. They also combine into new formations outside of commonly accepted parameters, which are intended to name, identify, and ultimately control objects by placing them into preexisting categories. In short, categories seek to establish clarity while hybrids thrive through ambiguity. Objects falling out of categories are viewed as misfits or as a nuisance, requiring that they are either fixed or eradicated. The wall in Izbit Khayrallah is such a nuisance—only, of course, where it doesn’t act as a functional part of the highway infrastructure. Its strange bits and pieces are bemoaned

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Fig. 8: Hybrid Object Wall, Izbit Khayrallah

as “eye-sores,” and the city periodically repaints them in a uniform color in a hopeless effort to homogenize the wall and to get rid of its impurities. But what if one of the true values of Hybrid Objects lies precisely in their very resistance to categorical absorption and in their repudiation of simplified classifications altogether? The ability to not be named, ordered, and fixed amounts to a fundamental rejection of western culture’s proclivity to think and act in hierarchical tiers, a tradition that reaches all the way back to antiquity. As an epistemological method to define the “real,” western culture’s proclivities can be understood as a strategy of divide and conquer, which accelerated in the Enlightenment era through the work of philosophers and scientists like Kant or Linnaeus, who meticulously ordered mind and world into categories and classes.7 This essential feature of modernity still prevails today, largely unchallenged in its dominance and enforced by our ref lexive use of categories in all areas of life. In the context of urban architecture, we rely on uniform categorical labeling—park, factory, residence, et cetera—for guidance and to interact with the city “properly.”

7  In particular I refer to Immanuel Kant’s list of categories in his Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 and Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae from 1735.

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One such example is the category “infrastructure,” which roughly identifies and groups a variety of diverse objects and systems strictly by function, performance, and economy. After all, non-functioning infrastructure is useless, unless we can, of course, revitalize it by moving it into another category, say, into “landmark.” A decommissioned water tower can thus take on new meanings through this categorical transfer and become “useful” once again, albeit in a completely different capacity. But the privileging of objects through categories has yet another effect. Even those elements of a functioning infrastructure-object that do not fit into the category “infrastructure” are typically ignored or relegated to either an afterthought or adornment. The water tower’s generic hardware, its subtle ornaments, or its curious material and textural qualities are deemed inessential, becoming disassociated from the category “infrastructure.” This is a critical point because the disassociation of an object—or of parts of it—from a category is precisely what creates the type of estrangement that ultimately permits the kind of “new” associations that, in turn, produce Hybrid Objects. Within this context, it does not matter if an object is defined by functional or aesthetic categories or on which scale it operates. For instance, another path toward estrangement can be seen in the loss of meaning that some objects, such as building details and ornaments, endure over time. A carved acanthus leaf in stone on a gothic façade falls into the category “ornament.” In the past, this leaf-object had several stylistic and allegorical references by which it gained meaning and was rendered accessible to many of its contemporaries, who were familiar with these references. But once these references are lost or illegible for most anybody but the learned historian, the acanthus leaf is no longer technically an ornament; it has become a rather “meaningless” supplement with some cosmetic value at best. In this case, the category “ornament” becomes basically a trap for the leaf-object, constraining it as an empty shell rather than releasing it to form new referential relationships beyond its original category. A post-categorical architecture could thus be defined by its capacity to cross-reference, physically and conceptually, between items initially hailing from different categories. Histories, programs, and styles are rewired and take on new meaning and become participatory in the experience of urban architecture. Different sets of value systems associated with categories are challenged and updated if they no longer function or are not legible for their communities. Hybrid Objects embody this philosophy and can enact it in

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Fig. 9: Hybrid Object Wall, Izbit Khayrallah

practice. In addition, many of the objects that have the potential to become hybridized do not belong to any predefined category at all or are only weakly associated with one. They are like f loaters ready to be moored down into new forms of meaning, defunct infrastructural pieces, leftover spatial cavities, broken curbs, and other unclaimed or unutilized residual output of modern cities.

Real Fictions

If we accept that categories and subcategories mainly function as a cultural artifice, an agreed upon set of rules with no definitive grip on the real, then the pivotal and exemplifying quality of hybrid architecture comes into focus. Hybridity draws directly from the tension between a “real” based on a largely fictitious set of rules and categories and a “fiction,” which is the very manifestation of the failure of said rules and categories to uphold the real. In other words, if indeed the essential claim of the “categorical real” would

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Fig. 10: Hybrid Object Wall, Izbit Khayrallah

work, there would be no hybrid artifacts because all objects would cleanly align within their predestined realms. This real/fiction paradox is the hallmark of the Hybrid Object.

Real Fictions / New Origins In a recent text, the French philosopher Alain Badiou writes that “today the word ‘real’ is mostly used as an intimidation.”8 According to Badiou, the source of this intimidation is rooted in the false equivalence between reality and rules, which leads him to ask: “Is the real never found, discovered, encountered, or invented? Is it always necessarily the originator of rules?” This question, uttered in exasperation, describes in beautifully simple terms what we stand to lose if we accept a reality governed by fortified parameters, 8  Alain Badiou, Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Realen (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2016), 11. The passage I quote is translated by me from German.

Real Fictions

whose primary function is to determine what is permissible and what is not or, in other words, what is possible or not. Badiou imagines a different, a better real, that he describes as one we happen upon almost by chance while strolling around aimlessly but with eyes wide open. By “finding, discovering, encountering, and inventing,” we engage actively and purposefully in our environment and produce the real through acts of participation, spontaneous collaborations, playfulness, and an open-ended curiosity. Badiou, by choosing the word “inventing,” signals the importance of fiction as an indispensable ingredient for the kind of real he promotes and desires. The wall in Izbit Khayrallah, with its curious assembly of objects, provides an apt architectural analogy to Badiou’s political commentary. Let us then revisit and have a second look at our wall, this time not only as an object to be discovered but also as one to be “invented.” Seen through the eyes of Rachel Lee and Grace Kim, two of my graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, the wall transforms in subtle yet decisive ways. Precise design interventions based on close reading forge the disparate elements of the existing site into a new design, and a speculative fiction emerges in reciprocity to the unexpected formal convergences. Along the rough concrete face of their wall, a series of circular objects create a vivid and unique display. At times f loating independently on the grey surface, at other times grouping into larger assemblies, their purpose or function does not immediately become comprehensible. Upon closer inspection, the circular objects reveal highly articulated ornamental features akin to those found on ceiling rosettes. Some of these artifacts have openings in the center that suggest the possibility of a space behind. Other artifacts skillfully entangle with a series of generic water pipes into what appears to be a precious serpentine fountain. A peculiar looking doorframe unravels into individual strands of an arabesque pattern, folding around and merging into two of the circular objects. It is not evident if this doorframe still functions and holds a door but, if it does, it may lead to the space behind, the one we can peak into through those rosette apertures. The wall now resembles a strangely familiar street façade. People bring their folding chairs and stools to gather in front of it, chatting in small groups and spending time. Other bystanders drink from the fountain and wash their hands before moving on. Street vendors lay out their merchan-

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Fig. 11: Hybrid Object Wall, Izbit Khayrallah

dise and display them on the wall and along the edge atop it. Cars and buses drop people off along the elevated highway, a common sight in Cairo, from where they engage in lively negotiations with the vendors. From all around the neighborhood in Izbit Khayrallah, people now come here to meet, play, and do business. What makes this wall “architecture” is the careful rethreading of found and built urban elements into new coherent forms. However, it is an architecture that does not rely on novelty or legible authorship as its sole raison d‘être. Instead it is content with the skillful appropriation of existing material in “novel” ways. The invention of this architecture lies in a f lat ontological approach in which all things matter and in which all things are real. But in order for us to recognize this fact and utilize the wealth of stuff in our cities in a productive way, we need design. We need the expertise of architects and their ability to create fictions that are based in the real without being absorbed by it. More than anything, we should take seriously extra- and cross-categorical alliances and what they can yield for the future of megacities, where cultural identities and local diversity are buried under a barrage of unresponsive political and material systems and their fallout. A common trope is that large-scale cities have grown too vast and become too culturally splintered to maintain an identifiable authenticity and that only individual buildings or neighborhoods are exempt if they are historical-

Real Fictions

ly preserved and landmarked. The rest of the city fades into a generic mass with an occasional spectacle building poking out. But one could also argue that the mix of histories, styles, scales, and functional bits, as demonstrated in the wall example, establish a new authenticity, one that can no longer be totalizing in its effect but still highly specific. Ironically, the authenticity of Hybrid Objects is largely contingent on their lack of an unequivocal origin. The estrangement of an object from its origin—its time, place, or function— is the quality that engenders new alliances and helps re-originate the Hybrid Object. New origins are needed in our contemporary cities. We are rapidly moving from a linear, monocultural understanding of history toward a lateral, interconnected one. Originality is no longer the domain of a clearly defined, singular “time and place” as Walter Benjamin9 once famously argued. Rather, today, “origins” are recycled in ever-accelerating speeds, mixed up, and meshed into new shapes. This is happening to artifacts as well as to cultures as both are inseparably linked to one another. But unlike many other fields, architecture and urban design, especially, are lagging in devising ideas and techniques to constructively address this momentous shift. The real fiction of hybrid architecture in Cairo is one attempt to remedy this.

9  Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Originally published in 1936.

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Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse An Untimely Practice of Ancient Spolia and its Contemporary Re-emergence Aleksandr Mergold Future, having become eternity, is so monotone and unchanging that there is nothing there to see, and therefore it is senseless to consider it. Instead, the gaze of culture gradually turns backwards, as if having done a 180-degree turn. Therefore, there is now not a beginning of history but rather its end. Culture becomes interested in the path that led to the present; it becomes interested in history. Vladimir Paperny/Культура Два

Has the Past Outran the Future? In the first quarter of the 21st century, our past has outran our future, at least as far as the built environment is concerned. The end of history in a political and economic sense that Francis Fukuyama predicted in his 1989 essay1 did 1  Francis Fukuyama writes, “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one‘s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history

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Fig. 1: Typical contemporary building demolition in the US

not become a reality in the last thirty years. Liberal democracy has not become the dominant ideology; instead of his predicted (boring) stability we seem to have a perpetual (and equally boring) political crisis. At the same time, Rem Koolhaas’ concerns about the preservation of short-lived contemporary buildings point to a temporal collapse in the profession of architecture.2 What seemed like a far-off future in 1983, today is (nearly) normal, namely mega-structural pyramids, autonomous police cars, and artificial humans in a very globalized, modern, yet strangely ruined and decrepit and nostalgic Los Angeles, as predicted in the original Bladerunner.3 Turning back in general is in vogue—now that radical reuse of old buildings is common. And some proposals, like PAU’s daring plan to reuse Madison Square Garden as a new Penn Station4 looking for a way out of a 20-year stalemate in a 55-year-old aftermath of the McKim, Mead & White building demolition, will serve to get history started once again.” “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18. 2  Rem Koolhaas argues that “the march of preservation necessitates the development of a theory of its opposite: not what to keep, but what to give up, what to erase and abandon.” “Cronocaos,” Log 21 (2011): 123. 3  The prediction is so close that the recent sequel, propelling us forward another thirty years to 2049 in Bladerunner II, feels like it will certainly be a reality. 4  Michael Kimmelman, “Penn Station Reborn,” New York Times, September 30, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/opinion/penn-station-reborn.html.

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 2: Two demolitions: (lef t) Penn Station, (right) View of a section of wall northeast from Erechtheion, containing column drums from the Older Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens

are evoking the collapse of the Roman Empire when its many amphitheaters have become farms, fortresses, churches, cities, cemeteries. Books like Future of Architecture Since 1889: a Worldwide History5 underscore the refocusing of the discipline of architecture on the past even when discussing what is to come. There is clearly a turn toward the past in search of formal richness within the ranks of some of the academics, those who consider history, in the vein of Colin Rowe and Piranesi, a resource for making meaningful form now—after the formal austerity of the 1990s and formless anarchy of the 2000s. Furthermore, contemporary buildings (monuments, landscapes, etc.) are understood as heritage. Architecture, in the aftermath of 9/11 is seen as a witness (and at times, a victim) of a past. Various social groups compete for their versions of history, both legitimate and otherwise, and in the US these pasts are particularly condensed, owning to the 4-year political cycle. And in this competition, buildings become evidence – as museums, historic sites, houses—an accidental patrimony, all in need of preservation, protection, and restoration. In academic settings and beyond, the discussion of ends of things as we know it—of the profession, of labor, of resources, of education, and, yes,—of history—have been pervasive. Perhaps it is the future that has been ending 5  Jean-Louis Cohen, The Future of Architecture Since 1889: A Worldwide History (London; New York: Phaidon, 2016).

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Fig. 3: (lef t) Casa dei Crescenzi, Rome, ca. 1040AD, (right) Amphitheatre in Arles, France, ca. 90AD (shown here before 1830’s)

or rather is being so obscured by the relics of the past that is no longer clearly visible from mountains of cultural and material debris we have accumulated? And as such, the end of the future is a very sad time.

10, 100 and 10000 Years While we debate the ends of the ephemeral, the physical architecture has been going through strange transformations. We are at a point where (at least in North America) an average building’s life expectancy is approaching a quarter century, not counting spectacular demolitions of equally spectacular buildings like the Gellender in 1910 and the American Folk Art Museum in 2014, bracketing the 20th century (and each only in existence for 13 years). A function of developer-driven economy, materials and systems, designed and made cheaply and efficiently, a typical building goes up quickly, serves its purpose and swiftly outlives its use and perceived usefulness.6 This kind of building, built out of inexpensive material systems, will most likely end up demolished, also quickly and efficiently, saving the expense of painstaking 6  Martin Pawley writes, “We in the West have come to identify the termination of one use with the termination of usefulness, and we carry this simple idea through ruthlessly, in our treatment of waste products our society generates in such profusion.” Garbage Housing (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 11.

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

labor to separate material systems into their basic and reusable components. Literally smashed to bits, the demolition debris will be deposited to a landfill. Over the last hundred years we have produced enough buildings that in the next decade will head for the landfill to spend ten thousand years before it is all just inert fill. From form to fill, the ratio of use versus usefulness, the past as opposed to the future, is not in our favor. Can this hopeless score be turned around? To consider ways out of what Koolhaas justly calls “cronocaos” let us turn to two famous demolitions: that of the Penn Station in AD 1963 and of the old Parthenon in 479 BC. In both cases buildings have eventually been rebuilt in some form. With Penn Station, that rebuilding was [arguably] unsuccessful, while the new Parthenon is now justly a part of all the cannons of (western) architecture. The demolition of Penn Station (as a result of decline in use of the building and increase in the value of its unrealized height) is famous for sparking the preservation movement in NYC and the US. The demolition of the old Parthenon (an act of violent destruction, a statement of victory by Xerxes I) prompted the Athenians under Pericles to rebuild it again, the sentiment that often follows damage inf licted on a significant iconic building.7 While most of Penn Station‘s exterior cladding was shattered to become fill,8 the Athenians had made a wall under their new Acropolis that contained a large portion of debris from the original Parthenon, stacked in neat rows. At that time, the recycling of building parts, made of solid stone at great expense of time and labor, must have been a very natural act. But in this case, instead of using old pieces in the buildings—i.e., columns as columns, architraves as architraves, etc., it all became a wall that warehoused the various spoils. Which may well be the case, though it also seems that the stack may have been a memorial9 —an act of commemoration and defiance against the war and destruction.

7  The recent fire in Notre Dame in Paris is a case and point, considering statements by the French president about rebuilding the cathedral in five years. 8  Some of its material remains are also scattered in NYC and across the US. Its twenty-two eagle sculptures, for example, are now found in several states as parts of other buildings. 9  Rachel Kousser, “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” The Art Bulletin 91, no. 3 (2009): 263–282.

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Perhaps this is one of the first preserved acts of spoliation, in the connotation of spolia as a productive phenomenon that establishes a meaningful material, formal, and cultural connection between past and present. Spolia is also an ancient practice, often destructive (as certainly Xerxes’s armies had partaken in the spoils of Athens, as did the Earl of Elgin in 1798), but it is more profound; it is about the transformation of quotidian building material into heritage and into memory and about the creation of new meaning out the same old content, reframed, reposition, reimagined. While Penn Station’s legacy is an important civic regulation; the legacy of the first Parthenon is spolia as a positive act of building—a practice of up-cycling, of turning old, found, ruined, wasted material into physical and cultural resource, a way to see future through a lens of the past.

What is Spolia? Spolia, as we now know it, is what historians would call the ancient practice of recycling building materials, where demolition can be seen as an act of creation and the debris becomes the resource for the new edifice. Until recently it was deemed rather inconvenient10 as it contaminates an understanding of history as a linear progression of time.11 It is both constructive and destructive (“spoils” imply conquest, destruction and uprooting). As a way of engagement with “historic artifact,” spolia opens a new door into the creation of built form. The Coliseum (of Rome, Arles and other cities) is the classic example of the range of spolia—having been used as mines for raw building material for other structures in later antiquity and as multi-functional sites 10  Giorgio Vasari may have summed up the prejudice against spolia best—as a kind of second-hand, derivative act: “Architecture, as we said, even if not as perfect as it had been, at least maintained higher standards than sculpture. Not that this is anything to wonder at, because the architects constructed their big buildings almost entirely from spoils and it was a simple matter for them to imitate old edifices which were still standing, when they were building afresh.” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (London: Penguin, 2011), 34. 11  As Dale Kinney observes, the emergence of spolia as a field of study in art history is a result of “a general broadening of the discipline beyond its traditional preoccupations with masters and masterpieces, to encompass a much wider variety of production and reception.” Dale Kinney, “‘Spolia Damnatio’ and ‘Renovatio Memoriae’,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997), 117.

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 4: (lef t) Gold-plated AK104 assault rif le, inscribed “A gif t from the president of the Republic, Mr Saddam Hussein” reimagined as a , US war trophy and Phillipe Starck s table lamp for Flos (right)

throughout its lifetime (an arena, a church, a city), this building types with its impressive life span and minimal carbon footprint is the ultimate paragon of sustainability and green architecture. Another well-known example, Casa dei Crescenzi (Rome, ca. 1065) is a simple Medieval brick structure infilled with marble from various older Roman buildings. At the Casa dei Crascenzi, a pragmatic reuse of pre-made found elements also became into an aesthetic endeavor—its spolia is ornamental, aspirational, and transformational while original functions of found elements were often disregarded. Ancient spoliation served multiple purposes: the efficient re-use of existing materials and systems and the political or aesthetic gesture of laying claim to the cultural heritage of the donor structure. Yet, spolia was not limited to antiquity and has been in continuing practice. It is non-linear and untimely, especially around crisis and upheavals when linear understanding of the past is questioned. WWI and the Russian Revolu-

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Fig. 5: Typical 2-panel vinyl siding system and material tests and drawings of its non-planar siding capabilities

tion, Chinese and Indian economic miracle, Cuban post-soviet crisis, and the Dutch aesthetic boom in the early 1990s are some of the historical contexts where design by destruction, repurposing, and defamiliarizing emerged— the spolia contemporanei. In all its incarnations, and various intentions, spolia

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

is a mechanism for cultural formation by sampling, mis-using, and mis-understanding bits of the past—buildings, infrastructure, objects—and fusing those into new and original forms, narratives, environments, and contexts.

Spolia Contemporanei Art historians have already laid out reasons for the use of spolia, mainly covering the late (western) antiquity and early Middle Ages.12 The focus seemed to have been on religion, the profanation of paganism, and re-affirmation of Christianity; it can be further extrapolated as an act of subversion, suppression and expression of an ideology. In our contemporary situation, what might those be? Besides taking spolia literally—i.e., spoils of war, evident in Phillipe Starcks mass-market rendition (as a table lamp for Flos13) of Saddam Hussein’s collection of gold-plated weapons14 that became US trophies in the latest Iraq War, the question here is the emerging possibility of spoliation in the (American) 20th century as a complex cultural and material artifact. A hundred years’ worth of systems, inventions, aesthetics and debris, a result of a kind of technological experimentation fueled by a “what-if optimism” that 12  Dale Kinney, repeating Arnold Esch’s types (1969), lists the varieties of spolia as follows: convenience and availability; profanation or exorcism of demonic force; interpretation Christiana; retrograding or political legitimization (damnatio memoriale); and aesthetic wonderment or admiration. See Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 233–252. 13  FLOS website states, “This provocative table lamp is part of the artist’s Guns Collection, making a statement while doing good. “Design is my weapon,” says Philippe Starck, who donates 20% of the collection’s sales to Frères des Hommes, a charitable organization dedicated to abolishing poverty around the world. The body of the Guns Table lamp is made from die-cast aluminum and features an overmolded polymer coating. It is available in two color combinations: polished 18K gold with a black matte shade silkscreened in gold on the inside, or a chrome finish with a white shade, silkscreened in silver on the inside. The shade is made from plasticized paper. This Philippe Starck Guns Table lamp uses a medium frosted halogen bulb providing direct reading and ambient lighting.” “Gun Lamp Collection by Phillippe Starck,” FLOS, https://usa.flos.com/ gun-lamp-collection-by-philippe-starck 14  An act which, in itself, is an artistic technique of making the massproduced special, akin to Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain.

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Fig. 6: Oil Canister as a lighted Taxi sign, No Waste, Ernesto Orosa’s book on Cuban quotidian design and architecture

If there is a “classic” contemporary spolia, it is found in Cuba! The combination of necessity, af ter the support from the USSR, withered in the 1990s, and free-form artistry, completely uninhibited by convention, only driven by function and certain, well-pronounced aesthetic of decay. In this case, a plastic oil canister is used on its side as a taxi sign, lighted from the inside with a lamp. The only connection between the functions here is color—yellow—and perhaps some vague formal alignment as well. The vessel here is not a container of liquid, but an icon.

at this point is as foreign to us, as the Roman Forum may have been to the Visigoths, since the very nature of manufacturing-driven, bridge-and-road-and-infrastructure building, American-dream-chasing United States no longer seems to be the current condition, but is approaching in appearance and mindset a ruin of its former self. The problem with this particular past is that it was not built to last, unlike that of Rome. Instead, the invention of built-in obsolescence (ironically, also a hundred years ago) set us well on the way to becoming a society deeply entrenched in producing and consuming massive quantities of cheap, replaceable goods, and therefore the ever-growing mountains of waste; the majority of which ends up in a landfill. Today, can there be convenience and availability, profanation or exorcism, damnatio memorea, political legitimization, and aesthetic wonderment or admiration? Can the notorious suburban vinyl siding been seen as—a complex material and cultural artifact, despite its ubiquity and simplicity? And in addition to these abstract considerations, there exists a dire

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 7: Day view, Jugaad canopy, New Delhi, 2008 Architect: Sanjeev Shankar

This canopy of salvaged, cleaned, and assembled oil cans is borderline art installation (a la El Anatsui) but it is spatial and of fers a take on the (inverted) arch where each can is a voussoir. Jugaad, as a way of thinking and living is a unique phenomenon to India—a combination of dire necessity with inventiveness, certain cheerfulness, and unmistakably strong aesthetic dimension that lead to incredible leaps of lateral thinking towards materials, objects, and technology that is far beyond recycling. Even Jugaad vehicles, monsters concocted out of bicycles and lawnmower engines, are lavishly and cheerfully decorated, of ten using repurposed labels from these very oilcans.

need to stop tapping into virgin materials and to learn to defamiliarize and decontextualize artifacts of the recent past instead, to find useful applications for the things (materials, products, objects, ways of making even ideas) that we already have. The picture is bleak, though perhaps not hopeless. The pursuit of the contemporary spolia (Spolia Contemporanei) is a search for a possibility of creating new cultural meaning out of an existing context that is decidedly “not ancient.” The Medieval builders may have opted to reuse Roman columns primarily because they were too laborious to re-fabricate. They then may have discovered serendipitously that those old artifacts had also augmented the meaning of the new context, thus stimulating, unbeknownst to them, a distinctive cultural practice. What would encourage the reuse of building parts that are already so inexpensive, so readily available off-the-shelf in great quantities, and so laborious to remove from their original contexts, to jumpstart a cultural practice of reimagining our legacy infrastructure, built environment, landscapes, objects, and ideas from the last

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Fig. 8: (lef t) chest of Drawers, Met Wijnrel (right) Chest of Drawers, Tejo Remy

What can one make of this 1990’s Dutch design? It is not a question of necessity, nor convenience; there is no specific politics involved either. Is this purely the case of “aesthetic wonderment and admiration”, a fascination with the quotidian living, and an appropriation of the mundane by “high-design”? One can argue here that there is a certain dimension of “profanation or exorcism” of high design—a reaction, simultaneously against the earnest modernist ef fort to bring furniture, architecture, product design to the masses and against the post-modern formalized “memories” of the past. This furniture is indeed memories, but a dif ferent kind, rough, gritty, dead-pan.

two centuries? An abstract desire to keep durable materials out of a landfill is a good start, but perhaps this do-good attitude alone is not enough to carry a contemporary phenomenon of spolia. Can there be another motivation— practical, aesthetic, economic, political? Conversely, can this binary of fabrication of short-lived edifices versus an obsession with the archiving of all the built environment be replaced by a more nuanced possibility of preservation through re-use and up-cycling? There are several moments in the recent past that have already prompted production of spolia contemporanei. The 20th century has already seen some spoliation. In many cases, it had to do with market-driven forces—either advent, local development or a parody (subversion?) of capitalism. In the case of Cuba in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the local economy, being not geared toward consumer products, was nevertheless driven by the desire for them. The result was a series of products (from toys to furniture to personal vehicles to buildings) produced from various kinds of refuse or found objects that are both the product of and an approximate image of daily

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 9: Revolutionary street decorations, ca. 1917-1927, USSR (Lev Rudnev’s conversion of the statue of Emperor Alexander III into a monument to Freedom, St. Petersburg (Petrograd), USSR)

Commemorative festivities required overnight transformations of the “old city” —resulting in a mix of cardboard urbanism, urban-scaled theater, or a Roman triumph. In StPetersburg, especially, the city that itself was first built as a series of facades in 1703 (the rest of the buildings were filled in subsequently), these bold, miraculous, clever transformations seemed most at home, an extension of the Silver Century theatrical traditions of the years leading to the revolution. Particularly, the monument to Emperor Alexander III, was recontextualized as a monument to Freedom, where the equestrian statue of Alexander, stout and heavy, was caged, reversing the message, the meaning, and the context of the original. Spolia sovetica, damnatio memoriae! The monument is still around now, without a cage, in a courtyard of a museum. The emperor’s reputation has been revisited recently; though given the history and the memory of the statue’s metamorphosis, there is no longer any earnest reverence nor raging condemnation—he has quietly settled in history as a complex, controversial, conflicted character. Others, whose statutes were destroyed, defaced, demounted, both during the soviet and post-soviet periods, strangely are still surrounded by much more frenzy (i.e. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the godfather of the KGB). Does it appear then that spoliation, reuse, reframing of statues is a more sensible way of contextualizing complex histories in the long term? Is allowing the artifact to mutate and appear in dif ferent lights and circumstances of its own past a better answer than destroying it outright just when the past seems suddenly too unbearable?

American life; yet, in reality, they are far more inventive, rich, and evocative than any of such products perceived originals. In India, jugaad is a kind of mindset or a way of life—the making do in a spectacularly lateral way with various objects or environments that are already available, though purposed for an entirely different use. It is closely

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Fig. 10: The oculi: Pantheon (built ca. 125AD) and a metal grain bin (ca. 1916AD)

aligned with the Western expression of “life hacking” or “adhocism.”15 It seems to exist regardless of class wealth or the social standings evoked by daily laborers and skilled engineers. Although some structural cases exist, the material examples of jugaad are mainly technical in nature (the name is directly translated as a type of DIY vehicle) but what’s particularly interesting is that the term also describes abstract ideas—the jugaad way of thinking, a version of lateral approach, defamiliarization, and what-if experimentation.16 In the Netherlands, the Droog design collective has emerged in the early 1990’s as a platform for experimentation with found objects, surrealism, and bricolage. Droog, which currently has involved essentially every contemporary Dutch designer of note, as if translating the work of Marcel Duchamp into an (anti)design movement, aims at establishing a uniquely Dutch identity in their material objects, often made of refuse, yet well-designed, simultaneously frugal and opulent.17 The work of the Office for Metropolitan 15  Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism, Expanded and Updated Edition: The Case for Improvisation, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 16  Jugaad (or jugar) is discussed in depth in a doctoral dissertation by J. Chatterjee completed at Cornell in 2011. See Jaideep Chatterjee, “The Gift of Design: Architecture-Culture in Postcolonial India,” (PhD diss., Cornell, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33534. 17  For example, from Droog’s webshop, the St. Petersburg chair, by Jurgen Bey, € 3900,00 (* € 3223,14 outside the EU) This chair was designed for the Café Dutch Room in St. Petersburg. An antique chair is covered with layers of fiber-glass-strengthened polyester

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 11: US Patent for vinyl siding, 1987

Vinyl siding is an architect’s biggest foe and builder’s biggest friend. It is a microcosmic version of the state of af fairs in the profession in the US. Observed in a letter in 1806 by Benjamin Henry Latrobe: “the profession of Architecture has been hitherto in the hands of two sets of Men. The first of those [gentlemen] who from traveling or from books have acquired some knowledge of the theory of Art, know nothing of its practice, the second of those [mechanics] who know nothing but the practice, and whose early life is spent in labor, and the habits of a laborious life, have had no opportunity to acquire the theory. The complaisance of these two sets of Men to each other renders it difficult for the Architect to get in between them, for the Building Mechanic finds his account in the ignorance of the Gentleman Architect, as the latter does in the Submissive deportment which interest dictates to the former.”*1 Vinyl is simultaneously ingenious and hideous. On the system level, it is fail-proof when it comes to water-tightness, building movement, sun exposure, and general maintenance. It is inexpensive, it does not require specialized skills to put up. It lasts forever. On the level of aesthetics, vinyl may seem a cliché, bad taste, a cheap embodiment of suburban mediocracy. Ease of use and cheapness are at odds with its indestructibility—it may be desirable during the service life of the building, but sends the material straight to the landfill in the building’s af terlife, as it is literally cheaper to put up new than to reuse old. At the same time, the appearance of a wooden clapboard (underscored by the embossed wooden pattern) is a cliché at best, but it also traces the lineage of the balloon frame house back to its naval roots (via a cabin in the woods) where a whaling ship crew would spend the winter ashore in a cabin made like an inverted clap-board sided ship. It also filters light beautifully. Thus, vinyl siding contains multitudes, and perhaps it can of fer opportunities for “Architects” and “Mechanics” to find common ground.

*1  Letter    “Letterofof12 12July July 1806 1806 to Robert Mills,” in andand Miscellaneous PapersPapers of BenjainCorrespondence Correspondence Miscellaneous of min HenryHenry Latrobe, Vol. 2, ed. John Van Horne (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Benjamin Latrobe, 1986),vol. 239. 1986), 2, 239. In Mary

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Fig. 12: Sural Ark, a folly of up-cycled vinyl siding

Architecture (OMA), the Rotterdam-based architecture bureau, led by Rem Koolhaas, had some of the similar traits in the early 1990s. OMA’s buildings belong to a family of contemporary bland capitalist modern architecture. But through subtle spatial transformations, unconventional material juxtapositions, and clever detailing—they also ref lect on and refer to the past architectures, subvert and criticize the status quo. The cost (per square meter) was likely exponentially higher than that of the typical office building; spolia has and the outermost layer is silk-screened with a flowery pattern, bringing a new lease of life to old-fashioned chairs. See “Saint Petersburg Chair,” Products, Droog, https:// www.droog.com/product/st-petersburg-chair/

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

never been about saving money per se, at least not primarily. It is about finding the opportunity to make more out of the same. In the USSR, the building of a new world after the Revolution in a country torn by a civil war was not an easy task; despite what the lyrics of l’Internationale had suggested.18 The slate was not clean and, no matter how destructive the early years of the Revolution were, the “old world” just wouldn’t disappear. At least in the early days of the Revolution the architects and artists involved in the construction of the “new world” relied heavily on the old one—sometimes literally as foundations, as backdrops, as canvas, and occasionally as an opportunistic reframing of the meaning of the old forms, monuments, buildings, and urban formations. The revolutionary spolia, a version of a damnatio memorea, played out in the most irreverent, radical, avant-garde ways, at least as far as architecture is concerned. Perhaps most spectacular examples of this kind of spoliation were when the objects themselves remained unchanged and only minimally enhanced enough to radically subvert, alter, and obliterate the meaning that these artifacts were designed to carry. An example is Lev Rudnev’s conversion of a monument to Emperor Alexander III into one a commemoration of an anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. While the US is currently grappling with its own crisis of meaning in monuments, it can re-consider a lesson from its former adversary, the USSR—at least from these early and radical but also radically minimal uses of spolia.

Toward on American Spolia Contemporanei Unlike early and late-Soviet, or even the Medieval European, or the Ottoman contexts,19 the America remnants are not always ref lective of a larger political, social, or even cultural agenda. Instead, at least in the last century, the 18  “We will destroy this world of violence Down to the foundations, and then We will build our new world. He who was nothing will become everything!” Second half of the first stanza, “l’Internationale,” Eugène Pottier, 1871, Russian translation, Arkady Kots, 1902, literal English translation by the author 19  The conversion of Hagia Sofia from a Christian church to a mosque (and its recent re-conversion from a museum) or, conversely, the Grand Mosque of Cordoba to a cathedral are two examples.

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Fig. 13: Metal Grain Bin, Butler Manufacturing Company, introduced 1907, patent 1917 (Clay Center, Kansas)

The metal grain bin, introduced by Butler at the turn of the 20th century is one of the few contemporary original architectural systems designed for flat-pack and self-assembly. And is certainly the only architectural system that works for dis- and re-assembly, over and over again as can be testified by any farmer in the Northeast. On par with the Quonset hut developed in WWI, this system is most of ten reused as a whole architectural object (various programs, other than grain bin—see the Fuller’s Dymaxion Houses or Austin+Mergold’s House-in-a-Can), but the reuse can also occur on a component basis (see Fig. 14 Oculi).

tendency was for a bottom-up, local innovation that would promptly develop into a nation- or worldwide corporate-driven mass production with optimized inputs and outputs. The consequence of this tendency, yields inexpensive, expiration-prone, replaceable, and ultimately wasteful objects, buildings, landscapes, and technologies. Yet, owing to the expanse, the romanticism associated with the sheer size of the Land, and the colonial ref lex to replace the indigenous past with the recently invented own all these American goods, objects, spaces, techniques, and technologies appear to have certain embedded phenomenology, references to places, spaces and forced beyond themselves, powerful, if purely accidental. American spolia, furthermore, can be

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 14: Oculi, a public art pavilion, Governors Island

of a material, formal, typological or technological nature, informed nevertheless by its conf licted, unreconciled, and yet very rich multiple histories. Besides the obvious qualities of strength, weight, price, et cetera, might materials have memories and aspirations? Does brick always want to be an arch? Does vinyl siding remember clapboard, which in turn remembers a wooden whaling ship? Even the most simple, mundane, and cheap material can transcend its banality when reimagined, de-contextualized, or even misused to attain new values. What if form could remain intact—persisting because of its size, adaptability, structural durability, ability to be repaired, and how much it is used (and loved) while the actual use, meanings, and cultural contexts of it changes dramatically? Then, the shape of things to come, unlike the things themselves, can literally be a given. Unlike form and material, typology is an intangible idea—this feels like a barn, a church, a train station—constructed of phenomenological relationships of form, material, program associations, and even memories. Can the relationships that make up “type” also be reused, repurposed, and reconfigured?

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Fig. 15: An architectural rendering of the proposed Madison Square Garden on an exterior wall of Penn Station during demolition, Aaron Rose, 1964-65

The recent proposal by PAU to strip the cladding and floor deck of the existing MSG building, thus making the structure into the atrium of Penn Station below and recovering the kinglike entry into the station (Vincent Scully famously lamented “we once entered Penn Station like kings and we now scour there like rats”) is a conscious act of American Spolia. Akin to the transformations endured by the Colosseum and Arles amphitheatre over the last two millennia, where the arenas had many functions (circus, quarry, city, church, memorial, garden, etc.) while retaining the original form (whether open or filled, positive or negative). What makes this decidedly dif ferent from adaptive reuse is the combination of the matterof-fact detachment from the aesthetics of the original building (stripping the cladding), the pragmatic dissection of the original function, and a romanticizing of the purity of structure in its clear formal manifestation—columns, beams, girders.

Finally, technology and technique also present an opportunity for re-imagination. Technology, which is often caught between the (designed) obsolescence of intended use and the unwieldiness of its (un-designed) dis-assembly, raises the question weather it can serve a purpose beyond the proverbial “doorstop.” Furthermore, can a technique—the know-how—that has been acquired but can no longer be used for its intended purpose also be considered as a resource in search for reapplication?

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse

Fig. 16: Unistrut system, Charles Atwood, Chicago, 1926 (US Patent, 1944)

Designed initially as a system for simplifying assembly and fireproofing of early electrical closets, Unistrut is an ingenious system, approaching the classical orders in the simple hierarchy of its components. If Palladio has shown that the classical orders can be used in ways heretofore unimagined; Unistrut, in theory, also allows nearly limitless structural reassembly and reconfiguration—all with a single wrench. Very much like the Erector set toys (invented only a decade earlier) Unistrut does not narrowly define the outcomes, merely suggesting options. And the possibilities, like in the Erector set, are certainly limitless. In the 21st century, it is relegated mainly to interfacing between the (relatively) permanent— buildings, and the (relatively) volatile (infrastructure: plumbing, electrical, HVAC, data). In other words, chances are that in every building there are cables, pipes or conduits hanging of f Unistrut. It is now cheap to make, but even cheaper to reuse, thus striking a perfect balance for reassembly. But it has also been waiting for a new, radical use—the original electrical closet and the contemporary infrastructure support aren’t too far away from each other still.

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The Ends A short glimpse into the hypothetical near future (in the US and beyond), where spoliation, like in the early Medieval period amid the ruins of the Roman Empire, is an accepted and widely employed practice offers a certain degree of hope. Not only might it alleviate some of the looming resource pressures but spoliation may also help resolve some of the tension between the emerging technologies and the proponents of the tried-and-true older systems. There is a possibility of a productive coexistence for both. Besides this politically comfortable notion, spolia in the full spectrum of its manifestation offers a way out of the current stalemate in the state of architecture. Instead of only going backward (presumably toward postmodernism or any of the previously explored movements) or forward (toward yet another bout of perpetual progress), the third option is to step side-ways, a lateral form of motion, and to take a moment to ref lect, reconsider, and heed what Rowe and Koetter had already suggested in Collage City in 1978. With the revolution achieved human affairs will become located in the full radiance of enlightenment. Such again and again has been the revolutionary presumption: and, deriving from it, again and again there has ensued an almost predictable disillusion. For, whatever the abstract height of the rational project, the totemic stuff has simply refused to be expunged. Merely it has discovered for itself a new disguise: and in this way, concealing itself in the sophistications of freshly invented camouflage, it has invariably been enabled to operate quite as effectively as ever.20 We tend still to treat the past as a footnote to the present. Yet more and more, it is becoming clear that the past (both distant and recent) must be a resource for today—not only as a reference but also as a quarry of parts, materials, technologies, ideas and experiences, especially in the realm of constructed environment. Our past will shape us, for better or, likely, worse, even if we ignore it. It is time to use it to our advantage.

20  Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 120.

As a Snake Sheds its Skin Bramante in Milan, Bramante in Rome Pier Paolo Tamburelli

I In The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects Vasari recounts that Bramante left Milan with some cash and, by being very careful with it, was able to forego work and rather devote himself to exploring the Roman Campagna and survey the ruins of the ancient city. Bramante had brought some money with him from Lombardy and earned some more by doing certain things in Rome. He managed this with extreme economy, as he wanted to remain independent and at the same time not to have to work, so that he would be able to measure with ease all the ancient buildings in Rome. And setting about this task, he wandered solitary and absorbed around the city; and in a short space of time he had measured all the buildings in Rome and in the surrounding countryside. He did the same as far as Naples, and everywhere he knew that there were relics of antiquity. He measured everything at Tivoli and Hadrian’s Villa, and as will be related in the proper place, made great use of what he found.1 1  Giorgio Vasari, “Bramante da Urbino,” in Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi, vol. IV (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 154. I will draw throughout on the version of the “Life of Bramante” in the Giunti edition (1568), which is more complete than the Torrentino one (1550). As a consequence, all references to the “Life of Bramante” in this essay are to the one edited by Milanesi, republished by Sansoni in 1973, and translated by H. Evans for the forthcoming Bramante, an Introduction, ed. K. Geers, V. Pizzigoni and P. P. Tamburelli.

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Bramante had been forced to f lee the city where he had spent the last twenty years of his life to avoid being caught up in an invasion2 and was fairly old for the period (he was fifty-five when he moved to Rome, and — wandering around the ruins must have been exhausting). What was he looking for? Bramante had not chosen to go to Rome to study the classical world and was not even short of work.3 His wanderings through the ruins were not to occupy Bramante’s time and did not stem from any personal need. They were a reaction to something that Bramante found. And what he found was the city itself. Rome was so different from all the cities that he had known up until then that he immediately felt the need for a period of study. Direct contact with the ruins placed Bramante in front of something unexpected, which obliged him to take a step back and carry out a more general reconsideration of the way he worked. 4It was a fairly natural sense of wonder for someone faced with the remains of a city that he could tell had been far bigger than any of his own day. This immense carcass of a city, of which traces could be seen everywhere in the countryside surrounding the small area that was still

2  Bramante was certainly still in Milan on December 20, 1498, when he was paid for a model for the cloisters of Sant’Ambrogio. Ludovico Sforza left the city on September 2, 1499, and the French army occupied Milan on September 6 (one of the advisers accompanying Louis XII was Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II). 3  As soon as he arrived in Rome, Bramante painted a coat of arms for Alexander VI in San Giovanni in Laterano. He also made immediate contact with several cardinals and members of the papal court. On Bramante’s reception in Rome, see F. Andreani, “Bramante e gli amici lombardi a Roma,” Palladio, 53 (2014), 5–22. We do not know whether Bramante had visited Rome before moving there in 1499. If he did so, it could only have been for brief periods. A reconstruction of Bramante’s movements can be found in A. Bruschi, “Identità di Bramante ‘... al mondo huom singolare,’” in F.P. Di Teodoro, Donato Bramante: Ricerche, Proposte, Riletture (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 2001), 7–18, and A. Bruschi, “Donato Bramante e i suoi amici pittori umbri,” Annali di Architettura, no. 21 (2009), 11–26. 4  Bramante was the last architect of the Renaissance to encounter the Roman ruins without prior preparation. His successors (partly as a result of Bramante‘s work) would come to Rome with a much clearer idea of what they might find there. Palladio, for example, “right from the first time, came to Rome with an already fairly well-developed idea of its architecture; he already knew a lot about Vitruvius, he was already, to a certain extent, familiar with the ancient and modern monuments of Rome through drawings, probably supplied to him by Trissino, and through Serlio’s treatise.” A. Bruschi, “Bramante, Raffaello e Palladio,” in Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, no. 15 (1973), 71.

As a Snake Sheds its Skin

inhabited in the 15th century, immediately presented itself as a challenge (and a model) for Bramante’s intelligence. In 1499, the atmosphere in Rome was hardly cheerful.5 The ruins that Bramante encountered as he wandered solitary and absorbed were more like the ones ensnared in Pasolini’s hostile and archaic lands than the austere but predictable ones of Poussin or the ones tamed by centuries of nostalgia that Goethe was going to find. Bramante’s ruins were immense in comparison with the city embedded in their midst and, rather than melancholy, seemed to be steeped in a deep and bitter sadness. The unknown and not very refined author6 of the Antiquarie prospetiche Romane says that the remains of the ancient city make even the stones weep. In Rome, the author writes, the landscape was filled with the following: ... painted sacred temples and sculpture some of which are standing and some in total ruin, making even the walls weep in sorrow7 Bramante tried to understand the city he had found—and that he was in no way looking for—precisely on the basis of its immediate presence. Ancient

5  On the somber climate of the reign of Alexander VI, for example , see J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: George Allen & Unwin/New York: Macmillan, 1878), 46. 6  Giovanni Agosti and Dante Isella have convincingly shown that the author of the Antiquarie could not have been Bramante, as had already been suggested by Schoefield in 1979: see Antiquarie prospetiche romane, eds. G. Agosti and D. Isella (Milan: Guanda, 2006), with a long essay by Agosti on the critical reception and history of the attribution of the Antiquarie. See also D. Isella, “Le capre di Tivoli,” in D. Isella, Lombardia stravagante (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 41–53. The opposite opinion is expressed in M. Giontella and R. Fubini, “Ancora sulle ‘Antiquarie prospettiche romane’. Nuovi elementi per l’attribuzione a Bramante,” Archivio Storico Italiano 164, no. 609, 3 (July-September 2006), 513–18. 7  ... templi sacri picti e di scultura Che ne son parte impié e guasti in toto, facendo per piatà piangier le mura Agosti and Isella (eds.), Antiquarie prospetiche romane, 7–8.

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Rome was simply a fact of contemporary Rome, a part of the city “as found,”8 a piece of the world, wie ich sie vorfand.9 Bramante eliminated nothing from the ruins a priori, not the metropolitan energy of a city that he sensed was immensely greater in size than the biggest city he had ever seen,10 not the traces of the terrifying catastrophe that must have destroyed it. In the ruins, Bramante recognized a wealth of formal solutions to be decoded and presented in the purity of their gleaming grammar, and he also recognized the mute and intractable energy that a past impossible to tame seemed to have left behind in the contemporary city. The architecture of antiquity was at once clear and frightful: a limpid catalog of architectural knowledge and a deposit of desires that were no longer identifiable but none the less violent for this. In referring to the architecture of the Romans, Bramante was not particularly original: the whole of Renaissance architecture was based on an enthusiasm for the ancients. But if awe at the glory of Rome was something shared by all the architects of the Renaissance, Bramante was the only one who did not want to soften the city that he had found, who preferred the reality of the ruins to the myth of classical antiquity, who was willing to see in the ruins not just the magnificence of the buildings of the past but also the barbarous richness of their present state. And this attitude of his may simply have been because Bramante took an interest in the ruins only after actually encountering them. For Bramante the ruins were just a piece of the world of the present. They were a problem and a resource for now and for this city. If 8  “Thus the ‘as found’ was a new seeing of the ordinary, an openness as to how prosaic ‘things’ could re-energise our inventive activity. A confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like. In a society that had nothing. You reached for what there was ... .” A. and P. Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” in D. Robbins, The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 201–202. See too “Rearrangements: A Smithsons Celebration,” OASE, no. 51 (1999) and A. and P. Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: Monacelli, 2005). 9  “As I found it.” L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 5.631 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 90. 10 The population of Rome in 1500 was somewhere around 50,000, whereas in the 2nd century CE the metropolis probably had a million and a half inhabitants. Between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, the only cities in Europe to have more than 100,000 inhabitants were Istanbul, Milan, Naples, Paris, and Venice and, among these, only Istanbul—which in any case Bramante never saw—came close to half a million.

As a Snake Sheds its Skin

Mantegna was a classicist whose enthusiasm was all the greater the farther he was from the world that he venerated and, when he was compelled by Innocent VIII to come to Rome to paint the chapel of the Belvedere, wrote “I’d feel better at home,”11 for Bramante the forms of antiquity were an issue only in the moment in which he met them in the street and were an issue precisely as a piece of the world, just the same as all the others.

II Those solitary and absorbed wanderings had an immediate effect. Among the ruins of ancient Rome Bramante found the pieces he needed to assemble for a much more rigorous system of forms than the one known to him in Milan. His repertoire changed; the solutions typical of the Lombard period were abandoned. This change of style is perhaps the most striking aspect of Bramante’s artistic production and has not failed to attract the attention of historians of architecture. To understand his work it is necessary to start from right here, from this glaring fact—and a fairly unusual one with respect to the kind of behavior that, after centuries of romantic idolizing of the self, we tend to expect from an artist. The abrupt change that takes place between the cloisters of Sant’Ambrogio12 and the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace13 (and then again between that cloister and the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio 14) 11  “... io staria meglio a casa mia.” G. Agosti, Su Mantegna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), 50. 12  Bramante completed the design of the cloisters just before he left Milan, probably in September 1499. He built the refectory and not much more and left a preliminary model and perhaps some designs for the orders of the two cloisters. The cloisters would be built after the middle of the 16th century and not be finished until the early decades of the 17th; see A.E. Werdehausen, “Bramante e il convento di Sant’Ambrogio,” Arte Lombarda, no. 79 (1986/4), 19–48. 13  A contract dated August 17, 1500, governed the execution of eight pillars of the lower order (the complete documentation is in A. Bruschi, Bramante architetto [Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1969], 822-36 and C. Ricci, “Il chiostro della Pace. Documenti bramanteschi,” Nuova Antologia I [1915], 361–667). So he must have begun work on the project some time earlier. The cloister was completed in 1504, as the inscription on the Ionic frieze declares: ... EREXIT ANNO SALVTIS CRISTIANE MDIIII. 14  There does not seem to be any debate over the date of the Tempietto, given that in this case the year is clearly engraved on a tablet in the crypt, which declares that the buil-

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seems to challenge our preconceptions. And, in fact, there are many art historians who have not been able to forgive Bramante for not having imparted sufficient “unity” to his “artistic personality,” going so far as to consign his extremely clear formal choices to the realm of the impossible. Bonelli writes the following: ... an artist cannot, in general, pursue in the same short period a figurative ideal like that of the Tempietto and at the same time negate it in his methods and results, as happened in the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace.15 And yet these choices were fully conscious, as is evident from an unequivocal passage in a letter from Guglielmo della Porta to Bartolomeo Ammannati (circa 1560). Bramante asserted that anyone who came to Rome to practise as an architect had to strip himself, as a snake sheds its skin, of everything he had learned elsewhere, and he proved this himself with his own example, saying that before he saw this city he used to think himself an excellent painter and architect, but that after practising for many years he became aware of his error, and this was the reason that, after having drawn a great number of the buildings of ancient Rome, of Tivoli, of Praeneste, and many other places,

ding was begun “by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in 1502.” In reality the tablet has probably been moved and has a different inscription on the back (see C.L. Frommel, “Bramante, il Tempietto e il convento di San Pietro in Montorio,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 41 (2013–14), 130–32). No source speaks of the consecration of the building and it is hard to say when the tempietto was completed. In this objectively complicated documentary context, scholars have taken the most varied positions. Murray (1972), Lotz (1974) and Nesselrath (1990) accept the date of the plaque. Italian scholars, on the other hand, have been more inclined to believe that a greater amount of time passed between the date of construction of the Tempietto and that of the cloister, leaving a long enough interval to imagine an evolution of his style. Thus, for Bruschi (1969) the Tempietto dates from 1508–1512 and for de Angelis d’Ossat (1966) 1510. In 1977, Bruschi took up the question again and proposed an earlier date (1502–1506/1507), while Spagnesi (1984) continued to propose 1508–12. For Frommel (2014) the Tempietto was built between 1502 and 1508. 15  Renato Bonelli, Da Bramante a Michelangelo. Profilo dell’architettura del Cinquecento (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1960), 19.

As a Snake Sheds its Skin

studying, noting and learning something new every day, he opened the way to the good and regulated architecture of antiquity.16 It is precisely the shedding of skin that took place in the move from Milan to Rome that we need to take as the starting point in our observation of Bramante’s work. Just what changed? And what did not change? The abrupt shift in style that characterizes the architect’s work stemmed entirely from the circumstances in which he found himself. The “Milanese period” and the “Roman period” are as different as can be imagined from a “Blue Period” and a “Rose Period”; the adoption of the new repertoire was not accompanied by a new ideology, architecture in the style of antiquity did not become an ideal of life. In Rome just as in Milan, Bramante worked within an “accepted tradition, yet one he had explored and made his own.”17 He did not choose a repertoire but limited himself to using what was already there: He drew on the artisan tradition in Milan and on the example of the ruins in Rome. When in Milan he did as the Milanese do; when in Rome he did as the Romans do. But in Rome, Bramante was able to rely on his previous experience, and could therefore recognize that—under different conditions—he was doing the same work. Between Milan and Rome, the shift of paradigm is obligatory, but this difference can be exploited critically. By initially combining the elements of one set of forms and then moving on to combine the elements of another set of forms, Bramante realizes that the most interesting aspect of his work does not lie in the forms but in the procedures by which they are put together. Thus, repetition of the same operations with different repertoires and a comparison of the respective results reveals the identity of the operations and the essential indifference of the collections with respect to the relationships that are established within them. The specific characteristics of the elements lose their importance, and the regularity of their relations emerges instead. The symbolic and allusive aspects remain in the background, and 16  Guglielmo della Porta, letter to Bartolomeo Ammannati, quoted in C. Pedretti, Leonardo: Architect (Milan: Electa, 1978), 116. 17  Constantino Baroni, Bramante (Bergamo: Istituto Arti Grafiche, 1944), 21. For an introduction to the context of 15th-century Milan, see L. Patetta, L’architettura del quattrocento a Milano (Milan: CLUP, 1987); for Rome, see P. Tomei, L’architettura a Roma nel Quattrocento (Rome: Multigrafica, 1942) and C.L. Frommel, Der römische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 1973).

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this characteristic highlights “the speculative, intellectual character of the operation of composition.”18 In Rome, and due to the evident difference in working conditions between Milan and Rome, Bramante recognizes that his problem is still the same: how to impart order to a given set of forms. And he recognizes that this operation can always be repeated on the basis of the results of the previous operation. On each occasion the work on the forms can be the subject of further work; the logic that combines the forms can always be turned back on itself. It becomes evident that operations on architectural forms are recursive.19 In a passage that, at first sight, seems to be nothing but a banal introductory panegyric, Vasari sets Bramante’s work against the background of a historical series stretching into the distant past. For while the Greeks were the inventors of architecture and the Romans their imitators, Bramante not only taught us new things by imitating them with new inventions, but added very great beauty and complexity to the art, the extent of whose embellishment we can now see today.20 Not only does Vasari recognize the recursive character of the operation that Bramante performed on the basis of the architecture of the Romans but also he realizes that the operation the Romans had already carried out on the architecture of the Greeks was of the same kind. Thus, Vasari sees Bramante’s cultural project as part of a much broader historical process, recognizing his work not only for itself but also in all its long-term implications. In their imitation of the architecture created by the Greeks, the Romans gave it a systematic nature unknown to the original. In his turn Bramante—by imitating them with new inventions—ascribes to the architecture of the Romans a rigor that it never had. The forms become more clearly defined on each occasion, their relations more constant and regular. On each successive reinterpretation the repertoire becomes more measured; each new round is conducted 18  Giorgio Grassi, “Analisi e Progetto,” in A. Rossi (ed.), L’analisi urbana e la progettazione architettonica (Milan, CLUP, 1969); now in G. Grassi, L’architettura come mestiere e altri scritti (Padua: Marsilio, 1979), 57. 19  By “recursive,” here I mean a procedure “that is applied iteratively to the result of its previous application.” P. Virno, E così via, all’infinito. Logica e antropologia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2010), 18. 20  Vasari, “Bramante da Urbino,” 146.

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with more rigor, each time the subjects of his study come out distilled and further rationalized.

III Bramante and his contemporaries—all of them—set themselves the goal of the revival of classical antiquity. This is perhaps the most conspicuous aspect not just of the architecture and art but of the entire culture of the Italian Renaissance.21 For the whole of this culture, architecture came to be seen as the discipline best suited to the reconquest of classical measure—a measure that could then be extended to the other arts and to society in general. This special role assigned to architecture was based on a simple fact: In architecture the Roman models were evident and therefore much easier to imitate than those of the other arts. Few works of classical sculpture had survived, and hardly any paintings, while the Campagna was full of ruined buildings. Nothing else was so plentiful in Rome. Thus, architects ended up forming the vanguard of the Italian Renaissance’s plan for the reconquest of the classical. Some went along with this plan out of conviction and others out of expediency. For Mantegna and Alberti, the forms of ancient Roman architecture implied a moral choice and carried a message for contemporary society. So, the antiquity of Rome became the embodiment of a completeness of meaning to be contrasted with an inexorably disappointing present.22 The enthusiasm for these values knew no bounds: Palladio called his children Leonida, Marcantonio, Orazio, Zenobia, and Silla.23 For Bramante the “beautiful manner of the ancients”24 was just a repertoire of forms, devoid of any intrinsic moral 21  Erwin Panofsky, “Renaissance and Renascences,” in The Kenyon Review VI (1944), 201–36, and E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksel, 1960). 22  This is a sentiment typical of Italian culture, of which perhaps the most succinct expression is Vito’s lament in a famous line from the movie Ecce bombo: “I should have been born a hundred years ago, in 1848. The barricades in Leipzig. By the age of twenty-two I’d have already been through the Paris Commune...” (N. Moretti, Ecce bombo, 1978). 23  Guido Beltramini, Palladio privato (Padua: Marsilio, 2008), 38. 24  The expression is Cellini’s. See B. Cellini, “Della architettura,” in Opere di Baldassare Castiglione Giovanni della Casa Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Cordié (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960), 1109. The expression is analyzed in a fundamental essay by Christof Thoenes: see C.

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value. Bramante was not interested in any revival: he accepted the fashion for classicizing as a fact of his time, as a matter of taste on which everyone seemed to agree and that was not therefore worth questioning. This repertoire was simply accessible and comprehensible, and provided an orderly and efficient system of forms, as well as one that was incredibly popular among the ruling classes of the day. For Bramante that was more than enough. The world around Bramante was classicist and so Bramante was classicist too (“Cause we are living in a material world/And I am a material girl”). Bramante does not ask himself what are the ideals that motivate people to copy the ruins he is measuring with so much dedication. He does not wonder where the ancients have gone, and why they have abandoned us. (“Ubi sunt” is a question that Bramante does not pose himself.) But while the ancients may not be there any longer, their remains still are. And a sufficient reason for investigating them is the fact that, at least in Rome, they are enormous and cannot be avoided.25 There is no need for ideal motives, eternal values are not required. There are columns, friezes, bases and pedestals that stand in precise spatial, geometric, and proportional relations to on another—nothing more. The ruins should be taken at face value: They can be understood architecturally, as walls, as vaults, as rooms; if they also represent something, it is a wholly secondary matter. There is nothing sentimental about those solitary and absorbed wanderings. The theory that Bramante derives from his excursions into the Roman Campagna is a theory of how to learn from ruins, of how to look at buildings that already exist (whether intact or ruined) and of how to use them to make new buildings. Bramante’s wanderings are reminiscent of the ones that Aldo Rossi claims to have undertaken in order to write The Architecture of the City Rossi writes the following. I read books on urban geography, topography, and history, like a general who wishes to know every possible battlefield—the high grounds, the passages,

Thoenes, “Bramante e la ‘bella maniera degli antichi,’” in C. Thoenes, Sostegno e adornamento. Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento: disegni, ordini, magnificenza (Milan: Electa, 1998), 59–65. 25  The ruins had to be studied, as Roberto Weiss so aptly put it: “not because they were ancient, but merely because they were conspicuous.” R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 5.

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the woods. I walked the cities of Europe to understand their plans and classify them according to types.26 Bramante constructs for himself the viewpoint that will allow him to observe the ruins in the most effective manner. He chooses the most favorable starting conditions: He postulates the strict superficiality and complete accessibility of the forms, presupposing a total absence of mystery. The most important difference between Bramante and his contemporaries lies in his refusal to look for secrets. For Bramante the riddle does not exist. The ruins are free from any enchantment; the architecture of the Romans is in plain sight. There is nothing to seek beyond form. It is necessary to fasten onto the surface, sacrificing if anything the depths. Hold onto the hose27 and let the heart go without qualms. The operation conducted by Bramante is the same as that of Ludovico Ariosto and Sergio Leone. (Peers of France and cowboys are fine precisely because no one believes in them any longer.) While Giuliano da Sangallo28 agonizes over trying to balance the books between nature (a rudimentary tectonics), codified theory (Vitruvius) and reality (the ruins), without ever managing to free himself from a terribly convoluted initial hypothesis,29 Bramante avoids making life unnecessarily complicated. For

26  Aldo Rossi, Autobiografia Scientifica (Milan: Nuove Pratiche, 1999), 21. English ed., A Scientific Autobiography, trans. L. Venuti (Cambridge, MA-London: MIT Press, 1981), 16. 27  The hose (by which I mean the kind of leggings that men wore during the Renaissance) are the ones which he mentioned so frequently in the poems he wrote during the Milanese period that they are known as the sonetti delle calze, or “Sonnets of the Hose.” The most recent edition of the sonnets is C. Vecce, Donato Bramante. Sonetti e altri scritti (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1995). 28  Giuliano da Sangallo was born a year before Bramante and died a year after and pursued a line of research that ran parallel to—and often intersected with—Bramante’s. Hence Giuliano’s production can be used to gauge Bramante’s choices with respect to the cultural context in which they are set. What Giuliano sought offers an excellent starting point to evaluate what Bramante found. On Giuliano see S. Frommel, Giuliano da Sangallo (Florence: Edifir, 2014). 29  Giuliano’s notes preserved in the Taccuino Senese, the Libro dei Disegni in the Biblioteca Apostolica and the folios in the collection of the Uffizi are the proof of an anguished search: Giuliano venerated the architecture of the Romans, and sought its secret almost with dread, as if he were trying to find a way to turn lead into gold. See C. Hülsen, Il libro di Giuliano da Sangallo: Codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424 (Leipzig 1910), reprint is in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52 (1989), 281–292. On the different attitude

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Bramante, the only thing that counts out of everything that Giuliano tries to reconcile is the ruins (i.e., the reality, the incontrovertible fact). The rest is superstition.30 In Bramante’s eyes, the buildings of ancient Rome can be understood only if they are not unnecessarily steeped in a bath of nostalgia that inevitably ends up concealing their concrete truth and preventing the comprehension of their formal logic. Like Machiavelli, who analyzes the history of Rome without worrying too much about the political theory of the Romans (commenting on Livy in great detail and drawing on Cicero only occasionally and somewhat reluctantly31), Bramante studies the remains of Roman architecture in the belief that his theory can be deduced entirely from those ruins, without the need for anything else. Bramante reduces to a means what for all of his contemporaries is an end: He uses the ruins with the kind of pragmatism shown by someone repairing a tractor with parts from an old Ferrari. Bramante seems to have been endowed with the unenviable talent of not believing in what he does and yet doing it much better than anyone else. So, once in Rome, Bramante does what he finds there is to do: He gives substance to the classical ideal that everyone is trying to resuscitate, finally going beyond declarations of principle. Bramante does, simply, the architecture that everyone would like to do, with just this one difference: He actually knows how to do it.

adopted by Bramante A. Bruschi, Bramante architetto (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1969) remains fundamental, in particular p. 168. 30  In this sense it seems fairly unlikely that Bramante had made a particularly thorough study ofthe De architectura or the De re aedificatoria, even if (notwithstanding the view of Metternich) it appears reasonable to suppose that he knew something at least of Vitruvius, if only by hearsay. So I find myself unable to agree with the hypothesis put forward by my friend Vittorio Pizzigoni that Bramante may have been the author of the so-called Vitruvio Ferrarese. See V. Pizzigoni, “Un uomo, un’opera, uno scopo: un’ipotesi sul manoscritto di Ferrara,” Annali di Architettura, 18–19 (2007), 53–70, and V. Pizzigoni, “Il Vitruvio Ferrarese e il Vitruvio di Fra Giocondo,” in P. Gros and P.N. Pagliara (eds.), Giovanni Giocondo, umanista, architetto e antiquario (Padua: Marsilio, 2014), 139–152. 31  F. Pagnotta, “Cicero in the opera and political thought of Machiavelli: Some introductory remarks,” Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics XVI, 2 (2014), 422–439; G. Sasso, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, vols. I-IV (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1988–97); J.J. Barlow, “The Fox and the Lion: Machiavelli replies to Cicero,” History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 627–645.

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The moves with which Bramante made his entry onto the architectural scene of 16th-century Rome were of an unparalleled realism and pragmatism. His cultural approach was certainly loftier (more ambitious, more general, riskier) but at the same time humbler (blunter, rougher, more practical) than that of his contemporaries. What would end up being seen as the foundation of the architecture of the High Renaissance was in the first place a work that demolished the moralistic premises of the very revival that it was accomplishing. Bramante freed the ruins from the ideological trappings heaped on top of them and set out to use the resources obtained in this way in the most direct and brutal manner. The models that attracted his attention were the most obvious ones (the basilica of Maxentius, the Pantheon, the temple of Fortuna Primigenia, the Palatine hippodrome). Bramante took possession of the “mine of references”32 provided by the Roman Campagna in the same way as Walcott drew on Homeric poetry to speak of the fishermen and taxi drivers of the Caribbean. In both cases the act of appropriation did not require a perfect knowledge of the thing that was being taken over: All that mattered was the need not to let such an evidently rich heritage go to waste and the urgency of the immediate aims for which it seemed possible to utilize it.33 The use of the forms of the past did not serve to resuscitate the spirit of an age, but to take possession of resources that could be expropriated and put immediately to work as they were simply common.

32  Gianfranco Contini, “Un’interpretazione di Dante,” in G. Contini, Un’idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 75. 33  Derek Walcott repeatedly declared that he had never read Homer’s epic poems nor the Aeneid in their entirety. Even in Omeros, Walcott says “I never read it ... / not all the way through” (LVI, III, 12–13, 283). Further on, he responds to the objection “The gods and the demi-gods aren’t much use to us” with the following “Forget the gods ... and read the rest” (LVI, III, 19–20, 283) and “I have always heard / your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song / of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy / your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along / the curled brow of the surf, the word ‘Homer’ meant joy, / joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace / of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars, / in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees. / Master, I was the freshest of all your readers.” (LVI, III, 24-32, 283). See D. Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).

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IV For Bramante the different families of forms can all be treated with the same attention and the same refinement. This means not only that there is no hierarchy between the different families, but also that there is not even a hierarchy within each family. The forms are logically equivalent.34 All of Bramante’s architecture is placed on a single level: The Doric is as plausible as the Ionic or the Corinthian. Whatever Vitruvius may have had to say about it,35 the Doric has not been rendered obsolete by more advanced forms. Paolo Portoghesi has rightly pointed out the following observation: Bramante’s reinstatement of the Doric, with metopes and triglyphs, in the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio is a mark of his refusal to make preferential choices of taste between the orders and his recognition of a whole range of correct solutions.36 In Bramante’s buildings the forms are always all on the same level. There are never any elements placed there as testimonies of another world—fragments of a fully classical character displayed as models, like the pediment on columns that Giuliano da Sangallo stuck onto the front of the villa of Poggio a Caiano. Bramante refuses to make a distinction between fully classical forms and vernacular ones. While the architecture of Giuliano (and later Palladio) is one in which the elevated and the picturesque elements divide up their spheres of competence in the same way as Latin and the vulgar tongue in contemporary literature,37 for Bramante there can be no distinctions of level 34  Giogrio Grassi, La costruzione logica dell’architettura (Padua: Marsilio, 1967), 68. 35  Vitruvius, De architectura, 4, 3, 1. English ed. The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M.H. Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), IV, III, 1 (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Page_107). 36  Even if those “correct solutions” do not, as Portoghesi would have it, correspond “to ‘genres’ of architectural language quite similar to literary genres.” See P. Portoghesi, “La lingua universale: Cultura e architettura tra il 1503 e il 1527,” in Studi Bramanteschi: Atti del Congresso internazionale (Rome: De Luca, 1974), 356. Its translation will soon be published in Bramante, an Introduction, ed. K. Geers, V. Pizzigoni and P. P. Tamburelli, in preparation. 37  In this hypothesis, the vernacular and Latin coexist by separating their roles, thereby allowing the high-flown tongue to avoid making compromises with the less elevated

As a Snake Sheds its Skin

between forms. His stubborn multilingualism does not produce a variety of genres but a single, exceedingly broad genre that comprises not only forms derived from the Romans but all other possible forms. Just as for Dante, for Bramante the “mingling of styles” ends up as the “violation of all style.” 38 Bramante declares his indifference to style in the only one of his writings on architecture to have come down to us: his report on the lantern of Milan Cathedral known as the Opinio.39 In his suggestions of how to complete the construction of the cathedral, Bramante goes into detailed morphological and spatial considerations but makes not even the slightest reference to the question of style. As far as ornaments are concerned, the best thing is to copy what is already there. As for the ornaments, such as stairs, corridors, windows, masonries, pillars and spires, what has been done above the sacristy allows us to understand a great deal, and even more from some drawings that were made at the time that this Cathedral was built ... .40 Gothic ornaments are fine. The Gothic cannot be treated as an ideological problem. It cannot be condemned morally. Since the Gothic is already part of the city’s reality, it has to be accepted: The Gothic should be understood through a formal analysis identical to the one applied to other forms. The Gothic is not a global alternative to the forms of classical antiquity; it is just another province of the empire of forms and thus can be treated with impec-

details of existence. See M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 38  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) 185. 39  Bramante, “Bramanti opinio supra domicilium seu templum magnum,” in Annali della Fabbrica del Duomo,” Session June 27, 1490, published by G. Mongeri, “Bramante e il Duomo,” in Archivio storico lombardo, yr. 5, 3 (1877); now in Studi Bramanteschi: Atti del Congresso internazionale (Rome: De Luca, 1974), 22–24. Its translation will soon be published in Bramante, an Introduction, ed. K. Geers, V. Pizzigoni and P. P. Tamburelli, in preparation. The only other text of Bramante’s to have survived, apart from the sonnets, is a short report on the fortifications of Crevola in Val d’Ossola. The report was so badly done that Ludovico Sforza immediately ordered it to be done again. 40  Bramante, “Bramanti opinio supra domicilium seu templum magnum, 24.

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cable detachment, just like the Doric or the Ionic.41 On the one hand, Bramante sets to work on the forms with great humility, without any futile arguments; on the other, he is perfectly aware of the complexity and ambition of this work. Bramante knows that the procedure of analysis and assemblage that he is proposing has immediate practical advantages (which he stresses in his report), but he is also aware that this operation is not as easy to carry out as he seems to be claiming. He knows that his so declaredly opportunistic method of working cannot be applied without a sophisticated theoretical basis and without specific expertise: “not without great ingenuity.”42 Bramante’s attitude toward the ornaments of the cathedral is the same as the one he takes later on with regard to the ornaments of St. Peter’s. When the workers ask him for designs for the capitals of the pilasters in the nave, Bramante tells them to go and copy the ones in the Pantheon and to scale them up from five to twelve palms, so that they would be “as well carved and with the same projection of the leaves and with the same amount of details as have those.”43 Bramante does not try to eliminate the arbitrary nature of the choice of any repertoire of forms; he does not conduct a crusade to liberate architecture from style (efforts that, without exception, have always led to the replacement of one style by another44). Bramante simply strips the choice of style of any expressive intent. It is precisely the fact that style conveys no meaning that makes it possible to use it. Only the use of style has meaning, not the choice. If the question is, “In what style should we build?”45 Bramante ans41  The Opinio is an even clearer text if we consider that the Gothic cathedral provided a perfect opportunity to indulge in a facile classicist polemic of the type that Palladio was unable to refrain from in the case of the completion of the façade of San Petronio in Bologna. 42  Bramante, “Bramanti opinio supra domicilium seu templum magnum, 23. 43  Convenzione of March 1, 1508, quoted in C. Baroni, Bramante (Bergamo: Istituto Arti Grafiche, 1944), 42. 44  The most striking example of the promotion of a new style through the discarding of all previous ones is provided by Le Corbusier: “Architecture has nothing to do with ‘styles’. ... The styles of Louis XV, Louis XVI, Louis XIV or the Gothic are to architecture what a feather is to a woman’s head [...].” Le Corbusier, “Trois rappels à MM. LES ARCHITECTES,” L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris, 1920), 90–95. 45  The classic formulation of the problem is Heinrich Hübsch’s “in what style should we build?”: H. Hübsch, In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (Karlsruhe: C.F. Müller Hofbuchhandlung und Hofbuchdruckeren, 1828. A contemporary edition is W. Herrmann, In

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wers, “In whichever you prefer.” And this is simply because for Bramante the question “In what style should we build?” is a completely senseless one and can only create false problems, given that there is only one architecture and the most important thing is precisely that, the fact that architecture is one, valid for everyone. For Bramante classicism is nothing but the commitment to use any style and therefore to accept all styles: a radical stylism, rooted in the firm conviction that all styles have equal value, and any convention is fine so long as it is recognized as a convention, and nothing “authentic” remains to conceal the social nature of artistic work. Thus, the choice of repertoire and the content of forms—things that have obsessed architecture from eclecticism to modernism to postmodernism and right up to the present day—can recede into the background once again and allow the questions of form to reemerge in all their complexity and richness. If there is only one repertoire, then it can’t help but be universal,46 and so there is no choice, and the only obligation with respect to this repertoire is to make good use of it, remembering above all that it is common currency. In this sense, learning from Bramante means trying to imagine a work that can be valid for everyone and that immediately puts itself in a position where it has to learn from everyone.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli’s contribution is part of his book On Bramante recently published by MIT Press and reprinted here with their kind permission. Pier Paolo Tamburelli, On Bramante (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022).

What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1992). 46  “Universal” and “universalism” are used here in a fairly generic sense, without going into the comprehensible criticism of the concept of the “universal” as an alternative to the “common” and of the contrast between a “realism of the Common” and a “nominalism of the Universal” made by Paolo Virno in his essay “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon,” Parrhesia, 7 (2009), 58–67.

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Learning to “See” Like A Machine Artificial Intelligence’s Impact on the Field of Architecture Benjamin Ennemoser

The field of Artificial Intelligence is currently undergoing a reinvigorated boom as manufactuers rapidly adopt and integrate AI technologies in consumer goods. This trend, called “AI’s spring” by some, is encouraging news that follows from a protracted period of declining confidence in artificial intelligence’s successful realization. Today, most people are unaware of just how much AI saturates their everyday lives. It is no longer unusual that individuals encounter a multitude of AI-driven technologies on any given day, such as targeted advertisements, autonomous robots, consumer prediction algorithms, and speech recognition software. AI technologies are increasingly expanding human beings’ digital footprints and are thereby impacting their decisions and behavioral norms. In other words, AI has outgrown its novelty among entrepreneurial futurists and is rapidly becoming accessible to the public as a ubiquitous tool for product development. The success of AI lies in the rise of Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV) and the capabilities of these emerging technologies for processing and learning from vast amounts of data. Machine learning algorithms, aided by computer vision, can extrapolate patterns and generate knowledge from datasets that are beyond mere numerical values, such as collections of aerial photography, images of architectural facades, 3D models, and other visual representations of the built environment. In other words, CV aided ML can be utilized to extract deep connections from a massive set of data in order to draw into focus essential aspects of diverse stylistic practices in the domain of architecture. What I aim to demonstrate is that many of the theoretical quandaries that the field of architecture now faces with the conf luence of ML and CV bears striking similarities to the earliest methodological problems around the

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classification of style in art history. To this point, the work of one of modern art history’s most well-known progenitors, Heinrich Wöff lin, is particularly helpful in theorizing AI’s interpretation of the built environment. A century ago, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölff lin (1864-1945) developed a technique to formally analyze the stylistic evolution of European painting traditions from the sixteenth to the seventeeth century. Wölff lin’s method analyzed painting along differential categories—e.g., open and closed forms; linear and painterly technique; and compositional multiplicity and uniformity, to name just a few—to demonstrate how formal elements act as stylistic precepts of a given historical period. Wöff lin’s main argument is that stylistic precepts tend to evolve under their own internal logic. The linear and painterly categories, for example, describe differing representational practices, namely the deliberate delineation objects on the picture plane through rigid contour lines versus visual depictions that utilize smooth transitions between discrete items. Wöff lin’s differential framework remains highly inf luential in art historical analysis to this day. And, as we shall demonstrate, ML processes use similar differential approaches to extract formal features from visual datasets. Just as Wöff lin was able to accurately authenticate a given painting’s period of origin based on its formal precepts, in a similar fashion ML can extrapolate the essential structures that govern the built environment when challenged to process satellite imagery and architectural elevations. The machine performs region detection and looks at each image in a series of exercises with variable contrast, scale, and resolution in order to extract and determine the key features of a dataset.1 ML algorithms can thus generate knowledge of the built environment that is imperceptible to human interpretation due to the brain’s shear biological limitation to analyze data at the scale of which AI is capable to process. [fig.1] With AI’s spring underway, then, this turn calls on architects to rethink the present paradigm of computational design and parametricism as a generative method in the field. Moreover, it challenges the field to grapple with theoretical questions around computational regimes in a fashion that was impossible only a short time ago. I will discuss the potential of emerging AI technologies such as ML in architecture at the juncture of Heinrich Wölf1  Ahmed Elgammal, “The Shape of Art History in the Eyes of the Machine.” Medium, (February 12, 2018), https://medium.com/@ahmed_elgammal/the-shape-of-art-history-inthe-eyes-of-the-machine-6c9090257263.

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

Fig. 1: Modern California House imagined trough the machine

Results from a messy dataset of 6,000+ precedent images from Los Angeles.

f lin’s methodology of formal language, style, and methods in relationship to messy datasets. My ultimate aim is to show how machine learning presents architectecture with a new opportunity to rethink the role of the architect and the design process within the context of human-machine collaboration.

Learning to “See” the Latent Space through Messy Datasets The explosion of technology that records information about people’s daily lives has led to a massive collection of online data that is growing exponentially with every passing year. Some economists have even begun to proclaim “data the new oil” and, sure enough, the sale of repositories have recently exceeded the value of crude.2 As architectural historian Mark Jarzombek argues: Humans, as ontological beings, might as well be defined by their data now.3 Since datasets are the raw material for ML and CV, today’s data-rich environment is perfect for any ML process. Architects have an opportunity 2  “Leaders: The world‘s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data,“ The Economist Newspaper, accessed May 6, 2017, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/theworlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data. 3  See Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

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to study the built environment through ML speculations with existing 2D urban imagery, 3D scans, and digital models. Through ML technology, architects can analyze and reevaluate their understanding of architecture from how machines comprehend a city, house, door, window, or stylistic architectural pattern by training them on massive datasets. In practice, it is ideal that such training datasets be “messy,” which means that their contents are unorganized, unlabeled, unfiltered, pixelated, and diverse. The messier the data the less primed the machine is by human presuppositions about what constitutes significant architectural qualities. Messy datasets are also the key difference between Wölff lin’s method and ML processes. Both, ML and Wölff lin follow the same visual analytical procedures. But, while Wölff lin operates on a rather small set of samples, ML disposes of vast amounts of data in its learning process. The above process of learning and messy datasets are negotiated in my research project ML-City. ML-City investigates how a messy dataset of 2D architectural imagery and ML can be implemented as an analytical and generative tool in an architectural design process. The ML algorithm learns a series of urban models and typologies to determine how it can identify similarities, patterns, and features. The messy dataset that is assigned to the ML algorithm to interpret consists of vast online collections of aerial photography with the highest diversity of urban images at different scales, angles, perspectives, and resolutions. The datasets diversity mitigates the problem of priming its interpretation. This method also allows for the ML algorithm to autonomously extract similarities and singularities that it deems significant from various urban contexts. By doing so, despite the size of the dataset, the machine uses familiar visual procedures as described by Wölff lin. Specifically, the machine distinguishes formal features that are similar to Wölff lin’s linear and painterly categories in architectural imagery. In the case of ML-City, the machine takes Los Angeles’ low-density urban fabric and integrates it into Cerda’s Barcelona block, which differs in density, scale, topology, demographic, and history. [fig. 2] ML-City reveals that ML algorithms favor the strict boundaries of Cerda’s Barcelona block. The clear boundaries and edges of the Block could be understood as precepts in Wölff linian terms: linear visual rules that the algorithm deems are essential to the overall logic of the dataset. Interestingly, the algorithms were also invested in injecting the blocks with features from LA’s low-density urban houses, such as pools, gardens, green areas, and

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

Fig. 2: AI generated hybridization between Los Angeles suburban houses and the 19th century Barcelona block

The urban grid is semantically translated through architectural features from one dataset to another.

backyards. These elements, especially vegetation like trees, yards, and gardens can be described as painterly features. They do not have a clear shape or outline but rather a smooth gradient of color in a visual composition. Moreover, through scaling and visual processes, the ML algorithm also distinguishes linear and painterly characteristics in visual patterns much smaller

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Fig. 3: Various cultural and historical cityscapes are hybridized into a new emerging urban fabric that inherits dominant features from each precedent

than a whole urban block. So for example are smaller elements such as pools, streets, windows, vehicles, people and roof structures detected and transferred based on their linear or painterly qualities. These smalle elements then, are again populated as micro-elements into bigger figures such as Cerda’s building block. Most importantly, through this experiment, the synthesis of Los Angeles and Barcelona resulted in a completely unprecedented tectonic form and typology. As such, the ML algorithm blends and outputs glitchy painterly and linear urban and architectural features that it invents into new compositions. The results are purely artificial depictions of urban scenarios made by AI, which do not exist in the real world. Despite their surreality, the outputs still reveal familiar and speculative architectural ideas that try to respect the essence of building traditions while altering their typological specificity by hybridizing and amplifying their dominant features.

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

While creating a detailed taxonomy of existing architectural models in an urban context, the generative machine learning process speculates on a wider ontology of models and renegotiates the computational design processes through ML and messy datasets. In other words, messy datasets are among one of the core features that distinguish ML architectural design from prevailing strains of computational design. The dominant discourse in computational design relies on algorithms whose capacity to handle complex datasets is far inferior to that of ML. Computational design, for instance, poses challenges when brought to bear on massive quantities of data available on the internet. Unlike conventional algorithmic operations, ML does not merely analyze these messy datasets through pre-given true/false statements but rather extracts repetitious structures it distinguishes through an interpretive logic it autonomously establishes. After messy data, learning is the second core feature of ML algorithmic processes to develop autonomous intelligence. In other words, training is the learning or hypothesis forming phase in the ML process. It is through training that ML algorithms learn how to perfect hypotheses about the datasets they encounter and generate new knowledge from them. The relationship between learning data and learning style was theorized by the computer scientist Alan Turing early in AI’s history. Turing uses the image of a Child Machine to describe the necessary socializing factors required to train a machine to elevate to the level of human intelligence.4 He hypothesizes that AI must undergo the same learning processes as children. In essence, it must navigate social settings in order to achieve human-like intelligence. Presently, ML algorithms learn the same way that children do, namely through a combination of personal experience and supervised instruction.5 In the current form of AI, the so-called soft AI, machines learn through the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN).6 CNNs function through a series of interconnected virtual layers that mimic how the neurons of the human brain transmit, retain, synthesize, and recreate environmental data. 4  See Alan M. Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence (Oxford: Blackwell for the Mind Association, 1950). 5  Martin Ford, “Introduction,” in Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it (Birmingham: Packt Publishing, 2018), 1–10. 6  Benjamin H. Bratton, „Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test,“ The New York Times, February 23, 2015, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/outing-a-i-beyond-the-turing-test/.

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Researchers use this technique to train machines to interpret, learn, and execute specific tasks without the aid of explicit protocols.7 And as Heinrich Wölff lin states: “Learning to see is everything” (Sehen lernen ist alles), therefore, ML in relationship to architecture also has to learn to “see” in order to gather knowledge about a messy dataset.8 A machine’s capability to see can be described as the ability to perceive visual data and make an autonomous decision on how to interpret data’s architectural content. In this phase, the machine creates its hypothesis about a dataset and stores its knowledge in an endless and manifold repository that is referred to as the latent space. More precisely, the latent space is a vector of hundreds of dimensions that hold all possible depictions of a dataset.9 This space is hidden but represents the machine’s memory that can be accessed to generate new artificial images and geometries of the training dataset. By accessing the latent space, we are visualizing space that offers all potential variations, combinations, and hybridizations of a messy dataset. The analog to this ability is similar to how human beings are able to both distinguish between different species—a cat and a dog, for instance—and hypothesize them in multiple variations and hybridizations. Machine learning is capable of just such a task; it literally can invent new versions of existing taxonomies. The contents of this space are not transparent, unambiguous imagery, however. It contains an almost endless array of versions of objects that are full of errors, misinterpretations, imperfections, and glitches. This is the heart of where the opportunity lies for speculative architecture. The latent space, in essence, forms and exercises its own conceptual framework for the meanings of categories, such as style, city, and architecture in a manner that is beyond human perception. Even if we are far from any superintelligence—that outperforms human sovereignty as ontological beings as described by Nick Bostrom—we are still drawing from an artificial consciousness that is able to envision a speculative thought or hypothe7  See Yoshua Bengio, Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it, interview by Martin Ford (Birmingham: Packt Publishing, 2018), 17–39. 8  Gottfried Boehm, “Sehen lernen ist alles”: Conrad Fideler und Hans von Marees.“ In Christian Lenz ed., Hans von Marees (Munich: Prestel, 1987), 145. Wölfflin uses the phrase in an essay-length book in the popular Bibliothek der Kunstgeschichte series. Heinrich Wölfflin , Das Erklären von Kunstwerken (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1921), 3. 9  See Casey Reas, Casey Reas: Making Pictures with Generative Adversarial Networks ( Montreal: Anteism Books, 2019).

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sis.10 By accessing the machine’s latent space, designers can draw from a rich source of machine interpretations, inexistent in the training dataset, that offer otherworldly design elements within the parameters of recognizable building conventions. In this way, architects can use ML to explore architectural proposals that ref lect deep connections contained within massive repositories of divergent human building practices.

Suggestion as a New Analytic Principle in the Age of Human-Machine Collaboration The history of architecture is shaped by technological inventions that impact formal language, style, construction, and thus define architectural paradigms. Technology is a medium for architects to explore or build new typologies and archetypes. Computational design technologies that emerged in the not-too-distant past led to a paradigm shift in the formal languages available to architects as well as transformations in the building industry that persist to this day. This shift is described by architectural historian Mario Carpo as the first digital turn.11 Late twentieth-century technologies such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) established a fixed way of working with data. In this era, data was used in a strictly objective sense for precision and efficiency with linear complexity and for optimizing procedural processes and binary tasks as a computational tool. In opposition to computational design techniques and parametricism that owe their formulas to the first digital revolution in architecture, the emerging concepts of ML grapple with technologies of closed algebraic expressions and their own paradigmatic meaning for data.12 In this sense, ML differs in technical and philosophical terms from the current debate on architecture within computational design methodologies. Traditional computational tools without ML have the ability to process large amounts of data with predefined rules at a clip that no human could ever be capable of matching. These processes are hardwired into code and allow re10  See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 11  Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 12  Friedrich Kittler, „Number and Numeral,“ Theory, Culture & Society 23 (December 2006): 51–61. doi:10.1177/0263276406069882.

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Fig. 4: Multiple precedents of grid and non-grid cities result in a hybrid cityscape containing linear and painterly elements

searchers to emulate and simulate and bio-mimic fixed statements in closed environments on a set of inputs and data with foreseeable results. These results express the empirical value of clinic data without accounting for the meaning and relationships within it. Increasingly, Carpo argues, the second digital turn in architecture will happen through the deployment of computational tools that are able to search rather than sort. Taking inspiration from Google’s slogan “Search Don’t Sort,” Carpo cites, as an example, the company’s search algorithm that is implemented in their online email service, Gmail.13 This algorithm spares users from time-consuming tasks like labeling and sorting their emails by making all files searchable. Search-ability, then, for Carpo is the operative concept that he

13  Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

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believes will mark the next paradigmatic shift in architecture in conjunction with AI. In opposition, I propose the concept of Suggestion to highlight the key concern attendant to an emerging age of human-machine collaboration. Moreover, I intend to use a machine, not for its capacity to quickly filter data, which would represent the concept of searching, but actually for proposing or, in this sense, suggesting a conceptual framework with a hypothesis about the data’s meaning. In other words, with ML, machines graduate from a fast calculator of binary tasks to an entity that has the ability to propose or share a suggestion within a design task. Meaning the machine engages in a symbiotic relationship with the designer where humans and machines collaborate as separate entities. In this relationship, the human is curating the dataset that is being used to train an ML algorithm, the machine then develops a hypothesis about a design process and contributes with suggestions to a collaborative creative process. Just as data and ML can inf luence decision-making, the human can steer and curate the machine‘s interpretation by training an unvaried or fake dataset in a two-way relationship between human and machine intelligence. In order to form an opinion or hypothesis about a dataset, a machine must reinterpret and renegotiate its very own version of semantic understanding in the context of its dataset. Consistent with the human-machine collaboration I am proposing here, ML’s creative potential is not unleashed until the meaning it sees in data is reintroduced into the computational design practice. Within this empirical understanding of data, as it was defined in the first digital turn, the meaning and interpretation of information was eliminated. There was simply no variable or parameter for the meaning of data that could be entered in a closed algebraic expression. Conventional computation practices do not deal with messy and diverse datasets. ML is challenging this through the exploration of endless suggestions from the latent space that approximate human subjectivity through the reintroduction of data’s meaning into computational design technologies. ML’s role in architecture thus raises the question of whether it is ushering in a new paradigm for the field. Future generations of architects have to develop a critical understanding of how to collaborate with technology and develop a culture for AI. The next paradigm shift within contemporary architecture is emerging from ML as a design collaborator and cultural driver that will reinvigorate an ontological investigation of architectural archetypes, taxonomies, styles, and formal languages. In this regard, architects must question current prac-

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Fig. 5: Evolution of ML training process of 3D datasets

The messy datasets consist of 3,000+ models of Modern California Houses. The sequence shows the incremental formulation of architectural features within the generated 3D model.

tices of computational design and styles such as parametricism in relationship to contemporary popular culture, authorship, digital ontologies, and evolving data-saturated environments.14 When machines cease being tools and become collaborators, the meaning of creative intervention in architectural form undergoes a significant transformation that remains to be theorized.

A New Ontology of Meaning and the Decay of Style As I discuss above, Heinrich Wölff lin’s methods are analytical in terms of classifying paired artworks. ML algorithms, on the other hand, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a technology used in vision and graphic problems by computer scientists, are able to not just analyze but also

14  See also Patrik Schumacher “The Concept of Style and Parametricism as Epochal Style,” Cameronica #10, 2016, https://www.patrikschumacher.com.

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

generate new artificial depictions from multiple architectural datasets.15 The algorithms semantically translate and compare the images from a distinct set A to another distinct set B and then the reverse.16 Through this generative process, architectural elements are compared and distinguished from each set. The machine is then tasked to create a new artificial proposal that hybridizes the disparate architectural precedents on which I have trained it. Extracted features, therefore, are introduced into a completely new context while preserving the qualities that the machine deems elemental to the original source data. For the computer, this process unfolds like a game of cat and mouse where two autonomous components—the Discriminator and the Generator—operate in pursuit of one another until they arrive at a termination point. In essence, the Generator, which can be described as an art forger, continuously produces fake depictions of the dataset it has learned. And the Discriminator, which can be described as an art critic, distinguishes whether the images are fake or real. In other words, the machine itself chooses what the essential qualities are within a dataset, which is to say that it literally forms an “opinion” about reality at a remove from human intervention. And from this process, ML is able to form conclusions about the meaning of data as well as generate and suggest independent proposals for how to augment or recreate the data it interprets. Meaning in this context can be understood as a semantic interpretation and translation of architectural elements and features that are successfully recognized by ML algorithms within the messy dataset. While the semantic meaning of the machine’s interpretations are detached from any human bias, the ML algorithm reestablishes a new abstracted conceptual framework on how chosen elements might be composited into an architectural fabric. Moreover, the machine establishes its very own speculation of how a building, a city, or a style is built-up by simply visually examining data and its correlating features. It is certainly possible to train machine intelligence to detect and generate features and patterns that approximate what humans recognize as archi15  Jun-Yan Zhu, Taesung Park, Phillip Isola, and Alexei A. Efros, “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks,” arXiv e-prints (March, 2017). 16  https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017arXiv170310593Z. See also Jun-Yan Zhu , Taesung Park, and Tongzhou Wang. 2017. „junyanz/pytorch-CycleGAN-and-pix2pix.“ https://github.com/junyanz/pytorch-CycleGAN-and-pix2pix.

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Fig. 6: House Y—ML generated modern California House

tectural style. Moreover, machine intelligence can translate one formal language into another using Style-Transfer algorithms in order to comprehend cultural and artistic inf luences.17 It is also possible to train a GAN on exclusively one architectural style and let the machine form an opinion of how this particular style is defined in terms of its formal language. This methodological approach of detecting, classifying and reproducing underlying features of an architectural dataset relies on the machine’s capacity for visual perception. Moreover, the machine’s ability to “see” and classify reveals remarkable synergies with how Heinrich Wölff lin describes his comparative methodology that can identify an epochal style or determine the stylistic affiliations of a given artwork.

17  See Guvenc Özel and Benjamin Ennemoser, “Interdisciplinary AI: A Machine Learning System for Streamlining External Aesthetic and Cultural Influences in Architecture,” Acadia Proceedings (Austin: 2019).

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

In Wölff lin’s methodology, two artworks have to be considered in order to determine their possible affiliation with the same periodic style. Importantly, the interpreter’s ability to “see” is key in Wöff lin’s analytical process. And by seeing, Wölff lin is specific about detaching vision from any bias or distraction by examining an artwork through multiple visual layers. By following his comparative methodology, regional or even artist-specific techniques and temperaments can be eliminated. And, once a work of art’s idiosyncratic features are isolated, then its generalizable and key features can be isolated. Subsequently, even artworks that, at first sight, are completely distinct from one another can be shown to belong to the same period-style or Zeitgeist. As an example, Wölff lin’s work reveals the artistic commonalities between the Italian sculptor and architect, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the Dutch painter, Gerard ter Broch. Eventhough both artists and their work seem distinctly different and incomparable. Wölff lin detects from these two painters, through his methodology, multiple visual layers in common, such

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as painterly structures and elements.18 There are significant conceptual similarities between Wöff lin’s approach and how ML examines datasets through multiple visual layers on multiple precedents in order to crystalize patterns that are deemed fundamental. Further, as proposed by Wölff lin’s approach, regional inf luences or artist-specific singularities are eliminated from the machine‘s interpretation or suggestion of what the key features ought to be of an artistic or architectural dataset.19 Despite the methodological similarities between Wölff lin’s method and the machine‘s process, the art historian was already biased before analyzing and categorizing artwork into a specific style. Established styles such as Rennaisance or Baroque, and their key features, were already largely defined and this inf luenced his decision-making process. The machine on the other hand is unbiased and rather relies on the curatorial act of the human that creates the dataset. With this pure point of view, so to speak, of the machine, ML explores and generates its own hypothesis about style based on a pure formal analysis. This is shown in the project House (Y)amnitski [fig. 5, 6] that investigates the relationship between architectural style, curated datasets, and machine interpretations in the latent space. The project brief, that led to House (Y)amnitski, was a design request for a two-story home in Marina Del Rey, California. An additional parameter the client expressed was that the house must ref lect the style of modern California houses with respect to the Los Angeles area. In addition to the dominant practice of training 2D images, this project investigates how to train 3D models in order to generate a new proposal in the form of 3D geometry. In House Y, 3D geometry of modern house typologies, materials, and building elements are used in order to investigate ML’s potential to interpret, blend, and reiterate a style through 3D geometry datasets. The machine autonomously envisions its version of a modern house in the form of elevations, images, and voxelized 3D models that blend various stylistic principles and hybridized cultural inf luences. The machine establishes its unique formal and spatial interpretation of the common patterns and stylistic features that 18  See Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegrif fe: das Problem der Stilentwickelung in der neueren Kunst. (München: Bruckmann, 1920). See also Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien. (München: T. Ackermann, 1888), 12. 19  See Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

Learning to “See” Like A Machine

might seem to derive from the common, human interpretation. The result of this design challenge was a provocative proposal that eschews culturally inherited interpretations of formal and spatial regimes by respecting the fundamental principles of a recognizable “modern house.” And by analyzing the machine’s intentions, the style of the curated dataset, forged within the machine’s latent space, allows architects to explore un-thought formal features and styles. Additionally, architects can train multiple styles and ask machines to hybridize them into a mixture that respects commonalities while introducing new unbiased features. In this sense, ML draws on its ability to develop an autonomous hypothesis and opinion about data. Within a new era of computer science and an emerging generation of ML algorithms, this ability is based on the intelligence machine’s interpretation of a diverse dataset’s fundamental qualities that are inaccessible to human perception. This consciousness forming process is based on ML algorithms that have configurable connections and the f lexibility to redraw connections and set weights between relationships and eliminate errors recursively through backpropagation. The result is a speculative knowledge gathering and learning process of machine intelligence that speculates on principles of formal language and style within an emerging ontology of architectural composition and elements. This comes from ML’s ability to learn from diverse and comprehensive datasets that inherit historic, cultural, demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental patterns and regimes. Departing from that aspect, and in the notion of human-machine collaboration, the alliance of human and machine intelligence can lead towards a paradigm shift that renegotiates current architectural practice and design methodologies. And if there is a current or coming epochal style and formal language within computational design techniques in architecture, machine learning will certainly suggest its own hypothesis about such a style by blending, twisting, and glitching its principles and meaning in the latent space.

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Computational Architecture, Architectonic Models Vera Bühlmann

One exposes oneself when one makes, one imposes oneself when one unmakes. When one unmakes, one is never wrong, in effect. I know of no better way to always be right. Michel Serres/The Troubadour of Knowledge

I do think there is meaning in nature and that it is precisely madness not to think so. … But we have to rethink what we mean by meaning. If we mean mental content intentionally designed to say something to someone, of course clouds or fire don’t communicate. But if we mean repositories of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence, then of course clouds and fire have meaning. John Durham-Peters/The Marvelous Clouds, Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media

Motivic Keys Architectonic models presume the loss of images. Images are lost when they become not only realistic but also physically (materially and gravitationally) realizable. Architectonic models take their loss as given and anticipate what this might mean. They draw an ideational energy from the emptiness of the image’s absence, from their vast importance of what is not there—there, in the unoccupied stead of images. Architectonic models articulate into the void, and as algebra does with its formal treatment of tautology (equations), they bring the nothingness of this void to scales. They articulate this “there”; they make its absence localizable. They make room for it by virtually seizing the “extent” as well as the “content” of such emptiness. These models are archi-

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tectonic because they are “built.” They are not simply “given,” but they are also not simply “constructed.” Hence, architectonic models are “built” daringly with ideation, and they are not “ideal”—there is no “original” which they would mimic more or less well, or rather—anything at all is of the kind of originality which they “copy.” Copia comes from the Latin word for “plenty,” it literally means “to transcribe in plenty.” For architectonic models, this “plenty” manifests not only as a multitude (many transcriptions, many copies) but also a magnitude. (There is a muchness to it, a bigness beyond any as of yet familiar scale; measurement is involved.) They do not start with form, but with a module. They start with “quantizing” the energy of ideation; that is to say, they articulate order likewise to how our contemporary physics of information (quantum physics) articulates communicational orders proportionate to a physical nature of information in terms of entropy and negentropy. They both articulate order based on modularizing alloys (forged mixtures, impure “essences”) of material quantity and formality. The “stuff” they are built with is a substance that literally “lacks” (in its extent as well as its content). The literalness of such “lacking” is of the essence, in the quasi-metaphysical sense of primary stuff, substance or source. Only, this “stuff” here is literally “nothing.” Architectonic models are not only “lacking” in their place (respective to a preexisting order). They are actively “lacking,” lacking “nothing.” Such “lacking” is the activity that makes them what they are. They are built as consolidation, combining into one “body” what is not one, by an inevitably forgetful kind of recollection, a remembering. They are committed to a statuesque point of the episteme, the Greek word for knowledge—they look for a logos of such a resting place of “standing upon” and “overviewing” (the episteme). But they don’t have one; they don’t possess one.1 Metaphysics has taken birth (natality, nature) for a given and has wondered about death; architectonic models presume loss. They acknowledge that there is death, disintegration, accompanying integral orders of whatever kind. Hence, they invert direction and take death for granted. They wonder about birth, nature, natality. They dare to part ways—even if only speculatively, fancifully—with the epistemological idea that everything happens as though science was resting, standing, or erected on an immutable pedestal—well founded. For them, the point of view of the episteme is that of a statue indexing “here lies.”

1  Episteme’s root means something like “to stand on, upon, above” or “nearby.”

Computational Architecture, Architectonic Models

Architecture begins with our dealings with death; Loos saw this clearly. But what to make of it?

Ordinateur, in two Legends The point I want to develop is that architectonic models ask for computational architecture. But we need to grant that “computation” is much older than we usually think. Computation does not start with calculus in the eighteenth century; it is not specifically related to arithmetic (Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis); rather, it is and always has been “mechanical.” Newton, who insisted on the tangential method of indexing the infinitesimal (for him, f luctuation), was perhaps more in touch with computation in this larger sense than Leibniz was. The Greek term mēkhanikos meant “full of resources, inventive, ingenious,” literally “mechanical, pertaining to machines,” from mēkhanē “device, tool.” In Greek, machine was apparently almost synonymous with mēkhanē, both go back to the PIE *magh-ana- for “that which enables,” from root *magh- “to be able, have power.”2 This etymology nicely captures the proximity between technics and magic—an almost forgotten proximity, whose return we currently witness in the form of distinctly religious overtones to the various ideas of “trans-humanism” and “non-anthropomorphic” truth that are being articulated with the present’s “computational turn,” where the advent of the contemporary “computer age” is often being stigmatized as a singularity, a quasi-messianic “event” that lacks comparison. Michel Serres, the French philosopher, who was teaching for many years at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, tells the captivating story of how in his home school—one of the last schools in France that did not separate the students of the natural sciences from those of the humanist subjects—he overheard a conversation between three teachers. Two of them were talking about how the word “computer” could adequately be rendered in French since the term was already taken (for a particular device that measures the consumption of water, gas, or electricity). The word “computer” comes from Latin computare, for counting, calculating, but it is not directive; it relates to 2  Cf. for example etymonline, and for a detailed discussion; see Fritz Krafft, “Mechanik. Zur begrifflichen Bestimmung,” Österreichische Ingenieur- und Architekten-Zeitschrift 135, no. 10 (1990): 470–477.

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a cyclical process where there is transformation but no substantial change. Hence, it used to describe what astronomists and astrologists were doing when observing and modeling patterns of the sky. The suggestions that they discussed involved “systémateur,” “combinateur,” “congesteur,” “digesteur,” “synthétiseur”—but none felt quite right: “Who would like to sit in front of her ‘digester’ (digesteur) in order to work?”3 A Latin grammarian, passionate for theology, overheard this conversation and told his colleagues that this peculiar machine they were talking about reminded him a lot of the subject he himself was currently working on, namely the creation of the world according to the doctrine of a Deus Ordinator, the doctrine of a God that ordinates (“un ordonnateur”) and protects humans and all existing creatures. This, as legend has it, is how the French word “ordinateur” for the English word “computer” was introduced by IBM in April 1955. After consulting his former professor in Paris, the philologist Jacques Perret, François Girard decided to export the word “ordinateur” out of its religious usage and instead reserve it for the novel “machines à telecommunication.”4 Serres’ story is greatly concerned with how this lexical importation and exportation could be thought of rigorously5 because it entails the entire problem of how a concept really differs from a metaphor. In other words, how can we reconcile thought’s rigor with its inventiveness? How to think of the status of ideation? The “cutting out” in such export must be a formal gesture if it is to be one legitimated secularly, he maintains. He thought of such cutting as encryption, as coding. There is a way how to think of such “cutting” as the building of “bridges,” which he shows us throughout his oeuvre.6 To think of communication as a particular kind of economy of transfer is constitutive for Serres’ understanding of “tele-communication.” Communication in its technical sense bridges times and spaces; meanwhile, we are used to this idea as a fact. But what does it entail philosophically? How to address 3  Arnaud Schwartz, “Ordinateur, de la théologie à l’informatique,” La Croix, August 13, 2007, https://www.la-croix.com/Ethique/Sciences/Sciences/Ordinateur-de-la-theologie-a-l-informatique-_NG_-2007-08-15-525218 . 4  Michel Serres, Éloge de la philosophie en langue francaise (Paris: Flammarion, 2014). See also wikipedia.fr: ordinnateur. 5  Michel Serres, “Structure et importation: des mathématiques aux mythes,” in Hermes I, La Communication (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 21–35. 6  Vera Bühlmann, Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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the vast (if not indeed ubiquitious omnipresent) role of communication technology in the infrastructural and technological constitutions of our contemporary living conditions? How indeed to explain that communication is no longer a term reserved for people talking to one another about things but rather that all processes, in whatever subject of the scientific and technological fields (whether humanist, social, or natural sciences), are de facto considered as “processes of communication” today. This results not only in a general mobilization and circulation of goods, values, ideas, et cetera but also it triggers processes of acceleration, dis-integration, and dissolution across all scales. There is no field where one would not speak about “noise” being able to become “signal” under particular conditions and “signs” that can lose their significance in “noise.” There is a new kind of materialism at play in these technologies, a materialism of quantum physics where light is both particle (massive, material) and wave (extension, immaterial); it is a philosophical materialism that no longer stands for a determinism but quite the opposite, one that rests on principle and elementary “indeterminateness.”7 When people in the Middle Ages described what they imagined God was doing for the world he had created, when they considered their god as “un Ordonnateur” who is “putting things in order” (in French, ordonnateur, celui qui met en ordre), were they not also talking about a notion imported from elsewhere? Did not, for example, Thomas Aquinas, with his doctrine of the analogia entis, propagate a “cutting out” and a kind of “export” from the doctrines of the universe’s univocity? According to its doctrine, God could be thought of as “computing” because he did not exclusively speak to them anymore through the scriptures that are already written, and the language-based hermeneutics of its theology. Rather, the computing God spoke to them materially and formally through what can be found in nature, through abstract but mathematical notions of “numbers” and “forms,” which could embrace the novel inf luence from the Arabic world (revival of Aristotelian metaphysics and natural science, eventually algebra, novel approaches to optics) and that could reconnect in novel ways with the Hebrew legacies as

7  Vera Bühlmann, Felicity Colman and Iris van der Tuin, “Introduction to New Materialist Genealogies: New Materialisms, Novel Mentalities, Quantum Literacy,” The Minnesota Review: a journal of creative and critical writing 2017, no. 88 (May 2017): 47–58, https:// doi.org/10.1215/00265667-3787378 .

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well.8 Do we not have here a kind of “export” from a particular context and “import” to an emerging other one? Perhaps the “cuts” that separate “secular” usages of concepts and ideas from a “religious” one is not captured well if we think of them in the terms of an either-or condition; in both, for sure, there is a kind of binding together, a contracting is involved (secular, literally “an age or lifespan,” “pertaining to a generation or age in this world,” as opposed to a “religious order” that would transcend this world). Paul Valéry was very perceptive to what the religious implications that any engagement with “ubiquity” entails. In a short article from 1928, entitled “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” he addresses these issues. “In all the arts there is a physical component which cannot be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power,” he wrote.9 The conquest of ubiquity he was talking about stems from within the rationalism at work in the empirical sciences itself, and it involves the categorical (the ultimate, the most abstract, the first and last) concepts of metaphysics: “In the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.”10 For Valéry, aesthetics and the arts had stepped into the placeholder position of former metaphysics, and the question that concerned many in the early twentieth century was the emerging relation between aesthetics and religion.11 Henri Bergson, who like Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher interested in the novel challenges with respect to “quantification,” suggested to apply the central paradigm of the industrial age, that of the machine, to the universe itself. In The Two Sources of Morality and of Religion from 1932, he begins to articulate the idea of what he calls “an open society.” He writes,

8  I am thinking, for example, of Averroes and his “material intellect” in the 11th century, Raymund Llull and Dante Alighieri in the 13th century, the latter with his interest in the vernaculars (especially his text Convivio), then the Renaissance masters in the 15th century, later Erasmus (especially his treaties on copiousness, Copia: Foundations of an Abundant Style), and Ramus in the 16th century (with his mechanical method of discovery). 9  Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964 [1928]). 10  Ibid. 11  See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 3 Bde. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964). See also Susan K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941).

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Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.12 Humankind has to decide whether to “make an effort,” this amounts to saying that whether human life will have been meaningful or not (individually as well as collectively) lies in our own hands. For Bergson, this depends on affirming this role which his “model” of the universe foresees for human existence, namely to operate this machine such that an “open society”13 could emerge and prosper. In our contemporary conditio humana of the Anthropocene, these questions raised by Bergson some eighty years ago resonate as uncannily prophetic: Are we not indeed concerned today with the precarious possibility of there not being a continued human existence on Earth and of being “responsible” for extinctions not only of ourselves but of entire species, the destruction of living environments by the “using up” of materials and resources, as well as that of cultural diversity in the loss (or sacrifice) of cultural life forms, identities, and so on?

Maintaining a Household and Steering a Ship How did we get here, and where do we go now? These are not only my questions at this point in the text but also the two questions at the core of any politics. There is a distinction with regard to leadership between governing and managing (gérer in French), to which Serres points.14 The latter is an economical term and operates situationally; managing is focused on how the integ12 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion, trans., Ashley R. Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: MacMillan, 1935); as Bergson literally puts it: “la fonction essentielle de l‘universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux.” 13 This is an important distinction to Karl Popper’s famous concept of the “open society.” For Bergson, it must be a “universal,” not merely a “global” society. 14 Michel Serres, “Science et Societé,” lecture at Conférence exceptionnelle de Michel Serres pour les 5 ans de la Maison, Maison pour la science en Alsace, Strasbourg, France, May 23, 2017. Accessed August 18, 2019. https://www.unistra.fr/index.php?id=26376.

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rity of an entity that is firmly planted within largely known and stable conditions can be best preserved with the aspiration perhaps that local growth or other desirable transformation can be achieved. In distinction, leadership in terms of governing comes from how to steer a ship in the open seas. In order to lead in the sense of governing, one needs to be able to answer at least four abstract questions: Where are we? Where do we come from? Where do we want to go? And, how best to get there? It is this latter form of leadership that we should reserve for politics, and it is immediately evident how crucially it depends upon knowledge of history and the capacity to envision other possibilities—and with this latter aspect (envisioning) it depends also on the apparently never-ending disputes around the core notions in metaphysics (space, time, matter, and life). With this chronicle—this sectional cut—of where we are today, I want to direct attention to how architecture can be “political.” Of course, architecture is also always involved with economy, but it is the political aspect that we have largely lost sight of today. We cannot take this as a fact; we need to think about why. If it might seem all too evident why (for example if somebody maintains “it’s capitalism!” or the like), we are surrendering to misology. We presumptively deprive argument and reason of its force. We are not looking from a boat but from within a particular economic order that we don’t dare to risk. Thus, it seems as if architectural theory “has run out of steam”15 because we are looking for a place for politics continuous with or even entirely within the economic paradigm. And then we are frustrated that these places are always already “a made bed,” a prepared place (dispositioned, biased) that grants little to no autonomy to what or whoever might “step in” and “hold” the position. I will not join the oft-heard complaint that architecture today is largely deprived of its political vitality. The last paragraph will demonstrate examples of how and where it can be found today. The question that interests me is the following: Can there be a relation of architecture to politics and, hence, necessarily also to history? For, without knowledge of history, the four basic questions cannot be answered. We need to know about the past and future to locate a “present.” We need to find a novel way of relating to history, another one than that of dialectical materialism as we know 15  Bruno Latour has recently put it this way; Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry - Special issue on the Future of Critique 30, no.2 (2004): 25–248.

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it from Hegel, Marx, and critical theory. If according to this legacy architecture seeks to be political in a revolutionary sense, the political is explicitly sought from within an order of economy. Maybe the expectation that architecture can or should be “revolutionary” is what has rendered us blind to how and where the political actually does manifest. My interest is to foreground how architecture’s political strength and liveliness consists of what I will call “scalar inversions” rather than “revolutions.” Scalar inversions depend upon architectonic models—models that, to recollect some points from the initial motivic keys, seek to facilitate copies of, and make realizable, nothing in particular. We can think of architectonic models as manifesting in computational architecture that relate “modeling” with “ideation/imagination,” eradicated from any order of pure ideality. Both of these terms (imagination, model) are highly contested in our contemporary discourse and greatly depend upon how we think of them. They are contested because contemporary technology works with them in a manner that is not anchored in an individual’s cognitive faculties. A good introduction, from a non-specialist point of view, to the more recent relevance of these notions is provided by Paul N. Edwards in his book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, but we cannot attend to it here. Rather, we look at Hans Blumenberg, who has drawn an important distinction in a short text between world pictures and world models—thus titled—from 196116 and just before the NGOs and think tanks that started to focus attention to the planning of demographic developments (the “agencies” at the core of Edwards’s book) more or less started to gather and organize themselves.17 The core interest for this distinction (between world models and world pictures) regards the relation between “building” and “education” (Bildung). A university is not a conglomerate of disciplines and faculties, Blumenberg foregrounds; rather, there is a “vivid economy of specialization and interdependency, of solitude and exchange among its fields and subjects.”18 It is the vivacity of this economy that he is concerned with and to which he interrogates his own field, that of philosophy. “Philosophy 16  Hans Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,“ in Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft (Giessen: Universitätsverlag, 1961), 67–75. 17  For example, The Club of Rome was founded in 1968, Greenpeace in 1971. 18  Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” 67; here and throughout my own translation.

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is the dawning human awareness of itself,” as he puts it. What he means by this is, so he says, is “something very basic. A human being seeks to grasp herself in what moves her in her own life, in what conditions this life of one’s own, in the possibilities that present themselves in vivid and powerful manner.”19 Blumenberg is concerned with modern science eradicating philosophy in this very respect. Without being able to discuss his argumentation here, it results in attributing to contemporary philosophy (to the human sciences at large, by implication) a “historicist straight jacket” in the role of attributing to it a warning voice of moral conscience. The individual’s “grasping of herself in what moves one’s life” is thereby being stripped of its imaginal force,20 and the dualism between natural and human/social sciences finds itself reinforced, together with a strong distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, one that sits so uncomfortably with the computational turn of our technologies. What about architecture? What about the kind of education that would need to communicate, share, and build the kind of knowledge that is to accompany this political side of architecture that I want to elaborate on, architecture’s potential of triggering scalar inversions? I propose to regard architecture in an analogous formulation to that in which Blumenberg characterizes philosophy before its “castration.” I want to suggest regarding architecture as manifesting the dawning cultural awareness of a culture as a culture, through seeking to grasp itself in what moves it in its own vivacity, in what conditions its very liveliness in the possibilities that present themselves to it “in vivid and powerful manner.”21

Architecture as Civic Anarchism Blumenberg forgets in two important ways to consider how architecture and architectonic models, factor in his account of world models and world pictures. One is the transversal domain of consolidation between what we could call “performative” forms of culture and “technically articulate” ones. 19  Ibid. 20  Henri Corbin, Temple and Contemplation (London: Routledge, 2013); Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 21  Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” 67.

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In other words, he fails to consider the domain of transition between religious cults and their linguistic articulation and ref lection (Logos) at work in “world pictures.” The other aspect is the domain of transversality between calculation and computation. This domain confuses any clear distinction between language (alphabets) and mathematics (numbers and forms) that is always already at work in scientific “world models.” My suggestion is to think of calculation and computation as “architectonic” in an analog manner as we think of the relation between cult and myth as “philosophical” (through Logos as the reasoning means of this relation). Calculation, then, refers to rules with no reference order external to their own performativity—it can be equally performative in any order, so it counts “unquestionably”—while computation, on the other hand, comes to rest on rules “stated” relative to “orders.” (Computation is algebraic; it mobilizes the terms of equivalences in stated equations; hence, it is a strange kind of “language” that is neither properly “linguistic” nor “logic” nor “purely mathematical.”22). If one acknowledges these two domains, one of gradual transition and the other of gradual transversality as “architectonic” (rather than merely “problematic”), then there is always already a world of noise, a messiness to distinctions like the one propagated by Blumenberg between “world pictures” and “world models”—even before his distinction begins to hold. I want to maintain that architecture is architecture in that it provides world models that live from consolidating precisely this polluted, dirty, impure messiness— about which both, philosophy and modern science, with their inclinations toward purification (and hence toward consecration rather than consolidation), are horrified. Why architecture? Perhaps the attribution I want to make is not an exclusive one, but I tend to think it is. Because no other form of the “fine arts” or the “applied arts” is so constitutively entangled like architecture is with all of the institutions of secular power at once: with politics, economy, religion, culture, technology, and science—and this in time scales that not only arch over human life cycles in both directions (toward the pole of “smallness” in building materials to that of “largeness” in a building’s monumentality) and in a way that lacks comparison to any other field and that further equips architecture with a strange sense of self-confidence about being “masters,” 22  This is still one of the best texts to learn about this distinction: Alfred North Whitehead, Treatise on Universal Algebra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910).

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oddly so in rendering service to those very institutions rather than aspiring or claiming to “direct” them. How can there not be an outright contradiction in saying that architecture masters through serving? That its pride is to be of service while at the same time to carry proudly the notion of a “first” and a “beginning” in its name (Greek arkhein, “be the first,” thence “to begin, begin from or with, make preparation for,” also “to rule, lead the way, govern, rule over, be leader of”)? How can serving and directing not be contradictory to each other? This is what the notion of scalar inversions (rather than revolutions) with regard to the relation between architecture, history, and politics are all about. My point is that in architecture as a term, as a name perhaps, to be the first, to rule or direct, is a political role coupled with a technical spirit (Greek tekton, from PIE *tecs, to weave, to fabricate) that does not shy away from a “numerical” kind of imagination. What I find interesting to think about is whether or how it is precisely in architecture that we can find an understanding of technics and its role with respect to episteme, to knowledge and thus to secular forms of “culture” (cultural techniques) that bypass the dualist and progressivist distinctions such as civility versus barbarity, modern versus premodern. Every globe has a north and a south pole. What I want to suggest is that we can think about architecture in a like manner, in essence, as one of two poles, the other being metaphysics. I suggest that they be regarded on an equal plane because both want to confine an infinite domain of “ubiquity” within rational bounds with an “ultimacy.” Metaphysics (with its doctrines) is concerned with anticipating consequences that derive from an ultimate, a first, a principle, beyond which it declares thought could not make any reasonable sense. Architecture, too, is interested in anticipation and the drawing of consequences with respect to such ultimacy, but different from metaphysics, it does not produce doctrines (that articulate how we can capture the world in pictures); rather, it makes room within the noise produced by the plurality of doctrines. So considered, it is clear why architecture strives especially in times of social transition of the greatest order and perhaps only then. Perhaps in times when an order focuses on differentiating itself inwardly, in times of instituting an order (not merely consolidating the grounds for such novel institutionalization), architecture is subsumed into either science or art (or in the disputes that lay claim to it from either side). According to this view, architecture does not represent world pictures or realize world models. It articulates “miniatures,” reduced images, literal-

Computational Architecture, Architectonic Models

ly “images greatly reduced in scale.”23 But it is crucial how we think of such “scaling” and “reduction.” An image that helps here is how we use “reduction” in cooking or perfume (when reducing ingredients into a concentrate of aroma), and accordingly the definition of a miniature as being greatly reduced in scale should read slightly different: A miniature is an image whose Greatness is being modeled as Bigness, and its reduction is not one in scale (where scale would be pre-existing) but into scales (that are to be appropriate for just that particularly “reduced image,” the architectural miniature). As such, architecture indeed engenders “models,” for which it articulates their buildings as miniatures through a process of reducing them to their “proper” scales. And these models are “structural,” but they are not “frameworks” like the “world models” that secular science wants to produce. These models are auxiliary structures, meant to be done away with (decoupled, deconstructed) once a building stands (and manifests the crystallization of a model in a miniature)—not because they can claim to be “natural” but because they have done their situational service. They are not structural in the sense of a skeleton or core but in the sense of facilitating real but ideational “adjunction.” Thinking of architectonic world models this way is at one and the same time much more ambitious and much more modest than scientific models. Through their alliance with metaphysics, they are models that seek to realize something “universal” (not something “worldly”); in this, they are more ambitious. But they know that no empirical data can legitimize (found) their models exhaustively; in this they are much more modest. It is why architecture can be thought of as the polar complement to metaphysics, as one of two poles of an abstract and yet real, an entirely fancied (invented, imagined) and yet buildable “globe/sphere.” Both metaphysics and architecture need to “inf late” what can be imagined beyond all (as of yet) reasonable bounds; hence, their interest in mathematics and its precise and rigorous (finitary) dealings with the infinite. They inf late their imaginations and take them for real not because they want to “transcend” from this world once and for all but because they want to be in touch (con-tingent to) with an outside to man-made institutions.24 They want to project themselves beyond the horizon instituted by the established social and civic orders—to bring back fresh views, ideas, 23  Cf. ffor the etymology of the word “miniature,” for example: https://www.etymonline. com/word/miniature. 24  Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

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and literally projects.25 They build speculative models of the universe in order to stay human, to divert institutional power such as to prevent the sphere of their fragile and balanceable concert-ation of ideational power from rigidifying and becoming an unbalanced con-centration. The constitutive element for architecture—if it manifests world pictures reduced to scales, miniatures of world models—is the module. The module facilitates the reduction to scales that is at stake between the “architectonic model” and the “miniature of a world picture” that is to be built. “Module” literally means an “allotted measure,” from the Latin modulus, “small measure,” the diminutive of modus, “measure, manner” (from PIE root *med-, “take appropriate measures”). Mathematicians think of it as a name for a relation of one over many because it is an algebraic term and became important after the introduction of the group concept by Évariste Galois and Henrik Abel. We can best think of it in terms of a diachronic tripod, providing a plateau (the plane on top of the pedestal of the episteme’s point of view?). If viewed in time as a magnitude (diachronic) rather than in space, a tripod is precariously balanced by its three legs—namely geometrical proportion, arithmetical proportionality, and harmonic proportion—since any of these means establish proportion differently.26 Here is not the place to elaborate on this; however, let me just say for now that the module can count as the magnitude (how much) as well as the multitude (how many). Respective to its units, a reference order can be appropriate (proportionate). As magnitude, it is the condensate of a world model, the seed for a realized, built, copy of it (a miniature, an image of the model reduced into scales); as multitude, it renders the magnitude countable and thus facilitates its condensation into a model that can be realized. The peculiarity of architecture is that it has a notion of the module that is all at once mathematical, metaphysical, scientific, technical but also “cosmical” (in the sense of both myth and beauty and their inspiration for decoration, decorum, arts, cults, and customs).27

25  Massimo Cacciari, “Project,” in The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 122–145. 26  P.H. Scholfield, The Theory of Proportion in Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). 27  Cf. Robert Hahn, Anaximander and the Architects (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001).

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In architecture, the “module” refers to the foot of a column, often its diameter (geometric proportion). But the significance of a column in architecture is cosmic: It is the cosmos’s axis; it symbolically separates, joins, or interpenetrates the cosmos. It is the scope that spans around the radial line that contracts the zenith (the summit point on a spherical surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it) and the nadir (the base point on a spherical surface, opposite to the summit point). This is why the architectonic column is an allegory for what carries the weight of the word in the universe. Architecture considered through the symbolism of the column can never perfectly integrate the three ways of rationalizing the balance (the stasis, the status, and the statement) of its buildings into one whole “body”: the harmonic proportion (status), the arithmetic proportionality (stasis), and the geometric proportion (statement). The three kinds of being-in-proportion cut through one another, they intersect each other in angles (inclinations and declinations). They cannot be reduced to one another (now specifically in the arithmetic sense of a mean magnitude, a common denominator). But from transcribing their respective scales (from having a model of how they cut through one another), architecture produces “reduced” miniatures (with respect to world pictures, they are “improperly” articulated models, they are rhetorically reduced, fashioned (coded) for a particular site and situation rather than claiming general validity) of the world modeled architectonically. “Reduction,” here, produces the “essence”; hence, it is a reduction to scales (not a reduction in scale). Such a notion of architectonic models are computational models that I propose at the beginning of this text. They are computational because they articulate balances in the “place-holding void” constituted by images that are absent. It is this absence that they fill, ideationally, with numerical imagination. Where the place of world images is unoccupied (or highly contested and therefore subject to great tumult and disorientation), architectonic models contract (mechanically, inventively) metaphysics with geometry. They follow metaphysics without obeying its doctrines. This is why I suggest speaking of architecture’s political role as that of an anarchic civility (civil with respect to a self-understanding as civil servants but anarchic with respect to any one world picture or world model (ideology) in particular). Computation is the postponing of decisions (one can indefinitely further “procedural-ize” a process), but it thereby actualizes an axial kind of decision—a scission rather than simply a decision—like the cut of the umbilical cord to which every in-

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fant is subject; the word “tekton” indeed shares the root with “tikto,” for “give birth, engender.”28 Architectonic models are computational models but unlike computational models considered as “calculative” only. Architectonic models place the infant, so to speak, in the position of a discrete beginning that is always also a continuation. Architecture claims a protective and leading role for such beginnings (arkhon), but it understands this role as one that seeks to step back and share its rules as soon as possible, that is, as soon as the weaving of threads (lines of continuity) through the noise through which it cuts (scission), grows sound, solid and stable enough for maintaining its own integrity other, perhaps self-directed.29 In this sense, education plays in the interplay between the initial consolidation and the subsequent institutionalization of an order that truly deserves to be called classical because it never possesses (but therefore also never loses) its own originality and “modernity.” Interestingly, Vitruvius thought of architecture itself as an enkyklios paideia, an imaginal and circular public domain that is to accommodate all knowledge available at a time.30

Scalar Inversions: Nine Vignettes Let us summarize. What I would like to propose is to think of architecture as the instrumentation of space, in its full scope of epistemic and aesthetic richness (Raumerfahrung). TThis implies to think of architecture not only in terms of lengths in a given, coordinated space but also to think of the axes that give us dimensions in terms of rotations, in essence, as temporal. The coding of the rotational axis gives us scales, and together in combination with lengths, they allow for interiorizing temporalities within dimensional architectonic volumes, elements, and concepts. To give a better idea to grasp what this would entail, one should think of architecture as an instrumentation of space that articulates temporalities like a musical instrument expresses sounds

28  Cf. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell, Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1999), 120. 29  Indra Kagis McEwen, “The ‘architectonic book,’” in Vitruvivianism: Origins and Transformations, ed. Paolo Sanvito (Berlin: De Gruyter Verlag, 2016), 101–112. 30  See Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

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(its extension, its body) in time. These articulations are then articulations of the world as a miniature that brings the world to scales in each particular articulation. Such articulations are guided by holistic ideas of the cosmos and their conjugation by what we could call metaphysical gestures. Through such a notion of instrumentation (not instrumentalization, which would mean to turn an object into a tool for achieving a particular goal), these miniatures are not meant to represent a world picture, and neither are they realizations of a world model. Rather, they can be thought of as crystallizations that modulate alloys (forged mixtures, impure “essences”) of material quantity and formality according to architectonic models—models that relate “modeling” computationally with “ideation/imagination” eradicated from any particular order of pure ideality. This eradication is what is meant with the loss of images. Its acceptance amounts for architecture to affirming finitude and death in relation to its core concept, that of form. Hence, what I propose is a materialist understanding of architecture. With this, architecture can continue the humanist legacy foregrounded by Blumenberg, namely that there is a particular relation between “building” and “education” (in German Bildung) that manifests in the university’s “vivid economy of specialization and interdependency, of solitude and exchange among its fields and subjects.”31 Architecture could then play a similar role on the social scale to the one whose loss Blumenberg mourned for philosophy on the scale of the individual, namely to grasp the possibilities that present themselves for living in vivid and powerful manner. The philosophical “dawning human awareness of itself” would then not relate to the individual but to cultures at large. Architecture education would be distinctive in how it bridges technics with arts, by drawing an ideational energy from the unoccupied stead of images: With numerical imagination, architectonic models bring the nothingness of this void to scales; this is what is meant with the term “scalar inversions.”32 Architects, then, act politically as civic servants, whose work is nevertheless that of a kind of mastership because they remain “anarchic” with respect to any one particular world picture or world model.

31  Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” 67. 32  The term of the “vignette” as well as that of “scalar inversions” and their roots in “numerical imagination” is inspired by John Durham Peters, “33 + 1 Vignettes on the History of Scalar Inversion,” ELH 86, no.2 (2019): 305–331.

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What follows are nine indexical vignettes to illustrate such architectonic-political gestures (here without unfolding any entailments they contain with respect to world pictures). The selection is not meant in a canonical sense, if canon means a list of best-of examples. But it is meant in a canonical sense, if canon is taken in its old sense from sculpture and architecture where it provides an abstract rational framework that keeps proportion, analogy, and symmetry as separate dimensions that can be related together in a great variety of manners.33 The examples are called vignettes to foreground the materialist understanding of time, which does not treat time in terms of a progressively linear historical periodization; vignettes come from vineyard, a name that beautifully bridges how the fertility of a ground and its particularly local character and temper, together with the technical/metrical cultivation of it (yard), affect what it produces (wine). Each of the vignettes bring temporalities to scales in space and exposes scalar inversions on diverse levels of abstraction—each demonstrating an instrumentation of space in the sense elaborated above.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) Alberti thinks of architecture as ordinated volumes made of pictures that represent nothing;34 he transcribed his experience with dioptric instruments to cryptography and invented new principles of encryption with his so-called Alberti Cipher,35 and he applied such encryption to develop grammatizations of vernaculars; 36 he bridged philosophy and economy by asking the following: Can I be a friend (in the philosophical sense of soulmate) to the prince upon whom I depend? Can there be friendship in marriage? Is the home the proper place for education?37 33  I have elaborated on this in “Once Upon the Autonomy of Words,” in Architecture and Naturing Af fairs, eds., Mihye An and Ludger Hovestadt, Naturing Affairs (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020). 34  Alberti, Das Standbild - Die Malkunst. Grundlagen der Malerei /De Statua - De Pictura - Elementa Picturae (Berlin: wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011); the first treatise on painting decoupled from its mimetical function. 35  Albertis ludi mathematici, cf. K. Williams et al., eds., The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti (Basel: Springer Basel, 2010). 36  Alberti wrote the first syntax of the Tuscan vernacular language. 37  Leon Battista Alberti, Diner Pieces, trans. David Marsh (Michigan: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies in conjuction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1987);

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Claude Perrault (1613–1688) Perrault made a strong intervention in the so-called quarrel between the ancients and the moderns38 in the seventeenth century, by proposing to mechanize the Classical Canon of orders and styles: His columns for the Louvre are columns liberated from carrying any weight; they are bound to carry the passing of time alone.

Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) In tune with the analytical paradigm of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution, Semper insisted on continuity between nature and technics; he subjected architecture to a materialist turn and regarded it as a fabric, an industrious function of nature; he was looking for an architectural science of style.39

Adolf Loos (1870–1933) Loos proposed to arrange rooms not according to planes (planar geometry) but rather within a given volume: He partitioned volumes into scales, cutting through and freely arrangeable within it (Raumplan). To distinguish (or extend? refine?) this approach, he came up with what he called the principle of cladding, by which he meant an imagination that does not form spaces but rather masses.

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) Le Corbusier developed a calculus of how to render the analytical partitioning of volumes into scales continuous again, as liberated ratios of logic orders. Hence, his reference was neither space nor mass but economical order, according to particular “rationalities” (plan libre)—an instrumentation that “modulates” the volumes of massive spaces or spatial masses.

Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri Della Famiglia, ed. by Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti and Francesco Furlan (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). 38  For more context, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Querelle_des_Anciens_et_des_ Modernes. 39  Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, Or, Practical Aesthetics (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004).

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Fritz Haller (1924–2012) Haller was not afraid to think the absolute of change: “Totale Stadt is here called the structure [Gebilde] that allows for this network [Gef lecht] of different living spaces in one total living space. Totale Stadt is a system of resting and moving objects and energies covering the entire world,” and “the sections ‘general model,’ ‘specific model,’ and ‘concrete construction’ plan of this study do not represent a well-ordered, complete whole. They can rather be compared to a loosely arranged puzzle from which pieces are still missing or have not been put in their proper position.”40

Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) Rossi writes a scientific autobiography, inspired by the conservation of energy principle and its relation to a material kind of memory and illustrating it with the schoolmaster Muller’s story. He tells of a mason who is struck by the idea that the energy expended from heaving a rock to a rooftop does not get lost but remains latent in the stone and might, if the stone fell down one day, even be the same energy that kills a passerby: “The principle of the conservation of energy is mingled in every artist or technician with the search for happiness and death,” a death that “in some sense is a continuation of energy.”41

Peter Eisenman (1932–) Eisenman is the thinker of the ultimate diagram in architecture; for him, the diagrammatic is totalized: “With the end of the end, what was formerly the process of composition or transformation ceases to be a causal strategy, a process of addition or subtraction from an origin. Instead, the process becomes one of modification—the invention of a non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal-oriented process.”42

40  Fritz Haller, Totale Stadt. ein Modell. 2, Ein globales Modell (Olten: Walter, 1975). 41  Aldo Rossi, Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 1. 42  Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 154–173.

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Rem Koolhaas (1944–) For Koolhaas, the force of manifestos acts upon the past; it dopes logistic grid structures through ciphering them: “Manhattan is the 20th century Rosetta Stone.”43 He depicts architecture as ultimate, against urbanism, by attributing it the greatest magnitude called “Bigness”: “Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of bigness;”44 the rationality of its massivity refers self-referentially to a voided and ciphered principle of causality: “[The] best reason to broach Bigness is … because it is there.”

Peter Zumthor (1943–) Zumthor turns to atmosphere as a word for architectonic quality: “I enter a building, see a space, and get its atmosphere, and within fractions of a second I have a sense of it as it is [für das, was ist].”45 An architect “rationalizes” this viscerally experienceable quality—holistically, mythically, technically, psychologically, and materially.

Junya Ishigami (1974–) Ishigami articulates constitutions of time dissolved. He follows rituals of a massive kind of transcendence. He builds a box of aluminum the size of a four-story house and weighing a ton, which he fills with helium so that it f loats and can be moved at the touch of a finger. And he designs columns about as thick as raindrops: “I want to make a new scale of architecture, a natural scale, an elemental scale” for an architecture as based on any sizes found in nature: “In nature structure and space are not divided. Air is space, but it also has a structure. But architecture divides these things.”46

43  Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). 44  Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness and the Problem of Large,” in S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 494–516. 45  Peter Zumthor, Atmosphären: Architektonische Umgebungen. Die Dinge um mich herum (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006). 46  Rowan Moore, “Junya Ishigami: Architecture of Air; Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 – review,” The Guardian, July 3, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/ jul/03/junya-ishigami-serpentine-pavilion-zumthor.

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Sublime Uselessness On the Speculative Virtues of the Architectural Project Riccardo M. Villa

Architectural Uselessness and Financial Endlessness Almost half a decade ago, architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri was penning his famous epigraph on the status of contemporary architecture: stripped from any ideological prefiguration, incapable of giving birth to any socially relevant change nor to any utopia that would deserve such a name, architecture was condemned, according to Tafuri, to “return to pure architecture” or “in the best cases, to sublime uselessness.”1 In such a “drama,” the convict responsible for having taken away from architecture any kind of usefulness is none other than capitalism; the declared program of Architecture and Utopia was then “the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture.”2 In a later interview, dated 1995, Tafuri stated: “Today architects are forced into either being a star or being a nobody.”3 What Tafuri acknowledged were the conditions of architecture in a world governed by market economy and driven by production, where no ideology is possible anymore. Faced with the all-encompassing and operative reality of this world, the imaginative power of architecture seems to be lost once and for all. In such an environment, our Weltbild—a “world-image” or, in Hans Blumenberg’s words, “that quintessence of reality in 1  Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), ix. 2   Ibid. 3  Manfredo Tafuri, “Non c’è critica, solo storia,“ Interview by Richard Ingersoll, Casabella, no. 619–620, 1995.

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which and through which man understands himself, orients his evaluations and his practical objectives, seizes his possibilities and his necessities and projects himself in his essential needs”4 —is nothing else than a derivative of a global economic model. It is precisely out of this ground, from this “picture of the world” as a mere non-ideological yet operative rendering of mechanisms of financial speculation, that I would like to look at how architecture’s potentialities and power can be and have been re-thought. It is curious to note how Tafuri—a scholar extremely attentive to the choice of words—decides to link what he defined as the “drama of architecture” to its loss of usefulness, almost electing the ratio utilitatis as indispensable to a valuable existence of architecture itself. Surely, in a post-ideological world view the other two poles of the Vitruvian triad appear as irrelevant: What places could firmitas and venustas have in the diagrammatic immediateness of continuous economic exchanges? What kind of construction can firmly stand against such f lows? What type of values does its beauty represent? Usefulness and exchangeability are different concepts, yet they intertwine with each other. In the Politics, Aristotle states that everything we possess has two uses: a “proper” use, tied to the final cause of the thing—its telos— and an “improper” one, that manifests whenever an object is exchanged for something else. “For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe.”5 The primacy of the first is explained by the fact that, in the very end, this will be the use that will “exhaust” the thing. This is particularly evident not only in the case of things like clothing, as in Aristotle’s example, but especially in the most basic form of goods like nourishment, that literally gets consumed as they are used. A thing turns into a good precisely when charged with such “destiny” of an ultimate consumption, and the related promise of satisfaction of needs—that is to say, whenever a thing can eventually do good. Aristotle’s explanation is here important for two reasons: First, it intertwines the notion of use to the one of end (as telos); second, it inscribes exchan4  Hans Blumenberg, “ Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft, vol. 30 (1961): 67–75. 5  Aristotle, Politics 1257a10–15, as quoted in Marcel Hénaff, “The Scandal of Profit and the Prohibition of Appropriating Time,” in The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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ge in use, instead of seeing it as a separate value. Exchange is what subtracts the thing from consumption or at least what temporarily suspends it from an “end” (use or consummation) that will eventually be met. It is perhaps worth mentioning, to this regard, the peculiar status of money: As a “substitute of need,” following Aristotle’s definition in the Nicomachean Ethics, money can only be exchanged. This means that its suspension from any final use is eternal, it constitutes money’s “destiny.” Never-ending exchange is precisely what the term “currency” embodies: a continuous f low, a current that never finds a final state of rest. It is important to remark once again that this does not mean that by not having a use, money is completely absolute from it: Even if suspended, use is still the presupposition that gives value to money, a destiny which money cannot reach but that still stands as its ultimate scope. This scope can, of course, be forgotten: It is the case of the merchant, a figure whose profession lives only off exchange rather than off the products of a work (a techne). According to Aristotle, the merchant cannot find an honorable place in the polis. He is treated like a virus, an entity that feeds off the natural cycles of needs and must, therefore, be kept out of the walls of the city. This “virulence” springs from the commerce that exceeds the boundaries of the polis, from all those exchanges that do not aim to the satisfaction of its finite needs (as finite is the city-form) but rather are carried by sea, a space with an endless horizon. Yet, there is a further reason for Aristotle’s condemnation of merchants: Profit, in the form of interests, is at the same time the aim and the product of the merchant’s activity. In other words, what he produces is not a finite product, like other artisans do. Profit is rather an open-ended type of product. Pleonexia is the name Aristotle gives to the insatiable desire for profit, a desire that is never content nor satisfied; for in chrematistics, the art of accumulating money, no proper use (no “end”) can be eventually envisaged. Furthermore, the merchant’s product is not natural but purely speculative. In antiquity, the word for interest was tokos; Aristotle regards it with suspicion because, in distinction to ordinary products, an interest is only destined for endless exchange. Furthermore, tokos literally translates as “child” or “offspring”: Interests are money engendered by money itself, a truly creative ability which is naturally belonging to living beings and that, thanks to speculation, is here artificially operated by a product.6 6  “And this term interest [tokos], which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. That is why of all

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On Imaginary Capitals: The Project as “Interest” Starting from Aristotle’s take on what we would call today financial speculation, I would now dare to trace an analogy between projects and interests: Both are “creatures” (tokoi) engendered from a speculative process. Furthermore, both can be “actualized,” to keep with Aristotle’s lexicon: Projects can be concretized in building, and interests can be expended for the purchase of goods. At the same time, both project and interest constitute imaginary capitals; they are “stocks” of a wealth that is apparently immaterial. Project here, is not to be understood as a tangible mass of the finished building but more in the sense of its architectural intention, a state in-between absolute ideality and immanence—and in this sense even more an inter-esse, a “being-in-between.” Virtual is the term that perhaps best fits such a state: The Latin vir, from which it derives, is a definition of man not as a biological entity but rather according to his social potentialities of proving himself (of being virtuous); the virtual indicates a reality the effects of which are not naturally determined but rather belong to a spectrum of mundane potentialities. Vis is the strength (be it willpower or brute violence) through which this potentiality is put into effect, the same that, if untamed, can degenerate into virus. In order to avoid such a risk, the potentially contagious violence of the vis must be channeled; it must be given a certain formality: To avoid an agony (a lethal struggle), forms of agonism (a formalized struggle) must be put into effect. As Michel Foucault pointed out in relation to neoliberal forms of government, competition is never a natural given but a “principle of formalization” produced by an “active governmentality.”7 Competition can then be considered as the internal logic of the virtual space to which projects and interests belong to; if political economy can regard it as a governmental device, architecture can perhaps look at competition as a regime of production of its own. Increasingly popular in the modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.” Aristotle, Politics I258b5 (as translated in Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth.) 7  Aim of neoliberalism is not to contain trade out of the polis (as for Aristotle), or to define a free space for the market within the political society (as for liberalism), but rather to formalise it as a form of government or, as Foucault states, to model the global exercise of political power on the principles of a market economy. Michel Foucault and Michel Senellart, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, (New York: Picador, 2010).

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architectural profession, competition is a practice that has at least two main features that are worth being mentioned. First, the multiplicity of competitors exposes every proposal to the actual possibility of not being realized at all. This implies that that telos, the end or use toward which the project is designed is, in this context, exposed to the risk of being suspended once and for all. It could rightfully be objected that this is the case for any project, be it part of a competition or not, yet the point is that, by the presence of many potential winners, the one of realization turns from an unfortunate possibility to an actual probability, whose chances rely on the number of overall competitors. In competitions, projects are literally expendable; they are designed in a perspective of potential waste. To avoid such waste of work, some architects collect their unbuilt projects as a sort of storage from which to draw, in order to reuse them in a further project that might require a similar design answer. In her “ethnographic study” on the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Albena Yaneva records the interesting case of Porto’s Casa da Musica: The form of an unused foam model initially designed for a private villa is simply scaled up and turned into the iconic Portuguese music hall.8 Here, the image provided by the project prevails on any possible destination and transcends it, turning at some point even into a mediator in the negotiations between the architect and the different clients. In this sense, architecture is truly interest, as interesse negotia, being in-between negotiations or economic affairs but also an interest in the sense of the Aristotelian tokos, of a currency able to be ex-pended (removed from its suspension) for diverse ends. The second outcome to be highlighted when considering the peculiar regime of production triggered by competitions is already implicit in the first: As the “stock” of projects can implicitly become an imaginary of reference for the office, such an imaginary can also be consciously constructed as such. The strategic constitution of a spectrum of reference is facilitated by the fact that in a competition the client keeps himself mostly out of the process, only providing initial requirements and intervening at the end with his decision over the winner. As a consequence, the architect has more freedom than in an ordinary private commission. Seen under this light, the accumulation of reusable (or expendable) forms constitutes a true capital for any architectu8  Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009).

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ral practice: on one hand, as an accumulation of forms-as-currency, that can be potentially expended and converted according to diverse purposes; on the other, as manifestation of an ideal spectrum of all the projects that have already been designed as well as the ones that will potentially be designed. The architecture that populates such an imaginary capital is one in which the destination is only a provisional, contingent content; “Architecture is without content, but not without intentions” state Kersten Geers and David Van Severen in the pamphlet of Everything Architecture.9 The exhibition collected models of projects from the office (many of them unbuilt) along with “perspectives, photographs, paintings, objects, and sculptures often not by the office, but integrally part of its universe”: projects and other interests that render that spectrum —“whatever we consider ‘architecture’ today”—somehow tangible and visible. The discreet elements of this “universe,” as they call it, are not just projected out of a pre-determined idea but rather are constitutional of an imaginary that arises out of their mutual interaction: “objects and sculptures find their place in between the models and tables, they negotiate the datum of the show, and question issues of size, scale, and originality.” This continuous negotiation and renegotiation is, to the Belgian duo, what constitutes the world of architectural tradition. By “cutting, accumulating, appropriating and selecting” the architect escapes an understanding of the world as a simple accumulation of givens to be taken as they are, merely as the totality of natural facts. The “cutting” that Everything Architecture puts into display celebrates what the authors define as “contemporary classicism”: a process of selection that does not settle but demands to be continuously renewed and actualized.

9  Pamphlet distributed on the occasion of the exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels, March 4 – May 29, 2016), italics are added. The title echoed the famous motto coined by Hans Hollein some decades before, when, by saying that “Everything is Architecture,” the Austrian designer declared instead the totality of the world (everything there is) as the horizon of reference for his work.

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World-Images and World-Pictures Quite a different cosmos is the one evoked by Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City in 1969: A “Universal Climatic System” as they call it, for it is a space in which circulation and economic f lows take over—nothing can be withheld, everything moves non-stop—an environment with no outside. The speculation at its base is both theoretical and real: The omni-comprehensive infinity of the No-Stop City matches with the infinite horizon of time at the basis of financial speculation. To the real speculation of finance, architecture replies with theoretical speculation in which theory is sichtbar machen, rendering visible the invisible “ideology” of capitalism.10 If, according to Tafuri, capitalist development was sieging architecture as an “ideological prefiguration,” Archizoom used architecture precisely in order to give a figure to those mechanisms that, springing from an operative reality rather than out of an ideology, were otherwise impossible to submit to a critique of ideology. The crisis that Archizoom’s project outlines is the one of architecture and of its surrender to urbanism, the dissolution of its finite form in an environment of endless circulation. In spite of its omni-comprehensiveness, the figure rendered by Archizoom Associati cannot be accounted as a traditional Weltbild: nno ideology can be spot in there, and its contemplation doesn‘t lead to any “redemption”. The No-Stop City is rather a representation of the Weltbildverlust, of a loss of that image.11 Archizoom’s theory portrays capitalism as a world-model, a rendering of a world engendered by the technological power at the service of capitalist development. The No-Stop City is a Weltbild only in the sense given to this word by Martin Heidegger: a Gebild, a “structured picture” rather than an image.12 It is an objective representation of the world, a Vor-stellung, 10  See Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture; Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 11  Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle.” 12  “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.” Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Of f the Beaten Track, eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge:

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something that “stands-in-front” as a separate object. Such a picture strictly arises from technics and calculation and cannot be ideological precisely for its fundamentally mathematical nature. Heidegger’s Weltbild is produced by technology and scientific research, as an exact picture: Its precision is determined and “brought out” (ex-actus) according to the measure of the frame through which the picture itself arises. Interestingly, the picture of a global exactitude is the one we find at the center of The City of the Captive Globe (1972). Attached as one of many “fictional conclusions” to Delirious New York, it portrays earth as constricted in the fabric of a Manhattan-like urban grid, surrounded by a multitude of different architectonic artifacts, each one erected upon a plinth. In the accompanying text, the city is presented as “devoted to the artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals and their inf liction on the World.”13 The world of phenomenal reality is here invented, destroyed and restored by science and art, whose speculations (theoretical and architectural) are equally placed on the same bases as other “forms of madness.” In a vision worthy of Don Quixote, folly melts with reason, science with mania, reality with fiction. The suspension from the ground is both architectural and epistemological: It grants to these constructions the condition of an “ideological laboratory,” uplifting “unwelcome laws” and “undeniable truths,” in order “to create nonexistent physical conditions.”14 These mental architectural constructions are referred to further in Koolhaas’ text as “institutes,” in a suspiciously direct reference to Heidegger’s text; in the latter, it is the “institutional character of research” that ensures the “procedural operativeness” (Betrieb) of science and its consequent rendering of a world picture.15 Nevertheless, in Koolhaas’ tale it is not just a picture of the world which is produced, but it is the world itself being “bred” and therefore reproduced in an “ageless pregnancy.” Instead of vanishing in the endless replication of the same model, as envisaged by Archizoom, architecture here Cambridge University Press, 2002). “Gebild” is Heidegger’s neologism to indicate a structured image. 13  Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 294–295. 14   Ibid. 15  Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 124. To some extent, Heidegger’s Betrieb seems to resonate with the “affirmative performance” (Aussageleistung) with which Blumenberg characterizes world-models.

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exploits the suspension provided by the endlessness of capitalist development and urbanism to operate a free, delirious construction of the world.

Reality as a Project The skyscraper is the “invention” at the center of Delirious New York. Its delirium is, before the one of an architectural “madness,” a literal, geometrical one: The Latin delirare literally means “to go out the furrow,” therefore crossing those lines that are defined by the established order. Nevertheless, the skyscraper does not fall into the horizontal infinity of the No-Stop City; its endlessness is rather a vertical one that, starting from a finite plan, grows toward the sky, rising as far as the financial and technological resources will allow. The lack of definition is also ref lected in the internal logic of the building itself: Thanks to what Koolhaas calls “lobotomy” (the disconnection between exterior and interior) and “vertical schism” (the independence of each f loor from the other),16 the skyscraper materializes a new kind of architectural typology that completely disregards any univocal destination or use. Nevertheless, the skyscraper’s “cultural potential” of accommodating almost any program does not condemn it to genericity: Its functional instability is counteracted by the ability to house “each known designation with maximum specificity, if not overdetermination.”17 Such quantitative outburst—the one of the vertical rise and the internal one of overdetermination—make of the skyscraper an “automonument,”18 a quality that springs out of sheer quantity, but that is not precisely calculable: A structure becomes a monument only “beyond a certain critical mass.”19 Therefore, automonumentality, later re-branded by Koolhaas as Bigness, is the quality of an architecture that does not try to resolve problems once and for all but that instead capitalizes on crisis. In the case of Manhattan, this aspect is represented by congestion: Instead of trying to reduce or control its own chaos, the “delirious” city exploits it. The skyscraper is the figure of such exploitation. Bigness is precisely what manifests after the overstepping of a “critical mass” or, in other words, of a point beyond 16  Koolhaas, Delirious New York. 100–107. 17   Ibid, 107. 18  Ibid, 100. 19  Ibid.

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which no balance or rest is calculable anymore. Like Heidegger’s notion of “the gigantic”20 —something that arises through the Weltbild yet out of its frame—automonument and Bigness are a kind of greatness that exceeds the resolution of a calculated picture: By stepping out of that horizon of calculability, these qualities draw their own status from a locus in which no equation can possibly be resolved. For such reasons, Bigness and automonument can rightfully be considered as the contemporary architectural embodiment of the notion of the sublime. 21 Through its own automonumentality, the skyscraper becomes the model of a construction that overcomes usefulness and pragmatism, not through refusal but rather through their delirious overload. The metropolis is not made of just one skyscraper, though. The grid in which the Globe is held “captive” welcomes a plurality, if not an infinity of these speculative constructions. Such plurality is at the base of an “Age of World-Pictures”: Heidegger himself acknowledged modernity as a Neuzeit that puts an end to the struggle between different world-images by reducing them to world-views, to ideological constructions. Both Heidegger’s and Koolhaas’ works are, in this sense, structural views upon the “postmodern condition:”22 a condition overcomes the modern loss or refusal of traditional values, its Wertfreiheit, by embracing it as the possibility for the proliferation of any value, and its potential of exchange. In such a setup, “evil” does not reside in the negation of goodness but rather in the impossibility to reconduct goodness to singularity, to reduce it to one. How to orient oneself in the face of such an “infernal” complexity? Here the answers of both Koolhaas and Tafuri seem to coincide: History—as a narrative account but also as a picture of events—is a project. Koolhaas’ “history” of the skyscraper—upon which his work as an architect is largely based—is fictional, it is not written with the aim to describe events “as they really were,”23 yet it works with factual material; it is not a 20  “The gigantic” is the translation of German das Riesenhafte. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture.” 21  Ibid, 135. “Sublime” as sub-limes, “lifted on the boundary,” is literally what slips out of the frame, what cannot be withheld by it. 22  Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport Sur Le Savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 23  “Wie es wirklich gewesen ist”: a positivist history of pure “factuality” is what Nikolaus Pevsner (here quoting Leopold von Ranke) pretended to fight for, an attitude which Tafuri himself takes distance from. See Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri

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product of pure fantasy. In a specular way, Tafuri’s account on contemporary architecture—his work as a historian—starts from a set of givens and shreds of evidence but in the full awareness that what it produces is a construction and not a reconstruction.24 Through the project, both architecture and history refuse any “dead determinism” as much as any apodictic “solution”: In history, Tafuri writes, “‘solutions’ do not exist. But you can always try to suppose that the only possible way is the exasperation of antitheses, the head-on collision of positions, the accentuation of contradictions.”25 This is a regime of competition that, like in the case of the architecture, suspends any deterministic telos and filters the images of history from a domain of purely fictional possibility to the one of a credible probability through the disposition of an immanent structure. If Koolhaas’ “Manhattanism” was about exploiting congestion, to Tafuri, history is a “project of crisis.”26 Crisis derives its etymology from the Greek krino, meaning “to cut, separate, put aside, distinguish.” The cut of the project, both as a critical tool as much as an instrument of decision, is what allows the casting of a bridge between the many senses inscribed in the “labyrinth” and the transcendent unambiguity of the “sphere,”27 building images that are “faithful” without a claim to be ultimately true.28 It is for these reasons that the “sublime uselessness” of architecture is something not to be lamented but rather articulated as a form of resistance to any blind economical utilitarianism, something that immanently transcends (and is therefore sublime and subliminal) any dead determinism through its inherent sophistication. It could be argued, very rightfully, that the utilitas to which Tafuri refers was rather one of an “engaged architecture,” socially and politically

and Contemporary Architecture, ed. Alta L. Price, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013). 24   Ibid. 25  Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e Storia dell‘Architettura (Lecce: Laterza, 1968), 270. The translation is the one appeared in Biraghi, Op.cit, 20. 26  Manfredo Tafuri, “Introduction: The Historical ‘Project’,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987): 1–24. 27  The reference is in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth. 28  It is interesting to this regard to note that we speak precisely of “high-fidelity” whenever mentioning a technology able to faithfully reproduce its source data.

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relevant.29 Yet politics, as Hannah Arendt points out, originates as a space in-between men, which in order to appear must be liberated from the necessities of economy (as the needs of the household) and that can, therefore, let the citizens of the polis deal, through their virtues, with the contingencies of a free life.30 It is in speculation as a locus communis of architecture and finance, an intra-worldly space of projects and interests in which necessary uses and determinate ends are “suspended,” that a contemporary and edifying dimension for architecture as a political practice—as a common good—can perhaps be reinvented.

29  Tafuri, interview. 30  Hannah Arendt. “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005): 93–200.

Making the Donkey Drink Water, or the “Problem” of Stopping in the Digital Age 1 Skender Luarasi We think in generalities, but we live in detail. Alfred North Whitehead/ The Education of an Englishman

Introduction: The “Problem” of Stopping in History There comes a moment in a digital studio when a critic or someone from the audience asks the student, Where do you stop? How do you select the best out of hundreds of iterations? The poor student tries to give an exhaustive answer but unsuccessfully. Somehow, the answer feels too general, as if it could work equally well for entirely different outcomes. Where and how does one stop? Why is the question asked? Why do the answers to the question tend to be inconclusive? The question of stopping has a history that precedes the digital. While the answers to the question of stopping vary, they all share the modern ethos and hubris of thinking that stopping is a problem of knowledge and that one can and ought to provide an answer to such a question. NOW! Modernity, however, does not know where to stop. It never did. Stopping is an aesthetic rather than an epistemological problem to be solved in general, and perhaps architecture is well poised to deal with it. That is why Paul Valéry, a distingu1  This paper draws from my dissertation, see Skender Luarasi, “Where Do You Stop? A Critical Inquiry into Style, Geometry and Parametricism in History” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2018). It also expands on arguments I presented at the symposium Divergence in Architectural Research, see Luarasi, “A Critical Inquiry into the ‘Problem’ of Stopping in Architecture” (presentation, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, US, March 6, 2020). This paper is also part of my forthcoming book On the Art of Stopping.

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ished thinker of stopping, chose an architect, Eupalinos, instead of Socrates, the philosopher who knew everything (but never wrote), to address it.2 The “problem” of stopping emerges at key historical moments in the self-legitimation of knowledge. The 17th century’s querelle between François Blondel and Claude Perrault about whether certain proportions were transcendentally or empirically beautiful is one such moment. Perrault’s ‘solution’ was to provide a natural and arbitrary beauty. If the former is “very apparent and consists in the relationship the parts have collectively as a result of the balanced correspondence of their size, number, disposition, and order,” the latter was what “appears agreeable not by reasons within everyone’s grasp but merely by custom and the association the mind makes between two things of a different nature.”3 Rudolf Wittkower did the same when he described the Palladian Villas as a customary variation governed by geometry.4 And Colin Rowe did the same when he compared Palladian and Corbusian villas in terms of the “virtues of a mathematical discipline” and “arbitrary free movement, curved walls, and framed views.”5 The two concepts are not symmetrical: The natural is supposed to provide principles of selection and judgment for (stopping) the customary. Another form the discourse of the natural(s) versus customarie(s) has taken in history is that of style. Though ostensibly against style(s), modern architecture did not dispense with the concept of style. Le Corbusier wrote that “in relation to the style of an age, the ‘styles’ are no more than an accidental surface modality, superadded to facilitate composition, stuck on to disguise faults, or duplicated for the sake of display.”6 The (natural) “style of the age” delimits different (customary) styles without being them or—to echo 2  Jacques Derrida quotes Nietzsche: “Socrates, he who does not write,” see Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 6. I am also referring here to Paul Valéry, see Valéry Eupalinos or the Architect, trans. William McCausland Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). 3  Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, trans. Indra Kagis McEwen (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1993), 40, 51. 4  See Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: Norton, 1971), 77. 5  Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976), 9. 6  Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnet (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1987), 118.

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Jacques Derrida—structures their play without participating in the play—a Style that is not a style.7 Such Style was a rhetorical conf lation of the modern machine and timeless geometry. In his early days with L‘Éplattenier, Le Corbusier had learned that nature is also all geometry. By analogy, then, the machine must be the natural—“The machine is all geometry.”8 “In place of the calcareous pebble or the imperfect orange, the machine brings shining before us disks, spheres, the cylinders of polished steel,” Le Corbusier writes.9 Here, the “best” pebble is the most geometrical one. Such a position, however, would be reversed after the war; the pebble would be appreciated precisely for its formal exuberance, chanced forms, and compositional “faults.”10 Though nature as model disappears with the advent of information theories, the model as nature does not. In Design Thinking, Peter Rowe frames stopping in terms of “a problem space [with] knowledge states, some of which represent solutions to a problem.”11 This space is represented as a tree (the natural), whose nodes are stopping points. Where does the tree metaphor stop? Through “normative positions” that provide “general principles with applicability beyond specific cases” and guard against “arbitrariness” (the customary).12 Where does the generality of such normative positions stop? These questions lead or rather regress to “an ‘urcorpus’ of knowledge that is considered to be ‘incorrigible’ and infallible … Theory then, it [sic] would seem, is mainly concerned with what lies outside the urcorpus of knowledge.”13 This conclusion concedes to the impossibility of such a theory to provide an answer to the question of stopping. In Design Thinking in Digital Age, while arguing that the digital provides “a clearer view of suitable stopping rules,” Rowe also provides the disclaimer that “there is no in-principle gua7  Jacques Derrida writes that the center has always been thought as “the center is not the center, [as] “that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality.” Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” in Writing and Dif ference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279. 8  Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 103. 9  Ibid, 112. 10 The concept of the shell becomes crucial in the postwar phase of Le Corbusier. For a comprehensive account of such a shift see Niklas Maak, Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2011). 11  Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 51. 12  Ibid, 114–115. 13  Ibid, 148.

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rantee that this would be the case. … What of course has not been replaced or directly enhanced is the actual activity, talent, and heuristic repertoire of a particular designer. A bit like donkeys, they can be led to water but not made to drink.”14 The natural is the “onto-epistemological” locus that presumably governs and stops the “deontological” donkey.15 The thesis, here, however, is rather the reverse: While the question erupts from an onto-epistemological level, it can be “answered” or dealt with only on the “lower” level, that of styles and the customary. No one ever really knows where to stop. Why is that?

Waiting and Toggling (between Cognitive and Aesthetic Judgement) That is, Paul Valéry answers, because there is “no way to measure knowledge except by the real powers it confers. I know only what I know how to handle.”16 The “problem” of not knowing where to stop indicates our knowledge’s freedom to produce representations of objects in respect to form. Remarking on this point, Valéry writes, “I see no necessary dependence between form and size; I can conceive of no form that might not be larger or smaller – it is as though the idea of a certain figure called forth in my mind an endless number of similar figures. If I have undertaken to produce one particular form, it is because I could have chosen to create entirely different ones.”17 This assertion is similar to Kant’s argument that in order for the “first person … to know something securely a priori he had to ascribe to the thing nothing except what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with its concept.”18 One cannot stop within cognitive judgement because the latter is immanently self-generative. For Kant, we can stop only through aesthetic 14  Peter Rowe, Design Thinking in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 59, 65. 15  I borrow and modify these terms from Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 11. 16  Paul Valéry, “Man and the Sea Shell”, in Paul Valery: An Anthology , Jackson Mathews ed., (London: Routledge. 1977): 108–135, 126. 17  Ibid., 120-121. 18  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108.

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judgement by clicking with an aesthetic object. For Valéry, we can stop only by waiting “for the desired effect to present itself. … [We] can do nothing but wait. We have no means to achieve in ourselves exactly what we want to obtain.”19 In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro draws an affinity between Kant’s aesthetics and Whitehead’s notion of the superject that “is not a subject that sub-jects an object under a schema but what a subject eventually becomes as it prehends a “datum” of the virtual as variation in a particular “subjective form.”20 The subject stops at the object. Stopping is a superjective moment. If there is a shift or toggling from the sub-jective state A to the superjective state B, then the next toggling will never return to the original subjective state A but to an A’, which will serve as the initial subjective state for the next toggling to a superjective state B’. Each toggling from A to B irreversibly changes the perception, imagination, and memory of any original state A.21 There is never a return to A, which means that the “original” state was never a subject to begin with but rather always-already a superject. Hence, a chain of superjects is captured by the following notation: S1, S2, S3, … Sn. What is original is not the subject but the superject, that which is superadded, the extra, the surplus. It is this irreversible entropic dynamism that opens up A and B to history and thus to the possibility of the new.22 The talent of making the donkey drink water lies precisely in these acts of toggling.

19  As cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 102, (emphasis mine). 20  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 23. For an account on Whitehead, see Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012). 21  Concerning the relation between perception and imagination and retention and protention, see Bernard Stiegler’s phenomenological analysis of the “cinematic consciousness” in Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); in particular, see “Selections, Criteria, and Recordings,” 16–20. 22  I make this argument in “Toggling through San Carlino: a speculative inquiry into the geometry and process in San Carlino and its interpretations in history,” Adil Mansure and Skender Luarasi, eds., Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 25–49.

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An Architectural Project: Waiting for Godot or A House for Two Strangers The project A House for Two Strangers shown below, based on Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, is an exercise in waiting, toggling, and stopping. It does not consist of any problem space with knowledge states but rather a chain of intercalated obstacles, entrenched into one another as potential moments of stopping. The form yields from different digital and analog techniques, prehended through one another—paper, pencil drawing, watercolor, photoshop, physical models, and digital modeling. The house folds around a path that connects the spaces of the two strangers while also connecting the house to that outside from which Godot is expected to arrive. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot but God-ot never appears. Godot’s infinite absence triggers a toggling process between the two, one that yields closure for the two tormented souls.23 [fig. 1] How does the increase in computational speed affect toggling, waiting, and stopping? On the one hand, the digital tends toward an increase of superjective potential; on the other hand, it tends toward a total sub-jection and pre-programming of the chain of superjects S1, S2, S3, … Sn under the next “natural” down the line (a tree, a law, a model and so forth). In that case, what is perceived as liberation may be a total preemption of chance and time. And if there is no time, there is no stopping but only a dreary landscape like the one Socrates finds himself in , described in Valéry’s Eupalinos, where he is forever damned to wander like a ghost, without a body and without finitude.

The Divergent Aesthetics of the Spline There are two diverging tendencies of the digital: one toward a total codification of the design processes and the other toward paralogy. For example, Bernard Cache argues that “a truly non-standard architecture will only emerge if it is able” to enable the “distant production [of] all the documents 23  I also show this project in “A Critical Inquiry into the ‘Problem’ of Stopping in Architecture.” Published in Proceedings of the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium: Divergence in Architectural Research, March 5-6, 2020 (Atlanta, GA: School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021): 187–191.

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required for the distant production of architectural components.”24 This presupposes a total formalization of architecture through a construction tree of geometrical relationships among “original parents” and “dependents.”25 On the other hand, Cache brings the myth of Vitruvius’s projectiles, “foundering

Fig. 1: House for Two Strangers

(top lef t) Process: Paper model, (top middle) paper model & Drawing, (top right) Digital modeling & drawing, (bottum lef t) Process drawing (bottum middle) drawing, digital model, (bottum right) digital model

24  Bernard Cache, Projectiles, trans. Clare Barrett and Pamela Johnston, (London: Architectural Association, 2011), 71. 25  Ibid, 69.

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in inglorious mud – an anti-architecture of decomposition.” The myth suggests that the machines should be stopped through machination, that “we can find at the very heart of our written tradition the means both to construct a rational discourse and maintain a critical distance.”26 In its very tendency to toggle between construction trees and mud, between the most general and the most singular, such criticality is a form of hyper-modernity that we also witness in the work of Le Corbusier and other high modernists. Such toggling is a technique of stopping.27 In “Digital Style,” Mario Carpo argues that the style of the early nineties was the result of “a quest for formal continuity in architecture, born in part as a reaction against the deconstructivist cult of the fracture, [crossing] paths with the computer revolution of the mid-nineties, [a quest that] evolved into a theory of mathematical continuity.” Deleuze’s The Fold and the concept of the objectile “accompanied, fertilized, and catalyzed some stages of this process.”28 By referring to Bernard Cache, Deleuze defines the objectile as a very modern conception of the technological object that refers to our current state of things, where f luctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of the law, where the object assumes a place in a continuum by variation, where industrial automation or serial machineries replace stamped forms. The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of formmatter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginning of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.29 Digital discourse has rarely ref lected upon the fact that Deleuze’s objectile has two biases: On the one hand, there are continuous and variable objects, on the other, contiguous points of view imagined as a “place” outside the curve “where the lines perpendicular to tangents meet in a state of variation” [fig. 2]. These monads “see” only variation between inf lections but not the latter itself, which is a blind spot. “The transformation of the object refers to a correlative transformation of the subject: Just as the object becomes objectile, 26  Ibid, 18. 27  I make such an argument in my dissertation in the third and fourth chapter, “Where do you stop,” in the context of Le Corbusier’s work in general and the Modulor in particular. 28  Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 91. 29  Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 19.

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Fig. 2: Diagram of the Fold, Gilles Deleuze

the subject becomes a superject … The superject is the condition under which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis),” Deleuze writes.30 Luciana Parisi has pointed out a distinction between Bergson’s theory of continuous time, which Deleuze is usually known to have been following, and Whitehead’s “atomic or mereotopoligical conception of time.”31 Instead of a virtual time that governs and integrates actual entities into continuous whole, in the mereotopological model, it is the actual spatiotemporal “chunks” that “select,” “feel,” or prehend virtual time(s) and are joined into a whole. If parametric aesthetics of topological control anticipates and thus harnesses events in its own morphogenetic body, mereotopology reveals that events are blind spots, cut-breaking spatiotemporalities that explain the becoming of the extensive continuum: the arrival of a new spatiotemporality out of sync with a system of relations qua smooth variations.32 For Whitehead, there is “no continuity of becoming, but only a becoming of continuity.”33 The latter is the process of prehending the eternal objects through actual entities, which are “the final real things of which the world is made up … [Their] ‘being’ is constituted by [their] ‘becoming.’ This is the principle of process.” Eternal objects are “Pure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Fact, or Forms of Definiteness.”34 Shaviro points out that they 30  Ibid, 19–20 (emphasis mine). 31  Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 79. 32  Ibid, 92. 33  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 35. 34  Ibid, 23, 22.

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Fig. 3: (lef t) A composite curve determined by radial curve segments, (right) a Spline curve determined by control vertices and weights

“take on something of the role that universals, predicates, Platonic forms, and ideas played in older metaphysical systems.”35 Stopping is (found in) the process of the prehension of eternal object(s) through actual entities. The objectile is an eternal object that is prehended through contiguous points of view or actualities. Deleuze’s objectile as understood vis-à-vis Whitehead demands a choice between continuity and contiguity. Both readings are true but not at the same time. The objectile cannot be interpreted pluralistically, as being both about continuity and contiguity, but only as being either about one or the other. The only way to have both is to toggle from one to the other. Yet, in “Postscript on Control Societies,” Deleuze was far less optimistic about such toggling or philosophical distance. The various placements or sites of confinement through which individuals pass are independent variables: we’re supposed to start all over again each time, and although all these sites have a common language, it’s analogical. The various forms of control, on the other hand, are inseparable variations, forming a system of varying geometry whose language is digital (though not necessary binary). Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another.36

35  Steven Shaviro, “Eternal Objects,” The Pinocchio Theory (blog), May 13, 2007, http:// www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=578. 36  Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 178–179.

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In such modulated confinements, there is no longer time as the subject and superject collapse into a f luctuating variable and self-modulating continuous whole. When Greg Lynn compares the NURBS curve or the spline with the baroque curve, he does so precisely in terms of the former’s capacity to self-modulate in a continuum. [fig. 3]: The idea that the baroque period anticipates topology in architecture is somewhat misplaced. There is a critical difference between the discrete geometry of baroque space – a geometry of multiple points, and the continuity of topology – a multiplicity without points. Where baroque space is defined by multiple radii, a topological surface is defined as a flow that hangs from fixed points that are weighted. Although baroque space is geometrically highly continuous and highly differentiated, it does retain multiple centers. The continuous contours of baroque interiors are composed of segments of multiple discrete radial elements.37 Lest it go without notice, Lynn operates within the natural versus customary tradition. The Baroque curve is customary insofar as it stands for a particular geometrical tradition. The spline, on the other hand, is “natural” insofar as it is more abstract and general than the Baroque curve, as well as capable of abstracting and generalizing all curves. The spline is the new “natural.” It is a Curve that is not a curve. Despite all the claims about its immanence, the digital stealthily acquires the transcendental f lavor of a mystical “post-industrial” organism, whose technologically empowered yet hypomnesic brain now formlessly and continuously “spreads” across the surface of the earth. It is through such an image of spreading on the surface that Bernard Cache analyzes the city of Lausanne in Earth Moves [fig. 4]. This image consists of inf lection, vector and frame, images that Cache identifies with concrete geographical and manmade features of the city. Such features, however, seem to “dim” into the abstract orographic map of Lausanne. The latter of the two becomes both an actual image and a pure virtuality that governs all actualities without being them.

37  Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 20.

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Fig. 4: (lef t) a Diagram of Lausanne, (middle) a Vectorial Diagram of Lausanne, (right) an Orographic Map of Lausanne

This map is a pure form because on its surface no signs or markings appear at all. The orographic design is a design without destiny, a map without a plan. A world before man, even if we know that it is man-made … this surface has the strange quality of being first though it is constructed and is never fully realized. What is this image? As it has no value, it has nothing obscure; as it has no meaning, it has no top or bottom, right or left; as it has no density, it is superficial, which is to say geographical and not geological; and it has no center, its boundaries are nowhere, for any scansion would allow for meaning to emerge and would constitute objects and singularities through discontinuity. In short, it is an open surface in the pure light of weightlessness.38 For Cache, inf lection is a primary image that “allow[s] for all possible becomings.” Space is no longer about crests and valleys, upward or downward singular vectors “but a surface of variable curvature. We will no longer say that time f lows, but that time varies. No settling is possible in such a landscape: variable curvature turns us into nomads.”39 Even if Cache argues that inf lection is a “radical exteriority … unlike Kantian interiority,”40 inf lec38  Ibid, 18 (emphasis mine). 39  Ibid, 41. 40  Ibid, 37.

Making the Donkey Drink Water, or the “Problem” of Stopping in the Digital Age

tion comes very close to the Kantian schema insofar as, while being a primary image, it also acquires a telic f lavor. By privileging inf lection as a primary image, Cache is in line with the general bias of digital style for favoring inf lection over contiguity. It is never acknowledged, however, that Cache also reverses the order by making the frame the primary image, anterior to both inf lection and vector. The merit of Earth Moves lies in toggling between the two images without synthesizing them. Inf lection can never be a pure but a mixed spatio-temporality because it has to be first prehended through the technical actuality of the frame. For Cache, as for Gottfried Semper, architecture consists of a series of “interlocking frames in every dimension: plans, sections, and elevations” as well as walls, f loors, and roofs. The frame opens up an interval for inf lection and vector to unfold. One never knows how the interval will be filled … Intervals always remain and intercalated phenomena always slip into them, even if they finally break the frames of probability apart. … Architecture would be the art of introducing intervals in a territory in order to construct frames of probability. There are three abstract functions of the frame: separation, selection, and arrangement. The functional element of the first is the wall. One must delimit an interval in which a form of life that doesn’t fit a priori in its milieu will occur … Architectural space is not [a] general form of simultaneity; it is a space where coexistence is not a fundamental given, but rather the uncertain outcome of processes of separation and partitioning. The wall is the basis of our coexistence. Architecture builds its space of compatibility on a mode of discontinuity.41 Cache argues that life and continuity is possible only by inorganic and discontinuous means.42 If separation “removes us from the territory,” the se41  Ibid, 23–24 (emphasis mine). 42  Cache’s thought, here, bears a closer affinity with Bernard Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis than Deleuze’s vitalistic philosophy of the fold. Epiphylogenesis refers to a technical memory that is “at the same time the product of individual epigenetic experience and the phylogenetic support for the accumulation of knowledge constituting the intergenerational cultural phylum.” Bernard Stiegler and Ars Industrialis, “Anamnesis

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cond function, selection, “reestablishes connections” with it while “the frame operates on a vectorial multiplicity in order to determine its “bite” on the diagram.”43 Arranging multiplicity in the interval is the third function of the frame. This “bite” is a superjective act of stopping.

Conclusion: The Relevance of Stopping Now Paradoxically, one can only stop in time—that is, in and through process. Once that occurs, such stopping is forever vanishing or dimming ‘behind’ generation time. The two times are out of sync or untimely in relation to one another. Stopping never comes immediately—in time—but only in time. It is always either too late or too early, opening up the possibility of a space of generation in and for which there are no rules or principles yet. Once these principles are found, constructed or naturalized, then the time of stopping is forever lost or eternally trapped in the curvaceous surfaces of Valéry’s seashells. Then, such time has to be found again, at a different historical situation, with new techniques and for different imaginations, motivations, and aspirations. Today, one rarely speaks about process: how one uses or misuses a tool, how one deliberates in choosing one image over another, or how one fails amidst the humbling uncertainty of the design process. This does not mean, however, that stopping is no longer relevant; it simply means that it is no longer on the radar of current discourse, being displaced perhaps by the old modernist illusion that stopping can be “resolved” through the latest technology and optimizing algorithms. What does it matter if no one gives a damn about process and stopping? After all, the digital “footprint” of an unbridled development gets larger and larger, both in urban centers and the periphery. At the risk of becoming tautological, I would state that stopping affects and becomes relevant for architecture only if one theorizes, practices, and cares about it; otherwise, it does not. Being concerned about stopping produces a different and Hypomnesis: Plato as the first thinker of the proletarianization,” Ars Industrialis, accessed February 29, 2016, http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis, accessed 2/29/2016, 4. 43  Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 24–25 (emphasis mine).

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architecture and discourse from that which does not. Theory comes alive only if it is practiced, if it takes place; otherwise, of course, it is dead. The more digital capacities are increased, the more difficult it is to stop, the more urgent the cultivation of an art of stopping becomes. This is because, in a digital context, to paraphrase Valéry, the liberation of form from requirements such as material and size increases to an unprecedented degree.44 This liberation is similar to André Leroi-Gourhan’s rather “scandalous” argument that our feet, or the liberation of hands from locomotion and nourishment, privileged gesture and speech and consequently the evolution of the brain. The latter “was not the cause of developments in locomotory adaptation but their beneficiary.”45 The more developed the technology is, the “blanker” the page is, the less criteria to justify form there are, the freer our minds and hands are and the more relevant the question of stopping becomes. What would we do with this extra time? What new “brain” does this liberation call for? How would we anticipate and participate in the making of such time or brain?

44  See note 17. 45  André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 19–26.

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Depth in Aesthetic Perception Eugene Han

The perception of depth is often conf lated with the representation of spatial extension, though they are inherently distinct. Depth is fundamentally a qualitative aspect to perception, whereas extension relies on quantification. For this reason, one may speak of a f lat drawing or image as presenting depth, even though dimensional recession may not be represented. This comparison is not one of simile or metaphor but is a direct product of the processes of perception itself. It is because depth exists in our seeing that it can be simulated in perspectival drawings or in the Euclidean space of computer modeling applications—it is prior to any particular technique of representation. It can thus be perceived in an architectural plan as much as in an abstract painting, without recourse to common visual cues such as vanishing points, atmospheric desaturation, geometric occlusion, or motion parallax. These techniques are only incidental and merely aid in the process of simulating three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional canvas. The common tendency to construe the perception of distance for that of depth is consequent to an intellectual tradition in which the world is thought to be objectively rationalizable by the sciences, despite the subjectivity of our perception of it. Few theories have underpinned this tradition as much as the philosophy of René Descartes in which geometry provided an objective system for seeing. Giving the illustrative example of a blind man holding a pair of hinged wooden sticks [fig. 1], Descartes asserted that distance could be visually rationalized by measuring degrees of convergence, “as if by a natural geometry.”1 Therefore, in vision, depth was determined by the minute differentiation of 1  René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology (1637), trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge, UK: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), §137, pg 106.

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Fig. 1: Diagram of blind man holding to sticks to illustrate the geometry of perception. Descartes, Discourse on Method

the ocular axes of the eyes. The closer the object is placed in relation to the viewer, the more obtuse the angle that is formed by the two eyes upon the object. The fundamental implication was that our visual perception relied on a geometrical foundation that structured the entire world, and so by projection, the world’s objectivity is made available to ratiocination alone. Descartes’ philosophy of vision was a composite of what is today considered to be elements of optics, physiology, and geometry, though it was preceded by various others from al-Haytham to Kepler. This approach however, conf lated physics with meaning, mathematics with seeing, and optics with perception. In the arts, this erroneous outlook was most notably echoed in the Renaissance with Brunelleschi, who “propounded and realized what painters today call perspective, since it forms part of that science which, in effect, consists of setting down properly and rationally the reductions and enlargements of near and distant objects as perceived by the eye of man.”2 While it is a compelling narrative that up until the Renaissance artists were gradually attaining representational accuracy over the course of centuries, the rationality of geometric perception was regularly refuted throughout history. In the 18th century, George Berkeley asserted that in vision, “it is plain it was impossible for any man to attain to a right notion of this matter so long as he had regard only to lines and angles, and did not apprehend

2  Antonio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), 43.

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, Fig. 2: Child s sketch of neighborhood illustrating depth without perspective

the true nature of vision, and how far it was of mathematical consideration.”3 For Berkeley, depth is learned by experience of the world rather than through geometry. Likewise, it has been argued that perspective did not follow a linear and singular course of development from crude to refined but appeared in various guises and for differing significations. In the 20th century, Erwin Panofsky asserted that “it is essential to ask of artistic periods and regions not only whether they have perspective, but also which perspective they have.”4 This distinction between the perception of depth and distance was duly recognized in various theories of psychology. For example, the gestalt psychologist Rudolph Metzger theorizes that the perception of depth tended toward the simplest visual order, which was distinct from the optics of binocular vision.5 He in turn refers to Gustaf Britsch’s observation that the idea of depth was present in children at any early age, well before their capacity to approximate spatial extension through perspective [fig. 2]. In his theory 3  George Berkeley, “An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision” (ed. 3rd, 1732), in Berkeley Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), §39, pg 19. 4  Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 41. 5  “The law of greatest order, of the good Gestalt (Prägnanz) … also determines the perceived depth distribution of geometric forms, and this often in contrast to the depth distribution that one would have to expect from the laws of binocular vision.” Rudolf Metzger, “Gestalt Laws in the Spatial Effect of Perspective Drawings,” in Laws of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1936), 119.

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Fig. 3: Privileged views of the Acropolis along ambulatory path August Choisy

of Ecological Optics, J.J. Gibson argues that contrary to the model set out by Renaissance artists, the impressions, or ambient arrays that the eye perceives, are fundamentally untranslatable into the projective rays of optics.6 Unlike the geometry that describes the projection of a camera through its lenses, perception is always already inf luenced by the active spectator’s attention, experiences, and anticipations. It is therefore argued in this paper that the perception of depth does not rely on its rationalization, which oftentimes is considered only afterward. As a problem of aesthetics, depth is the product of visual interpretation that translates the objectivity of a scene toward a meaningful construction as determined by the cognition of a perceiving subject. Hence, one can read depth in drawings that represent impossible scenarios that are physically irrational. In order to provide an alternative basis for its illustration, this study will look to the film theory of Sergei Eisenstein, who provided the study’s conceptual framework in his discussion of an image’s intrinsic perceptual tensions. 6  “The seen-from-here, from this stationary point of observation, is also not the supposedly flat visual field of tradition, for it is ambient. But it might justly be called viewing the world in perspective, or noticing the perspective of things. This means the natural perspective of ancient optics, not the artificial perspective of the Renaissance; it refers to the set of surfaces that create visual solid angles in a frozen ambient optic array.” J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), 196–197.

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From this conceptual foundation, techniques of eye-tracking analysis will be integrated in order to provide a graphic description for a theory of depth in its perception.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Mise-en-cadre The concept of montage undoubtedly served as the hallmark of Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory. At its most basic, montage can be described as a process in which two discreet impressions produce an other that is distinct from the sum of its parts. Its application is best exemplified by the splicing of two film shots in order to offer a larger narrative beyond what is presented within each shot in isolation. Eisenstein offers the following examples to illustrate how two images, when opposed to each other, come together to signify a distinct meaning: Eye + Water = Crying Door + Ear = Eavesdropping Child + Mouth = Screaming Mouth + Dog = Barking Mouth + Bird = Singing Knife + Heart = Anxiety, etc.7 Rather than through coalescence, he argued that the nature of montage was inherently a technique of collision. The violent, conf lictive, or ecstatic (экстатический), opposition of two images brought life to an otherwise indifferent assemblage of discreet parts. This collision, however, was not limited to the medium of film, as its relevance was regularly discussed within the domain of architecture.8 Two essays in particular make direct connection between montage and the perception of architecture and provide the basis for a theory of depth beyond physical extension. 7  Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form),” in Selected Works: Writings, 1922–34 Vol. 1, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI Publishing, 1988), 164. 8  Eisenstein was an aficionado of architecture, as he first studied architecture and engineering at the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd, and his father was the architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein.

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Fig. 4: Portrait of Maria Nikolayevna Yermolova

Eisenstein argues film’s lineage in Montage and Architecture (1938) by highlighting the intrinsic parallels in which the idea of space was rendered in both the filmic shot and the built environment. Using Auguste Choisy’s hand-drawn perspectives of the Acropolis from his Histoire de l’architecture of 1899,9 Eisenstein claims that Choisy provided nothing less than a “montage plan” in which individual shots were combined to form a larger conception of a total space. From the isolated views of an olive tree, the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and the Athena Promachos, a plurality of perspectives endowed discreet impressions with cohesive dimensionality [fig. 3]. Moreover, Eisenstein theorizes that these individual shots were held together by a path. On the one hand, this path can be understood as the ambulatory footpath taken through the Acropolis in order to encounter various privileged perspectives, 9  Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture, Tome 1 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899), 409-419.

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 5: “Yermolova,” Sergei Eisenstein, 1937: Deconstructed cadres of Yermolova Portrait

but more significantly, this path also stood for the one “followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; diverse impressions passing in front of an immobile spectator.”10 In other words, Eisensein recognizes that the attentional path of the observer’s eye facilitated the conf lict that was so necessary for the possibility of montage. The translation from the built environment to the montage of images was effortlessly held together by the dual meaning of path. Yet in his earlier essay titled Yermolova (1935), Eisenstein argued for the same essential idea without reference to space in the round. The director developed a language of depth through montage by analyzing the formal composition of Valentin Serov’s 1905 portrait of the actress Maria Nikolayevna Yermolova [fig. 4]. This painting was given particular attention in its explicit usage of the frame—not only as defined by the boundaries of the physical painting (i.e., the picture frame) but also those that constituted the image’s perceptual structure. By isolating the dominant lines that cut across the painting’s surface, a series of internal frames were defined as follows: from the inside edge of the f loor to the wall, the chair rail, the mirror frame behind the principal figure, and by the ref lected inside corner of the room. [fig. 5] All these internal frames are held 10 Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” in Selected Works: Towards a Theory of Montage Vol. 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 1991), 59.

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Fig. 6: “Yermolova,” Sergei Eisenstein, 1937: Simultaneous perspectives of Yermolova figure

together by the focal point of Yermolova’s countenance. As a form of montage in the static image, conf lict was to be found between the internal shots provided by each of these frames. Rather than as a shot through a single visual angle, Serov produced a veritable montage of views that collapsed the image of his subject into a panoptic vista, a “simultaneous conjoining presence.”11 Eisenstein describes these angles accordingly (and in order as shown in figure 6): The outline traced by the first line surrounds the figure as a whole; this is a ‘full-length shot.’ The second line gives us the ‘figure from the knees upward’. The third, ‘waist-length’. And finally the fourth gives us a typical ‘close-up’.12 11  Sergei Eisenstein, “Yermolova,” in Selected Works: Towards a Theory of Montage, Vol. 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 1991), 80. 12  Ibid, 86.

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 7: Compositional exercises using cadres as cropping regions

This visual collision resultes in a sense of movement, not by the figure of the actress but rather by that of the viewer. He states that “what has here been fixed on canvas is not a series of four successive positions of an object but four successive positions of the eye of the observer. Therefore these four points are not a function of the behaviour of the object … but are a characteristic of the behaviour of the spectator.”13 Eisenstein names this collision of frames mise-en-cadre, alluding to its relation to the idea of mise-en-scène. His definition is as follows: “The mise-en-cadre is the pictorial composition of mutually dependent cadres [shots] in a montage sequence.”14 Consistent with his theory that montage existed as much in inter-shot collisions as those of intra-shot, visual cadres thus provide a conceptual foundation for conceiving of depth through the collisions of a viewer’s successive perceptions within an image of the push and pull of the subject’s shifting vantage. What is perceived is not an image as a static totality but as a visual field in which the viewer is given the possibility to enter into itsspace, into its depth. This concept of depth was also alluded to in Eisenstein’s discussion of Japanese aesthetic education. His depiction of the framing of a cherry tree and sailboat [fig. 7] demonstrated how mise-en-cadre isolated impressions in order to both identify and oppose significant forms within an image.15 True to his montage theory, the juxtaposition of such frames yielded more 13  Ibid, 89. 14  Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Word, Inc, 1949), 16. 15  Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot,” in Selected Works: Writings, 1922-34, Vol. 1, 138.

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than a mere accumulation of a complete boat or a branch; instead, it allowed for the viewer to produce a dialectical total image in which its particular areas synthesized to form a greater perceptual profundity. And it is with this technique that the concept of mise-en-cadre, as an implementation of montage theory, can be applied towards the study of eye movements.

Measuring Moments of Depth In order to integrate the study of eye movements with a theory of perceptual cadres, eye-tracking was used to record a subject’s viewing patterns of an image. By means of infrared cameras, an eye-tracker detects changes in pupillary orientation that in turn ref lect changes in visual focus. Two principal behaviors are recorded in this process: fixation points, which describe moments in which the eyes remain fixed for a brief period, and saccades, which are rapid movements between fixation points.16 In the course of image viewing, the eyes often cluster around what are called Areas of Interest (AOIs). The proposed method for illustrating perceptual depth involves establishing frames, understood as cadres, from the various points of fixation provided by eye-tracking recordings. The recorded scanpath, the path followed by the viewer‘s eyes, serves as an armature that connects “diverse impressions passing in front of an immobile spectator,”17 while captured frames conceptually resemble those of Eisenstein’s deconstruction of Yermolova. The geometry of each frame is determined such that its center point is taken from each sequential fixation point, while its height and width parameters are determined against a normalized scale. More specifically, standard deviation calculations are applied to the relative scale of the eyes’ movements in both x and y axes, which subsequently affect the final proportions of each frame to ensure that the heightened attention of AOIs iares ref lected in the final analysis. For the sake of publication, the resultant cadres are distributed as a contact sheet of arbitrary row and column incrementation. Each analysis is 16  While generally labeled as fixations, movement still occurs while the eyes attend to a single point, such as what is found in microsaccades. In regards to the limitations of conventional eye tracking, other ocular changes which are not recorded include smooth-pursuit, vergence, and vestibulo-ocular movements. 17   See note 13 above.

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Fig. 8: “l‘arco con ornamento a conchiglia”, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

performed on data that are processed from a twenty-second recording of a subject’s viewing, at a variable frequency rate of approximately seventy-five hertz. Because this technique results in an average of approximately 1,500 unique locations, it was necessary to both cull and modulate the total available data for the sake of publication. Three readings have been selected for the purposes of variety, both in terms of representational subject matter as well as in the qualities of their respective scanpaths. In each of the following recordings, emphasis is given to the mode of analysis over that of behavioral interpretation.18

Reading 1—Etching The first reading is of Piranesi’s etching “l’arco con ornamento a conchiglia” (2nd state) from his Carceri d’invenzione series [fig. 8].19 The image depicts a fictional prison, rendered in a hand-drawn style with strong contrasts in shading. The subject corroborated that they were already familiar with both its 18  Likewise, it is not suggested that the included readings typify the perceptual behavior across various subjects but should be treated as isolated case studies. 19  The series is comprised of sixteen prints along with various studies that were published in two states in 1750 and 1761.

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, Fig. 9: Basic scanpath of Piranesi s etching

identification and historical significance. The basic eye-tracking analysis, as shown in figure 9, illustrates a relatively wide attentional distribution as the points of fixation cover a large portion of the available viewing area. This pattern exemplifies an exploratory behavior in which the subject sought to address the scene in its entirety. A pronounced AOI is present toward the lower right quadrant in which a visual element in the foreground obstructs what is otherwise an unencumbered view of the scene’s middle and background. Eye movements were produced in a generally counter-clockwise manner—a cyclical process—in which no particular area of the image dominated the subject’s visual attention. As the subject’s eye movements were distributed across the image, there is no immediate correlation between the content contained within each fixation and the form of their overall scanpath. Contrary to the paths of movement suggested by the image (walkways, stairs, portals, etc.) as well as those delineated by perspectival recession, the individual’s perception is characterized as one in which a global organization dominated the course of fixations. In viewing a front-facing superimposition of the subject’s visual

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 10: Representation of superimposed cadres

frames [fig. 10], there is clearer emphasis on the lower-right and upper-left quadrants of the image; however, this impression is skewed in favor of darker shaded areas. In the contact sheet analysis of the scanpath as shown in figure 11, it becomes evident that there were few recurrences over the course of the subject’s perception, as the sequence of indexical frames tend not to repeat previous image samples.

Reading 2—Architectural Plan The second reading involves the viewing of the plan of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra (La Rotonda) [fig. 12].20 The image is of an architectural building plan, which is radially symmetric and predominantly composed of relatively sim20  Andrea Palladio, Villa Capra (La Rotonda), 1592, Vicenza, Italy.

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Fig. 11: Contact sheet of individual cadres

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 12: Villa Capra (“La Rotonda”), Andrea Palladio

ple geometries (rectangles, squares, and circles). The plan is presented without context or explicit reference to scale, though the latter can be inferred from its visual elements. The subject was well aware of the architectural work prior to its viewing. Shown in figure 13, the subject’s eye movements were generally distributed so as to visually attend to all areas of the image. However, when isolating the first fifteen (of twenty) seconds of viewing time, four distinct phases were noticed and are defined by four clear clockwise paths of varying diameters [fig. 13]. These phases can be described accordingly: The first phase involved examination of the image’s center; the second was given over to the perimeter; the third phase “filled in” the space between the previous two phases; and in the last phase, a final examination of the perimeter was given before returning to the center. Much like the previous reading of Piranesi’s etching, the general nature of eye movements could be described by global rather than local patterns. In other words, the attention of one area of the image did not necessarily lead to the attention of other visually “connected” areas. In superimposing the individual cadres over each other, it is evident that all aspects of the image were attended with relatively even distribution [fig. 14]. The examination of the resultant contact sheet corroborates these previous observations [fig. 15]. The recurrence of architectural elements permeates the entire course of viewing, as the visual cycles are delineated by the periodic distribution of porticoes and steps, providing a fragmented decon-

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Fig. 13: (above) Basic scanpath of “La Rotonda,” (below) four phases of scanpath indicating cycles of eye movements, resulting in “rings”

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 14: Representation of superimposed cadres

struction of the plan’s original form. The subject’s perception of this plan can therefore be interpreted as a series of superimpositions of clockwise paths that structure the image along significant visual rings, each corroborating the radial symmetry of its form and the redundancy of its elements.

Reading 3—Narrative Painting The final reading consists of a cropped version of Ilya Repin’s second rendition of Unexpected Visitors [fig. 16].21 The painting portrays a series of figures set within a domestic interior space. Among the apparent principal characters, is a woman at center with her back turned toward the viewer and a male who is standing on the painting’s left side. Both seem to be holding each other’s gaze. Surrounding them are various other figures of differing ages and phy21  Ilya Repin, Unexpected Visitors (Не ждали), 1888, oil on canvas, 167.5 x 160.5cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Fig. 15: Contact sheet of individual cadres

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 16: Unexpected Visitors (Не ждали), Ilya Repin

sical postures. The theme of the painting suggests a strong narrative content; however, this matter is explicitly disregarded so as to avoid conf lating its formal analysis with its psychologization. During viewing, the subject was unaware of the painting, its origin, or its contextual significance. As shown in figure 17, the principal AOIs were given over to the faces of each of the figures. This propensity has been well documented since the inception of eye tracking, with particular interest typically given toward the eyes and mouth. Intermittent fixations were made on peripheral elements (a stool, a portrait in the background, a foot); however, they constituted only a minor portion of the total viewing time. Unlike in the previous two readings, eye movements were driven by local rather than global patterns. Throughout the viewing session, the subject constantly attended from one face to another, establishing a clear character-driven perceptual network. Examination of the superimposed cadres corroborates what was surmised in the scanpath analysis as the faces of the figures dominate the image’s rendering [fig. 18]. The attentional imbalance is such that very little visual information is evident regarding the interior space with almost no attention given to the scene’s foreground. Examination of the contact sheet [fig. 19] helps to illustrate the sequences of relationships drawn between faces as well as the perceptual regularity of principal figures over those that were more peripheral.

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Fig. 17: Basic scanpath of Repin’s painting

Fig. 18: Representation of superimposed cadres

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Fig. 19: Contact sheet of individual cadres

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Discussion and Limitations The included analyses should be considered as speculations that graphically describe depth beyond the simulation of physical extension and through the space resulting from the collision of discreet cadres. As such, depth was not to be found within the sole domain of the work itself but, instead, was co-generated together by the image, the subject’s attention, and the included mode of analysis. This form of representation was particularly effective in emphasizing moments of notable visual regard as determined by the subject. By illustrating perceptual redundancies, degrees of their presence were shown during the perception of an image. However, it is critical to note that the included analyses are offered as diagrams and, as such, inherently include limitations that arise in the illustration of a theory. A major constraint in the analyses was the limitation placed on the quantity of frames within an indexical contact sheet. A target of approximately 150 frames per reading was chosen because it represented a critical sampling mass of a subject’s perception. Yet, such a quantity does not justifiably represent what were, at minimum, well over 1,000 available frames. Presentation of the analysis could therefore be augmented if translated into a digital format whereby one could scrub through a much larger set of cadres. Another conspicuous limitation that must be considered is that, unlike in Eisenstein’s compelling deconstruction of frames in his analysis of Yermolova, the included diagrams defaulted to rectilinear cadres. This absence of image-specific frame formation was compensated, only partially, by the variable proportion of width and height parameters as determined by relative changes in saccadic movement. However, with a more developed methodology, frames could be articulated by factors including boundary detection, rates of changes in luminance and chrominance, and the recurrence of AOIs.

Conclusion The resultant analyses provide insight into the perceptual persistence(s) that occur in the reading of images and from which depth can be rendered beyond extension, toward that of the collision of impressions. This qualitative approach is exemplified by Eisenstein’s theory of montage and, more specifically, his idea of mise-en-cadre in which the space of an image was recognized by

Depth in Aesthetic Perception

Fig. 20: Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Fig. 21: Fragments of the Marble Plan of Ancient Rome, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

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the inherent tensions provided by its internal structure and subsequently enacted in its perception. While Eisenstein acknowledged his indebtedness to architectural theory in his reference to Choisy’s drawings of the Acropolis, it was with Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s work that he found even greater inspiration. The ecstaticness borne of the collisions of montage were brought to life in Piranesi’s Carceri series in which Eisenstein provided its formal deconstructions in his essay Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Form.22 But while moments of perceptual depth were offered by this heralded essay, it is with Piranesi’s Le antichità Romane that the included analyses are more indebted [fig. 20, 21]. In conceiving of Rome through the architectural figures that constitute the city’s form in both space and in memory, Piranesi offered nothing less than depth through the collisions of architectural frames. Depth is not conditioned by the simulation of space through the placement of figures onto a ground; rather, it is manifested by the tensions between the figures themselves. And so, what is rendered in Piranesi’s drawings is not a composition as a fixed totality but of a space made possible by the accumulations of formal collisions. In both the perspectives and fragmented maps of Rome, a veritable space is indeed represented but one in which physical distance plays only a subordinate role. While this living palimpsest is made explicit in Piranesi’s oeuvre, it is argued that the very same processes are intrinsic to the act of aesthetic perception itself. In Henri Bergson’s assertion of the qualitative nature of experience, he states that “pure perception in fact, however rapid we suppose it to be, occupies a certain depth of duration.”23 This depth of duration [épaisseur de durée] escapes quantitative measurement, and is fundamentally defined by the subjective experiences of perception. Through the inherently co-creative role of the subject in their perception, moments of any given work are in a constant state of reconstruction and collision, framed by the subject’s perceptual attention, and given depth through the engagement of the observer to the work of art.

22  Sergei Eisenstein, “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms,” trans. Roberta Reeder, Oppositions, no. 11 (Winter 1977): 83–110. 23  Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1911), 75.

Virtualities of the Visible The Architecture of Mixed Realities Maja Ozvaldič

In 2015, Studio Greg Lynn at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna initiated design research that focused on strategies of bringing together digital and physical environments as well as artifacts into a mixed reality. This research was undertaken in the context of the architectural design studio by introducing thoughts and questions on visual regimes and their relationship to our understanding of space and its design and form. The investigation propelled questions in relation to the techniques and tools we are using for looking—questions about who is doing the looking and what is being looked at. This essay explores early modern European visual culture and optical media and their techniques for altering reality in order to frame a contemporary notion of mixed realities. Furthermore, in attempting to trace a genealogy of the development of optical media and its infrastructures, this paper outlines the cultural context for the unfolding paradigm of the current human-machine-vision relationship. It is within the milieu of hybrid vision where the design challenges and the opportunities for a creation of contemporary mixed realities reside.

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Once upon a time In Italy Our notion of reality, the material world surrounding us, is strongly dependent on our sensory apparatus specifically the interconnection of our physical sensors with the processing brain. The early Renaissance propelled a considerable reconceptualization of vision. Using Euclidean geometry, which translated visual information onto a f lat surface, Renaissance artisans developed an “objective and logical basis for vision” that “exactly matched the natural reality of visual perception. Broadly speaking, the mind had direct access to accurate pictures of the world; the world was what it appeared to be.”1 Stuart Clark argues that this period was also a time of crisis with respect to visual cognition, especially regarding representational accuracy in relation to external fact. Hence the epoch from the 15th to the 17th century, which was so strongly concerned with veridicality, simultaneously amplified the existing studies on optical illusions. In about 1425, the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi performed an experiment. He was testing his studies on linear perspective, a new visual regime that was just emerging in Western art. According to the Renaissance biographer Antonino Manetti, a competition for the entrance to the Baptistery in Florence served as the site for his experiment. Brunelleschi, known for inventing his own tools and who hardly ever made drawings, entered the competition and created a depiction of the Baptistery while he was standing in the doorway of the Cathedral on the opposite side of the Piazza. The painting detailed the Baptistery exactly as it was seen with the naked eye from that specific location. The architect had produced textures of black and white marble and the detailed column of Saint Zenobius with impressive accuracy. The sky above and around the Baptistery was not painted. Instead the area was covered with burnished silver that mirrored the sky and brought real-time moving clouds into the static painting. Finally, the architect, or maybe a painter after all, made a hole through the board. Placed precisely on the painting’s surface, the hole defined the position of the viewer’s eye on the horizon. 1  Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.

Virtualities of the Visible

, Fig. 1: (lef t) Brunelleschi s “Guckkasten;” (right) Mann beim Zeichnen einer Laute

The depiction was not meant to be looked at directly. From a specific location, the painting was literally inserted into the spectator’s view of the Piazza di San Giovanni. The painting was held with its backside to the viewer while its face pointed toward the Baptistery. Afterwards, a mirror was placed between the Baptistery and the painting so that it mirrored the painted building. Once all the elements—the viewer, the painting and the mirror —were in the right position with respect to one another and at the right distance from the Baptistery, one could peek through the hole and see the Piazza di San Giovanni with Brunelleschi’s design under the actual sky. Close to a lifelike representation, what one would see through the hole is in truth a ref lection of a painted replica that seamlessly blended into its physical surroundings in accordance with the understanding of vision and spatial perception governed by the rules of geometry and optics.2 What is of interest is Brunelleschi‘s apparatus that facilitates the entanglement of moving clouds, the Piazza di San Giovanni, and the painting into a real-time augmented reality. The layering of discrete 2D elements to achieve the effect of depth in the visual field presents a coherent visual experience within the viewer‘s perceptual field. The experiment heralded a repositioning—a revolutionary shift from the eye of God to the eye of the human observer. As Friedrich Kittler points out, “The mirror, the hole, and the painting performed an automatic image analysis for all of 2  Friedrich Kittler, Optical media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 57.

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Fig. 2: The ghost machinery

(above) This depiction shows a proposal for theatres as originally envisioned by Henry Dircks in 1858. Although the ghost machinery was a further development by J. H. Pepper, it also limited the movement of the hidden figure; (below) The ghost machinery from The true history of the ghost: and all about metempsychosis

them.”3 Brunelleschi did not get the abovementioned commission despite his powerful demonstration, but the technique of linear perspective (the illusion of depth on a f lat surface) provided a new technical and artistic standard for centuries to come. A century after Brunelleschi’s experiment, yet still within the borders of today’s Italy, was a scientist exploring optical deceptions with the aid of mirrors and glass. Giovanni Battista della Porta, a Neapolitan scientist and the authority on the so-called science of the extraordinary, was a strong promoter of the scientific society in 16th-century Italy. In 1558 della Porta published his Magia Naturalis [Natural Magic], a book series on occult 3  Ibid.

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knowledge. His 1589 edition of the seventeenth book of Natural Magic was titled Of Strange Glasses. In it he describes optical “distortions that result from changes to the composition of shape of plain mirrors, the projection of ref lected rays at a distance” and “the illusions produced by manipulating two or more mirrors, so that they ref lect bizarre and unexpected objects and, in some cases, whole ‘amphitheaters’ of images.”4 What caught his attention was the “phenomenon of a hanging image.”5 Della Porta described this phenomenon in Chapter Twelve, titled “How we may see in a Chamber things that are not,” as the following: Wherefore to describe the matter, let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes, unless by the door or window where the spectator looks in. Let the whole window or part of it be of glass, as we use to do to keep out the cold. But let one part be polished, that there may be a Looking-glass on both sides, whence the spectator must look in. For the rest do nothing. Let pictures be set over against this window, marble statues, and suchlike. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectators back, he will think to be in the middle of the house, as far from the glass inward, as they stand from it outwardly, and so clearly and certainly, that he will think he sees nothing but truth.6 The same phenomenon was already described by Vitello in the 13th century, gaining major prominence six centuries later under the name Pepper’s Ghost. Named after the British scientist John Henry Pepper, this optical effect was widely used by the illusionists of the 19th century theaters. Pepper’s Ghost, as a technique of illusion, utilized one or more glass surfaces placed strategically as a veil between the spectator and the staged scene and, at the same time, between the staged scene and a hidden room. Through the interplay of glass and a bright light placed in a hidden room as well as the contrasting lighting conditions in the space of the theater itself, a ghostly ref lection from the hidden room is added to the staged scene via the glass veil. The perceived ghost is a real-time ref lection of an actual remote object or scene, hidden from the spectator’s view. In this case augmented reality 4  Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture, 98. 5  Ibid, 99. 6  John Baptista Porta, Natural Magick (London: Pigeons, 1658), 370.

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was created as two separate 3D settings collapsed into one visual experience, specifically the hidden scene or object overlaid on top of the actual scene. In Victorian theaters, these ghosts appeared to be 3D objects while still condemned to exist only as a ref lection on a 2D surface. The technique heavily relied on diverse and manipulable light conditions so that visual properties like opacity could be mastered. In addition, the stage and the hidden room had to be spatially adjacent. This technique is opposing Brunelleschi’s case which demanded one eye being fixed and positioned on the horizon of the perspectival construction. The theatre technique of spatializing augmentations and aligning those with physical reality has enabled the binocular view. Hence, these ghosts became viewable from a range of different angles and by many spectators simultaneously. As a further development of Brunelleschi’s technique for augmenting reality, Pepper’s Ghost can be considered the advent of a mixed reality. In mixed reality, virtual content is not only overlaid but also is anchored in space. Pepper’s Ghost, the forerunner of today’s notion of a hologram, gave the impression of spatialized movement and interaction with the actors of the actual staged scene.

Through the Looking Glass From Cubiculum Obscurum to Immersive Technologies Almost a hundred and sixty years after Pepper’s Ghost first appeared in public, we find ourselves in an advanced technological environment of even stranger glasses or the “automated, dimensionless and imageless devices”7 through which we engage reality. Della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis also contained a description of another device that he called cubiculum obscurum, which was basically an improved version of the camera obscura. A lens was inserted into the aperture of the camera obscura which not only corrected the f lipped projected image but also was able to preserve colors. Those were the beginnings of a “new era of scientific instruments for seeing and observing

7   Kittler, Optical media: Berlin Lectures 1999, 228.

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the world in Europe.”8 Over time, visual perception evolved into a hybrid act between humans and finally autonomous machines. The following chapter is speeding through further technological developments to fill in the gap between the Renaissance and now, based on the instrumental elements of Brunelleschi’s demonstration.

The Painting Photographic devices emancipated the visible from the physiology of the human eye and over the course of time took on the tasks of writing, seeing, drawing, processing, remembering and knowing—a characteristic previously unique to humans.9 As John May pointed out, perspectival drawings used to be mathematical depictions arranging geometric quantities. Photographs, in contrast, need additional labor to become quantifiable. “Images are data, and all imaging is, knowingly or not, an act of data processing.”10 May showed that digital photography, an oxymoron in itself, heralded a shift from light inscription to energy detection defined by signalization. Photogrammetric analysis was developed in parallel with the medium itself and facilitated for measurements being taken straight from images. Photogrammetric processes use 3D coordinates, defined by exterior (camera position) and interior orientations (lens properties). They re-establish depth that gets lost when projecting onto an image plane using image sequences. To do so, they translate image coordinates into locations of object points in space. Measuring from images is by now a fully automated process with the help of various algorithms that are known under the term computer vision. Furthermore, computational photography allows working in reverse and creating images out of measurements. Digital photographic technologies can visualize realities of relative scales and radical decentering. Images are turned into coordinates, objects into 3D maps of point clouds, scenic views into maps of textures, depths,

8  Ann M. Borys, Vincenzo Scamozzi and the Chorography of Early Modern Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2016), 167. 9   Kittler, Optical media: Berlin Lectures 1999, 11. 10 John May, “Everything Is Already an Image,” Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017), 12.

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colors, thresholds, edges, et cetera. Distinct material assemblies turn into continuously gridded distributions of pixels or points of color in 3D space.

The Mirror and the Hole The refinement of lens systems allowed humans to see further and closer, from deep space all the way to the microscopic dimensions of organisms. The development of medical imaging techniques that use electromagnetic radiation liberated human vision from its confinement within the visible spectrum of light. Sonography, which utilizes sound waves for real-time imaging, generates moving images of interiors. The method revolutionized medicine and surgery, going from 2D images to 3D objects and to objects in motion, and it enabled medical doctors not only to alter the invisible present but also to manipulate the future. During the Cold War period, while humans were racing to break out of the boundaries of our planetary confinement, machines were sent out into Earth’s orbit or even further out to inspect objects in the vast void of the cosmos. But we also made those machines gaze back at us and monitor our activities and those of our ecosystem. Today, more than a thousand active satellites are orbiting Earth at a low altitude or in geostationary orbit. They are nodes of an invisible planetary infrastructural network deployed for communication, weather forecasting, television, navigation, surveillance as well as military and aerial photography. Satellites provide a view of our whole planet—a digital 3D portrait—by using high-resolution digital images. Remote vision’s capabilities, which emerges from distant machines and globally networked cameras, “triggers actions from a distance”11 and enables glimpses into remote areas. It introduces a reduction of spatial and temporal interdependence. Interconnected devices and mobile computing have finally brought about a whole palette of new possibilities for cartography. Geography has positioned the individual high above the earth with a vertical view down while chorography has pulled the individual down onto the earth’s surface and introduced a relative and subjective experience of

11  Ken Goldberg, “Introduction: The Unique Phenomenon of a Distance,” in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 3.

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Fig. 3: Thesis presentation utilizing spatialized real-time augmentations

Diploma presentation by Jinhee Koh using a tablet and augmenting dynamic content onto physical model.

landscape.12 Denis Cosgrove writes, “The relationship between geographic and chorographic scales is not merely conceptual but practiced in the extension of Europeans’ lust to see the world, in what some have termed the ‘tourist gaze.’”13 Today, contemporary cartographer easily oscillates between both scales. “Everyone with a smartphone has, by definition, a free, continuously zoomable, self-updating, high resolution map of every part of the populated surface of the earth that goes with them wherever they go, and this is in itself an epochal development. … [T]hey are the first maps in human history that follow our movements and tell us where we are on them in real time.”14 The fast-evolving entertainment and gaming technologies have embraced the idea of precise digital positioning and the capturing of body movements and created a 3D, real-time exchange between a user and sensing machine. Thus, since the beginning of the 21st century, aside from the smartphone,

12  Denis Cosgrove, “Liminal Geometry and Elemental Landscape: Construction and Representation” in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed., James Corner and Alan Balfour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,1999), 107. 13  Ibid, 112. 14  Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London; New York: Verso, 2017), 21.

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Fig. 4: Augmented architectural representations

(above) Example of an architectural model augmented with movements of people, furniture and walls showing adjustable space divisions and the flux of daily life inside the design proposal. The contrast between the white walls and gray floor helps the camera to lock digital content onto the physical object; (below) The 2D section drawing is augmented with movements and furnishings throughout the building, visualizing occupation and movement within the spatial design. The black cut lines of the drawing work as markers for the positioning of digital content.

commercial products such as Nintendo’s Wii, Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox and Kinect—or lately headsets like Lenovo’s Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens—have entered the commercial market. Equipped with sensors and cameras for motion detection and geospatial positioning, these devices facilitate the aligning of physical and virtual environments. Depending on the device that determines the nature of the interaction, they cover the whole reality-virtuality continuum.

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With this novel 3D, interactive and real-time exchange relationship between the physical and virtual realm, mixed realities have dived into mass culture. As Mario Carpo pointed out on many occasions: The rise of 3D technology is fundamentally changing the way we capture, model and reproduce reality; hence also the way we use, navigate and understand reality.15

Vision 3.0 Human-Machine-Vision Relationship Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the act of looking is a shared endeavor between human and machine vision. Brunelleschi’s experiment and Pepper’s Ghost will serve to further detail the evolving visual entanglement. Mixed realities emerge through a liaison of optical media—integrated into a universal discrete machine of planetary intelligence and awareness—and the material world. At the intersection of these two areas, the main protagonist is a malleable ghost—the hologram. In Brunelleschi’s world of linear perspective, everything is organized around the hole. Today the viewer is not looking through a peephole anymore but is performing a stereoscopic view. The viewer’s eyes are resting on an aluminosilicate surface of a mobile computing device. From this glass surface the process of looking continues through an integrated machinic eye that does not just look but also examines the physical setting. Brunelleschi’s eye looked at a ref lection of a geometrically organized whole of a manipulated reality. In contrast, the machinic eye searches for targets within the camera’s feed, using computer vision technology, which encompasses methods for the acquisition, processing, analyzing, and understanding of digital images. Once the predefined target is found, a tracking procedure is initiated, using recognition algorithms deploying different detection methods. Image recognition facilitates the use the use of planar, diversely textured, high and local contrast images as targets. Feature recognition is used to 15  Mario Carpo, “Space Odyssey: The Rise of 3-D Technology,” Artforum, March 2017, https://www.artforum.com/print/201703/space-odyssey-the-rise-of-3-d-technology-66680.

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Fig. 5: Augmenting space in real scale

A spatial design for the distribution of digital information in physical space. Using the Microsof t HoloLens allows the user to move in physical space and simultaneously inhabit and act within a mixed reality.

detect features inside images like edges, corners, blobs, and ridges. Object and scene recognition work with intricate objects and large structures such as rooms, facades, squares, and courtyards as object targets. It deploys photogrammetry-based scanning procedures, where object parts are turned into sets of point clouds—data points in space. Furthermore, instant tracking algorithms work without predefined targets requiring manual realtime spatial referencing. What can be recognized as a target is determined by what is performing the detection. Hence, what qualifies as a target depends on the eye of the beholder and its brain. The glass surface on which images emerge and seamlessly blend with the physical world—previously the mirror—has slightly grown in its thickness and tremendously in its intelligence. It is embedded into a broader networked infrastructure of planetary scale. Aware of its position and orientation in space due to the satellite-based radio navigation system, the glass surface has turned into a “display and delivery format,”16 in other words, a screen of a smartphone or tablet. The ref lecting surface of the Renaissance mirror has become a digital interface device. Inside of it, a picture is contained but not 16  Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 174.

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in the form of a structured surface; rather, it is decomposed into bits of data. Once a target is identified by the machinic eye, data is structured, locked and presented as an overlay on top of a physical object or location that is relative to its target. These overlays augment material reality. The structured data—previously a painted picture—does not comply with the f latness of the screen nor with the statics of a single projection. It is structured in three dimensions and applied as such. It is spatially registered. Furthermore, data can be incorporated into the f lux of time, augmenting animated content, its past, present, future, and all of its permutations. The physical and digital environment are synchronized and seamlessly connected via live streaming from one to another and back again. The augmentation is continuously calculable and adjustable. When targets are lost from the camera’s gaze, the augmentation disappears. And once recalibrated, it pops up again. This hybridization of ontologically different entities is the great achievement of using the techniques deployed for augmenting and creating mixed realities. In the setting of portable technologies, the position of the (now split) viewer is no longer fixed. The position is defined but not condemned. Unlike Brunelleschi’s Florence, the viewer is set in motion, and by changing position the whole set on the screen adjusts accordingly to the camera’s view in realtime. In the manner of the old trick called Pepper’s Ghost, novel devices like the HoloLens, a head-mounted display, project holograms in front of our eyes and anchor them in space. All the technology is integrated into a compact layer that wraps around the viewer’s eyes. With the aid of various sensors, the headset tracks the viewer’s eye movements, and at the same time, performs inside-out tracking. The HoloLens maps the physical scene while sensing it, creating a digital replica of the actual physical setting. This 3D digital map helps the device align with the physical world, using depth data combined with simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms. The digital map that is created is a triangulated mesh, textured but with no thickness, providing references for interaction within a mixed reality. Unlike the Victorian theaters of the 19th century, the previously adjacent spaces of the stage have collapsed into each other. Consequently, holograms have gained intelligent agent-like abilities, provided by spatial mapping data, to act autonomously within the physical environment. Young Conker, a little holographic squirrel, jumps on the table and makes choices based on the shape and layout of a room. It is able to adjust its tactics in another room. The user’s

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Fig. 6: Spatilizing construction processes

A scaled replica of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp by LeCorbusier was erected by using spatialized data. The construction process was using 3D holograms which made 2D projections obsolete.

hand gestures and voice commands extend the sensory-based interaction, and little integrated speakers create a personalized ambiance. Windows and objects can be placed into a space where they may remain forever, scaled and spatially displaced by the gesture of a hand. Virtual objects and screens exist independent of one another; yet they are all world locked—placed relative to real objects. Like wormholes, there can be times within time and spaces within space; chronological and spatial inconsistencies can exist within a mixed reality. Similar to Pepper’s Ghost, contemporary holograms are made out of light, usually a coherent laser light. Within a mixed reality, holograms also invite and enable interaction in 3D. They can serve as spatialized reference systems and provide the ability to erect structures according to three-dimensional

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maps. Hence, building—or at least assembling—complex structures directly from spatialized data supersedes two-dimensional projections altogether. Livestreaming digital information environments into physical space offers a new mode of working, learning, communicating, and playing.

In the End Or just the Beginning We must expect innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be, either in their living actuality or restored from the past. They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. A work of art will cease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.17 The perspectival standard has aligned visual perception with a 2D surface using geometry. It has provided the same view for all and one frame at a 17  Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Aesthetics, trans., R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1971), 225.

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Fig. 7: Augmentations at the urban scale

The image shows augmentations at the urban scale, using the built industrial structures (Schwechat, Vienna) to place urban fragments from another geolocation (Rome) onto the built site (in Vienna).

time—fixed and immobile, with no absolute size, only proportions relative to the human measure (such as large, small, wide, narrow, far, close, dark, bright, and so on). Design used to be considered as the structuring of the human visual field. This was the legacy of early modernity. Later on, according to Erwin Panofsky’s essay Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, cinema achieved the dynamization of space and the spatialization of time by aligning the immobile spectator with the moving camera.18 “As we begin this new century, the ‘postcinematic’ ‘post-televisual’ viewer has new forms of ever-virtual mobility—new speeds of access to deep histories of images and text, newly mobilized screens that travel in airplanes and automobiles, screens that can be hand held and wireless,”19 Panofsky writes. A hybrid visual field is not organized by geometry but geometrically aligned due to digital 18  Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 96. 19  Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, 242.

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positioning that operates with visual variables and spatial registration. The hybrid human-machine visual system facilitates going beyond the cinematic experience and turns the static observer into a mobile user, physically maneuvering through a 3D space of mixed realities. Contemporary interface techniques for augmentation take us through the static 2D Renaissance window by synchronizing digital content with physical space and exporting this content onto precise locations. This implies that the dominion of the projected image might be fading, and 4D high fidelity is ready to establish itself. Then, what is required is a new sensibility towards form and space (maybe even time) that can cater for this humanmachine complex, providing reference systems for machine vision in order to enhance the human one. The techniques for augmenting reality permit a delamination of sensory reality into layers of discriminatory information and a re-composition into customizable wholes. A mixed reality does not need to be the same for everyone but can be further customized for each individual. Whether this development would be desired or feared remains to be seen. Visual hybrids, in their wildest sense, can create new notions of space and time and break their linear progression by overlaying the here and now with its recorded past and the probabilistic future. This would render our sensory perception of reality as being in f lux rather than static, by sampling data layers into complex representations of various possible realities. All of these processes are dependent on and “watched over by machines of loving grace.”20

20  Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (San Francisco: The Communication Company, 1967).

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Radical Acts in the Architectural Representation of Space A Comparison between Structures and Sequences of Space and Baroque Topologies Andrew Saunders Although we may look at an enclosed building from the outside, we can gain an understanding of the laws of its formation only by understanding its spatial formation from within. August Schmarsow / The Essence of Architectural Creation

In 1953, Italian modernist architect Luigi Moretti who was the founder and graphic designer of the aptly titled magazine Spazio (Italian for space), published a groundbreaking analysis of architectural space, “Structures and Sequences of Spaces.” The article featured carefully photographed negative plaster-cast models of interior volumes from ten iconic works of Italian architecture. The survey ranged from Hadrian’s Villa (2nd Century AD) to St. Peter’s Basilica (1506–1626) and culminated in an analysis of two unbuilt Baroque works from Guarino Guarini’s (1624–1683) lexicon Architettura Civile (1737). As novel and somewhat shocking representational figures, the latter two casts of Guarini’s churches at Casale and Lisbon are by far the most formally complex objects, essential for rendering visible the “unitary and absolute concreteness”1 of Baroque space. Over half a century later, a new spatial survey titled Baroque Topologies2 by Andrew Saunders analyzes the interior 1  Luigi Moretti, “Strutture e sequenze di spazi,” Spazio, no. 7 (December 1952–January 1953): 9–20, 107–108. For English translations see Luigi Moretti, “Structures and Sequences of Spaces,” Oppositions, no. 4 (October 1974): 123–139. See also “Structures and Sequences of Spaces,” in Luigi Moretti: Works and Writings, eds. Marco Mulazzani and Federico Bucci (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 177–182. 2  Andrew Saunders, Baroque Topologies (Modena: Palombi editori, 2018).

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Fig. 1: Strutture e sequenze di spazi, in “Spazio” n. 7, Luigi Moretti

space of many of the most critical churches of Roman high and late Baroque periods in the Piedmont region. A comparison of Baroque Topologies with “Structures and Sequences of Spaces” offers an opportunity for closer assessment of both the similarities and major differences in the two surveys, especially in their analytical modes of spatial representation. Similar to the role of Moretti’s plaster casts, Baroque Topologies demonstrates how LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) surveying technology, in addition to its unparalleled capability as a device for empirical measurement, documentation, and verification, can serve as an instrument for the architectural representation of space. Through this lens, Baroque Topologies re-presents the interior space of major Italian Baroque architecture in new and unfamiliar ways.

Schmarsow’s Influence on Moretti’s Survey To understand Moretti’s spatial study, it is important to trace the inf luence of August Schmarsow’s (1853–1936) concept of Raumgestaltung (German for spatial creation). Schmarsow is generally credited as the first person to

Radical Acts in the Architectural Representation of Space

Fig. 2: Baroque Topologies mesh render. (lef t) survey of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane; (right) composite

formulate a comprehensive theory of architectural space,3 clearly articulated in his essay “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (1893). Schmarsow establishes three critical points to define architectural space. First, all architecture from the simplest hut to the basilica serves a primary purpose to satisfy man’s universal intuition to make spatial enclosure. For that reason, Schmarsow argues that space is the essence of architecture. This in turn validates architecture (which was seen as an inferior art form due to its practical application) as a fine art, parallel in status to painting and sculpture. Second, the formation of space requires linking visual perception with movement, either a literal motion through the space or a transfer of its feeling to the static spatial form.4 The combination enables for the perception of space expanding and having direction that produces a sense of depth and volume. Finally, Schmarsow places more importance on the enclosed interior space of architecture over the exterior form of the building. He states that “those that prefer to articulate the structure and the exterior of the building, completely 3  Mitchell W. Schwarzer and August Schmarsow, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow‘s Theory of ‘Raumgestaltung’.” Assemblage, no.15 (1991): 48–61, 50. 4  August Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. Vischer, Robert, Harry Francis Mallgrave, and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 291.

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Fig. 3: Baroque Topologies point cloud render from survey of Church of San Lorenzo (1680) Torino, Italy. By architect Guarino Guarini (1624-1683)

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neglect the invention of space. Doing so, they lose sight of the inner aspect of architectural creation and of the perennial motive that supplies its psychological explanation.”5 Moretti clearly references Schmarsow in his article, and through this connection it is easy to comprehend why he focused exclusively on casting plaster models of the spatial sequences of interior volumes in key works of canonical Italian architecture.

Baroque Topologies: New Vantage Points Building on Moretti’s interest in developing a representational mode for the space of the interior, Baroque Topologies marks the first use of LIDAR-surveying technology deployed systematically in the spatial analysis and representation of key works of Baroque architecture. Unlike Moretti’s broad sampling from different periods, Baroque Topologies focuses on eighteen of the most well-known high and late Italian Baroque churches including critical work from Francesco Borromini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Carlo Rainaldi, Pietro da Cortona, Guarino Guarini and Bernardo Vittone. Before addressing how the tropes of the six individual architects benefit from this new mode of analysis, it is important to point out four general innovations in the architectural representation of space in Baroque Topologies. First, although the technology cannot technically see through external surfaces to the underlying hidden layers of composite structure, the 3D scanned point clouds produce a novel effect of transparency through a thin membrane surface composed of millions of points. This enables a unique topological vantage point to view the spatial envelope of the interior from the “outside” as well as from the “inside” simultaneously. It is as if the entire internal poché of the churches has been completely removed to reveal only the thin spatial residue of the interior shell volume, a view never before imagined. The interior becomes a manifold body providing an unprecedented representation of the complete spatial capacity of Baroque interior. Second, point cloud scans make possible new unimagined vantage points for experiencing the Baroque interior. To scan the interior in its entirety, a series of overlapping scan positions are plotted in plan to ensure total coverage when composited. Once the scans are completed, they are matched 5  Ibid, 292.

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Fig. 4: Baroque Topologies point cloud render from survey of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1675) Rome, Italy. By architect Carlo Rainaldi (1611-1691)

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together through an algorithmic registration process that identifies similar patterns in the separate scans to align them correctly. The view is not set or restricted to the physical location of the scanner. Perspective point of views then can be set in any location, making possible new immersive viewpoints not typically accessible to human experience or physical cameras. Third, much of the theatricality of Baroque churches occurs overhead in previously inaccessible and unmeasurable realms. The vaulted space of the cupola plays a key role in defining the infinite aspect of the Baroque cosmology, negotiating a theatric experience between the earthly realm and mystically expanding universes above. The range and accuracy of the laser scanner allows a measured and precise reconstruction of the world of illusive effects offered by the Baroque cupola, previously accessible only by the deceived eye of the viewer. Finally, through additive manufacturing, a series of photopolymer resin models of the interior spaces are 3D printed. The Baroque Topologies models differ from the Moretti study in three ways. First, they do not represent movement through sequences of separate spaces but instead focus on the autonomy of the interior space of the centrally planned Baroque church by demonstrating the principle of movement through manipulated polycentric geometry and painterly effects. Second, Moretti’s cast volumes are opaque streamlined reductions of the space and intentionally deny articulation through their mute abstraction. Quite opposite, the 3D printed models retain the highest definition of detail. They deny a smooth continuous reading and instead celebrate the discreet multiplicity of the space. Furthermore, the Baroque Topologies “casts” are constructed of translucent resin that registers gradient hues to render varying depth of space beyond the initial imprint of the ornamental outer membrane. For these reasons, the series not only represents an updated mode of representation but also a critique of the spatial conception of the original Moretti analysis.

Six Architects Having outlined the differences in the general approaches between the two surveys, we can now probe deeper into how the advances in architectural representation of Baroque Topologies are critical for the analysis of specific spatial tropes at play in the work of the six architects surveyed. Although

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there are similarities in the architects operating in a similar paradigm, Baroque Topologies renders the distinct differences in approaches more clearly in addition to highlighting the advances in the evolution of spatial concepts from the high Baroque in Rome to the late Baroque interiors of the Piedmont region. Until now, the illusive mechanism of the immersive Baroque interior has lacked a representational method capable of revealing the totality of its inner workings. The following are specific tropes of each architect that are made apparent through Baroque Topologies.

Architect as Painter: Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669) Above all, Pietro da Cortona was a painter. His best-known work is the trompe-l‘œil of the main salon of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, titled Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power (1633–1639). The picturesque scene provides clues to the intentions of his effects of layering within his architecture, most explicitly in the interior of Santi Luca e Martina (1635–1740). The interior is activated by bundled columns and interrupted walls actively intruding the space.6 The varying striated walls are positioned on one of three possible virtual planes offset from a cruciform plan figure. The distinct pulsating layers activate plan and section. The extreme verticality of the interior is divided into separate regions of full articulation and linear austerity extending all the way to the dome, which includes the most articulated coffers in the series. The full resolution representation of the interior reveals how Cortona deploys multiple layers and intricate figuration to achieve very literal painterly effects of spatial expansion.

Architect as Sculptor: Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) Trained at an early age by his father, young Gian Lorenzo Bernini was recognized as a child prodigy for his artistic abilities as a sculptor. As Bernini’s commissions grew in scale and scope to include architecture, he developed a sense of theatricality by integrating elements of architecture, sculpture, and painting together. Irving Lavin describes Bernini’s approach with the term bel composto translated as a “beautiful whole.”7 6  Rudolf Wittkower, “Carlo Rainaldi and the Roman Architecture of the Full Baroque,” The Art Bulletin 19, no. 2 (1937): 242–313, 277. 7  Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1980), 13.

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Fig. 5: Baroque Topologies point cloud render from survey of Santa Chiara (1741) Bra, Italy. By architect Bernardo Antonio Vittone (1704-1770)

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Fig. 6: Baroque Topologies point cloud render from survey of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1658) Rome, Italy. By architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680)

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Bel composto is evident in all three churches designed by Bernini and most articulated in Sant‘Andrea al Quirinale (1658–1661). The entire church is dedicated to an immersive experience of the ascension of St. Andrew to heaven. Putti spill from an oval aperture above the main altar clinging to anything they can grab, intertwining painting, sculpture, and architecture. Stucco figures by Antonio Raggi dance playfully around the main cornice as cherubs swing from heavy garlands. It is impossible to fully comprehend Bernini’s architecture if the representation of his interior space is reduced to pure geometry. Baroque Topologies represents the total interior including sculpture, painting, lighting and materiality, all active participants in Bernini’s bel composto.

Architect as Geometer: Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) Like his mentor Carlo Maderno (1556– 1629), Francesco Borromini began his career as a stonemason in Northern Italy. Through a mastery of the art of stereometry, geometry became a plastic vehicle for Borromini to incorporate symbolism, technical building principles, mysticism, heraldry, and composition into one system. Baroque Topologies includes surveys of six of Borromini’s most important works, including San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1634-1682) and Sant‘Ivo alla Sapienza (1642– 1660). What becomes evident in addition to his geometric genius is how the integrated details compliment the pulsating concave and convex governing geometry. Attention to alternating balustrades, hyperbolic arches, up and down niches, f lipping column capitals, f luctuating polar geometries of coffer primitives, eccentric cornice profiles, and alternating crossing of cherub wings are all willing participants in the totality of the interior worlds of Borromini. Reducing Borromini’s work to the governing geometry, as brilliant as it is, runs the risk of an incomplete reading of his total spatial prowess.

Architect as Architect: Carlo Rainaldi (1611–1691) Carlo Rainaldi was heavily inf luenced by the Mannerist architecture of his father. Born in Rome, Rainaldi’s architecture is often characterized as combining Northern Italian Mannerist inf luences with the more contemporary Roman Baroque. Peter Eisenman begins his book Palladio Virtuel comparing the heterogeneous spatial qualities of Rainaldi with the disaggregated approach of Palladian villas. Eisenman argues that Rainaldi’s architecture

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Fig. 7: Gian Lorenzo Bernini analysis. Bernini’s Egg Baroque seminar at PennDesign

This project explores and amplifies the Baroque concept of Bel Composto (Irving Lavin) in the cupolas of Bernini’s only three churches (Quirinale, Ariccia and Gandolfo). Bernini uses very simple partis of the Greek Cross, Circle and Oval in his three churches to set up clear rules. He then breaks those rules to blur the boundaries of painting, sculpture and architecture. As an “egg” the project pairs the perfect spherical dome of Ariccia with the more parabolic dome of Gandolfo to create a threshold to operate on with additional figuration from Quirinale.

combines “fragments that appear to be incongruent parts belonging to two entirely different wholes.”8 Rainaldi’s architecture represents an entirely different Baroque attitude toward problematizing the classical notion of harmonious part-to-whole relationships. Baroque Topologies documents four major buildings by Rainaldi, including his most accomplished, Santa Maria in Campitelli. By examining all four interiors, one begins to see how Rainaldi establishes patterns of difficult whole combinations, from disproportionate altars and side chapels to odd column groupings. Through Baroque Topologies, it becomes increasingly clear that

8  Peter Eisenman and Matt Roman, Palladio Virtuel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 15–17.

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Fig. 8: Carlo Rainaldi analysis. Rainaldi labyrinth Baroque seminar at PennDesign

This work analyzes and multiplies how Carlo Rainaldi combines disaggregated parts through the use of “ambiguous elements” (Wittkower) and a strong cornice in four Rainaldi churches (Agnese, Campitelli, Miracoli, Montesanto). Rainaldi’s baroque spaces challenge the notion and existence of a perfect and harmonious whole put forth by Vitruvius / Alberti. The resultant space creates a suspended sense of tension through parts that are alien to one another combining into what Venturi would call a “difficult whole”.

the exceptionally heavy cornices in all of his work play a critical role in binding the “disaggregated” elements into a cohesive whole.

Architect as Mathematician: Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) The shift in architectural innovation from Rome to the Piedmont region occurred in the latter half of the seventeenth century when the house of Savoy moved its capital from Chambéry, France, to Turin in 1559. Charles Emmanuel II (1638– 75) brought Guarino Guarini (1624– 1683) to the capital in 1666 and commissioned him to design some of the most important ecclesiastic works of architecture for the capital. Building on the legacy of the Roman Baroque architecture of Borromini, Guarini infused it with new structural daring inspired by the Gothic along with his own mathematical mysticism. Before coming to Turin Guarini traveled to Rome to study theology, philoso-

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Fig. 9: Guarino Guarini (1624-1683) analysis

Tangent polar unrolling of Guarini’s San Lorenzo in Torino. This model divides and recomposites the mesh model from LIDAR scans of San Lorenzo by the polar governing geometry of Guarini.

Radical Acts in the Architectural Representation of Space

phy, and mathematics. During his eight years of Theatine training in Rome, he encountered the works of Borromini that made quite an impression on him. In the Church of San Lorenzo (1668– 1687), Guarini abandoned the idea of the dome as solid—a Roman idea that placed value on the heaviness and solidness of architecture. Instead, he looked to the Gothic for architectural inspiration. Gothic architecture was light and airy, resulting in slender and daring load-bearing masonry. The dome of the Church of San Lorenzo in Torino is a masterful example. The porous lattice structure allows the space beyond to become filled with light, which is further accentuated by the lantern mounted above the ribs to create a f loating sensation. John Rupert Martin remarks, “The contradictions and anomalies of Guarini’s architecture have the effect, through their denial of architectural logic, of shifting the emphasis from the material to the ethereal.”9 The articulated negative model of San Lorenzo in Baroque Topologies demonstrates clearly how Guarini achieves the illusive of trompe-l’œil through entirely architectural means for the first time.

Architect as Lumineer: Bernardo Vittone (1704–1770) Rudolf Wittkower ends his three-volume series Art and Architecture in Italy championing Bernardo Vittone as the heir and last great architect in the evolution of the Italian Baroque centrally planned church. Vittone was a pivotal figure in the Piedmont school of Baroque architecture. As a pupil of Guarini, he completed his master’s posthumous treatise Architettura Civile in addition to publishing his own treatise on architecture. Vittone was explicitly connected to Rome winning an important competition sponsored by the Accademia di San Luca and traveling to Rome to study architecture.10 Building on what he learned from Guarini, Vittone spatializes the poché and further separated the interior shell from the exterior drum, creating an active zone for the passage of indirect light. Where the high Baroque sought to create the illusion of depth and infinite expansion of interior space by building a relief of layered ribs on coffers, Vittone separates layers into thin load-bearing shells. The pockets of space along with the variety of vaulting 9  John Rupert Martin, Baroque, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193. 10  Richard Pommer, Eighteenth-Century Architecture in Piedmont: The Open Structures of Juvarra, Alfieri & Vittone (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 108.

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and unique color schemes are clearly captured in Baroque Topologies, distinguishing the copulas of Vittone from any others in the collection. The architectural innovation can be seen in the pierced pendentives of Santa Maria di Piazza (1751-1752), the offset shells in Santa Chiara at Bra (1741– 1742) and the Guarini-inspired, inner lattice shell of his chapel at Vallinotto (1738–1739).

Conclusion When compared to the streamline opaque casts of Moretti, it is obvious that Baroque Topologies offers a far less reductive mode of analysis. Baroque Topologies favors realism over abstraction but should not be confused with virtual reality or the attempt to simulate the experience of actually inhabiting the interiors in person. Like Moretti’s analytical approach, the goal remains to render visible the invisible deep structures of the Baroque interior as a highly curated spatial design object. The reductive quality of Moretti’s models can be tied to both the lack of contemporary technology such as LIDAR and additive fabrication as well as modernism’s tendency toward abstraction and disdain for ornament (see Moretti’s built work). The six architects analyzed in Baroque Topologies operate with the full spectrum of the interior spatiality including articulated figuration, lighting, color and materiality—all absent from Moretti’s plaster models. Only through the full representation of these essential aspects of space, does it become possible to comprehend what Heinrich Wölff lin describes as the painterly style of the Baroque.11

11  Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (London: Collins, 1964).

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality Johan Bettum

Since a few years back, the postgraduate master degree studio Architecture and Aesthetic Practice at Städelschule Architecture Class in Frankfurt has used virtual reality (VR) as an experimental laboratory for exploring architectural questions pertaining to the phenomenon and our experience of space. These experiments have comprised of designing novel, immersive environments where architecture has been explored through the computerized representation of forms and spaces. This digitally produced realm of images supplement and often supplant the traditional role of drawing in the contemporary design process. In the studio, the image content has been variously generated by engaging with urban conditions and media-culture, digital systems of image production and surveillance, human perception and the formation of subjective reality, and—last but not least—disciplinary concerns in architecture. In sum, the experiments have explored aesthetic realms and modes of representation that only recently have emerged given a more efficient digital technology that in VR can be used for novel architectural design opportunities and to simulate how architecture is experienced. The current, rapid development of this technology means that one expects VR to become widely adopted in architecture for project development and presentations. This use of the technology is a far cry from the experiments conducted at the Städelschule. Here the ambitions have been to experimentally probe design opportunities enabled by VR as well as the manner through which spatial immersion and aesthetic experience can be understood in choreographic terms—that is, in terms of how architectural design can stimulate subject movement and participation while engendering a sense of reality.

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Fig. 1: Ritualistic Space: RocoCorean Temple of Post-Reality

For these experiments, VR constitutes the architectural medium par excellence. It presents a setting in which the human subject is fully immersed in an image-saturated environment. Thus, the medium offers distinct opportunities for investigating an immersive spatial experience in response to sensorial perception, and it therefore presents an ideal laboratory for exploring questions pertaining to the subjective perception of space. These spatial environments stage the immersed subject in relation to designed forms in a manner that reverberates with the concerns of nineteenth century aesthetic theory. Art and architectural theorists in this period, many in the German speaking part of Europe, explored how visual perception and kinaesthetics were at the heart of spatial cognizance and, therefore, situates the human subject in relation to how our sense of reality is formed. In turn, the work of these theorists can be related to contemporary findings in neurophysiology and aesthetics which suggests that our general perception of space and the sense of reality that it gives rise to are not pre-given. They are susceptible to change and conditioned by the endless f low of information from the outside that we process in relation to prior experiences.

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

In the studio Architecture and Aesthetic Practice this has prompted the exploration of contemporary digital regimes of representation in VR for architectural design. Notwithstanding that VR is a multi-sensorial medium, which hypothetically would accommodate the fact that the aural input is at least as important as the visual in the formation of spatial perception, the experiments have focused principally on the role of images in VR in relation to architecture. The experiments have delivered a range of novel, speculative projects that ref lect on contemporary concerns within the discipline and feed new practical and theoretical speculations for architectural design.

The Image Until about only thirty years ago, the line drawing made up the purview of architectural design. The drawing made possible the systematization of projection, the encoding and transference of measurable information, and the conveyance meaning through accepted norms of representation. This has radically changed in the three decades since then. With the development of digital technology embedded in all systems of production and consumption, computerized processes have come to replace those previously dominated by analogue practices and therefore challenge the concomitant traditional modes of thought. Thus, the ubiquitous, intense streams of images and their consequences are not merely limited to social media and communication in general but already inscribed and fully at work also in architecture. With its rapid adoption in architecture during the last three decades, the computer generated image fuels the professional and disciplinary imagination in the design process and even has an emerging role in the planning and execution of projects for construction. However, insofar as the image, since the invention of perspectival representation in the Renaissance, has been based on and supplemented by the line drawing in architectural representation, the basic ingredients for design have for a long time remained largely the same. The current and radical change rests with these ingredients’ relative roles and importance in the design process. What is at stake is the technology’s transformative capacity for architectural design and the degree to which it can re-originate disciplinary concerns and change how we design and produce architecture. The

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Fig. 2: Local Echoes

consequences of this are hypothetically formidable and open up for new conceptual paths and formal inventions. Beyond the veneer of the obvious with respect to the image, the changes are more profound than “what meets the eye” since—pun aside—that what is substantially different in its constitution and distribution to what it used to be. For as long as our attention to the image is focused merely on the screen, these changes will be difficult if not impossible to comprehend. Images in VR give us access to aspects of the radically different status of the image compared to what the computer screen does. VR situates the human subject within its image-saturated environment in an unparalleled manner as opposed to the framed image on a facing computer screen. It does so without collapsing one thing with the other but by maintaining fine and crucial differences between subject and object, bodily presence and simulat-

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

ed reality as well as perceptional processes and machinic operations. These differences constitute a new productive intimacy between the subject and the immersive environment made up of images—an intimacy scarcely addressed in architecture but in other disciplines since some time ago. For instance, the French film theorist Martine Beugnet, discussing what she calls a cinema of the senses accounts for views held by protagonists of the French film avant-garde in the era prior to World War II. She writes, “Only if spectators were immersed in the world created by the film itself would their senses and mind be challenged—and, by extension, their understanding and experience of reality—visible and invisible—questioned and enriched. The power of the cinema thus rested with ‘purely visual sensations.’”1 In VR, this intimacy between the subject and the medium is exceptional; it facilitates an aesthetic of sensation2 where the medium works as an intensely capacitated interface between the immersed subject and machinic processes. Insofar as Beugnet’s cinematic image is charged by camera movement and the motion in and of the image itself, VR extends this dynamic to the viewing subject, inscribing bodily action and gestures in the unfolding of the spatial simulation. In this manner a temporal dimension coexists with the spatial and allows for exploring architecture’s complex spatiotemporal nature. In consequence, the space cannot be imagined and does not exist without the immersed subject. Writing about time in art film-installations, Daniel Birnbaum notes that “there is no chronology, only chronological problems, and they are related not only to the issue of temporality as such and to our various modes of relating to time but also to the very issue of what it means to be a subject.”3 Moreover, the immersive space of VR is all image. Not only does the 360 degree image wraps itself around the immersed subject—the visual expe1  Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 22. In the quote, Beugnet uses of the words film and cinema have been replaced by medium. Beugnet discusses Antonin Artaud’s writing on the cinema of 1928, see Antonin Artaud, The Shell and the Clergyman, trans. Alastair Hamilton, in Collected Works (London: Caldon & Boyars, 1928/1972), 19–25. Her discussion draws on Gilles Deleuze’s writing on the cinema. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1992) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 2  Ibid, 14. 3  Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007), 79.

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Fig. 3: The Poetic Justice of Poor OBJs: Sequence of Framed Views

rience at any moment in time only limited by the orientation and the visual cone of the subject within the space—but the image has become—so to speak—spatialised. In VR, the subject penetrates and occupies this image. It would be as if retinal space has been externalized—or, vice versa, that virtual space has collapsed onto the retina. Yet, this totality of the image comes with a fundamental difference to the representation that, for instance, Beugnet addresses. She approaches it “at the level of material appearance and formal variations” and “as an exploration of film’s material dimension.”4 The digital image, however, is not produced by marks of light or the analog trace of tools on a surface; it is of a very different nature. The architect John May describes it as follows: [I]maging is a form of photon detection. Unlike photographs, in which scenic light is made visible during chemical exposure, all imaging today is a process of detecting energy emitted by an environment and chopping it into discrete, measurable electrical charges called signals, which are stored, calculated, managed, and manipulated through various statistical methods. Images are thus the outputs of energetic processes defined by signalisation, and these signals, in their accumulation, are what we mean when we say the word data. Images are data, and all imaging is, knowingly or not, an act of data processing. It is precisely the energetic basis of all imaging that […] opened up the 4  Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation, 8.

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

possibility of forms of screen movement that were not predicated on the rapid mechanical succession of cinematic still photographs (film) but rather on the exponentially more rapid transmission of electrical signals. In other words, images are inherently dynamic, and our tendency to think of them as fixed is likely related to the psychological residue of drawings and chemical photographs.5 While calling on us to examine the technical basis of architecture very closely, May concurs with Beugnet and Birnbaum in emphasizing the temporal dimension of technics. Imaging, then, turns to the subject and “[t]he radical difference between imaging and previous forms of simulation [is that] what imaging simulates is not specific ideas or thoughts but rather thinking itself.”6

The Subject In his foreword to Elizabeth Grosz book, Architecture from the Outside, Peter Eisenman writes, “The in-between in architectural space is not a literal perceptual or audible sensation, but an affective somatic response that is felt by the body in space. This feeling is not one arising from fact, but rather from the virtual possibility of architectural space. It is the fraying of the possible edges of any identity’s limits. … Only in architecture can the idea of an embodied and temporal virtuality be both thought and experienced.”7 Eisenman’s observation captures a persistent challenge for architecture, namely to fully comprehend and address the human subject in a spatial and temporal sense while not reverting to a phenomenology that reduces the same subject to an existential and metaphysical singularity. On the contrary, the implication in Eisenman’s statement suggests the obvious but nevertheless frequently ignored necessity of bodily presence to conceive of space

5  John May, “Everything is Already an Image,” Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017), 12. 6  Ibid, 22. 7  Peter Eisenman, “Foreword,” in Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture From the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), xiv. That Eisenman wrote this is notable as he is otherwise known as the ultimate purveyor of grid gymnastics and architectural formalism.

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or, as Grosz herself puts it “[T]he body … is already there, albeit shrouded in latency or virtuality. Bodies are absent in architecture, but they remain architecture’s unspoken condition. … Traces of the body are always there in architecture.”8 In this respect, VR is an unparalleled medium for spatially and temporally staging the subject since it simulates the immersive condition of architecture. It allows for exploring the phenomenon of embodiment and our apprehension of space through bodily movement and visual perception. In neurophysiology, embodiment is no longer merely understood as corporeal awareness but as “a complex multi-component phenomenon [that works through] the representation of an element within the body schema.”9 Space, then, is not a pre-given and fixed entity but continuously constructed by the inhabiting subject. For the subcect, being in space is to be in constant exchange with the environment and, in consequence, to form a sense of reality. Critical advances in neurophysiology suggest that our sensing the world is far more malleable and subject to manipulation than previously thought. The plasticity of neural processes and the brain’s makeup and functioning handle individual experience and input from the surroundings in a far more complex, intricate, and interrelated manner than what previous models suggest. These advances question previous assumptions about human perception being precast and fixed. They also challenge the idea that we relate to the world as something entirely external to ourselves. Research on neural processes and modifiable synapses in the complex network of the brain has given rise to radical insights and propositions, and the neurophysiologist Wolf Singer describes a continuous negotiation between previous experiences and sensory input as incessant neural labor. His description of what he calls cross modal integration accounts for multiple sensory sources and inputs being negotiated on neural and cerebral levels to produce our sense of “reality.” Routinized, sensorial input constitutes the antithesis to what this new research implies.10

8  Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 12–13. 9  Adrián Borrego, Jorge Latorre, Mariano Alcañiz, and Roberto Llorens, “Embodiment and Presence in Virtual Reality After Stroke. A Comparative Study With Healthy Subjects,” Frontiers in Neurology 10 (October 2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2019.01061. 10 Wolf Singer, “Keynote.” Lecture, Breaking Glass II, Städelschule, May 25, 2018.

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

Likewise, the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who has keenly followed research involving VR to learn about self-embodiment and the construction of the self, suggests that the self is not a neatly reified entity in the f low of information and sensory input from the world we inhabit. On the contrary, he argues that the human self does not exist and that we rather have phenomenal identities, “selves” as they appear in conscious experience.11 Thus, it appears that each of us constitutes multiple bodies and selves, a composite multiplicity and latency that architectural theory in the 1990s generally addressed as the “virtual.” This malleability or multiplicity of the self breaks down the clear distinction between the self and the spatial context it inhabits. It expresses a dynamic relationship between the subject and the space where movement matters and pulses, shifts, and turns engender perpetual change. These changes affect the virtual image—the building block of VR’s immersive environment, the virtual space that the medium engenders, as much as the subject that inhabits this space. For these reasons, VR gives direct and intimate access to the construction of subjective identities and spaces.

Virtual Space Since the 1990s, the term virtual has been part of architectural discourse. With the emergence of computers in architectural work, the term designates how these machines can digitally produce renditions of conventional drawings and design models. However, the philosophical ideas that grapple with the multitudinous of possible worlds and becomings are equally important. In this context, the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is central. In his writing, the virtual embodies pure or internal difference in itself. This inspired, for instance, the emergence of the continuously differentiated single surface typology, and the technique of folding was, in part, derived from Deleuze’s book, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.12 TThe more or less simultaneous impact on architecture that these two aspects of the virtual had may 11  See Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003). 12  Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

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Fig. 4: Uncanny Valley

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

have been largely fortuitous. However, their concurrence was substantial. The digital machinery, capable of producing, codifying, and rostering an endless array of geometrical variation, led till this day to a laissez-faire in the production of geometrical elements, forms and compositions. This reverberated with the idea of an infinite spectrum of becoming through systems of differentiation which inscribed the temporal dimension as necessary and integral to all types of transformations and the production of difference. Thus, the freedom of form-making in the virtual space of computer simulations resounded with the multiplicity and latency of its philosophical counterpart. Obviously, the virtual in VR shares history with that of the computer. However, the term virtual reality was already used by the French playwright Antonin Artaud in 1938 in his book, The Theatre and Its Double. About twenty years later, wanting to create a cinema of the future, the cinematographer and inventor Morton Heilig patented his Sensorama—an immersive and multi-sensory VR device.13 In the 1980s the computer philosopher and scientist Jaron Lanier popularized the term virtual reality while he and his colleagues introduced VR headpieces for commercial sale on the market. Yet, only with recent technological developments and reduced costs for the required hardware has VR become more common across a wide spectrum of disciplines and types of applications. The second term in the expression virtual space seems obvious for architecture. The question of space became one of the principle concerns in the discipline in the twentieth century, symptomatically as much as programmatically set out in Sigfried Giedion’s seminal book, Space, Time and Architecture, published in 1941.14 However, the inherent problem with a spatial project is that it is elusive. Whether on a formal or a poetic and non-formal level, architectural design practically concerns itself with the making of physical form. Space is the emptiness—the left-over, so to speak—given by geometrically defined form. In the introduction to his book, Giedion writes, “Today we have again become sensitive to the space-emanating powers of volumes … We again realise that volumes affect space just as an enclosure gives shape to

13  The Sensorama was developed from the late 1950s and on and patented in 1962. 14  Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). The book was based on lectures given at Harvard in 1938.

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Fig. 5: Patched City—The Archaeology of the Debris: Patched Figures

an interior space.”15 When tying space in with volume and, thus, form, Giedion explicitly relegates space to a second order outcome of form generation. Space is what results from the design of form as the principal mode of architectural production, notwithstanding how an architect may imagine and invoke the spatial outcome of the work. Increasingly, throughout the twentieth century, space progressively receded as an explicit architectural concern to become the epithet of what architects invoke and architecture ultimately delivers but cannot directly address. However, the most profound work on questions relating to space and the spatiotemporal complex was not done in the twentieth century. In15  Ibid, xlvii. Giedion’s relating form to space via the enclosing function of volumes echoes Gottfried Semper’s interest in the Roman vault for its space-engendering capacity. See Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, trans. Eleftherios Ikonomou and Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 1–85.

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

stead, art and architectural historians and theorists in the nineteenth century, most of them German such as Adolf Hildebrand (1847–1921), Heinrich Wölff lin (1864–1945), and August Schmarsow (1853–1936), made incisive and far-reaching advances on the relationship between the image (pictorial representation), visual perception, bodily movement, artistic form and space.16 Their work was informed by contemporaneous research in physiology and psychology and indirectly linked to the rise of psychology as a discipline and science and, thus, to the “epistemological currency of experience.”17 16  For a collection of these writings and a major introduction to central topics, see Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, trans. Eleftherios Ikonomou and Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 17  See Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 44. In her book, Alexander revisits central parts of this history and builds a convincing case for an alternative history leading up to modernism.

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Thus, the historians’ theories were hinged on engaging with the human subject, without which questions around visual and spatial perception would make no sense. However, importantly, the subject was not static and occupying a fixed point in space like the one within a perspectival construct—the dominant form of visual representation till this day. For instance, by distinguishing between visual and kinaesthetic perception, where the latter referred exclusively to eye movement, Hildebrand described a subtle dynamics between artistic or architectural form—the visual perception of this through images—and our apprehension of space. He distinguished between our perceiving a two-dimensional “distant view” of an object and a “near view” that was engendered by eye movement and the motion around the object. The perception of depth that is essential to spatial experience was at the heart of this dynamics and necessitated real or virtual movement strung out between the “distant” and the “near” views.18 Toward the close of the century, Schmarsow brought the interest in space to its apotheosis and supplied the conceptual basis for how space subsequently became addressed in the century that followed. He referred to architecture as the “creatress” of space, and Mitchell Schwarzer has written, “Schmarsow was the first to formulate a comprehensive theory of architecture as a spatial creation at the frontiers of the paradigm of perceptual empiricism.”19 Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou argue, “It is only with Schmarsow that the contribution of vision and movement to the notion of architectural space is fully established and that the kinaesthetic implications of our experience of space—beyond the purely visual ones—are fully realised.”20 Thus, accounting for Schmarsow’s ideas, they stress the role of the entire body, not only vision, in our experience of space: The principal concern for architecture as spatial creation is … the enclosure of the subject. Thus the most important dimension for actual space creation is depth. Because of the organisation of our body, we always

18  It is precisely in these dynamics that also the idea of a choreographic space resides—a space that gives rise to impulse for movement. 19  Mitchell Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung.” Assemblage, no. 15 (1991): 48–61. 50. Schwarzer refers to Schmarsow inaugural lecture as a professor at Leipzig University in 1893. 20  Mallgrave, Empathy, Form, and Space, 39.

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality

give space a direction; the orientation of the face and limbs determines what is ahead and whether we are moving forward or backward. In this way direction transforms every spatial enclosure into a ‘living space.’ Because the whole human body, rather than just our vision, stands at the center of our spatial experience, the minimal standard for the dimension of width coincides with the reach of our arms to the left and right. Movement forward, moreover, is not just actual but can be virtual. We can project our vision forward into the spatial form by imagining ourselves in motion, by measuring the various dimensions of width and depth … by attributing to the immobile lines, surfaces, and volumes the movement of the eyes and muscular sensations … [T]he spatial projection for us is always an internal projection of sensations … [T]he history of architecture is now the evolution of our ‘sense of space.’ Only on a secondary level do materials, skills, and methods of construction play a role in the development of this art.21 As current interest in this collection of nineteenth century aesthetic theory is rising, time may have come to rethink fundamental aspects of how architecture conceptually and theoretically has been molded over the last hundred years. Modernism has worked its reductive and crippling powers on the discipline; formalism in its strictest and most traditional sense is dissolving in the onslaught and imposition of extra-disciplinary obligations as well as the disciplinary promiscuity in the production of form; and—thus—current tendencies that attend to form in both the academy and in professional practice are prolific but bring little new. Meanwhile, contemporary technology, a shift in disciplinary focus, and attention to smaller if not minute scales of articulation, may open the door to new opportunities for architectural design. The presence of the human body in architecture, long ignored, may be one vehicle for breaking the standstill. Its presence is the that of Deleuze’s notion of the virtual, the very condition of actual experience. Elizabeth Grosz states, “I would contend that space and time are not, as Kant suggests, a priori mental or conceptual categories that 21  Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, trans. Eleftherios Ikonomou and Harry Francis Mallgrave. (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 61–62.

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precondition and make possible our concepts; rather, they are a priori corporeal categories, whose precise features and idiosyncrasies parallel the cultural and historical specificities of bodies … The limits of possible spaces are the limits of possible modes of corporeality: the body’s infinite pliability is a measure of the infinite plasticity of the spatiotemporal universe in which it is housed and through which bodies become real, are lived, and have effects.”22 VR sets all this in motion and gives architects unique, experimental access to things that are at the core of what architecture is about. No technology is in and of itself interesting. Nor are images, bodies, and movement in and of themselves interesting for the discipline. However, the technology of VR delivers a medium where all these things uncannily converge. A synthesis that does not collapse its terms into a nullifying compromise may cut the Gordian knot of the spatiotemporal complex in architecture.

22  Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, 31–32.

List of Figures Our of Key with the Times Fig.1: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Selfportrait, 1928/29, © Albert Renger-Patzsch Archive / Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Fig.2: Stefan Moses, Ernst Jünger selbst im Spiegel, 1963. photo: stefan moses | © stefan moses archive. Fig.3: Albert, Renger-Patzsch, Zeche Victoria Mathias, Essen-Nordviertel, 1929, © Albert Renger-Patzsch Archive / Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Fig.6: Paul Nash, Menin Road. Painting, © Imperial War Museum, London, 1919.

Real Fictions Fig.1: Izbit Khayrallah, Cairo, Google Maps Aerial View. Fig.2–11: Rachel Lee & Grace Kim, design studio taught by Ferda Kolatan at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 2016.

Architecture in the Time of a (Temporal) Collapse Fig.1: Photograph courtesy of the author. Fig.2: Aaron Rose. Museum of the City of New York. 2001.30.31 ©Aaron Rose Foundation, (right) photograph courtesy of Rachel Kousser. Fig.3: Casa dei Crescenzi, Rome, and Arles amphitheatre before houses were cleared (starting 1825), J.B. Guibert, postcard of old engraving, scanned by Robert Schediwy. Fig.4: (left) Courtesy of The Australian War Memorial, REL36105.001 (right) Philippe Starck, Guns Table - Dimmable Lamp in Gold, FLOS, SKU: FU295400 https://usa.f los.com/modern-table-lamps/Guns-table Fig.5: Courtesy of Austin+Mergold

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Fig.6: Ernesto Oroza and Penelope De Bozzi, 1999 (Archive Objets Reinventés). Fig.7: Courtesy of Sanjeev Shankar, photographer: Sundeep Bali. Supported by: Khoj, Goethe Institute, German Technical Cooperation, First exhibited at 48C. Public Art. Ecology. Fig.8: Courtesy of Droog Design. Fig.10: Courtesy of the author. Fig.12: Courtesy of Austin+Mergold, 2014; photo: Nicole Bouchard. Fig.14: Austin+Mergold with Maria Park, Chris Earls, Scott Hughes; photo: Zachary Tyler Newton. Fig.15: Aaron Rose. Museum of the City of New York. 2001.30.110 ©Aaron Rose Foundation.

Learning to “See” Like A Machine Fig.1, 2: Courtesy of the author. Fig.3, 4: Courtesy of the author and Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl. Fig.5, 6: Courtesy of the author.

Making the Donkey Drink Water or the “Problem” of Stopping in the Digital Age Fig.1: House for Two Strangers, Courtesy of the author Fig.2: Diagram of the Fold, Gilles Deleuze, from the Fold, 20. Fig.3: Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Courtesy of Greg Lynn. Fig.4: Cache, Bernard, Earth moves: The Furnishing of Territories. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995) 11, 13, 19. Courtesy of Bernard Cache.

Depth in Aesthetic Perception Fig.1: René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics – Discourse VI. Fig.2: Gustaf Britsch, Theorie der bildenden Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann A.G., 1926). Fig.3: August Choisy, Histoire d‘larchitecture, Tome 1 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899). Fig.4: Valentin Serov, Portrait of Maria Nikolayevna Yermolova, 1905, oil on canvas, 224 x 120 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Fig.5, 6: Sergei Eisenstein, “Yermolova,” 1937, in Selected Works: Towards a Theory of Montage, Vol. 2, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Tylor, & trans. Michael Glenny, (London: British Film Institure, 1991).

List of Figures

Fig.7: Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot,” (1929), in Selected Works: Writings, 1922–34 Vol. 1, ed. & trans. Richard Tylor (London: British Film Institure, 1988), 147. Fig.8: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ca. 1761, etching Fig.9–11: Courtesy of the author. Fig.12: Andrea Palladio, 1592, Vicenza, Italy Fig.13–15: Courtesy of the author. Fig.16: Ilya Repin, 1888, oil on canvas, 167.5 x 160.5cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow: Cropped view. Fig.17–19: Courtesy of the author. Fig.20, 21: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 18th century, from Le Antichità Romane.

Virtualities of the Visible Fig.1: Alison Cole, Bild Erlebnis Kunst, Perspektive, (Stuttgart / Zürich: Belser Verlag 1993), 12, 27. Fig.2: (above) Pepper‘s Ghost stage set up. Le Monde Illustré, 1862 (below) Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “Diagrams illustrating the ‘ghost’ machinery” New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/7bc54e70-27c70132-40a7-58d385a7b928. Fig.3: Studio Greg Lynn, Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2017, Photo by Lea Dietiker. Fig.4: Dieter Fellner and Michael Wögerbauer, Studio Greg Lynn, Summer Term 2016, Picture by Dieter Fellner & Michael Wögerbauer. Fig.5: Michael Knoll and Alina Razgoniaeva, Studio Greg Lynn, Winter Term 2016/17 Photo by Michael Knoll & Alina Razgoniaeva. Fig.6: Garvin Goepel, Diploma Project, Studio Greg Lynn, Summer Term 2018, Photo by Garvin Goepel. Fig.7: Dennis Schiaroli, Florian Smutny and Mathias Bank Stigsen, Studio Greg Lynn, Summer Term 2015.

Radical Acts in the Architectural Representation of Space Fig.1: Luigi Moretti, “Strutture e sequenze di spazi,” Spazio, no. 7 (December 1952–January 1953): 9–20, 107–108. Fig.2–6: Courtesy of the author, partly published in: Andrew Saunders, Baroque Topologies, (Modena: Palombi editori, 2018).

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Fig.7: Yang Li & Xiaoqing Guo, Baroque Topologies seminar taught by Andrew Saunders at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Fig.8: Yuhe Zhao, Adriana Davis, and Siyi Li, Baroque Topologies seminar taught by Andrew Saunders at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Fig.9: Angela Huang, Baroque Topologies seminar taught by Andrew Saunders at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

Spatial Fabulations on Other Tales in Virtual Reality Fig.1: Jun Eui Song, design studio taught by Johan Bettum at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, 2018–2019. Fig.2: Viviane El Kmati, design studio taught by Johan Bettum at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, 2016–2017. Fig.3: Shuruq Tramontini, design studio taught by Johan Bettum at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, 2017–2018. Fig.4: Yara Feghali, design studio taught by Johan Bettum at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, 2016–2017. Fig.5: Haewook Jeong, design studio taught by Johan Bettum at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, 2018–2019.

Contributors

Johan Bettum is Professor of Architecture and programme director of the Städelschule Architecture Class. He has taught and lectured, amongst other places, at the AA, UCLA, the Berlage Institute, Innsbruck University, the EPFL, Lausanne and Oslo School of Architecture. Bettum studied at the Architectural Association (AA) after gaining a BA with a major in biology from Princeton University. His main interests reside in the intersection between materials, geometry and architectural design. He was a research fellow at the Oslo School of Architecture from 1997-2001 and headed a nationally funded research project on polymer composite materials in architecture. Until 2000 he led the OCEAN group in Oslo whose work on polymer composites and advanced digital modeling greatly inf luenced the group‘s projects in this period. Bettum‘s PhD is titled ‚The Material Geometry of Fibre-Reinforced Polymer Matrix Composites and Architectural Tectonics.‘ His experimental practice, ArchiGlobe, explores related small-scale projects. Vera Bühlmann is a Swiss writer. She is professor for architecture theory, and director of the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology. Together with Ludger Hovestadt she founded and directs since 2010 the laboratory for applied virtuality at the Architecture Department at ETH Zurich, and co-edits the applied virtuality book series (Birkhäuser, Basel/Vienna, since 2012). From 2012-2013 she was a guest researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory at NUS Singapore. After studying philosophy and English language and literature in Zurich, Switzerland, she obtained a PhD in media theory/philosophy from Basel University (2009). Her latest monograph is entitled Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury, London).

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Benjamin Ennemoser is an architect and researcher based in Los Angeles, California. He has received several research fellowships and grants such as the Tische-Stipendium, the prestigious Dr. Otto Seibert-Stipendien-Schenkung and the Start-Grant. His work has been exhibited all over the world and presented his research about machine learning in architecture at academic institutions and conferences in the US and Europe. He has taught at the University of Innsbruck, University of Applied Arts Vienna, University of Fine Arts Vienna and Yun-Tech University, Taiwan. He is a licensed architect in Italy and a Lecturer at UCLA’s department of Architecture and Urban Design. As an architect and researcher, his work is situated within the field of computational design techniques, generative processes, computer science and new media as a speculative design methodology. He focuses on digital design, AI/machine learning, digital fabrication, applied robotics, soft-robotics, VR & AR and interactive architectural systems. Kurt W. Forster is professor at Yale University and has taught at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, and Bauhaus University at Weimar. He founded and directed the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles and headed the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. He has organized major exhibitions on Schinkel, Carlo Scarpa, Herzog & de Meuron, and directed the 2004 Venice Biennale. Forster has published widely on the history of art and architecture, including Schinkel: A Meander Through His Life and Work and Aby Warburg, Ein Blick in die Abgründe der Bilder, both in 2018. He is a member of the Accademia di San Lucca in Rome and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, winner of the Meret Oppenheim Prize, holder of the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany and of an honorary doctorate from The New School for Social Research in New York. Eugene Han is an assistant professor of architecture at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA), teaching in the department of Art, Architecture, and Design. He received his doctorate at Yale University School of Architecture, and previously taught at a number of schools and programs throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. His research looks at the interdisciplinary possibilities between aesthetic perception, the representation of eye tracking data, perceptual behavior, and computational methods. His studio work develops from-

Contributors

his research towards problems of architectural form and its design using stochastic methods. Ferda Kolatan is an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the founding director of su11 in New York City. He received his Architectural Diploma with distinction from the RWTH Aachen in Germany and his Masters in Architecture from Columbia University, where he was awarded the LSL Memorial Prize and the Honor Award for Excellence in Design. Kolatan has lectured widely and taught design studios as well as theory and fabrication seminars at Columbia University, Cornell University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of British Columbia, California College of the Arts, Washington University, Pratt Institute, and the RWTH Aachen. He is also a co-author of the book Meander: Variegating Architecture (Bentley Press, 2010) and was selected as a Young Society Leader by the American Turkish Society in 2011. Skender Luarasi is an architect, writer and educator. His PhD dissertation, received at Yale, focuses on how design processes end and how the question of finitude intersects with style, geometry and parametricism in history. Luarasi has published in Log, Haecceity, Forum A+P and other journals. Skender Luarasi holds a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Architecture from Wentworth Institute of Technology. He is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Research and Development at Polis University in Tirana, Albania. He has previously taught at the Yale School of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, Washington State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology among others. His practice is based in Boston and Tirana. Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl is a licensed architect, researcher, and educator. She teaches at the University of Innsbruck where she also gained her doctoral degree. In the past, she has been a visiting researcher at Yale School of Architecture in New Haven and the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH in Zürich, and was a visiting lecturer at Vienna University of Technology. Her research has been supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, the Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, the Julius Raab Foundation, amongst others. Prior to her teaching

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career, she worked as a project architect and lead designer for international architectural practices in Beijing, Berlin and Vienna. Aleksandr Mergold, B’Arch Cornell, M’Arch Princeton, is an assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University and a founding partner at Austin+Mergold LLC (A+M). His work focuses on a „design-and-adapt“ modus operandi, repurposing all that is mundane, common, available and disposable in today‘s construction, infrastructure, technology, and resources. Aleksandr Mergold is a Registered Architect in NY, NJ and PA. He is a winner multiple awards and prizes, including the 2010 NY Architecture League Prize and 2014 Folly Competition in NYC. A+M’s Oculi project opened on Governors Island in 2018 and reconfigured at ArtOmi in 2019. Ten, One Hundred and Ten Thousand Years, an A+M retrospective solo exhibition was on view at D/T Gallery, Center for Design + Technology in Detroit, MI. Aleksandr grew up in the ancient city of Tashkent (fm. USSR), whose urban fabric bears simultaneous traces of the Great Silk Road, colonial conquests, and a socialist planned economy. Maja Ozvaldič is a design architect, from Maribor/Slovenia, and is currently working and teaching in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts. She studied architecture and received her Diploma from the University of Applied Arts - Studio Greg Lynn. She gained her professional experience in Vienna working with Peter Kogler, the next ENTERprise - Architects and Chalabi Architects. In 2010 she received the TISCHE Scholarship and went working for Cmmnwlth in New York prior to joining Asymptote Architecture New York. She has previously taught with Lise Anne Couture at GSAPP Columbia University in New York and lectured at the Institute for Urban Design (IOUD) in Innsbruck. Since 2013 Maja has co-directed the SLIVER Lecture Series at the Institute of Architecture, which addresses design agendas of contemporary culture in order to map the expanded field of architecture. Andrew Saunders is an Associate Professor of Architecture at The Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and founding principal of Andrew Saunders Architecture + Design. As a designer, scholar and faculty member within the discipline of architecture, Saunders specializes in computational geometry as it relates to aesthetics, material culture, and advanced technology and fabrication. His approach to practice, research,

Contributors

and teaching leverages contemporary design technology as a critical lens and design instrument for reassessing how the material culture of architecture and design are generated and conceived. Saunders received his Masters in Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has significant professional experience as project designer for Eisenman Architects, Leeser Architecture and Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. Prior to being appointed Associate Professor at The University of Pennsylvania, he has held teaching positions at Cooper Union, and was Head of Graduate Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Pier Paolo Tamburelli studied at the University of Genoa and at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam. In 2004 Tamburelli founded baukuh together with Paolo Carpi, Silvia Lupi, Vittorio Pizzigoni, Giacomo Summa, and Andrea Zanderigo. baukuh is based in Milan and Genoa. baukuh completed and is currently developing several projects in Belgium, Italy, and Albania. They took part in the Rotterdam Biennale (2007 and 2011), in the Istanbul Biennial (2012), in the Venice Biennale (2008 and 2012), in the Lisbon Triennale (2016), and in the Chicago Biennial (2015 and 2017). Tamburelli has taught at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam, at TUM Munich, at FAUP Porto, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, TU Vienna, and he is currently a professor at the Milan Politecnico. He received the Icon Awards 2012 and was a member of the jury of the XVI Mostra Internazionale di Architettura of the Venice Biennale. Tamburelli is one of the founders and editors of the architectural magazine “San Rocco”. Riccardo M. Villa is an architect and theoretician. He is research assistant and PhD candidate at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Vienna, and member of the research collective Gizmo. Riccardo holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan, where he graduated with honours. He worked as architect and researcher between Milan, Brussels, and Vienna, contributing to several exhibitions, magazines, books and lectures. His current research focuses on images, ideology and ideography in the digital age.

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Architektur und Design Daniel Hornuff

Die Neue Rechte und ihr Design Vom ästhetischen Angriff auf die offene Gesellschaft 2019, 142 S., kart., Dispersionsbindung, 17 SW-Abbildungen 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4978-9 E-Book: PDF: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4978-3

Katharina Brichetti, Franz Mechsner

Heilsame Architektur Raumqualitäten erleben, verstehen und entwerfen 2019, 288 S., kart., Dispersionsbindung, SW-Abbildungen, 57 Farbabbildungen 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4503-3 E-Book: PDF: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4503-7

Christoph Rodatz, Pierre Smolarski (Hg.)

Wie können wir den Schaden maximieren? Gestaltung trotz Komplexität. Beiträge zu einem Public Interest Design April 2021, 234 S., kart. 29,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-5784-5 E-Book: kostenlos erhältlich als Open-Access-Publikation PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-5784-9

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Architektur und Design Tim Kammasch (Hg.)

Betrachtungen der Architektur Versuche in Ekphrasis 2020, 326 S., kart., Dispersionsbindung, 63 SW-Abbildungen 30,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4994-9 E-Book: PDF: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4994-3

Christophe Barlieb, Lidia Gasperoni (Hg.)

Media Agency – Neue Ansätze zur Medialität in der Architektur 2020, 224 S., Klappbroschur, Dispersionsbindung, 67 SW-Abbildungen 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4874-4 E-Book: kostenlos erhältlich als Open-Access-Publikation PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-4874-8

Thomas Hecken, Moritz Baßler, Elena Beregow, Robin Curtis, Heinz Drügh, Mascha Jacobs, Annekathrin Kohout, Nicolas Pethes, Miriam Zeh (Hg.)

POP Kultur und Kritik (Jg. 10, 2/2021) September 2021, 176 S., kart. 16,80 € (DE), 978-3-8376-5394-6 E-Book: PDF: 16,80 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-5394-0

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